Email is an inexpensive yet highly effective channel of communication. It’s been here for a while now – it’s turning 50 in October 2021 – and its popularity doesn’t seem to be waning. Some statistics project the number of emails sent out per day in 2021 will near 320 billion. That’s over forty emails per every person alive today – a staggering number.

What’s even more mind-boggling is that a large chunk of those emails never reach the people they were aimed at. For good reason, too – there are plenty of emails that are unsolicited, harmful, or deceitful, and the place they often end up in the spam folder.

The problem with the spam folder is that the emails you send as part of your email marketing campaign can easily end up in it. This is why it’s important to understand not only how to prevent emails from going to spam, but also how it can get there in the first place.

It seems we have our work cut out for us! We’ll cover:

Why Do Emails End Up in the Spam Folder?

The most obvious answer to this question is because a spam filter caught the emails and placed them into the spam folder. Often enough, it will do it because the emails are indeed spam – they are unwanted junk emails sent out in email blasts to whoever might get them.

But what if your emails don’t fit that bill? What if they’re sent with all the intention and purpose of a highly-targeted email campaign, and they end up flagged as spam anyway? Some of the things that might have gone wrong include:

The good news is that you’ll be able to address most of the issues, if you want, either on your own or through cooperation with the email recipient. There are plenty of things you could be doing, so let’s start tackling them one by one.

Pick Your Email Service Provider Wisely

It’s common knowledge that WordPress’ email sending capabilities aren’t always up to the assignment you give them. And while you are more than welcome to dive into the reasons behind WordPress’ bad track record of mail deliverability, you would do much better to try and fix it.

Among the methods you have at your disposal is configuring SMTP for your WordPress website, which means updating it to use the latest protocol. One way to do it is by using SMTP service providers, some of which can also serve as email service providers.

Choosing a good email service provider is important because the reputable ones will do their share to help your emails reach the recipients and not the spam folders. So besides working hard to keep their record squeaky clean, they should also be able to help you set up email authentication – a very important step for helping your emails appear less spammy to spam filters. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are authentication methods your email service provider should help you use.

Get the Names Right

Two names appear in your email address – the domain name and the sender’s name. There’s no reason to try and change the domain name or otherwise mask it – you want the recipient to recognize that they’re getting the email from your website, after all.

As for the sender’s name, WordPress’ default is set to “wordpress,” which isn’t that impressive and might turn off some of the recipients. It doesn’t just look generic, it is generic. Luckily, there are more than a couple of ways to change the sender name in WordPress, and any one you use could work wonders.

Just keep in mind that, even if it doesn’t say “wordpress,” the sender name can still make your emails look spammy. Avoid names that include lots of words, gibberish, or long sequences of numbers.

Using Double Opt-In

Using double opt-in verification significantly reduces the likelihood of emails being flagged as spam for several reasons. First of all, a double opt-in confirms the validity of the subscriber’s email address, ensuring that messages are sent to active and engaged users. This practice also minimizes the chance of fake or mistyped email addresses entering the mailing list, which can trigger spam filters. Finally, double opt-in demonstrates a clear consent from the recipient, enhancing sender credibility and trustworthiness in the eyes of email service providers.

The second step of the opt-in can be a welcome or confirmation email, with a link that the users need to click on to complete the subscription, or a checkbox. If you’re using one of the emailing and newsletter services like Mailchimp or Constant Contant, you will find double opt-in among the features.

Build Your List

If you’re working with WordPress, you’ll have plenty of awesome contact form plugins to help you build your mailing list. Sure, just putting a contact form on your website might not build you a mailing list overnight, but it’s a start. You’ll still need a way to get people to the page that has the form, and you’ll still need to give them an offer that will make them give you their emails.

Still, it’s worth the effort because doing it any other way just means trouble. You should never try to buy email lists and expect to see delivery and open rates as you would with organically grown mailing lists. You shouldn’t even expect to avoid being blacklisted for long if you go down the path of buying email lists. Just don’t do it.

Respect Your Subscribers and Handle Them with Care

When you’re collecting people’s email addresses, you should notify them that they will receive emails from you in the future. It might seem like it’s common sense that you’ll take an email address so that you can send emails to it, but you should do your best to let the people know what they’re signing up for.

When you send them the first email, it’s always a good idea to ask the recipient to whitelist your email address. They can do so by adding your address to their contacts list. It only takes a second to do it, and it can save you a world of trouble later on.

Finally, you should give your email recipients a way out – the unsubscribe link or button. You want it to be visible and marked, as it’s not something that should stay hidden. If you’re choosing between having your emails marked as spam and losing a subscriber, it’s always better to lose a subscriber. When enough people mark your emails as spam, you’ll have a much harder time getting through the spam filter.

Be Mindful of the Contents

The contents of the email matter, but so does the subject line. It shouldn’t look spammy. Exclamation points, dollar signs, offers that are just so obvious and aggressive might be something to avoid. Keep it real, informative, and don’t waste people’s time.

As for the contents of the email, you should be mindful that images tend to get blocked when emails are loaded by the recipient, so try not to use too many of them. Make sure that the subject and the contents match. The contents should be written plainly, using proper grammar, and with no spelling errors.

Dynamic scripts, images that are too big, adding too many links, and a bunch of attachments won’t have the desired effects on the spam filters. On the other hand, adding your physical address – if your business has it – to the email might make you appear more trustworthy.

Keep Good Hygiene with Regular Checkups

Every single component of an email marketing campaign can and should be subject to regular checkups. Everything from your IP to the email addresses on your list and the copy you use should be reviewed and tested regularly to ensure a timely reaction in case something is wrong.

Some of the things you should be checking include:

Of course, keeping an eye on the KPIs such as open and bounce rate is equally important for gauging the success of your campaign. Remember that, if something goes wrong, you want to know about it sooner than later and address the issue promptly.

Complying with Relevant Internet Privacy Regulations

This one is not something that necessarily guarantees the delivery of the emails in the right inbox, but it can significantly affect it, as it helps bypass some IPS blocks. In the past few decades, a whole array of internet privacy laws and regulations has emerged to protect internet users and their sensitive data. One of the most important such regulations is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which covers the European Union and all businesses and entities having customers or visitors in the EU. Make sure to check out our guide on GDPR for WordPress, as well as the list of the best GDPR plugins.

Also important is the CCPA, which we covered in our piece on CCPA and WordPress compliance, as well as the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), and CAN-SPAM Act.

Bear in mind that compliance to these an similar regulations relative to your operations is mandatory even outside the concerns for emails ending up in spam. It’s always easier to simply adhere to them than to face legal repercussions of ignoring them.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

It’s really hard to imagine the internet without email. The technology’s older than most internet users, and it managed not to lose a smidgen of its usefulness or allure over time.

However, it’s also hard to imagine email without imagining spam emails. It’s unavoidable, but you should still do your best to prevent adding to the problem. Go through all the steps of making your emails less likely to end up in spam folders, and you’ll be doing yourself, the recipient, and the internet as a whole a huge favor.

Your content is most likely the main driver of traffic to your WordPress website, and quality content is paramount. However, you shouldn‘t neglect the other side of the coin: WordPress metrics. They are a useful tool, indispensable when measuring the effectiveness of your content. You may have already implemented Google Analytics or any of the other analytics tools, and you may already have a huge pile of visitor data to work from.

But parsing all that data is not easy, especially if you are short on staff – or even a one-person show, as most personal blogs and websites are. There must be a way to sift through it all without becoming overwhelmed. It can’t be that all data are created equal. Surely you don‘t really need all the information you have access to all the time. If that‘s what you‘re thinking, you‘re right.

We are here to talk about WordPress metrics, and which ones are the most important for which purpose. Here‘s what we‘ll be discussing:

Number of Visits

The number of visits, or sessions, is the first quantitative measure of your website‘s presence online. A visit or session is the single instance of a unique visitor accessing your website, and it can include many page views, as a visitor can browse your website without leaving it.

You can infer a great deal from the number of visits alone: for instance, whether the number of visitors is rising or dropping. This will let you know whether your website is gaining popularity or not, and, consequently, whether you need to make adjustments to your content creation strategy.

Time and Duration of Visit

The time of day or day of the week when you get the most of your traffic is the WordPress metric which can reliably tell you when is the best time to publish on your website to reach the most visitors. This is especially helpful if your visitors are following your RSS feed or if you have automated Twitter or Facebook sharing.

Visit duration is a good indicator of your website‘s bounce rate: if it is too low, visitors are likely to leave your website convinced it doesn‘t have the content they want. A very short visit is called a bounce, and, while it is a persistent SEO myth that the bounce rate is a ranking factor, it does affect your website‘s authority indirectly.

Returning Visitors

When it comes to visits, you might also want to look into the number of return visits. Depending on the kind of website you‘re running, the ratio of single to returning visitors can mean that your visitors do not appreciate your content, or that your website does not contain the information they are looking for.

Exit Rate and Exit Pages

Exit rate is a metric that shows the average percentage of visitors exiting from the pages on a website. Since visitors always end up leaving at some point, every website will have a certain percentage, but it’s important that it’s not too high, as it may indicate serious performance issues. This is especially true for high exit rates on checkout pages, which usually indicate cart abandonment.

Exit rate is not to be confused with bounce rate. Bounce rate reveals the percentage of visitors leaving without navigating to any other page on a website. If this number is high, it may be a cause for concern. Fortunately, there are plenty of things you can do to reduce bounce rates on your website.

Exit rate, on the other hand, refers to exiting the entire session. More than the actual exit rate, you will want to focus on exit pages. This metric shows you which pages were the last in a session for your users. Some exit pages are “natural” points for leaving a website, for instance, checkout pages. However, if your content pages or landing pages are frequently measured as exit pages, you may want to look into the possible causes. These may include poor UX, broken links, thin content, structure errors, layout or design issues and content that does not meet user intent.

Countries of Origin

This WordPress metric is very important if you are catering to an international audience. Knowing where your visitors come from can be useful when determining your content creation strategy, but also your website language settings, your marketing campaigns, special offers, loyalty programs, and the like.

And not only that: some search engines have regional popularity. If a significant portion of your visitors comes from Russia, for instance, you should invest in optimising your website for Yandex as well as Google and other internationally popular search engines – provided your budget can support it.

Most Popular Posts and Pages

Another useful thing to know is which of your posts bring in the most traffic and which pages your visitors spend the most time on. Most popular posts and pages is the WordPress metric which can tell you just that.

Once you have a handle on the type of content your visitors prefer, you will be able to create more similar content and further drive the traffic numbers up. Just be sure to do your keyword research and avoid diluting your website‘s impact through keyword cannibalization.

You can use your most popular content as a special most popular posts widget, especially if it is not seasonal or time-sensitive. Your evergreen content has a lot of uses, and you should leverage it to the best of your ability.

And while you‘re enjoying the traffic to your most popular content, don‘t forget to use this metric to identify underperforming content as well, and fix it.

Conversion Rate

For most websites, conversions are what it’s all about. In the majority of cases, website owners want their visitors to perform a certain action, rather than just browse or read through passively. A conversion can be any event you want it to be – anything that matters to you. It can be a filled form, a digital goods download, newsletter or trial sign-up, and for eCommerce websites it will be a completed purchase.

Conversion rate or CVR is therefore the key metric that shows at which rate your visitors are doing what you want them to do. It is measured in your preferred analytics tool, where it’s usually very clearly marked as “Conversions.” Websites usually have multiple points of conversion – CTAs, landing pages, checkout pages and so on, so make sure to monitor them all. If these points are not performing well, you will have to work on them to improve them, and that’s precisely why CVR as a metric is so important. There are multiple plugins for improving conversion rate that you may want to check out, and for online shops, make sure to check out these tips for improving the WooCommerce conversions.

Top Google Search Terms

Related to keyword research, you probably want to know how your visitors got to your website in the first place. While, for many, it is through a link on social media or another website (more on that in the subsequent section), for many others the way to your website will be through a search engine. With Google being by far the most popular search engine globally, it stands to reason that you should concentrate on it when figuring out what brings visitors to you.

Referrals

Referrals are links to your website on other websites, typically linking to your articles. The traffic which comes your way through them is referred to as referral traffic. If you know which websites link to yours, you will be able to find more similar websites and offer them cooperation. Your guest posts on other websites might bring in even more traffic.

Your website gets more than just traffic from these links, though: it gets a vote of confidence in the form of a backlink. Backlinks are an important factor in SERP rankings, and you should not waste an opportunity to get one from a high-authority website.

Outbound Links

Outbound links are links on your website which take your visitors to other websites. There are many reasons why your website content may contain links to other websites: perhaps you are referring to somebody else‘s article, or are commenting on something somebody else has posted.

Identifying which of your outbound links are most clicked on can open up a lot of opportunities for cooperation and partnership. You could ask them to refer back to your website if appropriate, or arrange a guest post exchange, to name but two opportunities.

You may also use this metric to figure out what sort of content your visitors are interested in. If you can produce content similar to what you‘re linking to, you may keep them on your website.

Other Traffic Sources

Other ways people might reach your website are social media, e-mail, paid search results, and other reach-extending means. If you are running any kind of reach program, it stands to reason that you should have a handle on its effectiveness.

You may, for instance, find yourself investing a lot of time and effort – and possibly money – into generating content for an email newsletter. If it doesn‘t bring you any significant increase in traffic, you may want to think about making big changes or shutting it down altogether.

Demographics

In more abstract terms, knowing who your visitors are can be very helpful in determining your content creation, marketing, and sales strategies.

Demographics are a broad term, but if you find your visitors predominantly belonging to a certain age or gender segment, or predominantly using a certain type of device, you can make your original content and your ad content more relevant or interesting to them.

If you find your health website gets attention from an older audience, maybe give more attention to senior health issues when determining your content strategy. Is your recipe blog primarily visited by young people? They are likely beginner home cooks, so more basic recipes might be in order.

WordPress Metrics Summed Up

As you can see, there is data that matters more and data that matters less, and it all depends on the type of website it refers to. Don‘t look at this list as a definitive ranking of important vs. unimportant WordPress metrics: if the recent rise in big data has taught us anything, it is that no piece of data is completely worthless. Think of this list instead as a guide into what is what, and, if we can proffer some final advice, stick to what you can use best and expand when you can.

SEO is a field that’s known for constant changes due to major search engines’ algorithm updates and the complex dynamics of online marketing trends. However, throughout all that, one thing has remained a staple of good content marketing and search optimization, and that’s keyword research.

Our business WordPress themes are calibrated with SEO demands in mind, and there are plenty of free SEO tools on the market that can help, but keyword research is one of those things that we still have to do by ourselves, for the most part, at least.

In this article, we’re going to talk about keywords and their importance, and we’ll cover some of the basic techniques of keyword research, so buckle up!

If you’d like to skip to any specific part of the article, just click on one of the links below:

• What Are Keywords?

• Do Keywords Still Matter?

• What Is Keyword Research?

• Keyword Research and SEO

• Asking the Right Questions

• How to Discover Keywords?

• What Are Some Common Types of Keywords?

• What is Keyword Difficulty?

• Why Are SERP Features Important?

• Know Your Niche

• Keyword Research Tools

• How to Properly Use Keywords?

What Are Keywords?

Keywords can be described as terms, phrases, ideas or concepts that explain what your content is about. In SEO, specifically, keywords or keyphrases are the search terms people use to find information.

Let’s say you have a website. Take a page from it and try to boil down all its content into a single term or phrase. That’s your keyword for the page in question, if you did your SEO right.

So, a keyword is, at the same time, the search query used in a search engine, and the concentrated description of your web page and its content. By all content, we do mean all: text, images, videos, everything.

It’s important to note that, ideally, a keyword should be both these things: a description or the topic of your content, and a search query term. It’s only when the two coincide that we can actually talk about the correct use of keywords and proper SEO in general.

In order for your pages to rank for specific keywords, you need to use those keywords appropriately. But before you use them in your content, you have to find out what your keywords for a specific page should be. And that’s where keyword research comes in.

Do Keywords Still Matter?

Absolutely, yes, no doubt about it. A lot has changed in terms of social engines’ algorithms over the years and, yes, proper keyword implementation is perhaps not the only thing that guarantees good ranking, but to think that it has lost some of its importance would be insane.

Google MUM (Multitask Unified Model), voice search, zero click search and other advancements have somewhat changed the way search works today, but keyword targeting still remains as relevant as ever. The whole point of keywords is that they represent user intent and help identify search objectives. Now, thanks to AI becoming better and better in understanding the nuances in search input, correlating it to intent, search engines focus more on what they understand as intent than what the actual word is.

By using keywords in meta data and in content, we signal to search engines as to what the content is about and the algorithm then matches it to the user/search intent. Consequently, it’s clear that it is still necessary to use target keywords, otherwise there’ll be no way of aligning the content with search intent it aims to fulfill.

In short, regardless of the ever-evolving search engine logic and behavior, keywords absolutely remain relevant and vital to any SEO strategy.

What Is Keyword Research?

Simply put, keyword research is a set of techniques that we use to discover words, terms or phrases that people use in search engines. It represents an effort to find out what people are searching for and to match those queries with your content.

Ideally, keyword research should produce results (keywords) that describe what you offer, but in a language that your target audience (searchers) would use.

The internet is chock-full of websites from every possible industry and niche. Whatever your specific line of business, chances are there are hundreds of businesses just like yours out there. And what’s worse – most of them probably rank better than your site (no offense).

If this is the case, then it means you’re not using your keywords right and that you need to focus on keyword research. You need to pinpoint exactly which keywords trigger your target audience and produce the desired results (which is: traffic and conversions).

Although it does bear a big, scary name, keyword research is actually not hard to do. However, it is a process with a few rather scientific traits. It is systematic and uses very precise data and data analysis, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Keyword Research and SEO

Keyword research is one of the pillars of good SEO practice. In fact, it may even be considered the basis upon which all other SEO techniques are executed. It comes before content production, before on-site SEO and, of course, before promotion.

Think of keyword research as a form of traditional market research. It’s your starting point and the point of reference for everything that comes afterward. It helps you feel the pulse of your target audience and sets the direction for your SEO campaign.

Asking the Right Questions

A common ailment of many online businesses is that they don’t understand that what they offer and what they want to rank for can be completely different from what the target audience is searching for. Well, maybe not completely different, but definitely coming in a different form and phrasing. In order to provide the right answers, you need to anticipate the questions, which means – the keywords that are going to be used.

A big part of this anticipation process is figuring out who your audience is. For this, you will have to ask yourself some questions. Let’s say you’re in the bicycle repair business. Some of the useful questions you might want to ask include:

And so on.

As we said earlier, generic, blanket keywords simply won’t do. You need to understand the mindset of your searchers/potential customers. Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll be one step closer to formulating your perfect keywords. Depending on the audience, those may include cheap bicycle repair, bike repair in Trenton, bike spring overhaul, fast and reliable bicycle repair, cheap kids bikes on sale, bicycle repair and exchange, and so on. You get the idea.

In this process, you have to be equal parts psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist, marketing expert, IT expert and just another average Joe looking things up online.

How to Discover Keywords?

Once you have a general idea as to what your search terms (keywords) should be, it’s time to narrow them down. The next step is to discover as many keywords as you can. Your initial keywords, the ones you want to rank for, should serve as your starting point.

In this phase, it would be a good idea to use a keyword research tool (we’ll talk about those later in this article) to find out similar search terms, ones that you yourself wouldn’t have thought of, but that rank well for your particular topic or niche.

Keyword discovery is important because it allows you to bypass your “blindspot,” and to find all the potentially powerful keywords you initially overlooked. In the case of our bicycle repair shop, you may find that keywords such as how to adjust bike brakes, bicycle parts diagram, mountain bikes maintenance, repairs, bike repair shop near me and similar phrases may help you rank better than the simple bicycle repair shop.

What Are Some Common Types of Keywords?

All keywords can roughly be divided into nine categories. You are probably going to use two or more of these and perhaps some of them won’t be useful for your specific needs, but nevertheless, it’s important to know what they are:

What is Keyword Difficulty?

In simple terms, keyword difficulty refers to how hard it is for your site to rank for a particular search term or keyword. It is a complex metric that many people confuse with keyword competition. Keyword difficulty does encompass competition, but it’s just one of the factors that are taken into consideration when establishing the difficulty for a particular keyword or term.

One of the most important factors that establish keyword difficulty is search volume. Search volume represents the number of searches performed for a particular keyword or term. Depending on the tool you’re using, it can be expressed per month or per a given period (e.g. since May).

(Ahrefs analysis for the keyword bicycle repair)

Once you start researching keywords for your content, you will notice that their search volume varies greatly from one keyword to another, even though they seem similar or almost the same. The devil is in the details and you definitely want to pay extra attention here in order to come up with the perfect keyword.

In this phase of keyword research, the question “What is good search volume?” comes right up but unfortunately, it remains without a universal answer. In many cases, it is definitely better to aim for a keyword that plenty of people search for, but those with a lower search volume tend to come with far less competition.

One thing to keep in mind here is that keywords with very high search volume are often a sign of unclear search intent. This means you may think your visitors came for one thing while in fact they came for something else.

It’s generally a good idea to go for very specific search terms with somewhat lower search volume (and competition), and that’s why so many SEO experts recommend focusing on long-tail keywords.

SERP features are also an important factor for keyword difficulty, although it’s not something you can easily predict. If a result page for a keyword includes a lot of SERP features, like featured snippets, local packs, shopping results and knowledge graphs, the difficulty for that particular keyword will, naturally, increase.

Also, going after the same exact keywords as big, well-established brands, often means fighting a losing battle, especially if you’re only just starting out.

Why Are SERP Features Important?

With SERP features becoming more and more present on result pages and with Google coming up with new features basically each month, it’s important to understand in which format users want to consume the information we deliver to them.

In general, we all want the answers to be quick, direct and super-clear. The format of the results will depend on the search intent. For instance, informational search queries (where the search intent is to get specific information) get direct answer boxes and the searcher gets instant, clear information without having to click on any of the links below this particular search item. If your content provides direct information, your keywords should include terms such as who is, where is, how to, how old, how big, and so on.

We talk about navigational search intent when we want to get to a specific web location. To rank high for this sort of search intent, the keyword should, clearly, involve the name of our web location, or in the case of our website, qode interactive.

Transactional queries are more complex since they involve not just the intent to get something done, to perform a transaction (commercial or otherwise), but they also involve local search.

Bear in mind that whether your pages will turn up in the form of a SERP feature does not depend merely on your keywords. Still, these formats are important because they can teach you a lot about search intent – what people are searching for, and how – which, in turn, can help you gauge your keywords to perfection.

Know Your Niche

Everything we mentioned so far in this article works as an excellent general recommendation for fine-tuning your keywords and getting the most out of content marketing. However, focusing merely on these techniques that apply to pretty much every website can sometimes prevent us from seeing what really matters in our particular case, or more precisely – in our niche.

Successful keyword research depends greatly on your understanding of your own niche.

In most cases, you probably won’t use the exact same phrasing, but you can use these questions as a starting point and formulate a great keyword that will work well with your content (e.g. how to remove location tag in WordPress theme).

Keyword Research Tools

If all this sounds like too much work – don’t worry. As we mentioned a couple of times earlier, there are some (free and paid) tools you can use to perform successful keyword research:

Ahrefs

This keyword research tool is equal parts efficent and easy to use. In addition to a keyword explorer with metrics that include keyword difficulty, search volume and clicks per region or country, it also features a site explorer, content explorer, rank checker, and other handy tools. It’s also great for backlink strategy analysis.

Google Keyword Planner

Although it may be more basic feature-wise compared to other tools, this keyword planner has one major advantage: its results come straight from the source, i.e. from Google. The downside is that it’s designed primarily for ads, so that’s where its main focus lies.

Moz Keyword Explorer

The online marketing giant has an excellent keyword research tool that we particularly like because, in addition to standard suggestions, it also helps you get some pretty smart ones for your related keywords. The pack of features includes search volume and difficulty metrics, predictive keyword metrics, search in question format, competitive analysis, and data export, among others. It also offers “priority” as a unique metric, basically telling you whether you should use a particular keyword or not.

SEMrush

SEMrush is more than just a keyword research tool – it’s a comprehensive solution for online visibility and marketing analytics that also happens to incorporate some great SEO tools. In addition to tons of excellent keyword ideas, it also displays keywords your competition is already ranking for. Finally, the unique Keyword Magic tool that comes in this pack pulls out amazing keyword suggestions from SEMrush’s own enormous keyword database.

KW Finder

KW Finder is a tool that excels with its intuitiveness. It is ideal for beginners, and also for those who’re in a bit of a rush, because it displays the difficulty score next to every keyword, so you don’t have to click on each of them to see it.

Answer the Public

We like this keyword research tool because of its unique, quirky interface and the fact it’s completely free. In addition to keyword suggestions, Answer the Public integrates with another free tool, called Keywords Everywhere, which ranks the suggested keywords by the search volume.

How to Properly Use Keywords?

After you have researched and confirmed your primary, secondary, related and other sorts of keywords, it’s time to put them to use via a carefully formulated content strategy.

Obviously, you can’t just slap a bunch of keywords onto your pages and call it a day. You need to incorporate them in your content in a natural, organic way that won’t seem suspicious to search engine bots or off-putting to real users.

In general, you should use unique keywords and keyphrases across your pages, both in the body of your content and in all the places search engine bots are known to look at. These include:

Above all, you should avoid clickbaiting. This is something that both the users and the crawlers equally despise, and that will definitely get you pushed to the bottom of the SERP barrel. Not to mention that, when you offer purposely vague content titles, URLs and descriptions, you’re not just being deceitful – you’re also taking away a lot of power from your keywords.

In addition, there’s something to be said about the number of keywords you want to use to achieve the best effect. You’d think that the “the more the better” rule applies, but it’s not that simple. “Less is more” is another rule that you definitely shouldn’t follow. Achieving the optimal keyword density can do wonders for your website’s positioning in SERPs and there’s a formula you can use.

Also, have you ever wondered what happens when someone misspells a keyword in their search query? Can you still rank for that? There are some pros and cons in ranking for misspelled keywords and typos so that’s definitely another thing you want to consider.

Next, you will also want to make sure you’re ranking for the right keywords. There are a couple of tools and techniques to use (see the linked article) which can help you determine whether your keyword research efforts are paying up.

Finally, after you’ve carefully researched and applied your keywords, you should consider creating keyword clusters. Keyword clustering is not the quickest of SEO methods but it’s one that can take you a long way when it comes to your SERP positions, so make sure to check it out.

Wrapping It Up

Keyword research is one of those things we get better at with time. If you’re only just starting out, it helps to have a strong strategy and follow its steps until you feel confident enough to start drawing outside the lines:

And that’s it! You will now have a well-researched keyword list that will help you reach your business goals. Just make sure to review the list occasionally and freshen it up with new, relevant keywords.

What does your local ma-and-pa store have in common with a high-end e-commerce website? Both can use search engines to drum up business. For the online store, the good-old search engine optimization is there to make sure it appears as close as possible to the top of the first page of search results. And the ma-and-pa store can use local SEO to increase sales.

For many, however, this thing called local SEO is still a bit of a mystery. Search engines have been working on localized query results for over fifteen years, but the local SEO field has only recently started to blow up. Now, it’s slowly becoming the norm for any type of business that offers services in a certain geographical area.

In this article, we’ll show you:

What Is Local SEO?

In the simplest terms, local search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your business’ online assets so that it ranks well in search results that answer a query with a local component. When someone is looking for a hairdresser in the area where you have a salon, you want your business name to be the first thing they see. Local SEO should help with that.

The thing that makes this kind of searching so important is the fact that it’s highly effective at bringing people through the door of brick-and-mortar businesses. One of the reasons is because people who search for things locally tend to present qualified traffic.

A lot of searches for local things happen from mobile devices, and they don’t always include a geographic term as much as the term “near me.” So, you have people who are probably on the go, looking for nearby shops that sell things that they want. It would be hard to find a stronger indicator of purchase intent than that.

The numbers might vary, but most would say that at least seven out of ten local searches end with an in-store visit. That’s the power of local search and the reason why, ever since Google’s 2014 Pigeon update, which focused on improving local search results, businesses have increasingly been relying on local optimization.

How Does It Work?

Local search results work a bit differently than regular search results. The way they are presented might vary slightly between different search engines, but there are certain similarities you can notice.

For example, the results are grouped in a pack that appears at the top of the results page. Google’s users will see three results underneath a map showing the business’ location. Bing’s users will see the same, but with five results.

Here’s how it looks on the respective search engines for the search terms “hairdresser near me” and “hairdresser nearby.”

These aren’t the only results the user can get. Businesses should work towards appearing in this “snack pack” of search results because it increases their visibility, but they can still appear in the results when the viewer presses “view all” or “see more results.”

This time, the map becomes bigger, and there are more results visible. Click on one of the results will show a plethora of information about the business in question. This information includes name, ratings, address, working hours, contact information, website address, images, and user reviews.

From your end, local search results work in a way that has you register your business with the search engine’s business directory of the equivalent and then provide as much information about it as possible.

That’s the short version, at least, because providing all that information includes getting users to review your business, have it listed on business directories, and do lots of other optimization stuff. For starters, however, let’s see how you can claim your business in the search engine’s business service.

Claiming Your Business Listing on Search Engines

This type of search engine optimization works without a website because it relies on the search engines’ business listing type of service. You can think about it almost like a social network for businesses where everything revolves around creating a good profile.

For Google, this service is called Google My Business. For Bing, it’s called Bing Places for Business. Either way, your local SEO journey starts with claiming your business there. Here’s how you can do it on Google.

Go to google.com/business, and click on the Manage Now button.

You’ll be asked to find and manage your business. If this is the first time you’re making the profile, you can go ahead and click on the blue hyperlink that says “Add your business to Google.”

The next couple of steps will guide you through providing the necessary information for creating a listing. First, you’ll be asked to provide the name of your business. Next, you’ll be able to choose the category your business belongs to, whether you want to add a physical location or not, the address, the location on the map, optional phone number, and website, and that’s it! You might be asked to verify your business. That should be enough to get your website online – but you shouldn’t do it just yet.

Before you decide to go online, you should go to Google My Business and check out the Info option in the dashboard. It will list all the information available about your business.

Among the information you can add, you’ll find highlights, accessibility options, amenities, business descriptions, and photos. Some of the options you can find here are the same ones you can choose from the dashboard. For example, you can choose Photos from the dashboard and there you’ll be able to add photos including a cover photo, logo, photos of the interior and exterior of your business, and even your team members.

The bottom line is that you should check out all of these options and fill them out with as much information as you can. Every bit of information you can add here matters a lot. Once you’ve finished, you’ll be able to get your listing online. That’s great news, but that won’t be nearly enough.

Claim Your Business Wherever It’s Possible

Your next step should be, of course, to go through the same process on Bing Places for Business. It doesn’t matter if you think that no one uses Bing – the whole idea is to have your business information appear in as many online directories as possible, and you can consider Bing Places for Business as one.

From there, you can head over to real online directories such as Foursquare and Apple Maps, and claim your business in those places, too. Next, you’ll want to head to Yelp and other review websites and claim your business there as well. Every place where your business name appears with your business’ information is a citation, and the more of these you have, the better. Plus, it will make it easier for people to find you.

Does your business use social media? No? Well, what are you waiting for? It’s possible to create a Facebook Business Page, just as it’s possible to create a listing on other networks such as Twitter or LinkedIn. Make the most out of these. If you don’t plan to use them, at least provide the relevant information and keep it up to date.

Handle Reviews

You want your website to have reviews. Google will use its reviews, but any review your business can have online will count. You should run a campaign for people who’ve used your business to leave reviews.

A campaign doesn’t have to be as complex as it sounds – you can simply print out a QR code linking to your website’s listing on a review website, put it somewhere near the cash register, and just ask people to leave a review if they have the time.

You might want to skip asking people who don’t look like they would give a decent review – this might be cheating a bit, but it’s really important to have as many good reviews as possible. Of course, consistently providing a good user experience might be the best way to ensure that the reviews you get are good. If you do get a bad review, you should reply to it. It’s review management 101, so make sure you follow all of the best practices.

Just so you know, your ideal review should be well-written and positive. It should also contain keywords and references to your business’ location.

Optimize Your Website

When you’re optimizing your website for local search – or building it from scratch to rank it for local search results – you don’t do things too differently from when you’re optimizing or building a regular website. You’ll still create a homepage, add metadata, and research keywords – you’ll just do it so that they include local terms or queries people in your area might have. Let’s see some examples where you should focus your attention.

The Homepage

When a visitor comes to your homepage, it shouldn’t take them more than a couple of seconds to figure out who you are, what you have to offer, and where you’re located. Google’s crawler isn’t exactly the regular website visitor, but you should still provide them the same information.

Your homepage has tags and meta descriptions that should be edited to include terms that can identify your business’ location. That can be, for example, the name of the city. In a big city, it can also be the name of the part of the city where the business is located. If it helps Google understand which area the business is located in, it could go in the homepage’s tags and descriptions.

Metadata

If you’re updating the title tags and metadata on your homepage, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t do it on every other page you have on your website. The data might differ from one page to another, but the general rule is the same for all of it.

Good SEO practices state that you should have keywords in the metadata. For local optimization, you should ensure that you also include terms that denote your business’ location – the name of the city, county, neighborhood, whatever you want to focus on.

Keywords

You will, of course, have to research relevant keywords for your website – whether you plan to optimize it for local search or not. However, if you’re researching locally-relevant keywords, you’ll have to research with a twist.

While you’re using Google AdWords, Ahrefs, Google autocomplete, and even Craigslist to find out what words people are using to search for stuff, make sure that you always focus on searches that happen on a local level. So, either narrow down the search to a specific geographic area, if your resource allows it, or include a toponym of your choice in the keywords you’re looking for.

Content

The content you create for your website should always include the keywords that are relevant to the area where your business is located or where you offer a service or sell a product. You can achieve this, for example, by including plenty of local geographical terms in the content.

However, if you want to create good local content, and catch the eye of someone who’d want to maybe link to it, you might want to adopt another strategy. Instead of creating content you optimize for local search by using local keywords, you should create locally relevant content. Find topics that matter to the people who live in the area and cover them in your content.

Website Structure

As a business owner, you don’t have to limit yourself to a single area. Sure, proximity is one of the key factors for appearing in the snack pack of search results, but that has nothing to do with how you do your business. If you’re a plumber in a big city, you don’t have to focus on providing a service in a two-mile radius around your location. You’ll venture to other parts of the town, too.

The trick is to have a separate page for every part of the city where you can go – whether it’s a borough, a neighborhood, or however the city is divided. Then optimize the page specifically with keywords and metadata for that specific sub-location.

Add the LocalBusiness Schema

Using LocalBusiness schema, you can make sure that a search engine has the right understanding of all the elements on your page and that it knows how to display them so that people can read them. This is what you get by using schema markup on your website, and it can be incredibly helpful to users.

The LocalBusiness schema contains the properties that are relevant to local businesses. Google will require you to add only a handful such as an URL, physical address, and name of the business. You can also include anything from geographic coordinates to menus, working hours, contact information, and reviews. If you’re not sure how to get started with it, Google has made a tool to help with that, as well as a tool to test your page after you’ve added the code you’ve created with the markup helper.

Consider Local SEO Tools

A lot of processes in setting up local search engine optimization can be streamlined with the right tools.

For instance, Yoast has a handy Local SEO plugin designed to help brands reach more local customers. The basic Yoast plugin doesn’t have these specific features out of the box, but if you combine it with a specialized plugin, it can help you grow your local customer base quickly. The plugin organizes the data that’s relevant for local visibility on Google, such as business name, address, opening hours etc, by using Schema markup. This sort of structured data sends direct information to Google and it does so for each of your pages – not just your contact page. The plugin also takes care of the technical SEO and helps you optimize Google listings for all your locations, in case you have more than one.

When it comes to local SEO, keywords are particularly important. Now, you can do keyword research by yourself and follow the keyword density guidelines, but you can also consider using SEO Keyword Hound, a tool designed for optimizing your keywords. You can use it for competitor analysis, create keyword lists and track their performance through crucial metrics like impressions, clicks, CTR, etc. The best thing about this plugin is that it suggests a range of keywords to target in order to maximize your reach and visibility. The plugin itself is not designed specifically for local SEO but if you use location as part of your keywords and instruct the plugin to include it, it will work just like any specialized local SEO solution.

If you’re on a budget, there’s a great free plugin that can help your local SEO. Five Star Business Profile & Schema creates a detailed business card with all your information and structures it in Schema. You can add the business card as a Gutenberg block or a shortcode anywhere you like, and the plugin will make sure Schema is applied so that Google can pick up the information.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

When you’re optimizing a website for local SEO, you should understand that some circumstances will be out of your hands. The proximity of the searcher, for example, is a strong ranking factor and you have no control over it whatsoever.

But the things you can do, you should do diligently. Fill out as many listings for your website as possible. Always be on the lookout for comments, and ready to reply. And make sure that you produce content the locals would find interesting.

Email has been around for a long time – in fact, chances are it is older than you. It‘s gone a long way since its inception, but the basic mechanisms are still there. It shouldn‘t surprise you, then, that it also has a long history of use in marketing, and that email marketing still endures. In fact, for a lot of businesses and other online services email is still an irreplaceable tool.

Newsletters are among those email-based services, and, in this tutorial, we will show you how to easily create an email newsletter. But not only that: we will first take some time to discuss what an email newsletter is in the first place, and how your WordPress website can benefit from it. If you are already aware of the importance of this marketing tool and only want to know how to create a newsletter, feel free to scroll right down to the section you need.

Here‘s what we would like to talk about:

What is an Email Newsletter

An email newsletter is basically an emailed news update. It is often used by businesses or media, but also by online communities, fan and hobby associations, and similar.

Typically, a person has to subscribe to a newsletter to receive updates. They usually do this using a form to submit their email address. In the context of marketing, users who submit their addresses are referred to as leads or contacts.

A business will typically use a newsletter to advertise new additions to their stock, special offers, events, and similar, while an online community might also use them for special events notifications, a fan association might share news from other media, a podcast might notify subscribers about new episodes and so on.

Why Create an Email Newsletter

Do you remember which websites hosted the last five or so articles you found interesting or helpful? Possibly, if you keep returning to them or if you have to follow them for professional reasons. A lot of your visitors may find your content interesting in the long run, but the first thing that hooked them will have slipped their mind.

Not so if you prompt them to subscribe to your newsletter. You will be keeping your content fresh in their minds, while at the same time supplying them with news on your activities, your content, your stock, your special offers, and everything else they chanced upon your website in the first place.

Not only can you use your newsletter to keep visitors coming to your website, you can also use it to grow your community online and off, as well as your social following.

We have so far been concentrating on the business side of things: a store might send a catalog of new items to entice regular shoppers, and any business might alert interested parties to special offers. Why a news website might want to reach out to followers by email is self-explanatory: discerning readers will appreciate a news digest. A non-profit might want to publicize an event such as a fundraiser or a donation drive, while a fan association might want to publicize a convention or an online event. The why is not related to the type of online activity.

What‘s more, email is personal and independent of any other media. Only the people who subscribe to your list will get your emails, but they will get all of the content you wish to send their way – no chance of their missing an important update.

So, if you keep your emails interesting and on-topic, they will not languish unopened and unread in inboxes, and your visitors will appreciate them.

Best Practices for Newsletters

Now, as we are about to show you, sending out a newsletter is easy enough. But to make it truly effective, you have to be reasonably certain your subscribers will actually read it. There are no magic formulae which are guaranteed to work, but here’s a list of tips we find useful in this respect:

With all that in mind, let’s get into the details of how to set up an email newsletter.

How to Set Up a Mailchimp Account

The simplest and quickest way to set up and send out email newsletters is to subscribe to a newsletter service. You could try doing it all by hand, old school-like, but then you risk running afoul of an overzealous spam filter, not to mention that it would take an inordinate amount of time if you have a lot of addresses to send to and especially multiple recipient groups to cater to.

There are tons of these services around, but, from our experience, the best option for most small to medium-sized websites is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is an email marketing service, but it has all sorts of other functionalities. All you need to do to get started with Mailchimp is create an email account. You can use literally any email account you like, but there are some limitations if you choose a free email provider.

Once you have an email account, go to Mailchimp‘s home page and click on Sign Up Free.

On the next screen, enter your email address, and user name, then choose a password, and hit Sign Up.

You should get an email from Mailchimp at this time. Open it, and click Activate Account.

You will then be taken to another screen where you need to click I‘m Not A Robot.

On the next screen, choose a plan. We will go with a free plan for the purposes of this demonstration. When ready, click Next.

Next, you need to provide Mailchimp with some of your business data. First, it‘s the name and business name, and, optionally, website and phone number. Click Continue.

On the next screen, you need to enter your physical address. Once you have done that, click Continue again.

On the next screen, you need to enter the data on your contacts. Answer to the best of your abilities, then click Continue.

You will then be prompted to answer whether you are or will be selling products or services. Answer and click Continue or just Skip this.

Finally, you can subscribe to additional Mailchimp services if you like, and then click Continue.

Now, Mailchimp is a service with a lot of functionalities and a lot of possibilities for integration with WordPress. Using Mailchimp with WordPress is a topic all its own – and this is why we covered it in a different article. In this article, we will concentrate on sending out a newsletter, but you should know that Mailchimp is a powerful toolkit.

How to Get Started With an Email Newsletter

In order to start sending out your newsletters, you first need some addresses to send them to. In order to import your list of contacts, find the import link on your Mailchimp admin screen.

On the next screen, select the upload method of your choice. You can upload a file provided it is properly formatted, or simply copy and paste your list of contacts from a spreadsheet, which is what we‘ll do. Click Continue to Upload.

In order for Mailchimp to work with your contacts list, it has to be correctly formatted: as a spreadsheet, with an email address, first name, and last name. Select and copy all the personal data.

Paste the email and address data into Mailchimp‘s field, and click Continue to Organize.

You next need to add these contacts to a list of Subscribed contacts by selecting that option from the drop-down menu and clicking Continue to Tag.

Here you can tag your new contacts to make sense of them and make grouping them easier. You can enter any tag, and you even have some suggested tags on the right. Once done, click Continue To Match.

Next, you need to match the data which Mailchimp doesn‘t recognize by default or else choose not to import it. When it comes to columns containing names, for instance, Mailchimp has no way of attaching any significance to the data. You can do this yourself by clicking on any Not Recognized column and assigning it a label, such as FNAME for your subscribers‘ first name. When you choose the correct label from the menu, click Confirm, and then Finalize Import when satisfied.

You will then receive a report for review. If you are satisfied, click Complete Import. If not, you can Cancel it.

We have used only a single contact for this demonstration. Of course, you can add as many contacts as your plan will allow. Once you have a list of contacts, you can Start a Targeted Campaign.

Once on the campaign screen, you can finally start sending out your newsletter. First, give your campaign a name by clicking on the Edit name.

In the To section, select the intended audience for your contacts. You can do a lot to filter and select contacts among your contacts. You can also personalize your messages using data which your subscribers have submitted. In our case, the *|FNAME|* tag which corresponded to one of the columns we matched above.

The From section should hold a name of the sender (the default is yours, but you can actually use an assumed name), and an email address.

The Subject section should contain, most unsurprisingly, the subject of your email, and a preview which will appear to the recipient.

Here you’ll also set the send time for your newsletter.

Once you are satisfied with this, it‘s time for the content of your email. Click Design Content.

On the next screen, select a template from the available selection. We have gone with 1 Column – the first option in the Basic section, but you can choose whichever one best suits your needs.

Having selected a template, you will be taken to the email block editor. Use the blocks in the right-hand side menu and edit them.

We have deleted all the placeholder blocks, and then added our logo as an image block, a personalized message using the *|FNAME|* tag, a boxed text block with some Lorem Ipsum text, a divider, and a social follow block with a Facebook and Twitter icon. Of course, this is just one of the literally unlimited number of options available.

In the menu on the upper right, you can choose to Preview this email in various circumstances, or choose a ready-made Template or save your template for future use.

Once you are satisfied with your settings, click Continue.

Back on the campaign screen, you can give your campaign a link by clicking Edit next to the Campaign Link section. This is useful if there are more contributors to the campaign.

Next down, you can connect your social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) to your campaign.

Finally, you can choose which activities you will be tracking and how your content will behave in the Settings & Tracking section.

We will not be using any of these settings at the moment. Once you are happy with your settings, click Send.

And that‘s it! Your newsletter is out!

How to Prevent Newsletter Signup Spam

Newsletter signup spam happens when bots fill your subscriber list with fake or dummy email addresses, artificially increasing your list and raising your newsletter service costs, since with more subscribers you have to pay more money, too.

There are several ways to prevent this. Mailchimp itself, being a reputable newsletter service, offers double opt-in as a way to prevent spam subscriptions. This process includes two steps: in the first one, the user fills in and submits a subscription form. In the second step, he or she receives a confirmation email with a link that needs to be clicked in order to confirm the subscription.

Check to see if the double opt-in is selected in your Mailchimp settings and, if it’s not, toggle it on. The settings for customizing the double opt-in are located in the Forms and response emails section of the form builder. Note that this option is only available for Mailchimp subscription forms, and that the EU-based subscribers will probably already have double opt-in enabled as part of their privacy settings.

Another thing you can do to prevent spam subscriptions is to add CAPTCHA. We’ve written an extensive tutorial on adding CAPTCHA to forms in WordPress so make sure to check it out.

Finally, if you want to make sure all your contacts are valid, there’s an excellent tool you can use. Emailable parses your subscribers base (and very quickly too – up to eight times faster than the competition, or so they claim). This tool removes duplicates, filters out temporary and disposable addresses and verifies if the addresses are stilla active. All this can drastically improve the deliverability of your email campaigns and reduce bounce rates.

In Conclusion

We‘ve led you step by step towards the creation of an email newsletter. It takes some little setting up, but it‘s really not that much of a problem. The hard part is up to you: people will be submitting their email addresses to you, and they will be expecting relevant, high quality content. You need to deliver on that. What good would it do you to create an email newsletter, if nobody is going to bother to register for it or read it?

With search results, like with everything else, the rule says the more value we provide, the better we’re going to rank. And when it comes to value, the featured snippets and rich results, like how-tos, reviews and recipes, are hard to surpass. Featured snippets outperform regular search results by 42%, according to a study. Another study found that users click on rich results 58% of the time, and that for some types of rich results the CTR can jump up to 87%.

Although Google has been reducing the visibility of certain rich results, including FAQ and how-to, adding how-to schema to your pages still has a significant SEO value. Plus, Google changes its mind all the time, and since rich results have been providing great value to users for years, it’s safe to assume that the visibility and importance of rich results will at some point be restored.

Adding the WordPress how-to schema to your content is extremely easy to do and it can bring significant benefits outside of the current SERP trends, so today we set out to show you how to do it the easy way.

What Is How-To Schema?

How-to schema (officially, the HowTo schema type) is a type of structured data markup used in the context of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine result enhancements. Structured data is a standardized format that helps search engines understand the content and context of web pages more effectively. Unlike “plain” page data, structured data provides additional information to search engines so that they are crawled and indexed better.

Sometimes, if the page ranks for its target keyword properly, the content can be displayed as a rich result in SERPs. Similar to featured snippets, rich results are located at the top of the SERP and go beyond the usual title, URL and meta description. In the case of how-to, they contain the outline of the necessary steps to complete a task.

The how-to schema is specifically designed to mark up content that provides step-by-step instructions on how to perform a particular task or achieve a specific goal.

This includes all sorts of tutorials, guides, instructions, DIY projects, recipes (although there’s a separate schema type for recipes), etc. Thanks to structured data, search engines gain insight into specific information that makes up the instructions and then helps display them as a rich result in a step-by-step form that’s easy to read and understand.

What Can You Gain from How-To Schema in WordPress?

If your WordPress website has content that can be qualified as a tutorial, a guide or instructions, you can enrich it by adding structured data to boost your SEO.

As we said earlier, rich results seem to be pushed back by Google specifically. In order to make room for AI results, Google decided to sacrifice most of the rich results types, especially in mobile searches. Desktop results are more likely to display rich results but even that’s much less compared to before.

Still, rich results are definitely not dead nor banished from SERPs. Other search engines still might use them, plus rich results aren’t the only benefit of structured data, so it’s still wise to apply it.

Most importantly, structured data provides additional info, context and meaning about your content to search engines. This means that they can index it better, increasing your chances of ranking for your target keywords higher and faster.

Furthermore, major search engines, like Google, use structured data to populate their knowledge graphs. A knowledge graph is a database of interconnected entities and facts that provides users with more detailed and informative search results. By incorporating structured data, your content might have a better chance of being included in these knowledge graphs.

Structured data, like how-to schema, adds a layer of semantics to your content, making it more machine-readable and understandable. This can facilitate data sharing and integration between different applications and platforms.

Finally, structured data is very useful for ensuring accurate and relevant responses for voice search and virtual assistants. It helps these systems understand the context and content of your web page and deliver concise, relevant answers to users’ queries.

In WordPress, how-to schema can be added quite easily and doesn’t pose any particular burden to your website or slow it down. Because it can provide significant SEO value, there’s really no reason not to implement it, and we’re about to see how.

How to Add How-To Schema in WordPress?

If you know your way around website backend and its code, you probably already know how to add structured data using Schema.org or other methods, so you don’t really need this tutorial – that’s why we’ll focus on more beginner-friendly methods.

Even if you can’t code, Schema markup can be added via Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, but the problem is this tool doesn’t support the how-to format.

As usual, the easiest way to do something in WordPress is to use a plugin. And that’s what we’re going to do today.

There are a lot of plugins out there that you can use to add different kinds of structured data. Most of them are premium plugins, designed to do the one single purpose, or SEO plugins, like AIOSEO or Yoast. We discussed using some of them to add schema markup in WordPress, but not for how-to markup specifically.

However, if you opt for Qi Addons for Elementor, you will get not just the easy way to add how-to schema, but also 100+ widgets (free and paid) that will skyrocket your website performance, from showcase, typography and creative ones (animations, text effects, advanced sliders and galleries) to business, eCommerce and SEO ones.

This collection of Elementor addons contains the How-to Schema widget, which automatically generates structured data for the tutorials and instructions you publish using the widget. This widget is part of the free version of the plugin, so once you download and install the Qi Addons from the WordPress plugin repository, it will automatically be added to your backend.

Note: This tutorial uses the Qi Addons for Elementor, but Gutenberg users should know that there’s an almost identical solution for their needs, too: Qi Blocks for Gutenberg, containing the How-to Schema block. The usage is almost identical, so we won’t be covering them both.

After installing the plugin, start a new post or page that you want to add markup to. In the left-hand side menu, start typing “How-to Schema” to get to the widget. Now simply drag and drop it on the page to the right.

Thanks to the widget’s preset options, the JSON markup, which is the type of structured data the widget uses, will be automatically enabled. So there’s nothing you actually need to do in that regard – the markup will practically “write itself” based on the content you provide in the editor.

Now you can simply replace the dummy content with your own. You can also delete the parts you don’t need – for instance, we’re going to delete the subtitle, the title, as well as the images.

The titles of the steps are actually the “Items,” so to edit those, you need to click on each item in the widget menu, under Steps. You can add as many items or steps as you like by clicking on +Add Item.

You can include step images (which is recommended, for SEO purposes, and those will be displayed in the results, too) but we skipped this step and deleted the dummy images to speed things up.

If you change your mind about a step, you can edit it or delete it by clicking on the X for that item.

The style of your post will depend on your global settings. To change it, you will need to exit the widget and go to appropriate settings.

Once you’re done writing and editing your content, simply click on Publish and that’s it. Your post will not have How-to structured data automatically added to it.

If you want, you can test the markup using Google’s Rich Results Test. It’s a free tool that you can use to see if your pages and posts support rich results. Just make sure that, once published, your post can be properly indexed (for instance, that it doesn’t have a noindex tag on it).

Wrapping It Up

The main takeaway here is that adding how-to markup in WordPress is really as easy as it gets, and it can be done following several methods. We made sure to include the easiest one, and one that brings you additional value. Qi Addons and Qi Blocks pack a remarkable selection of useful elements for your website, and the How-to Schema one comes with the free version, so the whole thing is that more convenient.

When it comes to the actual usefulness of trying to qualify for the how-to snippet, we firmly believe that these rich results are still relevant and visible, although they’re competing with AI and other things Google at this point thinks are more important. Optimizing your content with structured data can only be beneficial and need not cost a thing.

Featured snippets are among the most effective SEO tactics you can use to drive more organic traffic to your site. And it is precisely for this reason that almost every marketer aware of the importance of featured snippets wants to implement this strategy into their content.

Representing brief excerpts that contain direct but informative answers to specific user search queries, featured snippets are a great way to let users know that your content is valuable and help your website appear more credible in your field.

And while all this sounds great, the real question is – how do you successfully optimize your WordPress site for featured snippets? Actually, there are different strategies you can use to implement featured snippets on your WordPress site, and this time around, we will share some of the most effective ones. We will also go into more detail about what featured snippets are and list some of the most common types of featured snippets out there, so make sure to stick around:

What Are Featured Snippets and How Are They Beneficial?

In a nutshell, featured snippets are page excerpts that usually appear at the top of SERPs and are displayed in a format that makes them stand out from other search results. The main goal of featured snippets is to quickly and directly answer the question in the search query and give the users exactly what they need in Google search results. Then, if they want to learn more about the topic, they can simply click on the URL located below the snippet which will lead them to the page or post in question.

Here is an example of what a Google featured snippet can look like:

Looking at this picture alone, you will probably realize that you’ve known what featured snippets are all along – you just didn’t know that that’s what they’re called. The thing is, every time you search for a particular thing on Google, it will try to provide you with a snippet that will answer your question in the best possible way. As we’ve already mentioned above, this answer will also be formatted differently compared to all other results to make it stand out better. Thus, it’s easy to see why having your content appear in the form of a featured snippet can be beneficial for your site. Not only will users be more inclined to click on your link and read more info about the subject directly on your site, but this direct exposure to Google has the potential to do wonders for your reputation and overall credibility. After all, if your content appears in the results as a featured snippet, users will regard your content as a credible source and see you as an expert in your field.

Therefore, by optimizing your content for featured snippets and having your pages displayed as either a featured snippet or a rich result, you can gain:

Some of the Most Common Types of Featured Snippets

While it’s true that all featured snippets represent a brief but informative extract from a relevant piece of content, they can still be displayed in different types of formats. Here are some of the most commonly seen featured snippet types:

Featured Snippets vs Rich Results

Another type of result that can significantly boost the organic traffic to a website and is sometimes used interchangeably with featured snippets are rich results. Rich results or rich snippets contain more data than the featured snippet, for instance more text and images too. These results appear as part of the organic search on top of the SERP, and are pulled from the page’s structured data.

Rich results are incredibly useful for traffic and SEO. To qualify for a rich snippet, the page needs to contain structured data, such as Schema.org.

Here are a couple of examples of rich results:

FAQ – If your website features a Frequently Asked Questions page, or you have an FAQ section in one of your pages or posts, you can apply the FAQ schema to it so it can qualify for a FAQ snippet. It is a snippet that lists several questions along with the answers and as such provides immediate value to the user who made a specific query.

Recipe – This is one of the most common (and most appreciated!) types of snippets. It displays a selection of top ranking recipes along with essential info like cooking time, ingredients, rating and an image.

Other popular types of snippets include:

and about a dozen more.

How to Optimize Your WordPress Site for Featured Snippets

Getting your content to appear in the form of a rich snippet may appear to be tricky at first. Still, there are many effective ways in which you can optimize your WordPress site and its content and convince Google that your content is good, relevant, and credible enough to earn a featured snippet.

Analyze Your Competition

To beat your competition and have your featured snippets appear in SERPs instead of theirs, you should always strive to analyze your competition and look into the strategies they may be using to have their content rank as a featured snippet. One way in which you can do this is to use an SEO tool (like Semrush, for example), enter the competitor’s URL, and analyze keywords (and keyword groups) that helped them get featured snippets in the first place. Then, what you want to do is create a list of all these keywords and sort them according to their search volume.

What you should pay special attention to are the keywords with low search volume. These types of keywords have low search traffic on Google, which means you will have less competition for these keywords and higher chances to score a featured snippet for these keywords.

We also advise you to look into the types of snippets your competition is scoring for when it comes to specific keywords. This way, you will know exactly what type (or types) of snippet(s) you should focus on so that you can optimize your content for it in the swiftest manner possible.

Optimize Your Content for Specific Featured Snippets

Once you learn what types of snippets you should aim to rank for, it’s time to optimize your content in a way that will make Google recognize your content as relevant and reliable enough to display it as a featured snippet in the first place. For example, if you want to optimize your content so that it appears as a Paragraph snippet, you need to make sure to create a brief piece of text with a definition that provides a concrete and straightforward answer on a particular topic. This snippet should ideally be between 40-60 words long, though your answer can be longer depending on the topic at hand and how demanding it is to provide the answer in general.

Another way in which you can make it easier to rank for the paragraph featured snippet is to add a heading before your paragraph that begins with (and contains) question keywords that appear in the user’s search query (such as “What”, “How”, etc.). Of course, the paragraph itself should contain keywords from the search query as well.

Similarly, if you want to rank for a numbered or bulleted list snippet, make sure to include these types of lists in your page or post as well. You can easily do this by separating different sections of your page using header tags. These tags have the purpose of further informing search engines about the main topics of your content, which makes it easier to understand what your content is about. By incorporating different headings into your text, you can easily signal to Google that you’ve created your own numbered and bulleted lists and have it display them as a featured snippet in SERPs.

In short, it all comes down to formatting your content in a way that looks as close as the type of featured snippet you want to rank for. Basically, the more you make sure that your content resembles a featured snippet, the better chances you have of Google recognizing your efforts.

Make Sure to Target Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords represent longer and more specific keyword phrases that people type into their search. These types of keywords are more conversational in nature, which is why they are widely used in voice search optimization as well.

Here’s an example of a basic, shorter keyword:

‘Optimize website for search engines’

And here’s an example of a long-tail keyword:

‘What are the best ways to optimize my website for search engines?’

Aside from optimizing your content for shorter featured snippet keywords that are more likely to be used by users, you should go out of your way to do so for long-tail keywords (and their variations) as well. It’s needless to say that by doing so, you will increase the chances of your content ranking for featured snippets.

To learn which long-tail keywords you should incorporate into your content, we recommend checking out the “People Also Ask” box in search results. This box is displayed right below a featured snippet in SERPs. You can type in a basic keyword or key phrase you want to rank for, and then look into some of the additional questions that appear in the “People Also Ask” box. These questions usually contain some long-tail keyword variations that people also use in their search queries. Therefore, if it makes sense, you can try using some of these variations to improve your chances of scoring a featured snippet for these keywords as well.

Always Aim to Create High-Quality Content

This sort of goes without saying, but to improve your chances of Google recognizing your content as valuable, you have to do more than proper formatting for it to end up in Google featured snippets. Aside from making sure that you cover the most relevant information in your content, you should also use sentences that are concise and easy to read and to also create content that is scannable in general.

Moreover, you shouldn’t forget to provide more value than your competition. You can do so by adding some unique examples on a topic, including some statistics, adding relevant images and appropriate links, and the list goes on.

Set Up Schema Markup on Your Site

Last but not least, to truly increase your chances of getting a featured snippet position in SERPs, you should see that you properly implement Schema markup on your WordPress site. Schema markup is a type of metadata that provides more information about your content to search engines. It does this by adding a layer of data to different pieces of content, and this data is what usually gets displayed as a rich snippet in SERPs. In other words, adding Schema to your site’s content will help Google figure out what type of featured snippet it should display, as well as help display it properly.

Schema will also help you qualify for a rich result. There are different schema types for different types of rich results – recipe, event, review, etc.

Structured data is basically code that provides additional information about your content. It is highly organized and standardized, and it helps search engines understand the content better. When it can be neatly classified by engines, the content has a much higher chance of ranking higher, or being displayed as a rich result.

To add Schema markup to your site, we recommend using a rich snippet plugin called All In One Schema Rich Snippets. This plugin comes with the support for the most commonly used rich snippet types out there, such as review, product, service, event, recipe, people, and even video. Once you install the plugin and configure its settings (the process itself is pretty intuitive), you should access the edit of your page/post and find the Configure Rich Snippet meta box located at the bottom of the editor. Then, you simply need to select the appropriate Schema type for your page or post.

We recommend checking out our article on how to add Schema markup in WordPress to learn more about the subject.

Once you have applied structured data to your content, you can check to see if it works and if Google recognizes it, you can have it checked and validated by Google itself or using the Schema Validator.

In Conclusion

Getting a featured snippet on Google can give you a significant advantage over your competitors and can also do wonders when it comes to boosting your website’s credibility as a whole. That being said, it may take some extra effort and patience on your part to be able to optimize your WordPress site for featured snippets. Just remember to keep up with your competition, aim to create readable, high-quality content that is well optimized both for people and search engines, and don’t forget to add schema markup to your site to ensure that your featured snippets can be properly displayed in SERPs. Just stay persistent, and all your hard work will eventually pay off.

When running a website, you usually need to invest some money to help it prosper. And using your own website to make money to keep up with the requirements of running one is entirely possible. Luckily, there are many different ways in which one can monetize their website. For example, many bloggers make money from blogging by implementing strategies such as publishing paid content with a paywall, setting up donations, and placing advertisements on their blogs. And since advertisements (generally known as ads) are one of the most widely used and effective ways to make money, it might be a good idea to find an easy way to implement them on your site as well.

By far, the easiest way to do this is to use the help of an advertising plugin. These kinds of plugins have everything you may need to successfully insert and manage ads and generate income from your WordPress site. So this time around, we’ve decided to talk about some of the best WordPress advertising plugins that will help you do just that. But first, let’s explore the benefits of using an advertising plugin in more detail.

Why You Should Use an Advertising Plugin on Your WordPress Site

So, you are probably wondering – why use an advertising plugin to manage ads in WordPress in the first place? Well, first of all, while WordPress is a great and flexible CMS, it does not come with the ability to easily manage ads out of the box. And to get a stable revenue from ads, you will need to add more than just a few ads to your site – which is why ad management is practically a necessity.

Also, while you can also add and manage ads on your site using code, not everyone possesses the coding knowledge or skills to do that without much hassle. Plus, any future site or theme updates can disrupt or erase the code altogether and prevent ads from showing properly on your site. Or worse yet, it may even cause some unforeseeable site damage and stop it from running properly altogether.

By adding an ad management plugin to your WordPress site, you can insert your ads much faster and easily customize their look. Finally, you can quickly determine the location that best fits your overall website design and content arrangement while not disrupting the overall user experience.

So, we are taking this opportunity to present some of the best WordPress advertising plugins around. These options are equipped with everything you need to successfully add, run and manage ads on your site and help earn much-needed revenue. Check them out:

Ad Inserter

Ad Inserter is a great and highly popular free plugin that comes with many advanced advertising features so that you can insert ad codes in different areas of your site and display ads in the best way possible. For example, you will be able to place your ads before or after content, before and after paragraphs, images, comments, and the list goes on. The plugin comes with Google Adsense and Google Ad Manager support, and also supports Media.net, Infolinks, and rotating banners, among others. With this plugin, you can also insert Google Analytics and other tracking codes, insert images, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or PHP code, customize the look of your ads using custom alignments and styles, use the post title, tags, or category names to create and add contextual ads, and plenty more.

If you want, you can upgrade to the pro version of the Ad Inserter plugin (starting at $20 for two sites) to get access to some extra features such as the ability to use ad impression and click statistics, get statistics reports for clients in PDF format, and perform A/B testing to learn which ads and settings work best for you. You also get a click fraud protection, lazy loading feature, sticky ads with the optional close button, and the list goes on.

Advanced Ads – Ad Manager and AdSense

This is another popular plugin option with over 100.000 active installations on wp.org. Advanced Ads is great if you want to use a simple and free ad manager plugin with plenty of features that is compatible with multiple ad network types. The networks include the likes of Google AdSense, Google Ad Manager (previously known as Google DoubleClick for Publishers, DFP), Amazon ads, and media.net ads. The plugin also comes with an ad block that will allow you to easily insert ads anywhere you want on your site using the Gutenberg block editor.

Some of the other ad management features include the ability to create and showcase unlimited ad units, rotate ads, schedule ads and set their start and expiration date, put targeted ads according to the content you post as well as user groups, and insert ads into your pages automatically without any code. Moreover, you will be able to display images and image banners, add PHP, JavaScript, HTML, or CSS, choose to show ads in your widget areas, disable ads on certain pages, display ads based on specific visitor role or geo-location (thanks to the Geo-Targeting addon), etc.

There are many other advanced features if you opt for the pro version of the plugin (it comes at a price of $49 for a single site). These include 13 additional display and visitor conditions (so you can display ads based on the URL referrer, browser language, specific cookies, etc.), the ability to use lazy loading, get access to the click fraud protection, use alternative ads for AdBlock users, limit ads so that they are displayed only once per page, and the list goes on.

Ads by WPQUADS

Ads by WPQUADS is yet another feature-rich plugin you can use to showcase and manage ads on your WordPress site in the best possible manner. With it, you will be able to use the click fraud protection feature to fight click fraud. In addition, of course, you get the Google Adsense support (to integrate with Google Adsense ad types), and Google Ad Manager. You will be able to use 12 different ad positions to easily regulate where your ads will appear on your site, as well as 10 post-specific ad positions to decide whether you will include or exclude specific pages from containing ads. Plus, there will be 9 targeting conditions available to regulate the appearance of your ads even further. You will get to group multiple ads and rotate them at random, use lazy loading, place an infinite amount of ads to your website, etc.

If you upgrade to WPQUADS pro, you can also expect to have access to professional features like the ability to make ads skippable, use the geo-targeting feature to target ads based on the specific cities and countries, find out which ads have the best performance and more. The pricing of the pro version of the plugin starts at $89 for one site.

Another reason why this plugin makes a great choice is that it’s created with the goal of maintaining your website speed as well, as it only loads the code at the time of execution.

Meks Easy Ads Widget

Meks Easy Ads Widget is a rather simple plugin you can use completely for free to create an unlimited number of ads on your site using the widget areas. You can create these ads all inside one widget and adjust your size by choosing from predefined sizes or creating a custom one. Also, you get to use both script and image-based ads, choose the random order of ads, and limit the number of ads per view, among other things. In addition, if you want, you will be able to autoplay the rotating ads.

Easy Google AdSense

Easy Google AdSense is a free and convenient plugin that really simplifies the AdSense experience. If you’ve already been verified and opened an AdSense account, this advertising plugin automates the entire process. Simply install it and enter your AdSense Publisher ID. Google will not start posting ads automatically, taking into consideration the optimal times to do it, based on your traffic, audience and other metrics. The whole point of ads is to show them to those who need to see it, when they need to see it. The plugin (well, Google, actually) uses machine learning to optimize your ads, and it even frees you from having to worry about meeting the terms and conditions. The plugin supports in-page ads, matched content, anchor ads, vignette ads and widescreen ads.

AdRotate Banner Management

If you are looking for a way to have your ads change frequently on your pages, showing a different ad every few seconds, in order to maximize the profit, check out AdRotate Banner Management. This plugin doesn’t just work with Google ads – you can also manage your own ads, the ads you get from partners, Media.net ads, Amazon Associate tags and so on. It allows you to set ad rotation the way you like, to schedule campaigns, create your own ads using a built-in ad generator, ad affiliate banners, etc. The plugin provides both a block and a widget for managing ads. There’s a paid version of this ads plugin too, which includes features like geo targeting, mobile ads, multiple schedules, tracking ads through analytics with reporting, and masking ads from ad blockers, among other features. The paid version costs $43.

Conclusion

If you plan to use ads to monetize your WordPress site, we suggest that you look no further than these advertisement plugins to make the process of managing your ads easier, quicker, and more efficient in every possible way. If you are looking for a more advanced plugin to cover your needs and want to have a choice to place ads in many different areas of your site, we suggest that you look into plugins such as Advanced Ads and Ad Inserter. These freemium options allow you to use anything from image and rotating banners to tracking codes and various display and user conditions. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a simple plugin that has basic, but beginner-friendly features, we recommend plugins like Meks Easy Ads Widget. In any case, you just have to choose the option that best fits your overall advertising needs and then start making the most out of your monetization efforts.

The term “omnichannel” can be defined as an approach or strategy that integrates all available methods and channels of interaction with customers. These days, when physical and digital worlds are more interconnected than ever, omnichannel indicates an integration of both online and offline advertising, marketing, communications and sales.

It is a particularly relevant term in e-commerce, as it aims to provide a seamless and cohesive approach to digital and brick-and-mortar shopping experiences. In practical terms, an omnichannel experience is when you receive a coupon via sms or email and then use it in a physical location. Or, when you sign up for a newsletter in a store and then receive promotions via your social media or email.

We’ve written extensively about this in our guide to omnichannel marketing and WordPress, and this time around we want to focus on some of the best omnichannel tools for WordPress that can help you promote your brand, boost your conversions and grow your sales:

Omnisend

Omnisend is an all-in-one marketing solution for e-commerce businesses. Once you have collected a pool of leads (email addresses, phone numbers, etc), Omnisend allows you to create automated campaigns, tailored for your specific needs, that engage your customers whatever channel they’re using. Omnisend’s rich features help you create pre-built automations such as welcome message series, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase campaigns and more.

Omnisend also offers rich segmentation and targeting abilities – you can create very narrow and specific audiences and then target them with custom campaigns. The audiences are updated in real time and all the actions can be automated using an intuitive and functional dashboard.

This tool is very easy to integrate into your operations, and it can be done pretty quickly, too, with guided migration and complete data sync. Should you encounter any difficulties, you can count on 24/7 support.

For small businesses or for those who just want to try Omnisend out first, there is a free plan. Paid plans start at $16/mo for medium businesses focused on email marketing and the true omnichannel features come with the pro plan that includes sms too, and costs $59/mo.

Brevo

You may not have heard of Brevo, but you’ve certainly heard of Sendinblue, the classic email marketing tool for WordPress and other platforms. Well, Sendinblue has just rebranded and it’s now a full-fledged CRM platform with a new name – Brevo.

Brevo is a platform designed to help brands build and develop customer relations throughout various channels – most importantly email and sms, but also live chat, social media and more. The great thing about Brevo is that it’s not just for marketing purposes – in addition to creating seamless campaigns throughout email, sms, WhatsApp and more, it also helps with identifying and targeting leads, tracking deals and optimizing your pipeline with automated actions.

Triggered emails are a particularly attractive feature of this platform. Brevo automates all your transactional messages with precision and reliability, thanks to an API that guarantees a 99% delivery rate. It also features an inbound email parser that captures data from what you receive and sends it in appropriate databases, from where it can be used for campaigns.

Brevo is a scalable platform that can be equally beneficial for small startups and big enterprises. It integrates seamlessly with WordPress and WooCommerce, as well as Zapier, Salesforce, Zendesk and other popular platforms.

Brevo comes with a free plan for those who just want to try it out. Paid plans are divided into functions – there are plans for marketing platform, sales platform, email, etc. The cheapest Marketing platform plan costs $25, Conversations plan is $15, the Sales platform is free and the Transactional emails plan is free as is and you pay per number of emails sent.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a feature-rich, powerful product for marketing automation tool that focuses on hyper-personalized customer messages across the most important channels – email, sms, push notifications, and beyond. It features advanced segmentation features, with any possible combination of rules, from profile and demographic info, location and behavior to order date, and more. Growth tools, such time-based pop-ups and dynamic forms, help turn visitors into subscribers. Behavior-based messaging can target customers based on engagement, event data and predictive analysis. On top of all that, the AI-driven tools help you proactively message your customers by predicting their next order time, churn rate, lifetime value and other important aspects.

Furthermore, Klaviyo features channel-based templates that are industry-specific, as well as cross-channel attribution and reporting.

Klaviyo has 300+ easy-to-install tech integrations, offers 24/7 support, live training and certifications, and has a network of 6,500 partners.

The pricing is based on the number of contacts a business has. If you’re starting with none or very little, you can use the basic Klaviyo plan for free. For businesses with 1,001-1,500 contacts, the Email and SMS plan costs $60/mo and Email only is $45. More contacts mean slightly more expensive plans.

HubSpot

While we’re on the subject of CRM platforms with omnichannel marketing features, we can’t skip to mention HubSpot, one of the leading marketing and CRM tools on the market for a while now. In addition to helping you effectively manage customer relations, HubSpot also streamlines your marketing campaigns and track customer interactions, building a cohesive system that allows you to craft pitch-perfect strategies that make the most out of every lead.

HubSpot offers a centralized customer data overview with interactions, manages and tracks leads throughout the pipeline, automates marketing tasks and their follow-ups, creates behavior- and preference-based targeted campaigns, and much, much more.

The platform’s Service Hub helps with tickets, support and feedback, and knowledge bases. The Operations Hub includes data sync, powerful and programmable automation and data quantity automation.

On top of all this, you can also use HubSpot as a content management system (although you won’t be needing it if you’re using WordPress) – it features a drag-and-drop editor, SEO tools such as keyword and topic recommendations, web hosting and custom domain connection, and even website templates.

As for the pricing, different tools (or hubs) come at different costs. For individuals and small teams, all solutions start at $30/mo. The enterprise and premium solutions are more costly, of course: the Marketing Hub starts at $800/mo, Sales Hub and Customer Service both start at $450, CMS is $360/mo, and operations is $720/mo. Note that you can also combine the products and make a bundle, in which case individual products will cost less.

Buffer

These days, no omnichannel strategy is complete without social media, and that’s where Buffer comes into play. It’s a powerful, reliable and feature-rich tool for scheduling and targeting automated social media messages and content, complete with analytics tools. You may remember it from our piece on how to automatically post to Facebook from WordPress. The people behind Buffer understand that social media represents an enormous pool of possibilities and one of the fastest and cheapest ways to grow your audience and your brand. They also understand that managing social media campaigns can be quite time-consuming. With their automation tools, it doesn’t have to be, though.

With Buffer, you get actionable insights about which content will perform the best, and at what times. It will also help you share to the right channels so that you reach the best possible audience for your message. Thanks to scheduling features, Buffer will literally post the content for you at scheduled times, in automated processes that help you save tons of time. And, regardless of your team size, Buffer’s collaborative tools (featuring permission settings and approval flows) allow your team to work by itself, without having to be (micro)managed.

This tool is known for a very user-friendly interface and easy integration with many popular tools and platforms, including, of course, WordPress.

Buffer has a free plan for individuals and small brands, which allows connecting up to three channels and comes with a landing page builder, planning and publishing tools and an AI assistant. Paid plans go from $6/mo to $120/mo and they come with a 14-day free trial period.

Evam

Evam is a real-time cross-channel marketing solution specializing in telecommunications, retail and loyalty, transport and travel, as well as financial services. In addition to omnichannel marketing, it also provides solutions and tools for customer experience management and operational efficiency. This platform uses AI and data collected from billions of touchpoints daily to take the optimum action in real time, showing the next best offer for each customer.

Evam’s omnichannel marketing tools hub helps users engage with their customers across all digital touchpoints in a cohesive, unified manner, assuring that both the branding and the messaging remain consistent, with maximum efficiency. It provides tools for cross-channel surveys, collects customer feedback, creates valuable insights and makes sure all campaign messages are delivered at critical moments. Unlike many other CRMs, Evam doesn’t create rules for individual touchpoints and instead uses weeks- or months-old journeys to manage customer interactions. This provides a more precise and reliable overview of the customer journey and thus assures more efficient customer interactions.

Evan provides businesses with a scalable and easy to use digital platform that’s ready to deploy out of the box and doesn’t require any IT support. The platform uses machine learning to develop scenarios, thus supporting agile value creation.

This is an advanced solution that doesn’t exactly integrate into a WordPress website like a plugin. The company can create tailored solutions and is made specifically for agile-oriented digital businesses, which is perhaps why the only way to learn of its pricing is to get in touch with them.

Wrapping It Up

There you have it – a selection of the top omnichannel tools for WordPress available on the market right now. You may have noticed that these tools are not exactly cheap (especially in enterprise versions). This is because they offer complex automation features that go far beyond simple plug-and-play solutions that are available for WordPress.

You may also have noticed that most of the tools focus on email and sms. These communication methods lie at the heart of omnichannel strategies. There are email automation tools that focus solely on that, but we made sure to include tools that help you easily integrate as many channels as possible, in an automated (and often AI-powered way). If there’s a tool you use and like that we didn’t include on our list, make sure to let us know!

Omnichannel marketing may seem like one of those buzzwords that make you sound like an expert and don’t really mean much – but that’s only if you’re completely clueless about digital marketing. It’s okay if you are – perhaps you’re just starting out in online business and are yet to get a grasp of the complexities of this field. Maybe, on the other hand, you do understand what omnichannel marketing is but you have no idea where to start with implementing it into your WordPress-based online presence, brand or product.

That’s what we’re here for today. Stick around as we talk about:

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing can be defined as a cohesive integration of branding, sales, advertising and messaging both online and offline, with the purpose of providing a unique concept, message and tone throughout the sales funnel.

If that doesn’t mean much to you because of the lingo, let’s put it this way: in omnichannel marketing, you are making sure that whatever the channel your customers use to reach your brand and interact with you, their experience will be the same, your message will be the same and your tone will be the same. They will have a seamless experience and they may start their journey through one channel, proceed or modify it through another and perhaps finish it through the third one.

Omnichannel can mean a lot of things, strategy-wise. There’s no single rulebook that says you have to do this and that to have a successful omnichannel campaign. It all depends on your channels, first of all, and then on what sort of customer approach you’re cultivating.

For instance, sending out an email to a customer that has abandoned their cart is an omnichannel technique.

Sending an sms, a message via instant messaging services or social media, informing the customer about a promotion or a sales event is an omnichannel technique.

Retargeting ads in one inbox related to the items added to cart on another platform is an omnichannel technique.

Giving out coupons to in-store customers that they can use for their online purchases is an omnichannel technique.

Using elements of a single campaign for billboards, posters, social media banners, ads and online editorials is an omnichannel technique.

You get the idea. We’ll get deeper into omnichannel strategies a bit later on. Right now we need to get one thing clear: is omnichannel the same as multichannel?

Omnichannel vs Multichannel

It could be said that in omnichannel marketing the primary focus is on the customer (and customer experience and customer journey). In multichannel marketing, however, the focus is on the brand.

Multichannel simply means using more than one channel of communication, for instance offline and online, and using those channels to promote a product or a service, or the brand as a whole.

In multichannel, the customer is contacted online, in-print and in brick-and-mortar stores, but each of these channels uses a different approach. In omnichannel, on the other hand, the approach to all the channels is integrated into a single seamless experience. The customers get to choose how (and through which channel) they want to engage with the funnel.

Another important distinction is that in multichannel strategies each channel functions independently and can deliver different messages, while in omnichannel the campaign is designed to have all channels working together.

Finally, personalization plays a very important role in omnichannel marketing. Because the communication is unified and seamless, your customer should expect you to know who he or she is when they interact with you.

Let’s give you an example. If your customer visits your Facebook page, they expect to have the same or similar experience that they have with your website, in terms of branding and communication. And if they have provided their information (personal or purchase info), they expect you to be aware of it and not to have them repeat it when they ask for help via live chat or phone support. In omnichannel, this is possible since the entire experience is connected and unified.

Benefits of Omnichannel Marketing

There’s a reason why so many successful big league brands use omnichannel marketing. It’s simply good for business, and here’s why:

Retention

By providing a smooth and streamlined customer experience with personalized communication throughout all your channels, you’re building trust in your brand. You come off as dedicated and consistent, and the customers appreciate that. Considering that, according to Invesp, the chances of selling to an existing customer are between 60% and 70% while the chances of selling to a new one are just 5%-20%, it’s clear why you want to work on your customer retention. And omnichannel marketing helps greatly with that.

Improved Customer Experience

When exposed to a unified and smooth experience that obviously works seamlessly, like a clock, throughout different channels, customers tend to be positively impressed. It shows dedication, care and effort, and that’s something we can all appreciate. If we can start a process (a purchase, for instance) in one channel and complete it in another, with our info saved and remembered, we’re that much happier with the experience.

Brand Recognition

Since omnichannel marketing includes in-store experience, it’s clear that consistent branding and messaging throughout all channels improves brand recognition and awareness. Simply put – omnichannel marketing makes you more recognizable.

Better Sales and Higher Revenue

According to omnichannel marketing statistics, brands that use three or more channels in their marketing campaigns have a 287% higher purchase rate, while the order rate is 494% higher. These numbers alone are enough to prove that there’s a direct link between omnichannel marketing and better sales – and consequently, higher revenue. You invest a bit in a strong seamless omnichannel campaign, and it pays off significantly in your business bottom line.

Better customer insight

A true omnichannel campaign is also highly beneficial for your analytics and data attribution efforts. Because you will want to track engagement throughout all of your channels, you will be gaining invaluable insight into all the steps of the customer journey. For instance, you will learn which are your customers’ favorite touchpoints and then boost those, while perhaps letting go of the touchpoints that perform poorly.

Winning Omnichannel Strategy for WordPress

WordPress itself isn’t of essence here because your website is only one of your channels. However, in order to connect them into a single strategy, you need to be sure your website can support it. Fortunately, WordPress as a platform is ideal for that because it’s so flexible. You can basically do anything you want with it, and you can certainly connect your WordPress website with your other channels into a unified experience.

Set Your Business Goal

Every strategy, regardless of the scope or industry, begins with establishing the business end goal, however obvious. This helps keep a sharp focus on the outcome, which, in turn, helps shape the strategy pillars and tactics.

Let’s assume you have an online shop with products or services you want to sell. Your end goal should be quantified per period – six months, a year, two years. You want to sell this many products or close this many service contracts in the given period. Keep this number in mind and monitor the progress regularly along the way.

Establish Your Customer Persona

The customer persona is a representation of your ideal customer, the one you’re speaking through your channels and the one you see as the most likely to convert. In order to have a successful, focused strategy, you need to build it around that persona. This will help you establish the tone and the language of your messages, and its content too, of course. You wouldn’t use the same language for a 60 year old woman from rural areas with limited access to the internet as you would to an urban millennial who spends most of his or her waking life on the phone or tablet.

Create a Customer Journey

Customer journey is a sequence of steps a person takes from the moment they first become aware of your brand, until becoming a customer. It’s a complicated process, both offline and online, and, as we know, the two often interact. A person can start the journey online and finish it in your brick-and-mortar location, which is, in fact, a very common scenario.

A thorough understanding of the processes that occur along this way will help you create an effective customer journey map and then use it in your omnichannel strategy. There are touchpoints that need to be synchronized and that point to one another (for example, registration for a newsletter or sms in the physical store can help increase checkout conversion rates of your eCommerce website by informing the customers about promotions and deals).

Segment Your Audience

Because omnichannel marketing often involves personalization, and has a strong focus on the customer instead of the brand, it is vital to take all your customer personas (because you will have more than one) and segment your audience according to them. Segmentation is important as it helps you shape the messages and design outcomes for each audience group. You can segment by location, age, gender, but also by interaction with your brand. After you have grouped the audience into segments, you will apply specific techniques and deploy pacific messages to each of them.

Connect Your Online Store with Your Physical Business

These days, an omnichannel strategy is basically all about connecting the online and offline experiences of your brand. In multichannel, these can be completely different. In omnichannel, however, you want to provide a seamless and unified experience. One way to do so is by creating some form of connection between your physical business and your online store or website. One obvious way to do so is by making it easy for the customers in your brick-and-mortar store to find you online – on social media, and on your website. You can display QR codes, stickers with social media icons, and so on. You can also have the customers give you their email in order to send them notifications about sales and special promotions reserved for subscribers only.

Track the Results

The path to conversion is almost never a straight one. A customer may discover you through TikTok and then decide to visit your store, or find something they like in your store and decide to purchase it online. Each of these paths needs to be tracked so you can learn how your audience converts. Once you have these insights, you can tweak your omnichannel strategy accordingly, combined with personalization.

Google Analytics remains the best tool for tracking all sorts of events, but in many cases, it won’t be enough. If you’re running a WooCommerce shop, there’s a range of excellent WooCommerce analytics plugins you can use.

Tips for Success

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s see how you can make sure your omnichannel strategy really works.

Wrapping It Up

If you’ve come this far, you now hopefully have a much better understanding of the concept of omnichannel marketing. Sure, this model may not be for every business, but if you do retail both online and offline, if you use more than one channel of communication with your customers and if you plan to scale up, omnichannel is definitely something you should consider investing your time and effort into.

If you have more ideas on how to create the perfect omnichannel strategy or you have questions related to this topic, hit us up in the comments!