DWGtalks, Author at Dream Warrior Group

Understanding SEO

The quest for visibility and relevance is a continuous journey in the digital world. One of the most critical tools in this journey is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, a common question arises: “How long does SEO take to work?”

Based on insights from SEMrush, this article aims to shed light on this question and more. Many use the comparison between the tai-chi movement and a fast-paced world to describe the pace of SEO versus other forms of promotion. It’s not an instant solution but a strategic process that requires patience and persistence. The timeframe for SEO results can vary, but generally, it takes several months up to a year to see measurable outcomes. Both research and industry consensus support this timeframe.

Understanding SEO Results

Before diving into the timeframe, it’s essential to understand what SEO ‘results’ mean. The primary metric for measuring Optimization success is relevant organic traffic. A significant uptick in organic traffic is often the first indicator of a successful Optimization program. If a substantial increase in bounce rate accompanies this, the success is far less credible. The best ways to compare the increase in organic traffic are:

Increase in engaged traffic = (Traffic after SEO campaign x (1-Bounce Rate))- (Traffic before SEO campaign x (1-Bounce Rate))

Increase in goal Completion = Goals completion after SEO Campaign – Goal Completion before SEO Campaign

The ratio of Converted Engagements = Increase in goal Completion / Increase in engaged traffic

A great SEO campaign will give you improved overall traffic, improved increase in engaged traffic, improved increase in goal completion, and improvement in the ratio of converted engagements.

If you only see your traffic increase without a lift in other areas, it may be time to question the quality of key phrases used for your site optimization.

Traffic increases from Search Engine Optimization – Real World Exampales

To provide a clearer picture, let’s look at some real-world examples. An e-commerce toy business that lost significant search rankings and traffic after launching a redesigned website managed to rank 37 priority key phrases back onto Page 1 within five months. Within six months, they saw a return to previous traffic levels. It took an additional year to ensure that the additional 25 keywords aimed at mid funnel were in the first page thus improving all the results.

A niche ad agency’s website that suffered from lost rankings in relevant keywords despite the increase in organic search traffic started to see an increase in relevant traffic results after seven months of implementing recommended improvements. Within nine months, they received record levels of relevant organic traffic, and within two years, they saw a 200% increase in goal completion (phone calls and form completions for purchase of their products and services).

Factors Impacting SEO Timeframes

Several factors can influence the timeframe for SEO results. Three of the most important are your actions, the website’s condition, and the competition. The “SEO results” clock starts ticking once you implement the program, not when you hire someone or when strategies are being formulated.

If your website has a lot of technical issues, received a manual action from Google, or was negatively impacted by a Google core update, it might take longer to see results. On the other hand, quick fixes like resolving a robots.txt file blocking search engines can produce fast SEO results.

Competition also plays a significant role. The competition can be challenging depending on the industry and the resources your competitors have. However, it’s possible to beat the competition with a nimble and creative approach.

Accelerating SEO Results

While you can’t drastically speed up SEO results, there are ways to streamline the process. An in-depth, technical SEO audit can pinpoint how to fix your site and beat the competition. Enlisting the help of an expert SEO consultant or agency can also make a significant difference.

In conclusion, SEO is a long-term investment. The results you see within several months to a year are just the beginning. With a solid SEO strategy, you can expect better results as time goes on. Remember, in the world of SEO, patience and persistence are key.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles Based web design and digital marketing Company, providing solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Posts & Marketing & Google PPC campaigns. Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.

AI in Marketing Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI), which has already impacted several disciplines, including technology, is permeating every aspect of our life. It is transforming how we do business, boosting engineering productivity, improving customer service with customized chatbots, helping product managers with customer interview questions, and even assessing the clarity of marketing messages. Although the speed at which AI realizes its promise can be intimidating, it also forces a radical rethinking of issues and how firms might develop more quickly.

The Role of AI in Marketing Automation

Leading manufacturers of marketing automation software have acknowledged the revolutionary potential of AI. Automation, marketing, and sales are three areas of our business where AI has the potential to have a significant influence. The marketing environment has already seen substantial changes as a result of AI. It supports the creation of content, research, customer support, and personalization.

For example, you may utilize AI technologies like ChatGPT to improve the clarity of your email newsletters, come up with ideas for a blog or social media piece, or even make product recommendations more enticing. AI can be programmed to comprehend typical consumer inquiries and offer support via chatbots or tickets.

By summarizing information from calls or notes and tailoring communications, AI can help sales representatives. AI can detect future customers or provide pertinent recommendations and content when given customer data. However, incorporating AI into your marketing tools can take time and effort. For example, you may need to export data to get insights before acting or frequently upload a great deal of data for your system to pick up any knowledge.

AI Efficiencies

Through detailed segmentation, automated branching, and personalized content, marketing automation uses AI to power 1:1 encounters. Many marketing automation services have created tools that assist sales representatives in determining a prospect’s mood based on received messages and estimating the likelihood that a deal will be closed based on prospect interaction and deal activity.

At Dream Warrior, we want to ensure that our clients are using their time in ways that will positively affect their businesses. We are constantly looking for methods to make the crucial daily chores that our clients must complete more effective and efficient.

How can you quickly produce ideas and iterate while producing content without disrupting your flow? We’re identifying needs and combining tools that will enable you to simplify your process. For example, you can create text content using straightforward prompts, receive comments on the prompt’s tone, length, or improvements, translate content into other languages, and create effective SMS content.

Most Marketing Automation services are investigating the possibility of building full campaigns from a single prompt, complete with a subject line, preheader, template, content, and call-to-action (CTA). These capabilities go beyond marketing and into sales, where AI may support salespeople in time-consuming chores like reviewing notes and determining the next steps. AI can also assist in creating compelling sales messaging.

Editing is usually simpler than beginning fresh. Those customers utilizing Marketing Automation customize a beginning framework daily using automation recipes while we work on improving our automation recipes with AI to provide our customers with the best place to start with whatever they need to automate.

The Future of AI in Marketing Automation

At Dream Warrior, we have always prioritized opening sophisticated capabilities to all of our clients. AI accelerates our goal of democratizing marketing automation. AI can swiftly build brand-new consumer experiences across channels, audiences, and messages from a single directive or objective. What motivates us is the possibility for our customers to quickly discover targeted segments, build outbound sequences and drip campaigns, add complicated branching, and add personalized content. We are thrilled to be a part of this adventure with our Marketing Automation partners since the future of AI and automation is promising.

Sitemaps

News about Sitemaps Ping Endpoint Deprecation

On Monday, June 26th, Google made a significant announcement regarding the Sitemaps Protocol, a tool that has been assisting search engines in discovering new URLs and scheduling crawls of already known URLs since 2005. The announcement revealed that the sitemaps “ping” endpoint, a feature of this widely utilized protocol, will be deprecated within the next six months.

What are Sitemaps

To repeat some of our previous posts, Google defines a sitemap as “a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, as well as the relationships between them.” (Google: Find out more about sitemaps.)

When you submit a sitemap, search engines may crawl your site more efficiently.

A sitemap will offer search engines crucial information such as:

When was a URL last updated?
How frequently are modifications made to a page?
The importance of a page in relation to other pages on your website.

This data assists search engines in finding, crawling, and indexing the web pages on your site. Sitemaps can be generated in an XML file, the most often used method. Some content management systems have capabilities that make it simple to create sitemaps.

Below is an example of a simple sitemap with all possible elements sourced from Dream Warrior Group‘s site.

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>https://dreamwarrior.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2023-06-28T00:00:00-07:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Understanding the Sitemap Ping

The sitemap protocol provides an unauthenticated REST method for sending sitemaps to search engines. However, subsequent internal Google and other search engine research have revealed that these unauthenticated sitemap submissions are no longer helpful. In the instance of Google Search, most of these submissions have been detected as spam. As a result, Google has chosen to remove sitemaps ping support. The deprecated REST API will stop working in six months, and any pings to it will result in a 404 error, and using the endpoint will no longer be useful.

The end of the sitemap pinging doesn’t mean that your sitemaps are useless; if you are utilizing robots.txt or regularly pushing your sitemap to the Google search console, you should experience no issues.

The Role of the Lastmod Element

The utility of the last mod feature, which indicates the latest modification date of a webpage, has fluctuated throughout time. However, it has recently become more impactful in a variety of situations, and Google now uses it as a signal for scheduling crawls to previously identified URLs.

To serve its purpose, the last mod element must be in a supported date format, as stated on sitemaps.org. Once you upload your sitemap, Google’s Search Console will alert you if it is not. Furthermore, it should accurately reflect the actual modification dates: if a page was last amended seven years ago, but the last mod element indicates that it was modified yesterday, Google will eventually discard the last mod dates provided.

You can apply the last mod element to all or just a subset of the pages in your sitemap. Because these sites frequently aggregate content from other pages on the site, some site software may need help to detect the last modification date of the homepage or a category page. In such circumstances, omitting the last model for these pages is appropriate.

It is critical to understand that “last modification” refers to “last significant modification.” Minor changes, such as changing the text in the sidebar or footer, do not warrant an update to the last mod value. Only if there are significant modifications to the primary text, structured data, or links you should change the last mod value.

Changefreq and Priority Elements

Google does not utilize the change freq or priority elements. The change freq element overlaps conceptually with last mod, while the priority element, a highly subjective field, often fails to accurately represent the actual priority of a page relative to other pages on a site based on Google’s internal studies. For further information on sitemaps, please review SITEMAP.ORG.

GA4 Reports

Part 6 of many about GA4 and what is coming after UA

We will pick up this installment of the Analytics after UA here at the end of this article GA4 Audiences by focusing on How to customize GA4 reports.

Basics of GA4 Reports

Standard GA4 reports provide us with a wealth of information about our users’ activity and the overall trajectory of our tracking efforts. If you’ve previously used Universal Analytics and are switching to GA4, you’ll note how adaptable the reporting interface is. Aside from the ability to produce new reports, you may also edit existing reports in any way – a feat previously unattainable in UA.

To do so, you must first understand where to look and how to activate some of these reports. It may appear complex, but we’re here to show you how to locate what you’re looking for. We’ll also demonstrate creating a new report based on the landing pages.

This guide shows you how to customize your Google Analytics 4 reports.

Please remember that we are utilizing our test property rather than Google’s demo account because modifying functionality is unavailable there.

If you’re also testing on the demo account, you must switch to a property you own. Even a brand-new, empty one should work, though you will notice how your changes affect the data afterward.

Standard GA4 Reports and How to modify them

Let’s start by looking at what a standard report looks like.

In your Google Analytics account, go to the Traffic acquisition report.

GA4 reports - Traffic Acquisition — GA4 Traffic Acquisition report

Standard reports are available for alteration, reorganization, and interface changes to suit your preferences. Going back to the Library and editing the collection the report is in will allow us to remove an entire report topic quickly.

Let’s use the retention subject as an example, as we don’t utilize it frequently and think it’s optional.

GA4 Reports - User Retention — User Retention Report

Go to Library → Edit collection under the life cycle collection, and follow the example below. Remove the panels you don’t want, add additional panels, and save.

GA4 Reports - Delete Panel — Panel deletion

GA4 Reports - Panel Replacement — Panel Replacement

Customize your GA4 Report Layout

To start customizing your Google Analytics 4 reports, determine what changes you want to make. For this example, let’s try removing the visualization charts.

At the top-right corner, click on the customize report icon.

The panel at the right shows the different aspects of the report you can change.

To hide a chart, click on the eye icon beside the said chart. A backslash symbol will cross through the eye icon to signify that it is hidden.

You should see that the charts are no longer part of the report, and only the table will remain. Next, let’s look at and modify the metrics shown in this report by clicking on Metrics.

New view 1 — New View – after removal of chart

The panel will present the visible list of metrics. If you want to remove a metric from the report, click the ✖ button to the right of the metric name.

In the list of metrics, we have the event count, engagement rate, conversions, etc., but what about the conversion rate? It is available in GA4, so this metric is present, but we must add it manually.

Adding Dimensions & Metrics to GA4 Report

Click Add metric at the bottom if you want to add a metric.

Browsing through the list of metrics, you’ll notice two conversion rates available in GA4: session conversion rate and user conversion rate.

Add both metrics to the report.

You could be unsure of how the two differ from one another. The user conversion rate displays the proportion of people who converted. The session conversion rate, on the other hand, indicates the proportion of sessions that resulted in conversions.

Organizing Your Report

Let’s change the placement of our metrics.

You can decide how you want the metrics displayed, but placing the conversion rates right after the sessions is preferable.

Upon satisfactory placement of the metrics, click on Apply.

To save the changes we’ve made, click Save → Save changes to the current report.

A popup will appear. Click Save one more time.

Besides the sessions column, we should only see the detailed table and the session and user conversion rates.

Creating Your Report in GA4 (GA4 Landing Page Report)

Making your own Google Analytics 4 reports is another method to personalize them.

Consider the scenario where we would like to involve a team of marketers in our project. However, they want to avoid fiddling with the reports’ configuration or going through multiple reports to find the necessary data.

They desire a single report with all the required data, in this case, the landing page report. You search your account but are unable to locate it. Therefore, you conclude that GA4 does not have it.

Go to Library → Create new report → Create detail report.

To make our lives easier, let’s start with a template. Select the Pages and Screens template.

You’ll see that we already have a typical report layout. We only need to modify the information that is displayed here.

Click on Dimensions.

Click on Add Dimension.

Add Landing page + String as a Dimension parameter and click on Apply.

Provide a name for the report and an optional report description. Then, click Save.

Returning to the reports library, you won’t find the landing page report in any report collections yet. It is not enough to create a report; we need to add the new report to a collection.

Adding a Report to a Collection

In our case, let’s add the landing page report to the life cycle collection.

Click on Edit collection under the life cycle card.

Editing will open a window with the life cycle collection structure on the left and a list of reports we may include in the collection on the riEditingght.

Drag the Landing Pages report under the engagement subject after finding it in the detail report bar.

If you want to remove a specific report from the collection, click the ✖ button next to the report name.

When you’ve made all the required changes, click Save → Save changes to the current collection.

Hope this series on how to manage GA4 has proven helpful. We will try to provide more hints in the future.

GA4 Audiences

Part 5 of many about GA4 and what is coming after UA

We will pick up this installment of the Analytics after UA here at the end of this article GA4 Segments and Audiences by focusing on building audiences in GA4.

Creating custom and remarketing audiences in Google Analytics 4 is one of the strategies to progress your analytics setup, per the GA4 checklist. You may need clarification on GA4’s comparable audiences, segments, filters, and comparative options.

Who are the GA4 audiences?

Let’s begin by defining the target audience. Users can be grouped or segmented into audiences based on one or more demographic, geographic, or user behavior characteristics.

This segmentation of users means you can use the whole amount of data in Google Analytics 4 to build audiences. For instance, you can create the following audience:

1. 1. Facebook Ads Traffic from the USA
  2. Google Organic Search Mobile Traffic
  3. Google Ads Desktop Traffic Paris, France
  4. Users who started their first session visiting the specific landing page and scrolled more than 50% of the page

Users that arrived at the targeted landing page for the first time during their first session and scrolled more than halfway down the page

These are all illustrations of audiences in GA4. So the question “What’s the difference between them” is excellent if you use segments in GA4 Explore.

How To Create Audiences in GA4

The audience creation process in Google Analytics 4 is comparable to that in Universal Analytics. Therefore, you should launch GA4 and take the next step to do that: Click the “New Audience” button under GA4 -> Admin -> Audiences.

creating Audiences in GA4 — Creating audiences in GA4

Let’s review the interface at this point. For this article, I decided to split the audiences into two types:

1. 1. Predefined audiences – the ones we can create using GA4 Templates
  2. Custom audiences – any audience we create using GA4 “Create a custom audience” button

Audience types — GA4 – Building new audiences

We can create the first type of audience using Google’s templates. Then, selecting the appropriate selection and entering the value are the only things we need to change. Next, Google offers us some ideas on how we may create them.

For instance, choosing “US” as the “country id” in the demographics template makes it simple to establish an audience that includes all users from the USA.

GA4 Audiences including US citizens — Audiences including US citizens

We can create remarketing audiences for Google Ads using customized or suggested audiences.

Predictive audiences is another intriguing Google Analytics 4 feature that allows you to run paid advertising campaigns, for example, for users more likely to churn. Send by ecommerce_purchase or in_app_purchase events to activate these audiences.

Audiences – Metric

Definition

- - - - Purchase Probability
        The probability that a user who was active in the last 28 days will complete a specific conversion event within the next seven days.
      - Churn probability
        The probability that a user who was active on your app or site within the last seven days will not be active within the next seven days.
      - Predicted revenue
        The revenue expected from all purchase conversions in the next 28 days from an active user in the last 28 days.

Unfortunately, you will see a “Not eligible to use” label if you don’t send these events.

Let’s create a custom audience and enable it in Google Ads. This way, it will become a remarketing audience.

Creating a custom audience in GA4

We want to target users who landed on the Show page during the last 30 days. We want to show them an ad detailing purchase ticket options and deals.

GA4 Custom Audience Users with page visit Jeffrey Kahane Show — Custom Audience – page visit Jeffrey Kahane Show

How to edit, delete or archive an audience in GA4?

As I previously stated, Google Analytics 4 allows you to build up to 100 audiences. So, you may find yourself in a position where you must remove, alter, or archive one.

Once more, editing an existing audience does not need resetting any users. This audience has no users before you provide and save modifications, but it immediately begins to get new traffic.

The audience can be archived in Google Analytics 4. The same as delete, it is. Go to the GA4 Audiences page, click the three dots next to the audience you want to delete, and then select “archive.”

Edit, Duplicate, Archive, or Delete GA4 Audience — Audiences – Editing

In the next and final installment you will read about Reporting with GA4.