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• 5-Step Conversion Rate Optimisation Checklist

  27 octobre 2023, par Erin

  Did you know the average conversion rate across e-commerce businesses in August 2023 was 2.03% ? In the past year, conversion rates have increased by 0.39%.

  Make no mistake. Just because conversion rates are higher this year doesn’t make it any easier to convert visitors.

  Cracking the secrets to improving conversion rates is crucial to running a successful website or business.

  Your site is the digital headquarters all of your marketing efforts funnel toward. With every visitor comes an opportunity to convert them into a lead (or sale).

  Keep reading if you want to improve your lead generation or convert more visitors into customers. In this article, we’ll break down a simple five-step conversion rate optimisation checklist you need to follow to maximise your conversions.

  What is conversion rate optimisation ?

  Before we dive into the steps you need to follow to optimise your conversions, let’s back up and talk conversion rate optimisation.

  

  Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO for short, is the process of increasing the number of website visitors who take a specific action. 

  In most cases, this means :

  • Turning more visitors into leads by getting them to join an email list
  • Convincing a visitor to fill out a contact form for a consultation
  • Converting a visitor into a paying customer by purchasing a product

  However, conversion rate optimisation can be used for any action you want someone to take on your site. That could be downloading a free guide, clicking on a specific link, commenting on a blog post or sharing your website with a friend.

  Why following a CRO checklist is important

  Conversion rate optimisation is both a valuable practice and an absolute necessity for any business or marketer. While it can be a bit complex, especially when you start diving into A/B testing, there are a variety of advantages :

  Get the most out of your efforts

  When all is said and done, if you can’t convert the traffic already coming to your site, dumping a ton of time and resources into traffic generation (whether paid or organic) won’t solve your problem.

  Instead, you need to look at the root of the problem : your conversion rate.

  By doubling down on conversions and following a conversion rate optimisation checklist, you’ll get the greatest result for the effort you’re already putting into your site.

  Increase audience size

  To increase your audience size, you need to increase your traffic, right ? Not exactly.

  While your audience may be considered people who have seen your content or follow you on social media, a high-value audience is one you can market to directly on an ongoing basis.

  Your website gives you the playground to convert visitors into high-value audience members. This is done by creating conversion-focused email signup forms and optimising your website for sale conversions.

  Generate more sales

  Boosting sales through CRO is the core objective. By optimising product pages, simplifying the checkout process, and employing persuasive strategies, you can systematically increase your sales and maximise the value of your existing traffic.

  Reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC)

  With conversion optimisation, you can convert a higher percentage of your website visitors into paid customers. Even if you don’t spend more on acquiring new customers, you’ll be able to generate more sales overall. 

  The result is that your customer acquisition costs will drop, allowing you to increase your total acquisitions to your customer base.

  Improve profitability

  While reduced customer acquisition costs mean you can pour more money into customer acquisition at a cheaper rate, you could simply maintain your costs while driving sales, resulting in increased profitability.

  If you can spend the same amount on acquisition but bring in 20% more customers (due to using a CRO checklist), your profit margins will automatically increase.

  5-step CRO checklist

  To double down on conversion rate optimisation, you need to follow a checklist to ensure you don’t miss any major optimisation opportunities.

  The checklist below is designed to help you systematically optimise your website, ensuring you make the most of your traffic by continuously refining its performance.

  1. Forms

  Analysing and optimising your website’s forms is crucial for enhancing conversion rates. Understanding how visitors interact with your forms can uncover pain points and help you streamline the conversion process.

  Ever wonder where your visitors drop off on your forms ? It could be due to lengthy, time-consuming fields or overly complex forms, leading to a frustrating user experience and lower conversion rate. Whatever the reason, you need the right tools to uncover the root of the issue.

  By leveraging Form Analytics, you gain powerful insights into user behaviour and can identify areas where people may encounter difficulties.

  Form Analytics provides the insights to discover :

  • Average time spent on each field : This metric helps you understand where users may be struggling or spending too much time. By optimising these fields, you can streamline the form, reduce user frustration and increase conversions.
  • Identifying drop-off points : Understanding where users drop off provides insights into which form fields may need improvement. Addressing these drop-off points can increase the conversion rate.
  • Unneeded fields with a high blank submission rate : Discovering fields left blank upon submission can highlight areas for simplification. By eliminating unnecessary fields, you can create more concise and user-friendly forms that may entice more visitors to engage with the form.

  

  Hear first-hand how Concrete CMS achieve 3x more leads with insights from Form Analytics. 

  These data-driven insights empower you to optimise your forms, remove guesswork and settle debates about form design. By fine-tuning and streamlining your forms, you can ensure a smoother path to conversion and maximise your success in converting more visitors.

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  2. Copywriting

  Another crucial element you need to test is your copywriting. Your copywriting is the foundation of your entire website. It helps communicate to your audience what you have to offer and why they need to take action.

  You need to ensure you have a good offer. This isn’t just the product or service you’re putting out there. It’s the complete package. It includes the product, rewards, a unique guarantee, customer service, packaging and promotions.

  Start testing your copy with your headlines. Look at the headers and test different phrases to convert more potential customers into paying customers.

  Here are a few tips to optimise your copy for more conversions :

  • Ensure copy is relevant to your headline and vice versa.
  • Write short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
  • Use bullets and subheaders to make the copy easy to skim.
  • Don’t focus too heavily on optimising for search engines (SEO). Instead, write for humans.
  • Focus on writing about benefits, not features.
  • Write about how your offer solves the pain points of your audience.

  You can test your copy in several areas once you’ve begun testing your headers – your subheaders, body copy, signup forms and product pages (if you’re e-commerce).

  3. Media : videos and audio

  Next, testing out different media types is crucial. This means incorporating videos and audio into your content.

  Don’t just take a random guess by throwing stuff against the wall, hoping it sticks. Instead, you should use data to develop impactful content.

  Look at your Media Analytics reports in your website analytics solution and see what media people spend the most time on. See what kind of video or audio content already impacts conversions.

  

  Humans are highly visual. You should craft your content so it’s easy to digest. Instead of covering your website in huge chunks of text, split up your copy with engaging content like videos.

  High-quality videos and audio recordings allow your readers to consume more of your content easily, and help persuade them to take action on your site.

  4. Calls to action (CTA)

  This brings us to our next point : your call to action (CTA).

  Are you trying to convert more prospects into leads ? Want to turn more leads into customers ? Trying to get more email subscribers ? Or do you want to generate more sales every month ?

  You could write the most compelling offer flooded with beautiful images, videos and CRO tactics. But your efforts will go to waste if you don’t include a compelling CTA.

  

  Here are a few tips to optimise your CTAs :

  • Keep them congruent on a single web page (e.g., don’t sell a hat and a sweater on the same page, as it can be confusing).
  • Place at least one CTA above the fold on your web pages.
  • Include benefits in your CTA. Rather than “Buy Now,” try “Buy Now to Get 30% Off.”
  • It’s better to be clear and concise than too fancy and unique.

  Optimising your call to action isn’t just about your copywriting. It’s also about design. Test different fonts, sizes, and visual elements like borders, icons and background colours.

  5. Web design

  Your site design will impact how well your visitors convert. You could have incredible copywriting, but if your site is laid out poorly, it will drive people away.

  You must ensure your copy and visual content fit your website design well.

  The first place you need to start with your site is your homepage design.

  Your site design consists of the theme or template, colour scheme and other visual elements that can be optimised to improve conversions.

  Here are a few tips to keep in mind when optimising your website design :

  • Use a colour scheme that’s pleasant rather than too distracting or extreme.
  • Ensure your design doesn’t remove the text’s clarity but makes it easier to read.
  • When in doubt, start with black text on a white background (the opposite rarely works).
  • Keep plenty of whitespace in between design elements.
  • When in doubt about font size, start by testing a larger size.
  • Design mobile-first rather than desktop-first.

  Finally, it’s critical to ensure your website is easy to navigate. Good design is all about the user experience. Is it easy to find what they’re looking for ? Simplify steps to reduce the need to click, and your conversions will increase.

  Start optimising your website for conversions

  If you’re looking to get the most out of the traffic on your site by converting more visitors into leads or customers, following this 5-step CRO checklist will help you take steps in the right direction.

  Just remember conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process. It’s not a one-time deal. To succeed, you need to test quickly, analyse the impact and do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

  To optimise your website for better conversion rates, you need the right tools that provide accurate data and insights to effectively increase conversions. With Matomo, you gain access to web analytics and CRO features like Form Analytics and Media Analytics, designed to enhance your conversion rate optimisation efforts. 

  Try Matomo free for 21 days and take your conversion rate to the next level. No credit card required.

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• How to Conduct a Customer Journey Analysis (Step-by-Step)

  9 mai 2024, par Erin

  Your customers are everything.

  Treat them right, and you can generate recurring revenue for years. Treat them wrong ; you’ll be spinning your wheels and dealing with churn.

  How do you give your customers the best experience possible so they want to stick around ?

  Improve their customer experience.

  How ?

  By conducting a customer journey analysis.

  When you know how your customers experience your business, you can improve it to meet and exceed customer expectations.

  In this guide, we’ll break down how the customer journey works and give you a step-by-step guide to conduct a thorough customer journey analysis so you can grow your brand.

  What is a customer journey analysis ?

  Every customer you’ve ever served went on a journey to find you.

  From the moment they first heard of you, to the point that they became a customer. 

  Everything in between is the customer journey.

  A customer journey analysis is how you track and analyse how your customers use different channels to interact with your brand.

  

  Analysing your customer journey involves identifying the customer’s different touchpoints with your business so you can understand how it impacts their experience. 

  This means looking at every moment they interacted with your brand before, during and after a sale to help you gain actionable insights into their experience and improve it to reach your business objectives.

  Your customers go through specific customer touchpoints you can track. By analysing this customer journey from a bird’s eye view, you can get a clear picture of the entire customer experience.

  4 benefits of customer journey analysis

  Before we dive into the different steps involved in a customer journey analysis, let’s talk about why it’s vital to analyse the customer journey.

  By regularly analysing your customer journey, you’ll be able to improve the entire customer experience with practical insights, allowing you to :

  Understand your customers better

  What’s one key trait all successful businesses have ?

  They understand their customers.

  By analysing your customer journey regularly, you’ll gain new insights into their wants, needs, desires and behaviours, allowing you to serve them better. These insights will show you what led them to buy a product (or not).

  For example, through conducting a customer journey analysis, a company might find out that customers who come from LinkedIn are more likely to buy than those coming from Facebook.

  Find flaws in your customer journey

  Nobody wants to hear they have flaws. But the reality is your customer journey likely has a few flaws you could improve.

  By conducting customer journey analysis consistently, you’ll be able to pinpoint precisely where you’re losing prospects along the way. 

  For example, you may discover you’re losing customers through Facebook Ads. Or you may find your email strategy isn’t as good as it used to be.

  But it’s not just about the channel. It could be a transition between two channels. For example, you may have great engagement on Instagram but are not converting them into email subscribers. The issue may be that your transition between the two channels has a leak.

  Or you may find that prospects using certain devices (i.e., mobile, tablet, desktop) have lower conversions. This might be due to design and formatting issues across different devices.

  By looking closely at your customer journey and the different customer touchpoints, you’ll see issues preventing prospects from turning into leads or customers from returning to buy again as loyal customers.

  Gain insights into how you can improve your brand

  Your customer journey analysis won’t leave you with a list of problems. Instead, you’ll have a list of opportunities.

  Since you’ll be able to better understand your customers and where they’re falling off the sales funnel, you’ll have new insights into how you can improve the experience and grow your brand.

  For example, maybe you notice that your visitors are getting stuck at one stage of the customer journey and you’re trying to find out why.

  So, you leverage Matomo’s heatmaps, sessions recordings and scroll depth to find out more.

  In the case below, we can see that Matomo’s scroll map is showing that only 65% of the visitors are reaching the main call to action (to write a review). 

  

  To try to push for higher conversions and get more reviews, we could consider moving that button higher up on the page, ideally above the fold.

  Rather than guessing what’s preventing conversions, you can use user behaviour analytics to “step in our user’s shoes” so you can optimise faster and with confidence.

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  Grow your revenue

  By taking charge of your customer journey, you can implement different strategies that will help you increase your reach, gain more prospects, convert more prospects into customers and turn regulars into loyal customers.

  Using customer journey analysis will help you optimise those different touchpoints to maximise the ROI of your channels and get the most out of each marketing activity you implement.

  7 steps to conduct a customer journey analysis

  Now that you know the importance of conducting a customer journey analysis regularly, let’s dive into how to implement an analysis.

  Here are the seven steps you can take to analyse the customer journey to improve your customer experience :

  

  1. Map out your customer journey

  Your first step to conducting an effective customer journey analysis is to map your entire customer journey.

  Customer journey mapping means looking at several factors :

  • Buying process
  • Customer actions
  • Buying emotions
  • Buying pain points
  • Solutions

  Once you have an overview of your customer journey maps, you’ll gain insights into your customers, their interests and how they interact with your brand. 

  After this, it’s time to dive into the touchpoints.

  2. Identify all the customer touchpoints 

  To improve your customer journey, you need to know every touchpoint a customer can (and does) make with your brand.

  This means taking note of every single channel and medium they use to communicate with your brand :

  • Website
  • Social media
  • Search engines (SEO)
  • Email marketing
  • Paid advertising
  • And more

  Essentially, anywhere you communicate and interact with your customers is fair game to analyse.

  If you want to analyse your entire sales funnel, you can try Matomo, a privacy-friendly web analytics tool. 

  You should make sure to split up your touchpoints into different customer journey stages :

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Conversion
  • Advocacy

  Then, it’s time to move on to how customers interact on these channels.

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  3. Measure how customers interact on each channel

  To understand the customer journey, you can’t just know where your customers interact with you. You end up learning how they’re interacting.

  This is only possible by measuring customer interactions.

  How ?

  By using a web analytics tool like Matomo.

  With Matomo, you can track every customer action on your website.

  This means anytime they :

  • Visit your website
  • View a web page
  • Click a link
  • Fill out a form
  • Purchase a product
  • View different media
  • And more

  You should analyse your engagement on your website, apps and other channels, like email and social media.

  4. Implement marketing attribution

  Now that you know where your customers are and how they interact, it’s time to analyse the effectiveness of each channel based on your conversion rates.

  Implementing marketing attribution (or multi-touch attribution) is a great way to do this.

  Attribution is how you determine which channels led to a conversion.

  While single-touch attribution models credit one channel for a conversion, marketing attribution gives credit to a few channels.

  For example, let’s say Bob is looking for a new bank. He sees an Instagram post and finds himself on HSBC’s website. After looking at a few web pages, he attends a webinar hosted by HSBC on financial planning and investment strategies. One week later, he gets an email from HSBC following up on the webinar. Then, he decides to sign up for HSBC’s online banking.

  Single touch attribution would attribute 100% of the conversion to email, which doesn’t show the whole picture. Marketing attribution would credit all channels : social media, website content, webinars and email.

  Matomo offers multiple attribution models. These models leverage different weighting factors, like time decay or linear, so that you can allocate credit to each touchpoint based on its impact.

  Matomo’s multi-touch attribution reports give you in-depth insights into how revenue is distributed across different channels. These detailed reports help you analyse each channel’s contribution to revenue generation so you can optimise the customer journey and improve business outcomes.

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  5. Use a funnels report to find where visitors are leaving

  Once you set up your marketing attribution, it’s time to analyse where visitors are falling off.

  You can leverage Matomo funnels to find out the conversion rate at each step of the journey on your website. Funnel reports can help you see exactly where visitors are falling through the cracks so you can increase conversions.

  6. Analyse why visitors aren’t converting

  Once you can see where visitors are leaving, you can start to understand why.

  For example, let’s say you analyse your funnels report in Matomo and see your landing page is experiencing the highest level of drop-offs.

  

  You can also use form analytics to find out why users aren’t converting on your landing pages – a crucial part of the customer journey.

  7. A/B test to improve the customer journey

  The final step to improve your customer journey is to conduct A/B tests. These are tests where you test one version of a landing page to see which one converts better, drives more traffic, or generates more revenue.

  For example, you could create two versions of a header on your website and drive 50% of your traffic to each version. Then, once you’ve got your winner, you can keep that as your new landing page.

  

  Using the data from your A/B tests, you can optimise your customer journey to help convert more prospects into customers.

  Use Matomo to improve your customer journey analysis

  Now that you understand why it’s important to conduct customer journey analysis regularly and how it works, it’s time to put this into practice.

  To improve the customer journey, you need to understand what’s happening at each stage of your funnel. 

  Matomo gives you insights into your customer journey so you can improve website performance and convert more visitors into customers.

  Used by over 1 million websites, Matomo is the leading privacy-friendly web analytics solution in the world. 

  Matomo provides you with accurate, unsampled data so you understand exactly what’s going on with your website performance.

  The best part ?

  It’s easy to use and is compliant with the strictest privacy regulations.

  Try Matomo free for 21-days and start Improving your customer journey. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

  21 day free trial. No credit card required.

  
  

  Your email address
  

  Your website address
  

  Your Analytics subdomain will be .matomo.cloud (change)

  Choose your analytics subdomain
  

  .matomo.cloud

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  Your information will be used to create an account on our cloud service. For more information please consult our privacy policy.
  
  
  

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• What Is Ethical SEO & Why Does It Matter ?

  7 mai 2024, par Erin

  Do you want to generate more revenue ?

  Then, you need to ensure you have a steady stream of traffic flowing to your site.

  Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo are powerful mediums you can use to scale your business.

  Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of creating search engine-friendly content to draw in traffic to your website. But, if you aren’t careful, you could be crossing the line of ethical SEO into unethical SEO.

  In this article, we break down what ethical SEO is, why it’s important in business and how you can implement effective SEO into your business while remaining ethical.

  Let’s begin.

  What is ethical SEO ?

  Since the early days of the internet and search engines, business owners and marketers have tried using all kinds of SEO tactics to rank atop the search engines for relevant keywords.

  The problem ?

  Some of these practices are ethical, while others aren’t.

  What exactly is ethical SEO ?

  It’s the practice of optimising your website’s rankings in search engines by following search engine guidelines and prioritising user experience.

  

  Ethical SEO is also referred to as “white hat SEO.”

  On the other hand, businesses that break search engine rules and guidelines to “hack” their way to the top with faulty and questionable practices use unethical SEO, or “black hat SEO.”

  Ethical SEO aims to achieve higher rankings in search engines through sustainable, legitimate and fair methods.

  Black hat, or unethical SEO, aims to manipulate or “game” the system with deceptive strategies to bypass the search engine’s guidelines to rank higher.

  The two core branches of ethical SEO include :

  1. Strategies that align with search engine guidelines.
  2. Accessibility to broad audiences.

  Some examples of ethical SEO principles include :

  • Natural link building
  • Compliance with search engine guidelines
  • Establishing great user experiences
  • Creating reader-focused content

  By sticking to the right guidelines and implementing proper SEO practices, businesses can establish ethical SEO to generate more traffic and grow their brands.

  8 ethical SEO practices to implement

  If you want to grow your organic search traffic, then there’s no doubt you’ll need to have some SEO knowledge.

  While there are dozens of ways to “game” SEO, it’s best to stick to proven, ethical SEO techniques to improve your rankings.

  Stick to these best practices to increase your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), increase organic traffic and improve your website conversions.

  

  1. Crafting high-quality content

  The most important piece of any ethical SEO strategy is content.

  Forget about rankings, keywords and links for a second.

  Step back and think about why people go to Google, Bing and Yahoo in the first place.

  They’re there looking for information. They have a question they need answered. That’s where you can come in and give them the answer they want. 

  How ? In the form of content.

  The best long-term ethical SEO strategy is to create the highest-quality content possible. Crafting high-quality content should be where you focus 90% of your SEO efforts.

  2. Following search engine guidelines

  Once you’ve got a solid content creation strategy, where you’re producing in-depth, quality content, you need to ensure you’re following the guidelines and rules put in place by the major search engines.

  This means you need to stay compliant with the best practices and guidelines laid out by the top search engines.

  If you fail to follow these rules, you could be penalised, your content could be downgraded or removed from search engines, and you could even have your entire website flagged, impacting your entire organic search traffic from your site.

  You need to ensure you align with the guidelines so you’re set up for long-term success with your SEO.

  3. Conducting keyword research and optimisation

  Now that we’ve covered content and guidelines, let’s talk about the technical stuff, starting with keywords.

  In the early days of SEO (late 90s), just about anyone could rank a web page high by stuffing keywords all over the page.

  While those black hat techniques used to work to “game” the system, it doesn’t work like that anymore. Google and other major search engines have much more advanced algorithms that can detect keyword stuffing and manipulation.

  Keywords are still a major part of a successful SEO strategy. You can ethically incorporate keywords into your content (and you should) if you want to rank higher. 

  Your main goal with your content is to match it with the search intent. So, incorporating keywords should come naturally throughout your content. If you try to stuff in unnecessary keywords or use spammy techniques, you may not even rank at all and could harm your website’s rankings.

  4. Incorporating natural link building

  After you’ve covered content and keywords, it’s time to dive into links. Backlinks are any links that point back to your website from another website.

  These are a crucial part of the SEO pie. Without them, it’s hard to rank high on Google. They work well because they tell Google your web page or website has authority on a subject matter.

  But you could be penalised if you try to manipulate backlinks by purchasing them or spamming them from other websites.

  Instead, you should aim to draw in natural backlinks by creating content that attracts them.

  How ? There are several options :

  • Content marketing
  • Email outreach
  • Brand mentions
  • Public relations
  • Ethical guest posting

  Get involved in other people’s communities. Get on podcasts. Write guest posts. Connect with other brands. Provide value in your niche and create content worth linking to.

  5. Respecting the intellectual property of other brands

  Content creation is moving at lightspeed in the creator economy and social media era. For better or for worse, content is going viral every day. People share content, place their spin on it, revise it, optimise it, and spread it around the internet.

  Unfortunately, this means the content is sometimes shared without the owner’s permission. Content is one form of intellectual property (IP). 

  If you share copyrighted material, you could face legal consequences.

  6. Ensuring transparency

  Transparency is one of the pillars of ethical marketing.

  If you’re running the SEO in your company or an agency, you should always explain the SEO strategies and tactics you’re implementing to your stakeholders.

  It’s best to lean on transparency and honesty to ensure your team knows you’re running operations ethically.

  7. Implementing a great user experience

  The final pillar of ethical SEO practices is offering a great user experience on your website.

  Major search engines like Google are favouring user experience more and more every year. This means knowing how to track and analyse website metrics like page load times, time on page, pageviews, media plays and event tracking.

  8. Use an ethical web analytics solution

  Last but certainly not least. Tracking your website visitors ethically is key to maintaining SEO ethics.

  You can do this by using an ethical web analytics solution like Matomo, Plausible or Fathom. All three are committed to respecting user privacy and offer ethical tracking of visitors.

  We’re a bit biassed towards Matomo, of course, but for good reasons.

  Matomo offers accurate, unsampled data along with advanced features like heatmaps, session recording, and A/B testing. These features enhance user experience and support ethical SEO practices by providing insights into user behaviour, helping optimise content. 

  Try Matomo for Free

  Get the web insights you need, without compromising data accuracy.

  Start for free

  No credit card required

  6 unethical SEO practices to avoid

  Now that we’ve covered the ethical SEO best practices let’s talk about what kind of unethical SEO practices you want to avoid.

  Remember, SEO isn’t as easy to manipulate as it once was 20 years ago.

  Algorithms are much more sophisticated now, and search engines are getting better at detecting fraudulent, scammy or unethical SEO practices every year.

  Avoid these eight unethical SEO practices to ensure you can rank high in the long term :

  

  1. Keyword stuffing

  Keyword stuffing is probably the most common unethical SEO practice. This is where someone deliberately stuffs keywords onto a page to manipulate the search engines to rank a web page higher.

  Where this is unethical isn’t always easy to detect, but in some cases, it is. It comes down to whether it’s relevant and natural or intentionally stuffing.

  2. Cloaking

  Cloaking is another unethical SEO practice where someone manipulates the information search engines see on their website.

  For example, someone may show search engines one web page on their website, but when someone clicks on it in Google, they can direct someone to a completely different page. They do this by detecting the incoming request from the user agent and presenting different content.

  3. Deceiving functionality

  Another way companies are unethically implementing SEO tactics is by deceiving people with misleading information. For example, a website may claim to provide a free resource or directory but may intentionally lead visitors to paid products.

  4. Fraudulent redirects

  Another way to deceive or mislead searchers is by creating fraudulent redirects. A redirect is a way to take someone to a different web page when they click on another one. Redirects can be useful if a page is broken or outdated. However, they can be used to deceptively take someone to a website they didn’t intend to view.

  5. Negative SEO

  Negative SEO is the intentional attempt to harm a competitor’s search engine rankings through unethical tactics.

  These tactics include duplicating their content or generating spammy links by creating low quality or irrelevant backlinks to their site.

  6. Hidden text

  Placing hidden text on a website typically has one purpose : keyword stuffing.

  Instead of making it visible to users reading the content, websites will place invisible text or text that’s hard to read on a website to try to rank the content higher and manipulate the search engines.

  3 reasons you need to implement ethical SEO

  So, why should you ensure you only implement ethical SEO in your organic traffic strategy ?

  It’s not just about what’s morally right or wrong. Implementing ethical SEO is the smartest long-term marketing strategy :

  1. Better long-term SEO

  Search engine optimisation is about implementing the “right” tactics to get your website to rank higher.

  The funny thing is many people are trying to get quick fixes by manipulating search engines to see results now.

  However, the ones who implement shady tactics and “hacks” to game the system almost always end up losing their rankings in the long term. 

  The best long-term SEO strategy is to do things ethically. Create content that helps people. Make higher quality content than your competitors. If you do those two things right, you’ll have better search traffic for years.

  2. Great brand reputation

  Not only is ethical SEO a great way to get long-term results, but it’s also a good way to maintain a solid brand reputation.

  Reputation management is a crucial aspect of SEO. All it takes is one bad incident, and your SEO could be negatively impacted.

  3. Lower chance of penalties

  If you play by the rules, you have a lower risk of being penalised by Google.

  The reality is that Google owns the search engine, not you. While we can benefit from the traffic generation of major search engines, you could lose all your rankings if you break their guidelines.

  Track SEO data ethically with Matomo

  Ethical SEO is all about :

  • Serving your audience
  • Getting better traffic in the long run

  If you fail to follow ethical SEO practices, you could be de-ranked or have your reputation on the line.

  However, if you implement ethical SEO, you could reap the rewards of a sustainable marketing strategy that helps you grow your traffic correctly and increase conversions in the long term.

  If you’re ready to start implementing ethical SEO, you need to ensure you depend on an ethical web analytics solution like Matomo.

  Unlike other web analytics solutions, Matomo prioritises user privacy, maintains transparent, ethical data collection practices, and does not sell user data to advertisers. Matomo provides 100% data ownership, ensuring that your data remains yours to own and control.

  As the leading privacy-friendly web analytics solution globally, trusted by over 1 million websites, Matomo ensures :

  • Accurate data without data sampling for confident insights and better results
  • Privacy-friendly and GDPR-compliant web analytics
  • Open-source access for transparency and creating a custom solution tailored to your needs

  Try Matomo free for 21-days. No credit card required.

  Try Matomo for Free

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