Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest (25-31 January)

Enhancing faceted navigation of a store, useful copywriting tips, slight social media updates, main newsletter errors, website content ideas, and much more from the world of digital marketing in our new episode of the RGray Weekly Marketing Insights and News Digest.

• Check out the Andy Chadwick, freelance SEO consultant, proposal to stores on how to improve your rankings and deliver a better shopping experience.
• Take a look at the greatest latest lessons in copywriting from Jackson Best in our weekly digest.
• Read more about the three quick new updates by Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok in our weekly article.
• Learn more about the key mistakes of the latest newsletters from Paul Metcalfe, who hit the nail on the head with these alerts. 
• If you are trying to find out the blog content ideas, pay attention to the infographic our team shared with 16 suggestions that should help you to get more traffic and engagement. 

How improving the faceted navigation of a store increased its traffic by 230% in 2 months

Faceted navigation is definitely a new term for many of us. Let’s figure it out.

In a previous update, Andy Chadwick described how he strengthened a store’s faceted navigation in the bespoke furniture niche, creating an interesting rise in organic clicks.

What is faceted navigation?

To make it simpler to understand, we’ve shown it in the picture above. The multiple filters that enable the user to narrow down options on a website are basically faceted navigation: the size, costs, colors, etc.

The issue with faceted navigation is that your site will end up generating billions of URLs with the limited quality or reproduced content when it is not managed. This is where the budget for crawling becomes a challenge.

Now, CMSs such as Shopify have a solution: adding a canonical link back to the category page.

This helps to remove the endless duplicate pages and URLs. But, it also renders these pages unindexable.

Why is it necessary to index such pages?

Because if there’s not much authority on your web store, targeting long keywords with a low volume search can be a powerful method. “Transactional long-tail queries” such as “men’s slim-fit white dress shirt” are mentioned here by Andy.

Such keywords describe a possibility. However, web owners fail to rank for these requests because CMSs are not set up to deal with “faceted navigation”.

How this can be solved?

Preferably, only those URLs that have a sufficient search volume might be indexed. 

Andy has found a compromise that fits the owner of a plugin. It’s not available to everybody! So, he proposes the following:

Build a completely merchandised landing page if you find any long-tail keywords that have a large search volume. For those precious keywords, this could boost your rankings even further and offer a better buying experience.

Lessons learned from a year of copywriting

One of the aspects of marketing where there is no objective truth is copywriting.

Everyone seems to have their tastes and style and identifying what really creates a decent copywriter and what copywriting actually means – can create a lot of uncertainty.

So whether you’re trying to dip your toes into the waters of copywriting or you’re in the field of recruiting them, this latest Jackson Best post points out some of his greatest lessons in copywriting over the past year:

• Copywriters should have a strong grasp of technology. If authors could scrawl their thoughts and ideas down on parchment, or a typewriter, and submit them – it would be romantic, but that’s not how the world really works now. By 2021, freelance copywriters should feel free to use a number of software tools.
• Many customers can’t write nice briefs. Among the first things, Jackson found when he started to write was that consumers don’t always set realistic standards. A one-sentence clarification of the material just doesn’t cut it. 
• Perfect and good are not enemies. Jackson posted about realizing that there’s no such thing as excellent writing when you’re on a deadline. Whether it’s your work or someone else’s, note you don’t always hand in the greatest work on the planet.

Social media updates

The news is pretty quiet right now, but three platforms have released new quick updates:

• To make life simpler, Instagram introduces a “professional dashboard” for companies and creators. Branded content shortcuts, monitoring advertising, shopping functionality – everything is there. The characteristics are not new to IG, only consolidated under one dashboard.
• Twitter launches Birdwatch. It is their community-based response to managing disinformation on their platform. The function is currently being tested in the USA, so if you are there feel free to try it out!
• TikTok (primarily in Italy) experiences further scrutiny. The data security agency of the country told TikTok that it must block users whose age it just can’t verify, because of the sad accident of a 10-year-old who participated in the application’s “blackout challenge”.

Huge mistakes

In recent times, newsletters are trending. They arise practically everywhere, but many of the latest newsletters are still made with some key errors.

Paul Metcalfe, a guy who assists newsletter owners with finding sponsors, previously shared about the major blunders he often sees. We’re going to jump in:

• Bad landing pages. Most newsletters do not simplify finding the sign-up box, or are bad and hurt conversion rates. Paul holds a specific contempt for Substack landing pages, which are about as unremarkable as possible.
• Poor onboarding flow. You don’t have to create it thrilling, but you have to be precise with your automation and make it count! The customization of your verification pages to interact with the reader is a fine choice to do.
• Generic welcome emails. A wonderful option to offer your readers a strong first impression is your welcome email, but many welcome emails are actually a standard text.

In the full Twitter thread, Paul has a bit more to tell, so you can check out here. He hit the nail on the head with these alerts – so if you are working on a newsletter, take these pieces of advice to heart!

16 website & blog content ideas to get more traffic & engagement [Infographic] 

Do you struggle with blog content ideas? Are you interested in some assistance to create posts that will strike a chord with your audience?

Our team shared 16 blog content concepts in this infographic that we hope will help you to get more traffic.