Growth Newsletter #057

Common marketing wisdom tells us that on-site user reviews are a great form of social proof for converting prospects.

This is generally true. But for DTC ecom brands, you might be collecting and displaying your reviews in the wrong place.

Research shows that users spend little time looking at DTC site-provided reviews—they believe these reviews have a higher likelihood of being manipulated.

Users would rather look at external reviews on Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or another third-party source.

So if you’re a DTC ecom brand, rather than focus on gathering on-site reviews, consider these tactics:

• Encourage customers to review your product on third-party sites. Since shoppers perceive reviews on third-party review sites as being less biased, you’ll get more ROI from these reviews than ones on your own site.
• Feature user-generated social media content instead. People trust reviews from your users on social media more than the reviews on your site. The logic: If people are willing to speak positively about a product on social media for their followers to see, then the brand can be trusted. So you can embed social media posts from real users directly on your site, as opposed to reviews, and come off as more authentic.
• Prioritize influencer marketing. This is a more involved approach to reviews—you can give micro-influencers your product for free in exchange for honest reviews. People turn to influencers for recommendations. Lean into a source they already trust. To go deep on influencer strategy, check out our influencer marketing playbook.

If you’ve already invested in getting reviews on your site:

• Make it easy to sort and filter them. Otherwise, users will further perceive your site as being manipulative in the kinds of reviews it features.
• Allow users to upload images with their reviews. Reviews with photos convey more authenticity than those without.

Landing page copy is difficult to optimize. You need a sufficient level of traffic to run accurate A/B tests, but driving traffic to your landing page is costly (you're paying per click just to get people to the landing page you're testing).

Consider running ads to test and refine your landing page copy.

Since your ads will get significantly more impressions than your landing pages, you'll be able to get statistically significant results on your copy, quickly.

Try this:

• Create multiple copy variations to test in Facebook's ad manager. Instead of conversions, focus on click-through rate. The goal is to determine which copy incites the most engagement.
• Test until a clear winner emerges. Use the winning ad copy as your landing page's headline, sub-headline, and body copy.

Many B2B and consumer SaaS startups create free resource templates for their target audience to use with the goal of nurturing them into paying customers.

They tend to offer these templates as part of a blog post. For example, an email service provider might provide cold email templates as part of a guide to cold outreach.

This SEO strategy is a great way to attract visitors—but you can get even more from it by creating standalone landing pages for each of your resources. Hypercontext, an employee engagement app, did exactly this by creating separate landing pages for each of its 60+ meeting templates. The result was a 51% organic traffic boost in just three months.

To be clear, Hypercontext still includes its templates in some of its blog posts. For example, it’s published:

• 4 things to include in your daily scrum meeting agenda [Template]: A blog post giving best practices about planning scrum meetings
• Scrum Team Meeting Template: A landing page where users can immediately access Hypercontext’s free template

To avoid keyword cannibalization, Hypercontext focuses its blog posts on other relevant info not provided in its templates. Meanwhile, it keeps its template pages very short and to the point.

Why does this strategy work? The standalone pages grab more long-tail template-related keywords than a blog post might. And since users searching specifically for templates usually have more of a transactional intent (and likely less interest in reading a long blog post), your standalone template pages actually better satisfy user intent.

Most content marketers know how to use Ahrefs for keyword research, backlink research, and site analysis.

But there are other powerful ways you can use Ahrefs that many marketers don’t know about. If you’re working in content marketing, consider trying these three tactics:

• Size your market. Using Keyword Explorer, look up your target keyword. Then click on the three dots in the corner of the Volume box and click “Export as CSV.” The CSV file shows how the volume of your target keyword has fluctuated over the last 5+ years. This will help you figure out whether your market is shrinking or expanding—which is nice to know before you invest in creating content for that keyword.
• Define your content clusters. When your keyword research turns up a group of similar or related keywords, it’s hard to decide how exactly to structure your pillar page. For guidance, enter these keywords into Keyword Explorer. Then in the sidebar, click “Traffic Share By Pages.” Look at the page that ranks for the most keywords you entered and earns the largest share of traffic—you can take notes on page structure, depth, and topics to use for your pillar page.
• Build links from pages with greater traffic potential. Avoid simply judging link-building targets based on their domain rating (or another authority score)—most of these scores matter less than they did years ago. Instead, prioritize building links from sites that drive more traffic. To do this, look up the URL of a competitor page that ranks for your target keyword in Site Explorer. Go to Backlinks and sort by page traffic. The top referring pages that drive the most traffic are the sites you should prioritize getting a link from, regardless of their domain rating.