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Posted by danatanseo

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Working as an in-house SEO Strategist for a small business forces me to get “scrappy” every day with tools and techniques. I’m constantly on the lookout for an opportunity that can help my company market to broader audiences for less money. In the past I’ve written on how you can add video overlays to your YouTube videos using Google AdWords and generate traffic back to your site without spending a dime. (P.S. This is still working, so if you haven’t done it, read this post then get on over to AdWords and get your video overlays rockin’).

Learn how to add Lead Generation Cards or LGCs to your Tweets!

What is a LGC?  LGC = Lead Generation Card (specifically in Twitter)

A LGC in Twitter is a form that can be attached to your Tweet that allows your followers to directly send you their contact information with the click of a single button in Twitter. Here is an example of what a LGC looks like:

Here is a Tweet containing the LGC:

Here is what appears when an end user clicks “View details:”

Notice how the box is pre-populated with
your recipient’s email address, enabling them to click the Call to Action button and beam their contact information to you in a single click. Ooohh, Aaahhh…Très Nifty! 

“But wait!” you say, “I don’t have any budget to pay for Promoted Tweets!”

Great! Neither do I! We have that in common!

The beauty of Twitter LGCs is that
you can add a LGC to a regular non-promoted Tweet and it doesn’t cost you a single solitary penny.

It’s Free…that’s right….I said the F-word.

Caveat – You can’t compose and publish the Tweet from your regular Twitter admin home page. You have to compose and send the Tweet from inside Twitter Ads. Here’s how you do it:

1. Log in to Twitter
2. Click the Setting Icon and select “Twitter Ads” from the drop down menu [Screenshot below]

3.  Click on the “Creatives” Tab in the top Nav Menu in Twitter Ads and Select “Cards”

4.  Click “Create your first Lead Generation Cards” – Bonus: You Can have an unlimited number of cards! 

Here’s what the form looks like:

You’ll need to make sure you have the link to your Website’s privacy policy handy. Plus you’ll need to have an alternative URL where end-users can visit a page to find out more about you and/or your offer. Other than that, all the dimensions you need or right there on the page. Very easy.

5.  Once your card is set up, click the “Tweets” tab, just to the left of the “Cards” tab. [Screenshot below] You can also get there by selecting “Tweets” in the “Creatives” drop down menu in the Top Nav.

6.  Click the blue “Compose Tweet” button located in the upper right corner.

7.  Leave the default delivery setting set to Standard. Compose your tweet & Click the last icon on the right just below your “Tweet” box (when you scroll over it, it says “Attach a Card to This Tweet”) 

8.  Select the card you would like to attach to your Tweet.

9.  Send your Tweet!

That’s it. Now you can grab your favorite beverage, sit back in your chair and just watch the cash roll in. Okay, maybe not, but you did just manage to attach a lead generation mechanism to your Tweet without spending one red cent!

Now, once you have cards set up in your Twitter Ads account, the steps are even easier. All you will have to do in that case is log in to Twitter. Click “Twitter Ads” from your settings menu. Click “Tweets” under the “Creatives” drop down in the top Nav. Click the blue “Compose Tweet” button. Write your Tweet, select the card and voila!

But wait, there’s more!

So, you might be thinking, “Great! But how do I get notified that someone filled out a Twitter LGC? What do I do with that info?”

Along with getting free LGCs, you also get access to some pretty nice analytic data for Tweets sent from your Twitter Ads account. So, here’s how you track and download your leads:

1. Navigate back to the “Card” Tab under “Creatives.”
2. Next to the card corresponding to the leads you want to access, mouse over the white area right below the card’s URL [Screenshot]

3.  Upload these into your favorite email program (we love Mailchimp!) or CRM and have at it!

For those of you who are visual learners, I’ve created a step by step video that walks you through the whole process:

There you have it. You’ve just successfully set up your Twitter Lead Generation Card and are ready to start raking in free leads from Twitter! Now I want to hear what your creative ideas are for implementing this and using it for your business. How do you think using Twitter Lead Generation cards along with your Tweets can augment your marketing program? I’d love to see them in the comments!

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Who’s ranking for ‘supermarket’? 

Kevin Gibbons wrote on this site back in 2008 about the way that supermarkets were ignoring SEO for many major keywords and thus missing out on branding opportunities. 

In this post he pointed out that none of the top UK supermarkets ranked above number nine in Google. Six years later, not much has changed. 

The only supermarket ranking on page one is Sainsbury’s, though local results ensure that local stores get some coverage. However, there are more local stores not mentioned here. Perhaps they haven’t heard of Google’s local results. 

You might think that they aren’t interested in search visibility for these terms, but the fact that ASDA and Sainsburys are using AdWords suggests otherwise.

The supermarkets rank well for terms such as ‘online grocery shopping’. Sadly, that’s not what most people are searching for: 

More recently, the Guardian Media Network talked about content marketing being a critical driver with major supermarkets having “quite an affinity with food-based content, generating everything from recipes, diets and forums through to events” which seems to be a major truism in today’s post-Hummingbird world of rich content curation and outreach.

Does this mean onsite SEO is irrelevant for supermarkets? Of course not, content curation still requires intensive levels of optimisation, and even the best content in the world won’t magically outreach itself.

Plus there is still no harm at all in having category and product pages nicely optimised to ensure maximum potential traffic capture for brand purposes, something which a struggling supermarket would be well advised to examine.

Morrisons SEO

The news is full of unfortunate stories regarding Morrisons at the moment, with the BBC referencing a 5.6% like for like sales decrease and a generally ‘disappointing’ sales performance at the end of last year.

Morrisons has been late to the online party, and only started offering online deliveries in January this year, in limited areas too. The company’s slow adoption of a proper digital strategy is very telling in the sales figures.

The structure of the website is very strange, with the main homepage at entirely image based, and the design a little old-fashioned.

All the curated content which could be put to work pulling in visitors for the brand (and earning backlinks to boost authority) is pushed into the subdomain your.morrisons.com, while the online grocery shopping section is split again on groceries.morrisons.com, with wine over on morrisonscellar.com and the Kiddicare range over on its own top level domain as well.

Meanwhile, the user experience, though not absolutely disastrous, is less than optimal. I explored it here, with the help of some user tests, and it seems that customers were confused about where to start shopping. 

All of the products and discounts promoted on the homepage lead to the your.morrisons.com sub-domain rather than product pages, while the actual link to start shopping is on the top nav, not in the prominent position it should be. 

Groceries, wine and baby products are lucrative product ranges, but compare the Morrisons approach with rivals like Sainsbury’s and Tesco and we can see that the lack of subdomain unification isn’t a good way to go.  (A mistake also made by Staples). 

Aside from the technical SEO considerations such as splitting authority up, the unified shopping experience and purchase path offered on these two market leaders is an obvious improvement over Morrisons’ more piecemeal approach.

Even in terms of direct content curation Morrisons is behind the times, making some sadly elementary optimisation mistakes like wrapping the H1 around the top logo on all pages, using generic meta descriptions for recipe type listings (example from the Mains page – “Find hundreds of fantastic offers, easy recipes and entertainment products for the family at Morrisons online.”) and no ALT text on the (sometimes lacklustre) recipe images.

This is even more of a shame when looking at the search functionality for recipes, which is actually fairly solid (although some filters for refinement by ingredient would be nice), and the pages themselves which are actually nice and simple in their design with minimal scrolling. 

There’s actually another missed opportunity here. Luke Knight, head of Lifestyle at 4Ps, raises the sometimes-thorny issue of supermarket-brand integration:

It amazes me how few grocers work closely with the brands they sell in order to improve all-round performance with supporting content as well as landing/product page merchandising. A brand like Lindt, for example, could sell a lot more through supermarket stockists if it worked with them to improve optimisation, merchandising and “added value” content like exclusive recipes.

It isn’t just the recipes, either. Morrisons has a mass of brilliant content available like its healthy eating tips section (everything from achieving your 5 a day on a budget to adding more egg into your diet) and their brilliant themed product ranges like NuMe, Just for Kids and Free From.

Charlie Kay, Senior Digital Executive on the 4Ps Food and Drink team, comments that Morrisons seem to be having trouble with its unique selling proposition:

The key to online success for a brand like Morrisons is identifying the USP, what can it offer that other online retailers don’t already make available to their customers? The website seems to heavily focus on price but with supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl dominating the “value for money” niche perhaps Morrisons needs to take a different approach.

It already has a good start on family-orientated content on the site, and with so much power behind the idea of families at supermarkets perhaps making the distinguishing approach the idea of “feeding the family” healthily on a budget would get the brand further than competing purely on price. 

There is so much editorial content here which could help Morrisons to cement its market share, but none of it seems to be integrated properly with a digital strategy that will grow visibility for the brand in order to attract more shoppers, long-term brand advocates and  (the ultimate and obvious goal) boost that bottom line.

I’ll leave it to the head of the 4Ps Food and Drink team, Kia McSween, to wrap up:

Brands like Morrisons have a unique opportunity to change the way customers and businesses alike interact with grocers. By understanding their audience better, grocers can put the customer experience at the forefront of their objectives. This will allow them to create an innovative platform and strategy which includes content that is tailored to suit their customers’ needs and wants.

What do you think? Are supermarkets missing out when it comes to SEO? Or is search somehow less important for these businesses?