3 Woefully Underused, Crazy-Effective PPC Landing Page Tips

A thoughtful account structure and irresistible Expanded Text Ads are great, but without fine-tuned landing pages, it’s all for naught. If your landing pages are underwhelming and underoptimized, you’re paying for prospects to click on ads and, outside of a captivated minority, head back to the SERP unimpressed.

Of course, there could also be instances in which your landing pages, in keeping with your ad copy and account structure, are phenomenal, but, for who knows what reason, you’re still not seeing conversions turn into customers.

Now, everyone and their grandmother knows the basic tenets of high-converting landing pages: Eye-popping offers. Seductive value props. Live chat support from a friendly guy name Justin instead of an inept machine. And don’t even get me started on the myriad aesthetic adjustments (tweaks to your colors, typefaces, images, and layout) at your disposal.

Everything listed above (and plenty of things that weren’t) can be A/B tested infinitely. You could hire someone to make bi-weekly changes, they’d never get bored, and it’s very likely you’d see conversion metrics improve as you culled bad copy and chucked bad design in the dumpster.

But what we’re talking about today is different. These are tangible changes that can pay immediate dividends. And, unlike most other landing page optimizations, your competition probably isn’t using any of these.

I asked some of the paid search mavericks on our managed services (and marketing) team for some highly actionable landing page optimization tips you can roll out of bed and implement in your account. Let’s dive in.

PPC Landing Page Tip #1: Combat Bots with Honeypots

Outside of dopey bears and FBI sting operations, you might not have heard much about honeypots before. Basically, a honeypot is a snippet of code you embed within your landing page form as a method of combatting pesky spam bots.

Now, there’s a more common way to combat such riffraff that you’re most certainly familiar with: CAPTCHA. The problem you can run into with CAPTCHA, though, is that they’re a user experience nightmare.

 

I cannot recall a single instance in which I’ve gotten one correct on my first attempt (there’s no way I’m the only one). And it appears as though CAPTCHA’s one-click (read: user-friendly), legible cousin, reCaptcha, is useless. CAPTCHA’s are the bane of my internet existence, and I’m not alone.

All of those hex color tweaks and CTA tests you’ve been conducting could very well have been undermined by your attempts to weed out spam. That’s right, folks: though CAPTCHA’s ward off spam, they can also dissuade prospects who, unimpeded, would have converted.

Enter the honeypot technique.

Truth be told, I had no idea what a honeypot was before Sam, one of our senior account strategists, approached me with in interesting case involving her email collaboration client, Zimbra.

What problem does it solve?

Zimbra had a problem. 

 

Their free trial landing pages had attracted a lot of bots, resulting in junk conversions. Using CAPTCHA’s on the landing pages helped eliminate bad bot traffic, but it also became a burden for human prospects: you know, the lovely people who were supposed to complete the form. Because of the CAPTCHA, Zimbra ended up weeding out humans who perceived the anti-spam measure as a roadblock.

 

According to Sam, “The simplest way to implement a honeypot is to add a hidden ‘test_email’ field in addition to your ‘email’ field to your form. This will trick the bot into completing both fields, and your human prospects won’t know it ever existed.” Once the leads roll in, simply filter out any in which the text_email field were completed, exclude those IP addresses (more on that in a minute), and focus on the real leads.

After implementing the honeypot on the trial pages, Zimbra’s account-wide conversion rate increased compared to the previous landing pages using CAPTCHA’s (as evinced in the graph above).

And the best part? The conversions that came through were actual humans. No more silly spam, just opportunities to close deals.

“Allen, how do I implement a honeypot on my landing page?”

It’s surprisingly easy, actually. Honeypots operate on a single principle: bots are stupid. As such, the hidden fields you need to add to your form aren’t especially complex.

Here’s what it looks like:

 

Provided you include a display: none CSS rule, which hides the form from actual humans, you’re ready to rock.

Of course, if you use WordPress, a plugin like Contact Form 7 Honeypot will save you from ever having to look at code. You can skip right to the part where the leads pour in.

For good measure, you can exclude the IP addresses of spammers within AdWords, so that after you’ve weeded them out with your honeypot, you can block them from ever seeing your ads again.

To do so, simply navigate over to the Settings tab on the campaign in which you want to make an IP exclusion.

 

Once you’ve gotten to the Settings menu in the UI, mosey on down to “Advanced Settings” (sounds daunting, isn’t) and click the edit button under “IP exclusions.” It looks something like this:

 

Finally, once you’ve reached the “IP Address Exclusion” interface, simply copy and paste the IP addresses of known spam bots into the field. You can add up to 500 in each campaign.

 

PPC Landing Page Tip #2:  Reconsider Your Customer Reviews

The first suggestion on the list was something that, on the surface, makes complete sense. A method of impeding bots without hampering UX for actual prospects. What’s not to love?

What comes next, however, flies in the face of what many would consider a best practice. I can hear you right now. “Eliminating customer reviews?! Are you mad?” Hang with me, friends: I assure you it’ll make sense momentarily.

Curating social proof on your landing pages so that it reflects customers’ positive experiences with your product or services can be phenomenal. It’s the affirmation some prospects need. On the other hand, simply throwing all of your unfiltered customer reviews on your landing page can be a double-edged sword.

 

And when you’re paying for every set of eyeballs, you simply can’t afford to be shooting yourself in the foot with subpar reviews.

What problem does it solve?

People who are ecstatic might leave a review. People who are satisfied probably won’t. Unfortunately, those who are offended by or unhappy with your offering are much more likely to leave a one. Worse yet, according to fan experience expert Ruby Newell-Legner, it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for a single unresolved negative experience. 

Senior account strategist Chris Panetta saw this exact scenario nearly cripple one of his clients:

In 2015 we averaged 219 sales a month at an average CPA of $52. This data predates the implementation of the review system. Then, in early 2016, the review system was implemented. The initial response was great! We saw CPA drop by 10-15%, conversion volumes improve, and overall traffic quality improve as well.

But after the second month things started going downhill, fast. CPA started to drastically increase, conversion volume declined rapidly, and we were at a complete loss for what was happening.

Six months had passed since the implementation of the review system and the account’s average CPA was continuing to climb north of $80. Then, one day, we decided to remove the on-site reviews. We had tried everything else and figured why not turn them off for 2-3 weeks and see what happens. To our surprise it worked! By the end of the third week CPAs were down to $65 and on their way back to the $55 range.

According to Chris, while the aggregated customer reviews were sterling, the product pages themselves told a very different story. Many customers did not understand or notice the fact that the hand-made-to-order products took 2-4 weeks to build and another ten business days to ship. Instead of contacting the business directly, customers voiced their frustration in the product reviews.

Once other prospects saw these horror stories, they fled in search of alternatives.

Yikes.

***

To further illustrate the potential pitfalls of featuring unfiltered customer reviews on your PPC landing pages, I’d like to point your attention to a product called Subtle Butt [pause for laugh].

 

Subtle Butt claims to function as “a disposable gas neutralizer,” allegedly eliminating the fetid effluvium associated with flatulence. Guess what, people: they don’t have a single review on their landing page. Click the (garish green) “Buy Now” button and you land on an ecommerce page that similarly has no customer reviews.

Now, in my humble opinion, this seems like a product that’d benefit from customer testimonials….

And if you head over to Amazon there are more than 200! Ranging from this #evangelist: 

to pages of this:

 

While these hellacious remarks make up just 21% of the total Amazon reviews for Subtle Butt, the negative reviews are bad enough that they could convince prospects not to buy. Now, I’m corroborating Chris’s point with a pretty extreme example, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Whether you’re a dog walker or an ecommerce outfit with 50,000 products, customer reviews can make or break your conversion volume: when you’re paying for every click, shooting yourself in the foot is entirely counterintuitive.

“But Allen, I have excellent customer reviews!”

If you really want to include customer reviews on your website, do so in a place where you aren’t sending paid traffic. Develop a separate testimonial page and test it as a sitelink extension if you think it would have value.

Here’s an excellent example of a testimonial page from online coding bootcamp Thinkful:

 

On the page, they’ve aggregated more than 200 reviews of their bootcamp from two different aggregators. The overwhelming majority of the reviews are positive (one aggregator, Course Report, rates Thinkful as the top coding bootcamp around). And guess what?

Outside of some hand-selected quotes, none of these reviews appear on Thinkful’s PPC landing pages.

The lesson?

Even if every customer who has interacted with your business has had a positive experience, if you’re going to leverage the power of social proof on your landing pages, curate it first.

PPC Landing Page Tip #3: Make Sure Your Landing Pages Load Like a Slayer Riff

Google loves landing pages that load quickly because people love landing pages that load quickly. As such, slow-loading pages (on desktop or mobile) are a surefire way to send your account performance into a tailspin.

Google makes it crystal clear that Ad Rank is impacted by site speed, which means your Quality Scores and CPC are, too.

 

What does this mean?

Simply put, a relatively slow landing page will increase your average CPC. A very slow landing page has the potential to hamper user experience to such a degree that you never actually enter into auctions (or worse, you do, at a ridiculously high CPC, and prospects click your ad only to hit the back arrow before the page even loads).

What problem does it solve?

According to Meg Lister, WordStream’s web optimization manager, “site speed is crucial in organic rankings, but it can have a major impact in paid search as well. Research shows that users become dissatisfied and are more likely to abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.”

It’s not called “pay every time your landing page manages to load on somebody’s device” advertising, folks: it’s pay per click.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Meg says that slow load times can “decreases the trustworthiness of your brand, especially if you’re a software or technology company.” As I mentioned above when discussing customer reviews, doing anything to break down trust–especially when you’re paying for the traffic– is a big no-no.

“Allen, I have no idea how fast my landing pages load: what do I do?”

Improving landing page load times isn’t a one-and-done proposition. Instead, it often takes a handful of subtle changes.

To get an idea of where you’re at, throw the URL for one of your landing pages into the PageSpeed Insights tool.

Once you’re done this, Google will provide you with a score and a detailed summary outlining the tweaks you should make if you want to ensure lightning-fast landing page load times. The report will look something like this:

 

Now, some of the suggestions Google provides might seem too complex for you to implement on your own (the word JavaScript alone sends me running for the hills). To jump start your renovations, here are 5 quick fixes that can improve your landing page load times that won’t require a web developer:

• Optimize your images for the web (resizing files can drastically reduce load times. Here’s a link to a free tool you can use to resize your images)
• Limit your use of plugins
• Use rich media (images, gifs, videos) sparingly
• Upgrade your hosting
• Fix broken links

Once you’ve made these changes, plug your landing page into PageSpeed tool again. Your prospects (and your wallet) will thank you!

About the Author

Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist and the reigning fantasy football champion at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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#KnowNearby: Every Emoji You Can Tweet at Google for Instant Local Links [Infographic]

Did you just decide to hunt down the best burger in Boston? Curious about craft cocktails in Charleston? Do you just want to know if the ominous stormclouds overhead will open up any time soon? Google’s got you covered (just not in the way you might think).

Many of the questions you may have typed into a search engine can now be answered on Twitter: as long as your inquiry can be distilled into a single emoji, Google will respond via tweet with a helpful link, a quippy pun, and the hashtag #KnowNearby.

While the ability to work emoji into AdWords copy was short lived, Google’s new method of leveraging Larry’s favorite digital hieroglyphs appears to be here to stay. Google claims that there are around 200 emoji that will yield a response at this point, and many more receive a response of “under construction” instead of “let’s try another” or “does not compute.”

We’ve put together an infographic detailing which emoji Google responds to on Twitter and, more importantly, what they respond with.

But first…

How Does it Work?

If you’re familiar with Twitter, this’ll be old hat.

All you need to do is tweet @Google with a single emoji…

And if the emoji you’ve tweeted is one of hundreds that Google currently recognizes, you’ll receive a response! Many have a corresponding GIF (see below), though some of the cheekier ones (I’m looking at you, eggplant) only result in a puny tweet and a link.

Now, it doesn’t seem to work when you string together a handful of emoji (context becomes muddied at that point, it would seem), and there are hundreds of emoji that don’t currently yield a link. Instead, you’ll see something that looks like this:

Curious as to exactly which emoji google will respond to? You’re in luck…

Which Emoji do Google Respond to on Twitter?

Some Emoji We’d Love To See Google Respond To On Twitter

In the event Google decides to introduce more emoji responses, we’ve got a few suggestions (most of them are transportation-related)

Plane Landing / Plane Taking Off 

It’d be great if, by tweeting a plan landing or taking off, Google could respond with arrivals and departures at the nearest airport. 

Cars 

In an unnavigable city like Boston, knowing where traffic is (and how to avoid it) can be the difference between getting somewhere on time and tearing your hair out. It would be phenomenal if, simply by tweeting a car emoji at google, you could get a traffic report (or a Google map with your current location pinned).

Astrological Signs 

While I don’t care must for astrology, I think the astrological emoji offer fertile ground for some silly puns and interesting SERPS. If Google’s going to respond to eggplants and peaches with tongue in cheek tomfoolery, why not have a bit of fun with these as well?

Unicorn 

Nobody loves unicorns quite like Larry. As homage to our founder’s obsession, it’d be baller if Google would respond to the unicorn emoji with a link to WordStream.

***

Google is the king of perpetual updates: if you discover any emoji that we haven’t covered (or you’ve got suggestions of your own to add to our list), please share them with us on Twitter or in the comments below!

About the Author

Allen Finn is a content marketing specialist and the reigning fantasy football champion at WordStream. He enjoys couth menswear, dank eats, and the dulcet tones of the Wu-Tang Clan. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Why All 4 of Google’s Micro-Moments Are Actually Local

Posted by MiriamEllis

When America’s first star TV chef, Julia Child, demonstrated the use of a wire whisk on her 1960’s cooking show, the city of Pittsburgh sold out of them. Pennsylvanians may well have owned a few of these implements prior to the show’s air date, but probably didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about them. After the show, however, wire whisks were on everyone’s mind and they simply had to have one. Call it a retro micro-moment, and imagine consumers jamming the lines of rotary phones or hoofing it around town in quest of this gleaming gadget … then zoom up to the present and see us all on our mobile devices.

I like this anecdote from the pages of culinary history because it encapsulates all four of Google’s stated core micro-moments:

I want to know – Consumers were watching a local broadcast of this show in Pittsburgh because they wanted to know how to make an omelet.

I want to go – Consumers then scoured the city in search of the proper whisk.

I want to buy – Consumers then purchased the implement at a chosen retailer.

I want to do – And finally, consumers either referred to the notes they had taken during the show (no DVRs back then) or might have turned to Julia Child’s cookbook to actually beat up their first-ever omelet.

Not only does the wire whisk story foreshadow the modern micro-moment, it also provides a roadmap for tying each of the 4 stages to local SEO via current technology. I’ve seen other bloggers pointing to the ‘I want to go’ phase as inherently local, but in this post, I want to demonstrate how your local business can decisively claim all four of these micro-moments as your own, and claim the desirable transactions resulting thereby!

Understanding Google’s definition of micro-moments

Google whisked up some excitement of their own with the publication of Micro-Moments: Your Guide to Winning the Shift to Mobile. Some of the statistics in the piece are stunning:

• 65% of smartphone users look for the most relevant information on their devices regardless of what company provides that information,
• 90% of them aren’t certain what brand they want to purchase when they begin their Internet search,
• 82% consult their smartphones even after they are inside a chosen store,
• and ‘how-to’ searches on YouTube are growing 70% year-over-year.

Google defines micro-moments as “critical touch points within today’s consumer journey, and when added together, they ultimately determine how that journey ends,” and goes on to identify mobile as the great facilitator of all this activity. It’s simple to think of micro-moments as a series of points in time that culminate in a consumer arriving at a transactional decision. For local business owners and their marketers, the goal is to ‘be there’ for the consumer at each of these critical points with the resources you have developed on the web.

Let’s reverse-engineer the famous tale of the wire whisk and put it into a modern technological context, demonstrating how a hypothetical cooking supply store in Pittsburgh, PA could become a major micro-moments winner in 2017.

A variable recipe for local micro-moments success

I want to be sure to preface this with one very important proviso about the order in which micro-moments happen: it varies.

For example, a consumer might decide she wants to patch cracks in her ceiling so she watches a video on YouTube demoing this >>> looks up the name of the putty the YouTube personality was using >>> looks up where to buy that putty locally >>> buys it. Or, the consumer could already be inside a home improvement store, see putty, realize she’d like to patch cracks, then look up reviews of various putty brands, look at a video to see how difficult the task is, and finally, purchase.

There is no set order in which micro-moments occur, and though there may be patterns specific to auto body shops or insurance firms, the idea is to be present at every possible moment in time so that the consumer is assisted, regardless of the order in which they discover and act. What I’m presenting here is just one possible path.

In quest of the fluffier omelet

Our consumer is a 30-year-old man named Walter who loves the fluffy omelets served at a fancy bistro in Pittsburgh. One morning while at the restaurant, Walter asks himself,

“I wonder why I can’t make omelets as fluffy as these at home. I’m not a bad cook. There must be some secret to it. Hey — I challenge myself to find out what that secret is!”

I want to know

While walking back to his car, Walter pulls out his smartphone and begins his micro-moment journey with his I-want-to-know query: how to make a fluffier omelet.

Across town, Patricia, the owner of a franchise location of Soup’s On Cooking Supply has anticipated Walter’s defining moment because she has been studying her website analytics, studying question research tools like Answer The Public, watching Google Trends, and looking at Q&A sites like this one where people are already searching for answers to the secret of fluffy omelets. She also has her staff actively cataloging common in-store questions. The data gathered has convinced her to make these efforts:

1. Film a non-salesy 1.16-minute video in the store’s test kitchen demonstrating the use of a quality wire whisk and a quality pan (both of which her store carries) for ideal omelet results.
2. Write an article/blog post on the website with great photos, a recipe, and instructions revealing the secrets of fluffy omelets.
3. Include the video in the article. Share both the article and video socially, including publishing the video on the company’s YouTube channel (*interesting fact, it might one day show up inside the company’s Google Knowledge Panel).
4. Answer some questions (electric vs. balloon whisk, cast iron vs. non-stick pan for omelet success) that are coming up for this query on popular Q&A-style sites.
5. Try to capture a Google Answer Box or two.

Walking down the street, Walter discovers and watches the video on YouTube. He notices the Soup’s On Cooking Supply branding on the video, even though there was no hard-sell in its content — just really good tips for omelet fluffiness.

I want to go

“Soup’s On near me,” Walter asks his mobile phone, not 100% sure this chain has an outlet in Pittsburgh. He’s having his I-Want-To-Go moment.

Again, Patricia has anticipated this need and prevented customer loss by:

1. Ensuring the company website clearly lists out the name, address, and phone number of her franchise location.
2. Providing excellent driving directions for getting there from all points of origin.
3. Either using a free tool like Moz Check Listing to get a health check on the accuracy of her citations on the most important local business listing platforms, or complying with the top-down directive for all 550 of the brand’s locations to be actively managed via a paid service like Moz Local.

Walter keys the ignition.

I want to buy

Walter arrives safely at the retail location. You’d think he might put his phone away, but being like 87% of millennials, he keeps it at his side day and night and, like 91% of his compadres, he turns it on mid-task. The store clerk has shown him where the wire whisks and pans are stocked, but Walter is not convinced that he can trust what the video claimed about their quality. He’d like to see a comparison.

Fortunately, Patricia is a Moz Whiteboard Friday fan and took Rand’s advice about comprehensive content and 10x content to heart. Her website’s product comparison charts go to great lengths, weighing USA-made kitchen products against German ones, Lodgeware vs. Le Creuset, in terms of price, performance for specific cooking tasks, and quality. They’re ranking very well.

Walter is feeling more informed now, while being kept inside of the company’s own website, but the I-Want-To-Buy micro-moment is cemented when he sees:

1. A unique page on the site for each product sold
2. Consumer reviews on each of these pages, providing unbiased opinion
3. Clearly delineated purchasing and payment options, including support of digital wallets, Bitcoin, and any available alternatives like home delivery or curbside pickup. Walter may be in the store right now, but he’s glad to learn that, should he branch out into soup kettles in future, he has a variety of ways to purchase and receive merchandise.

I want to do

The next day, Walter is ready to make his first fluffier omelet. Because he’s already been exposed to Patricia’s article on the Soup’s On Cooking Supply website, he can easily return to it now to re-watch the video and follow the recipe provided. Even in the I-want-to-do phase, Walter is being assisted by the brand, and this multi-part experience he’s now had with the company should go far towards cementing it in his memory as a go-to resource for all of his future culinary needs.

It would be excellent if the website’s page on fluffy omelets also challenged Walter to use his new whisk for creating other dishes — perhaps soufflés (for which he’ll need a ceramic ramekin) or chantilly cream (a nice glass bowl set over ice water helps). Walter may find himself wanting to do all kinds of new things, and he now knows exactly where he can find helpful tutorials and purchase the necessary equipment.

More micro-moment variables

As we’ve seen, it’s completely possible for a local business to own all four of Google’s attested micro-moments. What I can’t cover with a single scenario is all of the variables that might apply to a given geography or industry, but I do want to at least make mention of these three points that should be applicable to most local businesses:

1. Understanding how Micro-Moments Begin

The origins of both I-want-to-do and I-want-to-know moments are incredibly varied. A consumer need can arise from something really practical, as in, it’s winter again and I need to buy snow tires. Or, there can be public/cultural happenings (like Julia Child’s cooking program) to which consumers’ ultimate transactions can be directly traced. To discover the sparks that ignite your specific customers’ micro-moments fires, I recommend delving further into the topic of barnacle local SEO — the process of latching onto existing influences in your community in order to speak to existing wishes and needs.

2. Investing in mobile UX

Google states that 29% of smartphone users will immediately navigate away from any website or app that doesn’t satisfy them. 70% of these cite slow loading and 67% cite too many steps to reach information or purchase as reasons for dissatisfaction. On November 4, 2016, Google announced its major shift toward mobile-first indexing, signaling to all website publishers that Google sees mobile, rather than desktop, as the primary platform now.

Google’s statistics and policies make it irrefutable that every competitive local business which hasn’t yet done so must now devote appropriate funds to creating the best possible mobile user experience. Failure to do so risks reputation, rankings, and revenue.

3. Investing in in-store UX

Though my story of Walter touches briefly on the resources Patricia had built for his in-store experience, I didn’t delve into the skyrocketing technology constantly being pioneered around this micro-moment phase. This would include beacons, though they have so far failed to live up to earlier hype in some ways. It could involve the development of in-store apps. And, at the highest echelons of commerce, it could include kiosks, augmented, and virtual reality.

From shoestring to big-time, micro-moments aren’t so new

KFC may strive to master I-want-to-buy moments with chicken-serving robots, Amazon Go may see micro-moments in checkout-free shopping, and Google Home’s giant, listening ear may be turning whole lives into a series of documented micro-moments, but what makes sense for your local business?

The answer to this is going to be dictated by the competitiveness of your industry and the needs of your consumer base. Does a rural, independently owned hardware store really need a 6-foot-high in-store touch screen enabling customers to virtually paint their houses? Probably not, but a well-written comparison of non-toxic paint brands the shop carries and why they’re desirable for health reasons could transform a small town’s decorating habits. Meanwhile, in more competitive markets, each local brand would be wise to invest in new technology only where it really makes proven sense, and not just because it’s the next big thing.

Our industry loves new technology to a degree that can verge on the overwhelming for striving local business owners, and while it can genuinely be a bit daunting to sink your teeth into all of the variables of winning the micro-moment journey, take heart. Julia Child sold Pittsburgh out of wire whisks with a shoestring, black-and-white PBS program on which she frequently dropped implements on the floor and sent egg beaters flying across rooms.

With our modern capabilities of surveying and mining consumers needs and presenting useful solutions via the instant medium of the web, what can’t you do? The steps in the micro-moments funnel are as old as commerce itself. Simply seize the current available technology … and get cooking!

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How to Delegate SEO Work Effectively

Posted by zeehj

Whether you’re the only SEO at your company, work within a larger team, or even manage others, you still have to stay on top of your projects. Project management skills aren’t and shouldn’t be exclusive to someone (or some tool) with the title “project manager.” I believe that having good project manager skills is essential to getting work done at all, let alone delivering high-quality work in a timely and efficient way.

In defense of management

Freakonomics Radio released this podcast episode in October called In Praise of Maintenance. The TL;DR (or TL;DL, rather) is that our society rewards innovators, but rarely (if ever) celebrates the maintainers: the people who get sh*t done, and do it reliably, often without anyone’s noticing. This podcast episode confirmed what I’d been feeling for a long time: We don’t award enough praise to the good project managers out there who keep engagements moving forward. And that’s largely because it’s not a sexy job: it’s not exciting to report to stakeholders that necessary services that have been reliable for so long are, as always, continuing to be reliable.

It’s only when things aren’t running smoothly does it seem project managers get recognition. A lack of a rewards system means that we’re not teaching PMs, Consultants, Account Managers, and more that their excellent organizational skills are their most valuable asset. Instead, the message being communicated is that innovation is the only praise-worthy result, which oftentimes may not be essential to getting your work done. The irony here is that innovation is the by-product of an excellent project management framework. The situational awareness of knowing how to delegate work to your colleagues and a repertoire of effective organizational habits is vital if you ever want to free up your attention to allow for the headspace and concentration ingenuity requires.

Sound familiar? Lately I’ve been focused on the idea of a cluttered headspace, where it feels like everything on your to-do list is floating ephemerally around in your head, and you can’t seem to pin down what needs to be done. Of course, this isn’t specific to just professional life (or consulting work): it can happen with personal tasks, which can present their own set of organizational challenges. Regardless of your professional role, crunch time is exactly when you need to put on your project manager hat and get yourself organized. Read on to find out the tools and tricks I use to stay on top of my work, and how I delegate work when needed without losing a personal touch on projects.

Manage projects with tools that work for you

What do you do to make that process easier? One Slack conversation that seems to always come up is which project management tools do we use (and which is best). I take the annoying middle-ground stance of “whatever tool you use is best” and I stand by it (don’t worry, I’ll get to the actual list in a minute): a tool is only useful if it’s actually used.

So how do you get started? It’s always important to have preferred methods for project tracking, note keeping, and reminders. Depending on your role and learning style, you may find that some tools work better than others for you. For instance, while I have a few tools I work with to stay on top of client work, I also have a clear plastic desk cover that I can jot down notes and reminders on. Here’s a breakdown of the tools I use to manage projects, and the needs they meet.

• Inbox by Gmail. Yes, it’s different from classic Gmail. The two greatest aspects of Inbox, in my opinion, is the ability to snooze emails until a specific day and time, and save reminders for yourself (e.g. “Check in on Ty’s progress for the page speed audit,” or “Watch the video in this link after work”).

  Why are these my favorite Inbox features? Both functions serve similar purposes: they tell you what you need to know, when you need to know it. The ability to snooze emails and save reminders for yourself is invaluable when we’re talking about headspace: this way, you can use your email as your to-do list for any given day. If you know you don’t have to respond to someone until X date, there’s no reason their previous email should sit in your Inbox taking up space. As a result, I use Inbox as my personal assistant to remind me when I need to jump back to a deliverable or respond to a client. It’s possible to reach Inbox zero on a given day, even if you have an email awaiting your response. Just snooze it and attend to it when you really need to.

• Google Drive. Sure, not a sexy or new tool, but it’s my home for everything. Not only does GDrive cover all the file types that I need (Documents, Sheets, and Presentations), it also allows for easy, real-time collaboration on files with your colleagues and clients. If you like to nudge people to do things, too, you can assign contacts work to do from your GDocs (just highlight text, click the comment icon to the right, and insert the @ symbol with their name). If you’re crafting a presentation with a colleague, for instance, you can assign slides with questions for them. I recommend tagging them with your question and including a due date for when you need their answer.
• Tools my colleagues love:
  • Trello. It’s not my personal favorite, but a lot of my teammates love using Trello as their to-do lists, or even for tracking web dev or SEO projects. If you prefer text over visuals, you can also try Basecamp (which I tend to prefer).
  • Asana. Another great project management tool — I tend to use it on a project basis rather than a to-do list. If you’re a developer, you may prefer JIRA.

Of course, it’s possible to manage and delegate work without these, but I’m of the mind that pen, paper, and email can only get you so far, especially if you want your delegation process to be somewhat automated (think tagging colleagues in comments within documents, or assigning projects to them within standard project management tools like Asana).

How to delegate effectively

Tools can only get you so far: any good delegation process starts with a conversation (no more than five or 10 minutes) about the work you need and a great brief. The conversation establishes whether your colleague actually has the bandwidth to take your work on, and the brief goes into greater detail of what you actually need done. The brief format I follow works for a large number of different deliverables — I’ve used this same layout to delegate page speed, technical and backlink audits, and content briefs to colleagues. Below are the fields I always include, and the type of information always provided:

Subject: [BRIEF] Work I Need Done

Deadline: The precise date and time you need it, with enough time for you to review the work before delivering it to your stakeholders or your client. If it’s something like a page speed audit, I would allow up to a full week to review it and ensure that it’s in the best format and all the information is correct. Of course, it also depends on how familiar the delegate is with projects like these — if they’ve done a number of audits for you in the past, they may know your style and you may not need as much time to edit their final work.

Output/Deliverable: The format in which you need this work delivered to you. Maybe it’s a Google Doc or an Excel Spreadsheet. This brief format can work for any output you need, including more creative pieces (do you need a video edited to :30 seconds in a .mov format? A photo edited to certain specs and saved as a PNG or IDD?).

Expected hours: This may be the most challenging element of the entire brief. How long do you anticipate this work to take, start to finish? Keep in mind the experience level of the person to whom you’re delegating. Is this their first SEO technical audit, or their 30th? You will almost definitely need to check in with your delegate a few times (more on that later), so how long do you anticipate these meetings to take? Just like the deadline timing estimate, use your best judgment based on work you’ve done with this person in the past, and the type of work you’re assigning.

Relevant materials: This is where you can provide additional articles or tools that should help your colleague do the work you’ve assigned to them. Some good examples are 101 articles (like ones on the Moz blog!), or a tool you know you always use in projects like the one you’re delegating (think SEMRush, new photo editing software, or Google’s Keyword Planner).

Check in with your delegate along the way

Once you’ve delivered your brief, the next step is to make sure you check in with your delegate along the way. Even the most experienced person can benefit from added context, so whether it’s an in-person meeting or a five-minute call, touching base shortly after delivering a brief is necessary to ensure you’re on the same page. Beyond kicking off a project, it’s important to have check-ins along the way to stay on track.

At Distilled, we like to follow a check-in model at the following completion points:

• 1% (kickoff conversation);
• 5% (validation of process);
• 30% (ensure you’re on the right track before you invest too much time into the project);
• and 90% (final editing and proofing).

Not only is this good to keep everyone on the right track, it’s even more valuable both to the person delegating and the delegate to know how much work should be completed at which points, and how much detail is required as you give feedback.

In many ways, great project management and delegation skills are really future-proofing skills. They allow you to be on top of your work regardless of what work (or life) throws at you. You can be the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t manage your projects effectively, you’ll either fail or not see the greatest impact you otherwise could achieve. It’s time to ditch praising the model of a lone innovator who somehow “does it all,” and instead truly celebrate the maintainers and managers who ensure things remain operational and steady. Often, our biggest problems aren’t best solved with a complex solution, but rather a clear mind and supportive team.

A large part of turning projects around comes down to improving the project management process, and being organized allows you to juggle multiple clients and acknowledge when you’re at capacity. Without a solid foundation of project management skills, there is no groundwork for successful innovations and client projects. The next time you’re looking to bolster your skill set, do an audit of how you manage your own work, and identify all of the things that prevent you from delivering the best work on time.

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