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Your website is your initial point of contact with your audience. And no one wants to make a bad first impression. Using the correct content management system (CMS) can help you create the best website for your business. Let’s explore Squarespace vs WordPress.

An Overview of WordPress Features

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) that lets anyone easily build and manage websites. Since it was launched in 2003, it’s become one of the most popular CMS, powering over 43.5% of all websites on the Internet

Whether you have extensive coding knowledge or are learning how to code, WordPress has options to help you create and customize your site. 

An Overview of Squarespace


Squarespace is a different website builder that, like WordPress, provides everything you need to build a website. It allows people who have little to no technical knowledge to quickly build and launch a custom site without worrying about day-to-day management.

Squarespace vs WordPress: Which is Better?

Ease of Use: WordPress


WordPress uses the Gutenberg block editor for creating pages and posts. Each block represents a distinct element like text, images, or buttons, offering granular control over content structure. With over 60,000 plugins and countless free and premium themes, WordPress empowers you to build your website to your exact needs. 

Ease of Use: Squarespace

If you aren’t familiar with designing or building a website, it can seem like an intimidating process. However, Squarespace prides itself on being user-friendly and can help anyone build a website. 

Winner: Both

WordPress is a great tool if you have some web development and coding skills. If you’re still working on those skills, or trying to find them, Squarespace has everything you need to help you easily build your new site. 

Customization: WordPress

Your website needs to work for you. WordPress gives you total control over the design and functionality of your site with thousands of themes and plugins. You don’t have any limits with coding, which allows you to create customizations like lists, video insets, and tables that will set your business apart from its competition. For example, if you’re selling a product with a specific feature, you can create a video inset showing off that feature so the customer can get a full view of your product. 

Customization: Squarespace

You don’t want your website to look like everyone else’s. You want to stand out from the rest. Squarespace offers many different layouts, templates, and themes to help you create a custom look.

Winner: WordPress

Squarespace offers basic customization, but WordPress takes it to another level. From plugins to coding, you have the ability to create the exact website that works best for you.

Pricing: WordPress

WordPress is generally more affordable than Squarespace, with lower upfront costs and flexible monthly plans starting from $4. While the core platform is free, you’ll need to pay for website hosting and a domain name. Additional features like custom domains, extra storage, and e-commerce capabilities can be added through premium plans.

Pricing: Squarespace

With Squarespace, your plan’s price is what you pay for everything, including hosting, templates (site themes), integrations, extensions, and a content delivery network (CDN) for swift page-loading times.

Winner: WordPress

Squarespace is one of the more expensive CMS systems on the market. While having one price for everything is convenient, WordPress gives you more cost-saving options.

SEO and Internet Marketing: WordPress

WordPress excels in SEO and internet marketing. Its SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math offer advanced features for optimizing your site. For e-commerce, WordPress integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and CRMs like HubSpot, enhancing marketing efforts.

SEO and Internet Marketing: Squarespace

Unlike WordPress, Squarespace has the basics covered but that’s it. You’ll be able to do a few foundational tasks to support your site in search and other digital marketing initiatives. But you won’t be able to do more technical internet marketing work.

Winner: WordPress

Squarespace is one of the more expensive CMS systems on the market. While having one price for everything is convenient, WordPress’s open-source nature and vast plugin ecosystem provide unparalleled flexibility and advanced features, surpassing Squarespace’s internet marketing capabilities.

Security and Maintenance: WordPress

If you choose WordPress, it’s up to you to keep your security updated. The positive is this gives you more control over your website.

Security and Maintenance: Squarespace

Squarespace reverses the process by handling many of the security updates itself meaning you can be more hands off.

Winner: Depends on Your Needs

Both sites have many of the same security features. If you’re someone who isn’t afraid of getting into your site and keeping things updated then WordPress will work for you. However, if you would rather let someone else assume that responsibility, then Squarespace has you covered.

TWR LocationPages Images 01 jpg Squarespace vs WordPress: Which is Best for Your Business?

So Which is Better?

Squarespace is a great option for creating your website. It’s a user-friendly platform that offers basic SEO features and strong security.

However, for a more flexible and powerful solution, we recommend WordPress. It provides greater customization options, advanced SEO capabilities, and a wider range of e-commerce features to cater to your business needs.

Your website should help grow your business—not cause problems.

Still unsure about Squarespace vs WordPress? No worries—our team is here to help answer your questions and find the perfect solution for your business.

One of the phrases most often heard in advertising is “print is dead.” However, that’s not the case. Print ads are a valuable way to catch your audience’s eye by creating eye-catching artwork combined with strong copy

But in this digital age with everything web-based, can you still use print advertising to your advantage? 

To help answer this question, we’ll explain how you can use print advertising KPIs to measure your campaign’s success and gain valuable insights into your audience. 

KPIs You Can Use For Your Print Marketing Campaign

First, before you decide what KPIs to track, you need to determine what the goal of your campaign is. Your KPIs provide the measurable data you need to make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. You can’t know what to track if you don’t figure out what outcome you want to achieve. Some different goals you can have are:

  • Brand Awareness
  • Lead Generation
  • Sales
  • Brand Consideration
  • Website Traffic

Once you’ve determined your goals, then it’s time to assess which KPIs support them. Below we’ll explore common ones that are useful for measuring print campaigns.

Reach

When you decide to publish your print ad, you want to make sure the publication you’re using has a large enough circulation so you can reach as many people as possible. Another tip is to see where your ad is placed. 

Front, back, and inside covers are ideal placements as well as being located on a right-hand page. Or if you’re using brochures or rack cards as your advertising methods, you want to leave brochures in a high-traffic area where people are more likely to find and pick them up. 

Frequency

Frequency is the number of times a person is exposed to an ad or how many times the ad is repeated in a specific medium over a period of time. It’s often paired with reach since they are complementary. When you place a print ad, you want to know how many people (reach) are going to see your ad and how many times (frequency) they’ll see it. 

Cost Per Result

A print ad is a good investment when it works. Once you know what your reach and frequency are, you can do some basic math to find a rough cost per result. To do this, you take the cost of the campaign divided by the result, whether that is views, leads, or site visits. Your result depends on your campaign goal. This will give you an idea of whether the ad will be profitable or if it will just cost you money in the long run. 

Brand Recall

As a business, you want people to remember your brand when prompted. For example, if you own an Italian restaurant, you want someone to remember you when asked “Who has the best meatballs in the area?”.  

Engagement

Tracking engagement shows how many people interacted with your ad. By using tactics like QR codes or specific coupon codes, more on that below, you can see how many people were directed to your site from your print ad. 

Response & Conversion Rate

Another figure to track along with your engagement rate, is your conversion rate. This shows how many people completed their journey through the funnel and became customers based on your ad. You can track this figure using tactics like special forms for landing pages or specific phone numbers with call tracking on them. 

Tower KPI Blog 2024 image 3 min How to Use Print Advertising KPIs to Your Advantage

Ways To Track Your Print Advertising

Once you’ve decided on your goal and what KPIs to track, it’s time to select the correct tactic for your campaign. You need to think about what works best for your business. If it’s more call-based, a QR code might not work as well as phone calls. 

Special Phone Numbers

Another method to track where your leads are coming from is using a special phone number or vanity phone number in your print marketing. Everyone has heard the J.J. Wentworth commercials telling people to call “877-Cash-Now!” (Bonus points if you just sang that). That’s a vanity phone number—it contains a phrase that’s specific to your business and catches people’s attention.

Now if that doesn’t fit with your business style, you can create occasion-specific phone numbers through services like:

These companies allow you to create several temporary numbers you can use in your advertising. In particular, CallRail has phone call tracking, so you know where your leads are coming from and if your advert was successful.

QR Codes

Quick response (QR) codes are an easy way to access a website without typing a URL. They’ve become popular again in recent years since more public places have gone touch-free. 

Customers can scan a QR code in print ads using their phone’s camera to reach a specific landing page. When you create this page you’ll want to add a “noindex” tag, meaning that it won’t appear in search engine results. So the only way you can access the page is by the QR code. This gives you an accurate way to measure the effectiveness of your campaign material. 

Another way to attribute traffic from your campaign’s QR code is to direct traffic to a specific page via a URL that has UTM parameters applied to it. The five UTM parameters are source, medium, campaign, term, and content. The first three are required for tracking in Google Analytics and the last two are optional. 

Here’s an example of a URL from a campaign Strasburg Rail Road ran in June 2024 for their event “A Great Train Robbery: The Bonnie & Clyde Experience”

Tower KIP Blog 2024 image 4 min How to Use Print Advertising KPIs to Your Advantage

You can see the source (where they are running their campaign) is Penn Live, the medium is referral, which indicates what type of channel it is (referral from an ad, paid social, organic social, or cost-per-click ads). Finally, the campaign name is bonnie_clyde_june_2024.

Another benefit of using QR codes in print ads is that they generally do not expire. Once created, they can be used indefinitely unless the linked information is changed or removed.

Custom Landing Page Links

Custom landing pages are another tactic you can use in your print ads. For example, if you’re offering a free quote for work you offer, you can set up a landing page with a contact form.

Then you’ll want to add a “noindex” tag so this special landing page isn’t visible in search engines. You’ll also want to make sure it’s not added to your site navigation. That way no one can see the page unless they have the link you shared in your print ad. Doing this makes it easier to isolate traffic and only track activity from your print ad.

When it comes to creating a URL for this custom landing page, make sure you don’t create something that’s too long. You want to keep it short and easy so it looks good in the ad and is easy for users to input into their browser.

If you use Google Analytics for tracking, make sure to set up the custom landing page with a tag for the ad source (like a magazine name or brochure) so you can track your print campaign easily. This will also allow you to analyze it in GA4 alongside your other traffic sources.

Branded Hastags

A tactic that can increase your brand awareness is hashtags. Creating a branded hashtag can be an effective way to promote your business and drive conversations and can be as simple as using your company name or tagline in the hashtag. 

Hashtags can help you categorize your content so it becomes easily searchable. Including them in your ads allows you to join ongoing conversations on social media and allows your ads to be visible in those conversations.

This can lead to greater engagement, boosting your brand’s social media engagement through likes, shares, comments, and new followers.

A great example of a hashtag is Coca-Cola’s #ShareaCoke. Launched in Australia first, Coke removed the traditional Coke logo, replacing “Coca-Cola” from one side of a bottle with the phrase “Share a Coke with” followed by a person’s name. The goal was to find the personalized bottles and share them with friends. The hashtag was found on billboards and print ads as well. 

Specific Coupon Codes

Another method is to create specific codes for ads to entice people to visit your website and become customers. These codes can include the publication or ad name so you can easily track sales that result from them. 

An example of this could be if you owned a company and printed an ad in Clipper Magazine you could tell people to use code “CLIPPERMay2024” to get free shipping on your order or for a half price on a specific item. Or if you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can have someone bring in the ad, which acts as a valid in-store-only coupon. 

These codes can be customized to whatever objective you have for your campaign and you can run several at the same time. Just make sure you create custom coupons that don’t overlap with similar ones. 

Tower KPI Blog 2024 image 1 min How to Use Print Advertising KPIs to Your Advantage

Marketing Software

You can set up all the landing pages and coupons but if you don’t have a system in place, you’re spending money without getting your ROI. There are several programs that can help you with this task. 

One of the more popular tools is Google Analytics, which helps you build a complete picture of your audience while connecting key insights and traffic results. It also works with other Google products like Google Optimize. Plus, it’s a free tool, which is good from a cost standpoint. Also if you already have Google Analytics, make sure you’ve updated from Universal Analytics to GA4

Another popular tool is Semrush, which offers website traffic analysis for not only your website but for your competitor’s site as well. This can help you adjust your marketing strategy by seeing what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for the competition.

Hotjar is a similar tool to Google Analytics and Semrush in that it tracks who visits your site. However, Hotjar tries to give you the “why” behind their behavior. It allows you to visualize and map your audience’s actions while looking at recordings of their sessions. 

There are other tools on the market so do your research and see which one will work best for your business. 

Looking to improve your print advertising KPIs? Our content specialists can create authentic content that resonates with your audience.  

Imagine this: you’re working on a campaign and have two ad versions. Both have targeted copy, engaging headlines, and eye-catching images but both have different call to actions (CTAs). Both actions serve your objective but you’re unsure which would resonate with your audience more, so what do you do? 

This is where you can use split testing to help answer that question. After we answer what is split testing, we’ll explore how split testing works and how you can use it to your advantage in your internet marketing strategy. 

What is Split Testing?

Split testing is a method of comparing two versions of a marketing asset to see which one performs better. It diverts your traffic equally to each asset so you get an accurate sampling. This can be a disadvantage since you need an audience big enough to get accurate results and the traffic to support it. 

When you’re testing elements, it’s best practice to only change one element, such as different headlines, layouts, or copy length, while keeping the rest the same. This allows you to see what specific change performs well and which doesn’t.

What is A/B Testing?

When you do a split test, you need to use an A/B test. A/B testing is a similar tactic in that you’re seeing which element performs better. Some of the elements you can test are headlines, call to actions (CTAs), images, text copy, and landing pages/web pages.

One of the biggest differences is with A/B testing you’re not always splitting your audience exactly 50/50. When you use any type of testing, you’re seeing which elements work best with your audience. Like split testing, it’s best to limit your changes so you can isolate what elements work best.

To run a successful split test, you need to have A/B testing. But to run an A/B test, you don’t need to always have split testing.

What Can You Split Test?

One of the best features of split testing is that it isn’t limited to just one area. You can use split tests across your digital marketing tactics and use the results to create or adjust your strategy. Learning what factors you can split test can help you design a more effective experiment.

Content Marketing

Considered a long-term marketing strategy, content marketing focuses on building trust and relationships with your audience through quality, and relevant, content. It can take the form of blog writing, script writing for videos or radio ads, and webpage content.

Marketers need to have patience when using content marketing because, for example, it can take online web pages 4-6 months before they start ranking in Google search results. So to make sure your content is in a position to succeed in search engines, marketers can split test: 

  • CTAs
  • Text length
  • Image-heavy copy vs. text-heavy copy
  • Headlines
  • Message intent 
  • Webpage layout

Split testing reveals valuable insights into your target audience’s preferences and behaviors. This knowledge empowers you to craft content that truly speaks to their needs and desires.

Social Media Marketing

With the rise of social media usage among people, social media marketing has become a favorite tool of marketers. It’s a great way for companies to reach their target audience and drive traffic to their websites. 

Social media marketing includes posts, captions for images or videos, and targeted ads. Different elements you can test are:

  • CTAs
  • Text length
  • Post content
  • Headlines 
  • Post time
  • Background sounds
  • Message intent
  • Link destination 
  • Images 

By taking your results, you can help build a social media campaign that resonates with your audience and that they engage with. 

Email Marketing

A form of direct marketing, email marketing has been around since the beginning of email. When done correctly, it can build relationships with your audience, increase brand awareness, and promote your business.

One of the toughest parts about email marketing is you need what you’re sending to stand out because people get so many emails in a day. You need to hook them immediately so they want to open your email and not automatically delete it. 

When you’re crafting your email, you can test:

  • Subject lines
  • Templates
  • Audience segments
  • Send times
  • Personalization vs. general messaging
  • CTAs
  • Text length
  • Image-heavy copy vs. text-heavy copy

Testing different elements allows you to pinpoint the variations that will get your audience to click on and open. This translates to higher engagement rates, conversions, and overall campaign success.

SEO Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketing’s goal is to improve a website’s visibility in search engines, such as Google, by gaining qualified traffic. With Google users searching for information/products each day, search engines are one of the biggest traffic generators for websites. 

SEO plays a key role in improving your ranking positions since better rankings mean more traffic, which can bring more brand awareness. To improve these rankings SEO marketers use several tactics including metadata and ads. Areas they can test are:

  • Keywords
  • URLs
  • Landing pages
  • Schema markup
  • Linking strategies
  • Title tags/meta descriptions
  • Page loading speed
  • Mobile responsiveness

Split testing is a continuous process, like SEO, so by consistently testing and optimizing your website, you adapt to your audience’s preferences and maximize your long-term impact.

PPC Marketing

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a type of online marketing where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads. Typically PPC marketing is through search engines, such as Google Ads, and marketers bid on keywords. However, PPC marketing is evolving and starting to look like paid social marketing.  

With that change, PPC ads can also include social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. Elements you can test are:

  • CTAs
  • Headlines
  • Text length
  • Keywords
  • Text intent
  • Landing pages
  • Visuals
  • Dayparting
  • Ad objectives

Using split testing on PPC ads helps you gain a higher return on your investment or ROI. This means you’ll be spending your marketing budget on ads that you know will work and meet your goals.

How Do You Design Effective Split Tests?

To get accurate results in your testing, you need to set up an accurate test.

1. Define Goals & Target Audience

First, you need to determine what your goals are and what you want to achieve.  Knowing that gives your test structure and a direction to go in. 

Make sure your audience is equally split or as close to an even split as you can get it. This allows you to create a fair and unbiased split test.  

2. Select What to Test

As noted above, there are many different elements that you can test. However, to get the best results, you should only test one element at a time so you need to determine what’s the most important. Is it your CTA? Or do you want to see if a longer text piece captures more attention than a shorter one?

3. Create Variations

Once you’ve decided what element to test, now you need your variations. Make sure you’re creating clear differences for your team to compare. Otherwise, your test won’t yield any useful results.

When you’re creating your variations, you can create two for an A/B test or you can create more to do an A/B/C/D, or multivariate, test. Just remember to only change that one element across all variations and keep everything else the same. 

4. Set Up the Test

Now that you’ve determined your goals and what elements to change, it’s time to design your test. First, you need to determine how long you want to run your test. It needs to be long enough that you can collect sufficient data but not too long that it starts to skew the results. It’s a best practice to run a test for two weeks but you can add more time if you aren’t seeing results.

There are several tools you can use to help you set up your test and collect data. Some of them are HotJar (free), HubSpot (free), and Optimizely (paid). Research each one and see which options would work best for what results you want to gain. 

5. Analyze Your Results

Once you get your results in, it’s time to see what happened. Did one CTA perform better than the other? Or did changing when a campaign was launched make a difference? This is where you can use your analytics to track the key metrics related to your goals. 

Once you look over all your data, then you can reexamine your marketing strategy and implement what you’ve found. 

Two people sit at a desk and point at a tablet. The desk is covered in papers.

What are the Benefits of Split Testing for Me?

The obvious answer is to see which option resonates with your audience better, which is important. However, there are a few more subtle benefits you’ll get from split testing. 

Once you find out which option is best, you’ll be able to reduce your bounce rates. For example, you test copy length and discover that your audience responds better to shorter copy with more images. Moving forward, you can tailor your copy to meet your audience’s preference.

Another related benefit to reducing your bounce rates is you can increase your engagement rate. By being able to capture your target audience from the beginning, you’ll keep them on your site longer. This increases the chance they interact with your content more, whether it’s more blogs or other landing pages on your website. 

You can also use split testing to try a new marketing strategy before you launch it. You can see what works and identify any risks. Since this is just a test, you’ll have time to make any changes to your strategy and fix any issues you find before a launch date.

Once your launch occurs, you can use the split testing results in your reporting to show why these changes are necessary and how they can benefit your business. Having data to support your reasoning strengthens your argument and gives examples of why the changes are beneficial. This is especially helpful when you have an important launch and want to reach the maximum percentage of your target audience. 

You’ve learned what split testing is—now it’s time to contact our team today to integrate it into your marketing strategy.

Blog writing seems deceptively easy. Some people think that all you need to do is write new and compelling content, publish it on a consistent schedule, and new traffic will be generated. While that is a necessary part of the process, experienced content marketers know there is more to it. 

One way to drive traffic to your website is forum link-building. After reading this blog, you’ll learn why forum link-building is important, what forums you can use, and why it’s beneficial.

What is Link Building?

Link building refers to the variety of methods marketers use to increase the number of high-quality links that refer to your website. It often includes spending lots of time researching and reaching out to external sources. 

If you use the correct link-building strategy, you can increase your website traffic, boost your brand awareness, and increase your domain authority. 

What is Forum Link Building?

This type of link-building activity uses forums. By interacting on the forum and answering questions, you can establish backlinks to your website. 

These backlinks increase your page’s ranking in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) because you have more links pointing back to your site. This becomes important when you’re trying to outrank competitors in your industry. 

Why Should You Use It?

You want to be known as an authority in your industry and a brand people can trust. Every time you interact with a person is a chance to build a relationship with your audience. Creating quality content to share also demonstrates your brand’s expertise.

This content gives your audience something to refer to when checking your site. They might not have originally gone to your website for this topic, but they’ll remember you had a post on it. Since you’ve already built that trust with your audience, you’ve become a go-to resource for them, making it more likely that they will recommend your site to others or visit again. 

What Forums Should I Use?

If people discuss a topic, then there is a forum for it. There are forums for cars, travel, cooking, computer programming, and everything in between. But are all forums created equal? Below we’ll explore which ones are going to best benefit your website.

Quora

Quora is a question-and-answer forum. It covers over 400,000 topics and is used by 300 million people per month. 

Why Should You Use It?

While anyone can use Quora for advice on any issue, it can be more professional than other forums. Part of that is because the site is heavily moderated and any topics or answers that don’t adhere to the guidelines are removed. 

Since Quora is only for questions and answers, your answers are less likely to get lost in conversation threads.

Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow

Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow are online communities that allow users to ask and answer questions, mostly on technology and software. Stack Exchange is the overarching network and Stack Overflow is a specific community hosted in that network. 

Why Should You Use It?

Stack is one of the largest and most active programming Q&A communities on the internet, with a large community of users who provide help and support to other developers around the world. It is a well-known resource for programmers and software developers. If you’re a part of that industry, being involved with Stack is a good way to get your brand out there.

Reddit

Like Quora, Reddit is a social news and discussion website where users can submit content, such as links, text posts, and images, and engage in discussions with other users. It has 430 million monthly users. Where it differs from Quora is that Reddit shows the latest news as well. 

Why Should You Use It?

Since more people use Reddit, you can reach a larger audience. Reddit also allows you to discuss recent news stories and see what issues your audience is interacting with. 

There are questions on a variety of topics and different subcategories for more information/discussion to go more in-depth on an issue. 

However, something to keep in mind when you’re using Reddit is to do some research before you start using this platform. Discussions can get contentious fairly quickly on Reddit so it’s a good idea to do some research and understand your community before you start posting. 

Medium

Medium differs from the other platforms we’ve discussed as it’s a blogging platform. Once you create an account you can go on and either write blogs or you can repost ones already on your website. You can also determine if your articles are behind a paywall or not. 

Medium is free to everyone; however, non-members are limited to three free articles per month. To gain unlimited access, you can get a membership to the site.

Why Should You Use It?

While there isn’t as much interaction on Medium, you can still create content that links back to your website and help you become an authority within your industry. You can also still reach portions of your target audience and see what content matters to them. While not instantaneous, it can still be a good research tool.

Which One is the Best?

Deciding which forum is best isn’t easy. It depends on several factors including your overall content marketing strategy, your audience demographics, the industry you’re in, and what you want to achieve. 

For example, if you are a clothing designer, you might not use a forum like Stack Exchange that focuses on programming and software development. You might want to go somewhere like Reddit or Quora because you are more likely to find your target audience there. 

What Can You Accomplish With Forum Link Building?

Before you start on any project, you must establish what the benefits are for your business—what potential outcomes you would expect. When you start on your forum link-building journey, here are some of the potential benefits you can experience. 

Establish Your EAT

The acronym EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. It’s a marketing theory that helps websites rank better in Google SERPs. However, it can be applied to just about any type of marketing, including forum link-building. 

Expertise

Being a go-to expert in your field will not go unnoticed on whichever forum you select. By answering many questions with useful and relevant information, you will gain followers who will recognize your knowledge of the topic or industry.

Authority

In this case, authority goes hand-in-hand with your expertise. Answering questions gives you the ability to position yourself or your company over your competition. 

Trust

By being a beneficial resource for users, you’ll work on gaining trust. That can then turn into loyalty, which means users will be more willing to use you or your company’s products and/or services over others.

Generate New Content Ideas

When you’re creating new content for your website, forums are an overlooked place to find content. Thanks to the vast amount of users using the platform each day, you’re bound to come across various patterns in the topics you see. 

You’re likely to see questions surrounding your industry that you haven’t thought of. You can then use this information to create new, unique content for your website.

Gain Insight Into Your Audience

As you’re looking through posts on the forum, you can get an idea of what topics your target audience is interested in or have questions about. The forum lets you speak directly with your audience and gain valuable targeting data. 

Drive Traffic To Your Website

The goal of using link building is to drive quality traffic to your website. If you have great content but no one’s seeing it, then you have a problem. 

Getting your brand out in front of your audience and answering their questions helps show them that you’re knowledgeable and should be taken seriously as a resource. 

Tower March 2023 blog image 1 min scaled How Good Forum Link Building Helps Drive Traffic

How to Get Started Building Forum Backlinks

Now that we’ve gone over all the benefits of using forums for link building, the real work begins—using the forum. However, by using these simple steps, you can get started sooner than you think.

1. Create Your Forum Profile

Once you’ve created your content, the next step is to create a profile on your forums of choice. You can create an individual profile or you can create a profile on behalf of your company. It all depends on if this is for a personal project or for a business. 

2. Find Questions to Answer

Go through the forum and collect different questions you can confidently answer. When you’re searching for topics, you can bookmark topics so it will be easy to find them the next time you log in. 

Look for questions that speak directly to your brand and messaging. Don’t try to make questions fit what you’re saying—your audience can tell when you’re being disingenuous and that will lead to you losing credibility with them. 

3. Carefully Craft Your Answers

When you’re ready to begin answering questions, make sure your answers stand out from others. Don’t rush through your answers—take your time to think out your response and make sure that it’s beneficial. 

Using the suggestions below, your answers will be concise, clear, and useful for users.

  • Format answers
  • Use images
  • Create links
  • Make sure answers have value

4. Maintain Your Profile

Once you’ve started your profile, you’ll need to take time to maintain it. Some of the ways you can interact with your profile are:

  • Continue answering questions
  • Add content to your profile page
  • Interact with other members 
  • Create questions for other users to answer
Tower March 2023 blog image 2 min scaled How Good Forum Link Building Helps Drive Traffic

Is Forum Link-Building Right for You?

Having relevant, SEO-optimized content already created eases your workload as you try to link build and connect with your audience. You’ve done the hard work, now you just need to share it with your audience. 

Remember, you want quality traffic over quantity. You are going straight to the source and talking directly to the audience you want to target. Since they’re searching for what you’re offering, they’re probably going to be interested in what you have to say. 

Using forums provides the ability to spread brand awareness and speak directly with your audience, which helps you understand them better. 

Want help reaching your target audience through forum link building? See how working with an experienced full-service agency can support your business.

Editor’s note: This blog was originally published on May 1, 2019. It was updated on June 9, 2023.

We’ve all done it. We’ve all gone online and searched for a business using the formula “service + city.” So as a business owner, it makes sense to optimize your website for these keywords.

For example, you run a preschool with a single location that serves families in Lancaster, PA. You’d be smart to optimize your homepage, About Us page, and Contact page using keyword variations of “preschool + Lancaster.” However, things get tricky for small businesses that fall into one of these categories:

  • Single location serving multiple areas
  • Multiple locations serving multiple areas

If your small business operates as one of these business models, it makes good SEO sense to create location pages on your website for each city you serve or operate out of. This will allow you to optimize your homepage, About Us page, and other key pages for your brand and concentrate the “service + city” keywords on your individual locations pages. Sounds simple enough right?

But here’s the catch, you need to present all the local information in such a way that you avoid the issue of duplicate content on multiple locations pages. But that leads to the next question—how bad is duplicate content in local SEO?

TWR Blog DupeContent 01 min Is Duplicate Content on Multiple Locations Pages Really Bad?

What’s The Issue With Duplicate Content?

Google’s SEO best practices identify duplicate content as content that “either completely matches other content or is appreciably similar.” Duplicate content may come as a result of content that has been “templated” and is not uniquely crafted for each page. Titles may be too similar or the content may be virtually the same from page to page with only minor keyword changes.

So, when a user performs a search, the search engine struggles with which piece of content to return to satisfy the user’s needs. As a result, the search engine may not return any of these pages in the search results.

While you won’t be actively penalized for duplicate content by Google, having unique content for each page on your site is a ranking factor. Without it, you may see drops in your organic traffic.

Additionally, multiple location pages with content that is too similar can be flagged as doorway pages. These are template pages that are keyword optimized (in this case for “service + city”) but offer no real value to the user. Their only purpose is to drive users to another part of the site. If you’re going to include location pages on your site, make sure they include everything a user needs to know.

How Does Duplicate Content Impact Your Local SEO?

example of duplicate content on multiple locations pages

For a long time, it was easy to produce content for your location or service area pages. You created a template page, with the same word-for-word content, and then simply popped the correct city onto each page.

The trouble with this practice is that when search engines encounter multiple locations pages with identical content, they have trouble telling them apart. This can cause several problems for your SEO efforts.

It Can Hurt Your Rankings

A search engine’s goal is to present searchers with results that have helpful information. Not pages that simply rehash content already found elsewhere, including content within your website.

This is why they have search ranking systems designed to prioritize original content when ranking results. So, if you have multiple pages that look similar, Google will try to identify which page is the original.

But if it can’t identify the original, your rankings could suffer and the page might not rank at all. And if your content does rank, the version that gets chosen might not be the version that you want to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It Can Distribute Backlinks Unequally

TWR Blog DupeContent 02 min Is Duplicate Content on Multiple Locations Pages Really Bad?

Backlinks are crucial for local SEO, but if duplicate content exists across multiple pages, the link value weakens. This reduces the overall impact of your backlinks.

Each backlink is like an endorsement from another website, which tells Google that your content is probably accurate and helpful.

For example, you have two identical pages with similar URLs. Instead of having all your backlinks go to one page, they’re split between the two. So instead of having one page strengthened with all the backlinks, you get two weaker pages with fewer links.

This distribution could lead to lower rankings since neither page gains as much authority as a single page would.

It Can Hurt Your Site’s Crawlability

Search engines need to crawl and index your content for it to show up in search results. Duplicate pages waste your crawl budget, which is the amount of time and resources search engine crawlers devote to crawling your site before moving on.

If you have too much duplicate content, crawlers can end up reviewing multiple versions of the same content. This reduces the number of pages that can get crawled. The fewer pages that get crawled the more this can impact your site’s visibility in search results.

It Can Hurt Your Credibility

Having unique content on your site shows that you are an expert in your field and helps you gain your audience’s trust. Duplicate content doesn’t let you stand out from your competition and can cause people to turn away.

And that’s if they can find your site in the rankings.

By showing content targeted to your audience, you can improve your user experience and show why someone would look to your site as the authority on a specific topic.

How to Find Duplicate Content

Now that we’ve covered what duplicate copy is and why it hurts you, the next step is to check your location pages and site for it.

Finding Duplicate Content

Not sure if you have duplicate content? There are several ways to find out.

The first way is to do a search using “site:yoursite intitle:keyword.” This will find all the pages on your site that have the keyword in the title.

Several online tools can audit your site and find any duplicate content:

This isn’t a complete list but will give you a starting point to do your research and see which tool will work best for you.

How You Can Individualize Locations Pages

example of avoiding duplicate content on multiple locations pages

There are several practices that you can incorporate to avoid duplicate content on multiple locations pages. If you can use them all, great! But even incorporating just a few will help you avoid the issue of duplicate content and the confusion it causes for search engines and users alike.

Write Truly Unique Content

This one is non-negotiable. You must take the time to present the key information about each location so that it doesn’t mirror another page. You need to go beyond the quick fix of simply swapping out the city name

Add Photo or Videos

Showcase photos or videos specific to each location or service area you work from. Remember to add appropriate alt text for each image to individualize the page for an exact location.

Include Staff Bios

Whether your staff includes teachers, accountants, electricians, or chefs, including staff pictures and bios is an easy way to add unique content to your locations pages.

Share Customer Review or Case Studies

Another easy way to get over the hump of duplicate content on multiple locations pages is to include customer reviews or testimonials that are submitted for each of your business’ locations. Also, consider creating case studies to spotlight the great results you’ve produced for clients in those areas.

Provide Directions and a Local Map

Driving directions and maps are fantastic ways to localize your individual locations pages and provide key information to your customers. Do your locations pages suffer from “cut and paste” duplicate content? It may be a huge time investment, but individualizing your pages can only help your search result rankings.

Realizing Your Pages Have Duplicate Content?

Do your location pages suffer from “cut and paste” duplicate content? It can be a huge time investment to fix them, but individualizing your pages can only help your search result rankings.

Do you need to update your location pages to avoid duplicate content in your local SEO? Fix the problem by contacting our expert team.