Search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and digital banner advertising are among the most popular forms of ecommerce marketing, but they may not be the ...
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Sunday 31 July 2016
Friday 29 July 2016
Google Adds Social Media Icons & Links to Local Knowledge Panel
If you are a local business, you will want to check your local knowledge panel – Google is now displaying social media icons and links in their local knowledge panel. These are similar to the ones Google shows in the knowledge panel for big brands. Joy Hawkins, via Ryan Scollon, posted a screenshot this morning […]
The post Google Adds Social Media Icons & Links to Local Knowledge Panel appeared first on The SEM Post.
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Should SEOs and Marketers Continue to Track and Report on Keyword Rankings? - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Is the practice of tracking keywords truly dying? There's been a great deal of industry discussion around the topic of late, and some key points have been made. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand speaks to the biggest challenges keyword rank tracking faces today and how to solve for them.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about keyword ranking reports. There have been a few articles that have come out recently on a number of big industry sites around whether SEOs should still be tracking their keyword rankings.
I want to be clear: Moz has a little bit of a vested interest here. And so the question is: Can you actually trust me, who obviously I'm a big shareholder in Moz and I'm the founder, and so I care a lot about how Moz does as a software business. We help people track rankings. Does that mean I'm biased? I'm going to do my best not to be. So rather than saying you absolutely should track rankings, I'm instead going to address what most of these articles have brought up as the problems of rank tracking and then talk about some solutions by which you can do this.
My suspicion is you should probably be rank tracking. I think that if you turn it off and you don't do it, it's very hard to get a lot of the value that we need as SEOs, a lot of the intelligence. It's true there are challenges with keyword ranking reports, but not true enough to avoid doing it entirely. We still get too much value from them.
The case against — and solutions for — keyword ranking data
A. People, places, and things
So let's start with the case against keyword ranking data. First off, "keyword ranking reports are inaccurate." There's personalization, localization, and device type, and that biases and has removed what is the "one true ranking." We've done a bunch of analyses of these, and this is absolutely the case.
Personalization, turns out, doesn't change ranking that much on average. For an individual it can change rankings dramatically. If they visited your website before, they could be historically biased to you. Or if they visited your competitor's, they could be biased. Their previous search history might have biased them in a single session, those kinds of things. But with the removal of Google+ from search results, personalization is actually not as dramatically changing as it used to be. Localization, though, still huge, absolutely, and device differences, still huge.
Solution
But we can address this, and the way to do that is by tracking these things separately. So here you can see I've got a ranking report that shows me my mobile rankings versus my desktop rankings. I think this is absolutely essential. Especially if you're getting a lot of traffic from both mobile and desktop search, you need to be tracking those separately. Super smart. Of course we should do that.
We can do the same thing on the local side as well. So I can say, "Here, look. This is how I rank in Seattle. Here's how I rank in Minneapolis. Here's how I rank in the U.S. with no geographic personalization," if Google were to do that. Those types of rankings can also be pretty good.
It is true that local ranked tracking has gotten a little more challenging, but we've seen that folks like, well Moz itself, but folks like STAT (GetStat), SERPs.com, Search Metrics, they have all adjusted their rank tracking methodologies in order to have accurate local rank tracking. It's pretty good. Same with device type, pretty darn good.
B. Keyword value estimation
Another big problem that is expressed by a number of folks here is we no longer know how much traffic an individual keyword sends. Because we don't know how much an individual keyword sends, we can't really say, "What's the value of ranking for that keyword?" Therefore, why bother to even track keyword rankings?
I think this is a little bit of spurious logic. The leap there doesn't quite make sense to me. But I will say this. If you don't know which keywords are sending you traffic specifically, you still know which pages are receiving search traffic. That is reported. You can get it in your Google Analytics, your Omniture report, whatever you're using, and then you can tie that back to keyword ranking reports showing which pages are receiving traffic from which keywords.
Most all of the ranked tracking platforms, Moz included, has a report that shows you something like this. It says, "Here are the keywords that we believe are likely to have sent these percentages of traffic to this page based on the keywords that you're tracking, based on the pages that are ranking for them, and how much search traffic those pages receive."
Solution
So let's track that. We can look at pages receiving visits from search, and we can look at which keywords they rank for. Then we can tie those together, which gives us the ability to then make not only a report like this, but a report that estimates the value contributed by content and by pages rather than by individual keywords.
In a lot of ways, this is almost superior to our previous methodology of tracking by keyword. Keyword can still be estimated through AdWords, through paid search, but this can be estimated on a content basis, which means you get credit for how much value the page has created, based on all the search traffic that's flowed to it, and where that's at in your attribution lifecycle of people visiting those pages.
C. Tracking rankings and keyword relevancy
Pages often rank for keywords that they aren't specifically targeting, because Google has gotten way better with user intent. So it can be hard or even impossible to track those rankings, because we don't know what to look for.
Well, okay, I hear you. That is a challenge. This means basically what we have to do is broaden the set of keywords that we look at and deal with the fact that we're going to have to do sampling. We can't track every possible keyword, unless you have a crazy budget, in which case go talk to Rob Bucci up at STAT, and he will set you up with a huge campaign to track all your millions of keywords.
Solution
If you have a smaller budget, what you have to do is sample, and you sample by sets of keywords. Like these are my high conversion keywords — I'm going to assume I have a flower delivery business — so flower delivery and floral gifts and flower arrangements for offices. My long tail keywords, like artisan rose varieties and floral alternatives for special occasions, and my branded keywords, like Rand's Flowers or Flowers by Rand.
I can create a bunch of different buckets like this, sample the keywords that are in them, and then I can track each of these separately. Now I can see, ah, these are sets of keywords where I've generally been moving up and receiving more traffic. These are sets of keywords where I've generally been moving down. These are sets of keywords that perform better or worse on mobile or desktop, or better or worse in these geographic areas. Right now I can really start to get true intelligence from there.
Don't let your keyword targeting — your keyword targeting meaning what keywords you're targeting on which pages — determine what you rank track. Don't let it do that exclusively. Sure, go ahead and take that list and put that in there, but then also do some more expansive keyword research to find those broad sets of search terms and phrases that you should be monitoring. Now we can really solve this issue.
D. Keyword rank tracking with a purpose
This one I think is a pretty insidious problem. But for many organizations ranking reports are more of a historical artifact. We're not tracking them for a particular reason. We're tracking them because that's what we've always tracked and/or because we think we're supposed to track them. Those are terrible reasons to track things. You should be looking for reasons of real value and actionability. Let's give some examples here.
Solution
What I want you to do is identify the goals of rank tracking first, like: What do I want to solve? What would I do differently based on whether this data came back to me in one way or another?
If you don't have a great answer to that question, definitely don't bother tracking that thing. That should be the rule of all analytics.
So if your goal is to say, "Hey, I want to be able to attribute a search traffic gain or a search traffic loss to what I've done on my site or what Google has changed out there," that is crucially important. I think that's core to SEO. If you don't have that, I'm not sure how we can possibly do our jobs.
We attribute search traffic gains and losses by tracking broadly, a broad enough set of keywords, hopefully in enough buckets, to be able to get a good sample set; by tracking the pages that receive that traffic so we can see if a page goes way down in its search visits. We can look at, "Oh, what was that page ranking for? Oh, it was ranking for these keywords. Oh, they dropped." Or, "No, they didn't drop. But you know what? We looked in Google Trends, and the traffic demand for those keywords dropped," and so we know that this is a seasonality thing, or a fluctuation in demand, or those types of things.
And we can track by geography and device, so that we can say, "Hey, we lost a bunch of traffic. Oh, we're no longer mobile-friendly." That is a problem. Or, "Hey, we're tracking and, hey, we're no longer ranking in this geography. Oh, that's because these two competitors came in and they took over that market from us."
We could look at would be something like identify pages that are in need of work, but they only require a small amount of work to have a big change in traffic. So we could do things like track pages that rank on page two for given keywords. If we have a bunch of those, we can say, "Hey, maybe just a few on-page tweaks, a few links to these pages, and we could move up substantially." We had a Whiteboard Friday where we talked about how you could do that with internal linking previously and have seen some remarkable results there.
We can track keywords that rank in position four to seven on average. Those are your big wins, because if you can move up from position four, five, six, seven to one, two, three, you can double or triple your search traffic that you're receiving from keywords like that.
You should also track long tail, untargeted keywords. If you've got a long tail bucket, like we've got up here, I can then say, "Aha, I don't have a page that's even targeting any of these keywords. I should make one. I could probably rank very easily because I have an authoritative website and some good content," and that's really all you might need.
We might look at some up-and-coming competitors. I want to track who's in my space, who might be creeping up there. So I should track the most common domains that rank on page one or two across my keyword sets.
I can track specific competitors. I might say, "Hey, Joel's Flower Delivery Service looks like it's doing really well. I'm going to set them up as a competitor, and I'm going to track their rankings specifically, or I'm going to see..." You could use something like SEMrush and see specifically: What are all the keywords they rank for that you don't rank for?
This type of data, in my view, is still tremendously important to SEO, no matter what platform you're using. But if you're having these problems or if these problems are being expressed to you, now you have some solutions.
I look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Thursday 28 July 2016
Removing Links from Disavow to Recover Google Rankings
Doing disavows and link removals is always an interesting thing. And too often, sites are too aggressive in removing good quality links, which means that not only are sites losing rankings from the spam links artificially boosting the ranks, but they are also losing rankings due to the great quality links being caught in the […]
The post Removing Links from Disavow to Recover Google Rankings appeared first on The SEM Post.
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Five ways to use local SEO even when you don’t have a physical premise
How can a business stand out in local SEO with no physical premise? Is it even possible?
Local search is very competitive and it becomes even more of a challenge to compete with other businesses when yours has no physical premise.
Sam Nemzer from Distilled shared with us some useful tips at MozTalk on how to use local SEO for a business with no local pack.
Here are the five tactics that Sam Nemzer suggests:
1) Put user-focused content on category pages
A category page should focus on content and the more you add, the better for the SERPs. In order to add content, you can:
- Pull in third party data to immediately gain access to useful and relevant content (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Ticketmaster, TripAdvisor, etc)
- Use proprietary data that may be helpful for your business (this also makes it easier to obtain featured snippets)
- Find questions to answer. Sam Nemzer suggested the tool “Answer the Public”, a free visual keyword research that allows you to find the right questions for the specific keywords you want to use.
By the time you’ve found the answers from the particular keywords, it’s time to answer different questions on your own:
“How can you use this content on your site?”
“Is this still relevant to your business?”
“Have I relied too much on auto-generated content?
Remember, Google is not keen on pages that focus on automatically generated content, so make sure you don’t overuse it.
2) Get the level of granularity right
It’s important to start by researching your analytics data, to understand what gets traffic and how you can increase the content on your site.
Have a closer look at the keywords and see what people search in your industry.
Not every site needs the same details and the example below shows how property listings differentiate from job sites.
Finally, it may be useful to analyse your keyword data and ask yourself: “Do you need location pages at all?”
How can your business benefit from them? By the time you’re able to answer this question, you’re ready to continue to more practical tips.
3) Sidestep local packs by targeting high in the funnel
In order to avoid the high competition, it may be useful to avoid focusing on the most popular local packs and find the right content gaps to exploit.
How about aiming for different targeting where there’s less competition and more opportunities to stand out?
Retargeting may be useful to reduce CPC, but this also means that the conversion may not be immediate, although this also means that you can build recognition and serve as a knowledge provider in your industry.
4) Use structured data to stand out
Structured data refers to the type of data that provides information through a database and structured data markup may associate a description with its property.
Whether it’s a recipe, an article, a video, or an event, markup helps search engines crawl the content to display it appropriately to the users.
5) Make the most of Intelligent Personal Assistants
If local packs don’t seem to be effective for your business, there’s the option of having people come straight to your app and personal assistants can be really useful in this case.
Siri, Cortana and Google Now are changing the way people search through their mobile devices and this may be the right time to focus on this field in order to beat the competition in the most relevant context.
For example, Google Now allows any app to be integrated and Apple also announced that it will follow this direction, which brings an exciting opportunity for a business looking to be displayed in the right search results.
Key tips
Sam Nemzer sums up his talk with the following useful tips:
- Find API data to pull into category pages
- Find out how people are searching by location
- Find content gaps to exploit
- Add structured data
- Integrate your app (or start the process of building one)
This was a useful reminder on how local SEO can help any business and most importantly, how a business can go beyond local SEO and think outside the box in order to reach the right audience.
Keep these tips handy next time you’re ready to analyse your audiences and seek for the best ways to reach higher on the SERPs to promote your business.
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Case Study: How We Created Controversial Content That Earned Hundreds of Links
Posted by KelseyLibert
Content marketers, does the following scenario sound familiar?
You’re tasked with creating content that attracts publicity, links, and social shares. You come up with great ideas for content that you’re confident could accomplish these goals. However, any ideas that push the envelope or might offend anyone in the slightest get shot down by your boss or client. Even if a provocative idea gets approved, after feedback from higher-ups and several rounds of editing, you end up with a boring, watered-down version of what you originally envisioned.
Given the above, you're not surprised when you achieve lackluster results. Repeat this cycle enough times, and it may lead to the false assumption that content marketing doesn’t work for the brand.
In this post, I’ll answer two questions:
- How can I get my boss or clients to sign off on envelope-pushing content that will attract the attention needed to achieve great results?
- How can we minimize the risk of backlash?
Why controversy is so powerful for content marketing
To get big results, content needs to get people talking. Often times, the best way to do this is by creating an emotional reaction in the audience. Content that deals with a controversial or polarizing topic can be a surefire way to accomplish this.
On the other hand, when you play it too safe with your content, it becomes extremely difficult to ignite the emotional response needed to drive social sharing. Ultimately, you don't attract the attention needed to earn high-quality links.
Below is a peek at the promotions report from a recent controversial campaign that resulted in a lot of high-quality links, among other benefits.
Overcoming a client’s aversion to controversy
We understand and respect a client’s fierce dedication to protecting their brand. The thought of attaching their company to anything controversial can set off worst-case-scenario visions of an angry Internet mob and bad press (which isn’t always a terrible thing).
One such example of balancing a sensitive topic while minimizing the potential risk is a recent campaign we created for apartment listing site Abodo. Our idea was to use Twitter data to pinpoint which states and cities had the highest concentration of prejudiced and tolerant tweets. Bigotry in America is an extremely sensitive topic, yet our client was open to the idea.
Want to get a contentious idea approved by your boss or client? Here’s how we did it.
1. Your idea needs to be relevant to the brand, either directly or tangentially.
Controversy for the sake of controversy is not going to provide value to the brand or the target audience.
I asked Michael Taus, VP of Growth and Business Development at Abodo, why our campaign idea got the green light. He said Abodo’s mission is to help people find a home, not to influence political discourse. But they also believe that when you're moving to a new community, there's more to the decision than what your house or apartment looks like, including understanding the social and cultural tone of the location.
So while the campaign dealt with a hot topic, ultimately this information would be valuable to Abodo’s users.
2. Prove that playing it safe isn’t working.
If your “safe” content is struggling to get attention, make the case for taking a risk. Previous campaign topics for our client had been too conservative. We knew by creating something worth talking about, we’d see greater results.
3. Put safeguards in place for minimizing risk to the brand.
While we couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be a negative response once the campaign launched, we could guarantee that we’d do everything in our power to minimize any potential backlash. We were confident in our ability to protect our client because we’d done it so many times with other campaigns. I’ll walk you through how to do this throughout the rest of the post.
On the client’s end, they can get approval from other internal departments; for example, having the legal and PR teams review and give final approval can help mitigate the uncertainty around running a controversial campaign.
Did taking a risk pay off?
The campaign was a big success, with results including:
- More than 620 placements (240 dofollow links and 280 co-citation links)
- Features on high-authority sites including CNET, Slate, Business Insider, AOL, Yahoo, Mic, The Daily Beast, and Adweek
- More than 67,000 social shares
- A whole lot of discussion
Beyond these metrics, Abodo has seen additional benefits such as partnership opportunities. Since this campaign launched, they were approached by a nonprofit organization to collaborate on a similar type of piece. They hope to repeat their success by leveraging the nonprofit’s substantial audience and PR capabilities.
Essential tips for minimizing risk around contentious content
We find that good journalism practices can greatly reduce the risk of a negative response. Keep the following five things in mind when creating attention-grabbing content.
1. Presenting data vs. taking a stance: Let the data speak
Rather than presenting an opinion, just present the facts. Our clients are usually fine with controversial topics as long as we don't take a stance on them and instead allow the data we’ve collected to tell the story for us. Facts are facts, and that's all your content needs to offer.
If publishers want to put their own spin on the facts you present or audiences see the story the data are telling and want to respond, the conversation can be opened up and generate a lot of engagement.
For the Abodo campaign, the data we presented weren’t a direct reflection of our client but rather came from an outside source (Twitter). We packaged the campaign on a landing page on the client’s site, which includes the design assets and an objective summary of the data.
The publishers then chose how to cover the data we provided, and the discussion took off from there. For example, Slate called out Louisiana’s unfortunate achievement of having the most derogatory tweets.
2. Present more than one side of the story
How do you feel when you watch a news report or documentary that only shares one side of the story? It takes away credibility from the reporting, doesn’t it?
To keep the campaign topic from being too negative and one-sided, we looked at the most prejudiced and least prejudiced tweets. Including states and cities with the least derogatory tweets added a positive angle to the story. This made the data more objective, which improved the campaign’s credibility.
Regional publishers showed off that their state had the nicest tweets.
And residents of these places were proud to share the news.
Pleased WI was one of the top-10 least nasty places for pejorative tweets! Stay away from Louisiana. https://t.co/ijoAMsmKao
— Sam Million-Weaver (@millionweaver) March 9, 2016
If your campaign topic is negative, try to show the positive side of it too. This keeps the content from being a total downer, which is important for social sharing since people usually want to pass along content that will make others feel good. Our recent study on the emotions behind viral content found that even when viral content evokes negative emotions, it’s usually not purely negative; the content also makes the audience feel a positive emotion or surprise.
Aside from objective reporting, a huge benefit to telling more than one side of the story is that you’re able to pitch the story for multiple angles, thus maximizing your potential coverage. Because of this, we ended up creating 18 visual assets for this campaign, which is far more than we typically do.
3. Don’t go in with an agenda
Be careful of twisting the data to fit your agenda. It's okay to have a thesis when you start, but if your aim is to tell a certain story you’re apt to stick with that storyline regardless of what the data show. If your information is clearly slanted to show the story you want to tell, the audience will catch on, and you'll get called out.
Instead of gathering research with an intent of "I'm setting out to prove XYZ," adopt a mindset of "I wonder what the reality is."
4. Be transparent about your methodology
You don’t want the validity of your data to become a point of contention among publishers and readers. This goes for any data-heavy campaign but especially for controversial data.
To combat any doubts around where the information came from or how the data were collected and analyzed, we publish a detailed methodology alongside all of our campaigns. For the Abodo campaign, we created a PDF document of the research methodology which we could easily share with publishers.
- Where and when you received your data.
- What kind and how much data you collected. (Our methodology went on to list exactly which terms we searched for on Twitter.)
- Any exceptions within your collection and analysis, such as omitted information.
- A list of additional sources. (We only use reputable, new sources ideally published within the last year.)
For even more transparency, make your raw data available. This gives publishers a chance to comb through the data to find additional story angles.
5. Don’t feed the trolls
This is true for any content campaign, but it’s especially important to have an error-free campaign when dealing with a sensitive topic since it may be under more scrutiny. Don’t let mistakes in the content become the real controversy.
Build multiple phases of editing into your production process to ensure you’re not releasing inaccurate or low-quality content. Keep these processes consistent by creating a set of editorial guidelines that everyone involved can follow.
We put our campaigns through fact checking and several rounds of quality assurance.
Fact checking should play a complementary role to research and involves verifying accuracy by making sure all data and assertions are true. Every point in the content should have a source that can be verified. Writers should be familiar with best practices for making their work easy to fact-check; this fact-checking guide from Poynter is a good resource.
Quality assurance looks at both the textual and design elements of a campaign to ensure a good user experience. Our QA team reviews things like grammar, clarity (Is this text clearly making a point? Is a design element confusing or hard to read?), and layout/organization.
Include other share-worthy elements
Although the controversial subject matter helped this campaign gain attention, we also incorporated other proven elements of highly shareable content:
- Geographic angle. People wanted to see how their state or city ranked. Many took to social media to express their disappointment or pride in the results.
- Timeliness. Bigotry is a hot-button issue in the U.S. right now amidst racial tension and a heated political situation.
- Comparison. Rankings and comparisons stimulate discussion, especially when people have strong opinions about the rankings.
- Surprising. The results were somewhat shocking since some cities and states which ranked “most PC” or “most prejudiced” were unexpected.
The more share-worthy elements you can tack onto your content, the greater your chances for success.
Have you seen success with controversial or polarizing content? Did you overcome a client’s objection to controversy? Be sure to share your experience in the comments.
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Wednesday 27 July 2016
Using Nofollow on Navigation for Crawl Budget Reasons
Sometimes SEOs use nofollow for crawl budget reasons, particularly for sites that are very large in size or that have a structure that doesn’t tend to be crawled as optimally as it could be. So SEOs use nofollow to prevent Google from following certain links during the regular crawl, in order to direct Googlebot to […]
The post Using Nofollow on Navigation for Crawl Budget Reasons appeared first on The SEM Post.
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Are you paying enough attention to reviews in your local SEO?
Sponsored content in collaboration with ReviewJump. Views expressed in this article are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect SEW’s opinions.
Customer reviews are an important contributing factor to local search rankings. But Brodie Tyler, founder of ReviewJump, believes that they aren’t given enough emphasis – by businesses or the SEO community.
The business of reputation management has changed drastically with the advent of the internet.
The BrightLocal Local Customer Review Survey 2015 found that 92% of customers will read online reviews to determine whether a local business is a good one, and that 80% of customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
“Pre-internet, you used to ask around, ask your friends and family for recommendations, and that was basically your reputation. Now, with the internet, everything’s public. You can’t hide anything. Customers can leave you a review without your control,” says Tyler.
“So yes, things have changed drastically over the years, and that’s why you have to invest in it and pay more attention to it. Whether you like it or not, you have an online reputation. It’s just a matter of whether or not you’re going to do something about it.”
A direct correlation with ranking
Tyler founded ReviewJump, a web app that makes it easy for businesses to solicit customer reviews and to deal with negative feedback before it reaches the review stage, because he saw a niche in the market for businesses to directly control their online reputation.
“I come from the agency world, and ReviewJump was born out of my frustration at not being able to control the number of reviews our clients were obtaining,” he says. “I could control just about everything else – their link building, their on-site optimization; we can even control their content marketing. One thing I didn’t have was the right tool for helping our clients get more reviews.”
“Reviews have a direct correlation on where you rank in the local search results,” adds Tyler. “I know that because I did the research myself, personally.”
Tyler individually analyzed 22,000 local business listings on Google and Yelp in order to prove his own theory about the impact of reviews on local SEO rankings. “This was prior to launching ReviewJump, and I was in search of validation for reinvesting in our reputation management software; that’s why I was doing this research.”
He found that the top three local search results on Google, also known as the ‘three-pack’ of local search, have an average of 472% more reviews than those in the fourth, fifth and sixth positions.
The research showed that 66% of the time, the first three local search results had more reviews than the second three. And 63% of the time, the local listing with the most reviews overall would be ranked in the top three results.
The importance of online reputation
In spite of the persuasive SEO argument in favor of reviews, Tyler believes online reputation management isn’t valued as much as it should be.
“In my experience, a very small percentage [of companies] are actually doing anything about it,” he said. “Which I think can offer them a competitive advantage. If only a small percentage are paying attention to their reviews and online reputation, including yourself, that can give you an advantage.”
In its local search ranking factors for 2015, Moz ranked review signals – which encompasses review quantity, velocity and diversity – seventh out of a total of eight overall ranking factors, crediting it with an 8.4% influence on local search ranking. But Tyler believes this undervalues the importance of reviews to local SEO.
“I think that’s not accurate; I think that’s too low. I’ve done the research on that,” he says. “Maybe there needs to be more research into reviews as an overall ranking factor, or maybe it hasn’t been publicized enough.”
ReviewJump have seen the benefits of an increased number of reviews for their own clients. “There’s a medical spa in Arizona, Vitality Med Spa. They’ve been in business for years, but they only had a dozen or so reviews before they started with us. And in the last three weeks alone, they’ve gotten 33 new reviews in one location.
“That’s an increase of about 400%, all of them either four or five stars.” And, crucially, the spa is also ranking at number one in the three-pack of local search results.
Another client, a chain of boutique hotels, has enjoyed an increase of 335% more reviews each month since starting with ReviewJump. And one of the company’s earliest clients, Modern Dental, was ranked tenth in the local SERPs shortly after it came on board with ReviewJump, but is now showing up in the three-pack.
If Tyler could give one tip to companies looking to improve their online reputation management, it would be to understand that their reputation truly does affect their revenue. “You’re in business to make money. And I believe that people are missing out by not giving their online reputation the credence it deserves.
“The more reviews you have, the higher you’re going to rank, the more traffic you’re going to get, the more phone calls you’re going to get, the more customers you’re going to sell to.”
Sponsored content in collaboration with ReviewJump. Views expressed in this article are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect SEW’s opinions.
For more information on ReviewJump and to take a tour of the software, visit the ReviewJump website.
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Tuesday 26 July 2016
Affiliate Marketing: Advanced Commission Structures One of the first questions retailers ask when launching an affiliate marketing channel is “what should my commission structure be?” My advice is to research ... http://ift.tt/eA8V8J
One of the first questions retailers ask when launching an affiliate marketing channel is “what should my commission structure be?” My advice is to research ...
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17 useful search marketing stats from Merkle’s Q2 2016 report
This morning, Merkle released their quarterly Direct Marketing Report, ahead of Google’s own Q2 earnings announcement and it makes for a bumper stat-filled reading.
Of particular note are the revelations that:
- Google search spending growth has slowed to 22% as CPCs fall 9%
- Desktop PLA growth rate jumps while mobile growth is strong but slowing
- Shopping Ads traffic from Google image search and Yahoo surges
- Google’s expanded text ads have had only a modest impact
The report covers the latest trends in paid search, organic search, social media, display advertising, and comparison shopping engines, so let’s cherry-pick some of the highlights…
Paid Search
- Advertiser spending on Google paid search grew 22% Y/Y in Q2 2016, a slight deceleration from 25% growth in Q1.
- Click growth increased slightly to 34%, but CPCs fell 9%.
- Spending growth for Google text ads slowed to 10% Y/Y as CPC growth for brand keywords fell from 10% in Q1 to 0% in Q2.
- Google Shopping Ad spending growth rose to 43% as an influx of partner traffic bolstered total click volume.
- Combined spending on Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini search ads fell 17% Y/Y as click declines continued to worsen.
- Bing Product Ad spending fell for the first time since the format’s launch, likely the result of Yahoo moving to show more Google PLAs.
- Phones and tablets produced 53% of all paid search clicks in Q2, the same rate as a quarter earlier, but up 12 points from a year earlier. Google’s share of clicks from mobile increased slightly to just over 57%
Organic Search & Social
- Organic search visits fell 7% Y/Y in Q2, down from 11% Y/Y growth a year earlier, as organic listings face increased competition from paid search ads, particularly on mobile.
- Mobile’s share of organic search visits rose to 46%, but that still lags behind the 53% of paid search clicks that mobile produces, as well as the 47% share that mobile produced for organic search a year ago.
- Google produced 86% of all organic search visits in the US and 90% of mobile organic search visits.
- Google’s share of mobile organic search has increased by nearly two points in the past year.
- Social media sites accounted for 2.8% of site visits in Q2 2016, with Facebook producing 63% of all site visits driven by social media.
Comparison Shopping Engines
- The eBay Commerce Network commanded a majority of advertisers’ comparison shopping engine (CSE) spending for the first time in Q2. Along with Connexity, the two dominant CSE platforms accounted for 97% of all CSE ad spending.
- Advertiser revenue produced by eBay Commerce Network and Connexity listings grew by 33% and 23% Y/Y respectively; however, the two platforms combined for less than 10% of the revenue produced by Google Shopping Ads, among advertisers participating in all three platforms.
Display Advertising
- Total display advertising spending grew 62% Y/Y, driven by very strong results from Facebook, where Merkle advertisers increased their investment by 121% Y/Y.
- Retargeting accounted for 62% of all display spending in Q2.
- The Google Display Network (GDN) also delivered spending growth, with advertisers seeing its share of total Google ad spending increase to 12%.
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Expanded Text Ads Now Available in Google AdWords
Google AdWords has launched expanded text ads for advertisers. These expanded ads are mobile optimized for better performance with additional room for descriptions and the all important headline. Google is also discontinuing the use of the regular text ad format later this year. The new format adds about 50% more ad text with two headlines […]
The post Expanded Text Ads Now Available in Google AdWords appeared first on The SEM Post.
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Google AdWords Launches Device Bid Adjustments
Google AdWords announced earlier this year at the AdWords Summit that they would be launching device bid adjustments, giving advertisers more flexibility with how they bid on mobile versus desktop versus tablet. As we reimagine how ads look in a mobile-first world, it’s also important to have more flexible tools that help you optimize device-level […]
The post Google AdWords Launches Device Bid Adjustments appeared first on The SEM Post.
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No PageRank Loss for 30x Redirects, Including 301 & 302 Redirects
There has been a lot of debate on the issue of 301 versus 302 redirects over the years, specifically regarding the loss of PageRank. Gary Illyes from Google has confirmed now that when you are using a 30x redirect – such as a 301 (permanent), 302 (temporary) or 307 (temporary) redirect – that the destination […]
The post No PageRank Loss for 30x Redirects, Including 301 & 302 Redirects appeared first on The SEM Post.
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Ranking #0: SEO for Answers
Posted by Dr-Pete
It's been over two years since Google launched Featured Snippets, and yet many search marketers still see them as little more than a novelty. If you're not convinced by now that Featured Snippets offer a significant organic opportunity, then today is my attempt to change your mind.
If you somehow haven't encountered a Featured Snippet searching Google over the past two years, here's an example (from a search for "ssl"):
This is a promoted organic result, appearing above the traditional #1 ranking position. At minimum, Featured Snippets contain an extracted answer (more on that later), a display title, and a URL. They may also have an image, bulleted lists, and simple tables.
Why should you care?
We're all busy, and Google has made so many changes in the past couple of years that it can be hard to sort out what's really important to your customer or employer. I get it, and I'm not judging you. So, let's get the hard question out of the way: Why are Featured Snippets important?
(1) They occupy the "#0" position
Here's the top portion of a SERP for "hdmi cable," a commercial query:
There are a couple of interesting things going on here. First, Featured Snippets always (for now) come before traditional organic results. This is why I have taken to calling them the "#0" ranking position. What beats #1? You can see where I'm going with this... #0. In this case, the first organic is pushed down even more, below a set of Related Questions (the "People also ask" box). So, the "#1" organic position is really third in this example.
In addition, notice that the "#0" (that's the last time I'll put it in quotes) position is the same URL as the #1 organic position. So, Amazon is getting two listings on this result for a single page. The Featured Snippet doesn't always come from the #1 organic result (we'll get to that in a minute), but if you score #0, you are always listed twice on page one of results.
(2) They're surprisingly prevalent
In our 10,000-keyword tracking data set, Featured Snippets rolled out at approximately 2% of the queries we track. As of mid-July, they appear on roughly 11% of the keywords we monitor. We don't have good historical data from the first few months after roll-out, but here's a 12-month graph (July 2015 – July 2016):
Featured Snippets have more than doubled in prevalence in the past year, and they've increased by a factor of roughly 5X since launch. After two years, it's clear that this is no longer a short-term or small-scale test. Google considers this experiment to be a success.
(3) They often boost CTR
When Featured Snippets launched, SEOs were naturally concerned that, by extracting and displaying answers, click-through rates to the source site would suffer. While extracting answers from sites was certainly uncharted territory for Google, and we can debate their use of our content in this form, there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that Featured Snippets not only haven't harmed CTR, but they actually boost it in some cases.
In August of 2015, Search Engine Land published a case study by Glenn Gabe that tracked the loss of a Featured Snippet for a client on a competitive keyword. In the two-week period following the loss, that client lost over 39K clicks. In February of 2016, HubSpot did a larger study of high-volume keywords showing that ranking #0 produced a 114% CTR boost, even when they already held the #1 organic position. While these results are anecdotal and may not apply to everyone, evidence continues to suggest that Featured Snippets can boost organic search traffic in many cases.
Where do they come from?
Featured Snippets were born out of a problem that dates back to the early days of search. Pre-Google, many search players, including Yahoo, were human-curated directories first. As content creation exploded, humans could no longer keep up, especially in anything close to real-time, and search engines turned to algorithmic approaches and machine curation.
When Google launched the Knowledge Graph, it was based entirely on human-curated data, such as Freebase and Wikidata. You can see this data in traditional "Knowledge Cards," sometimes generically called "answer boxes." For example, this card appears on a search for "Who is the CEO of Tesla?":
The answer is short and factual, and there is no corresponding source link for it. This comes directly from the curated Knowledge Graph. If you run a search for "Tesla," you can see this more easily in the Knowledge Panel on that page:
In the middle, you can see an entry for "CEO: Elon Musk." This isn't just a block of display text — each of these line items are factoids that exist individually as structured data in the Knowledge Graph. You can test this by running searches against other factoids, like "When was Tesla founded?"
While Google does a decent job of matching many forms of a question to answers in the Knowledge Graph, they can't escape the limits of human curation. There are also questions that don't easily fit the "factoid" model. For example, if you search "What is ludicrous mode Tesla?" (pardon the weird syntax), you get this Featured Snippet:
Google's solution was obvious, if incredibly difficult — take the trillions of pages in their index and use them to generate answers in real-time. So, that's exactly what they did. If you go to the source page on Engadget, the text in the Featured Snippet is taken directly from on-page copy (I've added the green highlighting):
It's not as simple as just scraping off the first paragraph with a spatula and flipping it onto the SERP, though. Google does seem to be parsing content fairly deeply for relevance, and they've been improving their capabilities constantly since the launch of Featured Snippets. Consider a couple of other examples with slightly different formats. Here's a Featured Snippet for "How much is a Tesla?":
Note the tabular data. This data is being extracted and reformatted from a table on the target page. This isn't structured data — it's plain-old HTML. Google has not only parsed the table but determined that tabular data is a sensible format in response to the question. Here's the original table:
Here's one of my favorite examples, from a search for "how to cook bacon." For any aspiring bacon wizards, please pay careful attention to step #4:
Note the bulleted (ordered) list. As with the table, not only has Google determined that a list is a relevant format for the answer, but they've created this list. Now look at the target page:
There's no HTML ordered list (<ol></ol>) on this page. Google is taking a list-like paragraph style and converting it into a simpler list. This content is also fairly deep into a long page of text. Again, there is no structured data in play. Google is using any and all content available in the quest for answers.
How do you get one?
So, let's get to the tactical question — how can you score a Featured Snippet? You need to know two things. First, you have to rank organically on the first page of results. Every Featured Snippet we've tracked also ranks on page one. Second, you need to have content that effectively targets the question.
Do you have to rank #1 to get the #0 position? No. Ranking #1 certainly doesn't hurt, but we've found examples of Featured Snippet URLs from across all of page one. As of June, the graph below represents the distribution of organic rankings for all of the Featured Snippets in our tracking data set:
Just about 1/3 of Featured Snippets are pulled from the #1 position, with the bulk of the remaining coming from positions #2–#5. There are opportunties across all of page one, in theory, but searches where you rank in the top five are going to be your best targets. The team at STAT produced an in-depth white paper on Featured Snippets across a very large data set that showed a similar pattern, with about 30% of Featured Snippet URLs ranking in the #1 organic position.
If you're not convinced yet, here's another argument for the "Why should you care?" column. Once you're ranking on page one, our data suggests that getting the Featured Snippet is more about relevance than ranking/authority. If you're ranking #2–#5 it may be easier to compete for position #0 than it is for position #1. Featured Snippets are the closest thing to an SEO shortcut you're likely to get in 2016.
The double-edged sword of Featured Snippets (for Google) is that, since the content comes from our websites, we ultimately control it. I showed in a previous post how we fixed a Featured Snippet with updated data, but let's get to what you really want to hear — can we take a Featured Snippet from a competitor?
A while back, I did a search for "What is Page Authority?" Page Authority is a metric created by us here at Moz, and so naturally we have a vested interest in who's ranking for that term. I came across the following Featured Snippet.
In very short order, our changes had the desired impact, and we took the #0 position:
What should you target?
Featured Snippets can require a slightly different and broader approach to keyword research, especially since many of us don't routinely track questions. So, what kind of questions tend to trigger Featured Snippets? It's helpful to keep in mind the 5 Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why) + How, but many of these questions will generate answers from the Knowledge Graph directly.
To keep things simple, ask yourself this: is the answer a matter of simple fact (or a "factoid")? For example, a question like "How old is Beyoncé?" or "When is Labor Day?" is going to be pulled from the Knowledge Graph. While human curation can't keep up with the pace of the web, WikiData and other sources are still impressive and cover a massive amount of territory. Typically, these questions won't produce Featured Snippets.
What and implied-what questions
A good starting point is "What...?" questions, such as our "What is Page Authority?" experiment. This is especially effective for industry terms and other specialized knowledge that can't be easily reduced to a dictionary definition.
Keep in mind that many Featured Snippets appear on implied "What..." questions. In other words, "What" never appears in the query. For example, here's a Featured Snippet for "PPC":
Google has essentially decided that this fairly ambiguous query deserves an answer to "What is PPC?" In other words, they've implied the "What." This is fairly common now for industry terms and phrases that might be unfamiliar to the average searcher, and is a good starting point for your keyword research.
Keep in mind that common words will produce a dictionary entry. For example, here's a Knowledge Card for "What is search?":
These dictionary cards are driven by human-curated data sources and are not organic, in the typical sense of the word. Google has expanded dictionary results in the past year, so you'll need to focus on less common terms and phrases.
Why and how questions
"Why... ?" questions are good fodder for Featured Snippets because they can't easily be answered with factoids. They often require some explanation, such as this snippet for "Why is the sky blue?":
Likewise, "How...?" questions often require more in-depth answers. An especially good target for Featured Snippets is "How to... ?" questions, which tend to have practical answers that can be summarized. Here's one for "How to make tacos":
One benefit of "Why," "How," and "How to" questions is that the Featured Snippet summary often just serves as a teaser to a longer answer. The summary can add credibility to your listing while still attracting clicks to in-depth content. "How... ?" may also be implied in some cases. For example, a search for "convert PDF to Word" brings up a Featured Snippet for a "How to..." page.
What content is eligible?
Once you have a question in mind, and that question/query is eligible for Featured Snippets, there's another piece of the targeting problem: which page on your site is best equipped to answer that question? Let's take, for example, the search "What is SEO?". It has the following Featured Snippet from Wikipedia:
Moz ranks on page one for that search, but it still begs two questions: (1) is the ranking page the best answer to the question (in Google's eyes), and (2) what content on the page do they see as best matching the question. Fortunately, you can use the "site:" operator along with your search term to help answer both questions. Here's a Featured Snippet for [site:moz.com "what is seo"]:
Now, we know that, within just our own site, Google is seeing The Beginner's Guide as the best match to the question, and we have an idea of how they're parsing that page for an answer. If we were willing to rewrite the page just to answer this question (and that certainly involves trade-offs), we'd have a much better sense of where to start.
What about Related Questions?
Featured Snippets have a close cousin that launched more recently, known to Google as Related Questions and sometimes called the "People Also Ask" box. If I run a search for "page authority," it returns the following set of Related Questions (nestled into the organic results):
Although Related Questions have a less dominant position in search results than Featured Snippets (they're not generally at the top), they're more prevalent, occurring on almost 17% of the searches in our tracking data set. These boxes can contain up to four related questions (currently), and each question expands to look something like this:
At this point, that expanded content should look familiar — it's being generated from the index, has an organic link, and looks almost exactly like a Featured Snippet. It also has a link to a Google search for the related question. Clicking on that search brings up the following Featured Snippet:
Interestingly, and somewhat confusingly, that Featured Snippet doesn't exactly match the snippet in the Related Questions box, even though they're answering the same question from the same page. We're not completely sure how Featured Snippets and Related Questions are connected, but they share a common philosophy and very likely a lot of common code. Being a better answer will help you rank for both.
What's the long game?
If you want to know where all of this is headed in the future, you have to ask a simple question: what's in it for Google? It's easy to jump to conspiracy theories when Google takes our content to provide direct answers, but what do they gain? They haven't monetized this box, and a strong, third-party answer draws attention and could detract from ad clicks. They're keeping you on their page for another few seconds, but that's little more than a vanity metric.
I think the answer is that this is part of a long shift toward mobile and alternative display formats. Look at the first page of a search for "what is page authority" on an Android device:
Here, the Featured Snippet dominates the page — there's just not room for much more on a mobile screen. As technology diversifies into watches and other wearables, this problem will expand. There's an even more difficult problem than screen space, though, and that's when you have no screen at all.
If you do a voice search on Android for "what is page authority," Google will read back to you the following answer:
"According to Moz, Page Authority is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engines."
This is an even more truncated answer, and voice search appends the attribution ("According to Moz..."). You can still look at your phone screen, of course, but imagine if you had asked the question in your car or on Google's new search appliance (their competitor to Amazon's Echo). In those cases, the Featured Snippet wouldn't just be the most prominent answer — it would be the only answer.
Google has to adapt to our changing world of devices, and often those devices requires succinct answers and aren't well-suited to a traditional SERP. This may not be so much about profiting from direct answers for Google as it is about survival. New devices will demands new formats.
How do you track all of this?
After years of tracking rich SERP features, watching the world of organic search evolve, and preaching that evolution to our customers and industry, I'm happy to say that our Product Team has been hard at work for months building the infrastructure and UI necessary to manage the rich and complicated world of SERP features, including Featured Snippets. Spoiler alert: expect an announcement from us very soon.
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