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How important are featured snippets and how can you get them?

Featured snippets are one of the main engines of economic growth today, with countless businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs relying upon them to get their message out to prospective clients.

Despite the fact that featured snippets are a vital part of contemporary marketing and SEO success, however, many still struggle when it comes to properly leveraging featured snippets to the greatest extent possible, with some unlucky few having no idea where to begin at all.

Just how important are featured snippets, and how can you go about getting them?

Here’s a comprehensive breakdown of featured snippets and how you can bolster your SEO.

Today’s searchers are dominated by featured snippets

If you’re familiar with just about any popular search engine, from Google to Bing, you’ve likely already encountered featured snippets many times, even if you’re unsure of what they are.

To put it simply, featured snippets are those tidbits of information and links to websites that appear the highest in search results. When customers plug a question into Google, the first link and answer that comes up is known as the “zero position.”

It’s this option that gets the most clicks and pageviews.

It’s thus naturally desirable to have featured snippets in as much search queries as possible, as it necessarily directs customers towards your page and information rather than that of your competitors.

So how do I get a featured snippet?

The easiest way for you to ensure that your business or website can cash in on featured snippets? Make your content search engine optimized. This helps the algorithms which power sites like Google direct curious web-surfers towards your content.

There are many ways to make your content SEO, though some dated methods are still in use when they’ve long-since grown out of fashion.

Focusing your content on a single word or search term, for instance, used to be a staple strategy for getting featured snippets. However, it’s no longer ideal as the way algorithms operate has changed with time.

To avoid relying on these outdated methods of getting featured snippets, you should take some time and study up on the common SEO mistakes that too many small businesses make when trying to stand out in the digital realm.

You need more than digital expertise to make your content stand out – sometimes, you just have to make sure it’s not ladled with common errors and simple mistakes that a little homework ahead of time could have prevented.

As brutal as it may sound, the next step is scouting out your competition to steal their techniques and swipe away their snippets to make them your own.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and your business needs to do whatever’s necessary in order to stand out from the crowd. Finding and stealing major snippets that drive traffic to your rival sites is thus an imperative part of success in the 21^st century economy. 

The exception being, of course, that you have zero intention of cashing in on the ongoing digital boom.

By targeting the snippets your competitors rely upon the most, you’re building your market share by swiping away their consumers and luring them to your superior products or services.

Stealing snippets from your competitors

Don’t be uncomfortable with the notion of “stealing snippets” from your competitors. First of all, you’re not actually “stealing” anything in the illegal sense.

Furthermore it’s a necessary part of success in today’s market that everyone is aware of. You should rather view this as a natural consequence of the cut-throat nature of modern marketing, where only those on the top get any page views at all.

The first thing you should do is head to a service like SEMrush and type in the URL of your competitors so that you can get a glimpse at their site analytics.

By heading into the “organic research” tab and clicking on “position,” you’ll be able to view the keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their site.

Be sure to mirror this language as closely as possible if you’re trying to mimic the success of a thriving competitor.

Other low-hanging fruit that you can focus on includes the social media posts of others in your industry. These are likely jam-packed with viral content which you can study so as to embrace the better parts of their ad campaigns.

Recovering snippets that have been stolen from you

You should also take some time to learn about how to recover snippets which have been stolen from you. After all, your competitors aren’t going to stand idly by as you swipe their customer base out from under them.

Mastering the art of tracking down and reclaiming your lost featured snippets can seriously bolster the traffic you enjoy on a monthly basis, and it can even become a sense of pride for entrepreneurs when they reclaim their lost mantle at the top of the search results in their economic niche.

Take a deep dive into the art of recovering stolen snippets and don’t be afraid to run an audit to see if your competitors have been sniping away at your customer base.

This brutal aspect of running a business should serve as a constant reminder of how fierce competition can be, which is why it’s so important to distinguish yourself from the crowd and establish your links as credible and click-worthy.

Making your featured snippets last

Many small business owners are enthused when they get their first featured snippet, as they rightfully recognize this moment as the turning point in their digital careers. Sustaining the momentum you’ve started to develop is easier said than done, however, and making your featured snippets last once you have them should be at the top of your to-do list.

By tapping into ever-spirited nature of social media, you can guarantee that your brand and links are always generating a buzz.

Making your featured snippets last isn’t always possible; sooner rather than later, someone may kick you out of your spot, or worse yet your content might just become dated and thus unable to attract viewers at all because it’s simply stale. Producing engaging content on a regular basis is thus an essential part of staying at the top of the featured snippet scoreboard, and to do that you should be mastering today’s leading social media platforms.

SEO-content and social media boards go together hand in hand, so you need to integrate your strategies for the two if you want your digital brand to endure. Content promotion and link-building aren’t easy and investing in advertisements and SEO-content that helps you bolster the potential of securing a featured snipped doesn’t always come cheap. Getting a featured snippet to prominently display your brand or services online can be a godsend, however, and generate tons of business for even the smallest of companies.

Consider enlisting the help of some social media talent to help you generate a digital buzz, and never stop on your quest to produce engaging, SEO content that will cut through the noise and reach out directly to users when they search.

Chris Porteous is the CEO of Framestr / My SEO Sucks, building high performing sales funnels and marketing workflow solutions for businesses across North America.

The post How important are featured snippets and how can you get them? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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14 SEO Predictions for 2019 & Beyond, as Told by Mozzers

Posted by TheMozTeam

With the new year in full swing and an already busy first quarter, our 2019 predictions for SEO in the new year are hopping onto the scene a little late — but fashionably so, we hope. From an explosion of SERP features to increased monetization to the key drivers of search this year, our SEO experts have consulted their crystal balls (read: access to mountains of data and in-depth analyses) and made their predictions. Read on for an exhaustive list of fourteen things to watch out for in search from our very own Dr. Pete, Britney Muller, Rob Bucci, Russ Jones, and Miriam Ellis!

1. Answers will drive search

People Also Ask boxes exploded in 2018, and featured snippets have expanded into both multifaceted and multi-snippet versions. Google wants to answer questions, it wants to answer them across as many devices as possible, and it will reward sites with succinct, well-structured answers. Focus on answers that naturally leave visitors wanting more and establish your brand and credibility. [Dr. Peter J. Meyers]

Further reading:

• Content for Answers: The Inverted Pyramid - Whiteboard Friday
• We Dipped Our Toes Into Double Featured Snippets
• Desktop, Mobile, or Voice? (D) All of the Above - Whiteboard Friday

2. Voice search will continue to be utterly useless for optimization

Optimizing for voice search will still be no more than optimizing for featured snippets, and conversions from voice will remain a dark box. [Russ Jones]

Further reading:

• The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets
• Lessons from 1,000 Voice Searches (on Google Home)
• How to Discover Featured Snippet Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday
• How to Target Featured Snippet Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday

3. Mobile is table stakes

This is barely a prediction. If your 2019 plan is to finally figure out mobile, you're already too late. Almost all Google features are designed with mobile-first in mind, and the mobile-first index has expanded rapidly in the past few months. Get your mobile house (not to be confused with your mobile home) in order as soon as you can. [Dr. Peter J. Meyers]

Further reading:

• How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?
• How and Why to Do a Mobile/Desktop Parity Audit
• Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond
• How Mobile-First Indexing Disrupts the Link Graph

4. Further SERP feature intrusions in organic search

Expect Google to find more and more ways to replace organic with solutions that keep users on Google’s property. This includes interactive SERP features that replace, slowly but surely, many website offerings in the same way that live scores, weather, and flights have. [Russ Jones]

Further reading:

• Zero-Result SERPs: Welcome to the Future We Should've Known Was Coming
• What Do You Do When You Lose Organic Traffic to Google SERP Features?
• Google's Walled Garden: Are We Being Pushed Out of Our Own Digital Backyards?

5. Video will dominate niches

Featured Videos, Video Carousels, and Suggested Clips (where Google targets specific content in a video) are taking over the how-to spaces. As Google tests search appliances with screens, including Home Hub, expect video to dominate instructional and DIY niches. [Dr. Peter J. Meyers]

Further reading:

• YouTube SEO: Top Factors to Invest In - Whiteboard Friday
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up and Growing Your YouTube Presence
• Beyond YouTube: Video Hosting, Marketing, and Monetization Platforms, Compared

6. SERPs will become more interactive

We’ve seen the start of interactive SERPs with People Also Ask Boxes. Depending on which question you expand, two to three new questions will generate below that directly pertain to your expanded question. This real-time engagement keeps people on the SERP longer and helps Google better understand what a user is seeking. [Britney Muller]

Further reading:

• Infinite "People Also Ask" Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities

7. Local SEO: Google will continue getting up in your business — literally

Google will continue asking more and more intimate questions about your business to your customers. Does this business have gender-neutral bathrooms? Is this business accessible? What is the atmosphere like? How clean is it? What kind of lighting do they have? And so on. If Google can acquire accurate, real-world information about your business (your percentage of repeat customers via geocaching, price via transaction history, etc.) they can rely less heavily on website signals and provide more accurate results to searchers. [Britney Muller]

Further reading:

• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Taking Full Control of Your Google Knowledge Panels
• How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

8. Business proximity-to-searcher will remain a top local ranking factor

In Moz’s recent State of Local SEO report, the majority of respondents agreed that Google’s focus on the proximity of a searcher to local businesses frequently emphasizes distance over quality in the local SERPs. I predict that we’ll continue to see this heavily weighting the results in 2019. On the one hand, hyper-localized results can be positive, as they allow a diversity of businesses to shine for a given search. On the other hand, with the exception of urgent situations, most people would prefer to see best options rather than just closest ones. [Miriam Ellis]

Further reading:

• The State of Local SEO Industry Report
• Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future - Whiteboard Friday

9. Local SEO: Google is going to increase monetization

Look to see more of the local and maps space monetized uniquely by Google both through Adwords and potentially new lead-gen models. This space will become more and more competitive. [Russ Jones]

Further reading:

• New Research: 35% of Competitive Local Keywords Have Local Pack Ads
• What Do SEOs Do When Google Removes Organic Search Traffic? - Whiteboard Friday

10. Monetization tests for voice

Google and Amazon have been moving towards voice-supported displays in hopes of better monetizing voice. It will be interesting to see their efforts to get displays in homes and how they integrate the display advertising. Bold prediction: Amazon will provide sleep-mode display ads similar to how Kindle currently displays them today. [Britney Muller]

11. Marketers will place a greater focus on the SERPs

I expect we’ll see a greater focus on the analysis of SERPs as Google does more to give people answers without them having to leave the search results. We’re seeing more and more vertical search engines like Google Jobs, Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Shopping. We’re also seeing more in-depth content make it onto the SERP than ever in the form of featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and more. With these new developments, marketers are increasingly going to want to report on their general brand visibility within the SERPs, not just their website ranking. It’s going to be more important than ever for people to be measuring all the elements within a SERP, not just their own ranking. [Rob Bucci]

Further reading:

• Mapping the Overlap of SERP Feature Suggestions
• Make Sense of Your Data with These Essential Keyword Segments

12. Targeting topics will be more productive than targeting queries

2019 is going to be another year in which we see the emphasis on individual search queries start to decline, as people focus more on clusters of queries around topics. People Also Ask queries have made the importance of topics much more obvious to the SEO industry. With PAAs, Google is clearly illustrating that they think about searcher experience in terms of a searcher’s satisfaction across an entire topic, not just a specific search query. With this in mind, we can expect SEOs to more and more want to see their search queries clustered into topics so they can measure their visibility and the competitive landscape across these clusters. [Rob Bucci]

Further reading:

• Build a Search Intent Dashboard to Unlock Better Opportunities
• It's Time to Stop Doing On-Page SEO Like It's 2012
• Using Related Topics and Semantically Connected Keywords in Your SEO - Whiteboard Friday
• How to Feed a Hummingbird: Improve Your On-Page SEO with Related Topics in Moz Pro

13. Linked unstructured citations will receive increasing focus

I recently conducted a small study in which there was a 75% correlation between organic and local pack rank. Linked unstructured citations (the mention of partial or complete business information + a link on any type of relevant website) are a means of improving organic rankings which underpin local rankings. They can also serve as a non-Google dependent means of driving traffic and leads. Anything you’re not having to pay Google for will become increasingly precious. Structured citations on key local business listing platforms will remain table stakes, but competitive local businesses will need to focus on unstructured data to move the needle. [Miriam Ellis]

Further reading:

• The Guide to Building Linked Unstructured Citations for Local SEO
• Why Local Businesses Will Need Websites More than Ever in 2019

14. Reviews will remain a competitive difference-maker

A Google rep recently stated that about one-third of local searches are made with the intent of reading reviews. This is huge. Local businesses that acquire and maintain a good and interactive reputation on the web will have a critical advantage over brands that ignore reviews as fundamental to customer service. Competitive local businesses will earn, monitor, respond to, and analyze the sentiment of their review corpus. [Miriam Ellis]

Further reading:

• Time to Act: Review Responses Just Evolved from "Extra" to "Expected"
• How to Respond to the 5 Types of Google Reviews
• Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO
• See more local SEO predictions for 2019 by Miriam in our Q&A!

We’ve heard from Mozzers, and now we want to hear from you. What have you seen so far in 2019 that’s got your SEO Spidey senses tingling? What trends are you capitalizing on and planning for? Let us know in the comments below (and brag to friends and colleagues when your prediction comes true in the next 6–10 months). ;-)

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Ten reasons your SEO campaign isn’t working

The pursuit to keep up with the latest SEO trends has managed to overwhelm a lot of website owners and marketers in the digital sphere.

Competition is driving this mad race of ranking further and maintaining your online presence has become more difficult than ever.

The top reason for brands taking their Search Engine Optimization strategy this seriously is that they want to score an insane amount of traffic and as a result, they want to stay at the top of the search engine rankings. However, being able to achieve that is far from making simple SEO fixes here and there.

If your SEO strategy is really working, you can expect it to give out results in at least three months. If you don’t see the efforts kicking in, your SEO campaign is probably not working as it should. But, what are the reasons that lead to the failure of your SEO strategy or campaign?

Let’s find out.

Ten reasons your SEO campaign might not be working

1. Your website has poor content

The top reason behind your search engine optimization campaign’s failure is that your website is not putting out the content that really deserves the viewership of your audience. The traffic on your website is determined by the viewership percentage of the target audience. Your website will only be visited and surfed by the people of the Internet if they find content on your website that is worth going through and consuming.

Making sure that your website is putting out good content is an obligation for you, as a website owner. If your content is not original, plagiarism-free, and free of any grammatical errors, your audience will begin to abandon your website and this might result in them not coming back. Overall, you must make sure that your brand’s content is consumable and that it is of great value to your audience.

2. Your choice of hosting is not competent

Your hosting provider plays a very important role in determining the search engine performance of your website. If the choice of web hosting for your website isn’t reliable and competent, you are killing your website’s search engine ranking.

Choosing the right web host and investing in a reliable provider is going to be the best decision for your website. So, make sure that you review the best web hosts available in the market before making a confirmed choice.

3. There’s a problem with your link profile

The link profile of your website is a huge determinant of your site’s survival amidst all the algorithm update changes. Playing by the rules will help your website’s SEO campaign perform better and not eventually fail.

Building the right link profile for your website, having hyperlinks that attract users to your site, and earning backlinks from authoritative websites will make your website fail-proof. In this pursuit, please make sure that you are not buying backlinks for a fee or on a barter basis. Google is smarter than you think and it will eventually catch up with your strategy and penalize your website, rendering your website’s SEO strategy to fail.

4. You are not keeping up with Google Algorithm update

A lot of website owners, digital marketers, and SEO strategists are often left baffled at the number of Algorithm updates pushed out by Google. As notorious they might be, failing to abide by the directives of these Algorithms can lead to the failure of your SEO strategy.

With Google changing its search algorithm every now and then every year, you must not ignore the fact that these changes affect your site’s search results in significant ways. As for now, make sure that your website’s SEO campaign is in accordance with the major Google Algorithm updates such as Google Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Fred etc.

5. High bounce rate

Is your website experiencing an unusually high bounce rate? Well, that is one of the reasons that your SEO campaign isn’t working. You can check your site’s bounce rate by heading to Google Analytics and checking your page metrics. FYI, if too many people are leaving your website after visiting just one page, that’s a high bounce rate for you.

6. Your SEO strategy is outdated

Well, that’s the simplest explanation for your SEO campaign not performing well, as per your expectations; your SEO strategy is outdated and not at par with the current SEO trends.

If you are still falling for outdated SEO tactics such as reciprocal linking, flat URL structure, keyword stuffing, Link and article directories, exact-match domains etc., you are murdering your site’s SEO campaigns.

7. Your site’s on-site duration is terrible

The amount of time spent by a visitor on your site defines the dwell time on your site. If it’s not as per the standards i.e. if people are leaving your page soon after they drop on your website (for whatever reasons) your website’s SEO campaign is not going to reap any results.

8. You are expecting results too soon

As mentioned above, your SEO efforts started yielding results after a period of 3 months or more. Hence, if you are expecting your SEO campaign to be a quick sprout, we request you to be a little more patient and wait for it to give out relevant results.

9. You are not tapping social media properly

The success of your overall SEO strategy is determined truly only when you tap into all the relevant grounds that determine the SEO performance of your business website. We are talking about the social media channels that significantly contribute to the success of your SEO campaign.

10. Your website isn’t mobile-first

It’s 2019 and this shouldn’t be the case. If your website isn’t responsive and mobile-friendly yet, we have a few harsh words for you. One of the most basic requirements is to have a mobile responsive version of your website. If people are unable to access your website on their mobile devices, you are missing out on significant traffic and that could be a key reason for the failure of your SEO campaign.

Conclusion:

There are so many reasons that might lead to the failure of your SEO campaign. However, the ten listed above are the most common ones. By making sure that you have checked all of them out, you can move to explore any more reasons that might be causing your SEO strategy to fail.

Once you have determined what was the root cause of your problem, you will need to place an action plan to step up your SEO game. This will call for the revaluation of your existing SEO strategy and making a few fixes. Once you are done, you just need to stay calm and wait for the machinery to kick in.

Let us know what were some reasons that your SEO campaign didn’t work as expected?

The post Ten reasons your SEO campaign isn’t working appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Advanced Linkbuilding: How to Find the Absolute Best Publishers and Writers to Pitch

We Dipped Our Toes Into Double Featured Snippets

What a Two-Tiered SERP Means for Content Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets

Posted by TheMozTeam

This post was originally published on the STAT blog.

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We all know that featured snippets provide easy-to-read, authoritative answers and that digital assistants love to say them out loud when asked questions.

This means that featured snippets have an impact on voice search — bad snippets, or no snippets at all, and digital assistants struggle. By that logic: Create a lot of awesome snippets and win the voice search race. Right?

Right, but there’s actually a far more interesting angle to examine — one that will help you nab more snippets and optimize for voice search at the same time. In order to explore this, we need to make like Doctor Who and go back in time.

From typing to talking

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and queries were typed into search engines via keyboards, people adapted to search engines by adjusting how they performed queries. We pulled out unnecessary words and phrases, like “the,” “of,” and, well, “and,” which created truncated requests — robotic-sounding searches for a robotic search engine.

Of course, as search engines have evolved, so too has their ability to understand natural language patterns and the intent behind queries. Google’s 2013 Hummingbird update helped pave the way for such evolution. This algorithm rejigging allowed Google’s search engine to better understand the whole of a query, moving it away from keyword matching to conversation having.

This is good news if you’re a human person: We have a harder time changing the way we speak than the way we write. It’s even greater news for digital assistants, because voice search only works if search engines can interpret human speech and engage in chitchat.

Digital assistants and machine learning

By looking at how digital assistants do their voice search thing (what we say versus what they search), we can see just how far machine learning has come with natural language processing and how far it still has to go (robots, they’re just like us!). We can also get a sense of the kinds of queries we need to be tracking if voice search is on the SEO agenda.

For example, when we asked our Google Assistant, “What are the best headphones for $100,” it queried [best headphones for $100]. We followed that by asking, “What about wireless,” and it searched [best wireless headphones for $100]. And then we remembered that we’re in Canada, so we followed that with, “I meant $100 Canadian,” and it performed a search for [best wireless headphones for $100 Canadian].

We can learn two things from this successful tête-à-tête: Not only does our Google Assistant manage to construct mostly full-sentence queries out of our mostly full-sentence asks, but it’s able to accurately link together topical queries. Despite us dropping our subject altogether by the end, Google Assistant still knows what we’re talking about.

Of course, we’re not above pointing out the fumbles. In the string of: “How to bake a Bundt cake,” “What kind of pan does it take,” and then “How much do those cost,” the actual query Google Assistant searched for the last question was [how much does bundt cake cost].

Just after we finished praising our Assistant for being able to maintain the same subject all the way through our inquiry, we needed it to be able to switch tracks. And it couldn’t. It associated the “those” with our initial Bundt cake subject instead of the most recent noun mentioned (Bundt cake pans).

In another important line of questioning about Bundt cake-baking, “How long will it take” produced the query [how long does it take to take a Bundt cake], while “How long does that take” produced [how long does a Bundt cake take to bake].

They’re the same ask, but our Google Assistant had a harder time parsing which definition of “take” our first sentence was using, spitting out a rather awkward query. Unless we really did want to know how long it’s going to take us to run off with someone’s freshly baked Bundt cake? (Don’t judge us.)

Since Google is likely paying out the wazoo to up the machine learning ante, we expect there to be less awkward failures over time. Which is a good thing, because when we asked about Bundt cake ingredients (“Does it take butter”) we found ourselves looking at a SERP for [how do I bake a butter].

Not that that doesn’t sound delicious.

Snippets are appearing for different kinds of queries

So, what are we to make of all of this? That we’re essentially in the midst of a natural language renaissance. And that voice search is helping spearhead the charge.

As for what this means for snippets specifically? They’re going to have to show up for human speak-type queries. And wouldn’t you know it, Google is already moving forward with this strategy, and not simply creating more snippets for the same types of queries. We’ve even got proof.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of words in a query that surfaces a featured snippet. Long-tail queries may be a nuisance and a half, but snippet-having queries are getting longer by the minute.

When we bucket and weight the terms found in those long-tail queries by TF-IDF, we get further proof of voice search’s sway over snippets. The term “how” appears more than any other word and is followed closely by “does,” “to,” “much,” “what,” and “is” — all words that typically compose full sentences and are easier to remove from our typed searches than our spoken ones.

This means that if we want to snag more snippets and help searchers using digital assistants, we need to build out long-tail, natural-sounding keyword lists to track and optimize for.

Format your snippet content to match

When it’s finally time to optimize, one of the best ways to get your content into the ears of a searcher is through the right snippet formatting, which is a lesson we can learn from Google.

Taking our TF-IDF-weighted terms, we found that the words “best” and “how to” brought in the most list snippets of the bunch. We certainly don’t have to think too hard about why Google decided they benefit from list formatting — it provides a quick comparative snapshot or a handy step-by-step.

From this, we may be inclined to format all of our “best” and “how to” keyword content into lists. But, as you can see in the chart above, paragraphs and tables are still appearing here, and we could be leaving snippets on the table by ignoring them. If we have time, we’ll dig into which keywords those formats are a better fit for and why.

Get tracking

You could be the Wonder Woman of meta descriptions, but if you aren’t optimizing for the right kind of snippets, then your content’s going to have a harder time getting heard. Building out a voice search-friendly keyword list to track is the first step to lassoing those snippets.

Want to learn how you can do that in STAT? Say hello and request a tailored demo.

Need more snippets in your life? We dug into Google’s double-snippet SERPs for you — double the snippets, double the fun.

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SEO Channel Context: An Analysis of Growth Opportunities

Posted by BrankoK

Too often do you see SEO analyses and decisions being made without considering the context of the marketing channel mix. Equally as often do you see large budgets being poured into paid ads in ways that seem to forget there's a whole lot to gain from catering to popular search demand.

Both instances can lead to leaky conversion funnels and missed opportunity for long term traffic flows. But this article will show you a case of an SEO context analysis we used to determine the importance and role of SEO.

This analysis was one of our deliverables for a marketing agency client who hired us to inform SEO decisions which we then turned into a report template for you to get inspired by and duplicate.

Case description

The included charts show real, live data. You can see the whole SEO channel context analysis in this Data Studio SEO report template.

The traffic analyzed is for of a monetizing blog, whose marketing team also happens to be one of most fun to work for. For the sake of this case study, we're giving them a spectacular undercover name — "The Broze Fellaz."

For context, this blog started off with content for the first two years before they launched their flagship product. Now, they sell a catalogue of products highly relevant to their content and, thanks to one of the most entertaining Shark Tank episodes ever aired, they have acquired investments and a highly engaged niche community.

As you’ll see below, organic search is their biggest channel in many ways. Facebook also runs both as organic and paid and the team spends many an hour inside the platform. Email has elaborate automated flows that strive to leverage subscribers that come from the stellar content on the website. We therefore chose the three — organic Search, Facebook, and email — as a combination that would yield a comprehensive analysis with insights we can easily act on.

Ingredients for the SEO analysis

This analysis is a result of a long-term retainer relationship with "The Broze Fellaz" as our ongoing analytics client. A great deal was required in order for data-driven action to happen, but we assure you, it's all doable.

From the analysis best practice drawer, we used:

• 2 cups of relevant channels for context and analysis via comparison.
• 3 cups of different touch points to identify channel roles — bringing in traffic, generating opt-ins, closing sales, etc.
• 5 heads of open-minded lettuce and readiness to change current status quo, for a team that can execute.
• 457 oz of focus-on-finding what is going on with organic search, why it is going on, and what we can do about it (otherwise, we’d end up with another scorecard export).
• Imperial units used in arbitrary numbers that are hard to imagine and thus feel very large.
• 1 to 2 heads of your analyst brain, baked into the analysis. You're not making an automated report — even a HubSpot intern can do that. You're being a human and you're analyzing. You're making human analysis. This helps avoid having your job stolen by a robot.
• Full tray of Data Studio visualizations that appeal to the eye.
• Sprinkles of benchmarks, for highlighting significance of performance differences.

From the measurement setup and stack toolbox, we used:

• Google Analytics with tailored channel definitions, enhanced e-commerce and Search Console integration.
• Event tracking for opt-ins and adjusted bounce rate via MashMetrics GTM setup framework.
• UTM routine for social and email traffic implemented via Google Sheets & UTM.io.
• Google Data Studio. This is my favorite visualization tool. Despite its flaws and gaps (as it’s still in beta) I say it is better than its paid counterparts, and it keeps getting better. For data sources, we used the native connectors for Google Analytics and Google Sheets, then Facebook community connectors by Supermetrics.
• Keyword Hero. Thanks to semantic algorithms and data aggregation, you are indeed able to see 95 percent of your organic search queries (check out Onpage Hero, too, you'll be amazed).

Inspiration for my approach comes from Lea Pica, Avinash, the Google Data Studio newsletter, and Chris Penn, along with our dear clients and the questions they have us answer for them.

Ready? Let's dive in.

Analysis of the client's SEO on the context of their channel mix

1) Insight: Before the visit

What's going on and why is it happening?

Organic search traffic volume blows the other channels out of the water. This is normal for sites with quality regular content; yet, the difference is stark considering the active effort that goes into Facebook and email campaigns.

The CTR of organic search is up to par with Facebook. That's a lot to say when comparing an organic channel to a channel with high level of targeting control.

It looks like email flows are the clear winner in terms of CTR to the website, which has a highly engaged community of users who return fairly often and advocate passionately. It also has a product and content that's incredibly relevant to their users, which few other companies appear to be good at.

There's a high CTR on search engine results pages often indicates that organic search may support funnel stages beyond just the top.

As well, email flows are sent to a very warm audience — interested users who went through a double opt-in. It is to be expected for this CTR to be high.

What's been done already?

There's an active effort and budget allocation being put towards Facebook Ads and email automation. A content plan has been put in place and is being executed diligently.

What we recommend next

1. Approach SEO in a way as systematic as what you do for Facebook and email flows.
2. Optimize meta titles and descriptions via testing tools such as Sanity Check. The organic search CTR may become consistently higher than that of Facebook ads.
3. Assuming you've worked on improving CTR for Facebook ads, have the same person work on the meta text and titles. Most likely, there'll be patterns you can replicate from social to SEO.
4. Run a technical audit and optimize accordingly. Knowing that you haven’t done that in a long time, and seeing how much traffic you get anyway, there’ll be quick, big wins to enjoy.

Results we expect

You can easily increase the organic CTR by at least 5 percent. You could also clean up the technical state of your site in the eyes of crawlers -— you’ll then see faster indexing by search engines when you publish new content, increased impressions for existing content. As a result, you may enjoy a major spike within a month.

2) Insight: Engagement and options during the visit

With over 70 percent of traffic coming to this website from organic search, the metrics in this analysis will be heavily skewed towards organic search. So, comparing the rate for organic search to site-wide is sometimes conclusive, other times not conclusive.

Adjusted bounce rate — via GTM events in the measurement framework used, we do not count a visit as a bounce if the visit lasts 45 seconds or longer. We prefer this approach because such an adjusted bounce rate is much more actionable for content sites. Users who find what they were searching for often read the page they land on for several minutes without clicking to another page. However, this is still a memorable visit for the user. Further, staying on the landing page for a while, or keeping the page open in a browser tab, are both good indicators for distinguishing quality, interested traffic, from all traffic.

We included all Facebook traffic here, not just paid. We know from the client’s data that the majority is from paid content, they have a solid UTM routine in place. But due to boosted posts, we’ve experienced big inaccuracies when splitting paid and organic Facebook for the purposes of channel attribution.

What's going on and why is it happening?

It looks like organic search has a bounce rate worse than the email flows — that's to be expected and not actionable, considering that the emails are only sent to recent visitors who have gone through a double opt-in. What is meaningful, however, is that organic has a better bounce rate than Facebook. It is safe to say that organic search visitors will be more likely to remember the website than the Facebook visitors.

Opt-in rates for Facebook are right above site average, and those for organic search are right below, while organic is bringing in a majority of email opt-ins despite its lower opt-in rate.

Google's algorithms and the draw of the content on this website are doing better at winning users' attention than the detailed targeting applied on Facebook. The organic traffic will have a higher likelihood of remembering the website and coming back. Across all of our clients, we find that organic search can be a great retargeting channel, particularly if you consider that the site will come up higher in search results for its recent visitors.

What's been done already?

The Facebook ad campaigns of "The Broze Fellaz" have been built and optimized for driving content opt-ins. Site content that ranks in organic search is less intentional than that.

Opt-in placements have been tested on some of the biggest organic traffic magnets.

Thorough, creative and consistent content calendars have been in place as a foundation for all channels.

What we recommend next

1. It's great to keep using organic search as a way to introduce new users to the site. Now, you can try to be more intentional about using it for driving opt-ins. It’s already serving both of the stages of the funnel.
2. Test and optimize opt-in placements on more traffic magnets.
3. Test and optimize opt-in copy for top 10 traffic magnets.
4. Once your opt-in rates have improved, focus on growing the channel. Add to the content work with a 3-month sprint of an extensive SEO project
5. Assign Google Analytics goal values to non-e-commerce actions on your site. The current opt-ins have different roles and levels of importance and there’s also a handful of other actions people can take that lead to marketing results down the road. Analyzing goal values will help you create better flows toward pre-purchase actions.
6. Facebook campaigns seem to be at a point where you can pour more budget into them and expect proportionate increase in opt-in count.

Results we expect

Growth in your opt-ins from Facebook should be proportionate to increase in budget, with a near-immediate effect. At the same time, it’s fairly realistic to bring the opt-in rate of organic search closer to site average.

3) Insight: Closing the deal

For channel attribution with money involved, you want to make sure that your Google Analytics channel definitions, view filters, and UTM’s are in top shape.

What's going on and why is it happening?

Transaction rate, as well as per session value, is higher for organic search than it is for Facebook (paid and organic combined).

Organic search contributes to far more last-click revenue than Facebook and email combined. For its relatively low volume of traffic, email flows are outstanding in the volume of revenue they bring in.

Thanks to the integration of Keyword Hero with Google Analytics for this client, we can see that about 30 percent of organic search visits are from branded keywords, which tends to drive the transaction rate up.

So, why is this happening? Most of the product on the site is highly relevant to the information people search for on Google.

Multi-channel reports in Google Analytics also show that people often discover the site in organic search, then come back by typing in the URL or clicking a bookmark. That makes organic a source of conversions where, very often, no other channels are even needed.

We can conclude that Facebook posts and campaigns of this client are built to drive content opt-ins, not e-commerce transactions. Email flows are built specifically to close sales.

What’s been done already?

There is dedicated staff for Facebook campaigns and posts, as well a thorough system dedicated to automated email flows.

A consistent content routine is in place, with experienced staff at the helm. A piece has been published every week for the last few years, with the content calendar filled with ready-to-publish content for the next few months. The community is highly engaged, reading times are high, comment count soaring, and usefulness of content outstanding. This, along with partnerships with influencers, helps "The Broze Fellaz" take up a half of the first page on the SERP for several lucrative topics. They’ve been achieving this even without a comprehensive SEO project. Content seems to be king indeed.

Google Shopping has been tried. The campaign looked promising but didn't yield incremental sales. There’s much more search demand for informational queries than there is for product.

What we recommend next

1. Organic traffic is ready to grow. If there is no budget left, resource allocation should be considered. In paid search, you can often simply increase budgets. Here, with stellar content already performing well, a comprehensive SEO project is begging for your attention. Focus can be put into structure and technical aspects, as well as content that better caters to search demand. Think optimizing the site’s information architecture, interlinking content for cornerstone structure, log analysis, and technical cleanup, meta text testing for CTR gains that would also lead to ranking gains, strategic ranking of long tail topics, intentional growing of the backlink profile.
2. Three- or six-month intensive sprint of comprehensive SEO work would be appropriate.

Results we expect

Increasing last click revenue from organic search and direct by 25 percent would lead to a gain as high as all of the current revenue from automated email flows. Considering how large the growth has been already, this gain is more than achievable in 3–6 months.

Wrapping it up

Organic search presence of "The Broze Fellaz" should continue to be the number-one role for bringing new people to the site and bringing people back to the site. Doing so supports sales that happen with the contribution of other channels, e.g. email flows. The analysis points out is that organic search is also effective at playing the role of the last-click channel for transactions, often times without the help of other channels.

We’ve worked with this client for a few years, and, based on our knowledge of their marketing focus, this analysis points us to a confident conclusion that a dedicated, comprehensive SEO project will lead to high incremental growth.

Your turn

In drawing analytical conclusions and acting on them, there’s always more than one way to shoe a horse. Let us know what conclusions you would’ve drawn instead. Copy the layout of our SEO Channel Context Comparison analysis template and show us what it helped you do for your SEO efforts — create a similar analysis for a paid or owned channel in your mix. Whether it’s comments below, tweeting our way, or sending a smoke signal, we’ll be all ears. And eyes.

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Make sense of your data with these essential keyword segments

Posted by TheMozTeam

This blog post was originally published on the STAT blog.

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The first step to getting the most out of your SERP data is smart keyword segmentation — it surfaces targeted insights that will help you make data-driven decisions.

But knowing what to segment can feel daunting, especially when you’re working with thousands of keywords. That’s why we’re arming you with a handful of must-have tags.

Follow along as we walk through the different kinds of segments in STAT, how to create them, and which tags you’ll want to get started with. You’ll be a fanciful segment connoisseur by the time we’re through!

Segmentation in STAT

In STAT, keyword segments are called “tags” and come as two different types: standard or dynamic.

Standard tags are best used when you want to keep specific keywords grouped together because of shared characteristics — like term (brand, product type, etc), location, or device. Standard tags are static, so the keywords that populate those segments won’t change unless you manually add or remove them.

Dynamic tags, on the other hand, are a fancier kind of tag based on filter criteria. Just like a smart playlist, dynamic tags automatically populate with all of the keywords that meet said criteria, such as keywords with a search volume over 500 that rank on page one. This means that the keywords in a dynamic tag aren’t forever — they’ll filter in and out depending on the criteria you’ve set.

How to create a keyword segment

Tags are created in a few easy steps. At the Site level, pop over to the Keywords tab, click the down arrow on any table column header, and then select Filter keywords. From there, you can select the pre-populated options or enter your own metrics for a choose-your-own-filter adventure.

Once your filters are in place, simply click Tag All Filtered Keywords, enter a new tag name, and then pick the tag type best suited to your needs — standard or dynamic — and voila! You’ve created your very own segment.

Segments to get you started

Now that you know how to set up a tag, it’s time to explore some of the different segments you can implement and the filter criteria you’ll need to apply.

Rank and rank movement

Tracking your rank and ranking movements with dynamic tags will give you eyeballs on your keyword performance, making it easy to monitor and report on current and historical trends.

There’s a boatload of rank segments you can set up, but here’s just a sampling to get you started:

• Keywords ranking in position 1–3; this will identify your top performing keywords.
• Keywords ranking in position 11–15; this will suss out the low-hanging, top of page two fruit in need of a little nudge.
• Keywords with a rank change of 10 or more (in either direction); this will show you keywords that are slipping off or shooting up the SERP.

Appearance and ownership of SERP features

Whether they’re images, carousels, or news results, SERP features have significantly altered the search landscape. Sometimes they push you down the page and other times, like when you manage to snag one, they can give you a serious leg up on the competition and drive loads more traffic to your site.

Whatever industry-related SERP features that you want to keep apprised of, you can create dynamic tags that show you the prevalence and movement of them within your keyword set. Segment even further for tags that show which keywords own those features and which have fallen short.

Below are a few segments you can set up for featured snippets and local packs.

Featured snippets

Everyone’s favourite SERP feature isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it wouldn’t be a bad idea to outfit yourself with a snippet tracking strategy. You can create as many tags as there are snippet options to choose from:

• Keywords with a featured snippet.
• Keywords with a paragraph, list, table, and/or carousel snippet.
• Keywords with an owned paragraph, list, table, and/or carousel snippet.
• Keywords with an unowned paragraph, list, table, and/or carousel snippet.

The first two will allow you to see over-arching snippet trends, while the last two will chart your ownership progress.

If you want to know the URL that’s won you a snippet, just take a peek at the URL column.

Local packs

If you’re a brick and mortar business, we highly advise creating tags for local packs since they provide a huge opportunity for exposure. These two tags will show you which local packs you have a presence in and which you need to work on

• Keywords with an owned local pack.
• Keywords with an unowned local pack.

Want all the juicy data squeezed into a local pack, like who’s showing up and with what URL? We created the Local pack report just for that.

Landing pages, subdomains, and other important URLs

Whether you’re adding new content or implementing link-building strategies around subdomains and landing pages, dynamic tags allow you to track and measure page performance, see whether your searchers are ending up on the pages you want, and match increases in page traffic with specific keywords.

For example, are your informational intent keywords driving traffic to your product pages instead of your blog? To check, a tag that includes your blog URL will pull in each post that ranks for one of your keywords.

Try these three dynamic tags for starters:

• Keywords ranking for a landing page URL.
• Keywords ranking for a subdomain URL.
• Keywords ranking for a blog URL.

Is a page not indexed yet? That’s okay. You can still create a dynamic tag for its URL and keywords will start appearing in that segment when Google finally gets to it.

Location, location, location

Google cares a lot about location and so should you, which is why keyword segments centred around location are essential. You can tag in two ways: by geo-modifier and by geo-location.

For these, it’s better to go with the standard tag as the search term and location are fixed to the keyword.

Geo-modifier

A geo-modifier is the geographical qualifier that searchers manually include in their query — like in [sushi near me]. We advocate for adding various geo-modifiers to your keywords and then incorporating them into your tagging strategy. For instance, you can segment by:

• Keywords with “in [city]” in them.
• Keywords with “near me” in them.

The former will show you how you fare for city-wide searches, while the latter will let you see if you’re meeting the needs of searchers looking for nearby options.

Geo-location

Geo-location is where the keyword is being tracked. More tracked locations mean more searchers’ SERPs to sample. And the closer you can get to searchers standing on a street corner, the more accurate those SERPs will be. This is why we strongly recommend you track in multiple pin-point locations in every market you serve.

Once you’ve got your tracking strategy in place, get your segmentation on. You can filter and tag by:

• Keywords tracked in specific locations; this will let you keep tabs on geographical trends.
• Keywords tracked in each market; this will allow for market-level research.

Search volume & cost-per-click

Search volume might be a contentious metric thanks to Google’s close variants, but having a decent idea of what it’s up to is better than a complete shot in the dark. We suggest at least two dynamic segments around search volume:

• Keywords with high search volume; this will show which queries are popular in your industry and have the potential to drive the most traffic.
• Keywords with low search volume; this can actually help reveal conversion opportunities — remember, long-tail keywords typically have lower search volumes but higher conversion rates.

Tracking the cost-per-click of your keywords will also bring you and your PPC team tonnes of valuable insights — you’ll know if you’re holding the top organic spot for an outrageously high CPC keyword.

As with search volume, tags for high and low CPC should do you just fine. High CPC keywords will show you where the competition is the fiercest, while low CPC keywords will surface your easiest point of entry into the paid game — queries you can optimize for with less of a fight.

Device type

From screen size to indexing, desktop and smartphones produce substantially different SERPs from one another, making it essential to track them separately. So, filter and tag for:

• Keywords tracked on a desktop.
• Keywords tracked on a smartphone.

Similar to your location segments, it’s best to use the standard tag here.

Go crazy with multiple filters

We’ve shown you some really high-level segments, but you can actually filter down your keywords even further. In other words, you can get extra fancy and add multiple filters to a single tag. Go as far as high search volume, branded keywords triggering paragraph featured snippets that you own for smartphone searchers in the downtown core. Phew!

Want to make talk shop about segmentation or see dynamic tags in action? Say hello (don’t be shy) and request a demo.

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Four tools to better structure your article for SEO and usability

Writing a good article is not enough for search visibility and good user engagement. What really matters is how well you structure it in order to optimize it well and give clear answers to users’ questions.

Here are four factors to consider when creating effectively structured content, and tools to use for each.

1. How to use your HTML headings

HTML headings are nothing new. In fact I was blogging on them over a decade ago (back then we referred to them as “semantic structure” which gives a good idea what they are for).

HTML headings got back into the spotlight recently thanks to Google’s featured snippet algorithm.

We have found that Google looks for an H2/H3 subheads to locate the best answer to the query (and consequently feature the page).

Since featured snippets are also powering voice search results for the most part, we’ve seen a flood of newer articles on structuring your content with HTML headings over the past few months.

Here are a few takeaways on how to use HTML headings correctly:

1. Keep the content structure in mind. You don’t start your page with an H3 heading. Instead, it should H1 heading followed by an H2 heading followed by a few H3 headings. There can be several H2 and H3 headings within one article reflecting the hierarchy of content.
2. HTML headings are your perfect sections to put your primary and secondary keywords in. It’s not just for SEO (although it is important): Your readers will skim through your content and seeing those keywords (that brought them there) in prominent places will keep them reading.
3.  When taken out of context, H2-H3 headings should give a good idea of what the article is about. It’s like a summary of a page.
4. Each heading should be followed by a clear concise answer (e.g. a definition, a quick factual answer, etc.) This is for both search engines and readers to quickly find what they were looking for.

There are not many tools currently providing actionable optimization recommendations when it comes to content structuring. I usually turn to question research when I want to better understand how to break my article into subtopics.

To better understand how to word my headings, I am using  Text Analysis by Serpstat. The tool is based on Keyword Clustering feature (which I highlighted here), so your first step would be grouping your keyword list using that section. Once you identify semantic groups of your keywords, select one (or several) of the groups and proceed to the Text Analysis step.

The tool will analyze on-page content of your top 10 organic competitors in Google and come up with the optimization recommendations to create a better-optimized copy (and structure):

Read a more in-depth explanation of the feature here.

2. How to better optimize each article section

SEO has moved beyond keyword matching. While knowing your primary keyword(s) is still very important, using it throughout your article is not enough to optimize it.

How to better structure each section of your article?

TextOptimizer, the tool I have already highlighted here, makes the topic research even easier with its latest update. The tool uses semantic analysis to come up with the list of related and neighboring terms that should be covered in your article or on your landing page.

On top of all, you can clearly see what you should discuss within each section of your content. To give you a better idea, let’s say you are working on a landing page for your [social media marketing] services.

TextOptimizer will search Google for that query, extract search snippets and, using semantic analysis, identify key concepts that will best cater to Google’s and its users’ expectations. One of those identified terms is, say, “Business goals” which you may decide to cover under a separate HTML heading.

But what should be inside that section?

Clicking the phrase inside TextOptimizer’s dashboard will give you a very clear idea:

What you need to do now is to create a copy discussing several of these concepts inside your section covering “Business goals“.

3. Where and how to use your calls-to-action

In-content calls-to-action are often neglected. This is unfortunate because content is a massive lead driver, especially once you get it well-placed in Google’s search results (using the two tools above).

But how to turn your content into a conversion and / or lead generation channel?

Make the most of your in-content CTAs (including in-content two-step optin).

Finteza is the free analytics software with a solid focus on conversion rate optimization. It tracks your multiple CTAs and tells you exactly how your readers engage with them.

Finteza makes it super easy to add in-article CTAs to event tracking through their WordPress plugin:

Tip: When adding your in-content events for tracking, name them based on the placement to better understand which of those perform better. For example, “article-top download”, “sidebar banner”, “post-text webinar”, etc.

4. How to use in-content structured markup

Finally, if you really want to make the most of your content structuring, schema.org is always a good idea. When it comes to content, there are only a few schema.org types currently officially supported by Google including reviews, recipes and news.

One of the non-supported types which I am inclined to use is HowTo schema which we already saw used by Google as an experiment.

[Screenshot by Aaron Bradley]

Yoast Plugin makes it super easy to implement.

Tip: Use Yoast SEO plugin to easily add HowTo schema: Just keep adding steps until you’ve included all of them. This will help Google to better locate and interpret your instructions.

Content creation is the fundamental step in any digital marketing strategy, even in difficult niches. Make the most of your content development efforts with better structuring each page that goes up on your site.

What tools are you using to structure your content? Please share your tips!

The post Four tools to better structure your article for SEO and usability appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Link reclamation: A practical guide for turning unlinked brand mentions into links

Your latest content campaign has been covered by a top-tier global publication… but there’s no link! Your brand (or your client) has been mentioned, but that’s all.

At this stage, do you simply accept the brand value of a mention and move on to target your next link prospect? Or is there a process you can follow to at least try to get a link added in?

Sadly, unlinked brand mentions are one of the biggest challenges when building links through content marketing and digital PR. It’s more common than many link builders would like to admit.

But, seeing a link added in to an article after it’s been published can be easier to achieve than many assume.

You just need to know when it’s right to ask for a link, who you need to reach out to and what you should say. We’ll cover all these things below.

Content-led link building is hard — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It often takes blood, sweat and tears to launch a campaign which earns significant numbers of links. And it’s for that reason that link reclamation should be a tactic which is executed as standard. After all, if you’ve put the effort in to land coverage in the first place, it makes sense to follow additional steps to secure a link if that’s what it takes.

How many people use link reclamation?

To demonstrate a point: I recently reached out to my Twitter and LinkedIn networks. I asked a simple question: ‘Do you use link reclamation alongside your content marketing campaigns?’

The responses surprised me…

Always: 29%
Sometimes: 47%
Never: 24%

Of those who took the time to respond, only three in ten are executing link reclamation as standard on every campaign.

Perhaps more surprising is that one in four aren’t using it at all.

Given some of the comments left alongside the poll, this is something which many turn to if they have time — rather than working it into a wider link building process.

Think of the links which could have been earned but which were simply let lie as brand mentions.

What is link reclamation?

Link reclamation is a simple but efficient tactic to turn brand mentions into links; usually those earned as part of a content marketing or digital PR campaign.

As SEOs, we understand the value of authoritative, editorial links and the impact which they can have upon our campaigns — just as much as we understand how hard it is to even earn coverage from top-tier publications in the first place.

That’s why it can be frustrating when we discover a brand mention which doesn’t link.

What’s really important to remember, however, is that, in many instances, journalists aren’t purposefully avoiding linking to you or your client. For one reason or another (whether that’s trying to speed up the publishing process, a question as to whether a link is really needed to tell the story or others…) articles sometimes go published without a link.

As an industry we need to accept that there’s little we can do to change a journalist’s own processes and publication criteria. What we can do is take action and follow a series of tried and tested steps to try to land that link.

After all, the hard work of getting the coverage in the first place is already done. Turning a brand mention into a link is surely easy in comparison, right?

I’d like to say yes. And in many cases it is. However, I’ve also seen some horrendous examples of link reclamation gone wrong, usually because of a lack of understanding as to whether a link is actually deserved or not.

How do you find unlinked brand mentions?

One way to find unlinked brand mentions is to use ahref’s content explorer and follow their tutorial here. Combining a CSV export with Screaming Frog to compile a list of web pages which mention your brand but which don’t link.

If you’re actively promoting a content marketing or digital PR campaign, however, you’ll undoubtedly already be looking for the latest coverage.

One of the easiest ways to find this is through Google News. Filter by ‘Past 24 hours’ to see coverage picked up in the past day, or set to ‘Past week’ if you’re looking to find additional articles and features.

This will often throw up a number of unlinked brand mentions  which you then can use link reclamation tactics for to try and turn them into a link.

Don’t forget to set up Google Alerts both across your brand name and campaign headlines as well to easily be alerted to further unlinked mention opportunities to explore.

When should you ask for a brand mention to be linked?

It’s not always right to ask for an unlinked brand mentioned to be turned into a link.

Despite what many may say, a journalist doesn’t owe you a link. Not even if they cover your campaign.

A link’s purpose is to take a user from A to B and, in order for that to make sense to be in place, it typically needs to add value of some sorts.

To put this into a working context, let’s look at a few different scenarios here.

1. Your brand (or client) has been mentioned in an article in reference to a study which you conducted and which the article directly mentions. There’s no link but many of the statistics and findings have been revealed.
2. A journalist has featured an infographic which you produced (and embedded it) but hasn’t linked. They have credited your brand.
3. Your brand has been referenced alongside a quote which you supplied to a journalist to add further weight to their story around a subject.
4. Your brand has been mentioned out of context. In this case, let’s base it around a Tweet which circulated last year; one of your physical stores has been mentioned in an online newspaper, only in reference to a robbery taking place over the road from it.

In which instance would you say you’re well-deserved of the link?

Scenario one. 

When there’s a clear opportunity to add value with what’s on the other end of the link, there’s no debating that a link should be in place and it’s easy to justify why. The good news is that, in many cases, the link will already be in place when there’s clear value to the user and is an important part of the wider article.

Scenarios two and three are the ones where most link reclamation activity happens. Those where a link references the original campaign or the brand who has supplied a quote. In most cases, the link isn’t already in place here because it isn’t vital to the story. However, the link is in context and can be requested as a way to cite a source.

Scenario four is where link reclamation should be avoided. The link is of no value to readers and doesn’t make contextual sense.

Always be mindful as to whether it makes sense for a link to be added in to an article. Ask yourself; “would a link add value to a reader?” Otherwise, you’re wasting your time trying to reclaim an out-of-context mention.

You need to be able to clearly outline where a link should point to.

Note: requesting homepage, category or service page links is often not as successful as those to content pages as it can be seen as overly commercial.

You also need to be able to justify why it makes sense to be in place to maximize your success rate at link reclamation.

Who should you approach with your request?

You need to make sure you’re making your request to the right person to increase your chances of seeing a brand mentioned turned into a link.

Your options of who to approach are usually:

1. The journalist who wrote and published the article
2. Their editor
3. The publication’s corrections desk

You see, most go straight back to the journalist who they pitched the original story to, however this isn’t always as successful as it could be.

Why?

Journalists are busy people.

Once they’ve hit publish there’s a good chance they’ve moved onto writing their next article and have more or less forgotten about what they last put together. And we simply have to accept that. They have new priorities and they’re not about to go and drop everything to add your link back in.

Of course, that’s not to say that reaching back out to a journalist doesn’t work, simply that they’re not always the best option.

You could reach out to the editor of the section. However, again, they’re busy individuals and adding your link in likely doesn’t come as a high priority.

A corrections desk’s role is to make amends to articles which have already been published.

This makes them, at least for me, the first people to reach out to.

You’ll find corrections contacts listed for most publications. If we take a look at Metro’s ‘Contact Us’ page (found in their footer), we see:

The address clearly states that the purpose is for complaints or corrections. sSending your link reclamation request here often ensures both quick action and an increased chance of success.

Say you send to the corrections desk and either get no reply after three days or you don’t see the link added in. (Note that you often won’t be notified that a link has been added to the article after you request it through the corrections desk — so be sure to keep checking yourself.) In this case, you might go back and reach out to either the journalist or the editor (or both; essentially giving you three chances at getting that link).

What should you say to maximize your chances of getting the link?

I’ve spent hours in the past reworking emails, but am confident that the approach which I now take works well, at least across my own clients and campaigns.

I’ve learned that a successful link reclamation email includes the following:

• A polite THANK YOU for covering your campaign, brand or client (manners really do go a long way)
• A clear reference to the title of the article which contains the brand mention
• A link to the article which contains the mention
• The link which you want added in to the article
• A simple justification as to why the link adds value to readers

And, in practice, here’s what that looks like for me:

It’s simple, straight to the point and polite; however what it does perfectly is justify why a link would add value to the article and should be added in.

In this particular example, the link was added into an article on USA Today within 2 hours of sending the email.

Earning extra links for your brand

Link reclamation is something, as far as I’m concerned, should be done alongside all content marketing and digital PR campaigns to help you maximize the number of quality links earned.

Once you understand what works (and what doesn’t) in terms of who to approach and what to say, you’ll find that it’s something you can spend half an hour on each day and see results from.

At the end of the day, links still work in SEO. And there’s every argument to be made to put in that extra bit of effort to earn more from your (already put in) hard work.

James Brockbank is Managing Director of Digitaloft, a multi-award winning SEO, PPC & Content Marketing agency. You can find him on Twitter @BrockbankJames.

The post Link reclamation: A practical guide for turning unlinked brand mentions into links appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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