The power of page speed: Practical tips and tools to speed up your site

As regular users of the Internet, we all want what we’re searching for to appear instantly. Therefore, in 2010, Google released the PageRank algorithm, which made website and page speed a high ranking factor for crawlers to assess and rank in search engine results pages.

53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Throughout the digital years, a distinct correlation has become evident between page speed and visitor retention and bounce rate. And with visitor retention becoming increasingly important in terms of meeting revenue goals and other annual targets, page speed is one of the most vital focus areas for customer experience today.

Performing page speed tests should be a high priority (if it isn’t already) for your website. Looking at it from Google’s perspective, if your pages take an age to load, the search engine is not able to crawl as many pages, which results in Google using its crawl budget ineffectively, potentially negatively impacting your site’s organic performance.

The many benefits of boosting page speed

The benefits of improving your site’s page load speed are myriad and fall into three key areas.

1. Improved user experience

• Google reported that just a one-second delay in load time will decrease visitors’ satisfaction by 16%, and 79% of those users will not buy your product or service if they aren’t satisfied by your overall website performance.
• Many users nowadays will abandon a website if it performs poorly, particularly if a page takes a substantial amount of time to load. By having quick loading pages, you can resonate more with users by leaving them free to navigate and explore your site’s content.

2. Better overall marketing performance

• Whether your goal is to improve your overall conversion rate for a “consideration” page or to reduce your bounce rate on a particular page to below 30%, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a speedy website greatly contributes towards achieving these goals.
• In the UK, studies have shown that 67% of online shoppers will abandon their shopping basket on a slow website. However, if you improve a page’s load time by just one second, this can result in an uplift in the conversion rate of between 10 – 20%.
• If you’re aiming to achieve higher website traffic to a certain page, such as your “best sellers” or possibly a new blog post you’ve just published, page speed is one of the many factors you should take into consideration when trying to achieve this type of goal. Google studies have in fact shown that by having a delay of half a second can cause a 20% loss in traffic.

3. Enhanced SERP positioning

• Back to Google’s PageRank algorithm update – as mentioned this took into account page loading time and overall website speed, amongst other measures such as page views, so a focus on page speed is vital if you want to rank in the SERPs.
• What’s more, if your web pages load quickly, Google crawlers are able to search through your website at a faster rate. This means that more individual pages stand a chance at ranking in a SERP.

Eight steps to speed up your site

Page speed can be improved through a variety of different methods that will allow you to quickly see the true potential of your business’ website.

1. Compress files

For compressing files, a highly recommended tool to use is Gzip. Gzip allows you to reduce the size of HTML or CSS files among others, reducing overall HTTP response time. However, do not use Gzip on image files, as this may affect image quality.

2. Reduce redirects

Having a lot of redirects on your site results in more HTTP requests, which can translate into a reduction in page speed. Additionally, don’t neglect to fix broken links which can massively impact the user experience.

3. Remove render-blocking JavaScript

In terms of your website structure, try to refrain from the use of render-blocking JavaScript, including external scripts which are fetched before they can be executed. When scripts are inputted for rendering page content, they can be used to avoid extra network requests.

For faster page speed, the content needs to be smaller in terms of quantity and must execute at a fast rate to deliver a good performance. Also, if certain scripts are not critical to render straight away, they should be made to be asynchronous or deferred until the first render has completed.

4. Leverage browser caching

Each time a user visits a website, it collects a cache which involves information about the stylesheets, images, JavaScript and more. This is so when a visitor visits this website again, it doesn’t have to reload the entire page.

This benefits page speed, as this saves on time spent sending multiple HTTP requests to the server. An additional benefit is the reduction of bandwidth and therefore the overall cost of hosting your site.

5. Improve server response time

When reviewing your server response time, many factors can affect its rate, including everything from the amount of traffic your website receives, to the type of software your server uses and the hosting solution you require.

As a ballpark figure, you should be aiming towards a time of under 200ms. This can be done by reviewing different performance metrics and looking out for things like slow routing, lack of memory or slow database requests.

6. Make the most of content distribution networks (CDNs)

One of the main benefits of using CDNs is that they consist of multiple networks, which each make a copy of the website. This is then stored into multiple geographical data centers that provide users with faster and more reliable access to your site.

7. Ensure all images are optimized

When importing images into your website, be sure to use the correct size and file format (PNGs for graphics which are less than 16 colors and JPEGs for photographs), as well as ensuring they are compressed for web purposes. The volume of images used across your website can also affect page load time.

If your website is image-heavy, one solution is to combine the images together into fewer output files by using CSS Sprites. This will reduce latency and result in improvements to your page speed because it reduces any possibility of a delay or the number of round trips produced.

8. Minimize wasted white spaces

If you have white space, line returns or even comment tags, HTML and text can accumulate and increase your page size by 10 – 20%, negatively impacting page load time. It’s therefore worth reviewing your pages and examining each line of code to make the suitable amendments required to maximize performance.

Reviewing success and continually improving

Once you’ve taken some of the measures outlined above, it’s important to keep a close eye on your website’s performance, in order to identify any areas that require further improvement. Here are just some of the tools at your disposal.

Pingdom Speed Test

Pingdom’s Website Speed Test provides reports that are categorized into four areas: Waterfall breakdown, performance grade, page analysis, and history. By having such a comprehensive breakdown of your website’s performance, this allows you to not only complete a simple speed check but also see a useful overview with additional metrics, such as size analysis, size per domain or what type of content has the most requests.

Furthermore, you are able to narrow down your results by content type, page size by domain, requests by content type and requests by domain – therefore, you are able to identify exactly which pages are performing best – and worst.

Google PageSpeed Insights

The PageSpeed Insights tool by Google provides you with page insights into how well your website is performing in terms of speed, with a grade given on a scale of 1 to 100. This completes a review on both desktop and mobile versions of your website, by completing a page speed test. Anything above 85 indicates that your website is performing well.

The insights measure your page in two parts: Time to above-the-fold content to load and time to full page load.

GTmetrix

Another free tool, GTmetrix goes into great detail about both page speed and YSlow metrics by dividing reports into five sections: Page speed, YSlow, waterfall breakdown, video, and history.

The difference between this tool and other tools available like Google PageSpeed Insights is that you can test and compare your performance against different connection set-ups like cable or dial-up to see how it affects your page load time.

Optimizing page speed is crucial in today’s digital environment when users expect what they’re searching for to appear straight away. Therefore businesses of all sizes need to take advantage of the available SEO tools and tactics in order to adapt and compete with their peers on the search engine results pages.

Mae-Lei King is an SEO Account Executive at global digital agency Croud, based in their Shrewsbury office.

The post The power of page speed: Practical tips and tools to speed up your site appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2Kt2tR1
via IFTTT

Five ways to target ads on Google that don’t involve keywords

Empathetic Consulting: 3 Things to Remember When Working With Other Teams

Two simple behavioral levers to improve your link building efforts

Link building is hard. Anyone who says otherwise has either not done much of it, or they’re trying to sell you a course.

To make it even harder, there are a million supposed link building hacks and tactics on the web – and most of them are pretty bad. A quick Google search will net you a treasure trove of stale email templates and tactics like link reclamation that either trick you into believing them because they rank well in search, or make you wonder why articles like that don’t have an expiration date.

When it comes down to brass tacks, there are really only two broad strategies for increasing your link building effectiveness, both of which come from a framework using BJ Fogg’s behavior model:

• Increase motivation (make them want to link to you more) or
• Decrease friction (make it easier for them to link to you)

Link building is a critical part of SEO, whether your website is small or large.

Here’s how you can use BJ Fogg’s framework to really improve your link building strategies – despite what your Google searches are telling you.

What is BJ Fogg’s behavior model?

BJ Fogg’s behavior model illustrates that three elements must converge at the exact same moment for a behavior to occur: “Motivation”, “Ability”, and a “Prompt”. When the desired behavior is not performed, one or more of these elements is missing.

Source: Behaviormodel.org

Each of these elements is comprised of subcomponents. For example, “Core Motivators” will shape the “Motivation” element, “Simplicity Factors” define the “Ability” element, and each of these will work together in the context of the “Prompt”.

“Motivation” and “Ability” share a compensatory relationship in that when one is high, the other can be low and still achieve the desired results. For example, if something is hard to do, success can still be achieved if the motivation is high enough.

When this model is applied to link building, your best chance at securing a quality link is to either increase someone’s motivation to link to you or decrease friction to make it easier to link to you.

Let’s dive in.

Method one: Increase motivation

If you’re trying to increase motivation, you need to figure out how to influence how much the blogger or publisher wants to give you a link. The main way to do that is to produce really amazing content. That’s really a pre-requisite, for any long term content program, you can’t cut corners on content quality.

Outside of that, though, there are several ways to increase the blogger’s motivation to give you a link to that amazing content:

1. Build reciprocity and play the long game

Creating strong relationships is a clear path to increasing motivation. Your strategic partners can be an “in” to new markets or audiences, and ideally, you’ll be able to offer the same benefit to them.

As marketing strategist Mark Lindquist of Mailshake notes, when forming strategic partnerships, it’s not just about building high-profile relationships – it’s about working with the right people.

“I’m not at all concerned about the social following of someone as an indication of whether or not they’re worth connecting with,” he says. “Figure out what your goals are, find the people who can help you accomplish those goals, and build relationships with them.”

Guest posting is a great way to start building these relationships, but it’s also important to go to meetups, get on calls, and generally build your network and help others out. A good rule is to offer something of value first before asking for something in return. It’s a long game, but it will ultimately result in a win-win for everyone involved.

2. Offer clear incentives

‘What’s in it for me?”

This is the ultimate question at the center of almost any transaction or conversation in marketing and business, and for good reason. Mercy and gratitude won’t get the job done. You need to push the self-interest button to spur action.

If someone is devoting time and resources to help you, they’ll want to know that it’s worth their efforts. What incentives can you offer?

If you have a large social following, use it as leverage in the deal. They can tap into your audience and essentially get free exposure if they’re willing to do the same for you.

3. Give them something truly helpful

If your content genuinely helps someone improve their own content, it’s a much easier sell than a stale pitch of “My content is slightly better than what you already link to”. Here’s what better content could look like:

New original research

At Hubspot, we did some original research with the goal of getting some links back to our forms product. We published a blog post with the findings, and it was pretty easy to pick up some links because the data was new and interesting to bloggers.

Source: ahrefs

Exclusive quotes and interviews

Working with influencers is a strategy that works for tons of companies like DataBox, BigCommerce, and Mailshake.

For example, Smart Blogger uses round-up pieces to boost social shares and connect with influencers. They reached out to bloggers asking for their best tips on how to promote a blog, and the final article became one of their most successful posts at that time with more than 4,000 shares.

New images and graphs

Infographics and images can become outdated just as easily as blog text. As new research and information become available, images and infographics should be adjusted to reflect it.

I think the infographic link building tactic is sometimes overdone, but it can still work if you do it right. It’s best when you’re summarizing new data or complex information in a simple and interesting way. A great example is Pique Tea’s guide to intermittent fasting (a complex subject):

Source: blog.piquetea.com

SEO Smarty’s case study shows how they shared an infographic at scale using MyBlogGuest to get it in front of potential publishers (they earned 10 links from this method, by the way).

Or, you could do this the old-fashioned way by posting your infographic to your own blog, sharing seed content on social media, and reaching out to potential publications that could use it.

Anything that genuinely improves their content, ask yourself – “How can I improve tons of people’s content by creating something new?”

What questions do you have while reading content that goes unanswered? Could something you’ve written help to clarify?

LawnStarter does this well with their original research and data analysis pieces. For example, their blog post on the beneficial insects for your lawn includes backlinks to reputable sources for more information without distracting from the overall content.

Method two: Decrease friction

The other link building method is to lower the friction or the inherent effort it takes someone to give you a link. Your goal should be to make things as easy as possible for the person on the other side.

1. Make your outreach emails as clear as possible

Good email outreach means that the person on the other end of your email shouldn’t have to figure out what you’re trying to say. If they don’t understand your request, they probably won’t respond to it.

Keep it simple and professional, but don’t be afraid to infuse a little personality, either:

 

Image Source

There’s no need for mystery or ulterior motives. Ask for what you want, and tell them why you’re asking for it.

2. Deliver your quote or link fully formatted and ready to go

Give publishers as little work to do as possible. This not only makes it easy for them to do what you want, but it also ensures the quality of the final results. Your link or quote looks just as you want it to, the anchor text is spot-on, and you can reach back out with a genuine “Thank you”.

Other sources you can tap into are HARO or even Slack groups where people are actively looking for quotes. This is a super low-friction way to get links – for you and the publisher – because the barrier to entry is low.

3. Provide free content by guest posting

Guest posting remains one of the most effective, low-friction ways to earn backlinks. If your post is good, the publisher has zero work to do other than hit “Publish”.

If you can write a good guest post, you’re giving someone content for free, which is a win-win. Many publishers have a dedicated contributor program, but even if you don’t see one on their website, they still may accept guest posts with a good pitch.

Also, don’t forget to reduce friction in your own process. Use a cold email tool like Mailshake and a good CRM like HubSpot to automate and track all of your efforts, and remove much of the guesswork on outreach and follow-up.

BJ Fogg’s behavior model has been applied to a myriad of practical use cases, but its potency for effective link building is hard to ignore. Increasing someone else’s motivation and decreasing friction might not help you earn every link you pursue, but it can help you win bigger and lose smaller the more you do it.

Alex Birkett is a Senior Growth Marketing Manager at HubSpot, where he focuses on freemium user growth. He can be found on Twitter @iamalexbirkett.

The post Two simple behavioral levers to improve your link building efforts appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2OnmUUl
via IFTTT

9 Tips to Integrate Organic, Paid, and Content - Whiteboard Friday

Five extensions to help you boost on-page SEO

While there are many extensions that can supplement your online presence and improve your on-page SEO performance, some happen to be very underrated but offer a lot more than others.

On-page SEO is an integral part of online marketing. Over time, on-page SEO has been hammered and defined into several key instruments of the digital marketing toolbox that helps brands achieve their business goals on search engines. Without practicing on-page SEO, your brand may not rank on search engines effectively and fail to achieve the competitive edge it needs to get online exposure, generate leads, and earn revenue.

In this article, we will share five extensions to boost on-page SEO. These would directly complement your on-page SEO strategy, help you rack-up rankings, track your website’s performance and measure the core metrics of your online progress.

By using these five extensions you can build a stronger digital footprint on Google and significantly increase the efficiency in your marketing operations.

1. Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs is a great on-site SEO tool for your website that helps remove duplicate content and improves the crawl-ability of your web pages through canonical meta tags. It comes with a bunch of useful features that allow you to add tags to products, categories, and other pages of your website, improving relevancy with other pages and eventually helps boost on-page SEO. After installing them to your store you can set the authoritative version of your website by adding canonical tags to your store view, storefront, or a custom URL. Moreover, this extension organizes and defines your website content for search engines and users by adding canonical to layered navigation pages.

2. Hreflang tag implementer

Hreflang was Introduced by Google in 2011 to improve the relevance of searches by geographic location and distinguish the relationship between alternate languages and web-pages. Hreflang helps organize your website’s traffic inflows by specifying its geographic and language restrictions. These tags are understood by search engines which rank the website based on its geographical targets. But since the hreflang attribute has to be placed separately in the HTTP header, on-page markup, or the sitemap, many website owners face difficulty in determining the ideal location to use. With hreflang tag implementer, you can automatically generate alternate hreflang tags for any specific location. This allows website owners to prevent plagiarism issues when they add duplicate content on their website and is particularly advantageous for on-page SEO of bi-lingual websites that have language-specific audiences.

3. Image Alt tags extension

Alt tags are an important part of on-page SEO. These attributes help in creating a more accurate image context/descriptions for crawlers and search bots to index your image properly on search engines. Moreover, they serve a crucial purpose for visually impaired users in finding your website images through screen readers. But since they require dedicated effort, they often end up last in the list of tasks. Image Alt tags extension makes this simple and efficient for website owners by automatically generating alt tags that are SEO optimized for product images. It allows you to create unique and image friendly alt tags by using either custom text option or default product attributes.

4. SEO meta tags and templates

Being one of the fundamental elements of SEO, meta tags also serve a key factor in Google’s ranking process. But since meta tags have to be added individually, many website owners often neglect their implementation because of the time they consume. To make this process simpler, extensions such as SEO meta tags offer automation features that cut the process into a fraction of the time it takes to update meta tags. The extension helps optimize your on-page performance by automatically updating meta-tags on your products, generating meta titles, descriptions, keywords based on products, categories, and different CMS pages.

5. HTML and XML sitemap generator

A sitemap is an HTML or XML document that declares the list of pages your website contains by communicating it to search engines such as Google for indexing. These files are used by search engines to make your web pages more discover-able especially when you have a big website that contains loads of content. However, creating sitemaps involve certain technicalities and may not be everyone’s cup of tea. To overcome this, you can use an HTML and XML sitemap extension that helps auto-generate SEO optimized XML and HTML sitemaps so your web pages get indexed faster. Furthermore, it helps strengthen your internal linking, improve user navigation and boosts your on-page SEO.

Zeeshan Khalid is a web entrepreneur and an eCommerce specialist, and the CEO of FME extensions.

The post Five extensions to help you boost on-page SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2YmtrT3
via IFTTT

The ABCs of Video Content: How to Build a Video Marketing Strategy

Small-budget guide to testing ad copy, landing pages, and more

When you have a smaller digital marketing budget, you might think that testing should take a backseat to efficiency and driving conversions – but that would be short-sighted.

In order to stay competitive, continue to take up more market share, and keep up with the changing digital space it’s important to always be testing.

That said, you can test almost anything, but don’t get bogged down with your options. With a small budget, it’s important to focus on one or two tests at a time to make sure that you can reach statistical significance relatively quickly.

In this post, we’ll focus on some of the most important tests you can run:

1. Ad copy testing

2. Landing page testing

3. Testing new engines and ad formats

Ad copy testing 

Ad copy testing can do more than lead to more efficient ads. It can be a very effective tool for testing messaging that you can apply to other marketing efforts like your website, emails, and other digital marketing collaterals. Testing different messages can also help to understand your customer base and the ways they engage with your ads. Is there something that is getting a strong CTR but not converting down-funnel? Maybe you aren’t qualifying the user. My recommendation is to run at least two versions of your ads at all times, with particular attention paid to calls-to-action, pre-qualifiers, and value propositions.

In the image below, a bunch of hotel aggregators shows different value propositions – discounts, price comparisons, and selection:

If you’re a hotel aggregator trying to draw eyes and clicks, consider those main value props and how to stand out from the crowd. If you have a unique selling proposition, for example, exclusive access to boutique hotels, use it and see how users react.

Landing page testing

For lead gen and B2B businesses, tuning up your landing page can be hugely impactful in improving lead quality. You can test a ton of areas, but one of my favorites – simple and high-impact – is your download form. For example, it could be a “request a demo”, “download a whitepaper” type of landing page. Test the layout, the number of fields, the fields specified, error messages, and consider adding testimonials and value propositions to the lead form’s landing page to encourage users to convert. The surest rule of thumb with a landing page is to do everything you can to not confuse the user. The landing page from Blurb is a great example of a clean page with a simple value prop and CTA:

Source: Blurb

The number of fields is one of the simplest factors to address, too many fields can dissuade the user from filling out the form, but your internal team needs a certain amount of information to qualify the leads. Our recommendation is to winnow down the number of fields to only what your internal team can’t dig up on their own. If the lead volume gets to be too overwhelming for your team to do the research, consider adding fields to capture the hardest-to-find information.

Testing new engines and ad formats

If you stand still in this industry, you’ll fall behind, so make sure you’re testing emerging channels and ad formats. Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms are constantly introducing new ad formats, for example – lead gen forms, responsive search ads, and dynamic creative, all introduced in the last 12 months. Channels like Quora, Reddit, and SnapChat are clamoring for marketing attention and offer new ways to engage users.

For established platforms, test just about any beta you can get your hands on. They often provide performance gains because the competition is greatly reduced. Early adoption has its risks, but we’ve found those to be generally outweighed by the rewards of low initial costs and the chance to get a jump on creating best practices.

To expand your reach, it’s important to test into new engines. Putting a percentage of your budget (we’d recommend 15-20% as a rule of thumb for SMBs) into a new channel can help you find more efficient and qualified leads and potentially open up a budget.

Let’s start testing

You might be asking yourself, “How long do I run these tests?”, “What tests do I start out with?”, and “How do I measure the impact of these tests?”. And those are critical questions.

There is no set length for how long to run a test. It varies for every business. I recommend using a statistical significance calculator (a quick Google search for the term brings up dozens of options, we recommend Neil Patel’s or Optimizely’s) to see if you have reached statistical significance. Those tools are great free resources to let you know how much faith to put in your test results – or whether you need more volume to feel confident in your findings.

You might be tempted to make a decision before you have enough data, but I would recommend against that, especially if one or two conversions might sway the different outcome. In terms of what tests to prioritize, I would recommend you think about your business goals and objectives for the year. Maybe refining your messaging isn’t as important as driving more leads or testing new channels.

If you are into lead gen or B2B business running a landing page test or testing new engines or ad formats, it’s important to understand lead performance at all points of the funnel – are they marketing qualified leads? Are they turning into paying customers? Are they junk leads? Whatever your metrics, make sure to establish concrete before-and-after testing windows to compare apples to apples, and make sure no other hugely significant updates, for instance,  a rebrand or price increase are muddying the data.

Good luck, and happy testing.

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

The post Small-budget guide to testing ad copy, landing pages, and more appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2Zj0apT
via IFTTT

The Ultimate Guide to SEO Meta Tags

Posted by katemorris

Editor's note: This post first appeared in April of 2017, but because SEO (and Google) changes so quickly, we figured it was time for a refresh!

---

Meta tags represent the beginning of most SEO training, for better or for worse. I contemplated exactly how to introduce this topic because we always hear about the bad side of meta tags — namely, the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they're at the top of every page in the header and are therefore the first thing seen. But we don't want to get too negative; meta tags are some of the best tools in a search marketer's repertoire.

There are meta tags beyond just description and keywords, though those two are picked on the most. I've broken down the most-used (in my experience) by the good, the bad, and the indifferent. You'll notice that the list gets longer as we get to the bad ones. I didn't get to cover all of the meta tags possible to add, but there's a comprehensive meta tag resource you should check out if you're interested in everything that's out there.

It's important to note that in 2019, you meta tags still matter, but not all of them can help you. It's my experience, and I think anyone in SEO would agree, that if you want to rank high in search, your meta tags need to accompany high-quality content that focuses on user satisfaction.

My main piece of advice: stick to the core minimum. Don't add meta tags you don't need — they just take up code space. The less code you have, the better. Think of your page code as a set of step-by-step directions to get somewhere, but for a browser. Extraneous meta tags are the annoying "Go straight for 200 feet" line items in driving directions that simply tell you to stay on the same road you're already on!

The good meta tags

These are the meta tags that should be on every page, no matter what. Notice that this is a small list; these are the only ones that are required, so if you can work with just these, please do.

• Meta content type – This tag is necessary to declare your character set for the page and should be present on every page. Leaving this out could impact how your page renders in the browser. A few options are listed below, but your web designer should know what's best for your site.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

• Title – While the title tag doesn’t start with "meta," it is in the header and contains information that's very important to SEO. You should always have a unique title tag on every page that describes the page. Check out this post for more information on title tags.
• Meta description – The infamous meta description tag is used for one major purpose: to describe the page to searchers as they read through the SERPs. This tag doesn't influence ranking, but it's very important regardless. It's the ad copy that will determine if users click on your result. Keep it within 160 characters, and write it to catch the user's attention. Sell the page — get them to click on the result. Here's a great article on meta descriptions that goes into more detail.
• Viewport – In this mobile world, you should be specifying the viewport. If you don’t, you run the risk of having a poor mobile experience — the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool will tell you more about it. The standard tag is:

<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

The indifferent meta tags

Different sites will need to use these in specific circumstances, but if you can go without, please do.

• Social meta tags – I'm leaving these out. OpenGraph and Twitter data are important to sharing but are not required per se.
• Robots – One huge misconception is that you have to have a robots meta tag. Let's make this clear: In terms of indexing and link following, if you don't specify a meta robots tag, they read that as index,follow. It's only if you want to change one of those two commands that you need to add meta robots. Therefore, if you want to noindex but follow the links on the page, you would add the following tag with only the noindex, as the follow is implied. Only change what you want to be different from the norm.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

• Specific bots (Googlebot) – These tags are used to give a specific bot instructions like noodp (forcing them not to use your DMOZ listing information, RIP) and noydir (same, but instead the Yahoo Directory listing information). Generally, the search engines are really good at this kind of thing on their own, but if you think you need it, feel free. There have been some cases I've seen where it's necessary, but if you must, consider using the overall robots tag listed above.
• Language – The only reason to use this tag is if you're moving internationally and need to declare the main language used on the page. Check out this meta languages resource for a full list of languages you can declare.
• Geo – The last I heard, these meta tags are supported by Bing but not Google (you can target to country inside Search Console). There are three kinds: placename, position (latitude and longitude), and region.

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">

• Keywords – Yes, I put this on the "indifferent" list. While no good SEO is going to recommend spending any time on this tag, there's some very small possibility it could help you somewhere. Please leave it out if you're building a site, but if it's automated, there's no reason to remove it.
• Refresh – This is the poor man's redirect and should not be used, if at all possible. You should always use a server-side 301 redirect. I know that sometimes things need to happen now, but Google is NOT a fan.
• Site verification – Your site is verified with Google and Bing, right? Who has the verification meta tags on their homepage? These are sometimes necessary because you can't get the other forms of site verification loaded, but if at all possible try to verify another way. Google allows you to verify by DNS, external file, or by linking your Google Analytics account. Bing still only allows by XML file or meta tag, so go with the file if you can.

The bad meta tags

Nothing bad will happen to your site if you use these — let me just make that clear. They're a waste of space though; even Google says so (and that was 12 years ago now!). If you're ready and willing, it might be time for some spring cleaning of your <head> area.

• Author/web author – This tag is used to name the author of the page. It's just not necessary on the page.
• Revisit after – This meta tag is a command to the robots to return to a page after a specific period of time. It's not followed by any major search engine.
• Rating – This tag is used to denote the maturity rating of content. I wrote a post about how to tag a page with adult images using a very confusing system that has since been updated (see the post's comments). It seems as if the best way to note bad images is to place them on a separate directory from other images on your site and alert Google.
• Expiration/date – "Expiration" is used to note when the page expires, and "date" is the date the page was made. Are any of your pages going to expire? Just remove them if they are (but please don't keep updating content, even contests — make it an annual contest instead!). And for "date," make an XML sitemap and keep it up to date. It's much more useful.
• Copyright – That Google article debates this with me a bit, but look at the footer of your site. I would guess it says "Copyright 20xx" in some form. Why say it twice?
• Abstract – This tag is sometimes used to place an abstract of the content and used mainly by educational pursuits.
• Distribution – The "distribution" value is supposedly used to control who can access the document, typically set to "global." It's inherently implied that if the page is open (not password-protected, like on an intranet) that it's meant for the world. Go with it, and leave the tag off the page.
• Generator – This is used to note what program created the page. Like "author," it's useless.
• Cache-control – This tag is set in hopes of controlling when and how often a page is cached in the browser. It's best to do this in the HTTP header.
• Resource type – This is used to name the type of resource the page is, like "document." Save yourself time, as the DTD declaration does it for you.

There are so many meta tags out there, I’d love to hear about any you think need to be added or even removed! Shout out in the comments with suggestions or questions.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2Z6YXln
via IFTTT

Five biggest misconceptions about PageRank

Google’s PageRank is one of the metrics that started it all. It was present in that very first research paper, that laid a foundation for Google’s entire ranking system.

PageRank figures out the importance, credibility and “weight” of a webpage, based on the type of backlinks that the webpage gets. It’s a system analogous to academic quotations. So the more robust your backlink profile is, the more appropriate and authoritative backlinks you receive, the higher your chances to rank.

We all know perfectly well what importance good backlinks have. The weight assigned to the page due to its backlink profile can make or break the ranking. And ever since PageRank was first adopted, the SEO community started trying to optimize for it. So it goes, they adopt, and we adapt.

During its long history as a vital ranking factor, PageRank was surrounded by a multitude of misconceptions. In this article, I will address some of the most prevalent ones.

1. PageRank as a metric is too old to matter

PageRank went out of public access in 2016. Before that, its last available update was in 2013. And the original algorithm was presented way back in 1999.

On the Internet, not just metrics, but entire tools can become outdated in a matter of weeks. So talking about an instrument from 1999 might seem like a bad idea to some.

And usually, I’d agree. But not in this case.

First of all, PageRank is, in many ways, one of the cornerstones of Google’s entire ranking system. PageRank (PR) was originally created with a specific goal in mind – to help users avoid junk results in their searches. And it’s been fulfilling that function beautifully for years.

Second, it’s not exactly the same metric. PageRank’s formula has been updated dramatically (you can read a more in-depth review of the algorithm changes here). And that’s done in order to reflect the changes in the Internet landscape.

And on top of all that, there is also the news that PageRank’s patent is being prolonged by Google. So it’s pretty obvious that PageRank is still alive and well as a metric of a page’s weight.

Closely connected to the first is the second misconception.

2. Google isn’t using the PageRank tool since they stopped publicly updating it

First off, PageRank was never officially discontinued. It stopped being publicly available, sure. And Google hasn’t updated the publicly available version in years, yes.

But always keep in mind that Google states outright that they are still using PageRank after all these years.

This misconception stems from the fact that Google is no longer showing the public PR scores.

In the beginning, PageRank was an easily and conveniently accessible metric. By using Google Toolbar, you could simply click and see the one to ten value of any page you’re visiting.

That led to the overwhelming use of link spam by the malevolent SEO agencies to get juice from authoritative blogs and websites.

That needed to be stopped, so Google (along with a couple of other search engines) introduced a “nofollow” tag. That’s an attribute that you can use to stop PR from taking certain links into account so that you don’t lose your authority due to link spam.

But even after that, an entire economy grew out of SEO agencies and companies optimizing solely and purely for PR. It got to a point where it started hurting the actual users, at which point Google put their foot down.

3. There’s no way to gauge the weight of a page

Since PR stopped being public, there’s no way to gauge the weight of a page.

This is a tough one because it’s based on a very real, indisputable fact. Since PageRank became closed to the public eye, we can no longer see that metric. That’s pretty much the end of the story.

No company, no developer team, can actually claim to know precisely what PageRank says about any page.

But there are actually alternatives to PageRank, which are definitely useful to look at. Those are the tools like SEO PowerSuite’s InLink Rank, Moz’s Page Authority, and Ahrefs’ URL Rank.

Those are all built with the goal of substituting PageRank in mind. They try to give their users an easy way to understand the relative weight of a page due to the number and quality of its backlinks.

Every one of those alternative metrics uses specific algorithms to get closer to whatever the actual PageRank of a page would’ve been like.

(Note, full disclosure: Me being a creator of SEO PowerSuite, I can only fully vouch for that particular software. I suggest any reader interested to go and check out the work done by other teams.)

4. PageRank lost its weight 

PageRank lost its weight compared to hundreds of other metrics that come in play for Google to determine rankings.

Now, the big question is, does it even matter that there are these alternative metrics available? Since there are hundreds, literally hundreds of metrics that Google uses, can we actually say that backlinks are as important as they once were?

To find this out, we did some research in-house. And we found a strong correlation between InLink Rank scores and Google SERP positions.

We found that the correlation between Domain InLink Rank and SERP ranking stands at a high enough number: 0.128482487. Which means that the backlink profile of a page plays a significant role in the placement of a page in the rankings.

So backlinks absolutely still play a huge role in the ranking of pages. For our part, we routinely perform this type of research, continually finding how important this metric is to the ranking. It’s now up to the webmasters and site admins to keep close tabs on their backlinks, using the available alternatives to PR.

5. You can’t influence your PageRank score

Obviously, even getting that PR score, the question is – To what extent can webmasters really influence it? How much can be done to improve your scoring?

Of course, we cannot really know how to increase PR. But we can definitely talk about some things that you need to avoid in order to not lose any of them.

Run a backlink analysis

We’ve already established that backlinks are still important for rankings. By using software to run backlink analysis you’ll see the type of backlinks you get. Then you can manage your profile that much easier.

Keep your content close to your homepage

It’s a truism that a user should never travel more than three clicks from your homepage. Make sure the important pages stay close to those of high PageRank and ensure that there are breadcrumbs for easier user navigation.

Use anchor text with relevant keywords

Create anchor text with the appropriate (but avoid stuffing at all costs) keywords. This achieves two things:

a) It lets your users orient themselves in your content a lot more.

b) It will help you with optimization.

Organically placed relevant keywords are a perfect way to tell the search engines about the actual content of your page.

Place your links carefully

Always know what kind of weight is carried by what kind of link. Links that you place in your content will be more valuable to PageRank than navigational ones. Keep the number of links out of your pages reasonable, don’t overdo it and damage your PR score inadvertently.

Shape your internal PageRank flow

Use “nofollow” tags and appropriately placed internal links to shape what pages get the highest ranking. For that, first, open an auditor tool to see what pages get the most rankings. In WebSite Auditor, you can see a convenient visualization with every one of your website’s subdomains laid out according to their InLink Rank score.

Based on that, you can easily create a little boost for the pages that don’t get enough ranking, by linking to them from your most important ones.

Perform a technical audit

By performing a technical audit, you can see the internal linking structure, and eliminate the dead links, 4xx pages, and much more, all of which influences your PR score.

Extra – Maximize your linkless mentions

Google is starting to look at your brand mentions, and using the info it found in order to evaluate domain authority. As we know, the algorithms used by Google rely more and more on users’ intentions nowadays than anything else. So the straightforward links will give way to linkless mentions, implied links. Growing linkless mentions is clearly much easier than running backlinks.

Use a social monitoring tool for this. Ideally, the one that has a web crawler of its own instead of relying on third-party databases (Awario comes heavily recommended). Looking through your brand mentions across the social media as well as millions of webpages, you’ll be able to manage your branding that much more successfully.

Conclusion

PageRank is still going strong as a metric used by Google for ranking. It’s been around since 1999, and it’s still one of the cornerstones of Google’s ranking of pages.

Since it’s been closed to the public eye, hundreds of new metrics sprung up, from the quality of images on your page to the existence of a privacy policy, and terms & conditions page that is easily available. But having a solid backlink profile is still as important as ever.

Luckily, due to a vast number of tools available on the market, you can see the state of your backlink profile, and influence it to help your pages and your domain grow. In 2019, it would be foolish to ignore any metric influencing growth. And it’s doubly true for a metric as important and fundamental as PageRank.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at @ab80.

The post Five biggest misconceptions about PageRank appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2YfcUwp
via IFTTT

How to Boost Content Linkability Without Wasting Your Marketing Budget

Converting custom: Using analytics to optimize sales funnels

Sales funnels form the backbone of just about every company you’ll make a purchase from today, tomorrow, or all year round.

For many business owners, the term “sales funnel”, otherwise known as “conversion funnel”, can sound much like self-important corporate jargon – an affectation that makes the process of selling products seem like brain surgery.

The good news is that if you’re already selling goods or services online, then you already have a sales funnel in place. Easy! Right? Well, there’s a significant difference between having a funnel for customer conversions and utilizing your website in a way that actively drives sales.

Fundamentally, a sales funnel is a term that helps you to visualize and understand how a visitor flows from your landing page into the other side of your checkout page – converting themselves into a fully-fledged customer in the process. The reason the word “funnel” is used to describe the process is that you’re aiming to guide prospective customers from your landing page towards a conversion.

There are five key elements behind a strong sales funnel. Firstly, you need to focus on raising awareness of your business and brand. You then need to transform your target audience’s awareness into discernible interest. The third element involves building desire in your product or service from interested visitors. If your sales funnel is firing on all cylinders, the desire you’ve built will then turn into a conversion. Finally, re-engagement is the pivotal ending point – which helps to lure returning customers straight back up to the top of the funnel.

Source: BigCommerce

(An effective sales funnel will not only guide visitors into making a purchase but also re-position strategically so that they feel encouraged to return to buy from you in the near future.)

Learning from your funnels

While many businesses are guilty of leading customers up the garden path, be sure to create a funnel that leads them directly to a conversion. This can be done by carefully crafting your pages in order to encourage a sale, from call-to-actions to alluring offers – if your pages can spark audience interest then your sales funnel will be looking good.

One problem that a surprising number of marketers suffer from is their failure to understand that people are complex creatures and that it is fairly difficult to shepherd them into spending their money. This means there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution when creating effective sales funnels, and the best course of practice is for businesses to get into the minds of their target audience.

How old will our most dedicated customers be? What sort of language will they respond to? How persuasive can we be without running the risk of alienating them?

Audiences are difficult to predict. A punchy and slang-laden call-to-action may work with customers under 25, but this could represent just five percent of your prospective following. Be sure to connect with your target audience in a way that will inspire them to make a purchase.

Time is money, and it certainly pays to be proactive. But setting up a sales funnel that’s reactive enough to adapt to customer demands can certainly work wonders in maximizing your sales moving for the foreseeable future.

Sales funnels are great tools to conduct a little trial and error. Be sure to monitor the key pages that customers would visit during their path towards completing a purchase, and keep a watchful eye for weak links.

There are plenty of analytical approaches towards monitoring the success of your sales funnels, but one of the most effective methods is also the most simple. Keep an eye out for the level of traffic your pages receive. It’s logical that as you peer deeper into your sales funnel, the traffic will drop. From your catalog page to your item description page, to your checkout page, all the way through to your completed purchase page; expect to see fewer visitors and lower click-through levels. However, if a link between one step and another represents something of a cliff-edge in terms of visitor figures, it’s worth rethinking your approach. If masses of visitors decide to leave at a specific stage in the conversion process, it’s logical that you’ve failed to appeal to them effectively enough.

Source: Google Analytics

The value of returning customers

Sales funnels can also tell you a lot about the type of customer you attract. Sometimes marketers are also guilty of failing to differentiate between new customers and returning customers. Your sales funnel could be brimful of exciting offers for fresh-faced new visitors, and mailing list incentives too – but these measures aren’t going to do too much for long-serving customers looking for a fresh reason to jump back down the rabbit hole of your funnel.

Again, the effectiveness of your appeals to new and existing customers alike can be analyzed at varying depths, depending on the tools you have at your disposal (said tools will be explored later).

The value of the returning customer certainly can’t be underestimated. They’ve already gone to the trouble of coughing up for your goods or services so it can be assumed that they’re better placed to shoot through your funnel and make a purchase again.

The industry-wide emphasis on attracting new blood into a sales funnel can risk leaving existing customers feeling alienated – and is a particularly common oversight when it comes to businesses offering services.

Returning customers have little reason to be exposed to your glowing company testimonial page (even if the five-star review you received two weeks ago feels worthy of hanging up on the office wall), they’ve already experienced your sales process and enjoyed it enough to revisit your site.

If you see that there are considerable numbers of returning customers on to your homepage but very few completing purchases in relation to new visitors, it could mean that your sales funnel isn’t structured to be appealing enough to them.

Should your sales funnel analytics point to a need for engaging better with existing customers, consider investing fresh content that gives them a reason to get excited about your products. Regular blog posts are a great way to help keep your audience interested and engaged – whether it’s their first time visiting your site or the 301st time.

If you’re keen to level the playing field between new and returning customers, a great way of covering all bases is to utilize smart call-to-actions for your website and mailing lists. Smart CTAs are capable of displaying different information in the same space on your website’s pages, depending on a range of variables – like a visitor’s location, preferred language, membership to a mailing list or whether they’re a new or existing customer.

Tools

Naturally, there’s a wide range of tools available to help you to tap into your sales funnel performance and analyze exactly who you’re appealing to and who appears to be disinterested in your product.

SEO guru, Neil Patel, believes that Google Analytics can enable marketers to take a more organic approach in monitoring their sales funnel. By listing a range of significant pages throughout your funnel to monitor, Google Analytics can tell users exactly where potential customers lose interest as well as quantifying the most effective pages of your site in a marketing perspective.

For a deeper, more exponential scrub of exactly how well your sales funnel is performing, using tools like Finteza can help. The tool allows you to register events like account registration, email subscription, and purchases, carry out behavioral analysis and see the final drop-off point.

Source: Finteza

(Image above shows Finteza’s “Exits” section that illustrates where sessions are completed and which external link has caused the exit.)

Such tools enable you to essentially visualize your funnel, whilst regular reports can keep you fully aware of its performance long into the future.

When it comes to analyzing exactly what makes returning customers tick, the insight provided by Kissmetrics takes some beating. With intuitive visualizations and customer retention analysis, Kissmetrics makes for a formidable tool in shaping a winning sales funnel.

Source: Kissmetrics

Remember, audience behavior can be tricky to predict. You might think that your sales funnel is entirely leak-free, but with the support of competent analytics, you’ll be capable of tending to any structural weaknesses in a flash before your custom starts to fall away. There’s nothing wrong with a little trial and error in marketing and with the right data behind you, it’s safe to assume that there’ll be a lot more instances of trial and success when it comes to your conversion rates.

Dmytro Spilka is Head Wiz at Solvid Digital. He can be found on Twitter at @spilkadi.

The post Converting custom: Using analytics to optimize sales funnels appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2y51tN3
via IFTTT

Spying On Google: 5 Ways to Use Log File Analysis To Reveal Invaluable SEO Insights

Don’t underestimate the power of video

Video content impacts organic performance more than any other asset that can be displayed on a web page. In today’s online marketing world, videos have become an integral step in the user journey.

Yet for the large enterprises, video optimization is still not an essential part of their website optimization plan. Video content is still battling for recognition among the B2B marketer. Other industries, on the other hand, have already harnessed this power of video.

In the recent Google Marketing Live, Google mentioned that 80% of all online searches are followed by a video search. Some other stats to take into consideration,  according to Smallbiztrends by 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic. Furthermore, pages with videos are 53 times more likely to rank on Google’s first page.

I took a deeper look into video content and its impact on organic performance. My analysis started in the fall of 2018. Google had already started to display video thumbnails in the SERPs. According to research from BrightEdge, Google is now showing video thumbnails in 26% of search results.

 

 

Source: BrightEdge

Understanding the true influence of video SEO for your business will require some testing. I did four different sets of tests to arrive at the sweet spot for our pages.

The first test was to gauge if having video content on the page made any significant changes. I identified a page that ranked on page four of the SERP’s in spite of being well optimized. The team placed video content relevant to the textual content to the page. And the test result was loud and clear, having a video on the page increased relevance, resulting in increased rankings, and visibility in universal search. The Page started to rank on page one and the video thumbnail in the SERPs displayed the desired video and linked back to the page.

The next test was to understand the impact of the method of delivery. I measured what was the level of user engagement and organic performance when video contents are displayed/delivered on the page via different formats. The page was set up wherein users could get access to the video content either via a link that would take the user to YouTube or as a pop-up or as an embedded file that actually plays the video on the page itself. Results were very evident – every time the video was embedded on the page the user engagement increased, which decreased the bounce rate, and improved page ranking.

Taking a step further in our testing journey, I conducted a follow-up test to evaluate which category of video content performs better? Like any other SEO strategy, video optimization isn’t different. Skip the marketing fluff and go for product feature videos, “how-to” videos, or “what is” videos. We tested assorted video contents on the same page. Whenever the content of the video addressed a user need and was relevant to the page textual content the page rankings improved.

Lastly, I tested if Google prefers YouTube videos or domain hosted videos. On this subject, several of my business colleagues and I have budded heads. There is no universal truth. Google does display both YouTube and domain hosted videos in the thumbnails on the SERPs. Different sites will see different results. I tested the impacts of an embedded YouTube video on the page.  What I found was something I had not even considered in my hypothesis. When the video was already present on YouTube and then embedded on the page, the URL improved in rankings and at the same time the thumbnails on the SERPs showed the YouTube video but when the user clicked on the video it took them to the product page and not to the YouTube video.

Key takeaway

Many enterprise SEO strategists failed to leverage the video content because they feel their products are not that B2C in nature. Remember that search engines like videos because searchers like videos.

Videos take the static image or textual content to experience content, wherein the user can actually view how to use the information. This brings in a much higher and stronger level of engagement that in turn improving the brand reputation.

What video content should you consider?

I recommend starting at square one – what is the user intend/need you are trying to address. Define the goals you want to achieve from this video marketing. Are you looking to drive conversions or spread brand awareness? Put some thought into whether the video is informative and engaging and whether it is relevant to the page that it is displayed in.

Don’t overlook how that message is conveyed as well. Take into account personas as that establishes your intended target audience, the overall tone that the video should take. What stage of the user journey is being targeted? Understanding the areas where video results are high can help provide insight and guidance for additional content strategy ideas.

Things to remember when starting to incorporate video content

More and more people are searching and viewing content on their handheld devices. Therefore, you have to optimize this content with a mobile-first approach.

The basic SEO principle still applies. Optimize title, description, tags, transcript. Matching these to the user intent can encourage click-throughs

• Ensure its page placement. Always surround your video with relevant content to tie it all together.
• Videos up to two minutes long get the most engagement. Keep them short and let your brand shine through.

Don’t just link to it, embed it onto your site and make sure the video image is compelling.

This is the critical time to incorporate video content and optimization into your content strategy for 2019. When quality videos are added to web pages, it gets recognized as rich content, a step up from the regular text-filled pages. Video content will only help your optimization strategy in expanding your reach to driving engaged site visits.

Tanu Javeri is Senior Global SEO Strategist at IBM.

The post Don’t underestimate the power of video appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from SEO – Search Engine Watch https://ift.tt/2JQpLzN
via IFTTT

Aren't 301s, 302s, and Canonicals All Basically the Same? - Best of Whiteboard Friday

MozCon 2019: Everything You Need to Know About Day Three

Posted by KameronJenkins

If the last day of MozCon felt like it went too fast or if you forgot everything that happened today (we wouldn't judge — there were so many insights), don't fret. We captured all of day three's takeaways so you could relive the magic of day three. 

Don't forget to check out all the photos with Roger from the photobooth! They're available here in the MozCon Facebook group. Plus: You asked and we delivered: the 2019 MozCon speaker walk-on playlist is now live and available here for your streaming pleasure. 

Cindy Krum— Fraggles, Mobile-First Indexing, & the SERP of the Future 

If you were hit with an instant wave of nostalgia after hearing Cindy's walk out music, then you are in good company and you probably were not disappointed in the slightest by Cindy’s talk on Fraggles.

First learning of the day: Fraggles. Fragment + Handles. A piece of information and an anchor that scrolls directly to the information on the page @Suzzicks #MozCon

— Warrior Forum (@warriorforum) July 17, 2019

• “Fraggles” are fragments + handles. A fragment is a piece of info on a page. A handle is something like a bookmark, jump link, or named anchor — they help people navigate through long pages to get what they’re looking for faster.
• Ranking pages is an inefficient way to answer questions. One page can answer innumerable questions, so Google’s now can pull a single answer from multiple parts of your page, skipping sections they don’t think are as useful for a particular answer.
• The implications for voice are huge! It means you don’t have to listen to your voice device spout off a page’s worth of text before your question is answered.
• Google wants to index more than just websites. They want to organize the world’s information, not websites. Fraggles are a demonstration of that.

Luke Carthy — Killer Ecommerce CRO and UX Wins Using A SEO Crawler 

Luke Carthy did warn us in his talk description that we should all flex our notetaking muscles for all the takeaways we would furiously jot down — and he wasn’t wrong.

“Traffic doesn’t always mean sales, and sales doesn’t always mean traffic.” @MrLukeCarthy #MozCon

— Melina Beeston (@mkbeesto) July 17, 2019

• Traffic doesn’t always mean sales and sales don’t always mean traffic!
• Custom extraction is a great tool for finding missed CRO opportunities. For example, Luke found huge opportunity on Best Buy’s website — thousands of people’s site searches were leading them to an unoptimized “no results found” page.
• You can also use custom extraction to find what product recommendations you or your customers are using at scale! Did you know that 35% of what customers buy on Amazon and 75 percent of what people watch on Netflix are the results of these recommendations?
• For example, are you showing near-exact products or are you showing complementary products? (hint: try the latter and you’ll likely increase your sales!)
• Custom extraction from Screaming Frog allows you to scrape any data from the HTML of the web pages while crawling them.

Andy Crestodina — Content, Rankings, and Lead Generation: A Breakdown of the 1% Content Strategy 

Next up, Andy of Orbit Media took the stage with a comprehensive breakdown of the most effective tactics for turning content into a high-powered content strategy. He also brought the fire with this sound advice that we can apply in both our work life and personal life.

If you write an amazing, high-traffic blog post, the people visiting it don't have commercial intent. People landing on a sales page have 50x higher intent. #mozcon @crestodina

— Mike Arnesen (@Mike_Arnesen) July 17, 2019

• Blog visitors often don’t have commercial intent. One of the greatest ways to leverage blog posts for leads is by using the equity we generate from links to our helpful posts and passing that onto our product and service pages.
• If you want links and shares, invest in original research! Not sure what to research? Look for unanswered questions or unproven statements in your industry and provide the data.
• Original research may take longer than a standard post, but it’s much more effective! When you think about it this way, do you really have time to put out more, mediocre posts?
• Give what you want to get. Want links? Link to people. Want comments? Comment on others people's work.
• To optimize content for social engagement, it should feature real people, their faces, and their quotes.
• Collaborating with other content creators on your content not only gives it built-in amplification, but it also leads to great connections and is just generally more fun.

Rob Ousbey — Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right 

Google’s algorithms have changed a heck of a lot in recent years — what’s an SEO to do? Follow Rob’s advice — both fashion and SEO — who says that the answer lies in testing.

in head terms, it's about user engagement metrics. However, links are more correllated with long tail searches. @RobOusbey #Mozcon

— Matthew Decuir (@MattBasically) July 17, 2019

• “This is the way we’ve always done it” isn’t sufficient justification for SEO tactics in today’s search landscape.
• In the earlier days of the algorithm, it was much easier to demote spam than it was to promote what’s truly good.
• Rob and his team had a theory that Google was beginning to rely more heavily on user experience and satisfaction than some of the more traditional ranking factors like links.
• Through SEO A/B testing, they found that:
  • Google relies less heavily on link signals when it comes to the top half of the results on page 1.
  • Google relies more heavily on user experience for head terms (terms with high search volume), likely because they have more user data to draw from.
• In the process of A/B testing, they also found that the same test often produces different results on different sites. The best way to succeed in today’s SEO landscape is to cultivate a culture of testing!

Greg Gifford — Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and Q&A 

If you’re a movie buff, you probably really appreciated Greg’s talk — he schooled us all in movie references and brought the fire with his insights on Google Posts and Q&A  

Google Posts allows you to drive conversions without driving people to your site - convert on zero-click searches! @GregGifford #MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 17, 2019

The man behind #shoesofmozcon taught us that Google is the new home page for local businesses, so we should be leveraging the tools Google has given us to make our Google My Business profiles great. For example…

Google Posts

• Images should be 1200x900 on google posts
• Images are cropped slightly higher than the center and it’s not consistent every time
• The image size of the thumbnail is different on desktop than it is on mobile
• Use Greg’s free tool at bit.ly/posts-image-guide to make sizing your Google Post images easier
• You can also upload videos. The file size limit is 100mb and/or 30 seconds
• Add a call-to-action button to make your Posts worth it! Just know that the button often means you get less real estate for text in your Posts
• Don’t share social fluff. Attract with an offer that makes you stand out
• Make sure you use UTM tracking so you can understand how your Posts are performing in Google Analytics. Otherwise, it’ll be attributed as direct traffic.

Google Q&A

• Anyone can ask and answer questions — why not the business owner! Control the conversation and treat this feature like it's your new FAQ page.
• This feature works on an upvote system. The answer with the most upvotes will show first.
• Don’t include a URL or phone number in these because it’ll get filtered out.
• A lot of these questions are potential customers! Out of 640 car dealerships’ Q&As Greg evaluated, 40 percent were leads! Of that 40 percent, only 2 questions were answered by the dealership.

 Emily Triplett Lentz — How to Audit for Inclusive Content 

Emily of Help Scout walked dropped major knowledge on the importance of spotting and eliminating biases that frequently find their way into online copy. She also hung out backstage after her talk to cheer on her fellow speakers. #GOAT. #notallheroeswearcapes.

"My desire for a specific word choice doesn't negate someone else's need for safety" -- @emilytlentz #MozCon pic.twitter.com/sXF2CjXVzo

— Yosef Silver (@ysilver) July 17, 2019

• As content creators, we’d all do well to keep ableism in mind: discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. However, we’re often guilty of this without even knowing it.
• One example of ableism that often makes its way into our copy is comparing dire or subideal situations with the physical state of another human (ex: “crippling”).
• While we should work on making our casual conversation more inclusive too, this is particularly important for brands.
• Create a list of ableist words, crawl your site for them, and then replace them. However, you’ll likely find that there is no one-size-fits-all replacement for these words. We often use words like “crazy” as filler words. By removing or replacing with a more appropriate word, we make our content better and more descriptive in the process.
• At the end of the day, brands should remember that their desire for freedom of word choice isn’t more important than people’s right not to feel excluded and hurt. When there’s really no downside to more inclusive content, why wouldn’t we do it?

Visit http://content.helpscout.net/mozcon-2019 to learn how to audit your site for inclusive content!

Joelle Irvine — Image & Visual Search Optimization Opportunities 

Curious about image optimization and visual search? Joelle has the goods for you — and was blowing people's minds with her tips for visual optimization and how to leverage Google Lens, Pinterest, and AR for visual search.

“Visual search is easier when you don’t know what you’re looking for, when you’re looking to match a particular style, and when your search way is too long or complicated.” @joelleirvine #MozCon

— Melina Beeston (@mkbeesto) July 17, 2019

• Visual search is not the same thing as searching for images. We’re talking about the process of using an image to search for other content.
• Visual search like Google Lens makes it easier to search when you don’t know what you’re looking for.
• Pinterest has made a lot of progress in this area. They have a hybrid search that allows you to find complimentary items to the one you searched. It’s like finding a rug that matches a chair you like rather than finding more of the same type of chair.
• 62 percent of millennials surveyed said they would like to be able to search by visual, so while this is mostly being used by clothing retailers and home decor right now, visual search is only going to get better, so think about the ways you can leverage it for your brand!

Joy Hawkins — Factors that Affect the Local Algorithm that Don't Impact Organic 

Proximity varies greatly when comparing local and organic results — just ask Joy of Sterling Sky, who gets real about fake listings while walking through the findings of a recent study.

Local results not only vary by city, but even within the same zip codes, there can be drastically different local results. @JoyanneHawkins #mozcon pic.twitter.com/8g6acxUDAq

— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) July 17, 2019

Here are the seven areas in which the local algorithm diverges from the organic algorithm:

• Proximity (AKA: how close is the biz to the searcher?)
  • Proximity is the #1 local ranking factor, but the #27 ranking factor on organic.
  • Studies show that having a business that’s close in proximity to the searcher is more beneficial for ranking in the local pack than in traditional organic results.
• Rank tracking
  • Because there is so much variance by latitude/longitude, as well as hourly variances, Joy recommends not sending your local business clients ranking reports.
  • Use rank tracking internally, but send clients the leads/sales. This causes less confusion and gets them focused on the main goal.
  • Visit bit.ly/mozcon3 for insights on how to track leads from GMB
• GMB landing pages (AKA: the website URL you link to from your GMB account)
  • Joy tested linking to the home page (which had more authority/prominence) vs. linking to the local landing page (which had more relevance) and found that traffic went way up when linking to the home page.
  • Before you go switching all your GMB links though, test this for yourself!
• Reviews
  • Joy wanted to know how much reviews actually impacted ranking, and what it was exactly about reviews that would help or hurt.
  • She decided to see what would happen to rankings when reviews were removed. This happened to a business who was review gating (a violation of Google’s guidelines) but Joy found that reviews flagged for violations aren’t actually removed, they’re hidden, explaining why “removed” reviews don’t negatively impact local rankings.
• Possum filter
  • Organic results can get filtered because of duplicate content, whereas local results can get filtered because they’re too close to another business in the same category. This is called the Possum filter.
• Keywords in a business name
  • This is against Google’s guidelines but it works sadly
  • For example, Joy tested adding the word “salad bar” to a listing that didn’t even have a salad bar and their local rankings for that keyword shot up.
  • Although it works, don’t do it! Google can remove your listing for this type of violation, and they’ve been removing more listings for this reason lately.
• Fake listings
  • New listings can rank even if they have no website, authority, citations, etc. simply because they keyword stuffed their business name. These types of rankings can happen overnight, whereas it can take a year or more to achieve certain organic rankings.
  • Spend time reporting spam listings in your clients’ niches because it can improve your clients’ local rankings.

Britney Muller — Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target 

Closing out day three of MozCon was our very own Britney, Sr. SEO scientist extraordinaire, on everyone’s favorite SEO topic: Featured snippets!

Why are we so concerned about traffic? What about branding/messaging/share of voice? You can't NOT target a keyword just because it has a Featured Snippet @BritneyMuller #MozCon

— Ruth Burr Reedy (@ruthburr) July 17, 2019

We’re seeing more featured snippets than ever before, and they’re not likely going away. It’s time to start capitalizing on this SERP feature so we can start earning brand awareness and traffic for our clients!

Here’s how:

• Know what keywords trigger featured snippets that you rank on page 1 for
• Know the searcher’s intent
• Provide succinct answers
• Add summaries to popular posts
• Identify commonly asked questions
• Leverage Google’s NLP API
• Monitor featured snippets
• If all else fails, leverage ranking third party sites. Maybe your own site has low authority and isn’t ranking well, but try publishing on Linkedin or Medium instead to get the snippet!

There’s lots of debate over whether featured snippets send you more traffic or take it away due to zero-click results, but consider the benefits featured snippets can bring even without the click. Whether featured snippets bring you traffic, increased brand visibility in the SERPs, or both, they’re an opportunity worth chasing.

Aaaand, that's a wrap!

Thanks for joining us at this year's MozCon! And a HUGE thank you to everyone (Mozzers, partners, and crew) who helped make this year's MozCon possible — we couldn't have done it without all of you. 

What was your favorite moment of the entire conference? Tell us below in the comments! And don't forget to grab the speaker slides here! 

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2GdsthR
via IFTTT