Ultimate guide to video marketing on YouTube

30-second summary:

• YouTube’s popularity has made it the second most popular search engine after Google.
• For marketers trying to market their products and services to new audiences, YouTube needs to become a priority.
• Venngage’s Ronita Mohan outlines everything you need to know about YouTube product marketing in the ultimate guide below.
• From deciding your target audience and goals to creating great, targeted content, YouTube SEO, metrics to analyze and more material that will add value to your video marketing efforts.

YouTube marketing has fast taken over the world, not just because of the popularity of online videos but because of the accessibility of the platform.

This has led to YouTube becoming the second most popular search engine after Google. Users are heading directly to YouTube for detailed visual answers to their questions, instead of googling their queries.

For marketers trying to market their products and services to new audiences, YouTube needs to become a priority. 

We outline everything you need to know about YouTube product marketing in the ultimate guide below.

Outlining YouTube marketing goals

No marketing strategy would be complete without setting out specific, measurable goals—the same goes for YouTube.

What do you want from your YouTube channel? Do you want to spread brand awareness? Increase conversions? Educate the community?

Accordingly, you will have to design your content and share it with your audience.

You also need to understand the people who use YouTube. Yes, it is a very popular platform, but you aren’t aiming for every single YouTube user.

The goals you set for the channel will also translate into the kind of audience you are aiming to reach—people who want to be educated about a subject, or who want to purchase items that will improve their lives. Or others who just want answers or troubleshooting assistance.

Once you decide on your target audience and your goals, you can create content that specifically caters to them.

Try creating a calendar for your YouTube content—you should aim to post every day, if possible—so that you have clear deadlines for sending out content.

Your videos don’t have to be very long—five minutes at the most—but the channel should be updated frequently so you can improve engagement rates.

Creating a YouTube business channel

According to the latest visual content marketing statistics, video used by marketers has increased by 7% from previous years—and this rise is expected to continue.

When you make a personal Google account, you will be able to sign into YouTube—however, this is not the same as having a business account on the platform.

For one, if you want to upload videos, you need to create a channel—this channel can be specifically for you to upload business videos.

YouTube does offer an option to create an account solely to manage your business—the Brand Account option allows multiple people to use the same login to manage the account and gives you access to analytics.

You still need to create a channel for the Brand Account if you want to upload videos, leave comments, and make playlists.

Once you create your channel, it is imperative that you add your brand logo as the profile image, in the right dimensions—800 x 800 pixels.

You also need to add a YouTube banner (like the Lego channel example above)—2,560 x 1,440 pixels is the recommended size from Google. Check the cropping across devices and finalize the art.

With the channel art uploaded, you should add your associated brand accounts—your website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al.

The links you add will appear on your channel as icons that users can then click through to.

You will also need to add a brief description of your company, and you have the option of creating a welcome video that will introduce visitors to your channel.

These are the basics of setting up your business channel. Then, it’s onto content creation.

YouTube marketing video types

There are a number of video types that you can explore when creating content for your YouTube channel. We look at seven of the most popular varieties below.

1. Behind the scenes

Take users into the life and times of your brand and your company culture with behind-the-scenes videos. Tours of your office space, Q&As with staff members, highlights from office events—these all make for excellent social content. 

 

The Lush behind-the-scenes video is a great example of how engaging this content is—two employees share how a product is made, intercut with visuals of the actual process.

It’s soothing, calming, fun, and it gives the company a more personal outlook.

2. “Best of” videos

 

Most YouTube channels round off the year with ‘best of’ videos—of the year, the decade, the season, best tools, or best strategies. And this is something that you can collate for your brand, or collaborate with someone to create.

“Best of” videos are also great gateway content—someone searching for videos on a particular topic could find yours and be interested enough in your content to watch more. 

3. Explainer videos

These are very popular types of videos—people are constantly looking for solutions to their problems. This is why YouTube has become a favourite search engine in its own right.

Make life easier for users by creating explainer videos that showcase how to use a product, how to troubleshoot an issue, or how to understand a concept or industry.

 

Google Small Business’ video on taking high-quality photos is a simple but effective explainer—it features someone who has had success in the area alongside clear and easy-to-follow steps. 

Note the friendly and comforting tone that makes the video more accessible to users who may be at the beginner stage of business photography. This helps make content more relatable and engaging.

4. Interviews

Interviews with professionals in your field, in your company, or in an area of interest to your audience also make for popular content.

Akin to explainer videos, interviews also place your brand as a thought leader in the field—it tells people that you don’t just create content, you are an expert on it. 

 

This interview from Inc with a leading CEO in the field makes for great content. The light and personal tone, the choice of the interviewee, and the message all place the brand as a thought leader trying to improve the knowledge of their audience.

5. Listicles

Lists make for very popular content online—whether in blogs, infographics, or videos, lists about a topic are eye-catching and easy to consume. 

 

Listicles are the most popular kind of content online. The Ahrefs video here is short, snappy, and to the point. 

But the reason why listicles work is that they are finite—the audience knows there are 3 points and they can also go back to the point that is more relevant to them.

When attention spans are low, it helps to make your content more bite-sized, as exemplified in listicles.

6. Product demos

Make your product readily usable for customers by creating a product demo—that you can then use on your website. A demo will answer a lot of questions about the way a product should be used, while also acting as a sales pitch to buyers who are still on the fence. 

 

Oracle Netsuite’s product demo has a simple set up—two people discussing the product with shots of the product in use. It gives users a visual guide to follow and refer to when they’re using the product themselves.

7. Testimonials

The internet may be a bastion of content, but it also has a propensity for spewing information that is patently untrue. If you want users to engage with you, you need to be real.

And what better way to do that than to feature testimonials with real people—staff and customers—on your YouTube channel?

These make for convincing videos that will make your brand look more human.

 

Omada’s testimonial video shows the importance of giving brands a human face—these are real people who were helped by a company and that makes the brand more attractive to potential customers.

Creating YouTube videos

Now that you know what kind of videos you should be creating, it is time to make your videos. 

The content you create should be brand-conscious—ensure your logo is visible but that it doesn’t overwhelm the screen.

You should always include a call-to-action—asking people to subscribe to the channel, to like your video, visit your website, or to use a promo code.

Adding a strong and relevant CTA will help users stay engaged with your brand beyond viewing a single video.

Also, though many think that YouTube videos need to be highly stylized and have great production values, that isn’t always the case.

Focus less on how your video looks, and more on the content of your video.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What story are you trying to tell? 
• Who are you telling it to? 
• What do you want in return?

Answer these questions when you are making your videos—that will help you generate interest in your audience much more than expensive visuals.

Remember that video marketing on channels like YouTube is less about making sales, and more about making connections.

Don’t put content out there and hope for the best. You need to engage with the audience—ask people to comment and then reply to them. Look out for trolls and report them immediately.

Promote your content on social media channels. Add a link to your YouTube channel on your website and newsletter.

YouTube SEO

SEO isn’t just for written content—it has a huge role to play in video marketing, and eventually in how well your channel is received.

There are a number of SEO tools that you can use to make this process easier. But first, you need to know the key aspects of YouTube SEO that you need to work on.

1. Tags

If you want your audience to find your content, your channel and videos need to have the tags that are relevant to them. 

The VidIQ extension is a good tool for checking tags that would be relevant to your content and are more effective in reaching your target audience.

2. Keywords

As with tags, when creating videos, ensure you choose the keywords that not only describe the content but also appeal to your audience.

Use a mind map to brainstorm your keywords and keep track of which ones are most effective for your audience.

3. Headlines

You will have spent time optimizing blog headlines. The same goes for YouTube videos. The headlines you choose should be extremely relevant to your topic. 

Keep the headline to 60 characters—as you would do with a blog headline—so it isn’t cut off on search engines. 

You should keep the primary keywords to the beginning of the headline—another important way to boost organic SEO.

Don’t use obscure keywords as this will make it harder for your videos to be found—and will negatively impact your ranking.

Looking for inspiration?

Here are some headlines that earned brands 1000s of views:

• How to find influencers to explode your Shopify store
• Is this candy actually as intense as it claims?
• What do real people say about Purple?

Short, sharp, and focused headlines will improve clicks and engagement.

4. Thumbnails

The type of thumbnail that appears beside your video has an impact on how many people click on it—thus improving your ranking. According to YouTube, 90% of the top viewed videos feature custom thumbnails.

When you upload a video to YouTube, you will be able to choose a frame from your video. While this makes the process easier, it doesn’t actually tell the audience much about the video.

Instead, create a customized frame to use as the thumbnail—this can include visuals from the video, alongside the headline and a tagline.

Customized thumbnails will share more information than a random screenshot from the video, and make your content more attractive.  

5. Video descriptions

Your video headline can only share so much information—to make your video more compelling to the audience, and for YouTube SEO rankings, write a detailed video description.

As with titles, ensure your primary keywords are kept in the front of the description. Include bullet points about the key areas you are discussing—if you can include timestamps for when in the video you will be discussing these points, even better.

Add a bit of levity by including links to the music you’re using in the video. And you should definitely include your CTA in the description.

To break it down, here are the essential elements of a great video description:

• To-the-point introduction, written in brand tone, explaining exactly what viewers will see in the video
• Keywords, used at the beginning of your description and sprinkled throughout. Avoid keyword stuffing, as you would do with a blog
• Include your CTA below the description—a link to subscribe to your channel, visit your website, or use a code
• Below the CTA, add links to related content
• Add timestamps to important moments in the video

6. Hashtags 

People don’t realize that hashtags on YouTube are definitely a thing—and they can be massively helpful for your organic SEO.

YouTube allows a maximum of 15 hashtags, which can be used in the titles and descriptions of your videos.

These hashtags are clickable—users can see all content related to those hashtags. This also means you need to be judicious in your use of hashtags.

For one, they need to be relevant to your topic. They also need to be popular—obscure hashtags, like rarely-used keywords, won’t be clicked on.

Use hashtags to make your content more easily discoverable but choose them wisely. 

YouTube metrics

The discussion around which YouTube metrics you should be focusing on has been raging for years. There are a large number of metrics available but they aren’t all made equal.

Here are some of the metrics that you should examine when trying to determine how well your content is performing:

• Bounce Rates – The rate at which people are leaving your video before completing it
• Click Rates – The number of times your video is being clicked on
• Completion Rates – How many times your video has been watched to completion 
• Comments – The number of comments your video received
• Conversion Rates – How often users viewed a video and then acted on the CTA
• Likes and Dislikes – The number of likes or dislikes your video received
• Recurrence Rates – How often viewers watched the same video multiple times
• Referrals – Where users are finding your videos from
• Sharing – How often people are sharing your videos
• Subscribers – The number of subscribers your channel has
• Video Views – How many people watched a video in total

Those are a lot of metrics but you don’t have to study each one to decide whether your content is a success.

Go back to the goals that we mentioned in the first point of this blog—what are you trying to achieve with your YouTube marketing strategy? 

• If you want more conversions from your videos examining the completion rates and conversion rates of your videos will tell you whether your content is engaging enough for people to act on your CTA.
• If creating a wholesome YouTube channel is your goal, study the referrals to find out where people are finding your content—so you can optimize those channels further.

Though you will want to grow your subscriber base, the number of subscribers you have may not be indicative of how good your content is.

• If your videos are being viewed despite low subscriber numbers, it may be a sign that your content is good but isn’t catering to repeat customers.
• In general, bounce rates and completion rates are good indicators of the success of your content.

When people leave your video without completing it, that means it didn’t hold their interest. If most people are leaving around the same point in the video, that gives you an idea of what you need to improve in the content itself.

Videos with low completion rates could be indicative of the fact that your videos are too long. Try creating shorter videos to see the impact on completion rates.

Focus on the metrics that align with the goals of your video marketing strategy instead of looking at every single one of them.

YouTube advertising

YouTube advertising is an option that brands can explore once they have become more comfortable with the platform.

According to PPCHero, 48% of marketers are investing in YouTube advertising, making it the third most popular advertising platform, after Facebook and Instagram. 

There are a number of YouTube ad formats that you can use to reach your target audience.

Some YouTube video ad formats:

• Bumper ads: Six-second long unskippable ads that play before, during, and after videos. These cannot be skipped.
• In-stream ads: These 15 second-long ads come in skippable and non-skippable forms and appear before, during, and after videos across YouTube and other Google-affiliated videos.
• Masthead ads: The masthead ads appear muted at the top of the YouTube search page. These ads can be 30 seconds long.
• Outstream ads: Optimized for mobile marketing only, Outstream ads appear on mobile websites associated with Google, not on YouTube mobile.
• Video discovery ads: Much like banner ads, the video discovery ads appear on the YouTube homepage, search results pages, and alongside related videos. 

Depending on your needs, you can create ads that will improve your brand awareness and reach.

Bumper ads have the best chance of being seen because they are unskippable—but they are also only six-seconds long. If you can create strong messaging within that time, you can reach your target audience.

For a start, it makes more sense to create in-stream ads. You have more length to play with—15 seconds—and you can have them placed during a variety of relevant videos.

If you are unfamiliar with the platform, it’s always best to test out a few options so you know how which direction to go.

Conclusion

Video marketing on YouTube can feel like a challenge at first—but by following the above steps, you can start to build a following on the platform and improve your conversions. 

Now that you have these basics in the bag, you can launch a YouTube channel to market your brand and products and let it grow into a successful marketing platform.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at the online infographic and design platform, Venngage.

The post Ultimate guide to video marketing on YouTube appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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What Readers Want During COVID-19: B2B Edition

Posted by amandamilligan

I couldn’t believe the response to my last post about coming up with content ideas in the B2C space during COVID-19. Thank you to all who read and commented — I truly hope it was helpful.

One piece of feedback we received was an ask to see some B2B content ideas, which, frankly, is an excellent subject. At first I was stumped about how to determine this, but then I decided that a different tool could do the trick.

Exploding Topics, the new tool by Brian Dean (Backlinko) and Josh Howarth, explores topics that are surging in popularity but haven’t hit their peak.

This time around, rather than focusing on specific keywords, I focused on overall trends so we can identify which categories might be of interest to your target businesses and their audiences. Then, you can examine whether these trends make sense for your niche and draw inspiration from them for your content.

All things remote

This trend obviously applies to B2C as well, but it’s an important consideration for B2B. Nearly everything has been either canceled, paused, or moved into the world of the virtual. For many companies and industries, this is uncharted territory, and they need guidance.

There is another category I could have included here that focuses on website and app development, programming, and the open source tools that help people build those types of assets as they lean more into digital.

If you’re not one of these B2B providers, there are still ways to gain inspiration from this data. Consider if your brand can provide:

• The logistics of how to set up remote platforms
• Best practices on how to make anything remote more successful and engaging
• Comparison guides for different tools and solutions
• The platform for people to lend the help and support they’re hoping to (like in the case of virtual tip jars)
• Communication tips and solutions to help people stay productively connected

Shipping and delivery

Consumers are interested in having things shipped directly to them, but not everyone has the infrastructure to deal with shipping to begin with, let alone an increased order volume with the (understandable) safety limitations now in place.

Consumers and businesses alike are curious about how to make the shipping and delivery process more effective.

Consider if your brand can provide:

• Guides for small businesses who’ve never had to ship product before
• Tips on how companies can message shipping updates and delays to consumers
• Advice on how to improve the delivery component of a business
• UX or language tips for updating delivery messaging in apps or on websites

Transactions and payment

As we’re all staying six feet away from each other, we’re also trying not to hand off credit cards (let alone cash). Companies used to brick-and-mortar business models are also needing to adapt to fully digital payment systems.

Not all of these searches apply to business (like Venmo), but they do point to a concern everyone’s having: How do we pay for things now?

Consider if your brand can provide:

• Answers about privacy or security questions people have regarding digital payments
• A detailed list of all the payment options available
• Advice on how to optimize storefronts and purchasing processes
• Explanations of how payment processes can impact sales, and how to optimize them

Design tools

This section speaks to an overall trend I touched on before: Professionals now build their own assets if they can’t afford to hire web developers, designers, etc. More and more people are trying to figure out how to keep their businesses going when they can’t keep on as much staff or hire as many contractors.

Perhaps you can identify what your target audience might be struggling with and suggest free or inexpensive online tools to help.

Consider if your brand can provide:

• A list of tools that can assist your target audience in communicating, organizing, creating, etc.
• Design advice to help them get up to speed as quickly as possible
• Resources in how to complete tasks on a smaller team
• Recommendations for what should be prioritized when money is tight

Ethical trends

This is perhaps the most fascinating trend I saw arise. The four brands below have something in common: they all have to do with either sustainability or a transparent, mission-driven approach.

My theory is now that people don’t have as much disposable income, they’re becoming more mindful in their shopping choices, selecting items they believe match their own values.

Consider if your brand can provide:

• A greater level of analysis on this potential trend
• Research into how the consumer perspective has shifted during COVID-19
• Advice on how to potentially shift marketing, branding, and advertising messaging
• Tips on how your target audience can better understand their marketing during this tumultuous time

And finally (*sigh of relief*), marketing

Yes, as I was doing my research, my instinct that marketing would remain crucial during this time was confirmed.

That doesn’t mean you won’t lose business. We’ve had clients pull back because even though they’d like to keep marketing, keeping the company afloat by fulfilling their product orders and services and paying their employees will always (and very understandably) come first by a long shot.

But for businesses that can still afford marketing, they’ll likely need it, and they’re looking for the tools and insight they need to thrive.

Consider if your brand can provide:

• Marketing 101 tips for smaller businesses
• Specific how-to guides for different aspects of inbound or outbound marketing
• Tool recommendations to help people get marketing tasks done quickly and cheaply
• Advice on the kind of marketing that’s most successful during an economic downturn

Conclusion

Remember: This is only for inspiration. What matters most is what your target audience needs and wants. Put yourself in their shoes to be able to best address their challenges and concerns.

But hopefully some of these concepts spark some ideas for how your B2B brand can provide value to your target audiences. Companies around the world are looking for guidance and support now more than ever, and if you’re in a position to provide it to them, your content can go a long way in building trust.

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Content Authority: Potential Measures of Authoritative Content - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by rjonesx.

When it boils down to it, every idea in SEO can be understood as a set of measurements we use to rank one page over another. And that means that when it comes to measuring a concept like the authoritativeness of your content, there are almost certainly factors that you can analyze and tweak to improve it. 

But if Google were to use a measure of content authority, what might go into it? Against what yardstick should SEOs be measuring their content's E-A-T? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Russ Jones walks us through a thought experiment as to what exactly might constitute a "content authority" score and how you can begin to understand your content's expertise like Google.



Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, folks, this is Russ Jones here with another Whiteboard Friday, and today we're going to have fun. Well, at least fun for me, because this is completely speculative. We're going to be talking about this concept of content authority and just some ideas around ways in which we might be able to measure it.

Maybe Google uses these ways to measure it, maybe not. But at the same time, hopefully what we'll be able to do is come up with a better concept of metrics we can use to get at content authority. 

Now, we know there's a lot of controversy around this. Google has said quite clearly that expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are very important parts of their Quality Rater Guidelines, but the information has been pretty flimsy on exactly what part of the algorithm helps determine exactly this type of content.

We do know that they aren't using the quality rater data to train the algorithm, but they are using it to reject algorithm changes that don't actually meet these standards. 

How do we measure the authoritativeness of content?

So how can we go about measuring content authority? Ultimately, any kind of idea that we talk about in search engine optimization has to boil down in some way, shape, or form to a set of measurements that are being made and in somehow shape or form being used to rank one page over another.

Now sometimes it makes sense just to kind of feel it, like if you're writing for humans, be a human. But authoritative content is a little bit more difficult than that. It's a little harder to just off the top of your head know that this content is authoritative and this isn't. In fact, the Quality Rater Guidelines are really clear in some of the examples of what would be considered really highly authoritative content, like, for example, in the News section they mention that it's written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Well, I don't know how many of you have Pulitzer Prize winning authors on your staff or whose clients have Pulitzer Prize winning authors. So I don't exactly see how that's particularly helpful to individuals like ourselves who are trying to produce authoritative content from a position of not being an award-winning writer.

So today I want to just go through a whole bunch of ideas, that have been running through my head with the help of people from the community who've given me some ideas and bounced things off, that we might be able to use to do a better job of understanding authoritative content. All right.

1. ALBERT

So these are what I would consider some of the potential measures of authoritative content. The first one, and this is just going to open up a whole rat's nest I'm sure, but okay, ALBERT. We've talked about the use of BERT for understanding language by Google. Well, ALBERT, which stands for "a lighter BERT," is a similar model used by Google, and it's actually been trained in specific circumstances for the goal of answering questions.

Now that might not seem like a particularly big deal. We've been doing question answering for a whole long time. Featured snippets are exactly that. But ALBERT has jumped on the scene in such a dominant fashion as to have eclipsed anything we've really seen in this kind of NLP problem.

So if you were to go to the SQuAD dataset competition, which is Stanford's Question Answering competition, where they've got these giant set of questions and giant set of documents and then they had humans go in and find the answers in the documents and say which documents don't have answers and which do, and then all sorts of different organizations have produced models to try and automatically find the answers.

Well, this competition has just been going back and forth and back and forth for a really long time between a bunch of heavy hitters, like Google, Baidu, multiple Microsoft teams. We're talking the smartest people in the world, the Allen Institute, all fighting back and forth.

Well, right now, ALBERT or variations thereof have the top 5 positions and 9 of the top 10 positions, and all of them perform better than humans. That is dominance. So we've got right here this incredible technology for answering questions.

Well, what does this have to do with content authority? Why in the world would this matter? Well, if you think about a document, any kind of piece of content that we produce, the intention is that we're going to be answering the questions that our customers want answered. So any topic we start with, let's say the topic we started with was data science, well, there are probably a lot of questions people want to know about that topic.

They might want to know: What is a data scientist? How much money do they make? What kind of things do you need to know to be a data scientist? Well, this is where something like ALBERT could come in and be extremely valuable for measuring the authoritativeness of the content. You see, what if one of the measures of the authoritative content is how well that content answers all of the related questions to the topic?

So you could imagine Google looking at all of the pages that rank for data science, and they know the top 10 questions that are asked about it, and then seeing which piece of content answers those 10 questions best. If they were able to do that, that would be a pretty awesome metric for determining how thorough and how significant and valuable and useful and authoritative that content is.

So I think this one, the ALBERT algorithm really has a lot of potential. But let's move on from that. There are all sorts of other things that might have to do with content authority. 

2. Information density

One that I really like is this idea of information density. So a lot of times when we're writing content, especially when we're not familiar with the topic, we end up writing a lot of fluff.

We kind of are just putting words in there to meet the word length that is expected by the contract, even though we know deep down that the number of words on the page really doesn't determine whether or not it's going to rank. So one of the ways that you can get at whether a piece of content is actually valuable or not or at least is providing important information is using natural language programs to extract information.

ReVerb + OpenIE

Well, the probably most popular NLP open source or at least openly available technology started as a project called ReVerb and now has merged into the Open IE project. But essentially, you can give it a piece of content, and it will extract out all of the factual claims made by that content.

So if I gave it a paragraph that said tennis is a sport that's played with a racket and a ball and today I'm having a lot of fun, something of that sort, it would be able to identify the factual claim, what tennis is, that it's a sport played with a racket and a ball.

But it would ignore the claim that I'm having a lot of fun today, because that's not really a piece of information, a factual claim that we're making. So the concept of information density would be the number of facts that can be extracted from a document versus the total number of words. All right.

If we had that measurement, then we could pretty easily sift through content that is just written for length versus content that is really information rich. Just imagine a Wikipedia article, how dense the information is in there relative to the type of content that most of us produce. So what are some other things? 

3. Content style

Let's talk about content style.

This would be a really easy metric. We could talk about the use of in-line citations, which Wikipedia does, in which after stating a fact they then link to the bottom of the page where it shows you the citation, just like you would do if you were writing a paper in college or a thesis, something that would be authoritative. Or the use of fact lists or tables of contents, like Wikipedia does, or using datelines accurately or AP style formatting.

These are all really simple metrics that, if you think about it, the types of sites that are more trustworthy more often use. If that's the case, then they might be hints to Google that the content that you're producing is authoritative. So those aren't the only easy ones that we could look at. 

4. Writing quality

There are a lot of other ones that are pretty straightforward, like dealing with writing quality.

How easy is it to make sure you are using correct spelling and correct grammar? But have you ever looked at the reading level? Has it ever occurred to you to make sure that the content that you're writing isn't written at a level so difficult that no one can understand it, or is written at a level so low as to be certainly not thorough and not authoritative? If your content is written at a third-grade level and the page is about some health issue, I imagine Google could use that metric pretty quickly to exclude your site.

There are also things like sentence length, which deals with readability, the uniqueness of the content, and also the word usage. This is a pretty straightforward one. Imagine that once again we're looking at data science, and Google looks at the words you use on your page. Then maybe instead of looking at all sites that mention data science, Google only looks at edu sites or Google only looks at published papers and then compares the language usage there.

That would be a pretty easy way for Google to identify a piece of content that's meant for consumers that is authoritative versus one that's meant for consumers and isn't. 

5. Media styles

Another thing we can look at is media styles. This is something that is a little bit more difficult to understand how Google might actually be able to take advantage of.

But at the same time, I think that these are measurable and easy for search engine optimizers, like ourselves, to use. 

Annotated graphs

One would be annotated graphs. I think we should move away from graph images and move more towards using open source graphing libraries. That way the actual factual information, the numbers can be provided to Google in the source code.

Unique imagery

Unique imagery is obviously something that we would care about. In fact, it's actually listed in the Quality Rater Guidelines. 

Accessibility

Then finally, accessibility matters. I know that accessibility doesn't make content authoritative, but it does say something about the degree to which a person has cared about the details of the site and of the page. There's a really famous story about, and I can't remember what the band's name was, but they wrote into their contracts that for every concert they needed to have a bowl of M&Ms, with all of the brown M&Ms removed, waiting for them in the room.

Now it wasn't because they had a problem with the brown M&Ms or they really liked M&Ms or anything of that sort. It was just to make sure that they read the contract. Accessibility is kind of one of those things of where they can tell if you sweat the details or not. 

6. Clickbait titles, author quality, and Google Scholar

Now finally, there are a couple of others that I think are interesting and really have to be talked about. The first is clickbait titles.

Clickbait titles

This is explicitly identified as something that Google looks at or at least the quality raters look at in order to determine that content is not authoritative. Make your titles say what they mean, not try to exaggerate to get a click. 

Author quality

Another thing they say specifically is do you mention your author qualifications. Sure, you don't have a Pulitzer Prize writer, but your writer has some sort of qualifications, at least hopefully, and those qualifications are going to be important for Google in assessing whether or not the author actually knows what they're talking about.

Google Scholar

Another thing that I think we really ought to start looking at is Google Scholar. How much money do you think Google makes off of Google Scholar? Probably not very much. What's the point of having a giant database of academic information when you don't run ads on any of the pages? Well, maybe that academic information can be mined in a way so that they can judge the content that is made for consumers as to whether or not it is in line with, whether we're talking about facts or language or authoritativeness, with what academia is saying about that same topic.



Now, course, all of these ideas are just ideas. We've got a giant question mark sitting out there about exactly how Google gets at content authority. That doesn't mean we should ignore it. So hopefully these ideas will help you come up with some ideas to improve your own content, and maybe you could give me some more ideas in the comment section.

That would be great and we could talk more about how those might be measured. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks again.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Volvo’s Trevor Hettesheimer talks about how COVID-19 has changed automotive business

30-second summary:

• ClickZ and SEW hosted a virtual briefing, The Impact of COVID-19 on the Automotive Industry & Marketing with Trevor Hettesheimer, Manager, KPI’s, Analytics, Search & Planning at Volvo.
• There has been a sharp drop in automotive sales compared to the 2020 forecast in January, which predicted 16.8 million in total sales and 13.4 million in retail sales.
• As a result of nationwide shutdowns combined with an oil price war, automotive industry sales were down 41% in March 2020 compared with the previous year.
• To help mitigate the impact on its business, Volvo took inventory of their U.S. dealerships and assessed who could remain open for sales and service.
• They then assessed what dealers could do business online and brainstormed ways they could safely deliver cars or allow consumers in lockdown to have their cars serviced.
• Hettesheimer noted that the most significant drop in sales would likely be April at 60-80% below what was initially forecasted at the start of 2020.
• Based on the pre-virus forecast, Volvo decided to cut all planned media spend for April and May, except for paid search which is based on consumer intent. They audited their ad copy and messaging to ensure it made sense in the current business climate.
• Volvo is constantly monitoring the state of the economic recovery across the U.S to inform when they decide to relaunch their advertising.
• Hettesheimer summarizes four key steps that businesses can use to inform their marketing decisions: take inventory, review all messaging and adjust as appropriate, capture demand with search marketing, and take note of changing search behaviours and tailor content accordingly.

We recently hosted a virtual briefing as part of our new Peer Network series on the impact of COVID-19 on the automotive industry and marketing with Trevor Hettesheimer, Manager, KPI’s, Analytics, Search & Planning at Volvo.

Trevor has spent over two decades at Volvo US in a variety of different roles. He began his career as Volvo’s Global Marketing Analyst and helped to bring their first SUV to market, the award-winning XC90.

Hettesheimer currently focuses on reporting and presenting predictive analytics based on Volvo’s KPI’s. Hettesheimer is also responsible for Volvo’s paid search marketing and SEO activities in the US.

In the briefing, which is part of our new Peer Network initiative, Hettesheimer shares insights and data on how COVID-19 has dramatically changed business at Volvo.

The impact of COVID-19 on the automotive industry

In order to understand COVID-19’s impact on business in the US, Hettesheimer and his team consult a key resource available from Bing, the COVID-19 Tracker, which provides real-time reporting on how the virus is tracking in the U.S.

COVID-19 Tracker—Source: Bing

“The coronavirus is truly a human tragedy at a global scale,”

says Hettesheimer.

“There are 2.1 million confirmed cases and growing worldwide, with over 144,000 deaths. This is really impacting every nation on the planet. From an economic standpoint, many economists agree that the world is facing the  most serious challenge since WWII ended.”

Hettesheimer went on to note that while the government stimulus package of 2 trillion dollars will stem the initial economic tide of the virus, more money will soon be needed as the crisis drags on.

“As marketers, even how we’re working has seen drastic change,” says Hettesheimer.

“While Volvo is already an innovator in the automotive sector with a well-established remote working and distributed workforce even before the setup, we’ve never had 100% of our employees working from home at the same time.”

Volvo’s headquarters are just outside of New York City, which was still the epicentre of the virus at the time the briefing was recorded. Their factories in the U.S. and Europe temporarily shut down and this, combined with the remote work environment, has had a significant impact on the way Volvo has been approaching company collaboration and marketing. In looking at the automotive industry pre and post-virus, there has been a sharp drop in the automotive sales forecast.

2020 Pre-virus US Automotive Sales Forecast—Source: J.D. Power & Associates

The stock market crashed on February 20th after reaching record highs in early February and continued a precipitous drop through February 28^th. Additionally, most global markets were impacted due to an oil price war between Russia and the OPEC nations led by Saudi Arabia. The lower oil prices threatened oil exporters like the U.S. with higher production costs.

As a result of this, automotive industry sales were down 41% in March 2020 compared with the previous year.

Impact of COVID-19 on Volvo’s marketing plan

The first step Volvo took in response to the virus, was to understand the scale and severity of its impact on their sales and service business. They took inventory of their dealerships and assessed who could remain open in some capacity for sales and who could remain open for service.

They found that, regionally, as many as 98% of Volvo’s dealerships across America were closed.

Volvo also assessed which dealers could continue doing business online for sales and looked at ways they could safely deliver cars to people or allow consumers on lockdown to get their cars serviced.

From there, they attempted to forecast sales in the new pre-pandemic landscape. They did this by looking at consumers’ ability to shop and at their finances. The assumption was that consumers who had the means to buy a car and the ability to leave their house to shop, would do so.

Volvo then attempted to determine the business impact of the virus through the end of 2020, designating four phases of retail sales assumptions as follows.

Using the above assessment, Hettesheimer noted that the most significant drop in sales would likely occur in April, with a potential drop in sales of 60-80% below what was forecasted at the start of 2020. The forecast for the remainder of the year was assessed as follows:

May/June:  Second recovery phase where daily rates of new infections/death are at the peak or declining. Sales will still be down significantly, but at improved levels compared with March/April.

July through December: Third phase that will coincide with the consumer’s “new normal” – with infection rates/deaths significantly down and restrictions on businesses and consumers relaxing.

“Consumer behaviour will be changed for some time,” says Hettesheimer.

“Perhaps as a consumer or as a car dealer, you’ll think twice before getting into a car to perform service or buy a pre-owned vehicle.”

Impact of COVID-19 on search planning for 2020

Like many businesses, Volvo sought out ways to preserve capital in the current uncertain environment. The company tallied committed media funds versus uncommitted media funds and ultimately made large cuts to planned April and May media spend. This enabled them to control their profitability and cash flow in the short term as sales took a major downturn while enabling them to continue investing in the business over the long term.

Throughout April, all marketing channels are dark for Volvo at a national level, though there may be some local ads still running. There are two exceptions nationally.

• Channels where consumers come to Volvo based on intent (for example, search marketing)
• Organic social media properties

Volvo also assessed all in-market customer-facing messaging and pulled or edited ad copy and creative that did not make sense in the current environment. This included reviewing their website to make sure messaging matched current capabilities such as the ability to take a test drive.

Says Hettesheimer,

“We looked carefully at our language on the website. One of the big changes we had to make, for example, was that all the hours of operation had to be changed in our ‘Find A Dealer’ directory.”

Volvo also reviewed its in-market offerings to determine which ones worked better online versus at the dealership, like the Volvo Concierge Program. This is an online chat service providing white-glove services for Volvo shoppers and customers that enable them to chat with a call centre person live, 24/7.

Volvo Concierge Home Page

Volvo is trying to anticipate when dealers will open again—and when consumers will start shopping for cars—by monitoring the state of the economic recovery across the U.S. This will inform when they decide to relaunch their advertising.

They do this by looking at a variety of data sources including Google Analytics, Google Trends, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IMHE) COVID-19 projection models, and state-by-state school closure updates.

Steps businesses can take to survive a global pandemic

In looking towards the future, Hettesheimer summarizes four key steps that businesses can use to inform their marketing and business decisions as follows.

• Take inventory—Use available data and resources to understand how your specific business will be impacted over the short, medium and long terms. Then apply financial analysis to help understand the impact on profit and cash flow.
• Review all advertising and marketing materials including paid ads and publicly available content (e.g., your website) and adjust the content, as necessary.
• Capture demand with search marketing.
• Take note of changing search behaviours and tailor content/ads accordingly.

“Be sensitive,” advises Hettesheimer. “Your customers are hurting right now. Let them know you’re there for them when they’re ready. If you can offer special financing or help them through a rough patch, do so, and make sure you mention that as well, but be humble.”

You can register to view the free on-demand briefing, “Impact of COVID-19 on the automotive industry” on ClickZ. You can also apply to join our Peer Network, a peer-peer networking forum for senior marketers.

The post Volvo’s Trevor Hettesheimer talks about how COVID-19 has changed automotive business appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Announcing: The Keyword Research Master Guide [New for 2020]

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Why a new guide?

Often in SEO, we get so preoccupied with technical SEO (pagination, site speed, the latest Python course, etc.) that we forget the basis of winning SEO begins and ends with keywords.

• Not choosing keywords before you start with SEO means shooting in the dark — a likely losing gamble if your content will succeed or not.
• Choosing the wrong keywords means wasting your time and budget on content that will never gain visibility in search results.
• Conversely, choosing smart, targeted keywords can help carve out and dominate a traffic niche that raises you above the competition.

No doubt, the difference between good SEOs and mediocre SEOs is often their keyword research strategy.

Here at Moz, a question we often hear after people finish reading the famous Beginner's Guide to SEO is: What do I read next?

To give people a practical place to start, we wanted to provide you with concrete keyword research workflows. It's as if you're looking over our shoulder as we do strategic keyword research.

We also included a few intermediate-to-advanced concepts, such as keyword grouping, understanding keyword priority, and on-page keyword optimization.

And finally, we wanted to make sure it was free.

If you want, feel free to jump to the guide now, or read below about what the guide covers and how it differs from any other guide on keyword research.

THE KEYWORD RESEARCH MASTER GUIDE

1. Understanding seed keywords

We call them "seed" keywords because all your other keywords grow out of them. Finding the right seed keywords will absolutely make or break your entire keyword research strategy.

Finding the right seed keywords is about asking and answering three key questions:

1. What do you think you want to rank for?
2. What do you already rank for?
3. What do your competitors rank for?

After this, you validate your answers with data to find the absolute best seeds.

We also show you the exact process and tools we use to extract these seeds, such as Google Search Console (shown below).

The cool thing about seed keywords is this: they grow more seeds! Once you find the right seeds, you can reiterate the process again and again to grow a complete keyword strategy for an entire site, even one that's thousands of pages.

Read Chapter 1: Seed Keywords

2. Building perfect keyword lists

This is where the rubber hits the road. Here you expand your seed keywords into complete lists. These lists support multiple pages and topics, and can even grow more seeds.

This is also the place you want to be as comprehensive as possible, in order to uncover the opportunities your competition probably missed.

Read Chapter 2: Keyword Lists

3. Prioritizing keywords

Nearly any old keyword tool can give you lists of hundreds or thousands of keywords. The secret to success is knowing which keywords to prioritize and pursue.

Which keywords will actually prove profitable? Which keywords can you actually rank for?

To answer these questions, we do a deep dive into the keyword metrics that help us to prioritize our keyword lists:

• Relevance
• Monthly volume
• Keyword difficulty
• Organic click-through rate (CTR)
• Priority

Understanding how to use these metrics goes a long way in choosing the exact right keywords to invest in.

Read Chapter 3: Prioritizing Keywords

4. Grouping keywords

Keywords never exist in a vacuum. Instead, they almost always appear with other keywords.

Adding related keywords to a page is a smart strategy for increasing topical relevance. At the same time, trying to target too many keywords on the same page may dilute their relevance and make it more difficult to rank.

Here, we show you techniques to address both of these problems:

1. When to create separate pages for each keyword
2. How to group related keywords together

We'll also show you some grouping tips to help set you up for your next task: on-page keyword optimization.

Read Chapter 4: Grouping Keywords

5. On-page keyword optimization

Very few keyword research guides ever even mention on-page keyword optimization.

We wanted to do better.

Because keyword research uncovers intent, this is a great starting point for on-page optimization. If you understand not only what your users are searching for, but also what they expect to find, you can better create your content to satisfy their expectations.

We've also included a brief overview of where and how to incorporate keywords on the page. While this section is mostly beginner level, more immediate SEOs should find the refresher useful.

Read Chapter 5: On-page Keyword Optimization

6. Tracking keyword rankings

If you’re a consultant, agency, in-house SEO, or simply work for yourself, you want to know how your keywords perform in search engines.

Traditionally, keyword tracking was synonymous with "ranking" — but times have changed. Today, with personalization, localization, and shifting competitive environments, keyword tracking has grown much more sophisticated.

In this chapter, we'll cover:

1. Traditional keyword ranking
2. Local rank tracking
3. Rank indexes
4. Share of Voice (SOV) and visibility

By the end of this chapter, you'll understand which type of keyword tracking is right for you, and how to report these numbers to the people who matter.

Read Chapter 6: Tracking Keyword Rankings

7. Keyword research tools and resources

Bonus time!

We couldn't squeeze everything in the previous chapters, so we added all our extra resources here. The crème de la crème is the Keyword Research Cheat Sheet. You can download, print, share with your team, or pin to your wall.

We've also made a handy list of our favorite keyword research tools, along with a few other useful resources on keyword research.

THE KEYWORD RESEARCH MASTER GUIDE

We hope you enjoy! Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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How Google SERP Layouts Affect Searching Behavior

Posted by yetisteve

There are several studies (and lots of data) out there about how people use Google SERPs, what they ignore, and what they focus on. An example is Moz’s recent experiment testing whether SEOs should continue optimizing for featured snippets or not (especially now that Google has announced that if you have a featured snippet, you no longer appear elsewhere in the search results).

Two things I have never seen tested are the actual user reactions to and behavior with SERPs. My team and I set out to test these ourselves, and this is where biometric technology comes into play.

What is biometric technology and how can marketers use it?

Biometric technology measures physical and behavioral characteristics. By combining the data from eye tracking devices, galvanic skin response monitors (which measure your sweat levels, allowing us to measure subconscious reactions), and facial recognition software, we can gain useful insight into behavioral patterns.

We’re learning that biometrics can be used in a broad range of settings, from UX testing for websites, to evaluating consumer engagement with brand collateral, and even to measuring emotional responses to TV advertisements. In this test, we also wanted to see if it could be used to help give us an understanding of how people actually interact with Google SERPs, and provide insight into searching behavior more generally.

The plan

The goal of the research was to assess the impact that SERP layouts and design have on user searching behavior and information retrieval in Google.

To simulate natural searching behavior, our UX and biometrics expert Tom Pretty carried out a small user testing experiment. Users were asked to perform a number of Google searches with the purpose of researching and buying a new mobile phone. One of the goals was to capture data from every point of a customer journey.

Participants were given tasks with specific search terms at various stages of purchasing intent. While prescribing search terms limited natural searching behavior, it was a sacrifice made to ensure the study had the best chance of achieving consistency in the SERPs presented, and so aggregated results could be gained.

The tests were run on desktop, although in the future we have plans to expand the study on mobile.

Users began each task on the Google homepage. From there, they informed the moderator when they found the information they were looking for. At that point they proceeded to the next task.

Data inputs

• Eye tracking
• Facial expression analysis
• Galvanic skin response (GSR)

Data sample

• 20 participants

Key objectives

• Understand gaze behavior on SERPs (where people look when searching)
• Understand engagement behavior on SERPs (where people click when searching)
• Identify any emotional responses to SERPs (what happens when users are presented with ads?)
• Interaction analysis with different types of results (e.g. ads, shopping results, map packs, Knowledge Graph, rich snippets, PAAs, etc.).

Research scenario and tasks

We told participants they were looking to buy a new phone and were particularly interested in an iPhone XS. They were then provided with a list of tasks to complete, each focused on searches someone might make when buying a new phone. Using the suggested search terms for each task was a stipulation of participation.

Tasks

1. Find out the screen size and resolution of the iPhone XS
   Search term: iPhone XS size and resolution
2. Find out the talk time battery life of the iPhone XS
   Search term: iPhone XS talk time
3. Find reviews for the iPhone XS that give a quick list of pros and cons
   Search term: iPhone XS reviews
4. Find the address and phone number of a phone shop in the town center that may be able to sell you an iPhone XS
   Search term: Phone shops near me
5. Find what you feel is the cheapest price for a new iPhone XS (handset only)
   Search term: Cheapest iPhone XS deals
6. Find and go on to buy a used iPhone XS online (stop at point of data entry)
   Search term: Buy used iPhone XS

We chose all of the search terms first for ease of correlating data. (If everyone had searched for whatever they wanted, we may not have gotten certain SERP designs displayed.) And second, so we could make sure that everyone who took part got exactly the same results within Google. We needed the searches to return a featured snippet, the Google Knowledge Graph, Google's “People also ask” feature, as well as shopping feeds and PPC ads.

On the whole, this was successful, although in a few cases there were small variations in the SERP presented (even when the same search term had been used from the same location with a clear cache).

“When designing a study, a key concern is balancing natural behaviors and giving participants freedom to interact naturally, with ensuring we have assets at the end that can be effectively reported on and give us the insights we require.” — Tom Pretty, UX Consultant, Coast Digital

The results

Featured Snippets

This was the finding that our in-house SEOs were most interested in. According to a study by Ahrefs, featured snippets get 8.6% of clicks while 19.6% go to the first natural search below it, but when no featured snippet is present, 26% of clicks go to the first result. At the time, this meant that having a featured snippet wasn’t terrible, especially if you could gain a featured snippet but weren't ranking first for a term. who doesn't want to have real estate above a competitor?

However, with Danny Sullivan of Google announcing that if you appear in a featured snippet, you will no longer appear anywhere else in the search engine results page, we started to wonder how this would change what SEOs thought about them. Maybe we would see a mass exodus of SEOs de-optimising pages for featured snippets so they could keep their organic ranking instead. Moz’s recent experiment estimated a 12% drop in traffic to pages that lose their featured snippet, but what does this mean about user behavior?

What did we find out?

In the information-based searches, we found that featured snippets actually attracted the most fixations. They were consistently the first element viewed by users and were where users spent the most time gazing. These tasks were also some of the fastest to be completed, indicating that featured snippets are successful in giving users their desired answer quickly and effectively.

All of this indicates that featured snippets are hugely important real estate within a SERP (especially if you are targeting question-based keywords and more informational search intent).

In both information-based tasks, the featured snippet was the first element to be viewed (within two seconds). It was viewed by the highest number of respondents (96% fixated in the area on average), and was also clicked most (66% of users clicked on average).

People also ask

The “People also ask” (PAA) element is an ideal place to find answers to question-based search terms that people are actively looking for, but do users interact with them?

What did we find out?

From the results, after looking at a featured snippet, searchers skipped over the PAA element to the standard organic results. Participants did gaze back at them, but clicks in those areas were extremely low, thus showing limited engagement. This behavior indicates that they are not distracting users or impacting how they journey through the SERP in any significant way.

Knowledge Graph

One task involved participants searching using a keyword that would return the Google Knowledge Graph. The goal was to find out the interaction rate, as well as where the main interaction happened and where the gaze went.

What did we find out?

Our findings indicate that when a search with purchase intent is made (e.g. “deals”), then the Knowledge Graph attracts attention sooner, potentially because it includes visible prices.

By also introducing heat map data, we can see that the pricing area on the Knowledge Graph picked up significant engagement, but there was still a lot of attention focused on the organic results.

Essentially, this shows that while the knowledge graph is useful space, it does not wholly detract from the main SERP column. Users still resort to paid ads and organic listings to find what they are looking for.

Location searches

We have all seen data in Google Search Console with “near me” under certain keywords, and there is an ongoing discussion of why, or how, to optimise for them. From a pay-per-click (PPC) point of view, should you even bother trying to appear in them? By introducing such a search term in the study, we were hoping to answer some of these questions.

What did we find out?

From the fixation data, we found that most attention was dedicated to the local listings rather than the map or organic listings. This would indicate that the greater amount of detail in the local listings was more engaging.

However, in a different SERP variant, the addition of the product row led to users spending a longer time reviewing the SERP and expressing more negative emotions. This product row addition also changed gaze patterns, causing users to progress through each element in turn, rather than skipping straight to the local results (which appeared to be more useful in the previous search).

This presentation of results being deemed irrelevant or less important by the searcher could be the main cause of the negative emotion and, more broadly, could indicate general frustration at having obstacles put in the way of finding the answer directly.

Purchase intent searching

For this element of the study, participants were given queries that indicate someone is actively looking to buy. At this point, they have carried out the educational search, maybe even the review search, and now they are intent on purchasing.

What did we find out?

For “buy” based searches, the horizontal product bar operates effectively, picking up good engagement and clicks. Users still focused on organic listings first, however, before returning to the shopping bar.

The addition of Knowledge Graph results for this type of search wasn't very effective, picking up little engagement in the overall picture.

These results indicate that the shopping results presented at the top of the page play a useful role when searching with purchasing intent. However, in both variations, the first result was the most-clicked element in the SERP, showing that a traditional PPC or organic listing remains highly effective at this point in the customer journey.

Galvanic skin response

Looking at GSR when participants were on the various SERPs, there is some correlation between the self-reported “most difficult” tasks and a higher than normal GSR.

For the “talk time” task in particular, the featured snippet presented information for the iPhone XS Max, not the iPhone XS model, which was likely the cause of the negative reaction as participants had to spend longer digging into multiple information sources.

For the “talk time” SERP, the challenges encountered when incorrect data was presented within a featured snippet likely caused the high difficulty rating.

What does it all mean?

Unfortunately, this wasn't the largest study in the world, but it was a start. Obviously, running this study again with greater numbers would be the ideal and would help firm up some of the findings (and I for one, would love to see a huge chunk of people take part).

That being said, there are some solid conclusions that we can take away:

1. The nature of the search greatly changes the engagement behavior, even when similar SERP layouts are displayed. (Which is probably why they are so heavily split tested).
2. Featured snippets are highly effective for information-based searching, and while they led to some 33% of users choosing not to follow through to the site after finding the answer, two-thirds still clicked through to the website (which is very different from the data we have seen in previous studies).
3. Local listings (especially when served without a shopping bar) are engaging and give users essential information in an effective format.
4. Even with the addition of Knowledge Graph, “People also ask”, and featured snippets, more traditional PPC ads and SEO listings still play a big role in searching behavior.

Featured snippets are not the worst thing in the world (contrary to the popular knee-jerk reaction from the SEO industry after Google's announcement). All that has changed is that now you have to work out what featured snippets are worth it for your business (instead of trying to just claim all of them). On purely informational or educational searches, they actually performed really well. People stayed fixated on them for a fairly lengthy period of time, and 66% clicked through. However, we also have an example of people reacting badly to the featured snippet when it contained irrelevant or incorrect information.

The findings also give some weight to the fact that a lot of SEO is now about context. What do users expect to see when they search a certain way? Are they expecting to see lots of shopping feeds (they generally are if it’s a purchasing intent keyword), but at the same time, they wouldn't expect to see them in an educational search.

What now?

Hopefully, you found this study useful and learned something new about search behavior . Our next goal is to increase the amount of people in the study to see if a bigger data pool confirms our findings, or shows us something completely unexpected.

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Five ways a CRM system improves SEO results

30-second summary:

• When you look at what all a CRM system does for you, it lines up perfectly with the goals of an effective SEO strategy. The two should go hand-in-hand, working together to make each other more successful.
• Right from initiating surveys to getting insights from customer data for hyper-targeted content creation, there’s a lot that a CRM can offer that will add value to your SEO strategy.
• Customer experience too is intricately linked to the heart of how SEO works. When people search for keywords or phrases, they’re trying to find answers to questions and other information to satisfy a need.
• Don’t underestimate the impact a CRM system can have on your SEO. Five ways your CRM can help you get better results with SEO.

The beauty and bane of SEO is that it’s a richly diverse topic. There are so many avenues to explore and angles to consider. In a previous article, we looked at how different inter-organizational collaborations can boost your SEO implementation and improve your results. Part of this article was dedicated to collaborations with customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Although we touched on some of the benefits of CRM systems for SEO teams, it’s worth diving a bit deeper. When you look at what all a CRM system does for you, it lines up perfectly with the goals of an effective SEO strategy. The two should go hand-in-hand, working together to make each other more successful.

Here are five ways your CRM system can help you get better results with SEO.

1. Getting on the same page

When you’re using a CRM system, you have the opportunity to continuously learn from your customers. You can use this opportunity to find out more about their pain points, what they’re searching for, and what they’re purchasing. This information can then be passed over to the relevant part of your company to deal with it.

Through a CRM system, you can issue surveys, ask questions, and record information given by your existing customers and leads. With a more complete picture of customer data you can create localized content, adjust the timing of certain SEO campaigns to match buying habits, and highlight features of your products or services with keywords that address customer pain points.

Here is what Daniel Liddle – SEO Growth Strategist at Green Park Content says,

“Getting that crucial customer behaviour information from CRM systems is the best way to refine the intent and behaviour of your leads. With more and more CRMs incorporating machine learning into their software such as Microsoft’s Dynamic365 and Salesforce, sentiment analysis and forecasting is becoming a lot easier to report on and also making that data actionable in order to drive sales. And, that’s the key point, there’s elements of information that’s more ‘nice to know’ but you really want to be looking and building on actionable data which a lot of software companies are driving towards doing this autonomously.”

2. Nurturing SEO leads

SEO gets people to your content, but what happens next? If you don’t get enough engagement on your pages or response from your calls to action (CTAs), even your SEO will suffer over time. You have to follow up with leads generated by your SEO efforts so that you can turn them from page visitors to conversions.

CRM can help you guide your overall SEO strategy. If you integrate SEO efforts into your CRM system, you’ll get an idea of whether your SEO is bringing the right types of people to your pages, how many conversions you’re generating, and what brought people there in the first place. All of this means better SEO with measurable results that matter to your bottom line. Traffic and page views are great, but it’s better to get less general traffic if that means more conversions.

3. Providing consistency

Using a CRM system, you can ensure that your whole organization is on the same page. No matter how small or large your operation is, consistency in marketing and customer-facing strategies matters. CRM helps you stay organized to present the same central message across all platforms.

The more you talk about a certain subject, the more your authority on the subject increases. Building authority on a topic is great for SEO, as your content will have an advantage in the rankings if your focus stays consistent. You’ll be able to build a stronger link profile, get more social media mentions, and post more relevant content that your audience loves.

Growing that authority requires company-wide efforts to produce a consistently good experience that’s relevant to your audience and fulfils their needs. CRM helps you stay on track and get everyone on board from different parts of the organization.

For instance, Mario Peshev, CEO of DevriX, relies on their in-house CRM tool for gathering case studies in a consistent manner:

“Our retainer contracts are long-term and we revise our accomplishments two to four times per year. Having our customer portfolio in one place enables us to review the progress to date, leverage a case study template, and prepare drafts for new PR opportunities or updating existing success stories delivered for our clients.”

4. SEO and customer experience

The entire point of a CRM system is to improve the customer experience your company offers, from the beginning of the sales funnel to after-sales services and everything in between. By improving your customer experience, you can also boost your SEO.

Customer experience is intricately linked to the heart of how SEO works. When people search for keywords or phrases, they’re trying to find answers to questions and other information to satisfy a need. If you know what your customers want and need, you can better tailor your content and keywords to address those needs.

To give a good customer experience you first have to know your customers. Take that information and apply it to SEO. Using the data about your existing customers, you can target your SEO efforts on a more realistic market of people that share the needs and wants of your existing customer base. Since you know these types of people already use your products or services, it’s a good idea to market to similar people as well.

Better, more targeted content means lower bounce rates, more organic traffic, and higher engagement with your CTA. Your SEO efforts can only benefit from relevant content that addresses what people really want to know.

5. Improving third-party reviews

Speaking of customer experience, SEO is also partially impacted by outside mentions of your company. Specifically, third-party review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and Travel Advisor hold a lot of weight. If you are listed on these sites with a solid number of reviews (most of which are positive), you’ll do better in SEO than if you’re unlisted with fake reviews, no reviews, or poor reviews.

If you’re doing your CRM work right, you should end up with more satisfied customers. These are the guys who are going to be leaving the reviews for you. It’s a long-term strategy, but by focusing more on a great customer experience that leaves more people satisfied with what you provide, you will naturally end up with more positive reviews. You can even prompt people to leave reviews if you’re confident that more people will be happy rather than disappointed.

CRMs do a lot for your business if you use it right. If you’re using one already or considering adopting the use of one, think about the bigger picture of everything you can do with it. Don’t underestimate the impact a CRM system can have on your SEO. Get ahead of your competition in the ranking using every tool at your disposal.

The post Five ways a CRM system improves SEO results appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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