Five reasons why SEO should be prioritized over paid media campaigns

30-second summary:

• Most marketers combine SEO and paid media campaigns, but the marketing budget between the two should not necessarily be split down the middle.
• Paid media campaigns, which include PPC, social, and influencer campaigns, are a one-and-done expense, meaning the investment doesn’t build on itself.
• SEO can take weeks or months to show results, but after the effort, it’s cost-effective and sustainable.
• All in all, SEO should be prioritized if you’re focused on the longevity of your company’s marketing scheme.
• Elevation Marketing’s Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services explains why SEO gives more bang for your buck.

US digital ad spending was expected to grow 19% to $129.34 billion by 2020, finally surpassing traditional advertising methods. According to eMarketer, this figure accounts for 54.2% of total ad spending in the country — and this isn’t a fluke. Digital marketing is effective, but there are multiple routes marketers can take. So, how do you know which?

SEO and paid media campaigns are two of the most common digital marketing strategies, and they’re often implemented together as a one-two punch. SEO is a more long-term play in which marketers will work to enhance a website’s SERP rankings, and the latter includes anything from paid social media ads to PPC campaigns. While paid media can get you thousands of impressions,  it may not always be worth the largest chunk of a marketing budget, especially if you’re thinking about the bigger picture.

The truth is that most online experiences (about 68% according to research) begin with a search engine, and that’s where SEO shines, despite the fact that 25% of marketers admitted to having a less than average understanding of organic traffic. A great SEO strategy won’t see immediate returns like PPC campaigns might, but it provides an effective strategy that is far more scalable and sustainable. 

For this reason, SEO should take priority overpaid media, especially when your marketing budget is tight, but ultimately both types of digital marketing strategies work best when used hand-in-hand.

1. SEO is cost-effective

The ROI of an SEO campaign is a bit harder to calculate than that of a paid campaign. If you’re paying for links or ad clicks or paying an influencer to create a sponsored post, you can easily see the real-time profits. SEO is a little bit different because it can take months to reap the benefits. Nonetheless, it’s still more cost-effective in the long run because once a comprehensive SEO strategy is correctly implemented, it’s set and tends to snowball. You only need to invest in maintenance and updates, rather than investing every single time you run a paid campaign. 

When it comes to search engines, SEO generally has a smaller CPA (cost per acquisition) than PPC. That’s not to say that SEO doesn’t require an initial investment. A great strategy requires a sharp, well-versed professional — which does come at a premium. Google also uses more than 200 different factors to rank websites and some of these factors are constantly evolving, so a long-term investment is a must to keep up with the ever-changing SEO landscape, it just doesn’t usually cost as much as consistently running paid advertising campaigns throughout the entirety of your company’s lifespan.

There are also multiple resources on the web that allow you to learn the basics of SEO on your own. This technical SEO checklist gives step-by-step instructions on how to perform on-page checks that will boost your search engine rankings. This is perfect for those who are just starting out and want to get some base-level SEO added to their site. 

2. SEO has longevity

You might get great results for things like paid search and digital display media, but the second the campaign ends, that success is over. For example, you can bid for a spot on the first page of Google (which can be very expensive depending on the keyword), but that disappears the second you stop paying for it. At the end of the day, paid media is artificially inflated growth.

There is some truth to the old adage that all good things take time, and SEO is a prime example. With a great strategy, you should see solid results by six months, and even more solid results by a year, but these results don’t just disappear the second you decide to divest and reallocate your marketing budget to something else. Once your website’s SEO is established, it’s established (i.e. when you’re in, you’re in). The rest is maintenance, like minding Google’s core updates and creating regular content, or it will trickle to a stopover time. Think of SEO as building a foundation for a house and paid media campaigns as furnishing the room.

3. SEO is sustainable

Paid media’s longevity problem makes it difficult for startups and smaller, newer businesses to maintain long term. While most brands invest a solid amount in paid campaigns from the beginning, it’s not exactly a sustainable strategy. Think of it this way: the average social media influencer charges between $75 to $3,000 per sponsored post — and it can go way beyond that. That’s just for one post that will get buried in a feed, whereas a business could invest the same amount in SEO content, and see the returns for months on end.

In short, SEO is a sustainable way to elevate your online presence and raise brand awareness. Your ROI from SEO will continue to climb long after your paid media efforts have peaked. Even organic social media marketing doesn’t perform the same way. For example, pages with more than 500,000 likes on Facebook have seen a dramatic decrease in reach, possibly to encourage companies to increase their ad spend.

4. Users prefer organic links

Flatly put, people prefer and trust organic links over paid ads. In fact, organic results can get 15 times the CTR of paid search results if you rank well on a high search volume keyword, and that’s because people just don’t trust advertisements. Consumers want results because they’re relevant, not because someone paid to be there.

A survey done by MarketingSherpa showed that 70% of the links users click on are organic, while only 25% are paid. This emphasizes the importance of having your site rank organically as users are far more likely to visit your site via an organic link.

Of course, backlinking is also a crucial part of any SEO strategy. Users may overwhelmingly favor organic content, but there’s a fair chance they won’t see it unless you’ve got a solid link building strategy that includes placements from trustworthy, high-quality, third party websites. Studies have shown that 91% of all pages don’t get organic traffic from Google, largely because they don’t have any backlinks. More than half of all website pages don’t even have one backlink when the more backlinks a page has, the higher it ranks on Google’s SERPs.

5. SEO is scalable

SEO is fully scalable, meaning you can adjust your campaigns as your company grows. In fact, many business owners first dive into the world of SEO by reading up and implementing their own basic strategy before they have the funds to bring in the professionals. The more you do, the better it’s going to work. 

Paid media doesn’t work in the same way. Sure, it can generate impressions and raise the brand, but ad blindness is an extremely real consequence. According to Forbes, Americans are inundated with 4,000 to 10,000 every single day, and it’s no secret that they start to filter them out eventually. 

Overall, a solid SEO strategy sets up a solid foundation for marketing success that can only be elevated through paid campaigns. The same can’t be said for the reverse.

Ryan Gould is Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services at Elevation Marketing. He can be found on LinkedIn.

The post Five reasons why SEO should be prioritized over paid media campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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How to Create 10x Content — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Have you ever tried to create 10x content? It's not easy, is it? Knowing how and where to start can often be the biggest obstacle you'll face. In this oldie-but-goodie episode of Whiteboard Friday, Rand Fishkin talks about how you can develop your own 10x content to help your brand stand out.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about how to create 10x content.

Now, for those of you who might need a refresher or who haven't seen previous Whiteboard Fridays where we've talked about 10x content, this is the idea that, because of content saturation, content overload, the idea that there's just so much in our streams and standing out is so hard, we can't just say, "Hey, I want to be as good as the top 10 people in the search results for this particular keyword term or phrase." We have to say, "How can I create something 10 times better than what any of these folks are currently doing?" That's how we stand out.

What is 10x content?

10x content is content that is 10 times better than the highest ranking result for a given keyword(s). Here are 119 Examples of 10x Content.

Criteria for 10x content:

• It has to have great UI and UX on any device.
• That content is generally a combination of high quality, trustworthy, it's useful, interesting, and remarkable. It doesn't have to be all of those but some combination of them.
• It's got to be considerably different in scope and in detail from other works that are serving the same visitor or user intent.
• It's got to create an emotional response. I want to feel awe. I want to feel surprise. I want to feel joy, anticipation, or admiration for that piece of content in order for it to be considered 10x.
• It has to solve a problem or answer a question by providing comprehensive, accurate, exceptional information or resources.
• It's got to deliver content in a unique, remarkable, typically unexpectedly pleasurable style or medium.

If you hit all of these things, you probably have yourself a piece of 10x content. It's just very hard to do. That's what we're talking about today. What's a process by which we can get to checking off all these boxes?

Step 1 - Gain deep insight.

So let's start here. First off, when you have an issue, let's say you've got a piece of content that you know you want to create, a topic you know you're going to address that topic. We can talk about how to get to that topic in a future Whiteboard Friday, and we've had some in the past certainly around keyword research and choosing topics and that sort of thing. But if I know the topic, I need to first gain a deep, deep insight into the core of why people are interested in this subject.

So for example, let's do something simple, something we're all familiar with.

"I wonder what the most highly-rated new movies are out there." Essentially this is, "Well, okay, how do we get into this person's brain and try and answer the core of their question?" They're essentially asking, "Okay, how do I figure out . . . help me decide what to watch."

That could have a bunch of angles to it. It could be about user ratings, or it could be maybe about awards. Maybe it's about popularity. What are the most popular movies out there? It could be meta ratings. Maybe this person wants to see an aggregated list of all the data out there. It could be editorial or critic ratings. There's a bunch of angles there.

Step 2 - We have to get unique.

We know that uniqueness, being exceptional, not the same as everyone else but different from everyone else out there, is really important.

So as we brainstorm different ways that we might address the core of this user's problem, we might say, "All right, movie ratings, could we do a round-up?"

Well, that already exists at places like Metacritic. They sort of aggregate everything and then put it all together and tell us what critics versus audiences think across many, many different websites. So that's already been done.

Awards versus popularity, again, it's already been done in a number of places that do comparisons of here's the ones that had the highest box office versus here's the ones that won certain types of awards. Well, okay, so that's not particularly unique.

What about critics versus audiences? Again, this is done basically on every different website. Everyone shows me user ratings versus critic ratings.

What about by availability? Well, there's actually a bunch of sites that do this now where they show you this is on Netflix, this is on Hulu, this is on Amazon, this you can watch on Comcast or on demand, this you can see on YouTube. All right, so that's not unique either.

What about which ratings can I trust? Hang on a tick. That might not exist yet. That's a great, unique insight into this problem, because one of the challenges that I have when I want to say, "What should I decide to watch," is who should I trust and who should I believe. Can I go to Fandango or Amazon or Metacritic or Netflix? Whose ratings are actually trustworthy?

Well, now we've got something unique, and now we've got that core insight, that unique angle on it.

Step 3 - Uncover powerful methods to provide an answer.

Now we want to uncover a powerful, hard-to-replicate, high-quality method to provide an answer to that question.

In this case, that could be, "Well, you know what? We can do a statistical analysis." We get a sample set big enough, enough films, maybe 150 movies or so from the last year. We take a look at the ratings that each service provides, and we see if we can find patterns, patterns like: Who's high and low? Do some have different genre preferences? Which one is trustworthy? Does one correlate with awards and critics? Which ones are outliers? All of these are actually trying to get to the "which one can I trust" question.

I think we can answer that if we do this statistical analysis. It's a pain in the butt.

We have to go to all these sites. We have to collect all the data. We have to put it into a statistical model. We then have to run our model. We have to make sure that we have a big enough sample set. We've got to see what our correlations are. We have to check for outliers and distributions and all this kind of stuff. But once we do that and once we show our methodology, now all we have to do is...

Step 4 - Find a unique, powerful, exceptional way to present this content.

In fact, FiveThirtyEight.com did exactly this.

They took this statistical analysis. They looked at all of these different sites, Fandango and IMDB users versus critics versus Metacritic versus Rotten Tomatoes and a number of other sites. Then they had this one graph that shows essentially the star rating averages across I think it was 146 different films, which was the sample set that they determined was accurate enough.

Now they've created this piece of 10x content, and they've answered this unique take on the question, "Which rating service can I trust?" The answer is, "Don't trust Fandango," basically. But you can see more in there. Metacritic is pretty good. A couple of the other ones are decent.

Step 5 - Expect that you're going to do this 5 to 10 times before you have one hit.

The only way to get good at this, the only way to get good is experimentation and practice. You do this over and over again, and you start to develop a sixth sense for how you can uncover that unique element, how you can present it in a unique fashion, and how you can make it sing on the Web.

All right, everyone, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on 10x content. If you have any examples you'd like to share with us, please feel free to do so in the comments. No problem linking out. That's just fine. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to become a master of featured snippets

30-second summary:

• Featured snippets are here to stay, so it’s time for you to adapt.
• 65% of organic Google searches now include at least one rich snippet.
• Ranking for them isn’t as difficult as you think.
• There is a structured and repeatable process for gaining those positions.
• Ahref’s Mark Webster shows you how to analyze and create featured snippets.

The trick is being able to get featured snippets is using a structured process. One that you can repeat over and over again. Which is exactly what we show you how to do in this blog post. But just before we go any further into how to do that, let’s do a quick brief on featured snippets.

What is a featured snippet?

Featured snippets are the images, content summaries, answers, widgets, or other data that Google displays in their SERPs in addition to traditional web results.

From Google’s point of view, these provide their “customers” with better user experience – they get the information they need without ever needing to actually go to a website. And an improved revenue model for them – paid ads are how Google keeps the lights on.

But it’s a different story for website owners and bloggers. Featured snippets can feel like a mammoth task. But you don’t have to feel that way.

Why are featured snippets important?

There’s a straightforward answer to this – Google has increased its use of featured snippets in the last 12 months.

This is a trend that does not look set to change anytime soon.

If anything, Google will double-down on this approach, treading the fine line between scraping your content (without paying for it) and rewarding you with enough traffic to continue publishing.

There was even a time when you could grab the featured snippet and the numero uno ranking for a given keyword.

So you could effectively rank for position zero and position one. Which obviously drove insane amounts of traffic.

But then Google went and changed its algorithm to terminate “spot zero” rankings, and SEOs went back to the drawing board. The point we’re making is how your visitors interact with your website has changed dramatically.

But this also provides you with an opportunity.

As you probably already know, grabbing the first position result in Google SERPs will give you a CTR of at least 31.7% for a given search query. That’s why SEOs push so hard to dominate that particular slot in the organic SERPs.

But what if we told you that a competing featured snippet gets way more clicks you should get. There is hope, though.

Because around 60% of all featured snippets are owned by sites that don’t hold position one or that keyword. Basically, as long as you rank somewhere on page one it’s simply a matter of reverse engineering how to grab the featured snippet for that result. And yes, we’ve got you covered.

Analyzing the competition

As has been the case with most aspects of SEO over the last few years you should analyze what your competitors are doing.

So, the Authority Hacker team analyzed over one million search results for commonalities in the “how” and “why” of rich snippets.

Our criteria were that we included all types of featured snippets, including YouTube, People Also Ask, Knowledge cards, and more. And we also only analyzed phrases that had at least 1,000 searches per month.

What we found is that anywhere up to 65% of all search results included a snippet of some kind.

Basically, if you’re not optimizing for these rich/featured snippets, I can pretty much guarantee that your competitors are.

Finding featured snippet gaps

Let’s say you rank on page one for your keyword of choice. It typically takes a lot of links and a lot of work to kick down the door to position one. But snagging a featured snippet can help you leapfrog your competitors.

Quick reminder: You have to already rank somewhere on page one for our tactic to work.

With that in mind, head on over to Ahrefs.

Click on ‘Site Explorer’, paste in the URL of your website, click the search icon, and then click on ‘Organic Keywords’.

Now, filter the results so you only see what pages already rank on the first page of the SERPs.

And the final step is to look for the gaps i.e. keywords you already rank for but where you don’t own the featured snippet.

To do that click on ‘SERP Features’ and select ‘Featured snippet” and ‘Apply’.

Here’s what the results look like:

Now you know exactly what keyword phrases to target for your next featured snippet conquest.

And yes, you could do all of this manually.

But that’s entirely up to you – Ahrefs is our tool of choice when it comes to this stuff.

How do you get featured snippets?

So now we get to the cool stuff – reverse-engineering the SERPs to snag those premium organic placements.

Remember those commonalities we mentioned a little while back?

Well, what also became apparent during our research is that Google isn’t quite as clever as they’d like you to think they are.

All the talk about using AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing) to determine search results well it’s basically smoke and mirrors.

It all sounds compelling but it’s still basically fluff. Instead, the process they appear to use is far more mechanical in nature.

Our data indicate that they’re using how content is structured and semantic analysis to figure out what should appear as a featured snippet. Which all sounds very complicated, but it isn’t.

What we found is that Google follows some very basic rules when choosing which page to take a featured snippet from.

In effect, they would appear to be giving preference to pages that structure their data in a very specific way:

1. “How to”, “What is” or “Best x vs. y” queries are your best targets
2. You should wrap the original search query, verbatim, in an H2 or H3 tag
3. You should also include an image within your “answer”
4. You should write 50-ish words (no more than 300 characters) to answer the query

What you are effectively doing here is over-optimizing for the search query.

So it’s kinda like being back in 2004, for now.

Some will view this tactic as “keyword” stuffing, which I think is maybe a little hyperbolic.

I see it as simply structuring your data in a way that makes Google pay attention to your page.

We’re simply providing you with the information we use to dominate whatever featured snippet we want to.

What you do with that information is entirely up to you.

But just imagine the positive impact this could have on an already successful affiliate site?

Are there any downsides?

As with any SEO “hack”, there is always the likelihood that Google will update its algorithm again, changing the selection criteria.

So – in several month’s time – you might have to adjust your approach to retain your position zero placements.

But the argument I’d make here is that in the meantime you’ll miss out on a lot of free traffic.

Something which your competitors will be more than happy to take the risk on.

For me, this is an opportunity to take advantage of.

And if things change, well I’ll see that as “Que sera sera”.

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How Your Brand Can Earn Media Coverage on NBC News, USA Today, CNBC, and More

Posted by amandamilligan

As you might imagine, it’s not easy to get your brand name mentioned in top media outlets.

But if you put in the work to engage in content marketing + digital PR, the benefits are massive:

• High-quality backlinks to your site
• A significant boost in brand awareness
• An increase in your brand’s authority
• Improved relationships with writers who loved your content

I’ll explain how you can earn this type of coverage and its corresponding benefits for your brand.

Step 1: Create newsworthy content

You probably have an instinctual sense of what qualifies as news, but some of the key newsworthy elements are timeliness, proximity, and significance.

Timeliness is tough. Hard news is usually covered by media outlets automatically anyway. However, there’s a way to create news — and it’s through data journalism.

By doing your own research, conducting your own studies, running your own surveys, and performing your own analyses, you’re effectively creating news by offering brand new stories.

For example, for our client Porch, we used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder, Yelp, and Zillow to determine which cities are the best for young families.

This project is inherently location-based, which adds the proximity element as well. But even if your content isn’t location-based, explore whether you can take your data and localize it so that you cover multiple geographic areas. (Then, you can pitch local news in addition to national news!)

Significance is also an excellent element to keep in mind, especially during the ideation stage. It basically means: How many people are impacted by this news, and to what degree?

This is especially important if you’re aiming for national news publications, as they tend to have a wide audience. In this case, there are plenty of young families across the country, and CNBC saw that it could connect with this demographic.

When you combine all of these newsworthy elements, you can increase your chances of getting respectable news publications interested.

Step 2: Design and package the content for clarity

You need to present your data in a clear and compelling way. Easier said than done, though, right?

Here are common design pitfalls to watch out for:

• Over-designing. Instead, experiment with simplistic styles that match your branding and take more creative liberties with headers and where the data naturally lends itself to imagery.
• Over-branding. If you have your logo on all of the images, it might be a bit too much branding for some publishers. However, if you have a really authoritative brand, it can add authority to the content, too. Test both versions to see what works best for you.
• Over-labeling. Include all of the text and labels you need to make things clear, but don’t have too much repetition. The more there is to read, the more time it’ll take to understand what’s happening on the graph.

Finally, don’t be afraid to add the most interesting insights or context as callouts to the images. That way people can identify the most pertinent information immediately while still having more to explore if they want the full story.

Take, for example, one of the graphics we created for BestVPN for a project that got coverage on The Motley Fool, USA Today, Nasdaq and more. We don’t assume people will read text in an article to get relevant information, so we put it right on the image.

Here’s another example of a project image we created for Influence.co.

We included the callout at the bottom of the image and featured it in our pitch emails (more on that later) because we knew it was a compelling data point. Lo and behold, it became the headline for the Bustle coverage we secured.

Note: It’s entirely possible a news publication won’t run your images. That’s totally fine! Creating the images is still worth it, because they help everyone grasp your project more quickly (including writers), and when well done, they convey a sense of authority.

When you have all of your data visualized, we recommended creating a write-up that goes along with it. One objective of the article is to explain why you executed the project in the first place. What were you trying to discover? How is this information useful to your audience?

The other objective is to provide more color to the data. What are the implications of your findings? What could it mean to readers, and how can they apply the new knowledge to their lives, if applicable?

Include quotes from experts when appropriate, as this will be useful to publication writers as well.

Step 3: Write personalized pitches

I could create an entirely separate article about how to properly pitch top-tier publishers. But for our purposes, I do want to address two of the most important elements:

Treat writers like people

“You did something PR people never do — but should. Looked at my Twitter feed and made it personal. Nicely done!” — CNBC writer

Building real connections with people takes time and effort. If you’re going to pitch a writer, you need to do the following:

• Read their past work and fully understand their beat
• Understand how your work matches their beat
• Check out their social profiles to learn more about them as people

Some still swear by the templated approach. While it might work sometimes, we’ve found that because writers’ inboxes continue to be inundated with pitches, reaching out to them in a more personalized manner can not only increase our chances of getting emails opened, but also getting a genuinely appreciative response.

So, start your email with a personal connection. Reach out about something you have in common or something about them you admire. It will go a long way!

Include a list of the most relevant insights

“Wow these findings are super interesting and surprising. I will for sure include if I go ahead with this piece.” — The Wall Street Journal writer

Never assume a writer is going to click through to your project and read the entire thing before deciding if they want to cover it. In the pitch email, you need to spell out exactly what you think is the most interesting part about the project for their readers.

The key word being their readers. Sure, overall you probably have a few main takeaways in mind that are compelling, but there’s often nuance in which specific takeaways will be the most relevant to particular publishers.

We’ve seen this so many times, and it’s reflected in the resulting headlines. For example, for a project we created called Generational Knowledge Gaps, we surveyed nearly 1,000 people about their proficiency in hands-on tasks. Look at the news headlines on REALTOR Magazine and ZDNet, respectively:

While REALTOR Magazine went with a headline that captures the general spirit of the project, ZDNet’s is more honed in on what matters for their readers: the tech side of things. If we’d pitched to them the same way we’d pitched to REALTOR, they might not have covered the project at all.

So, after a personalization, include bullet points that say what the key data points are for their particular audience, wrap up the email with a question of whether they’re interested, and send it off.

Conclusion

It’s not an easy process to get the attention of top writers. You have to take time to develop high-quality content — it takes us at least a month — and then strategically promote it, which can also take at least another month to get as much coverage as you can. However, this investment can have major payoff, as you’ll be earning unparalleled brand awareness and high-value backlinks.

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Voice search SEO guide: Trends and best practices

30-second summary:

• An optimized content and voice search SEO is crucial to rank higher in search engines.
• Long-tail keywords are the backbone of voice searches.
• Mobile optimization goes hand-in-hand with voice search optimization.
• FAQ sections are your best friend.

Voice search is fast gaining popularity among online users. It is easier, faster, and more conversational as compared to traditional search.

As per ComScore, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches. Google also reports that 27% of online users are using voice search on mobile globally.

But to make it work, you will require optimized content and focus on voice search SEO. In this article, we will be digging into the eight best practices of optimizing just that.

Before that, what exactly is voice search SEO?

In simple terms, voice search SEO is a technique that optimizes the content, phrases, keywords, metadata, and more to enable your voice search to rank on top whenever a user asks questions. It mainly focuses on the natural language of users and delivers them answers accordingly.

The new 2020 voice search trends

1. Smart speakers are driving voice search adoption

As per emarketer, smart speaker usage is estimated to grow at a compound yearly growth rate of approximately 48% to meet the demands of more than 76 million users by 2020.

And it is said that 40 million Americans currently possess a smart speaker. Clearly, more and more households are using smart speakers these days.

Earlier, only a handful of products such as Alexa and Siri were popular. But over the years, voice technology has improved tremendously. As a result, many tech companies are releasing their own smart speakers.

2. Improvement in voice AI and machine learning (ML)

There is a remarkable improvement in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and it has changed how users interact with their smart devices and search the internet.

For instance, with Google’s RankBrain, you can recognize words and phrases to predict forecast results more accurately. When it encounters a new phrase, it makes its best guess and gives answers accordingly.

3. Used to search for local products and services

People are increasingly using voice search to search for local products and services. According to statistics, 58% of people have used voice search while finding information about a local business.

Also, as per Google reports, searches for “near me” business has increased drastically over the last few years. It is indeed great news for local businesses.

4. Increase in popularity of voice SEO

To emerge at the top, marketers are regularly fine-tuning their SEO strategy to optimize for voice search. Considering that Google’s voice recognition has 95% accuracy, businesses wanting to attract more inbound traffic to their site have to implement voice SEO.

And Google alone is not working on perfecting voice recognition to make the most of voice search. China’s iFlytek speech recognition system has an accuracy rate of 98%, and the team is working to achieve 99% accuracy.

5. Voice search is more mobile than ever

Google’s voice search is now available in more than 100 languages on mobile devices.

Moreover, statistics suggest that mobile phones are used nearly 40% more than smart speakers for voice search.

And with mobile phones, people usually use voice search in different environments like at the office alone, at a restaurant, at a party, or any other location.

This trend of voice search on smartphones continues to rise – all thanks to advances in speech recognition technology.

Here are some best practices to optimize voice search SEO

1. Use long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are specific keywords that your target audience is likely to enter (and in this case speak) to the search engine.

People have been using long-tail keywords for a long time and seeing brilliant results with their search rankings.

Thus, it’s a great idea to use long-tail keywords to optimize voice search for a website.

In fact, according to statistics, they make up 70% of all web searches.

In voice search, you can add long-tail keywords in a more conversational tone and specify what users are looking for.

The good news is that you can use plenty of online tools to search for relevant phrases and add them to your content. Some of them include:

• Ubersuggest
• SEMrush
• HubSpot Content Strategy Tool

2. Implement schema markup

Also known as Structured Data, Schema Markup is a code that you can add to your website. It will allow search engines to understand your site’s content, what it means, and why it is there.

Schema Markup can also help search engines robots crawl and make it rank higher on search engines. Further, you can use it for improving and getting comprehensive search results that boost the user experience.

Just have a look at the example below

The second search result has a star rating and a publication date, which has been added using Schema Markup. Since the result is illustrated, the users are likely to click on it readily.

You can also implement schema markup SEO best practices to provide more information about your site to the search engines and rank higher.

3. Curate content that gives direct answers

Users don’t do voice search like they do a text search. Instead, they will probably be making longer and more specific queries.

As per research, there has been a 61% growth in question keyphrases.

The statistics reveal how people are using question keywords to ask queries through voice search.

Thus, it’s an excellent idea to curate your content to answer their queries. However, make sure that you write great content that is valuable to your target audience. It will satisfy your user and, at the same time, increase the chances of appearing in featured snippets.

4. Optimize your Google My Business page

Another way to rank higher for voice searches is to optimize your Google My Business page.

Actually, it’s one of the easiest ways to get discovered by your target audience when they voice out their queries in Google. You just have to make sure that your content, images, and information are complete and precise.

Additionally, implement your prevailing local SEO strategy along with targeting how users are phrasing their queries. As per reports, 76% of smart speaker-users carry out local searches at least once a week. Thus, local SEO is as crucial as entering relevant info and images.

5. Work on increasing domain authority

Websites with many links pointing to them rank higher in regular search. And it is the same for voice search.

A study by Brian Dean, which examined 10,000 Google Home search results, found that sites with more links rank more often in voice search.

As soon as you put in your voice query, the Google search engine will provide results from high authority websites.

Here are some of the ways to increase your domain authority to rank higher in voice search:

• Optimize your on-page content
• Apply optimal internal linking strategies
• Remove bad and spammy links
• Make your site mobile-friendly

6. Make your site mobile-optimized

Everyone surfs the internet via smartphones these days since it’s convenient and accessible. It is only evident that most users will do their voice search from mobile.

The graph below shows the different environments where people use voice search.

Since voice searches are mostly done via mobile phones, mobile optimization is crucial.

Some useful tips for mobile-optimization site include:

• Optimizing your mobile pages with AMP
• Checking your site’s speed using GTMetrix and working to boost it
• Creating mobile-responsive web pages
• Taking advantage of responsive landing page builders
• Creating content to be more readable on smartphones
• Regularly testing your website with Google’s mobile-friendly test tool

7. Optimize site speed

Your page speed is going to play a significant role in voice search SEO. Studies show that the pages that rank higher in search engines after doing a voice search load in 4.6 seconds. They are also 52% faster compared to average pages.

Thus, optimizing your site speed is essential if you want to rank higher in search engines.

To increase your page speed, you can implement tricks like:

• Using a CDN
• Choosing a great web hosting platform that provides fast page load speed and uptime
• Optimizing the image size on your website
• Limiting the number of plugins
• Using website caching
• Reducing the use of web fonts

8. Create voice search FAQ pages

Crafting voice search FAQ pages will benefit you a lot since question keywords are very popular.

According to statistics, voice search results come more from FAQ pages than desktops.

The best part is that FAQ pages can rank for several voice search queries. Moreover, they are concise and answer precisely what the users are looking for.

Therefore, Google usually pulls out the answer from your FAQ page whenever users do a voice search.

Wrapping up

Voice search is convenient and straightforward to use. No wonder it is gaining popularity among online users. But unless you optimize your voice search for SEO, users won’t be able to find your content.

Implementing all the eight tips mentioned in this article to optimize your site for voice search SEO can help you a great deal. These are tried and tested tips and will definitely work.

Plus, when you optimize your site for voice search SEO, you will be optimizing your website in general and rank higher in search engines either way.

Ricky Wang is a freelance content marketer and blogger at rickywang.com where he writes to readers about growing an online business. Connect with him on Twitter.

The post Voice search SEO guide: Trends and best practices appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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How to use super-resolution and improve onsite image quality

30-second summary:

• There’s “super-resolution” technology that can greatly improve the quality of your website images.
• Higher resolution images have multiple benefits, including being preferred by Google and being more likely to attract attention and be shared.
• There are a few considerations before using super-resolution, including the impact it can create for on-site speed.
• Fractl’s VP of Creative, Kristin Tynski, shares a concise instructional guide to help you understand super-resolution and how you can apply it to your images.
• Find out how keeping abreast of this AI revolution will keep you ahead of the curve and help with digital marketing

A few years ago, “zoom and enhance” was an internet meme making fun of CSI-style shows using a technology that didn’t really exist. Taking a very low-resolution image and zooming in/enhancing it wasn’t something that could be done as depicted. 

However, in the last few years, new modern artificial intelligence (AI) models have changed that. The so-called “super-resolution” can now be done with pretty stunning results. Even better, the models and underlying code are open-sourced, meaning anyone can upscale their images using these new, state-of-the-art AI models.

I’m going to reveal how you can easily utilize this technology to automatically upscale your website images in bulk and why it can be beneficial.

The advantages of super-resolution

Super-resolution is probably best suited for e-commerce sites that don’t have super high-quality images and instead have small images provided by manufacturers, drop shippers or other ecommerce middlemen. 

Here’s a look at the kind of quality increase you could expect from this process.

Source: Imgur Album

You can see more full-size examples here. The differences are more apparent the larger the image is zoomed.

There are many potential benefits to super-resolution:

• Google prefers unique/non-duplicate images that it hasn’t seen before. It seems likely that applying super-resolution to a stock image or an ecommerce image that is widely used by many sites (and exists many times in the index) might make that super-resolution image the canonical “best version” of that image online, possibly leading to improved ranking benefits. 
• Higher resolution images are more often linked to and shared vs their lower-resolution counterparts. 
• Higher resolution images are more likely to attract and retain the attention of visitors, likely leading to increased on-site engagement metrics (lower bounce rate, higher time on site, etc.), which are known to be important factors in search rankings. 

However, there are some other factors to consider before proceeding. Site speed is a key SEO ranking metric. Increasing image resolution typically also means increasing image size. The tradeoff between quality and image size is an important one, and you should have an idea of how upscaling images may impact page load times.

If you already have only high-quality images, as you should, upscaling likely isn’t worthwhile.

Super-resolution upscaling also doesn’t do particularly well with text. It can create artifacts that decrease overall image quality. However, it works much better for images without text.

Despite those caveats, if you still think the increase in quality would be useful for you like the examples below, keep reading.

Implementing super-resolution on your site’s images

This guide requires that you sign up for two APIs:

1. SerpAPI – Used for scraping all indexed images from Google Image search 
2. DeepAI Super Resolution – Used for performing the super-resolution enhancements on each image

While it’s possible to achieve what is outlined here without relying on paid APIs, it does drastically simplify the process for relatively inexpensive API usage rates. If you have an ongoing need for using super-resolution on your images, implementing these models from their open-source base code is probably your least expensive bet. 

Using super-resolution on your images

Here’s what to do:

• Copy this Google Collaboratory notebook to your own drive. 
• Replace Frac.tl with your own domain in the code in the fifth cell.  
• Replace the API key in the fifth cell with the API key you get from SerpAPI.
• Replace the API key in the seventh cell with the API key you get from DeepAI.org
• Run each cell sequentially

The code does the following

• Scrapes all Google Image results for the domain given and downloads them into the images folder
• Gets the URL for each image in the image folder after they have been scraped and gives them to the Deepai.org super-resolution API
• Gets the super-resolution images from the Deepai API and downloads them to the super images folder

Conclusion

We are now at a tipping point in the emergence and democratization of AI-driven models that can do magical things. Learning Python opens up a huge new world where open-source code and open-source trained models now give even programming novices the opportunity to leverage these technologies for a huge variety of digital marketing goals.

Keeping abreast of this AI revolution will not only keep you ahead of the curve but will also give you the opportunity to be among the first to apply these advancements in new and creative ways, addressing previously unaddressable problems and challenges in our space. 

Kristin Tynski is VP of Creative at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s worked with Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses.

The post How to use super-resolution and improve onsite image quality appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Page Authority 2.0 Is Coming This Month: What’s Changing and Why

Posted by rjonesx.

Hey folks,

I'm Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist with Moz, and I'm proud to announce that this month we’ll be releasing a terrific update to our metric, Page Authority (PA).

Although Page Authority hasn't attracted the same attention as its sibling metric Domain Authority, PA has always correlated with SERPs much better than DA, serving as a strong predictor of ranking. While PA has always fluctuated with changes in the link graph, we’re introducing a whole new method of deriving the score.

Learn More About Page Authority 2.0

What's changing

Long gone are the days of just counting backlinks a couple of ways and hoping they correlate well with SERPs. As Moz tends to do, we’re pioneering a new manner of calculating Page Authority to produce superior results. Here are some of the ways we’re changing things up:

The training set

In the past, we used SERPs alone to train the Page Authority model. While this method was simple and direct, it left much to be desired. Our first step in addressing the new Page Authority is redefining the training set altogether.

Instead of modeling Page Authority based on one page's ability to outrank another page, we now train based on the cumulative value of a page based on a number of metrics including search traffic and CPC. While this is a bit of an oversimplification of what’s going on, this methodology allows us to better compare pages that don't appear in the SERPs together.

For example, imagine Page A is on one topic and Page B is on another topic. Historically, our model wouldn't get to compare these two pages because they never appear on the same SERP. This new methodology provides an abstract value to each page, such that they can be compared with any other page by the machine-learned model.

The re-training set

One of the biggest problems in building metrics is not what the models see, but what the models don't see.

Think about this for a minute: what types of URLs don't show up in the SERPs that the model will use to produce Page Authority? Well, for starters, there won't be many images or other binary files. There also won't be penalized pages. In order to address this problem, we now use a common solution of running the model, identifying outliers (high PA URLs which do not in fact have any search value), and then feeding those URLs back into the training set. We can then re-run the model such that it learns from its own mistakes. This can be repeated as many times as is necessary to reduce the number of outliers.

Ripping off the Band-Aid

Moz is always cognizant of the impact the changes to our metrics might have on our customers. There is a trade-off between continuity and accuracy. With Page Authority, we’re focusing on accuracy. This may cause larger-than-normal shifts in your Page Authority, so it’s more important than ever to think about Page Authority with respect to your competitors, not as a standalone number.

What actions should we take?

Communicate with stakeholders, team members, and clients about the update

Just like our upgrade to Domain Authority, some users will likely be surprised by changes in their PA. Make sure they understand that the new PA will be more accurate (and more useful!) and that the most important measurement is relative to their competitors. We won't release a Page Authority which isn't better than the previous version, so even if the results are disappointing, understand that you now have better insight than ever before into the performance of your pages in the SERPs.

Use PA as a relative metric, like DA

Page Authority is intrinsically comparative. A PA of 70 means nothing unless you know the PA of your competitors. It could be high enough to allow you to rank for every keyword you like, or it could be terribly low because your competitors are Wikipedia and Quora. The first thing you should do when analyzing the Page Authority of any URL is set it in the proper context of its competitor's URLs.

Expect PA to keep pace with Google

Just as we announced with Domain Authority, we’re not going to launch the new PA and just let it go. Our intent is to continue to improve upon the model as we discover new and better features and models. This volatility will mostly affect pages with unnatural link profiles, but we would rather stay up-to-date with Google's algorithms even if it means a bit of a bumpy ride.

When is it launching?

We’ll be rolling out the new Page Authority on September 30, 2020. Between now and then, we encourage you to explore our resources to help you prepare and facilitate conversations with clients and team members. Following the launch of the new PA, I’ll also be hosting a webinar on October 15 to discuss how to leverage the metric. We’re so excited about the new and improved PA and hope you’re looking forward to this update too.

If you have any questions, please comment below, reach out to me on Twitter @rjonesx, or email me at russ@moz.com.

To get prepared and learn more about the upcoming change to Page Authority, be sure to dig into our helpful resources:

Visit the PA Resource Center

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!

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