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Tuesday, 26 April 2016
Beyond local SEO: Greg Gifford on how to win the visibility race
Last Friday at a packed-out Brighton SEO conference, expert local search consultant Greg Gifford delivered a fast and furious presentation on the secrets of local marketing visibility: it’s not just about local SEO.
In a slide-show brimming with references to classic car movies, Greg Gifford raced through a host of tips and tricks that can massively improve your business’s local visibility and let you storm ahead of the competition.
The days of “just having a website” and trying to make it rank near the top are over; it takes more than just SEO to market to local customers. That’s not to say that local SEO isn’t important, of course, but it shouldn’t be your only consideration.
By thinking about local SEO as just one part of a wider visibility strategy, you can ensure that your business has a presence across multiple channels, not just in search. That’s better for your customers as well as for you.
In his talk, Gifford gave a run-down of other key areas to pay attention to, and how to optimise each one to target exactly the local audience you want to attract.
But first, because search is still hugely important for a local business, here are some handy tricks that Greg Gifford shared which will help you get ahead in the SEO game.
Quick tips for local SEO
Future-proof your SEO tactics
You only need to look at pizza delivery for an example of how much weight local visibility now carries in search, more than ever before. If you Google “pizza delivery”, even without specifying a location, Google will serve you local results – whether you asked for them or not.
Any algorithm changes that Google makes to its local search results have the potential to shake things up hugely, and the businesses who adapt fastest are often those who end up on top.
Google’s ‘Pigeon’ update in 2014 was a massive game-changer for local SEO, and mobile-oriented ranking changes like Mobilegeddon can have a huge impact on local given that 94% of mobile searches have local intent.
But if you live outside the US, you’re in luck (for once!): Google algorithm updates always hit the US before they roll out anywhere else, so by keeping an eye on what’s happening in the States, you can ‘future-proof’ your SEO tactics and know exactly what to do by the time the update comes to you.
And even if you live in the US, there’s still a way you can get ahead: Gifford recommends keeping an eye on Moz.com’s local search ranking factors research, an extensive survey conducted across SEO experts analysing the changes in ranking factors they have observed over the past year. This will give you the low-down on what changes search experts sense in the winds and how they recommend dealing with them.
Make your blog a local destination
Maintaining a blog is still an excellent content and SEO strategy, giving businesses a platform to publish regular, fresh and insightful content and build a relationship with their visitors.
But in the words of Greg Gifford, “Don’t just market your shit!” Make your blog a local destination; share all sorts of things that people want to read.
Visitors will be turned off by a blog that is clearly just another mouthpiece for the company to promote its products. By thoughtfully curating all sorts of valuable local content, you can turn your blog into a go-to destination, boost its visibility and build relationships and links with other local blogs and businesses.
And speaking of local businesses…
Get those local business links!
When it comes to inbound links to your website, businesses will fight tooth and nail to try and get links from sites with the most domain authority. But Greg Gifford’s tip is one that many businesses wouldn’t even consider: go after “crappy little church websites”. You know the ones, with Microsoft Word clipart and neon green Comic Sans font in the header.
These kinds of tiny hyper-local websites have a huge amount of local relevance, and so their links carry a lot of weight. Best of all, none of your competitors will be going after them, so you can snap them up and enjoy the boost.
Increase your local SEO with inbound links from highly hyperlocal websites – even if they aren’t always of the best quality. Photo by Lincolnian, made available via CC BY-SA 2.0
Build ‘local silos’ to show up in nearby cities
If you want your site to show up in search for a city you’re not located in, Gifford recommends building what he calls ‘local silos’ targeted at nearby cities.
A silo is the name given to a system or sector that operates in isolation from others. You’ve probably heard a lot about we should be breaking down silos, but in this case, they can work to your advantage.
To build ‘local silos’, create little self-contained zones of information within your site that are based around the city or neighbourhood you want to target and optimise the heck out of them.
Publish blog posts about that city, get links back from local businesses, and make sure they point to pages within the silo; and before too long, you’ll see your silos start to rank in local searches for that area.
Track your Google My Business clicks
In the midst of all the cool local SEO hacks, it pays to remember the basics, like making sure your business is listed on Google My Business and your profile is complete.
Gifford also advises adding tracking parameters to your Google My Business links in order to monitor the traffic coming to your site via that page. Local SEO Guide has a good guide on how to do this with Google’s URL builder tool.
It’s also worth keeping an eye on developments with Google Posts, which Google seems to be prepping as a significant platform for business promotion, and which could possibly be the next major development in local search if Google rolls it out on a larger scale.
How to optimise your email marketing
So we’ve covered the ‘local SEO’ part of local visibility; how about the ‘beyond’? Greg Gifford’s first tip might seem a little old-school, but it’s still one of the most effective marketing tools at your disposal: email marketing.
Gifford advises making sure that you’re using a responsive email design. Brands who have fully embraced responsive emails see 55% more Clicks to Open (CTO) from mobile and 23% more from desktop compared to brands who haven’t, according to research by Yesmail.
Adding video to your emails can increase their attractiveness and interactivity, and a survey conducted by Forrester Marketing Group found that including a video in email marketing increased Click-Through Rate by 200 to 300%.
That statistic is from 2010, but more recent statistics have shown that just including the word “video” in an email subject line can raise open rates by 19% and Click-Through Rates by 65%.
Having a carefully curated list of email addresses to target can also come in handy when using Facebook Ads, as we’ll see later on.
Go beyond YouTube
If you’re going to commit to using video in your marketing strategy, Gifford has one key recommendation for you: don’t use YouTube. Instead, the video hosting service that Gifford recommends for keeping control of your content and tracking the important metrics is Wistia.
Here are some of the reasons he lists for opting for Wistia instead of YouTube or another major video host:
- Wistia provides detailed video analytics, including engagement statistics, trend graphs, and individual viewer ‘heatmaps’ which show the parts of a video each user watched, skipped and rewatched.
- You can tie user information to email addresses, and also use Wistia’s ‘Turnstile’ tool to add a form that requires users to input their email address at any point before, after or during the video.
- Wistia allows you to give your videos a custom play button, which according to Wikia’s former Director of Growth and Acquisition Casey Henry can increase your play rate by 19%.
- Similarly, you can also add a custom thumbnail to your videos, which can potentially boost your play rate by as much as 35% (and often winds up looking much nicer).
- Wistia embeds on Facebook play in the news feed, and on Twitter will expand into a Twitter card that also allows users to play them in-stream.
Facebook ads
“Facebook ads used to be the drunk guy that showed up late to the party; now, they’re the cool guy that everyone’s stoked to see,” says Gifford. And if you’re looking to gain local visibility, Facebook ads have a lot of valuable advantages.
- Facebook’s demographic targeting is incredibly diverse and exact, allowing you to target users based on location, age, gender, interests, and some mind-bogglingly specific parameters like education level, device and mobile connection.
- You can also load in email lists and use them to create a custom audience of Facebook users who have accounts registered with those addresses.
- Facebook also allows you to create Lookalike Audiences which will target new groups of people who are similar to audiences you’re already targeting.
- Facebook’s ‘local awareness ads’ are an incredibly powerful local advertising tool. Google research on local search showed that roughly 70% of users want ads customised to their city or zip code, and between 60 and 70% want ads customised to their immediate surroundings.
Facebook’s local awareness ads allow you to drop a pin on any point on a map, and ads will be shown on mobile devices within a certain radius of that point. Try dropping a map pin on your competitors, on an event or at a conference!
Use Beacons
Gifford’s final hot tip for local visibility is to use Beacons. Beacons are “small, Bluetooth-enabled hardware devices that can be installed in physical locations, like retail stores. They silently broadcast a message to any Bluetooth-enabled devices in their proximity, kind of like a lighthouse with text”, as Dan Cristo writes.
Usually Beacons require a dedicated app to work, but Beacon providers have begun setting up app networks which will allow Beacons to pop up a message on someone’s phone as long as any app in the network is running.
The apps are location-aware, so they can be tagged by the Beacon even if they aren’t running. You can then connect directly to Facebook’s API, allowing you to retarget ads at actual foot traffic.
DealerOn, Gifford’s marketing and advertising company, ran some tests with Beacon and found they led to anything from a 34.6% to a 45.7% increase in Click-Through Rate on ads. At a recent conference, the Beacon at DealerOn’s booth tagged 687 unique users.
Beacons are still an emerging technology, but they have the power to improve the customer experience and potentially revolutionise search – especially in a hyperlocal context. So watch out for opportunities and get creative with how you use them.
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The convergence of SEO and UI goals for mobile users
One year after Google put an algorithmic premium on mobile experience, the so-called “Mobilegeddon,” Google is at it again. New tools are coming in late spring to help webmasters make their websites work better on mobile devices.
Mobilegeddon was the consequence of businesses not making their websites easier to use on smartphones and other mobile devices. Google’s updates were an incentive to reward webmasters by ranking mobile-friendly websites higher in search results.
However, there was fallout: webmasters without mobile optimized sites saw as much as a 12% plunge in traffic to non-mobile sites, according to an Adobe study in July 2015.
Small businesses in particular suffered because only a third of such businesses had a mobile optimized website, according to eMarketer.
Google must focus on mobile because more than half of all Google searches are from smartphones and mobile devices. If consumers do not have a good experience when they click on a mobile SERP link, they will likely leave the page (and Google).
Specifically, a Google survey from late 2015 reported a loss of 29% of smartphone users if a site doesn’t satisfy their needs (lack of information or slower load times).
Furthermore, studies show that even a one second increase in load time can lead to an 11% decrease in page views, a 7% decrease in conversions and a 16% decrease in satisfaction.
Mobile-optimized sites are now central to a satisfying web experience.
So as the trend towards mobile continues, there are two reasons why businesses want to optimize their websites for mobile devices: superior customer experience and search engine ranking – and in fact, both are interconnected.
When Google rolled out Panda in 2011, they forever shifted algorithmic signal to include both relevance and quality. Therefore, without a superior customer experience (read: good UI), Google will not give a website a shot at a top SERP ranking and, in turn, high search results won’t result in increased user engagement.
But, mobile Information Architecture (IA) and User Interface (UI) is hard. Because of their mobility, small screen size and cumbersome keyboard entry, consumers interact with mobile devices in an entirely different way than with laptops or desktops and in a different context.
Mobile users do not have patience for anything that’s short of being intuitive, relevant and fast.
Making your web page play nice across multiple devices, which has come to be labeled “responsive web design” means that you can use one URL that will adjust to whatever device it’s being used on.
Many websites still require horizontal scrolling or zoom on mobile, and layouts should be viewable on mobile without these shortcomings to the user experience. Responsive pages that can be viewed with ease on a desktop PC, tablet or smartphone are critical to making your webpage stickier for mobile users as well as saving on the cost of developing separate sites for multiple devices.
Google is not, however, throwing businesses under the bus. The new tools will allow businesses to enter their website URL to get a diagnostic check to explain why their website isn’t mobile-friendly as well as how to improve the site. The time is (past) if you weren’t pro-active ensuring your site is mobile-friendly – stop everything and call a mobile savvy partner to make it so.
The good news is that brands that invest in mobile optimization and mobile strategies will crush the competition. If there is one unifying theme across all demographics, millennials in particular, it is the pervasive use of mobile devices to research and shop.
In fact, 93% of people who use a mobile device for research make a purchase and according to internal ConsumerAffairs user data, mobile visitors purchase within 2-4 hours compared to 1-3 days for desktop visitors.
Any user interface should be developed considering the way users engage with their mobile devices. Hold it in your hand, and walk through some of the sites you frequent on mobile. Ask yourself these questions:
- How long does it take the site to load?
- How do your hands engage with the site?
- Are you needing to scroll far to get info?
- Do you have trouble navigating to the point of a form fill or purchase?
- Is it easy to click and call the business?
- Where are menu items placed on the mobile UI, and where does your hand align with those menu items and calls to action?
Evaluate your customer journey pathways and imagine what your UI could do to give a smoother experience to mobile users.
To make sure you are converting web visits to sales, a mobile-friendly website must have print that is big enough to read without having to constantly pinch and zoom; tasks need to be simplified; links need to be clearly visible and spaced far enough apart so that errant clicks don’t occur.
For example, we love the way Flipboard’s user interface aligns with their business objectives. Flipboard gives people a single place to follow all of their interests and then save or share stories, images, and videos into their own Flipboard magazines. To that end, their mobile site is fast, simple and intuitive. The reward? 82 million monthly readers.
To compete for mobile customers and higher search engine rankings, marketers must become mobile UI architects to design a more intuitive and relevant customer experience. Mobile is no longer the alternate platform, it is now the platform of choice.
Mobile devices are the new norm. We do everything on them from making dinner reservations, finding a date, managing our bank accounts, to hailing a ride. Mobile has changed the very foundation of how consumers communicate, connect, and discover online.
Not surprisingly, consumers expect brands to provide a superior mobile experience.
Zac Carman is CEO of ConsumerAffairs and contributor to Search Engine Watch.
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How to optimise your page images to increase site speed
Google’s official slogan is “Don’t Be Evil”, but it’s long been rumoured that the company has a second, internal motto that they tend to keep under wraps:
“You’re either fast, or you’re f***ed.”
We’ve written about site-speed in the past, and there’s no doubt of its importance (if there is, stick around for the stats section of this post) but for content marketers, improving the speed of your website is often seen as a particularly arduous technical exercise that’s completely out of your control. Only a back-end full-stack engineer can speed things up significantly, right?
As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth. As Tom Bennet from Builtvisible explained in his excellent recent talk at Brighton SEO. Here, I’ll run through some key points Tom addressed to show how and why you should concentrate on delivering a lightning-fast experience to users.
Why is site speed important?
Now, I mentioned stats didn’t I?
According to the official Google webmaster blog, site speed matters. Google itself spends an awful lot of time checking whether or not your site is keeping up with your competitors. If you are slower, then your place in the search results will suffer.
But that’s not the only important factor here. Site speed improves the overall User Experience. As a case in point, Tom mentioned this extraordinary stat from Firefox:
When Firefox increased average page load time by 2.2 seconds, form downloads increased by 15.4%. That equates to more than 10 million downloads per year.
Once you hear figures like that, the value starts to become clear. Tom also took time to quote Steve Souder, a pioneer of much modern web performance work:
So, we know we can do something about it. But where to concentrate our efforts?
What can we do about it?
To illustrate, Tom built a simple, fairly standard content page using bootstrap and jQuery. The content marketing industry churns out thousands of these every day, so it should be fairly relevant:
Next, we fire up the page and measure it using a combination of Yahoo’s Yslow and Google PageSpeed rulesets. Here are the initial results:
Taht F Grade is going to seriously hurt our credibility in Google’s eyes, and 3.9 seconds is going to seem like a grind for users. If you don’t believe me, count slowly to four. Would you be willing to wait that long for every page on a site to open?
But where should marketers focus their efforts to have the most impact?
On a typical page like this, images are by far the largest and most common element, so this is where we should be concentrating to start with.
Now, this isn’t just a case of opening up your images in Photoshop and making them smaller. Resolution does matter (we still want our pages to look beautiful), but only up to a certain point, so the first step is to check our image sizes:
As you can see from the page element, this image has been uploaded at 1024 x 683 pixels, but the user will only ever see it at a maximum of 420 x 289, less than half the upload size.
As always, it’s important to consider the User Experience, so let’s ask ourselves a few questions:
- What formats should we be using for images? PNGs are great for images with fewer colours or transparencies, while PEGS are perfect for photos.
- Dimensions: what is the maximum width and height at which the image will be displayed?
- Finally, do you really need all of those images?
If you have text within an image, get rid of it and use an actual font instead, and use vector graphics or CSS for things like logos or shading on the page. As Tom put it
“The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.”
Google has a range of guidelines and advice on this available which you should check out.
So, Tom resized, reformatted or replaced his images. How did this affect the overall site speed?
Being diligent with images was enough to shave a whopping 1.2 seconds – or 30% – off of the total page load time.
It’s still not rocketspeed at this point, but it’s much, much better. Tom detailed several other useful tips during his presentation which I will try to cover in the future as well, but for now – time to tighten up those images.
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Bing Ads Testing High Contrast Bolding of Keywords in Search Results
Here is how it appears in the search results:
Here is how it normally displays, without the high contrast bolding:
And another query with the bolding:
Bing is only doing the black bolding for Bing Ads only, not for the organic search results. They are also bolding the ads at the bottom of the page too.
When you look at this example with the sidebar ads, it becomes apparent that it might be even more important to ensure you have the keywords in your description text because of the way it stands out. In the fourth ad in this example, it stands out quite a bit with the multiple times it uses the word “credit” in the description…. and imagine how much more prominent it would have been with it at the top of the search results instead.
Should advertisers think about tailoring their ads around the fact keywords are being bolded? Especially if this Bing test becomes permanent or if Google decides to test something similar?
This does appear to be a limited test by Bing, as they switch between using it and not using it.
The post Bing Ads Testing High Contrast Bolding of Keywords in Search Results appeared first on The SEM Post.
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In Depth Articles Return to Google Search Results
A few weeks after Google removed all In-Depth Articles from the search results, they are now returning. Yesterday I spotted multiple search results that are now showing In-Depth Articles once again, after losing them earlier this month.
They have returned with the same most recent styling Google was using. They are separated from regular search results with very thin lines, with the descriptions only being 2 lines long. Last year, they used to show both thumbnails and longer descriptions, as well as a header stating they were In-Depth Article results.
Here are examples:
Aaron Friedman also posted screenshots on Twitter.
I'm seeing In Depth Articles are back. Did they take offline for testing or something? @rustybrick @dr_pete http://pic.twitter.com/pBTSrgk8lx
— Aaron Friedman (@AaronFriedman) April 26, 2016
Not all queries I used to see In-Depth Articles for are showing them now, and some are only showing up for a longer tail version. So it is possibly Google has reduced the percentage of results showing them, or increased the criteria of search queries that trigger them.
Once Mozcast updates for the day, I will include the data. While Google had once shown these results for as much as 13% of the search queries, according to Mozcast data, most recently it was about 7%.
Mozcast fluctuated In-Depth Articles from o% to 0.1%, but Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz was never able to see it in the live results.
Google never commented on the loss of the In-Depth Articles in the search results, so it isn’t clear why they were removed or why they have returned.
The post In Depth Articles Return to Google Search Results appeared first on The SEM Post.
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Facebook Allowing Users to Turn Off Live Video Notifications
When Facebook began allowing Pages to use live video streams, they made the decision to automatically send push notifications to all users whenever a Page began a live video stream, including sending them multiple times per hour for the same page as the stream would stop and start again. This quickly annoyed users who found it easiest to simply unlike the Facebook Pages rather than try and find a way to turn off those notifications.
Facebook seems to be rolling this out to users now. To see if you can turn off the notifications, go into Facebook settings, then notifications. But it does seem to be a very slow roll out. The tweet below shows it rolling out on the 21st, but I still don’t have it.
looks like you can now turn off all facebook live notifications. go to settings – notifications – live videos. http://pic.twitter.com/cgqLguXFTt
— Teresa Hammerl (@colazioneAroma) April 21, 2016
The post Facebook Allowing Users to Turn Off Live Video Notifications appeared first on The SEM Post.
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