How well prepared are you for a technical site audit? Here are some here are 5 points not to miss. 1. Take Mobile Optimization To The Next Level Mobile is critical for your business. More than half of the search […]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
5 Points Not To Overlook In A Technical SEO Audit
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Written by Joydeep Bhattacharya, Seo Sandwitch
The post 5 Points Not To Overlook In A Technical SEO Audit appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
10 Types of Visual Content Your Brand Should Be Creating Right Now [Infographic] – Over the past few years, we've seen content become more visual. Marketers have experimented with infographics, videos, and more — and they've made plans to keep it up this year. To help narrow your focus, check on this infographic from Canva below. From quote cards to infographics, this helpful list is designed to inspire your next visual project. Canva
Facebook Now Tracks Call-to-Action Clicks via ‘Actions on Page’ Insights Tab – Facebook is giving page owners a deeper understanding into how active those call-to-action buttons are. SocialTimes
Parents Spend 1.3 Times More Time on Facebook Than Non-Parents (Study) – Mobile devices have become vital tools for parents, according to a new study by Facebook IQ. The social network’s research arm interviewed parents aged 25 through 65 of infants, toddlers, adolescents and teens in eight markets–Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, U.K. and U.S.—analyzing Facebook and Instagram data with help from Ipsos MediaCT and Sound Research. Facebook
Study: Sophisticated Bots Outwitting Marketers, Will Cost $7.2 Billion In 2016 – Ad fraud is a major problem in digital advertising that results in billions of dollars in annual losses to marketers. While marketers are winning the battle against “basic bots,” they’re losing against more sophisticated bots, according to a new study and report from White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). Marketing Land
Report: 60% of Users Unwilling to Vacation Without Mobile Device – Expedia and Egencia, Expedia’s business travel brand, have revealed the results of the Expedia / Egencia Mobile Index, which measured the behaviors and preferences of mobile users while traveling. The study was conducted by Northstar, and gathered data from 9,642 travelers from 19 countries. SocialTimes
Survey: Under 40 Percent Start A “Local Search” With A Search Engine – What we widely call “local search” is only partly about search engines. Finding local content and making offline purchase decisions is a multifaceted process that involves several categories of information and devices. That’s according a new survey and report from IDC and YP. Search Engine Land
The 2016 Facebook Awards is Now Accepting Entries – It’s award season and The Facebook Awards is now welcoming submissions. Formerly the Facebook Studio Awards, the newly-dubbed Facebook Awards launched in 2012 to honor the most creative work on Facebook and, starting in 2015, on Instagram too. Facebook
Report: 61% of Fortune 500 CEOs Have No Social Media Presence – Social media adoption is sluggish among Fortune 500 CEOs; 61 percent are not active on any of the major social networks. Domo found that 195 of the CEOs on the list are active on at least one of the six major networks — Facebook, Twitter, G+, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube — but none are active across all six. SocialTimes
Facebook Introduces Audience Optimization for Publishers – This week, we’re launching Audience Optimization, an organic targeting tool to help publishers reach and engage their audiences on Facebook and better understand the interests of people clicking on their posts. This tool lets you improve the relevancy of your post by indicating who is most likely to engage with it, which can increase engagement at both the post and Page level. Facebook
Study: Quality Backlinks & Comprehensive Content Are Still Biggest Factors In Google Rankings – A new study broke down 1 million Google results. The results show that links & content had the highest correlation with a low Google position. Search Engine Land
Google Updates The General Guidelines Section Of Their Webmaster Guidelines – Google has quietly updated their Webmaster Guidelines document, which is one of the first places webmasters should go when learning about SEO best practices and dos and don’ts. Google
Facebook Audience Network Adds Support for Mobile Web – Facebook announced that its Facebook Audience Network mobile ad network added support for the mobile Web. The social network officially introduced Facebook Audience Network at F8 in April 2014, and it revealed earlier this month that the ad network reached a $1 billion annual run rate during the fourth quarter of 2015. SocialTimes
In response to 8 Digital Marketing Events Where You Can Learn, Connect and Grow in 2016, Thomas Flannagan said, "Nice events! I'll for sure visit stated webinars, thanx for the info!"
On How to Write for People: 5 Ways to Create Connections & Personality in Your Content Marketing Efforts, annhandley shared, "LOL to being your "spirit animal." 
“Has my topic been done already and done so well that my take on it isn’t really necessary?”
Marissa has a specific idea for her business. It’s a good idea.
But other people have already started businesses doing something similar.
Chances are you feel the same way about your business idea. You’re not alone, and we’ve got experience and insight for you in the podcast today.
Enjoy!
“Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.” – Jon Acuff
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title='Click to share on Twitter!'>Tweet This
Podcast episodes mentioned:
Al Jazeera America to shut down
The Fizzle Guide to Defining Your Target Audience
Deconstructing Expertise: Why You Need it & How to Get it
User Onboarding | A frequently-updated compendium of web app first-run experiences
Simplified Planner | Emily Ley
The Day Designer – Life + Business + Creativity
Feel Like It’s All Been Done Already? Watch This.
40 Days Prayer Book, Scott Erickson + Justin McRoberts
If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it can be a little daunting at first. With so much data available to dig through, it’s hard to know where to look to find the most important metrics.
Marketers that want to better understand their audience, and strengthen their marketing strategy, need to know how to best utilize all of the data available inside Google Analytics.
Without knowing which sections to pay attention to, you could spend hours digging through the platform and walk away with your head spinning.
Similarly, without analyzing your website traffic, it’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and know when it’s time to make a shift.
If leveraged correctly, Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into who visits your website, how they got there in the first place and what pages they spend the most time on; this is powerful data for marketers that can be used to enhance their strategy.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses alike. Through use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.
The back end of Google Analytics is broken down into eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.
Almost all eight sections contain sub-sections that provide a ton of data, but not all sections are critical for marketers to pay attention to.
Before we dive in to the sections that matter most to marketers, let’s get familiar with some basic Google Analytics terminology:
Now that you’re familiar with the Google Analytics sections and terminology, let’s dive in to the areas that you want to pay most attention to in order to save time and strengthen your marketing strategy.
There are three sections that matter most to marketers: Acquisition, Audience and Behavior.
The Audience section provides a tremendous amount of data about your website visitors. It contains multiple subsections that provide information about the gender, age and location of your website visitors. You can also uncover information about their interests, as well as the browsers and mobile devices used to access your site.
The Acquisition section will provide detailed information about how people arrive to your site. Digging in to the “All Traffic” tab will show you exactly how people are arriving at your website – whether it be a search engine, social media site or blog that you’re a contributor for.
The Behavior section helps you understand how people are interacting with your site. You’ll visit this section to better understand which pages on your website are the most popular.
Focusing on these three sections will help you save time when digging through Google Analytics.
When used together, the information uncovered can help you make decisions about which marketing efforts (be it guest blogging or social media posting,) are most useful in driving website traffic.
Analyzing these sections within Google Analytics will provide you with insight that will enable you to make smarketing (smart, marketing) decisions about the type, tone, and placement of content that you use on your website.
Before we dive into who exactly is visiting your site, it’s important to understand how they’re getting there.
To see your various traffic sources for a set period of time, go to the Acquisition tab and click the “All Traffic” dropdown. Select the “Channels” button, set the time period at the top of the viewing pane and scroll down to see the results for the give timeframe.
Here’s a simple breakdown of what these different channels mean:
Looking at the traffic channels will allow you to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the Channels are listed in order of driving power; the Channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.
To dig deeper into the data, click each Channel to see more information.
For example, when I click Social, I can see the entire list of social media sites (again, listed in order of most to least powerful) that drove traffic to my website during the selected timeframe.
Analyzing the power of different channels will help you decide which efforts to focus on, and potentially spark ideas to increase traffic from other channel types.
Get More Out of Analytics With Kissmetrics!
Make better marketing decisions by knowing who is sending you signups, not just which channels are sending traffic. Request a personal demo of Kissmetrics to learn more.
Here are a few ideas to increase traffic across all channel types:
Once you’ve implemented some of these ideas, take the time to review the Channels breakdown again to see the impact of your efforts.
If your efforts to grow traffic from one channel go unnoticed in your analytics, try a different one!
For example, let’s say you have a ton of referral traffic and very little organic traffic. If your attempts to improve SEO and grow organic traffic have little impact, it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re better off continuing to guest blog, as it’s proven to be a critical marketing activity that is worth your time and effort.
Understanding who is visiting your site in terms of their age, location and gender is the best way to tailor your site to suit their interests and preferences.
If you want your website content and imagery to appease and resonate with your audience, you need to know who they are.
To find this information, head over to the Audience tab. You’ll want to focus on the sub-sections of Demographics and Geo.
First, let’s look at the Demographics of Age and Gender.
As you can see, the majority of my website visitors are aged 25-34, followed by those aged 35-44.
Knowing this, I aim to create content that is geared towards, and valued by, young professionals. Some examples are tips for professional development and advice for managers leading a team of employees.
Understanding how old your website visitors are, and whether they’re male or female, is helpful if you’re looking to capture their attention when they land on your site.
For example, if 90% of your website visitors are women, you could deliver a more personalized website experience for them by starting your “About” or “Welcome” page with “Hey ladies!”
Through analyzing the Gender section, I can see that the majority of my site visitors are female. It’s not skewed too heavily though, so I don’t want to tailor my site to females only. That’s why I’ve chosen my website colors to be black, white and green; I wanted to create a sleek and clean aesthetic that would be appealing to both men and women.
Digging in to the age and gender of your website visitors is useful if you want to craft creative content for your blog posts and website pages that captures their attention and gains their trust.
For example, telling your fans to “Treat yo self” to a free guide on your website isn’t going to resonate with individuals in their 60’s. However, it WILL get a chuckle from millennials.
Finally, you want to look to see where your website visitors are from. Looking at the Location tab under the “Geo” dropdown will show you the countries, states and cities of your website audience.
When you first click “Location” you’ll be shown the list of countries. Not surprisingly, the majority of my website visitors are from the United States.
Looking at the different states is a great way to gain insight that can be levered for any AdWords or paid Facebook campaigns you’re going to run. You want to target those states and cities that you see are frequenting your site.
I can see that New York dominates the results by a large margin. That’s not surprising since I live there and the majority of my mentors, friends and family live in New York as well.
Clicking on the individual states will bring you to the list of cities, within that state, that your website visitors come from.
Since I currently live in Buffalo, I’m not surprised to see Buffalo and other Western New York cities at the top of the list. I also see New York City, which is expected since that is where the majority of my friends and family reside.
If you don’t see your city as the top city, you might want to consider shifting your marketing strategy, and content, to target those in your geographic area.
Last but not least, it’s important to dive in to the content to see which pages people spend the most and least time on.
To do this, click the Behavior tab and go to the Site Content drop-down. You’ll want to look at the Content Drilldown, as well as Landing and Exit Pages to see which pages are most viewed on your website.
Content Drilldown is the overview of which pages on your website are visited the most.
Seeing which pages, and blog posts, are most viewed by your audience is helpful in guiding your web development strategy; you want to create more of what works.
Through analysis, I can see that my homepage and services page are the most popular. I can also see that the page on my site that has all of my marketing blogs is more popular that the blog page itself, which shows me that my audience values marketing content.
Now, you want to head over to the Landing Pages view in order to see what pages people are landing on when they get to your site.
The Landing Pages view is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your social media and promotional strategy, as you hope to see the blogs and website pages promoted most at the top.
For me, that would be my homepage, services page, free social media guide page and Bravery Beats blog post. Those pages are the ones that I promote the most, as they provide the most value and information that I find relevant for my audience.
It’s important to me to see my free social media guide at the top of the landing page list, as this page is a free giveaway that I’m using in part to provide value, and in part to build my email list.
Analyzing the traffic of this page is a good way for me to assess both the value and popularity of the giveaway.
If you don’t see your most important and/or promoted blog posts and website pages in the list of the top ten landing pages, it’s time to either reevaluate their value and/or your promotional strategy to ensure you’re driving traffic to those pages through social media and email marketing campaigns.
Spending time in the behavior section will allow you to develop an awareness of what content your website visitors find the most valuable. You can use this as a guide for what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to blog topics and page types.
For example, if you notice that the top visited pages are all blog posts about social media, yet none of your design blogs are ranking in the top, you want to spend more time blogging about social than you do about design.
Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool.
By paying attention to the demographics of your audience, you’ll be able to create content and imagery that you know your audience desires. This allows you to craft a customized and relevant site experience for your audience that will keep them coming back for more. (Thereby increasing your direct traffic!)
When you start monitoring your referral traffic, you’ll start to see which guest blogs are helping to increase your online visibility. This will help you save time by focusing only on the guest blogs that provide a return (in the form of website visits) on your content creation efforts. Similarly, by diving in to your social referrals, you’ll be armed with data to decide exactly which social media channels are the best to share your blog posts on.
By utilizing, analyzing, and focusing on these various sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and how they find you.
About the Author: Julia Jornsay-Silverberg is a social media marketing consultant and coach with a passion for helping small businesses use social media to build brand awareness and connect with customers. Check out her free guide, “Socially Strategic” to help you get started strategically on social media. You can also find her on Twitter and Periscope.
Posted by randfish
SEO has much of its roots in the practice of targeted link building. And while it's no longer the only core component involved, it's still a hugely valuable factor when it comes to rank boosting. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over why targeted link building is still relevant today and how to develop a process you can strategically follow to success.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about four questions that kind of all go together around targeted link building.
Targeted link building is the practice of reaching out and trying to individually bring links to specific URLs or specific domains — usually individual pages, though — and trying to use those links to boost the rankings of those pages in search engine results. And look, for a long time, this was the core of SEO. This was how SEO was done. It was almost the start and the end.
Obviously, a lot of other practices have come into play in the industry, and I think there's even been some skepticism from folks about whether targeted link building is still a valid practice. I think we can start with that question and then get on to some of these others.
In my opinion, targeted link building does make sense when you fulfill certain conditions. We know from our experimentation, from correlation data, from Google's own statements, from lots of industry data that links still move the needle when it comes to rankings. If you have a page that's ranking number 4, you point a bunch of new links to it from important pages and sites around the web, particularly if they contain the anchor text that you're trying to rank for, and you will move up in the rankings.
It's also okay if you say, "Hey, we're not yet ranking in the top 20, but our paid search page is ranking on page 1. We know that we have high conversions here. We want to move from page 3, page 4 up to page 1, and then hopefully up into the top two, top three results. Then it is worth this targeted link building effort, because when you build up that visibility, when you grow those rankings, you can be assured that you are going to gain more visits, more traffic that will convert and send you these key business metrics and push those things up. So I do think targeted link building still makes sense when those conditions are fulfilled.
Is this something that can actually do the job it's supposed to do? And the answer, yeah. Look, if rank boosting is your goal, links are one of the ways where if you already have a page that's performing well from a conversion standpoint — from a user experience standpoint, pages per visit, your browse rate, things like time onsite, if you're not seeing high bounce rate, if you have got a page that's clearly accessible and well targeted and well optimized on the page itself — then links are going to be the most powerful, if not one of the most powerful, elements to moving your rankings. But you've got to have a scalable, repeatable process to build links.
You need the same thing that we look for broadly in our marketing practices, which is that flywheel. Yes, it's going to be hard to get things started. But once we do, we can find a process that works for us again and again. Each successive link that we get and each successive page whose rankings we're trying to move gets easier and easier because we've been there before, we've done it, we know what works and what doesn't work, and we know the ins and outs of the practice. That's what we're searching for.
One: one-to-one outreach. This is you going out and sending usually an e-mail, but it could be a DM or a tweet, an at reply tweet. It could be a phone call. It could be — I literally got one of these today — a letter in the mail addressed to me, hand-addressed to me from someone who'd created a piece of content and wanted to know if I would be willing to cover it. It wasn't exactly up my alley, so I'm not going to. But I thought that was an interesting form of one-to-one outreach.
It could be broadcast. Broadcast is things like social sharing, where we're broadcasting out a message like, "Hey, we've produced this. It's finally live. We launched it. Come check it out." That could go through bulk e-mail. It could go through an e-mail subscription. It could go through a newsletter. It could go through press. It could go through a blog.
Then there's paid amplification. That's things like social ads, native ads, retargeting, display, all of these different formats. Typically, what you're going to find is that one-to-one outreach is most effective when you can build up those relationships and when you have something that is highly targeted at a single site, single individual, single brand, single person.
Broadcast works well if, in your niche, certain types of content or tools or data gets regular coverage and you already reach that audience through one of your broadcast mediums.
Paid amplification tends to work best when you have an audience that you know is likely to pick those things up and potentially link to them, but you don't already reach them through organic channels, or you need another shot at reaching them from organic and paid, both.
But the idea being the first step is opportunity discovery, where we figure out where the link opportunities that we have are. Step 2 is building an acquisition spreadsheet of some kind so that we can prioritize which links we're going to chase after and what tactics we're going to use. Step 3 is the execution, learn, and iterate process that we always find with any sort of flywheel or experimentation.
We might find that it turns out for the links that we're trying to get relevant communities are a great way to acquire those links. We reach out via forums or Slack chat rooms, or it could be something like a private chat, or it could be IRC. It could be a whole bunch of different things. It could be blog comments.
It could be press and publications. There are industry publications that cover certain types of data or launches or announcements or progress or what have you. Perhaps that's an opportunity.
Resource lists and linkers. So there's still a ton of places on the web where people link out to. Here's a good set of resources around customer on-boarding for software as a service companies. Oh, you know what? We have a great post about that. I'm going to reach out to the person who runs this list of resources, and I'm going to see if maybe they'll cover it. Or we put together a great meteorology map looking at the last 50 winters in the northeast of the United States and showing a visual graphic overlay of that charted against global warming trends, and maybe I should share that with the Royal Meteorological Society of England. I'm going to go pitch their person at whatever.ac.uk it is.
Blog and social influencers. These are folks who tend to run, obviously, popular blogs or popular social accounts on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn, or what have you, Pinterest. It could be Instagram. Potentially worth reaching out to those kinds of folks.
Feature, focus, or intersection sources. This one's a little more complex and convoluted, but the idea is to find something where you have an intersection of some element that you're providing through the content of your page that you seem to get a link from and there is intersection with things that other organizations or people have interest in.
So, for example, on my meteorology example, perhaps you might say, "Lots of universities that run meteorology courses would probably love an animation like this. Let me reach out to professors." "Or you know what? I know there's a data graphing startup that often features interesting data graphing stuff, and it turns out we used one of their frameworks. So let's go reach out to that startup, and we'll check out the GitHub project, see who the author is, ping that person and see if maybe they would want to cover it or link to it or share it on social." All those kinds of things. You found the intersections of overlapping interest.
The last one, biz devs and partnerships. This is certainly not a comprehensive list. There could be tons of other potential opportunity to discover mechanisms. This covers a lot of them and a lot of the ones that tend to work for link builders. But you can and should think of many other ways that you could potentially find new opportunities for links.
So what you want is either the URL or the domain from which you're trying to get the link. The opportunity type — maybe it's a partnership or a resource list or press. The approach you're going to take, the contact information that you've got. If you don't have it yet, that's probably the first thing on your list is to try and go get that. Then the link metrics around this.
There's a good startup called BuzzStream that does sort of a system, a mechanism like this where you can build those targeted link outreach lists. It can certainly be helpful. I know a lot of folks like using things like Open Site Explorer and Followerwonk, Ahrefs, Majestic to try and find and fill in a bunch of these data points.
We can have those ideas and hypotheses and use that to improve our processes. We want to learn from our mistakes. But to do that, just like investments in content and investments in social and other types of investments in SEO, we've got to give ourselves time. We have to talk to our bosses, our managers, our teams, our clients and say, "Hey, gang, this is an iterative learning process. We're going to figure out what forms of link building we're good at, and then we're going to be able to boost rankings once we do. But if we give up because we don't give ourselves time to learn, we're never going to get these results."
All right, look forward to your thoughts on tactical link building and targeted link building. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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!
[Note From Ashley: TopRank Marketing team members Debbie Friez and Joel Carlson recently attended a Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) event in Minneapolis and collaborated to bring you the insights below from the event.]
Long gone are the leisurely evenings and weekends where people disconnected from the outside world and made time to relax. Today’s consumers are ALWAYS connected and constantly consuming information from a variety of sources.
The question for marketers is: how can you capture the attention of your audience while they’re on the go and multi-tasking constantly? One of the solutions that has surfaced in recent years is incorporating podcasts into your digital marketing mix.
Below we’ll dive in to three case studies MIMA social broadcasting event that uncover how different brands are working podcasts into their marketing strategy.
First, Why a Podcast?
Busy salespeople don’t have time to read a newsletter or possibly an email. This was the dilemma for the Medicare and Retirement division of United Health Group. They wanted to share tools and ideas with their sales agents during enrollment period.
Within the healthcare industry, communication is heavily regulated which means there are lots of things that they can’t do or say. Kendra Klemme, Associate Director of Communications, United Health Group, says everything has to be cleared through lawyers. So the question comes up, “How do we work within this system?” and still accomplish what we need to get done.
Once cleared by the lawyers, the communications team decided a podcast was the right route to take for communicating with sales, and production happened quite quickly. The focus of the podcast was on providing the sales team with information to help them improve their approach and results. The key was providing a method for getting the sellers excited to start fast out of the gate during enrollment period.
Early podcasts were produced to be anywhere between 10-15 minutes in length, making them easy to listen to for sales people in between their customer visits. From the initial podcasts that were done in 2015, UHG received positive feedback from sales leaders and agents, having reached 7K+ listens overall.
Moving forward for 2016, the plan is to produce two podcasts per month – one on highlights from the monthly eNewletter, lasting anywhere from 3-5 minutes and another longer one on areas of interest to their audience.
What UHG learned from producing podcasts:
If you grew up on a farm, you know that harvest season is CRAZY BUSY! Despite that fact, the Mosaic company wanted to talk to farmers during harvest about raising yields.
On today’s modern farms, you will find farmers checking social media and listening to all kinds of media while they bring in the crops. In order to capture that audience, they wanted to create a podcast around “A Prairie Home Companion” meets “Twin Peaks” meets “Serial”.
The result was “The Great Yield Mystery”, a 10 episode audio drama, which included a website, gamification, prizes and a trailer poster. And the result gave their existing audience something they could use.
The podcast had a longer tail than they expected and exceeded interaction goals by 379%.
Kevin Hunt, Social Media Manager, General Mills, and an experienced podcaster provided insights into “A Taste of General Mills”, a brand website for consumers. He shared that General Mills wanted to provide a deeper look into their brand through an interview style podcast hosted on the website and modeled after “This American Life”. (Clearly NPR is winning in the podcast idea segment!)
The first podcast produced featured the creator of Cheerios. Recorded during a commercial shoot, it provided a behind the scenes perspective. This was followed by podcasts covering their monster cereals, celebrating 50 years of the Pillsbury Dough Boy, focusing on a cookbook editor and interviewing people with cooking fails, and then celebrating the 150th anniversary of General Mills. In February of 2016, the podcast will be quite topical by focusing on Super Bowl appetizers.
Kevin emphasized the need to make a plan for setting-up interviews, recording, scripting, and promotion. Their posting strategy includes iTunes and SoundCloud for searchability. General Mills doesn’t make a separate show page for the podcasts, but instead includes it as a part of the blog.
Audience growth takes time, so promotion is key. General Mills creates special graphics for promoting on their social channels. They also email subscribers of the blog.
Podcasting in both video and purely audio forms has become an increasingly popular digital marketing tactic. Before venturing out on a podcasting endeavor, consider the following:
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The post 3 Examples of Brands Using Podcasts to Increase Sales, Offer Value & Build Audiences appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
If you are running an SEO program, you are in for a long haul. Sometimes, it takes from 6 months to a year to see a slight improvement in online visibility attributable to SEO efforts. You do not need […]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
15 Quick Ways to Check The Health of Your SEO Program
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Written by Lyena Solomon, Personal Blog
The post 15 Quick Ways to Check The Health of Your SEO Program appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Howdy Moz Fans,
After more than 5 years — including an 18-month hiatus as a Moz associate — tomorrow marks my last day working as a Mozzer.
Make no mistake — I love this job, company, and community. Moz has taught me to be a better marketer. Both Rand Fishkin and Sarah Bird (and many others) have taught me more about emotional intelligence and how to treat others than I thought possible of myself. Moz has introduced me to amazing coworkers and industry folk around the world. I’m truly grateful for this experience.
Since my first YouMoz post was accepted for publication by Jen Lopez before I even worked here, I’ve done my best to share SEO tips and tactics to help people advance their marketing and improve online visibility. These posts are truly the thing I’m most proud of.
Time for one last SEO tip, so I hope it’s a good one...
The beauty of SEO is that, instead of pushing a marketing message onto folks who don’t want to hear what you have to say, you can reverse-engineer the process to discover exactly what people are looking for, create the right content for it, and appear before them at exactly the moment they are looking for it. It’s pull vs. push.
Works like magic. Customers come to you.
Let’s begin this process by telling a lie.
“Content is king.”
Bull hockey. The king doesn’t rule jack squat. A truer statement is this: If content is king, then the user is queen, and she rules the universe. Let’s say that again, because this is important.
“The user is queen, and she rules the universe.”
Google only cares about your content inasmuch as it answers the user’s search query. Search results are not a collection of “good” content; they are a ranked list of content that best satisfies what the user is looking for.
Here’s a typical process many SEOs use when building content:
The shortcoming of this approach is that 1–4 are often hit or miss. Google’s Keyword Planner, perhaps the best available keyword tool available, is famous for not surfacing most long-tail keywords. Additionally, creating the exact content and building the right links in order for Google to rank you for precise pages is challenging as well.
Unfortunately, this where most people stop.
My advice: Don’t stop there.
This whole process relies on traditional SEO signals to rank your content higher. Signals like keyword usage and PageRank (yes, it’s a real ranking factor). While these factors remain hugely important, they miss the point of where SEO has already moved.
In our latest Ranking Factors Expert Survey, we asked over 150 top search marketers to rate which factors they see gaining and losing significance in Google’s algorithm. The results showed that while most traditional SEO features were expected to either retain or decrease in influence, we found that user-based features were expected to increase.
In addition to signals like mobile-friendliness, site speed, overall UX, and perceived quality, the factors I want to focus on today include:
What I am going to talk about is how to improve all three of these factors for underperforming pages at the same time, using a single technique.
Here’s the tip: Optimize for how users are actually using the page — as opposed to how you optimized the page ahead of time — and you’ll see significantly better traffic.
Once you begin receiving traffic from search engines, you have an incredible amount of data regarding real search visits. If your page receives any traffic at all, Google has already guessed what your content is about — right or wrong — and is sending some traffic to you. In all reality, there is a gap between the traffic you thought you were optimizing for when you created the page, and the traffic you are actually getting.
You want to close that gap. We’ll ask and answer these 3 questions:
Here’s how we’re going to do it. I present your SEO homework.
This process works best on pages with lower or disappointing traffic levels. The reason you want to stay away from your high-performing pages is the adage: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
That’s not to say that high-performing pages can’t be improved, but whenever you make changes to a page you risk ruining the things that work well, so for now we’re going to focus on our under-performers.
The simplest way is to use analytics to identify pages you believe are high quality — and target good keyword phrases — but receive less traffic than you’d expect based on site averages.
For this example I’ll use Google Search Console for my data, although you could use other platforms such as Bing Webmaster or even features found in Moz Pro.
Here’s a picture of our traffic and search queries for Followerwonk. While it’s a good amount of traffic, something looks off with the second URL: it receives 10x more impressions than any other URL, but only gets a 0.25% click-through rate. We’ll use this URL for our process.
Next, we want to discover the keyword phrases that surface our URL in search results. Here’s how you do it in Search Console.
After you complete #3 above by clicking on the URL you wish to analyze, you’ll find a page of data isolating that URL, but it will lack keywords. Now hit the "Queries" tab to filter keywords filtered for this specific URL.
For our Followerwonk URL, we discover an interesting result. The phrase "twitter search" generated a million search impressions, but only 724 clicks. Google believes we deserve to rank for this query, but obviously the page doesn’t offer what people are looking for
Or does it?
The Followerwonk Bio Search page offers advanced Twitter bio search, complete with lots of advanced options you can’t find on Twitter. It’s reasonable that tons of people searching for "twitter search" would find enormous value in this page. So why the disconnect?
A quick screenshot reveals the heart of the problem.
That’s it — the entire page. Very little explanatory text makes it difficult to quickly grasp what this page is about. While this is an awesome page, it fails in one key aspect for its highest volume search query.
The page fails to satisfy user intent. (At least in a quick, intuitive way.)
So how can we fix this? Let’s move on to the next steps.
Now that we understand how users are actually finding our page, we want to make it obvious that our page is exactly what they are looking for to solve their problem. There are 5 primary areas this can be accomplished.
Rewriting the title tags and descriptions of underperforming pages to include the keyword queries users perform to find your URL can lead to a quick increase in clicks and visits.
Additionally, after you get these clicks, there’s a growing body of inconclusive evidence that higher click-through rates may lead to higher rankings. In the end, it really doesn’t matter. The whole point is that you get more traffic, one way or another.
The key is to take this data to optimize your search snippet in a way that entices more and better traffic.
Earning the click is only half the battle. After we get the visitor on our site, now we have to convince them (almost immediately) that we can actually solve the problem they came here to find. Which leads to…
Consider this: A user searches for "best restaurants in Seattle." You want your pizza parlor to rank #1 for this query, but will this satisfy the user?
Likely not, as the user is probably looking for a list of top restaurants, complete with reviews, hours, maps, and menus. If you can offer all — like TripAdvisor, Opentable, and Yelp — then you’ve helped the user complete their task.
The key to task completion is to make solving the user’s problem both clear and immediate. On our Followerwonk page, this could be accomplished by making it immediately clear that they could perform an advanced Twitter search, for free, along with an expectation of what the results would look like.
A standard for task completion can be found by answering the following question: After the user visits this page, will they have completely found what they are looking for, or will they need to return to Google for help?
When the query is satisfied by your website, then you’ve achieved task completion, and likely deserve to rank very highly for the targeted search query.
The beauty of this process is that you can see results very quickly. The easiest thing to do is to submit the page for reindexing in Google, which can help your changes appear in search results much faster.
You may see changes submitted this way reflected in search results within minutes or hours. Usually it's not more than a day or two.
Now that your results are live, you want to measure present performance against past. After a few days or weeks (whenever you have enough data to make statistically significant decisions) you want to specifically look at:
Warning: You may not get it right the first time. That’s okay. It’s fine to iterate and improve (as long as you don’t destroy your page in the process). In fact, that’s the whole point!
If you follow this process, you may see not only increases in traffic, but improved traffic coming to your site that better aligns what you offer with what the visitor is searching for.
The best content that aligns with user intent is what search engines want to deliver to its users. This is what you want to broadcast to search engines. The results can be rewarding.
What's next for me? In the near term, I'm starting a boutique online publishing/media company, tentatively named Fazillion. (Our aim is to produce content with heart, as we ourselves are inspired by sites like Mr. Money Mustache, Wait but Why, and Data is Beautiful.)
I can’t express enough how much this company and this community means to me. Moving on to the next adventure is the right thing to do at this time, but it makes me sad nonetheless.
Say what you want, SEO is a wonderful industry of awesome human beings.
— Cyrus Shepard (@CyrusShepard) January 21, 2016
Coincidentally, my departure from Moz creates a unique job opening for a talented SEO and Content Architect. It should make a wonderful opportunity for the right person. If you’re interested in applying, you can check it out here: SEO Content Marketer at Moz
Happy SEO, everybody! If you see me walking down the street, be sure to say hi.
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