SEO Videos And Blogs

The Bionic Marketer: We need a better metaphor for AI than ‘digital agents doing your job’

Talor Levy — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 12:35:50 -0500

Join Flint McGlaughlin on February 12th at 2 PM EST for ‘How to take a conversion marketing approach to Agentic AI and RAG (with zero tech skills).’ There is no cost to participate. Plus, attendees get a 10-pack of avatars to use in your AI expert agent (both AutoAI and normal variants). Register at https://MeclabsAI.com/Conversion In this excerpt from a live session of Get Productive With AI, Flint McGlaughlin shares a framework that integrates AI as an extension of human expertise, offering insights into the future of work where you can achieve more, do better, and work faster all at once. Watch this exploration into how AI and modern technology empower individuals, paving the way for unimaginable efficiency and innovation.

In this excerpt from a live session of Get Productive With AI, Flint McGlaughlin shares a framework that integrates AI as an extension of human expertise, offering insights into the future of work where you can achieve more, do better, and work faster all at once. Watch this exploration into how AI and modern technology empower individuals, paving the way for unimaginable efficiency and innovation.

The post The Bionic Marketer: We need a better metaphor for AI than ‘digital agents doing your job’ appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

How Advanced AI Models Are Revolutionizing MeclabsAI: The future of intelligent systems

Talor Levy — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 14:39:13 -0500

In a recent live, interactive session of ‘How To Get Productive With AI,’ an attendee asked:

“With agents and far higher levels of intelligence in AI rolling out this year, how will MeclabsAI leverage that? To clarify, it seems like the capabilities of new models are so far beyond that it might change the nature of how a system like MeclabsAI could work.”

Flint McGlaughlin answers that question in this live event excerpt. Watch this video now and get a peak into the future of AI development and its impact on your business intelligence.

To try MeclabsAI for free, just visit https://MeclabsAI.com/

The post How Advanced AI Models Are Revolutionizing MeclabsAI: The future of intelligent systems appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

How To Use MeclabsAI To Generate Leads

Talor Levy — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:40:48 -0500

Join Flint McGlaughlin for ‘Get Productive with AI’ on January 8th at noon EST. Learn more and get your scholarship at https://MeclabsAI.com/GetProductive

Flint McGlaughlin delves deep into how MecabsAI – underpinned by layers of proven methodology from over 10,000 marketing experiments – to redefine your approach to generating high-quality leads.

You’ll see how to utilize these tools in MeclabsAI:

• Webpages Analyzer app – to gather comprehensive insights about your current online presence

• Project Planner expert – to quickly develop a tailored 90-day plan aimed at boosting your lead flow

• Conversion Pro expert – to generate an optimized plan for your business, drawing on a wealth of research and principles refined over 20 years

• Marketing Professor expert – to craft a 14-day customized course to upskill your team

To get deeper instruction along with a community of support, get your free 3-month, full scholarship to the AI Guild at https://join.meclabsai.com/ You’ll receive a Quick Start AI Productivity Kit as a welcome gift to the community.

The post How To Use MeclabsAI To Generate Leads appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

How Do You Quickly Create Compelling Content To Grow Your Business

Talor Levy — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:38:03 -0500

Join Flint McGlaughlin for ‘Get Productive with AI’ on January 8th at noon EST. Learn more and get your scholarship at https://MeclabsAI.com/GetProductive

Flint McGlaughlin delves deep into the power and potential of AI-driven content creation, showcasing how MeclabsAI’s comprehensive suite of libraries, apps, and experts can significantly enhance your content strategy and streamline your creative process. Beginning with an exploration of MeclabsAI’s foundational components, the video offers a step-by-step guide on leveraging your internet resources, such as your YouTube transcripts, to fuel the content generation engine of MeclabsAI. You can see:
• How the Video Transcript Analyzer app in MeclabsAI transforms a video transcript into a concise summary, segmented with time codes for easy navigation.
• The creation of a three-part blog series strategy by the Copywriter – Blog Posts expert in MeclabsAI, which was trained on the insights of renowned editor and copywriter Daniel Burstein
• Compelling posts generated for different social content platforms

The post How Do You Quickly Create Compelling Content To Grow Your Business appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

How Can You Quickly Get a Higher Conversion Rate on Your Website

Talor Levy — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:34:34 -0500

Join Flint McGlaughlin for ‘Get Productive with AI’ on January 8th at noon EST. Learn more and get your scholarship at https://MeclabsAI.com/GetProductive

Flint McGlaughlin sheds light on how MeclabsAI can help you with website optimization.

He teaches the transformative potential of the Micro-Yes Architecture – a proprietary framework developed by MecLabs. This approach is demonstrated through live examples, illustrating the platform’s aptitude in organizing and optimizing web content to align with strategic conversion goals. Flint also shoes how to use the platform’s specialist tools. You can watch as:
• Copywriter – Landing Pages expert evaluates and propose enhancements for key web elements like headlines, subheadlines, and calls to action, grounded in a wealth of data derived from 20 years of meticulous experimentation
• Marketing Professor expert offers custom-designed courses on the principles underpinning effective web optimization
• Project Planner expert plans a comprehensive suite of solutions to guide users in enhancing their website’s performance.

This methodology is anchored in empirical evidence drawn from numerous experiments, for example, Flint discusses a real-world experiment that results in a 262% increase in conversion.

The post How Can You Quickly Get a Higher Conversion Rate on Your Website appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

The Key to Transformative Marketing Is a Transformed Marketer: How to plan you transformation

Talor Levy — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 11:28:46 -0500

Flint McGlaughlin synthesizes critical learning objectives and helps attendees operationalize their application through a disciplined, analytical framework. The course session is structured to guide learners through a consolidation of previous learning checkpoints, emphasizing the transition from theoretical understanding to practical application:

Strategic Participation in Meclabs Learning Tracks: The session underscores the imperatives of strategic engagement with the Meclabs learning tracks. From understanding the basics of MeclabsAI application to planning for growth through deeper immersion in the methodology, participants are guided on how to elevate their marketing acumen systematically.

Operationalization of Meclabs Principles: The session delves into how learners can operationalize core Meclabs principles into their daily marketing practices. This segment emphasizes the significance of seamlessly integrating strategic insights into actionable marketing tactics.

Strategizing for Future Transformation: Ultimately, this session equips participants with a strategic blueprint to plan their transformation into highly effective marketers. By highlighting the pathway through Meclabs learning tracks and emphasizing continuous application and refinement of learned principles, learners are empowered to embark on a transformative journey in marketing excellence.

Course Retention Exercise
Click here to take a quiz in MeclabsAI (https://meclabsai.com/share/1CAqJNzy6…) to help you improve retention of the key principles.

Get the entire 7-week course in just 3 hours
Join Flint McGlaughlin on January 8th at noon EST for an accelerated version of ‘MEC050: Get Productive With AI.’ There is no cost. Click the link to learn more and get your scholarship: https://MeclabsAI.com/GetProductive

The post The Key to Transformative Marketing Is a Transformed Marketer: How to plan you transformation appeared first on MarketingExperiments.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A Marketing Primer

Nick Nelson — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 10:11:58 -0400

The new era of search is here. Artificial intelligence is unlocking new ways for people to find information and solve problems, with greater speed and confidence than ever before. AI-powered engines and platforms are fundamentally changing the nature of online search as we know it.

It’s an exciting time. These emerging AI tools can do some really cool things. But for business leaders, it can also feel like a scary time, with your brand’s visibility and engagement at risk.

Understanding generative engine optimization and the unique (but not radically different) principles it entails will be very helpful in charting your marketing strategy’s future.

The good news is that if you’ve been developing a forward-thinking SEO strategy, you’re already on the right track, and if not, you aren’t yet too far behind.

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) refers to the practice of optimizing content specifically for AI-driven search engines and features, such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity AI, Copilot, Gemini, Llama, and more. This involves tailoring your content to show up in AI-generated summaries and results, by incorporating the qualities these search tools prioritize.

Generative engine optimization vs. search engine optimization

They have many overlapping elements, but GEO and SEO are distinct. While SEO largely focuses on traditional web optimization techniques like link-building, keyword placement and site structure, GEO is more narrowly concerned with the substance, makeup and credibility of the content itself.

In essence, GEO is about making your brand’s content stand out to intelligent technologies from a saturated information environment. Luckily, this is what modernized SEO strategies are already striving to do.

Benefits of generative engine optimization

The rise of generative search and GEO best practices can have very positive implications for brands. Here are a few worth mentioning:

Customers have new ways to find your brand. As more and more people start using these AI-powered tools and platforms, you have more pathways to impressions and engagement beyond traditional search engines.

Showing up in AI search makes a strong impression. At TopRank, we often remark that showing up near the top of a search for a target keyword is doubly beneficial: not only are you more likely to earn clicks, but you send a compelling signal to searchers, who recognize that Google heavily weighs credibility and authority of a source as SEO ranking factors. This can be even more true for generative AI engines, which scrutinize the distinct value of cited content as they synthesize and summarize.

Competitors are still catching up. Many companies still don’t have GEO in their marketing lexicon unless they’re talking about geographical regions. Optimizing for generative search as an extension of your SEO helps you stay ahead of the playing field.

GEO rewards audience-centered SEO strategies. If you’ve already been letting customer-centric elements like intent, usefulness, relevance and originality guide your SEO approach, your brand will be well positioned for the age of GEO.

With that in mind, let’s explore some GEO best practices, which are still taking shape but well informed by early data and research.

How to optimize content for generative engines

“Companies will need to focus on producing unique content that is useful to customers and prospective customers. Content should continue to demonstrate search quality-rater elements such as expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.” – Alan Antin, Vice President Analyst at Gartner (Source)

Optimizing content for AI means optimizing for humans first and foremost. At a high level, these are some of the qualities to prioritize in your brand’s content if you want to gain visibility with generative search engines:

Comprehensiveness: AI-driven engines prioritize detailed, well-rounded content that thoroughly addresses the user’s query. Traditional SEO fixtures like structuring content with clear headings and questions, using schema markup, and including diverse forms of media will help your cause.
Credibility and Relevance: Since AI engines favor content from trustworthy and relevant sources, it’s essential to build credibility through linking to reputable sources, regularly updating content, and strengthening your online reputation.
User Intent Alignment: Tailor content to align with user intent by analyzing common search queries and SERP features. This might involve creating various forms of content, such as guides or FAQs, that address different aspects of a topic.
Structure and Accessibility: While traditional SEO techniques like using meta tags and optimizing for mobile devices remain key, GEO also requires adapting content for newer technologies like voice search, and structuring content in formats friendly to natural language processing models.

You might ask, how can I bring these qualities forward in practical ways? Here are a few specific tips and techniques for GEO success:

Include verifiable statistics, quotes and citations.

A lack of reliable accuracy has been one of the biggest objections raised around AI-driven search tools. Accordingly, there’s a major emphasis on countering this perception. Generative engines want information that sends signals of trust, so the addition of substantiating elements like expert quotes and data-backed insights is powerful.

A research paper found that relevant statistics, quotations and citations can boost content visibility in generative engines by up to 40 percent.

Focus on E-E-A-T principles in your content.

I know, I know: another acronym? But believe us, with respect to GEO, adhering to the principles of E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, trust) is VVI. (Very, very important.)

As Kody Van Sistine shares at Search Engine Land, “The more you sound like a trustworthy, authoritative, experienced expert in your content, the more humans and AI want to read, remember and rank your pieces.”

Fortify your brand’s online presence.

Optimize content for AI and generative engines is about more than the piece of content itself. It’s about the context surrounding it: the author, the domain, the brand itself. If your company has an untrusted reputation, or no real online reputation at all, you’ll find it difficult to gain traction with these engines.

“SEO professionals and businesses should invest in brand-building initiatives, collaborate with influencers, provide exceptional customer experiences, and consistently deliver valuable content,” recommends SEO expert Andrew Chadwick. “A strong brand can help mitigate the impact of algorithm changes and promote sustained visibility and growth.”

Stay adaptive with your strategy.

Generative engines and AI-driven search are still in their early days. This is an area that promises to evolve constantly in the months and years ahead. Keeping track of what’s happening, what’s changing, and what matters most requires a significant level of energy and experience.

At TopRank Marketing, keeping a close eye on the evolution of SEO and AI search trends is what we do, because the success of our client programs depends on it. Check out our SEO services to see how we can help you future-proof your strategy.

The post Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): A Marketing Primer appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

A Complete Guide to Using Original Research to Elevate B2B Content Marketing

Theresa Meis — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 11:07:01 -0400

Let me know if this sounds familiar: You’re drafting a masterful thought leadership piece and want to back up your thesis with a strong data point. After a bit of searching, you find the perfect one! But when you click through to the source, it takes you to one of those “Billionty Best Statistics For Marketers” lists.

Okay, so you find the stat again, click through, and it takes you to… an older stat round-up list.

Many (many…) frustrating clicks later, you find you’re back in 2012. Maroon 5 is topping the charts, London’s hosting the summer Olympics, and the stat you’ve been chasing is no longer relevant.

If you’ve ever found yourself at the bottom of the dreaded stat source rabbit hole wishing you just had reliable data – do I have a solution for you!

Original research. At TopRank Marketing, we’ve partnered with several big brands on ambitious original research reports that have driven amazing results for lead gen and brand awareness. We’ve got tips to share from our experience.

Your guide to B2B original research

Publishing your own marketing research reports, on the surface, may appear daunting — they take budget, time, and certain skills to do well. That’s why we’ve broken down the benefits and best practices of conducting B2B original research.

B2B original research influences your bottom line

Here are a few high-quality data points that drive home the value of publishing your own marketing research:

84% of deals are already won or lost before vendors even know they’re on the radar.
Research reports are a sought-after form of content. 55% of B2B buyers regularly consume research reports, and rate them as the most valuable type of content when evaluating purchasing decisions.
High-quality research and data are the top factors that motivate B2B buyers to express interest in a sales conversation.

In short: Your buyers are looking for your company to be the voice of authority and to offer insights that make their jobs easier, ahead of ever contacting your sales team.

“Early-stage positioning can reduce the number of vendors that buyers consider before they arrive at the 70% Constant… and affect which vendors are top-of-mind when it’s time to engage sellers.” – The 2023 B2B Buyer Experience Report, 6sense

Brand benefits of B2B original research

From strengthening thought leadership to giving your customers information they’re hungry for, publishing your own research data has a number of benefits:

Becoming the primary source

Being the source of a data point or unique research positions your brand as the authoritative origin of valuable information. Your company owns the insights and findings, allowing you to control the narrative and provide exclusive content to your audience.

Positioning your brand as an industry leader

The most powerful way to build your brand’s reputation is to publish data-backed thought leadership that aligns with your company’s vision and meets the needs of your customers and stakeholders. B2B original research helps your company present fresh, data-driven insights, and establishes your business as a go-to authority on new trends and issues within your sector.

Cementing trust and credibility

By publishing the most sought-after data-backed insights under your logo, you gain the twin advantages of differentiation and credibility. Data-backed content builds trust with your audience by providing factual, relevant information that helps readers determine their own path forward. B2B buyers are often decision-makers looking for reliable information to guide their business strategies and purchases, and research-based content offers the credibility they seek.

Amplifying your brand

When you publish high-quality information, other B2B thought leaders and media outlets take notice. As the primary source of original research, your company becomes a go-to expert. Any publication that cites your work, every podcast that discusses your findings, and each webinar that invites your brand thought leaders on to share their insights amplifies your brand that much further.

Types of original research

The type of research you publish depends largely on your end-game: do you want the research to generate leads? Are you after greater brand awareness? Is this a marketing research report you want to publish on a regular cadence?

These are a few types of reports to consider adding to your marketing strategy:

Yearly benchmarks

These are annual studies that track key metrics or industry trends over time. They are useful for showing how specific areas evolve year after year.

Example: LinkedIn 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark

One-off research

Research focused on a single topic, often related to emerging trends, industry disruptions, or niche subjects. These are useful for addressing specific questions or timely issues.

Example: Sprinklr and LinkedIn: Proving the Power of Brand*

Customer Insights and preferences

Studies that survey your customers or broader market to understand buyer behaviors, needs, or preferences. This data helps craft solutions that better address customer pain points.

Example: Global B2B Buyer Report, BigCommerce

Trend reports

Regular publications that analyze and predict key market trends in the B2B space. This helps your audience stay ahead of the curve with industry developments.

Example: TopRank 2023 B2B Influencer Marketing Report: Elevate & Ignite*

Reporting on disruptive trends

Research that measures how companies are reacting to major industry shifts, economic changes, or technological advances like AI positions your brand as responsive and in tune with industry needs.

Example: HubSpot: The Intersection of Marketing, Data and AI*

* TopRank Marketing partnered on or led these original research projects.

Repurposing marketing research reports: The content gift that keeps on giving

The dollars you invest in original research can be stretched far and wide as that research is repurposed into blog posts, infographics, white papers, webinars, video series, and so on … all unlocking different ways to reach and provide value for your audience.

Blog posts: In what we like to refer to as a “turkey slice,” you can break down key findings into a series of blog posts, each focusing on a different aspect of the research.

Infographics: Visualize data and insights from the report into easily digestible infographics.

Social media posts: Share individual stats, charts, or quotes across LinkedIn, X/Twitter, or other social media platforms, driving engagement.

Whitepapers: Combine the research with related content to create a detailed whitepaper or guide for your audience.

Ebooks: Expand on the research findings by providing additional context or case studies, turning the data into an in-depth ebook.

Webinars: Host a webinar discussing the report’s insights, with key speakers diving deep into the findings.

Case studies: Use the data to support a case study highlighting how a company benefited from the trends or insights revealed in your research.

Podcasts: Create a podcast episode discussing the findings, either with internal experts or guest industry professionals.

Presentations: Develop a presentation or slide deck to share at industry conferences or with prospects.

Video series: Create short videos discussing the top takeaways, explaining how the insights apply to your audience’s challenges.

Newsletters: Feature snippets from the marketing research report in a company newsletter or as part of an email marketing campaign.

Best practices for B2B original research

Our team has a great deal of collective experience putting together high-quality reports based on original research. Here are the best practices we’ve developed along the way.

#1. Establish your research goals: Understand what insights you want to uncover, how they align with your company’s strategic goals, and how they serve your audience’s needs.

#2. Target the right audience: Ensure your research is aimed at your core audience, whether it’s clients, prospects, or key industry players.

#3. Ask neutral, focused questions: Design survey or interview questions that are free of bias. If the results of your surveys and interviews don’t support your original hypothesis, remember: that data still holds insights, and may be even more newsworthy!

#4. Don’t be afraid to outsource the research: For your data to be high-quality and accurate, you may want to work with a third-party research organization. They have the connections and expertise to ensure the quality of your questions, rapidly deploy your survey, and help you make sense of the responses.

#5. Validate and cross-check data: I once stumbled upon a data point that had been published far and wide, long after the original publisher pulled their report due to inaccuracy. Cross-checking data strengthens its credibility and prevents misleading conclusions.

#6. Use a blend of quantitative and qualitative data: While quantitative (hard numbers) data can provide a broad overview, qualitative (observable but not measurable) data offers deeper insights. Use both forms of data to give your report more dimension and support a compelling narrative.

Source: 2024 B2B Marketing Benchmark

#7. Get other industry experts involved: Data from a single voice is interesting, but a consensus of thought leaders backing up that data? That’s compelling! Partnerships can be accomplished through co-branded research, or by including quotes and feedback from experts.

Source: 2023 B2B Influencer Marketing Report: Elevate & Ignite

#8. Give your audience actionable takeaways: Data is great, but useful insights are what drive impact and motivate organic sharing. Highlight key findings and suggest practical applications that can help your audience use the insights to inform their strategies.

Source: The Intersection of Marketing, Data and AI

#9. Prioritize the report design: Design can make or break your report’s readability. Make your research accessible and easy to digest by using a combination of visuals (infographics, charts) and detailed insights to present your findings.

Source: Proving the Power of Brand

#10. Promote, promote, promote: Publishing a research report should never be a one-and-done campaign. Make sure you continue to leverage your research findings by promoting the report across various channels and through different content formats to reach a broader audience and maximize the impact of your research.

Source

Our friends at Content Marketing Institute have also drafted an excellent self-assessment for marketers who are considering diving into original research: Don’t Start an Original Research Project Before Answering These 8 Questions.

Learn to stop worrying and love B2B original research

Publishing a marketing research report is an excellent way for your company to share the next Big Idea with your industry. At TopRank, we’ve helped companies bring their research to life, as well as published our own proprietary insights.

Some highlights from this last year of report drafting include:

The TopRank 2023 B2B Influencer Marketing Report: Elevate & Ignite
Sprinklr and LinkedIn’s Proving the Power of Brand
HubSpot’s The Intersection of Marketing, Data and AI

Interested in learning more about how we can help you develop a

SEO in 2025: Adapting to Google’s New Reality

Molly Owens — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 09:01:10 -0400

In the latter half of 2023 and throughout 2024, the SEO landscape has been thrown into upheaval. Monumental updates and changes have left many small- and mid-size websites reeling, especially in niches where they once outperformed larger competitors.

The reality is, SEO results almost never happen in a vacuum. Every action you take on your site is influenced by a web of concurrent developments — algorithm updates, SERP feature shifts, and more. This makes it difficult to isolate variables and pinpoint what’s really driving disruptions in your performance.

Understanding what’s currently happening in the world of SEO is more vital than ever for informing your strategy as you plan for what’s ahead in 2025.

A timeline of SEO turbulence: Late 2023 into 2024

The last six months of 2023 saw relentless volatility in the SERPs, with one major algorithm update after another.

August 2023 Core Update: This marked the beginning of a turbulent period, shaking up rankings across the board.
September Helpful Content Update (HCU): Previously separate from core updates, this iteration has left many sites struggling to recover.
October and November Core Updates: These continued the trend of volatility, with significant impacts on rankings and traffic.
Google’s Deal with Reddit: In February of 2024, Google licensed Reddit’s content to train its AI models. At the same time, Reddit’s presence in the SERPs exploded, sparking debate about its usefulness and safety for users. While Reddit’s AI overview appearances are dwindling, its influence on search visibility remains significant.
March 2024 Core Update: This 45-day-long update aimed to reduce unhelpful content by 40%, with harsh penalties for offenders. Sites were deindexed within days, making this one of the most impactful updates in recent memory.
August 2024 Core Update: With this update, Google acknowledged that many smaller sites saw major losses during the HCU, aiming to connect people with “a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches.” Early results show some signs of recovery for those sites.

Adding to the complexity, Google replaced the First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vitals (CWV) metric. While not a primary ranking factor, INP and CWV could act as tie-breakers among top-ranking pages — a crucial detail given the fierce competition on the SERP today.

The rise of AI Overviews and the impact on organic search

In May of 2024, during Google I/O, Google launched its AI Overviews (AIO), formerly known as the Search Generative Experience (SGE) following a period of beta testing. Despite the initial excitement, AIO quickly came under fire for generating hallucinated answers.

Although its visibility has decreased, AIO still significantly impacts the SERP, pushing organic results down by an average of 900 pixels. This shift affects the click-through rates of even top-ranking pages.

It’s possible to have your content cited in AIO, which is theoretically prime placement. However, trying to tell where your site is appearing in these overviews is extremely hard (a “maddening adventure,” as Search Engine Roundtable puts it). Google Search Console currently lumps those clicks and impressions into overall data.

Learn more on our blog: Age of SGE: How Will AI Affect Search Traffic in the Next Decade?

The resulting outcome: More zero-click searches

As these changes unfold, we’re seeing a rise in zero-click searches — instances where users either get the information they need directly from the SERP without clicking through to any site, or create a new search because the initial results didn’t satisfy them. For the former case, this trend ties closely to Google’s apparent goal of keeping users within its ecosystem for longer, thereby increasing ad revenue. Features like AIO contribute to this, as they deliver information-rich content that satisfies user queries without the need for external clicks.

This change has profound implications for organic search. The traditional click-through rate curve may start to change shape, with even top-ranking positions losing their prime status as SERP features push them further down the page. Higher competition and the evolution of search behavior mean that being number one might not be as valuable as it once was.

Sounds scary, I know. But rest assured, there are steps you can take to confidently navigate these challenging times in SEO.

How to respond: Re-establishing your SEO strategy in 2025

Given the current landscape, it’s important to re-establish your baselines and goals. Don’t hyperfocus on year-over-year losses, especially if your site has been hit by updates like the September Helpful Content Update. In some cases, recovery might not be the right goal — stability could be the new success.

Here’s what you can do to adapt:

Prioritize Quality Traffic: Not all traffic is created equal. Focus on creating content designed to convert, following Google’s guidelines for helpful content as well as the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Write for humans, not search engines!
Solidify Your Technical Foundation: Crawlability is key — Google needs to access your content easily. Core Web Vitals may not be everything, but as mentioned, they can break a tie when all else is equal. Audit your site’s technical state and incorporate elements like schema markup to help search engines quickly understand your content.
Emphasize Content Freshness: Google now considers multiple dates when crawling your content — byline date, syntactic date, and semantic date. Consistency across these signals is key. Avoid URL dates if possible, as they’re harder to update.
Bolster E-E-A-T: Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness should be the pillars of your content strategy. Author bylines, bios and expert quotes will help build credibility, while structured data helps communicate your industry niche and relationships to other organizations.
Optimize for Conversion: With organic traffic potentially dropping, optimizing for conversion becomes critical. Understand your user funnel and tailor CTAs to guide users further down the path. This way, any losses in traffic will have less impact on your bottom line.
Prioritize Your Efforts: When planning your action items, use a chart to outline resource intensity and estimated impact. This will help you prioritize tasks wisely.

Staying agile in an ever-changing world of SEO

SEO is inherently dynamic, but the strategies outlined here are evergreen. As the landscape continues to evolve, staying informed and adaptable is key. Focus on creating high-quality content, maintaining a strong technical foundation, and optimizing for user experience.

Working with an expert partner in all things SEO will help you stay in front of the curve, and your competitors.

The post SEO in 2025: Adapting to Google’s New Reality appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Try These 7 B2C Influencer Marketing Tactics for B2B Success

Alex White — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 09:00:35 -0400

Despite their differences, business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) influencer marketing share several key similarities.

Both audiences seek value, with a strong emphasis on trust, credibility, and social proof. They are actively engaged online and respond well to relevant, high-quality content. Effective influencer marketing strategies for both segments leverage this content to address specific needs and interests, driving engagement and fostering meaningful connections.

This is all to say that the many successful tactics that work for B2C influencer marketers can work for those on the B2B side of things, too. Yes, the goals and audiences may differ but the fundamental principles behind these tactics — building trust, leveraging content, and engaging authentically — are always relevant. By digging into these B2C tactics and adapting them for B2B, we can uncover strategies that get results. Let’s take a look at seven popular B2C methods that can be optimized for B2B influencer marketing.

1. Content co-creation

B2C: Influencers create content that authentically showcases the brand, often integrating the product into their daily life.
B2B Adaptation: Co-create content that aligns with both the brand’s marketing goals and the influencer’s expertise and audience.
The Stat: 40% of brands say creator and/or user-generated content was the most important part of their 2023 social media strategy. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

“What’s a faster way to connect with a target audience than building thought leadership from scratch? Working with influencers that already have authority and credibility with the target audience you want to reach.” – Lee Odden, Board Advisor, TopRank Marketing

2. Authentic storytelling

B2C: Influencers share personal stories and experiences with a product to connect emotionally with their audience.
B2B Adaptation: Humanize your brand by encouraging B2B thought leaders to share their professional journeys, challenges, and how your solution helped solve their specific problems. For best results, ensure the influencers in your selection pool have vast experience with your brand.
The Stat: Conversions improve by 30% when brand-influencer posts focus on storytelling. (Source: Sprinklr)

3. Product demonstrations and reviews

B2C: Influencers create captivating short-form videos to show products in action.
B2B Adaptation: Because of their sometimes intangible traits (think software), showcasing a B2B product, service or solution takes special care. Rely on the influencer to share their POV on the offering, being sure to back it up with their industry expertise, the value proposition, their personal experience, and use cases.
The Stat: 96% of B2B companies plan to use video product demos in their content marketing over the next year (Source: RIVIA.AI)

“Influencers showcasing the practical applications of B2B products or providing authentic reviews can significantly influence potential buyers. This type of content aids in decision-making and boosts product credibility.” – Neil Patel, Co-Founder, Neil Patel Digital

4. Event partnerships and live streaming

B2C: Influencers often attend brand events and live-stream their experience to their followers.
B2B Adaptation: Partner with influencers to live-stream industry events, conferences, or product launches. These types of activations not only increase your reach but also adds a layer of credibility when an industry expert endorses your brand.
The Stat: 68% of B2B marketers found that having influencers attend and cover industry events significantly enhances brand visibility and generates quality leads. (Source: Influencer Marketing Hub)

5. Long-term partnerships

B2C: Consumer-facing influencers form long-term relationships with brands, promoting products over a series of months or even years.
B2B Adaptation: Turn your B2B influencers into brand ambassadors. Recurring content creation, thought leadership, and event appearances can build sustained credibility and trust over time.
The Stat: 56% of CMOs interviewed believe that the best way to optimize the use of B2B influencer marketing campaigns is to “build long-term relationships that show true brand advocacy.” (Source: Warmly,)

“Influencer marketing in the B2B space cannot be focused on short-term tactics; it’s about building long-term relationships with key opinion leaders. These relationships can lead to ongoing collaborations, where influencers become advocates for your company.” – Rafael Schwarz, CRO, TERRITORY Influence

6. Leveraging niche platforms

B2C: Influencers often engage with audiences on niche platforms like TikTok or Instagram, depending on where their audience is most active.
B2B Adaptation: Identify and engage with influencers on niche platforms relevant to your industry, like TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, newsletters, and even Threads. These platforms might have smaller but more engaged and relevant audiences for B2B brands, allowing for more targeted influencer campaigns.
The Stat: Instagram is the top platform for influencer marketing, with 80.8% of marketers planning to use it in 2024. (Source: Sprout)

7. Influencer-driven content series

B2C: Creators develop multi-part series to keep their audience engaged and the brand on their radar.
B2B Adaptation: Partner with influencers to develop a content series that explores different aspects of a relevant industry topic. Examples include blog posts, videos, or webinars that allow the influencer to provide insights on complex subjects over an extended period of time.
The Stat: B2B buyers engage with 3-7 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep. (Source: Kurve)

“As brands, we need to Content localization can be a time-consuming, research-intensive process, which is probably why it’s often overlooked — even by big brands that otherwise have highly robust and effective SEO strategies in place. But that’s also what could make it such a key differentiator for you.

When you take the time to accurately localize your content, your brand won’t just feel like another option for your audiences. Instead, you’ll feel like a brand that actually understands them and takes the time to speak to them on their own terms (literally). You’ll stand out from your competition, form more authentic relationships with your audience, and drive more qualified traffic to your web pages. All it takes is a little extra work on the front end.

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth localizing your content for different regions, that’s already a pretty good sign the answer is yes.

What is content localization?

Content localization is the process of creating or editing content for a specific region. Though localization is related to — and frequently conflated with — content translation, the two are separate undertakings that require separate expertise.

Where translation is about converting the text of one piece of content from one language to another, localization can be thought of as converting the meaning of a text. Localizers are in charge of rewriting text to ensure its message makes sense to and resonates with the localized audience they are attempting to communicate with.

Compared to translation, content localization is much broader in focus. It could involve any number of alterations to content, including changes to:

Spelling, such as changing American English to British English (for example, changing the spelling of “color” to “colour”).

Measurements, such as switching from the imperial measurement system to the metric system (for example, changing feet to meters).

Time and date formatting, such as changing the MM/DD/YYYY format used in the US to the DD/MM/YYYY format used in most of Europe.

Idioms and phrases, which may rely on cultural knowledge that makes them difficult to translate to other cultures, requiring a replacement or analog instead.

Hyperlinks, including any links to other webpages or websites you include in the content. You don’t want to localize one page only to send your visitors to an un-localized, irrelevant webpage when they want to learn more.

Images and other media are often overlooked by localizers, but swapping out images and videos with media that’s more relevant to a local audience is a great way to make a page feel more targeted.

Emojis, which can have different connotations in different cultures and regions. For example, the smiley face emoji actually symbolizes contempt or distrust in China.

Keywords are also highly affected by localization. Using localized keywords is an opportunity to rank highly in the locales you’re targeting, significantly boosting your visibility to the right audience. Keyword localization is an important part of international SEO.

Depending on the nature of the content itself, even more substantial changes may be necessary. For instance, if you’re writing about celebrations or cultural events that aren’t observed in every region you’re targeting, then it won’t make much sense to publish that content in those regions. Instead, your content team should consider creating an alternate piece of content for those regions — or scrapping the idea entirely in favor of something with broader appeal.

Content localization best practices

No matter your audience, your content, or the region you’re localizing to target, you should always take the time to follow each of these best practices.

Get to know your regions first

The earlier you start your localization process, the more effective it will be. If possible, make thoughtful localization a part of your content and SEO market entry strategizing. As you develop audience personas, take note of where these audiences are located, and gather insights such as the following:

Languages spoken in the regions

Formatting styles used in the region (for date, time, measurements, spelling, etc.)

Average demographics in the region (including age, education, income level, etc.)

How people within this region typically find and interact with content online

Major competitors in the region and how they approach content creation

Audiences most likely to be interested in your product

Major holidays celebrated in the region

Unique cultural factors to be aware of within the region

Specific words, phrases, and subject matter to avoid

Anything else your content creators should know about the region

The later you implement your localization strategy, the more content you’ll have to retroactively localize, which can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. If you already have a great deal of existing content you’d like localized, it’s worth taking the time to conduct an SEO content audit with your new regions in mind.

Create (and maintain) regional style guides

Once you’ve researched the regions you’re targeting, build out separate style guides for each. These style guides should contain all of the information you found during your research and will serve as a source of truth for your content and SEO specialists.

Consult these style guides frequently and continuously update them as you learn more information about the region in question. If and when you conduct additional customer research, cross-check your learnings with your regional style guides and update them accordingly. If you maintain them properly, your style guides should continue to become more accurate and useful the longer you have them — just like your personas.

Don’t think of your regions as “primary” and “secondary”

Chances are, you probably do most of your business in one or two major regions. It’s tempting to think of these regions as your “primary” regions and narrowly focus on them. But by deprioritizing “secondary” regions, you risk stifling their potential for growth.

Take the time to consider all of these regions a primary source of traffic and potential revenue, and create content for them accordingly. Doing any less will only serve to alienate your “secondary” regions — which is exactly what localization aims to avoid.

Measure success for continuous optimization

Track all the localization changes you make to content closely so you can measure their success. Detailed, regionally segmented reporting will help you understand the specifics of progress and opportunities.

Keeping a close eye on how your localization efforts affect your success within target regions can inform your ongoing content approach. Include learnings in your regional style guides to build out more informed and impactful localization strategies for each of your regions over time.

Ask for local guidance

There’s nothing more valuable than local insight for any stage of your content localization. If you’re just starting out, ask locals to review your research and style guide and add anything they can come up with. Have these locals review any localization edits you make to your content on an ongoing basis to ensure a higher level of authenticity and effectiveness.

You’ll find that your brand gets out of content localization what you put into it. If you take the time and invest the resources to accurately and thoughtfully localize your web content per target region, you’ll see just how valuable localization can be.

Want to learn more about advanced content strategies that can help your brand get ahead? Check out our full content marketing hub.

The post Content Localization Tips From the Experts appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Here’s How 11 Expert Marketers Define B2B Influencer Marketing

Debbie Friez — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 09:00:41 -0400

What is B2B influencer marketing?

I get asked this question quite often. Especially by non-marketers, who have the assumption I work with a Kardashian selling makeup.

Let’s begin with the distinction between B2B and B2C influencer marketing. A slightly more B2C-centric definition comes from McKinsey: “Influencer marketing is a collaboration between popular social-media users and brands to promote brands’ products or services.” Although sometimes true for B2B, there are more nuances we can explore.

As we defined it in our 2023 Influencer Marketing Report, “B2B influencer marketing is the strategic practice of brands working with knowledgeable and influential figures in a given industry to create, co-create and amplify content.”

At a high level, these definitions accurately summarize what B2B influencer marketing is and how it works. But we wanted to offer a deeper perspective on the practice, straight from the voices who bring it to life.

I asked some amazing marketers via LinkedIn, emails and messages for their thoughts. This group of marketing thought leaders called out the need for collaboration, authenticity, relationships, data, education, and trust, along with leveraging employees and executives.

Come take a closer look at their definitions of B2B influencer marketing.

How experts define B2B influencer marketing

Simply put, B2B influencer marketing is, “Trusted voices influencing buyer decisions,” says Ursula Ringham, Head of Global Influencer Marketing, SAP, Inc.

Collaboration is key, says Jonathan Steiert, Sr. Content Marketing Manager, NetLine. “B2B influencer marketing is a collaboration where one business leverages the trust and reach of an industry expert or entity to amplify its message to a targeted professional audience.”

The content queen, Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs, breaks down influencer marketing like you would a good marketing strategy:

“It’s a collab between an organization and an individual marked by 4 key essentials:

Clear goals, KPIs: Why are we doing this? How will we measure success?

Alignment of audience and values: Does our expertise align? Does the influencer use, believe in the product or service?

Relationship: Is this a relationship or does it feel like a one-off? Do we like each other?

Trust: Is there transparency and authenticity? Do we trust each other and honor the other’s strengths? Do we give each other creative freedom? Is there content collaboration or content control?”

A strategic partnership

“B2B influencer marketing,” according to Sprout Social, “is a strategic approach where businesses promote their product or services through collaborative partnerships with subject matter experts within a specific industry. Through these relationships, businesses are able to harness an influencer’s credibility to reach new audiences.”

It is that mutually strategic focus and tight-knit partnership that really distinguish B2B influence as a marketing approach, in the eyes of many practitioners. You’ll notice some recurring language in the way they describe the discipline.

“I define B2B influencer marketing as a strategic collaboration that aligns brands with industry experts to enhance credibility, extend reach, and build authority collectively,” says Sarah Evans, CEO at Sevans PR. “This approach not only highlights the expertise of thought leaders but also intertwines their insights with a brand’s narrative, elevating all. It’s about creating a symbiotic relationship where expert opinions are brought to the forefront, providing a dual benefit—boosting the brand’s reputation and amplifying the influencer’s authority. This method is a powerful way to leverage shared knowledge and influence, crafting a narrative that resonates deeply within professional communities.”

A strategic partnership begins with collaboration, says Justin Levy, Head of Social Media, Influencer Marketing & Community, ZoomInfo. “B2B influencer marketing is the collaboration with industry thought leaders to, typically, drive brand awareness and engagement. The most successful B2B influencer marketing campaigns are those that are mutually beneficial for both the brand and the influencers that the brand works with.”

To Sydney Dusselier, Senior Writer, Prophix, “B2B influencer marketing is all about partnering with thought leaders and innovators in your space to build mutually beneficial relationships that help educate and engage your target market. Co-creating campaigns, assets, and social media content with B2B influencers is one of the best ways to convey your commitment to amplifying the voices of your audience and addressing their concerns in an approachable way, rather than resorting to a sales pitch right away.”

Commenting on the mutual benefits between brand and influencer, Amy Higgins, Director, Content Marketing, Cloudflare, shares: “Personally, I define B2B influencer marketing as a mutually beneficial relationship where brands co-create together. The trick is finding what is ‘beneficial’ for both parties. Sometimes the influencers receive a monetary benefit. However, more often than not, B2B influencers work with brands to expand their community and influence in the industry.”

B2B influencers add credibility and authenticity

Brands want to find a way to relate and show credibility with their audience. Influencers provide that authenticity. The experts agree.

“First of all, B2B influencer marketing is suuuch a fantastic way to humanize a brand and create a lot of buzz with the right audience,” says Ruth Schuster, Social Media Lead, HRS. “Second of all, with experts and brand ambassadors, a B2B brand can share its messages more authentically, build better trust, and make complex content more accessible for its audience. As a result, it drives higher engagement and conversions because influencers bring credibility and attention, making clients more likely to trust and choose the brand.”

Ruth adds, “To sum it up: it just helps brands in such a meaningful way to educate and position themselves as industry leaders, driving growth and strengthening their market presence.”

The theme of credibility and authenticity continues with Morgan J. Ingram, Founder and Chief Edutainment Officer, AMP Creative. “My definition of B2B influencer marketing is amplifying your company’s mission and narrative in the market by partnering with credible voices in your industry,” he says. “These influencers have built an audience around a specific topic due to their expertise and accomplishments. By collaborating with them, you tap into their credibility to expand your market share.”

“The future of B2B influencer marketing is integration, not transaction,” Morgan continues. “Influencers will deeply align with an organization’s revenue goals and brand narrative, creating content that authentically reflects the company’s mission. This approach moves beyond simple endorsements to value-driven pieces of content.”

“You need to humanize your brand if you want people to buy into it and influencer marketing is one of the best ways to do that. B2B influencer marketing allows companies to expose their offerings to more tailored, professional communities and build brand authority by working with respected experts. Through those experts, or influencers, brands can get the word out about an offering while cultivating deep, authentic relationships with potential customers,” points out Tim Alexander, Social Media and Influencer Strategist.

Specialized expertise is a must

You don’t pick a B2B influencer because they look cute. You look for someone who can inform your audience.

The B2B Influencer Marketing Guide reminds us that it comes down to the three R’s:

Relevance – Who is reaching your brand’s most valuable audience?

Resonance – Who is inspiring your audience to meaningful action?

Reach – Given the first two, who has the biggest audience?

Mandy McEwen, Founder & CEO, Mod Girl Marketing makes this point. She says, “B2B influencer marketing is the strategy of engaging well-connected, expert thought leaders to elevate your brand’s presence and trustworthiness. Unlike B2C, where it’s all about reach and consumer influence, B2B influencer marketing focuses more on the depth of connections and the specific subject matter expertise these influencers bring.”

Want to learn more about B2B influencer marketing and how it works? We’ve got plenty for you to explore:

2024 B2B Influencer Marketing Statistics and Trends

Why You Need an Influencer Strategy (and How to Build One)

The B2B Influencer Marketing Software You Need to Succeed

Everything You Need to Know about B2B Influencer Contracts and Payments

How do you define B2B influencer marketing? Let us help define it for your brand. Discover our influencer marketing services.

The post Here’s How 11 Expert Marketers Define B2B Influencer Marketing appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

How Strong SEO Strategies Will Boost Your Lead conversion

Harry Mackin — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 09:27:43 -0400

Whether you work at an agency or you’re managing a marketing budget in-house, you’ve probably had the classic debate before: do you focus on organic lead cultivation through SEO or try to generate as many leads as possible with aggressive tactics right now?

I won’t pretend to be impartial: When you have the choice, favoring SEO is almost always the better investment. This isn’t an unfounded hunch, either: in our client programs here at TopRank Marketing, organic traffic consistently converts at a higher rate than overall traffic across a range of conversion types.

Marketers tend to argue that SEO is important because it’s essential for “long term” growth. The time’s come to reframe that argument: SEO is essential because it unlocks the true potential of a brand’s lead conversion.

Here are the big ways SEO unlocks that potential, with real-world examples from TopRank’s case studies.

Brand awareness generates more leads than demand generation over time

When the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) noticed that brand marketing was “losing the budget war” to lead generation a number of years ago, they conducted a large scale study to find out why.

At first, this study confirmed the conventional wisdom that led to marketers emphasizing lead gen over brand marketing in their budgets. Direct response efforts yield much faster results that translate to a quick spike in leads. Marketers can point to these short-term results as a measurable win.

As they looked at the results, however, the IPA noticed something else: brand marketing driven by SEO took longer to ramp up than lead gen, but while these lead gen tactics fizzled out quickly, the brand marketing’s effectiveness kept rising.

Ultimately, the IPA study showed that SEO-based brand marketing initiatives reliably generated more leads for the same share of budget than their direct response counterparts. On average, your money goes further when you use it on brand marketing than when you spend on lead gen.

This conclusion led the IPA to formulate the famous “60-40” rule, which states that the optimal balance of brand and demand is 60% branding and 40% direct response. Your lead gen efforts guide your customers through your sales funnel to conversion, but your SEO brand marketing is what brings them into that funnel in the first place.

As this study proves, when you emphasize brand marketing, you simply put your brand in front of more leads overall than you would with lead gen alone. And if you want to maximize your lead gen potential, SEO is a clear necessity.

Intent-driven SEO provides the right kind of visibility for lead gen

Impressive as these numbers may be, the best argument for the importance of SEO has more to do with quality than quantity. In today’s SEO, search volume isn’t the end-all, be-all it once was. When determining which keywords to pursue now, SEO experts carefully consider a combination of search volume, keyword difficulty, and — most importantly — search intent.

Search intent attempts to understand why a search engine user types in the keyword they’re looking for. Understanding this intent is the best way to provide best answer content to these users. As search engines become more intelligent, intent is increasingly the best way to rank highly in Search Engine Result Pages. But understanding and capturing search intent is also one of the most important things you can do to generate leads.

Your ideal leads have specific intent whenever they use a search engine. If you can understand this intent and provide users with the information they’re looking for, the quality of traffic to your site will rise. The people who find you via organic search will be looking for what you have to offer. Through your best-answer content, get to know your brand, start to associate you with your area of expertise, and then look to you for help if and when they become leads.

The right intent-focused SEO doesn’t just raise your brand visibility; it brings you the right visibility to generate leads. And, as the IPA proved, it continues to do so effectively over time.

An example of how this works: one of TopRank’s clients, a public accounting firm, came to us for help raising their brand visibility. Instead of focusing on general visibility, we developed a highly-focused SEO strategy to zero in on the relatively low-volume but high intent keywords the firm’s highly-educated, relatively technical audience would be looking for.

This strategy helped the client rank for over 55 new keywords in SERP positions 1-3 and earn a 96% year-over-year gain in new keywords in top search positions. Even more crucially, however, the keywords we were able to rank for drive the right kind of audience to the firm’s site permanently. The client has become visible to the right people for the right reasons, and the leads follow.

Strong SEO can multiply the effect of all other lead gen initiatives

As the examples above show, SEO strategies aren’t just for raising brand awareness. Instead, it’s more accurate to think of them as the central hub of any digital marketing strategy.

After all, everything you do — from your long-term brand raising efforts and content marketing to your SEM lead generation — feeds back to your site. The more effective you can make this hub, the more all your other efforts will benefit as a result.

When a luxury home décor retailer approached TopRank Marketing, they were looking for a way to stand out against much larger national brands and e-commerce juggernauts in their competitive category. To do that, they would need to carefully manage a long, multi-touchpoint customer journey.

To help them achieve their goal, TopRank incorporated every tool in our tactical mix into an integrated, multifaceted strategy with SEO at the heart.

Through competitive auditing and analysis, our SEO experts identified high-intent keywords our client’s audience was searching but their competitors weren’t winning. We pivoted the client’s SEO and content strategies to focus on these opportunities, then used a combination of lead-generating influencer marketing, social media marketing, and video and content affiliate marketing to drive leads back to the newly SEO-optimized pages.

The result of this strategy was a 11.2% month-over-month increase in revenue, driven by +28.6% MoM gains in organic traffic, +30.9% gains in total website sessions, and a +55% return on ad spend.

By starting with SEO strategy, TopRank was able to provide the backbone that the rest of the initiatives needed. First, organic SEO, focused on intent, captured the attention of the right audience. Then, we retargeted this audience with social media and influencer lead generation advertising. Finally, these ads led the audience back to search engines – and back to the high-intent pages we optimized to give them what they wanted.

It’s time to stop thinking of SEO and lead conversion as two separate objectives to be pursued in isolation: they are both a part of the same buyer’s journey. If you want your marketing to convert leads as effectively as possible, building a strong SEO strategy should be one of your top priorities.

For more help using SEO to drive the measurable results you need, check out our Top SEO Strategies for Lead Generation.

The post How Strong SEO Strategies Will Boost Your Lead conversion appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

Should You Develop a Microsite for SEO? Learn Why and How

Ryan Leighty — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:29:53 -0400

If you’re searching for Nike shoes, you might go to Nike.com and browse. But what if you want to know more about Nike as a company? Say you wanted to research their sustainability commitments and practices before you buy your new kicks. In that case, you can visit nike.com/sustainability and find a whole mini-website dedicated to everything Nike and eco-friendly.

Nike’s sustainability hub is a great example of a microsite. It helps a particular audience explore a single topic, with depth and breadth of coverage. It’s easier for people to find the information they’re looking for and explore related topics, too.

Microsites can be a powerful way for B2B brands to reach specific audiences with specific messages. Here’s what you need to know about microsites for SEO.

Developing a microsite SEO strategy

Microsites have a bad reputation in some SEO circles, and it’s true the technique can come off as spammy or convoluted if it’s not done properly. But the right microsite strategy helps everyone:

Improves the user experience

Helps people find information easily

Highlights topics important to your brand

Helps your audience self-select

Builds your domain’s authority around a specific area

But let’s start with the basics:

What is a microsite?

A microsite is a small standalone website with a specific focus on a topic, product, campaign, sub-brand or event. They usually have their own subdomain or even a unique url, such as business.att.com or HubSpot’s Website Grader at website.grader.com.

Advantages of microsites for B2B

There are a few key ways that a microsite can improve your site SEO and your customers’ experience:

Targeted content. Microsites are highly focused, which helps attract niche audiences and can boost rankings for long-tail keywords.

Link building. When microsites are crosslinked with the main website, it helps the SEO of both sites.

Enhanced user experience. Microsites encourage users to explore the entire collection of pages, which helps boost time on page, lower bounce rates, and signal to search engines that the content is valuable.

Brand authority. Specialized microsites can establish a brand’s authority on a particular topic, with in-depth content that boosts credibility.

Microsites in action: A case study

A TopRank Marketing client has a solution with two distinct audiences:

Individual end users, who might purchase a monthly subscription (B2C)

HR leaders, who would purchase a business licenses for their teams (B2B)

It’s easy to see how these two audiences need dramatically different messaging. Trying to reach both with one site was underserving the B2B audience and failing to generate traction.

To better reach the B2B audience, we helped this client develop a microsite focused on the benefits of the solution for teams. We created content aimed at helping this audience, and at demonstrating the solution’s value.

Ultimately, the microsite helped target the B2B audience more effectively. The site is now ranking in the top 10 for dozens of keywords with B2B-specific intent — a feat that would have been almost impossible without the microsite.

When to create a microsite

Here are a few simple guidelines to help determine whether your audience/message would be best served with a microsite or simply a page on your main site.

You’re launching a new product or campaign. If your latest launch has its own messaging, branding, goals or unique audience, it could benefit from a microsite.

You’re targeting a new audience. As with the B2C/B2B example, a new audience for your brand could use a clean-slate introduction.

You’re testing a new idea or product. Microsites are a good way to soft launch a new service without cluttering the main site.

You’re telling a new brand story. As with Nike’s sustainability site, microsites help tell brand stories beyond the products and services you offer.

You want to optimize for a subset of keywords. If you have your eye on a juicy collection of long-tail keywords, a microsite can help you rank for them.

You have a complex navigation structure on your main site. Convoluted navigation is a bad user experience that can hurt your ranking potential. Microsites are an effective way to get organized.

Developing a microsite SEO strategy

The process for developing a microsite is similar to strategically creating content for your main site, with a few key differences. Follow these steps:

Determine your objectives. Set specific goals for the microsite to accomplish.

Analyze your audience. Make sure it’s unique enough to warrant a microsite, and explore content and keywords related to this particular audience.

Develop your content strategy. Research your keywords as they relate to your audience and refine your topics and subtopics.

Create content. Develop your content with an eye toward specificity, depth of coverage and value for the intended audience.

Optimize for SEO. Meta descriptions, tags, headers and SCHEMA can all help your content get seen.

Publish and promote. Use paid and organic social, influencer activation, and paid search to help launch the site.

Measure and optimize. Keep tabs on your site’s performance and adjust as needed.

Microsite challenges to watch out for

As useful as microsites can be, there are a few challenges you’ll need to meet:

Keeping the site up to date. It can be challenging to manage multiple microsites. Make sure you have the resources to support what you’re creating.

Brand consistency. A microsite should have its own look and feel, but still be recognizable as part of your brand.

Duplicate content. It’s important to not cannibalize your main site for microsite traffic. Make sure all microsite content is original and unique.

A microsite with macro impact

When they’re strategically created, deployed and supported, microsites can be a great way to reach a specific audience or promote a new product, service or campaign.

A microsite makes it easier to target a specific subset of keywords. This helps the site reach a more relevant audience, which helps search engine algorithms see the value of your content.

Need help building your own microsite SEO strategy? Our SEO team is on the case.

The post Should You Develop a Microsite for SEO? Learn Why and How appeared first on TopRank® Marketing.

The Big Guide to Organic Social Media Marketing

Alex White — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 09:22:35 -0400

Do you want to be the Dollar Shave Club of B2B marketing on social media? In a market filled with countless razor companies, the brand found a way to stand out, building a strong online community and achieving significant growth without relying primarily on paid advertising.

Notice how I said “without relying primarily on paid advertising.” That’s because, while paid is a practical option, it should be used primarily to complement your organic strategy.

If you’re a savvy marketer, you’ve likely noticed how the majority of social platforms have become increasingly pay-to-play, reducing the reach of posts without the backing of funds. That doesn’t mean you need to jump straight into unloading your ad dollars. Instead, you should consider taking an approach similar to the B2C brand above, and create a strategy that’s data-driven, innovative, and most importantly, differentiated.

What is organic social media marketing and why is it important?

Organic social media marketing uses unpaid strategies to build and engage with an audience on social media platforms. Simply put, you’re leveraging social media platforms to interact with and reach your audience without spending any money.

Anyone can advertise on social media (have you seen these wacky ads on X?), but not everyone will find success – at least not in the long-term, and not without a well thought out plan of action for organic social media.

This plan should focus on creating authentic interactions and meaningful engagement, and showcasing your brand’s unique perspective. If you invest time in building the foundation of your organic strategy, your brand will flourish and reach its KPIs (key performance indicators).

How to build an organic social media strategy

1. Define your goals and objectives

What do you want to achieve on social media? Your social media objectives should match up with your business goals.

For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, your social media goal might be to increase followers and increase reach and engagement. Be sure to get specific with the goals you want your social media effort to help you achieve, like improving brand loyalty, generating leads, or increasing the number of users who visit your website.

Once you’ve defined your goals, you’ll want to decide how you’re going to measure them. We recommend using the SMART framework: (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). Adhering to these criteria will ensure clarity, focus, and measurable outcomes, which will in turn improve accountability and resource allocation.

2. Identify and understand your target audience

Who is your target audience? We’re talking about the folks who are most likely interested in your products or services.

For example, a company like Ben and Jerry’s is likely targeting those who identify as sweet tooth enthusiasts over highly cost-conscious consumers (let it be known that I’m a fan of Americone Dream). But they don’t just know who to target by chance; no, they’ve most certainly done their research. According to HubSpot, 82% of marketers say having high-quality data on their target audience is important to succeeding.

Getting your audience data likely won’t be too much different than how these northeastern purveyors of ice cream get theirs. Conduct your research by utilizing tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, surveys, and industry reports. (Unfortunately, you likely won’t be doing any taste testing.)

To take your audience analysis a step further, you can create personas based on demographics, interests, and pain points. Having this information will help you further down the road when it’s time to create content and engagement strategies. As Gary Vaynerchuk said: “Content is king, but context is God. If you don’t understand your audience, you can’t create the right context for your content to be relevant and impactful.” Keep this in mind as you develop your strategy.

3. Choose the right platforms

How you choose your social media platforms will depend on one question: which ones do your audience use the most?

You’re unlikely to see Fruit by the Foot advertising on LinkedIn or Lockheed Martin on TikTok because their audiences aren’t there – or at least not with a contextually relevant mindset. To ensure you’re reaching your audience where they are, you can analyze your competition’s social activity. But don’t just leave it up to that. You’re going to want to use GA4 to track referral traffic from different platforms, employ social listening tools to monitor industry conversation and brand mentions, and dig into engagement metrics to determine where your content performs the best.

While every brand is going to have a different approach, we would be remiss if we didn’t recommend LinkedIn for most B2B brands. We’re not alone in this assessment, either. A recent survey from Content Marketing Institute found that 84% of marketers said the platform delivered the best value for their organization.

However, every brand is different; you must let your research be your guiding star for deciding which platforms to use and which ones to keep in mind for a later date. At this time, the “big five” are all viable options:

LinkedIn: Connect with other businesses, industry leaders, and professionals. LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of B2B leads generated through social media.

Twitter/X: Share industry news, engage with thought leaders, and participate in relevant hashtags and discussions. 66% of brands are on Twitter/X.

Facebook: Useful for building brand awareness and engaging with a broader audience. Business decision-makers spend 74% more time on the platform than average users.

YouTube: Demonstrate products, share expertise, and engage with potential clients through tutorials, case studies, and more. 93% of brands gained a new customer due to a video on social media.

Instagram: Showcase culture and products through images and stories. Instagram has about 2 billion monthly users and is the preferred platform of younger audiences.

Be sure to choose your channel or channels wisely if your budget and resources are limited. According to TopRank’s Josh Nite, “It’s best to post more fitting content to fewer channels than to spread yourself too thin posting everywhere.”

4. Develop a content strategy & create engaging content

Now that you know who your audience is and where they are, it’s time to figure out what type of content you’ll be sharing and how often.

To be frank, you can’t create and publish just anything at any given time and expect positive results. Much like anything else, you need a content plan. As our friend and author, Jay Baer put it, “Content is fire, social media is gasoline. A well-crafted social media content strategy accelerates your message, amplifies your reach, and ignites deeper engagement.” You put a lot of work into building your fire, so keep it aflame by putting the same amount of effort into your master social plan.

Start your content strategy by going back to the data you pulled earlier as these insights can guide your approach. Use this information to create a content calendar, making sure to balance it with different content such as videos, infographics, third-party news, and so on. You’ll want to ensure your posting schedule is consistent, and that your content is valuable and thematic. The value will help people recall why they’re returning, and the thematic recurring content will train them when to return.

Regardless of your choice of social media sites, you’ll need to utilize one or more of the many available tools to assist in getting your content published and seen. And while LinkedIn, Later, Sprout Social, and Sprinklr are all fantastic solutions, your choice should be made based on your budget, goals, and amount of resources.

5. Engage with your audience

Imagine this: You’re at a social networking event and you’re just standing there blurting out the occasional remark like, “I’m a really great guy,” “I tell the best stories,” “Please buy my book!,” etc. You’re not actually conversing with anyone, and they’ve noticed you, but they’re not interested. In fact, they’re leaving to hang out with Ted, the cool new guy from accounting.

This is, effectively, what many brands are doing on social media. They have an audience but they’re not effectively engaging with them, which isn’t great for how they’re perceived. Customers can take this as a sign to unfollow or never attempt to engage with the brand again. You need to talk to your audience, not at them.

Interacting with your audience isn’t just meant for customer service inquiries; it’s a tactic for fostering a sense of community, improving brand loyalty and brand reputation, boosting conversion rates, and increasing your follower count. To put it simply, engaging with your audience drives … engagement.

According to a report by Social Media Examiner, brands that reply to comments on their social media posts see a 40% increase in engagement compared to those that don’t. That alone would be enough for most brands to ensure audience engagement is a part of their organic social efforts.

6. Report and optimize for best results

Is your brand succeeding on social media? Think of it like your health. Just as you go to the doctor for a status report on your body and mind, you should regularly check your social accounts using the tools above for a social “health check.”

The benchmarks set early on in your social program are like baselines set by your primary care provider. Use these benchmarks to track progress, identify what’s working, and eliminate ineffective strategies to shape your program into a high-performance machine. Sprinklr recommends tracking the following categories of social media metrics:

Social media marketing metrics

Social media engagement metrics

Social media conversion metrics

Social media customer service metrics

Social media ROI metrics

Determine how often to report on these KPIs: weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually are all popular timeframes to gather data, but your choice will depend on several factors including, campaign goals, content volume, and algorithm updates, just to name a few.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but this data must be taken from your reporting platform, organized, and saved for future reference. There’s no telling if the data will always be available, and you never know if a client will ask about a campaign from when Obama was still in office.

Tips for organic social media reach and engagement

Consider the advice below to supercharge your organic social media efforts:

Switch up your content by platform: 69% of B2B marketers say that tailoring content to specific social media platforms results in better engagement and ROI.

Engage with your employees: Employees who share company content on social media can increase the reach of that content by up to 561%.

Share user generated content: Customer engagement is 28% higher when using UGC compared to content that was professionally created by experts.

Make video part of your strategy: Viewers can retain up to 95% of the information conveyed through video.

Don’t forget your hashtags: 72% of marketers agree. Using trending hashtags makes an impact on content reach.

Stay active and consistent: Companies that post weekly on LinkedIn, for example, see a 2x lift in engagement with their content.

Don’t be afraid to ask for engagement: Ask questions and be human!

Tag your “friends”: This will signal the algorithms to boost your post. Also, a way to bring in new audiences. Partnering with influencers can help you do this in an authentic, targeted way.

What’s next for your organic social strategy?

Are you ready to advance your organic social efforts? Assess the three B’s with your team: bandwidth, budget, and business goals. Ensure you have a strategic vision with clear objectives to achieve positive results.

Creating and maintaining your brand’s digital footprint requires more work than many realize. It’s no wonder many organizations make the strategic decision to outsource certain marketing functions to scale their efforts without incurring the costs of an in-house team.

Could your organization use a helping hand? Contact us today about our marketing strategy and planning solutions.

The post New York, NY USA — The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) just announced TopRank Marketing and Sprinklr won a 2024 Content Marketing Award for “Across the Socialverse 2023: B2B Social Influence.” The Content Marketing Awards, presented each year by CMI, is the largest and longest-running international content marketing awards program in the world for content creation, distribution, and innovation.

The Content Marketing Awards recognize the best content marketing projects, agencies, and marketers in the industry each year. This year’s panel of all-star judges reviewed nearly 1,000 entries to determine the best of the best in content marketing excellence.

The 60 categories recognize all aspects of content marketing, including the best in strategy, automation, research, social media, video, editorial, illustration, design and much more, across many different industries from healthcare to manufacturing, from B2B to B2C.

“It’s been another great year of content marketing excellence,” shares Stephanie Stahl, managing director, Content Marketing Institute. “The winning marketers and brands prove that content — strategic, compelling, informational, and inspiring content — is at the heart of any great marketing program. These winners showcase some of the most innovative and successful content and experiences in the marketing industry. We are honored to award their hard work and share their amazing projects with our content marketing community.”

The Socialverse campaign, developed by TopRankMarketing and Sprinklr, took shape as a documentary-style masterclass hosted by social media thought leaders, helping Sprinklr expand to new audiences and build resonant awareness around their powerful new AI-integrated Self Serve Plan offering.

“It’s an especially big honor to be recognized among a field of finalists in this category that featured several very impressive and high-scale B2C influencer campaigns,” says TopRank Marketing CEO Donna Robinson. “This really is a sign of how far B2B influencer marketing has come, and where it’s going.”

As winners of Best Use of Influencer Marketing, TopRank Marketing – Sprinklr are now in consideration for Project of the Year. Finalists and winners for that category — along with Branded Campaigns of the Year, Agencies of the Year, and Content Marketers of the Year — will be announced in September and winners will be celebrated at Content Marketing World, October 21-23 in San Diego, California.

About TopRank Marketing

Founded more than 20 years ago, Minnesota-based agency TopRank Marketing has long been a leading force in the B2B influencer marketing practice, producing the annual B2B Influencer Marketing Report and partnering with big brands around the globe to plan and execute winning strategies.

About Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute (CMI) exists to do one thing: advance the practice of content marketing through online education and in-person and digital events. We create and curate content experiences that teach marketers and creators from enterprise brands, small businesses, and agencies how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multichannel storytelling. Global brands turn to CMI for strategic consultation, training, and research. Organizations from around the world send teams to Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing-focused event, the Marketing Analytics & Data Science (MADS) conference and CMI virtual events, including ContentTECH Summit. Our community of 215,000+ content marketers shares camaraderie and conversation. CMI is organized by Informa Connect. To learn more, visit www.contentmarketinginstitute.com.

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SEOpinions Q2 2023 | CRO & SEO, AI Chatbots in Search, & GA4

Travis Tallent — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 11:50:13 -0400

Our VP of SEO, Travis Tallent is back with his latest edition of SEOpinions, giving you all the latest Search insights to cut through the noise.

Take me to the full version

Here’s what you can expect in the full edition:

Get ahead of Google’s next update: Combine CRO & SEO to win BIG

It’s likely no surprise to you, as a customer, that user experience matters—in-store and on-site. As a marketer, you may be surprised to know that SEO and CRO often work in silos, operating as if the other isn’t a priority or shouldn’t be considered.

With the latest algorithm core update from Google, now is the time to ensure that SEO and CRO are working in tandem to create an exceptional user experience.

After all, CRO & SEO are a match made in heaven.

Should AI in Search change your SEO Strategy?

The truth is, no one knows how AI chatbots will impact your brand’s SEO strategy, because we’re still in the chaos phase of this new technology.

What we do know is a strong SEO plan remains a critical part of your overall strategy. Embrace the chaos, keep your ear to the ground, and you’ll be just fine.

Remember, change doesn’t have to be scary.

The Wonder of Google Analytics 4 is Around the Corner

Are you still using Universal Analytics (UA) over GA4? You’ll be happy to know that with GA4’s new features, it’s just as good as UA (if not better)!

Whilst many SEOs and content marketers are sceptical of making the switch to pastures new – hopefully the latest features will inspire you to dip your toes into the GA4 water.

SEOpinions is a quarterly newsletter by Brainlabs to cut through the noise, inform you of important SEO updates, and predict upcoming changes so you can prioritize your SEO roadmap accordingly.

Full edition of Q2 SEOpinions 2023

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Adam Potashnick appointed as Brainlabs’ North America CEO

Brainlabs — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 14:22:39 -0400

We’re thrilled to announce the appointment of Adam Potashnick as CEO, North America.

Adam will have a remit to build on Brainlabs’ impressive growth across the US and Canada and further cement our reputation as a full-service, digital-first media agency with a unique scientific approach backed by proprietary technology at the core of our offering.

Adam joins the agency from EssenceMediacom after a seventeen year tenure. He held the role of Chief Operating Officer spanning four years, responsible for operations, teams and clients across four offices totalling 2,000 staff. Most recently, following the merger between Essence and MediaCom in January, he took on the role of Chief Revenue Officer for the merged agency.

Prior to his COO role, Adam was Chief Growth Officer at MediaCom, where he led the team to work with clients such as Uber, Hotels.com, adidas/Reebok, Hasbro and J.P. Morgan Chase. Throughout his time at the GroupM agency he held a number of client leadership roles, including leading ABInbev, Dell, Indeed, Sony Playstation and Ebay accounts to name a few.

In 2021, The Internationalist recognized Adam as an International Agency Innovator. Adweek named him as a Media All-Star for the second time – an honor awarded to only 20 individuals in the industry each year.

On Adam’s appointment:

Daniel Gilbert, Global CEO of Brainlabs, commented: “Our success is fuelled by the unrelenting passion and dedication of our top-class, united team of experts. Now, with a person of Adam’s caliber and warmth joining to lead our next chapter of growth I couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come. Adam’s record speaks for itself but what I’m most impressed by is how he lives and breathes the elements of our Win-Together culture that sit right at the core of Brainlabs. He gets what winning with our clients truly means and I can’t wait to see his leadership in action!”

Adam Potashnick added: “After seventeen remarkable years at one company, I’m looking forward to pastures new, and working with the Brainlabs super-team led by Daniel Gilbert and Stephen Allan. The agency has quickly earned a powerful reputation in the industry thanks to their undeniably innovative way of working with their clients and I’m excited to contribute to that and help them continue to transform the world of digital advertising for the better.”

Read more about this on AdAge.

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Brainlabs awarded $50M Media Business for Mobile Operator, Consumer Cellular

Brainlabs — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 04:07:43 -0400

We are delighted to share the news that mobile operator Consumer Cellular has joined our growing client roster in the US. Brainlabs will manage its multi-million retail media, paid search, and paid shopping account.

Brainlabs and Consumer Cellular spoke to Adweek about the brand’s huge ambitions for growth and innovation, and the important role Brainlabs plays as an agency partner.

The appointment comes following a review of the company’s marketing strategy under the new leadership of CMO Craig Lister, who joined in August of this year, and represents a period of significant change for the brand.

“We’d like to see a much more balanced footprint and one that addresses all the points of the customer journey. Because we know it often begins in digital, and in some cases can end there as well,” the CMO told Adweek.

“We were looking for groups that were performance-marketing oriented, extremely data-driven and could scale very gracefully into other types of programmatic media,” Lister continued.

During the review, Brainlabs evaluated Consumer Cellular’s account data and shared optimization recommendations, impressing the brand team. It also created its own method for managing paid media accounts, which hinges on constant campaign testing and optimization, and coined it d’Artagnan. This industry-first approach enables always-on testing and optimization, essential for effectively leveraging performance data and increasing results by up to 70%.

Commenting on the appointment, Jeff Allen, COO Brainlabs North America, Brainlabs said: “Consumer Cellular has a powerful customer-first mindset, a huge appetite for growth and innovation and many other values that align meticulously with our own at Brainlabs. We’re ecstatic to partner with Craig and his team to build on the brand’s deeply loyal community, and transform their customer acquisition journey to dominate in the competitive telco market.

We’ll be taking an approach that doesn’t exist anywhere else thanks to the technology our team of media scientists have created, and we couldn’t be more excited to showcase its capabilities with a client like Consumer Cellular.”

Read the full article in AdWeek.

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Brainlabs CEO Dan Gilbert speaks to The Times about the future of AI tech in Marketing

Brainlabs — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 07:00:01 -0500

AI tech tools that make online marketing more accurate

Recent announcements on new AI-powered services have sparked huge amounts of debate in the advertising community, with discussions spanning the accuracy & reliability of new models, the ethical & environmental impact of AI and what these new tools could mean for businesses.

There’s no denying that life for advertisers across the globe is set to become more tricky thanks to the arrival of AI-powered tools. However, as AI promises to open up a whole new way of working, many marketers are questioning how to respond.

Dan Gilbert, founder and chief executive of Brainlabs spoke to Richard Tyler at The Times on how AI can make online marketing more accurate.

Read the full article in The Times: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tech-tools-that-make-online-marketing-more-accurate-xhx22kmnm

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Chris Davis, Head of Growth speaks to Campaign about de-influencing

Brainlabs — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 06:54:38 -0500

De-influencing represents a sleeping giant our industry needed to wake

“A rebellion”. “The birth of the anti-ad”.”The death knell for influencers”. Just a few contentious terms you’ll find if you Google “what is de-influencing?”.

After more digging online or a quick scroll on TikTok (#deinfluencing has more than 200 million views), you might surmise it as “a viral trend taking over social media, one influencer-fuelled negative product review at a time”.

But if you do, and you’re a brand marketer, you might be overlooking one of the most symbolic marketing macro shifts in recent history. It comes with challenges, but also enormous opportunities and learnings we cannot afford to ignore.

Chris Davis, Head of Growth at our Influencer arm Fanbytes by Brainlabs shared his thoughts on the matter in Campaign Magazine, explaining why de-influencing is an opportunity brand marketers can win big on.

Read the full article in Campaign: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/de-influencing-represents-sleeping-giant-industry-needed-wake/1815164

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Brainlabs Appointed as Media Agency of Record for The Estée Lauder Companies UK & Ireland

Brainlabs — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 05:31:00 -0500

We are delighted to share the news that The Estée Lauder Companies UK & Ireland has appointed Brainlabs to be its media planning and buying agency of record.

Brainlabs will be working closely with ELC UK&I to create digital-first and data-led campaigns across its iconic brand portfolio – including Clinique, MAC and Jo Malone London. The remit will cover all strategy and planning and media activation across search, social, programmatic, display, TV, Print, Radio and outdoor.

Our world-class team will apply Brainlabs’ industry leading tech, data tools and expertise, to drive growth across the Estée Lauder Companies UK & Ireland brand portfolio.

Daniel Gilbert, Brainlabs Global CEO said: “This is an incredibly proud moment for Brainlabs. The Estée Lauder Companies is the leader in prestige beauty and we are excited to work together to strengthen and enhance their engagement across the UK and Ireland, with both new and existing consumers. Our digital first and data-led approach. will be core to this, and we can’t wait to continue on this journey with them.”

You can read more here.

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SEOpinions Q1 2023 – E-E-A-T, AI & ChatGPT, & Algorithm Changes

Travis Tallent — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 07:38:31 -0500

SEOpinions is a quarterly newsletter by Brainlabs to cut through the cruft, inform you of important SEO updates, and predict upcoming changes so you can prioritize your SEO roadmap accordingly. Read the last edition here.

2023: The Year Pandora’s Box Opened for AI in Search

There has been *so much hubbub* in the SEO industry since the release of ChatGPT less than two months ago on November 30th, 2022. And with all that noise, it can be hard to know what to prioritize in your SEO roadmap.
Rest assured (Google and boss), this article was *not* written by generative AI, but not for lack of trying! After many attempts of trying to generate something in ChatGPT, it was clear that my experience and expertise were going to be the only things to stitch together my scattered thoughts.

Double E-EAT This For Lunch

In a previous SEOpinions, I discussed the importance of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness), how you can leverage it to see better content performance, and how Google is shifting its algorithm to prefer content written with E-A-T in mind.

To address shoddy content—especially in a world of generative AI content—Google has updated its search rater guidelines to include an extra E for Experience in what is now “Experience-Expertise-Authority-Trustworthiness” (E-E-A-T).

This extra E highlights the effort Google is making to ensure that ranked content is written by an author with experience, and is of appropriate quality for the topic.

See Google’s guidelines on E-E-A-T here.

Experience, Expertise, and Authority all bubble up to higher levels of trustworthiness, which is stated as the most important criterion by Google.

Keep in mind topics classified as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) require a higher level of trust than other topics—and this can vary on a page-by-page basis so it is essential to have well-researched, expert-driven content for any topic that may veer into the YMYL category. Google states:

“You’ll also see clearer guidance throughout the guidelines underscoring the importance of content created to be original and helpful for people, and explaining that helpful information can come in a variety of different formats and from a range of sources.”

In regards to YMYL, there may be instances where content is entirely left to experts in the field rather than folks with experience. Google provides this helpful example in the search rater guidelines (page 28).

And lastly, are your website pages authored?

Another addition to the search rater guidelines asks the raters to attempt to understand the author of the page. This addition shows Google’s attempt to get to the bottom of who is writing content.

On page 15, Google states:

“Start by finding out who is responsible for the website and who created the content on the page… Then, look for information about the website and/or content creators on the website itself.”

If it’s unclear, you may say goodbye to better rankings! To make authorship easier for Google to understand, it is best to, A) provide clear and linked citations, B) clear and robust author bios, and C) use schema markup when applicable.

Action items:

Share your unique story. Product reviews sharing the experience of unboxing will outperform those written by a non-product user. Review content should be spoken from a unique experiential point of view.

Create multimedia content that highlights experience. Multimedia is your golden ticket to success in taking up more real estate in the SERPs. But it’s also a unique way to show Google that you have E-E-A-T as it is more challenging to use generative AI to produce video, infographics, interactive content, etc.—though, there are many companies trying!

Have obvious authors with bios for the website and page. Google is now tasking quality raters with identifying who wrote the page. Having clear authors makes it easy for Google to connect the dots between brands, authors, and topics.

Know when to fold ‘em. If you are in the YMYL category, there may be some topics that are increasingly challenging for your brand to be an “expert” in, depending on how Google interprets the brand. It’s worth testing into more expert-based content, especially if you have subject matter experts on hand, but know that there may be more juice to squeeze in other topics.

Takeaway: Unique and helpful content that engages E-E-A-T will continue to outperform content that doesn’t have these elements. Consider changing your content briefs to include author bios and subject matter expert pull quotes/involvement, and ensure to invest in multi-media content.

AI is here to stay: ChatGPT, Content, and the Value of Human Experience

Using AI content is not new. In fact, GPT-1 (short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer)—OpenAI’s language model—came out in 2018. Even before then, using semantic SEO to generate content was common for larger retailer and aggregator sites like Zillow. Companies like Jasper AI and Copy.Ai have been around for several years.

Nevertheless, ChatGPT—built on GPT-3.5—opened Pandora’s box of interest in generative AI content when it was released and I suspect that interest will continue to grow. The two important differences today compared to 2018 when GPT-1 came out: 1. the accessibility and knowledge of generative AI is more vast, and 2. the quality of content produced is better (but still not stellar).

As can be seen using Google trends data, AI is a lot more mainstream than it was in 2018. In my own experience, I’ve been asked more about AI in the last 6 months than I have in my previous 10 years in marketing.

Source: Google Trends

2. GPT-3 is capable of a far better content output than GPT-1 simply due to the number of parameters available.

(source: Semrush)

Nevertheless, ChatGPT and GPT-3 are still not accurate and, in the case of ChatGPT, don’t provide clear citations for the sources of information. This leaves us with an overly confident output that can misinform en masse. In fact, ChatGPT even provides a clear list of limitations on the dashboard homepage.

My POV on AI content:

I’ll cut to the chase from my experience working with a large retail site with tens of thousands of SKUs where AI-generated content was the best way to scale efforts:

AI-generated content will rank, but it won’t rank competitively.

To improve AI content’s chance to rank in a competitive position (top 5), it requires human review and optimization.

More importantly, to avoid common errors with AI content, content needs to be reviewed and edited. In fact, CNET is in hot water regarding AI content that didn’t have an appropriate level of human review (Futurism).

As with most content, there is a correlation between dofollow links to the domain and ranking performance for AI content as well (Kevin Indig).

AI content is better served for simple, utility content like product descriptions and FAQs rather than thought leadership content.

AI content performs better in some industries/markets than others, as can be said for any content.

In my opinion, generative AI is just heating up and will continue to make a splash in 2023 and beyond. Those who learn to integrate generative AI into their workflows will be far ahead of those who don’t. However, those who entirely rely on generative AI may see initial success, but will eventually be on the wrong side of search engines.

Quick FAQs about AI content:

Can Google differentiate AI content from human content?

Yes, Google knows when content is “AI content” (SEO Roundtable).

Does Google penalize AI content?

No, Google does not automatically penalize AI content. It penalizes unhelpful content generated for search rather than humans (SEO Roundtable).

Is/does AI content make the internet worse?

Yes, AI content will make the internet messier—and already has (The Verge). Winning is going to boil down to originality and leaning into stronger branding.

Will ChatGPT replace SEO jobs?

No, AI content will not take over your job as an SEO but is likely to change it (Search Engine Journal).

Will ChatGPT replace search engines like Google?

No, I don’t believe ChatGPT is going to eliminate search engines (Algolia). But I do think that the UI/UX of search engines may change (as they have over the last decade).

What is the difference between Jasper AI, ChatGPT, Copy.ai, and other generative AI companies?

Most generative AI tools are built on GPT-3 and create UI/UX wrappers around GPT-3 to produce generative content outputs. The user experience, brand, and pricing are the largest differentiators but you will notice slight variations in output between them depending on how they’ve stitched their tool up to GPT-3.

Are companies using AI content now?

Yes, companies have been and will continue to invest in AI content. Bankrate is a notable example of this with them stating that specific articles have been written by AI. AI-generated content will rank, but it won’t rank competitively. As has been true for a long time, search engine optimization and human editing is required for content to perform well.

As said before when asked about AI, content created primarily for search engine rankings, however it is done, is against our guidance. If content is helpful & created for people first, that’s not an issue.https://t.co/3rs3Yrrrk1 https://t.co/TlFEbdXGAp https://t.co/Yl9XWr5CAN pic.twitter.com/gFTE2C2wq1
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 12, 2023

Action items:

Valuable, unique content needs to have human involvement. I don’t envision a world in the foreseeable future where difficult content that is generated via AI performs well in SERPs without human intervention.

Brand voice matters more than ever. With the influx of content that generative AI models enable, brand voice and consistency are going to be a unique way to build trust with users and search engines. Think of brands that do this exceptionally well—Headspace, Apple, LEGO—and find a way to build that branding into everything you do. Even low-consideration markets (like hospitals) benefit from building strong brands.

Difficult content will get an upper edge. Content that is difficult to generate via AI—like thought leadership content, videos, and interactive content—will be easy proof to search engines that your brand is investing in unique, helpful, and experiential content. Using subject matter experts either through bylines, pull quotes, etc., is a differentiating way to show value.

Invest in new workflows. Ask anyone on my team and they’ll tell you I love a good process. Your content development workflow should include the use of AI in smart ways (creating briefs, conducting research, writing utility content) alongside the involvement of subject matter experts.

Takeaway: AI content is here to stay and here to disrupt marketing plans in 2023 and beyond. Test using AI in your workflows, while also adapting your content workflows to incorporate more subject matter experts to create valuable content, will serve as a boon.

Build for the future: Algorithm changes to expect

Google has changed a lot over the last year, and it’s not slowing down in our lifetime. Here are some algorithm and SERP changes to expect in 2023 so you can prioritize your SEO roadmap.

Links have less value than they used to.

While links still play an important role in SEO success and strategies, the weight of their impact is declining over time as Google improves its algorithms to understand content context, according to John Mueller (Search Engine Journal). I believe digital PR will always remain important, regardless of the link, but linking schemes will continue to lose their authority (rightly so).

Action item: Invest in digital PR, but care less about the dofollow links and more about the referral traffic, brand influence, and exposure.

Desktop results are now scrollable

Mobile results have been scrollable since Oct 2021 (Google), and now desktop results are scrollable (Search Engine Land). This is a big change for Google and ends the age-old SEO joke that “dead bodies are hidden on page 2.” Still, it’s not a surprising change considering consumer behavior has adjusted to continuous scrolling thanks to social media. Below is an example of what this looks like from Search Engine Land.

Action item: Keep an eye on your organic click-through rates, impressions, and clicks, and know that this could benefit keywords positioned 8-20.

As retail media rings in the money, product feeds are getting easier to implement via Google.

Google has released a new way for e-commerce brands to add shopping products to product feeds via Google Search Console (Search Engine Journal). Google has dramatically changed what the transactional SERP looks like, in part to hedge its bets against Amazon, as discussed in SEOpinions Q4 2022. This is because retail media continues to break records and be a huge growth opportunity for the search giant.

While Google is making product feed integration easier than ever, with more marketplaces throwing their hats in the ring—Walmart, Target, Instacart, etc.—product feeds are hardly getting easier to manage. Investing in product feed management is certainly a priority for any e-commerce brand.

Action item: Take advantage of Google’s product feed ease, but also invest in robust product feed management to diversify your performance.

Featured snippets are only going to become more important as Google tries to fight misinformation and AI search engines attempt to give “one result” sourced from many different sources.

Zero-click results have been on the rise for a while, and even in my own search experience, I’ve noticed more information being provided by Google in the SERP. An ex-Googler argues that Google has been doing this to make results better and more trustworthy (Search Engine Journal). I don’t know if I agree with that being the sole reason, as there is a lot of money involved in Google owning the search experience, but I do agree that misinformation has been and will continue to be something Google needs to combat—especially with the rise of AI content. I suspect that zero-click results will continue to rise as search engines attempt to answer more informational queries in the SERPs. According to a Semrush study released in Oct 2022, over half of search queries result in either a zero-click, google keyword refinement, or a click to a google-owned site (google flights, weather, YouTube, etc.). Only 45% of search queries result in organic clicks. This is consistent with other zero click studies showing less than half of traffic yield and organic click.

Action item: Invest in robust content that will own SERP featured snippets, as this can bolster brand awareness and performance regardless of a click.

Takeaway: Google’s algorithm is always chan

Google Search in 2023: Is Performance Max a must?

Andy Goodwin — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 03:16:39 -0500

The post Google Search in 2023: Is Performance Max a must? appeared first on Brainlabs.

5 Key Principles of Marketing During a Recession

Hayati Alaluf, Kamala Johal and Luciana Zegheanu — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 04:29:14 -0500

Inflation is at an all time high, energy prices are dangerously surging and a global recession is looming. There is a huge responsibility on marketers to help businesses to stimulate growth and help consumers to make the right choices given their new financial circumstances.

So we’ve identified 5 principles to help brands not only navigate this period, but thrive.

1) Capture demand that exists now

It is essential to maximise existing demand before pushing more people into the sales funnel. Bain & Company reported that ‘a downturn is when customer loyalty is either gained or lost’ and market analysis of the last five major recessions found that maintaining strong experiences for current customers trumps efforts to bring in new ones. With increased competition, brands should prioritise increasing conversion rates for in-market and existing customers.

Brands should take advantage of platform automation and predictive analytics. Those that utilise broader campaign types such as Google’s Performance Max and broad match, as well as value based bidding, have been found to drive 20% more conversions at a similar CPA. Incorporating first-party data into your strategy and evaluating the on-site experience through advanced user testing and research will help to drive repeat visits

2) Don’t go dark

Marketers are often tempted to abandon established best practices and marketing spend. Staying the course, however, offers much greater reward. Data shows that it is important to maintain marketing investment during times of financial pressure for both protecting share of voice and staying more resilient to price elasticity.

In order to bring efficiencies in a recession, brands should consider the full funnel to see both long and short-term results. Leverage the power of digital video to maximise investment, and diversify the digital channel mix to drive incremental reach. YouTube can be a very effective channel during a recession, as it offers diverse formats and targeting options that can help drive immediate action, while also helping to position the brand long-term. Influencers can be just the right approach to channel diversification and incremental reach.

3) Highlight your relevancy & value

The pandemic has accelerated consumers’ needs for honest and direct brand communications. There is a trust issue around brands utilising a blanket approach to communications and inauthentic messages. To combat this, you can emphasise the necessity of your products and services by focusing on appeals such as time savings and convenience. Brands should avoid one-size-fits-all messages, and personalise communications to resonate with a diverse audience and highlight your multi-faceted value. Influencers can offer both authenticity and diversity of message to resonate with various consumers’ needs. Automation through DCO is another route that can help with personalisation of messages using real users’ data signals.

4) Redefine the audience opportunity

Changing category norms impacts audience consumption and shopping behaviour, and it’s critical to track how customers reassess priorities, reallocate funds, switch brands, and redefine value. Of course, given the recession, value-seeker audience groups usually grow significantly. Pre-existing trends toward reduced materialism, commitment to sustainability, higher expectations of corporate social responsibility and other changes to people’s thoughts and behaviours can impact standard audience profiles during challenging economic periods.

5) Measure to drive business growth

Maintaining or increasing spend during a recession will mean more pressure to justify media investment, especially for mid and upper-funnel tactics. Brands need a 360 approach to measurement to understand the incremental impact from digital media. In fact, brands that integrate multiple sources have been found to drive +16% higher incremental revenue and are 4x more likely to exceed business goals, and increase revenue and market share. This means ensuring you have a layered approach to measurement, from econometrics to inform overall budget splits to attribution and lift studies to inform cross-channel and in-channel decisions. It is important to experiment with different measurement solutions, invest in the right tech, and embrace a test and learn approach to drive overall performance.

The post 5 Key Principles of Marketing During a Recession appeared first on Brainlabs.

SEOpinions Q4 2022 – Tackling competing updates, Google’s Multisearch & more

Travis Tallent — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 06:03:23 -0500

With all the noise in the SEO industry, it can be hard to know what to prioritize. SEOpinions is a quarterly newsletter by Brainlabs to cut through the cruft, inform you of important SEO updates, and predict upcoming changes so you can prioritize your SEO roadmap accordingly. Read the last edition here.

1. As tech giants fight for power, the offerings become the same

In a sea of sameness, tech giants seem to be reinventing the wheel to convince their existing audience to use them for everything. Companies like Google, Amazon, TikTok, and Meta are working hard to get marginal gains where they can – in new users, revenue, engagement, etc. This is especially true as these tech giants try to diversify their earnings, which is turning out to be a challenge. They all want to be everything and, yet, each of them also wants to be unique.

To compete with Amazon, Google has added organic shopping results to transactional SERPs, and has enhanced local search to be more shoppable to compete with TikTok and Instagram. TikTok has expanded its video descriptions and added shopping features to compete with Google and Amazon. Instagram has added a searchable map to compete with Google and TikTok. Meanwhile, Amazon is improving ambient computing in Alexa to make their voice search more competitive with Google. While the changes are intriguing, it begs the question if the offerings are different enough from the competition.

The speed at which these tech giants are rolling out new features is rapidly increasing. This can be dizzying to marketers as we have to define, test, and redefine new strategies.

So how can you, as a brand, still look different in this sea of sameness?

Action items:

1) Repurpose content across platforms and mediums. Repurposing content on multiple platforms is extremely beneficial, not just to feed two birds with one scone, but also to enhance authority within Google. If you launch a new YouTube video, make sure to cut it down into a TikTok series, Quora/Reddit/Twitter thread, blog post, etc. As Google makes its SERP more visual, your opportunities to own more SERP real estate will improve with posting on multiple platforms. Brands invest a lot in content production. To see ample returns, invest a bit more to make that content useful for various mediums, like graphics, videos, etc.

2) Conduct audience research. Beyond personas, audience research allows you to know who you’re really looking to connect with and where that audience spends their time today. Use a tool like Sparktoro to start on your quest for audience research. Once you are armed with this information, you can understand what types of content an audience engages with.

3) Keep up with new features. Knowing new platform features allows you to be a first-mover on these platforms, which can be an easy way to capture market share while competitors sleep. Subscribe to newsletters like Search Engine Land, or let your agency know to relay new product features and opportunities to keep you abreast of platform changes. Now, not every feature will be a winner—in fact, most won’t—but when you do get a winner and you’re one of the first to already be there, that will pay dividends.

Example: Organic shopping rolled out over 2.5 years ago. Now, with transactional queries, we’re seeing organic shopping take up more of the SERP. Optimizing the shopping feed is now paying dividends—and many late adopters are playing catch-up now.

Takeaway: Adapt your workflow to squeeze as much juice as possible out of content production, invest in audience research, and be a first-mover with new features.

2. Consumers have spoken: Google is a Discovery platform

Google is the discovery platform, while Amazon is the shopping platform. I recognize Amazon may not be relevant for your industry, but there is an “Amazon” in every industry where consumers go to “shop”—take Expedia for travel.

Understanding the entire customer journey is essential to determining the story you want your brand to tell in each phase—and knowing where to invest your time and resources.

While lines continue to blur across the product offering among tech giants, consumers may not be as fickle to change their purchase journeys. We can see that Google (including YouTube) made significant gains in Discovery and Comparison Searches over the last 1.5 years, while Amazon made gains in shopping searches.

Nevertheless, the first touchpoint is essential. This puts Google in a favorable position to own the entire consumer journey, especially as it continues to make the SERP more transactional.

Action items:

1) Lean into the first touchpoint. Use this data to convince stakeholders to also invest in Google and YouTube for discovery, not just performance. Again, that first touchpoint can make all the difference!

2) Conduct audience research. Understand your audience’s purchase journey and where each platform plays a role in their decision-making process.

3) Build a cohesive strategy. Your strategy should consider how that journey plays from start to finish, while also serving folks who may find you somewhere in the middle.

4) Build for effortless transactions. Invest in downstream channels to make the purchase journey as effortless and frictionless as possible.

Takeaway: Google is a powerhouse discovery platform, while Amazon or other industry-relevant sites are used for transacting. Understanding this consumer behavior allows you to develop a full-funnel strategy to fuel ongoing growth.

3. Are you multisearch ready?

At Search On 2022, Google rolled out a fancy new photo-first search feature called ‘multisearch’. It’s available today in the Google app using Lens. This is amazingly cool technology and I can think of using it in some unique ways, such as: searching for translation, discovering new plants, having an image be read for those with eye impairment, etc.— but consumers have been slow to adopt visual search.

For the last twenty years, we’ve seen ‘searcher stubbornness’ hold true with typing in a query and expecting a speedy response—despite the advent of image search (and even voice search), we’re still searching the same way we did decades ago.

John Mueller, Google’s Search Liaison, says:

John was then asked whether he was talking about image search or Google Lens. Turns out, it’s both:

However, while search habits are largely the same, the results we’re served are dramatically different—they’re more visual, more in-SERP, and more personalized (to location, interest, and previous searches). Consumers have responded positively to more visual results in response to their text query, hence why Google has adapted its SERP to include more images and videos. Nevertheless, the point of entry hasn’t changed.

Multisearch is Google’s big bet that searcher habits will expand to include searching and shopping by using images as the core input. Multisearch gives searchers the ability to do just that. Here is an example of what it looks like:

Here is my take: Web search isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, even in the world of voice and image search—but this technology does have use cases that I think will be adopted over time. As of now, this feature is only available on mobile devices via the Google app but I personally hope it extends to Google.com search engine (on mobile and desktop) so we can easily search in the browser, and for screen grabs as well.

Action items:

1) For e-commerce brands:

i. Invest in your shopping feed to ensure that photos are implemented and product attributes are as complete as possible.

ii. Ensure that photos are included in your product schema.

2) Optimize unique images, especially for products or services—with things like image alt-text, understandable file names, and image titles. For products that require some explanation, build custom images explaining features of the product in an attempt to show for image search and via Google Lens search.

Takeaway: Multisearch isn’t going to change the way people search overnight, but it’s clear what Google is aiming for. E-commerce sites should continue to optimize feeds to make shopping as frictionless as possible, even for visual searches. For non-ecommerce sites, if you have additional resources to invest in being a first-mover and improving Google’s ability to find visual information on your site, then you will future-proof your strategy. However, for now, I wouldn’t throw all my eggs in this basket until searcher adoption grows.

4. Tackle economic volatility with confidence as an SEO

While I can’t tell the future, I can say with confidence that the economic times have changed a lot in the last 3 years. Consumer confidence has tanked globally in that time, according to OECD data, which has had a mixed effect on inflation, consumer spending, and company spending.

While I do have an Economics degree, I’m by no means an economist. Even economists have a hard time knowing what’s going to happen next given they’re always looking at lagging indicators. Nevertheless, as a concerned human living among other concerned humans, I want to share my perspective on how to make business conversations easier in this uncertain environment as you try to do the best work of your life.

During times of economic uncertainty, knowing your numbers inside out and building relationships with key stakeholders becomes paramount. This allows you to be healthily critical of strategy shifts, and be in lock-step with other teams/departments so you can work toward the same vision. In times of uncertainty, there is little room for error – and no time for misalignment.

Action items:

1) Keep an obsessive look at your analytics and understand:

a) What channels are driving performance?

Don’t forget about ambient channels and implied attribution. The last thing you want to do is cut off all of your awareness drivers as your funnel will eventually dry up.

b) Draw “insights”, not “findings”

Don’t just share that traffic is fluctuating; uncover why—is it branded/non-branded searches? Is demand down for your category? etc.

Storytelling with insights as opposed to findings is a much easier way to get stakeholder buy-in.

2) Make sure you’re carrying as much due diligence as possible and being critical of every dollar spent. This is an easy way to quickly win over business leaders. When you ask for new tools or team members, make sure that the business case is built in full and you are confident in the numbers (beyond just “needing help”).

3) Focus on squeezing the most out of your hero products. It’s tempting to continuously expand products—I’m a big fan of new product launches myself—but hero products that already make up the majority of revenue are going to be your path of least resistance. Find ways to showcase hero products on the site and in marketing efforts, and explore paths to increasing revenue for those products—through increasing AOV through bundles, or rethinking a subscription model.

4) Use a prioritization model for all SEO work. This is a great way to align with other teams on the most impactful and important projects. The RICE model is my recent favorite as it accounts for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort–which is a good way to align SEO goals with business objectives.

5) Streamline processes and use automation where possible. Finding ways to do things faster, with less input, is always a benefit, but even more so when every dollar is being criticized more than before. Leading the way to improve workflows that open up additional team capacity to make an even larger impact is a huge win.

6) Keep a “win” list that is easily shareable with stakeholders. All of your wins—personal and team wins—should be kept on a shortlist so they’re easily shareable among execs who may ask. And even if they don’t ask, find a way to share those results in a humble and appropriate way.

Takeaway: Economic turbulence is here to stay for the foreseeable future. You can effectively navigate this turbulence by reevaluating how you present information, prioritize projects and communicate.

5. Search Engine Watch: An SEO Strategy Flywheel to Win Over Executives

I was fortunate enough to be featured in Search Engine Watch highlighting the SEO Strategy Flywheel I presented at the SearchLove SEO conference. Using this process can help you scale your efforts as a team—in-house or agency-side.

That’s all the SEOpinions for this quarter, but subscribe to Brainlabs’ blog to catch the next one!

Read previous SEOpinions editions here:

SEOpinions Q2 2022
SEOpinions Q3 2022

The post SEOpinions Q4 2022 – Tackling competing updates, Google’s Multisearch & more appeared first on Brainlabs.

Web Design Agency Atlanta – Responsive Website Design

Steven Sorrell — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 14:11:22 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/baWy6t-dQNI
via MDIMS Marketing

Web Design Agency Atlanta - Responsive Website Design

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Video Marketing Agency Atlanta

Steven Sorrell — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 10:16:16 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/NUS6SUlSzJ0
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Video Marketing Agency Atlanta

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Local SEO Atlanta

Steven Sorrell — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 11:33:44 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Cgg24IUzdNM
via MDIMS Marketing

Local SEO Atlanta

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 11:28:26 -0400
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Digital Marketing Agency Atlanta

Steven Sorrell — Tue, 25 Jul 2017 12:36:06 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Xx_E8HzrMjQ
via MDIMS Marketing

Digital Marketing Agency Atlanta

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 12:22:20 -0400
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YouTube Advertising And Video Marketing Marietta

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 06:59:18 -0400
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YouTube Advertising And Video Marketing Marietta

Steven Sorrell — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 06:57:59 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/lw1xM8uGtWw
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Choosing Keywords With Buyer Intent

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:55:44 -0400
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Choosing Keywords With Buyer Intent

Steven Sorrell — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 15:54:00 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/YT57TInpQUM
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Search Engine Optimization – SEO Agency Marietta GA

Steven Sorrell — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 13:00:31 -0400

Watch video on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/B9KRfSxp804
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Search Engine Optimization - SEO Agency Marietta GA

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 13:00:28 -0400
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Multitasking millennial binge-watchers lead digital media revolution

Steven Sorrell — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 09:20:16 -0400

New research suggests nearly a third of all U.S. consumers ‘binge-watch’ streaming video at least once a week, and millennials not only stream more video than any other demographic, they also do as many four other things at the same time.

More people “binge-watch” online video, stream digital music and “cut the cord” today than ever before, as technology continues to reshape the consumption of digital media. Perhaps unsurprisingly, millennials, or adults born between 1981 and 1996, are driving this shift. Recent research from Deloitte indicates that nearly half of the U.S. population subscribes to at least one streaming service, and both teenagers and the youngest millennials now spend more time watching streaming video online than live TV.

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Americans also watch streaming video in really big chunks; nearly a third of the consumers surveyed said they binge watch, or view three or more episodes in one sitting, at least once a week. And when consumers binge, they frequently watch as many as five episodes at a time. This number applies to most age groups, with the exception of people over 69, who Deloitte tactfully labeled “matures” and who binge watch much less frequently.

Multitasking while binge-watching

While Americans binge, they do much more than simply enjoy the programs in front of them; they multitask like crazy. According to Deloitte’s research, 92 percent of consumers multitask while watching TV, and millennials often do four additional activities as they stream.

For the full story: http://www.cio.com/article/3047619/consumer-electronics/multitasking-millenial-binge-watchers-lead-digital-media-revolution.html

And more on Digital Media: https://duncandigitalmedia.wordpress.com