Search Engine Marketing Feed 2

Unbounce: Revolutionizing your marketing with high-performing landing pages

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 19:18:46 +0300

Master landing page A/B testing for higher conversions

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 17:00:30 +0200

How a three-word test led to a 104% conversion increase

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 21:00:53 +0200

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 9: 2024 AI Marketing Playbook

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:28:18 +0300

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 8: Try AI - Part Deux

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 18:22:46 +0300

Smart Builder Tutorial: Launch a Shoppable Landing Page in Minutes Demo

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 19:14:51 +0300

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 7: AI on Trial

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:37:04 +0300

Smart Builder Tutorial: Create a High-Converting Landing Page With AI (Bloopers) #ai #marketing

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 18:11:23 +0300

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 6: Arms Race

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 20:34:21 +0300

5 Powerful Buying Motives & How to Appeal to Them to Increase Sales

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:30:27 +0300

Why do people buy? It’s a question marketers have asked themselves for decades. Centuries, even. You have a product or service. You know your product or service solves a very tangible problem. You even know who your ideal customer is. But what hidden mechanism inside that customer pushes them from the point of “I’m considering it” to “I’m committed to buy?” And how do you craft the kind of messaging that appeals to said mechanism?

That’s what we’re here to talk about today. Turns out, there are five key motives that lay dormant within all prospective buyers. And as a marketer or business owner, it’s your job to appeal so strongly to those hidden motives that your customer has no choice but to pull the trigger.

The five key buying motives we’re going to discuss today are, in order:

The need for security
The need for esteem
The need for self-actualization
The need for variety and novelty
The need for efficiency and convenience

Let’s dive in.

1. The need for security

Chance the Rapper was onto something when he wrote I Might Need Security. Every person on earth seeks security in some fashion—even the greatest risk-takers and independent souls—need for security is one of the key motives that drives consumer behavior.

The need for security is rooted in the fundamental human desire for safety and protection. It can be triggered by a number of factors, from physical threats, to financial instability, to emotional vulnerability–the list goes on.

How does that relate to consumer behavior? Well, consumers who are motivated by the need for security tend to value products and services that offer reliability, predictability, and stability. They are risk-averse, and generally speaking, are hesitant to try new things or take chances that could compromise their safety or well-being.

Well, at least the part of them that needs security is averse to these things.

That doesn’t mean you need to suddenly back all of your products with a 30-day money-back guarantee. But it does mean that, in order to appeal to the need for security, you need to focus, above all else, on building trust with your customers.

Testimonials, reviews, and case studies can be massive when it comes to making your customer feel like they are in safe hands. This is invaluable marketing collateral that you should promote on your website, product pages, email campaigns, sales calls–anywhere you get the chance. If you’re a B2B business, try offering a free trial or demo to give customers the chance to actually use your product before committing.

Testimonials, case studies, and reviews can all go a long way in appealing to your prospects’ need for security.

Everybody has been burned before. Everybody has bought that one product or service and immediately experienced buyer’s remorse; or worse, been done tangible or financial harm.

Emphasizing safety and trust, being transparent, and specifically highlighting your track record of integrity and credibility, can go a really long way in assuaging those concerns for buyers.

Free guide >> 26 Brilliant Ways to Use Psychology in Your Copywriting ✏️

2. The need for esteem

The need for esteem is a powerful buying motive that is driven by the human desire for recognition, respect, and status. People who are motivated by the need for esteem want to feel valued and respected by others, and as such, they often seek out products and services that enhance their image and social status.

Think about that one person you know who (either personally or second-hand), has the G-Wagon in their garage. Rest assured, the need for esteem was heavily involved in that purchase, and you better believe that Mercedes appeals to that need in its messaging.

Interestingly, Mercedes stresses safety and strength in a lot of its G-Wagon ads (thus appealing to the need for security), but the need for esteem is clearly present in this one.

Messaging: My Car Is My Castle.

Implication: Buying a G-Wagon is akin to owning an enormous, stone-clad home that people will find universally impressive.

Appealing to the need for esteem requires you, as a marketer, to focus on building a strong brand identity that communicates prestige, quality, and exclusivity.

Here are some time-honored strategies you can use to do just that:

Go hard on exclusivity. Those motivated by the need for esteem are much more likely to buy your product if it is a limited edition, of “premium” quality, or if it equips them with status among their peers.
Offer personalized experiences. Think about the luxury shirt company that brings a customer in, offers him a glass of whisky, and brings out a distinguished-looking gentleman to tailor his shirt. By offering personalized products or services, you can appeal to the need for esteem.
Leverage social media influencers and celebrities. We talk a lot about social proof in marketing, and there’s no better way to show your customer they’re among elite company than by partnering with a celebrity or an esteemed influencer.

Market your product as elite, and you’ll have customers that value esteem in your back pocket.

3. The need for self-actualization

You know that one friend who, no matter what job or career they’re in, can’t seem to find satisfaction? The need for self-actualization is strong with this one.

The need for self-actualization is driven by the desire to reach one’s full potential and achieve personal growth and fulfillment. People with this buying motive seek out products and services that help them develop their skills, pursue their passions, and achieve their goals.

While we don’t all have the benefit of marketing a nonprofit, you can and should stress that by purchasing your product, your customers can either better themselves, better their situation, or better the situations of those around them.

Attend UV Irvine, and you can give a passion greater purpose (thereby achieving your full potential).

Here are some examples of self-actualization in action:

Your software helps business owners save valuable time and money–time and money that they can in turn devote to cultivating their passions or running their businesses.
Your ecommerce brand donates a portion of all sales to charity, thereby making the buyer feel better about their purchase.
Your online class helps customers learn a valuable skill that they can use to earn more money or create something meaningful.

Again, you don’t need to run a nonprofit to appeal to the need for self-actualization; and if you’re running a small business, especially a local business, customers should inherently feel good about buying from you, rather than a large company. But if you can take that a step further by emphasizing the fact that customers can deeply improve their lives by buying from you, you’re going to sell a lot of products.

Get the guide >> 135 Best Words & Phrases for Marketing with Emotion

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 5: Try AI

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 22:53:37 +0300

3 Time-Saving Facebook Automated Rules to Try (+1 to Avoid!)

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 15:30:00 +0300

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital advertising, staying on top of your game requires embracing automation and utilizing the tools at your disposal. One such tool that deserves your attention is the automated rules feature within Facebook (Meta) Ads.

These rules are like your personal assistant, diligently monitoring your campaigns and making adjustments based on the predefined conditions you set.

In this article, we’ll explore:

What Facebook’s automated rules are
Types of automated rules for Facebook ads
How to apply Facebook automated rules (and 3 to try!)

Let’s dive in.

What are Facebook ads automated rules?

Facebook automated rules empower advertisers to automate routine campaign management tasks, saving time and enabling a proactive approach to optimization.

Advertisers can elect to use automated rules for a variety of reasons, whether it be for tighter budget control, ad optimization, or ensuring audience saturation is reduced. Implementing automated rules can have a profound impact on the efficiency of your Meta Ads account and its ability to deliver quality results for your business.

Types of Facebook automated rules

As you get started with automated rules, you are presented with these options:

Custom rules
Reduce auction overlap
Optimize ad creative
Reduce audience fragmentation

Let’s go over these quickly so we know what we’re working with:

Custom rules

This allows you to create your own rules, selecting the parameters, the triggers, and the action that you wish to be taken. Custom rules are really what comes to mind when Facebook automated rules get brought into the conversation. The reason is, this is where a skilled account manager can make tweaks that make managing accounts (either for clients or your own) much easier.

For example, you can create cost-per-action (CPA) caps for conversions and lead generation campaigns by specifying the maximum cost per result you’re willing to obtain.

This is a simple example, but it is a way to automatically optimize ad sets according to your own standards. There are many other examples of these that I will dive into later.

Client Retention for Agencies: 10 Tips for Keeping Clients for the Long Haul

Thu, 27 Jul 2023 15:00:00 +0300

If you want to run a successful digital marketing agency, your #1 job is to foster a group of happy, long-term clients. Unfortunately, this can be quite a daunting feat.

With some of your digital marketing services, like paid search, it’s usually easy to demonstrate your value early on. Whether it be all the heavy lifting that goes into an account buildout or hefty clean-up for an account takeover, it’s often clear to clients that they’re getting their money’s worth during the first couple of months.

But then you hit the dreaded plateau that account managers are far too familiar with. Once an account is in good, working condition, it’s nearly impossible to improve at the same rate you were at the outset.

Of course, PPCers know that this is nothing to be alarmed about, but clients rarely share this sentiment. So, how on earth do marketing agencies retain clients for the long haul? The trick is to work on client retention long before you run the first ad and keep at it throughout the relationship.

These 10 tips will help you keep clients around longer so you’re not always refilling the sales pipeline just to stay even.

What is client retention and how do I measure it?

Client retention can refer to the actions you take to keep a client on good terms and working with your agency.

Customer retention is also a business metric that measures the rate at which your agency keeps customers over a given time.

To calculate customer retention, divide the total number of customers at the end of the selected period by the total number of customers at the beginning of the selected period. Don’t forget to account for new customers acquired during the period. We don’t want to count them.

Client retention rate is a great metric to review every month or every quarter. Some customer churn happens, but if there’s a decrease in your retention rate, there’s a problem to address.

Why is client retention so important for your agency?

If you think of revenue like water, churn is what leaks out of the bucket’s holes and retention is your efforts to stifle the leaks. If your retention efforts fail, you’ll need to pour new sales in the top just to keep from emptying the bucket. And agency growth will be nearly impossible.

Beyond the soggy sales analogy, poor client retention also hurts your reputation. Unhappy clients often go out into the wild to write poor reviews or spread their unhappiness by word of mouth. Either way, any one lost customer can cost you many new ones in the future.

And finally, a lack of customer retention can cause your costs to skyrocket. Why? Because closing and onboarding a new client is much more labor intensive than keeping an existing one. So your bottom-line revenue will decrease even if you close enough new deals to maintain your top line.

10 tips to boost client retention

Client retention is a full-cycle activity. It starts before you sign a client and continues throughout their engagement with your agency.

Tip #1: Qualify new clients thoroughly

Not every deal is a deal worth closing, especially if it turns into a problematic client that churns quickly. So, the first tip to improve client retention is to qualify prospects and filter out the ones with a low chance of success.

To qualify prospects, you’ll create a set of characteristics that describe your agency’s ideal client. A few characteristics to consider include:

Industry
Company size
Previous experience with paid ads
Advertising budget

Add to this list by reviewing clients that weren’t successful in the past and looking for common attributes they shared. Maybe you learn that a specific type of B2C client has a high failure rate and should be referred to other agencies in the future.

Tip #2: Set proper expectations

If you manage PPC marketing for any length of time, you know that exponential growth isn’t sustainable forever. Make sure your next client understands the natural ebb and flow of results from paid advertising.

One way to do this is to create an anonymized graph showing typical results over time from your average client. Highlight points along the maturity graph that show the expected bump in initial growth followed by the more stable long-term growth.

Beyond results, you can also set expectations for things like communication frequency, ad content, and ad cost changes. Whatever you feel a previous client has been surprised by could become a point to explain to a new client.

Tip #3: Provide an excellent onboarding experience

During client onboarding, you set the stage for the rest of the client-agency relationship. If you create the right atmosphere early on, you’ll have a happy client that’s excited to work with you. You’ll also be able to weather future challenges if something goes wrong.

A key function of successful onboarding is the kickoff call. Here are a few actions to take during that call:

Introduce the client to the person(s) that will manage their ads and communication
Confirm the expectations set during the sales process
Gather or confirm access to accounts, contact details, and communication channels
Review the process or workflow

An onboarding questionnaire is also a good option. That’ll give you something to refer to as you start doing the work.

Tip #4: Understand your clients’ business goals

It’s impossible to deliver great results for your clients without having a firm grasp of your client’s business and company goals. That’ll not only help you get better results, but it’ll help you answer questions in a more relevant way.

Plus, when you know your client’s company better, you’ll be able to position digital marketing results in the context of their greater business objectives. Your work will carry more weight with their team, and you’ll be better able to retain the client.

You can learn formally, like through a questionnaire, or informally during regular chats. Ask about their competitors, growth, history, and leadership. Then follow them on social media to see what topics consume their focus.

Tip #5: Get to know your clients personally

People who manage digital marketing accounts for a living are chameleons of sorts. We’re mathematicians when it comes to bidding strategy, creative writers when it comes to ad copy, and we even channel our inner developer when it comes to setting up tracking codes.

Yet, how often do we think of ourselves as customer service agents? Far too many practitioners overlook this component of the role, which is a hazardous mistake.

Taking the time to get to really know your clients can go a long way. Rather than dreading check-in calls, they’ll look forward to chatting with you and giving you updates on their business. Even more importantly, these personal connections can help to ensure clients stick with you if account performance goes south. They’ll be more likely to be more patient as you work to turn things around and more forgiving about account snafus.

Start small. Get to know your clients’ birthdays and hobbies. Favorite sports teams and foods are other simple topics to discuss. Add that information to their file and review it before calls.

Use the right words and phrases to connect with your clients. Get the guide >> 135 Words & Phrases for Marketing with Emotion

Instagram Threads: What You Need to Know (+5 Fast Tips to Get Started)

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 23:34:28 +0300

New social media platforms are launching all the time, but how do you know which ones are worth investing your time and money into?

Threads is Meta’s newest social media platform that launched in July 2023. While there has been plenty of buzz about this emerging channel already, you may be wondering if Instagram Threads is worth it for your business. We’ve got you covered with this complete walk-through of the newest social media kid on the block.

What is Threads?
Why is Instagram Threads important?
Threads vs. Twitter
Is Threads right for your business?
How to create an Instagram Threads account
Instagram Threads tips

What is Threads?

Threads is a text-based social media app Meta launched in July 2023. Within Threads, users can share posts up to 500 characters long. Posts can also include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. Users can respond to posts—creating a “thread.”

Threads is currently only available to Instagram users with access to iOS or Android in 100 countries. However, that may change as Threads could expand to desktop web browsers and more.

To help understand how Threads works, many people have compared it to Twitter, which is set up similarly.

Source

Meta even recently released a “following feed,” similar to the one on Twitter (now named X) so users can see posts only from those they follow.

Why is Instagram Threads important?

With so many staple social media platforms dominating the industry already, it’s rare to see a new app emerge in popularity. Let’s discuss the context as to why Meta, the parent brand of Instagram and Facebook, created Threads.

Threads is different from Instagram in that it’s primarily for text-based posts. However, since each Thread reply is added to the original thread, it allows users to have a conversation more fluidly than Instagram’s standard comment section.

Source

Threads vs. Twitter

Threads wasn’t created solely to build out Instagram’s offerings–it’s been speculated that Threads is meant to directly compete with Twitter. For example, Instagram Threads has openly pointed out that it’s meant to be used more for entertainment purposes, rather than news or politics like on Twitter.

Twitter has gone through a tumultuous rebranding after Elon Musk acquired the platform. This opened the door for the social space to become more competitive (TikTok also recently announced their own text-based features). In fact, Twitter’s usage has declined by 25% since Musk has taken over, and even Twitter’s most active users are tweeting less overall. On top of this, traffic to Twitter has decreased by almost 6% from January 2023 to June 2023. Additionally, in the US alone, Twitter has lost roughly five million users, going from 88 million down to 83 million. Although, Twitter still has about 200 million active users globally.

Meanwhile, Threads reached 100 million users within a few days after its launch—which is one of the fastest growth rates for a social media app ever recorded. However, that number declined just as rapidly as the app has seen a 70% decline in daily active users since then. This indicates that Instagram users are likely trying out Threads, then deciding to opt out and delete their accounts shortly after.

In short, it’s too soon to tell the longevity of Threads in comparison with Twitter—especially with Twitter continuing to throw changes at us by the minute, like the recent rebrand of Twitter into “X.” However, keeping in mind the key similarities and differences between the two can help your business stay ahead of the game.

Should your business be on Instagram Threads?

So, if the Instagram Threads user base continues to ebb and flow, should your business even be on there?

The short answer is yes. You want to maximize your business’s online presence and ensure your brand is easily found online. Keeping up with your business’s listings, social media profiles, and general web presence increases your brand reputation. Also, there are no costs associated with joining Instagram Threads that would eat at your marketing budget.

Think of it this way: if a potential customer is looking for your business on Threads, it’s better to be on there than not. Plus, an Instagram Threads account is quick and easy to create (more on this next).

However, like with anything in marketing, there is no right or wrong answer when it comes to what’s best for your business. You don’t want to take on another platform if you don’t have the bandwidth to properly manage your account. For example, if you don’t have a strong business Instagram account, it’d likely be best to work on your Instagram first before trying out Threads.

Smart Builder Tutorial: The Easiest Way to Create a High-Converting Landing Page With AI

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 21:08:39 +0300

5 Adaptable Buyer Persona Examples to Inspire Your Own

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:30:56 +0300

As a small business owner, your ability to understand and connect with your target audience is paramount. In fact, your success hinges on it!

By identifying your ideal customers’ needs, motivations, and pain points, you can gain insight into them on a deeper level and develop compelling messaging that resonates and drives results. This is where buyer personas come in.

In this article, we’re sharing five helpful buyer persona examples along with everything you need to know to build your own, including:

The definition of a buyer persona
Why creating these detailed profiles is important for your business
Steps to create buyer personas

Let’s dive in!

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers that helps you and your team better visualize and communicate to your target audience.

Imagine you are the owner of a small plant container business. Perhaps there are three typical types of customers you currently have or target in your marketing:

Individuals looking for seasonal plant styling for their homes.
Local businesses that need plants for their shops and offices.
People who gift plants for special occasions.

Now, for each of these, imagine you combine all the most common qualities into one fictional person representing that ideal customer. This generalized description is what we call a buyer persona. While the persona is fictional, the detailed profile is based on everything we know about our current and future customers.

Based on data and research, a buyer persona typically includes but is not limited to the following elements:

Demographic information: Age, location, education, occupation, income, etc.
Psychographic information: Values, interests, lifestyle, etc.
Behavioral information: Goals, pain points, shopping habits, decision-making process, etc.

Why create buyer personas for your business?

Now that we’ve covered what buyer personas are, let’s look at why developing them is a crucial step for your business.

Buyer personas are essential for several reasons:

More effective marketing

As a small business, you are likely always looking to attract new customers. Buyer personas will provide the information needed to craft persuasive campaigns more likely to convert your prospects into long-term customers.

Enhanced sales performance

Buyer personas are an excellent sales enablement tool that will allow your sales representatives to visualize who your customers are and better understand them. These profiles will also provide them with data-driven background information to inform their messaging and discussions.

The 7 Pillars of Building a Future-Proof PPC Account Structure

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 20:25:57 +0300

Navigating the ever-changing landscape of pay-per-click (PPC) account structure management can be overwhelming. However, you want to iron out your account structure now to avoid future headaches that could leave you feeling like this:

Given the constant shifts in the rules of audience engagement coupled with economic fluctuations, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of how to set up and manage your accounts with agility.

There are seven fundamental pillars to consider when future-proofing your PPC account structure. Let’s delve into each!

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 4: AI for Data Geeks

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 02:05:33 +0300

49 Back-to-School Messages for A+ Marketing (With Tips & Examples)

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 18:53:24 +0300

Back to school might be a bittersweet time for students, families, and teachers. Business owners, however, should be jumping for joy. Back to school provides tons of opportunities to promote your business and get out of any summertime lulls. In fact, Americans are estimated to spend $37 billion during the back-to-school season.

That said, you need an “A+” back-to-school message to maximize your marketing success during this busy time of year. A strong back-to-school message can be applied to any of your seasonal campaigns, social media posts promotions, email copy, ad copy, website pages, and more.

Consider class officially in session as I teach you how to make a message that pops with this complete list of back-to-school message ideas.

Back to school messaging tips
Back-to-school messages any business can use
Back-to-school messages for email
Back-to-school messages for social media
Back-to-school messages for sales
Back-to-school messages for services
Back-to-school messages for students
Back-to-school messages for teachers
Even more back-to-school quotes and messages
Back-to-school slogans

Back-to-school messaging tips

Regardless of how you might decide to apply the following back-to-school message and slogan ideas, here are a few quick back-to-school marketing tips to keep in mind:

Keep your back-to-school messages short and sweet. Avoid overthinking how you’ll connect with your audience during this time of year. Your customers are likely busy getting back into a routine, so a clear and concise message is all you need to get your points across.
Include a call to action whenever possible. Consider the end goals for your marketing messages. If you’re trying to convert more customers, be sure to point that out with powerful call-to-action phrases.
Always connect back to your value propositions. Whether you’re solving a customer pain point, providing any sale prices or savings, or anything in between, you’ll want your messaging to convey your business’s unique value.

For our next lesson, let’s look at some back-to-school message ideas and examples!

Google Ads for Lead Generation: 10 Practical Strategies That Really Work

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:30:49 +0300

Lead generation is an essential aspect of marketing for all businesses. It’s the process of attracting and converting potential customers into leads that express interest in your products or services. And Google Ads is an indispensable platform for businesses to generate leads and improve their marketing strategy.

Stat source

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to many businesses, including a music school I worked with that had to shut its doors to in-person teaching. With students no longer coming to their facility, their phones stopped ringing, and they desperately needed to find a solution. They decided to pivot to offering virtual lessons and turned to Google Ads to get the word out. This decision proved to be a game-changer, as their phones started ringing again, and their business began to thrive.

In this article, I’ll be sharing:

The top strategies for creating effective lead generation ads in Google Ads, using the music school’s experience as an example.
How these strategies can work for businesses that need leads in any industry.
Step-by-step directions for how to implement conversion tracking and remarketing with Google Ads to make the most of these strategies.

By the end, you’ll have the tools needed to maximize your marketing efforts and achieve your goals with Google Ads.

How to use Google Ads for lead generation

These practical strategies will help you use Google Ads to generate more leads for your business.

1. Know your target audience

For any ad to be successful in generating leads, it needs to be targeted to the right audience.

Before creating ads, the music school conducted research using Google Search Console to collect data on demographics, interests, and behaviors, creating a detailed buyer persona of potential students.

By analyzing search queries, audience demographics, and website performance, they gained valuable insights into their audience’s preferences and behaviors.

Armed with this information, the school was able to create more targeted ads and content that resonated with their audience and resulted in improved conversion rates.

To learn about your target audience from Google Search Console, you can follow these steps:

Go to Search Console and select the website you want to analyze.
Click on the “Performance” tab to see the search performance of your website.
Look at the data under the “Queries” tab. This section will show you the queries (keywords) that people are using to find your website.
Analyze the impressions and clicks data for each query. Impressions refer to the number of times a search result from your website appeared in the search engine results page (SERP) for that query, while clicks refer to the number of times a user clicked on that search result.
Look for patterns in the queries that are bringing traffic to your website. Are there any particular queries that are driving a significant amount of traffic? What types of queries are they (e.g. informational, navigational, transactional)?
Look at the demographic data of the users who are performing these queries. Are they mostly from a certain geographic location or age range?

Use this information to tailor your ad copy to better target your audience. For example, if you notice that a certain demographic is more likely to search for certain keywords, you can include copy that is specifically tailored to that demographic.

By regularly analyzing your Search Console data, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience and make data-driven decisions to improve your search ads performance.

Are your Google Ads making the grade? Find out with our Free Google Ads Performance Grader ✅

2. Utilize the right keywords

Keywords are the foundation of your Google Ads campaigns. The music school conducted thorough keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner to identify high-intent keywords that their target audience was likely to use. They included a mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords to cover various search queries and improve their ad visibility.

When selecting your keywords to generate leads with Google Ads, make sure to consider keyword intent. Depending on how you’re collecting leads, you’ll need to align keyword intent with the keywords you’re choosing.

For example, if you collect leads through gated white papers or resources, you could target informational keywords. But if you collect leads through a quote request, you’d want to target keywords with transactional or commercial intent.

Use our Free Keyword Tool to discover new keywords you can use in your Google Ads for lead generation.

3. Craft compelling ad copy

The music school’s ad copy was the first point of contact between their business and potential leads. They wrote clear, concise, and persuasive ad copy that highlighted the unique selling points of their virtual music lessons. They included a compelling call-to-action (CTA) to encourage users to take the desired action, such as contacting them, signing up, or making a purchase.

These are all important aspects of Google Ads that drive leads.

Ranked: The 14 Most Important Copywriting Skills Every Marketer Needs

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 21:50:08 +0300

Great copy is all around us. Not just in Nike ads or on billboards, but in emails, social media posts, and those delightful little sandwich boards on city sidewalks.

Source

All those words do some heavy lifting for businesses. They generate awareness, traffic, leads, and conversions. That’s true of sidewalk sandwich boards and seven-figure ad campaigns.

So how do you write copy that converts?

After a decade of professional writing, I’ve found some copywriting skills to be fundamental for choosing words that compel action–whether copywriting is a central focus of your job or just something you dabble in. I’ve listed them here and ranked them, starting with the most important.

Master these skills and your copy will do big things for your business. And if you’re like me, you’ll enjoy the heck out of writing it.

1. Curiosity

The best copywriters I’ve ever read aren’t always the best “writers.” They’re people who genuinely want to understand how something works and are excited to explain it to others.

Famed adman David Ogilvy was the epitome of curiosity. He obsessed over understanding everything about the products he marketed and the people who bought them.

Curiosity is the fuel that energizes every other skill on this list. If you’re curious, you’ll naturally be more empathic. You’ll want to learn marketing strategy. And you’ll be a crazy good interviewer.

You can even leverage your audience’s curiosity to generate more awareness.

That’s why I consider curiosity to be the most important copywriting skill.

2. Empathy

Empathy is an important copywriting skill because it gives us the power to imagine what a customer is battling with so we can explain our solution in a more relevant way.

With a little empathy, you won’t write that a family SUV has a state-of-the-art entertainment system. Instead, you’ll say it has “enough distraction that no one will ask ‘are we there yet?’”

Molly Maids gets it. They use power words like “chaos” and “stress” to empathize with busy parents trying to hold it together during school break.

Empathy is a neurological response, so most of us have it naturally. But you can sharpen the skill with practice.

The Only Website Maintenance Checklist You’ll Ever Need

Tue, 18 Jul 2023 15:30:08 +0300

You might have the greatest product or service in the world. You might even have the slickest, most compelling branding in the world. Yet, all of that can fall flat because of one avoidable, albeit massive mistake…

Your website maintenance isn’t up to par.

It’s easy to neglect website maintenance, especially if your company lacks a dedicated web team. Still, website maintenance plays a critical part in any company’s success. Fortunately, website maintenance is manageable for companies big and small–especially with a handy checklist!

To equip you with everything you need to know to be successful, we’re covering:

What website maintenance is
Why website maintenance is important
How to do website maintenance (and how often)
Website maintenance cost

Let’s get started.

What is website maintenance?

Simply put: website maintenance is the practice of ensuring your site is safe and secure, running well, and delivering a great user experience.

More specifically, website maintenance is an umbrella term for several activities that play a part in the overall functionality and success of your website.

Some of these activities include:

Security updates: Regularly checking for plugin and content management system (CMS) updates to ensure your site is free of security risks.
Traffic metrics: Checking your site’s traffic to look for major dips and sudden increases in bounce rate that indicate problems with technical aspects of your site or the content itself.
Content review: Reviewing your site for missing pieces of content, broken HTML code or images, and pages that take particularly long to load.
Design audits: Checking your site’s design to see if it’s causing slow load times, difficult to navigate on any devices, and accessible for all your customers.
Technical audits: Monitoring overall site uptime, checking for broken links, ensuring all pages are crawlable, and more to keep technical issues from holding you back.

There are countless additional activities that fall under website maintenance, many of which depend on the type of site, the platform it’s running on, your industry, and more. For example, ecommerce companies tend to have more in-depth website maintenance measures, as they have to worry about cart functionality, accepting payments, etc.

Why website maintenance is important

Website maintenance carries with it a number of benefits, beyond the obvious perk of, “your site simply works.”

67% of people have increased online shopping habits since the coronavirus pandemic.
Conversion rates are 5x higher for B2B sites loading in 1 second, vs. sites loading in 10 seconds.
The average load time for a site on page one of Google is 1.65 seconds.
45% of shoppers are less likely to purchase when pages load slowly.

Remember the aforementioned great product, service, brand, and so on? When your website maintenance is in great shape, you’re not only free to focus on delivering the greatest product and experience—your products and brand are able to truly shine.

How to do website maintenance

Websites have many, many moving parts. So, it should come as little surprise that website maintenance entails many, many processes. Fortunately, you don’t have to tackle website maintenance all at once, allowing you to break it up.

Take a deep breath and follow this website maintenance checklist to give your customers, brand, and products the platform they deserve.

Backup your site

First and foremost, it’s important your site is simply alive. (Alive and well can wait.) What begins as a simple plugin update or article edit can turn into blank pages and broken websites in no time. Regular site backups prevent these hiccups from turning into countless hours of lost work.

Your host or CMS should have automatic site backups in place. Make sure these are active, preventing any kind of sitewide catastrophe. It’s also a good idea to download copies of your site to a secure hard drive.

⏰ How often: Monthly + after major site changes

Check site speed

How quickly your site loads plays a huge role in your overall online success. (Remember: conversion rates are higher for quick-loading sites.)

Use a tool, like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, to check your site’s load times. If things are slow, it’s time to perform a technical audit and determine what’s holding you back. Also, remember to check your page speed on a number of devices and browsers.

⏰ How often: Monthly + After major site changes

Perform security updates

Your website’s performance means little if your site’s not secure. When your security falls behind, you put your customers and your brand at risk.

Make it a monthly habit to check that your site platform/CMS is up to date. Also, don’t neglect to check for plugin updates, as outdated plugins can have security vulnerabilities that put your entire site at risk.

After running any updates, make sure your site still functions on all devices and browsers, and that your load times weren’t impacted.

⏰ How often: Monthly

Delete unused plugins

Speaking of plugins, delete the plugins you’re no longer using. By clearing out unused plugins you’re not only reducing your potential security issues via outdated plugins, you’re also making your CMS cleaner and easier to navigate on the backend.

⏰ How often: Monthly

Check content analytics

Use an analytics tool and regularly review the performance of your content to check:

Overall site traffic
Top-performing pages
Lowest-performing pages
Pages with the highest bounce rate
Month-over-month trends

If you notice a general decline in traffic, it’s possible a technical issue is impairing your SEO. Similarly, if you notice a page or article is suddenly performing far worse than it used to, look for broken elements on the page itself.

You can use tools like Google Analytics 4 or Google Search Console to dig deeper into content performance and URL performance metrics.

While content analytics plays a role in website maintenance, it’s also something your marketing specialists can check. Regardless of who checks analytics, encourage cross-departmental communication so both your content/marketing team and tech team know what’s going on.

⏰ How often: Monthly

Hunt down broken links

Broken links lead to a negative user experience, which in turn impacts your bounce rate, SEO, and brand reputation. As part of your website maintenance routine, use a tool to check for broken links.

For example, Ahrefs offers a free broken link tool that will quickly show which links lead to 404 pages on your site.

Replace the broken link with updated content, or remove the link entirely if a replacement destination page doesn’t exist.

⏰ How often: Monthly

Review browser compatibility

It’s possible your site flies on Chrome but crashes and burns on Edge or Safari. The same goes for mobile and tablet devices, too.

Run the aforementioned speed tests on your site while using major browsers and mobile devices (including tablets). Make sure your speed is consistent for each experience, and note the overall user experience. Is site navigation as easy on a phone as it is on a desktop? Are all elements displaying correctly?

⏰ How often: Quarterly + After major site changes

Test site forms

Contact forms and lead forms only help if they’re working. From newly-launched landing pages for gated assets to ancient contact forms, all site forms need your attention from time to time.

Use a test email and complete any forms on your site. Make sure the response not only goes through to your company inbox, but that the form also captures all the correct information.

You would want to make sure your test pulled in all the relevant fields from your form.

Run the same test on a variety of browsers and devices as well, as some forms may not display properly on a mobile device or tablet right out of the gate.

⏰ How often: Quarterly/Whenever you launch a new landing page

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 3: Agencies of Change

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 16:11:00 +0300

Social media marketing: four keys to boost lead generation and sales

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 18:09:53 +0300

30-second summary:

Social media has increasingly become a key avenue for the fate of brands’ online performance
There is a relation between brand perception, social listening, customer service, and the eventual consumer spending power
Here’s how social media marketers can make the most of social channels to drive business value

In order to gain sales and increase leads, social media marketing must be fully integrated within a company’s overall marketing strategy – including search.

For companies looking to increase lead generation for sales conversion and build upon long-term customer relationships, social media involvement tends to be more cost-effective and successful, in the long run, than traditional short-term-oriented marketing methods.

Social media’s return on investment is best measured over time in the form of customer loyalty, customer relationship management, and an improved corporate perception in the general marketplace.

1. Regularly updated content boosts search engine rankings

Research proves that by providing relevant and constantly updated content, companies can gain new customers, achieve a higher search engine ranking, and increase online visibility. Online marketing methods that center around search-optimized content can also improve a company’s SERP ranking.

Now that search engines like Google is indexing social media content, keyword-rich posts, and relevant comments within social networks. This has become a viable marketing tactic.

According to Google’s Gary Illyes in one of his discussions with SEO Eric Enge on social media mentions and rankings and how Google might use online mentions of a brand on social media and networks:

“The context in which you engage online, and how people talk about you online, can actually impact what you rank for.”

Furthermore, related research conducted by CognitiveSEO discovered an equivocal link between social shares and SEO. Analyzing 23 million social media shares on selected platforms showed that – likes, comments, and shares that posts receive are vital signals for Google and other search engines to rank websites.

2. A positive social media brand presence strengthens online reputation

Engaging potential consumers – in social networks – can bolster a company’s reputation and strengthen its ability to improve customer service. A business that engages its customers online and participates in the dialogue is better positioned to respond to customer inquiries.

According to Convince & Convert, 32 percent of customers expect a response to be within 30 minutes and 42 percent of customers expect it to be within the hour. Moreover, about 57 percent of customers expect response time during weekends and nights to match response times during normal working hours.

Having a fast response time not only leads to a happy customer but can also lead to additional revenue for companies. A study conducted by Twitter found that when an airline responded in six minutes or less to a tweet, the customer was willing to pay about $20 more for that airline in the future. When an airline, however, took more than an hour to give feedback, that customer was willing to pay only an additional $2.33 for that airline in the future. This really makes you want to put some pep in your step when it comes to responding to customers, doesn’t it?

Also, a business with a strong social media presence is better positioned to respond to customer complaints. Negative comments can act as an early warning system, empowering a brand to:

quickly adapt its message,
reinforce its product’s value,
positively nurture relationships with customers, influencers, and brand advocates.

Whether negative word of mouth buzz comes in the form of a disparaging online video, as a comment in a user forum, or from an adverse online review of a product, companies with an active and solid social media presence can help repair their reputation by responding in real-time.

3. Measure social media effectiveness

Companies concerned with analytics and other metrics for measuring social media effectiveness can employ several simple methods for gauging the success of social marketing campaigns. Some ways to measure and track social media marketing include:

A. Increase in followers

An increase in the number of followers on social media means an increase in a brand’s popularity. It is worth understanding the audience engagement and crafting social media campaigns that can increase your social media following.

B. Reactions on published posts

Evaluating the reactions of audiences on social media posts helps determine what is interesting the most. This helps focus more on what interests users the most.

This applies to all social media channels, be it Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. The inbuilt analytics provided by these channels helps evaluate the way audiences are reacting to published posts.

Similarly, online marketers need to check when someone tags them in a post or, mentions them. The more tags they get, the more users they reach. This helps instantly increase business visibility as more people engage online with the brand’s content.

C. Social media reach

Social media campaigns’ reach helps determine the total number of people that are reached both within and outside of targeted audiences. The more reactions and engagements to published posts, the better is the online visibility.

Having a good reach to business posts on social media is a clear indication that the marketing campaigns are on point.

D. Referral traffic

Another important metric that businesses consider when measuring social media effectiveness is gauging referral traffic. This gives a clear picture of how the marketing campaign has performed on social media. Every online marketer should evaluate performance by measuring the difference between the actual target achieved and the target set.

This will help gauge the efforts needed to be put in. If a particular channel is found to be unable to get sufficient traffic, then it should be reconsidered. A social media channel that is not resonating with the nature of the business is probably a waste of time and effort.

E. Click-through rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is another important factor when measuring the effectiveness of social media, as it is closely associated with direct conversion.

Generally, a higher CTR means that a marketing campaign is effective. Because more clicks mean more visitors that are drawn to the website. CTR is considered as one of the KPIs by a majority of the businesses and is generally used in PPC ad campaigns, a link on a landing page, etc.

4. ROI based on soft metrics

While hard metrics of conversions (sales, cost-per-sales, and profit) are the way many businesses tend to rate social media ROI, businesses should also consider some softer metrics as a means to measure their campaign effectiveness.

In fact, according to research by the Association of National Advertisers,

“80 percent of US client-side marketers measured the effectiveness of their social content, with social media metrics such as “likes” the most common.”

Measuring campaign effectiveness considering softer metrics can be done by asking the following questions:

Are brand-relevant tweets being re-tweeted on Twitter?
Are there more fans and brand-friends on Facebook?
Is there an uptick in online conversations about a new product launch or web design improvements?
Are site visitors and customers sharing opinions and discussing what they want and need?

Questions such as these may not add up, in the short run, to actual sales and quantifiable profit but ROI based on soft metrics could certainly provide insight on social media marketing’s worthiness. This has the potential, in the long run, to convert into profit and hard ROI.

Make definite social media marketing goals

To take full advantage of social media channels for effective marketing and improved profits, marketing teams need to execute strategic marketing plans. Businesses must apply measurable metrics, take a long-view approach, and define clearly their social media marketing goals.

Only through this, can social media marketing prove itself worthwhile for proving business value.

Jacob M. is a copywriter, marketing blogger, inbound marketing consultant, and founder of Write Minds. He can be found on Twitter @jmcmillen89.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The post Social media marketing: four keys to boost lead generation and sales appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

The Future SEO: Boardroom edition

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 15:44:40 +0300

30-second summary:

SEO’s dynamic nature and Google’s mysterious algorithm specifics keep the industry on its toes
Is it possible to simply spot the inefficiencies of SEO in its infancy and foresee trends?
With over 20 years of leadership roles, SEO pioneer Kris Jones taps into his experience to help SEOs derive more strategic value

Pretty much anytime we speak about something’s future, we’re doing something called extrapolating. By definition, extrapolating involves extending existing data or trends to assume the same procedure will continue in the future. It’s a form of the scientific method that we probably use every day in our own lives, quite reasonably, too: the summers will be hot, the downtown traffic will be bad at 9 AM, and the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

But how can we look into the future of something as complex and ever-changing as SEO? As with all cases of hindsight, we are clear on how SEO began and how it has transformed over time.

We see the inefficiencies of SEO in its infancy and how advancing search engines have altered the playing field.

The catch is this: how can we surmise about the future of SEO without having access to all the mysterious algorithm specifics that Google itself holds?

The answer is simple: we have to extrapolate.

I’ve seen SEO from the boardroom perspective for more than 20 years. I’ve seen the old days of keyword stuffing to the semi-modernization of the late 2000s to the absolute beast that Google has become now, in the 2020s.

Given that, where do I think SEO is going in the not-too-distant future? Here are some thoughts on that.

User intent will remain crucial

One aspect of SEO that is essential right now and will become only more vital as time goes on is user intent in search queries.

It’s an antiquated view to think that Google still cares much about exact-match keywords. Maybe 15 to 20 years ago, getting keywords exactly right in your content was a huge deal. Google matched queries to corresponding word strings in content and then served the best of that content to a user.

Today, trying to optimize for exact-match keywords is a futile effort, as Google now understands the intent behind every query, and it’s only going to get better at it as time goes by.

If you recall Google’s BERT update from late 2019, you’ll remember that this was the change that allowed Google to comprehend the context of each search query, or the meaning behind the words themselves. And the latest Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update adds further depth and dimensions to understanding search intent.

No longer does Google look only at the words “family attractions.” It knows that that query references children’s activities, fun activities, and events that are generally lighthearted and innocent.

And all of that came from two words. How did Google do it? Its consistent algorithm updates have allowed it to think like a human.

All of this is to say that user intent has to be part of your keyword and content strategy going forward when you’re doing SEO.

Produce more evergreen content

Sometimes, over the years, I have heard people mention that devising an effective content marketing strategy is difficult because as soon as a topic’s period of relevance is over, that content will never rank again. Use your data to analyze content performance and strike the right balance between content and formats.

If you don’t know any more about this subject, you might be tempted to believe that. Maybe, at one time, you got a content piece entitled “Top Furniture Brands of 2019” to rank for the featured snippet. That makes sense. The post was probably a long listicle that described the best brands and linked out to the manufacturers’ websites or retail stores that carried those brands.

But maybe, as spring of 2019 transitioned into fall and winter, that post fell way down the rankings and now can’t be found anywhere anymore.

The reason is obvious: you haven’t made the content evergreen. The best furniture brands of 2019 may not be the best brands of 2020 or 2021 or 2022. So, what do you do? You put the work in to make the blog post evergreen by updating it. Go through and change out the best brands, change the content, change the post’s title, and then republish the post.

You can also just plain focus on subjects that will almost never need any updating at all:

“Top 20 Christmas cookies to bake this year”
“How to train a dog”
“10 Steps for Hanging Heavy Objects on the Wall”

Whether it’s 2021 or 2050 or 2100, there are going to be people who have never hung a thing on a wall before and will need some help online.

Whatever your market niche is, do some topic research in Answer the Public, Semrush, or BuzzSumo to find relevant subjects for you. You can also mine the SERPs to see what kinds of content are ranking already for your desired topics. Just remember to mix in plenty of evergreen content with your more timely content posts. Google will reward you for it.

Mobile will remain first

This final point is about mobile-first indexing, but you likely already know about that. It’s certainly no secret that Google is going to rank your website’s mobile version when it crawls your pages. About 60 percent of all searches are now performed on mobile devices, and so Google now prioritizes a site’s mobile web pages over the desktop versions.

As I said, you knew all that.

What some people still may not know is that Google’s new Core Web Vitals should be a major part of your mobile page optimizations.

The Core Web Vitals are primarily a web-dev task. Overall, the three vitals work together to give users positive, seamless experiences when they access a web page.

The vitals are Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and First Input Delay (FID).

CLS refers to the amount of moving around that a web page’s content does before it actually loads fully.

If you have a high CLS, that’s bad. It means some elements are appearing before the page loads all the way, which increases the chances of a user clicking on something that then moves elsewhere. That, in turn, means the user will probably click on something unintended.

LCP, meanwhile, is the time it takes for a page’s content to appear. It specifically refers to the amount of time between when you click on a URL and when the majority of that URL’s content appears for you to see.

Finally, FID measures how long it takes users to be able to interact with a web page in any way. These actions could be typing in a field or clicking menu items.

Even if you don’t work in web development, you can see how useful these three measures actually are. They all take user experience into account, which, coincidentally, is why they are part of Google’s larger 2021 Page Experience update.

The Core Web Vitals are essential in and of themselves, but I think my “boardroom” perspective on them is one we can all safely adopt: that they are just examples of more great things to come from Google.

The search engine giant is always thinking of new ways to make users have better, more helpful, and more positive experiences on its platform. As SEOs, we need to be ready to respond so we don’t get left in the dust.

To know the future, look to the past

We know that extrapolation can be taken only so far, but that’s why the past is so vital to understand. It can give us hints at what lies ahead.

What will Google think of next? It’s going to respond to whatever need is out there for improved online search experiences.

Think of 2020, when the pandemic was in its infancy. People needed information, and Google responded. Within months, you could tell whether restaurants were requiring masks indoors, how many virus cases were in your county, and where you could go for more information or help.

What, then, is the future of SEO? It’s going to be whatever the masses need it to become.

Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

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The post The Future SEO: Boardroom edition appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Everything you need to know about the Google MUM update

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 15:16:07 +0300

30-second summary:

Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update landed in June 2021, seeking to deliver search results that overcome language and format barriers to deliver an improved search experience
The Google MUM update uses an innovative solution that accesses a wealth of previously hidden information around a core query, providing more of what we want without having to carry out multiple different searches
Google MUM can understand and translates 75 different languages, including text and images
MUM will see us bid farewell to BERT

They say Mum always knows best but can the same be said for Google’s MUM update? Giant search engine, Google, launched their latest update as the answer we have been looking for to make internet searching more intuitive and inclusive.

But what does this mean for website owners, SEO practitioners, and agencies providing marketing services?

What is Google’s MUM update?

The Google Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update, aims to answer modern search demands by using an AI-powered algorithm to improve online search capability. When searching the internet, contradictory to expectations users are faced with multiple searches, geographical, and language barriers due to a lack of intuition on the search engine.

Google’s MUM will remove the need to carry out multiple searches that users currently do in order to compare and gain deeper insights. It has the ability to understand and bring solutions based not just on textual content but also an interpretation of images, videos, and podcasts in a way that was never possible before.

It understands 75 different languages which implies that it can pool and serve results to give users the most holistic and comprehensive search experience, answering even the most complex queries.

Google MUM will redefine search relevance changing the way people accesses and use information across the world wide web. This however, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt that not all content can be trusted and would eventually boil down to user discretion.

The MUM update means searches will serve information that provides helpful, related insights, and will reach further for these sources than any other search engine update before it.

Google believes that the MUM update is the answer.

Although in its early days the algorithm will continue to see iterations but it certainly looks to be an exciting move that Google is committed to build on. How? Google intends to follow these in order to ensure they can make it “the world’s best MUM” and remove any machine learning biases:

Human feedback from raters using the Search Quality Rater Guidelines will help understand how people find information
Similar to 2019’s BERT update, MUM too will undergo the same process applied to Google search models
Applying learnings from their latest research on how to reduce the carbon footprint of large neural network training systems to ensure search continues to function as efficiently as possible

Why MUM matters

MUM interprets meaning in a people-friendly way, breaking down language barriers to provide us with the most comprehensive search engine capability ever.

It’s fast, far-reaching, and thorough as compared to any previous search engine update. This matters in a world where users want detailed, relevant, and accurate answers in seconds – anywhere, anytime.

This will remove silos in search dropping all the veils of language barriers and lack of intuition. It will view user queries, questions and comparison needs from all angles reducing the time we spend trying to find the right answers to elicit what we need.

For a long time, keywords and SEO content have been a critical part of how information is served and how it needs to match intent. Over recent years whilst this has remained important to draw attention to specifics, it has changed slightly to be more phrase friendly, finding keywords used in a more natural context. This certainly benefits the MUM search algorithm. It can provide nuanced answers to questions, using NLP, and in-depth world knowledge to gather additional information supplements by a mix of formats – text, images, or even video and audio in the future.

The benefits of MUM

Its ability to think beyond the question or statement will tap into multiple dimensions of the SERP and SEO as a result. Users, businesses, and content creators are being encouraged to say goodbye to the “exact response days” and tap into the user intent and journey that is layered, complex, and sometimes more generalized.

Google MUM’s AI smarts will be another piece in mastering and understanding user intent and thought processes.

Imagine wanting to travel to a country and the questions you currently have to ask to find all you need to know. Firstly, you might wonder how you get there. Then you may search for where to stay, what’s in the area, for visas or vaccinations required and perhaps a bit about the weather and activities available. The list goes on and so does the time taken to search and sift through results.

We now want more, right away, and Google MUM is the beginning of meeting these needs.

Eliminating language barriers

MUM will find results in other languages, opening up a treasure chest of local and more insightful information than any previous Google search technology has ever offered. It aims to become your very own expert and translator, with the added value that you can expect from an enthusiastic human – succinctly delivered, plentiful detailed, and readily given in a language you understand, just like engaging with a human expert.

Searches are no longer inhibited by the words we choose. People can elicit more specific answers to questions by including an image, video or web page in our search. This ensure greater access to international content that previous search engines would not have recognized.

This breaking down of language barriers will allow users, SEOs, and businesses to see more localized insights and responses. On the SEO and digital marketing front, this also means – more competition! Local people create many reviews on areas or facilities, yet we currently miss what could be the best answer to our review style questions due to language barriers.

Unless users search sufficiently and widely using local terms, spellings or language nuances, they never discover pieces of information that would be an integral part of decision making.

Making multi-modal matter

While MUM will know it all (hopefully) since it uses the T5 text-to-text framework and is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT. We will still see answers to straightforward questions. But the ones that are less simple or don’t have a straight answer will flourish with this multi-modal approach. Imagine, what if the answer lies in an image that could be in Japanese?

AI and the search engine

Search engines have driven the way content is created, focusing heavily on keywords, phrases, intent, and other key factors. So should AI change how businesses, SEOs, and agencies think about attracting visitors and engaging them while ensuring we use the exposure Google MUM can offer? This is a far greater intelligent search algorithm that understands nuances and will bring more relevant and varied content to the fore.

Content that is wrongly pitched will disappear more readily than ever before. This reinstates how important the user experience, content, overall SEO, accessibility, and intent are for success in the age of digital. Content must, therefore, be better than a few placed keywords to make it anywhere in page rankings and it must make optimal use of multimedia formats that Google MUM looks at. End-users are MUM’s focus and that must be at the front of how content marketers work. This is important to remember when considering redesigning your website. We see it reinforcing the need for quality SEO and key phrase content if you want to be noticed.

Google MUM has a far greater ability to answer comparison style questions too.

“Will I find the same weather in Turkey as Egypt?” style questions will bring answers in one go. Previously we would have to dig around the information for each country and compare information ourselves. Not only will one question suffice to elicit temperatures for each, but it will offer added value information on each country that it knows people may have gone on to search. It may include relevant comparisons between the two countries, such as vaccinations or visa information, dress codes or helpful information that its AI capability recognizes as appropriate.

MUM vs BERT

Like every launch, the latest proclaims to be the best. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was launched in 2019 and understood searches better than we have ever been able to before. Around this time, keywords became key phrases seeking to provide results based on user intent. In other words, content had to answer common questions.

Numbers tell us that MUM is 1000 times more powerful than BERT, so will MUM always know best? It undoubtedly would seem that this changes the face of search and SEO as we know it in 2021.

What you need to do

Create content that remains high quality and focused yet opens up the possibilities that tangential linking can bring to comparison and related topics. Content must answer questions and provide the right level of added value, including appropriate use of multimedia formats so that MUM will notice you. Written content, including blog posts and articles, is still a key player in attracting attention. There is increased importance on backing this up with podcasts, images, audio, and video content – this would help when MUM’s new iterations come into play.
Google MUM will know it is relevant and add it to search results. Your content will now compete amongst the most significant contributions around the world. While it removes language barriers, it would still be wise to have multi-lingual SEO as part of your strategy. This will dramatically affect the regional power of content, so use it to your advantage, ramping up regional relevance, neighborhood interests, or specifics both verbally and visually.
Produce content that builds brand recognition and loyalty using informative, engaging writing, images, and other media. Remember to add structured data to your page to give clues about the content. Brands and advertisers need to be mindful that this is an AI-centric update and would learn as it goes. We know that whilst Google MUM will widen search answers, there will always be people that know where to look and who to rely on for trusted content, so the expanded pool of SERP competition will not typically minimize your current audience as long as you continue to remain reliable. Bottom line is – Continue to build your expertise and authority in the industry so you can ‘EAT’ your competition.

In all honesty, with fewer tricks to hide behind, what you need to make sure of when creating MUM-friendly content simply translates to quality. If it is interesting, relevant, and valuable to your end user, then it will be seen. It will widen the potential audience and bring more significant competition for visibility, and that is just as likely to be a good thing as bad for many.

Conclusion

Are we genuinely heading to an internet-driven world without barriers? While Google’s MUM seeks to understand more about what we might be looking for than any search engine has ever before, will this open up the search-scape to a truly more worldly experience? We can’t answer all the questions and there are many still to be asked as the rollout gathers pace. Only time will tell us how Google improvise MUM in the future. After all, technology and innovation never stand still for long.

Joe Dawson is Director of strategic growth agency Creative.onl, based in the UK. He can be found on Twitter @jdwn.

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The post Everything you need to know about the Google MUM update appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Influencers in today’s SEO

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 18:54:29 +0300

30-second summary:

With search getting more sophisticated there will be a strong relation between user signals and influencers
Google’s Multitask Unified Model (MUM) and the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) model will impact search intent and influence a business’ search visibility
Intellifluence’s CEO, Joe Sinkwitz explains key concepts surrounding the impact of influencers on website rankings in modern SEO

One new to SEO might assume that the only role influencers play when it comes to ranking is in the form of bloggers providing reviews and links via guest blogging. However, if we were to segment search into simplistic buckets of links, content, and the cumulative user signals associated with how a visitor interacts with links and content, the future role of influencers is going to skew far more towards the user signals bucket.

Historically, influencers have been viewed as a paid social channel add-on for B2C and D2C companies, only more recently taken seriously for their ability to influence B2B purchases. Their use cases are far more versatile than the initial assumptions and preconceived notions related to value, with expected compensation ranges to match that versatility based on audience sizes and channel selection. As an SEO, it is easy to understand how influencers that maintain blogs in your niche would be useful when undergoing a PR-driven outreach campaign for link purposes. To understand how influencers can affect the outcome of a site’s rankings external to the links generated, it’s important first to understand a few key concepts.

Content created in partnership with Intellifluence.

Targeted peer personas

Within the realm of content marketing, a marketer would seek to develop out personas in order to properly structure content with the appropriate hooks and value propositions. For ease in understanding how to create a sample buyer persona, consider the following process:

Provided you’re not operating on a brand new site, look into your previous 100 customers – if you have enough data, you can be more granular and select out your most ideal customers.
Based on the buyer contact’s email, use a tool such as Clearbit to generate a list of their social media accounts. Keep in mind that where they maintain social accounts is just as important as to their level of usage and subject matters.
Who do these customers aspire to be? Are they constantly seeking out solutions? Whom do they follow to get these solutions? A quick hack in this is to sort their followers by audience size as authoritative influencers tend to have a larger following than most of their industry peers.
Digging further, who influences those subject matter experts? Which sources do they consume?
Who are your ideal customer’s peers? On one hand, you’ll likely have some of that data immediately when analyzing the audience data. If you do not, LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes segmentation rather simple based on their filters and query refinements, allowing you to select extremely similar individuals to your targets.
Repeat the above process as necessary to generate a large enough dataset that you can apply pivots on in a worksheet, in order to determine buyer persona commonalities.

Once targeted personas are created based on those characteristic commonalities, we can use them in order to positively impact those user signals. Here are a few oversimplified pieces for the sake of brevity.

Navigational queries

Through multiple experiments, we know that spikes in navigational queries can have a spillover effect on rankings for non-navigational queries. As Google is introducing Multitask Unified Model (MUM) to make sense of complex queries, the more positive effects we as SEOs can provide on showing that these navigational queries also have informational and transactional signals associated with them, the better the intent and therefore search the ordering will be on the coveted transactional terms.

How does this work with targeted peer personas? It can be as easy as hiring influencers that exist frequently enough in the sum audience data to your targets to share out useful information related to your product or service, specifically writing out the brand name. Each time we’ve run campaigns of this type, the navigational queries spike. This alone is very useful, but there’s more power to these peer influencers.

Repeat dwell

Having a user specifically search for your brand and click the result is a fantastic first step. What could be better? Repeatedly visiting and spending time on-site. I recognize that we’re simplifying here but structuring a campaign with peers that follows the model of Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) allows you to introduce the brand name for navigational queries then pepper the targeted audience via those peer influencers with interesting facts and use cases.

In this phase of the campaign, the direct links from social posts could be used as we can all probably agree that our Chrome and Android data is being used to continually refine future searches. The goal of this phase is to drive repeat usage of the site. Some commercial activity may very well take place, which is a bonus, but not the KPI.

Query satisfaction

The final phase of the AIDA model moves from desire to action, and our goal is to turn our navigational queries into transactional rankings. Translated to how MUM might perceive this, a user that seeks out a result navigationally, returns to the result from another channel, and then comes back with a transactional query modifier is likely satisfied with the query result and thus that website should be shown more frequently.

How does that work with the influencers? The third style of posts from the peer influencers to your buyer personas can again return to mentioning your brand name and including a specific value proposition to generate that action. It could be a coupon code, a time-specific call-to-action for a deal, a giveaway, or any combination of the sort. By now focusing on a specific transactional modifier with your brand name, a percentage of those blended queries will occur, resulting in action being taken, which is the definition of query satisfaction. You’ll have successfully used influencers to influence how Google perceives the site for future transactional queries.

Joe Sinkwitz is CEO at Intellifluence.

The post Influencers in today’s SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Four ways to improve page speed and master Core Web Vitals

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 19:03:56 +0300

30-second summary:

Websites that rank well on Google tend to have a higher Core Web Vitals score
There are three core web vitals that make up the majority of the site’s overall page speed score
Prioritizing user experience in web design and marketing campaigns could give you a competitive edge
This comprehensive guide prepares you for the rollout of the new Google Search algorithm update

Google’s latest major update to its search algorithm focuses greatly on the user experience through a new set of ranking factors metrics, called Core Web Vitals. Early results from Core Web Vital audits reveal that the average website performs below these new standards. Searchmetrics’ research revealed that, on average, sites could reduce page load time by nearly one second by removing unused JavaScript.

This provides an amazing opportunity to outperform other websites by boosting your own page rankings.

Here is everything you need to know about Core Web Vitals plus four simple steps to improve your metrics.

Content created in partnership with Searchmetrics.

What are the Core Web Vitals metrics?

Core Web Vitals are an extension of Google’s page experience signals that include mobile-friendliness and HTTPs. The three Core Web Vitals metrics measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability, which Google views as providing an accurate depiction of a real-world, user experience.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the loading time of the largest image or text block visible within the user’s viewpoint.
First Input Delay (FID) measures the interactivity on the page by calculating the time from when a user first interacts with the site to the time when the browser responds to that interaction.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) refers to how much the content shifts during page rendering.

How to check your page speed insights

There are many online tools that check your page ranking score, including PageSpeed Insights, Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse Audit, and Search Console. These sites measure page speed in various elements and display the results using a traffic light system. PageSpeed Insights provides a breakdown of the results and highlights areas of improvement.

What does “good” performance mean in numbers?

To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading. Pages should have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds and maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

Websites, like Wikipedia, have the highest page speed score due to a lightweight approach to web design, using mainly text and optimized images. Websites that rely heavily on video content and images are slower to load and make for a poor user experience. Therefore, there is a balance to strike between design and user experience.

See where your site ranks. Visit PageSpeed Insights and enter your URL. Note: The top number is your Lighthouse score, also referred to as PageSpeed score, measuring from zero to 100. While it’s a good general benchmark for the performance of your site. It’s not entirely related to the three Core Web Vitals metrics, which should be viewed as an analysis of LCP, FID, and CLS.

How to improve your page speed

Passing is considered getting a “good” score in all three areas. Making small changes can improve the page speed score by as little as one second, which can shift the site from a “poor” or “needs improvement” score in LCP to a “good” one. Reducing load time will make users happier and increase traffic to the site.

Tom Wells, creative marketing expert at Searchmetrics, says,

“Anything that’s not needed on a website shouldn’t be there.”

Putting it simply, identifying and removing elements that are not used or have a substantive purpose could improve the site’s page speed score.

1. Oversized images

Poorly optimized images are one of the main causes affecting a site’s LCP score as this is usually the largest element to load. Ecommerce businesses and those who rely heavily on images may have poorer LCP scores due to the page rendering of multiple high-resolution images.

Optimizing these assets by using responsive design or next-gen image formatting such as WebP, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR can improve the score by cutting down rendering time. Often, images can be condensed to a much smaller size without affecting the quality of the image. Free resources like Squoosh can do this for you.

2. Dynamic content and ads

Loading ads on a web page is one of the main causes of a bad CLS score. This can be down to elements on the page shifting to accommodate dynamic ads, which makes for a poor user experience.

Using a smart implementation method such as allocating size attributes or CSS aspect ratio boxes for all ads, videos, and image elements is one way to reduce content shifting. Some companies may use a plugin or coding at the top of the website to place the ads. However, this could lead to a slower website, impacting the user experience negatively and indirectly affecting rankings.

Also, never insert content on top of existing content, except in response to specific user interactions as this ensures any layout shift that occurs. For example, when you click a CTA button and a form appears is an exception.

3. Plugin-centric web economy

Plugins can act like “plaster over the cracks” to solve website problems, says Wells. Despite creating a temporary fix, it can slow down and hinder web performance as all the code needs to load before the user is able to fully interact with the webpage.

Using plugins can increase server request counts and increase javascript execution time. All these factors can lower the site’s FID score.

“Often we look for advanced fixes and solutions but sometimes it’s as simple as deleting what’s not needed,” says Wells.

Therefore, removing some plugins, especially unused ones, can improve the reactivity and speed of the website.

4. Too much code

Google advises focusing on the overall website performance.

“It’s critical for responsive and well-scored websites to be as lightweight as possible,”

says Wells.

“The more things that a server has to load, the slower that load time is going to be overall.”

While unused CSS and JavaScript may not directly impact the page speed score, it can still impact the site’s load times, create code bloat, and negatively impact user experience.

When should I start?

Google’s rollout of the new algorithm began in mid-June, so it’s worth getting a start on reviewing how well your site scores on pages speed tests. Websites that rank well tend to have higher Core Web Vitals scores and this trend is set to continue as Google places greater emphasis on user experience.

Want more Core Web Vital insights? Read Searchmetrics’ Google Core Web Vitals Study April 2021.

The post Four ways to improve page speed and master Core Web Vitals appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 18:56:23 +0300

30-second summary:

Confused users don’t spend money
Your search marketing needs to thread in your brand’s messaging, targeting, design, and overall experience to ensure trust, clarity, and eventual sales
SEO pioneer, serial entrepreneur, and best selling author, Kris Jones helps you weave a tight SEO and search marketing strategy before 2022 ushers in

If you spend enough time in the digital marketing space, even if you focus on just one area of it, you’ll eventually catch wind of the intersection of SEO, paid media, web design, and link building. There’s no avoiding it since all these areas run together to ideally form a strong online presence for a business. Within that context, if you’ve ever been the one to devise a digital strategy for yourself or your clients, you’re probably familiar with the types of market niches that would push a business to focus more on SEO or paid search marketing.

SEO is obviously a fantastic tool for just about anyone, but don’t discount the power of paid media. Each has its pros and cons, and when done the right way, neither is going to hurt you.

What will hurt you, however, is making mistakes in your efforts and then letting them go for a long time. Weak points in your SEO and paid media can be tricky things. They can harm your digital presence in the long term and yet be difficult even to detect unless you really know what you’re doing.

With the home stretch of 2021 right around the corner, now is the best time to stitch up those holes in your search marketing for 2022. Here are four tips for cleaning up your SEO and paid media marketing.

1. Stop writing for keywords over topics

SEOs know the old story, but here it is again for anyone who doesn’t. Ten to twenty years ago, it was a popular practice to keyword-stuff on web pages. That just meant overusing a certain keyword on a page in an attempt to get Google to rank the page more highly.

In 2021, we know this is a bad practice because it doesn’t help users to answer their questions. What answers questions for online users today is content that discusses popular topics rather than just keyword-spamming.

You can use popular topic-research tools such as BuzzSumo, Answer the Public, or Semrush to find topics relevant to your desired industry niche. Then, do your own research to generate content that’s useful. Always think of the user first.

Keywords still have their place, though. Google needs to match up queries with content, and the content that makes the smartest, most useful, and natural use of keywords will tend to perform better. Content needs to have keywords in its headings and also use naturally within the body. But don’t think that you need to overuse keywords or focus your content completely around the keywords. Instead, determine the intent of the keywords and align that with your topic research to create killer content that ranks.

2. Don’t abandon paid media message consistency

When your search marketing includes paid media, too, you have a whole other set of guidelines to follow. Again, everything you do should be with users in mind. Put yourself in their place. How would you respond to this ad if you saw it?

Then, click through to the landing page to make sure everything still makes sense. The thing is, here is where PPC specialists can fail if they aren’t careful.

With paid media, you’re using ads to get people to do things. That’s what you have available: words and images on little square ads on web pages or paid search results on the SERPs.

Sounds straightforward, right? As long as you do your research and get the ads’ messaging correct, you should be golden.

Except you can go way wrong if your messaging isn’t consistent across the entire paid search journey. Your landing pages need to contain the same type of messaging as your ads. They need to reference the information users saw when they first clicked the ad.

That shows continuity across your paid campaigns. Without that continuity, without landing pages that reference offers or claims made in ads, users will be confused. They’ll wonder if they clicked the wrong ad or got taken to the wrong website.

And confused users don’t spend money.

Think about it this way: it’s been estimated that it takes between five and seven impressions before one user remembers a brand. Five to seven! It can be challenging enough to reach those numbers but imagine if you tried to get there without brand consistency. You’d be setting yourself up for failure, plain and simple.

The solution is once again to think like a user. Go through all the elements of a paid search user’s journey. If the messaging and branding flow logically and actually make sense, you may have a winning campaign on your hands.

3. Don’t ignore poor site UX

I said at the outset that the different areas of digital marketing all have the potential to intersect and flow together. Here is where SEO and web design meet up: website UX.

SEOs can spend all day researching keywords, writing content, optimizing meta tags, and building backlinks, but users probably aren’t going to do what you want if your website has a terrible layout and design, not to mention if it isn’t optimized for the mobile experience.

But don’t just listen to me – read the numbers. According to Intechnic, 67 percent of online users say that a badly designed website negatively affects their impressions of a brand. That is a huge figure, to put it mildly.

When Google’s spiders crawl a site, they do so logically, as a human would. That means the main navigation needs to set out the content your site has and be clear about where users can go to find certain information.

Now, what qualifies as a “good” layout? It’s simple when you think about it, and yet so many websites struggle to do it. The main navigation needs to show users all the vital areas of a site. Whatever business you’re in, your nav should show your main services first, followed by a blog if you have one (you should), an “about us” section, and a contact tab.

That setup right there covers all the main points that you’ll need to keep users engaged. Now, how everything else breaks down from there is up to you, but again, keep it logical. Your main services tab should have a submenu of all your main services, your locations tab can break down to show your different business locations, and so on.

Also, you absolutely cannot forget accessibility when you’re talking about website UX today. Accessibility, of course, is the capability of any piece of website content to be consumed and understood by people with a range of physical or mental disabilities. Not only is this simply a good business practice, but it’s also just inclusive and courteous.

Website accessibility includes considerations such as making content available to the visually and hearing impaired, ensuring your web pages are navigable with a keyboard only instead of just with a mouse, and choosing colors that don’t clash so color-blind people have no trouble reading your content.

Makes sense, right?

It’s important that it does make sense because if neither human users nor Google can understand how to navigate your website, you probably won’t rank for your desired keywords.

4. Don’t set and forget PPC

If you’re a business owner and are doing your own digital marketing, or if you employ one (possibly overworked) specialist to do it for you, it can be more than a little tempting to engage in the “set it and forget it” mindset.

Small to medium-sized businesses have so much to do just running themselves that putting sufficient effort into digital marketing can seem like too much of a stretch.

You may think that you’ve come up with a pretty effective PPC ad campaign that contains all the right visuals and messaging and hits all the right audience marks. And maybe you have, for now.

But you can’t set and forget anything in PPC or digital marketing more generally. Trends change, markets shift, consumers move on. You have to check in on your ads’ performance over time to see if you’ve recently fallen flat. Because if you have, then you’re wasting a lot of effort maintaining ads that aren’t converting.

Instead of letting things go like this – put the time into analyzing your ads’ performance, particularly in the time immediately following the start of the campaign. You want to ensure things are running as you predicted and tweak them if they aren’t.

While you’re at it, set aside some time to research how you can optimize your PPC campaigns’ resource consumption. The best campaigns are obviously the most efficiently performing ones, and so how can you do better?

Try reworking your ad copy. It sounds simple, but as you know, more relevant ad copy drives click-through rates and Quality Scores. And high-quality scores reduce your cost per click and cost per conversion.

Another money-worthy avenue you can take to hone in on your ads’ efficiency is to use dayparting and geolocation together. Dayparting will schedule your ads to appear at certain times of day, while geolocation will show your ads only in certain places.

This is particularly useful for local businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations and want to get customers through the doors.

This takes plenty of audience research to get it right, but it’s a smart and common-sense way to optimize the resources you’re using on your PPC ads.

A stale PPC campaign has the potential to be one of your biggest search marketing holes in 2022, so don’t wait on this one.

Jump on your 2022 fixes now

There truly is no time like the present for fixing your search marketing loopholes. Any mistake that’s out there for any length of time is probably going to hurt you. But with the second half of 2021 already here, lots of businesses are setting their sights on 2022.

Become one of them. Follow these pointers to get ahead in your search marketing efforts, and it could make all the difference.

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The post Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

The future of gaming and streaming: a networking and SEO arsenal

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 17:02:22 +0300

30-second summary:

As the world starts to return to normalcy, the gaming and live streaming industry need SEO, social networking, and online marketing for continued growth
I spoke with industry influencers Alinity, Matt Rehwoldt, and eUnited’s General Manager and VP, Matt Potthoff on the industry’s current scenario, the obstacle course for amplified audience engagement, and the budding need for innovation

Over the past five years, the boom of the live-streaming, esports, and gaming industries has been stealing headlines not only in the tech industry but also in mainstream media.

That boom only increased its radius during the pandemic, which saw astronomical highs in terms of viewership numbers for the Amazon-owned Twitch streaming platform, Google’s YouTube, and even Facebook Gaming, who jumped more aggressively into the marketplace with the acquisition of Microsoft’s Mixer platform during the summer of 2020.

Since then, much of the world has started getting back to more normalcy, which means that studios are back to work on big project games, esports teams are heading back to regular competitions, and the streaming landscape continues its evolution.

Despite the boom, the industry lacks some key ingredients

But despite the impressive numbers, the industry as a whole still lacks some key ingredients that can not only take the industry to the next level, but also improve the business landscape of content creators as well.

More often than not, the industry is splintered off into a number of sectors that, aside from annual conventions and events, don’t often regularly network efficiently.

Compounding the limitations of networking efficiency is the void in marketing practices such as search engine optimization (SEO) and traditional internet marketing that content creators and brands are leaving on the table.

Some of the core complaints among streamers and content creators, among others, is – the lack of discoverability provided by their platforms, and how their growth seems bottlenecked and capped due to the lack of visibility.

Furthermore, content creators and brands often find themselves in the cycle of social media posting, which can lean heavily into monotony and automation – two major factors that drive down engagement.

Sure, you can blame the platforms themselves and you would be partially right. Social media platforms are a wide net of interests and demos, so posts may not hit at high percentages consistently. Streaming platforms seem to be staying the course, which is smart business as it has proven to be profitable, even during the most challenging economic crisis in nearly a century.

That leaves content creators, esports teams, game studios, and the industry as a whole, at a crossroads. Where innovation has seemed to bypass the needs for more connected networking and growth potential, many are forced to double down on the work despite the lack of return just to stay afloat.

Natalia Mogollon, better known as Alinity, is one of the most popular streamers on the Twitch platform, boasting over one million followers to her channel and had leveraged the platform to build one of the more recognizable brands in the streaming industry.

Streaming and content creators

To get an objective perspective on the matter, I caught up with gaming content creator, Alinity and Matt Rehwoldt, former WWE wrestler and content creator.

“In regards to networking with other creators, I feel like most creators currently use Twitter for that”

“The problem is that I don’t know which creators are genuinely interested in networking and which just want interactions in order to increase their following. It’s probably 50-50.

“But again, I think the market for small to medium size creators is huge. People that are starting to grow and want to meet other creators”

And it’s the market that remains largely untapped or maximized.

Outside of the most famous streamers in the world, many streamers may be stuck under a ceiling or bottlenecked when it comes to growth, and that is where the streaming side of the industry needs to evolve.

A few years ago, professional wrestler and content creator Matt Rehwoldt was involved in the WrestleMania 34 United States Championship match between Randy Orton, Bobby Roode, Jinder Mahalm, and Rusev, performing in front of over 78,000 people in New Orleans, Lousiana.

And while Rehwoldt is back in the industry with promotions such as New Japan Pro Wrestling and rumored to be heading to Impact Wrestling, the ‘Drama King’ has carved out a home for his brand on both Twitch and YouTube.

Despite his name recognition and work on some of the biggest wrestling stages in the industry, the limitations that platforms present can still negatively impact his content.

“The biggest challenge facing content creators is always discoverability,”

“Twitch struggles with this the most and it’s been said to death by any “How To Grow On Twitch” video you see on YouTube – which is the very point. You need to bring people to Twitch from other sources as their search and discoverability is extremely limited.”

“Here I’ll refer your readers to Alpha Gaming’s Harris Heller. He makes some great points about Twitch’s weaknesses with the most glaring being its searchability.

The inclusion of things like highlights or clips is very cool, but why can’t I search “Crazy FRAG” and find a whole list of clips around those search terms? Then through watching things like that I find new creators. So there needs to be more searchable content on Twitch where you don’t have to just go to the search bar and type the exact name of the stream you’re looking for.”

“Browsability is key,” he said.

But Rehwoldt also points out that YouTube may present better discoverability but also has its own setbacks.

“YouTube is better but there you’re competing in an even larger ecosystem against clickbait warriors and what feels like the whole world”

he points out.

Rehwoldt goes on to point out how SEO is not only impactful but a valuable resource to learn and utilize.

“That said, if you can take the time to teach yourself a little SEO and how to use titles and keywords properly, it’ll help you a lot. It’s something I still struggle with and am learning too.”

But like many streamers, Rehwoldt has been frustrated with the issues that hold back his content. He stresses the importance of understanding that it all comes down to patience and hard work.

“I’m still learning,”

Rehwoldt says.

“My channels are growing but not nearly as fast as I’d like them to. So for me, it’s more about keeping my mind right. Do good work that I love and the growth seems to come. Not letting myself get discouraged because some video or stream didn’t “pop off” is key too.”

“Everyone points to people like Ludwig or other creators who blew up seemingly overnight and then get frustrated when they feel like they make similar quality content and the same doesn’t happen to them.”

Well there are two things to consider here: First, that often those creators didn’t blow up from “nowhere” and they’ve been working hard either behind the scenes or prior to launching their content and got seen by the right people at the right time. A classic case of preparation meets opportunity.

Secondly, life is also full of incredible exceptions.

People who explode into stardom because they went viral etc. But never ever try to compare yourself to the exception. I’ve known and spoken to so many creators, those who make a living at it, and it takes years of trying and putting out content that you later look back on and shake your head. Trial and error everyone. Have patience with your work and yourself.”

Esports

While SEO is not prominent in sectors such as streaming, and the collective industry as a whole, it has trickled in with regards to the Esports industry.

Matt Potthoff is the general manager and Vice President of eUnited, and a former professional esports player who has won championships as a player, coach, and general manager.

“eUnited has blossomed into a staple esports organization in North America since its inception in 2016”, Potthoff said.

“We have competed across many titles and have accumulated over $3 million dollars in prize winnings.

eUnited’s most notable championships are winning the 2018 Smite World Championship and the 2019 Call of Duty World Championship. We pride ourselves on growing amateur talent into championship contender players over numerous gaming communities.”

Part of their growth has been the incorporation of SEO and internet marketing through leveraging social media.

“eUnited does use elements such as SEO to increase visibility when selling merchandise or showcasing new sponsors. Additionally, we help players revise their stream titles and descriptions for better chances of obtaining new viewership when users are searching for different topics on Twitch”

Potthoff points out that the integration of internet marketing, SEO, and targeted social networking can provide results and those results can impact profitability.

“eUnited leverages streaming platforms to grow their players’ brands and sell ads to sponsors by utilizing their player’s streaming audience. Most sponsorship activations in esports that aren’t held in person are done over streaming platforms like Twitch”

Innovation and moving forward with solutions

Regardless of the sector of industry, it seems the problems remain the same, and some success can be rooted in the implementation of SEO and optimized networking.

But how does the industry innovate to address this?
How do content creators address the areas of need?
How do we implement better networking and more meaningful connectivity between these different sectors?

Many brands and content creators face hurdles with finding these solutions. They may not have the budget to consistently contract a quality Internet Marketing & SEO agency, and the SEO agency market certainly doesn’t hone in on these offerings.

So, what is the solution?

I considered all of this when I initially launched Gamactica in October 2018. I asked myself these same questions, and I saw the very issues pointed out in this article when I started streaming.

This is why the foundation of what we have been building with Gamactica is rooted in SEO, internet marketing, and intuitive social networking for the industry. Award-winning internet marketing company Elite Rank Media is the backbone of the internet marketing initiatives and processes. Since 2009, the company has been providing marketing services to brands around the world and has been recognized for its work in both Medical SEO and localized Miami SEO marketing, among others.

An industry where content creators, streamers, gamers, esports teams, esports players, game studios and developers, and cosplayers are spread out so distantly on the social space is one that needs the innovation of improved connectivity.

Our purpose is to provide a professional social network to streamline social networking, bring these sectors together more efficiently, and provides the tools and resources that empower these brands and content creators to reach new levels.

And these are the innovations that can help push through the ceilings, break through the bottlenecks, and clear the hurdles that everyone seems to face, regardless of the industry sector.

Gamactica is implementing those innovations.

“I think the idea is very interesting,”

Alinity says of Gamactica.

“Most current social media platforms focus on relationships with our followings, but a new focus towards networking is innovative. It almost makes me think of LinkedIn.

“I feel like it has a lot of potential for connecting brands and creators, I think there is a big need in that regard. It seems like some streamers are really well connected and get lots of sponsorships, whereas the new creators have no idea how to get these. I think there is a big untapped market within the creators with about 100-500 concurrents (viewers)”

she adds.

“They have more tight communities and often get overlooked but I think there is a huge potential for brand deals with high return on investment for brands, as they tend to be more connected with their viewers. This connection becomes difficult once you get over 1000 concurrent viewers”

she continued.

Alinity points out the vitality of the current market size, the need for better networking, and industry innovation.

“I think the market for small to medium size creators is huge. People that are starting to grow and want to meet other creators. I think the large “whale” streamers would be a good influence for smaller ones to join.”

During the journey of Gamactica, it has been key to stand out as a unique platform, and showcasing how it stands alone is vital to the continued growth.

“I love the idea of something like Gamatica”,

Rehwoldt said.

“But I will be blunt – I’ve seen many trying to compete in this niche space as well. I myself have been approached by several ‘gamer social media’ sites where you open an account, you can link all your streams, socials etc, and it involves you in a like-minded community with the idea that you can all discover each other.

“The key here will be offering something to truly stand apart! Think outside the box!”

And that outside the box thinking is structured in Gamactica’s platform, community, and directories. Streamlining popular social networking features and intuitively interweaving them with the marketing and branding impact that is needed on a larger scale.

“I do think a platform that offers a solution to increase visibility for players is needed,”

Potthoff said.

“My only problem is that a majority of the users are on platforms such as Discord, Twitch, and YouTube.”

“I feel anyone can be discovered in gaming,”

he added.

“It just takes the right moment and presence to take advantage of a situation. If another platform is increasing the odds for a player or company to be discovered, they should definitely sign up and take advantage of it.”

Pushing the needed innovations is at the core of Gamactica’s journey, and implementing the proper concepts while listening to the industry, as a whole, will shape its continued growth.

Not only is the focus on connectivity and marketing, but also helping structure the platform to help combat the harassment and toxicity issues that plague the industry, and also help empower female creators and brands that are operating in a male-dominated sector.

The future requires innovation to achieve growth and continued success, and that journey is what Gamactica is dedicated to continuing.

Stay tuned for more articles in this series.

Anthony DiMoro is CEO of Gamactica. He can be found on Twitter @AnthonyDiMoro.

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The post The future of gaming and streaming: a networking and SEO arsenal appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Six content ideas to supercharge your marketing in 2021

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 15:54:13 +0300

30-second summary:

Keyword research is at the heart of understanding where your business stands and what your end-users expect
Surveying or monitoring your analytics is a great way of listening to your customers or readers for effective content ideas
Seasonality is a great way to find fresh content ideas by finding angles where your primary topic overlaps with seasonal interests
Collaborate and meet real people – use every opportunity (events, meetups, live sessions) to talk to people and listen to what they’d be interested in consuming
Use “question research” to understand the existing information gaps in the market
Re-package your old, better-performing content into new (updated) assets

If you feel like everything has already been written and you have no idea what else you can write about, here are six content ideas for you that help you come up with valuable and engaging content this year:

1. Use new keyword research tools

Keyword research is not just for SEO! They can give you in-depth insight into your audience’s interests, questions, and struggles. Research and address them in your content.

The key is to try a new tool from time to time. Why? Each tool uses a different data source or a different output or a different way to organize those keywords. Any of these will be enough to give you lots of content ideas.

Luckily, we have quite a few tools to choose from.

Kparser

This tool will give you pretty much everything you need to create a good topic list. Or at least point you in the right direction. Look at the left-hand channel to find popular concepts around your main topic and build your content around those!

Source: Screenshot by the author

Kparser offers a premium version for $69 a month but I’ve always been using its free version which is great!

KeywordTool.io

KeywordTool.io allows access to lots of data sources, including Google, Youtube, Amazon, Instagram, and Twitter.

(Content ideas sourced from Amazon)

Source: Screenshot made by the author

The tool will give you lots of ideas for free but to see each keyword analysis, you need to upgrade to one of the listed plans.

Answer the Public

This one you may not have heard of. It features a man called ‘The Seeker’, who impatiently awaits your questions. You put in keywords or phrases, he suggests some interesting topics.

Apart from being a great keyword research tool, this one is also great for question research (see my #5 tip on the list!) Using different ways to group and organize your keyword lists will likely uncover more ideas. These grouping techniques include keyword clustering and semantic research.

Source: Screenshot by the author

Answer the Public is freemium and comes at $79/month minimum if you pay for a year, but frankly I’ve never had to upgrade as the free version is simply awesome!

2. Turn to your actual customers for ideas

You know who you really need to listen to. Correct, your current and future customers. You want your content to make a difference for your bottom line, not just bring your word out there, no matter if anyone is there listening or not.

You don’t just want to be heard, you want to be heard by your target audience.

You can even gamify that process by building up your surveys with visualization tools, here are some extra tips on that.

You can offer a good mix of generic questions (like, ask about their lifestyle) which would help you build up your customers’ personas and target them better. Then come your brand-specific questions:

“What questions did you have when browsing our services?”
“Were they sufficiently covered on the site?”

The latter will help you improve your site performance too.

The cool thing is that you will also be able to use your survey results in site content and articles, making your site intent-rich, trustworthy, and linkable.

It’s also a wise idea to set up a well-defined routine to help you record your customers’ questions as they come. This will help you in both content planning and social media goals.

Slack is a nice tool to help your in-team communication and idea-sharing. Simply set up a separate Slack channel and encourage your customer and support team to send your customers’ questions there as soon as they come across any.

Using your web analytics is another way to listen to your customers and readers. Finteza is a great solution to better understand which content and on-page elements your site users respond to best. It supports a variety of events including mouse-overs, clicks, and downloads allowing you to measure which content does a better job engaging your readers:

Source: Finteza

3. Take seasonal trends into account

There are holidays and seasonal trends to include in your content editorial plans. When you catch a trend, there’s always a huge boost of interactions, new followers, and clicks.

Source: Screenshot by the author

The great thing about seasonal trends is that you can plan your editorial calendar months in advance because they are easy to predict and repeat yearly. This means you’ll be able to re-use your calendar as a reference point to structure your seasonal content strategy and improvise for maximum success.

Simply sit down and plan your content assets for upcoming big holidays, seasonal events like spring cleaning season, summer holidays, Amazon Prime Day, and other noteworthy days that are relevant to your target customers.

Source: Screenshot by the author

You can use Google Spreadsheets to create your content roadmap. To better focus on ideation and get more inspired, I usually start with planning my seasonal content using a printable calendar which you can easily find using these steps.

There are handy calendar apps that can even integrate into WordPress to keep track of those holidays you may want to include in your social media editorial plan.

You can schedule social media updates as far as one year ahead to make sure there’s always something going on your brand channels no matter how busy you get.

4. Get out into the world

We have a tendency to look for our inspiration online because we are targeting an internet-based audience, which is totally understandable: you can discover so many wonderful topics on the web. It just isn’t the only place we can look and purely searching online actually limits our scope, and so our returns.

The most popular piece of content is one that comes from the real world. People love personal stories!

Go out into the real world. Seek out events in your industry, or things that are tangentially related. Discover how everyday experiences connect to your niche and use your social media channels as a platform to explain and share with others.

Get out of cyberspace and into meet-space!

A good way is to engage with your local community (now in a safe and socially distanced way!)

This serves as a great way to understand the pulse of your audience/target customers, their intent, and personal experiences that impact their decisions. Plus, you also earn a chance to introduce new people to your brand.

You can also connect with other local brands, businesses, and business owners and potentially work out some topic ideas that way.

5. Find out what people are asking online

Question research offers a few important marketing opportunities:

Questions give you lots of insight into what your target audience is struggling with and how to best help them
Questions are your best content ideation source
Covering niche questions online opens up more organic search visibility opportunities including getting featured and ranking in “People Also Ask” results
Asking a question on social media is one of the most important ways to increase your social media engagement because whenever they see a question mark, people have that natural reflex to stop and find an answer

So ask questions on social media often and engage with answers you receive.

If you are open to trying tools to bolster this exercise, Text Optimizer is a smart option. All you Just type your keyword into its “Topic Ideas” section and it will generate a list of topic ideas for you:

Source: Screenshot by the author

Every question is rated based on how many people are searching for it and how many sites are covering it – giving you a clear analysis of demand vs competition which informs your decision making.

The tool is paid and I am not aware of any alternatives. But the good thing is, question research will be mostly free. You will get some content ideas without the need to pay or register an account.

Quick tip: If you install their Google Chrome extension, most of that analysis will come for free as long as you use Google Chrome.

Source: Screenshot by the author

6. Learn the art of content re-packaging

Right off the bat, re-packaging content is going to be the best weapon in your arsenal. It takes what you already have and makes it stretch, getting more out of every piece you write. A lot of those prolific writers are using this tactic, albeit at its extreme. That is how they manage to get so much out without others writing for them.

So what does re-packaging content entail? It is creating new content directly from the old. Some ways to do that are:

Collecting articles into an ebook to give away on your site (As a bonus, this would also make a great lead magnet!)
Creating a webinar with the information you have written
Turning your content series into a (mini) email course
Creating newsletters
Recording a podcast with the old post content
Shooting a video with the old post content
Converting info from posts into infographics
Making a Slideshare presentation with condensed slides
Writing new posts based on small details mentioned

How to show the business value of your SEO proposal

Thu, 22 Jul 2021 12:54:00 +0300

30-second summary:

Your SEO proposal plays an instrumental role not just for your agency but also for your client’s business
Forecasting needs to be a star element of your customer acquisition process – but how do you navigate these tricky waters?
SEOmonitor dissects the entire thought process and action plan for you
Here’s how to ensure realistic, practical, achievable, and mutually agreed milestones and budgets are set with your clients

Clients often ask for a forecast to estimate their ROI with this type of marketing investment. Agencies are caught between building a realistic business case and explaining that they’re all scenarios, not promises. Think about it like this – you both need to know where you’re going, or you won’t have a clue when you’re there. But it’s all about how you set expectations from the start. This is where your SEO proposal plays an instrumental role in customer acquisition and experience.

Let’s imagine the following scenario: a Client Service Director argues about the benefits of presenting a business case to a new lead to make the sell.

Yet, the agency’s CEO wants to make sure the initial internal evaluation is on point. After all, it makes sense to calibrate your model first and then show the opportunity.

With the right forecasting methodology in place, you can do both and prove your SEO services’ business value.

The big question is how to go about it.

Content created in partnership with SEOmonitor.

What does SEO success mean for your client’s business?

To invest in SEO, a client needs to understand how that strategy translates into sessions, conversions, and ultimately revenue. So, as an agency, you need to connect the business metrics with the non-brand organic traffic and keyword ranks – the data that you directly impact.

Keywords are influenced by many variables that you need to consider when designing a trustworthy methodology to create realistic SEO scenarios.

And even before that, the way you do your keyword research influences those scenarios:

What is the client’s industry trend like?
What is their business trend? Are they in a growth phase, or are they plateauing?
What is their market share in terms of organic real-estate (their visibility compared to their competitors)?

Understanding the opportunity for growth

The competitors’ keywords gap analysis

It’s common sense, but it can sometimes escape the client’s focus – showing them who their real online competitors are in terms of queries and search intent.

A perfume shop, for example, will be in tight competition with big retailers such as Amazon more than competing perfume shops, deciding to offer online services.

Exploring the client’s domain in connection with the competitor landscape will give you an overview of the overlapping and non-overlapping keywords, together with their key attributes (search volumes, seasonality, etc.). This is one significant way to understand which keywords are worth introducing into your SEO proposal and ulterior strategy so as not to get sidetracked by misleading keywords.

Continuing our perfume shop example, although the client might want to focus on a specific set of keywords, you’ll be able to make a compelling, data-based argument on why it’s important to improve non-overlapping keywords.

Let’s say you found out that a competitor to our perfume shop had dedicated pages for aroma-based perfumes, with listings that target “vetiver” or “white musk”. Replicating this won’t involve changing the client’s product line and will add new valuable keywords to the mix.

The client’s market share

Another way to evaluate the client’s business status quo is by using the Visibility metric as a market share indicator. Calculated as an impression share and weighted against search volumes, it shows you the growth potential compared to the client’s competitors and the total shares.

As it’s expressed as a percentage, you’ll know where to focus your attention.

For instance, if it’s a competitive market, and the main competitor has a Visibility of 70 percent, then improving the rankings for high-volume keywords in the top-three group will be a game-changer. You’ll also know which keywords to select for a winning SEO strategy.

Transparent calculations for a realistic timeframe

After thoroughly researching and selecting the targeted keywords at hand, modeling how the non-brand organic traffic might look if a particular performance is achieved in a timeframe of six or 12 months will help your agency set the right expectations.

To do so, you need to look at all the variables impacting your keyword list:

Search seasonality and the keywords’ year-over-year trend
How the inertial traffic influenced by seasonality only looks (as if the website’s rankings would stand still)
The performance in time toward the SEO goal, calculated as linear or exponential
The average CTR curve calculated for the top 10 positions for each mix of SERP features and device segmentation, showing you the actual clicks that manage to reach your client
The long-tail keywords and their impact on forecasted traffic

With this model in mind, you get to estimate sessions and conversions instead of ranks. For instance, in SEOmonitor’s forecasting module, the estimation of the additional conversions is based on the estimated additional visits multiplied by the corresponding conversion rate of each keyword included in the calculation. You can verify each input and output at an individual keyword level and see what makes a realistic or too far-fetched scenario.

Thus, you transform the loaded notion of forecasting into a more tangible idea – various additional traffic scenarios which translate into possible business results, moving the conversation towards marketing added value.

To make a case for a certain scenario, you can highlight what their traffic would look like with and without the proposed SEO campaign, being transparent about what went into your calculations and what assumptions you’ve made.

Letting the client understand the overall opportunity and what’s in it for their business will help you set a common ground for success.

Is it the right budget for the client’s business now?

When your agency builds a business case, another important thing is to evaluate the direct connection between SEO performance and results, correlated to an objective benchmark that both, you and the client can easily gauge.

Compare the SEO budget and forecasted results to its equivalent in Google Ads, and you’ll have an external comparison showing the worth that SEO brings. For instance, if the estimated Google Ads Value for your realistic scenario is $55,000 for 12 months, then a $500 to $700 retainer seems more plausible than a $1,500 one.

In contrast, if the estimated Google Ads Value reaches $250,000+ for the same 12 months timeframe, it’s clear that we’re talking about international SEO on a highly competitive market and a $5,000 to $7,000 retainer at least.

Instead of guesstimations and the painful back and forth of establishing a budget benchmark, you’ll now have an overview of where the business is and how you can contribute in terms of revenue. So these calculations can help you set the right price for that client profile.

Even if you choose not to put that forecasting scenario in your proposal and instead negotiate KPIs after the SEO technical improvements are in place (the third or fourth month of collaboration), you’ll have an important internal calibration tool at your disposal.

The forecasting exercise helps assess if the new client’s objective is worth it and keeps your agency accountable for the SEO strategy you propose.

Is the campaign going in the right direction?

An initial business case with variable scenarios helps the agency define success for the new client. Then, it’s just as important to track the SEO campaign’s progress once it’s in place. After all, forecasting is just a way to estimate a possible future and set “a north star” for both of you. The rest depends on how the strategy evolves against the shifting context.

Here’s where re-forecasting plays a significant part.

Perhaps the agency decides to share KPIs for the first time in the third or fourth month of collaboration after implementing the audit requirements. Or it’s time for the quarterly review, and the initial SEO strategy and subsequent forecasting are scrutinized. Either way, it’s crucial to revise and adapt.

Maybe there are new keyword lists to add and model into a traffic scenario or a digital PR opportunity to add to the overall plan. Maybe the client has additional products or services that they want to optimize that weren’t included in the starting plan.

For instance, coming back to our perfume shop and its pandemic challenges, it’s important to touch base regularly to see what new opportunities are in store. They might be looking to branch out in the home fragrance industry but don’t know how much demand is in their target market. As their SEO agency, you can re-pitch an SEO campaign based on search data for “home perfumes” and design a creative digital PR campaign with that hook.

This step of the client relationship-building process is an added advantage in proving how you’ve created business value and what more you can do.

Summary

Effectively communicating your proposed SEO campaign’s value is crucial for potential clients to decide if –

the price is right,
the timeframe is right,
the ROI is worth it.

It’s also a way to keep your agency honest and accountable.

A trustworthy forecasting methodology helps with all of the above, as you get to:

Establish a common definition of what success looks like – rankings achieved for relevant keywords, Visibility achieved against competitors, and other established factors which directly translates to additional traffic, conversions, revenue
Establish a realistic budget based on the client profile and its Google Ads equivalent value
Keep track of the SEO objective and re-forecast when it’s the case to adjust the strategy

SEOmonitor’s forecasting module supports SEO agencies to do all that with reliable data and all the necessary variables, taking into account seasonality, YoY trends, and more.

Plus, with the Google Slides integration, you get a Proposal Builder that automatically pulls the forecast data and transforms your business scenario into a pitch-ready presentation.

The forecasting module is just one of the solutions SEOmonitor develops for agencies to acquire, manage, and retain more relevant customers.

Join us in our quest to bring more transparency to the SEO industry!

The post How to show the business value of your SEO proposal appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

The importance of accurate keyword difficulty scores

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 17:18:28 +0300

30-second summary:

Keyword difficulty (KD) scores help digital marketers understand potential search engine performance
KD scores are useful in building SEO strategies, filtering out ineffective keywords
Low competition keywords give an advantage in attracting traffic
Some KD calculating tools may be inaccurate due to the use of limited parameters
Semrush has developed a new formula for KD score calculations that it says has improved accuracy

With countless companies competing for the same audience, digital marketers need to develop a highly effective and targeted content strategy to find a way through the crowded market and connect with potential customers. Keyword difficulty (KD) is an essential metric to assist marketers in formulating an effective SEO strategy for reaching the top of search engine results pages (SERP).

Focusing on a keyword with a low KD score can achieve faster results with traffic from search engines as there is less competition. Whereas keywords with a higher KD score will typically have far more competition in search results, making it much harder to appear near the top of SERPs in the short term. Long-term improvements are achievable but will take time and require multiple SEO measures to be implemented.

KD calculation tools can determine how effective a keyword may be in search results. However, a lot can depend on the SEO tools that digital marketers are using. Such tools are not always accurate due to the limited parameters that can vary from developer to developer. The result is that the KD calculation may be inaccurate and even lead a digital marketer to believe that their keywords will perform better in practice than in reality.

Content created in partnership with Semrush.

Semrush, an online visibility management platform provider, has developed what it says is a proven formula to achieve an accurate KD percentage score based on in-depth research into SEO patterns and client feedback.

How Semrush’s Keyword Difficulty platform works

This year, Semrush released an updated version of its KD metric. The new formula was the result of extensive lab testing by the company’s team of data scientists and engineers. They studied patterns of SERP activity for approximately 120,000 keywords, covering more than 100 parameters and varying contexts to determine an accurate KD value. Alongside this, the teams analyzed the data to determine the difficulty that keywords would face in using SEO to appear on the first page of search results.

The three steps to decode your SERP standing and opportunities

Semrush’s platform has three steps to calculate the formula.

1. SERP analysis

The first involves SERP analysis, where the median value is identified for three metrics throughout URLs on the first page of search results. The three median values are:

The number of referring domains pointing to the ranking URLs
The authority score of the ranking domains
The ratio of follow/no-follow links to the ranking URLs

2. Keyword parameter analysis

The second step is an analysis of keyword parameters. This considers the above SERP factors, alongside a closer inspection of individual keywords. All factors are weighted differently in Semrush’s formula regarding the likelihood of influencing the first-page ranking.

The parameter weighted the highest by some way is the median number of referring domains for ranking URLs, totaling 41.22 percent. While the second-largest weighted share is the median authority score for ranking domains at 16.99 percent. Search volume is third with 9.47 percent, and the median follow/no-follow ratio for ranking URLs is a fraction lower in the fourth position at 9.17 percent.

Other parameters include featured snippets, branded keywords, and site links, with the weighted share becoming progressively smaller. Factors that can harm the KD score are keywords with a high word count and no SERP features.

3. The calculations

The third step is the calculation itself. The formula also adapts for each country, taking a nation’s population size and the number of websites into account when calculating the KD score based on Semrush’s regional database.

What KD scores mean for your SEO performance

On Semrush’s KD platform, the user can enter up to 100 keywords at a time to check the KD score. Crucially, the platform can help the user find valuable low-competition keywords. KD scores can also be calculated for both long-tail and local keywords. In addition, the tool allows the user to compare their SEO strategy with competitors to see what is performing well and identify any keyword gaps.

The results provide the user with the KD rating and advice on what they need to do next to gain hits. At the lower end of the scale, scores of 0-14 percent are classed “very easy” with the strongest likelihood of new pages appearing near the top of Google rankings without the need for backlinks.

The next step up is 15-29 percent, which is considered “easy”. While there may be some competition, it remains possible to achieve a high ranking for new web pages. However, this will require quality content based on the keywords.

Things get progressively harder as the KD scores get higher. A score of 85-100 percent, for example, is classified “very hard”, where keywords face the strongest competition and the odds are stacked against new websites breaking through. A ranking is still possible through features such as on-page SEO, link building, and campaigns to promote content. In this instance, pay-per-click advertising may prove more beneficial.

To find out more about Semrush and its Keyword Difficulty platform download its recent whitepaper.

The post The importance of accurate keyword difficulty scores appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise. Marian Anderson

Sun, 31 May 2020 02:52:32 +0300

No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger than its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise. Marian Anderson

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Want to create a product you can sell on your blog, but have no idea what it should be? Here are some tips to help you come up with the perfect idea for your first product. https://problo.gr/3c9ZOY9 pic.twitter.com/3sSe4bN2yO

Fri, 29 May 2020 16:33:06 +0300

Want to create a product you can sell on your blog, but have no idea what it should be? Here are some tips to help you come up with the perfect idea for your first product. https://problo.gr/3c9ZOY9 pic.twitter.com/3sSe4bN2yO

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All was going so well with this delivery from @AppleSupport until something happened at Podong International Airport.... What's going on @FedExHelp?pic.twitter.com/johipH1ETb

Fri, 29 May 2020 03:19:59 +0300

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Promoting other people's products as an affiliate may seem like a silly idea when you're thinking of creating your own. But you can a lot by doing it, which will give you a better chance of selling your own products. https://problo.gr/3c9ZOY9 pic.twitter

Thu, 28 May 2020 19:33:06 +0300

Promoting other people's products as an affiliate may seem like a silly idea when you're thinking of creating your own. But you can a lot by doing it, which will give you a better chance of selling your own products. https://problo.gr/3c9ZOY9 pic.twitter.com/atbRy1rHen

When you're starting out as a blogger, you may feel that your lack of blogging experience makes you look silly. Here's how I got over that hurdle, and how you can too.pic.twitter.com/nRwFCPsT8T

Thu, 28 May 2020 15:33:02 +0300

When you're starting out as a blogger, you may feel that your lack of blogging experience makes you look silly. Here's how I got over that hurdle, and how you can too. pic.twitter.com/nRwFCPsT8T

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Just switch from using Apple's smaller Magic keyboard to the full-sized numeric one and my typing accuracy has plummeted. Am almost going to have to completely retrain my brain for shortcut keys.

Thu, 28 May 2020 07:42:19 +0300

Just switch from using Apple's smaller Magic keyboard to the full-sized numeric one and my typing accuracy has plummeted. Am almost going to have to completely retrain my brain for shortcut keys.

Sometimes watching the news out of the US I wonder if it's all one big joke that the country is playing on the rest of the world to see how long we'll believe it's real. Maybe these last few years have been them trolling us!?

Thu, 28 May 2020 05:16:17 +0300

Sometimes watching the news out of the US I wonder if it's all one big joke that the country is playing on the rest of the world to see how long we'll believe it's real. Maybe these last few years have been them trolling us!?

Search Engine Marketing Feed 2

Unbounce: Revolutionizing your marketing with high-performing landing pages

Master landing page A/B testing for higher conversions

How a three-word test led to a 104% conversion increase

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 9: 2024 AI Marketing Playbook

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 8: Try AI - Part Deux

Smart Builder Tutorial: Launch a Shoppable Landing Page in Minutes Demo

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 7: AI on Trial

Smart Builder Tutorial: Create a High-Converting Landing Page With AI (Bloopers) #ai #marketing

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 6: Arms Race

5 Powerful Buying Motives & How to Appeal to Them to Increase Sales

1. The need for security

2. The need for esteem

3. The need for self-actualization

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 5: Try AI

3 Time-Saving Facebook Automated Rules to Try (+1 to Avoid!)

What are Facebook ads automated rules?

Types of Facebook automated rules

Custom rules

Client Retention for Agencies: 10 Tips for Keeping Clients for the Long Haul

What is client retention and how do I measure it?

Why is client retention so important for your agency?

10 tips to boost client retention

Tip #1: Qualify new clients thoroughly

Tip #2: Set proper expectations

Tip #3: Provide an excellent onboarding experience

Tip #4: Understand your clients’ business goals

Tip #5: Get to know your clients personally

Instagram Threads: What You Need to Know (+5 Fast Tips to Get Started)

Table of contents

What is Threads?

Why is Instagram Threads important?

Threads vs. Twitter

Should your business be on Instagram Threads?

Smart Builder Tutorial: The Easiest Way to Create a High-Converting Landing Page With AI

5 Adaptable Buyer Persona Examples to Inspire Your Own

What is a buyer persona?

Why create buyer personas for your business?

More effective marketing

Enhanced sales performance

The 7 Pillars of Building a Future-Proof PPC Account Structure

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 4: AI for Data Geeks

49 Back-to-School Messages for A+ Marketing (With Tips & Examples)

Table of contents

Back-to-school messaging tips

Google Ads for Lead Generation: 10 Practical Strategies That Really Work

How to use Google Ads for lead generation

1. Know your target audience

2. Utilize the right keywords

3. Craft compelling ad copy

Ranked: The 14 Most Important Copywriting Skills Every Marketer Needs

1. Curiosity

2. Empathy

The Only Website Maintenance Checklist You’ll Ever Need

What is website maintenance?

Why website maintenance is important

How to do website maintenance

Backup your site

Check site speed

Perform security updates

Delete unused plugins

Check content analytics

Hunt down broken links

Review browser compatibility

Test site forms

Unprompted Podcast: AI, Marketing and You | Episode 3: Agencies of Change

Social media marketing: four keys to boost lead generation and sales

30-second summary:

1. Regularly updated content boosts search engine rankings

2. A positive social media brand presence strengthens online reputation

3. Measure social media effectiveness

A. Increase in followers

B. Reactions on published posts

C. Social media reach

D. Referral traffic

E. Click-through rate (CTR)

4. ROI based on soft metrics

Make definite social media marketing goals

The Future SEO: Boardroom edition

30-second summary: