How to Design a Homepage That Converts

First impressions matter.

When someone visits your website, the first thing they’ll see is your homepage. The way your homepage is set up can make or break your conversion rates.

I know how much time and effort it takes to improve your SEO ranking and drive more traffic to your website.

If you’re seeing a boost in your website traffic but not in conversions, it’s time for you to analyze your homepage. It doesn’t matter what type of business you have or what industry you’re in, focusing on the design of your homepage pays off.

Where do you start?

Your website has so much to offer. It can be overwhelming to decide what you want visitors to see first. It’s tempting to include as much information as possible.

I’ve helped tons of businesses revamp their websites. I’m going to share some of the top elements of a homepage you need to focus on.

If you follow these tips, your homepage will turn into a conversion machine. Here’s how you do it.

Keep it simple

Websites with simple designs have higher conversion rates.

As I briefly stated earlier, some websites try to cram as much information as possible into a small space on their homepages. They want to show off all their products, services, awards, affiliations, contact information, and anything else you can imagine.

If this sounds like your homepage, simplifying your design should be the first thing on your agenda.

It’s fine to include lots of information on your website, but it doesn’t need to be on your homepage. Take a look at this design from the Mint homepage.

Do you see how effective this is?

The menu bar at the top of the screen has only four options. The amount of text is minimal, so it’s very easy for users to scan the page and focus on headlines.

There is a clear point of emphasis on the middle of the screen. It’s their call-to-action (CTA) button, encouraging visitors to sign up for free.

Even if you’ve never heard of this company, this design makes it obvious what help they can offer their customers:

• finances
• budgets
• credit score
• bills
• savings

These buzzwords are easy to read because the layout is so simple.

Now the visitor can navigate on the website to find more information about what they’re interested in. But if Mint tried to explain every detail of their services in this small space, people would get distracted and overwhelmed.

While this homepage has some color, it’s used sparingly and tastefully. The colors aren’t contrasting and don’t make it difficult to read anything on the page.

To keep your website simple, you need to choose the right color scheme. This will help improve your conversion rates.

Compare your existing homepage to the example above. Try to replicate it in terms of the amount of text, navigation options, and CTA.

Focus on speed

Speed has a huge impact on your conversion rates. If your website loads too slowly, it’ll kill your conversions.

People are impatient. In today’s digital age, we’re used to getting content at lightning speeds. If a website doesn’t load right away, its bounce rate is likely to increase.

Your page loading time has a direct correlation with the previous point I talked about. Simple websites load faster.

If you’ve got tons of images, long blocks of text, complicated menus, lots of colors, flashing lights, and other unnecessary elements, your website won’t load very quickly.

But what if you’ve got a simple design and it still takes a while for your website to load?

I’d evaluate your web hosting services. While it may sound appealing to choose the cheapest option for hosting your website, you get what you pay for.

It’s worth it to spend the extra money to ensure your website doesn’t crash or have problems loading pages, especially the homepage.

The increase in website traffic and the boost in conversions will easily pay for the extra costs, plus extra in the long run.

Use quality images

Images can definitely help boost your conversion rates.

Websites without images seem plain, boring, and somewhat unprofessional. But that doesn’t mean you need to go crazy and put as many images as possible on your homepage.

As you now know, too many images can hurt your page loading time. Furthermore, research from Google found pages with fewer images have higher conversion rates.

Use images sparingly. Make sure all your images look professional. If they look as if you took them on a flip phone in 2006, it won’t help your cause.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use all the pictures you feel you need to on your website. I’m just saying you don’t need to have them all on your homepage.

For example, let’s say you have an ecommerce website.

You should have multiple-angle, high-quality images of every item you’re selling. You could have six, eight, or ten photos for just one item.

However, save those pictures for when a customer clicks on that product.

If you were highlighting your top five best-selling items on your homepage, you’d have 50 images if you used every single one. Instead, use one image per item. When a visitor clicks on one of them, they’ll see the remaining photos of that product on the corresponding page.

Run A/B tests

Let’s say you’ve made some changes to your homepage, and you’ve noticed your conversions have increased. That’s great news. Does that mean you’re done?

Absolutely not. While your conversions may have increased, you don’t know whether you’ve reached your peak yet. Keep striving to improve your website.

One of the best ways to figure out whether you’ve got the most optimal design for your homepage is through A/B testing.

Also known as split testing, A/B testing involves running alternative versions of the same page to see which one has a higher conversion rate: 50% of your traffic sees one design, while the other 50% sees another.

It’s important you don’t change too many elements between the two versions when you run these tests. Otherwise, you won’t know which factor impacted the results.

You’re better off changing one element only, such as the CTA button text, color, or placement.

Here’s an example of an A/B test from the Sim City homepage:

Look at the difference between the two variations. The homepage on the right eliminated some text and an image. As a result, the simplified version had a 43% increase in checkouts.

That’s because the control version had too many distractions. The variation was much simpler, so it was easier for the users to focus on checking out.

I see cases like this all the time in my consulting work. Businesses are typically convinced that an offer, such as the one above offering $20 off a purchase, will help drive sales and increase conversions.

But it isn’t until they run an A/B test that they discover what really works.

The possibilities are nearly endless when it comes to your A/B tests. After you test one element, change something else and run another test.

If you initially tested the phrasing of your CTA button, test the color next. After that, test its size or placement. You can even test various images to see which one converts better.

A/B testing is an ongoing process. The tests should go on for as long as they need to until you feel your results are accurate.

Don’t let these tests get in the way of making other improvements to your homepage, such as simplifying the design or increasing the page loading time.

Make sure your call to action is clear

I know I’ve mentioned your CTA a few times throughout this guide, but it’s so important that it’s worth discussing in greater detail.

You can’t expect to have high conversion rates if your CTA isn’t glaringly obvious on your homepage. Although it’s critically important, many websites neglect their CTAs:

These numbers blow me away. Less than half of all the websites have a CTA that can be found in under three seconds.

People visiting your website won’t spend much time looking for the button that puts money in your pocket. If it’s not obvious, they’ll move on.

That’s why simplicity, which I talked about earlier, is so important. If you have few distractions on your website, the visitor’s eye will go straight toward your CTA.

Look again at the Mint website, or the Sim City’s A/B test. It’s very easy to find call-to-action buttons in both cases in just a couple of seconds.

Here’s a look at the homepage for one of my other companies, Crazy Egg:

As you can see, I practice what I preach.

The design of this homepage is extremely simple, and the CTA can be spotted instantly.

Here’s something else you should keep in mind. Your homepage should have only one CTA. Yes, you’ll have links to other pages on your site.

But when it comes to getting conversions, the call-to-action button needs to be obvious:

• sign up today
• subscribe now
• join for free
• click to learn more
• shop now to get 20% off your purchase.

All of these are great CTAs for a homepage. However, these won’t be effective if they’re all used simultaneously.

The site visitors won’t know which one to click on, and it will hurt your conversions. Focus on the most profitable action.

Optimize your website for mobile devices

It’s awesome that your site works well on a desktop, but that’s not enough if you want the highest conversion rates possible. Your homepage needs to be optimized for smartphones and tablets.

Earlier I discussed the importance of speed. If your site takes too long to load, users will abandon the page.

Obviously, this will crush your conversion rates. Half of Internet users expect your mobile website to load in less than two seconds.

Mobile optimization is important for all websites in every industry. However, it’s even more important for ecommerce stores.

That’s because the majority of online shoppers use their smartphones to shop.

If you have an ecommerce store that’s not mobile optimized, you’re missing out on a huge portion of the market.

Optimizing your homepage for mobile users needs to be a priority.

Conclusion

If you’re unhappy with your conversion rates, analyze your homepage.

Start by simplifying the design. This will make it easier for visitors to find your CTA.

Simplicity also translates to a faster page loading time. Make sure you have suitable web hosting service.

Your homepage should have high quality images. Just be sure to use them sparingly. Too many images can have a negative impact on your conversions.

Run A/B tests to see which elements of your homepage can be modified to improve conversions.

Making sure your homepage and the rest of your website is optimized for mobile devices is an absolute necessity.

If you follow these tips, you’ll start to see your conversions rise almost instantaneously.

What elements of your website are designed to optimize conversion rates?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/IgPnrRUAjTQ/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171511766204

5 YouTube optimization tips to improve your video rankings

Just how big is YouTube these days? According to a really cool infographic that was released earlier in 2017, there are some pretty incredible statistics:

• YouTube is available and used in 88 countries around the world
• It is the second largest social media platform with over 1.5 billion monthly users, second only to Facebook (2 billion) and more than twice the number of Instagram (700 million)
• 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• Mobile viewing makes up half of the site’s streaming.

In other words, YouTube is HUGE. Not only has it been steadily growing since its initial launch in 2005, it has become the single biggest and most important video service on the web. While there are others that have come in is wake, none have reached the same level of popularity.

With that it mind, it is no wonder that so many people are looking to boost the effectiveness of their content on the platform. However, with so much use comes other struggles, like being seen in the crowd. If 720,000 hours are uploaded a day, you have to do everything possible to stand out and be noticed.

Here are five optimization tips for your YouTube channel and videos that will help you to start doing better in search, get recommended, and gain more traction.

Find the sweet spot with your video title length

There are several things to consider when coming up with the video title:

• How engaging and catchy it is for the eye
• How many important keywords you use within your title (those keywords are going to help you rank that video in both YouTube and Google search)
• Which part of the title is immediately visible when people search YouTube or see your video thumbnail in YouTube-generated related videos.

Taking all of the above in the account, the sweet spot for your video title is going to be around 100 characters. That is enough to give a unique, descriptive title while still showing in search without a cut off.

Make sure that title not only describes what is happening in the video and contains key phrases you have already researched, but it is also attention grabbing enough that people will want to click on it.

When crafting a video title, consider including the following:

• Include the important names and entities (your interviewee, event name, branded hashtag, featured brand name, etc.)
• Location (especially if you are targeting a specific locale)
• Your important keyword you’d like the video to show up for.

To distinguish that important keyword, use keyword clustering technique that allows you to see core phrases behind obscure keyword variations. My own trick is to use Serpstat’s clustering feature that allows you to group keywords by how many identical URLs rank in Google for each specific query:

You can read more on how Serpstat clustering feature works in this guide.

You may also to match each keyword group to appropriate keyword intent to make sure your future video content will cover the immediate need and prompt engagement.

Make your descriptions longer

Video and channel descriptions are another valuable resource for drawing traffic to all of your content. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters, which is between 500 and 700 words.

The rule of thumb is obvious: The more original content you have below your video, the easier for search engines it is to understand what your video is about and what search queries to rank it for.

Not every description needs to be that long, but aiming for around 2,000 characters for videos and 3,000 for channels is a good place because it gives you the space necessary to optimize your keyword use and give some context to viewers. More is fine, but make sure you aren’t filling it with a lot of pointless fluff.

Make the first 150 characters of a description count

Of the words you write, the first 150 characters are the most important. That is because YouTube cuts it off with a (More) tag after the point, so the viewer has to specifically opt in to reading the rest. Not all of them are going to do that.

You should make sure those first characters tell the viewer what they really need to know in order to connect with what they are reading. From there you can focus more on keywords and the rest of the description, as it will still count the same towards searches.

It is also a great place to link out to other channels, your website, etc. Make sure your call to action (CTA) is in the first words, such as liking, subscribing, learning more, etc.

Have a good, high-resolution thumbnail

Thumbnails are pretty standard for monetized video channels at this point. You have probably noticed that they follow a certain pattern: silly face, bright colors, something odd in the background, over the top. Sure, it seems annoying. But they follow the formula because the formula works.

Now, you don’t have to do the same thing. You just want to make sure that you have an eye catching, visually stimulating thumbnail in the recommended 1280 x 720 size. There are a few generators out there to help you make one, but my thumbnail maker of choice right now is Adobe Spark.

Keep in mind that you want a standard format across all of your thumbnails. For instance, if you do your face on one then you should do them on all. If you use some kind of animation or logo, use that.

You want to be immediately recognizable to anyone who follows your channel right from the suggested videos sidebar, or the search results. If you have old videos, go back and upload thumbnails to each one to start getting some better click results.

Furthermore, make sure your thumbnails are readable: Viewers should be able to easily see what it is about at a glance when seeing it in the right-hand column of the suggested videos or on a small mobile device.

Utilize playlists – I mean it!

Playlists are incredibly helpful. First of all, they help you group together certain videos right on your channel. So let’s say you did a series on how to increase your YouTube views and it was split into ten videos. You would create a playlist on your channel titled “Super YouTube Tips” so that people could find them all in one place. But that has an additional benefit.

Search leans towards introducing playlists right at the top of the results page. It also allows people to specifically search for playlists. That is great because it can introduce viewers to multiple videos instead of one and many will choose to pop on a playlist and watch straight through everything there.

If you do a creative series with a continued plot you will find this is a huge help and makes it a million times easier to sort it out, even if YouTube screws with the order on your channel (an issue more than one content creator has had in the past, take it from me).

To sum that up, YouTube playlists help you:

• Increase your chances to rank your video content for a wider variety of phrases (which is also helpful for brand-focused results)
• Improve engagement rate with your videos by giving your audience collections of videos so that they can sit back and watch endlessly. And we know that engagement is the crucial ranking factor when it comes to YouTube rankings.

To illustrate the point, here’s a quick example of how we were able to grab two spots for our show name with the playlist:

Bonus tip: Feature your videos on your site

Finally, an obvious but often missed tactic is to increase your YouTube channel performance by prominently displaying your videos on your site. It’s simple: the more people watch your videos (especially if they watch more of each of your videos), the more exposure YouTube offers to your content through suggesting your videos as related.

One of the most effective ways to generate more views for your channel is to promote your videos outside of YouTube, i.e. use your blog and social media channels. There’s a variety of WordPress themes that aim at doing exactly that: promote your YouTube channel prominently on-site.

Furthermore, promote your videos on social media as much as it makes sense for your audience to build additional exposure, links, and re-shares.

Do you have any tips for optimizing YouTube? Let us know in the comments!

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/03/02/5-youtube-optimization-tips-to-improve-your-video-rankings/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171456930504

A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics: Real-time reports

Google Analytics is a tool that can provide invaluable insights into what’s happening on your website, your levels of traffic and engagement, and the success of your campaigns.

However, to a newcomer to Google Analytics, the array of different reports available can seem a little overwhelming. Once you’ve got Google Analytics set up for your website, where do you look first? Where will you find the most useful data for your campaigns?

Reports on Google Analytics are broadly divided into two types. There are standard reports, which are the preset reports listed down the left-hand side of your dashboard, divided into the segments Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

The data that appears in these is predetermined by Google Analytics, but you also have the option to customize many of them, allowing you to use the standard reports as a base and then tweak them to your liking.

Then there are custom reports, which can either be created completely from scratch with whatever data you want to gather together in a single view, or created based on a standard report, with additional segments or filters added to tailor the report to your needs.

There are dozens of different standard reports available in Google Analytics, providing a wealth of insight into audience demographics, sources of traffic, content performance, campaign performance and much, much more.

In this series, we’re going to tackle the gargantuan task of explaining each segment of Google Analytics and the standard reports they contain. We’ll cover the data you can find within each standard report, and how it can be used in your marketing and SEO efforts.

First up are real-time reports. How do they work, and what kinds of campaigns are they useful for?

What are real-time reports?

As it says on the tin, the Real-Time Reports section in Google Analytics allows you to monitor activity on your site in real time, as it happens.

It can be a useful way of “taking the pulse” of your website in a specific moment, or tracking the response to a campaign in real-time. Just don’t get too obsessed with watching the numbers go up and down!

A visitor to your site qualifies for the real-time report if they have triggered an event, or pageview, within the last five minutes. This is different from the other types of standard report, where a session is defined by a 30-minute window.

The Real-Time Reports section is broken down into:

Overview

This is the big-picture view of what’s happening on your website at any given moment. The Real-Time Overview report shows how many users are currently active on your site, a list of the top active pages, top sources of referral traffic, top social traffic sources, the top locations that users are visiting from, and more.

Locations

This report drills deeper into the available data on where exactly in the world your users are accessing your website from.

In the initial view, this information is broken down by country, but if you select a country name from the list or the map of active users, you can ‘zoom in’ on exactly which cities your users are logging in from. If you select a city from the list or map, you can get even more granular and filter the data by that specific city.

Note that if you apply a country or city filter and then navigate to another report in the section, such as Traffic Sources, the data presented to you will continue to be filtered by that region until you opt to clear the filters.

Real-time location data can be useful if you’re running a campaign targeted at a specific region of the world and want to monitor its performance, or if you want to get a sense of where your users are accessing your website from at different times of day.

Traffic Sources

As the name indicates, this real-time report shows where on the web your visitors are coming to your site from.

The data is organized by medium (how the visitors are getting to your site – organic search, direct traffic, via email, via social media, and so on), source (where visitors are coming to your site from), and the number of active users – or, if you select the Page Views filter, the number of pageviews from that traffic source in the last 30 minutes.

This real-time report can be useful if, for example, you’ve had a few different mentions in the press recently and want to gauge which one is generating more traffic to your site, or if you’re running a social campaign and want to assess how well it’s working.

Content/Screens

The Content report (called Screens if you’re viewing analytics for a mobile app) shows which specific pages of your site visitors are currently active on, showing the page URL, the page title, and the number and percentage of active users on that page. Again, you can switch to viewing this by pageviews (or screen views) in the last 30 minutes instead of by active users.

Another handy feature of the real-time Content report is that it breaks down your user data by device, so you can see which percentage of visitors are accessing your site on desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Events

This report is useful if you’ve used Google Analytics’ Events feature to create custom events for interactions on your site – such as button clicks, downloads, video plays, ad clicks, and so on. More detailed, non-real-time data on Events can be found in the Behavior section of your Google Analytics dashboard.

You can then use the real-time data from this report to track the top events on your site as they occur, or switch to viewing those activated in the past 30 minutes. Google sub-divides these into Event Categories and Event Actions, and as with the Content report, also shows you the breakdown of which devices your visitors are using when they trigger Events.

Conversions

The Conversions report will track the real-time completion of any Goals you’ve set up in Google Analytics.

Goals are different to Events in that they track the completion of an activity that contributes to the success of your business, rather than just an interaction with your site. This can include making a purchase, filling in a sales form, subscribing to a mailing list, and so on. More detailed, non-real-time data about Goal completions can be found in the Conversions section of GA.

As with the previous two reports, the Real-Time Conversions report breaks down which devices your visitors are using when they convert, and also allows you to view the data by active users or by Goal Hits in the last 30 minutes.

How can you use real-time reports in your campaigns?

Testing and troubleshooting campaign setup

One very handy quick use for real-time reports in Google Analytics is to test that everything is set up and working correctly. Unlike with non-real-time reports, there’s no wait for data to begin displaying, so you can immediately tell if things are in order, or if there’s an issue you need to troubleshoot.

Maybe you’ve just set up a new tracking feature in GA, such as a new Event or Goal, and you want to make sure you’re registering the form submissions properly. Or you might have created a new tracking link for your email marketing campaign, and you want to test that it’s showing up in the reports as expected.

You can test these out by having someone from your team carry out the Event or Goal that you want to track, or click the link in your campaign email, and then monitoring real-time reports to make sure that the activity shows up correctly.

Monitor campaigns unfolding in real-time

As we mentioned earlier, it’s not always a good idea to get too bogged down in watching the numbers on your site go up and down – often, the best insights from a campaign can be gleaned after the fact, as it’s not always clear what’s taking place in the moment.

However, there are some types of campaign that benefit from real-time monitoring and influencing. For example, say you’re running a social campaign, and you want to adjust your level of activity in real time based on audience interaction.

Real-time reports are the best way for you to monitor this, and will tell you useful things like when activity from a post or a tweet has dropped off (meaning it’s time to push out the next one), turn on paid promotion, or ask influencers to give your campaign a boost.

Capitalize on what’s trending

You may also need to react in the moment to something that isn’t part of a pre-planned campaign. For example, sudden activity on a specific piece of content or on one of your social channels might alert you to a big press hit, or that particular topic suddenly being in the news.

Checking up on real-time reports every so often can tip you off to when this is happening, and allow you to respond in an agile fashion. If it’s a trending piece of content, you could spotlight it on your front page, or knock out a quick update or refresh.

If it’s a big press hit, you can monitor where the traffic is coming to your website from and plan how to capitalize on the attention: are lots of people finding you on Facebook? Can you update your Facebook page or push out some paid social advertising? If people are searching for your brand all of a sudden, now might be a good time to check how you appear for those search terms and if necessary, do some on-the-spot reputation management.

How do you make use of real-time reports in Google Analytics? If you have any novel ways of integrating these into a marketing campaign, share them in the comments!

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/03/01/a-guide-to-the-standard-reports-in-google-analytics-real-time-reports/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171456930314

The 5 SEO mistakes holding your ecommerce site back right now

Ecommerce sites are so different from other web platforms that SEO for them can almost be considered a separate branch of the industry.

While many fundamentals are the same, ecommerce, especially of the marketplace variety, introduces complications that could almost be ignored if they occurred on a smaller scale on a different type of website.

Let’s talk about five SEO mistakes that could be holding back your ecommerce site as we speak.

1. Duplicate content

Duplicate content is the bane of the ecommerce site’s existence, and I can almost guarantee you right now, if you have an ecommerce site that you haven’t audited for duplicate content, you have duplicate content. Especially if your site is on a marketplace model.

It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using or how informed you are about SEO – if you haven’t checked for it recently, it’s probably hurting your rankings.

Consider what Ben Davis at Econsultancy noticed happened to pages on three of Sports Direct’s websites. The parent company hosted the same product with identical product descriptions and similar layouts, on three different sub-brands: Cruise, Flannels, and Van Mildert.

What he found is that none of the pages had a consistent presence in the search results. The brand’s strong authority with search engines allowed the pages to rank with some semblance of consistency on the second page, but with a very important caveat: only one page would show up at a time.

Whenever one page did well, the others fell well below position 100 in the search results, effectively impossible to find.

This type of duplicate content is common for ecommerce sites, in particular marketplaces that sell products, which can be found elsewhere. Large marketplaces generally use generic product descriptions provided by the product seller, but in doing so they are creating duplicate content and, unless they are lucky, they almost certainly will not rank consistently on the front pages of the search results.

Custom product descriptions and design templates are highly recommended in order to combat this problem. Ecommerce sites with very large marketplaces can’t necessarily hope to ever do this for every product.

But following the Pareto principle – an economic principle which states that 20% of the invested input is responsible for 80% of the results obtained – updating your highest performing and most promising product pages with unique content is well worth the effort if you do so with a strong background in both SEO and writing copy for conversions.

However, this isn’t the only type of duplicate content that plagues ecommerce sites.

Another frequent issue is duplicates on your own site. The most common cause of this form of duplicate content is placing a filter in the URL parameter, such as a URL parameter for different colors of the same product, URL parameters to filter products on a category page, and so on.

While this form of duplication doesn’t typically lead to results as extreme as duplicates across different websites, it does dilute the search engine authority dedicated to any single version of the page, and if done en masse it can result in a downgrade in your site’s overall rankings because of Google Panda.

To deal with this type of duplicate content, you need to be sure to implement the rel=canonical tag in such a way that it consistently points to only one URL for any page with nearly identical variations.

2. Too many low-performing indexed content pages

The correlation between additional content on your site and additional search engine traffic is probably the most battle-tested strategy out there. A solid content marketing strategy is essentially guaranteed to increase your search engine traffic in the long haul, and we’ve seen it happen for literally every single client who stuck with it long enough to see the results.

Even so, there are circumstances in which a poorly optimized content strategy can actually backfire, produce too many irrelevant pages, and believe it or not, drag down your entire site in the search results. In fact, this happens a lot more often than many people realize.

Consider the case of Une Belle Vie. When they came to Inflow for help, they were seeing declines in search engine traffic.

After analyzing their site and performance in the search engines, Inflow concluded that the ratio of content to products was too high. This was diluting their authority with search engines and placing too much crawl budget and PageRank in the hands of low-performing blog posts.

After carefully identifying which pages to remove and which to keep, the site saw a steady increase in search traffic, a 30.04% jump in revenue, and a 5.25% bump in conversion rates.

So, does this mean you should shut down your blog?

No! I definitely wouldn’t recommend that, certainly not as a first resort at least.

The lesson here is more nuanced. Simply adding content to your site is a strategy that can do more harm than good by diluting your authority with search engines. If I had to guess, I don’t believe that Une Belle Vie’s traffic losses were the result of bad content, but of an unfocused content strategy without consideration given to search engines.

Your content efforts need to be focused, and it’s crucial that any authority built by your content strategy is channeled to your product landing pages.

As an important point, I would always first consider optimizing existing pages over removing them. Pages that perform relatively weakly often do so because they don’t send a message clear enough to the search engines, about their purpose.

It is also often the case that several thin pages of content should be combined into a single, comprehensive resource. Keyword research and knowledge of technical SEO are a big plus here.

Only after addressing opportunities for optimization should you start cutting pages. In the process, it’s important to ensure that the pages you remove:

• Are not a source of existing search engine traffic
• Are not capturing inbound links from external sources
• Are redirected to related resources to capture any inbound authority they may have already had

3. User-generated content (not enough or too much)

User-generated content is a double-edged sword. It can work wonders. Wikipedia is entirely user-generated, and it wins the search results. It’s been central to Amazon’s success, with user reviews building more trust with buyers than any branding efforts ever could.

But the dark side of user-generated content is as ugly as its upside is beautiful. When Google first released Panda, eBay fell from #6 to #25 on Moz’s list of sites with the most top ten search result listings. The low quality content produced by seller/users on eBay was definitely a factor and likely central to those losses.

So, how should you deal with user generated content?

First, I want to stress that user-reviews are almost certainly a good move. Recent studies have shown that adding user reviews to your website improves organic search traffic by approximately 30%.

It’s difficult to estimate to what extent this is due to a subsequent reduction in portions of duplicate content, to rich snippets including star ratings in the search results, to Google ranking pages with user reviews higher directly, or to user behavior, sending more positive signals to Google after user reviews were added.

However, it is that these factors add up, the end result is clear. Adding user reviews to your site will almost certainly improve your search engine traffic.

If you’re afraid of user reviews trashing your reputation, that’s less of a concern than you might think. Believe it or not, products with diverse star ratings actually perform better than products with five-star only ratings. By including some authentication into the process, you can cut down on trashing from anonymous sources, and if you respond well to criticism, it can often improve performance better than never having been criticized in the first place.

Bear in mind that most people won’t leave a review unless you ask. Research by Trustpilot indicates that people are twice as likely to leave a review if you ask them (jumping from 14 to 29%).

So, what about the dark side of user-generated content? Consider the case of eBay versus Wikipedia. Both are user-generated content sites, but Wikipedia thrives under Panda while eBay suffered after its introduction.

The key is process. Wikipedia has processes in place to ensure quality. While those processes wouldn’t satisfy a college professor, they are sufficient to create a relatively trustworthy resource with the ability to consistently meet quality expectations.

Putting moderators and other processes in place to keep the quality level high are vital if you want user-generated content to work for your ecommerce platform. Giving users the ability to rate one another’s content also helps keep quality levels high. Take Amazon’s ability to sort reviews by “most helpful” as the gold standard here.

4. Not optimizing existing pages with better keywords

This is one change that every ecommerce site should make, preferably on some sort of repeated schedule.

Keyword research is one of those factors that’s so important for SEO that it’s taken as obvious, and for that reason it also paradoxically gets ignored more often than it should. This is especially true when it comes to optimizing your existing pages.

Here is a process that I recommend using that Darren DeMatas calls the “Double Jeopardy” technique, and he shares an example of using it to boost search traffic by an unparalleled 1780%.

Here is the gist of the process:

1. Go to Google’s Keyword Planner and add your product page URL to the tool. To narrow it down to informational keywords, you can add “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how” as required terms. This is good for blog posts and similar content, but not a good fit for product landing pages.

2. Take the keywords to SEMrush or a similar tool in order to identify which keywords have competition you can beat. In addition to metrics provided by tools like this, you should also scope out the competition on the front page for those phrases in order to ensure that they have the quality levels you can beat.

3. Find your highest performing pages for the target keyword by performing a “site:domain ‘keyword’” search in Google. This will tell you which page on your site already performs best for the keyword.

4. Do an “inurl:forum” search for your keyword to see what information people have on the topic that you won’t necessarily find on the front page of search results. Forums are a great place to start the research, since they give you an idea of exactly what people want to know or are struggling with.

Whether you are using this to put together a blog post or a landing page that overcomes buyers’ objections, this research is incredibly useful. Other creative searches and sources of information are also encouraged.

5. Now update your content to ensure that it would be the most promising thing on the front page for that search phrase. That means your title should stand out and that the content on your page either solves users’ needs better than anything else on the front page, or that it overcomes buyer objections and understands their purchase intents better than any other landing page, on the front page.

We’ve developed similar processes internally and they almost never fail to increase search engine traffic, especially when applied as a strategy for your entire site, as opposed to an occasional tweak to a few pages on your site.

Using this process, you capitalize on your existing page data and authority, in order to rank for the kinds of terms that Google is already prepped to reward you for, as opposed to simply picking the highest traffic keywords off, of the list of suggestions that Google’s Keyword Planner gives you, after plugging in a generic and obvious keyword.

Keep in mind that you can also put a competitor’s URL into the keyword planner to get suggestions.

Another common issue with keywords on ecommerce sites is their hyper-focus on branded keywords. Most product pages are built around the product name and the brand name.

By no means should you remove this information or take it out of the most prominent keyword locations (like the URL, title tag, and first paragraph). However, in addition to this branded information, you should also make an effort, to include keywords related to the product that aren’t about the brand or product model.

These may be referred to as “generic” keywords, although it’s still important to make an effort to use highly specific keywords matching very specific user needs. The point is that you should step up your keyword game and indicate what the page will do for people who aren’t searching for specific brands or product names.

5. Poor internal linking

Ecommerce sites often have an enormous number of products, and as a result it can be incredibly difficult to reach any given page using the links on the site. This doesn’t just mean it’s hard for a user to navigate to a page, it also means that PageRank flow through your site can become diluted, leading to important pages receiving less authority with the search engines than they ought to.

Victorious SEO was able to help Blomdahl USA earn 440% ROI, in large part by repairing poor link architecture.

Getting your link architecture under control is an absolute necessity if you want your ecommerce site to be optimized for search engines. Issues with link architecture generally come in four different forms:

Poor semantic structure

A link architecture with this issue doesn’t organize the site, hierarchically. Pure PageRank is only one factor the search engines consider, and the relevance of the links is also a crucial consideration.

Site navigation, folder structure, and interlinking should be systematic. Some organic contextual cross-linking between categories is of course fine, even preferred, but if there is no clear hierarchy in place at all, your interlinking does very little for you.

Excessive link depth

Something is very wrong if it takes more than a few clicks to get from the homepage to any product page. Consider the six degrees of separation rumored to connect any two individuals on the planet. If it takes 10 degrees of separation to get from your homepage to a product page, even the most obscure one, you do not have an optimized site.

Too many links from one point to the next means it’s difficult for search engines to crawl your site and discover pages. It also means that those deep pages receive almost no PageRank.

No prioritization

This is the opposite of excessive link depth. It’s what happens when there are so many links on every page that the most authoritative and important pages on your site receive virtually no attention from search engines. This is a case of diluting your authority by not prioritizing what matters.

Not enough links

Related to excessive link depth, sometimes it’s the case that a page may not be reachable at all from links elsewhere on the site. The most common cause of this is using two different platforms to create separate sections of the site, then failing to interlink them.

Conclusion

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen an ecommerce site that wasn’t suffering from SEO issues of some kind.

There is essentially always room for improvement, and these five mistakes are the typical places I find myself starting. If you run an ecommerce site, I highly recommend starting with these issues.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/03/01/the-5-seo-mistakes-holding-your-ecommerce-site-back-right-now/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171456930014

Mystified by martech? Introducing the ClickZ Buyers Guide series

Search Engine Watch sister site ClickZ has just launched the first report in its new series of buyers guides, which aims to to disentangle and demystify the martech landscape for marketers.

The guide, which focuses on bid management tools, covers a range of market leading vendors and draws on months of research and more than 1,600 customer reviews.

This will be the first in a series of guides created using the collective knowledge of the ClickZ and Search Engine Watch communities to help our readers arrive at more informed technology decisions.

The modern martech landscape is complex and competitive, making it difficult for marketers to cut through the noise and select the right technology partners.

Our buyers guides are created with the objective of providing a clear view on the areas in which vendors excel, in order to allow our readers to establish successful relationships with the most suitable platforms.

What sets our guides apart is the use of a customer survey to hear directly from current clients of each software package. For the bid management tools guide, we received more than 1,600 survey responses, which has provided a wealth of valuable data across our six assessment categories.

 Graphs in the report are interactive to allow comparison.

The series of guides begins with bid management tools because of the importance these technologies hold in the modern martech stack. Along with deriving maximum value from the $92 billion spent annually on paid search worldwide, these platforms also help marketers manage their display advertising and social budgets, with some even providing support for programmatic TV buying.

This creates a varied landscape of vendors, with some focusing on the core channels of Google and Facebook, and others placing bets on the potential of the likes of Amazon to provide a real, third option for digital ad dollars.

Though the vendors we analyzed share much in common, there are subtle distinctions within each that make them suitable for different needs. A combination of customer surveys, vendor interviews, and expert opinion from industry veterans has helped us to draw out these nuances to create a transparent view of the current market.

Within the guide, you will gain access to:

• Tips on building a business case for investing in a bid management platform
• Questions to ask of potential bid management tool partners
• Profiles of the six vendors we analyzed
• The ClickZ and Search Engine Watch customer survey results

Follow this link to download the Bid Management Tools Buyers Guide on Search Engine Watch.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/28/mystified-by-martech-introducing-the-clickz-buyers-guide-series/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171410903354

Six steps to improving your local search strategy

With local search proven to be one of the hottest SEO trends of 2017, it is projected to maintain its standing among make-or-break optimization factors in 2018.

The competition between online and brick-and-mortar stores is heating up, and local search optimization can become a decisive factor in how a site ranks locally and, consequently, in how much traffic and clients it drives from local, on-the-go searches.

Fortunately, major local search tactics are not that hard to master. Follow the six steps below to achieve the best results in terms of SERPs, traffic, and conversions on the local battlefield.

Claim Google My Business

Failure to claim your company’s account at Google My Business may be the reason your website does not show up at the top spot of Google’s local search results. If you are not there (and Bing Places for Business), you are missing out on incredible opportunities to drive local traffic.

With Google’s local three-pack considered to be the coveted spot for every local business, you need to please the Google gods to get listed there:

• Go through the verification process. Google will send you an actual postcard, with a private PIN inside (provided you register at the GMB website and you own a business’s physical address). P.O. boxes are not allowed.
• Fill out all GMB listing elements: logo, photos, description, categories, business hours, payment methods, physical address (if any), phone number, website, etc. This information must be consistent across your website, GMB, and other directories.
• Optimize your GMB listing. Ensure that all text elements are written for humans and feature your top-priority local keywords (e.g. city, neighborhood, type of service, brand name, etc.)

According to Google My Business guidelines, any business can be unlisted if they violate any of the following rules:

• Using a URL redirect instead of a site’s actual URL
• Stuffing a company’s name field with keywords
• Registering multiple GMB listings for one company. If you have a multi-location business, read our guide to how to optimize your Google My Business listing to avoid a penalty
• Using any address that is not your business’s actual physical address.

Register with online directories and listings

According to a Local Search Ranking Factors Study 2017 by Moz, link signals play a key role in how sites rank in local search. However, many website owners pay zero attention to online directories and listings, which are a safe source of relevant, high-quality links.

The process here is simple:

• Find top business directories to get your company listed. Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Citysearch, Better Business Bureau, Angie’s List, and Yellow Pages are a must
• Research local business directories. Check out local media and government websites, or simply do a Google search
• Fill out and optimize your directory accounts. Be descriptive, write for humans, and do not forget about keywords. Confirm that all business details are consistent across every directory.

Bonus tip! Like directories and listings, citation data aggregators feed search engines with crucial bits of information about your business, such as your business name, address and phone number (NAP). Ensure that all information you submit to CDAs is consistent. Do not confuse your customers and Google.

Optimize titles and meta descriptions

Titles and meta descriptions are still a biggie in local search. Customizable HTML elements act as ads that define how a page’s content is reflected in search results, and they have to be catchy enough to get clicked.

Since titles and meta descriptions are limited to ~50+ and ~160+ characters, they may pose a challenge. These tips should help:

• Research the local keywords you want to rank for; analyze your competition
• Place local keywords at the beginning of the tag (you might use a formula by Moz: Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name)
• Cut page names from your titles (e.g. Home, Services, Products, etc.)
• Keep your titles relevant to corresponding pages; never duplicate your titles
• Write title tags for humans; avoid keyword stuffing.

What it comes down to is this: Even if your business gets a coveted No.1 position in local search thanks to all of your SEO efforts, you still have to incentivize users to click on your link. Masterfully crafted and meaningful titles and meta descriptions can make a big difference.

Collect and manage online reviews

According to BrightLocal’s 2017 Local Consumer Review Survey, 97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, with 85% trusting them as much as personal recommendations.

Since reviews can become your ultimate weapon for building trust and a positive reputation among your targeted audience, it makes sense to ask for them. As of 2017, 68% of consumers are willing to leave a review when asked by the business (70% in 2016).

So where do you start? Implement this simple process to manage your reviews:

• Start monitoring reviews. Use one of these tools: Reputation Loop, Get Five Stars, Trust Pilot, Vendata, Awario, Social Mention, Mention, Talkwalker Alerts. You may also rely on Hootsuite and Tiny Porch.
• Respond to each review, whether positive or negative. 30% of consumers consider an answer to their review as a key factor when judging a local business.
• Manage Google My Business reviews for your SEO. According to Google, the amount and score of GMB reviews are calculated into local search ranking.
• Manage Yelp, Facebook, and BBB.org reviews for marketing. These are the most trusted review platforms among consumers.

Bonus tip! Since consumers read an average of seven reviews before trusting a business, develop a strategy for generating ongoing positive reviews. Make sure to contact happy customers and ask for their reviews to mitigate the effect of negative reviews.

Use local structured data markup

Schema markup, a code used for marking up crucial bits of data on a page to assist search engine spiders in determining a page’s contents, is one of the most powerful but least-utilized SEO methods. With  ~10 million websites implementing Schema.org markup, you should start using this leverage against your competition.

However, structured data is not simple to master. As of 2017, Schema’s core vocabulary consists of 597 Types, 867 Properties, and 114 Enumeration values.

The good news is that Google has developed several tools to help business owners, marketers, and SEO professionals:

• Structured Data Markup Helper
• Google Data Highlighter
• Structured Data Testing Tool

Bonus tip! Make LocalBusiness schema your top priority. Particularly, discover specific Types for different businesses below the list of properties.

Appear in local publications and media

On the link-building side of things, content is your most powerful weapon. Reach out to local publications, media sites, and bloggers to serve up content that soothes the pain points of local consumers. You will not only get coverage and reach new audiences, but you will also garner relevant backlinks that push your site up in local searches.

Follow this process to amplify your linkbuilding efforts through content marketing:

• Make a list of local publications where you want your business featured or mentioned
• Research the people in charge (e.g. editors, journalists, bloggers, etc.)
• Figure out how to contact them
• Start sending out your individual pitches with content ideas
• Collect responses and find common ground on publication terms
• Analyze feedback if your attempts fail
• Rinse and repeat!

Bonus tip! Consider cooperating with other local businesses to build powerful content. Reach out to your partners to research ideas and create content with meat on its bones. Otherwise, you may fall short of beating out competition from national-level players.

Conclusion

SEO changes all the time, and local search is not much different. However, the six steps above will provide a solid bedrock for your local SEO strategy. Implement these tactics, and you will outperform your competition in local search results.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/28/six-steps-to-improving-your-local-search-strategy/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171410903199

Migrating HTTP to HTTPS: A step-by-step guide

On February 8th 2018 Google announced that, beginning in July of this year, Chrome will now be marking all HTTP sites as ‘not secure’, moving in line with Firefox, who implemented this at the beginning of 2017.

This now means that the 71% of web users utilizing either browser will be greeted with a warning message when trying to access HTTP websites.

Security has always been a top priority for Google. Back in 2014 they officially announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor. This was big, as Google never usually tells us outright what is or isn’t a ranking factor, for fear of people trying to game the system.

In truth, every website which stores user data shouldn’t need an extra incentive to prioritize security over convenience. In a previous article for Search Engine Watch, Jessie Moore examined the benefits and drawbacks of migrating your website to HTTPS, and determined that on net, it is well worth making the move.

However, if you are yet to make the switch, and nearly 50% of websites still haven’t, we’ve put together this guide to help you migrate to HTTPS.

1. Get a security certificate and install it on the server

I won’t go into detail here as this will vary depending on your hosting and server setup, but it will be documented by your service provider. Let’s Encrypt is a great free, open SSL certificate authority should you want to go down this route.

2. Update all references to prevent mixed content issues

Mixed content is when the initial page is loaded over a secure HTTPS connection, but other resources such as images or scripts are loaded over an insecure HTTP connection.

If left unresolved, this is a big issue, as HTTP resources weaken the entire page’s security, making it vulnerable to hacking.

Updating internal resources to HTTPS should be straightforward. This can usually be done easily with a find-and replace database query, or alternatively using the upgrade-insecure-requests CSP directive, which causes the browser to request the HTTPS version of any resource called on the page.

External resources, plugins and CDNs will need to be configured and tested manually to ensure they function correctly.

Should issues arise with external-controlled references, you only really have three options: include the resource from another host (if available), host the content on your site directly (if you are allowed to do so) or exclude the resource altogether.

3. Update redirects on external links

Any SEO worth their salt will have this at the top of their list, but it is still incredible how often this gets missed. Failure to update redirects on external links will cause every link acquired by the domain to chain, where the redirect jumps from old structure to new, before jumping from HTTP to HTTPS with a second redirect.

Each unnecessary step within a sequence of redirects allows Googlebot more of a chance to fail to pass all the ranking signals from one URL to the next.

We’ve seen first-hand some of the biggest domains in the world get into issues with redirect chains and lose a spectacular amount of visibility.

If you haven’t already audited your backlinks to ensure they all point to a live page within a single redirect step, you can get some big wins from this activity alone.

First, make sure you have all your backlink data. Do not rely on any single tool; we tend to use a minimum of Majestic, Ahrefs and Google Search Console data.

Next, run all referred pages through Screaming Frog to check the page still loads and do the following depending on the situation:

• Any ones which return a 4XX will need to be mapped to the secure version of the most relevant page still active on site.
• Any ones which go through multiple steps before resolving to a page will need the redirect updated to just point to the secure version of the destination page.

Finally, any which are working will be handled by the global HTTP to HTTPS redirect so do not require additional action.

4. Force HTTPS with redirects

Again, this will vary wildly depending on your setup. CMS’s such as WordPress and Magento will handle this for you automatically within the admin panel. Otherwise, you may need to update your .htaccess or webconfig files with a rule redirect, but this will be well documented.

One common issue we see with rule redirection is separate rules for forcing HTTPS as for forcing www. This will cause chains where first www. is added to the URL then HTTPS is forced in a second step.

Ensure you update any rule redirects to point to HTTPS as the destination to prevent this issue.

5. Enable HSTS

Using redirection alone to force HTTPS can still leave the system vulnerable to downgrade attacks where hackers force the site to load an unsecure version. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a web server directive which forces all requests for resources to be loaded through HTTPS.

You will need a valid SSL certificate, which must be valid for all subdomains. Providing you’ve do this, you’ll then need to add a line of code to your .htaccess or webconfig file.

6. Enable OCSP

Online certificate status protocol improves upon the certificate revocation list (CRL). With the CRL, browsers had to check the CRL for any issues with the server’s SSL certificate, but this meant downloading the entire list and comparing, which is both inefficient from a bandwidth and an accuracy perspective.

The OCSP overcomes these inefficiencies by only querying the certificate in question, as well as allowing a grace period should the certificate have expired.

7. Add HTTP/2

Hypertext transfer protocol is the set of rules used by the web which governs how messages are formatted and submitted between servers and browsers. HTTP/2 allows for significant performance increases due, in part, to the ability to process multiple requests simultaneously.

For example, it is possible to send resources which the client has not requested yet, saving this in the cache which prevents network round trips and reduces latency. It is estimated that HTTP/2 sites’ load times are between 50%-70% improved on HTTP/1.1.

8. Update XML sitemaps, Canonical Tags, HREF LANG, Sitemap references in robots.txt

The above should be fairly explanatory, and probably would have all been covered within point two. However, because this is an SEO blog, I will labor the point.

Making sure XML sitemaps, canonical tags, HREF LANG and sitemap references within the robots.txt are updated to point to HTTPS is very important.

Failure to do so will double the number of requests Googlebot makes to your website, wasting crawl budget on inaccessible pages, taking focus away from areas of your site you want Googlebot to see.

9. Add HTTPS versions to Google Search Console and update disavow file and any URL parameter settings

This is another common error we see. Google Search Console (GSC) is a brilliant free tool which every webmaster should be using, but importantly, it only works on a subdomain level.

This means if you migrate to HTTPS and you don’t set up a new account to reflect this, the information within your GSC account will not reflect your live site.

This can be massively exacerbated should you have previously had a toxic backlink profile which required a disavow file. Guess what? If you don’t set up a HTTPS GSC profile and upload your disavow file to it, the new subdomain will be vulnerable.

Similarly, if you have a significant amount of parameters on your site which Googlebot struggles to crawl, unless you set up parameter settings in your new GSC account, this site will be susceptible to crawl inefficiencies and indexation bloat.

Make sure you set up your GSC account and update all the information accordingly.

10. Change default URL in GA & Update social accounts, paid media, email, etc.

Finally, you’ll need to go through and update any references to your website on any apps, social media and email providers to ensure users are not unnecessarily redirected.

It does go without saying that any migration should be done within a test environment first, allowing any potential bugs to be resolved in a non user-facing environment.

At Zazzle Media, we have found that websites with the most success in migrating to HTTPS are the ones who follow a methodological approach to ensure all risks have been tested and resolved prior to full rollout of changes.

Make sure you follow the steps in this guide systematically, and don’t cut corners; you’ll reap the rewards in the form of a more secure website, better user trust, and an improved ranking signal to boot.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/26/migrating-http-to-https-a-guide/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171319355794

Are keywords still relevant to SEO in 2018?

What a useless article! Anyone worth their salt in the SEO industry knows that a blinkered focus on keywords in 2018 is a recipe for disaster.

Sure, I couldn’t agree with you more, but when you dive into the subject it uncovers some interesting issues.

If you work in the industry you will no doubt have had the conversation with someone who knows nothing about SEO, who subsequently says something along the lines of:

“SEO? That’s search engine optimization. It’s where you put your keywords on your website, right?”

Extended dramatic sigh. Potentially a hint of aloof eye rolling.

It is worth noting that when we mention ‘keywords’ we are referring to exact match keywords, usually of the short tail variety and often high-priority transactional keywords.

To set the scene, I thought it would be useful to sketch out a polarized situation:

Side one:

Include your target keyword as many times as possible in your content. Google loves the keywords*. Watch your website languish in mid table obscurity and scratch your head wondering why it ain’t working, it all seemed so simple.

(*not really)

Side two:

You understand that Google is smarter than just counting the amount of keywords that exactly match a search. So you write for the user…..creatively, with almost excessive flair. Your content is renowned for its cryptic and subconscious messaging.

It’s so subconscious that a machine doesn’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Replicate results for Side One. Cue similar head scratching.

Let’s start with side one. White Hat (and successful) SEO is not about ‘gaming’ Google, or other search engines for that matter. You have to give Doc Brown a call and hop in the DeLorean back to the early 2000s if that’s the environment you’re after.

Search engines are focused on providing the most relevant and valuable results for their users. As a by product they have, and are, actively shutting down opportunities for SEOs to manipulate the search results through underhanded tactics.

What are underhanded tactics? I define them by tactics that don’t provide value to the user; they are only employed to manipulate the search results.

Here’s why purely focusing on keywords is outdated

Simply put, Google’s search algorithm is more advanced than counting the amount of keyword matches on a page. They’re more advanced than assessing keyword density as well. Their voracious digital Panda was the first really famous update to highlight to the industry that they would not accept keyword stuffing.

Panda was the first, but certainly not the last. Since 2011 there have been multiple updates that have herded the industry away from the dark days of keyword stuffing to the concept of user-centric content.

I won’t go into heavy detail on each one, but have included links to more information if you so desire:

Hummingbird, Latent Semantic Indexing and Semantic Search

Google understands synonyms; that was relatively easy for them to do. They didn’t stop there, though. Hummingbird helps them to understand the real meaning behind a search term instead of the keywords or synonyms involved in the search.

RankBrain

Supposedly one of the three most important ranking factors for Google. RankBrain is machine learning that helps Google, once again, understand the true intent behind a search term.

All of the above factors have led to an industry that is focused more on the complete search term and satisfying the user intent behind the search term as opposed to focusing purely on the target keyword.

As a starting point, content should always be written for the user first. Focus on task completion for the user, or as Moz described in their White Board Friday ‘Search Task Accomplishment’. Keywords (or search terms) and associated phrases can be included later if necessary, more on this below.

Writing user-centric content pays homage to more than just the concept of ranking for keywords. For a lot of us, we want the user to complete an action, or at the very least return to our website in the future.

Even if keyword stuffing worked (it doesn’t), you might get more traffic but would struggle to convert your visitors due to the poor quality of your content.

So should we completely ignore keywords?

Well, no, and that’s not me backtracking. All of the above advice is legitimate. The problem is that it just isn’t that simple. The first point to make is that if your content is user centric, your keyword (and related phrases) will more than likely occur naturally.

You may have to play a bit of a balancing act to make sure that you don’t up on ‘Side Two’ mentioned at the beginning of this article. Google is a very clever algorithm, but in the end it is still a machine.

If your content is a bit too weird and wonderful, it can have a negative impact on your ability to attract the appropriate traffic due to the fact that it is simply too complex for Google to understand which search terms to rank your website for.

This balancing act can take time and experience. You don’t want to include keywords for the sake of it, but you don’t want to make Google’s life overly hard. Experiment, analyse, iterate.

Other considerations for this more ‘cryptic’ content is how it is applied to your page and its effect on user experience. Let’s look at a couple of examples below:

Metadata

Sure, more clickbait-y titles and descriptions may help attract a higher CTR, but don’t underestimate the power of highlighted keywords in your metadata in SERPs.

If a user searches for a particular search term, on a basic level they are going to want to see this replicated in the SERPs.

Delivery to the user

In the same way that you don’t want to make Google’s life overly difficult, you also want to deliver your message as quickly as possible to the user.

If your website doesn’t display content relevant to the user’s search term, you run the risk of them bouncing. This, of course, can differ between industries and according to the layout/design of your page.

Keywords or no keywords?

To sum up, SEO is far more complex than keywords. Focusing on satisfying user intent will produce far greater results for your SEO in 2018, rather than a focus on keywords.

You need to pay homage to the ‘balancing act’, but if you follow the correct user-centric processes, this should be a relatively simple task.

Are keywords still relevant in 2018? They can be helpful in small doses and with strategic inclusion, but there are more powerful factors out there.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/26/are-keywords-still-relevant-to-seo-in-2018/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171319355269

15 Ways to Use Snapchat for Your Business

The days of Snapchat being used solely for sending pictures between friends are over.

This social media platform has evolved. Your company can’t afford to ignore the impact this marketing channel can have on your business.

It’s an absolute necessity if you’re focusing on Generation Z as your target market. That’s because 71% of Gen Z use Snapchat as part of their daily routines. Plus, 51% of this group use Snapchat roughly 11 times each day.

While Snapchat is known for its popularity with teens, its market penetration is starting to hit young adults and older generations as well.

Snapchat is a viable marketing channel if your current target market falls anywhere between the ages of 12 and 34. But keep an eye on these trends as older generations may continue adapting to this platform.

In Q4 of 2017, Snapchat hit 187 million active daily users. The platform has seen more than an 18% growth rate in terms of daily users in the last year.

There is no sign of a slow down, and I expect these marketing trends to continue in the future.

What exactly does this mean for your business?

It’s great news. You now have another viable marketing channel to engage with your customers.

But this may be intimidating or confusing if you’ve never used Snapchat before and don’t know how to apply it to your business.

Fortunately, you’re in luck. I’ll show you the top 15 ways to use Snapchat for your business.

1. Post to your story often

Once you’ve created a Snapchat account, you need to make sure it’s active. The best way to approach this is by adding content to your story on a daily basis.

Anything you post on Snapchat will disappear after 24 hours. Posting content often will keep your brand fresh in the minds of your followers.

Just don’t go overboard. Posting 20 times in one day isn’t effective.

That’s because people will skip over your posts. Depending on how many people a user follows on Snapchat, they’ll have lots of stories to view each day.

But that doesn’t mean they are going to watch every single post in its entirety.

According to a study conducted by Snaplytics, engagement drops by 36% once users reach the fourth snap of a story. They also discovered that roughly 80% of your followers will see your post about 4 or 5 hours after it’s been added to your story.

What does this mean for you?

Based on these numbers, I’d recommend updating your Snapchat story about three times per day, every four or five hours.

This will help keep your engagement high and prevent your followers from skipping over your content.

2. Promote your Snapchat account on other marketing channels

For your Snapchat strategy to be successful, you need followers.

Rather than trying to conjure up followers out of thin air, try to target users following your business accounts on other platforms.

Look at how People Magazine uses this strategy in their Instagram bio:

This is really important for you, especially if you just created a Snapchat account for your company. Nobody’ll know you have an account unless you tell them.

In addition to Instagram, you can promote it on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can even work this promotion into your YouTube videos.

Tell your email subscribers to follow you on Snapchat and pitch it on your website too.

The more channels you promote it on, the greater the chance of getting more followers you’ll have.

3. Create a sponsored lens

People love to use Snapchat filters and lenses.

It’s estimated that sponsored filters are seen by 16 million users each day. These filters are a way for people to take creative photos.

Snapchat has plenty of them built directly into their platform. Instead of posting a basic selfie, users can make the image black and white, apply a filter to make their eyes abnormally large, or make their nose disappear.

Some filters for video snaps can even change the pitch of your voice.

All of these were created to make users have more fun. They’ll send a snap to their friends with one of these filters because it’s entertaining and often humorous.

But now businesses can create a sponsored filter as well. Gatorade used this strategy during Super Bowl 50, and it turned into one of the most successful Snapchat campaigns on record.

If you’ve ever watched the Super Bowl, you know it’s tradition for the winning coach to get Gatorade dumped on his head by the players. So Gatorade created a sponsored filter during the game that would simulate Gatorade getting dumped on the user’s head.

The filter had more than 165 million views and increased their purchase intent by 8%.

Here’s another example from Taco Bell to show you what these filters look like:

As you can see, the filters themselves are silly, but they create brand awareness and help you create engagement.

The only problem with this strategy is that it’s expensive. If you want to create a filter during a holiday or special event, such as the Super Bowl, you have to be ready to dish out between $100,000 and $750,000.

That cost will keep your filter active for 24 hours. But if you can afford it, the return on your investment can be huge.

The Taco Bell filter above was viewed 224 million times. The average user spent 24 seconds playing with the lens before sharing it with friends.

4. Let social influencers take over your account

Another great way to get more followers and increase engagement is through social proof.

Celebrities and other influencers already have a steady following on social media. Take advantage of that.

If you allow someone else to take over your Snapchat account, you can expose your brand to a much wider audience. Some of these people may not even know your company existed until they saw an influencer talking about it.

You may need to pay the influencer to do this unless you have some kind of other mutual agreement or common interest in whatever you’re promoting.

Here’s a great example of what I’m talking about from iHeartRadio:

They allowed singer Hailee Steinfeld to take over their account. As a result, she promoted the takeover to her fans on social media.

Hailee has over 933k followers on Twitter and more than 8 million Instagram followers. This is great brand exposure for iHeartRadio, especially because she is directly related to their industry.

That’s important for you to keep in mind as well. You may find a professional basketball player with 10 million Instagram followers, but if sports aren’t related to your industry, their followers may not be relevant to your company.

5. Feature user-generated content

Ask your followers to send you pictures and videos of them interacting with your brand or using your products.

You can repost this content on your Snapchat story.

A great way to encourage user-generated content is by running contests and similar promotions.

GrubHub used this strategy on Snapchat a few years back. Their campaign was a huge success.

They ran a contest called “SnapHunt,” which lasted for a week. Every day they posted a new challenge. A winner was selected for each challenge and won a $50 gift card.

During this contest, GrubHub’s followers grew by 20%. Furthermore, 30% of their followers participated in this contest.

It’s safe to say engagement was high.

6. Offer discounts and promo codes

Not sure what to post on your story?

When in doubt, give your followers something they can actually use. Send out discounts and other promotional offers via Snapchat.

This strategy will also help you drive sales and increase conversions. KIND used this strategy to offer their Snapchat followers 15% off a purchase.

When you’re posting on Snapchat, keep the overall goal of your company in mind. Don’t get distracted with all the other bells and whistles.

You want sales.

Offering discounts is a great way to accomplish this.

7. Take over another account

Earlier we talked about letting someone else take over your Snapchat account. But another effective strategy is taking over another account yourself.

When someone else takes over your account, you’re relying on that person’s followers to add you on Snapchat to view your content.

But when you take over an account, the audience won’t have to do anything. It will be your job to convince them they should be following your brand.

Make sure your content is engaging.

Even if they don’t add your Snapchat account, you’ll still be able to create brand awareness with a new audience.

8. Promote a new product

Keep your followers up to date with any exciting news from your brand. A new product launch is definitely worth mentioning.

Even if your product hasn’t launched yet, you can build hype and anticipation—consumers will be ready for it when your product finally gets released.

Here’s something to take into consideration. How often do people visit your website? I’m willing to bet that the average consumer isn’t checking your website on a daily basis for any updates.

But they are checking Snapchat every day.

Just because you’re promoting a new product launch on your website doesn’t mean that people will see it. That’s why you’ve got to take advantage of other marketing channels.

Here’s an example of a new product promotion via Snapchat from McDonald’s:

Try to follow their lead the next time you want to tell your followers about a new product or service.

9. Provide exclusive access

It’s obviously unreasonable to let your social media followers to walk right into your office and check things out.

But with Snapchat, you can give them that same exclusive feeling by providing them with behind-the-scenes content. Show your followers what it’s like in your office or production facility.

If you’re at an event, take snaps of some of the action backstage.

This type of content will keep your followers engaged because it makes them feel as if they are getting VIP treatment.

10. Reply to your followers

The majority of your Snapchat strategy should be focused on uploading content to your story. However, that’s not the only way to engage with your audience.

Followers may reply to your story and send you direct messages as well.

On other social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, everyone can see whether you’re responding to followers or not.

But on Snapchat, only you and the person sending the message know whether you’re responding. So it’s easy for companies to ignore comments on Snapchat.

But you should still make an effort to reply to your followers.

Getting a personal response from a brand will make the user feel special. Ignoring their message shows them you don’t care about what they have to say.

68% of customers say the reason why they stop using a particular brand is if they don’t think the company cares about them.

You can easily avoid this by simply responding to those private messages.

11. Post relevant content

Your snaps shouldn’t be mindless images of your products. You can use this platform to show your audience your brand is aware of various topics.

You could talk about charities or any other type of social involvement of your business.

Here’s an example from Dove. They used their platform to discuss self-esteem issues:

Their Snapchat story featured interviews with 30 women and various psychologists. They wanted to have an open discussion about self-esteem issues to help women enhance their self-images.

As a result, the campaign had more than 130,000 views.

Just make sure you tread carefully when you’re approaching something like this. It’s best for businesses to stay away from issues involving race, religion, politics, and other controversial topics.

12. Promote an upcoming event

If your company is hosting or attending some kind of meeting or event, tell your audience about it.

Depending on what kind of event it is, you could even try to get your followers to come and show their support.

67% of people are more likely to purchase tickets to an event after watching a similar event on a live video stream.

While Snapchat technically isn’t live video, it’s pretty close. You can assume the percentage of people interested in the event will be similar.

13. Drive traffic to your website

Snapchat recently introduced a new feature that allows you to add links to your story. To do this, simply take a photo or video using their camera as you normally would.

Then click the paperclip icon before adding it to your story.

Now you can add a link to your post. Users will have access to the link if they follow the prompt at the bottom of your story to “swipe up.”

This is a great way to increase your website traffic.

14. Inform your followers about an important milestone

Keep your Snapchat audience informed about important dates for your company.

Is it your 10th anniversary? Is it your CEO’s birthday?

You can even talk about other milestones, like getting your 10,000th follower on a certain social media platform.

All of these are great excuses to post on Snapchat. It’s a nice break from the same boring posts that get shared on a daily basis.

15. Mix it up

This piggybacks on my last point. You don’t want your content to be boring.

Lots of the tips we’ve discussed so far are definitely useful and should be applied to your Snapchat marketing strategy. But with that said, don’t just pick one or two and use the same ones every day.

You’ve got to keep things interesting.

If your followers aren’t entertained, they’ll stop following you. Once that happens, it won’t be easy for you to market to those people again.

You can avoid this by keeping your content fresh.

Conclusion

Snapchat is growing in popularity. If your company doesn’t have a Snapchat account, you need to create one ASAP.

But once your account is active, you need to get followers and keep them engaged.

Overall, you want to make sure your Snapchat marketing strategy makes your business better. In addition to creating brand awareness, you want to drive sales as well.

Whether Snapchat is new for you or you’re looking for a fresh insight to spice up your existing Snapchat marketing campaign, the tips I’ve outlined above are a great place to start.

Use this guide as a reference for increasing engagement on Snapchat.

What tactics are you using to connect with your followers on Snapchat?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/J2kvUgfguj0/

source https://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/171209160219