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Four digital marketing strategies to prepare for a wild holiday season

30-second summary:

Ecommerce has become an increasingly important element of any business, but it is more important than ever going into the 2020 holiday season.

With the plethora of brands vying for ad space online, companies must make the most of their marketing budgets by adjusting their digital strategies.

Socium Media CEO Owen Loft offers four tips for breaking through the noise to get in front of your customers and boost sales this holiday season.

Retailers already set up for online sales had an immediate advantage, but others quickly fell behind. Instead of reaping profits from consumers who have chosen to shop from home, retailers without online infrastructures have missed out on booming sales opportunities. Online shopping was already trending upward before the pandemic, but the pandemic pushed the shift from physical to ecommerce ahead by five years.

Businesses cannot afford to overlook digital. But one question remains: How can they bolster their online presence and get in front of their target customers in the current landscape?

Holiday season 2020: A perfect storm of competition

Reaching customers who have flocked online has become more challenging (not to mention costly) as large retailers take control of valuable advertising space. And big-box stores aren’t the only ones driving up the cost of digital advertising — political candidates have sunk more than three billion dollars into campaign advertising this year.

Major retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart are taking more online-centric approaches to holiday shopping this year. Many have already announced that they will keep their physical stores closed on Thanksgiving. Some will even remain closed on Black Friday or offer limited shopping hours, pushing customers to stay home and shop online.

With the coronavirus pandemic stretching into the fourth quarter of 2020, major elections, and the holiday season, marketers have major competition for valuable online ad space.

Revamp your digital marketing strategy to reach customers at home

To break through the noise and make the most of your marketing budget in the current environment, you must adjust your digital marketing strategies. Here’s how:

1. Prepare for the early rush

In years past, Black Friday signaled the start of holiday shopping. This year, however, Amazon’s annual Prime Day — typically held in the summer — was rescheduled to early October due to the pandemic. Some experts predict this will be the starting point for holiday shopping in 2020, which amounts to roughly an extra month and a half of holiday-related advertising and deals.

Another reason for the early start? Getting ahead of anticipated shipping delays. Some businesses already have felt the coronavirus-related strain on deliveries; pair that with additional demand, and customers will probably start shopping early to make sure their gifts arrive on time for the holidays. It will be more important than ever to start your holiday marketing efforts early. You’ll also want to communicate shipping cut-off dates clearly on your website so customers can plan their purchases accordingly.

2. Leverage your email lists

With major events converging at once — COVID-19, the 2020 election, and the holidays — consumers will be bombarded with ads across the internet. Considering this perfect storm, it might be easier to reach your target customers in their inboxes. And if they subscribe to your business’s emails, it means they’ve had positive experiences and trust your brand. They’ll be more likely to order from you, a known quantity, rather than the thousands of other retailers jockeying for their attention.

3. Highlight gift-able items in your ads

Some items in your business’s inventory simply won’t wrap well, while others are practically made to be gifted. Analyze your inventory and determine which products would fit in a gift guide for your business.

To do this, harness the data you already have. Which products are popular with your customers? What were your top sellers during the 2019 holiday season? You should also research consumer trends to see what up-and-coming products will be popular this year, which will allow you to highlight them in your marketing.

Once you’re armed with that knowledge, make sure you have adequate inventory of those products — even if those items aren’t your typical bestsellers — and plan your marketing strategy around them. With high-quality images and video and updated ad copy ready to go, those products are sure to fly off the shelves.

4. Be flexible

While online shopping is by no means new, ecommerce in the time of COVID-19 is unprecedented. Retailers — even major ones — can’t predict how consumers will behave this year. With a slew of retailers staying closed during the traditional holiday shopping times, some consumers may shift to ecommerce for everything. Others may decide to play the waiting game in hopes that physical stores reopen before the holiday season kicks into gear.

Because it’s impossible to know precisely what consumers will do, your tried-and-true marketing methods may not work. If you don’t already, prepare some contingency marketing plans in case you need to pivot quickly and try a new strategy to reach your customers.

Ecommerce has steadily become an important part of business, but this year it is absolutely critical. With a veritable trifecta of competition due to the pandemic, election, and holiday season, marketers must reassess their digital marketing strategies to ensure they can reach customers and boost sales.

Owen Loft is Co-founder of Socium Media, a performance-focused digital marketing agency specializing in paid search, paid social, and SEO. He can be found on LinkedIn.

The post Four digital marketing strategies to prepare for a wild holiday season appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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The rise of vertical search engines

30-second summary:

Google’s rise as the dominant search engine has left the industry undisrupted for 20 years.

The number of use cases for search are infinite meaning Google’s information lacks depth in some cases.

Vertical search engines support unique workflows and provide domain expertise.

Specialized search for consumers is well established but B2B search is rapidly growing due to a “digital exhaust” effect.

B2B search helps fuel SMB’s and the mid-market because more businesses get found.

On October 20, 2020, the Justice Department sued Google, an Alphabet subsidiary, claiming the company’s internet search platform is an illegal monopoly that is harmful to both competition and consumers. The case aims to prove that Google’s position as a dominant search provider limits consumer choice and partnerships with companies like Apple suppresses competition. Taking on Big Tech has been a mainstay in the national conversation ever since the 2016 Presidential election, but this is the first antitrust action taken against Google. While we might not reach the end of this story for years, the DOJ’s suit signals a larger shift in the search industry, which hasn’t been disrupted in over 20 years. The unintended consequence of Google’s conquest to broaden search is limited depth for some. Businesses tend to be affected more than consumers because of how results are ranked. Therefore, in the wake of Google’s antitrust suit, a new market for specialized information has emerged.

Shifting dynamics

In 1998 Google processed 10,000 search queries per day – roughly 3.65 million annually. The official Google Zeitgeist reported 1.2 trillion searches in 2012, the year it was published. That trend would eventually stabilize to an estimated 2.3 trillion searches per year in 2020.

Despite its size and tremendous growth, web search dynamics have begun to shift. Google has taken a super-aggregator and partnership approach to many growing verticals. Google Maps, for example, aggregate Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Google Shopping and Google Finance are aggregators for ecommerce and financial information, respectively. Vertical search has always been at odds with aggregators, wanting to be found but also wanting direct traffic. Vertical search engines have built their own mobile apps to lure users away from the Google search bar.

Defining a vertical search engine

A vertical search engine is a search engine that focuses on a specific domain, or vertical. Think of LinkedIn for people search, Zillow for housing search, or Kayak for travel search. The benefits of using a vertical search engine are:

More precise information due to narrowed scope

Calibrated systems for providing users with vertical expertise

Purposefully designed to facilitate a specific task or workflow

The third point is particularly noteworthy, especially when comparing vertical search engines to Google. It’s unlikely that you’re searching for car prices and inventory for fun. The price tells you if you can afford it; location information tells you where the nearest dealership is. Search is part of a workflow. Google, in most cases, acts as a middle man, guiding users from point A to point B.

Like web search, vertical search also supports various workflows. Where they differ is providing users with both the pathway and tools to complete an intended action. Here’s an example: Zillow users start by searching for homes, weighing data on home prices and taxes against other factors like school districts and proximity to work. The user’s workflow ends with an appointment for an open house with the listing agent. Workflows differ greatly depending on someone’s need, which is why the market for vertical search engines is so vast.

In recent years Google has attempted to compete with certain consumer search workflows. Google Flights, a Kayak competitor, brings users closer to booking travel all within one platform. Interestingly enough, Google’s purchase of ITA Travel in 2011 (which became Google Flights) was reviewed and cleared with the DOJ. If history is any lesson, Google is surely capable of competing with certain vertical search engines and capturing market share for consumer-based search. Business to business search, however, is a different ballgame.

The need for B2B search tools

There is a gap in the B2B search market. The gap exists, in part, by the design of Google’s search algorithm, which ranks websites based on five key factors. You’ll find the most popular business websites, but not every business website. More importantly, results might not provide the right business.

B2B search is beginning to transform, however. The amount of digital exhaust has increased drastically over the last few years. The emergence of Shopify, Squarespace, and others have decreased the barrier to entry for businesses on the internet. In 2014 the internet surpassed one billion websites and two billion is within reach. Having a website is one thing, but getting found is another. Companies must invest in website tools and resources and consistently optimize website content. Not to mention, it takes time to accumulate domain authority. If you’re a small business in a constrained economy, this looks like a tall order.

Google’s ranking algorithms, limited workflows, and surface-level information create an opportunity for B2B search engines across multiple functions. For example, ThomasNet (www.thomasnet.com) is an industrial sourcing platform connecting procurement professionals and industrial manufacturers. Drugdu (www.drugdu.com) operates medical device databases citing access to over 1,000,000 products.

With so much focus on small businesses this year due to COVID-19, it should be noted that B2B search products are good for SMBs, thus good for the economy. Tools like ThomasNet and Drugdu even the playing field, allowing small businesses to be found. Information also tends to be more trustworthy because of the general absence of advertising and crowdsourced information reduces reliance on individual company databases.

The big picture

The last antitrust case presented against a large technology company was in 1998 when Microsoft was, ultimately, found guilty of abusing monopoly power. Over the last two decades, Google has emerged as the clear leader in consumer search, but they’ve failed to extend their reach into vertical search engines. That void has since been filled with dozens of specialized search engines, platforms that mostly benefit small to mid-sized businesses. The advantages for users are clear: focusing on a limited set of data accelerates workflows and supplies better information. As the Google saga unfolds, vertical search engines are well-positioned to grow by facilitating business-to-business commerce.

Andrew Bocskocsky is a software expert, CEO, and Co-Founder of B2B search engine Grata.

The post The rise of vertical search engines appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Google Analytics data is used to support tons of important work, ranging from our everyday marketing reporting, all the way to investment decisions. To that end, it's integral that we're aware of just how that data works. In this Best of Whiteboard Friday edition, Tom Capper explains how the sessions metric in Google Analytics works, several ways that it can have unexpected results, and as a bonus, how sessions affect the time on page metric (and why you should rethink using time on page for reporting).

Editor’s note: Tom Capper is now an independent SEO consultant. This video is from 2018, but the same principles hold up today. There is only one minor caveat: the words "user" and "browser" are used interchangeably early in the video, which still hold mostly true. Google is trying to further push multi-device users as a concept with Google Analytics 4, but still relies on users being logged in, as well as extra tracking setup. For most sites most of the time, neither of these conditions hold.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Tom Capper. I am a consultant at Distilled, and today I'm going to be talking to you about how sessions work in Google Analytics. Obviously, all of us use Google Analytics. Pretty much all of us use Google Analytics in our day-to-day work.

Data from the platform is used these days in everything from investment decisions to press reporting to the actual marketing that we use it for. So it's important to understand the basic building blocks of these platforms. Up here I've got the absolute basics. So in the blue squares I've got hits being sent to Google Analytics.

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I've marked P. So we've got page view and page view and so on as you're going around the site. I've also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

The job of Google Analytics is to take all this hit data that you're sending it and try and bring it together into something that actually makes sense as sessions. So they're grouped into sessions that I've put in black, and then if you have multiple sessions from the same browser, then that would be a user that I've marked in pink. The issue here is it's kind of arbitrary how you divide these up.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I've got some examples I'm going to go through. But first I'm going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that's what they're trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

So in this example, say a supermarket, we enter by a passing trade. That's going to be our source. Then we've got an entrance is in the lobby of the supermarket when we walk in. We got passed from there to the beer aisle to the cashier, or at least I do. So that's one big, long session with the source passing trade. That makes sense.

In the case of a brick-and-mortar store, it's not to difficult to divide that up and try and decide how many sessions are going on here. There's not really any ambiguity. In the case of websites, when you have people leaving their keyboard for a while or leaving the computer on while they go on holiday or just having the same computer over a period of time, it becomes harder to divide things up, because you don't know when people are actually coming and going.

So what they've tried to do is in the very basic case something quite similar: arrive by Google, category page, product page, checkout. Great. We've got one long session, and the source is Google. Okay, so what are the different ways that that might go wrong or that that might get divided up?

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

The first and possibly most annoying one, although it doesn't tend to be a huge issue for some sites, is whatever time zone you've set in your Google Analytics settings, the midnight in that time zone can break up a session. So say we've got midnight here. This is 12:00 at night, and we happen to be browsing. We're doing some shopping quite late.

Because Google Analytics won't allow a session to have two dates, this is going to be one session with the source Google, and this is going to be one session and the source will be this page. So this is a self-referral unless you've chosen to exclude that in your settings. So not necessarily hugely helpful.

2. Half-hour cutoff for "coffee breaks"

Another thing that can happen is you might go and make a cup of coffee. So ideally if you went and had a cup of coffee while in you're in Tesco or a supermarket that's popular in whatever country you're from, you might want to consider that one long session. Google has made the executive decision that we're actually going to have a cutoff of half an hour by default.

If you leave for half an hour, then again you've got two sessions. One, the category page is the landing page and the source of Google, and one in this case where the blog is the landing page, and this would be another self-referral, because when you come back after your coffee break, you're going to click through from here to here. This time period, the 30 minutes, that is actually adjustable in your settings, but most people do just leave it as it is, and there isn't really an obvious number that would make this always correct either. It's kind of, like I said earlier, an arbitrary distinction.

3. Leaving the site and coming back

The next issue I want to talk about is if you leave the site and come back. So obviously it makes sense that if you enter the site from Google, browse for a bit, and then enter again from Bing, you might want to count that as two different sessions with two different sources. However, where this gets a little murky is with things like external payment providers.

If you had to click through from the category page to PayPal to the checkout, then unless PayPal is excluded from your referral list, then this would be one session, entrance from Google, one session, entrance from checkout. The last issue I want to talk about is not necessarily a way that sessions are divided, but a quirk of how they are.

4. Return direct sessions

If you were to enter by Google to the category page, go on holiday and then use a bookmark or something or just type in the URL to come back, then obviously this is going to be two different sessions. You would hope that it would be one session from Google and one session from direct. That would make sense, right?

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you've got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that's some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I've got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we'll see how the time on page metric works out.

I want you to bear in mind that, basically, because Google Analytics really has very little data to work with typically, they only know that you've landed on a page, and that sent a page view and then potentially nothing else. If you were to have a single page visit to a site, or a bounce in other words, then they don't know whether you were on that page for 10 seconds or the rest of your life.

They've got no further data to work with. So what they do is they say, "Okay, we're not going to include that in our average time on page metrics." So we've got the formula of time divided by views minus exits. However, this fudge has some really unfortunate consequences. So let's talk through these scenarios.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there's a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

However, let's think about this next example. We've got a page view, event 10 seconds later, except this time instead of clicking somewhere else on the site, I'm going to just leave altogether. So there's no data available, but Google Analytics knows we're here for 10 seconds.

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That's how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven't triggered an event. So we've got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that's how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we're on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

So that would make some sense. What they actually do, because of this formula, is they end up with 30 seconds. So you've got the total time here, which is 30, divided by the number of views, we've got 3 views, minus 2 exits. Thirty divided 3 minus 2, 30 divided by 1, so we've got 30 seconds as the average across these 3 sessions.

Well, the average across these three page views, sorry, for the amount of time we're spending, and that is longer than any of them, and it doesn't make any sense with the constituent data. So that's just one final tip to please not use average time on page as a reporting metric.

I hope that's all been useful to you. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Internal communication plan: How SMB marketing teams can achieve growth

30-second summary:

With remote work and the peak season coming in, creating an internal communication plan has become a massive priority for upper management to facilitate great teamwork.

How can companies create internal communication plans that not only work in the short term but can also be utilized for years to come to achieve steady team growth?

Eight great steps to improve your SMB digital marketing team’s internal communication plan and optimize successful outcomes.

Creating an internal communication plan has become a massive priority this year. 

With more companies working remotely, documenting processes and making them accessible to teams has taken precedence over many other tasks.

Since team members cannot walk over to each other’s desks for a quick chat, it has become key for upper management to determine how best to facilitate teamwork.

Overcoming communication barriers in such an environment will take planning—especially as this remote working situation is set to continue for some time.

How can companies create internal communication plans that not only work in the short term but can also be utilized for years to come to achieve steady team growth?

We share a step by step guide that will help marketing teams communicate better in the long run.

1. Audit established internal communication plans

Before you go steaming ahead to create a new internal communication plan, you need to look at what you already have—or whether you have something at all.

Analyze your documentation to see whether you have the most up-to-date information. Examine your process flow to determine whether obstacles are being overlooked.

Study how effective your former communication plans had been—did you reach the goals set out for it? If not, what areas require improvement?

It’s also worth creating a company-wide survey to get a better understanding of where your employees think the company is.

Are they comfortable with the way communication is handled? Would they prefer changes in a particular area?

A thorough audit, like in the example below, will make it much easier to start creating an internal communication plan that helps your company grow.

Source: Venngage

2. Internal communication plan metrics

Now that you’ve determined what worked and didn’t in your previous internal communication plans—or that you do need one—you need to determine metrics for it.

Some metrics to aim for include:

Employee reach

Employee engagement rates

Employee retention rates

Message open rates

Message click rates

Level of productivity

Employee net promoter score

Revenue increase

Your SMB may not be focused on all of these metrics—but you should aim for at least a few of these in your initial plans.

You don’t want to have a narrow focus such as increasing productivity rates that don’t improve engagement or revenue.

Instead, choose a set of metrics that you can calculate, and that won’t be unattainable, like the open rate below used by Contact Monkey.

Source

3. Setting goals for internal communication plans

Miscommunication can cost SMBs an average of $420K in losses, found SHRM. Which is why internal communication plans are so necessary.

When you determine your metrics, you also need to set goals for your company and how the internal communication plan will tie into those goals.

How do you choose a goal for your plan that will help your marketing team grow? By using the SMART goal-setting method:

Be specific about what you want to accomplish, and use simple language to convey it

Choose a measurable goal that you can analyze

Make the goal attainable so your communications don’t aim for something you can’t get

Your goal should be relevant to the team and your overarching company goal

The goal should also be time-based so that your plan doesn’t miss deadlines

Here’s a visual overview of SMART goals that your team can refer to in the future.

Source: Venngage

4. Identify internal communication plan stakeholders

No matter the size of your company or marketing team, your internal communication plan needs to be targeted towards specific stakeholders.

This is because not all messages are relevant to every member of the team. 

The way a website design team functions will differ from the PR team, or social media team, like in this example.

Source

You also don’t want to bombard other teams with marketing information that won’t be important to them.

Creating a one-size-fits-all plan for your company will only cause more misunderstandings—that is why you need to outline your target audience before creating a plan.

Use behavioral targeting methods to understand how, when, and why your team members need to be reached. This will make communication more effective.

5. Brand your internal communication plan

Branding is an essential part of external communications, but it should also be acknowledged for internal communication plans.

While brand symbols like logos, colors, and fonts are meant to evoke a connection between companies and consumers, it’s also necessary to maintain consistency within the company.

Branding ensures that your team is seeing the same message design internally and on your external channels.

So, make sure your internal newsletters and your business letter template, like this example, are updated regularly to reflect your branding styles.

Source: Venngage

But remember that branding isn’t just about the visual appearance of your company—your tone and messaging should also be consistent in your communications.

Don’t adopt a serious tone internally, only to be jovial with customers—your team is in many ways a customer, as well. 

Your messaging should also be consistent—don’t tell external parties something that your marketing team doesn’t already know.

6. Design the internal communication process

One of the key aspects of an internal communication plan is workflow—your team should know whom they need to send content and strategies for approvals.

You should include a flow chart in your plan—these demystify approval processes so team members send their material to the right people in the right order.

7. Channels to implement internal communication

There are numerous channels where you can implement your internal communication plan:

Emails

Intranet

Internal newsletter

Closed social media groups

Project management tools 

Slack, or similar alternatives

Video conference calls

Most of these channels are completely free to create and maintain but some of them can be time-consuming, as you can see from this chart.

Source

Emails aren’t as instantaneous as they used to be and many people have found themselves using them solely for external purposes.

On the other hand, instant messaging tools have allowed remote workers to keep in touch with each other and respond immediately.

Your SMB may not have the ability to institute an intranet, but you may be able to design newsletters to send to your team.

Include which channels you will be using in your plan and for what kind of communication so that team members are aligned and know where to reach out for responses.

8. Regularly evaluate your internal communication plan

If you think your job is done because you’ve created your internal communication plan, I’m afraid that isn’t the end of it.

Your plan will need to change to reflect your marketing team’s structure, your company’s new goals, and even the external environment.

Be prepared to assess the following on an annual basis:

Email open rates

Click-through rates

Channels used

Feedback from your team

Common barriers

Areas for improvement

Once you determine how these areas have performed you can redesign your communication plan.

Conclusion: Create an internal communication plan that keeps your team aligned

Creating an internal communication plan that works takes time and energy. You will also need to A/B test your tools and processes to define the ones that work best for your company.

To recap, here’s how you can create an internal communication plan that works:

Audit your current plans

Choose your metrics

Set plan goals

Identify stakeholders

Brand your documents

Design the process

Choose your channels

Evaluate your plan

By following these steps, you can create an internal communication plan that will help your marketing team become aligned with your company.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic maker and design platform. Ronita regularly writes about marketing, sales, and small businesses.

The post Internal communication plan: How SMB marketing teams can achieve growth appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there's the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There's simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

Any form of review incentives or spam

Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews

Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.

The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.

Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.

Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.

Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.

Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

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Holiday marketing: Get the data that puts you ahead of the competition

What you will read in this post:

Understand holiday season traffic trends

Optimize for strong SEO and PPC keywords

Analyzing keyword-driven traffic for seasonal marketing

Which sites won the most keyword traffic?

Black Friday marketing: November 2019

Christmas marketing strategy: December 2019

Build strong display and referral partnerships

Analyze historic conversion data

The biggest display and referral sites (and the brands winning traffic)

Black Friday marketing strategy: November 2019

Christmas marketing: December 2019

Already imagining the taste of the delicious holiday meals and the laughter of your kids when the entire family comes together? Sorry, we know you’re a marketer; you don’t have time for that. You’re busy worrying whether you have everything you need so your marketing strategy can ensure the biggest possible chunk of holiday traffic and generate maximum sales.

This post investigates seasonal marketing statistics of the past few years and provides some eye-opening insights from SimilarWeb’s Digital Marketing Intelligence that helps plan your seasonal marketing.

But first, let’s quickly look at how the COVID-19 pandemic changed consumer preferences and spending this year. Keep these in the back of your mind when you set goals for this year’s holiday marketing strategy.

According to a recent report published by McKinsey & Company, consumer behavior has shifted in five main areas:

Increased online buying

Increased interest in household goods

Higher focus on essentials (health, hygiene, security, and sustainability) 

More mindful buying (consumers are researching more, looking for cheaper alternatives and value)

More readiness to break loyalty to a brand

Pay attention to the last point. Consumer loyalty has suffered during the time of crisis. This can be meaningful for your retention marketing and also serve as an opportunity for your acquisition marketing and content SEO strategy. One thing is for sure: Competition is going to be more fierce than ever during November-December.

Content created in partnership with SmilarWeb.

Holiday Marketing 2020

It’s now more crucial than ever to know how to leverage your digital marketing channels and optimize campaigns in real-time to reach relevant consumers and stay ahead of the competition. You need the most up-to-date data on overall traffic trends and impactful digital marketing strategies to ensure you can pivot and optimize campaigns as trends emerge.

So digital marketers, to learn how to stand out from the countless online businesses vying for your customers’ attention away from, tune in as we deep dive into SimilarWeb Pro data focused on SEO, PPC, and affiliate channels.

This article will help you understand the data behind seasonal marketing and how to translate it into a strong digital marketing strategy. Make sure you are well-positioned to beat the competition.

Understand holiday season traffic trends

Prime Day isn’t usually part of the official holiday season. However, in 2020 “usual” doesn’t count. Due to the wrinkle of COVID-19, Prime Day was pushed back and correlated with the seasonal kickoff this year.

We decided to look at its impact in previous years to understand how this might affect the shopping-heavy fourth quarter of the year and help you draw conclusions for your holiday season marketing push.

Amazon’s annual two-day event has grown in significance over the past few years and not only impacts amazon.com (and it’s dozens of subdomains), but the whole ecommerce space.

In 2019 we witnessed more than 8% growth in traffic during the Prime Day week, compared to the year before. Shopping in December has been increasing over the years as well. Meanwhile, traffic during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday week did not increase in 2019 compared to 2018 when a record growth of 12% year-over-year (YoY) occurred.

This year we are faced with the question: How will COVID-19 impact consumer behavior during the holidays? Analyzing shopping behavior on Prime Day may indicate what you can expect for the remainder of the year.

According to Amazon, 2020 Prime Day sales topped last year’s by almost 40%. And based on our data, half of the 50 best-selling products are private label brands. That’s good news for ecommerce. Or is it? Forbes tells us that Amazon avoids comparing numbers with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so we are wondering if Prime Day sales met the goals.

Looking at the data provided by SimilarWeb’s digital marketing intelligence tool, we see that non-amazon retailers saw increased traffic of just below 30%.

Target, for example, created a rival Deals Day, which led to a 54% week-over-week (WoW) traffic increase. BestBuy, with its exceptionally attractive deals, experienced the most significant growth among top retailers. Next in line was Costo with a traffic increase of 59%.

It looks like last year’s trend for Prime Day continued. If this is true for the remaining two months of 2020, Black Friday will be less significant, and shoppers in December will look for the best deals. For marketers, it means now’s the time to buckle up; you might need an extra-aggressive holiday marketing strategy.

Optimize for strong SEO and PPC keywords

However heavy holiday traffic in 2020 will be, you need to grab your share. It’s a good time to review your keyword strategies for SEO and PPC. After all, they are both major traffic drivers.

SEO means optimizing your website’s content, structure and user experience according to Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This starts with an effective keyword research for organic searches and competitor analysis, followed by a review of your pages, and optimization of your pages according to your research findings.

For SEO, it’s crucial that your pages stay focused on the topic at hand which means your meta tags need to be relevant and your pages need to include related and relevant information around the right focus keyword.

Another important factor is that your content needs to be linked to from other pages on your site as well as from other websites. As your content pages gain authority and rank over time, they will move up the SERP.

The process of optimizing your pages should have started months ago so, now is an excellent time to re-check your internal linking, meta titles, and image ALT tags and ensure everything is in the right place.

It’s also critical that you check search volume changes and new trending keywords to make sure you’re still targeting the best keywords. People’s searches are constantly changing so there may be a new keyword phrase growing in search volume that your competitors aren’t targeting yet. The closer we get to the holidays, the more competition gets fierce over major seasonal terms.

Keyword analysis for PPC is one of those critical tasks for the holiday season. To get optimal results with PPC, you have to be on the ball with the latest trending keywords.

This is the time to finalize your budget, adjust your bids and overall strategy, so you can easily adapt and pivot during the busier times ahead as you see campaign results and understand how your audience is responding. You may also want to adjust based on what your competitors are doing to drive clicks.

Analyzing keyword-driven traffic for seasonal marketing

During the holiday period, brands largely dictate what shoppers are searching for. That’s because consumers don’t want to miss out on their uncounted deals and special offers.

For you, this is an opportunity to hook onto the right keywords and go head-to-head with your biggest competitors. It’s a once-in-the-year chance to “steal” large amounts of traffic from under their nose and convert them into paying visitors. Once you’ve acquired new customers, it’s hard for others to win them back.

How do we know this? Our keyword research tool provided us with data from previous years. Contrary to other keyword research tools, SimilarWeb Pro leverages actual user search queries and clicks to provide highly reliable data.

You can use the tool to receive the freshest keyword-related data and identify trends before anyone else. Can you see how you would lead the keyword competition for paid traffic? The tool also lets you generate and prioritize keywords, optimize traffic share, benchmark against your industry, and more.

Next, we want to see if brands also snatch the majority of the traffic. Spoiler: No! SimilarWeb data shows that publishers and Black Friday sites receive the majority of search traffic in the U.S..

This underlines the importance of partnering with affiliate and coupon websites- such as Slickdeals and CouponChef – that know how to leverage search traffic and seasonal trends. The top winners were bestblackfriday.com and blackfriday.com, both with approximately 11% traffic share, followed by bestbuy.com and walmart.com at around 9%.

Which sites won the most keyword traffic in the holiday season?

Black Friday marketing: November 2019

A review of popular keywords in November 2019 shows that three out of the top ten paid search keywords were related to gaming, representing 24% of total paid search traffic.

‘Battlefield 5′, ‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’, and ‘Fire Emblem Warriors’ were popular video games, and it’s fair to assume that they appeared on innumerable wish lists that people were attempting to fulfill. It seems Black Friday marketing that considers Christmas wish lists are a good bet.

It is also interesting to note that amazon.com claimed over 96% of all traffic from these terms in the time period analyzed. When we look at Black Friday keywords specifically, things get more interesting.

The top PPC-related queries at that time included the term ‘Black Friday’ in combination with a branded term. The keywords ‘Black Friday ads 2019′, ‘call of duty black ops 4’, ‘Nintendo Switch Black Friday’, and ‘black Friday deals’ claimed traffic shares ranging from 9% to 12%.

Specific Black Friday campaigns paid off. Most of the traffic winners were well-loved retail brands such as Best Buy and Walmart.

Most searched organic terms related to Black Friday in 2019 were ‘deals’, ‘black friday’, ‘cyber monday deals’, and ‘black friday ads 2019’ claiming respective traffic shares of 3% to 5% each. Unlike PPC-driven traffic, none of the leading organic search terms were branded.

Not only did big box retail names win traffic from these keywords, top affiliates such as blackfriday.com and bestblackfriday.com also made it into the top 10, which you can see in the graph below.

To sum this up:

Top organic searches were generic 

Top PPC terms were 50% branded and 50% generic

Organic search traffic went to retailers, brands, and affiliates 

PPC traffic went to popular household brands

The top ten winners can be seen below.

Christmas marketing strategy: December 2019

As expected, the overall November trends continued throughout December. The highest traffic-driving keywords were again gaming-related gifts and gadgets. The three most searched terms were ‘just dance 2020’, ‘star wars jedi fallen order ps4’, and ‘the witcher 3’. 

Interestingly, Amazon scooped up over 96% of all traffic for ‘just dance 2020’, and ‘the witcher 3’; rd.bizrate.com won 97% of the traffic for the keyword ‘star wars jedi fallen order ps4’.

Now let’s take a closer look at terms related to the December holidays to see how Christmas marketing campaigns compare.

Most searched organic terms were ‘cyber monday’, ‘deals’, ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’, and ‘laptop deals’ with traffic shares of  3% to 9%. 

Paid keyword terms with the highest traffic shares were ‘cyber monday deals’, ‘siberian husky christmas blowups’, ‘black friday deals’ – still a high traffic share, however 68% down month-over-month (MoM), ‘christmas tree’, ‘icicle christmas lights’, ‘die hard christmas book’, and ‘nintendo switch games for christmas list’. Interestingly, several of the top keywords were related to Christmas decorations, with gift-related keywords coming in closely behind them.

‘Ugly Christmas sweaters’ was the top Christmas related keyword driving organic traffic in December.

See the ten winners for Christmas related keywords here:

Build strong display and referral partnerships

Referral sites and a Display Ads strategy are crucial during this time. Why? Consumers are looking for deals, but they also know that not every ‘deal’ is a good bargain for them. They trust 3rd party sites to review and guide them through the jungle of deals during the holiday seasons.

We found that SimilarWeb data supports this assessment. Some of the affiliate and display publisher sites driving the most traffic fell within the 10 top winners of keyword traffic over the holiday season in 2019. 

Here’s your opportunity to generate more traffic to your site. A display publisher will show your display ads on the ad space of their websites. Rather than publishing your display ads by yourself, use affiliates to do it for you. The same goes for other referral sites such as deal comparison sites and review sites that can help you win a bigger chunk of the traffic share.

Use SimilarWeb’s digital marketing intelligence tool to find your best affiliates by analyzing performance statistics of display publishers and referral sites. You can compare relevant sites and identify the biggest traffic providers. The tool also lets you benchmark against your main competitors for traffic from the significant sites.

Analyze historic conversion data

Looking at the stats from 2019, we see that direct traffic brought the highest conversions volume on average in November. Retailers experienced the largest growth in converted traffic from Display and Referral channels during this month, growing MoM 42% and 32%, respectively. Also, referral was the best converting marketing channel at 11%, overtaking even direct traffic, which converted approximately 9% during that same period.

Referral traffic spiked during the last week of November. Display ads’ traffic growth wasn’t as concentrated and was used more evenly to promote future deals and increase brand recognition.

The biggest display and referral sites (and the brands winning traffic)

Black Friday marketing strategy: November 2019

When looking at retail winners, Kohs and BBB experienced the largest increase in overall traffic during the last week of November in 2019. Other big winners include Costo, Walmart, Target, and Wayfair.

During this time, Costco and Sam’s Club saw the highest growth of referral traffic during, growing 241% and 199% from October to November, respectively. Another big referral traffic winner, Walmart, came in third, increasing its traffic on this channel by a whopping 114%.

Referral leaders have received more than 50% of referral traffic from the top two coupon and rebate sites, with bestblackfridaydeals.com sending about 45% of all referral traffic to the competitive set during November. Walmart seems to have had a solid relationship with the referral site. About 81% of all its outgoing traffic went directly to the retail giant.

While slickdeals.net was the second-largest referral site during that period, it only drove about 6% of traffic. However, display traffic tells a very different story, as slickdeals.com claims the number one spot.

Bestblackfridaydeal.com dropped down to the third spot with shares of  18% and 2% of display traffic, respectively. Cosco.com scooped up about 73% of that traffic in November. Shopping-category leaders utilized display advertising traffic analytics to increase their brand awareness on affiliate sites.

Did we mention the importance of display and referral sites for your holiday marketing? The numbers speak for themselves.

Christmas marketing: December 2019

Now, take a look at the interesting shifts in winners throughout the holiday season of last year. November’s big winners were overtaken in December. As Christmas approached, michaelkors.com grew by 191% when compared to October the same year, claiming the number one spot for overall growth.

While neither Walmart or Target landed in the top spots for MoM growth, the retail conglomerates did win massive overall traffic. Walmart.com saw a mind-blowing 450M visits while target.com was able to rake in upwards of 250M.

Swagbucks.com was the top referral site in December 2019 for the best-performing sites during that period with an 8% traffic share. It drove about 63% of its traffic to worldmarket.com. Other big referrals sites were slickdeals.net and cashbackholic.com.

Among the display publishers, Rakuten secured the largest traffic share with almost 17%. Dealmoon could seize 9% and Slickdeals managed to grab 4%. In fourth place was Dealsplus, everyone else in the top 10 got less than 2%.

The holiday marketing games are on, roll up your sleeves!

During the holiday season, optimizing your digital strategies is more critical than during any other time of the year. You can only be sure of it’s efficiency when you build on reliable data about you and your main competitors’ performance. Make no mistake, they are getting ready for the winter games as well.

Understand how different channels work together to drive success. Leverage marco and seasonal market trends and determine how to make consumer behavior work in your favor. In our example, we’ve learned that brands who partner with affiliates have the best chance of winning traffic from top keywords. 

Now use SimilarWeb Pro to find the best affiliates to partner with, the most successful channels to utilize, and the highest trending keywords in real-time. Get started by opening an account now!

And if you can’t wait to see how you can fine-tune your marketing strategy for this holiday season, use the form below to download the most-up-to-date data for this year and get the competitive edge you need to blow your competition away.

The post Holiday marketing: Get the data that puts you ahead of the competition appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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How visual content can give a boost to your SEO and how to take advantage

30-second summary:

Visual content offers a ton of value for your website.

It can boost critical statistics such as time on page.

Visuals guide the reader through your content more smoothly.

They make your content more consumable and increase sharing.

Google loves images that are optimized for search.

Read on to learn more about how adding optimized images to your site can boost your search visits from your target audience.

See examples of how companies are successfully incorporating visual content into their marketing and websites.

It’s no secret that visual content is hot right now (queue the Zoolander references). You know content formats like video, infographics, GIFs, memes, and more should be a part of your content strategy, but did you know these also impact your site’s SEO?

How does visual content impact SEO?

There is so much value to adding visual content on your website. While your written content serves the purpose of enabling you to naturally incorporate keywords and create more content to rank in search engines, the visual content you add to your site and elsewhere can help give that content a further boost.

1. Video content keeps visitors on the page

One stat Google loves is “time on page”. If visitors are checking out your site and leaving after an average of 10 seconds, that signifies to Google that your content is bad or isn’t relevant. By placing a video in the middle of your written content, you can keep people on page longer.

Think about it. Let’s say it takes someone 10 seconds to read the first two paragraphs of your article. Then, directly on your site is a video your visitors can easily click on that adds more value to the piece.

They click to view and end up watching the full two-minute video. This intrigues your visitors to dig deeper. Before they know it, they’ve been on your site for five minutes. This can give a huge boost to your time on page stats.

Video also impacts critical stats like your bounce rate, which is also a critical factor used by Google. The last thing you want is people visiting your site and bouncing away after just reading a few lines on one page. Video can help reduce your bounce rate and convince people to stick around.

While we’re on the subject, here’s a video from Neil Patel that explains this concept a bit more. In the video, Patel highlights a few ways (including video) that you can use to reduce your bounce rate.

2. Visuals help guide the reader through your content

Reading straight through a 1000-word article, no matter how well-written, can become tedious quickly. To keep site visitors flowing through the content, you can add things like infographics, screenshots, and more to help visualize the concepts you’re presenting and push your visitors further down the page.

Breaking up your content with related visuals allows readers to take a break from soaking up the copy and instead check out a few related graphics, videos, or other visual content. It also provides an opportunity for the reader to pause and look at a graphic that might more easily explain a complex subject you’re presenting or highlight some related stats visually to really drive home the impact, so they don’t get lost in the text.

Here’s a great example of an infographic that grabs readers’ attention and gives them something more to soak up in addition to just text. These are a few screenshots from a larger infographic that appeared in an article highlighting the state of SEO in 2019.

To view the full infographic, click here.

3. Google’s machine learning is learning to read visuals

While it’s not 100% clear how this works, it’s out there and known well enough that Google is actively learning how to read images on pages. With billions of images online, Google’s machine learning becomes adept at using shapes and other elements to compare and comprehend what the images on your site represent.

I mean, is there really much more I need to say here? If Google is focusing on learning how to crawl something and then attribute it to the value your site brings to the Internet, you need to pay attention. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your images are relevant and are formatted in a way Google can read them.

How can you use images to boost SEO?

So, now that you know the “why” part, let’s dig into the “how” part. It’s important to dig a bit deeper and explore some of the ways you can apply visual marketing to your efforts to boost your SEO.

1. Make sure your images add to the story

There is a ton of value in adding things like graphs, screenshots, and other content that actually relate to your article and adds value. There is decidedly less value in adding generic images that simply represent the concepts and don’t really add anything. Since we’re on the topic, why don’t I use some visuals to show you what I mean?

For example number one, you can see instructive screenshots dropped into this piece of content. These are screenshots from an article I recently wrote that details how to use HARO for SEO and backlink building. I used screenshots to walk readers through each step and provide them with actionable guides like the image of the email template and the walkthrough of how to set up an email.

On the opposite side, you have the images below that show an example of using images that relate to the topic but don’t really add value. This is another article on my site. I decided to test out generic images on this piece, as you can see in the screenshots below. The images relate to the content, but they really don’t add much extra.

As you can see, both do add a certain level of appeal to their respective articles. That said, for example one, the HARO article, has 12 times the number of page views, 11 more comments, and double the time on-page. So, you can see the value is clear that adding relevant images that add to the story brings a boost to your SEO.

2. Optimize your images

It’s not enough to just add images to your pages and posts. You also need to ensure they are optimized. If you ignore this step, you can run into issues with the performance of your site. For example, images that aren’t optimized can lead to slow load times on your site, and site speed is a critical ranking factor for Google.

To ensure you aren’t bogging down your site with heavy images, try using appropriate image types. The best formats to use are JPEG, PNG, and GIF. And as for videos, host the videos elsewhere (YouTube, for example) and then embed them on your site rather than uploading them directly.

Another important factor in optimizing your images is the tags you add. Just like you need to add meta tags to your posts, you need to add tags to your images as well. This serves as a way to tell Google (and let’s not forget other search engines, of course) what your images are about.

Source: Kayako

3. Take advantage of off-site search

You’ve likely heard this before, but it deserves being restated. YouTube is the second largest search engine. Second only to…drumroll please…Google!

So, why not take advantage of posting videos to YouTube and optimizing those videos to give you more content to rank in search?

While this is obviously an off-site strategy, if you create excellent video content and then optimize it properly to appear in search, your videos can grab some SEO value.

You can then add links back to your website in your video descriptions and on your YouTube channel, and as your videos become more popular, clicks from the links on your YouTube channel will give a boost to your site traffic.

Wrapping it up

So, you get it now, right? Images are good for the health of your website and the impact of your SEO strategy. They not only add some life to your website and grab readers’ attention, they also help you improve critical stats that can help give your SEO a boost.

If you’ve been using visuals in your content, your first step should be to review those visuals to ensure they are optimized. Make sure they add to the story and then check to catch any missed opportunities to enhance your files with the right file types along with proper tagging.

Using images and video content on and off your website is a no-brainer. In today’s visual world, it’s important to stay on top of the continuing trend toward a preference for visual content. Make sure to work visuals into your content to give your SEO a serious boost.

Anthony is the Founder of AnthonyGaenzle.com a marketing and business blog. He also serves as the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Granite Creative Group, a full-service marketing firm. He is a storyteller, strategist, and eternal student of marketing and business strategy.

The post How visual content can give a boost to your SEO and how to take advantage appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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[blissyy]

Behind the SEO: Launching Our New Guide — How to Rank

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Seven years ago, we published a post on the Moz Blog titled "How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint."

From an SEO perspective, the post did extremely well.

Over time, the "How to Rank" post accumulated:

400k pageviews

200k organic visits

100s of linking root domains

Despite its success, seven years is a long time in SEO. The chart below shows what often happens when you don't update your content.

Predictably, both rankings and traffic declined significantly. By the summer of 2020, the post was only seeing a few hundred visits per month.

Time to update

We decided to update the content. We did this not only for a ranking/traffic boost, but also because SEO has changed a lot since 2013.

The old post simply didn't cut it anymore.

To regain our lost traffic, we also wanted to leverage Google's freshness signals for ranking content.

Many SEOs mistakenly believe that freshness signals are simply about updating the content itself (or even lazier, putting a new timestamp on it.) In actuality, the freshness signals Google may look actually take many different forms:

Content freshness.

Rate of content change: More frequent changes to the content can indicate more relevant content.

User engagement signals: Declining engagement over time can indicate stale content.

Link freshness: The rate of link growth over time can indicate relevancy.

To be fair, the post had slipped significantly in all of these categories. It hasn't been updated in years, engagement metrics had dropped, and hardly anyone new linked to it anymore.

To put it simply, Google had no good reason to rank the post highly.

This time when publishing, we also decided to launch the post as a stand-alone guide — instead of a blog post — which would be easier to maintain as evergreen content.

Finally, as I wrote in the guide itself, we simply wanted a cool guide to help people rank. One of the biggest questions we get from new folks after they read the Beginner's Guide to SEO is: "What do I read next? How do I actually rank a page?" This is exactly that SEO guide.

Below, we'll discuss the SEO goals that we hope to achieve with the guide (the SEO behind the SEO), but if you haven't check it out yet, here's a link to the new guide:

How to Rank On Google

SEO goals

Rarely do SEO blogs talk about their own SEO goals when publishing content, but we wanted to share some of our strategies for publishing this guide.

1. Keywords

First of all, we wanted to improve on the keywords we already rank for (poorly). These are keywords like:

How to rank

SEO blueprint

SEO step-by-step

Our keyword research process showed that the phrase "SEO checklist" has more search volume and variations that "SEO blueprint", so we decided to go with "checklist" as a keyword.

Finally, when doing a competitor keyword gap analysis, we discovered some choice keywords that our competitors are ranking for with similar posts.

Based on this, we knew we should include the word "Google" in the title and try to rank for terms about "ranking on Google."

2. Featured snippets

Before publishing the guide, our friend Brian Dean (aka Backlinko) owns the featured snippet for "how to rank on Google."

It's a big, beautiful search feature. And highly deserved!

We want it.

There are no guarantees that we'll win this featured snippet (or others), but by applying a few featured snippets best practices—along with ranking on the first page—we may get there.

3. Links

We believe the guide is great content, so we hope it attracts links.

Links are important because while the guide itself may generate search traffic, the links it earns could help with the rankings across our entire site. As Rand Fishkin once famously wrote about the impact of links in SEO, "a rising tide lifts all ships."

Previously, the old post had a few hundred linking root domains pointing at it, including links from high-authority sites like Salesforce.

Obviously, we are now 301 redirecting these links to the new guide.

We'll also update internal links throughout the site, as well as adding links to posts and pages where appropriate.

To help build links in the short-term, we'll continue promoting the guide through social and email channels.

Long-term, we could also do outreach to help build links.

To be honest, we think the best and easiest way to build links naturally is simply to present a great resource that ranks highly, and also that we promote prominently on our site.

Will we succeed?

Time will tell. In 3-6 months we'll do an internal followup, to track our SEO progress and see how we measured up against our goals.

To make things more complicated, SEO is far more competitive than it was 7 years ago, which makes things harder. Additionally, we're transparently publishing our SEO strategy out in the open for our competitors to read, so they may adjust their tactics.

Want to help out? You can help us win this challenge by reading and sharing the guide, and even linking to it if you'd like. We'd very much appreciate it :) To your success in SEO.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is key to reducing digital ad waste

30-second summary:

As PPC costs continue to increase, it’s more important than ever for marketers and agencies to be able to access their data – all of their data.

What’s even more critical is to track true conversions, meaning the leads that actually convert into paying customers for a business.

The issue is that Google and other ad platforms treat all conversions as equal, a major flaw in the system.

Do you really want your advertising budget being wasted on ads that are producing solicitations instead of qualified leads?

More insights on how the world’s first AI Smart Core℠, SherloQ

is revolutionizing how websites and digital ad campaigns operate altogether.

As pay-per-click (PPC) costs continue to increase, it’s more important than ever for marketers and digital ad agencies to be able to access their data – all of their data.

A recent article by Susan Wenogard talks about just how critical it is to track all conversions. I would argue what’s even more critical is to track true conversions, meaning the leads that actually convert into paying customers for a business.

The issue is that Google and other ad platforms treat all conversions as equal, a major flaw in the system. Here’s an example. Let’s say an ad generates 10 clicks and out of those clicks, five of them convert into a lead on the site either through a phone call, email, or chat. Out of those five conversions, only one converts into a customer while the rest are solicitations. However, the automation systems of the advertising platform will equate all of these conversions as valuable to the business and optimize its campaigns accordingly.

Do you really want your advertising budget being wasted on ads that are producing solicitations instead of qualified leads? I think not.

Content created in partnership with SherloQ

, Inc.

Here we go, again: Disappearing data

Google Ads also recently started to limit the data shared in its Search Terms Report to only include terms that were searched for by a significant number of users. Google has stated that this change is in regard to privacy compliance.

But, what does Google define as significant or insignificant data? This change reduces an advertiser’s ability to identify the search queries that triggered an ad, even for those that generated a click or conversion. This spells even more waste for advertisers and is equivalent to losing 28% of your budget’s visibility.

Are you ready to throw away 28% of your advertising budget? Again, I think not.

The real solution to reducing digital ad waste

With the world’s first AI Smart Core℠, SherloQ

is revolutionizing how websites and ad campaigns operate altogether.

Powered by IBM Watson, SherloQ

allows marketers to easily train their AI-models on the types of leads that are most valuable to their business. First-party customer data from call tracking, chat vendors and on-site form submissions are piped into the system, and then SherloQ

rates and assigns each lead with an Ad Rank Score

, while also accounting for bio-patented feedback from the end-user.

SherloQ

continuously feeds this data back into individual advertising platforms, informing them to optimize for the ad campaigns that are driving real customers for the business – thus eliminating ad waste.

In a recent case study of the McKnight’s Senior Living Directory, the number one publisher for senior living in the United States, the team shared some insights on how they are using SherloQ

with IBM Watson:

“Our directory has over 14,000 retirement and assisted living communities listed, including the multiple agencies we work with to manage assisted living websites and digital advertising for our listings. SherloQ’s

AI automation and data mining capabilities allows us to expand our digital media offerings and effectively run PPC advertisements for all 14,000 facilities while having a global view that would otherwise be impossible.”

Additionally, SherloQ

is giving marketers control over their data, at a critical time, too. SherloQ

provides marketers and agencies with user intent and intelligence that’s based on first-party data, identifying the specific landing pages and language/keywords consumers use to describe or find a business. This intelligence can be used to improve website SEO and content marketing strategies, ad copy and creative, and identifies potential new markets to enter.

For marketers and agencies seriously looking to reduce or eliminate their digital ad waste, download our white paper to learn more and contact SherloQ

to sign up for a demo or free 30 data trial.

The post Artificial intelligence (AI) is key to reducing digital ad waste appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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[blissyy]

How We Became Digital Marketers in Just One Summer

Posted by rootandbranch

Editor’s note: This blog is from the perspective of five University of Pittsburgh students — Kirsten, Steve, Darcie, Erin, and Sara — who completed a class this summer called "Digital Marketing Search Fundamentals", taught by Zack Duncan of Root and Branch.

Introduction

Our digital marketing class this summer did not give us credits that count towards graduation (in fact, some of us graduated in Spring 2020), nor did it give us a grade. Instead, we learned about paid search and organic search along with some of the key concepts central to digital marketing. We also became certified in Google Ads Search along the way. 

We each had different reasons for taking the course, but we all believe that digital marketing will have value for us in our lives.

At the beginning of the term, in June 2020, we were asked, “What is one thing you’re hoping to get out of this class?” Here are some of our responses to that question:

I hope to gain a strong understanding of SEO and Google Ads, and to get hands-on experience to understand how both would be used in a work setting.

I want to learn something about marketing that I might not learn in the classroom.

I'm hoping to become more competitive in this difficult job market.

I hope to build on my resume and develop skills for personal use.

I want to learn a foundational skill that can be applied in many different aspects of business. 

Now that we’ve completed the class, we wanted to share our thoughts on why we believe digital marketing matters — both for our lives today and as we look ahead to the future. We’re also going to cover five of the most important building blocks we learned this summer, that have helped us see how all the pieces of digital marketing fit together.

Part 1: Why digital marketing matters

Why digital marketing training matters now

To become more competitive candidates in applying for jobs

Some of us are recent grads in the midst of searching for our first jobs after college. Some of us are still in school and are actively looking for internships. We’ve all seen our fair share of job listings for positions like “Digital Marketing Intern” or “Digital Marketing Associate”. Given that the majority of us are marketing majors, you might think it’s safe to assume we would be qualified for at least an interview for those positions. 

Nope. 

Before gaining a solid foundation in digital marketing, we were often quite limited in the listings we were qualified for. But things have been changing now that we can say we’re certified in Google Ads Search and can speak to topics like digital analytics, SEO, and the importance of understanding the marketing funnel.

To help with growing freelance side businesses

Towards the beginning of the pandemic, a few of us were dangerously close to graduation with little to no hope of finding a job in marketing. Instead of binge-watching Netflix all day and hoping some fantastic opportunity would magically come our way, the entrepreneurial among us decided to see how we could use our current skills to generate revenue. 

One of us is especially interested in graphic design and learned everything there was to know in Adobe Creative Suite to become a freelance graphic designer, starting a side business in graphic design, and designs logos, labels, menus, and more.

After this class, finding clients has changed in a big way now. Instead of being limited to looking for clients in social media groups, digital marketing knowledge opens up a whole new world. With a functioning website and a knowledge of both paid and organic search, the process of finding new customers has dramatically changed (for the better!).

To be more informed consumers

While a digital marketing background doesn’t instantly translate to job opportunities for everyone, it can help all of us become more informed consumers.

As consumers, we want to pay for quality goods and services at a fair price. Some basic digital marketing knowledge gives us a better understanding of why the search engine results page (SERP) findings show up in the order that they do. Knowing about keywords, domain authority (for organic search) and quality scores (for paid results) can demystify things. And that’s just on the SERP.

Moving off the SERP, it’s helpful to know how nearly every advertisement we see is somehow targeted to us. If you are seeing an ad, there is a very good chance you fall into an audience segment that a brand has identified as a potential target. You may also be seeing the ad due to a prior visit to the brand’s website and are now in a retargeting audience (feel free to clear out those cookies if you’re sick of them!).

The more information you have as a consumer, the more likely you are to make a better purchase. These few examples just go to show how digital marketing training matters now, even if you are not the one actively doing the digital marketing.

How a digital marketing foundation be useful in the future

It’s helpful in creating and growing a personal brand

Your brand only matters if people know about it. You could sit in your room and put together the most awesome portfolio website for yourself and create a solid brand identity, but if no one else knows about it, what’s the point? Digital marketing concepts like understanding SEO basics can help make your presence known to potential customers, employers, and clients.

It would be terrible if your competition got all the business just because you didn’t use the simple digital marketing tools available to you, right? Digital marketing efforts can have many different goals ranging from making sales to just increasing general awareness of your brand, so get out there and start!

To become a more flexible contributor in future career opportunities

One thing we’ve heard consistently in the job search process is employers love flexible, cross functional employees. It seems the most successful and valued employees are often those that are not only experts in their field, but also have a pretty good understanding of other subjects that impact their work. Let’s say you’re an account manager for a digital agency, and you have some great insight that you think could be helpful in driving some new ad copy testing for your biggest client. It’s going to be a whole lot easier talking with your copywriter and media team (and being taken seriously by them), if you have an understanding of how the text ads are built. 

To see data as an opportunity for action, as opposed to just numbers

Are you someone who enjoys numbers and performance metrics? That's great! So are we! But those numbers are meaningless without a digital marketing background to provide context for the data. 

Understanding data is a valuable tool for getting to know your audience and evaluating advertising campaigns. Seeing that your Google Search text ad has a poor click-through rate is only actionable if you have the foundation to take steps and improve it. Analyzing your website’s metrics and finding that you have a low average session duration is meaningless if you don’t connect the dots between the numbers and what they mean for your web design or your on-page content.

It’s pretty clear that the numbers don’t give much value to a marketer or a business without the ability to recognize what those metrics mean and the actions that can be taken to fix them. As we advance in our careers and have more and more responsibility for decision making, digital marketing fundamentals can continue to grow our experience with turning data into insight-driven action.

To optimize for conversions — always

Whatever the goal, it’s important to know if you’re operating efficiently in terms of your conversions. In other words, you need to know if you’re getting a return for the investment (time, money, or both) you’re putting in. When you’re operating to get the most conversions for the lowest cost, you are employing a mindset that will help your marketing efforts perform as well as they can.

Having a digital marketing foundation will allow you to think intelligently about “conversions”, or the kinds of results that you’d like to see your marketing efforts generate. A conversion might be a completed sale for an e-commerce company, a submitted lead form for a B2B software company, or a new subscriber for an online publication.

Whatever the desired conversion action, thinking about them as the goal helps to give context in understanding how different marketing efforts are performing. Is your ad performing well and should it receive more media spend, or is it just wasting money? 

Thinking about conversions isn’t always easy, and may take some trial and error, but it can lead to making smart, measurable, and cost-effective decisions. And those decisions can get smarter over time as we get more and more familiar with the five key building blocks of digital marketing (at least the five that we’ve found to be instructive).

Part 2: Understanding five building blocks of digital marketing

1. The marketing funnel (customer journey)

The marketing funnel (or the user/customer journey) refers to the process by which a prospective customer hears about a product or service, becomes educated about the product or service, and makes a decision whether or not to purchase the product or service in question.

It encompasses everything from the first time that brand awareness is established to the potential purchase made by the customer. The awareness stage can be known as the “top of the funnel”, and there are lots of potential prospects in that audience. 

From there, some prospects “move down the funnel” as they learn more and get educated about the product or service. Those that don’t move down the funnel and progress in their journey are said to “fall out” of the funnel.

As the journey continues, prospects move closer to becoming customers. Those who eventually “convert” are those that completed the journey through the bottom of the funnel.

Understanding that there is such a thing as a customer journey has helped to frame our thinking for different types of marketing challenges. It essentially boils down to understanding where, why, when, and how your prospects are engaging with your brand, and what information they will need along the way to conversion.

2. Paid search vs. organic search and the SERP

For many of us, one of the first steps in understanding paid vs. organic search was getting a handle on the SERP. 

The slide below is our “SERP Landscape” slide from class. It shows what’s coming from paid (Google Ads), and what’s coming from organic search. In this case, organic results are both local SEO results from Google My Business, and also the on-page SEO results. Here’s a link to a 92-second video with the same content from class.

We learned to look for the little “Ad” designation next to the paid text ads that are often at the top of the SERP. 

These are search results with the highest AdRank who are likely willing to bid the most on the specific keyword in question. Since paid search is based on CPC (cost per click) pricing, we learned that the advertiser doesn’t incur any costs for their ad to show up, but does pay every single time the ad is clicked. 

Although many CPCs might range in the $2 - $3 range, some are $10 and up. With that kind of investment for each click, advertisers really need to focus on having great landing pages with helpful content that will help drive conversions.

Organic search, on the other hand, is “free” for each click. But it also relies on great content, perhaps even more so than paid search. That’s because the only way to get to the top of the organic search rankings is to earn it. There’s no paying here! 

Search engines like Google are looking for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) in content to rank highly on the SERP. In addition to making good local sense for Google, it all comes back to the core of Alphabet’s business model, as the slide below shows.

Understanding Google’s motivations help us understand what drives organic search and the SERP landscape overall. And understanding the basics of paid and organic search is an important foundation for all aspiring digital marketers who want to work in the field.

3. Inbound vs. outbound marketing

Are you working to push a message out to an audience that you hope is interested in your product or service? If so, you’re doing some outbound marketing, whether it be traditional media like billboards, television, or magazines, or even certain types of digital advertising like digital banner ads. Think about it as a giant megaphone broadcasting a message.

Inbound work, on the other hand, aims to attract potential customers who are actively engaged in seeking out a product or service. Search marketing (both paid search and organic search) are perfect examples of inbound, as they reach prospects at the moment they’re doing their research. Instead of a megaphone, think of a magnet. The content that does the best job in solving problems and answering questions will be the content with the strongest magnetic pull that gets to the top of SERPs and converts. 

If you’re going to be here for a while, click the image below for more information on how we think about content in the context of digital marketing efforts.

4. Basic digital marketing metrics

There are some universal metrics that we all need to understand if we’re going to develop a competency in digital marketing. Click through rate (CTR), for example, is a great way to measure how effective an ad unit or organic result is in terms of generating a click. 

But before we can fully understand CTR (clicks divided by impressions), we first need to make sure we understand the component parts of the metric. Here are four of those key components that we learned about during our digital marketing training:

Impression: A search result (paid or organic) or an ad shows up on a page

Click: A user clicking the search result or ad on a page triggers a recorded click

Conversion: After clicking on the search result or ad, the user completes an action that is meaningful for the business. Different types of businesses have different conversion actions that are important to them.

Cost: While organic search results are “free” (not counting costs associated with creating content), paid ads incur a cost. Understanding the cost of any paid advertising is a crucial component of understanding performance.

How does it all work in practice? Glad you asked! Check out the example below for a hypothetical advertising campaign that served 10,000 impressions, drove 575 clicks, cost $1,000, and generated 20 conversions:

5. Platforms and tools a beginner digital marketer should use

Our class was focused on search marketing, and we talked about one platform for paid and one platform for organic. 

On the paid side, there is only one name in the game: Google Ads. Google has free training modules and certifications available through a platform called Skillshop. You’ll need a Google-affiliated email address to log in. After doing so, just search for “Google Ads Search” and you can go through the training modules shown below. 



If you’re already a Google Ads pro, you can hop right to the exam and take the timed Google Ads Search Assessment. If you can get an 80% or higher on the 50-question exam, you’ll get a certification badge!

For organic search, we learned about keyword research, title tags, H1s and H2s, anchor text in links, and more through the training available on Moz Academy. The 73-minute Page Optimization course has eight different training sections and includes an On Page Optimization Quiz at the end. Fair warning, some of the content might be worth watching a few times if you’re new to SEO. For most of us this was our first exposure to SEO, and it took some time for most of our brains to sort through the difference between a title tag and an H1 tag!

Another platform that we liked was Google Trends, which can be useful for both paid and organic search, and is just generally a cool way to see trends happening! 

There are many more resources and tools out there in the world. Some of us are aiming to get more comfortable with these fundamentals, while some others have already branched out into other disciplines like social media.

Conclusion

Thanks for coming along with us on this digital marketing journey. We hope it was a useful read!

During the process of putting this together, things have changed for us:

Kirsten landed a full-time job.

Steve started doing consulting work for a growing Shopify site in Google Ads and Google Analytics, and is planning to make consulting his full-time work.

Darcie landed a job as a Paid Search Analyst for a national retailer.

For all of us, we know we’re only taking the first steps of our digital marketing futures, and we’re excited to see what the future holds!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Customer experience optimization (CXO) for online stores: Three proven SEO tactics

30-second summary:

Once you have the right product and pricing, succeeding with your online store essentially boils down to effective digital marketing and delivering a top-notch customer experience.

For ecommerce, in particular, SEO — or ranking on the first page of Google — plays a huge role in effective marketing and online branding, as it builds trust in the eyes of your audience which paid ads can’t. And trust translates to a better customer experience.

Here we discuss three proven SEO tactics that boost your search engine rankings while also enhancing your brand’s customer experience in ways that go beyond trust-building.

Your modern online store has a lot of moving parts, with hundreds to thousands of different product pages, numerous variations of the same page, and dynamic elements. And you’re well aware of the importance of having your store rank on the first page of Google — more traffic, brand awareness, trust, and sales. However, SEO today is not just about including the right keywords and building backlinks to your online store but is closely knit with providing a great user or customer experience (CX).

When you work on your SEO by keeping the customer experience aspect in mind, you’ll build a store that not only garners top rankings and tons of organic traffic but also converts that traffic into customers.

In this post, let’s take a look at three tried-and-true SEO tactics that directly improve your store’s search visibility while also establishing an outstanding customer experience.

Tactic #1: Make your store load lightning fast

Page speed is one of the most critical factors that can make or break your store’s rankings and CX. Most people today lack the patience to wait for even three-to-five seconds for your website to load, and won’t think twice before bouncing off to a competitor.

Source: Think With Google

Site speed is an official Google ranking factor since 2010. Thus, optimizing your store’s speed is pivotal to both search rankings and CX.

That being said, the sheer number of visuals and dynamic elements on your store can make this seemingly straightforward task a tall order.

The best way to go about optimizing your site speed is to run your site through a free tool such as GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess how your site performs currently. These tools will generate a list of suggestions and optimization opportunities that you can then check off one by one to make your store lightning fast.

For example, you may have bulky image files that need to be compressed using an image compression tool. Or, you may have yet to enable browser caching so repeat visitors don’t have to reload the entire page each time.

Similarly, it is possible that you have too many unnecessary redirects in your product pages or render-blocking resources that negatively impact your site speed. Use the aforementioned tools to pinpoint the exact reasons for suboptimal speed, and then work to individually improve every aspect.

Tactic #2: Ensure content on all pages is unique and updated

Google wants you to have unique, high-quality content on every URL of your store. But with countless URLs owing to product variations and categories, this can become a tough nut to crack.

That’s because, on top of creating unique, keyword-optimized, and descriptive content for each product page, you must take care of internal search result pages and product filters (such as color and size) that result in too many low-value duplicate pages which you don’t want Google to index.

And duplicate content (for instance, multiple colors or sizes of the same shirt) can seriously hurt your SEO.

To dodge this, opt for one of these three options:

Include a canonical tag (rel=canonical) on product variation pages that points to the main product page.

Place a “noindex” tag on the pages you don’t want Google to index.

Block the variations within your robots.txt file.

Next, you need to have a plan for dealing with outdated content, such as products that are discontinued or seasonal. You need to deal with such content in a way such that the SEO value is not lost and customers aren’t left confused.

The easiest way to do that is to use 301 redirects to point old URLs to the new ones. This way, visitors get the most up-to-date content on the product they are looking for (thus ensuring consistent customer experience), while the link juice from the original URL is correctly passed on to the new page.

Tactic #3: Focus on the mobile experience

Online shopping on smartphones and tablets has become mainstream in the last decade. Today, mobile is where the money’s at.

Take a look at these numbers from the recent holiday shopping seasons:

On Black Friday ($6.2 billion in online revenue in 2018), nearly 40% of sales on the conventionally brick and mortar shopping day came via a mobile device.

On Cyber Monday ($9.2 billion in online revenue in 2019), 54% of visitors came from mobile devices, while around 33% purchases on their mobile device, up over 40% from the previous year.

What’s more, in 2021, 53.9% of all retail ecommerce is expected to be generated via mobile. In other words, odds are that the bulk of your visitors are coming from a smartphone or tablet than a desktop.

Despite that, 84% of users have experienced difficulties in completing mobile transactions. This means you have a great opportunity to surpass your competitors in terms of customer experience (CX) and rankings by creating a mobile-friendly store.

Due to Google’s mobile-first indexing, the mobile version of your store (not the desktop!) is the benchmark for how Google indexes your website and determines your rankings.

Follow these best practices for a stronger mobile experience:

Incorporate a responsive design, so all the content on your store automatically adjusts to the screen size. This way, you serve the same HTML code and URLs regardless of the visitor’s device.

Mobile page speed is an official ranking factor, so ensure optimal speed on mobile by optimizing images, enabling compression, minifying CSS and JS, avoiding redirects, improving server response times, and leveraging browser caching.

Don’t forget usability. Make your store easy to navigate, even on mobile. Enable autofill for contact forms, wherever possible. Make buttons large enough to be easily clickable. After all, Google rewards excellent experience no matter the device.

Furthermore, make sure to avoid these common mobile UX mistakes:

Blocked JavaScript and CSS files

Unplayable video content (due to Flash)

Illegibly small font size

Cluttered touch elements

Simply put, smartphone ecommerce is a growing trend and Google is prioritizing mobile experience. And so, focus on your store’s mobile-friendliness for better rankings and CX.

SEO and customer experience (CX) are two sides of the same coin

The modern customer won’t settle for anything less than a sublime online shopping experience, which starts from finding your store on the first page of search results to a fast loading site, up-to-date content, and beyond.

Coupled with the fact that search engines like Google have now evolved to a point where they’re able to reward remarkable customer experience with first-page rankings, you know you’ve got to work on your store’s SEO from a CX perspective.

The three tactics outlined above directly improve your SEO and CX, so focus on getting these right to not only boost your store’s search rankings and drive more organic traffic but also to render an impressive shopping experience that customers keep coming back to.

Harsh Agrawal is the pioneering blogger behind ShoutMeLoud, an award-winning blog with over 832K subscribers and a million Pageviews per month.

The post Customer experience optimization (CXO) for online stores: Three proven SEO tactics appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Page speed is a big deal – Why? It impacts SEO rankings

30-second summary:

Consumers expect ≈ and apps to respond quickly. Each second of delay can cost $100K in lost revenue for brands.

There are tools to help understand a page’s overall speed. Looking at the relationship between page speed and SEO ranking shows that having a faster performing site/page does impact ranking in a positive way, albeit slightly.

As marketers look for additional data points about why they should prioritize page speed, Jason Tabeling highlights the data and how it fits into an overall SEO strategy.

The saying is, “Speed Kills.” However, when it comes to digital speed, it’s really, “Slow speed kills.” According to a study by Google and Deloitte for every 0.1 seconds that your page speed improves can increase your conversion rates by 8%. That data point creates a pretty powerful business case to improve the performance of your site. Think about this data point from your own experience browsing the web, mobile, and desktop. Have you ever found that a page was just loading too slow that you moved on to something else, or that brand lost the sale? I know I have. 

So, we know that speed improves page performance, but what about how it impacts SEO rankings? I took a look at a small data set to try to get a sense of the impact that page speed has on rankings. I took 10 retail and conversion based keywords and ran the specific webpages through the Google Page Speed Test to look at the correlation between speed and rank. This data set gives a good directional study on the impact. Here is what I found;

Rank and page speed are only slightly correlated

Creating a scatter plot of each website’s rank with the page speed shows the distribution. The data does show a relationship between speed and rank. The correlation of the data suggests there is just a 0.08 correlation. A correlation of 1 would be perfectly correlated. So, this score isn’t very high, but there is a correlation and when you are looking for an edge and you know the impact speed has on conversion rates becomes very meaningful. The way to forecast the impact is to use the trendline and its slope. If you remember your algebra class you can use this data to create the equation of a line and estimate what your page speed needs to be a achieve a certain rank. Using that equation you can see that every 10 points of additional speed roughly equals a tenth of a point in rank improvement. So moving from a speed score of 10 equals a rank of 5.3, but a page speed of 100 would equal a rank of 4.4. This might not seem like a big deal, but remember speed dramatically improves conversion rates and has a positive impact on rank as well.

What action should you take?

Here’s an outline of a few steps you can take to optimize your speed.

1. Improve your page speed

There are a lot of opportunities for brands to increase their page speed. Probably the most surprising thing was how many sites had very slow speed rankings. Look at the data in the histogram below. 56% of page speed scores came back <20. That is pretty remarkable considering there are some very well known brands in this study. There are so many opportunities to improve page speed and Google’s tool, and many others provide very step by step actions to take to improve. If you haven’t run your site through this tool or another one you should do that to start – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

2. Don’t forget that speed is important but it’s just one of many factors that impact SEO rankings

While this article is about speed, it should be clear that SEO has many more key items that impact rank and overall results than speed. SEO is a holistic strategy that includes content and technical resources. You can’t forget about how well your content resonates with your audience, how fresh it is, and how well the search engine spiders can crawl and understand your site. So many businesses get caught up in their re-platforming their ecommerce platform and never put a minute of thought into the SEO strategy. 

The post Page speed is a big deal – Why? It impacts SEO rankings appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links — Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Are you using internal links to their full potential? Probably not. Luckily, Cyrus is here with five tips to help you boost your internal linking strategy — and your site performance — in this brand new Whiteboard Friday.

Resources for further reading:

• Should SEOs Care About Internal Links? • Internal Linking Best Practices

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard, and today we are talking about internal links. Specifically, five SEO tactics to maximize your internal links.

I love internal links. There are a lot of guides out there, internal link best practices — they explain everything. This is not that video. This is not that guide. Instead, I want to show you ways to maximize your internal links for maximum SEO gain, because I see a lot of people who don't leverage their full power, and they think internal links simply aren't as powerful. 

But first, a story...

So I have some specific tactics for you to try and employ, and we'll get into those in a second. But first, to demonstrate internal links, I want to start with a story, a story which shows some of their potential power. It's a story of a single link here at Moz that we employed several months ago. 

We have a page on Domain Authority. If you Google "Domain Authority," it's typically the very first result. Back in January, we added a single link to the page. We had just launched a new tool, SEO Domain Metrics, and we wanted to add a link from our existing page to our new page. So we did. The link said "Check your Domain Authority for free," and we added it. Within weeks we saw some interesting metrics, not on the page that we linked to, but on the page that we linked from.

We also included an image on the page to draw attention to the link. Bounce rate instantly went down 33%. Why? People were clicking the link. They wanted to check their Domain Authority. Pages per session went up 33%. So when people were visiting this page, they were visiting more pages pretty much because of this link and the accompanying image.

Session duration was up 10%. So people were spending 10% more time on Moz after they visited this page. Within a few weeks, traffic to the page that we added the link to was up 42%, and it has sustained that traffic increase ever since January when we added that link. Of course, the page that we linked to we added links from all over the site.

Traffic on this page has risen exponentially, and it's now one of the top pages on Moz, probably not all because of this link, but the cumulative efforts of many of those links. So why did that link work so well and why do we think that the link helped improve those page metrics? So here's the thing that most people don't get about internal links.

1. Engagement 

Number one, strive for engagement. When you add internal links to your page, it gives people the opportunity to visit other relevant pages on your site, thereby improving your engagement metrics. That's when you know that your internal links are working when you improve engagement. If you're just adding SEO links for SEO value and there's no engagement change, are you really adding value?

No. So you want to go after engagement. There are some technical Google reasons for this. Google has several patents that we've discussed over the years — reasonable surfer. There's a patent called User Sensitive PageRank. Through these patents, Google describes how they want to count links that people actually click.

If people aren't clicking on your links, should they really count? So Google has several processes in place to sort of measure what people are clicking or what they might click and actually pass more weight through those links. So you get help with the engagement, but you also pass more link signals through those links that people are actually clicking.

Now think about where you might be putting your internal links now. Are you putting them at the bottom of the page, like in a related post? Is anybody clicking those widget links? Maybe not, probably not. Look at the top of this post, the top of this page. I'm going to add some links about internal linking at the very top of the post. Do you think people are going to click those links?

You bet they are. There's a good chance you're going to click one of those links after you watch this video. Or maybe you clicked on it before you watch those videos. So we would expect those links to pass more value than adding those links further down on the page or in a widget or something like that. You can tell your internal links are working and have value when you see your engagement metrics start to move.

So that should be the number one measure or standard of if your internal links are valuable and are working for you. Pursue engagement, number one rule. 

2. Extreme topical relevance

Number two tip, extreme topical relevance. Now people say, yes, you should link to topically relevant pages. I like link to extremely topically relevant pages.

So whenever I publish a new page, I look for the other pages on my site that are very topically related, and I make sure to interlink them appropriately so I can get the right rankings boost to the right pages that I want. There are other Google technical reasons for this too. We talked about reasonable surfer and user sensitive PageRank. Well, Google also has something they patented called Topical PageRank, and that means that links that are more topically relevant pass more value.

Links that are less topically relevant pass less value. You can also look at your engagement metrics to see if these links are topically relevant because people generally don't want to click less topically relevant links. So a couple of tips for finding your most topically relevant pages on your site. For example, for Domain Authority, I might look at all the other keywords that that page ranks for in positions 2 and 10, which means they rank highly but they're not quite number 1 and I want to boost the rankings.

I want to find other pages on my site that also rank for those keywords. So I would use a query like this, and I'll put the code in the transcription below. I would search on my site, site to moz.com, search for my keyword "Domain Authority," and I would exclude the page that I'm actually looking for, so:

site:moz.com domain authority -inurl:/domainauthority

Google will give me a list of other pages on my site that rank for Domain Authority, excluding this, and I know those might be good link targets to link to my page to help it rank for those terms. We have some other resources on that as well if you search around and I'll link to:

Harnessing the Flow of Link Equity to Maximize SEO Ranking Opportunity

3. Add context

Third tip, don't just add links, add context to your links.

One thing that a lot of people do, that I hate seeing, is when they add a link to a page, they'll just find a piece of relevant text and they'll add a link to it and that's it, without adding any relevant context or anything else like that. In my experience, it's much better if you add context around a link. Google's freshness patents talk about the amount of change in a document.

When they just see a link, they might ignore just a simple link added. But if you add text, if you add image, if you add context around a link to help draw people's attention to it, to help give some relevant signals to Google, that link, in my experience, is much more likely to pass value than simply adding a link and linking some existing text.

So always add context to your links. 

4. Make every link unique

Number four, can you believe we're at four out of five? Number four, make every link unique. Now a lot of people in SEO they talk about link ratio. Should you use exact match anchor text or partial match anchor text? What should your ratios be? I think that's far too complicated.

I think much easier is just simply make every new link you add unique. Make it natural. Use natural words. I tend to avoid exact match anchor text completely. That way I get to avoid something that's very easy to do, which is over-optimization. If you're a new site with not a lot of authority, Google has processes in place to detect over-optimization when they think that you're trying to manipulate your rankings.

So make every link unique. Use natural words. Don't worry about ratios and things like that. If you follow my advice, I would generally avoid exact match anchor text on internal links. Other people may give you different advice though. 

5. Trim low value links

Finally, tactic number five, you may consider trimming your low value links, and this is another technical reason.

This is a type of old PageRank sculpting. The idea is every page has a certain amount of PageRank. If you include lots and lots of links on your page, the value that Google is able to pass through each link is diminished. It's diluted. So you sometimes may want to eliminate the low value links. So what do I mean by a low value link?

Links that are not engaging and not relevant. People are not clicking them. If they're not engaging and they're not relevant, there is simply no point to include them on the page if they're not being actually helpful. 

Conclusion

All right. So those are my five tips for getting the most power of your internal linking. If you have any other tips that you'd like to share with the community, we'd love to hear about them in the comments below.

Hope you enjoyed this video. Best of luck with your SEO.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Four ways to test your marketing ideas instead of trusting blogs

30-second summary:

Blogs are a valuable and insightful arm of any brands’ marketing strategy.

The drawback to that, of course, is that industry blogs are filled with untested theories and can start to resemble echo chambers if relied upon solely.

Marketing innovation comes not by reading the work of others, but by continually testing and trying new approaches to age-old problems.

Sarah Fruy explores new testing strategies marketers can explore in order to maximize the value of their funnels.

If more than a decade of work in the marketing trenches has taught me anything, it’s that no silver bullet will make all your problems go away.

Unfortunately, a misconception exists that a one-size-fits-all answer is available through a simple Google search. One marketer finds success with a particular tactic, writes a blog post about it, and tells everyone to use the same strategy. Before you know it, a listicle features this tactic and more people start viewing it as a best practice.

Rinse and repeat.

While this tactic might very well be the right strategy for your business, chances are good that it’s not. I absolutely encourage scouring the internet for helpful advice, but you must test that theory with your own audience on your own platforms. Consumer behavior is constantly evolving. As effective marketers, we need to test our theories as much as possible to avoid costly mistakes.

Building a culture of testing

Marketers who neglect testing are probably working from a waterfall approach rather than using an agile method. They believe success stems from big-bang campaign launches, with a long planning period leading up to a major release. They value their instincts over data-driven decisions.

This might result from a lack of knowledge around agile marketing practices or an organization that requires many layers of approval before a launch. Others believe that success lies in following in the footsteps of “greater” marketers and implementing their playbooks the best they can. They think, “If it worked for so-and-so, it will work for me.”

Others might cite budget as a barrier. But even a bootstrapped startup with no budget can find ways to test and validate ideas before going all-in. A large budget doesn’t prevent failure, as even larger corporations suffer from premature releases of products and ideas. For example, Microsoft developed a reputation in recent years for rolling out clunky products and campaigns — from Vista to corrupted chatbots — that suffered from hurried rollouts.

Who wants to risk a failure with so much time and money at stake? A few factors will help you better analyze your campaigns and institute a more successful testing program. Use these tips to build the testing culture you need to thrive:

1. Work with a cross-functional group

A recent Deloitte report found that 89% of executives listed organizational design through teams as their top priority for handling challenges in their businesses.

Building cross-functional teams with employees from different departments and skill sets allows for faster communication and decision-making. It also adds to the conversation more diverse perspectives and experiences, allowing you to interpret data points from a variety of angles and fueling more creative testing ideas.

If you aren’t ready to completely restructure your operations just yet, start by establishing an outside-in approach to idea generation by pulling in members of other departments for input and new concepts. Even a single variant perspective strengthens the ideas you’re building for new campaigns and helps you spot potential issues before implementation.

2. Don’t run one-off tests

An agile marketing team’s initial goal is typically to release a minimum viable product and then test the waters and see how a select segment of your market responds.

If you get a signal that the campaign is working, develop, and amplify that success. If the campaign doesn’t perform to your expectations, iterate on your approach or move on to a new program. Using the data as your guide, you will be building an entire culture of testing so you can be confident in every initiative you deploy.

Earlier this year, we decided to test exit modals on our website. The initial results were positive, so we scaled the number of pages and continued to see success. Our next step included personalizing the experience and testing different types of creative messages.

As you can see, one idea — “Should we implement exit modals on our site?” — spawned an ever-expanding list of testing ideas for our team. A well-structured program will yield many tests to prove a hypothesis before it’s ready for full-blown exposure, so stopping at a one-off test leaves plenty of valuable data undiscovered.

3. Don’t optimize for a single metric

It’s easy to set up a test and optimize for clicks or form fills, but you might also want to consider the long-term impact of short-term gains.

Maybe more people sign up for your free trial, but they also churn at a higher rate. If you optimize solely around their interest to sign up, you miss out on the bigger insight down the road: This new audience is actually decreasing your overall revenue. To illustrate why you can’t focus on one area, look no further than Homejoy, a home-cleaning startup.

The company invested a ton of resources into a single metric — customer acquisition. A $19 first-time customer promotional price fueled its growth. However, the deal mostly attracted a customer base interested in the discount. With no focus on customer retention, Homejoy saw only 25% of those homeowners return, and the growth stagnated, expediting the failure of the company.

4. Include both quantitative and qualitative research

A few years back, I was under pressure to have my startup business sponsor an event as a way to market our new product. Being in the early stages of product development, our customer persona wasn’t fully developed yet, but the opportunity guaranteed press coverage and a large volume of foot traffic in the market we were beta testing. So I took a risk and got us a booth.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the event’s audience wasn’t a strong demographic fit for us — something we would have learned if we had attended a year earlier and interacted with the audience firsthand.

Running tests can be very exciting when you hit statistical significance, but don’t let that evidence shield you from actually talking to your audience. Make sure to include open-ended questionnaires or user groups in your research program. Try to balance your research so you understand not only how a user responds, but also why the user responds that way.

No single idea or marketing initiative will work for everyone, no matter what the blogs say. Don’t rely on untested insights to drive your campaigns. Instead, do your research, narrow the scope to fit your needs, and test each new plan to ensure you’ve got a real winner on your hands.

Sarah Fruy, Director of Brand and Digital experience, leads the strategy and goals for Pantheon’s website and branded content. You can find Sarah on LinkedIn and Twitter @sarahfruy.

The post Four ways to test your marketing ideas instead of trusting blogs appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Winter is coming: How to prepare your content strategy for a COVID-19 winter

30-second summary:

With the number of cases of the novel coronavirus rising once again, content marketers face a resumed challenge to meet consumer needs.

Sales around the holidays will need to be approached sensitively, as unemployment rises and families are forced to tighten their belts.

Creating empathetic and emotionally-driven content will be more likely to appeal to audiences during these times.

The potential for future lockdown measures will see a potential increase in the demand for video content, particularly tutorials and explainers for new skills and products.

Although the last few months have seen quarantine restrictions being eased around the world, a resurgence in COVID-19 cases has led to a new round of measures being put in place to quell the spread of the virus before winter. However, now that scientists have a greater understanding of the nature of the novel coronavirus, it seems more likely that these new rules will be less all-encompassing than they were the first time around — pending any drastic rises in numbers, of course.

What this does mean, however, is that people in lockdown are likely to still be looking out for content that’s relevant to their current situation. We already talked you through what businesses learned about content marketing through the first phase of the pandemic, and the ever-changing state of things shouldn’t stop you from maintaining something close to your regular content schedule.

But based on what we now know about the virus, and what has and hasn’t worked with content strategies during the pandemic, there’s a lot your business can do to prepare for the winter ahead. Here are four key things to consider.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Traditionally the day for huge savings on big-ticket items, Thanksgiving weekend accounts for around a third of consumers’ entire holiday spend. But with Turkey Day fast approaching, many consumers are not even sure how (or if) they’ll be able to see family safely. Stores are having to come up with new ways to mark the occasion and give their customers the discounts they expect. Fortunately for most businesses, this primarily means giving their online offerings a shot in the arm.

In the midst of a huge global economic downturn, however, businesses will be wise to approach content around sales and promotional offers extremely carefully. The products you choose to put on sale at a discount may have to change to meet the different demands customers have had and will continue to have, during the pandemic. Consequently, writing copy that will emphasize your business’s reasons for doing this could help potential customers see eye-to-eye with your motivations, and help demonstrate an understanding of what consumers need on a wider level.

Emotional content

Going beyond Thanksgiving, the other focal point of your fourth-quarter content marketing campaign will likely be Christmas, but this festive season will clearly require a different approach from previous years. In particular, as The Drum points out, “how brands give back to communities and people will be a huge influence on shoppers this year.” This means that in addition to the keyword research you conduct to determine what you write about, how you write your Christmas content will be just as important.

Beyond the economic impact, most are feeling as a result of the pandemic, which is highly likely to shift consumer behaviors, people are far more likely to be reevaluating what is important to them during this time of year. The possibility of not seeing friends and family as they would on a normal.

Christmas means that the content your business releases will need to be sensitively-written, and seriously take this into consideration. However, Retail Week recently reported that nearly two-thirds of shoppers are more willing to “explore new products” at this time of year than any other time, so combining the emotional appeal with consumer appeal is critical.

This doesn’t only apply to customer-facing companies, however, no matter how easy it may be to forget that real people are responsible for the decisions a business makes. In the wake of the pandemic, emotionally-driven B2B content has been widely discussed and strongly recommended. One Linkedin discussion which took place in early May noted that “B2B audiences share the same fundamental human priorities and are just as interested in seeing their personal experiences reflected in the content.”

Video content

The most effective form of emotionally-driven content your brand could put together for the holidays is through video, which has seen a huge increase in viewing times since the onset of the pandemic. This has been the case across all sectors, and Econsultancy reports that video ad spend has increased by between 60% and 74% since the pandemic began.

As a result, it’s never been more important to start preparing easily-digestible video content to promote your products, explain your brand’s values and give people something fun to watch. But your work isn’t going to be done once you’ve completed the final cut — taking steps to carefully optimize your video content is essential if you want your videos to be seen.

Tutorials and explainers

From makeup tutorials and guides to making your own facemasks, to step-by-step advice on developing new skills, video content has been particularly beneficial during the lockdown as people seek out new ways to pass the time and feel a sense of accomplishment. DIY learning resources have become big business, and the most-searched-for terms — which YouTube has publicly claimed are “astonishing” in their consistency — mainly revolve around picking up new hobbies or coping mechanisms.

These have included baking (particularly sourdough), yoga and guided meditations, and home improvements, all of which would be useful in less fraught times, but particularly centering now. And brands which wouldn’t otherwise be providing this sort of content are getting in on the act, with the likes of Nike and DoubleTree Hotels diverting their budgets and strategies to give searchers the kind of useful content they need. With no clear end in sight for the most recent round of restrictions, videos of this nature are likely to continue being an excellent entry point for bringing new customers to your brand, so finding relevant subject matter will stand you in good stead through the holidays.

Edward Coram James is an SEO professional and the Chief Executive of Go Up Ltd, an international agency dedicated to helping its clients navigate the complexities of global SEO and the technical aspects of delivering location-specific pages to targeted audiences.

The post Winter is coming: How to prepare your content strategy for a COVID-19 winter appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Top 10 Changes That Impacted Google My Business in 2020

Posted by ColanNielsen

2020 has been a busy year for Google My Business (GMB). Since January, Google has launched new features, fixed bugs, and had to adapt to the global pandemic.

At Sterling Sky, we think it’s important to keep track of all the changes that happen in the local search space in general, and that impact GMB specifically. So far in 2020 we are up to 54 changes.

As you can tell, changes that impact Google My Business came at a fast pace — and at high volume — in 2020. In this post, I highlight the changes I think were most important in each month of this year, so far. For an exhaustive list of all the updates that have been made, check out this timeline.

January: Google posts borked — hello, 2020!

Foreshadowing things to come, GMB started off the year with a major issue in their Google Posts feature. Google Posts were getting rejected left, right, and center.

At first, it appeared to be a bug in the system. We were further confused when Google stated that everything was “working as intended”, but the Google My Business Forum was still flooded with users complaining that their Google Posts were being rejected, and not just for a single reason:

And then Google announced that they resolved the issue. Was it truly “Working as intended”? Likely not, but the issues have, indeed, been resolved.

This hiccup made it tough for SEOs who offer Google Posts as part of their service offerings to do their work, and it would have been even more difficult for software companies that connect to Google’s API and offer multi-location Google Posts.

When one of GMB’s products fail, it’s on us as SEOs to clearly explain what’s happening to our clients. Staying on top of GMB bugs, and being able to articulate them, is a critical component of the modern local SEO tool belt.

February: Google adds “suggested categories” for GMB Products

February saw the first of many visible changes to the GMB dashboard when Google added “suggested categories” to the Products section. As of today, we still don’t know if this specific addition impacts ranking, but they still appear in the business profile on mobile, so they can impact conversions. In addition, we do know that adding actual GMB Products does not impact ranking.

March: Google launches several COVID-related features

March saw the beginning of GMB allocating a large percentage of their support resources to the healthcare verticals that were impacted most by COVID-19. To complicate things further, Google disabled the GMB Twitter and Facebook support options.

In addition to allocating resources to healthcare verticals, they began launching specific GMB features to help businesses adjust and communicate their current state of operations to their customers. Some of these initial features included:

Shutting off the ability for businesses to receive new reviews and Q&A

Adding the option to report a location as “Temporarily Closed”

Disabling new photos uploaded by customers

Adding a COVID-19 Google Post type

These features have done a great job helping businesses through the pandemic, and give SEOs another venue to offer value by implementing them for our clients in a proactive manner.

For instance, the COVID-19 Google Post type appears higher up in the business profile, compared to regular Google Post types, which gives us the opportunity to offer businesses an effective way to give their message an increased level of visibility.

April: GMB adds telehealth appointment and COVID links

April concluded with GMB adding several new website link options to the dashboard. The two main link options that were added are the “COVID-19 info link” and the “Telehealth info link”:

Here’s how they look live on mobile:

We dug into Google Analytics for the example above. The COVID links, in addition to being a useful way to communicate new protocols, also drove traffic and conversions.

May: Google confirms April/May local ranking fluctuations were bugs

In November 2019, we described the local ranking algorithm as the “most volatile” we had seen it to date. The ranking fluctuation was so great that we named the algorithm update that was happening “Bedlam”.

When we started to see strikingly similar volatility in the local search results in April 2020, we jumped to the conclusion that this was another local algorithm update. However, Danny Sullivan confirmed that it was a bug this time around:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Just wanted to update. Thanks for the examples. They helped us find a bug that we got resolved about about two weeks ago, and that seems to have stabilized things since.</p>— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) <a href="https://twitter.com/dannysulli... 28, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Several of our clients who saw major ranking fluctuation told us that the real-world impact on their business was palpable. When their rankings dropped, they immediately felt it from a revenue perspective, and when their rankings moved back up, revenue went back up as well. I can only guess that the amount of revenue lost and gained due to this bug, across all businesses, was astronomical.

June: GMB adds “more hours” option

In June, GMB included a new set of hours that a business can add to their locations to indicate when they are open for special circumstances. Some of the “more hours” options appeared to be a response to the pandemic, such as “senior hours”. I suspect that this feature will be available long after the pandemic is over.

SEOs can add value for their clients by proactively setting this up. Some bigger chains such as Wal-Mart are already doing a great job utilizing this feature. Here are some examples I’ve found in the wild recently:

July: Google adds ability to flag user profiles

This is one of my favorite new features from Google this year. They now provide the option for any user to flag a user profile. This new feature is ideal when you want to report a reviewer’s profile that is engaging in clearly fake reviews.

Before this option became available, the only way to report an entire user’s profile was to send an email to Local Guides support.

The important thing to remember is that this feature is only available from the Google Maps App. Here’s how it works:

Open the Google Maps app.

Find a contribution from the profile that you’d like to flag.

Tap on the user name of the profile.

Tap the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner.

Choose “Report profile”.

August: GMB adds performance metrics to direct edit experience

The GMB direct edit experience has been around for a while now. (Ben Fisher did a great job covering it recently.) It’s a useful way for GMB page managers and owners to make edits to the listing directly on Google search, and not have to go into the GMB dashboard.

What GMB added to this feature in August was the ability to see performance metrics (GMB Insights) directly in Google search as well. What I like about this feature is that you can go back and get data from a six-month window, and as of today, you can only go back three months inside the GMB dashboard.

Here’s how you find the performance metrics. Please note that this feature is not available to all businesses yet. Google typically rolls out new features in phases. As Google gathers data on this rollout, and if it is being adopted well, I imagine we will see this rolled-out to 100% by early 2021.

Perform a branded search for the business that you manage and select the “View profile” button.

Next, you need to select “Add a highlight”. This used to be labeled as “Promote”:

After that, select “Performance”:

And finally, after selecting the performance option you will be able to view your insights data.

September: COVID-related health and safety attributes launch

The pandemic influenced several new GMB features such as the “temporarily closed” option and COVID-19 Google Post type, which we have already covered. I think the most significant feature related to COVID-19, however, was the launch of the coronavirus-related health and safety attributes, which were launched in September.

Google seems to be adding more attributes to the list as time goes on, but here is what they have added as of today. You can select these under the “Info” tab inside the Google My Business dashboard.

These attributes are powerful because they are highly visible in multiple places. You can see them on both mobile and desktop, and in both Google Maps and Google search.

Here’s what they look like in the wild:

October: New “preview call history” module in GMB dashboard

As of the beginning of October, I started seeing a module inside the GMB dashboard called “Preview call history BETA”. It’s not entirely clear what the final feature will look like, but experts have been weighing in over at the Local Search Forum.

Here’s what we know so far based on feedback from Google as well as members' feedback from the Local Search Forum.

It’s currently US only and opt-in.

No transcription or call recording.

Call logs remain for 45 days.

There is a whisper message telling the owner that the call originated from Google.

The number displayed to the caller will be the forwarding number.

This may interfere with off-site call tracking via GMB, so use cautiously if you’re using a call tracking strategy.

So what? November, December, and 2021

Like Bowie said, “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes”. When it comes to Google My Business, you can expect the changes to keep coming as we complete 2020 and move on to 2021.

As for my future predictions, where Google My Business is concerned, I see guidelines opening up to include additional business models as a result of the pandemic, and due to the shift that businesses have had to make from an in-person, brick-and-mortar operation to online service.

Telehealth is a prime example. Google has been adding several GMB attributes that a business can select to indicate that they offer online services. Currently, the guidelines say you need to make in-person contact with customers to qualify for a listing. At the very least, Google has opened this rule up temporarily during the pandemic to accommodate this new health model. So the question is whether or not this will continue into the future once the pandemic is over. I think they will.

And with that, remember to turn and face the strange, and embrace Google My Business in all of its constantly changing glory.

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Does changing your business phone number affect SEO?

30-second summary:

Although a business phone number isn’t as tough on your SEO as a complete rebrand, changing it can have an impact on your SEO.

Preserving NAP consistency should be your primary goal when changing your phone number.

Your marketing strategy can help make the transition easier for your customers, too, as you can notify them of the change ahead of time.

The key goal in addition to retaining your ranking should be to not lose the trust of your customers by changing your information – hence the need to approach the process carefully.

Much like all other aspects of digital marketing and brand positioning, SEO is a constantly changing game. With so many moving pieces and evolving trends, it’s no wonder that brands aren’t quite certain which decisions will negatively impact their SEO, and which ones are safe enough to make. 

One day, it seems that one kind of behavior is perfectly fine, while the next Google will penalize it because they’ve implemented algorithm changes. Add customer expectations into the mix, and it gets even more difficult to figure out just what’s worth the effort, and what should be left alone. 

When it comes to your business details, including your name, address, and phone number (neatly packed into the notion of NAP information), change can be good. After all, entire companies have successfully rebranded without a hitch. However, changing a single piece of information such as your phone number can change the entire customer journey if not done right.

Here, we’ll tackle a few essential steps in the process to keep in mind, so that your phone number shift doesn’t impact your ranking or your brand perception negatively. 

NAP it in the bud

Local search is a vital component of your overall SEO strategy, all the more so when you’re running a strictly local business with a physical presence, such as a pastry shop, a car repair facility, or a beauty salon. Your foot traffic heavily depends on your customers’ ability to find correct information online when they search for your services.

If they stumble upon an outdated number, they’ll call the next business in their search results with solid reviews and forget that you exist. Simply put, consistency matters. Google doesn’t want to disappoint its users, so it penalizes businesses with inconsistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information across the internet. As soon as your directories, your website and other online listings don’t show your actual phone number, your ranking will suffer.

The remedy is fairly simple. If you have decided to change your phone number or your entire communications system, for that matter, you should take the time to revise all your local business listings and directories where your company pops up. 

NAP consistency is a vital ranking factor that can either plummet your business in the eyes of search engines, or it can help you reach those topmost desirable spots in the SERPs. So, while changing your business phone number might not be a cause for worry on its own, how you distribute it will greatly matter in local rankings. 

Take care of your call tracking

Some businesses steer clear of call tracking simply because they aren’t sure how to go about it, afraid to damage their SEO in the process. Even more importantly with regards to call tracking, every business needs to adhere to those key legal requirements, such as the EU’s GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, to make sure their customers’ sensitive information is safe. But when the time comes to move from outdated landlines and change your numbers or merge them, you can also reap the benefits of this potentially SEO-beneficial process.

Wanting to unify and improve their communication systems, companies are switching to digital phone solutions such as voice over internet protocol (or VoIP for short). There are many perks of such a transition for call tracking, smarter customer support, and better customer engagement, all of which can support your SEO efforts in the long run. As you learn about VoIP and its many applications, you’ll be able to make the most of your phone-based interactions with your customers to serve your brand reputation, but also your ranking.

In addition to having more business phone numbers at your disposal if you need them, you should know that VoIP platforms come with other useful features such as call analytics, recording, emailing, and texting. Collecting all of that data and implementing SEO-safe call tracking with the help of Dynamic Number Insertion both work in favor of your SEO.

Building and preserving customer trust

When done right, changing your business phone number can be a seamless process that doesn’t do any damage to your ranking. However, it’s important to remember the reason for the ranking in the first place: search engines want to give users the best, most trustworthy results first and above all other available options online. In doing so, they reward businesses that accurately portray themselves online, and contact information is a vital component of that representation.

The basic premise goes as follows: if a customer calls you and gets a notification that the number no longer exists, they lose trust in your brand. Google and other search engines recognize that lack of trust and thus push other businesses above yours, with accurate and verified contact details available. In a sense, it’s customer trust that drives search engine ranking. 

Research has confirmed this, as 80% of surveyed respondents in BrightLocal research have stated that they would lose trust in a business with incorrect and inconsistent contact details. If you’ve decided to change your phone number, making sure it’s consistently represented across all of your digital outlets is the key piece of your SEO puzzle: to preserve customer trust and thus to preserve your ranking. 

Notifying the customer in time

Thankfully, you can make sure that your customers have the correct information in a few simple ways. If you’ve taken care of all of your business directory listings, your social media pages, messaging app presence, and your website, you can use your marketing strategy to get the word out. 

Your subscribers and return customers will want to know that your business has changed a vital piece of information. Just like you don’t want them to spend an hour going to an old address of your café only to discover a weird-looking shop for plumbing supplies, you want to have your new number added to their contacts list.

You can use your weekly/monthly newsletter to notify them of the switch, post a social media update letting customers know the new number they can reach you on, and post a little announcement on your website, too, especially if you gain plenty of call traffic from all of these outlets.

Changing a business phone number can be a simple process in itself, but its impact on your business will not be unless you prepare properly. Taking care of all the business registers where your company is listed paired with implementing search engine-approved tracking tactics as well as customer engagement will be more than enough to help you through the process. 

Emma Worden is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. You can find Emma on @EmmaRWorden.

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