One of the most overused phrases in content marketing is how it is an ever-changing landscape, forcing agencies and marketers to adapt and improve their existing processes. In a short space of time, a topic can go from being newsworthy to negligible, all while certain types of content become tedious to the press and its readers. A vast amount of the work we do — at Kaizen and many other similar agencies — is create content with the sole purpose of building high authority links, making it all the more imperative that we are conscious of the changes and trends outlined above. If we were to split the creative process into three sections — content, design, and outreach strategy — how are we able to engineer our own successes and failures to provide us with a framework for future campaigns? Three important factors for producing link-worthy contentOver the past month, I’ve analyzed over 120 pieces of content across 16 industries to locate and define the common threads between campaigns that exceed or fall short of their expectations. From the amount of data used and visualized to the importance of effective headline storytelling, the insight is a way of both rationalizing and reshaping our approach to content production. 1. Not too much data — our study showed an average of just over five metricsBehind every great piece of content is (usually) a unique or noteworthy set of data. Both static and interactive content enables us to display limitless amounts of research which provide the origins of the stories we try to communicate. However many figures or metrics you choose to visualize, there is always a point where a journalist or reader switches off. This glass ceiling is difficult to pinpoint and depends on the type of content, and the industry or readership you’re looking to appeal to, but a more granular study of good and poor performing campaigns that I performed suggested some benefits of refining data sets. ObservationsA starting point for any piece of research is the individual metrics, whether it is cost, type, or essentially anything worth measuring and comparing. In my research, in the content campaigns that exceed our typical KPI, there was an average of just over 5 metrics used on each piece compared to almost double in campaigns with either a normal or below satisfactory performance. The graph below shows the correlation between a lower number of metrics and a higher link performance. An example of these findings in practice can be found in an infographic study completed for online travel retailer Lastminute.com that sought to find the world’s most chilled out countries. Following a comprehensive study of 36 countries across 10 metrics, the task was to refine these figures in a way that can be translated well through its design. The number of countries was whittled down to just the top 15, and the metrics were condensed to have four indexes which the rankings were based on. The decision to not showcase the data in its entirety proved fruitful, securing over 50 links, covered by the Mail Online and Lonely Planet. As an individual who very much enjoys partaking in the research process, it can be extremely difficult to sacrifice any element of your work, but it is that level of tact in the production of content that distinguishes one piece from another. 2. Simple, powerful data visualizations — our analysis showed highest achievers had just one visualizationRegardless of how saturated the content marketing industry becomes, we are graced every year with new and innovative ways of visualizing data. The balancing act between originality in your design and an unnecessarily complex data-visualization is often the point on which success and failure can pivot. As is the case with data, overloading a piece of content with an amass of multi-faceted graphs and charts is a surefire way of alienating your users, leaving them either bored or confused. ObservationsFor my study, I decided to look at the content that contained data visualizations that failed to hit the mark and see whether the quality is as much of a problem as quantity in terms of design. As I carried out the analysis, I denoted the two examples where one visual would incorporate most or all of the study, or the same illustration was replicated several times for a country, region or sector. For instance, this study, from medical travel insurance provider Get Going, on reliable airlines condenses all the key information into one single data-visualization. Conversely, this piece from The Guardian on the gender pay gap shows how it can be effective to use one visual several times to present your data. Unsurprisingly, many of the low scorers in my research averaged around eight different forms of data visualizations while high achievers contained just one. The graph below showcases how many data-visualizations are used on average by high and low performing pieces, both static and interactive. Low performing static examples contained an average of just over six, with less than one for their higher-scoring counterparts. For interactive content, the optimum is just over one with poor performing content containing almost nine per piece. In examples where the same type of graph or chart was used repeatedly, poor performers had approximately 33 per piece, with their more favorable counterparts using just three. It is important to note that ranking-based pieces often require the repetition of a visual in order to tell a story, but once again this is part of the balancing act for creatives in terms of what type and how many data-visualizations one utilizes. A fine example of an effective illustration of the data study contained in one visual comes from a 2017 piece by Federica Fragapane for Italian publication La Lettura, showcasing the most violent cities in the world. The chart depicts each city as a shape sized by its homicide rate, with other small indicators defined in the legend to the right of the graphic. The aesthetic qualities of the graph give a campaign, fairly morbid in the topic, an extended appeal beyond the subject of just global crime. While the term “design-led” is so-often thrown around, this example proves how effective it can be to integrate visuals effectively through your data. The piece, produced originally for print, proved hugely successful in the design space, with 18 referring domains from sites such as Visme.co. 3. Pandering to the press — over a third of our published links used the same headline as our pitch email subject lineKaizen produces hundreds of campaigns on a yearly basis across a range of industries, meaning the task of looking inward is as necessary today as it ever has been. Competition means that press contacts are looking for something extra special to warrant your content’s publication. While ingenuity is required in every area of content marketing, it’s equally important to recognize the importance of getting the basics right. The task of outreach can be won and lost in several ways, but your subject line is, and will always be, the most significant component of your pitch. Whether you encapsulate your content in a single sentence or highlight your most attention-worthy finding, an email headline is a laborious but crucial task. My task through my research was to find how vital it is in terms of the end result of achieving coverage. ObservationsAs part of my analysis, I recorded the backlinks of a sample of our high and average content and recorded the headlines used in the coverage for each campaign. I found in better-performing examples, over a third of links used the same headlines used in our pitch emails, emphasizing the importance of effective storytelling in every area of your PR process. Below is an illustration in the SERPs of how far an effective headline can take you, with example coverage from one of our most successful pieces for TotallyMoney on work/life balance in Europe. Another area I was keen to investigate, given the time and effort that goes into it, is how press releases are used across the coverage we get. Using scraping software, I was able to pull out the copy from each article where a follow link was achieved and compare it to the press releases we have produced. It was pleasing to see that one in five links contained at least a paragraph of copy used in our press materials. In contrast, just seven percent of the coverage within the lower performing campaigns contained a reference to our press releases, and an even lower four percent using headlines from our email subject lines. Final thoughtsThese correlations, similar to the ones discussed previously, suggest not only how vital the execution of basic processes are, but serve as a reminder that a campaign can do well or fall down at so many different points of production. For marketers, analysis of this nature indicates that a refinement of creative operations is a more secure route for your content and its coverage. Don’t think of it as “less is more” but a case of picking the right tools for the job at hand. Nathan Abbott is Content Manager at Kaizen. The post Three fundamental factors in the production of link-building content appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/15/three-fundamental-factors-in-the-production-of-link-building-content/
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Instagram is a phenomenon of our time. The photo-sharing app has 7.7 billion users by now (and counting). One billion people use Instagram every month and 500 million use the platform every day. Its engagement is also 10 times higher than that of Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest’s, and 84 times higher than Twitter’s. All kinds of businesses ranging from your teen neighbor making earrings to huge corporations and media are on Instagram. And for a good reason — 80% of Instagram accounts follow at least one business. [Screenshot taken from the Instagram Business homepage] At times when Facebook is becoming more and more Messenger-based and Twitter revolves around politics and social issues, Instagram stands to be the platform for friends, strangers, and brands alike. It’s no surprise we’re so serious about Instagram marketing and the tools that help us with it. Below is the list of such tools which covers everything from filters to analytics. 19 top Instagram marketing tools1. GrumGrum is a scheduling tool that lets you publish content (both photos and videos) on Instagram. You can publish from multiple accounts at the same time and tag the users. You can do that right from your desktop. Price: Starts at $9.9/month. Offers a free trial for 3 days. 2. AwarioAwario is a social media monitoring tool that finds mentions of your brand (or any other keyword) across the web, news/blogs, and social media platforms, including Instagram. By analyzing mentions of your brand on the platform, it tells you who your brand advocates and who the industry influencers are, what the sentiment behind your brand (positive, negative, or neutral) is, as well as the languages and locations of your audience. It also analyzes the growth and reach of your mentions, and tells you how you compare to your competitors. Price: Starts at $29/month. Offers a free trial for 14 days. 3. BufferBuffer is another scheduling tool. However, it includes Instagram among other social networks rather than focusing on Instagram alone. With Buffer, you can schedule content to be published across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can publish the same or different messages across different platforms. You can also review how your posts are performing in terms of engagement, impressions, and clicks. The tool can be used by up to 25 team members, and you can assign them the appropriate access levels. Price: Starts at $15/month. Offers free 7-day or 14-day trials depending on the plan. 4. Hashtags for likesHashtags for likes is a simple tool that suggests you the most trending relevant hashtags. Knowing the most popular hashtags in real time helps brands keep up with trends, bandwagon on the news, and ultimately grow followers. Price: $9.99/month. 5. IconosquareIconosquare is a social media analytics tool that works for Instagram and Facebook. It shows you the metrics on content performance and engagement as well as on your followers. You’ll discover the best times to post and understand your followers better. The tool also analyzes Instagram Stories. Besides analytics, you can schedule posts, monitor tags and comments about your brand. Price: Starts at $39/month. A free 14-day trial is available. 6. CanvaCanva is a design tool that is a great fit for marketers and companies that don’t have an in-house designer. Among other things, Canva helps create perfect Instagram stories. Stylish templates and easy design tools ensure that your Story stands out, which, again, isn’t easy in the world of Instagram. Price: Free 7. ShortstackShortstack is a tool to run Instagram contests. Contests are huge on this platform, they cause loads of buzz, increase brand awareness, and attract new followers. They are a practice loved by marketers. ShortStack gathers all user-generated content, such as images that have been posted on your content hashtag, and displays them. It also keeps track of your campaign’s performance, showing your traffic, engagement, and other valuable data. Price: Free up to 100 entries. Paid plans start at $29/month. 8. SoldsieSoldsie is a handy tool that helps you to sell on Instagram and Facebook using comments. All you have to do is upload a product picture with relevant product information. Users who are registered with Soldsie can simply comment on the photo, and Soldsie will turn that into a transaction. More expensive Soldsie plans are also integrated with Shopify. Price: Starts at $49/monthly and 5.9% transaction fee. 9. Social RankSocial Rank is a tool that identifies and analyzes your audience. You can identify influencers among your followers, see who engages with your brand and with what frequency. You can sort your followers in lists that are easy to work with (for example: most valuable, most engaged, and others). You can also filter your audience by bio keyword, word/hashtag, and geographic location. Price: Available on request. 10. PlannPlann is an Instagram social media management tool. It allows you to design, edit, schedule, and analyze your posts. For example, you can edit the Instagram grid to look just as you wish. You can rearrange, organize, crop, and schedule your Instagram Stories. All exciting stats, from best times to post and best-performing hashtags to your best-performing color schemes are available. And you can also collaborate with other marketers to run your Instagram account together. Price: Free, paid plans start from $6/month. 11. Social InsightsSocial Insights is another platform that offers many important Instagram marketing features, such as scheduling and posting from your computer, identifying and organizing your followers, and analyzing followers’ growth, interactions, and engagement. You can add other team members without sharing your Instagram login. Price: Starts at $29/month. A free 14-day trial is available. 12. Instagram Ads by MailchimpIf you’re already using MailChimp, its Instagram Ads feature might come in handy. The tool lets you use MailChimp contact lists to create Instagram campaigns. The whole process (creating, buying, and tracking results of your ads) is, therefore, in the familiar place and powered by data. Price: No extra fees if you’re using MailChimp. 13. Unfold – Story CreatorUnfold – Story Creator is an iOS app that makes lifestyle, fashion, and travel content more professional-looking. The app offers stylish templates, advanced fonts and text tools, and exports your stories in high resolution so that you can share them to other platforms besides Instagram. Price: Free 14. PicodashPicodash is an Instagram tool that finds target audiences and influencers on the platform. It lets you export your and your competitors’ Instagram followers and following lists, users that have used a specific hashtag, posted at a specific location or venue, commented or liked a specific post, as well as tagged users. You can also download any account stories or highlighted stories. Price: Starts from $10 for a Followers/Hashtag Posts export. You can also request a sample of 100 for free before you order a full export report. 15. WyngWyng is an enterprise-level platform that finds user-generated content with a specific mention or hashtag, exports it, and gets the rights to this content. This is very helpful for running contests. Instagram is, however, a tiny fraction of what the tool covers. Price: Available on request. A free 14-day trial is available. 16. AfterlightAfterlight is the iOS/Android image editing app that makes your content look more professional and refined. It offers plenty of unique filters, natural effects, and frames. Price: $2.99 17. SendibleSendible is a popular social media management platform that lets you run accounts on different social media platforms, including Instagram. It’s integrated with some other tools that are useful for Instagram, such as Canva. The tool does scheduling, monitors mentions, and tracks the performance of your Instagram posts. You can also team up with other marketers and work together on your Instagram marketing (and other) goals. Price: Starts at $29/month. A free 14-day trial is available. 18. OlapicOlapic is an advanced visual commerce platform. It collects user-generated video content in real time, publishes it to your social media channels (including Instagram) makes it shoppable, measures and predicts which content will perform best. It goes far beyond Instagram and even social media. What is more, it obtains rights for the content for you so that you’re able to use it across your advertising, email, and offline channels. Price: Available on request. 19. PabloPablo (made by Buffer) is a platform that lets you easily create beautiful images for your Instagram marketing purposes. You can choose photos from Pablo’s own library which includes more than 500,000 images, add text (25+ stylish fonts are available) and format. The resizing option for various social platforms, including Instagram, will ensure your image fits perfectly. Price: Free ConclusionAs you can see, there’re plenty of tools to choose from. Check them out, spot the ones that you need, and take your Instagram marketing to a whole new level. Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at @ab80. Read next:
The post Top 19 Instagram marketing tools to use for success appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/15/top-nineteen-instagram-marketing-tools-to-use-for-success/ There have been an abundance of hand-wringing articles published that wonder if the era of the phone call is over, not to mention speculation that millennials would give up the option to make a phone call altogether if it meant unlimited data. But actually, the rise of direct dialing through voice assistants and click to call buttons for mobile search means that calls are now totally intertwined with online activity. Calling versus buying online is no longer an either/or proposition. When it comes to complicated purchases like insurance, healthcare, and mortgages, the need for human help is even more pronounced. Over half of consumers prefer to talk to an agent on the phone in these high-stakes situations. In fact, 70% of consumers have used a click to call button. And three times as many people prefer speaking with a live human over a tedious web form. And calls aren’t just great for consumers either. A recent study by Invoca found that calls actually convert at ten times the rate of clicks. However, if you’re finding that your business line isn’t ringing quite as often as you’d like it to, here are some surefire ways to optimize your search ads to drive more high-value phone calls. Content produced in collaboration with Invoca. Four ways to optimize your paid search ads for more phone calls
If you’re waiting for the phone to ring, make sure your audiences know that you’re ready to take their call. In the days of landlines, if customers wanted a service, they simply took out the yellow pages and thumbed through the business listings until they found the service they were looking for. These days, your audience is much more likely to find you online, either through search engines or social media. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t looking for a human to answer their questions. If you’re hoping to drive more calls, make sure your ads are getting that idea across clearly and directly. For example, if your business offers free estimates, make sure that message is prominent in the ad with impossible-to-miss text reading, “For a free estimate, call now,” with easy access to your number. And to make sure customers stay on the line, let them know their call will be answered by a human rather than a robot reciting an endless list of options.
If your customer found your landing page via search, there’s a majority percent chance they’re on a mobile device. While mobile accounted for just 27% of organic search engine visits in Q3 of 2013, its share increased to 57% as of Q4 2018. That’s great news for businesses looking to boost calls, since mobile users obviously already have their phone in hand. However, forcing users to dig up a pen in order to write down your business number only to put it back into their phone adds an unnecessary extra step that could make some users think twice about calling. Instead, make sure mobile landing pages offer a click to call button that lists your number in big, bold text. Usually, the best place for a click to call button is in the header of the page, near your form, but it’s best practice to A/B test button location and page layouts a few different ways in order to make sure your click to call button can’t be overlooked.
Since 2014, local search queries from mobile have skyrocketed in volume as compared to desktop. In 2014, there were 66.5 billion search queries from mobile and 65.6 billion search queries from desktop. Now in 2019, desktop has decreased slightly to 62.3 billion — while mobile has shot up to 141.9 billion — nearly a 250% increase in five years. Mobile search is by nature local, and vice versa. If your customer is searching for businesses hoping to make a call and speak to a representative, chances are, they need some sort of local services. For example, if your car breaks down, you’ll probably search for local auto shops, click a few ads, and make a couple of calls. It would be incredibly frustrating if each of those calls ended up being to a business in another state. Targeting your audience by region can ensure that you offer customers the most relevant information possible. If your business only serves customers in Kansas, you definitely don’t want to waste perfectly good ad spend drumming up calls from California. If you’re using Google Ads, make sure you set the location you want to target. That way, you can then modify your bids to make sure your call-focused ads appear in those regions.
Keeping up with where your calls are coming from in the physical world is important, but tracking where they’re coming from on the web is just as critical. Understanding which of your calls are coming from ads as well as which are coming from landing pages is an important part of optimizing paid search. Using a call tracking and analytics solution alongside Google Ads can help give a more complete picture of your call data. And the more information you can track, the better. At a minimum, you should make sure your analytics solution captures data around the keyword, campaign/ad group, and the landing page that led to the call. But solutions like Invoca also allow you to capture demographic details, previous engagement history, and the call outcome to offer a total picture of not just your audience, but your ad performance. For more information on how to use paid search to drive calls, check out Invoca’s white paper, “11 Paid Search Tactics That Drive Quality Inbound Calls.” The post How to optimize paid search ads for phone calls appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/16/optimize-paid-search-phone-calls/ Search queries for your brand name, called “brand searches,” are among the most important keywords in a keyword portfolio. Even so, marketers are not often paying as much attention to these types of queries as they should. While juicy high-volume non-branded queries are exciting, providing your audience and customers with helpful brand information it is an equally thrilling prospect. The truth is that users for many brands, big and small, are commonly underserved by branded search results they find. In this post, we’ll show you exactly how to conduct a branded search audit, identify failing results, and implement improvements. This audit is one that we perform for our clients at Stella Rising. Now you can do the same for your clients or website. The first part of the audit is about setting the stage. Do you know what ratio of your traffic is the result of non-brand queries vs. brand queries? You should. In this section of the audit, you’ll set the stage to discuss the importance of what you identify. Why are branded queries so important?Branded queries are among the most important keywords you can optimize as they represent a brand-aware audience that is more likely to convert. In fact, many of the people searching for your brand are already customers looking for information or looking to purchase again. It’s easy (generally)Unlike most things in SEO, Google wants you to rank well for your own brand terms. Whenever we see branded searches that are failing users, it’s usually easy to fix. Often, it’s as simple as creating a new page or changing a meta tag. Other times it can be more challenging, such as when brands have significant PR and/or brand reputation issues. That said, in most cases, branded search queries are among the easiest to rank for. Don’t overlook them. Correlation to rankings and personalizationWhile the search volume of a domain name is not a confirmed ranking factor, Google does hold a patent that may indicate the more searches a brand receives, the more likely that brand is to to be seen as high quality by Google. This, in turn, may help them to rank for associated non-brand terms. What does that mean? Essentially, if tens of thousands of people search your brand name + couch, you may be more likely to rank for “sofas.” A number of 2014 Wayfair commercials brilliantly capitalized on this opportunity. The commercials literally told people to Google “Wayfair my sofa” or “Wayfair my kitchen,” thus tying signals around their entity to other non-brand entities. How Wayfair brilliantly linked its advertising with its branded search termsBranded searches can also impact autocomplete which in turn can impact more branded searches, feeding into the connection described above. When users click one of these autocompleted search suggestions, they execute a “branded search,” which then signals to Google that the entities are related. For example, “Amazon, Ralph Lauren or Macy’s” with “Men’s shirts”. Branded search audit part one: Setting the stageIn part one of this audit, you will provide branded search landscape insights. Like any good show, you need to set the stage for the information you are about to present. This will help to win buy-in, prioritize your efforts, and keep you strategically on track. What is your ratio of branded search?For this part, you’ll need to head to the Google Search Console and open up your performance report for the last three months. Start by setting up a filter for your brand name. If you have a brand name that people commonly misspell, then you will want to take that into account.* Click the “+ New” button and then click “Query.” Filter by “Queries Containing” and not “Query is Exactly.”
*Advanced Tip: The above instructions only account for your brand name, not product names that are proprietary to your brand. Consider using the API to pull down your GSC report and do filtering for those as well. You’ll then see the total number of branded clicks and impressions your site receives. Now change your filter to “Queries not containing,” this will give you roughly the number of non-branded clicks the website has received from Google search. Take this data and bring it into Excel. From there, create a pie chart to visually demonstrate the ratio of branded to non-branded clicks the website receives. What are the top branded queries driving traffic?The next and perhaps one of the most critical questions for this analysis is, “What are the top branded queries?” Understanding this is important because the next step in this audit is to manually search each of the top ten (or more) queries. Then you will understand which queries will better serve users. While this analysis is simple, we found that creating a simple visual with the data makes for a better story in your presentation. To do this, download the data by clicking the down arrow at the top of the queries table. Once you have the data in Excel, you can create a cool visual using the 2D bar chart graph. What are the top pages receiving branded clicks?Similar to the above analysis, you will need to download the top pages from the “pages” tab in your performance report. Where do branded searches come from?For some brands, it is worth considering where branded searches come from geographically. To find this information, set your filter to include brand queries and then click the “countries” tab in the Google Search Console. Now we could just put that image into a report, but what fun would that be? Instead, download the data and bring it into Excel to create a visual. You can do this a number of ways, but we recommend either using a map or a tree-map which generates a cool way of looking at the data. A pie chart would do but is not as visually appealing. Open Excel and highlight the data you downloaded. Click “Insert”, then click either on “Maps” or the second box for a treemap. Tree-map visualization of country click dataHow has branded search trended over time?The last and perhaps the most essential question outside of which queries get clicks is, “how has branded search trended over time?” This trend is a hugely important question for any brand that has or is currently investing in brand building efforts, media, PR, or even non-branded paid search campaigns. During this section of the audit, we have seen brands that previously invested millions in traditional print flatten out for years. Alternatively, we’ve also seen DTC brand’s growth hit a wall. Knowing where brand interest stands is a data point that is vital to all brands and their performance marketing strategies. Whether you are conducting a branded search audit or not, tracking the branded search volume is something that should be on the KPI list for marketers across a multitude of disciplines. Branded search audit part two: Identifying issues in branded searchDo you have any brand image issues?Sorry, no SEO magic here. If your brand, founder or employee made headlines (and not the good ones you send to mom) your only strategy is to do your best to rectify the situation. Take, for example, a brand we came across which was at one point dealing with first page Google results full of nasty headlines. The headings covered how the center had allegedly abandoned more than 40 research animals on an island. When I first heard this story and considered the best plan forward I thought, “Can they just decide not to abandon the animals and find them homes?” In fact, that’s exactly what they did. As a result, the negative stories were replaced over time with positive ones about how the center reached an agreement to find a sanctuary for the animals. The first page of results for their brand name is now squeaky clean. The moral of this story is, never abandon animals on an island. But, if you do, and get dragged through the mud for it, no amount of SEO will save you. Are there any abandoned research animals in your organization? If so, get them off the island. In other less metaphorical terms, part of auditing brand search is brand reputation. As we all now know, “E-A-T” and reputation are hugely important to Google. Deal with business practice issues head-on and find the best resolution possible. John Mueller has reminded us that Google has a really good memory and is not apt to forget anything about your brand history. Stains on your brand reputation can really take a toll and have lasting power. The best offense here is a good defense. Searching the top ten queriesNow for the part of the audit where we find the broken stuff. Take your list of top terms and manually execute the search in a private browsing window for each term. Record your results and a screenshot of the SERP. What are we looking for?
Searching other navigational queriesOther areas to check out are navigational or known brand queries that help users navigate and interact with your brand. For example:
Manually execute a search in a private browsing window for these terms. You’re looking for title tags and meta descriptions that do not speak to the query, missing pages where content would be better-served broken-out, and other websites owing the conversation around your terms. In some of our audits, we have seen third-party sellers ranking on position one for things like “brand name return policy”. Furthermore, the information presented was not even correct. When it came to our site, we were not making that information easy to find, and as such, we got beat out. Simple adjustments to meta information and where content lived helped to improve our visibility and win back the featured snippet. Track and measureAs with any good SEO effort, you should carefully track and measure the success of your recommendations. Consider setting up a monthly tracking sheet for your branded search volume. Also, consider tracking some of the branded queries identified as “needing work” in your rank tracker. ConclusionThe branded search audit is a deliverable which does not take a great deal of time but can result in tremendous impact for your brand or client. By focusing on branded queries first, you are serving those most likely to convert on your site while simultaneously addressing your lowest hanging fruit. Have questions about conducting your own audit? Let us know in the comments section below. John Morabito is the Director of SEO at Women’s Marketing / Flying Point Digital. He can be found on Twitter @JohnMorabitoSEO. The post How to conduct a branded search audit appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/15/how-to-branded-search-audit/ One of the biggest problems digital marketers face is nuances to crafting high-quality SEO rich content. A great area of opportunity for marketers is their SEO alt text for images. We’ve all been to websites and the image is replaced by a red “X”, or it’s just a blank box. Wouldn’t it be great if you could benefit from that image box for an increased search engine ranking? That’s where alt text comes in. Alt text is just a way to describe what is going on in the image while actively increasing your ranking through smart, thoughtful placement of SEO keywords. We are going to look at ways you can improve your image alt text while keeping your content search engine friendly. Research keywords before you startIt’s important that you look carefully into which keywords you’re going to use before you start creating content including your alt text. Google’s Keyword Planner tool can help you make educated decisions about which words are best suited for your website, depending on your niche. When you’re researching keywords, the best practice is to look for words that feature high search volume but low competition. The reason for this thought process is simple. High volume, high competition keywords result in an uphill battle that you may not win. If there are plenty of people searching for the words you pick, but a bunch of reputable websites who have a high domain authority, you’re going to have a much harder time reaching the top of the search engine results. At the same time, low competition, low search keywords mean your website probably will not get the traffic you need to thrive. The happy medium is words that are popular, but not dominated by highly authoritative sites. The success of your keywords is going to reflect not just in your content or title, but in your alt text, making this an important starting point. Supplement your alt text with primary keywordsIt’s worth pointing out that alt text is important, but it should never take priority over your researched and currently implemented SEO. You would never want to rearrange your pre-arranged keywords to make the alt text keywords fit. Instead, try to find images that compliment the keywords you’ve already selected. When you work backward from your alt text images, you could end up with a page that is more focused on the images instead of the content throughout. The only exception to this rule is if your content is image heavy. Companies that implement slideshows, photo galleries, and the likes may benefit more from working backward from their images instead of the other way around. Connect the content to the image textAnother common mistake that SEO marketers make is they don’t directly link the alt text to the content they create. Alt text, as mentioned, is just text that describes what’s going on in the image. If you want to make a strong connection with your audience and the search engine results, make sure you make a connection between the text in your content, the image, and the alt text. For example, if your piece of content was about website design, your content should include text within the piece that explains the image. In this fictional piece, let’s say your keyword is “expert web design”, you’re going to need to include an image that emphasizes your point, explains the image in the content, and the alt text should include the keyword. Keep it shortSince the main purpose of alt text is to inform the reader of what the image shows if they can’t view it, your alt-text should never drag on. Simply explain what the image shows using your keywords as the primary descriptor and additional text as needed. The recommended alt-text length is about 125 characters. Some browsers only create one line of alt-text and allocate the size of the image to the length of the one line. The result of a long alt text line is not just “search engine confusion”, but also reader confusion when they cannot finish the line of text from within the image because it was cut off by the browser they are using. If you find that your alt text is always longer than 125 characters, your point is probably better off posted in the actual content of the article instead of the alt image text. Examples of SEO-friendly alt textFirst, let’s take a look at the source code: <img src=”Image.gif” alt=”alt-text-goes-here”> In this example, the “image.gif” is the image that is displayed to those who can properly see the image. Those who can’t see the image will instead see the text you include where it says “alt-text-goes-here”. Here are some better examples to give you an idea of what a good SEO-friendly piece of alt text looks like. Example oneYou own a pet shop and your display picture is a kitten in a basket at your pet shop. Your source code should look something like this: <img src=”FluffyCat.png” alt=”Pet Shop Kitten Snuggling in Basket”> The goal is to make your alt-text clean, concise, and friendly to the keywords you decided to target in your piece. Example twoNow let’s say you have an online car accessory shop. You sell things like seat covers, floor liners, and air fresheners. On your air freshener page your alt text will look like this: <img src=”AirFreshner.png” alt=”Air Freshener Pack and New Car Accessories”> In the example above, you’re targeting air fresheners, new cars, cars in general, and car accessories. Example threeFinally, you have a membership site that sells marketing tips to your audience. You have an infographic of marketing statistics everyone should know in 2019. How will your alt-text look in this situation? Since you obviously can’t fit every stat in your alt-text, you might say: <img src=”MarketingStatsInfo.Png” alt=”New Marketing Statistics for 2019″> Piecing it togetherThere’s no doubt that alt text plays a crucial role in an online world consumed by the importance of keywords. If you want to make the most of your alt text, keep these tips in mind and remember that the online world is constantly evolving. As your website grows in size and authority you may have to make changes to your SEO keywords for future articles, and therefore for your alt text. The good news is, this allows you to pull off some interesting split tests to see which keywords are ranking well for you, and which ones are pulling in lackluster results. One thing is clear, don’t underestimate the power of alt text as it relates to your readers and your search ranking. It may not be the most important factor, but correctly creating optimized images and alt text is an important piece of the puzzle. Syed Balkhi is an entrepreneur, marketer, and CEO of Awesome Motive. He’s also the founder of WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights. Syed can be found on Twitter @syedbalkhi. Read next:
The post How to write SEO-friendly alt text for your images appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/12/seo-friendly-image-alt-text/ Zazzle Media has released their annual State of Content Marketing 2019 survey, which found that less than one in ten marketers (9%) will be focusing on Digital PR in 2019. Despite this, over three quarters (76%) state that brand awareness is a key performance indicator for them. Not only this, but 25% of content marketers will be ceasing to participate in offline PR activity as it has been perceived as an ineffective channel for them over the recent years. It seems there is an apparent disconnect between marketers’ desired goals and the tactics they need to carry out to achieve these. So why are marketers seemingly less concerned about off-page distribution, and why should you make a case for Digital PR to hold a key position in your marketing activities? Brand awarenessWhilst the creation of written blog content will appeal to people on the site, we need a mechanism that is going to drive these people towards the site first. Digital PR can help users find your site in a more organic way rather than in a targeted advertorial manner. The survey found that a quarter of marketers want to target new audiences through content distribution, but without Digital PR this will prove to be a difficult task. Brand protectionPR allows you to control narratives and get involved with industry conversations which you would otherwise be unable to participate in. The digital aspect also allows you to receive real-time coverage updates which mention your brand’s name and put out an immediate response in an attempt to stem or enhance any positive or negative feedback. Protecting your brand, especially in the SERPs, is a powerful tool for PRs. Read next: Organic reputation management & brand protection Link buildingA major perk of creating Digital PR campaigns is that they usually come with linkable assets that have a chance of being cited within media coverage. Link building is an activity which has a reputation of relying on black-hat tactics for success, paying for links, directories, and the others. Digital PR allows you to avoid all these techniques and the risks associated with them and build some legitimate links from high authority publications. Read next: Five proven content formats to maximize link acquisition with digital PR. Managing director of Zazzle Media, Simon Penson, commented on the statistics:
What do you think of these findings? Let us know your thoughts on the results in the comments. Kirsty Daniel is a Digital Marketing Executive at Zazzle Media. She can be found on Twitter @kirsty_daniel. The post Survey: Less than 10% of marketers to focus on Digital PR in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/12/digital-pr-2019/ In all my years as an SEO consultant, I can’t begin to count the number of times I saw clients who were struggling to make both SEO and affiliate marketing work for them. When their site rankings dropped, they immediately started blaming it on the affiliate links. Yet what they really needed to do was review their search marketing efforts and make them align with their affiliate marketing efforts. Both SEO and affiliate marketing have the same goal of driving relevant, high-quality traffic to a site so that those visits eventually turn into sales. So there’s absolutely no reason for them to compete against each other. Instead, they should work together in perfect balance so that the site generates more revenue. SEO done right can prove to be the biggest boon for your affiliate marketing efforts. It’s crucial that you take a strategic approach to align these two efforts. Four ways to balance your affiliate marketing and SEO efforts1. Find a niche that’s profitable for youOne of the reasons why affiliate marketing may clash with SEO is because you’re trying to sell too many different things from different product categories. So it’s extremely challenging to align your SEO efforts with your affiliate marketing because it’s all over the place. This means that you’ll have a harder time driving a targeted audience to your website. While your search rankings may be high for a certain product keyword, you may be struggling to attract visitors and customers for other products. Instead of trying to promote everything and anything, pick one or two profitable niches to focus on. This is where it gets tricky. While you may naturally want to focus on niches in which you have a high level of interest and knowledge, they may not always be profitable. So I suggest you conduct some research about the profitability of potential niches. To conduct research, you can check resources that list the most profitable affiliate programs. You can also use platforms like ClickBank to conduct this research. While you can use other affiliate platforms for your research, this is a great place to start. First, click on the “Affiliate Marketplace” button at the top of the ClickBank homepage. You’ll see a page that gives you the option to search for products. On your left, you can see the various affiliate product categories available. Click on any of the categories that pique your interest. On the search results page, you’ll see some of the affiliate marketing programs available on the platform. The page also displays various details about the program including the average earning per sale. Then filter the search results by “Gravity,” which is a metric that measures how well a product sells in that niche. You should ideally look for products with a Gravity score of 50 or higher. Compare the top Gravity scores of each category to see which is the most profitable. You can additionally compare the average earnings per sale for products in different categories. 2. Revise your keyword strategySince you’re already familiar with search marketing, I don’t need to tell you about the importance of keyword planning. That being said, I would recommend that you revise your existing keyword strategy after you’ve decided on a niche to focus on and the products you want to sell. The same keyword selection rules apply even in this process. You would want to work with keywords that have a significant search volume yet aren’t too competitive. And you will need to focus on long-tail keywords for more accuracy. While you should still use the Google Keyword Planner, I suggest you try out other tools as well for fresh keyword ideas. Among the free tools, Google Trends is an excellent option. It gives you a clear look at the changes in interest for your chosen search term. You can filter the result by category, time frame, and region. It also gives you a breakdown of how the interest changes according to the sub-region. The best part about this tool is that if you scroll down, you can also see some of the related queries. This will give you insights into some of the other terms related to your original search term with rising popularity. So you can get some quick ideas for trending and relevant keywords to target. AnswerThePublic is another great tool for discovering long-tail keyword ideas. This tool gives you insights into some of the popular search queries related to your search term. So you’ll be able to come up with ideas for keywords to target as well as topic ideas for fresh content. 3. Optimize your website contentHigh-quality content is the essence of a successful SEO strategy. It also serves the purpose of educating and converting visitors for affiliate websites. So it’s only natural that you will need to optimize the content on your website. You can either create fresh content or update your existing content, or you can do both. Use your shortlisted keywords to come up with content ideas. These keywords have a high search volume, so you know that people are searching for content related to them. So when you create content optimized with those keywords, you’ll gain some visibility in their search results. And since you’re providing them with the content they need, you will be driving them to your site. You can also update your existing content with new and relevant keywords. Perhaps to add more value, you can even include new information such as tips, stats, updates, and more. Whatever you decide to do, make sure the content is useful for your visitors. It shouldn’t be too promotional but instead, it needs to be informative. 4. Build links to boost site authority and attract high-quality trafficYou already know that building high-quality backlinks can improve the authority of your site and therefore, your search rankings. So try to align your link-building efforts with your affiliate marketing by earning backlinks from sites that are relevant to the products you’re promoting. Of course, you can generate more social signals by trying to drive more content shares. But those efforts aren’t always enough. Especially if you want to drive more revenue. I suggest you try out guest posting, as it can help you tap into the established audience of a relevant, authoritative site. This helps you drive high-quality traffic to your site. It also boosts your page and domain authority since you’re getting a link back from a high authority site. Although Matt Cutts said in 2014 that guest posting for SEO is dead, that’s not true if you plan your approach. The problem is when you try to submit guest posts just for the sake of getting backlinks. Most reputable sites don’t allow that anymore. To get guest posting right, you need to make sure that you’re creating content that has value. So it needs to be relevant to the audience of your target site, and it should be helpful to them somehow. Your guest posts should be of exceptional quality in terms of writing, readability, and information. Not only does this improve your chances of getting accepted, but it also helps you gain authority in the niche. Plus, you will get to reach an engaged and relevant audience and later direct them to your site depending on how compelling your post is. Bottom lineSEO and affiliate marketing can work in perfect alignment if you strategically balance your efforts. These tips should help you get started with aligning the two aspects of your business. You will need some practice and experimentation before you can perfectly balance them. You can further explore more options and evolve your strategy as you get better at the essentials. Shane Barker is a Digital Strategist, Brand and Influencer Consultant. He can be found on Twitter @shane_barker. The post How to perfectly balance affiliate marketing and SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/11/how-to-perfectly-balance-affiliate-marketing-and-seo/ Your international marketing campaigns hinge on one crucial element: how well you have understood your audience. As with all marketing, insight into the user behavior, preferences and needs of your market is a must. However, if you do not have feet on the ground in these markets, you may be struggling to understand why your campaigns are not hitting the mark. Thankfully you have a goldmine of data about your customers’ interests, behavior, and demographics already at your fingertips. Wherever your international markets are, Google Analytics should be your first destination for drawing out actionable insights. Setting up Google Analytics for international insightGoogle Analytics is a powerful tool but the sheer volume of data available through it can make finding usable insights tough. The first step for getting the most out of Google Analytics is ensuring it has been set up in the most effective way. This needs to encompass the following: Also read: An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms 1. Setting up views for geographic regionsDepending on your current Google Analytics set-up you may already have more than one profile and view for your website data. What insight you want to get from your data will influence how you set up this first stage of filtering. If you want to understand how the French pages are being accessed and interacted with then you may wish to create a filter based on the folder structure of your site, such as the “/fr-fr/” sub-folder of your site. However, this will show you information on visitors who arrive on these pages from any geographic location. If your hreflang tags aren’t correct and Google is serving your French pages to a Canadian audience, then you will be seeing Canadian visitors’ data under this filter too. If you are interested in only seeing how French visitors interact with the website, no matter where on the site they end up, then a geographic filter is better. Here’s an example. 2. Setting up segments per target areaAnother way of being able to identify how users from different locations are responding to your website and digital marketing is by setting up segments within Google Analytics based on user demographics. Segments enable you to see a subset of your data that, unlike filters, don’t permanently alter the data you are viewing. Segments will allow you to narrow down your user data based on a variety of demographics, such as which campaign led them to the website, the language in which they are viewing the content, and their age. To set up a segment in Google Analytics click on “All Users” at the top of the screen. This will bring up all of the segments currently available in your account.
To create a new segment click “New Segment” and configure the fields to include or exclude the relevant visitors from your data. For instance, to get a better idea of how French-Canadian visitors interact with your website you might create a segment that only includes French-speaking Canadians. To do this you can set your demographics to include “fr-fr” in the “Language” field and “Canada” in the “Location” field. Use the demographic fields to tailor your segment to include visitors from certain locations speaking specific languages. The segment “Summary” will give you an indication of what proportion of your visitors would be included in this segment which will help you sense-check if you have set it up correctly. Once you have saved your new segment it will be available for you to overlay onto your data from any time period, even from before you set up the segment. This is unlike filters, which will only apply to data recorded after the filter was created. Also read: A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics – Audience reports 3. Ensuring your channels are recording correctlyA common missing step to setting your international targeting up on Google Analytics is ensuring the entry points for visitors onto your site are tracking correctly. For instance, there are a variety of international search engines that Google Analytics counts as “referral” sources rather than organic traffic sources unless a filter is added to change this. The best way to identify this is to review the websites listed as having driven traffic to your website, follow the path – Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. If you identify search engines among this list then there are a couple of solutions available to make sure credit for your marketing success is being assigned correctly. First, visit the “Organic Search Sources” section in Google Analytics which can be found under Admin > Property > Organic Search Sources. From here, you can simply add the referring domain of the search engine that is being recorded as a “referral” to the form. Google Analytics should start tracking traffic from that source as organic. Simple. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for every search engine. If you find the “Organic Search Sources” solution isn’t working, filters are a fool-proof solution but be warned, this will alter all your data in Google Analytics from the point the filter is put in place. Unless you have a separate unfiltered view available (which is highly recommended) then the data will not be recoverable and you may struggle to get an accurate comparison with data prior to the filter implementation. To set up a view without a filter you simply need to navigate to “Admin” and under “View” click “Create View”. Name your unfiltered view “Raw data” or similar that will remind you that this view needs to remain free of filters. To add a filter to the Google Analytics view that you want to have more accurate data in, go to “Filters” under the “View” that you want the data to be corrected for. Click “Add Filter” and select the “Custom” option. To change traffic from referral to organic, copy the below settings: Filter Type: Advanced Field A – Extract A: Referral (enter the domain of the website you want to reclassify traffic from) Field B – Extract B: Campaign Medium – referral Output To – Constructor: Campaign Medium – organic Then ensure the “Field A Required”, “Field B Required”, and “Override Output Field” options are selected. You may also notice the social media websites are listed among the referral sources. The same filter process applies to them. Just enter “social” rather than “organic” under the “Output To” field. 4. Setting goals per user groupOnce you have a better idea of how users from different locations use your website you may want to set up some independent goals specific to those users in Google Analytics. This could be, for example, a measure of how many visitors download a PDF in Chinese. This goal might not be pertinent to your French visitors’ view, but it is a very important measure of how well your website content is performing for your Chinese audience. The goals are simple to create in Google Analytics, just navigate to “Admin”, and under the view that you want to add the goal to click “Goals”. This will bring up a screen that displays any current goals set up in your view and, if you have edit level permissions in Google Analytics, you can create a new one by clicking “New Goal”. Once you have selected “New Goal” you will be given the option of setting up a goal from a template or creating a custom one. It is likely that you will need to configure a custom goal in order to track specific actions based off of events or page destinations. For example, if you are measuring how many people download a PDF you may track the “Download” button click events, or you may create a goal based on visitors going to the “Thank you” page that is displayed once a PDF is downloaded. Most goals will need to be custom ones that allow you to track visitors completing specific events or navigating to destination pages. With the number of goals you can set up under each view (which is limited to 20), it is likely that your goals will be different under each in order to drive the most relevant insight. 5. Filtering tables by locationAn easy way to determine location-specific user behavior is using the geographic dimensions to further drill-down into the data that you are viewing. For instance, if you run an experiential marketing campaign in Paris to promote awareness of your products, then viewing the traffic that went to the French product pages of your website that day compared to a previous day could give you an indicator of success. However, what would be even more useful would be to see if interest in the website spiked for visitors from Paris. By applying “City” as a secondary dimension on the table of data you are looking at how you can get a more specific overview of how well the campaign performed in that region. Dimensions available include “Continent”, “Sub-continent” “Country”, “Region”, and “City”, as well as being able to split the data by “Language”. Also read: How to integrate SEO into the translation process to maximize global success Drawing intelligence from your dataOnce you have your goals set up correctly you will be able to drill much further down into the data Google Analytics is presenting you with. An overview of how international users are navigating your site, interacting with content and their pain points is valuable in determining how to better optimize your website and marketing campaigns for conversion. 1. Creating personasMany organizations will have created user personas at one stage or another, but it is valuable to review them periodically to ensure they are still relevant in the light of changes to your organization or the digital landscape. It is imperative that your geographic targeting has been set up correctly in Google Analytics to ensure your personas drive insight into your international marketing campaigns. Creating personas using Google Analytics ensures they are based on real visitors who land on your website. This article from my agency, Avenue Digital, gives you step by step guidance on how to use your Google Analytics data to create personas, and how to use them for SEO. 2. Successful advertising mediumsOne tip for maximizing the data in Google Analytics is discerning what the most profitable advertising medium is for that demographic. If you notice that a lot of your French visitors are coming to the website as a result of a PPC campaign advertising your products, but the traffic that converts the most is actually from Twitter, then you can focus on expanding your social media reach in that region. This may not be the same for your UK visitors who might arrive on the site and convert most from organic search results. With the geographic targeting set up correctly in Google Analytics, you will be able to focus your time and budgets more effectively for each of your target regions, rather than employing a blanket approach based on unfiltered data. 3. LanguageDetermining the best language to provide your marketing campaigns and website may not be as simple as identifying the primary language for each country you are targeting. For example, Belgium has three official languages – Dutch, German, and French. Google Analytics can help you narrow down which of these languages is primarily used by the demographic that interacts with you the most online. If you notice that there are a lot of visitors from French-speaking countries landing on your website, but it is only serving content in English, then this forms a good base for diversifying the content on your site. 4. Checking the correctness of your online international targetingAn intricate and easy to get wrong aspect of international marketing is signaling to the search engines what content you want available to searchers in different regions. Google Analytics allows you to audit how well international targeting has been understood and respected by the search engines. If you have filtered your data by a geographic section of your website, like, /en-gb/ but a high proportion of your organic traffic landing on this section of the site is from countries that have their own specified pages on the site, then this would suggest that your hreflang tags may need checking. 5. Identifying emerging marketsGoogle Analytics could help identify other markets that are not being served by your current products, website or marketing campaigns that could prove very fruitful if tapped into. If through your analysis you notice that there is a large volume of visitors from a country you don’t currently serve then you can begin investigations into the viability of expanding into those markets. ConclusionAs complex as Google Analytics may seem, once you have set it up right expect to get clarity over your data, as it makes drilling down into detail for each of your markets an easy job. The awareness into your markets you gain can be the difference between your digital marketing efforts soaring or falling flat. Helen Pollitt is the Head of SEO Avenue Digital. She can be found on Twitter @HelenPollitt1. The post How to get international insights from Google Analytics appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/10/how-to-get-international-insights-from-google-analytics/ JavaScript-powered websites are here to stay. As JavaScript in its many frameworks becomes an ever more popular resource for modern websites, SEOs must be able to guarantee their technical implementation is search engine-friendly. In this article, we will focus on how to optimize JS-websites for Google (although Bing also recommends the same solution, dynamic rendering). The content of this article includes: 1. JavaScript challenges for SEO 2. Client-side and server-side rendering 3. How Google crawls websites 4. How to detect client-side rendered content 5. The solutions: Hybrid rendering and dynamic rendering 1. JavaScript challenges for SEOReact, Vue, Angular, Node, and Polymer. If at least one of these fancy names rings a bell, then most likely you are already dealing with a JavaScript-powered website. All these JavaScript frameworks provide great flexibility and power to modern websites. They open a large range of possibilities in terms of client-side rendering (like allowing the page to be rendered by the browser instead of the server), page load capabilities, dynamic-content, user-interaction, and extended functionalities. If we only look at what has an impact on SEO, JavaScript frameworks can do the following for a website:
Unfortunately, if implemented without using a pair of SEO lenses, JavaScript frameworks can pose serious challenges to the page performance, ranging from speed deficiencies to render-blocking issues, or even hindering crawlability of content and links. There are many aspects that SEOs must look after when auditing a JavaScript-powered web page, which can be summarized as follows:
A lot of questions to answer. So where should an SEO start? Below are key guidelines to the optimization of JS-websites, to enable the usage of these frameworks while keeping the search engine bots happy. 2. Client-side and server-side rendering: The best “frenemies”Probably the most important pieces of knowledge all SEOs need when they have to cope with JS-powered websites is the concepts of client-side and server-side rendering. Understanding the differences, benefits, and disadvantages of both are critical to deploying the right SEO strategy and not getting lost when speaking with software engineers (who eventually are the ones in charge of implementing that strategy). Let’s look at how Googlebot crawls and indexes pages, putting it as a very basic sequential process: 1. The client (web browser) places several requests to the server, in order to download all the necessary information that will eventually display the page. Usually, the very first request concerns the static HTML document. 2. The CSS and JS files, referred to by the HTML document, are then downloaded: these are the styles, scripts and services that contribute to generating the page. 3. The Website Rendering Service (WRS) parses and executes the JavaScript (which can manage all or part of the content or just a simple functionality).
4. Caffeine (Google’s indexer) indexes the content found New links are discovered within the content for further crawling This is the theory, but in the real world, Google doesn’t have infinite resources and has to do some prioritization in the crawling. 3. How Google actually crawls websitesGoogle is a very smart search engine with very smart crawlers. However, it usually adopts a reactive approach when it comes to new technologies applied to web development. This means that it is Google and its bots that need to adapt to the new frameworks as they become more and more popular (which is the case with JavaScript). For this reason, the way Google crawls JS-powered websites is still far from perfect, with blind spots that SEOs and software engineers need to mitigate somehow. This is in a nutshell how Google actually crawls these sites: The above graph was shared by Tom Greenaway in Google IO 2018 conference, and what it basically says is – If you have a site that relies heavily on JavaScript, you’d better load the JS-content very quickly, otherwise we will not be able to render it (hence index it) during the first wave, and it will be postponed to a second wave, which no one knows when may occur. Therefore, your client-side rendered content based on JavaScript will probably be rendered by the bots in the second wave, because during the first wave they will load your server-side content, which should be fast enough. But they don’t want to spend too many resources and take on too many tasks. In Tom Greenaway’s words:
Implications for SEO are huge, your content may not be discovered until one, two or even five weeks later, and in the meantime, only your content-less page would be assessed and ranked by the algorithm. What an SEO should be most worried about at this point is this simple equation: No content is found = Content is (probably) hardly indexable And how would a content-less page rank? Easy to guess for any SEO. So far so good. The next step is learning if the content is rendered client-side or server-side (without asking software engineers). 4. How to detect client-side rendered contentOption one: The Document Object Model (DOM)There are several ways to know it, and for this, we need to introduce the concept of DOM. The Document Object Model defines the structure of an HTML (or an XML) document, and how such documents can be accessed and manipulated. In SEO and software engineering we usually refer to the DOM as the final HTML document rendered by the browser, as opposed to the original static HTML document that lives in the server. You can think of the HTML as the trunk of a tree. You can add branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits to it (that is the DOM). What JavaScript does is manipulate the HTML and create an enriched DOM that adds up functionalities and content. In practice, you can check the static HTML by pressing “Ctrl+U” on any page you are looking at, and the DOM by “Inspecting” the page once it’s fully loaded. Most of the times, for modern websites, you will see that the two documents are quite different. Option two: JS-free Chrome profileCreate a new profile in Chrome and disallow JavaScript through the content settings (access them directly here – Chrome://settings/content). Any URL you browse with this profile will not load any JS content. Therefore, any blank spot in your page identifies a piece of content that is served client-side. Option three: Fetch as Google in Google Search ConsoleProvided that your website is registered in Google Search Console (I can’t think of any good reason why it wouldn’t be), use the “Fetch as Google” tool in the old version of the console. This will return a rendering of how Googlebot sees the page and a rendering of how a normal user sees it. Many differences there? Option four: Run Chrome version 41 in headless mode (Chromium)Google officially stated in early 2018 that they use an older version of Chrome (specifically version 41, which anyone can download from here) in headless mode to render websites. The main implication is that a page that doesn’t render well in that version of Chrome can be subject to some crawling-oriented problems. Option five: Crawl the page on Screaming Frog using GooglebotAnd with the JavaScript rendering option disabled. Check if the content and meta-content are rendered correctly by the bot. After all these checks, still, ask your software engineers because you don’t want to leave any loose ends. 5. The solutions: Hybrid rendering and dynamic renderingAsking a software engineer to roll back a piece of great development work because it hurts SEO can be a difficult task. It happens frequently that SEOs are not involved in the development process, and they are called in only when the whole infrastructure is in place. We SEOs should all work on improving our relationship with software engineers and make them aware of the huge implications that any innovation can have on SEO. This is how a problem like content-less pages can be avoided from the get-go. The solution resides on two approaches. Hybrid renderingAlso known as Isomorphic JavaScript, this approach aims to minimize the need for client-side rendering, and it doesn’t differentiate between bots and real users. Hybrid rendering suggests the following:
Dynamic renderingThis approach aims to detect requests placed by a bot vs the ones placed by a user and serves the page accordingly.
The best of both worldsCombining the two solutions can also provide great benefit to both users and bots.
ConclusionAs the use of JavaScript in modern websites is growing every day, through many light and easy frameworks, it requires software engineers to solely rely on HTML to please search engine bots which are not realistic nor feasible. However, the SEO issues raised by client-side rendering solutions can be successfully tackled in different ways using hybrid rendering and dynamic rendering. Knowing the technology available, your website infrastructure, your engineers, and the solutions can guarantee the success of your SEO strategy even in complicated environments such as JavaScript-powered websites.
Giorgio Franco is a Senior Technical SEO Specialist at Vistaprint.
The post A survival kit for SEO-friendly JavaScript websites appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/04/09/a-survival-kit-for-seo-friendly-javascript-websites/ When SEO Was EasyWhen I got started on the web over 15 years ago I created an overly broad & shallow website that had little chance of making money because it was utterly undifferentiated and crappy. In spite of my best (worst?) efforts while being a complete newbie, sometimes I would go to the mailbox and see a check for a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars come in. My old roommate & I went to Coachella & when the trip was over I returned to a bunch of mail to catch up on & realized I had made way more while not working than what I spent on that trip. What was the secret to a total newbie making decent income by accident? Horrible spelling. Back then search engines were not as sophisticated with their spelling correction features & I was one of 3 or 4 people in the search index that misspelled the name of an online casino the same way many searchers did. The high minded excuse for why I did not scale that would be claiming I knew it was a temporary trick that was somehow beneath me. The more accurate reason would be thinking in part it was a lucky fluke rather than thinking in systems. If I were clever at the time I would have created the misspeller's guide to online gambling, though I think I was just so excited to make anything from the web that I perhaps lacked the ambition & foresight to scale things back then. In the decade that followed I had a number of other lucky breaks like that. One time one of the original internet bubble companies that managed to stay around put up a sitewide footer link targeting the concept that one of my sites made decent money from. This was just before the great recession, before Panda existed. The concept they targeted had 3 or 4 ways to describe it. 2 of them were very profitable & if they targeted either of the most profitable versions with that page the targeting would have sort of carried over to both. They would have outranked me if they targeted the correct version, but they didn't so their mistargeting was a huge win for me. Search Gets ComplexSearch today is much more complex. In the years since those easy-n-cheesy wins, Google has rolled out many updates which aim to feature sought after destination sites while diminishing the sites which rely one "one simple trick" to rank. Arguably the quality of the search results has improved significantly as search has become more powerful, more feature rich & has layered in more relevancy signals. Many quality small web publishers have went away due to some combination of increased competition, algorithmic shifts & uncertainty, and reduced monetization as more ad spend was redirected toward Google & Facebook. But the impact as felt by any given publisher is not the impact as felt by the ecosystem as a whole. Many terrible websites have also went away, while some formerly obscure though higher-quality sites rose to prominence. There was the Vince update in 2009, which boosted the rankings of many branded websites. Then in 2011 there was Panda as an extension of Vince, which tanked the rankings of many sites that published hundreds of thousands or millions of thin content pages while boosting the rankings of trusted branded destinations. Then there was Penguin, which was a penalty that hit many websites which had heavily manipulated or otherwise aggressive appearing link profiles. Google felt there was a lot of noise in the link graph, which was their justification for the Penguin. There were updates which lowered the rankings of many exact match domains. And then increased ad load in the search results along with the other above ranking shifts further lowered the ability to rank keyword-driven domain names. If your domain is generically descriptive then there is a limit to how differentiated & memorable you can make it if you are targeting the core market the keywords are aligned with. There is a reason eBay is more popular than auction.com, Google is more popular than search.com, Yahoo is more popular than portal.com & Amazon is more popular than a store.com or a shop.com. When that winner take most impact of many online markets is coupled with the move away from using classic relevancy signals the economics shift to where is makes a lot more sense to carry the heavy overhead of establishing a strong brand. Branded and navigational search queries could be used in the relevancy algorithm stack to confirm the quality of a site & verify (or dispute) the veracity of other signals. Historically relevant algo shortcuts become less appealing as they become less relevant to the current ecosystem & even less aligned with the future trends of the market. Add in negative incentives for pushing on a string (penalties on top of wasting the capital outlay) and a more holistic approach certainly makes sense. Modeling Web Users & Modeling LanguagePageRank was an attempt to model the random surfer. When Google is pervasively monitoring most users across the web they can shift to directly measuring their behaviors instead of using indirect signals. Years ago Bill Slawski wrote about the long click in which he opened by quoting Steven Levy's In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives
Of course, there's a patent for that. In Modifying search result ranking based on implicit user feedback they state:
If you are a known brand you are more likely to get clicked on than a random unknown entity in the same market. And if you are something people are specifically seeking out, they are likely to stay on your website for an extended period of time.
Attempts to manipulate such data may not work.
And just like Google can make a matrix of documents & queries, they could also choose to put more weight on search accounts associated with topical expert users based on their historical click patterns.
Google was using click data to drive their search rankings as far back as 2009. David Naylor was perhaps the first person who publicly spotted this. Google was ranking Australian websites for [tennis court hire] in the UK & Ireland, in part because that is where most of the click signal came from. That phrase was most widely searched for in Australia. In the years since Google has done a better job of geographically isolating clicks to prevent things like the problem David Naylor noticed, where almost all search results in one geographic region came from a different country. Whenever SEOs mention using click data to search engineers, the search engineers quickly respond about how they might consider any signal but clicks would be a noisy signal. But if a signal has noise an engineer would work around the noise by finding ways to filter the noise out or combine multiple signals. To this day Google states they are still working to filter noise from the link graph: "We continued to protect the value of authoritative and relevant links as an important ranking signal for Search." The site with millions of inbound links, few intentional visits & those who do visit quickly click the back button (due to a heavy ad load, poor user experience, low quality content, shallow content, outdated content, or some other bait-n-switch approach)...that's an outlier. Preventing those sorts of sites from ranking well would be another way of protecting the value of authoritative & relevant links. Best Practices Vary Across Time & By Market + CategoryAlong the way, concurrent with the above sorts of updates, Google also improved their spelling auto-correct features, auto-completed search queries for many years through a featured called Google Instant (though they later undid forced query auto-completion while retaining automated search suggestions), and then they rolled out a few other algorithms that further allowed them to model language & user behavior. Today it would be much harder to get paid above median wages explicitly for sucking at basic spelling or scaling some other individual shortcut to the moon, like pouring millions of low quality articles into a (formerly!) trusted domain. Nearly a decade after Panda, eHow's rankings still haven't recovered. Back when I got started with SEO the phrase Indian SEO company was associated with cut-rate work where people were buying exclusively based on price. Sort of like a "I got a $500 budget for link building, but can not under any circumstance invest more than $5 in any individual link." Part of how my wife met me was she hired a hack SEO from San Diego who outsourced all the work to India and marked the price up about 100-fold while claiming it was all done in the United States. He created reciprocal links pages that got her site penalized & it didn't rank until after she took her reciprocal links page down. With that sort of behavior widespread (hack US firm teaching people working in an emerging market poor practices), it likely meant many SEO "best practices" which were learned in an emerging market (particularly where the web was also underdeveloped) would be more inclined to being spammy. Considering how far ahead many Western markets were on the early Internet & how India has so many languages & how most web usage in India is based on mobile devices where it is hard for users to create links, it only makes sense that Google would want to place more weight on end user data in such a market. If you set your computer location to India Bing's search box lists 9 different languages to choose from. The above is not to state anything derogatory about any emerging market, but rather that various signals are stronger in some markets than others. And competition is stronger in some markets than others. Search engines can only rank what exists.
Impacting the Economics of PublishingNow search engines can certainly influence the economics of various types of media. At one point some otherwise credible media outlets were pitching the Demand Media IPO narrative that Demand Media was the publisher of the future & what other media outlets will look like. Years later, after heavily squeezing on the partner network & promoting programmatic advertising that reduces CPMs by the day Google is funding partnerships with multiple news publishers like McClatchy & Gatehouse to try to revive the news dead zones even Facebook is struggling with.
As mainstream newspapers continue laying off journalists, Facebook's news efforts are likely to continue failing unless they include direct economic incentives, as Google's programmatic ad push broke the banner ad:
Google is offering news publishers audience development & business development tools. Heavy Investment in Emerging Markets Quickly Evolves the MarketsAs the web grows rapidly in India, they'll have a thousand flowers bloom. In 5 years the competition in India & other emerging markets will be much tougher as those markets continue to grow rapidly. Media is much cheaper to produce in India than it is in the United States. Labor costs are lower & they never had the economic albatross that is the ACA adversely impact their economy. At some point the level of investment & increased competition will mean early techniques stop having as much efficacy. Chinese companies are aggressively investing in India.
RankBrainRankBrain appears to be based on using user clickpaths on head keywords to help bleed rankings across into related searches which are searched less frequently. A Googler didn't state this specifically, but it is how they would be able to use models of searcher behavior to refine search results for keywords which are rarely searched for. In a recent interview in Scientific American a Google engineer stated: "By design, search engines have learned to associate short queries with the targets of those searches by tracking pages that are visited as a result of the query, making the results returned both faster and more accurate than they otherwise would have been." Now a person might go out and try to search for something a bunch of times or pay other people to search for a topic and click a specific listing, but some of the related Google patents on using click data (which keep getting updated) mentioned how they can discount or turn off the signal if there is an unnatural spike of traffic on a specific keyword, or if there is an unnatural spike of traffic heading to a particular website or web page. And, since Google is tracking the behavior of end users on their own website, anomalous behavior is easier to track than it is tracking something across the broader web where signals are more indirect. Google can take advantage of their wide distribution of Chrome & Android where users are regularly logged into Google & pervasively tracked to place more weight on users where they had credit card data, a long account history with regular normal search behavior, heavy Gmail users, etc. Plus there is a huge gap between the cost of traffic & the ability to monetize it. You might have to pay someone a dime or a quarter to search for something & there is no guarantee it will work on a sustainable basis even if you paid hundreds or thousands of people to do it. Any of those experimental searchers will have no lasting value unless they influence rank, but even if they do influence rankings it might only last temporarily. If you bought a bunch of traffic into something genuine Google searchers didn't like then even if it started to rank better temporarily the rankings would quickly fall back if the real end user searchers disliked the site relative to other sites which already rank. This is part of the reason why so many SEO blogs mention brand, brand, brand. If people are specifically looking for you in volume & Google can see that thousands or millions of people specifically want to access your site then that can impact how you rank elsewhere. Even looking at something inside the search results for a while (dwell time) or quickly skipping over it to have a deeper scroll depth can be a ranking signal. Some Google patents mention how they can use mouse pointer location on desktop or scroll data from the viewport on mobile devices as a quality signal. Neural MatchingLast year Danny Sullivan mentioned how Google rolled out neural matching to better understand the intent behind a search query.
The above Tweets capture what the neural matching technology intends to do. Google also stated:
To help people understand the difference between neural matching & RankBrain, Google told SEL: "RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts. Neural matching helps Google better relate words to searches." There are a couple research papers on neural matching. The first one was titled A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval. It mentioned using Word2vec & here are a few quotes from the research paper
The paper mentions how semantic matching falls down when compared against relevancy matching because:
Here are a couple images from the above research paper And then the second research paper is Deep Relevancy Ranking Using Enhanced Dcoument-Query Interactions That same sort of re-ranking concept is being better understood across the industry. There are ranking signals that earn some base level ranking, and then results get re-ranked based on other factors like how well a result matches the user intent. Here are a couple images from the above research paper. For those who hate the idea of reading research papers or patent applications, Martinibuster also wrote about the technology here. About the only part of his post I would debate is this one:
I think one should always consider user experience over other factors, however a person could still use variations throughout the copy & pick up a bit more traffic without coming across as spammy. Danny Sullivan mentioned the super synonym concept was impacting 30% of search queries, so there are still a lot which may only be available to those who use a specific phrase on their page. Martinibuster also wrote another blog post tying more research papers & patents to the above. You could probably spend a month reading all the related patents & research papers. The above sort of language modeling & end user click feedback compliment links-based ranking signals in a way that makes it much harder to luck one's way into any form of success by being a terrible speller or just bombing away at link manipulation without much concern toward any other aspect of the user experience or market you operate in. Pre-penalized ShortcutsGoogle was even issued a patent for predicting site quality based upon the N-grams used on the site & comparing those against the N-grams used on other established site where quality has already been scored via other methods: "The phrase model can be used to predict a site quality score for a new site; in particular, this can be done in the absence of other information. The goal is to predict a score that is comparable to the baseline site quality scores of the previously-scored sites." Have you considered using a PLR package to generate the shell of your site's content? Good luck with that as some sites trying that shortcut might be pre-penalized from birth. Navigating the MazeWhen I started in SEO one of my friends had a dad who is vastly smarter than I am. He advised me that Google engineers were smarter, had more capital, had more exposure, had more data, etc etc etc ... and thus SEO was ultimately going to be a malinvestment. Back then he was at least partially wrong because influencing search was so easy. But in the current market, 16 years later, we are near the infection point where he would finally be right. At some point the shortcuts stop working & it makes sense to try a different approach. The flip side of all the above changes is as the algorithms have become more complex they have went from being a headwind to people ignorant about SEO to being a tailwind to those who do not focus excessively on SEO in isolation. If one is a dominant voice in a particular market, if they break industry news, if they have key exclusives, if they spot & name the industry trends, if their site becomes a must read & is what amounts to a habit ... then they perhaps become viewed as an entity. Entity-related signals help them & those signals that are working against the people who might have lucked into a bit of success become a tailwind rather than a headwind. If your work defines your industry, then any efforts to model entities, user behavior or the language of your industry are going to boost your work on a relative basis. This requires sites to publish frequently enough to be a habit, or publish highly differentiated content which is strong enough that it is worth the wait. Those which publish frequently without being particularly differentiated are almost guaranteed to eventually walk into a penalty of some sort. And each additional person who reads marginal, undifferentiated content (particularly if it has an ad-heavy layout) is one additional visitor that site is closer to eventually getting whacked. Success becomes self regulating. Any short-term success becomes self defeating if one has a highly opportunistic short-term focus. Those who write content that only they could write are more likely to have sustained success.
from http://www.seobook.com/keyword-not-provided-it-just-clicks |
ABOUT MEPleasure to introduce myself I am Gillian 32 from Calgary, Canada. I am working as social media expert and have helped many clients with their social media marketing. Archives
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