Every marketer or website owner knows what meta tags are, but not all of them realize the importance of these small pieces of code. Optimizing your meta title and description you improve such crucial things as click-through rate and the users’ first impression on your content quality. Although Google doesn’t use meta tags in its ranking algorithms, metadata has an indirect impact on your SERP. Read the article to find out:
How meta tags influence your SERPWell, if search robots don’t pay much attention to your meta tags, why should you bother these pieces of code at all? You could quickly write some short title and description containing your main keywords to help search engines form your snippet, and that would be enough. Not at all. To make it clear, here is the chain of consequences which correct or incorrect meta title and description can cause: As you see, there’s a logical correlation between the metadata you provide and your rankings. So, it’s absolutely worth spending some time to elaborate your meta tags. Do’s when writing metadataThe main purpose of creating meta tags is to describe the content of a page ranking in search results. The data you provide there should be:
To make your snippets bring your website ranking a significant profit, they should meet specific requirements. There are two components of metadata you should always consider: title and description. I’ve circled out the tips you should follow when working at each of them. TitleTitle tags provide you with great opportunity to engage your potential customers and make them click through to your website. It’s worth to make sure whether they give a precise and accurate summary of your page content. Here are the basic requirements you should consider when creating title tags:
Here’s the way it should look in the code: What people see in the search results: Description
The meta description in the code: The same data in the search results: Don’ts when writing metadataCreating your perfect snippet, it’s essential not only to know the crucial requirements but also to be aware of what actions can ruin your ‘first impression’ thing. Title
Description
For instance, this one’s length is about 61 characters: And here’s how the page snippet looks in search results: Search robots used the first sentences from the article instead of using way too short meta description of the page.
Evaluate whether your meta tags are well-optimizedIf you already provided metadata for your pages, it’s time to see whether you did your best or you should change anything. Firstly, look at your competitors’ snippets. Do they add some information your snippets miss? Check what your competitors focus on and think if it could help you improve your click through rate. Secondly, use SEO tools to analyze your meta title, body text, etc. according to the keywords you and your rivals use. For example, Serpstat Text analysis will help you create automated suggestions for optimizing meta tags and page texts. To conduct analysis, you should conduct clustering first of all: click on Create a project, input domain and a list of keywords you use on your website, choose a search engine and select Linkage strength. When the cluster is ready, click on Start text analysis. Here’s what you’ll see: The results will help you better understand how you can improve your metadata and correct existing mistakes. To sum upSome website owners may overlook meta tags importance knowing search engines don’t consider them ranking factors. But they forget that the quality of their snippets influences a lot their users’ experience. And that is, indeed, the ranking factor. So, make sure you follow the tips from the articles to fulfill users’ expectations and watch your SERP improving. If compacting all the tips in a few sentences, here is what you should always keep in mind:
Inna Yatsyna is a Brand and Community Development Specialist at Serpstat. The post Do your snippets make people click? Do’s and don’ts of metadata appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/22/dos-donts-metadata-snippets-clicks/
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How is content marketing changing in 2019? What are the key trends you need to know for the next 12 months? Here are the most important stats to maintain a successful content marketing strategy. A content marketing strategy needs to be frequently evaluated to ensure that it’s still relevant. As we’re heading towards the end of 2018, it’s a good time to review your work from the past 11 months to find out what worked better and what needs to be improved. It’s easy to fall behind with all the emerging trends in technology. A good way to stay up-to-date is to follow CMI’s annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends—North America report. It’s the ninth year that the Content Marketing Institute surveys content marketers across the world about the top trends that have to do with strategy, planning, tools, proficiency, and everything that can help you improve your content marketing ideas. These are the top content marketing stats you need to know to keep your content marketing strategy up-to-date. 70% of B2B content marketers say their organization’s content marketing is much/somewhat more successful compared with one year agoIt’s interesting to see that more marketers see an increased success in their content marketing efforts. It’s an encouraging step that moves content marketing towards a more sophisticated and mature stage. As more marketers realize the potential of content marketing, more businesses will be convinced to increase their budget on content marketing campaigns. Thus, it is a very important step for marketers to see the benefits of content marketing so that they bring more team members on board. Moreover, according to the report, 93% of the most successful B2B content marketers reported that their organisation is extremely/very committed to content marketing. The focus on the most successful B2B marketers in some of the stats makes a case of the best practices that more marketers should follow to improve their strategies. In this case, there seems to be a connection between the stronger commitment and the success in a content marketing strategy. Once marketers get the buy-in from the seniors, commitment and success can be easier. 39% of marketers have a documented content marketing strategyA documented content marketing strategy allows you to be more organized and efficient in your marketing team and it tends to be a good indicator of your organisation’s maturity level in marketing. However, although more marketers realize the potential of content marketing, only 39% of them have an actual documented strategy. It’s common to discuss your strategy and your objectives without finalizing them in a written form. This is not necessarily a wrong approach, but what we can learn from this report is that a documented strategy is more common among successful B2B marketers. In fact, 65% of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy. Thus, the documentation of your strategy can be the first step towards an improved success in your content marketing efforts. Half of the respondents expect their content marketing budget to increase over the next 12 monthsThere are many companies that have a solid content marketing budget over the past years but we should also keep in mind those who are just getting started. As content marketing evolves, there might be additional reasons to invest more time and money to your strategy. Whether it has to do with hiring, using new marketing technologies or trying out new channels, it is encouraging to see that more marketers are willing to increase their budget during 2019. When it comes to the allocation of the budget, content creation sees the biggest increase year-over-year. 61% of B2B content marketers have increased their use of social media for content marketing purposes compared with one year agoSocial media networks can be very helpful when distributing your content. That’s how it gains a more significant role in a content marketing strategy year-by-year. We seem to be moving away from the thinking that social media is mainly about vanity likes and followers embracing a holistic strategy that makes the most out of each channel. In fact, social media can nowadays be used across different objectives in your content marketing strategy, from awareness to lead generation and conversion. 66% of B2B content marketers use paid methods to distribute contentPaid advertising can help marketers expand the reach of their post. Organic promotion is not enough anymore and more marketers seem to acknowledge the benefits of boosting their distribution methods. Why are they using paid methods then? The most common objectives are to:
74% of B2B content marketers say they’ve used or developed long-form content in the last 12 monthsWho said long-form content is dead? The constant discussion about our shortened attention span doesn’t seem to affect long-form content, at least not in every context. It’s very promising to see that a big number of marketers is still investing time in long-form content, whether it’s in written form or even video content of longer length. What’s important is to produce interesting, engaging, and relevant content for your audience without thinking of the ideal length based on others’ suggestions. 49% of the respondents said that their organizations measure ROI for content marketingAlmost half of the respondents are currently focusing on the measurement of their content marketing success. It might seem challenging to determine the content marketing ROI in a tangible way, but you can still focus on smaller objectives based on annual goals and specific campaigns to be more specific with your data. For example, according to CMI’s report, these are the most popular goals among marketers when it comes to content marketing in the past 12 months:
What we can learn from these stats about content marketing in 2019It’s not easy to master content marketing as content demands increase and digital trends keep evolving. There are many challenges that marketers need to overcome. However, more marketers realize the big opportunity to meet different objectives through a successful content marketing strategy. As their budgets increase, there is also an encouraging approval coming from the teams beyond marketing who start acknowledging the potential power of content marketing. The key areas to consider about your next plans in content marketing have to do with
A successful content marketing strategy may take time, but now is the right time to start thinking ahead. The post 7 content marketing stats you need to know for 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/21/7-content-marketing-stats-2019/ Voice search is growing, a statement appearing time and time again throughout the web. It has fundamentally changed the way people search and it’s here to stay. With a simple command, users can conduct searches for information, products, services and local businesses. It’s such a hot topic that our Head of Search and Strategy Stuart Shaw spoke at one of the UK’s largest SEO conferences a few weeks ago to talk about the details of voice search and why it’s important for brands. While voice isn’t likely to surpass traditional search any time soon, it has spurred us to explore how local businesses can optimize, adjust their marketing strategies and understand the potential voice search could have on their bottom lines. The opportunity for local businessesTo get information about a local service near to us, we pull out our phones and we search for it:
In fact, a recent study by Brightlocal highlighted that 53% of people owning smart speakers such as Amazon’s Alexa & Google Home are performing searches like these for local businesses every day in the US: Putting that in context for the UKA recent YouGov study showed that people in the UK owning a smart speaker had doubled between Q3 2017 and Q1 2018 to 10% of the total population. A study by radiocentre predicted that this growth could reach as high as 40% by the end of 2018. Looking a little deeper, we could say that per household there is more than one occupant. In fact on average there’s actually 2.3 people per household, according to the most recent UK gov statistics: Source: Office of national statistics So, if the 40% of UK households prediction is correct, that is potentially 11 million households exposing voice search content to 25 million people in the UK. Who’s leading the smart speaker market?Three-quarters of the market share in the UK in Q1 2018 was taken up by Amazon’s Alexa. This, of course, will change but right now this is where the biggest opportunity lies for local businesses optimizing for smart speakers in the UK:
Source: Office of national statistics Although voice search is still in a stage of infancy, and we have only talked about smart speakers, it’s clear to see just how relevant this technology is to brick and mortar businesses. And, it’s constantly evolving… Here’s a timeline from Stuart’s presentation, highlighting significant changes in voice search, and it’s becoming increasingly accessible for more and more people to conduct a voice search every day: 3 Biggest steps to optimize your local business for voice search1. Take ownership of your digital footprintAlthough voice assistants seem all-knowing, they rely heavily on information they can find around the web about your business. A big part of optimizing for local SEO is ‘citations’ which are online references to your business name, address and phone number (NAP). Voice assistants use these citations from trusted sources to provide information to users that are conducting local search queries. So, where should I cite my business? Each voice assistant relies on different and sometimes multiple data aggregators for answers to local search queries:
So, these data sources are the most important places to make sure your business is correctly cited, up-to-date and optimised:
2. Utilize schema markupSchema is a type of on-page data markup that allows webmasters to provide search engines with data about their business in a more structured way. The structured format allows search engines to understand the contents and context of web pages much easier (less algorithmic interpretation) and, subsequently, the engines can better understand the relevance of pages to particular search queries and present richer results. Schema is only going to play a bigger part in ranking for rich results and featured snippets which are heavily used in for voice search content. What does schema markup do? Search engines experiment with how they display rich results all the time and by having your site marked up, you have the opportunity to be featured in new rich results. For example, Google experimented with a ‘prominent knowledge panel card’ shown on mobile devices which displays when users conduct a branded search for the business. In the knowledge card you can see ‘place actions’ such as ‘find a table’ or ‘book an appointment’ which would direct searchers into an appropriate webpage to conduct the action. These rich results went on to influence the structure of Google My Business which is now heavily used by local businesses. The point here is that the business websites shown in the example image below were ‘future proofed’ and optimal which qualified them for this rich result. In other words, as Gary Illyes – web trends analyst at Google puts it: “If you want your sites to appear in search features, implement structured data.” The biggest benefit and ‘thing it does’ is help Google understand relevance much more fluently. Another few quotes from Gary Illyes helps explain this: “Add structured data to your pages because, during indexing, we will be able to better understand what your site is about.” “And don’t just think about the structured data that we documented on developers.google.com. Think about any schema.org schema that you could use on your pages. It will help us understand your pages better, and indirectly… it leads to better ranks.” Why it’s important for local businesses Schema is a tool which search engines and subsequently voice assistants are using to paint a clearer picture of a business website’s central topic and the services the site can offer users. With structured data present, it is much more likely that your business (if relevant) will be identified as a good candidate for answering local voice search queries. Using local business schema will:
So how do you take control? There are hundreds of schema types which can be utilised for hundreds of business and content types. There are also multiple ways of marking up schema in your page source code. By far the easiest is using JSON-LD. Using the example from above the marked up code looks something like this: The best way to get your code ready is to go to SchemaApp.com, follow the instructions or use this tutorial and locate the schema types that are most relevant to you and your business. Types of local business data that can be marked up:
Bear in mind there are guidelines for usage summarized below:
See Google’s policies for structured data for more information. Once you’ve gone through SchemaApp, copy and paste the output code into relevant pages before your closing </head> tag or, if it’s content specific schema (such as the review rating above), paste the code before the closing </body> tag in the HTML of your page. Finally, check your mark up with this structured data testing tool which will highlight any errors once implemented. Note: Avoid using Google Tag Manager for this markup, apply the code natively where possible. 3. Produce content relevant to voice search needsThere are great ways of optimizing specifically for voice search using your on-site content. The simplest is to explore the realm of user intent and uncover the types of questions people may want answering, when it comes to your business. That doesn’t mean you need to create 1000s of pages that are optimized specifically for voice search terms. Instead, search engines such as Google pulls answers to voice queries directly from page content, even if it is a snippet that makes up a small section of the content. Work long tail queries into long-form content Conduct some long tail keyword research and look for questions people ask about your local business and work them into your content, where it is relevant to do so. I highly recommend Answer the Public to scale your efforts here. Here’s an example of what I mean. This is a query I searched recently that could be relevant to any local business: ‘Does tesco take american express?’ Here’s what was shown at the top in a featured snippet (the content that will be read out if conducting a voice search with Google Home): And here’s the content that Google has pulled out from halfway down the page from choose.co.uk: FAQ pages can be perfect for voice searchWritten correctly, an FAQ page can serve voice search queries really effectively and if you struggle to work in your long tail optimisation into relevant pages, an FAQ page is a great way to get around it:
ConclusionHowever, you look at SEO, voice is the future and it’s growing exponentially and it’s being integrated into more and more of our everyday tech. Local business marketers should be making specific efforts to capitalize on voice search to maximize their online and offline conversion. The caveat here is not to let your standard SEO practice fall behind. Having a fully mobile responsive website, fast site speed and good quality local backlinks, among many other optimizations, are still, and will remain, vital for ranking in local search and will greatly impact your voice search efforts. Get a deeper dive to voice search or get help with your voice search strategy. The post How to optimize your local business for voice search appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/20/optimize-local-business-voice-search/ Google has recently updated exact match close variants; now implied words, paraphrase words and same-intent keywords are allowed to match to exact match keywords as close variants. This change gives advertisers less control over their exact match keywords and gives Google more control to appropriately match search query intent to similar keywords. For advertisers using (or planning to use) the Alpha-Beta structure for their accounts, there are a few considerations to be aware of with this update to exact match close variants. Background on Alpha-BetaThe Alpha Beta structure breaks keywords into two different campaigns – Alpha and Beta. Alpha campaigns contain exact match keywords that are strong-performing search queries. Top-performing search queries can be determined by a few different metrics (conversions, impressions, clicks, etc.) depending on your business targets and goals. These Alpha keywords are placed into single keyword ad groups, which allows for keywords with hyper-targeted landing pages and ad copy. Single keyword ad groups allow the landing page and ad copy to be as relevant to a user’s search as possible, increasing the likelihood that a user will click on the ad. CPCs are typically lower with this structure as well because of the relevancy of the ad copy and landing page to a user’s search intent. Beta campaigns contain broad match modifier (BMM) keywords; these give advertisers more control than broad match keywords and are more inclusive than phrase match keywords. These Beta campaigns allow advertisers to mine for additional top-performing keywords. In order to continually identify top-performing search queries to promote to Alpha, you need to monitor Beta search queries on a recurring basis. It is also important to mine search query reports to eliminate poor-performing search queries that are not driving conversions or are irrelevant to your business. Once the Alpha-Beta campaign structure is established, ensure that exact match traffic is funneled to your Alpha campaigns, not Beta campaigns, by adding all Alpha keywords as exact match negatives to your Beta campaigns. This campaign structure allows advertisers to maintain control of: the search queries that appear on the SERP, the message delivered to consumers, treatment of top performers, and easy negation of underperforming or irrelevant queries. Close variant changesGoogle has made a few changes to exact match close variant targeting over the past few years. You might remember the change in March 2017 that allowed for exact match keywords to show for typos, plurals, and other close variants as long the meaning was similar. (Many advertisers experienced little impact from this change.) The most recent change, which occurred in late September, allowed for implied words, paraphrase words, and same-intent keywords to match to our exact match keywords as close variants, with the help of Google’s algorithm. Google’s stance was that the changes were released to be more inclusive of the constantly changing consumer search behavior; they’ve said that roughly 15% of searches seen every day are new. Impact on Alpha-Beta structureThis change in close variant matching has impacted the way the Alpha-Beta structure is managed. There are two impacts that are important to consider: increases in spend on exact match keywords and poor exact match close variant matching. As Google starts to consider additional variants for exact match, I would expect to see traffic start to increase to Alpha campaigns. With no corresponding budget increases, Alpha campaigns could hit some restrictions, so be sure to keep an eye on campaign budgets in the upcoming months. It is now increasingly important to monitor close variant matching. The easiest way to monitor matching is to download a search query report and filter match type for exact match (close variant). You can also look into exact match keywords that are seeing significant increases in spend or traffic. If you experience that exact match variants are poorly matching, the solution is to add ad group negatives to control the funneling of these search queries. Note: Google’s algorithm might match search queries as exact match close variants even though that search query is built out as an exact match keyword. This is another circumstance where we would want to add ad group negatives to filter traffic to the most appropriate keywords. There could also be instances where Google is matching top performing search queries to your exact match keywords as close variants. If the intent of these search queries is significantly different from the keyword that it is matching to, breaking out those search queries as keywords will allow for more control of traffic and messaging. For example, you would not want to break out sweater and sweaters into different single keyword ad groups because the intent is the same, so you can deliver the same ad copy messaging and the same landing page. You would want to break out and add an ad group negative for “b2b internal payment,” which was an exact match variant for “b2b international payment” (hmmm). These keywords have a very different intent and should never be grouped together. In the new world of close variants, the Alpha-Beta structure still allows advertisers to maintain more control over search queries, landing pages, and messaging. But the latest update does impact some of the control over search queries matching to exact match keywords, making it more important to review search query reports regularly. The post An updated look at Alpha-Beta in a world of close variants appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/19/alpha-beta-close-variant-update/ We invited Michael Akkerman, Global Head of Partners Program at Pinterest, to our NY office yesterday evening to speak on visual search. He talked about discovery over search, audience engagement over audience size, less time more well-spent over more total time spent, and social communities over social networks. It was an insightful, instructive, and *obviously* visual-heavy session. Here were some of the key takeaways / highlights. Pinterest is a visual discovery engine — discovery over searchWhen people come to our platform, they’re trying to discover new pieces of information. Our Pinners are not looking to connect with friends or post at parties. They’re doing home renovations. They’re in the market for something. They want to go and actually discover something. Google is great for when I know what I want, but it’s really crappy when I don’t know how to articulate it. How do I describe a style I’ve only seen, a city I don’t know, a specific color? Like this: Or this: I know them when I see them. Pinterest is visual-first. We wanted it to be able to take images instead of words. Pinterest = possibilitiesWhat do I want to eat? What do I want to wear? How should I decorate my house? What’s my style? We help people understand their taste. Total numbers of pins: 23 billion food and drink. 18 billion home and garden. 8 billion beauty. 23 billion style. 4 billion travel. Are you in one of these categories? Your customers are on Pinterest.
What keeps people from buying? They’re still trying to figure out what they want — they’re still discovering. For us, the camera is the new keyboard. Let the image be the SERP. Shop the look. Discover products inside an image. Personalization not as a feature, but rather the underpinning of the platformOn Pinterest, we understand that every single person has different interests. We don’t want personalization as just a feature. We want it as the underpinnings of the entire platform. The way we’re doing it is we’re bringing what’s called the taste graph. The hipster guy from Williamsburg? His garden board doesn’t look like everyone else’s. My travel board? I want to go to Morocco. Not everyone does. When you interact on Pinterest, it feels like it knows you. What storytelling was on search versus what storytelling is on Pinterest. Driving people closer to an engaging experience. Audience engagement over audience sizeContent at scale:
We have the largest human focus group in the world, curating content into boards. “We’re 250 million people, not 2 billion. It’s really looking at the intent. You’ll find platforms with much larger audiences, but they’re not there to engage. We’re a smaller audience size, but people are there with intent.” More time well-spent over total time spentThe visual revolution. 50% of the brain is dedicated to understanding visual information. People retain 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they see and do. At Pinterest, that “do” part is very interesting. We’re about time well-spent. We want you off the platform as soon as possible — we want you to solve your problem as quickly as possible.
Purposeful communities over social networksWe’re not a social network — but communities are naturally springing up all the time around given topics, images, ideas, and brands. Most people call Pinterest “my time.” Not about my social network. Ads within the context of purpose-based community versus in a social network 1. Annoyance: “People use social media to share things about their lives with each other. And let’s face it, ads are annoying in that context.” 2. Value: “With Google, you know the intent but not the person. With Facebook, you know everything about the person but less about the intent. I was drawn to Pinterest because it combines both.” Ads often don’t add value, and they feel disruptive, disjointed. Why not make them additive? If you’re searching for a certain type of shoes, we’ll show you ads for those shoes.
How people shop: convenience and need over loyalty, bundles over individual itemsExample of REI: They saw that normal human beings shop in bundles. If they’re going camping, they don’t need ten jackets and ten tents. They need a bundle of assorted things. Thus, they started highlighting and bundling trending Pinterest products on their own site. Loyalty is elusive in today’s marketMost purchases are driven by shopping, not by loyalty to a brand. People who switch from brand A to brand B do so because brand B was present the second they were looking for a product. Marketers like Pinterest because you can reach customers so early on in their buying journeyPinners start the Black Friday hunt in August. Most people start pinning, searching, saving 12 weeks before an event. That’s great for a marketer. You can drive interest incrementally over time. When someone is designing their perfect home, looking for the perfect bag, planning their next vacation — you should be there. They’re discovering your product. Agnostic cross-channel insightLast-touch vs multi-touch attribution, in pictures: “Last-touch attribution is like a shopkeeper looking out the door and seeing a bunch of customers lined up outside and saying “oh, if I had two more front doors, I’d have three times as many customers.” It doesn’t work that way.” You need to do multi-touch attribution. You’re trying to engage customers, build brand, drive sales. But that looks different in every channel. Kenshoo found that Facebook was undervalued by as much as 30%. We see the exact same thing on Pinterest right now. The full livestream is available on our @Sewatch twitter here as well as online here. The post Pinterest on visual search: key takeaways appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/16/pinterest-visual-search-takeaways/ There were over a billion voice searches a month, as of January 2018 and 40% of those mobile searches had local intent. This strongly suggests that local SEO now requires optimizing for voice. The human brain is wired to love convenience. Voice search is enabling people to search with the help of their voice and search engines have become accurate enough to provide direct answers to their voice commands. As an SEO, how should you revamp your strategy in order to gain an edge over your competitors? In this guide, I’ll tell you what you can do to make your clients’ local business websites the superstars of voice search. Focus On Long-Tail And Localized KeywordsPurely voice focused SEO requires you to research and find out long-tail keywords. More than 70% global searches, in fact, are for long tail keywords. Purely local SEO requires, of course, the localization of keywords by adding geographic indicators to them. Geo-local indicators include; Brooklyn espresso, 18th, and Broadway french fries. These two research strategies need to be integrated to get the best traction from voice and local SEO as a single channel. Here’s how you can do this:
This, however, is a manually time-consuming method.
I would add all these long tail localized keywords into an Excel sheet, and then run them through a keyword research tool to identify the ones with the right balance of search volume and keyword difficulty. Latch On To The Micro MomentsFor a marketer, a micro-moment is a crucial fraction of the buyer’s pre-purchase journey. Hence, micro-moments need to be tapped correctly as these can nudge the buyer into purchasing from your business. At the core of each of these moments is a question. For a local business, all these questions can be translated into question-form keywords, which makes their content highly contextualized and valid as answers to these questions. Here’s an infographic to help you understand the micro-moments, and the questions that arise in the buyer’s mind at these moments. For instance, consider these questions for the four micro-moments:
I’ll tell you more on optimizing your local website to tap these micro-moments in the next section. Let Your Business Be The First To AnswerShoppers have questions before they buy; the brands that can answer the quickest will get their business. From a local + voice SEO perspective, this boils down to optimizing your local website for the queries that users will ask their mobile phones’ voice search assistants. To build a list of question form keywords, I recommend these two tools.
Note: If entering local keywords such as ‘cheap cruise tickets in London’ does not return any question keywords, remove the local element, re-do your questions search, and add the local element to these questions on your own. Get The ‘Context’ Perfectly Right For Your Local Business WebsiteTo make your local business website get Google’s love for relevant voice searches, you need to communicate its context comprehensively. After all, Google doesn’t want to be embarrassed by showcasing irrelevant search results for voice queries. To make your local website’s context clear to Google’s algorithm, do this:
What to do with Long Tail, LSI, and Question Keywords?Now that you have a massive library of a long tail, LSI, and question keywords, all localized to your target geography, it’s time to bring out their SEO juice and use it to make your local business website super visible for voice searches. Here are the best practices to stick to:
Concluding RemarksThe unsaid rule of digital marketing is – find your niche. The same can be extended to understand how voice search and local SEO’s overlapping nature can enable brands significantly improve their online visibility. Don’t wait, because your competitors are coming for you. Get started with the methods I’ve put together in this guide. The post Voice search and local SEO: How to get started? appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/15/voice-search-local-seo-guide/ Amazon is already well-known for its rising dominance of the ecommerce market and other fast-growing segments like AWS, its leading cloud computing platform — now, their search advertising business is booming as well. In fact, it’s on track to generate more than $10 billion in advertising revenues over the next year, a nugget found within Amazon’s most recent third-quarter financial results. In September, the global powerhouse unified its disparate ad products and systems under one brand, Amazon Advertising. The accelerating growth of Amazon’s ad business poses a threat to established digital advertising platforms including Google and Facebook. The Seattle-based internet giant is forecast to push past Verizon’s Oath and Microsoft to the number three position behind the “duopoly” of Google and Facebook with market share of more than four percent this year. In comparison, the duopoly’s share of new digital ad dollars is declining, forecast to garner only about 48% of new ad spend in 2018 vs. 73% two years ago. According to a recent Bloomberg TV segment on Amazon’s increasing share of total online ad spend, 54 percent of product searches across the entire internet now occur on Amazon, said Jumpshot CEO Deren Baker. Sponsored ads on Amazon have increased during the last 18 months, with clicks on product searches via sponsored ads on Amazon rising from three to seven percent. Two thirds of these clicks are on the first page of search results, said Baker, increasing pressure to run sponsored ads up against competitors and Amazon’s private labels. In another extension of its full-court press to rapidly expand its online advertising business, Amazon is now testing a pilot program that lets advertisers use search queries to retarget ads across the web using its demand side platform. It’ll be the first time Amazon’s rich search data will be used outside the walls of its own platform for advertisers to capture shoppers’ intent and serve up more personalized ads. Advantages over Google in brewing ad platform warsWith more than half of U.S. online shoppers starting their product searches on Amazon today, Google is at a disadvantage in understanding their purchase behaviors in detail. It doesn’t have the data intelligence that Amazon has in terms of what products were actually bought, when those transactions occurred, what journeys the shoppers took in purchasing their final selections, and what other products were added to shopping cart before the final check-out. Based on that rich set of behavior-based data, Amazon can put it to work with smarter sales pitches that follow shoppers wherever they go on the internet through retargeting campaigns. This added layer of intelligence could help relieve consumer frustration and wasted ad spends that online search expert, journalist and entrepreneur John Battelle recently wrote about in a self-described “rant” against dumber ad retargeting campaigns. While he’s described programmatic advertising as a “database of intentions” and “the most important artifact in human history, replacing the Macintosh as the most significant tool ever created,” Battelle complains that adtech is failing because people are sick of being followed by ad targeting so stupid that a fourth grader could do better. One ad he describes is for a robe on Amazon that he’d just purchased a few weeks ago that popped up while reading The New York Times – most likely served up via Google Adwords. With Amazon’s smarts, this can be avoided. Since Amazon’s business plan seems focused on becoming the everything company, marketers will naturally be drawn to spending more with the emerging advertising powerhouse. For example, now with its new Whole Foods business, Amazon can make correlations between online and offline shopping behaviors. It also has insights into video and music preferences through its 100-million plus Prime members. And, Amazon is consistently the “go-to” e-commerce player for major shopping events from Cyber Monday to Mother’s Day to Prime Day. Lastly, and importantly, Amazon is a step ahead of incumbents in terms of all the purchase data is has tied to attribution, the science of assigning credit and allocating dollars from a sale to the marketing touchpoints a customer was exposed to prior to a purchase. This metric is used by companies to help optimize campaigns and allocate future ad spend based on performance. Some cautions about what Amazon needs to get rightAccording to advertiser feedback from Amazon’s new retargeting pilot for its demand side platform, some agencies chose not to participate in pilot stage because they can’t use blacklists or evaluate ad inventory for brand safety issues. Avoiding ads being placed next to brand-inappropriate content has emerged as what many describe as an industry brand safety crisis. While Amazon has been a beneficiary of brand marketers moving budgets closer to the point of sale due to a brand-safety backlash on other search and social channels, it needs to deliver brand-safety features for off-platform campaigns to pick up significant steam. Like many other ad giants, it will face more scrutiny in terms of user privacy concerns as it moves beyond its own walled garden where it owns all the data and interactions and doesn’t need to be concerned with ad blocking. Beyond its own walls, Amazon needs to rethink and reshape its data policies. Historically, Amazon has faced complaints about its advertising tools and lack of support for marketers to implement campaigns. It needs to improve self-service capabilities and provide excellent service for advertisers to grow its business significantly. From a broader societal and legislative perspective, Amazon needs to be mindful of its impact on media publishers in a world that’s now dominated by three ad platforms: Google, Facebook, and Amazon. It is sure to be more closely monitored by legislators who already view Amazon as a growing target for monopoly concerns. Also, as Amazon’s knowledge of our buying patterns and inner desires rises, along with its ad business, it may be increasingly scrutinized for being a good corporate citizen that does not play into unhealthy, hyper-consumerist tendencies. Gary Burtka is vice president of U.S. operations at RTB House, a global company that provides retargeting technology for global brands worldwide. Its North American headquarters are based in New York City. The post Amazon emerges as search advertising powerhouse appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/11/12/amazon-emerges-as-search-advertising-powerhouse/ There were over a billion voice searches a month, as of January 2018 and 40% of those mobile searches had local intent. This strongly suggests that local SEO now requires optimizing for voice. The human brain is wired to love convenience. Voice search is enabling people to search with the help of their voice and search engines have become accurate enough to provide direct answers to their voice commands. As an SEO, how should you revamp your strategy in order to gain an edge over your competitors? In this guide, I’ll tell you what you can do to make your clients’ local business websites the superstars of voice search. Focus on long tail and localized keywordsPurely voice focused SEO requires you to research and find out long-tail keywords. More than 70% global searches, in fact, are for long tail keywords. Purely local SEO requires, of course, the localization of keywords by adding geographic indicators to them. Geo-local indicators include; Brooklyn espresso, 18th, and Broadway french fries. These two research strategies need to be integrated to get the best traction from voice and local SEO as a single channel. Here’s how you can do this:
This, however, is a manually time-consuming method.
I would add all these long tail localized keywords into an Excel sheet, and then run them through a keyword research tool to identify the ones with the right balance of search volume and keyword difficulty. Latch on to the micro momentsFor a marketer, a micro-moment is a crucial fraction of the buyer’s pre-purchase journey. Hence, micro-moments need to be tapped correctly as these can nudge the buyer into purchasing from your business. At the core of each of these moments is a question. For a local business, all these questions can be translated into question-form keywords, which makes their content highly contextualized and valid as answers to these questions. Here’s an infographic to help you understand the micro-moments, and the questions that arise in the buyer’s mind at these moments. For instance, consider these questions for the four micro-moments:
I’ll tell you more on optimizing your local website to tap these micro-moments in the next section. Let your business be the first to answerShoppers have questions before they buy; the brands that can answer the quickest will get their business. From a local + voice SEO perspective, this boils down to optimizing your local website for the queries that users will ask their mobile phones’ voice search assistants. To build a list of question form keywords, I recommend these two tools.
Note: If entering local keywords such as ‘cheap cruise tickets in London’ does not return any question keywords, remove the local element, re-do your questions search, and add the local element to these questions on your own. Get the “context” perfectly right for your local business websiteTo make your local business website get Google’s love for relevant voice searches, you need to communicate its context comprehensively. After all, Google doesn’t want to be embarrassed by showcasing irrelevant search results for voice queries. To make your local website’s context clear to Google’s algorithm, do this:
What to do with long tail, LSI, and question keywords?Now that you have a massive library of a long tail, LSI, and question keywords, all localized to your target geography, it’s time to bring out their SEO juice and use it to make your local business website super visible for voice searches. Here are the best practices to stick to:
Concluding remarksThe unsaid rule of digital marketing is – find your niche. The same can be extended to understand how voice search and local SEO’s overlapping nature can enable brands significantly improve their online visibility. Don’t wait, because your competitors are coming for you. Get started with the methods I’ve put together in this guide. from https://searchenginewatch.com/voice-search-local-seo-get-started Instagram is a powerful visual platform for digital marketers to take advantage of. Naturally, anybody taking part in a multichannel marketing strategy understands that efforts to market your Instagram profile should extend beyond Instagram itself. Surprisingly, however, Instagram accounts are actually notoriously difficult to index and display in the search results. This is because most Instagram users are, in fact, not so interested in promoting themselves, and in fact Instagram actually blocks search engines from indexing your Instagram images. The profiles themselves can still be indexed, but the images are not. This represents a major hurdle for marketers hoping to get additional traffic to their Instagram account from the search results, but the hurdle is not insurmountable. Let’s talk about how to optimize your Instagram account for search engines. Make sure your profile is set to publicInstagram profiles are set to public by default, meaning that anybody can access your profile and all of your content. As a marketer, this is obviously how you want it. However, it’s a good idea to double check that your privacy settings were never altered and ensure that this hasn’t been changed. To do this, go to your profile and click the hamburger menu icon: Next go to “Settings” followed by “Account Privacy” and make sure that the “Private Account” toggle is set to “off.” Set up social profile schema for InstagramGoogle allows you to use schema.org markup to tell them which social media profiles are yours. If your brand gets a card in the Knowledge Graph, your social media profiles will then show up there: Have your developer take a look at Google’s documentation on proper implementation of Social Profile structured data and ensure that your Instagram account is included. Include your most important keyword in your Instagram nameThe title tag for your Instagram page is automatically generated using your profile information, and it looks like this: My Name (@username) • Instagram photos and videos Including your primary target keyword under your profile name is the only way to get your most important keyword into your Instagram title tags. We strongly discourage keyword stuffing here, but there is certainly a way to do this that is appropriate for your brand and your users. It’s simply a matter of changing, for example, “Casey’s” to “Casey’s Groceries.” To update your name in Instagram, click the profile button: Then just click the “Edit Profile” button and update the “Name” field. Include a specific and keyword-rich bioWhile editing your profile, you should also make sure that your bio is optimized for the search results. You don’t have a lot of room to work with: your Instagram bio is limited to a maximum of 150 characters, similar to Google’s dynamic limit on meta descriptions. Thankfully, “keyword stuffing” is more or less acceptable in an Instagram bio if you are using hashtag keywords, and the keywords are appropriate. Instagram hashtags are clickable links that take users to a list of posts with the same hashtag, so they are considered helpful for users. If you have other brand accounts or influencers you work with, you can also include @ usernames here, and they will turn into clickable links. The bio renders as html and is crawlable by search engines, and it is virtually the only text on your page, so this is where a massive chunk of the optimization takes place. You can use a combination of TagBlender for Instagram hashtag research and the Google Keyword Planner for keyword research to arrive at what keywords to include here. It’s a good idea to get at least a few words in your bio that aren’t just hashtags, however, in order to give the search engines a bit more semantic meat to work with. Flesh out your bio as much as you can given the limited space. Make it as clear as possible who you are and what you’re about. While you’re editing your profile, you should of course also make sure that the “Website” field includes the URL for your brand’s website. While this link is unfortunately nofollowed, it still serves as a source of referral traffic and shouldn’t be neglected. Treat your image caption like a title tag — because it is oneWe tend to treat Instagram image captions as though they were meta descriptions, but we should be treating them more like title tags, because when Instagram creates a page for your post, the title tag includes the caption, like this: My Name on Instagram: “this is my image caption” So, here again we see how important the “Name” field in your profile is, since it also shows up here, even though your @ username does not. But the remainder of the title tag is taken up by your image caption. This can result in some very messy and incomplete looking title tags in the search results: The situation gets even worse when emojis are included. I’m not suggesting that you keep the image caption short enough to stay within the title tag, since this would be a very, very short image caption. However, it’s a good idea to check where your title tag will regularly cut off and make sure that the most important information is at the beginning of the caption and before the title tag cuts off. As with your bio, make sure that your caption is focused and keyword rich, but keep in mind that this will also be acting as a call to action from the search results. A string of hashtags may make sense and look fine on Instagram, but in a title tag in the search results it will look a great deal more spammy. Link directly to your Instagram postsThis is arguably the most important step in the process. The Instagram web app is mostly buried in JavaScript, and that means that the links to your individual Instagram posts from your Instagram profile don’t count as “real” links according to Google. For this reason, the vast majority of Instagram posts are not indexed in the search results. You can not promote your individual Instagram posts merely by promoting your Instagram profile. In order for anybody to find these posts in the search results, you will need to link to them directly from your other channels, making sure to copy the link that points directly to the post. To get the link, click the ellipses in the bottom right corner of the post: And then click the “Copy Link” button from the pop-up: You will want to naturally include a link to your post from as many of your platforms as possible, within reason, in order to ensure that the post gets indexed. This can be accomplished using Instagram recap blog posts, or by including citation links to your Instagram posts whenever you post an Instagram picture to your blog. In Shopify’s Instagram followers guide, they also recommend following, liking, and commenting on your competitor’s followers posts, since about 34% of them will follow back. The more followers you have, the more links you’ll pick up from followers linking to your posts across various platforms. ConclusionWhile Instagram is not an SEO-friendly platform, taking these extra steps will help your Instagram profile and posts turn up in search results when similar brands will likely be invisible. We recommend working these steps into your process to give your Instagram profile a boost in visibility.
Manish Dudharejia is the president and founder of E2M Solutions Inc, a San Diego based digital agency that specializes in website design & development and ecommerce SEO. Follow him on Twitter. from https://searchenginewatch.com/optimize-instagram-account-search-engines Google is always evolving. But some things in the world of search never change. One such thing is the presence of Wikipedia across the Google SERPs. From queries about products and brands to celebrities and topical events, Wikipedia still features heavily across Google searches – even while our habits as search engine users change (with voice and mobile increasingly having an impact), and while Google itself works to make its results more intuitive and full of rich features. Back in May my piece No need for Google argued that wikis themselves were fantastic search engines in their own right (check out wiki.com if you want search results that delve into the content on Wikipedia as well as other numerous wikis). Wikipedia’s visibility on Google is testament to the continuing value and usefulness of “the free encyclopedia anyone can edit.” So how does Wikipedia manage to maintain this visibility in 2018? Natural rankingEven in 2018, Google’s SERPs are still dominated by the organic rankings – a list of web pages it deems relevant to your query based on a number of factors such as size, freshness of content, and the number of other sites linking into it. Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia’s pages still do the job when it comes to appearing in Google’s organic rankings. It has massive authority, having been established for nearly 20 years and now boasting almost 6 million content pages. There has been plenty of time for inbound links to build up and there are an ever-growing number of pages on the domain giving other sites more reason to link back. So Wikipedia is a massive, well-established site. It also does really well in the fresh content stakes. Around 35 million registered editors keep tweaking and adding to the site’s content, as well as countless more users who make changes without signing in. Additionally, more than a thousand administrators check and verify whether changes should be kept or reverted. This ensures the site is being amended around the clock – and Google is always keen to rank sites which are actively updated ahead of those which are published and never touched again. Another element of Wikipedia’s natural ranking prowess is thanks to its on-site SEO. Here I’m referring to things like how it uses internal links to reference its own pages which are handy for both users and Google’s crawlers. Internal links are super easy to add when editing Wiki-pages – and thus appear peppered throughout most articles on the site. Also, note the site’s use of title and header tags, as well as its clean URLs. These features aren’t the toughest SEO hacks in the world, but you can see how added together they keep Wikipedia visible across Google’s organic rankings in the face of increasing competition and ever-emerging SEO tactics. Featured snippetsWikipedia is doing well at remaining visible in other parts of the SERPs too. Featured snippets are the box-outs on Google’s results pages which appear above the natural results. They seek to give a summary answer to the searcher’s question, without the user needing to click beyond the SERP. There is no mark-up that Wikipedia is including on its pages in order for its content to be included in featured snippets. Rather, it is the strength of the site’s content – which usually see a concise and clear (read: edited) summary at the top of each article page – which is helping Google’s crawlers to ascertain what information on the page would be useful to the user in that context. “People also ask”It follows that if Google is including Wikipedia articles in its featured snippets, that it also retains visibility (albeit small, before a user makes a click) in the search engine’s “People also ask” boxes. Again, Google is crawling and delivering this content programmatically. When searching for “midterms 2018,” Google’s algorithm is smart enough to understand that searchers are also asking more long tail questions around that search term – and even if Wikipedia doesn’t have a presence in the organic listings (in this instance, most of these places are given over to news sites), it still receives some visibility and traffic by virtue of its clear, concise and crawlable content. Knowledge graphsKnowledge graphs appear towards the right hand side of the Google SERPs. They typically feature a snippet of summary text… Images and/or maps… And a plethora of scannable details and handy links… They are generated in part from Google drawing on content the algorithm crawls programmatically (as in featured snippets), as well as that which is marked-up to alert the search engine to useful details. Businesses can increase their chances of being included in knowledge graphs by signing up to Google My Business and adding the necessary information to their profile, as well as by using on-site mark up. As you can see from the examples above, Wikipedia content is frequently used by Google to populate knowledge graphs. Again, this is likely due to the natural authority of the site and the easily-crawlable text, rather than any SEO-responsible mark up. But it is a good example of showing how visible the domain is thanks to the strength of its content. Frequently, as is the case with the above “landmarks in plymouth” query, Google will opt to display the informational Wikipedia content (and elements from other sources) in the knowledge graph while giving over the rest of the SERPs to other pages – but it is still visible. Site linksAnother way Wikipedia is good at ensuring it grabs another bit of SERP real estate – as well as giving searchers more reason to click through to the domain – is by giving Google good reason to display its site links. These are generated by a mixture of relevant links Google crawls from the page in question (“United States Senate elections” in the above example), as well as other related pages on the same domain (“Ras Baraka” is the re-elected Mayor of Newark, but his page is not linked from the elections page). Wikipedia succeeds here, where the BBC doesn’t, by virtue of its flawless site-structure and liberal use of internal linking – making it easy for Google to draw out the most relevant links for the query. TakeawaysThere are a number of places in Google’s increasingly rich SERPs that Wikipedia doesn’t tend to appear as frequently, if at all. These include: image packs, video results, news and social carousels, sponsored (and retail orientated content), and local results. The reason for this is obvious in most cases, but not in all. Images and video do, of course, feature across thousands of Wiki-pages, but it is arguable that other sites are that bit better at optimizing this kind of content. After all, wiki software was established when much of the web was text based, so we can understand why Google may be more likely to display this content from more modern CMSs. With that being said, seeing the degree to which Wikipedia is still visible across the SERPs not only highlights the increasing opportunity for SEOs to find some visibility amid increasingly competitive results pages, but also goes to show how important domain authority, good (updated, concise, edited, readable and crawlable) content and excellent internal linking is to acquire and maintain visibility on Google in 2018. from https://searchenginewatch.com/wikipedia-visible-google-serps-2018 |
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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