Struggling to post regularly on your blog? One of the best ways to solve that is by creating a content calendar for your blog. Here's how you can rock one.
The post 3 Simple Steps to Create a Content Calendar for Your Blog by @syedbalkhi appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How do you know if your CTR is doing well or poorly? In this post, Larry Kim breaks down the average CTRs in Google AdWords by industry.
The post The Highest (and Lowest) Average CTRs in Google AdWords by Industry by @LarryKim appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
How do you know if your CTR is doing well or poorly? In this post, Larry Kim breaks down the average CTRs in Google AdWords by industry.
The post The Highest (and Lowest) Average CTRs in Google AdWords by Industry by @LarryKim appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google is expanding on a mobile search feature rolled out in late 2015, whereby searchers could star images they find in image search directly to their mobile devices. The expansion of this feature will see Google allow desktop searchers to star images they find in image search results in a similar way. Google is taking some liberties in its announcement with the with the use of the word “save”. For instance, the headline reads: “Easily save the images you love…now on desktop”. A more accurate choice of wording would be anything along the lines of “favorite”, “bookmark”, or “star”; because […]
The post Google Image Search Now Allows People to “Save” Images to Desktop appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google is expanding on a mobile search feature rolled out in late 2015, whereby searchers could star images they find in image search directly to their mobile devices. The expansion of this feature will see Google allow desktop searchers to star images they find in image search results in a similar way. Google is taking some liberties in its announcement with the with the use of the word “save”. For instance, the headline reads: “Easily save the images you love…now on desktop”. A more accurate choice of wording would be anything along the lines of “favorite”, “bookmark”, or “star”; because […]
The post Google Image Search Now Allows People to “Save” Images to Desktop appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has now been rolled out to 12 countries in total, with possibly more to come.
The post Who Has AMP Carousel and Who Doesn't? Google Reveals Countries With AMP in Search Results appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project has now been rolled out to 12 countries in total, with possibly more to come.
The post Who Has AMP Carousel and Who Doesn't? Google Reveals Countries With AMP in Search Results appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Media coverage is great for any business. It brings traffic, sales and adds to your reputation – and it can bring valuable editorial links. But if you're not experienced in public relations, how do you get media coverage? Just like SEOs, many PRs are self-taught and I believe it's a skillset that can be learned.…
The post 4 Reasons your competitors get media coverage (and you don't) appeared first on Majestic Blog.
Posted by Laura.Lippay
[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]
Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? Maybe they have low vision or color blindness, or are fully blind. Think about how they use the Internet. Close your eyes, or at least squint really hard, and try to find today's news or interact with your friends on Facebook. It's a challenge many of us don't think about every day, but some of what we do in SEO can affect the experience that people with visual impairments have when visiting a page.
Visually impaired Internet users are able to navigate and use the web using screen readers like VoiceOver or Jaws. Screen readers, much like search engine crawlers, rely on signals in the code to determine the structure and the context of what they're crawling. The overlap in what search crawlers look for and interpret versus what screen readers look for and interpret is small, but the idea is the same: Where are the elements of this page and how do I understand them?
While it's important to understand where SEO and accessibility (a11y) overlap in order to optimize correctly for both, it's also important to note that optimizing for one is not necessarily akin to optimizing for the other. In other words, if you've optimized a page for search engines, it doesn't mean you've necessarily made it accessible - and vice versa.
Recently, web accessibility expert Karl Groves wrote a post called The Accessibility & SEO Myth. Mr. Groves knows the world of accessibility inside and out, and knows that optimizing for accessibility, which goes far beyond optimizing for the visually-impaired, is very different overall, and much more complex (strictly from a technical standpoint) than optimizing for search engines. He's right - that despite the ways SEO and a11y overlap, a11y is a whole different ballgame. But if you understand the overlap, you can successfully optimize for both.
Here are just some examples of where SEO and accessibility can overlap:
If you're developing the page yourself, I would challenge you to learn more about the many things you can do for accessibility beyond where it overlaps with SEO, like getting to know ARIA attributes. Take a look at the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and you'll see there are far more complex considerations for accessibility than what we typically consider for technical SEO. If you think technical SEO is fun, just wait until you get a load of this.
Chances are, if you're optimizing for accessibility, you're probably covering your bases for those technical optimizations where accessibility and SEO overlap. BUT, this doesn't always work the other way around, depending on the SEO tactics you take.
Thankfully, the Converse site has a pretty descriptive alt attribute in place!
Consider a screen reader reaching an image of a pair of women's black Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes and reading its alt attribute as "Women's black Chuck Taylor All-Stars buy Chucks online women's chuck taylors all-stars for sale." Annoying, isn't it? Or compare these page titles with SEO and accessibility in mind: "Calculate Your Tax Return" versus "Online Tax Calculator | Tax Return Estimator | Tax Refund/Rebate." Imagine you just encountered this page without being able to see the content. Which one more crisply and clearly describes what you can expect of this page?
While it's nice to know that proper technical search engine optimization will affect how someone using a screen reader can contextualize your site, it's also important to understand (1) that these two optimization industries are, on a bigger level, quite different, and (2) that what you do for SEO where SEO and a11y overlap will affect how some visitors can (or can't) understand your site.
Marking the 5th Global Accessibility Awareness Day https://t.co/QiJyAM8xGW 05/19? Let us know how Globala11yawarenessdayAtGmailDotCom #gaad
- GblA11yAwarenessDay (@gbla11yday) March 14, 2016
For Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19, I'll be collaborating with some experts in a11y on a post that will go into more details on what aspects of SEO + a11y to be keenly aware of and how to optimize for both. I'll be sure to find as many examples as I can - if you've got any good ones, please feel free to share in the comments (and thanks in advance).
In the meantime, to learn more about accessibility, check out a couple of great resources:
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Media coverage is great for any business. It brings traffic, sales and adds to your reputation – and it can bring valuable editorial links. But if you're not experienced in public relations, how do you get media coverage? Just like SEOs, many PRs are self-taught and I believe it's a skillset that can be learned.…
The post 4 Reasons your competitors get media coverage (and you don't) appeared first on Majestic Blog.
All of the SEO knowledge with NONE of the expense.
Online education is big business. That includes the digital marketing space. Scores of people are pushing online training programs promising to turn students into 'SEO Rockstars'.
Here's the good news. You can learn most, if not everything, taught in these courses for FREE. I'll even share the 'secret sauce' that nobody ever tells you about. Here it is: Being successful online takes a LOT of HARD work. It requires having an understanding of how SEO works, then taking the time to develop and execute a strategy. On the plus side, most SEO skills are non-technical in nature. These skills can be acquired over time and at your own pace.
Following is a syllabus that I have created for the development of Organic Search Specialists at my own company, Measurable SEO. Individuals could use this knowledge to secure a job in SEO or to optimize their own website(s). Companies looking to develop an in house marketing team could also follow this plan.
In the US, Google enjoys roughly double the market share of Bing and Yahoo combined. No one understands Google better than Google itself, so the best place to begin is by reading and understanding the 32 page Google SEO Starter Guide. This guide was originally developed as an internal document for Google employees and later released for the benefit of webmasters.
Some other good beginner guides:
Google has developed a Website Performance Optimization MOOC. In this short course, you'll learn how to optimize any website for speed. The introduction of the accelerated mobile page project (AMP) and the use of website speed as a ranking factor are signals that speed is an increasingly important factor for achieving online success. Looking for a quick tutorial instead? Check out A Beginner's Guide to Website Speed Optimization.
The User Experience for the Web (WebUX) MOOC provides an overview of the general principles of online user experience. Students will learn about the techniques and tools used to create a great UX and how user-centric design fits into the software development cycle.
For those interested in learning more about Mobile optimization, there is a UX Design for Mobile Developers course. Invest six hours per week to finish this course in approximately six weeks.
As mentioned previously, most SEO is non technical, but one cannot ignore the fact the web is a technical platform. There are certain rules and best practices to follow when building and auditing websites. This module, from Distilled U, explains how search engines interpret pages. This knowledge will help you in diagnosing problems and understanding how to improve websites. You will need to sign up for a Demo account, which permits you to experience up to three modules for free.
A Google search for the phrase 'keyword research' returns nearly 7 million results. This is probably the most written about topic in all of SEO, so where do you begin? In terms of a simple, yet comprehensive and effective approach, I like the 19 Step Keyword Research Process. This exercise is designed to help you find relevant and highly searched keyword phrases with low competition.
The basics are covered well in the Google Starter guide. A number of free tools are available to assist you. One 'advanced' optimization technique, marking up content with schema, is detailed in this Quick Start Guide . Once you've finished optimizing your site, analyze it using the free Microsoft SEO Toolkit.
This Writing for the Web course emphasizes the differences between online writing and print writing. Without understanding that difference, it is difficult to effectively communicate across the web. Due to the interactive nature of the internet, the course emphasizes the importance of user behavior. You will learn how web design, writing style, structure and search engine optimization can impact that behavior.
Creating an Effective Content Strategy for Your Website is an online course which teaches you how to develop a strategy that utilizes a variety of media (text, images, videos, and infographics) across multiple channels.
In this course, the instructor will show you how to transform an outdated, text heavy website into a multimedia powerhouse. Learning how to create a content inventory, gap analysis, and content matrix will help you form the foundation for a strategy. This will require signing up for a 10 day free trial at Lynda.com. Since the course is only two hours long, you should be able to easily complete it within the trial period.
If you prefer a written tutorial, as opposed to an online video, check these out:
There has been a lot of chatter on the web that links aren't as important as they once were. I have written several articles explaining why that isn't the case. The mere existence of the Penguin algorithm and manual link penalties sends a clear message that links still have a profound impact on search rankings. This was most recently confirmed on March 23, 2016 in a Google Q&A where the three most important ranking signals were revealed.
The key takeaway is to be in compliance with Google webmaster guidelines pertaining to link building and to stay away from link schemes. The follow guides will get you started:
Formerly known as Webmaster Tools, the data, provided by Google, in the console, helps you monitor a website's health and visibility within Google Search results. The search console offers insight as to how Google views a website and helps one optimize for peak performance in the SERPs. Learn about Search Console by navigating to Search Console Help
Many are intimidated by Google analytics, but there's no need to be afraid when you can become a pro for free. Google teaches analytics via online courses at Analytics Academy. Choose from a wide array of self-study programs, including:
By taking these courses, you will learn the key principles of digital analytics and specifically how to get started with Google's own Analytics.
After you have studied all of this material, it will be time to run a digital marketing campaign. This course teaches you how to assemble and organize different online marketing channels into a cohesive, profitable campaign. This 10 hour course touches on everything from design and how it can influence customer decisions to calculating ROI, measuring marketing channels and knowing what to focus on.
In Summary
Despite the overwhelming volume of digital marketing resources available on the web, much of it is outdated, or in some cases, really bad. If you study all the course material presented here, you will have a better understanding of SEO than many of the so called SEO rockstars.
Just keep in mind that digital marketing is very fluid and ever changing. The famed cinematographer Conrad Hall probably sums it up best, “You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward”.
Know your competitors. Be one step ahead in the cut-throat competition in the online marketing community with Ahrefs's help.
The post How to Effectively Monitor Your Niche on Autopilot Using Ahrefs by @sejournal appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by Laura.Lippay
[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]
Do you know anyone who is visually impaired? Maybe they have low vision or color blindness, or are fully blind. Think about how they use the Internet. Close your eyes, or at least squint really hard, and try to find today's news or interact with your friends on Facebook. It's a challenge many of us don't think about every day, but some of what we do in SEO can affect the experience that people with visual impairments have when visiting a page.
Visually impaired Internet users are able to navigate and use the web using screen readers like VoiceOver or Jaws. Screen readers, much like search engine crawlers, rely on signals in the code to determine the structure and the context of what they're crawling. The overlap in what search crawlers look for and interpret versus what screen readers look for and interpret is small, but the idea is the same: Where are the elements of this page and how do I understand them?
While it's important to understand where SEO and accessibility (a11y) overlap in order to optimize correctly for both, it's also important to note that optimizing for one is not necessarily akin to optimizing for the other. In other words, if you've optimized a page for search engines, it doesn't mean you've necessarily made it accessible - and vice versa.
Recently, web accessibility expert Karl Groves wrote a post called The Accessibility & SEO Myth. Mr. Groves knows the world of accessibility inside and out, and knows that optimizing for accessibility, which goes far beyond optimizing for the visually-impaired, is very different overall, and much more complex (strictly from a technical standpoint) than optimizing for search engines. He's right - that despite the ways SEO and a11y overlap, a11y is a whole different ballgame. But if you understand the overlap, you can successfully optimize for both.
Here are just some examples of where SEO and accessibility can overlap:
If you're developing the page yourself, I would challenge you to learn more about the many things you can do for accessibility beyond where it overlaps with SEO, like getting to know ARIA attributes. Take a look at the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and you'll see there are far more complex considerations for accessibility than what we typically consider for technical SEO. If you think technical SEO is fun, just wait until you get a load of this.
Chances are, if you're optimizing for accessibility, you're probably covering your bases for those technical optimizations where accessibility and SEO overlap. BUT, this doesn't always work the other way around, depending on the SEO tactics you take.
Thankfully, the Converse site has a pretty descriptive alt attribute in place!
Consider a screen reader reaching an image of a pair of women's black Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes and reading its alt attribute as "Women's black Chuck Taylor All-Stars buy Chucks online women's chuck taylors all-stars for sale." Annoying, isn't it? Or compare these page titles with SEO and accessibility in mind: "Calculate Your Tax Return" versus "Online Tax Calculator | Tax Return Estimator | Tax Refund/Rebate." Imagine you just encountered this page without being able to see the content. Which one more crisply and clearly describes what you can expect of this page?
While it's nice to know that proper technical search engine optimization will affect how someone using a screen reader can contextualize your site, it's also important to understand (1) that these two optimization industries are, on a bigger level, quite different, and (2) that what you do for SEO where SEO and a11y overlap will affect how some visitors can (or can't) understand your site.
Marking the 5th Global Accessibility Awareness Day https://t.co/QiJyAM8xGW 05/19? Let us know how Globala11yawarenessdayAtGmailDotCom #gaad
- GblA11yAwarenessDay (@gbla11yday) March 14, 2016
For Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19, I'll be collaborating with some experts in a11y on a post that will go into more details on what aspects of SEO + a11y to be keenly aware of and how to optimize for both. I'll be sure to find as many examples as I can - if you've got any good ones, please feel free to share in the comments (and thanks in advance).
In the meantime, to learn more about accessibility, check out a couple of great resources:
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
All of the SEO knowledge with NONE of the expense.
Online education is big business. That includes the digital marketing space. Scores of people are pushing online training programs promising to turn students into 'SEO Rockstars'.
Here's the good news. You can learn most, if not everything, taught in these courses for FREE. I'll even share the 'secret sauce' that nobody ever tells you about. Here it is: Being successful online takes a LOT of HARD work. It requires having an understanding of how SEO works, then taking the time to develop and execute a strategy. On the plus side, most SEO skills are non-technical in nature. These skills can be acquired over time and at your own pace.
Following is a syllabus that I have created for the development of Organic Search Specialists at my own company, Measurable SEO. Individuals could use this knowledge to secure a job in SEO or to optimize their own website(s). Companies looking to develop an in house marketing team could also follow this plan.
In the US, Google enjoys roughly double the market share of Bing and Yahoo combined. No one understands Google better than Google itself, so the best place to begin is by reading and understanding the 32 page Google SEO Starter Guide. This guide was originally developed as an internal document for Google employees and later released for the benefit of webmasters.
Some other good beginner guides:
Google has developed a Website Performance Optimization MOOC. In this short course, you'll learn how to optimize any website for speed. The introduction of the accelerated mobile page project (AMP) and the use of website speed as a ranking factor are signals that speed is an increasingly important factor for achieving online success. Looking for a quick tutorial instead? Check out A Beginner's Guide to Website Speed Optimization.
The User Experience for the Web (WebUX) MOOC provides an overview of the general principles of online user experience. Students will learn about the techniques and tools used to create a great UX and how user-centric design fits into the software development cycle.
For those interested in learning more about Mobile optimization, there is a UX Design for Mobile Developers course. Invest six hours per week to finish this course in approximately six weeks.
As mentioned previously, most SEO is non technical, but one cannot ignore the fact the web is a technical platform. There are certain rules and best practices to follow when building and auditing websites. This module, from Distilled U, explains how search engines interpret pages. This knowledge will help you in diagnosing problems and understanding how to improve websites. You will need to sign up for a Demo account, which permits you to experience up to three modules for free.
A Google search for the phrase 'keyword research' returns nearly 7 million results. This is probably the most written about topic in all of SEO, so where do you begin? In terms of a simple, yet comprehensive and effective approach, I like the 19 Step Keyword Research Process. This exercise is designed to help you find relevant and highly searched keyword phrases with low competition.
The basics are covered well in the Google Starter guide. A number of free tools are available to assist you. One 'advanced' optimization technique, marking up content with schema, is detailed in this Quick Start Guide . Once you've finished optimizing your site, analyze it using the free Microsoft SEO Toolkit.
This Writing for the Web course emphasizes the differences between online writing and print writing. Without understanding that difference, it is difficult to effectively communicate across the web. Due to the interactive nature of the internet, the course emphasizes the importance of user behavior. You will learn how web design, writing style, structure and search engine optimization can impact that behavior.
Creating an Effective Content Strategy for Your Website is an online course which teaches you how to develop a strategy that utilizes a variety of media (text, images, videos, and infographics) across multiple channels.
In this course, the instructor will show you how to transform an outdated, text heavy website into a multimedia powerhouse. Learning how to create a content inventory, gap analysis, and content matrix will help you form the foundation for a strategy. This will require signing up for a 10 day free trial at Lynda.com. Since the course is only two hours long, you should be able to easily complete it within the trial period.
If you prefer a written tutorial, as opposed to an online video, check these out:
There has been a lot of chatter on the web that links aren't as important as they once were. I have written several articles explaining why that isn't the case. The mere existence of the Penguin algorithm and manual link penalties sends a clear message that links still have a profound impact on search rankings. This was most recently confirmed on March 23, 2016 in a Google Q&A where the three most important ranking signals were revealed.
The key takeaway is to be in compliance with Google webmaster guidelines pertaining to link building and to stay away from link schemes. The follow guides will get you started:
Formerly known as Webmaster Tools, the data, provided by Google, in the console, helps you monitor a website's health and visibility within Google Search results. The search console offers insight as to how Google views a website and helps one optimize for peak performance in the SERPs. Learn about Search Console by navigating to Search Console Help
Many are intimidated by Google analytics, but there's no need to be afraid when you can become a pro for free. Google teaches analytics via online courses at Analytics Academy. Choose from a wide array of self-study programs, including:
By taking these courses, you will learn the key principles of digital analytics and specifically how to get started with Google's own Analytics.
After you have studied all of this material, it will be time to run a digital marketing campaign. This course teaches you how to assemble and organize different online marketing channels into a cohesive, profitable campaign. This 10 hour course touches on everything from design and how it can influence customer decisions to calculating ROI, measuring marketing channels and knowing what to focus on.
In Summary
Despite the overwhelming volume of digital marketing resources available on the web, much of it is outdated, or in some cases, really bad. If you study all the course material presented here, you will have a better understanding of SEO than many of the so called SEO rockstars.
Just keep in mind that digital marketing is very fluid and ever changing. The famed cinematographer Conrad Hall probably sums it up best, “You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward”.
Know your competitors. Be one step ahead in the cut-throat competition in the online marketing community with Ahrefs's help.
The post How to Effectively Monitor Your Niche on Autopilot Using Ahrefs by @sejournal appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Twitter turned 10 last week. This post isn’t about Twitter, but it made me realise how long I’d been working in the social media field (it’ll be nine years next week).
I’m reasonably convinced I got my first social role because I just happened to be doing social when the whole thing became popular. This happens a lot in marketing. Something new comes along and we all hop on board, until everyone is doing it and it’s gradually subsumed by another area of marketing. In Twitter’s case a slightly wonky mix of PR and CRM.
Digital transformation is probably the biggest of those ‘new, shiny things’ to hit the marketing world in the past five years, and it’s unusual in that it actually attempts to connect marketing up with other parts of the business.
It has become the teenage sex of the digital world; Everyone is talking about it, but you’re never quite sure how far anyone has really gone. Hundreds of articles and whitepapers now exist (I wrote a few of them myself), focused on the three key areas of DT: people, processes and technology.
As with social media though, there comes a point when people start to realise that, hey, maybe we should have a clear goal in mind here?
A great deal of resource is being put into transformation projects, some are successful, but in a lot of cases they are slightly disjointed. Getting the new tech is probably the easiest part. Putting the new processes in is time-consuming but can be done with regular training and a step-change approach.
The people part is probably most difficult, because it not only requires new skills, but often a cultural change as well.
And here’s the rub. The differentiation that makes companies into successful digital enterprises.
As an example, let’s have a look at Barclays.
Image via VisMedia
Barclays has invested heavily in digital, with a multichannel and multi-platform approach. And just so you know this isn’t me slighting the company, it has done a very good job. I can now easily access my finances via any device; I rarely need to visit a branch. I no longer receive paper updates, and I can easily send payments directly from my phone. Services and resources are delivered successfully in a variety of formats.
But there is a gap. And in the case of financial services it has allowed a new wave of digital-first fintech enterprises to fill a gap in the market.
Companies like ZhongAn, Wealthfront, Klarna and Ebury. All have something in common. They all offer fast, tailored solutions. And tailoring means you are forced to really dig into your available customer data, and act on it quickly.
Traditional business structures exist for a reason. They allow any given business to deliver its services to the customer in at least a semi-acceptable fashion. But too often when we approach digital transformation, our goals are to expand on existing business, rather than exploit new opportunities.
We are using digital to deliver our services in a more efficient way, but that doesn’t mean the services themselves are actually better.
Customer-centricity is a term that gets bandied around a lot, and personally I believe it’s largely a result of culture. Actually caring about what you are doing and what people think of it goes a long way. And that isn’t to say that businesses attempting to transform themselves don’t care. Only that their focus is often on the wrong thing.
Size has something to do with this. Start-ups in particular do have certain luxuries available to them. If I start a business then I can, within reason, cherry-pick the exact tools I want to run my business, and hire the people I feel are the best fit to help me run it. People who already have ideal skill-sets. But much of this can be offset by investment, so it has to come down to attitude.
According to Cisco research, some 45% of businesses have boards that are not concerned with digital disruption.
In finance in particular this seems to be compounded. Research suggests that a majority of senior banking execs have not even heard of the biggest fintech startups, let alone become concerned about them.
In short, they see no reason to change.
But the startups of this world know that they are no longer dealing with single-channel audiences who insist on having their emails printed out. Services need to be delivered easily across multiple interfaces, in line with customer intent. They have to find out what a new type of customer wants, and give it to them quickly.
Conversely, they also have the luxury of time. If you are starting from scratch, then there’s plenty of room to prototype products, test them, launch MVPs and reiterate.
Businesses that are dealing with an existing model have none of this. They have busy people who are already struggling with deadlines. Who has time to take a step back and really think about how services are delivered? This becomes compounded where there’s a focus on short-term bottom line. It takes a rare individual to stand in front of the board and say with confidence: We are going to lose money for the next six months. But after that our income will increase dramatically.
This kind of leadership seems to be sadly lacking in many sectors, but there is evidence that things are changing. The best digital leaders tend to have a few common traits and chief among them is the being able to see value in unexplored areas.
A few years ago I had a conversation where I was told vociferously that Twitter could not make any money for my business. Because there is nowhere to input credit card details on Twitter. That’s an extreme case, and I hope, one that’s changed (Incidentally, Twitter brought in just shy of a million pounds in that particular year) as these new types of business leader have come to prominence.
It doesn’t always involve the type of full pivot that many startups take. I do not expect Barclays to turn into Uber at any point, but it does involve really understanding customer feedback at speed, and at scale.
There are so many factors in play here that this is threatening to turn into a novel already, but I think the key consideration here is that when implementing new processes, tools – and yes, people – it should all be done with one eye on the customer. Data and anecdotal evidence from user tests should be constantly collected and used.
Digital transformation is about making your business fit for purpose so whether you are setting goals or already implementing, don’t be afraid to start afresh. Digital should improve your services, but first ask yourself: Are these the services my customer really needs?
This article was originally published on our sister site ClickZ. We’re republishing a handful of their recent articles over the Bank Holiday weekend. Go give them some love.
Want to know more about the challenges and benefits of digital transformation? Make sure you check out Shift, our new event in London this May.
On Monday morning, via their AdWords blog, Google announced they are beginning a major redesign of the AdWords platform for "marketing in a mobile-first world". This update will occur over the rest of 2016 and into 2017.
The post Google Announces AdWords Redesign by @dantosz appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Subscribe to that list here and receive regular tips as well!
To collect more input and inspiration I reached out to the industry peers to learn their most effective traffic building tips!
I got 18 tips worth sharing with the world!
1. Get busy on Pinterest. Just like SEO, only tastier! Brings long term traffic, and builds over time. What more do you need.
(By Ashley Faulkes @madlemmingz)
Further reading: Pinterest Tips and Tricks for your Website
2. Stop thinking content and start thinking value. Yet another list of 10 ways to do something doesn’t give any value.
(By Tim Fehraydinov @Texterra_eng)
Further reading: How to Rank Higher in Google
3. Go visual and respect the time of the reader. Life is too short to read boring and repetitive introductions, and the phrase “check it out” basically kills the post as it doesn’t sound motivating.
On the other hand, an interesting picture going with an accurate headline are always catchy, makes want for more and maybe even to subscribe for later news.
(By @jone_vasaitis)
Further reading: 20 Sites to Diversify Your Visual Marketing
4. Interview an online influencer and get them to promote it via their social media channels and any other means they have
(By Cormac Reynolds @BrightonCormac)
Further reading: How to Get Your Expert Interview Retweeted Like Crazy
5. Optimise page title and meta description for highest CTR. It’s not enough just to appear in the SERPS – people need to click!
Further reading: How to Optimize Title Tags for Higher Rankings and Better Click-Through #JimAndAnn
6. Combine power of Content (great topics, in-depth), SEO (keywords, backlinks), Social (be everywhere, network) for traffic building
Further reading: 5 Steps To An Integrated Approach To SEO-Friendly Content Marketing
7. Blog commenting is great to build traffic. Post indepth comments on high-authority blogs in your industry!
(By @ErikEmanuelli)
Further reading: How Commenting May Help You Build Your Credibility And Traffic For Your Blog
8. Spend time writing a headline which people can’t help but click! After reading the headline people should be excited to read your article!
(By @zenagency)
Further reading: How to (Try to) Write a Perfect Headline
9. Collaborate on content with industry peers for them to then help you promote it!
Examples:
Further reading: 8 Collaboration Tools to Improve Your Content
10. Make a list of best blog posts on a particular topic. Don’t be shy to use the content of your competitors.
(By @JaneKryukova)
Further reading: How to Get Traffic and Links from Blog Roundups
11. Be helpful. I contribute to multiple forums and provide answers to questions when I can. I receive hundreds of site visits through signature links each month from doing so. You can as well.
Further reading: 6 Ways to Get Traffic from Forums to Your Website
12. Use keywords with search volume that already rank. Find them with @Searchmetrics & @SEMRush or @Spyfu. Optimize with @Moz Grader
(By @LukaszZelezny)
Further reading: 3 Awesome Free Keyword Research Tools
13. Schedule social shares throughout the month for new posts
Further reading: How to Promote a Blog Post on Social Media
14. Be relative to the question, if you want to be chosen as the one to answer it. Keywords still count!
(By @DonSturgill)
Further reading: Basic 101Beginner’s Guide to SEO
15. Give value and engage at every opportunity. It makes people curious for more.
Further reading: Social Media 101
16. Share your content where your fan base is mostly active (for me it’s Twitter and DeviantART). Tag/mention people and use hashtags!
Further reading:
17. Share your content more than once, esp through Twitter and Reddit. Be sure to mix up you hashtags to reach new audiences
(By @EdwinDearborn)
Further reading: 7 Different Ways To Re-Package Your Tweets
18. Smile when you write. People are drawn to smiles, and it does come out in your writing.
Further reading: 52 more signs that you might be a writer
Are there any tweetable traffic tips you’d like to share? Post them in the comments!
The post 18 Tweetable Traffic Building Tips to Start Using Today! appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
Posted by sam.nemzer
[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]
What’s more important: topics or keywords? This has been a major discussion point in SEO recently, nowhere more so than here on the Moz blog. Rand has given two Whiteboard Fridays in the last two months, and Moz’s new Related Topics feature in Moz Pro aims to help you to optimize your site for topics as well as keywords.
The idea under discussion is that, since the Hummingbird algorithm update in 2013, Google is getting really good at understanding natural language. So much so, in fact, that it's now able to identify similar terms, making it less important to worry about minor changes in the wording of your content in order to target specific keyword phrases. People are arguing that it’s more important to think about the concepts that Google will interpret, regardless of word choice.
While I agree that this is the direction that we're heading, I wanted to see how true this is now, in the present. So I designed an experiment.
The question I wanted to answer was: “Do searches within the same topic (but with different keyword phrases) give the same result?” To this end, I put together 10 groups of 10 keywords each, with each group’s keywords signifying (as closely as possible) the same concept. These keywords were selected in order to represent a range of search volume, and across the spectrum of informational to transactional. For example, one group of keywords are all synonymous the phrase "cheapest flight times" (not-so-subtly lifted from Rand’s Whiteboard Friday):
I put the sample of 100 keywords through a rank-tracking tool, and extracted the top ten organic results for each keyword.
Then, for each keyword group, I measured two things.
The full analysis and results can be seen in this Google Sheet.
This chart shows the results of the experiment for the 10 topic groups. The blue bars represent the by position score, averaged across each topic group, and the red bars show the average all pages score.
The most striking thing about this is the wide range of results that can be seen. Topic group D’s keywords are 100% identical if you don’t take ordering into account, whereas group J only has 38% crossover of results between keywords.
We can see from this that targeting individual keywords is definitely not a thing of the past. For most of the topic groups, the pages that rank in the top 10 have little consistency across different wordings of the same concepts. From this we can assume that the primary thing making one page rank where another does not, is matching exact keywords.
If we look into what factors might be affecting the varying similarities between the different topic groups, we could consider the following factors:
Although Google’s categorisation of searches into do, know and go can be seen as a false trichotomy, it can still be useful as a simplistic model to classify searcher intent. All of the keyword groups I used can be classed as either informational or transactional.
If we break up our topic groups in this way, we can see the following:
As you can see, there's no clear difference between the two types. In fact the highest and lowest groups (D and J) are both transactional.
This means that we can’t say — based on this data, at least — that there’s any link between the search intent of a topic and whether you should focus on topics over keywords.
Another factor that could be correlated with similarity of SERPs is keyword difficulty. As measured by Moz’s keyword difficulty tool, this is a proxy for how strong the sites that rank in a SERP are, based on their Page Authority and Domain Authority.
My hypothesis here is that, for searches where there are a lot of well-established, high-DA sites ranking, there will be less variation between similar keywords. If this is the case, we would expect to see a positive correlation in the data.
This is not borne out by the data. The higher the keyword difficulty is across the keywords in a topic group, the less similarity there is between SERPs within that topic group. This correlation is fairly weak (R2=0.28), so we can’t draw any conclusions from this data.
One other factor that could explain the lack of pattern in this result is that 100 keywords in 10 groups is a fairly small sample size, and is subject to variation in the selection of keywords to go into each group. It is impossible to perfectly control how "close" in definition the keywords in each group are.
Also, it may just be the case that Google simply understands some concepts better than others. This would mean it can see some synonyms as being very closely related, whereas for others it's still perplexed by the variations, so looks for specific words within the content of each page.
So does this mean that we should or shouldn't ignore Rand when he tells us to forget about keywords and focus on topics? Somewhat unsatisfyingly, the answer is a strong "maybe."
While for some search topics there's a lot of variation based on the exact wording of the keywords, for others we can see that Google understands what users mean when they search and sees variations as equivalent. The key takeaway from this? Both keywords and topics are important.
You should still do keyword research. Keyword research is always going to be essential. But you should also consider the bigger picture, and as more tools that allow you to use natural language processing become available, take advantage of that to understand the overall topics you should write about, too.
It may be a useful exercise to carry out this type of analysis within your own vertical, and see how well Google can tell apart the similar keywords you want to target. You can then use this to inform how exact your targeting should be.
Let me know what you think, and if you have any questions, in the comments.
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