Photos and illustrations can make your blog post much more appealing. Make sure to pick or create the right image for your blog post so you'll stand out!
The post Why the Right Images Are so Important For Your Blog appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Getty Images is in a spat with Google in the E.U., Google has a new ad design that has folks on WebmasterWorld talking, and Google has promised to get tougher on clickjacking, among other stories.
We've also got a fun rant about keywords from SEO Chat and some privacy-focused topics from Cre8asiteforums!
Getty Images Files E.U. Complaint Against Google for Enabling Image Piracy
This is a complicated legal case, but here's a brief summary: Getty Images is extremely protective of its image portfolio. Google Images displays images to the public in response to search queries.
When Getty's images get pirated by third parties and begin to rank well in Google image searches… Getty feels that Google is encouraging piracy. Users on WebmasterWorld are talking through the details. WebmasterWorld engine writes that
“This complaint is really important, and it may shape the ways this and a number of aspects of Google's information sources are displayed. For example, the Knowledge Graph panel.”
User Andy Langton writes that
“The easiest comparison is probably with the Google Books case,”
where the courts sided with Google. In that case, the courts determined that Google Books was a “public good,” a “transformative” medium, and that it was respectful of copyright holders.
New Ad Unit Design For Google AdSense
It's a very minimal design – white space with just a dash of color – but that's not what WebmasterWorld users don't like about it. What some users don't like is that it doesn't really look like an ad. Martinibuster writes,
“The ad unite is nice looking and will definitely blend. But… user expectation contributes to what gets clicked. Think about this in terms of user expectation. It looks like a block of content… In short, it does not resemble anything that a site user would actually click. So in theory that ad unite may result in less clicks.”
You can take a look at an example ad in the thread, and share your thoughts!
Google's Gary Illyes Indicates the Next Penguin Update Will be the Last
The Penguin to end all Penguins! Well, sort of. What Illyes probably means is that Penguin will move to a “real-time” model, so there will be less of the drama and nail-biting of waiting for constant updates. Martinibuster writes that a real-time model will be more fair:
“People who knowingly got spammed got what they knew were coming to them…However, updates that take several months are cruel to the businesses who are victims of poor advice, misinformed or shoddy consultants and to those who are small mom and pop amateurs who were making it up as they went along.”
User Ebuzz agrees:
“…it has been 1.5 years so far since the last update. A very long time and no end in sight. Now that's cruel…to make people wait an eternity for a shot at redemption.”
What do you think?
Clickjacking Draws Action From Google
You may not have heard the term before – clickjacking is when you click on a video to play it, for example, and instead a new window opens up with an advertisement. Threadwatch has the details on Google's new crusade against such practices.
Google has said:
“When our system detects a clickjacking attempt, we zero-in on the traffic attributed to that placement, and remove it from upcoming payment records to ensure that advertisers are not charged for those clicks.”
There's a bonus discussion on WebmasterWorld, where users wonder how fair and accurate Google will be in identifying actual clickjacking attempts.
Ads in Google Get A Little Sneakier
Here's an update to a Threadwatch report from last week! Adam W wrote last week that Google's paid ads were starting to appear more and more organic in the E.U. That could lead to confusion over which results are paid and which aren't. Now Google seems to be adding some new ad entries. For now,
“…it does not look like these ads appear in the standard 3-pack and will only be seen after clicking 'more places' on the search results page.”
What do you think? Too many ads, or is this fair play?
Here's a compelling rant from a user on SEO Chat. User knuckles writes,
“I'm sick of seeing stuff like 'long-tail keywords are phrases consisting of [x number of] words. A lot of experts and 'gurus' keep repeating this nonsense. All those graphs where 1 word is a head, 3 words is a body and 5 words is a long-tail. It's all a bunch of crap.”
What do you think about the length of keywords and phrases? Does it matter at all? Knuckles thinks that it doesn't:
“…keyword length has nothing to do with its properties, some short/long/medium keywords are trash some are head…”
There's plenty of room for friendly debate in this thread!
Ethics: Name Dropping to Promote Yourself Or a Company
Over on Cre8asiteforums, folks are wondering if it's fair or ethical to use someone's name without their permission. Link bait projects often name people as “the top 10 in X profession” without asking them first.
The goal, of course, is to get the people on the list to link back to the article. But what if those people have moved on to different careers? What if they don't want to be associated with X industry anymore?
Over 70 pages of charts and information from comScore is up for discussion in this Cre8asiteforums thread! Users are talking about how mobile usage “continues to explode in 2016.”
You've probably also heard that desktop usage may have “peaked.” Are we really reaching a turning-point in how the Internet is used?
The post Getty vs Google, Long Tail Rants, and More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
Posted by randfish
[Estimated read time: 14 minutes]
Are you guilty of living in the past? Using methods that were once tried-and-true can be alluring, but it can also prove dangerous to your search strategy. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out eight old school SEO practices that you should ditch in favor of more effective and modern alternatives.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about some old school SEO practices that just don't work anymore and things with which we should replace them.
Look, I get the appeal here. The idea is that we've done a bunch of keyword research, now we're doing keyword targeting, and we can see that it might be important to target multiple keywords on the same page. So FYI, "pipe smoking," "tobacco smoking," "very dangerous for your health," not recommended by me or by Moz, but I thought it was a funny throwback keyword and so there you go. I do enjoy little implements even if I never use them.
So pipes, tobacco pipes, pipe smoking, wooden pipes, this is not going to draw anyone's click. You might think, "But it's good SEO, Rand. It's good to have all my keywords in my title element. I know that's an important part of SEO." Not anymore. It really is not anymore an important . . . well, let's put it this way. It's an important part of SEO, which is subsumed by wanting to draw the clicks. The user is searching, they're looking at the page, and what are they going to think when they see pipes tobacco, pipes, pipe smoking, wooden pipes? They have associations with that - spammy, sketchy, I don't want to click it - and we know, as SEOs, that Google is using click signals to help documents rank over time and to help websites rank over time.
So if they're judging this, you're going to fall in the rankings, versus a title like "Art of Piping: Studying Wooden Pipes for Every Price Range." Now, you're not just playing off the, "Yes, I am including some keywords in there. I have 'wooden' and 'pipes.' I have 'art of piping,' which is maybe my brand name." But I'm worried more about drawing the click, which is why I'm making this part of my message of "for every price range." I'm using the word "stunning" to draw people in. I'm saying, "Our collection is not the largest but the hand-selected best. You'll find unique pipes available nowhere else and always free, fast shipping."
I'm essentially trying to create a message, like I would for an AdWords ad, that is less focused on just having the raw keywords in there and more focused on drawing the click. This is a far more effective approach that we've seen over the last few years. It's probably been a good six or seven years that this has been vastly superior to this other approach.
This used to be a practice that could have positive impacts on rankings. But what we've seen lately, especially the last few years, is that Google has discounted this and has actually even punished it where they feel like it's inappropriate or spammy, manipulative, overdone. We talked about this a little in our internal and external linking Whiteboard Friday a couple of weeks back.
In this case, my suggestion would be if the internal link is in the navigation, if it's in the footer, if it's in a sidebar, if it's inside content, and it is relevant and well-written and it flows well, has high usability, you're pretty safe. However, if it has low usability, if it looks sketchy or funny, if you're making the font small so as to hide it because it's really for search engines and not for searchers and users, now you're in a sketchy place. You might count on being discounted, penalized, or hurt at some point by Google.
This is an SEO tactic that many folks are still pursuing today and that had been effective for a very long time. So the idea was basically if I have any variation of a keyword, I want a single page to target that because keyword targeting is such a precise art and technical science that I want to have the maximum capacity to target each keyword individually, even if it's only slightly different from another one. This still worked even up to four or five years ago, and in some cases, people were sacrificing usability because they saw it still worked.
Nowadays, Google has gotten so smart with upgrades like Hummingbird, obviously with RankBrain last year, that they've taken to a much more intent- and topic-matching model. So we don't want to do something like have four different pages, like unique hand-carved pipes, hand-carved pipes, hand-carved tobacco pipes, and hand-carved tobacco smoking pipes. By the way, these are all real searches that you'll find in Google Suggest or AdWords. But rather than taking all of these and having a separate page for each, I want one page targeting all of them. I might try and fit these keywords intelligently into the content, the headline, maybe the title, the meta description, those kinds of things. I'm sure I can find a good combination of these. But the intent for each of these searchers is the same, so I only want one page targeting them.
Every single one of these link building, link acquisition techniques that I'm about to mention has either been directly penalized by Google or penalized as part of an update, or we've seen sites get hit hard for doing it. This is dangerous stuff, and you want to stay away from all of these at this point.
Directories, well, generic directories and SEO directories for sure. Article links, especially article blasts where you can push an article in and there's no editorial review. Guest content, depending on the editorial practices, the board might be a little different. Press releases, Google you saw penalized some press release websites. Well, it didn't penalize the press release website. Google said, "You know what? Your links don't count anymore, or we're going to discount them. We're not going to treat them the same."
Comment links, for obvious reasons, reciprocal link pages, those got penalized many years ago. Article spinners. Private link networks. You see private and network, or you see network, you should just generally run away. Private blog networks. Paid link networks. Fiverr or forum link buys.
You see advertised on all sorts of SEO forums especially the more aggressive, sketchy ones that a lot of folks are like, "Hey, for $99, we have this amazing package, and I'll show you all the people whose rankings it's increased, and they come from PageRank six," never mind that Page Rank is totally defunct. Or worse, they use Moz. They'll say like, "Domain authority 60-plus websites." You know what, Moz is not perfect. Domain authority is not a perfect representation of the value you're going to get from these things. Anyone who's selling you links on a forum, you should be super skeptical. That's somewhat like someone going up to your house and being like, "Hey, I got this Ferrari in the yard here. You want to buy this?" That's my Jersey coming out.
Social link buys, anything like this, just say no people.
So this again used to be a very common SEO practice, where folks would say, "Hey, I'm going to split these up because I can get very micro targeted with my individual websites." They were often keyword-rich domain names like woodenpipes.com, and I've got handmadepipes.net, and I've got pipesofmexico.co versus I just have artofpiping.com, not that "piping" is necessarily the right word. Then it includes all of the content from all of these. The benefit here is that this is going to gain domain authority much faster and much better, and in a far greater fashion than any of these will.
Let's say that it was possible that there is no bias against the exact match domain names folks. We're happy to link to them, and you had just as much success branding each of these and earning links to each of these, and doing content marketing on each of these as you did on this one. But you split up your efforts a third, a third, a third. Guess what would happen? These would rank about a third as well as all the content would on here, which means the content on handmadepipes.net is not benefitting from the links and content on woodenpipes.com, and that sucks. You want to combine your efforts into one domain if you possibly can. This is one of the reasons we also recommend against subdomains and microsites, because putting all of your efforts into one place has the best shot at earning you the most rankings for all of the content you create.
It's the case like if I'm a consumer and I'm looking at domain names like woodenpipes.com, handmadepipes.net, uniquepipes.shop, hand-carved-pipes.co, the problem is that over time, over the last 15, 20 years of the Web, those types of domain names that don't sound like real brands, that are not in our memories and don't have positive associations with them, they're going to draw clicks away from you and towards your competitors who sound more credible, more competent, and more branded. For that reason alone, you should avoid them.
It's also that case that we've seen that these types of domains do much more poorly with link earning, with content marketing, with being able to have guest content accepted. People don't trust it. The same is true for public relations and getting press mentions. The press doesn't trust sites like these.
For those reasons, it's just a barrier. Even if you thought, "Hey, there's still keyword benefits to these," which there is a little bit because the anchor text that comes with them, that points to the site always includes the words and phrases you're going after. So there's a little bit of benefit, but it's far overwhelmed by the really frustrating speed bumps and roadblocks that you face when you have a domain like this.
A lot of folks, when they're doing keyword research, for some reason still have this idea that using cost per click or AdWords as competition scores can help determine the difficulty of ranking in organic, non-paid results. This is totally wrong.
So see right here, I've got "hand-carved pipes" and "unique wooden pipes," and they have an AdWords CPC respectively of $3.80 and $5.50, and they have AdWords competition of medium and medium. That is in no way correlated necessarily with how difficult they'll be to rank for in the organic results. I could find, for example, that "unique wooden pipes" is actually easier or harder than "hand-carved pipes" to rank for in the organic SEO results. This really depends on: Who's in the competition set? What types of links do they have and social mentions do they have? How robust is their content? How much are they exciting visitors and drawing them in and serving them well? That sort of stuff is really hard to calculate here.
I like the keyword difficulty score that Moz uses. Some other tools have their own versions. Doctor Pete, I think, did a wonderful job of putting together a keyword difficulty score that's relatively comprehensive and well-thought through, uses a lot of the metrics about the domain and the page authority scores, and it compensates for a lot of other things, to look at a set of search results and say, "This is probably about how hard it's going to be," and whether it's harder or easier than some other keyword.
Last one, some folks are still engaging in this, I think because content strategy, content marketing, and content as a whole has become a very hot topic and a point of investment. Many SEOs still invest in what I call "nonstrategic and unfocused link bait." The idea being if I can draw links to my website, it doesn't really matter if the content doesn't make people very happy or if it doesn't match and gel well with what's on my site. So you see a lot of these types of practices on sites that have nothing to do with it. Like, "Here are seven actors who one time wore too little clothing." That's an extreme example, but you get the idea if you ever look at the bottom ads for a lot of content stuff. It feels like pretty much all of them say that.
Versus on topic link bait or what I'd call high quality content that is likely to draw in links and attention, and create a positive branding association like, "Here's the popularity of pipes, cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, and cigars in the U.S. from 1950 to today." We've got the data over time and we've mapped that out. This is likely to earn a lot of links, press attention. People would check it out. They'd go, "Oh, when was it that electronic cigarettes started getting popular? Have pipes really fallen off? It feels like no one uses them anymore. I don't see them in public. When was that? Why was that? Can I go over time and see that dataset?" It's fundamentally interesting, and data journalism is, obviously, very hot right now.
So with these eight, hopefully you'll be able to switch from some old school SEO techniques that don't work so well to some new ways of thinking that will take your SEO results to a great place. And with that, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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!
Inspired by Majestic, I decided to present 5 of the most awkward and difficult questions that SEO professionals hear way too often, with a little bit of advice on how to respond. 1. When am I going to be in 'The top 10'? This is probably the most uncomfortable question you can hear while working…
The post Five of the most awkward questions asked by SEO clients appeared first on Majestic Blog.
Posted by MatthewBarby
[Estimated read time: 10 minutes]
The traditional ways of measuring the success or failure of content are broken. We can't just rely on metrics like the number of pageviews/visits or bounce rate to determine whether what we're creating has performed well.
“The primary thing we look for with news is impact, not traffic,” says Jonah Peretti, Founder of BuzzFeed. One of the ways that BuzzFeed have mastered this is with the development of their proprietary analytics platform, POUND.
POUND enables BuzzFeed to predict the potential reach of a story based on its content, understand how effective specific promotions are based on the downstream sharing and traffic, and power A/B tests - and that's just a few examples.
Just because you've managed to get more eyeballs onto your content doesn't mean it's actually achieved anything. If that were the case then I'd just take a few hundred dollars and buy some paid StumbleUpon traffic every time.
Yeah, I'd generate traffic, but it's highly unlikely to result in me achieving some of my actual business goals. Not only that, but I'd have no real indication of whether my content was satisfying the needs of my visitors.
The scary thing is that the majority of content marketing campaigns are measured this way. I hear statements like “it's too difficult to measure the performance of individual pieces of content” far too often. The reality is that it's pretty easy to measure content marketing campaigns on a micro level - a lot of the time people don't want to do it.
Within any commercial content marketing campaign that you're running, measurement should be business goal-centric. By that I mean that you should be determining the overall success of your campaign based on the achievement of core business goals.
If your primary business goal is to generate 300 leads each month from the content that you're publishing, you'll need to have a reporting mechanism in place to track this information.
On a more micro-level, you'll want to be tracking and using engagement metrics to enable you to influence the achievement of your business goals. In my opinion, all content campaigns should have robust, engagement-driven reporting behind them.
One metric that Medium uses, which I think adds a lot more value than pageviews, is "Total Time Reading (TTR)." This is a cumulative metric that quantifies the total number of minutes spent reading a piece of content. For example, if I had 10 visitors to one of my blog articles and they each stayed reading the article for 1 minute each, the total reading time would be 10 minutes.
“We measure every user interaction with every post. Most of this is done by periodically recording scroll positions. We pipe this data into our data warehouse, where offline processing aggregates the time spent reading (or our best guess of it): we infer when a reader started reading, when they paused, and when they stopped altogether. The methodology allows us to correct for periods of inactivity (such as having a post open in a different tab, walking the dog, or checking your phone).” (source)
The reason why this is more powerful than just pageviews is because it takes into account how engaged your readers are to give a more accurate representation of its visibility. You could have an article with 1,000 pageviews that has a greater TTR than one with 10,000 pageviews.
A related and simpler metric to acquire is the average time on page (available within Google Analytics). The average time spent on your webpage will give a general indication of how long your visitors are staying on the page. Combining this with 'scroll depth' (i.e. how far down the page has a visitor scrolled) will help paint a better picture of how 'engaged' your visitors are. You'll be able to get the answer to the following:
“How much of this article are my visitors actually reading?”
“Is the length of my content putting visitors off?”
“Are my readers remaining on the page for a long time?”
Having the answers to these questions is really important when it comes to determining which types of content are resonating more with your visitors.
BuzzFeed's “Social Lift” metric is a particularly good way of understanding the 'virality' of your content (you can see this when you publish a post to BuzzFeed). BuzzFeed calculates “Social Lift” as follows:
((Social Views)/(Seed Views)+1)
Social Views: Traffic that's come from outside BuzzFeed; for example, referral traffic, email, social media, etc.
Seed Views: Owned traffic that's come from within the BuzzFeed platform; e.g. from appearing in BuzzFeed's newsfeed.
This is a great metric to use when you're a platform publisher as it helps separate out traffic that's coming from outside of the properties that you own, thus determining its "viral potential."
There are ways to use this kind of approach within your own content marketing campaigns (without being a huge publisher platform) to help get a better idea of its "viral potential."
One simple calculation can just involve the following:
((social shares)/(pageviews)+1)
This simple stat can be used to determine which content is likely to perform better on social media, and as a result it will enable you to prioritize certain content over others for paid social promotion. The higher the score, the higher its "viral potential." This is exactly what BuzzFeed does to understand which pieces of content they should put more weight behind from a very early stage.
You can even take this to the next level by replacing pageviews with TTR to get a more representative view of engagement to sharing behavior.
Alongside predicting "viral potential" and "TTR," you'll want to know how your content is performing against your bottom line. For most businesses, that's the main reason why they're creating content.
This isn't always easy and a lot of people get this wrong by looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist. Every sales process is different, but let's look at the typical process that we have at HubSpot for our free CRM product:
This is a simple process, but it can still be tricky sometimes to get a dollar value on each piece of content we produce. To do this, you've got to understand what the value of a visitor is, and this is done by working backwards through the process.
The first question to answer is, “what's the lifetime value (LTV) of an activated user?” In other words, “how much will this customer spend in their lifetime with us?”
For e-commerce businesses, you should be able to get this information by analyzing historical sales data to understand the average order value that someone makes and multiply that by the average number of orders an individual will make with you in their lifetime.
For the purposes of this example, let's say each of our activated CRM users has an LTV of $100. It's now time to work backwards from that figure (all the below figures are theoretical)…
Question 1: “What's the conversion rate of new CRM activations from our email workflow(s)?”
Answer 1: “5%”
Question 2: “How many people download our gated offers after coming through to the blog content?”
Answer 2: “3%”
Knowing this would help me to start putting a monetary value against each visitor to the blog content, as well as each lead (someone that downloads a gated offer).
Let's say we generate 500,000 visitors to our blog content each month. Using the average conversion rates from above, we'd convert 15,000 of those into email leads. From there we'd nurture 750 of them into activated CRM users. Multiply that by the LTV of a CRM user ($100) and we've got $75,000 (again, these figures are all just made up).
Using this final figure of $75,000, we could work backwards to understand the value of a single visitor to our blog content:
((75,000)/(500,000))
Single Visitor Value: $0.15
We can do the same for email leads using the following calculation:
(($75,000)/(15,000))
Individual Lead Value: $5.00
Knowing these figures will help you be able to determine the bottom-line value of each of your pieces of content, as well as calculating a rough return on investment (ROI) figure.
Let's say one of the blog posts we're creating to encourage CRM signups generated 500 new email leads; we'd see a $2,500 return. We could then go and evaluate the cost of producing that blog post (let's say it takes 6 hours at $100 per hour – $600) to calculate a ROI figure of 316%.
ROI in its simplest form is calculated as:
(((($return)-($investment))/($investment))*100)
You don't necessarily need to follow these figures religiously when it comes to content performance on a broader level, especially when you consider that some content just doesn't have the primary goal of lead generation. That said, for the content that does have this goal, it makes sense to pay attention to this.
So far I've talked about two very different forms of measurement:
What you'll want to avoid is actually thinking about these as isolated variables. Return on investment metrics (for example, lead conversion rate) are heavily influenced by engagement metrics, such as TTR.
The key is to understand exactly which engagement metrics have the greatest impact on your ROI. This way you can use engagement metrics to form the basis of your optimization tests in order to make the biggest impact on your bottom line.
Let's take the following scenario that I faced within my own blog as an example…
The average length of the content across my website is around 5,000 words. Some of my content way surpasses 10,000 words in length, taking an estimated hour to read (my recent SEO tips guide is a perfect example of this). As a result, the bounce rate on my content is quite high, especially from mobile visitors.
Keeping people engaged within a 10,000-word article when they haven't got a lot of time on their hands is a challenge. Needless to say, it makes it even more difficult to ensure my CTAs (aimed at newsletter subscriptions) stand out.
From some testing, I found that adding my CTAs closer to the top of my content was helping to improve conversion rates. The main issue I needed to tackle was how to keep people on the page for longer, even when they're in a hurry.
To do this, I worked on the following solution: give visitors a concise summary of the blog post that takes under 30 seconds to read. Once they've read this, show them a CTA that will give them something to read in more detail in their own time.
All this involved was the addition of a "Summary" button at the top of my blog post that, when clicked, hides the content and displays a short summary with a custom CTA.
This has not only helped to reduce the number of people bouncing from my long-form content, but it also increased the number of subscribers generated from my content whilst improving user experience at the same time (which is pretty rare).
I've thought that more of you might find this quite a useful feature on your own websites, so I packaged it up as a free WordPress plugin that you can download here.
The above example is just one example of a way to impact the ROI of your content by improving engagement. My advice is to get a robust measurement process in place so that you're able to first of all identify opportunities, and then go through with experiments to take advantage of the opportunity.
More than anything, I'd recommend that you take a step back and re-evaluate the way that you're measuring your content campaigns to see if what you're doing really aligns with the fundamental goals of your business. You can invest in endless tools that help you measure things better, but if core metrics that you're looking for are wrong, then this is all for nothing.
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!
Today we embark on our fifth weekly #ClickZChat, where the good people of SEW and ClickZ take to Twitter to discuss with our expert friends and followers a particularly burning digital marketing related issue.
For this week's chat, we'll be talking about location marketing, NFC, beacons, and their usefulness for marketers, so please join us at 12pm EST (5pm UK) on Wednesday 27 April.
As preparation for the discussion, I've pulled together as many stats relating to beacons as I could possibly find, many of which should provide fuel for the conversation and maybe aid your own location marketing strategy.
1) The value of in-store retail sales influenced by beacon-triggered messages in the United States in 2015 and 2016 was $4.1 billion.
2) In 2016, an extraordinary $40 billion increase is estimated. Statista suggests that beacon messages will trigger retail sales worth $44.4 billion in the US.
3) Men are more likely than women to make a purchase based on personalized advertising they saw on an in-store beacon or display.
4) Among responding male internet users aged between 18 and 34 years, 91% said they were influenced by personalized in-store advertising. Female internet users influenced by in-store beacon tech amounted to 76%.
5) More than 42% of companies already have proximity marketing (such as beacons and geolocation) in place. 39% say they will implement it in the next three years. 18.6% say they have no plans for beacons.
6) The future plans for beacon technology integration is trailing in popularity behind online basket comparison (42%), in-store Wi-Fi (54.3%), scan-and-go (59.3%) in-store bookmarking (62.8%).
[Source: Statista]
7) 46% of retailers have launched beacon programs in 2015, up from 15% in 2014.
8) 71% retailers are able to track and understand customers' buying patterns using beacons.
9) 65% feel they are able to target customers down to the aisle level.
10) 59% feel customers are more engaged in the store.
11) 53% retailers feel they are able to create more relevant and compelling offers in the store.
12) 24% retailers saw an increase in sales.
13) 24% retailers saw an increase in offer redemption,
[Source: Retail Touchpoints and reported by Beaconstac]
14) 82% of customers make purchase decisions in-store. [Google]
15) By 2018, the beacon installed base will consist of 4.5 million active beacons overall, with 3.5 million of these in use by retailers.
16) Half of the top 100 retailers in the US tested beacons in 2014, this was expected to increase to one-third of their store locations by the end of 2015.
17) Globally, it's estimated that 570 million Android and Apple smartphones are compatible with Bluetooth low energy (BLE), the signal used by beacons to trigger smartphone apps. This is one-third of the smartphone installed base.
[Source: Business Insider]
We are continuing on in the series of 'Link Data Advice from Duane Forrester'. Last week we began the mini-series by starting to look at how Link data can be used beyond SEO and introducing you to Duane's thoughts on how to use link data to measure influence. If you missed the first instalment of…
The post Link Data Advice from Duane Forrester Part 2 appeared first on Majestic Blog.
BrightLocal recently published their third Expert Local Citation survey. Read on to see some key takeaways from the survey.
The post 86% of Local #SEO Experts Say Quality of Citations More Important Than Quantity by @AkiLiboon appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Are you confident in how good your blog, web page, or other form of online content is? Find out if you match up to Julia's list of 15 top copy guidelines!
The post A 15-Point Checklist to Make Sure You're Publishing Worthwhile Content by @JuliaEMcCoy appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
In an exclusive study conducted by SEO PowerSuite, some revealing findings were uncovered as to how SEOs are responding to Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project two months out. The goal of the study was to identify SEOs' awareness of the AMP launch, gauge the impact they believe it will have on mobile search results, and learn actions they plan to take as a result. SEO PowerSuite surveyed 385 SEO professionals from both North America and Europe. The sample group represented a mix of in-house SEOs, SEOs who work for their own companies, agency SEOs, and outside consultants. Do SEO's Know […]
The post Only 23% of SEOs Currently Implementing AMP, 50% Believe it Will Affect Rankings by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Everyone on the Internet seems to be riled up by Penguin rumors.
Our communities are no different, but they also offer a wide breadth of more substantive fare. Take a look!
Over 750,000 Web Hijacking Incidents Tracked by Google in One Year
Between July of 2014 and June of 2015, Google tracked a stunning number of hijacking events through its Safe Browsing and Search Quality programs. As WebmasterWorld admin engine explains,
“One of the issues the study goes into is how well the incidents were managed, and 80% of cases were cleaned up after the first alert from Google.”
But even if they were cleaned up quickly, as many as 12% of affected sites were hijacked a second time within just 30 days. The angle Google is speaking from here seems to be that webmasters need to take more preventative measures after the first hijacking.
Users on WebmasterWorld took the news with some cynicism. User smilie wrote,
“How about Google hijacking everyone's images? Hypocrites.” User tangor added “This is news? Gotta ask, what took so long? (NOTE: Irony and Satire)”.
More About Google's Batch of Unnatural Outbound Link Messages
For the most part, it appears that bloggers were the group most often impacted by Google's round of manual actions last week. The manual actions focused on “unnatural outbound links,” and are rumored to be about Google's new stance on the disclosure of promoted and sponsored posts and links.
Their new stance was announced last month, and you can find details about it in this Threadwatch update. In an interesting thread on SEO Chat, one of our users seems to have received the reverse of the “unnatural outbound links” message.
It's a little confusing, but Google calls it “unnatural links to your site – impacts links, some incoming links.” User Hawaii explains that
“It says they are devaluing…links that point to my site and not my site.”
Whether it's related to unnatural links from bloggers or not, Ann Smarty and forum moderator Chedders have great advice for how to deal with this type of message!
Is Zombie Traffic Just Mis-Matched Traffic?
Zombie traffic is a popular topic on WebmasterWorld these past few months. If you haven't been keeping up, zombies are visitors to your website who shuffle slowly from page to page and leave without converting or providing you with any benefit. Webmasters first began noticing an increase in this type of visitor late last year.
In a new thread on WebmasterWorld, as summarized on Threadwatch, users are wondering if zombie traffic is just an ordinary phenomenon dressed up in a trendy name. Mis-matched traffic is what people think the zombies could be.
User sqimul of WebmasterWorld describes how they live in Bangladesh, but are constantly redirected to Indian websites in product searches.
Those Indian websites seem helpful at first, but only after thoroughly investigating the website is it understood that they don't deliver products out of the country. Google may be pointing users to websites that they think will be helpful… when in fact, it's impossible for that traffic to convert.
External Links in New Windows – Target=_blank or JavaScript?
Opening a new window or tab for an external link can be helpful to your users. But is there a proper way to code such an action to get Google's approval? In this SEO Chat thread, user Doodled wonders if JavaScript or a target=_blank solution is superior. Other users point out that Google might not be as against target=_blank as you may think. Ann Smarty writes,
“Either way, I'd imagine [Googlebot] would be able to read both target=”_blank” and the javascript if they wanted it to be in a ranking factor…”
Chedders writes that the target=_blank solution
“…[is] quite a common and valid thing to do to help users in some cases and not something I have seen anything about. I know there has been some talk about this approach being deprecated in the future and I think I am right in saying its gone already with XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 but I could be wrong there.”
What have you heard? We'd love some sources to settle this mystery!
Danny Sullivan Marks 20 Years Covering Search
Help us congratulate Danny Sullivan in a celebratory thread over on Cre8asiteforums! As Kim Krause Berg writes,
“I had a filing cabinet stuffed with articles and info written by Danny from my days as an SEO in the late 90's. The only people I followed and trusted were he and Jill Whalen and later… Ammon Johns. They gave me the confidence to keep testing and analyzing and getting around the B.S.”
In the year since I started reading Mr. Sullivan's works, I've also enjoyed and appreciated his ability to cut through B.S. with a clear-headed and fact-driven mentality. Share your stories and congratulations here!
How Important is Site Speed? When Does it Become Important?
A nuanced site load speed discussion was picked up on SEO Chat. In the full thread (which you can find a link to on Threadwatch, above) users are discussing the diminishing returns that site speed brings, as well as how and why those returns may diminish. Chedders writes that
“Back in the 80's…we were told that 7 seconds was an acceptable time frame…but even then that was the maximum.”
Doodled adds support to that limit, writing about a study he read wherein it was discovered that
“…it was somewhere at around 10 seconds that the user's chain of thought was definitely broken…”
What do you think should be the absolute maximum for a page's load time? What do you think is a good time? When should you stop worrying about your load speed?
comScore: Data Suggests U.S. Desktop Use Has Passed Its Peak and Now Declining
Google – and everyone else, really – seem to believe that mobile browsing is the future. New data from comScore may support that train of thought. WebmasterWorld admin engine writes that
“If it were just one month you'd just put it down to aberrations, but, as it appears to show a trend, it should be noticed.”
Or…is the data actually an overblown piece of marketing? That's what user iamlost says when they write,
“You know, for a group (webdevs) that tend to utilize various analytics programs daily you'd think the statistics hogwash being passed in that piece would cause laughter not consideration… Most reporters (and marketers) should not be allowed near stats.”
You can read iamlost's full rebuttal of the piece in the thread, and I recommend you do. As user J_RaD writes,
“Ever year we get some kind of 'death of the desktop' story,”
and this could be one of them, I suppose. Or do you agree that desktop may really be dying?
The post The Fall of Desktop, Unnatural Links, and More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
Earth Day is just around the corner! Are you ready to create a sustainable marketing strategy for your business? Check out this infographic by Campaigner.
The post Creating a Sustainable Marketing Strategy [Infographic] by @AkiLiboon appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by randfish
What have you been doing with branded searches? If the answer is "not much," it may be time to shift your focus a bit. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the huge benefits of turning some of your unbranded searches into branded and offers some key tactical advice.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about how to influence branded search and get a load of benefit out of that. Some of these things that I'm going to talk about today are more theoretical. Like we think they work. We've experimented. We've seen some other folks experiment. We're pretty sure. Then some of them are solid. We know that these things influence. Regardless, I think I can persuade you that trying to turn more of your unbranded search into branded search is a hugely positive thing. Generating more branded search in general is also hugely positive. Let me show you what I mean with some examples first.
Non-branded search, these are essentially the search terms, the queries and phrases that we are all pursuing. We're trying to rank for them. This is searchers who have not yet expressed a brand preference. They're searching. Let's say we're talking to a chemist or a lab instructor at a school and they're trying to put together all their materials for their lab. So they're searching for things like test tubes and lab equipment and chemical safety goggles. They're trying to figure out the best prices and the best products, the ones that'll be the safest, the ones that'll be best for their class. Those are unbranded. They have expressed no brand preference. They haven't said, "Oh I want this kind and I know that."
Branded searches are more like, "Oh I know I want a Fisher test tube, Fisher Scientific." Fisher test tubes is what I'm looking for, or lab equipment from Thermo. Thermo Scientific makes a bunch of lab equipment that you can buy prepackaged, kind of all together. Or chemical goggles, "I know I want the 3M variety." 3M has, like, these awesome chemical goggles. They're very safe, very good for this stuff.
These branded searches are preferable in many ways for the brands that own and control these companies than the non-branded searches. Here's why.
Obviously it is way, way easier to rank well for "3M chemical goggles" if you are 3M than ranking for just "chemical goggles" if you're 3M. You're competing against far fewer folks. A lot of people won't even use your brand name. Even the people who do, like maybe on Amazon.com, you'll still get some benefit from that because they're searching for your brand.
It also increases the propensity to convert, meaning that if someone performs that branded search, they're more likely to actually buy that product. They're generally speaking further down the funnel. They've sort of decided to at least investigate your brand, and now you have a chance to pitch them. They're familiar. They know your brand name at least. That's a real positive thing.
The second thing that's nice is you can affect search suggest, meaning that if lots of people, for example, started searching for "3M chemical goggles" instead of "chemical safety goggles" or "chemical goggles," it would actually be the case that over time what you'd see Google do is in the dropdown box for "chemical safety goggles," 3M, the word, would start to be associated with it. You'd see that in search suggest. It might be at the very bottom.
For example, if you do a search for "whiteboard," today in Google, Whiteboard Friday is somewhere on that list, but it's usually way down towards the bottom. In some geographies it's probably not there at all. Over time if we get more and more people searching for Whiteboard Friday, it'll move up in search suggest. So that means people will be more likely to perform that query. At least they'll see it and say, "Oh that must be a brand," or "I must have some association with that, or maybe I'm supposed to," or "I want to investigate that, I'm curious about it."
This is one of those speculative things. We believe that right now search volume for branded terms does have an impact on ranking for the non-branded version of the query.
We saw Google file some patents around this, but we also saw some tests in this direction that looked promising, basically saying that if . . . Let's do Fisher for this one. Let's say people start searching for Fisher test tubes a lot more. Google might say, "You know, I think Fisher is very relevant to the search query 'test tubes.' Let's move Fisher up in the rankings for just the unbranded phrase 'test tubes,' because that volume is suggesting to us that this brand is more relevant to this query than maybe we initially presumed." That's huge as well. If you can drive up that search volume, now you can start to get benefit in the non-branded rankings.
You can appear in the related search feature. Related searches is usually somewhere between the middle of the page and the very bottom of the page, most of the time at the very bottom of the search page. That's a powerful way for those 10% to 20% of people that scroll all the way to the bottom before making a click selection or before deciding to change their query, those related searches are a powerful way to suggest, just like search suggest is, that they should, instead of searching for the non-branded term, search for your branded query. The related searches, by the way, is also we think influenced by content, which I'll talk about in a second.
Create an entity-style association. This is essentially the idea of co-occurring keywords. If Google is crawling the web and they see tons of documents, high-quality, trustworthy documents that contain the word "test tubes" that also contain the word "3M," oftentimes in close proximity to the word "test tubes," they'll over time start to associate the word "test tubes" with the word "3M." That can impact suggest. It can impact related. It can impact rankings. It has a bunch of positive potential impact. That can make you more relevant for all sorts of things around search that are just awesome.
Then the last one, which is also cool and powerful, is that this can affect search personalization, meaning, for example, let's say someone does a search for "3M chemical goggles." They click on 3m.com. Maybe they buy them. Maybe they don't. Next time they do a search, for example let's say "chemical aprons," well it turns out that Google already knows that person has visited 3M in the past. They might see that behavior and, because they're logged into their account, they might show them 3M higher up in the rankings. They might show them 3M higher in the search suggest as they start typing. That personalization is another powerful way that you're getting benefit from branded search.
There are all these benefits. We want to make this happen. How do we do it?
It turns out SEOs, we're going to have to work pretty cross-departmentally in our marketing teams to be able to make this happen because some of the best tactics require things that SEO doesn't always own and control entirely. Sometimes you do, sometimes not.
You've seen more and more of this. You have seen advertisements probably on television and YouTube ads. You've seen branded ads on display ads. You've probably heard things on the radio that say search for us, all that kind of stuff. All that classic media, everything from billboards to radio - I know I'm drawing televisions with rabbit ears still. There are probably no TVs in the US that still have rabbit ears. Magazines, print, whatever, billboards, all of that brand advertising can drive people to then be curious about the brand and to want to investigate them more. If you hear a lot about 3M goggles and the cool stuff they're doing, well, you might be tempted to perform a search.
Be careful with this one. This can get spammy and manipulative and could get you into trouble. You can do it. If you do it in authentic white hat ways, you'll probably be okay.
The idea is basically telling customers like, "Hey, if you want to research us, learn more about 3M's goggles, don't just take our word for it. Search Google. Go find what people are saying, what reviews are saying about our product." You see I think it was LG or Samsung ran a big one of these where they were suggesting people do a Google search, because it turns out their phone had been very, very highly rated by all the top folks who'd done a review of them. You can do that in email. You could do it over social networks. You could do it in content. You're essentially driving people directly to the Google search result page. That could be an embedded link, or it simply could be a suggestion to search and check people out.
You can use events and sponsorship, all of that stuff to essentially drive latent interest and curiosity, kind of like we did with brand advertising but in a little more organic fashion. If The New York Times writes a piece about you, if you speak at a conference . . . This is me wildly gesticulating at a conference. It looks like I'm very dangerously, precariously perched to fall into the crowd there. Guest contributions on a website, maybe something like a Fortune.com, which takes some guest posts, driving people to want to learn more about the brand or the product that you've mentioned.
I put just web documents here, but really it's important, trustworthy web documents from sources that Google likes and trusts and indexes. That means looking at: Where are all the places potentially on the web that lab equipment is talked about or would be talked about maybe in the future? How do I influence those authors, those creators, those publications to potentially consider including my brand, Thermo Scientific, in their documents? Or how do I create content for places like these that include my brand and include the unbranded term "lab equipment?"
Bunch of tactics, bunch of great opportunities here. I'd love to hear from you folks about what you've done around influencing branded search and how you've seen it affect your SEO campaigns overall. I'll look forward to catching up with you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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What makes a digital influencer?
Is it follower numbers? The ability to find and create great content? Or just a genuine passion for transformation and digital change?
On May 24th and 25th, we'll be hosting our new Shift event in London, and we want to find the biggest influencers online to be help us drive digital change.
The gurus and visionaries who are kindling conversation about digital leadership and the drive towards truly customer-centric business models. Senior marketers, digital gurus and business leaders tasked with implementing digital transformation and responsible for driving marketing strategy across data, digital, acquisition, search, customer experience, analytics, user experience and customer service. Anyone who wants to transform.
With this in mind, we've created #Digirevolution, and we want you to join us.
We've built a unique leaderboard that weighs up your social media credentials, examines the content you've been sharing and assigns you an influencer score. If you're sharing content and using the #Digirevolution hashtag then we'll feature you here on the blog every week until May 16th, when our top influencer will receive a free pair of tickets to the event.
We'll be sharing your #digitrevolution tweets and comments, so join the conversation and tweet your way to the top of our digital revolution leaderboard.
What are you waiting for? Get tweeting leaders!
Interested in digital transformation, leadership and customer experience? Discover more about Shift and the #digirevolution.
Majestic has been keeping a secret… an email from Her Majesty's Government announcing that we are Queen's Award Winners. It starts like this: As The Queen's 90th birthday gets underway, the announcement of the 50th year of these prestigious awards is significant. We have won many awards in our time, but this one supersedes…
The post Queen's Award Winners & Proud appeared first on Majestic Blog.
Today we embark on our fourth weekly #ClickZChat, where the good people of SEW and ClickZ take to Twitter to discuss with our expert friends and followers a particularly burning digital marketing related issue.
For this week's chat, we'll be talking about Instagram and its rise in value for marketers, so please join us at 12pm EST (5pm UK) on Wednesday 20 April.
As preparation for the discussion, I've pulled together as many stats relating to Instagram as I could possibly find, many of which should provide fuel for the conversation and maybe aid your own social media strategy.
Please note: many of these stats were researched and published in a ClickZ article by Leighann Morris from last year, and I have updated the numbers wherever possible.
1. Instagram has more than 400 million monthly active users
2. More than 75% of those users are outside the U.S.
3. More than 30 billion photos have been shared
4. Instagram users generate 3.5 billion likes per day
5. More than 80 million photos are uploaded per day
6. Instagam's monthly userbase has grown from 90 million in Jan 2013, to 400 million in September 2015.
7. Instagram counted 77.6 million users in the US in 2015.
8. 27.6% of the US population used Instagram in 2015.
9. There is a fairly even gender split between Instagram users: 51% male/49% female.
10. Monthly US Instagram users are expected to reach 111.6 million by 2019. 
11. In 2012 Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, a relative bargain compared to the $14 billion it paid for WhatsApp in 2014. Here's a chart of Facebook's other recent acquisitions…
12. In February 2014 in the US, Instagram had 6.5 million multi-platform users, 20 million desktop users, and 40 million mobile users.
13. As of January 2014, 41% percent of US Android users who had installed Instagram were also daily active users. 
14. As of September 2015, the greatest share of traffic to Instagram was from the US (23.94%) while traffic from the United Kingdom accounted for 3.57% of site visits.
15. 8% of Instagram accounts are reportedly fake spam-bot accounts and 30% are inactive, according to Business Insider.
16. These are the 10 most popular retailers on Instagram by follower numbers:
1) Nike
2) Adidas Originals
3) Louis Vuitton
4) Dolce & Gabbana
5) Michael Kors
6) Adidas
7) Dior
8) Christian Louboutin
9) Gucci
10) Prada
17. Instagram comes 8th in Statista's chart of leading social networks worldwide as of April 2016, ranked by number of active users (in millions). It overtook Twitter at the end of last year.
18. In a survey of US teens, 11% of respondents had 101 – 200 followers on Instagram. The US teen average was 150 followers. According to a February 2015 survey, 59% of US teens regularly accessed the social network.
19. As of April 2015, 35% of US users accessed Instagram several times a day. By 2019, the total number of Instagram users in the United States is expected to double the 2014 figure.
20. Instagram continues to rise in popularity among teenagers. In 2015, 33% of US teens chose Instagram as their personal number one social network, up from just 12% in 2012. This compares favourably with Facebook and Twitter, which were chosen by 14 and 20% of the respondents, respectively.
21. 50% of comments are posted in the first six hours.
22. According to Simply Measured, there's little correlation between text length and engagement rate.
23. Adding a location to posts results in 79% higher engagement.
[Sources: Statista, Sprout Social, DMR]
If you'd like to discuss your own triumphs and challenges in using Instagram as a marketer we'd love to hear your opinions, so please join us for #ClickZChat.
