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In this week's wrap-up, SEJ Lead News Writer Matt Southern gives us the latest in Google AMPs to be shown in organic search , and learn the basics in mobile SEO from Bridget Randolph.
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Posted by randfish
What's more important: drawing in more traffic, or converting the traffic you have? When it comes to your landing pages, that may be a tough question to answer. After watching today's Whiteboard Friday, you'll be better equipped to decide whether your site should opt for an SEO focus, a conversion focus, or a strategic balance of both.
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 landing pages and conversion-focused landing pages versus SEO-focused landing pages.
So a few weeks back, I was at Unbounce's CTA Conference up in Vancouver, Canada, which was an amazing event, one of the best conferences that's put on in our industry, in my opinion. I got a question from a few folks there about how to decide whether to target a landing page toward SEO, toward conversion rate optimization and conversion-focused, or whether we could combine those. So I thought we'd chat a little bit about that today. It is quite doable.
An SEO-focused landing page has a few features that are unique from a conversion-focused landing page. In fact, both of them are unique. So what I'm going to do is use the example of Little Hotelier. Little Hotelier offers reservation software, front desk software for small hotels, B2Bs, guesthouses. I thought we could imagine basically a resource page on their website that was really a landing page that's focused on SEO around a hotel booking site database. So, of course, one of the things you have to do if you're a small hotel, or a B2B, or a guesthouse is you've got to get listed on hundreds if not thousands of different listing sites - Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, etc., etc., all the way down the list, down to the very local-focused ones or regional-focused ones.
Managing all those listings is a real pain. So is managing the front desk and the bookings and making sure that everything is convenient. So Little Hotelier manages all this for us and has a resource page. It's not quite as good as the one I'm going to describe here. But let's just imagine for a sec that they have this list of all the hotel booking sites, a database of it with all the information you might want. Then, of course, they have their conversion-focused page, littlehotelier.com, their homepage, which is really all-in-one business software for B&Bs, and guesthouses and small hotels. This is very conversion-focused. They're trying directly to get people to buy the product.
This page is much more resource-focused. They're trying to get people to see, "Hey, here are all of those sites that, well, of course, Little Hotelier can help list you on and manage for you, but also here's just generic and general information about them." I think it'd be awesome if they listed all of these sites and included things like traffic and the number of bookings that they saw from those sites in 2015, the requirements to get listed, and the submission page. Then they could have a CTA, a call to action like, "Let Little Hotelier manage hotel bookings for your property."
This would work really as an SEO-focused landing page. It's designed to draw traffic in, to drive keywords like "list of hotel booking sites," "where to submit my small hotel," "most visited hotel booking sites." You could even make regional-focused ones of this, like "hotel listing sites New Zealand" if they wanted to have a New Zealand-focused set of sites where you could submit or manage yourself in the booking world. This one is really much more targeted, hypertargeted, only focused on the keywords that are going to convert people directly, like "small hotel software" or "B&B hotel reservation software," that kind of stuff.
The differences between these two and the way to identify whether you need one or the other or need a mix of them is to ask a few questions. First off:
If you're only concerned with conversion, then you want this one. But if you are worried about both ranking for keywords and trying to convert some visitors, you probably want a more content-focused page like this one, a more SEO-focused landing page.
One of the needs that you have with SEO is that you need low bounce rate and high engagement rate. But the reverse is true here. You don't necessarily need to worry about bounce rate, engagement rate, you only need to worry about conversion rate.
SEO-focused: So this needs a low bounce rate and a high click-through rate. You want people staying on this page, you want them to click the call to action, and you want them to investigate more.
Conversion-focused: But on this page, actually a high bounce rate is okay if the conversion rate is high. So if people are converting from this page, it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people visit and many of them go away from here. That's not too important to you. You're just worried about conversion rate and optimizing for that conversion rate. If you can bring that up a percent, you don't mind if bounce rate also goes up 5% or 6% or 7% because you're turning people off who are the wrong customers.
SEO-focused: Here, you've got to have keyword-targeted content. That means the content itself needs to fulfill all the requirements that Google has and that visitors have around what they're looking for.
Conversion-focused: This, keyword targeting is secondary or might even be unnecessary entirely.
SEO-focused: This needs to be able to earn editorial links or it can't rank. If it can't earn editorial links, it's going to have a very, very difficult time with manual link building to a conversion-focused page. Commercially-focused pages are much tougher.
Conversion-focused: But this one doesn't even need to worry about links at all.
SEO-focused: This one has to serve many audiences. It's treated really like a piece of content that helps anyone who's looking for this information and then has a CTA, a call to action on the page.
Conversion-focused: But this one needs to be heavily focused on one particular audience, the particular audience Little Hotelier is trying to convert who's the right customer for them, for their software. Hopefully, those folks are already qualified.
SEO-focused: These folks over here are not necessarily qualified. This might be part of the qualification process. If you visit this page and you then say, "Huh, I'm kind of interested in letting them manage my bookings," maybe you should end up here, on this landing page that is conversion-focused.
SEO-focused: This page should be driving traffic to those more conversion rate-focused pages.
Conversion-focused: This page, yes, it might rank for some keywords, but it's primarily concerned with direct conversions, and hopefully it's receiving traffic from other onsite channels, like this one, or offsite paid channels that are driving very targeted visitors.
What I'd urge you to do is ask yourself these questions when you're considering a landing page. Am I trying to earn traffic that might be interested in my content? If so, you're building one of these (SEO-focused). If you're trying to target an audience that is already qualified, that's already familiar with you, or that you're trying to get familiar with your product, then you're really trying to convert them, in which case you want one of these (conversion-focused).
Conversion-focused: These pages are great for doing tons of landing page testing and optimization. They're great for videos. They're great for testimonials.
SEO-focused: These types of pages are great for content. They're great for serving all sorts of visitor intense. They're great for targeting a large set of keywords that all have the same searcher intent.
When you try and mix these, things get a little challenging. That's where you really need to balance out and decide: "Hey, what is my primary goal here? Serve the searcher audience, which may not be conversion-focused, or convert people and not worry so much about the searcher audience. Maybe try to capture them on other pages before they get here."
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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There are also rumors of a Google algorithm change or hiccup – perhaps more zombie traffic choking up the pipes?
Facebook released some news about their own algorithm, Alphabet posted record profits, and our users are discussing 300 series redirects, the value of Domain Authority, and more!
Here's our action-packed roundup for this week:
Google Releases an Explanation of Impressions, Positions, and Clicks in Search Analytics Reports
In Search Console you can access Search Analytics Reports which, among other things, will tell you some basic information about your impressions, clicks, and average position within search results. Sounds simple, right?
Well, no – below the surface, Search Analytics Reports are surprisingly technical. Some confusion over the inconsistency of certain points and their meaning led Google to release a new article explaining almost everything you need to know.
You can join the discussion via SEO Chat above, or get a brief explanation on Threadwatch. On WebmasterWorld, admin engine writes that
“Most of the documents are going to be updated as it will start to reflect the increasing AMP pages.”
So we can expect this first release to be one of many!
What's Happening in Google SERPs for August?
Rumors of a “Phantom 4” have been hovering in the air since June. Now that we're in August, users on WebmasterWorld say that they're seeing even more strange things happening in Google SERPs. A lot of it, like the Phantom 4 rumors, seems to be happening in the ecommerce sector. Martin Ice Web reports that they're seeing,
“Very big losses on high traffic keywords. Sales are completely off since last weekend [July30 – 31]. Biggest winner is Amazon. In our vertical it is hard to find a query… Amazon hasn't at least 4 but 7 entries in a row.”
They go on to speculate that something is targeting
“category pages and pushed single item pages. If so, that would completely work…against Panda algo.”
Other users like ecommerceprofit report that
“We have been on fire for a while now but I know the zombies will be back soon.”
Is zombie traffic related to the recent changes, or are zombies increasing in conjunction with a “Phantom 4” update?
Google, Alphabet Post Q2 2016 Profits – Up 24% to $4.88 Billion
Alphabet posted huge gains from the second quarter of 2016. You can check out some reports about it and read the thoughts of other webmasters in this thread. MrSavage writes that the figures aren't that surprising though:
“Mobile is growing into a majority. Google had (during FCC investigation) somewhere around 95% to 98% of the mobile search market. Anyone who 'owns' that much of a business is pretty much scary. They own the world's OS in essence.”
JesterMagic writes that while Alphabet posts high earnings,
“…the affiliate business is suffering thanks to Google's and Apple's stranglehold on the stores which REQUIRE app publishers to use Google's or Apple's payment system…”
Facebook's Algorithm, Demystified
Data collected by a third party promises to demystify Facebook's newsfeed algorithm. Users on Cre8asiteforums are discussing a new article from INMA all about it. It's no surprise that parts of their article aren't optimistic about brands' ability to organically reach consumers.
Grumpus picks out a part of the article that says user engagement is decreasing: “What exactly constitutes 'engagement'?…When I think of engagement, I think about the number of interactions any given item receives…” but is that what Facebook considers engagement to be? Post your thoughts and read the data in this thread!
Many newbies on SEO Chat talk about Domain Authority as if it is a totally infallible, Google-sanctioned metric. But in reality, it's a third party tool and, while useful, may have its flaws. In this thread, a user posts that their “beef with DA [is that] I notice with older, authority sites, DA is more accurate as more backlinks are picked up.
However, for newer websites, MOZ doesn't pick up hardly any backlinks.” Chedders adds that
“I have been banging the drum against DA for ages now. I often say at best it's a guess… PR used to give us something in my eyes but that was taken away from us a while ago.”
ThomasHarvey says that ”
Honestly, I place some value on Moz DA, it's the most accurate metric that I believe we now have access to.
What are your experiences with DA, and how much stock do you place in it?
Google Previews Expanded AMP Support in Entire SERPs
AMP Pages seemed like a mere bauble last year, but it's clear that they'll be very important soon. They might even shake-up how webmasters organize their desktop and mobile sites. On WebmasterWorld, user aakk9999 writes that,
“…it used to be 'have a desktop and have a mobile site,' then 'we prefer one single responsive site'. I am wondering whether now we should be building a desktop site and then a separate AMP version… because having an AMP site on the desktop is quite limiting…”
Other users seem to agree. Some question whether AMP is worth it though. User aristotle writes that
“My pages are already extremely fast… what would I gain by spending all the time it would take [to implement AMP]?”
The natural response is that Google might favor you in SERPs – but is that really why a website should be higher up? This is shaping up to be a question of whether Google's POV or the user's POV is more valuable.
User iamlost has a great write-up about the changes to 300 series redirects. “The gist,” they write, “is that Google no longer applies a PageRank dampening factor to 300 level redirects.
It may well, however, treat unrelated redirects as soft 404s, to counter SEO abuse.” This is a big shake-up in how 300 series redirects have been treated in the past! Read all about it and share your thoughts here!
Threadwatch has an excellent summary of a recent discussion about UI/UX and links. Traditionally, links on a page have been colored blue and underlined. Recent design trends, however, are changing that.
Sometimes it makes finding a link on a page very difficult. How does tradition and collective training play a part in user experience? What are the limits of the Internet's adaptability? These questions and more are highlighted here!
What is “Good Quality Traffic” for an AdSense Publisher?
“Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” so they say. And that's true when you're trying to place a value on your traffic. Different webmasters place different values on different slices of traffic.
It all depends on your goals. Or, as netmeg writes,
“…note that what's good quality traffic for YOU might not be good quality traffic for AdSense purposes.”
The users of WebmasterWorld are sharing lists of what makes traffic “quality” in this thread – give it a read!
The post Search Analytics, Algorithm Rumors, and More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
