AMP (accelerated mobile pages) is designed to deliver publishers’ pages quickly on mobile devices, but the stripped-down format lacks functionality in some areas. This week, the German-Swiss online payment infrastructure provider LaterPay is releasing what it says is the first AMP-enabled paywall and subscription platform, called AMP Access. While there are other custom solutions, such as from The Washington Post, LaterPay CEO and founder Cosmin Ene told me he is unaware of any other out-of-the-box offering. [Read the full article on MarTech Today.] About The AuthorBarry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine. Reference source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2AgqG9D
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Companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Amazon and LinkedIn build great consumer relationships. They grow their businesses around serving customers and fully understanding them through data. Traditionally, companies have tried to understand and manage customer relationships in two separate types of systems:
Both methods result in storing and using customer data in different places. Siloed data is difficult to stitch together and makes a customer-centric approach much more difficult. Marketers look to build omnichannel experiences to cater to the way customers interact across multiple touch points when and where they want. The traditional customer data management model leads to a disjointed experience. Not being able to act on the signals that your customers provide in real time is a missed opportunity. Customer Data Platforms can help. A CDP delivers the next tier of customer understanding by connecting data from various channels and silos within your organization and unearthing rich, holistic profiles built to power your customer experience. Use this guide from Lytics to discover what a CDP is and whether you’re ready to use one. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Choosing A Customer Data Platform.” About The AuthorDigital Marketing Depot is a resource center for digital marketing strategies and tactics. We feature hosted white papers and E-Books, original research, and webcasts on digital marketing topics -- from advertising to analytics, SEO and PPC campaign management tools to social media management software, e-commerce to e-mail marketing, and much more about internet marketing. Digital Marketing Depot is a division of Third Door Media, publisher of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and producer of the conference series Search Marketing Expo and MarTech. Visit us at http://ift.tt/XKa9gM. Reference source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2kdxM8K
Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here. Read more source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2zQHLrt As a digital marketer, you can measure the success of your work in several ways. One of those ways is by examining key SEO metrics. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that provide you with easy-to-read reports so you can check those metrics. Two of the best utilities, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, are not only offered for free, but most of the metrics you need to focus on can be gathered from either one of those tools. But which metrics are the most important to track? Here are 12 that stand out from the pack. 1. Organic trafficOrganic traffic is defined as traffic you earn from appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) without paying for placement. That’s the essence of SEO, after all. You want your site to rank for keywords related to your niche. It’s important to track your overall organic traffic so that you can see how many people are visiting your site as a result of your SEO strategy. By landing pageOverall organic traffic is sitewide. You also need to track organic traffic by landing page. Why? Because that’s how you can determine where you need improvement. If you find that some pages are ranking on page 1 while others are on page 7, you know that you need to direct your SEO efforts towards those pages that are ranking poorly. Additionally, if you’re using different SEO strategies for different pages, you’ll get an idea of which strategies work best when you compare rankings. By locationIt’s important to track where your organic traffic comes from. This is especially true if your SEO efforts are meant to target specific geographic locations or if you’re planning to expand your business into new markets. First, you should track organic traffic by country. You might be surprised to learn that you have a strong fan base overseas. If that’s the case, then you may want to consider updating your marketing strategy to include expansion into these markets. (Time for some international SEO!) Alternatively, if you’re seeing heavy organic traffic from countries that aren’t profitable for your business, you may want to figure out why that is. It’s possible that you may need to adjust your SEO strategy to focus more on your target countries. Even if the vast majority of your organic traffic comes from within the US, it’s possible that your product or service appeals to people in some states more than others. The only way you can know that is by tracking organic traffic by state. If you find that people in certain states like your brand better than people in other states, you can divert more marketing resources into those states so that you can improve sales. If states that are important to your business aren’t performing well, that may be a sign that you need to tweak your website experience to better target this audience segment. Drilling down even further, it might be the case that your brand appeals to people in metropolitan areas. That’s why it’s good to examine organic traffic by city. Again, allocate your resources where you’re likely to get the best ROI. 2. Organic bounce rateThe bounce rate tells you how many people “bounced” away from your site after only viewing one page. It’s measured as a percentage of visitors, with a lower number being better. If you see that you have a high bounce rate, that may mean you need to do some on-site work to keep people around. For example, you could show links to related posts or other items of interest in the right-hand sidebar. By landing pageIt’s also a good idea to inspect the bounce rate by landing page. That way, you can see which landing pages tend to turn away visitors and which ones keep them hanging around for more. If a landing page has a high bounce rate, that could indicate that the content on the page didn’t match the keyword the visitor plugged into the search engine. (It could also mean the person quickly found what they needed and left, so be careful here.) 3. Organic conversion rateRemember: Organic traffic only gets people to your website — it doesn’t mean you’ve made the sale. That’s why you need to measure the conversion rate as well. You’ll want to check your aggregate conversion rate for organic traffic. That way, you’ll get an idea of how well you’re appealing overall to people who arrive at your site from the search results. However, you’ll also want to drill down into various segments to see what factors are impacting conversion rates. By landing pageYou may wish to measure conversion rate by landing page. Why? Because conversions are usually won or lost on the page itself. If you find that one page has a much higher conversion rate than another, then that could mean one doesn’t have an effective marketing message. By locationBy tracking organic conversions by geographic location, you might find that your messaging appeals to people in specific areas. If you do find that your message resonates with people in one or more locations, follow basic principles of Business 101 and push more marketing dollars into those regions. By deviceIt’s almost impossible to capture a healthy market share unless you appeal to a mobile audience. To check how well your site appeals to people on mobile devices, you need to check the conversion rate by device for organic traffic. If you find that your conversions for desktop users are unusually higher than conversions for smartphone or tablet users, then your site probably isn’t optimized for a mobile audience. Run some tests and contact your development team to improve the mobile experience. By browserYour job would be a lot easier if there were only one browser and everybody used it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. That’s why you need to check conversion rate by browser for organic traffic. If you find that people on one browser convert much higher than people on other types of browsers, that usually means that your site is user-hostile to people using those other browsers. Contact your development team and ask them to ensure that the site works across all popular browsers. I recently worked with a client and found their site didn’t work on Samsung Galaxy phones. When we fixed it, they started making an extra $50,000 a month. 4. Top exit pages for organic trafficExit pages are the last pages that people visit before they leave your site. It’s important that you track the top exit pages. Why? Because those pages are probably your “problem children.” They’re pages that cause people to lose interest in your site and go elsewhere. See what you can do to improve those pages so that visitors hang around for a little longer. 5. Breakdown of organic traffic from Bing and GoogleAlthough Google is the most popular search engine, it’s not the only search engine. Many of your customers use Bing, too. That’s why you should examine your organic traffic breakdown between those two search engines. If you find that you’re not pulling in the expected traffic you think you should from one search engine or the other, it’s probably a great idea to update your SEO strategy. I often see that people do not focus enough on Bing when looking at this report. 6. Keywords ranked in GoogleYou may wish to use a keyword tracking tool like SEMrush to determine the total number of keywords for which your site ranks in Google. Once you know what keywords your site is ranking for, there are numerous ways you can use that data to inform your SEO strategy. Take note of which keywords you want to rank for but aren’t yet — these are the keywords you may want to focus on in your SEO campaigns. It’s also a good idea to capitalize on your existing success. If you find that your site ranks in the top 10 for some high-converting keywords, continue using those keywords in your content marketing campaigns to ensure that you stay there. Your top-ranking keywords are likely bringing you the most traffic, so make sure that the landing pages associated with those keywords are relevant to keep your bounce rate low. 7. Local visibilityIf your business has one or more physical locations that local customers can visit directly, it’s very important that you keep track of your local visibility. Specifically, is your site appearing in the local 3-pack for keywords related to your niche? Is it appearing when people type the name of your town or city plus the name of your industry? If not, it’s time to work on some local SEO. 8. Click-through rate (CTR)Google Search Console offers a Search Analytics report that shows the average percentage of people who click on one of your links after seeing it in the search results. That percentage is called the click-through rate (CTR). It’s a stat you should pay attention to because it tells you more than just how well your pages rank in the SERPs. It also tells you how much the content appeals to people. If people like what they see of your content in the search results, they’ll click the link. If not, they’ll move on to another result. By landing pageExamining CTR by landing page will show you your money-makers from an SEO perspective. Those are the pages that get the most attention from the search results. You should also look at the pages with the lowest CTRs and optimize them. By top keywordsAnother stat to check is the CTR of your top search terms in Google Search Console. If you see that a term is getting you a lot of clicks, you should determine which pages are ranking for those keywords and ensure that your page content accurately reflects searcher intent. It might be a good idea to test conversion optimization elements on these pages, too. On the flip side, if you observe a low CTR for a valuable search term, you should look at the page(s) optimized for that term and find out why. It might be that the title or description associated with the page isn’t relevant or enticing. 9. Pages indexed in Google Search ConsoleOne thing is certain: Nobody is going to find a webpage in the search results if it isn’t indexed. That’s why you need to pay attention to the number of pages on your website that have been indexed. If you find that it takes an unusually long time for your pages to get indexed, you can always submit them manually using the Crawl>Fetch as Google option in the Search Console. You should also take note of how many pages are indexed relative to how many pages have been submitted. Again, if you find that a small percentage of your submitted pages are indexed, you might need to manually request indexing via the Search Console. 10. Pages crawled per dayThe Google Search Console will also show you how many pages have been crawled every day for the last 90 days. If you have thousands of pages, and only a small percentage of them are getting crawled, that could point to a problem with your crawl budget. Google won’t crawl your entire site if it looks like its bot will consume too many of your system resources in doing so. 11. Duplicate titles and descriptionsYou can also use Google Search Console to check the number of duplicate titles and descriptions on your site. As a rule of thumb, duplicate content is a no-no. When multiple pages have the same title tags and meta descriptions, that tells search engines that all those pages are about the same topic; this can dilute your topical authority and limit your ability to rank well for those terms. If you find that you’ve got duplicate content on your site, it’s a good idea to update it so that it’s unique or block it. 12. Crawl errorsGoogle Search Console also provides you with crawl errors. Although the default report shows sitewide errors, you can also use a filter to view errors by segment. Any crawl errors you find should be addressed right away. Follow your SEO metrics closelyI find it fascinating how many SEO metrics there really are. And the ones I mentioned here are just the start. The longer I work in digital marketing, the more I learn. I encourage you to really dive deep into your analytics and get good at determining which data is most helpful for measuring SEO success. Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here. About The AuthorJohn Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, a digital marketing teacher at the University of California San Diego and author of the book Digital Influencer, A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online. Throughout his career, Lincoln has worked with hundreds of websites, ranging from start-ups to household names, and has won awards in SEO, CRO, analytics and Social Media. In the media, Lincoln has been featured on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. Magazine, CIO magazine and more. Source link : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2isgUdS Last year, I wrote a piece addressed to SEO companies showing how much they were spamming Google Maps and giving the industry a bad reputation. If I worked at Google, this type of stuff would make me hate SEO companies and have no desire to help them. Lately, I’ve been seeing this same level of spam (or worse) in the legal industry. If you’re an attorney or a marketing agency that works with attorneys, this article is for you. Personally, if I were looking to hire an attorney and trust my money and my life to someone, the last place I would look is Google, due to my knowledge about how unreliable the information is and how fabricated the reviews are. Let’s get into some specifics. Fake reviewsAttorneys often complain about how hard it is to get their clients to leave reviews. I get it. Someone rarely wants to publicize who they hired to help them with their divorce or admit that they had to hire a criminal lawyer. This does not, however, excuse what attorneys are doing to get reviews in spite of this. One common trend amongst attorneys currently is review swapping. Although sites like Avvo might have sections that encourage peer reviews, they do a good job of separating them so that consumers realize they are not reviews from clients. Google has no such distinction and is very clear in their guidelines that reviews should be about the customer experience. Attorneys you are friends with all around the country do not count as customer reviews. I say this because so far, every review that fits this scenario that I’ve reported to Google has been removed. In addition to violations of Google’s guidelines, quid pro quo attorney review circles may violate attorney ethics rules. According to Gyi Tsakalakis, a digital marketer with a focus on law firms:
There also could be legal implications to review swapping. In addition to it being against Google’s guidelines, it could also get you in trouble with the FTC. In an article I wrote on fake reviews earlier this year, Brandon J. Huffman, attorney at Odin Law, mentioned:
Review swaps aren’t the only thing that can get lawyers in trouble with their state Bar Associations. A variety of fake review tactics are likely to lead to sanctions, such as having your employees pose as clients to leave reviews or paying someone to write fake reviews. Indeed, many law firms are just flat-out getting fake reviews posted. Recently, in looking at the top 20 listings that ranked for personal injury lawyers in a major city in the USA, I found eight that had fake reviews (40 percent). Fake listingsThe most common practice for attorneys who want to rank in several cities is to create listings at virtual offices. When these are reported, Google has been pretty good at removing them. However, attorneys (and their marketing companies) are getting smart at this stuff and have found ways to trick Google My Business support into thinking their fake locations are real locations. These are also clearly false, or at least misleading, communications about the lawyer’s’ services — a clear violation of attorney ethics rules. Fake photosI have experienced this one many times. An attorney will submit photos on their listing that “prove” they exist there, even though the address belongs to a virtual office service provider. These photos are often: • photoshopped. I actually visited an office recently that an attorney was using for a listing on Google. The photos of the signs that he posted did not exist there in real life. So he was willing to actually show up at the office and tape signs to the wall just to “show” Google that he is really at that location. There is a word we use in my circles to describe this type of thing — and it’s called lying. As business author Stephen Covey says:
Using other attorneys’ addressesThis is another tactic I’m seeing on the rise in the attorney world. One attorney will get another attorney to accept the postcard from Google My Business so they can get an “address” in that town. Usually, they aren’t competition and practice different types of law, so there isn’t any negative impact on either party. This is also against the guidelines, and when caught, will be removed by Google. I’m seeing more and more videos being used as evidence on the Google My Business forum to help prove businesses don’t exist at the address they are using. User Garth O’Brien posted another clever idea as a comment on an article by Mockingbird Marketing:
Keyword stuffingThe final tactic I see being used frequently is keyword stuffing. It’s an old trick that still works well. If you want to rank higher on Google, just shove “Best Attorney Ever City Name” into your business name field in Google My Business. The problem is that Google will remove the keywords when they catch you. I have also seen them recently suspend a listing for an attorney who wouldn’t stop doing it. Currently, this guy has no ability to edit or control his listing on Google. SummaryIf you are sick of the spam you see in the legal industry, please to continue to report it on the Google My Business forum. I urge you not to let these people get away with the tactics they are using. Also, no matter how tempting it is — never join them! Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here. About The AuthorJoy Hawkins is a Local SEO expert who is a Google My Business Top Contributor. She regularly contributes to many online communities in the Local SEO world, including the Google My Business forum (Top Contributor), the Local Search Forum (Top Contributor), and the Local University Forum (Moderator). She is also a contributor to the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Joy is the owner of Sterling Sky in Canada and is the author of the Expert's Guide to Local SEO, which is an advanced training manual for people wanting a detailed look at what it takes to succeed in the Local SEO space. Reference source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2jxXNf0 Google has added an audiobook option to its book search feature. Now, if you search for a specific book title, the Google book search feature includes an “Audiobook” button under the “Get Book” tab that will display different audiobook platforms offering the title. The book search update was announced via the following tweet:
To actually listen to the audiobook, users must select their preferred audiobook app. About The AuthorAmy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles. See more source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2j4WBQJ Back in 2015, we published an article entitled ‘How do I get sitelinks to appear in my site’s search results?’ which looked at how to get the hallowed set of additional links which can appear beneath your website’s SERP listing, known as ‘sitelinks’. At the time of publication, this was all up-to-the-minute, cutting-edge information. However, since then, Google has made a change to the way that Search Console handles sitelinks, making our invaluable words of wisdom sadly outdated. As a result, we’ve written up this refreshed and revised guide containing everything you need to know about sitelinks and how you can give yourself the best chance of getting them. What are sitelinks?As I hinted at in the introduction just now, sitelinks are additional links which appear beneath the main URL for a brand or publisher when you search for it on Google. They deep link to other pages within your site, and are designed by Google to “help users navigate your site”. N.B.: These are not to be confused with sitelink extensions in Google AdWords, which are very similar but appear in AdWords ads. AdWords users have full control over whether these links appear and what they contain, unlike organic links – as we’ll cover in just a moment. In some cases, sitelinks will also appear with a handy searchbox which lets the user search within your site directly from the SERP. Here’s what the sitelinks for Search Engine Watch look like: Sadly, no searchbox as of yet. Right away you can see that these are a mixture of category pages, static pages within our site, and the odd article. A couple of these are links we would choose to feature – the SEO and PPC categories are key sections of our site – but others are decidedly not: Online Marketing Guides, for example, is a static page from nearly two years ago which links to articles on search engines of different kinds. The reason for this is that Google pulls in sitelinks automatically, rather than letting the publisher choose what they want to feature. Sitelinks can be a little bit of a double-edged sword in this regard: even if you can get Google to display them, they might not necessarily be the links you would have chosen to display. But having sitelinks appear under your search result is still a positive thing overall. Here’s why: They give your brand more SERP real estateYou can get up to six sitelinks for your SERP listing, plus a searchbox if you can wrangle one. On desktop, this means that four or five times as much SERP space is given over to your listing, while on mobile, a sitelinked listing can take up the entire screen. This has the benefit of further pushing down any irrelevant or unwanted results, news articles or social mentions for your site – as well as any competitor results that might appear – and makes users more likely to click on your website rather than another result about you. Based on the statistic that the first three results in search account for nearly 55% of all clicks, Blogging Wizard calculated that having sitelinks could boost click-through rate for the top result by around 20%. They give the user more options for navigating your siteUsers searching for your site on Google might not necessarily want to land on your homepage. Sitelinks on the SERP provide them with a direct link to other parts of your site which might be more relevant to them, or encourage them to explore sections that they might not have known about. If your SERP result has a quick search bar, they can use it to navigate directly to the page they’re looking for, saving them a step in the user journey. They direct traffic to other (possibly under-served) areas of your siteHopefully your website is laid out in a way that allows users to easily find the content or pages that you want to promote. But even then, they are unlikely to be as visible or straightforward to click through to as a link on the SERP. Sitelinks have the benefit of distributing organic search traffic that would normally be concentrated on your homepage across other areas of your site. However, one side effect of this that is that these pages will effectively become landing pages for your site, and so you should bear in mind that a lot of people might be forming their first impression of your site from these pages. True, anyone can click a link to a part of your site other than the homepage and land on your site that way, but these links are present on Google, and you can guarantee that a certain percentage of users are clicking them to get to your site. So make sure they look their best! What Google changed about sitelinksUp until October 2016, Google had one feature which allowed site owners a small modicum of control over which pages could be displayed as sitelinks for their website. Google Search Console previously had an option to ‘demote’ sitelinks, in which site owners could specify any URL they particularly didn’t want to appear as a sitelink. Google said that while it couldn’t guarantee the page would never appear, it would “get the hint”. But late last year, Google Webmasters made the announcement that, “after some discussion & analysis”, they would be removing the Demote Sitelinks setting in Search Console. They elaborated,
In other words – we believe we have the ability to display the most relevant sitelinks for the user, without your input! Google did also offer some insight into how site owners can influence the sitelinks that appear for their website, saying:
They followed this up with a few best practice tips to help improve the quality of sitelinks for your website. So, I know you’re dying for me to get to the good bit already: What can you do to make sitelinks, and more importantly the right sitelinks, appear for your website? How can I get sitelinks for my website?Overall, the best practice advice for how to get sitelinks to appear for your website boils down to having a high-quality site which Google can crawl easily. Google itself mentions in the excerpt above that the “structure of your site” needs to allow its algorithms to find good sitelinks, or it won’t display them. Luckily, the steps you can take to improve your chances of getting sitelinks are all things that will improve your overall SEO, and make your website easier to navigate for visitors. You may find that you’re already doing several of them. Rank #1 for your brand name in search resultsThis one might seem like a no-brainer to some, but the most basic prerequisite for getting sitelinks is that you be the top ranked search result when someone searches for your brand or website name. Google doesn’t award sitelinks to the second, third, fourth or other lower-down SERP rankings. For example, if I search for Wired magazine from the UK, the UK publication – wired.co.uk – is the one that ranks top for its brand name and gets sitelinks, while its US site, wired.com, ranks lower down. If you’re struggling to rank #1 for your brand name among other websites with a similar or the same name, a rebrand to a more unique name or URL might give you a better chance of getting to the top. Build and submit an XML sitemapA sitemap is a lot like what it sounds like: a ‘map’ of your website which lists every page on the site, which can be designed for users or for search engines, in both cases to help them navigate the site. In this case, we’re talking about a file hosted on your website’s server which tells search engines about the organization of your site’s content, and allow search spiders to more intelligently crawl your site. Google Search Console Help Center has a set of instructions that you can follow on how to build and submit a sitemap. If you have a WordPress site, though, you can sit back and relax as a sitemap is already automatically generated and submitted to search engines for you. Other steps that you can take that will allow search engines to crawl your site more quickly and accurately:
Home > Clothing > Women’s Clothing > Accessories > Handbags If you have any legacy structures within your site that make navigation obscure or overly complicated, now might be the time to overhaul them.
Whew! That was a lot of points, but as I say, the steps you can take to have the best chance of getting sitelinks are mostly just good overall SEO practices, and you should be doing most of them anyway. Bear in mind that there’s no still guarantee sitelinks will appear after you do this, but you’ll be in a much better position to get them. How can I get a searchbox to appear with my sitelinks?All of this advice so far has dealt purely with how to get sitelinks to appear for your website, but as I’ve mentioned, some lucky websites are also awarded with a handy searchbox which allows users to search your site directly from the SERP. Is there anything you can do to influence whether or not this searchbox appears for your site? To an extent, yes. While whether or not you get a sitebox at all is still at the mercy of Google, once you have one, it’s possible to configure it to use your site’s internal search engine to search your site (instead of Google, which is the default). Google Developers has a Sitelinks Searchbox page which details how you can use structured data markup to implement a searchbox that uses your website’s own search engine. The jury’s out on whether implementing this will increase your likelihood of getting a searchbox to begin with (if you’ve got any data on this either way, it’d be interesting to know!). But if for some reason you want to make sure that your brand’s search result doesn’t come with a searchbox attached, there’s a way to prevent that. Simply add the following meta tag to your site’s homepage:
So there you have it: everything you need to know about how to maximize your chances of getting sitelinks. In short, have a quality website, follow SEO best practices, and lay out the welcome mat for search spiders. Rebecca Sentance is the Deputy Editor at ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. Want to stay on top of the latest search trends?Get top insights and news from our search experts. Related readingOptimizing images to rank well in search is a must for an increasingly visual web: a good logo or some eye-catching graphics can be as effective at attracting visitors to your website as your written content. But even if you're highly familiar with optimizing written content for search, you may not know where to begin with images. Here's how to ensure your images rank well in search. Keyword research is not easy. Every SEO has done it, but few will ever master it completely. In this guide we go beyond raw search volume data to metrics that will help you choose the keywords that deliver the best ROI for you right now. Analytics and reporting are a critical part of any SEO campaign, and while Google Analytics is a great place to start, it most certainly shouldn't be where you stop. In this post, we'll cover some of the best free and paid tools available for SEO reporting and analytics. If you're still optimizing for "keyword strings", you're not alone. But the industry is evolving towards a different tactic that helps you to get to grips with your niche and create great-quality content: keyword clustering. So what is it, and how should you go about using it? See more source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2AKiMpV When it comes to SEO, it can be hard to know where to start — and it is easy to waste a lot of time and effort on activities that are going to deliver little in the way of returns. This is not a new problem, and it is as true with traditional marketing tactics as it is with modern digital tactics. Fortunately, there are business and marketing methodologies that exist to simplify marketing planning. And one of our favorites at Bowler Hat is the SWOT Analysis. In this post, I am going to detail how you can use the time-proven SWOT Analysis to focus your efforts and improve your SEO. SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and ThreatsA SWOT analysis covers four key areas: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This is a true back-to-basics approach you can use to understand where you currently are in regard to optimizing your website and improving your SEO. This is achieved through a simple grid system that has four panels, two rows and two columns. The top row outlines strengths and weaknesses, which are usually internal to the business. The bottom row has the opportunities and threats, which are typically from external sources. The first column, with strengths and opportunities, details factors that should be helpful in achieving your objective. The second column has the weaknesses and threats which are harmful to achieving your objective. In an ideal world, your SEO SWOT will build on your digital marketing strategy so you will have all your strategic ducks in a row, and SOSTAC is your friend here. SEO SWOT AnalysisTo use a SWOT analysis for SEO, we have to look at a business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats from an SEO perspective. To help you put this into play, let us consider the following fictional business: Bob’s Widgets. Bob’s Widgets Bob’s Widgets has a WordPress website and is a true widget industry expert. Bob’s Widgets can serve users from their local store in Birmingham, UK, but the big win is targeting people looking to buy widgets online. Bob does not show up in the local results when users search with a local intent. And while Bob is publishing some useful, informative content on a weekly basis, this content does not rank on the first page and receives very little traffic from search engines. Some competitor content does rank on the first page, but it is simply not in the same class as the content published by Bob and his team. Bob’s Widgets currently has some SEO software that is reporting some technical issues, but currently, there is no plan in place to improve organic search results. The site is also not well-optimized beyond the home page and major service pages. There is currently no SEO plugin in place for the WordPress CMS, and the SEO software is reporting some duplicate content. Bob has identified the important commercial keywords and currently ranks around the bottom of page 2 for these terms. Bob’s two main competitors rank around the top 5, with competition from Wikipedia, Amazon and eBay filling out the remaining spaces. There is some search content around the problems that Bob’s Widgets solve, and often these searches show SERP features like featured snippets and “people also ask” results. Bob’s Widgets has been going for nearly 15 years, yet far newer companies are starting to show up on the front page of results. Comparing these businesses, we see that although newer, they have more authority metrics than Bob’s Widgets. It appears they are actively engaged in improving their SEO. The website does generate some inquiries, but Bob has no idea what sources of traffic are working currently. Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
This would all be detailed in your SWOT chart as follows: With this knowledge in place, we can now work on putting a plan together. SEO action planThis simple analysis helps provide an action plan of what our focus areas are and helps define the key elements of the SEO strategy for Bob’s Widgets going forward. In the example above, Bob is publishing content and has an OK site. We just need to get the basic optimization dialed in:
When we are looking at SEO action plans at Bowler Hat, we tend to put these into a spreadsheet with a few other figures to allow us to prioritize our work. Typically, we want to consider difficulty, time and benefit to order the tasks. Clearly, some of these jobs above will not set the world on fire but should be resolved to create a solid platform. It makes sense to get these out of the way first and then focus on the long-term tasks. SEO SWOT questionsThe following questions will help you put this into action for your business — if you can’t answer some of these questions, then this also highlights more weaknesses. SEO Strengths Strengths are an internal factor and are typically the easiest thing to detail, so we start here.
SEO Weaknesses Weaknesses are again internal, and determining weaknesses is not so easy. You will have to be honest. Smart competitors will target your weaknesses, so you must identify them as opportunities for improving your SEO.
SEO Opportunities Your SEO opportunities are born out of the strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are areas to build upon. Weaknesses are areas to be explored.
SEO Threats Threats are the hardest element and need to be based on an understanding of your own weaknesses and your competitors’ strengths. This also needs a critical appraisal of how search engine results are changing in ways that could impact your business.
Maximizing your SEO resultsOften, the most difficult element of an SEO campaign is knowing where to focus your efforts. By utilizing a SWOT Analysis, you can quickly and easily direct your efforts where they will have the most impact. I would love to hear from any of you that have put a SWOT to work to focus your SEO efforts! Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here. About The AuthorMarcus Miller is an experienced SEO and PPC consultant based in Birmingham, UK. Marcus focuses on strategy, audits, local SEO, technical SEO, PPC and just generally helping businesses dominate search and social. Marcus is managing director of the UK SEO and digital marketing company Bowler Hat and also runs wArmour aka WordPress Armour which focuses on helping WordPress owners get their security, SEO and site maintenance dialled in without breaking the bank. See more source : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2AoO9FO
Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here. Origin soruce : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2BxtltP Today’s Google doodle is a callout to British horticulturist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll. Google says that Jekyll was born on this date 174 years ago in London and spent most of her life in Surrey, England, planting enchanting gardens. “As a student, she took inspiration from the landscapes of English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner, capturing the seasons, the light, the textures, and the hues of every growing thing on her canvases,” writes the Google doodle team on the doodle blog, “Jekyll brought that painterly sensibility to her life’s work, designing about 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the US.” Leading to a search for “Gertrude Jekyll,” the doodle was designed by British artist Ben Lewis Giles. If you look closely at the image, you’ll notice Jekyll standing on the left, watching her garden grow. Google also shared four of Giles’ preliminary artworks that led to today’s final design: The doodle is currently posted on Google’s home page in the US and the United Kingdom, along with a handful of other countries, including Canada, Hungary, Iceland, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Cuba. About The AuthorAmy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles. Source link : Originally from Marketing Online Tip - Feed http://ift.tt/2zBx73R |
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