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Facebook Showcase Video Ads

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore Facebook Showcase video ads and fan subscriptions with special guests Andrea Vahl and Owen Video. Watch the

The post Facebook Showcase Video Ads appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 7: Measuring, Prioritizing, & Executing SEO

Posted by BritneyMuller

It's finally here, for your review and feedback: Chapter 7 of the new Beginner's Guide to SEO, the last chapter. We cap off the guide with advice on how to measure, prioritize, and execute on your SEO. And if you missed them, check out the drafts of our outline, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, and Chapter Six for your reading pleasure. As always, let us know what you think of Chapter 7 in the comments!

Set yourself up for success.

They say if you can measure something, you can improve it.

In SEO, it’s no different. Professional SEOs track everything from rankings and conversions to lost links and more to help prove the value of SEO. Measuring the impact of your work and ongoing refinement is critical to your SEO success, client retention, and perceived value.

It also helps you pivot your priorities when something isn’t working.

Start with the end in mind

While it’s common to have multiple goals (both macro and micro), establishing one specific primary end goal is essential.

The only way to know what a website’s primary end goal should be is to have a strong understanding of the website’s goals and/or client needs. Good client questions are not only helpful in strategically directing your efforts, but they also show that you care.

Client question examples:

Can you give us a brief history of your company?

What is the monetary value of a newly qualified lead?

What are your most profitable services/products (in order)?

Keep the following tips in mind while establishing a website’s primary goal, additional goals, and benchmarks:

Goal setting tips

Measurable: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Be specific: Don’t let vague industry marketing jargon water down your goals.

Share your goals: Studies have shown that writing down and sharing your goals with others boosts your chances of achieving them.

Measuring

Now that you’ve set your primary goal, evaluate which additional metrics could help support your site in reaching its end goal. Measuring additional (applicable) benchmarks can help you keep a better pulse on current site health and progress.

Engagement metrics

How are people behaving once they reach your site? That’s the question that engagement metrics seek to answer. Some of the most popular metrics for measuring how people engage with your content include:

Conversion rate - The number of conversions (for a single desired action/goal) divided by the number of unique visits. A conversion rate can be applied to anything, from an email signup to a purchase to account creation. Knowing your conversion rate can help you gauge the return on investment (ROI) your website traffic might deliver.

In Google Analytics, you can set up goals to measure how well your site accomplishes its objectives. If your objective for a page is a form fill, you can set that up as a goal. When site visitors accomplish the task, you’ll be able to see it in your reports.

Time on page - How long did people spend on your page? If you have a 2,000-word blog post that visitors are only spending an average of 10 seconds on, the chances are slim that this content is being consumed (unless they’re a mega-speed reader). However, if a URL has a low time on page, that’s not necessarily bad either. Consider the intent of the page. For example, it’s normal for “Contact Us” pages to have a low average time on page.

Pages per visit - Was the goal of your page to keep readers engaged and take them to a next step? If so, then pages per visit can be a valuable engagement metric. If the goal of your page is independent of other pages on your site (ex: visitor came, got what they needed, then left), then low pages per visit are okay.

Bounce rate - “Bounced” sessions indicate that a searcher visited the page and left without browsing your site any further. Many people try to lower this metric because they believe it’s tied to website quality, but it actually tells us very little about a user’s experience. We’ve seen cases of bounce rate spiking for redesigned restaurant websites that are doing better than ever. Further investigation discovered that people were simply coming to find business hours, menus, or an address, then bouncing with the intention of visiting the restaurant in person. A better metric to gauge page/site quality is scroll depth.

Scroll depth - This measures how far visitors scroll down individual webpages. Are visitors reaching your important content? If not, test different ways of providing the most important content higher up on your page, such as multimedia, contact forms, and so on. Also consider the quality of your content. Are you omitting needless words? Is it enticing for the visitor to continue down the page? Scroll depth tracking can be set up in your Google Analytics.

Search traffic

Ranking is a valuable SEO metric, but measuring your site’s organic performance can’t stop there. The goal of showing up in search is to be chosen by searchers as the answer to their query. If you’re ranking but not getting any traffic, you have a problem.

But how do you even determine how much traffic your site is getting from search? One of the most precise ways to do this is with Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics to uncover traffic insights

Google Analytics (GA) is bursting at the seams with data — so much so that it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to look. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather a general guide to some of the traffic data you can glean from this free tool.

Isolate organic traffic - GA allows you to view traffic to your site by channel. This will mitigate any scares caused by changes to another channel (ex: total traffic dropped because a paid campaign was halted, but organic traffic remained steady).

Traffic to your site over time - GA allows you to view total sessions/users/pageviews to your site over a specified date range, as well as compare two separate ranges.

How many visits a particular page has received - Site Content reports in GA are great for evaluating the performance of a particular page — for example, how many unique visitors it received within a given date range.

Traffic from a specified campaign - You can use UTM (urchin tracking module) codes for better attribution. Designate the source, medium, and campaign, then append the codes to the end of your URLs. When people start clicking on your UTM-code links, that data will start to populate in GA’s “campaigns” report.

Click-through rate (CTR) - Your CTR from search results to a particular page (meaning the percent of people that clicked your page from search results) can provide insights on how well you’ve optimized your page title and meta description. You can find this data in Google Search Console, a free Google tool.

In addition, Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy tracking pixels to your website without having to modify the code. This makes it much easier to track specific triggers or activity on a website.

Additional common SEO metrics

Domain Authority & Page Authority (DA/PA) - Moz’s proprietary authority metrics provide powerful insights at a glance and are best used as benchmarks relative to your competitors’ Domain Authority and Page Authority.

Keyword rankings - A website’s ranking position for desired keywords. This should also include SERP feature data, like featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes that you’re ranking for. Try to avoid vanity metrics, such as rankings for competitive keywords that are desirable but often too vague and don’t convert as well as longer-tail keywords.

Number of backlinks - Total number of links pointing to your website or the number of unique linking root domains (meaning one per unique website, as websites often link out to other websites multiple times). While these are both common link metrics, we encourage you to look more closely at the quality of backlinks and linking root domains your site has.

How to track these metrics

There are lots of different tools available for keeping track of your site’s position in SERPs, site crawl health, SERP features, and link metrics, such as Moz Pro and STAT.

The Moz and STAT APIs (among other tools) can also be pulled into Google Sheets or other customizable dashboard platforms for clients and quick at-a-glance SEO check-ins. This also allows you to provide more refined views of only the metrics you care about.

Dashboard tools like Data Studio, Tableau, and PowerBI can also help to create interactive data visualizations.

Evaluating a site’s health with an SEO website audit

By having an understanding of certain aspects of your website — its current position in search, how searchers are interacting with it, how it’s performing, the quality of its content, its overall structure, and so on — you’ll be able to better uncover SEO opportunities. Leveraging the search engines’ own tools can help surface those opportunities, as well as potential issues:

Google Search Console - If you haven’t already, sign up for a free Google Search Console (GSC) account and verify your website(s). GSC is full of actionable reports you can use to detect website errors, opportunities, and user engagement.

Bing Webmaster Tools - Bing Webmaster Tools has similar functionality to GSC. Among other things, it shows you how your site is performing in Bing and opportunities for improvement.

Lighthouse Audit - Google’s automated tool for measuring a website’s performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, and more. This data improves your understanding of how a website is performing. Gain specific speed and accessibility insights for a website here.

PageSpeed Insights - Provides website performance insights using Lighthouse and Chrome User Experience Report data from real user measurement (RUM) when available.

Structured Data Testing Tool - Validates that a website is using schema markup (structured data) properly.

Mobile-Friendly Test - Evaluates how easily a user can navigate your website on a mobile device.

Web.dev - Surfaces website improvement insights using Lighthouse and provides the ability to track progress over time.

Tools for web devs and SEOs - Google often provides new tools for web developers and SEOs alike, so keep an eye on any new releases here.

While we don’t have room to cover every SEO audit check you should perform in this guide, we do offer an in-depth Technical SEO Site Audit course for more info. When auditing your site, keep the following in mind:

Crawlability: Are your primary web pages crawlable by search engines, or are you accidentally blocking Googlebot or Bingbot via your robots.txt file? Does the website have an accurate sitemap.xml file in place to help direct crawlers to your primary pages?

Indexed pages: Can your primary pages be found using Google? Doing a site:yoursite.com OR site:yoursite.com/specific-page check in Google can help answer this question. If you notice some are missing, check to make sure a meta robots=noindex tag isn’t excluding pages that should be indexed and found in search results.

Check page titles & meta descriptions: Do your titles and meta descriptions do a good job of summarizing the content of each page? How are their CTRs in search results, according to Google Search Console? Are they written in a way that entices searchers to click your result over the other ranking URLs? Which pages could be improved? Site-wide crawls are essential for discovering on-page and technical SEO opportunities.

Page speed: How does your website perform on mobile devices and in Lighthouse? Which images could be compressed to improve load time?

Content quality: How well does the current content of the website meet the target market’s needs? Is the content 10X better than other ranking websites’ content? If not, what could you do better? Think about things like richer content, multimedia, PDFs, guides, audio content, and more.

Pro tip: Website pruning!

Removing thin, old, low-quality, or rarely visited pages from your site can help improve your website’s perceived quality. Performing a content audit will help you discover these pruning opportunities. Three primary ways to prune pages include:

Delete the page (4XX): Use when a page adds no value (ex: traffic, links) and/or is outdated.

Redirect (3XX): Redirect the URLs of pages you’re pruning when you want to preserve the value they add to your site, such as inbound links to that old URL.

NoIndex: Use this when you want the page to remain on your site but be removed from the index.

Keyword research and competitive website analysis (performing audits on your competitors’ websites) can also provide rich insights on opportunities for your own website.

For example:

Which keywords are competitors ranking on page 1 for, but your website isn’t?

Which keywords is your website ranking on page 1 for that also have a featured snippet? You might be able to provide better content and take over that snippet.

Which websites link to more than one of your competitors, but not to your website?

Discovering website content and performance opportunities will help devise a more data-driven SEO plan of attack! Keep an ongoing list in order to prioritize your tasks effectively.

Prioritizing your SEO fixes

In order to prioritize SEO fixes effectively, it’s essential to first have specific, agreed-upon goals established between you and your client.

While there are a million different ways you could prioritize SEO, we suggest you rank them in terms of importance and urgency. Which fixes could provide the most ROI for a website and help support your agreed-upon goals?

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, developed a handy time management grid that can ease the burden of prioritization:

Source: Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Putting out small, urgent SEO fires might feel most effective in the short term, but this often leads to neglecting non-urgent important fixes. The not urgent & important items are ultimately what often move the needle for a website’s SEO. Don’t put these off.

SEO planning & execution

“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” - Morris Chang

Much of your success depends on effectively mapping out and scheduling your SEO tasks. You can use free tools like Google Sheets to plan out your SEO execution (we have a free template here), but you can use whatever method works best for you. Some people prefer to schedule out their SEO tasks in their Google Calendar, in a kanban or scrum board, or in a daily planner.

Use what works for you and stick to it.

Measuring your progress along the way via the metrics mentioned above will help you monitor your effectiveness and allow you to pivot your SEO efforts when something isn’t working. Say, for example, you changed a primary page’s title and meta description, only to notice that the CTR for that page decreased. Perhaps you changed it to something too vague or strayed too far from the on-page topic — it might be good to try a different approach. Keeping an eye on drops in rankings, CTRs, organic traffic, and conversions can help you manage hiccups like this early, before they become a bigger problem.

Communication is essential for SEO client longevity

Many SEO fixes are implemented without being noticeable to a client (or user). This is why it’s essential to employ good communication skills around your SEO plan, the time frame in which you’re working, and your benchmark metrics, as well as frequent check-ins and reports.

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Meet 4 Female CMOs Paving The Way For The Future of Marketing

The modern CMO must be both right- and left-brained. It’s not enough to be creative — you have to be analytical, too. Man or woman—it doesn’t matter: the CMO of the digital world has to be good at everything. Ground-breaking campaigns only matter if they yield a positive ROI.

Here are four women who show how a strong CMO fuses the creative with the analytical to produce exceptional results for their brands.

1. Deloitte Digital, Alicia Hatch

Alicia Hatch leads Deloitte Digital’s marketing efforts and has spearheaded the billion-dollar Halo franchise’s marketing efforts.

At Deloitte Digital, however, she’s more than just a creative thinker—she has positioned Deloitte Digital to disrupt the advertising world. In Hatch’s words: “We’re making creativity more important than ever by tying it more closely to the heart of business strategy and industry insights.”

Hatch has launched numerous initiatives across Deloitte’s content and commerce systems as well. She was a huge part of John Hancock’s decision to switch over to Deloitte from Hill Holiday. When Transamerica came to Deloitte to reinvent their retirement offerings, Hatch was at the forefront. Her innovative strategy brought in an eclectic team, ranging from ethnographers to data scientists, to provide a dynamic and holistic approach.

Alicia gives the following advice for paving the future: “if you become comfortable with that gray area—the space where you know you don’t know the answer—you only have a tremendous opportunity in front of you.”

2. VMware, Robin Matlock

Robin Matlock sits at the marketing helm of VMware. Her vision is a results-driven one. “We have to facilitate a conversation that is anchored around business outcomes,” she says. ”Everything we do as marketers … is to help sellers start those conversations.”

Robin’s strategy for transformation is rooted in data. She is making a major impact by tracking engagement to improve customer experience. One of the major insights she gained from this is that leads that are touched by VMware’s marketing efforts convert at double the rate as leads only touched by sales.

In addition, she specializes in running a highly data-driven global marketing team. What does engagement mean for vertical markets? Who are the target personas? What actions are they taking?

It’s not enough to say if someone from Firm X watched an educational video, Matlock needs to know how they watched it. Did they sit through it from start to finish? Did they skip around? Did they promote it via social media? To really transform a pipeline, Matlock believes you need to get granular to get accurate.

3. Twitter, Leslie Berland

Leslie Berland is not only the CMO of one of the world’s tech darlings, but she’s also its first CMO. Hired in 2016, she pioneered Twitter’s self-awareness campaign, an issue it hadn’t addressed in its first decade as a business.

She started the famous #SeeEverySide campaign, showcasing the multitude of ideas and perspectives across the Twitterverse. This was more than just a promotional effort — it was essential to the inner-workings at Twitter.

Fired up and ready to throw thanks to @leslieberland #SheInspiresMe #BossBabe #SeeEverySide pic.twitter.com/LGV0cepoE3

— Erin (Twomey) Turner (@erinleeturner) August 3, 2017

Berland spoke on this: “That was very anchoring and grounding for us as a company. And it is where our product strategy is focused—showing what’s happening, what matters, news and information as it unfolds.”

Perhaps the most iconic part of this campaign was when they posted the single word “The” to their page and allowed users to run with it from there.

Among her many skills, she has an uncanny ability to focus on both the inner- and outer-facing operations at Twitter—so much so that she is now the acting head of HR. Her title “CMO and Head of People” is not only a clever variation on the archaic “human resources” — it’s part of her strategy to build a better enterprise.

4. SoFi, Joanne Bradford

It’s tough referring to SoFi as “startup” after 2015 when it raised a cool billion in funds and recruited veteran marketing executive Joanne Bradford.

Bradford, who served Microsoft, Yahoo, and Pinterest, among others, is another of the rare right brain/left-brain CMOs on this list. For starters, prior to serving as CMO, she was their COO—which is a testament to her analytical and leadership skills.

Her talents were critical in scaling and growth, where she has been instrumental in securing new partnerships and growing their member base. Engagement and leveraging Member Success programs were her bread and butter in these efforts, and the results are staggering. In her time with SoFi, the company has exceeded half a million members.

Perhaps the most iconic story about Bradford was locking down the first overtime Super Bowl ad ever. Understanding the value of awareness, she created the ad on a shoestring budget of $10,000 and filmed it in under a week. Due to her efforts, SoFi’s brand awareness has grown more than 10-fold in just three years.

A Dynamic Future for Marketing

Competition in the marketing space is fiercer than ever as the field becomes more sophisticated and analytical. That’s not to discount creativity, however—it’s as essential as ever before. But in the 21st century, creativity has to be fueled by data (and vice versa) in order to create the perfect storm for business growth and development.

This mantra is well understood by these four women, who are paving the way for the future of marketing. The smart marketer will make sure to follow their lead, coupling left- and right-brain innovation to deliver dynamic, powerful results for their brands.

The post Meet 4 Female CMOs Paving The Way For The Future of Marketing appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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Affordable, Stat-Based Retail Strategy For Your Agency’s Clients

Posted by MiriamEllis

Retail clients are battling tough economics offline and tough competitors online. They need every bit of help your agency can give them. 

I was heartened when 75 percent of the 1,400+ respondents to the Moz State of Local SEO Industry Report 2019 shared that they contribute to offline strategy recommendations either frequently or at least some of the time. I can’t think of a market where good and relatively inexpensive experiments are more needed than in embattled retail. The ripple effect of a single new idea, offered up generously, can spread out to encompass new revenue streams for the client and new levels of retention for your agency.

And that’s why win-win seemed written all over three statistics from a 2018 Yes Marketing retail survey when I read it because they speak to motivating about one quarter to half of 1,000 polled customers without going to any extreme expense. Take a look:

I highly recommend downloading Yes Marketing’s complete survey which is chock-full of great data, but today, let’s look at just three valuable stats from it to come up with an actionable strategy you can gift your offline retail clients at your next meeting.

Getting it right: A little market near me

For the past 16 years, I’ve been observing the local business scene with a combination of professional scrutiny and personal regard. I’m inspired by businesses that open and thrive and am saddened by those that open and close.

Right now, I’m especially intrigued by a very small, independently-owned grocery store which set up shop last year in what I’ll lovingly describe as a rural, half-a-horse town not far from me. This locale has a single main street with less than 20 businesses on it, but I’m predicting the shop’s ultimate success based on several factors. A strong one is that the community is flanked by several much larger towns with lots of through traffic and the market is several miles from any competitor. But other factors which match point-for-point with the data in the Yes Marketing survey make me feel especially confident that this small business is going to “get it right”. 

Encourage your retail clients to explore the following tips.

1) The store is visually appealing

43–58 percent of Yes Marketing’s surveyed retail customers say they’d be motivated to shop with a retailer who has cool product displays, murals, etc. Retail shoppers of all ages are seeking appealing experiences.

At the market near me, there are many things going on in its favor. The building is historic on the outside and full of natural light on this inside, and the staff sets up creative displays, such as all of the ingredients you need to make a hearty winter soup gathered up on a vintage table. The Instagram crowd can have selfie fun here, and more mature customers will appreciate the aesthetic simplicity of this uncluttered, human-scale shopping experience.

For your retail clients, it won’t break the bank to become more visually appealing. Design cues are everywhere!

Share these suggestions with a worthy client:

Basic cleanliness is the starting point

This is an old survey, but I think we’re safe to say that at least 45 percent of retail customers are still put off by dirty premises — especially restrooms. Janitorial duties are already built into the budget of most businesses and only need to be accomplished properly. I continuously notice how many reviewers proclaim the word “clean” when a business deserves it.

Inspiration is affordable

Whatever employees are already being paid is the cost of engaging them to lend their creativity to creating merchandise displays that draw attention and/or solve problems. My hearty winter soup example is one idea (complete with boxed broth, pasta, veggies, bowls, and cookware). 

For your retail client? It might be everything a consumer needs to recover from a cold (medicine, citrus fruit, electric blanket, herbal tea, tissue, a paperback, a sympathetic stuffed animal, etc.). Or everything one needs to winterize a car, take a trip to a beach, build a beautiful window box, or pamper a pet. Retailers can inexpensively encourage the hidden artistic talents in staff.

Feeling stuck? The Internet is full of free retail display tips, design magazines cost a few bucks, and your clients’ cable bills already cover a subscription to channels like HGTV and the DIY network that trade on style. A client who knows that interior designers are all using grey-and-white palettes and that one TV ad after another features women wearing denim blue with aspen yellow right now is well on their way to catching customers’ eyes.

Aspiring artists live near your client and need work

The national average cost to have a large wall mural professionally painted is about $8,000, with much less expensive options available. Some retailers even hold contests surrounding logo design, and an artist near your client may work quite inexpensively if they are trying to build up their portfolio. I can’t predict how long the Instagram mural trend will last, but wall art has been a crowd-pleaser since Paleolithic times. Any shopper who stops to snap a photo of themselves has been brought in close proximity to your front door.

I pulled this word cloud out of the reviews of the little grocery store:

While your clients’ industries and aesthetics will vary, tell them they can aim for a similar, positive response from at least 49 percent of their customers with a little more care put into the shopping environment.

2) The store offers additional services beyond the sale of products

19–40 percent of survey respondents are influenced by value-adds. Doubtless, you’ve seen the TV commercials in which banks double as coffee houses to appeal to the young, and small hardware chains emphasize staff expertise over loneliness in a warehouse. That’s what this is all about, and it can be done at a smaller scale, without overly-strapping your retail clients.

At the market near me, reviews like this are coming in:

The market has worked out a very economic arrangement with a massage therapist, who can build up their clientele out of the deal, so it’s a win for everybody.

For your retail clients, sharing these examples could inspire appealing added services:

A small pet food chain is offering health consults in addition to selling merchandise.

Even small clothing boutiques can provide personal styling sessions.

I know of a particular auto parts store where salespeople show you how to change windshield wipers and headlight bulbs for free and it brings our household back almost every time..

It’s common for shops like toy stores to have kids’ birthday clubs, but sophisticated businesses offer loyalty programs, too

I wrote about offering shipping last year as an additional service with self-evident value in this age of convenience.

The cost of these efforts is either the salary of an employee, nominal or free.

3) The store hosts local events

20–36 percent of customers feel the appeal of retailers becoming destinations for things to learn and do. Coincidentally, this corresponds with two of the tasks Google dubbed micro-moments a couple of years back, and while not everyone loves that terminology, we can at least agree that large numbers of people use the Internet to discover local resources.

At the market near me, they’re doing open-mic readings, and this is a trend in many cities to which Google Calendar attests:

For your clients, the last two words of that event description are key. When there’s a local wish to build community, retail businesses can lend the space and the stage. This can look like:

Any type of class, like these ones that teach how to operate an appliance or machinery, how to re-skill at something like wilderness survival, or how to cook/make things.

Any type of event, like the open mic night I’ve cited, above, or celebrations, or appearances by well-known locals such as authors, or ongoing club meetups.

Any type of special appeal, like this recycling deal gifting participants $20 off new jeans if they donate their old ones, or housing a drop-off point for light bulbs, batteries or charitable giving, or hosting the kick-off of a neighborhood cleanup with some added benefit to participants like a breakfast or discount.

Again, costs here can be quite modest and you’ll be bringing the community together under the banner of your business.

Putting it in writing

The last item on the budget for any of these ventures is whatever it costs to publicize it. For sure, your client will want:

A homepage announcement and/or one or more blog posts

Google Posts, Q&A, photos and related features

Social mentions

If the concept is large enough (or the community is small) some outreach to local news in hopes of a write-up and inclusion of local/social calendars

Link building would be great if the client can afford a reasonable investment in your services, where necessary

And, of course, be sure your client’s local business listings are accurate so that newcomers aren’t getting lost on their way to finding the cool new offering

Getting the word out about events, features, and other desirable attributes don’t have to be exorbitant, but it will put the finishing touch on ensuring a community knows the business is ready to offer the desired experience.

Seeing opportunity

Sometimes, you’ll find yourself in a client meeting and things will be a bit flat. Maybe the client has been disengaged from your contract lately, or sales have been leveling out for lack of new ideas. That’s the perfect time to put something fresh on the table, demonstrating that you’re thinking about the client’s whole picture beyond CTR and citations.

One thing that I find to be an inspiring practice for agencies is to do an audit of competitors’ reviews looking for “holes” In many communities, shopping is really dull and reviews reflect that, with few shoppers feeling genuinely excited by a particular vertical’s local offerings. Your client could be the one to change that, with a little extra attention from you.

Every possibility won’t be the perfect match for every business, but if you can help the company see a new opportunity, the few minutes spent brainstorming could benefit you both.

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Why Done is Better Than Perfect is Now a Broken and Unworkable Philosophy

Facebook’s mantra for developers has long been “Move Fast and Break Things.”

This idea of doing something, even if it’s not ideal was also adopted by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, who serves as the tech Oprah for millions of people. Her version of the slogan is “Done is Better than Perfect.”

In the startup and “personal brand” worlds, the premise of “just ship it” is dogma so universally embraced that it joins the “hustle” mantra to form the twin peaks of self-actualization.

Even acknowledged genius Seth Godin advocated for releasing work with known flaws. In his book Poke the Box, Godin urged readers to behave more like computer programmers, shipping out minimum viable products and improving them in real time. In this way, at least when he wrote the book in 2010/2011, Godin was aligned with the Facebook approach of anything goes, as long as it goes.

And in those days — just 8 or 9 years but seemingly a lifetime ago — customers were wandering around in slack-jawed wonderment, giddy about all the new innovations that improved their lives.

In 2010 alone, Facebook passed Google to become the most-visited website, making social networking fully mainstream.

The iPad was launched, creating a whole new computing category.

Foursquare got popular, kicking off the notion of location-based personalization.

Microsoft Kinect appeared for the Xbox 360, taking the “your body is the controller” trend up a level after it was created by Nintendo’s Wii.

The Apple app store took off, ushering in a whole new way to get software and media.

Netflix became the #1 app for iPhone in 2010, making portable streaming viable for all.

Groupon was Time Magazine’s #2 iPhone app for 2010, popularizing the daily deals business model.

In short, technology and customer experience advances were MASSIVE in this period, with meaningful shifts in consumer computing, connectivity, and entertainment.

And in this period, a philosophy of “Done is Better Than Perfect” may have added up. The public was justifiably blown away by the scope and scale of these advances, so if the Kinect was a little buggy or the app store was hard to figure out — whatever. It’s worth fighting the frustration to get access to something that has a fundamental impact on how you interact with others or spend time.

Today, however, the scope and scale of the advances are primarily in the “same but more” and “same, but a little better” category. Bigger TVs. Faster streaming. Some AR/VR frosting on the same, old cake. A paradox of choice at every turn. Even what is billed as “new” isn’t all that “new” these days.

And for their part, it’s vastly more difficult to shock and awe consumers today. All the amazing advances of the recent past have raised the bar again and again and again such that customer expectations are higher than ever and continue to escalate.

I vividly remember when the Taco Bell restaurant in my town went to 24-hours-a-day. It was like a magic trick performed with refried beans and a talking Chihuaha. Now, everything is 24-hours-a-day, and I couldn’t care less. I expect it now.

When Zappos popularized free, two-way shipping? We throw around the term “game-changer” with regularity, but that actually altered the fabric of e-commerce, forever. Today, most online stores offer free, two-way shipping. They can’t NOT do it, because consumers expect it.

This is the yoke of customer experience, and why CX optimization is so hard in companies. CX is one of the only elements of business where consumer expectations go up and up and up. What was a remarkable customer experience three years ago is commonplace today.

Simultaneously, the long-running economic expansion has also helped shape how and why customers buy. When times are bad, price becomes the primary criterion. But when times are good, consumers take other attributes into account when making a decision. And these days, customer experience is a driving factor in more, and more, and more purchases.

Research from Walker suggests that customer experience will be the deciding factor in a MAJORITY of B2B purchases by next year.

A research study from PwC shows that 75% of Americans say customer experience is an important factor in their buying decisions.

Further, consumers will pay up to a 16% price premium for a great experience.

And, 63% of consumers say they’d provide more, personal data in exchange for better CX.

In this present-day era, where consumers are making decisions that are significantly dictated by customer experience, how in the world do you justify putting a product or service into the marketplace that is knowingly less than great?

The whole idea of “Done is Better Than Perfect” is that speed trumps quality. But today, if you make that trade-off, you are strategically and purposefully sacrificing customer experience for nimbleness. That may accomplish corporate goals. and may help you cross some parking lot items off your next 2-week product dev sprint, but it does NOT serve the customer.

Right now — and at least until the economy turns markedly worse — customers want it ALL. They want it fast, and they want it great. To give them something less than your best because you’ve convinced yourself that okay is adequate as long as you’re moving fast is counter-cyclical at best, and ritual business suicide at worst.

The entire wheelbarrow of startup culture thinking that prioritizes progress over making the customers’ job easier has merit when consumers are genuinely delighted that your new thing finally exists (even imperfectly). But those days are long past. And thus, until further notice, it’s time to put a giant fork in “Done is Better Than Perfect” and similar claptrap, for they are well and truly past their prime.

The post Why Done is Better Than Perfect is Now a Broken and Unworkable Philosophy appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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The Definitive Guide to Instagram Affiliate Marketing

One of the ways in which influencers from all industries are trying to monetize their social media influence is through Instagram affiliate marketing. With Instagram becoming so popular globally and having an active and engaging audience, Instagram affiliate marketing is one of the top ways in which influencers can monetize their social media followings – 1...

Read More »

The post The Definitive Guide to Instagram Affiliate Marketing authored by Neal Schaffer appeared first on Neal Schaffer-Social Media Speaker, Author, Consultant, Educator and Influencer.

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8 Costly Facebook Ad Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Are you making Facebook ad mistakes that could be eating away at your marketing budget? Are your ads helping Facebook more than they’re helping your business? In this article, you’ll discover the most common mistakes made with Facebook ads and how to resolve them from top Facebook advertising experts. #1: Testing Multiple Interests in a

The post 8 Costly Facebook Ad Mistakes and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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14 SEO Predictions for 2019 & Beyond, as Told by Mozzers

Posted by TheMozTeam

With the new year in full swing and an already busy first quarter, our 2019 predictions for SEO in the new year are hopping onto the scene a little late — but fashionably so, we hope. From an explosion of SERP features to increased monetization to the key drivers of search this year, our SEO experts have consulted their crystal balls (read: access to mountains of data and in-depth analyses) and made their predictions. Read on for an exhaustive list of fourteen things to watch out for in search from our very own Dr. Pete, Britney Muller, Rob Bucci, Russ Jones, and Miriam Ellis!

1. Answers will drive search

People Also Ask boxes exploded in 2018, and featured snippets have expanded into both multifaceted and multi-snippet versions. Google wants to answer questions, it wants to answer them across as many devices as possible, and it will reward sites with succinct, well-structured answers. Focus on answers that naturally leave visitors wanting more and establish your brand and credibility. [Dr. Peter J. Meyers]

Further reading:

Content for Answers: The Inverted Pyramid - Whiteboard Friday

We Dipped Our Toes Into Double Featured Snippets

Desktop, Mobile, or Voice? (D) All of the Above - Whiteboard Friday

2. Voice search will continue to be utterly useless for optimization

Optimizing for voice search will still be no more than optimizing for featured snippets, and conversions from voice will remain a dark box. [Russ Jones]

Further reading:

The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets

Lessons from 1,000 Voice Searches (on Google Home)

How to Discover Featured Snippet Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday

How to Target Featured Snippet Opportunities - Whiteboard Friday

3. Mobile is table stakes

This is barely a prediction. If your 2019 plan is to finally figure out mobile, you're already too late. Almost all Google features are designed with mobile-first in mind, and the mobile-first index has expanded rapidly in the past few months. Get your mobile house (not to be confused with your mobile home) in order as soon as you can. [Dr. Peter J. Meyers]

Further reading:

How Does Mobile-First Indexing Work, and How Does It Impact SEO?

How and Why to Do a Mobile/Desktop Parity Audit

Internal Linking & Mobile First: Large Site Crawl Paths in 2018 & Beyond

How Mobile-First Indexing Disrupts the Link Graph

4. Further SERP feature intrusions in organic search

Expect Google to find more and more ways to replace organic with solutions that keep users on Google’s property. This includes interactive SERP features that replace, slowly but surely, many website offerings in the same way that live scores, weather, and flights have. [Russ Jones]

Further reading:

Zero-Result SERPs: Welcome to the Future We Should've Known Was Coming

What Do You Do When You Lose Organic Traffic to Google SERP Features?

Google's Walled Garden: Are We Being Pushed Out of Our Own Digital Backyards?

5. Video will dominate niches

Featured Videos, Video Carousels, and Suggested Clips (where Google targets specific content in a video) are taking over the how-to spaces. As Google tests search appliances with screens, including Home Hub, expect video to dominate instructional and DIY niches. [Dr. Peter J. Meyers]

Further reading:

YouTube SEO: Top Factors to Invest In - Whiteboard Friday

A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up and Growing Your YouTube Presence

Beyond YouTube: Video Hosting, Marketing, and Monetization Platforms, Compared

6. SERPs will become more interactive

We’ve seen the start of interactive SERPs with People Also Ask Boxes. Depending on which question you expand, two to three new questions will generate below that directly pertain to your expanded question. This real-time engagement keeps people on the SERP longer and helps Google better understand what a user is seeking. [Britney Muller]

Further reading:

Infinite "People Also Ask" Boxes: Research and SEO Opportunities

7. Local SEO: Google will continue getting up in your business — literally

Google will continue asking more and more intimate questions about your business to your customers. Does this business have gender-neutral bathrooms? Is this business accessible? What is the atmosphere like? How clean is it? What kind of lighting do they have? And so on. If Google can acquire accurate, real-world information about your business (your percentage of repeat customers via geocaching, price via transaction history, etc.) they can rely less heavily on website signals and provide more accurate results to searchers. [Britney Muller]

Further reading:

The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Taking Full Control of Your Google Knowledge Panels

How to Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

8. Business proximity-to-searcher will remain a top local ranking factor

In Moz’s recent State of Local SEO report, the majority of respondents agreed that Google’s focus on the proximity of a searcher to local businesses frequently emphasizes distance over quality in the local SERPs. I predict that we’ll continue to see this heavily weighting the results in 2019. On the one hand, hyper-localized results can be positive, as they allow a diversity of businesses to shine for a given search. On the other hand, with the exception of urgent situations, most people would prefer to see best options rather than just closest ones. [Miriam Ellis]

Further reading:

The State of Local SEO Industry Report

Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future - Whiteboard Friday

9. Local SEO: Google is going to increase monetization

Look to see more of the local and maps space monetized uniquely by Google both through Adwords and potentially new lead-gen models. This space will become more and more competitive. [Russ Jones]

Further reading:

New Research: 35% of Competitive Local Keywords Have Local Pack Ads

What Do SEOs Do When Google Removes Organic Search Traffic? - Whiteboard Friday

10. Monetization tests for voice

Google and Amazon have been moving towards voice-supported displays in hopes of better monetizing voice. It will be interesting to see their efforts to get displays in homes and how they integrate the display advertising. Bold prediction: Amazon will provide sleep-mode display ads similar to how Kindle currently displays them today. [Britney Muller]

11. Marketers will place a greater focus on the SERPs

I expect we’ll see a greater focus on the analysis of SERPs as Google does more to give people answers without them having to leave the search results. We’re seeing more and more vertical search engines like Google Jobs, Google Flights, Google Hotels, Google Shopping. We’re also seeing more in-depth content make it onto the SERP than ever in the form of featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and more. With these new developments, marketers are increasingly going to want to report on their general brand visibility within the SERPs, not just their website ranking. It’s going to be more important than ever for people to be measuring all the elements within a SERP, not just their own ranking. [Rob Bucci]

Further reading:

Mapping the Overlap of SERP Feature Suggestions

Make Sense of Your Data with These Essential Keyword Segments

12. Targeting topics will be more productive than targeting queries

2019 is going to be another year in which we see the emphasis on individual search queries start to decline, as people focus more on clusters of queries around topics. People Also Ask queries have made the importance of topics much more obvious to the SEO industry. With PAAs, Google is clearly illustrating that they think about searcher experience in terms of a searcher’s satisfaction across an entire topic, not just a specific search query. With this in mind, we can expect SEOs to more and more want to see their search queries clustered into topics so they can measure their visibility and the competitive landscape across these clusters. [Rob Bucci]

Further reading:

Build a Search Intent Dashboard to Unlock Better Opportunities

It's Time to Stop Doing On-Page SEO Like It's 2012

Using Related Topics and Semantically Connected Keywords in Your SEO - Whiteboard Friday

How to Feed a Hummingbird: Improve Your On-Page SEO with Related Topics in Moz Pro

13. Linked unstructured citations will receive increasing focus

I recently conducted a small study in which there was a 75% correlation between organic and local pack rank. Linked unstructured citations (the mention of partial or complete business information + a link on any type of relevant website) are a means of improving organic rankings which underpin local rankings. They can also serve as a non-Google dependent means of driving traffic and leads. Anything you’re not having to pay Google for will become increasingly precious. Structured citations on key local business listing platforms will remain table stakes, but competitive local businesses will need to focus on unstructured data to move the needle. [Miriam Ellis]

Further reading:

The Guide to Building Linked Unstructured Citations for Local SEO

Why Local Businesses Will Need Websites More than Ever in 2019

14. Reviews will remain a competitive difference-maker

A Google rep recently stated that about one-third of local searches are made with the intent of reading reviews. This is huge. Local businesses that acquire and maintain a good and interactive reputation on the web will have a critical advantage over brands that ignore reviews as fundamental to customer service. Competitive local businesses will earn, monitor, respond to, and analyze the sentiment of their review corpus. [Miriam Ellis]

Further reading:

Time to Act: Review Responses Just Evolved from "Extra" to "Expected"

How to Respond to the 5 Types of Google Reviews

Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO

See more local SEO predictions for 2019 by Miriam in our Q&A!

We’ve heard from Mozzers, and now we want to hear from you. What have you seen so far in 2019 that’s got your SEO Spidey senses tingling? What trends are you capitalizing on and planning for? Let us know in the comments below (and brag to friends and colleagues when your prediction comes true in the next 6–10 months). ;-)

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How to Write Instagram Captions That Improve Engagement

Do you want to improve your Instagram post engagement? Wondering how to write strong Instagram captions that move people to action? In this article, you’ll discover how to create appealing Instagram captions that clearly communicate your marketing messages and encourage people to act. Why Instagram Captions Matter for Marketers On occasion, you’ll see celebrities or

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Advanced Linkbuilding: How to Find the Absolute Best Publishers and Writers to Pitch

Posted by KristinTynski

In my last post, I explained how using network visualization tools can help you massively improve your content marketing PR/Outreach strategy —understanding which news outlets have the largest syndication networks empowers your outreach team to prioritize high-syndication publications over lower syndication publications. The result? The content you are pitching enjoys significantly more widespread link pickups.

Today, I’m going to take you a little deeper — we'll be looking at a few techniques for forming an even better understanding of the publisher syndication networks in your particular niche. I've broken this technique into two parts:

Technique One — Leveraging Buzzsumo influencer data and twitter scraping to find the most influential journalists writing about any topic

Technique Two — Leveraging the Gdelt Dataset to reveal deep story syndication networks between publishers using in-context links.

Why do this at all?

If you are interested in generating high-value links at scale, these techniques provide an undeniable competitive advantage — they help you to deeply understand how writers and news publications connect and syndicate to each other.

In our opinion at Fractl, data-driven content stories that have strong news hooks, finding writers and publications who would find the content compelling, and pitching them effectively is the single highest ROI SEO activity possible. Done correctly, it is entirely possible to generate dozens, sometimes even hundreds or thousands, of high-authority links with one or a handful of content campaigns.

Let's dive in.

Using Buzzsumo to understand journalist influencer networks on any topic

First, you want to figure out who your topc influencers are your a topic. A very handy feature of Buzzsumo is its “influencers” tool. You can locate it on the influences tab, then follow these steps:

Select only “Journalists.” This will limit the result to only the Twitter accounts of those known to be reporters and journalists of major publications. Bloggers and lower authority publishers will be excluded.

Search using a topical keyword. If it is straightforward, one or two searches should be fine. If it is more complex, create a few related queries, and collate the twitter accounts that appear in all of them. Alternatively, use the Boolean "and/or" in your search to narrow your result. It is critical to be sure your search results are returning journalists that as closely match your target criteria as possible.

Ideally, you want at least 100 results. More is generally better, so long as you are sure the results represent your target criteria well.

Once you are happy with your search result, click export to grab a CSV.

The next step is to grab all of the people each of these known journalist influencers follows — the goal is to understand which of these 100 or so influencers impacts the other 100 the most. Additionally, we want to find people outside of this group that many of these 100 follow in common.

To do so, we leveraged Twint, a handy Twitter scraper available on Github to pull all of the people each of these journalist influencers follow. Using our scraped data, we built an edge list, which allowed us to visualize the result in  Gephi.

Here is an interactive version for you to explore, and here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

This graph shows us which nodes (influencers) have the most In-Degree links. In other words: it tells us who, of our media influencers, is most followed. 

These are the top 10 nodes:

@maiasz

Radley Balko (@radleybalko) Opinion journalist, Washington Post

@johannhari101

@davidkroll

@narcomania

@milbank

@samquinones7

@felicejfreyer

@jeannewhalen

@ericbolling 

Who is the most influential?

Using the “Betweenness Centrality” score given by Gephi, we get a rough understanding of which nodes (influencers) in the network act as hubs of information transfer. Those with the highest "Betweenness Centrality" can be thought of as the “connectors” of the network. These are the top 10 influencers:

Maia Szalavitz (@maiasz) Neuroscience Journalist, VICE and TIME

Radley Balko (@radleybalko) Opinion journalist, Washington Post

Johann Hari (@johannhari101) New York Times best-selling author

David Kroll (@davidkroll) Freelance healthcare writer, Forbes Heath

Max Daly (@Narcomania) Global Drugs Editor, VICE

Dana Milbank (@milbank)Columnist, Washington Post

Sam Quinones (@samquinones7), Author

Felice Freyer (@felicejfreyer), Boston Globe Reporter, Mental health and Addiction

Jeanne Whalen (@jeannewhalen) Business Reporter, Washington Post

Eric Bolling (@ericbolling) New York Times best-selling author

@maiasz, @davidkroll, and @johannhari101 are standouts. There's considerable overlap between the winners in "In-Degree" and "Betweenness Centrality" but they are still quite different. 

What else can we learn?

The middle of the visualization holds many of the largest sized nodes. The nodes in this view are sized by "In-Degree." The large, centrally located nodes are disproportionately followed by other members of the graph and enjoy popularity across the board (from many of the other influential nodes). These are journalists commonly followed by everyone else. Sifting through these centrally located nodes will surface many journalists who behave as influencers of the group initially pulled from BuzzSumo.

So, if you had a campaign about a niche topic, you could consider pitching to an influencer surfaced from this data —according to our the visualization, an article shared in their network would have the most reach and potential ROI

Using Gdelt to find the most influential websites on a topic with in-context link analysis

The first example was a great way to find the best journalists in a niche to pitch to, but top journalists are often the most pitched to overall. Often times, it can be easier to get a pickup from less known writers at major publications. For this reason, understanding which major publishers are most influential, and enjoy the widest syndication on a specific theme, topic, or beat, can be majorly helpful. By using Gdelt’s massive and fully comprehensive database of digital news stories, along with Google BigQuery and Gephi, it is possible to dig even deeper to yield important strategic information that will help you prioritize your content pitching.

We pulled all of the articles in Gdelt’s database that are known to be about a specific theme within a given timeframe. In this case (as with the previous example) we looked at "behaviour health." For each article we found in Gdelt’s database that matches our criteria, we also grabbed links found only within the context of the article.

Here is how it is done:

Connect to Gdelt on Google BigQuery — you can find a tutorial here.

Pull data from Gdelt. You can use this command: SELECT DocumentIdentifier,V2Themes,Extras,SourceCommonName,DATE FROM [gdelt-bq:gdeltv2.gkg] where (V2Themes like '%Your Theme%').

Select any theme you find, here — just replace the part between the percentages.

To extract the links found in each article and build an edge file. This can be done with a relatively simple python script to pull out all of the <PAGE_LINKS> from the results of the query, clean the links to only show their root domain (not the full URL) and put them into an edge file format.

Note: The edge file is made up of Source-->Target pairs. The Source is the article and the Target are the links found within the article. The edge list will look like this:

Article 1, First link found in the article.

Article 1, Second link found in the article.

Article 2, First link found in the article.

Article 2, Second link found in the article.

Article 2, Third link found in the article.

From here, the edge file can be used to build a network visualization where the nodes publishers and the edges between them represent the in-context links found from our Gdelt data pull around whatever topic we desired.

This final visualization is a network representation of the publishers who have written stories about addiction, and where those stories link to.

What can we learn from this graph?

This tells us which nodes (Publisher websites) have the most In-Degree links. In other words: who is the most linked. We can see that the most linked-to for this topic are:

tmz.com

people.com

cdc.gov

cnn.com

go.com

nih.gov

ap.org

latimes.com

jamanetwork.com

nytimes.com

Which publisher is most influential? 

Using the "Betweenness Centrality" score given by Gephi, we get a rough understanding of which nodes (publishers) in the network act as hubs of information transfer. The nodes with the highest "Betweenness Centrality" can be thought of as the "connectors" of the network. Getting pickups from these high-betweenness centrality nodes gives a much greater likelihood of syndication for that specific topic/theme. 

Dailymail.co.uk

Nytimes.com

People.com

CNN.com

Latimes.com

washingtonpost.com

usatoday.com

cvslocal.com

huffingtonpost.com

sfgate.com

What else can we learn?

Similar to the first example, the higher the betweenness centrality numbers, number of In-degree links, and the more centrally located in the graph, the more “important” that node can generally be said to be. Using this as a guide, the most important pitching targets can be easily identified. 

Understanding some of the edge clusters gives additional insights into other potential opportunities. Including a few clusters specific to different regional or state local news, and a few foreign language publication clusters.

Wrapping up

I’ve outlined two different techniques we use at Fractl to understand the influence networks around specific topical areas, both in terms of publications and the writers at those publications. The visualization techniques described are not obvious guides, but instead, are tools for combing through large amounts of data and finding hidden information. Use these techniques to unearth new opportunities and prioritize as you get ready to find the best places to pitch the content you’ve worked so hard to create.

Do you have any similar ideas or tactics to ensure you're pitching the best writers and publishers with your content? Comment below!

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Social Media Audience: Your Audience Might Not Be Where You Think They Are

Marketing is the science of influencing buying decisions by convincing your customers that they need what you are selling – no matter if it’s a product or a service. In this day and age, marketing is at the heart of the economy – after all, there are simply far too many products and services for...

Read More »

The post Social Media Audience: Your Audience Might Not Be Where You Think They Are authored by Neal Schaffer appeared first on Neal Schaffer-Social Media Speaker, Author, Consultant, Educator and Influencer.

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How to Build a Successful Instagram Ad Campaign With Only $5 a Day

Want to do more with Instagram ads? Wondering how to create an affordable Instagram ad campaign that runs automatically? In this article, you’ll discover how to create and run a self-sustaining Instagram ad sequence that converts followers into customers for as little as $5 per day. #1: Identify Your Most Engaging Instagram Posts Let’s dive

The post How to Build a Successful Instagram Ad Campaign With Only $5 a Day appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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We Dipped Our Toes Into Double Featured Snippets

Posted by TheMozTeam

This post was originally published on the STAT blog.

Featured snippets, a vehicle for voice search and the answers to our most pressing questions, have doubled on the SERPs — but not in the way we usually mean. This time, instead of appearing on two times the number of SERPS, two snippets are appearing on the same SERP. Hoo!

In all our years of obsessively stalking snippets, this is one of the first documented cases of them doing something a little different. And we are here for it.

While it’s still early days for the double-snippet SERP, we’re giving you everything we’ve got so far. And the bottom line is this: double the snippets mean double the opportunity.

Google's case for double-snippet SERPs

The first time we heard mention of more than one snippet per SERP was at the end of January in Google’s “reintroduction” to featured snippets.

Not yet launched, details on the feature were a little sparse. We learned that they’re “to help people better locate information” and “may also eventually help in cases where you can get contradictory information when asking about the same thing but in different ways.”

Thankfully, we only had to wait a month before Google released them into the wild and gave us a little more insight into their purpose.

Calling them “multifaceted” featured snippets (a definition we’re not entirely sure we’re down with), Google explained that they’re currently serving “‘multi-intent’ queries, which are queries that have several potential intentions or purposes associated,” and will eventually expand to queries that need more than one piece of information to answer.

With that knowledge in our back pocket, let’s get to the good stuff.

The double snippet rollout is starting off small

Since the US-en market is Google’s favorite testing ground for new features and the largest locale being tracked in STAT, it made sense to focus our research there. We chose to analyze mobile SERPs over desktop because of Google’s (finally released) mobile-first indexing, and also because that’s where Google told us they were starting.

After waiting for enough two-snippet SERPs to show up so we could get our (proper) analysis on, we pulled our data at the end March. Out of the mobile keywords currently tracking in the US-en market in STAT, 122,501 had a featured snippet present, and of those, 1.06 percent had more than one to its name.

With only 1,299 double-snippet SERPs to analyze, we admit that our sample size is smaller than our big data nerd selves would like. That said, it is indicative of how petite this release currently is.

Two snippets appear for noun-heavy queries

Our first order of business was to see what kind of keywords two snippets were appearing for. If we can zero in on what Google might deem “multi-intent,” then we can optimize accordingly.

By weighting our double-snippet keywords by tf-idf, we found that nouns such as “insurance,” “computer,” “job,” and “surgery” were the primary triggers — like in [general liability insurance policy] and [spinal stenosis surgery].

It’s important to note that we don’t see this mirrored in single-snippet SERPs. When we refreshed our snippet research in November 2017, we saw that snippets appeared most often for “how,” followed closely by “does,” “to,” “what,” and “is.” These are all words that typically compose full sentence questions.

Essentially, without those interrogative words, Google is left to guess what the actual question is. Take our [general liability insurance policy]keyword as an example — does the searcher want to know what a general liability insurance policy is or how to get one?

Because of how vague the query is, it’s likely the searcher wants to know everything they can about the topic. And so, instead of having to pick, Google’s finally caught onto the wisdom of the Old El Paso taco girl — why not have both?

Better leapfrogging and double duty domains

Next, we wanted to know where you’d need to rank in order to win one (or both) of the snippets on this new SERP. This is what we typically call “source position.”

On a single-snippet SERP and ignoring any SERP features, Google pulls from the first organic rank 31 percent of the time. On double-snippet SERPs, the top snippet pulls from the first organic rank 24.84 percent of the time, and the bottom pulls from organic ranks 5–10 more often than solo snippets.

What this means is that you can leapfrog more competitors in a double-snippet situation than when just one is in play.

And when we dug into who’s answering all these questions, we discovered that 5.70 percent of our double-snippet SERPs had the same domain in both snippets. This begs the obvious question: is your content ready to do double duty?

Snippet headers provide clarity and keyword ideas

In what feels like the first new addition to the feature in a long time, there’s now a header on top of each snippet, which states the question it’s set out to answer. With reports of headers on solo snippets (and “People also search for” boxes attached to the bottom — will this madness never end?!), this may be a sneak peek at the new norm.

Instead of relying on guesses alone, we can turn to these headers for what a searcher is likely looking for — we’ll trust in Google’s excellent consumer research. Using our [general liability insurance policy] example once more, Google points us to “what is general liabilities insurance” and “what does a business insurance policy cover” as good interpretations.

Because these headers effectively turn ambiguous statements into clear questions, we weren’t surprised to see words like “how” and “what” appear in more than 80 percent of them. This trend falls in line with keywords that typically produce snippets, which we touched on earlier.

So, not only does a second snippet mean double the goodness that you usually get with just one, it also means more insight into intent and another keyword to track and optimize for.

Both snippets prefer paragraph formatting

Next, it was time to give formatting a look-see to determine whether the snippets appearing in twos behave any differently than their solo counterparts. To do that, we gathered every snippet on our double-snippet SERPs and compared them against our November 2017 data, back when pairs weren’t a thing.

While Google’s order of preference is the same for both — paragraphs, lists, and then tables — paragraph formatting was the clear favorite on our two-snippet SERPs.

It follows, then, that the most common pairing of snippets was paragraph-paragraph — this appeared on 85.68 percent of our SERPs. The least common, at 0.31 percent, was the table-table coupling.

We can give two reasons for this behavior. One, if a query can have multiple interpretations, it makes sense that a paragraph answer would provide the necessary space to explain each of them, and two, Google really doesn’t like tables.

We saw double-snippet testing in action

When looking at the total number of snippets we had on hand, we realised that the only way everything added up was if a few SERPs had more than two snippets. And lo! Eleven of our keywords returned anywhere from six to 12 snippets.

For a hot minute we were concerned that Google was planning a full-SERP snippet takeover, but when we searched those keywords a few days later, we discovered that we’d caught testing in action.

Here’s what we saw play out for the keyword [severe lower back pain]:

After testing six variations, Google decided to stick with the first two snippets. Whether this is a matter of top-of-the-SERP results getting the most engagement no matter what, or the phrasing of these questions resonating with searchers the most, is hard for us to tell.

The multiple snippets appearing for [full-time employment] left us scratching our head a bit:

Our best hypothesis is that searchers in Florida, NYS, Minnesota, and Oregon have more questions about full-time employment than other places. But, since we’d performed a nation-wide search, Google seems to have thought better of including location-specific snippets.

Share your double-snippet SERP experiences

It goes without saying — but here we are saying it anyway — that we’ll be keeping an eye on the scope of this release and will report back on any new revelations.

In the meantime, we’re keen to know what you’re seeing. Have you had any double-snippet SERPs yet? Were they in a market outside the US? What keywords were surfacing them? 

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New Facebook Group Management Tools

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore new Facebook group management tools with special guest, Bella Vasta. Watch the Social Media Marketing Talk Show

The post New Facebook Group Management Tools appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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What a Two-Tiered SERP Means for Content Strategy - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by willcritchlow

If you're a big site competing to rank for popular head terms, where's the best place to focus your content strategy? According to a hypothesis by the good folks at Distilled, the answer may lie in perfectly satisfying searcher intent.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

If you haven't heard the news, the Domain Authority metric discussed in this episode will be updated on March 5th, 2019 to better correlate with Google algorithm changes. Learn about what's changing below:

Learn more about the new DA

Video Transcription

Hi, Whiteboard Friday fans. I'm Will Critchlow, one of the founders at Distilled, and what I want to talk about today is joining the dots between some theoretical work that some of my colleagues have been doing and some of the client work that we've been doing recently and the results that we've been seeing from that in the wild and what I think it means for strategies for different-sized sites going on from here.

Correlations and a hypothesis

The beginning of this I credit to one of my colleagues, Tom Capper, THCapper on Twitter, who presented at our Search Love London conference a presentation entitled "The Two-Tiered SERP," and I'm going to describe what that means in just a second. But what I'm going to do today is talk about what I think that the two-tiered SERP means for content strategy going forward and base that a little bit on some of what we're seeing in the wild with some of our client projects.

What Tom presented at Search Love London was he started by looking at the fact that the correlation between domain authority and rankings has decreased over time. So he pulled out some stats from February 2017 and looked at those same stats 18 months later and saw a significant drop in the correlation between domain authority and rankings. This ties into a bunch of work that he's done and presented elsewhere around potentially less reliance on links going forward and some other data that Google might be using, some other metrics and ranking factors that they might be using in their place, particularly branded metrics and so forth.

But Tom saw this drop and had a hypothesis that it wasn't just an across-the-board drop. This wasn't just Google not using links anymore or using links less. It was actually a more granular effect than that. This is the two-tiered SERP or what we mean by the two-tiered SERP. So a search engine result page, a SERP, you've got some results at the top and some results further down the page.

What Tom found — he had this hypothesis that was born out in the data — was that the correlation between domain authority and rankings was much higher among the positions 6 through 10 than it was among the top half of the search results page and that this can be explained by essentially somewhat traditional ranking factors lower down the page and in lower competition niches and that at the top of the page, where there's more usage data, greater search volume and so forth in these top positions, that traditional ranking factors played less of a part.

They maybe get you into the consideration set. There are no domains ranking up here that are very, very weak. But once you're in the consideration set, there's much less of a correlation between these different positions. So it's still true on average that these positions 1 through 5 are probably more authoritative than the sites that are appearing in lower positions. But within this set there's less predictive value.

The domain authority is less predictive of ranking within this set than it is of ranking within this set. So this is the two-tiered SERP, and this is consistent with a bunch of data that we've seen across the place and in particular with the outcomes that we're seeing among content campaigns and content strategies for different kinds of sites.

At Distilled, we get quite a lot of clients coming to us wanting either a content strategy put together or in some cases coming to us essentially with their content strategy and saying, "Can you execute this? Can you help us execute this plan?" It's very common for that plan to be, "We want to create a bunch of big pieces of content that get a ton of links, and we're going to use that link authority to make our site more authoritative and that is going to result in our whole site doing better and ranking better."

An anonymized case study

We've seen that that is performing differently in different cases, and in particular it's performing better on smaller sites than it is on big sites. So this is a little anonymized case study. This is a real example of a story that happened with one of our consulting clients where we put in place a content strategy for them that did include a plan to build the domain authority because this was a site that came to us with a domain authority significantly below that of their key competitors, also with all of these sites not having a ton of domain authority.

This was working in a B2B space, relatively small domains. They came to us with that, and we figured that actually growing the authority was a key part of this content strategy and over the next 18 months put out a bunch of pieces that have done really well and generated a ton of press coverage and traction and things. Over that time, they've actually outstripped their key competitors in the domain authority metrics, and crucially we saw that tie directly to increases in traffic that went hand-in-hand with this increase in domain authority.

But this contrasts to what we've seen with some much larger sites in much more competitive verticals where they're already very, very high domain authority, maybe they're already stronger than some of their competitors and adding to that. So adding big content pieces that get even more big authoritative links has not moved the needle in the way that it might have done a few years ago.

That's totally consistent with this kind of setup, where if you are currently trying to edge in the bottom or you're competing for less competitive search terms, then this kind of approach might really work for you and it might, in fact, be necessary to get into the consideration set for the more competitive end. But if you're operating on a much bigger site, you've already got the competitive domain authority, you and your competitors are all very powerful sites, then our kind of hypothesis is that you're going to be needing to look more towards the user experience, the conversion rate, and intent research.

Are you satisfying searcher intent for competitive head terms?

What is somebody who performs this search actually looking to do? Can you satisfy that intent? Can you make sure that they don't bounce back to the search results and click on a competitor? Can you make sure that in fact they stay on your site, they get done the thing they want to get done, and it all works out for them, because we think that these kinds of things are going to be much more powerful for moving up through the very top end of the most competitive head terms.

So when we're working on a content strategy or putting our creative team to work on these kinds of things on bigger sites, we're more likely to be creating content directly designed to rank. We might be creating content based off a ton of this research, and we're going to be incrementally improving those things to try and say, "Have we actually satisfied the perfect intent for this super competitive head term?"

What we're seeing is that's more likely to move the needle up at this top end than growing the domain authority on a big site. So I hope you found that interesting. I'm looking forward to a vigorous discussion in the comments on this one. But thank you for joining me for this week's Whiteboard Friday. I've been Will Critchlow from Distilled. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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