Bruce Clay's Blog, page 24
October 1, 2015
SMX Liveblog: Being Found on YouTube
SMX Liveblog: Being Found on YouTube was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
YouTube is exploding. They reported 60% YOY growth. “Even though TV and YouTube are video, YouTube is its own medium and it has its own rules and norms.”
Moderator: Amy Gesenhues, General Assignment Correspondent, Search Engine Land (@amygesenhues)
Speakers:
Yevgeniy Skazovski, Chief Marketing Strategist, FairSquare Inc. (@gene_seomachine)
Jeff Martin, Vice President, YouTube Audience Development, Touchstorm (@Jeff_Martin)
Dan Piech, Shareablee (@DanPiech)
Gene Skazovski: Be a YouTube Star! 10 Tips for YouTube Video Optimization
YouTube is a wonderland where new brands are born every day. Why be on YouTube?
1 Billion+ users worldwide
2nd most popular search engine
Mobile revenue is up 100% YOY
60% growth in Q2 YOY
70% increase in how to videos
More stats that will sell YouTube to your organization: http:/expandedramblings.com/index.php/youtube-statistics/
YouTube is an untapped market for small businesses.
YouTube as a brand platform: these are stars who were launched by YouTube
Justin Bieber
PewDiePie
JennaMarbles
WHZHUD2
The top 100 YouTubers make $100 million a year on YouTube.
How can you be found in the YouTube wonderland?
Video title – give it a good name. Like any other page on the web, 70 characters with a CTA. Use “official”, “new” or alike to bring more attention to videos – DIY, Tips, Video, How-To, For More Info Call, Testimonials, Case Study, Tutorial, Reviews, Free, 60 second video.
Video description – tell me more. 300 words or more with sprinkled keywords. Summarize the content, emphasize important comments or “quotes” from the video, link to pages and resources in the video using absolute URLs, the more detail the better.
Video tags – “This video is relevant to”. Be generous (up to 20) suggestions: brand name, position/title, competitors name.
Closed captioning – it’s more than 508 (compliance). If you’re not doing captioning, then don’t do YouTube. http://youtube.com/watch?v=WmTMiWGiP6Y
Backlink to videos – Yes, backlinks. Use relevant anchor text. Allow video embedding if possible. Expand referring sources (share). Link to video from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogs. Promote videos through SEM (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/141808).
Content quality – that old song again. Create non-boring content up to 203 mintes in length. Understand your customer’s attention span. Slit lengthy videos into multi-part videos. Get to the point quickly. Use :29 and :15 durations for successful video advertising.
Playlists – don’t miss out! If you already have videos, you’re not creating content, you’re making it more engaging and usable.
Natural content – have you read your comments lately? This builds content on the YouTube page. Suggestions for new content come from comments.
Advertise – Hello! Can anyone see/hear you? Probably not. Give your videos a paid push. YouTube Sponsored Search, pre-roll video ads, in-stream ads videos. Use companion banners. Use video remarketing. Bid on competitor names and videos.
Call to Action – Engage videos! Include your phone number or web address. Don’t forget overlays to resources mentioned in videos. Don’t leave out branding!!!
Jeff Martin: Millions of Organic Views in 20 Minutes or Less!
Touchstorm is a certified YouTube partner and they know all the guidelines of YouTube.
For a video to maximize its visibility, two factors have to be looked at – meta data and video performance.
Meta Data
Meta data optimization starts with keyword research.
Look at the YouTube Instant suggestions when you start typing in a YouTube search bar. You can see new ideas and roots that you hadn’t thought of based on what people were searching.
Keywordtool.io is a more efficient way to do keyword research. There’s a small fee for using it.
As you refine the keywords, search for those keywords in YouTube. The content that you see, is that what your content would be like or is it different and unrelated?
Once you’re confident in your keywords, look those keywords up in Google Trends YouTube to get a priority for creating the videos.
Optimization – Titles
Use full keyword phrases to optimize early on for channels without a significant subscriber base. If a video’s performance takes off, there is flexibility to adjust later to try to capture more. Optimize the most popular keywords from left to right.
Example of possible titles for the same video. Start with the first one and if the video does well, you can advance to options 2 and 3.
Optimization – Description
What to avoid at risk of having your video removed: Don’t stuff, don’t reference metadata, don’t violate community guidelines. Videos removed seldom ever come back and you’ll have to start over again.
Optimization – Tags
YouTube says to begin tags with long-tail phrases and work down to single-word phrases including brand. You can include adjectives like “quick,” “simple,” and “easy” but it should be a red flag to you if there are more adjectives as tags for your video than others.
Performance – Metrics
Traditional SEO has 2 sides: on-page and off-page. YouTube’s 2 sides are on-page and performance. Views are valuable but not for the number they add up to.
Engagement always lags behind views, so when a user pauses and takes an action, it’s valuable. Video watch time is paramount. It’s the total minutes spent watching a video! It’s not a measure of how much a video was watched, and it’s not a reason why videos need to be shorter.
Session watch time – total minutes a user watches your content AND any other content during a session. You want your content to be part of a very long session. Currently, there’s no effective way to monitor this as it can span into third-party videos.
Watch time takeaways:
When completion rates are equal, a shorter video needs more views than a longer video to compete.
The longer a video is, the more challenging it is to retain the audience.
Review rankings of competing videos in SERPs to understand the length of videos in use and their success.
Adhere to YT production best practices to maximize watch time.
Session watch time takeaways:
What software to use to study your performance? VideoAmigo.com is a video marketing suite that provides competitive intelligence, automated YouTube search ranking monitor, in-depth channel analysis and recommendations. He says it’s free!
Dan Piech: YouTube and Branding Stats
That’s a lot of videos, views and engagement (likes, dislikes and comments)! People engage on a per view or per post measure much higher on YouTube than on Facebook or Twitter.
Overall, brand view counts only increased 1% last year. However likes increased by 26%, dislikes increased 29% and comments increased 6%. Average views per video have declined because the amount of videos is growing.
Sports and recreation videos are doing incredibly in the last year with view counts growing 37% but engagements nearly doubling! And yet, the number of videos posted is smaller than the year previous.
Look at these numbers as they relate to your industry.
How frequently should you be posting? It depends on your industry. And quantity is not more important than quality.
Looking at a specific industry: fashion, you can see that there’s a big difference in the amount of actions these publishers are getting despite posting about the same number of videos.
Look at the Vogue in your own industry to see what you can do similarly.
Case study: Video less than 3 minutes drove 60% of actions for publishers. TV saw 40% of actions from video between 2-4 minutes long. For the average brand, videos 1-4 minutes long drive 50% of likes. Those under 3 minutes drive more views. Shorter videos get more views but positive engagements happen on videos that are a little longer.
How much of my engagement consists of what I value most? Here’s the like-to-dislike ratio by industry:
Publishers capture higher likes per view, showing opportunities for co-branded ad sponsored content.
The Most Valuable Analytics Reports for SEO – SMX Liveblog
The Most Valuable Analytics Reports for SEO – SMX Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
What reports do you really need for search engine optimization? How can you make sense of the volumes of data that even low-end analytics tools collect about your site visitors and activity? After all, there are hundreds of canned reports to choose from, but only a few are really relevant for SEO. And the answer is going to be different depending on which type of stakeholder wants information.
In the SMX East session “The Most Valuable Analytics Reports All SEOs Should Be Running,” a panel of three SEOs share their tactics when it comes to reporting.
Leslie To, Timothy Gillman and Adam Proehl
What the SEO Stakeholders Need – Adam Proehl
First up is Adam Proehl (@AdamProehl), a partner with NordicClick Interactive. He is talking about how to present analytics and information to the different teams digital marketers must work with to achieve SEO success.
“You can be the greatest SEO in the world, but if you can’t present to executives, you’re going to fall short of your ultimate potential. You can learn all the technical SEO you want, but you also need to understand corporate politics, priorities and limited budgets,” Proehl says.
Who Affects Your SEO?
Board and C-suite
IT and development
Marketing communications
Local branches and retailers
Board and C-Suite
What resonates with them? They want to know what they’re getting for his money.
ROI analysis
Competition (this keeps them up at night)
Risk vs. upside
Visual representations (keep them simple)
IT and Development
What resonates with them?
Work effort
Priority fit
Why it matters
Proof and evidence
Forget spreadsheets. Show the visuals. Quote the source. Give clear requirements. Translate insights into customer experience. Don’t insult them.
Local Branches and Retailers
What resonates with them?
Where they show
Their competition
What you’re doing from them
Marketing and Communications
What resonates with them?
Coverage/brand perception
Messaging
Audience habits and mindsets
Market trends
Provide them query data, click data and post-click engagement. Show them what their audience cares about.
Using Data to Tell a Story – Timothy Gillman
Timothy Gillman (@TimGillmanDrums), analytics strategist at Portent, holds that if you take the time to combine multiple data sets, you’re going to impress people.
Reports need to acknowledge KPIs every time, and in context. If you have a report with no KPIs, it’s just a bunch of numbers. Rather, you want to tell a story with a story
Get your data
Customize report
Combine data sets
Example of Context + KPI
Using Portent’s data, we’re going to find the best landing pages by search volume and (?).
Put URL in SEMRush and look at data. Now, it’s time to customize by filtering out homepage and branded queries. Export it; select CSV, where you’ll have more control. Make a pivot table!
Now, onto find out what happens after people visit a site. Head over to Google Analytics. Here, look at the Channels Report. Use Report Filters and eliminate other and PPC channels, and use custom segment, which will stay intact across multiple reports.
Make sure to add metrics, primarily KPI metrics, and add landing page dimension. Export the file as a CSV, and combine this data with the original CSV from SEMRush.
From here, visualize the data. Visualizations drive home our SEO efforts.
If you tweet to @TimGillmanDrums, he will provide you with a Google Analytics custom report and a dashboard.
Build Your Map to Google Analytics Treasure – Leslie To
Leslie To (@itsleslieto), director of SEO at 3Q Digital, says the first thing you must think about is this: What metrics and dimensions do you care about most?
Some definitions:
Metric = number or ratio (revenue, sessions, bounce rate, etc.)
Dimension = user info (landing page, channel, device type, etc.)
To’s Approach to Google Analytics
Select a metric. Focus on KPIs. To focuses on users + sessions, sessions per use, revenue per user and a few microconversions.
She likes to use default channel dimensions because it provides context.
Control noise through segmentation:
New vs. returning (Note: Returning users are more likely to spend more money. This is interesting, because clients often ignore retention in favor of new customer acquisition.)
New customers are important, obviously, but don’t forget about existing.
Converters vs. non-converters. Can we utilize certain channels to make up for performance gaps in others?
Final thought: Mindful reporting leads to actionable insights.
September 30, 2015
Creating a Search Culture in a Large Organization – Executives Share Their Experience at SMX
Creating a Search Culture in a Large Organization – Executives Share Their Experience at SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
“Empowering Your Organization with a Search Culture” is a unique SMX East session. Executives from Verizon, Comcast and Pernod-Ricard will share some of their insights, challenges and strategies when it comes to digital marketing for massive brands.
Courtney Goldstein, Eryck Dzotsi, Wendy Bolivar, Bill Hunt, Cory Haldeman
Absolute SEO for Absolut Vodka
Pernod-Ricard is a global organization with 300 brands in 80 countries with 101 sites. Brands include Absolut and Chivas Regal Whiskey. Two years ago, Bill Hunt (@BillHunt) started doing SEO for the company. Along with Pernod-Ricard’s Engagement Manager Wendy Bolivar (@wendybolivar), Hunt talks about Pernod-Ricard’s goals, as well as his challenges and tasks.
Pernod-Ricard’s Top Three Priorities
Consumer Centricity
Excellent Execution
Speed and Scale
“We wanted to have one-on-one relationships with the consumers, from social media to advertising. We wanted to personalize interactions with consumers. We wanted to make sure that the entire organization is thinking of search,” explains Bolivar.
Bill’s Tasks to Achieve Goals
Create a scalable framework for “findability” — not just in search, but in social media, too.
Increase adoption by brands and markets.
Increase SERP shelf space.
Reduce paid media and agency costs.
Maximize the “last three feet” by enabling partners through the optimization of product feeds.
Develop “Spirit Interest Journeys” by finding how people search for different drinks.
While Wendy Made Sure
Search is a key part of a marketing ecosystem and should never be a standalone activity.
Search is a portfolio play and requires collaboration with wider teams.
Search is about understanding consumer behaviors and interests.
Search has to serve one or many specific business objectives to be effective for business.
Bill’s Challenges
Markets have limited budgets.
Global brand controls websites.
Few understand digital and search.
There’s a campaign marketing culture.
Marketing is about the experience.
Decentralized management and resources.
Verizon on Achieving SEO
Head of SEO and content strategy for Verizon Communications, Cory Haldeman (@coryhaldeman), takes the stage.
“At the top level, the C-suite needs to think of SEO as a vehicle. Help them understand how the search engines work at a high level. Explain crawling, indexation, ranking and relevance. It’s not dumbing it down, but streamlining,” he says.
Haldeman recommends explaining the context: everyone uses search, and their competitors are also there. Show them how the competition is beating them, and it will light a fire among executives to fight back.
And remember: share price is the bottom line. Show them how SEO will benefit the bottom line. Use Google Trends to show the C-suite when and how people think.
Achieve IT Buy-In
“Most of the time, IT hates me,” Haldeman admits. “But sometimes they love you.”
What the IT department does is critical to your success. You must form a relationship with them. Be clear. Don’t give fluffy requirements. Be very specific. Haldeman created an SEO bible for Verizon’s IT teams and constantly encourages them to use it. He also makes sure to thank them. He reports back to the IT teams how their work is helping the company achieve success. Give them the credit that they’re due.
Establishing a Digital Center of Excellence at Comcast
Comcast’s VP of digital marketing, Courtney Goldstein, and Eryck Dzotsi (@erycked), director of SEO at Merkle, are next up. They’re going to share the struggles they had bringing Comcast up-to-speed when it comes to SEO and digital marketing.
The old media approach at Comcast was all about television. Goldstein shares a quote from founder Ralph Roberts: “The fundamental fact is that people love television and if you can provide them with more television, they’ll love it even more.”
In today’s world, with 60 percent growth in the number of homes that have absolutely no television in them, the old model of focusing on television doesn’t work anymore.
Comcast used to have disparate teams, but with Dzotsi’s help, the entire organization began to think holistically. For the past year and a half, Comcast’s entire organization has thought in terms of SEO. Even lawyers were educated on title tags.
Business goals became aligned across teams, and that made the search agency’s job a lot easier since everyone was on the same page.
Search Culture Recommendations
Prove value to gain advocates from a brand. Provide data, analytics and metrics. Educate your clients.
Incorporate search in cross functional digital processes.
Be flexible and embrace change.
Beyond The Web: Why App Deep Linking Is The Next Big Thing
Beyond The Web: Why App Deep Linking Is The Next Big Thing was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
If you have an app, app indexing should be more than on your radar – it should be a practice, according to the speakers of this lively SMX East session. Mariya Moeva, Emily Grossman, and Igal Stolpner all take the stage to offer convincing anecdotes and facts for why you should be implementing app indexing now. They also provide tips on how to do it.
Moderator: Barry Schwartz, News Editor, Search Engine Land, RustyBrick (@rustybrick)
Speakers:
Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google
Emily Grossman, Mobile Marketing Specialist, MobileMoxie (@goutaste)
Igal Stolpner, Head of Growth & Marketing, Investing.com (@igalst)
Mariya: Get Your App Indexed with This One Weird Trick!
App indexing best practices. Practical, specific advice for people with apps.
Where are we with apps? The progress is like where websites were in 1999. There are no set standards with apps as we have today, like with HTML and CSS, and we’re learning as we go. Google currently supports deep app links for signed in and signed out users on Android. Soon (October, says Mariya) they will support iOS 9 universal links and then you’ll see app deep linking in Google Search for iPhones in Safari as well.
Google has indexed more than 50 billion app links and the number is growing every day.
25% of searches on Android return app deep links.
Visit g.co/appindexingstudies to see featured case studies. You can read these to ask yourself: does this makes sense to you? Have some accurate KPIs that you can measure so you can see if you’re getting what you want out of it.
Tips for implementation:
Use http scheme instead of a custom scheme.
Associate your site with your app. You can do this from either Search Console or Developer Console.
Publish your deep links. She recommends using the app indexing API to do this. Send a title and description of the page and Google maps on their end. It’s a simpler implementation and comes with a ranking boost.
Monitoring what’s going on:
Add your app to Search Console. You can see clicks and impression for your content as well as queries. There’s also going tell installs of your app and you can be part of their beta test.
Errors
Fetch as Google for Apps. See how your app looks to the Google crawler.
You will be able to test changes to your app without pushing it live to Google Play.
Fetch as Google for API info:
Google updated its infrastructure so that it can do deep linking for iOS. A year from now, she hopes for a shared standard that we can talk about that gets app content in front of users in the same way we have for websites.
Emily: App Store Model Versus Search Engine Model
App Store model: meta data provides a preview of the type of content in the app. Google wasn’t previously able to get inside of the app and understand what’s inside it. That’s a problem if your goal is to index all the world’s data.
Now rather than an app store model we’re looking at a search engine model and it’s powered by deep linking. A specific URL is assigned to an app screen.
HTTP scheme
Android API
If you do custom scheme URLs you have to do web markup. Here’s the deep link URL format:
Sync with Google Play Developer Console or Search Console.
iOS was added to the developer documentation as of last night. This is very different documentation than any documentation Google’s released.
Get your app ready:
Modify your application delegate.
Adopt an entitlement in Xcode that lists each domain associated with your app.
Get your server ready:
Create an apple-app-site-association file for each associated domain with the content your app supports and host it at the root level.
Association file must be hosted on an HTTPS domain.
CocoaPods is the dependency layer that allows for functionality between the app and search. iOS 9 gets rid of the need for this but CocoaPod syncing is still required:
Apple Search
Apple is invested in getting users into apps because Apple’s made $9 billion on the App Store. Apple Search works with a public and private index. Results in Apple Search pull from both.
With NSUserActivity, Google won’t put content in the public index just because you say it’s public. They’ll start it in the private index and test it until they feel confident adding it to the public index. Web Markup is the only option for directly getting it into public index.
App Search API Validation Tool – you’ll see how Apple sees your app and how it will show up in search results.
Igal: App Indexing Case Studies and Why You Should Invest in Deep Linking Too
Igal says he learned from Mariya just now that you can soon test an SDK before going live and that’s a very big thing.
Apps and app indexing aren’t for everyone. Apps do a better job for his industry (finance) because:
Apps vs. Mobile Site
They offer the same content and found more pages per session and more monthly visits per user on apps.
Since implementing in early 2014, drop of non-daily users from 15% to 8%.
Why aim for app indexing?
Competition isn’t there yet.
Increases CTR.
Brings new installs.
Improves rankings.
In Google search results an indexed app appears with its logo. This grabs attention and increases the CTR up 40%.
Google drives new installs directly from search results. This isn’t at the expense of traffic to the mobile site.
Challenges:
Coordinating the work between different teams.
Apps are released in versions – everything is slower!
Adjusting the App for Google Search
App’s back button
First click free experience
Slow loading
Some results: Android
Users coming to the app from Google search view 20% more screens in a session and spend longer in the app. If a user has the app installed they’re getting higher rankings.
Question for Mariya: Can you explain the ranking boost again?
If you have web content corresponding with an app page, you get a ranking boost.
When you let Google index content using the API, you let Google see what pages of your content users like the most and for those there’s an additionally ranking boost.
Is the ranking boost given regardless or just for high engagement?
There aren’t many apps using the API now and those that are all high quality, high engagement. As more apps join, they’ll tune and adjust.
Search Console shows you everything that happened before a click and the click. Analytics is everything after the click. Together you see the full picture.
Winning at Mobile PPC Advertising – SMX Liveblog
Winning at Mobile PPC Advertising – SMX Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
John Busby, Amy Bishop and Aaron Levy
This SMX East session titled “Winning At Mobile PPC (Beyond mCommerce)” promises to take us beyond the “why you have to be on mobile” rhetoric, since that’s now a given. Speakers Aaron Levy, Amy Bishop and John Busby will share from their experience (they’re all senior-level ad managers) to help advertisers take advantage of mobile user behavior to drive ecommerce.
Know Your Mobile Audience – Aaron Levy
Aaron Levy (@bigalittlea), manager of client strategy at Elite SEM, starts things off.
Printing Money on the Go: Alternate Metrics for Mobile Audiences
Is your mobile conversion rate low? Let’s talk about why mobile doesn’t convert like desktop. It’s not mobile’s fault. It’s our fault. Why? Because we’re not doing mobile persona research. And mobile users behave differently than desktop users. Before he gets to that research, however, he has some fast facts from his mobile research:
Mobile volume thrives in boredom and commuter hours: when you’re on a train, a plane, a bus, etc.
Mobile peaks on weekends – everyone’s at home and no one wants to go on a desktop.
Mobile conversion rate is steady throughout the day (unlike a desktop).
Mobile conversion increases throughout the week (desktop tanks).
Mobile usage skews toward low income users.
Mobile usage skews toward Hispanic users.
Audience-Driven Metrics and Goals: The Four Types of People Using Mobile
Don’t think about the device. Think about who’s using it. People shopping at Brooks Brothers aren’t the same people shopping at Walmart. They have different goals. Levy puts people into four buckets: Bored, Research, Need and Desperate.
1. Bored
These are professionals. People who have a commute. People who don’t want to talk to other people when they walk into a room. You’re doing nothing. This is someone on the go. Could switch to a computer if they want — they’re second screening. They’re really impulsive. They’re killing time. Make their decisions as easily as possible. Persuade them and they’ll buy. Don’t give them too much – they’ll bail if you show them an email form. They’re usually rich.
One solution to reach the Bored mobile audience: Implement a PayPal button. Average conversion rate for Amazon Prime? 79 percent. They have the PayPal button. Tempt the buyer and then get out of the way.
2. Research
These are often parents. They’re busy, and they have a few extra minutes. They’ll probably finish their task elsewhere. They’re filling time rather than wasting time. They’re multi-device searchers that are a pain to track. Pensive, protective and thoughtful. Don’t want to part with their money easily. They’re not going to buy from their phone. Your conversion rate here will be terrible. Give them what they want — they’re here for information. Understand their motivation. Are they shopping for new or a replacement? Get them to sniff around and know that they’ll come back later.
Solution for the Research mobile user base: Use cross-device attribution. See Google AdWords’ Total Conversions metric. You can’t find this data in a third-party bid tool. Use this ratio to pinpoint how much people are moving around, and it will help you determine what mobile is really worth:
3. Need
The people in this bucket are on mobile because they don’t necessarily have desktop computers.
They don’t necessarily have nice phones (they can be using flip phones!). Data, in fact, might be precious to them — don’t waste theirs. The person could also be on vacation and not have a laptop with them. In this case, then, you have a single device searcher. They don’t really want to buy it on their phone, but they will because they don’t have another option. Preach convenience in your copy. Usually this falls into the low income bracket.
Solution for Need mobile searchers: Offer conversion options. This audience group might not have a credit card. Invite them into the store, then, with a location-based coupon (cash and store-based conversions)! And make the coupon code as easy as possible.
4. Desperate
These are the people that forgot something. They need something right away, super quick. They’re usually on the richer side — whatever they find is the first thing they’re going to buy.
Solution for the Desperate mobile audience type: Make the conversion as easy as possible and, again, get out of the way. Don’t have a form — identify alternate KPIs. Don’t make them go elsewhere. Provide convenience-driven copy.
Keep Your Radius Small – Amy Bishop
Amy Bishop (@hoffman8), senior manager: audits, outbound, training at Clix Marketing, has a lot of info to share. She starts out by telling us that 60 percent of local searchers say location information on ads is important to them. Bishop says to reign in the radius, though.
“Take your locations and target the radius around them. This is important because people are looking for things around them. 72 percent of consumers who performed a local search visited a store within 5 miles. Searches containing ‘near me’ have grown exponentially. And 80 percent of ‘near me’ searches occur on a mobile device. 50 percent of local searches result in a same day store visit,” she says. “When you’re targeting people on mobile, you’re not just interrupting their session, but their day. So the radius you choose is important.”
If you determine opportunities to tighten or expand location targeting, do it.
Takeaways
People who are searching for your brand — you can set a bigger radius because they’re searching for your stores. But narrow it for those not searching by brand.
Consumers will go in a store if they’re close to a store, if they can get the product quickly and/or if they can get better pricing.
42 percent of people are conducting research via mobile in the store.
Timing matters. Consider your target demographic’s interests. If you’re targeting someone at the gym, hit them with a coupon for athletic gear.
Once at their destination, 56 percent of travelers rely on mobile devices to find and decide on activities.
How to Track Mobile Ads – John Busby
John Busby (@JohnMBusby) is senior vice president of marketing & consumer insights at Marchex Consumers. First, he tells the audience that people are using mobile phones in a dramatically different fashion than they use desktop computers. After a local mobile search, for example, the most common response to a mobile search is to make a phone call or store visit. So, fundamentally, the mobile phone is a bridge between the online and the offline world.
For the past 15 years, marketers have been focused on cookies and tracking. But the “marketing technology stack” isn’t designed for phone calls.
Google has two PPC ad formats that support phone calls: enhanced campaigns and call-only campaigns. You probably have these questions:
Which ad or keyword generated the call?
Did the phone call convert to a sale?
How do I optimize my call?
To know which ad generated the call, use a tracking pixel or unique phone number (supplied by Google) placed in the ad.
In order to know which keyword generated a call, you need Dynamic Tracking.
To know whether the call converted to a sale, use conversational analytics. This monitors speech silence programmatically to determine the likelihood of a sale.
Other Advice for Mobile PPC Advertisers
Some keywords are more likely to drive web conversions, while others are more likely to convert through calls.
Test call-focused campaigns for keywords that drive call conversions.
Generally speaking, we find that geo-targeted brand campaigns can be more cost-effective.
SMX Liveblog: Getting Mobile Friendly to Survive the Next Mobilegeddon
SMX Liveblog: Getting Mobile Friendly to Survive the Next Mobilegeddon was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Mobile. Mobile. Mobile!
Moderator:Barry Schwartz, News Editor, Search Engine Land, RustyBrick (@rustybrick)
Speakers:
Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google (@methode)
Stoney deGeyter, CEO, Pole Position Marketing (@StoneyD)
Marcus Tober, Founder/CTO, Searchmetrics Inc. (@marcustober)
Gary Illyes: Google’s Mobile Focus
When Gary was a kid he never did what parents and teachers told him to do. Roughly when Justin Beiber was knee-high to a snow blower, his parents got him a computer and thought that might give him something to spend time on in a good way. It didn’t work. But around 2000 he got a cell phone. This made him very cool. That worked!
In 2005 he got his first girlfriend a mobile phone. He expected she’d be excited about it. Her response: Is there Internet on it?
Gary appreciated the power of the Internet for getting him Super Mario cheat codes. But he also so there was more than 10 blue links. He’s flashing photos of cats playing keyboards on the screen.
People’s expectations of search have changed and continue to change – radically.
Autocomplete was a change, for example. Today Google focuses exclusively on mobile. 2015 is the year when mobile search exceeds desktop searches.
People aren’t just searching. They’re shopping, reading email, seeking advice, comparing products and reviews.
Mobile friendly update: On April 21, 2015, Google made the mobile-friendly update. They look at “5 or so” properties of a page and if they appear right on a mobile screen.
App indexing: Apps show up in search results and when users click on the result and have the app installed, they’ll bring the user to that result in the app. If they don’t have the app, there’s an install button in the result. This takes away friction.
Google Now: It effectively pushes relevant info to you. Traffic alerts, photospots, see this presentation by Cindy Krum from Day 1 of SMX East (http://bit.ly/1KMtjgs).
Now on Tap: At Google I/O, Google talked about it. If you’re chatting with a friend and want to organize dinner, you shouldn’t have to copy and paste text into a search box. Instead, a long tap on the chat text will give you more info and context.
Voice search: This is the future where you talk to gadgets and they answer you. Search strings like this will work:
Stoney deGeyter: Configuring Your Mobile Friendly Site
Common mistakes:
Blocking JavaScript, CSS and images. Search engines need this to see how your site renders on different screens
Unplayable content. There are issues with mobiles playing Flash videos. Use video-embedding that’s playable on all devices. Optional: provide a transcript of the video available.
Mobile-only 404s. Allow visitors on mobile devices to pass through to your mobile URLs without error.
Redirecting to the wrong pages. Redirect each URL to the appropriate mobile counterpart – NOT the home page. Make sure redirects work on all devices.
Use banners instead. Let people get to the content without forcing them to view an overlay.
Irrelevant cross-links. For example, when you provide a link to view the mobile site from the desktop site or vice versa, make sure you go to the same page and not the home page.
Slow loading pages.
Non-responsive images. Use the HTML picture element to serve different size images to different devices based on their screen size. Cheat: use automated “adaptive images” tools and plugins.
Small touch size. Design for fat fingers.
Unreadable text. Use EM or REM units on your fonts, and then adjust the base font size for different screen resolutions using media queries.
Responsive website configurations:
Marcus Tober: The Data of Going Mobile-Friendly
Marcus’s presentations are slide-heavy and available here: Slideshare.net/searchmetrics
Google is focusing on mobile, so forget about desktop. We use our phones everywhere. That’s why Google focuses on how users interact with content and how to serve it. On mobile we want things as fast as possible.
Concepts like keyword density and how many links on a page is irrelevant in the mobile world. It’s about how we use it, how we share it. Focusing on the content makes us much more successful.
Mobilegeddon was an update Google announced many weeks in advance. There’s always winners and losers of changes.
Losers:
Boxofficemojo
Didct.cc
Reddit.com
In the case of Reddit they implemented a separate m.dot mobile site and recovered all their traffic and rankings.
Mobile Ranking Factors Study
Be aware of the correlation and causation paradigm. Don’t believe that high correlation is a high factor and vice versa. These factors compare mobile and desktop.
They measured the correlation of these factors.
Presence of unordered lists
Number of interactive elements
Number of backlinks
HTTPS
Number of internal links
File size
Site speed
Keyword in title
Word count
Keywords in body
Proof terms
Relevant terms
Redirects
For the results of the correlation study, view the results here.
Semantic content optimization is about consumer intent and not keywords. Don’t optimize a site with “seattle attractions” but rather “pikes place market” and “space needle”.
Direct Answers: How Should SEOs React? SMX Speakers Weigh In
Direct Answers: How Should SEOs React? SMX Speakers Weigh In was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
If your site gets featured in Direct Answers in search results, it can really boost traffic to your site. Don’t think of them as the enemy, but as a friend! Eric Enge, Amber Fehrenbach and Ehren Reilly are going to share their key insights into how to make Direct Answers populate, with data and examples straight from their agencies/brands at this don’t-miss SMX East session!
Ehren Reilly, Amber Fehrenbacher and Eric Enge
Latest Stone Temple Consulting Direct Answers Research – Eric Enge
Stone Temple Consulting’s Eric Enge (@stonetemple) shares an important quote from Google’s Amit Singhal: “The destiny of Google’s search engine is to become that Star Trek computer, and that’s what we are building.” Direct Answers are another step toward being the Star Trek computer.
Stone Temple Consulting ran 1.4 million queries through Google to see which would have rich answers including sidebars and which would have rich answer not including sidebars. The results? 35 percent rendered rich answers including sidebars and 29.4 percent rendered rich answers without sidebars.
How has this grown over time?
That’s 38 percent growth in seven months. Enge fully expects this trend to continue. Rich Answers are growing.
Two thirds of the time, Google includes a link to the source of the information. The cases where they don’t supply the link, the information is either public domain (capital of Washington state, for example). In other cases, Google has licensed the data (for song lyrics, as an example).
So, if your SEO strategy has had a heavy dependency on public domain information, know that this is going to get taken away from you. Google has a right to publish it, and they have a mission to be that Star Trek computer, so they’re going to do so.
Also, 54 percent of the domains used by Google for Rich Answers have a Moz domain authority of 60 or less. Lesson? Authority doesn’t trigger the answer.
These examples of Rich Answers show many cases of sites getting more traffic, thanks to their sites. What wins when it comes to Rich Answers? Simple, direct answers.
Stone Temple Consulting’s Testing
Enge published five videos answering various search questions in May, complete with transcripts. Each of them gave more information than just an answer to the question. In addition to the direct, simple answer, there’s more valuable content to go along with it.
Enge shared one of the videos on Google+ and submitted the URL to Google Search Console. In three days, they had a Rich Answer result for “How do you implement a NoFollow attribute on a link?”
Out of the other four videos, he was also able to get one more Direct Answer via a video: a 40 percent success rate!
Enge’s Advice for Getting a Direct Answer to Populate
Identify a simple question.
Provide a clear direct answer.
Offer value added info.
Make it easy for users and Google to find.
Turning Direct Answer Lemons into Lemonade – Amber Fehrenbacher
Amber Fehrenbacher (@afehrenbacher) is the CMO from Surety Bonds (specialty insurance company for bonds). After being hit hard by Penguin and Panda, Surety completely overhauled their marketing strategy and boosted their conversion rate and organic sessions, and decreased their bounce rate. Furthermore, within 30 days of the site redesign, Direct Answers started showing up for their content (even though the content itself didn’t change that much). Here’s what did change:
Responsive site redesign
Data-driven decision making
Developed in-house content team
Re-engineered user funnel
Aligned social strategy with content
Guest post
Surety’s Preferred Tools
Google Analytics
Search Console
MailChimp
Keyword Planner
Google Forms
PageAnalytics
Moz
Piwik
Optimizing for Direct Answers, According to Surety
Follow Google best practices on structured data.
Analyze user behavior in segments.
Derive content from keyword research.
Conduct qualitative research and pair with quantitative data to develop strategy.
Winning at Direct Answers – Ehren Reilly
Ehren Reilly (@ehrenreilly), the director of growth at Glassdoor, is next up to share his latest insights on Direct Answers.
Types of Businesses Struggling Since the Advent of Direct Answers
TimeAndDate.com
DollarstoRupees.com
WhatIsMyIPAddress.com
These services were useful, but not unique. This is no longer a viable business model. Nor, as Enge mentioned earlier, are lyrics sites.
Spoiler Answers: This is Reilly’s term for Direct Answers that share everything you need right on the SERP, such as an entire recipe. Publishers get upset over these situations as they lose traffic and ad revenue. But this is the reality. So how do publishers deal with it? Face reality and focus on the positive. You can show up above the No. 1 position if you can answer the question more directly than the No. 1 result.
Think Inside the Box:
Clickable Direct Answers are click magnets.
CTR on clickable Direct Answers derive twice as much traffic as a No. 1 SERP result with no Direct Answer.
If you’re No. 2 and not in a Direct Answer, you stand to lose half your traffic.
Google Keynote Announces AdWords Changes & New Way to Think about Ads at #SMX East
Google Keynote Announces AdWords Changes & New Way to Think about Ads at #SMX East was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Brad Bender, vice president of product management at Google Display Network, delivered a keynote at SMX East 2015. Google VIPs often use the SMX stage to share big announcements, and today was no exception! Here are Google Display Network’s announcements, right off the bat:
Google Display Network is rolling out enhanced Dynamic Remarketing. Ads will now automatically reshape and resize to fit all devices.
The Global Display Network is moving to 100% viewable — We’re migrating all the CPMs to viewable CPMs. Reporting will be rolled out to all advertisers.
Adwords Audience Insights launched today. This will enable marketers to take a look at their remarketing lists and really understand their composition: demographics, location, interests, type of device — all this will empower them to make different choices about who to target and what to do creatively.
(You can read more about these rollouts on the AdWords blog.) Now, on to the full story on everything Bender had to say re: the Google Display Network, live from New York.
Using Programmatic Advertising EffectivelyBender shares that GDN is interested in accomplishing three things:
Reaching the perfect audience
Delivering relevancy at the moments that matter
Optimizing with full transparency
We used to go online — now we live online. The average U.S. family has four smartphones and consumes 60 hours of digital content a week. That’s really exciting for marketers because you have so many more moments to reach users that might care about your brand.
People used to have an attention span of 12 seconds and now it’s less than eight seconds. That’s a shorter attention span than a goldfish, and just a moment to grab your user’s attention.
This is where programmatic ads come in, and it’s what I’m very excited about as far as opportunities go. With the Google Display Network, what we’re looking to do is make all this programmatic capability available to all of you.
Reach Your Perfect Audience
The data you can bring to bear comes in advertising proprietary data, as well as AdWords intent rich data. Programmatic advertising, to start with, provides an incredibly valuable set of data. These are the relationships you have with your customers. Remarketing is a great example of this. Consumers go to websites up to six times before deciding to buy.
Customer Match, announced early this week, lets you upload an email address to Google, and we enable you to reach those users in a privacy-safe way in really relevant moments. Let’s say you’re a travel retailer with a frequent flyer program — when a user types “flight” into their mobile device, this can allow you to show them a coupon. You can also do this on YouTube and Gmail — provide a campaign that inspires them to think about their next trip, for example, when they’re searching for things like flights.
Audience Suite
How do you make choices about when and where to advertise? That’s why we created the Audience Suite to help marketers make smart choices about when and where to advertise.
Let’s say a user is surfing Formula One racing. They’re probably not looking to buy a race car, which makes them an Affinity Audience, rather than an In-Market Audience (who’s looking at fuel economy, makes and models). We want to make sure messages are incredibly relevant to each type of audience.
Gmail Ads
There are more than 900 million active Gmail users. Native ads in Gmail just rolled out globally — the ads that look like an email at the top of your inbox. Gmail ads are another great example of power programmatic — it’s about reaching users wherever and whenever they are in this always online world.
People spend time in Gmail. Gmail passes Larry Page’s toothbrush test — it’s used at least twice a day. We used to have text ads that ran in Gmail on the right-hand side and we’ve removed them. The only ad now is a native ad experience, after determining that this would be the most engaging for users. It’s a teaser ad that behaves like an email. Click it and it expands to a full screen immersive experience. You can include videos, rich media, etc. Recently we made it so that you can run these ads within AdWords.
Marriot International wanted to give users a real sense of what it would be like to stay at their international hotels. They made a full screen creative canvas to drive awareness using videos and imagery via Gmail ads. Marriot saw a 25% increase in visits to the site and an 18% increase in page visits per user.
Ad Resizing
Ad resizing is a huge area of complexity. Think about Android alone – there are more than 18,000 Android devices out there. If you had to think about manually creating a creative for each one of these, it would be nearly impossible. This is a great example of where programmatic can help. It automatically changes the size of the creative so it works in all these different environments. We’ve made it so you only have to upload three creative sizes to reach 95% of our inventory, up from 55%.
Conversion Trends for Ads
What are you seeing holistically in terms of conversion trends?
90% of users use multiple devices throughout a day. The customer journey is no longer linear and that’s the fundamental thing. Our goal is to stitch all that together to give you a full picture. You can still do last click attribution and look at single devices, but I think it gives you an incomplete view and will lead you to make incorrect decisions.
Web to app and app to web: Clicks and conversions are happening across devices, to a site to an app and vice versa. Now, you can do remarketing across web and app — a user can go to your mobile site, and later you can remarket to them on your app.
Think about Ads Differently: They Fund the Free Content We Take for Granted
Taking a step back, ads are really important for today’s ecosystem. They fund most of the free content we take for granted — videos, blogs, etc. It’s all funded by ads. I think the phenomenon of ad blocking is driven by people having bad experiences with ads. A number of years ago, we had popups (a bad experience). There are still bad experiences now — but ad blockers block bad ads and good as. We’re focused on making the ads as useful and relevant as possible and giving the user more power over how those ads behave.
September 29, 2015
SMX Liveblog: Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan
SMX Liveblog: Evening Forum With Danny Sullivan was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
No format, no PowerPoint, just questions from the SMX East audience to Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan).
Google announced universal app campaigns and customer maps?
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/09/Google-brings-you-closer-to-your-customers.html
Google could have done this sort of thing ages ago and they haven’t. So, now that everyone else is doing it, no one’s going to point to Google and say you shouldn’t be taking first party data. The real question after this is when will you allow the targeting of people on their search histories for ads across the web.
You can create similar audiences based on an email list and based on visitors to your site (logged in or cookied).
Internet addresses running out of IP 4 addresses.
We’re moving to IP 6 and had enough warning to get ready for it.
Should SEOs transition to being a digital marketer?
Are you struggling with being a search marketer when “SEO is dead”? As long as there’s someone to own social and paid, then be the SEO! Someone needs to own the expertise.
Should we optimize for Bing? Yandex? Baidu?
For Baidu, they’re targeting marketers who can sell products.
A year ago you said Google+ was important for SEO. How do you feel about that now?
I would still say you should have a valid Google+ account for SEO. You still see content on Google+ posts outranking original content on a website. I’m looking forward to the day when I can say no. There’s no doubt the advantages have become less. Now all I can tell you is that you can get a ranking boost, of course, that’s the core of SEO. But, I wouldn’t invest a huge amount of time being social on Google+. I wouldn’t do a Hangout there. (!)
Does it change at all for Google My Business and Google+? In the case of local businesses, is google+ not dead?
Let’s call it Google Maps. I told Google when are you going to tell Google+ Local back into Google Local. Their answer was aren’t we doing that already? They didn’t internally understand the connection between Google Maps, local and Google+.
How should people address Twitter marketing?
Twitter stats are useful. You have to tweet a lot. I’ll tweet a story when it publishes and tweet again the next morning. I can tweet the same thing four times in the next day or two and people aren’t going to be seeing it multiple times, but rather maybe a chunk of people will see it one of those times.
It looks like a divorce between Bing and Yahoo. What’s really happening?
Ginny plugs a session called Ask the Search Engines: All Your Questions Answered. Bing and Yahoo are having a conscious uncoupling. Divorce is a harsh word – so 21st century. Marissa Mayer came in and saw an opportunity in mobile. Under the new agreement, 49% of desktop Yahoo searches can be served by Gemini. What’s going on is Yahoo trying to get back to the ad revenue in search. I think it was a hard negotiated battle on both fronts there. I expect that at the end of five years we’ll see a full separation.
Danny: No one thought mobile was big when the deal was first signed and so that’s how Marissa saw the opportunity. What they’re saying by way of explanation is that there was so much potential and opportunity for Yahoo so they didn’t put it in the contract in order to let it see where it grew.
Will there be a rise of negative SEO and should there be more defensive SEO strategy?
The best defensive strategy is – get ready to groan – have great content. Two or three years ago there was a negative SEO freak out along with Penguin. The reality is that it’s not an issue for most people.
What’s the latest on dynamic search ads (DSA) and where are they going?
Ginny thinks they’re going to grow. There’s always a job in negative keywords. You still have to manage a campaign. You still have to know who you’re targeting, understand what your bid strategies are. Will marketers be drawn to the product as it improves? Absolutely. As targeting improves and performance improves as machine learning improves, it will become more intuitive for marketers to know how to implement it. It won’t be the end of keywords. In some way we may not buy keywords the same way but she doesn’t think keywords are going away. Ultimately Google’s goal is the advertiser gives them their KPI and they’ll make it work. That’s a few years away. Keywords aren’t going to be informing that automation.
With the internet of things (IOT) growing at a fast pace, how can we prepare?
Danny does a presentation of trends in search and he talks about how search is changing with wearables. If he goes to a new city, foursquare pops up and says I saw you’re in a new city. Try out this restaurant. He didn’t do a search on Google. You literally can’t type into so you’re telling it things. Years ago he said that a search marketer isn’t someone who gets you ranked in Google. A search marketer understands how someone finds your information and figures out how to get you displayed. Pay attention to the Apple Watch, Android Wear, don’t spend too much time worrying about the Pebble.
How can you promote SEO internally?
If you’re at a company who thinks you should do SEO first, then you’re lucky. Tomorrow is the Landy Awards and there’s a cross-channel category that highlights the value of SEO from the beginning. Look at the case studies you can present to people. Look at past mistakes that you can point to and say this would have been easier if SEO was involved in the beginning. After the Landy Awards we’re hoping to write up a lot of the winners. People are doing amazing things with fantastic returns.
As a hotel chain we’ve experienced a challenge with Google increasing CPCs with brand searches. Has anyone had a similar issue?
Tad Miller says check out RKGs report. We’re seeing 200 to 300% increases in brand keywords with 10/10 quality score. There’s a 50-60% incremental lift in traffic and conversions and a 25% increase in organic search click through. So you can’t just not do paid search for brand keywords.
No One Wants to Do Them, But Content Audits Are Worth It. Mike King Explains Why at #SMX
No One Wants to Do Them, But Content Audits Are Worth It. Mike King Explains Why at #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Content audits are worth it.
Or so says Mike King (@IPullRank). He’s diving into content audits in “Perfect Starts: How to Get More of the Right Traffic” at this SMX East 2015 session. Fair warning: he has a lot to say, and he talks fast — this liveblog captures the highlights. (Get his full 80+ slide deck here.)
No one became a marketer so they could do content audits. But, you have to create things that people actually want and will provide people value — and content audits help you do that. But we often put things on the Internet and are like, hmm, did that work? This is wrong. You should PLAN out a strategy.
A content audit, then, helps you identify holes in the customer journey and leaks in link equity needed to support organic search rankings. Audits also help you figure out where the money is — what has performed in the past? Which audiences has it resonated with?
Key Questions for Content:
• What is already performing?
• What can perform better?
• What are we missing?
Have a clear business objective. It’s not as important to get No. 1 for terms as it is to get No. 1 for the RIGHT terms.
Personas
King is a big proponent of personas. Understand who they are, as well as the stages they go through when looking for your product or service. Use a style guide, by the way. And if you don’t already have one, check out Voiceandtone.com from MailChimp.
Quickest Way to Build Personas: Data!!!
Put your mailing list through FullContact and get a lot of data – figure out more information on them. Then use DemographicsPro and upload their Twitter handles. Now you can get a 20+ page report with all kinds of data. Also, upload that your mailing list to Facebook’s audience insights.
Now you have user insights and can better build insights.
Build a Journey Map
Start with your business goals and put your keywords in social listening tools — what questions are people asking? How are they using the terms? What phase of their journey matches up with each phrase?
King’s Content Audit Preferred Tools
• Screaming Frog
• Social Crawlytics
• BuzzSumo
• DeepCrawl
• URL Profiler
• SEO Tools for Excel
• SEOGadget for Excel
• Content Audit for WordPress
• Kapost
Final Thoughts
Keep doing pivots until your data tells a compelling story.
Remember to isolate your competitors’ top-performing content pieces, and run some analysis on them. And use data on your existing content to help you make a case for new content.
