Google Says Sticky Footers Are OK, With One Exception by @MattGSouthern

Google’s Gary Illyes says sticky footers on a website are nothing to worry about when it comes to SEO.

Illyes’ advice on sticky footers, which are footers that stay glued to the bottom of a screen, was prompted by the question of whether or not they can be seen as obtrusive.

In response, Illyes says one should always be cautious to not annoy users. That said, it sounds like there’s nothing against sticky footers in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Nah, I wouldn't worry about that, but do try to make them as less obtrusive as possible. You really don't want to annoy your users

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 28, 2017

However, there is one huge caveat here. If the sticky footer contains an ad then it could be frowned upon by Google.

According to the better ads standards, a large sticky ad which takes up more than 30% of the screen would be considered obtrusive.

“Large Sticky Ads stick to the edge of a page, regardless of a user’s efforts to scroll. As the user browses the page, this static, immobile sticky ad takes up more than 30% of the screen’s real estate.

A Large Sticky Ad has an impeding effect by continuing to obstruct a portion of the page view regardless of where the user moves on the page.”

Google has said it will block obtrusive ads in the Chrome browser beginning some time next year. This includes both mobile and desktop.

One may conclude from this that the sweet spot for a sticky footer is anything less than 30% of a screen’s real estate.

Since that will vary from screen to screen, it may be best to test your website design on a majority of today’s most common screen resolutions.

Google is Testing a Feature No One Seems to Want by @MattGSouthern

Google is testing a new feature in desktop search that, quite frankly, no one is happy about.

When Jennifer Slegg from The SEM Post reported on seeing autoplaying videos in Google search, the chatter around the web has been nothing but negative.

Here is a smattering of the sentiments thus far. I combed through Twitter to find even one positive opinion to balance out the negatives, but there were none to be found.

This is, without doubt, one of the worst ideas @Google has ever had: autoplay videos in search. https://t.co/KcQdlNF41u

— Alex Johnson (@MAlexJohnson) July 27, 2017

This is a dreadful idea: "Google is testing autoplay videos directly in search results." https://t.co/4rA4V1shXz

— Rob Price (@robaeprice) July 27, 2017

Dear Google, autoplay videos will NOT "improve the search experience," thanks… https://t.co/zJBZUAGMdO

— Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 27, 2017

The people who conceived, greenlit, and built this should be reprimanded and sent to human sensitivity training. https://t.co/8ufeBcuZ9l

— David Chartier 🥃 (@chartier) July 27, 2017

According to Slegg, the autoplaying videos have been spotted in the knowledge panel when movie titles are searched for on desktop.

Videos will initially play without any sound, though sound can be turned on manually. That means they technically abide by Google’s better ad standards.

The videos are not considered to be ads, though it is worth bringing up the ‘better ads’ comparison because it gives you an idea of what Google considers to be intrusive and non-intrusive.

In addition, videos will not repeat themselves. They will only play once unless prompted to play through another time. Once again, they are not showing up in mobile search – at least not currently.

Not thrilled with seeing autoplaying videos in your search results? Google’s official Chrome account is actually tweeting out advice for how to block them.

Hi Gavin. To disable autoplay, you can install an extension with a similar feature from the Web Store: https://t.co/nMOpjsHaWx.

— Google Chrome (@googlechrome) July 27, 2017

What’s being linked to in the above tweet is a Chrome plugin that will prevent you from seeing any type of autoplaying video in the Chrome browser. However, if you’re not using Chrome, then the plugin will obviously be of no use to you.

What does this mean for the future of search? Well, Wired published a rather insightful article with potential answers to that very question.

If nothing else, it opens up a window of opportunity for Google’s competitors:

“Perhaps the changes at Google aren’t enough to send you into the arms of a competitor quite yet, or to get regulators to take a second look at Google’s search dominance. But it means that the time is ripe for more competition.”

Google Home Service Ads to Launch Soon in Chicago by @https://twitter.com/1SEOcom

A source says the vetting process for Google Home Service Ads in the Greater Chicago metro area is finishing up, meaning the search feature for this market will soon launch.

Since 2015, Google has been partnering with businesses in California to display the ads for relevant queries. Philadelphia was the first East Coast city added to the list of test markets after the recruitment process finished in June.

Based on recruitment for Home Service Ads in Philadelphia, Google most likely reached out directly to 30-to-40 Chicago companies seen as recognized and trusted providers. We know that at least one of those companies was a plumbing business.

However, it’s possible that Google also vetted other home service providers including handymen, electricians, and locksmiths. These types of companies are yet to be featured in the Home Service Ads pack for queries in Philadelphia but appear for searches in California.

Google plans to expand the ads nationwide by the end of 2017. So far, it seems like they’re staying the course; the feature started on the West Coast, expanded to the East Coast in Philadelphia, and will soon launch in a Midwest market.

In Chicago, recruited businesses had to go through background checks, obtain proper licenses and insurance, and evaluations from undercover shoppers. After they had passed these screenings, businesses could partner with Google for the ads.

Select providers in Chicago will soon have the chance to connect directly with customers through phone calls and web-based leads. Users, on the other hand, will be able to leave reviews and place requests—straight from the search results page.

Partnering with Google means that companies will receive the “Google guaranteed” tag below their brand name. This way, customers will recognize when a company is backed by the Google guarantee, which implies the job is guaranteed to be done right or your money back.

Now that the recruitment process for Home Service Ads for this market is concluding, Chicago providers will soon notice their brand featured in the pack of listings.

SearchCap: Gboard update, Locadium launch & EPIC privacy

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Gboard update, Locadium launch & EPIC privacy appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Privacy group files flawed complaint against Google Store Sales Measurement

At a time when companies have growing access to consumer data from an increasing number of sources, privacy is more important than ever. But it’s also important for privacy advocates to understand what’s going on before they formally complain to regulatory bodies.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a complaint with the FTC over Google’s Store Sales Measurement program. The group is arguing that:

Google has collected billions of credit card transactions, containing personal customer information, from credit card companies, data brokers, and others and has linked those records with the activities of Internet users, including product searches and location searches. This data reveals sensitive information about consumer purchases, health, and private lives.

It asserts that Google is using a “secret, proprietary algorithm for assurances of consumer privacy” and that the company uses “an opaque and misleading ‘opt-out’ mechanism.” It further argues that these are “unfair and deceptive trade practices” and confer FTC jurisdiction. It’s asking for an injunction accordingly.

Store Sales Measurement began testing in 2014 and was rolled out in the US earlier this year. In contrast to the statement in the EPIC complaint, Google does not receive or have access to personal credit card transaction data.

What Google is getting is anonymous, aggregated information from credit card companies; it doesn’t see specific purchases and can’t identify individuals. Google also doesn’t know what was purchased; it receives information that among a group of X number of users exposed to a digital ad campaign, a subset bought something in the advertiser’s store. That information (on an aggregate basis) is reported back to the advertiser to help assess the efficacy of the campaign.

In addition, the data is encrypted and, according to Google, it cannot be used to identify individuals. Google told me through a spokesperson that it “does not share any personally identifiable information with advertisers or partners for this product.”

Google is not unique in this arena — Facebook introduced offline sales measurement through Custom Audiences in 2013. Other companies, such as Oracle and 4Info can do similar kinds of sales-related offline tracking.

Google’s opt-out process is a available under Google My Activity–>Activity Controls. Users can opt-out by unchecking the box below.

Google has not done a good job publicizing this opt-out option, nor is it intuitive. Clearly that process can be dramatically improved.

EPIC is right to push for more transparency around privacy and use of consumer data. However in this case they get some basic facts wrong.

By the same token, Google, Facebook and others can do a better job educating consumers about how their data is being used and the kinds of controls that can be exercised over that data. Both companies over the past couple of years have tried to do this with mixed results.

Most consumers don’t really have a clear sense of how their digital data is being used behind the scenes. But in the case of Google’s Store Sales Measurement, it’s not being misused.

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About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

Google+

.

Google Attempts to Make Torrent Sites Less Visible in Search Results by @MattGSouthern

Google has removed the carousel of pirate sites that once appeared when “best torrent sites” was searched for.

As you may know, contents within search results carousels are not hand curated by Google.

TorrentFreak reports the company conducted an investigation into what was appearing for the “best torrent sites” query, and ultimately decided to remove the carousel.

However, one must question whether or not that makes any difference compared to what is showing up instead.

Now, when “best torrent sites” is searched for, it returns a featured snippet box which pulls in content from TorrentFreak of the best torrent sites. So, in a way, searchers are still being directed to illegal torrent sites.

A Google spokesperson told TorrentFreak:

We have investigated this particular issue and determined that this results carousel wasn’t working in the intended manner, and we have now fixed the issue.”

Google’s “intended manner” likely didn’t involve a carousel of torrent sites, so it has “fixed the issue” by removing the carousel.

Perhaps Google will consider investigating the issue even further, because it’s still relatively easy to access the torrent sites that were featured in the carousel.

Locadium: a new ‘point solution’ to monitor GMB listings changes

LocalSEOGuide is releasing a new Google My Business monitoring tool called “Locadium.” It’s conceptually similar to other local listings monitoring services; however it’s exclusively focused on Google My Business (GMB).

Yext, Moz, Brandify, Vendasta, BrightLocal, SIMPartners, Chatmeter, among others, also provide local listings scans and monitoring. However, according to LocalSEOGuide founder Andrew Shotland, Locadium is the only tool that will monitor both the “front end” (consumer fields) and “back end” (API) of GMB. It sends alerts when there’s any change on to a company’s listing in any of the data fields.

It will be marketed to agencies, multi-location brands and SMBs. Pricing is variable for agencies and brands but for SMBs it costs $5 per month.

Similar tools on the market monitor local listings across the internet. However Shotland doesn’t see Locadium evolving into a broad-based listings monitoring service outside GMB. “We have no desire to compete with Yext,” he says. The appeal of Locadium is its focus and simplicity. “It’s a classic point solution.”

Shotland indicated the next piece of functionality he wants to add is a single report for GMB insights for multi-location enterprises so marketers working with them don’t have to check location by location.

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About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

Screenwerk

, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

Twitter

or find him at

Google+

.

Deadline extended for entries in the 2017 Search Engine Land Awards

Today is your lucky day! Due to the volume of inquiries surrounding this year’s awards competition, the deadline for entries in the Search Engine Land Awards competition has been extended until Friday, August 4th at 11:59PM PT. No further extensions will be granted so be sure to get your submissions completed on time.

The judges are eager to begin the review process as we expect the level of competition to set even higher standards for our already tough program. Speaking of judges, this is also a good time to share a little more about how our judging process works.

Privacy & confidentiality

Since we ask for a significant amount of detail and supporting data in our application process, your (and your clients’) privacy and sensitivities around confidential data is extremely important for us to address.

That’s why we keep our primary panel of judges — those who review the main campaign initiative categories — limited to full-time employees and contractors of Third Door Media (our parent company) who also produces our conference series, Search Marketing Expo. This reduces any concerns around any competitors seeing information related to process or budget during judging. Also judging these highly sensitive categories are official representatives from the top search platforms, Google and Bing, who are also bound to strict confidentiality standards.

For the in-house team awards, we work with our trusted in-house workshop presenter Jessica Bowman and other internal resources. In the special case of the individual awards (Search Marketer of the Year), we invite the previous year’s winners to participate in selecting the successors along with past winners. (As of this writing, the rules state that each individual may only receive this honor once.)

The agency awards are reviewed by independent partners, Clutch.co and OMCP.org. Client verification and contact information is also kept confidential.

Other measures are in place to reduce conflicts of interest in judging, and judges are asked to recuse themselves from reviewing and scoring any application in which they may have a personal or business connection.

As an applicant, in the terms and conditions, you may also specify how much data you are willing to let us share in follow-up coverage of any case studies submitted. Of course, should you win an award, we will work with you to showcase your achievements in a manner in which you (and the client, if applicable) feel most comfortable.

Now, get back back to working on completing your entry to be considered among the best in SEO & SEM, and wow us with your best work to take home the highest honors in search marketing. Enter here.

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About The Author

Search Engine Land is a daily publication and information site covering search engine industry news, plus SEO, PPC and search engine marketing tips, tactics and strategies. Special content features, site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Search Engine Land.

Organizing for Martech: Re-examining modern marketing

Many organizations are struggling to optimize their staffing and skills to compete in a rapidly changing marketing world. What worked yesterday in marketing and technology may not work today – or tomorrow. With the rapid infusion of technology into the marketing organization, tensions between marketing and IT are inevitable.

How do you structure marketing to manage martech? What skills do you look for….or even need? How do you foster collaboration across groups in this new environment? Who’s in charge? Who should be?

Join Scott Brinker and our panel of martech experts as they explore the challenges facing CMOs looking to transform their marketing organization. They’ll discuss emerging best practices and the pros and cons of different management structures. You’ll also gain insights into how they manage and run their own companies.

Register today for “Organizing for Martech: Re-examining modern marketing,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by MarTech.

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About The Author

Digital Marketing Depot

is a resource center for digital marketing strategies and tactics. We feature hosted white papers and E-Books, original research, and webcasts on digital marketing topics -- from advertising to analytics, SEO and PPC campaign management tools to social media management software, e-commerce to e-mail marketing, and much more about internet marketing. Digital Marketing Depot is a division of Third Door Media, publisher of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land, and producer of the conference series Search Marketing Expo and MarTech. Visit us at

http://ift.tt/XKa9gM

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5 tools, tips and hacks to maximize your SEO output

This article was co-authored by my colleague at Go Fish Digital, Chris Long.

Part of being an effective SEO is being incredibly efficient with the tasks at hand. You just aren’t going to have the time needed to go deeper and continue to add value if you’re spinning your wheels doing manual, repetitive tasks.

Because of this, we have always valued things that can make you more efficient: tools, scripts, automation, and even interns!

Today, we dig deep into our toolbox to pull out five of our favorite ways to maximize your SEO productivity output.

1. Automate Google Analytics data extracts & reporting

Generating monthly reports is one of those repetitive tasks that can consume a day or more at the beginning of the month (especially in the agency world!).

If you’re manually pulling data from Google Analytics, you need to be constantly checking that your date ranges are correct, that you’ve applied the proper segments, that you’re analyzing the right metrics, and that you’ve accessed the primary profile in the first place. Not only would automating this type of reporting save time, but it would also ensure consistency and eliminate mistakes.

And while scheduling reports in Analytics is fine, reporting can really be taken to the next level with the Google Analytics Add-On for Sheets. This add-on is a lifesaver for us during reporting time!

By adding this to Google Sheets, you can pull data directly from the Google Analytics API without ever having to log into the Analytics interface. To start, you’ll need to configure which metrics, date ranges, segments and profile the API should be pulling. Next, you simply run the report; the data is then loaded into your spreadsheet automagically.

The beauty of this whole system is that once you have set up your reporting framework, the amount of time spent gathering Google Analytics data each month should be drastically reduced.

For most of my reports, all I do is adjust the date ranges at the beginning of each month, and I let the API apply all my segments and collect only the metrics I need. I also create charts in the same spreadsheet that reference the cells this data gets pulled into.

With some very minor changes to the spreadsheet each month, I’m able to pull all of the data I need and have it formatted into easy-to-read charts.

This little add-on easily saves me about a day’s worth of work every single month.

2. Find internal linking opportunities with Screaming Frog

Internal links are one of the most underrated ranking factors in SEO. They not only allow you to optimize the destination pages for the exact keywords you want, they also provide a great opportunity to strategically distribute link equity in a way that targets your key landing pages.

Because of this, we’re continually providing clients with recommendations on improving the internal links on their websites. And from this, we have plenty of evidence that it works, even with some of the most competitive keywords there are.

For large and enterprise websites, it can be tough to find every one of those juicy internal linking opportunities awaiting your attention. The good news is that Screaming Frog comes with a “Search” feature that makes finding internal linking opportunities a breeze.

Before running a crawl of a website, simply navigate to “Configuration > Custom > Search” and add keywords you want to optimize for. Screaming Frog will then crawl the whole site and return URLs that use that text in the “Custom” report section. You can run a search for 10 different keywords at a time so you can include the different variations of the keyword you’re optimizing for.

You can also pair this search with Screaming Frog’s Include/Exclude feature to only search for opportunities in specific sections of your website. For improved productivity, I like to use the OpenList extension, which opens all of the URLs at once in separate tabs.

3. Scale keyword research with Merge Words

Google is better than ever at understanding the topic of a web page through its improved entity recognition. Better language processing allows Google to group related terms and understand their context.

This means it’s extremely important to not only understand your core keywords but semantically related terms as well. Keyword strategies revolving around concepts such as TF-IDF are gaining more traction among search professionals.

Google’s improved language comprehension means that your pages are capable of ranking for a much larger set of keywords than the ones they’re optimized for. While this is great for SEO, it can be intimidating to start keyword research with this in mind.

How are you supposed to determine all of the different keyword combinations you should be including in your content? And how are you to know which keywords to actually implement on the page?

Enter the Merge Words tool. This simple tool allows you to add words to three separate columns; then, as the name suggests, it will merge every combination of all of the terms you entered.

Now, instead of spending a great deal of time manually plugging keywords into your keyword research tool, you can quickly combine all of the different identifiers into Merge Words, then copy-and-paste that data into your keyword research tool.

An example of how this could be used is with an aftermarket car parts retailer. They could merge lists of all of the makes/models (Acura MDX, Acura TL, etc.) they provide parts for with all of the products they carry (headlights, seat covers, etc). The result is every combination of make/model with every part they provide (e.g. Acura MDX headlights, Acura MDX seat covers, Acura TL headlights, Acura TL seat covers).

They could then plug this list into the Google Keyword Planner to see what the most searched keywords were.

4. Scale SEO improvements with global changes

SEO productivity doesn’t have to just refer to specific tactics to make the collection of data easier. Productive SEOs are also capable of applying this thinking to campaigns as a whole to scale their success. While page-level recommendations can be extremely beneficial, often times it can be tedious and lead to diminishing returns to solely optimize a website on a page-by-page basis.

Especially with larger enterprise websites, it can be hard to move the needle for a website’s organic traffic by just picking at individual pages.

For this reason, I believe the most productive use of an SEO’s time is looking for global improvements. These sitewide improvements can be the most beneficial use of time as the SEO or developers only need to make the change in one location and yet it can impact thousands of pages.

So, how can you identify changes that can be made on a global level? One we do quite a bit is tweak title tag and meta description template logic so that it includes important words, phrases, and modifiers that people commonly search for along with the primary keywords.

Another valuable sitewide improvement is to look for errors that are built into the website template. Once again, Screaming Frog is our best friend. Start by running a crawl of a website, then sort the reports Screaming Frog provides by “Inlinks.” This shows how many links on the site contain that error.

Oftentimes, we’ll find internal 301 redirects or 404 errors that have thousands of inlinks pointing to them. This is a great clue that this error is occurring site-wide, and a simple change to the template can fix this issue across a large quantity of URLs.

5. Make interns part of your company culture

This may sound like cheating, but sometimes a repetitive or tedious process just needs that human touch. We’ve found that these types of tasks are perfect for interns. They get to do real work, and it frees up our team members for more difficult and meaningful work.

Our summer internship program has been a great success, and we work really hard to make the internships a win-win for everyone involved.

The interns benefit because we pay them well and they get great hands-on, real-world experience beyond grabbing coffee and filing documents. Go Fish Digital benefits by having capable hands ready to take on some of the more repetitive tasks that need to be performed manually.

The program is also a great way to identify talent early, and several former interns have gone on to be great full-time team members with the company.

In running the program, here are some of the things we’ve learned that have really helped us run a strong, efficient program:

• Take hiring interns seriously. Our hiring process for interns is not all that different from hiring full-time team members. There are several rounds, and we do provide a prompt for a work sample. They’ll be in your office for roughly three months and will have an impact on your culture, so make sure it is a positive one.
• Onboard interns in groups. The “class” of interns tends to build a good bond as they have others coming on in their same situation. It also means you can train once, and get twice (or more) the output when it comes to delivery.
• Minimize or eliminate work-from-home opportunities for interns. It takes a lot of self-discipline to be just as productive at home as in the office, and while we trust our team with this, we’ve had less positive experiences with interns working remotely.
• Ensure that the interns are learning valuable skills. They should learn real marketing skills, and they should also learn how to be a good in-office team member.
• Hold an exit interview with the interns so that you can provide each other with feedback. We actually didn’t do this at first, and a smart intern pointed out that they would really love some feedback on how things went from our perspective. It turns out that though they are less experienced, they also have some great insight from spending time working with the company, so make sure you get their honest feedback on the experience as well.

Final thoughts

Scaling, efficiency, and productivity are core tenants my company — and for good reason.

If you can find a better and faster way to do something, you increase your quality output while freeing up time to do the more thoughtful (and more rewarding) work required to be successful at SEO.

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Brian Patterson is partner and co-founder of

Go Fish Digital

, and is responsible for researching and developing strategies for Online Reputation Management (ORM), SEO, and managing web development projects. He blogs on the

GFD blog

and can be found on Twitter

@brianspatterson

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Your Indexed Pages Are Going Down – 5 Possible Reasons Why by @benjarriola

Getting your webpages indexed by Google (and other search engines) is essential. Pages that aren’t indexed can’t rank.

How do you  see how many pages you have indexed? You can

Each will give different numbers, but why they are different is another story.

For now, let’s just talk about analyzing a decrease in the number of indexed pages reported by Google.

If your pages aren’t being indexed, this could be a sign that Google may not like your page or may not be able to easily crawl it. Therefore, if your indexed page count begins to decrease, this could be because either:

• You’ve been slapped with a Google penalty.
• Google thinks your pages are irrelevant.
• Google can’t crawl your pages.

Here are a few tips on how to diagnose and fix the issue of decreasing numbers of indexed pages.

1. Are the Pages Loading Properly?

Make sure they have the proper 200 HTTP Header Status.

Did the server experience frequent or long downtime? Did the domain recently expire and was renewed late?

Action Item

You can use a free HTTP Header Status checking tool to determine whether the proper status is there. For massive sites, typical crawling tools like Xenu, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, or Botify can test these.

The correct header status is 200. Sometimes some 3xx (except the 301), 4xx, or 5xx errors may appear – none of these are good news for the URLs you want to be indexed.

2. Did Your URLs Change Recently?

Sometimes a change in CMS, backend programming, or server setting that results in a change in domain, subdomain, or folder may consequently change the URLs of a site.

Search engines may remember the old URLs but, if they don’t redirect properly, a lot of pages can become de-indexed.

Action Item

Hopefully a copy of the old site can still be visited in some way or form to take note of all old URLs so you can map out the 301 redirects to the corresponding URLs.

3. Did You Fix Duplicate Content Issues?

Fixing duplicate content often involves implementing canonical tags, 301 redirects, noindex meta tags, or disallows in robots.txt. All of which can result in a decrease in indexed URLs.

This is one example where the decrease in indexed pages might be a good thing.

Action Item

Since this is good for your site, the only thing you need to do is to double check that this is definitely the cause of the decrease of indexed pages and not anything else.

4. Are Your Pages Timing Out?

Some servers have bandwidth restrictions because of the associated cost that comes with a higher bandwidth; these servers may need to be upgraded. Sometimes, the issue is hardware related and can be resolved by upgrading your hardware processing or memory limitation.

Some sites block IP addresses when visitors access too many pages at a certain rate. This setting is a strict way to avoid any DDOS hacking attempts but it can also have a negative impact on your site.

Typically, this is monitored at a page’s second setting and if the threshold is too low, normal search engine bot crawling may hit the threshold and the bots cannot crawl the site properly.

Action Item

If this is a server bandwidth limitation, then it might be an appropriate time to upgrade services.

If it is a server processing/memory issue, aside from upgrading the hardware, double check if you have any kind of server caching technology in place, this will give less stress on the server.

If an anti-DDOS software is in place, either relax the settings or whitelist Googlebot to not be blocked anytime. Beware though, there are some fake Googlebots out there; be sure to detect googlebot properly. Detecting Bingbot has a similar procedure.

5. Do Search Engine Bots See Your Site Differently?

Sometimes what search engine spiders see is different than what we see.

Some developers build sites in a preferred way without knowing the SEO implications.

Occasionally, a preferred out-of-the-box CMS will be used without checking if it is search engine friendly.

Sometimes, it might have been done on purpose by an SEO who attempted to do content cloaking, trying to game the search engines.

Other times, the website has been compromised by hackers, who cause a different page to be shown to Google to promote their hidden links or cloak the 301 redirections to their own site.

The worse situation would be pages that are infected with some type of malware that Google automatically deindexes the page immediately once detected.

Action Item

Using Google Search Console’s fetch and render feature is the best way to see if Googlebot is seeing the same content as you are.

You may also try to translate the page in Google Translate even if you have no intention to translate the language or check Google’s Cached page, but there are also ways around these to still cloak content behind them.

Index Pages Are Not Used as Typical KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which help measure the success of an SEO campaign, often revolve around organic search traffic and ranking. KPIs tend to focus on the goals of a business, which are tied to revenue.

An increase in indexed pages pages may increase the possible number of keywords you can rank for that can result in higher profits. However, the point of looking at indexed pages is mainly just to see whether search engines are able to crawl and indexed your pages properly.

Remember, your pages can’t rank when search engines can’t see, crawl, or index them.

A Decrease in Indexed Pages Isn’t Always Bad

Most of the time, a decrease in indexed pages could mean a bad thing, but a fix to duplicate content, thin content, or low-quality content might also result in a decreased number of indexed pages, which is a good thing.

Learn how to evaluate your site by looking at these five possible reasons why your indexed pages are going down.

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Image Credit:

Featured image containing Google Search Console screenshot from Roberto Peñacastro‘s account posted on Google Product Forums. 

5 Easy Content Optimization Tactics to Boost Your Traction & ROI by @JuliaEMcCoy

Your content is useless if nobody knows it exists.

To work for you, your content needs an audience.

To get that audience, you need optimized content.

Content optimization is how you get your content seen and heard. It gets your best stuff in front of many audiences, including electronic ones that ease human discovery.

By now, you know all about SEO and the top ways to rank on search engines. You have Google’s M.O. down pat, and you understand how to write for humans and algorithms.

So, what do you need now?

You need easy and proven tactics that will elevate your content traction and ROI. These tips and tricks will give your content the extra push needed to succeed.

Look at these techniques and tools like moves on a chessboard. They’re incremental steps that can lead you to a big, satisfying checkmate.

1. Score Your Headline

The headline is number one in today’s climate of information overload. If it’s effective, it makes people stop and click. A good headline is your only defense against the endless tide while everyone you follow is posting non-stop.

Your headline is integral to your content’s success. Your headline is what jumps out at readers first. Your headline is the part of your content that shouts, “Look at me! I’m interesting!”

Or, it should.

How do you know the headline you crafted works on all the right levels for readers – intellectually, emotionally, and “hey, this looks cool”?

One easy way to make sure your headline works is to score it using an online tool. Figure out if your headline sucks in seconds with the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer. Another good option is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.

All you have to do is plug in that little 70-characters-or-less line and hit “enter.”

The headline analyzer will come back with a score for your labor of love. In general, for good results, you should be shooting for an EMV score above 40 percent:

This tactic works well. Headlines scored at 40 percent and can get 5o to 100 percent more shares than non-scored headlines, based on my experience.

This is an easy, quick way to boost your headline prowess. Plus, you’ll improve your content’s one-two punch when a reader catches a glimpse of it. They won’t want to look away.

2. Research Trends & Jump on Them

Before you can create good headlines, you need topics to write about. Before you can come up with good topics, you need to know what readers are gobbling up.

Trends are helpful in the content marketing world. Trends tell you what topics readers are zeroing-in on and which ones are old hat.

Of course, if you jump on the bandwagon too late, you’ll feel silly and you won’t get any of the benefits. You’ll feel like I did in middle school when I realized my straight-leg jeans were so 1998. Meanwhile, everyone else was wearing flared styles. The horror!

Don’t worry, though. You can avoid making a content faux-pas by researching trends that are happening right this second. Then you can dive in without any hesitation.

How?

Try a tool like BuzzSumo. This app does a ton of great research for you. It can:

• Analyze keywords and how they’re performing.
• Tell you which pieces of content are trending on your site.
• Show you what’s trending for other brands.

You can look up key influencers in your industry and see how their activity is working for them. This feels vaguely voyeuristic, but acceptably so.

For instance, let’s see which articles get the most shares on HubSpot. All you have to do is enter the URL into BuzzSumo’s search bar and hit Search:

Instantly, you can see which articles have the most shares. You can sort the results by social network, too, and see which content is landing on different platforms.

For instance, HubSpot’s top article is “5 Smart Reasons to Create Content Outside Your Niche.” Meanwhile, their top article on Twitter is “8 Signs of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership.”

BuzzSumo can also show you which types of content are most popular. It will additionally illuminate which types aren’t landing as well:

I can glean lots of great insights from these trends and use them when creating my own content.

Plus, you can take a look at trends happening on your own website. Search your URL and find out what content is getting the most shares. Do a content analysis and see which types of posts are hitting the mark. Note the trends and see what people are digging – then go from there.

The same follows if you’re guest posting on another website. Search their trends, then create what will appeal to the most readers.

Hopping on these trends can get you noticed in a big way. Putting out what audiences are into right now helps you tap into current interest and stay in the game.

3. Include Influencer Quotes in Your Content

Along with staying trendy, you need to hang out with the cool kids if you want to optimize your content in fresh ways. This means you should tap influencers and thought leaders in your industry.

Industry influencers are those people who have a wide following. However, don’t mistake popular for influential.

An influencer is a trusted authority. They have clout. They’re known for their intelligence and experience. When they give a recommendation, share a link, or generally give something the thumbs-up, their followers listen.

Reaching out to an influencer and building a relationship is a good practice in general, but you can also make their clout work for you.

This infographic deftly defines thought leadership:

Do it by including influencer quotes in your content.

This doesn’t mean you have to interview the person. Instead, you can cite their published pieces and data, making sure to credit them. Then, once your content is on the web, reach out to said influencer and let them know you mentioned them.

This is one of the easiest ways to start networking. Plus, once you quote their authority content in your own pieces, you’ll immediately instill more trust in your audience. They’ll think, “Oh, I read such-and-such person’s blog, too – they’re a great source!” By extension, you’ll get props for displaying your own trust in these influencers.

This is a perfect example of a circle of influence – take full advantage of it!

4. Don’t Forget the Nitty-Gritty of SEO

You’re busy scouting for influencer quotes, scoring your headlines, and researching trends. In the midst of all this, don’t overlook small steps that can lead to big content traction.

In fact, go all the way back to one of the basic foundations of SEO.

Meta tags.

This basic HTML code tells search engines where to look on your page to find all the necessary elements. They also describe and structure your content for readers.

Case in point: the title tag.

This seemingly simple, unassuming tag is powerful. It shows up everywhere. This includes:

• The page title in search results
• The title on the tab in your internet browser
• The main text in social media posts to describe the page when someone shares it

Search engines and platforms grab this tag and analyze it to display important information to readers.

Readers use it to know where they are on the web. It helps them categorize what they’re reading and determine if they want to click on a link shared in a post or on a SERP.

The same goes for meta description, the alt attribute for images, and other tags that describe your content.

You may not be a hardcore coder, but you can still properly title your pages and include other vital bits of meta. Do these small tasks and you’ll not only help organize the web – you’ll also make it much easier for your audience to find you.

5. Make Your Content Easy to Share

Make it easy for your audience to repost, retweet, or link to your content on social media. In fact, it should be so easy, they shouldn’t have to think about it.

So, what can you do to make your content physically shareable?

• Include a static social share toolbar on your site. It should appear on each page that contains shareable content. Try the Floating Share Bar from AddThis or the HootSuite Social Share.
• Include share buttons at the end of a blog post or article. ShareThis has Inline Share Buttons that you can place in an exact location on a page. Easily accessible share buttons on a page are the standard way to quickly let readers share your content to their chosen social outlet. It’s totally simple – and it looks snazzy, too, which is a big plus. Along with providing ways to organically share your content, you can also encourage this behavior with a few tricks.
• Ask your readers for a share or a like outright. If you’re not too overt about it, you may inspire them to help you out. Ask a question at the end of the post and encourage answering in the comments. Asking readers for their personal experiences and opinions about a hot-button topic is a great way to begin a discussion and get some shares.
• End each and every piece with a CTA that spurs your readers to share. If your CTAs aren’t getting you anywhere, revise and tweak until you hit on a good formula.

The cliché is true when it comes to content marketing: Sharing is caring.

Encourage your readers to share, and make it easy for them to do so. You’ll reap the rewards.

Optimizing Your Content in Fresh Ways Can Give You an Edge

If you need to give your content marketing a push, consider these easy ways to optimize your output.

Taking the time for tasks like these isn’t a big commitment, but could pay off handsomely with more shares, more engagement, and a bigger audience.

In short, make it as easy as possible for your audience to find you to find that traction you’ve been looking for. The result will be a higher return on your content investment. And that’s a big deal.

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Image Credits

Featured image: (c) Julia McCoy & Express Writers

Thought leadership: Mitchell Levy

Screenshots taken by author, July 2017

If your GMB page updates & no one knows, does it make a sound?

If you own SEO at a multi-location brand (or an agency that works with them), it can be hard to sleep at night.

Once upon a time, we were approached by a multi-location retailer about a Google My Business (GMB) problem. Apparently, at some point, Google updated the phone number on a decent percentage of their GMB pages from the local store number to their national customer support number.

They had discovered this because their customer support calls — and cost — had gone through the roof virtually overnight. The problem got fixed, and things went back to normal, but I doubt the person managing their GMB program ever got a good night’s sleep after that.

Over the years, most of us in the Local SEO world have become accustomed to Google updating GMB pages, even those that have been claimed, seemingly on an algorithmic whim. We’ve noticed this is particularly common with images:

The old “change your dealership photo to a cat picture” trick

If you’ve seen any of our Local SEO presentations in the past year or two, this shot is probably familiar, but it’s so good I can’t stop sharing it! Nor can I stop sharing a more recent example we call, “You Want a Slice With That Jeep?”

And because a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s take a look at this luxury apartment building turned Porta-Potty depot:

When Google shut down MapMaker earlier this year, a metric ton of images in the Local Knowledge Graph got changed. And while I am sure Google’s engineers did a ton of testing, what we’ve seen over and over again is that Google often doesn’t know exactly how changes to one part of its systems will affect other parts. It’s one of the reasons we Local SEO types have jobs. It’s also the reason why we find ourselves a bit cranky in the morning.

This issue was happening so often, we actually built a tool to monitor front-end GMB changes because we were pretty sure that GMB’s dashboard was not alerting us to a good portion of updates that were getting published.

Auto-generated retailer department GMB pages

Often, the problem is not that Google updated a GMB page you have already claimed, but that it creates new pages for you that you don’t know exist. This issue can be acute for multi-location retailers that have, or appear to have, multiple departments. Over the past year or two, we have seen Google auto-generate department GMB pages, often with disastrous results. Following are a few special ones.

The image below shows a typical GMB page for a store with multiple departments. Often, these “stores within a store” are legitimately created by the brand and can be great when it comes to ranking for local, category-specific queries.

But if you click on the “Costco Hearing Aids Center” link in the Department listings, it takes you to an unclaimed, clearly auto-generated GMB page that is marked as “Closed today” — this screenshot was taken at 12:00 noon on a Wednesday.

What’s that you say? I’m losing business based on a GMB problem I didn’t even know I had? It’s hard to hear GMB alert me to that issue without my hearing aid! Or, maybe they will never actually alert you to stuff like this, but you might notice your customer base has started skewing towards people who can actually hear.

Here’s an unclaimed Target Photo Center listing with no phone number, address or a website link — but hey, at least it’s open.

And it’s not like Target’s SEO team is asleep at the wheel. GMB is likely not going to alert them that this listing has even been created. And there’s not enough time in the day to click on every GMB listing for every Target store to see where it leads.

In Target’s case, at least Google is polite enough to not give out mistaken data. But when it auto-generates these department GMB pages, it also often auto-generates the linked website URLs, which is not always a recipe for success. Check out the website link to this auto-generated Sam’s Club* Optical Center:

This Website link takes you to an old Optical category page on the site which provides a not-so-great user experience (good thing most visitors need glasses and won’t be able to see it well):

I could go on for a while with examples, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only one. So I asked a bunch of other SEOs on Twitter (where else would they be?) how many had had GMB updates go live without their approval over the past six months:

78%. That’s not a rounding error.

Burnt GMB offerings

Most SEOs I spoke with who handle large accounts see a huge percentage of listings that get “updates” notifications from the GMB dashboard each month. One quoted 920 out of 1,080 pages they manage. Often, these are just suggested changes to “Offerings” or “Amenities,” which are likely not huge deals:

Another told me that up to 30% of their GMB listings change in some way every month. And while I suspect that Google alerts us to most of these changes, that still leaves a huge number of updated GMB pages that we never know about… until a client sends a “WTF” screenshot….

How to monitor your GMB pages for updates

Thanks to Google releasing a GMB API last year, there are plenty of great third-party tools for keeping track of changes to your GMB pages. Here are a few:

Good night and good luck!

*Full disclosure: Sam’s Club & Yext are clients of Local SEO Guide

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Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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About The Author

Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a leading local search engine optimization blog and consultancy.

Latest Gboard iPhone updates include access to Maps, YouTube & a new drawing feature

Google’s latest Gboard updates for iPhone lets users easily access YouTube and Maps via the search-enabled keyboard and includes a new “Ink” drawing feature.

Now when you tap the ‘G’ to open Gboard, a ‘YouTube’ and a ‘Maps’ option appears, making it possible to add your current location via Maps or search for a YouTube video and add the link.

There is also a new Ink drawing feature that lets you draw a message instead of typing it. To access, tap the emoji icon and select the pen icon at the bottom of the screen.

Google says Gboard also now supports three new languages: Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi.

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About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including

MarketingProfs.com

,

SoftwareCEO.com

, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

10 Apps That Will Help You Achieve Digital Marketing Wellness by @lisabuyer

A lack of work-life balance is one of the top sources of stress today for digital marketers.

The struggle is real in our mobile-first digital world.

The lines between professional output and personal input have forever been blurred because of the ubiquity of smartphones and today’s 24/7 on-demand work culture.

Where does the digital marketer’s day start and stop for the search and social marketing community?

Whether you’re a social media strategist, search marketer, data scientist, PPC manager, or in-house marketing team, you can probably relate.

The challenges of managing productivity, creativity, and strategy planning creep up on us daily.

Check if this is you:

• I switch between multiple social media profiles hourly
• I check on personal Facebook status updates more than 5x a day
• I get push notifications from my smartphone from at least three social media profiles
• I respond to emails from multiple devices every waking moment
• I manage multiple marketing campaigns using both mobile and desktop apps
• I skip lunch to catch up on social media updates and notifications
• I take my mobile device to the bathroom “just in case.”
• I refresh email more than three times per hour
• I stop in the middle of what I’m doing to answer an email or read a social media notification
• I scroll Twitter whenever I have a free minute or two
• I bring my smartphone to all meetings and keep it facing up so I can see the screen
• I answer all smartphone calls, no matter who I’m with or what I’m doing
• I have multiple chat platforms open not to miss out
• I read emails and respond to text messages while on a conference call
• I create Snapchat or Instagram stories daily
• I miss personal commitments to “catch up on work.”
• I answer questions without fully paying attention to what you said because I was reading an “important message”
• I stop what I’m working on to read a push notification
• I work on multiple things at once
• I underestimate the amount of time something will take
• I hold my breath while reading stressful messages
• I have more than 10,000 unread emails in my inbox

Did you check more than half of these scenarios? If so, you’ll be happy to know there’s an app for that.

Are We Digitally Doomed?

If you’ve chosen digital marketing as your career, it can sometimes feel like you’re doomed. You get a double dose of social media and smartphone exposure.

Today’s average consumer spends about five hours a day on their smartphone. That puts digital marketers average mobile radiation pushing six or seven hours a day.

You are targeting, retargeting, and the ones being targeted. You’re always holding a device, wearing a device, or looking at a device.

The faster we go, the more we do. But why does it seem the more we do, the less we get done?

Also the less we seem to have left over at the end of the day for what is most important to friends, family, and downtime.

Multitasking and productivity are hitting a wall, and the results are not adding up in anyone’s favor.

While some might brag about being expert multi-tasking digital do-ers, the reality is this: studies show our brains function best when fresh, calm, and focused on one thing at a time.

We’re Literally Addicted to Technology

Smartphone addiction is an actual condition called nomophobia. It means we literally can’t live without our phone in hand or in sight without breaking into a cold sweat.

It’s no coincidence or by chance. It’s by design.

Brain hacking is an intentional strategy orchestrated by Silicon Valley.

The tech giants behind the alluring apps we can’t live without are hiring developers to study the neuroscience behind what triggers us to become obsessed with our apps.

In a recent “60 Minutes” interview, a former Google product manager shared how Silicon Valley is engineering your phone, apps and social media to get you hooked.

Brain Time

Most of us have no idea how much time we spend on our smartphones since it practically entered into human science as a new body part.

Unfortunately, the time we do spend on our devices ends up being in the wrong place for the wrong reason.

So what are the options or app-tions?

Ironically those smartphones that bring us pain and distraction can also reconnect us by bringing insta-inspiration, and transformation.

Whether you have an Android or iPhone, most of these apps can take your brain on a mini-vacay so you can keep your digital marketing sanity.

Here are the 10 best apps for digital marketing wellness.

Get hooked on these digital detox apps to bring more Zen and balance to your life.

1. Onward

With the help of a “coach,” Onward helps you realize how much screen time you spend each day by category.

This app then guides you with the aid of artificial intelligence to guide you in limiting the additional screen time while still achieving your same goal.

Are you spending time in the right apps for maximum productivity and purpose?

2. Space

Using neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the Space app helps us combat social media and smartphone addiction by adding space between you and your social media apps.

The same types of developers app developers are using to get us hooked in are also reverse engineering the brain.

3. Buddhify

BuzzFeed named Buddhify the number one app to ease anxiety, and I agree.

Buddhify comes with a beautiful user interface packed with more than 80 meditations including a track called “Work Break.”

One of my favorites in that category is “Ready.” It’s a perfect guided meditation for those times when you need to be at your best (e.g., when you’re getting ready for a public speaking event such as a conference, presentation or meeting).

In just eight minutes you can go from frazzled and scattered to calm, balanced, present, and laser sharp.

Other tracks for the digital marketer in mind include: Being Online, Waking up, Going to Sleep, and Feeling Stressed.

Buddhify app comes packed with more than 80 meditations including a track called “Work Break” and another called “Being Online.”

4. Jiyo

Jiyo is a well-being social network and powerful app by Deepak Chopra and co-founder Poonach Machaiah.

This app uses artificial intelligence to make your well being personalized and give you tips on what you need most.

Let’s say you get off a red-eye. Jiyo can tell you have traveled many time zones and might assign you a certain stretch to help offset a lack of sleep. It’s designed to help you be your best selfie – or, as Jiyo calls it, wellfie.

Jiyo works through an app that analyzes your data such as movement and sleep. It then assigns you a task each day and offers curated content on nutrition, sleep, and wellness.

5. Calm

Calm is a book, blog, and an app ready to do just that: calm you down.

Bubbling brooks, campfire sparks, and chirping birds come to the sensory rescue so you can reset the brain.

In case you need some coaching with healthy breathing, calm gives you a visual to follow.

6. Fitbit

I’ve had a Fitbit since the first one came out in 2007.

Today Fitbit is not just a product but part of the wearable movement and on of the devices that sync with Jiyo.

Digital marketers are notorious for sitting in front of the computer all day. Having a Fitbit or the Apple Watch can help remind you to move more.

7. Yogaglo

When I go to a conference or on a business trip I have all the best intentions of working out at the hotel gym. Inevitably work life gets in the way.

Using the Yogaglo app, you can find a class that is as short as 5 minutes, any level, any style yoga or meditation – no mat required.

Just five minutes is better than nothing when trying to get your groove back for an early morning marketing workshop in Vegas! Deep breathing exercises help, trust me.

8. InBoxPause

What if your went to check your inbox and heard: “I’m sorry the inbox you are trying to reach is currently not available. Please try again in about an hour.”

Digital marketing wellness starts with inbox sanity.

The InBoxPause  app is by the same team who brought us Boomerang. Check it out, and your inbox will start giving you the space and time you’ve been asking for.

9. Slack

For in-house emails, I checked out of email hell and text message mania about three years ago thanks to Slack.

Setting up teams on Slack helps you eliminate unnecessary digital marketing communication, declutter your mind, and regain creativity and focus.

10. Breathe

If you have the latest Apple Watch, then you have the new app designed to be your coach.

This healthful app makes sure you are not holding your breath while reading emails.

The mindful app assists with breathing, meditation, and stress reduction.

Final Thoughts

Coming up with novel ideas, brilliant strategies, and off-the-charts campaigns typically doesn’t happen in the middle of chaos. Our digital lives are fixated on Google calendars, running from one meeting or Skype call to the next, and thinking about the next tweet we’re writing or responding to.

Studies show that silence and clearing of the mind increase our chances of coming up with big ideas and bursts of inspiration and motivation.

How do you measure the ROI on adding these apps to your mobile device portfolio? Digital marketers can rejoice at the fact most of the apps come with analytics and reports to help you benchmark your progress and stay on a balanced track.

The digital marketing world keeps getting complicated, as professionals, we can use old school techniques to reduce stress with an intentional swipe and scroll to the right digital marketing wellness app.

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Image credits

Featured Image: Unsplash

Screenshots taken by Lisa Buyer, July 2017

6 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Get Great Results With Your Facebook Videos by @PromoBySlidely

This post was sponsored by Slidely.

Facebook hit 2 billion users in late June. This unprecedented growth offers more opportunity to reach a larger audience with your videos and a chance to grow your business dramatically.

However, with all this growth also comes some serious challenges. More people means more marketing noise, which means more advertisers bidding on the same users.

How do you get the results you want?

Getting great results with your Facebook videos can definitely be difficult. After analyzing and using thousands of video ads on Facebook and social media, we put together this list of quick wins. You’ll be surprised at how much small adjustments can help improve your performance.

1. Invest in the First 3 Seconds

According to Facebook, 65 percent of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will watch for at least 10 seconds, and 45 percent will watch for 30 seconds.

Track how long your audience watched your videos by checking the “Video Average Watch Time” metric in your Facebook Insights. It shows you the average time each of your videos is watched. You’ll notice that watch time likely does not exceed five seconds.

In order to ensure that your audience watches your video from the beginning to end, keep your video short and simple. Appeal to the emotions and curiosity of your audience.

2. Always Use Text

Text is super important to the success of your videos – especially considering that 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound. It shows that audience’s don’t need sound or noise to understand or make a decision about the brand.

Make sure your audience gets the most out of your video by adding some sort of text to your video from the beginning. You can use subtitles (which you create through Facebook and disappear once the viewer turns the sound on), general captions, or text that brands your message coherently.

Video made with Promo by Chubby’s American Grill

3. Focus on One Important Point Only

Before you actually create your video, think about your audience and ask what would make them share it? What will make them comment or like it? Create a video to achieve some of the following goals:

• To be simply social and entertaining or get a laugh
• To express a feeling about a particular topic/speak for your audience
• To show off
• To prove they were the first ones to find something

4. Write Facebook-Specific Copy for Your Post

While you may be posting to the same video to all of your social media accounts, remember to alter the text you use in the post to suit the outlet and your audience there.

Use these tips to improve your results with the copy of your Facebook post:

• Ask a question
• Experiment with text length
• Use the text or a quote from the video
• Add emojis

5. Repurpose Your Best Performing Video Posts

When you’re looking to reach a brand new audience, it’s best to repurpose your best posts (in terms of engagement and reach).

To do this, start by reviewing all of your video campaigns to find the video posts with the most engagement and save each post ID. Then, when you’re in the ad creation phase for your new audience, instead of creating an ad from scratch, simply choose “use existing post” and insert the original ID you saved.

Repurposing your posts like this will give you a boost right from the start that can quickly snowball into even better results.

6. Choose the Right Video Creation Tools

Thanks to the evolution of video, technology, and social media platforms, there are endless options for tools to create videos that work.

If you’re looking for a more personal feel, Facebook Live or YouTube Live are great options.

To make professional videos perfect for marketing on social media or adding to your landing pages or blog, look no further than Promo by Slidely. It’s a super easy video maker that provides users with a catalog of over 3 million video clips, a library of music, and a simple text editor.

Video made with Promo by Symetric

The more and the better the videos, the better the results you’ll see

When it comes to video marketing, it requires commitment and consistency (meaning several videos) to see mind-blowing results. Remember to keep your audience at the top of mind when you create videos.

People love watching videos – especially creative, interesting, and well-made videos. Keep that in mind, as well as all of these tips, and start creating videos that get great results now.

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Slidely. Used with permission.
In-post videos and images by Slidely. Used with permission.

How to Become a Thought Leader in Your Niche & Build Your Brand by @krisjonescom

How do you build brand recognition and develop brand authority in your niche?

As we say in the industry, “Content is king.”

After selling my old company, I started a new company. That meant building an entirely new brand from the ground up. Fortunately, I was able to use my personal brand to bring in an audience for my business and establish trust in the quality of my work.

As a thought leader in the search industry, I frequently deliver keynote speeches, write guest blogs, and produce content for my company’s website to gain exposure for my personal brand and my business. The added exposure amounts to increased leads for my business and greater brand authority for me and my business.

Google holds a sweet spot for major brands in its organic results, as they usually get first pick for crawling and indexing. This is why we must utilize content marketing to establish ourselves as thought leaders and gain trust and authority for our brands.

Thought leadership and brand authority essentially go hand-in-hand.

Brands are built on the backs of leaders who can choose to emerge from underneath their brand.

So how do you become a thought leader for your brand?

How to Become a Thought Leader

Create Your Platform

You can’t just declare yourself a thought leader — that is up to others to decide.

The first step to becoming a thought leader is building your brand and establishing your credentials.

For personal branding, it’s key to leverage your social media accounts, especially LinkedIn and Facebook. Fill out a detailed bio of your accomplishments and career skills. These will become important channels for brand outreach and content promotion.

To beget your brand, you must ultimately improve your web presence. Go through the proper channels to position your website to gain exposure:

• Establish a branded domain name.
• Create a unique logo and complementary color scheme.
• Acquire local citations for your website.
• Optimize on-site technical factors to provide quality user experience.

Most importantly, discover an underserved niche in your industry that presents room to scale and that you’re proficient in. Conduct your keyword research to gather a better understanding of how to meet the demands of your customer base.

Now, it’s time to formulate your ideas and disseminate them to the masses.

Building a Branded Blog

Most marketers realize the value of branded blogs in conducting their SEO campaign and creating brand awareness for their business.

Branded blogs allow businesses and individuals to express their ideas about topics important to their niche.

Consistent blogging allows you to provide commentary on current industry trends and display your command over their subject matter.

Google rewards content that is relevant, fresh, and presents a unique spin on a topic. Producing evergreen content strategically positions your web pages to acquire backlinks, develop page authority, and help your website rank organically for targeted keywords.

More importantly, building a consistent blog establishes your brand’s authority over its niche through quality content. The higher the quality of your content, the more customers trust your brand. This, in turn, amounts to greater brand loyalty, which contributes heavily to your return on investment (ROI).

Building Your Content

Following Your SEO Talents

You want to develop thematically related categories for your content to position your web pages to index and rank for a wide range of semantically similar keyword phrases.

With machine learning technology, Google can evaluate the quality of your content and determine its relevance to user intent better than ever.

Expand your content marketing strategy to different sources to acquire backlinks and establish your value to customers in your niche.

Providing comments on relevant blogs, participating in niche forums, and writing industry reviews all get you engaged with your community and communicate your command over its most important topics.

Everything you put your name on could be a valuable backlink and traffic source for your website.

You should also consider producing content that serves to display original research, such as a white paper or an e-book. In terms of writing, long-form content is shared at a much higher rate than short-form content and typically ranks higher than thin content.

Other content with high shareability include:

• Infographics
• Images
• Lists
• Videos
• ‘How to’ articles
• ‘Why’ articles

Identify your brand to customers through keyword terms utilized in your content and across all web pages of your sales funnel. Optimize all meta tags with appropriate keywords from your research and include social media buttons to encourage easy shareability.

Marketing Your Content

Social media marketing is an absolute must today.

Leveraging social media can help increase your brand’s exposure, expand your audience, and allow you to engage with your audience to create brand loyalists.

Your Facebook and Twitter feeds allow you to syndicate content with backlinks that will improve their rank. Compounding posts will also grant your content more inbound links.

Connect with influencers in your industry that would benefit from your sponsorship. Not only does your content reach a wider audience but also a more relevant audience. Look on BuzzSumo for ideas on topics that are going viral on social media.

Use different channels to market your content, whether through paid promotion or email marketing campaigns. Email marketing often has a higher ROI than search marketing and is effective at retaining existing customers and keeping them up to date with your brand. My business uses monthly newsletters to keep customers updated and to create social value for our products and brand.

Building a brand should not necessarily seek to acquire a wider audience, but to retain your existing one to foster a community and create brand loyalists. One way to do this is to always respond to user comments and reviews, whether on your native website or your social media page.

Establishing Expertise

Finally, a syndicated blog or podcast may be effective to curate thought leadership, but it’s critical to become more active within your community.

• Interview other thought leaders in your industry. Publish the interviews on your website.
• Quote thought leaders: Reach out to a thought leader for a comment or quote next time you’re writing an article.
• Ask a thought leader to share some of your content with their audience. This creates a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties, generating valuable backlink and content promotion opportunities. I regularly post and share content from other influencers in the SEO industry on my social media accounts.
• Write a book. I wrote a best-selling book on Search Engine Optimization, which gave my personal brand (and various businesses) immense exposure and established myself as a thought leader within the SEO field.
• Speak at industry conferences. This will allow you to present your ideas in a professional setting. Public speaking engagements put your name in front of some very powerful influencers and put a face to the brand name.

It’s also important to establish the value of your products and business to your customers.

Publish testimonials on your website to show successful case stories and have someone else brag about your expertise. Online reviews and word-of-mouth advertising affect consumer decisions more than any other advertising factor out there.

The Advantages of Thought Leadership for Your Brand

It’s no secret that brand authority and thought leadership reaps multiple benefits. Businesses considered as thought leaders enjoy more sales, profitability, and are less price sensitive.

Consider IBM’s Smarter Planet Program that launched amid the 2008 recession. It generated $3 billion in revenue in 2010 alone and increased their brand value in every region globally.

Thought leadership makes brands more innovative and creative and differentiates them from the competition. Consider how valuable brand authority remains in today’s highly competitive consumer market.

More importantly, becoming a recognized thought leader in your industry usually comes as a result of measurable SEO results–more average shares per post, high conversion rates, and more authoritative backlinks than your competitors. This all communicates trust for you and your brand, which means higher organic rank and greater brand exposure.

There are more benefits to being a thought leader and making your brand authoritative:

• Higher indexing and crawling rates for your website
• Larger audience to market content
• Increased leads for your business
• Higher CTR based on brand recognition

Conclusion

It’s important to realize that SEO is not static. It requires consistency and years of churning out content to get your voice recognized as a thought leader.

Historically, I’ve been experimental and ambitious in my business strategies, which is why I’ve enjoyed many successes up to this point. Go against the grain and establish yourself as a thought leader and brand authority in your niche.

Becoming a thought leader boils down to the quality of your content and what you can provide for it. What can you say that no one else has said before?

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Image Credits
Featured Image: Pixabay

How to Use Content & Social Selling to Make More Sales by @TheBillWidmer

The ultimate goal of all marketing is to generate sales.

Yes, you want brand awareness and traffic and leads. But those things don’t matter without sales.

We know content marketing can help you increase revenue. But have you thought about leveraging your content for social selling?

Why social selling?

Because, according to a study by Feedback Systems, 63.4 percent of businesses who use social selling report a year-over-year sales growth, compared to just 41.2 percent of businesses who don’t.

Here’s how to leverage social selling in your content marketing and, ultimately, how to help your salespeople sell more.

What Is Social Selling?

Social selling essentially means using social media the way it was supposed to be used: being social.

You provide useful content. You answer questions. You have conversations with prospects.

For social selling to be effective, you really have one main goal: getting your potential customers to respond to your efforts.

In the beginning, that means getting them to comment on a status update or reply to a post. Over the long run, however, that means getting them to respond to an email or schedule a call.

How to Use Content Marketing to Generate Social Sales

There’s no better example of the selling power of blogging than the River Pools and Spas blog created by Marcus Sheridan.

Marcus’s strategy was to create a blog post to answer every common question his customers ask about pools. Things like comparing construction materials, costs, locations, and even the type of water.

He believes that great content is the best sales tool in the world.

The idea here is to create a database of articles based on frequently asked questions which you can use in your social media customer service responses.

Don’t just push those articles out on social media. Yes, by all means, share them – but their best use is to answer customer questions on social media or to engage with your followers.

However, FAQs aren’t the only way to combine content and social.

What Kind of Content Helps With Social Selling?

After four years of content marketing, I can tell you this:

To generate sales, your content must be helpful and have your customer’s needs in mind.

Here are some ideas:

• How-to guides for common problems in your industry
• Useful FAQ pages
• Explainer content about how to use your product or service
• Video content (even if it’s just shot with your phone)
• Webinars
• Shocking or surprising information that gets people to take action

Let’s break down those last two.

Webinars

Webinars allow you to answer your prospects’ questions in real time. You can instantly overcome obstacles to the sale.

To host a webinar, you can use software like ClickMeeting, which does all the heavy lifting for you.

What’s awesome about webinars is that you can record the session then re-use the video in a new blog post to help answer FAQs, so you kill two birds with one stone.

Plus, you get to hear your customer’s common questions, problems, and obstacles, which will help you improve your content and sales collateral.

Shocking or Surprising Information

A great example of social selling using shocking content comes from Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL).

Jeff Molander explains in this video how JLL created a few short videos of insurance experts talking about a hole in the average real estate property manager’s insurance. If they have green roofs, they may not be covered in the event of a disaster like a tornado or an earthquake.

JLL just shared the videos with their social media followers. This shocking bit of information was majorly effective and they received a ton of phone calls and emails of real estate managers looking to change their insurance policy to fix the issue.

Molander also explains that social selling is all about copywriting. If you create content with the purpose of getting into the minds and hearts of your ideal client — backed by a desire to serve their needs — you’ll get more leads.

Hopefully, you can sell to all these new-found leads. But how do you increase your chances?

What to Do After You Generate Traffic

You understand how to use content and social media to generate traffic. Now it’s time to turn these leads into sales.

It starts by understanding more about your leads. Google Analytics is great, but it doesn’t reveal enough information about your individual prospects to help you nurture a relationship with them.

Enhance Your Analytics for Easier Outreach

To enhance your Google Analytics for social selling purposes, you can install Leadfeeder, which works on top of Google’s tools to reveal data related to your site’s anonymous visitors.

Leadfeeder will actually show you which companies your website visitors work for. It uses their IP addresses to determine what offices they’re browsing from. You’ll get a lot more info about the company, including a list of LinkedIn connections you have that are associated with that company.

It also tracks which pages your anonymous audience members look at, which can help you segment them, and it automatically pushes this data to your CRM, where you can sort them by quality, recency, and other factors.

In other words, you have better insight into the traffic you’re already getting, so you can follow up with targeted outreach messaging via your social channels and land more clients.

You can also use this information to determine what types of content your most valuable leads are interested in, which can help you refine your ongoing social selling-oriented content strategy.

But what else can you do to have a better chance with your social media traffic?

Set Up Your Content for Maximum Conversions

Driving traffic is great, but it’s useless if your visitors leave without offering up their contact info and never come back. That’s why it’s important to have strong, highly-relevant calls to action within your content. A simple “Subscribe to get our updates” box won’t cut it. You need to offer something better.

For example, content upgrades work really well. Offer an e-book, cheat sheet, checklist, or other highly related item in exchange for their email. They work well because, since they visited the page, you know they’re interested in the topic.

My personal favorite way to offer a content upgrade that grabs attention without being annoying is via a pop up in the corner that’s activated on scroll depth, like this one from my travel blog, The Wandering RV:

That opt-in shows up at 15 percent scroll depth or on exit intent. I created it using Thrive Content Builder, but you can also do something similar with a free plugin like Sumo.

Email Outreach to Enhance Your Social Selling

Once you have your visitor’s contact info, it’s time to seal the deal.

The best way to do that is to reach out to them via email or social media. Through outreach, you can interact with them, get them on the phone, or even lead them directly to a sales page on your website.

For example, here’s an outreach email HubSpot used to land 16 new B2B customers:

For your convenience, here’s some text to copy-paste:

“Hello [first name],

I have an idea that I can explain in 10 minutes that can get [company] its next 100 best customers.

I recently used this idea to help our client [SaaS company/competitor] almost triple their monthly run rate.

[First name], let’s schedule a quick 10-minute call so I can share the idea with you. When works best for you?”

If you’re looking to send out a ton of emails at once with automated follow-ups, you can use a tool like Ninja Outreach or MailShake. They both make outreach really easy and stress-free.

Conclusion

Social selling is the epitome of new-age sales. Done right, it can skyrocket your company’s growth.

Content marketing is the epitome of digital marketing. Done right, it can also skyrocket your company’s growth.

When you combine the two? Watch out, because you’ll be unstoppable!

Of course, these things take time to master and kick in. But investing in the long game is the way to go.

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Image Credits
Featured Image: Unsplash
Screenshots by Bill Widmer. Taken June 2017.