The 10 Most Important Metrics You Should be Tracking in Content Marketing by @IAmAaronAgius

Today, 88% of marketers are using content marketing – up 2% from last year, with as many as 76% of marketers planning to produce more content in 2016.

What’s interesting is that increase is taking place despite more than 65% of marketers being unsure about what content is effective and what isn’t.

In fact, some of the top challenges for B2B content marketers is measuring the effectiveness of content and the ROI of their efforts.

Being able to measure the success of content should be a priority for any marketer, but determining the success of content isn’t as simple as looking at a single conversion point.

There are a lot of metrics you can dig into, but there’s no single set of metrics that offer all the answers.

With that in mind, here are some key metrics (in no particular order of importance) that you should be paying attention to in determining the overall performance and health of your content marketing program:

1. Social Shares

The number of social shares your content garners is a metric you should be tracking for every piece of content you produce as part of your content marketing strategy.

No, it’s not that definitive on its own, but it is a strong indicator of relevancy for your audience.

Social media can lend a great deal to brand lift. Use your best performing content to set benchmarks for any new pieces you create so that you’ll know what to expect, as well as what your audience likes to see.

While there are plenty of tools and plugins to simplify social sharing, not all platforms make it easy to gather data.

In 2015, Twitter shared they were removing the counts from share buttons. To get a complete view of social shares, use tools like BuzzSumo to track and compile the data for you.

2. Engaged Time (beyond Time on Page)

A good metric for tracking the success or effectiveness of your content is how long it captures the attention of your audience. You can get a general idea of this with Google Analytics’ “time on page” metric.

If you’re not tracking content engagement, then you can count yourself among the majority.  Just under 30% of marketers actively track and monitor the length of content engagement. That would likely increase if more marketers knew that visitors who engage with content for at least three minutes were twice as likely to return to their sites.

How else will you know what content and topics to leverage if you’re not monitoring the content that interests your audience the most?

The only problem with “time on page” in Google Analytics is that it doesn’t tell you if people are actively engaged. If you were distracted by a phone call and never read a post after opening it, that’s not engagement, but it would impact the time on page metric.

You can find Javascript snippets that help with tracking time on page, or tools like Riveted can assist with measuring actual engagement in your content by monitoring scrolling, clicks and keyboard use.

3. Total Lead Attribution

You want to track the metrics for every stage of your sales funnel, especially where leads are concerned. The leads you generate are the lifeblood of your business, and they’re likely the primary reason for your content marketing.

Track this metric by looking at the number of leads generated from form completions, such as offer opt-ins, trial signups and email subscribers.

You also want to track your lead-close rate. This is where it helps to have a CRM or multi-touch attribution system (Converto is one example) that allows you to see which of your leads can be specifically attributed to your content marketing campaigns.

This way you can track the source of leads from the time they come in until the point at which they close, monitoring the content they consume along the way that contributed to lead closure.

4. CTA Click-Through Rates

Measuring lead attribution and how leads close is an important part of your content marketing and sales process, but it’s not easy to know where to make changes without some additional data.

If you’re looking at ways to improve lead closure and conversion rates, step backward in your funnel process to determine if you need to start by improving your calls to action.

Use the click-through rate of your various calls to action to see how individual content pieces are performing throughout your funnel and whether or not they’re causing a bottleneck that prevents your audience from advancing through the funnel.

This is also a good opportunity to look at the placement of your content in relation to your funnel and the buyer’s journey.

Make sure your content is properly placed (top of funnel content for acquisition vs middle of funnel for relationship building) and that your calls to action and offers are appropriate for the stage of the funnel.

5. Direct Post Engagement

Sometimes you have to go outside of your analytics to measure the performance of your content by looking to your direct post engagement to see what readers think of your content.

Ideally, you want each piece of content to be gateway to a vibrant and growing community, so compare the comment section and direct post engagement of your content with others published alongside it.

Qualitative metrics can help you understand what your audience dislikes, what they love, or what kind of content sparks the best discussions.

6. Content Traffic

It can be frustrating when you’re generating high quality “10X content,” but there’s no one funneling in to read it.

Measure the number of unique visitors to your site and keep an eye on this metric over time. This way, you can determine whether or not your content strategy is working, as well as how individual pieces of content are performing as part of that strategy to bring you new eyeballs.

Just remember that visitor counts alone – even per post – lean heavily toward being a vanity metric. Raw traffic data isn’t nearly as important as what your audience does once they get there. For individual posts, pay close attention to engagement time, as well as bounce rates.

7. Retention Metrics

Retention metrics show how well you’re holding the attention of your audience.

This can be seen in the percentage of returning visitors to your site and individual content pieces. You also want to monitor the frequency of returns, as this gives insight into the relationships you’re developing and how well your audience sees you (and your content) as a trusted authority and quality source.

According to a study from Vulture.com, visitors who came to the site five times in a month were more likely to develop a pattern of regularly returning to a site.

This is echoed by a case study involving Virgin Mobile, where consumers who experienced Virgin’s branded content between 5 and nine times were 278% more likely to purchase from that brand.

8. Referral Links and Natural Inbound Links

Referral links or All Referral sources aren’t necessarily a metric to live or die by when you’re monitoring the performance of your campaigns. Not all of your content is going to garner a large volume of outside links, but those that do can reveal opportunities for future content campaigns.

Watching referral paths can reveal guest blogging and content curation opportunities, as well as help you discover networking opportunities with other influencers in your industry.

A sharp increase in natural inbound links is also a good indication that a piece is going viral with your audience. Pay close attention to the topics that are getting the most attention.

9. Cost Metrics

I know it’s tough, but you should always calculate your return on investment (ROI) for your content marketing.

Take into account the cost of production and distribution for each piece of content, and know the value of each lead once they close so you can distribute the revenue earned/value across each piece of content they consumed before closing.

10. Ramp Up Time and Longevity

Ramp up time is important because it’s not only easy to improperly assume that content is underperforming if it’s not gaining traffic or leads, but it’s also easy to continue relying on content in your funnel well beyond the life of that content.

HubSpot, for instance, analyzed older content and determined that ramp up time for content can take as long as a few months.

Similarly, data from Bitly’s URL shortening tool found the half-life of links is just a few hours. Essentially, links created by the service have driven 50% of their lifetime potential clicks in about three hours.

Pay attention to the longevity of your content, as well as the ramp up time it needs to gain traction. This will let you proactively respond to underperforming content to optimize it and give it a “freshness” bump.

What other metrics do you watch to measure the performance and health of your content marketing campaigns? Share your strategy with me in the comments:

Featured Image: pixabay
All screenshots taken by Aaron Agius, June 2016

 

Kathleen Garvin of Penny Hoarder on Creating Engaging Content and #ChewbaccaMom #MarketingNerds

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On this week’s episode of Marketing Nerds, I sat down with Kathleen Garvin of The Penny Hoarder to talk about how to create content your audience will actually want to engage with – which is no easy task! During our discussion, we talked about the recent Chewbacca Mom Facebook live video, how company culture can play a huge part in creating engaging content, and why brands should be careful when they try to ‘news jack’.

Here are a few transcribed excerpts from our discussion, but make sure to listen to the podcast to hear everything:

On the Viral Video ‘Chewbacca Mom’

I think everything about that video was great. She seems like a very pleasant, fun-loving woman. There’s so much bad news out there that I think it’s kind of fun to have that, to kind of break the mold and have someone be so happy about this goofy mask, so that was really cool.

Kohl’s was pretty good, too. They were pretty quick to follow-up and capitalize on that moment because, yeah, it was, it was the largest Facebook live video created so far. It was just this huge thing.

On “News Jacking” for Increased Engagement

To kind of touch on your point about Kohl’s, they were so great. They were quick to follow-up and just keep the momentum going. It was this huge great plug for them. I mean, aside from being a popular video, it’s great to be name-dropped like that and have millions upon millions of people view it and, also go to your store to try to get that same exact mask and re-create your own happy moment.

I remember seeing on Facebook that they gave them all kinds of gift cards, gave the whole family masks, and just all kinds of other Star Wars-themed merchandise. That was really great.

If you wanted to take the conversation to kind of jump off of that, I mean, it was kind of funny because then all of these brands kind of came out of the woodwork in terms of like, “Oh, well, we’ll give you this,” or, “Oh, come here.”

She was being flown everywhere. Some great, some not-so-great, in terms of news jacking. I think it was also kind of a case where some brands kind of out of nowhere were jumping on this train, and it ended up seeming weird.

I think it’s great if you want to try to put your own spin on a big news story, but also be aware that if that itself is going to be kind of distraction and not add to the story, you might want to think twice about jumping on board.

One of the more strange offers she received was from this college in central Florida where they were like, “Oh, we’re going to give you and your family scholarships.” Which, you know, is a nice gesture, but, she, her, and her family are based in Texas. Her children are not of college age. That seemed to be one of the weirder ones. Not so organic, but trying to jump on that, “Hey, we want this publicity, too,” kind of thing.

On Viral Content

Content goes viral for a couple of different reasons, but it’s not an accident at the same time. Like, you’ll see the same story across so many different platforms, and it will just blow up. You just kind of just go down the line and see what stories everyone is talking about.

As I mentioned earlier, with Chewbacca mom, you have to look in terms of how can we inject ourselves into this conversation, well, what is everyone talking about, and does it have a Penny Hoarder angle? Is it exciting? Can we add to it? Above all, will it be useful for our readers?

On Company Culture & Engaging Content

I think there’s a difference between saying that you’re allowed to fail and actually, you know, living that. I think a lot of companies like to say it because it’s cool to say and you want to feel like you’re that cool company that will try things and fail and won’t be afraid to fail and try again. But you know, I’ve seen examples in my own life and in the life of co-workers where that’s not always the case.

I do feel bad for people in those situations. It’s a very powerless feeling to feel like you can’t contribute or you might be on Twitter and see something’s trending and you know it would be great for your company to kind of leap off of and create a really engaging piece, and then you bring it to a manager who might say, “Well, that’s not your job, so why are you on Twitter? No, I’m not interested.” It does start at the top.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds Podcast with me and Kathleen Garvin:

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

 

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Featured Image Created By Paulo Bobita 

In Post Image: Deposit Photos | bakhtiarzein

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What to Do When Things Go Wrong in SEO

Editor note: This is a section of our soon to be completely redone SEO Guide. Enjoy!

One unfortunate part of the world of SEO is sometimes things go wrong. This can happen because you get over-aggressive with SEO tactics, because you make mistakes in Google because you don’t know any better, or if you hire an SEO firm that uses shady tactics. This chapter will go through what you need to do get back on track.

Diagnosis

There are two major ways to learn you have a problem. The first is if you see a large drop in the organic search traffic to your site. Sometimes that drop can be catastrophic in nature, and it might look something like this:

The other way you might learn about a problem is if you get a message directly within Google Search Console telling you about it. If you’re not signed up for Search Console, you should do that immediately. In fact, pause reading for a moment, and go set it up now.

Here is a look at where you can find these messages in Search Console:

Overview of Manual Penalties

When you get notified about a problem within Search Console, this is considered a “manual penalty.” What this means is a person at Google actually analyzed your site, and as a result, assessed a penalty to the site.

When this happens, the message in Search Console normally gives you some high-level description of the problem. The most common manual penalties are:

1. Site-wide link penalties
2. Partial link penalties
3. Thin content penalties

Here is an example of such a Search Console message focused on links:

Here is an example of a manual thin content penalty notice:

Once you have a manual penalty, the basic process must follow these three steps:

1. Determine the cause of the penalty. (For example, if you have a link penalty, you need to determine which links Google doesn’t like.)
2. Remedy the problems.
3. Submit a Reconsideration Request to Google asking them to remove the penalty.

Overview of Algorithmic Penalties

These are caused by algorithms Google uses to identify sites they consider to be poor in quality, and then lower your rankings. The most well-known of these are:

1. Panda: Focuses on identifying poor quality content.
2. Penguin: Targets poor quality links.
3. Search Quality: A lesser known algorithm that evaluates site/page quality.
4. Top Heavy Ads: Focuses on sites that have too much advertising on them.
5. Payday Loans (Spammy Sites): Identifies spammy SEO practices that Google has seen as a common practice on payday loan sites, but the algo is applied to any site using those practices.

Technically, Google considers these to simply be algorithms, and not penalties, so we’ll go with their terminology. But the practical impact on you is the same: you see a drop in your traffic. If you have one of these algorithms hurting your traffic, you need to try to figure out what the cause is, as Google doesn’t tell you about these with a message in Search Console.

Google used to announce updates to algorithms like Panda and Penguin, but that doesn’t generally happen now, so that will leave you with the challenge of working it out on your own. This will require a strong understanding of what the algorithms do, and then a harsh look at your site to see if you can figure out what the problem is.

Links Google Doesn’t Like

If you’ve received a manual link penalty, or you believe that you’ve been hit by the Penguin algorithm, this section will help you determine what types of links may be causing the problem.

As you saw earlier in this guide, Google considers links to be an important part of their ranking algorithm. For that reason, many publishers are anxious to get as many links as they can, but unfortunately, there are certain types of links that can hurt you. What Google really wants you to do is obtain links that are editorial in nature.

What that means is the links can’t be something that you paid for, provided compensation for, or that otherwise were given to you for reasons other than the linking party genuinely wanted to reference your site.

This is because Google relies on these links to act as votes for your content, and each vote is an indicator that your site has some level of importance. More votes signify more importance. However, as you saw in the chapter on links and content marketing, all votes for the content of your site are NOT created equal. Some are far more important than others.

The reason why Google penalizes certain types of links is that those links indicate to Google that they are non-editorial in nature. If you have too many of these links pointing to your site, it starts to impact the quality of their search algorithms, and this is why Google takes action on them.

With that in mind, here is a look at some of the most common links that can cause problems:

• Paid Links: Any form of payment is considered a problem by Google. If you’re buying ads and getting links to your site in return, the best policy is to implement a “NoFollow” attribute on those links so Google won’t think you’re trying to spam their search results.
• Web Directories: These are sites that organize websites into hierarchical directories, and there are really only a very few decent ones (such as Best of the Web, Business.com, DMOZ.org). If you want to get links from these places, and perhaps one or two others that are specific to your market place, fine, but don’t pursue any more than that.
• Article Directories: These are sites that allow you to submit your article content, and they usually include a link back to your site. However, these links are not editorial in nature. You can simply upload the article and no one reviews it, so for that reason, it doesn’t act as a true endorsement for your site.
• International Links (from countries where you don’t do business): There is no reason for you to have many links from countries where you don’t operate, so if you have lots of these, that could be a problem.
• Bad Anchor Text Mix: As you’ve seen earlier in this guide, the words used in the anchor text of links does help Google understand better what your pages are about. In the past SEOs abused this by going out and obtaining many links using “exact match”, or “rich” anchor text (i.e. the anchor text of the link was exactly the main keyword associated with your page). Too much of this rich anchor text is a clue to Google that you are over-aggressive in your SEO. See the image below for an example of bad anchor text.
• Coupon Codes: If you have been handing out coupon codes to other publishers and getting a link in return, that’s considered to be very similar to a paid link. If you have these types of links, you’ll have to deal with them.
• Poor Quality Widgets: if you created a neat widget that publishers can place on your site, and in return you get a link, this might be a problem.
• Affiliate Spam: If you are paying a publisher for clicks to your site, or a rev share or commission on sales generated by traffic they send to you, that’s considered a purchased link.
• Comment Spam: If you’ve been going to blogs and forums all over the web, and implementing links back to your site, Google isn’t going to like that. This is black hat SEO, so avoid it altogether.
• Link Exchanges: There is nothing wrong with exchanging links with close business partners or major media sites, but if a large percentage of your overall link portfolio comes from link exchanges, that will raise a red flag. So do this only in moderation.
• Other Non-Editorial Links: The list above isn’t a complete list of problem links. To make the final diagnosis, you have to try and evaluate whether or not it makes sense for Google to consider a link editorial or not.

The above image is an example of bad anchor text, simply because it’s obviously contrived. The writer couldn’t even take the time to write the article in such a way as to put the words “buy” and “cars” in the same sentence.

Note that it’s not bad if some links to your site use rich anchor text, but if you are getting a large percentage of links that do so, that’s not normal, and Google will see that as a problem.

Cleanup Up Link Related Problems

If you’ve received a manual link penalty, believe you’ve been hit by Penguin, or are worried that your site is in danger of having either of these things happen, you should work on cleaning up your link profile. The basic process for doing this is as follows:

1. Build a complete list of links to your site. Google Search Console provides a list of links, but unfortunately, that list isn’t complete. For that reason, we recommend that you also obtain data on links to the site from Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and ahrefs. The reason we use all 3 of these sources plus Search Console is that each will find links that none of the others do.
2. Dedupe the list as much as possible, as each tool will show many of the same links that the other tools do.
3. Begin analyzing all of the links. Generally speaking, you don’t need to look at more than two or three links per domain linking to you
4. Mark links that you see as problematic as you’ll need to address them.
5. Repeat three and four until you’ve been through links from each of the domains linking to you.
6. Reach out to sites that you want to remove links from, and request their removal.
7. Repeat the outreach to those that don’t respond to increase your chances of success. Don’t make this request more than three times.
8. For those links that you can’t get removed, use Google’s disavow tool to tell Google you want to discount those links.
9. Once steps 7 and 8 are complete, nearly all of the labor is done.

In step 8, I reference Google’s disavow tool. This tool allows you to list all the links pointing to your site that you think might be bad, and to tell Google to not credit them to your site. Basically, it acts as a shortcut to removing potential links.

This might lead you to ask, why should I take the time to manually request link removals, then? Can’t I just list all the bad links in the disavow tool? The reason you should still request removals is that Google likes to see the extra effort.

From their perspective, you were over the line in what you were doing, and they want to see clear evidence that you won’t do it again. When they see that you make the manual removal effort, it acts as a signal that you are sincere in your intent to not violate their guidelines again. This is particularly important in the case of manual penalties.

As the last step in a recovery process, if you cleaned up your links because you received a manual link penalty, you will need to fill out a reconsideration request. You can read more about that below. If it’s a Penguin problem, then you simply need to wait (more on that below too).

One last point: Recovering from link problems is aided by attracting high-value links as well. This is something you should be trying to do on an ongoing basis. How to do that is beyond the scope of this section of the guide, but learning how to do this is a cornerstone to the success of any SEO strategy.

Penguin Recovery Process

Unlike a manual penalty from Google, there is no value in filing a reconsideration request if you’ve been hit by the Penguin algorithm. You need to clean up the link problems, and then wait.

However, Google’s Penguin algorithm is one that has historically run very rarely. It was first released on April 24, 2012, and has only been updated five times since then. This means sites have been hit by Penguin can wait very extended periods of time before recovering.

However, Google has been working on a new release of Penguin for quite some time, and in theory, this one will act much more real time. In a recent keynote event, Gary Illyes said that once this update is out: “If your pages are affected by Penguin, then generally you will be able to get rid of that effect much faster.” This is an important change.

But for now, you have to wait until this new release comes out. Perhaps the hardest part is that there is no guarantee that when you think you’re done cleaning up your bad links you’ve done enough. It takes a very experienced eye to recognize all the different types of links that Google thinks of as poor quality.

For this reason, it’s important that you use a harsh approach to judging the value of your links. It’s better to take the risk of cutting out some links that may be good (i.e. overshoot the mark a bit) than it is to not cut out enough. It’s important to get the link cleanup and recovery phase behind you, so you can focus your efforts on moving your business forward.

Content Google Doesn’t Like

Just as there are types of links Google doesn’t like; there are also types of content that Google doesn’t like. Some of the most important types of these are:

1. Thin Content: If you have a large number of pages with only a sentence or two on them, and they make up a large percentage of your overall site, that can be a problem.
2. Curated Content: Sites that simply curate content from third parties and add little unique value are also problematic.
3. Syndicated Content: It’s OK if you have some syndicated content on your site, but if a large percentage of the pages are syndicated from 3rd party sites, and you add little of your own value, then that will be seen as a problem.
4. Scraped Content: If you’re scraping content from other sites, that will definitely be an issue. This is one of the more egregious forms of poor quality content.
5. Doorway Pages: These are pages that have been created largely for the purpose of capturing search engine traffic and immediately driving sales. These are often pages that are poorly integrated into the site, and focus on driving an immediate conversion.
6. User Generated Content (that is not properly moderated): This almost always leads to large amounts of low-value content. If you are allowing users to add comments or reviews to your site, this can be a great thing, but take great pains to use human review to screen out poor quality contributions.
7. Advertising Dominated Content: This is content where the value added content is somewhat obscured or dominated by the presence of ads. I.e. these pages may have multiple ads above the fold, and the user needs to scroll before they see much of the value added content they were looking for.
8. E-commerce Sites with the Great Majority of Pages Being Product Pages with Nothing but Manufacturer’s Supplied Descriptions: This is common with many lesser brand e-commerce sites. Be careful though, simply rewriting those product descriptions, but saying more or less the same thing isn’t enough.

Google wants to see the unique value add of your site. They aren’t going to let you receive search engine traffic if you are simply not adding much unique value to users who visit your site. To be clear, the mere existence of your site, or having a nice navigation hierarchy, aren’t examples of unique value.

Better examples of quality content are:

• Unique articles that you’ve created that help users solve problems of interest to them.
• Reviews of products placed on your site by users. Important note: reviews that you repost from other sites don’t count as unique content.
• How to videos that walk users step by step through something they want to learn about.
• Interactive content that engages users and attracts lots of attention.
• Data-driven studies that reveal key information that others haven’t seen or created before.
• Access to expert advice and/or interaction with experts.

These are just a few examples, and the bottom line is that Google wants to see what it is that makes you special. It’s OK if you have the best plumbing site that services Rhode Island, or the best marriage counseling site in Pasadena. If you serve broader markets, such as all of Europe, then the challenge content-wise is greater, and you have to be prepared to step up to meet it.

Continually Improving Content Quality

It’s easy to say that if you’ve been hit by a thin content penalty, or Panda, that you need to improve your content quality. But, it would be better to say you need to improve your content quality whether or not you’ve been impacted by either of these.

If you publish a website, then continual improvement of the quality of the content on it needs to be a core mission of your website team. It’s a competitive world out there, Google loves quality content, and there’s no win in letting your competition get an edge on you.

Invest the time and energy to make your site the best it can be, from the perspective of adding value to users who come to it. Of course, keep the focus tight to the marketplace you serve.

If you’ve been hit by a manual thin content penalty, and you believe you fixed the problem, then the next step is clear: file a reconsideration request.

Panda Recovery Process

Google’s Panda algorithm is a bit further along than the Penguin algorithm in the sense that Google already considers it a part of the main algorithm. That means you won’t have to wait for up to a year to see a recovery in the event of having been hit by Panda.

However, that doesn’t mean that recovery will be instantaneous. Plan on fixing the issues and then having to wait and see. It may take Google a few months to re-crawl your site, see the improvements, and then rerun the Panda portion of their algorithm on it.

As with Penguin, this is another reason why you should make a point of being very thorough in your efforts to improve content quality. Don’t settle for the bare minimum and wait. Do more than you think is needed, and then keep going and do even more.

Reconsideration Requests

If you’ve been hit by a manual penalty, and you believe you’ve fixed the problem, you must file a reconsideration request. Google won’t notice that you’ve fixed it, and you must notify them before they will take a look at it.

There are some key elements to a reconsideration request. Here is a summary of the most important ones:

1. Don’t file one until you have made a very thorough effort to clean up the issues reported by Google. Just don’t. If the reviewer at Google sees you haven’t taken their concerns seriously, they will reject your request, and the bar to getting a future reconsideration request approved could get higher.
2. Keep your reconsideration request short and to the point. Explain you saw the penalty, made a good-faith effort to fix the problem, explain what you did, and tell them that you will endeavor to meet their guidelines going forward.
3. Don’t complain about the fact that you were penalized. Don’t complain about the impact on your business. From their point of view, they gave you a penalty because you were doing things to negatively impact their business, and they deal with thousands of these requests every day, so you’re more likely to aggravate them than get their sympathy.
4. Remember they are human. You can’t use a reconsideration request to become their friend, but you can write it in such a way that you are considerate of their time, and not make yourself a burden on them.

Those are the basics, but it bears repeating – Don’t send one in until you’ve made a very serious effort to address their concerns. If you have no idea what it is they’re complaining about, get expert help.

Otherwise, you’re wasting the reviewers time, your time, and delaying the eventual recovery of your website.

Other Types of Penalties

There are many other penalties that are beyond the scope of this guide. For the most part, these arise from more advanced forms of trying to deceive Google, so hopefully you will never encounter them. Here is a brief list of those other types:

• Cloaking and Sneaky Redirects: This happens when you serve different content to Google then you do to users. Google considers this to be a major no-no.
• Hidden Text and Keyword Stuffing: SEOs used to find ways to put text on web pages that users couldn’t see (such as white text on a white background) to feed content only to Google. Or, they would repeat the main keyword over and over again on web pages. Don’t do these things!
• User Generated Spam: You might get this message if you are accepting user generated content (UGC) on your site, and you aren’t carefully moderating it. UGC is a great way to add unique content to your site, but you should only do it if you are actively screening out bad submissions.
• Unnatural Links from Your Site: If you appear to be selling links to other publishers with a goal of providing them SEO benefit in return for money, Google may spot that you’re doing this and give you this message.
• Hacked Site: This is Google trying to flag you that you have a problem because a third party has hacked the code for your web site. The best way to keep this problem from happening is to be ruthless about keeping all the software involved in publishing your site up to date.
• Pure Spam: Google will give you this message in Webmaster Tools if they believe your site is using very aggressive spam techniques.
• Spammy Freehosts: This is related to where you are hosting your site. Make sure you are working with a reputable hosting company!

Summary

Recovering from a penalty (or Panda or Penguin) should only be viewed as the first step. Treat it as a warning shot across the bow. Just because you’re able to recover doesn’t mean you can’t get hit again. In the future, you should avoid the behavior that led to the problem.

But look beyond that. All the work that you did to recover should be a clue as to what you need to do to thrive in Google. If you had to deal with thin content, then take that as a signal to keep focusing ongoing energy on improving your content. Or, if you have a link-related problem, keep investing energy in doing the types of things that attract high-quality links to your site. Then you can move past survival, and into a world where your traffic keeps growing over time.

Image Credits

Featured Image: MPF_photography/DepositPhotos.com
All screenshots by Eric Enge. Taken July 2016.

Google Chrome for iOS Now Supports Accelerated Mobile Pages by @SouthernSEJ

An update this week to the Google Chrome browser for iOS brings support for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

The post Google Chrome for iOS Now Supports Accelerated Mobile Pages by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

AdWords gains 3 new cross-device attribution reports

Google is introducing three new reports on cross-device activity along with a reorganization of the Attribution section under the Tools menu in AdWords.

With 6 out of 10 online conversions in the US starting on one device and ending on another, according to a Google/Ipsos study, the new reports are designed to help marketers track cross-device conversion paths, including those that include search ad clicks from more than one device in a conversion path.

The new cross-device activity reports:

• Devices: an overview of the cross-device activity in your account.
• Assisting Devices: shows assist levels  and values by each device type — mobile, tablet, desktop.
• Device Paths: the top conversion paths for visitors that used more than one device before converting.

You’ll notice in the screenshot example above that the existing conversion, path and click analysis reports are now rolled up under their own sections within the Attribution reporting menu. The new reports and layout will be rolling out over the next several weeks.

With this announcement, Google also released benchmarks on cross-device conversion activity for search campaigns in the United States, Japan, Germany and Great Britain.

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

SearchCap: Google iOS app, Google Search Console export & AdWords characters

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google iOS app, Google Search Console export & AdWords characters appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

How your old content can help with SEO

As the volume of content on the internet continues to expand at jaw-dropping rates, it’s getting harder and harder to attract an audience.

And yet, publishers and brands are investing heavily on churning out new pages. The Washington Post publishes 1,200 new content assets every day, 500 of which are articles prepared by their in-house editorial team. Across the entire web, according to estimates from Internet Live Stats, over 4.3 million blog posts go up each day. Keeping up with that kind of competition volume is a bit of a non-starter.

What’s more, traffic referred from search, which was once considered to be the most attainable and most effective audience acquisition channel, is likewise becoming harder to attain. Depending on the user’s search term, geolocation and device, Google’s monetized SERPs are likely to aggregate fewer than 10 organic, non-personalized results. Regardless, social media is driving more traffic to content pages than search.

One recent study conducted by Boost the News found that 74 percent of new articles hit their traffic peaks on the same day they’re published, followed by 25 percent the following day.

Long live the king

“Content is king,” as the mantra goes, but where’s the ROI on publishing pages that are basically useless after less than a week? Why do you have to keep feeding fresh meat to the content beast if you’re not going to get anything in return? The answer is that you don’t.

Sure, it’s probably a good idea to publish new material on a regular basis, but don’t forget to also make the most of your older content assets. Regularly update that which is outdated, and upgrade that which is laggardly. Promote and repurpose that which stands the test of time.

By extending your content’s shelf life, you’ll be able to maximize your discoverability, while at the same time giving your investment in these assets a fighting chance at performing. Here’s how.

Determine what assets are ripe for life extension

Start by auditing the content that’s currently up on your site, deciding which pages should be unpublished, updated, upgraded, promoted or repurposed.

If you have old content that’s no longer relevant in any way to your ideal audience, then just go ahead and unpublish it. Content marketing is about quality, and if something isn’t helping you, there is no need to have it live. You don’t need anything unnecessarily slowing down your website and turning off readers.

Content that relates to old products or services that you no longer offer, job listings and previous employee information are some obvious things that can be taken down. Before you delete these unnecessary materials, though, set up 301 redirects so that people who head to the old URLs get forwarded to newer, updated pages with relevant information.

For example, when visitors try to access a job listing that’s no longer open, you can direct them to your updated careers page, where they can learn more about all of your current openings. This allows for longer time on site and can lead to increased brand awareness, trust and loyalty.

Update and upgrade

Spend some time reviewing your page performance metrics from the past. Were there any articles that should have been major performers but never lived up to their potential? Anything that was once a powerhouse, but audience interest dwindled?

Pages like these need your attention. Spend some good hours updating the talking points in your content to reflect the latest trends and information. Research your long-tail keywords and use these phrases organically within the content, to ensure that Google recognizes the usefulness of your page to the people who would benefit from it most.

Add visuals and subheaders to make the page more inviting. Cite some statistics to back up the arguments you make. Quote and link to experts who write about the topic at hand, so you’ll have a chance of obtaining some powerful ego-baited backlinks.

Google’s algorithms favor domains with an ongoing flow of fresh content, but they also favor pages that were published recently. To update your content without sacrificing its seniority benefits, make sure that the new version sits on the same URL as the old.

Using this powerful tactic, one recent experiment yielded a 66-percent lift in organic traffic to old blog posts.

Drive traffic to your evergreen assets

While page views don’t directly impact search rankings, on-site engagement signals can help holistically. By keeping people clicking around your content archives, your bounce rate will plummet, and by promoting your content to new audience members off-site, you’ll effectively also boost your site’s organic social shares, which also indirectly help with SEO.

Use your email list and your social media profiles to promote your best older content. For maximum email click-through performance, set up a series of rich content guides that are specific to topics, and then assign each topic to an audience segment.

Much of your content, particularly text-heavy blog posts or long webinars, can likely be atomized into short-form content optimized for your various social channels. You can create highly engaging graphics on tools like Canva and share content that’s relevant to your specific audiences on each channel. For example, knowing that videos perform well on Facebook, infographics perform well on Pinterest and listicles perform well on Twitter can help you distribute evergreen content with posts that will help maximize engagement.

The best part is, once they’re set up, social posts promoting your evergreen assets can easily be automated for periodic recurrence using an app like Hiplay.

Beyond email and social, CodeFuel offers a solution that helps site visitors discover content that’s both relevant and related. The system curates content for promotion via automated topic tagging, ultimately increasing time on site and giving your evergreen content the attention it deserves. CodeFuel’s metrics also allow you to easily see what content is performing best and where the biggest opportunities are for updating and monetizing pages.

No, repurposing content won’t kill your rankings

Well, it depends. It’s true that Google will penalize duplicate content, so you definitely don’t want to create a new blog post or section on your website with the exact same text or metadata that already appears elsewhere. However, syndicated content, especially when the original has had a chance to get indexed and when syndicated versions include canonical tags, poses zero SEO danger. Google is usually smart enough to recognize the oldest instance as the one that should rank, and it simply ignores the others.

That being said, there are many formats in which you can leverage to atomize your content assets. For example, a section from a text-heavy blog post could be turned into a video, infographic, slide deck or podcast episode. These are great ways to maximize your digital footprint and reach new audiences.

Podcasting is especially powerful in this regard. Since podcasts are favored by on-the-go people who don’t necessarily have time to look at your website or read your blog content, they represent a huge opportunity. All you have to do is record someone reading your old blog posts in a personable way, and you have your first episode. With new tools like Anchor, you can easily record yourself, share your content, and grow your audience.

One of the best examples of content repurposed for multi-platform promotion is Jay Today, an initiative of Convince & Convert’s Jay Baer, who published a short spoken word video, in eight different formats, for 149 episodes before he pulled the plug on it last summer. Each video clip was uploaded to iTunes, Medium, LinkedIn Pulse, Baer’s own blog and more.

Nine lives for your content

Enough with the volume game. It’s time to get serious about maximizing the life cycle of each and every content asset that you produce. Even if you end up publishing fewer new articles as a result of these efforts, you’re likely to still come out ahead.

Focus on quality, and don’t forget the opportunities you can find in your archives. When you think strategically about publishing ROI and repurpose, upgrade and promote your content, the benefits are huge. You’ll spend less on production, improve your SEO rankings and reach new audience members.

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Search Marketing Is The Future, Right? by @annaleacrowe

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Bing Network. All opinions are 100% mine.

I’ve always been fascinated by the constant evolution of search. It scares me to accept that I’ve never been able to get the full grasp of these changes. I couldn’t sit still.

My career was built on writing and consulting about SEM. I should be prepared for the future. I should know what’s coming next. But, I don’t.

The future of search has me in a constant spin cycle.

Do you feel this way? Bing has 133 million monthly searches. Google hit over 100 billion. That’s a lot to take in. The good news is this hasn’t stopped me (or others!) from digging into these changes.

This past year working at SEJ has allowed me to explore new strategies to help explain the future of SEM. I discovered that I’ve been looking at the future of search all wrong. And, I think a lot of us have.

What is the Future of Search?

I’ve worked on over 100+ SEM clients. The majority of them focused only on increasing their rankings on Google.

This is where I went wrong.

I shouldn’t be focused on increasing rankings in Google, creating more content, or building more links. I should be focused on the user.

In 2016, we’re seeing marketers approach this in different ways:

Understanding searcher intent – Making it easy for searchers to get better search results by personalizing our content to answer queries and voice search.
Exploring multiple search channels – Building a search strategy outside of Google that reaches your target audience on the platforms they live.

Rand Fishkin has an amazing Slideshare on this:

For example, Confluent Forms worked with Michlin Metals to optimize for intent-based search. Confluent Forms altered the meta data and saw an upward spike in impressions, clicks and click-through rate, and position. And, they were even featured in a Google Answer Box. Optimizely increased conversions by 32% for Secret Escapes by matching user intent with expectation between landing page copy and PPC ads.

And, let’s not forget about the other search channels. Marin Software grew Sykes Cottage conversion volume on Bing by 259%. Hello Society increased referral traffic from 3,952 to 16,592 in one month on Pinterest.

All of this is how I now understand search will work in the future. Yep, I was missing the whole point all along.

In 2000, my main channels were paid search and organic search. Fast forward to 2016, to compete you must be on paid, organic, local, image, video, map, social, news, mobile, and voice search.

Whew! That’s a lot!

Does this New Way of Search Marketing Work for Big or Small Brands?

The short answer: Both.

Businesses spend thousands of dollars on PPC and SEO campaigns each year looking for the right audience. Utilizing tools like Bing’s Remarketing campaigns allows both big and small brands to benefit from targeting consumer buying behaviors for better ad conversions with minimal spend. AdWords also offers remarketing ads, so I’d analyzing both avenues before allocating your budget.

For me, smaller brands with a limited budget see greater success on Bing because the cost-per-click has been lower. WordStream also saw an average of 33.5% cheaper CPC on Bing.

In addition to advertising, businesses will also need to adapt to the new way users are searching. According to comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. Voice search uses a more natural tone, which changes the search results.

Tech Goliaths like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, are focusing on new digital assistants, like Cortana. Cortana (iOS, Android, Windows), has already seen 2.5 billion questions asked globally. Pretty crazy, huh? Digital assistants are transforming how searchers use mobile. Searchers are bypassing Google search and using apps or voice search for their queries.

This means more opportunities for marketers to influence consumers and measure the impact of search on other channels.

Takeaways

It seems to me that the next generation of search will rely on helping businesses personalize their brand to reach a very niche audience. There is a whole new side for SEM marketers to explore — and potentially some awesome benefits, too!

Brands can expand their reach by utilizing multiple search engines.
The content based on user intent and conversational language will have a greater impact.
Investing in personalized ad campaigns can bring in higher conversions.

For all the work we do with perfecting our strategies, perhaps these coming years bring us the opportunity to engage on a deeper level more meaningful level, not only with our audience but with our brands too.

I’d love your thoughts on this! Feel free to discuss in the comments or on Twitter.

Image Credits: 

Featured Image by sellingpix/depositphotos

Learn more about Bing Network.

Google reiterates suggested 33-character limit in ETA headlines to avoid truncation

As expanded text ads began rolling out, some advertisers noticed that the new, longer double-headline is sometimes cut off. This can be frustrating and have potential legal ramifications for businesses in highly regulated industries like pharmaceuticals. Here’s an example of a truncated ETA headline:

Google AdWords’ social team responded to the tweet above with a recommendation to keep the combined character count of the two headlines limited to a total of 33 characters to avoid having the second headline truncated.

On Wednesday, Google’s Cassie Hartt has followed up with clarification on this issue on the AdWords Community forum. As many pointed out in that initial Twitter thread, truncation is really about pixels rather than a specific character count. But since ads are based on characters not pixels, to avoid headline truncation Hartt reiterated the recommendation of 33 characters. From Hartt’s post:

Advertisers who must adhere to strict legal or regulatory ad requirements should consider creating headlines with 33 characters or less to ensure all of their ad text shows — even on the smallest devices. These advertisers should also take into consideration the size (and language) of these characters. For example, an ‘M’ takes up more space than an ‘i.’

So, if you’re including compliance-related information in your headlines, or the meaning of your headline changes when truncated, or you just can’t stand seeing your work cut off, it’s probably best to stick with 33 characters.

Hartt added that if the Ad Preview tool shows the full headline, “it generally won’t truncate when served,” and the company still encourages most advertisers to take advantage of the full 60 characters allowed.

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

How to download all of your landing pages from Google Search Console via Analytics Edge — and I mean ALL of them!

Google Search Console (GSC) is powerful and provides a boatload of data directly from Google. One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Search Analytics report, which enables you to drill into queries that your site ranks for and the landing pages ranking for those queries, then slice and dice that information by device, country, date and more. You can also compare queries, pages, countries and devices by date, which is extremely helpful when diagnosing surges or drops in traffic.

When analyzing websites, I often export data from GSC to Excel for further analysis. For example, when helping companies with website redesigns or CMS migrations, it’s important to have a solid understanding of all landing pages ranking for queries and receiving Google traffic. You can find that data in the Search Analytics reporting by selecting the Pages group. See below.

There’s a nifty Download button at the bottom of the report which enables you to export a spreadsheet with your landing page data. That’s great, but I’m about to rain on your parade: The UI in Google Search Console is limited to only one thousand URLs. Yes, just one thousand. That may be enough for some sites, but it’s extremely limiting for many large-scale sites.

So we’ve got a tricky situation. We have valuable data directly from Google, but we’re handcuffed by not having enough of it (at least to download). What’s an SEO to do?

Solutions for finding more landing page data in Google Search Console

I’ve written in the past about how to hack Google Search Console to get more data from your reports. For example, setting up directories in GSC, which will focus your reporting on URLs located just in those directories. That will help, and it can enable you to find more landing pages in GSC. But it’s not perfect, especially for sites that don’t have categories mapped out as distinct directories. And you’re still limited to one thousand rows of data per directory.

You can also learn how to code and use the Search Console API directly. Just understand that there’s a learning curve involved. Unfortunately, I know many people who have started to dig into the API and then wasted time, never got it to work, and pulled their hair out in frustration. If you have the technical aptitude to code and tap into the API, I recommend doing that. But if you’re looking for a solid solution right out of the box, that might not be your best option. Let’s move on.

So, based on the limitations I listed above, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool that can easily and seamlessly export all of your landing pages (or queries) from GSC to Excel? And I mean ALL of them. Enter Analytics Edge.

Analytics Edge add-in for Excel: Your Swiss Army knife for GSC and Google Analytics data

In March, I wrote a post explaining how to easily export all of your landing pages from Google Analytics via Analytics Edge. I ended up finding the solution since I work on a lot of large-scale websites and didn’t have an easy way to export bulk reports. Analytics Edge works extremely well when exporting many landing pages from Google Analytics. You can use the Google Analytics Connector for Analytics Edge to work seamlessly with your data.

Well, it wasn’t long before I started testing other “connectors” that Analytics Edge supports. And one is for Google Search Console.

There are several important tasks you can execute by using the connector for Search Console, but I’ll focus on exporting all of your landing pages for this post. I think once you try it out, you’ll be hooked. I know I am… I use it all the time, especially when working with large-scale sites.

Let’s jump in.

How to download all of your landing pages via the Analytics Edge plugin for Excel

1. Download and install the Analytics Edge free or core add-in. There’s a free trial for the core add-in if you wanted to simply test it out. But the free add-in will work as well (just with less functionality). After installing the add-in, you should register it in Excel.

2. Next, install the Search Console connector by clicking the Manage Connectors button in the menu.

3. Once you install Analytics Edge and the Search Console connector, access the options in the Analytics Edge menu at the top of Excel. Click the Google Search drop-down and select Accounts. This is where you will connect Analytics Edge with the Google account(s) you want to download data from. Go through the process of connecting the Google account you want to work with.

 

4. Now that you’ve connected a Google account to Analytics Edge, click the Google Search drop-down again and select Search Analytics. This will start the wizard for working with the Search Analytics report from GSC. Name the macro whatever you want, and you’ll be taken to the next screen.

5. Now pick an account to work with and a specific website. You should see all of the sites you have access to in the list. Also, select the page dimension, since we want to export all landing pages from GSC. Next you can select filters and the date range.

6. There are three tabs in the report interface. The first is labeled Fields, and we just set that up by selecting the page dimension. If you click the Filters tab, you can filter your report by query, page, country, device and type. You can also limit the number of rows you want to export. For our purposes today, I would leave all blank (but you can focus your export by using these filters in the future.)

7. The third tab, labeled Dates, enables you to select the date range for your report. There are some presets available, like “Last 28 Days” and “Last 90 Days,” or you can select a specific date range. Note, GSC data only goes back 90 days. This is a serious limitation, and I know Google is thinking about extending that to one year. There’s no ETA on that yet, so let’s choose “Last 90 Days” to get as much landing page data as possible. Then click Finish to start the export.

8. Analytics Edge will export your results, but it will only show a sample of the export in the worksheet highlighted in green (in memory). If all looks good with the sample, then you must “write to worksheet” to see all of the data that was exported. In order to do this, click File, and then Write Worksheet.  Simply enter a name for your new worksheet and click Finish. Boom, check the new worksheet that was created to find all of your landing pages.

If you followed the instructions above, then you are staring at glorious landing page data in its entirety. Not a one-thousand row sample of that data, but the entire enchilada. Awesome, right?

So whether you’re working on a redesign or CMS migration, analyzing an algorithm update or simply archiving Google Search Console data, Analytics Edge makes it easy to export ALL of your data without running into the one-thousand-row limitation.

Bonus: Blow your mind and export queries by landing page

If you’re working with a large-scale website in GSC, then I’m sure you’re eager to use Analytics Edge to seamlessly export all of your top landing pages. But what if I told you there’s another report that could blow your mind?

Using the Search Console connector for Analytics Edge, you can download all queries by landing page. Yes, that means you can quickly pivot that data to have a killer report in Excel listing each landing page, along with each query that the page ranks for. I won’t cover every step in the process as I did above, but I’ll explain the main differences with running the new report below.

First, when choosing settings in the Analytics Edge wizard for the Search Analytics reporting, you should select both the page and query dimensions. That will enable you to export the raw data containing queries by URL.

One you export the data and “write to worksheet” as I explained earlier in the tutorial, you’ll see all queries by landing page. You’ll notice that the data isn’t organized well, but we can take care of that quickly with a pivot table.

To create a pivot table using our data, click the Insert link in the main menu of Excel, and then Pivot Table. Leave the default options and click OK. The pivot table should be created in a new worksheet.

Then select page, query, and then metrics like clicks, impressions, and average position. And boom, you’ll now see each landing page and its associated queries. See below.

Now you’ll have each landing page that is ranking in Google and driving traffic, along with the queries that the page is ranking for. Awesome.

Summary: Don’t settle for 1,000 rows — export all of your landing pages from GSC

Google Search Console contains a powerful set of features and data directly from Google. And the search analytics report within GSC provides a wealth of data regarding queries that are ranking in Google, the pages that rank for those queries and more. But there’s a one-thousand-row limit on exporting from GSC, which is extremely limiting for many larger sites.

That’s why using a tool like Analytics Edge can help liberate your data. With just a few clicks, you can export all of your landing pages. And I mean ALL of them. Have fun.

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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

Glenn Gabe, president of

G-Squared Interactive

, is a digital marketing veteran with over 20 years of experience. Glenn currently helps clients maximize their online marketing efforts via Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Advertising, Social Media Marketing, and Web Analytics. During the past 20 years, Glenn has assisted clients across a wide range of industries including consumer packaged goods (CPG), e-commerce retailers, startups, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, military, education, non-profits, online auctions, real estate, and publishing.