8 Key Tips for Improving Your Site’s User Experience

Search engine optimization also known as SEO is a subject covered by numerous people and blog sites, its the procedure of making your web site look appealing to the search engines in the hope of getting a preferential ranking for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research study I encounter lots of posts that provide some excellent insights to seo.

Below you could find an article from Kiss Metrics which I discovered to be valuable as well as extremely fascinating .

Do you ever navigate to a blog post for information, only to find that the site is so hard to look at you can barely even bring yourself to read it? Sadly, this happens more often than it should.

Gathering, writing, and sharing information aren’t the only important aspects of your content strategy. The design of your websites and blogs is also essential–and may just require even more attention than writing the articles themselves. If you don’t put effort into maximizing your site’s UX, the time and effort you spend on research and writing will only go to waste.

From improving your content formats to making your site more visually appealing, there are lots of factors that can help you better the user experience of your website or blog.

1. Choose the Right Headings

You might not think about how important headings are to your site’s user experience. After all, our readers hardly notice headings, right? Think again.

Formatting subheadings requires a careful strategy. The most effective subheadings are:

  • Clear and straightforward

  • Similar in length

  • Parallel in structure

  • Directly related to the title of your article

Headings in articles aren’t just good for SEO. By highlighting searchable key terms, your headings and subheadings clearly and directly address the questions your readers are looking for, making your website more comfortable to navigate. They also break up the text, making articles easier to scan and less daunting for your readers.

2. Add Authentic Images

We all know that images are great for making web pages more visually interesting. Still, images must be chosen carefully.

While it is cheap and easy to upload stock photos, it is best to avoid stock photos altogether. This is true regardless of whether you hire a professional photographer or take the pictures yourself. Stock photography may look professional, but they are often impersonal, vacuous, and devoid of character.

A particularly elucidating photo experiment proves this point exactly. When Visual Website Optimizer ran a test for a moving company to determine the value of real photography versus stock photos, it found that a page displaying original photos of their trucks and crew showed a 45% improvement in conversions over the stock version.

semrush-movers.jpgImage credit: https://vwo.com

3. Mix and Match Content Formats

The last thing you want is for well-researched blog posts to come across as dull and monotonous. While tone and style are certainly responsible for engaging written content, so too is the visual appeal.

Visual appeal isn’t just about inserting images; it is also about the look and formatting of the text itself. Varied content formats between articles or even within the same article give your content visual texture.

Rather than stick to long paragraphs, break up your text with subheadings, bullet points, or lists (like this one).

4. Use White Space to Your Advantage

Think about it: If this entire article were just one big paragraph, you probably wouldn’t be reading it, would you?

How you format your words isn’t the only thing that makes your text visually appealing; equally as important is the blank space between the images and text, also called white space.

White space is critical because it invites your readers into the article, giving them room to breathe. Paragraph separations, subheadings, lists, and spaces around images all help create white space.

Consider these two examples of text. The first, from Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road, is deliberately long and dense for stylistic effect.

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.

While this style works well for a novel, it would be too convoluted in a blog post. Take, on the other hand, this article from CNBC:

Following your work blunder, Black encourages you to reach out to people you are close to at work as fast as possible.

‘Get to your champions, your supporters, your mentors, you don’t want them hearing about it in the hallway from somebody else a week later,’ Black says.

The point is to make sure they hear the correct information directly from you and not a rumor that has spun out of control.

Those champions and supporters can help you restore your personal image, Black adds.

Since the purpose of a blog post is to convey information clearly and directly to busy readers, you don’t want your articles to be poetic and difficult to decipher; instead, you want your articles to be well-spaced and easy to navigate and understand.

5. Make It Interactive

While varied content formats and a strategic use of white space make your site easy and pleasant to use, you can spice up the look and feel of your site even more. Making your site interactive makes your users more likely to browse your site for additional articles and to keep coming back.

There are many different types of interactive content. One option is to make website text and images subtly interact with the user’s mouse. When the user’s mouse hovers over a menu item, the text can change color. Or, when the user hovers over a product image, explanatory overlay text can fade in.

You can also pursue more creative options. Apester, for example, works with publications to embed quizzes, polls, and visual storytelling within the articles themselves. Visual storytelling is particularly useful in driving user interaction, as it connects with readers’ emotions and gives them a chance to be part of your site’s narrative. When your readers actively participate in the content they read, you increase user engagement and the time spent on your site.

6. Optimize Your Site for Mobile

It is frustrating to navigate to a site using your phone, only to find that the site’s pages don’t fit properly onto your mobile screen. Google is equally eager for change, as revealed with the mobile-friendly ranking boost it put forth in 2015.

Now, Google is providing yet another incentive for sites to go mobile-friendly. It is shifting to a mobile-first index – meaning that it will look primarily at mobile content for its search rankings. Google already sees more mobile searches than desktop searches, and its upcoming shift to a mobile-first index, estimated to roll out sometime in 2018, is its way to account for this.

Still, Google doesn’t want you to worry if you are slow to go mobile. For those without a mobile site, the search engine will still index their desktop site. But the bottom line is that mobile content will be the decisive factor in ranking search results. This prioritization of mobile represents an important fact – that mobile is indeed the new standard and that, in the future, there could be bigger consequences for not adapting your site accordingly.

If you want to rank well for SEO, and if you don’t want users to give up on your site, it is critical that you make your pages easily viewable and readable on mobile. This will not only make your site more searchable but will also drastically improve its usability. A great option to gear up for Google’s change, which the search giant is trying to push, is to move towards responsive web design, which gives a site capabilities to automatically accommodate for features like screen size and device type.

7. Eliminate and Customize Your 404s

As you probably know from personal experience, 404 error pages are a huge deterrent from reading a page. Even if just one page on a website displays a 404, readers are likely to navigate away from the site altogether in search of a faster, more reliable one. In other words, a single 404 on your site could drive potential readers away.

To avoid this, thoroughly search your site to catch all your 404s before your readers do. On top of that, rather than allow your site to navigate to the standard 404 page, personalize 404 error messages so that they are friendly and attractive. Though such messages are, of course, best avoided, custom 404s, when they do exist, are better than those without personality.

Kualo, in particular, has a great 404 page that entertains users with its own version of Space Invaders:

semrush-404.jpgImage credit: http://www.creativebloq.com

Integrating games into your 404s is an effective way to keep your readers entertained, rather than annoyed when a link fails to load. You can use entertaining, thematically relevant images for a similar effect.

Still, entertainment value is just one key virtue of a good 404. You should also couple your entertainment tactics with a clear and simple error message about what went wrong, as well as options for easy navigation back to your site.

Regardless of your page design, you should make it clear to users that you empathize with them and genuinely care about delivering a smooth and comfortable browsing experience. You should also speak in a personable tone and use words that your users can relate to and understand. This, combined with the humor that a good 404 page can bring, helps build an emotional connection with your users.

8. Speed Up Your Page Loads

In the current age of fast-paced work and neverending multi-tasking, speedy page loads can make or break whether a user remains on your site. If a page loads too slowly, users are likely to give up going to your website in favor of faster ones–including the sites of your competitors. In fact, it’s been shown that 87% of users who have to wait 2 seconds for a page to load will abandon the site.

Improving your page load speed is not only important for desktop, but it is also an integral part of optimizing for mobile that represents one of Google’s many efforts to encourage what might already be a natural shift toward the mobile web. The company is facilitating the move toward an increasingly user-friendly mobile experience with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a Google-backed project with the goal of boosting mobile page load speed and streamlining the mobile web.

In order to check whether your site delivers a speedy user experience across all platforms, you can use free tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. When you enter the URL of the site in question, the Google tool will show areas where your page speed is weak and provide suggestions for improvement.

Your Website Should Be An Experience

From creating a quick and comfortable browsing experience to making your content clear, eye-catching, and interesting, it is essential that you take the time to improve your site’s user experience. A good web experience isn’t just about reading useful information; even more, it’s about reading useful information in a pleasing and engaging way. Informative content alone simply isn’t enough.

I hope you have actually appreciated this article on 8 Key Tips for Improving Your Site’s User Experience If you wish to view more write-ups on seo then do not hesitate to surf our other articles. We have much more curated posts from Ahref and also I wish you enjoy reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

How to Find Commercial Intent Based Keyword Phrases For (Almost) Any Niche

Search engine optimization likewise referred to as SEO is a subject covered by many individuals and blog sites, its the procedure of making your internet site appearance attractive to the online search engine in the hope of acquiring a special position for your targeted keyword. Throughout my study I come across lots of short articles that supply some great understandings to search engine optimization.

Listed below you can locate an short article from Kiss Metrics which I found to be extremely interesting and also useful .

SEO is all about conversions. Traffic and time on page are vanity metrics that are literally of no use if they don’t lead to sales.

Commercial intent keywords have the power to drive targeted traffic which ultimately converts to more sales and revenue. It would be right to say that “commercial intent keywords = more sales”.

So, how do we find commercial intent keyword phrases?

The process is really simple, but I will make it even simpler for you! Let’s take an example of a small business selling guitars online. We need to find as many keywords as possible that have a direct commercial intent.

We will break the keyword phrase into two parts:

  • A- Intent

  • B- Keyword

For the intent part, we are already aware that we are looking to target prospects who are interested in buying guitars so the following words will be the most important:

  • Buy

  • Purchase

  • Deals

  • Offers

  • Sale

  • Low Price

  • Cheap

  • Discount

  • Best Price

Once you have the intent words ready, next step is to sign in to your SEMrush account.

Now, it is time to enter your main intent (buy) + target keyword “guitars online” in the search box. So, the entered phrase will be “buy guitars online”. 

Taking the above example, we can see under the “Phrase Match Keywords” section that SEMrush displays around 110 keywords that exactly matches the searcher’s intent to buy the product.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-10840-pm.png

Now, click on the “view full report” button located at the bottom right section of the phrase match table. Here, you will come across the complete list of keywords that are important from selling point of view.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11000-pm.png

Exclude keywords that are irrelevant to your business by clicking on the advanced filter link. In the report, we can see that “buy guitar cover online” is something that is not directly related to the product that we are selling so we will exclude keywords like these.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11102-pm.png

Once that is done, click on the “Export” button located at the right corner of the screen just above the report, and you get a super important list of commercial intent based keywords in no time.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11335-pm.png

Repeat the search with variants of keywords like purchase, deal, cheap, offers, etc. and continue expanding your list until you have covered all of it.

Tip: Change the device drop down to mobile, to see what people search via mobile devices, and again repeat the searches to uncover even more keywords to support your campaign.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11408-pm.png

Four Ways to Generate More Keyword Ideas

Until now we have learned how to generate great commercial intent keyword ideas using SEMrush. Now, let’s move ahead to some more tips to generate lot more ideas than what we have already covered.

1). Conduct a Google search with your main keyword query “buy guitars online”, and you will see product listing ads. These ads are a great way to identify branded keyword phrases that might be a good choice to include in your report provided you are selling them.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11511-pm.png

Some of the examples of hot selling guitar brands that I uncovered using this tactic are:

  • Gibsons 
  • Dolphin
  • Les Paul
  • Yamaha
  • Epiphone
  • Stagg etc. 

You can identify and include all the brands that you are selling. Now, scroll down to the bottom of the search page, and you will see a carousel like the one displayed below:

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-12914-pm.png

From this carousel of “guitar type”, you can have an idea of the popular guitar types. Make a list and add the intent words “buy”, “sale”, “offer” etc. to them in order to generate your own keyword phrases based on the types of guitar. Repeat the SEMrush search discussed above to uncover the potential search volume of such keywords.

Right beneath the guitar type carousel, you will see the “searches related to” section:

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-13259-pm.png

Identify even more popular keyword phrases using these suggestions from Google. For example, if you have a physical store then it makes sense to get your website ranked on top if someone searches using the keyword “guitar stores near me”. 

2). Repeat a Google search with your main keyword query “buy guitars online” + the first alphabet (A), then continue the search with the remaining 25 letters of the English Alphabet.

  • “Buy guitars online a…”
  • “Buy guitars online b…”
  • “Buy guitars online c…”
  • “Buy guitars online d…”

This search will uncover all the autocomplete keywords. In the screenshot below, we identified 2 more keywords – “buy guitars online cheap” and “buy guitars online cash on delivery” from the search “buy guitars online c”. If you do international shipping then “buy guitars online Canada” can also be a good choice. (Alternatively, you can also use the tool keywordtool.io to do this research).

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11542-pm.png

3). Remove the intent keyword phrase from your main keyword and enter the query in the Google search. In this case, the query “guitars” is the one that we will search.

We can immediately identify that the main search query also has a commercial intent behind it because the top organic listings are from stores selling guitars online. This is a great way to determine whether your base keyword/s have a strong buying intent or not.

screen-shot-2017-10-23-at-11612-pm.png

4). Login to Adwords and visit Keyword Planner. Now, enter your main keywords and see the Cost Per Click (CPC) or the suggested bid. The greater the value means the advertisers are willing to spend more on that keyword. This is a great indicator that the keyword might have a strong commercial intent.

Detailed, But Worth It

Keyword research might take a longer time than you would expect. Make sure you give yourself ample amount of time to handle this detailed process because wrongly targeted keywords often ruin the entire SEO strategy.

The process suggested above will work for most niches and will give you insights you need for SEO and marketing purposes. When doing keyword research, do not forget to prepare a separate excel sheet containing just commercial intent keywords. I am sure this will improve the ROI of all your campaigns.

Are you using any other trick to identify commercial intent keywords? Please let me know in the comments below and let’s start a discussion.

If you would certainly such as to see more short articles on search engine optimization after that really feel cost-free to search our other short articles. We have lots of more curated write-ups from Kiss Metrics as well as I hope you take pleasure in reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Large-Scale Study: How to Rank for Featured Snippets in 2018

Search engine optimization also called SEO is a subject covered by numerous people and also blogs, its the procedure of making your internet site look attractive to the online search engine in the hope of getting a special ranking for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research study I find numerous write-ups that offer some fantastic understandings to search engine optimization.

Below you could discover an write-up from Kiss Metrics which I discovered to be helpful as well as extremely interesting .

In a study conducted by SEMrush and Ghergich & Co., we analyzed 1.6 million featured snippets. Furthermore, we analyzed 80 million keywords. The goal was to break down featured snippet percentages by keyword group.

Our focus was on questions, prepositions, and comparisons search phases. I have seen great success earning featured snippets in these three areas. But I wanted the data to back up what I saw on the ground. Now, thanks to SEMrush, I have it. TL;DR Raw Data Linked at the bottom of this article.

Let’s start by looking at the power of question keywords.

New to Featured Snippets? The data says start here!

Questions show a 480% increase in the percentage of keywords with featured snippets

Something shocking happens when I remove questions, prepositions, and comparisons from our large data set. Contrary to popular belief, only 7% of generic keywords have featured snippets. Small studies show higher numbers, but 80 million keywords is the largest study I have seen.

(Generic keywords are any non-question, preposition, or comparison keyword.)

You can see in the chart that 41% of questions have featured snippets. Comparison and preposition keywords are also more likely to show featured snippets.

If you are starting to look at featured snippets, side with data and optimize questions.

Questions show a 480% increase in the percentage of keywords with featured snippets.

Featured Snippet Question Findings

Featured Snippet Questions Findings

What jumps off the page is how well questions do at earning paragraph featured snippets. The main exception to that rule is “how” phrases. “How to” keywords are fantastic at earning featured snippet lists.

Featured Snippet Preposition Findings

Featured Snippet Preposition Findings

Look closely at preposition keywords, and you can see what I mentioned about “how to” keywords. Prepositions are a great opportunity to optimize ordered and unordered lists.

Featured Snippet Comparison Findings

Featured Snippet Comparison Findings

Our analysis of comparison keywords is a bit tricky to break down. On the surface, it seems they are well suited for paragraph featured snippets. But that is because there are not a lot of well-structured comparison tables for Google to pick from.

I have had success formatting pricing comparisons into tables and earning featured snippets. The content did not change — only the way we presented the data. Pricing keywords are the type of end-of-buying-cycle keywords that tend to have high conversions.

Featured Snippet Overall Breakdown

Featured Snippet Overall Breakdown

The chart shows that if you try to rank for questions, go for a paragraph featured snippet. If you are trying to rank for prepositions, use a list. Pricing comparisons perform well in tables.

Now you have the data on what type of featured snippet to optimize for. Let’s look at how to optimize your content for featured snippets.

How Long Should Featured Snippet Content Be?

Optimal Featured Snippet Paragraph Lenghts

As a good rule of thumb, I tell copywriters to create paragraphs in the 40–60-word range. You need to be succinct and avoid giant walls of text.

Optimal Featured Snippet Lists Lengths

You should use longer lists whenever possible, so Google is forced to truncate the results. You need to give the user a reason to click through to your site. If it only makes sense to use a short list, try to use enough words for each item, so Google truncates each list item.

That said, keep what is best for the user in mind. Sometimes that is a short, straight to the point list, and that is ok.

Optimal Featured Snippet Table Lenghts

Like lists, you should look to create tables that Google will truncate. Focus on end-of-buying-cycle keywords, such as price.

Optimal Featured Snippet Image Sizes

The takeaway is to use landscape images. We found that the most common aspect ratio for featured snippets images is 4:3. The media image size in pixels was 600w x 425h. Landscape images also look less pixelated when Google scales them down.

What is a Featured Snippet Hub?

What is a featured snippet hub?

A featured snippet hub is an internal URL that has earned 10 or more Google featured snippets for a single page.

I coined this phrase to give a name to something exciting we saw in the data. You can’t really be in marketing without naming everything you come across.

We found individual pages earning 200-300 featured snippets for a single internal URL.

Breakdown of Featured Snippet Hubs

In total, we discovered 3,800 URLs earning 10 or more featured snippets for a single page. Analysis on these featured snippet hubs shed interesting light on featured snippet optimization.

lock-crop.png

Secure HTTPS Adoption is No Longer Optional

70% of featured snippet hubs have adopted HTTPS. This number shows a steep rise over the past six months.

Use Media to Break Up and Visualize Your Content

media-crop.png

Analyzing image use is hard because some images are for design purposes. To combat this, we only looked at images containing alt tags. On average, we found 14 images with alt tags per URL. Some of these images are still likely to be design-oriented, but the takeaway is pretty clear.

The days of using a stock photo at the top of your article and calling it a day are over. They should never have existed in the first place. Don’t fixate on the count, fixate on providing visual aids inside your content to drive your points home.

Authoritative Domains

gavel-crop-1.png

  1. Median Root Domains 3,500

  2. Median Awesome Score 60

Think of authoritative domains as relative to your niche. Few small businesses need to earn 3,500 root domains to be considered a topical authority vs. the competition.

Social Engagement

microphone-crop.png

89% of the featured snippet hub URLs have social activity. This does not mean social shares equate to higher rankings or earning snippets. What it means is that content we see in these positions shows strong user engagement signals.

Mobile Friendly or Die

speed-crop.png

We ran all 3,800 URLs through Google’s Page Speed API. Site speed scores were what I expected, but the mobile friendliness and usability scores were off the charts!

The average Mobile Friendly Score is 95/100. The average usability score is 96/100. For a list this large, obtaining that high of an average score demands attention.

I do not believe the exact score matters in the end. What matters is that mobile users have an excellent experience on your site. They must be able to access answers quickly and navigate your site with ease.

Featured Snippet Hubs Have High Mobile Friendly Scores

HTML Elements

dreamforce-17-semrush-017.jpg

95.77% of featured snippet hubs use lists. Not only one list, but many ordered and unordered lists per URL.

Anatomy of a Featured Snippet HubExample 1

The Anatomy of a Featured Snippet Hub (Illustration Breakdown)

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-to-lose-weight-as-fast-as-possible
This URL Earned 96 Featured Snippets

  • High User Engagement: 750 social shares

  • Mobile Friendly: 99/100

  • HTTPS Adoption: Yes

  • Media Usage: 12 health-related images

  • Word Count: 2,100 words

  • Clear Headers: 12 h1–h6 tags

  • Succinct Content: Average paragraph length is 42 words

  • Uses Lists: 7 ordered or unordered lists

  • Cite Facts: 48 external fact citations

Anatomy of a Featured Snippet HubExample 2

http://trendblog.net/how-to-track-your-lost-iphone-or-ipad-without-tracking-app/
This URL Earned 87 Featured Snippets

  • High User Engagement: 7,000 social shares

  • Mobile Friendly: 98/100

  • HTTPS Adoption: No

  • Media Usage: 15 iPhone related images

  • Word Count: 2,078 words

  • Clear Headers: 16 h1–h6 tags

  • Succinct Content: Average paragraph length is 34 words

  • Uses Lists: 6 ordered or unordered lists

  • Cite Facts: 6 external citations

This is a great time to mention that correlation is not causation. I do not look at featured snippet hubs as a black box that holds secrets to earning featured snippets. I am simply pointing out some common themes that I think are instructive for content creators. Understanding that, our findings make total sense from a search engine’s perspective.

Let’s look at a few things Google must do when sending users to specific content.

If you look at the common findings for these hubs, they align with a search engine’s goals.

1. Provide succinct answers

  • Average paragraph is 42 words

  • Lists are great for mobile

  • Clear headers for scanning

2. Use trusted sources

  • Strong external links

  • Strong social engagement

3. Establish thorough topic coverage

  • 48 external fact citations

  • 2,100 words

4. Focus on secure browsing

5. Ensure great user experience across devices

  • High mobile friendly scores

  • High mobile usability scores

Thanks to SEMrush, we have the data on what type of featured snippet to optimize for. You know the exact lengths you should use for each type of snippet. You also have insights into feature snippet hubs and why Google trusts their content.

Use this study to re-optimize your best old content that ranks in the top 10, but lacks featured snippets. Put these findings in place for all future content production.

How to Upgrade Old Content to Earn aFeatured Snippets

Give search engines the answers they need. Use succinct formats, focus on mobile user experience, and you will reap long-term rewards.

Get the Raw Data (Save Google Sheet as Copy)

I wish you have enjoyed this article on Large-Scale Study: How to Rank for Featured Snippets in 2018 If you would like to check out even more write-ups on seo then do not hesitate to surf our various other articles. We have many more curated posts from Ahref and also I hope you delight in reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Google News Digest: Handling Black Friday Buzz with AdWords Updates, New Look for Flights and Securing Content Credibility

Search engine optimization likewise referred to as Search Engine Optimization is a subject covered by many people as well as blog sites, its the procedure of making your site appearance eye-catching to the internet search engine in the hope of gaining a preferential ranking for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research I stumble upon many write-ups that offer some wonderful insights to seo.

Listed below you can find an post from Ahref which I located to be very intriguing and valuable . The short article is titled Google News Digest: Handling Black Friday Buzz with AdWords Updates, New Look for Flights and Securing Content Credibility as well as you can locate it below

The madness of Black Friday has passed (by the way, please share the best and most notable Black Friday deals you have encountered this year) and now everyone is preparing for the Christmas and New Year holidays. And Google is no stranger to that. We can see how the search giant is preparing for the festive season with #SmallThanks to small businesses, richer product knowledge panels for mobile and a more comprehensive and advanced functionality in AdWords.

With the year coming to its end, this is also the time to draw some conclusions and look at some data to make sure that you enter the next year more informed and data-driven. Thus, we can see an unprecedented amount of important research being released – scroll down to see what trends dominated this Black Friday, and what caused a pretty high number of Google accounts’ hijacking.

Oh, and since the New Year is all about leaving old stuff behind and entering it with a new feel, Google Maps, Flights, and Google Analytics for Firebase are shaking the dust off their shoulders and celebrating the New Year with new looks. Check it all out below!


GOOGLE SEARCH NEWS

Black Friday Search Query Trends Research

Yes, this has already happened – twice as many people searched for “Black Friday ads” as those who needed a “turkey recipe” from Google. This is one of the findings of a recent research by Thinkwithgoogle that looked at trends that surrounded all the Black Friday buzz.

According to Google, the number of search queries for Black Friday has increased by up to 80% since 2014, and thematic Black Friday videos views have gone up 120%. In 2016, the number of mobile search queries for “Black Friday” peaked right on Thanksgiving. The majority of queries has to do with learning about the best time to shop during all the sales, yet the most popular searches were coming from bargain-seekers who were wondering – “Cyber Monday or/vs. Black Friday”.

And, if you are curious about products that were at the top for Black Friday bargain-seekers, you can read our research on the Top 2017 Black Friday Deals.

Black Friday search trend

Source: Holiday Shoppers are in the Driver’s Seat Now – Here’s What They’re Looking For

Google Pushes Content Parity with AMP Pages

Google continues to improve user experience with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), as AMP adopters are sometimes “guilty” of publishing two versions of their content – one for the AMP page, and the other one for the canonical page not based on AMP. Webmasters often create AMP pages as a teaser for the original content, which contradicts the nature of the AMP Project, which was originally designed as a way for users to consume valuable web content but with a faster loading speed.

Here is an example of a teaser AMP page:

amp page

Thus, starting Feb 1, 2018, Google’s policy will demand that an AMP page is in relative parity with the canonical page and includes all the “critical content”. Otherwise, your AMP page will not be considered as a worthy candidate for all the AMP perks, i.e., search features like top stories, carousel, and so on. You should check out your Google Search Console for any notifications about such issues. That said, Google emphasized once again that AMP is not a ranking signal.

Source: Engaging Users Through High Quality AMP Pages

Richer Product Knowledge Panel on Mobile

With the holiday season upon us, along with a tougher competition for pre-holidays internet shopping buzz, providing users with all the relevant information about products is essential. So, Google updated its product-oriented knowledge panel on mobile search. The changes concern both the appearance – blue color, new carousel format – and the content of the panel. Users will now be able to see product reviews, detailed descriptions, videos, and, shopping ads within one place – the Knowledge Panel. The scale and geography of the updates are still unclear.

Source: Google Updates Mobile Product Knowledge Panels to Show Even More Info in One Spot

Research on the Causes of Google Accounts’ Hijacking

Holidays are holidays, but security concerns remain at the forefront of Google’s attention. Therefore, Google cooperated with the University of California, Berkeley to conduct some research, with Google user account as a case study, that studied all the ways in which hackers managed to take over user accounts.

The results indicated that 250,000 Google user accounts are being hijacked every week. Google and Berkeley tracked black markets for 12 months and found out that more than 788,000 credentials were stolen via keylogging,12 million were hacked via phishing, and 3,3 billion logins and passwords were taken due to third-party breaches.

Google intends to use the data from the research to improve detections and blocking of hijacking attempts. If you want to learn more about the research, you can find the full report at Research at Google.

Source: New Research: Understanding the Root Cause of Account Takeover

Google Joins the Trust Project to Bring More Credibility to Web Content

Only a person that has been far away from Earth has not heard about fake news. Search and tech giants are taking the issue of online news transparency very seriously. Thus, Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter have joined the Trust Project, that aims to bring more credibility and transparency to web content – be it a news article or a shopping ad. The key parts of the project are «Trust Indicators» – icons that display the news publisher’s ethics, standards, journalists, and practices. These icons will appear right next to articles within Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.

How does the Trust Project decide which indicator it should assign to each publisher? The “Trust Indicators” are guided by eight indicators, negotiated by the leading 75 news organizations. 

the trust project

To learn more about the “Trust Indicators”, check out Barry Schwartz’s SEO recap.

Source: Facebook, Google and others join the Trust Project, an effort to increase transparency around online news

Job-Seeking With Google Made Easier

Having analyzed plenty of feedback from job-seekers who already engage with the Google’s job feature, Google rolled out a couple of updates. Like it or hate it, salary is one of the main factors for applying for one job or another, yet many employers are playing it safe and don’t disclose the salary. Thus, the main novelty has to do with displaying salaries for each vacancy mentioned on Google or a rough estimate if the employer does not mention a specific amount. Other updates include enhanced location filtering and the ability to save jobs you are interested in.

Currently, the job-seeking with Google option is only available in the US.

job search experience on Google

Sources: Make Your SIte’s Complete Jobs Information Accessible to Job SeekersNew Tools to Make Your Job Search Simpler


GOOGLE ADS NEWS

Google AdWords Updates

Inspired by the coming holiday season and in the move to push advertisers to use the new AdWords interface, Google AdWords is introducing new features that should help you create the best, paid advertising campaign you can:

  • Promotion extensions: You can now add deals and special offers to your existing ads without the need to create new ones. This is particularly handy around the holidays when people are more prone to be pickier with all the deals available on the market. You can only access the feature within the new AdWords interface.

  • Ad variations: Have you ever wondered how much your ads’ click-through-rates might change if you used “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Xmas”? Well, now you don’t have to wonder anymore, as AdWords’ new feature will help you test thousands of your ads in just a few clicks, and change your entire ad groups according to the results you see. Once again, the feature is available for those who are already enjoying the new AdWords experience.

  • Custom intent audiences for Google Display Network will help you reach those shoppers who are looking for a particular deal you offer. This is “purchase intent”, at a high level. The feature allows you to create custom audience groups with the highest purchase intent based on keywords that you target.

  • Opportunities page will help you increase the efficiency of your ad campaigns. The page includes information about all the new features, actionable recommendations, and insights on how to optimize your bids, budgets, ads, and keywords to enhance the overall performance of your ad campaigns.

promotion extension

Source: New AdWords Innovations to Drive Better Results for Your Business


GOOGLE TOOLS NEWS

#SmallThanks Transforms Small Business Customers into Brand Advocates

Google has launched a new project – the #SmallThanks Hub, which is completely dedicated to serving small businesses. The project is a free Google initiative to help small businesses leverage digital channels to their advantage. #SmallThanks Hub provides you with customized marketing materials – posters, Social Media posts, prints, stickers, and so on – that are based on your online reviews. All you have to do is search for your brand name on the site, and if the search giant spots any customer-produced greetings towards your business, it will automatically generate all the content you may need. People trust fellow users more than they trust your marketing team, so this seems like a great holiday gift to small business from Google, and from you to your loyal customers.

You can sign up for #SmallThanks Hub for free, yet the service is so far only available in the US.

Turn customers into advocates

Source: Turn Customers into Advocates with #SmallThanks

Google Flights Redesigned

Google has completely changed its Flights interface, along with adding new features to its functionality.

Here is how it looked before:

google flight before

And here is what it looks like now:

google flight new

The new design is currently in beta and is intended to facilitate the flight search and reservation process. So far, the new look is in preview only.

Source: Google Travel

A Fresh Look for Google Maps

The state of permanence is not a common state for Google and one of Google’s key services – Google Maps – is getting a new look with a fresher design.

There is a new interface, different colors, category icons, and a different navigation system – these are all features of the new Google Maps which engages more than 1 billion users.

Here is the new look:

google maps new look

All the places that belong to one category – cafe, museum, gas station – will be designated with a certain color. For instance, the “Food & Drink” category will be identified with an orange icon, “Shopping” – with blue, “Health” – with pink, and so on.

google map new look colors

All the Google Maps changes will be fully rolled within the upcoming weeks to all of the products that are related to the service – Assistant, Search, Earth и Android Auto, аlong with other apps and websites that use Google Maps API.

Source: Google Maps Gets a New Look

A New Design of Google Analytics for Firebase

Google Analytics for Firebase, an instrument that allows tracking user engagement with mobile apps, is getting a new look and some new functionality.

The new design looks more consistent with the recent redesign of Google Analytics. Apart from a more familiar look, the tool will also now provide more real-time data, so developers will have more timely and interactive information to track their app’s performance. Google Analytics for Firebase also includes a new Stability Card with data from Firebase Crash Reporting and Firebase Crashlytics. The card will display the number (in percentage) of users who haven’t witnessed any app bugs/crushes. Another novelty has to do with the Latest Release report that allows you to monitor adoption and stability of the app after merely few hours post-release.

Google Analytics for Firebase

Source: Google Analytics for Firebase: New Look and New Features


Final Words

After all the excitement of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, we can already feel the preparations for another holiday season. Our Google News Digest goes live every two weeks, which means we only have a couple of left this year; make sure to stay tuned to make sure that you aren’t missing anything significant. Especially since December is the time when people and companies draw conclusions and directions for the upcoming year! And, for any SEO and digital marketing professionals, knowing about Google updates, news, tweaks, and trends are of paramount importance.

And don’t forget to give me a shout in the comments if you spot anything unusual, interesting and worthy of mentioning in the next digest!

I wish you have actually enjoyed this short article on Google News Digest: Handling Black Friday Buzz with AdWords Updates, New Look for Flights and Securing Content Credibility If you would love to view more posts on search engine optimization then don’t hesitate to surf our various other short articles. We have much more curated posts from Ahref and also I wish you enjoy reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

How to Track Your Online Reputation with SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring Tool

Seo additionally referred to as SEO is a subject covered by numerous individuals as well as blogs, its the procedure of making your internet site appearance eye-catching to the online search engine in the hope of obtaining a preferential position for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research I find lots of short articles that give some wonderful understandings to seo.

Listed below you could find an write-up from Kiss Metrics which I discovered to be really interesting and also valuable .

If you want to play by the rules of the digital world, you have got to be utterly visible. But, this is only one side of the story though. Knowing what the digital space has to say about you and your competitors is also a big part of your job.

Your brand reputation journey starts with tracking mentions, be they a positive review, a passing mention or a total diss.

Finding mentions can be very time-consuming and may require hours of research. We at SEMrush are no fan of working too hard, so we have introduced a tool that will save hours and hours of your time. With the new Brand Monitoring tool, you will automatically be notified of new mentions of your and your competitor’s brands and be able to analyze the results in one place.

In this guide, you will learn how to make the most out of the Brand Monitoring tool.

Discover Who Mentions You

Brand monitoring does two crucial things: it helps you identify new promotional opportunities and indicates the potential risks coming from bad mentions. Let’s see how we can address both issues in just a few easy steps.

Set Up a Campaign

If you are already registered with SEMrush, you should log into your Projects dashboard and select to set up the Brand Monitoring tool. If not, enter your details to create a free user account and set up your first Project.

Before you get started, you need to decide exactly what you want to track. This could be your brand (e.g., Amazon) or product name (Amazon books), your competitor’s brand (eBay) or a specific industry trend. Once you have defined your starting query, proceed to set up your campaign.

A window will appear first asking you for a ‘Campaign Title.’ Your next step will be to enter the main keyword for which you wish to track mentions, for example, Amazon. You also have the ability to narrow down your search by adding additional keywords to track:

  • The ‘OR’ option will allow you to search for alternative keywords. These would be any variations of your brand, different spellings, or alternate names for your brand (e.g., Amazone, AMZN).
  • The ‘AND’ option is more for specifying which mentions you are looking for. These could be more focused on a certain product or feature (e.g., books).

  • The ‘NOT’ option will remove any mentions containing your specified keyword (e.g., jobs, resume, forest).

Once you have entered your keywords, you will then be asked what language or country you would like to track your mentions in, and you can opt to receive a weekly email report at a given time.

weekly-bmt-1-updated-opt.gif

Find Relevant Mentions On the Web

Once you set up and open your Brand Monitoring campaign, you will be redirected to the ‘Mentions’ tab. This will display all the mentions of your brand SEMrush found on the Web and io Twitter (switch between the ‘Web’ and ‘Twitter’ tabs).

Let’s start with the ‘Web’ resource feed. There are a number of filters you can apply at this step to simplify the process of working with mentions and their analysis.

  • For example, you can filter your results by their source: news, blogs or the entire Web.
  • You can set a time period to find mentions that occurred during a particular marketing campaign.
  • The search bar also gives you the option to see results by domain, mention or title.

Let’s say you need to find out whether you are mentioned by a website at all and, if so, how often. In that case, you will need to choose the ‘Search by Domain’ option. 

Seeing your brand name in someone’s title is always flattering. Within the same search field choose ‘Search by title’ to see those good people who mentioned your brand in the title. 

You can choose to narrow down your search with the ‘Search by mentions’ option, which will find your mentions, given a specific context. For example, for Amazon, you can add words like service or customer service, then you will only receive mentions containing those words.

Take a look at these filters in action:

bmt-1-opt-updated.gif

The tool allows you to segment your mentions for better navigation.

For example, you can mark your mentions as read and unread. Mentions in bold are new mentions, and read mentions will be shown in gray.

You can refine your mentions list by hiding mentions, using the ‘Block domain’ button. There you can mark them as ‘Irrelevant’ or as ‘My resource’ if they are coming from your domain.

screen-shot-2017-11-24-at-155845.png

Remember that once you click on ‘Block domain’, you give the tool the green light to remove all mentions coming from that domain. Should you want to unblock the domain you have previously marked as ‘blocked’, you can always find it in the ‘Blocked resources’ tab and add it back to your mentions feed by clicking the ‘Unblock’ button.

In order to successfully manage your mentions and understand which of them need the utmost attention, you can segment your results with the help of various tags. Each individual mention will have a few controls you can use. You can star (favorite) any mentions you would like, and add tags to them. Later on, you will be able to filter your mentions by ‘Favorites’ or by the tags that are assigned to them:

bmt3-updated-opt.gif

If you wish to add another campaign to your project, you have the ability to add up to three. These can be created through the green ‘Create New Campaign’ button to the right. You can use this option if you wish to create campaigns for yourself by product or by a department in your company.

At any time, you can change which project, or campaign within a project, you are viewing via the drop-down under your project name as shown below:

screen-shot-2017-11-27-at-150013.png

Find Relevant Mentions on Twitter

Twitter is good for finding potential clients. Many companies monitor tweets with keywords that are relevant to their business, for example #runningshoes or #healthyfoods so that they can contact their owners and offer them their goods and services. Twitter is also commonly used for monitoring brand reputation, in particular, negative and positive reviews.

Now switch to the ‘Twitter’ tab. The tool will provide you with the list of your brand’s mentions found based on the same requirements as you defined earlier when you set up the campaign. To be more specific, the tool will collect all the mentions with your brand’s name:

  • In the hashtag

  • In the text of the tweet itself

  • Following an @-symbol, for example, @yourbrand

Also, you will be able to see your mentioner’s Twitter profile.

The filters allow you to fine-tune your results and see your brand’s mentions for a specific time period, or those that contain a particular word:

twitter mentions

Discover Who Links to You

Backlinks in mentions should always be seen as potential conversion opportunities. Having backlinks from trusted and popular sources is also a signal to Google that you are doing well and deserve higher rankings. The Brand Monitoring tool helps you identify backlink sources that can serve as an effective marketing channel for promoting your brand.

The ‘Backlinks’ filter will help you find websites that are already linking to you and can be further exploited as great marketing channels, as well as those that don’t contain links and require some additional effort on your part to establish relationships with them.

But before you do so, make sure the resource you are trying to get in touch with is authoritative enough. Our Brand Monitoring (BM) score will help you understand if the domain is worth targeting: the higher the authority score, the harder you should try to get a backlink from them. You can filter domains by BM score to see how often and if any reputable sources are linking to your website:

screen-shot-2017-11-27-at-192914.png

Tip: if there are no backlinks on a given page, you can reach out to the author to see if they can provide you with a link, building out your backlink portfolio. If a website or an author actively mentions you and provides a link leading to your website, consider offering them more of your content so that they can refer to in their posts.

Now, go back to the top of the page where you will see the ‘Mentions Volume Trend’ line graph. You will be given the option to switch between your campaigns so you can analyze the number of mentions in each. You can also look up the ratio between the number of mentions and the number of backlinks: while the number of mentions is reflected in the line graph, the number of backlinks is represented by bars. You also have the ability to export the graph to a PNG file, which serves as a great visual for your clients, bosses or team members.

Tip: If you would like to add a domain to track, you can use the blue link to the right of any domains you have already entered.

Analyze Your Competitors

Tracking your competitors’ mentions and backlinks will help you understand what works for them, so you can find new opportunities and set new goals based on that. Apart from helping you monitor your own online reputation, the Brand Monitoring tool can also help you gather data on your competition.

Start off by creating campaigns to track your competitors’ mentions and backlinks. Assuming that you are still in the ‘Statistics’ tab from the previous step, click ‘Create campaign’ and fill in your competitor’s campaign details, just like we did in the first step with Amazon. You can add up to three domains at a time, for example, your domain and two of your competitors.

screen-shot-2017-11-27-at-153523.png

Now scroll down to the ‘Campaign Comparison’ graph to compare the volume of your and your competitors’ mentions side by side. All the competitors you have added in the previous step (in the ‘Mention Volume Trend’ graph will show in this graph too: 

screen-shot-2017-11-27-at-194352.png

To gain further insight into who is mentioning you and your competitors, visit the ‘Resources’ table. Here you will see the number of mentions and backlinks you and your competitors are getting.

You can check the number of mentions against the number of backlinks provided and contact those websites that forgot to link to you. For example, sites.google.com has mentioned Amazon 13 times but has provided only one link.

You can also get in touch with the authors linking to your competitors and tell them about your products or services.

screenshot-2.png

The Brand Monitoring tool can serve as a valuable resource to your digital marketing campaign. Analyzing your, and your competitors’, mentions and backlinks will create new opportunities for your brand, like new audiences, promotion channels, and potential partnerships.

Have you had the chance to use the Brand Monitoring tool? If so, have you had any success using this tool? Please let us know in the comments below!

I hope you have appreciated this post on How to Track Your Online Reputation with SEMrush’s Brand Monitoring Tool Then really feel free to search our various other write-ups, if you would certainly like to watch more posts on search engine optimization. We have a lot more curated posts from Ahref and I wish you enjoy reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Things You Don’t Know About Mobile SEO #semrushchat

Seo additionally known as SEO is a subject covered by lots of people and blogs, its the procedure of making your internet site appearance eye-catching to the internet search engine in the hope of acquiring a preferential ranking for your targeted keyword. During my research study I encounter many articles that give some fantastic understandings to search engine optimization.

Below you could locate an write-up from Kiss Metrics which I located to be extremely intriguing and also valuable .

Plenty of businesses and marketers understand the importance of search engine optimization and are willing to spend top dollar and a lot of time to make sure their site is fully optimized. Many, though, forget about mobile SEO, which is one very expensive mistake. Mobile usage has surpassed desktop usage, so if your mobile site isn’t just as optimized as its desktop counterpart, you could see your site sinking in SERP rankings and losing both traffic and sales.

During last week’s #SEMrushchat, we invited Scott Levy, a 19+ Year SEO Veteran, CEO/Founder of Fuel Online, and best selling author!  During this recap, we are going to go over everything you don’t know about mobile SEO but should. With industry experts like Bill Slawski and Dawn Anderson sharing their insights, this is one that you won’t want to miss.

Q1. If I already have a fast and responsive mobile site, should I implement AMP pages or not? Why?

It can be a hassle to add to a mobile site that has already been worked on a great deal by SEO experts. Even if your mobile site is already fast and responsive, many experts agree that you still want to implement AMP pages if you don’t have them already, and especially if you are putting out a lot of content on a regular basis.

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a project that was created by Twitter and Google designed to make incredibly fast-loading mobile pages. They work by taking HTML and reducing it down significantly by cutting out components like forms or javascript. They optimize for readability and speed, and that is it.

Nothing beats AMP in terms of speed, and since this is a factor that Google values, it can help you get a slightly higher ranking in mobile SERPs. This combined with the fact that faster loading is directly correlated with higher visitor retention rates and reduced bounce rates will increase your mobile ranking even more.

AMP pages are particularly important for sites with a lot of content, including those in the news and publication industries and businesses that upload blog posts frequently. Google’s “top stories” consistently only feature AMP content, so you don’t want to risk losing out on that opportunity.

What about businesses who aren’t churning out content like crazy? Some experts believing that AMP implementation is not necessary for businesses who aren’t regularly pumping out content. Outside of publishing, it hasn’t necessarily been proven to be as immensely valuable. What good is a lead page, some experts argue, if the lead form has to be stripped away from it or other elements are cut out? Is a fast-loading mobile site worth it if it’s not really usable aside from high readability?

If you do SEO for an e-commerce site, AMP can make life more difficult. On product pages, you want to pull out all the stops to get those conversions. Review and UGC widgets, pop-ups for promos, and even videos can be used to increase sales, but AMP pages can knock all of this away. According to Dawn Anderson- @DawnieAndo, AMP pages could actually cause problems on e-commerce sites. Since small businesses have a limited amount of time, it could be a waste to spend it implementing AMPs on product pages.

q1-chat-recap.jpg

Essentially, if you have to adapt AMP pages to rank well and outshine competitors with your content, go for it. Otherwise, it makes more sense to check if the searches you are trying to rank for feature AMP pages. If not, spend your time elsewhere and make sure the rest of your mobile site is up to speed.

Q2. Let’s say your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, is this something to be worried about? Why or why not?

While some sites try to clone their desktop site with its mobile version, it’s not unusual for mobile sites to have different content. Even Google understands that we offer different content based on the type of device that the user has in front of them at any given time, which is why they have mobile searches and desktop searches.

Your mobile site doesn’t need all of the content available on your desktop site, but it should contain all the information users need to know about your business. Desktop sites, after all, generally have higher conversion rates than mobile sites, so not every single landing page needs to be mobile optimized. So, while you won’t need every landing page, customers should still be able to view product pages and get in touch with you from their mobile device.

One of the chat participants also found that, in his analysis of big sites, those with different content on mobile and desktop had different rankings as a result. Because of this, make sure that your highest SERP-rated content is available on both mobile and desktop sites, and that there is as much overlap between the two as possible. While desktop has more conversions, you can’t afford to miss out on the massive traffic that mobile can send by sinking in the mobile SERPs.

Creating a seamless, mobile-responsive site is a good way to go. It will reduce some of the bloat from a desktop site and make it much more user-friendly. Both customers and Google will notice. How you serve mobile content matters almost as much as the content that you actually have available because mobile is all about the user experience.

Ultimately, the best way to go is to try to provide the most content possible on your mobile site, but ensure that it is fast-loading and mobile responsive. If you have certain content on desktop, after all, you could still rank if a query calls for it even if your mobile doesn’t have it, which can cause one frustrated mobile searcher to end up on your site. Users judge mobile sites very quickly, with itchy trigger fingers reaching towards that back button, and you want to do everything you can to decrease the chance that they click it.

While desktop has more conversions than mobile, after all, having a high quality mobile responsive site can get significantly more conversions than a non-responsive one.

q2-chat-recap.jpg

Q3. In which stage of the buyer’s journey is optimizing my mobile site most important?

Mobile sites should be optimized for all stages of the buyer’s journey, point blank. It doesn’t matter whether you want to attract cold traffic to your site in the “awareness” stage of the digital sales funnel, or you want to capture users further along in the consideration stage. Every single stage in the sales funnel matters, so you can’t afford to focus on just one.

Conversion rates are generally higher on desktop, after all, but that doesn’t mean that your business can’t be the exception. Nearly 60% of traffic now comes from mobile devices, so you can’t afford to have a mobile site that can reel them in at the awareness stage but is so dysfunctional at the conversion page that you lose them. If customers struggle to purchase from your mobile site, you could potentially lose them for good.

While some might travel over to your desktop site if they are really firm in their decision, it is more likely that they will evaluate your online presence overall to be weak or lacking, and they will go check out your competitors instead. Attracting customers means nothing if you can’t get them to convert, or if you can’t keep them around for more than just one purchase. Since every stage is different- with different expectations, intentions, potential objections, and value triggers- you can’t skimp out and neglect anyone.

Though all stages of the digital sales funnel are important and you want to make sure that every customer finds your mobile site to be functional regardless of where they are in their buyer’s journey, it can be particularly important to ensure that you are ranking well at the awareness and research stages of the funnel. Make sure that you are hitting those essential keywords and ranking for them on mobile, just as you are on your desktop site.

If not, see how you can change that; creating AMP pages for these key pages may be a good idea. Other methods of improving ranking for your mobile site includes:

  • Using HTML5 instead of Flash.

  • Having more easily scannable content (think short bullet points instead of paragraphs).

  • Cutting back on images and videos, which can slow down loading times.

  • Utilizing more “proof terms,” or phrases similar to the chosen keyword.

No matter the stage of the user journey, your mobile site should be optimized. Why? Because different users use different things differently. However, you want to make sure you get them at the informational stage, right before they search for a keyword you might rank for at the initial informational stage. Each stage may be different; we have these different stages because users have different expectations, intentions & value triggers for each phase.

q3-chat-recap.jpg

If the thought is overwhelming, just ask yourself this: can you afford not to have a mobile-optimized site for any stage of the sales funnel? We are guessing not.

Q4. Which SERP features should I optimize my mobile site for?

  • The SERP features that you should optimize for completely depends on your individual business and your goals. These should be targeted after you’ve created a strong, mobile-responsive site in general.

There are plenty of options to choose from, so let’s take a look at the nine of the most valuable SERP features you can target and when you should optimize for them:

  • Local packs should be the first choice for local businesses. Local packs for each search contains three local business suggestions from Google. Each business will show up on Google’s map, along with their business name, website, hours, contact information, Google reviews, and directions to the store.

  • Schema generated review stars can help your business stand out from the rest by showing that your customers love you. Businesses with high reviews can be favored by Google, and will definitely be favored by customers. This is a good option to utilize for most businesses but can be particularly important for businesses in high competition fields establishing themselves online.

  • AMP, as we discussed above, is a good choice for businesses regularly publishing a lot of content– especially if it is timely. This content will load shockingly fast on mobile devices and can help increase viewer retention rates.

  • Google OneBox is a separate display box within the SERPs that shows information in a particular subset; this may include news stories or links to shop products. The separation helps it stand out, and the boxes often contain information that Google believes users are most interested in seeing based on the search. As a result, Google OneBox is a good option for products you are trying to sell through your commerce business. Getting your product featured there can mean a lot of clicks.

  • App rankings should be optimized for when you are trying to increase downloads of your mobile app. This one is pretty self-explanatory.

  • Featured Snippets are small summaries of an answer that Google will pull up for questions entered into the search engine. Featured Snippets are great choices to go after when you are optimizing content like blog posts and can help to establish your credibility. Try to answer commonly-asked questions in brief, concise text to rank for these.

  • Structured Snippets require Structured Snippet extensions and allow you to highlight specific aspects of your products or services that you most want customers to notice. They can be used to provide fast and valuable information to customers, like amenities of an apartment complex or different packages your business offers. You can use these to enhance your Adwords campaign.

  • Videos are an important part of marketing today, and videos both often show up on the first page of search results and have their own separate tab on Google. Videos are actionable, if you are looking to provide actionable, how-to content, this is a good one to target.

Ultimately, you should take a look at which feature will put you most immediately in front of your target audience on mobile for the keywords and searches you’re trying to rank for on mobile. Consider this with how it aligns with your overall content strategy.

Some publishing sites, for example, might try to go for the AMPs to end up in Google’s Top Stories, but evergreen content may have a longer lifespan if you go after featured snippets. Look at what’s actually showing up in that top spot before you make your choice.

Remember to do this research on a mobile device to get accurate information you can use to choose which SERP feature you want to optimize for.

q4-chat-recap.jpg

Q5. Do you have any predictions on the future of mobile website development and optimization?

All of our experts had different predictions regarding the future of mobile websites, but there was one thing many people agreed upon: that mobile traffic will continue to increase. Scott Levy- @FuelOnline even believes that we will see a shift from 60% of traffic coming from mobile to nearly 80% in the coming years.

It is no secret that mobile traffic has been growing quickly, and a lot of our experts believe that this trend will only continue. This has been true, despite the fact that research indicates that we have some security concerns regarding mobile devices. One study by Hitwise found that 72% of searches for the food and beverage are conducted on mobile, but only 39% of searches in the banking industry occur on our mobile devices. This indicates some trust issues that sites should be striving to resolve.

Mobile usability is still lagging behind what it could be. Living in a world where users are reaching for their mobile devices first will require us to change that. Websites will need to be faster and easier to use on any device– including phones, smart watches, and more. This may result in a shift to more app usage instead of conventional desktop usage, requiring more businesses to create apps for their customers to keep them engaged. It also could mean that we’ll become so obsessed with speed that we may end up with much more bare pages that are fast, but not quite as useful. This will all require marketing teams to learn to truly embrace multi-channel optimization.

Some of our experts also predicted that we will see more advanced technology affecting mobile optimization. A few believe that this will come from artificial intelligence (AI) to take over more automation for both users and businesses, and others believe we will see expanded capabilities of current features, like voice search. Voice search is currently booming in popularity and requires that sites are creating content that Google can use to provide a single answer to a voice search query to stay ahead.

q5-chat-recap.jpg

We will have to see what the future of mobile site optimization has in store, but we know one thing for sure: you need to keep a close eye on the current best practices and make sure that your site is functional, valuable, and (most importantly) fast.

Make sure to join us this week on #SEMrushchat as we discuss “Top Tips For Successful Personal Branding On and Offline” with special guest, Mel Carson!

I hope you have enjoyed this short article on Things You Don’t Know About Mobile SEO #semrushchat Then really feel free to browse our various other posts, if you would certainly such as to watch more write-ups on search engine optimization. We have many more curated articles from Ahref and I hope you delight in reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

How to Craft a Successful Abandoned Shopping Cart Email

Search engine optimization likewise referred to as Search Engine Optimization is a subject covered by numerous people and also blogs, its the process of making your internet site appearance eye-catching to the search engines in the hope of gaining a preferential position for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research study I find several articles that offer some fantastic understandings to seo.

Listed below you can locate an article from Ahref which I located to be helpful and also really fascinating . The short article is entitled How to Craft a Successful Abandoned Shopping Cart Email and you can discover it listed below

Cart abandonment is one of the most serious problems faced by e-commerce businesses.

Baymard Institute analyzed 37 separate studies containing cart abandonment statistics and came up with an average cart abandonment rate of 69%. For your average store owner, that is a significant loss of revenue.

Featuring a product page with killer sales copy, compelling images, and a powerful CTA will improve your chances of getting a visitor to convert – but it won’t guarantee it.

If a visitor adds your product to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, all hope is not lost. They have already signified an interest in the product; it might be that they just weren’t ready to purchase at that particular time.

Common reasons for cart abandonment include:

  • Temporary distractions

  • Unexpected shipping costs during the checkout process

  • Fears over data security

  • Lack of adequate payment options

While you should constantly be improving your user experience and checkout process to mitigate these issues, cart abandonment emails work particularly well at reviving visitors who didn’t purchase because of distractions.

While Facebook retargeting ads are also powerful for cart revival, I recommend starting with email marketing since it costs nothing to send an email.

1# Give Value

When someone enters their contact information but fails to complete the process, you have the opportunity to send them an ultra-targeted sales email in order to achieve the conversion.

According to Sales Cycle, nearly 50% of all abandoned cart emails are opened, so don’t think you are harassing people by reminding them about a product that they showed interest in.

Your products provide value to your customers, so you are giving them another opportunity to enhance their lives when they purchase (if you don’t actually believe in your products, I recommend going back to the drawing board).

When you write a cart abandonment email with the mindset of giving rather than extracting value, the process is much easier.

People are compelled to purchase due to emotional rather than logical reasons. By helping your customer to see how your product will allow them to avoid pain or move toward pleasure, you will maximize your impact with cart abandonment emails.

#2. Subject Line

Please don’t be tempted to send an abandoned cart email with Shopify’s default subject line: “Complete Your Purchase!”

This comes across as corporate and transactional. Instead, appeal to the reader’s self-interests and aim to spike their emotions. The average person receives 88 emails per day. It is important that yours stands out from the rest.

Consider incorporating one or more of the following elements into your subject line:

Personalization

Unique brain activation patterns occur when we hear our own name. Embedding the customer’s name in your subject line is an easy way to make your abandoned cart email stand out from the other generic marketing messages in their inbox.

Example: “Forget something Andrew?”

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

If someone is on the edge about making a purchase, you can push them over the edge by leveraging FOMO.

Tell your customer in no uncertain terms what they are missing out on, and how they can take action immediately.

For example: “Only 200 widgets left! Save 20% today.”

Alternatively: “Hurry! Your cart is about to expire.”

Humor

If you want to grab someone’s attention, make them laugh. Behaving as if their shopping cart has a mind of its own is a lighthearted way to re-engage customers.

Example: “Your shopping cart is lonely!”

Alternatively: “Your cart forced us to send this reminder!”

Education

Sometimes, users don’t complete a purchase due to lack of information. Instead of focusing on landing page optimization, you can improve conversions using education.

Example: “Do you have any questions about [Product]?”

Instead of pushing for a sale, this allows you to open a dialogue. Once you are aware of the customer’s concerns, you can link them to FAQ content, blog posts, external reviews or start a live chat with one of your customer service representatives to alleviate fear.

Often, taking a P2P (people-to-people) approach to marketing is the best way to increase sales.

#3. Body Copy

Your mission when crafting body copy is to encourage a conversion with emotive language and imagery.

semrush-image-1.png

In this fantastic cart abandonment email by Doggy Loot, many emotional levers are being switched.

By stating “Hurry, don’t let these deals run away” and “Fetch your items now before it’s too late!”; this evokes a sense of urgency for the reader. The fact that the copy is consistent with the dog branding is an added bonus.

As mentioned previously, avoidance of pain is a core emotional driver.

This copy is written with a specific buyer persona in mind (someone who loves their dog). The phrase “Please, don’t disappoint your dog” tugs at the heartstrings, particularly when coupled with the emotive hero image of the animal.

semrush-image-2.png

In this abandoned cart email by Threadless, it feels as if one of your friends is sending you a funny message – instead of a faceless corporation pushing you to convert.

After giggling at the thought of being captured by a giant bird or marauding clowns, you are left with a visual reminder of the product you nearly purchased.

In a predominantly black and white email, the pink elements immediately draw attention – especially the “Finish Your Purchase” CTA button.

Once you have leveraged urgency, FOMO, and humor in your body copy, always finish strong by imploring your reader to take action and complete the purchase.

#4. Incentivization

For most online stores, there is an inverse correlation between the amount of time that has elapsed since the add to cart and the likelihood of achieving the conversion.

Put simply: your chances of reviving an abandoned cart are highest within 48 hours of the initial engagement. After this, your chances become lower over time.

Many store owners offer special discounts in their cart abandonment emails. I think this is a great idea, but I also recommend increasing the discounts over time.

Since it is much harder to revive a cart that’s been inactive for 2 weeks compared to 2 days, offer these users a more substantial discount.

Your 48-hour discount could be 10%, whereas your 2-week discount could be 20%. A sale with lower profit margins is still better than no sale at all.

For stores with younger demographics, an abandoned cart may signify that a person is interested in the product, but doesn’t have the money to pay for it presently. To combat this, try sending out your abandoned cart emails at the beginning of the month when your customers have more disposable income.

Can you think of any other tips for crafting a killer abandoned cart email? Please let me know in the comments below.

If you would certainly like to see even more short articles on search engine optimization after that feel free to search our various other short articles. We have lots of more curated posts from Kiss Metrics as well as I wish you enjoy reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

How To Write High-Quality Blog Posts For Search Engines and Readers

Search engine optimization also called Search Engine Optimization is a subject covered by lots of people as well as blog sites, its the procedure of making your web site look eye-catching to the search engines in the hope of gaining a special ranking for your targeted keyword. During my research I discover several articles that offer some terrific understandings to search engine optimization.

Below you could discover an write-up from Kiss Metrics which I found to be valuable and also really fascinating .

The idea of writing your first blog post can be quite exciting. Once you begin working on a post, though, you realize it is just as daunting too.

That is because there are quite a few things that you need to do to write a killer post that your target audience and the search engines will fall in love with. And, that is the kind of blog post I will show you how to write in this piece, with an example from when I was a novice blogger myself. 

The Day I Sat Down to Write About What Makes a Great Blog Title

Starting out as a blogger, I already had the ambition to grow into a master blogger who would know everything about blogging and teach people how to do it right.

Out of the list of titles that I had created for the things I wanted to write about, I thought it was high time I wrote about what makes a great blog post title.

It was – and is still – a rich topic with a lot of substance that could be very useful to a lot of people. Obviously, anybody writing a blog wants their title to be appealing and eye-catching. The more your title appeals to readers, the more likely they are to click on your post and start reading it.

So, I was sure it would make a great blog post. Of course, I followed my mantra of the-six-principles-of-epic-blog-writing, like I always do, and got to work. Let me show you what my process is all about.

Step #1: The Only Good Research Is Finding Great Content on Your Topic

You may clap your hand on your open mouth, whispering the word “cheating” after reading that header, but that is basically what anybody does when they want to write something good.

I always begin with getting a good grasp on what is already out there. That is what good research is all about.

Besides, David Leonhardt, founder of The Happy Guy Marketing, says: Your best bet is to pick a proven topic, one you know your audience loves. And how do you know what your audience loves? By checking Google’s top results on the subject. Only popular content makes the top of that list.

So, I went on a hunt for articles and blog posts that talked about how good blog titles were made. Of course, I found endless results on Google that were mostly filled with sub-par content and looked a lot like spun versions of the good ones out of Google’s suggestions.

Pro tip: The smart way to avoiding bad content is looking at the design of the page. Spun content, which is mostly published to support poor quality SEO strategies, is often published on basic HTML layouts without any finesse. You will get that vibe from them.

Anyway, I found a few articles on the first page that had great substance and had been published on respected websites.

I sat down to read each one of them thoroughly.

Step #2: Find Faults in the Great Content You Discover and Aim to Make It Better

And this is the second reason why we went for that literature in the first place. We want to find fault in what has already been done, so we can fill that gap with our improved version of the same content (without the mistakes those writers made *evil laughter*).

This is something marketing experts do with a lot of pleasure, but it also involves a lot of work.

When you look at a few pieces of good content on a similar topic, sometimes it can be really tough to find their mistakes and, even when you do find them, filling that gap can demand some real work.

Coming back to the what I said about this being the method of smart content experts, when Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) was working on his great post about ranking factors that affect Google suggestions, he looked for the most thorough piece available on search engines and started looking for weaknesses. He found the piece had a plain design, quite a few outdated ranking factors, and few references.

Brian then worked for 20 hours straight and made the post that increased his website traffic by 110% within two weeks.

In my case, I found a number of tips about titles that fit the bill, but what I didn’t find, in most cases, were proper examples to go with each tip. So, I made a note of that.

Step #3: Only Include Practical Ideas and Tips in Your Posts

This is another crucially important idea. If you want your reader to feel they learned a lot from your post and that they would want to come back to your blog for the value they have experienced, you need to include insanely practical, actionable tips. If you fail to provide that kind of value, the reader will soon move on to other sources of content.

In the words of Brian D. Evans, serial entrepreneur and founder of Influencive.com: “If you want to leave a lasting impact on someone, you have to find ways to help them, teach them, but also inspire them. You have to get them excited about what you’re saying and want to learn more!”

And this excitement is only born in your readers out of the value your content offers. So, make sure everything you say, every tip you offer, is worth their attention and a practical solution.

This is why I broke down that literature I found to discover the lack of examples. That was the value I could add to my post.

Step #4: Quote Industry Influencers

Again, this adds immense value to your content. Unless you are a big name in your industry, your reader probably won’t recognize you. You can show them your worth by sharing valuable ideas and backing them up with direct quotes from influencers.

Now you know why I went to find the quotes I have used in this article from my long list of powerful lines from my favorite online marketing gurus. *wink wink*

Step #5: Make Sure Your Blog Post Has Real-World Examples

If I just told you my process in these five steps and wrote lines over lines about how these are great ideas, they wouldn’t catch your eye as much as they do now without quotes regarding similar methods used by big industry names.

This is another kind of value. It shows you know what you are talking about. When you quote real-world examples that can be verified by the reader, they feel comfortable trusting your word.

Once that happens, you have started the trust process and on your way of adding a loyal follower. Despite this loyalty, with blog posts, you can expect relatively high bounce rates regardless of the quality of content.

Edward Leake the Managing Director of Midas Media explains the reason for this problem: “…reducing bounce rates can be tricky for blogs as people will often land with the intent of digesting the article and then leaving.”

While there are other factors that can stop readers from bouncing off, it is not our subject for today.

Step #6: Make Your Published Page Look Pretty

Website design is very important for attracting an audience and pushing them towards your content. I always take great care in designing my post pages and a lot of my readers have complimented my blog for it.

I don’t do it because I “have a great taste,” as one of said in a comment, though. My purpose is to make sure my design catches the eye of my reader and helps me make them stay a little while longer.

This is one of the things Brain Dean did with his famous post I mentioned earlier in this piece.

So, there you have it. Follow this process on how to write a blog post and your content will come out better than most things getting published on the Internet every day.

Bonus Tip for Publishing Professional Pieces

If you have just written a blog post that discusses a more professional subject than a personal or social topic, one great way to promoting it on social media is publishing it on LinkedIn.

With the now public forum of Pulse, LinkedIn gives you a unique opportunity to reach great professional audiences who will be able to read your content.

There are a lot of LI Pulse Channels, though. So, you have to make sure your content is in line with the expectations of a channel’s audience before you publish it there.

I wish you have enjoyed this post on How To Write High-Quality Blog Posts For Search Engines and Readers After that feel cost-free to browse our various other articles, if you would like to check out more write-ups on search engine optimization. We have a lot more curated articles from Ahref and I wish you delight in reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

How to Upscale: 7 Tips That Marketers Know About Holiday Email Marketing

Search engine optimization likewise known as SEO is a subject covered by many individuals and blog sites, its the process of making your web site look eye-catching to the online search engine in the hope of obtaining a preferential ranking for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research study I stumble upon numerous articles that give some great insights to search engine optimization.

Listed below you could locate an article from Kiss Metrics which I located to be extremely intriguing as well as useful .

The meaning of ‘Holidays’ is subject to perspective. It can be a good opportunity for throwing a Halloween party, catching up with long lost friends, carving a turkey during Thanksgiving, waiting expectantly for that specific deal during Black Friday sales, or unwrapping Christmas presents while sipping hot cocoa near the fireplace.

For a marketer, the onset of the holidays is synonymous to gearing up for the biggest and busiest shopping season. The total online sales recorded from Nov 1st to Dec 31st alone was about $91.7 billion in 2016. So, to help email marketers, like you, make optimum utilization of this beneficial time we have compiled 7 tips that every email marketer knows about holiday email marketing; the catch is our insights on how to upscale them.

Tip #1: Plan Early

Most of the articles you may have read earlier must be stating that email marketers begin preparing their holiday calendar and strategies based on the calendar almost months in advance. This helps avoid any last moment hiccups and plug any unseen holes. Christopher Donald, President of Operations & Managing Partner at INBOXARMY, shares the same thought that planning your holiday email marketing strategy early can be a smart move for your business.

Holiday Email from Fortnum & MasonFortnum & Mason sent its first Halloween promotion email at around mid-September

Upscaling Scope

While this stands true, all hope is not lost. Most brands send their Halloween promotion email a week prior to the holiday.

Forzieri’s Halloween emailForzieri’s Halloween email that was sent exactly a week prior to Halloween

Tip #2: Segment Your List

Gifting someone based on their likes/dislikes or wants tells so much about how well you know them. Personalization in emails is a similar concept, and your subscribers are bound to feel attached to your brand when you personalize your email content based on their preferences. One of the easiest ways to cater personalized content during the holiday season is by segmenting your email list, believes Kath Pay, CEO Holistic Email Marketing.

Upscaling Tip

This holiday season, clean your mailing list too. No point in sending holiday emails to those subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in the past 2-3 months.

SideKick Email

Tip #3: Spread the Cheer with Holiday-themed Subject Lines

The holiday season means your subscribers’ inbox is going to get flooded with promotional emails from all different brands. A relevant and contextual subject line can be the saving grace in such a scenario, says Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer, Return Path. As per Convince & Convert, 35% of email opens are purely based on subject line alone.

Subject Gmail Inbox - Email Subject Lines

Upscaling Tip

Since most of your subscribers are going to open your email on their mobile devices, you need to make optimum use of subject lines and pre-header text. The maximum supported characters for subject lines and pre-header text for different email clients:

  • Android Portrait:  46 chars
  • Android Landscape: 62 chars
  • iPhone landscape: 64 Chars
  • iPhone Portrait: 64 chars

Tip #4: Create a Holiday Guide

Most brands tend to create Holiday guides in order to help their subscribers make the right choice during holiday shopping. This is a valuable resource wherein customers purchase products that match their interests or a central theme.

Holiday Email By HBOHBO shop’s Holiday guide email showcases curated products that are neatly categorized

Upscaling Tip

Add testimonials or Instagram live feeds in the email footer to strengthen the purchase impulse of your subscribers.

The Body Shop Holiday Email

 Tip #5: Create Urgency

Many brands tend to create a sense of urgency in their email copy by using words such as ‘Limited Free Shipping’ and ‘Buy Now’. This is effective in drawing up all the last moment shoppers by creating the fear of missing out.

Reitmans Holiday EmailReitmans has a simple email design wherein the focus of the subscriber directly rests on the bold text in the image.

Upscaling Tip

Jaymin Bhuptani, Director of EmailMonks, suggests the inclusion of a countdown timer along with your holiday promotion email, cart abandonment, or advance sale announcement email to boost the conversion rate. When a countdown timer is used along with an actionable statement such as “Buy within X-hours and get a 20% discount on the items in your cart”, your subscribers subconsciously would worry about missing a great deal.

J Crew Email

Tip #6: Mobile First Designs and Responsive Emails

The holiday season is the time to be around your loved ones, so a majority of the subscribers are going to open your emails in mobile and other handheld devices. So, brands are creating emails that are specifically designed for mobiles and the email elements are re-arranged for desktop layout.

A C Moore Email

Upscaling Tip

Most of the native mobile email clients support CSS3 coding, and with the help of keyframe animations, you can turn your plain holiday email into an interactive, visual wonderland. The plus point, in this case, is that the more your subscriber interacts with your email, the more time they spend in learning the message that your email conveys. This can significantly help your conversion rate. Those who open your email on a non-supporting email client can still get to experience your awesome email by clicking the ‘view email online’ link.

Taco Bell is famous for including interactivity in their promotional emails. In the following email, all the 3 characters are static/sticky, and rest of the email background moves when you scroll down. This is achieved by setting them as fixed positioned elements.

Tacobell-EmailClick on the email to experience the interactivity.

On a similar tone, their Christmas promotional email made use of the concept of ‘Gamification’ in emails, wherein the email copy changes based on user input/interaction. As you can see yourself in this email, based on the alternative that you choose, the email copy displays a different message. In fact, the curiosity gets to you, and you tend to check all three alternates!

Tacobell 3 option email

Tip #7: Improving Cart Abandonment Emails Timing or Frequency

During online shopping, visitors abandoning their cart for varied reasons is bound to happen; identifying the cause and offering alternatives in a timely manner is what matters and it is very important especially during the holiday season.

Due to the increased visitor flow and limited stock, many marketers tend to reduce the time gap between cart abandonment and triggering of the email to help bring the abandoner back to the cart faster. No matter what improvements you do this holiday season, what you need to keep in mind is that your cart abandonment email needs to:

  • Be triggered quickly
  • Remind the abandoner about the products in cart
  • Have actionable content
  • Show alternatives based on the abandoned products
  • Have a holiday based message or seasonal greetings

Upscaling Tip

While cart abandonment emails have the immense scope of improvement this holiday season, do not forget the other behavioral or triggered emails. A social sharing button in the welcome email, ‘Refer to a friend’ option in the transactional email or holiday based message in the re-engagement email can prove very beneficial.

Wrapping Up

With the December holidays and New Year’s coming, you can still make use of the above tips to add that extra gleam to your email marketing campaigns this holiday season. How do you plan to execute your holiday email marketing plan this year? We would love to hear your thoughts.

If you would certainly such as to check out more articles on search engine optimization then really feel free to search our various other posts. We have several even more curated short articles from Kiss Metrics and also I wish you take pleasure in reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

5 Advanced Display Remarketing Strategies

Search engine optimization also called SEO is a subject covered by lots of individuals as well as blogs, its the process of making your site appearance attractive to the online search engine in the hope of getting a advantageous ranking for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research I come across several articles that offer some terrific insights to search engine optimization.

Below you could discover an post from Kiss Metrics which I discovered to be really fascinating as well as helpful .

On average it takes 5 – 8 touch-points before a person will buy from your website. It takes this long because there is so much information available and people need to be sure that they are making the right choice.

One single ad will not work.

It is good to think about the entire customer journey, from awareness to research to purchase. Also, keep in mind what happens after they become a customer? Don’t forget, once someone becomes a customer the journey isn’t over. In fact, it should be just beginning. If someone has already bought from you, then they are much more likely to buy from you again. 

Display Remarketing Campaigns

Display remarketing campaigns are some of my favorites to set up. They are cheap to run, the ROI is high, and they make sense if you think about the customer journey. People need time to consider their options, and remarketing campaigns keep you at the front of their minds. 

That being said, I think a massive opportunity is being missed in most AdWords accounts. Most PPC managers simply set up a remarketing campaign with a single audience for the last 30-days, and that is it. It is easy to let it run and forget about it because the return on remarketing can be so high. It doesn’t seem worth the effort to change it. 

But if you think about those touch-points, and that people need 5 – 8 before they purchase, your remarketing campaign will be at least one of those touch-points. Surely you would want to make that touch-point as relevant and as impactful as possible?

I have put together a list of 5 advanced display remarketing strategies you can implement right now. 

1. Create a Sequential Display Remarketing Campaign

The first thing you need to do is understand the time lag from when your customers first interact to when they convert. This varies from industry to industry. For example, if you are selling a low cost branded item it could be 0-1 days. However, if you sell a more complex and expensive product it could be 30 days +.

Go into Google Analytics, under “Conversions” you will find the drop-down button for “Multi-Channel Funnels”. Hit Time Lag.

1-time-lag.png

This report gives you some lovely data. From here you will be able to see when users typically convert after their first interaction and you will be able to plan your remarketing campaign. 

2-time-lag.png

Let’s say you have a scenario where 30% of your conversions came from 0 – 7 days after first interaction, 10% of conversions came from 8 – 12 days after the first interaction, and 60% of your conversions came after 13 days from the first interaction. You would probably have a product that was a bit more complex, and your users would need time to research before they signed up. 

You could then create a sequenced display remarketing campaign that took users through their research journey. You could switch up the creative and, giving them different messaging to help them come to the right decision.

You could also adjust your bidding strategy. For the above scenario, you have the highest bids for the 13+days customers as you know this group is more likely to convert. 

Do think about your messaging and your creative. Usually, the further away the ad is from the first interactions, the bigger the incentive/offer needs to be in order to bring them back.

Ad 1:  Could be a brand message.

Ad 2: Promoting your customer service or customer reviews.

Ad 3: New customer offer or free-delivery offer code.

3-ads.png

Create your sequence by creating different audiences based on days since the last interaction. Then, when you are creating your campaigns, simply exclude the other audiences from that campaign.

For example: 

You could create 3 audiences (your sequence):

Audience 1: 0-7 days since first interaction.

Audience 2: 8-14 days since first interaction.

Audience 3: 14 – 30 days since first interaction.

Then, when you create your campaigns: 

Campaign 1: 

  • Target Audience 1 (Exclude Audience 2 & 3)

Campaign 2:

  • Target Audience 2 (Exclude Audience 3) 

Campaign 3:

  • Target Audience 3

2. Segment Your Remarketing Audience

Don’t treat all your traffic the same. 

Each page on your website will have a different value. Someone who had an item in their shopping cart and then abandoned the journey is much more valuable than someone who landed on the home page then bounced. Targeting the latter with remarketing is a waste of time, money, and impressions. Your bidding strategy changes as well, for example, paying £1.50 per click from someone who has been on your website 2mins+ will be a better investment than paying £0.20 for all visitors. 

You can segment your audience based on their behavior on site and/or their traffic source. Some of my favorite segmentations include: 

  • Time on site
  • Number of visits 
  • Certain goal completion
  • Visiting specific pages
  • Demographics

Let’s say you were running a remarketing campaign for a company that didn’t have a huge budget, but you did want to include remarketing in your marketing mix. By segmenting your traffic, you could target high-value customers, for example, users who visit multiple times and spend over the average amount of time on your website, or users who abandoned their shopping cart.

You can do this by going into Google Analytics and setting up a custom audience.

Once you are in your Google Analytics, click on the “Admin” section. 

2-ga-admin.png

Click the link labeled “audience definitions”.

22-ga-audience-def.png

Select “Audiences”.

23-ga-audiences.png

Click on the “new audience” button.

24-ga-audience.png

Select “Create New”.

25-ga-create-new.png

As an example, let’s say I wanted to target users who visited my site at least twice and spent more than one minute each time and they didn’t buy anything. I could create this audience and build a specific campaign for them. 

26-ga-next-step.png

It is, however, worth keeping in mind that the more specific you get in your audience building, the smaller the number will eventually get. You have to have at least 100 members in an audience to run a display remarketing campaign. 

Once you have built your audience, name it, and hit “Next step”. From there it will ask you to choose a destination for your audience. If you have linked your AdWords and Analytics accounts select your AdWords account from the drop-down menu. When you next log into AdWords your new audience will be there waiting for you. 

3. Content Remarketing

If you are investing time and money into creating content on your site, then content remarketing could be a great option. There are two great things that happen when you don’t hound customers with hard selling messages; you earn trust and gain conversions in the future

Here is how you can do it: 

  1. Create a remarketing audience based on people who have been reading blogs or articles on your site. 
  2. Create an audience based on people who have shown an interest on your site (for example: spent more than 2min+ on your site, visited multiple pages, etc.) then retarget them with a piece of content on your site. 
  3. Create ads that show the next piece of content that they might like. For example, if you’re a bank you could offer them something like “5 things to look out for when deciding on a credit card”.

Content remarketing is all about increasing trust and nurturing the user. Its main objective isn’t to drive direct conversions right away, but over time it could have a positive impact on referrals and word of mouth (the more someone trusts your brand, the more they will recommend you). 

Here is an example from Tableau, they are a data visualization software company. Here they have served me a remarketing banner which points me to a whitepaper they created. Notice how there is not a hard-selling messages? They are simply using content to get users back onto their site. 

31-tableau.png

4. Create a Remarketing Campaign for Customers

You might be asking yourself “Why waste money on users who are already customers?”

Well, I have some stats for you: 

  • It costs 5x to acquire new customers than it does to keep current customers.
  • 80% of your future revenue will come from 20% of your base.
  • Creating customer advocates will have a massive impact on your overall results. 77% of people are more likely to buy a product after hearing about it from friends or family.
  • Word of mouth is a primary factor behind 20% – 50% of ALL buying decisions.
  • Returning customers spend 67% more than new customers

See what I’m getting at? 

You have an amazing opportunity to create value for your company by creating remarketing campaigns designed for your existing base. 

Here are a few ideas to get you thinking about what you can do for your base:

  1. Create an educational campaign. Highlight features that are available at your company at no extra cost.
  2. Give an offer code/free delivery to customers who have already purchased something from your site. Just as a thank you.
  3. Invite customers to a free webinar.
  4. Cross or upsell existing customers by telling them about other services your offer. 

As always, know your customer. If you understand what will give them real value, you will not only keep a customer you will create an advocate

5. Create Campaigns Based on Where the User Came From 

When you think about the different traffic that comes to your site you might value one above another. For instance, display awareness traffic might not be as valuable as a click coming from a high converting PPC campaign. 

Earlier we had a look at segmented users based on their behavior on-site. Now, let’s have a look at segmenting users based on where they came from

As a quick reminder, website traffic falls broadly into one of these four categories: 

  • Paid
  • Organic
  • Referral 
  • Direct

Let’s say you were a bank and you were running a new promotion on mortgages. You invest heavily into mortgage-related keywords on PPC. You might want to follow through with your new PPC campaign with creating a remarketing campaign based on users who visited your website but found it via your PPC campaign. By doing this, you will be able to segment your audience data, match up your creatives and messaging, and get a broader view of how effective your campaign is performing. 

Creating this new audience is relatively simple. You start off by logging into your Google Analytics account. 

  • Click on Admin then Audience Definitions (Audiences). 
  • Select + New Audience then Create New

This is where you’ll be able to select which Campaign, Medium, Source, and Keyword your user came from. 

51-ga-traffic-source.png

Once you hit Apply you will be able to see the estimate audience size. 

This strategy can be brilliant if you are looking to create a full circle paid media campaign. It also works if you are looking to test out new audiences. 

Some final bits of advice: 

Setting up a remarketing campaign shouldn’t be a “set & forget” job. You should be testing, switching ad creatives, and reviewing audiences. 

  1. Make sure your data is clean by excluding audiences from campaigns that are not relevant to them. If you are running a remarketing campaign to non-converters, make sure you exclude converters! (Seems simple, but you wouldn’t believe how many times I have seen this happen). 
  2. Keep an eye on frequency. Please don’t bombard your users with ads ALL day, every day. You are just going to burn through those impressions, and your ads will have less of an impact. 
  3. Watch those mobile clicks. Personally, I am not a fan of display remarketing on mobile. I have found there are so many clicks that are accidental that they just completely mess up the campaign stats and waste budget. Now, I am not saying completely remove mobile from your strategy, just keep a beady eye on those clicks!

I have outlined 5 remarketing strategies above, but I am keen to hear more, which ones have you tried?

I wish you have actually appreciated this short article on 5 Advanced Display Remarketing Strategies Then really feel complimentary to surf our various other write-ups, if you would like to see more short articles on search engine optimization. We have many more curated posts from Ahref and also I wish you appreciate reading them.

Read more……>click Here<