Day: November 22, 2017

US Search Awards 2017: Tasting the Victory as “The Best SEO Software Suite”

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that we have won the US Search Awards for the “Best SEO Software Suite”. We are very honoured to be acknowledged by the Search community and to be rewarded for all the hard yet gratifying work we do here, at SEMrush.

We would like to take a moment to thank everyone who made this victory possible – the judges for having trust in our suite, the entire SEMrush team for all the diligence and creativity, and, of course, our community – we would not have been where we are today without your support, feedback and inspiration.

— Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush.

The US Search Awards is an extraordinary annual event that took place on the 8th of November, in Treasure Island during Pubcon Las Vegas. The event brought together SEO, PPC, Digital, and Content Marketing experts to network and celebrate achievements in the realms of Search and Digital Marketing. It was a great honour to be present and to get a sense of the remarkable work that is continually underway in the industry.

Commitment to Innovation

We believe that the key to our success and recognition comes from the innovative and experimental nature of our company. Thanks to the agile structure of our organisation, teams and individuals are free to come up with creative ideas and their implementation.

It’s not always a smooth ride, but our commitment to our customers and determination to constantly innovate our tools help us overcome all the challenges. So, this is a very special moment for SEMrush as with every award we receive we become more energised and charged up to take up new challenges and work even harder to deliver the best SEO Software Suite experience to our community.

— Vitalii Obishchenko, Chief Product Officer at SEMrush

In 2017 we have:

• Released 107 updates in the last 12 months, adding new features to our existing tools on a weekly basis

• Developed around 2-3 new tools that have been released to beta each quarter

• Analyzed our clients’ wishes that shaped over 50% of all the updates

Key Innovations Released in 2017

As you can already tell, 2017 was a fruitful and eventful year for SEMrush. So here is a selection of the most groundbreaking and influential innovations we developed throughout the year:

1.The Utmost Volatility Tracker – SEMrush Sensor

Sensor is the ultimate tool that tracks Google SERPs’ volatility and displays a comment on the possible causes behind that volatility. Sensor covers 6 regional databases: the US, the UK, Australia  (mobile and desktop), France, Germany, and Spain (desktop). The tool monitors a fixed set of keywords across 26 categories daily and reflects all the SERP fluctuations within a 30-day range.

We can proudly declare SEMrush Sensor the best volatility tracker out there. Here is a comparison with other major SERP changes trackers:

2. Expanded Mobile Keyword Database

With Google’s Mobile-First Index just around the corner, the need for larger mobile keyword databases becomes more and more pressing. And we developed the sole mobile keywords database on the SEO tools market and rolled out sixteen new mobile databases—this is in addition to the US database that’s been in existence since 2015. The US mobile database includes 40,000,000 keywords, while the UK, Brazil, Australia, France and others – 1,000,000 keywords each.

3. Enhanced Site Audit Tool

SEMrush’s Site Audit tool now includes 60 checks for monitoring and improving your website health. The latest updates doubled the overall number of checks within the tool, which now covers issues includingInternational SEO, HTTPS Implementation, AMP Checks (a unique check for the SEO tools market), Redirect Chains and Loops, and Orphan Pages’ Detection.

Site Audit covers both desktop and mobile versions of the website and has an instant “re-crawl” button.

4. Lean Cycle Workflow for Link Building

We are constantly improving our tools to suit our users’ needs. And with link-building, being the fundamental SEO success factor every SEO and digital marketing professional is concerned with, it deserved some serious attention and a thorough improvement on our part. Thus, we established a “workflow” logic that appears to be very popular across our community. So, this year we developed the Lean Cycle Workflow for Link Building:

Four SEMrush tools – Backlink Audit, Link Building tool, Backlink Analytics and Gap Analysis – are now covering every aspect of link building: from discovering and analysing backlinks for the user’s own domain—and that of their competitors, and helping to remove harmful backlinks, to speeding up the process of acquiring new high authority links.

5. Focus on SERP Features

SERP Features are gaining more and more interest from the SEO and Digital Marketing community, and we could not get past this trend, so we added SERP Features reports and data to five of our existing tools:

• SEMrush Sensor shows the daily changes within SERP Features (%)

• Organic research includes a SERP Featuresreport for the domain/keyword it ranks for

• Keyword Magic Tool shows SERP Features for designated keywords

• On Page SEO Checker provides suggestions for appearing in SERP Features

• Position Tracking tool identifies all available SERP Features for the keywords you want to track

6. Upgraded Keyword Magic Tool

KMT is a comprehensive keyword dictionary with over 3,600,000,000 keywords for 30+ countries, with more than 505 million keywords for the US database alone.

The tool provides killer keyword grouping and real-time metrics, displays the Keyword Difficulty score and SERP Features overview, and also supports question-type queries.

Extra: To provide our users with a more comprehensive analysis, and suggestions on how to organically rank well for a particular keyword, we also developed a Keyword Difficulty tool.

Now it’s getting personal

Last, but by no means least, we want to congratulate SEMrush blog editor Melissa Fach on winning the Search Personality of the Year award. Melissa is an amazing person and a great professional. She helps our community grow every day and is always ready to share her knowledge and experience. This award is well-deserved and we are happy for you, Melissa!

Final Words

We are really proud to have won the award for the “Best SEO Software Suite” category. It only proves that by focussing on your customers, listening to their needs and adjusting to them is the right path to success.

Once again, we would like to thank all those who have contributed to our success – we are more driven and motivated than ever to keep doing the best work we can.

Read more……>click Here<

SEMrush Toolkit For Bloggers

If you think that blogging is just for telling the world about your hobby, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool.

Good content drives traffic to your website, generates leads and brings in new customers. And no business can afford to miss out on an opportunity like this.

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool.

However, a lot of companies take the statement “the more content the better” literally. Content created for content’s sake became our new reality, but in an insanely competitive place such as the Internet it is a dead end.

To genuinely help your business, you need to systematically produce high-quality, super-relevant SEO-optimized materials with more value to the users than your competition.

Sounds like too much to ask? It isn’t. In 2018, bloggers should also be marketers to stand out and achieve whatever goals the business sets.

We at SEMrush want you to succeed in any online marketing activity that you take on. So, specifically for bloggers and content writers, we have made a list of 8 tools that will help you streamline content creation without any loss in quality.

Keyword research

Tool to use: Keyword Magic Tool

All content activity should begin with keyword research. Whether you are creating a new post or updating an old one, you should always have an updated list of your target keywords at hand. It may not be your lifelong ambition, but the ability to work with keywords is very important for successful blogging.

In Keyword Magic Tool, you can create your own keyword empire from a single seed: type in your seed keyword and you’ll get a list of thousands of related keywords broken down by groups.

By researching the related keyword groups and analysing their total volume, you can gather a lot of ideas for your future posts.

Superpower features

Questions

One great way of making your post popular is to make it answer a specific question. This way you directly help users solve their problem and increase your odds of getting into the Featured Snippet.

In Keyword Magic, we have a Questions filter that allows you to see all the questions related to your seed keyword.

Keyword match filters

Using the exact keywords in your text is an outdated technique. Modern searching is all about related words and semantic diversity.

In Keyword Magic, we have match filters that allow you to find keywords with the precise matching characteristics.

Broad match shows you the keywords with all the forms of the included words. In the case of “dog food” this would be “feeding dogs properly”, “how do I find the best food for my doggie” etc. It is the broadest category, so if you are just starting your research, stick to it.

Phrase match allows you to see all the keywords with the exact phrase from the seed keyword, but in a random order and with other words included; selecting it, you will see “how to choose food for a dog”, “dog doesn’t eat food what to do” etc.

Exact match will help you see the words with the exact phrase in it in the sequence that you have chosen. Use it in the later stages of your research when you’re working with a particular phrase. By selecting it, you’ll see phrases like “vegetarian dog food” and “dog food is delicious what is wrong with me”.  

Advanced filters

Some of our readers say that playing with filters in the Keyword Magic tool is one of their favorite things about SEO (except for getting backlinks from the Wall Street Journal, of course). It is a mighty feature indeed — you can find the best words to use: with high volume, low CPC cost, ones that have multiple SERP features, including or excluding certain keywords etc.

In summary, don’t skip keyword research — it is the foundation of online commercial writing.

Topic research

Tool to use: Topic Research (coming soon)

There are many blogging woes, and one of them is that keyword lists are useless without the niche research. After you select the most perspective keywords to work with, you need to know what is already out there and pay special attention to your competitors.

Some bloggers research forums like Quora and services like BuzzSumo to find topics that people are actually interested in. It is a very useful but a fairly time-consuming tactic.

To help you save hours on web surfing, we have developed the Topic Research tool. It is still in closed beta, but will be out soon. Here’s what it can do.

When you type a seed keyword, you will see the set of Cards or a Mind map containing the most popular articles about the topic from the websites that rank the highest on the SERP for this keyword.

Superpower features

Detailed cards

As we listened to our users, we realized that related searches, question keywords and the most popular headlines are what interest content writers the most. It can take a lot of time to find that information for a list of keywords, even with the handiest of keyword research tools, so, we have gathered it all in one place.

Mind Map

Sometimes you simply need ideas for what to write about. We thought about that too. In the Mind Map view, we show related keywords and hot headlines, as well as related searches for their combination with the seed keyword. This way it stays relevant, but covers a broader set of topics.

Post drafting

Tool to use: SEO Content Template

When I start writing a new post, I feel both apprehensive and enthusiastic. Some things can be foreseen, but I never really know how my post is going to perform and whether the readers are going to actually engage with it. Does this sound familiar?

To avoid perfectionist paralysis, I try to get as many details about the future post as possible, because the more specific the requirements, the easier the writing.

There are several parameters that help your rivals rank high on the SERP — certain text readability, expected word count, backlinks from relevant resources etc. It makes sense to start analysing those, as since it is working for the most successful players, it might work as well for you. We gathered the most important of these parameters in our SEO Content Template tool.

As usual, it starts with typing in your seed keyword, but unlike other tools, it allows you to use a lot of various seeds at once.

The ideas that you get from it include:

• The highest ranking pages for each keyword

• Semantically related keywords for your combination of keywords

• Potential backlink sources

• Text recommendations such as average readability and content length

• Meta tag requirements

Superpower features

Examples of keyword usage

What saves a great deal of time is the module with examples of how your rivals use certain keywords on their pages. Here you can see the actual text fragments from your rival’s content and get an idea of how you could use it yourself. A manual search would take hours in cases where you are working with a lot of keywords.

Meta tag recommendations

Apart from the post itself, there are other supporting texts that are important for rankings. For instance, page title and meta description. A lot of bloggers write them at the very last moment (if at all); however, these texts are what your organic snippet is made of, that is, they create the first impression on the user. Poorly written meta tags can draw your readers away and decrease the page’s CTR potential.

We gathered the basic recommendations for the meta tag texts in the last module on the SEO Content Template. Don’t leave it for your webmasters to write or Google to generate automatically — you can end up losing readers.

SEO optimization

Tool to use: On Page SEO Checker

What any commercial blogger knows is that you cannot rely on creativity if you want your content to get attention. Brilliant ideas don’t save badly promoted posts, and basic search optimization is inevitable if you want your readers to find you.

Don’t get discouraged!

When your posts are not performing so well in search results, there are things you can do on the content side without digging too deep into SEO.

On Page SEO Checker allows you to gather Content Ideas for your posts that will help you rank higher on the SERP compared to your competitors.

Superpower features

Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of the most powerful means of promotion. High quality links from relevant resources drive traffic to your website, so knowing where your competitors get theirs is crucial for link building.

In On Page SEO Checker you can see your competitor’s referring domains and use them for outreach.

Bulk analysis

Tool to use: Content Audit

When you work with a lot of content on a blog, some tiny details tend to get overlooked. This  is absolutely normal, yet sometimes annoying. A comprehensive page analysis takes time, but the results are not always representative if not compared to other pages’ performance metrics.

To help you keep track of all your published materials we created the Content Audit tool. For each page you can track:

• Titles

• Word count

• Shares in social networks

• Backlinks

• Latest traffic data from Google Analytics

• Actual search queries from Google Search Console

• Page status, etc.

Comparing your articles, you can see what content works best for your audience and find out what pages are underperforming and require fixing or optimization.

Outreach and mentions tracking

Tool to use: Brand Monitoring

As a human being, you can pay no attention to what people think about you. As a blogger, you cannot. Tracking brand mentions is extremely important to maintain a good reputation and is really helpful for gathering backlink ideas.

Our Brand Monitoring tool allows you to see who and how mentions your brand name online. Having live data from Twitter and 5-hourly web updates you can promptly react to positive and negative comments, debunk false information about your brand or find ideas for networking and link building. 

Superpower features

Backlink filter

If a certain domain mentions your brand name, they are obviously interested in you. And if for some reason they don’t have a backlink to your website, it makes total sense to obtain one there.

In Brand Monitoring, you can filter out all the domains that mention your brand but have no backlinks to your website, and add them to your link building list.

Rank tracking

Tool to use: Position Tracking

Knowing that your posts perform well on the SERP is a great inspiration. However, the SERPs are volatile, and the ranks change frequently regardless of your optimization work.

To help you keep track of all your rankings for the selected keywords, we have the Position Tracking tool. It allows you to track your rankings in multiple locations and on multiple devices, so that you can see your precise performance characteristics.

Superpower features

SERP Features filter

If your target keywords trigger SERP features, you can drastically increase your site visibility by getting into one of them. As for blogging, it most probably will be the Featured Snippet.

To help you track those particular keywords and see how you perform for them, select Featured Snippet in the filter.

Management

Tool to use: Marketing Calendar

Being a content strategist or a content team manager requires a lot of patience. Yes, patience, since every writer has their own pace and approaches work in a different manner. But whatever the traits of your team members, the work should be done and it should be done on time.

Managing several content campaigns is even trickier: not only does your editorial calendar become quite busy, but you can’t always dig deeply into every piece to check it personally.

We have a successful blog on semrush.com, and we know exactly what a content manager needs. We developed the Marketing Calendar, which helps us keep track of all our campaign activities in one place.

Superpower features

Notifications

Juggling several tasks is complicated, though many writers put multitasking to their strengths list. But we’re all human, and sometimes forget things. 

To help you keep up with all the deadlines and assignments we added the Notifications to the calendar home page. 

Google Drive integration

Oh, those Google sharing options! Sending your proofreader a read-only version of the text or accidentally granting strangers with the editing permissions — for a writer at the brink of a deadline it’s always a lottery. 

We took this into consideration developing our Calendar, so now you can import files directly from your Google Drive.

Conclusion

Commercial writing differs from writing for yourself. When a business depends on content, you can never let your standards drop or not post when you don’t feel like it.

Some writers think that commercial blogging or content writing is not ‘real’ writing, but this is not true. It is not less creative than any other type of writing, it just requires a different approach and a proper toolkit to streamline the work.

Think about it the next time you feel like this.

Read more……>click Here<

Marrying UX and SEO: How to Optimize for Time on Site and Page Speed

One key takeaway from SEMrush’s latest ranking factor study was how user engagement signals seem to impact ranking performance. High on the list of results were user satisfaction signals such as time spent on site, pages per session and bounce rate.

Although we don’t know to what extent user satisfaction is incorporated into Google’s algorithms, we do know that Google strives to make their users happy (as they always have) and many SEOs agree with the idea that Good UX is good SEO.

In this article, I will give some tips on UX/SEO optimization that can lead to better rankings:

• How to increase time spent on site.
• How to improve page speed (and tackle bounce rate).

How to Increase Time Spent on Site

When optimizing for increased time on site, the obvious question that pops into my head is: How much time is considered long enough? And, as often when it comes to SEO, the answer is: that depends.

How so? Well, because it is tricky to figure out exactly how much time Google thinks a visitor should spend on a website for any given search query.

Consider This Example:

A website that can answer a simple query such as “How many ounces to a pound?” might satisfy users within seconds and with a single page, while a search such as “What is an economic recession?” may call for visitors to spend some time exploring the topic.

The goal here, then, is for that exploration to happen on your website rather than a competitor’s, and we can do that by providing supplementary content.

Tip 1 – Create Supplementary Content and Link To It

This is not only a good SEO practice, but it also gives the users the possibility to expand their search and stay on the same domain, rather than looking for related information elsewhere.

Wikipedia does this by linking to every possible related topic known to man (or so it feels when browsing an average wiki page):

However, adding internal links on keywords merely because they appear in the body of the text might not be the best way of referencing supporting content.

We can learn from thebalance.com here. Rather than linking from keywords in the body, they choose to link to supplementary articles that help readers better understand the topic at hand:

Here, each linked piece of content directly supports the main article. As a result, visitors have the option of consuming related content (if they find it necessary) and therefore, spend more time on the site. 

Tip 2 – Answer Multiple Queries and Kill Two (or More) Birds with One Stone

If someone wants to know “what the tallest building in the world is” one can guess that they also want to know the second highest, and the third, perhaps all the way up to top 25. A piece of content that provides answers to the main search query, as well as related questions, could be seen as a better result than one simple answer.

This does seem to be the case in this example. The 2 first pages of the U.K. SERPs of the query “what is the tallest building in the world” does not include a single website that answers that specific question only. Instead, these results list a minimum of 5 of the highest buildings, most of them more.

Interestingly, there are websites such as Guinness World Record (DA 84) which technically answers the query perfectly by writing about the Burj Khalifa (which is the world’s tallest building), but that article is hidden by Google all the way down at page 4 in the SERPs.

The takeaway here is to think like a searcher: anticipate subsequent searchers and incorporate them into a single piece of content. This gives visitors more than they expected which, in turn, can lead to increased time spent consuming the content.

Tip 3 – Showcase Related Content

There are situations where you can’t bundle up all available information into one piece of content, of course, and the solution here is creating and linking to related content.

The BBC does this by listing articles related to a specified story as well as content relevant to the broader topic:

This is another strategy that allows visitors to easily browse through related content on the site.

Most e-Commerce sites have adopted this strategy too, although the related content is often other products instead of articles and the listings are likely cookie-based and personalized.

While the main driver behind this personalized shopping experience from Amazon might be sales, users are presented with products they are likely to read more about or purchase and are, thus, more likely to remain on the site longer, browsing.

In Google’s eyes, a happy consumer is one that stays to see what else there is to offer.

Website engagement is a subject well-covered and going into each aspect in detail is beyond the scope of this article. Here are some tips on improving time spent on site and links to articles covering each topic:

How to Improve Page Speed (and Tackle Bounce Rate)

A note on bounce rate. Bounce rate is a somewhat controversial topic. As a standalone metric in Google Analytics, it shows the percentage of visitors who leave the website after visiting a single page. However, leaving a website after a single page visit is not always a bad thing: some pages give instant answers to queries, and a high bounce rate is therefore expected. Thus, one shouldn’t make strategic SEO decisions based on bounce rate without a fair amount of contextual information such as user intent, content type, CTAs, and so on.

As far back as 2010 Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor, and there have been several ranking correlation studies from Moz and Neil Patel (among others) that indicate this to be the case. Additionally, in March this of this year Google’s Gary Illyes stated that page loading speed will be a ranking factor in a mobile-first world.

While we are still waiting for a mobile-first index to happen, it is fair to say that a website that loads quickly is good for both SEO and UX.

Some aspects that can help your website perform faster include:

Using a Content Delivery Network

Through a CDN your content gets cached on local servers to serve local visitors quicker. I use CloudFlare, but there are other solutions to choose from, including (but not limited to) Akamai, MaxCDN, and Rackspace.

Using a Good Hosting Provider

Image credit: Nate Shivar, shivarweb.com

Finding a decent hosting company requires some research but good hosting can do miracles for your site speed, especially in regards to Time to First Byte, and will be worth it in the end. Inform yourself on how to choose hosting provider by reading this article by CNET and this one by sitepoint.com.

Compressing Images

Large images can be a killer for load time. Tools that can optimize image size while preserving visual quality include Tiny PNG, Compressor.io, JPEG Optimizer, and BJ Lazy Load to name a few. More on that here.

Image credit: imagerecycle.com

Leverage Browser Caching

This allows for browsers to “remember” loaded page elements in order to speed up page load time for returning visitors. Read this to learn how to implement this on your website.

Image Credit: Heroku Dev Center, devcenter.heroku.com

Minify Resources

Reduce the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This article can help you get started with that.

Image Credit: keycdn, cdn.keycdn.com

As a side point, in addition to reducing bounce rate, low page load time can also help increasing conversion: Walmart reported a bump in conversion of 2% for every 1 second of improvement.

Image Credit: Cliff Crocker, walmartlabs.com

To check your site speed, I would recommend webpagetest.org as it gives you a breakdown of the loading time for each element and a score for each element

• First Byte Time
• Keep-alive Enabled
• Compress Transfer
• Compress Images
• Cache static content
• Effective use of CDN

Site speed is ONE important aspect when it comes to reducing bounce rate, but there are many more, of course. I would recommend reading the following articles to learn more about the other improvements that can prevent visitors to bounce:

4 Simple Tips to Reduce Bounce Rate

Should You Worry About Your Content’s Bounce Rate?

How to Decrease Your Website’s Bounce Rate [Infographic]

In Conclusion

User experience and SEO go hand-in-hand, and it seems like optimizing websites to satisfy users can lead to higher rankings. Admittedly, UX is a broad subject, and the above tips only cover a small part of it. Nonetheless, I hope these examples have piqued your interest in UX and given you more ideas of optimization projects you can run for your clients or on your own websites.

Read more……>click Here<

The Art of Crafting Successful Facebook Ads #semrushchat

Do you want to spice up your advertising game and make your ads more effective? During the most recent #SEMrushchat, we collected a list of actionable techniques for crafting successful Facebook ads and ensuring you spend your advertising budget wisely. Susan Wenograd, Facebook Ads and paid search maven, international speaker, trainer, and writer for Search Engine Journal and Marketing Land, joined us along with other chat participants to share 20+ tips for developing a winning Facebook ad campaign, as well as some predictions of the Facebook advertising future.

Q1. What are some of your top tips in creating an effective Facebook ad?

• Use the AIDA Model

AIDA, which stands for attention, interest, desire, and action, is one of the core principles of modern marketing and advertising. In order to make it work, you need to attract attention of your audience. Once you’ve captured their attention, you should keep it by providing something entertaining or memorable in your ad. Then your goal is to create desire; this step is sometimes called “decision”. Your message that you deliver in your ad should be highly relevant to your audience. You need to make an offer they can’t refuse. Finally, you should find a way to make people complete the desired action, whether it’s visiting your website, subscribing to your blog, or making a call.  

• Avoid Selling

Facebook ads are not only about selling your product or service, but also for building long-term relationships with people. Instead of attacking your potential users with countless salesy messages, you can focus on increasing your brand awareness through your message. “Try and think how you’d go up and shake their hand in person. Offer value and be helpful first, conversational in your ad copy,” recommended Susan Wenograd‏ – @SusanEDub.

• Offer Value

Provide a value proposition that will tell people why they should click on your ad and learn more about your brand. Ask yourself: how is it different from many other brands that offer a similar product or service? You want to prove to your potential followers or clients that your ads deserve their attention. You can try something like “10,000 happy marketers use our service to enhance their strategy!” Or, you can provide some kind of incentive in your ad by offering a discount or free trial.

• Employ CTAs That Make People Take Action

Aside from making your ad relevant and nice-looking, you need to make sure that its call-to-action is clear, and tells viewers what they should do next. Be straightforward, and ask users to complete the desired action. The main goal of your CTA is to encourage people to perform a particular action right off the bat. Therefore, it may be worth including a sense of urgency in your CTA.

• Grab User’s Attention with the Right Images

Don’t underestimate the power of visuals in your Facebook ads. Every day, people are seeing large amounts of ads in their news feed, this means that you need to stand out from the crowd to get your paid content noticed.

Make sure to take into account all of the important elements of your Facebook ad images: size, shape, color, and message. Use images that are eye-catching and avoid visuals that have many small details and text that can distract a viewer’s attention. Also, make sure that your image is relevant to your product or service and communicates the core message of your ad.

Susan Wenograd also pointed out that when it comes to Facebook ads, it’s sometimes better to opt for something less polished, because it better resonates with a social media audience and looks more of a social post, rather than advertising.

Q2. Which Facebook advertising techniques can be effective for companies with small budgets?

• Align Your Goals with Your Campaigns

If you operate with limited budgets, you need to set the right objectives that you want to accomplish with your advertising campaign. Think of what type of actions you want your potential users to take to benefit your business and then align your goals with your ad campaigns. Be specific in your ads to tell viewers what to do next. For example, if you want to collect a customer base first, you probably need to get people to sign up for your email list, rather than simply visit your website. “Initially, you know what you’re trying to achieve with the ads. A small budget can go a long way with specific goals,” tweeted Netvantage Marketing‏ – @netvantage.

• Be Specific About Who You Are Targeting

In order to make sure that people who see your ads are eager to engage with it, you need to choose a relevant audience to target. You can get specific with users who will see your ads by narrowing down your audience by age, gender, location, and other characteristics and use targeting features that are built into Facebook Audience Manager and Facebook Power Editor.  

• Target Users Who Already Like Your Page

By using Audience Insights, you can find potential customers more effectively and narrow down the audience by their interests. It will help you target those users who already like your page and create more meaningful, directed ads.

• Use Split Testing Feature

The split testing feature for Facebook ads is a powerful tool that can help advertisers to analyze which ads deliver the best results for their business. With this feature, you are able to test different elements of your ads and then optimize for your audiences, placements, and delivery settings to get the most out of your Facebook ad campaigns and maximize return on investment.

• Boost Your Posts

Some of our chat participants suggested boosting your posts on Facebook, if you are a business with a small advertising budget. Boosting a post is very easy to do, you just need to click the “Boost Post” button that appears in the lower right corner of your post. Once you do this, and the boost is approved by Facebook, more people will see this particular post in their news feed, which can help you get more users to like, share, and comment on your posts.

The difference between Boosted Posts and Facebook Ads is that the former is the most basic advertising you can do on the social platform. If you’re looking for a more customized promotion, it’s worth using Facebook ads that provide much more targeting options. Ads also allow you to format your content in a number of different ways and add an optional CTA button.

Q3. Video Ads: What are the best practices for creating a Facebook ads landing page promoting a video on Facebook?

There’s so more to Facebook advertising than just the ads. In order to ensure the success of your Facebook ad campaign, you also need a strong accompanying landing page that performs the same functions as any other landing page, which is to drive visitor action. Here are some techniques to create landing pages that promote a video on Facebook:

• Make Sure Your Landing Page and Your Video Are Related

Always avoid deceiving Facebook users with your ads. There should be no misleading content about your landing page and you should provide a clear offer and make sure that you communicate the same message across your landing page and in your video. It’s important that your landing page delivers exactly what it promises so that your users know exactly what to expect. For instance, if you’re offering instant access to your video, don’t force users to leave their email address before they can watch this video; this is not a direct access.

• Make an Impact in the First Seconds

If used correctly, Facebook video ads can be a powerful user acquisition tool. However, people see too many posts in their Facebook news feeds, so they make quick decisions about whether or not your post is worth paying attention to. When using a Facebook video ad, try to grab viewers’ attention in the first 2-3 seconds; videos that fail to do that are likely to result in poor engagement.

• Choose the Right Thumbnail

In order to encourage users to click on your video to make it play, you need to trigger their curiosity. This is where a good thumbnail can help. Choose from options provided by Facebook as they offer several images that they select from the video. You also can upload your own customized image for the thumbnail to make it more intriguing.  

• Use Subtitles

According to Facebook, captioning a video increases average video view time by 12%. Because many users are scrolling through the Facebook feed with the sound off, your message can be lost if there are no subtitles. On the other hand, by adding captions to your Facebook video ad, you can significantly boost engagement.

• Try Micro Conversions

A micro conversion is a small step on the way towards your major conversion goal. Susan Wenograd‏ – @SusanEDub mentioned that videos tend to result in high engagement, but conversion is often lower than with other types of ads. She recommended to start with micro conversions; by tracking and analyzing these small actions, you can see how a user is progressing towards a more valuable stage, which is a macro conversion. Without this information, advertisers are thrashing about in the dark. There are many examples of micro conversions you can measure, such as viewing a product page, signing up for a newsletter, spending a certain amount of time on a website, or simply watching a video.  

Video ads can be great for sales. You just need to make sure that it clearly communicates your message to the viewers and is worth paying their attention to.

Q4. Let’s say you have a CTR of +5%, but low conversions. What is the problem and how could you solve it?

Social Media Examiner surveyed over 5,700 marketers and found that in 2017, 94% of them used Facebook for marketing, compared to 93% in the previous year. What’s more, 62% of marketers surveyed said that this social network is their most important marketing platform.

Although many marketers use Facebook to amplify their marketing efforts, not all of them find positive conversion rate results from their Facebook ad campaigns.

Susan Wenograd says that conversion rate depends on your audience. If you work with a cold audience, low conversion is an expected behavior. The same is true for the type of campaign you choose, for example, if you want to drive traffic to your website with Facebook ads, this means that conversions are not the primary goal of this campaign.

Here are some other reasons why your Facebook ads have low conversions and how you can resolve this issue:

• Improve Your Landing Page

If people are clicking on your ad, but not converting, this could mean that your creative and your landing page are not related. “If it’s a warm audience, you likely have a disconnect between your creative and the landing page,” tweeted Susan Wenograd‏ – @SusanEDub. When users land on your landing page, they should see what they were promised. Otherwise, they will leave it without converting.

• Make Your Message Clear

The issue may also be related to vague advertising messages. Writing ambiguous ad copy is a common problem for people who are new to marketing or advertising, but when it comes to ads, you don’t have much space to explain your product or service in detail. You need to be concise, descriptive, straightforward, and fair. Don’t write that your business can solve your audience’s problems, instead, explain how it will do so.

• Provide a Strong CTA on Your Landing Page

A good CTA button is one of the most important elements of any landing page. Look at your CTA and answer the following questions:

• Is it compelling enough?

• Does it have a contrasting color to attract users?

• Is it’s placement effective?

• Is your CTA copy clear and self-explanatory?

Whether or not people will want to perform a desired action largely depends on the quality of your CTA.

• Focus on Your Audience

In order to make your ad and your landing page more effective, you need to invest time into figuring out who your target audience is, what they want and need, and what they can expect from your business. Find out who’s clicking and who isn’t to learn more about your viewers. Try to look at your landing page from your eyes. Is what you see helpful? Make sure that your ad and your landing page resonates with your audience.  

You can also use heatmaps to get more insights into your audience and see what people are doing on your page, how they’re behaving, and where they bounce.

As you can see, there are several reasons why users don’t convert. Take a closer look at your advertising and your landing page to figure out the problem so that you can make necessary changes.

Q5. Where do you think Facebook advertising is going? What are the latest trends?

Finally, as we promised, we collected a list of trends and predictions for the future of Facebook advertising:

Special thanks to the following chat guests who helped us to create this list: @SusanEDub, @FranJolly, @netvantage, @Kevin_Indig, @UdaniNeha, @basecreative, @salmonseo, @lucasvos, @ThinkSEM, @FredDeesJuneyah, @simoncox, and @revaminkoff.

That’s it for today!

Hopefully, the tips from this post will help you create amazing Facebook ads to reach your business goals. You can also check out our Ultimate Facebook Ads Audit Guide.

We would like to thank Susan Wenograd and our other chat guests for sharing their expertise. Join us this Wednesday as we do a Real-Time Website Analysis!

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On Page SEO checklist: Blogging for People and Search Engines

This is the third article in a series of guides for content specialists on how to write successfully both for people and search engines in 2017. Check out previous one and stay tuned for new updates. 

Top-rated bloggers don’t only have excellent writing skills, they also take responsibility for their content’s performance in search engines. They’ve learned one simple trick – you have to write both for people and search engines.

Of course although over the time search engines have become smarter, and learned to understand the context, not just the separate keywords, search engine optimization is not going anywhere just yet. The good thing is, it is becoming technically easier to promote the website now than it was a few years ago, because there are a lot of tools that do all the boring work for you.

In this article, we’ve collected the complete list of the tools that can be used for content optimization of your page. Step by step, following the logic of SERP anatomy, we’ll explain how to make each detail of your article attractive to both users and search engines.

On-Page SEO Checklist 

Title 

As a writer, you sure understand the power of a good title. It’s highly important for attracting the user’s attention and increasing the page CTR: they will see your title on the SERP, and if they don’t like it, they will most probably not read your article.

From the SEO point of view it makes sense to put your keyword in the title only if it is short and high-volume: the recent SEMrush research on ranking factors confirmed it. If you are trying to promote for a long-tail keyword, it will be quite tricky to put all of it into the title, so better focus on the quality of the content, Google and social shares will do the rest for you.

The title should be there not only for users, but for crawlers as well. So make sure you have title tags on your page. Also notice that while your H1 tag and title should not necessarily be repeating each other, you would still want them to be related.

Check out this article whenever you run out of ideas for great headlines: How to Write Great Headlines for the Web.

Related tools

On Page SEO Checker gathers information about the correct H1 and title tags and checks keyword stuffing there.

URL

Before anything else, your URL has to be descriptive and meaningful (please avoid weird number and random letter combinations!). And of course the URL is a very good place for your keywords.

Also don’t forget that in a year you may want to update your content (including the title), so make sure your URL is evergreen and can be later applied to slightly or even drastically different content. If you decide to change the URL, do not forget about redirection in order to avoid 404 mistakes.

Your URL length matters — it’s best to keep it around 3 to 5 words long. Also, when it comes to URL structure, using underscores as word separators is not recommended.

Want to learn more? Check out this article: On-Page SEO Basics: URLs.

Related tools

SEMrush Site Audit checks all the URLs on your website for length, for underscores and helps you make sure none of the URLs has too many parameters in them.

Meta Description

Meta description does not impact your rankings in any way, but as I said earlier, you have to think about your users as well. Well-written meta description will help them better understand what your article or page is about.

Also do not just let Google choose the meta description for you: if you do, you may find a random phrase from your page residing there. And avoid duplicate meta descriptions across different pages.

Get some more ideas here: On-Page SEO Basics: Meta Descriptions.

Related tools

SEMrush On Page SEO checker — the group of Content ideas provides you with all the tips you need to make your content better from the SEO standpoint. For example it will help you make sure that you put tags to all the right places, and if your SEO specialist resorts to the old keyword stuffing in <meta> tag.

SEOmofo is a SERP view generator. Enter your URL, title and description to manage the number of symbols and preview your article’s appearance on SERP.

Portent – another SERP view generator.

Keywords and Semantically Related Words

To provide users with the most relevant results for their particular search terms, use your target keywords within the first 100-150 words of your text and add some additional weight by placing semantically related words.

To improve your understanding of the idea of semantic search, check out this recorded webinar: The Future of SEO: 5 Ways to Adapt Your Content for 2016 with Andy Crestodina.  

Related Tools

SEMrush SEO Content Template gives you a whole list of semantically related keywords for the ones you plan to create content for. There you also get examples of content the top-10 ranking websites put on their pages.

SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool gives you a huge list of keyword ideas based on your single seed keyword.

H1…H3

Structured text is easy to read and navigate through. There are plenty of methods for text structuring. If you are dealing with a lot of information, you can use a list with numbered bullet points – it’s easy to perceive and allows you to include plenty of information in the article without sacrificing the user’s attention.

The second way is more ‘classic’ – write an introduction pointing to the problem and then divide the text into 3 to 5 main points and title them with descriptive subheads. In my experience, 3-5 statements within one article is more than enough to prove your point. (Fewer might not look like enough to convince a reader, more might make the article difficult to read.)

In SEO language – don’t forget to use H1…H6 tags for your subheads (and place your target keywords in the subheads, of course). Learn How To Use H1-H6 HTML Elements Properly.

Related tools

SEMrush Site Audit helps you avoid a lot of troubles with H1 tags: it will tell you if any of them are duplicated, missing, or in abundance on the page. Any of these things can become an issue in the eyes of Google.

Video Content

Adding video content to your page can also help you structure it and get more attention. It also attracts the audience that prefers visual content.

Although it hardly benefits you from the SEO point of view, absence of videos can harm your visits, especially if everyone else in the niche has them. Also, having a script besides the video has become a common practice, because it helps both, users and crawlers, notice your content.

If you are placing your own videos, don’t forget to optimize them as well. Check out this guide:  Advanced Hacks for YouTube Optimization.

Related Tools

SEMrush On Page SEO checker – this instrument will check if websites with a higher position for a particular keyword have video content on their pages.

SEMrush Social Media tracker provides you with detailed analytics for your video content and its performance through all social networks. You can monitor video metrics, such as likes, dislikes, and shares, track the audience activity, engagement, and interest trend for every video posted by you or your competitors.

Images

It’s been proven that “content with at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. However, we didn’t find that adding additional images influenced rankings.” And, as we mentioned above, it’s a great way to structure your article and customize it. Some experts recommend to insert an image in the text in depth of one scroll, so the user would always have an image on the page while reading. We think it’s optional if you have some other eye-catching elements on the page like subheads or quotes.

Do not forget that the image format changes from platform to platform (they are cropped differently on Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network or search engine), so pay attention to microformats. Make sure that links to your domain and header images will look good on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other platform.

Talking about SEO: images that are too large can slow down your site speed – one of the most powerful user experience constituents. So be sure to use the right file size and format, and use image compressors correctly to reduce image size while maintaining visual quality.

Descriptive image file names and the use of ALT tags can help images from your page appear in Google image search results.

For more information, check out this great article by Shopify: 10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips.

Related tools

SEMrush Site Audit checks all the images for the presence of ALT attributes in the page code.

Content length

You have to be sure that your content is long enough – it’s good for readers and search engines. But keep in mind that there is no exact ‘perfect’ content length; it all depends on your goals and the content purpose.

The main point is: people love longer content because it implies deeper topic coverage.

And it’s a proven fact that longer content tends to rank higher.

Here’s more proof of why big content wins, along with some recommendations on writing lengthy texts: 10 Things to Keep in Mind When Working on Big Content.

Related tools

SEMrush On Page SEO checker will provide you with the information about your (and your competitors’) content length on a page ranking for a particular keyword.

SEMrush SEO Content Template tells you how long your future content should be so that it’s on the level with your competitors’.

Readability

There is another important content metric — readability, which shows if your content is easy or difficult to read. Readability level depends on a lot of factors. Not only grammar and syntax play an important role, but also the design and structure of the text — everything that can influence our perception. Basically, the secret is simple — know your audience (are they advanced specialists or beginners?), good writing skills and focus on the message will help find a balance. If you want to check your text’s readability score — there are some tools that can help.

For more information and recommendations about readability tools, check out this Raven’s post – Ultimate list of online content readability tests.  

Related tools:

SEMrush On Page SEO checker helps you make sure that your content is not less readable than your competitors’.

Readable checks the pasted or typed in text for readability.

Readability Test Tool checks how readable is the text under the specific URL.

Internal Links

Internal linking helps you enrich your content with additional useful information for readers while attracting attention to the related content you’ve created. Also, internal linking is one of the SEO essentials – it has a big influence on search engine bots’ behavior. Crawler starts visiting pages that could otherwise be lost. And in case you did not have time to dive deep into backlink building, internal linking may be a good place to start.

Check out this article for more information: 3 Internal Linking Strategies for SEO and Conversions.

Related tools

SEMrush On Page SEO checker lets you know if the page has any internal links leading to it.

SEMrush Site Audit compiles all the internal links that are broken in one list so that you can fix them quickly.

Social Sharing Buttons

Social shares don’t count as links, but they will help your content earn more SEO badges and cover bigger audience — add social sharing buttons and make them noticeable. And it seems that content with a lot of social shares is more likeable and trustable in the eyes of random users. Also, if an opinion leader or someone with a big scope of followers likes or reblogs your content, it’s very likely that it will attract new readers to you.

Related Tools

SEMrush Social Media Tracker searches for your rivals’ posts that gater a lot of user interactions and helps you gather ideas for the topics and formats of your future content.

Click to Tweet – use Click to Tweet tool for sharing the main statements of your article. Choose a quote, insert it into Click to Tweet; embed generated a link to your blog  and you’ll get tweetable, noticeable quote with Twitter logo on it.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most common SEO problems. Our recent study shows that 50% of websites have some pages with duplicate content. It won’t give you a penalty, but it’s a signal to search engines that your website has little to no value for your readers. Needless to say – your readers won’t appreciate it either.

All aspects of the duplicate content problem are covered here: Duplicate Content SEO Advice From Google.

Related Tools

SEMrush Site Audit provides you with the list of all pages with duplicate content on your website.

Crawlability

Can’t see your article in SERPs, although you think you did everything right? Make sure that your website was not blocked from crawling, otherwise, you did all your work in vain. Crawlability is a difficult technical question most content creators are probably not familiar with, so talk to your webmaster and find a solution.

Meanwhile, check out: 18 Reasons Your Website is Crawler-Unfriendly.

Related tools

SEMrush Site Audit not only checks if all the pages of your site are crawlable, but also provides you with the info about all necessary tags (e.g. headings, <meta> tags and other important HTML attributes).

Page Loading Speed

It’s not even a second – it’s a millisecond delay that can force a user to close your article and go to another website. Sometimes the reasons for delays can be simple, such as images with large file sizes on a page; sometimes they are more serious, including problems with your server. No matter the reason, it’s crucially important to be aware of any page speed issues.

Related tools

SEMrush Site Audit checks load speed and page compression, which are both responsible for the page load time.

Google Pagespeed Insights – the easiest way to check your page load time.

Mobile-Friendliness

If your company’s website is still not mobile-friendly, you are probably missing a part of traffic flow. No, let’s put it this way — you’re losing traffic. Of course, responsive design and mobile website development requires time and effort. It’s not something you can do in a day but it is worth every second you spent on it. Mobile-friendly websites have a strong priority in mobile SERP.

Related tools

Google Mobile Friendly Test  – solution from Google for checking website mobile-friendliness.

Markups

We’ve already talked about the importance of your content’s SERP appearance.  Markup implementations can increase your CTR in times, and the best thing of it, that microdata can be applied to different types of content no matter what topic you are covering.

Look at this great example. Both sites are using Schema markups to provide more information to the user: a list of ingredients, reviews, cooking time and even calorific value.

How does this influence your SERPs? Not in any way. Schema implementation has nothing to do with the direct impact on your ranking. But do you remember about CTR? Exactly! Everything that’s good for your reader is good for SEO.

Related Tools:

SEMrush Site Audit – will give you information about the percentage of pages with implemented markups: Schema.org, Twitter Cards, Open Graph, Microformats.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool – will check if there are no mistakes in markup implementation on your page.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, Google is doing a lot in trying to help unique, informative content get better ranking. But it’s not just Google who decides if your content deserves a higher position – it’s your readers as well. Google doesn’t read your work and grade you with an “A” for excellent wording or exclusiveness of insights; it estimates a level of interest for your article by taking into account users’ behavior and your text’s availability.

You might be surprised to know that some on-page SEO issues have a little to no impact on rankings. At the same time, some issues which have nothing to do with SEO directly, but mostly with writing and content appearance, can have a giant impact on page CTR, time on page and bounce rate –  user experience signals which Google relies on to determine page quality and SERP positions.

Which of these on-page and text elements do you think you might sacrifice without any negative impacts on your article’s ranking? One? Two? Maybe five?

Well, of course, some of them can be ignored, but we intentionally didn’t point them out. Don’t think about a bare minimum. Create a good story and do as much as you can to make your text attractive and noticeable to readers and you’ll maximize your content’s impact. 

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