FACT: Email is an amazing channel for attracting, winning and retaining customers. Not to mention generating repeat business.
But there is one problem; it is really hard to get emails right for the first time.
What you consider an engaging subject line, recipients see as a dud. A call to action you believe would compel them to click, spurred no action whatsoever.
That is why it is important to A/B test your emails to find new techniques or elements that improve conversions.
Unfortunately, many companies launch split tests hoping for the best. They disregard the rules of A/B testing and commit some major mistakes rendering their efforts useless.
So, if you have been split testing emails but see no viable results, keep on reading. I am going to show you the most common A/B testing mistakes sabotaging your efforts.
Before we begin though…
Why You Should Always Start by Testing Concepts Not Elements
As it turns out before you even begin testing various email elements, you should identify a general strategy your audience responds best to.
In other words, before you start fine-tuning the template, testing subject lines or modifying the call to action, you should first test two different marketing strategies against each other.
For instance, you could test two different ways to convert recipients – via email form or social media login. Or sending people to a landing page vs. allowing them to purchase the product directly via email.
And only when you have identified the winning strategy, should you start testing individual elements to improve conversions.
However, when you do, make sure you don’t commit any of the mistakes below:
Mistake #1. Testing More Than One Element at Once
By far and away, this is the most common mistake of them all.
You have so many ideas on how to improve email conversions. But the last thing you want is spending weeks to test every one of them in turn. And so, to speed things up a little, you decide to analyze them all at once.
You send different template variations under various sender names, using different subject lines, and including different copy in each test.
This results in so many email variations that, in the end, you can’t even tell if any of your ideas worked.
Time-consuming as it may be, you should always test only one element at a time.
Mistake #2. Checking Results Too Early
Since the majority of email platforms start delivering campaign results within 2 hours after sending, it is tempting to start analyzing a test’s performance right away, right?
However, by doing so, you miss out on some important data.
For one, users have different reading habits. Some open the email right away, flick it and either act on it or forget about it. Others put important messages aside to check out later. And as a result, might come back to your email a couple of days later.
And so, by analyzing results too early, you might miss important traffic and usage patterns, affecting the actual test results.
From personal experience, I can attest that the best time to start going through test results is about 2 weeks after launching the campaign.
Mistake #3. Ignoring Statistical Significance
80% of your test results are worthless. It is no different for almost anyone else split testing their emails.
And so, the challenge is to draw conclusions based only on the remaining 20%.
One way to achieve it is by identifying statistically significant results and weeding out those caused by pure chance.
One way to do it is to use a statistical significance calculator. Personally, I use the one developed by Visual Website Optimizer, but you could use just about any similar app out there.
Mistake #4. Focusing on Too Small Sample Size
The number of recipients you include in the test affects the outcome. The smaller change you want to test, the greater sample size you might need.
For instance, let’s assume that you developed a hypothesis stating that using emojis in the subject line should help increase the existing 15% open rate by 10%. To conduct such analysis, you need to test this hypothesis on 8,000 people.
Using a smaller sample size will deliver statistically insignificant results.
So, before you launch the test, you need to calculate what sample size you need to receive viable feedback from. To do so, use the Optimizely’s sample size calculator.
Mistake #5. Failing to Develop a Proper Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed statement made on the basis of limited evidence that can be proved or disproved and is used as a starting point for further investigation. I am sure you have heard this definition already.
However, in email split testing, a hypothesis must have one other characteristic:
It must be applicable to different campaigns.
So for instance, a statement such as “emails with animated pictures generate a higher CTR” would work as a hypothesis. Once proven right, it could be applied to many different campaigns.
On the other hand, assuming that a particular subject line will fare better than another would not work. It applies to a specific campaign only and cannot scale to your other email efforts.
The lack of understanding of this important email hypothesis characteristic leads to conducting tests de facto without a hypothesis at all. Or in the best case scenario, using a weak hypothesis to try and improve conversions.
To avoid making this mistake, use the industry’s approved hypotheses. Jordie van Rijn collected 150 of them in this post.
Mistake #6. Not Testing Segments
We all know that different audience segments might respond to your message in their own unique way. And thus, a hypothesis improving conversions in one segment might deliver no results in another.
Just take cultural differences as an example. Spanish recipients might have no problem with a high frequency of emails. However, emailing a couple of times a week might prompt subscribers from other countries to abandon your list.
And so, segment your tests to analyze different user behaviors.
Mistake #7. Sending Each Variation at a Different Time
To receive viable results, you should analyze no more than one variable at a time.
And yet, I see many companies unknowingly adding another factor to the mix: time. How? By sending each variation at a different time.
With this method, half of the subscribers might receive one variation at a time they are not busy and thus, susceptible to opening marketing messages. The other half, however, might get it in the middle of a busy day, resulting in many ignoring or even overlooking it.
As a result, the data gets skewed by different recipient behavior, depending on the time at which they received the email.
So, to guarantee the validity of the test, always send both variations at the same time to ensure that no other factor interferes with the test.
What About You?
Are there any other email testing mistakes you made? Share them with us in the comments below.
4 Counterintuitive Hacks To Court The Champions Of Your Industry
Imagine your just-released book makes it to Oprah Winfrey’s famous list of “favorite things.”
OMG! You gonna go completely crazy. Isn’t it? Why? Because, now, you could almost be sure that your book sales would skyrocket. You could be a world celebrity overnight.
Well, that’s the power of industry champions. A simple word from their mouth, about how good or how great your product is good enough to draw eyeballs, financial windfalls, and more. That said, it is not that easy to court champions, commonly referred to as the “influencers” in the industry lexicon, to promote your product and services. Why?
Here is the problem: Influencers are very picky about what they promote these days. More so, with hundreds and thousands of such requests flooding their inboxes, day in and day out, making them more pickier than ever before. Yes, everyone wants a piece of these champions today. (Maybe, over a period of time, you may even feel that climbing Mount Everest would have been a better off experience than getting an influencer on board to evangelize your product.)
Regardless of the many difficulties involved in roping in the right influencer, be assured this is a superior marketing strategy over traditional strategies. Why?
Check out these stats and facts that suggest why Influencer marketing is the best go-to strategy for product promotion:
#1. As per the past 30-days stats from Google Trends, Influencer Marketing Towers Over Traditional Marketing Strategies such as Print Advertising and Video Advertising, significantly.
Influencer Marketing Towers Over Traditional Marketing Strategies
#2. As per a recent survey, 84% of marketers are looking to launch at least one influencer campaign in the next 12 months.
#3.According to E-consultancy, nearly 60% of the fashion and beauty industry is already pursuing influencer marketing strategies and about 21% are planning to jump onto the influencer marketing bandwagon.
Going by the growing importance of Influencer marketing, it has become all the more important for businesses to roll-up-their sleeves and dig into their social media networks to figure out the top macro or micro-influencers in their respective domains who could draw in the required traction for their brands.
But then, as I mentioned earlier, the question is, why would an influencer promote your brand when he has enough and more on his plate? In fact, one should take it for granted that your request email will be trashed in no time.
But, here’s the kicker: I have managed to catalog some counter-intuitive hacks that are sure to help you draw some pre-champions on board, if not the champions.
Counterintuitive Influencer Courting Hack #1: Shoot Compelling Cold Emails to Industry Champions
Let’s be honest. You don’t trust the effectiveness of emails, let alone cold emails.
Here’s the reality:
Twenty-five year old Adam Lyons, a college dropout, with an industry-disrupting idea up his sleeve – The Zebra an insurance rate comparison company – decided to roll up his sleeve and cold email his investor idol Mark Cuban.
Guess what? It worked.
Cuban got back within 20 minutes. And after a couple of prompt email exchanges, Cuban was on Zebra’s board. If you ask what actually worked in Lyon’s favor, then it was his email’s compelling subject-line “Wanna disrupt the insurance industry?” that happened to grab Cuban’s attention right away.
More importantly, Lyon was aware of Cuban’s choice of emails over meetings. So it was up to him to grab Cuban’s attention, via a compelling email subject line and copy. It goes without saying, he did manage to do that.
Today, Zebra has managed to raise $21 million and has got over 70 employees working for them. And, let me assure you, it all began with a cold email shot to a top industry influencer.
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Harvard Business School students Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna applied this same persuasive strategy while building their startup Birchbox. Backed by a striking subject line “Reimagining beauty retail online,” and equally compelling copy, the duo shot cold emails to all the big shots in the beauty industry. The result? Birchbox was able to attract bigger brands on board for their online subscription-based beauty business. Investors followed.
Just like The Zebra, Birchbox followed the old school formula of coming up with a compelling email subject line. The strategy worked for them as well. Aside from the subject line, what actually worked in the student’s favor was the email copy that said:
“Do you have five minutes to give me advice?”
As it turned out, this emotionally-rich line seeking mentorship worked its way to a good number of macro-influencers’ heart helping them green flag their project.
According to the Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp:
The students had requested five minutes of mentorship, which the brands weren’t comfortable refusing. Huh! No seeking big favors? Nor free products? Yes. They had simply requested for some free advice.
Sure enough, these Harvard students got more than they had actually bargained for. Or, they simply happened to get what they were actually looking for?
Ready to leverage cold emailing as a critical strategy to attract influencers on board?
Here are a few tips which might help you do so:
#1. Grab the influencer’s attention on social media first.
#2. The first step, in a way, makes sure you know the influencer ‘just enough’ to personalize your emails.
#3. Work on your subject line. The CEO of The Zebra used an eye-grabbing subject line “Wanna disrupt the insurance industry,” which made sure Mark Cuban not only responded to his email but promptly got onto Zebra’s board as well.
#4. Keep the copy short and to the point. Don’t make the reader scroll your email down on their smartphones.
#5. Add a page with a lot more information; however, avoid attaching a complete business plan.
#6. “Ask for something that is pretty hard to say ‘no’ to,” says Birchbox CEO Katie Beauchamp. Also, avoid asking big favors or free products. Seek advice. Beauchamp’s simple but emotional one line resonated so well with the recipients that it got eyes and things rolling for them.
#7. Send follow-up emails. It should increase your response rates and might as well get you that do-or-die ‘yes’ you are desperately looking for.
#8. Make sure you send your emails at an ideal time of the day.
Key takeaway: Writing cold emails is an art. Even a smart email subject line could open several doors for you.
As the name implies, pre-champions are champions in the making, in other words, micro-influencers. They are easier to target than the macro influencers of the industry.
The only thing to bear in mind while reaching out to pre-champions is that they should hold considerable influence among your targeted group.
They may not have a big follower count to boast off but should be good enough to make your product famous among a particular segment of the audience. Yes, when you are starting out it is incredibly important to think small. Why? Because the smaller groups have hyper-engaged audiences than larger groups.
I sense your eyebrows raising? But, here’s the thing:
“Engagement is the new impressions. It matters as much, if not more than someone’s reach.”
Kristy Sammis in a March 2016 episode of the podcast, Half Hour Intern
For instance, a beauty influencer may operate hundreds of cosmetic shops and beauty parlors and might as well have millions of followers. Contrarily, a beauty micro-influencer may have a thousand followers, but what actually makes her famous are her instructional videos on Instagram and YouTube that are attracting high user engagement. Decide, which is better? The one with million followers or the one with 1000+ highly engaged audience?
Think about it!
Pre- Champions have better engagement rates.
Markerly discovered a surprising trend while studying user engagement activities on Instagram. As per the study, the number of Instagram followers is inversely proportional to engagement activities. In other words, the more the number of followers the less likely they are to like or make comments on your posts.
In the study, Markerly analyzed more than 800,000 Instagram users with a majority of them having at least 1000 followers. And this is what they found out:
Instagram users with <1000 followers generated likes 8% of the time.
Users with 1,000-10,000 followers generated likes at a 4% rate.
Users with 10,000 – 1, 00,000 followers earned a 2.4% like rate.
Users with 1-10 million followers earned likes only 1.7% of the time.
Markerly’s graphical breakdown of how likes and comments decline as followers increase.
According to Markerly’s Report Likes and Comments on your Instagram posts decline when the follower count increases
Markerly suggests you go after micro-influencers with the Instagram following in the 10k-100k range. Even an Experticity study revealed that micro-influencers have 22.2X more conversions than a regular Instagram user. This is mainly because they are passionate and knowledgeable about their area of work.
Key takeaway: Think small. Go for pre-champions with higher user engagement ratio.
Counterintuitive Influencer Courting Hack #3. Drop “Swag Bombs”
Marc Ecko, founder of Marc Ecko Enterprises, a global fashion and lifestyle company came up with this unique “swag bomb” approach to get influencer attention.
The strategy is simple: Give stuff away for free to people who would like it.
Make no mistake. You aren’t mailing anything and everything to any random influencer. On the contrary, you need to put in the required effort, energy and creativity to nail down the right influencer for your industry and then, more importantly, you need to customize your package to suit the influencer taste.
Ecko apparently built his billion dollar business based on this brilliant strategy. As Marc’s says in this guest blog Marc Ecko’s 10 Rules for Getting “Influencer” Attention, “Our collaboration with George Lucas and the iconic Star Wars brand was a direct result of Swag Bomb strategy. I’ll go to my grave proud of the fact that George Lucas actually said–and this is a quote–“No one has made STAR WARS cooler than ECKO.”
The first influencer he happened to carpet bomb with his Swag Bomb strategy was Kool DJ Red Alert. Being a leading DJ of his time and with Rolling Stones going ga-ga about him, Ecko knew a shout-out from this DJ was just enough for his fashion company to get the required traction.
Regardless, instead of dialing up, Ecko spammed this DJ’s fax machine with “Echo Airbrushing” promos. It worked. On one fine day, Marc hears his name being shouted out on air. That is about it. Ecko was never the same again.
Sure, Marc had finally caught his dear DJ’s attention. But he didn’t stop there. He eventually becomes a perennial swag bomber as he started sending airbrushed hats, jackets and t-shirts to several offices of champs and pre-champs. He never asked for anything. He just made great stuff and sent them to the influencers he knew might appreciate it.
Marc Ecko’s shout out on a Radio Channel won the brand high traction during its initial days
Key takeaway: A Swag Bomb, when done right, can lead to colossal amounts of PR, connections, and access in the longer run.
Counterintuitive Influencer Courting Hack #4: Cash In On Conferences
Tim Ferris, the author of 4-Hour bestselling series such as 4-hour Work Week, Tools of Titans, The 4-Hour Body, and The 4-Hour Chef, is known for his networking tours.
Ryan Holiday, the internationally bestselling author of Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts, mentions a little secret that Ferris employs for promoting his books. The latter doesn’t believe in spending on advertisement or publicity. Instead, he travels from conferences to conferences, shaking hands with as many influential people he could meet, learning, developing relationships, and most importantly, doing favors for them.
Not surprisingly, his books have made it to the New York Times Bestseller list, and have been translated into more than 40 languages. Boom! Boom! Isn’t that a big number?
Bonus Hack: Turn the Influencer Marketing Strategy Right On Its Head
Now, how do you do that? A fashion company called Pretty Little Thing has turned the influencer marketing strategy on its head just by becoming a little more observant. Instead of requesting influencers to make a particular piece of their clothing popular they simply observed what the influencers were doing and then created matching, economical products.
In short: Kim Kardashian wears a latex dress, and Pretty Little Thing will come up with a similar looking product and promote it on social media sites saying if Kim Kardashian is wearing it, you too could try.
And it is working for the brand because the social fashion brand has over 1.2M followers on Instagram and is shipping over 20,000 orders world over each day.
Parting Lines
It is not what you know; it is who you know. Your network is your net worth. You can’t deny that. A tweet or even a post by one of the champions or pre-champions is sure to send sales surging for you.
Regardless, you won’t get pre-champions right out of the gate. You gotta hustle it! It may take some solid swag bombing sometimes. Be ready. There is nothing like free lunches in the world, and there is always some give and take involved.
I know these are just handful of tips. If you have any influencer marketing idea that could be seen as a counterintuitive strategy, go ahead and share them below.
Google News Digest: Curvier Mobile SERPs, a Strategic Deal with Salesforce and Virtual and Augmented Reality with Google
Google continues its preparations for the most anticipated update to come – Mobile First Index – including a softer and lighter look for its mobile interface. But it all doesn’t stop just at looks – the functionality for mobile search is expanding beyond even what desktop has to offer, as from now on all the busy Wall Street guys and those who simply like to follow the stock market can do so right from their smartphone.
But before the big update, there is something that is coming up just around the corner – the holiday season, the busiest time of the year for many SEOs and digital marketers. With the festive spirit in mind, Google rolled out updates to its AdWords and Merchant Center to make sure we all expand our reach, well…even beyond the reach.
Most of the updates concerned tweaks and tricks regarding Google tools. To learn more about each of them, scroll down, and definitely pay extra attention to the biggest deal with Google’s new strategic partner – Salesforce.
GOOGLE SEARCH NEWS
A New Curved Interface for Mobile Search Results
Google is continually working on its mobile experience and has rolled out a brand new interface for mobile search results. And if curviness is the new black, the new design follows that trend by introducing a new curved look for all components of mobile SERPs – the search box, cards, Top Stories and so on – and also appears to have a lighter color scheme. It is unclear, though, on what scale and in which countries this update is so far available.
In its quest to provide users with the most credible and relevant news, Google rolled out a Knowledge Panel for news publishers. The knowledge panel displays all the basic info about the news publishers so that users can evaluate their trustworthiness and see more background information about publishers they are not yet familiar with. Depending on the amount and quality of accessible information, the panel will include the following details:
Writes about – the topics and types of content typically covered by the publisher.
Awards – the most notable awards received by the publisher.
Reviewed claim – this tab appears when a large part of a publisher’s content has been reviewed by a trusted fact-checker.
According to Google, the knowledge panel will not influence pages’ ranking in SERPs, although it might affect click-through rates for some publishers that aren’t showcasing much credibility or authority. It is not clear which criteria determine whether a news publisher gets into the knowledge panel, but allegedly publishers that provide fresh and credible content will stand a higher chance of being featured in the panel.
Product Comparison Differences Highlight Available in SERPs
Can you always tell the difference between the brand new iPhone and its previous version? If you are as unobservant as many others, you will go to Google for answers. Google updated its product comparison function in the search results. The widget that included products’ characteristics has been upgraded with a “Highlight Differences” toggle that makes the differences stand out. The product comparison feature was introduced in 2016 and is only available for certain product types, such as smartphones, tablets, and game consoles.
Whether you are a suited-up Wall Street guy or simply a fan of the stock market, you can now compare stocks right from Google’s mobile SERPs. All you have to do is learn the stock symbol by heart, enter it into the search box and click on the newly introduced “Compare” tab. For instance, to check out Alphabet’s stock chart, you have to enter GOOG. Afterwards, the search results will display an entire section dedicated to information on Alphabet stock. The section includes a “Compare” tab that offers a set of related stocks that you can add by clicking on the “+” sign next to the suggested companies.
Google News Requires a Manual Update for Old RSS-Feed URLs
Effective December 1, 2017, Google’s old RSS-feed URLs will become obsolete. This means that users will have to manually update their subscriptions as the old ones will cease to work. To update your RSS feeds, you will have to go to Google News, select the sections you need or create new ones and press the “RSS” button at the bottom of the page. As a result, you will see a feed URL in the address bar that should be copied to get the new URL for the RSS feed.
Merchant Center and AdWords Updates for Reach Expansion
The holiday season is approaching, and with the consumer spirit on the rise, Google is adding a few new features for those whose sales rely on Merchant Center and AdWords. The novelties include:
The ability to acquire a higher number of clicks thanks to campaign optimization via Opportunities.
Settings for shipping deadlines (only for the US).
The introduction of Absolute Top Impression Share (ATIS) – a metric that shows the frequency of your ads displayed in the most prominent Shopping position compared to those of your competitors.
Remarketing and dynamic remarketing within Gmail to target potential customers right in their inbox.
AdWords Data Control, a New Tool in Google Data Studio
Data visualization, data integration, team KPI monitoring – many tools offer these functionalities as it is often hard to get a grasp on data that you already own and turn it into a flexible and comprehensive insight-generating machine. Google Data Studio (a free data visualization service) was built precisely for that but lacked a certain flexibility. But, from now on, Google added a new tool – AdWords Data Control. It allows you to select various AdWords accounts that will provide data for Data Studio reports. There is no longer a need to create separate reports for each user and account, instead, you can use a unified template that will gather data from your selected account.
The new tool is especially helpful to bigger companies with various branches and business units since they will now have the opportunity to add cross-functionality to their use of data and have a unified reporting mechanism.
It is a very rich time for Google’s partnership programs – from development collaborations with HTC to a strategic deal with the fact-checking giant IFCN. This time Google signed an unprecedented partnership with Salesforce to provide their users with the utmost marketing and sales cloud experience. As a part of the agreement, Salesforce will be using Google Cloud Platform’s infrastructure, while in turn, Google will favor Salesforce as its core CRM provider that supports its cloud services. Salesforce is already working on integrating with the G Suite so that their mutual clients can access Salesforce data right from Gmail, Google Docs and other Google products.
Following the growing trend towards virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), Google is making it easier for app builders to implement elements of 3D with its new service – Poly. Poly is a large source of ready-made yet flexible 3D objects and scenes that can be freely downloaded and adjusted according to your needs. It’s something like Unsplash for 3D. Developers can find any object they need via search and use it in their apps that support AR/VR. Poly is integrated with such familiar 3D instruments as Tilt Brush and Blocks and supports direct OBJ-format files download.
Poly contains thousands of free models, from zebras to a rocket ship. Developers can either use the objects as they are, or alter them. You can even make animated GIFs. To view the objects in VR, you can do so via Cardboard or Daydream View.
Google Chrome is Blocking Unwanted Tabs and Windows
Chrome continues to insist that web security is its biggest priority. Thus, starting in January 2018, Chrome will begin blocking new surprise tabs and windows to protect its users from malicious content. Chrome 64 will be disabling all redirects, coming from third-party iframes. Instead of immediately redirecting users to another unintended page, Chrome will display an info bar. This will allow users to remain on their selected page and avoid surprise redirects.
To help website owners come to terms with this update, Google launched a new “Abusive Experiences” report in Search Console. You can run your website through the report to see whether there are any signs of abusive experiences. And if the issues don’t get addressed within 30 days, Chrome will automatically block the new windows and tabs.
Google My Business offers a new feature – selection attributes. You can now select attributes from predefined choices. For instance, the “Kosher food” selection attribute has such choices as “No Kosher food,” “Some Kosher food,” and “Strictly Kosher food.”
Google recommends adding attributes to company descriptions so that your potential customers have a clearer idea of what you have to offer, which will essentially lead to a more satisfying customer experience.
New Tools for a More Efficient Management of Google Analytics Users
Big companies often struggle with assigning permissions to each and every employee with access to the important parts of the company’s analytics. From now on, account admins will have the ability to centralize user management across their company’s various Google Analytics accounts. If one person needed access to 25 accounts, previously you had to set up the permission by visiting and changing the settings of each account. Now admins can give out permissions all from one place – the admin account. Moreover, to facilitate the management of large numbers of people, you can now create groups that include the appropriate employees, and give the entire group the access to the relevant Google Analytics accounts.
Google is changing every day, and it is essential that you follow all the relevant updates and tweaks and react in a timely manner. We do our best to inform you of all the changes that are taking place in Google’s space to make sure that you have all the information you need to stay on top of SERPs. So, stay tuned to our Google News Digest, which airs every two weeks.
Speaking of staying on top of SERPs, make sure to take a look at the second edition of our Ranking Factors Study, which is based on the biggest scope of keywords compared to all the existing research on Google’s ranking factors. Our unique findings include in-depth insights on ranking factors: direct traffic is the ultimate factor that affects your rankings, along with backlinks and user behavior. But no spoilers – simply click on the banner below to learn more.
What makes your rankings go up when you’re done with the on-page SEO?
SEMrush Ranking Factors Study 2017 — Methodology Demystified
In the second edition of the SEMrush Ranking Factors Study 2017 we’ve added 5 more backlink-related factors and compared the strength of their influence on a particular URL vs. an entire domain. According to tradition, we offer you a deeper look at our methodology. Back in June, when the first edition of the study was published, many brows were raised in disbelief — indeed, direct website visits are usually assumed to be the result of higher SERP positions, not vice versa. And yet site visits is exactly what our study confirmed to be the most important Google ranking factor among those we analyzed, both times. Moreover, the methodology we used was unique to the field of SEO studies — we traded correlation analysis for the Random Forest machine learning algorithm. As the ultimate goal of our study was to help SEOs prioritize tasks and do their jobs more effectively, we would like to reveal the behind-the-scenes details of our research and bust some popular misconceptions, so that you can safely rely on our takeaways.
Jokes aside, this post is for real nerds, so here is a short glossary:
Decision tree — a tree-like structure that represents a machine learning algorithm usually applied to classification tasks. It splits a training sample dataset into homogeneous groups/subsets based on the most significant of all the attributes.
Supervised machine learning — a type of machine learning algorithm that trains a model to find patterns in the relationship between input variables (features, A) and output variable (target value, B): B = f(A). The goal of SML is to train this model on a sample of the data so that, when offered, the out-of-sample data the algorithm could be able to predict the target value precisely, based on the features set offered. The training dataset represents the teacher looking after the learning process. The training is considered successful and terminates when the algorithm achieves an acceptable performance quality.
Feature (or attribute, or input variable) — a characteristic of a separate data entry used in analysis. For our study and this blog post, features are the alleged ranking factors.
Binary classification — a type of classification tasks, that falls into supervised learning category. The goal of this task is to predict a target value (=class) for each data entry, and for binary classification, it can be either 1 or 0 only.
Using the Random Forest Algorithm For the Ranking Factors Study
The Random Forest algorithm was developed by Leo Breiman and Adele Cutler in the mid-1990s. It hasn’t undergone any major changes since then, which proves its high quality and universality: it is used for classification, regression, clustering, feature selection and other tasks.
Although the Random Forest algorithm is not very well known to the general public, we picked it for a number of good reasons:
It is one of the most popular machine learning algorithms, that features unexcelled accuracy. Its first and foremost application is ranking the importance of variables (and its nature is perfect for this task — we’ll cover this later in this post), so it seemed an obvious choice.
The algorithm treats data in a certain way that minimizes errors:
The random subspace method offers each learner random samples of features, not all of them. This guarantees that the learner won’t be overly focused on a pre-defined set of features and won’t make biased decisions about an out-of-sample dataset.
The bagging or bootstrap aggregating method also improves precision. Its main point is offering learners not a whole dataset, but random samples of data.
Given that we do not have a single decision tree, but rather a whole forest of hundreds of trees, we can be sure that each feature and each pair of domains will be analyzed approximately the same number of times. Therefore, the Random Forest method is stable and operates with minimum errors.
The Pairwise Approach: Pre-Processing Input Data
We have decided to base our study on a set of 600,000 keywords from the worldwide database (US, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and others), the URL position data for top 20 search results, and a list of alleged ranking factors. As we were not going to use correlation analysis, we had to conduct binary classification prior to applying the machine learning algorithm to it. This task was implemented with the Pairwise approach — one of the most popular machine-learned ranking methods used, among others, by Microsoft in its research projects.
The Pairwise approach implies that instead of examining an entire dataset, each SERP is studied individually – we compare all possible pairs of URLs (the first result on the page with the fifth, the seventh result with the second, etc.) in regards to each feature. Each pair is assigned a set of absolute values, where each value is a quotient after dividing the feature value for the first URL by the feature value for the second URL. On top of that, each pair is also assigned a target value that indicates whether the first URL is positioned higher than the second one on the SERP (target value = 1) or lower (target value = 0).
Procedure outcomes:
Each URL pair receives a set of quotients for each feature and a target value of either 1 or 0. This variety of numbers will be used as a training dataset for the decision trees.
We are now able to make statistical observations that certain features values and their combinations tend to result in a higher SERP position for a URL. This allows us to build a hypothesis about the importance of certain features and make a forecast about whether a certain set of feature values will lead to higher rankings.
Growing the Decision Tree Ensemble: Supervised Learning
The dataset we received after the previous step is absolutely universal and can be used for any machine learning algorithm. Our preferred choice was Random Forest, an ensemble of decision trees.
Before the trees can make any reasonable decisions, they have to train — this is when the supervised machine learning takes place. To make sure the training is done correctly and unbiased decisions about the main data set are made, the bagging and random subspace methods are used.
Bagging is the process of creating a training dataset by sampling with replacement. Let’s say we have X lines of data. According to bagging principles, we are going to create a training dataset for each decision tree, and this set will have the same number of X lines. However, these sample sets will be populated randomly and with replacement — so it will include only approximately two-thirds of the original X lines, and there will be value duplicates. About one-third of the original values remain untouched and will be used once the learning is over.
We did the similar thing for the features using the random subspace method — the decision trees were trained on random samples of features instead of the entire feature set.
Not a single tree uses the whole dataset and the whole list of features. But having a forest of multiple trees allows us to say that every value and every feature are very likely to be used approximately the same amount of times.
Growing the Forest
Each decision tree repetitively partitions the training sample dataset based on the most important variable and does so until each subset consists of homogeneous data entries. The tree scans the whole training dataset and chooses the most important feature and its precise value, which becomes a kind of a pivot point (node) and splits the data into two groups. For the one group, the condition chosen above is true; for the other one — false (YES and NO branches). All final subgroups (node leaves) receive an average target value based on the target values of the URL pairs that were placed into a certain subgroup.
Since the trees use the sample dataset to grow, they learn while growing. Their learning is considered successful and high-quality when a target percentage of correctly guessed target values is achieved.
Once the whole ensemble of trees is grown and trained, the magic begins — the trees are now allowed to process the out-of-sample data (about one-third of the original dataset). A URL pair is offered to a tree only if it hasn’t encountered the same pair during training. This means that a URL pair is not offered to 100 percent of the trees in the forest. Then, voting takes place: for each pair of URLs, a tree gives its verdict, aka the probability of one URL taking a higher position in the SERP compared to the second one. The same action is taken by all other trees that meet the ‘haven’t seen this URL pair before’ requirement, and in the end, each URL pair gets a set of probability values. Then all the received probabilities are averaged. Now there is enough data for the next step.
Estimating Attribute Importance with Random Forest
Random Forest produces extremely credible results when it comes to attributing importance estimation. The assessment is conducted as follows:
The attribute values are mixed up across all URL pairs, and these updated sets of values are offered to the algorithm.
Any changes in the algorithm’s quality or stability are measured (whether the percentage of correctly guessed target values remains the same or not).
Then, based on the values received, conclusions can be made:
If the algorithm’s quality drops significantly, the attribute is important. Wherein the heavier is the slump in quality, the more important the attribute is.
If the algorithm’s quality remains the same, then the attribute is of minor importance.
The procedure is repeated for all the attributes. As a result, a rating of the most important ranking factors is obtained.
Why We Think Correlation Analysis is Bad for Ranking Factors Studies
We intentionally abandoned the general practice of using correlation analysis, and we have still received quite a few comments like “Correlation doesn’t mean causation,” “Those don’t look like ranking factors, but more like correlations.” Therefore we feel this point deserves a separate paragraph.
First and foremost, we would like to stress again that the initial dataset used for the study is a set of highly changeable values. Just to remind you that we examined not one, but 600,000 SERPs. Each SERP is characterized by its own average attribute value, and this uniqueness is completely disregarded in the process of correlation analysis. That being said, we believe that each SERP should be treated separately and with respect to its originality.
Correlation analysis gives reliable results only when examining the relationship between two variables (for example, the impact of the number of backlinks on a SERP position). “Does this particular factor influence position?” — this question can be answered quite precisely since the only impacting variable is involved. But are we in a position to study each factor in isolation? Probably not, as we all know that there is a whole bunch of factors that influence a URL position in a SERP.
Another quality criterion for correlation analysis is the variety of the received correlation ratios. For example, if there is a lineup of correlation ratios like (-1, 0.3 and 0.8), then it is pretty fair to say that there is one parameter that is more important than others. The closer the ratio’s absolute value, or modulus, is to one, the stronger the correlation. If the ratio’s modulus is under 0.3, such a correlation can be disregarded — the dependency between the two variables, in this case, is too weak to make any trustworthy conclusions. For all the factors we analyzed, the correlation ratio was under 0.3, so we had to shed this method.
One more reason to dismiss this analysis method was the high sensitivity of the correlation value to outliers and noises, and the data for various keywords suggests a lot of them. If one extra data entry is added to the dataset, the correlation ratio changes immediately. Hence this metric can’t be viable in the case of multiple variables, e.g. in a ranking factors study, and can even lead to incorrect deductions.
Coming down to the final curtain, it is hard to believe that one or two factors with a correlation ratio modulus so close to one exist — if this were true, anyone could easily hack Google’s algorithms, and we would all be in position 1!
Frequently Asked Questions
Although we tried to answer most of the frequently raised questions above, here are some more for the more curious readers.
Where the study dataset comes from? Is it SEMrush data?
The traffic and user behavior data within our dataset is the anonymized clickstream data that comes from third party data providers. The data is accumulated from the behavior of over 100 million real internet users, and over a hundred different apps and browser extensions are used to collect it.
Why didn’t we use artificial neural networks (ANNs)?
Although artificial neural networks are perfect for tasks with a large number of variables, e.g. image recognition (where each pixel is a variable), they produce results that are difficult to interpret and don’t allow you to compare the weight of each factor. Besides, ANNs require a massive dataset and a huge number of features to produce reliable results, and the input data we had collected didn’t match this description.
Unlike Random Forest, where each decision tree votes independently and thus a high level of reliability is guaranteed, neural networks process data in one pot. There is nothing to indicate that using ANNs for this study would result in more accurate results.
Our main requirements for a research method were stability and the ability to identify the importance of the factors. That being said, Random Forest was a perfect fit for our task, which is proven by numerous ranking tasks of a similar nature, also implemented with the help of this algorithm.
Why are website visits the most important Google ranking factor?
Hands down, this was probably the most controversial takeaway of our study. When we saw the results of our analysis, we were equally surprised. At the same time, our algorithm was trained on a solid scope of data, so we decided to double-check the facts. We excluded the organic and paid search data, as well as social and referral traffic, and taken into account only the direct traffic, and the results were pretty much the same — the position distribution remained unchanged (the graphs on pp. 40-41 of the study illustrate this point).
To us, this finding makes perfect sense and confirms that Google prioritizes domains with more authority, as described in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Although it may seem that domain authority is just a lame excuse and a very vague and ephemeral concept, these guidelines dispel this myth completely. So, back in 2015 Google introduced this handbook to help estimate website quality and “reflect what Google thinks search users want.”
The handbook lists E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, as an important webpage-quality indicator. Main content quality and amount, website information (i.e. who is responsible for the website), and website reputation all influence the E-A-T of a website. We suggest thinking of it in the following way: if a URL ranks in the top 10, by default, it contains content that is relevant to a user search query.
But to distribute the places between these ten leaders, Google starts to count the additional parameters. We all know that there is a whole team of search quality raters behind the scenes, which is responsible for training the Google’s search algorithms and improving search results’ relevance. As advised by Google Quality Evaluator Guidelines, raters should give priority to the high-quality pages and teach the algos to do so as well. So, the ranking algorithm is trained to assign a higher position to pages that belong to trusted and highly authoritative domains, and we think this may be the reason behind the data we received for direct traffic and for its importance as a signal. For more information, check out our EAT and YMYL: New Google Search Guidelines Acronyms of Quality Content blog post.
Here’s more: at the recent SMX East conference, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that ‘how people perceive your site will affect your business.’ And although this, according to Illyes, does not necessarily affect how Google ranks your site, it still seems important to invest in earning users’ loyalty: happy users = happy Google.
The Google algorithm is like a human. It looks at brand sentiment and online reputation to understand your website better. @methode#SMX
What does this mean to you again? Well, brand awareness (estimated, among other things, by your number of direct website visits) strongly affects your rankings and deserves your putting effort into it on par with SEO.
Difference in Ranking Factors Impact on a URL vs a Domain
As you may have spotted, every graph from our study shows a noticeable spike for the second position. We promised to have a closer look at this deviation and thus added a new dimension to our study. The second edition covers the impact of the three most important factors (direct website visits, time on site and the number of referring domains) on the rankings of a particular URL, rather than just the domain that it resides on.
One would assume that the websites on the first position are the most optimized, and yet we saw that every trend line showed a drop on the first position.
We connected this deviation with branded keyword search queries. A domain will probably take the first position in the SERP for any search query that contains its branded keywords. And despite how well a website is optimized, it will rank number one anyway, so it has nothing to do with SEO efforts. This explains why ranking factors affect a SERP’s second position more than the first one.
To prove this, we decided to look at our data from a new angle: we investigated how the ranking factors impact single URLs that appear on the SERP. For each factor, we built separate graphs showing the distribution of URLs and domains across the first 10 SERP positions (please see pp. 50-54). Although the study includes graphs only for the top three most influential factors, the tendency that we discovered persists for other factors as well.
What does this mean to you as a marketer? When a domain is ranking for a branded keyword, many factors lose their influence. However when optimizing for non-branded keywords, keep in mind that the analyzed ranking factors have more influence on the positions of the particular URL than on the domain on which it resides. That means that the rankings of a specific page are more sensitive to on-page optimization, link-building efforts and other optimization techniques.
Conclusion: How to Use the SEMrush Ranking Factors Study
There is no guarantee that, if you improve your website’s metrics for any of the above factors, your pages will start to rank higher. We conducted a very thorough study that allowed us to draw reliable conclusions about the importance of these 17 factors to ranking higher on Google SERPs. Yet, this is just a reverse-engineering job well done, not a universal action plan — and this is what each and every ranking factors study is about. No one but Google knows all the secrets. However, here is a workflow that we suggest for dealing with our research:
Step 1. Understand which keywords you rank for — do they belong to low, medium or high search volume groups?
Step 2. Benchmark yourself against the competition: take a closer look at the methods they use to hit top 10 and at their metrics — Do they have a large scope of backlinks? Are their domains secured with HTTPS?
Step 3. Using this study, pick and start implementing the optimization techniques that will yield the best results based on your keywords and the competition level on SERPs.
Once again, we encourage you to take a closer look at our study, reconsider the E-A-T concept and get yourself a good, fact-based SEO strategy!
What makes your rankings go up when you’re done with the on-page SEO?
How To Tell If My Agency Is Using Black Hat Techniques
There are dozens of black hat techniques that are still in use today. This article is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of those techniques; instead, it is meant to discuss the techniques that are most likely to be used by an agency and to help you, the customer, determine whether your agency is using them.
We will discuss what to look for on your website, what to look for off-site, and what questions you can ask your agency to get some inside details about what is happening with your SEO campaign. We will not conduct any technical analysis and instead focus on what the everyday person can determine on their own.
CHECK YOUR OWN WEBSITE
The most common on-site black hat techniques:
Duplicate Content – Agencies won’t be using duplicate content to cheat Google, but they might use duplicate content to cut costs. It is also possible that their contract writer is cheating them by sending the same piece of content to multiple clients.
This is a pretty easy check — just run your website through Copyscape. It costs five cents per page, which can add up. You can also do a batch search if you want to check your entire site in one scan.
Over-Optimization – This is caused by an over-aggressive SEO strategy by putting your ‘money’ keywords every place they can fit them in.
Read through your own content. Do the internal links (links that go to other pages on your website) seem to be phrased to help guide the reader to other pages that might help them, or are the links there specifically to enhance SEO? Do all of the internal links use rich anchor text? (Example: Personal Injury Lawyer, Orthopedic Doctor, ‘Any Primary Keyword’)
Check your primary product/service pages to see if the primary keyword for that page is used everywhere it possibly can be. Is the exact keyword in the URL address, the page title, the sub-headers, in the image alt-tags, and twenty more times throughout the main content? That is overdoing it.
Abuse of Schema – Changing the way your website is presented in the SERPs can do magical things. But you have to be sure that all of the schema you use is applicable to your website.
Choose a few of your most important top-level pages and insert the URL into Google’s Schema Tool. This will produce a list of schema markup that is present on that page. Do these markups make sense? Most markups have logical names, which means you should be able to tell if they belong or not. You also want to ensure that you aren’t fabricating information. For instance, you should not have a review markup if you don’t have any reviews.
CHECK WEBSITES LINKING TO YOURS
The most common off-site black hat techniques:
Buying Links – There are companies whose purpose is to sell links. Sometimes these companies sell links on websites they own, and sometimes the company will do manual outreach to get a link on a website they do not own. Often, you can pick from a list of websites like a menu, paying different prices for different links.
Link Exchanges – These used to be more popular before Google caught on. The basic premise is that two websites agree to post a link to each other. This is often done through the exchange of a guest blog post.
Private Blog Networks – These are websites that are built for the sole purpose of generating links, even though they look like real websites. Often, these websites will have banner ads, blog comments, social profiles, and anything else to make them look legitimate.
To a certain extent, you are at the mercy of your agency. None of the above are particularly easy to uncover. Aside from just asking your agency, the best thing you can do is look at your link profile and gauge for quality. Here is an easy way to find out what sites are linking to yours so that you can apply ‘everyday commonsense’ to gauge your website’s quality.
DISCLAIMER: Most links available to small businesses are from other small businesses or small blogs. The below is not an end-all-be-all answer. It is meant to allow you to ask your agency educated questions.
Open an internet browser.
You can either search Google for ‘Search Console’ or just click this link to go directly there.
Log into Search Console with the Google account that has administrative access.
If you don’t have admin access, ask your agency to make you an owner of all of your Google services. This is something that you should do, regardless.
You might see multiple websites listed; select the website you want to investigate. You might see the website listed more than once, in which case you will need to click through to find out which one actually has data.
On the left, click ‘Search Traffic.’
In the drop-down under ‘Search Traffic,’ click ‘Links To Your Site.’
You should see two columns in the middle of your screen. The left column should be titled ‘Who links the most,’ and there should be a link at the bottom of that column called ‘More>>’ — click that.
This will provide a list of every website that links to yours.
You could click through to the next level and evaluate every single link coming into your website. But that would likely be too time-consuming for you and you would be better off taking a more top-level look at your link profile. Here is what I suggest:
Scan through the list of websites in Search Console and create your own list of any that seem ‘off.’
Start to visit each of the websites that are on your list.
If the website ends up being a directory, just ignore it and move onto the next.
Ask yourself the following questions about each website:
Does the website have a clear audience and purpose?
Read the content. Is it well written or does it look like it was written by someone who doesn’t speak your native language?
If you want to go one step further, you can visit WhoIs and input each of the websites you are suspicious of. This will tell you who owns the website.
Is the information blocked or private? This will usually show the domain registrar as the owner, such as Go Daddy.
Are many of the websites owned by the same person?
ASK YOUR AGENCY
Sometimes you just need to ask your agency what they are up to. They will likely open a discussion about strategy. Here are some questions you should ask that might reveal what your SEO looks like behind the scenes:
Have any of our links come from some of your other clients? (Link Exchanges)
Have any of our links come from websites that you own or control? (PBNs or Link Exchanges)
Do you ever directly pay for a link? (Buying Links or PBNs)
How aggressive are you with on-site optimization?
Every industry, market, and company is unique. Your agency may have a good reason for using some combination of the above, but you deserve to know those reasons. We believe that you should have some idea about what is going on behind the scenes of your SEO campaign. Taking an active interest in the success of your marketing campaign generally, produces positive results.
How To Use Emoticons, Memes and GIFs In Social Media Marketing Without Embarrassing Yourself
One of the toughest tasks for many marketers is the constant need to track, test and improve upon current trends in the industry. It is probably one of the main reasons why you are reading this article right now.
Today, we will look at emoticons, memes, and GIFs and try to deduce if they are worth being a part of your social media marketing efforts as well as teach you a thing or two that will help you use these graphics without embarrassing yourself.
While these “visual expressions” have been around since we were capable of sending first emails, we have seen a significant rise in their usage for marketing purposes only in the last couple of years. The main reason for that is actually quite simple; brands and businesses noticed that this can be a great way to connect and engage with millennials. Additionally, these graphics are a form of visual content, and social media craves visual content.
But enough of my rambling, let’s review how can you take advantage of them and what you should pay special attention to since there are many traps to fall into.
Emoticons
If there is one thing on this list that I shouldn’t have to clarify it is definitely emoticons. We use them in text messages, emails, tweets and every other message we leave on our social media channels.
I mean, a few months back, we had The Emoji Movie where Patrick Stewart lent his voice to the poop emoji. That should speak enough about their popularity.
How can you use them:
Distinguish your brand by designing your own emojis.
Use them to increase engagement on your social media updates (e.g., ask your audience to vote on something through the use of emoji).
Respond to comments and tweets with emojis to communicate a specific emotion.
Use them to tell a story (like McDonald’s did in the example below).
Emojis aren’t bound by language barriers so they can be used to reach a wider audience without the need for translation.
Things to keep in mind:
Don’t be overly complicated. The message you are trying to convey has to be easy to understand (look at the Deadpool and Chevrolet examples below). Not everyone has the patience to decipher your messages.
Don’t go overboard. Too many emojis tend to be distracting and can move the focus away from the message you want to send. In the worst case scenario, your audience may even find it annoying.
Make sure you know what the emoji expresses. Turn to Emojipedia – an emoji dictionary that also features latest news and development from the emoji world (yeah, you read that right).
Avoid using emojis in serious situations. Emoticons are inherently fun, cheeky, and informal and as such should be avoided when dealing with serious issues or communicating in strictly formal environments.
Good example #1 – McDonald’s Good Times Campaign
McDonald’s used emoticons to tell a story in a way that associates their brand with positive things. It is often used in their tweets. Cool, simple, and effective.
Good example #2 – Deadpool Billboards
These billboards caught the attention of many fans and pictures like the one above got a lot of shares on different social channels. We can’t measure how much overall impact this had on the moviegoers, but the fact remains that Deadpool is the highest grossing R-rated movie of all times.
Good example #3 – #EndageredEmoji
World Wide Fund For Nature started the #EndageredEmoji Twitter campaign to raise the awareness about endangered animals and hopefully raise some funds that will help to save them from extinction.
Bad example #1 – #ChevyGoesEmoji
Chevrolet decided to write a press release and asked their audience to decode it. While the campaign did create a lot of buzz, the overwhelming number of dislikes proves they tried to be too clever.
I’m sorry Chevrolet, it had to be done 🙂
Memes
Memes are extremely versatile. They can come in the form of an image, a video, a GIF, a text (a phrase) or a combination of all of the above. Their origin is often related to a popular cultural reference. Memes are meant to be funny and heavily rely on sarcasm.
People always try to find a new way to use them, so it is not rare to come across the same meme with a bunch of slight variations.
How to use them:
Memes can be a perfect addition to your humor-based campaign.
Use of memes will increase engagement and shareability of your content.
Target a specific group of people who understand the context to make a stronger connection with them.
Memes can provide a way to answer both positive and negative comments and feedback on social media.
Things to keep in mind:
Memes often have a short life-span. The more popular a meme is, the faster it becomes irrelevant and old. Most likely because people get bored seeing it all the time.
Make sure you are using them correctly. You need to follow “meme trends” if you want to use them successfully. Missing the true intention of a joke can set you up for a tsunami of embarrassment. KnowYourMeme is a great resource to inform yourself on their meaning and connotations behind a particular meme.
Do not try too hard. If you overuse them, your audience might get the feeling that you are trying too hard to capitalize on a trend which could make them avoid your brand.
Content first, memes second. Memes are here to grab attention and enhance your content. They can’t replace the content itself.
Good example #1 – Jimmy John’s Twitter posts
A perfect example of using a “You vs. the guy…” meme in the right context to promote your product.
Good example #2 – #OscarNomNoms by Seamless
Seamless (online food delivery company) used 2014 Academy award nomination to create their own memes and start the hashtag OscarNomNoms creating Oscar film spoof posters.
Bad example #1 – Whataburger
A great example of how to use a meme in the wrong way. This is a Confession Bear meme people use to express controversial opinions and taboo behaviors. Wanting a burger definitely, doesn’t fit into that category and their followers were quick to notice that.
Bad example #2 – FAFSA
This was a tweet from the Federal College Financial Aid that received a lot of backlash from their followers who thought that not being able to afford college isn’t particularly funny. They deleted the tweet and issued an apology calling it an “ill-conceived attempt at reaching students through social media.”
GIFs
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. In laic terms, you have a bunch of pictures crammed together into one file that is shown in succession which results in animation.
We love GIFs and memes so much that we even created a page cleverly named things to whine about where we like to share memes in the form of a GIF and channel our daily frustrations as content marketers in a productive direction.
You can use GIFs to:
Spice things up by creating an animated version of your logo.
Showcase your product or service (like Wendy’s often does on their Facebook page).
Drive traffic to your blog posts (follow the example of General Electric).
Involve your followers by asking them to tag a friend that can relate to a GIF you posted or ask them to give you feedback in the form of a GIF (here is a great example from FC Arsenal).
Reply to comments in a witty manner.
Tell a story or describe a process.
Animate data you can share across your social media channels (a great example from Mashable).
GIFs should generally be short (up to 10 seconds or so). They are meant to be consumed quickly.
Quality is important. GIFs obviously aren’t suited to be in Full HD format, but if you can count the number of pixels on the screen, you may want to look for one that has a better quality.
Beware of copyright issues. Be sure you are following “fair use” when you are creating a GIF from the material you don’t own.
Choose your hosting carefully. GIFs don’t always play nice, so twitching, freezing, and refusing to load are not rare issues. Choose reliable sites to host your GIFs like Giphy or Imgur.
Size does matter. Facebook recommends that GIF files should be up to 8MB and that text should be less than 20% of the image.
Opt for subtle motions. GIFs have a lot of trouble animating fast motions so it is better to avoid it whenever you can.
Since we linked to many examples already, this time we will skip showing of additional examples. Also, to be honest, it is pretty hard to find the original GIFs for these examples and giving screenshots just doesn’t fit into this section.
Context Is Everything
There is a time and place for everything. A stand-up comedian can joke about anything while he is on the stage. You, on the other hand, don’t have that luxury.
Seeing people get showered with ice cold water may seem silly at first, but when you understand that they are trying to raise awareness about a disease called ALS, suddenly, things make more sense.
That is why context is so crucial.
You need to make sure that your audience is also familiar with the context you are using a particular meme/emoticon in. If you use a meme to brag about something you won, but your audience doesn’t know you won something, they may get the wrong impression.
In short, always:
Make sure the situation is appropriate.
Know in which context the emoticon/meme should be used.
Make sure the audience knows what are you referring to.
Beware of Things Going Viral
All of these graphics became popular because they are fun and easy to use, fast to consume, and easy to share.
These characteristics help them to go viral which could also help your comment or post to go viral too. The threat lurking behind the corner is that you could get attention for the wrong reasons. While you can argue that there isn’t such a thing as negative publicity, I really doubt you would consciously expose your brand to ridicule just to gain some attention.
With sites like Reddit around, if something actually goes viral, it sometimes results in a temporary shut down of your website, as the server can’t handle so many requests. This is known as the Digg effect.
While this is highly unlikely to happen, I thought it was interesting information to share 🙂
Know Your Audience
As with any piece of content that leaves your workshop to engage your current and potential customers, you first need to make sure you know your target audience.
While it is hard to do any damage with a restrained use of emoticons, memes are a different story.
Keep in mind that memes attract young adults that like to spend a lot of time on the internet.
If your audience doesn’t consist of that demographic, there is no point in using them. You will just aggravate your audience as they will not understand what you’re doing.
Also, keep in mind that using memes and GIFs will affect your brand image. If you want to be seen as traditional, serious, professional, etc., you may want to avoid using them completely.
Safety In Moderation
While these graphics may be addictive and fun to use, there can be too much of a good thing. If you don’t believe me, just look at what his love of explosions did to Michael Bay.
While I did mention this couple of times already, I will repeat it again – don’t overuse these elements. They can be addictive when you get the hang of how to use them properly, but they will lose its effectiveness if they are popping out of your every post and comment.
Additionally, the more you use them, the higher the chance you will make a mistake and set yourself up for a joke.
If You Make A Mistake, Play It Cool
If you find yourself in a situation where you have messed up, it is best to own up to your mistake. Trying to find an excuse will just push you further down the hole.
If you, for example, use a meme in a completely wrong context and people start to point that out in the comments, the worst thing you could do is try to get out of it by using another meme. This option is only viable if you really know what you are doing. And if you used a meme wrongly in the first place, there is a decent chance you could do it again.
To avoid being on the lists such as “Biggest Social Media Fails of 2017”, consult with a colleague that is well versed in “meme usage” or just leave the comment section to run its course. One or two mistakes won’t break your social media marketing strategy, but a constant misuse of emoticons, memes, and GIFs could have a serious negative impact.
Off You Go
Smiley faces, funny GIFs, and perfectly timed memes are waiting to boost your social media engagement. The power is in your hands, use it wisely.
SEO Questions to Answer Before the Year Ends #semrushchat
Last week’s special edition #SEMrushchat was dedicated to SEO questions that marketers need to answer before the end of 2017. While at Pubcon in Las Vegas, the SEMrush team had the chance to speak to many experts about backlinks, “nofollow” attribute, AMP, and other SEO topics that digital marketers deal with every day. Here are some insights into the world of SEO from experts like Marie Haynes, Patrick Stox, Aleyda Solis, Jim Stewart, Reva Minkoff, and more:
Q1. Would you add “nofollow” attribute to low authority sites, even if you trust the site’s content and quality?
The nofollow tag enables webmasters to point out some of their links that search engines shouldn’t be counting. Basically, this element is a notice sign for Google and other search engines that says “don’t count this link.” By using this attribute, you can ensure that your nofollow links will not pass PageRank to another page. Therefore, Google will not penalize you for linking out too much or linking to a low-quality site.
Is it worth adding the nofollow attribute to links that point to a low-authority site, even if you trust the site’s content? Our chat participants believe that low quality doesn’t necessarily mean bad content. In fact, there’s no reason to nofollow any links, because even a low-authority site can be a good source of information and it can grow into a high-authority site in the future.
If the content on the site that the link is pointing to is relevant to your topic and can benefit your readers, there is no use in adding nofollow. Imagine you are reading a post on one of the blogs that you visit on a regular basis and you see a link in the post and you don’t know whether or not the author has followed this link, the only thing you probably care about is if it’s relevant to the content you’re reading at the moment. The author thought it was worth putting the link on their site, so therefore the link must be worth clicking.
A1 as far as the site is reputed (as in content quality) I wouldn’t mind showing Google the same I show to my readers (I’ll dofollow it) #SEMrushchat
You should always pay attention to whether or not a link is relevant and helpful to your site visitors. If it can provide some value to them, you don’t really need to add the nofollow element. After all, if the site is questionable and shady, you shouldn’t be linking to it at all.
A1. ‘Follow-ness’ should be based on users. Is it relevant, helpful and interesting for the user in this context? If not – why’s it there anyway? #semrushchat
A1. @Marie_Haynes says there are only a few reasons to “nofollow” a link: 1. If it’s an untrustworthy site 2. If it is linking to my competitors sites and I didn’t want to give them extra page rank from link. Many people are over using “no follow”. #semrushchatpic.twitter.com/qx0F5ZxKCS
Q2. How do you incorporate user intent into your keyword strategy? How important are longtail keywords for user intent?
User intent has been a buzzword in the SEO community, however, it is still ignored by many website owners. User intent should inform the direction of your content strategy, it is the key to improving your SEO campaign and it gives you the information that users are trying to find when they type in a particular search query.
A2) User intent should play a huge role in KW research. Research long tail searches and ensure your content answers the ? #semrushchat
To make sure, you incorporate user intent in your keyword strategy, consider using these four tips:
1. Keep in Mind Different Types of User Intent
The intent is categorized into three groups: informational, navigational, and transactional. These intent types can help you to identify your audience persona and which stage your target users are in your funnel. Tailoring your content to one of these categories is vital. In order to do so, you need to look at which keywords your audience is using in their search queries and keep in mind that some queries have different meanings and intents. Bill Slawski gave an example of how “Saturn” is both the name of a planet and the make of a car.
A2: Good-old segmentation of keywords into “informational”, “navigational”, “transactional” and “locational” keywords, and through defining the key micro-moments. Quicker wins can be found through targeting long-tail searches, which have higher commercial intent. #semrushchat
Long-tail keywords are highly targeted search phrases that are designed to serve specific user intent. The good thing about these keywords is that they have low competition, but tend to have high conversion rates. Neil Patel explains good conversions of long tails by the fact that users who type these descriptive key phrases, i.e. long-tail keywords, are usually more qualified than those who type short phrases. By discovering long-tail keywords and building your content around them you can incorporate user intent into your strategy.
A2 – Longtail keywords are precious. They best describe the user intent and shall as such definitely be incorporated into the website. How? By dedicating a blog post specially around these specific keywords #SEMRushChat
When searching for long-tail keywords, organize them by topic, so you can find the best place for them in your content. If you already have an existing blog post or article on this specific topic, you can insert your new long-tail phrases into them.
a2: HOWEVER – because of their uniqueness, don’t look at long-tail as a bag of words to optimize for – optimize for the TOPIC #semrushchat
When creating content that you want to rank for specific keywords, it can be hard for users to find the exact information they were looking for. Fix this by using topic clusters; choose the broad topics you want to rank for and then craft your content based on specific keywords related to the specific topics.
4. Search for An Emotional “Hook”
When optimizing for topics, value becomes even more important than ever before. It is important to serve a particular function for your audience and give them answers and solutions they need in a certain situation. Beyond that, you should create an emotional hook because people are driven by emotions. Think which keywords can help you to evoke your audience’s emotions, while keeping user intent in mind.
A2 – I like to think about the emotional drivers behind that keyword and make sure that the meta title and description reflect their emotional needs. Works a treat! #semrushchat
Make sure to use long-tail keywords in your content strategy to address the specific user intent and optimize your copy for particular niche-based topics.
Q3. Is it better to publish new content regularly or release one evergreen piece quarterly? Why?
It can be hard to find the right balance between the need for new content that’s posted regularly and evergreen copy that’s published quarterly. Even though time-sensitive content won’t be relevant endlessly, it provides a few strong benefits and it helps you rank well in search engines and drive traffic to your website. It also allows you to build up your brand, keep your audience engaged, and boost your credentials.
A3: Of course the regular content publication is the preferred way. Reason: It keeps the User Engaged + it keeps the crawler comin’. Better Indexation. Increase in Internal Links. Website remains Fresh, etc. Let me think some more… #SEMRushChat
On the other hand, evergreen content is always fresh. It stays relevant years after it was written, so your site visitors can gain value from it over and over again. Evergreen copy keeps your website applicable for the long-run and builds your reputation as an authority in your niche.
A3. Depends on the vertical….
..but evergreen pieces are the way to go, IMO.
Far more fun to create, but also strong link earners too (if done right)#SEMrushchat
Both of these content types are strategically important to your website and blog and if you can provide new real-time posts along with your evergreen pieces of content, you have a higher chance of being noticed and followed. ”If I was starting a new blog today, I’d create a handful of evergreen pieces, publish them, then promote them with smaller content on a weekly or monthly basis throughout the rest of the year,” tweeted Dale Davies – @daledavies_me.
A3 Do both if you can. At The Penny Hoarder, we produce timely newsy posts, longer articles and, now, larger content pieces (that require months of work + colab from depts., so ~1/quarter). Both have their merits. #semrushchat
Nevertheless, some of our chat participants remarked that the point is not how often you post your content, but how quality and relevant it is.
A3: I think it’s best to produce thoughtful, data-driven content as often as it makes sense to publish it for your industry/target market. #semrushchat
A3. #Blogging is a great way to keep users engaged and get #google to crawl your site. However, it needs to be relevant to users otherwise it will be a waste of time #semrushchat
A good balance between new and evergreen content will help you to keep your users engaged and build credibility and trust with your audience.
Q4. Links are important for SEO. What is the top white hat technique you’ve used for a client/your own website to get high-quality links?
Building relevant inbound links to your website can be hard and time-consuming. Nevertheless, it’s one of the sustainable and long-term ways to stay on top of Google search rankings. Our chat participants shared their top white hat techniques for earning high-quality backlinks:
Perform research and create high-quality content
One of the most popular tips is to produce high-quality content that contains real value. If you create great copy that people naturally want to share, you can successfully generate organic links. But before you start writing a new piece of content, you have to invest your time in a thorough research and make sure that your topic is valuable to your potential readers. Matthew Barby suggests performing competitive research every week or month to find new opportunities to take advantage of while they are still fresh.
A4: The most important part of getting high-quality links is creating high-quality content. Before creating content, make sure there are sites that will find your content valuable. Don’t create content without doing your research first. #semrushchat
By amplifying your blog post with data, you can make your story more meaningful and insightful and then visualize your findings to make it more link-worthy. Felix Tarcomnicu points out that visuals, graphs, and infographics are still a powerful tool for attracting links. He suggests reinforcing your copy with facts and a fabulous design.
A4: Informative content with lots of data, like stats, infographics, how-tos. Anything benefitial to your audience, that can be distributed and shared organically. #SEMRushChat
Link building is just another term for relationship building. The best link has always been a link from a related, high-authority site and the most effective way to earn links from a high-quality site is to build a natural relationship with an influential person who manages it. Most relationships take time to develop, so you need to first identify influencers in your niche and connect with them, share and comment on their content, and deliver value to them by introducing them to people within your network and/or creating content together.
A4 Build relationships. Be sincere, not smarmy. Quality sites that prioritize user experience want to lead their readers to the best resources. #semrushchat
If you are using a good product or service that you find helpful, you can provide your review — a free testimonial that the company can post on its website. To show that you are a real person or brand, this company would likely to add a link back to your site on their web pages. This is where backlinks make a move.
A4. I have got links for a client by asking them to give testimonials to their vendors that were placed on their vendor websites. #semrushchat
What other powerful ways do you use to earn high-quality backlinks? Let us know in the comments!
Q5. What is the future of AMP and how is it going to transform the SERPs in 2018?
Over the past 12 months, there has been a ton of hype in the SEO world around the AMP project led by Google. Here are some of our chat participants’ prediction about the future of AMP and how it is going to change the SERPs:
A5: The future of AMP is accelerated pages for desktop browsers, and light weight pages served from Google for any user device. #SEMRushChat
A5. #AMP is a gamechanger for publishers, but ensure you’re using a trusty AMP plugin or it could cause serious conflicts that negatively affect your site’s #SEO. #semrushchat
8 Key Tips for Improving Your Site’s User Experience
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.
Image 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:
Image 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.
How to Find Commercial Intent Based Keyword Phrases For (Almost) Any Niche
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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).
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.
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.
Image credit: https://vwo.com
Image credit: http://www.creativebloq.com
