Day: November 24, 2017

Search engine optimization likewise referred to as Search Engine Optimization is a subject covered by many individuals and also blog sites, its the process of making your web site look attractive to the internet search engine in the hope of acquiring a advantageous ranking for your targeted keyword. During my study I stumble upon several write-ups that offer some fantastic understandings to seo.

Below you can locate an short article from Kiss Metrics which I located to be extremely intriguing and also beneficial .

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

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

— Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush.

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

Commitment to Innovation

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

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

— Vitalii Obishchenko, Chief Product Officer at SEMrush

In 2017 we have:

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

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

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

Key Innovations Released in 2017

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

1.The Utmost Volatility Tracker – SEMrush Sensor

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

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

2. Expanded Mobile Keyword Database

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

3. Enhanced Site Audit Tool

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

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

4. Lean Cycle Workflow for Link Building

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

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

5. Focus on SERP Features

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

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

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

• Keyword Magic Tool shows SERP Features for designated keywords

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

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

6. Upgraded Keyword Magic Tool

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

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

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

Now it’s getting personal

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

Final Words

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

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

I wish you have enjoyed this short article on US Search Awards 2017: Tasting the Victory as “The Best SEO Software Suite” Then feel totally free to surf our other short articles, if you would certainly such as to watch more short articles on search engine optimization. We have many more curated short articles from Ahref as well as I wish you delight in reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Seo also referred to as Search Engine Optimization is a subject covered by numerous people and also blog sites, its the process of making your website appearance appealing to the internet search engine in the hope of gaining a advantageous ranking for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research study I find lots of short articles that provide some great understandings to search engine optimization.

Below you can find an post from Ahref which I located to be helpful as well as extremely fascinating . The write-up is labelled SEMrush Toolkit For Bloggers and you can discover it below

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

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool.

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

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool.

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

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

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

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

Keyword research

Tool to use: Keyword Magic Tool

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

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

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

Superpower features

Questions

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

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

Keyword match filters

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

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

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

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

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

Advanced filters

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

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

Topic research

Tool to use: Topic Research (coming soon)

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

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

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

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

Superpower features

Detailed cards

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

Mind Map

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

Post drafting

Tool to use: SEO Content Template

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

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

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

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

The ideas that you get from it include:

• The highest ranking pages for each keyword

• Semantically related keywords for your combination of keywords

• Potential backlink sources

• Text recommendations such as average readability and content length

• Meta tag requirements

Superpower features

Examples of keyword usage

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

Meta tag recommendations

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

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

SEO optimization

Tool to use: On Page SEO Checker

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

Don’t get discouraged!

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

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

Superpower features

Backlinks

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

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

Bulk analysis

Tool to use: Content Audit

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

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

• Titles

• Word count

• Shares in social networks

• Backlinks

• Latest traffic data from Google Analytics

• Actual search queries from Google Search Console

• Page status, etc.

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

Outreach and mentions tracking

Tool to use: Brand Monitoring

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

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

Superpower features

Backlink filter

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

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

Rank tracking

Tool to use: Position Tracking

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

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

Superpower features

SERP Features filter

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

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

Management

Tool to use: Marketing Calendar

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

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

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

Superpower features

Notifications

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

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

Google Drive integration

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Think about it the next time you feel like this.

If you would certainly such as to watch even more articles on search engine optimization then feel cost-free to surf our other articles. We have numerous more curated short articles from Kiss Metrics and I wish you enjoy reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

Seo also referred to as SEO is a subject covered by numerous people and also blog sites, its the process of making your internet site appearance appealing to the search engines in the hope of acquiring a special position for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research I stumble upon lots of short articles that offer some fantastic insights to search engine optimization.

Below you could find an article from Kiss Metrics which I found to be really interesting and helpful .

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

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

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

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

How to Increase Time Spent on Site

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

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

Consider This Example:

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

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

Tip 1 – Create Supplementary Content and Link To It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip 3 – Showcase Related Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Improve Page Speed (and Tackle Bounce Rate)

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

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

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

Some aspects that can help your website perform faster include:

Using a Content Delivery Network

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

Using a Good Hosting Provider

Image credit: Nate Shivar, shivarweb.com

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

Compressing Images

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

Image credit: imagerecycle.com

Leverage Browser Caching

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

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

Minify Resources

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

Image Credit: keycdn, cdn.keycdn.com

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

Image Credit: Cliff Crocker, walmartlabs.com

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

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

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

4 Simple Tips to Reduce Bounce Rate

Should You Worry About Your Content’s Bounce Rate?

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

In Conclusion

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

If you would certainly like to check out even more posts on search engine optimization then really feel complimentary to search our various other posts. We have many even more curated posts from Kiss Metrics as well as I wish you take pleasure in reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Search engine optimization also referred to as SEO is a subject covered by lots of people as well as blog sites, its the process of making your website appearance eye-catching to the online search engine in the hope of obtaining a special ranking for your targeted keyword. During my study I stumble upon many articles that give some terrific insights to search engine optimization.

Listed below you can find an write-up from Kiss Metrics which I found to be very fascinating as well as useful .

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

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

• Use the AIDA Model

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

• Avoid Selling

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

• Offer Value

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

• Employ CTAs That Make People Take Action

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

• Grab User’s Attention with the Right Images

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

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

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

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

• Align Your Goals with Your Campaigns

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

• Be Specific About Who You Are Targeting

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

• Target Users Who Already Like Your Page

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

• Use Split Testing Feature

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

• Boost Your Posts

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

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

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

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

• Make Sure Your Landing Page and Your Video Are Related

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

• Make an Impact in the First Seconds

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

• Choose the Right Thumbnail

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

• Use Subtitles

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

• Try Micro Conversions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Improve Your Landing Page

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

• Make Your Message Clear

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

• Provide a Strong CTA on Your Landing Page

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

• Is it compelling enough?

• Does it have a contrasting color to attract users?

• Is it’s placement effective?

• Is your CTA copy clear and self-explanatory?

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

• Focus on Your Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it for today!

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

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

I wish you have actually appreciated this post on The Art of Crafting Successful Facebook Ads #semrushchat Then really feel totally free to browse our various other articles, if you would certainly like to check out even more write-ups on search engine optimization. We have much more curated short articles from Ahref and also I wish you enjoy reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Search engine optimization likewise referred to as Search Engine Optimization is a subject covered by many individuals and also blogs, its the procedure of making your web site look attractive to the search engines in the hope of acquiring a preferential position for your targeted keyword. Throughout my research I come across lots of write-ups that give some fantastic understandings to search engine optimization.

Below you could discover an short article from Ahref which I located to be valuable as well as extremely fascinating . The article is titled On Page SEO checklist: Blogging for People and Search Engines as well as you can locate it below

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

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

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

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

On-Page SEO Checklist 

Title 

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

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

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

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

Related tools

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

URL

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

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

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

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

Related tools

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

Meta Description

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

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

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

Related tools

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

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

Portent – another SERP view generator.

Keywords and Semantically Related Words

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

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

Related Tools

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

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

H1…H3

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

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

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

Related tools

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

Video Content

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

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

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

Related Tools

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

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

Images

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

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

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

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

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

Related tools

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

Content length

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

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

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

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

Related tools

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

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

Readability

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

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

Related tools:

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

Readable checks the pasted or typed in text for readability.

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

Internal Links

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

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

Related tools

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

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

Social Sharing Buttons

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

Related Tools

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

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

Duplicate Content

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

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

Related Tools

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

Crawlability

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

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

Related tools

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

Page Loading Speed

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

Related tools

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

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

Mobile-Friendliness

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

Related tools

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

Markups

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

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

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

Related Tools:

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

If you would certainly such as to view more articles on search engine optimization then really feel cost-free to search our various other short articles. We have numerous more curated posts from Kiss Metrics as well as I hope you delight in reviewing them.

Read more……>click Here<

Search engine optimization likewise called SEO is a subject covered by lots of individuals and blog sites, its the process of making your web site look appealing to the internet search engine in the hope of acquiring a special position for your targeted keyword. During my study I discover lots of articles that offer some wonderful understandings to seo.

Listed below you can find an write-up from Ahref which I located to be very fascinating as well as useful . The post is entitled Facebook’s Latest Plan for Fake News and also you can discover it listed below

Fake news…the term itself is enough to elicit powerful emotions from whoever is reading an article. There is so much distrust and misinformation on the Internet these days that people can’t make heads or tails of current events. Today we are going to be taking a closer look at Facebook and its plan to quell fake news debacles, but first I must offer a disclaimer: this analysis does not take a political stance.

Rather, I want to look at the fake news update from the perspective of a small to medium-sized business and adopt the perspective of a digital marketer. Why? Because it matters to your social media marketing strategy. Plus, it cannot be denied that people are more skeptical of information today than ever before. As digital marketers, we have to work that much harder to earn the trust of our audience, and it is infinitely easier to lose their trust than it is to gain it.

And, I have to admit, not all news is necessarily political. There is plenty of news that is industry specific and related to business. It is fairly common for businesses to voice their opinions or inform their audience of the latest industry developments. If you have ever posted a news-type article on your blog, then you need to be aware of Facebook’s latest changes.

 Why Did Facebook Roll Out the New Update?

If you were not already aware, Facebook has been under heavy fire from a variety of sources, including the general public, the government, talking heads, and many other organizations. Many have criticized Facebook as only providing an “echo chamber,” and due to political controversy, has taken a lot of heat due to recent misinformation that could sway people’s understanding of current events.

In fact, there have been organizations outside the United States that intentionally inject fake news into US citizens’ Facebook feeds to muddy the waters. There have even been instances of US citizens purposely making fake news as a means to their own ends, be it a politically motivated goal or a way to incite fear to get people to purchase products. And finally, there is the good ol’ Internet trolls and jokers who just think it is funny to mislead people.

Even though some of them are so ludicrous you can’t help but laugh (such as the KFC mutant chicken hoax), misinformation can be damaging to society. But as far as Facebook is concerned, it can also be detrimental to the success of the social media platforms. The new update aims to cut down on misinformation and stymie hoaxes. Facebook posted that it is doing three main things to thwart misinformation, as follows:

• Inhibit the financial incentives that motivate false news creators.
• Create new technology that helps mitigate the prevalence of fake news.
• Help people make better-informed decisions.

That all sounds well and good, but I am curious to see how effective the latest update will be. Furthermore, I am curious to see what other tools Facebook will implement in the future. I doubt that this will be the last update the Facebook unleashes to stop hoaxes, trolls, scam artists, and charlatans. They have existed since the dawn of the Internet, and will likely persist for years to come.

There has been some exciting speculation that special AI systems will be able to track and identify trolls and accounts specifically designed to mislead people. But most people have fearful doubts about general AI. Still, this seems to be an exciting step in the right direction.

 Sharing Content

Given the recent Facebook crackdown on false information, web marketers need to be extra careful concerning what content they engage with on their social media accounts. Some lax small businesses may, every now and then, share another piece of content that populated their news feed. Doing so isn’t all that uncommon because it allows a marketer to inform their audience of breaking industry news without having to instantaneously draft content in response to current events.

However, you need to be more careful now than ever before. We do know that Facebook is cracking down on the fake news in the immediate future, but they may ratchet down on hucksters even more in the future. Not only would sharing a fake news content erode credibility and trust with your audience, but it also perpetuates false claims. Oh, and it isn’t going to do your marketing campaign any favors, either.

If you get flagged too many times, you could lose the ability to purchase Facebook ads. Facebook isn’t only trying to discourage those that post false information; it is also trying to stop false information from spreading like wildfire.

Posting Content

Right now, it doesn’t seem that Facebook is too heavy-handed when it comes to making judgments regarding whether or not a website shares the fake news. Unless you are a diabolical content producer with malicious intentions, I think it is doubtful that you will end up getting flagged by Facebook. But because we don’t know exactly how all the proprietary Facebook code works, it is better to err on the side of caution.

It is more important now than ever – regardless of the update – to check your facts, cite and link to your sources, and publish accurate content. Also, if someone genuinely questions the validity of your content, I would recommend responding with links to your sources. If on the other hand, you seem to be dealing with a troll, you will just have to use good judgment.

Final Thoughts

Before you click the “share” button on Facebook, make sure you scrutinize the information that you are sharing. If you get duped into sharing false news stories every now and then, it doesn’t seem that any negative consequences will arise. However, if you repeatedly get tricked or share misinformation without doing your homework, your account could be banned from Facebook advertising.

I hope you have appreciated this short article on Facebook’s Latest Plan for Fake News If you would like to check out even more short articles on search engine optimization then don’t hesitate to surf our various other short articles. We have many more curated posts from Ahref as well as I hope you enjoy reading them.

Read more……>click Here<

Search engine optimization also known as SEO is a subject covered by several individuals and also blogs, its the process of making your site look attractive to the internet search engine in the hope of acquiring a preferential position for your targeted keyword. During my research study I encounter several short articles that supply some terrific insights to search engine optimization.

Below you could discover an short article from Kiss Metrics which I found to be beneficial as well as extremely interesting .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sat down to read each one of them thoroughly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step #4: Quote Industry Influencers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step #6: Make Your Published Page Look Pretty

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

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

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

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

Bonus Tip for Publishing Professional Pieces

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

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

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

If you would certainly such as to watch more posts on search engine optimization then feel totally free to search our other posts. We have lots of even more curated write-ups from Kiss Metrics and I wish you take pleasure in reading them.

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

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

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

Tip #1: Plan Early

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

Fortnum & Mason sent its first Halloween promotion email at around mid-September

Upscaling Scope

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

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

Tip #2: Segment Your List

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

Upscaling Tip

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

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

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

Upscaling Tip

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

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

Tip #4: Create a Holiday Guide

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

HBO shop’s Holiday guide email showcases curated products that are neatly categorized

Upscaling Tip

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

 Tip #5: Create Urgency

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

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

Upscaling Tip

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

Tip #6: Mobile First Designs and Responsive Emails

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

Upscaling Tip

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

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

Click on the email to experience the interactivity.

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

Tip #7: Improving Cart Abandonment Emails Timing or Frequency

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

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

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

Upscaling Tip

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

Wrapping Up

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

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5 Advanced Display Remarketing Strategies

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

One single ad will not work.

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

Display Remarketing Campaigns

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

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

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

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

1. Create a Sequential Display Remarketing Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad 1:  Could be a brand message.

Ad 2: Promoting your customer service or customer reviews.

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

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

For example: 

You could create 3 audiences (your sequence):

Audience 1: 0-7 days since first interaction.

Audience 2: 8-14 days since first interaction.

Audience 3: 14 – 30 days since first interaction.

Then, when you create your campaigns: 

Campaign 1: 

• Target Audience 1 (Exclude Audience 2 & 3)

Campaign 2:

• Target Audience 2 (Exclude Audience 3) 

Campaign 3:

• Target Audience 3

2. Segment Your Remarketing Audience

Don’t treat all your traffic the same. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click the link labeled “audience definitions”.

Select “Audiences”.

Click on the “new audience” button.

Select “Create New”.

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

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

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

3. Content Remarketing

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

Here is how you can do it: 

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

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

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

4. Create a Remarketing Campaign for Customers

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

Well, I have some stats for you: 

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

See what I’m getting at? 

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

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

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

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

5. Create Campaigns Based on Where the User Came From 

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

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

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

• Paid
• Organic
• Referral 
• Direct

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some final bits of advice: 

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

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

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

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Brand Authority as an SEO Ranking Factor #SEMrushchat

In last week’s #SEMrushchat, we talked about an exceptionally important topic: how brand authority interacts with SEO as a ranking factor, since we just released our newest study: the 17 most prominent Google ranking factors. We invited expert, Jennifer Slegg – founder & editor of The SEM Post, speaker, and author of Understanding Google Panda Algo Guide. Along with her and our other guests, we focused on questions like how to identify a good brand authority, how authority influences rankings, and how PR and SEO can, and should, interact. Here is what they had to say: 

Q1. How do you identify a good brand authority? What are the main metrics you would use?

There are three factors that come into play: expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Expertise is your knowledge level and the value you can provide on any given subject. Expertise is your knowledge level and the value you can provide on any given subject. Your authority is how established your brand is, both in your industry and online. Trustworthiness is how much customers and industry peers trust that you, your content, and your products and services are all top-notch.

When it comes to measuring these factors, there are a number of metrics to look at in order to get the full picture, all of which can individually strengthen your search rank.

There are several ways to measure this. The first is branded search volume, or how many people are searching for you by name. Instead of searching for “sneakers,” for example, someone might search for “Nike sneakers” due to the brand being well established. This includes branded products, content, and even social media.

Site links, including the number of backlinks a site has, are essential. In fact, our Ranking Factors study found that there was a direct correlation between the total number of backlinks a site had and its position in the SERPs, with every domain ranking for high-volume keywords having about 3x more backlinks than from lower-volume groups on the same position.

That being said, you don’t want to spam your links or use unethical practices to build links; Google penalized Rap Genius for doing just that recently, knocking them from the top page of the results even for their own name. This lasted ten days.

Social mentions are also a key factor. This can significantly improve your brand authority, and the transparency and user-generated content that comes with social media and social mentions can improve trust from other users and help you to be favored by Google.

Other key metrics to keep an eye on include knowledge graph integration, competitors bidding on a brand, and co-citations with competitors in lists.  All of these indicate that people are talking about you and interacting with your content and brand organically, helping to establish your brand and raising your authority in Google.

Q2. Should marketers work to increase the branded search volume, or is it something that comes naturally as a result of good PR? Why?

While good PR can naturally increase branded search volume, marketers should also be working diligently to increase their branded search volume simultaneously. Though this may come naturally on its own, deliberately helping this metric increase is always a good idea and producing content that will increase the branded search volume is a good plan.

Ideally, you want customers to search for “Lush bath bombs” instead of just “bath bombs,” or “pepsi.com” instead of “soda.” While it’s relatively easy to rank for branded keywords, it’s more difficult to get customers to search for them.

To do this, you’ll need to spark interest using strategies such as guest posting, word-of-mouth marketing, referrals, and creative campaigns that keep users coming back. It’s about building up your brand and making people interested in that. Having strong content can, over time, also help with this; it is why people search for things like “Jon Loomer Facebook Ads blog post.”

While you can easily rank for brand keywords (unless there is competition for a said keyword), it is better to optimize the brand for all keyword buckets equally. According to Ryan Glass – @RyanGPhx, “Marketers like to drive up branded search volume, and SEO experts want to drive it down and diversify the terms we are visible for.”

It is essential that you are always focused on increasing your brand awareness because it doesn’t just “come naturally” today, where there is an overabundance of content and a near crisis of attention scarcity. You could search for almost any given topic and be shown thousands of blog posts and hundreds of free ebooks. While some will definitely be others, it is the brand authority that will often carry the most weight in determining where users click. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great the content is if you haven’t been able to build a name around it.

In addition to producing more content, you should also be focusing on presenting your products and services in a clear, concise language that includes search phrases that will likely be used by consumers. This is where smart copywriting and keyword research comes into play. If you have optimized your product for “ballet slippers” but most of your target audience is searching for “pointe shoes,” you will miss out on a lot of searches – and a lot of sales.

You shouldn’t neglect the organic power of social mentions and PR placements. They provide a well-rounded, holistic brand authority that is difficult to match without them. Encourage customers to leave reviews, which have a strong word-of-mouth advertising feel and the benefit of immense visibility and immortality on your site. Some reviews will be SERP-friendly, which will automatically help you in rankings and brand authority. Even if they aren’t, however, Google takes customer reviews and mentions of your brand into their ranking consideration.

And, as Andrew Martin – @AndrewDoesSEO pointed out, organic content has the capability to alleviate some of the need for PPC campaigns. When you are building relationships on social media or through content organically, you are staying relevant and on their mind. They will trust you more, and if they need something your business can offer, they will actively search you out instead of you needing to pay for PPC campaigns to win over these customers. You can then allocate that budget to other, more difficult targets like connecting with cold audiences.

Q3. How should SEO and PR work together? What are the main touch points?

It is very clear that SEO and PR go hand-in-hand. Whether it’s a press release or outreach for a guest posting opportunity, you have to think of both disciplines both separately and together in order to get the most out of your marketing. If you want your press release to do well, for example, you want to make sure it is optimized for SEO. At the same time, that very press release could benefit your SEO strategy. The two disciplines are separate, but they are entwined.

In many cases, after all, the best place for some of your content to live isn’t necessarily on your site, but on another site. This has enormous SEO benefits of a good backlink and a strong, relevant built-in audience. Plus, SEO can directly affect the outcomes of our PR goals; an SEO-optimized press release, after all, can ensure that as many people as possible see it. They increase visibility in different ways, and together they can increase brand authority for optimal SERPs.

It is clear that good content writers or PR individuals and strong SEO marketers aren’t always the same people, even if everyone has a general understanding of the other disciplines. PR workers are typically focused specifically on content and sharing certain messages, whereas SEO experts are focused on the array of technical factors that will affect search results.

Because of this, both the PR and content teams and the SEO marketers should be checking in with each other regularly about the goals they have and how to meet them.

PR and SEO are stronger together, and weaker apart. This is a consistent theme that our experts noticed and made sure to point out when weighing in. If you want your big announcement to get as much visibility as possible, after all, you need strong SEO behind it. This can happen when all press releases and content are run by the SEO team, and feedback from the SEO team is observed regarding link opportunities.

Some important examples of how PR and SEO teams should be working together include:

• Educating each other and creating goals – and the strategies to accomplish them – together.

• Discussing media outreach. The PR team might know that the audience on one site is a better fit for your business, but your SEO specialists might be aware that a different site would provide more valuable backlinks (or that certain links on the same page might be more valuable than others). Together, they will make sure all the bases are covered.

• Developing strategies to distribute and amplify content. When consulting each other, these teams can make sure that all of your content is highly readable by both Google and your target audience.

Q4. How, if at all, could authority influence positions in search?  

Authority can, and does, influence search a great deal. Brands with higher authority are often more desired, and therefore searched out more frequently by customers because it’s a brand that they trust. This, in turn, results in even better search visibility because it’s getting more traffic. Authority means trust, after all, and trust means better CTR, which means more authority. All of this is an upward spiral that means better SERPs across the board, giving you the ability to rank for more difficult and valuable keywords and show up higher in the results.

This doesn’t just go for consumers; bloggers and publications prefer trusted brands, too. They will trust you and your content more as reliable and accurate, so it’s much easier for a trusted brand to get links than it is for an unknown company to do the same.

This means that known brands have an enormous natural advantage when it comes to generating significantly more backlinks. And, the more backlinks you get, the better your SERPs become. On top of that, if you are able to optimize for keywords correctly, you will dominate the organic traffic, too. Again, it is all about that upwards spiral and building momentum.

In the meantime, there are strategies you can use to make your content more linkable and trustworthy to new visitors. These strategies include:

• Sourcing statistics and facts that you can back up and verify from other credible sites and publications.

• Adding social share buttons, or quotable “Click to Retweet” CTAs in the text to increase social shares and drive up social proof.

• Mentioning influencers, brands, and publications in your own articles, which can help put you on their radar.

• Providing value with your contest instead of just trying to sell your products or services aggressively.

It is also worth noting that domain names and queries are seen as search entities instead of brand entities; it is why Google favors big brands. This is why big brands sell a small portion of what companies only sell but consistently rank better for broad search terms because of their site and brand authority in the space. If you search for organic soap, for example, you might be sent to Whole Foods or Target which has two or three choices, instead of a small local business with twenty-five options.

In this way, authority heavily influences the search user, and those enterprise-level clicks will significantly boost your ranking position; even smart keyword research can only do so much against that kind of authority level. The only way to combat this factor is to build up more authority for your own brand.

Q5. How can negative sentiments in the SERPs affect authority, and how would that negativity also affect rankings?

Negative sentiments or reviews can cause an almost immediate drop in CTR and traffic, especially if those sentiments pop up towards the top of a search engine, like the United Airlines debacle that happened earlier this year; news reports about the scandal ranked above the business’s site. Negative sentiments can cause your brand reputation to suffer, losing trust or earning you less of it, sinking the amount of traffic you are getting. Simultaneously, fewer people trust your brand, which means that fewer people are looking for it, hurting you again. We talked about an upwards cycle in question 3; this is a downward spiral you don’t want to get sucked into.

To top it all off, Google has recently incorporated sentiment monitoring into the Quality Rater Guidelines. They want site raters to look for the reputation of the sites they rate, specifically telling them to look at off-site sources of reputation. If you have bad reviews on Yelp or several bloggers hot on your tail saying that you aren’t reliable, your SERPs are going to drop. There’s nowhere to hide, so you need to be ready.

Because of this, you want to do what you can to avoid negative reviews and comments online. Offer incredible customer service, produce great products, and make your customers happy, and all the E.A.T. goodness can follow. It is important that you don’t just wait for Google to start knocking you down, you should actively monitor both social and traditional media channels. SEMrush has brand monitoring tools that allow you to see what other people are saying about you (since they might not always say it to you) in real-time, allowing you to get ahead of any type of bad situation. 

Negative sentiment can erode your brand in the long-term as users slowly abandon you as a viable authority, source, and brand. It can also hurt you even quickly in the short-term if you are unlucky and don’t respond to it fast enough, and the situation escalates with stories across multiple mediums and a flurry of negative social mentions. Keep in mind that every single business will have unhappy customers and that this is almost unavoidable.

It is also true that negative sentiment can be more powerful than positive sentiment in some cases. After all, one unhappy customer will tell ten of their friends to never shop again, while one happy customer will tell only one of their friends about their great experience. In one scenario, you lose eleven customers; in the other, you gain two. Negative reviews that show up online can do even more damage.

Here is the good news: while no brand wants to have negative comments about them online, it isn’t an automatic death sentence. If the situation is handled well or if it’s an occasional or isolated incident, they can recoup. If not, of course, they’ll be purchasing a ton of reputation management and maybe getting a new PR team to boot.

Are there any other questions you have about brand authority coming into play as an SEO ranking factor? Do you have any additional insight?  For more information, check out our recent study about the 17 most prominent Google ranking factors.

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