Unfiltered: How to Show Up in Local Search Results

Posted by sherrybonelli

If you're having trouble getting your local business' website to show up in the Google local 3-pack or local search results in general, you're not alone. The first page of Google's search results seems to have gotten smaller over the years – the top and bottom of the page are often filled with ads, the local 7-pack was trimmed to a slim 3-pack, and online directories often take up the rest of page one. There is very little room for small local businesses to rank on the first page of Google.

To make matters worse, Google has a local "filter" that can strike a business, causing their listing to drop out of local search results for seemingly no reason – often, literally, overnight. Google's local filter has been around for a while, but it became more noticeable after the Possum algorithm update, which began filtering out even more businesses from local search results.

If you think about it, this filter is not much different than websites ranking organically in search results: In an ideal world, the best sites win the top spots. However, the Google filter can have a significantly negative impact on local businesses that often rely on showing up in local search results to get customers to their doors.

What causes a business to get filtered?

Just like the multitude of factors that go into ranking high organically, there are a variety of factors that go into ranking in the local 3-pack and the Local Finder.

Here are a few situations that might cause you to get filtered and what you can do if that happens.

Proximity matters

With mobile search becoming more and more popular, Google takes into consideration where the mobile searcher is physically located when they're performing a search. This means that local search results can also depend on where the business is physically located when the search is being done.

A few years ago, if your business wasn't located in the large city in your area, you were at a significant disadvantage. It was difficult to rank when someone searched for "business category + large city" – simply because your business wasn't physically located in the "large city." Things have changed slightly in your favor – which is great for all the businesses who have a physical address in the suburbs.

According to Ben Fisher, Co-Founder of SteadyDemand.com and a Google Top Contributor, "Proximity and Google My Business data play an important role in the Possum filter. Before the Hawk Update, this was exaggerated and now the radius has been greatly reduced." This means there's hope for you to show up in the local search results – even if your business isn't located in a big city.

Google My Business categories

When you're selecting a Google My Business category for your listing, select the most specific category that's appropriate for your business.

However, if you see a competitor is outranking you, find out what category they are using and select the same category for your business (but only if it makes sense.) Then look at all the other things they are doing online to increase their organic ranking and emulate and outdo them.

If your category selections don't work, it's possible you've selected too many categories. Too many categories can confuse Google to the point where it's not sure what your company's specialty is. Try deleting some of the less-specific categories and see if that helps you show up.

Your physical address

If you can help it, don't have the same physical address as your competitors. Yes, this means if you're located in an office building (or worse, a "virtual office" or a UPS Store address) and competing companies are also in your building, your listing may not show up in local search results.

When it comes to sharing an address with a competitor, Ben Fisher recommends, "Ensure that you do not have the same primary category as your competitor if you are in the same building. Their listing may have more trust by Google and you would have a higher chance of being filtered."

Also, many people think that simply adding a suite number to your address will differentiate your address enough from a competitor at the same location — it won't. This is one of the biggest myths in local SEO. According to Fisher, "Google doesn't factor in suite numbers."

Additionally, if competing businesses are located physically close to you, that, too, can impact whether you show up in local search results. So if you have a competitor a block or two down from your company, that can lead to one of you being filtered.

Practitioners

If you're a doctor, attorney, accountant or are in some other industry with multiple professionals working in the same office location, Google may filter out some of your practitioners' listings. Why? Google doesn't want one business dominating the first page of Google local search results. This means that all of the practitioners in your company are essentially competing with one another.

To offset this, each practitioner's Google My Business listing should have a different category (if possible) and should be directed to different URLs (either a page about the practitioner or a page about the specialty – they should not all point to the site's home page).

For instance, at a medical practice, one doctor could select the family practice category and another the pediatrician category. Ideally you would want to change those doctors' landing pages to reflect those categories, too:

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Another thing you can do to differentiate the practitioners and help curtail being filtered is to have unique local phone numbers for each of them.

Evaluate what your competitors are doing right

If your listing is getting filtered out, look at the businesses that are being displayed and see what they're doing right on Google Maps, Google+, Google My Business, on-site, off-site, and in any other areas you can think of. If possible, do an SEO site audit on their site to see what they're doing right that perhaps you should do to overtake them in the rankings.

When you're evaluating your competition, make sure you focus on the signals that help sites rank organically. Do they have a better Google+ description? Is their GMB listing completely filled out but yours is missing some information? Do they have more 5-star reviews? Do they have more backlinks? What is their business category? Start doing what they're doing – only better.

In general Google wants to show the best businesses first. Compete toe-to-toe with the competitors that are ranking higher than you with the goal of eventually taking over their highly-coveted spot.

Other factors that can help you show up in local search results

As mentioned earlier, Google considers a variety of data points when it determines which local listings to display in search results and which ones to filter out. Here are a few other signals to pay attention to when optimizing for local search results:

Reviews

If everything else is equal, do you have more 5-star reviews than your competition? If so, you will probably show up in the local search results instead of your competitors. Google is one of the few review sites that encourages businesses to proactively ask customers to leave reviews. Take that as a clue to ask customers to give you great reviews not only on your Google My Business listing but also on third-party review sites like Facebook, Yelp, and others.

Posts

Are you interacting with your visitors by offering something special to those who see your business listing? Engaging with your potential customers by creating a Post lets Google know that you are paying attention and giving its users a special deal. Having more "transactions and interactions" with your potential customers is a good metric and can help you show up in local search results.

Google+

Despite what the critics say, Google+ is not dead. Whenever you make a Facebook or Twitter post, go ahead and post to Google+, too. Write semantic posts that are relevant to your business and relevant to your potential customers. Try to write Google+ posts that are approximately 300 words in length and be sure to keyword optimize the first 100 words of each post. You can often see some minor increases in rankings due to well-optimized Google+ posts, properly optimized Collections, and an engaged audience.

Here's one important thing to keep in mind: Google+ is not the place to post content just to try and rank higher in local search. (That's called spam and that is a no-no.) Ensure that any post you make to Google+ is valuable to your end-users.

Keep your Google My Business listing current

Adding photos, updating your business hours for holidays, utilizing the Q&A or booking features, etc. can help you show off in rankings. However, don't add content just to try and rank higher. (Your Google My Business listing is not the place for spammy content.) Make sure the content you add to your GMB listing is both timely and high-quality content. By updating/adding content, Google knows that your information is likely accurate and that your business is engaged. Speaking of which...

Be engaged

Interacting with your customers online is not only beneficial for customer relations, but it can also be a signal to Google that can positively impact your local search ranking results. David Mihm, founder of Tidings, feels that by 2020, the difference-making local ranking factor will be engagement.

(Source: The Difference-Making Local Ranking Factor of 2020)

According to Mihm, "Engagement is simply a much more accurate signal of the quality of local businesses than the traditional ranking factors of links, directory citations, and even reviews." This means you need to start preparing now and begin interacting with potential customers by using GMB's Q&A and booking features, instant messaging, Google+ posts, responding to Google and third-party reviews, ensure your website's phone number is "click-to-call" enabled, etc.

Consolidate any duplicate listings

Some business owners go overboard and create multiple Google My Business listings with the thought that more has to be better. This is one instance where having more can actually hurt you. If you discover that for whatever reason your business has more than one GMB listing, it's important that you properly consolidate your listings into one.

Other sources linking to your website

If verified data sources, like the Better Business Bureau, professional organizations and associations, chambers of commerce, online directories, etc. link to your website, that can have an impact on whether or not you show up on Google's radar. Make sure that your business is listed on as many high-quality and authoritative online directories as possible – and ensure that the information about your business – especially your company's Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) -- is consistent and accurate.

So there you have it! Hopefully you found some ideas on what to do if your listing is being filtered on Google local results.

What are some tips that you have for keeping your business "unfiltered"?

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Why Today’s Bloggers Spend More Time Writing Less Content

What are bloggers’ biggest challenges, processes, and goals in 2017? What are the trends that bloggers need to be paying attention to in 2018?

Andy Crestodina, my Andy (Andy Tyson), and me, looking crazy as usual

Every year for the last four years, the wonderful Andy Crestodina has been on a quest to answer these questions in his blogger survey. I met Andy a number of years ago at a social media event, and we became fast friends. In fact, one of the weddings I was invited to actually listed “Jess Ostroff & Andy Crestodina” on the invitation because we had so many pictures together on Facebook and the bridesmaid at the wedding got confused about who my boyfriend was. (His name is also Andy—easy mistake to make.)

But I digress.

This year, an impressive 1,377 bloggers answered the call to provide their insights. That’s a lot of bloggers! I’m not surprised, given Andy’s charm and smarts. He is a true data nerd, and I can say for myself that the reason I spent the time filling out the survey was that I knew the output would be interesting, useful, and perhaps even inspiring.

I was right.

Behold: Five major takeaways from the 2017 blogger survey. And please do yourself a favor and download the full survey for more delicious insights. You won’t be disappointed in the time, energy, and work that went into analyzing this data!

1. Writing Time Increases, Publishing Frequency Decreases

Despite the fact that videos, Stories, and Snaps are growing in popularity, it’s clear from these 1000+ bloggers that writing still matters. (Thank goodness!) Bloggers are spending more time than ever crafting high-quality pieces. But the number of hours in the day remains the same, which means that something has to give.

It’s no longer about publishing 500-word articles every day to keep people’s RSS readers topped up. Instead, more and more bloggers are moving to a once or twice per week strategy. Many are culling it back even more to a few times per month.

In 2014, almost 40 percent of bloggers said they were knocking out posts in one to two hours. But when I look back at the content I published in 2014, I can tell you with a straight face that it wasn’t very good. It sounds like other bloggers are reflecting and finding the same results. We didn’t spend enough time researching, looking for unique snippets of information, or injecting our own perspective.

From 2014 to now, I’d argue that many of us were creating content for the sake of content instead of for results. Now, finally, we are taking into account what our audience wants and how blogging fits into our overall marketing strategy.

According to the report, the average blog post takes a whopping three hours and 20 minutes to write. I’m definitely on the longer side—closer to five or six hours per post—especially if you include the time I spend brainstorming in the shower.

This tells me that even if your entire job is creating blog content, the average writer can’t really create more than one or two posts per day, let alone go through the editorial process of editing, graphics-creation, and promotional strategy to get those posts published as quickly.

So that explains the decrease in publishing frequency, but is less really more? According to these bloggers, the answer is, “Perhaps.” 49 percent of bloggers say that spending more time on each post does make a difference in the results they get from those posts.

However, this is not a conclusive finding because bloggers also find a correlation between frequency and success.

This begs the question: How can we keep up with the demand to create more when we don’t have more resources, more budget, or more talent to produce at a high level?

In my humble opinion, if you are stuck with the decision about whether to create more content to keep up with frequency demands or better content with less frequency, creating less content that is of better quality and is more suited to your audience’s needs is the best option.

Ann Handley, author of Everybody Writes, agrees:

“The bigger themes here are two. One: Quality matters. And two: We don’t need more content. We need more relevant content.”

Relevancy is the killer app, and writers are reaping the rewards of spending more time making fewer pieces of content better, not creating more pieces that suck.

The average blog post takes a whopping 3 hours and 20 minutes to write.
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2. Quality and Media Matter More Than Ever

When I saw the figure that says that bloggers who have a formal process for edits are 43 percent more likely to report strong results, I did a happy dance.

This goes back to the point I mentioned earlier about timing, however, because adding an editor into the process increases the overall time spent on a blog post. And it’s still true that the majority of bloggers edit their own work instead of going through a formal editing process, but the numbers are slowly rising, so I’ll keep dreaming about the day when all content creators use editors—because it truly does make a difference. After all, no one likes reading blog posts that are riddled with typos, and a poorly written article decreases your credibility as a thought leader.

In addition to the conversation around quality, bloggers are also experimenting with including other types of media within their written pieces of content. Most bloggers are adding more images to their posts, which helps break up the text and provides a visual element for those of us who like to skim.

When it comes to other forms of media, such as audio and video, I found it interesting that the biggest percentage of bloggers are seeing strong results from including audio in their content.

I believe this is related to the increasing number of podcasters out there and may also be related to including an audio reading of the blog post itself, which we have done here on Convince & Convert. People love to have different avenues for consuming content, and audio has proven to be a great one because it allows listeners to multitask while learning.

Still, the most common form of media used among bloggers is images, and 30 percent more bloggers are using multiple images to draw readers into their posts. This increasing use of media is paying off, with the bloggers who do use video, audio, and graphical elements reporting strong results.

3. Long-Form Articles Are Winning

As you may have guessed, while bloggers are spending more time on each post, they aren’t spending more time writing the same amount of words. Blog posts are getting longer. They are trending toward the long-form, 2,000+ word posts.

At Convince & Convert, we’ve seen the positive results that are associated with longer form content. That’s because readers these days are looking for a one-stop shop of information. They don’t want to scour through a bunch of 250-word articles when they can skim through one 3,000 word article to find the answers they need.

Bloggers from this survey agree. In fact, over half of them report strong results when a post is 2,000 words or more.

Today, the average blog post is 1,142 words long, which is 41 percent longer than the average post just three years ago. Plus, six times as many bloggers are writing 2,000+ word posts—six times! It’s no wonder bloggers are spending more time than ever on writing.

I’d be willing to wager that the average word count will increase next year after seeing that longer form posts drive better results. Would you agree?

4. Paid Promotion Plus Influencer Marketing Equals Content Promotion Success

It’s not surprising that using paid advertising tactics to promote blog posts wasn’t very popular in 2014. Back then, social media ad platforms were in their infancy (or non-existent), and most people didn’t know how to leverage them effectively.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest have made it easy for anyone to become an advertiser. Combine that with the fact that organic reach continues to decline, and the insane spike in the usage of paid services is hardly a mystery.

According to the survey, paid content promotion has seen a 5X increase since 2014. If this increase in usage continues, we will see half of all bloggers using paid services within the next four years.

Part of the reason paid services are so attractive right now is because their reporting tools help us justify the spend in ways that most other promotional tactics do not. It’s always about proving effectiveness, measuring content marketing efforts against goals, and reaching audiences where they are. Paid advertising services that provide targeted, specific options allow us to do just that.

And while none of the other promotion tactics compared to the massive rise in paid services, influencer outreach has seen its own success over the last couple of years as well.

It’s interesting to note that while influencer outreach is not the most popular form of promotion, it is reported to be one of the most effective. Almost half of bloggers who are collaborating with influencers are seeing strong results.

That’s compared to only about 30 percent from social media marketing, even though social media marketing is by far the most widely used tactic for promotional efforts.

Remember: Just because things like tweeting or sharing a Facebook post are easy doesn’t mean they work. This research suggests that you may benefit more from investing your time and resources in the tactics that are harder but provide better results.

5. Updating Old Posts Is a Worthwhile Strategy

Although only 55 percent of bloggers are updating older posts with new information and links, 74 percent of those bloggers are reporting strong results. This means that the ones who aren’t doing this may simply not know what they’re missing!

I could go on and on about the reasons why updating old content is so important. Here are just a few reasons:

1. It allows you re-use content you’ve already spent lots of time and energy on.
2. It signals to Google that you’re maintaining popular content.
3. It tells your readers that you care about them because you’re consistently providing them with useful information.

Here at Convince & Convert, we have implemented a new strategy where we go through our most popular blog posts based on Google Analytics and update the top 10 posts every quarter. If the top 10 are the same for the next quarter and there are no new updates to make to those particular posts, we move on to the top 20, and so on.

This allows us to continue ranking for the terms that people are searching for and providing them with the information they need.

Lisa Jenkins from Social Media Examiner started using this strategy when she noticed that visitors continued to find and click on older articles through Google, but bounce rates were increasing. Starting with those articles is a great step toward developing an ongoing update strategy that works.

Just remember: “While you can update the text and should include a date stamp at the top of the article to show readers when the last update occurred, you should never change the original URL, or you’ll lose all that search juice,” Lisa cautions.

Bottom Line: Blogging (Still) Works

I might argue that “blogging” is out and “content marketing” is in. This is because bloggers aren’t just writers anymore—they’re strategists, editors, promoters, and data analysts. It’s not enough to spend hours writing a piece of content. The success of bloggers’ creations lies in the quality, relevancy, and promotion.

And as bloggers evolve into content marketers, their success evolves with them. From 2016 to 2017, 20 percent more bloggers report strong results from their blogging efforts.

Yes! This is encouraging, especially for those of us who are still camera-shy or are not excited about all the Snap-stagram madness. If we keep investing our energy in writing, hiring the right editors, and putting our sights on the promotion engines that produce the highest ROI, we will all be just fine.

Don’t forget to download the full report here. Thanks to Andy and his team for pulling together this helpful research year after year.

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How to Use Autoplay Video in Your Pinterest Ads

Do you advertise on Pinterest? Wondering how to add video to your promoted pins? Autoplay video pins aren’t yet commonly used so adding them to your Pinterest marketing now will help you stand out in a sea of still images. In this article, you’ll discover how to create promoted video pins that autoplay on Pinterest.

This post How to Use Autoplay Video in Your Pinterest Ads first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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The 7 Ways Brands Use Social Listening

Listening has become the stalwart of social data analysis techniques. Years ago, in the early days of social’s prevalence in society, brands recognized their buyers were spending more and more time on social, and they asked the obvious question: “What’s everybody saying out there?” Fast forward to today: The questions have become more complicated, and software has become a requirement for answering those questions. As a result, many organizations are turning to social listening tools to make sense of the online conversation.

In March of this year, Clutch released a study analyzing how medium and large businesses use social listening tools. Here’s what they are monitoring with social listening tools:

1. Customer requests, questions, and concerns: 86% (of businesses surveyed)
2. Competition: 77%
3. Brands and products: 75%
4. Industry terms and trends: 61%
5. Industry/brand influencers: 60%
6. Company’s name: 55%
7. Company’s executives: 44%

Responses aside, the list above is a relatively comprehensive summary of what you can do with a social listening tool. And frankly, I’d argue you should be doing all of these things—not just the top three or five. Let’s walk through this list and discuss the importance of each and how you can use social listening to execute these tactics more effectively.

Customer Requests, Questions, and Concerns

Social is one of the few multi-purpose communication channels for brands (along with email, chat, etc.). It’s a marketing channel, but it’s also a customer service channel. Customer service representatives often have their own set of tools for managing questions on social, but that doesn’t mean social marketers are exempt from listening to their customers’ commentary on social. They may have the luxury of relying on the customer service and PR teams to handle complaints and crises, but they’re not off the hook on this one.

A social following cannot thrive without a strong community as its foundation, and community is not built by shoving content down people’s throats—it’s built by engaging in conversations. Like any conversation with someone you don’t know well (yet), there are some topics you’ll want to avoid. By using a listening tool to stay aware of the types of concerns and complaints coming through social, you’ll keep from putting your foot in your mouth when you reach out to engage in positive conversation with people who could become brand advocates.

A social media following can't thrive without a strong community as its foundation.
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Competitive

This one is too easy. Good marketers are both knowledgeable and wary of their competition. As you position yourself for success in the competitive landscape, you’re going to need to know your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. They will tell you all about their strengths on their website; that side is easy. The weaknesses side is a bit more challenging.

Social listening tools make it possible to tap into the rumor mill about your competitors, so you can discover what people don’t like about their brand, products, etc. After you’ve learned their shortcomings from the most credible sources out there—their customers on social—determine how you can double-down on your competitive advantages.

If your brand operates in the fidget spinner market, and you discover your competitor is catching a lot of flack on social for their products breaking, you can reposition your message around the quality and durability of your spinners (assuming that’s a strength of your product). Now you’re better positioned to gobble up market share from the competition. Be careful—this goes both ways. More on that later.

A word cloud can be a good starting point to determine which of your competitors are being talked about most, especially if you are in a saturated market, and what attributes people associate with your competitors.

Brands and Products

Let’s focus on products for a moment. Most people just think about brands when they think about listening, but you’ve got to go the next layer deeper and analyze the conversation about products as well. There are a couple ways you can do this. (This is one of the places you can tell the difference between a quality listening tool and a tool that’s entry-level.)

1. Product Category Listening: This is where you listen to a conversation about a defined product segment. For example, let’s pretend you work at Under Armour. Beyond just your brand, you’d also want to listen to what people say about basketball shoes, and then zoom in to analyze what they say about your basketball shoes versus competing products in the same category from Nike, Adidas, etc.
2. Product Theming: This is where you listen to a conversation around your brand (or a competitor’s brand) and create sub-segments within the conversation about specific products and product lines. For example, you may listen to the conversation about Under Armour, then create thematic segments for posts about shoes, hoodies, shorts, etc.

There are merits to both options. Option one will capture discussion of your products even when your brand name isn’t mentioned. Option two will constrict conversation to your products when your brand name is also mentioned, but you can get a consolidated overview for your brand’s various product lines.

Creating thematic segments by product or product characteristics help you determine the scope of conversation and affinity for various products and product lines.

Industry Terms and Trends

Organizations are always looking for ways to extend their own message, and one way to do that on social is to hitch your wagon to a trending hashtag. A good social listening tool will not only tell you what happened but also help you understand what’s emerging. Finding emerging hashtags that (1) align with your brand voice and message and (2) are already being used by people talking about you is an effective way to stay relevant and shareable.

Industry and Brand Influencers

Influencer analysis is something everyone is talking about but only some are doing.

Identifying and listening to influencers have become playing stakes for any respectable listening tool. There are some tools that exclusively do influencer identification; frankly, I recommend just going with a listening tool that has influencer identification functionality. You’ll get more bang-for-your-buck, and you need to be able to see the activity of the influencer within the context of the rest of the conversation to determine if they are in line with the tone of the audience you want to access.

How do you determine what makes a good influencer? Consider what outcome(s) you want from a potential influencer partnership. Are you seeking more reach? Consider someone who has a large following and whose content is shared a lot. Do you want more engagement? Go with someone who gets a lot of engagement on the content they are already posting related to your brand. Do you want to improve brand sentiment? Find someone who is already an advocate for your brand and posts frequently about your brand.

Analyzing specific demographic groups by gender, age, and location tells you what types of messages and media will resonate most with a given audience segment.

Company Name

Come on; this one’s too easy. Yes, you should listen to what people say about your brand. Frankly, I’m surprised only 55 percent of people surveyed said they were using a listening tool to hear what people say about their own brand. Not listening to what people say about your brand is like going on vacation and leaving your door wide-open. You’re just asking to get ransacked.

But, even if we entertain the idea of an imaginary world where nobody ever says anything bad about your brand or products on social (see the “Competitive” section above), you’re still in trouble because your content will be tone-deaf. Social starts with community, and community starts with conversation.

Use a listening tool to understand the demographics of the people talking about your brand, what gets them excited (positive sentiment), and what subjects are a little touchy (negative sentiment), so you when you publish your own content, it’s relevant and well-received. People buy from brands they like and boycott brands who make insensitive remarks. Keep your foot out of your mouth. Listen to what people say about your brands and products.

Company Executives

In many ways, social has leveled the playing field for credibility and influence. Maybe Elon Musk isn’t a member of your executive team, but your executives, even at a small company, can be powerful thought leaders and build brand trust. Some brands and many agencies are already leveraging their executives’ social presences as part of their marketing mix, but for those who aren’t already, a listening tool can help you get started.

You’ll want to listen to what competitors’ executives are saying on social, as well as how some of the major executive influencers conduct themselves on social. Your executive team will likely need a little coaching, so study what messages are resonating, what posting frequency is appropriate, and how other executives stay on message while being authentic. Then, after using your listening tool to research these elements, use it to measure the engagement and shareability of your executives’ content, so they can see the difference they are making.

Speaking of measurement, listening tools can do a lot for you, but they can’t do everything. Social is a part of the entire buyer’s journey, which means you’ll also need to measure how people engage with your brand’s social content, how they get to your website from social, and ultimately, the role social played in their decision to become a customer.

If you’re interested in a demo of Simply Measured Listening and the rest of our full-funnel social analytics solution, so you can measure social’s role in the entire buyer’s journey, click here.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Simply Measured and Convince & Convert.

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The Secret to Making Employee Advocacy Work

Does your company empower its employees to act as brand ambassadors on social media? Isn’t it about time?

The movement, known widely as “employee advocacy,” has gained great momentum in recent years. Companies that choose not to embrace it miss out on tremendous opportunities to amplify their messages, increase the authenticity of those messages, and better rally their employees around the pursuit of the brand’s vision.

Roope Heinilä is a respected industry leader who’s been spreading the “employee advocacy” gospel for years. He’s the CEO of Smarp, an app that powers employee communication, advocacy, and engagement programs. Roope agreed to talk to me about employee advocacy and offer tips for making it work. You’ll learn a lot about this important topic in the 10-minute interview below and a transcribed version of the interview that follows.

What Employee Advocacy Means in 2017

Barry: What is employee advocacy?

Roope: Employee advocacy at its core is about employees promoting the brand that they work for. It’s pretty much about turning employees into brand ambassadors for their employers.

Of course, employee advocacy as a concept has been around for ages, but with the advent of social media, employees’ ability to affect a large amount of people has really gone up quite a bit. Now they’re able to affect hundreds, if not thousands.

Barry: I’ve gathered that a marketing department taking up social media all by itself is often too small of an effort. Is employee advocacy a way to amplify the company’s messages?

Roope:  If you think about social media—any of the networks, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—they’ve all really been built with the relationship between people at its core.

Facebook was not built to connect companies and people to each other—it was built to connect people. What employee advocacy does is it allows companies to tap into that connection that people have and to actually humanize their brands that way and really utilize the core elements of the social network for both the personal benefit of the employee and for a business benefit.

Barry: Making the company’s voice louder and increasing reach is one benefit, but are there others?

Roope: Yeah, it definitely shouldn’t be just about increasing our reach. More important than reach is the authenticity.

If you think about it from a personal perspective, which one do you trust more: a message coming from a friend or a message coming from a brand? In addition to just getting the authenticity there, you’re also able to engage your employees and really make them be part of the brand, so that brand is shaped by the employees, not the other way around.

This is very much a core part of employee advocacy. It’s about getting your employees to be your brand. And that impacts not only marketing, but it impacts communications—even HR—through better employer branding, recruiting, and, most importantly, it impacts the engagement that your employees actually have with the brand. Through an employee advocacy program, they become more engaged through engaging with branded content—actually understanding what the company stands for, understanding its mission, its vision, its future.

Barry: That’s interesting. It’s sort of a morale builder.

Roope: Yeah. Today’s companies are pretty much people and laptops. The only thing of value is the people in the company. If you think about it that way, you should really be getting those people to be your brand. No matter what you do, they will be a part of it.

A brand should be shaped by its employees, not the other way around.
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Barry: So I buy in. I have, let’s say, a mid-sized company, and I love the idea of having advocates across the company. What are my challenges for getting started?

Roope: First off, you’ve got to rethink the whole concept. Instead of thinking about what I was just talking about from brand perspective, think about it from an individual employee’s perspective.

Why would you, as an employee, want to take part in employee advocacy? That’s where your own professional branding, personal branding, increasing your awareness in your networks, as well as furthering your own career comes in.

The first challenge and the biggest challenge is always getting employees on board. The way you do that is by actually making the whole employee advocacy program be employees-first, which means that from a company’s perspective, first off think about, how does this help my employees become better at what they do, and how does this help their careers?

Barry: The people that you are trying to onboard—are they bound to be 100 percent willing?

Roope: You should only aim for the willing ones. There are many ways of doing it. We’ve seen companies start with large amounts of people, and we’ve seen companies start small. Both of those have their ups and downs, but the key thing in both of them is that it has to be completely voluntary participation. Otherwise, when you’re trying to boost engagement, when you’re trying to turn your employees into brand ambassadors, you might be doing the exact opposite.

Barry: No twisting arms?

Roope: That doesn’t work. You might get some short-term benefits, but in the long term, you’re just going to be hurting your company. You should still provide everybody the opportunity to become advocates, provide the training that’s needed, and also, probably most important from the company’s perspective, recognize the people who choose to be advocates.

Barry: It makes me think of an ironic mind shift, because here management is making some decisions to put a program in place and train people and onboard people, whereas just a few years back, it seemed like the executive suite would have walked up and down “cubicle row” going, “What are you doing on Facebook? Get back to work.” So is there a mind shift taking place in terms of attitudes about social media?

Roope: When we started out in 2011 and we went to pitch companies talking about employees and social, the usual response we got it was, “Yes, will you be able to provide us with the software that blocks social media completely?”

Luckily, a shift has happened over the last five years, where companies are now seeing social and their own employees much more as an opportunity than a threat. To me, it’s very weird that companies have been willing to hand their brands over to celebrities, to brand ambassadors, to customers, but not to their own employees before. How can you trust your customers, trust professional advocators, trust athletes, etc., with your brand if you’re not going to trust the people who created that?

Sustaining Employee Advocacy

Barry: I’ve asked you some questions about how to get started. What happens next in an employee advocacy program?

Roope: Hopefully you will have been able to engage your employees in the program. You’ll have a lot of employees sharing, creating your messages, really staying up-to-date on all the latest company news. I believe the next stage is that, instead of just providing them the news, providing them the content, that we engage our employees in curating that content.

I believe the knowledge in companies does not just come from the communications department or the marketing department. It comes from the actual employees working in product development, working in sales, working in any of the core functions in your company. If companies are truly shaped by their employees, that shaping should not be limited to employees just “parroting” your marketing messages, but becoming a part of creating them.

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11 Clever Ways to Get More Retweets Right Now

Do you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels on Twitter? Pumping out tweets but not much to show for it? Trust me, you are not alone!

Look, everyone and their grandmother is out there competing for attention on Twitter. So if you want to get noticed and shared, you’re going to have to put in some work.

The good news? This post is here to help!

Today you’ll learn some features of Twitter that make getting more retweets easier. Plus, we’ll go over some ways to craft better tweets and what kind of tweets you can send to increase your chances of getting retweets.

So let’s dive right in and check out 11 things you can start doing today to get more retweets.

1. Pin a Tweet

I made this the first section because if you take nothing else away from this post, please make sure you have a pinned tweet.

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How to Create and Analyze Instagram Stories for Business Accounts

Looking for ways to market your business with your Instagram business account? Are you aware of the unique advantages businesses have with Instagram Stories? In this article, you’ll discover how to create, use, and analyze Instagram stories using a business account. Why Use Instagram Stories? If you’re already publishing photos and videos on Instagram, you

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Instagram Live With Friends, Facebook Live Video Producer, Snapchat External Link Sharing

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore Instagram Live with Friends with Jeff Sieh, Facebook Live Video Producer with Luria Petrucci,

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How to Use the "Keywords by Site" Data in Tools (Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc.) to Improve Your Keyword Research and Targeting - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

One of the most helpful functions of modern-day SEO software is the idea of a "keyword universe," a database of tens of millions of keywords that you can tap into and discover what your site is ranking for. Rankings data like this can be powerful, and having that kind of power at your fingertips can be intimidating. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the concept of the "keyword universe" and shares his most useful tips to take advantage of this data in the most popular SEO tools.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about the Keywords by Site feature that exists now in Moz's toolset — we just launched it this week — and SEMrush and Ahrefs, who have had it for a little while, and there are some other tools out there that also do it, so places like KeyCompete and SpyFu and others.

In SEO software, there are two types of rankings data:A) Keywords you've specifically chosen to track over time

Basically, the way you can think of this is, in SEO software, there are two kinds of keyword rankings data. There are keywords that you have specifically selected or your marketing manager or your SEO has specifically selected to track over time. So I've said I want to track X, Y and Z. I want to see how they rank in Google's results, maybe in a particular location or a particular country. I want to see the position, and I want to see the change over time. Great, that's your set that you've constructed and built and chosen.

B) A keyword "universe" that gives wide coverage of tens of millions of keywords

But then there's what's called a keyword universe, an entire universe of keywords that's maintained by a tool provider. So SEMrush has their particular database, their universe of keywords for a bunch of different languages, and Ahrefs has their keyword universe of keywords that each of those two companies have selected. Moz now has its keyword universe, a universe of, I think in our case, about 40 million keywords in English in the US that we track every two weeks, so we'll basically get rankings updates. SEMrush tracks their keywords monthly. I think Ahrefs also does monthly.

Depending on the degree of change, you might care or not care about the various updates. Usually, for keywords you've specifically chosen, it's every week. But in these cases, because it's tens of millions or hundreds of millions of keywords, they're usually tracking them weekly or monthly.

So in this universe of keywords, you might only rank for some of them. It's not ones you've specifically selected. It's ones the tool provider has said, "Hey, this is a broad representation of all the keywords that we could find that have some real search volume that people might be interested in who's ranking in Google, and we're going track this giant database." So you might see some of these your site ranks for. In this case, seven of these keywords your site ranks for, four of them your competitors rank for, and two of them both you and your competitors rank for.

Remarkable data can be extracted from a "keyword universe"

There's a bunch of cool data, very, very cool data that can be extracted from a keyword universe. Most of these tools that I mentioned do this.

Number of ranking keywords over time

So they'll show you how many keywords a given site ranks for over time. So you can see, oh, Moz.com is growing its presence in the keyword universe, or it's shrinking. Maybe it's ranking for fewer keywords this month than it was last month, which might be a telltale sign of something going wrong or poorly.

Degree of rankings overlap

You can see the degree of overlap between several websites' keyword rankings. So, for example, I can see here that Moz and Search Engine Land overlap here with all these keywords. In fact, in the Keywords by Site tool inside Moz and in SEMrush, you can see what those numbers look like. I think Moz actually visualizes it with a Venn diagram. Here's Distilled.net. They're a smaller website. They have less content. So it's no surprise that they overlap with both. There's some overlap with all three. I could see keywords that all three of them rank for, and I could see ones that only Distilled.net ranks for.

Estimated traffic from organic search

You can also grab estimated traffic. So you would be able to extract out — Moz does not offer this, but SEMrush does — you could see, given a keyword list and ranking positions and an estimated volume and estimated click-through rate, you could say we're going to guess, we're going to estimate that this site gets this much traffic from search. You can see lots of folks doing this and showing, "Hey, it looks this site is growing its visits from search and this site is not." SISTRIX does this in Europe really nicely, and they have some great blog posts about it.

Most prominent sites for a given set of keywords

You can also extract out the most prominent sites given a set of keywords. So if you say, "Hey, here are a thousand keywords. Tell me who shows up most in this thousand-keyword set around the world of vegetarian recipes." The tool could extract out, "Okay, here's the small segment. Here's the galaxy of vegetarian recipe keywords in our giant keyword universe, and this is the set of sites that are most prominent in that particular vertical, in that little galaxy."

Recommended applications for SEOs and marketers

So some recommended applications, things that I think every SEO should probably be doing with this data. There are many, many more. I'm sure we can talk about them in the comments.

1. Identify important keywords by seeing what you rank for in the keyword universe

First and foremost, identify keywords that you probably should be tracking, that should be part of your reporting. It will make you look good, and it will also help you keep tabs on important keywords where if you lost rankings for them, you might cost yourself a lot of traffic.

Monthly granularity might not be good enough. You might want to say, "Hey, no, I want to track these keywords every week. I want to get reporting on them. I want to see which page is ranking. I want to see how I rank by geo. So I'm going to include them in my specific rank tracking features." You can do that in the Moz Keywords by Site, you'd go to Keyword Explorer, you'd select the root domain instead of the keyword, and you'd plug in your website, which maybe is Indie Hackers, a site that I've been reading a lot of lately and I like a lot.

You could see, "Oh, cool. I'm not tracking stock trading bot or ark servers, but those actually get some nice traffic. In this case, I'm ranking number 12. That's real close to page one. If I put in a little more effort on my ark servers page, maybe I could be on page one and I could be getting some of that sweet traffic, 4,000 to 6,000 searches a month. That's really significant." So great way to find additional keywords you should be adding to your tracking.

2. Discover potential keywords targets that your competitors rank for (but you don't)

Second, you can discover some new potential keyword targets when you're doing keyword research based on the queries your competition ranks for that you don't. So, in this case, I might plug in "First Round." First Round Capital has a great content play that they've been doing for many years. Indie Hackers might say, "Gosh, there's a lot of stuff that startups and tech founders are interested in that First Round writes about. Let me see what keywords they're ranking for that I'm not ranking for."

So you plug in those two to Moz's tool or other tools. You could see, "Aha, I'm right. Look at that. They're ranking for about 4,500 more keywords than I am." Then I could go get that full list, and I could sort it by volume and by difficulty. Then I could choose, okay, these keywords all look good, check, check, check. Add them to my list in Keyword Explorer or Excel or Google Docs if you're using those and go to work.

3. Explore keywords sets from large, content-focused media sites with similar audiences

Then the third one is you can explore keyword sets. I'm going to urge you to. I don't think this is something that many people do, but I think that it really should be, which is to look outside of your little galaxy of yourself and your competitors, direct competitors, to large content players that serve your audience.

So in this case, I might say, "Gosh, I'm Indie Hackers. I'm really competing maybe more directly with First Round. But you know what? HBR, Harvard Business Review, writes about a lot of stuff that my audience reads. I see people on Twitter that are in my audience share it a lot. I see people in our forums discussing it and linking out to their articles. Let me go see what they are doing in the content world."

In fact, when you look at the Venn diagram, which I just did in the Keywords by Site tool, I can see, "Oh my god, look there's almost no overlap, and there's this huge opportunity." So I might take HBR and I might click to see all their keywords and then start looking through and sort, again, probably by volume and maybe with a difficulty filter and say, "Which ones do I think I could create content around? Which ones do they have really old content that they haven't updated since 2010 or 2011?" Those types of content opportunities can be a golden chance for you to find an audience that is likely to be the right types of customers for your business. That's a pretty exciting thing.

So, in addition to these, there's a ton of other uses. I'm sure over the next few months we'll be talking more about them here on Whiteboard Friday and here on the Moz blog. But for now, I would love to hear your uses for tools like SEMrush and the Ahrefs keyword universe feature and Moz's keyword universe feature, which is called Keywords by Site. Hopefully, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Recommended Marketing Podcasts: Week of October 23rd

Podcasts are a great way to educate yourself. Whether you’re on the train, in the car, at your desk, or anywhere in between, this medium is an incredible vehicle for supplementing your industry knowledge. Every week, I’ll be sharing with you a round-up of some of the best marketing podcast episodes you can find, spanning the entirety of the marketing landscape.

Whether you’re new to podcasts or you’re a seasoned listener, I know you’ll find value in each weekly round-up. Let’s get listening, shall we?

Duct Tape Marketing Podcast: Traditional PR is Still a Fabulous Way to Stand Out

In a world dominated by social media, PR is often misunderstood and therefore underutilized. Small business marketing expert John Jantsch recognizes this and wants to make sure his listeners know how to take advantage of valuable press coverage. In this episode, Media Maven founder Christina Nicholson walks John and the rest of us through the wild world of press pitching and what steps are needed to be successful—all in under 20 minutes!

Takeaway: Reporting staffs are stretched thin and don’t have the bandwidth to chase stories like they once did. Christina recommends providing everything a reporter could ever dream of on a silver platter, including video and photography. The more complete the pitch, the more likely your story will be published. One of the best takeaways from this episode is to always position yourself (or your client) as an expert. Reporters are far more likely to contact experts for a story they’re writing than other professionals in the industry they might know, so market yourself appropriately!

When pitching reporters, always position yourself (or your client) as an expert.
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Marketing Over Coffee: Now with More Animojis!

If you haven’t heard, Apple released the iPhone 8 a few weeks ago and no one really cares. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but the hype is more for the iPhone X, the other device that was announced last month. In their latest episode, authors, speakers, and marketing leaders John Wall (EventHero) and Christopher Penn (SHIFT Communications) discuss the new capabilities phones like the X will usher in for the marketplace, including an interesting take on how parents can encourage their children to use Animojis when communicating online.

Takeaways: Outside of the animal faces, Wall and Penn talk about IKEA’s new VR initiative to “show” how products would look in your home, Amazon’s brilliant Polly Text to Speech tool (which apparently is advanced enough for podcast-level audio!), and the ramifications of Facebook’s crackdown on hate speech. These two gentlemen have been partners on Marketing Over Coffee for a long time, and if you aren’t already subscribed to the show, it’s 100 percent worthy of the precious space on your phone. Christopher Penn is one of the smartest people, let alone marketers, I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting, while John Wall owns one of the best podcasting voices you’ll ever hear. This duo brings information and insights you’ll only find here, so it’s definitely in your best interest to pay attention when these two publish.

AskPat 0973: How Do I Generate Leads in a Saturated Market?

Creating leads is a tough job. Not only do you need to generate traffic to your site, but you then need to convince visitors to convert by sharing additional information. That’s a lot of commitment from someone who just might not be ready! Fortunately, we know that Smart Passive Income’s Pat Flynn is one of the best in the biz to ask when it comes to executing against consumer behavior. In this short, seven-minute episode of AskPat, we learn exactly how Flynn works his magic and succeeds in even heavily crowded markets.

Takeaways: Pat suggests leveraging the ACE formula (Access, Convenience, Exclusivity) for getting people to take the action you’re seeking. Access means offering access to you, whether it’s through hosting a webinar, holding office hours, or simply being more transparent via specific social channels. Convenience means saving people time, whether it’s through compiling an ebook of all your blog posts or some other relevant content aggregation, or offering value by saving your audience the hassle of trying to navigate your entire website for the info they want. Finally, Exclusivity is content that is reserved only for those who provide additional value (i.e. your customer receives meatier information and you receive their email). Armed with the ACE formula, we now have no excuses for generating qualified leads—let the good times begin!

That’s all for this edition! I’ll be back with a new batch next week. In the meantime, share any podcasts you think I should know about in the comments!

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It Is About Time: The Journey, Episode 3

The Journey, a Social Media Examiner production, is an episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=BijVCgXu5C0 Watch The Journey: Episode 3 Episode 3 of The Journey reveals what many will see as an impossible goal pursued by Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner. Mike makes time for

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How Social Media Has Evolved and Where It Is Headed

Want to prepare for emerging social technologies and marketing tactics? Wondering how to reach your audience as algorithms change? To explore the past, present, and future of social media marketing, I interview Brian Solis. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed

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Red Bull’s Event Coverage Is an Essential Lesson for Marketers

Red Bull is not a drink; Red Bull is a lifestyle. “Red Bull gives you wings,” and apparently, it also gives you a tendency to enjoy skydiving, BMX, snowboarding, and cliff jumping.

First of all, I don’t consume this B12-infused, carbonated energy drink. I would rather yawn my way into my late 80’s than live fast and die hyper-caffeinated. That doesn’t stop me from admiring all my fellow Red Bull enthusiasts that meet many more generational expectations than me.

What do I mean? While I’m staring at my laptop screen in Panera Bread, these 20-somethings are probably carelessly dangling their tanned legs off some hundred-foot cliff halfway across the globe.

A post shared by Gary Hunt (@garydiver) on Jul 5, 2017 at 11:21pm PDT

Sigh. They are going to kick me out of their millennial squad.

As much as I want to resent Red Bull, I begrudgingly like the brand’s social media presence much more than I like the taste or side effects of their beverage, particularly the brand’s cliff diving account.

Will she make the big splash? Who will win? Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series Women title contender #1: @adyjimte won her first ever event on the Azores and is just 60 points behind @rhiannan_iffland – Can she take the King Kahekili Trophy in Chile. #redbullcliffdiving #cliffdive #diving #champion #azores #chile @deantreml

A post shared by Red Bull Cliff Diving (@redbullcliffdiving) on Sep 26, 2017 at 8:09am PDT

Red Bull hosts a variety of events for extreme athletes across the world, including skydivers, skiers, snowboarders, cyclists, and climbers. However, unique to the brand are its cliff diving competitions. The event’s Instagram account, which boasts over 100k followers, is dedicated to reposted content from Red Bull athletes and original coverage of competitions. Each post receives thousands of views and likes.

When analyzing the success of Red Bull’s cliff jumping campaign, one can’t ignore the virality of the athlete’s posts on their own professional accounts. Just one video from Red Bull sponsored athlete Rhiannan Iffland has received over 95 thousand views (below).

While I could wrap up this blog with few hundred gushing words about Red Bull’s excellent utilization of influencer and advocate networks, instead, I would like to focus on their excellent branding and coverage of events.

How Red Bull’s Marketing Makes the Most of Live Events

#Tb to one of the most epic days! #givesyouwings #helicopter #extremesports #redbull #escapetheordinary @redbullau @redbullire @gopro @delfinasport

A post shared by Rhiannan Iffland (@rhiannan_iffland) on Aug 29, 2017 at 8:25am PDT

Just look at the excellently branded merchandise! Anyone with eyes can see who is sponsoring this incredible athlete. That said, branding of Red Bull content does not begin or end with spiffy outfits. Check out all the branded content in this video, both digital and physical:

Can @rhiannan_iffland defend her title and win the #redbullcliffdiving World Series once again? It all will be decided on October 21, LIVE on @redbulltv at 3:15 pm local time | 6:15 pm GMT Link in bio.

A post shared by Red Bull Cliff Diving (@redbullcliffdiving) on Oct 17, 2017 at 7:04am PDT

Let’s count the branding elements together, shall we? Be sure to tell me if I’ve missed something:

1. Diving platform, both top and side
2. Diver’s swimsuit
3. Safety buoy
4. Convenient product placement
5. Signage on rock face
6. Hats—always hats
7. Winners’ platforms
8. Digital outro

Does every frame have a branded element, or is it just me? I can guarantee no one will be elbowing her friend, asking what awesome brand would sponsor such an insane event.

When the majority of brand awareness is built from the coverage of sponsored events, these plentiful brand elements are especially important. The coverage itself is a thing of beauty. Each video that has been mixed down for Instagram contains many perspectives, meaning the sheer volume of camera equipment they have available at events is impressive. Additionally, videos are of the highest quality, utilizing slow motion effectively but not excessively.

The higher the quality of your event coverage, the longer the lifetime of your campaign.
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What Marketers Can Learn from Red Bull’s Social Media Savvy

If nothing else, Red Bull proves to marketers everywhere that events continue to convert. In other words, digital marketers everywhere might stop heckling their PR peeps. Turns out, IRL (in real life) events are not dead.

When large events are sponsored by brands (i.e. expensive events), branding elements are of utmost importance. Events are created to increase brand awareness—to further a brand’s story. For attendees to make the connection, branding must be prominent.

Finally, give your events legs by providing adequate coverage. This often means live coverage during the event (tweeting, video, etc.) as well as photography and videography to utilize once the event has concluded. Never forget: The higher the quality of your coverage, the longer the lifetime of your campaign.

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