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, we explore YouTube creator monetization updates and Premieres with Steve Dotto, Instagram video chat, Topics channels, IGTV Guidebook, and
https://ift.tt/2NdcceE
Want to know how Twitch is growing live video audiences? Wondering how Twitch supports loyal, engaged communities? To explore what marketers need to know about Twitch, I interview Luria Petrucci. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers,
https://ift.tt/2yUbDTRPosted by randfish
We rely pretty heavily on Google, but some of their decisions of late have made doing SEO more difficult than it used to be. Which organic opportunities have been taken away, and what are some potential solutions? Rand covers a rather unsettling trend for SEO in this week's Whiteboard Friday.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about something kind of unnerving. What do we, as SEOs, do as Google is removing organic search traffic?
So for the last 19 years or 20 years that Google has been around, every month Google has had, at least seasonally adjusted, not just more searches, but they've sent more organic traffic than they did that month last year. So this has been on a steady incline. There's always been more opportunity in Google search until recently, and that is because of a bunch of moves, not that Google is losing market share, not that they're receiving fewer searches, but that they are doing things that makes SEO a lot harder.
Some scary newsThings like...
So, as a result, I think search marketers really need to start thinking about: What do we do as Google is taking away this opportunity? How can we continue to compete and provide value for our clients and our companies? I think there are three big sort of paths — I won't get into the details of the paths — but three big paths that we can pursue.
1. Invest in demand generation for your brand + branded product names to leapfrog declines in unbranded search.The first one is pretty powerful and pretty awesome, which is investing in demand generation, rather than just demand serving, but demand generation for brand and branded product names. Why does this work? Well, because let's say, for example, I'm searching for SEO tools. What do I get? I get back a list of results from Google with a bunch of mostly articles saying these are the top SEO tools. In fact, Google has now made a little one box, card-style list result up at the top, the carousel that shows different brands of SEO tools. I don't think Moz is actually listed in there because I think they're pulling from the second or the third lists instead of the first one. Whatever the case, frustrating, hard to optimize for. Google could take away demand from it or click-through rate opportunity from it.
But if someone performs a search for Moz, well, guess what? I mean we can nail that sucker. We can definitely rank for that. Google is not going to take away our ability to rank for our own brand name. In fact, Google knows that, in the navigational search sense, they need to provide the website that the person is looking for front and center. So if we can create more demand for Moz than there is for SEO tools, which I think there's something like 5 or 10 times more demand already for Moz than there is tools, according to Google Trends, that's a great way to go. You can do the same thing through your content, through your social media, and through your email marketing. Even through search you can search and create demand for your brand rather than unbranded terms.
2. Optimize for additional platforms.Second thing, optimizing across additional platforms. So we've looked and YouTube and Google Images account for about half of the overall volume that goes to Google web search. So between these two platforms, you've got a significant amount of additional traffic that you can optimize for. Images has actually gotten less aggressive. Right now they've taken away the "view image directly" link so that more people are visiting websites via Google Images. YouTube, obviously, this is a great place to build brand affinity, to build awareness, to create demand, this kind of demand generation to get your content in front of people. So these two are great platforms for that.
There are also significant amounts of web traffic still on the social web — LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., etc. The list goes on. Those are places where you can optimize, put your content forward, and earn traffic back to your websites.
3. Optimize the content that Google does show.LocalSo if you're in the local space and you're saying, "Gosh, Google has really taken away the ability for my website to get the clicks that it used to get from Google local searches," going into Google My Business and optimizing to provide information such that people who perform that query will be satisfied by Google's result, yes, they won't get to your website, but they will still come to your business, because you've optimized the content such that Google is showing, through Google My Business, such that those searchers want to engage with you. I think this sometimes gets lost in the SEO battle. We're trying so hard to earn the click to our site that we're forgetting that a lot of search experience ends right at the SERP itself, and we can optimize there too.
ResultsIn the zero-results sets, Google was still willing to show AdWords, which means if we have customer targets, we can use remarketed lists for search advertising (RLSA), or we can run paid ads and still optimize for those. We could also try and claim some of the data that might show up in zero-result SERPs. We don't yet know what that will be after Google rolls it back out, but we'll find out in the future.
AnswersFor answers, the answers that Google is giving, whether that's through voice or visually, those can be curated and crafted through featured snippets, through the card lists, and through the answer boxes. We have the opportunity again to influence, if not control, what Google is showing in those places, even when the search ends at the SERP.
All right, everyone, thanks for watching for this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
https://ift.tt/2Khosgi
Do you want better results from your Facebook campaigns? Looking for tactics to help you get more out of your investment in Facebook ads? In this article, you’ll discover seven advanced tips to improve the performance of your Facebook advertising campaigns. #1: Capitalize on Event-Based Lookalike Audiences Lookalike audiences are one way to create highly
https://ift.tt/2tLrvSHPosted by sergeystefoglo
If your work involves SEO at some level, you’ve most likely been hearing more and more about JavaScript and the implications it has on crawling and indexing. Frankly, Googlebot struggles with it, and many websites utilize modern-day JavaScript to load in crucial content today. Because of this, we need to be equipped to discuss this topic when it comes up in order to be effective.
The goal of this post is to equip you with the minimum viable knowledge required to do so. This post won’t go into the nitty gritty details, describe the history, or give you extreme detail on specifics. There are a lot of incredible write-ups that already do this — I suggest giving them a read if you are interested in diving deeper (I’ll link out to my favorites at the bottom).
In order to be effective consultants when it comes to the topic of JavaScript and SEO, we need to be able to answer three questions:
With some quick searching, I was able to find three examples of landing pages that utilize JavaScript to load in crucial content.
I’m going to be using Sitecore’s Symposium landing page through each of these talking points to illustrate how to answer the questions above.
We’ll cover the “how do I do this” aspect first, and at the end I’ll expand on a few core concepts and link to further resources.
Question 1: Does the domain in question rely on client-side JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links?The first step to diagnosing any issues involving JavaScript is to check if the domain uses it to load in crucial content that could impact SEO (on-page content or links). Ideally this will happen anytime you get a new client (during the initial technical audit), or whenever your client redesigns/launches new features of the site.
How do we go about doing this?
Ask the clientAsk, and you shall receive! Seriously though, one of the quickest/easiest things you can do as a consultant is contact your POC (or developers on the account) and ask them. After all, these are the people who work on the website day-in and day-out!
“Hi [client], we’re currently doing a technical sweep on the site. One thing we check is if any crucial content (links, on-page content) gets loaded in via JavaScript. We will do some manual testing, but an easy way to confirm this is to ask! Could you (or the team) answer the following, please?Check manually
1. Are we using client-side JavaScript to load in important content?
2. If yes, can we get a bulleted list of where/what content is loaded in via JavaScript?”
Even on a large e-commerce website with millions of pages, there are usually only a handful of important page templates. In my experience, it should only take an hour max to check manually. I use the Chrome Web Developers plugin, disable JavaScript from there, and manually check the important templates of the site (homepage, category page, product page, blog post, etc.)
In the example above, once we turn off JavaScript and reload the page, we can see that we are looking at a blank page.
As you make progress, jot down notes about content that isn’t being loaded in, is being loaded in wrong, or any internal linking that isn’t working properly.
At the end of this step we should know if the domain in question relies on JavaScript to load/change on-page content or links. If the answer is yes, we should also know where this happens (homepage, category pages, specific modules, etc.)
CrawlYou could also crawl the site (with a tool like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) with JavaScript rendering turned off, and then run the same crawl with JavaScript turned on, and compare the differences with internal links and on-page elements.
For example, it could be that when you crawl the site with JavaScript rendering turned off, the title tags don’t appear. In my mind this would trigger an action to crawl the site with JavaScript rendering turned on to see if the title tags do appear (as well as checking manually).
ExampleFor our example, I went ahead and did a manual check. As we can see from the screenshot below, when we disable JavaScript, the content does not load.
In other words, the answer to our first question for this pages is “yes, JavaScript is being used to load in crucial parts of the site.”
Question 2: If yes, is Googlebot seeing the content that’s loaded in via JavaScript properly?If your client is relying on JavaScript on certain parts of their website (in our example they are), it is our job to try and replicate how Google is actually seeing the page(s). We want to answer the question, “Is Google seeing the page/site the way we want it to?”
In order to get a more accurate depiction of what Googlebot is seeing, we need to attempt to mimic how it crawls the page.
How do we do that?
Use Google’s new mobile-friendly testing toolAt the moment, the quickest and most accurate way to try and replicate what Googlebot is seeing on a site is by using Google’s new mobile friendliness tool. My colleague Dom recently wrote an in-depth post comparing Search Console Fetch and Render, Googlebot, and the mobile friendliness tool. His findings were that most of the time, Googlebot and the mobile friendliness tool resulted in the same output.
In Google’s mobile friendliness tool, simply input your URL, hit “run test,” and then once the test is complete, click on “source code” on the right side of the window. You can take that code and search for any on-page content (title tags, canonicals, etc.) or links. If they appear here, Google is most likely seeing the content.
It’s always good to sense-check. Another quick way to check if GoogleBot has indexed content on your page is by simply selecting visible text on your page, and doing a site:search for it in Google with quotations around said text.
In our example there is visible text on the page that reads…
"Whether you are in marketing, business development, or IT, you feel a sense of urgency. Or maybe opportunity?"
When we do a site:search for this exact phrase, for this exact page, we get nothing. This means Google hasn’t indexed the content.
Crawling with a tool
Most crawling tools have the functionality to crawl JavaScript now. For example, in Screaming Frog you can head to configuration > spider > rendering > then select “JavaScript” from the dropdown and hit save. DeepCrawl and SiteBulb both have this feature as well.
From here you can input your domain/URL and see the rendered page/code once your tool of choice has completed the crawl.
Example:When attempting to answer this question, my preference is to start by inputting the domain into Google’s mobile friendliness tool, copy the source code, and searching for important on-page elements (think title tag, <h1>, body copy, etc.) It’s also helpful to use a tool like diff checker to compare the rendered HTML with the original HTML (Screaming Frog also has a function where you can do this side by side).
For our example, here is what the output of the mobile friendliness tool shows us.
After a few searches, it becomes clear that important on-page elements are missing here.
We also did the second test and confirmed that Google hasn’t indexed the body content found on this page.
The implication at this point is that Googlebot is not seeing our content the way we want it to, which is a problem.
Let’s jump ahead and see what we can recommend the client.
Question 3: If we’re confident Googlebot isn’t seeing our content properly, what should we recommend?Now we know that the domain is using JavaScript to load in crucial content and we know that Googlebot is most likely not seeing that content, the final step is to recommend an ideal solution to the client. Key word: recommend, not implement. It’s 100% our job to flag the issue to our client, explain why it’s important (as well as the possible implications), and highlight an ideal solution. It is 100% not our job to try to do the developer’s job of figuring out an ideal solution with their unique stack/resources/etc.
How do we do that?
You want server-side renderingThe main reason why Google is having trouble seeing Sitecore’s landing page right now, is because Sitecore’s landing page is asking the user (us, Googlebot) to do the heavy work of loading the JavaScript on their page. In other words, they’re using client-side JavaScript.
Googlebot is literally landing on the page, trying to execute JavaScript as best as possible, and then needing to leave before it has a chance to see any content.
The fix here is to instead have Sitecore’s landing page load on their server. In other words, we want to take the heavy lifting off of Googlebot, and put it on Sitecore’s servers. This will ensure that when Googlebot comes to the page, it doesn’t have to do any heavy lifting and instead can crawl the rendered HTML.
In this scenario, Googlebot lands on the page and already sees the HTML (and all the content).
There are more specific options (like isomorphic setups)This is where it gets to be a bit in the weeds, but there are hybrid solutions. The best one at the moment is called isomorphic.
In this model, we're asking the client to load the first request on their server, and then any future requests are made client-side.
So Googlebot comes to the page, the client’s server has already executed the initial JavaScript needed for the page, sends the rendered HTML down to the browser, and anything after that is done on the client-side.
If you’re looking to recommend this as a solution, please read this post from the AirBNB team which covers isomorphic setups in detail.
AJAX crawling = no goI won’t go into details on this, but just know that Google’s previous AJAX crawling solution for JavaScript has since been discontinued and will eventually not work. We shouldn’t be recommending this method.
(However, I am interested to hear any case studies from anyone who has implemented this solution recently. How has Google responded? Also, here’s a great write-up on this from my colleague Rob.)
SummaryAt the risk of severely oversimplifying, here's what you need to do in order to start working with JavaScript and SEO in 2018:
I’m really interested to hear about any of your experiences with JavaScript and SEO. What are some examples of things that have worked well for you? What about things that haven’t worked so well? If you’ve implemented an isomorphic setup, I’m curious to hear how that’s impacted how Googlebot sees your site.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
https://ift.tt/2Kx70E4Customer expectations keep going up, and up, and up. Customers today don’t give your company or organization a “pass” because you’re in B2B, of financial services, or healthcare, or manufacturing. The greatest companies in the world, regardless of category, are teaching your customer what is possible and what is the norm.
Forrester says we are five years into “the age of customer”: an era of manifest customer expectations increases that will challenge almost every business. Specifically, their analysts say:
“The age of the customer will place harsh and unfamiliar demands on institutions, requiring changes in how they develop, market, sell, and deliver products and services.” ~ @forrester
Click To Tweet
To succeed in this environment, companies must look for every opportunity to understand customer expectations and continuously leapfrog past them, time and time and time again. The cycle for optimization of customer experiences is getting shorter and shorter too. What was a remarkable customer experience in 2016 is table stakes today. And to be able to continue to jump in front of rising customer expectations, your data and systems must be constantly getting better as well.
But data is both a blessing and a curse for CX professionals today.
Oracle CX produced a terrific report called 2018 Smarter Insights CX Report and discovered that 39% of surveyed CX pros believe they are under-proficient and underprepared for the new, data-rich era of customer experience management.
They know data is important, but they aren’t sure how to match the available data to on-the-ground CX improvements and enhancements. So what happens instead? They often sit around a conference room and come up with ideas, relying on instinct and anecdote to guide their initiatives. This CAN work, but isn’t the best approach.
Big Data + Machine Learning = CX Improvement RecipesBut using big data to guide CX decisions is doable. You just have to know where to look and how to read the numbers.
This was proven especially true by my friend Christopher S. Penn and his firm BrainTrust Insights, in their recently published white paper “Turning Complaints Into Insights.”
Studying the impact of complaints on your business makes a lot of intuitive sense, doesn’t it? After all, if you’re going to make a CX improvement, fixing whatever your customers complain about is a good starting point. In fact, I wrote a whole book about the science and importance of complaints, Hug Your Haters.
In their research, Penn and Co. analyzed 51,260 customer complaints from a credit reporting customer database to see what made consumers unhappy, which complaints were most emotional, what actions companies took (if any), and what impact those actions had on the company’s bottom line.
They first classified the complaints into one of five categories:
They then used two machine learning libraries to gauge the sentiment and emotional strength of each complaint, yielding a matrix of problem type and problem magnitude.
The darker the color in the table above, the more emotionally charged the complaint, indexed as anger, disgust, fear, or sadness. The data show that anger at its strongest (when consumers complain about credit reporting investigations, followed by unexpected fees and trouble with fraud alerts. Disgust is highest around issues of closing on a mortgage, and excessive fees.
And, there are several other issues—almost all of them operational circumstances that could be changed/fixed— that routinely are causing high-emotion customer complaints.
The team at Braintrust Insights then looked at the actual resolution of these complaints, organized by issue type, sentiment (anger, disgust, et al) and intensity (darkest colors in the chart above).
Row three in the table shows the complaints that are most emotionally charged are highly disproportionate to have been settled with some sort of monetary relief for the customer. This demonstrates a correlation between intensity and business-level outcome, and further emphasizes how important complaints are to company health.
How You Can Use Big Data to Improve Your Own CXWhat we learn in this example (and I encourage you to download the entire report, as there is a lot more gold in there), is that when you’re looking at customer complaints, you don’t have to rely solely on complaint volume or simple keyword analysis when classifying and categorizing them. The emotions prism through which this data was sifted is readily available.
Second, we learn that complaints and emotional intensity have a direct tie to business outcomes. People who are the most unhappy often have to be compensated monetarily, at least in this financial services example.
If you are looking to make specific customer experience improvements in your company—and you should be—a great place to begin your investigation into specific potential changes is to uncover the things about which your customers have the most intense feelings.
Good CX professionals use their instinct and experience to find and fix. Great CX professionals augment that expertise with big data and machine learning, peering into the numbers to find larger truths.
Big thanks to BrainTrust Insights for allowing me an early glance at this terrific report. They’ve got more interesting stuff on the way!
https://ift.tt/2K9MgCG
Wondering which hashtags your business should be using on Instagram? Want to know how many hashtags to use for the best results? In this article, you’ll discover how to use hashtags for maximum effect on your Instagram posts. Understand the Structure of an Effective Instagram Hashtag Recipe There are countless hashtags you can use to
https://ift.tt/2KbfhxP
Wondering how to improve the visual and written content you share on social media? Want a list of tools to help? In this article, you’ll find 26 helpful tools and apps from the Social Media Marketing Podcast’s Discovery of the Week. #1: intoLive intoLive is a cool iOS app for creating interactive social media videos.
https://ift.tt/2KkQcQt
Among the dozens of social networks, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most potent lead generation platforms. Compared to others, these two networks provide marketers with better tools and targeted markets for lead acquisition.
LinkedIn, with more than 530 million active users allows users to follow and interact with the brands of their choice. What’s better, the platform encourages peer-to-peer connections, making it possible for “like-minded” parties to find each other with ease.
B2Bs, in particular, have every reason to market on LinkedIn. Studies show that a whopping 80% of global B2B leads come LinkedIn. What’s more, 94% of B2B marketers have a LinkedIn profile. Some studies even suggest that 46% of social media traffic coming to B2B sites is from LinkedIn.
This means that if you’re a B2B company, then nearly half of the social media traffic you see on your site is coming from LinkedIn.
https://ift.tt/2lvnVbP
Need to manage your Facebook ad spend more effectively? Wondering how Facebook’s Automated Rules feature can help? In this article, you’ll learn how to set up automated rules to better manage the costs of your Facebook advertising campaigns. Why Use Automated Rules for Facebook Ad Campaigns? As your number of Facebook campaigns grows, optimizing them
https://ift.tt/2MWa4Yz
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, we explore Facebook’s new video platform and Instagram’s IGTV video app with Ian Anderson Gray, YouTube Creative Suite for
https://ift.tt/2KbSTUi
Want your audience to ask about your products? Wondering how to spark people’s interest? To explore how to use curiosity in your marketing, I interview Chalene Johnson. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and
https://ift.tt/2tsC4Kp
Posted by MiriamEllis
Did you recently notice a minor or major drop in your Google review count, and then realize that some of your actual reviews had gone missing, too? Read on to see if your experience of removal review was part of the action Google took in late May surrounding anonymous reviews.
Q: What happened?A: As nearly as I can pinpoint it, Google began discounting reviews left by “A Google User” from total review counts around May 23, 2018. For a brief period, these anonymous reviews were still visible, but were then removed from display. I haven’t seen any official announcement about this, to date, and it remains unclear as to whether all reviews designated as being from “A Google User” have been removed, or whether some still remain. I haven’t been able to discover a single one since the update.
Q: How do I know if I was affected by this action?A: If, prior to my estimated date, you had reviews that had been left by profiles marked “A Google User,” and these reviews are now gone, that’s the diagnostic of why your total review count has dropped.
Q: The reviews I’ve lost weren’t from “A Google User” profiles. What happened?A: If you’ve lost reviews from non-anonymous profiles, it’s time to investigate other causes of removal. These could include:
A: One month later, these reviews remain absent. This is not a bug, and seems unlikely to be a test.
Q: Could my missing anonymous reviews come back?A: Never say “never” with Google. From their inception, Google review counts have been wonky, and have been afflicted by various bugs. There have been cases in which reviews have vanished and reappeared. But, in this case, I don’t believe these types of reviews will return. This is most likely an action on Google’s part with the intention of improving their review corpus, which is, unfortunately, plagued with spam.
Q: What were the origins of “A Google User” reviews?A: Reviews designated by this language came from a variety of scenarios, but are chiefly fallout from Google’s rollout of Google+ and then its subsequent detachment from local. As Mike Blumenthal explains:
As recently as 2016, Google required users to log in as G+ users to leave a review. When they transitioned away from + they allowed users several choices as to whether to delete their reviews or to create a name. Many users did not make that transition. For the users that chose not to give their name and make that transition Google identified them as ” A Google User”…. also certain devices like the old Blackberry’s could leave a review but not a name. Also users left + and may have changed profiles at Google abandoning their old profiles. Needless to say there were many ways that these reviews became from “A Google User.”Q: Is the removal of anonymous reviews a positive or negative thing? What’s Google trying to do here?
A: Whether this action has worked out well or poorly for you likely depends on the quality of the reviews you’ve lost. In some cases, the loss may have suddenly put you behind competitors, in terms of review count or rating. In others, the loss of anonymous negative reviews may have just resulted in your star rating improving — which would be great news!
As to Google’s intent with this action, my assumption is that it’s a step toward increasing transparency. Not their own transparency, but the accountability of the reviewing public. Google doesn’t really like to acknowledge it, but their review corpus is inundated with spam, some of it the product of global networks of bad actors who have made a business of leaving fake reviews. Personally, I welcome Google making any attempts to cope with this, but the removal of this specific type of anonymous review is definitely not an adequate solution to review spam when the livelihoods of real people are on the line.
Q: Does this Google update mean my business is now safe from anonymous reviews?A: Unfortunately, no. While it does mean you’re unlikely to see reviews marked as being from “A Google User”, it does not in any way deter people from creating as many Google identities as they’d like to review your business. Consider:
A: No, not really. I empathize with the business owners expressing frustration over the loss of reviews they were proud of and had worked hard to earn. I see actions like this as important signals to all local businesses to remember that you don’t own your Google reviews, you don’t own your Google My Business listing/Knowledge Panel. Google owns those assets, and manages them in any way they deem best for Google.
In the local SEO industry, we are increasingly seeing the transformation of businesses from the status of empowered “website owner” to the shakier “Google tenant,” with more and more consumer actions taking place within Google’s interface. The May removal of reviews should be one more nudge to your local brand to:
A: A Google rep once famously stated,
“The wiki nature of Google Maps expands upon Google’s steadfast commitment to open community.”
I’d welcome your opinions as to how Google should deal with review spam, as I find this a very hard question to answer. It may well be a case of trying to lock the barn door after the horse has bolted, and Google’s wiki mentality applied to real-world businesses is one with which our industry has contended for years.
You see, the trouble with Google’s local product is that it was never opt-in. Whether you list your business or not, it can end up in Google’s local business index, and that means you are open to reviews (positive, negative, and fallacious) on the most visible possible platform, like it or not. As I’m not seeing a way to walk this back, review spam should be Google’s problem to fix, and they are obliged to fix it if:
Knowing that Alphabet has an estimated operating income of $7 billion for 2018, I believe Google could fund these safeguards:
Now it’s your turn! Let’s look at Google’s removal of “A Google User” reviews as a first step in the right direction. If you had Google’s ear, what would you suggest they do next to combat review spam? I’d really like to know.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
https://ift.tt/2JWcPLz
Want to sell tickets or take reservations on Instagram? Looking for a way to let customers purchase from you without leaving Instagram? In this article, you’ll learn how to set up Instagram action buttons to let customers do business with you via your Instagram business profile. What Action Buttons Are Available on Instagram? Instagram has
https://ift.tt/2MbfCgCOnline reviews, when done well, create new customers. Done poorly, they repel potential customers.
How important are online reviews? More than 80% of Americans trust them, according to BrightLocal research. A new study I just finished yesterday for my upcoming book with Daniel Lemin found that online reviews rank second—behind only friend and family recommendations—among the critical sources of information driving a consumer’s potential purchase.
And among millennials? They trust online reviews MORE than they trust friends and family.
But they can’t be reviews from whenever. Like the new Harry Styles ballad, they have to be FRESH! In fact, 77% of consumers do not trust reviews that are older than 90 days, says BrightLocal.
Also, Google now uses “review velocity”—the pace at which your business accumulates new reviews—as a ranking factor for local search results.
We are at a point where getting a consistent supply of positive reviews has a material impact on business success. Yet, SO MANY businesses entirely botch the review solicitation process. By my count, there are four ways to ask for an online review:
Online Reviews Solicitation Playbook 1Ignore online reviews entirely, and just hope and assume that some percentage of customers will be motivated to create them. This is a bad idea, since about 1% of customers will do so on their own.
Online Reviews Solicitation Playbook 2Use some sort of visual cue to encourage or nudge customers to create an online review. This is where you find things like “Review us on Yelp” window clings and so forth. This is better than doing nothing, but isn’t terribly persuasive.
Online Reviews Solicitation Playbook 3Making a whole hullabaloo out of online reviews, and either engaging in a quid pro quo (write us a review and you get a discount), or a guilt trip (what do I have to do today for you to give us a review?). This is not only a violation of the terms of service of essentially every reviews platform, but new research finds that bribing people for reviews actually produces FEWER reviews, not more.
Online Reviews Solicitation Playbook 4Providing customers with some sort of tactile, noticeable item that encourages them to write a review without feeling like they are being fully bribed to do so. If you can execute it operationally, this is the option you want.
A Brilliant Idea From Antigua
Upon checking out, they gave me two small bottles of local rum, and attached to each was a business card, encouraging a TripAdvisor review. Online reviews are clearly important to the owners—after all, even in Antigua rum isn’t free—and a quick check of TripAdvisor finds that they have 411 reviews, a 4.5 average, and are ranked #4 of all hotels in the St. John’s area of the island.
THIS is how you solicit reviews. I’m going to drink the rum first, then write the review.
Find a way to give your customers something small enough to not feel like a bribe, yet noticeable enough to make them remember you and want to write a review.
If you come up with some cool ideas (and I know you will), let me know, won’t you? I’m always looking for new case studies.
https://ift.tt/2toNpLB
Do you use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog or business? Wondering how the latest Pinterest changes will affect your account and overall marketing approach? In this article, you’ll discover the latest Pinterest updates and how to leverage them to improve your business presence. #1: Business Profiles Feature Dynamic Cover Images The first noticeable
https://ift.tt/2MH4Dga
You might have noticed over the past few years that online courses are springing up everywhere. There are sites like Udemy and Skillshare where you can find courses on almost any topic you like. And there are also people who release and sell individual courses on topics they specialize in directly from their websites.
This is because online courses are in high demand. The E-learning market is expected to grow to $325 billion by 2025. But selling courses directly isn’t the only method businesses can use to generate a profit. There are several other ways you can use them to get more customers. One of them is to weave courses into your content marketing. It will make your content an even more powerful marketing medium.
Today I am going to show you several ways you can use courses to boost your content marketing…
Use courses as lead magnets:
Email has become an essential component of most businesses’ content marketing right now.
https://ift.tt/2MAoUUl
Want to make a stronger first impression with your Instagram profile? Wondering how to add branding and personality to your Instagram bio? In this article, you’ll discover useful tips to help you build and optimize an Instagram profile for business. #1: Choose a Quality Profile Photo That Reflects Your Branding First and foremost, your Instagram
https://ift.tt/2K0HQgxPosted by Dom-Woodman
Occasionally, a problem will land on your desk that's a little out of the ordinary. Something where you don't have an easy answer. You go to your brain and your brain returns nothing.
These problems can’t be solved with a little bit of keyword research and basic technical configuration. These are the types of technical SEO problems where the rabbit hole goes deep.
The very nature of these situations defies a checklist, but it's useful to have one for the same reason we have them on planes: even the best of us can and will forget things, and a checklist will provvide you with places to dig.
Fancy some examples of strange SEO problems? Here are four examples to mull over while you read. We’ll answer them at the end.
1. Why wasn’t Google showing 5-star markup on product pages?
2. Why wouldn’t Bing display 5-star markup on review pages, when Google would?
3. Why were pages getting indexed with a no-index tag?
4. Why did any page on a website return a 302 about 20–50% of the time, but only for crawlers?
Finally, a quick note. It’s entirely possible that some of this checklist won’t apply to every scenario. That’s totally fine. It’s meant to be a process for everything you could check, not everything you should check.
The pre-checklist checkDoes it actually matter?Does this problem only affect a tiny amount of traffic? Is it only on a handful of pages and you already have a big list of other actions that will help the website? You probably need to just drop it.
I know, I hate it too. I also want to be right and dig these things out. But in six months' time, when you've solved twenty complex SEO rabbit holes and your website has stayed flat because you didn't re-write the title tags, you're still going to get fired.
But hopefully that's not the case, in which case, onwards!
Where are you seeing the problem?We don’t want to waste a lot of time. Have you heard this wonderful saying?: “If you hear hooves, it’s probably not a zebra.”
The process we’re about to go through is fairly involved and it’s entirely up to your discretion if you want to go ahead. Just make sure you’re not overlooking something obvious that would solve your problem. Here are some common problems I’ve come across that were mostly horses.
Factors which make it more likely that you’ve got a more complex problem which require you to don your debugging shoes:
Pick a couple of example pages to work with — ones that exhibit whatever problem you're seeing. No, this won't be representative, but we'll come back to that in a bit.
Of course, if it only affects a tiny number of pages then it might actually be representative, in which case we're good. It definitely matters, right? You didn't just skip the step above? OK, cool, let's move on.
2. Can Google crawl the page once?First we’re checking whether Googlebot has access to the page, which we’ll define as a 200 status code.
We’ll check in four different ways to expose any common issues:
We should now have an idea whether or not Googlebot is struggling to fetch the page once.
Have we found any problems yet?If we can re-create a failed crawl with a simple check above, then it’s likely Googlebot is probably failing consistently to fetch our page and it’s typically one of those basic reasons.
But it might not be. Many problems are inconsistent because of the nature of technology. ;)
3. Are we telling Google two different things?Next up: Google can find the page, but are we confusing it by telling it two different things?
This is most commonly seen, in my experience, because someone has messed up the indexing directives.
By "indexing directives," I’m referring to any tag that defines the correct index status or page in the index which should rank. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:
An example of providing mixed messages would be:
Or:
If we’re providing mixed messages, then it’s not clear how Google will respond. It’s a great way to start seeing strange results.
Good places to check for the indexing directives listed above are:
This page has a lot of mentions of the rendered DOM on it (18, if you’re curious). Since we’ve just had our first, here’s a quick recap about what that is.
When you load a webpage, the first request is the HTML. This is what you see in the HTML source (right-click on a webpage and click View Source).
This is before JavaScript has done anything to the page. This didn’t use to be such a big deal, but now so many websites rely heavily on JavaScript that the most people quite reasonably won’t trust the the initial HTML.
Rendered DOM is the technical term for a page, when all the JavaScript has been rendered and all the page alterations made. You can see this in Dev Tools.
In Chrome you can get that by right clicking and hitting inspect element (or Ctrl + Shift + I). The Elements tab will show the DOM as it’s being rendered. When it stops flickering and changing, then you’ve got the rendered DOM!
To see what Google is seeing, we're going to need to get log files. At this point, we can check to see how it is accessing the page.
Aside: Working with logs is an entire post in and of itself. I’ve written a guide to log analysis with BigQuery, I’d also really recommend trying out Screaming Frog Log Analyzer, which has done a great job of handling a lot of the complexity around logs.
When we’re looking at crawling there are three useful checks we can do:
If Google isn't getting 200s consistently in our log files, but we can access the page fine when we try, then there is clearly still some differences between Googlebot and ourselves. What might those differences be?
This means that:
Working out what’s happening with these periodic effects is going to be fiddly; you’re probably going to need to talk to a back-end developer.
Depending on your skill level, you might not know exactly where to lead the discussion. A useful structure for a discussion is often to talk about how a request passes through your technology stack and then look at the edge cases we discussed above.
Two useful pieces of information to enter this conversation with:
If Google can crawl the page consistently, then we move onto our next step.
5. Does Google see what I can see on a one-off basis?We know Google is crawling the page correctly. The next step is to try and work out what Google is seeing on the page. If you’ve got a JavaScript-heavy website you’ve probably banged your head against this problem before, but even if you don’t this can still sometimes be an issue.
We follow the same pattern as before. First, we try to re-create it once. The following tools will let us do that:
Is there a difference between Fetch & Render, the mobile-friendly testing tool, and Googlebot? Not really, with the exception of timeouts (which is why we have our later steps!). Here’s the full analysis of the difference between them, if you’re interested.
Once we have the output from these, we compare them to what we ordinarily see in our browser. I’d recommend using a tool like Diff Checker to compare the two.
Have we found any problems yet?If we encounter meaningful differences at this point, then in my experience it’s typically either from JavaScript or cookies
Why?
We can isolate each of these by:
Yet again we can compare them using something like Diff Checker, which will allow us to spot any differences. You might want to use an HTML formatter to help line them up better.
We can also see the JavaScript errors thrown using the Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool, which may prove particularly useful if you’re confident in your JavaScript.
If, using this knowledge and these tools, we can recreate the bug, then we have something that can be replicated and it’s easier for us to hand off to a developer as a bug that will get fixed.
If we’re seeing everything is correct here, we move on to the next step.
6. What is Google actually seeing?It’s possible that what Google is seeing is different from what we recreate using the tools in the previous step. Why? A couple main reasons:
We’ve gotten this far without talking about time! Pages don’t get crawled instantly, and crawled pages don’t get indexed instantly.
Quick sidebar: What is caching?Caching is often a problem if you get to this stage. Unlike JS, it’s not talked about as much in our community, so it’s worth some more explanation in case you’re not familiar. Caching is storing something so it’s available more quickly next time.
When you request a webpage, a lot of calculations happen to generate that page. If you then refreshed the page when it was done, it would be incredibly wasteful to just re-run all those same calculations. Instead, servers will often save the output and serve you the output without re-running them. Saving the output is called caching.
Why do we need to know this? Well, we’re already well out into the weeds at this point and so it’s possible that a cache is misconfigured and the wrong information is being returned to users.
There aren’t many good beginner resources on caching which go into more depth. However, I found this article on caching basics to be one of the more friendly ones. It covers some of the basic types of caching quite well.
How can we see what Google is actually working with?Again, once we’ve found the problem, it’s time to go and talk to a developer. The advice for this conversation is identical to the last one — everything I said there still applies.
The other knowledge you should go into this conversation armed with: how Google works and where it can struggle. While your developer will know the technical ins and outs of your website and how it’s built, they might not know much about how Google works. Together, this can help you reach the answer more quickly.
The obvious source for this are resources or presentations given by Google themselves. Of the various resources that have come out, I’ve found these two to be some of the more useful ones for giving insight into first principles:
But there is often a difference between statements Google will make and what the SEO community sees in practice. All the SEO experiments people tirelessly perform in our industry can also help shed some insight. There are far too many list here, but here are two good examples:
If we’ve reached this point, we’re pretty happy that our website is running smoothly. But not all problems can be solved just on your website; sometimes you’ve got to look to the wider landscape and the SERPs around it.
Most commonly, what I’m looking for here is:
Either way, they’re nearly always found by doing exact searches in Google. I.e. taking a relatively specific piece of content from your page and searching for it in quotes.
Have you found any problems yet?If you find a number of other exact copies, then it’s possible they might be causing issues.
The best description I’ve come up with for “have you found a problem here?” is: do you think Google is aggregating together similar pages and only showing one? And if it is, is it picking the wrong page?
This doesn’t just have to be on traditional Google search. You might find a version of it on Google Jobs, Google News, etc.
To give an example, if you are a reseller, you might find content isn’t ranking because there's another, more authoritative reseller who consistently posts the same listings first.
Sometimes you’ll see this consistently and straightaway, while other times the aggregation might be changing over time. In that case, you’ll need a rank tracker for whatever Google property you’re working on to see it.
Jon Earnshaw from Pi Datametrics gave an excellent talk on the latter (around suspicious SERP flux) which is well worth watching.
Once you’ve found the problem, you’ll probably need to experiment to find out how to get around it, but the easiest factors to play with are usually:
