This Is the One Thing You Can Do to Vastly Improve Your Content Marketing

To improve your content marketing, you need to stop thinking in terms of content marketing and start thinking in terms of content experiences instead. Here’s why:

The phrase content marketing has become so watered down and generic. Simply calling it content marketing and thinking about it in terms of sharing blogs, publishing articles, emailing ebooks and promoting webinars dilutes how valuable and important content marketing truly is. Content is the blood that runs through the veins of a company. Without it, there is no inbound. No sales enablement. No demand generation. No social media. And no sales too.

UberFlip defines the content experience as this:

A content experience is the environment in which your content lives, how it’s structured and how it compels your prospects and customers to engage with your company.

So starting today, we’re going to shift our thinking to the entire content experience. Because when we shift our thinking to experiences, we change the focus from simply publishing a blog post to personalization, organization, and the entire strategy instead.

What is content marketing if it isn’t about coming up with a strategy to engage your customers to buy your products and services?

What is content marketing if it isn't about coming up with a strategy to engage your customers to buy your products and services?
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And I have the perfect way to shift your thinking and show you how companies like GE, Cisco and SAP are implementing a content experience strategy to vastly improve their content marketing results. It’s called The Content Experience Coffee Break, a no-cost, 4-part webinar series I recorded with my friend Randy Frisch at UberFlip. Don’t worry, each webiNINE is short — only 9 minutes. It’s fast, it’s fun, and you’ll become a content experience expert in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee (or two).

If you’re more of a reading type, here’s a brief recap of what we discuss in The Content Experience Coffee Break:

1. Bring Your Content to Life with Inbound Marketing, Demand Gen, Account-Based Marketing and Sales Enablement

Simply having content on your website and in your channels isn’t good enough anymore. In fact, according to a study by SiriusDecisions, 60-70% of all content doesn’t get used at all. Ouch.

But content is more important than ever.

According to a study by SiriusDecisions, 60-70% of all #content doesn't get used at all. #ouch
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Here’s a sneak peek of the Content Experience Coffee Break

Content touches inbound marketing. It touches account-based marketing. It touches demand generation. And it touches sales enablement, to name a few. You can — and should — think about the entire experience and how you can leverage content with:

1. Inbound marketing: create content that solves your prospects’ problems, and have it ready for them when and where they need it.
2. Demand generation: drive people to content experience that are personalized and drive conversions/leads.
3. Account-based marketing: engage your target accounts with personalized content experiences that accelerate pipeline and drive sales.
4. Sales enablement: empower actual members of your sales team to use content and distribute it to prospects.

I love this example of account-based content that Randy shared from Snowflake. See how Snowflake customized the content for the account they were targeting? AWESOME.

2. You Can — and Should — Scale Personalized Content Experiences Into Your Marketing Campaigns

We talk so much about marketing your content, but we don’t actually do it. I wrote about this more than 6 years ago in my book Youtility.

For 2019, you need a content experience framework to create and market personalized content for every part of the buyer journey. And you can download an awesome framework that UberFlip created. With this schema, you can plan for an end-to-end experience that works. It sounds more complicated than it is. This framework from UberFlip makes it easy.

3. And Now the Fun Part! Boost Your Content Engagement & Conversions by Putting it in More Places

According to recent UberFlip’s Content Experience report (download it now), by putting your content in more than one place (for example, under different types of navigation in your website), you can increase your content views by 8X (no, not 8%—8X)!

Placing your content in more than one place can increase views by more than 8X (yes, 8 times, not 8 percent)
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It makes sense: if you house your content in more places, you’ll get more engagement.

Creating new content isn’t the only way to increase views and sales; you should place the content in more contextual places too.  In fact, adding more than two headings to your navigation bar can increase content views by 200%.

I like it.

For example, let’s say our team at Convince & Convert creates an ebook on social media that would fit in a topical dropdown on ConvinceandConvert.com. We could achieve a nice bump in views by also placing that same content under a vertical focus or solution focus dropdown.

It makes sense: the more specific and relevant your navigation is, the more likely people will be to view your content.

Not convinced on the business impact? Just remember: it takes 7 pieces of content to make your prospects sales-ready. If you personalize your content and make it easier for prospects to access your content, you’ll move them closer to opportunities — faster. Cha-ching.

It takes 7 pieces of content to make your prospects sales-ready. If you personalize your content and make it easier for prospects to access your content, you'll move them closer to opportunities — faster.
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4. But Now Comes the Question: Who Owns the Content Experience?

If the content experience is so important (it is!), who is in charge of it in your organization? Here are a few options Randy and I discussed:

The Content Marketer

I can make that case. If a content marketer is involved with storytelling and content assets, they should be in charge of the content experience? In small organizations, this makes sense.

The Demand Generation Marketer

Demand gen marketers tend to be involved with lead nurturing and lead management, so they should care about what content they’re using in their lead nurturing campaigns. Having the demand gen marketer be in charge of the content experience would make sense in some organizations.

The Digital Marketer

If you’re a digital marketer in charge of website content, it would probably make sense for you to own the content experience, while working closely with the content manager too.

And how about a new role: the Content Experience Manager/Director/VP? This could be you!

Still pondering who owns the content experience? UberFlip created an entire ebook on this topic. Check it out. Maybe you could be the first (or next?) Content Experience VP in your organization.

Now that you’ve shifted your focus from content marketing to the entire content experience, make sure to grab a coffee (or even a beer, I don’t judge), and join me for The Content Experience Coffee Break to see how you can achieve incredible gains from your content in 2019. See you there. 

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Revenue Optimization: Maximizing ROI on Your Ads

Want your Facebook and Google ads to generate more revenue? Curious how Google Analytics data can help you find website optimizations that will help? To explore how optimizing the customer journey helps you boost sales, I interview Tanner Larsson. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business

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Local Search Ranking Factors 2018: Local Today, Key Takeaways, and the Future

Posted by Whitespark

In the past year, local SEO has run at a startling and near-constant pace of change. From an explosion of new Google My Business features to an ever-increasing emphasis on the importance of reviews, it's almost too much to keep up with. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome our friend Darren Shaw to explain what local is like today, dive into the key takeaways from his 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, and offer us a glimpse into the future according to the local SEO experts.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Darren Shaw from Whitespark, and today I want to talk to you about the local search ranking factors. So this is a survey that David Mihm has run for the past like 10 years. Last year, I took it over, and it's a survey of the top local search practitioners, about 40 of them. They all contribute their answers, and I aggregate the data and say what's driving local search. So this is what the opinion of the local search practitioners is, and I'll kind of break it down for you.

Local search today

So these are the results of this year's survey. We had Google My Business factors at about 25%. That was the biggest piece of the pie. We have review factors at 15%, links at 16%, on-page factors at 14%, behavioral at 10%, citations at 11%, personalization and social at 6% and 3%. So that's basically the makeup of the local search algorithm today, based on the opinions of the people that participated in the survey.

The big story this year is Google My Business. Google My Business factors are way up, compared to last year, a 32% increase in Google My Business signals. I'll talk about that a little bit more over in the takeaways. Review signals are also up, so more emphasis on reviews this year from the practitioners. Citation signals are down again, and that makes sense. They continue to decline I think for a number of reasons. They used to be the go-to factor for local search. You just built out as many citations as you could. Now the local search algorithm is so much more complicated and there's so much more to it that it's being diluted by all of the other factors. Plus it used to be a real competitive difference-maker. Now it's not, because everyone is pretty much getting citations. They're considered table stakes now. By seeing a drop here, it doesn't mean you should stop doing them. They're just not the competitive difference-maker they used to be. You still need to get listed on all of the important sites.

Key takeaways

All right, so let's talk about the key takeaways.

1. Google My Business

The real story this year was Google My Business, Google My Business, Google My Business. Everyone in the comments was talking about the benefits they're seeing from investing in a lot of these new features that Google has been adding.

Google has been adding a ton of new features lately — services, descriptions, Google Posts, Google Q&A. There's a ton of stuff going on in Google My Business now that allows you to populate Google My Business with a ton of extra data. So this was a big one.

✓ Take advantage of Google Posts

Everyone talked about Google Posts, how they're seeing Google Posts driving rankings. There are a couple of things there. One is the semantic content that you're providing Google in a Google post is definitely helping Google associate those keywords with your business. Engagement with Google Posts as well could be driving rankings up, and maybe just being an active business user continuing to post stuff and logging in to your account is also helping to lift your business entity and improve your rankings. So definitely, if you're not on Google Posts, get on it now.

If you search for your category, you'll see a ton of businesses are not doing it. So it's also a great competitive difference-maker right now.

✓ Seed your Google Q&A

Google Q&A, a lot of businesses are not even aware this exists. There's a Q&A section now. Your customers are often asking questions, and they're being answered by not you. So it's valuable for you to get in there and make sure you're answering your questions and also seed the Q&A with your own questions. So add all of your own content. If you have a frequently asked questions section on your website, take that content and put it into Google Q&A. So now you're giving lots more content to Google.

✓ Post photos and videos

Photos and videos, continually post photos and videos, maybe even encourage your customers to do that. All of that activity is helpful. A lot of people don't know that you can now post videos to Google My Business. So get on that if you have any videos for your business.

✓ Fill out every field

There are so many new fields in Google My Business. If you haven't edited your listing in a couple of years, there's a lot more stuff in there that you can now populate and give Google more data about your business. All of that really leads to engagement. All of these extra engagement signals that you're now feeding Google, from being a business owner that's engaged with your listing and adding stuff and from users, you're giving them more stuff to look at, click on, and dwell on your listing for a longer time, all that helps with your rankings.

2. Reviews✓ Get more Google reviews

Reviews continue to increase in importance in local search, so, obviously, getting more Google reviews. It used to be a bit more of a competitive difference-maker. It's becoming more and more table stakes, because everybody seems to be having lots of reviews. So you definitely want to make sure that you are competing with your competition on review count and lots of high-quality reviews.

✓ Keywords in reviews

Getting keywords in reviews, so rather than just asking for a review, it's useful to ask your customers to mention what service they had provided or whatever so you can get those keywords in your reviews.

✓ Respond to reviews (users get notified now!)

Responding to reviews. Google recently started notifying users that if the owner has responded to you, you'll get an email. So all of that is really great, and those responses, it's another signal to Google that you're an engaged business.

✓ Diversify beyond Google My Business for reviews

Diversify. Don't just focus on Google My Business. Look at other sites in your industry that are prominent review sites. You can find them if you just look for your own business name plus reviews, if you search that in Google, you're going to see the sites that Google is saying are important for your particular business.

You can also find out like what are the sites that your competitors are getting reviews on. Then if you just do a search like keyword plus city, like "lawyers + Denver," you might find sites that are important for your industry as well that you should be listed on. So check out a couple of your keywords and make sure you're getting reviews on more sites than just Google.

3. Links

Then links, of course, links continue to drive local search. A lot of people in the comments talked about how a handful of local links have been really valuable. This is a great competitive difference-maker, because a lot of businesses don't have any links other than citations. So when you get a few of these, it can really have an impact.

✓ From local industry sites and sponsorships

They really talk about focusing on local-specific sites and industry-specific sites. So you can get a lot of those from sponsorships. They're kind of the go-to tactic. If you do a search for in title sponsors plus city name, you're going to find a lot of sites that are listing their sponsors, and those are opportunities for you, in your city, that you could sponsor that event as well or that organization and get a link.

The future!

All right. So I also asked in the survey: Where do you see Google going in the future? We got a lot of great responses, and I tried to summarize that into three main themes here for you.

1. Keeping users on Google

This is a really big one. Google does not want to send its users to your website to get the answer. Google wants to have the answer right on Google so that they don't have to click. It's this zero-click search result. So you see Rand Fishkin talking about this. This has been happening in local for a long time, and it's really amplified with all of these new features Google has been adding. They want to have all of your data so that they don't have to send users to find it somewhere else. Then that means in the future less traffic to your website.

So Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm also talk about Google as your new homepage, and this concept is like branded search.

• What does your branded search look like?
• So what sites are you getting reviews on?
• What does your knowledge panel look like?

Make that all look really good, because Google doesn't want to send people to your new website.

2. More emphasis on behavioral signals

David Mihm is a strong voice in this. He talks about how Google is trying to diversify how they rank businesses based on what's happening in the real world. They're looking for real-world signals that actual humans care about this business and they're engaging with this business.

So there's a number of things that they can do to track that -- so branded search, how many people are searching for your brand name, how many people are clicking to call your business, driving directions. This stuff is all kind of hard to manipulate, whereas you can add more links, you can get more reviews. But this stuff, this is a great signal for Google to rely on.

Engagement with your listing, engagement with your website, and actual humans in your business. If you've seen on the knowledge panel sometimes for brick-and-mortar business, it will be like busy times. They know when people are actually at your business. They have counts of how many people are going into your business. So that's a great signal for them to use to understand the prominence of your business. Is this a busy business compared to all the other ones in the city?

3. Google will monetize everything

Then, of course, a trend to monetize as much as they can. Google is a publicly traded company. They want to make as much money as possible. They're on a constant growth path. So there are a few things that we see coming down the pipeline.

Local service ads are expanding across the country and globally and in different industries. So this is like a paid program. You have to apply to get into it, and then Google takes a cut of leads. So if you are a member of this, then Google will send leads to you. But you have to be verified to be in there, and you have to pay to be in there.

Then taking a cut from bookings, you can now book directly on Google for a lot of different businesses. If you think about Google Flights and Google Hotels, Google is looking for a way to monetize all of this local search opportunity. That's why they're investing heavily in local search so they can make money from it. So seeing more of these kinds of features rolling out in the future is definitely coming. Transactions from other things. So if I did book something, then Google will take a cut for it.

So that's the future. That's sort of the news of the local search ranking factors this year. I hope it's been helpful. If you have any questions, just leave some comments and I'll make sure to respond to them all. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

If you missed our recent webinar on the Local Search Ranking Factors survey with Darren Shaw and Dr. Pete, don't worry! You can still catch the recording here:

Check out the webinar

You'll be in for a jam-packed hour of deeper insights and takeaways from the survey, as well as some great audience-contributed Q&A.

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How to Track Awareness, Completion, and Engagement Goals With Google Analytics

Want a better way to evaluate your website’s performance? Wondering how to set goals to mark key points in your customer’s journey? In this article, you’ll learn how to assess the effectiveness of the customer journey on your website using awareness, completion, and engagement goals. #1: Define Goals Along the Customer Journey Before you open

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Change Course & Don’t Break Anything: The Journey: Season 2, Episode 11

Ever needed to accelerate your marketing plans to meet a goal? Watch the Journey, Social Media Examiner’s episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business. Watch the Journey Episode 11 of the Journey explores how the team at Social Media Examiner attempts to stimulate sales by quickly changing course. What

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The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful 2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

A thousand thanks to the 1,411 respondents who gave of their time and knowledge in contributing to this major survey! You’ve created a vivid image of what real-life, everyday local search marketers and local business owners are observing on a day-to-day basis, what strategies are working for them right now, and where some frankly stunning opportunities for improvement reside. Now, we’re ready to share your insights into:

• Google Updates
• Citations
• Reviews
• Company infrastructure
• Tool usage
• And a great deal more...

This survey pooled the observations of everyone from people working to market a single small business, to agency marketers with large local business clients:

Respondents who self-selected as not marketing a local business were filtered from further survey results.

Thanks to you, this free report is a window into the industry. Bring these statistics to teammates and clients to earn the buy-in you need to effectively reach local consumers in 2019.

Get the full report

There are so many stories here worthy of your time

Let’s pick just one, to give a sense of the industry intelligence you’ll access in this report. Likely you’ve now seen the Local Search Ranking Factors 2018 Survey, undertaken by Whitespark in conjunction with Moz. In that poll of experts, we saw Google My Business signals being cited as the most influential local ranking component. But what was #2? Link building.

You might come away from that excellent survey believing that, since link building is so important, all local businesses must be doing it. But not so. The State of the Local SEO Industry Report reveals that:

When asked what’s working best for them as a method for earning links, 35% of local businesses and their marketers admitted to having no link building strategy in place at all:

And that, Moz friends, is what opportunity looks like. Get your meaningful local link building strategy in place in the new year, and prepare to leave ⅓ of your competitors behind, wondering how you surpassed them in the local and organic results.

The full report contains 30+ findings like this one. Rivet the attention of decision-makers at your agency, quote persuasive statistics to hesitant clients, and share this report with teammates who need to be brought up to industry speed. When read in tandem with the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, this report will help your business or agency understand both what experts are saying and what practitioners are experiencing.

Sometimes, local search marketing can be a lonely road to travel. You may find yourself wondering, “Does anyone understand what I do? Is anyone else struggling with this task? How do I benchmark myself?” You’ll find both confirmation and affirmation today, and Moz’s best hope is that you’ll come away a better, bolder, more effective local marketer. Let’s begin!

Download the report

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Water Damage Ottumwa Iowa | Ameristeam Restoration | 641-632-9945

Water Damage Ottumwa Iowa Water Damage Ottumwa Iowa Water Damage Ottumwa Iowa Call 641-632-9945 https://ift.tt/2PuiICn Ameristeam Restoration 2440 Queens Ave, Oskaloosa, IA 52577 (641) 295-6722 Water mitigation is the process of reducing or preventing the amount of water damage that happens after a flood or a permeating leak. It prevents additional damage by taking fast, appropriate actions. Water mitigation is needed after plumbing failures or when storms cause water to rush into your home. Soaked rugs, damaged walls, warped flooring and ruined furniture are only the beginning if mitigation is not engaged quickly. Specific steps are taken to reduce property destruction, to prevent further water damage and to restore your property to its full value. We’ll bill your insurance company and work with your insurance adjuster throughout the entire job. No job is too large or too small we have the right equipment and trained technicians for any size job. We also have a program for customers who have suffered a water damage and have no coverage in place. We can make it affordable for you to save your home even without insurance only at Mold Pro. Two things you need to remember when it comes to water damage restoration. Stop the leak and start drying and removing the moisture from your home as soon as possible. The longer it takes to get started and finished drying your home the more money will be needed for reconstruction of your home. Our certified water restoration technicians will extract, dry, and restore your structure protecting your most valuable investment, your home. With our top of the line equipment we will remove any water or moisture preventing mold or mildew growth in the future ensuring a safe environment for you and your family. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=474bn_KfRgI

Video Marketing Kansas City | Imagination Marketing Systems | (816) 596-9180

Video Marketing Kansas City Video Marketing Kansas City Video Marketing Kansas City (816) 281-5582 https://ift.tt/2AxTzwe Using Online Video Can Help Increase Your Business Profits Marketing is a business necessity wherein tools and technology innovations are utilized to increase a business’ profitability. The relatively new online video technology is one technology example that can be harnessed to increase profits and even possibly lower marketing costs. Now that video can be attached to almost any web page, the possibilities of using video as a marketing technique (in the same manner of television) is slowly but surely gaining ground. - Research on the phenomenon of communication retention show that people remember only 10% of what they have read and 20% of what they hear; however, people remember more than 50% of what they see and hear at the same time – just like watching a movie. - Marketing analysts report that companies that currently use on-demand video, video e-mail or streaming video podcasts have reported sales increases of close to 25%, sometime more. The increase in client response is attributed to the fact that multimedia rich content is a better catalyst to move and/or persuade clients towards buying a product or service because they can see its benefits in action. - As far as online viewers are concerned, video builds credibility and trust. It is very similar to having a live person communicating to the end-user/client the benefits of doing business with somebody that they can see and listen as opposed to something that they read online. Customer rapport, trust and a mutually fruitful business relationship is much more easily established and achieved. - Sending personnel to various locations at the same time to set up a product demonstration invariably entails a long list of additional expenses. Doing the same using online video, streaming video or on-demand video obviously lowers the costs significantly. Lower product marketing costs results into more profits for the company. - Cost of savings is not limited to product marketing costs. Video can also be used to set up conferencing and training methods, locally and internationally. Live conferencing and training can be easily set up and synchronized between two or more groups of people, regardless if they are at different time zones, at the same time. The above are only a few of the dollar related reasons why the emerging technology of online videos is fast becoming an effective marketing tool. video production kansas city video production companies kansas city kansas city video production company music video production kansas city viral video marketing kansas city music videos kansas city post production kansas city Video Marketing Kansas City MO Video Advertising Kansas City MO Advertising Video Kansas City MO Benefits of Video Marketing Kansas City MO Best Video Marketing Kansas City MO Business Video Marketing Kansas City MO Digital Marketing Agency Kansas City MO Digital Marketing Kansas City MO Internet Video Marketing Kansas City MO Kansas City MO Digital Marketing Kansas City MO Video Production Services Local Video Marketing Kansas City MO Marketing Video Kansas City MO Marketing with Video Kansas City MO Online Video Advertising Kansas City MO Online Video Marketing Kansas City MO Online Video Production Kansas City MO Small Business Video Marketing Kansas City MO Video Advertising Agency Kansas City MO Video Advertising Company Kansas City MO Video for Business Kansas City MO Video for Local Business Kansas City MO Video for Marketing Kansas City MO Video Marketing Agency Kansas City MO Video Marketing for Business Kansas City MO Video Marketing Online Kansas City MO Video Marketing Services Kansas City MO Video Marketing Specialist Kansas City MO Video Marketing YouTube Kansas City MO Web Marketing Kansas City MO Web Video Marketing Kansas City MO Video Marketing Leawood KS Video Marketing Overland Park KS Video Marketing Shawnee KS Video Marketing Olathe KS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmJPTnxHyE4

Video Marketing Kansas City | Imagination Marketing Systems | (816) 281-5582

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6 New Lessons About Content Marketing Relevance

You’re in a battle for attention. Figuring out the best way to earn attention in a maelstrom of information and entertainment is the great marketing challenge of modern times.

But the answer is obvious: relevancy.

Relevancy is the killer app. Relevancy creates attention.

Relevancy is the killer app. Relevancy creates attention.
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: If you want your content to succeed, it must be somebody’s FAVORITE blog, podcast, video, or haiku in the world.

If you want your content to succeed, it must be somebody's FAVORITE blog, podcast, video, or haiku in the world.
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And to be someone’s favorite, you need to be hyper-relevant.

The trick is, as your audience grows, it can become more difficult to focus, and thus your relevancy wanes. We are constantly working on this issue at Convince & Convert. This is one of the very few online outposts that covers social media strategy, content marketing strategy, digital marketing strategy, word of mouth strategy, and customer experience. That breadth is a plus (I hope), but it also can produce relevancy issues, as we aren’t hyper-focused on ONE element of digital marketing and CX.

That’s why it is vital that we do routine surveys of our blog and email readers, to gauge what they REALLY want. We recently completed the 2018 update of our survey, and I learned these 6 lessons:

Congrats Lonna! Can’t wait to see you at CONEX.

But First, a Winner!

Big congratulations to Lonna Whiting, who won our survey-takers contest. Lonna is a veteran content creator who specializes in branding, customer and employee experience, corporate and internal communications, and social media strategy. She’ll be joining me at the CONEX event next August, in Toronto, on my dime.

Lesson 1: Analytics Can Fool You

If you look at our website analytics, approximately 50% of our audience is in the USA. But 76% of our survey respondents say their company’s headquarters is located in the US, followed by EMEA at 9%, and Canada at 8%. We presume survey respondents are really our “core” audience, so it’s interesting to see such a big gap in traffic geography between all visitors and core visitors.

Lesson 2: B2B and B2C Can Coexist

We don’t play favorites on this front, and I think the B2B vs. B2C argument is usually misplaced. Our audience here at C&C is just slightly more likely to be B2B.

Lesson 3: Most Marketing Challenges Apply to All Sizes

Our audience works in both very large and very small companies, and everything in between.

35% of our survey respondents are in businesses with 10 or fewer team members. Conversely, 41% work in companies with more than 100 employees; and 27% are part of large organizations with 501 or more team members.

Lesson 4: Decision-Makers Seek Information

73% of our audience influences or makes the decisions in the company about software, conferences, and similar. There is a story sometimes told about executives and managers that suggest they don’t do their own reading and learning; that they delegate that task to subordinates. This data indicates otherwise.

Lesson 5: Old Dogs Want New Tricks

One of the things I love about digital marketing is that it is ever-changing. And that constant flux requires constant learning. Our audience concurs, and many of them are OGs in this industry! 79% have been in marketing for 6 or more years, and an amazing (at least to me) 51% of our survey participants have 11 or more years of experience.

Lesson 6: 2019 Marketing Budgets are Going Up

Among our survey respondents, 54% say that they expect their marketing/sales/CX budget to go up in 2019; and just 5% believe their budget will go down next year.

Based on the lessons learned in this research, we’ll continue to make adjustments here at C&C, both in our editorial approach and in our media/sponsorship offerings. We work with more than 25 companies to generate awareness and leads for their solutions, via our blog, podcasts, webinars, videos, emails, and more.

In fact, this year we had the unique scenario where we actually sold out of media inventory. That being the case, we are deep into discussions with many MarTech and AdTech companies about 2019 programs. If we can help you with your demand gen, please let us know ASAP. Here are our 2019 opportunities. We are so excited to get to know you better.

The post 6 New Lessons About Content Marketing Relevance appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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6 Instagram Lead Generation Tactics

Do you have an engaged audience on Instagram? Want to convert your Instagram followers into leads? In this article, you’ll discover how to combine calls to action with Instagram features to capture more leads for your business. #1: Link Your Profile Bio to a Lead Generating Landing Page To best capture leads on Instagram, you’ll

The post 6 Instagram Lead Generation Tactics appeared first on Social Media Examiner.

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Using a New Correlation Model to Predict Future Rankings with Page Authority

Posted by rjonesx.

Correlation studies have been a staple of the search engine optimization community for many years. Each time a new study is released, a chorus of naysayers seem to come magically out of the woodwork to remind us of the one thing they remember from high school statistics — that "correlation doesn't mean causation." They are, of course, right in their protestations and, to their credit, and unfortunate number of times it seems that those conducting the correlation studies have forgotten this simple aphorism.

We collect a search result. We then order the results based on different metrics like the number of links. Finally, we compare the orders of the original search results with those produced by the different metrics. The closer they are, the higher the correlation between the two.

That being said, correlation studies are not altogether fruitless simply because they don't necessarily uncover causal relationships (ie: actual ranking factors). What correlation studies discover or confirm are correlates.

Correlates are simply measurements that share some relationship with the independent variable (in this case, the order of search results on a page). For example, we know that backlink counts are correlates of rank order. We also know that social shares are correlates of rank order.

Correlation studies also provide us with direction of the relationship. For example, ice cream sales are positive correlates with temperature and winter jackets are negative correlates with temperature — that is to say, when the temperature goes up, ice cream sales go up but winter jacket sales go down.

Finally, correlation studies can help us rule out proposed ranking factors. This is often overlooked, but it is an incredibly important part of correlation studies. Research that provides a negative result is often just as valuable as research that yields a positive result. We've been able to rule out many types of potential factors — like keyword density and the meta keywords tag — using correlation studies.

Unfortunately, the value of correlation studies tends to end there. In particular, we still want to know whether a correlate causes the rankings or is spurious. Spurious is just a fancy sounding word for "false" or "fake." A good example of a spurious relationship would be that ice cream sales cause an increase in drownings. In reality, the heat of the summer increases both ice cream sales and people who go for a swim. That swimming can cause drownings. So while ice cream sales is a correlate of drowning, it is *spurious.* It does not cause the drowning.

How might we go about teasing out the difference between causal and spurious relationships? One thing we know is that a cause happens before its effect, which means that a causal variable should predict a future change.

An alternative model for correlation studies

I propose an alternate methodology for conducting correlation studies. Rather than measure the correlation between a factor (like links or shares) and a SERP, we can measure the correlation between a factor and changes in the SERP over time.

The process works like this:

1. Collect a SERP on day 1
2. Collect the link counts for each of the URLs in that SERP
3. Look for any URLs are out of order with respect to links; for example, if position 2 has fewer links than position 3
4. Record that anomaly
5. Collect the same SERP in 14 days
6. Record if the anomaly has been corrected (ie: position 3 now out-ranks position 2)
7. Repeat across ten thousand keywords and test a variety of factors (backlinks, social shares, etc.)

So what are the benefits of this methodology? By looking at change over time, we can see whether the ranking factor (correlate) is a leading or lagging feature. A lagging feature can automatically be ruled out as causal. A leading factor has the potential to be a causal factor.

We collect a search result. We record where the search result differs from the expected predictions of a particular variable (like links or social shares). We then collect the same search result 2 weeks later to see if the search engine has corrected the out-of-order results.

Following this methodology, we tested 3 different common correlates produced by ranking factors studies: Facebook shares, number of root linking domains, and Page Authority. The first step involved collecting 10,000 SERPs from randomly selected keywords in our Keyword Explorer corpus. We then recorded Facebook Shares, Root Linking Domains, and Page Authority for every URL. We noted every example where 2 adjacent URLs (like positions 2 and 3 or 7 and 8) were flipped with respect to the expected order predicted by the correlating factor. For example, if the #2 position had 30 shares while the #3 position had 50 shares, we noted that pair. Finally, 2 weeks later, we captured the same SERPs and identified the percent of times that Google rearranged the pair of URLs to match the expected correlation. We also randomly selected pairs of URLs to get a baseline percent likelihood that any 2 adjacent URLs would switch positions. Here were the results...

The outcome

It's important to note that it is incredibly rare to expect a leading factor to show up strongly in an analysis like this. While the experimental method is sound, it's not as simple as a factor predicting future — it assumes that in some cases we will know about a factor before Google does. The underlying assumption is that in some cases we have seen a ranking factor (like an increase in links or social shares) before Googlebot has and that in the 2 week period, Google will catch up and correct the incorrectly ordered results. As you can expect, this is a rare occasion. However, with a sufficient number of observations, we should be able to see a statistically significant difference between lagging and leading results. However, the methodology only detects when a factor is both leading and Moz Link Explorer discovered the relevant factor before Google.

Factor	Percent Corrected	P-Value	95% Min	95% Max
Control	18.93%	0
Facebook Shares Controlled for PA	18.31%	0.00001	-0.6849	-0.5551
Root Linking Domains	20.58%	0.00001	0.016268	0.016732
Page Authority	20.98%	0.00001	0.026202	0.026398

Control:

In order to create a control, we randomly selected adjacent URL pairs in the first SERP collection and determined the likelihood that the second will outrank the first in the final SERP collection. Approximately 18.93% of the time the worse ranking URL would overtake the better ranking URL. By setting this control, we can determine if any of the potential correlates are leading factors - that is to say that they are potential causes of improved rankings.

Facebook Shares:

Facebook Shares performed the worst of the three tested variables. Facebook Shares actually performed worse than random (18.31% vs 18.93%), meaning that randomly selected pairs would be more likely to switch than those where shares of the second were higher than the first. This is not altogether surprising as it is the general industry consensus that social signals are lagging factors — that is to say the traffic from higher rankings drives higher social shares, not social shares drive higher rankings. Subsequently, we would expect to see the ranking change first before we would see the increase in social shares.

RLDs

Raw root linking domain counts performed substantially better than shares at ~20.5%. As I indicated before, this type of analysis is incredibly subtle because it only detects when a factor is both leading and Moz Link Explorer discovered the relevant factor before Google. Nevertheless, this result was statistically significant with a P value <0.0001 and a 95% confidence interval that RLDs will predict future ranking changes around 1.5% greater than random.

Page Authority

By far, the highest performing factor was Page Authority. At 21.5%, PA correctly predicted changes in SERPs 2.6% better than random. This is a strong indication of a leading factor, greatly outperforming social shares and outperforming the best predictive raw metric, root linking domains.This is not unsurprising. Page Authority is built to predict rankings, so we should expect that it would outperform raw metrics in identifying when a shift in rankings might occur. Now, this is not to say that Google uses Moz Page Authority to rank sites, but rather that Moz Page Authority is a relatively good approximation of whatever link metrics Google is using to determine ranking sites.

Concluding thoughts

There are so many different experimental designs we can use to help improve our research industry-wide, and this is just one of the methods that can help us tease out the differences between causal ranking factors and lagging correlates. Experimental design does not need to be elaborate and the statistics to determine reliability do not need to be cutting edge. While machine learning offers much promise for improving our predictive models, simple statistics can do the trick when we're establishing the fundamentals.

Now, get out there and do some great research!

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Understanding China’s Black Friday, Singles Day, and How Brands are Leveraging It

2018 Singles’ Day recap!

• +140,000 brands participated in this special day, including 60,000 global brands like Lululemon, Adidas, Bose, Gap, Nike, Macy’s, Zara, and the list goes on. Brands from the U.S. Germany, Australia, Japan, and South Korea have been taking part in the day and are among the top international brands preferred by Chinese consumers.

• 15 million products were listed during the sale with wellness and baby products, such as diapers, vitamins, milk powders, etc., being some of the most popular products.

• 812 million orders were placed, and more 1.48 billion payments were processed through Alipay, with 90% of those done on a mobile device.

What is “Singles Day” in China?

November 11, in China, celebrates people not in relationships, its symbolizing singletons. Double 11 (the 11th of November) marks Singles’ Day or 光棍节 Guanggunjie.

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How to Use LinkedIn Dynamic Ads

Have you heard of LinkedIn dynamic ads? Wondering how to include a person’s name or profile picture in your LinkedIn ad creative? In this article, you’ll learn how to set up a LinkedIn dynamic ad campaign to deliver highly personalized offers. What Are LinkedIn’s Dynamic Ads and Why Do They Matter? LinkedIn’s ad system allows

The post How to Use LinkedIn Dynamic Ads appeared first on Social Media Examiner.

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What to Do with Your Old Blog Posts

Posted by -LaurelTaylor-

Around 2005 or so, corporate blogs became the thing to do. Big players in the business world touted that such platforms could “drive swarms of traffic to your main website, generate more product sales” and even “create an additional stream of advertising income” (Entrepreneur Magazine circa 2006). With promises like that, what marketer or exec wouldn’t jump on the blog bandwagon?

Unfortunately, initial forays into branded content did not always dwell on minor issues like “quality” or “entertainment,” instead focusing on sheer bulk and, of course, all the keywords. Now we have learned better, and many corporate blogs are less prolific and offer more value. But on some sites, behind many, many “next page” clicks, this old content can still be found lurking in the background.

This active company blog still features over 900 pages of posts dating back to 2006

This situation leaves current SEOs and content teams in a bit of a pickle. What should you do if your site has excessive quantities of old blog posts? Are they okay just sitting there? Do you need to do something about them?

Why bother addressing old blog posts?

On many sites, the sheer number of pages are the biggest reason to consider improving or scaling back old content. If past content managers chose quantity over quality, heaps of old posts eventually get buried, all evergreen topics have been written about before, and it becomes increasingly harder to keep inventory of your content.

From a technical perspective, depending on the scale of the old content you're dealing with, pruning back the number of pages that you put forward can help increase your crawl efficiency. If Google has to crawl 1,000 URLs to find 100 good pieces of content, they are going to take note and not spend as much time combing through your content in the future.

From a marketing perspective, your content represents your brand, and improving the set of content that you put forward helps shape the way customers see you as an authority in your space. Optimizing and curating your existing content can give your collection of content a clearer topical focus, makes it more easily discoverable, and ensures that it provides value for users and the business.

Zooming out for a second to look at this from a higher level: If you've already decided that it's worth investing in blog content for your company, it’s worth getting the most from your existing resources and ensuring that they aren’t holding you back.

Decide what to keep: Inventory and assessmentInventory

The first thing to do before accessing your blog posts is to make sure you know what you have. A full list of URLs and coordinating metadata is incredibly helpful in both evaluating and documenting.

Depending on the content management system that you use, obtaining this list can be as simple as exporting a database field. Alternatively, URLs can be gleaned from a combination of Google Analytics data, Webmaster Tools, and a comprehensive crawl with a tool such as Screaming Frog. This post gives a good outline of how to get the data you need from these sources.

Regardless of whether you have a list of URLs yet, it’s also good to do a full crawl of your blog to see what the linking structure looks like at this point, and how that may differ from what you see in the CMS.

Assessment

Once you know what you have, it’s time to assess the content and decide if it's worth holding on to. When I do this, I like to ask these 5 questions:

1. Is it beneficial for users?

Content that's beneficial for users is helpful, informative, or entertaining. It answers questions, helps them solve problems, or keeps them interested. This could be anything from a walkthrough for troubleshooting to a collection of inspirational photos.

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How to Search Optimize Your YouTube Video

Video has become a necessary part of the content marketing mix. This is because of a few reasons. First, we have the fact that people just enjoy videos more than text in many circumstances. Human beings are visual creatures, and we tend to remember what we see more than what we read.

Second, some experts claim the average attention span of adults is shrinking. While the myth of the 8-second attention span has mainly been busted, even the most dedicated reader gets bored with too much text. Content marketers have known this for a long time, which is why you often see text-based content broken up with visual content.

Third, there are the metrics themselves. More than 500 million hours of video content is viewed every single day on YouTube, which means we are seeing more content in a single month than television networks in the United States have aired in 30 years. Wow!

Google’s Bias

In 2006, Google bought YouTube. It might have been their biggest outside investment they ever made — and the most profitable. All the way back in 2014, it was estimated that the site could be worth as much as $40 billion a year. That figure is not exact, but I’m sure it’s grown significantly.

As such, Google has done what you would expect: they give preference to search results that include YouTube videos. Videos hosted on their site gain featured snippets: a goldmine for those who want to get seen. When we at Internet Marketing Ninjas did our own study on the subject, we found that more than 20% of top results were YouTube videos.

User Preference

I’m sure you’ve heard this phrase a lot: “Have you checked YouTube?” The only more common search related phrase I hear is, “Have you Google’d it?” Not surprising, considering the video platform is the second largest search engine on the web, and it isn’t a search engine to begin with!

We are living in an age when failing to produce high quality and consistent video content could have a marked negative impact on your brand. The best time to have gotten on board is five years ago. The next best time is right now.

But should it be search engine optimized?

Of course! In fact, optimizing videos is easy because the process is almost identical to how you would optimize content for any other medium.

But first, let’s look at our opportunities. Video can achieve visibility in two ways:

1. YouTube video is ranking in general Google search results
2. YouTube video is ranking in YouTube search results (as well as shows up within related and suggested videos)

Below are the tips to generate brand visibility from both:

1. As with Basic SEO, Content Quality Comes First

This is especially useful for video discovery on YouT

ube itself as the platform is pretty smart at understanding how well your audience is engaging with your videos and liking it.

Before we get into the tips on how to do this, let’s cover some basics:

1. Create videos people want to watch. In the past, it was enough to just make a video version of what you were already creating and your user base would eat it up. But if you look at the popular channels on YouTube, they have a certain formula. You need to make sure you are following a similar structure and keeping your quality high, consistent and watchable. Your topics should be those that your audience is going to be passionate about. Most importantly, you have to present it in a way that keeps their interest. Just talking into a camera isn’t going to cut it unless you are really charismatic… at least not for every video.
2. Come up with your own style and format! Unique ideas always win! For example, YouTube channel Daisy Brown created an entire eerie sub-story using subliminal messages in the captions. They were essentially easter eggs that only those with captions on saw, which they then alerted other users to in the comments. It made for a richer story. while bringing in second or third watches by the same users who missed things the first time.
3. Plan ahead. Whether it is a series or single-shot videos on different topics, you need to really plan. Have topics set for certain times, with a shooting schedule. Outline the video itself, the script and how it will be presented. Create a video editorial calendar and stick to it.
4. Focus on what works. This is going to be an ever-evolving process with some hits and misses along the way. Watch what works and what doesn’t and listen to your audience. If something isn’t appealing to most of them, you aren’t going to convince them with more of the same.
5. Come up with eye-catching branding. YouTuber ImJayStation regularly gets millions of views on every one of his videos. His most popular video has 9.5 million views after one year. How does he do it? By selling it, even though almost every video is the same type of content. He uses eye-catching thumbnails with bright red words in the corner.

Finally, use all your available marketing channels to promote your video content and help its discovery. This includes both using your social media accounts and displaying your videos on your site (it’s a good idea to use themes and plugins to embed your YouTube videos on your blog).

2. Conduct Video Content Keyword Research

While Google has got much smarter, it still relies on keywords a lot. For low-competitive queries, ranking youtube.com page is a breeze!

Yep, the first step is going to be the same one that you would use for any other content. Having a spreadsheet of high ranking keywords for your own brand and industry is a critical part of the process.

I personally like Serpstat for this because they have a video specific feature that shows whether there are currently videos ranking for each specific query. You can easily sort and filter keywords that still fit in your range so you aren’t putting your videos into a pool already overflowing with big names or brands.

To set up Serpstat search, use the following filters:

• Special elements on SERPs -> Video thumbnails
• Keyword difficulty** -> 1-20

This way you’ll see queries that already blend video results inside general results and at the same time those that don’t have too high organic competition:

**Keyword difficulty is Serpstat’s own metric evaluating of the level of competition for a key phrase in top 10 search results, where:

• 0-20 => quite easy to rank in top 10;
• 21-40 => medium organic competition;
• 41-60 => difficult to rank in top 10;
• 61-100 => very difficult to rank in top 10.

Since we are mostly about dominating low-competitive queries here, we are focusing on keyword difficulty between 1 and 2 here.

Another cool tool for discovering video content opportunities is Video SEO Tool (Disclaimer: This tool has been developed by the company I work for). The tool checks your domain top rankings and retrieves all the videos that rank for most valuable queries. The tool analyzes both Google and YouTube search results showing you which videos won the race:

3. Video Optimization Basics

Now the two first steps are crucial, and most challenging ones. You are likely to find yourself spending an insane amount of time coming up with unique ideas and keywords, putting up videos and styling/editing them to perfection. Uploading them to YouTube is the easiest step: Don’t overlook the basics though.

It’s really simple: Search engines love text content, so make sure you have a lot of it around your video. Add more content to each video page including:

• A detailed and attention-grabbing title of the video (including those keywords you are targeting)
• A detailed description (at least 500-word description of the video topic or, when possible, the full transcript of the video which you can put together using services like this one)
• More tags

Use the checklist:

Another great idea is to create clickable table of contents listing takeaways / subtopics covered in the video. Both description and the pinned comment should have the clickable table of contents to draw viewers into the video. This will improve “deep” views into the video which is a crucial factor in YouTube rankings. For example:

YouTube has its own language, look and formula. If you optimize based on those factors you see on the most popular channels, you will be able to build a strong viewer base and get your brand discovered through this powerful platform.

The post How to Search Optimize Your YouTube Video appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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Why Social Media Gaffes Persist for Years, and How to Protect your Reputation

Most businesses with an active social media presence dream of viral posts that deliver explosive follower counts and booming revenue growth. But viral visibility isn’t always positive. In fact, even the largest companies in the world get caught off guard by preventable gaffes that taint their online reputations for years.

But don’t let that scare you away from growing your business’s social media presence. While the next few paragraphs may seem frightening, they’ll arm you with the information necessary to safeguard your brand from common missteps. Let’s look at why mistakes go viral, exactly what makes them stick around, and how to safeguard your reputation.

Why Social Media Gaffes Go Viral

In my first article for Maximize Social Business, I clearly stated that you should not delete anything on social media…but there is an escape clause to that argument. While you shouldn’t delete follower complaints—unless they are hate speech—it is acceptable to remove your own posts without fear of backlash.

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13 Facebook Engagement Tactics for Your Business Page

Do you want more organic visibility in the Facebook news feed? Wondering what types of posts and content are working for others? In this article, you’ll find 13 ways to create Facebook posts that generate meaningful interactions and improve organic news feed visibility. Why Is Facebook Engagement So Important? First, let’s recap why engagement is

The post 13 Facebook Engagement Tactics for Your Business Page appeared first on Social Media Examiner.

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Snow Removal in Saint Joseph Missouri | Triple T Lawn Care Service

Triple T Lawn Care 8702 SE State Rte A St Joseph, MO 64508 (816) 294-2330 http://tttlawncare.com/ Snow Removal Services Snow Removal Services in St. Joseph Mo Snow Removal Services in St. Joseph Mo Snow Removal Services in St. Joseph Mo Triple T Snow Removal Services in St. Joseph Mo offers snow plowing, salting, snow removal, snow hauling, loader work, calcium chloride, snow shoveling & snow blowing service, “curb to curb” service, winter seasonal management, seasonal service contracts, competitive rates, and free estimates & site consultations. Services Offered Include The Following: Bobcat Service Snow Pushers Salting Snow Shoveling Snow Blowing Snow Plowing Snow Removal Sidewalk Snow Removal Loader Work Just about anywhere the snow falls, Triple T is equipped to clear it. At the first sign of snow or ice, the licensed and insured team at Triple T is ready to go. Our staff is on-call 24/7 whenever snow or ice is in the forecast. We provide seasonal snow removal deals in addition to per push and on-demand services both for industrial and commercial sites. Once we receive snow our employees are out in the community doing the job. By using a seasonal snow removal package deal, we guarantee to have your property removed within 8 hours after the snow has ceased. If ice has you worried, Triple T now offers standard salting service along with liquid calcium chloride spraying. Triple T utilizes a year-round dedicated snow management division for residential and commercial clients. We think we are the most effective snow removal service company in St. Joseph Missouri and also have a proven track record with many happy clients of all sizes to prove it. Our fleet of plow vehicles and other snow removal equipment is prepared for use the moment the the winter season strikes. Triple T offers the following services over the snow and ice filled winter months. Residential and Commercial Snow Removal in St. Joseph Mo Triple T has created a name for itself in the greater St. Joseph Mo area for snow removal services. Triple T clears snow from about 400 acres on 15 sites, which include a sizable strip mall and many other business and residential properties in the Northwest Missouri areas. Snow Removal service include: snow removal st joseph, ice management st joseph, parking lot clearing st. joseph, st joseph snow removal, st joseph ice removal, saint joseph ice melt, savannah snow removal, ice removal platte city, parkville snow management,ice management savannah Contact Triple T for more details or Call for a FREE quote on snow removal services https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMgHxLHFT7Q

LinkedIn Video: How Marketers Can Create Videos People Watch on LinkedIn

Looking to connect with an audience that has buying power? Wondering how to reach LinkedIn users with video? To explore how LinkedIn video marketing works, I interview Goldie Chan. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

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What SEOs Can Learn from AdWords - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by DiTomaso

Organic and paid search aren't always at odds; there are times when there's benefit in knowing how they work together. Taking the time to know the ins and outs of AdWords can improve your rankings and on-site experience. In today's edition of Whiteboard Friday, our fabulous guest host Dana DiTomaso explains how SEOs can improve their game by taking cues from paid search in this Whiteboard Friday.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Dana DiTomaso. I'm President and Partner at Kick Point, and one of the things that we do at Kick Point is we do both SEO and paid. One of the things that's really useful is when SEO and paid work together. But what's even better is when SEOs can learn from paid to make their stuff better.

One of the things that is great about AdWords or Google Ads — whenever you're watching this, it may be called one thing or the other — is that you can learn a lot from what has a high click-through rate, what performs well in paid, and paid is way faster than waiting for Google to catch up to the awesome title tags you've written or the new link building that you've done to see how it's going to perform. So I'm going to talk about four things today that you can learn from AdWords, and really these are easy things to get into in AdWords.

Don't be intimidated by the interface. You can probably just get in there and look at it yourself, or talk to your AdWords person. I bet they'd be really excited that you know what a callout extension is. So we're going to start up here.

1. Negative keywords

The first thing is negative keywords. Negative keywords, obviously really important. You don't want to show up for things that you shouldn't be showing up for.

Often when we need to take over an AdWords account, there aren't a lot of negative keywords. But if it's a well-managed account, there are probably lots of negatives that have been added there over time. What you want to look at is if there's poor word association. So in your industry, cheap, free, jobs, and then things like reviews and coupons, if these are really popular search phrases, then maybe this is something you need to create content for or you need to think about how your service is presented in your industry.

Then what you can do to change that is to see if there's something different that you can do to present this kind of information. What are the kinds of things your business doesn't want? Are you definitely not saying these things in the content of your website? Or is there a way that you can present the opposite opinion to what people might be searching for, for example? So think about that from a content perspective.

2. Title tags and meta descriptions

Then the next thing are title tags and meta descriptions. Title tags and meta descriptions should never be a write it once and forget it kind of thing. If you're an on-it sort of SEO, you probably go in every once in a while and try to tweak those title tags and meta descriptions. But the problem is that sometimes there are just some that aren't performing. So go into Google Search Console, find the title tags that have low click-through rate and high rankings, and then think about what you can do to test out new ones.

Then run an AdWords campaign and test out those title tags in the title of the ad. Test out new ad copy — that would be your meta descriptions — and see what actually brings a higher click-through rate. Then whichever one does, ta-da, that's your new title tags and your meta descriptions. Then add those in and then watch your click-through rate increase or decrease.

Make sure to watch those rankings, because obviously title tag changes can have an impact on your rankings. But if it's something that's keyword rich, that's great. I personally like playing with meta descriptions, because I feel like meta descriptions have a bigger impact on that click-through rate than title tags do, and it's something really important to think about how are we making this unique so people want to click on us. The very best meta description I've ever seen in my life was for an SEO company, and they were ranking number one.

They were obviously very confident in this ranking, because it said, "The people above me paid. The people below me aren't as good as me. Hire me for your SEO." I'm like, "That's a good meta description." So what can you do to bring in especially that brand voice and your personality into those titles, into those meta descriptions and test it out with ads first and see what's going to resonate with your audience. Don't just think about click-through rate for these ads.

Make sure that you're thinking about conversion rate. If you have a really long sales cycle, make sure those leads that you're getting are good, because what you don't want to have happen is have an ad that people click on like crazy, they convert like crazy, and then the customers are just a total trash fire. You really want to make sure you're driving valuable business through this kind of testing. So this might be a bit more of a longer-term piece for you.

3. Word combinations

The third thing you can look at are word combinations.

So if you're not super familiar with AdWords, you may not be familiar with the idea of broad match modifier. So in AdWords we have broad phrases that you can search for, recipes, for example, and then anything related to the word "recipe" will show up. But you could put in a phrase in quotes. You could say "chili recipes." Then if they say, "I would like a chili recipe," it would come up.

If it says "chili crockpot recipes," it would not come up. Now if you had + chili + recipes, then anything with the phrase "chili recipes" would come up, which can be really useful. If you have a lot of different keyword combinations and you don't have time for that, you can use broad match modifier to capture a lot of them. But then you have to have a good negative keyword list, speaking as an AdWords person for a second.

Now one of the things that can really come out of broad match modifier are a lot of great, new content ideas. If you look at the keywords that people had impressions from or clicks from as a result of these broad match modifier keywords, you can find the strangest phrasing that people come up with. There are lots of crazy things that people type into Google. We all know this, especially if it's voice search and it's obviously voice search.

One of the fun things to do is look and see if anybody has "okay Google" and then the search phrase, because they said "okay Google" twice and then Google searched "okay Google" plus the phrase. That's always fun to pick up. But you can also pick up lots of different content ideas, and this can help you modify poorly performing content for example. Maybe you're just not saying the thing in the way in which your audience is saying it.

AdWords gives you totally accurate data on what your customers are thinking and feeling and saying and searching. So why not use that kind of data? So definitely check out broad match modifier stuff and see what you can do to make that better.

4. Extensions

Then the fourth thing is extensions. So extensions are those little snippets that can show up under an ad.

You should always have all of the extensions loaded in, and then maybe Google picks some, maybe they won't, but at least they're there as an option. Now one thing that's great are callout extensions. Those are the little site links that are like free trial, and people click on those, or find out more information or menu or whatever it might be. Now testing language in those callout extensions can help you with your call-to-action buttons.

Especially if you're thinking about things like people want to download a white paper, well, what's the best way to phrase that? What do you want to say for things like a submit button for your newsletter or for a contact form? Those little, tiny pieces, that are called micro-copy, what can you do by taking your highest performing callout extensions and then using those as your call-to-action copy on your website?

This is really going to improve your lead click-through rate. You're going to improve the way people feel about you, and you're going to have that really nice consistency between the language that you see in your advertising and the language that you have on your website, because one thing you really want to avoid as an SEO is to get into that silo where this is SEO and this is AdWords and the two of you aren't talking to each other at all and the copy just feels completely disjointed between the paid side and the organic side.

It should all be working together. So by taking the time to understand AdWords a little bit, getting to know it, getting to know what you can do with it, and then using some of that information in your SEO work, you can improve your on-site experience as well as rankings, and your paid person is probably going to appreciate that you talked to them for a little bit.

Thanks.

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How to Make Your LinkedIn Company Page Stand Out

Want to create a stronger presence for your company on LinkedIn? Wondering how others are using company pages to support their business goals? In this article, you’ll discover how 10 prominent businesses are making the most of LinkedIn and 4 key components of an engaged LinkedIn company page. #1: Recruit Talent Tesla is on a

The post How to Make Your LinkedIn Company Page Stand Out appeared first on Social Media Examiner.

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How to Succeed with Linkedin Video

If you call LinkedIn advertising the greatest gift to B2B businesses since direct mail, you wouldn’t be far off. The ability to advertise to people based on their job title is a great marketing and sales opportunity. The addition of a built-in video player in 2017 made LinkedIn even more powerful and it provides a great opportunity for brands.

LinkedIn isn’t just for getting a job, it is a great place to connect professionally and share business-related content. As with any social media site that ventures into video, there is a time where said social media site gives an extra boost to posts that include video.

This is true on Linked and to back this up, LinkedIn has released some data about what they see when it comes to video on the site.  LinkedIn says that video posts are shared 20 times more than regular posts.

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3 Social Media Tools to Jumpstart Your Influencer Marketing

Are you interested in working with influential social media personalities? Not sure where to start? In this article, you’ll find three tools to help you manage influencer relationships and campaigns. #1: Partner With Legitimate Influencers Using HYPR One of the biggest risk factors in influencer marketing is fraud, where fake influencers buy followers in order to

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Announcing the 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey

Posted by Whitespark

It has been another year (and a half) since the last publication of the Local Search Ranking Factors, and local search continues to see significant growth and change. The biggest shift this year is happening in Google My Business signals, but we’re also seeing an increase in the importance of reviews and continued decreases in the importance of citations.

Check out the full survey!

Huge growth in Google My Business

Google has been adding features to GMB at an accelerated rate. They see the revenue potential in local, and now that they have properly divorced Google My Business from Google+, they have a clear runway to develop (and monetize) local. Here are just some of the major GMB features that have been released since the publication of the 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors:

• Google Posts available to all GMB users
• Google Q&A
• Website builder
• Services
• Messaging
• Videos
• Videos in Google Posts

These features are creating shifts in the importance of factors that are driving local search today. This year has seen the most explosive growth in GMB specific factors in the history of the survey. GMB signals now make up 25% the local pack/finder pie chart.

GMB-specific features like Google Posts, Google Q&A, and image/video uploads are frequently mentioned as ranking drivers in the commentary. Many businesses are not yet investing in these aspects of local search, so these features are currently a competitive advantage. You should get on these before everyone is doing it.

Here’s your to do list:

1. Start using Google posts NOW. At least once per week, but preferably a few times per week. Are you already pushing out posts to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? Just use the same, lightly edited, content on Google Posts. Also, use calls to action in your posts to drive direct conversions.
2. Seed the Google Q&A with your own questions and answers. Feed that hyper-relevant, semantically rich content to Google. Relevance FTW.
3. Regularly upload photos and videos. (Did you know that you can upload videos to GMB now?)
4. Make sure your profile is 100% complete. If there is an empty field in GMB, fill it. If you haven’t logged into your GMB account in a while, you might be surprised to see all the new data points you can add to your listing.

Why spend your time on these activities? Besides the potential relevance boost you’ll get from the additional content, you’re also sending valuable engagement signals. Regularly logging into your listing and providing content shows Google that you’re an active and engaged business owner that cares about your listing, and the local search experts are speculating that this is also providing ranking benefits. There’s another engagement angle here too: user engagement. Provide more content for users to engage with and they’ll spend more time on your listing clicking around and sending those helpful behavioral signals to Google.

Reviews on the rise

Review signals have also seen continued growth in importance over last year.

Review signals were 10.8% in 2015, so over the past 3 years, we’ve seen a 43% increase in the importance of review signals:

Many practitioners talked about the benefits they’re seeing from investing in reviews. I found David Mihm’s comments on reviews particularly noteworthy. When asked “What are some strategies/tactics that are working particularly well for you at the moment?”, he responded with:

“In the search results I look at regularly, I continue to see reviews playing a larger and larger role. Much as citations became table stakes over the last couple of years, reviews now appear to be on their way to becoming table stakes as well. In mid-to-large metro areas, even industries where ranking in the 3-pack used to be possible with a handful of reviews or no reviews, now feature businesses with dozens of reviews at a minimum — and many within the last few months, which speaks to the importance of a steady stream of feedback.

Whether the increased ranking is due to review volume, keywords in review content, or the increased clickthrough rate those gold stars yield, I doubt we'll ever know for sure. I just know that for most businesses, it's the area of local SEO I'd invest the most time and effort into getting right -- and done well, should also have a much more important flywheel effect of helping you build a better business, as the guys at GatherUp have been talking about for years.”

Getting keywords in your reviews is a factor that has also risen. In the 2017 survey, this factor ranked #26 in the local pack/finder factors. It is now coming in at #14.

I know this is the Local Search Ranking Factors, and we’re talking about what drives rankings, but you know what’s better than rankings? Conversions. Yes, reviews will boost your rankings, but reviews are so much more valuable than that because a ton of positive reviews will get people to pick up the phone and call your business, and really, that’s the goal. So, if you’re not making the most of reviews yet, get on it!

A quick to do list for reviews would be:

1. Work on getting more Google reviews (obviously). Ask every customer.
2. Encourage keywords in the reviews by asking customers to mention the specific service or product in their review.
3. Respond to every review. (Did you know that Google now notifies the reviewer when the owner responds?)
4. Don’t only focus on reviews. Actively solicit direct customer feedback as well so you can mark it up in schema/JSON and get stars in the search results.
5. Once you’re killing it on Google, diversify and get reviews on the other important review sites for your industry (but also continue to send customers to Google).

For a more in-depth discussion of review strategy, please see the blog post version of my 2018 MozCon presentation, “How to Convert Local Searchers Into Customers with Reviews.”

Meh, links

To quote Gyi Tsakalakis: “Meh, links.” All other things being equal, links continue to be a key differentiator in local search. It makes sense. Once you have a complete and active GMB listing, your citations squared away, a steady stream of reviews coming in, and solid content on your website, the next step is links. The trouble is, links are hard, but that’s also what makes them such a valuable competitive differentiator. They ARE hard, so when you get quality links they can really help to move the needle.

When asked, “What are some strategies/tactics that are working particularly well for you at the moment?” Gyi responded with:

“Meh, links. In other words, topically and locally relevant links continue to work particularly well. Not only do these links tend to improve visibility in both local packs and traditional results, they're also particularly effective for improving targeted traffic, leads, and customers. Find ways to earn links on the sites your local audience uses. These typically include local news, community, and blog sites.”

Citations?

Let’s make something clear: citations are still very valuable and very important.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s look at what’s been happening with citations over the past few surveys:

I think this decline is related to two things:

1. As local search gets more complex, additional signals are being factored into the algorithm and this dilutes the value that citations used to provide. There are just more things to optimize for in local search these days.
2. As local search gains more widespread adoption, more businesses are getting their citations consistent and built out, and so citations become less of a competitive difference maker than they were in the past.

Yes, we are seeing citations dropping in significance year after year, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need them. Quite the opposite, really. If you don’t get them, you’re going to have a bad time. Google looks to your citations to help understand how prominent your business is. A well established and popular business should be present on the most important business directories in their industry, and if it’s not, that can be a signal of lower prominence to Google.

The good news is that citations are one of the easiest items to check off your local search to do list. There are dozens of services and tools out there to help you get your business listed and accurate for only a few hundred dollars. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Ensure your business is listed, accurate, complete, and duplicate-free on the top 10-15 most important sites in your industry (including the primary data aggregators and industry/city-specific sites).
2. Build citations (but don’t worry about duplicates and inconsistencies) on the next top 30 to 50 sites.

Google has gotten much smarter about citation consistency than they were in the past. People worry about it much more than they need to. An incorrect or duplicate listing on an insignificant business listing site is not going to negatively impact your ability to rank.

You could keep building more citations beyond the top 50, and it won’t hurt, but the law of diminishing returns applies here. As you get deeper into the available pool of citation sites, the quality of these sites decreases, and the impact they have on your local search decreases with it. That said, I have heard from dozens of agencies that swear that “maxing out” all available citation opportunities seems to have a positive impact on their local search, so your mileage may vary. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The future of local search

One of my favorite questions in the commentary section is “Comments about where you see Google is headed in the future?” The answers here, from some of the best minds in local search, are illuminating. The three common themes I pulled from the responses are:

1. Google will continue providing features and content so that they can provide the answers to most queries right in the search results and send less clicks to websites. Expect to see your traffic from local results to your website decline, but don’t fret. You want those calls, messages, and driving directions more than you want website traffic anyway.
2. Google will increase their focus on behavioral signals for rankings. What better way is there to assess the real-world popularity of a business than by using signals sent by people in the real world. We can speculate that Google is using some of the following signals right now, and will continue to emphasize and evolve behavioral ranking methods:
   1. Searches for your brand name.
   2. Clicks to call your business.
   3. Requests for driving directions.
   4. Engagement with your listing.
   5. Engagement with your website.
   6. Credit card transactions.
   7. Actual human foot traffic in brick-and-mortar businesses.
3. Google will continue monetizing local in new ways. Local Services Ads are rolling out to more and more industries and cities, ads are appearing right in local panels, and you can book appointments right from local packs. Google isn’t investing so many resources into local out of the goodness of their hearts. They want to build the ultimate resource for instant information on local services and products, and they want to use their dominant market position to take a cut of the sales.

And that does it for my summary of the survey results. A huge thank you to each of the brilliant contributors for giving their time and sharing their knowledge. Our understanding of local search is what it is because of your excellent work and contributions to our industry.

There is much more to read and learn in the actual resource itself, especially in all the comments from the contributors, so go dig into it:

Click here for the full results!

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