6 Ways Social Listening Can Help Your SEO

Gone are the days of SEO being a straightforward process of keyword research, on-page optimization and link building. As Google adds other factors to its algorithm and learns to assess website quality in a human-like way, SEO becomes intertwined with other marketing tactics. One of these tactics is social listening, which has been mainly used for social media marketing until recently. In this post, I explain how social listening can benefit your SEO.

First things first: let’s figure out the meaning behind “social listening”. The term describes what social media listening (also called social media monitoring) tools do. They crawl the Web, news, blogs, forums and social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) to find mention of any given keywords. Keywords are usually brand names, words that describe the industry or people’s names (e.g. a CEO, an author, an artist).

Using social listening for SEO requires proper knowledge and skill. It’s very important to set specific goals and know the details of how to conduct a proper search. Here’s how to go about it:

1. Find unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links. 

With link building still being at the core of any SEO strategy, it’s vital to cover all such opportunities. Here’s the one you might not have thought about: turning existing brand mentions into links.

If your brand has been around for a while, or if your brand, company or a specific product has had any kind of popularity at some point, it’s almost certain that there are mentions of your brand on the Internet: on blogs, forums, news sites or just somewhere on the Web. Obviously, not all of them will link back to your site: writers don’t care about promoting anyone else but themselves; they don’t have your SEO goals in mind, and the idea of linking might’ve never even crossed their minds. However, that doesn’t mean they would have a problem with adding a link if you ask them. So the only real challenge here is to find the linkless mentions. This is where social listening is relevant.

To be fair, you won’t be able to get linkless mentions with every social listening tool: you’ll need one with the Boolean search mode. With Boolean search, the user sets up the search query manually using the Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, AND NOT etc. So in the case of finding linkless mentions, the user should type their brand name as a keyword and add AND NOT link:yoursite.com/* . Tools that have Boolean search as their option include Awario (disclosure: I work for the company), Talkwalker, and Brandwatch.

2. Monitor new links to your site.

Modern link building means knowing where and how your backlinks are being built. First, it’s useful to know marketing purposes: what if you can get more out of the website that already links to you? Second, you’ve got to know if your backlinks are coming from quality sites, because, as we know, links from the spammy and untrustworthy sites can seriously hurt the rankings.

With social listening, you find out about any new links anywhere on the Internet in real time. To start looking for new links, type your site’s URL in a website/web page field, which is available in most social media monitoring tools, and choose to search from limited sources: the Web plus news/blogs. This will exclude mentions that come from social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). You can also use the link: operator if your tool offers Boolean search.

3. Find guest blogging opportunities. 

Any SEO will tell you that guest blogging is a sound link-building strategy. It will not bring you a sudden rankings boost, but it’s a solid, tried and true way to build up your site’s reputation. This is why finding guest post opportunities is an ongoing task for many marketers. While there are always a couple of blogs that are easy to find but impossible to get featured on, there are also other blogs which are harder to find because they are not in the first two pages of Google. Yet, they might be more relevant and have a more loyal audience — that’s what usually happens in smaller communities. These blog editors are also more likely to publish your articles. 

These guest blogging opportunities can be found with social listening. To find relevant blogs, type in the keywords that describe your industry (or rather a range of topics you’d like to write about) and wait for the tool to find:

• all blogs that talk about this topic: you can go through them and find the ones you didn’t know about.
• social media influencers in that industry (people with a large following that talk about your topic a lot). Go through the people in the list of influencers (all tools mentioned before offer a feature to find influencers) to see which ones have a website with a blog. You’ll be surprised to find out just how many have a relevant (maybe not that well made) website with a dedicated audience. 

There are a number of other ways to find guest posting opportunities with a social media listening tool. All of them go beyond your usual methods and are worth checking out!

4. Keep an eye on your brand’s reputation. 

In 2010, a horrible story appeared in the New York Times. In it, the author explained how negative reputation could help brands rank better in Google and cause more sales, as bad reviews generated links and buzz around the brand. The whole approach received a name: negative advertising. Merchants were acting badly on purpose, making their customers angry and, therefore, more likely to write passionate, albeit angry reviews. 

Of course, that wasn’t a good thing for Google, and after the problem became apparent, they announced they incorporated an algorithmic solution to down-rank brands that provide poor user experience. We don’t know how it works now, although they talked about their “world-class sentiment analysis system” at some point. We do know it works, though. No more similar cases were in sight. 

You are probably not one of those terrible marketers willing to torture their clients just to get higher in Google. However, social media crises do happen even to the best of brands with the best intentions. And a social media crisis can result not only in a long-term reputation problem but also in a serious ranking drop.

This is why it’s important to keep an eye on the sentiment around your brand. A social media tool with a built-in sentiment analysis will help you notice any suspicious spikes in time and take care of the problem before it goes viral or gets big enough for Google’s algorithm to notice. 

5. Grow brand mentions. 

While link building is still absolutely essential in SEO, it is becoming less and less so. You can see how passionately Google is working towards new ways of figuring out the real value of websites, understanding their content, and being more and more capable of evaluating the Internet the way humans do. And the Internet is much more than just links. These days it’s more about being popular, going viral, being heard in its various corners. And, most of all, the Internet is about social media: taken together, the single most used websites that don’t have any dofollow links. 

What does it tell us? That we should shift our attention to linkless mentions. And it’s not just our speculation. In 2017, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said in his keynote at Brighton SEO the following:

“If you publish high-quality content that is highly cited on the internet — and I’m not talking about just links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding, crap like that. Then you are doing great.”

At the same time, we know that Panda patent talks about “implied links” as a signal that could be no less important than backlinks. An implied link is defined as “a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource”. Sounds like a mention! 

This is why you should work towards growing brand mentions. With social listening, you can, firstly, track brand mentions. Knowing when, where, and in relation to what brand mentions appear will no doubt give you a much better idea as to how to grow more. For example, should your marketing strategy focus more on social media? If so, on which platforms? Or maybe, you have to move to forums and blogs (e.g., try marketing on Reddit?)

Second, you can imply new techniques of growing brand mentions, such as social selling and influencer marketing. 

6. Learn from your competitors. 

All the tips above can be used to monitor your competitors and discover where they get links, where they guest post, which influencers they work with, and so on. All this information can be used in your own marketing and SEO strategy. 

The workflow is as straightforward as it gets: everything that you’ve done for your brand can be completed using your competitors’ brand names and URLs. Creating a different alert for every vital competitor will make the task even easier and let you see your progress compared to that of your competitors in a clear and detailed way.

Conclusion

Social listening is full of possibilities. It’s this new, not-totally-explored-yet technology that slowly changes the way we do digital marketing. Try using it for SEO and you might see changes you never expected to see. 

The post 6 Ways Social Listening Can Help Your SEO appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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How to Get Verified on Instagram – The Latest Advice and Analysis

Marketing budgets are shifting to influencer marketing on Instagram, so it should come as no surprise that more and more social media influencers (and wannabe influencers) are wondering how to get verified on Instagram.

Social Media Verification

Currently, most prominent celebrities, politicians and athletes from all over the world are active on Instagram and make use of it to interact with their fans globally. So, what makes these high profile entities distinguish themselves over social media? The answer is simple: It’s the blue tick that appears next to the name or handle of a person on their profile page. This tick ensures that you get the privilege to appear on top of searches and yield even more influence on Instagram. This is why how to get verified on Instagram is a popular subject of conversation amongst influencers.

I personally have become verified for my personal account on both Twitter (@NealSchaffer) and Facebook (Neal Schaffer on Facebook), although I have not yet become verified on Instagram.

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How to Organize Social Media Marketing Tasks: 3 Tools

Do you need to bring some organization to your social media workflow? Looking for tools to help? In this article, you’ll discover three tools to help you better organize social media posting, monitoring, and campaign execution tasks. #1: Plan Your Social Media Schedule With ContentCal One of the biggest challenges for multi-platform social media managers

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Changing the Marketing Team: The Journey: Season 2, Episode 19

Are you doing too much yourself? Then watch The Journey, Social Media Examiner’s episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business. Watch the Journey This episode of The Journey explores how Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner begins the search for someone to replace himself as the head of marketing. It also

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5 Statistics to Guide Your Marketing Resource Decisions in 2019

Resource decisions are some of the most important and difficult decisions that a marketing leader must make. Do I have the right people doing the right things? Should I use in-house resources, external resources, a combination of the two, or just punt that great idea into another quarter and hope that the decision magically takes care of itself?

Planning and deploying a marketing strategy will benefit from an objective point of view and skills that may not be available in-house.

But how will you choose the right resources to optimize results? A new Ascend2 research study, Marketing Resource Effectiveness Survey Summary Report, provides valuable insight to help companies make critical resource decisions in 2019.

Here are a few noteworthy findings from the research study:

Finding #1: Collaborate on Planning and Deployment

About three-quarters of marketing professionals consider a collaboration between outsourced and in-house resources a valuable combination of objective and subjective insights for both planning and deploying a marketing strategy. 

There is great value in having a fresh perspective as you create your marketing plan. To get the most value from the ideas and input from external resources, make sure to have an open mind when you receive their contribution. It is also important to get data and input from your audience on what they want and how they want it. But make sure you do more than ask; it is critical that you listen.

About 75% of marketing professionals consider a collaboration between outsourced and in-house resources a valuable combination.
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Finding #2: Begin by Determining Your Objectives

To determine the appropriate resources you need, you should first determine your primary objectives. Increasing the number of leads, sales prospects and customers acquired, and improving brand awareness, are all primary objectives for a marketing strategy according to a majority of marketing professionals.

Finding #3: Most Effective Tactics Used

With so many marketing tactics that you can do, an important step is to determine what you should do based on what works. Social media marketing, content marketing, and SEO are effective tactics for 53%, 48% and 47% of marketing professionals respectively. While email has been integrated into virtually every form of digital marketing, it no longer tops the chart as a stand-alone tactic. 

When deciding on the resources that you need, consider how your resources understand the individual tactics that they will work on as well as how all the pieces fit together. You want your resources to be flexible and strategic. 

Finding #4: Seek Outside Resources to Lead Your Most Difficult Tactics

While the previous chart shows only 25% of marketing professionals consider data and artificial intelligence-driven marketing to be a most effective tactic, 49% consider it a difficult tactic to deploy. This may be a case of difficulty impacting effective use. You may need to seek outside resources to lead your most difficult tactics, as compared to not doing those tactics.

49% of marketing professionals consider data and AI difficult tactics to deploy.
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Finding #5: How Effectiveness is Changing

As marketers become more proficient in all forms of digital marketing practices and technologies, the effectiveness of the tactics used is increasing. A total of 94% of marketing professionals believe that the effectiveness of tactics is improving to some extent. A key reason that effectiveness is improving is the improved skills of marketing professionals, continuing education (online courses, certification courses, webinars, reading online resources, etc.), and advancements in technology.

When faced with a difficult decision, I always look for research that can help guide my decision. Research can also be used to sell my plan to the management team, and make an adjustment to my current strategy.  

Get more research insights by downloading the entire study, Marketing Resource Effectiveness Survey Summary Report. 

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The Definitive Guide to Building a Personal Brand in China (2019)

Your personal brand is your reputation. And your reputation in perpetuity is the foundation of your career.

Gary Vaynerchuk

The best companies in the world don’t sell. They brand. For example, Apple never tries to “convert” you into buying an iPhone. Instead, they paint a picture of the “iPhone experience.” They focus on branding.

Not saying you should never sell. But personal branding is a disproportionately valuable factor that most people just don’t focus on.

Becoming a Brand:

The advent of social media has shifted attention to the online environment; you must standout online and become a Digital Leader. How?

• have a good understanding of the digital world
• use social platforms that are useful for your personal brand
• having a roadmap and a clear brand strategy
• generating content about you and your talent
• adapt your brand strategy as professional and personal changes come up

You can focus on LinkedIn and Facebook and win; for sure you can.

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How to Use Facebook Premiere: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you want more views for your Facebook videos? Wondering how Facebook Premiere can help? In this article, you’ll learn how to schedule a Facebook premiere and find tips to help you better engage with your viewers. What Is Facebook Premiere? Facebook Premiere is a feature that allows you to upload and schedule pre-recorded videos

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B2B Local Search Marketing: A Guide to Hidden Opportunity

Posted by MiriamEllis

Is a local business you’re marketing missing out on a host of B2B opportunities? Do B2B brands even qualify for local SEO?

If I say “B2B” and you think “tech,” then you’re having the same problem I was finding reliable information about local search marketing for business-to-business models. While it’s true that SaaS companies like Moz, MailChimp, and Hootsuite are businesses which vend to other businesses, their transactions are primarily digital. These may be the types of companies that make best-of B2B lists, but today let’s explore another realm in which a physical business you promote is eligible to be marketed both locally and as a B2B.

Let’s determine your eligibility, find your B2B opportunities, identify tips specific to your business model, analyze an outreach email, explore your content with a checklist, and find an advantage for you in today’s article.

Seeing how Google sees you

First to determine whether Google would view your brand as a local business, answer these two questions:

1. Does the business I’m marketing have a physical location that’s accessible to the public? This can’t be a PO Box or virtual office. It must be a real-world address.
2. Does the business I’m marketing interact face-to-face with its customers?

If you answered “yes” to both questions, continue, because you’ve just met Google’s local business guidelines.

Seeing your B2B opportunity

Next, determine if there’s a component of your business that already serves or could be created to serve other businesses.

Not totally sure? Let’s look at Google’s categories.

Out of the 2,395 Google My Business Categories listed here, there are at least 1,270 categories applicable to B2B companies. These include companies that are by nature B2B (wholesalers, suppliers) and companies that are B2C but could have a B2B offering (restaurants, event sites). In other words, more than half of Google’s categories signal to B2B-friendly companies that local marketing is an opportunity.

Let’s look at some major groups of categories and see how they could be fine-tuned to serve executive needs instead of only consumer needs:

Food establishments (restaurants, cafes, food trucks, caterers, etc.) can create relationships with nearby employers by offering business lunch specials, delivery, corporate catering, banquet rooms, and related B2B services. This can work especially well for restaurants located in large business districts, but almost any food-related business could create a corporate offering that incentivizes loyalty.

Major attractions (museums, amusements, cultural centers, sports centers, etc.) can create corporate packages for local employers seeking fun group activities. Brands looking to reduce implicit bias may be especially interested in interacting with cultural groups and events.

Professional services (realty, financial, printing, consulting, tech, etc.) can be geared towards corporate needs as well as individuals. A realtor can sell commercial properties. A printer can create business signage. A computer repair shop can service offices.

Personal services (counseling, wellness, fitness, skill training, etc.) can become corporate services when employers bring in outside experts to improve company morale, education, or well-being.

Home services (carpet cleaning, landscaping, plumbing, contracting, security, etc.) can become commercial services when offered to other businesses. Office buildings need design, remodeling, and construction and many have lounges, kitchens, restrooms, and grounds that need janitorial and upkeep services. Many retailers need these services, too.

Entertainers (comedians, musicians, DJs, performance troupes, etc.) can move beyond private events to corporate ones with special package offerings. Many brands have days where children, family members, and even pets are welcomed to the workplace, and special activities are planned.

Retailers (clothing, gifts, equipment, furniture, etc.) can find numerous ways to supply businesses with gear, swag, electronics, furnishings, gift baskets, uniforms, and other necessities. For example, a kitchen store could vend breakfast china to a B&B, or an electronics store could offer special pricing for a purchase of new computers for an office.

Transportation and travel services (auto sales and maintenance, auto rentals, travel agencies, tour guides, charging stations, etc.) can create special packages for businesses. A car dealer could sell a fleet of vehicles to a food delivery service, or a garage could offer special pricing for maintaining food trucks. A travel agency could manage business trips.

As you can see, the possibilities are substantial, and this is all apart from businesses that are classic B2B models, like manufacturers, suppliers, and wholesalers who also have physical premises and meet face-to-face with their clients. See if you’ve been missing out on a lucrative opportunity by examining the following spreadsheet of every Google My Business Category I could find that is either straight-up B2B or could create a B2B offering:

See local B2B categories

The business I’m marketing qualifies. What’s next?

See which of these two groups you belong to: either a B2B company that hasn’t been doing local SEO, or a local business that hasn’t created a B2B offering yet. Then follow the set of foundational tips specific to your scenario.

If you’re marketing a B2B company that hasn’t been doing local SEO:

1. Know that the goal of local SEO is to make you as visible as possible online to any neighbor searching for what you offer so that you can win as many transactions as possible.
2. Read the Guidelines for Representing your business on Google to be 100% sure your business qualifies and to familiarize yourself with Google’s rules. Google is the dominant player in local search.
3. Make sure your complete, accurate name, address, and phone number is included in the footer of your website and on the Contact Us page. If you have multiple locations, create a unique page on your website for each location, complete with its full contact information and useful text for website visitors. Make each of these pages as unique and persuasive as possible.
4. Be sure the content on your website thoroughly describes your goods and services, and makes compelling offers about the value of choosing you.
5. Make sure your website is friendly to mobile users. If you’re not sure, test it using Google’s free mobile-friendly test.
6. Create a Google My Business profile for your business if you don’t already have one so that you can work towards ranking well in Google’s local results. If you do have a profile, be sure it is claimed, accurate, guideline-compliant and fully filled out. This cheat sheet guide explains all of the common components that can show up in your Google Business Profile when people search for your company by name.
7. Do a free check of the health of your other major local business listings on Moz Check Listing. Correct errors and duplicate listings manually, or to save time and enable ongoing monitoring, purchase Moz Local so that it can do the work for you. Accurate local business listings support good local rankings and prevent customers from being misdirected and inconvenience.
8. Ask for, monitor, and respond to all of your Google reviews to improve customer satisfaction and build a strong, lucrative reputation. Read the guidelines of any other platform (like Yelp or TripAdvisor) to know what is allowed in terms of review management.
9. Build real-world relationships within the community you serve and explore them for opportunities to earn relevant links to your website. Strong, sensible links can help you increase both your organic and local search engine rankings. Join local business organizations and become a community advocate.
10. Be as accessible as possible via social media, sharing with your community online in the places they typically socialize. Emphasize communication rather than selling in this environment.

If you’re marketing a local business that hasn’t created a B2B offering yet:

1. Research your neighborhood and your community to determine what kinds of businesses are present around you. If you’re not sure, reach out to your local Chamber of Commerce or a local business association like AMIBA to see if they have data they can share with you. Doing searches like “Human Resources Event Seattle” or “People Ops Event Seattle” can bring up results like this one naming some key companies and staffers.
2. Document your research. Create a spreadsheet with a column for why you feel a specific business might be a good fit for your service, and another column for their contact information.See if you can turn up direct contact info for the HR or People Ops team. Phone the business, if necessary, to acquire this information.
3. Now, based on what you’ve learned, brainstorm an offering that might be appealing to this audience. Remember, you’re trying to entice other business owners and their staff with something that’s special for them and meets their needs..
4. Next, write out your offering in as few words at possible, including all salient points (who you are, what you offer, why it solves a problem the business is likely to have, available proof of problem-solving, price range, a nice request to discuss further, and your complete contact info). Keep it short to respect how busy recipients are.
5. Depending on your resources, plan outreach in manageable batches and keep track of outcomes.
6. Be sure all of your online local SEO is representing you well, with the understanding that anyone seriously considering your offer is likely to check you out on the web. Be sure you’ve created a page on the site for your B2B offer. Be sure your website is navigable, optimized and persuasive, with clear contact information, and that your local business listings are accurate and thorough — hopefully with an abundance of good reviews to which you’ve gratefully responded.
7. Now, begin outreach. In many cases this will be via email, using the text you’ve created, but if you’ve determined that an in-person visit is a better approach, invest a little in having your offer printed nicely so that you can give it to the staff at the place of business. Make the best impression you possibly can as a salesperson for your product.
8. Give a reasonable amount of time for the business to review and decide on your offer. If you don’t hear back, follow up once. Ideally, you’re hoping for a reply with a request for more info. If you hear nothing in response to your follow-up, move on, as silence from the business is a signal of disinterest. Make note of the dates you outreached and try again after some time goes by, as things may have changed at the business by then. Do, however, avoid aggressive outreach as your business will appear to be spamming potential clients instead of helping them.

As indicated, these are foundational steps for both groups — the beginnings of your strategy rather than the ultimate lengths you may need to go to for your efforts to fully pay off. The amount of work you need to do depends largely on the level of your local competition.

B2B tips from Moz’s own Team Happy

Moz’s People Ops team is called Team Happy, and these wonderful folks handle everything from event and travel planning, to gift giving, to making sure people’s parking needs are met. Team Happy is responsible for creating an exceptional, fun, generous environment that functions smoothly for all Mozzers and visitors.

I asked Team Happy Manager of Operations, Ashlie Daulton, to share some tips for crafting successful B2B outreach when approaching a business like Moz. Ashlie explains:

• We get lots of inquiry emails. Do some research into our company, help us see what we can benefit from, and how we can fit it in. We don't accept every offer, but we try to stay open to exploring whether it's a good fit for the office.
• The more information we can get up front, the better! We are super busy in our day-to-day and we can get a lot of spam sometimes, so it can be hard to take vague email outreach seriously and not chalk it up to more spam. Be real, be direct in your outreach. Keeping it more person-to-person and less "sales pitchy" is usually key.
• If we can get most of the information we need first, research the website/offers, and communicate our questions through emails until we feel a call is a good next step, that usually makes a good impression.

Finally, Ashlie let me know that her team comes to decisions thoughtfully, as will the People Ops folks at any reputable company. If your B2B outreach doesn’t meet with acceptance from a particular company, it would be a waste of your time and theirs to keep contacting them.

However, as mentioned above, a refusal one year doesn’t mean there couldn’t be opportunity at a later date if the company’s needs or your offer change to be a better fit. You may need to go through some refinements over the years, based on the feedback you receive and analyze, until you’ve got an offer that’s truly irresistible.

A sample B2B outreach email

“La práctica hace al maestro.”
- Proverb

Practice makes perfect. Let’s do an exercise together in which we imagine ourselves running an awesome Oaxacan restaurant in Seattle that wants to grow the B2B side of our business. Let’s hypothesize that we’ve decided Moz would be a perfect client, and we’ve spent some time on the web learning about them. We’ve looked at their website, their blog, and have read some third-party news about the company.

We found an email address for Team Happy and we’ve crafted our outreach email. What follows is that email + Ashlie’s honest, summarized feedback to me (detailed below) about how our fictitious outreach would strike her team:

Good morning, Team Happy!

When was the last time Moz's hardworking staff was treated to tacos made from grandmother's own authentic recipe? I'm your neighbor Jose Morales, co-owner with my abuela of Tacos Morales, just down the street from you. Our Oaxacan-style Mexican food is:

- Locally sourced and prepared with love in our zero-waste kitchen
- 100% organic (better for Mozzers' brains and happiness!) with traditional, vegan, and gluten-free options
- $6–$9 per plate

We know you have to feed tons of techies sometimes, and we can effortlessly cater meals of up to 500 Mozzers. The folks at another neighboring company, Zillow, say this about our beautiful food:

"The best handmade tortillas we've ever had. Just the right portions to feel full, but not bogged down for the afternoon's workload. Perfect for corporate lunches and magically scrumptious!"

May I bring over a complimentary taco basket for a few of your teammates to try? Check out our menu here and please let me know if there would be a good day for you to sample the very best of Taco Morales. Thank you for your kind consideration and I hope I get the chance to personally make Team Happy even happier!

Your neighbors,
Jose y Lupita Morales
Tacos Morales
www.tacosmorales.com
222 2nd Street, Seattle – (206) 111-1111

Why this email works:

• We're an inclusive office, so the various dietary options catch our eye. Knowing price helps us decide if it's a good fit for our budget.
• The reference to tech feels personalized — they know our team and who we work with.
• It's great to know they can handle some larger events!
• It instills trust to see a quote from a nearby, familiar company.
• Samples are a nice way to get to know the product/service and how it feels to work with the B2B company.
• The menu link, website link, and contact info ensure that we can do our own exploring to help us make a decision.

As the above outreach illustrates, Team Happy was most impressed by the elements of our sample email that provided key information about variety, price and capacity, useful links and contact data, trust signals in the form of a review from a well-known client, and a one-on-one personalized message.

Your business is unique, and the precise tone of your email will match both your company culture and the sensibilities of your potential clients. Regardless of industry, studying the above communication will give you some cues for creating your own from the viewpoint of speaking personally to another business with their needs in mind. Why not practice writing an email of your own today, then run it past an unbiased acquaintance to ask if it would persuade them to reply?

A checklist to guide your website content

Your site content speaks for you when a potential client wants to research you further before communicating one-on-one. Why invest both budget and heart in what you publish? Because 94% of B2B buyers reportedly conduct online investigation before purchasing a business solution. Unfortunately, the same study indicates that only 37% of these buyers are satisfied with the level of information provided by suppliers’ websites. Do you see a disconnect here?

Let’s look at the key landing pages of your website today and see how many of these boxes you can check off:

My content tells potential clients...

☑ What my business name, addresses, phone numbers, fax number, email addresses, driving directions, mapped locations, social and review profiles are

☑ What my products and services are and why they meet clients’ needs

☑ The complete details of my special offers for B2B clients, including my capacity for fulfillment

☑ What my pricing is like, so that I’m getting leads from qualified clients without wasting anyone’s time

☑ What my USP is — what makes my selling proposition unique and a better choice than my local competitors

☑ What my role is as a beneficial member of the local business community and the human community, including my professional relationships, philanthropy, sustainable practices, accreditations, awards, and other points of pride

☑ What others say about my company, including reviews and testimonials

☑ What my clients’ rights and guarantees are

☑ What value I place on my clients, via the quality, usefulness, and usability of my website and its content

If you found your content lacking any of these checklist elements, budget to build them. If writing is not your strong suit and your company isn’t large enough to have an in-house content team, hire help. A really good copywriter will partner up to tell the story of your business while also accurately portraying its unique voice. Expect to be deeply interviewed so that a rich narrative can emerge.

In sum, you want your website to be doing the talking for you 24 hours a day so that every question a potential B2B client has can be confidently answered, prompting the next step of personal outreach.

How to find your B2B advantage

Earlier, we spoke of the research you’ll do to analyze the business community you could be serving with your B2B offerings, and we covered how to be sure you’ve got the local digital marketing basics in place to showcase what you do on the web. Depending on your market, you could find that investment in either direction could represent an opportunity many of your competitors have overlooked.

For an even greater advantage, though, let’s look directly at your competitors. You can research them by:

1. Visiting their websites to understand their services, products, pricing, hours, capacity, USP, etc.
2. Visiting their physical premises, making inquiries by phone, or (if possible) making a purchase of their products/services to see how you like them and if there’s anything that could be done better
3. Reading their negative reviews to see what their customers complain about
4. Looking them up on social media, again to see what customers say and how the brand handles complaints
5. Reading both positive and negative media coverage of the brand

Do you see any gaps? If you can dare to be different and fill them, you will have identified an important advantage. Perhaps you’ll be the only:

• Commercial cleaning company in town that specializes in servicing the pet-friendly hospitality market
• Restaurant offering a particular type of cuisine at scale
• Major attraction with appealing discounts for large groups
• Commercial printer open late at night for rush jobs
• Yoga instructor specializing in reducing work-related stress/injuries

And if your city is large and highly competitive and there aren’t glaring gaps in available services, try to find a gap in service quality. Maybe there are several computer repair shops, but yours is the only one that works weekends. Maybe there are a multitude of travel agents, but your eco-tourism packages for corporations have won major awards. Maybe yours is just one of 400+ Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, but the only one to throw in a free bag of MeeMee’s sesame and almond cookies (a fortune cookie differentiator!) with every office delivery, giving a little uplift to hardworking staff.

Find your differentiator, put it in writing, put it to the..

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5 Effective Ways That Will Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

Have you upgraded your content marketing strategy for 2019? What strategies have you put in place to improve your content marketing campaign?

Every seasoned marketer will always search for more content marketing ideas and the most effective ways to strengthen his marketing practices to enable him to stay ahead of the competition and, maximize return on investment (ROI).

And as the world of digital marketing continues to evolve with new marketing procedures, the competition has also become more intense.

So, to keep up with the competition, you need to figure out the best formulas and apply them to your B2B content marketing approach.

To that end, we have put together 5 powerful strategies that will help you boost your content marketing strategy.

1: Use Customer Feedback to Improve Content Marketing Strategy

Are you taking advantage of customer feedback to up your B2B marketing techniques?

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How to Share Documents in Your LinkedIn Posts: Marketing Tips

Want more visibility for your documents? Wondering how to better showcase your content in the LinkedIn feed? In this article, you’ll learn how to add clickable downloads, slideshows, and PDFs to your organic LinkedIn posts. What Is LinkedIn’s Document Sharing Feature for Organic Posts? LinkedIn’s document sharing feature lets you upload documents to organic LinkedIn

The post How to Share Documents in Your LinkedIn Posts: Marketing Tips appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 6: Link Building & Establishing Authority

Posted by BritneyMuller

In Chapter 6 of the new Beginner's Guide to SEO, we'll be covering the dos and don'ts of link building and ways your site can build its authority. If you missed them, we've got the drafts of our outline, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, and Chapter Five for your reading pleasure. Be sure to let us know what you think of Chapter 6 in the comments!

Chapter 6: Link Building & Establishing Authority Turn up the volume.

You've created content that people are searching for, that answers their questions, and that search engines can understand, but those qualities alone don't mean it'll rank. To outrank the rest of the sites with those qualities, you have to establish authority. That can be accomplished by earning links from authoritative websites, building your brand, and nurturing an audience who will help amplify your content.

Google has confirmed that links and quality content (which we covered back in Chapter 4) are two of the three most important ranking factors for SEO. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trustworthy sites, and spammy sites tend to link to other spammy sites. But what is a link, exactly? How do you go about earning them from other websites? Let's start with the basics.

What are links?

Inbound links, also known as backlinks or external links, are HTML hyperlinks that point from one website to another. They're the currency of the Internet, as they act a lot like real-life reputation. If you went on vacation and asked three people (all completely unrelated to one another) what the best coffee shop in town was, and they all said, "Cuppa Joe on Main Street," you would feel confident that Cuppa Joe is indeed the best coffee place in town. Links do that for search engines.

Since the late 1990s, search engines have treated links as votes for popularity and importance on the web.

Internal links, or links that connect internal pages of the same domain, work very similarly for your website. A high amount of internal links pointing to a particular page on your site will provide a signal to Google that the page is important, so long as it's done naturally and not in a spammy way.

The engines themselves have refined the way they view links, now using algorithms to evaluate sites and pages based on the links they find. But what's in those algorithms? How do the engines evaluate all those links? It all starts with the concept of E-A-T.

You are what you E-A-T

Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines put a great deal of importance on the concept of E-A-T — an acronym for expert, authoritative, and trustworthy. Sites that don't display these characteristics tend to be seen as lower-quality in the eyes of the engines, while those that do are subsequently rewarded. E-A-T is becoming more and more important as search evolves and increases the importance of solving for user intent.

Creating a site that's considered expert, authoritative, and trustworthy should be your guiding light as you practice SEO. Not only will it simply result in a better site, but it's future-proof. After all, providing great value to searchers is what Google itself is trying to do.

E-A-T and links to your site

The more popular and important a site is, the more weight the links from that site carry. A site like Wikipedia, for example, has thousands of diverse sites linking to it. This indicates it provides lots of expertise, has cultivated authority, and is trusted among those other sites.

To earn trust and authority with search engines, you'll need links from websites that display the qualities of E-A-T. These don't have to be Wikipedia-level sites, but they should provide searchers with credible, trustworthy content.

• Tip: Moz has proprietary metrics to help you determine how authoritative a site is: Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Spam Score. In general, you'll want links from sites with a higher Domain Authority than your sites.

Followed vs. nofollowed links

Remember how links act as votes? The rel=nofollow attribute (pronounced as two words, "no follow") allows you to link to a resource while removing your "vote" for search engine purposes.

Just like it sounds, "nofollow" tells search engines not to follow the link. Some engines still follow them simply to discover new pages, but these links don't pass link equity (the "votes of popularity" we talked about above), so they can be useful in situations where a page is either linking to an untrustworthy source or was paid for or created by the owner of the destination page (making it an unnatural link).

Say, for example, you write a post about link building practices, and want to call out an example of poor, spammy link building. You could link to the offending site without signaling to Google that you trust it.

Standard links (ones that haven't had nofollow added) look like this:

<a href="https://moz.com">I love Moz</a>

Nofollow link markup looks like this:

<a href="https://moz.com" >I love Moz</a>

If follow links pass all the link equity, shouldn't that mean you want only follow links? Not necessarily. Think about all the legitimate places you can create links to your own website: a Facebook profile, a Yelp page, a Twitter account, etc. These are all natural places to add links to your website, but they shouldn't count as votes for your website. (Setting up a Twitter profile with a link to your site isn't a vote from Twitter that they like your site.) It's natural for your site to have a balance between nofollowed and followed backlinks in its link profile (more on link profiles below). A nofollow link might not pass authority, but it could send valuable traffic to your site and even lead to future followed links.

• Tip: Use the MozBar extension for Google Chrome to highlight links on any page to find out whether they're nofollow or follow without ever having to view the source code!

Your link profile

Your link profile is an overall assessment of all the inbound links your site has earned: the total number of links, their quality (or spamminess), their diversity (is one site linking to you hundreds of times, or are hundreds of sites linking to you once?), and more. The state of your link profile helps search engines understand how your site relates to other sites on the Internet. There are various SEO tools that allow you to analyze your link profile and begin to understand its overall makeup.

How can I see which inbound links point to my website? Visit Moz Link Explorer and type in your site's URL. You'll be able to see how many and which websites are linking back to you.

What are the qualities of a healthy link profile?

When people began to learn about the power of links, they began manipulating them for their benefit. They'd find ways to gain artificial links just to increase their search engine rankings. While these dangerous tactics can sometimes work, they are against Google's terms of service and can get a website deindexed (removal of web pages or entire domains from search results). You should always try to maintain a healthy link profile.

A healthy link profile is one that indicates to search engines that you're earning your links and authority fairly. Just like you shouldn't lie, cheat, or steal, you should strive to ensure your link profile is honest and earned via your hard work.

Links are earned or editorially placed

Editorial links are links added naturally by sites and pages that want to link to your website.

The foundation of acquiring earned links is almost always through creating high-quality content that people genuinely wish to reference. This is where creating 10X content (a way of describing extremely high-quality content) is essential! If you can provide the best and most interesting resource on the web, people will naturally link to it.

Naturally earned links require no specific action from you, other than the creation of worthy content and the ability to create awareness about it.

• Tip: Earned mentions are often unlinked! When websites are referring to your brand or a specific piece of content you've published, they will often mention it without linking to it. To find these earned mentions, use Moz's Fresh Web Explorer. You can then reach out to those publishers to see if they'll update those mentions with links.

Links are relevant and from topically similar websites

Links from websites within a topic-specific community are generally better than links from websites that aren't relevant to your site. If your website sells dog houses, a link from the Society of Dog Breeders matters much more than one from the Roller Skating Association. Additionally, links from topically irrelevant sources can send confusing signals to search engines regarding what your page is about.

• Tip: Linking domains don't have to match the topic of your page exactly, but they should be related. Avoid pursuing backlinks from sources that are completely off-topic; there are far better uses of your time.

Anchor text is descriptive and relevant, without being spammy

Anchor text helps tell Google what the topic of your page is about. If dozens of links point to a page with a variation of a word or phrase, the page has a higher likelihood of ranking well for those types of phrases. However, proceed with caution! Too many backlinks with the same anchor text could indicate to the search engines that you're trying to manipulate your site's ranking in search results.

Consider this. You ask ten separate friends at separate times how their day was going, and they each responded with the same phrase: "Great! I started my day by walking my dog, Peanut, and then had a picante beef Top Ramen for lunch." That's strange, and you'd be quite suspicious of your friends. The same goes for Google. Describing the content of the target page with the anchor text helps them understand what the page is about, but the same description over and over from multiple sources starts to look suspicious. Aim for relevance; avoid spam.

• Tip: Use the "Anchor Text" report in Moz's Link Explorer to see what anchor text other websites are using to link to your content.

Links send qualified traffic to your site

Link building should never be solely about search engine rankings. Esteemed SEO and link building thought leader Eric Ward used to say that you should build your links as though Google might disappear tomorrow. In essence, you should focus on acquiring links that will bring qualified traffic to your website — another reason why it's important to acquire links from relevant websites whose audience would find value in your site, as well.

• Tip: Use the "Referral Traffic" report in Google Analytics to evaluate websites that are currently sending you traffic. How can you continue to build relationships with similar types of websites?

Link building don'ts & things to avoid

Spammy link profiles are just that: full of links built in unnatural, sneaky, or otherwise low-quality ways. Practices like buying links or engaging in a link exchange might seem like the easy way out, but doing so is dangerous and could put all of your hard work at risk. Google penalizes sites with spammy link profiles, so don't give in to temptation.

A guiding principle for your link building efforts is to never try to manipulate a site's ranking in search results. But isn't that the entire goal of SEO? To increase a site's ranking in search results? And herein lies the confusion. Google wants you to earn links, not build them, but the line between the two is often blurry. To avoid penalties for unnatural links (known as "link spam"), Google has made clear what should be avoided.

Purchased links

Google and Bing both seek to discount the influence of paid links in their organic search results. While a search engine can't know which links were earned vs. paid for from viewing the link itself, there are clues it uses to detect patterns that indicate foul play. Websites caught buying or selling followed links risk severe penalties that will severely drop their rankings. (By the way, exchanging goods or services for a link is also a form of payment and qualifies as buying links.)

Link exchanges / reciprocal linking

If you've ever received a "you link to me and I'll link you you" email from someone you have no affiliation with, you've been targeted for a link exchange. Google's quality guidelines caution against "excessive" link exchange and similar partner programs conducted exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, so there is some indication that this type of exchange on a smaller scale might not trigger any link spam alarms.

It is acceptable, and even valuable, to link to people you work with, partner with, or have some other affiliation with and have them link back to you.

It's the exchange of links at mass scale with unaffiliated sites that can warrant penalties.

Low-quality directory links

These used to be a popular source of manipulation. A large number of pay-for-placement web directories exist to serve this market and pass themselves off as legitimate, with varying degrees of success. These types of sites tend to look very similar, with large lists of websites and their descriptions (typically, the site's critical keyword is used as the anchor text to link back to the submittor's site).

There are many more manipulative link building tactics that search engines have identified. In most cases, they have found algorithmic methods for reducing their impact. As new spam systems emerge, engineers will continue to fight them with targeted algorithms, human reviews, and the collection of spam reports from webmasters and SEOs. By and large, it isn't worth finding ways around them.

If your site does get a manual penalty, there are steps you can take to get it lifted.

How to build high-quality backlinks

Link building comes in many shapes and sizes, but one thing is always true: link campaigns should always match your unique goals. With that said, there are some popular methods that tend to work well for most campaigns. This is not an exhaustive list, so visit Moz's blog posts on link building for more detail on this topic.

Find customer and partner links

If you have partners you work with regularly, or loyal customers that love your brand, there are ways to earn links from them with relative ease. You might send out partnership badges (graphic icons that signify mutual respect), or offer to write up testimonials of their products. Both of those offer things they can display on their website along with links back to you.

Publish a blog

This content and link building strategy is so popular and valuable that it's one of the few recommended personally by the engineers at Google. Blogs have the unique ability to contribute fresh material on a consistent basis, generate conversations across the web, and earn listings and links from other blogs.

Careful, though — you should avoid low-quality guest posting just for the sake of link building. Google has advised against this and your energy is better spent elsewhere.

Create unique resources

Creating unique, high quality resources is no easy task, but it's well worth the effort. High quality content that is promoted in the right ways can be widely shared. It can help to create pieces that have the following traits:

• Elicits strong emotions (joy, sadness, etc.)
• Something new, or at least communicated in a new way
• Visually appealing
• Addresses a timely need or interest
• Location-specific (example: the most searched-for halloween costumes by state).

Creating a resource like this is a great way to attract a lot of links with one page. You could also create a highly-specific resource — without as broad of an appeal — that targeted a handful of websites. You might see a higher rate of success, but that approach isn't as scalable.

Users who see this kind of unique content often want to share it with friends, and bloggers/tech-savvy webmasters who see it will often do so through links. These high quality, editorially earned votes are invaluable to building trust, authority, and rankings potential.

Build resource pages

Resource pages are a great way to build links. However, to find them you'll want to know some Advanced Google operators to make discovering them a bit easier.

For example, if you were doing link building for a company that made pots and pans, you could search for: cooking intitle:"resources" and see which pages might be good link targets.

This can also give you great ideas for content creation — just think about which types of resources you could create that these pages would all like to reference/link to.

Get involved in your local community

For a local business (one that meets its customers in person), community outreach can result in some of the most valuable and influential links.

• Engage in sponsorships and scholarships.
• Host or participate in community events, seminars, workshops, and organizations.
• Donate to worthy local causes and join local business associations.
• Post jobs and offer internships.
• Promote loyalty programs.
• Run a local competition.
• Develop real-world relationships with related local businesses to discover how you can team up to improve the health of your local economy.

All of these smart and authentic strategies provide good local link opportunities.

Refurbish top content

You likely already know which of your site's content earns the most traffic, converts the most customers, or retains visitors for the longest amount of time.

Take that content and refurbish it for other platforms (Slideshare, YouTube, Instagram, Quora, etc.) to expand your acquisition funnel beyond Google.

You can also dust off, update, and simply republish older content on the same platform. If you discover that a few trusted industry websites all linked to a popular resource that's gone stale, update it and let those industry websites know — you may just earn a good link.

You can also do this with images. Reach out to websites that are using your images and not citing/linking back to you and ask if they'd mind including a link.

Be newsworthy

Earning the attention of the press, bloggers, and news media is an effective, time-honored way to earn links. Sometimes this is as simple as giving something away for free, releasing a great new product, or stating something controversial. Since so much of SEO is about creating a digital representation of your brand in the real world, to succeed in SEO, you have to be a great brand.

Be personal and genuine

The most common mistake new SEOs make when trying to build links is not taking the time to craft a custom, personal, and valuable initial outreach email. You know as well as anyone how annoying spammy emails can be, so make sure yours doesn't make people roll their eyes.

Your goal for an initial outreach email is simply to get a response. These tips can help:

• Make it personal by mentioning something the person is working on, where they went to school, their dog, etc.
• Provide value. Let them know about a broken link on their website or a page that isn't working on mobile.
• Keep it short.
• Ask one simple question (typically not for a link; you'll likely want to build a rapport first).

Pro Tip: Earning links can be very resource-intensive, so you'll likely want to measure your success to prove the value of those efforts. Metrics for link building should match up with the site's overall KPIs. These might be sales, email subscriptions, page views, etc. You should also evaluate Domain and/or Page Authority scores, the ranking of desired keywords, and the amount of traffic to your content — but we'll talk more about measuring the success of your SEO campaigns in Chapter 7.

Beyond links: How awareness, amplification, and sentiment impact authority

A lot of the methods you'd use to build links will also indirectly build your brand. In fact, you can view link building as a great way to increase awareness of your brand, the topics on which you're an authority, and the products or services you offer.

Once your target audience knows about you and you have valuable content to share, let your audience know about it! Sharing your content on social platforms will not only make your audience aware of your content, but it can also encourage them to amplify that awareness to their own networks, thereby extending your own reach.

Are social shares the same as links? No. But shares to the right people can result in links. Social shares can also promote an increase in traffic and new visitors to your website, which can grow brand awareness, and with a growth in brand awareness can come a growth in trust and links. The connection between social signals and rankings seems indirect, but even indirect correlations can be helpful for informing strategy.

Trustworthiness goes a long way

For search engines, trust is largely determined by the quality and quantity of the links your domain has earned, but that's not to say that there aren't other factors at play that can influence your site's authority. Think about all the different ways you come to trust a brand:

• Awareness (you know they exist)
• Helpfulness (they provide answers to your questions)
• Integrity (they do what they say they will)
• Quality (their product or service provides value; possibly more than others you've tried)
• Continued value (they continue to provide value even after you've gotten what you needed)
• Voice (they communicate in unique, memorable ways)
• Sentiment (others have good things to say about their experience with the brand)

That last point is what we're going to focus on here. Reviews of your brand, its products, or its..

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How Lax Social Media Security Can Destroy Your Online Store

Digital security has become a much bigger concern over the past few years. Recent statistics show that 60% of small businesses that suffer a data breach are forced into bankruptcy within six months. This figure is likely higher for online retailers since they are obviously more dependent on their digital presence. Online retailers are taking stronger precautions to guard their e-commerce websites against the growing number of cyber threats. The problem is that they often ignore the need to protect other digital properties, such as social media accounts.

The problem is that social media accounts can be even more vulnerable to cyber attacks. The consequences of failing to secure your e-commerce social media profiles can be just as devastating.

The consequences of failing to secure your online store can be severe

One of the biggest fears that any e-commerce company has is that its website will be hacked.

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How to Use Facebook Automated Rules to Manage Facebook Ads

Spending too much time managing your Facebook ad spend? Want to manage your Facebook advertising campaigns more efficiently? In this article, you’ll discover how to use Facebook’s automated rules to save time managing Facebook ad performance. Why Use Facebook Automated Rules to Manage Facebook Ad Campaigns? There are two main phases of Facebook advertising: setup

The post How to Use Facebook Automated Rules to Manage Facebook Ads appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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How to Leverage Your Internal Influencers: Key Findings from Onalytica’s Latest Research

The modern buyer journey is changing and becoming increasingly more social. At the same time, a buyer’s trust in brand messaging is at an all-time low. More than ever, consumers (both B2C and B2B) are seeking out authentic feedback in social media as part of their decision journey. Simultaneously, brands are encouraging employees to become that trusted voice through employee advocacy programs.

In their recent report, Employee Advocacy 2.0: Leveraging Influence to Drive a Connected Organization and Employee-Led Buyer Journey, Onalytica (with help from Tribal Impact) produced a thorough guide to help companies build and optimize these programs while avoiding common missteps.

Employees Are Powerful People

The reason employee advocacy is so impactful is because of an employee’s unique position within the company. They know all the details of the brand and product and are usually perceived as having valuable “insider information” to share.

“Employees have the potential to be brands’ biggest champions and can be the key connectors between your brand and the market influencers.”

According to LinkedIn, employee-shared content is regarded as being three times more authentic and, therefore, typically sees a click-through rate that is twice as high as when the corporate mouthpiece shares the same data.

According to @LinkedIn, employee-shared content is regarded as being three 3X more authentic a CTR that is twice as high as when the corporate mouthpiece shares the same data.
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In addition to increased reach, engagement, and brand awareness, employee advocacy allows brands to have a voice earlier in the buyer journey.

The report cites that 85% of customers seek out trusted expert content when considering a purchase and 84% of C and VP level buyers use social media in their decision-making process. Because of this, most of the buyer’s journey is complete before the buyer is even known to the company, increasing the value of early influence. This is reflected in the fact that leads generated through employees have been found to convert seven times more than any other lead gen source.

85% of customers seek out trusted expert content when considering a purchase.
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There are also less quantifiable benefits, such as increased brand trust and confidence and more effective retention and recruiting efforts as visible, motivated employees help attract future talent.

Brands Can’t Just Buy Employees’ Influence

Brands are realizing that employees are a powerful influencer group they can always access, but they should not assume that access equals control. An employee’s personal influence is just that —personal — and usually not for sale. Companies may find ways to incentivize broadcast sharing of branded content, but, unless the employees are internally motivated, the full potential of their advocacy is falling short. Shifting the company view of employee advocacy from ‘owned’ to ‘earned’ media is a fundamental and required mindset shift. Finding what motivates the employee advocate to go beyond sharing branded content to creating their own content and connecting with external influencers is the secret to unlocking the power of these programs.

‘Employee advocacy 2.0’ describes moving from Content Amplification to Employees as Influencers.

Here is my favorite advice from the report on leveraging your own internal influencers:

Find What Motivates Employees

In a study conducted by Hinge Research Institute, 46% of millennials saw employee advocacy as an opportunity to develop skills high in demand; 39.4% view it as access to more job opportunities and 38% saw it as differentiation from peers. Brands should focus on helping employees develop skills and become more influential rather than viewing them as a broadcasting channel. 

46% of millennials see employee advocacy as an opportunity to develop skills high in demand.
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Key ways to do this include:

1. Helping employees identify personal goals that align with program goals
2. Prioritizing valuable, “share-worthy”, branded content
3. Identifying external influencers and engagement opportunities
4. Providing tools and training to make it easy and remove doubt

Help Employees Identify Goals

Often employee advocacy programs are hindered by three main barriers:

1. It’s not clear what content to share or how to share it
2. Expectations are not defined
3. Employees don’t see the value of using social media in the workplace

To begin understanding what motivates employees, conduct an audit, grouping likely participants into persona categories based on audience size and social activity to allow for customized training and activation efforts.

The idea is to help employees simultaneously increase their network size and social activity if that’s a desired goal; not all employees will move to the ‘influencer’ persona, based on their own motivations and alignment with the company message.

Prioritize Valuable, “Share-Worthy” Branded Content

Integrating disconnected employee advocacy, social selling and influencer marketing programs begin to leverage the content creation efforts across the sales and marketing teams. Focusing on content that prioritizes problem-solving and innovation in highly relevant and relatable terms builds upon unifying themes and lead to more authentic and useful content. Encourage employees to engage with industry content and create their own commentary or responses, rather than relying solely on branded content.

Identify External Influencers and Engagement Opportunities

Every employee has passion and expertise related to his/her field and role, and this passion is the conduit for connection to external influencers and experts. Facilitating these connections gives employees both permission and a shortcut to begin building relationships with key external influencers. In addition, empowering employees to follow these influencers more closely expands the brand’s social listening capacity and responsiveness and helps make future content creation efforts more relevant to target audiences.

Provide Tools and Training to Remove Friction and Doubt

A key shortcut to avoid is using the same training and activation content for the various personas. Instead, craft training materials and set expectations based on the employees’ current skill set, personal goals and preferred learning style. Craft a simple and approachable social media policy that outlines expectations and success. Implement social listening, content sharing and influencer mapping tools to help make the process as easy as possible. Build confidence by encouraging C-Suite and senior management to pilot the program to lead by example.

Measure the Success of Your Internal Influencer Program

Defining desired outputs and outcomes is essential to analyzing program success, but brands must also exercise patience. Avoid trying to accelerate results through stringent KPIs or risk losing the authentic voice that makes employee advocates so valuable. Some structured metrics are in the table below, but it’s just as important to celebrate the one-off and individual wins that program participants achieve that are the early building blocks to long term employee advocates.

Turn These Tips into Employee Advocacy 2.0

As you consider your own business, here are 3 actions you can take right away:

1. Evaluate your content through the eyes of your employees. Is your branded content so valuable employees are happy to use their influence to share?
2. Level up social listening and external influencer efforts. Finding and activating employee advocates is only part of a successful program. Can you begin building the topic hubs and influencer lists that will eventually map back to specific employee efforts?
3. Pilot a program with senior leadership. Where do your senior leaders fit in the persona category chart? Are there influencer networks you can tap into? What are the basic first steps to modeling this behavior in advance of a company rollout?

These first steps will help prepare your company to mobilize and motivate employee advocates. Ready for the next steps? We work with the world’s most interesting brands,—let us help you build your plan of action.

The post How to Leverage Your Internal Influencers: Key Findings from Onalytica’s Latest Research appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

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Facebook Group Changes: How the Invited Category Impacts Groups

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 recommendations and Facebook group membership changes with guests Owen Video and Bella Vasta. Watch the Social

The post Facebook Group Changes: How the Invited Category Impacts Groups appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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Google Data Studio: How Marketers Can Build Powerful Dashboards

Want an easy way to interpret your analytics? Wondering how to create dashboards? To explore how to create dashboards with Google Data Studio, I interview Chris Mercer, a measurement marketing expert. He’s the founder of MeasurementMarketing.io and the Measurement Marketing Academy. Mercer explains how dashboards and analytics reports differ and when to use each one.

The post Google Data Studio: How Marketers Can Build Powerful Dashboards appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

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Redirects: One Way to Make or Break Your Site Migration - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

Correctly redirecting your URLs is one of the most important things you can do to make a site migration go smoothly, but there are clear processes to follow if you want to get it right. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Kameron Jenkins breaks down the rules of redirection for site migrations to make sure your URLs are set up for success.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, guys. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and I work here at Moz. What we're going to be talking about today is redirects and how they're one way that you can make or break your site migration. Site migration can mean a lot of different things depending on your context.

Migrations?

I wanted to go over quickly what I mean before we dive into some tips for avoiding redirection errors. When I talk about migration, I'm coming from the experience of these primary activities.

CMS moving/URL format

One example of a migration I might be referring to is maybe we're taking on a client and they previously used a CMS that had a default kind of URL formatting, and it was dated something.

So it was like /2018/May/ and then the post. Then we're changing the CMS. We have more flexibility with how our pages, our URLs are structured, so we're going to move it to just /post or something like that. In that way a lot of URLs are going to be moving around because we're changing the way that those URLs are structured.

"Keywordy" naming conventions

Another instance is that sometimes we'll get clients that come to us with kind of dated or keywordy URLs, and we want to change this to be a lot cleaner, shorten them where possible, just make them more human-readable.

An example of that would be maybe the client used URLs like /best-plumber-dallas, and we want to change it to something a little bit cleaner, more natural, and not as keywordy, to just /plumbers or something like that. So that can be another example of lots of URLs moving around if we're taking over a whole site and we're kind of wanting to do away with those.

Content overhaul

Another example is if we're doing a complete content overhaul. Maybe the client comes to us and they say, "Hey, we've been writing content and blogging for a really long time, and we're just not seeing the traffic and the rankings that we want. Can you do a thorough audit of all of our content?" Usually what we notice is that you have maybe even thousands of pages, but four of them are ranking.

So there are a lot of just redundant pages, pages that are thin and would be stronger together, some pages that just don't really serve a purpose and we want to just let die. So that's another example where we would be merging URLs, moving pages around, just letting some drop completely. That's another example of migrating things around that I'm referring to.

Don't we know this stuff? Yes, but...

That's what I'm referring to when it comes to migrations. But before we dive in, I kind of wanted to address the fact that like don't we know this stuff already? I mean I'm talking to SEOs, and we all know or should know the importance of redirection. If there's not a redirect, there's no path to follow to tell Google where you've moved your page to.

It's frustrating for users if they click on a link that no longer works, that doesn't take them to the proper destination. We know it's important, and we know what it does. It passes link equity. It makes sure people aren't frustrated. It helps to get the correct page indexed, all of those things. So we know this stuff. But if you're like me, you've also been in those situations where you have to spend entire days fixing 404s to correct traffic loss or whatever after a migration, or you're fixing 301s that were maybe done but they were sent to all kinds of weird, funky places.

Mistakes still happen even though we know the importance of redirects. So I want to talk about why really quickly.

Unclear ownership

Unclear ownership is something that can happen, especially if you're on a scrappier team, a smaller team and maybe you don't handle these things very often enough to have a defined process for this. I've been in situations where I assumed the tech was going to do it, and the tech assumed that the project assistant was going to do it.

We're all kind of pointing fingers at each other with no clear ownership, and then the ball gets dropped because no one really knows whose responsibility it is. So just make sure that you designate someone to do it and that they know and you know that that person is going to be handling it.

Deadlines

Another thing is deadlines. Internal and external deadlines can affect this. So one example that I encountered pretty often is the client would say, "Hey, we really need this project done by next Monday because we're launching another initiative. We're doing a TV commercial, and our domain is going to be listed on the TV commercial. So I'd really like this stuff wrapped up when those commercials go live."

So those kind of external deadlines can affect how quickly we have to work. A lot of times it just gets left by the wayside because it is not a very visible thing. If you don't know the importance of redirects, you might handle things like content and making sure the buttons all work and the template looks nice and things like that, the visible things. Where people assume that redirects, oh, that's just a backend thing. We can take care of it later. Unfortunately, redirects usually fall into that category if the person doing it doesn't really know the importance of it.

Another thing with deadlines is internal deadlines. Sometimes maybe you might have a deadline for a quarterly game or a monthly game. We have to have all of our projects done by this date. The same thing with the deadlines. The redirects are usually unfortunately something that tends to miss the cutoff for those types of things.

Non-SEOs handling the redirection

Then another situation that can cause site migration errors and 404s after moving around is non-SEOs handling this. Now you don't have to be a really experienced SEO usually to handle these types of things. It depends on your CMS and how complicated is the way that you're implementing your redirects. But sometimes if it's easy, if your CMS makes redirection easy, it can be treated as like a data entry-type of job, and it can be delegated to someone who maybe doesn't know the importance of doing all of them or formatting them properly or directing them to the places that they're supposed to go.

The rules of redirection for site migrations

Those are all situations that I've encountered issues with. So now that we kind of know what I'm talking about with migrations and why they kind of sometimes still happen, I'm going to launch into some rules that will hopefully help prevent site migration errors because of failed redirects.

1. Create one-to-one redirects

Number one, always create one-to-one redirects. This is super important. What I've seen sometimes is oh, man, it could save me tons of time if I just use a wildcard and redirect all of these pages to the homepage or to the blog homepage or something like that. But what that tells Google is that Page A has moved to Page B, whereas that's not the case. You're not moving all of these pages to the homepage. They haven't actually moved there. So it's an irrelevant redirect, and Google has even said, I think, that they treat those essentially as a soft 404. They don't even count. So make sure you don't do that. Make sure you're always linking URL to its new location, one-to-one every single time for every URL that's moving.

2. Watch out for redirect chains

Two, watch out for chains. I think Google says something oddly specific, like watch out for redirect chains, three, no more than five. Just try to limit it as much as possible. By chains, I mean you have URL A, and then you redirect it to B, and then later you decide to move it to a third location. Instead of doing this and going through a middleman, A to B to C, shorten it if you can. Go straight from the source to the destination, A to C.

3. Watch out for loops

Three, watch out for loops. Similarly what can happen is you redirect position A to URL B to another version C and then back to A. What happens is it's chasing its tail. It will never resolve, so you're redirecting it in a loop. So watch out for things like that. One way to check those things I think is a nifty tool, Screaming Frog has a redirect chains report. So you can see if you're kind of encountering any of those issues after you've implemented your redirects.

4. 404 strategically

Number four, 404 strategically. The presence of 404s on your site alone, that is not going to hurt your site's rankings. It is letting pages die that were ranking and bringing your site traffic that is going to cause issues. Obviously, if a page is 404ing, eventually Google is going to take that out of the index if you don't redirect it to its new location. If that page was ranking really well, if it was bringing your site traffic, you're going to lose the benefits of it. If it had links to it, you're going to lose the benefits of that backlink if it dies.

So if you're going to 404, just do it strategically. You can let pages die. Like in these situations, maybe you're just outright deleting a page and it has no new location, nothing relevant to redirect it to. That's okay. Just know that you're going to lose any of the benefits that URL was bringing your site.

5. Prioritize "SEO valuable" URLs

Number five, prioritize "SEO valuable" URLs, and I do that because I prefer to obviously redirect everything that you're moving, everything that's legitimately moving.

But because of situations like deadlines and things like that, when we're down to the wire, I think it's really important to at least have started out with your most important URLs. So those are URLs that are ranking really well, giving you a lot of good traffic, URLs that you've earned links to. So those really SEO valuable URLs, if you have a deadline and you don't get to finish all of your redirects before this project goes live, at least you have those most critical, most important URLs handled first.

Again, obviously, it's not ideal, I don't think in my mind, to save any until after the launch. Obviously, I think it's best to have them all set up by the time it goes live. But if that's not the case and you're getting rushed and you have to launch, at least you will have handled the most important URLs for SEO value.

6. Test!

Number six, just to end it off, test. I think it's super important just to monitor these things, because you could think that you have set these all up right, but maybe there were some formatting errors, or maybe you mistakenly redirected something to the wrong place. It is super important just to test. So what you can do, you can do a site:domain.com and just start clicking on all the results that come up and see if any are redirecting to the wrong place, maybe they're 404ing.

Just checking all of those indexed URLs to make sure that they're going to a proper new destination. I think Moz's Site Crawl is another huge benefit here for testing purposes. What it does, if you have a domain set up or a URL set up in a campaign in Moz Pro, it checks this every week, and you can force another run if you want it to.

But it will scan your site for errors like this, 404s namely. So if there are any issues like that, 500 or 400 type errors, Site Crawl will catch it and notify you. If you're not managing the domain that you're working on in a campaign in Moz Pro, there's on-demand crawl too. So you can run that on any domain that you're working on to test for things like that.

There are plenty of other ways you can test and find errors. But the most important thing to remember is just to do it, just to test and make sure that even once you've implemented these things, that you're checking and making sure that there are no issues after a launch. I would check right after a launch and then a couple of days later, and then just kind of taper off until you're absolutely positive that everything has gone smoothly.

So those are my tips, those are my rules for how to implement redirects properly, why you need to, when you need to, and the risks that can happen with that. If you have any tips of your own that you'd like to share, pop them in the comments and share it with all of us in the SEO community. That's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday.

Come back again next week for another one. Thanks, everybody.

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