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. Join us live for the Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner as we explore the Facebook Creator app with Mari Smith, Instagram changes with Sue
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
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Controlling and improving the flow of your on-site content can actually help your SEO. What's the best way to capitalize on the opportunity present in your page design? Rand covers the questions you need to ask (and answer) and the goals you should strive for in today's Whiteboard Friday.
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Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about a designing a page's content flow to help with your SEO.
Now, unfortunately, somehow in the world of SEO tactics, this one has gotten left by the wayside. I think a lot of people in the SEO world are investing in things like content and solving searchers' problems and getting to the bottom of searcher intent. But unfortunately, the page design and the flow of the elements, the UI elements, the content elements that sit in a page is discarded or left aside. That's unfortunate because it can actually make a huge difference to your SEO.
So if we're asking ourselves like, "Well, what's the question here?" Well, it's what needs to go on this page. I'm trying to rank for "faster home Wi-Fi." Right now, Lifehacker and a bunch of other people are ranking in these results. It gets a ton of searches. I can drive a lot of revenue for my business if I can rank there. But what needs to go on this page in what order with what placement in order for me to perform the best that I possibly can? It turns out that sometimes great content gets buried in a poor page design and poor page flow. But if we want to answer this question, we actually have to ask some other ones. We need answers to at least these three:
A. What is the searcher in this case trying to accomplish?
When they enter "faster home Wi-Fi," what's the task that they want to get done?
B. Are there multiple intents behind this query, and which ones are most popular?
What's the popularity of those intents in what order? We need to know that so that we can design our flow around the most common ones first and the secondary and tertiary ones next.
C. What's the business goal of ranking? What are we trying to accomplish?
That's always going to have to be balanced out with what is the searcher trying to accomplish. Otherwise, in a lot of cases, there's no point in ranking at all. If we can't get our goals met, we should just rank for something else where we can.
Let's assume we've got some answers:Let's assume that, in this case, we have some good answers to these questions so we can proceed. So pretty simple. If I search for "faster home Wi-Fi," what I want is usually it's going to be...
A. Faster download speed at home.
That's what the searcher is trying to accomplish. But there are multiple intents behind this. Sometimes the searcher is looking to do that..
B1. With their current ISP and their current equipment.
They want to know things they can optimize that don't cause them to spend money. Can they place their router in different places? Can they change out a cable? Do they need to put it in a different room? Do they need to move their computer? Is the problem something else that's interfering with their Wi-Fi in their home that they need to turn off? Those kinds of issues.
B2. With a new ISP.
Or can they get a new ISP? They might be looking for an ISP that can provide them with faster home internet in their area, and they want to know what's available, which is a very different intent than the first one.
B3. With current ISP but new equipment.
maybe they want to keep their ISP, but they are willing to upgrade to new equipment. So they're looking for what's the equipment that I could buy that would make the current ISP I have, which in many cases in the United States, sadly, there's only one ISP that can provide you with service in a lot of areas. So they can't change ISP, but they can change out their equipment.
C. Affiliate revenue with product referrals.
Let's assume that (C) is we know that what we're trying to accomplish is affiliate revenue from product referrals. So our business is basically we're going to send people to new routers or the Google Mesh Network home device, and we get affiliate revenue by passing folks off to those products and recommending them.
Now we can design a content flow.Okay, fair enough. We now have enough to be able to take care of this design flow. The design flow can involve lots of things. There are a lot of things that could live on a page, everything from navigation to headline to the lead-in copy or the header image or body content, graphics, reference links, the footer, a sidebar potentially.
The elements that go in here are not actually what we're talking about today. We can have that conversation too. I want a headline that's going to tell people that I serve all of these different intents. I want to have a lead-in that has a potential to be the featured snippet in there. I want a header image that can rank in image results and be in the featured snippet panel. I'm going to want body content that serves all of these in the order that's most popular. I want graphics and visuals that suggest to people that I've done my research and I can provably show that the results that you get with this different equipment or this different ISP will be relevant to them.
But really, what we're talking about here is the flow that matters. The content itself, the problem is that it gets buried. What I see many times is folks will take a powerful visual or a powerful piece of content that's solving the searcher's query and they'll put it in a place on the page where it's hard to access or hard to find. So even though they've actually got great content, it is buried by the page's design.
5 big goals that matter.The goals that matter here and the ones that you should be optimizing for when you're thinking about the design of this flow are:
1. How do I solve the searcher's task quickly and enjoyably?
So that's about user experience as well as the UI. I know that, for many people, they are going to want to see and, in fact, the result that's ranking up here on the top is Lifehacker's top 10 list for how to get your home Wi-Fi faster. They include things like upgrading your ISP, and here's a tool to see what's available in your area. They include maybe you need a better router, and here are the best ones. Maybe you need a different network or something that expands your network in your home, and here's a link out to those. So they're serving that purpose up front, up top.
2. Serve these multiple intents in the order of demand.
So if we can intuit that most people want to stick with their ISP, but are willing to change equipment, we can serve this one first (B3). We can serve this one second (B1), and we can serve the change out my ISP third (B2), which is actually the ideal fit in this scenario for us. That helps us
3. Optimize for the business goal without sacrificing one and two.
I would urge you to design generally with the searcher in mind and if you can fit in the business goal, that is ideal. Otherwise, what tends to happen is the business goal comes first, the searcher comes second, and you come tenth in the results.
4. If possible, try to claim the featured snippet and the visual image that go up there.
That means using the lead-in up at the top. It's usually the first paragraph or the first few lines of text in an ordered or unordered list, along with a header image or visual in order to capture that featured snippet. That's very powerful for search results that are still showing it.
5. Limit our bounce back to the SERP as much as possible.
In many cases, this means limiting some of the UI or design flow elements that hamper people from solving their problems or that annoy or dissuade them. So, for example, advertising that pops up or overlays that come up before I've gotten two-thirds of the way down the page really tend to hamper efforts, really tend to increase this bounce back to the SERP, the search engine call pogo-sticking and can harm your rankings dramatically. Design elements, design flows where the content that actually solves the problem is below an advertising block or below a promotional block, that also is very limiting.
So to the degree that we can control the design of our pages and optimize for that, we can actually take existing content that you might already have and improve its rankings without having to remake it, without needing new links, simply by improving the flow.
I hope we'll see lots of examples of those in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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http://ift.tt/2jA0s7UPodcasts are a great way to educate yourself. Whether you’re on the train, in the car, at your desk, or anywhere in between, this medium is an incredible vehicle for supplementing your industry knowledge. Every week, I’ll be sharing episodes from some of the best marketing podcasts around, spanning the whole marketing landscape.
Whether you’re new to podcasts or you’re a seasoned listener, I know you’ll find value in each weekly round-up. Let’s get listening, shall we?
The Beancast #474: Playing Whack-A-Mole
Host Bob Knorp packs an astounding number of brilliant minds into each episode of The Beancast. This podcast features some of the best coordination, production value, and pacing in the marketing podcast vertical.
In this week’s edition, the gang discusses Net Neutrality. (If you don’t know what this means, you need to stop reading this sentence and click here—just come back when you’re done). They explore how Google is losing ground to Facebook in local search and why Gayle King had one of the best post-scandal weeks ever from a PR perspective.
Takeaway: Net Neutrality is the biggest internet news item right now, despite not getting the kind of coverage it truly warrants. This impacts marketers doubly, beyond our own consumer internet usage, as it poses serious threats to how content reaches intended audiences. ISP providers insist nothing will change if legislation is amended, but only time will tell.
Duct Tape Marketing Podcast: How to Understand and Solve Your Customer’s Problems
When it comes to marketing our businesses and clients, our biggest sources of content are often our customers’ problems and reviews, according to small business expert and host John Jantsch.
Takeaways: As Marcus Sheridan and Jay can attest, leveraging customer reviews (both yours and your competitors’) provides a competitive advantage. By taking feedback and repurposing it into actionable answers and advice for prospective clients, we solve problems for our audience and ourselves (new business leads!).
At the 7:45 mark, John discusses how this approach has been successful for his business. Heeding feedback allowed John to isolate what his consultancy does and how customers understand what his efforts will address. As John emphasizes, “With this problem-solving approach . . . you can take something very complex and just simplify it.”
Our biggest sources of content are often our customers' problems and reviews.
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Turning an idea into a thought-provoking piece of content is a tough but necessary process. Sonia Simone, Chief Content Officer for Copyblogger, shares her simple but incredibly effective strategy for determining whether your brilliant idea is going to work for your intended audience.
Takeaways: When it comes to generating content ideas, “You have to know who you want to have a conversation with,” as Sonia so poignantly points out at the 7:00 mark.
Internally, make sure you or your team practices asking what your core audience wants more of, as well as what they want less of—which is perhaps even more important. As John Jantsch points out in the Duct Tape Marketing episode above, the more niche you can get with your content, the better.
That’s all for this edition! I’ll be back with a new batch next week. In the meantime, share any podcasts you think I should know about with me @jwsteiert on Twitter or in the comments below!
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The Journey, a Social Media Examiner production, is an episodic video documentary that shows you what really happens inside a growing business. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CPH2nuwsDw Watch The Journey: Episode 8 Episode 8 of The Journey follows Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, as he continues to pursue what many will see as an impossible goal: to
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Want to save time creating content and ads for your social media marketing? Interested in tools that help you track content and ad performance? To explore tools that simplify a marketer’s job, I interview Ian Cleary. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner.
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
In 2016 and 2017, I worked with a team of researchers at Salesforce to determine the differences between high-performing marketing organizations and everyone else. One key finding stuck with me: High-performing marketing organizations use, on average, three times more tools to create a cohesive customer experience than underperformers. This explosion of tools and channels has drastically changed the role and scope of marketing. Creating holistic experiences across a highly fragmented customer experience now requires a new kind of automation.
This massive difference in tool sets has a lot to do with the breadth of channels. However, it’s also related to the rise of a new idea of marketing automation.
In 2013, when I wrote Marketing Automation for Dummies (published by Wiley), there was only one type of automation: a marketing automation platform (MAP). These centralized tools allowed limited data sets to guide a few internal and external actions—namely lead nurturing, lead scoring, and lead routing. That was marketing automation 1.0.
Marketing Automation 2.0, on the other hand, is a decentralized web of technology. It can consume any data, manipulate automations across a range of tools, and execute on any platform or channel. It opens up possibilities far exceeding the bounds of a MAP. This is the future of marketing hyper-connected world.
Lead Gen in a 2.0 WorldModern lead generation is drastically altering many of the foundational ideas of traditional MAP. Just look at the notion of capturing an email address. Marketing automation 1.0 tells us a customer must fill out a form for a company to obtain their email address. However, as Guillaume Cabane (former VP of Growth at Segment) found, replacing lead capture forms with a chatbot drastically increases revenue in a way forms never could.
At Segment, Cabane used chat bots to increase conversions by 5x over forms and double conversations with qualified leads. Automations deploy these chatbots using a collection of data sets from various tools, and Segment displays a chat window to only the ideal 10 percent of website visitors. The automations happen across a network of tools, none of which are their traditional marketing automation platform (MAP). The future of marketing isn’t just new tools but entirely new processes—processes automation 1.0 isn’t able to accomplish. The future of marketing and lead generation requires an automation 2.0 framework.
The future of marketing automation isn’t just new tools but entirely new processes.
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Engagement in a 2.0 World
Email is the engagement medium of automation 1.0. However, today’s consumers demand we engage them across a wide array of channels consistently, not just email. We must follow consumer leads easily when engaging via external channels.
In 2015, messaging applications overtook social media in total usage. This is why marketing thought leaders such as Jay Baer now use messaging applications to communicate with their audiences. Jay’s team is seeing almost a 10X increase in open rates and a 5X increase in click troughs over traditional email. They’re executing these engagements outside of MAP while still connecting the data to the MAP middle-layer applications.
In addition to outbound engagement, best-in-class companies also use internal communication tools such as Slack, Trello, and Chatter to maintain consistency around key accounts and opportunities. Automating internal communications ensures holistic engagements and better outcomes in a 2.0 framework.
New middle-layer tools such as Zapier and Tray.io are the key to these extended internal or external engagements. David Dorman, Digital Ocean’s Director of Growth and Demand Generation, says the middle-layer tool they use “lets us be proactive with our marketing in a way that we couldn’t before.” This new middle layer of technology is the backbone of 2.0 systems. It provides a flexible and scalable way to connect a massive set of tools. Thanks to automation, it ensures the correct engagement is triggered at the correct time on the correct channel.
Middle-layer tools don’t replace MAP. Rather, they extend the range of possibilities and open the door to a wider range of engagements in the future.
The Toolset of the Growth HackerThe term “demand generation” arose from the marketing automation tool platform. Now, there’s another marketing role taking shape as a result of the new level of data connectivity: the growth hacker.
Where MAPs were the tool of choice for the demand generation specialist, automation 2.0 is the toolset of choice for the growth hacker. Brendon Ritz, growth hacker and Marketing Operations Lead at AdRoll, says AdRoll uses multiple tools to source individual and behavioral data. Multiple middle-layer applications run logic and automate the execution of experiences across a web of applications. It’s the power behind their modern revenue engine. This extended range of possibilities has increased their demo setups by 30 percent.
We’re moving into a hyper-connected world. Centralized tools can’t keep up with the new channels and data types entering the marketplace. The only way to create the engagements our consumers desire is to leverage decentralized systems. Those systems require multiple layers of automation able to manage data between execution points and channels.
Marketing powerhouse organizations such as Digital Ocean, AdRoll, and Segment have proven the value of a 2.0 system. Today, they’re laying down the roadmap for the future of marketing. Automation 2.0 is the next big thing.
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