13 Ingredients in the Perfect Social Media Contest

With the competition for attention online at an all-time high, the struggle to keep followers engaged with your company’s social channels is real, and ongoing. In addition to the smart use of visuals, businesses often turn to social media contests and promotions to stir excitement and drive activity from their audience.

It’s not as easy as tweeting “Who wants to win an iPad!?”, even though we’ve all clicked on that at one time or another. Excellent social media contests require substantial planning and nimble execution. They have many moving parts and potential points of failure.

Here’s a checklist of 13 ingredients you’ll need before launching the perfect social media contest:

1. Venue

Where will this contest take place? Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? Or will it be present in multiple venues, like a photo contest where participants can enter on Facebook or Instagram? Remember that each time you add a venue for participation, your oversight responsibilities grow geometrically.

2. Entry Mechanism

How do people qualify to enter your social media contest? There are hundreds of variations, but there are six main categories of participation mechanism. They are: Sweepstakes (nothing required—most common on Twitter); Connect (like/follow the company’s social account to enter); Like (like a particular piece of content to enter); Share (share a piece of content to enter); Vote (state preference from among multiple pieces of content to enter); Create (develop user-generated content and upload to enter).

Remember: The more you ask your audience to do, the fewer will do it. Remember too that the younger your audience, the more comfortable they will be creating content for your contest.

The more you ask your audience to do in a social media contest, the fewer will do it.
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3. Theme and Name

Is this contest seasonal? Does it tie into a particular product or service? Remember, the theme/name will guide the rest of the creative. Take some time to come up with something that resonates. Try to keep your contest name short, as long names eat up valuable characters in tweets and ad headlines.

4. Timeline

This is where you coordinate the major elements of the social media contest. The best approach here is to work backward from the date that you want to announce winners. From there, figure out when judging starts/ends (if applicable), when entries close, when entries open, when promotion starts, and other key milestones. Be sure to account for time to develop the creative, get approval for the contest rules, and any other internal hurdles that you need to cover before launch.

5. Visual Identity

In today’s social media landscape of visual billboards, you’ll need strong graphics and video to support your contest. Graphic needs may include cover and profile images, logos, headers, landing pages, emails, promoted posts, carousel images, or ad images (to name a few). Videos explaining and promoting the contest should be in both vertical (Snapchat, Instagram) and horizontal (YouTube, Facebook) formats, and likely various other lengths to maximize impact across different social channels. To make sure your design team doesn’t mutiny, use your timeline from step four and give them a single list of everything you need, including specific pixel dimensions and required language or copy. For Facebook, remember the 20 percent rule when creating graphics for promoted posts and ad images.

6. Prizes

What will winners receive? This is a place for you to be creative, and most social media contests are far too obvious here. (See “win an iPad” above.)

Remember, the prize itself can be the theme for the contest, as with the legendary “best job in the world” campaign from Tourism Queensland. The best contests have prizes that tie directly back to the company itself. This becomes particularly important when you consider the downstream results of this effort. You want to activate and attract people who are genuinely interested in your business, not just “contest hunters” who enter everything they can find. If you sell fishing gear, give away fishing gear as a prize, not an iPad.

7. Editorial Calendar

Here’s where you map out (via Excel, a custom Google calendar, and/or your social media management software) all the social media posts, email messages, advertising support, and other communications about your promotion. You don’t necessarily have to write all of the messages in advance—although it’s not a bad idea, and your legal team may require it. Remember that your social media contest (and corresponding communications) has five phases: pre-launch, launch, last chance, completion, and winners. You need to plan multiple messages across multiple platforms for each phase.

8. Seeding Strategy

This applies to the pre-launch and launch phases of your social media contest. This is where you figure out how to give your promotion the best chance of lift-off in the critical early days of the promotion. What you’re trying to do here is make sure that the people who already love you, and the people who have a disproportionate number of social connections, are fully aware of the contest and are ready to participate and spread the word the minute the promotion begins. This could include special “Shh, Coming Soon” emails to key customers and social influencers, making sure all employees are aware of the event and other opportunities.

Remember: You do not want to “soft launch” a contest. This is especially true on Facebook, where the algorithm dictates that slow starters get buried.

9. Amplification Strategy

With the exception of simple Twitter contests and basic Facebook contests that are managed within your timeline, you will probably need some sort of amplification to ensure that your contest has the reach (and garners the attention) you desire. This may include Facebook and Instagram ads (think about custom audiences ads shown only to your email subscribers), Facebook promoted posts, Twitter promoted tweets, ad opportunities on Pinterest, amplification networks like Outbrain, Taboola, and Stumble, and other options. Remember that even if your contest takes place on one platform, you can use multiple platforms to amplify it.

10. Rules

I purposefully put rules and legal advice tenth on this list because I have found it is much easier to have legal weigh in on the entirety of the program (including seeding, editorial, amplification) all at once, instead of having them look at the mechanism and prizes first, and then going back to them later with a second round of inquiries about the other elements. As with the design team, make legal’s job easier by giving them the total picture up-front. Be proactive by doing your research first on what each venue allows for contests, and have the links ready to share with legal. (Here’s Facebook’s Pages Terms.) It’ll make them happy, and you absolutely want to keep them on your side.

11. Community Management

Participants and prospective entrants will have questions and comments about your contest. Some will be easy to address. Others may not be so simple. It is absolutely critical (even for simple contests) that you have a defined plan for who is moderating and overseeing your social outposts. This doesn’t just mean the channels where the contest is located and normal business hours. What is your plan for coverage on nights and weekends? Your day-to-day community management realities will likely be modest compared to what you need to accomplish during a contest. Plan for this.

12. Crisis Plan

You should already have a social media crisis plan. If you’ve never created one, the launch of your new contest provides excellent leverage for getting it finished. Will something go massively awry with your contest, causing you to activate your crisis plan? Probably not. But if it does, and you don’t have that crisis plan to turn to in that critical moment, the chances you’ll ever get to do another contest are just about zero. Consider this to be the “I’m not about to get fired because of a contest” ingredient of this recipe. (See my popular “8 steps to manage a social media crisis” post and slides here.)

13. Software (Sometimes)

As with amplification, you may not need software if your social media contest is very straightforward. But for any sort of contest that requires data collection as part of the entry mechanism, you’ll need software to help build and manage the affair. There are literally dozens of software packages that help you do this, either as their sole function or as part of a larger suite of social media management capabilities. Here at Convince & Convert, we’re familiar with most of them but haven’t used them all first-hand.

Software I can personally recommend (please feel free to nominate others in the comments) includes:

• Wyng: For mid-sized companies on Facebook and beyond, this software packs tons of campaign and content templates and ideas.
• Shortstack: For small businesses up to large agencies, this is one of the legacy providers for contests on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
• Strutta: For medium/large companies hosting contests on Facebook, Instagram, or their own microsite, their DIY and custom packages make this software accessible for most.
• Woobox: This software is designed for mid-sized companies and large brands that make Facebook a top priority.
• Wishpond: This tool works best for medium/large companies connecting contests to lead generation.
• Rafflecopter: This is one of the best options for bloggers and solopreneurs looking to run a simple giveaway with multiple entry points.

Those are the 13 ingredients of the perfect social media contest. What did I miss?

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Instagram Stories: How Businesses Can Make the Most of Stories

Do you want to create more engaging and effective Instagram stories? Are you using all of the Instagram Stories features available to you? To explore how you can use the latest Stories features, I interview Sue B. Zimmerman. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social

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The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Pouring money into a paid ad campaign that's destined to fail isn't a sound growth strategy. Time and again, companies breaking into online ads don't see success due to the same issue: they aren't known to their audiences. There's no trust, no recognition, and so the cost per click remains high and rising.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies the cycle many brands get trapped in and outlines a solution to make those paid ad campaigns worth the dollars you put behind them.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about the number one reason so many paid ad campaigns, especially from new companies and companies with new products or new ventures that they're going into, new markets and audiences they're addressing, fail. They just fall apart. I see this scenario play out so many times, especially in the startup and entrepreneurial world but, to be honest, across the marketing landscape.

Here's how it usually goes. You've got your CEO or your CMO or your business owner and they're like, "Hey, we have this great new product. Let's spread the word." So they talk to a marketer. It could be a contractor. It could be an agency. It could be someone in-house.

The marketer is like, "Okay, yeah, I'll buy some ads online, help us get the word out there and get us some traffic and conversions."

Then a few months later, you basically get this. "How's that paid ad campaign going?" "Well, not so good. I have bad news."

The cycle

Almost always, this is the result of a cycle that looks like this. You have a new company's campaign. The campaign is to sell something or get exposure for something, to try and drive visits back to a web page or a website, several pages on the site and then get conversions out of it. So you buy Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe LinkedIn and Twitter. You probably use the Google Display Network. You're probably using AdWords. All of these sources are trying to drive traffic to your web page and then get a conversion that turns into money.

Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it's a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you're naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don't make it here. They don't make it there. Why is that?

Why does this happen?

Well, before we address that, let's talk about what happens here. When these are low, when you have a low engagement rate on the platform itself, when no one engages with your Facebook ads, no one engages with your Instagram ads, when no one clicks on your AdWords ad, when no one clicks on your display ads, the cost to show to more people goes up, and, as a result, these campaigns are much harder to make profitable and they're shown to far fewer people.

So your exposure to the audience you want to reach is smaller and the cost to reach each next person and to drive each next action goes up. This, fundamentally, is because...

• The audience that you're trying to reach hasn't heard of you before. They don't know who you are.
• They don't know, trust, or like you or your company product, they don't click. They don't click. They don't buy. They don't share. They don't like.

They don't do all the engagement things that would drive this high cost per click down, and, because of that, your campaigns suffer and struggle.

I see so many marketers who think like this, who say yes to new company campaigns that start with an advertising-first approach. I want to be clear, there are some exceptions to the rule. I have seen some brand new companies that fit a certain mold do very well with Instagram advertising for certain types of products that appeal to that audience and don't need a previously existing brand association. I've seen some players in the Google AdWords market do okay with this, some local businesses, some folks in areas where people don't expect to have knowledge and awareness of a brand already in the space where they're trying to discover them.

So it's not the case always that this fails, but very often, often enough that I'm calling this the number one reason I see paid ads fail.

The solution

There's only one solution and it's not pretty. The solution is...

You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.

Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.

Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.

The second option is to...

Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.

The way you can do this is through systems like Google's retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.

But if you don't do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don't want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You're going to be a lot happier.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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6 Pieces of Marketing Advice You Can Actually Use

With 2018 in full swing, marketers should be thinking about way to level-up their strategies. And as much as we wish it would, money (and a marketer’s budget) doesn’t grow on trees.

You probably don’t have the budget for cash-consuming items like augmented reality or time-consuming brand boosters like Instagram stories. Plus, as social networks become increasingly segmented, it’s tough to know where and when to engage your precise target audience and how to monetize every social network. And even if you do know, the sheer volume of work may be overwhelming.

Fortunately, there are plenty of straightforward (and, frankly, less expensive) tactics to increase website traffic and engage prospective customers. These dependable strategies have the potential to generate real, tangible outcomes for marketers. Here are six social media marketing pointers from some of the industry’s leading practitioners on how to make these trends work for you, no matter what your budget may be.

1. The Line Between Social Media Content and Social Ads Is Blurring

With Facebook and Instagram using the same targeting engines and technologies (more or less), your content now has a super high-horsepower amplification engine behind it. Think about building ad campaigns that have direct targeting, retargeting, the ability to target audiences you’ve built, and the ability to target audiences that look like the audiences you’ve built. Test and track them all.

Yes, your content might be a series of editorial style videos. But now they can be distributed with this advanced targeting and specifically served to people that view a high percentage of similar content, and to other people that have the same demographic, interest, and behavioral qualities. This is social content with targeting power like we’ve never seen before.

“Remember that ‘social’ implies you’re giving something useful to the audience,” explained Jason Falls, noted digital marketing speaker and author. “Ad targeting to get people to give you something is fine. But leveraging it to show people how much you can give to them goes a long way in building trust and brand affinity.”

2. Social Ads Are on Steroids

The ability to target people based on multiple data points—including demographics, interests, and behaviors—coupled with the ability to utilize existing audiences and lookalike audiences has created social ad capabilities, audience growth, content virality, website traffic, and event attendance. And sales are endless.

Chad Richards, veteran social media marketer and Senior Social Media Manager at Firebelly Marketing, a social media marketing agency, explained,

“People divulge a lot of personal information on social media, so these networks know a lot about us: our characteristics, our interests, and behaviors. Because of this, it’s never been easier to reach exactly the right people with your products and services. And with Facebook’s Pixel, Twitter’s Universal Website Tag, LinkedIn’s Insight Tag, and Snapchat’s Snap Pixel—all provided pieces of code you place on your website—tracking sales and other conversion events from your social ad efforts is clear and straightforward.”

3. Micro-Influencers Get the Respect They Deserve

Influencer marketing is gaining acceptance from marketers at medium-sized—and even small—brands. Emphasis will shift (as it should) to influencers with small, yet highly engaged followings, and toward those connected to other influencers. More importantly, brands that get it understand that influencer marketing is about relationships and not transactions. It’s about creating win- win relationships that benefit the brand and the influencer.

These micro-influencers have audience reach that big influencers can only dream of. While they may lack celebrity, they have an underdog commitment and fight to prove their value to their audience. They live and die to prove this value, which is ultimately in the best interest of a strategic marketer. A successful partnership with an influencer is worth its weight in platinum.

“Customers love authenticity. It’s what enabled RedBull, Dove’s ‘real beauty’ and Pantene’s ‘Shine’ campaigns 10 to 12 years ago, and what Tory Burch seems to be at with Anni Kravi or The Beauty Chef today,” says Christopher Samuel, global corporate preparedness and engagement lead at Monsanto.

“I recommend brands take the long view. Invite and immerse micro-influencers in authentic real-world brand experiences. Existing fans may choose to become advocates. New ones may create their own real-world content/stories, and the ROI on engagement and conversion will be significant. While in influencer marketing, more is more (micro- plus celebrity influencers), the key to success is a commitment to authenticity, transparency, and long-term equity-building.”

Influencer marketing's emphasis will shift to influencers with small, highly engaged followings.
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4. Social Intelligence Is Easy to Access

With companies like Nuvi and Brandwatch churning out valuable data and beautiful visual reports, any brand can arm itself with the most cutting-edge information about its customers, prospects, its industry, and the conversation. Business development, and marketing in general, needs to focus on what we know about our client or customer. Therefore, understanding the social content that is popular (by brand, competitor, or the industry in general) is critical.

Paying attention to where content and amplification is happening, and which influencers are involved, and which types of content are being amplified—these are all invaluable aspects of understanding what is happening in the social sphere. The opportunity lies in how we extend that knowledge into real actionable insights to inform strategy and tactics.

“Social listening takes real-time conversations and opinions from the internet to the boardroom”, says Will McInnes, CMO, Brandwatch. “Marketers use these insights to beef up their content and influencer marketing practices, and the entire company can gain better insight into what their consumers are looking for everyday. Social data doesn’t just equip marketers with the information necessary to make better business decisions—it allows entire companies to better understand the world they navigate.”

5. Content Intelligence Is Making Life Easier

Yes, we all know we live in a content marketing world. Thanks, HubSpot, for the mass proliferation of this. However, we also know the 80/20 principle applies to content with the most or least levels of engagement. Smart companies like Ceralytics help clients analyze reams of data across awareness, engagement, and conversion, as well as benchmark it against competitors—all while identifying content gaps and missed opportunities with associated keyword difficulties. Say goodbye to overpriced content marketing strategy agencies and hello to smart content that really kicks your competition’s butt.

“The days of ‘if you write it, they will come’ are over,” says Brandon Andersen, veteran marketer and founder of Ceralytics, a content intelligence platform and service. “Succeeding in content marketing now takes a deep understanding of what topics resonate with your audience through the buying cycle. Without these insights, content marketers will continue to shoot in the dark and ultimately fail.”

6. Conversion Matters

Brands will start paying more attention to converting at scale as opposed to the current preoccupation with traffic acquisition. Instead of obsessively chasing more traffic, focus on converting and engaging the traffic you’re already getting.

Whether it’s a conversion on a landing page into a lead or sale, this is the best place to start. From there, you can move across the rest of the site to optimize for email sign-ups, whitepaper downloads, or problem-solving. The crux here is to remove obstacles or friction that prevent visitors from converting. It could be the amount of text. It could be a messaging mismatch between the ad (or general expectations) and the text on the page. Or maybe it’s the image, a lack of trust symbols, or the layout of the page. An improvement of one percentage point in conversion can be a significant game-changer.

“Conversion rate optimization needs to be viewed from your visitor’s perspective. You need to create compelling online experiences for every stage of the online customer journey. The biggest mistake that you can make is to be a greedy marketer and only focus on the bottom of the sales funnel,” said Tim Ash, the CEO of SiteTuners and chairperson of the Digital Growth Unleashed conference.

If your company is a leader and is traditionally first in the space, go ahead and chase the edgy opportunity (and if you’ve got extra time and budget). Otherwise, take the smart and practical approach. Pursue a solid mix of these six opportunities to get the maximum bang for your time and investment.

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How to Use Google AdWords to Promote YouTube Videos

Do you want a specific audience to see your YouTube content? Wondering how Google AdWords targeting can help? In this article, you’ll discover five ways Google AdWords targeting can improve delivery of your YouTube video ads. #1: Use Placement Targeting to Reach Other Channels’ Viewers A Google AdWords video ad campaign with placement targeting allows

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How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer

Posted by Daniel_Marks

Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked at some point to investigate an organic traffic drop. I’ve investigated quite a few, so I thought I’d share some steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.

Is it just normal noise?

Before you sound the alarm and get lost down a rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you’re seeing is actually real. This involves answering two questions:

A.) Do you trust the data?

This might seem trivial, but at least a quarter of the traffic drops I’ve seen were simply due to data problems.

The best way to check on this is to sense-check other metrics that might be impacted by data problems. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you flat-out missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data problems will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.

One of the more common sources of data issues is simply missing data for a day.

B.) Is this just normal variance?

Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.

For example, you could plot your weekly SEO traffic for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation (using the STDEV function on Google Sheets or Excel makes this very easy) to figure out if a drop in weekly traffic is abnormal. You’d expect about 16% of weeks to be one standard deviation below your weekly average just by sheer luck. You could therefore set a one-standard-deviation threshold before investigating traffic drops, for example (but you should adjust this threshold to whatever is appropriate for your business). You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation).

SEO traffic is usually pretty noisy, especially on a short time frame like a week.

Let’s assume you’ve decided this is indeed a real traffic drop. Now what? I’d recommend trying to answer the eleven questions below, at least one of them will usually identify the culprit.

Questions to ask yourself when facing an organic traffic drop1. Was there a recent Google algorithm update?

MozCast, Search Engine Land, and Moz’s algorithm history are all good resources here.

Expedia seems to have been penalized by a Penguin-related update.

If there was an algorithm update, do you have any reason to suspect you’d be impacted? It can sometimes be difficult to understand the exact nature of a Google update, but it’s worth tracking down any information you can to make sure your site isn’t at risk of being hit.

2. Is the drop specific to any segment?

One of the more useful practices whenever you’re looking at aggregated data (such as a site’s overall search traffic) is to segment the data until you find something interesting. In this case, we’d be looking for a segment that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This is often the first step in tracking down the root cause of the issue. The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically:

• Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet)
• Page type (product pages vs. category pages vs. blog posts vs. homepage etc.)

But there will likely be plenty of other segments that might make sense to look at for your business (for example, product category).

3. Are you being penalized?

This is unlikely, but it’s also usually pretty quick to disprove. Look at Search Console for any messages related to penalties and search for your brand name on Google. If you’re not showing up, then you might be penalized.

Rap Genius (now Genius) was penalized for their link building tactics and didn’t show up for their own brand name on Google.

4. Did the drop coincide with a major site change?

This can take a thousand different forms (did you migrate a bunch of URLs, move to a different JavaScript framework, update all your title tags, remove your navigation menu, etc?). If this is the case, and you have a reasonable hypothesis for how this could impact SEO traffic, you might have found your culprit.

Hulu.com saw a pretty big drop in SEO traffic after changing their JavaScript framework.

5. Did you lose ranking share to a competitor?

There are a bunch of tools that can tell you if you’ve lost rankings to a competitor:

• BrightEdge’s Share of Voice
• GetStat’s Share of Voice
• SEMrush’s Rankings Distribution Report

If you've lost rankings, it’s worth investigating the specific keywords that you’ve lost and figuring out if there’s a trend. Did your competitors launch a new page type? Did they add content to their pages? Do they have more internal links pointing to these pages than you do?

GetStat’s Share of Voice report lets you quickly see whether a competitor is usurping your rankings

It could also just be a new competitor that’s entered the scene.

6. Did it coincide with a rise in direct or dark traffic?

If so, make sure you haven’t changed how you’re classifying this traffic on your end. Otherwise, you might simply be re-classifying organic traffic as direct or dark traffic.

7. Has there been a change to the search engine results pages you care about?

You can either use Moz’s SERP features report, or manually look at the SERPs you care about to figure out if their design has materially changed. It’s possible that Google is now answering many of your relevant queries directly in search results, put an image carousel on them, added a local pack, etc. — all of which would likely decrease your organic search traffic.

Celebritynetworth.com lost most of its SEO traffic because of rich snippets like the one above.

8. Is the drop specific to branded or unbranded traffic?

If you have historical Search Console data, you can look at number of branded clicks vs. unbranded clicks over time. You could also look at this data through AdWords if you spend on paid search. Another simple proxy to branded traffic is homepage traffic (for most sites, the majority of homepage traffic will be branded). If the drop is specific to branded search then it’s probably a brand problem, not an SEO problem.

9. Did a bunch of pages drop out of the index?

Search Console’s Index Status Report will make it clear if you suddenly have way fewer URLs being indexed. If this is the case, you might be accidentally disallowing or noindexing URLs (through robots.txt, meta tags on the page, or HTTP headers).

Search Console’s Index Status Report is a quick way to make sure you’re not accidentally noindexing or disallowing large portions of your site.

10. Did your number of referring domains and/or links drop?

It’s possible that a large number of your backlinks have been removed or are no longer accessible for whatever reason.

Ahrefs can be a quick way to determine if you’ve lost backlinks and also offers very handy reports for your lost backlinks or referring domains that will allow you to identify why you might have lost these links.

A sudden drop in backlinks could be the reason you’re seeing a traffic drop.

11. Is SEM cannibalizing SEO traffic?

It’s possible that your paid search team has recently ramped up their spend and that this is eating into your SEO traffic. You should be able to check on this pretty quickly by plotting your SEM vs. SEO traffic. If it’s not obvious after doing this whether it’s a factor, then it can be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages.

To be clear, some level of cannibalization between SEM and SEO is inevitable, but it’s still worth understanding how much of your traffic is being cannibalized and whether the incremental clicks your SEM campaigns are driving outweigh the loss in SEO traffic (in my experience they usually do outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, but still worth checking!).

If your SEM vs. SEO traffic graph looks similar to the (slightly extreme) one above, then SEM campaigns might be cannibalizing your SEO traffic.

That’s all I’ve got — hopefully at least one of these questions will lead you to the root cause of an organic search traffic drop. Are there any other questions that you’ve found particularly helpful for diagnosing traffic drops? Let me know in the comments.

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Why Your Facebook Live Videos Aren’t Working

If you have been following me for awhile now, you will be very familiar with my thoughts and processes of dominating your niche on Facebook.

Using Facebook Live for your business and messenger bots is the number 1 strategy for 2018 and beyond.

Why?

Well! that’s a great question.

Because Facebook live promotes 6 x more engagement than recorded videos. With the new update of the Facebook algorithm on the 11th January, we need more engagement to get any sort of organic reach. Even if that is only a few percent improvement. Last month I wrote about the recent changes in Facebook and what you can do for your business page.

Doing business today with social media is a necessity. Yes, the algorithms have changed. Every time you get used to using a platform it changes. It can be time confusing and it can be frustrating.

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