LinkedIn Unlocked is a social selling roadmap that will help you generate a consistent flow of quality leads.
The post LinkedIn Unlocked – Book Interview appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Your customers are impatient Multiple studies have demonstrated the inverse link between page speed and rate of abandonment. Google’s own research has shown that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load, while Akamai found that 79% of online shoppers who experience a dissatisfying visit are unlikely […]
The post Site speed for in-house marketers: Creating a culture of performance appeared first on Builtvisible.
Here are 5 small business branding guidelines help make your firm look bigger than it is as well as 3 reasons to use small business branding.
The post 5 Small Business Branding Guidelines = Big Opportunity appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Ranking higher on Google. A ceaseless rush to get authority for your website and lots of visitors to eventually turn them into clients. Search engine optimization doesn’t have to be the black sheep of marketing. You just got to understand how to use it. You can complement your SEO efforts with lots of other marketing forms, such as analytics data. It will stop you from bleeding website data. It really will.
How does it work? You need an account on a dedicated analytics product. Then, you need to get access to your analytics data, pull up your sleeves and step in using our analytics data kit filled with actionable tips.
For our experiment, we mainly used Google Analytics. Even though from time to time we felt that the data coming from here is not comprehensive, the platform provides lots of valuable features.
Knowing exactly which pages receive organic traffic is crucial. It will help not only your content marketers to make better decisions, but it will also improve the strategy of your overall marketing campaigns. Organic search traffic is one of the first metrics on your list that needs to be tracked. Go to Behavior » Site Content » All Pages to view all the pages ordered by the highest number. In case you want to see the traffic only for some category of pages from your website, you’ll have to search for it. Below you can see an example of the Blog category:
The pages with high scores can give you a glimpse of indexation. Landing pages with a high number of unique pageviews mean that they are of interest, offer a better user experience, and are indexed better than the others. Thus, if the viewers like you, Google likes you, and that will bring the appreciation of other websites and turn the pages into link magnets. Improving those pages and optimizing them is essential to sprout your backlink profile.
Use those pages to link them to other relevant pages, because internal links have a strong signal of transferring value (therefore, you’ll improve your conversion rates, time on site and your traffic).
On the other hand, pages with a lower score (pages with a high bounce rate) mean they don’t offer what was promised from the title and meta description. Those users will always pogo stick away unless immediate changes are made.
Using Google data, you can see what your audience searches before accessing your content. All the hustle for searching queries and relevant keywords can easily turn into an easy and pain-free task. View the Google’s search terms from the amounts of data collected in Search Console. Access it through Acquisition » Search Console » Queries.
Here you can find plenty of keywords data. You will find all that your users searched about you before they entered your website: your brand name, services you might offer, informational queries and lots of other mixed searches. In our case, I recommend looking for the relevant keyword phrases, that could have a chance to rank higher and bring more traffic to your website. To make the strategy work, you’ll have to filter the list by the average position.
What you should do is go to Advanced filter » include » Average position » greater than » (insert arbitrary number here). In the blank space, I would recommend inserting the number 10, which basically means all the keywords that rank below the 10th position (from the second page to the last one). Baby steps. Start with the pages that have a higher chance to be pushed to the first page rather than going directly to those in higher positions (greater than 80/90/100, etc).
Look for the queries that are relevant to your business, for that type of keywords that could push the user down the funnel to turn a lead, such as very specific keywords, not informational ones. Some specific examples might be: washing machine service in Perth, home cleaning service provider Minneapolis, but that really depends on the industry and type of business.
After you’ve gathered all the keywords, search for the pages related to each keyword. Up to this point, you have the easy way to avoid the headaches or the-long-phase-pain-in-the-neck journey. The first option is to use a dedicated tool or a plugin. Keyword Tool has an option to see on which position is your content for a specific query. Below you can see the rankings for “24-hour locksmith Sydney”. In the list, you see all the first 100 positions so you can easily search with “ctrl + f” and find your site.
The hard way would be to go to the search engine you use, such as google.com and search for that particular query, manually.
After you found the page, copy-paste it into Content Assistant and optimize it. Transform the low-hanging fruits into best-performing pieces of content. We’ve crafted a step-by-step guideline, if you need any help.
Make sure you don’t rank already for a highly competitive keyword for the same page, otherwise you risk messing around your actual rankings. I know Google is working on a complicated and dreadful-algorithmic situation. For that, you’ll have to return to Acquisition » Search Console » Queries search for the main keyword. In our case, it would be locksmith and see which similar phrases you have there and their position.
There are some triggers in analytics that could lead to financial outcome, if you follow a well-planned strategy. Following a similar path as we talked about in the query hunting at point 2, we can look up to money keywords 
(All I see is dolla’ signs, dolla’ signs).
You have two options to scour for money keywords in Analytics. In the first case, you can find money keywords that would convert by looking into Google Adwords campaigns, which can be accessed through Acquisition » Adwords » Keywords.
A bit of keyword research and analytics SEO never killed nobody. Order keywords by cost, then select the ones that have a higher cost and lots of clicks, because those are the most successful ones.
In the last case, you can see the search terms from your own e-commerce website/ online shop. Go to Behavior » Site Search » Search Terms. If you have an e-commerce website, I bet there are lots of people that might search for something else, once they’ve entered your website. You can find what they were looking for and try to use those search terms to your advantage, such as creating new content, optimizing product pages for those specific keywords or other similar pages.
Usually, when navigating an ecommerce website, visitors search for a category of products, a specific product, color or even an SKU (stock keeping unit – the identification code).
After you’ve gathered all the keywords and made a list of them with the corresponding page, you can start optimizing the content you already have, as we discussed previously or you can create new content.
If you want to see data from the various third-party campaigns ran by you, you can use Analytics. Look at all the campaigns you have through Acquisition » Campaigns » All Campaigns.
This analytics tool category includes promotional campaigns created on other websites that point to yours through dedicated landing pages, discount codes, articles and so on. All the links from each campaign must use a UTM code to make it easy to track in Analytics. A UTM code is attached to a custom URL that can be used to track a source, medium, and campaign name. You can also use it for email campaigns.
All the data gathered from third-party campaigns can help you understand which website performs better and can bring lots of clients back to your site. We all know that links bring a lot of value to your domain. The more powerful, the better. Links are a strong ranking signal, so make sure you take advantage of what you’ve got.
Select the keywords that are grammatically correct and relevant for future articles or actual keywords optimization ideas for published content. Priority goes to keywords with lots of users.
Another interesting strategy would be to look at the keywords that bring traffic to your website, which can be accessed by Acquisition » Campaigns » Organic Keywords. You can use those in your optimization process to generate new content ideas. They have a strong indicator of quality search.
It is critical to know where your visitors are coming from. Think of it this way: it’s like when you have a defined profile, with all the attributes and metrics highlighted and a group with all sort of unfiltered, uncategorized, unstructured data with lots of inconclusive info. Which one would be easier to go through?
Jeff Sauer, Google Analytics consultant, explains how the journey of the user and how channel grouping can help over-simplify the traffic coming to your website:
| Channels represent the paths visitors take to arrive on your website. Some visitors type in your URL, some search your brand name, others search by topic and find your content. | |
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Jeff Sauer |
| Founder of Jeffalytics | |
Analytics allows you to see some of the default channels at first, but they can be easily customized in order to view detailed categories. It is best to use the channel grouping feature from Google Analytics: Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.
In the example represented above, you can see a list of channels. There is a variety of channels you could create. You just have to make sure all of them are relevant and useful to your business.
If you don’t know where 15% is coming from, that’s a problem, right? Using granular channel grouping will ease up your decision-making process because this way you’ll have an accurate view of your data.
Paul Koks, Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics, points out the benefits for customizing channel grouping to get an accurate view of your marketing performances:
| Goals are crucial to analyze the performance of your landing pages, channels etc. A proper structure and suitable naming conventions for your goal sets are extremely helpful for you and other people that have access to the same reporting view. | |
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Paul Koks |
| Analytics Advocate at Online Metrics | |
Traffic has a high connection with high rankings, but they are also in a constant battle, at the same time. You shouldn’t focus only on one or the other. Tracking keywords that send traffic to your site is one of the most important pieces of the pie. In Analytics, you can view the organic search traffic for all the searched terms in a specific period of time. Go to Acquisition » All Traffic » Channels.
Once you get here, you need to click on Organic Search and a new list of search terms will load.
Here you can view all the keywords that are successful and bring a lot of users. Gauge your website’s performance in terms of search traffic (visitors, sessions) and opt to use only those that can bring a significant amount of traffic for content that you’re under-optimized for.
Make sure you avoid seasonal keywords and seasonal periods (Christmas, Easter and other local events and celebrations) that potentially could spike the traffic because they are in demand only at that specific time.
Besides all the data analysis methods, Google Analytics can provide some shortcuts to your reports and historical data. Annotations are a great feature you should use to keep track of your changes. They are some notes you can add to mark important events.
If you want to add annotations to flag any important changes, you’ll have to go the graphic you’re interested in and click on the small arrow to expand and create your annotation.
Before starting to create new annotations, observe the following tips:
Farid Alhadi, an analytics expert, performed lots of experiments and analytics researches and saw the value in annotations. They are best put to use to avoid breaks and irregularities, but also to take advantage of all the natural spikes from the website’s results.
| These “sticky notes” might seem insignificant, but can often be a life-saver, providing insight as to why your data sometimes looks the way it does, especially anomalies or outliers. | |
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Farid Alhadi |
| Sales Director at E-Nor | |
What’s SEO success if we don’t create segmented audience? How will we know on which type of client we should focus our attention more, or for which we should interfere in the funnel to convert them? Segmentation will provide you with lots of insight data on your audience to get a deep-dive into everything that happens with your website. Advanced segments in Analytics can help you get deeper information for isolated groups established through parameters.
Dave Chaffey, co-founder at Smart Insights, has an interesting story about the overall behavior when it comes to Google Analytics usage:
| The best marketers put effort into understanding their customers’ behaviours, characteristics and needs, so at first glance, Google Analytics can be frustrating to use to help marketing since there isn’t an obvious report about customers. The closest we can get is the visitors report, but these seem anonymous and undifferentiated. | |
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Dave Chaffey |
| Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights | |
He rather said an honest and hard truth:
| If you’re using Google Analytics and not using Segments, you might as well not bother using Google Analytics other than for trend reporting. | |
|
Dave Chaffey |
| Co-founder and Content Director of Smart Insights | |
To create segments, you need to go to your property, where you’ll find a button that says Add Segment » New segment.
After that step, you get to the point when you have the option to create conditions or sequences. Conditions are best out to use in situations when you want to understand how something on your site influences the visitor, for example. Let’s say you want to find how your blog impacts the revenue.
You should use sequences if you want to measure which users took specific actions in a certain order on your site; the evolution, the journey of the user on site. For example, create a sequence for users that go to a specific page and then they click to create an account and convert. That way, you could analyze the aggregate data regarding user behavior and the differences that appear from the other ones.
Getting the SEO analytics you specifically need can turn into a “light-bulb” moment.
Kunle Campbell, an e-commerce growth consultant, points out in a few words the main goal of the advanced segments and the high-driven value it can bring to a website:
| Advanced segments are good at determining acquisition channels that drive quality traffic to your site. You can also create segments for different demographic groups, to see what pages they visit most and how long they stay on your website. You can segment users and sessions with specific keywords you are targeting. Custom segments are available for importing and sharing with others. In short, advanced segments is a powerful tool for investigating important sets of website traffic and for revealing weak areas in your site, to address. | |
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Kunle Campbell |
| Founder of 2X eCommerce | |
Let me tell you a short story I know from my grandma about three countryside brothers from a small village. All of them were raised by a single dad who had an orchard. One day, their dad was hit by a rare disease which weakened him day by day. Knowing that he didn’t have much time left, he wanted to see which of his sons is ready to take over the orchard. Each one of them received one bean.
They were told that the first one who manages to grow a leaf from that bean will take over the family legacy – the orchard. The first one put it in the ground and watered it every day in the evening. The second one placed it in a glass of water on the porch to receive light. The last one thought of doing something different. First, he gathered more information on how to grow it and he found out that the best way was to put ii in a glass on a piece of wet cotton wool or a sort of wadding and place it somewhere when it can receive light, watering it from day to day, always checking the piece of cotton. Days passed, the first started to rush and put a stick to attach the beanstalk to be prepared when it grows. The second one drowned the bean and it never grew. The interesting part of the story is the fact that the third son always checked the bean and kept track of what was happening to it, keeping a note with what he did and what happened.
After a few days the first leaf appeared. The third son was ecstatic. The father was happy and the orchard had a new owner. The interesting part I was trying to point out through this story is the fact that in order to make something work you need to search, make the right steps at the right time. Don’t rush into things, like the first son did. Don’t try to do your job just one time and forget about it like the second son did, but try to track the evolution, analytics data, keep reports and establish goals like the third son did.
This article is not a guide to Google Analytics, nor a list with Google ranking factors or an SEO checklist. It’s a list with actionable steps that you can take in order to improve your marketing strategy and get the most out of your current marketing campaigns by using the data you already have. Also, this blog post will not guarantee you SEO success but it will surely help you with your conversion rate optimization, with your SEO rankings and will ultimately improve your organic search traffic.
As analytics data is the first insight you get about your business and the audience. It can bring a lot of value to start mushrooming your SEO strategy.
The post 8 Steps to Get Higher Rankings Using Google Analytics Data appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
Maui Roofing & Exterior Project Spotlight - https://youtu.be/SepNMLewlCc
We all know that BlackHat SEO is considered to be a bad thing. One might think: “as long as you can rank a website well with it, it must be good; there are risks of getting caught and penalized by Google’s algorithms, but most people take that risk, don’t they?”
Well… actually no. BlackHat SEO really is a bad thing. Not only for the one that uses it, but for you and everyone else, as well. Why? Because most BlackHat SEO tactics started off as legitimate ways to optimize your website. Tactics that, if properly used and not abused, might have still been safe and useful today.
Some people started noticing that specific tactics bring results (translated in higher traffic or ranks), and then others came and abused those tactics. Google then had to stop them. As manual review is virtually impossible, Google uses algorithms. When Google’s algorithms catch patterns that are against the guidelines, websites get penalized. Since the abuses actually come from legitimate techniques… I hope you see where this is going.
Long story short, some good-intended people are going to suffer from blackhat SEO (and I’m not talking only about people that hired unethical SEO agencies without knowledge). Here are some examples of how legitimate things got abused and are now hurting everyone, more or less.
Guest blogging started out long time ago as something nice. The magic of guest posting was that both sides would profit. The poster would benefit from access to the host’s traffic, exposure and probably a backlink, too. In return, the host would receive free, quality content.
However, as soon as people found out how beneficial these things could be for a website’s ranking, two things happened:
Oftentimes, the price for hosting a guest post with links to a website would be a monthly fee. The link/guest post would be deleted if the guest poster failed to pay the fee. Everything turned upside down. In a normal Universe, the writer gets paid by the website owner. But in 2014’s SEO Universe, it was the other way around.
Matt Cutts wrote something about this back in the day, which is more or less the foundation of this article:
| Ultimately, this is why we can’t have nice things in the SEO space: a trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behavior remains. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking “guest post outsourcing” and writing articles about “how to automate guest blogging.” | |
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Matt Cutts |
| Former Head of Spam at Google / @mattcutts | |
What I think bothers Matt the most, is the fact that they’ve used “guest posting” as a term to cover up the spam that has been going on before with article directories. Article directories used to be great! They were today’s Medium. But then, they got clogged up with useless, spammy pieces of content.
Guest posting should be about you being invited to write somewhere, to share something unique with an audience. You can’t “outsource” guest posting, nor can you “automate” it. Outsourced, automated guest posting is basically article spam under another name.
But you know what the most dangerous part is? The fact that it works. Until you get penalized, of course. Rand Fishkin has the perfect explanation for this.
SEO is really hard and things move slowly. So, when you start with legitimate guest posts, it takes some time to see results. As soon as you do see results, you think the method is the Holy Grail. You want to find ways to keep doing it more and more. Thing is, it’s not so easy to convince someone to write on their website. Chances are even smaller to be invited to write.
So, instead, you expand by slowly optimizing the process of spamming people, outsourcing the content and paying webmasters to accept your posts. Congratulations! You’ve just turned something nice into a blackhat SEO technique.
In the end, not even real guest posts aren’t all that great. You know why? Because somebody else is actually benefiting from them.
| One of the frustrating things about guest posting that people forget all the time is that when you are putting content somewhere else, especially if that’s good content, especially if it’s stuff that’s really earning traffic and visibility, that means all the links are going to somebody else’s site. | |
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Rand Fishkin |
| The One True King of Moz / @randfish | |
Sure, some of that awareness and link equity is transferring onto you as well, and that’s why we do guest posting, but in the end, posting really good content on your own site is the best thing to do!
But the real problem with guest posts is that Google is taking measures against it. However, these measures affect everyone who has ever guest posted, because Google’s penalties are mostly based on algorithms. Some webmasters will get penalized for their legitimate guest posts as well and, then, others will miss great guest post opportunities out of penalty fear.
After guest posting became cancerous, with one side spamming the hell out of the internet and the other side asking for recurring payment, blackhatters quickly came up with a brilliant idea.
“If nobody wants to accept guest posts without payment anymore, why not have your own websites on which you can send your own guest posts to?”
How did that go? Awfully wrong, of course.
Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: http://t.co/rc9O82fjfn
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 19, 2014
It didn’t take long for Google to find them. How, you ask? Well, it was actually quite simple. The services were public and anyone could buy them.
Matt probably put on a wig and pretended to be www.thebestdrillingmachineforsmallholes.com. He bought some links, tracked them down, penalized the entire network and, most importantly, fed everything to the algorithms.
BuildMyRank PBN shutting down after Google penalty.
These actions didn’t only affect the PBN owners. It affected everyone. The people that paid for the service got hit as well. Some of them were innocent, hiring agencies that used PBNs on their sites without their knowledge.
@n2tech when we take action on a spammy link network, it can include blogs hosting guest posts, sites benefiting from the links, etc.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 20, 2014
But the funny part is that Google was always one step ahead. They laughed it off as if they had complete control, when in fact, they didn’t.
@danthies ah, glad you noticed that. Good to see at http://t.co/IizsTpta that it’s on peoples’ radar that they’re on our radar.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 15, 2012
Soon after the PBN penalties, everybody started saying that PBNs are dead. The BlackHat Forums went crazy and many ‘make money online’ bloggers also agreed that PBNs don’t work anymore.
The difference is that those PBNs were actually only blog networks. They were never private, they were public. PBNs aren’t dead and they will never be. It’s very hard to catch a network of sites with completely different names, locations and webhosts, that doesn’t sell its services. But they are still vulnerable.
Most people that build Private Blog Networks will use expired domains, because they have higher authority. Google could be raising a red flag on those domains and monitor them more closely. Many people also used the disavow tool to feed all the PBN links they couldn’t remove. This helped Google learn even more patterns.
If a PBN does start from scratch, with fresh domains, then it’s even harder to detect, considering you covered it well. However, based on multiple patterns collected with the disavow tool throughout the years they can still be identified. One mistake, and you’re doomed.
Many people that have hired PBN based SEO agencies have expanded their business and made investments based on the revenue from the new traffic they have received. As soon as Google penalizes them, their revenue will drop, leaving them forced to kick people out of their companies and even on the verge of bankruptcy.
Also, consider that a private blog network costs about $2.500 to fully set up. We’re talking about small PBNs, with around 5-10 domains. You also have to spend a ton of time finding the domains and different webhosts, building the websites and good article writers. After that, you also have to manage the websites. If you fully outsource the creation, the costs can go up pretty high. All with the risk of getting penalized at some point.
The sad part is that this will, again, also affect innocent people. If you find a niche that seems to be working for you, what do you do? You expand. The same way Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram, the same way you will buy other websites or create new ones. It doesn’t mean it’s a blog network, but if you’re unaware of the problems and start linking between your sites, Google might see it as one and penalize it. If they fit a pattern, they will get penalized.
If you do have multiple sites, be careful on how you interlink between them, as it might trigger a penalty to your entire network of websites.
We’ve recently published a whole article dedicated to doorway pages just a while ago. I stated my frustrations with Google misleading people into thinking separate pages for multiple locations are a bad thing.
Whenever someone has a business that operates in different cities, SEOs jump to warn them about the risks of building doorway pages. The problem is that there are so many definitions for doorway pages, that people don’t know where to draw the line anymore.
Long story short, around 2004 people noticed that creating a page for each keyword variation can help you gain more exposure in search. So they found a method to scale it by duplicating pages and changing only the important keywords.
This way, Doorway Pages were created, or how Google puts it, “sites or pages that are created to rank highly for specific queries.” This is really funny, considering that most, if not all, of the pages on the web are created for that purpose.
There’s a growing search for a doorway pages alternative, but the truth is there is no alternative. There’s probably no such a thing as a doorway page either. If you have to create separate pages for separate keywords, that should be perfectly fine. But some people abuse this, creating irrelevant pages altogether and harming the community as well.
Webmasters are now confused and they sometimes get stuck, fearing not to get penalized. However, there are many examples of doorway pages ranking just fine.
Buying and selling links will always exist. In order to keep the top payers from the top positions in the organic searches, Google had to differentiate between the two, so they introduced the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
This attribute specifies to the Google bot that no equity should be passed from one site to another. In other terms, the link has no SEO benefit. It only sends the user through, if clicked.
But did people respect that? Of course not! They hate nofollow links. Nobody wants them, because they don’t help with rankings. Well, it turns out that nofollow links are actually not that bad, and that they can help with rankings.
Obviously, Google started penalizing those who pay for dofollow links. What happened in the end? Big publishers turned all their links into nofollow, to make sure that they don’t get penalized, as the link market within these publishers was thriving. Now a lot more people have to suffer.
Also, dofollow/nofollow links complicate everything a lot, as you can get penalized for a dofollow link that you obtained naturally, if it fits the pattern of some mass links buyer. If you’re interested, please read more about the dofollow / nofollow issue here.
Yet another evergoing confusion… Ok, so obviously, hiding content with CSS or JS in order to manipulate search engines is a bad thing. But why would tabs and dropdowns be one? I mean, almost every menu out there is a dropdown. Should we not make them dropdowns anymore?
Well, back in the day, webmasters were hiding massive amounts of keyword rich content in the favor of ads or copy. This meant that if Google indexed that content the same way, it could show up in the meta description, misleading the users into thinking they would find that information on the page. Had it been a clear and obvious tab or dropdown, however, I’m sure that people would have had no problem finding it.
Google has to justify their action in some way because, obviously, people are confused. We all know the reason for this was abuse, but why can’t I put content in a tab to make my site look better, just because some guy uses white font on white background to stuff in keywords and keep his site pretty?
Although John Mueller spreads fear that tabs and dropdowns will affect you, Matt Cutts (former Head of Spam @ Google) has a way better explanation for this:
Obviously, if you don’t really hide your content, there’s nothing to fear. Just make your dropdown arrows and tab switches visible and not a 1×1 pixels wide dot. You can also hear him say:
If you use a common framework to do your dropdowns, that a lot of other websites use, then there’s less likelihood that we might accidentally classify it as hidden text.
This means that Google does indeed make mistakes and because of blackhat practitioners, well-intended SEOs will suffer as well.
But now, apparently, it’s ok to use hidden content again, as of 2016 and the mobile first index.
no, in the mobile-first world content hidden for ux should have full weight
— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) November 5, 2016
However, let me tell you one thing. It was always OK to use content hidden in tabs or dropdowns, just as Matt Cutts mentioned in the video above. However, if it was really hard or impossible for the user to view it, it would not get indexed and could potentially get your site penalized.
For many years, people have thought that content in tabs and dropdowns was a bad thing, so they didn’t use it. Except for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has been using it for quite a while, dominating the top positions on almost every keyword.
I’ll be blunt. I hate spam. I work with a lot of websites, and often, I see something like this:
Website being spammed with comments
This resulted in the server trying to send 12000 notifications through e-mail, which was POP3 synced with a Gmail account. Google eventually banned the website’s IP address for spam, when in fact, it was not this website that was doing the spam. Yey BlackHat!
In the end, nobody wins from this, as none of those comments are approved, so they don’t show up on the page.
Spamming doesn’t work anymore, but a lot of people still do it. I tested tools like GSA and ScrapeBox. They don’t work for building high quality links. Most quality sites don’t auto-approve comments. It will be just a waste of your money and time, as these software have a pretty steep learning curve.
ScrapeBox, however, can be pretty useful for identifying quality sites, as its main purpose is to scrape Google for links. You can use it to create a database of potential websites you can pitch your content to.
And don’t get me wrong. Blog commenting isn’t BlackHat and is actually a pretty useful technique. However, the point should be to really try and establish a relationship through your comments with either the blogger, the readers or the other commenters.
These days, people think that blog commenting is a bad thing, when actually, it isn’t. To be more specific, it never was!
Commenting is the life force of blogging.
It’s the way people used to establish connections and it still is. Spam and irrelevant stuff written just to get a backlink, be it automated or manually built, is never a good thing.
So far, we’ve talked about how spam hurts the internet, its users and ethical webmasters, but I want to end this by sharing something for the BlackHat SEOs out there. It’s an old story, told by a Google Web Spammer.
He used to do blackhat SEO which would constantly blast other sites with spam to rank his own sites or his clients. He spammed the internet so much that he ended up making over $100k per month. This is an insane amount of money, which permitted him to buy expensive houses and cars, hire a cook and spend time with his son whenever he wanted.
However, it was when Google kicked in with the penalties that his troubles began. At first, he thought that he would just rinse and repeat, as usual, but in a couple of months it was clear that it wasn’t going to work this time. He wasted a lot of money trying new methods, in vain. Most of his spammer friends were in the same situations, many of them turning to drugs to get relief from the stress.
This guy knew the risks, despite the fact that he believed himself to be invincible for a while. However, most businesses don’t know the risks at all. Many SEO freelancers and agencies lie to people by promising them high rankings in record time. Traffic and profits go up and the companies start investing, then BOOM! Suddenly it’s all over.
You can read more about the Confessions of a Google Spammer here. The story has a good ending.
I understand why people do BlackHat SEO. I understand that it’s about money. I understand their frustration about not putting the work to become the world’s largest search engine and have everyone obey by their rules and then complaining about it (ironic).
But what ignites my hatred towards it is the fact that it’s also usually related to horrible services, spam, scams, viruses & malware and even worse. No scammer will ever use whitehat SEO, because they know there’s no need for long time investment. They care so much about Google’s evil monopolized reign, but they don’t give a damn about the kids they scam with fake Candy Crush cheats offers.
Acquaintance: “Hey, what do you do for a living?”
BlackHat SEO: “I scam kids online.”
Elon Musk has success with Tesla, although the electric car is a concept dating back 100 years. Why? Most likely because he made his electric car better than a petrol one. Nobody achieved that before. On the same line, blackhat techniques were more efficient than whitehat ones for a very long time. However, things are starting to change for the better, thanks to Google and the whitehat SEO community’s efforts.
Next time you see some blackhat stuff going on, please don’t just overlook it because you’re not the one doing it. Openly disagree with it, complain about it and report it to Google. It’s going to make the internet a better place for everyone.
The post 7 Examples of How BlackHat SEOs Hurt You, The Internet & Everyone Else appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
In Lost and Founder, Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love.
Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. His hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies,
The post Lost and Founder – Book Interview appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Do you recycle content marketing as part of your on-going content marketing strategy and processes? Here are 100+ ways to reuse, repurpose and repromote your existing content marketing to improve content lifetime value and effectiveness. Includes examples.
The post Recycle Content Marketing: 100+ Ways To Reuse, Repurpose & Repromote appeared first on Heidi Cohen.
Allow me to make some assumptions for as to why you’re reading this: You’re an agency marketer or in-house stakeholder in charge of planning and executing off-site optimisation You have experienced, or know, that content only link building is typically high investment, high return. But it holds at least some risk, even if you avoid […]
The post Free, easy access link building appeared first on Builtvisible.
The latest cognitiveSEO Talks episode – On search and Traffic – brings to your attention Dan Petrovic, a digital marketing from Australia who runs a company called Dejan. Except being a great guy with an experience of over 16 years in digital marketing, Dan is quite involved in understanding how people consume news content online.
The director of Dejan shared with us loads of tips on how to write content like a pro, how to make the most out of Search Console plus tons of great insights on Google and its ranking factors. We don’t want to spoil the pleasure of discovering great ideas yourself, so hit play and enjoy the talk!
Dan Petrovic likes to understand the cumulative traffic for every quick query that leads to that particular URL and understand the movement impact on traffic. He also tackles a topic highly debated by the SEO Pros: click-through rate and rankings – do they go hand in hand or not? He brings a lot of added value to this long-debated issue, backing it up with studies and researches.
| In the last two-three years I have been quite actively involved in understanding how people consume a news content online, and during this time, I’ve developed a whole range of new ideas and thoughts on how content should be structured and done in a context of user experience, usefulness SEO strategy data, and all sorts of wonderful things to do with digital marketing. | |
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Dan petrovic |
| Search Marketer @dejanseo / dejanseo.com.au | |
Dan’s knowledge and expertise will surely captivate you. We could keep on talking about how great he is personally and professionally but we believe that the shortest distance between two people is a story. Or an inspiring talk in our case. So grab a pen and a notebook and let yourself inspired by this interview.
Razvan: Hello everyone! Welcome to cognitive SEO Talks. Today we have a special guest from Australia, Dan Petrovic. He will say more about him and he will introduce us to the world of content, content marketing, and SEO as he sees it in 2018. Dan, welcome, the microphone is all yours!
Dan: Thank you very much! It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. It’s a pleasure to be with you again.
So, I’m Dan from Australia, and run a company called Dejan marketing – that’s all you need to know about me. If you need to find out more, you can google it. In the last two-three years I have been quite actively involved in understanding how people consume a news content online, and during this time, I’ve developed a whole range of new ideas and thoughts on how content should be structured and done in a context of user experience, usefulness SEO strategy data, and all sorts of wonderful things to do with digital marketing. So I’m sure we’ll cover a whole lot of interesting topics today.
Razvan: Sure we will.
Dan: Absolutely nothing. But there’s a catch, obviously.
Dan: What is absolutely not unique about how I do content is that the method that I apply has been used for many many years. It’s called “inverted pyramid” and it’s been used in the world of journalism for quite a long time. We can talk about it in detail, but essentially the TLDR version is – and that’s an important term to remember “too long didn’t read”; that’s the generation we live in – is: Start with the answer, with your big news, deliver on the promise of your title. See, if you say that you’re gonna say something in the title then your first sentence should deliver on that promise to explain the most salient points in your opening sentence. Don’t delay, don’t give your goodies halfway down the article or the bottom of the article.
So the second thing is once you’ve highlighted the main point of what you’re trying to say, your main idea, then you go into the details to support the main notion, the main idea, the main discovery, or the piece of news. Everything else that goes after that could be described as fluff. So, main point, secondary items, tertiary information. In essence, that’s how content should be written for the web, otherwise, people will simply not read it. It’s interesting because the research that I did was two decades after Jakob Nielsen did his research and we’ve come to the same conclusion. After surveying a thousand online readers, I’ve come up with a percent that he did 20 years ago – it’s 16%. 16 % of readers actually read everything word-for-word, the rest will just skip.
Razvan: That’s a big percent. I think it’s a big percent. If you’re writing an article that has about 5,000 words and 16% of the readers are reading it completely, then it’s a big, big achievement.
Dan: How sad is that? How sad it is that you have to say that you’re happy with 16 percent of your audience actually reading the article that you put your …
Razvan: Yeah, that’s the reality of the web and the content and the scanning, and not reading everything.
Dan: The scanning is where it’s at, you know? People will scroll all the way to the bottom of the article, skip the entire body of the article, and go to the comments, because often in the comments you can quickly get a summary of what the article is about, and people do that. Now, this doesn’t apply to written word; this applies to basically every piece of content that doesn’t get to the point, that doesn’t deliver on its promise, including video. And that’s why we’ve had that little chat before this live recording where I said “Let’s not do a long intro because people will skip it anyway. Let’s just get into the subject matter and talk concrete things”. So what’s unique other than following the inverted pyramid and being helpful in terms of the format that people expect…
There are some other ancient tricks – but really ancient – and one of them is put one idea or one thought into a paragraph; don’t bundle two ideas into the same paragraph. And this goes back to what you mentioned about scanning. So imagine the user is reading an article, they hit a paragraph of text in within that article, now this paragraph is trying to sell itself to the reader, “please read me”, and if the reader decides that this paragraph is starting with something that they’re not interested in they will automatically skip to the next paragraph assuming but the next main idea is in the second paragraph, or the third, or the fourth, and so forth. So if you’re writing about two distinct ideas or two distinct subjects, and you bundle them within the single paragraph, one will be lost because they’ll jump to the third idea in the second paragraph. And that makes sense.
So when writing for the web, follow the inverted pyramid, split your ideas into indistinct paragraphs, use bullet points, bolding, headings, all the good principles of scanability and usability, and, in addition to that, make sure that the article actually delivers on its promise. So that’s quite important. Now the final thought, I guess, on how am I different? I really feel like the world doesn’t need any more content – there’s too much of it already.
So there’s news – news is always useful, evergreen content is useful, you know, how to solve problems, this and that, but I think in our landscape in digital marketing too many people are pumping out content just for the sake of Google rankings or traffic, so they have a weekly schedule, you know, “it’s Tuesday, so we must publish an article because, you know, we publish articles on Tuesday”. My role when I’m writing or when I’m doing work for our clients it’s when there’s something to write about, not because it’s Tuesday and it’s your schedule. If we all keep in mind that there’s too much content out there and if there’s no other good reason to push content out, then there should not be content pushed out. It’s as simple as that. So we could talk about this maybe a little bit later but essentially before I decide to create a piece of content for my clients, that piece of content has to be defended by reason and purpose, not only newsworthiness but by the data.
Razvan: How do you find the reason? Because, normally, if you have a client you can’t say to him “We’re not going to publish anything because I don’t think it’s anything worth publishing”. It’s your purpose and scope to find that, and improve their rankings, and bring more traffic, and do all this stuff.
Dan: Topics are really hard, and that’s, you know, that’s the little bit of sprinkling of the magic that comes into what just happens as creativity. But I don’t leave things to creativity or chance. A good idea for an article could strike me in a shower, while I’m sleeping or driving my car, or a just completely random situation.
Razvan: Yeah, I totally agree, but it’s not scalable.
Dan: Yeah, they should invent like waterproof notepads for your shower. There’s a whole subreddit called “shower thoughts”, because you that’s your meditative space. It’s very rarely that I sit in my office and I say “Alright, I’m gonna come up with a great article idea for my client!” and within these half an hour – one hour I come up with great ideas – I never do it. This just doesn’t happen like that. Creative thought takes time and it’s a little bit mysterious to me. So I leave that aside, the ideas come to me when they come, and I just write them down. But I think the big exercise and the responsibility of a digital marketer is to advise not only on opportunities but also be able to sort and prioritize different activities, and same goes with content. Let’s take an e-commerce site: you know, these guys are retailing ten thousand different products in hundred different categories, from electronics to skincare, and you’re trying to decide as a content marketing agency or an SEO “What do we write about next?”. So your decision could be influenced by maybe something trending as a piece of news; you spot something interesting being hot on Reddit or in Google Trends – although Google Trends is pretty slow at capturing hot stuff -, so you can be inspired by that, but my process is a much simpler than that. When I try to determine what to write about I look at the Search Console data, and look at a wide range of keywords, not like ten arbitrary keywords, maybe a hundred, I look at the whole twenty thousand keywords, if such exists, and … Do you use API with Search Console yourself?
Razvan: Mmm, via API?
Dan: Yeah.
Razvan: No.
Dan: Right. I have a tool that does API calls to Search Console, but I primarily (when I’m just doing manual work) I just do CSV exports. The problem with Search Console is that the CSV export is limited to a thousand lines, and to get really all the keywords out of the Search Console you have to do a little bit of a hack. So what I do is… What you will notice is that if you minus (-) your brand, for example, out of the Search Console, you’ll still get a thousand keywords export. If you minus letter A, you’ll still get a thousand keywords export.
Razvan: And you mix everything in the end.
Dan: You could do for each letter of the alphabet you could minus (-) A, minus B, minus C, and in the end, just do a merge command in DOS and just merge it into a single CSV file, deduplicate the whole file, and voila!, you’ve got the full range of different queries for that particular domain.
Now little hack aside, you look at those keywords and it’s a very long spreadsheet; it doesn’t mean anything. You’re just looking at keywords, rankings, CTR, and so forth. So, for me, the next step is understanding what has potential and I do that in two ways: first is I try to understand if something has potential to get more clicks if it moves up in rank, and I like to calculate how many more clicks will I be getting if something moves up. Certain keyword will move one position up and it will get a hundred extra clicks, the other keyword will get five hundred extra clicks if it moves one position up – they’re all different, but then goes the difficulty, as well, for that particular keyword, and also a grouping of those keywords and mapping them to different URLs. So one distinct URL could be triggered by 12 different keywords or queries in Google. So what I do is I like to understand the cumulative traffic for every quick query that leads to that particular URL and understand the movement impact on traffic, and that’s really easy to calculate. If you understand your CTR distribution curve, 30% for number one position, 20% for two, and so forth, and not by some sort of arbitrary industry standards, judging by the data of your own website – excluding the branded terms, because your branded terms will have 80% click-through rate and such, that’s not to be factored in – so you just look at, statistically, if something is on position 3, what’s the click-through rate. So you cannot calculate what your clicks will be on position 2. So that’s a really really simple type of work, understanding how pages will benefit from movement in the rankings. Now you suddenly understand which keywords to focus on and which pages to focus on. And most people make a mistake of writing more blog content, completely disregarding their commercial landing pages, the quality of content on their product pages or services pages, and I think us, as an industry, need to focus more on that and less on pumping out more blog stuff, because that’s where the links go towards high-quality stuff. And one other exciting thing is – in terms of not just content, but also general optimization opportunity – is understanding with something has a very bad CTR. Let’s say, you’re on number 1 position but your CTR is like 8%. You would want to investigate that. Let’s say that that query has a hundred thousand impressions, and you’re only getting 80,000 clicks on it, or like 8,000 clicks on it, it’s like really really low. You would want to investigate that straight away because that’s something you’re losing traffic on. So content, in this case, is not the content of the page itself, it’s the content of your title and the content of your meta description, which I think need rigorous and ongoing testing process until the website is completely satisfied that they’ve found the optimal title and description for that perfect snippet, and then experimentation with schema and other mechanisms. One that’s recently popped up and is not, I think, not utilized as much as it could be, is the featured snippets, the zeroth result.
Dan: Absolutely. The solution is simple: you keep your core keywords – because we’ve done the keyword research, we looked at that Search Console data, we know what keywords need to be there, so we playing with all the other factors. There are elements of a title tag that will increase the click-through rate without changing impact of the ranking of the main or of the primary keyword. One example is addition of a price in the title. Let’s take, for example, a service like cruises, “cruises to New Zealand”, right? So that’s a title and CTR is 10%. Suddenly, we put “cruises to New Zealand from $1600” – suddenly we’ve seen 12% click-through-rate because we added the price. It could be the other way around – we could have the price in there and the CTR drops because people are “ah, too expensive, I’m not gonna click on it”. It doesn’t matter.
Razvan: It’s tricky to test because when you change it from “cruises to New Zealand” and you also have the price, for example, your rankings might also change, and you cannot measure the CTR correctly.
Dan: You only need to measure the CTR on the average ranking position. The absolute position doesn’t exist, we know that. If somebody searches from their mobile phone or tablet, or logged in or log out, if somebody searches from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, completely different result.
Razvan: Yeah, correct, but you can lose positions and lose from an average of 1,5-2,5 for example to an average of 2,5 or 2, and then you cannot compare the CTR with what you had before, because it doesn’t make sense. You’re on position 2 on average, so your CTR normally it’s lower.
Dan: But you still can. Let’s say your keyword is ranking on position 5. It has 10% click-through-rate, you change the title tag, the CTR increases but the rank drops, the rank drops to position 6. You’d expect 8% click-through-rate on your position 6, but you’re getting 10% click-through-rate – that’s 2% above the expectation. So you can always notice deviation from the norm. So regardless of what position the keyword is on or the page is on for that particular query, you can always understand how the adjustment and the title have impacted its performance on that particular position; so even if it drops, you can always understand if the CTR has been increased. Of course, that doesn’t help with the fact that you’ve dropped the position, but from what I’ve been doing, I have rarely seen a drop in the ranking on the basis of adjustment of the title.
Razvan: Obviously, when you change it, you change it with the intent of increasing the CTR and increasing the ranking. Both might happen or both not.
Dan: That’s with titles. So, with meta descriptions, you can literally do whatever you want and it has absolutely no impact. But the title is what people pay attention to first, that’s a given. And in some instances… So price is #1, rich snippets is another one, presence of a well-known brand – sometimes websites think “Well, my brand is in the URL, why do I need to insert my brand as a variable in all my titles?”. But for big brands, you know, like Expedia or Nike, if you put the brand in the title, that actually adds to the confidence and trust of the user for that particular search snippet. So it can be beneficial. For a lesser-known brand, removing of your own brand could increase the click-through-rate.
Dan: Yeah, that’s what’s going on at the moment. So we’ve got a client who is running a very very elaborate and quite an expensive AdWords campaign with a lot of keyword volume, so they’re in an educational space, they’re an .edu domain and we’re currently easing with their PPC department, obtaining all the data and understanding not just instances of highly performing CTRs, but we’re trying to understand the rules: what in general increases the CTR? So the next step after that will be if we have a hypothesis we quickly tested with Adwords, once it proves successful we again test it in organic. The problem with this is that behavior between organic and AdWords is slightly different, it’s not dramatically different, but it is different. So it’s good for quick hypothesis testing and rolling things out into organic, but the testing must continue in the organic results as well. I don’t have a fancy framework for testing at the moment, it’s just a Google spreadsheet and monitoring the impact of different experiments on the CTR. So combining the rank increase and combining the CTR optimization getting more traffic to the pages that need that increase in the order of priority, obviously. So where does content come into this? Well, the pages that you’ve highlighted as the ones with the highest potential to grow and bring you clicks – of course there’s a third layer to the whole research, and that is applying the average conversion rate and the average or the goal value for that particular page, or in general, so you can attach monetary reward and understand how much more revenue the business will generate in different scenarios, whether the scenario will be to optimize the CTR, to be to the click-through-rate where we should be; as per the average, or the scenario where we increase the rank or both. I think that’s a nice piece of information to show to your management.
Dan: There is no belief that this is a well-known fact and I think Google’s been quite sneaking the way that they talk about CTR. There is absolutely no shadow of a doubt that CTR is a ranking signal. CTR is not only a ranking signal, CTR is essential to Google’s self-analytics, I suppose. It’s one of the core metrics that Google or other search engines use to improve the quality of their search results and this is not limited to Google, all the other search engines use that as well. Bing and Google, they did joint research, Microsoft and Google did joint research, and Yahoo as well, to understand how position bias impacts the click-through-rates and they did research about how bolding of the keywords that match the query on the snippet impacts the user selection and impacts the CTR. So as a result of one of those papers and patents at a later date, Google removed the bolding of the search terms matchings users’ search query from the title in the snippet.
And you remember Google from maybe 5-6-7 years ago – the keyword was bolded in the title. Two years after that paper came out showing bias in users’ selection based on the bolding in the title, they actually ended up removing it. So I think that the article I published was on Moz and it was called “User behavior data as a ranking signal” and as for those who are curious about that, you can google it and get to that article, it’s loaded with proof that Google not only uses that but really relies on CTR as one of their essential quality signals.
Now one thing to understand is that Google also owns Chrome and that they get a variety of data from Chrome as well, and if he is not convinced, you can simply type in “Chrome:// histograms” in your address bar and you will open a file that’s been recording everything you’ve ever done in Chrome, including opening tabs, closing tabs, bookmarking, copying URL, starting to type URL, completing the URL, hitting enter, swiping text, tapping, scrolling, everything! So it’s a large text file that gets compressed and, if you’ve ticked the box, gets sent to Google for quality purposes. So user behavior data is essential to Google’s self-improvement. Where people get it wrong is where they think that they can go to some website and inflate the click-through-rate for that particular page and suddenly expect higher rankings for that website. This is not a real-time signal; Google simply uses it to improve the systems, not to in real-time manipulate the authority of a website much like a link graph would or something like that.
Razvan: You know, I’ve noticed in the past, on some blackhat boards, some negative SEO in terms of clicking the URLs on a specific page. Let me give you an example: so they roll some ads, mini ads where people were paid a few cents for clicking on result pages for an already given keyword and it sounded like this “search for this keyword and then go and click on any of the results there, except a specific page there”, which was targeted to be delisted from the top 10 and “when you click on the on the results that you’ve chosen, go and scroll and navigate inside the page. So, practically, they were doing negative SEO to a particular page and that page didn’t see anything coming, so they didn’t see any click, and doing this consistently they practically were able to manipulate the rankings and drop the page or the set of pages from the top 10.
Dan: I’m skeptical simply because black hats are not really known as scientific types. Google document their testing process and they want the results to be true, so they are true in their findings.
Razvan: Yeah, they were paying for the stuff to be … and I can tell you that I saw on blackhead boards this kind of announcements on a variety of keywords both for negative SEO and also for … there were ads like “Go to this particular page” and practically they were improving the rankings for a particular page by doing the same thing “Go to this page, search for this, go to this page, click inside the page, start navigating and that’s it, your job is done, you can get your two cents-five cents, whatever they were paying for this in order to increase the CTR but also show to Google that there was activity on that particular browsing session. And this was done for months, continuously depending on the budgets of the people that were trying to manipulate.
Dan: So here’s the thing. For the last two years, I haven’t been as prolific with my writing and sharing, and this and that. I’ve been busy. But I haven’t stopped experimenting and one of my experiments was with Mechanical Turk and I’m talking large numbers of Mechanical Turk users in an attempt to use user selection to attempt to manipulate the results. I’ve run the tests persistently, continuously on a large number of users, for different pages and different queries, and I haven’t seen any impact. Now I have been using Mechanical Turk, so that’s perhaps the weakness of this experiment: it was cheap to run but there may have been known IP addresses and, you know, before what it’s worth there was a large group of users participating in the experiment and I haven’t seen anything interesting other than the data showing up in the Search Console, so the only thing I’ve actually manipulated was the key queries in the Search Console and the click-through-rate for that particular test query. So it’s worked, Google’s bought it, and then it’s peaked, and I see it in there, but has done absolutely nothing, not only in terms of the rankings but also hasn’t done anything in terms of Google Suggest or the related queries at the bottom of search results, which was part of my test as well. I was trying to manipulate the Google Suggest for some circle queries and it hasn’t worked, unfortunately.
Razvan: Many people claim success on manipulating the Google Suggest in the past but I don’t recall now the exact suggest that they’ve manipulated, but it was newsworthy. Sites wrote about the manipulation. I think there was something also in Romania done by someone and it was acknowledged that results shouldn’t be there, and the suggest didn’t make sense to be there. But it was a couple of years ago so maybe now Google has their algorithms better, for sure.
Dan: Well yeah, I’m sure they’re improving because they’ve got a whole team in charge of the suggests, but I know that suggests can be manipulated but it takes really large volumes of people to trigger it.
Razvan: It depends on what you’re trying to manipulate, probably, because if there are queries which have low volume then Google should relate to that lower volume… If you’re trying to manipulate for a keyword like “CNN” if you’re trying to manipulate for a keyword which has a couple of hundreds of searches per month maybe you have more chances there. But let’s talk about something that works for you now.
Dan: Yeah. I’m generally internally criticized within the company, criticized for oversharing and we have one particular method that’s working rather well but my guys have asked me to embargo the method so we can milk the benefits for a year or two. I will not keep it a complete secret.
I think in essence it’s the problem that we’re consistently finding with all our corporate clients. So this is typically large websites that have very successful blogs, hide the main authority, and what’s happening is that these websites have … all their link equity is coming from blogs and news and whatnot to their blog content which is great, high quality pages, but if you look at their money pages – zero links, because they’re just boring. There’s absolutely nothing of value on the pages. So if you’re selling cars, you know, if you’re a Toyota website and that’s your latest model, so you’ve got your specifications and this and that but other than that there’s nothing on it. I think the worst case I’ve seen was a website I was selling car seat covers – how boring is that, you know? It’s a seat cover, you wrap it around your seat and that’s that. So currently we’re busy with working with our clients’ money pages in improving the content and linkability of those pages.
Something – this is not a new thing for us, it’s working really well, but it’s not a new thing, we’ve had attempts in the past – one of the methods was to run a competition page, not on the separate competition page but on the page of the product that you’re giving away. So, let’s say you’re selling glasses and this is the model of the glasses and you’re giving away ten pairs in the next month to the lucky winners – don’t create a separate competition page, create a competition page on the glasses page itself, of the product you’re giving away. It could be on a separate tab or an accordion or whatever mechanism, just structure it so it’s not detracting from the purchase, but if people land on that competition page, hash competition (#competition) at the end of the URL jumps straight to the competition rules. So it’s time to announce the winners – what do you do? Do you send them to the winners’ page? No, you don’t. You show the winners on the page again, where you’re selling the glasses, the page where the pair of glasses can be purchased from.
So you see how we’re reusing the main product page, not only in terms of improving the content – that’s what I’m doing now, but the old method was to create publicity interest for the landing page itself. So that’s one nice method that works and people are just ignoring it. So, basically, you know, we’ll try to generate links, but links to link commercial landing pages are really hard. So that’s the problem we’re solving at the moment – we’re working towards increasing the quality of the content to such a point by using data, statistics, new research, really useful stuff, tools, tables, downloadables, really reaching the pinnacle of usefulness for the product page or the service page to such a level that you can actually do outreach for that page and a blogger might actually link to it because there’s something of such high value on that page that they find it very useful.
The problem that I’ve run into when doing this when working on the highest possible quality landing pages, is that they tend to be quite big and there’s a lot of stuff going on and that tends to detract from the purchasing part. So we’ve got a problem now and we’re trying to create a linkable asset that’s our landing page, which would otherwise be a blog post, a completely irrelevant page to which we don’t need links, but on the other hand we want our conversion rate to be very high and if you have too many distracting elements your conversion rate will drop. Every next element the add is one more point against your conversion. So, like I mentioned earlier, utilization of tabs and accordions and other devices to structure the layout is helpful in this context, except Google’s desktop index is still being funny about tabs and accordions and such devices, anything contained within the tab or accordion will be indexed but not ranking. So you could literally – (and I did this experiment) I published a poster post on Moz, then I copied that post on my own website; Moz is high-authority mine is lower-authority but I did one thing: I expanded every hidden content on my version and Moz’s blog post had little clickable elements to expand the bits and pieces; guess who ranked first for the expandable pieces? Me, for essentially duplicate content. So, essentially, what’s happening right now is landing pages for very important products that contain information behind a tab or an accordion or otherwise a hiding element, that content will not rank at all. In fact, scrapers, dirty scrapers with low domain authority will outrank it if they display that content on default. So, that’s something to keep in mind.
Mobile? Not a problem. Gary Illyes, John Mueller have said that they don’t have a problem with hiding elements of content on mobile devices, that’s good user experience, and Google uses accordions themselves in the search results as related questions, and I cannot fathom the hypocrisy of it, because they’re punishing webmasters for utilizing such elements by not ranking content, yet they’re employing that piece of user experience themselves. So mobile-first fine desktop – not so fine. So you’ve got that issue of conversion optimization versus content richness, and that’s something that we’re currently working on.
Dan: Writing useless content on the blog – more blog posts! Let’s build some links for that stuff, yeah. I think another thing is chasing links ignoring the technical apt SEO basics, like what we’ve discussed earlier, optimizing your click-through-rate, improving your titles and descriptions, that’s one of the most basic SEO things people completely ignore.
Dan: Three years ago – not so different, but 5-6 years ago, yeah, quite different.
Dan: I think 50% completely changed and I think there’s no longer a choice for an SEO has to become a digital marketer. Internally within our team we’ve completely blended, for example, we’ve completely blended the social ads in SEO process, to the point where my accounts ladies are asking us “Is this invoice towards the paid or organic?” and we say “What’s the difference?”. So when we form a digital strategy, our ads could be serving to increase awareness of a piece of content that could lead to links. Internally, we call it “micro-targeting”. I know it’s a little bit of a bad timing for this topic but effectively we have been using Facebook to micro-target specific users, to influence their opinion and try to make them write about our clients. Targeting people at certain newspapers or, you know, in government or other areas, bloggers …
Dan: I have tried – too expensive. It has unordinary targeting, I love what LinkedIn’s done with targeting, arguably works better than Facebook for certain industries – obviously not for your moms and dads and common, but for professional world and services and such – very good targeting. I found myself surprised with Twitter. Twitter’s served a great purpose for my SEO projects. Imagine getting links to your clients’ content without doing manual link outreach – how nice is that? I’m not saying I can get that every time and in large volumes, but if you structure an advertising campaign in the right way to send bloggers and journalists to the content, if the content is good enough, if the topic is good enough, it will be picked up. So, effectively, you’re buying impressions, you’re buying clicks, you’re paying for that part, and it’s up to the journalist or blogger to link to that piece of content if they find it link-worthy enough. So that’s where the content quality comes into place, and if your content piece is 5000 words of boring stuff and you don’t get to the point, and it’s all hard to read, it’s a wall of text and you’ve blended everything, they’re just going to leave. So if you’ve got something newsworthy, useful, really valuable, and really easy to digest, and you’ve sent to the blogger or journalist to that page at the right time, you know, you didn’t catch them too late or too early in a day and they’re just about writing about something like that and they’re like “Oh, that’s really useful!” – that’s really hard, but it’s even harder if you’re doing manual begging, link begging, “would you please…?”, “would you mind?” – that’s really nasty work, nobody likes to do that. So I guess I’m trying to pioneer a technique and trying to perfect the technique of micro-targeting with influences through advertising in an attempt to get high-quality content, the exposure it needs to be picked up on an organic level. So I’m paying money, getting links, but not breaching Google’s guidelines.
Dan: Avoid smoke and mirrors, avoid vague language. If you don’t understand what an SEO is saying to you, if they can’t explain it to you like a five-year-old – I just remember the AJ Kohn, “Blind five-year-old”, that’s the whole point – if you can’t understand what your SEO is saying to you, don’t sign up. If an SEO agency is explaining your strategy to you or their approach, it has to make perfect sense. The communication from them during that initial proposal process has to be crystal clear; it has to make business sense, it has to have passed that logic, basic logic, reasonable main test, and if it’s all too vague and if they’re using just jargon, if their excuses for low performance of the campaign is like “our algorithms, and this and that”, and they’re trying to put too many things in there, stay away. A good SEO agency will explain everything like black and white, and they’ll explain what’s possible and what’s not, where’s the area of opportunity and where there’s not. Recently, to most of my new clients, I have explained that everything we do will be a test. We’ll try this: we’ll put 5,000 dollars into this idea and we’ll let you know if it works or it doesn’t. That’s the best an SEO can do. We do not control Google, we do not know what’s going to happen, we are the weatherman. We can see what’s going on in the landscape there, we can see it might rain, but we cannot make it rain. And that’s the big difference. An SEO that promises the rain is a crook.
Razvan: Yeah, unfortunately, there are a lot of SEOs that did this in the past and probably still do it and yes you’ve got a bad name during this process of evolution.
Dan: We understand that Google is, at this point, beyond what I would describe as petty human tweaks. There might be new engineering ideas and new concepts introduced to the Google’s algorithms, but way beyond that point where human input is the most relevant thing. We already know that Google’s let the machine make up its own mind about whether a website is of a high-quality or of a low-quality, whether a content piece is valuable or not, whether it’s authoritative or not. In the age of unsupervised machine learning, we have absolutely no control, and what we’re going to be seeing is machines teaching machines and self-improving and self-improving and user behavior data will be valuable, traffic will be valuable, your external marketing tactics will be valuable, branding will be super important, understanding when somebody is notable and significant will be important. So I think an SEO needs to look at all the other channels employing a sound marketing strategy in order to persuade Google’s AI essentially that this domain or brand is of significance and authority. There will be less and less room for these manipulative signals that we’re so used to, including links. Links are still the backbone of Google and how Google works, but they’ve given reins to machine learning and that’s game over for little tricks and tweaks and this and that. I think we’re gonna see more and more reliance on Google’s engineering end to machine learning, and we’re going to see a lot more intelligence out of Google.
In fact, there’s an article that I wrote maybe in 2015 that predicts the entire timeline of Google going from a basic search engine to becoming our assistant, to be able to write its own content, advise, represent us in court as a legal representation, and yeah, it’s got an interesting projection. I’ll try to dig up that link and share it with you so you can share with the rest of your viewers. I think it’ll be quite interesting to see if I’m still on the money with my prediction so far because we’re in 2018 now and would be interesting to see how accurate I was or was overly optimistic. We’re not at the Skynet level yet but we’re getting there.
What I would love to see is one proper competitor to Google, whether it’d be Amazon, or eBay, or a new search engine, or you know even Facebook, I’d love to see a proper competitor in terms of, you know, information retrieval and presentation to users. Maybe it comes out of China or Russia, I don’t know, but I would really love for it to exist soon; I’m waiting for that nice surprise. Let’s make a prediction: in the next five years, somebody will come to the world stage and completely surprise us with a disruptive search engine and artificial intelligence technology, perhaps based on quantum computing, cubits, not zeros and ones.
Razvan: Yeah, the problem is that Google is highly investing in quantum computing.
Dan: I hope it’s not Google, I hope it’s … and I love Google guys, they’re sending me gifts. I think there needs to be good competition, and that’s a good thing for Google and a good thing for users if there’s proper competition to Google, so they’re not driven just by their shareholders but by pure competition. Just like Russia and America need a new space race, we need the search engine race to start again.
Razvan: Thank you very much for answering all these questions to our audience.
Dan: You know what they say: “When you do a talk, tell them what you’re gonna tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them“, so let’s do that last part then. Remember when you are writing for the web start with the basics, get to the point, go into the further detail, and all the fluff at the end. Split your ideas into multiple paragraphs. Work your highest possible quality content towards your landing pages, commercial ending pages, based on the data, and the data is driven from the Search Console and all your opportunities and potential is there. Look at your CTRs, look at your authority optimization opportunities based on traffic growth and CTR optimization. Keep testing, keep experimenting. You are not just an SEO, you’re a digital marketer, employ every channel. That’s all I have to say.
Razvan: Okay, thank you very much, Dan!
Dan: It’s been an absolute pleasure! I look forward to joining you again some other time.
The post How Click-Through Rate Impacts Your Google Rankings with Dan Petrovic from Dejan SEO appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.
