Photos and illustrations can make your blog post much more appealing. Make sure to pick or create the right image for your blog post so you'll stand out!
The post Why the Right Images Are so Important For Your Blog appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google Translate is now 10 years old. When it first launched it supported only two languages and has now gone on to support over 100 languages. In addition, the user base grew from just hundreds, to hundreds of millions. In celebration of this achievement, the company took to the official Google blog to highlight 10 milestones Translate has reached since its launch 10 years ago. Here is a recap of each. 10 Google Translate Milestones in 10 Years Translate breaks down barriers. An example given is how a community in Canada is using Translate to communicate with a refugee. Over 500 […]
The post Google Celebrates 10 Milestones During 10 Years of Google Translate by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by MiriamEllis
[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]
Imagine getting three months in on a Local SEO contract before realizing that your client's storefront is really his cousin's garage. From which he runs two other “legit” businesses he never mentioned. Or that he neglected to mention the reviews he bought last year. Worse yet, he doesn't even know that buying reviews is a bad thing.
The story is equally bad if you're diligently working to build quality unique content around a Chicago client's business in Wicker Park but then realize their address (and customer base) is actually in neighboring Avondale.
What you don't know will hurt you. And your clients.
A hallmark of the professional Local SEO department or agency is its dedication to getting off on the right foot with a new client by getting their data beautifully documented for the whole team from the start. At various times throughout the life of the contract, your teammates and staff from complementary departments will be needing to access different aspects of a client's core NAP, known challenges, company history, and goals.
Having this information clearly recorded in shareable media is the key to both organization and collaboration, as well as being the best preventative measure against costly data-oriented mistakes. Clear and consistent data play vital roles in Local SEO. Information must not only be gathered, but carefully verified with the client.
This article will offer you a working Client Discovery Questionnaire, an Initial Discovery Phone Call Script, and a useful Location Data Spreadsheet that will be easy for any customer to fill out and for you to then use to get those listings up to date. You're about to take your client discovery process to awesome new heights!
Lack of a clearly delineated, step-by-step onboarding process increases the potential for human error. Your agency's Local SEO manager may be having allergies on Monday and simply forget to ask your new client if they have more than one website, if they've ever purchased reviews, or if they have direct access to their Google My Business listings. Or they could have that information and forget to share it when they jump to a new agency.
The outcomes of disorganized onboarding can range from minor hassles to disastrous mistakes.
Minor hassles would include having to make a number of follow-up phone calls to fill in holes in a spreadsheet that could have been taken care of in a single outreach. It's inconvenient for all teammates when they have to scramble for missing data that should have been available at the outset of the project.
Disastrous mistakes can stem from a failure to fully gauge the details and scope of a client's holdings. Suddenly, a medium-sized project can take on gigantic proportions when the agency learns that the client actually has 10 mini-sites with duplicate content on them, or 10 duplicate GMB listings, or a series of call tracking numbers around the web.
It's extremely disheartening to discover a mountain of work you didn't realize would need to be undertaken, and the agency can end up having to put in extra uncompensated time or return to the client to renegotiate the contract. It also leads to client dissatisfaction.
Setting correct client expectations is completely dependent on being able to properly gauge the scope of a project, so that you can provide an appropriate timeline, quote, and projected benchmarks. In Local, that comes down to documenting core business information, identifying past and present problems, and understanding which client goals are achievable. With the right tools and effective communication, your agency will be making a very successful start to what you want to be a very successful project.
There's a lot you want to learn about a new client up front, but asking (and answering) all those questions right away can be grueling. Not to mention information fatigue, which can make your client give shorter and shorter answers when they feel like they've spent enough time already. Meanwhile your brain reaches max capacity and you can't use all that valuable information because you can't remember it.
To prevent such a disaster, we recommend dividing your Local SEO discovery process into a questionnaire to nail down the basics, a follow-up phone call to help you feel out some trickier issues, and a CSV to gather the location data. And we've created templates to get you started...
Use our Local SEO Client Discovery Questionnaire to understand your client's history, current organization, and what other consultants they might also be working with. We've annotated each question in the Google Doc template to help you understand what you can learn and potential pitfalls to look out for.
If you want to make collecting and preserving your clients' answers extra easy, use Google Forms to turn that questionnaire into a form like this:
You can even personalize the graphic, questions, and workflow to suit your brand.
Once you've received your client's completed questionnaire and have had time to process the responses and do any necessary due diligence (like using our Check Listings tool to check how aggregators currently display their information), it's time to follow up on the phone. Use our annotated Local SEO Client Discovery Phone Script to get you started.
No form necessary this time, because you'll be asking the client verbally. Be sure to pay attention to the client's tone of voice as they answer and refer to the notes under each question to see what you might be in for.
Sometimes the hardest part of Local SEO is getting all the location info letter-perfect. Make that easier by having the client input all those details into your copy of the Location Data Spreadsheet.
Then use the File menu to download that document as a CSV.
You'll want to proof this before uploading it to any data aggregators. If you're working with Moz Local, the next step is an easy upload of your CSV. If you're working with other services, you can always customize your data collection spreadsheet to meet their standards.
Keep up to date on any business moves or changes in hours by designing a data update form like this one from SEER and periodically reminding your client contact to use it.
There are two sides to every successful client project: one half belongs to the agency and the other to the company it serves. The attention to detail your agency displays via clean, user-friendly forms and good phone sessions will signal your professionalism and commitment to doing quality work. At the same time, the willingness of the client to take the necessary time to fill out these documents and have these conversations signals their commitment to receiving value from their investment.
It's not unusual for a new client to express some initial surprise when they realize how many questions you're asking them to answer. Past experience may even have led them to expect half-hearted, sloppy work from other SEO agencies. But, what you want to see is a willingness on their part to share everything they can about their company with you so that you can do your best work.
Anecdotally, I've fully refunded the down payments of a few incoming clients who claimed they couldn't take the time to fill out my forms, because I detected in their unwillingness a lack of genuine commitment to success. These companies have, fortunately, been the exception rather than the rule for me, and likely will be for your agency, too.
It's my hope that, with the right forms and a commitment to having important conversations with incoming clients at the outset, the work you undertake will make your Local team top agency and client heroes!
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Twitter founder Biz Stone first launched launched Jelly in January 2014 as a social Q&A search engine when you could pose questions that could be answered by your network or extended network. Today, Stone is unveiling a more refined version of his original idea which he is proudly touting as a new kind of search engine based. It's still based on delivering answers to questions on demand; thanks to the help of real people. The key differences are now it's not limited to just your social network. You can view questions from anyone, and answer questions from anyone. In addition, you […]
The post Biz Stone's 'Jelly' App Relaunches As a New Search Engine by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Most of the advice about running paid social ads deals with the technical process behind it. Here's how you can create amazing Facebook and Twitter ads.
The post How to Create Amazing Ads for Facebook and Twitter by @mchale05 appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Posted by MatthewBarby
[Estimated read time: 10 minutes]
The traditional ways of measuring the success or failure of content are broken. We can't just rely on metrics like the number of pageviews/visits or bounce rate to determine whether what we're creating has performed well.
“The primary thing we look for with news is impact, not traffic,” says Jonah Peretti, Founder of BuzzFeed. One of the ways that BuzzFeed have mastered this is with the development of their proprietary analytics platform, POUND.
POUND enables BuzzFeed to predict the potential reach of a story based on its content, understand how effective specific promotions are based on the downstream sharing and traffic, and power A/B tests - and that's just a few examples.
Just because you've managed to get more eyeballs onto your content doesn't mean it's actually achieved anything. If that were the case then I'd just take a few hundred dollars and buy some paid StumbleUpon traffic every time.
Yeah, I'd generate traffic, but it's highly unlikely to result in me achieving some of my actual business goals. Not only that, but I'd have no real indication of whether my content was satisfying the needs of my visitors.
The scary thing is that the majority of content marketing campaigns are measured this way. I hear statements like “it's too difficult to measure the performance of individual pieces of content” far too often. The reality is that it's pretty easy to measure content marketing campaigns on a micro level - a lot of the time people don't want to do it.
Within any commercial content marketing campaign that you're running, measurement should be business goal-centric. By that I mean that you should be determining the overall success of your campaign based on the achievement of core business goals.
If your primary business goal is to generate 300 leads each month from the content that you're publishing, you'll need to have a reporting mechanism in place to track this information.
On a more micro-level, you'll want to be tracking and using engagement metrics to enable you to influence the achievement of your business goals. In my opinion, all content campaigns should have robust, engagement-driven reporting behind them.
One metric that Medium uses, which I think adds a lot more value than pageviews, is "Total Time Reading (TTR)." This is a cumulative metric that quantifies the total number of minutes spent reading a piece of content. For example, if I had 10 visitors to one of my blog articles and they each stayed reading the article for 1 minute each, the total reading time would be 10 minutes.
“We measure every user interaction with every post. Most of this is done by periodically recording scroll positions. We pipe this data into our data warehouse, where offline processing aggregates the time spent reading (or our best guess of it): we infer when a reader started reading, when they paused, and when they stopped altogether. The methodology allows us to correct for periods of inactivity (such as having a post open in a different tab, walking the dog, or checking your phone).” (source)
The reason why this is more powerful than just pageviews is because it takes into account how engaged your readers are to give a more accurate representation of its visibility. You could have an article with 1,000 pageviews that has a greater TTR than one with 10,000 pageviews.
A related and simpler metric to acquire is the average time on page (available within Google Analytics). The average time spent on your webpage will give a general indication of how long your visitors are staying on the page. Combining this with 'scroll depth' (i.e. how far down the page has a visitor scrolled) will help paint a better picture of how 'engaged' your visitors are. You'll be able to get the answer to the following:
“How much of this article are my visitors actually reading?”
“Is the length of my content putting visitors off?”
“Are my readers remaining on the page for a long time?”
Having the answers to these questions is really important when it comes to determining which types of content are resonating more with your visitors.
BuzzFeed's “Social Lift” metric is a particularly good way of understanding the 'virality' of your content (you can see this when you publish a post to BuzzFeed). BuzzFeed calculates “Social Lift” as follows:
((Social Views)/(Seed Views)+1)
Social Views: Traffic that's come from outside BuzzFeed; for example, referral traffic, email, social media, etc.
Seed Views: Owned traffic that's come from within the BuzzFeed platform; e.g. from appearing in BuzzFeed's newsfeed.
This is a great metric to use when you're a platform publisher as it helps separate out traffic that's coming from outside of the properties that you own, thus determining its "viral potential."
There are ways to use this kind of approach within your own content marketing campaigns (without being a huge publisher platform) to help get a better idea of its "viral potential."
One simple calculation can just involve the following:
((social shares)/(pageviews)+1)
This simple stat can be used to determine which content is likely to perform better on social media, and as a result it will enable you to prioritize certain content over others for paid social promotion. The higher the score, the higher its "viral potential." This is exactly what BuzzFeed does to understand which pieces of content they should put more weight behind from a very early stage.
You can even take this to the next level by replacing pageviews with TTR to get a more representative view of engagement to sharing behavior.
Alongside predicting "viral potential" and "TTR," you'll want to know how your content is performing against your bottom line. For most businesses, that's the main reason why they're creating content.
This isn't always easy and a lot of people get this wrong by looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist. Every sales process is different, but let's look at the typical process that we have at HubSpot for our free CRM product:
This is a simple process, but it can still be tricky sometimes to get a dollar value on each piece of content we produce. To do this, you've got to understand what the value of a visitor is, and this is done by working backwards through the process.
The first question to answer is, “what's the lifetime value (LTV) of an activated user?” In other words, “how much will this customer spend in their lifetime with us?”
For e-commerce businesses, you should be able to get this information by analyzing historical sales data to understand the average order value that someone makes and multiply that by the average number of orders an individual will make with you in their lifetime.
For the purposes of this example, let's say each of our activated CRM users has an LTV of $100. It's now time to work backwards from that figure (all the below figures are theoretical)…
Question 1: “What's the conversion rate of new CRM activations from our email workflow(s)?”
Answer 1: “5%”
Question 2: “How many people download our gated offers after coming through to the blog content?”
Answer 2: “3%”
Knowing this would help me to start putting a monetary value against each visitor to the blog content, as well as each lead (someone that downloads a gated offer).
Let's say we generate 500,000 visitors to our blog content each month. Using the average conversion rates from above, we'd convert 15,000 of those into email leads. From there we'd nurture 750 of them into activated CRM users. Multiply that by the LTV of a CRM user ($100) and we've got $75,000 (again, these figures are all just made up).
Using this final figure of $75,000, we could work backwards to understand the value of a single visitor to our blog content:
((75,000)/(500,000))
Single Visitor Value: $0.15
We can do the same for email leads using the following calculation:
(($75,000)/(15,000))
Individual Lead Value: $5.00
Knowing these figures will help you be able to determine the bottom-line value of each of your pieces of content, as well as calculating a rough return on investment (ROI) figure.
Let's say one of the blog posts we're creating to encourage CRM signups generated 500 new email leads; we'd see a $2,500 return. We could then go and evaluate the cost of producing that blog post (let's say it takes 6 hours at $100 per hour – $600) to calculate a ROI figure of 316%.
ROI in its simplest form is calculated as:
(((($return)-($investment))/($investment))*100)
You don't necessarily need to follow these figures religiously when it comes to content performance on a broader level, especially when you consider that some content just doesn't have the primary goal of lead generation. That said, for the content that does have this goal, it makes sense to pay attention to this.
So far I've talked about two very different forms of measurement:
What you'll want to avoid is actually thinking about these as isolated variables. Return on investment metrics (for example, lead conversion rate) are heavily influenced by engagement metrics, such as TTR.
The key is to understand exactly which engagement metrics have the greatest impact on your ROI. This way you can use engagement metrics to form the basis of your optimization tests in order to make the biggest impact on your bottom line.
Let's take the following scenario that I faced within my own blog as an example…
The average length of the content across my website is around 5,000 words. Some of my content way surpasses 10,000 words in length, taking an estimated hour to read (my recent SEO tips guide is a perfect example of this). As a result, the bounce rate on my content is quite high, especially from mobile visitors.
Keeping people engaged within a 10,000-word article when they haven't got a lot of time on their hands is a challenge. Needless to say, it makes it even more difficult to ensure my CTAs (aimed at newsletter subscriptions) stand out.
From some testing, I found that adding my CTAs closer to the top of my content was helping to improve conversion rates. The main issue I needed to tackle was how to keep people on the page for longer, even when they're in a hurry.
To do this, I worked on the following solution: give visitors a concise summary of the blog post that takes under 30 seconds to read. Once they've read this, show them a CTA that will give them something to read in more detail in their own time.
All this involved was the addition of a "Summary" button at the top of my blog post that, when clicked, hides the content and displays a short summary with a custom CTA.
This has not only helped to reduce the number of people bouncing from my long-form content, but it also increased the number of subscribers generated from my content whilst improving user experience at the same time (which is pretty rare).
I've thought that more of you might find this quite a useful feature on your own websites, so I packaged it up as a free WordPress plugin that you can download here.
The above example is just one example of a way to impact the ROI of your content by improving engagement. My advice is to get a robust measurement process in place so that you're able to first of all identify opportunities, and then go through with experiments to take advantage of the opportunity.
More than anything, I'd recommend that you take a step back and re-evaluate the way that you're measuring your content campaigns to see if what you're doing really aligns with the fundamental goals of your business. You can invest in endless tools that help you measure things better, but if core metrics that you're looking for are wrong, then this is all for nothing.
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Posted by KelseyLibert
[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]
In a recent Whiteboard Friday about 10x content, Rand said to expect it to take 5 to 10 attempts before you'll create a piece of content that's a hit.
If you've been at the content marketing game for a while, you probably agree with Rand. Seasoned content marketers know you're likely to see a percentage of content flops before you achieve a big win. Then, as you gain a sense for why some content fails and other content succeeds, you integrate what you've learned into your process. Gradually, you start batting fewer base hits and more home runs.
At Fractl, we regularly look back at campaign performance and refine our production and promotion processes based on what the data tells us. Are publishers rejecting a certain content format? Is there a connection between Domain Authority (DA) and the industry vertical we targeted? Do certain topics attract the most social shares? These are the types of questions we ask, and then we use the related data to create better content.
We recently dug through three years of content marketing campaigns and asked: What factors increase content's ability to earn links? In this post, I'll show you what we found.
We analyzed campaign data from a sample of 345 Fractl campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2016. To compare linking performance, we set benchmarks based on the industry averages for links per campaign from our content marketing agency survey: High success (more than 100 placements), moderate success (20–100 placements), and low success (fewer than 20 placements).
We looked at the relationship between the number of placements and the content's topic, visual assets, and formatting. "Placement" refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. In terms of links, a placement could mean dofollow, cocitation, nofollow, or text attribution.
The chart below highlights the largest differences between our high- and low-success campaigns.
We found the following characteristics were present in content that earned the most links:
The data confirmed our assumptions about why some content is better than others at attracting links, as all four of the above characteristics were present in some of our biggest hits. As an example, our Women in Video Games campaign checked all four of those boxes.
It paired a highly emotional topic (body image issues) with a strong visual contrast. It also included a pop culture theme that appealed to a niche audience (video game fans) while also resonating with a broader audience. To date, this campaign has amassed nearly 900 placements, including links from high-authority sites such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, MTV, and Vice Motherboard.
Read on for more takeaways on how to increase your content's link-earning potential.
Emotional impact was the greatest differentiator between our most successful campaigns and all other campaigns, with those that secured over 100 placements being 3 times more likely to feature a strong emotional hook than less successful campaigns.
Our Truth About Hotel Hygiene earned more than 700 placements thanks to a high "ick" factor, which gave it emotional resonance paired with universal interest (most people use hotels). We've also found including an element of surprise helps strengthen the content's emotional impact. This study definitely surprised readers with a shocking finding: The nicest hotels had the most germs.
In our Perceptions of Perfection campaign, audiences were surprised to see drastically how designers altered a woman's photo to fit their country's standards of beauty. The surprise factor added an additional layer of emotionality to the already emotional topic of women's body image issues, which helped this campaign get nearly 600 placements.
So we've proven emotionally provocative content can attract a lot of links, but what about high-quality links? We found a correlation between high average domain authority and content topics with mass appeal. Broad topics appeal to a greater range of publishers, thus increasing the number of relevant high-authority sites your content can be placed on.
Some verticals may have an advantage when it comes to link quality too. Campaigns for our travel, entertainment, and retail clients tend to have a high average domain authority per placement since these verticals naturally lend themselves to content ideas with mass appeal.
Some examples of campaign topics with a DA-per-placement average above 55:
Pro tip: A site's influence matters more than the type of link you'll acquire from it. Don't fear nofollow links; for two of our best-performing campaigns of all time, the initial links were nofollows from high-authority sites. A nofollow link on a high-authority site can lead to syndication on hundreds of other sites that will give dofollow links.
Contrast was a recurring theme in our high-performing campaigns, with strong contrasts achieved through visual or numerical comparisons. More than half of our highest-performing campaigns centered around a ranking or comparison, compared to just a third of our lowest-performing campaigns. Pitting two or more things against one another fuels discussion around the content, which can lead to more placements.
Comparing Cortana was a hands-on study for which participants gave a command to their virtual assistant and rated their satisfaction with the response. Comparing the three most widely used smartphone assistants attracted the attention of techies (especially Apple fans) as well as the broader public, since most people have one of these assistants on their smartphone.
The Airport Rankings campaign looked at which airports offered the best and worst experiences, based on data including the volume of canceled flights, delays, and lost luggage. Local publishers loved this campaign; many focused on the story around how their regional airport fared in the rankings. Since most travelers have lived through at least one terrible airport experience, the content was extremely relatable too.
Pro tip: Side-by-side visualizations pack a high-contrast visual punch that helps drive linking and social shares. This type of contrasting imagery is extremely powerful visually since it's easy to process. It helps evoke an immediate response that quickly engages viewers.
Did you notice a majority of the broad-topic campaigns with a high domain authority listed above also had a geographic angle? In addition to broad appeal, geography-focused topics help attract interest from international and regional publishers, thus securing additional links.
The Most Popular Concert Drugs, one of our most successful campaigns to date with nearly 1,900 placements, examined the connection between music festivals and drug mentions on Instagram. Many global sites featured the story for its worldwide festivals, including publishers in the U.K., France, Italy, Australia, and Brazil. Had we limited our selection to U.S. festivals, it's doubtful this campaign would have attracted as much attention.
As with the example above, pairing a geographic angle with Instagram data proved to be a winning formula for the Most Instagrammed Locations campaign. We featured the most Instagrammed places in both the U.S. and Canada, which helped the campaign secure additional coverage from Canadian publishers.
Pro tip: To extend a campaign's reach to the offline world, consider pitching relevant TV and radio stations with geo-themed content that offers new data; traditional news outlets seem to love these stories. We've had multiple geo-focused campaigns featured on national and local news stations simply because they saw the story getting covered by online media.
Our campaigns with more than 100 pickups were nearly twice as likely to incorporate a pop culture theme than our campaigns with fewer than 20 pickups. Content that ties in pop culture is primed for targeting a niche of dedicated fans who will want to share and discuss it like crazy, while it simultaneously resonates on a surface level for many people. Geek-culture themes, such as comic books and sci-fi movies, tend to attract a lot of attention thanks to rabid fan bases.
Trending pop culture phenomena are best for making your content feel relevant to the current zeitgeist (think: a Walking Dead theme that appeals to fans of the show while also playing up the current cultural obsession with zombies).
On the other hand, old school pop culture references are effective for creating strong feelings of nostalgia (think: everything in BuzzFeed's '90s category). If your audience falls within a certain age bracket, consider what would be nostalgic to them. What did they grow up with, and how can you weave this into your content?
Fictional Power Sources looked at which iconic weapons, vehicles, and superpowers featured in movies were the most powerful. Rather than focusing on one movie, we featured a handful of popular movies - including Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix - which increased it the campaign's appeal to movie fans.
Sitcom Cribs looked at the affordability of the living spaces on various TV shows - could the “Friends” characters really afford their trendy Manhattan digs? By featuring a lot of older TV shows, this campaign had a high nostalgia factor for audiences familiar with classic '90s sitcoms. Including newer TV shows kept the campaign relevant to younger audiences too.
Pro tip: To increase the appeal, feature a range of pop culture icons as opposed to just one, such as a list of movies, musicians, or TV shows. This adds to the range of pop culture fans who will connect with the content, rather than limiting the potential audience to one fan base.
Earning high-quality links is just one benefit of creating content that incorporates high emotionality, contrast, broad appeal, or pop culture references. We've also found these characteristics present in our campaigns that perform well in terms of social sharing.
In particular, emotional resonance is a key ingredient, not only for earning links but also for getting your content widely shared. Our campaigns that received more than 20,000 social shares were 8 times more likely to include a strong emotional hook than campaigns that received fewer than 1,000 shares.
How can you ensure these elements are incorporated into your content, thus increasing its linking and sharing potential? In a previous post, I walk through exactly how we create campaigns like the examples I shared above. Check it out for a step-by-step guide to creating engaging, highly shareable content.
What observations have you made about your most successful content? I'd love to hear your thoughts on which content elements attract the most links and shares.
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If you want to learn more about how to create a 'galaxy' of content around each piece of content you build, you will want to join us for the next SEJ ThinkTank webinar on May the 4th (be with you) for a Star Wars-themed webinar.
The post Next #SEJThinkTank: How To Build A Galaxy of Content Through Repurposing by @dantosz appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
