Google My Business updates their analytics to show business owners the source of their views and how they found the listing. The post Google My Business Insights updates analytics while dropping Google+ source data appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Posted by George-Freitag Duplicate listings have been a plague to local search marketers since local search was a thing. When Moz Local first introduced duplicate closure in the fall of 2014, the goal was to address the horribly time-consuming task of finding and closing all those duplicate listings causing problems in Google, Bing, and various mapping platforms. Though we’ve consistently been making improvements to the tool’s performance (we’ll get into this later), the dashboard itself has remained largely unchanged. Not anymore. Today, we’re proud to announce our brand new duplicate management dashboard for Moz Local: Here’s a rundown of the features you can look for in the Moz Local upgrade:
This duplicate management update represents a new standard in the industry and will help our users be more productive and efficient than ever. A bit of contextEliminating duplicates and near-duplicates on major data sources and directories has always been one of the most effective ways to increase your presence in the local pack. It’s a key part of citation consistency, which was rated as the second most important tactic for getting into local pack results according to the 2015 local ranking factors survey. On top of that, in last May’s Mozinar on local search, Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide mentioned that he saw a 23% increase in presence in the local pack just by addressing duplicates. So we know that seeking and destroying duplicates works. The problem is that doing it manually just takes for-e-ver. Anyone who works in local search knows the pain and monotony of combing through Google for variations of a business, then spending more time finding the contact form needed to actually request a closure. Our duplicate listing feature has always focused on easily identifying potential duplicates and presenting them to marketers in a way that allows them to quickly take action. In the case of the aggregators (like Infogroup and Localeze) and direct partner sites (like Foursquare and Insider Pages), this takes the form of single-click closure requests that are quickly reviewed and sent directly to the source. For sites that aren’t part of our direct network or don’t accept closure requests from anyone, like Facebook, we still do our best to point our users in the right direction so they can close the listing manually. Originally, the dashboard took the form of a long list where marketers could scroll down and take action, as needed. Though this worked great for many of our users, it quickly became problematic for large brands and agencies. Based on data collected from the thousands of brands and locations we track, we know that the average enterprise client can have around 3,500 duplicate listings and, in some cases, that number can be as high as 100,000 duplicates. Even though we estimate our tool can reduce the time spent managing duplicates by around 75%, when you have literally thousands of duplicates to parse through, a single to-do list quickly becomes impractical. 1. New dashboard for full transparency
The first opportunity we saw was to provide you with a bit more transparency into our closure process. Though we always provided some insight related to where we were in the closure process, there was no way to view this at an aggregated level and no way to see how many duplicates had been closed so you could track your progress. So we fixed that. Now all Moz Local customers can easily see how many duplicates are still marked as "open," how many are being reviewed, and how many listings have been successfully closed. If you’re an agency or consultant, this can be especially useful to demonstrate progress made in identifying and closing duplicates for your clients. If you’re a brand, this can be a great way to build a business case for additional resources or show the value of your local strategy. We also saw another opportunity to improve transparency by further breaking down the reporting by the type of data partner. Moz Local has always been very deliberate in surfacing the relationship we have with our partners. Because of this, we wanted to add another layer of insight based on the nature of the partnership. Verification Partners include Google and Facebook, since they're sources we use to verify our own data. Though we can’t close duplicates directly at this point, they're so influential we felt it was imperative to include the ability to identify duplicates on these platforms and guide you as far as possible through the closure process. Direct Partners are data sources that we have a direct relationship with and submit business listings instantly through our distribution service. For all major aggregators and most of our direct partner directories, you can use our single-click duplicate closure, meaning that all you have to is click “Close” and we’ll make sure it’s removed completely from their database, forever. Lastly, we have our Indirect Partners. These are sources that receive all of our listing data via our direct partners, but we do not submit to directly. Though we can’t close listings on these sources automatically, we can still detect duplicates and send you directly to their closure form to help you request the closure. 2. Improve workflow through filtersThe second opportunity was to address the long list-view that our users used to identify, evaluate, and take action related to duplicates we discovered. With so many of our clients having hundreds or thousands of listings to manage, it quickly became apparent that we needed some advanced sorting to help them out with their workflow. So we added that, as well. Now, if you only want to view the listings that need action, you can just click “Open,” then scroll down and choose to close or ignore any of duplicates in that view. If you then want to see how many duplicates have already been closed and removed from the data partner, you can just click that checkbox. If you want to only see the open duplicate listings for a certain partner, like Foursquare, that’s an option as well. Further, just like everything else in the Moz Local dashboard and Search Insights, reporting strictly follows any filters and labels from the search bar. This can be especially useful if you’re an agency that wants to narrow your view to a specific client, or a brand that wants to only view reporting for a single marketing region. For example, if you only want to see closed duplicates from Infogroup located in Texas that are part of the campaign “hanna-barbera” well, there you go. All data in any filtered view is easily exportable via CSV so you can repurpose it for your own reporting or research. Lastly, all of these reports are retroactive, meaning any duplicates you’ve requested closure or closed in the past will show up in the new duplicates dashboard and be available for advanced sorting and reporting. 3. Enhanced duplicate management
The new interface and reporting features aren’t the only things we’ve improved. Over the last year, our developers have been spending countless hours fine-tuning the duplicate closure process and improving relationships with our data partners. Early on, the Moz Local team decided that the product should focus on the data sources that have the greatest impact for local businesses, regardless of their relationship with us, directly. As a result, we built the widest and most complex set of partnerships with aggregators, direct and indirect partners, and business directories in the industry. This update not only launches a new dashboard but also marks the kickoff for some huge improvements to our back-end. Faster closure processingThe challenge that comes with working with a network as diverse as ours is that each of our partners handle duplicate listings in completely different ways. The Moz Local team has always had resources devoted specifically to work with our partners to improve our data submission and listing management processes. For duplicates, however, this meant we needed to help some of our partners enhance their own APIs to accept closure requests or, in some cases, create the API all together! As part of this update, our development team has implemented new instrumentation and alerts to better identify submission errors sent to our partners, speed up the closure process, and quickly re-submit any closure requests that were not processed correctly. Shorter review cyclesAdditionally, we’ve shortened our internal review cycle for closure requests. In order ensure the quality of duplicate closures and to be sure our “alternates” feature isn’t being used maliciously, we manually review a percentage of closure requests. Through a variety of processes, we are now able to programmatically approve more closures, allowing for faster manual reviews of all other closure requests. As a result, we are now able to automatically approve around 44% of all closure requests instantly. The futureThe most exciting thing about this update is that it’s only the beginning. Over the next few months expect to see further integration with our data partners, discovery and progress notifications, increased closure efficiency, and more. We hope you find our new duplicates dashboard useful and, most importantly, we hope it makes your lives a little bit easier. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4105558
Bidding agreements prevented 1-800 Contacts and its rivals from bidding on each others’ trademarked terms. The post FTC sues 1-800 Contacts over reciprocal, “anti-competitive” PPC bidding agreements appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/ftc-sues-1-800-contacts-reciprocal-anti-competitive-ppc-bidding-agreements-255395 Posted by Robbie Tilton, UX Designer, Google VR At Daydream Labs, we have experimented with social interactions in VR. Just like in real reality, people naturally want to share and connect with others in VR. As developers and designers, we are excited to build social experiences that are fun and easy to use—but it’s just as important to make it safe and comfortable for all involved. Over the last year, we’ve learned a few ways to nudge people towards positive social experiences. What can happen without clear social norms People are curious and will test the limits of your VR experience. For example, when some people join a multiplayer app or game, they might wonder if they can reach their hand through another player’s head or stand inside another avatar’s body. Even with good intentions, this can make other people feel unsafe or uncomfortable. For example, in a shopping experiment we built for the HTC Vive, two people could enter a virtual storefront and try on different hats, sunglasses, and accessories. There was no limit to how or where they could place a virtual accessory, so some people stuck hats on friends anywhere they would stick—like in front of their eyes. This had the unfortunate effect of blocking their vision. If they couldn’t remove the hat in front of their eyes with their controllers, they had no other recourse than to take off their headset and end their VR experience. Protecting user safety Everyone should feel safe and comfortable in VR. If we can anticipate the actions of others, then we may be able to discourage negative social behavior before it starts. For example, by designing personal space around each user, you can prevent other people from invading that personal space. We built an experiment around playing poker where we tried new ways to discourage trolling. If someone left their seat at the poker table, their environment desaturated to black and white and their avatar would disappear from the other player’s view. A glowing blue personal space bubble would guide the person back to their seat. We found it’s enough to prevent a player from approaching their opponents to steal chips or invade personal space. Reward positive behavior If you want people to interact in positive ways—like high-fiving ? —try giving them an incentive. In one experiment, we detected when two different avatars “touched” each other’s hands at high speed. This triggered a loud slapping sound and a fireworks animation. It sounds simple, but people loved it. Meanwhile, if you tried to do something more aggressive, like punching an avatar’s body, nothing would happen. You can guess which behavior people naturally preferred. via Google Developers Blog http://developers.googleblog.com/2016/08/daydream-labs-positive-social.html Google Now testing Explore Interests feature to make personal assistant app more personalized8/9/2016
TechCrunch reports the new feature aims to give Google Now users more control over the information Google tracks on their behalf. The post Google Now testing “Explore Interests” feature to make personal assistant app more personalized appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Want to share campaign negative lists with a load of campaigns, but finding the interface a drag? Columnist Daniel Gilbert of Brainlabs has a script for that! The post Here’s an AdWords script to apply shared campaign negative lists everywhere appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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As Google continues to refine its search results to better serve users in their moments of need, columnist Adam Dorfman looks at how recent developments in contextual search may impact brick-and-mortar businesses. The post Google injects more context into micro-moments appeared first on Search...
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In addition to the new offline features, Google Maps has added more international ride-service options to compare rates in a number of countries. The post Google Maps adds “Wi-fi only” feature & ability to save areas to SD card appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Google is proactively pushing AMP through the Google Search Console message center. The post Google Search Console sending AMP notifications to encourage adoption appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-sending-amp-notifications-encourage-adoption-255355 Posted by larry.kim Conversion rate optimization (CRO) has been around since the beginning of the web. Historically, a lot of the time and attention has been spent on the on-page elements — headlines, copy, calls-to-action, forms, and design — to increase conversions. Although optimizing on-page elements to maximize conversions still can and does have tremendous value, isn't there a better way forward? Absolutely! There are several ways to increase your conversion rate by as much as 5x. But the smarter way to do it is by influencing the right people before they ever land on your site or persuading them to come back if they left your site before converting. Here are 10 mind-blowing CRO truth bombs that will change the way you think about landing page optimization forever. 1. The classic A/B test is a fairy taleOnce upon a time, there lived a brilliant conversion rate expert who changed the [font type / line spacing / button color / image / something else] and magically increased conversions by 5 percent. And they all lived happily ever after. The end. Except, the percentage increase you think you've achieved isn't as real as it seems. Oh no, it looks like someone has abducted our big CRO gains! What really happens after a typical A/B test is that:
When you get good results from A/B tests, it's probably because your offer is new. Once that offer is no longer new, it loses its novelty. You can't keep selling last year's offer forever. People want something new. As is the case with ad fatigue, once you reach a certain point, your offer will bring diminishing returns. That’s why you can't optimize your way to infinity. Should you still do A/B testing? Yes! A/B testing is absolutely worth your time. You need to do it. However, just realize that this isn't a growth strategy — it's table stakes. Improving something by 5 percent 10 times in a year doesn't increase your conversion rate by 50 percent. The gains don’t persist. Also, the more you optimize, the higher the risk of negative returns. If you start out with an offer that has a 0.5 percent conversion rate, there's lots of upside. But once you've got a 6 percent conversion rate, there's better than a 50/50 change your new offer will actually hurt sales. 2. CRO often increases quantity at the expense of qualityIn ecommerce, a sale is a sale. But if you're doing lead generation you have to be careful that you aren't exchanging quantity for quality. Quantity doesn't always translate to quality. In fact, a higher conversion rate can actually ruin your percentage of marketing qualified leads. Here’s some data from one of our customers: Beware of making superficial on-page changes that increase leads at the expense of quality, like promising free iPads or gift cards. Remember, if you double your leads, you're also doubling the time it takes for someone to follow-up on all those leads. If you have too many leads, you run the risk of losing some gems in all that noise, and the longer it takes to get to someone, the lower the connect rates and conversion rates. 3. Average conversion rates haven't changed much in yearsThe importance of CRO has certainly gained a lot attention in the past few years. No doubt you've recently seen some sort of case study where the author details how their company tripled their conversion rate. If more people are doing CRO, then you'd think it would have a visible impact on outcomes industry-wide, right? So why are conversion rates still pretty much the same as they were 15 years ago? According to my WordStream data, the median search conversion rate is 2.35 percent, whereas the top 10 percent of sites — the unicorns — have conversion rates of 11.45 percent or higher: We run these numbers periodically over the years but they never move. If more and more companies are adopting CRO, why aren't industry average conversion rates moving up? 4. Raise your CTR to raise your conversion ratesClick-through rate (CTR) is the most important conversion metric. Why? Because the higher your click-through rate is, the higher your conversion rate will be. Here's an example of data from just one large client account. We see this in many accounts, but this is just one illustration. (The data gets murky when you combine accounts, since conversion rates depend on the industry and offer.) If you can get people excited enough to click on your offer, then that excitement usually will turn into a conversion. So increasing your CTR by 2x will increase your conversion rate by 50%. Now, it’s important to understand that I’m not advocating raising CTR by offering free kittens or other gimmicks. If you just add the word “Free” to your ad, the CTR will increase, but if your offer isn’t truly free, the conversion rate will drop. Instead, I’m advocating finding truly innovative offers with massive differentiation and value that get your target market super excited about signing up for whatever you're selling, right away! From that perspective, your CTR is a great way to tell whether your offer sucks or if it is actually appealing to people who aren't already biased toward you already (i.e., people who have visited your landing page in the past). Your market is much bigger than the people who are already in your funnel. What is a good CTR? Check out these Google AdWords industry benchmarks: Here are three ways you can raise CTR and create unicorn ads:
5. Brand familiarity is ridiculously importantOne thing you can't control with on-page CRO is brand awareness. People who are familiar with your brand are more likely to sign up or purchase your product or service. At Wordstream, we looked at conversion rates, comparing those who were familiar with the company (repeat visitors) versus those who were not and found that repeat visitors were around 2–3x more likely to convert. Granted, this isn't a perfect measurement of who is familiar or not familiar with your brand. Someone who appears to be a new visitor might already have been exposed to that brand. Regardless, brand affinity and recall clearly has a huge impact on CRO. This is where the highest leverage is. 6. Boost your conversions with remarketingIf greater brand exposure increases conversion rates, then how can you increase brand exposure? Go nuts with remarketing on the Google Display Network and Facebook. We’ve seen it: conversion rates actually double the more times someone sees an ad in a remarketing campaign. Remarketing lets you turn one shot at converting a user into 100 or more possible shots. With Facebook remarketing, you can target using the extremely valuable combination of behaviors, interests, and demographics to increase engagement and conversions by 3x for a third of the cost-per-click. This is where you want to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads. 7. RLSA will save the dayWe've found that RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) campaigns are search ads that target people who search on your desired keywords AND have recently visited your website. We've found that they typically have 2–5x better ROI than non-RLSA ads due to the fact that they are familiar with your brand. The problem is that RLSA, by definition, only targets people who have visited your site. The solution: forget unbranded search ads and grow your cookie pools by using social media ads. If you can increase your audience sizes by 10x, you can capture 10x more conversions! Note: This strategy applies only to certain verticals with very high CPCs where there's a lot of competition and conversion rates are challenging. Get more details in my post, RLSA for Competitive Markets: A Ridiculously Awesome Way Forward in PPC. 8. Increase conversions for pennies with video adsWhat's the point of advertising? To bias people. Video ads deliver on the two most important components of high conversion rates:
Video ads on Facebook provide the highest value at the lowest cost. They are so cheap because they have the highest engagement rates. People love visual content. Video is one of the best ways to bias people so they'll choose you over some brand they've never heard of. 9. You need to change your offer in a BIG wayWe've looked through billions of dollars of ad spend. It turns out that the highest converting offers have very little to do with conventional "CRO best practices." Here's what actually matters: Your offer needs to be massively different and more valuable from what your competitors are offering. It doesn't matter how pretty your fonts and images are. Making small changes to your current bad offer won't move the needle. It will just result in small changes to your conversion rate. If you want to dramatically increase conversion rates, then you need a completely different and better offer. Want to collect more emails? Rather than publishing yet another whitepaper, which has low differentiation, consider creating something people actually want, such as a calculator or tool, which we've seen have conversion rates as high as 50 percent. For example, one way that WordStream offers substantially more value is by providing a keyword suggestion tool. People simply type in a keyword and we email them the full results for free in an Excel file. All they need to do is provide their email. 10. You can totally eliminate your landing pagesOK, here's the problem. Only 2 percent of people are clicking on your ads, and only 2 percent of those people who reach your landing page are converting. That's a HUGE dropoff. Wouldn't it be great if you could skip this landing page step and capture leads directly from ads? Well it is great, and you can do just that! Thanks to new mobile technologies, like Facebook Lead Ads, you no longer have to send people to a landing page, which will continue to lose 97 percent of prospects. Only one field is needed — email. You can just eliminate that stage entirely from your funnel. Summary: Unicorn CRO!In the end, there are three types of unicorn conversion rate activities that impact conversions:
There's much more to CRO than moving around your on-page elements. Why increase your conversion rate by a measly 5 percent when you could increase it by 5x? Focus on #1 is a minimum. Focus more on #2 and #3 for insanely great returns. Start thinking more widely about the conversion lifecycle. Think about not just what's on your landing page, but also what happens before and after they see it — or consider the possibility of eliminating that page altogether. New technologies such as mobile, remarketing, and RLSA are the future of CRO. The real leverage is less about tweaking on-page elements and more about branding and growth hacking. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4100781
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google local pack ad, expanded AdWords ads & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/searchcap-google-local-pack-ad-expanded-adwords-ads-255344 Posted by EricaMcGillivray All the puzzle pieces have come together, and MozCon 2016 is ready to rock! Over the past week, I've had the pleasure of peeking at our speakers' outlines, and I cannot wait. Whether you're looking to for the latest SEO information, ready to tackle mobile's biggest issues, wanting to push your content to 10x, or generally wanting to absorb everything online marketing, it's going to be so good. If you're reading this post and remembering you haven't bought your ticket yet, I'll pause: Now let's get to the good stuff: The MozCon 2016 AgendaMonday08:00–09:00am 09:00–09:20am Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web. 09:25–10:10am Content Marketer and Storyteller at caraharshman.me A/B testing is bread and butter for anyone who aspires to be a data-driven marketer. Cara will share stories about how testers, from one-person agencies to dedicated testing teams, are doing it, and how you can develop your own A/B testing expertise. Cara Harshman just celebrated her four-year anniversary at Optimizely. Besides managing content strategy, customer case studies, and the blog, she has been known to spend a lot of time writing parody songs for company all-hands meetings. 10:10–10:40am 10:45–11:15am VP of Marketing at Box Change makes us all nervous, and relaunching an entire site can be both thrilling and daunting. Lauren will walk you through how to do it right, from infrastructure and content to design, information architecture, and marketing automation, and share real life triumphs and cautionary tales. Lauren Vaccarello is a best-selling author and currently runs corporate and field marketing at Box. 11:15–11:45am VP Marketing at Litmus Far from dead, email is a powerful workhorse that belongs in every marketer's optimization toolkit. Justine will show you how to use email to deliver personal, 1-to-1, and contextually relevant messages that delight your subscribers and encourage engagement. After mastering table-based layouts in college, Justine Jordan fell in love with the unruly art of email design back in 2007. Currently VP of Marketing at Litmus, Justine and her team are passionate about inspiring fellow marketers to create better email. 11:45am–12:15pm CEO at Outspoken Media Dig into the discipline of reputation marketing and strategy. Rhea will show you what the role of a reputation marketer looks like, what analytics to track, and why everyone should be investing in their organization’s reputation to diversify and reduce marketing spend and other high business costs. Rhea Drysdale is the Co-Founder and CEO of Outspoken Media, a reputation marketing agency that offers custom solutions for difficult SEO, content, and reputation problems. 12:15–01:45pm 01:50–02:20pm SEO Consultant at Hall Analysis LLC Information Architecture (IA) shapes the way we organize data, think about complex ideas, and build web sites. Joe will provide a new approach to IA for SEO and Content Marketing, based on actionable insights, that SEOs can extract from their own data sets. Joe Hall is an executive SEO consultant focused on analyzing and informing the digital marketing strategies of select clients through high-level data analysis and SEO audits. 02:20–02:50pm CMO at Banana Splash Best practices lie. Talia shares how to build a mobile conversion optimization strategy and how to turn more mobile visitors into customers based on A/B testing their emotions, decision making process, and behavior. As CMO at Banana-Splash and Founder of Conversioner, Talia Wolf helps businesses optimize their sites using emotional targeting, consumer psychology, and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, and sales. Talia is a keynote speaker, author, and Harry Potter fan. 02:50–03:20pm CEO at STAT Search Analytics Featured snippets (also known as “answer boxes”) are steadily appearing in the first organic SERP spot, providing big opportunities for SEOs able to snag them. Armed with the latest data and analysis, Rob Bucci will take you on a deep dive into the constantly evolving featured snippet and show you how to earn more for your site. Coming from Vancouver, Canada, Rob Bucci is the CEO of STAT Search Analytics. He especially loves tackling big data challenges in data mining and analysis. When he isn’t doing that, you can find him splashing in the ocean, or taking cookies out of the oven. 03:20–03:50pm 03:55–04:25pm Co-Founder at Crate A look at how taking risks on content and making investments can work out in a big way for brands and marketers. Whether it’s Reddit, Slideshare, Quora, or Instagram, Ross shares some of the lessons he's learned from a variety of different content experiments. Ross Simmonds is a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He's worked with both startups and Fortune 500 companies and is the co-founder of two startups: Crate and Hustle & Grind. 04:25–5:10pm Partner at Kick Point You can follow all the “rules” about perfect post length, perfect time to post, perfect image size, and everything else and still not see any financial impact from social media. Dana doesn't think social media should always revolve around community building and group hugs. When you show the right people what they want to see, when they want to see it, you'll start attributing revenue increases to social media efforts. Dana DiTomaso is a partner at Kick Point, where she applies marketing into strategies to grow clients' businesses, in particular to ensure that digital and traditional play well together — separating real solutions from wastes of time (and budget). 07:00–10:00pm Catch the pub crawl on Monday night, details coming soon! You'll be able to explore some of our favorite haunts and make some new friends. Spread across multiple bars, go at your own pace and visit the stops in any order. Each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner and one by us. You must bring your MozCon badge — for free drinks and light appetizers — and your US ID or passport. See you there! Official MozCrawl stops and partners coming soon. Tuesday08:00–09:00am 09:05–09:50am Marketing Scientist at Moz Google is getting better every day at understanding intent and natural language, and the path between typing a search and getting a result is getting more winding. How often are queries interpreted, and how do we do keyword research for search engines that are beginning to understand concepts? Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with marketing and data science on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past four years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project. 09:50–10:20am Creator and Copywriter at Copy Hackers Abstracted benefits, summarized value, and promise-free landing pages keep marketers safe — and conversion rates low. Joanna shares how and why your copy needs to get specific to move people to act. The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and Airstory. She's optimized copy for Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Bounce Exchange, and Rainmaker, among others, and spoken at CTA Conf, Business of Software... and now MozCon. 10:20–10:50am 10:55–11:15am Director of Marketing and Communications at Logz.io Server log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how Google and other search engines crawl your website. Sam will show you what and where to check and what problems you may to need to fix to maximize your rankings and organic traffic. Samuel Scott is a global marketing speaker and Director of Marketing and Communications for log analysis platform Logz.io, as well as a contributor to TechCrunch and Moz. 11:15–11:35am Marketing Lead at Seer Interactive Torn between your marketing work and hiring? Emma shares how to take the skills you already have, flip them on their head, and find people to hire on your growing marketing teams. Spoiler: they’ve been under your nose the whole time. Emma Still leads all Marketing efforts for Seer Interactive. Prior to that, she led a team of SEO professionals at Seer, where she leveraged her digital marketing skills to recruit team members to build stronger, more successful digital teams. 11:35–11:55am SEO Manager at Wayfair Learn how to optimize internal link structure for an easy and surprisingly large SEO ranking wins. Alex will cover the math behind how authority flows through your site, how to evaluate links in your global navigation, common mistakes on CMSs, and other tactics to improve your site’s most important pages. Alex Stein is currently SEO Manager at Wayfair.com, an online home goods store. Follow him on Twitter @sonofadiplomat for all things SEO, and he is, in fact, the son of a diplomat. 11:55am–12:15pm SEO Manager at Hornblower Cruises and Events Learn the tactics for creating a navigation that increases your organic visibility, streamlines user experience, and boosts conversion rates as Robyn walks you through the most important steps to getting your navigation in order. Robyn Winner is a passionate SEOer with a deep love for data analytics, user experience optimization, content strategy development, and her two adorable cats who fill her life with joy and fur... on everything. 12:15–01:45pm 01:50–02:35pm President at Nifty Marketing Mike will walk through the projects that his individual team members took on to improve how they handled local links, reviews, reports, and lots of areas in between. Mike Ramsey is the President of Nifty Marketing, which works with big brands and small businesses on digital marketing. He talks about running agencies, local search, and Idaho a lot. 02:35–03:05pm Director of Business Development at Wistia True customer loyalty and retention lies in the experience people have with your brand. Kristen will show you how to leverage video to optimize for experience, foster loyalty, lower churn, and create evangelists. As Director of Business Development at Wistia, Kristen Craft loves working with Wistia's partner community, building connections with other companies that care about video marketing. Kristen holds degrees in business and education from MIT and Harvard. 03:05–03:35pm 03:45–04:15pm Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward How do you connect your search rankings to your long-term conversion rates? Customer journey mapping. Rebekah will show you how to bridge the gap between SEO, content, design, and UX with an effective framework your team can use to deliver radically relevant digital experiences when and where it matters most. Rebekah Cancino spent the last decade helping clients, like Aetna and United Way, overcome some of their toughest content problems. Her consultancy offers workshops and training for in-house teams that bridge the gap between content, design, and technical SEO. 04:15–05:00pm CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive Domain Authority is a trust sentiment, not a pure numeric value. Wil will show real examples of sites that build authority and trust by understanding and then solving users' problems. He'll also give you practical ways to use Google SERPS to uncover the many ways to best solve these problem. Wil Reynolds — Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive — founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site's traffic has on the company's bottom line has shaped the SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House. 07:00–10:00pm We're thrilled to bring back MozCon Ignite: A networking and passion-talks event for attendees on Tuesday night from 7–10 pm at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall at Seattle Center. Here you'll meet-and-greet your fellow Community members and hear them give five-minute talks about their hobbies and passion projects. Last year, we heard about everything from how to cook the perfect hot dog to what it's like to lose your short-term memory. Leave that notebook in your hotel and settle in for some fun. Enjoy light appetizers, non-alcoholic drinks, and two alcoholic drink tickets on us. It's going to be a blast! Speakers announced here. Wednesday09:00–10:00am 10:05–10:35am Strategic Storytelling Advisor at Kindra Hall Whoever tells the best story wins. In marketing, in business, in life. Going beyond buzzwords, Kindra will reveal specific storytelling strategies to create great content and win customers without a fight. Kindra Hall is a speaker, author, and storytelling advisor. She works with individuals and brands to help them capture attention by telling better stories. 10:35–11:20am Founder and CEO at UpBuild Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and one you're likely not using to its full potential. Mike will deliver 29 rapid-fire tips that'll empower you to overcome the tracking challenges of dynamic web apps, build user segments based on website interactions, scale the implementation of structured data, analyze the consumption of rich media, and much more. Mike Arnesen has been driven by his passion for technical SEO, semantic search, website optimization, and company culture for over a decade. He is the Founder and CEO of UpBuild, a technical marketing agency focusing on SEO, analytics, and CRO. 11:20–11:50am 11:55am–12:25pm CEO at AppsWithoutCode.com Tara shares how to build useful tools like calculators, widgets, and micro-apps to acquire millions of new users, without writing a single line of code. Tara Reed is a Detroit-based entrepreneur and founder of AppsWithoutCode.com. As a non-technical founder, she builds her own apps, widgets, and algorithms without writing a single line of code. 12:25–12:55pm Managing Director at Manyminds Securing links can be tough, and it's not about how creative or productive or smart we are, but how persuasive we are. Kirsty will walk you through how to get clients and managers to say yes to your best ideas, how to get interesting, affordable data, how to get experts to collaborate with you, and how to create outreach emails that compel people to cover your campaign. Kirsty Hulse is the founder of Manyminds Digital, a digital marketing agency made entirely of expert, independent resource. With a decade's experience, she has defined search strategies for some of the world's leading brands. 12:55–02:25pm 02:30–03:15pm CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC In the future, app and web content will be indistinguishable, and Google’s new Firebase platform allows developers to use the same resources to build, market, and maintain apps on all devices, in one place. Cindy will outline how digital marketers can use Firebase to help drive indexing of native and web app content, including Deep Links, Dynamic Links, and Angular JS web apps. Cindy Krum is the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events. 03:15–03:45pm UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive How often are you asked to influence people to click a button? Buy a product? Stay on a page? We like to think of ourselves as logical, yet 95% of our decisions are unconscious. Sarah shares how to weave cognitive psychology concepts into your digital experiences. Steal these persuasive triggers to boost engagement, conversions, leads, and even delight. Sarah Weise is UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive. She has crafted experiences for hundreds of websites, apps, and products. Over the past decade, she has specialized in creative, lean ways to connect with customers and build experiences that matter. 03:45–04:15pm 04:20–05:05pm Wizard of Moz Links still move the needle — on rankings, traffic, reputation, and referrals. Yet, some SEOs have come to believe that if we "create great content," links will just appear (and rankings will follow). Rand will dispel this myth and focus on how to build the architecture for a link strategy, alongside some hot new tools and tactics for link acquisition in 2016. Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web. 07:00pm–12:00am There ain't no party like a Moz party! It's true. We invite all MozCon attendees to join us on Wednesday night until midnight at the Garage for pool, photos, bowling, karaoke, and more. Let's relax and celebrate with all the new friends we've made. Congratulations to our MozCon Ignite speakers!MozCon Ignite is quickly becoming one of our favorite evening events. Trust me, you don't want to miss this Tuesday night MozCon event where our community comes together to share ideas, heartwarming tales, hilarious fun, and more about their lives outside of business and marketing. All in 5-minute stories. If you don't know what Ignite is, check out this 5-minute Ignite talk about what Ignite presentations are. This year, MozCon Ignite will be at McCaw Hall, home of the Seattle opera. Our lineup (in alphanumerical order):Help! I Can't Stop Sweating – Hyperhidrosis with Adam Melson With a love for all things digital, Adam Melson works for Seer Interactive as a team lead and has been there for over eight years. Outside of work, Adam loves running, hanging around his wife and baby, and sweats. A lot. Many people have a sweating problem. He'll go into that problem and solutions for it. Life Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Parent with Adrian Vender Internet Marketing Inc Adrian Vender is a seasoned digital marketing and analytics consultant, currently acting as the Director of Analytics at IMI. Adrian has a passion for integrating technical solutions to marketing strategies to provide the best opportunity for campaign optimization. When Adrian decides to give up on working for the day, he can get lost in the world of Reddit or in quality family time. How Pieces of Paper Can Change Lives with Anneke Kurt Godlewski Charles E. Boyk Law Offices, LLC After traveling and studying abroad in the Netherlands, Anneke Kurt Godlewski settled in Toledo not only to be close to family, but also because northwest Ohio has the most interesting and compassionate people, which has helped her career in community-based marketing and PR. Anneke has been called an excellent cook (she's just a great recipe-reader!), and she loves to take photographs, read, write, and give. She's also a freelance writer and currently working on a memoir called The Curvy Catholic, which chronicles keeping faith after bad dates, self-acceptance issues, and crazy motherhood. Prison and a Girl that Loves Puppies with Caitlin Boroden Caitlin Boroden is a Senior Digital Marketing Strategist at DragonSearch in the beautiful Hudson Valley, NY. She is fascinated by SEO, photography, puppies, and has a slight addiction to Reddit. My Year of Fuck It! with Daisy Quaker Daisy Quaker is an Online Marketing Manager at AMSOIL INC. She leads in-house SEO, online advertising, marketing automation, and lead nurturing efforts. She moonlights as co-founder at NezLab. NezLab specializes in Online Advertising (AdWords) audits that help clients maximize the return on their online ad campaigns. She also makes a mean curry and tries to get seven hours of sleep every night. A Plane Hacker's Guide to Cheap *Luxury* Travel with Ed Fry Ed Fry is a London-based marketer, employee #1 at inbound.org, and has just joined Hull.io as their first marketer. Outside of marketing, one of his favorite past times involves indulging in tea and scones at 35,000 feet. Embracing Awkward: The Tale of a 5' 10" 6th Grader with Hannah Cooley Hannah Cooley is an SEO manager at Seer Interactive in San Diego. (Yes, she knows Wil Reynolds. No, she doesn't have his personal phone number.) She may have been the most awkward 6th grader on earth, a phase that never quite went away. Hornets, Soba, & Friends: A Race in Japan with Kevin Smythe Kevin Smythe is a trail runner based in Seattle. When not running in the mountains, he's the controller at Moz, crunching numbers to provide balance to his life. Wooly Bits: Exploring the Binary of Yarn with Lindsay Dayton LaShell Diamond + Branch Marketing Group Lindsay Dayton LaShell is an experienced digital marketer, content strategist, and the founder of Diamond + Branch Marketing Group. She wishes she had six arms so that she could drink beer, scritch her dog, answer email, and knit a sock at the same time. Finding Myself in Fiction: LGBTQUIA Stories with Lisa Hunt Lisa Hunt is a Moz Helpster: the first to be hired outside of the U.S. and part of our small UK team. Before moving into support, she worked in retail as the manager of a bookshop. She was very disappointed to learn that they don't teach you to read in your first year at primary school and insisted that her mum teach her instead. Is Your Family Time for Sale? with Michael Cottam Visual Itineraries Michael Cottam is an independent SEO consultant from Bend, Oregon. Michael's a full-time single dad of 9-year old Benjamin, and when not saving clients from the wrath and whim of Google, he takes Ben traveling around the world and exploring the great outdoors. How to Start an Underground Restaurant in Your Home with Nadya Khoja Nadya Khoja is the Director of Marketing for Venngage and online infographic maker. When she is not working on promoting the tool, she hosts trade-based dinner parties in her apartment in Toronto. Flood Survival: Lessons from the Streets of ATL with Sarah Lively Sarah Lively is a Senior SEO Specialist at Nebo Agency where she specializes in building online reputations and helping clients perfect their digital strategies. She is also considered to be an amateur meteorologist and spends most of her spare time studying rain patterns and hiding from storms. How a Cartoon Saved My Life with Steve Hammer Steve Hammer is the co-founder and president of RankHammer, the 2015 US Search Awards small agency of the year. He's best known for his love of Adwords scripts and eating better than most anyone in Internet marketing. It's going to be a blast! Thank you to everyone who tossed their hats in the ring. Seriously, it takes courage to try. Hope to see you all at MozCon! Make sure to buy your ticket, as we sell out in advance every year. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4096730
The paradoxical findings suggest many SMBs are making assumptions about marketing effectiveness without actually measuring. The post Survey: Local search marketing top channel for SMBs but large number not tracking ROI appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Don’t miss out on MarTech Europe, THE conference for professionals at the intersection of marketing and IT. Rates go up this Saturday, register now and save £300 off on-site prices. You’ll get case studies from leading brands about the marketing, technology and management issues we all struggle...
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Columnist Andreas Reiffen shares insights about price sensitivity and user behavior in Google Shopping, based on an analysis of 15,000 conversions across the German, UK and US markets. The post Advanced Google Shopping: Is price a proxy for Quality Score in product ads? appeared first on Search...
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Expanded text ads recently went live in AdWords, so what's the next step? Columnist Pauline Jakober explains how to strategically expand on your existing text ads when making the transition. The post So we have 45 more characters in AdWords text ads… Now what? appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Marketers share how they are approaching the new text ad format and results they're seeing. The post Expanded Text Ads: from quirks to testing methods & early results, what we know so far appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/google-expanded-text-ads-quirks-testing-results-255093 Posted by CraigBradford Strategy is hard enough if you understand it. It's even harder if you don't. If you understand it, you realize it's made up of many moving parts. If you don’t, the best you’ll come up with is some version of operational efficiency: building more links, writing more blog posts, making more video. Those activities aren’t strategies — and if you fail to differentiate your plan, you’ll find yourself forever chasing those who started before you, or falling behind better-funded competitors. What is strategy?Good strategies are compounds, not elements. Start here: A good starting point for understanding strategy is an infamous article by Michael E. Porter – "What is Strategy?" It’s quite academic, but covers a lot of the key points. I recommend reading it a few times; it’s worth it. To understand what strategy is, I like to use a chemical analogy of elements and compounds. A compound is a combination of two or more elements. In the case of a strategy, the activities would be the elements and the strategy would be the compound. I like this analogy for a few reasons: Reverse-engineering a compound can be challengingMany people fall into the trap of trying to copy a competitor's strategy. This is bad for a number of reasons, but one in particular that I’d like to highlight: even if you think you know what a competitor's strategy is from the outside, it can be very hard to copy successfully unless you know all of the individual details. Much like a chemical reaction, different quantities of the same elements combined in different ways can produce very different results. Often, when people try to copy a strategy, they’re really just copying an element or activity. Compounds are only as strong as their weakest linkDifferent strategies take different levels of energy to crack. In What is Strategy?, this idea is referred to as “activity systems” and “fit.” The example used is Southwest Airlines. Some people would try and describe a strategy as a slogan: “Southwest Airlines services price- and convenience-sensitive customers.” That might be true, but there’s not anything particularly advantageous about that idea. The competitive advantage comes from how they integrate: “Through fast turnarounds at the gate of only 15 minutes, Southwest is able to keep planes flying longer hours than rivals and provide frequent departures with fewer aircraft. Southwest does not offer meals, assigned seats, interline baggage checking, or premium classes of service. Automated ticketing at the gate encourages customers to bypass travel agents, allowing Southwest to avoid their commissions. A standardized fleet of 737 aircraft boosts the efficiency of maintenance.” This is what those individual pieces look like as part of a system: The more stable the compound, the slower it reactsA stable compound with lots of bonds, while strong and hard to copy, is slow to adapt if the market changes unexpectedly. Change forces managers to dismantle their existing resource systems and reassemble them in new strategic positions. “For example, Liz Claiborne, an apparel company, relied on a positioning strategy in which production, distribution, marketing, design, presentation and sales resources were all tightly linked. But when the industry changed, the company’s relationships with department stores were disrupted. In an effort to adapt, Claiborne executives changed resources such as their “no reordering” process that had antagonized department stores. But since this process was synergistically entwined with other resources like overseas logistics and distant manufacturing locations, the “no reordering” process could not be undone without damaging system coherence. Financial performance sank precipitously. Only after Claiborne executives dismantled their existing resources and started reconnecting new ones did positive performance begin to return.” All of the above is to say that the key to an effective and sustainable strategy is to focus on the integration of activities. Operational efficiency alone isn’t a strategy. A good way to sanity-check this is by asking why you're doing an activity. I like this slide from fellow Distiller Rob Ousbey, which puts some of theory into context in marketing strategy: What type of strategy do you need?Start here: The type of marketing strategy you use can (and should) change as the business requirements change. Two questions that are a good place to start:
Based on your answers to those questions, there are choices. I like the wording from “Which Strategy When?”:
It’s possible, probably recommended, to have some mix of all three. I like the graph that our R&D team use to explain this, shown below. The idea is that there are always trade-offs between the chance of success and reward. Picking a strategy and making decisionsStart here:
Closely related to the difficulty of strategy is the necessity to make choices. Strategy forces you to make decisions and explicitly cut off options. This can be difficult for a number of reasons. I talked about this in depth in my SearchLove Boston presentation, Creating a Digital Strategy: One of the hardest things about strategy? Resisting the urge to do it all. The most obvious way this happens is by getting distracted by competitors. In the book The Secrets of Consulting, the first chapter introduces the idea of the law of strawberry jam: "the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets,” which is a nice way of saying that you can’t do it all. Every service or feature you add to your business has a cost of some kind. Trade-offs are a critical part of making sure your strategy is sustainable, because they protect from competitors trying to straddle multiple markets. To go back to the previous example of Southwest Airlines, someone that tried to spread it far and thick was Continental Lite. By trying to copy Southwest and offer a low-cost airline solution while still trying to compete as a full-service airline: “The airline dubbed the new service Continental Lite. It eliminated meals and first-class service, increased departure frequency, lowered fares, and shortened turnaround time at the gate. Because Continental remained a full-service airline on other routes, it continued to use travel agents and its mixed fleet of planes and to provide baggage checking and seat assignments.” If you haven’t made some trade-offs, your position probably isn’t sustainable and is open to imitation. “Trade-offs ultimately grounded Continental Lite. The airline lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job. Its planes were delayed leaving congested hub cities or slowed at the gate by baggage transfers. Late flights and cancellations generated a thousand complaints a day. Continental Lite could not afford to compete on price and still pay standard travel-agent commissions, but neither could it do without agents for its full-service business. The airline compromised by cutting commissions for all Continental flights across the board. Similarly, it could not afford to offer the same frequent-flier benefits to travelers paying the much lower ticket prices for Lite service. It compromised again by lowering the rewards of Continental’s entire frequent-flier program. The results: angry travel agents and full-service customers.” Other academic theories as to why copying competitors is a bad idea are covered in the Innovator's Dilemma, which I also recommend reading. The short version is that when competitors copy each other, the only person that wins is the customer. Over the long term, the more competitors converge, the more they look like each other and customers default to price to help choose between options. This drives prices down and squeezes margins. To draw comparisons to the search space, I see this taking place in processes like keyword research. So many companies make a big list of keywords, then churn out average content that looks the same as every other article online about that topic. Don’t waste your time. Advice for choosing a digital marketing strategyStart here: Don’t turn it into an optimization problem. There's more than one right answer in the majority of cases. I like the advice Scott McNealy gives (he was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years). When asked how he makes decisions, he said: “It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about 'making the right decision' and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.” What an amazing attitude! You can see how this applies at the later stage in strategy. Once you’ve gone through all of the possible scenarios, validated the ideas, and narrowed it down to the last couple, this is the stage where analysis paralysis takes effect and people naturally want to turn strategy into planning. Just pick one and focus on making sure it turns out a success. Another way to think about this: strategy is about placing bets and shortening odds of success. Remember that you can course-correct; strategy isn’t sniping. You can take more than one shot and iterate, so don’t be afraid to change. With that in mind, I’ll wrap it up. Hopefully this was useful to some people. For a deeper dive into this, take a look at my SearchLove presentation, Creating Your Digital Strategy, which covers all of the above and in a more practical, process-driven way.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4092077
The configuration showed three organic listings with one ad at the top. The post First appearance of ads in Local Pack found in UK mobile search result appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Olympics Google logo, SEO KPIs & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Wondering what metrics you should use to demonstrate value to your clients? Columnist Marcus Miller shares some of the most useful KPIs in terms of connecting SEO outcomes to business objectives. The post KPIs for SEO: measuring SEO success appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. A Google Fiber installer: Source: Twitter Google Japan Top Contributor...
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The free gaming app has "produce from all over the market" competing for the title of freshest fruit, and works on both Android and iOS. The post Olympics Google Doodle marks start of 2016 Rio Games & points to “Fruity Games” mobile app appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/olympics-google-doodle-marks-start-2016-rio-games-points-fruity-games-mobile-app-255155 Posted by randfish What's more important: drawing in more traffic, or converting the traffic you have? When it comes to your landing pages, that may be a tough question to answer. After watching today's Whiteboard Friday, you'll be better equipped to decide whether your site should opt for an SEO focus, a conversion focus, or a strategic balance of both. Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about landing pages and conversion-focused landing pages versus SEO-focused landing pages. An SEO-focused landing page has a few features that are unique from a conversion-focused landing page. In fact, both of them are unique. So what I'm going to do is use the example of Little Hotelier. Little Hotelier offers reservation software, front desk software for small hotels, B2Bs, guesthouses. I thought we could imagine basically a resource page on their website that was really a landing page that's focused on SEO around a hotel booking site database. So, of course, one of the things you have to do if you're a small hotel, or a B2B, or a guesthouse is you've got to get listed on hundreds if not thousands of different listing sites — Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, etc., etc., all the way down the list, down to the very local-focused ones or regional-focused ones. This page is much more resource-focused. They're trying to get people to see, "Hey, here are all of those sites that, well, of course, Little Hotelier can help list you on and manage for you, but also here's just generic and general information about them." I think it'd be awesome if they listed all of these sites and included things like traffic and the number of bookings that they saw from those sites in 2015, the requirements to get listed, and the submission page. Then they could have a CTA, a call to action like, "Let Little Hotelier manage hotel bookings for your property." This would work really as an SEO-focused landing page. It's designed to draw traffic in, to drive keywords like "list of hotel booking sites," "where to submit my small hotel," "most visited hotel booking sites." You could even make regional-focused ones of this, like "hotel listing sites New Zealand" if they wanted to have a New Zealand-focused set of sites where you could submit or manage yourself in the booking world. This one is really much more targeted, hypertargeted, only focused on the keywords that are going to convert people directly, like "small hotel software" or "B&B hotel reservation software," that kind of stuff. The differences and identifying your needsThe differences between these two and the way to identify whether you need one or the other or need a mix of them is to ask a few questions. First off:
If you're only concerned with conversion, then you want this one. But if you are worried about both ranking for keywords and trying to convert some visitors, you probably want a more content-focused page like this one, a more SEO-focused landing page. Bounce rate and engagement rateOne of the needs that you have with SEO is that you need low bounce rate and high engagement rate. But the reverse is true here. You don't necessarily need to worry about bounce rate, engagement rate, you only need to worry about conversion rate. SEO-focused: So this needs a low bounce rate and a high click-through rate. You want people staying on this page, you want them to click the call to action, and you want them to investigate more. Conversion-focused: But on this page, actually a high bounce rate is okay if the conversion rate is high. So if people are converting from this page, it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people visit and many of them go away from here. That's not too important to you. You're just worried about conversion rate and optimizing for that conversion rate. If you can bring that up a percent, you don't mind if bounce rate also goes up 5% or 6% or 7% because you're turning people off who are the wrong customers. Keyword targeting
SEO-focused: Here, you've got to have keyword-targeted content. That means the content itself needs to fulfill all the requirements that Google has and that visitors have around what they're looking for. Conversion-focused: This, keyword targeting is secondary or might even be unnecessary entirely. Editorial linksSEO-focused: This needs to be able to earn editorial links or it can't rank. If it can't earn editorial links, it's going to have a very, very difficult time with manual link building to a conversion-focused page. Commercially-focused pages are much tougher. Conversion-focused: But this one doesn't even need to worry about links at all. AudienceSEO-focused: This one has to serve many audiences. It's treated really like a piece of content that helps anyone who's looking for this information and then has a CTA, a call to action on the page. Conversion-focused: But this one needs to be heavily focused on one particular audience, the particular audience Little Hotelier is trying to convert who's the right customer for them, for their software. Hopefully, those folks are already qualified. SEO-focused: These folks over here are not necessarily qualified. This might be part of the qualification process. If you visit this page and you then say, "Huh, I'm kind of interested in letting them manage my bookings," maybe you should end up here, on this landing page that is conversion-focused. TrafficSEO-focused: This page should be driving traffic to those more conversion rate-focused pages. Conversion-focused: This page, yes, it might rank for some keywords, but it's primarily concerned with direct conversions, and hopefully it's receiving traffic from other onsite channels, like this one, or offsite paid channels that are driving very targeted visitors. What I'd urge you to do is ask yourself these questions when you're considering a landing page. Am I trying to earn traffic that might be interested in my content? If so, you're building one of these (SEO-focused). If you're trying to target an audience that is already qualified, that's already familiar with you, or that you're trying to get familiar with your product, then you're really trying to convert them, in which case you want one of these (conversion-focused). Conversion-focused: These pages are great for doing tons of landing page testing and optimization. They're great for videos. They're great for testimonials. SEO-focused: These types of pages are great for content. They're great for serving all sorts of visitor intense. They're great for targeting a large set of keywords that all have the same searcher intent. When you try and mix these, things get a little challenging. That's where you really need to balance out and decide: "Hey, what is my primary goal here? Serve the searcher audience, which may not be conversion-focused, or convert people and not worry so much about the searcher audience. Maybe try to capture them on other pages before they get here." All right, everyone, look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4067754
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Gboard update, Google local reviews & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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