Act now: your chance to learn actionable SEO and SEM tactics ends soon. SMX East is next week!9/20/2016
SMX East kicks off in just a few days! Why settle for flat SEO and SEM performance? Get actionable SEO and SEM tactics and best practices in retargeting, AdWords scripts, backlinks, adaptable content, and more. View the exceptional content in our agenda, then register for the ultimate search...
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Posted by dohertyjf I remember when I first started in SEO back in 2010 full-time. It feels like forever ago and yesterday at the same time. I was constantly plugged into the SEO Twitter firehose of information. I subscribed to the popular SEO blogs of the day, soaking up information about SEO that wasn’t even relevant to my day job at the time building links. While I read plenty of content about link acquisition, I also went deep into the geeky sides of technical SEO because it appealed to my web developer background. Every week or two, Google was announcing something new. Some new feature, some new snippet, some new ad type, some new way of getting your pages/sites indexed faster and making them stand out from the crowd. I remember SMX 2012 in New York City where I sat in on a session where now-former Mozzer Matt Brown spoke on Schema.org and counseled all of us to hop on the Schema bandwagon because it was the future of search. You can see that presentation here and I’ll reference it a few times in this post. Five years later, I can look back and say, “Yes, they were right. Schema has stuck around and proven to be a stronger and stronger part of search algorithms and you should learn it and implement it, if you haven't already.” It works and we know that now in 2016, but back in 2012 it was new and took a lot of effort to implement. And so many people simply didn’t. So how can you, as either a small business owner dabbling in SEO (while also doing all the things as the owner) or a professional SEO/digital marketer, know when you should implement something that's brand-new, or whether you should wait on it until you have more data? Is there a history of it?Google is almost twenty years old, if you can believe that. They’ve been around a long time, built a huge business, and changed the way the world’s information is organized, found, and consumed. Google is a once-in-a-lifetime company, and I say that as someone with a love/hate relationship with them (alongside many other SEOs/digital marketers). In spite of their growth and current size, their mission has always been the same: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This is at Google’s core. Google has moved into other areas, such as social, but haven't seen great success because they're better at organizing content than creating it. Check out this from Matthew Brown’s talk: The Authorship program was killed in 2014 (post here on SEL), though the idea behind it (identifying who wrote what and where online) lives on to help Google organize the world’s information better. This is a great example of something that everyone said you *should* do (and maybe short-term helped with clickthrough rates), but which Google eventually killed because it was a new initiative. You would have been much better served to spend your time writing around the Internet and marketing your company than just trying to get an image in the SERPs. Are others already implementing it?I hate the United States culture of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses. Why do we feel the need to spend money that we don’t have to buy things we don’t want to impress people we don’t really like (paraphrase from here)? The same thing happens in digital marketing. If we see someone implementing something, we should rightly ask "Why are they doing that?", then make our own decisions. The interesting thing — just like with impressing our neighbors — is that sometimes (but not always) they will have the inside line on something great that a) you can afford (aka get done for your company) and b) is in line with your personal strategy and values (aka you’re true to yourself). HTTPS is one such example. If you’re a business with customers (which all of you are, because how do you make money without customers? If you can, I’d like to speak with you), then you care about them and want them to be safe and happy. While HTTPS takes time to deploy on large websites, and can have very real challenges as Wired is learning the hard way, on smaller sites it can be much simpler and can be implemented more quickly. You may not see a bump in rankings, traffic, or revenue right away, but you can be sure that HTTPS is something Google wants to and is beginning to reward. Finally, if you see something rolled out and not many people are implementing it, ask why. If it’s because it’s difficult technically but you can get it done fast and it’s true to your strategy, then get it done — it'll help you get ahead of the pack. If it requires a huge undertaking, however, take your time and wait until the barrier to entry is lower or until the search engines finally start making good on their promises. Is it a continuation or a new initiative for Google?Earlier I mentioned Google’s core mission of organizing the world’s information. This is why Google was initially created, and it's what they still do incredibly well. Over time, they’ve (finally) taken the user into account and realized that offering a great user experience benefits their bottom line. User experience (and design!) has become part of their core. There are a few things that Google is terrible at, such as social or content. They’re also terrible at launching software that works really well and can displace incumbents. Google Flights is great, but online travel agencies (OTAs) like Expedia are still winning, even as Google puts themselves above the organic results. That’s just one example. If it’s a brand-new initiative that Google has not previously gone after, be very suspicious. I like the "hurry up and wait" approach here — hurry up to learn all that you can about it, but wait on implementing it, especially if you're a small company with a million things to do already. Stay true to your strategy. If it’s a continuation of something they've already been doing and received traction on, then you should take more notice and seriously consider how you can implement it for your company. Take, for example, the recent rollout of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which essentially allows Google to display a cached version of your page to mobile users so that it loads quickly and makes users happy(er). Google has said for years that they want above-the-fold content on mobile sites to load in under one second. AMP is a continuation of something they've been conveying for quite a while, a promised initiative they're finally making good on. Within mobile search results, we now see how sites that load quickly tend to rank better than they otherwise would. I’ve witnessed this firsthand on some of the sites I've touched — when engineers care about speed, your site makes both search engines and users very happy. Is it passive or active?Sometimes Google creates new initiatives within search that require no implementation on your end. They run tests all the time (SERPtests is a great resource from Conrad O’Connell) that affect the way your site shows up. Don’t assume that just because they’ve changed something that it’s in your best interest. Google is a business and they exist to make themselves money, not you. As an SEO, you are not Google’s friend. So, once again, we hurry up to learn and then decide whether we should take action (adjust your meta descriptions, add Schema, etc.) or just sit back and let the data accumulate to inform better decisions. The answer will always be different depending on your business, and I can’t tell you whether you'll benefit from specific changes or not. But you're empowered to make that decision. If a new feature requires active development from your end, take the time to figure out why Google's made the change, what it might mean for the future, and how much work it’s going to take to achieve the expected outcome. If you’re a consultant and not helping your clients prioritize their work based off the predicted impact and the amount of effort, you’re not doing your job. And if you’re an in-house SEO in this boat, same message: you’re not doing your job. Does it fit with your current SEO strategy?I’ve touched on this point a few times, but I consider it so important that it merits its own section. I’ve been a consultant since 2011. I’ve worked with businesses of all kinds and ran marketing directly on a few bigger brands as well. I’ve seen companies with zero SEO strategy where we built it from scratch, and I’ve seen companies with an SEO strategy that was set years ago and hasn’t changed. Neither of these is good. An SEO strategy should be set, to a degree. You should know what your business needs to do in order to rank and drive the business results needed from organic search. However, your strategy should not be so set that you're unable to implement new things that are both true to your business and will move that metrics needle. Know where you're going with your strategy and what your metrics are. By having those goals in mind and by putting in place processes that allow you to grow passively, you can confidently say "yes" or "no" to new features that may move the needle or may be a distraction. What about first-mover advantage?Now, I know there are a lot of people who believe that being a first mover is a great thing. And when you’re launching a new business, this mindset is incredibly pervasive. Everyone wants to "find the niche where no one is and be there to be the first mover." The problem is that first mover advantage doesn’t always exist. From a Harvard Business Review article: First-mover status can confer advantages, but it does not do so categorically. Much depends on the circumstances. I don’t really believe in first-mover advantage, and as an entrepreneur, going into a completely new realm where no one else has gone before feels too risky to me. I’d rather take my time to learn from others who are trying to do something similar, figure out the unique angle on the business (whether the vertical or the business model), and then build something that users really want. This is called being wise (listening to others) not just smart (figuring it all out on your own). SEO is a constantly shifting industry. We’re built on the back of a computer algorithm, after all. Because of this, things will change constantly and all digital marketers need to develop a rubric through which you can decide whether a new feature or opportunity is worth your time, effort, and change of strategy long-term.
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Europe sees a fairer marketplace, Google sees a bonanza for lawyers. The post New EU copyright rules: basic fairness or punitive media subsidy? appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Posted by Scott Huffman, VP of Engineering
We have been investing in the core machine learning technologies that enable natural language interfaces for years. To continue that investment, we’re excited to welcome API.AI to Google! API.AI has a proven track record for helping developers design, build and continuously improve their conversational interfaces. Over 60,000 developers are using API.AI to build conversational experiences, for environments such as Slack, Facebook Messenger and Kik, to name just a few. API.AI offers one of the leading conversational user interface platforms and they’ll help Google empower developers to continue building great natural language interfaces. Stay tuned for more on details on integrations into Google. And if you’re already using API.AI, keep building your conversational interfaces and if you’re not, start today! via Google Developers Blog http://developers.googleblog.com/2016/09/making-conversational-interfaces-easier-to-build.html
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: SEO vectors, Google data studio & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Currently in beta, Google Data Studio allows you to create branded reports with data visualizations to share with your clients. Columnist Sherry Bonelli explains the benefits and how to try it out. The post What is Google Data Studio and how can you use it? appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Contributor JR Oakes takes look at technology from the natural language processing and machine-learning community to see if it's useful for SEO. The post Using word vectors and applying them in SEO 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/word-vectors-implication-seo-258599 Posted by BrianChilds Coming up with blog titles and topics can be a struggle. Most small businesses aim to publish blogs 3-10 times a month and then use these blog articles to populate everything from newsletters to conversion funnels. When you publish content on a regular basis it's easy to burn through your initial list of blog titles in a few months. Coming up with good titles also takes a lot of time, and when you work on a team defining what's "good" becomes subjective. Because regular blogging has such a positive impact on inbound traffic, the process of coming up with ideas shouldn't be a burden. Never worry about blog topics again: I'll show you how to generate 100+ long-tail blog title ideas that include estimates of search volume and competitiveness. What makes a good blog title?Before jumping into how to generate 100+ blog topics quickly, let's discuss the importance of having good titles. I think of blog content development as having two parts: blog articles that form the core of my SEO or inbound marketing strategy, and a backup list of blog ideas I can pull from in a pinch. Both types benefit from having great titles. Good topics generally follow some basic rules, including:
When it comes to generating a great backup list of blog topics quickly, it can be hard to identify titles that meet those criteria without succumbing to clickbait. There are several blog title generator tools available, but I find that they tend toward clickbait or "catchy" titles that are more useful for paid channels rather than the long-term value expected from organic search. Some of the more popular blog title generators are: HubSpot's Blog Topic Generator Impact's BlogAbout Title Generator Portent's Content Idea Generator It should come as no surprise that there's been a backlash against clickbait titles recently. I recommend against using traditionally clickbait titles since they often result in only one type of beneficial metric: page views. To positively impact both search rank position and on-site conversions you need to focus on valuable content that delivers high engagement measured by things like better-than-average time on page, good page depth, and low bounce rates. Clickbait titles and content generally do not provide this. A better way to generateOkay, so let's take a look at a quick way to generate blog titles. Read it, try it, and time it.
Boom! There you have it. Never hunt for blog titles again. You've created a list you can choose from in a pinch, knowing you have quality titles based on search volume, difficulty, and opportunity. See how fast you can create a great list of blog titles! More tips for professional marketersAs you analyze results from the Keyword Suggestions feature in Keyword Explorer, here are some additional things you can do to learn about your target customers: Look for trends in the questions people ask. Do most questions center on a specific pain point, such as cost, quality, or ease of use? Consider segmenting your users based on these different pain points and their associated value drivers. Find the "best question." In your list of blog titles, look for the one question that best aligns with your target customer. Then run a Keyword Explorer query on that question by selecting the magnifying glass icon on the right side of the webpage. Often, these results will display an even longer, more targeted list of questions to choose from. Hope this helps your blogging efforts! Tell us about your experience using Keyword Explorer to generate targeted blog titles. If you want to keep mastering keywords and blog titles after your Moz Pro free trial ends, check out Moz Pro Medium or Keyword Explorer standalone subscriptions. 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/9375/4447697 Posted by sam.nemzer As of June this year, Google is now grouping keyword volumes for similar keywords in Keyword Planner. I wanted to investigate whether or not this is having an impact on the pages that rank for these similar, grouped keywords. My hypothesis is that, given that Google is associating keywords closely enough to group their volumes, we should expect that the search results would be very similar too. What has Google changed and why does it matter?The grouping of keyword volumes is a problem for anyone working in search because Keyword Planner is the primary source for volume data that we use in keyword research, whether that be from Keyword Planner directly, or through a third party tool that takes Keyword Planner data as its input—such as SEMRush, BrightEdge or SearchMetrics. By "grouping keyword volumes," we mean that different keywords that are slightly different (but generally convey the same meaning) are given the same volume, which represents the combined volume of every variation. For example, if (hypothetically) [SEO] is searched 21,000 times per month in the UK, and [Search Engine Optimisation] is searched 12,100 times per month, once these keywords are combined, each will be reported as receiving the total of the two—33,100 searches per month.\ On top of this, in the last few weeks Google have also been reducing access to keyword planner data for some accounts. Earlier this month, it was announced that Keyword Planner data will be given only in very broad buckets for advertisers with "lower monthly spend" (although some ways around this have been found). This is a separate change from the volume grouping, which is the main focus of this article. The fact that Google is grouping keyword volumes in this way implies that they see these keywords as equivalent, at least to some extent. The questions that this raised for me were:
There is further reason to think this way given the simple fact that Google is always getting smarter. As well as Parsey McParseface, the English language parser that Google released to the public, much of the research output that we see in patents and journal articles from Google relates to natural language processing, so it is clear that this is an area that Google see as a priority for their research. One way to test whether or not Google does indeed consider grouped keywords to be identical is to look at search results. The theory is that if keywords are viewed identically, we should see exactly the same pages ranking for the keywords. What's going on in the SERPs?I did a similar analysis a few months ago, which was focused more on general distinctions between keywords within a topic. This analysis is much more focused on the types of variations of keywords that we are seeing being grouped. These types of variations were categorised by, among others, Jennifer Slegg at The SEM Post. The five types of variations that I've looked into for this analysis are the following:
For each of these five categories, I put together a list of 50-100 keywords, along with a variation for each. Within these keyword pairs I investigated whether or not Keyword Planner reported the same volume, and also used the rank tracking tool STAT to see what pages are ranking for each keyword. From that analysis, I was able to measure the prevalence of grouping keyword volumes within each category (i.e. the percentage of keyword pairs that have grouped volumes), and the similarity of the SERPs (the number of top ten results that were shared between the two keywords) for grouped and ungrouped keyword pairs. ResultsThe results for those metrics are the following: I also looked at how common it is that SERPs are exactly identical, that is that the top ten results are the same pages, in the same order. This showed an interesting pattern. There are only two categories with significant numbers of identical SERPs—Punctuation and Typos. In the case of keywords with and without punctuation, you are more likely to see identical SERPs (implying that Google sees the pair of keywords as identical) if keyword volumes are grouped than if they are not. This is not a hard-and-fast rule though – there are still some ungrouped keywords which have identical SERPs. In the case of Typos, there are no grouped keyword pairs at all that have identical SERPs. Given also the low prevalence of grouped keywords in this category, it appears that the identical SERPs are coming from "showing results for" SERPs, where Google replaces results for the mistyped keywords with the correct one. What conclusions can we draw?
What should we take away from this?What does this mean for SEOs doing keyword research? Rank tracking companies such as STAT are looking into ways of splitting keyword volumes between the constituent keywords, so there is hope for at least semi-accurate volume data. What it does mean is that we should ignore the grouped volumes when targeting keywords—just because keywords are given the same volume, it doesn't mean you shouldn't target them individually on your site. On a wider scale, this tells us something about how the anthropomorphised "Google" thinks and works. There are two very separate factors at work here—what Google tells us, and what we actually see. This is something Rand picked up on in his recent Whiteboard Friday, and it applies across all of search—Google tells us one thing, but search rankings don't necessarily behave the same way. This backs up my belief to never take anything at face value, and always do your own research. Do these results surprise you as much as they do me? Let me know in the comments. 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/9375/4445461
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google algorithm update, iOS10 widgets & images in mobile 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-algorithm-update-ios10-widgets-images-mobile-258948
While conventional wisdom and recently published studies may hold that link building takes a long time to have a positive impact, columnist Conrad Saam begs to differ and shares four case studies. The post The immediate results of link building appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Getting a handle on the data for multiple-location businesses can be a significant challenge. Columnist Brian Smith provides step-by-step guidelines to making it happen. The post How to manage local listings for enterprise brands appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Was there a major Google algorithm change this week? Many webmasters believe so. The post Google downplays the Google algorithm ranking update this week as “normal fluctuations” appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Google is now showing images in the mobile search results for product like queries. Do you like the new mobile search snippets? The post Google mobile search results now showing images in the snippets 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. Bing Ads agency awards event: Source: Twitter Google baby big: Source:...
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Google search could be on the iOS Search screen with a widget, if it wanted. Why isn't it offering that option to its users? The post There’s no Google Search widget for the iOS 10 Search screen: why that matters 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-widget-ios-258885 Posted by rcancino With all the data that today's marketers can access, there's often still no substitute for the quality of information you can get from interviewing real people. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we welcome Rebekah Cancino -- a partner at Phoenix-based Onward and #MozCon 2016 speaker -- to teach us the whys and hows of great interviews. Video TranscriptionHi, Moz fans. I'm Rebekah Cancino. I'm a partner at Onward, and I lead content strategy and user experience design. Today I'm here to talk to you about how to support the data you have, your keyword data, data around search intent, analytics with real life user interviews. So recently, Rand has been talking a little more about the relationship between user experience design and SEO, whether it's managing the tensions between the two or the importance of understanding the path to customer purchase. He said that in order to understand that path, we have to talk to real people. We have to do interviews, whether that's talking to actual users or maybe just people inside your company that have an understanding of the psychographics and the demographics of your target audience, so people like sales folks or customer service reps. Now, maybe you're a super data-driven marketer and you haven't felt the need to talk to real people and do interviews in the past, or maybe you have done user interviews and you found that you got a bunch of obvious insights and it was a huge waste of time and money. I'm here to tell you that coupling your data with real interviews is always going to give you better results. But having interviews that are useful can be a little bit tricky. The interviews that you do are only as good as the questions you ask and the approach that you take. So I want to make sure that you're all set and prepared to have really good user interviews. All it takes is a little practice and preparation. It's helpful to think of it like this. So the data is kind of telling us what happened. It can tell us about online behaviors, things like keywords, keyword volume, search intent. We can use tools, like KeywordTool.io or Ubersuggest or even Moz's Keyword Explorer, to start to understand that. We can look at our analytics, entry and exit pages, bounces, pages that get a lot of views, all of that stuff really important and we can learn a lot from it. But with our interviews, what we're learning about is the why. This is the stuff that online data just can't tell us. This is about those offline behaviors, the emotions, beliefs, attitudes that drive the behaviors and ultimately the purchase decisions. So these two things working together can help us get a really great picture of the whole story and make smarter decisions. So say, for example, you have an online retailer. They sell mainly chocolate-dipped berries. They've done their homework. They've seen that most of the keywords people are using tend to be something like "chocolate dipped strawberries gifts" or "chocolate dipped strawberries delivered." And they've done the work to make sure that they've done their on-page optimization and doing a lot of other smart things too using that. But then they also noticed that their Mother's Day packages and their graduation gifts are not doing so well. They're starting to see a lot of drop-offs around that product description page and a higher cart abandonment rate than usual. Now, given the data they had, they might make decisions like, "Well, let's see if we can do a little more on-page keyword optimization to reflect what's special about the graduation and Mother's Day gifts, or maybe we can refine the user experience of the checkout process. But if they talk to some real users -- which they did, this is a real story -- they might learn that people who send food gift items, they worry about: Is the person I'm sending the gift to, are they going to be home when this gift arrives? Because this is a perishable item, like chocolate-dipped berries, will it melt? Now, this company, they do a lot of work to protect the berries. The box that they arrive in is super insulated. It's like its own cooler. They have really great content that tells that story. The problem is that content is buried in the FAQs instead of on the pages in places it matters most -- the product detail, the checkout flow. So you can see here how there's an opportunity to use the data and the interview insights together to make smarter decisions. You can get to insights like that for your organization too. Let's talk about some tips that are going to help you make smarter interview decisions. So the first one is to talk to a spectrum of users who represent your ideal audience. Maybe, like with this berry example, their ideal customer tends to skew slightly female. You would want that group of people, that you're talking to, to skew that way too. Perhaps they have a little more disposable income. That should be reflected in the group of people that you're interviewing and so forth. You get it. The next one is to ask day-in-the-life, open-ended questions. This is really important. If you ask typical marketing questions like, "How likely are you to do this or that?" or, "Tell me on a scale of 1 to 10 how great this was," you'll get typical marketing answers. What we want is real nuanced answers that tell us about someone's real experience. So I'll ask questions like, "Tell me about the last time you bought a food gift online? What was that like?" We're trying to get that person to walk us through their journey from the minute they're considering something to how they vet the solutions to actually making that purchase decision. Next is don't influence the answers. You don't want to bias someone's response by introducing an idea. So I wouldn't say something like, "Tell me about the last time you bought a food gift online. Were you worried that it would spoil?" Now I've set them on a path that maybe they wouldn't have gone on to begin with. It's much better to let that story unfold naturally. Moving on, dig deeper. Uncover the why, really important. Maybe when you're talking to people you realize that they like to cook and by sharing a food item gift with someone who's far away, they can feel closer to them. Maybe they like gifts to reflect how thoughtful they are or what good tastes they have. You always want to uncover the underlying motives behind the actions people are taking. So don't be too rushed in skipping to the next question. If you hear something that's a little bit vague or maybe you see a point that's interesting, follow up with some probes. Ask things like, "Tell me more about that," or, "Why is that? What did you like about it?" and so on. Next, listen more than you talk. You have maybe 30 to 45 minutes max with each one of these interviews. You don't want to waste time by inserting yourself into their story. If that happens, it's cool, totally natural. Just find a way to back yourself out of that and bring the focus back to the person you're interviewing as quickly and naturally as possible. Take note of phrases and words that they use. Do they say things like "dipped berries" instead of "chocolate-dipped strawberries?" You want to pay attention to the different ways and phrases that they use. Are there regional differences? What kinds of words do they use to describe your product or service or experience? Are the berries fun, decadent, luxurious? By learning what kind of language and vocabulary people use, you can have copy, meta descriptions, emails that take that into account and reflect that. Find the friction. So in every experience that we have, there's always something that's kind of challenging. We want to get to the bottom of that with our users so we can find ways to mitigate that point of friction earlier on in the journey. So I might ask someone a question like, "What's the most challenging thing about the last time you bought a food gift?" If that doesn't kind of spark an idea with them, I might say something even a little more broad, like, "Tell me about a time you were really disappointed in a gift that you bought or a food gift that you bought," and see where that takes them. Be prepared. Great interviews don't happen by accident. Coming up with all these questions takes time and preparation. You want to put a lot of thought into them. By asking questions that tell me about the nature of the whole journey, you want to be clear about your priorities. Know which questions are most important to you and know which ones are must have pieces of information. That way you can use your time wisely while you still let the conversation flow where it takes you. Finally, relax and breathe. The people you're interviewing are only going to be as relaxed as you are. If you're stiff or overly formal or treating this like it's a chore and you're bored, they're going to pick up on that energy and they're probably not going to feel comfortable sharing their thoughts with you, or there won't be space for that to happen. Make sure you let them know ahead of time, like, "Hey, feel free to be honest. These answers aren't going to be shared in a way that can be attributed directly to you, just an aggregate." And have fun with it. Be genuinely curious and excited about what you're going to learn. They'll appreciate that too. So once you've kind of finished and you've wrapped up those interviews, take a step back. Don't get too focused or caught up on just one of the results. You want to kind of look at the data in aggregate, the qualitative data and let it talk to you. What stories are there? Are you seeing any patterns or themes that you can take note of, kind of like the theme around people being worried about the berries melting? Then you can organize those findings and make sure you summarize it and synthesize it in a way that the people who have to use those insights that you've gotten can make sense of. Make sure that you tell real stories and humanize this information. Maybe you recorded the interviews, which is always a really good idea. You can go back and pull out little sound bites or clips of the people saying these really impactful things and use that when you're presenting the data. So going back to that berry example, if you recall, we had that data around: Hey, we're seeing a lot of drop-offs on the product description page. We're seeing a higher cart abandonment rate. But maybe during the user interviews, we noticed a theme of people talking about how they obsessively click the tracking link on the packages, or they wait for those gift recipients to send them a text message to say, "Hey, I got this present." As you kind of unraveled why, you noticed that it had to do with the fact that these berries might melt and they're worried about that. Well, now you can elevate the content that you have around how those berries are protected in a little cooler-like box on the pages and the places it matters most. So maybe there's a video or an animated GIF that shows people how the berries are protected, right there in the checkout flow. I hope that this encourages you to get out there and talk to real users, find out about their context and use that information to really elevate your search data. It's not about having a big sample size or a huge survey. It's much more about getting to real life experiences around your product or service that adds depth to the data that you have. In doing that, hopefully you'll be able to increase some conversions and maybe even improve behavioral metrics, so those UX metrics that, I don't know, theoretically could lead to higher organic visibility anyway. That's all for now. Thanks so much. 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/9375/4423946
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google images, mobile shopping & election hub 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-images-mobile-shopping-election-hub-258869
You are now 50% less likely to see the image box show up in your Google search results page. Is it a bug or a feature? The post Google drastically reduces how often the image box shows up in the web search results 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-drastically-reduces-often-image-box-shows-web-search-results-258846
As we edge closer to the holidays, it's time to make the most of your Google Shopping campaigns. Columnist David Rekuc reveals seven tips to help you bring your shopping campaigns up a notch. The post 7 advanced tips for Google Shopping ads 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/7-advanced-tips-google-shopping-ads-258660
Bidding on your competitors' brand terms could yield positive results, but columnist Jacob Baadsgaard warns that it might cause problems in the long run. The post Bidding on the competition: Is it really worth it? 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/bidding-competition-really-worth-258398
Advertisers have seen many big updates from Google over the past year, but columnist Andy Taylor makes the case that the most impactful updates may well have been the least publicized. The post The biggest Google ad updates are also the quietest 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/biggest-google-ad-updates-also-quietest-258423
Survey says nearly 90 percent of mobile consumers turn to search first. The post Google: Search the primary and most often used mobile shopping tool 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-primary-often-used-mobile-shopping-tool-258649
Google says election-related searches for this election cycle are up 240% over 2012. The post Google Trends Election Hub offers deep dive into search trends for 2016 candidates & political issues 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-trends-election-hub-offers-deep-dive-search-trends-2016-candidates-political-issues-258784 Posted by petewailes Progressive Web Apps. Ah yes, those things that Google would have you believe are a combination of Ghandi and Dumbledore, come to save the world from the terror that is the Painfully Slow WebsiteTM. But what actually makes a PWA? Should you have one? And if you create one, how will you make sure it ranks? Well, read on to find out... What's a PWA?Given as that Google came up with the term, I thought we'd kick off with their definition: "A Progressive Web App uses modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience." The really exciting thing about PWAs: they could make app development less necessary. Your mobile website becomes your app. Speaking to some of my colleagues at Builtvisible, this seemed to be a point of interesting discussion: do brands need an app and a website, or a PWA? Fleshing this out a little, this means we'd expect things like push notifications, background sync, the site/app working offline, having a certain look/design to feel like a native application, and being able to be set on the device home screen. These are things we traditionally haven't had available to us on the web. But thanks to new browsers supporting more and more of the HTML5 spec and advances in JavaScript, we can start to create some of this functionality. On the whole, Progressive Web Apps are:
It's worth taking a moment to unpack the "app-like" part of that. Fundamentally, there are two parts to a PWA: service workers (which we'll come to in a minute), and application shell architecture. Google defines this as: ...the minimal HTML, CSS, and JavaScript powering a user interface. The application shell should: This method of loading content allows for incredibly fast perceived speed. We are able to get something that looks like our site in front of a user almost instantly, just without any content. The page will then go and fetch the content and all's well. Obviously, if we actually did things this way in the real world, we'd run in to SEO issues pretty quickly, but we'll address that later too. If then, at their core, a Progressive Web App is just a website served in a clever way with extra features for loading stuff, why would we want one? The use caseLet me be clear before I get into this: for most people, a PWA is something you don't need. That's important enough that it bares repeating, so I'll repeat it: You probably don't need a PWA. The reason for this is that most websites don't need to be able to behave like an app. This isn't to say that there's no benefit to having the things that PWA functionality can bring, but for many sites, the benefits don't outweigh the time it takes to implement the functionality at the moment. When should you look at a PWA then? Well, let's look at a checklist of things that may indicate that you do need one... Signs a PWA may be appropriateYou have:
In short, you have something beyond a normal website, with interactive or time-sensitive components, or rapidly released or updated content. A good example is the Google Weather PWA: If you're running a normal site, with a blog that maybe updates every day or two, or even less frequently, then whilst it might be nice to have a site that acts as a PWA, there's probably more useful things you can be doing with your time for your business. How they workSo, you have something that would benefit from this sort of functionality, but need to know how these things work. Welcome to the wonder that is the service worker. Service workers can be thought of as a proxy that sits between your website and the browser. It calls for intercept of things you ask the browser to do, and hijacking of the responses given back. That means we can do things like, for example, hold a copy of data requested, so when it's asked for again, we can serve it straight back (this is called caching). This means we can fetch data once, then replay it a thousand times without having to fetch it again. Think of it like a musician recording an album — it means they don't have to play a concert every time you want to listen to their music. Same thing, but with network data. If you want a more thorough explanation of service workers, check out this moderately technical talk given by Jake Archibald from Google. What service workers can doService workers fundamentally exist to deliver extra features, which have not been available to browsers until now. These includes things like:
It's planned that in the future, they'll be able to do even more than they currently can. For now though, these are the sorts of features you'll be able to make use of. Obviously these mostly load data via AJAX, once the app is already loaded. What are the SEO implications?So you're sold on Progressive Web Apps. But if you create one, how will you make sure it ranks? As with any new front-end technology, there are always implications for your SEO visibility. But don't panic; the potential issues you'll encounter with a PWA have been solved before by SEOs who have worked on JavaScript-heavy websites. For a primer on that, take a look at this article on JS SEO. There are a few issues you may encounter if you're going to have a site that makes use of application shell architecture. Firstly, it's pretty much required that you're going to be using some form of JS framework or view library, like Angular or React. If this is the case, you're going to want to take a look at some Angular.JS or React SEO advice. If you're using something else, the short version is you'll need to be pre-rendering pages on the server, then picking up with your application when it's loaded. This enables you to have all the good things these tools give you, whilst also serving something Google et al can understand. Despite their recent advice that they're getting good at rendering this sort of application, we still see plenty of examples in the wild of them flailing horribly when they crawl heavy JS stuff. Assuming you're in the world of clever JS front-end technologies, to make sure you do things the PWA way, you'll also need to be delivering the CSS and JS required to make the page work along with the HTML. Not just including Obviously, this means you're going to increase the size of the page you're sending down the wire, but it has the upside of meaning that the page will load instantly. More than that, though, with all the JS (required for pick-up) and CSS (required to make sense of the design) delivered immediately, the browser will be able to render your content and deliver something that looks correct and works straightaway. Again, as we're going to be using service workers to cache content once it's arrived, this shouldn't have too much of an impact. We can also cache all the CSS and JS external files required separately, and load them from the cache store rather than fetching them every time. This does make it very slightly more likely that the PWA will fail on the first time that a user tries to request your site, but you can still handle this case gracefully with an error message or default content, and re-try on the next page view. There are other potential issues people can run in to, as well. The Washington Post, for example, built a PWA version of their site, but it only works on a mobile device. Obviously, that means the site can be crawled nicely by Google's mobile bots, but not the desktop ones. It's important to respect the P part of the acronym — the website should enable features that a user can make use of, but still work in a normal manner for those who are using browsers that don't support them. It's about enhancing functionality progressively, not demanding that people upgrade their browser. The only slightly tricky thing with all of this is that it requires that, for best experience, you design your application for offline-first experiences. How that's done is referenced in Jake's talk above. The only issue with going down that route: you're only serving content once someone's arrived at your site and waited long enough to load everything. Obviously, in the case of Google, that's not going to work well. So here's what I'd suggest... Rather than just sending your application shell, and then using AJAX to request content on load, and then picking up, use this workflow instead:
Adding in the data required means that, on load, we don't have to make an AJAX call to get the initial data required. Instead, we can bundle that in too, so we get something that can render content instantly as well. As an example of this, let's think of a weather app. Now, the basic model would be that we send the user all the content to show a basic version of our app, but not the data to say what the weather is. In this modified version, we also send along what today's weather is, but for any subsequent data request, we then go to the server with an AJAX call. This means we still deliver content that Google et al can index, without possible issues from our AJAX calls failing. From Google and the user's perspective, we're just delivering a very high-performance initial load, then registering service workers to give faster experiences for every subsequent page and possibly extra functionality. In the case of a weather app, that might mean pre-fetching tomorrow's weather each day at midnight, or notifying the user if it's going to rain, for example. Going furtherIf you're interested in learning more about PWAs, I highly recommend reading this guide to PWAs by Addy Osmani (a Google Chrome engineer), and then putting together a very basic working example, like the train one Jake mentions in his YouTube talk referenced earlier. If you're interested in that, I recommend Jake's Udacity course on creating a PWA available here. 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/9375/4415486 |
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