Affiliate marketing, SMM, Jargon

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8 Old School SEO Practices That Are No Longer Effective - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 14 minutes]

Are you guilty of living in the past? Using methods that were once tried-and-true can be alluring, but it can also prove dangerous to your search strategy. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out eight old school SEO practices that you should ditch in favor of more effective and modern alternatives.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about some old school SEO practices that just don’t work anymore and things with which we should replace them.

Let’s start with the first one — keywords before clicks.

Look, I get the appeal here. The idea is that we’ve done a bunch of keyword research, now we’re doing keyword targeting, and we can see that it might be important to target multiple keywords on the same page. So FYI, “pipe smoking,” “tobacco smoking,” “very dangerous for your health,” not recommended by me or by Moz, but I thought it was a funny throwback keyword and so there you go. I do enjoy little implements even if I never use them.

So pipes, tobacco pipes, pipe smoking, wooden pipes, this is not going to draw anyone’s click. You might think, “But it’s good SEO, Rand. It’s good to have all my keywords in my title element. I know that’s an important part of SEO.” Not anymore. It really is not anymore an important … well, let’s put it this way. It’s an important part of SEO, which is subsumed by wanting to draw the clicks. The user is searching, they’re looking at the page, and what are they going to think when they see pipes tobacco, pipes, pipe smoking, wooden pipes? They have associations with that — spammy, sketchy, I don’t want to click it — and we know, as SEOs, that Google is using click signals to help documents rank over time and to help websites rank over time.

So if they’re judging this, you’re going to fall in the rankings, versus a title like “Art of Piping: Studying Wooden Pipes for Every Price Range.” Now, you’re not just playing off the, “Yes, I am including some keywords in there. I have ‘wooden’ and 'pipes.’ I have 'art of piping,’ which is maybe my brand name.” But I’m worried more about drawing the click, which is why I’m making this part of my message of “for every price range.” I’m using the word “stunning” to draw people in. I’m saying, “Our collection is not the largest but the hand-selected best. You’ll find unique pipes available nowhere else and always free, fast shipping.”

I’m essentially trying to create a message, like I would for an AdWords ad, that is less focused on just having the raw keywords in there and more focused on drawing the click. This is a far more effective approach that we’ve seen over the last few years. It’s probably been a good six or seven years that this has been vastly superior to this other approach.

Second one, heavy use of anchor text on internal links.

This used to be a practice that could have positive impacts on rankings. But what we’ve seen lately, especially the last few years, is that Google has discounted this and has actually even punished it where they feel like it’s inappropriate or spammy, manipulative, overdone. We talked about this a little in our internal and external linking Whiteboard Friday a couple of weeks back.

In this case, my suggestion would be if the internal link is in the navigation, if it’s in the footer, if it’s in a sidebar, if it’s inside content, and it is relevant and well-written and it flows well, has high usability, you’re pretty safe. However, if it has low usability, if it looks sketchy or funny, if you’re making the font small so as to hide it because it’s really for search engines and not for searchers and users, now you’re in a sketchy place. You might count on being discounted, penalized, or hurt at some point by Google.

Number three, pages for every keyword variant.

This is an SEO tactic that many folks are still pursuing today and that had been effective for a very long time. So the idea was basically if I have any variation of a keyword, I want a single page to target that because keyword targeting is such a precise art and technical science that I want to have the maximum capacity to target each keyword individually, even if it’s only slightly different from another one. This still worked even up to four or five years ago, and in some cases, people were sacrificing usability because they saw it still worked.

Nowadays, Google has gotten so smart with upgrades like Hummingbird, obviously with RankBrain last year, that they’ve taken to a much more intent- and topic-matching model. So we don’t want to do something like have four different pages, like unique hand-carved pipes, hand-carved pipes, hand-carved tobacco pipes, and hand-carved tobacco smoking pipes. By the way, these are all real searches that you’ll find in Google Suggest or AdWords. But rather than taking all of these and having a separate page for each, I want one page targeting all of them. I might try and fit these keywords intelligently into the content, the headline, maybe the title, the meta description, those kinds of things. I’m sure I can find a good combination of these. But the intent for each of these searchers is the same, so I only want one page targeting them.

Number four — directories, paid links, etc.

Every single one of these link building, link acquisition techniques that I’m about to mention has either been directly penalized by Google or penalized as part of an update, or we’ve seen sites get hit hard for doing it. This is dangerous stuff, and you want to stay away from all of these at this point.

Directories, well, generic directories and SEO directories for sure. Article links, especially article blasts where you can push an article in and there’s no editorial review. Guest content, depending on the editorial practices, the board might be a little different. Press releases, Google you saw penalized some press release websites. Well, it didn’t penalize the press release website. Google said, “You know what? Your links don’t count anymore, or we’re going to discount them. We’re not going to treat them the same.”

Comment links, for obvious reasons, reciprocal link pages, those got penalized many years ago. Article spinners. Private link networks. You see private and network, or you see network, you should just generally run away. Private blog networks. Paid link networks. Fiverr or forum link buys.

You see advertised on all sorts of SEO forums especially the more aggressive, sketchy ones that a lot of folks are like, “Hey, for $99, we have this amazing package, and I’ll show you all the people whose rankings it’s increased, and they come from PageRank six,” never mind that Page Rank is totally defunct. Or worse, they use Moz. They’ll say like, “Domain authority 60-plus websites.” You know what, Moz is not perfect. Domain authority is not a perfect representation of the value you’re going to get from these things. Anyone who’s selling you links on a forum, you should be super skeptical. That’s somewhat like someone going up to your house and being like, “Hey, I got this Ferrari in the yard here. You want to buy this?” That’s my Jersey coming out.

Social link buys, anything like this, just say no people.

Number five, multiple microsites, separate domains, or separate domains with the same audience or topic target.

So this again used to be a very common SEO practice, where folks would say, “Hey, I’m going to split these up because I can get very micro targeted with my individual websites.” They were often keyword-rich domain names like woodenpipes.com, and I’ve got handmadepipes.net, and I’ve got pipesofmexico.co versus I just have artofpiping.com, not that “piping” is necessarily the right word. Then it includes all of the content from all of these. The benefit here is that this is going to gain domain authority much faster and much better, and in a far greater fashion than any of these will.

Let’s say that it was possible that there is no bias against the exact match domain names folks. We’re happy to link to them, and you had just as much success branding each of these and earning links to each of these, and doing content marketing on each of these as you did on this one. But you split up your efforts a third, a third, a third. Guess what would happen? These would rank about a third as well as all the content would on here, which means the content on handmadepipes.net is not benefitting from the links and content on woodenpipes.com, and that sucks. You want to combine your efforts into one domain if you possibly can. This is one of the reasons we also recommend against subdomains and microsites, because putting all of your efforts into one place has the best shot at earning you the most rankings for all of the content you create.

Number six, exact and partial keyword match domain names in general.

It’s the case like if I’m a consumer and I’m looking at domain names like woodenpipes.com, handmadepipes.net, uniquepipes.shop, hand-carved-pipes.co, the problem is that over time, over the last 15, 20 years of the Web, those types of domain names that don’t sound like real brands, that are not in our memories and don’t have positive associations with them, they’re going to draw clicks away from you and towards your competitors who sound more credible, more competent, and more branded. For that reason alone, you should avoid them.

It’s also that case that we’ve seen that these types of domains do much more poorly with link earning, with content marketing, with being able to have guest content accepted. People don’t trust it. The same is true for public relations and getting press mentions. The press doesn’t trust sites like these.

For those reasons, it’s just a barrier. Even if you thought, “Hey, there’s still keyword benefits to these,” which there is a little bit because the anchor text that comes with them, that points to the site always includes the words and phrases you’re going after. So there’s a little bit of benefit, but it’s far overwhelmed by the really frustrating speed bumps and roadblocks that you face when you have a domain like this.

Number seven — Using CPC or Adwords’ “Competition” to determine the difficulty of ranking in organic or non-paid results

A lot of folks, when they’re doing keyword research, for some reason still have this idea that using cost per click or AdWords as competition scores can help determine the difficulty of ranking in organic, non-paid results. This is totally wrong.

So see right here, I’ve got “hand-carved pipes” and “unique wooden pipes,” and they have an AdWords CPC respectively of $3.80 and $5.50, and they have AdWords competition of medium and medium. That is in no way correlated necessarily with how difficult they’ll be to rank for in the organic results. I could find, for example, that “unique wooden pipes” is actually easier or harder than “hand-carved pipes” to rank for in the organic SEO results. This really depends on: Who’s in the competition set? What types of links do they have and social mentions do they have? How robust is their content? How much are they exciting visitors and drawing them in and serving them well? That sort of stuff is really hard to calculate here.

I like the keyword difficulty score that Moz uses. Some other tools have their own versions. Doctor Pete, I think, did a wonderful job of putting together a keyword difficulty score that’s relatively comprehensive and well-thought through, uses a lot of the metrics about the domain and the page authority scores, and it compensates for a lot of other things, to look at a set of search results and say, “This is probably about how hard it’s going to be,” and whether it’s harder or easier than some other keyword.

Number eight — Unfocused, non-strategic “linkbait”

Last one, some folks are still engaging in this, I think because content strategy, content marketing, and content as a whole has become a very hot topic and a point of investment. Many SEOs still invest in what I call “nonstrategic and unfocused link bait.” The idea being if I can draw links to my website, it doesn’t really matter if the content doesn’t make people very happy or if it doesn’t match and gel well with what’s on my site. So you see a lot of these types of practices on sites that have nothing to do with it. Like, “Here are seven actors who one time wore too little clothing.” That’s an extreme example, but you get the idea if you ever look at the bottom ads for a lot of content stuff. It feels like pretty much all of them say that.

Versus on topic link bait or what I’d call high quality content that is likely to draw in links and attention, and create a positive branding association like, “Here’s the popularity of pipes, cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, and cigars in the U.S. from 1950 to today.” We’ve got the data over time and we’ve mapped that out. This is likely to earn a lot of links, press attention. People would check it out. They’d go, “Oh, when was it that electronic cigarettes started getting popular? Have pipes really fallen off? It feels like no one uses them anymore. I don’t see them in public. When was that? Why was that? Can I go over time and see that dataset?” It’s fundamentally interesting, and data journalism is, obviously, very hot right now.

So with these eight, hopefully you’ll be able to switch from some old school SEO techniques that don’t work so well to some new ways of thinking that will take your SEO results to a great place. And with that, we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Director Shashi Kanth Sharma: Docoss is Planning To Earn From Affiliate Marketing

Are you aware of the new Docoss X1 Smartphone that has been launched recently in to the market calming to have a price tag of Rs. 888. It has been …

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Inbox Blueprint 2.0 Review And LIMITED Bonus By Liveness.org

With the original launch of Inbox Blueprint, Anik Singal taught over 10,000 students how to use email marketing and affiliate promotions to earn …

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Nine signs affiliate agreement with SCA

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Title: Affiliate Marketing Program Manager

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6 Online Side Hustles Perfect For Parents

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Core Spreads to launch new affiliate programme

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11 Ways To Engage Influencers Before Asking For Something

You want to get noticed by influencers don’t you?

The trick is not to yell “me, me, me” over the rooftops.

Unfortunately, I see exactly this tactic nearly every day. Here’s a recent email I received:

I get this exact template ALL THE TIME. It reads like this:

1. Hey Dave – you wrote a great article (which I probably didn’t read)
2. But you forgot to link here, or linked to a poorer resource
3. How about linking to mine, instead?

From people I have never met, who offer me nothing in return.

Now to be honest, sometimes the resources they send are great, and from time to time I’ll even link to them.

But what would go SO much better would be if someone offered me something, anything related to what I’m working on.

So, in light of this movement towards depersonalization, I’m going to pitch you all on how you can engage with people BEFORE demanding something from them, as well as give you some ideas for what you can offer in that outreach email.

Here are 11 ways to build a relationship before asking for something in return.

1. Respond to their audiences’ questions in comments

What do influencers value most?

Their audience, of course!

What I love (love!) is when someone sparks a discussion on my blog. Afterall, the point of writing content, lest we forget, is to spark conversation.

For example, here’s a great discussion that took place on BareMetric’s blog not that long ago.

The question was originally to Josh, but the first person to answer was actually another member from the audience. Once the ice was broken, more comments flooded in.

Influencers love to see this! Do this just a few times on their blog, and they will remember you.

2. Invite them to a podcast or interview

My most successful outreach campaigns (by acceptance rate) are always requests to interview someone on our podcast.

And, not surprisingly, these are the outreach campaigns I respond to the most as well.

Does it surprise anyone that I have much better luck featuring someone on my podcast than asking a stranger for a link?

Probably not. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever turned one down myself.

People like to be featured, influencers especially. It’s what got them there in the first place after all.

And afterward, you can capitalize off that new personal relationship to maybe get a link (possibly even to that very same podcast – see how it works?).

3. Send them a gift (ex. an amazon book)

Let’s stop thinking digitally, just for a moment. We tend to default there automatically since we all work online.

But it’s not all that hard to transition out of it, we just have to ask for someone’s phone number, or physical address.

Here’s an email I received from Sara at Socially Stacked, in which she offered me a free t-shirt in exchange for changing my link (which was already to them, she just wanted an update).

Everyone loves free t shirts – especially people who went to college and lament the fact that post college they are so hard to get!

P.S. – You know what I love most about this shirt – my girlfriend likes it. Yes, it’s actually a quality shirt, and it’s the first time someone ever sent me a physical gift for a digital action. #remembered.

4. Buy them lunch (or offer to meet in person)

Sticking with our recent theme of non digital acts of affection, let’s move onto buying launch, which I’ve seen recommended by not just one but two great entrepreneurs (Ramit Sethi and Neil Patel).

Now you might be wondering if they have so much money and you, potentially, don’t – why would you buy them lunch?

Remember, it’s not about the money, it’s about the gesture.

Offering to buy someone lunch is like saying, “I know your time is valuable. I’d like to treat you in exchange for spending it on me”.

This tactic will allow you to move levels above your traditional social / entrepreneurial class, and the cost of lunch (<$30) is well worth the advice (which usually costs hundreds per hour).

5. Leave them a review on Amazon or iTunes (or give them a testimonial)

Positive reviews are how many search engines work, such as iTunes, Amazon, and TripAdvisor.

Unfortunately they’re a pain in the butt to get, because they require the person to create an account, log in, and post something after they’ve already received all the value there is to get.

They have no incentive to leave a review, which is why so many great products and podcasts have relatively few reviews.

So if you want to stand out in the crowd, a relatively easy way (5 minutes, seriously), is to write someone a review.

A spin on that is to send someone an offer for a testimonial. I used this recently myself by offering Drip, the email marketing software I use, a testimonial solely because I like their product so much:

About a month after I provided them with the testimonial, they demonstrated our blogger outreach software and became a customer. An unintended but welcome consequence!

6. Offer them your product for free

Speaking of products, have you considered offering yours for free?

If your product is inexpensive, or digital, this is a super simple way to get a few folks on board.

People love free swag (remember the t-shirt example).

This works great in tandem with a product review if you’re marketing an eCommerce website or SaaS!

7. Endorse them on LinkedIn

The other day my partner met with a potential client. He didn’t close the deal.

The reason, the client said, was because his LinkedIn profile was lacking connections.

Now, this might seem like a very arbitrary reason to ding someone (to us it did), but the point is that your online profiles matter.

They’re your reputation.

And when it comes to LinkedIn, one of the ways to make it sparkle is through Skills & Endorsements.

So, spend some time and hand out a few recommendations. It’s free, and the person gets a notification when you do it!

8. Join their newsletter and respond to their questions

A tip that Brian from VideoFruit recommends is to join someone’s newsletter and answer their first email.

As someone who has a newsletter and in whose first email is a question, I can say that people rarely take the time to answer this question and engage with me.

But I always respond when someone does.

Sign up for the newsletters of your favorite influencers and actually let them know you’re following along.

9. Introduce them to someone (a potential customer, or a connection)

This is by and large the most valuable thing you can do for someone.

A valuable introduction, is, well, invaluable.

Here’s an example of this happening to me just the other day:

In addition to helping two people at the same time, you’ll also be helping yourself by tightening your own network.

And trust me, if the two people get major value out of meeting each other they will NEVER forget who made that introduction.

10. Become a case study for them

Another thing I’m looking for is successful case studies that prove the points I try to make elsewhere.

For example, if I write and publish this article about building relationships, I’d love for someone to put it into action and use one of the techniques and then let me know.

Another example is with my software – we’re constantly on the lookout for success stories, and when one comes my way, you’re guaranteed to get featured with a link.

I did this recently as well with Drip in an article I wrote about how we achieved nearly 1000% ROI on Black Friday with Drip. In turn, they featured us on their blog and on Medium (note how in this example we’ve used multiple techniques including the testimonial and the case study to build a relationship with another software tool in our niche).

11. Send them birthday wishes on G+ or Facebook

This last one is a fun one, but why not wish someone a happy birthday, which you can do on FB and G+.

It will make you feel good, try it!

Wrap

We’ve been way more successful at getting links (and many more things much more valuable than links), when we thought first about what we could give and thought last about what we could take.

I’ve also been much more generous giving out links and other things when the tables were turned.

How do you like to build relationships with influencers?

Guest Author: Dave Schneider is the co-founder of NinjaOutreach an all in one Prospecting and Outreach tool which was created to streamline the process of connecting with influencers. He can also be found @ninjaoutreachand his business blog SelfMadeBusinessman.

The post 11 Ways To Engage Influencers Before Asking For Something appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Marketing By Making Friends

Friendships are important. Some are long-term and some are just beginning, but they are what make us connect as human beings.

Positioning your business on social media is no different than having these type of friendships.

You need to advance your social media marketing to continue to nurture and court the following “friends”;

• Current customers with whom you already have a good relationship
• New customers, or those who have “converted” in some way
• Audience members who have just discovered you
• Future audience members you don’t know exist and who have not “discovered” you yet.

While your content marketing goals should include nurturing the first three “friend” groups, your long-term business growth must focus on the fourth group – the future “friendships” you have not yet made.

You can’t just cast out a wide net, hoping to catch a few new prospects. That is wasteful in terms of time and money.

So here are 4 rules of friendship that can guide your content marketing and help you find future customers.

1. Choose your friends wisely

Image Source: Pixabay

Part of choosing friends wisely is hanging out in the right places, so you meet the kind of people you will be compatible with. And so it is on social media.

You must understand each social channel, so that you can choose only those that will bring results. Jumping onto every new platform that may come along is a big mistake. You will be wide but not deep, and your message will be diluted on all of them.

Time and lots of it

It takes time to nurture a marketing campaign and an audience.

1. You have to make introductions, slowly get to know one another, have time for lots of interactions, and then the trust comes.
2. When it does, you have to continue to nurture that relationship so that your audience does not forget about you – they should see value in your “friendship,” they should see you often, and they should enjoy your “company” so much that they share your value with other friends.
3. And along the way, important others will begin to see you as a “leader”, and want to associate with you too.

Because of the time involved, it is better to have a few close friends (channels) than numerous acquaintances.

How to choose

1. Who is your customer? What do you know about them? They are not just an age-group or a gender. You have to dig much deeper than that and develop that persona of your typical customer. To do this, give your customer a name (Sally or Joe), and answer many questions about him/her. If you are not certain if you have developed a detailed enough persona, there are plenty of templates out there you can use.
2. Where does Sally or Joe hang out online? Use the research that has already been done for you and save yourself a lot of time and false starts.
3. What type of content do you need to generate for Sally or Joe? And where is the best place for that content from among those places they hang out?
4. What do you want him/her to do after being exposed to your content? Getting a “like” is meaningless. You want some type of a conversion, and you want that content shared. Figure this out before you produce a piece of content for any platform you have chosen.

If you only select two platforms and do them well, you will see far better ROI than if you pick 5-6.

2. Engaging and leading your new friends

Image Source: Flickr

You want to be of value to your Sally or Joe. To do that, you cannot just produce an amazing piece of content. You have to dig in with it.

Here is how you do that:

1. No matter how busy you are during a day, you have to check in on that piece of content often. This is how you discover what questions people have and what conversations they are having, and you have to join in – always. See why 1-2 platforms done well takes time?
2. Develop your own style. Are you “punchy?” Can you use humor? Can you be casual? Can you say things simply? Really expert marketers can do all of these things. You need to find a good balance between being the expert all the time (can make you a bit “stiff”) and recognizing others for their contributions (nice to feature your customers). You also need to be diplomatic and at times “referee” heated discussions without offending anyone. This is all a tall order but well worth the results.
3. Write well. This doesn’t mean that you publish a piece of content that your college English professor would love. It means that you use good grammar and spelling and adapt your style and vocabulary to Sally or Joe. If you have any concerns about this, get a couple of tools to help you.

Hemingway editor and Grammarly are both good. And for readability, get a tool like Read-able.com. And if you have any concerns about getting too sophisticated, pull out a copy of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and read it. Follow his lead – no adverbs, no frills, and no three-line long sentences.

4. Keep up to date on new features of the social media platforms you are using. They are really evolving pretty quickly, in an effort to stay relevant. As an example, here are some new features that you can expect from Twitter in 2016:

• Even more characters allowed
• Conversational ads that will show up as surveys or polls
• Twitter camera available to the public, not just celebrities
• Q & A sessions

All of these updates have consequences for your content.

3. Promoting your friendships

Image Source: Pixabay

How you package your content is pretty important – not just for Sally and Joe but for the platform you are using. You can take the same content, and package it differently for each platform you use – in fact, you must do it.

Here are some basics that you may have forgotten:

1. First, create that amazing piece of content – it has to be wonderfully educational, entertaining or inspiring if you want Sally or Joe to read it, like it, and share it or take some action as a result of reading it.
2. Change out that content for each platform. Here are just a few ideas:

• For Twitter you may only place a teaser with a link. But get a bit creative here. How many different titles can you think of for the same piece of content? You can market it under several different very catchy titles on Twitter several times a day. And to make it easy on yourself, automate that publishing through Buffer or some other automated tool.
• Create a slide show of that content and publish on SlideShare
• Use Instagram to post an image and some great teaser or quote and place the link in your caption.
• Start a Quora conversation with a question and then participate in answering that question
• Feature customers whenever possible in your content
• Create a video (they are really simple to do and can be informal and a bit rough – viewers like informal)
• Turn it into an infographic for Pinterest
• Have a great article on your blog with plenty of visuals

3. Have fun with your audience. Remember, social media is all about friendship and relationships. If you are a person who can have some fun, show it with your posts. A great way to do this is through memes or a joke of the day with an image on Instagram. If Sally or Joe see you as a real human who like fun, they’ll come back.
4. Humanize yourself. Give viewers a tour of your place of business, featuring your office pet and your team members. Tell stories about yourself and your team.
5. Support a cause and promote it on all of your platforms. Millennials want to do business with companies that have a social conscience. Check out toms Shoes or Headbands of Hope to see how a business can grow through support of a cause.
6. Choose a couple of hashtags that are popular. You can use any number of search tools for hashtags, such as hashtagify.me, and Instagram has its own search tool now, called Mulpix. Check out how Pottery Barn finds its followers through hashtags and then features their posts.
7. Locate groups that are already “into” your niche, join them and promote your content through them. Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn all have groups or fan pages. Get involved in conversations and promote your content – carefully and diplomatically, of course. Become a listener too. And don’t promote your content too early. Get trust first.
8. Keep promotion more about nurturing long-term relationships with Joe and Sally – that’s really what social media is all about. It’s good to do the analytics, of course, but don’t obsess about them. Focus on the relationships and trust first.

4. Using visuals to appeal to your friends

Image Source: Pixabay

This part of social media marketing deserves its own place among the 4 most important rules for friendship, because it has become such a “force”. The statistics are pretty clear – just on Facebook alone, photos will get 53% more “likes” and “shares.” And of course many platforms are almost entirely visual.

All of your content must include visuals. Here are a few examples.

• Photos can provide amazement, inspiration, entertainment – use them often and the more personal the better. Feature yourself, your team, and your customers. Pottery Barn does this well on Instagram; ModCloth does this well in Facebook.
• Surveys, polls, quizzes, and videos that involve interaction are popular and effective. Use tools like Snapapp and Canva to create some stunning ones quite simply
• SlideShare is a growing medium for searches
• Infographics are perfect when you want to get a lot of information into visual form and they are great for LinkedIn and your blog posts
• The more recent addition of carousels to Instagram lets you tell great visual stories

The more visuals you can use in creative ways, the more your followers will return for more and the more they will share.

A final thought

Friendships, whether in real life, or as a part of a social media marketing campaign don’t just happen by throwing yourself out there for others to find. They require careful consideration, introductions, first dates, and gradual building of trust and common interests.

Look at Sally and Joe as friends, as people whose friendships you want to nurture and sustain for a long time. When you approach social media marketing with this principle in mind, you will be successful.

Guest Author: Kerry Creaswood is a young and ambitious writer from Savannah, GA. She is fond of various forms of art and thinks that everything we can imagine is real. To find more about Kerry – check her out on Twitter.

The post 4 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Marketing By Making Friends appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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EXCLUSIVE: Docoss plans to earn from affiliate marketing: Director

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The Local SEO Agency’s Complete Guide to Client Discovery and Onboarding

Posted by MiriamEllis

Why proper onboarding matters

Imagine getting three months in on a Local SEO contract before realizing that your client’s storefront is really his cousin’s garage. From which he runs two other “legit” businesses he never mentioned. Or that he neglected to mention the reviews he bought last year. Worse yet, he doesn’t even know that buying reviews is a bad thing.

The story is equally bad if you’re diligently working to build quality unique content around a Chicago client’s business in Wicker Park but then realize their address (and customer base) is actually in neighboring Avondale.

What you don’t know will hurt you. And your clients.

A hallmark of the professional Local SEO department or agency is its dedication to getting off on the right foot with a new client by getting their data beautifully documented for the whole team from the start. At various times throughout the life of the contract, your teammates and staff from complementary departments will be needing to access different aspects of a client’s core NAP, known challenges, company history, and goals.

Having this information clearly recorded in shareable media is the key to both organization and collaboration, as well as being the best preventative measure against costly data-oriented mistakes. Clear and consistent data play vital roles in Local SEO. Information must not only be gathered, but carefully verified with the client.

This article will offer you a working Client Discovery Questionnaire, an Initial Discovery Phone Call Script, and a useful Location Data Spreadsheet that will be easy for any customer to fill out and for you to then use to get those listings up to date. You’re about to take your client discovery process to awesome new heights!

Why agencies don’t always get onboarding right

Lack of a clearly delineated, step-by-step onboarding process increases the potential for human error. Your agency’s Local SEO manager may be having allergies on Monday and simply forget to ask your new client if they have more than one website, if they’ve ever purchased reviews, or if they have direct access to their Google My Business listings. Or they could have that information and forget to share it when they jump to a new agency.

The outcomes of disorganized onboarding can range from minor hassles to disastrous mistakes.

Minor hassles would include having to make a number of follow-up phone calls to fill in holes in a spreadsheet that could have been taken care of in a single outreach. It’s inconvenient for all teammates when they have to scramble for missing data that should have been available at the outset of the project.

Disastrous mistakes can stem from a failure to fully gauge the details and scope of a client’s holdings. Suddenly, a medium-sized project can take on gigantic proportions when the agency learns that the client actually has 10 mini-sites with duplicate content on them, or 10 duplicate GMB listings, or a series of call tracking numbers around the web.

It’s extremely disheartening to discover a mountain of work you didn’t realize would need to be undertaken, and the agency can end up having to put in extra uncompensated time or return to the client to renegotiate the contract. It also leads to client dissatisfaction.

Setting correct client expectations is completely dependent on being able to properly gauge the scope of a project, so that you can provide an appropriate timeline, quote, and projected benchmarks. In Local, that comes down to documenting core business information, identifying past and present problems, and understanding which client goals are achievable. With the right tools and effective communication, your agency will be making a very successful start to what you want to be a very successful project.

Professional client discovery made simple

There’s a lot you want to learn about a new client up front, but asking (and answering) all those questions right away can be grueling. Not to mention information fatigue, which can make your client give shorter and shorter answers when they feel like they’ve spent enough time already. Meanwhile your brain reaches max capacity and you can’t use all that valuable information because you can’t remember it.

To prevent such a disaster, we recommend dividing your Local SEO discovery process into a questionnaire to nail down the basics, a follow-up phone call to help you feel out some trickier issues, and a CSV to gather the location data. And we’ve created templates to get you started…

Client Discovery Questionnaire

Use our Local SEO Client Discovery Questionnaire to understand your client’s history, current organization, and what other consultants they might also be working with. We’ve annotated each question in the Google Doc template to help you understand what you can learn and potential pitfalls to look out for.

If you want to make collecting and preserving your clients’ answers extra easy, use Google Forms to turn that questionnaire into a form like this:

Loading…

You can even personalize the graphic, questions, and workflow to suit your brand.

Client Discovery Phone Script

Once you’ve received your client’s completed questionnaire and have had time to process the responses and do any necessary due diligence (like using our Check Listings tool to check how aggregators currently display their information), it’s time to follow up on the phone. Use our annotated Local SEO Client Discovery Phone Script to get you started.

No form necessary this time, because you’ll be asking the client verbally. Be sure to pay attention to the client’s tone of voice as they answer and refer to the notes under each question to see what you might be in for.

Location Data CSV

Sometimes the hardest part of Local SEO is getting all the location info letter-perfect. Make that easier by having the client input all those details into your copy of the Location Data Spreadsheet.

Then use the File menu to download that document as a CSV.

You’ll want to proof this before uploading it to any data aggregators. If you’re working with Moz Local, the next step is an easy upload of your CSV. If you’re working with other services, you can always customize your data collection spreadsheet to meet their standards.

Keep up to date on any business moves or changes in hours by designing a data update form like this one from SEER and periodically reminding your client contact to use it.

Why mutual signals of commitment really matter

There are two sides to every successful client project: one half belongs to the agency and the other to the company it serves. The attention to detail your agency displays via clean, user-friendly forms and good phone sessions will signal your professionalism and commitment to doing quality work. At the same time, the willingness of the client to take the necessary time to fill out these documents and have these conversations signals their commitment to receiving value from their investment.

It’s not unusual for a new client to express some initial surprise when they realize how many questions you’re asking them to answer. Past experience may even have led them to expect half-hearted, sloppy work from other SEO agencies. But, what you want to see is a willingness on their part to share everything they can about their company with you so that you can do your best work.

Anecdotally, I’ve fully refunded the down payments of a few incoming clients who claimed they couldn’t take the time to fill out my forms, because I detected in their unwillingness a lack of genuine commitment to success. These companies have, fortunately, been the exception rather than the rule for me, and likely will be for your agency, too.

It’s my hope that, with the right forms and a commitment to having important conversations with incoming clients at the outset, the work you undertake will make your Local team top agency and client heroes!

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!

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Measuring Content: You’re Doing it Wrong

Posted by MatthewBarby

The traditional ways of measuring the success or failure of content are broken. We can’t just rely on metrics like the number of pageviews/visits or bounce rate to determine whether what we’re creating has performed well.

“The primary thing we look for with news is impact, not traffic,” says Jonah Peretti, Founder of BuzzFeed. One of the ways that BuzzFeed have mastered this is with the development of their proprietary analytics platform, POUND.

POUND enables BuzzFeed to predict the potential reach of a story based on its content, understand how effective specific promotions are based on the downstream sharing and traffic, and power A/B tests — and that’s just a few examples.

Just because you’ve managed to get more eyeballs onto your content doesn’t mean it’s actually achieved anything. If that were the case then I’d just take a few hundred dollars and buy some paid StumbleUpon traffic every time.

Yeah, I’d generate traffic, but it’s highly unlikely to result in me achieving some of my actual business goals. Not only that, but I’d have no real indication of whether my content was satisfying the needs of my visitors.

The scary thing is that the majority of content marketing campaigns are measured this way. I hear statements like “it’s too difficult to measure the performance of individual pieces of content” far too often. The reality is that it’s pretty easy to measure content marketing campaigns on a micro level — a lot of the time people don’t want to do it.

Engagement over entrances

Within any commercial content marketing campaign that you’re running, measurement should be business goal-centric. By that I mean that you should be determining the overall success of your campaign based on the achievement of core business goals.

If your primary business goal is to generate 300 leads each month from the content that you’re publishing, you’ll need to have a reporting mechanism in place to track this information.

On a more micro-level, you’ll want to be tracking and using engagement metrics to enable you to influence the achievement of your business goals. In my opinion, all content campaigns should have robust, engagement-driven reporting behind them.

Total Time Reading (TTR)

One metric that Medium uses, which I think adds a lot more value than pageviews, is “Total Time Reading (TTR).” This is a cumulative metric that quantifies the total number of minutes spent reading a piece of content. For example, if I had 10 visitors to one of my blog articles and they each stayed reading the article for 1 minute each, the total reading time would be 10 minutes.

“We measure every user interaction with every post. Most of this is done by periodically recording scroll positions. We pipe this data into our data warehouse, where offline processing aggregates the time spent reading (or our best guess of it): we infer when a reader started reading, when they paused, and when they stopped altogether. The methodology allows us to correct for periods of inactivity (such as having a post open in a different tab, walking the dog, or checking your phone).” (source)

The reason why this is more powerful than just pageviews is because it takes into account how engaged your readers are to give a more accurate representation of its visibility. You could have an article with 1,000 pageviews that has a greater TTR than one with 10,000 pageviews.

Scroll depth & time on page

A related and simpler metric to acquire is the average time on page (available within Google Analytics). The average time spent on your webpage will give a general indication of how long your visitors are staying on the page. Combining this with ‘scroll depth’ (i.e. how far down the page has a visitor scrolled) will help paint a better picture of how ‘engaged’ your visitors are. You’ll be able to get the answer to the following:

“How much of this article are my visitors actually reading?”

“Is the length of my content putting visitors off?”

“Are my readers remaining on the page for a long time?”

Having the answers to these questions is really important when it comes to determining which types of content are resonating more with your visitors.

Social Lift

BuzzFeed’s “Social Lift” metric is a particularly good way of understanding the ‘virality’ of your content (you can see this when you publish a post to BuzzFeed). BuzzFeed calculates “Social Lift” as follows:

((Social Views)/(Seed Views)+1)

Social Views: Traffic that’s come from outside BuzzFeed; for example, referral traffic, email, social media, etc.

Seed Views: Owned traffic that’s come from within the BuzzFeed platform; e.g. from appearing in BuzzFeed’s newsfeed.

This is a great metric to use when you’re a platform publisher as it helps separate out traffic that’s coming from outside of the properties that you own, thus determining its “viral potential.”

There are ways to use this kind of approach within your own content marketing campaigns (without being a huge publisher platform) to help get a better idea of its “viral potential.”

One simple calculation can just involve the following:

((social shares)/(pageviews)+1)

This simple stat can be used to determine which content is likely to perform better on social media, and as a result it will enable you to prioritize certain content over others for paid social promotion. The higher the score, the higher its “viral potential.” This is exactly what BuzzFeed does to understand which pieces of content they should put more weight behind from a very early stage.

You can even take this to the next level by replacing pageviews with TTR to get a more representative view of engagement to sharing behavior.

The bottom line

Alongside predicting “viral potential” and “TTR,” you’ll want to know how your content is performing against your bottom line. For most businesses, that’s the main reason why they’re creating content.

This isn’t always easy and a lot of people get this wrong by looking for a silver bullet that doesn’t exist. Every sales process is different, but let’s look at the typical process that we have at HubSpot for our free CRM product:

1. Visitor comes through to our blog content from organic search.
2. Visitor clicks on a CTA within the blog post.
3. Visitor downloads a gated offer in exchange for their email address and other data.
4. Prospect goes into a nurturing workflow.
5. Prospect goes through to a BOFU landing page and signs up to the CRM.
6. Registered user activates and invites in members of their team.

This is a simple process, but it can still be tricky sometimes to get a dollar value on each piece of content we produce. To do this, you’ve got to understand what the value of a visitor is, and this is done by working backwards through the process.

The first question to answer is, “what’s the lifetime value (LTV) of an activated user?” In other words, “how much will this customer spend in their lifetime with us?”

For e-commerce businesses, you should be able to get this information by analyzing historical sales data to understand the average order value that someone makes and multiply that by the average number of orders an individual will make with you in their lifetime.

For the purposes of this example, let’s say each of our activated CRM users has an LTV of $100. It’s now time to work backwards from that figure (all the below figures are theoretical)…

Question 1: “What’s the conversion rate of new CRM activations from our email workflow(s)?”

Answer 1: “5%”

Question 2: “How many people download our gated offers after coming through to the blog content?”

Answer 2: “3%”

Knowing this would help me to start putting a monetary value against each visitor to the blog content, as well as each lead (someone that downloads a gated offer).

Let’s say we generate 500,000 visitors to our blog content each month. Using the average conversion rates from above, we’d convert 15,000 of those into email leads. From there we’d nurture 750 of them into activated CRM users. Multiply that by the LTV of a CRM user ($100) and we’ve got $75,000 (again, these figures are all just made up).

Using this final figure of $75,000, we could work backwards to understand the value of a single visitor to our blog content:

 ((75,000)/(500,000))

Single Visitor Value: $0.15

We can do the same for email leads using the following calculation:

(($75,000)/(15,000))

Individual Lead Value: $5.00

Knowing these figures will help you be able to determine the bottom-line value of each of your pieces of content, as well as calculating a rough return on investment (ROI) figure.

Let’s say one of the blog posts we’re creating to encourage CRM signups generated 500 new email leads; we’d see a $2,500 return. We could then go and evaluate the cost of producing that blog post (let’s say it takes 6 hours at $100 per hour – $600) to calculate a ROI figure of 316%.

ROI in its simplest form is calculated as:

(((($return)-($investment))/($investment))*100)

You don’t necessarily need to follow these figures religiously when it comes to content performance on a broader level, especially when you consider that some content just doesn’t have the primary goal of lead generation. That said, for the content that does have this goal, it makes sense to pay attention to this.

The link between engagement and ROI

So far I’ve talked about two very different forms of measurement:

1. Engagement
2. Return on investment

What you’ll want to avoid is actually thinking about these as isolated variables. Return on investment metrics (for example, lead conversion rate) are heavily influenced by engagement metrics, such as TTR.

The key is to understand exactly which engagement metrics have the greatest impact on your ROI. This way you can use engagement metrics to form the basis of your optimization tests in order to make the biggest impact on your bottom line.

Let’s take the following scenario that I faced within my own blog as an example…

The average length of the content across my website is around 5,000 words. Some of my content way surpasses 10,000 words in length, taking an estimated hour to read (my recent SEO tips guide is a perfect example of this). As a result, the bounce rate on my content is quite high, especially from mobile visitors.

Keeping people engaged within a 10,000-word article when they haven’t got a lot of time on their hands is a challenge. Needless to say, it makes it even more difficult to ensure my CTAs (aimed at newsletter subscriptions) stand out.

From some testing, I found that adding my CTAs closer to the top of my content was helping to improve conversion rates. The main issue I needed to tackle was how to keep people on the page for longer, even when they’re in a hurry.

To do this, I worked on the following solution: give visitors a concise summary of the blog post that takes under 30 seconds to read. Once they’ve read this, show them a CTA that will give them something to read in more detail in their own time.

All this involved was the addition of a “Summary” button at the top of my blog post that, when clicked, hides the content and displays a short summary with a custom CTA.

This has not only helped to reduce the number of people bouncing from my long-form content, but it also increased the number of subscribers generated from my content whilst improving user experience at the same time (which is pretty rare).

I’ve thought that more of you might find this quite a useful feature on your own websites, so I packaged it up as a free WordPress plugin that you can download here.

Final thoughts

The above example is just one example of a way to impact the ROI of your content by improving engagement. My advice is to get a robust measurement process in place so that you’re able to first of all identify opportunities, and then go through with experiments to take advantage of the opportunity.

More than anything, I’d recommend that you take a step back and re-evaluate the way that you’re measuring your content campaigns to see if what you’re doing really aligns with the fundamental goals of your business. You can invest in endless tools that help you measure things better, but if core metrics that you’re looking for are wrong, then this is all for nothing.

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!

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What 300+ Content Marketing Campaigns Can Teach You About Earning Links

Posted by KelseyLibert

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

In a recent Whiteboard Friday about 10x content, Rand said to expect it to take 5 to 10 attempts before you’ll create a piece of content that’s a hit.

If you’ve been at the content marketing game for a while, you probably agree with Rand. Seasoned content marketers know you’re likely to see a percentage of content flops before you achieve a big win. Then, as you gain a sense for why some content fails and other content succeeds, you integrate what you’ve learned into your process. Gradually, you start batting fewer base hits and more home runs.

At Fractl, we regularly look back at campaign performance and refine our production and promotion processes based on what the data tells us. Are publishers rejecting a certain content format? Is there a connection between Domain Authority (DA) and the industry vertical we targeted? Do certain topics attract the most social shares? These are the types of questions we ask, and then we use the related data to create better content.

We recently dug through three years of content marketing campaigns and asked: What factors increase content’s ability to earn links? In this post, I’ll show you what we found.

Methodology

We analyzed campaign data from a sample of 345 Fractl campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2016. To compare linking performance, we set benchmarks based on the industry averages for links per campaign from our content marketing agency survey: High success (more than 100 placements), moderate success (20–100 placements), and low success (fewer than 20 placements).

We looked at the relationship between the number of placements and the content’s topic, visual assets, and formatting. “Placement” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. In terms of links, a placement could mean dofollow, cocitation, nofollow, or text attribution.

Which content elements can increase link earning potential?

The chart below highlights the largest differences between our high- and low-success campaigns.

We found the following characteristics were present in content that earned the most links:

1. Highly emotional
2. Broad appeal
3. Comparison
4. Pop culture-themed

The data confirmed our assumptions about why some content is better than others at attracting links, as all four of the above characteristics were present in some of our biggest hits. As an example, our Women in Video Games campaign checked all four of those boxes.

It paired a highly emotional topic (body image issues) with a strong visual contrast. It also included a pop culture theme that appealed to a niche audience (video game fans) while also resonating with a broader audience. To date, this campaign has amassed nearly 900 placements, including links from high-authority sites such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, MTV, and Vice Motherboard.

Read on for more takeaways on how to increase your content’s link-earning potential.

Content that evokes a strong emotional response is extremely effective at earning links.

Emotional impact was the greatest differentiator between our most successful campaigns and all other campaigns, with those that secured over 100 placements being 3 times more likely to feature a strong emotional hook than less successful campaigns.

Example: The Truth About Hotel Hygiene

Our Truth About Hotel Hygiene earned more than 700 placements thanks to a high “ick” factor, which gave it emotional resonance paired with universal interest (most people use hotels). We’ve also found including an element of surprise helps strengthen the content’s emotional impact. This study definitely surprised readers with a shocking finding: The nicest hotels had the most germs.

Example: Perceptions of Perfection

In our Perceptions of Perfection campaign, audiences were surprised to see drastically how designers altered a woman’s photo to fit their country’s standards of beauty. The surprise factor added an additional layer of emotionality to the already emotional topic of women’s body image issues, which helped this campaign get nearly 600 placements.

Choose content topics with wide appeal to increase potential for high-quality links.

So we’ve proven emotionally provocative content can attract a lot of links, but what about high-quality links? We found a correlation between high average domain authority and content topics with mass appeal. Broad topics appeal to a greater range of publishers, thus increasing the number of relevant high-authority sites your content can be placed on.

Some verticals may have an advantage when it comes to link quality too. Campaigns for our travel, entertainment, and retail clients tend to have a high average domain authority per placement since these verticals naturally lend themselves to content ideas with mass appeal.

Some examples of campaign topics with a DA-per-placement average above 55:

• Cities That Hate Tourist
• Most Googled Brands in Each State
• Data Breaches by State and Sector
• Airline Hygiene Exposed
• Deadliest Driving States

Pro tip: A site’s influence matters more than the type of link you’ll acquire from it. Don’t fear nofollow links; for two of our best-performing campaigns of all time, the initial links were nofollows from high-authority sites. A nofollow link on a high-authority site can lead to syndication on hundreds of other sites that will give dofollow links.

Use rankings and comparisons to fuel online discussion.

Contrast was a recurring theme in our high-performing campaigns, with strong contrasts achieved through visual or numerical comparisons. More than half of our highest-performing campaigns centered around a ranking or comparison, compared to just a third of our lowest-performing campaigns. Pitting two or more things against one another fuels discussion around the content, which can lead to more placements.

Example: Comparing Siri, Cortana, and Google Now

Comparing Cortana was a hands-on study for which participants gave a command to their virtual assistant and rated their satisfaction with the response. Comparing the three most widely used smartphone assistants attracted the attention of techies (especially Apple fans) as well as the broader public, since most people have one of these assistants on their smartphone.

Example: Airport Rankings

The Airport Rankings campaign looked at which airports offered the best and worst experiences, based on data including the volume of canceled flights, delays, and lost luggage. Local publishers loved this campaign; many focused on the story around how their regional airport fared in the rankings. Since most travelers have lived through at least one terrible airport experience, the content was extremely relatable too.

Pro tip: Side-by-side visualizations pack a high-contrast visual punch that helps drive linking and social shares. This type of contrasting imagery is extremely powerful visually since it’s easy to process. It helps evoke an immediate response that quickly engages viewers.

Incorporate a geographic angle to earn international or regional links.

Did you notice a majority of the broad-topic campaigns with a high domain authority listed above also had a geographic angle? In addition to broad appeal, geography-focused topics help attract interest from international and regional publishers, thus securing additional links.

Example: Most Popular Concert Drugs

The Most Popular Concert Drugs, one of our most successful campaigns to date with nearly 1,900 placements, examined the connection between music festivals and drug mentions on Instagram. Many global sites featured the story for its worldwide festivals, including publishers in the U.K., France, Italy, Australia, and Brazil. Had we limited our selection to U.S. festivals, it’s doubtful this campaign would have attracted as much attention.

Example: Most Instagrammed Locations

As with the example above, pairing a geographic angle with Instagram data proved to be a winning formula for the Most Instagrammed Locations campaign. We featured the most Instagrammed places in both the U.S. and Canada, which helped the campaign secure additional coverage from Canadian publishers.

Pro tip: To extend a campaign’s reach to the offline world, consider pitching relevant TV and radio stations with geo-themed content that offers new data; traditional news outlets seem to love these stories. We’ve had multiple geo-focused campaigns featured on national and local news stations simply because they saw the story getting covered by online media.

Include pop culture references to pique audience interest.

Our campaigns with more than 100 pickups were nearly twice as likely to incorporate a pop culture theme than our campaigns with fewer than 20 pickups. Content that ties in pop culture is primed for targeting a niche of dedicated fans who will want to share and discuss it like crazy, while it simultaneously resonates on a surface level for many people. Geek-culture themes, such as comic books and sci-fi movies, tend to attract a lot of attention thanks to rabid fan bases.

New School vs. Old School

Trending pop culture phenomena are best for making your content feel relevant to the current zeitgeist (think: a Walking Dead theme that appeals to fans of the show while also playing up the current cultural obsession with zombies).

On the other hand, old school pop culture references are effective for creating strong feelings of nostalgia (think: everything in BuzzFeed’s ’90s category). If your audience falls within a certain age bracket, consider what would be nostalgic to them. What did they grow up with, and how can you weave this into your content?

Example: Fictional Power Sources

Fictional Power Sources looked at which iconic weapons, vehicles, and superpowers featured in movies were the most powerful. Rather than focusing on one movie, we featured a handful of popular movies — including Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix — which increased it the campaign’s appeal to movie fans.

Example: Sitcom Cribs

Sitcom Cribs looked at the affordability of the living spaces on various TV shows — could the “Friends” characters really afford their trendy Manhattan digs? By featuring a lot of older TV shows, this campaign had a high nostalgia factor for audiences familiar with classic ’90s sitcoms. Including newer TV shows kept the campaign relevant to younger audiences too.

Pro tip: To increase the appeal, feature a range of pop culture icons as opposed to just one, such as a list of movies, musicians, or TV shows. This adds to the range of pop culture fans who will connect with the content, rather than limiting the potential audience to one fan base.

Earning high-quality links is just one benefit of creating content that incorporates high emotionality, contrast, broad appeal, or pop culture references. We’ve also found these characteristics present in our campaigns that perform well in terms of social sharing.

In particular, emotional resonance is a key ingredient, not only for earning links but also for getting your content widely shared. Our campaigns that received more than 20,000 social shares were 8 times more likely to include a strong emotional hook than campaigns that received fewer than 1,000 shares.

How can you ensure these elements are incorporated into your content, thus increasing its linking and sharing potential? In a previous post, I walk through exactly how we create campaigns like the examples I shared above. Check it out for a step-by-step guide to creating engaging, highly shareable content.

What observations have you made about your most successful content? I’d love to hear your thoughts on which content elements attract the most links and shares.

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How To Guarantee Your First Impression In Search Results Is A Winner

How long ago did you Google yourself?

Did you think your name search results were making a good first impression?

Many people won’t even scroll, the first thing they see when searching for you (or your business or your product) in Google is what they go away with.

Did you know that 7 out of 10 of your perspective clients would Google you before even considering your product or your service? Did you know that most people would type your site name into Google instead of your browser address bar?

In the era of Google becoming a common verb, is it a smart idea to neglect your branded search results?

Probably, not…

What if you begin to be associated with a negative search phrase? What if a fake negative review ranks on top of your search engine results? What if people searching for you are driven away to your competitors?

Think of your search engine results page (SERP) as the first impression via search that a potential visitor to your website is going to have. It is important that it is a positive one, otherwise it could become a huge hurdle to your business success.

So, what creates a negative impression?

Common Reasons For a Bad First Impression

1. Auto-suggest provides a less than flattering option

A cringe inducing scenario for you – someone is disgruntled with your brand and they decide to trash talk you. A lot.

Before long, your name starts to be associated with those insults and auto-suggest immediately offers up “[Your Name] sucks!” as a possibility when you start putting in your name.

It could be better. Instead of suggesting that you or your business might be a bad choice, Google may simply recommend checking out for alternatives;

How many potential customers who were actually heading your direction will be driven away by this?

Plenty of companies have faced this very headache, especially giant corporations.

2. The image results look weird

When you put your name into Google, does it show “blended” image results as one of the first results? In many cases, those images could be embarrassing!

You want better control over how your brand is portrayed, both personally and professionally. You don’t want any confusion. Or anything offensive, which can happen from time to time.

The tricky thing about these onebox search results is that they are attention grabbers! According to the most recent Google SERPs eye-tracking studies, when a a visual is located on a page, natural human behavior will make your eyes go to that image first.

We’re naturally programmed to look at images: Your photos within your name search results will draw attention and influence to people’s opinion. There’s no way around that.

In some cases, that box may include some images misrepresenting your personal brand and creating a negative first impression:

3. Your business reviews aren’t favorable

Negative reviews high up in search results can become a sure-fire way to lose interest before you have even gained it.

What’s more, Google will highlight those reviews with stars making them stand out in search results.

Easy Fixes For These Common Pitfalls

Now that we know what issues may be creeping up on you and your SERP, it is time to look at how to fix them. The good news? They are all pretty simple, even if a few may take some time to work on.

1. Auto-suggest provides a less than flattering option

Unfortunately, this problem is not easy to deal with. Google Auto-Suggest results are fast to appear and slow to go away.

Google Suggest is powered by what people type into search results and thus can:

• Manifest a real problem that needs to be fixed
• Signal a competitor’s negative campaign
• Show you more phrases you need to be ranking for
• It could be all of the above.

So your steps to address the issue will be:

• Fixing the problem your customers are telling you about by searching it in Google
• Using Mechanical Turk to push other suggestions into the box (This should be your last resort!)
• Creating and optimizing landing pages to rank for those suggested queries (Both organic and PPC)

A preventative measure is to keep an eye on your competitors, because it’s always easier to handle before it becomes a search suggestion. Monitor comparison sites in your niche to make sure your product is always ahead. Most popular examples of those comparison sites are SimilarWeb, SiteGeek, G2Crowd, etc. Establishing your presence on those sites will help you more easily handle the problem when it’s in search results.

2. The image results look weird

You can’t actually choose the pics that show up in an image result one-box. But you can provide multiple images that differ from one another. Make sure you match the metadata to your name, so Google will immediately recognize it upon searching.

Publish varied images to varied platforms. The more images it can pull for your name, the better. Google seeks variety in image search results. Unless they find diverse images of you, your brand or your product, the more they’ll have to “make up”.

Variety is one the key Google image search rankings factors.

To get better control over your image search results;

• Use more visual sharing platforms (Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, Facebook, Google Plus, etc) and upload different photos of yourself there. Here are more ideas to diversify your visual marketing channels.
• Use folders, tags, and albums… as well as solid original descriptions to give Google more context and surround your photos with original text about you.
• When you are invited to do an expert interview on someone else’s blog, consider providing a unique photo of yourself to go with that interview.
• Use Cyfe to monitor all these multiple visual channels you set up:

The more visual context you provide for yourself and your brand, the better!

3. Your business reviews aren’t favorable

In many cases, you’ll need to track down the original source, so follow the unflattering suggestions to their results pages. Sometimes it will be reviews on official sites like Yelp, and you can comment to tell your side and to offer a solution to the poster.

Other times it may be a blog, and that is when you have to contact them directly. Ask them to take down the review in exchange for offering up a solution to whatever is bothering them. Ask them to try working with you, your service or your brand again, then writing a second review mentioning the first and how things may have been different this time.

If it is a reasonable person they should have no trouble doing this. Occasionally you may come across a troll, in which case legal action may be required.

In the meantime, or if this isn’t possible, you can bury those results with plenty of varied and high quality content and mentions across the web. Include a lot of social posting mentioning your name in that campaign.

Tip! Use Facebook pages to move negative reviews down and replace them with positive ones!

Facebook pages have become a great way to improve your business standing. They rank high fast and if you request friends and happy customers to review your business on Facebook, you’ll have plenty of 5-star reviews to show off in search results.

Tip! Use Schema.org on your site to optimize your site for rich snippets (starred ratings in Google search results). Here is how;

• Use this review Schema.org generator to generate code to add to your product pages (It will do for any products – eBooks, courses, services, etc)
• Install org plugin on your blog to be able to use rich markup for your blog reviews. Here’s how to easily install and test WordPress plugins.

Have any SERP tips for a good first impression? Let us know in the comments!

Author Bio: Ann Smarty is a marketing blogger and community manager for Internet Marketing Ninjas. She is author of reputation management course.

The post How To Guarantee Your First Impression In Search Results Is A Winner appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.

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