Meanwhile, here on Marketing Land, affiliate marketing and its future prospects drew the most reader attention this year, while customer reviews and …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2hBHDRZ via Affiliate Marketing
… email marketing, SEO best practices, SEM/PPC management, social media optimization and ad management, affiliate marketing, and many others.
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ipPBPy via Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing Consultant. Memphis, Tennessee. Skip this page Develops marketing communications, leads and manages marketing projects, and …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ilNHNk via Affiliate Marketing
The guy in charge of building out the program, which is billed as an affiliate marketing program, is Donald Steinberg, and he currently serves as the …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ilD5hk via Affiliate Marketing
It should be part of the promotional tactics used in every marketing campaign and can be valuable in search engine marketing (SEM), affiliate …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ipM6IC via Affiliate Marketing
Posted by randfish
From understanding the big-picture search trends to making sure your SEO goals jive with your CEO’s goals, there’s a lot to consider when planning for 2017. Next year promises to be huge for our industry, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to craft a truly remarkable SEO strategy to help you sail through 2017.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this special New Year’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you have all had a wonderful holiday season and are about to have a wonderful New Year’s.
This week, we’re going to chat about how you can have a remarkable, amazing SEO strategy in 2017. The first thing I’m actually going to start with is not the broad-spectrum, strategic picture, which we talked a little bit here on Whiteboard Friday about, and I’ll reference some of those, but is actually understanding some of those big-picture search trends. What are the search engines doing? How is that affecting my strategy? How does that mean I should influence and affect my specific tactics for 2017? So I’ll walk through a few of these big ones. There are others, but I think these encapsulate many of the big things we’ve been seeing.
So, knowing all those things, I think we can now craft some very smart SEO tactics. We can apply those to the SEO problems we face.
Here’s Zow Corporate, the opposite of Moz, which is hopefully not very corporate. Zow Corporate’s big three for 2017, they want to grow revenue with new enterprise customers, they want to lower their costs to get more profitable, and they want to improve their upsell to existing customers. So SEO can help with these things by — and this is a really smart framework — you want to take the things that your organization wants to accomplish at its executive or board level, and you want to show that SEO is actually doing those things, not just that you’re trying to rank for keywords or bring more traffic, but that you’ve mapped your priorities in this way.
So I could say SEO can help by identifying searchers that enterprise targets and influencers perform and then ranking for those. We can lower our costs to get more profitable by reducing the cost per acquisition. We’ll drive more traffic with organic search, thus reducing our dependency on advertising and other forms of marketing that cost a lot more. Those types of things.
You can also think about adding some additional things to your content-to-keyword map or to your project list by breaking down all the SEO efforts that you’re going to do to hit all these goals into discrete projects with a few things — an estimated time of delivery, the people who are assigned to it, and an ordering based on the expected return on investment. You can be wrong about this. It’s okay to be, “Hey, we’re taking our best guess, thumb in the air. We don’t really know for sure, but we’re going to try. Here’s the project. It’s link building for the home page. It’s our number-one priority. The value estimate is high because we currently rank number two or three for our own brand name. It’s assigned to this person, to Rand, and the ETA is March 30th.” Great, terrific, and now I know. I’ve taken this from here and from my projects list. It’s part of my goals. It’s where I think I can have a big impact. Terrific.
So you want to take any tactic or any project and add the metrics by which you will measure yourself. So if we’re trying to rank in the top three for our competitor comparison searches, Zow versus whatever companies Zow’s competing with, and the metrics there are ranking first, then search volume, the traffic we get from it, the conversions, and the retention of those customers who’ve come through, now you’ve got a real picture of how your SEO efforts map up to these big-picture goals. It’s a great way to frame your SEO.
So, with that being said, I am looking very much forward to hearing how you’re planning your 2017 SEO strategy. If you have recommendations and tips that you’d like to see here or questions, feel free to leave them in there, and despite the holiday break, I will be in there to answer your questions as best I can.
Look forward to joining you again next week and next year for a wonderful year of SEO and Whiteboard Fridays. 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!
Seth Godin said in an interview a couple of years ago that everyone should start a blog.
The first thing I thought to myself was “Yeah right! As if I have anything useful to share with anyone”.
Fast forward a couple of years down the road and I find myself writing a blog post that grew my e-mail list from 0 to 1000 within two months.
And here is how I started.
When I first did some research on how to start a blog that people would actually want to read, most of it was tactics. How to set up a blog, SEO guidelines and headline copy. There was no clear guideline on how to write hardcore value that brings a unique perspective.
I decided to learn how to write content that connects with people. I did this by experimenting on multiple online platforms such as Quora, Medium, and Reddit.
I made sure that in my signature I would link to a newsletter that people could sign up to. I did this using the Tiny Letter tool. After I broke the 1000 subscribers milestone I decided to shift to MailChimp.
I got 614 subscribers in my first month of writing and 420 more in May with just 5 blog posts. I didn’t focus on SEO. I didn’t focus on spamming my work all over social media. I just wrote until I found a formula where I use psychology and powerful storytelling techniques that help me understand my audience and connect better with their needs.
I did this by incorporating these 6 elements in most of my blog posts.
Every time before I publish I check if I have these elements present. Below you will find a more detailed description of each.
The 3 types of blog posts that get read are usually the following:
No matter which angle you approach while writing your content you must make it interesting. The key is to tell a story. Wrap it up in a personal experience. Present it as a journey. The reader should feel like they are discovering something together with the writer.
Is your content something that solves an urgent need? Or is it just something that’s nice to know.
Learning how to knit gloves might be more important for someone living in Alaska than someone who is living in Hawaii.
Learning how to do yoga might not be that important when your target demographics are more interested in how to ace job interviews or get promoted faster.
Learn what your audience actually needs. Focus to solve that problem. You could even write a really long blog post about a certain topic and then publish it in episodes. This way your content is easier to digest. It also builds up like a journey.
When writing a blog or creating content in general, everyone tries to adopt the image of the ultimate expert. More often than not that creates a huge distance between you and your readers. They can’t relate to your content because it seems that you come from totally different realities. That’s why movies have such a big success when implementing the Hero’s Journey. Someone starts from an unfavorable situation (that most of us can relate with) and wins.
Most common examples, especially in writing, are headlines like the following:
“This is how I went from being homeless and broke to making my first million $”
“This is how I got 100k views on my first blog post without any connections”
“This is how I lost 30 kg of fat and gained 10 kg of lean muscle”
What’s the key to appealing to someone’s self-interest? Simple, you develop your empathy first.
Most people start a blog because they want to develop their passion or make some passive income. The problem with this mindset is that all the focus is on the “I”, rather than the reader.
3 million blog posts get published each day on the internet. You might believe most topics are already covered. This is the main reason a lot of people never start a blog. They feel like the market is saturated.
What sets apart an extraordinary writer from the crowd? The key is to bring your own personal touch.
Bring your own twist by incorporating unique graphics in your blog posts. Use clever anecdotes that approach subjects from a different angle. Write counterintuitive advice nobody has mentioned before.
If you want your content to be more than just a good feeling you need to provide a solid action plan. Your readers need a framework they can start implementing right away.
This can come in the form of a checklist, Gantt chart or an outline. For example, this is the outline I used in one of my recent posts about overcoming anxiety.
This is the general outline I use:
Here are 3 tools that will help you understand what people are looking for.
To create content that connects with your audience, implement these elements in your writing process. The key is to understand that you are not just publishing words on a web page – you are writing to actual people that need your help.
After I grew my e-mail list I decided to start my own blog where I have all my posts in one place. I write about habits, psychology and how to create remarkable work. Check it out here: Rule Your Way
Guest Author: Andrei is a blogger that deconstructs topics regarding creative work, human behavior, and methods to break through procrastination. You can read his personal blog at www.ruleyourway.com
The post How to Get 1,034 Email Subscribers in Two Months Using Emotional Triggers appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
In the past, I have developed one of the largest affiliate marketing programs in the world, with offices in over 50 countries and an affiliate base of over …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2iHWsQD via Affiliate Marketing
The market for Affiliate Marketing is booming. It has become mainstream in the last couple of years as more and more retailers are using the channel …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ibbmlJ via Affiliate Marketing
Apply, or post a similar freelance job: We are launching a new product through affiliate marketing and looking for someone who has an experience …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ig4MIF via Affiliate Marketing
On the other hand, Alibaba Pictures has been stepping up its game in Hollywood while also competing there with home-market rival Tencent Pictures …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ijoJAD via Affiliate Marketing
When it comes to starting your own business, there is a lot to consider…
The location of your office, the make up of your team, how you plan on attracting potential clients, and much more.
Usually, there is a detail startups forget about – it’s communication. Communication is one of the most essential things that can effect your business both in a good and in a drastic way.
The more effectively you communicate with people, the more organized your staff are, and the happier your clients are.
Let’s have a look at these 5 useful tools that will help you better communicate with staff in your organization, as well as your clients.
Trello is a lightweight project management app that helps teams collaborate with each other and keep track of current projects. The service is highly visual and customizable. It’ll perfectly suit a team that prefers kanban-style management.
You can create a number of boards with Trello. For example, a board for your designers, a board for your marketing staff, one more board for your developers and so on. Each board may have an unlimited number of columns and task cards.
Most businesses choose a standard model: Plan -> In Progress -> Done. However, you may add additional columns such as; For Approval, Keep for Future, Need Reply , etc.
Trello lets you add a detailed description for each column as well as labels and stickers to your task cards. The tool makes it easy to see what your team members are working on, which tasks are on hold and why.
There are three options you can use:
While Trello helps you track current and future tasks, Slack is a communication tool that is killing emails. Instead of sending an email to your colleague and waiting for a reply, you can drop them a few lines on Slack.
It’s an excellent private channel that lets you exchange messages, files, and links. The service is instantly searchable, thus no message will be lost. You can filter the search results by relevance, recent type, or file type to find exactly what you are looking for.
Slack integrates with a majority of popular services such as Google Drive, Google Docs, Dropbox, Twitter, MailChimp, Trello, Groove and many others. The service offers fully functional iOS and Android apps, so you can stay tuned wherever you are.
Currently Slack offers three packages:
Officevibe is a great tool that allows you to see how satisfied your co-workers are. It provides a continual feedback system to help increase productivity, reduce turnover and build a responsible and friendly team.
Use Officevibe to create short 5-minute surveys and send them to your staff. You can set the email to be sent automatically at the necessary frequency. The reports come in real-time, thus you can see what troubles your team and what they appreciate. This tool allows you to quickly find the weak points and fix them.
You can also use Officevibe to promote team building activities and increase your staff engagement in the process.
The service is available for $4 per person per month. Before buying it, you can start a 14-day free trial period.
When you know the strong and weak points inside your office, it’s time to think about your current and potential clients. And that’s where Survey Monkey is a must-have. This survey creator offers a number of tools to easily survey your clients and analyze the data you obtain. It’s widely used by KraftFoods, Samsung, and other companies.
Creating a survey using Survey Monkey is really easy. All the icons are clearly marked and labeled. Besides, there is a short description of each option. While you are creating a survey, it appears in the center of the page, so you can see in real-time the way it’ll look.
When you are done with creating your survey, choose one of the distribution options: embed your survey into your site or blog, create a link to it and share on social networks, or send via email.
There are four plans available:
When you use Survey Monkey or Officevibe, it’s you who starts a conversation. With Zendesk, it’s your clients who contact your team first. It’s a ticket-based service that is widely used by companies such as Scyscanner and many others.
Using Zendesk, your clients may create a ticket with their question or issue. The service is very flexible. You can set what fields your customer should fill to create a ticket, add triggers and tags, create auto-replies, sort incoming tickets by question type, create macros for a faster reply, add how-to guides, and so on.
You have 30 free days to try Zendesk. After that you’ll have to choose one of the four plans:
Whatever idea you want to implement in your startup, you should always keep in mind how you will communicate with your staff in the process.
It’s not a secret – the more effort you put into building a strong and friendly team, the higher your revenue will be at the end.
If your staff are not happy, it’ll effect your clients and your reputation.
I hope the tools above will help you create a great and productive team and communicate effectively with your customers. If you know more cool services, share them in the comments below.
Guest Author: Terry Smith is a freelance blogger, former teacher and web developer. He enjoys modern technology and likes sharing his thoughts and ideas with other people. You can follow him on Twitter.
The post 5 Tools Startups Should Use to Effectively Communicate with Staff and Clients appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Binary Option Affiliate Marketing Stock Erteilen Sie, Wie Sie Verdienen Auf Forex Trading Deutschland Atletiek, lokeren, avlo, start 2 run, lopen, sport, …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ihSrGd via Affiliate Marketing
In this article, we’ll explain the pros and cons of dropshipping vs affiliate marketing to help you determine which is more profitable.
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2icUQzt via Affiliate Marketing
One of the internet’s most venerable revenue models for content creators sparked a lot of interest in 2016 — is affiliate marketing still viable? And, if so …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2iopfKG via Affiliate Marketing
Binary Option Affiliate Marketing Win Forex Hft Easy Freedesign4- Freedesign4me - Free Design Elements, Vectors, Brushes, Patterns, 3d Models, …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ieW4wx via Affiliate Marketing
Franchise business for sale lei step mental freelance marketing jobs in bangalore essays money kamana workers. Online surveys that pay vacancy for …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2ioAL8P via Affiliate Marketing
Humanizing social media marketing is an art, and it’s hard to master.
But not everyone instills a human element into their social media marketing, primarily because people consider it unimportant. After all, there are chatbots to answer queries and respond to complaints.
For your online brand, be it blogging or dealing in the actual sale of products, you have to interact with your audience. The reason is because people sitting on the other end don’t feel cared for.
To them, your presence is faceless and you wish to suck them dry of their hard earned money.
If you don’t engage with your audience, how will they know you’re just not in this to fill your pockets and profit? (although usually the objective)
Building trust with your customers goes a long way. There’s no substituting that!
It is less costly for any company to get a customer to repeat purchase or share your content than creating a new one altogether (only logical, wouldn’t you agree?).
So let’s see how we can become more engaging on social media by humanizing social media marketing:
Humor is recommended even for managers in a strictly corporate environment. So, when interacting with your audience online, make sure to throw in a pint of humor. By humor, it does not mean anything and everything goes (no below the belt jokes please!). Just keep a balance of fun, info, and control.
Take the example of Fork You Too, an Indian dining café which took the pun route to engage with its customers.
See the image below:
Image Source: Social Samosa
This form of engagement technique has served them well. It’s both amusing and commendable.
We understand now that human voice is required to give your brand a personalized touch. You cannot tamper with the brand’s logo and certainly not its name. What you can do is introduce a character or a mascot to represent your brand.
In this way, people can develop a sense of connection with your brand. The McDonald’s Ronald McDonald clown is a classic example of how you can associate with your audience with a mascot.
Perhaps, visualize a few details for your character, add some bio and then map it out in your business. Ensure its relevance. You can’t have Ronald McDonald act as the humanoid voice for an online clinical consultancy firm and its presence over social media.
Image Source: No Cookie
People follow you on social media channels to expect amusement and not be bored with corporate jargon and lingo. You should converse with your audience the way you would in your circle of friends and family.
Instead of saying “Thank you” or “Appreciated” to customer feedback, reply “Cheers mate!” Did you see how casual it sounded? You get the ‘feel’ here?
Social media tools are a great way to ease your burden so that you can write down your posts in advance and schedule them for later publishing. Although, you have made content available but when you respond to comments it comes off as a bit awkward.
Your audience can tell the difference between a pre-planned answer with a touch of customization, their name. Consequently, you end up distancing yourself from your audience and fail to hold ground.
Rather you should learn to respond in that instant when a suggestion is made or when positive feedback is registered or some criticism is hurled at ya. Can’t get any more ‘engaging’ than this!
The trickiest part in managing your social media presence is that your online presence should exude a similar aura of your brand that the visitors would feel in your physical establishment.
If you’re a clothing brand, your funky appeal online should correspond with that of your store. You can’t have dull people managing your business there.
Seriously, would you leave your operations in the hands of the people who wouldn’t know how to keep the customer’s enticed? So you need to hire the kind of people who can carry similar energy online as your staff do in your brick-and-mortar store.
A good example of this is Nordstrom Department store. It uses Pinterest marketing which allows its 4.5 million users from its Pinterest community to pin their favorite items on their website and the items which are pinned the most go to display in their physical stores.
Image Source: Business2Community
You can sell your brand by posting ads; you’re allowed to do that. There is nothing wrong with it, but don’t do just that.
You should try to engage them in a conversation. How? By asking for their feedback, their preferences, or thanking them for reading your blog.
If your target audience tends to comment on an external thread, try stepping into the conversation. Let them know that they are important to you, that their every word is helping you shape your services en route for improvement and continued excellence (no, I’m not asking you to lie).
Image Source: Contently
As you can see in this example, McDonald’s is using its customer support on Twitter to inform, educate and take feedback from its clients.
Everybody makes mistakes and that’s what makes us human. So if your company has made a mistake, be open about it and admit it! The more transparent your dealings are with your customers, the more loyal and cemented relations you will have with them.
When it comes to complaint handling, you need to stay vigilant on your social media platforms. Do not argue or try justifying to the customer how it is their fault and not yours. It will drive them away. Even if it is their fault, clarify them through their inbox/message and move it from the public eye.
It can be insulting and disrespectful to the customer. If it has been established that the mistake has been committed from your end then lay out a road map on how you plan to resolve it for them.
This list is not exhaustive. There are always going to be a number of other ways to humanize social media. However, the future of customer retention will largely depend on how you connect with your customer; in a corporate fashion or at a human level.
Guest Author: Joseph Carey is an expert in social media marketing tools and currently holds a position as a Digital Marketer in a renowned media house. In addition, he is associated with an assignment-writing firm known for its best essay writing service at True Essay Help.
The post How to Humanize Your Social Media Marketing: 7 Quick Tips appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
Real world from home how to get money fast in star trek online parcel amgen austell ga marketer. Forex news gbp chf e-books collection jobs bull how …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2hjYwNS via Affiliate Marketing
Forex Affiliate Marketing Volatility Trading Strategies Pdf Merge The Independent Promotional Verification Service protecting your brand’s reputation …
from Affiliate Marketing http://ift.tt/2iztLcy via Affiliate Marketing
Posted by jocameron
Welcome to the seventh installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, Jo showed us how to better optimize our sites when we think we’ve done it all (but still aren’t ranking). This time around she’s giving us the tools and the knowledge to finally capture ourselves a SERP feature. Read on and level up!
The content on your freakin’ awesome site better be targeting the intent of the searcher.
People of the world want different types of content depending on what they search. If you get this right, your content will earn the engagement signals that tell search engines you’re fighting the good fight.
The stakes are even higher now. Not only are you battling it out in the organic results, but there are attention-grabbing features that draw clicks away from organic results.
But, hey now, chin up! You can use these features to focus on keywords with higher opportunity and win those bobby-dazzlers to drive even more traffic.
I’m going to show you how to use the ever-impressive SERP features to check whether you’re targeting intent and whether the entirety of your content satisfies searcher intent, putting you within striking distance of owning some of those queue-jumping features.
Follow along in your Moz Pro account or start a free trial, it’ll be fun, trust me.
Intent is the nuanced language people use to search different things, and it drastically changes what they’re really, truly seeking.
Every single time a human inputs their heart’s desire into that blank, judgement-free rectangle, they’re asking Google to satisfy their intent.
Show me your best “headphone reviews,” your most reliable “sewing machine repairs,” your funniest “cat vs printer gifs,” I command thee!
Headphone reviews – I want comparisons, specs, images, first-hand experiences. Maybe I’ll buy something, eventually.
Sewing machine repairs – I’m looking for a local business who I can call or visit. Or an instructional article or video.
Cat vs printer gifs – Desperately seeking images in the .gif format of a furry friend freaking out over a machine friend.
With a few simple clicks on my keyboard, my intention is revealed. As a marketer, if you’re targeting keywords with particular intent, then this needs to be reflected in your content. As a searcher, I haven’t got time to read a long article about cat gifs and printers. I want an array of images to choose from. Likewise, I don’t want to scroll through an image gallery when I’m looking for a service, or an in-depth guide when I’m on the precipice of entering that ever-so-tempting sales funnel.
Now let’s look more specifically at the headphone niche. If you sell headphones you might think, “If I can stuff my landing page with a bit of jazzy content and get it in front of every person who searches for ‘headphones’ in every weird and wonderful way, I’m bound to get a chunk of traffic and *bam*, I’ll sell a bunch of headphones.”
It doesn’t really work like that. If your content doesn’t satisfy the intent indicated by the searcher, they’re likely to head back to search — and you just know Google is paying attention to this behavior. So you could end up sending signals to Google that your content isn’t all that good as it sends your visitors back to search. And because Google wants everyone to find what they’re after, your rankings could take a trip to page-two obscurity.
Intent for the purpose of marketing your content can be lumped into three different types that broadly encapsulate what warm bodies are looking for. This is explained in more detail in this post by Tom Anthony. Here is a brief recap that looks at how searches in the headphone niche can fit into vastly different intent types:
Informational: what were the first earbud headphones?*
Navigational: cnet headphone reviews
Transactional: cheap travel headphones
* I’m going to go all hipster on you and say it was the stethoscope, which morphed into it’s current shape around the 1850s according to Wiki.
Can you see how the implied intent varies depending on the phrasing around the search term? As you research your own target keywords, build up lists, and use those lists to formulate content, the implied intent of the searcher plays an important role in what form your awesome content will take.
It also goes hand-in-hand with your journey into long-tail keywords.
As the marketers of the world have been paying attention to the implied intent to guide their content creation, so indeed has the biggest website on the planet. The website that reduced internet usage by 40% when it went down for 2 minutes a few years ago. Yeah, you’ve heard of them, right? Well, they’re taking a big, old, sloppy bite of the intent pie. In their quest to give the people what they want right in the results pages, Google unleashed The Glorious SERP Feature.
The fancy-schmancy SERP feature is Google’s way of dazzling users with its more-than-a-result result.
It’s Google’s way of saying ‘I hear you’ with its finger guns out, blowing imaginary smoke and reholstering them back into its pockets whilst leaning over the back of your chair, all pleased with itself.
Features might pop up all over the results, like this:
The one with its paw in the air ready to swat? Argh, too cute.
Or they might shuffle into the results, like so:
Then again, they may hang out over here, all nonchalant but desperate to please at the same time:
With 16 different varieties currently documented, they’re like the chameleon of the SERP kingdom: taking relevant content and reinventing itself like a shapeshifting lizard queen (or Madonna).
There are a handful of features you can reasonably have a punt at without throwing cash at Google: Featured Snippets, Related Questions, Image Packs, Site Links, Tweets, Videos, and the News Box. I’m going to focus on Featured Snippets, Related Questions, and Image Packs.
The rest of the features are within the reach of larger sites, Google partners, or local businesses. I’m not going to dive into the local aspect in this post, as our Local Learning Center is a good place to start that journey.
For regular schmoes like us, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on all 16 features and their presence in the results for keywords you’re tracking. Even if you can’t win them they will elbow out organic results.
Featured Snippets: These are like having those fast-track passes at your local theme park. You can jump from somewhere else in the results to position ZERO, and then you’re pretty much owning that SERP.
Rob Bucci is my featured snippet guru and you’ll probably join the ranks after watching his talk at Brighton SEO.
Related Questions: If you’re tracking Featured Snippets, then you’ll want to familiarize yourself with their buddies, the Related Question.
Winning a Related Question will most likely get you a small bump in clicks through to your site; nothing wrong with that. However, the treat you don’t want to miss out on is grabbing those questions and adding them to your tracked keywords in Moz Pro. Often, this will help you sniff out a Featured Snippet you can target.
Image Packs: I looove image packs — there aren’t enough ways to display that in text form. I’m very visually motivated and I spend a fair bit of time searching for animated .gifs. If you watch Rob Bucci’s talk then you’ll know that they didn’t tend to find overlap with Featured Snippets. So these are a good opportunity to target the visually minded and increase your chances of getting traffic through features across more keywords.
Back in the olden days, like 6 months ago, you would look at keyword modifiers and find transactional terms like ‘buy,’ ‘cheap,’ and so on, then bundle these into the ‘transactional’ pile, and so on and so forth and rinse and repeat.
Now, in the bright and shiny land-of-the-future, we can use the presence of particular features to understand the intent as Google sees it. You’re doing two very important things here: lumping your keywords into piles to understand intent that you will use to guide your content, AND identifying features you can win and those that may push you out of the results.
As with every job there is a manual method and a tool-based method. Manual is totally fine for people with small sites, like a personal blog, and a handful of keywords. I hope that by explaining the basic manual method it will lay the foundation of understanding when we ramp up to the tool-based method.
Okey dokey spreadsheet fans, get ready for the keyboard + mouse dance we do when filling up a spreadsheet with lovely data. Start by searching your keywords one-by-one, use incognito mode to avoid personalised results, and add a mark to the sheet next to the features that are present.
Here’s a sheet with all the features already added to get you started. I even added some gentle colors inspired by the first episode of Black Mirror Season 3. Lacie’s giving it 5 stars.
Don’t forget to check out the second tab with your handy-dandy SERP feature cheatsheet.
This is a good way to start understanding more about the different SERP features, identify what they look like, where they hang out, and how intrusive they are.
Got more than a handful of keywords? Want all this data for your site and your competitors? Want a tool to do the heavy lifting for you? Don’t we all.
Did I mention before about the Moz Pro has a 30-day free trial? I’m pretty sure I did, but it was so far up the page and the follow-along-with-me part is starting right now! It will do all the SERP feature hunting, tracking, and cataloguing for you.
Moz Pro will identify the presence of all 16 SERP features and will also be able to show you if your site is present in Featured Snippets, Image Packs, In-depth Articles, Local Packs, Reviews, Site Links, and Videos.
First off, head to the SERP Features tab under Rankings.
You’ll see the percentage of features present for the keywords you’re tracking (in gray), along with the percentage of features your site is present in (in blue).
Underneath the Overview chart look for the filter icon, click it and scroll down to choose SERP Features and enter your desired feature. I’m going to start with Image Packs. It’s fairly easy to optimize some image — don’t forget to add informative file names, alt text, and correctly compress your images.
This little feature key will help you decipher the results:
 |
Blue: Your site is in the feature. |
 |
Orange: You and one or more of your competitors are in the feature. |
 |
Red: You are not in the feature, but one or more of your competitors are. |
 |
Gray: A SERP Feature exists but no one in your campaign is present. |
Keep an eye out for features your competitor is dominating by clicking the SERP Features header to filter the results.
If you’re on page one for your desired keyword, and there is a Feature Snippet present, then there is a gift there, just waiting for you. Kind of like when you had that Amazon parcel sitting on your front doorstep, getting chewed on by your neighbor’s dog and piddled on by their cat and you’re in your house just meters away, blissfully unaware.
Become aware by heading to the SERP Features tab and filtering by Featured Snippets.
Hit that Rank header until the arrow is pointing up, then scroll down to peruse keywords with Feature Snippets present sorted by your rank. The tooltip Insights indicates I’m within striking distance of owning this snippet.
Ronell outlines a strategy for winning and keeping a Featured Snippet. At its heart, it’s about pure laser-focus on intent, find the question, answer said question, add value, and make it accessible to humans and bots.
For this I’m going to head to my Rankings tab, containing all the keywords I’m tracking in my Moz Pro campaign.
Double click the little up/down icon header twice to filter all the down-arrow keywords to the top of the pile.
I’ve noticed that my rankings have dropped for my coveted keyword ”learn how to moz,” and I want to figure out if there are some SERP features present that could indicate whether my content could be targeting intent better. So I’ll click the keyword to open up the Keyword Analysis. Then scroll down to Your Performance and toggle to SERP Features from the drop-down menu.
You’ll see all the different types of features on the left-hand column and when they were present in the results for your keyword indicated by the light gray line.
I’m not seeing any Featured Snippets or Image Packs, but lookie here! A Related Question…
Remember what we said about Related Questions? Track those beauties down and add the questions to your bundle — you might just find a Featured Snippet hiding out there.
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll snap up those questions and add them to my Moz Pro campaign.
Now the next time my campaign updates I can check for tasty little Featured Snippets to target.
Now back to analyzing intent. I’m going to look at that page and see what can be improved to better match the intent as implied by Google.
I can see that videos are present, so I’m going to pop a video into my content. It may not show up as a feature on the results page, but I’m responding to what the searchers of the world are seeking, and I’m also thinking this will keep people on the page whilst serving their needs.
You can also follow this same process by sorting by Rank to find keywords where you’re on the bottom of the first page or the top of the second page to suss out the intent as indicated by the presence of certain SERP Features.
Then zip back up to the last step and repeat the process of analyzing keywords for features to figure out intent and hunt down those tasty features.
Here’s a quick recap: SERP features are your insight into what content Google thinks best serves the needs of searchers for any given keyword.
You can use the presence of features to quickly understand the implied intent for your target keywords and cross-reference this with a drop in rankings to improve how your content meets the needs of searchers.
By combining the feature power of Image Packs, Related Keywords, and Featured Snippets you’ll be covering the most effective organic features and potentially queue-jumping your way to position ZERO.
For the organic fanatics, you’ll also be able to track all 16 features and give more love to those with features you can win whilst artfully stepping around keywords with unobtainable features overcrowding the results and pushing your tasty URL into the lost land of page 2.
Happy hunting!
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!
