Posted by Daniel_Marks

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

This was one of the first television commercials to ever air:

Talking to the camera on a mic was the obvious way to leverage television: after all, that’s how radio commercials worked. Now, advertisers could just put radio commercials on television. What an exciting new advertising medium!

As it turns out, putting radio commercials on television wasn’t really the best use of this new medium. Sound familiar? This seems awfully similar to the current practice of turning your television commercial into a YouTube pre-roll ad. However, the difference this time isn’t the media format, which is largely similar (YouTube videos are still video, banner ads are still text + image, podcast sponsorships are still voice, etc.) Instead, the difference is how people are consuming the content; in other words, the context.

A television commercial is a relatively static experience: 30 seconds of video placed within a few appropriate time slots, reaching people in their living room (or possibly bedroom). A Facebook newsfeed ad is a little more dynamic: it can be seen anywhere (home, office, bus, etc.), at anytime, by anyone, in almost any format and next to almost any content. The digital age has basically exacerbated the “problem” of context by offering up a thousand different ways for consumers to interact with your marketing.

But, with great problems comes great opportunity — or something like that. So, what are some ways to leverage context in the digital age?

Intent context

Different channels have different user intents. On one end of the funnel are channels like Facebook and Snapchat that are great fillers of the empty space in our lives. This makes them well-suited for top-of-funnel brand advertising because you aren’t looking for something specific and are therefore more receptive to brand messaging (though you can certainly use Facebook for direct marketing purposes).

BuzzFeed, for example, has done a great job of tailoring their Snapchat content to the intent of the channel — it’s about immediate gratification, not driving off-channel behaviors:

This feels like you’re watching your friend’s Snapchat story, not professionally produced branded content. However, it’s still the early days for Snapchat — all companies, including BuzzFeed, are trying to figure out what kind of content makes sense for their goals.

As for Facebook, there are plenty of examples of doing brand awareness right, but one of the more famous ones is by A1 Steak Sauce. It was both set and promoted (in part) on Facebook:

Critically, the video works with or without sound.

On the other end of the funnel is something like AdWords: great when you know what you’re looking for, not so great when you don’t. This subway ad for health insurance from Oscar feels pretty out of place when you use the same copy for AdWords:

Getting intent right means that you need to actually experience your ad as a user would. It’s not enough to put a bunch of marketers together in a conference room and watch the YouTube ad you created. You need to feel the ad as a user would. This means watching your ad when you’re in the living room and just clicked on a friend’s YouTube link from Facebook to watch a soccer highlight (or whatever).

Situational context

Situational context (is that redundant?) can be leveraged with a whole range of strategies, but the overarching theme is the same: make users feel like the ad they’re seeing is uniquely built for their current situation. It’s putting a YouTube star in pre-roll ads on their own channel, or quickly tweeting something off the back of a current event:

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

…or digital experiences that are relevant to the sporting event a user is watching:

There are thousands of examples of doing this right:

• Burger King tailors its pre-roll ads to the video you’re about to watch
• HubSpot plays off the fact that you just unsubscribed from their email list
• Netflix shows you a “Friends” clip related to the YouTube video you’re about to watch
• Coke triggers an app notification while watching a Coke commercial
• YouTube automatically adds links to purchase a movie to fan-uploaded movie scenes
• Shopify reaches you with a simple message just after logging out:

Behavioral context

You might want people on Facebook to watch your video with sound, but the reality is that 85% of Facebook video views are silent. You might want people to watch your brilliant one-minute YouTube ad, but the reality is that 94% of users skip an ad after 5 seconds You need to embrace user behaviors instead of railing against them, like these smart people:

• Wells Fargo creates a Facebook version of their television ad: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/building-video-for-mobile-feed
  
  The important takeaways are making it short, having captions to make it understandable without sound, and putting the brand mention earlier in the video.

• Geico makes an “unskippable” 5 second YouTube ad:
  How do you reach people who skip your commercial after 5 seconds? Make the ad 5 seconds long!

Understanding channel behaviors means not using channel features for the sake of channel features while still taking advantage of behaviors that allow for richer ad experiences. It means using the channel yourself, looking up the relevant research, talking to experts, and making informed decisions about how people will actually engage with your creative work.

Location context

A user’s location can prompt geographic-specific advertising (for example, Facebook Local Awareness Ads or in-store Snapchat filters). It can feel gimmicky when used needlessly, but can provide a compelling marketing experience when done right.

AirBnB’s slogan is “belong anywhere.” One of the ways to feel like a local in a new city is to have locals give you a personal tour — which is exactly what AirBnB provides by targeting people on mobile when they’re looking for directions:

Or you can just make use of location services in more straightforward ways, like how the Bernie Sanders campaign targeted his core demographics in New York before the important primary by using Snapchat Geofilters.

However, be careful about inferring location from device — only 17% of mobile searches are on the go.

Audience context

Audience targeting is likely the most powerful form of context provided by digital marketing. You can segment your audience in a thousand different ways — from Facebook Lookalikes to Google Customer Match — that a billboard could only dream of. The more you customize your ad copy to the audience you’re targeting, the better off you’ll be. (There seems to be a running theme here…)

You could directly speak to the audience of your competitors by targeting branded keywords:

Or better yet, target competitor customers that are about to change services:

Great tip: Target the keywords “Cancel [your competitor’s service]” w/ PPC ads. @wilreynolds #searchlove <— Brilliant strategy
— Annie Cushing (@AnnieCushing) October 27, 2014

Retargeting is another powerful way to use audience context by changing your copy to reflect the actions a user has taken on your site (more great retargeting examples here):

Then, of course, there are all the obvious ways of leveraging audience, such as adjusting your value proposition, using a slightly different tone, or tweaking the offer you provide.

There’s a cliché that the digital age has killed advertising creativity. Forget about clever copy or innovative work, It’s all about spreadsheets and algorithms now. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Internet didn’t kill advertising creativity — it just raised the bar. Content in all its forms (video ads, blog posts, tweets, etc.) will always be important. It might be harder to buy engaged eyeballs for your 30-second commercial online, but content done right can reach millions of people who are voluntarily consuming it. More importantly, though, the Internet lets you engage with your audience in a thousand innovative ways, providing a revamped arena for marketing creativity: context.

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Posted by serpschris

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

One of the biggest takeaways from SearchFest in Portland earlier this year was the rapidly rising importance of semantic search and structured data — in particular Schema.org. And while implementing Schema used to require a lot of changes to your site’s markup, the JSON-LD format has created a great alternative to adding microdata to a page with minimal code.

Check out Mike Arnesen’s deck from his SearchFest talk, “Understanding & Facilitating Semantic Search,” for a great overview on using structured data.

What was even more exciting was the idea that you could use Google Tag Manager to insert JSON-LD into a page, allowing you to add Schema markup to your site without having to touch the site’s code directly (in other words, no back and forth with the IT department).

Trouble is, while it seemed like Tag Manager would let you insert a JSON-LD snippet on the page no problem, it didn’t appear to be possible to use other Tag Manager features to dynamically generate that snippet. Tag Manager lets you create variables by extracting content from the page using either CSS selectors or some basic JavaScript. These variables can then be used dynamically in your tags (check out Mike’s post on semantic analysis for a good example).

So if we wanted to grab that page URL and pass it dynamically to the JSON-LD snippet, we might have tried something like this:

But that doesn’t work. Bummer.

Meaning that if you wanted to use GTM to add the the BlogPosting Schema type to each of your blog posts, you would have to create a different tag and trigger (based on the URL) for each post. Not exactly scalable.

But, with a bit of experimentation, I’ve figured out a little bit of JavaScript magic that makes it possible to extract data from the existing content on the page and dynamically create a valid JSON-LD snippet.

Dynamically generating JSON-LD

The reason why our first example doesn’t work is because Tag Manager replaces each variable with a little piece of JavaScript that calls a function — returning the value of whatever variable is called.

We can see this error in the Google Structured Data Testing Tool:

The error is the result of Tag Manager inserting JavaScript into what should be a JSON tag — this is invalid, and so the tag fails.

However, we can use Tag Manager to insert a JavaScript tag, and have that JavaScript tag insert our JSON-LD tag.

If you’re not super familiar with JavaScript, this might look pretty complicated, but it actually works the exact same way as many other tags you’re probably already using (like Google Analytics, or Tag Manager itself).

Here, our Schema data is contained within the JavaScript “data” object, which we can dynamically populate with variables from Tag Manager. The snippet then creates a script tag on the page with the right type (application/ld+json), and populates the tag with our data, which we convert to JSON using the JSON.stringify function.

The purpose of this example is simply to demonstrate how the script works (dynamically swapping out the URL for the Organization Schema type wouldn’t actually make much sense). So let’s see how it could be used in the real world.

Dynamically generating Schema.org tags for blog posts

Start with a valid Schema template

First, build out a complete JSON/LD Schema snippet for a single post based on the schema.org/BlogPosting specification.

Identify the necessary dynamic variables

There are a number of variables that will be the same between articles; for example, the publisher information. Likewise, the main image for each article has a specific size generated by WordPress that will always be the same between posts, so we can keep the height and width variables constant.

In our case, we’ve identified 7 variables that change between posts that we’ll want to populate dynamically:

Create the variables within Google Tag Manager

• Main Entity ID: The page URL.
• Headline: We’ll keep this simple and use the page title.
• Date Published and Modified: Our blog is on WordPress, so we already have meta tags for “article:published_time” and “article:modified_time”. The modified_time isn’t always included (unless the post is modified after publishing), but the Schema specification recommends including it, so we should set dateModified to the published date if it there isn’t already a modified date. In some circumstances, we may need to re-format the date — fortunately, in this case, it’s already in the ISO 860 format, so we’re good.
• Author Name: In some cases we’re going to need to extract content from the page. Our blog lists the author and published date in the byline. We’ll need to extract the name, but leave out the time stamp, trailing pipe, and spaces.

• Article Image: Our blog has Yoast installed, which has specified image tags for Twitter and Open Graph. Note: I’m using the meta twitter:image instead of the og:image tag value due to a small bug that existed with the open graph image on our blog when I wrote this.
• Article Description: We’ll use the meta description.

Here is our insertion script, again, that we’ll use in our tag, this time with the properties swapped out for the variables we’ll need to create:

I’m leaving out dateModified right now — we’ll cover than in a minute.

Extracting meta values

Fortunately, Tag Manager makes extracting values from DOM elements really easy — especially because, as is the case with meta properties, the exact value we need will be in one of the element’s attributes. To extract the page title, we can get the value of the <title> tag. We don’t need to specify an attribute name for this one:

For meta properties, we can extract the value from the content attribute:

Tag Manager also has some useful built-in variables that we can leverage — in this case, the Page URL:

Processing page elements

For extracting the author name, the markup of our site makes it so that just a straight selector won’t work, meaning we’ll need to use some custom JavaScript to grab just the text we want (the text of the span element, not the time element), and strip off the last 3 characters (” | “) to get just the author’s name.

In case there’s a problem with this selector, I’ve also put in a fallback (just our company name), to make sure that if our selector fails a value is returned.

Testing

Tag Manager has a great feature that allows you to stage and test tags before you deploy them.

Once we have our variables in place, we can enter the Preview mode and head to one of our blog posts:

Here we can check the values of all of our variables to make sure that the correct values are coming through.

Finally, we set up our tag, and configure it to fire where we want. In this case, we’re just going to fire these tags on blog posts:

And here’s the final version of our tag.

For our dateModified parameter, we added a few lines of code that check whether our modified variable is set, and if it’s not, sets the “dateModified” JSON-LD variable to the published date. You can find the raw code here.

Now we can save the tag, deploy the current version, and then use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to validate our work:

Success!!

---

This is just a first version of this code, which is serving to test the idea that we can use Google Tag Manager to dynamically insert JSON-LD/Schema.org tags. However after just a few days we checked in with Google Search Console and it confirmed the BlogPosting Schema was successfully found on all of our blog posts with no errors, so I think this is a viable method for implementing structured data.

Structured data is becoming an increasingly important part of an SEO’s job, and with techniques like this we can dramatically improve our ability to implement structured data efficiently, and with minimal technical overhead.

I’m interested in hearing the community’s experience with using Tag Manager with JSON-LD, and I’d love to hear if people have success using this method!

Happy tagging!

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Posted by larry.kim

[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]

Your organic click-through rate is ridiculously important. While it may not be a direct ranking signal that’s even part of Google’s core algorithm, I believe CTR is an indirect signal that definitely impacts rank. And if you improve your click-through rate, you should see your rankings and conversions improve.

Although having a high organic CTR is crucial, having positive website engagement metrics is even more critical. What value is there in getting hundreds or thousands of people to click on your brilliant headlines if those people don’t stick around for more than a few seconds?

If Google values dwell time, is there a way to see it? YES! Today I’ll share some data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings.

One important note before we get started: Please don’t focus too much on the absolute bounce rate and time on site figures discussed in this article. We are only looking at figures for one particular vertical. The minimum expected engagement will vary by industry and query type.

Does Google measure dwell time? How is that different from bounce rate & time on site?

Yes. We know Google measures dwell time, or how much time a visitor actually spends on a page before returning to the SERPs.

In 2011, Google announced a new option that allowed us to block domains from appearing in our search results. If you clicked on a result and then returned to the SERP from the website within a few seconds, Google’s blocked sites feature would appear. Clicking it would let you block all results from that site.

Google told us they would study the data and considered using it as a ranking signal.

Although that feature is no longer with us, we know it was based on whether (and how quickly) you bounced back. So we know Google is definitely measuring dwell time.

The problem is, we don’t have a way to measure dwell time. However, we can measure three engagement metrics that are proportional to and directionally equivalent to dwell time: bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate.

Does Bounce Rate Impact Organic Position?

OK, let’s get the official Google line out of the way. Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted the following in 2015: “we don’t use analytics/bounce rate in search ranking.” Matt Cutts said similar in the past. Pretty clear, right?

However, I’m not saying that bounce rate is used as a direct ranking factor. And Google definitely doesn’t need Google Analytics to compute dwell time. What I believe is that, in some Rube Goldbergian way, bounce rate does in fact (indirectly) impact rankings.

Does the data back that up? We looked to see if the bounce rate of the pages/keywords we were ranking for had any relationship to their ranking. Check out this graph:

This is very peculiar. Notice the “kink” between positions 4 and 5? In mathematical terms, this is called a “discontinuous function.” What’s happening here?

Well, it seems like for this particular keyword niche, as long as you have a low bounce rate (below 76 percent) then you’re more likely to show up in positions 1 through 4. However, if your bounce rate is higher (above 78 percent), then you’re much less likely to show up in those coveted top 4 positions.

Am I saying bounce rate is part of the core search algorithm Google uses? No.

But I think there’s definitely a relationship between bounce rate and rankings. Looking at that graph, it leads me to believe that it’s no accident — but in fact algorithmic in nature.

My guess is that algorithms use user engagement as a validation method. Think of it more like a “check” on click-through rates within the existing algorithm that hasn’t been quantified.

Undoubtedly, click-through rates can be gamed. For example, I could promise you the digital equivalent of free beer and have a ridiculously high click-through rate.

Image via Fox.

But if there’s no free beer to be had, most (if not all) of that traffic will bounce right back.

Image via Fox.

So I believe Google is measuring dwell time (which is proportional to bounce rate) to check whether websites getting high CTRs actually deserve it and if the clicks are indeed valid, or if it’s just click bait.

One other question this discussion obviously raises is: do higher rankings cause higher engagement rates, as opposed to the other way around? Or could both of these be caused by some a completely unrelated factor?

Well, unless you work at Google (and even then!) you may never know all the secrets of Google’s algorithm. There are things we know we don’t know!

Regardless, improving user engagement metrics, like bounce rate, will still have its own benefits. A lower bounce rate is just an indicator of success, not a guarantee of it.

Does time on site impact organic position?

Now let’s look at time on site, another metric we can measure that is proportional to dwell time. This graph also has a “kink” in the curve:

It’s easy to see that if your keyword/content pairs have decent time on site, then you’re more likely to be in top organic positions 1–6. If engagement is weak on average, however, then you’re more likely to be in positions 7 or lower.

Interestingly, you get no additional points after you cross a minimum threshold of time on site. Even if people are spending 2 hours on your site, it doesn’t matter. I think you’ve passed Google’s test — passing it by even more doesn’t result in any additional bonus points.

Image via Fox.

Larry’s Theory: Google uses dwell time — which we can’t measure, but is proportional to user engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates — to validate click-through rates. These metrics help Google figure out whether users ultimately got what they were looking for.

Conversion rates: The ultimate metric

So now let’s talk about conversion rates. We know that higher click-through rates typically translate into higher conversion rates:

If you can get people really excited about clicking on something, that excitement typically carries through to a purchase or sign-up.

So what we need is an Engagement Rate Unicorn/Donkey Detector, to detect high and low engagement rates.

Before we go any further, we need to know: what is a good conversion rate?

On average across all industries, site-wide conversion rate for a website is around 2 percent (the donkeys), while conversion rates for the top 10 percent of websites (the unicorns) get 11 percent and above. While absolute conversion rates vary wildly by industry, unicorns always outperform donkeys by 3–5x regardless of industry.

Remember, conversion rates are a very important success metric because you get the most value (you actually captured leads, sold your product, got people to sign up for your newsletter, or visitors did whatever else it was you wanted them to do), which means the user found what they were looking for.

How do you turn conversion rate donkeys into unicorns?

Image via Fox.

The way you don’t get there is by making little changes. The difference between donkeys and unicorns is so huge. If you want to increase your conversion rates by 3x to 5x, then small, incremental changes of 2 or 3 percent usually won’t cut it.

What should you do?

1. Change your offer (in a BIG way)

Rather than A/B testing button color or image changes, you might be better off trashing your current offer and doing a new one.

Ask yourself: Why in the world are 98 percent of the people who see your offer not taking you up on it? Well, it’s probably because your offer sucks.

Image via Fox.

What can you offer that will resonate enough that +10 percent of people would be excited about signing up for it or buying it on the spot?

Be open-minded. The answer is probably something adjacent to what you’re currently doing.

For example, for my own company, five years ago our primary offer was to sign up for a trial of our software. It was somewhat complicated, people had to learn how to use the software, and not everyone made it through the process.

Then I had an epiphany: Why don’t I just grade people’s accounts without having them do a trial of our PPC management software, and just give them a report card? That increased my conversion and engagement rates by 10x, and the gains persisted over time. There is much more leverage in changing the offer versus, say, the image on an existing offer.

2. Use Facebook Ads

You can influence users even before they do searches. Brand awareness creates a bias in people’s minds which has a ridiculously huge impact on user engagement signals. We can do this with Facebook Ads.

You want to promote inspirational, compelling, memorable content to your target market. Although they’ll consume your content, they won’t convert to leads and sales right away. Remember, love takes time.

Image via Fox.

Rather, your goal is to bias them so in the future they’ll do a search for your product. If it’s an unbranded search, having been exposed to your marketing materials in the past, they’ll be more likely to click on and choose you now.

Facebook and many other vendors have conducted lift studies that prove that Facebook ads impact clicks and conversions you’ll get from paid and organic search.

You won’t get away with promoting junk. You have to promote your unicorns.

For this, we’ll use Facebook’s:

• Interest-Based Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the things you’re selling.
• Demographic Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the stuff you’re selling, maybe within the next month.
• Behavioral Targeting to reach the people who buy stuff that is related to the stuff you’re selling.

For example, let’s say you’re a florist or jeweler. You can target Facebook ads at people who will celebrate an anniversary within the next 30 days.

Why would you want to do this? Because you know these people will be searching for keywords relating to flowers and jewelry soon. That’s how you can start biasing them to get them to have happy thoughts about your business, increasing the likelihood that they’ll click on you, but more importantly, convert.

It’s not just Facebook. You can also buy image display ads on Google’s Display Network. You can use Custom Affinity Audiences to target people who have searched on keywords you’re interested in, but didn’t click through to your site (or you can specify certain categories related to your business).

3. Remarketing

Image via Fox.

People are busy and have short attention spans. If you aren’t using remarketing, essentially you’re investing a ton of time and money into your SEO and marketing efforts just to get people to visit one time. That’s crazy.

You want to make sure the people who gave you a look to see what your site was about never forget you so that subsequent searches always go your way. You want them to stay engaged and convert.

Remarketing greatly impacts engagement metrics like dwell time, conversion rate, and time on site because people are more familiar with you, which means they’re more likely to be engaged with you for longer.

There’s a reason we spent nearly a million dollars on remarketing last year. Investing in remarketing:

• Boosted repeat visits by 50 percent.
• Increased conversions by 51 percent.
• Grew average time-on-site by 300 percent.

These are huge numbers for a minimal investment (display ads average around $10 for 1,000 views).

It’s your job to convert or squeeze as much money as you can from people who are already in the market for what you sell. So use remarketing to increase brand familiarity and increase user engagement metrics, while simultaneously turning the people who bounced off your site in the past into leads now.

4. Clean up your bad neighborhoods!

If you’ve tried all of the above (and other ways to improve engagement rates) and still have bad neighborhoods on your websites that have low CTR and/or user engagement rates — just delete them. Why?

I believe that terrible engagement metrics will lead to a death spiral where your site gets less clicks, less leads, less sales, and even lower rankings. And who wants that?

Now, I don’t have any proof of this, but the software engineer in me suspects that it would be very difficult for Google to compute engagement rates for every keyword/page combination on the Internet. They would need to lean on a “domain-level engagement score” to fall back on in the event that more granular data wasn’t available. Google does something conceptually similar in AdWords by having both account-level and keyword-level Quality Scores. It’s also similar to how many believe that Google considers links pointing to your domain and also individual pages on your site when computing organic rankings (a moment of silence for our beloved Google PageRank Toolbar). Dumping your very worst neighborhoods — only if all attempts to resuscitate have failed miserably — would, in theory, raise a domain-level score, if it existed.

Obviously better CTRs, higher engagement rates, and improved conversion rates lead to more leads and sales. But I also believe that improvement in these metrics will lead to better organic search rankings, creating a virtuous cycle of even more clicks and conversions.

Conclusion

It’s becoming increasingly clear that organic CTR matters. But you might not realize that high CTRs with low engagement rates aren’t that meaningful.

Image via Fox.

So no cheap tricks, guys! Don’t invest in sites that specialize in gaming your click-through rates. Even though they might work now to an extent, they won’t work well in the future. Google is good at fighting click fraud on ad networks, so you can expect them to apply those same learnings to fight organic search click fraud.

I would prioritize click-through rate and conversion rate (or engagement) optimization at the very top of the most impactful on-page-SEO efforts.

At the very least you’ll get more conversions. But if I’m right, you’ll not only get more conversions, but you’ll get better rankings, which will lead to more conversions and even better rankings.

So use the tactics and strategies from this post to diagnose your engagement rates, and then start optimizing them!

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Posted by Bill.Sebald

There’s no shortage of advice on the Internet. This holds especially true in digital marketing; after all, we’re the folks who came up with “content is king,” right? If we weren’t the inventors, we clearly co-opted it.

I’ve been wanting to write a piece that takes us back to the roots of digital marketing. A reminder of sorts; one that might serve to snap some marketers out of the mundane daze of their daily grunt work. I wanted to inspire a vacation from hanging out in the weeds, which unfortunately can be common for some digital marketing practitioners. Falling into tactics and routine processes without any deviation certainly feels like grunt work — something that marketing should never be.

In reality, there’s still plenty of life left in classic digital marketing advice. Like music or meals, sometimes the basics still have plenty of flavor left. Maybe you simply have to challenge yourself to hold onto your roots.

So, I decided a great place to collect this general advice is the platform that still hangs onto 140 characters — Twitter. I wasn’t looking for anything too specific or particular, just cornerstone digital marketing advice. I posted a few repeated tweets requesting the following:

You have 140 characters to give your best digital marketing / SEO and client management advice. Go, go, go!!!
— Bill Sebald (@billsebald) March 1, 2016

Next, I’m going to share some of the fantastic responses and expand upon them. Thanks to everyone who helped me out with their responses.

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Marie Haynes

@billsebald Figure out how to be better, more useful, and immensely more helpful than all of your competitors.
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) March 3, 2016

This is a great tweet to kick things off. My mind immediately goes to the concept of 10x content, of which Rand is a big proponent. Want to be the best option for searchers? Be the best solution. (Wow, that makes it sound awfully simple!)

But it’s true; this translates from the written word to business, and frankly, to life in general. Or what about The Immutable Laws Of Marketing, where not only being the best — but being perceived as the best — would help you fit into the The Law of Perception, among others classic concepts.

Here’s a quote I’ve always believed: “Perception is reality.” I find it really tough to argue. Even if you think you’re a stud, it doesn’t mean a thing if your customers do not. Using your own company as an example, you could compete by putting together one hell of a PR game, or you could genuinely build a practice that does the talking for you. If you’re an agency or consultant getting repeat business and having success through referrals, you’re doing something right.

Han Solo said it best: “Don’t get cocky, kid. A strong perception will fade if you don’t maintain it with consistently high value.” He may not have said the last part.

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John Doherty

@billsebald move discussions from tactics to strategy. Tactics change, strategies live on.
— John Doherty (@dohertyjf) March 2, 2016

In my opinion, the heyday of SEO was very much a tactical time. It was a land of scalability and, well, a lexicon of spammy tactics. We spoke and wrote about SEO strategies, but we were often only discussing tactics.

But Google made some significant changes to offset the value of many standalone tactics. Google didn’t want to be manipulated by SEOs — they wanted to be influenced by valuable websites. I believe we’re still very much in a rebirth of SEO, and I’m completely in agreement with John — true strategic partnerships are the most valuable SEO relationship you can have today.

Tactics are components of a strategy, built upon a hypothesis and goals, and including milestones. It’s a bigger picture, but an accountable one as well. Being a strategic thinker is not everyone’s cup of tea, but it can be practiced. I would suspect (and I’ll bet John will agree) that the most success in 2016 will come from those consultants and agencies who master the multi-stepped, multi-faceted, data-driven strategy. And those who have the ability to help their clients execute and implement in parallel.

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Steve Hammer

@billsebald measure what matters to the business – don’t get hung up on metrics that don’t drive to that goal.
— Steve Hammer (@armondhammer) March 2, 2016

Damon Gochneaur

@billsebald tie yourself to revenue, not traffic, rankings etc, over communicate, & expect to get fired every time you talk to a client.
— Damon Gochneaur (@DamonGochneaur) March 3, 2016

Several interesting points here from Steve and Damon. First, measure what really matters to the client. If it’s not revenue, it’s certainly some form of ROI. Let’s be honest: as digital marketers, notably SEOs, this is a serious challenge.

Reporting on rankings and traffic is easy. We have software with report “export” options, but we’re not hired to be button pushers. In actuality, we are hired to help our clients hit their KPIs, while muddling through a plane of limited visibility through search referrals and unpublished Google metrics. How did we get ourselves into this?

Being goal-oriented is everything. In my opinion, some of the most important questions you can ever ask yourself are:

• Why is this particular task (or strategy) worth doing?
• How do I measure it?
• What are the metrics I can use to show my client we had an impact?

More often than I’d prefer to admit, I hear from prospects who say, “I don’t know what my last SEO company really did.” That’s shocking to me. Why would a client keep an SEO company who failed to communicate up to the required level? But at the end of the day, even if it takes longer than it should, the client does ultimately end up leaving if they don’t get what they want. Business 101.

Last, “expect to get fired every time you talk to a client” is truly an interesting one (and one I’ll be stealing). I love it. If you want your client for the long term, try to impress them every time. Have you ever rescued a sour client relationship? It’s tough being behind the 8-ball. Treat every opportunity like it’s your last. That should keep you honest.

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Nick LeRoy

@billsebald use data to support all your decisions
— Nick LeRoy (@NickLeRoy) March 1, 2016

One of the most beautiful things about digital marketing is the ability to capture loads of data. In the old days, someone sat next to a billboard and clicked a counter as cars drove by, with no sense of engagement or demographics. Now we are so data-rich that going into the campaign creation stage without due diligence is almost negligent. While Google does keep plenty of juicy metrics a secret, we still have client analytics, log files, and even fairly accurate competitor data (a la SEMrush).

At Greenlane, any time we create a campaign for a client, hours of data gathering and looking for stories precedes the actual strategy creation. Does this guarantee success? No. Does it improve the odds? Yes – a helluva lot. A “data-first” position is what the most seasoned marketers adopt, but it should simply be something everyone – no matter how experienced – should adopt. For some right-brained marketers, reading numbers like words it’s a skill you need to learn and practice.

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Jeff Gibbard

@billsebald stay in constant communication, no matter how good the work, the relationship keeps the contract going.
— Jeff Gibbard (@jgibbard) March 3, 2016

This is a great point. We’re in the relationship business. This makes us an important line of defense/offense when needed, a challenging partner, and a safe pair of hands to rely upon. When your point-person sees you as a partner, you have an agent defending your honor when it’s time for internal budget reviews. Who’s the first to get fired? The consultant… unless that consultant does amazing work and is beloved.

Plus, the more frequent the communication, the better the intelligence gathering becomes. How many times have you talked with a client and the conversation took an unexpected turn?

Here’s an example. An SEO finds themselves talking about an email campaign they knew nothing about. The SEO started to learn about all this content that the email team was creating based on A/B tests. The SEO learned about stockpiles of great content that never appeared anywhere but in customers’ inboxes. This SEO found the motherlode, even though the call was originally about URL structures. (This is a true story. My name was removed to protect my identity).

These conversations are gold, and don’t happen often if you’re not speaking on a routine basis. Enjoy the communication.

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Mark Kennedy

@billsebald Give the opinion/strategy that will work for the client’s business (as if it was your own), not what the client “wants to hear”.
— markkennedysem (@markkennedysem) March 2, 2016

Are you someone willing to mix it up with a client, or are you just trying to placate them? We’re not here to let our clients eat Big Macs, folks. We’re being hired to tell them there’s over 500 calories in that hamburger, and give them reasons why they should or shouldn’t eat it. Our job is to empower clients with what we’ve learned in the steps we’ve taken before. I proudly tell new prospects that “we will fight for our ideas if we really believe them to be the best.” I’ve never had anyone reject us for that statement that I know of. Even if they have, I’d argue that we probably dodged a bullet ourselves.

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Corey Eulas

@billsebald I don’t need that much: K.I.S.S.
— Corey Eulas (@coreyeulas) February 29, 2016

The “Keep It Simple, Stupid” Principle. It’s a great principal in marketing, especially in design and usability. But I agree with Corey that the same holds true with digital marketing.

A fantastic way to balance your relationship with the client is to understand what level of complexity they want. Do they want massive amounts of data, or would some visualization help them get the point faster?

I love our attorneys (said nobody ever, and this is from a guy whose ex-wife is a divorce attorney). They’re great at expediting a phone meeting, giving us just what we need, and executing on follow ups. I hate law and don’t understand most of it. But when we have a need, they do a fantastic job of relaying it to me in my language. It’s an incredibly important trait of any service provider. As I am with tax law, most of our clients are the same with SEO. Keep it simple.

Albert Einstein said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” It’s a balance which brings valuable results.

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Chad Lio

@billsebald Spend the time + research to find a niche within a niche. Once you’ve found it, create content that matches audience intent.
— Chad Lio (@WaiverWarrior1) February 29, 2016

I like this a lot. It’s the advice I give many clients who either have relatively young websites or aggressive competition. SEO is organic — start with a few sectional wins, and Google will start noticing your website as a whole. The niche (sometimes within the niche) is often areas of lower competition and higher opportunity. Hit those areas hard. Get a good footing there and create a roadmap for expansion.

Let’s say you’re an eCommerce site who sells nothing but buttons. Looking at Google’s Keyword Planner, “Mother of Pearl Buttons” (whatever they are) has a search volume of 880 monthly estimated searches. Not a huge number, but pretty high for a small niche campaign. Showing your customers and Google that you’re the master of Mother of Pearl Buttons is really not above the reach of even the smallest company. You will live in infamy, kind of.

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Dan Kern

@billsebald Clients must understand they’re never “done” with their website (optimization, content, design, etc). If stop, eventually drop.
— Dan Kern (@kernmedia) April 30, 2016

Here’s an analogy I occasionally use when talking to prospects who are thinking of merely dabbling with SEO for a only a brief period.

“SEO is like a big game of King of the Mountain. On your mountain, you have many aggressive competitors all climbing towards the top. Someone will always get there. Then, without warning, Google might make a change and knock away all your progress, starting you at the bottom again. Not guaranteed, but this can happen to the other climbers as well. You have two choices: quit the game, or play to win in this routine scenario. SEO is a game that’s not for the weak of heart. But keep in mind, when you do win, your rewards should offset all your losses.”

That analogy either produces excitement or pause, and I think this is important. We should encourage our clients to understand the true rules of engagement with SEO.

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Phil Nottingham

@billsebald buy Bill Sebald a beer.
— Phil Nottingham (@philnottingham) April 30, 2016

Without a doubt, this is my favorite piece of advice in the entire article. I think it speaks for itself. I’ll be at MozCon this year, so everyone can feel free to take Phil’s advice.

How about you? Any nuggets of advice you’d want to add? Sound off in the comments.

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Posted by Laura.Lippay

[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]

(header photo is the search result for “scene” in the Blind Photographers Flickr photo pool.)

In the first two posts in this series we covered site and page structure overlaps, and formatting and linking overlaps. In this final post we’ll cover accessibility and SEO overlaps when coding for media elements.

Images and non-text elements

As you can imagine, images online can be problematic for visually impaired visitors to decipher, but luckily we’re using technology here so you and I can help solve that issue with the proper coding on and around images and non-text elements.

Some examples of images and non-text elements are:

• Images, including graphs and charts, word art, decorative and background images, webcam images, photographs
• Infographics
• Image maps
• Animations
• Graphical buttons
• Captchas

Here are some of the things you can optimize around images and non-text elements for better accessibility.

Alt attributes

Image alt attributes in SEO are used to describe to search bots what the image is or what the image points to if the image is a link. If a link, the alt attribute acts like keyword anchor text, helping Google understand the context of the destination page.

Alt attributes on images are also read by screen readers. Here’s a quick example:

Alt attributes are a win-win optimization for accessibility and SEO, but there are some things to keep in mind, particularly these first two items below, when optimizing alt attributes for screen readers.

Alt attribute do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use alt attributes on decorative images: Decorative images of clouds on your health insurance website are not a hook for getting image search traffic and are not useful in providing context to screen readers. A decorative image can still look dreamy to sighted users but not get in the way of navigating through the page for visually impaired users by keeping the alt attribute as alt=”” (null), or by making it a background image.
• Don’t use alt when there’s also a text link: If the image is a link and there is link text next to the image, both pointing to the same destination, the screen reader will read both and it sounds repetitive and weird. Use alt=”” (null) for the image alt and keep the anchor text pointing to the destination page about the topic. This may be contested by SEOs who want to put the alt attributes on the image to help it rank in image search. What I’d recommend in a case like this one is to use the alt attributes on the images on the destination page, since that’s the page you’d want to appear in SERPS anyway (probably a great topic to debate more in the comments).
• Do keep it short or use captions: There are some traces of recommendations around the web that the JAWS screen reader doesn’t do well with alt attributes over 125 characters. Whether that’s true or not, it’s more user-friendly to keep alt attributes short. If you’d like to understand why, add a screen reader extension to your browser (like ChromeVox for Chrome or Fangs for Firefox) and navigate around a page with images that have long alt attributes. If you have a lot to say about an image, put it in caption text or describe it in text on the page instead of in the alt.
• Don’t keyword stuff — write naturally. Let’s consider the health insurance website with decorative cloud images example again. An SEO may see five decorative cloud images on a landing page as five opportunities to stuff “health insurance, health insurance tools, health tools” etc. into the alt attributes. Don’t do it. It’s not only noise to screen readers, it can be confusing and annoying. Plus, realistically, no one is doing image searches for “health insurance” — and even if they were, the chances of them clicking on a picture of clouds in search results expecting to get what they’re looking for is pretty slim. Similarly, make sure your alt attributes are descriptive and make sense — write them for people, not just a bunch of keywords for bots.

Image captioning

Google can segment text near an image to attribute that text to the image and even create its own captions; therefore, text near an image can help provide context and could affect rankings. Image captioning also provides context for screen readers, often providing more context than an alt attribute might, or in place of an alt attribute if one is not known at the time of upload.

Image captioning do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use alt attribute if there is an image caption. Similar to the anchor text link, describing an image via alt attributes and a caption can be repetitive. This could also be a debatable practice, as SEOs would likely want to use both. In that case, consider how it will read by a screen reader that reads both a caption and an alt attribute, and try to make the best decision that will work for both
• Do describe what you’re captioning. For example, use “Figure 1:” so that this captioning tag is properly understood by people using assistive technologies that may not recognize the tag.
• Optional: Do use a <figcaption> tag: <figure> with <figcaption> tags can be applied to images or other page elements. Figcaption isn’t necessarily a known tag to optimize for SEO and they aren’t a must-do for screen readers, but it sounds like Google does try to index the text within a tag whether it recognizes the tag or not, and despite figcaption’s variable readability by screen readers, the text may be considered as a related element to an image for screen readers and hopefully helpful nonetheless.

Text-as-images

The reasons to avoid text as images are similar for SEO as accessibility: Simply avoid text within an image if you want the text to be able to be machine-read. Text as an image is also not always ideal for people needing to use magnifiers, since magnifying text in an image can be pixelated and hard to read.

Text-as-images do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t use text as images for important information. If you must use text as an image, do use an alt attribute to describe the image text if it’s something that should be read by search bots and screen readers.
• Do consider styling actual text as an alternative. If you need your text to look a certain way, style it using HTML + CSS or use SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).

Infographics

Infographics have historically been popular among SEOs for attracting links that boost rankings. SEOs may also want to provide on-page context of the infographic and its parts to search engines.

For accessibility, the idea is to be able to easily determine what the infographic portrays. Screen readers, unlike search engines, can’t determine the infographic page’s context by using the link text and page content of the hundreds of pages linking to your infographic. For screen readers it’s all up to the on-page code signals, and you can imagine that describing a complex infographic would be weighty for an alt attribute. Also consider the use of color for colorblind users or the problem we encounter with text as images (not “readable,” scales pixelated) that we covered in part 2.

There is not a simple <infographic> tag that lets you add a lengthy, thorough description of the infographic like a long alt attribute (although you can consider longdesc below). Rather, I’d recommend you test out these tactics below to see what works best for you and your particular situation:

Infographic do’s and don’ts:

• Don’t describe the whole thing in an alt attribute. It’s terribly user-unfriendly for screen readers (can’t navigate through the text, copy or paste it, etc). Use alts as they’re meant to be used, and choose another method for long descriptions.
• Do adhere to color contrast requirements. Plan ahead when thinking about color for your infographic, and use colors that meet the minimum color contrast requirements. Use this tool to help you out.
• Do consider ARIA-describedby. This ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) attribute is read in addition to alt text on an image, and allows for a long description. Here’s a video example. Note that because describedby is announced in addition to image alt text, this can be repetitive.
• The longdesc attribute: This image attribute allows you to provide a machine-readable link to long descriptions for images (either within the page or on a separate page), but isn’t well-supported and to my knowledge also isn’t a working SEO technique.
• Do consider hidden text alternates: See the example in the previous post of an image infographic provided as an easily shareable piece within an iFrame with indexable text hidden in a CSS clip in the iFrame HTML.
• Do create your infographic using CSS: This is a great solution. Below are two pages with the same infographic and how each of them look cached in Google. One is an image file with the text and links on the page below it. The other is an infographic with indexable text and links created via HTML + CSS.

Left: Infographic as image (the page also provides the infographic text on the page).

Right: Infographic provided as HTML styled with CSS (source here).

You’ll notice they look incredibly similar.

Let’s look at the code. Here’s Google’s cache of the infographic text content of each page.

Top: Google cache (partial) of infographic text provided on the image infographic page.

Bottom: Google cache (partial) of infographic text in the infographic on the CSS infographic page.

Both provide indexable and screen readable solutions. The CSS version does it without having to also duplicate the information in text on the page for sighted visitors.

You may have noticed the CSS version also adds helpful invisible display:none section headers, which are seen by the screen readers but not visible in the infographic. See more on hidden text in the previous post.

Image & non-text element tools & resources

• HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives – More in-depth examples for making non-text elements accessible
• HTML5 Accessibility Chops: the figure and figcaption elements
• Accessible Infographics
• How to Create an Accessible Infographic
• ARIA-describedby on infographics
• W3: Using the aria-describedby property to provide a descriptive label for user interface controls
• Color Contrast Analyser tool (download)
• Color Contrast Checker tool (online)

Video transcription, subtitling, and captioning

Video transcription

Video transcription is the text of the video provided alongside the video. Video transcription is helpful to hearing-impaired visitors who can’t hear the video, or to interpret words for people watching something in another language or strong accents. It’s also helpful to anyone watching a video with sound that’s tough to hear, when watching video in a loud room, or when you need to watch with no sound.

Similarly for search engines, video transcripts describe the content of a video via text.

Video subtitling and captioning

Subtitles and captioning provide time-synced text along with a video while it plays. Subtitles provide the dialogue, while captioning provides the dialogue and also describes other sounds like music, sound effects and speaker identification.

Options for providing text accompaniments for your video content include:

• Add the transcript as text on the page. You can simply add the transcription as text on the same page as the video, like this example of the coral reef video text below the video on the page. You can type up the transcript yourself or use tools or services to do this for you (see resources section).
• HTML5 <video> and <track>. The HTML5 <track> tag on a <video> or <audio> element allows you to add video to your page and specify a .vtt text file with your transcription text. From what I can tell, Google can index .vtt files, but I don’t see any clear examples of Google associating a .vtt text file with the page that sources it for the video.
• Add an interactive transcript. Use a service that creates an interactive transcript, where the transcript is time-synced and can be used as navigation through the video, like these timed transcript TED talks.
• YouTube transcripts, subtitles, and closed captions are automated by YouTube to various degrees of accuracy, but they’re incredibly convenient if you’re putting your video on YouTube. The automated transcription must be checked, though — it’s especially bad with accents, background noise, or this awesome example of YouTube’s automated transcript of a video of the ChromeVox screen reader that, in the video, reads “image. Spacer image. Image. Caption icon off image. Internal link. Privacy slash security. Link. Sponsor image. Search index page description” but is transcribed as “en españa en carnac o móviles en china se dirigen al cómico jim carrey algo”.

Video accessibility do’s and don’ts:

• Do provide video (and/or audio) transcripts. The time and effort it takes to provide text alternatives can help search engines and various viewers needing a text accompaniment to understand the content.
• Do upload or correct YouTube transcripts & captions: YouTube’s automated transcripts are convenient but usually weird and wrong, and therefore need to be edited for correctness. Having the correct text is helpful for your transcript-dependent viewers and, when search engines do index the transcript text, that text content can help surface the video page in search results.
• Do provide context. When it makes sense (especially in closed captioning), indicate speaker names, and other sound context like music, relevant sounds, laughing, cheering, shouting, crying, etc.
• Don’t spam. Don’t use transcripts for keyword stuffing. It’s a terrible user experience, and depending on your platform, a transcript may not be indexed by search engines anyway, so keep it real.

Video accessibility tools & resources

• Tips for creating a transcript file (YouTube)
• Adding Captions to Videos on Web Pages
• Transcripts on the Web: Getting people to your podcasts and videos
• Media Accessibility Checklist
• Deafness and the User Experience
• Transcription tool and services (there are many):
  • Amara volunteer or paid transcription services
  • Wistia captioning
  • 3Play interactive captioning
  • ProTranscript basic or interactive transcription
  • CaptionBox interactive transcripts (has WordPress plugin)
  • SubPLY embeddable, customizable, interactive transcripts
  • Dotsub captioning & translation
  • YouTube: Upload your video, download the automated transcription, and then edit the transcription to use it wherever you intend to use it.
  • Speech recognition software. There are various solutions out there. Remember that it will be important that the speech-to-text output is correct.

Recap & thank you’s

In case you missed the previous posts, here’s what we’ve covered:

• Post 1: Web accessibility overview, screen reader downloads, and SEO/A11y overlaps with titles, headings, schema markup, navigation and sitemaps in Optimizing for Accessibility + SEO: Site & Page Structure Overlaps
• Post 2: SEO and A11y overlaps in regards to hidden text, keyword stuffing, text size and color contrast, and links and anchor text in Optimizing for Accessibility + SEO: Formatting & Link Overlaps

And I want to extend a huge thank you to the folks below for taking the time for fact-checking, providing references, for some great discussions while creating this series, and for their commitment to making the web accessible. THANK YOU!

Ted Drake (website | twitter)

Ryan Burgess (website | twitter)

Vincent François (website | twitter)

Jennifer Sutton (website | twitter)

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