Posted by RonGarrett
In the last three years at Distilled, I have sold approximately $5 million in marketing services to over 100 businesses. Initially, the vast majority of the business I sold was in search, but over time it has evolved to encom… Continue reading →
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
This time, it’s about engaged traffic.
While checking our stats here at Moz, we noticed that while visits sent to us from Facebook keep decreasing, traffic from Google+ has started to appear significant by comparison.
While not everyone has an audience active on Google+, the number of people who interact socially with any Google products on a monthly basis now reportedly exceeds 500 million.
What’s different about Google+ is that beyond the direct social visits as seen above, Google offers marketers the opportunity to interact with visitors through many more touch points, including YouTube and directly in search results. This means that for visitors who engage with you through Google+, the potential traffic channels multiply.
For this method to work, it requires that your visitors actually engage.
Facebook and Twitter experts know this and perfected their engagement craft over several years. Engagment with Google+ means a new set tactics and best practices. These are areas that I consistently see otherwise expert brands fall short and miss easy opportunities.
Let’s discuss supercharging our Google+ engagement.
The more users notice your Google+ posts, the more likely they are to engage. The challenge is to stand out in a sea of thousands of posts.
First things first. Unlike other social platforms, Google+ posts act more like mini blog posts, and every post needs a headline. Not only does adding a header help your post stand out, but Google uses the first words of your post in two different ways:
Adding the right headline can help your post stand out in search results, and can greatly influence the number of people who both notice and click through to your content.
Use a headline, every time.
Easily break up your long blocks of text with formatting to make your posts simpler to read and skim. This allows you to communicate more clearly and makes your text more accessible.
In addition to adding bold to your headline, copy and paste the formatting cheats below to help compose a post that stands out from the rest.
*This is a Bolded Headline*
_
Italic_
*Bold*
-Strikethrough-
Mix and match styles: _*Bolded Italic*_
Numbered List:
*1.* Point One
*2.* Point Two
*3.* Point Three
Bulleted List:
• Point 1
• Point 2
• Point 3
Link:
http://example.com
#hashtag1 #hashtag2
Google+ is a both a visual and a text medium, so make them both count!
Don’t be afraid of writing longer posts. Instead of simply posting a link to your latest blog posts and hoping for the best, add a summary of your important points. Explain why this is important. Give people additional context as to why they should click and share.
Personal example of Google+ posts where I embraced the long-form:
The few minutes it takes to jot down your thoughts could result in multiple reshares and thousands of additional eyeballs on your content.
The vast majority of top posts on Google+ use images. In fact, the most popular post I’ve personally ever shared was a simple animated GIF.
For increased shareability, it’s usually best to upload your own photo.
By default, Google+ tries to include an image for any URL that you share. Unless you define the right Open Graph images and the proper social meta tags, the images are often not ideal, or are sized wrong.
When you upload your own image, the image links to the full-size version, not the URL you want to share. In this case, don’t forget to include a link to the URL in the text.
Most people set their post to “public,” thinking this gives them maximum exposure. In fact, there is a much more effective way to gain exposure to your top content, as long as you don’t abuse it.
By also adding your circles and select individuals to your share settings, this triggers a notification for those users that you’ve shared a post directly with them.
Used smartly, these notifications can greatly influence the amount of activity on a post.
Warning: When targeted sharing is used too often, it turns spammy. Be careful what you share.
Only choose your very best, most important posts.
Amazingly, Google+ also allows you to notify people in your circles via email when you share. In order for this to work, the individuals must have their email notifications set up correctly. Be extra careful with this function, as it can turn people off fast!
Twitter and Facebook have made us accustomed to hashtags, but Google+ uses them in entirely different ways to organize and recommend content.
Google uses hashtags and semantic analysis to form relationships between topics. For example, consider this hashtag search for #linkbuilding. Notice the related topics Google associates with link building:
These associations aren’t random. In fact, Mark Traphagen demonstrates how you can “teach” Google these relationships by tagging your own posts.
By default, Google often adds hashtags automatically to any post with sufficient text. Best practice is to add your own relevant hashtags at the end or within the body of each post.
The followed link on Google+ has gone the way of the dodo.
When Google+ was born, it was a bonanza for links, and seen as an SEO paradise. Since that time, Google has replaced most equity passing followed links with nofollow, which pass no link equity. This includes profile links, “contributor to,” and shared URLs.
There is one exception. Public +1’s remain followed.
For now, whenever a visitor +1s your content without sharing it to their stream, this results in a followed link as long as the visitor has +1’s set to “public.”
This could be an oversight, or Google could remove these followed links soon.
While the value of +1s for SEO has been debated again and again, this may be the last remaining place that a +1 may actually pass link equity.
I’m sort of in love with the Google+ commenting system.
Much like Facebook’s popular commenting plugin, you can embed Google+ comments on your own blog. What makes this so powerful is when visitors leave a comment, they are given the option of sharing your post to their own Google+ followers.
This can greatly increase engagement among these users and their followers.
Officially, Google+ comments are only supported for Google’s own Blogger platform. Fortuneatly, clever folks have devised a number of plugins and solutions for Wordpress, Drupal, and more.
Google’s +Post Ads offer an interesting premise: take your most successful Google+ posts and turn them into ads that show all over Google’s massive display network.
This exposes your posts to more people who otherwise would not have interacted with your brand on Google+ alone. This interaction drives more social sharing, and the sharing can continue after the paid promotion is over.
For example, if you are a car manufacturer, you could target your Google+ posts to appear on auto parts websites.
While still early in adoption, +Post Ads present a unique opportunity for businesses to attract customers at different stages of the buying cycle, and then keep those customers engaged through social media.
While the jury is still out if +Post Ads will be effective, it will likely take some time for marketers to learn how to effectively leverage this channel.
Interactive Google+ posts allow you to perfectly customize how your content is shared, but they also allow you to prompt your social audience to take a specific action.
Google maintains an impressive list of actions which you can automatically embed into your post. These include:
Mike Arnesen wrote up a good overview of getting started with Interactive posts, or you can find more at the Google Developers blog.
Google+ isn’t so much a social media platform like Twitter and Facebook, but an identity platform that works with Google to connect across all our different devices and web services.
This means that while sites like Facebook and Twitter can still deliver traffic to your website, Google+ is so integrated across so many platforms that it has many more places to touch potential visitors. Business that build up their audience base today potentially position themselves to collect bigger rewards in the future.
Do you receive traffic from Google+? Is it a part of your social strategy? Let us know in the comments below.
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Continue reading → I am a big proponent of sustainable, organic growth for companies. ManageWP for example spends less than 3% of revenue for paid marketing activities. I recently found a great presentation by Kyle Wild of keen.io (through a new and very cool platform for learning called gibbon.co) that talked about the same approach and I could […] Continue reading →
Posted by DaveSottimano
Most of us will remember the days in SEO where geotargeting was nearly impossible, and we all crawled to the shining example of Apple.com as our means of showcasing what the correct search display behaviour should be. Well, most of us weren’t Apple, and it was extremely difficult to determine how to structure your site to make it work for international search. Hreflang has been a blessing to the SEO industry, even though it’s had a bit of a troubled past.
There’s been much confusion as to how hreflang annotations should work, what is the correct display behaviour, and if the implementation requires additional configuration such as the canonical tag or WMT targeting.
This isn’t a beginner- or even intermediate-level post, so if you don’t have a solid feel for hreflang already, I’d recommend reading through Google’s documentation before diving in.
In today’s post we’re going to cover the following:
I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again: Know your Google search parameters better than your mother. Half the time we think something isn’t working, we don’t actually know how to check. Shy of having an IP in every country from which you want to check Google results, here is the next best thing:
For example, if want to mimic a Spanish user in the US:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=es&gl=us&pws=0&q=seo
Or if I want to impersonate an Australian user:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=au&pws=0&q=seo
If you want a full list of language/country codes that Google uses, please visit the Google CCTLDs language and reference sheet. If you want the Google docs version go here, or if you want a tool to do this for you, check out Isearchfrom.
You might be wondering about duplicate content and Panda, which is a valid concern. I personally haven’t seen or heard of any site with international duplicate content being affected by Panda updates. The sites I have analyzed always had some sort of international SEO configuration, however, whether it was WMT targeting or hreflang annotations.
<head> hreflang, 302 redirect on homepage, and subdomain configuration
<link href="http://www.cnn.com" hreflang="en-us" rel="alternate" title="CNN" type="text/html"/>
<link href="http://mexico.cnn.com" hreflang="es" rel="alternate" title="CNN Mexico" type="text/html"/>
Take a look at the US results for yourself.
Take a look at the US results for yourself.
Take a look at the Mexican results for yourself.
<head> hreflang, language/country variations and duplicate content
*FYI – I’ve shortened this for simplicity
x-default – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com….
en_GB – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com….
en – href https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com….
<head> hreflang, subdomain & cctld, country targeting and x-default
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://www.musicradar.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.musicradar.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://www.musicradar.com/us/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="http://www.musicradar.com/fr/" />
Musicradar.com should appear in GB and all other queries other than EN-US and FR-FR where each respective subfolder should appear.
See the Canadian results for yourself
See the American results for yourself
See the French results for yourself
XML sitemaps hreflang, subfolders, rel canonical and dupe content
<loc>https://www.ridgid.com/</loc>
<xhtml:linkhreflang="en-US" href="https://www.ridgid.com/" rel="alternate"/>
<xhtml:link hreflang="en-CA" href="https://www.ridgid.com/ca/en" rel="alternate"/>
<xhtml:link hreflang="en-PH" href="https://www.ridgid.com/ph/en" rel="alternate" />
Check out the Canadian results for yourself
Check out the Philippines results for yourself
Essentials:
Other nice-to-haves:
My secret sauce is Nerdydata.com, and if you didn’t know about this beautiful site, I hope that Nerdydata.com gives me a free t-shirt or something for telling you.
I find most SEOs who know about the tool are using it for useless stuff like meta tags (this is my own opinion), but what it really should be used for is reverse engineering things like hreflang and schema.org to find working examples. For example, a footprint you might use is hreflang=”en-us” and you’ll find a tonne of examples.
Here’s a few to get you started:
| marketo.com | asos.com | 99designs.com | sistrix.com |
| mozilla.org | agoda.com | emirates.com | trivago.com |
| salesforce.com | techradar.com | symantec.com | rentalcars.com |
| softonic.com | aufeminin.com | alfemminile.com | moo.com |
| istockphoto.com | ea.com | freelotto.com | softonic.it |
| americanexpress.com | zara.com | xero.com | trustpilot.com |
| viadeo.com | marriott.com | gofeminin.de | here.com |
| hotels.com | enfemenino.com | ringcentral.com | mailjet.com |
That’s it folks, hopefully you’ve learned a thing or two. Good luck in your international adventures and feel free to say hi on Twitter. 🙂
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Continue reading → Posted by randfish
Ranking for branded keywords is obviously quite a bit easier than for unbranded terms, but it takes some thought. We don’t just want to send everyone through our homepages; it’s far better to send them to the page that best answers their query. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers four steps to be sure you’re setting things up the right way.
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about getting your branded search terms right. Branded search is very important, because when people perform branded queries — your brand name plus some other modifier, some noun, some information they’re seeking around your company and your brand — you want to make sure you show up correctly in the search engines.
One of the challenges here is that, as SEOs, a lot of the time we think about trying to target queries that can bring us new traffic, which often means unbranded searches, things where people haven’t yet decided what brand they’re going with. But branded search is incredibly important. It actually makes up a huge amount of volume of Google and Bing and Yahoo’s total search queries.
Here I performed a search for ZIIIRO Watches. I’m wearing one of their watches. I like them a lot. They have a weird spelling. It’s Z-I-I-I-R-O Watches. If you searched for ZIIIRO Watches a few months back, their website was a little funky. In fact, most of the internal pages weren’t crawlable.
I remember when I performed a search for ZIIIRO Watches, the only page that actually mentioned that they were a watch company, I think it was either their about or contact page would show up. That was the first page that ranks for ZIIIRO Watches. That’s not ideal.
What you really want to rank there is either their homepage or their products page that lists all their watches. Those are the two things that I could potentially see as being valuable, and if it were me, I’d particularly want the watches page to be ranking, especially if they’re expanding into other items beyond just making watches.
Now what you want here as a brand, when people perform branded types of queries, is the most relevant, useful page to answer queries about that specific thing. That’s why I said if I were the brand manager at ZIIIRO or if I were the SEO at ZIIIRO, what I would want is my watches page there rather than my homepage. The reason I want that is because getting to that information as quickly, as fast as possible is likely to have the best impact on both my SEO and on how the visitors will perform.
If I list my homepage there, I’m asking visitors to make one more step to figure out my navigation system and get to my watches page, or whatever page it is on my website. I don’t like forcing that step. I want them to get right there. Generally speaking, that can help with things like pogo sticking. It can help with time on page and engagement. It can help with conversion rate optimization. It’s just the best way to drive traffic through search.
The second thing, you want a title and description right here that’s going to really earn that click. Contact ZIIIRO Watches, phone, address, email form, that’s awful, right? That doesn’t entice me. Even if I did want to get in touch with them, what I really want there is if I put “ZIIIRO phone number” or “Contact ZIIIRO” or “ZIIIRO Help,” “ZIIIRO Support,” what I want to see is something like “Contact ZIIIRO and get immediate help. You can email us, call us, or one click to fill out our form and get responses in 24 hours or less.”
That’s what I want the description right there to say. It creates the action, the desire for me to click that, and the indication that I’m going to get what I want.
The other thing that I really like doing is making sure that the headline on the page itself, once I reach whatever page this is, I really want that headline, the big thing that comes up bold at the top, to closely match. It doesn’t have to mirror exactly what the title says, but to closely match that title so that I never get that experience of a searcher clicking and then going, “Wait a minute. This isn’t the page I thought I was about to get.”
That’s a bad experience. That’s why I try and make those match up. Then the description as well, that intent should match.
Finally, the last thing that I urge folks to do here is to have internal links that point to the pages that are most likely to guide the searcher’s next few steps. If I know that the next steps in a visitor’s journey from the watches page are often to check things out by price group, or to check things out by color, or to check things out by types of, I don’t know, wristband or whatever it is, I want to make sure that those links are very prominent and easy to access on the page that I’m showing them here.
What you don’t want to do is let the wrong pages show up here, like we have in this ZIIIRO example. I can actually walk you through a process, step by step, of ways that I would actually urge every SEO to go through this process either once a year, or once a redesign, and find all the pages that might be ranking for branded queries that you don’t intend to be ranking there, that you wish weren’t ranking there, and how to change those up.
Step one, you need to get a list of your branded terms and phrases. This used to be easier than it is today, thanks to keyword not provided. But still, we are lucky that not provided is only 90% of your Google search traffic.
There are those 10% of queries we can get some of our branded search queries through there. You can do a filter inside of Google Analytics by performing a search on the referring keywords. Or you can also do this in Moz Analytics, if you set up a branded rule for your keywords.
Bing provides you keywords as well. Bing powers Bing.com and Yahoo searches as well. In the U.S., that’s about 20% of searches or so. In Europe, obviously much less. But you can get some keyword data there.
You can use auto suggest and related searches, meaning I start typing “ZIIIRO” here, and I hit the spacebar and I see what else populates. By the way, the auto suggest tends to work better on Google’s homepage if you set up “don’t auto send me to the search results page.” You can sometimes see more search suggest on the Google homepage than you can on the results pages.
You can use related searches, which is a box down at the bottom. If I were to scroll to the bottom of the results, I’d generally see a box down here that says “related searches” and five, six, seven, eight different queries that I could look at there.
You can also use your internal search query data, of course. You can use things like Google AdWords, the AdWords keyword tool. The challenge there is with a lot of low volume searches, which many of the longer tail stuff in the brand tends to be lower volume, it can be challenging to figure those out via something like AdWords.
Step two, we’re going to depersonalize and search. We’re going to take the keyword that we’re looking for — in this case ZIIIRO Watches — and we’re going to form a search query just like this, “Google.co.nz”. Why am I looking in New Zealand? I’ll tell you in a sec. “search?q=ziiiro+watches&GL=US”.
Why this weird search query format? Well, what’s happening here is that if I go to Google.com and I search for ZIIIRO Watches, I can add something like “&PWS=0” to the end of my search query, which will depersonalize the results, but it won’t remove the geographic bias.
What I really want to see is no geographic bias when I’m performing these searches. To do that, I take myself out of the country, out of the U.S., into New Zealand, and then I put myself back in the U.S., thus removing any personalization that comes from geographic biasing. You can do this with
.ca, .co.uk, dot whatever. It doesn’t actually matter. I like generally doing it with a country code that matches the language you’re searching in, though.
By the way, when you do this, if you do it in a new incognito window, meaning you’re not logged in, you don’t generally have to worry about also adding “PWS=0” to remove personalized results.
If applicable, go to step three. Applicable meaning you need to localize. If I’m searching, for example, and I want to see how this looks in Seattle, Washington versus Portland, Oregon versus San Diego, California or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I can actually use the “&near” parameter at the end of a query like this to see what it looks like in a specific geography.
You don’t have to, by the way, go out to New Zealand to do that. You can just search in regular .com. Then I can see what search results for people near Seattle, Washington, or I think you can also now use near equals a ZIP code if you want to get that granular.
Then your job is simply to list the non-ideal results and start fixing them one by one. So I take a list of these keywords that I’ve got, a list of any of the search results that I didn’t particularly like, and I prioritize based on how much traffic I’m either getting for that keyword, how much search traffic that landing page is receiving, or how much the estimated volume might be in something like AdWords.
Now I’ve got a prioritized list that I can run through and say, “All right, got to fix this one. These three look good. Got to fix this one. These four look good.” For that process, you can refer to some other Whiteboard Fridays that I’ve done on how to get the right result ranking for the search query term you’re looking for. Generally speaking, it’s not going to be that hard when it’s a branded search term.
All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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