Posted by rjonesx.

It’s not very often that Moz as a company openly advocates for a particular political position. While we’ve always supported our employees’ choices to be vocal about the issues for which they’re passionate and have done our best to live by the TAGFEE values (as imperfect as that attempt may be), we have rarely directed the attention of our customers or our readers toward a particular end. Today, we break with that tradition to join hands with countless organizations across the web in a Day of Action in support of net neutrality.

Net neutrality is a fairly simple principle: that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.

At face value, net neutrality seems to affirm the basic principles of free speech which most of us hold dear. If the FCC moves forward in retracting policies that protect the Internet in the interest of the public good, it is reasonable to suspect that these freedoms will be curtailed.

This curtailed freedom is often described in terms of small or independent content producers who will be cut out of this new caste-like system of Internet access. However, I would like to take a moment to shed light on different vital services which are likely to suffer without the protections provided by net neutrality.

1. 911 call centers

Over 65 million Americans rely on Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) for their home phone service, and in 2009, the Congressional Research Service called for 911 call centers to migrate to IP technology in modernizing their infrastructure. Both families and the call centers themselves depend on unfettered bandwidth. When you call 911, seconds matter, and the quality of that bandwidth determines that speed. Without net neutrality, that bandwidth and those seconds are put to the highest bidder.

2. Clinical Video Telehealth for our veterans

In 2016, the Department of Veterans Affairs served over 677,000 veterans in rural and under-served areas via telehealth. The VA’s Clinical Video Telehealth (CVT) is a true innovation, connecting their best doctors with their neediest patients. Unfortunately, this critical health technology relies on the same network backbone as any Internet service. Who will pay the increased tolls to ensure that serving our veterans remains a priority on these networks?

3. Online education for K–12 students and their teachers

Finally, by 2014, 75% of all US districts offered some form of online education for K–12 students. More than 2.7 million students took advantage of this blended ed-tech, while 315,000 students were enrolled in full-time online education. The same technology you might use in your workplace to hold sales calls is used by teachers to meet with parents and students across the country, delivering education to those who are difficult to serve otherwise. It’s annoying when Netflix buffers, but it is tragic when a child can’t communicate effectively with his or her teachers.

These are just three of countless examples of how the Internet has come to provide vital services to our veterans, our children, and our communities. Without the basic protections net neutrality affords, these vital services, and so much more, are at risk. Net neutrality advocates are correct to be concerned about the free and unfettered speech of sites across the web if the Internet is left unprotected, but we should not pretend that only our words are at stake. Our safety, our veterans, and our children are on the line, too.

If you’re interested in learning more and taking action, take a look at Battle for the Net.

Thank you for your consideration.

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Posted by Alex-T

After storing this idea in mothballs for quite a while, I finally decided to conduct an analytical study that would breakdown the most popular industries in the US based on the number of monthly online visitors. Special thanks to the SimilarWeb team, who helped me with the convoluted process of assembling data on the industry traffic distribution across 1,000 top-visited US domains.

The purpose of this research isn’t just to share some general trends and observations that will leave you thinking, “Sounds interesting, but what’s next?” I’ve also included a bunch of actionable ideas based off of the data I went over myself.

For those of you wondering whether it’s worth it to read this article in its entirety, below are the key findings:

1. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, and Amazon own 32.34% of the total US traffic market. These five online giants decide which sites we’re going to visit next and what ads we see.
2. The top five industries in the US are Internet and Telecom, Arts and Entertainment, News and Media, Shopping, and Adult Entertainment. Altogether, these businesses control 82.55% of the US market share.
3. In the Internet and Telecom Category, search engines and social network sites get up to 95% of the traffic share.
4. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the most visited search engine sites in the US However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that people use Yahoo as a search engine.
5. Wikipedia.org has over 4.7 billion monthly users, with 86% of those users coming from organic search. Wikipedia is known to be a traffic-generating site.
6. In the Shopping category, 74% of market traffic is split between Amazon (51.24%) and eBay (22.01%).
7. YouTube promotes the Gambling industry more than any other.
8. In the Business sector, industries like Marketing, Advertising, and E-commerce have the smallest share compared to other subcategories.
9. The tourism industry is extremely competitive; however, it has a diverse range of small- and medium-sized players, since the top domains occupy only 17% of the total market share.

82.55% of all US online traffic is shared among five industries

Over 80% of all US online surfers are divided among five industries, while the rest of the traffic (15%) is spread across more than 15 other niches. Among the top five leaders are Internet Telecom (45.9%), Arts and Entertainment (12.35%), News and Media (9.35%), Shopping, and the Adult industry.

I expected to see the Shopping industry at the top of the list with a much higher percentage of traffic, but it may not have made it to the top three because SimilarWeb defines YouTube as part of the Arts and Entertainment industry, which drives over 36% of traffic in this category.

The Reference category is represented mostly by Wikipedia with 1.32% of all US traffic. I can see how one day Wikipedia may be acquired by either Google or Facebook, jacking up their traffic and sales. Currently, Wikipedia is still a non-profit organization, and hopefully things will stay the way they are.

Over 30% (32.34%) of all US online traffic is controlled by five websites

In most cases, these five websites control what information we consume on a daily basis. Even more important, they also determine what sites we visit next and what kinds of ads we see. Here’s a list of the top five sites with their traffic market share:

• Google – 16.41%
• Facebook – 6.56%
• YouTube – 4.91%
• Yahoo – 2.55%
• Amazon – 1.91%

And yes, all the websites listed above offer advertising opportunities. If your site doesn’t have any visibility on Google and Facebook, you’re missing the majority of your audience because 67.4% of all US users search on Google, and Facebook gets 68% of all active web users. Without a doubt, Facebook may not be the right fit for all business types, but it is a must-have SMM channel for B2C products.

Keep reading to find out what I discovered about the top 10 categories as well as what kinds of subcategories they sprout into.

Please note that one of the categories has been left aside for the reason that is has no subcategories. Something tells me you’re well aware that Pornhub has the biggest market share in Adult Entertainment.

Internet and Telecom

According to the US Department of Commerce and the Bureau Of Economic Analysis, in 2015 the Information Industry was the largest contributor to the US economy’s 1.4 percent growth, adding close to $900 billion in value.

On the graph below you can see that over 41 percent of US traffic is shared between search engines and social network sites, which are getting most of the juice.

What I find really interesting is that SimilarWeb doesn’t recognize Yahoo as a search engine, and puts it in the News and Media category instead. That’s why, if you check the top search engines in the US, you won’t find Yahoo listed among them, but you’d be surprised to find Baidoo.com ranking number five. That was quite a gem for me to discover even though the Chinese-speaking population in the US is remarkably high. This may be something digital marketers should pay close attention to, especially if they work for big international companies.

Another finding that really left me clueless is that the least popular Russian email agent, Mail.ru, appears to be among the top industry players — and Yahoo’s email agent still wasn’t there.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the most visited search engine sites in the US

Before I even started sifting through the data I gathered, I confidently assumed that I’d find Bing in second place. Turns out, the second-most visited search engine site is Yahoo.com.

So, does this mean that Yahoo is used more actively by online surfers than Bing? If you base your answer solely on the collected data, then the answer to the question is yes. But it’s not that simple.

Yes, it’s true that users visit Yahoo more frequently than they do Bing, but that’s not because they want to search for something on Yahoo. First of all, there’s a large group of people still using YahooMail (even though it’s 2017), and some people simply prefer checking for weather updates and news reports on Yahoo. With that being said, if we look at ComScore’s latest search engine popularity report, we will find that Yahoo is used as a search engine by 12.2% of all online US traffic and Microsoft is popular among 21.4%. But, realistically, Yahoo’s share of the search market is even smaller, since the majority of their search results are powered by Bing.

So if you’re considering Yahoo as a platform for promoting your product or service, check the demographics data around what kind of businesses typically advertise on Yahoo.

Speaking of demographic insights, I was struggling to find fresh ComScore reports (the last one was released more than three years ago), so I had to use Alexa.com. This isn’t the best and most accurate tool because the company gathers data from its own SEO toolbar, but it’s better than nothing.

Here’s what Alexa.com reports about Yahoo’s user demographics:

• There are more female users than male
• Most users are college-aged
• Following the previously mentioned trend, the top browser location is a school or a college

In order to determine which industries are advertising on Yahoo, I used Yahoo Ad Insights’ Industries report, which includes such businesses as:

• Automotive
• Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
• Entertainment
• Finance
• Retail
• Tech and TELCO
• Travel

And here I stumbled upon another controversial fact. Data from Alexa.com shows that the dominating age group consists of students who, in my opinion and judging from my own experience, can barely afford products that fall into industries like Finance or Retail. If you happen to have experience using Yahoo for advertising, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Bing owns 0.48% of all traffic and 30% of the search engine market in the US

If we compare Bing with Yahoo, the former gets 3.35 times less traffic than Yahoo does. But as we have just discovered, Bing gets two times more search market queries compared to Yahoo. This means that it provides a lot more advertising opportunities for businesses. Also, the majority of Yahoo searches are powered by Bing, which means that once you’re ranking well in Bing, you automatically become visible in Yahoo.

All in all, Bing can boost traffic to your business by 30% and you don’t even need to invest in a new market or launch a new product or service. There’s no doubt you’ll need to put some effort into that process, but if you currently have a steady traffic flow from Google, then you’re already receiving visitors from Bing as well. You just need to analyze what exactly is going on with your Bing traffic, and find the right ways to take advantage of it. Here’s a great read supported with a video by John Lincoln who talks about SEO for Bing.

If you’re still not sure whether you should care about traffic coming to your site from Bing, here’s a great example. Searchengineland.com receives a little over 10% of Bing.com’s one million organic traffic visitors on a monthly basis:

Arts and Entertainment

As I’ve previously mentioned, this category ranks second and owns over 12% of all US traffic, all thanks to YouTube. Also if we look at the top industry domains, we’ll find that Netflix gets 5.67% of all traffic in this category. I find it interesting that organic traffic isn’t the top referral traffic source for Netflix. Those would be direct (58.54%) and referrals (23.59%). Obviously, you can tell which of the media streaming platforms — YouTube or Netflix — Google gives its royal preference to. It kind of makes sense because all of Netflix’s content is on-demand.

The graph below demonstrates that YouTube gets three times more organic traffic than Netflix:

Digging deeper, we learn Google can’t list Netflix’s content in a video featured snippet because Netflix is only accessible with a paid subscription. In some way, Netflix is cornering itself.

The screenshot below shows that Netflix does have visibility in SERPs via the Knowledge Graph, but it’s not getting any traffic from this ranking because the Knowledge Graph doesn’t feature a link to a domain.

The Music and Audio subcategory has its own peculiar numbers. I was surprised to see Pandora as a leader, ahead with two times more traffic and leaving Spotify with only 3.68 percent.

The pie chart below gives you a breakdown of the traffic distribution for other subcategories:

YouTube sends the majority of its traffic to Gambling sites

SimilarWeb shows that somewhere around 5% of all YouTube ad traffic is sent to Bet365.com, one of the largest gambling websites. Using SEMrush, I also checked the list of sites that get the most visitors from YouTube, and I found out that among the top three sites there’s another gambling site: Freelotto.com:

It’s safe to say that if you have a business in the entertainment industry, you should definitely consider YouTube as one of your traffic sources.

News and Media

Findings from the data collected confirm that people still read newspapers online and check them for weather updates instead of checking their phone apps.

My husband reads the news on his laptop during breakfast. Yet it still drives him nuts when I ask him to check for weather updates for me, despite my having all kinds of gadgets. Oh, well — guess old habits die hard. But it looks like I’m not alone in this world, because the majority of users have the same habit:

In case you’ve been wondering what the “Other” category stands for in this graph, here’s what it means. Currently, SimilarWeb hasn’t come up with a way to categorize those websites — that’s why it has the highest percentage. But among the most popular sites I found two prominent newspapers: Dailymail.co.uk and Theguardian.com.

Take a look at the screenshot above. Both The New York Times and Washington Post are among the top 5 sites in Newspaper subcategory.

The screenshot below demonstrates top 5 countries that bring traffic to Dailymail.co.uk. As you can see, there’s more traffic coming from the US than from anywhere else in the world:

It’s something to keep in mind if you’re searching for the most popular US newspapers online.

Shopping

Online shopping is an integral part of the e-commerce industry, which is, in fact, one of the fastest-growing markets in the US. In the past few years, the e-commerce share of the overall US retail market has grown from 6.6% in 2014 to 8.5% in Q1 2017. However, even though most retail purchases are made online, there’s a big group of people who are inspired to purchase a product offline after visiting a website. Statista reports that the number of web-influenced offline retail sales is 20% higher than non-web influenced sales. This means that for physical stores that don’t have an online representation, establishing their web presence is a must because the conversion process in most cases starts online.

There’s a 74% chance it will either be Amazon or eBay

The subcategory of Shopping called “General Merchandise” accounts for over 60% of web traffic, and is owned by Amazon (51.24%) and eBay (22.01%). The rest of the subcategories can be found in the pie chart below:

When shopping for goods in the Home and Garden category, North American users most likely check Homedepot.com, which gets 20.29% of all traffic in this subcategory, or Lowes.com, which is a go-to place for 10.55% of all users. Interesting fact: the traffic source that drives the most visitors to both sites is organic search results, which brings over 40% of monthly visitors.

Computer and Electronics

The data confirms that Microsoft has more monthly online visitors than Apple. Microsoft’s traffic share is a little over 15%, with Apple being left behind with only 3.28%. However, this doesn’t affect Apple’s sales at all, and it serves as proof of the fact that investing in your brand authority and focusing more on the quality of your product will make you stand out.

Based on R&P Research, Apple net profits surpassed those of Microsoft in 2011. Apple made $25.9 billion in net profits in 2011, and Microsoft saw $23.2 billion. From then on, Apple has outplayed Microsoft in acquired net profits:

If you’d like to dive deeper and learn more about how traffic is distributed across Shopping subcategories, then take a look at the graph below:

Reference category

I’m sure it’s not news to you if I tell you that Wikipedia’s traffic share in the Reference category is 44.55%. When it comes to subcategories, directories such as Yelp, Yellowpages, and Whitepages get over 85% of Internet traffic. It’s funny how I, as a teenager growing up in Russia, used to flip through the Yellow Pages — one of the most popular print directories for finding various companies. Any time I needed to find a store, I’d open up this book and navigate my finger through finely printed lines of text.

Now, you can only find hard copies of the Yellow Pages gathering dust somewhere in a small-town office.

The pie chart below gives a more detailed overview of how traffic is distributed across all the subcategories:

Wikipedia can bring you relevant users from search

Wikipedia.org has over 4.7 billion monthly visitors, and 86 percent of those visitors come from organic search. You should definitely see Wikipedia not only as an authoritative source with high-quality links, but also as a traffic generation channel.

For instance, according to SEMrush’s Traffic Analytics tool, SEJ receives more than 300 visitors from Wikipedia on a monthly basis:

Wikipedia is the best option for well-established businesses that really want to increase their online traffic, but suffer from an obnoxiously high level of competition in Google. To make this happen, your business has to have enough authority on the web; otherwise it will take forever. Prior to suggesting that experts link to your content, you have to make sure your brand is recognized. The type of content you want to end up under the “References” section on Wikipedia should be of the exact same quality as everything you read on that website.

Pay attention to the visibility of Wikipedia’s pages in SERPs for a keyword you’re targeting

To check that, go to SEMrush and check the domain for keywords:

You can also type in the following query to Google:

site:wikipedia.org your keyword + “dead link”

This will show you all articles on the web with dead links. If you’re looking to learn more about how Wikipedia can help you with your SEO efforts, here’s a post that I’ve recently come across that has tons of actionable advice.

Business Industry

In this category, the largest proportion of traffic is divided between Zillow.com (3.65%), USPS.com (2.50%), and UPS.com (1.69%).

Marketing, Advertising, and E-commerce have the smallest share compared to other subcategories:

Moving further, while looking at the leading sites in Marketing and Advertising, I found that advertising networks are getting the highest number of visitors. Among those sites are Dotomi.com (2.45%), Traffichaus (2.60%), and Innovid (2.63%). In addition, VigLink recently published a study in which they confirm that the demand for ad network is constantly growing, and advertisers are looking to connect with publishers and take advantage of affiliate marketing traffic.

Career and Education

In this niche, Indeed.com and Instructure.com attract the majority of visitors. The latter is an Ed Tech company which develops educational software; the majority of its traffic comes from referrals (61.7%).

The Universities and Colleges subcategory, along with listing Ivy League universities, mentions Purdue University, which, for some reason, happens to rank only 92 in the QS World University Rankings for 2016–2017, but is number 13 in terms of traffic.

We wanted to see which channel brings the most traffic to the world famous universities (ranked by the QS World Universities) compared to Purdue University, and find out the reasons for success in getting online traffic for both Purdue and other world-renowned universities.

All the universities in the screenshot above rank the highest, even though Purdue University is only number 13 when it comes to online traffic. Yet the screenshot clarifies a lot; Purdue University receives much of its traffic from organic search, which contributes greatly to its online visibility.

The is the first industry in which I’ve noticed traffic being distributed equally among all subcategories:

Travel

The travel business is extremely competitive; however, it is made up of a large diversity of small- and medium-sized players, because the top industry domains only have a little over 17% of the total market share. However, a subcategory such as Airlines and Airports has a few major players that get the majority of visitors — 45% of the traffic (in the travel industry), shared among the following businesses:

• Southwest.com – 14.74%
• American Airlines – 10.68%
• Delta – 10.78%
• United Airlines – 9.12%
• JetBlue – 4.5%

If you look at the graph below, which shows the traffic distribution for the different subcategories, you’ll see that, in general, traffic within the Hotel and Accommodation sector is higher than for airline- and airport-dedicated websites.

The reason for this might be because one of the most common means of traveling in the US is by car.

Speaking of general marketing trends in the travel industry, one of the top sources that brings traffic to that niche is affiliate marketing. For instance, Kayak.com is one of the biggest affiliates of Southwest.com, bringing over 15,000 visitors on a monthly basis:

If you’re interested in learning more about the current state of affiliate marketing in the travel industry, we’ve recently conducted a comprehensive study. We analyzed the top affiliate programs and sites using the SEMrush Traffic Analytics report. We also asked 50 well-known affiliate marketing experts about general affiliate marketing trends and incorporated their answers into our research.

Final thoughts

As always, it flatters me that you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with results of my hard work, and I hope that you now have a good understanding of the current state of traffic distribution across the most popular US industries. Before I began my research, I thought that a good portion of all Internet traffic was controlled by Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc. But it turned out that the top five most visited sites only get a little over 30% of all US traffic. On the other hand, findings from this data prove once again that establishing your business on Facebook, YouTube, and Google is essential to its long-term success.

As for the industry traffic distribution across top-visited domains, what springs to mind is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Categories like Adult Entertainment, Internet and Telecom, Shopping, and News and Media mostly serve our basic psychological needs. And moving down the list of industries, you’ll find that Business and Industry, Reference, Career and Education, and Travel get less searches because, apparently, not that many people nowadays have time to take care of their self-actualization needs.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts about my research as well as any ideas on what I could have covered but didn’t. Let me know if you were able to put any of the aforementioned conclusions into practice.

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Posted by Royh

Working as an SEO, it’s crucial that you’re ready to embrace changes in the SEO landscape, keep your finger on the pulse of Google’s updates, integrate and evaluate changes through on-site and off-site testing, build outreach campaigns, and all the other required tasks we love so much.

Implementing all of this successfully, though, is easier said than done. How exactly can you make sure that you’re focusing on quality traffic? And how do you even know that this traffic will help your brand grow? In this blog post, I’m going to show you how to pivot your SEO strategy according to the business’ needs.

1. Align your SEO strategy with the business strategy

SimilarWeb, the company I work for, decided to change their go-to-market strategy. Instead of targeting their current audience, their new vision was to target their enterprise audience.

This meant that, instead of targeting a broad audience, the goal is now a specific audience — complete with higher competition and less volume. In other words, it’s quality vs. quantity.

Thus, because our SEO efforts will now be focused on targeting those enterprise users, I need to adjust our SEO strategy accordingly to achieve the required conversions.

2. Work with the strategy/product marketing manager in your organization

Working closely with the product manager will help you generate a list of action items that need to be evaluated to better understand your organization’s long-term goals. Ideally, you should be concentrating on driving factors such as the vision of your company, the competitive landscape, the targeted audience, etc.

In particular, you should focus your marketing energy on researching and analyzing a few different things:

• Geo – Understand which countries and languages are the most valuable to the product. This can be determined by analyzing the amount of sales, leads, and revenue potential.
• Industries – The second step will be to define which industries you should focus on; it can be any industry, from e-commerce to insurance and beyond.
• Audience/persona – Drill deep down into the marketplace to discover who your target audience is and exactly what it is they’re looking for.
• Come up with a list of keyword groups/themes that you would like to target.
• Update your knowledge of your competitors, and build a new competitive intelligence report that will not only include your main competitors, but also industry content leaders. This will offer new ideas and help you develop new strategies; there’s a great post by Aleyda about competitive analysis workflows that can help you develop your own.

3. Build new keyword research

After you’ve gathered all this information and you’re aligned with the new strategy of the company, it’s time to come up with a new keyword research strategy.

I would recommend starting with your updated list of competitors. Analyze how much traffic they’re getting and which keywords will be relevant in your new strategy.

My favorite tools for this:

• SEMrush
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Sistrix
• SimilarWeb

Here’s example of what that looks like in SimilarWeb Pro; you can see how much traffic the actual websites are getting per keyword, the ratio between organic and paid, the ranking position, and more:

Once you have the list of keywords your competitors are using, it’s vital that you use another keyword tool to generate additional ideas.

Moz Keyword Explorer is my favorite for this; not only does it unearth new angles for your keyword strategies, but it also helps you group these keywords into relevant groups to enhance their accessibility:

Grouping keywords by high lexical similarity

Next, filter all the relevant keywords from the list based on topic, relevancy, and volume.

Segment the keywords based on their probability of getting ranked. In the case of Keyword Explorer, you can do this by analyzing the Opportunity score. Additionally, you can examine the volume of the keywords and see what their current ranking in the SERP is.

Now you have that big, exciting list of keywords organized by groups, volume, and opportunity, it’s time to start keyword mapping to get those keywords into your site pages. Make sure that all your site pages integrate the new keywords into titles, descriptions, H1s, H2s, etc. If you need help with building the keyword/content mapping, you should watch this Whiteboard Friday from Rand.

4. Focus on relevant traffic

In the past, there have been many assumptions made about SEO rankings. The most common assumption: get more traffic to your site and you’ll improve your rankings. However, as I’ll now discuss, good SEO shows us that this is far from the truth.

Improving the quality of your traffic will help improve your rankings

At SimilarWeb, we decided to remove most of the irrelevant traffic to our site (around 40%) from the total SEO traffic.

Here are some reasons that led us to remove low-quality traffic from the index. Irrelevant traffic…

1. Provides 0% value to the business in terms of leads/sales
2. Has a high bounce rate
3. Results in low pageviews per user
4. Indicates content that’s not relevant to the business. Google’s purpose is to complete the searcher’s task and provide the best result for their query, so if you have content on your site that’s not performing well in terms of ranking, CTR, bounce rate, time on the page, and so on, you should consider rewriting it or removing it from the index.

You can see our own results here, which clearly show a significant increase in all the engagement stats:

• Bounce rate was reduced by 42%
• Pageviews per session increased by 34%
• Time on site increased by 65%

Final thoughts

Changes in a company’s strategy can present a fantastic opportunity for SEO managers to review the current status of their SEO efforts. And, by identifying what is and isn’t working, you’ll arm yourself with the knowledge required to build a new strategy which will attract not just traffic, but relevant users who have a higher probability to convert.

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!

Posted by randfish

Competing with comparison sites in the SERPs can feel like a losing game, but it doesn’t have to. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the challenges and outlines five solutions that can help you begin ranking for those high-value comparative terms.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this impossible edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about one of the toughest things that a lot of SEOs face, which is trying to rank for these specific types of queries that have a plural comparative intent behind them.

Some examples:

So I’ll give you a bunch of examples just to set the stage for this.

Let’s say I’m a hotel operator in Edinburgh, and I run one individual hotel, maybe a boutique hotel, and I want to rank for “best hotels in Edinburgh.” But that is nearly impossible, because if you look at the front page of results, all the folks there are comparative types of sites. They’re media properties. They’re hotel comparison shopping sites. So it’s TripAdvisor and Telegraph and US News & World Report, and This is Edinburgh, which is a media magazine there.

If I want to rank for “compare headphones” and I am the maker of one particular type of headphones, it’s incredibly difficult to outrank a PC Magazine, Forbes, HeadphonesCompare.com, CNET, Reevoo. This is an incredible challenge, right?

“Best Broadway shows,” if I’m operating a new Broadway show and I want to come up for this, which would be really meaningful for my Broadway show, which, by the way, most of them lose money. It’s an incredibly tough business. NYC Theatre, Time Out, Broadway.com, how do I get in there?

Or let’s say I’m in the software field. I’m FullContact, and I want to rank for “FullContact versus Clearbit.” There are lots of comparative types of searches like this. If you search for your brand name or your product’s brand name and “versus,” you’ll almost certainly come up with a bunch of suggestions. Well, it turns out neither FullContact nor Clearbit rank for this type of query. It’s Inbound.org and StackShare and Quora and Analyzo.

For “Android word games,” if I’ve come out with a new word game, it could be huge for me to rank for this term. But you know what? It’s going to be Android Central and Google Play, Tom’s Guide, Android Headlines, right?

If I have a new TV comedy, it would be fantastic because a lot of people are searching for “TV comedies” or “TV comedies on Netflix” or what have you. If I was Netflix or if I were some of these folks, I would love to come up here. But instead, it’s UPROXX and Ranker and IMDB. It’s comparative media sites almost always.

The problems

So what do we do? The first step is we have to identify the problem, like what is fundamentally going on. Why is it that these types of sites consistently outperform? This is not universal, but it’s close enough, especially on competitive head terms, like some of these, where it gets close to impossible or feels that way.

I. It’s really tough to rank without using the right words and phrases.

If you are a boutique hotel in Edinburgh, you might not be very comfortable using words like Hilton or Marriott or some of these other words that are branded terms that are owned by your competition. There could be legal issues around that, but it might also just be a brand guidelines type of thing. So that’s one part of the hard problem.

II. It’s really hard to rank without serving the searcher’s true intent.

In these cases, the searcher’s intent is, “I want to compare multiples of these things.” So if you have an individual hotel website or an individual headphone website, an individual Android word game, that’s not actually answering the searcher’s intent. It used to be easier, back before RankBrain and before Google got really smart with Hummingbird around their query intent understanding. But these days, very, very challenging. So that’s the second one.

III. It’s really hard to get links, hard to get links when you’re purely promotional or self-interested, you’re just one brand trying to outrank these folks, because these types of pieces of content seem sort of less selfish. The comparisons feel less self-interested, and therefore it’s easier for them to get organic links.

So tough challenge here. Three big issues that we have to address.

5 primary solutions

There actually are some solutions. There are some ways that some very creative and clever folks have worked around this in the past, and you can use them as well.

1. You can try separating your media or your blog or editorial content.

By separate, I mean one of two ways. You could go with a wholly separate domain. That’s pretty tough. You won’t inherit the domain authority. It will probably be a new domain, so that will be a challenge. Or you simply separate it editorially, such that it’s segmented from the promotional content. Moz actually does this, and, as a result, we rank for a lot of these types of queries. We even rank for a lot of SEO software types of queries that are clearly comparative, because we have that editorial independence in our editorial content. So this is one way you can go about doing that.

2. You could try a guest posting strategy or a guest contribution.

So if you can go out to the websites that are already listed here or ones like them, those independent, editorial, media-driven properties and say, “Hey, I will contribute to this as an independent author or writer. Yes, I work for this brand, but I think when you see my content, you will see that I’ve done my research and I am not biased.” If you can prove that to the editors at these publications, you can often prove that to the audience as well, and then you can earn these types of rankings.

You can actually see an example of this. I think it was, yes, I think the Forbes contributor here, I suspect they worked either with or for or at least in conjunction with a brand, because it seemed like they had a preference behind them and the author had a connection there.

3. You can commission independent research.

This is something that a lot of big companies will do. They’ll go out and they’ll say, “Hey, you’re an independent research firm that’s well-trusted. Will you do some research in our particular space?” Then hopefully it’s something that the press will pick up. It’s these press websites that you’re actually hoping are going to earn the rankings over here.

I will say while most of the folks doing this right now are very large companies with big research budgets and big advertising and promotional budgets, you don’t have to be. You can go and contract a single expert in the field, someone that you trust to do a great job, and you can say, “Hey, you already contribute to CNET, you already contribute to Time Out, you’re already a contributor to Tom’s Guide or Android Headlines or whatever it is. Could you do this independent research? We’ll pay you. Whatever the results you find, we’ll pay you regardless.” That can be quite successful.

4. If you need to do it yourself, but you don’t want to keep it on your own site, you could use a microsite.

So creating a site like if I’m Q over here and I’m XvsYvsQ.com, I’m not sure the exact match domain is precisely the route I’d take, but conceivably that microsite can perform well in these searches, and there are several examples, few and far between though they are, of this strategy working.

5. Win all the lists.

So if I want to rank in “best Broadway shows,” well, maybe I could just be “Hamilton.” If I want to win at “compare headphones,” maybe I could invent that patent on the noise-cancelling headphones that Bose have, which, by the way, win like three out of five of these. If I want to win the FullContact versus Clearbit, well, I need the features and the functionality and the things that these reviewers are using in order to win.

There’s almost always a bunch of objective criteria that you can identify by looking through these SERPs and related SERPs to figure out what you need to do. The challenge is it’s not just a marketing or an SEO or a content problem. Now it becomes a product and a positioning and oftentimes an engineering problem as well in order to have that win. But now you’ve got the strategies, hard though it may be. This is not impossible. It’s just difficult.

All right. Look forward to your comments and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by STMartin

You can’t afford to throw money away on inefficient tactics in the paid advertising space. Keeping your campaigns cost-effective is a must. To streamline your paid campaigns, there are many different landing page best practices you can employ. We’ve seen the most significant of these results often come from optimizing your call-to-action.

Now, optimizing your CTA can include a few different factors. Not only is there placement, copy, design, and the usual list of CRO check boxes — there’s also the psychology of the interaction itself to consider.

To truly optimize your individual paid campaigns, you should get far more granular with your CRO. This will include taking your actual value proposition under investigation. Here are a few questions you may want to ask yourself regarding the psychology of your landing page and CTA:

• Where is my user in the buyer’s journey?
• Are they in the right stage for this conversion?
• Is what we are offering convenient/valuable enough?
• Does our offer align with the information we’re asking for?

You’d be surprised how often your CTA issue is offer-related as well as copy-related. Too many marketing managers are focusing on fixing their landing page copy, when they should be asking their CMOs to consider changing what they offer in the first place.

Results from our CTA psychoanalysis study [SaaS]

The best insights are built on hard-earned data — so we decided to get some for you before we started. The CTA Psychoanalysis Spreadsheet (which you can click the image to download for free) analyzed the CTAs of the top 100 SaaS landing pages:

What we found in the study is that most CTA issues fall under one of four categories:

1. Clarity

The main issue here is that the goal conversion of the page is unclear. This can be because you are using vague copy (like “click here”) on your buttons. Or it could come from your landing page lacking the necessary information to educate your user on their need for your service.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the landing page may look clean but it lacks any helpful information to educate the user on why they should convert. Especially for early-stage searchers, this page might as well be a black-hole of mystery and friction.

Make sure that your landing page has any necessary information your user needs to be adequately informed on your product/service. Here are a few things to focus on:

• Time-saving value of your product
• Competitive pricing of your product/services
• The exact pain point your product/service solves

2. Timing

Here we saw that many landing pages were offering assets to the user that were not appropriate for where they were in the buyer’s journey. For example, if a user hasn’t been given the right contextual information to understand their need for your service, offering a free trial in your CTA is a bit misplaced.

The same goes for offering digital assets with zero explanation of what they are:

Make sure that your offer properly aligns with where your user is in the buyer’s journey.

• Top-funnel offers just ask for contact information
• Mid-funnel offers can push branded experiences like email subscription
• Bottom-funnel offers get to focus on scheduling meetings and calls

Lastly, whatever you offer, make sure you explain what they heck the user is downloading so they aren’t blindly clicking spam.

3. Friction

Whenever you’re asking for contact information from a user, you need to walk a fine line between value and friction. The more information you ask for (name, email, business, competitors, etc.) the more friction you’re going to force on your landing page.

If your forms are asking for every bit of information your user could possibly supply, they’re probably bouncing off en masse. Make sure what you ask for is equal to what you offer.

The majority of B2B search marketers report that the form field “sweet spot” for conversions is somewhere between 3–5. Any more than that and you start pushing users away.

4. Placement

This has been, and always will be, an issue for CTAs. Online readers aren’t known for their attention spans — and you only have a few seconds to grab and hold their attention.

This means that your goal conversion (your CTA) should be highlighted and attention-grabbing. At the least, it should be visible immediately when you land on the page. You’d be surprised how many sites we still see with nearly invisible CTA buttons buried under a forest of irrelevant images:

Pro tip? Make sure your buttons are easily found… that is, only if you want your users to click them.

These are just the common issues we ran into while studying an entire industry. While these prove that there are many common CTA issues that can be easily fixed, it doesn’t prove how impactful fixing them can be.

To see just how powerful optimizing your CTAs can be, keep reading.

3 B2B case studies to prove the power of CTAs

Now I did just lay out that there are four primary issues to handle when it comes to CTAs. But the last issue (placement) can be fixed fairly easily. As long as your button is clear and visible with plenty of empty space to isolate the goal conversion, you should be in the clear.

But when it comes to the other three CTA issues, fixing them can get a bit more complex. We’ve found that breaking down the psychology of the landing page interaction is a great way to reverse-engineer the buyer’s journey to your site.

Through this, we’ve been able to test some aggressive CRO strategies with our clients’ campaigns. What we’ve seen is that the most impactful changes come from addressing either:

• Convenience of the conversion
• Copy of your button and landing page
• Landing page offer or gated asset

B2B search marketing is all about understanding the nuances of your end customer and where to ideally place your brand in order to convert them. If you really want to streamline your buyer’s journey, you’ll dive deep into these CRO puzzles.

Case study 1: Changing the CTA convenience

We were able to drastically increases this client’s conversions by optimizing their CTA. In this instance, “optimizing” refers to making the conversion more convenient for their users.

The goal of their landing page was to fill their pipeline with qualified leads interested in scheduling a demo. This is a great lead-gen tactic, and the landing page was a clean, streamlined experience.

But what we realized was that “scheduling” a demo can cause serious hesitation in users. Scheduling requires them to go into their own calendar and consult when they’re free and can match your company’s schedule.

To make the conversion more convenient, we created a demo video that was available for download. Luckily, the client already had a great video asset that we could use.

This way, instead of trying to consolidate two calendars (user’s and company’s), the user could download the video and watch at their discretion. (On the left: “Schedule a Demo Today!” & on the right: “FREE 5 Min Demo Video”)

When it comes to convenience, it’s important that you speak to users not only in terms of dollars, but time. While money is always a resource that we want to save, time is an invaluable and infinite resource that we are all constantly clamoring for more of. If you really want to impress users, start speaking to them in terms of time-saving value. You can see from the screenshot below that doing so will prove worthwhile.

That’s right — we saw over 738% increase in conversions by making the process more convenient for users. That’s some serious conversion rate optimization — which leads to some serious revenue.

Case study 2: Changing the CTA copy

By optimizing the exact phrasing of this software site’s CTA button, we were able to drastically increase their paid leads.

Now, if you are running any sort of serious landing page campaign, your CTAs will explicitly state the goal conversion of your page. For example, a “click here” button simply isn’t going to cut it. If you are telling them to read a blog, download an e-book, or schedule a meeting, your CTAs should read accordingly: “Read now,” “Download e-book,” “Get in touch.”

But copy-focused CRO goes beyond just focusing your CTAs. A/B testing your button copy to see which variants convert more of the traffic your ads generate is also key. In this case, we tested whether the industry-oriented copy or the value-oriented copy would convert higher.

Originally, the button read only “Watch the Demo Video” — a CTA that we knew worked from the previous test above. We tested the two screenshots in two different targeted markets.

The first (MES Software) was targeted towards industry experts who would hopefully react to the specific copy. The second (Free) was for everyone else. The results were quite interesting:

• “MES Software” Results: 8.18% increase in conversions
• “Free” Results: 9.49% increase in conversions

We can see from the results that targeting your CTA copy towards your target market’s vocabulary does work quite well. But, as in most cases, emphasizing that the asset is free of charge eliminates nearly all friction from the experience, which resulted in a serious increase in conversions.

Thus far we’ve seen that changing the CTA to cater to your user’s convenience results in serious increases in conversions. Emphasizing a great deal with “free” in your copy also work incredibly well.

The more value you convey through your button’s copy (whether it’s monetary with “free” or expertise with “MES”) the more success you’re likely to see. But what happens when you change your landing page’s offer altogether?

Case study 3: Changing the CTA offer

What we saw in this third campaign is that oftentimes there are multiple search intents behind the traffic your paid ads are generating. This means that not everyone who clicks through your ad is seeing relevant material if you’re running a blanket campaign.

But these clicks are still potential leads that you are leaving on the table. Don’t let them bounce off. Create a custom experience for each of your distinct search intents. Don’t just stop at niche — go all the way to creating custom experiences for singular searchers!

Previously, this landing page CTA was focused on a singular goal (scheduling a demo), but there were multiple search intents behind who was clicking on their ad. Because of this we were seeing a lot of bounces.

After we looked at the data, we realized that we could create a custom landing page experience for each of these different search intents. One of these was focused on a certain industry report, the second with a new cybersecurity threat, and the third with the actual brand name in mind.

In the screenshots below, you can see how we created three unique experiences for different expected users:

This newly segmented landing page campaign saw a drastic increase in conversions by targeting each of these different buyer’s journeys. The more customized an experience you can provide, the more conversion-prone your user will be.

Instead of hoping that a catch-all ad campaign would generate leads from each of these different intents, try the opposite. Creating a more customized user experience will rarely come back to bite you. After all, the conversion rates of each of these segmented pages speak for themselves:

• Gartner Report Conversion Rates: 36.9%
• NSS Report Conversion Rates: 18.63%
• Healthcare Cybersecurity Conversion Rates: 8.85%

As always, when it comes to digital marketing, segmentation should always yield more success.

Takeaways: Smooth slide to conversion

As far as golden rules go, your CTAs should be following one:

Make conversion easy for your users.

This goes for any interpretation of the word “easy” you can think of. The more convenient your offer and the more value-driven your landing page & button copy, the more enticed your users will be to convert. CRO takes more than just copy and design into consideration.

To truly master your buyer’s journey and become an ROI-driven CRO mastermind, you need to analyze the psychology of your paid campaigns. You need to dive deeper into the implications of each market interaction. And — most importantly — you need to implement changes that will drive leads/revenue, not just empty clicks.

The smoother your CTAs, the smoother the slide straight to your sales team.

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