30-second summary:

• As marketing budgets inevitably tighten, the demand for cost-effective and dependable channels such as SEO continues to increase
• Some of the critical updates and algorithm changes in 2022 give marketers a heads-up on where to focus in 2023
• SEO and content marketers need to create better processes and work in tandem to achieve business goals
• The days of set-and-forget SEO are over, organizations must utilize SEO in multiple ways

With marketing budgets under more scrutiny than ever, savvy organizations are looking towards SEO for sustained growth. Incorporating organic search into the digital strategy offers rich rewards – both in terms of cost efficiency and improved brand equity – that can contribute to an entire organization. As such, marketers have embraced this approach to maximize returns on marketing and technology expenditure.

In this article, I explain why SEO is so hot, what has changed in 2022, and what to capitalize on in 2023.

According to research from Gartner, CEOs are doubling down on digital investment strategies as they maximize their marketing ROI. However, Google recently reported that ad spending is down.

At the same time, in a recent survey of over 1000 enterprise marketers, over 90% of marketers are planning to place a greater emphasis on SEO in 2023.

Why organizations will lean into SEO in 2023

As marketing budgets inevitably tighten, the demand for cost-effective and dependable channels continues to increase — drawing much-deserved SEO attention from company leaders. In particular, they are finding that SEO insights give them a comprehensive view of consumer trends in times of volatility. It’s this invaluable knowledge that organizational and departmental heads know can help them drive their decisions today and tomorrow.

After two decades of sustained growth, search remains an essential channel despite marketplace volatility. It is a testament to the importance and effectiveness of search for connecting businesses with their target audiences.

Concerning enterprise organizations, some key benefit factors leading to the lean into SEO include:

1. SEO is a high-yield channel and is not impacted by market conditions
2. Organizations can benefit from long-term SEO incremental value
3. Only SEO can provide real-time insights into both market demand and customer intent
4. SEO insights drive sales, product, digital, and media initiatives across organizations
5. Organizations benefit from brand equity due to SEO presence on the SERPs
6. In tandem, SEO and PPC (together) give more control over the customer experience

SEO is rapidly becoming the key to unlocking a connection between businesses and customers. Organizations can get ahead of their prospects’ needs by understanding what they are looking for, why it matters to them, and how optimized content can best meet those requirements when needed most.

The focus on the (human) consumer and their experiences is something that Google focused heavily on in 2022. Some of the critical updates and algorithmic changes give marketers a heads-up on where to focus in 2023.

Learn from 2022 to prepare for 2023

2022 has been an eventful year for organic search, with several significant updates impacting how SEO and marketing teams should focus and operate.

Below are a few key areas where Google has indicated where SEO, content, technical and online marketers need to change – adapt and become agile – and where to prioritize their focus in 2023.

The Page Experience Update and Core Web Vitals was rolled out (mobile and desktop) to ensure users receive results that load quickly and render within a certain time threshold.

Read more on SEW: Mobile-first and Core Web Vitals: Page Experiences

Future focus for 2023

• In 2023 all organizations must ensure their website’s technical performance creates an optimal user experience
• This involves examining the page loading speed, browser response time, and content stability during loading for a seamless customer journey
• Leveraging a tailored blend of data-led insights, content, and technical expertise in 2023 will help you create powerful user experiences. Google puts great emphasis on optimizing results and prioritizing accurate, reliable information – from page speed through to navigation capabilities Ensure you combine data-science techniques with best (white-hat) SEO best practices.
• By focusing both on website functionality and providing engaging, relevant content – marketing teams can plan for success in the current – and any – economic climate

Google’s Product Algorithm Update was released to help users make informed decisions. This was in the form of a refreshed set of instructions and updates based on the annual performance of product reviews. It was designed to empower users with access to accurate information that will enable them to make sound product purchasing choices.

Future focus for 2023

• In 2023 make it your goal to create a world-class experience for consumers, helping them find what they need quickly and easily. Aim to make the process of looking for items simpler than ever before – empowering people who search with an effortless journey directly from search results into their shopping carts!
• If your selling products, demonstrate your professional abilities by providing well-founded advice and showcasing why you are the go-to expert on a subject
• Back up any product recommendations with reliable data to provide assurance of authenticity

Multisearch was announced in April to enable searches using images and text. Powered by Google Lens, it allows people to use mobile cameras or photos to search relevant images and text to find the most relevant results they need. Connecting words & visuals to create an exciting array of possibilities for consumers.

Future focus for 2023

• In 2023 expect more advancements in Google’s AI development and MUM
• Balance the content you create, and find an image-to-text ratio to provide the accurate answers users now want and expect
• Focus on mobile optimization of images and expect this type of functionality to become a new norm in 2023

Google’s Helpful Content Update was announced and recently rolled out to ensure users receive the most useful search results.

Future focus for 2023

• In 2023, content creators and website owners must develop unique materials tailored specifically toward human end-users instead of robots or spiders
• For instance, when collecting customer reviews on products sold online – be sure requests inquire about specific details so reviewers can demonstrate intimate knowledge in their feedback
• Similarly, blog posts covering events or news should include fresh perspectives not found elsewhere by readers searching through Google’s services
• Today’s algorithms are much more sophisticated, and they identify content that does not satisfy the reader – in some cases, content that has been “spun up” by automated tools.

SEO and content marketers need to get better together.

Read more on Helpful Content here

Googles Search On event

At Google’s Search On event, they revealed some innovative developments that will revolutionize how we search online. For example, visual search results will provide an interactive and engaging experience with graphic cards of imagery directly integrated into every search result.

Additionally, users can also look forward to a new auto-complete feature for their searches as well as more tailored multi-search options designed for them to find meaningful answers quickly.

Googles Spam Update to help direct customers towards content with real purpose. As part of this effort, the search giant is improving the quality of results and expanding into new formats and mediums for delivering helpful information.

• Consider how these updates may affect your SEO strategies moving forward
• Ensure you are balancing keywords and not keyword stuffing
• Avoid thin content and focus on quality over quantity
• Use AI correctly for insights and optimization, not article content creation

Conclusion

SEO teams are becoming indispensable for organizations looking to uncover fresh opportunities and build a durable business. Cost-efficient tactics not only save funds but add value across departments too.

In 2023 focus on the following;

1. Utilizing SEO insights as a source of organization-wide business intelligence
2. Ensure technical SEO best practices are used to ensure websites provide experiences consumers expect and automate research and site fixes when and where possible
3. Focus on visual search and expect its importance to rise in 2023
4. Balance your optimization of content with key Google E-A-T and Helpful content guidelines, do not over-optimize
5. Leverage AI and automation to manage repetitive and time-consuming tasks and scale
6. Balance SEO and PPC and find synergies to adapt to changes in the market and with Google
7. Become the consultant and business advisor organizations need in times of change

SEO is no longer viewed as a stand-alone task; it is an integral part of your overall marketing plan. It enhances and bolsters other strategies in place while providing maximum reach for your business goals in 2023.

Be prepared for change and be flexible and agile. Slacking regarding optimization in terms of user experience, technical issue resolution, and speed can see you left behind competitors who are continuing their efforts without pause.

The days of set-and-forget SEO are over. Be prepared as organization look to utilize SEO in multiple ways

Change will be the main constant in the economy, with organizations and SEO next year!

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform. Find him on Twitter @jimyu.

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The post 2023, the year of SEO: why brands are leaning in and how to prepare appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Has it become nearly impossible to cut through the noise of six million apps in app stores?
• For app marketing to be effective, it has to take into consideration the whole ecosystem that affects your app’s marketing performance
• Whether it is app store optimization (ASO) or combining organic and paid user acquisition, marketers need to look at data holistically and ask the right questions when analyzing app performance
• A successful app marketing strategy understands the correlation between ASO and paid user acquisition efforts
• You need to understand how your paid funnel impacts organic growth and vice versa

Whether you like it or not, apps have become a day-to-day standard for businesses and consumers. There is an app for everything, whether it is shopping, banking, travel, or gaming.  In fact, a recent survey has found that 88 percent of mobile time is spent within apps.

According to Statista’s data from Q2 of 2022, there are more than six million apps across Google Playstore, Apple app store, and Amazon store.

Source: Statista

That’s why marketing your app properly has never been more important and has become an integral part of a business’s marketing strategy. But for it to be effective, app marketing has to take into consideration the whole ecosystem that affects your app’s marketing performance. Whether it is app store optimization (ASO) or combining organic and paid user acquisition (for example, via Google App Campaigns and Apple Search Ads), marketers need to look at data holistically and ask the right questions when analyzing an app’s performance.

Here I will share some of the knowledge I have gained and tricks of the trade I have learned over the past 10 years in the marketing field.

Organic growth on its own won’t take you far

While a few years ago ASO may have been the most important part of your app marketing strategy, to stay competitive in the busy app marketing landscape, you need to power up your User Acquisition (UA) strategy. This does not mean that ASO is no longer important – it sure is – but it has to be combined with your paid user acquisition strategy for an app’s sustainable growth. Both organic and paid UA has the main goal to drive quality conversions while maintaining a low cost per conversion.

To start with, you need a solid ASO foundation to maintain a stream of high-quality users across channels. It is essential as the user will ultimately land in your app store listing. You are literally wasting your money if you haven’t invested time in ASO and optimizing your store listing.

Paid user acquisition can lead to more organic app installs. Ads will bring new attention to your app store listing. The more installs your app generates, the higher your app will be ranked in the app stores. As a result, it increases visibility across search results and browse sections. Due to increased visibility, more and more users will land in your organic store listing and download your app. Hence the growth loop continues!

A successful strategy is about understanding the correlation between ASO and paid user acquisition efforts. You need to understand how your paid funnel impacts organic growth and vice versa. At GAMEE, we have used App Radar’s all-in-one platform which has helped our team work together within one system and understand, as well as maximize, the impact of organic and paid user acquisition for both Google and Apple app stores.

Analyzing app performance

After putting a lot of effort into optimizing your UA, don’t just sit back and hope to see perfect results. Throughout the campaign, you should be analyzing your app’s performance and asking the right questions. You’d probably like to know how much growth your ASO efforts brought. Or was it your paid UA traffic that led to an increase or drop? It can be challenging to answer all these questions, especially considering many factors that can play a significant role. As an example, let’s look at a couple of scenarios.

Scenario one: A drop in app installs

Seeing a drop in installs? It might be concerning at first sight. However, the good news is that there is most probably an explanation for every decrease in installs. And for every problem, there is also a solution.

One crucial impact factor you need to consider is paid user acquisition efforts. When you notice a decrease in downloads, you should first check whether you had ads running during that specific time. Ads can bring a significant amount of traffic to your app, and once you stop or reduce them, this might have a substantial effect on your results. Check the correlation between organic and paid conversions, and then analyze how your paid conversions impact your total growth and understand whether an increase in installs might be due to reduced activity via paid channels.

What should you do now?

First, try to get a better picture of the situation by looking at the last 30 or 90 days timeframe and understanding how significant the impact was. If pausing, for example, your Google App Campaigns greatly decreased your installs, you should consider re-activating the ads.

Scenario two: An increase in app installs

This is the result we are all aiming for. Ideally, you’d want this to continue throughout and beyond your marketing campaign. But for that, you need to know what was impacting the increase. Transferring and attributing success from one place to another can be tricky if you do not know where the success is coming from.

Your best bet would be to look at the conversion breakdown to help you find the answer. Is it Google Ads, Apple Search Ads, another paid channel, or ASO? If you run a campaign via a paid channel at the same time as the installs increased then it is most likely that that was what influenced your overall app growth. It is worth also evaluating which ad platform is the most efficient. Do you get a better cost per conversion with a paid channel? To get an idea of whether your app is performing better or worse, you may want to compare the figures with previous campaigns – How did your impressions, conversions, and costs perform compared to the previous period? Taking all of this into account will help you determine whether you should change your focus or make tweaks to your campaign.

Three takeaways from GAMEE’s experience

At GAMEE we have learned that there are three elements every app marketer should never stop working on:

ASO

It is the end-point to all of your app activities. Every dollar and hour invested elsewhere can be multiplied by a good ASO strategy and approach. This is where our use of App Radar’s platform was extremely valuable in maximizing our campaigns.

Testing

Use custom app store listings (where possible), various combinations of paid ad networks, and app store A/B tests to get the best results.

Prioritizing

Pick the audience, markets, regions, and/or demographics you need to win and focus your ASO and paid channels on them.

While analyzing the impact of paid and organic user acquisition is no easy task, the one thing you don’t want to do is put all your eggs in one basket. You can’t rely on just organic UA or just paid UA. For a successful app marketing strategy, both areas have to work in tandem. Your campaign should also allow room for testing. This enables you to tweak and pivot strategy as you go, and tailor it for your target audience. Trust me, if properly managed your app will soon be reaping your strategy’s benefits.

Jan Gemrich is Chief Marketing Officer at GAMEE, a high-engagement play-to-earn gaming platform, that attracts over 30 million users. GAMEE is part of Animoca brands which is a leading blockchain gaming company.  Jan previously worked for 9+ years at Google, based out of Prague, London, and Toronto, where he was responsible for user growth (Google Pay, Android, Search) and the launch of new products (Pixel, Stadia, etc).

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The post Are the days of pure organic growth over for apps? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• SEOs must improve the efficiency of ecommerce shopping ad campaigns to meet consumer expectations of a hassle-free online experience
• Brands need to invest time, gather experience, and implement various new strategies to maximize their performance as the digital space is growing and evolving at a rapid pace
• Setting up something like a Google Shopping Campaign may not be an uphill task; however, you need to implement smart strategies to make it more effective
• The valuable tactics mentioned in this post will help you boost your ecommerce sales and get you started on the right track

We are witnessing a significant increase in digital ad spending across the globe. The pandemic has resulted in consumer behavior changes that have led to a new era of ecommerce. The majority of people around the world have increased their reliance on online shopping and brands have been investing more money and attention in direct-to-consumer activity.

According to a report by Oberlo, digital advertising spend in 2022 grew by 15.6 percent from 2021. The report further states that digital ad growth shows no signs of stopping and the growth is expected to continue for the next few years.

If you are running a business that sells products, you should absolutely embrace ecommerce to drive its growth. However, while neglecting ecommerce is not an option, there are numerous other brands online that could be fierce competition for your products, so it is important for you to enhance your strategy to remain both relevant and visible.

Important things to consider before starting a campaign

Ensure that your website is e-commerce SEO services-friendly (search engine optimized) and has a user-friendly design. A well-structured ecommerce website can help you achieve the kind of results you are looking for.

It is extremely crucial to create an ad that resonates with your potential customers. You should create a detailed customer persona with the following steps.

• Decide who your target audience is. Are you targeting young men who like outdoor activities? Middle-aged mothers? Adults with aging parents?
• Once you determine your target audience, you should understand what they are looking for. Analyze their requirements and try to find out their interests. What hobbies or goals might your target audience have? What interferes with their ability to do these things?
• Turn these obstacles – these pain points – into your guidestones and try to address the problems that they pose.

How to maximize efficiency for your ecommerce paid campaigns

If you are looking to establish sustainable positive brand awareness online and improve your revenues from online sources, it’s critical to fine-tuning your online strategy.

Here is a list of key tactics that you must employ in order to achieve optimum results. While we will be specifically speaking about Google ads, many of these tactics are broadly applicable across any paid advertising service you use.

Optimize the product data feed

• The data in your Google Product Feed determines your campaign performance, which seriously impacts your ROI. Therefore, optimization is key.
• Make sure that the title is simple so that your audience can understand everything they need to know about your product just by reading it. Such titles can also help you gain maximum visibility on search engines like Google.
• Instead of the Google Product Feed, if you prefer using a spreadsheet, make sure that you include all possible information about the product such as color, size, material, the age range of potential customers, and so on.
• Select the right product categories and subcategories and align them with the appropriate product types. Failing to do this can seriously hurt your sales.
• A quality Product Feed Management tool helps you track your performance, which is crucial, as you can make the necessary adjustments to your ad campaigns based on your performance.

Fine-tune your campaign by using negative keywords

• Nothing is perfect in this world, and that includes the Google Shopping system as well.  Even though Google Shopping listings are a boon for marketers, imperfect keyword targeting is a big issue as search results can sometimes display your products with irrelevant search keywords. For instance, if you sell running shoes, but not other running accessories, you don’t want your ads coming up for shoppers who won’t purchase. 
• If you’re showing up for these keywords that won’t generate buys, your ad campaigns could experience high spending but terrible conversion ratios, low click-through rates, and low ROIs and ROAS.
• Implementing a negative keywords strategy in your Google Shopping ad campaigns can prevent your ads from showing up when certain search phrases are used. This in turn can boost the campaigns’ ROAS and ROI.
• Using negative keywords in your ad campaigns can prevent unwanted clicks, thereby helping you save money by improving the click rate of your advertisement.

Highlight your sales, discounts, and special offers

• Every customer loves a great offer as they are getting an opportunity to save while purchasing something.
• If you want to move your products quickly, showcasing discounts and special offers is a great way to achieve that. While running special offers and deals, you need to specifically mention that, and if you really want to stand out in the field, you should run ads regarding these offers and deals.

Use Single Product Ad Groups

• Single Product Ad Groups (SPAGs) enable marketers to set bids for each product individually. An SPAG allows you to pause individual products that aren’t giving you the expected results. SPAGs also give you the option to create negative keywords for specific products.
• An SPAG allows you to identify your best-selling products and least-selling products, which will help you to group them into performing and non-performing categories accordingly.
• An SPAG is a very useful tool, as it allows you to make modifications at the product level and create keywords for your product and control the bids at the market level.

Try Google Showcase Ads

• Google Showcase Ads feature product images and prices directly on the results page. These ads expand when clicked and display a custom description of the product and a catalog of related products. These ads allow you to group together related products and present them together to introduce your brand or business.
• Google Showcase Ads can improve your sales performance and efficiency of your paid campaigns as they allow you to highlight your products using high-quality digital images. You will be able to see them at the top of the SERP (search engine results page), above the paid search ads.

Create a good post-purchase experience

• Considering the fierce competition from other brands and competitors online, it is very important to encourage repeat purchases, as they are often much less expensive than converting first-time shoppers.
• A strong check-out experience and post-purchase considerations will help build strong customer loyalty which will make second and third purchases more likely.
• Use customer data wisely once it is acquired. This will improve your customer retention rate. You can group your customers based on how much they have purchased and how many times they have purchased. You can then provide exclusive discounts and offers to your loyal customers accordingly.

Important points to remember while creating an ecommerce website

Here are a few key points that you must consider while creating an ecommerce website.

• Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Many users use mobile devices for online searches, in fact, most online searches are executed on mobile devices. Making your site mobile user-friendly ensures that customers will be able to navigate your site on their mobile devices seamlessly.
• Different users prefer different payment methods. Therefore, it is important to offer multiple payment options, as customers may cancel the purchase if they don’t find their preferred payment option on your ecommerce website. For instance, you could offer a normal credit card payment option, as well as PayPal or Google Pay.
• Keep the sales process simple. Even customers who are not computer or mobile-savvy should be able to complete their purchase without trouble. A simple and straightforward experience can give your customers an effortless and seamless experience while purchasing.

Final thoughts

It is important for every brand to put the time in to ensure that they stand out and speak to their audience. Try to identify the ways in which you can keep your audience engaged as it can help in driving greater data capture and increase brand loyalty.

The strategies mentioned in this post can help you improve the efficiency of your ad campaigns, and implementing them correctly will pay off handsomely in the long run.

Andy Beohar is VP of SevenAtoms, a Google and HubSpot certified agency in San Francisco. Andy develops and manages ROI-positive inbound and paid marketing campaigns for B2B & Tech companies. Connect with Andy on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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The post Maximizing efficiency for ecommerce paid campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Would you turn down an opportunity to acquire new customers without breaking the bank?
• Google Discover currently supports 800M users in exploration and is a great way to attract new audiences
• Joe Dawson covers the “why” and “how” in this comprehensive Google Discover optimization guide

Even though spending on SEO plays such a major role in the online business sphere, most web admins spend their lives attempting to crack Google’s organic page ranking algorithms. As SEOs may or may not lose sleep over the latest updates, Google Discovery is surely a dreamy-eyed way to win more audiences.

What is Google Discover?

Discover is the brainchild that replaced Google Feed in 2018 and helps around  800M monthly active users with content exploration. Discover aims to push hand-selected news and articles directly to user feeds without the need for searching. Google builds a profile of users and supplies them with content considered relevant to individual interests.

Nothing is anonymous online, and we all leave digital trails of our fundamental interests. Just as your website offers opportunities to glean first-party data, so does Google. With the average person estimated to make at least three to four searches per day, that’s plenty of information to harvest.

Source: Google Search Central

Google plays their cards close to their chest about how they build consumer profiles. Experts believe that the following are factored into the creation of these blueprints:

• Search history unique to Google
• Browser history of websites visited
• Activity on any installed apps
• Location, assuming this information has not been barred in settings

That’s certainly enough material to understand what a user may be interested in. Much like social media targeted advertising, Google knows what your audience wants to see and will do all it can to meet such desires through Discovery. It’s your responsibility to optimize your Discovery presence and ensure that your content is chosen to be pushed.

Why optimize Google Discover?

Discover attracts a loyal, returning audience to your website. It allows users to follow a particular brand or business, ensuring their content will always appear on their smartphone. Naturally, you need to earn this loyalty. The usual caveats apply here. Work to attract your target audience by speaking their language, delivering content that shows your brand can be relied upon.

Source: Marketing Charts

Perhaps more pertinently, Discover knows what users want to hear about – and delivers this in spades. Imagine that a user’s five most visited websites are for their local NFL team, a health food store in their town, a website specializing in tips for joggers, a website that sells running shoes, and a food blog packed with recipes. This suggests that the user in question enjoys sports and fitness. This individual’s Google Discovery feed will reflect this lifestyle.

Somebody with more sedentary hobbies may receive articles on the latest comings and goings on Netflix or technology and gadget news. If you optimize your content for Discover, it could be your website and articles that are pushed onto a smartphone. As Discover has an enviable CTR, this is not an opportunity to pass up.

How to optimize your website for Google Discover

Now that we’ve established that Discover fast-track site traffic, and by extension, conversions – how do you achieve this optimization? This fifteen-point checklist covers hints and tips to enhance your success rate.

1. Comply with Google’s policies

First thing’s first. Do not forget that Discover is a Google property, which means abiding by the search engine’s usual rules and regulations. In essence, that means continuing to follow organic SEO and page ranking practices.

As much as keeping on top of Google’s regular algorithm updates can sometimes feel like a full-time job, it remains necessary. To optimize the potential of Discover, your website must maintain standard white hat SEO protocols. If your dedication to improving page ranking and quality score slips, your content is less likely to be selected by Discover.

2. Create a Google My Business account

Here’s another quick and simple hack to help produce tangible results. Google always wants to provide users with the finest and most relevant connections. If you’re using Discover for ecommerce, the big G will consider a GMB account as a seal of quality. You’re likelier to be selected by Discover if you have an active profile – especially one that boasts organic, positive reviews.

3. Ensure mobile compatibility

When investigating different web design possibilities, highly prioritize mobile compatibility. This sounds like a no-brainer as Discovery is a mobile-centric tool, but you may be surprised at how many fall at this hurdle. Use Google’s Mobile Usability Report to check how your site is doing.

If you build your website through WordPress, consider taking advantage of the Web Stories plug-in. This is made for use on Google – after all, Web Stories even have their own segment on the search engine’s home page – and will often pique the curiosity of Discovery.

4. Feature larger images to create compelling UX and boost CTRs

You can even feature your card images in a large format by using the robots meta tag max-image-preview setting. This is a great way to gain more screen space and win audience attention that will drive CTR. According to Google, this increased a food blog’s CTR by 79 percent and drove a weekly magazine’s clicks by 332 percent across six months.

Source: Google Search Central

5. Find a unique niche and demonstrate your knowledge

Like when bidding for a plum PPC spot, popular keywords can create an extremely competitive environment in Discovery. Unless you’re among the major players in your industry, you risk being muscled out by more prominent names. For example, if you’re writing about sports, ESPN is always likelier to be selected to discuss the playoffs and significant incidents in a game.

That doesn’t mean that Discover is pointless, you’ll just need to think outside the box. Come up with a topic that could be less commonplace within your niches, such as a particular player, team, or set of stats. Discuss these at length, appealing to the regulations of the E-A-T algorithm, and the results will come.

6. Consider your target audience

Discover is designed to match the ideal content with the perfect audience. That needs to be considered when creating blog posts and similar copy. Take the time to build a picture of your target audience and use analytics to ensure you are appealing to them.

Based on the results, you may need to adjust your approach. For example, emotive language may attract one type of reader but deter users likelier to convert. Equally, you may find that you need to use less prose and more images to draw users you really want.

7. Master your headlines carefully

Over 14 percent of all Google text searches include a question. Embrace this in your headlines. If you pose a question, you’re likelier to be selected by Discovery and attract an audience’s attention.

All the same, never lose sight of Google’s quest for relevance. That means not trying to pull a bait and switch. A blog headlined “how to hire an app developer” needs to discuss the trials and tribulations of this very process. An article that says, “don’t bother – here is a DIY mobile app design guide to save money,” will not be embraced by Discovery.

8. Ensure your content is of the highest quality

We’ve just established that Google Discover has limited patience for clickbait, but you may be able to slip some of this material through the net.

You’ll quickly lose their trust and struggle to attract followers. The same applies to content that has not gone through a quality check process and is littered with typos and errors. Quality matters, so do not try to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. Another way to create compelling, relevant content for your audience is by checking your Google search traffic and keyword research. This will help you distinguish and craft top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content for key segments of the search journey and align it with the sales funnel.

9. Keep your finger on the pulse

News and current events are the bread and butter of Google Discover. On paper, Google will always look to deliver the latest and greatest news articles to users. Criticism has been leveled at Discover, claiming that it has been top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), but it still pays to remain relevant when attempting to appeal to algorithms.

Anecdotal evidence claims that Discover ranks some search terms that SEO does not, opening new opportunities. That does not mean that you should throw together a hot take on the latest Twitter controversy and wait for the clicks to roll in. If that flies in the face of your brand values, you’ll suffer in the longer term. Just avoid shying away from existing talking points that would add value to your audiences. Also, don’t hop on this bandwagon unless you have something valuable to say as a brand.

10. Encourage users to ‘heart’ you

If you have a captive audience outside of Discover, encourage them to follow you on this platform. Discover offers a heart icon that matches the purpose of a Facebook like, which is a direct way to show appreciation for the material.

If somebody follows an article from your site in their areas of interest, it will be noted on their Google profile. They are then likely to receive more content on the same subject from your brand – as are other, unrelated users that Google considers to have similar interests.

11. Increase your brand awareness

As an extension of the point above, users are prone to discover – and follow – your Discover profile if they are aware of your brand. Use your marketing campaigns to raise your Google Discover profile, steering people toward following you on here.

12. Regularly create and post new content

Discover is often looking for the newest insights and articles to share with users. As a result, a freshly published blog is much likelier to be selected than something penned weeks, months, or years previously – assuming it meets the quality standards we previously mentioned. Evergreen content occasionally gets picked up, but not as often.

Just be aware that articles selected by Discover tend to have a shorter shelf life than something penned with organic SEO in mind. You can still look to appeal to both markets. Discover can be just as helpful for an inbound marketing strategy. Just do not expect your blog to remain on the platform longer than three or four days.

13. Include images and videos in your content

Regardless of whether a picture is truly worth a thousand words, there is no denying that Discover looks to curate variety in its content. Websites that included images and video in their blog posts saw a much greater uptake in selection by Discover than those that relied on pure prose.

Quality matters just as much as quantity here. A quick video shot on your smartphone and shoehorned into your content will not cut the mustard. Discover looks for crisp, high-definition image quality in moving and static pictures alike, so always opt for the greatest resolution you can that retains mobile friendliness.

14. Interact on social media

Discover loves social engagement. As with organic SEO, Discover is likely to select and push content that attracts comments and shares on social media. This creates a chicken and egg scenario. Will your content go viral on social media because it was picked up by Discover, or did Discover push the content because it was gaining social media traction?

In truth, the order of events matters little. Discover can sit neatly alongside the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to bolster awareness of your content and amass an army of new followers. As always, this creates a snowball effect – the more followers you gain, the more strangers will have your content pushed to their appliances.

15. Track your analytics – and improve where necessary

Finally, as with your SEO performance, you should always keep an eye on your Google Discover traffic analytics. You’ll find this in your Search Console. Do not be alarmed if your Discover traffic looks low. It takes a couple of days for these visits to hit the report so things may change in time.

Discover may not be essential if you are still attracting attention through other means. But no website should ever turn down an opportunity to boost website traffic! So if your numbers are tracking lower than anticipated, revisit points one through fourteen and implement what you can to improve performance.

Joe Dawson is Director of strategic growth agency Creative.onl, based in the UK. He can be found on Twitter @jdwn.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

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The post Is your business optimized for Google Discover? This guide is for you! appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Accessibility underpins stellar user experience and positive brand perception, the key factors that appeal to value-driven consumers
• According to WebAIM, 98 percent of US-based websites aren’t accessible
• Though not a sparkly aspect of digital marketing strategies, there are multiple layers to “why?” and “how?” brands must be accessible across the internet

Marketers develop and execute numerous strategies to broaden their business reach. But one critical factor that most marketers neglect is web accessibility. And this neglect leads to their business being closed off for a large majority of potential customers.

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility ensures that the internet is accessible, usable, and beneficial for everyone alike. It considers all possible disabilities to ensure marketing messages are delivered to every kind of audience and get the most value out of the website.

As important as it may seem right now, web accessibility is often the last thing marketers think of when building a website. And then, too, it is often brushed under the rug.

Despite the World Wide Web Consortium, commonly known as W3C developing dedicated web content accessibility guidelines to make the internet more accessible, digital inclusivity remains a rarity.

And this unfortunate reality acts not only as an accessibility barrier, but a growth barrier as well.

The value of web accessibility in modern marketing initiatives

Acknowledging and adopting web accessibility enhances the customer experience, opens new doors for your business, uplifts marketing outcomes, and boosts revenue in more ways than just one.

1. Extends your market reach

15 percent of the world’s population is disabled and belongs to a highly valuable market segment with strong spending powers.

With a digitally inclusive web presence, your business interacts with an increased volume of people who it would’ve missed otherwise. In this way, web accessibility brings a whole new community of prospects you can interact with, win as customers and boost your revenue.

2. SEO benefits

Search engines prefer to rank websites that are secure, accessible, and valuable to all kinds of users. Moreover, they perceive digitally inclusive websites as authentic sources of information and favor them in rankings.

As a result, enhancing web accessibility undeviatingly supplements your online marketing with an SEO boost, helping you get to the coveted top position in SERPs. It opens another channel for web traffic that connects you with your target audience.

3. Enhanced user experience

User experience is at the heart of your digital presence as it relates directly to conversions. The basic principle of UX optimization dictates that you research what your target audience wants and deliver it.

In the case of differently-abled audiences, it’s common sense that they would want you to deliver a website they can interact with and benefit from.

By optimizing your website’s accessibility, you boost its usability which is a core element of user experience.

If all other elements of UX are optimized, enhanced usability wins customer satisfaction and gives the prospect a final push towards conversion, contributing to your revenue.

4. Positive brand perception

Web accessibility enables your brand to appear as a strong advocate of digital inclusivity and works to build positive brand perception. Now isn’t that a critical outcome of modern marketing?

Today where people seek a business’s values before engaging with it, a concrete stance on digital inclusivity reflects your values of empathy, compassion, and equal opportunities for all. This builds your community of like-minded people who then contribute to your revenue.

Five-point checklist to get started with web accessibility

For maximum effect, web accessibility should be considered a priority rather than an afterthought and must be included in your digital and marketing strategy.

Following are a few ways through which you can uplift your digital inclusivity and leave a larger impact:

1. Multilingual SEO

Web accessibility not only aims at eliminating accessibility barriers for people with permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities. It also removes linguistic barriers, so people from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds can have equal access.

Given that English is spoken by a meager 4.83 percent of the world’s population, multilingual SEO eliminates linguistic barriers and helps searchers from all linguistic backgrounds to benefit from the internet.

Here’s a guide I created on multilingual SEO to get you started.

2. Voice search

The introduction of smart assistants such as Alexa has pioneered a new era of voice search ubiquity and the consequent web accessibility.

As an excellent avenue to pursue for businesses looking to be more digitally inclusive, voice search unlocks your website’s chances of interaction with people who cannot search the conventional way.

Here are some best practices to optimize voice search SEO:

• Use long tail keywords that are specific, descriptive, and natural for users’ language
• Serve up content that gives direct answers
• Optimize your ‘Google My Business’ account
• Create voice search FAQ pages
• Implement schema which is a code that you can add to your website that improves search visibility

For more depth, check out this voice search SEO guide for trends and best practices.

3. Alternate (Alt) text

Alt text helps visually impaired visitors understand what a web image depicts. Hence image optimization allows web visitors to absorb the information your website offers in its totality and ties back to enhanced user experience.

Tips for using alt text:

• Keep it descriptive and keyword specific, this will show up in case your page loads slow or if there was an audio description needed
• For ecommerce sites, make good use of structured data to give the search engine more specific details about your products’ color, type, size, and a lot more

If you need more details, here’s an evergreen image optimization guide.

4. Hierarchical organization or content using H tags

Hierarchical layout shapes your web content in an easy-to-read structure. A critical part of web accessibility (and SEO), a hierarchical organization can make your website usable and understandable for users with certain cognitive disabilities and people with short attention spans, boosting their satisfaction and your websites’ overall UX.

Check out this guide on optimizing meta tags.

5. Color contrast

Color contrast involves adjusting the color of foreground web elements (for instance, fonts) against the color of the background elements to ensure that the foreground elements, which bear value, stand out and are easily readable for people with visual impairment.

The Bureau of Internet Accessibility has identified a color contrast ratio that ensures that your website is visible and readable for people with color-related visual impairments.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is a necessity, but unfortunately, it doesn’t get the same limelight as other digital marketing avenues that promise increased reach, better perception, and higher revenue.

This reality can work in your favor if you capitalize on the lack of web accessibility and gain a competitive edge by adopting digital inclusivity.

There are numerous marketing benefits of web accessibility, most significant of which may be the development of positive brand perception in an era of value-driven shoppers.

Inclusive marketing initiatives are commendable. But they are only valuable when backed by conscious efforts of enhancing your business’s digital accessibility. So, endeavoring to actualize web accessibility strategies can help you become the pioneer of an internet era where digital inclusivity is a priority.

Atul Jindal is a web design and marketing specialist, having interests in doing websites/apps optimized for SEO with a core focus on conversion optimization. He creates web experiences that bring conversations and transform web traffic into paying customers or leads.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

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The post A must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Holiday season shopping is on and your ecommerce store whether a local shop or an international ecommerce brand needs visibility for sales
• How do you jump right in front of your potential customers and drive sales in a highly competitive space?
• SEO pioneer, former Pepperjam founder, and serial entrepreneur, Kris Jones shares a practical ecommerce SEO guide

There is perhaps no type of business that is more primed for SEO than ecommerce companies. Think about it: where a local law firm can put up a billboard or buy ad space in a regional newspaper in addition to doing SEO, ecommerce businesses essentially have one resource available to them, the internet.

That’s where they do 100 percent of their business, and it’s where they’re going to reach the customers they want. So, ecommerce companies should spend a lot of time getting their SEO just right. One crucial way of doing that is to optimize your site to appear in Google’s various SERP features.

There are so many ways you can tell users about your business just from the SERP even before they get onto your website. And the information you present could mean all the difference between capturing your ideal traffic and losing it to competition.

Therefore, to market yourself in the best light to all potential customers searching for your products, you have to optimize your website specifically for the SERP features that drive conversions.

How do you do it? Here are four of the most vital Google SERP features for which you should be optimizing your ecommerce business’ SEO.

1. Rich cards

Back in 2016, Google introduced a new mobile SERP feature called rich cards. By using structured data, SEOs could make a business’s results “richer,” that is, more visually appealing, clickable, and therefore more likely to generate an organic click.

If you search for a certain type of product, results marked up with the proper language tell Google to show the product along with an image that can help users know if they want to explore more. Users simply swipe to see more items.

Now, why am I recommending a SERP feature from 2016?

It’s because in the first quarter of 2021, mobile traffic accounted for almost 55 percent of online traffic worldwide, and that number is only going to increase. Basically, mobile search results are even more relevant today than they were in 2016.

With that in mind, how can you optimize your ecommerce products for rich cards?

You need to use the JSON-LD method of marking up your products. You can then test your work with the various free rich results tools on offer from Google.

2. Google Images results

Somewhat related to rich cards is the need for ecommerce businesses to optimize their content for Google Images results. Relevant images will appear at the top of a SERP, before any organic results.

A good product description does indeed go a long way, but don’t forget to think simply, as well: if customers can see clear, high-quality images of your products, that will help your credibility along, and hence drive conversions.

How do optimize for Google Images results? Well, Google doesn’t read images like it reads text, so it’s all going to come down to how you prepare your images on the back end.

First of all, ensure your images are originally yours. You don’t stand much of a chance trying to rank for stock photos.

Next, give your photos descriptive file names that tie into the pages where they will be placed. In the case of ecommerce, since you’ll probably have a series of photos for each product, give the image files titles that reflect the product, with words separated by hyphens.

Here’s an example: unisex-sneakers-blue-brandname-yoursitename

And don’t forget to provide descriptive alt text to each image in case it can’t load and be seen.

Finally, be sure you’re not uploading huge image files that will weigh down a website. Compress them down as small as you can to give your site enough breathing room while still ensuring the images show what you need them to show. Check out this comprehensive guide on image optimization.

3. Rich snippets

Wait a minute, you might say, why are you talking about both rich cards and rich snippets?

With ecommerce products, rich cards will stop you at the images. You can choose to go a step further for appropriate products by optimizing for rich snippets.

Rich snippets add in extra details about your products. These get placed inside your search results, under the meta title, and above the meta description.

To get rich snippets on your product results, you’ll use structured data just like you did for rich cards. You can choose which information to enter based on what specifically can grab your potential customer’s attention and satisfy their search query.

For ecommerce companies, it makes the most sense to optimize your rich-snippet products for prices, in-stock status, sales, different brands, customer reviews, and star ratings.

Think about each of these features. Doesn’t it make sense that a customer searching for this type of product would want to see this information from your online store?

Rich snippets are one great way of reaching users with extra information without the need for the users actually to click on your result. You’re taking the most concentrated bits of data about your product offerings and jumping right out onto the SERPs at the user.

Sure, you can choose not to do this for your products. But if your competitors are, who do you think stands the better chance of getting a click and making a sale?

Rich snippets are just good ecommerce SEO, plain and simple.

4. Sitelinks

Finally, you should attempt to optimize your site for SERP sitelinks.

I say “attempt” to optimize because this isn’t a SERP feature you can just click on and off, like alt text or structured data.

So we’re all on the same page here, sitelinks are the clickable buttons below your result’s metadata on a SERP. They typically offer opportunities for users to navigate directly to sections of your website.

In the case of ecommerce, the most logical sitelinks you would want to get listed in your result would be for your most popular product categories.

But again, I’m saying “would want” because sitelinks are chosen by Google’s algorithm. That doesn’t mean you can’t influence which sitelinks Google places there. Which pages Google links in your results is based primarily on your site’s navigation.

As SEOs, we always recommend having a direct and easy-to-navigate website structure. It helps the user experience, supports navigation, and prompts Google to crawl your pages.

Other things that help Google crawl your site include keyword-optimized content, smart internal linking, and simple, intuitive menus.

It is through these elements that you stand your best chance of defining what your SERP sitelinks will be. When you tell Google which pages are most important to you and your customers, the search engine will respond in kind by generating helpful sitelinks.

This is yet another example of having your SEO jump right to the SERP at users without them having to do anything.

And when you’re in the competitive ecommerce space, that really matters.

Go forth and optimize

Businesses always have it tough when going up against the competition. Whether you’re a local shop or an international ecommerce brand, there’s always someone else trying to beat you at your own game.

While SEO can never make anyone do anything, we put ourselves on the best possible footing when we take the above steps to optimize our websites for the SERP features.

If you’re not doing these things already, you’ll want to get started as soon as you can! And then sit back and watch what happens.

Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The post Four Google SERP features for ecommerce SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• The PageRank still exists and here’s a deeper look at how Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model plays a key role
• A well thought linking strategy both internally and externally for your ecommerce site can amplify search visibility
• Google expert, Susan Dolan and NOVOS’, Head of SEO, Daniel Cartland guide you ahead of the holiday season

PageRank is a patent Google introduced, which used links to help determine websites rankings in the SERPs. The algorithm was named after Google founder Larry Page.

The original patent has not been renewed and has since been updated by other algorithms, which work to achieve the same goal. However, by understanding the fundamental principles, we can better understand how to position our ecommerce sites to drive traffic and revenue.

PageRank key concepts

PageRank is passed between websites through links and can be distributed through a single website with internal links.

Some pages have a higher PageRank than others and thus can pass on more PageRank to pages they link to. When a page links to another, a dampening factor is applied. The original patent set this as 0.85 – so a page with a PageRank of one, linking to another page would pass 0.85 PageRank.

Key update: the Reasonable Surfer Model

Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model indicates that a link that is more likely to be clicked on will pass more PageRank than a link that is less likely to be clicked on. This is determined by a whole host of factors, including font size, color, and anchor text. However, the position of a link on a page is also something that we often have control over as SEOs and that we can, therefore, leverage.

Here is a simple, rather crude representation of how certain links will pass more/less PageRank based on the prominence of a link and how likely it is to be clicked on.

Build external links through to key pages

As linking pages pass PageRank, it stands to reason that we want to generate backlinks to key pages that we want to rank. For most ecommerce sites, the pages that rank for the highest volume and most revenue-driving keywords are category pages.

Wherever possible, we should therefore look to use tactics that support link building through to the pages that drive revenue, which for most sites looks something like:

• Category pages
• Product pages
• Homepage
• Blog posts

This is obviously easier said than done. Practicing these tactics with an overall aim to drive PageRank to your key pages. This reduces the dampening factors at play.

How to get past this

One common way to bypass this difficulty in building links to category pages is internally linking to key category pages we want to push from blog posts/Digital PR pieces that then get links themselves.

Although the PageRank passed to the page we ideally want to rank will undergo a dampening factor, this can still be more beneficial than failing to get any links at all to your target page.

It is worth considering how relevant the category page is to the blog/PR piece it is being included on, as well as where the links are placed on the page, being mindful of the impact the Reasonable Surfer dampening effect can have.

1. Build links from pages with high PageRank

As any Digital PR will know, high authority pages or pages that have lots of PageRank to pass onto your own site are some of the most sought-after links to attain.

Most of the time, this is actually viewed at a domain level, however as is demonstrated in this great review of how PageRank works by Majestic, a domain that should theoretically have a high PageRank can actually be significantly decreased at a page level by its own internal linking.

One caveat for Digital PR teams in this regard is not being too reliant on domain-level metrics as a proxy for links that pass a lot of PageRank and are thus good for ranking. Exactly which pages have high PageRank is nigh-on impossible to know, and although an over-reliance on third-party tools is never optimal, they may be the closest we can get to figuring out PageRank passed by a specific page, rather than a domain.

2. Build links from relevant sites

As part of the Reasonable Surfer Model, it suggests that a link is less likely to be followed if the links are unrelated to the document:

“This reasonable surfer model reflects the fact that not all of the links associated with a document are equally likely to be followed. Examples of unlikely followed links may include “Terms of Service” links, banner advertisements, and links unrelated to the document.”  (Source)

As a result, building links from sites that are of higher relevance to your own site, is likely to pass more PageRank.

3. Remember it is not just about the number of links

Due to how PageRank is calculated, the PageRank value passed by one site can be drastically higher than the PageRank passed by the culmination of 1000s of others combined.

This is why the reliance on the overall number of links can be misleading.

Use internal linking to spread PageRank

We need to consider a few different methods while identifying pages that will benefit the most from ranking and how you pass PageRank around an ecommerce site:

1. Link to pages you want to rank from pages that have high PageRank themselves
2. Link to pages you want to rank more frequently throughout the site
3. Give links to pages you want more prominently ranked

1. Link to pages you want to rank from pages that have high PageRank themselves

Pages that have high PageRank, from which we can assume to be the pages most linked to from external sites, can be used to pass PageRank to – 

Homepage linking

The best example of how you can do this is through the homepage. The homepage for most websites tends to be one of the most, if not the most externally linked to page on a site.

This means that in terms of PageRank, the homepage has the most to pass on to other internal pages.

By carefully selecting which pages you link to from the homepage, and therefore pass the high levels of PageRank to the key pages you want to rank.

2. Link to pages you want to rank more frequently throughout the site

Another method to consider is how frequently you link to the most important pages you want to rank.

Considering that each page can pass PageRank on – this stands to reason that if a page is internally linked to more frequently, it is likely to pass on more as compared to a page less internally linked to (although obviously influenced by the PageRank of the linking pages).

Therefore, you should be considering where you can add internal links to ensure that important pages are linked to more frequently, including:

Global navigation

Due to being outside of the main body content of the page, we can reasonably assume there is a dampening factor applied to links in the menu. However, given its role in navigation, this is likely to be far less than in the footer. 

Therefore, since the global navigation is, as the name suggests, linked globally from every page on the site, the sheer number of links that will be passing PageRank is likely to funnel to those pages included in the navigation. These should therefore be the key pages you want to be ranking.

Breadcrumbs

As long-time fans of breadcrumbs at NOVOS, their benefit of passing PageRank to key pages should not be underestimated, due to the frequency with which different levels of pages are linked to.

The benefit of breadcrumbs on ecommerce sites (outside of usability benefits for the customers) is that they pass PageRank up to the core pages that generally rank for competitive keywords. They are typically helpful to rank the categories.

Most ecommerce websites have a pyramid structure with the homepage at the top, followed by some core categories, an increasing number of subcategories, and lots of product pages. By implementing breadcrumbs on the site, you use the pyramid structure to your advantage (both SEO and CX wise). Since every product page will link up to its relevant subcategories and category, and every subcategory will link through to its relevant category.

In this sense, you distribute internal links as an inverse pyramid, concentrating the highest number (if we disregard the homepage) on the core categories that are the pages generally targeted for high volume keywords. In this sense, your ecommerce site stands a great chance of receiving large amounts of PageRank from internal links.

Product pages also generally are easier to build links to and also naturally generate them. The higher PageRank product pages can distribute upwards, the greater is the relevance – which implies lesser chances of suffering significantly from dampening factors.

Footer

Based on the Reasonable Surfer Model we can assume that the PageRank passed by footer links is significantly impacted by dampening factors. However, the fact that these links are site-wide may mean that there is some benefit to including important pages in the footer for the accumulation of PageRank.

3. Give links to pages you want more prominently ranked

As the Reasonable Surfer Model applied to the likelihood of a link being clicked on a page, it is therefore worth considering whereabouts on a page. This could also mean considering page templates in general links.

For example, in a content strategy, where multiple blogs are being written on a given relevant topic to support a category page, linking to the category page early in the article, with clearly related anchor text, is likely to drive more PageRank than right at the end of an article. On a case-by-case basis, this distinction may appear trivial, however, on an ecommerce site with hundreds and thousands of blogs, the PageRank passed in total may be significant.

Susan Dolan is a Search Engine Optimization Consultant first to crack the Google PageRank algorithm as confirmed by Eric Schmidt’s office in 2014. Find her on Twitter @GoogleExpertUK.

Daniel Cartland is Head of SEO at NOVOS, Global SEO Agency Of The Year 2020 and 2021. A Brighton SEO speaker, Daniel has a particular interest in the quirks of how to optimize for different CMS. Find him on Twitter @DanielCartland.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The post How to use PageRank for ecommerce websites appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• The story of SEO and UX began almost 20 years ago with both making a foray into the market in the 1990s
• After years of analyzing data, I found that UX is a critical ranking factor for SEO
• If you’ve exhausted all your SEO techniques but still don’t see a considerable movement on your website or rankings – you’re probably losing at user experience (UX)
• Atul Jindal condenses years of his experience and observations into this SEO guide to help you win at SEO and search experience

I’ve worked with many SEO and CRO campaigns as well as fortune 50 companies over the years. This gives me access to valuable data that helped me understand what is working and what’s not. Over the years by analyzing data I found that UX is a critical ranking factor for SEO.

The story of SEO and UX began almost 20 years ago with both making a foray into the market in the 1990s. While SEO was widely used as a marketing technique, UX (user experience) concentrated on giving the users an enhanced engaging experience on the website.

If you have exhausted all your SEO techniques but still don’t see a considerable movement on your website or rankings. Then probably you’re losing at User experience.

But it is quite difficult to find UX-related issues on your website. When you’re only looking at your website from an SEO perspective! You need to take a look at your website with your user’s (customer’s) eyes.

In this guide, I’ll explain UX and guide you on how to implement it into your SEO campaigns to get results.

What is UX?  

User experience (UX) is the experience of a user with your website/application. An easy-to-use website will provide a pleasant user experience but an unplanned website will have a bad or poor user experience.

UX focuses on the site architecture, visitor journey, desktop, and mobile layouts, user flows. In short, user experience is driven by how easy or difficult it is to navigate through the user interface elements that the website designers have created.

User interface (UI) focuses on the graphical layout of any application. It includes several factors such as fonts and design styles, text entry fields, transitions, images, and animation interface. In short, anything visual comes under the umbrella of UI.

It is important to note that UI and UX are two different functionalities. While UI revolves around design layout, UX is the experience of the user on the website while they are navigating the web pages.

Since we have a better understanding of the two, let us further understand how we can successfully implement UX into an SEO campaign.

Why does UX matter in SEO?

In recent years, Google has changed its ranking criteria. There was a time when Google was looking for the keyword reparations in your content or the number of backlinks that your website has.

But now the scenario has been completely changed. Google is becoming more user-centric day by day. They are using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and other kinds of latest technologies to understand, evaluate and provide the best of the best results. 

Google has introduced the EAT concept as well as metrics like search intent, page speed, mobile-friendliness, dwell-time are ranking factors to rank on Google. All these factors are part of a rich user experience. 

A rich user experience is a factor that creates the difference between the first and second positions. Providing a rich user experience is always helpful for visitors and encourages them to stay longer and engage more on your website. That sends positive quality signals that show your website the best result to Google. And as a result of that Google rewards you with top spots.

How to implement UX into an SEO campaign?

As mentioned above, SEO and UX share common end goals – audience engagement. SEO will answer a person’s query, while UX will take care of their navigational queries once they reach the webpage. 

Today, it has become imperative to include the two while designing SEO campaigns or any digital marketing strategy. Google is constantly evolving its user experience and merging effective SEO strategies to give the audience a more meaningful experience. 

An excellent example of UX and SEO design is IKEA. We all know what IKEA stands for, but their website forms a story at every step. It guides the user to the correct landing pages and keeps them engaged. The color palette, their tags, and categories make a user stay longer and engaged on the website. 

Source: IKEA designed on Canva

Empathy plays a vital role in optimizing your web pages with the right combination of keywords. Those days are no more with us when the exact keyword matches were enough to rank well. Today, it is about putting yourself out there and thinking from a bigger perspective. 

Google has done a great job over the past five years of getting away from ranking signals that can be spammed easily such as links and keyword stuffing. 

In other words, understanding your audience’s buying intent and analyzing their search queries will lead to refined and sustainable results. 

Let us understand the three most critical factors that influence the SEO + UX ranking. 

Understand your audience

It is probably one of the trickiest parts of running any successful campaign – Understanding the target audience. 

Most companies spend a considerable amount of time researching the audience before concluding who will be their right target. It is why we have spent a sizable amount of time highlighting its importance. 

We have often heard of marketers, businesses, and content creators emphasizing the importance of the right target audience. While sometimes it is more or less commonsensical to grasp the audience’s pulse, there are times when you need to explicitly ask: 

• Who is my target audience? 
• What do they want? 
• What they are searching for? 
• How are they looking for the information? 
• Did my searcher bounce right away? 
• Was there any action taken on the link?

These are key questions, Google’s algorithm takes into consideration to understand whether search results are aligned to the searcher’s intent.

For example, Airbnb works on an inclusive design model that concentrates on improving readability across all platforms. Their target audience is clearly defined – travel enthusiasts, people looking for holiday home options, and people looking for holiday hosting solutions. Their focal point has been improving the user experience by leading them to the right landing pages. They coupled it with catchy CTAs that probed the user to take an action. Whether you are a host or someone seeking an extraordinary travel experience, their comprehensive holiday solutions pave the way to make booking a holiday faster and easier. 

Source: Airbnb. Designed on Canva 

Once you understand your audience completely, it can lead to a page getting clicks and some action taking place if you are on the first of Google search results. 

UX helps the audience stay glued to the page while SEO honors their intent to click on the page’s keyword and land. Everything you do, your focal points are always around the satisfactory experience of the users. From addressing their color preferences to the layout and messages, you have to build everything that caters to your customers. 

Another critical factor in understanding the audience is the user’s intent. It would help if you addressed it while carrying out a detailed audience persona such as informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial purpose. In each case, the queries have to be predefined to understand the user’s need. 

Keyword research

Understanding the intent of potential visitors landing on your web page through search is another crucial factor that makes up for an effective UX and SEO strategy. If your website is not fully optimized with the right set of keywords, there is a bleak chance of it ranking on Google or even leading to any action. 

For example, imagine searching for the keywords – “How to wear a bowtie?” 

The most logical conclusion is that your search will lead you to a tutorial or a video, right? If the same set of keywords are used by an ecommerce site selling the bowtie, your query will remain unanswered. You may conclude that the website using this keyword is not worth visiting in the future because they apply ‘click-bait’ words to lead a consumer to their website. 

But if the person lands on the right page with the instructions clearly outlined, they stay to learn, thus increasing the dwell time and may browse the website for more information. Here your keyword has played a vital role in leading the consumer straight to the tutorial. 

Google keyword planner, Moz keyword explorer, Keywordtool.io, Ahrefs Keywords explorer, or SECockpit are some practical tools used widely to search for the right keywords. 

The best way to select the right keywords to fit your SEO strategy is to iterate the keywords you need ranking. Search relevant topics based on your business to portray and understand how the user intent affects keyword usage. 

In short, keyword research, before setting up SEO campaigns and merging them with UX, help you evolve with changing market trends. 

Site architecture

Designing a website without optimizing it for search engines is a waste of time and vice versa. Both these aspects work together and need to be carefully considered right from the beginning. 

The site’s architecture is how the pages flow on your website. From the SEO point of view, good website architecture means Google will easily find and index your page. Simply, links should help Google to navigate smoothly from high to low authority pages. Google Search Console has improved a lot since its early days and became highly informative to SEO technicians, helping them to understand how a website is indexed and appeared to Google. 

Using H1, H2 tags, headings, taglines, catchy CTAs, and informational menu labels, decide whether your audience will interact with your website or not. Remember- your homepage should not be more than four clicks away. 

Mobile responsiveness

Mobile-responsive design has gained significant importance for both the user experience and SEO. Over 50 percent of all traffic is now driven by mobile search and sites that are not mobile-responsive will compromise the user experience.

According to Google’s page experience document, mobile-friendly websites have priority access to appear above in search results. Enhancing the readability of your readers by incorporating the right font family and text size is a must-have to consider improving the mobile experience. Having a responsive website with the ability to load faster has on varying screen sizes has become a standard these days.

You can check a site’s mobile responsiveness by using Google’s Mobile-friendly testing tool. 

Conclusion

Bad SEO + UX ruins the entire motive of brand building. It pays well to give importance to the fine attributes today. It includes domain name, informational content, internal links, optimizing meta tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, headings, and page titles to make the entire experience worthwhile.

Implementing SEO with UX design may seem a little daunting initially; however, it is critical to boost rankings and build a great brand.

Atul Jindal is a web design and marketing specialist, having interests in doing websites/apps optimized for SEO with a core focus on conversion optimization. He creates web experiences that bring conversations and transform web traffic into paying customers or leads.

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The post UX: an important SEO ranking factor appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• Keywords represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding consumer intent
• Using AI-powered chatbots, conversational data that occurs over messaging channels like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messaging can give businesses a deeper understanding of what consumers want
• Below, we’ll discuss how conversational marketing platforms like Spectrm use natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) to guide customers through the buying funnel
• A robust conversational marketing platform makes it possible for companies to build chatbots that engage and convert customers on the websites, apps, and social platforms where people spend their time

For more than two decades, Google and other search engines have attempted to crack the consumer intent code. The entry point for a search marketing campaign is the keyword list. Yet keywords—whether spoken or typed—represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding what a user wants. There’s no way to clearly measure (or identify) user intent, but Google is getting better at figuring out what a user wants with technologies like Google Hummingbird, an algorithm update they rolled out in 2013. Google introduced Hummingbird in response to the increasingly conversational nature of search queries. 

Per a 2013 article in Wired, “Google is now examining the searcher’s query as a whole and processing the meaning behind it.” In January 2020, Statista reported roughly 40 percent of US search queries contained four or more terms.

Asking a search engine or virtual assistant a question is the beginning of a conversational journey that carries the searcher across channels until they ultimately find what they want (or not). Keywords pull the curtain of intent back, but they only provide a glimpse of the customer journey, labeling the searcher’s thoughts without revealing the “why” of what they’re searching for. 

Once a user clicks on a search result, the conversation—from the search engine’s perspective—is over. 

But thanks to advances in natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI), businesses have access to a much deeper understanding of what consumers want across the entire buying journey. 

AI-powered chatbots that “speak” to consumers can collect customer intent data and take the conversation beyond an initial keyword query. They enable businesses to leverage that customer intent data instantly to scale one-to-one personalization in direct chat.

Below, we discuss how conversational marketing platforms employ NLP and AI in chatbots to guide customers through the buying funnel, using conversational analysis to gain an understanding of customer intent that goes far beyond keywords. 

Content created in partnership with Spectrm.

The customer conversation is online

According to Hootsuite’s Digital In 2020 report, 60 percent of the world’s population is online. The report found that, globally, users spend an average of 6 hours and 43 minutes online each day—40 percent of their waking life using the internet. A large chunk of that time, more than two hours, is spent using social media.

Consumers were using mobile messaging and chat an average of 20 minutes per day in 2020, with Business Insider predicting that the average would grow to 24 minutes by 2021. Interacting with chatbots is a natural extension of consumers’ comfort with messaging in social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Increasingly, messaging is how we connect with each other. Facebook and Instagram are at the center of this trend. Businesses have the potential to reach and engage with over two billion people on Facebook and Instagram using their respective messengers. This level of engagement gets to the root of consumer intent, diving beneath surface keywords to the conversational data that can help companies understand what’s motivating the consumer to conduct their search in the first place. 

Leveraging conversations to drive results

Conversational marketing platforms use messaging apps to engage with consumers and determine intent. This is next-level chatbot technology that uses AI to create a two-way exchange with every customer, asking them questions throughout the buying process and capable of operating on multiple messaging channels.

Spectrm is an example of a conversational marketing platform that goes beyond simple, generic approaches to conversational AI by using domain-specific NLP to guide consumers through the customer journey. Generic conversational AI uses general NLP that can be used for simple tasks like autosuggestions and basic keyword matching. Domain-specific NLP is trained for the individual business. Spectrm’s approach to conversational AI combines domain-specific NLP with the use of generative adversarial networks, a type of machine learning that enables enterprises with little or no customer intent data to quickly generate their own data sets to train the algorithm.

“Marketing chatbots that use domain-specific NLP learn how your individual customers speak. The customer intent data specific to your business, customers, and goals are used to continuously improve your chatbot. It’s about understanding how your customers engage naturally with your brand, and training your bot to respond to that to drive outcomes valuable to your business. Even if you don’t have a lot of conversational data to train your bot.” – Writes Spectrm

Chatbots are only part of what makes conversational marketing platforms work. Platforms like Spectrm operate across multiple messaging channels where consumers spend all their time including Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messaging, Google Business Messages, and even at the display level via conversational display ads using AdLingo and Google DV360.

Consumers like chatting with businesses. They’re already moving through the buying cycle using one-on-one conversations that provide much more in-depth intent data than a simple keyword search. Consider the follow statistics:

• 75 percent of consumers prefer to engage with brands in private messaging channels versus traditional channels
• 65 percent of people are more likely to shop with a business they can reach via chat

Conversational data = More targeted campaigns

Conversational data can be used to create marketing campaigns that are more targeted than traditional search and display campaigns. They enable businesses to design targeted messaging around the customer journey, learning what customers want/need in the context of how they’re interacting with the chatbot.

Conversational data also enables businesses to create customer profiles using the answers people provide in chat. Personalization and segmentation become easier based on the granularity and specificity of conversational data. This information can be used to personalize marketing messages at a one-to-one level directly in chat. 

None of this is possible without the right platform. Some factors to strongly consider while evaluating an enterprise-level conversational marketing platform would be:

• An easy to implement, no-coding setup
• Customizations for your specific company and customer needs
• Easy integrations with your tech stack
• Enforcement of the highest privacy standards (GDPR, CCPA, and the others)
• Connection to your product feed (for ecommerce websites) and ability to serve product recommendations/content in real-time based on user input
• Flexible role management with the ability to set user access roles

Tools like Spectrm are at the heart of marketing automation, enabling companies to acquire new customers at scale. A robust conversational marketing platform makes it possible for companies to build chatbots that engage and convert customers on the websites, apps, and social platforms where people spend their time—no engineering resources needed.

Just like search engines, conversational intelligence tools effectively use language to get to the heart of consumer intent. They go beyond keywords to make every datapoint actionable, using chatbot analytics to optimize funnels and segment customers. 

In Spectrm’s words, “Reaching the right audience is getting harder every day. Consumers are more curious, demanding, and impatient than ever. They expect their digital experiences to be personalized, instant, and effortless. Chatbots enable brands to connect with their audience personally and offer seamless customer experiences from the start.”

To view Spectrm’s offerings, click here.

The post Going beyond keywords: how conversational insights take the guesswork out of marketing appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

30-second summary:

• The Mobile Experience is critical for all categories when looking at Core Web Vitals (CWV)
• Image compression seems to be a leading challenge for leading brands
• Pages doing well for CWV tend to be informational in nature
• Retail, in particular, could see significant disruption if second-tier retailers receive a boost
• Across all sectors, there is opportunity and time for improvement and preparation as long as issues are addressed as a business priority
• Enterprise Search and Digital Marketers need to prescribe the right course of action to meet core vital benchmarks
• They must also convince the rest of the organization that the efforts will be worth the results

The long-awaited implementation of mobile-first indexing is now upon us, meaning that content visible only on desktop will be ignored from this point on by the world’s largest search engine. Mobile-first has been a priority of Google’s for years as the beat of the user experience drum has grown to a crescendo.

A few short months from now, the Page Experience update as a whole will roll out, too. Page experience “measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page,” according to Google and consists of five major Search signals.

Hopefully you’re familiar with at least four of these, as they’ve been in play for some time. Mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines have each been rolled out and updated as Google has sought to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations.

So what’s new?

In May, signals from a new metric called Core Web Vitals (CWV) will combine with these existing four signals for one mega-metric called Page Experience. BrightEdge (my company) conducted a study into CWVs preparedness and mobile-first compliance to determine the potential impact on sites in four major industries. But first, it’s important to understand the CWV opportunity and the relationship between this new set of metrics and the mobile-first index.

Demystifying Core Web Vitals

Before we go any further, note that CWVs are not a guideline that could instigate a penalty if not followed. Cloaking is one such example of a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and if you’re caught out at it you run the risk of being penalized by Google.

Core Web Vitals, on the other hand, is an opportunity. If you fail to meet the thresholds for each of the three major areas of focus that make up the CWV signal, you won’t get a penalty. But you will miss out on the rankings boost available to those who meet the standards.

And what are those standards?

Meeting one of two of these goals won’t suffice; Google has confirmed that all three must be met in order to see the rankings boost available via CWV. You can read more about these important metrics here.

Core Web Vitals and mobile-first go hand-in-hand for search UX

Safe browsing, HTTPS security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines are fairly straightforward — you’re either in line with the guidelines or you’re not.

Mobile-first and Core Web Vitals are more complex, consisting of a greater volume of moving parts, and therefore are getting the lion’s share of webmaster attention as the May rollout looms. Hosting, site structure, image optimization, and more can all impact how your site loads on mobile. James Parsons recently shared a 28-point checklist of optimizations to work through as you’re preparing for CWVs that every webmaster and SEO should check out.

Mobile-first has an outsized impact due to its influence on local search experience, as well. Considering that 60 percent of mobile searches have local intent, the vast majority of businesses cannot afford to ignore Google’s emphasis on the mobile index. When local consumers are out in their neighborhoods searching for nearby businesses to meet their needs, it’s imperative that the website loads lightning-fast.

So how are businesses doing at preparing for the Page Experience update? BrightEdge (my company) recently conducted research that compared top sites in different industries to see how vulnerable each is to the May update. We currently have no way to gauge just how impactful the introduction of CWVs to the ranking algorithm will be, and so wanted to both explore preparedness and establish a baseline.

Here’s what we found.

Which sites stand to benefit from the Core Web Vitals boost?

We analyzed over 1,500 URLs across four industries for the purpose of this study:

• Education (253 URLs)
• Finance (328 URLs)
• B2B (302 URLs)
• Retail (689 URLs)

Rather than using the homepage, we selected the URLs responsible for driving organic traffic for each site. For each webpage, we measured Share of Voice for the top 500 keywords in each industry, analyzed mobile page speed performance using the Crux database, and evaluated adherence to Core Web Vitals using the parameters:

• Largest Contentful Paint: Less than 2.5 Seconds
• First Input Delay: Less than .1 Second
• Cumulative Layout Shift: Less than .01

As it turns out, some industries are better prepared than others for the Page Experience update, as reflected in these findings of what percentage of URLs would receive the Core Web Vitals rankings boost if it rolled out today:

• 24 percent of Finance URLs
• 13 percent of B2B URLs
• Five percent of Education URLs
• Less than one percent of Retail URLs

As you can see, there are massive seats at the table for brands that act now to get in line with this impending update. First-movers will enjoy the benefits of this ranking boost when it hits. The full findings can be found here.

1. LCP has an impact on user bounce rates and reducing the time to First Contentful Paint can improve conversions by up to 15 percent
2. CLS impacts conversion as layout shift annoys users and disrupts their experience
3. FID is key in your site’s ability to respond to the action a user wants to take. helps a website respond more quickly to the actions your audiences take
4. Enterprise sites built on apps that require a lot of scripts to execute are creating complexity and potentially significant investment to bring in line with CWVs

Here are some of our findings by industry.

Education

• More than 50 percent of pages met all three CWVs criteria on desktop
• Job listings sites like Indeed.com most often met the CWV thresholds

Finance

• More than 60 percent of pages met all three CWVs criteria on desktop
• Banking and brokerage sites struggled while informational resources such as Investopedia excelled

B2B

• Close to 70 percent of pages met all three CWVs criteria on desktop
• Informational and definition-type pages performed best, while transactional content struggled

Retail

• More than 50 percent of pages met all three CWVs criteria on desktop
• Again, informational resources such as Tech Radar and Consumer Reports performed best

It is worth mentioning that in retail, multiple product listings from the same domains dominated share of voice, resulting in a higher proportion of retail URLs being tested. We did not see a single example of major online retailers (Amazon, Target, and the others) winning a share of voice with their homepages – rather, their organic traffic is being fueled by product and category pages.

We hypothesize that page attributes such as hero images of products and promotional pop-ups are driving non-compliance for the largest contentful paint and layout shift.

Key Takeaways

Core Web Vitals signals and the larger Page Experience set of metrics are sure to be impactful, but they are among many signals that indicate to Google that your webpage offers a safe, positive, and useful experience for the searcher. This is the heart and soul of every update Google makes and should therefore be the driving force in your SEO strategy.

Keep these findings in mind as you prepare for the Page Experience update and implementation of Core Web Vitals as Google ranking signals:

• Mobile experience is impactful and critical to optimize for across all industries.
• Image compression and optimization is proving challenging for many brands, which presents an opportunity for those able to get this right.
• More informational pages meet Core Web Vitals metrics than transactional.
• Retail brands stand to experience major volatility in search results , particularly if second-tier retailers are able to capitalize on Page Experience and receive a rankings boost.

Enterprise digital marketers and SEOs must work now on the right course of action to meet core vital benchmarks, so they are not left behind. How you communicate the potential impact of this upcoming shift to decision-makers to win buy-in is key.

The post Mobile-first and Core Web Vitals: connecting the dots for page experience success appeared first on Search Engine Watch.