[Report] Who owns the flights market in search?

Which brands dominate the US flights market in search?

A new report by Pi Datametrics has analyzed the entire US flights market to discover the most organically valuable search themes and players with the greatest share of voice across the market.

The search data was collected from across Google US with a view to identifying the search terms with the most commercial opportunity over the last four years, and trended to reveal demand peaks and declines across the travel industry.

‘International’ flights: Trended search themes | May 2016 – May 2017

Image source: Pi Datametrics Market Intelligence

So what does the data show, and what can marketers learn from it about the state of the flights market?

The difference between organic value and search volume

Trended search volume data is a strong indication of research and demand phases, but to determine when a search is most likely to actually convert, Pi has applied their proprietary Organic Value Score.

Search volume alone doesn’t always indicate value. Pi’s Organic Value Score averages out all of the metrics critical to conversion – including adword data – to reflect the true value of individual search terms, and their overarching search themes.

Looking at the search volume graph (above) in isolation, ‘Latin America & Caribbean’ appears to be the one of the most important search themes to focus strategy on within the ‘International flights’ market.

But, if we overlay commercial value, the data tells a slightly different story. ‘Latin America & Caribbean’ devalues significantly, while ‘Europe & Middle East’ retains its competitive edge.

Share of voice: Top sites across the entire ‘Flights’ market

Date: 7th June 2017 | Top 20 sites

Image source: Pi Datametrics Market Intelligence

Using a datapool of the most valuable ‘International’ and ‘Domestic’ search terms, Pi generated a vast snapshot of the entire US ‘Flights’ market (12,286 sites), to reveal the players dominating the industry.

Kayak own the US ‘Flights’ market

Kayak perform best both internationally and domestically, closely followed by Tripadvisor – which has recently transformed into an integrated review / booking site.

Here are just a few key insights:

• The top 3 performers own 57% of the entire ‘Flights’ category.
• All ‘Others’ beyond the top 20 own 10.1% of the ‘Flights’ market. Kayak, alone, owns more than double this.
• The top 11 performers consist of online travel agencies, aggregators or integrated review and booking sites. These sites own 86% of the entire market.
• An airline doesn’t appear until position 11, and only owns 0.6% of the category.

Image source: Pi Datametrics Market Intelligence

Which airline groups own the entire ‘Flights’ category?

• Priceline Group owns 33.5% of the entire market – that’s four times more share than the entire remaining market, beyond the top 20
• Expedia Inc owns 25.6% of the entire market
• All ‘Others’, beyond the top 20, own a tiny 7.7% of the market
• Airline providers can use this market share data to establish the best aggregators to resell their ‘Flights’

When combined, Expedia Inc and Priceline Group own nearly 60% of the entire US ‘Flights’ market. This is astronomical, and has created an ‘illusion of choice’ across the digital travel landscape.

• Priceline is the 6th largest internet company by revenue ($10.64bn USD).
• Expedia is the world’s 10th largest internet company by revenue ($8.77bn USD).

These revenue statistics just prove the success of their digital duopoly.

What can marketers and SEOs in the travel industry learn from the data about the most valuable search terms? Knowing their most valuable content gives businesses the foresight to dictate strategy.

From Pi’s trend chart, we can see that Europe and Middle Eastern flights have the highest Organic Value across the US ‘International flights’ market.

Aggregators, airlines and integrated booking sites can use this data to plan marketing activity around the most valuable flights.

Why is the online flights market so heavily dominated by just two companies?

Priceline group and Expedia own significant search real estate, and dominate the flights industry.

We can’t know exactly how these groups achieve their success, but we can presume that each brand prioritizes search throughout the business.

What’s more, these groups have an array of interrelated digital assets, which provide greater opportunity for comprehensive link infrastructures. This would only serve to boost their presence across the search landscape.

Based on the data, we can also see that online travel agencies, aggregators and booking sites decisively outrank airlines themselves in almost all cases. So why is this?

Based on their business offering, aggregators and OTAs offer a variety of content covering all areas of the flights market.

As direct providers, airlines may have less opportunity to match this offering, which could in turn impede market share.

The full report can be downloaded from the Pi Datametrics website.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/31/report-who-owns-the-flights-market-in-search/

The 10 most common WordPress SEO challenges and how to solve them

If you’re new to the business of SEO and are just figuring out how to optimize your WordPress site for search, navigating the landscape of SEO can seem like a nightmare.

You’ll have seen a thousand different articles on SEO: on-page optimization tips, off-page optimization tips, SEO basics, email marketing tips, etc. online and implemented them – only to see them fail, or worse, backfire.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. SEO can be tricky, and there is always a huge scope for overdoing or underdoing things. While I can’t fully solve this problem for you, I’ll make an attempt to round up the most commonly faced SEO challenges with WordPress so that you can look into your site and make some amends.

The important thing to understand here is that the same factors can prove to be a boon as well as a challenge when it comes to SEO. The key is to understand your own website intricately and devise plans depending upon what works best for you. Listed below are a few things that are commonly done wrong.

1. Finding the right theme

Ask yourself, how did you choose your WordPress theme while creating your website? Odds are you picked the most visually attractive theme that you thought would appeal to your customers.

Another common mistake people make is picking the most premium or commonly-used themes, as they think these are shortcuts to success. This is where you’re going wrong. Many complicated themes are filled with poor code that slows down your website. And loading time is a small but significant factor that affects your SEO rankings.

So pick a theme that works best for the nature of your website. Minimalist themes can be just as effective as complicated themes. And remember to check how often these themes are updated; you do not want an outdated theme dragging your site down.

2. The plugin game

WordPress plugins can truly be a boon for website SEO. But people tend to overdo it by adding too many of them and as a result, the website becomes heavier and slower to load. In order to improve user experience and your website ranking, it is imperative to pick and install only the right plugins for your website.

Multiple plugins also tend to occupy excessive server resources. Therefore, many managed WordPress hosts do not allow websites that consume too many resources.

3. The sitemap issue

As a basic WordPress website doesn’t give you too many features and controls, you’re bound to install SEO plugins, most of which have the option of sitemaps. You can even create multiple sitemaps by getting additional plugins to allow you further control over your site.

But here’s the problem. Many people forget to submit their sitemaps to Google Search Console. Once you fail to do that, search engines stop recognizing your sitemaps and needless to say, you won’t show up anywhere despite all your customized plugins.

4. Link stuffing gone wrong

Adding links to your site is one of the most important SEO tactics, and can do wonders for your website ranking. Many themes come with pre-set links to help you out. But there are two ways this can go wrong:

• Over stuffing – Nothing overdone is attractive, and adding links is no exception. Adding too many links can distract your user and also turn them off your site. A good rule of thumb to go by is using up to 20 links. This way you’re well within your bounds.
• Stuffing nonsense – The relevance of the content you feed to your customers is more important than you think. Offer original and relevant content that is useful to your customers so that they spend more time on your site, thus improving your rankings.

5. Schema gone wrong

Schema markup is the primary code that allows Google (and other search engines) to understand what your website is about. You showcase your Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP) so that Google can run it through its algorithms and display your site if it has local relevance. So this is the single most important thing that helps Google understand who you are and what kind of services you provide.

This obviously improves your rankings and visibility. But if you get this wrong, it could work against you, as it confuses Google.

The best way out of this challenge is to gain a deep understanding of how Schema works. Various online resources can help you learn that. For starters, you can check-out the ‘Organization of Schema’ page to look for the list of most common types of schema markup and the ‘Full Hierarchy’ page for the schema types that you will need.

6. Underestimating alt text for images

People often focus all their attention on optimizing text content and miss out visual content, i.e. images. It’s a big blunder. Without fail, make the time to give your images proper names and descriptions. This will go a long way in improving your site’s functionality, accessibility and ranking.

So if you’ve overlooked this, rename all your images now and add proper descriptions. Another shortcut to do this is using the SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin.

7. Wrongly done permalinks

Despite the huge amount of information available on permalinks over the internet, it is one of the most difficult things to get right. And your website takes a really big hit by doing this wrong.

So here’s an over-simplified tip for you. The ideal permalink will allow you to include two very basic yet important things: post name and category. It should look something like this: “/%category%/%postname%/“.

What this does is allows search engines as well as your site visitors to clearly understand what your website is about.

8. Ignoring H1 tags

As your webpage grows, you might end up having a lot more duplicate content than is advisable. Even if this doesn’t affect you initially, it will in the long run.

With growing popularity and content, you might feel you have no option but to use the same H1 tags for multiple pages. But this makes search engines alert and eventually averse to your site. So as far as possible, get precise and innovative and provide only unique content for your site.

And don’t even think of employing the age-old technique of overusing keywords in your meta tags. This might have worked in the past, but Google is very smart and now identifies it.

9. The sin of using duplicate content

It’s not an exaggeration when I say it’s a sin to use duplicate content. The problem is that you might be doing this without even knowing that you are.

The most common mistake in this department is over-categorizing and over-tagging: Google identifies content with multiple common tags and flags them as duplicate content. As a rule, a post should typically be in no more than one or two categories, and tagging should be limited only to the most relevant topics covered in the post.

Furthermore, if you find no obvious way in which you can tag a specific post, don’t tag it. Not every post needs tagging.

However, it is easy to tackle this. WordPress offers plugins like All-In-One-SEO or SEO Plugin Yoast to avoid this error. These plugins add ‘No Follow’ tags to pages that help search engines categorize pages appropriately.

10. Forgetting internal links and related posts

Linking one article to other relevant content across your site increases the average time spent by a user on your website, and also acts as a search engine ranking signal. However, adding unrelated links or poor-quality content will do the opposite and put them off.

If you do not wish to use too many internal links, another smart way to go about it is by adding related posts. Get a plugin to pick the right kind of posts to display as related posts to keep your relevance and integrity intact. The best way to do this is getting the right balance between internal links and related posts.

So read this article through again and thoroughly examine your SEO practices to identify how many of these aforementioned things are you getting wrong, and how many you are doing right.

Another factor that significantly affects your user experience is your host. A slow host will increase your loading time and therefore affect users. Keep this in mind while picking your web hosting company.

Your goal should always be to give your visitors rich quality and relevant content, delivered in the right manner and at the right speed. That is the only true way to keep your customers happy and run a thriving website.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/30/the-10-most-common-wordpress-seo-challenges-and-how-to-solve-them/

5 SEO features to make sure your ecommerce platform supports

When choosing an ecommerce platform to power your online store, it’s important to consider search engine optimization (SEO) features in your decision-making process.

No matter how experienced you are with SEO, when you put the power into a platform’s hands, you may or may not end up with ability to control elements of your site that are essential to your ranking success.

Let’s take a look at five core features that your ecommerce platform needs to have, along with examples of platforms that offer each feature. Hopefully this guide will make it easier for you select a home for your merchandise that is capable of dominating search.

Editable robots.txt files

The Robots.txt file allows you to tell search bots which pages and directories to ignore when crawling your site to index it for the search engines. I bet you’re thinking it’s not a big deal if you can’t control this file, but let me show you why it matters.

When a customer makes a purchase from you, let’s say you send them to a thank you page, offering them a chance to subscribe to your exclusive newsletter where they can stay up to date with the most current sales and promotions before the general public finds out. When someone visits this page, it’s an indication that they’ve successfully completed a purchase, a signal that you can use to track, analyze and optimize buyer journeys.

That’s definitely a page you wouldn’t want indexed in the search engines – and unless you block access to it with the robots.txt file, it’ll become discoverable by the general public. Basically, any page you don’t want users to see without completing a certain action needs to be blocked from crawlers.

While many ecommerce platforms don’t allow their users to directly access this file, BigCommerce does.

BigCommerce also allows you to easily integrate your store with Google Shopping, Facebook, and eBay, as well as a range of other shopping comparison sites, so you can get additional SEO boosts automatically, without having to manually submit your product listings to various engines.

Independent page titles and URLs

To avoid issues with duplicate content, and to ensure you have the best chance at ranking for certain keywords and phrases, it’s best to make sure you can control these metadata elements at the page level. Some ecommerce platforms don’t allow you to have this control, meaning you have a generic title in every single page on your shop.

The URLs may be different for each page, but may end up produced like /randomcharacters989j.htm rather than something like /pink-t-shirts.

Chances are you’ll want to use specific keywords for each page on top of the ones you use site-wide. You’ll definitely have long tail keywords to use on each product category page as well. Unless you have the ability to control the titles and URLs at the page level, you’re stuck essentially targeting the same keywords on every single page in your store.

Magento is a robust ecommerce platform that allows users to control the page titles and URLs so they can make the most of their SEO efforts with keywords.

Magento is, of course, not the only platform that does this, but it is a key feature to look for. That said, Magento isn’t the most intuitively user-friendly option available, and unless you’re already an experienced developer, you may find yourself hiring one to make it work for you.

An integrated blogging platform

Because it’s the best way to publish rich, dynamic, link-worthy content on your domain, blogging is an integral part of ecommerce marketing today. Businesses that blog 11 or more times per month receive two to three times the traffic compared to those who blog less often or not at all.

It can be complex to set your shop up on one platform and your blog on another, and then figure out the best way to link the two together – not just for user experience, but also for SEO purposes.

You could have your shop on the main domain, and install WordPress in the /blog directory. That works, but can be a bit of hassle in terms of unified design as well as ongoing management workflow. You’ll have to login to your ecommerce platform to handle products, orders, and general store management. Then, you’ll have to login to your WordPress or other blogging platform to add, edit, and manage your blog content. As you grow, it can be harder to handle that at scale.

Shopify makes it easy by including a blog in the ecommerce platform. This way you can keep everything streamlined. Shopify’s SEO features are solid overall, and the platform also allows for independent page titles and URLs.

Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs allow your content to be syndicated in various places online, while telling Google to pay attention to only one URL. It helps Google to determine the page you want rank, with syndicates using the tag to convey to search bots that you deserve all the SEO juice. This solution is also useful in cases where you want to use multiple URLs for the same product category.

For instance, if you want people to see a list of all the yellow dresses in your store, the URL could be:

http://www.domain.com/store/dresses/yellow/yellowdresses instead of something like: http://www.domain.com/store/dresses/formal?gclid=98675.

Canonical URLs allow you to tell the search engines that similar URLs are the same – allowing you to have products that are accessible under multiple URLs. For instance, that yellow dress can be found at /yellowdresses, /formaldresses, and of course on its individual product page. It may also be found on other pages depending on the other filters you make available to your customers.

When you choose your canonical URL, pick the page that you believe is the most important. Then add a rel=canonical tag when linking from the non-canonical one to the canonical one. Essentially, this redirects the search engines to the important one, so it is more likely to rank – without directing the users away from any of the pages. If you’re having to do this manually, it can become a painstakingly time-consuming task.

WooCommerce is an ecommerce platform that allows you to convert your WordPress installation into a full-fledged shopping experience. It’s available for free, but the premium version comes with additional features and themes. The support for canonical URLs is built-in to WooCommerce, regardless of which version you choose to use.

Automatic redirect management

If your business uses multiple domains, then you’re going to have to spend some time setting up canonical URLs or 301 redirects to forward users and search engines to the right place. If you don’t, you’ll detract from the user experience and risk losing ranking with the search engines because you’re sending traffic to broken links.

If figuring out your 301 redirects and canonical URLs is driving you crazy, then a platform that use automatic redirects could be a priority for you.

SquareSpace is a hosted ecommerce platform like BigCommerce and Shopify. It will automatically redirect users and search engines to your primary domain and use canonical URLs to help you. It’s the automatic redirect that allows you to use a custom domain without your built-in Squarespace domain showing up in the search engine results.

Which one is the best?

Honestly, what works best for you will depend on what your budget is, and what your ecommerce products are.

The bottom line is that regardless of what you choose, you need a platform that is helpful for SEO. If it’s not set up for SEO-friendly URLs, then there’s not much point in using it, because if you can’t get it ranking to bring in organic traffic, you’ll spend a great deal more on customer acquisition.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/29/5-seo-features-to-make-sure-your-ecommerce-platform-supports/

How to ensure you ask the right questions of your data

Our team at Google recently talked to web analysts who say they spend half their time answering basic analytics questions for other people in their organization.

In fact, a recent report from Forrester found 57% of marketers find it difficult to give their stakeholders in different functions access to their data and insights.

To help, our team at Google recently launched a new feature in Analytics to help you better understand “what happened?” questions of your data, such as “how many visitors to my site from California arrived via paid search?”

But the right “why and what next” questions are not always so easy to consider, let alone answer. Posing the wrong questions wastes precious time, and with only so many hours in the day to use your data effectively, you need to become really skilled at knowing what questions to ask when analyzing results so you find answers that are actionable and relevant.

Let’s go through some ways you can get better at this.

1. Have the right objectives and KPIs established before your team begins executing

I’ve advised countless companies on measurement planning over the years, and continue to stress the importance of this both online and at events.

If you haven’t conducted measurement planning and established what your success metrics are up front, get started today. Without this, you will never ask the right questions of your data because you’ll always be boiling the analytics ocean instead of focusing on the metrics that really matter.

Establishing objectives and KPIs is the best thing you can do to ensure you always ask relevant questions that lead to actions that will actually be taken, and which are aligned with your business. 

2. No analysts work in a silo; know what all your different teams are doing

If you are sitting in your analyst ivory tower all day, ultimately you will ask questions you think are interesting, but perhaps not ones which have answers your team cares about, or even really impact your business.

Don’t be isolated; rather, spend time with your different teams so you have your finger on the pulse of their projects and goals – you will then be far better positioned to help them.

3. Automate your reporting so you can spend more time asking questions of data

Updating custom dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports manually is a time-consuming process. It’s also one no one really enjoys doing.

Sure, it’s quicker to do it once, but over time, automation will save you a lot of effort, effort which is better spent asking questions of your data to tease out meaningful insights to inform your marketing.

In a previous column on ClickZ, Search Engine Watch’s sister site, I outlined some ways to get started with automating dashboard updates in order to focus your time on analysis.

4. Executive summaries of your dashboards shared with your team are a chance for real-time feedback

As I’ve shared before in my piece ‘Five steps to report marketing results like a boss‘, never send a dashboard without an executive summary outlining the main takeaways.

Your summary inevitably will include insights from questions you asked of your data when reviewing the visualizations and trends. And this summary in turn will almost always generate responses from those who you have the dashboard tailored for – all too critical for us as analysts to close the feedback loop on our analysis. Don’t ignore it.

5. Don’t waste too much time on unanswerable questions

We’ve all been there when a team member asks you a question about an outlier in a given month. Maybe you had a huge spike in high bounce traffic you can’t seem to find a reason for.

Usually in these such cases it didn’t matter anyway, other than satisfying someone’s curiosity – but you could spend hours on end going down the rabbit hole to try and determine why something happened that might not have been that important in the first place.

In my experience nearly all the “unanswerable” questions end up being ones which didn’t matter much anyway.

6. Educate your wider marketing team on the data sources your company has access to

Without knowing what it is your analysis tools are capturing, you can’t meaningfully ask good questions. So as part of onboarding new team members be sure you educate them on what data sources you have access to.

The other benefit on educating your team is if someone senior like your CMO asks a question beyond the scope of your current reporting capabilities, it can be a good opportunity to research how you might answer that question and potentially ask for an increased budget if required (something we all want more of).

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/28/how-to-ensure-you-ask-the-right-questions-of-your-data/

Build it and they shall come: Why your SEO architecture and search strategy must be aligned

As a society, we have been conditioned with the age-old saying “Build it and they shall come”.

However, does this hold true for the digital world and your website? And more specifically, what about Google?

In most organizations, organic search optimization becomes a layer that is applied after the fact. After the brand teams, product owners and tech teams have decided what a website’s architecture should be.

However, what if I were to tell you that if search were a primary driver in your site’s architecture you could see a 200%+ performance gain out of your organic channel (and paid quality scores if you drive paid to organic pages), along with meeting brand guidelines and tech requirements?

The top 5 benefits of architecture driven by organic search

1. Match Google relevancy signals with audience segmentation and user demand
2. Categorization of topical & thematic content silos
3. A defined taxonomy and targeted URL naming schemes
4. Ability to scale content as you move up funnel
5. A logical user experience that both your audience and Google can understand

When search strategy is aligned with your architecture you gain important relevancy signals that Google needs to understand your website.

You position yourself to acquire volume and market share that you would otherwise lose out on. In addition, you will be poised for organic site links within Google, answer box results and local map pack acquisition.

Imagine opening a 1,000-page hardcover book and looking for the table of contents, only to find it is either missing completely or reads with zero logic. As a user, how would you feel? Would you know what the chapters are about? Get a sense of what the book is about?

If you want Google to understand what your website is about and how it is put together, then make sure and communicate it properly – which is the first step for proper site architecture.

Let us pick on a few common, simplistic examples:

/about-us            (About who?)

/contact-us         (Contact who?)

/products/          (What kind of products?)

/articles                (Articles about what?)

/categories         (Category about what?)

And my very favorite…

/blog                     (Blog? What is that about? Could be anything in the world)

These sub-directories within the infrastructure of your website are key components – they are the “chapter names” in your book. Naming something “articles” lacks the relevancy and key signals to describe what your chapter is about.

The upper level sub-directories are known as parent level pages, which means any pages underneath them are child level pages. As you build and scale child level pages, it should be categorized under the proper parent level page. This allows all of the related content of the children pages to “roll up” and become relevant for the parent level page.

Google thrives on this sort of organization, as it provides a good user experience for their users, as well as communicating systematically what the pages are supposed to be about and how they are related to each other.

Example of a proper architecture

As you can see from this example, the relevancy of the two category levels (business plan template & how to write a business plan) all have relevancy that rolls up to the term business plans.

Then as you drill down one level deeper, you can see that you would isolate and build pages that are for business plan outline and business plan samples. These both roll up to the business plan template category.

Through proper keyword targeting and research you would locate the primary keyword driver that matches the page intent and high volume for the URL naming conventions. This communicates to Google what the page will be about as well as matching high customer demand from a search perspective.

Most brand or product teams create and name a structure based on internal reasons, or no particular reason at all. So rather than applying search filters after the fact and trying to retrofit, do the research and understand the volume drivers – then apply them to the architectural plan. You will have significant gains in your rankings and share of voice.

With a structure like this, every page has a home and a purpose. This architecture not only is designed for “current state” but also will scale easily for “future state”. It becomes very easy to add child categories under the primary silo category thus allowing you to scale easily and move up funnel to capture new market share and volume.

How does user experience (UX) play a role in architecture?

A common crossroads we encounter is the UX as it relates to search, content marketing and architecture. UX typically wants minimal content, limited navigational options and a controlled user journey.

However, keep in mind that a UX journey is considered from one point of entry (typically the home page), while search if done properly – every page becomes a point of entry.   So we need to solve for both.

The good news is that pure architecture structure and URL naming schemes is and can be completely different than the UX. Build the architecture the proper way and you can still apply any UX as an overlay.

Where the primary differences come in is between UX and navigation. Here again, UX typically wants to limit the choices and control the journey, which means that the navigation is reduced and not all architectural levels are available and visible.

The challenge here is that you want Google to rank you number one in the world for all of these pages; however, you are also telling Google they are not important enough to you to even be in your navigation.

A rule of thumb I learned almost 20 years ago is to make sure every page can stand on its own. A user should never have to go “back” in order to go forward. So make sure your navigation and categorical pages are available from every page, especially knowing for organic search, a user will enter your site and the journey at every level.

Now does this mean abandoning UX? No. You can still control the journey through your primary CTAs and imagery, without sacrificing navigation or architecture.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/25/build-it-and-they-shall-come-why-your-seo-architecture-and-search-strategy-must-be-aligned/

5 remarketing strategies to prep for Q4

Remarketing is always one of the most powerful tools in an ecommerce marketer’s belt, but it takes on added importance in Q4.

With the holidays fast approaching, you can do a good amount of prep work now to put yourself in a great position to capitalize on the holiday rush. I’ve outlined my five favorite remarketing strategies below.

1. Dynamic product ads (Facebook & Google)

If you’re an ecommerce company with a significant number of products and you aren’t remarketing with dynamic product ads, you are making a big mistake.

Over and over in our accounts, DPAs have proven to be among the more successful ecommerce remarketing ad types. These ads basically show and remind users of products they have seen on your site, along with similar products they may be interested in.

If you haven’t set these up yet, make sure to prioritize this initiative, as feeds can get technical and should be addressed before you’re crunched for time.

2. Audience creation by depth

An amateur mistake of those launching remarketing campaigns is that they typically blanket all audiences and remarket to anyone who has visited the site but not converted.

They may have taken things a step further by also creating an audience for users who have added products to cart but not converted, but that’s still leaving plenty of room for refinement.

Remarketing to one or two audiences just doesn’t take advantage of the varying intent of audiences that have visited your site. Segmenting your audiences by depth of interaction even further (product category pages, about page, initiate checkout page, audience time on site, etc.) will allow you to understand the performance of each type of audience; from there, you can bid more aggressively to reach those with a higher likelihood of purchasing (vs. those perhaps in the research phase).

Additionally, you can start working with your creative team to develop specific visuals for these different audience segments (e.g. for audiences that viewed female clothing, creative can show gender-specific products, etc.).

3. Sequential remarketing

In addition to developing audiences by how far they’ve gotten to your site or how they’ve interacted with your site, you’ll also want to develop audiences by time they last visited the site (e.g. a day ago, a week ago, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, etc.).

After you create these segments, you can implement sequential remarketing and show these audiences different creative and messaging.

Instead of showing the same audience the same creative and messaging over and over, you can test different creative and messaging as time goes on (try further incentivizing users as time goes on to push them to convert).

4. Remarketing lists for specific dates

One tactic we’ve used with success is creating audiences for specific holidays – for example, develop an audience that came to your site during Black Friday or Cyber Monday.

These audiences will include visitors who may not be your typical customers (and might be purchasing gifts). You can then leverage these audiences in Q4 to remind them to purchase gifts for their loved ones.

5. Broad RLSA strategy

Given that you have so many audiences developed (right?), you’ll definitely want to layer these segments onto your existing search campaigns.

This will allow you to bid more aggressively for higher-intent audiences who have visited your site but not converted and are still searching for they types of products or services you have to offer. Since they are already familiar with your site, your goal should be to bring them back and get them to complete the conversion.

Additionally, you can create a separate campaign with broad or highly competitive/expensive terms you typically wouldn’t bid on, and layer those campaigns on your remarketing lists. Because you are going after an audience that is already aware of your site/service/product, you’ll see higher CVRs and should be able to bring CPAs for those terms within reach.

The sooner you put all of these into play, the more data you’ll have at your fingertips for quick and efficient optimization when traffic gets hot (and more expensive). Good luck!

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/24/5-remarketing-strategies-to-prep-for-q4/

Four tools to build a smarter and more up-to-date in-house marketing team

The SEO community has been fighting with low-quality, outdated and simply incorrect content for ages. How can you educate yourself as well as your team in this abyss of misinformation?

It can be overwhelming to be a new SEO because there’s no way to tell a trustworthy article from a misleading one. In many cases, new SEOs are being guided by outdated advice and get themselves intro trouble.

The other problem is the SEO information overload. There are so many click-baiting articles that keep retelling the same advice again and again. It’s really hard to find really valuable guides these days – it’s usually the same repackaged advice over and over.

Here are four tools that can help solve these problems.

1. Zest

What I’d been usually doing to overcome these two problems was creating my own feed list and only reading what those selected bloggers had to say. There are two problems with that method:

1. You limit yourself to a certain circle of voices and you are very likely to miss new and exciting ideas from emerging bloggers
2. The quality of many blogs I added 5 or more years ago have deteriorated

I had pretty much lost hope of finding a decent solution to recommend my team members until I came across Zest.is.

Zest.is is a marketing community of curators, moderators and administrators who select marketing content to only publish the very best of it.

It works through a Google Chrome extension: just have it installed and give it a try. You’ll be impressed by the quality of content there. Every single article is a gem! Katya Rozenoer did a good job describing the Zest content quality assurance process here.

You can:

• Search and filter content by tags
• Filter your feed by media types to show only Video or Audio content
• Sort your feed by most recent, clicked, or shared articles

Furthermore, you can share each and every article you come across there on social media (your followers will be thankful) and even add articles to Slack discussions and Trello boards (I found that option especially useful: Read the rest of the article to get a better idea how this option helps team collaboration).

From now on, I am going to recommend Zest to anyone looking for no-fluff marketing content.

2. Serpstat

I have a confession: I don’t believe in learning without acting/playing. You cannot learn anything by just reading; you need to start implementing that advice into action right away. Therefore I love tools so much that I have spent 80% of my blogging career finding and reviewing SEO tools.

I had started using SEO tools prior to learning what SEO really was, and I still think that’s the only way to go.

There are lots of great SEO tools out there; I won’t overwhelm you here with trying to list all of them. What you really need for your new in-house SEO team is something that:

• Can help with multiple aspects of SEO process (keywords, backlinks, on-page, competitor research, etc.)
• Can enable productive co-working and collaboration for your team to work on a project at the same time
• Isn’t too overwhelming (Your team members should be able to figure it out without additional training, because that’s the point of it)

I’ve tried different tools that satisfy the above criteria, Serpstat being the most recent one.

You’ll find their…:

• Overall toolset pretty huge and comprehensive
• Their keyword and competitor research tools absolutely awesome. I simply love the selection of keywords I get there as well as the data and filters I can play with.
• Their on-page report pretty basic but it will work great for newbies because they will be able to see SEO errors in action
• Their rank tracking and backlink tools quite reliable and well-designed

Overall, it’s a must to have a tool like this to let your in-house SEO team play inside daily.

3. Buzzsumo Trends and Alerts

While Zest will help your team access the highest-quality SEO guides and tutorials, Buzzsumo will help them monitor trends and news.

• You can set up alerts for common words like “SEO”, “Content marketing”, etc. to get those links delivered to your inbox
• You can use Buzzsumo’s “Trending” section to see currently hot articles on any topic

Buzzsumo is using their “Trends score” metric allowing you to spot popular content even before it gets hot.

I wouldn’t offer it to my new team on day one though. They will find too many click-baiting headlines there and will quickly get overwhelmed. Once you have a well-read team who can tell real news from click-bait, it’s time to get up-to-date. That’s when they can start using Buzzsumo Trends.

4. Trello

Finally, it’s important that your team can share links, concepts and ideas in a productive way. Furthermore, it should be encouraged that your team share their findings with each other because it’s in proper communication that true knowledge is born.

I tried using Slack, but somehow the point gets missed in long communication strings there. It’s like a never ending chatroom. Trello is much less entertaining, but it’s much better organized and much more productive.

I like to have a separate Trello board running where all the members can add their must-read URLs as new tasks for anyone else to go through. To keep that list from growing enormous, we keep tasks in the “To read” column for a month before we move them to the archives.

We also keep a separate column for “To-do” items, i.e. articles that inspired some form of action (be it playing in Trello or a quick fix on a company blog). Actionable guides are my favorite articles.

If your team uses Zest for marketing reading, you can add articles to Trello right from your Zest dashboard, which is pretty awesome.

I know Trello is not for everyone. I’ve seen plenty of people who don’t like using it for anything. There are plenty of other productivity tools listed here, so you can pick an alternative.

How do you build an inspired and educated digital marketing team? Please share your resources!

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/23/four-tools-to-build-a-smarter-and-more-up-to-date-in-house-marketing-team/

Why SEOs can’t afford to wait around for a mobile-first index

We’re often told that the web is increasingly mobile, and that it is imperative for businesses to adapt their marketing strategies to be ‘mobile-first’ in order to capitalize on this shift in internet behavior.

But just how mobile is the web in 2017, and what does this mean for search?

SEO and performance marketing agency BrightEdge today released a new report which sheds light on this question, and on the steadily widening gap between mobile and desktop search.

I spoke to Erik Newton, VP of Customer Marketing and Head of SEO at BrightEdge, about the report’s findings, Google’s mobile-first index tests, and how SEOs can adapt their strategy to account for the increasing divergence between desktop and mobile.

Majority mobile: 57% of web traffic is now mobile & tablet devices

In one of the key findings of the research, BrightEdge reports that 57% of web traffic now originates from mobile and tablet devices – meaning that close to 6 out of every 10 consumers are using a mobile device. Businesses who still aren’t optimizing for mobile, therefore, are ignoring a decisive majority of potential customers.

Even more noteworthy is the finding that the same query on the same search engine generates a different rank on mobile and desktop 79% of the time.

Among the top 20 ranked results, the gap is less pronounced, with 47% of queries differing between devices – but this still means that close to half of rankings differ.

And 35% – more than a third – of the time, the first page that ranked for any given domain was different between mobile and desktop SERPs.

In a press release about the research, BrightEdge commented that these figures indicate a “significant shift to a new mobile-first index”. I asked Erik Newton whether this means that BrightEdge believes Google’s mobile-first index is already being rolled out. Most SEOs believe we are still awaiting the official launch of the new index, but is BrightEdge seeing otherwise?

“We are seeing a divergence of rank and content between the two devices, and we have seen the data move in both directions over the last few months,” says Newton. “We believe that Google is testing and calibrating, as they have with other major shifts, to prepare for the separate mobile index.”

This fits with Google’s usual M.O. around big algorithm updates, but it also means that whatever strategies SEOs are planning to deploy when the mobile-first index finally rolls around, now might be the time to start testing them.

And for those who are still biding their time, they may already be losing out.

How are businesses really doing on mobile?

In the marketing industry, we’ve been talking for what feels like years, with increasing urgency, about the need for our campaigns and our web presences to be mobile-friendly. Or mobile-responsive. Or mobile-first.

But how are businesses really doing with this? Are marketers doing enough, even in 2017, to optimize for mobile?

“For most of the businesses that grew up on desktop, we see them using a desktop frame of reference,” observes Erik Newton. “We see evidence of this tendency in web design, page performance, analytics, and keyword tracking.

“We believe that Google gives the market signals to move forward and toward mobile faster. This is one of those times to push harder on mobile.

“Some of the newer companies, however, are mobile-first and even mobile-only. They are more likely to be app-based, and have always had majority mobile share.”

As we’ve seen from the figures cited in the previous section, using desktop as a frame of reference is increasingly short-sighted given the widening gap between desktop and mobile rankings. But how, then, should marketers plan their search strategy to cater to an increasing disparity between the two?

Should they go so far as to split their SEO efforts and cater to each separately? Or is there a way to kill two birds with one stone?

“The research report has some specific recommendations,” says Newton.

“One – Identify and differentiate mobile versus desktop demand.

“Two, design and optimize websites for speed and mobile-friendliness. Three, use a responsive site unless your business is app-based and large enough to build traffic through app distribution.

“Four, understand different online consumer intent signals across desktop and mobile devices. Five, produce separate mobile and desktop content that resonates on multiple device types.

“Six: focus on optimizing mobile content and mobile pages to improve conversions. Seven: track, compare, and report mobile and desktop share of traffic continuously.

“Eight, measure and optimize the page load speed of the mobile and desktop sites separately. And nine, track your organic search rank for mobile and desktop separately.

“The first challenge is to be even equally attentive to both mobile and desktop. We find that many brands are not acutely aware of the basic stat of mobile share of traffic.

“Additionally, brands can analyze the mobile share among new visitors, or non-customers, to see what kind of a different role it can play for people at different stages of the customer journey. For example, my mobile traffic is 32% higher among new visitors than overall visitors, and my mobile-blog-non-customer is 58% higher. That’s a place I should be leaning in on mobile when communicating to non-customers.

“Brands do not need to split their SEO efforts, but they do need to decide that some content efforts be mobile-first to be competitive.”

It can be difficult for brands who have traditionally catered to desktop users and who are still seeing success from a desktop-focused strategy to break away from this mindset and take a gamble on mobile. However, the figures are convincing.

What’s most evident is that it isn’t enough for SEOs and marketers to wait around for the launch of Google’s mobile-first index: it’s already being tested, and when combined with the growing proportion of mobile web traffic, brands who wait to develop a mobile-first strategy are increasingly likely to miss out.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/23/why-seos-cant-afford-to-wait-around-for-a-mobile-first-index/

The best SEO influencers and resources to follow

More than any other digital marketing discipline, SEO is a game of opinions. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy that guarantees success, and that leaves plenty of room for healthy debate.

Given how profitable SEO can be when done well, the industry has spawned a vast array of influencers, dispensing morsels of invaluable insight that businesses can apply to their own strategies. A few of these influencers have even gained something close to celebrity status.

It’s been a tough few months for the industry in that sense, with luminaries like Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan and Matt McGee announcing their respective departures from the scene in the near future.

These are all respected figures with a wealth of experience who essentially put SEO on the map. In their wake, there is a need for a new wave of dedicated SEO experts to conduct and share their findings with the wider community. Fortunately, there are plenty of worthy candidates.

Unfortunately, there is also a lot of bad advice out there. SEO provokes conjecture along with healthy debate, and following the wrong advice can have a negative impact on any business.

However, help is at hand. The below is a list of experts and resources that continually provide excellent, reliable, actionable SEO advice.

Backlinko

As the name suggests with minimal subtlety, the site is mainly about link building. This is an essential area of SEO, but yet also the one of the most difficult to master. With Google’s Penguin algorithm now functioning in real time, all SEOs need to make sure their link earning practices are squeaky clean.

Backlinko helps to bridge this gap by providing convincing evidence of the areas that drive performance, backed up by case studies and in-depth research.

The blog also contains exhaustive, permanent resources on non-link building topics, including YouTube ranking factors and a very long list of 201 SEO tips.

Backlinko provides a lesson for all SEO and content marketers. The site’s principal author, Brian Dean, posts as frequently as he has something substantial and of lasting value to share. This flies in the face of the received wisdom that content publication should have a regular cadence, but it seems to work.

For anyone looking to go beyond the usual SEO soundbites and find out what really works, this is an excellent place to start.

SEO by the Sea

SEO by the Sea is a niche blog, focusing on analysis of newly granted patents for companies like Google. It makes for a much more entertaining read than one might expect, with rare insights into the workings of the world’s foremost tech companies.

The site is run by Bill Slawski and provides more substantial information than most other SEO-focused blogs out there. Of course, not all of the patents reviewed see the light of day in product form, so we need to approach them with a modicum of caution. However, as a resource for understanding the technology and methodology behind retrieving and ranking search results, SEO by the Sea is unparalleled.

In combination with the corroborating evidence we can find on sites like Backlinko, this site helps provide a rounded view of how a search engine really works.

Lisa Myers

Lisa Myers is the founder of UK-based agency Verve Search, and is also a regular on the SEO conference scene. She has presented at a wide range of events; most of the presentations can be found here.

Lisa’s presentations have covered some fascinating topics, including the need for SEOs to inject some emotion into their content to cut through with audiences. Many of the decks are focused on how to attract authoritative backlinks through content, which is undoubtedly one of the most challenging and unpredictable areas of our work. Her most recent talk from MozCon 2017 is definitely worth reading for anyone that works in content marketing or influencer engagement.

Lisa Myers is also the founder of Women in Search, another great resource if you are looking for some SEO influencers to follow.

Dr Pete

Dr Pete is the resident marketing scientist at Moz and he has for some time been a reputable authority on the inner workings of search engines.

Recently, he has focused on understanding Google’s ‘featured snippets’, which are another huge opportunity for SEOs, but not one that we can distil to an exact, simple formula. This guide is about as comprehensive a resource on the subject as one could hope for, and following the steps it outlines can help SEOs improve the likelihood they will show up in those coveted featured snippets positions.

You can also follow Dr Pete on Twitter, where he is typically very responsive to any specific questions from the SEO community.

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is an industry veteran and is one of the most reliable authorities on Google updates. He runs the excellent Search Engine Roundtable, which is just about the best site out there for any breaking SEO news. Posts are short and to the point, containing the essential information as it becomes available. The sources for their news stories typically work in the engineering teams at Google, so it as about as reliable as we could expect to find.  

This means that posts are typically quite short and to the point, containing the essential information we need to know. Search Engine Roundtable is therefore a little different to most other SEO blogs, choosing to report on very specific pieces of Google information, rather than in-depth studies. As a result, it’s a site that most SEOs should visit quite frequently to keep abreast of the latest news as it breaks.

Stone Temple Research

Stone Temple is an SEO agency and, like most SEO agencies, they have a blog. What makes theirs stand out from the crowd is their dedication to spending a huge amount of time preparing rigorous studies that tell us something new.

The recent study on how Google might rank videos differently on YouTube versus traditional search is essential reading for anyone in the industry. Past studies have investigated Google’s indexation of Twitter posts over time and the effectiveness of the various digital assistants.

Stone Temple keep a clear focus on content quality, backing everything up with a coherent methodology and a transparent view on their findings. As such, posts are relatively infrequent, but they are typically worth the wait.

Webmaster Central

So, there are lots of different guides and resources out there, but sometimes SEO questions don’t fit so neatly within these categories. Chances are, however obscure your SEO question is, someone has asked it already on Webmaster Central.

This Google help forum provides an opportunity for search professionals to ask and answer detailed questions. Everything from disavow files to international SEO is covered in a huge amount of depth, so this site is worth benchmarking in case you run into any obstacles. In all likelihood, someone else will already have encountered (and overcome) the same hurdle on Webmaster Central.

Marketing Experiments

This is not strictly an SEO resource, but it is worth adding to an SEO reading list nonetheless. Marketing Experiments contains a trove of case studies, mainly focused on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tests. User engagement factors are increasingly important for SEO rankings, so this is not an area of marketing that we can ignore. With the advent and subsequent growth of RankBrain, the worlds of SEO and CRO have converged almost entirely now.

Image via Pixabay

Marketing Experiments hosts a lengthy list of use cases that can provide invaluable data to shape our own hypotheses when it comes to testing landing page variations. The Unbounce blog is also a good place to stay up to speed with the latest in CRO.

Inbound.org

You can bring all of this together, and add a lot more influencers to your own list, by signing up to Inbound.org. Inbound curates a personalized list for marketers based on their areas of interest, with options including PPC, SEO, Social Media, and Data Science.

Inbound highlights trending topics in organic search, but it also serves as a marketing community and forum for people to share ideas. There are always new voices in the SEO industry; this is a great place to hear them first.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/22/the-best-seo-influencers-and-resources-to-follow/

5 ways to identify potential featured snippets to rank for

Have you been wondering how to start owning Google’s featured snippets for your brand?

If you’d like to earn those coveted “position 0” spots, you need to start by understanding what featured snippets are and how to earn them. By earning featured snippets, you can increase web traffic, boost visibility in Google SERPs, and earn the credibility you deserve.

The first, and most important, step in earning featured snippets is understanding how to identify “snippable” opportunities.  Once you know how to find them, you can craft the rest of your strategy around maximizing these opportunities.

In this article, I’ll go over five ways to identify featured snippet opportunities.

Use Google to identify potential snippets

Start looking for snippet opportunities by putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and thinking what questions you may want answers for.  Even boring industries have a large range of opportunities to answer questions in the featured snippets.

For instance, let’s say you are in the diamond industry. The very nature of this industry is filled with terminology people will search to get information about.

Doing a quick Google search like, “What is a girdle on a diamond” will showcase a Google featured snippet.

Hopefully the showcased content is yours. Under the snippet you will sometimes see a helpful note from Google, “People also ask.”

These are the pressing questions your target audience wants answers for. You can dig a little deeper and even see who has the leading content for that question based query.

Now that you see a few competitors, you can try to steal their snippet with a little more research and some snippable optimization.

Use SEMrush to snag competitor featured snippets

SEMrush is one of the most used online platforms for site analytics, and also a useful tool to identify Google Featured Snippets. You can use SEMrush to find your snippets, or use the platform to find your competitors’ snippets as well.

To check out your snippets, do an “Organic Research” search for your domain:

Next, locate “Featured Snippet” on the right side of the page.

You can also filter your snippable keywords using the “Advanced Filters” option, choosing Include – SERP Features – Featured Snippets.

Once you’d identified snippets that your competitors rank for, you can optimize for those same terms.

As for identifying your own snippets, it allows you to find variations of relevant long tail keywords that you could also own, and find keyword clusters that you already have authority in and might be able to expand upon.

Look for questions on Quora

Given that the foundation of these snippets is answering who, what, why, when, where type questions, you’ll need inspiration for finding the questions your audience is asking.

To do so, you can use Q&A platforms like Quora to find them. This will help you compile a healthy list of potential blog topics for your Featured Snippet content marketing campaign.

For instance, let’s say you were a travel site looking to compete with Kayak, Expedia, and other dominating brands.

Type in a quick question with a few of your keywords:

A nice dropdown of questions to choose from will suddenly appear right from the get-go, even before finishing your question.

You can also type in one or two keywords and find groups that may have snippet-worthy questions waiting for you to develop content around.

Once in the group, you can poke around, follow certain questions. You can also find a nice list of other groups to the right you may want to check out.

Next, you can use the on-page elements to optimize for the snippets as described here.

Find segmented questions on Answer the Public

Did you know that certain question words have a higher likelihood of being showcased as a snippet? That’s right: the question in question matters.

According to research by SEMrush, question based queries that begin with “how” or “what” are more snippable than when, where, why, and who.

This is valuable knowledge to have, but where do you find questions segmented into those respectable question words fast? Well, Answer the Public to the rescue.

Let’s say you want to earn a few SEO content snippets.

Your search results for SEO will yield a ton of questions you can use for content. The best part is that you can focus on the “how” and “what” questions to increase your Featured Snippet chances.

Find a variety of questions on Reddit

If you are searching for a wide range of questions for your daily blog, Reddit can be very useful. This online platform offers valuable insight for what questions are trending.

First, you will need to access the “askreddit” section of the platform:

Once you are there, you can use the search feature to further segment your search based on your industry. Focus on generic keywords in order to get relevant questions.

Once you’ve identified the questions, you can then focus on optimizing for those searches.

Ready for position zero?

Identifying potential Featured Snippet opportunities is the first step towards earning those coveted position ones. Make a list of all the question based queries you find using the above strategies, and begin optimizing your snippable content today.

How do you find featured snippet opportunities?

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/21/5-ways-to-identify-potential-featured-snippets-to-rank-for/

How to escape Google’s filter bubble

For some people the personalization of their news apps and other content feeds online is a manual, conscious decision.

They want to be displayed certain topics due to their interests, which is completely understandable. Cut through the noise by making sure that you get given what you want.

For a lot of us, though, while personalization can make the considerable amount of time we spend scrolling through social feeds more entertaining, most of the automated personalization we encounter on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily requested – and is wider spread than one might initially think.

In a Ted talk, Eli Pariser discussed what he called the ‘filter bubble’. For those who have never heard of the filter bubble, it is a similar theory to that of ‘echo chambers’. Essentially, the focus of providing and consuming content that is closely aligned to your preferences results in the creation of a bubble or chamber, restricting your view of the wider picture.

As our internet ecosystem has evolved, we have shared increasing amounts of personal data with services we use every day, from social networks to search engines. They then use this data to tailor the content they provide us with to what they think will be most appealing, engaging or relevant. Google in particular has gradually increased the extent with which it tailors results to the user with innovations like Hummingbird and RankBrain, the inclusion of social results in search, and semantic search.

To many users this personalization of search results is helpful and convenient, but an increasing number of users are disturbed by the extent to which the sites they encounter are being shaped by forces outside of their control. If you are one of them, you may be wondering: How can you stop this from happening? How do you escape the filter bubble?

In this article, we are going to look at ways in which you can partially escape Google’s filter bubble, as well as how SEOs can penetrate it to make sure their sites are surfaced to as wide an audience as possible.

How do you escape Google’s filter bubble?

Disclaimer: If you want to be completely free of Google’s filter bubble, the only real way is to stop using Google. Know this, though – the rest of your treasured social feeds and news outlets will be no different, and who would want to stop using Google?

Do what you can to hide from the Big G

You can always log out of Gmail, delete your search history/browser cache and use an incognito browser (to prevent a level of browser caching). Again, though, you will not be completely free.

The filter bubble is not just specific to personal activity online; it also takes into personal factors that are not dictated by the individual such as device and location. You are also potentially not free of Google’s own internal bias, shown by their recent fine from the EU.

The outlook appears to be pretty bleak, huh? Well not entirely. Escaping Google’s filter bubble (and to an extent, all other platforms’ bubbles) is less about attempting to erase your internet history or privacy settings, and more about simply being aware of the bubble.

Awareness is critical

Take it upon yourself to find different sources and take an objective view. Let’s face it: echo chambers were around long before Google and Facebook. Newspapers have spent decades reporting the news with their own bias – you only need look at the differences in how The Independent and the Daily Mail provide commentary for the goings on in the world to see this in action.

Depending on how conspiracy theory-led you are, you could argue that this pushing of agendas comes straight from the top at a government level. The point is that the most powerful tool for escaping Google’s filter bubble is one’s own awareness of the situation. If you are researching important information, don’t take everything as gospel and verse. Research, utilize multiple sources, and try to look at the situation objectively.

All of us are culprits, including myself. We use a single news app because it is the easy option, thus our echo chambers are somewhat self-inflicted. That is not to say that we should necessarily start to use Ask Jeeves, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo.

The point is that we should look deeper than the first results, and utilize alternate sources to investigate key topics.

How can SEOs penetrate Google’s filter bubble?

Whichever side of the fence you are when it comes to the personalization of content and its effect on our ability to have complete access to information, the Google filter bubble presents a predicament to SEOs and marketers alike.

Compared with the deeper moral arguments surrounding the Google filter bubble, it may seem somewhat trivial to discuss how SEOs can flog more of their wares via Google. However, the filter bubble has a real impact on both consumers’ lives and companies.

So how as SEOs do we penetrate it?

How specific are target search terms?

We did a test in the office here with three different individuals off two different devices each (mobile with wifi turned off, and laptop), all logged in to their Gmail accounts. We tested both broad and more specific search terms, and were not displayed different results.

This is not to say that the filter bubble does not exist, but it did get us thinking. Pariser’s Ted talk used the example of two individuals searching for ‘Egypt’ and being returned very different results. The issue here? Egypt is an incredibly broad search term and whilst SEOs may look to target ‘broader’ search terms within their strategy, the majority will have a very different view of ‘broad’ when compared with searching for ‘Egypt’.

We would bet that the data would show a less powerful filter as the searches become more and more specific, especially for more traditional transactional search terms harbored by SEOs.

Penetrating the bubble

One of the main issues of the filter bubble for SEOs is that it takes users down a self-fulfilling path: the more you engage with a certain website or topic, the more likely you are to be shown similar information. As such, penetrating the filter bubble is the number one priority.

A constant improvement in your site’s authority will help prevent your website being shut out of people’s filter bubbles, but alternate marketing channels should also be utilized:

Social media

Capitalize on highly shareable content to expand your degrees of separation and drive traffic to your website. You will be competing against each social platform’s own version of the filter bubble, but this is somewhat mitigated by the ability to share content.

Paid search and social

If the bubbles are proving too strong to penetrate, incorporating paid search (Adwords) and social media advertising will give you a foot in the door for new prospective customers.

Email

Direct mail is often shunned by those of us that are dedicated to the Inbound Methodology but is another effective way of driving action from consumers. Use behavioural automation to take your campaigns to the next level and drive action.

Trust in the process

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here; what we are saying is nothing new. Trusting in the quality of your campaign and ensuring that you diversify the marketing channels that you employ should be part of the agenda regardless of filter bubbles. It might require a revisit of some of your core pillars but this is something that should be completed time to time anyway.

Really understand your buyer personas – these are the individuals who will become customers. Dig deeper into their drivers and satisfy their queries, questions and concerns. As always, value for the user is at the forefront of what we as SEOs should be providing.

Diversity of content and link building – again, no surprises here. Spread the net a little wider and assess how diverse the content is that you are providing. Is it too specific to a certain buyer persona and therefore somewhat neglecting other (also valuable) prospects?

Furthermore, high quality link building can gain you exposure on relevant sites, therefore widening the net further.

Keep people coming back

All of the above is great for your SEO campaign but don’t neglect the need to keep people coming back. The continual improvement of your user experience and a higher percentage of returning visitors will ensure that your users are furthering their own self-fulfilling Google filter bubble prophecy.

Combine this this with a widening diversity of content, and you put your website in a great place to mitigate the effects of the filter bubble.

 

If you enjoyed this article, check out some of our other pieces on similar topics:

• Say goodbye to Google: 14 alternative search engines
• Going over to the duck side: A week using DuckDuckGo
• The 10 best ways to generate traffic without Google
• Should Google be more transparent with its updates?

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/08/18/how-to-escape-googles-filter-bubble/