5 UX tips for better SEO results

When Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev was asked about Google’s most important ranking factors, he gave three: content, links, and RankBrain.

We’ve known for a long time that links impact websites’ search rankings and Google has for a very long time emphasized the importance of quality content. What is RankBrain all about, however? Unlike content and links, RankBrain is influenced by behavior metrics that indicate that users actually find a site to be useful. These behavior metrics, more than anything else, are influenced by the usability of your website — in other words, user experience (UX).

If you’ve been focusing on content and links at the expense of user experience, you won’t be able to maximize the performance of your website in the search engines. The following five UX tips will give you an SEO advantage.

1. Work on your site’s mobile compatibility

Google hasn’t hidden the fact that it pays a lot of attention to a site’s mobile compatibility. Anyone who has been in SEO for more than a few years will remember mobilegeddon, and mobile-first indexing is a thing: in other words, coming to terms with the realization that most of the usage of its search engine comes from mobile devices, Google has decided to start indexing the mobile version of a website first.

In other words, if your website does not have a mobile version — or if the mobile version of your website is not properly optimized — then you could lose more than half of your search traffic.

Below are some tips to ensure your website is mobile compatible:

• Use a responsive website design that adapts to mobile devices or create a mobile version of your website that is properly redirected for mobile users.
• Ensure that content is consistent across your mobile site and desktop site.
• Make sure that all the content formats used on your mobile site can be crawled and indexed.
• Ensure that metadata is consistent across the mobile and desktop version of your site.
• Ensure that your sitemap is also accessible on your mobile site.

2. Optimize your website speed

Just how important is the speed of your website? Research shows that a single second delay in site load time can reduce your conversions by 7 percent, and that 40 percent of people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. In other words, people don’t like slow websites. And that explains why Google keeps strengthening page speed as a ranking factor.

While Google has long been using site speed as a factor to rank desktop sites, it recently began to use site speed as a ranking factor for mobile sites in July 2018.

You can make your website faster by doing the following:

• Enable caching
• Use a CDN
• Remove unnecessary scripts and plugins
• Compress your images
• Combine your background images into CSS sprites
• Minify your JavaScript and CSS

3. Optimize your site architecture

Another UX tip that will give your site an edge in the search engines is to optimize your site architecture in a way that is easy to use and search engine friendly. For example, take a look at the following screenshot from the website of Lookers:

In particular, pay attention to the navigation bar and you will notice a few things:

• The navigation links are clear and descriptive enough to make people know what they will get without much thought.
• People are presented with links to all the key pages — so they don’t have to waste time looking for what they want. One of the hallmarks of good site architecture is that it enables people to get to where they want with fewer clicks.
• The format and presentation of the navigation links is consistent — both the link structure and the description.

Not only will a good site structure make your site more accessible to readers, while at the same time making it easy for the search engines to crawl your website, but you are also likely to be rewarded by sitelinks. Here’s what a Google search for Lookers turned up:

4. Use breadcrumbs navigation

A breadcrumb is a secondary navigation system that helps users know where they are on your website and that can help them trace their way back. Besides the fact that breadcrumbs make it easy for users to navigate your website, they also make it easy for Google to see how your site is structured and while increasing your site’s indexability.

Here’s a look at SEW’s breadcrumbs:

As you can see, from the screenshot above, the trail goes like this “Home >> Industry >> The end of Google+ after a data breach and how it affects us.” In other words, it makes it easy for the user to trace his/her steps back to the primary category of the article, then to the homepage.

5. Work on your content readability

While we tend to focus on the technical aspects of UX when it comes to SEO, content also plays a great role in UX as far as the big G and other search engines are concerned. Making the following tweaks to your content will give you an edge:

• Ensure your content is properly formatted. Use a lot of subheadings, bullets, and numberings to make your content more easy on the eyes.
• Use short paragraphs and avoid long blocks of text.
• Work on your content grammar, spelling, and structure.
• Spice up your content with visuals and multimedia.

Conclusion

While good UX can give you an edge when it comes to SEO, it does more than that: it ensures that users actually use your website while guaranteeing an improvement in ROI and conversions.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/30/5-ux-tips-seo

How should PPC and SEO work together to gain visibility?

Getting PPC and SEO to work together effectively is always a key goal, whether we’re managing just one of the channels or both of them.

Although it sounds easy in principle, it’s generally not. A typical request cropping up is around sharing top-performing PPC ad copy by category and using this to update meta descriptions.

Sharing ad copy performance is something PPC teams should definitely be doing with their SEO counterparts; but unless your meta descriptions are awful the impact here is minimal.

This brings us to the first problem you encounter — although there is lots you CAN do, picking and prioritizing what you do when is vital.

The second common request is switching off PPC ads when you rank in position one (P1) organically. Initially this makes perfect sense and gets the attention of sharp CMOs and CFOs. But this is the second key challenge to overcome; how do I get the right data in the right place to know if it’s actually working.

Let’s take a typical example: car insurance. Here we see MoneySuperMarket ranking P1 organically:

The inevitable push comes; can we turn PPC off in [car insurance] because it’s really expensive and we’re ranking P1 organically.

Well, probably not. Yes, your report is accurate: you rank P1 organically. But you’re actually the fifth result on that page. On my work monitor the organic ranking is well past halfway down the page. On mobile you’re well below the fold:

This is where getting the right data is key.

Keyword universe

One way in which we’re improving SEM data for our clients is via a Keyword Universe. This isn’t perfect by any means, but it gives us a working framework on which to build our reporting and optimize efforts. A template can be found here.

It uses PPC search query data as a starting point. It’s important to use this; instead of the Paid v Organic report you can find in Google Ads or Search Ads 360. The reason for this is that Shopping search query data isn’t included in this report, so for retailers you’re likely to be missing out on a ton of data!

Layer this with organic data from Search Console and you’ll start to be able to build up an idea of your coverage.

Pulling in conversion data at a keyword level for PPC is easy; organic not so much. What we recommend here is using the category column to categorize your terms and then pivot up. You can then assign landing pages to categories and understand organic conversions and revenue. Not a perfect solution, but it gives you something to work with.

Then you can add in search volume estimates from Google Keyword Planner or other tools you may use. You can use this to figure out what your paid, organic, and SEM share of voice is. This gives you a few ideas:

• Where is PPC very dominant and SEO not so much? What can you do to improve rankings across these terms?
• Are there areas where PPC has coverage but conversion rate is poor, and you can perhaps sacrifice this spend and allow organic to pick things up?
• Do you have a good share of voice across SEM across your key categories?

You can then add in search queries where you only rank organically and see if you want or need PPC coverage.

Finally, you could add in keywords you might want to target and ask the PPC team to run some tests to see what kind of volume and competition you will be up against. Run PPC temporarily until organic rankings get up to scratch.

The categorization element of the report is the most time-consuming.

Brand testing

As you can see, the argument for switching off generics can be blurry at best. However, we tend to also see an argument for switching off brand. It’s generally the next conversation once a client realizes that turning off a generic head term is perhaps not going to have the impact there were expecting.

Again there are a multitude of options and approaches here but we’ll cover the most common ones:

• Turn all PPC brand off because we’re ranking P1
• Leave PPC brand on all the time and gun for 100% impression share
• Switch off desktop

There are tech providers out there which offer, in various guises, ways supported here. The important thing to remember is that you are not allowed to scrape Google search results if you are also making changes to bidding. So for example, ad monitoring platforms which can tell you what competitor creative is for certain terms can do that because they are allowed to scrape the results — but they cannot use this information to make automatic changes to your account. That means an account manager jumping between both monitoring tools and search engines on a daily basis to eke out minor gains. It’s possible; but probably not a sensible use of time.

The challenge we have with the strategies outlined above, respectively, are:

• Turning it all off will lead to drop in traffic and a potential drop in orders and revenue.
• This can be expensive; you don’t necessarily need to protect your brand all the time, and you can use saved budget elsewhere (i.e use it to grow your brand with YouTube)
• You lose data because you aren’t bidding for your terms.

As such, we’ve been establishing a more balanced approach – which takes time, but will help save budget and, most importantly, keep the data flow going so you can explain WHY the results are as they are.

Key steps to a more balanced approach

1. Understand the lay of the land:

• Use Google Ads to report on your top spending exact match brand terms. You’ll also want to include search impression share and search exact match impression share.
• If you are in position 1, with 100% exact match share (or 95%+ overall search impression share), you can probably stand to save some budget by reducing your costs-per-click. If you aren’t in P1 with 100% impression share then this gets more complex; and you’d need to understand the reasons for not being at those levels. However, you can still follow the next steps to help you monitor overall performance.
• You’ll also want confirmation you are ranking P1 for the terms you are looking on PPC. It would be very rare that you wouldn’t be — but worth checking!

2. You now want to identify a target search exact match impression share. This is a little bit finger in the air as the idea is to drop this gradually over a period of weeks; but you need a starting point. We’d recommend:

• If the auction for your terms is usually aggressive then play it cautiously – drop from 100% to 95% and monitor from there.
• If the auction tends to be weak (i.e not many competitors) you can afford to drop to 90% or 85%; but we wouldn’t recommend going lower than that in week one.

3. A report template can be found here. All you need to do here is to populate the table with your data. Take the PPC data from Google Ads for the campaign you are testing and then Google Search Console data and look for your branded terms.

4. Fill out the report every week, with both your PPC and SEO teams feeding into it. What you are hoping to achieve is SEM traffic staying static and your overall PPC investment declining.

Key benefits of brand testing

This is a good starting point for brand testing. The key benefits are:

• If you keep spend going through Google Ads, you can monitor your cost savings, your traffic drop and how aggressive the auction is getting.
• It allows you to measure where the point of no return is; once you start seeing SEM traffic drop, you can bump up your bids a little bit to regain the traffic – although we’d recommend not being too jumpy here. Day by day things will change – look at this over weeks rather than days.
• A common concern is the time taken to manage this; but typically you are looking at a handful of keywords – no more than 10 which actually spend the greater share of budget – and making changes maximum twice per week.

Build an environment that encourages sharing

Aside from the more practical tips outlined above, we’ve found the most important strategy in getting PPC and SEO to work well together is enabling a method for the teams to talk to each other. If this is internal it should be easy; but across different agencies it’s likely to be a bit more difficult. Our top tips for this are:

1. Establish a monthly learning deck. This changes from client to client but typically looks like this:

• A top-line view of performance versus targets for key metrics (orders, revenue, ROAS, traffic to site, etc.). Do this for each channel individually.
• A review of the tests / learnings that have been made in the past month
• It’s also important to focus on what is important to both teams, including:
  • New keywords / new negatives from PPC
  • Any kind of landing page testing
  • Any kind of a copy testing
  • Any data regarding audience from PPC. We’re finding content teams are able to use PPC data to help ideation. For example; what are people’s affinity segments, what are their detailed demographics?
• A review of what is coming up and anything that’s currently in progress.

2. Have a monthly call. This can be tweaked depending on the scale of work that’s going on; but monthly works for a lot of our clients. It takes 30 minutes and we run through the monthly learning decks and highlight areas of opportunity. One example of a benefit here was landing page testing. An SEO team had struggled to make a case for changes to the organic page because the internal brand team were winning the argument on what the page should look like. We used PPC landing page data to evidence how a change in the position of a call to action had a significant impact on the conversion rate of the page; immediately the SEO team got the green light to start testing new page designs and performance improved!

3. Make sure you’re sharing anything you think may be relevant. Sometimes even the smallest detail can be important. For example SEO teams may be planning for AMP pages; but that means new Floodlight tags for PPC teams if they are using SearchAds 360.

4. Don’t forget about the other teams. I know this is an SEM post; but audience data is already a key pillar. Search has had to play catch-up with the likes of Facebook; but the stuff PPC teams have access to at their fingertips is extensive. Make sure the social and programmatic teams know about it!

Getting PPC and SEO to work better together is a bit like the attribution conversation. It’s not always perfect; but it’s better than doing nothing! Hopefully these points give you a jumping-off point.

Martin Reed is PPC Account Director at Croud.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/29/ppc-seo-work-together-gain-visibility/

10 fun facts (and a typo) from the original Google paper by Larry and Sergey

Yesterday while I was having a blast reading “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” I happened across some fun facts.

We got into some of the more technical goods from the paper yesterday, but figured these would also be an worthwhile — or at least more enjoyable — read. Friday and all.

1. “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” – people encountering a crawler for the first time

They note that they received almost daily emails from people either concerned about copyright issues or asking if they liked the site after looking at it. For many people with web pages, this was one of the first crawlers they had seen.

“It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen. Almost daily, we receive an email something like, “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” There are also some people who do not know about the robots exclusion protocol, and think their page should be protected from indexing by a statement like, “This page is copyrighted and should not be indexed.”

More innocent times.

2. A billion web documents predicted by 2000

“It is foreseeable that by the year 2000, a comprehensive index of the Web will contain over a billion documents. . . The goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers.”

Now in 2018, there are reportedly 130 trillion documents on the web — an extraordinary number indeed. And sure enough, their search has scaled to meet it.

3. Google took up 55 GB of storage

“The total of all the data used by the search engine requires a comparable amount of storage, about 55 GB.”

Now, Google is 2 billion lines of code. As noted by one of their engineering managers in 2016, the repository contains 86TB of data.

4. “People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.”

Please note: “tens.”

They write about the need for more precision in search. Remember the days when people regularly clicked past page 1?

5. Percentage of .com domains: from 1.5 to 60, to now 46.5

They note how “commercialized” the web was already becoming, leaving search engine technology “to be largely a black art and to be advertising oriented.”

“The Web has also become increasingly commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of web servers were on .com domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997.”

According to Statistica, the number of .com domains is down to 46.5% as of May 2018.

“With Google,” they wrote, “we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.”

6. “There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits”

After going into some technical detail about optimized compact encoding, they reveal that they’ve their complex compact encoding preparations are categorized simply — endearingly — into fancy and plain.

7. Already defending user experience in anticipating search

From the start, it seems Brin and Page fought for users to not need to excessively specify their queries in order to get desired information. They wrote:

“Some argue that on the web, users should specify more accurately what they want and add more words to their query. We disagree vehemently with this position. If a user issues a query like “Bill Clinton” they should get reasonable results since there is a enormous amount of high quality information available on this topic. Given examples like these, we believe that the standard information retrieval work needs to be extended to deal effectively with the web.”

It’s interesting that this was so clearly in their thinking from the beginning. At last week’s Search Summit, Googler Juan Felipe Rincon said, “The future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know.”

8. There was a typo

In the second paragraph of section 3.2, they write “Couple this flexibility to publish anything with the enormous influence of search engines to route traffic and companies which deliberately manipulating search engines for profit become a serious problem.”

Did you catch it? The verb should be, “companies which are deliberately manipulating search engines become” or “companies which deliberately manipulate search engines become.” Of the utmost gravity, we know.

Just goes to show that even if an incomplete verb phrase won’t keep you from doing some pretty cool stuff in the world. And of course, that even the best of us need editors.

9. Search Engine Watch shout out

We tweeted this yesterday, but felt the need to share again for extra emphasis. Our very own Search Engine Watch was cited in the paper, stating that top search engines claimed to index 100 million web documents as of November 1997. Been a fun 21 years.

10: They chose these photos

Happy Friday, everyone.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/fun-facts-original-google-paper

Google’s PageRank algorithm, explained

Earlier today, Dixon Jones from Majestic shared on Twitter a thorough, digestible explanation of how PageRank actually works. 

I gave it a watch myself, and thought it was a good moment to revisit this wild piece of math that has made quite a dent on the world over the past 20 years.

As a sidenote, we know as of 2017 that while PageRank was removed from the Toolbar in 2016, it still forms an important part of the overall ranking algorithm, and thus is worthwhile to understand.

Jones starts with the simple — or at least, straightforward — formula.

For those who don’t adore math, or who may have forgotten a few technical terms since the last calculus class, this formula would be read aloud like this:

“The PageRank of a page in this iteration equals 1 minus a damping factor, plus, for every link into the page (except for links to itself), add the page rank of that page divided by the number of outbound links on the page and reduced by the damping factor.”

Back to the original Google paper

At this point, Jones moves forward in the video to a simpler, still useful version of the calculation. He pulls out excel, an easy 5 node visual, and maps out the ranking algorithm over 15 iterations. Great stuff.

Personally, I wanted a bit more of the math, so I went back and read the full-length version of “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (a natural first step). This was the paper written by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. Aka the paper in which they presented Google, published in the Stanford Computer Science Department. (Yes, it is long and I will be working a bit late tonight. All in good fun!)

How’s this for an opening line: “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.”

Casual, per their overall, continuing style.

As an extra fun fact, our very own Search Engine Watch was cited in that Google debut paper! By none other than Page and Brin themselves, stating that there were already 100 million web documents as of November 1997.

Anyway, back to work.

Here’s how the PageRank calculation was originally defined:

“Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows:

We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper.”

What does that mean?

Bear with us! Here’s our formula again:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note this is the same as the picture above, except that the photo “simplifies” the second part of the equation by substituting an upper case sigma (∑), which is the symbol for a mathematical summation, i.e. do this formula for all pages 1 through n and then add them up.

So to calculate the PageRank of given page A, we first take 1 minus the damping factor (d). D is typically set as .85, as seen in their original paper.

We then take the PageRanks of all pages that point to and from page A, add them up, and multiply by the damping factor of 0.85.

Not that bad, right? Easier said than done.

PageRank is an iterative algorithm

Perhaps your eyes glazed over this part, but Brin and Sergey actually used the word “eigenvector” in their definition. I had to look it up.

Apparently, eigenvectors play a prominent role in differential equations. The prefix “eigen” comes from German for “proper” or “characteristic.” There also exist eigenvalues and eigenequations.

As Rogers pointed out in his classic paper on PageRank, the biggest takeaway for us about the eigenvector piece is that it’s a type of math that let’s you work with multiple moving parts. “We can go ahead and calculate a page’s PageRank without knowing the final value of the PR of the other pages. That seems strange but, basically, each time we run the calculation we’re getting a closer estimate of the final value. So all we need to do is remember the each value we calculate and repeat the calculations lots of times until the numbers stop changing much.”

Or in other words, the importance of the eigenvector is that PageRank is an iterative algorithm. The more times you repeat the calculation, the closer you get to the most accurate numbers.

PageRank visualized in Excel

In his video, Jones gets pretty much straight to the fun part, which is why it’s so effective in just 18 minutes. He demonstrates how PageRank is calculated with the example of 5 websites that link to and from each other.

He then brings it back to the calculations in excel:

And demonstrates how you would iterate by taking the row of numbers at the bottom and repeating the calculation.

Upon doing this, the numbers eventually start to level out (this was after just 15 iterations):

Or as some might caption this photo, “Eigenvectors in the Wild.”

Other interesting observations Jones raises:

1. Link counts (just total numbers) are a bad metric. We need to care more about each page’s rank.
2. It’s the ranking at the page level that counts, not the domain authority. PageRank only ever looked at individual pages.
3. The majority of pages have hardly any rank at all. In his example, the top 3 out of 10 accounted for 75-80% of the total ranking.

So finally, here’s the original tweet that got me down this long, riveting rabbit hole. Hope you all enjoy the same!

Here you go. How PageRank REALLY works https://t.co/OO7J0KChsr cc @RyanJones and @JosephKlok & anyone else willing to retweet.

— Dixon (@Dixon_Jones) October 25, 2018

source https://searchenginewatch.com/google-pagerank-algorithm-explained

Yandex: Beating Google in Europe’s biggest internet market

Welcome to the fourth in my series on alternatives to Google. It follows my piece No need for Google back in May and my in-depth reports on Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Baidu.

Today we turn to Yandex. Since we last covered Russia’s search giant (way back in 2015) the engine has reasserted its dominance over Google in the market. It has a presence in other countries too and is branching out into numerous other tech verticals.

So let’s take a look at search in Russia and what Yandex is doing well in order to solidify its position. And what does the future hold for the brand and Russian search market at large?

A top-level view of digital Russia

Russia is the biggest internet market in Europe. It boasts more than 109m web users reaching 76% of the total population (according to Internet World Stats).

The size of the market may not be much of a surprise, but the country’s digital landscape does have some unique traits. Desktops, for instance, are still the leading devices by which Russian users engage with the digital world. According to StatCounter, more than 75% of the platform market is accounted for by desktop use – with mobile and tablet weighing in at 22% and 2% respectively.

This proportion of mobile/tablet users compared to desktop users is far smaller than other big European internet markets such as the UK (where handheld devices now equal desktops), as well as the continent as a whole (where mobiles account for around 45% of digital platform use).

Yandex vs. Google: Two separate battles on desktop and mobile?

It is arguable that Yandex’s popularity in the Russian market may be linked to the continuing popularity of desktops in the region.

If we look at the overall search market across all platforms (again, using StatCounter data), Yandex’s share has grown from 38% to 53% between 2014 and 2018. If we focus in on desktops, we see Yandex’s share peaking at nearly 60% a little earlier this year.

It is a different story when we look more closely at the mobile/tablet search sector. In fact, things are almost exactly flipped with Google currently boasting 58% share of the market and Yandex second at 40%.

What is Yandex doing well?

At first glance, Yandex doesn’t look much different to Google. The English-language Yandex.com homepage – with its generous white space and spare pictogram links to ‘images,’ ‘video,’ etc. – arguably bears even more similarity to the Google homepage than it does to the busier magazine-style design it uses for the Cyrillic versions of its own pages.

To US and UK audiences, then, Yandex’s Cyrillic design might look a little old fashioned. But this layout hints at the desktop-centric users it is appealing to in its domestic market. While in the design sense, the needs of the Russian market plays its part in keeping things quite traditional, the engine has been ahead of the curve in other ways. For instance, in being able to understand the unique nuances and inflections of the Russian language. This was certainly an initial USP for the engine, and is no doubt fundamental in keeping so many domestic users coming back to the service rather than making their searches elsewhere.

Aside from its dependable search functionality across text, image, video, and its portal homepage elements, Yandex has long been quick to branch out into other digital and technology services. Yandex.Disk is its cloud storage offering giving P2P sharing functionality and the ability to search your files straight from the search bar. Alice, the service’s voice assistant is taking the brand’s speech and language recognition capabilities even further.

More recently, Yandex.Music – with its smart playlists and massive library of streamable songs – has just launched in Israel (it’s first territory outside of the former Soviet Union). Yandex Taxi is also on the verge of launching autonomous cabs in the nation’s capital Moscow. Yandex’s developments inside and outside of search are united in that they are always quick to plug the gap in the Russian market as soon as the technologies are viable, and they are increasingly underpinned by machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The future for Yandex and Russian search?

Looking to the future, Yandex does potentially face some challenges. While the brand’s market share is on the upward trajectory, so too is the migration of Russia’s desktop users to mobile devices. This trend might be slower and steadier in Russia than in other markets, but the move to mobile must surely be seen as inevitable – and is likely to be key in giving access to the 24% of citizens who are currently disconnected.

Google is in a good position to benefit from any growing appetite for mobile search in Russia. This is due in no small part to the prevalence of the Android OS which currently accounts for more than 69% of the mobile OS market (including tablets).

But the Russian search market is a complicated one and things are very hard to predict. I wonder if Yandex will be able to make good in the mobile search sphere if, for instance, Russian consumers are lured by the advanced voice recognition services of Alice? Could new internet users be ‘straight to voice’ in the same way populations have been ‘straight to mobile’ in other emerging markets? Additionally, if other Yandex-branded apps, across such verticals as video and ecommerce, see further visibility as more Russian users come to mobile, will this help keep more mobile users on Yandex-owned mobile sites when they are searching for these respective types of content?

There might be more questions than hard predictions here, but out of all the alternatives to Google, Yandex is arguably one of the more clear-cut success stories. Winning once more in a massive domestic market with plenty of room for growth, growing in other countries and verticals, as well as pushing the technology envelope wherever it can. I’d be surprised if it went down without a fight, even if a Russian mobile boom happened tomorrow.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/yandex-beating-google-europes-biggest-internet-market/

SEO for web designers: What you should know

A great website is a powerful combination of quality content, appropriate web design, ample SEO efforts, and marketing. Web design and SEO go hand-in-hand, and both play a part in developing an SEO-optimized website.

This further lays emphasis on the major role played by web designers in building the entire website and its online reputation as well. To get better at SEO, web designers need to get a deeper understanding of the commercial aspects of websites. Apart from creating killer designs, web designers should always be aware of some of the basic SEO insights that can implement positive change in their entire web design approach.

In this post, we’ll discuss the basics of SEO for web design, whether you’re building a new website or revamping an existing one.

Site structure

The structure of your website is essentially how your audience gets around. There is always a peculiar way for the information to flow on a website. This path is taken by every visitor to reach their destination i.e. the information they are looking for. Every web designer must keep the fact in mind that if the site visitors are having a hard time going around the website or reaching their point of destination, the site’s traffic will always be affected.

To put simply, the structure of the site is the casual flow of navigation for new and experienced website visitors alike. The web design should be approached in such a manner that all visitors can seamlessly experience the site’s navigation and get around it with utmost ease.

As a general rule, pages should be no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. This will help your site’s SEO by allowing search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible. Make sure the navigation isn’t complex for the user nor confusing for search engines.

The compulsion of a responsive, mobile-friendly web design

Mobile traffic as a share of total global online traffic in 2017 was 52.64%. Well, that means that every web designer needs to get the fact that a mobile-friendly website will help them get better at the traction of the traffic. A responsive website is highly favored by search engines and it can only happen when the web designers approach it in the correct manner.

Having a responsive web design will help your website adjust to the pixel-width of the screen upon which they are being viewed. This will work to equate and enhance the user experience on every device. Less work for the audience means that they spend more time on your website. So, don’t be that website that 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend because of a poorly designed website on mobile.

Image optimization is crucial

Web designers play a very crucial role in deciding the aesthetic appeal of the website they are working on. Right from the typography, the use of colors, patterns, geometric shapes, symmetry etc., they also handle the choice of images that would make it to the website.

Hence, optimizing the chosen images is a must because large images slow down your web pages, creating a roadblock for optimal user experience. Depending on the website builder in use, web designers can optimize images by decreasing their file size by either a plugin or script. This also happens to be a core instruction in the blogging tips furnished by reputed bloggers.

Speed optimized web design

Web developers and designers have to be at the beck and call of the client and the team, owing to revisions and bug fixes. In this haste, they often avoid optimizing their web design for a fast loading web speed. Did you know that a website that takes more than 2-3 seconds to load can face a higher abandonment rate as compared to others?

Roping in the importance of page speed from the very beginning is just as important as laying the building blocks of the website. If the project manager or client is inexperienced, web designers must guide them through the importance of investing in a reliable web hosting service as well because that definitely affects the loading speed of the website and other server-side issues.

Using the right tools

Web designers aren’t expected to be the best at taking care of a site’s SEO, but they should at least have a surface-level understanding of how their SEO tip-offs can help the website function improve immensely.

There are a few tools that should be at the disposal of every web designer such as the GTmetrix. This tool can help them analyze their site’s speed and make it faster. It will also provide them with insights on how well their site loads along with actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. Tools like Responsive Web Design Testing can help them test their website’s responsiveness across multiple devices with different screen sizes instantly in just simple steps. To top it off, the very popular Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool can help these web designers with a website crawler, that allows them to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze onsite SEO.

Conclusion

The design of the website and its SEO are the two moving parts of the same entity. Hence, it should be the aim of every web designer to furnish their knowledge of web designing with the key SEO elements that are a must to be considered before, during and after a website design task. They must understand that they are the ones that will set the SEO fireball rolling.  In an attempt to embed the site’s SEO into the design process, we hope that our basic SEO insights for web designers will be of huge help to experienced and new web designers, alike.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/seo-web-designers-what-know

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

source https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Ecommerce marketers at US brands are struggling to keep pace with where and how consumers browse and purchase online, according to new research published today.

An ecommerce-focused study by Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, produced in partnership with Catalyst, part of GroupM, has found that 85% of browsing and purchasing activity occurs with non-Amazon retailers, but only 25% of US brands say they have a strategy for ecommerce retailers beyond Amazon.

The Era of Ecommerce: Capitalizing on the New Customer Journey has also found that there is a 29 percentage point gap between the proportion of consumers who have visited a retailer to research and the proportion of brands who market on that retailer’s website (53% vs 24%).

Details about the research

The report is based on a survey of more than 750 North America-based consumers and more than 600 business to consumer (B2C) client-side marketers across the following nine sectors: appliances, baby care, beauty and personal care, clothing and apparel, consumer electronics, footwear, furniture and home decor, non-perishable goods and beverages, and toys. It includes in-depth interviews with numerous senior marketers actively engaged in ecommerce advertising for their brands. All surveys and interviews were conducted between June and September 2018.

This research comes as a follow up to last year’s Age of Amazon report, in which we told the story of the ecommerce giant and what its ascent meant for marketers. Building on that, this report looks beyond only Amazon to assess the wider ecommerce industry, highlighting both consumer and advertiser behaviors.

From traditional search engines to ecommerce websites, and from vertical-specific retailers to visual search, this research seeks to understand how and when consumers use specific channels and how advertisers prioritize each channel. Significant opportunity awaits advertisers who think holistically about reaching consumers in each phase of the consumer cycle.

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst, commented on the report: “Our new research illuminates a significant disconnect between today’s consumer behavior and ecommerce advertising strategies. We’re hopeful that marketers will be able to use our findings and recommendations to bridge this gap, and ultimately drive better returns for their businesses.”

Downloadable link

The research will debut today at the Transformation of Search Summit held in New York. It is also available for download from ClickZ here (registration required).

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/22/new-research-era-ecommerce/

Why search marketing matters in 2018

First let me ask you: how many unread emails are in the “promotions,” “updates,” and “other” tabs of your inbox? When I got to work on Monday morning, there were 248. How many of those did I read, you ask? Three at best, and only because they were already my favorite news roundups. The others? Didn’t stand a chance. “Marked as read,” “deleted,” and otherwise wholeheartedly, happily ignored.

Long story short, consumers these days are drowning in emails. We have promotions, “we’ve missed you!”s, “rate our product!”s, and 100 other types of unread newsletters pouring from our inboxes and never getting close to our attention.

For a long time, it was businesses seeking out consumers

And while that obviously is still at play, the tides are shifting. It’s just too much content to keep tabs on. More and more, consumers are ignoring the bombardment and seeking out businesses on their own terms — when and where they want to look.

For a long time, SEO was a small group of nerds (*experts) sitting in a corner doing their thing, trying to convince everyone that search mattered and that there were ways to improve rankings.

For a long time, people kind of let them do their thing while not understanding what SEO actually was or fully grasping their value.

But now, the amount of content is suffocating. I don’t want to read 248 “other” emails to find the information I need. I want it know.

Where do I go? The place where 93% of online journeys begin: I search.

Now, businesses need to be found by searching consumers

As often happens when tech goes mainstream, all of a sudden businesses care a lot more about that group of nerds in the corner.

The question now turns to, “how can I make sure my business is found when and where my customers are looking?”

In a world of customer experience, I don’t want to bother consumers — I want them to happen “serendipitously” upon my product or service. I want to be there when they’re ready.

These days, customer journeys start not when a consumer walks into a store, or lands on my web page. Customer journeys start the second a consumer opens a search engine.

Desktop to mobile to voice

And to top it all off, the stakes keep getting higher. When I search on desktop, I probably look at the first ten results. On mobile, maybe I consider five. On voice? One gold spot at the top.

Exciting times for SEO and search marketing.

As such, we’re thrilled to host The Transformation of Search Summit today here in New York City, in partnership with ClickZ and Catalyst.

Topics to consider in search marketing

We’ll be covering all of these and more:

• The new customer journey
• Blockchain and the decentralized economy, and what they mean for search
• Optimizing for voice search
• Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services
• Visual search and ecommerce
• Strategies for search transformation

Needless to say, we’re pretty jazzed about the event. Speakers include some brilliant minds from SAP, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, LEGO, Hertz, Pinterest, Hilton, Conde Nast, and many more.

Mostly, we’re excited to see the continued rise of search marketing and how businesses adapt to better at being found by consumers.

This post also appeared on ClickZ.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/19/why-search-marketing-matters-in-2018/

The comprehensive guide to voice search keyword research

Informational keyword research is a subject that has been covered thousands of times across every SEO blog, publication, and web design company.

However, with voice becoming a more prominent way of searching, it’s important that it’s now taken into consideration. With voice usage growing, marketers need to understand how their audience is using this technology, and how they can adapt to this. Keyword research has been advancing dramatically over the last couple of years. No longer are the days of simply sorting by the highest search volume and creating a page; it comes down to much more than that. Semantics, categorisation, ranking difficulty vs reward, questions, featured snippets, people also ask. The list goes on.

A straightforward task has now become much more complex as well as time-consuming, and it’s important that it’s right the first time as keyword research will tend to influence your strategy, projections and, in some cases, KPIs.

We’ll be using a variety of paid and free tools within this guide. However, even without the paid tools it will give you a large dataset but will require a little more manual work.

Keyword Set

We’re going to be basing this on you already having a website that is established in some form or another, meaning you already have some rankings which can be used as an initial starting point. However, if this isn’t the case you’ll be able to simply skip these steps, although in some cases it could cause you to miss out on some smaller keywords.

Search Console

Underrated a lot of the time and critiqued heavily, however it’s a free tool that does give you lots of data, especially with recent updates; you’re able to obtain 16 months’ worth. It can sometimes be slightly inaccurate, however that’s much more data that you will be able to get from many paid tools.

To get the most out of this it’s best to try and filter down to the pages which are informational on your site – for example, your blog, a hub or guides.

This will give you a top list of URLs which you can then dig into and provide you with a list of keywords to expand on. We suggest taking a list of the main subjects you find here to be able to dig into them further later on.

Autocomplete

Another free tool that we can take advantage of? Autocomplete, or Google Suggest, has been around for 14 years now, which simply seems insane. The feature, created on a bus by Kevin Gibbs, has given us bundles of joy throughout the years as well as causing controversy in other instances but it does give us a great research tool.

This is something that we have created in-house tools to take care of, simply due to the nature of the task. However it’s something you can carry out manually by adding your keyword into the search box and grabbing the suggestions.

It’s worth noting here that the monthly search volumes, as well as CPC estimates, are all generated by the keywords everywhere tool which is a must have as it can give you instant feedback on how many people are searching for the keyword as well as commercial intent.

This is something that will work well for some industries but not all. Again, take down all of the keyword suggestions you find and place them into your list of ideas generated from Search Console.

Now, this is where we start to look at voice in more detail. We know that voice search is mainly used for asking questions – the whos, wheres and whats of the world. Having a list of these question modifiers allows you to take the Google Suggest keyword data even further.

• Where
• Should
• Which
• Is
• Do
• Can
• What
• Does
• Why
• Have
• When
• Was
• Will
• Are
• How
• Who

These question modifiers allow us to really dig down into the questions people are asking, as these may not always have a lot of search volume and be easily find-able. By using wildcards in the search queries alongside the main subject, you will expand the keyword set even further.

Some questions may not make sense and may not be keywords you want to go after. But, doing this for all of the questions modified, along with your key subjects, will give you a great starting position for your voice focused keyword research.

Related Queries & People Also Ask

Yes, we’re still on the same page yet there are more sections where we can continue to expand the keyword set. Related queries and people also ask are great free sources to further expand on what you already have.

If you do this with all of the question queries you have obtained from the initial search console and suggested search data, you will then have a huge list of questions people are asking about your chosen areas. This gives you a great starting point for targeting people searching via voice as well as normal typed searches.

Competitors

This isn’t anything new but is an important step in making your data set as fool-proof as possible. Entering your competitors into Ahrefs or SEMrush, filtering down by their informational areas, or simply anything with one of the question-related modifiers and adding this to your list is a very quick and simple way of making sure you aren’t missing anything the competition is doing.

Ahrefs

This is one of our favorite tools right now. It’s been proven to be one of the best at backlink exploration but is also great for keyword data, especially when building up a keyword set.

Creating a keyword list

First of all, you’ll need to set up your keyword list, based on the previous data you have gathered. This will then automatically pull through the search volumes, clicks, difficulty and many more data points.

It’s important to note that some of the data may not have been updated in some time. If this is the case you’ll need to use your credits to re-run this to gather new data.

Questions

As we know, voice search is all about questions. This is where we can further expand on the keyword set by using Ahrefs’ questions section.

This is going to be one of the most important areas of the keyword research. Ahrefs does only take the first 10 keywords from the keyword list though, so it may be worth inputting the main categories, to begin with, to find questions around those and gradually digging deeper once you have the main questions.

There are going to be a lot of long tail questions with very little search volume, depending on the niche. It’s worth filtering through these to see if they are in fact useful. If so keep them, if they don’t make sense, get rid.

Other data gathering tools

As well as the ‘normal’ keyword research tools there are many other places you can find data on questions people are searching for. Again, depending on the niche this may or may not be useful to you. Quora is a great place for gathering information around voice-based searches as it’s a platform for exactly that – asking questions.

This is simply the top five results for that seed keyword in the search bar. Search for some of your main topics, grab the lists of results and again feed them into your keyword set, either on Ahrefs or your excel sheet.

The same can be said for Pinterest. This is great for lifestyle and retail websites as Pinterest is, of course, a very visual platform.

This search has very quickly given me another list of suggested searches, which I can then take, expand on using the variety of different techniques already outlined and again add to the already extensive data set we have collated. Pinterest is great platform to find keyword ideas for retail, to inform both offline and online strategies.

Local intent keywords

Voice search is not only about content driven informational terms. Sometimes it may be as simple as asking for opening times, contact details or business history. It’s important that these are factored into your keyword sets. Also, if you aren’t a business with a lot of branded search volume it may be difficult to find specific keywords with tools.

However, data from GSC may still provide you some great insight. We would suggest having a separate document to make sure that any questions around your specific brand are answered. This may mean making sure your structured data is up to scratch, Google Local Listings are complete or the content on your site includes what people are looking for.

The Final Keyword Set

Doing a keyword research for voice is not much different to how you would normally carry out a keyword research for informational. However, there is much more of a focus on questions – not only high-volume questions but ones which could have 0-10 searches a month simply due to the long tail nature.

Running through this process multiple times, with your different seed keywords, will help build out an extensive list of questions and informational terms people are searching for. This will not only help influence your content strategy but your sales strategy – knowing what people are looking for is the first step in understanding your user or customer base.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/18/guide-voice-search-keyword-research/

How voice queries are showing up in search data

The rise of voice search is no secret, and many companies are still wondering how to address it. When it comes to search data, how can we monitor which queries are from voice? In this article, Jason Tabeling shows how he finds insights into voice search from his own company’s data.

Alpine.AI estimates that there will be more than 1 billion voice searches completed in 2018.

At this point I’m sure that everyone has seen or done a voice search, even if you just saw an example in a Google Home or Amazon Alexa ad. The power of what can be completed with a voice command is growing by the day. This trend is already having a massive impact on consumer behavior and therefore needs to be a consideration when monitoring or optimizing our search accounts.  

Right now Google doesn’t provide specific information on how a search was started. For example, was it a Google home search, from the app, done via typing or voice.

However, I wanted to take a recent dive into our own search data from our company, BrandMuscle. I used Google Ads client data across all verticals, comparing the first nine months of last year with this year, dates 1/1/17-9/30/17 versus 1/1/18 – 9/30/18.

The data revealed some interesting trends that give insight into how voice searches might be showing up in the data we currently have available.

Looking at the length and type of queries

To start, I looked at the length of search queries. The thought is with voice search consumers are using a more natural language. So instead of searching for “car insurance” consumers might search for “cheapest car insurance for Toyota Camry.” Our data shows the average number of words in each query has increased for both mobile and desktop queries year over year. Desktop queries are up 7% year over year to 4.3 words per query. Mobile has increased 9% year over year to 4.14 words per query. With mobile increasing more rapidly I think this shows the impact voice is having, as well as larger devices enabling consumers to input longer queries.  

The other area I wanted to dig into was what types of search queries are consumers using. I think voice search has brought an increase of consumers asking questions in a more natural language. Therefore I looked into question modifiers like who, what, where, when, why, and how. The use of these terms indicate more conversational tones. Our data has shown an increase in these terms of 118%, and a majority of that change coming on mobile phones which is up 178%.  

So what actions should you take with the increase in voice search? Here are 3 considerations:

1. Build experiences for question based queries

One of the reasons why search is such a great marketing tactic is consumers are giving you specific clues as to what they want. This is even more true when a question modifier is included. For example the implications behind what type of information a consumer is looking for when they are searching for “Where” + Running Shoes vs. “What” + Running Shoes is very important. “Where” would indicate the consumer wants map or location information, where “what” indicates more research based content is needed. Having ad copy and landing page experiences that meet these specific demands will help increase conversion rates. 

2. Monitor your search query data

Some of you might be reading these and questioning if this data matches your own search accounts. I bet it’s directionally correct, but might vary significantly. The only way to know is to dig into your own data. See what insights you can derive. Are any queries that your ad appeared where it should not have? This should be a part of regular account maintenance as you update match types and negatives. 

3. Test voice queries that are important to your business

Putting yourself into the shoes of one of your customers is still a very helpful lens for account managers. We often take our eyes off what the consumer experience is considering how much focus and attention we put into the details of a good search program. However, sometimes it’s just as simple as seeing what the search query results look like as a consumer. Try a search on Google Home. Does it provide an answer? Is it an answer that was taken from your organic listing? What opportunities can you uncover with this information?  

Voice search is having a major impact on our lives as consumers and marketers. This change is happening quickly and will continue to evolve as the technology continuously gets better and better. Following a few of these quick tips to keep an eye on your data will be very helpful to staying ahead of this trend. 

source https://searchenginewatch.com/how-voice-queries-show-up-search-data

7 common SEO mistakes most WordPress bloggers make

WordPress initially started out as a ‘blog-only’ platform and now that it has extended as a full-fledged Content Management System, it remains a popular blogging platform. WordPress.com blogs have over 409 million monthly viewers who looked at 22.4 billion pages per month this past year.

This standalone fact is enough to justify the popularity of WordPress as people’s favorite blogging platform.  

WordPress does provide a lot of helpful features for blogging enthusiasts who are looking to start their own blogging website. However, inexperienced bloggers do commit some mistakes in spite of all the online help available. In this blog post, we will review the most common SEO WordPress mistakes that bloggers commit out of either ignorance or sheer carelessness. Regardless of the reason, these mistakes affect the search engine ranking of their blogs and even their online reputation. 

So, let’s explore seven of the most common SEO mistakes made by WordPress bloggers. 

1. Not using the right SEO optimized blogging theme 

If you are new to blogging, you might have missed out on the information that WordPress offers SEO optimized themes for your blogs which are highly helpful when it comes to the quest of online rankings. If you are not using an SEO optimized blogging theme, you are obviously a step behind than the others who are relying on them. There are a lot of SEO optimized blogging themes for WordPress that you could choose from such as Divi, MagPlus, Jevelin etc.  

2. Missing on an SEO optimized contact form 

Even if your WordPress blog is in its initial phase, it needs to provide a point of contact to its followers, even if they are less in the count than expected. A contact form serves the purpose just right. Your contact form is a conversion driver and optimizing it for the right SEO keywords will help your visitors easily find your blog, hence amplifying the traffic. 

3. Not buying a domain 

Are you running your free blog using WordPress with the default blog address you were allotted with? If the answer is ‘Yes’, you might not be pleased with what we are about to tell you. A blog or even a website runs well only when it runs as per the need of its target audience. A proper domain name provides an identity to your blog and prepares a path for the visitors to lay their expectations. Not buying a domain can damage the traffic expectations of your blog and kill its overall Search engine ranking. 

4. Not optimizing blog images 

A great blog comes to being only when its relevant content is paired with original and high-quality images. However, a lot of WordPress blog and website owners forget to tap the optimization of these images. It is very important to optimize the images you use in your WordPress blog. It helps your site load faster and even enhances your Google PageSpeed score. 

To optimize your blog images, you can seek help from WordPress image optimization plugins such as Smush It, EWWW Image Optimizer, and TinyPNG. These plugins will help you compress your images without affecting their resolution and also take care of their SEO optimization. 

5. Choosing the wrong keyword 

Your blog’s reachability depends entirely on the Keyword chosen by you for its Search Engine Optimization. Keyword Research might be a very extensive concept but it can do wonders for your blog’s SEO if done in the right manner. 

You have to work on an SEO Keyword strategy for your blog in a manner that you are using  Keywords that define the subject of your content, are low in competition yet are commonly used by visitors for finding the information they are looking for. Finding Keywords that fit the bill for all these requirements can be quite a task and might overwhelm certain users. As demanding they might be, they require your focus or the attention if you are looking to rank your blog well.  

6. Not focusing on loading speed 

Your online blog’s loading time will highly affect the traffic on it and also the site abandonment ratio that follows if your blog takes a lot of time to load for its visitors. A loading time above 2-3 seconds can lead to a lot of visitors abandoning your blog.

If you really are serious about your blog’s loading speed, you must get a Caching plugin for your blogs such as W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache or WP Super Cache. These plugins are easy to use and they make your WordPress blog speedy as well. You must also not refrain from investing in a reliable web hosting service because they tackle your blogging website’s server side issues and have their fair share towards your blog’s overall performance and speed.  

7. Not focusing on content and readability 

Probably one of the most important aspects of your blog is the content that you push through it. It needs to be of a top-notch quality when you are looking to commit no SEO mistakes in and around it. Make sure the following things about your blog’s your content: 

• Create original content that is relevant as per the audience. 
• Make sure that this content is readable and provides a ‘takeaway’ for the target audience. 
• Blogging consistently will help you have a stable traffic on your blog. Use plugins like the Editorial Calendar to blog regularly. 

Conclusion

A lot of experienced blog owners do commit technical and onsite SEO errors and then look for SEO agencies and content marketers to take care of their blog’s SEO. However, the most common mistakes can be easily avoided by creating a checklist of the must-haves. 

Analyze your WordPress blog today and see if you are committing any of the mistakes mentioned above. Hopefully, you’ll be able to tackle them and remove them from your blog at the earliest. Once you have a solid SEO content strategy and a perfect plan of action for your blog’s SEO, you will definitely be able to refine and improve the overall SEO performance of your WordPress blog.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/common-seo-mistakes-wordpress-bloggers-make