What defines high-quality links in 2019 and how to get them?

Links are a way for users to get relevant information on the internet. They are also a ranking factor for your pages. Of the 200+ ranking factors, Google is known to use, links share the top three spots with content and RankBrain.

However, having links is not enough. Their quality matters. Google takes into account not only the number of backlinks a web page has but their quality as well. Sadly, some SEOs, in the rush to make their sites appear popular to search engine crawlers, invest in low-quality links. High-quality link building, however, is the only way to get desirable results.

Chasing the quickest and cheapest results, some SEOs resort to the wrong methods of generating backlinks. These are often blackhat techniques that could lead to Google penalties and destroyed reputations. What’s surprising is that even SEO agencies employ poor link-building techniques. A 2018 study conducted by Assertive Media of 230 UK link-building agencies found that nine out 10 used unscrupulous techniques.

To avoid their fate, you need to know what makes a high-quality link.

So, what determines high-quality links?

Below are three factors that determine the quality of the link.

a) Authority of the linking page

The authority of the page linking to you is important to Google. The logic is that if an authoritative page has noticed your content, it must be impactful and relevant. This authority, referred to as PageRank, shows Google how authoritative the page that noticed you is, signaling your own authority.

b) Authority of the linking site

The site-wide authority of the linking website is also an important indication to Google that your site is authoritative. Much like page authority, website authority measured by domain rating (DR) and domain authority (DA) scales on Ahrefs and Moz respectively is transmitted by the linking website.

c) Content relevance

Page rank and domain authority are of no consequence if the web content is irrelevant. For instance, the prospect of getting a link from NYTimes.com sounds amazing. However, the link is useless to you if the subject matter of the article doesn’t relate to the subject matter of your website. This is because at the base of all link-building is the relevance of the linked information to the user.

How to get high-quality links in 2019?

It’s no secret that high-quality link building is still one of the most essential SEO skills. However, to master it means mastering several other skills, necessary for getting others to link to your site.

To get a link that meets all three criteria discussed above and do it consistently so your website is strengthened by high-quality links takes a deliberate effort. It requires you to spend an ample amount of time doing the right things.

The following are some of the most effective things you can do to improve your link-building efforts in 2019:

1. Publish content strategically

Content marketing is at the heart of quality link-building. Before you can expect backlinks, you have to provide useful content. But that’s not enough. Having a strategy will help you see what type of content performs best, where to publish it and when to change tactics.

For instance, according to Backlinko, visuals, list posts, research data, and in-depth guides perform the best. With a sound strategy, you can distribute the various types of content across a diverse range of top ranking sites. Ultimately, a content marketing strategy will help you publish content that not only aids the user but also gets you high-quality links.

For example, in 2015, we did an in-depth article at Effective Inbound Marketing where we called on the most noted link-building experts in the industry and asked them to give their thoughts on guest blogging. The article took nearly one month to complete but was the best performing piece on several article ranking sites for the day. Suffice to say, it generated tons of organic backlinks as it was widely discussed on several blogs. This is mainly because it answered people’s problem at the time and the strategy we used ensured that the thought-leaders shared the article with their followers.

2. Use email outreach

In link-building, often you get only what you ask for. Whether it’s link reclamation, reverse image search, submitting your blog to relevant directories, pitching guest posts or using broken links for link-building, many techniques will require you to email people.

Don’t shy away from it. Approach it knowing the challenges of reaching people by email in 2019. In order to avoid ending up in people’s spam folders, I’d suggest the following approach:

• Personalize your email to the recipient.
• Address their questions and aim to solve a problem rather than being direct in your request.
• Identify the best time to reach out to people, and you’ll get a higher response rate.

3. Be active in your online communities

First, you need a presence on various online platforms that allow you to create a profile with a link to your website. For instance, Product Hunt, the place where users meet to discuss the latest technologies, is also a DA 75 site. All it takes to get a link from it is creating a profile. For best results, be active on the site by reviewing products, commenting, upvoting, and downvoting the content regularly.

Crunchbase is a similar community of people who want to stay on top of the digital shift. By creating an account, you automatically get a high-quality link from the DA 91 website. The more active you are, the more you benefit from your account. These and other online communities are a valuable source of high-quality links, but you must remain active to reap maximum rewards.

4. Polish and optimize your website

Poor website design is bad for SEO. To start with, if your design turns people off, they will leave your site quickly. Google will take it as a signal of poor service.

Another design factor to consider is website speed. Research shows that 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load.

You also need to take into account the diversity of the devices people use to access your content. More specifically, you have to optimize your website for portable devices, such as smartphones, as a substantial amount of traffic is continually coming from them. Smartphones and tablets make up more than 61% of internet traffic.

In 2019, having a flexible site design that can be modified on the fly is crucial. The ability to quickly tweak your website allows you to stay responsive to the needs of the consumers while adopting new design trends as they develop. Settling on a rigid design denies you this chance. However, if you choose to use a CMS based design like WordPress it would allow you the convenience of making changes easily.

Conclusion

For more than two decades, link-building has been a sound SEO strategy for many. This is unlikely to change in the coming years. If you hope to succeed, you must learn to recognize a high-quality link and, more importantly, how to get one.

Ayodeji Onibalusi is the Founder of Effective Inbound Marketing.

The post What defines high-quality links in 2019 and how to get them? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/07/how-to-get-high-quality-links/

The evolution of SEO and the shift from point solutions to platform

In the practice of SEO, as in life, the only constant is “change.” Even the pace of change in SEO is changing.

It’s accelerating as results grow ever richer and more personalized, search engines more numerous and specialized, and searchers increasingly expect to be able to summon answers whenever, wherever and however they like.

Though it may not always feel like it, none of this happened overnight. If we look at some of the key milestones in the evolution of search, we can get insight into how we got to where we are now. Let’s skip ahead a bit and start with Google in the early 2000s.

• The early 2000s: Google takes on black hat SEO methods by de-legitimizing and even penalizing unethical tactics like keyword stuffing and questionable link-building practices. At the same time, we see the very beginnings of localized search results.
• The mid to late 2000s: Google begins to refine the search experience with universal search, which incorporates results from sources like websites, social media, images, video, and news in its SERPs. Google Suggest launches, which offers related search phrases in the search results. Microsoft launches Bing.
• The early 2010s: Google breaks SEO briefly with algorithm changes that emphasize quality, user-focused content. Any vestigial gaming of the system is dead. Optimization is very much alive, but the gap narrows between content that Google’s algorithm sees as high quality and content that humans see as high quality. Localization gets a boost, and we begin to see zero-click searches.
• The mid-2000s to today: Search explodes. Google begins to demote content that is not mobile-friendly, then rolls out mobile-first indexing. YouTube becomes the second largest search engine behind Google. Amazon ranks first for product searches. We enter the frontier of voice search.
• Today and beyond: SEO has evolved and has proven out as a key business performance driver. Meanwhile, search is ubiquitous, increasingly vertical, and enormously topical.

SEO now

SEO is still very much about maximizing the effectiveness of organic content to drive traffic and demand, but its role in the organization has expanded and so has the workload along with it.

How SEO is used in the modern enterprise

SEO methods and insights are supporting strategy and decision making beyond website content. The broader use of SEO intelligence is a natural progression in the evolution of search. After all, SEO research can reveal a lot about consumer intent. For content, paid search, social media, and email marketers, knowing what the target audience is looking for makes it easier to tailor the message, product or service to them.

A 2018 survey of UK marketers reinforces the perception of SEO as an essential (88% of respondents) and effective (79% of respondents) part of the marketing imperative, but the survey also highlights the difficulty marketers and SEO specialists have when it comes to keeping up with the pace of change in search. More than two-thirds of respondents (70%) incorrectly identified a bogus Google algorithm change as being real. (Source: Zazzle Media)

How SEO is executed in the modern enterprise

For most search marketers, the daily work of SEO is a significant undertaking. Add to that the fact that 75% of marketers are regularly using at least four different tools or data sources to execute their SEO strategy.

SEO in 2019 and beyond: SEO goes single-platform and real-time

To date, SEO has been largely a reactive business function. In 2019, look for search to become not only reactive but predictive. Two shifts will drive this:

1. A shift from point solutions to platform SEO
2. The enablement of true, real-time SEO

The shift from point solutions to platform SEO

The time-consuming and somewhat disjointed nature of SEO execution for most search marketers is not surprising given the rapid pace of change in search. It is also not sustainable over the long term. Search is only going to evolve more quickly. Keeping up on all the changes, mastering new and additional tools to manage SEO, and finding the time to incorporate more and more diverse data sources into an already overtaxed SEO routine is prohibitive.

To see where the practice of SEO is headed, we can look at how leading brands do it now. BrightEdge Instant (disclosure, customer) empowers the next generation of search marketers to use real-time insights and take action to optimize content all within one unified platform, so they can effectively:

1. Speed up the busy work of SEO by
   • Streamlining or automating repetitive SEO tasks
   • Integrating disparate data sources and adding immense value by, effectively, crowdsourcing otherwise unavailable data
2. Turn data into insight by employing AI and deep learning to organize data and generate meaningful recommendations
3. Keep up with major and minor changes in search for their users and innovate accordingly

For SEO to be effective it needs to be efficient. Moving from managing multiple SEO point solutions, sourcing data from numerous sources in numerous formats, and analyzing data in Excel to single-platform SEO solution creates efficiency that marketers can no longer ignore.

The enablement of true, real-time SEO

What we know today as real-time SEO is, in actuality, the same, rearward-looking SEO with a shortened timeframe. SEO evolution, like change, is constant and the breakthrough for SEO has begun with live, real-time data that right-now drives keyword and ranking research, and produces in-the-moment recommendations.

Marketers will be able to see trends as they are developing rather than once they’re established. This level of insight will enable them to predictively produce or optimize content to capitalize on the interest that’s coming. This ability to displace competitors pre-emptively will change the face of search forever.

Andy Betts is a chief marketer, consultant, and digital hybrid with more than 20 years of experience in digital, technology and marketing working across London, Europe, New York, and San Francisco. He can be found on twitter @andybetts1.

The post The evolution of SEO and the shift from point solutions to platform appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/07/seo-evolution-point-solutions-to-platform/

On-site analytics tactics to adopt now: Heatmaps, intent analysis, and more

Is your landing page engaging your target customers? How can you increase ROI without increasing marketing budget? Both of these questions can be answered by a well set on-site analytics routine.

You cannot improve what you are not measuring. This makes web analytics the most important growth tactic out there.

But are we measuring enough?

Most digital marketers out there believe they are already incorporating web analytics by using Google Analytics and monitoring daily traffic sources.

While Google Analytics is a great platform, there’s much more into web analytics than using one platform (especially if you are not technical enough to make use of event tracking).

As technology is evolving, you need to always be looking for more and more ways to analyze your page performance to discover new growth opportunities and understand your target customers better.

Here are a few on-site analytics ideas for you to experiment with:

Conversion optimization analytics

These questions will lead you to stats that provide actionable insights about your page and user behavior.

Are your on-page CTAs engaging your page users?

The purpose of conversion tracking is to analyze which of your on-page calls-to-action engage your customers best.

There are several events and conversion tracking solutions out there, including the most obvious one, Google Analytics.

Further reading:

• An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms
• How to set up event tracking in Google Analytics
• How to set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics

But you know that I love newer less-discussed tools that can bring an innovative perspective or method to the table.

Finteza is a free web analytics platform that focuses on monitoring and analyzing conversions. The unique feature of Finteza is its unique conversion analysis that shows how your customers are engaging with each step inside your conversion funnel.

You can track multiple calls-to-action and compare how they perform at what stage of your conversion funnel.

To use Finteza:

• Install its tracking code (this part is similar to Google Analytics).
• Add your events (which is much easier than Google Analytics). You can even use their plugin that lets you add links to events using WordPress visual editor.

Once all your events are set-up, you can build your funnels inside the “Funnels” section by simply selecting your events to see within one report:

Which page elements draw your users’ attention?

Another great way to analyze your page performance is to use heatmaps.

A heatmap is a visual color-coded representation of user behavior on your site. Here’s more in-depth information on heatmaps. There are several types of heatmaps that can help you get a more in-depth understanding of what people tend to do once they land on your page:

1. Click maps visualize which links and buttons attract most clicks. These are great to analyze whether your CTA or a banner attracts most on-page interactions (clicks).

2. Move maps visualize where desktop users move and pause their mouse. These could be used to identify parts of the page that distract your users from your main CTAs.

3. Scroll maps visualize how many people scroll down to any point on the page. This is perfect if you want to see how deep into your long-form content your readers tend to get.

You can easily set up any or all of these heatmaps to track your page using Hot Jar. To use HotJar, simply install their tracking code. From there you can set up any type of tracking for any page of yours inside HotJar dashboard.

HotJar is free unless you want to track more than 2,000 page views a day (my tests usually include 1,000 views only).

By analyzing and aggregating user behavior, heatmaps give an overview of how web page users interact with the page. This helps understand on-page engagement trends and optimize for higher conversions.

While conversion tracking tools are all about understanding what engages your users, using heatmaps will help you clearly see what distracts your page users from converting as well as what can help you draw their eyes to more important elements of your page.

For example, if they keep clicking your image instead of your CTA, or if they keep ignoring your important links (or scroll right through them), you know that you need to re-position your site elements and remove a distracting image.

On-page SEO analytics

Is your content targeting the intended audience?

Search intent is by far the most important metric out there determining how well the page meets your target customer’s needs:

• Why do people type certain words in the search box? What do they intend to do?
• Does your page give them what you need? Does it provide a solution?

In other words, search intent reflects the user’s intended action behind each search query. It defines whether your page has any chance to convert at all. With voice search on the rise, meeting the users’ immediate needs should be any business’s priority, which is why search intent has become a much hotter topic these days.

Both of these questions can be answered by intent analysis. Text Optimizer is the fastest way to analyze whether your page is likely to satisfy the needs of your page intended audience.

Text Optimizer applies semantic analysis to create a visual representation of the intended audience and whether the page is likely to meet their expectations. To install, simply copy-paste the URL of your page and the tool will do the job.

Is your web page optimized enough?

Finally, the most boring, yet still necessary page analysis tactic is to check if your page is sufficiently optimized. In many cases, when you seem to be struggling to get your page one to two positions up, on-page SEO analysis is the answer.

Serpstat’s Text Analysis feature provides a fresh perspective on how on-page analytics should be done. It determines the keywords all your more successful organic search competitors have and shows where exactly you want to include those on your page:

To use the Text Analysis feature:

• Run your keyword list (for Serpstat to group it into thematic clusters)
• Click through to “Text Analytics” tab and provide your landing page URL that you want to rank for each group
• Wait for the tool to analyze the content of your top-ranking competitors and provide the list of keywords that seem to “move the needle”,  keywords that appear in most high-ranking pages for a certain query group.

Serpstat’s text analysis goes through your top ten organic competitors, compares its content and generates a list of keywords that appear on all of them. The idea behind this is actually brilliant: We don’t know why a certain page is ranking higher than your page, so whatever is able to move the needle is worth trying.

Takeaways: New analytics tools and tactics to experiment with

• Try setting up user behavior tracking and event analytics with Finteza
• Set up HotJar to monitor on-page engagement with heatmaps
• Analyze whether your page satisfies search intent using Text Optimizer
• Analyze what should be included in your on-page copy using Serpstat

In order to develop a sound digital marketing strategy, you need to know and understand your target market and how users engage with your site.

This research should be repeated at least quarterly, since markets can easily change, even in a short period of time. You may also find that you are able to expand your target market, leading to greater revenue generation, and wider reach.

On-site analytics is a continuous process. It never really ends. You need to continue analyzing and comparing your page performance and user engagement metrics to keep up with new user expectations, new traffic sources and new tactics your competitors are implementing to attract and engage customers to their sites.

Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on twitter @seosmarty.

The post On-site analytics tactics to adopt now: Heatmaps, intent analysis, and more appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/06/on-site-analytics-tactics-to-adopt-now-heatmaps-intent-analysis-more/

How AI is powering real-time SEO research: Insights and optimization

The shift to real-time data analysis and optimization has supercharged marketing in a way that frankly should have SEOs on the edge of their seats.

As organizations struggle to make sense of and activate their data, SEOs can combine their deep experience with massive amounts of data to make smarter business decisions and have an edge. Things are about to get real, very real.

Automation in marketing no doubt was (and still is) a game-changer for consultancies, agencies, and clients. Straight-up automation brought efficiency and order to the workflow. Now, you can expand your capabilities even further with the AI layer.

According to a study by the Economist, 75% of executives say AI will be “actively implemented” in companies within the next three years. Business leaders aren’t feeling so great about how it’s being implemented, though. Although 92% of C-level executives with some of the world’s biggest brands recently reported that the pace of their big data and AI investments are accelerating, 77% also said that business adoption of AI initiatives is a major challenge.

Where’s the disconnect? It’s telling that 93% of those interviewed identified people and process as obstacles. In this post, we’re going to explore the different ways SEOs can lead the charge in AI-powered insights and optimizations. We are entering a new era of real-time SEO and insights are being powered by machine learning and AI.

Understanding the opportunities in evolving SERPs

Google has gone all-in on AI, and it’s driving increasingly complex yet engaging and functional enhanced search results. With RankBrain, Google uses machine learning to analyze the context of content and serve more accurate organic search, image, and video results.

How does it work? Roger Rogerson dug up a succinct explanation in a recent column:

“… RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries. …”

– Greg Corrado, from Bloomberg’s: Google turning its lucrative web search over to AI machines

RankBrain isn’t just using natural language processing (NL) to better understand the intent behind each query. It’s converting words to data, plotting it on a chart, and examining the relationships that exist between terms. What it “learns” then drives rankings and different types of results in the blink of an eye for each new query.

How can you use this to your advantage?

• Content optimization is more important than ever. The bar for quality is high, and Google needs to be able to see how each piece of content, whether text, image, or video is the best answer for specific types of queries. But optimizing content once, before it’s published, isn’t going to cut it anymore. SEOs need AI-powered automation to audit site content, resolve errors, and suggest new optimizations on an ongoing basis, based on real-time data, and consumer behaviors.
• Automate competitive research and find opportunities to increase your share of voice with smart monitoring that identifies content that is outranking yours. See exactly where you need to build out content and what it needs to include in order to regain your rankings.
• Stay ahead of SERP changes with AI-powered analysis. By the time you manually evaluate the SERPs that Google returns for even a few keyword phrases, you’re making optimizations based on old data. Get ahead of the game with real-time SEO insights that tell you exactly what you need to do to take over competitors on the terms that offer your greatest opportunities.

Making smarter optimizations with AI-powered insights

A typical SEO practitioner uses six separate tools cobbled together and spends four hours a day on research, reporting, and analysis. This is no longer necessary, though. BrightEdge Instant for example (disclosure, my company’s innovation) provides marketers with real-time recommendations and data so marketers take action to optimize content, all within one unified platform.

Voice-enabled technologies, now used in more than 20% of mobile queries, are one opportunity you can’t afford to overlook. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and other digital assistants rely on AI to converse with consumers and respond to their needs. You need to understand the conversational journey and the next three follow-up questions someone is going to ask but are probably wading through a list of keywords from Keyword Planner. You’re manually looking for conversational searches or turning to a point solution with display-only capabilities (without search volume) that is disconnected from your SEO workflow.

SEOs need to be able to analyze when and why people use voice search in order to provide the types of answers digital assistants can use. Structured data is a great way to achieve this, but right now more than 80% of the world’s data is unstructured (SEW offers a guide to help you get started here).

Keyword research is another opportunity to save time and improve performance by working AI into your workflow. Given the large proportion of queries that Google says have local intent, you need to understand the location for every part of your business worldwide. For businesses with hundreds of thousands of locations worldwide, it’s impossible to accurately research and report on keyword performance in each of your key markets. Using an AI-powered tool here allows you to scale research across thousands of locations and dozens of languages, all on one platform. You can make smart, high impact decisions that give you the competitive edge quickly and seamlessly, and this is without a mess of Excel sheets.

How can you use this to your advantage?

• Make voice a reality by taking a data-driven, AI-enabled approach to understanding the conversations happening in your space. Doing so will help you identify top-of-the-funnel, awareness-generating question keywords, analyze the keyword landscape, and understand which portion of your keywords are quick answers, and which percentage you are winning.
• Look for a tool that uses the power of AI to curate the most relevant topics and keywords to go after. Automation can exponentially amplify your efforts to evaluate a seed list, but it’s the AI layer that supercharges it by understanding intent, producing and evaluating a massive list of related terms in real-time, identifying current trends, and helping you to prioritize your efforts.
• Don’t forget about video! YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and consumers increasingly look there as part of their shopping process (especially in the early stages of their buying journey). Measuring video performance and rankings immediately and on an ongoing basis enables you to respond to real-time insights, and make optimizations to improve performance in the critical post-publication period.

SEOs cannot afford to be late adopters in the AI arena and laggards in relation to real-time SEO. Today, you need to be able to anticipate searcher needs and have technology in place to trigger the optimizations that will return your content as the top answer for relevant queries. Want to learn more? Make sure you caught my last column, Five ways SEOs can utilize data with insights, automation, and personalization.

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform BrightEdge. He can be found on Twitter @jimyu.

The post How AI is powering real-time SEO research: Insights and optimization appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/06/how-ai-is-powering-real-time-seo-research-insights-and-optimization/

The SEO metrics that really matter for your business

Whether you are a business owner, marketing manager or simply just interested in the world of ecommerce, you may be familiar with how a business can approach SEO.

To every person involved, the perception of SEO and its success can vary from a sophisticated technical grasp to a knowledge of the essentials.

At all levels, measurement and understanding of search data are crucial and different metrics will stand out; from rankings to the finer details of goals and page speed.

As you may know, you can’t rely solely on ranks as a method to track your progress. But there are other, simple ways to measure the impact of SEO on a business.

In a recent AMA on Reddit, Google’s own Gary Illyes recently urged SEO professionals to stick to the basics and this way of thinking can be applied to the measurement of organic search performance.

In this article, we will look to understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to understanding the impact of SEO, and how they can be viewed from a technical and commercial perspective. Before we start, it’s worth mentioning that this article has used Google’s own demo analytics account for screenshots. If you need further info to get to grips, check out this article, or access the demo version of Google Analytics.

Each of these are commercial SEO metrics — data that means something to everyone in a business.

Organic traffic

This is undoubtedly a simple, if not the most simple way of understanding the return of any SEO efforts. The day-to-day traffic from search engines is the key measure for many marketers and any increase can often be tied to an improved level of search visibility (excluding seasonal variation).

In a world where data drives decisions, these figures are pretty important and represent a key part of any internet user’s session, whether that is to get an answer, make a purchase or something else.

In Google Analytics, simply head follow this path: Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels to see the organic traffic received within your chosen time period

You might be asking, “how can I know more?”

Google might have restricted access to keyword data back in 2011, but you can still dig down into your traffic from organic search to look at landing pages and locations.

Organic traffic data – Filtered by landing page 

Not all traffic from search hits your homepage, some users head to your blog or to specific landing pages, depending on their needs. For some searches, however, like those for your company name, your homepage will be the most likely option.

To understand the split of traffic across your site, use the “Landing Page” primary dimension and explore the new data, split by specific page URL.

Organic traffic data – Filtered by location

Within the same section, the organic search data can be split by location, such as city, to give even further detail on the makeup of your search traffic. Depending on how your business operates, the locations shown may be within the same country or across international locations. If you have spent time optimizing for audiences in specific areas, this view will be key to monitor overall performance.

Revenue, conversions, and goals

In most cases, your website is likely to be set up to draw conversions, whether that is product sales, document downloads, or leads.

Part of understanding the success of SEO, is the contribution to the goal of a business, whether that is monetary or lead-based.

For revenue based data, head to the conversions section within Google analytics, then select the product performance. Within that section, filter the secondary dimension by source/medium to show just sales that originate from search engine traffic.

If your aim isn’t totally revenue based, perhaps a signup form or some downloadable content, then custom analytics goals are your way of fully understanding the actions of visitors that originate from search engines.

Within the conversions section, the source of your goal completions can be split by source, allowing you to focus on solely visits from organic search.

If a visitor finds your site from a search and then buys something or registers their details, it really suggests you are visible to the right audience.

However, if you are getting consistent organic search visits with no further actions taken, that suggests the key terms you rank for, aren’t totally relevant to your website.

SEO efforts should focus on reaching the relevant audiences, you might rank #1 for a search query like “cat food” but if you only sell dog products, your optimization hasn’t quite worked.

Search and local visibility

In the case that your business has web and/or physical store presences, you can use the tools within Google My Business to look further into and beyond the performance of the traditional blue links.
Specifically, you can understand the following:

• How customers search for your business
• How someone sees your business
• What specific actions they take

The better your optimization, the more of these actions you will see, check these out!

Average search rankings

Rankings for your key terms on search engines have traditionally been an easy way to quickly get a view of overall performance. However, a “quick Google” can be hard to draw conclusions from. Personalized search from your history and location essentially skews average rank to a point where its use has been diminished.

A variety of tools can be used to get a handle on average rankings for specific terms. The free way to do this is through Google Search Console with freemium tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs, which also offer an ability to understand average rank distribution.

With search rankings becoming harder to accurately track, the measure of averages is the best way to understand how search ranking relates to and impacts the wider business.

Technical metrics – Important but not everyone pays attention to these

When it comes to the more technical side of measuring SEO, you have to peel back the layers and look beyond clicks and traffic. They help complete the wider picture of SEO performance, plus they can help uncover additional opportunities for progress.

Search index – Through search consoles and other tools

Ensuring that an accurate index of your website exists is one thing that you need to do with SEO. Because if only a part of your site or the wrong pages are indexed, then your overall performance will suffer.

Although a small part of overall SEO work, its arguably one of the most crucial.

One quick way is to enter the command “site:” followed by the URL of your site’s homepage, to see the total number of pages that exist in a search engine’s index.

To inspect the status of a specific page on Google, the Google Search Console is your best option. The newest version of the search console provides a quick way to bring up results.

Search crawl errors

As well as looking at what has been indexed, any website owner needs to keep an eye out for what may be missing, or if there have been any crawl errors reported by Google. These often occur because a page has been blocked, or the format isn’t crawlable by Google.

Head to the “Coverage” tab within Google Search Console to understand the nature of any errors and what page the error relates to. If there’s a big zero, then you and your business naturally have nothing to worry about.

Click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate

In addition to where and how your website ranks for searches, a metric to consider is how often your site listing is clicked in the SERPs. Essentially, this shows the percentage of impressions that result in a site visit.

This percentage indicates how relevant your listing is to the original query and how well your result ranks compared to your competitors.

If people like what they see and can easily find your website, then you’ll likely get a new site visit.

The Google Search Console is the best go-to resource again for the most accurate data. Just select the performance tab and toggle the CTR tab to browse data by query, landing page, country of origin, and device.

If someone does venture onto your site, you will want to ensure the page they see, is relevant to their search, after all, search algorithms love to reward relevance! If the page doesn’t contain the information required or isn’t user-friendly, then it is likely the user will leave to find a better resource, without taking any action, known as a bounce.

In some cases, one visit may be all that is needed, therefore a bounce isn’t an issue. Make sure to view this metric in the wider context of what your business offers.

Mobile friendliness

Widely reported in 2015, was the unveiling of mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. This is crucial to the evolution of browser behavior, with mobile traffic, often greater in volume than desktop for some sites.

Another report in the ever useful Google Search Console gives a clear low-down of how mobile-friendly a site is, showing warnings for any issues. It’s worth saying, this measure isn’t an indication of how likely a conversion is, but more the quality of your site on a mobile device.

Follow your metrics and listen to the data

As mentioned at the start of this article, data drives decisions. In all areas of business, certain numbers will stand out. With SEO, a full understanding comes from multiple data points, with positives and negatives to be taken at every point of the journey.

Ultimately, it often comes down to traffic, ranks, and conversions, the numbers that definitely drive business are made up of the metrics that don’t often see the light of day but are just as important.

As a digital marketer, it is always a learning experience to know how data drives the evolution of a business and ultimately, how successes and opportunities are reported and understood.

Matthew Ramsay is Digital Marketing Manager at Digitaloft. 

Further reading:

• How to take advantage of the latest updates to Google Search Console
• Complete guide to Google Search Console
• Progressive web apps (PWAs) for SEO: Benefits, stats, examples
• How to perfectly balance affiliate marketing and SEO

The post The SEO metrics that really matter for your business appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/03/seo-metrics-for-business/

Progressive web apps (PWAs) for SEO: Benefits, stats, examples

The last couple of years have made a few things very clear. If you have a business online, you need to make it your business to be mobile-first.

Second, your mobile experience needs to be smooth and frictionless if you want it to translate into dollars. Lastly, smartphone users are super fickle and despite downloading over 113 billion apps in 2018, users still regularly use only about 9 apps per day.

So, you need to be on mobile. You need to be awesome on mobile. And people are probably not going to download and use your app regularly. What do you do then?

Build something that combines the slick, user-friendly interface of a mobile app without actually creating an app.

Yes, I’m talking about progressive web apps or PWAs.

In the simplest possible words, a PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Users have the option to save a PWA to their phone and launch it just like an app, but it’s totally optional.

There are a whole host of perks that PWAs bring with them while overcoming the inherent disadvantages of building and maintaining a mobile site and a mobile app simultaneously. Let’s take a deeper dive to see how you can get the most out of PWAs.

Speed, thy name is PWA

This is undoubtedly one of the most exciting features of PWAs. Businesses can target users who might be on a slow data connection or even those who are offline with a PWA by using mobile development best practices like caching content ahead of time, compression, and more.

Why should you care about site speed? Because it directly impacts your SEO and your conversion rate.

In January 2018, Google formally announced what many SEO experts suspected for a while that mobile speed would be a key factor in organic search rankings for websites. With that came the mad rush to mobile optimize websites, improve page load times, improve navigation, and the works. In the case of PWAs, pages load instantly due to pre-caching and allow users a quick and simple user experience. A definite SEO win.

Research has shown over time that there is a correlation between site speed and conversion rates. A drop in site speed usually leads to a corresponding drop in conversion rates and vice versa.

Source: Think with Google

Source: One North

Websites can enjoy vastly improved conversion rates with the faster page load times that PWAs offer. Cosmetics giant Lancome switched to a PWA in 2017 and saw a significant improvement in both speed and conversion rates. They experienced an 84% drop in time until the page is interactive and a 17% growth in conversion rates.

Better engagement

Google dictates the fundamental requirements that a website needs to fulfill to qualify as a progressive web app. A smooth user experience including easy navigation, timely push notifications, cross-browser compatibility, responsive pages across all devices are a few important requirements that also lead to a growth in engagement.

PWAs mimic real mobile apps by allowing users to install them on their devices. With the app now on their mobile phones, the chances of interaction and engagement become exponentially higher, as experienced by Forbes magazine when they launched their own PWA. Users were notified every time new content was available via push notifications. With lightning-fast page load times, quick transitions and light page design, Forbes’ PWA managed to achieve the following:

• Increase scroll depth by 3x
• Improve sessions per user by 43%
• Get a 6x increase in readers completing articles
• Double their engagement rate which means a 100% increase in engagement

In the case of a publishing site like Forbes, high engagement equals high conversions, all thanks to their new PWA.

We know that website engagement metrics like session duration, click-through rates, and bounce rates have a direct impact on search rankings. As Larry Kim demonstrates here, time on site has a definite correlation with your organic search rankings. The higher the session duration, the higher your likely ranking on Google.

Source: Medium

You can say hello to page one on Google, all thanks to PWAs and their superior website engagement rates.

It’s all about the URLs

Progressive web apps truly embrace SEO best practices in every sense of the term. From clear and concise meta descriptions to adding Schema.org data for better indexing and parsing of site data by search bots; a search-optimized website is more likely to make the PWA cut than others.

PWAs don’t require different “mobile.site.com” types of URLs to offer a great experience on mobile devices. They’re automatically configured to provide a consistent experience, no matter what the device. Another bonus is that PWAs are necessarily HTTPS enabled. Not only does this bump up your site on organic search results but also reassures users about the security on your site leading to lower bounce rates, higher click rates, and likely higher conversion rates.

Each page comes with its own unique URL, making even deeply embedded pages easily crawlable and discoverable by search engines. Unique URLs for each page also makes sharing pages on social media and other sites much easier, not to mention more transparently trackable.

With pre-caching in place using service workers, all URLs on PWAs load even when your device is offline, empowering users who operate on older devices or poor network connections.

In closing

As users evolve and express their preferences more clearly, it is up to businesses to ensure that they pick up on these signals and adapt to stay relevant to their target audience. Today’s user is telling us that they expect a fast and frictionless journey on their mobile devices, without being forced to download an app for this superior user experience.

Time to pick up on those cues and invest in PWAs that combine ease of the mobile web with the speed and user-friendliness of a mobile app. Two for the price of one is what you get with PWAs. So when are you going to build yours?

Rohan Ayyar is Regional Marketing Manager at SEMrush. He can be found on Twitter @searchrook.

The post Progressive web apps (PWAs) for SEO: Benefits, stats, examples appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/02/how-progressive-web-apps-pwas-for-seo-benefits-stats-examples/

Tips to lower brand CPC for greater profitability

In the realm of digital marketing, brand ownership means everything. It’s safe to say that nearly all search advertisers see the vast majority of their traffic and revenue come from their branded initiatives.

Put simply, branded (search engine marketing) SEM is something advertisers need to fully own and focus on optimizing. With that being said, one of the biggest challenges within the brand space is optimizing spend as efficiently and effectively as possible, in relation to CPC (cost per click) levels.

Knowing that branded campaigns are so important for paid search, many advertisers opt to max out their keyword CPC bids. This means that the CPC headroom, or monetary gap between your max CPC bid and your keyword’s average CPC, will be much larger than needed.

In their minds, this ensures that they are capturing the maximum amount of traffic without sacrificing brand real estate. Although the theory behind that approach is technically accurate, these individuals are not being nearly as efficient with client spend. These campaign managers also allow Google and Bing’s algorithms a greater opportunity for charging extra money.

Typically, SEM advertisers fall into this trap for a good reason, because they want to ensure that they are eliminating competition on their client’s branded space.

But, we believe that minimizing the headroom between the max CPC bid and the average CPC over time will allow these advertisers to ultimately cut the spend levels without the sacrifice of user volume or traffic.

What we did to prove this theory

We ran a couple of tests to see how traffic was affected. Initially, we cut our bids in half, but we immediately saw traffic drop off as a result. Then we took a different approach and thought about what would happen if we tried shaving our bids down incrementally on a daily basis? This would allow us to keep a close eye on traffic and impression share, and bid back up if we ever fell below a certain volume threshold. Ultimately, we found that if you play this long-term dance with the search engine, the theory holds true. You can reduce your average CPC, maintain consistent traffic levels, and ultimately lower your keyword bids.

Implementation

Before launching a bid walk down test, it’s important to audit your account for potential risks and to estimate the expected impact. Here are several preliminary checks that we recommend:

1. Competitive landscape: Check the auction insights on your core keyword over the past year and note how many competitors are bidding in the auction as well as their average impression share. The higher the competition, the higher the risk, since advertisers will be able to overtake your position without bidding as aggressively. The higher competition also limits the opportunity to drive lower cost, since auction activity is a key component of Google’s quality score algorithm.
2. The headroom calculation: Another important check is looking at the past average CPC versus your current bid. The difference between your bid and the average CPC equals the headroom. Larger headroom means more opportunity for incremental efficiency. Because every advertiser lives in a unique digital environment, we don’t have a concrete headroom threshold that indicates an opportunity for cost savings. In general, we have run successful tests with advertisers who have a headroom ratio above eight. As an example, an advertiser with a two-dollar bid and a twenty cent average CPC is a qualified candidate. Our most successful case studies included advertisers with lower competition and a greater headroom spread.

Now for the exciting part. Let’s begin decreasing bids to reduce the average CPC. Keep in mind that this process may take several months, but the long-term benefits can help advertisers gain up to 40% cost savings, which can have a significant impact on profitability and frees up budget for acquiring new customers. Here are the steps:

1. Benchmark position & share metrics

Looking at the past 30 days, determine your average impression share and absolute top impressions share (as called as the new measure for the average position). For most advertisers, these metrics hover between 90-99%.

2. Launch engine bidding rules

Now that we have our benchmark share of voice metrics, we can launch two engine rules to help automate the bid walk down process. Google/Bing react poorly to major shifts, so we are going to set rules that only change our keyword bid incrementally up or down per day.

• The bid down rule – Create filters to isolate down to your core keyword and set a daily rule to decrease the max CPC if – average impression share > X, and absolute top impression share > X using yesterday’s data.
• The bid up rule – Stay at the core keyword level, but now set a rule to increase the max CPC if average impression share < X and absolute top impression share < X using yesterday’s data.

It is imperative to set both rules to run each morning. So long as your core term is maintaining adequate search impression volume, the bid down rule will make incremental adjustments daily. Once your impression share falls below your set threshold, the bid up rule will increase your bid every day until you have regained share. We set the impression share rules plus or minus a small percentage from their actuals so that the rules have more room to make changes. For a more conservative approach, set these rule thresholds to an exact percentage over the past 30 days.

Over time, you should expect to see your max CPC get closer to your average CPC, which will reduce overall cost without losing any volume. Advertisers with high auction pressure should check their core keyword daily (auction insights, impression share metrics, and live search results) to ensure that competitors are not outbidding your brand.

To conclude, as an advertiser, it is imperative to recognize the volatility of the search engine landscape. There are a lot of moving parts with branded real estate, some easy to control, and some not. This process will help you capitalize on greater opportunities without leaving anything up to chance.

Lowering brand CPC’s isn’t an overnight process by any means. But if you are willing to take a gradual approach towards efficiency, you will save your client significant money without the sacrifice of impression share on your keywords.

Steven Oleksak is Senior SEM Manager and Nicolas Ross is an SEM Coordinator at PMG Advertising Agency.

The post Tips to lower brand CPC for greater profitability appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

source https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/05/01/lower-brand-cpc/