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How to Maximize Website Conversion Rates Through Mobile Optimization Strategy
If you’re struggling for conversions, it’s tempting to throw money at the problem in search of a quick fix. Resist that temptation, though – because the key to a better conversion rate isn’t always to be found by pumping money into your ad campaigns, or a flashy new marketing drive.
Nope – the solution’s much more simple. Mobile optimization!
Starting with your site’s mobile experience makes sense. After all, 46% of Americans spend between five and six hours on their phones, every day. When they come across your website, it’s likely to be via their phones. Meaning your site needs to be ready.
Below, we’ll walk you through our top 4 mobile optimization tips. Follow them, and you’ll end up with a clean, compelling, and customer-centric site – that’s ready to convert.
What is Mobile Optimization Strategy?
First things first – what is mobile optimization, exactly?
Mobile optimization is the process of tailoring your website to users accessing it on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet (as opposed to on a desktop computer.)
It involves ensuring that your website’s layout, structure, and content are customized to mobile devices. So why is that important?
Well, think about the consequences of a site that isn’t optimized for mobile. Content displays as misshapen or missized. Elements jump around on the page, as if with a life of their own; you find yourself having to zoom madly in and out, simply to read the text on the screen.
It’s not a good user experience (UX). But, more importantly, it’s not good for business. 57% of mobile users won’t recommend a business with poor mobile optimization.
Sloppy mobile optimization – or total lack of it – means a frustrated user. And frustrated users rarely turn into customers!
How To Maximize Your Conversion Rates Through Mobile Optimization Strategy: 4 Top Tips
Ready to start maximizing your conversion rates – and make your website more mobile-friendly in the process? Here are our 4 top mobile optimization tips:
- Provide a simple, clean checkout experience
- Add on-page product recommendations
- Offer more ways to pay
- Strengthen your CTAs – and their visibility
Read on for the full scoop.
1. Provide a Simple, Clean Checkout Experience
The first way of boosting your mobile site’s conversion rates? Optimizing your checkout flow to ensure you’re providing a frictionless experience at the checkout.
How exactly you do this will depend on how you’ve built your website. But a few broad tips include:
- Enabling guest checkout, so users aren’t deterred by having to create an account to make a purchase
- Providing a wide range of shipping options
- Reducing the amount of form fields (i.e. the depth of info you require from your customers)
- Displaying security badges to increase consumer trust
Image source: Average Website Conversion Rates in 5 Key Industries
2. Add On-Page Product Recommendations
Integrating on-page product recommendations is a low-effort – but potentially high-impact – action for optimizing your mobile site.
The on-page product recommendations you recommend could be products the customer has recently viewed, or ones similar to the products they’re currently looking at. These will appear in the frame as they browse your store on their mobile, meaning they can quickly, and easily navigate to the kinds of products they like.
On-page product recommendations are great for UX. But they’re also good for your conversion rates – as you’re removing one more barrier to your customer making a purchase.
3. Offer More Ways to Pay
These days, offering a diverse range of ways to pay isn’t simply a ‘nice to have.’
It’s a must-have. And, along with choosing the right web hosting provider and building your site with the most suitable platform, it’s one of the biggest website decisions you’ll make.
Consumers are more discerning now than ever. Many distrust the process of paying online; others just want the process to be as slick, seamless, and speedy as possible.
Your job? To ensure your customers can pay with multiple different payment methods, including:
- Mobile wallets (such as Apple Pay and Google Pay)
- Credit and debit cards
- PayPal
Millennials, in particular, are fond of the convenience and ease mobile wallet payments offer. In the US, Gen Y leads the share of consumers making digital or mobile wallet payments (46%), according to Statista.
And, to target Gen Z, you can even offer your customers a ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ (BNPL) service. It’s big with that demographic – in the US, 55.1% of Gen Z consumers 14 years old and over will use a BNPL service at least once this year.
4. Strengthen Your CTAs – And Their Visibility
When it comes to maximizing conversions, compelling call-to-actions are a must.
So take the time to audit the content, placement, and design of your website’s current CTAs. Do they:
- Start with command verbs that create excitement and engagement.?
- Cultivate a sense of urgency?
- Demonstrate the benefit to the customer if they choose to take action?
Remember, you’re optimizing your CTAs here for mobile devices. So think about your user, and how they’re interacting with your site. They’re already on their phone, after all – so how can you tap into that to improve your CTAs?
One tip is to use phone call-based CTAs. Instead of inviting someone to fill out a lengthy contact form, or get in touch via email – both trickier to do from a mobile phone, or while on the go – invite them to call to make an inquiry, instead.
Plus, CTAs aren’t just about the wording – what they say – but about how they look. So make sure they stand out from the rest of the page’s content (you want people to know they’re looking at a CTA, after all!). Harness the powerful simplicity of white space. And, if there’s a button, make sure it’s big, bold, and screams “click me!”
Summary
Mobile optimization won’t just improve the look, feel, and usability of your site. It’ll increase your conversion rates – and help you grow your business online, too.
So good luck, and have fun implementing these tips. Mobile optimization can be tricky and time-consuming. But the results will be worth it in the end – trust us!
The post How to Maximize Website Conversion Rates Through Mobile Optimization Strategy first appeared on PPC Hero.
How to Boost Brand Reach and Conversion Rates Through Consistency on Social Media
Image Source: Deposit Photos
Social media is one of the most powerful weapons brands and marketers have at their disposal. It’s free to post your content and with the right profile, your reach can put you in touch with millions of people around the world.
But social media brand awareness success doesn’t happen by accident, it takes a dependable approach and a considered strategy. Let’s look at why and how companies can create a consistent approach to maintaining and improving their social media brand awareness.
What is Brand Consistency?
Brand consistency is concerned with how companies deliver messages that align with their core values, brand identity, and brand guidelines. With a cohesive approach to branding and messaging across social media platforms, companies can create a consistent experience for all of their existing and future customers.
Consistency in message and branding helps to create trust, which is fundamental to building a sustainable and successful brand. Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, says that 95% of our purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. The emotional connection that customers make with brands can be the difference between choosing one brand over another. If brands are constantly flitting between different visuals, voices, and messages, it can be confusing or alienating to the consumer.
Given the wide range of social media platforms available to brands, it’s important that content is managed accordingly and attention is paid to its consistency. Building up a level of trust with your audience through social media also means your brand is memorable, especially if they can see your brand across a range of different marketing channels. In a crowded market, being memorable is an important asset and will lead to increased conversion rates.
Content Management is Critical for Consistency
Companies and brands can choose to engage across multiple social media channels, each with slightly different demographics. Whether that is through TikTok to approach a younger market or Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram to appeal to a slightly more mature crowd.
The challenge facing companies is to create consistent content that speaks to the audiences of each platform, it is engaging and is organic rather than a paid-for placed advert. That is the role of a content management team; to monitor and maintain a consistent level of visual and written content with your brand messaging, values, and ethos always in mind. A dedicated content management department should ensure that before any content or messaging goes live they check it aligns with your core values and brand guidelines.
Content management is also tasked with keeping your social media material on-brand while continually talking about your brand day after day. Remember that, like your business goals and creative ideas, social media channels are constantly evolving so, without losing any core and consistent messaging, your content must also evolve. It would be easy for the content to grow stale and for the quality to drop by being less interesting, no longer appealing to your demographic, and distinctly off-brand. Therein lies the challenge of creating social media content for raising brand awareness; keeping messages and visuals fresh while sticking with your brand identity and guidelines.
Creating Brand Guidelines
Your brand guidelines are the one-stop shop for all of your digital communications and they help maintain that consistent communication that is so essential for raising and maintaining brand awareness and growing your reach. Think of them as an extension of your mission statement. Here you will establish clear rules and standards for your visual and written materials that can be used in all of your digital marketing campaigns going forwards.
Some of the instructions and themes your guidelines should outline include:
- Tone and voice – What is the personality of your brand? Think about how you wish your brand to come across when communicating with your social media followers.
- Logo – Your logo is one of the most important ways for customers to recognize your brand, it must remain consistent across all communications. Strong design makes a brand instantly recognizable by its logo alone, for example, McDonald’s, Apple, and Nike.
- Images – Determine which types of imagery you use, for example, fresh and modern, vintage, or corporate. Given you’re posting on social media, you must also be consistent in how you shoot your photos and videos while featuring your target demographic in your imagery. Or, if you’re using paid visuals on social media, be careful that your image selection supports your brand’s consistent message.
- Font – Perhaps overlooked but the font you use should remain the same in all marketing exploits. From the style to the color, it all helps improve brand recognition.
- Post frequency – Important for social media, in particular, to decide when is the optimum time to post to ensure you aren’t over-communicating, especially when taking emails and outreach into consideration.
- Color palette – Just as important as your logo and font style is the color palette you choose. Maintaining the same colors for all activities leaves customers in no doubt about the brand behind the communications.
The Importance of a Social Media Calendar
You can plan your communications ahead of time by creating a marketing calendar that is accessible to everyone in your team and automated to save time or communicate timely reminders. This calendar helps you stay on top of each social media post across your entire team. For multichannel campaigns, a social media marketing calendar puts everything in one place so you can see how it all fits together and falls in line with your brand voice and guidelines.
With such an overview of your social media marketing, from posts to emails and ads, you gain a better perspective of the consistency you need. You can check on the timings of your messaging to ensure future messages align. And the ability to schedule posts means you have more breathing room to make changes that can enhance your brand’s reputation and build on any success sparked from social media activity, such as:
- reacting to positive leads
- addressing conversions and sales queries promptly
- responding well to customer requests
- updating content running across social posts and sites, and
- adjusting timings as and when required.
Knowing Your Audience
Brands must know their key demographics and audience, and it is a vital component for consistent content. Once you know who you are marketing to, you can create a plan to make it happen. Take time to truly understand what motivates your audience to click on and engage with social posts.
Once you have a better understanding of your audience’s tastes, interests, and behaviors you can create consistent content that you know they will engage with. This is even more true in an age of personalized ads, which are tailored to various demographics and tastes.
Failing to recognize your audience means you could be wasting your ads on people who have zero interest in your brand. By consistently targeting the right people, you can increase conversions and sales rather than taking a scattergun approach and seeing what sticks.
Wrapping Up
A consistent approach to communication should also be a major part of your social media approach. The detail in your branding guidelines how you as a company will approach social media communications. Ideally, you will respond to users within an hour but a minimum expectation is 24 hours before returning a message.
Your guidelines can spell out how your company as a whole will approach this, and ensure that each person responsible for communicating with your audience does so the right way.
From the tone you use to the speed of response and even how you address the customers, keeping a consistent format is important as it allows you to change the people in the communication chain at your end but the user will not notice the difference.
The post How to Boost Brand Reach and Conversion Rates Through Consistency on Social Media first appeared on PPC Hero.
A new Optimize feature to keep your website updated through COVID-19
As communities around the world respond to COVID-19, we know this time presents unique challenges to your business. We’d like to share a few ways Google Optimize can help you keep your website updated with the latest information.
Last week we introduceda new way for you to quickly post an informational banner at the top of your website. This means you can easily let your customers know if your business hours or services have changed – or even just reinforce that you are still open to serve them – and where they can find more information.
And of course you can still use Optimize to help you update any page of your site, so we’ve included some tips and best practices below to get you started.
Quickly add a message on your website
Once you log into your Optimize account you can add a message to the top of your site by clicking “Add a banner.” You can use our templated banner or customize it by editing the color, size, and text. We recommend you use a color that stands out from the other content on the page. You can also select on which pages of your site the banner should be shown, for example only the homepage or on every page of your site.
Use our template to quickly post a banner at the top of your website with an important message.
You can also tailor your message by location. Let’s say you’re a clothing retailer based in San Francisco and are offering expedited shipping to customers located within the city. Optimize can help you display a customized banner that highlights faster shipping just to users located in San Francisco.
Temporarily update your site
You may have updated store hours or services available at this time. Use Optimize to create a personalization to temporarily display a different version of your site to people when they visit. You can end the personalization whenever you like and your site will go back to displaying its original version.
This is helpful if you want to let your customers know about new ways they can purchase from your business. For example, if you’re a restaurant that is now accepting to-go orders over the phone, you can add your phone number to your home page or make it more visible on your site. Or, if you’re a clothing retailer that is now only accepting online orders, you can update your FAQs page to include your new shipping and return policy.
Consider website best practices
We’ve also put together some additional recommendations to consider while updating your website during this time:
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Reduce distraction on your site. Avoid automatic product carousels or animation on your site. If you have information about how customers can order from you on the same page, the carousel or animation could draw attention away from that message.
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Adjust your FAQs page. Your frequently asked questions might be different than what they were last year. Make sure this page highlights what is currently top of mind for your customers. If you need to reduce your customer support load, place your contact information below all other sections to allow users to read your FAQs first.
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Change your message for mobile devices. Adding longer messages to your customers may display fine on desktop but they probably will be too long on mobile devices. Limit your messages on your mobile site to less than 50 characters. And allow users to close the message if they wish.
Normally Optimize users would only be able to run 10 personalizations on their site at the same time. We have temporarily removed this restriction for the next 90 days so that you can make as many updates to your site as you need until July 31, 2020. If you don’t already have an Optimize account, you can create one for free here.
Conversion modeling through Consent Mode in Google Ads
Last year, we introduced Consent Mode, a beta feature to help advertisers operating in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom take a privacy-first approach to digital marketing. When a user doesn’t consent to ads cookies or analytics cookies, Consent Mode automatically adjusts the relevant Google tags’ behavior to not read or write cookies for advertising or analytics purposes. This enables advertisers to respect user choice while helping them still capture some campaign insights.
Without cookies, advertisers experience a gap in their measurement and lose visibility into user paths on their site. They are no longer able to directly tie users’ ad interactions to conversions, whether the users are repeat visitors or whether those users have arrived from paid or organic traffic sources. To help close this gap, we’re introducing conversion modeling through Consent Mode. This will help marketers preserve online measurement capabilities, using a privacy-first approach.
Now, Consent Mode will enable conversion modeling to recover the attribution between ad-click events and conversions measured in Google Ads. Early results from Google Ads have shown that, on average, conversion modeling through Consent Mode recovers more than 70% of ad-click-to-conversion journeys lost due to user cookie consent choices. Results for each advertiser may vary widely, depending primarily on user cookie consent rates and the advertiser’s Consent Mode setup.
How modeling fills in measurement gaps
Conversion modeling can help fill in blanks in media measurement at times when it’s not possible to observe the path between ad interactions and conversions. Conversion modeling through Consent Mode specifically addresses gaps in observable data from regulations on cookie consent in various regions. Conversion modeling uses machine learning to analyze observable data and historical trends, in order to quantify the relationship between consented and unconsented users. Then, using observable user journeys where users have consented to cookie usage, our models will fill in missing attribution paths. This creates a more complete and accurate view of advertising spend and outcomes — all while respecting user consent choices. Conversion modeling also upholds privacy by not identifying individual users, unlike tactics like fingerprinting which Google has a strict policy against.
Using modeling to probabilistically recover linkages between ad interactions and conversions that would otherwise go unattributed means more conversion insights for optimizing campaign bidding and understanding what’s driving sales. It’s important for any modeling approach to account for the fact that people who consent to cookies are likely to convert at a different rate than those who don’t.
Holistic measurement for your Google Ads campaigns
It’s important for advertisers to have accurate reporting so they can make their marketing investments go further. Advertisers using Consent Mode will now see their reports in Google Ads updated: for Search, Shopping, Display, and Video campaigns, the “Conversions,” “All conversions” and “Conversion value” columns will now include modeled conversions for consent gaps. All other Google Ads campaign performance reports that use conversion data will also reflect the impact from adding in modeled conversions.
Modeled conversions through Consent Mode will be integrated directly in your Google Ads campaign reports with the same granularity as observed conversions. This data then makes its way into Google’s bidding tools so that you can be confident your campaigns will be optimized based on a full view of your results.
For advertisers who want to optimize their campaigns based on return on ad spend or cost-per-acquisition, they can use Target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS) orTarget Cost Per Acquisition (tCPA) Smart Bidding strategies with Consent Mode. If you had previously adjusted targets to account for cookie consent changes, you can now go back to setting targets in line with your ROI goals. Note that you’re likely to see gradual improvements in reported performance as we recover lost conversions through modeling.
For advertisers who want to maintain their campaign spend, conversion modeling through Consent Mode also works with the Maximize conversions or Maximize conversion value Smart Bidding strategies in Google Ads. We recommend you make sure that the budget you’ve decided on is well-aligned with your spend goals.
Get started
If you’re an advertiser operating in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, have implemented Consent Mode and are using Google Ads conversion tracking, conversion modeling from Consent Mode is available for you today.
And if you aren’t using Consent Mode yet, you have two options to get started. You can implement it yourself on your website by following our instructions. Or if you need some extra help, we’ve partnered closely with several Consent Management Platforms, a few of which already take care of critical implementation steps on behalf of advertisers.
We are continuously adding new privacy-forward techniques to help our machine learning solutions better understand the aggregate behavior of non-consenting users, and offer actionable insights in reporting for deeper clarity on your marketing spend. We’ll be bringing conversion modeling through Consent Mode to other Google advertising products, like Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360 later this year.
Case study: Schneider Electric’s digital transformation through centralized search
30-second summary:
- Digital transformation affords businesses opportunities to make genuine connections with customers through personalized marketing experiences.
- Digital buyer behavior is changing, with increased consumer expectations for digital-only interactions and reduced tolerance for traditional sales tactics like cold-calling.
- Paid search is a fast-growing channel that warrants a data-driven approach to strategy and execution.
- Evan Kent, VP Integrated Marketing at Schneider Electric, and Kimberly Dutcher, SEM Manager at Merkle share their collaborative approach to a paid search strategy redesign that continues to drive positive business results.
There’s no more denying that digital transformation is here. It’s on the mind of every business leader, changing how businesses employ digital technologies and organize their business models to create more value for their brand. In the marketing space, digital transformation affords businesses countless opportunities to make a genuine connection with customers through personalized marketing experiences. By designing business organization, strategy, and technology around digital transformation, brands can ultimately deliver customer experiences that are contextually relevant and personally informed.
Schneider Electric and its paid search partner of five years, Merkle, tackled the digital transformation challenge head-on in 2019. They engaged in a more purposeful way than ever before to redesign the brand’s approach to paid search marketing in an effort to align with the business’s overall digital transformation initiatives.
Diving into digital transformation
Schneider Electric’s purpose is to empower everyone to make the most of their energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all. As the global specialist in energy management and automation, it is the business’s mission to be a digital partner for sustainability and efficiency. To support this mission, the Schneider Electric team recognized an immediate need to redesign their search marketing program to improve the quality of traffic driven to the website.
With recent changes in digital buying behavior, the Schneider Electric team quickly recognized that overall search volume was outpacing their investment. The market was growing, yet Schneider Electric’s investment was shrinking. The brand’s soft voice in the market was compounded by a siloed approach to marketing investment. Paid search programs were defined by available investment from business units (BUs) versus starting with the available search volume and then defining an investment need. This resulted in campaigns that were under-funded, chasing search volume that simply did not exist, and a general lack of evergreen brand paid search.
The Schneider Electric team decided it was time for a change. To resolve its in-house challenges, the business created a team of dedicated search specialists to work side-by-side with its digital agency, Merkle. These specialists are the link between deep knowledge of Schneider Electric’s audiences and account optimization. The Schneider Electric paid search team made an intentional shift from creating and running reactive paid search campaigns to proactive market and industry-based planning. Their search mission changed to focus on traffic, landing pages, and the basic need to answer the questions searchers have.
Unifying digital transformation with paid search
Having worked with Schneider Electric for five years on paid search, the Merkle SEM team had valuable historical information on the business and its paid search trends. This data was invaluable to proposing a consolidated, centrally budgeted paid search account structure for the US. The restructure evolved Schneider Electric’s US paid search program from 14 paid search accounts and 22 budgets for seven BUs to one account with one budget. This drove considerable performance improvements and allowed for a robust test-and-learn environment.
The account redesign was also an opportunity for the unified paid search team across Schneider Electric and Merkle to lay the groundwork for future paid search marketing expansion and success. For the first time, the teams were able to take a big-picture, data-driven, strategic approach to the channel that gave all parties the information they needed to drive big results for the business, rather than driving localized results for individual BUs.
Key levers for successful transformation
1. Keywords
In creating a transformed US paid search account aligned to Schneider Electric’s business goals of driving the right search traffic to the right pages on the site, the unified paid search team wasn’t starting from square one. Years of historical data and analysis helped guide the teams on which keywords were historically the best performing. In the case of this paid search digital transformation, a keyword audit was a critical piece to start with, ensuring the team was focused on the right keywords for the brand and its critical products and solutions. Click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) were the team’s primary key performance indicators (KPIs), given the strong historical data in the engine and the wide breadth of optimization levers that could help improve those metrics in the early stages of account optimization.
2. URLs
The unified paid search team took a two-pronged initial approach to their paid search final URL selection. First, the team worked to identify whether they had assigned the most relevant URLs for the keywords. Boosting quality score was a critical KPI, as the quality score is a major factor in how often and how high your ads show on the search engine results page (SERP). Second, the Schneider Electric paid search team translated the quality score for the Schneider Electric web team to improve overall page quality and user experience on the site. It is these types of cross-channel collaborations that are necessary to drive continued marketing success; the business’s digital transformation can’t be successful without it.
3. Efficiency metrics and results
Continual monitoring and optimization of the team’s high-level KPIs, CTR, and CPC is what ultimately drove success for the business. Over the course of 2020, the paid search team drove a 137 percent year-over-year increase in CTR through keyword audits, URL audits, ongoing performance optimizations, and flexible allocation of budget to the most efficient keywords. Collaboration with the Schneider Electric site analytics team was critical for measurement as well, with bounce rate and site engagement becoming key user experience measurement metrics.
Continually evolving paid search with digital transformation
In 2020, the first year of the transformation, the paid search team was focused on the basics:
- Who is the target audience?
- Where on the site would they land?
- Do we have the answer to the searcher’s question?
- Are we bidding on the right keywords?
- Is there an existing search volume? How much investment do we need?
- How long should a program run? How do we integrate other media functions to optimize the buy?
- Do we have the best ad copy?
Designing this customer-first approach took time and optimization is an iterative process, but the results have been exponential:
- Lower cost per click
- More traffic to the site
- Searchers go deeper into the site
Now that the paid search team has a solid foundation, the door is open for experimenting with new and more advanced search techniques to further optimize audiences, bidding strategies, and cross-sell opportunities. With the right traffic coming to the site, the team can focus on monetizing that traffic by driving and measuring site engagement, leads, and contribution to revenue. Paid search is no longer a guessing game – data-driven and statistical techniques are used to optimize investment.
With a number of 2021 paid search marketing trends emerging, especially around automation in the industry, the Schneider Electric and Merkle paid search team is excited to dig into what opportunities exist for further expansion of their marketing efforts. B2B advertisers are changing the way they play the search marketing game in 2021, and those who innovate early and often are the ones who rise to the challenge, and, ultimately, capitalize on the opportunity.
Evan Kent is VP Integrated Marketing at Schneider Electric and Kimberly Dutcher is SEM Manager at Merkle.
The post Case study: Schneider Electric’s digital transformation through centralized search appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Enhance the Customer Journey Through Ad Copy
This blog covers several approaches to help enhance ad “real estate” and help personalize copy for customers in different phases of their journey.
Read more at PPCHero.com
PPC Hero
1000 Ranking factors: How Google finds signals through the noise
30-second summary:
- Google has the ability to measure content quality signals like never before, and with each new Core Update, they understand content quality more as humans do.
- Google uses different search models depending on the search query, meaning ranking signals can vary depending on search intent.
- In a recent correlation analysis we did in the sports ticketing industry, the top factors that correlated with good rankings were long-form landing page content and high domain authority.
- Given Google’s guidance about their forthcoming 2021 web vitals update, page experience and performance are likely going to become more essential for ranking on page one.
- LinkGraph’s CTO explains how machine learning is helping us better understand how Google finds and evaluates content quality signals when ranking web pages.
What makes a web page rank on the first page of Google? Historically, the best correlation studies regressed thousands of search factors against page one rankings in an attempt to understand the primary drivers of SERP performance.
But these ranking factors are weighted differently depending on the type of search. Google uses varying search models depending on the search intent behind the question. Local searches with the map pack, higher economic value searches with high CPC, informational queries with high search volume, searches where the most relevant results may be rich media like videos/images, and even search within highly regulated industries like health and money, can all weight ranking factors differently
To make correlation studies even more challenging, Google updates its core algorithm several times a year, meaning those signals continue to evolve. As Google continues to refine its ability to measure and analyze those signals, their bots are getting better at understanding website quality the way that humans do.
Opening Google’s black box and the North star
In the last decade, the academic fields of machine learning and natural language processing have made great strides. Starting around 2012, Google’s search algorithms evolved beyond regression-based models towards deep learning. Google’s ranking algorithm has now become a black box, and even their engineers find it challenging at times to understand why their models produce the results they do.
Ultimately, we know their goal has always been to bring the highest quality search results to users, and they’ve always done the best they could with the technologies and datasets available to them at the time.
Every core update is consistent with what they have been telling us for years: they reward high-quality pages and penalize low-quality sites and spam. Google’s updates have always been marching in the same direction, and it’s well understood among SEOs that there is a North Star towards:
- Higher-quality content
- Fast, snappy user experiences
- Increasing site authority and reputation
What can be frustrating for webmasters is Google’s lack of specific guidance about which specific ranking factors matter the most in their specific industries? When studying how certain properties like page speed, text content, and backlinks relate to rankings, advanced SEOs are turning to correlation analysis and machine learning tools to better understand how Google finds these signals through the noise.
What we learned about the primary drivers of SERP rankings
We look into an industry-specific correlation analysis, and what we learned about the primary drivers of SERP rankings.
To better understand these signals, we studied the correlation of 18 important ranking factors across 200 searches in the sports ticketing vertical. Each keyword had a CPC of over $ 8.
What we discovered was that the most important factors that were correlated with top rankings were high Domain Authority and long-form landing page content. Domain organic traffic value, URL organic traffic, and page load speed were among the weaker correlations.
Unfiltered backlink count and Referring Domain counts themselves were not as strongly correlated as metrics like Moz’s Domain Authority, which differentiates between low-quality links and high-value links. Additionally, Majestic’s Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics proved less correlated to ranking on the first page then Moz’s Domain Authority.
For the startup client, we were working with, this analysis taught us that maximizing the amount of page rank on their most competitive landing pages was critical in order to contend with the heavyweights in their space, more than anything else they could do for their SEO.
From a content perspective, we found the web pages that rank on the first SERP align with what Google claims to reward: Long-form, topically-rich pages with interactive elements that provide a great page experience, like jump links, expandable content modules, and interactive javascript or videos.
In our analysis, we were surprised to see that page load speeds weren’t as strong of a factor as we might have expected. Nevertheless, given Google’s guidance about their forthcoming 2021 web vitals update, performance signals are likely to become more important. Even though these signals may not be as important as site authority in the algorithm today, I would strongly advise brands to begin preparing for the update and begin making on-page content improvements and page speed improvements right now and understand how your site stacks up in the ‘Chrome User Experience’ report.
What this means for ranking on page one in your industry
If you’re an upstart and looking to break into page one of Google, most of these Google algorithm updates should come as very good news because they create a more democratic SEO landscape. In every correlation analysis, we’ve performed, site authority has always been the most influential factor. It’s also the hardest ranking factor to improve because link building takes such a concerted amount of effort and can take years in big industries.
Seeing other ranking factors demonstrating strong influence over rankings – such as content length and quality, page speed, and web vitals, and high-quality UX. It means that new entrants gain more opportunities to succeed in SEO on the merits of their web pages, not just because they are incumbents with massive backlink profiles.
Even if you don’t have the tools to do your own comprehensive correlation analysis, you can manually reverse engineer the SERPs in your industry. Studying how your competitors to benchmark on these important search factors can reveal valuable tactical insights that help you direct your team’s SEO efforts towards the most impactful work possible and deliver faster-ranking improvements.
Manick Bhan is the founder and CTO of LinkGraph, an award-winning digital marketing and SEO agency that provides SEO, paid media, and content marketing services. He is also the founder and CEO of SearchAtlas, a software suite of free SEO tools. He is the former CEO of the ticket reselling app Rukkus.
The post 1000 Ranking factors: How Google finds signals through the noise appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
How to build your brand authority through content marketing
30-second summary:
- Brand authority can make a huge difference in whether someone decides to buy from you or not.
- First you have to examine what your current brand recognition is like by seeing how you’re talked about online. This can help you identify opportunity areas.
- Then you can dive in deeper and start researching typical questions your target audience has. Why? So you can answer them.
- Finally, you’ll set out to answer the questions you collected in an authoritative way to start building trust.
Please forgive the fact that I’m tweaking a tired adage, but the message is true: Building your brand authority doesn’t happen overnight.
I was reminded of this fact very recently while scrolling through LinkedIn:
Ongoing marketing efforts are needed to tell an authoritative story and build trust in potential customers. It can always make a difference when someone is deciding between two companies, and it’s even more important with B2B, since those products/services tend to involve a higher cost.
Here’s how you can go about utilizing digital marketing to increase your brand authority.
Note: I’m going to focus on the content itself, but earning backlinks — which is significantly easier to do with high-quality content — is a primary way to indicate to Google that other sites trust you, which signals that you’re more authoritative. Prioritizing your backlink portfolio will dramatically help you in all other authority-building efforts.
Gauge your brand authority level
Don’t assume you already understand how you’re viewed by your audience. Instead, before launching into any marketing strategies, check the data to get a sense of how you’re being perceived.
- Have your branded searches increased or decreased? What search terms are people pairing with your brand?
- How are your customers or leads finding out about your brand? Was it from authoritative interviews or content you put out there or some other way?
- Are you ever mentioned in the media? If you haven’t already, set up Google Alerts for your brand name and any prominent, public-facing employees.
Another interesting consideration is: Who are the current authorities in your space? Are you aware of them all?
The first way to identify this is to type into Google the phrases you wish you ranked for and see who is ranking for those terms. Sometimes it’s the competitors you knew about, but sometimes other sites have climbed up the authority ladder.
Additionally, you can use tools like SparkToro to search your topic area and see where your audience is going for information.
If you search for your vertical, you can then see the most popular publications, podcasts, social channels, and more visited by the audience interested in your vertical.
Then the question becomes, are you on these lists? If not, who is and why? What are they doing well? You can aim to be featured on these different media outlets, as you know they appeal to your target audience.
Identify your audience’s questions
If you answer your audience’s questions, they’ll start to trust you and see you as an authority.
The concept sounds simple, and it is. But the execution is harder. First, how do you find out what their questions are?
Here are a few ways:
- Tools like Answer the Public and BuzzSumo’s Questions will show you what people are asking based on different keywords you enter.
Snapshot of BuzzSumo’s Questions tool
- Keyword research can reveal the types of challenges people are facing. Don’t just look at keyword volume — look at “People also ask”. Get lost for a little while, clicking on various questions and related keywords. (Keywords Everywhere is a cool tool for search volume/competition, as is Keyword Surfer).
- Talk to your sales team about what common questions are coming up. Have you answered these with content? Do they speak to the greater problems your audience faces?
- Brush up on your audience personas. Different segments of your audience may have different problems. See if you’ve been accidentally neglecting a segment.
Once you have a solid list of the questions your audience has, you can work on effectively answering those questions.
Answer the questions with authoritative content
Once you know what you want to write about, how do you make it authoritative?
First of all, your methodology matters. Do your own original research whenever possible. Content backed by data is inherently more trustworthy than content based on opinion. If you’re featuring opinion, make sure it’s someone who can prove their expertise through their past experience.
Secondly, the content has to be created in a way that conveys authority:
- It shouldn’t have any grammar or spelling errors
- If it’s time-sensitive in any way, it needs a date on the article so people know exactly when it was written and thus the content can be put in its proper context
- Sources should all be cited
- The design should be clean and easy to read
- The structure and navigation should be well-thought-out and provide insight into exactly what readers will learn
- All information should be backed up with explanations and facts
- If your piece was written by experts, provide their name and bio
Let’s take a look at some examples. I pulled the top organic text and video results for the query “how to choose a bike.” (I’m thinking about buying a bike, so I’m finding myself using a lot of bike-related examples as of late…)
REI’s article, “How to Choose a Bike,” ranks number one. I use REI examples a lot because I think they have a fantastic content strategy by using their expertise to answer all kinds of questions their customers could have.
But let’s focus specifically on what makes this article seem authoritative.
First, it’s well organized and clearly outlined, even including a table where you can get the top-level information very quickly. Having a well-thought-out structure and design is a visual indication of knowledge and understanding of a topic.
They also have a section at the bottom labeled “Contributing Experts” so you know exactly who put the guide together and what experience they have.
Finally, they responded to all of their comments, providing additional information to the people who had further questions.
Now let’s check out the top video result, which is from 2013, meaning people have found it useful for more than six years. What about it feels authoritative?
For one, look at how he outlines right at the beginning what the video will cover, setting proper expectations and indicating a solid knowledge of the subject.
Additionally, he doesn’t just list the features of the different types; he explains the usefulness of those features to help you make a more informed decision.
There are a few other techniques to display authority, as well. Andy Crestodina recommends including quotes and tips from other thought leaders in your piece. You can also get third-party validation for your content in the form of testimonials, reviews, or asking influencers to share what you created. The point here is to showcase that you associate with experts and that other people trust you.
Conclusion
It’ll take time and effort, but once you’re an authority, every other aspect of your marketing will gain more traction. Consider how to build authority into all of your digital marketing, and you’ll have the potential to amplify your results even further.
Amanda Milligan is the Marketing Director at Fractl, a prominent growth marketing agency that’s worked with Fortune 500 companies and boutique businesses.
The post How to build your brand authority through content marketing appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
How to increase online sales in three easy steps through PPC ads
30-second summary:
- Coronavirus and related quarantine measures led to an increase in online sales, the amount of video content consumed, and the time people spend on the internet in general.
- PPC ads are relevant more than ever.
- In this article, you’ll find the most common errors in contextual advertising and get practical recommendations on setting up effective PPC ads.
Coronavirus and related quarantine measures led to an increase in online sales, video content consumption, and the time people spent on the internet in general. That’s why PPC ads are more relevant than ever now for your business. Well crafted ads can be a great way to improve your conversion rate and profit.
In this article, you’ll find the most common errors in contextual advertising and get practical recommendations on setting up effective ads.
The most common errors when setting up ads
1. Contactless ads
Advertisements without contact information take up less space in SERP and lose to competitors’ ads due to the fact that they are less noticeable and informative.
2. Lack of quick links and favicon
This error leads to a decrease in traffic, CTR, and means that the ad budgets will rise.
3. Ads are not optimized for the Google Display Network
A search engine ad campaign is different from one shown on the Google Display Network. If you just copy ads, you’ll not get a good result.
The main difference between campaigns on the thematic sites and in search:
- Images are not displayed in search but on thematic sites, they must be added.
- Advertising on thematic sites should be more creative than in search. There are many different formats in GDN you can experiment with.
4. Lack of division into the industry and regional campaigns
Without this separation, you can waste the budget. Dividing the campaign, you’ll identify which industries or regions are more effective, which part of the campaign should get more attention and budget.
5. Improper structure of PPC ads campaigns
The campaign structure does not appear from scratch but is created on the basis of internet demand and customer market analysis (customer needs and requirements, product demand, and other such parameters).
For example, you can create the following groups from your PPC campaign: On a company brand, on general keywords, on regions, on types of the product, on promotions, and on competitors.
6. The site doesn’t load when clicked
Often, a campaign is running but a server is not configured to process the labels of advertising systems. Therefore, when you click on an ad, the site may not load.
How to set up an effective PPC ads campaign
Work with contextual advertising involves continuous analysis. Before launch, it’s an analysis of the target audience, the strengths and weaknesses of the product, the activities of competitors, and niche filling. Since the situation on the market is changing dynamically, before running an advertising campaign, you should carry out a direct analysis of contextual ads, their results, as well as competitors.
Before starting a PPC campaign
As I’ve already said, you should make a deep analysis before setting up your advertisements. You should learn:
1. The target audience
These are people whose attention you want to capture and convert them into buyers.
A specialist should understand their pains, determine triggers of influence, find out which style works best to communicate with them.
You can do it with the help of different polls and surveys among your clients, talking to your customer support team, and studying your competitors.
2. The product
How are you selling the product? How is it made? How is it different from competitors? What value does it create for buyers? What are its strengths and weaknesses? You should know answers to all these questions because it’ll be rather difficult to sell a product or service without them.
3. The niche
Each business has its specifics. It can be something more familiar to each of us (for example, retail, like Amazon) or something non-standard from B2B (business to business) sphere (for example, content marketing services). Study sites from given examples to see the difference between niches.
Therefore, before selling, you need to understand:
- Whom to sell to?
- How to sell?
- What difficulties could arise?
- What kind of competition you’re surrounded by?
4. Competitors’ ads
A strong competitor can appear at any second. So, you should not lose vigilance at any stage of contextual advertising. High competition always threatens high CPC (cost per click) and lower outreach.
To help an advertiser, there are a number of tools for monitoring the market and creating your successful PPC campaign or optimizing it. You can get the following information from them:
- The quality of the texts, relevance of the ad to the user’s request, benefits which it brings to the buyer.
- Keywords which are used in ads.
- What the landing page looks like if it’s able to convert visitors into buyers due to the unique selling proposition, and convenience of making the order.
- The dynamics of changes in the effectiveness of ads.
There are tons of tools on the market for this but from personal experience, I can share that one of the most popular and easy tools is Serpstat. Here you can find:
- Information about ads campaign entering only the domain of the competitor;
- Keywords and their volume
- Keywords competition
- Links to landing pages
- Main performance metrics
Basic checklist to set up an effective PPC ad campaign
A full checklist for setting up contextual advertising includes hundreds of points. Here, I’ve shared the minimum, most essential requirements that everyone can implement.
1. Separation of B2B and B2C (business to consumer) keywords. It’s a top-level of the structure. You need to study your audience segments in detail.
2. You should optimize ads for different devices. Campaign for mobile search should be a separate one with different keywords and settings.
3. You need to make good ads:
- Keywords in the title
- Qualifying words
- Keyword in the display link
- Keyword in the description
- Call to action
- Quick link with a keyword
- Contacts
4. To increase the effectiveness of your ad, I recommend using different ad extensions: Structured snippets, call, location, price extensions, and more.
5. For high and medium search volume keywords your campaign should be built on the principle – “one keyword = one ad”. Low search volume ones need to be grouped.
6. Launch campaign for near-niches. For example for car dealers, such niches will be car services, leasing, components, and other segments you may find relevant in this niche.
7. Limit budget for ineffective keywords, platforms, channels.
8. Work in GDN but filter platforms not to get rubbish traffic.
9. Try new instruments: ads in Gmail, such campaigns as call-only ads, local search ads, true view, and the others.
10. Use dynamic remarketing on incomplete activities, and abandoned baskets. It allows you to contact users who have already been on your site.
11. Use other promotion channels. One of the best schemes is: bring a new visitor with the help of PPC ad, return him/her to the site with the help of social networks remarketing, lead to a decision on the call or order after the third contact through MyTarget.
12. Remember that ads can be displayed at the wrong time for your company. For example, if you have a B2B offer, you should not spend budget at night or on weekends.
13. Fill in the list of negative keywords.
Analysis of your ads campaign
To estimate your contextual advertising you should use two tools: A site analytics system and Google Analytics or Google Ads.
To analyze your site and its traffic, you can use the Finteza tool. It’s a service that can provide you with information about your audience by 15 basic parameters such as visit sources, events, UTM parameters, page addresses, countries. Everything you need to do here is to filter data by parameters appropriate for your PPC campaign. As a result, you’ll get information in diagrams and funnels.
Indicators you should use to analyze the effectiveness of your advertising according to Google Analytics or Google Ads:
CTR (click through rate)
CTR should increase while CPC needs to decrease. If this doesn’t happen, your ads are of poor quality for this system and you should change your tactics.
CR (conversion rate)
It shows how many users from the ad made a targeted action on the landing page (made an order, left some request, signed up, or followed a link). This point should always increase.
CPO
The cost of attracting a customer who will make a purchase should always decrease.
ROI
Investments pay off if the indicator is more than zero. It’s great when it increases also.
CAC (customer acquisition cost)
You need to evaluate it to understand how much a new client costs you. Business is fine when this amount is less than the average bill.
LTV (customer lifetime value)
It shows how much money every customer brought to you from the first deal. The larger the number, the better it is for you.
To round up
At first glance, setting up contextual advertising may seem to be easy. In reality, it’s a continuous work with the analysis of your ads and competitors, the full niche. To create an effective campaign you need to have basic marketing knowledge and an analytical mindset.
Contextual advertising will bring profit only if it’s set up correctly and thought out in detail.
The post How to increase online sales in three easy steps through PPC ads appeared first on Search Engine Watch.