I was fresh out of journalism school, which I’d studied because I wanted to write truth to the world. By making information publicly available, I thought I could contribute to the greater good. I saw myself educating readers by sharing the stories of the world. Pretty altruistic, right?

I never thought I would work in marketing. Who plans on a career in marketing? What 10-year-old says, “I want to be a marketer when I grow up, Mommy!”

Well, I’ve learned that marketers play a similar role as journalists but in the private business sector. We’re in the business of communications — crafting messaging and figuring out how to get those messages in front of as many people as possible.

We use our storytelling talents and distribution know-how for our companies and our clients. Our job is to get the right story in front of the right audience.

I’ve learned that SEO wins happen at the intersection of identifying storytelling opportunities and maximizing the visibility of those stories through search.

And yet I think it can be easy for an SEO to forget a critical role they play for clients and for organizations: that of the content evangelist.

SEOs can fall into a trap of focusing on the technical requirements for making content findable by search engines. And while crawl-ability and accessibility issues are key SEO responsibilities, big brands today are demonstrating that the competitive advantage lies in crafting 10x content and investing in an SEO content strategy.

The Job of an SEO

Here’s an infographic you’ve probably seen before. It’s Search Engine Land’s Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. It does a really good job of hitting on every component of an SEO’s domain.

It’s neatly divided into on-page and off-page factors. Of course, nothing in real life is ever so neat. There’s always overlap and grey. There are no links without content. But, if we accept this diagram at face value, then we can still interpret a lot about an SEO’s top priorities.

For instance, look at the on-page factors. You’ll see content and you’ll see technical SEO. We know that Google has said that the two most important ranking signals are content and links. From that we can infer that technical SEO does not provide as big of a competitive advantage.

Technical SEO is more like the barrier to entry for ranking. Is your site crawl-able, is all the HTML in the right place, are duplicate pages consolidated with canonicals, and are parameters excluded in Search Console? These technical SEO issues are critical to search visibility. Still, I’d argue they represent the lowest common denominator. You’re rarely going to climb to the first page or the top 3 rankings on the basis of clean, crawl-able code. Not having these things will hurt you, but having them won’t give you a competitive edge.

Remember what Google said — the most important ranking factors are links and content. And if you have to prioritize one of those things, it has to be content, because content is what generates links.

Why Content Should Be Your Top SEO Priority

Here are concrete ways that you can empower your role in SEO by evangelizing content to your company or your clients.

1. Content is in your control.

When it comes to generating links and content, don’t put the cart before the horse. As long as you’re not buying links (and you’d better not), you’re going to need link-worthy content on your site that attracts links.

Who links to you is an X factor. It’s not as squarely in your control. What is in your control? Content.

Who links to you is an X factor not in your control. What is in your control? #Content.
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2. Content has trackable metrics.

What gets measured gets done. While bottom-line KPIs are traffic and conversions, those results are the outcome of the effort you put in to make your site an authority with a satisfactory user experience.

Leading metrics you can focus on improving are:

• The number of thin pages that you make better.
• The number of new ranking pages you add to the site.
• The number of pages on the site and pages indexed.

What’s awesome about focusing SEO campaigns on content is that you can truly track your progress while you’re creating more great content.

3. Bigger sites make more money.

When your boss asks you, “What’s the ROI of this content initiative?” you can say that big sites make more money.

When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, he brought a new growth strategy to the paper. WaPo grew WaPo traffic 28% from 2015 to 2016. The effort resulted in WaPo surpassing The New York Times’s traffic in 2015. How did they do it? By adopting a content strategy around producing a high volume of content aimed at long-tail and niche interests.

How can a small website compete with a larger one? Who are the major competitors in your space? How many pages do they have on a topic? More pages mean more opportunities to rank. More pages demonstrate depth of expertise, making you more likely to rank on a topic.

Just like a company needs to grow to make a profit, so does a website.

How to Set Content Apart as 10x

At this point, you might agree that an SEO has to prioritize content strategy. You may be thinking to yourself, “OK, I get it. I can make the push for my clients or in my group to add good, quality content to the site to see ranking gains.”

That is certainly a worthy goal. But the truth is that good, quality content isn’t good enough. Today’s bar for Page 1 rankings is 10x content.

The skyscraper technique popularized by Brian Dean is the process of looking at the top result for a query you’re targeting and then outdoing that top-ranking page with your own page. Dean calls this content marketing for link builders. See what ranks the best and then shoot even higher with your own answer to the query. Sounds like a lot of work, right? It is. Of course, smart SEO minds have refined the process.

So what is the process for creating 10x content? For a succinct answer, we turn to Rand Fishkin’s classic Whiteboard Friday “Why ‘Good, Unique Content’ Needs to Die (And What Should Replace It).”

Research the pages that are ranking. Use Google to see the top-ranked pages and use BuzzSumo to see the most shared content on a topic.

Then ask these questions as you’re taking it all in:

• What are the questions that are asked and answered in these pages?
• How thorough is the information? What’s missing? HubSpot shared word-count analysis of its blog posts compared to organic traffic and found that a word count of 2,250–2,500 words gets the most traffic. So you definitely want content to be thorough and comprehensive.
• What’s the format and delivery mechanism of these pages? You might also call this the user experience. Is it visual? Is it video? Is it rendered well for the device? Is the info I’m looking for on the page, or do you have to click to another page? Is it easy to find an answer?
• What are the sources of the information and are they credible?
• What’s the quality of the writing?

Once you collect all these answers and identify what search engines are rewarding and what people are sharing, you’ll know what you at least have to do to compete. And you can figure out how to better it.

My 3 Best Tips for Capturing 10x Content Magic

Here’s the sucky thing. Generating 10x content requires sweat and grind. But there are some likely sources of 10x content magic that you can mine.

Data-driven content: This is the Pricenomics model. Pricenomics is a content agency that turns company data into content and then tracks the distribution and performance of the content.

If you read the Pricenomics blog, they’re always posting this in action. It’s a really fun blog, so I recommend you check it out. Here’s an example:

Venngage, an infographics company, used the Pricenomics content marketing model to sift through all of their client data and come up with the most popular font types in America. What data can you bring to light that will make people think, “Huh, I’ve always wondered!” or “Hey, I never would have thought.”

There’s story in data and people just eat that stuff up.

Expert voice content: This is just journalism 101. You go to the expert source and you name your sources.

Honestly, if you can find a good expert, maybe someone on your staff or maybe the biggest name in your industry, and they agree to an interview, then this is one of the fastest ways to 10x your content.

You get that credibility factor. You get the network effect of the expert and their followers sharing and reading.

What you want to steer clear of here is the trap of the expert round-up. I think we’ve all seen that. And those aren’t all bad, but they are kind of cheap.

We’re not going for cheap. What you’re looking for in talking to your expert is to raise your page to the next level. Bring something to the forefront that the normal person misses, but that will create that light-bulb moment in those reading it for the first time.

Start your practice of nurturing relationships with experts with this Bruce Clay guide.

Voice of Customer content: Writers start by thinking about their audience. You get into the target audience’s head to find out what they want, what they need, what they know, what they don’t know they need. And then you write to solve a problem in that audience’s – or persona’s – life.

In marketing, we’re matching the pain point with our solution. And what really resonates with your target audience is hearing or reading the thoughts that are actually going on in their head, or close to it.

There are many possible ways to gather the information used to synthesize VOC: focus groups, individual interviews, and contextual inquiries (like on-site surveys) are a few. But you’re basically using structured in-depth interviews, focusing on the customers’ experiences with current products or services. Need statements are extracted, organized into useful categories, and then prioritized and used by the business all the way from product development to marketing.

I learned about the methodology around Voice of Customer data from Copy Hackers. User-generated content, product reviews and testimonials are essentially forms of VOC content.

And maybe this is where the altruist in me comes out, because when we turn our focus to SEO content, we’re doing something special. We’re not trying to find a loophole to exploit and win on a technicality. We’re sharing stories that will enrich people’s experience. We’re teaching people about solutions that will make their lives better. And we’re making connections with people like us.

SEO has to encompass those 30-or-so factors on the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors. But the forensic-style technical SEO is not the bar you’re holding your work up to — it’s the minimum viable SEO. Today, getting the technical stuff right is just the ticket to entry.

If you’re actually trying to reach the top, then you’re going to have to prioritize content as the top SEO issue for you to solve.

If you like this post, please share it with your friends or colleagues. For more like this, be sure to subscribe to our blog.

This post is based on my presentation “Thin Content Is THE Top SEO Issue” which I shared at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. Check out the full deck below.

The post Make Content Your #1 SEO Strategy Initiative appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Around the same time, Mary Meeker shared a prediction that by 2020, 50% of searches would be voice or visually based. (Source: Recode)

If you’re not familiar with visual search (and I wasn’t in this context), it’s search and retrieval instigated by the searcher “showing” a device or product like the one they’d like to buy (or if not buy, then get more information about). Here’s an example: shop for dog food by showing your device the near-empty bag of dog food in your pantry, and then buy it from Amazon or another online retailer. Go ahead and look into the Amazon Echo Look for a visual-search-type device that’s almost to market.

If we as marketers understand that text-based search is trending-down-to-obsolete over the next two years, and that our customers will be searching with their voices and images, what do we do to evolve our marketing strategies?

Director of Account Strategy at Marketing Refresh, Katy Katz, and VP of Industry Insights at Yext, Duane Forrester, shared their plans of attack for exactly that with the rapt audience at Pubcon Las Vegas this week.

This post covers (jump to sections with links):

• Eye-opening stats and findings about how well voice search serves consumers
• Technical considerations for SEOs and content marketers optimizing for voice search
• User behavior and new technology that is shifting SEO
• Tactics to compete in voice search
• Skills required of the digital marketer of the future

Eye-Opening Stats and Findings about How Well Voice Search Serves Consumers

What are people trying to do with voice commands today? Katy shares the findings of SEER Interactive’s 2017 study about the kinds of actions people use voice search for:

Look at those top voice-activated actions! They’re pretty personal. Your customers expect personalization. They’re expecting you to know who they are and what’s important to them. They want you to personalize their experience.

Consumers ask questions in a personal way. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now smart enough to answer these questions. Katy’s 5-year-old used Alexa and said, “Alexa, play Darth Vader.” Smart Alexa played the Imperial March.

We can type 40 WPM, but we can speak 150–160 WPM! With voice search, people will articulate their queries more specifically and precisely.

In SEO and content marketing, voice search is making a big impact on strategy in these areas: keyword research, content strategy, and technical implementation. (Author’s note: That’s all. Just like, everything.)

Technical Considerations for SEOs and Content Marketers Optimizing for Voice Search

First, understand the anatomy of a voice query. These are the key features:

• The 5 Ws: Voice-triggered searches are usually looking for a result that answers a who, what, where, when, why or how question.
• Conversational: Voice searches are typically conversational (that is, use natural language).
• Long-tail: Voice searches are long-tail queries by their conversational nature.
• Mobile: Voice searches are done primarily on mobile devices.
• Clear intent: Voice searches are performed with a very clear and specific intent in mind.

Here’s an example voice search query where we can see how a digital marketer’s work to identify keywords, implement structured data markup, and gain positive reviews come into play when Google is determining result relevancy:

To establish a solid foundation for voice search SEO:

1. Define your goals. You know the drill. Make sure they’re specific and measureable. Help you focus on what to focus on. She probably spends 80% of her time helping clients identify the goals that will give the highest ROI.
2. ID your audience. Take the time to get to know your audience in audience interviews. You’ll learn about their pain points and goals and the questions they want to answer. There’s nothing else like talking to your customers.
3. Achieve language-market fit. This term isn’t used a lot but it’s a big deal when it comes to search. It’s qualitative research into the exact words and phrasing that your buyers use to describe your product, service or category. Talk like your customers!

4. 

   Map the buyer’s journey. Your customers are working through questions at each phase. If there are gaps in your content you’re missing out on opportunities.

With your foundation in place, optimize for these technical considerations for voice search:

Long-tail keywords. Here are keyword research tools for long-tail:

• Keyword.io
• Answer the Public
• Buzzsumo Question Analyzer
• SEMRush
• KWFinder
• Quora
• Google autocomplete

Snag those snippets. Design your content to optimize for featured snippets. Google Home and Siri are pulling quick answers for this. Short in nature. Simple, concise. Answers the questions in a way that provides utility for the user. The amount of snippets doubled this year. A snippetable post is short and digestible, fact-based logic; if Google already owns the Knowledge Graph, don’t even try to answer it.

Schema markup. Tell the search engines and AI what information is about. Making sure your house in order with different schema types is imperative for voice search.

Brand optimization. Manage your brand across the web. Off-site SEO and PR is everywhere. Local SEO, social media, off-site SEO, reviews are all influencing your consumers throughout their journey. It takes 6-8 touches for a prospect to convert to a sale. For local SEO, check out Moz Local, Yext, Reach Local, GMB. For reviews, check out Get Five Stars, Review Trackers, Yotpo, Reputation Loop — help you with automated tools to grow your reviews and show yourself as a trustworthy provider.

In sum, your buyers have questions each step of the way. There is no part of the journey that is more important than any other. Own the conversation. Own your brand.

User Behavior and New Technology That Is Shifting SEO

The media we consume is shifting from the silver screen to our digital devices. With that, influence is shifting and celebrities are losing ground. Today, 6 in 10 YouTube subscribers would follow advice on what to buy from their favorite creator over their favorite TV or movie personality.

And there’s the consumer dependence and preference for their mobile device. Technology companies are investing across the board in assistants and AI. Duane asked the audience, “Who believes in the mobile-first Google index?” Well not only should you believe in it, Duane says that it is certainly live now and in use. He expressed that there’s one index and it’s filtered for mobile. He challenged marketers with the question, “Why would the search engine trust your site for the desktop user when you haven’t invested in the mobile user?”

Another area where user behavior is opening new avenues for marketing is local search. Location search is exploding. Note, however, that the growth in “near me” searches is flattening as it becomes assumed.

Want some more eye-opening stats? Duane shared these ones on local search and map behavior:

• 76% of people who use location search visit a business within one day.
• 28% of location searches result in a purchase.
• Digital maps reduce travel time by 12% on average.
• Digital maps save people more than 21 million hours per year.
• 63% of digital map users take advantage of them to plan safe routes.
• Digital maps have supported more than $1 trillion in sales for businesses.
• Geospatial services help companies raise revenue and diminish costs by more than 5%.

There are hundreds of attributes that contribute to local visibility:

Anyone hear about RankBrain lately? No one? That’s because it’s too busy out there learning.

Voice search is an important inflection point for us in the marketing community. Where we saw mobile coming, voice search is now here because all the tech that makes it possible developed independently.

There are 180 companies in China developing voice search speakers. Duane predicts that in a year, North America will be inundated with cheap, accurate voice search systems. The current players will carve out the higher end and the newer players will carve out the lower end that is able to perform nearly as completely.

Voice search is going to take off because people are lazy. Now we can just talk and get what we want. The next stage is visual search (image-based search) where the Alexa or Home device will show the searcher what they are trying to buy to confirm that’s what they are looking for.

Voice search tech is being embedded into home products like refrigerators and coffee makers. Your refrigerator will ping your phone when you’re at the store and tell you that you’re out of milk.

Tactics to Compete in Voice Search

Google’s not going to tell SEOs via Search Console which organic queries were performed with text search and which were voice search. Look into your site’s organic keyword data and find the queries that brought one visitor, maybe with the stop words removed, and then bundle those up and consider them your voice search terms.

Make sure your site is clean and accessible. Mobile-friendly matters and consumer behavior is happening on mobile devices. PWAs are the future – one code base for all UX and devices. Your developers are going to love having only one code base to manage, but it’ll be a few years for the technology to allow for this.

Secure your site, move to HTTPS. Check out the Wired.com articles where they detailed their move to secure. It was hard.

Today’s consumers want to attach to businesses that reflect their values. That doesn’t equate to donating to a cause, it’s more like getting your whole company to do a 5K in support of that cause and documenting the whole thing. Really invest in developing your brand in terms of its support of relevant and interested communities. Brand loyalty dropped a while ago and now businesses have to demonstrate their mission in their actions.

Skills Required of the Digital Marketer of the Future

This is your future: the digital knowledge manager. It’s a senior-level, cross-functional position. The digital knowledge manager requires a deep, varied career that has spanned many of the traditional core digital marketing competencies.

The digital knowledge manager needs to be able to speak the language of everyone. They will be adept at persuasion and convincing different groups to take on specific tasks. They are an investigator, negotiator, communicator, thinker, and builder.

As always in digital marketing, the future is now.

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The post How to Optimize for Voice Search: Content Marketing & Technical SEO Tips appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Still have a few Christmas presents to buy for loved ones on your list?

Thank Bezos we can turn to Amazon Prime to buy online and get gifts in time for next week’s office holiday parties and family affairs. Procrastinators rejoice!

Here are 11 gift ideas spanning all price ranges and interests, (nearly) all for sale with Amazon Prime two-day delivery.

From good reads to the hottest new tech, these gifts are sure to get a smile from digitally minded friends and family. Some SEO holiday wish list items might even find their way to your own Amazon wish list.

1. Amazon Echo and Echo Dot

Smart home devices and systems are the cutting-edge tech of 2016. Last year Amazon entered the market with Echo, and Alexa was introduced as a household helper for turning on music or giving weather reports on voice command.

This year Amazon’s released a smaller and more affordable voice-controlled smart home device in Echo Dot. For a fun toy that’s opening doors to our voice-controlled, smart home future, give the gift of Amazon Echo, $139.99, or Amazon Echo Dot, $39.99.

2. Google Home

In the same vein as Echo is the Google Home voice-activated smart home assistant. Unfortunately, as a direct competitor to Echo, Amazon isn’t allowing vendors to sell it. But if you’re looking to buy for a Google tech fan on your list, hop to it and get it in-store at Walmart or online from the Google Store for $129.00.

3. “Digital Sense”

Digital marketing is in a maturation period. Marketers are expected to be more sophisticated, technically savvy and, on top of it all, more human than ever. What does that even mean?

With a brand new business strategy book that offers frameworks for optimizing the customer experience, Travis Wright and Chris J. Snook share the “common sense” secrets that the most effective leaders in business use to increase customer satisfaction and employee happiness. $26.00 on Amazon Prime.

4. iPhone headphone lightning adapter

In the category of insanely useful and usually delayed when buying for oneself: lightning adapters that allow iPhone 7 owners to plug regular headphones into the device. By now, half of us have lost the one that came with the iPhone 7, am I right?

Apple’s official adapter is $8.99 on Amazon Prime. Take adapter usefulness to the next level with a 2-in-1 that allows users to charge and listen at the same time; $9.77 on Amazon Prime.

5. “Social PR Secrets” 3^rd Edition

Once upon a time, “brand” and “publisher” were terms reserved for the Coca-Colas and New York Times of the world. Today we think of brands and publishers as designations accessible to anyone.

If you have a blog, YouTube channel, Instagram, Etsy storefront, podcast (or dreams of any of the above), you are a brand and publisher. The handbook for anyone who meets these criteria is Lisa Buyer’s “Social PR Secrets.” She even remembers to put it all in perspective with a chapter on mindfulness and the value of unplugging from time to time. $24.99 on Amazon Prime.

6. Aeropress coffee and espresso maker

Got a coffee addict and tech nerd on your list? They’ll appreciate the elegantly low tech solution to the perfect single-serving mug of coffee. K-Cups are convenient when you don’t want to brew a whole pot, but you know they got nothing on real beans.

As an Aeropress owner myself, I tell you the coffee meets French press standards while the clean up, transportability and store-easy size make it a cinch for everything from camping to office life. $29.95 on Amazon Prime.

7. Snapchat Spectacles

Maybe a stretch to put this on the list, Snapchat’s hard-to-get spectacles aren’t a Prime buy (they won’t arrive in time for Christmas; they’re slated for delivery Dec. 22 to Jan. 11) but they make the list as 2016’s hottest tech for the social media obsessed.

These retail for $130 if you can find one of Snapchat’s pop-up vending machines. For everyone else, they’re resold by vendors on Amazon starting at $246.

An affordable Snapchat-themed alternative (not pictured): the official Snapchat plushie which is available on Prime for $8.99.

8. “Ready Player One: A Novel”

Ernest Cline’s work of adventure sci-fi fiction takes place in 2044, when the virtual utopia known as OASIS serves up puzzles and intrigue, danger and power.

It’s been praised as Willy Wonky meets the Matrix, making it an exciting choice for the sci-fi geek on your list. Plus Steven Spielberg is directing the movie slated for release in 2018. $9.99 for the paperback on Amazon Prime.

9. Tile Mate

JSYK don’t buy Tile for me. I’ve already got one linked to nearly everything I refuse to lose from my keys to my cat. (Seriously.)

Save a sister the future headache of hunting for lost keys, wallet, phone, tech … this slim little chip is connected to a smart phone app so users can find anything fast. The 4-pack on Amazon Prime is $69.99 (stocking stuffers!) or buy a single Tile for $24.95.

10. “No Sleep: NYC Nightlife Flyers 1988-1999”

Perfect for the music lover or 90s kid on your list, “No Sleep” by DJ Stretch Armstrong and the SEO industry’s own Evan Auerbach is a visual history of the music scene in New York during the 90s.

Auerbach, social media specialist at Dragon Search digital marketing agency, moonlights as a hip hop historian and his first book was named in this year’s top 30 most giftable coffee table books by New York Magazine. $26.25 on Amazon Prime.

11. Red Swingline stapler a la “Office Space”

“Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler.” Pay homage to office culture by gifting your office mate a red Swingline stapler – aka the straw that broke Milton’s back in the cult classic movie “Office Space.” $12.57 on Amazon Prime.

The post Procrastinator’s Holiday Gift Guide: 11 Amazon Prime Buys for (or from!) an SEO appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• Using Snapchat
• FAQ: How can I unlock the potential of Snapchat for my business and connect with millennials effectively? 

Using Snapchat

Building a Strong Following: To get started on Snapchat, focus on gaining followers. Make a promise that sets you apart from others and deliver on it. Provide exclusive deals, updates, intimacy, and fun to attract and retain followers. Promote your Snapchat account through various channels using your username and snap code.

Embracing the Snapchat Style: Snapchat has its own unique style and language. Keep your content short, fun, and designed in the Snapchat style using stickers, filters, text, and drawings. Get familiar with Snapchat’s vocabulary by exploring resources like Urban Dictionary.

Sharing Exclusive Deals: Create a sense of scarcity, urgency, and exclusivity with your deals. As Snapchat Stories no longer play automatically, entice your followers to come back by offering exclusive deals and content.

Announcing Important Updates: Use Snapchat to drive awareness and store visits by announcing sales or new products. Leverage the platform’s reach to engage your audience and generate interest.

Elevating Your Visuals: Snapchat is a powerful video platform, rivaling Facebook in daily video views. Invest time in enhancing your photography and videography skills. Focus on striking visuals, contrast, and lines to create captivating content.

Mastering Snapchat Hacks: Explore the various hacks and features of Snapchat to make your content more engaging. Switch between front and back cameras with a double tap, zoom in and out while recording videos, and use a stylus or tablet for doodling.

Storytelling with Sequences: Overcome the 10-second time limit by creating a sequence of images and videos that connect to form a story. Save these sequences to your camera roll and repurpose them on other social media platforms.

Building Intimacy: Snapchat demands intimacy like no other social media platform. Foster trust and connection by spending time with your audience, having conversations, and sharing behind-the-scenes content. Involve your followers to deepen the bond.

Running Effective Ad Campaigns: If you have a substantial budget, consider sponsored campaigns on Snapchat. Starting at $100,000, these campaigns can yield positive results, such as increased purchase intent.

Hosting Engaging Contests: Drive participation and excitement among your audience by running contests on Snapchat. Offer coupons or prizes that incentivize engagement and create buzz around your brand.

Collaborating with Influencers: Influencer takeovers on Snapchat can be highly entertaining and engaging. Find influencers who resonate with your audience and collaborate to reach a wider demographic.

Creating Custom Geofilters: Leverage the power of geofilters to enhance brand visibility during events or at specific locations. Use cost-effective on-demand geofilters to create memorable experiences for your audience.

Embracing Authenticity: Break through the noise and stand out by being real on Snapchat. Share content that reflects your brand’s personality and values. Differentiate yourself by going against the norm and providing unique perspectives.

Gamifying Engagement: Snapchat incorporates a scoring system based on user interactions. Focus on building engagement and earn points by interacting with your audience. Use engagement metrics, such as unique views, story completions, and screenshots, to measure success.

Avoiding Third-Party Apps: Steer clear of third-party apps that offer shortcuts for posting content on Snapchat. These apps may violate the platform’s terms of service and result in temporary lockouts.

With a way to connect with millennials and their growing spending power, Snapchat is crucial if you’re going after a younger audience. By following the strategies we’ve outlined, your brand will build a strong Snapchat presence.

And don’t forget to embrace authenticity, innovation, and compelling storytelling to make a lasting impact on Snapchat and beyond.

Ready to unlock Snapchat’s potential and captivate millennials? Dive into these expert strategies now to elevate your brand’s presence and connect authentically in the ever-evolving world of Snapchat marketing. Contact us.

FAQ: How can I unlock the potential of Snapchat for my business and connect with millennials effectively?

Leveraging social media platforms is crucial for connecting with diverse audiences. If you’re wondering, “How can I unlock the potential of Snapchat for my business and connect with millennials effectively?” you’re not alone. Let’s delve into this inquiry with the expertise needed to navigate the vibrant world of Snapchat and successfully engage with the millennial demographic.

Understanding the Snapchat Landscape

To start, comprehend the unique features Snapchat offers. With its ephemeral nature, Stories, and interactive lenses, Snapchat provides a creative space for businesses to showcase their personality. Millennials, known for their appreciation of authenticity, are drawn to engaging and visually appealing content.

Crafting Authentic Stories

Millennials value authenticity. Craft your brand narrative through Snapchat Stories that resonate with your audience. Share behind-the-scenes glimpses, highlight company culture, and, most importantly, keep it real. Authenticity builds trust and creates a connection that transcends a mere transactional relationship.

Utilizing Interactive Features

Snapchat’s interactive features like lenses and filters can elevate your brand’s engagement. Create branded filters that users can apply to their snaps, turning them into brand ambassadors. Encourage user participation through interactive elements, fostering community around your brand.

Strategic Content Planning

Develop a content strategy tailored to Snapchat’s short-form, visual nature. Keep content relevant, entertaining, and aligned with your brand identity. Use a mix of product showcases, user testimonials, and interactive polls to maintain a diverse and engaging content calendar.

Leveraging Snapchat Ads

Snapchat offers targeted advertising options that can boost your visibility among millennials. Utilize the platform’s advertising tools to create visually striking ads that align with your brand message. Target your audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors to maximize the impact of your campaigns.

Step-by-Step Guide: Unlocking Snapchat’s Business Potential

1. Create a Snapchat Business Account: If you haven’t already, set up a dedicated business account on Snapchat.
2. Define Your Audience: Identify your target demographic among millennials to tailor your content effectively.
3. Explore Snapchat Features: Familiarize yourself with Snapchat’s features, including Stories, filters, and lenses.
4. Craft Authentic Content: Develop a content strategy that reflects your brand’s authenticity and resonates with millennials.
5. Utilize Interactive Elements: Experiment with interactive features like filters and lenses to boost user engagement.
6. Plan a Content Calendar: Outline a consistent posting schedule and plan diverse content to keep your audience engaged.
7. Create Branded Filters: Design and deploy branded filters to encourage user-generated content.
8. Encourage User Participation: Foster a sense of community by encouraging users to share their experiences with your brand.
9. Explore Snapchat Advertising: Delve into Snapchat’s advertising tools to target your ads effectively.
10. Optimize Ad Creatives: Design visually appealing ads that align with your brand and resonate with your target audience.
11. Set Advertising Budgets: Allocate budgets strategically to maximize the impact of your Snapchat advertising campaigns.
12. Monitor Analytics: Regularly analyze Snapchat analytics to assess the performance of your content and ads.
13. Adjust Strategies: Based on analytics, refine your content and advertising strategies to optimize results.
14. Engage with Followers: Respond to comments, messages, and user-generated content to build a sense of community.
15. Collaborate with Influencers: Identify and collaborate with Snapchat influencers to extend your brand reach.
16. Stay Updated on Trends: Keep abreast of Snapchat trends and adapt your strategies to stay relevant.
17. Measure ROI: Evaluate the return on investment for your Snapchat efforts to ensure they align with business goals.
18. Adapt and Evolve: In the dynamic social media landscape, be flexible and adapt your strategies as needed.
19. Collect User Feedback: Solicit feedback from your Snapchat audience to continually refine your approach.
20. Celebrate Milestones: Acknowledge and celebrate milestones with your Snapchat community to strengthen brand loyalty.

Mastering Snapchat for Business Success

Unlocking the potential of Snapchat for your business and effectively connecting with millennials requires a strategic and authentic approach. You can cultivate a meaningful presence on Snapchat by understanding the platform, creating engaging content, utilizing interactive features, and leveraging advertising tools. Embrace the dynamic nature of this social media giant, and watch your brand resonate with the ever-discerning millennial audience.

This article was updated on December 11, 2023.

The post Unlocking the Potential of Snapchat for Business: 15 Expert Tips appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Big news in the world of search this morning. Google released a major update to its link analyzing algorithm, Penguin, today. This latest update is the long-anticipated upgrade that will help sites previously penalized by Penguin get out from under the SEO shadow of spammy paid links.

If you’re an SEO services or penalty assessment client of Bruce Clay, Inc., expect to hear from your analyst with a Penguin Update impact report ASAP.

The announcement was made by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes this morning on the Google Webmaster Blog.

As the fourth significant enhancement since its initial launch in 2012, Penguin 4.0’s most noteworthy upgrades include:

1. Real-time data refreshes as part of the core ranking algorithm and
2. A more granular approach to the way it filters spam.

Bruce Clay, Inc.’s VP Duane Forrester‘s response to the Penguin update? “About time! But now the real work for many begins. Those working hard on managing their link profiles or cleaning up old link building programs have reason to be optimistic. Those thinking old tactics will still work are about to fall on hard times.”

What a Real-Time Update Means

“With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page,” writes Illyes.

With real-time data refreshes, Penguin becomes part of Google’s core algorithm, which “also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.”

We turned to Duane again for comment: “A real-time factoring of link quality into the mix means as soon as they see it, they decide. Everything is on the fly, so it’s the algo at work here, making the call on good, bad and ugly as it sees links. If you’re still thinking buying links works, you’d better be careful. Those days are behind us.”

What a Granular Filter Means

In his blog post, Illyes writes: “Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.”

SEO industry news outlet Search Engine Land requested further comment from Google on what “granular” means in this context.

Previously, Penguin was a sitewide penalty. So, does being “more granular” mean that it’s now page-specific? Yes and no, it seems. We asked Google for more clarity about this, and we were told: “It means it affects finer granularity than sites. It does not mean it only affects pages.”

More Answers on the Penguin Update

Illyes took to Twitter to answer SEOs’ questions about the latest Penguin update.

On how many pages are affected by the Penguin Update:

@emerikusz_ we don’t have a number to share. The number is never stable with realtime algorithms: today it may be 1, tomorrow 42

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 23, 2016

On whether the roll-out of Penguin is complete:

@dr_pete it will never be “complete” for a recrawl+reindex may change its effect on pages any time.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 23, 2016

On how manual actions are now handled:

@SEO @JohnMu yes, manual actions haven’t changed with this launch

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 23, 2016

On the utility of disavowed links in the link pruning process:

@BruceClayInc we haven’t changed our recommendations for the disavow tool with this launch

— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 26, 2016

SEO power tip: Visit DisavowFiles.com for a free tool to check your disavowed links against more than a trillion other disavowed links.

Stay tuned as we learn more on how Penguin 4.0 is affecting our clients’ sites.

The post The Long-Anticipated Real-Time Penguin Is Live appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• Conversions
• Strategy
• FAQ: How can I enhance my website’s SEO through a strategic content plan? 

Conversions

Let’s start with conversions. It is crucial to have clear goals that your website should accomplish for both your business and its visitors. These goals include quote requests, phone calls, store locators, appointment scheduling, subscriptions, or video views. You can align your site design and content offerings by clearly defining your conversions.

Once you have defined your conversions, it’s time to inventory your content and identify areas that require updates. Conduct a thorough crawl of your web pages and create a spreadsheet that includes important details such as URL, HTTP status, last modified date, title tag, description tag, keywords tag, H1 tag, external links, and snippets of body text. This inventory will help you identify outdated content, pages with errors, and main theme hub pages that should receive more attention.

Analyze your page’s traffic sources and determine which sources bring your website the most traffic. Identify the pages where visitors spend more time and the pages they quickly bounce from. This data will provide valuable insights into user behavior and help you prioritize your content updates.

In addition to analyzing performance, gathering user feedback is essential. Take the time to read your website and navigate through its various sections. Reacquaint yourself with the site’s navigation, information, conversion paths, and search traffic. Ask friends or colleagues to read your pages and provide feedback. Conduct user tests by having individuals navigate through specific scenarios and record their experiences. This feedback will give you a better understanding of how your customers are experiencing your site and help you identify areas for improvement.

Strategy

With a clear understanding of user behavior and feedback, it’s time to implement your strategy. Consider your website’s architecture and ensure it aligns with how users navigate it. Implement SEO siloing techniques, where each big idea or category of your website becomes a pillar with supporting content. Link relevant pages within each silo to maintain a concentrated theme and improve rankings due to subject relevance. Our SEO guide provides a step-by-step process for structuring your website through SEO siloing.

Now that your strategy is in place, it’s time to update your content. Review the inventory spreadsheet and identify pages that need updates or new content creation. Assign keywords to each page that align with its theme and optimize the content for search engines and user experience. Use tools like the SEOToolSet Single Page Analyzer to analyze content optimization and ensure keywords are effectively used. Make sure each page accomplishes its intended purpose and has a clear call to action. Consider how pages link to each other to guide users through the site and discover more relevant content.

To manage the content update process, assign priorities to different pages, and set deadlines for completion. This will help you stay organized and ensure timely progress. Additionally, consider testing different versions of your new content to gather insights on performance. Tools like Content Experiments in Google Analytics allow you to serve different page variations to your visitors’ segments and measure each version’s impact.

Ready to transform your clients’ apprehension into social media success? Partner with our SEO team to navigate fears, unlock opportunities, and propel their business to digital greatness. Contact us. 

FAQ: How can I enhance my website’s SEO through a strategic content plan?

Optimizing your website for search engines is crucial to ensuring online success. Strategic content plans can be one of the best ways to boost the search engine optimization of your website and increase its online visibility. Let’s discuss how we can work together on developing one together.

1. Understanding Buyer Intent:

Begin by identifying the buyer intent search terms relevant to your business. What are users searching for when they land on your site? Conduct thorough keyword research to understand your audience’s needs and align your content with those queries.

2. Quality Over Quantity:

Crafting high-quality content is paramount. Google’s algorithms prioritize content that adds value and answers users’ queries. Ensure your content is well-written, relevant, and engaging, providing a meaningful experience for your audience.

3. Strategic Keyword Placement:

Integrate your target keywords strategically. Place them in the title, meta descriptions, headers, and naturally throughout the content. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as it can harm your SEO efforts.

4. Content Variety:

Diversify your content types. Incorporate blog posts, infographics, videos, and other formats to cater to different audience preferences. This keeps your content fresh and appeals to a broader audience.

5. Regular Content Updates:

Search engines favor regularly updated content. Develop a content calendar and consistently update your website with fresh, relevant information. This signals to search engines that your site is active and reliable.

Transitioning smoothly from one aspect to another ensures a comprehensive understanding of how a strategic content plan can significantly impact your SEO efforts.

Step-by-Step Guide: Enhancing SEO through a Strategic Content Plan

1. Identify Buyer Intent: Begin by researching and understanding the specific search terms reflecting user intent for your industry.
2. Quality Content Creation: Develop high-quality, informative content that addresses your audience’s needs and provides real value.
3. Keyword Integration: Strategically incorporate target keywords in titles, meta descriptions, headers, and naturally throughout your content.
4. Content Variety: For maximum reach, diversify your content to reach a wider audience with infographics, blog posts, videos, and more.
5. Maintain Regular Updates: Create a content calendar so your website remains fresh with informational updates.
6. Engage with Your Audience: Encourage user interaction through comments, social media, and other channels to boost engagement signals.
7. Optimize for Mobile: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly; mobile optimization is crucial for SEO.
8. Page Load Speed: Optimize your website’s speed to enhance user experience and satisfy search engine algorithms.
9. Internal Linking: Strategically incorporate internal links to guide users to other relevant content on your site.
10. Backlink Strategy: Develop a backlink strategy using your high-quality content to build authoritative links, enhancing your site’s credibility in the eyes of search engines.

A strategic content plan is the cornerstone of effective SEO. Understanding buyer intent, creating high-quality content, and implementing various strategies can significantly enhance your website’s visibility in search engine results. Keep evolving your content plan to stay ahead in the ever-changing digital marketing landscape.

This article was updated on December 15, 2023.

The post Keep Your Website Fresh with These Strategies for Updating Your Content appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Enter the 2016 Quantitative Local Search Ranking Factors study. This mammoth, data-crunching undertaking to analyze 100+ factors across 30,000 businesses was conducted by Local SEO Guide and Places Scout, all toward the goal of figuring out how local businesses can rank better in Google.

See the official study write-ups:

• Local SEO Guide local search ranking factors report
• Places Scout local search ranking factors report

At Bruce Clay, Inc., we count lawyers and plastic surgeons among our SEO services clients, along with multi-location automotive service chains and national franchise brands. There are unique challenges posed by local SEO. So it was an intellectual joy to talk about the biggest-bang-for-your-buck local search strategies with two of the study co-authors. Many thanks to Dan Leibson (Local SEO Guide VP of local and product) and Mark Kabana (Places Scout CEO and founder).

If you have 25 minutes (and some patience to stomach technical audio difficulties), I’d invite you to watch our discussion. Otherwise, I’ve summed up the highlights below.

Read on for the top three things (and one crucial bonus) you need your teams doing today to get the edge in local search.

1. Get Links

Here’s a chart of the factors analyzed in the study.

What the pros say:

Dan Leibson: That pie chart represents the factors we analyzed and what percent were link factors, website factors, Google My Business (GMB) factors and off-site factors. Those are the core factors that we analyzed in the study.

Mark Kabana: With the data we gathered, 50% of those factors were link factors. The reason we weighed links so heavily is because we’ve always known that links are important. The reason to do a study like this is because, in addition to links, we now have new things like reviews and social, website analysis and other things that are included as part of the study.

The bottom line: Whatever you’re doing right now, stop doing it and try to get a few links.

Top local #SEO tip from @DanLeibson: Stop whatever you’re doing right now and get a few links.
Click To Tweet

Local Link Building Tip!

Meetup.com allows sponsorship of local meetup groups. Find local meetup groups and offer to sponsor them with pizza or a room to have their meetup group. You can often get a link through that.

2. Get Reviews

The #1 most correlated local ranking factor is reviews.

What the pros say:

Mark Kabana: All along, Google has been focused on websites’ popularity. Whoever the coolest kid is in high school, they want to rank them the highest in Google. Back in the day, Google didn’t have a whole lot to work with so it was mainly things like backlinks that would get them to rank you higher.

These days with social being a bigger influence, there’s a lot of different ways to become more popular in the eyes of Google; one of them is more reviews. Your business seems more popular if a lot of people are talking about you.

Reviews may not technically be a backlink, but they may drive other factors such as click-through rates, people spend more time on your site, your bounce rate lowering, things like that might be a secondary factor that increases other primary ranking factors.

Tip for Getting Reviews

Don’t be ashamed to ask for reviews. This is more applicable to small businesses. If you’re a multi-location business, you need to get buy-in for a review program at the corporate level. It’s  really hard to get your locations all invested in that at the same time and it’s something you want to control with the marketing team. Look into GetFiveStars or Grade.us, or any type of review management software.

3. Post Photos and Get User Submitted Photos on GMB

Just below reviews, profile views and a handful of link signals, photos are a top correlated local ranking factor.

What the pros say:

Mark Kabana: The more photos you have, the more people are talking about you and you look cooler to Google. One thing we didn’t analyze is whether those photos came from the business or from a user. We measured the raw photo count from the Google My Business page. The question of whether photos that users share have more impact on rankings than photos that the business shares is something we’re going to look into in our 2017 study.

Dan Leibson: Google wants to focus more on brands and branding — anything that creates a richer user experience.  So for people throughout all types of industries — whether on the content side, the SEO side, the pay per click side, the social side — a robust, richer content drives better user engagement.

SEOs have done experiments showing that more user engagement with the Google My Business page does seem to improve the rankings. So anything you can do on the branding side to make your business look better and make people more willing to engage with it has the potential benefit of improving your ranking.

Bonus To-Do! Verify Your Google My Business Listing

Having an owner-verified Google My Business listing correlated better with strong search performance. So if you’re a small business and there’s nothing you’re doing with Google My Business right now, get verified.

How do these top four local SEO to-dos line up with your experience? Shout out in the comments.

The post 3 Things to Do Today to Get More In-Store Visits from Local Search appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

It turns out that the WordStream founder’s pyramid scheme is a real thing, and it’s not even shady! It’s just a memorably scandalous name for a cutting-edge social media advertising tactic. And he’s letting all of us search and social PPC advertisers in on it.

I had a chance to interview Kim in advance of his social hacks presentation at the SocialPro conference taking place today and tomorrow. We jump right in to his uber-powerful paid social advertising tactics that boast 20% to 40% click-through and engagement rates. (If you want a little background on social advertising first, check out WordStream’s Social Ads 101 guide and then jump back here.)

This interview is 20 minutes of action-packed insight on how to reach your target market through Facebook and Twitter — where the competition is low, the cost is low and the ROI is high, if done right.

Love this interview? Subscribe to this blog for updates from the SMX Advanced conference this week.

Interview Transcript

Virginia: SocialPro is coming up, and you have a solo presentation there on paid social hacks. When I first asked you if you’d chat with me a bit, it was based on conversion hacks you shared at Conversion Conference (read my liveblog coverage of Larry’s 10 CRO hacks here). But you have a whole new set of hacks to share at SocialPro.

Larry: We have a lot of these crazy hacks. We like to try to figure out the secrets.

Virginia: Secrets that you’re willing to share! Every time I hear you speak, I pick up a little bit more. I’m excited to absorb some more of your super powers in social paid advertising today.

Larry: I hope you can make it (to my SocialPro presentation). We’re talking a lot about Facebook and Twitter advertising.

I’m as excited about those two as I was about Google advertising 10 or 15 years ago. It’s so powerful, so transformative, so cheap, there’s not that much competition. It’s pretty remarkable in terms of what you can do compared to how you used to do it, which was not as good.

Virginia: You’ve been talking a lot about unicorns lately. What’s a unicorn ad.

Larry: I use the unicorn analogy in a lot of my content when I talk about CRO or AdWords or SEO. The idea of a unicorn is something really remarkable — like the top one or two percent. My point about these unicorns is they’re so rare and so beautiful, they’re not just a little bit better than everything else, they’re ten or 100 times better than everything else. I want to share some secrets on how to create these unicorns for yourself.

Virginia: At Conversion Conference you said you wrote a program for detecting unicorns. So what’s the formula for creating a unicorn ad?

Larry: WordStream has over 10,000 customers — that’s a good amount of ads that I can scan through programmatically and look for really high click-through rate ads. A couple months ago we did a deep dive on why do some ads have 40% click-through rate as opposed to some ads that have .4% click-through rate? That’s a big difference, like two orders of magnitute, or 100 times difference.

Of the things that stood out among these rare and beautiful unicorn ads, one of them had to do with the keywords. Going after keywords with high commercial intent, as opposed to going after keywords that are very informational in nature.

The other idea was the use of emotional triggers instead of dynamic keyword insertion. Dynamic keyword insertion is very safe. It will get you an above-average ad. But it doesn’t translate to being super remarkable. The ones that were remarkable had emotional triggers like fear or anger or happiness or laughter. They were effective in shocking you or scaring you or exciting you into clicking this thing, even if it ad didn’t include the keyword you were searching for in the headline.

Virginia: In your Conversion Conference presentation you crystallize four voices for ad copy. If you write an ad in the voice of the bearer of bad news, the hero/villain, the comedian or the feel-good friend — give that a try.

Larry: So many companies write ads as though the company is speaking to you. So like, some benefit or feature of the product or services they are offering. A far more effective copywriting technique is to come at it from one of those friend or enemy personas as opposed to the company speaking.

Virginia: You shared a preview of your SocialPro presentation with me. One of the slides is “Larry’s Organic & Paid Social Network Sharing/Posting Pyramid Scheme.” Can you share the pyramid scheme with me?

Larry: The pyramid scheme, it’s totally legal, you won’t get put in jail. It just sounds kind of scheme-y. It has to do with this idea of unicorn detection.

You and I, we both do a lot of blogging. We want to believe that every post we write is a unicorn because we’ve put all our time and effort into it. But in reality, only one or two percent will do really well.

The idea here is, how do you figure out which of your pieces of content are those rare unicorns among the average run-of-the-mill stories. Because in Facebook and Twitter, when you’re (paid) promoting content, you really want to go all-in on your best content, just promoting the ones that have 30 or 40 percent engagement rates because you end up getting tons of free clicks and paying very little for that exposure because people love it so much.

The idea is to audition the content by tweeting it. Tweet out your stories. If something, once in a while, is getting 100 retweets in an hour, then those are probably unicorns, and those are the things that, if they did well organically, will also likely do well in a paid way.

Virginia: A mistake that some companies make is boosting every post they have. You’re saying, use organic posting as the audition, and then find out what your top performers are, and those are the unicorns. Those are the ones you want to blast off into space.

Larry: The worst thing you can do is launch a donkey into space. They can’t withstand the rigors of space travel. You want to go all in on your unicorns. If you have $1000 to spend on posts in a month, and ten posts, the worst thing you can do is equally split the spend among all of your posts. You want to go all-in on you top post and you won’t get just double, you might get ten times the engagement, clicks and conversions.

It’s a bit like the Hunger Games, where they auditioned and had to battle each other out and figure out who will be the victor and only the victor was celebrated in the capitol. So maybe you have ten posts this month. You need to find the victor. Which is the one piece of content that will be promoted and celebrated this month? You have to battle them out in some organic way.

For example, posting them on Twitter, or email marketing — maybe you have email statistics from opens if you’re mailing out your blog posts. This might be an indication that content will do well on social media, because if things do well organically, they tend to also do well in a promoted fashion.

Virginia: It’s a good reminder. We all want to believe that everything we write is great, but we have to be self critical.

Larry: I’ve written over 1600 articles in the last six years. That’s a lot of content. But 50 articles of the 1600 articles produce half the traffic of the million-plus visitors to the WordStream blog. That’s three percent of them producing half the traffic. We’re really looking for those gems. No matter how good you are, I define unicorns on a relative basis. It’s going to be your top 1%. So no matter how good you are, only 1 of 100 is going to be your unicorn.

Virginia: Is this pyramid scheme still viable if you don’t have as many followers as you do. If you’re just starting out or you don’t have much of a following, you might not be able to get as much of a statistical significance.

Larry: What you do is you promote everything with very small budgets, like $5. With $5 on Twitter or Facebook you can get 2,000 or 3,000 ad impressions. That’s a good sample. Even if you have no fans organically, so no means to audition the stuff, you can still audition in a paid way by keeping the budget small. I’d argue that if you have 2,000 impressions and it’s not doing well — you don’t have a 20% or 30% engagement rate, if it’s like half that — then it’s probably not going to make it into outer space. Polling organizations can poll the outcome of a U.S. election based on 1,000 calls or something. Once you have 1,000 or 2,000 people seeing this thing, that’s a pretty good sample size. Very small micro-budgets of testing something out, and then tripling-down on the thing that came up on top.

Virginia: You’ve coined a new term: “super remarketing.” Remarketing is getting content shown again to someone who has been to your site, or been cookied, or are in an audience that you’ve preselected. And earlier in this interview you mentioned that social ads are better than search ads and I’m guessing that one of the reasons you say this is probably super remarketing?

Larry: Yes. This is not an official term, and if you’ve never heard it, it’s because we made it up. But basically why remarket when you can do super remarketing? You probably do remarketing; the conversion rate for these ads is probably 2% to 4% — that’s pretty typical for the industry. That still means that 96% to 98% are not clicking. With super remarketing, rather than remarketing to everyone who visited a certain page or section of your website, you can be more picky.

Instead of remarketing to every one of them, we pick certain behaviors and interests that are aligned with our target buyer. So maybe it’s, we only sell to people who work at Fortune 500 companies. You can actually target for that in Facebook Ads by looking at the size of the company where they’re employed. Or maybe they have certain job titles, like I’m only looking for people who are director and above or college degree education or who are super wealthy or who own a boat or who are leaning left in their political leanings or have an anniversary coming up.

If you can figure out who your target market is — and I hope you would have some idea of who the target market is, otherwise how are you still in business — if you can express that in terms of interests, demographics and behaviors, then overlay those characteristics over the remarketing audience, then that’s very powerful.

You’re not only remarketing to everybody who visited your site, you’re requiring multiple things. You had to A) visit the site and B) have a certain job title or certain interests in certain topics or certain purchasing behavior. By being more picky you can get a lot more yield for a lot smaller spend. You tend to get five times higher click-through rates and conversion rates as opposed to remarketing alone. In online marketing, people get excited about 3% increases or 5% increases, but this is like 300% increase or 500% increase. That’s why I’m calling it super remarketing.

Virginia: As an example of the results that this can yield, can you share a success story. On your own articles you have super remarketed to journalists.

Larry: That’s an example of “super duper remarketing” — it’s a custom list where you know the identity of the people you are trying to target, like if you know their Twitter names or their emails. Then you’re not basing it off of job titles, which is pretty good, but if you absolutely know the ten people or 1,000 people you are looking for, then just upload those names and target those thousands. For one thousand names, the most you could possibly spend is like $10 or $20 because it’s cost per impression and maybe $5 to $10 per thousand impressions.

If you’re targeting this very targeted message to people like journalists if you’re trying to get press coverage, this is a powerful way to get in front of these people and they tend to write about the things that they see.

Virginia: They do, and then you get lots of links, which gives you cross-over SEO value, as well as media mentions, and then you’re a columnist for the Huffington Post.

Larry: We’ve created global news cycles using this technology. Seeding stories to people at CNN and Fox Business, we’ve created global news stories with ten thousand or more press pick-ups, internationalized into 27 languages just by spending these very small remarketing budgets towards targeted lists. It’s pretty powerful stuff. You should look into it.

For Larry’s presentation and more decks from SocialPro, keep an eye out on Marketing Land’s SlideShare tag SocialPro.

If you liked this, there’s lots more great digital marketing content where this came from! Subscribe to our blog for updates from the SMX Advanced conference this week and interviews with top experts in digital marketing year-round.

The post VIDEO: WordStream’s Larry Kim on Paid Social ‘Super Remarketing’ — #SocialPro Interview appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• Chris Mercer runs an interactive agency SeriouslySimpleMarketing
• Krista Seiden works in-house at Google
• Alex Harris is a CRO consultant

What are the skills a CRO needs to work with you or be you?

Alex: Being a CRO consultant requires thick skin to get clients, getting results and keeping cash flow. You learn a lot. The ability to manage projects, manage PNL, and to find contractors to accomplish that. What’s specific to CRO consultant? To streamline your time to get the best results possible. Thinking about the clients and customers to get the best results possible. Much higher pressure on results.

What do you look at in a CRO as an employee?

Chris: It comes down to a UI systems person. There are CROs that are backend and CROs that are client facing. The back end CROs are very process focused, and comfortable with a system managing you. The front-end is a data-driven sales person, like a sales engineer. You have to constantly sell clients on waiting to call the test, and other coddling. A sales person who is data driven is pretty rare. It’s equivalent of finding a developer who understands marketing. If you’re that person, write your own ticket.

Krista: Someone who’s really going to dive into the analytics and find golden nuggets.

What’s the most effective way to become a contributor as an entry-level CRO?

Alex: Make mistakes early. Have mentors around you that can help you learn. Be in an organization that has some risk tolerance.

Chris: They hire people as marketing manager assistants and give a foundation for how to explain starting from the data. It’s important to soak in the data at first and then coming up that will be ingrained.

Krista: If you’re just starting out in CRO because it’s becoming part of your job, there’s a good chance that your organization doesn’t have a full-time dedicated CRO person. When she started a new job, she had to be the enthusiastic advocate for doing CRO.

Tim: If you’re not passionate about it, if you don’t really want to help visitors to your website have a less painful experience, you shouldn’t be in CRO.

How do you manage CROs?

Krista: Teams that she’s worked with can struggle to find the meaningful tests. Things she challenges CROs to do is dive into the data and ask the hard questions.

Chris: It’s about building a system that manages them and they have a hand in that so the management gets buy in. Testing velocity is a metric that can be objectively tested and gives the CRO a system to manage themselves.

Krista: An initiative to have 100 tests in the quarter caused a lot of poor quality tests going out.

Tim: What gets measured gets done. People will adjust to the penalty-reward system you put in front of them. An award to the highest test velocity doesn’t account for business outcomes. The focus should be on the quality and not the quantity of the test. More experienced manager will focus on managing systems and processes, not people.

Alex: He’s turned designers into CROs, analysts into CROs, and he challenges them to take a decision to its next step — owning the test, presenting to the client, and getting mentorship and guidance from Alex along the way. Young talent tends to play it safe and he pushes people to try new things. Encourage risk-taking as a manger.

What’s the biggest challenge you face if you’re a full-time CRO?

Alex: Time management. Start with where you’re going to make the most money and then work back from there. It’s about prioritization.

Chris: It’s hard to grow the agency. As we grow the company, some structure has to be left behind so someone can come in and take their place as others move up. Asking questions like how do you know what you know? It’s frameworks, checklists – extracting their knowledge and formulating it.

Where should CRO ideally live in a company, or to whom does it report?

Alex: An early startup he was in didn’t know where CRO went in the organization. Ultimately they built an acquisition team that held CRO.

Tim: You could put it under analytics, under product development, under IT … these are difficult.

Krista: She’s seen it under product, under research. In large companies, she’s seen it best effective aligned with analytics under marketing.

Chris: The Make More Money department.

Tim: At SiteTuners they make organizations more mature on CRO. Customer experience, measurement, tools and technology, process and culture, and skills and structure. At the advanced model, it’s reporting to the very top of marketing, the CMO. Not part of the team that touches the web experience. The most dynamic companies have a team reporting to the CMO, and every other part of the company ask them to break, re-break, fix and then give it back. Not part of the team that touches the web experience.

Krista: She thinks that Tim’s point about not having CRO as part of the team that touches the web experience keeps the team from being invested.

Tim: The problem at the website experience level is that you’re invested in incremental tinkering improvements rather than at the strategic level.

Advice for pricing your services?

Alex: Move to a retainer model. Get the customer the best results possible in a month time. Start small and then every client you get, raise your price.

Chris: If you want to grow and add to your staff, you need to charge more than you think you need to. Add some skin in the game clause – as I increase your revenue, dear client, then I can earn from that as bonus based on performance. This is good for small businesses where you’re dealing with the principles.

Tim: This doesn’t work for big businesses because the contract negotiations get caught up on that clause and you lose time when you could be getting more work.

Alex: You can also start with packages of tests, like one to three tests to get started.

Tim: Goes into retainer after some consultation analysis. Then they have two packages, the high gas package and the minimum required for results.

Effective CRO for Particular Roles

Tim is going to name off job roles and the panel will share their biggest challenge to being an effective CRO.

Copywriter

Alex: Be persuasive using data – be direct response focused.

Krista: Not being too tied to a perfect message crafted in your head but tie back to what the data tells you.

Chris: There are more research-driven copywriters.

User Experience Engineer

Krista: mindset for beautiful design will be their biggest hurdle

Chris: understanding purpose-driven design will be their biggest hurdle

Psychologist

Chris: Over-complicating will be the weakness. It goes back to Mona Patel’s BS excuse persona of the Scaffolder. (Read the liveblog coverage of Patel’s keynote).

Alex: When you’re defining the user journey you focus on understanding the psych for user personas, but may overlook the design aspect.

Mathematician or Statistician

Alex: You may look at the numbers but how do you understand it holistically, melding the qualitative and quantitative. And they may not have the business knowledge to understand how an optimization will affect the business.

Krista: She sat on the core team for the Optimize 360 product. A statistician on the team was very vocal about how the test reports would look and the data provided to the user. But she doesn’t think the user needs to see too many details. They wanted to pair it down to the key reports.

Tim: Sometimes the numbers lie. Running a test where environmental factors can skew the data. What’s missing is the context of the numbers — the business context.

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You’re tuned in to Conversion Conference 2016 and a presentation by Michael Aagaard of Unbounce. He loves that quote by Einstein because it relates to CRO. The story he’s going to tell today is about how we can change our mindset to just straight testing and broadening it to understanding the problem.

He starts us off viewing a landing page with lead capture form. Being a conversion optimizer, he wanted to optimize the page. He removed three of the fields on what he’d call a monster form. The result was 14% lower conversions. Ouch! So next he went looking at where the drop off occurs on the form. He found which form fields had low interaction and high drop-off and addressed them by rearranging the order of the fields (putting ones that were a low commitment higher up) and tweaked label copy.

This time they got 19% increase in conversions.

The question: why didn’t he do the research right away and why did who jump to best practices?

It’s very difficult to understand a problem that you don’t understand. Vice versa, it’s easy to solve a problem when you understand it.

He asked other conversion optimizers what keeps them from doing conversion research:

• Time
• Client/Company Buy-in
• Budget
• Not knowing where to start

Split testing is not an excuse to skip your homework.

6 Things You Can Do Right Away

… to conduct better research, better hypotheses, get better results.

1. Manual step-drop analysis with Google Analytics.

Same with ecommerce.

There’s a custom report in GA that he wrote and we might be able to get it later.

2. Run feedback polls on critical pages.

There’s a conflict in CROs.

1. Get more data
2. Don’t bother users

For everyday ninja analysis, feedback polls are cool, unobtrusive, and you just ask one questions. But you can do them wrong. A question like “did you find what you were looking for today” and then a scale of 1 to 10 is bad. Start with the question “what were you looking for” and then “did you find it.” What does it mean if 50% of people choose 4? That data is useless.

His tip is to lower the perceived time investment of filling out the poll with clever formatting.

The person will click on “yes” or “no” and then the form will change to let them type in the reason why.

3. Conduct interviews with sales and support.

These are the questions to ask them:

• What are the top three questions from potential customers?
• How do you answer when you get these questions?
• Are there any particular aspects of ______ that people don’t understand?
• What aspects of ______ do people like the most/least?
• Did I miss anything important? Got something to add?

4. Perform 5-second tests.

Here’s the tool: http://fivesecondtest.com/. You give a user a screenshot to view for five seconds and then ask, “What do you think this page was about?” He showed users an Unbounce page with an employee of theirs on the page. Yes, we think people on pages is good for conversions. But when they showed that page to five-second testers, no one knew what the page was about, and some even said they were distracted by the image.

5. Calculate your sample size and test duration.

Before you can call a test trustworthy, you need statistical significance. There’s a very fascinating set of calculations he does. Look for a simple size and test duration calculator. Unbounce.com has one A/B Test Duration & Sample Size Calculator.

6. Formulate a data-driven test hypothesis.

You need to know some things before you can make a hypothesis:

• Why do we think we need to make a change?
• What is it that we want to change?
• What impact do we expect to see?
• How will we measure this impact?
• When do we expect to see results?

Here’s a mad-libs style hypothesis exercise you can fill out for your hypothesis:

Because ________, we expect that ________ will cause ________. We’ll measure this using ________. We expect to see reliable results in ________.

It’s all about seeing through the eyes of your users. Data driven empathy is what it’s about. He gives credit to Andy Crestodina, sitting behind me, for that phrase.

The reasons that you have to do conversion research:

1. Time
2. Client/company buy-in
3. Budget
4. Don’t know where to start

Final Thought

Be like Einstein: prioritize understanding the problem before you start your testing. Always be aware of bias and be critical of data (you can make it say whatever you want if you torture it enough). Also, split testing is only a tool.

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