Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Erik Fisher, Kim Reynolds, and Jeff Sieh, we explore Facebook Publisher changes, YouTube Breaking News, Facebook Camera updates,
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
What are the factors Google considers when weighing whether a page is high or low quality, and how can you identify those pages yourself? There's a laundry list of things to examine to determine which pages make the grade and which don't, from searcher behavior to page load times to spelling mistakes. Rand covers it all in this episode of Whiteboard Friday.
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Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to figure out if Google thinks a page on a website is potentially low quality and if that could lead us to some optimization options.
So as we've talked about previously here on Whiteboard Friday, and I'm sure many of you have been following along with experiments that Britney Muller from Moz has been conducting about removing low-quality pages, you saw Roy Hinkis from SimilarWeb talk about how they had removed low-quality pages from their site and seen an increase in rankings on a bunch of stuff. So many people have been trying this tactic. The challenge is figuring out which pages are actually low quality. What does that constitute?
This is an intriguing one. So if someone performs a search, let's say here I type in a search on Google for "pressure washing." I'll just write "pressure wash." This page comes up. Someone clicks on that page, and they stay here and maybe they do go back to Google, but then they perform a completely different search, or they go to a different task, they visit a different website, they go back to their email, whatever it is. That tells Google, great, this page solved the query.
If instead someone searches for this and they go, they perform the search, they click on a link, and they get a low-quality mumbo-jumbo page and they click back and they choose a different result instead, that tells Google that page did not successfully answer that searcher's query. If this happens a lot, Google calls this activity pogo-sticking, where you visit this one, it didn't answer your query, so you go visit another one that does. It's very likely that this result will be moved down and be perceived as low quality in Google.
This is not an exhaustive list. But these are some of the things that can tell Google high quality versus low quality and start to get them filtering things.
How can SEOs & marketers filter pages on sites to ID high vs. low quality?As a marketer, as an SEO, there's a process that we can use. We don't have access to every single one of these components that Google can measure, but we can look at some things that will help us determine this is high quality, this is low quality, maybe I should try deleting or removing this from my site or recreating it if it is low quality.
In general, I'm going to urge you NOT to use things like:
A. Time on site, raw time on site
B. Raw bounce rate
C. Organic visits
D. Assisted conversions
Why not? Because by themselves, all of these can be misleading signals.
So a long time on your website could be because someone's very engaged with your content. It could also be because someone is immensely frustrated and they cannot find what they need. So they're going to return to the search result and click something else that quickly answers their query in an accessible fashion. Maybe you have lots of pop-ups and they have to click close on them and it's hard to find the x-button and they have to scroll down far in your content. So they're very unhappy with your result.
Bounce rate works similarly. A high bounce rate could be a fine thing if you're answering a very simple query or if the next step is to go somewhere else or if there is no next step. If I'm just trying to get, "Hey, I need some pressure washing tips for this kind of treated wood, and I need to know whether I'll remove the treatment if I pressure wash the wood at this level of pressure," and it turns out no, I'm good. Great. Thank you. I'm all done. I don't need to visit your website anymore. My bounce rate was very, very high. Maybe you have a bounce rate in the 80s or 90s percent, but you've answered the searcher's query. You've done what Google wants. So bounce rate by itself, bad metric.
Same with organic visits. You could have a page that is relatively low quality that receives a good amount of organic traffic for one reason or another, and that could be because it's still ranking for something or because it ranks for a bunch of long tail stuff, but it is disappointing searchers. This one is a little bit better in the longer term. If you look at this over the course of weeks or months as opposed to just days, you can generally get a better sense, but still, by itself, I don't love it.
Assisted conversions is a great example. This page might not convert anyone. It may be an opportunity to drop cookies. It might be an opportunity to remarket or retarget to someone or get them to sign up for an email list, but it may not convert directly into whatever goal conversions you've got. That doesn't mean it's low-quality content.
THESE can be a good start:So what I'm going to urge you to do is think of these as a combination of metrics. Any time you're analyzing for low versus high quality, have a combination of metrics approach that you're applying.
1. That could be a combination of engagement metrics. I'm going to look at...
2. You can combine some offsite metrics. So things like...
3. Search engine metrics. You can look at...
4. You are almost definitely going to want to do an actual hand review of a handful of pages.
Make 3 buckets:
Using these combinations of metrics, you can build some buckets. You can do this in a pretty easy way by exporting all your URLs. You could use something like Screaming Frog or Moz's crawler or DeepCrawl, and you can export all your pages into a spreadsheet with metrics like these, and then you can start to sort and filter. You can create some sort of algorithm, some combination of the metrics that you determine is pretty good at ID'ing things, and you double-check that with your hand review. I'm going to urge you to put them into three kinds of buckets.
I. High importance. So high importance, high-quality content, you're going to keep that stuff.
II. Needs work. second is actually stuff that needs work but is still good enough to stay in the search engines. It's not awful. It's not harming your brand, and it's certainly not what search engines would call low quality and be penalizing you for. It's just not living up to your expectations or your hopes. That means you can republish it or work on it and improve it.
III. Low quality. It really doesn't meet the standards that you've got here, but don't just delete them outright. Do some testing. Take a sample set of the worst junk that you put in the low bucket, remove it from your site, make sure you keep a copy, and see if by removing a few hundred or a few thousand of those pages, you see an increase in crawl budget and indexation and rankings and search traffic. If so, you can start to be more or less judicious and more liberal with what you're cutting out of that low-quality bucket and a lot of times see some great results from Google.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Are you struggling with writing tweets that get clicks back to your content? It can be a challenge – trust me, I know.
But driving traffic is often the number one goal of businesses using Twitter for business, and rightly so. After all, Twitter is designed for people who are looking for information.
In fact, Twitter’s CMO, Leslie Berland, recently put it best in a speech at CES 2017 in an attempt to demystify the purpose of the platform. She said, “Twitter is the place to see what’s happening.” Hell, it’s even right there when you go to compose a tweet!
Unlike other social media platforms, Twitter’s main purpose and benefit is not to connect online with people you already know.
On those other platforms (think Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat), most messages from businesses are an interruption to the social experience.
Panera Bread wants to be a comfortable place for their customers to gather. Their stores have been designed to invite and welcome customers to enjoy relaxing, conversation, reading; all in a casual atmosphere.
Panera has built a successful business based on providing an experience that was aligned with their mission; until it wasn’t. The brand discovered the in-store experience was no longer relaxing. Customers were lined up waiting for orders, often there were long lines waiting to order. Success can breed complacency. Unless a brand adopts a disrupting mindset, they may realize the need for change too late.
I’ll use the Panera Bread case study as an example of a brand that identified significant challenges that threatened their growth, maybe their existence, and took steps to disrupt themselves. I’ll also offer some practical insights and questions for you to consider. Panera 2.0 was a significant initiative designed to bring the customer experience back into alignment with their mission.
Want to create a sales video that converts? Looking for expert tips about building rapport with your prospects? To explore how to sell with video on YouTube and Facebook, I interview Jeremy Vest. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by SimonPenson
PrefaceThis post serves a dual purpose: it's a practical guide to the realities of preparing for voice right now, but equally it's a rallying call to ensure our industry has a full understanding of just how big, disruptive, and transformational it will be — and that, as a result, we need to stand ready.
My view is that voice is not just an add-on, but an entirely new way of interacting with the machines that add value to our lives. It is the next big era of computing.
Brands and agencies alike need to be at the forefront of that revolution. For my part, that begins with investing in the creation of a voice team.
Let me explain just how we plan to do that, and why it’s being actioned earlier than many will think necessary….
Jump to a section:Why is voice so important?
When is it coming in a big way?
Who are the big players?
Where do voice assistants get their data from?
How do I shape my strategy and tactics to get involved?
What skill sets do I need in a "voice team?"
"The times, they are a-changing."
– Bob Dylan
Back in 1964, that revered folk-and-blues singer could never have imagined just what that would mean in the 21st century.
As we head into 2018, we're nearing a voice interface-inspired inflection point the likes of which we haven't seen before. And if the world’s most respected futurist is to be believed, it’s only just beginning.
Talk to Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Chief Engineer and the man Bill Gates says is the "best person to predict the future," and he’ll tell you that we are entering a period of huge technological change.
For those working across search and many other areas of digital marketing, change is not uncommon. Seismic events, such as the initial roll out of Panda and Penguin, reminded those inside it just how painful it is to be unprepared for the future.
At best, it tips everything upside down. At worst, it kills those agencies or businesses stuck behind the curve.
It’s for exactly this reason that I felt compelled to write a post all about why I'm building a voice team at Zazzle Media, the agency I founded here in the UK, as stats from BrightEdge reveal that 62% of marketers still have no plans whatsoever to prepare for the coming age of voice.
I’m also here to argue that while the growth traditional search agencies saw through the early 2000s is over, similar levels of expansion are up for grabs again for those able to seamlessly integrate voice strategies into an offering focused on the client or customer.
Winter is coming!Based on our current understanding of technological progress, it's easy to rest on our laurels. Voice interface adoption is still in its very early stages. Moore’s Law draws a (relatively) linear line through technological advancement, giving us time to take our positions — but that era is now behind us.
According to Kurzweil’s thesis on the growth of technology (the Law of Accelerating Returns),
"we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years."
Put another way, he explains that technology does not progress in a linear way. Instead, it progresses exponentially.
"30 steps linearly get you to 30. One, two, three, four, step 30 you're at 30. With exponential growth, it's one, two, four, eight. Step 30, you're at a billion," he explained in a recent Financial Times interview.
In other words, we're going to see new tech landing and gaining traction faster than we ever realized it possible, as this chart proves:
Above, Kurzweil illustrates how we’ll be able to produce computational power as powerful as a human brain by 2023. By 2037 we’ll be able to do it for less than a one-cent cost. Just 15 years later computers will be more powerful than the entire human race as a whole. Powerful stuff — and proof of the need for action as voice and the wider AI paradigm takes hold.
VoiceSo, what does that mean right now? While many believe voice is still a long ways off, one point of view says it's already here — and those fast enough to grab the opportunity will grow exponentially with it. Indeed, Google itself says more than 20% of all searches are already voice-led, and will reach 50% by 2020.
Let’s first deal with understanding the processes required before then moving onto the expertise to make it happen.
What do we need to know?We’ll start with some assumptions. If you are reading this post, you already have a good understanding of the basics of voice technology. Competitors are joining the race every day, but right now the key players are:
And (major assistants) coming soon:
All of these exist to allow consumers the ability to retrieve information without having to touch a screen or type anything.
That has major ramifications for those who rely on traditional typed search and a plethora of other arenas, such as the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT).
In short, voice allows us to access everything from our personal diaries and shopping lists to answers to our latest questions and even to switch our lights off.
Why now?Apart from the tidal wave of tech now supporting voice, there is another key reason for investing in voice now — and it's all to do with the pace at which voice is actually improving.
In a recent Internet usage study by KPCB, Andrew NG, chief scientist at Chinese search engine Baidu, was asked what it was going to take to push voice out of the shadows and into its place as the primary interface for computing.
His point was that at present, voice is "only 90% accurate" and therefore the results are sometimes a little disappointing. This slows uptake.
But he sees that changing soon, explaining that "As speech recognition accuracy goes from, say, 95% to 99%, all of us in the room will go from barely using it today to using it all the time. Most people underestimate the difference between 95% and 99% accuracy — 99% is a game changer... “
When will that happen? In the chart below we see Google’s view on this question, predicting we will be there in 2018!
It is also important to point out that voice is an additional interface and will not replace any of those that have gone before it. We only need to look back at history to see how print, radio, and TV continue to play a part in our lives alongside the latest information interfaces.
Moz founder Rand Fishkin made this point in a recent WBF, explaining that while voice search volumes may well overtake typed terms, the demand for traditional SERP results and typed results will continue to grow also, simply because of the growing use of search.
The key will be creating a channel strategy as well as a method for researching both voice and typed opportunity as part of your overall process.
What’s different?The key difference when considering voice opportunity is to think about the conversational nature that the interface allows. For years we've been used to having to type more succinctly in order to get answers quickly, but voice does away with that requirement.
Instead, we are presented with an opportunity to ask, find, and discover the things we want and need using natural language.
This means that we will naturally lengthen the phrases we use to find the stuff we want — and early studies support this assumption.
In a study by Microsoft and covered by the brilliant Purna Virji in this Moz post from last year, we can see a clear distinction between typed and voice search phrase length, even at this early stage of conversational search. Expect this to grow as we get used to interacting with voice.
The evidence suggests that will happen fast too. Google’s own data shows us that 55% of teens and 40% of adults use voice search daily. Below is what they use it for:
While it is easy to believe that voice only extends to search, it's important to remember that the opportunity is actually much wider. Below we can see results from a major 2016 Internet usage study into how voice is being used:
Clearly, the lion's share is related to search and information retrieval, with more than 50% of actions relating to finding something local to go/see/do (usually on mobile) or using voice as an interface to search.
But an area sure to grow is the leisure/entertainment sector. More on that later.
The key question remains: How exactly do you tap into this growing demand? How do you become the choice answer above all those you compete with?
With such a vast array of devices, the answer is a multi-faceted one.
Where is the data coming from?To answer the questions above, we must first understand where the information is being accessed from and the answer, predictably, is not a simple one. Understanding it, however, is critical if you are to build a world-class voice marketing strategy.
To make life a little easier, I’ve created an at-a-glance cheat sheet to guide you through the process. You can download it by clicking on the banner below.
In 2014, Mark Schaefer sent shudders through the marketing landscape with a theory called “content shock”. His concept is as simple as it is scary:
As more and more brands create more and more content, audiences already glued to smartphones, computers and TVs will literally reach peak content consumption levels.
Schaefer’s forecast has indeed come true. Content marketing is now a zero-sum game, making everyone—including Netflix, your target audience’s friends and family, and the latest podcast—a competitor. Every second your target audience spends on someone else’s content makes yours less valuable, and there’s data to back this up.
“Brands might be shocked to hear that while branded content creation is up 300 percent year over year, consumer engagement with that content is totally flat,” Beckon CEO Jennifer Zeszut told VentureBeat in 2016. “[Brands are] investing a lot in content creation, and it’s not driving more consumer engagement.”
Don’t panic. This is not a death knell for content; it’s proof that success will come if you evolve with the content marketing landscape. Zeszut illustrates this herself, saying research shows that five percent of brand content accounts for 90 percent of engagement.
This is more than a glimmer of hope. In fact, if examined through the right lens, it’s evidence that your content could become even more valuable to your brand’s marketing strategy. But how can you focus on creating only that five percent of ultra-valuable content 100 percent of the time? Data.
It’s a one-word answer, but the implementation is quite a bit more complex. Publishing winning content piece after winning content piece requires the right tools and the construction of a data-driven content team, one that understands past performance, emerging trends, and ripe opportunities within your industry. The good news? Most brands already have many of the pieces. Here’s what to do with them.
5% of brand content accounts for 90% of engagement – Jennifer Zeszut
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Start with Your Content Strategy
The first two steps of building a data-driven content team start with your content strategy:
Your content team and your content strategy should hold both business objectives and metrics above all else—including creativity. Because creativity without business results equals failure.
If business objectives and metrics are not at the core of your content strategy, it might be worth brushing up on the seven essential steps of content strategy. With business objectives and metrics as your pillars for success, you are now ready to source the data you need to show what is working and what is not.
Identify Data SourcesYour organization may have more data sources than you realize. Individually, they hold value, but companies that create synergies of knowledge from them have a better understanding of their target audience’s needs, the content that impacts bottom lines, and emerging trends that competitors have not yet recognized.
Hopefully, your team already benefits from web analysis insights. If not, become best friends with your Google Analytics/Adobe Analytics (formerly Adobe Omniture) experts. Go buy them pizza and discuss how you can support each other’s needs. For each metric you need, identify the proper team or people who can source them. You may have to poke your head into many different departments to get this information, including finance, customer support, and sales support.
Disclaimer: Though this article focuses on quantitative data, qualitative data can provide insights, too. For example, marketers can create better content by speaking with customer service, sales, and social media managers about what they see and hear in their personal interactions with customers and prospects. But, before acting on qualitative data, align your quantitative data with it to ensure what you’re hearing are issues customers actually have, and not issues you think they should have.
Coordinate with Key PersonnelCreating a data-driven culture can start anywhere in an organization, but C-suite buy-in is essential to bringing the necessary pieces together. After identifying your data sources, take the conversation to your CMO to ensure that she understands the ask you’re making of colleagues outside your department, and to request she have a conversation with other higher-ups who would otherwise hear grumbles and come to the defense of their employees. Remember, their employees will now provide you analysis on top of their day-to-day duties.
In these conversations, be careful to relate your efforts to the company’s overall goals, not just those of marketing. How would you feel if IT requested you not put in tickets late in the afternoon so they could juice their stats?
The conversations you have, and those you inspire the C-suite to have, may greatly impact other departments. A greater need for analysis could tip the scales to hire that new analyst a department has needed. It also helps cement analysts into the day-to-day of the company, giving them greater insights into their own data across different aspects of the customer’s journey.
Get Buy-In from AnalystsThe people who hold the keys to your organization’s array of data sources likely get so focused in their day-to-day duties that they don’t see how the information they bury themselves in could be of value to others. It’s not intentional; people just tend to focus on what they need to meet their deadlines, exceed their goals, and make their bosses happy.
That attitude may sound tough to breach, but getting buy-in is possible if you’re open and collaborative. Here are three keys to getting this buy-in:
Through these three actions, you’re essentially showing the analysts and your entire department that you aspire to create a data-driven content marketing culture to push the company towards its C-level goals—the ones tied to profits and company growth.
Utilize Insights, Rather Than Pay Them Lip-ServiceEstablishing business objectives and key metrics is essential, but your content team also needs to heed these insights and build strategies based on them. If your analysts provide data that points to doing A, don’t turn your backs on it to do B. That move, as well-intentioned and reasoned as it may be, will breed distrust and resentment and could sink your data-driven intentions before they have a chance to deliver results.
As you move forward, stay positive, and do not punish failure or point fingers at the people helping you. Work in concert with your colleagues to understand what went wrong and how to improve. If you followed the data and it didn’t work, revisit the topic and respectfully ask the analysts for their take. The collaborative process that takes place in success and in failure will bring your teams together.
Acquire and Use the Right ToolsWith organization-wide buy-in and a coordination plan, your analysts can now do the heavy lifting: identifying and pulling the proper data and metrics that showcase opportunity and content performance, as well as establishing the pathways to be able to do this.
For example, your analyst may pull in leads from a marketing automation system (MAS) that is also tied to a CRM. In this case, your data needs to flow back and forth from the MAS to the CRM and still link back to article performance. This may require more time on their part, so it reinforces the importance of identifying the business impact of your content efforts up front.
On the creative marketing side, content intelligence platforms like Ceralytics will help your team identify existing gaps in your coverage, the topics that differentiate your brand from others, insights into how your competition approaches content marketing, and the types of content and topics that result in increases of brand awareness, engagement, and conversions.
Meet Regularly, and Let Metrics Show Your SuccessWeekly meetings help keep the content team up-to-date with the performance of existing campaigns. Focus the meetings on the metrics of success that tie back to business objectives. Did a particular piece of content outperform expectations? Discuss why, and what iterations of that content could be created next. Did something under-perform? Dig into the specifics: Was it hitting the wrong channels, or was the topic just not something people in the industry care about?
Also, use these meetings to discuss where a particular business objective may be falling short, and brainstorm new ideas on how to fill those gaps. If customer retention is falling, a data-driven content team can identify that trend at the same time as sales, and can proactively come to sales managers with potential solutions.
Turn Insights into ActionNow it’s time for your content team to turn these ones and zeros into something creative, something that will drive results for your brand. Of course, that’s no easy task, but at least your data-driven content team, along with the rest of the organization all the way up to the C-suite, will know you have a strategy pushing your brand in the right direction.
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