The Most Overlooked SEO Factor You’ve Probably Been Neglecting

SEO isn’t very technical.

But it becomes technical because so many marketers and content creators are using the latest “hack” to increase their rankings. The more information there is, the more differing opinions you hear, the more complicated it becomes.

But at the end of the day, it boils down to a couple things:

• Getting backlinks to your site
• Satisfying users

The more quality sites you have pointing to yours, the more credible Google will view your site. Backlinks maybe aren’t as important as they once were, but they’re still valuable.

This blog post will cover #2. You need to satisfy users. That covers a lot of things, but there’s one that’s often overlooked.

So here’s the best, most overlooked SEO that I can give you.

Drumroll please…

Make sure users don’t go back to the search page

What do I mean by that? Here it is in practice:

For this search, the second site I visited is viewed as more valuable by Google because I didn’t go back to the SERP to find a better site.

Rand Fishkin refers to this as pogo-sticking. He says:

For every search result, there’s some different pogo-sticking rate. But great pages and sites tend to have the trait that they’ve got really low pogo-sticking rates….That means that a searcher is made happy, and they’re not coming back and doing other searches and clicking other results. Sometimes this might be okay. Maybe there are some sorts of searches where Google says, “Oh, lots of people do click multiple times, and lots of people do bounce back and forth and it’s fine.” But for the vast majority of searches this is really important to get right.

While you will likely have to stay on the first website for a few moments, if Google notices that you go back to the SERP and click on another site and don’t go back, that means that that site was more useful for you.

People search Google for a reason. They either want to find a website (i.e. branded searches) or they have a question that needs to be answered. That’s Google’s job. They answer questions for people.

People are becoming increasingly used to asking a machine a question and getting an answer. Siri, Alexa, and Google Home provide answers for people. They don’t even need to search to find answers.

You know why Wikipedia ranks so well? Because each article has thousands of words, and it answers the question that the searcher was looking for. And it’s continuously updated with new information.

It continues to rank well because people know that Wikipedia has lots of great information, so it becomes a preferred result of many searchers. They’ll seek out Wikipedia over other sites.

This comes down to answering questions and satisfying users.

Making users never want to click the back button

That’s your goal. To make sure a user who visits your site from a search never thinks about clicking the back button.

So, how do you do that?

Well, for branded searches it’s pretty easy. If someone searches for your company name, your company will be the 1st result and they’ll visit your site. The question is answered; there isn’t a worry about them clicking the back button.

If you have a blog or any online publication it becomes much more difficult. Those 9 other sites on the SERP are your competition, and they think that they can deliver a better answer to users.

Here are some examples of well-ranked sites that answer users questions without getting in the way.

Rotten Tomatoes

If you want to know if critics and an audience liked a movie, you go to Rotten Tomatoes. There isn’t any other place that can consistently answer that question.

I’ve heard the movie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri is good. So, I Googled it:

Was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri Good?

Rotten Tomatoes was the first result. I clicked and they gave me an answer:

My question is answered – looks like it’s a good movie!

My question is answered – looks like it’s a good movie!

Putting this information at the top of the page with the yellow background helps visitors find the information they need quickly. There no need to scroll through a long page to find the answer.

Yahoo! Answers

Is Yahoo Answers a bit stale?

Yes.

But it continues to ranks well because it answers users questions.

Let’s try a query. Recently I had a “knocking” noise coming from my refrigerator. So, hesitant to call a repairman, I decided to Google it:

what is causing knocking noise in my refrigerator?

Yahoo Answers was one of the first results. I clicked on the result, and they delivered the answer:

A simple answer that makes sense. Thanks, Yahoo Answers.

Check out when that question was answered. A decade ago! Yet it’s still a favorite result from searchers.

You can remember hundreds or thousands of times where you’ve searched for something and wound up finding your answer on Yahoo Answers.

The only issue Yahoo! Answers has is that it isn’t authoritative. For example, an unqualified person can answer a medical question and if it’s rated as the answer then that is what users will see. It becomes Google’s job to put these results much lower than they would have been and place a site like Mayo Clinic higher, which they (usually) do.

wikiHow

Just think of how many times you’ve had to Google something that starts with…”how to…”

The brillance of wikiHow is that they set out to answer every question that begins with “how to…” and they do a good job of it.

I recently had to put a suit on that came with cufflinks. In a moment of embarrassment, I didn’t know exactly how to put cufflinks on. I didn’t want to look like a fool and ask one of my buddies to help me put my cufflinks on.

So I Googled it and landed on Wikihow. And they provided me with this wonderful answer (with pictures):

Who is going to click the back button when they get the best answer here?

Think about how much time that took someone to write that article. They started with a blank page and wrote detailed step-by-step instructions that were crisp and to the point. Then they added pictures and gifs to help the visual learners. It probably took at least a few hours, but now they outrank everyone, including YouTube.

Tips to help you

So how do you create content that satisfies users? Here are a few of my tips:

Make it Easy For The People That Scan

Most people won’t read your entire article when they are looking for an answer to a simple question. They’ll scan and find their answer and move on. You need to help these “scanners” find their answer. It starts with putting the answers and important parts in the headers.

KISSmetrics has a blog post that discusses the best time to send a newsletter. People that are coming to that page are looking for an answer. So the answers are placed in the headers:

Take a look at the blog post to see the full list of tips. If you were coming from google looking for the best time to send a newsletter, you’d quickly find your answer. Why would you hit the back button?

If you have a blog post like this, then you should put the answers in the headers.

Use lightboxes and bold words to emphasize

You can also bold words and use large font to highlight the parts you want to get across.

This blog post from CoSchedule uses an unobtrusive box to show readers their tips:

This post fits well with the overall design of the blog post. I recommend you follow a similar template.

Dummies.com puts tips in a box as well, making it easy to find the most important information:

Quora is a great Q&A platform, but sometimes people don’t want to search through dozens of answers on Quora in order to get their answer.

So Quora has an “Answer Wiki”:

Here are all the answers from the Quora community, organized into one section. Is there a better travel hacks page on the web? All the information you’ll need is on one page.

Provide summaries

Often times people searching just want a quick answer. They don’t want to read a 3000-word article to answer their question. This is why summaries placed at the top of your article can be helpful.

Examine.com answers a common question at the top of the page:

There’s your answer. No searching a web page or hitting Command + F to find an answer. It sits right at the top, immediately below the question. If I wanted more information, I’d scroll and read the entire article.

In a similar fashion, ScienceDaily puts a summary at the top of each article:

Business Insider is reducing news stories to bullet points:

You can also place the bullet points at the bottom of the article.

It’s important to remember that word count and detailed articles still matter. Yes, Business Insider uses bullet points, but they also have an entire news article.

Don’t skimp on quality or use bullet points because it’s easier for you. It’s about making it easier for visitors. Again, it’s about satisfying users. They won’t click pogo-stick (hit the back button) and they’ll be sure to visit your site again.

Use Videos and GIFs for Instructional Content

If your content contains a lot of how-tos and tactical information, it may be useful to spend some time creating videos. I’ve done that with Quicksprout University:

The university has hundreds of videos, along with the transcript of each video.

When a visitor lands on this page, they know what to do. Watch the video, read the description, and the transcript can help them reference certain parts of the video.

Mechanics of Sport contains great how-to content for learning how to ski and snowboard. Just check out their page and video for instructions on putting skis on:

There are four sections to this page:

• Setting Yourself Up
• Putting the Skis On
• Putting Skis On Animation
• Common Mistakes

Take a look at that page and ask yourself, “if I wanted to know how to put skis on, is there a page that could answer the question better than this?”

You should be asking yourself the same question when you’re creating how-to content. Look at the entire body of work and ask yourself if there’s any site that answered the question or gave the instructions better. If there is, you still have work to do.

Don’t use elements that make visitors want to leave

Sometimes marketers will get in the way. They’ll shoot themselves in the foot by adding too much to a page, and it ends up making visitors click the back button and never coming back.

That’s why it’s important to not add things that make visitors leave. Here are some things you’ll want to avoid:

• Autoplay videos
• Obtrusive advertisements
• Slow page loading
• Paywalls
• Surveys (i.e. fill out a survey before viewing content)
• UNresponsive design
• No message match (what visitors click on and what they see on your page don’t match)

If visitors must leave, try to get some information from them

Overlays work based on mouse movement. If the software detects that your mouse is moving up towards the top of the screen, with the intention of closing the tab or clicking the back button, the overlay will appear. Here it is in action:

These are becoming more common around the web, and yes they are annoying, but they are also very effective.

Your goal is to get something from each visitor; the most common first step is the visitor’s name and email address. And overlays can deliver that. They’re great for building your email list.

My thinking is this: if visitors are going to leave my site, I at least want some information from them. The overlay is the best tool for that.

I’d recommend experimenting with an overlay. Over the long term, the best option is to hire a developer to create one for you. That way you aren’t paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars every month to keep it running.

If you can’t start with a developer, or prefer to use a tool, I’d recommend Hello Bar or Sleeknote.

Just remember not to use interstitials or popups on mobile devices – or you’ll get an SEO penalty.

Want more SEO tips? I’ve got 3 more in this video:

Conclusion

SEO can get complicated pretty quickly.

There are so-called experts around the web promising easy ways to increasing rankings using a simple hack. Or worse, trying to sell you their service and promising you the first spot on Google.

Yet through all this noise, we often forget the fundamentals – satisfying users.

As content creators, we need to provide users with great content that helps people find what they’re looking for. That’s an answer, a how-to, or something thought provoking.

The goal is to get users to stay and consume our content. To make sure they don’t click the back button.

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2GLBcGA

7 Social Media Trends to Watch and Capitalize On in 2018

The trend is your friend.

Why? Because trends often become the norm, and getting in early allows you to harness its power without too much competition or noise. Write something off as “just” a trend, and you may be late to the party of the year.

Remember when Facebook was a “trend”? Or Twitter? Instagram? Now, those are a key component to your digital marketing plan (and if not, they should be).

You’ve got to reach and engage with your audience where they spend time online. And where is that? Say it with me: social media.

• In its State of Social 2018 Report, Buffer found that businesses are overwhelmingly on the social train. 96% use Facebook, with Twitter (89%), LinkedIn (70%), Instagram (70%), and YouTube (57%) rounding out the top five. The report also revealed that 85% of businesses plan to create more video content on those platforms than they did last year.
• We spend an average of 2 hours and 15 minutes on social media each day, which accounts for one-third of our online time, and twice as much as any other activity.

• Customers spend anywhere from 20-40% more on companies that engage with them on social media.
• The most popular social media platforms in January 2018 include Facebook (2.2 billion users), YouTube (1.5 billion), WhatsApp (1.3 billion), Facebook Messenger (1.3 billion), and WeChat (980 million). Three of the top five are messenger apps.
• There were 2.46 billion social media users in 2017. That number is expected to hit 2.62 billion in 2018, and 3.02 billion by 2021.
• Social media is popular with Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z.

The statistics paint a very clear picture: social media must be an integral part of your marketing mix in 2018 and beyond. Ignore it at your peril.

That said, social media is an evolving beast, with new features popping up all the time.

Some are destined for the trash heap of history – remember how much “fun” poking was on Facebook? – while others become cornerstones of the platform that we can’t remember living without.

So what to do, which platforms to use, and what trends to try?

Here’s seven for the new year:

1. Social Listening
2. Live Streaming and Video
3. Influencer Marketing
4. Facebook Continues to Set the Pace
5. Increased Engagement on Messaging Platforms
6. Instagram Stories
7. Augmented Reality

1. Social Listening

This may not be completely new, but it’ll take on increased importance in 2018 and the years to come. Social media in all its forms is only getting bigger and more popular, and by extension you’ll have to start paying more attention to it.

But that goes beyond just having a few accounts on a few different platforms. You’ll even have to do more than “just” having an active presence on those platforms. You need to listen to what people are saying about you, your competition, your brand, and your products, and respond accordingly. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

People are talking about you more often than just when they’re engaging directly with you. People are making complaints, lavishing praise, and showing off your stuff on many different platforms and networks. Some you belong to, and some you don’t.

But that’s beside the point: if they’re talking to or about you, they expect a response from you.

In fact, 60% of consumers that post a complaint on social media expect a response in less than 60 minutes. You’ve got one hour to notice and respond. And if you don’t, 88% of them are unlikely to buy from you again or recommend you to friends and family.

Enter social listening.

You need systems in place to monitor many different channels for your particular keywords and phrases, and to bring those mentions to your attention so you can examine them for both insight and opportunities.

What are people saying about your brand? How do they feel about your latest product? What problems or complaints do they have? An active social listening strategy can provide those answers and more.

And as we increasingly use social media for everything, there’s a lot of insight you could harvest, to say nothing of the improved customer experience you can provide by responding to issues and complaints in a timely and convenient manner.

The bigger you get, the more important it is to be aware of what others are saying about you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, review sites, and more.

A simple way to get started is Google Alerts. You can quickly set up email notifications for the words and phrases you want to monitor by entering them into the search bar, setting your preferences on frequency, sources, region, and more, and clicking the “Create Alert” button. It’s just that easy.

But to truly get the most out of social listening, you need a service or tool that specializes in it. A few of the best include Brandwatch, Hootsuite Insights, Mention, ReviewTrackers, Talkwalker, and TrackReddit.

Respond quickly to complaints. Collect valuable data on your customers. Manage a crisis. Find influencers. Generate reports. Analyze your competition. Understand your audience and industry better. Measure impact. Gauge brand sentiment. Enhance customer service and engagement.

The list of what social listening can’t do is much shorter than what it can do. If you’re not already using it, I highly recommend you start. Sign up and start listening today.

Being aware of public opinion and sentiment towards your brand are as important as the product or service itself. Social listening gives that to you.

2. Live Streaming and Video

Video – whether recorded or live – is becoming the social media tactic you can’t afford to ignore. That’ll only get more apparent in 2018.

According to a recent post by Hubspot, 43% of social media users want to see more video content from marketers, businesses now publish an average of 18 videos each month, the average video retains a little over one-third of its viewers (37%) to the very end, and 85% of businesses have in-house personnel and resources for video creation.

Do you? Are you using video and its younger-but-equally-popular brother, live streaming, as part of your social media efforts? You should. Consider:

• Over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• YouTube users enjoy 1 billion hours per day
• Two-thirds of people – a full 67% – are more likely to buy a ticket to an event after watching a live video about it
• Live video is both created and watched by people in virtually every age category, from teenagers to those 55 and older. Overall, 36% of Americans watch it, while 22% create it.

• 80% prefer watching a live video from a brand than reading a blog post, and 82% prefer live video over any other type of social media post
• Live videos on Facebook are watched 3x longer and get 10x more comments than those that are recorded
• 36% of internet users have watched a live video as of November 2016
• Live.me – a mobile-only live streaming app – is less than two years old, but already has over 20 million active users who create more than 200,000 hours of new content each day

Viewers respond positively to live video streaming because of the immediacy and engagement it creates with their favorite brands and personalities.

Brands and personalities can quickly deliver an enhanced customer experience with live video. The four most popular types are explainers, product demos, how-tos, and testimonials, but you can do so much more: live events, announcements, product reveals, interviews, behind-the-scenes, Q&A sessions, demonstrations, and on and on.

Most social media platforms now have native live streaming capabilities or easy integration, so you can pick and choose where and when to do it. Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope, Twitter, Snapchat, Twitch, and Instagram Live are all great platforms to try depending on where your customers and audience are hanging out.

To set yourself up for success, let your followers and fans know you’ll be live streaming beforehand. Post about it, send a reminder, create a daily or weekly or monthly schedule, be consistent, get the word out to generate as big an audience as possible.

Then click that “Go Live” button. Be authentic, informative, and remember to breath. Connect and build a relationship with your audience, and they’ll become not only loyal, but vocal advocates on your behalf.

3. Influencer Marketing

Some have called this one dead and done, but influencer marketing is not only still alive, it’s growing. That’s not to say it hasn’t evolved, though.

In 2018, it’s less about riding the coattails of whomever is most popular at any given moment, and more about building meaningful relationships and finding the influencers that reflect your brand ethos.

Many companies have found themselves in defense mode after partnering with an influencer based solely on numbers, only to discover later that they’ve shared sexist, racist, grossly inappropriate, or bigoted content on their channels. 73% of marketers list “finding the right influencer” as the biggest challenge.

YouTuber PewDiePie, for example, has over 60 million subscribers and makes millions of dollars each year on the platform. In February of 2017, he had lucrative partnerships with Google and Disney…that is until he was fired from both after he posted objectionable and anti-Semitic material. Not the kind of exposure Google and Disney were trying to get.

Don’t make that mistake. Launching a successful influencer marketing campaign should never be based on the number of followers or fans. You need to look for relevancy to your industry, products, and target audience – Kim Kardashian to promote your new robo-advisor might not be the best fit – their average amount of comments and other engagement metrics, and the overall sentiment towards them (you can find that with social listening).

Choose wisely, as your designated influencer is an reflection of your brand. You want it to be a positive one. Once you’ve identified one, reach out and connect. Build the relationship. Ask for their ideas if their interested, but don’t feel obligated to grant them complete control and freedom. Influencer marketing works best when it’s a true partnership.

But what about the $64,000 question: does it work?

• Influencer marketing was tied for first with email marketing as the most cost-effective online acquisition channel. Marketers in the same poll listed blogs (37%), Facebook (25%), and YouTube (6%) as the top three platforms for the tactic.
• Don’t automatically associate “celebrity” with “influencer”. In fact, Markerly found that the rate of engagement decreases as the number of followers rises. Those with 10+ million followers saw likes 1.6% of the time, and comments only 0.04% of the time, compared to 8% and 0.5% respectively for those with less than 1000 followers. They suggest working with a micro-influencer in the 10k-100k range of followers for maximum reach and engagement.

• Influencer marketing generates an average return of $7.65 for every $1 spent, while 84% of polled marketers describe it as an “effective” strategy, and 67% plan to increase their budget for it.
• 70% of teenage YouTube users trust influencers more than traditional celebrities.
• 86% of the most watched beauty videos on YouTube were created by influencers while only 14% were created by beauty brands themselves.
• On Twitter, there’s a 5.2x increase in purchase intent when consumers see tweets from both brands and influencers. Just under half of Twitter users (49%) say they rely on recommendations from influencers, while 40% have made a purchase based on a tweet from an influencer.

• Marketers in a Linqia survey listed Facebook (87%), Instagram (87%), blogs (48%), Twitter (44%), and Pinterest (40%) as the platforms most important to their influencer campaigns. Do you need to use all of them. Absolutely not. Find your audience, identify relevant influencers on that platform, and go from there.
• The same survey identified CPE (cost-per-engagement) and CPC (cost-per-click) as the two most preferred pricing models.

Are you game to give it a go? The payoff for a well planned and strategic influencer marketing campaign can far exceed your wildest expectations. Expect this tactic to continue to grow in 2018.

4. Facebook Continues to Set the Pace

It’s easy to consider Facebook past its prime. It’s been around since 2004 – a lifetime in the digital realm – and the news and trends frequently focus on what’s new and emerging.

That’s a major mistake. Facebook is the platform to rule all platforms. Was, is, and will continue to be. If you only engage on two platforms, it should be Facebook and one other. Three? Facebook and two others. You get the idea.

The social media behemoth had 1.40 billion daily active users and 2.13 billion monthly active users as of December 2017. And that’s not all:

• Facebook averages more than 8 billion video views each day.
• 91% of millennials are on the platform.
• Over 800 million users “like” something on it every day.
• Males have an average of 145 friends, while females have 166. Your content or post reaches an exponentially bigger audience with each share and like.

Long story short: be active on Facebook. Regardless of your age group or target, they are on that platform.

With numbers like that, Facebook could just sit back and count its ad revenue. But it doesn’t. It continues to evolve and innovate at a breakneck speed.

In 2018, there’s a lot going on at Facebook. These three should be on your radar:

1. Facebook Messenger – Originally integrated with Facebook itself, it’s now a standalone – and very popular – app. It boasts 1.3 billion users, and 11% of the worldwide population uses it monthly. 60 million businesses are on it, as are half of all teenagers in the United States. It’s a bigger platform than Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat combined, and it hosts 7 billion conversations daily. And with A.I. and chatbot integration, the channel has the potential to be huge.
2. Facebook Spaces. Let’s ignore the whole virtual vs augmented reality debate for now. Both are gaining in popularity and prevalence. Both are opening up unparalleled opportunities for engagement. Facebook has launched its own virtual reality meeting place called Spaces for use with Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive. Users can build and customize their own appearance, connect with others, draw 3D objects, and immerse themselves in a 360-degree virtual environment. You can even host live events as you would with live video streaming. As it grows and improves, businesses will be able to present fully-realized stores, behind-the-scenes features, and more to their audience. It’s not quite there yet…but stay tuned.
3. Facebook Watch. We live in an on-demand culture these days. We want what we want when we want it. If you can deliver that to your customers, you’re ahead of the curve. The new Watch feature is a video-on-demand service for long-form content and shows. Ball in the Family – the reality show built around three basketball players and their father – is hosted on the platform. Businesses can create videos and shows to engage with their community, connect directly with their users, and more.

Facebook may be old by social media standards, but it’s proof-positive that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

5. Increased Engagement on Messaging Platforms

We already mentioned Facebook Messenger, but that’s not the only circus in town. The popularity of messaging platforms is exploding. WhatsApp (1.3 billion monthly active users), WeChat (963 million MAUs), and Facebook Messenger (1.2 billion MAUs) are leading the charge.

And with easy integration of both artificial intelligence and chatbots, you can automatically increase engagement and the customer experience.

Facebook research shows that 54.5% of US social media users prefer messaging channels over email, phone and online chat, and 67 percent of business owners plan to increase their messaging over the next two years.

Messaging allows you to reach your audience at scale and on their preferred channel. 89% of consumers would like to use it to communicate with businesses, but only 48% of businesses are able to do so. Those numbers don’t add up.

In fact, users would rather give up using the telephone, their morning coffee, and sex before they’d give up messaging. On average, 77% of users keep messaging notifications turned on so they never miss a thing. FOMO is a powerful motivator.

And I know from firsthand experience that you get achieve an 88% open and 56% click-through rate using Facebook Messenger.

Allow me to state the obvious: messaging is big, effective, and only getting bigger. With it, you can deliver messaging sequences, automate conversations with your users, create a sales funnel, and push out announcements, resources, and new content, to name just a few.

A chatbot – yes, the majority of bots are good – can automate your sales, help desk, complaint department, and more. You can communicate with your customers on their turf and whenever they want to, not the other way around.

Not convinced? Check out these ten examples of effective chatbots on Messenger to see how useful and entertaining they can be.

If you’re itching to give it a try, look to popular platforms and services to build and launch your own (many without the need for coding skills):

• Chatfuel
• Botsify
• Landbot.io
• Chattypeople
• FlowXO
• Beep Boop

Bots aren’t evil. And messaging isn’t going away anytime soon. Take full advantage of both.

6. Instagram Stories

Introduced in August 2016 to compete with a similar feature on Snapchat, Instagram Stories quickly grew to over 100 million daily active users (DAU) in just a few months, hit 200 million DAUs in well under a year, and now boasts an impressive 250 million DAUs. It’s growth and popularity far outpaces that of Snapchat, and is still trending upward.

Are you using it?

About half of all businesses on Instagram post at least one Story each month, while 20% of those stories generate at least one direct message. How’s that for engagement?

The Story feature allows users to post both videos and photos that disappear in 24 hours. You can add filters, stickers, text, and drawings. You can even create simple polls to ask questions and collect valuable data on your audience.

Using the Instagram Story feature is not complicated, and even if you’ve never used Instagram before, you’ll quickly discover all it has to over.

Instagram itself has an impressive 800 million monthly active users, which is more than Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest combined. It should most definitely be part of your social media tool belt.

Include the recent Instagram Shopping functionality – a feature that allows you to tag up to five items within an image with a clickable link to more information – and you can increase engagement and sales even more.

7. Augmented Reality

While virtual reality creates an immersive experience, it does have some major drawbacks. For starters, it limits the mobility of the user wearing the VR headgear. And since most of us access the online world via our mobile devices, that’s a big issue.

That’s where augmented reality (AR) has a distinct advantage. Because users don’t have their vision restricted, mobility is not impeded. In fact, AR typically promotes greater mobility as users search for virtual elements within the physical world.

It’s already taking the gaming industry by storm. Remember Pokémon Go? The company behind it – Niantic – will be releasing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite in the near future. It will presumably have the same opportunity that Pokémon Go had for businesses to market themselves in partnership with the game.

Purchase a “lure”, and it not only lured the Pokémon to your business, but it also lured players to your physical location to capture them. Win-win.

Augmented reality is poised to have a similar impact on social media, allowing online personalities and products to be brought directly into homes, photos, and videos. And as it doesn’t require additional hardware other than your smartphone, most of us are already equipped to enjoy it.

Face filters and lenses fall under the AR umbrella, too.

Lens Studio by Snapchat gives everyone the ability to create and share custom lenses and “magical AR experiences”. Let your followers and fans play with your brand and products in the real world.

With augmented reality you can let your hair down and have some fun while still spreading brand awareness and engaging with leads and customers. Get in on it.

Conclusion

I personally think these seven will be the ones to watch in 2018. Pick one, pick a few, and try them out.

I also have marketing strategies for you to try in 2018:

Social media is all about connection, relationships, and engagement.

But to do that, you need to stay current on the latest trends and popular features. Don’t jump on the bandwagon of every one – some will not be a good fit for you, your brand, and your customers – but it’s worth selectively choosing those that make sense to your business and goals.

Trends come. Trends go. But some survive to become tomorrow’s mainstays. Get in before the masses, and you stand to win big.

What other social media trends have you noticed in the past few months? What are you most excited about trying?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2nFqVmJ

Using Video Analytics to Optimize Content Performance

Today’s marketing teams are investing more than ever in producing great content designed to attract, engage and convert their online audiences, but one of the most significant challenges we still face is understanding which content is resonating with our audience. Ebooks and whitepapers are great, but we have no idea if the person chose to consume that content after they downloaded it, and when it comes to videos few know how to begin using video analytics to optimize their content. 

And this is one of the reasons why I’m so passionate about video analytics and think about it as a content marketer’s best friend.

In this episode of Vidyard Chalk Talks, we discuss how you can use video engagement analytics to understand the performance of your content better and to help you continuously optimize your overall results.

Video Analytics

Because video is a centrally hosted, stream-based, medium, it affords us some unique opportunities to develop deep insights into how our audiences are choosing to consume that content.

But it also affords us the ability to centrally track that information to optimize our content accordingly to update it everywhere it’s published and to test how that impacts overall performance.

It’s not just about informing future content decisions. It’s about helping us optimize the performance of our existing assets in the field.

When we think about the engagement journey of your video, it starts with the splash screen.

What’s the click-through rate on that as your front door to your video? How many views is that video getting? How many seconds are being watched in total? What’s the average second-by-second drop-off rate for people who choose to stay tuned to that content? And finally, what’s the average engagement time by the end and what can you learn from that to optimize your content performance?

You can apply these metrics to a few different models to make sure that you’re optimizing your video performance using these video analytics.

Looking at Macro-Level Trends

I always recommend doing is making sure that periodically you’re looking at the macro-level trends around your overall video views and video engagement time across your entire library of videos.

You’re going to want to trend up over time, but what you want to look for are outliers where you see spikes up or down in the number of views or the seconds being watched of your overall video content.

For example, if at a certain time you see a big spike up you might find a video that all of a sudden had a huge number of views or a huge amount of engagement and that video you’re going to want to double down on and learn from it.

Or the opposite, if you see a big drop in the number of user engagement time perhaps there was a video that was performing well that got removed or changed or something happened to have a significant impact.

What’s Working? What’s Not?

The first thing, as mentioned earlier, is the splash screen. With a platform like Vidyard, you can split test up to eight different splash screen images for each video in your library. By doing that you can make sure you’re putting the best front door on your video that optimizes the number of people clicking on it to engage in that content.

In addition to the overall engagement, it’s also good to look for hot and cold spots. For example, a cold spot you can see at a certain point in a video if you’re losing a lot of people. It’s good to dig into that content, and try and figure out why that might be.

Did it turn to a more ‘salesy’ message? Did it drag out too long? If less than 50 percent of your viewers are making it to the end of your content, you may want to think how you could shorten it, or even turn it into multiple content assets.

What’s Next?

Once you’ve identified what’s working in your video content, consider what next steps are. Even if they are engaged, is it driving downstream conversion?

For example, if a certain video is designed to help you generate new leads you’ll want to be tracking how it’s influencing lead flow within your marketing automation system (MAP). Or if it’s bottom of the funnel content, can you find a way to associate it with the amount of revenue understand if it’s helping close more deals. Things like that are a bit more advanced because you need to integrate the data into your marketing and CRM systems.

Another thing you can do is test different calls-to-action (CTAs) at the end of your video. Maybe one is a demo request button. Perhaps another is to watch a different video, download an eBook, or view a customer story. You could try all of these to see which ones get the best results.

How Are Videos Influencing Lead Gen, Pipeline, and More

And then finally, related to the first point is looking at how video analytics are helping to influence lead generation, pipeline development, or revenue which are often the goal of creating video content within your business. Make sure that all of your video analytics/data is being tracked back into your MAP and CRM, so over time you’ll see trends on which videos are performing. Not just with views and engagement time but in terms of how they’re influencing actual pipeline and revenue in the business.

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So hopefully this gives you a good sense of how you can use video data to not only understand how many views you’re getting, but how long people are engaging with your content. It will help you to identify areas of improvement to optimize your performance to update your content in the field and continuously improve how you’re doing video content.

 

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Stop Guessing, Start Converting: Here are the Keywords to Use for Awareness, Consideration, and Decision Stage Content

People think SEO is all about traffic.

But I’m here to tell you that’s not the case.

Yes, if you do it correctly, SEO should bring in lots of traffic.

Ultimately, though, SEO is about revenue.

It’s about driving in new customers to buy stuff.

And that’s why most people do keyword research wrong.

Here’s the common mistake I always see.

People do two things when researching new keywords:

1. They look at estimated monthly search volume
2. And they compare that to the competition

That’s a good start, of course. But it’s often not enough.

The problem is that it leaves a giant, black hole in your SEO strategy where it matters most: The bottom line.

Only comparing volume and competition leads you to make questionable decisions.

In this scenario, you typically select the highest searched keyword that you can compete for.

It’s like a popularity contest. Keywords are chosen for their ability to drive traffic, not for their ability to convert.

That’s the problem we’re going to fix today in this article.

I’m going to show you how to side-step this common mistake. You’ll see the ‘missing ingredient’ from your keyword research. And you’ll discover how to not just get traffic, but more leads and customers, too.

But first, we need to relate keyword research back to something you’re already familiar with:

The Buyer’s journey.

Why your content and keywords should align with buyer’s journey stages

A recent study found that “55% of consumers visit stores before buying online.”

Wait a second. What?

People visit physical stores and then buy online?

That’s odd.

You’re used to seeing the reverse. People will research stuff online before buying.

The study goes on to confirm that “more than half (56%) of 18-24 year-old shoppers say they buy products sight unseen.”

The theory behind such a high rate of physical inspections comes back to the product.

The more “high-touch” it is, the more common someone wants to see it or feel it in person, first.

That makes sense when you consider it.

You might buy socks on Amazon, without ever looking at them. But if you’re going to throw down a few hundred bucks on a new jacket, you’re going to want to make sure it fits properly.

What this means for companies, though, is that we live in an omnichannel world.

People not only research things online extensively before buying. They now also will research stuff offline, buy online, and vice versa.

Google calls this early research period the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). Their data shows that almost all consumers today will research extensively before buying.

And what’s happening, is that they’re slowing moving through the stages of the buyer’s journey.

Here’s a perfect example of what visitors are experiencing when they get sick:

A healthy person is never going to buy cough medicine.

Why would they? They don’t have a need for it just yet.

Only when their throat starts to hurt, do they realize they have a problem.

Next, they’ll take a look at all the various alternatives they could buy.

And that’s no easy feat, because we’re literally surrounded by medication.

Now, we know what customers are doing before buying (more or less).

Our goal is to construct a conversion funnel that lines up with each step.

Consumers own the shopping experience. They’re going to shop how they want, when they want.

No amount of advertising or campaigns we run will change that.

So don’t fight it. Instead, adjust and respond accordingly.

Bringing this back to SEO, it means you need to create pages on your site for each step.

This is the content mapping process. You take each customer persona, and figure out what they would want to see in the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision steps.

The reason we’re spending so much time here is because most website I see are lopsided.

They either have too much Awareness content, like blog posts. And not enough Decision-stage stuff that will convert they people they’ve brought in.

B2B companies often suffer from the reverse. They have too much Decision-stage content that only talks about their company, their products, or their services.

Why’s that a problem?

Because it means they can’t optimize for Awareness keywords to bring in enough search volume.

See what I mean?

Keyword research and optimization is completely dependent on your site content.

You can’t optimize an About page for a big, popular keyword like “content marketing.”

I mean, you can. But it won’t rank anytime soon.

That’s why one of the first things I do when starting work with any B2B company, for example, is to build out their content assets, first.

They need content targeting each funnel stage:

Before we can optimize each to bring in leads and customers.

I know. It’s kind of a chicken and egg problem.

But search engines are too sophisticated today.

You can’t fool them. At least, not for very long.

When companies come to me, suffering from lots of traffic but low deal flow, I like to use the following trick.

Treat SEO like PPC.

Yes, you heard me. I want you to take a PPC-based approach to keyword research.

How to find keywords by funnel stage

PPC only focuses on keywords that convert.

You don’t care about traffic or clicks or impressions or any other vanity metric.

Literally, the only thing that matters, are the ‘money keywords’ that drive leads or sale.

Tiny variations on a word suddenly matter. One word substitution in a phrase becomes a big deal.

So I want you to organize SEO keywords by match types. Just like you’d do with a PPC campaign:

At the top of the funnel, people are simply looking around at various TVs.

In the middle, they’re looking for pricing information.

And at the bottom, they’re ready to purchase.

But more importantly, do you see the specific words they’re using at each point?

• “Reviews” at the top.
• “Best store” in the middle.
• “Buy” at the bottom.

That’s what we want to focus on here.

People use specific words that indicate which stage of the funnel they’re in. That’s how you identify them.

And that’s how we’ll take them to optimize content in a few seconds.

Here’s a good starting point from the HubSpot’s Inbound Conference:

People in the Awareness stage often use “issue or opportunity” terms. That makes perfect sense when you think about it. People are just beginning to realize their problem.

Think about how you found this very post you’re reading right now.

Why’d you click on this one and not one of the hundreds of others that crossed your stream today?

Because you identified with the problem.

The Consideration stage is when people start looking for solutions. They start looking for “tools,” “suppliers,” or “services” that can remove this pain point from their life.

Here, they’re comparing alternatives.

There might be five different software options that solve their pain point. So they’re gathering data on which one is right for them.

Finally, “reviews,” “benchmarks,” or “tests” can help someone make the ultimate Decision.

Of course, real life is a little more complicated and nuanced.

But try to keep it simple.

These three ‘buckets’ are fine for including in your keyword research.

Now, when you’re going to start researching keywords, you’re not just looking for volume and competition.

Instead, you’re starting with funnel stage.

You’re deliberately looking at keywords under Awareness, for example.

Then, you can drill down into the volume and competition for each. So you’re only ultimately comparing queries in the same funnel stage.

For example, pull up Ubersuggest and type in your search queries.

Mine is “keyword research.” :)

Ubersuggest will do exactly what is says: suggest new potential variations based on the original keyword.

So you’ll get a massive list of potential options, all with their estimated volume, CPC, and competition measures.

But first, we need to make this data relevant.

Scroll down to the very bottom of the tool and hit “Export.”

Exporting the data into a CSV file will allow you to start adding more context to each keyword.

For starters, you’d want to start assigning a Funnel Stage from the three options we’ve covered above.

Now, you can add one more column for the important piece:

The landing page.

Keyword research is nothing without pages to optimize.

So let’s look at examples for each step of the funnel to see how you can complete this process.

Step #1. Top of the Funnel

“Las Vegas” gets over a million searches each month.

Crazy, right?

Just getting a tiny slice of that would get you tons of traffic.

But you know what?

Most of that traffic would be completely useless if you were selling products or services.

(Ad revenue might be a different story.)

The reason is because “Las Vegas” is just too general.

You don’t understand the search intent behind that query. Which means you probably can’t figure out how to optimize a page on your site for it.

People looking for this could be looking for the weather, for example.

They’re not exactly ready to buy show tickets or a hotel room just yet.

Not only that, but you’re also most likely competing against the big boys with huge budgets.

I like to look at the top few PPC results to get an idea of how smart advertisers are targeting different keywords.

And “Las Vegas” shows some tough companies:

That’s why most people suggest a long-tail approach to top-of-the-funnel keywords.

You can target a ton of less competition queries that are also experiencing the problem you’re describing.

Take “UX mistakes,” for example.

No, people won’t Google this and convert immediately. But you can easily target keywords like this with blog content:

You’re getting them into your website initially, so that you can send them into other resources or retarget them with ads down the line.

Here’s how I like to generate new top-of-the-funnel keywords.

Write down all of the pain points customers experience. Follow that up with the benefits of your product or service.

Take these potential topics and start building out your categories for your blog.

Now, for each one, see if you can attach the following top-of-the-funnel keyword modifiers:

• Fix
• Issue
• Problem
• Troubleshoot
• Upgrade
• Prevent
• Optimize

Plug these variations into Ubersuggest. It will spit out dozens of new awareness keywords, perfect for new blog post topics.

Now, see if you can find a few related ‘clusters’ of these keywords.

If you have a really popular one, that can serve as the ‘hub’ for the specific variations underneath.

Hub pages can be really long, in-depth resources, like my guides that span several different topics:

Each of these guides can internally link to relevant blog posts that cover similar topics.

And you’re building out a ‘web’ of relevant terms for Google to index.

Beyond just bringing in traffic, guides can also help you start turning strangers into leads.

Here’s how.

Step #2. Middle of the funnel

People in the consideration stage are now looking for options.

They’re looking for solutions to the pain they just realized.

Now, they’ve skipped over generic terms like “Las Vegas.” And are now looking for something specific, like “Las Vegas hotel rooms.”

Here, your objective changes.

You want to go from pages that will attract eyeballs to ones that will get people to stick like glue.

And that affects everything you do.

For example, someone who’s interested in a blog post around some pain point isn’t going to spend three hours on your site.

The time and energy someone’s willing to invest needs to rise proportionately, first.

Once you do get that ‘buy in,’ you can use in-depth resources like guides to keep them reading or coming back.

Remember what we learned earlier?

Consumers will often research at least ten different resources prior to purchasing.

So do you want those ten steps to be on your site, or someone else’s?

Now, let’s repeat the process we took in the last step.

Isolate those same key product or service benefits. But this time, apply the following variations:

• Solution
• Provider
• Supplier
• Vendor
• Comparisons
• Software
• Features

People in this stage are comparing alternatives.

You don’t just want to ‘tell’ them about your features. You want to literally show them.

For example, head on over to the Crazy Egg recordings feature page.

Keep in mind that this is just one feature of several.

But we’ve gone through a ton of time (and money) trying to make it tell the best story.

We want to literally show people what the product does for them.

What does this have to do with keyword research?

Everything!

You want to transition someone’s interest in the middle of the funnel.

They’re looking for answers.

The keywords people use to find this page will bring with it a certain expectation.

They’re expecting to find something specific when they type in “ux design features.”

If the content on the page doesn’t line up with their expectation, they hit the back button.

And then you know what happens to your rankings?

They fall like a rock.

See, SEO isn’t just about keywords. It’s about optimizing for someone’s experience.

Ultimately, the best experience doesn’t just influence rankings.

It also dictates whether someone is going to take the next step to make a decision.

Or if they’re going to hit the back button on their browser to look for someone else.

Step #3. Bottom of the funnel

You’ve scoped out a few hotels for your upcoming trip to Vegas.

What do you do next?

You’re going to look for price comparisons for the actual weekend in question.

Now, you’re getting into crunch time.

You want to make a decision. But only after weighing all the options.

This is where you often start seeing branded queries pop up, for example.

You’re going to start punching in dates.

Soon-to-be consumers in the Decision stage will also use queries like the following:

• Pros vs. cons
• Benchmarks
• Reviews
• Ratings
• Pricing

If you’re looking for the “best CRMs” in the last step, in this one, you’re pricing each one of them out.

You’re looking at the ‘next steps’ involved.

Kalia Strong includes a few other excellent modifiers to start regularly including in your bottom of the funnel keyword research, too.

At this point, someone is trying to decide if they should move forward. And if so, should they move forward with you?

Again, connect that back to your site content now.

Let’s say I’m interested in HubSpot. But I know from some initial research that it can get pricey.

So what do I search for when I’m trying to weigh my options?

Check out the very first paid result for this example:

(Now do you see why we think more like a PPC-er when doing SEO?)

SharpSpring has helpfully put together a product comparison for me, available for download, of course.

Of course, SharpSpring is a HubSpot alternative.

They’re positioning themselves against HubSpot.

So this page is optimized with “comparing HubSpot SharpSpring.”

SharpSpring’s URL structure gives away their “alternatives” SEO strategy.

They’re building out multiple pages just like this to bring in people who’re ready to make a decision.

Dig around on their site for a few seconds and you’ll see these comparison pages pop up again:

And again:

Obviously, these pages won’t get a ton of organic traffic by themselves.

But that’s the beauty of this strategy.

They don’t need to!

All of the keywords you’ve targeted earlier in the process were designed to bring in people.

They will get people interested.

These pages are built with one thing in mind: convert.

Then, each page can have it’s own relevant search query assigned:

• Marketing automation vendor comparison
• HubSpot pricing and reviews
• Marketo pricing and reviews
• Act-On pricing and reviews
• Pardot pricing and reviews
• Infusionsoft pricing and reviews

That’s the chicken and egg problem illustrated.

On the one hand, you need to change how you’re segmenting keywords by funnel stage.

You want to bring in people at each step. Or transition ones from the step before.

BUT, you often can’t do that until you have the appropriate pages that also target each funnel stage.

Otherwise, you’re trying to optimize pages with irrelevant search queries. Ones with mismatching search intent.

So even if you did get clicks and visits, they won’t line up with visitor expectations.

Which means instead of buying, they’re going to bounce.

And go buy from someone else.

Conclusion

Traditional keyword research often fails.

It fails because people only consider volume and competition.

If they can reasonably compete for a term, they’ll go after the one with the best traffic metrics.

But traffic doesn’t mean much without buyers.

And too often, the most popular keywords only bring in traffic. They bring in people who’re looking for information around their problems.

However, these people are weeks or months away from acting to solve that problem.

That’s where the buyer’s journey becomes relevant.

You need to first consider funnel stages, and how to help people at each one.

Only then should you dig deeper into comparing search volume and competition.

Because then you’re comparing apples to apples. You need to make sure two keywords are directly related, first, before you can reasonably select one over the other.

Then, you can tack on different modifying words to bring up tons of related topics.

And this is where SEO starts.

Because you need to be armed with enough related searches, to then go out and build (or modify) the appropriate pages.

Without content and site pages targeting each step, those keywords aren’t going to do you any good.

Not only do the keywords need to target the appropriate search intent, but so do your pages.

That means if someone is looking for “best CRM,” they’re not looking for you to brag about being the “best CRM.”

They’re looking for a comparison of CRM alternatives so that they can choose who the ‘best’ is.

So it’s two sides of the same coin.

To convert more visitors, you need better search terms. But to dominate those search terms, you need better pages, too.

What are your top converting keywords and what do those pages have in common?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

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