maspillera

M Posted 7 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

In recent years there's been a lot of discussion about personalized search and a personalized user experience on the web. A few years ago, search engines emphasized their efforts to create more personalized results on the SERP. Personalized search results attempted to connect the information you looked at before and how you interact with the platform to the query you just input, creating an improved and unique user experience.

Lately, however, there's been some pushback on personalized search. Customers began to voice concerns about how their info was stored and the amount of tracking that sites placed on them. If you're a search marketer, odds are you're familiar with the ritual of logging into an incognito browser window to run a Google search query so you can see the universal listing instead of the personalized one.

Recently Google announced it would be stepping back the extent of personalized search, focusing only on location of the user or the searches they made immediately prior to their current search. As a marketer, you want to understand what this means for the trend of personalization throughout the industry. Here is what we think everyone should know.

Why did Google step back from personalized search results?

Google’s Pandu Nayak explained Google’s rationale, saying, “A query a user comes with usually has so much context that the opportunity for personalization is just very limited.”

Generally, Google found that SERPs didn't offer much opportunity for effective personalized search. Their efforts did not do much for customers and did not improve the web results displayed.

In other words, Google discovered that while their ability to understand the likely intent of certain queries--and thus pair those queries with micro-moments--remains strong, their ability to interpret the individual desires of a particular user was ineffective. People enter queries influenced by a large number of factors which may or may not be connected to their past searches and/or other interactions with Google.

Keep in mind that you can often still find examples of personalized search with different Google products.

How this impacts marketers

Search marketers may find that this change makes it easier to track and measure optimization results. There'll be, theoretically, less overall variation in SERP layout between individual searchers, especially in the case of universal listing elements, like Quick Answers and Local 3-Pack. SERPs won't change as much from person to person, customization being limited to the nature of the search query.

For example, the layout and types of content presented for personalized search will still adjust depending upon your vertical searches and efforts to create SERPs that conform to the likely micro-moment. Consider local searches. When a person makes a search with a likely “I-want-to-go” micro-moment, such as “parks near me,” Google focuses on the local 3-pack and score-based, UGC-driven review sites like Yelp.

This has the potential to help with personalized search optimization strategy. Brands can feel more confident that their listings will appear consistently when they achieve a high ranking on universal search results. That in turn will help them accurately measure their ability to interest and engage users. Measurements of the number of times their site will likely appear in organic listings, based on search volume, will be more accurate and can be better compared to their site traffic.

It is also important for marketers to note that this does not mean that personalized search overall is dead. The ability to customize content and be relevant to your users should still be a priority across multiple aspects of digital marketing.

Types of personalized search marketing that are still important

Personalizing for intent

Google will continue to display different SERPs depending upon their understood intent of the user. In other words, users searching for terms that align well with an “I-want-to-buy” micro-moment will see different types of results than those who have searches aligning with “I-want-to-go” micro-moments. This means that as you develop your content, you should also be keeping these different goals in mind.

To create content for the right micro-moment, you should spend time researching the likely user intent of your intended audience. Look at the current layout of the SERP for your target keyword and see where you should focus your efforts. You can read more about optimizing for the different micro-moments by reading the following BrightEdge blog posts:

• The I-want-to-go moment
• The I-want-to-buy-moment
• The I-want-to-know moment
• The I-want-to-do moment

Personalized search for repeat visitors

Customers still like knowing that they matter to brands. They want to know that the businesses they buy from cares about helping them personally with their pain points and needs. Finding ways to personalize content on your site for return customers can be enormously beneficial. The individualized experience will boost your engagement rates while also letting customers know that you remember them.

You can personalize the content of known users by taking steps like these:

• Suggesting purchases based on what the customer bought in the past
• Offering tips and advice based on the purchases people have made
• Making content suggestions based on the material they have downloaded from your site

Personalized email campaigns

Email allows you to speak directly to prospects and customers one-on-one, which makes it a prime vehicle to personalize your material. For email to successfully engage with prospects, it must be in alignment with their buyer persona and where they are on the buyer journey. A well-run email program will keep people engaged and encourage them to learn more about the brand and keep opening emails. This is an opening for you to continue to nurture them to progress through the sales funnel.

As the web continues to mature and grow with users and the development of new technology, experiments with personalization will continue. Customers want to reach their prospects directly and provide them with a user experience that encourages them to return.

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Before you spend all the time, money and effort you've laid aside for SEO, consider this: your site architecture might be negating any effort you spend in offsite SEO. In fact, poor site architecture could be causing you to throw away your money. You've got to be sure that your site is set up in a way that will not only bring in visitors but keep them there long enough to generate a lead, make a sale, sign up for your newsletter or become an active member of your community -- and site architecture is key to those goals!

What Exactly Is Site Architecture?

Ten or more years ago, there were very few ways to set up a website. Perhaps you had directories with relevant names, or your directories may not have been named well. All your files might have existed in your root directly, and you may have used file names and page titles that only made sense to you. However, the Internet has come a long way from that point, and how you set up your site is important.

Site architecture is a way to group and organize content on your site which encompasses URLs, directories, file names and navigation. The way you set up your site ensures that both computers and humans can find everything on it with ease. But if you do site architecture wrong, you're actually make it more difficult for your readers and search engines, which could seriously hurt your bottom line!

One of the biggest components of site architecture is the number of clicks it takes to achieve a task. Once upon a time, webmasters assumed that readers would click infinitely, but the opposite has proved to be true. If it takes too many clicks to find an article, check out from your store or sign up for a newsletter, your readers might simply leave your site. This is especially true with mobile users.

Although traditional site architecture uses nested directories in a practice now known as silos, this required more clicks to find pages. The pages further down the silos had fewer links to them than the articles further up the silo. While grouping your pages in directories named with keywords is helpful for SEO, you'll want to ensure you're not making them click too many times to find the "bottom" pages. Think of ways you can reduce clicks to any page on your site to three to four clicks at most without decreasing the usefulness of silo structure.  

Keyword Research in Relation to Site Architecture

Although Google no longer favors sites simply because the domain contains a keyword, choosing page URLs with your relevant keywords will certainly help your users as well as crawlers. Good keyword research will indicate topics & themes to be included in your site architecture and page URLs. This URL structure will also help you manage content in respective directories and sub directories.

Before you can give your files, directories and links their proper names, you have to determine a method for naming that will benefit your site. These are the words that searchers would use to find your business. They revolve around industry, services, products and sometimes location if you serve a specific geographic area. But if your website exists mostly to educate visitors, the appropriate keywords will differ than if you're selling something to consumers.

Many webmasters and SEO experts become too focused on short keywords. Yes, they're easier to think of, but there's also more competition for those short keywords coming from similar sites and businesses. This is why long-tail keywords, which are longer keyword phrases, can be so beneficial. In comparison, long-tail keywords have less competition and might get fewer clicks, but visitors who use them are more targeted likely to convert to customers.  

Using Keywords in Directories, File Names, and URL Structure

Once you identify keywords, you'll want to use them in page URLs, categories, post titles, anchor text, file names and image alt attributes, among other on-page locations that benefit SEO. This ensures that your visitors know exactly what to expect from the address of the page. Search engine robots use these same cues.

It's important for more than just your pages to use keywords, however. Images, videos and even archives that you provide for download should use human-friendly keywords. So you'll want to take the time to rename videos and pictures from the automatic names that your camera gives them. Anything that you download from the Internet and upload to your website might need to be renamed, too.

For example, the popular blogging platform WordPress offers several options for formatting your links. However, the default format uses post and page IDs, which are virtually useless to Google and your visitors. A URL such as http://yourdomain.com/successful-site-architecture-seo is preferable to http://yourdomain.com/?p=123 because your visitors know what to expect simply by looking at the address bar.

Link to Your Own Content/Internal Links

By now, you're intent on enabling Google and other search engines, not to mention your visitors, to find all your content. In the past, SEO has focused heavily on backlinks -- links from other sources -- but this isn't the only way to do that. In fact, linking to your own content, a process known as internal linking, is just as important as external back-linking. Internal linking helps to spread link value on your own site, but it also ensures that no content becomes lost and impossible to find for crawlers as well as your visitors.  

What Does Bad Architecture Look Like?

You've read plenty of advice to help you structure your site in a way that's useful to readers and beneficial to your search engine optimization efforts, but how do you know if you're using it right? Is your current site architecture failing you? Here are a few examples of poor site architecture:

• Site directory contains numbers and not user friendly words. Example – YourSite.com/shoes/mens vs. www.YourSite.com/1234/shoes-page
• It takes more than three or four clicks to get to any page from the index
• Images and files do not use keywords in names, images lack alternative text
• Small sites have unnecessary directories that cause confusion for users
• There are too many links on the home page or navigation
• Navigation changes between pages or sections on the site
• Pages exist that aren't linked to from multiple sources
• Page URLs misuse long-tail keywords, which can be vital to a site's success
• There is no sitemap (page) or, if there is, the site architecture cannot be adequately shown in the sitemap

In fact, devising a site map is one way to quickly locate the weaknesses in your site architecture. If it takes more than three clicks to get to a page on your site, a sitemap will quickly illustrate this. Not all loopholes will be revealed with this method, but it’s one place to start! If you want your website to stand out from the competition, you'll need more than "About Us" and "Contact Pages." In fact, when you become comfortable creating strong site architecture, you might look for a reason to use it. Adding a blog to your eCommerce website, for example, is one way to use and improve those skills while boosting your site's SEO. But even if your website is small, you'll be remiss if you don't pay attention to site structure and what it can do for SEO.  

ktama

M Posted 7 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Strive to position your site in one of the top three spots on the first page of Google and on average 35% of searchers will be clicking over to your site. Video SEO strategies place you front and center for your target audience. Google is now showing video thumbnails in 26% of search results according to BrightEdge Research. I want to share how adding high-quality videos to relevant pages on your site will engage your viewers and keep them on your site about 50% longer. Google search engine crawlers like that a lot.

Why are videos so popular?

Think about all the reasons you like videos. They’re interactive. You can click on a play button, an offer, or click for more information. Maybe you even replay it. Videos convey human emotion making it easy to connect with the content. Videos increase your click-through rate, which drives 157% increase in organic traffic from SERP (search engine results page). During my research, I found that the experts confirm these results. According to Smallbiztrends by 2019, global consumer Internet video traffic will account for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic. Furthermore, pages with videos are 53 times more likely to rank on Google’s first page. Unbounce tells us that using videos on landing pages can increase conversion by 80%.

Maximizing your efforts using video SEO

Adding a random video here or there won’t do the job. You’ll need to be thoughtful about whether the video is informative and engaging and whether it makes sense on the page. Don’t just link to it, embed it onto your site and make sure the video image is compelling. You should add good SEO text along with valuable content to your page. Don’t forget to share your videos on all your social media platforms. Try to evaluate your videos and content according to a cycle. Your video boosts your ranking. It drives more people to your site. Potential customers click your link. It satisfies their interest because of your awesome videos. They linger longer. Video SEO goes up.

Boost your Google video search rankings

If you have a website, you have a story to tell, so use your video to educate your viewers. What is your product about? What’s the history behind it? What made it so valuable to you that you wanted to offer it to the public? If you’re offering a service, describe it to them. Show them how it works and what they have to gain from it. Add some testimonials to validate your content. Think about the questions that your customers ask most often about your product or service and answer them in your video. If you’re offering a product, making videos is even easier. Think of your website as a how-to book that someone might check out of a library. We’ve become a nation of DIY-ers. Describe your product, and then show your viewers how it works. I like to show the before and after results.

By giving your customers information, you’re empowering them to make a great decision—and that is to invest in your product or service. As you educate your customers, you gain credibility as they deem you an expert in your industry. Posting a how-to video is also a great way to get your video listed in the “suggested clips” results. Show them who you are and what you’re all about. Shoot some video of your office behind the scenes so your audience knows what goes into what you’re offering. Add some music, a touch of humor, or something unexpected. Think about how quickly the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge or the Police Department Lip Sync Challenges went viral. Why? Because they’re fun.

Google likes YouTube videos and privately hosted videos

When deciding your video strategy, you need to think about where the content will live. In recent years, Google only promoted YouTube videos with thumbnails on the SERPs, but recently they are increasing the exposure of domain-hosted videos also. Don’t forget to optimize all the backend information like title, description, tags, number of subscribers after watching, comments, likes, and dislikes. This is an important step because it tells Google how to categorize and prioritize your video.

Making videos takes a lot of effort, so I recommend creating a version for YouTube and one for your site. Consider the YouTube version more of an upper funnel piece designed to get people to your web site and videos on your site mid-funnel designed to get people farther in and to transact there.

Tips for Creating Engaging Video Content:

Be careful not to make your videos too long. You’ll keep your audience’s attention for 1-2 minutes, but not longer than 4 minutes. About half of your visitors will be watching your clip on a mobile device which is another good reason to keep your videos short and visible in that size window. A video on your home page can be effective; people often use corporate or product explainer videos there.

Depending on the content, consider whether to place it on a more relevant page or depth in the site path or journey. Surround your video with relevant content to tie it all together. Include a transcript of your video below the video window and load it with SEO-friendly keywords. Turn your visual graphics into a downloadable infographics or assets to capture even more attention. Remember that search engines like videos because searchers like videos. Leave out the fluff and keep them meaningful. Keep them short and mobile-friendly and let your brand shine through.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 6 months ago

t 9 min read

Over the last 2 years, BrightEdge covered Amazon organic optimization as part of its vertical search optimization (VSO) series; since then Amazon Advertising has also emerged as the third-largest advertising platform. Here is more information on what that means for your brand strategy.

An estimated 70% of Americans with a minimum of $150,000 or more in income and shop online also have an Amazon Prime membership. The ecommerce giant shipped more than 5 billion items in 2017 through their Prime program around the world. In 2017 they also posted an incredible net sale revenue of $177.97 billion, a 31% growth over 2016.

This impressive growth has been driven by the 310 million active customers that use the Amazon platform, and the more than 353 million products currently listed on the site, including their marketplace sellers. Not only does the platform offer an incredible number of products and customers, but advantages such as the two-day shipping on many products for Prime customers and the trust that it has built with consumers has fueled its incredible growth.

Now it has a new statistic to add to its repertoire. Not only has it come to dominate almost half of the US ecommerce market, but its role as an advertiser has also begun to attract attention. According to eMarketer, the Amazon ad platform will now be the third largest, behind only the powerhouses of Facebook and Google. This means that it will overtake Verizon’s Oath and Microsoft by the end of this year.

As a marketer, here is what this new designation means for you and how you can take advantage of this opportunity in your own marketing strategy.

Amazon Advertising ad growth

Advertisers in the US will spend an estimated $4.61 billion on the Amazon Advertising platform this year, which will come to an estimated 4.1% of all the digital spend in the country. Of course, this does comprise a relatively small percentage of the more than $230 billion in revenue the site will likely post this year, but it does represent an intriguing level of growth. This growth clearly indicates that how brands and customers perceive the Amazon Advertising platform has continue to mature.

This expansion will also continue rapidly over the next few years, as eMarketer projects that the Amazon Advertising platform will continue to grow by more than 50% per year through about 2020.

Why brands have taken such an interest in Amazon Advertising

The large number of users and subscribers have led to a solid audience for those in the ecommerce and retail sectors. Nearly half of all product searchers--49 percent--will start on directly on Amazon when they begin to look for a new product to purchase. This is significantly higher than the 36% that will start on the search engines or the 15 percent that start on brand websites. Brands, therefore, understand that Amazon will offer them a strong, consistent platform for finding potential customers.

This evolution remains strongly indicative of the popularity of vertical search. Vertical search allows users to find more precisely what they seek. Rather than using the horizontal search of the average search engine, people have begun turning to platforms, such as Amazon Advertising for ecommerce, Kayak for flights or hotels, or Yelp for finding local businesses.

Additionally, 40% of shoppers report never scrolling past the first page on their Amazon results. To gain the attention of these customers, therefore, an ad provides brands the opportunity to get in front of their prospective customers and ensure that they have visibility.

Amazon’s growth and stability also provides brand with a high level of trust, they feel confident that their listings and ads will be seen and that customers will continue to return.

How to succeed with Amazon Advertising

Success with Amazon Advertising requires consideration for the entire brand presence on the platform. The ads can be a good way to drive customers to the listing, but with the high number of products and choices for customers, competition is fierce. You not only want people to click on the listing, you want them to make a purchase. Succeeding with Amazon Advertising, therefore, requires careful thought regarding your listings and other organic Amazon efforts.

The content on the listing should be optimized for the users. This includes listing all the possible relevant information such as the:

• Product titles
• Detailed, well-written descriptions
• Answers to questions that have been asked
• Bullets describing key features and important information
• Number of reviews
• Average rating score
• Number of images
• Characters and keywords in title

Not only does this information help the customer, it also helps Amazon with indexing. When people type queries into the search functions, the Amazon algorithm will match people with the products that fit the need most closely. For example, if someone specifies a color or size of a product, then they will focus on the products that match those specifications. If you do not list the color or size of your product, then your listing will likely be overlooked.

Therefore, as you continue to build your listing content, you also want to pay attention to the vocabulary that your prospective customers use. Align the content on the page with the search terms people likely use, which will help increase the number of queries your ad and listing can appear for.

To really engage people after they have clicked on your ad, you also need to pay attention to your branding and pricing. Research to see what other competitors offer on the same or similar products, such as pricing and shipping cost information.

You also want to brand and message your page. Make it clear when someone clicks on your page what differentiates you from your competitors. The messaging should accentuate your value and what sets you apart from the crowd. It should be clear that buying your product means doing business with your authentic organization, not just a third-party seller, and that you place a heavy value on the experience of your customers.

According to eMarketer, the Amazon Advertising platform has taken its place as the third largest advertising platform. Although the gulf between Amazon and Google and Facebook remains large, this position represents the power and growing influence of the ecommerce giant on consumers.

Brands know that customers trust and appreciate Amazon, and thus they have been investing in advertising budget here with increasing regularity. As brands decide to move forward, they should pay close attention to whether or not the Amazon Advertising platform will also benefit their own strategy and how to build an ad campaign.