maspillera

M Posted 8 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

“Hi, we just updated our privacy policy…” The odds are that you've received a bunch of emails the past few weeks that read like this: and from a variety of different software and service providers (including BrightEdge.) If you didn't know already, the reason for this sudden torrent of privacy updates is the European Union's rollout of the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which went into effect on May 25, 2018.

The regulation, which seeks to standardize laws for data protection and privacy across the member nations of the EU, sent many companies into overdrive to update their software products, websites, and other assets to be GDPR compliant. It also might have led some marketers to believe that their lead generation efforts will be negatively affected. The more likely reality, however, is that GDPR regulations will be a good thing for digital marketing campaigns, as digital marketers will have a more transparent view into how much of their website audience is genuinely interested in being contacted to receive a newsletter, schedule a demo, or any other marketing touch. In this post, we'll walk you through the potential marketing benefits of GDPR regulations and how to implement the required changes in a way that makes sense from both a legal and marketing standpoint.

What is GDPR?

Despite being adopted in 2016, the legal requirements of GDPR only came into effect in May of this year. The core intent of the regulation is to provide citizens of European Union member nations with the ability to fully control their personal data online, as well as to facilitate international business within the EU by establishing a shared set of data protection standards that should be adhered to. The primary requirements of GDPR that would affect web marketers are as follows:

• Users’ personal data cannot be processed unless the user has given direct opt-in consent to the vendor
• Users must be informed about the extent to which their data is being collected
• Users have the right to access their personal data that’s been captured by a website or platform, and also documentation on how that data is being used by the vendor
• The right to erasure (also known as the "right to be forgotten"): EU citizens have the right, at any time, to request that their personal data be deleted by a vendor

Does GDPR Hurt Digital Marketing?

The idea that GDPR might hurt digital marketing efforts stems from the fact that a key part of the regulation is the requirement that vendors include specific and visible opt-in messages to be included in the lists for interactions like email campaigns and other types of marketing/sales outreach. For example, if you create a landing page with a registration form for users to sign up for a webinar, it’s no longer a valid assumption that EU users are consenting to be enrolled in the mailing list for your newsletter when registering for the webinar. Instead, you must now include on the registration (as well as other forms on your site) a field or option through which the user can state that they would like to have their information shared or used to contact them with an offer other than the one they are explicitly signing up for.  Here is an example of how we do it: The concern is that by introducing this additional layer of "friction" before a user can be added to a database, a vendor may suffer a decline in its total amount of leads.

How GDPR Helps Marketing

While it may be true that GDPR rules may reduce the overall amount of leads you receive through your website, only focusing on only the topline number is a shortsighted way of looking at your digital lead generation efforts. A more nuanced way of looking at lead generation is to model it according to your full conversion funnel. Not all leads are created equal. If the ultimate goal of generating leads on your website is to convert more users into sales then it follows that you will want to focus exclusively on getting in touch with users who have the highest likelihood to buy your product or service. GDPR compliance is actually aligned with this digital marketing goal. By requiring users to opt in being contacted for offers explicitly, there's greater certainty that the people who do end up opting in will, on average, be higher intent leads. So while lead volume at the top line may reduce, that would likely come alongside increased conversion further down the funnel all the way to revenue, making your digital marketing efforts not just more transparent, but far more efficient. In addition, your sales team will thank you for bringing in such engaged leads for them to contact. In short, while you may see top-level workable leads decrease you should see a corresponding increase in the conversion of your leads and ultimately higher close rates on your website lead generation tactics.

How to be GDPR Compliant on Your Site

At this point, many vendors around the world have completed most if not all of their GDPR updates. (hence the tidal wave of privacy policy update emails) That said, it never hurts to double check your work and ensure that you're up to date. Here's a checklist of essential updates that should be up and running on your website:

1. Update webforms: Run a site audit to identify which web forms are currently active and build out a plan to update those forms to include an opt-in button or checkbox with a clear description of what the opt-in would sign the user up for.
2. Update privacy policy: If you're a SaaS platform, it's especially important that you work with your legal team or counsel to update the privacy policy on your website to comply with GDPR terms. If you haven't already, send an email to your full customer list stating that you've updated your privacy policy and include a direct link to the privacy policy page.
3. Update marketing automation settings: If your web forms are connected to a marketing automation platform it's highly important that you update your backend rulesets to take your new opt-ins into account. Set up a condition that ensures no one who leaves the opt-in field null will accidentally be added to a lead list or list of people to be contacted for offers other than the one they specifically registered for.

Next Steps...

If you have already implemented these steps you can breathe a little easier. If not, it is imperative that you implement your GDPR strategy with the help of your legal team as soon as possible but remember, it is likely that this will benefit your digital marketing strategy and your customers alike. This post does not constitute legal advice.

gregalbuto

M Posted 8 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

SEO is the foundation of a successful website. Considering that an estimated 51% of site traffic originates from organic search, it is clear that where a website appears on the SERP will greatly impact the site’s overall traffic success. Properly done, SEO can drive engagement, conversions, and revenue.

These SEO basics are a good way to start your way towards successful SEO. SEO is often untended by businesses, however, because it can feel daunting to get a site optimized so it appears high in the SERPs. SEO is a less glamorous form of marketing as it often requires waiting weeks to start to really see the impact of your efforts.

By just taking a few minutes a day, however, to focus on taking a few basic steps towards using SEO, you can increase your visibility and therefore your success online. Here are 8 SEO basics you need to get started.

Want to get the most from your SEO? Here is how to maximize your ROI.

SEO Basics 1: Who do I create content for?

Before you can move forward with your SEO plan, you must first know exactly for whom are you are writing. This means breaking down your target customers into customer personas. These categories will help you understand the pain points and needs of your unique audience so that you can tailor the material to engage them.

You can begin to build your target personas by examining and your current and past customers. You want to understand what they wanted to see from a business and what brought them to you.

You can also use market research to supplement your findings. It is also important to know exactly when a prospective client will be engaging with your content. Reports, such as white papers or case studies, tend to serve customers who are further down the buyer’s journey, while blog posts about the industry are often explored by those in the beginning Awareness stage.

The type of content as well as the material you cover should all be tailored to meet the needs of particular customers at certain points in their buyer’s journey.

SEO Basics 2: What kind of content do people want to read?

Once you know who you are writing for, the next part is understanding exactly what they want to read. This is keyword research. By doing keyword research you can examine factors, such as the traffic and level of competition for a particular keyword. This can help you pinpoint concepts that your targeted personas are likely to be searching for, improving your chances of attracting a strong audience.

Using a platform like BrightEdge will also allow you to go one step further. Once you have selected a keyword to be tested, you can also check the top 10 domains ranked for the keyword. This will not only help you see if the keyword is worth pursuing, but it will also give you added insight into the types of content and information that have already been well-ranked for this topic. This is a shot of the BrightEdge Recommendations capability which provides actionable on-page and off-page insights.

SEO Basics 3: How do I write content that is easy to digest?

Armed with your topic and the understanding of the ideal audience, you now need to create fresh content. As you develop your material, the customer should be the center focus. Make sure the content adds something of value for your readers. Use your professional expertise to offer them unique insight. This value will not only improve engagement, but it will also help to cast you as the helpful professional to whom they should return when they have more questions about your industry.

Remember that in online marketing, this is often the opportunity to begin to build a relationship with your prospect, so you want to get off to a strong start. When considering your content, it is also important to think about your format. Customers have ever-decreasing attention spans with the average now down to around 8 seconds. Using features such as bullets, lists, headings and short paragraphs all make your content easier to scan and digest. This will help people retain your material and better understand the depth of the information you can provide.

SEO Basics 4: How can I help people find my content?

Once you have your high-value content prepared, you need to find a way to get that content in front of the targeted customers. People do not magically find quality content, you need to engage in a few best practices to improve the visibility of your material. To begin, make sure you have included your keyword 5-10 times throughout the content, depending on length.

This includes the H1, at least one H2 and naturally a few times in the body of your content. Remember as you begin this step, however, that keyword stuffing is frowned upon both by readers and by the algorithms. Google has taken great care to downgrade the sites that use stuffing techniques to try and make their thin content seem relevant despite its lack of depth. Instead, your focus should be to naturally incorporate your targeted keyword in your material. Remember that this includes semantically related keywords. Google continues to push towards semantic search with their updates such as Hummingbird and RankBrain.

In other words, they work to understand the context and intent behind a query. Including related keywords naturally in your material will help to further establish your relevance to the search algorithm. Keep in mind that your efforts to get your content in front of the right people at the right time also includes distribution.

Your plan should include your social media platforms as well as email lists (learn more about social media metrics). Delivering your content to the people who are the most likely to appreciate it can help boost your traffic and engagement rates, both of which are considered by search engines when determining the position of the article on the SERPs.

SEO Basics 5: How to I create a pleasant user experience?

Once you get people on your website, you want to make the entire experience pleasant for them. This means features, such as fast load times and using images. Customers quickly grow impatient and annoyed when a website takes too long to load. One study found that an increase of just 1 second in load time can decrease conversions by 7 percent. You can improve your load times by taking steps, such as:

• Only using the most necessary plugins
• Enabling browser caching
• Optimize images that are too heavy

While it is important to use appropriately-sized images, the visuals themselves can also help improve the user experience. Unique images, particularly those that directly involve your company, such as personnel or your products and services, tend to be great. Most people are very visual, and adding images helps you tap into that power to make your material seem more interesting. Using these two steps will help to increase engagement and will decrease bounce rates.

SEO Basics 6: How do I make my site easy to navigate?

As people arrive on your website, you want to help them move around your page. They should be able to clearly understand where they are in your website in relation to everything else in the domain. If they want to learn more about your company itself, for example, then it should be obvious where they can find an About Us link.

Your sitemap should also be uploaded to Google to help the search engine understand your site as it crawls the domain. Your URLs should similarly be clearly structured. Rather than having your domain followed by several random letters and numbers, it should clearly indicate where the person is on the site. For example, yourdomain.com/blog/8-seo-basics. This will also help you add in another keyword, boosting your relevancy.

SEO Basics 7: How do I get people to engage with my site?

Now that you have people on your website, you want to do everything you can to keep them on the page. The more a person reads and engages with your website, the easier it will be to help them build a relationship with you. They will be more likely to remember your brand and view you as a trusted authority.

As they prepare to make a purchase, it is a natural inclination to lean towards those with whom they already have a relationship. As people spend more time on your website, they are also sending valuable signals to the search engines, letting them know that they appreciate and trust your content. You can nurture this engagement a few ways.

One important means is through internal links. These links will provide access to resources for those who want to learn more about these related subjects. You should have all links in your piece open into a new window.

This improves the user experience and encourages people to come back to the original article easily. Your content should also be followed by relevant CTAs. Your chief goal with your content is to nurture leads and encourage them to move further through the buyer’s journey. Relevant CTAs are a great way to tap into the interests of your reader and encourage them to move to the next stage in the process. This is one of the nearly unlimited reports generated by the BrightEdge Story Builder.

SEO Basics 8: How do I track metrics and analytics?

As you begin to do SEO on your website, you also need to track metrics. It is not optimal to run an SEO campaign based upon intuition or feelings. When you are just getting started in SEO, there are a few key areas that you want to focus on your:

• Traffic rates by channel
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rates
• Cost per conversion

These numbers will help you see how well your SEO efforts are helping to bring more people to your website and how interesting they find your material. As you mature in your SEO process, you will also want to start looking at more in-depth metrics, such as how your performance is changing month-over-month and year-over-year. You will want to explore how your performance is impacted by different campaigns as well. Fortunately, a platform like BrightEdge allows you to customize your analytics so you can easily get the information you need at each stage of your campaign. SEO is an important part of any marketing campaign. Following each of these SEO basics will help you succeed.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 8 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Google announced a number of AI-driven product enhancements at its annual Google I/O conference on May 10. It is delivering materially on its positioning as an AI-first company. To Google that appears to mean injecting AI into all products and services to make them smarter and more useful. Just before the keynote, Google announced it is rebranding its Google Research division to Google AI. The move further emphasizes how Google is focusing R&D on computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks. As part of this process, it is also subtly expanding the scope and the possibilities of Search.

Google Assistant Gets Really Helpful

Google Duplex is taking voice and AI to a new level as Google CEO Sundar Pichai demoed the Google Assistant calling a hair salon and making him a hair appointment. Some people declared the demo passed the Turing Test, where the AI is so good that the person does not know they are talking to a computer. Google will make conversation more natural by not requiring the "Hey Google" or "Ok, Google" and using more natural timing and cadence. While this technology may not have a direct relationship to Search on its surface, on closer inspection it does bring up some interesting questions. Voice is already one of the most significant transformations to the way people search online, often presenting direct verbalized answers to users' questions and bypassing the SERP altogether. Voice already represents a full 20% of Google searches made on mobile and Android devices as of 2016, and one in six adults in the United States possesses some form of "smart speaker" device as of 2017. It's clear that this is a technology set to become a potential tidal wave. That said, Pichai's product demo is another reminder that as search marketers we must continually question whether we're looking at SEO for Voice the right way, as we do for any other type of optimization. If the future of Voice is moving from queries like "which hair salons are open on Tuesday?" to directions like "make me a haircut appointment on Tuesday," how will that affect SEO? If a user issues a direction to buy batteries, but doesn't indicate a brand or ecommerce platform preference, how will the voice assistant decide which options to present first? Will it present options at all? It is an opportunity for brands to take advantage of even more certain and commercial search intent.

Gmail Starts Suggesting What to Write

In addition to the existing smart reply feature, Gmail will soon be able to suggest full sentences for you while you write with its new Smart Compose capability. Machines are already writing more than most people realize, playing a role in sports, weather, and simple news updates. Companies that use machines to write, do not usually publicize it.

Google Maps Will Augment the Reality of Your Pedestrian Navigation

Google Maps is getting more friendly and social with its For You tab where it will feature new and interesting restaurants and businesses in your neighborhood. And it will soon combine street view and camera to add augmented reality directions that will help you navigate the real world with a layer of video and audio. As we discuss in more detail below, Google is expanding aspects of its search experience - in this case local search results - and surfacing them areas other than a basic search results page. Someone walking down the street in an unfamiliar city may not have the time or inclination to navigate away from GPS navigation in Google Maps to look up "restaurants in my area," so now they could have the results of that local search query tiled over an augmented reality viewpoint. This opens up another avenue for local SEO to get in front of potential customers at exactly the right moment. Additionally, this move is a reaction to localized vertical search engines like Yelp and FourSquare. By answering the need to present a competing feature set to these VSEs, Google indirectly acknowledges that VSEs are now a significant force in Search.

Google News Will Let You Personalize Your News Without Becoming too Insular

Google News will also being using AI to find and curate news customized for the user. Additionally, it is designed to provide you "a range of perspectives" to expose users to ideas outside their core. Google seems to be doing some beneficial social engineering to provide personalized content while keeping society from becoming too fragmented and insular.

Google Lens Will Help You Make Physical Virtual

Google Lens will help you take real-world text and make it editable and available to use inside your phone. And it you can point it at a product and it will help you find a place to purchase it online. Google is in a continual process of refining its search experience to present users with the exact content that they need in response to the exact query or intent that they have. This was the rationale behind all of the named search algorithm updates as well as the introduction of the customer micro-moments model. By introducing contextual ecommerce listings to Google Lens, Google is applying the same philosophy horizontally across its technologies. An outgrowth of the same strategy can be seen in the recent addition of ecommerce aspects to Image Search via structured data tags. Google is trying to get even more dialed in on micro-moment targeting by expanding the breadth of where search results-style listings are presented to the end user. Previously these listings may only have been surfaced to the user through the traditional SERP - but is that where every digital audience is beginning its customer journey now?

You have heard of voice search, but have you heard of thought search?

As futuristic as it sounds, an MIT student has a working proof of concept of his AlterEgo product that allows him to think a search, search Google, and get the answer silently vibrated into his ear. Arnav Kapur was featured on “60 Minutes” and did calculations, found trivia information, and ordered a pizza using only his thoughts. The device is not connected to his brain, just worn on Kapur’s head. When the user thinks and internally vocalizes a specific command or question, it is conveyed to a computer and Google — sort of like silently Googling something in your head. Electrical signals that the brain normally sends to the vocal cords are intercepted and sent to a computer and that information is then communicated to the user’s inner ear via vibrations. Google is expanding not just the places where search happens, but the ways in which we conduct searches altogether.

How does BrightEdge use AI for SEO success?

BrightEdge Insights uses deep learning and big data to recommend the critical actions that will drive the biggest impact for your business. Insights gives you the confidence that you are focusing on the content or optimization issues that will drive the biggest impact today. Insights prioritizes all of the actions in one simple feed, placing the most critical actions at the top. Instead of spending time on data extraction, manipulation, and syntheses, you will get back hours each week by taking recommended actions from Insights that yield quick wins in SEO. With artificial intelligence, Insights does the heavy lifting to uncover the most relevant actions you should take. Insights looks at millions of web pages, examines thousands of changes each week, and boils them down to a few key findings that will move the needle for you.

Takeaway

What do these advances in AI mean for marketers? The advice remains consistent: build relevant, quality content that provides a great user experience. As Google uses RankBrain to understand intent at higher specificity, more detailed and specific (longtail) content is likely to be in first position. Additionally, watch for developments in technical SEO and markup that will make your content more discoverable and desirable to the AI-savvy bot and algorithms.