gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

What are local citations?

Citations are online references to a local business displaying company info which can include their name, address, or phone number, or NAP. Citations can be found in the form of virtual business directories, review sites, local blogs, etc. and help influence local search results, helping users discover local businesses. Citations can appear whether you submit them or not – businesses don’t always have control over where citations appear. When consumers post about your business and include elements of your NAP, that’s a citation.

While the minimum information for a local citation is the NAP, additional business information including business descriptions, email addresses, driving directions and more, can contribute to a well-rounded citation.

Local search has evolved greatly over the last decade especially citations. As Google My Business became the leading source for local search and citations, the citation landscape shifted significantly. GMB is influential in Google Local, Google Maps, Knowledge Graph, and aggregator sites. This is why it’s so critical to leverage GMB and give it the necessary time and budget to grow your leads.

Local Seaarch Citations

Citations are critical to local SEO. You can leverage citations to gain referral traffic by appearing in directories and users catching your citations. Citations with links back to your site have more SEO value than those without links, as having quality backlinks play an influential role in ranking in the SERPs. You won’t want to link back to just any page, though. Choose a page that makes sense for a user to click to after finding your citation. Also, be sure to link to an existing page. Linking to a broken link or an error page can provide the user with a poor UX when they arrive on your site.

Optimizing local citations

In order to maximize the visibility of your citations, it is important to claim and edit the directory citations you’re able to. Below are a few simple ways to begin optimizing your citations.

1. Have consistent citation listings. If any of your information is inconsistent, it can hurt your rankings, create a poor UX for users trying to find you, and make your citations difficult to manage. When there are different data points, Google and Bing don’t know which to use.
2. Choose a secondary and tertiary category. If you have the option to, choose a category beyond your definitive one in order to maximize exposure on directory sites.
3. Leverage keywords in your business descriptions. Keywords are an essential part of SEO. To optimize your citations, include the keywords you want to rank for in the descriptions.
4. Link to your locations page. Instead of linking to a variable landing page from your description, link to your locations page that includes more of your business information.
5. Strive for success in your reviews. While reviews aren’t part of citations, they’re often paired with them and positive reviews are a great way to increase traffic and brand awareness. Share your positive reviews and work with consumers to keep them coming. Users will see them alongside your directory listing.

Use Data Cube To Identify Top Keywords

Build a strategy for local citations on directories

Remember that directories aren’t the only place for your business citations, though. Local bloggers, review sites, and any person can create a citation for your business with a simple mention of your business name. If you’re hoping to land a mention on a popular local blog site, you can reach out to the owner of the blog via email and submit your citation for review.

Otherwise, focus your larger efforts on building citations via directories. While bigger businesses without local storefronts may focus their off-site SEO on building links, local businesses should be focused on gaining citations.

Having your business citations on reputable, trusted listings, and directories, will help your site rank better in search engines. Both the quality of the directory and your citation impacts how search engines view you.

There are numerous directories that relate to specific industries and getting listed on them is important. In the local world, some of them include Google My Business, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Chamber of Commerce, Bing Maps, Facebook, and hundreds more. There are also more specific directories for different industries including lawyers.com and doctordirectory.com. Facebook, Yelp, and the industry specific sites are the most relevant and the ones that will help your site rank better in the SERPs.

There is also the dilemma in which you may not get listed on some directories, therefore, it’s important to focus on the ones that will benefit you the most first and work on the others at a later date. We suggest coming up with a list of directories you want to appear on and rank them yourself by priority.

Tracking your local citations

Visitors will lose trust in your business if the information on your citations are inaccurate. You can use different software features, including a citation checker, to track your local citations. Leverage a citation management tool in order to create a workflow to track which directories you appear on and which citations you need to clean up. You can also do a site search for your citations. You can take the below steps to do a site search:

1. Open a search engine
2. Enter “site:www.website.com [key term you want to search]”
3. Alter your search if necessary

The golden rule of citations is quality over quantity. Remember that while you can add citations to social platforms, business directories, websites, and more, it’s important to first focus on the most valuable outlets first. Verify to search engines that your business exists with local citations and optimize accordingly in order to maximize SERP real estate for your business.

bcoughlin

M Posted 5 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

User engagement is not often a high enough priority for digital marketers, and that is both a big mistake and a big opportunity. Many reports focus on traffic, revenue, keyword rankings (and of course DataCube score), but user engagement metrics are usually an afterthought.

Unlocking the value of user engagement data should be at the heart of every report, whether the focus is SEO/SEM, content marketing, email marketing, or conversion rate optimization.

Check Your Data Cube Score Today!

What is an engagement metric?

A variety of commonly tracked metrics tend to fall under the bucket of “engagement,” but they all focus on how people interact with your webpage. Do users spend more time on one page than another? Do users click back to a search result immediately after visiting your website? If a particular type of content is present, such as a video, do users watch the full video?

Note the difference between an engagement metric and an experience metric. Experience metrics focus on technical performance of your site, such as the page load speed.

In addition to the common engagement metrics discussed here, remember you can set up custom metrics to answer questions specific to your website or business. For example, if you’ve recently invested in new media (videos, infographics, etc.) to give your customers more information at various points of the sales funnel, you might want to see if the average order value of customers who watch a new video is higher or lower than those who don’t watch a video, and compared to those who watch a different video.

Really digging into engagement metrics helps determine ROI on recent digital implementations and gives you a wealth of helpful information for marketing resource allocation.

What are the most important user engagement metrics?

• Pageviews & sessions - All other engagement metrics give context to the traffic data (pageviews and sessions) in your analytics. Traffic metrics tell you what happened, but few clues to why.
• Check out Tips on getting more value out of your SEO reporting for more on SEO traffic analysis.
• Pageviews per session: At a very high level, comparing pageviews per session before and after a page/site update is a great way to see if people are engaging more or less with your website. That said, dependent on business goals, a better strategy may be shortening the path to conversion, so a lower pageview per session number might be an improvement. This is more commonly a focus for paid media than SEO, but it’s really a question of funnel stage. If a potential customer is higher in the funnel, like a business blog, you likely want a higher pageview per session number, but for top-converting product pages, a lower number.
• Conversion rate: Many reports already have some focus on conversion rates as an important KPI, but overemphasizing work on improving them may lead to poorer overall performance. For instance, removing a few paragraphs of text to boost the conversion rate may hurt your SEO keyword ranking and lower overall traffic and conversions.
• Bounce rate: What is bounce rate? A “bounce” is a single session where the user views no other pages. Understanding an acceptable bounce rate is unique to different intended user experiences, so while lower is usually better, if someone searches for a definition and finds exactly what they want, a bounce actually indicates high user satisfaction, not low. Read more about bounce rates in a recent post.
• Time on page & session duration: How long a user spends on your website and on particular pages is often most helpful for content marketers, as the time a person actually spends on an article is critical to understanding and predicting interest for upcoming content calendars. Content calendars always need more ideas, and making data-informed strategic decisions about what topics or types of articles to create is make-or-break for content marketers.
• Top exit pages: Limiting exposure to low-performing content, such as a distracting product selector tool that slows the path to conversion, can be a great way to quickly improve overall conversion rates, so taking a look periodically can open up quick wins when you need them.

Segment by design as well as category to uncover more engagement insights

Many traffic reports break down overall traffic numbers by category or topic, usually aligning with business objectives. Segmenting by page design or feature allows for more cross-channel analysis and optimization.

Example: An apparel website’s report might segment traffic by shoes, shirts, and pants. After a major website redesign, the report shows shoes benefited much more than shirts and pants. A number of business decisions might be made because of this, but if the report segmented by page type, such as category pages, product pages and product guides, the real story may be the shoe category had more product guides, which benefited the most from the design update, and drove the shoe performance. With that information, instead of investing more heavily in shoes, the company’s digital marketing director might invest in more product guides rather than more shoe-specific content.

Understanding user engagement in context of website performance

What’s more important, user engagement or traffic? What about keyword ranking? How do these impact one another? There are a lot of questions that can come up when you start digging into engagement metrics. Sometimes, if your keyword rankings and SEO traffic go up, your website might start to receive more casual users, who are less engaged than those who found you before.

To help make sense of this, build and refine a custom dashboard tailored to your business and website’s goals. Over time, it will go beyond telling you what is happening, and tell you why.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Backlinks are foundational to SEO and play an influential role in search engine ranking. If you are a trusted website that receives backlinks from other sites, search engines like Google will also see you as trustworthy. This will give your pages better opportunity at ranking well, improve your content’s discoverability by people and searchbots, and increase referral traffic.

Get backlinks with both new and existing content

Earning backlinks organically is difficult, and while creating new content isn’t guaranteed to generate backlinks, a strong content strategy will be crucial to building backlinks to your site. Publishing content regularly and coordinating your outreach via your network, customers, and social media is key to gaining traction with your audience. Below are some additional ways you can get backlinks.

• Produce high-quality, educational content that other sites are motivated to link to
• Leverage social sharing for others to see your content and promote the opportunity to link to it
• Get backlinks from companies and individuals you already have good, business relationships with
• Track your unlinked mentions and reach out to other brands to ask for backlinks
• If you have a strong local presence, look to get citations from local resources and business listings
• Find pages that discuss your industry and mention competitors but not your brand. Reach out and introduce yourself, your brand, and suggest adding your site as a link

Earning good backlinks

Good backlinks are of high-relevance and come from other trusted, reputable websites. The Google Penguin algo update initially released in April 2012 and last updated in January 2016 exists to identify and penalize sites that are linked to from poor-quality or spammy sites.

There are several ways you can earn good backlinks. Below are a few valuable ones for you to get started:

• Leverage your network or customers for guest post content. While the effectiveness of link-swapping guest posts has been diminished, useful content from people outside your organization can still provide value
• Create content that is educational, authoritative, and trustworthy
• Execute site audits to maintain healthy SEO and fix broken backlinks
• Become a thought leader in your industry by developing original research, write about industry updates, create a strong social presence, and more

What is domain authority and why is it relevant for backlinks?

Domain authority is not used by Google or other search engines and it is not an actual ranking factor for SEO. It was created by Moz as an indicator of success for your domain. Despite this, in the SEO community, there is often discussion about domain authority as though it is a Google metric.

You can also leverage Data Cube for similar insights into the strength of your domain and BrightEdge’s backlink reporting for a complete and accurate understanding of your backlink data.

By focusing on your site health and backlink profile, you can influence higher ranks in the SERPs. Signal to Google that you have a trustworthy, authoritative site by focusing at least some of your SEO efforts on building backlinks.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Knowing which KPIs – or key performance indicators – for SEO are the most important to track is crucial to the success of your organic strategy and can help guide future content creation. Today, 53.3% of online traffic comes from organic searches. Not only does this mean that SEO is more important now than it ever has been before, but it also means keeping track of your SEO metrics and KPIs is even more relevant today.

What are KPIs for SEO?

SEO KPIs are used to determine whether current strategies are working and indicative of your channel’s performance against your goals. Tracking the correct metrics and knowing which ones are important will help you to drive organic traffic to your site. However, with so many metrics to choose from, which KPIs are most important to SEO?

Some SEO KPIs that will provide value to your website include:

• Ranking keywords. Knowing how many keywords you’re ranking for, what those keywords are, and where they rank, will allow you to better understand which keywords you should be optimizing to build a strategy.
• Organic conversion. rate Knowing what content resonates with your audience and how they navigate through your site is critical to online success. Leverage your analytics platform to identify pages that need to be optimized for more conversions. If you use Google Analytics and/or Adobe Analytics, use analytic integrations with BrightEdge to find the engagement metrics that matter.
• Share of voice. Tracking share of voice will help you figure out how you fare against the competition in the SERPs.
• Organic click through rate. Monitoring your CTR will help you determine the success of your content. A high CTR doesn’t always mean success, though. Take note of not only CTR but also, sales or conversions after CTR. If your conversion rate is low, you may be targeting the wrong audience with your content.
• Backlink profile. Building link authority will allow your site to be seen as a thought leader and trustworthy to both Google and users. Receiving external backlinks from reputable sites will drive more referred traffic to your site.
• Number of pages indexed on Google. For your site to appear in the SERPs, your pages need to be indexed by Google. The more pages Google has indexed, the more opportunity your site has to rank for relevant keywords. You can check whether or not your pages have been indexed via Google Search Console.

Tracking your KPIs in BrightEdge

1. Leverage Keyword Reporting to determine how many keywords your website is ranking for in the SERPs. Using Keyword Reporting, you can see how you compare to your competitors with valuable keywords. You can also extract rich data sets that include search volume for individual keywords, SERP rankings, universal results, and more.
2. Use StoryBuilder to create reports and dashboards to keep track of and report on SEO data and KPIs to executives and managers.
3. BrightEdge offers backlink reporting that is seamlessly integrated with Majestic’s “Fresh Index” backlink database. Leverage this feature and build a strategy around and discover competitor links you don’t have.
4. Use Data Cube to gain insights into which of your site’s URLs are winning with high ranking keywords. Track the success of your keywords and expand your knowledge of how they perform over time. 

Demo BrightEdge and Start Tracking Your KPIs ASAP!

What other SEO metrics should I track?

SEO metrics are data points or indicators you should track and monitor to measure performance and keep a healthy, optimized website. Whether it’s to track engagement or reflect on SERP authority, monitoring your SEO metrics can assist you in planning strategies for the future. Chances are, if your SEO metrics are strong, your KPIs will be too.

While there are countless SEO metrics you can keep tabs on, some of the metrics you could most benefit from tracking include the following:

• Bounce rate
• Exit pages for organic traffic
• Pages crawled per day
• Location
• Local visibility

What are content marketing metrics?

Content marketing metrics are measurable metrics you can track in order to find the relevant data you need to determine the success of your content or campaigns. You can leverage content marketing metrics to evaluate ROI and alter strategies. Some metrics you should consider tracking include:

• Social media engagements and shares
• Web traffic
• Bounce rate
• Sales
• Retention
• Engagement
• CTR
• Backlinks
• Time on page
• Email opt-in rates

If your content isn’t performing well, it’s likely that you will see poor CTRs, little time on page and overall low engagement. In order to increase the success of your content marketing metrics, leverage both BrightEdge and analytic integrations, like Google Analytics, to find which content, strategies, and campaigns are performing best. This will give you an idea of strategies to repeat or improve moving forward.

gregalbuto

M Posted 5 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Click through rate, or CTR, is a performance metric that helps you understand your audience and what content resonates.

However, a good CTR doesn’t always mean higher conversions or better engagement with your site. If you have a high CTR but you’re not seeing purchases from those users, you are likely targeting the wrong audience.

How to get a good CTR?

There are several ways you can increase your CTR. Below are a few ways you can begin.

1. Write unique and informative copy. For SEO, this is your meta description, in PPC it’s your ad copy. It’s the text that entices users to click on your link. Without giving away too much, or an exact answer to Q&A content, leverage your copy to draw attention to your content for users to learn more.
2. Leverage structured data. Help your content stand out and grab the attention of users with structured data. Rich snippets have been known to receive more organic clicks. Optimize your pages using structured data to better your chances of receiving clicks.
3. Optimize for local SEO. Localizing your content is especially relevant today as Google continues to move to mobile-first indexing. Local SEO can help your brand stand out in local searches and drive more organic leads to your site. 50% of users visit a store within a day of searching locally. 

How to maintain a good CTR?

In order to get a good CTR, create quality content. You’ll want to start by choosing keywords, especially long-tail keywords, that have a high search volume and resonate with your audience. You can use Instant to pinpoint keywords that are both trending and work for your content.

Demo BrightEdge Instant!

Optimize your title, meta description, and/or ad copy with the keyword you want to appear for. For PPC, remember to use negative keywords as well. Leveraging negative keywords allows you to filter out queries that are less relevant. Some of the more common negative keywords would be “free” or “cheap” to avoid customers that aren’t looking to spend on quality products or services.

If you’re looking to increase CTR of an ad, consider adding a review extension to the copy. When potential customers are able to see that your brand is positively reviewed, you can increase your clicks by up to 66%.

When will I see an increased CTR?

Typically, you will see higher CTRs at the beginning of the customer journey while users are doing informational searches. You will typically see lower CTRs toward the end of the journey when users are making buying decisions.

You will also likely see a higher CTR from video content. An email with a video, rather than an email with just content, receives a 96% increase in CTR. Video content averages the highest click through rate of all digital channels. It is smart to consider adding a video or a link to a video in your content to increase your CTR.

While digital marketers regularly test out different ways to increase CTR and organic traffic and have discovered that some simply don’t work, there are tried and true ways to increase CTR. By getting creative with your meta descriptions and using an SEO-driven titles, you have a better chance of increasing your CTR and, in turn, your ROI as well.