Don’t Invite Bloggers To An Event Without These Tips |  |
- Don’t Invite Bloggers To An Event Without These Tips
- SEO Guide: Fashion E-commerce Websites
- Santa Claus Is Coming To Town: Is Your PPC Account Ready?
- What is a DSP?
- How to Build Relationships as a Brand
- The Changing World of SEO & 7 Tips to Stay Ahead
- Search Love – The Importance of SEO for People, Not Robots
- Keyword Cannibalistion: What is it and how can it be solved?
| Don’t Invite Bloggers To An Event Without These Tips Posted: 10 Nov 2015 02:30 AM PST The relationship between brand and blogger is a fragile one, and I can say that with some confidence as I wear both pairs of these shoes. By day I work in digital PR, and by night I am a travel and lifestyle blogger. As a blogger I love to get invites to relevant events in my area. It might be a party celebrating the opening of a new restaurant, or it could be a meet-up for other likeminded bloggers. Most of the time the emails I receive as a blogger make me excited, and I'm more than happy to engage with the brands or PR agencies who have been in touch. In fact, you can spot me below in a group shot from a blogger event in Oxford. Go on! It’ll be like Where’s Wally? I promise. Apart from the stripy jumper.
But a small percentage of the time I am left rolling my eyes, or worse, completely offended with what has landed in my inbox. Luckily the instances of the latter are few and far-between. Saying that, I have a few handy tips for sending outreach emails to bloggers, especially if you want to get them on side before holding an event! You don't want to negatively influence a write up if it's you who has caused the issue and not the event itself. Make the event interestingThis may seem obvious, but getting an event "right" is often more challenging than you might expect. The admin side is laborious; you will need to reply to many emails and phone calls, as well as making decisions about tiny details which may seem trivial. There needs to be a hook to get people to come to your event. If you're a huge brand, bragging rights might be enough for your attendees, but most brands are going to rely on providing a freebie or an exclusive experience to entice potential attendees to say "yes".
In the past I have had success with gestures big and small; free nibbles and drinks can be just as effective as a full day event packed full of activities if you understand your outreach targets well enough. If you are a retail brand who organises events to reveal your new catalogue of products (I get emails like this from The White Company, Next, and Lush amongst others) why not try and create a more unique experience for bloggers? Press events are still fairly traditional; but bloggers are more likely to want to engage rather than just preview. So if you are launching a new tea set, have a full on tea party – maybe even invite teddy bears as plus ones if it gives you a memorable edge. If you are releasing a fresh clothing line, why don't you invite bloggers to dress up in the pieces and put on a fashion show, with them as the stars? It's the experience people want to write about, not just the product. Moving on to the outreach process itself, you'll want to keep these considerations in mind… How will you approach them?There are many tools you can use to identify bloggers (something which I wrote about at length over on the SEMrush blog) but once you have a number of targets at your fingertips you are going to need to figure out how to actually contact them. Depending on the information that you can find, you will likely have the option of a number of social media platforms, as well as by email, or even by phone in some cases. Whatever you do, avoid contacting a blogger through the comment section on their "about me" page on their blog. Not only does this give your strategy away to competitors, but it can also reduce the chances of the blogger, and others who visit their site, of wanting to get involved with your brand. It looks impersonal, and it's also less professional if it looks like you're just taking the easy route. Get their name rightWhether you use email or a DM on Twitter to contact the bloggers you have targeted, you should follow some simple rules for developing a better relationship with them. Chances are you will take offence when someone addresses you with the wrong name, so try and avoid doing this to someone else. Spelling is important. For example, my name is Hannah. It has never been Hanna, Hana, and especially not Anna. I find it rude when I get an email addressed to any of these spellings as my name is accessible on my blog as well as on my social media profiles. Have a consistent email formatIf you do go down the email route, be clever with your approach. Yes, carefully consider things like the subject line and the content of your email, but don't forget about the smaller details too. Have you ever received an email that contains different colour text and fonts that don't stay consistent throughout all of the content? These variations are red flags for copy and pasted content. Not personal. Not original. Just one version of an email that has been quickly adapted for you, but not crafted for you. Don't be so obvious with copying and pasting content. Either adapt all content in one programme like Word or Google Docs and move it all over at the same time, or strip all mismatching HTML from your message by toggling between rich text to plain text and back again. Oh yeah, and make sure you don't reference someone else's name or blog URL in your invite. That's poor form. Bloggers talk, so don't be a negative talking point between them. Don't spam on TwitterEven if you have ample spaces on for your blogger event, it's best to avoid your entire Twitter feed being filled up with messages to various bloggers. There are phases when bloggers like to know others are involved, and the beginning of the event process isn't usually it. The invitation is a thing of pride. Make sure you are fairly subtle in your approach by offering little teasers so people want to contact you for more information. Or if you are going to use social media, at least make it personal for each blogger. Zomato UK have figured out the magic formula for community engagement on Twitter, and whilst it isn't exactly the same in terms of event invites, we can still probably gain some ideas from their approach. Look at how they target individual people whilst still speaking to a large audience…
Keep it lightTone can be misunderstood when words are written instead of spoken, so keep the content of your email very friendly and positive. If you ask too much of people from the outset, they may think you're trying to get the better side of the deal. Ultimately people don't want to feel like they have been used just to promote your brand, so be respectful. It's OK to reveal a hashtag for an event to encourage community interaction, but specifying that your invite is only redeemable if a blogger writes a post on their blog (maybe featuring a link to a specific URL on your site with predefined anchor text) is taking things a little too far. Maintain contactIf you are organised in your approach, you will have invited bloggers to your event in plenty of time. But don't let this be the one and only time you reach out to them before it happens. Try and chat more so you can start building that all-important relationship. It will be of benefit because it means that the bloggers you have invited will feel more valued by you and your brand, and will help to properly commit them to attending. A few no-shows are usually inevitable, but good communication will hopefully give you more warning. It's wise to send an email to all attendees in the week running up to the event. Do not make the mistake of using the "to" field in your email if you're going to send one email to all bloggers at once. Have the decency to use the "BCC" field so you can maintain a good reputation for privacy.
I’d love to hear your own tips for inviting bloggers to events. Please leave me a comment below or get in touch through Twitter. The post Don’t Invite Bloggers To An Event Without These Tips appeared first on White.net. |
| SEO Guide: Fashion E-commerce Websites Posted: 03 Nov 2015 08:38 AM PST
Now that fashion month is over it seems like a great time to talk about SEO in the fashion e-commerce industry. Perhaps you are an online clothing retailer or a fashion boutique looking to increase your traffic and gain further exposure? You may or may not know how SEO can impact your website and how important it is, either way you are in the right place! Just as you would expect fashion designs to stand out on the runway, the same applies to your website. There are certain ways that you can make your website stand out from the crowd and get noticed by Google and consumers, ultimately helping you to gain further exposure. Although the standard practises of SEO still stand there are specific tactics that can work significantly well. Keyword Research TechniquesThe standardised keyword principles still apply to fashion e-commerce websites, and it's essential that you target the right keywords so that google can lead consumers from your target market straight to your site. You'll firstly need to understand the way users are searching, what they are searching for and their behaviours. When searching on fashion e-commerce websites you will most often find that retailers will opt for those generic keywords like 'Chiffon Dress', this is great when users are simply wanting to browse 'all' chiffon dresses. What about returning users? Returning visitors who have previously visited your website for a browse will most often than not search for specific product names. When naming products, it is crucial that you are specific, for example if I am searching for a "Midi Dress" I may not find your "Ivana Dress". Instead consider calling it "Ivana Midi Dress". Boohoo is a great example of a brand that is doing this right. Unique Meta DataHaving unique meta data on every page is important for any site, for fashion e-commerce websites it is a very common issue to have duplicate meta data across product level pages. This could be because the meta data is automatically generated by the CMS. Ensuring your site has unique meta titles and descriptions enables you to 'stand out from the crowd' in search results, helping to enhance click through rates and conversions. Faceted Navigation to Increase ConversionsParticularly for fashion e-commerce websites a faceted navigation is vital. It is an important part of the user journey and is therefore a key part of your site you should consider. If you are new to the idea of faceted navigation, it is simply a form of navigation (usually on the left hand side of the page) that allows you to filter the results you see on the page. When looking for particular items whether it be clothing/shoes or accessories the user will likely want internal search functions to narrow down their search. By doing so this will make it easier for consumers to find what they are looking for, increasing the chances of a conversion. When implementing faceted navigation you should also be careful not to generate duplicate content, instead offer a simple front-end solution to searching a page; ie. don’t let it generate loads of URLs which use parameters! Is Your Site Structure Way Too Complicated?Site structure is also a key element to consider for any website helping to create a better user journey. I would recommend that you consider having categories based on your collections and trends in conjunction with product type. New Look is a fantastic example of this:
As you can see New Look manages to fit a lot into their navigation without making it look overcrowded and complicated. By doing so allows you to target trends but also related keywords and generic category terms. This will then cater for your visitors in different ways when navigating through your site. Integrate Your XML Sitemap Within Your CMSYou should make sure that within your CMS you have an automated XML sitemap function. You don't want to be manually creating a new XML sitemap each time a product is added or goes out of stock. However, it is important that you don't include URLs which you don't want to be indexed e.g. URLs which are duplicates of other pages, but with products in a different order, sound confusing? see the next section on canonicals for further details. Canonical IssuesMost fashion e-commerce websites will have the option to sort products by ‘new in’, price and other aspects of criterion. This is good for users but bad for search engines, if each time products are sorted in a different way they generate a new URL at the same time, therefore creating ‘duplicate content’. Pagination can also create duplicate content issues which is where products are shown on one page or a number of pages. With all of this duplicate content, it can be easy to panic, but fear not, here are some best practices to help you fix them before they even happen! Robots.txtThe robots.txt file allows you to control what pages search engines access. You can opt you use a wildcard in your robots.txt file which will exclude all URLs with the term stated. Here's an example: User-agent: * This will ask search engines to ignore any URLs with the word ‘price’. You can do this for each level of criterion you wish to exclude. Something else to keep in mind, when there are multiple duplicate URLs, you can choose the ‘main one’ (or ‘canonical’) by looking at your Google Analytics account and identifying which version of the page receives the most traffic. Parameter HandlingJust like you can exclude search engine access to URLs within your robots.txt you can also handle URLs with certain parameters. You can find parameter handling in the configuration section within Google Search Console. Parameters can get complicated, because depending on your CMS, they can handle different features on your website, so it is always worth consulting an expert before making changes. Either way, parameters are a common cause of duplicate content and should be addressed. Canonical TagsThe canonical tag is a simple line of code which is placed on each version of the duplicate page. It is designed to let search engines know that you are aware of the duplication, but allows you to specify which URL you would like search engines you would like to index in place of the duplicates. The tag looks like this: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/” /> When dealing with duplication on your website, it is best practice to use a combination of the methods described here (as well as redirects) to ensure that you are leaving no room for error on your website. If your issue is caused by pagination you can try using pagination tags which work in a similar way to canonical tags. What To Do When Products Go Out Of StockWhen products go out of stock please do not direct them to another page. This is extremely frustrating when users click through from an external link, I have seen it many of times. Instead you should remove the product from your category page and amend the product page to display the product as out of stock. This applies even if you will be getting more stock back in. Although you should suggest similar products or even a link back to the category page to avoid users leaving the site. Category Page ContentIt is important to have content on category pages as a standard practise of optimisation. This enables you to use content as a way to explain what the page is about. Miss Selfridge and Topshop are great examples of brands currently doing this:
You may sometimes look at some large e-commerce fashion websites and wonder why they haven't included content. The fact is that big brands have enough authority so they can skip this and still perform well. For start-up websites this is a MUST! Fashion E-commerce BlogsFashion e-commerce sites that have blogs tend to use them as a platform that is used to promote their own products. Great, but users don't really respond well to posts that are purposely created to increase sales. Think of it like this, use your blog to provide content that you see in fashion magazines. This type of content is based around trends and 'as seen on' celebs, which your users will engage with. This also still allows you to provide links back to products now and again within your posts. Please also make sure that you are linking to your blog from your homepage, it should be clearly linked to within your navigation. You should also have the same domain for your blog rather than having it on a separate sub-domain, if you want to gain the SEO benefits. Missguided is a good example of a fashion brand who is doing this well with its’ blog. Link BuildingLink building for fashion e-commerce is linked in with PR practices. You'll see that brands such as Boohoo and Missguided are keen on establishing relationships with fashion bloggers. Working with bloggers enables you as a brand to reach your target market, promote products and build links back to your site. If you haven't read my previous post on how can bloggers help my brand? Then why not check it out and find out how working with bloggers can have a positive impact on your brand. Make Sure Your Social Media Sites Are Kept Up to DateSocial media is an important part of SEO particularly for fashion e-commerce websites. Make sure you have profiles set up across the most common social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram or maybe even Snapchat. These profiles should all be linked to your website enabling users to easily find you on your social profiles, however it is not enough to just own them; you will need to update them and make sure they are consistently used and up to date. SummaryThere are many ways that you can enhance SEO performance on your site, some of which are mentioned in this post. It is important to remember that you won't see the benefits straight a way. It takes time, just like anything that's worth the wait. If you are a brand looking to increase your SEO performance then why not get in touch, we'd love to hear from you. I hope this post was beneficial and hopefully answered what you were looking for. Have questions? Then why not leave a comment I'd be more than happy to answer them. The post SEO Guide: Fashion E-commerce Websites appeared first on White.net. |
| Santa Claus Is Coming To Town: Is Your PPC Account Ready? Posted: 30 Oct 2015 01:00 AM PDT Whether you're a Grinch and can't stand the so-called 'Christmas Creep' getting earlier each year (did you see Tesco started selling mince pies on 2nd September?!) or whether you just can't wait to deck the halls (56 sleeps by the way; not that I'm counting…) if you're in e-commerce, it cannot be overstated how important it is to have a strategic plan for your PPC accounts over the holiday season. Recent stats released by RJMetrics put the above statement into perspective for us:
So, are you ready? 'He's making a list; he's checking it twice!' |
| Posted: 29 Oct 2015 02:43 AM PDT I’ve been in the PPC game for over 11 years now and boy has it changed. We’ve seen new ad platforms, new match types, geo-targeting, scripting, an abundance of new keyword research tools, numerous optimisation platforms promising to better our accounts, consolidation of tracking with Google Tag Manager, bid strategies and most recently media buying by the form of a DSP or Demand-side Platform. If we ask Google what a DSP is:
Oh that makes perfect sense, right?…… In my latest post I aim to translate the above into something resembling plain English. So what is a DSP?A DSP – or in its full attire, demand-side platform – is a piece of software that allows users to purchase media/advertising space on the web in an automated fashion based on pre-set targeting. This method is often used by digital media agencies such as ourselves to assist in purchasing large volumes of space at small prices. At least that's the aim. How do they help?Think back a couple of years; did you ever visit a website and think ‘Yeah I’d like to advertise on their site‘? You process would probably be to have made contact with the webmaster and asked for a rate card, which looking back was ludicrously expensive. You’d have negotiated the price down saying to yourself ‘Yeah I’ve got a good deal here!‘ Well how good a deal was that really retrospectively? I’ve actively paid £3,000 per month to advertise two banners on a news site for one month and received a few hundred clicks for the privilege. (This was some years back now!) Well, DSPs take out the people part of the ad buying process making it a cheaper and far more efficient process. How does a DSP work in practice?Well, in plain english a DSP allows advertisers to buy impressions across a large range of publisher sites targeted to users based on their location, previous web behaviour etc. Those publishers make their ad spaces available through ad exchanges which DSPs use to automatically decide which impressions are viable for the advertiser and purchase that space as required. The price the advertiser pays for that space (impression) is decided in real-time by a practice know as RTB, or real-time bidding. RTB means that there is no human negotiation on pricing, the RTB process automatically auctions off the impressions to the highest bidder (similar to what takes place in AdWords with its AdRank algorithm). This system is the same as the Google Display Network (GDN), which is restricted to only sites serving GDN ad space. The second advantage of DSPs is that they encompass these ad networks but also offer reach to wide range of other websites that do not offer ad space through the GDN. Are DSPs here to stay?Well, in my opinion yes. We are seeing more and more publishers making their inventory available for real-time bidding, which for advertisers makes for good reading as RTB is a far more cost-effective way of advertising. This is not to say that humans will be pulled from the process altogether as they are still required for the optimisation side of things. An example of how DSPs can workSo I wanted to set-up an example campaign, to show you how we can use a DSP to actively target an audience which would otherwise be unattainable via GDN and other more domestic platforms. In the example you will see how we combine lateral targeting to form our target audience. The scenario is a van dealership looking to extend its reach but at a controlled cost. The main challenges from the off are that the is no such audience as ‘people interested in vans’. So how do we reach those van lovers? Well, we identified three main audiences that work together to highlight the white van man. These are:
Perfect, so what formats would we use? Native – Native ads are those ads that don’t look like ads, but actually are ads that fool us into thinking that they’re content, when actually they are ads.
Banner – Exactly what it says on the tin.
Where do we target those audiences? Service Stations: Targeting users by service station location is great as we can advertise to them whilst they are on rest periods.
Ports: As above, we can target based on user location to ferry ports for example. Effectively targeting drivers in key areas where we know typically the audience would be using their smartphones, allowing us to bid harder in these areas.
CostsSo that’s all well and good, but DSPs are expensive right? Well, in reality no, not really. For the demo campaign we set-up here, the following costs were quoted by the DSP we use internally at White.net. CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions):
I was very happy with the CPM estimates, now you could argue that they do not look to dissimilar to that of the Google Display Network, but, lets not forget that we are targeting our exact audience here and not using a hit & hope method that we would otherwise use with GDN as white van man is not a typical audience. Now of course using a Demand-side Platform is not free, product fees vary by provider. Some provide a % of spend fee, others fixed fees based on spend thresholds per month. Do your research to see which works best for you, not what works best for the provider. Are DSPs for me?If you want to broaden your reach, extend your re-marketing efforts and bring down advertising costs then yes, yes they are. I’d like to know a little moreIf you would like to learn more about DSPs and harnessing their power for your gain then reach out to us, we’d be more than happy to discuss your needs. I hope the post was helpful, and as always I welcome your comments below. The post What is a DSP? appeared first on White.net. |
| How to Build Relationships as a Brand Posted: 27 Oct 2015 12:00 AM PDT Reliable, trustworthy, helpful; are these words that you might use to describe your ideal partner or your ideal brand? The fact that these probably appear on both lists means that our relationships with brands are much more complex than someone might first think. As a brand it is important to recognise this, and as no relationship can be one-sided, it becomes your job when presenting your brand to the world to demonstrate these qualities. In The Human Brand the author begins by asking users to think about some of their favourite brands; when you do this the words you use to describe them are not simply terms about the high quality product, but will also be words you might associate with a close friend or family member. Why is this important?People don't just want to buy a product. People want to build a relationship. To do this, you need to be able to speak to your audience directly in a way that is relatable. Generating brand loyalty is fundamental to guaranteeing repeat customers and ensuring that you will be the brand of choice for all their recommendations to friends and family. By building a relationship in this way, your brand moves away from being just a website or store, and instead becomes human. 3 steps to humanise your brand:
Understand your audienceTo develop a way to speak directly to your audience, the first stage is understanding exactly who that audience is.
There are multiple ways that Google Analytics can help you to identify who your customer is; it can provide demographic information like below:
But if you're looking for a little more insight then you should look at some more granular data to answer the following questions:
At White.net we've learnt that most of our website traffic comes comes during the work day from those using a desktop computer; visitors are likely to be professionals (as seen above: males between 25 and 34) who often visit just one page of our blog. This shows that the blog section of our site is being used specifically to solve queries that people have, so any content strategy behind the articles we're writing need to tackle the most common digital marketing problems people are having in order to be meeting the needs of our readers.
Whether you're researching your own brand, or looking at larger competitor brands, YouGov Profiles provides a detailed breakdown of the demographics it believes to be true of your audience.
In this case, you'll learn the typical customer of Chase Distillery enjoys Formula 1, is interested in politics and tends to work in Insurance, Consulting or Business sectors. With this in mind, a marketing department can build up a clear image of the customers they're targeting (or the customers they're not reaching yet) to develop a well-informed strategy. Understand your brandThere are two common assumptions when creating a tone of voice that may result in your brand missing out on what it was that your audience really wanted:
The difference between tone and voice Commonly these two get lumped together for brands, but when forming relationships with your audience it's important to realise that these are two distinct features. If you're telling your friends what you did on the weekend, the content of the story won't differ too much from telling your colleagues, but the way you tell the story in both cases may be very different. Voice should be the core of your messaging, your thoughts on certain key issues and the underlying principles you want to communicate. Tone will differ based on which part of your audience you're talking to and on which platform. Handling a complaint on Twitter will need to be handled with a much more serious tone than saying thanks for positive feedback via email, although both may be emphasising the business values of a high quality service. Audience versus brand After you've spent time identifying the main personas in your audience and how they interact with your product, it's easy to skip the time spent developing your own brand's persona and assume the two to be the same. Look at your own friends; you're not clones of one another so why would this relationship be any different? Often people look for qualities they aspire to, or a level of knowledge that they themselves don't have when they're building relationships with brands. Your brand needs to account for the characteristics in the personas and then be a better version of these that people will want to associate with. Position your brand as a relatable expert in your sector and you're likely to see your popularity soar. Understand the contextIn an ideal world the people who spend time on your website, follow you on social media, and buy your product will all be of a very similar demographic. But it's rare that things will work out like this in real life. Whilst your tone of voice might be perfect for your audience, this is ineffective if you're not getting the right people clicking through to your site in the first place. Research shows that behaviour in the SERP can be different depending upon multiple characteristics, for example gender can impact typical time spent on page and scrolling patterns:
(Gerald Murphy did a great talk about this at BrightonSEO in September; you can view his slides here) When building a keyword map, identify which part of the buying cycle each keyword is at as this will help each page to be categorised into a type of query too. Once you know which pages point to each part of the buying cycle you can ensure you're making the most of your meta titles and descriptions in the SERPs. For example, people spend the most time on the SERP if it's a navigational query so these pages really need to draw you in. Transactional queries have a quick click onto page so the title really needs to grab the searcher’s attention, and things like rich snippets will add even more value here. As a brand, building relationships can be one of the hardest challenges you face, but it will be worth the time investment to do so. Brand loyalty is the ultimate marketing tool for any business; it ensures repeat customers, recommendations to friends/family, and also will make customer’s more understanding of any issues you may have with a product. If you’re willing to work hard towards making your brand human and understanding those who interact with it, then you’ll be able to reap the rewards down the line. The post How to Build Relationships as a Brand appeared first on White.net. |
| The Changing World of SEO & 7 Tips to Stay Ahead Posted: 22 Oct 2015 09:32 AM PDT Last night I had the pleasure of speaking at the first Optimise Oxford alongside Ned Poulter and Jono Alderson. Below are the slides that I presented along with a brief summary of it. SEO isn’t dead, it’s evolving!For several years we have been hearing that SEO is dead, and I do get a little fed up of it. SEO isn’t dying, it’s evolving. It’s growing up, we are becoming a more mature industry that is looking for long term growth, not short term results that lead to failure. 89 major algorithm updates in 4 yearsSince the start of 2011 Google has released 89 major updates to it’s algorithm with the aim of improving the results provided to the user. These updates include the following: PandaFirst released in February 2011, there has been over 29 recorded updates to the Panda algorithm. The initial update affected 12% of english speaking search queries worldwide, and led to well known brands suffering. Panda cracked down on websites with thin content, content farms and high ad-to-content ratio. Businesses such as eHow were hugely effected, taking traffic levels down to 10s of thousands from 100s of thousands. PenguinFirst hit in April 2012, the Penguin update aimed at reducing many spam factors and affected an estimated 3.1% of English queries. HummingbirdThe first major rewrite of Google’s algorithm since ‘Caffeine’, Hummingbird was created to provided more meaning behind the search queries. This change allowed more focus on understanding the billions of pages that are currently indexed through data markup and the expanded knowledge graph. PigeonThe Pigeon update focussed on looking at more useful, relevant and accurate search results. This update bought the local ranking factors more in line with the traditional ranking factors. However, this update has made significant changes to the maps, location parameters and the local pack. MobileFirst announced in February, #Mobilegeddon launched on the 21st April 2015. With Google putting more emphasis on mobile users, the new mobile index put more weight on those websites that were mobile friendly. This shouldn’t have been a major surprise to the majority of us, with over 2 billion smart phones used globally. 7 tips to stay aheadThink like a brandRegardless of the size of your business, you are a brand. So start thinking like one.
Understand your audienceIf you don't know your audience type, then how can you market to them? Once you know this you can start to create marketing decisions based on user information. Create content for each stage of the buying cycleContent is an important part of any marketing plan. One key aspect from a search perspective is the user lands on the correct page for the search query that they have entered. Although not easy, this can be done by understanding the intent behind the search and producing the correct content asset for that search. At White, we utilise the user journey flow below to identify the correct piece of content for each stage of the buying cycle. This provides an easy to reference guide to what content is required based on the user’s intent.
Think about mobileMobile is more important than ever, and should be considered a must for your business. Although conversion continues to be higher through desktop, mobiles are a huge part of the research stage and are being used on the commute to work and in the evenings. To check whether your website complies to the mobile requirements set out by Google, please visit the mobile friendly tool they have provided. Invest in the marketing mix, not just SEOIt’s key that you supplement your SEO efforts with alternative marketing initiatives. You may create some really great content for your SEO campaign, but to get the very best results you should market it across all channels. Methods such as email are still considered one of the best forms of marketing if you can get it right. Due to platforms such as MailChimp, email marketing has become an easy, yet cheap way of engaging with your audience. Build for long term growth, not short termPeople continue to want results now! That is the world that we live in, but we need to educate stakeholders that consistent and long term growth is a better way of building a business, than instant short term returns. This means creating the right strategy, employing the right people, building and engaging with the right audience. This all takes time, but it will pay off with long term success, and not falling foul of search engine guidelines. The post The Changing World of SEO & 7 Tips to Stay Ahead appeared first on White.net. |
| Search Love – The Importance of SEO for People, Not Robots Posted: 21 Oct 2015 06:55 AM PDT SearchLove is a two-day conference organised by the people behind Distilled which covers some of the newest and most exciting things going on in the world of digital marketing. Attracting industry leaders from around the world, and some of the most well-known speakers in the field, the conference has grown to cult status and now hosts events in San Diego, Boston, and London. Whilst each and every talk this year had some great takeaways and their own unique thoughts on digital marketing, there was a clear overall theme of the talks- digital marketing is changing. You can no longer base a strategy upon just meeting the known elements of the google algorithm – it’s unreliable and leaves your site vulnerable to updates – so instead it’s time to target your SEO to meet the needs of the user. Why is SEO changing?If you're looking to change the way that your agency or in-house team is approaching SEO strategy, the first step to success has to come from getting the entire team on board. Without the crucial buy-in from the key decision-makers its unlikely that you'll be able to action any real change. To do this, you must explain why these thoughts on how SEO is changing are so important to action today, rather than in the future. It's all about the Human AlgorithmWhilst we can speculate about algorithm updates and try to prepare for changes in SEO, if we continually work to an unknown algorithm then as an industry we will be consistently fire-fighting rather than looking at the wider strategy. The one thing that will remain unchanged is the fact that humans purchase our products, so why not market to their algorithm rather than a robot's? Google's work is becoming increasingly humanGoogle Now is evidence of a notable shift in the way Google works, as its role from major search engine provider to an intelligent, personal assistant gains momentum. Tom Anthony predicted that this trend will only continue into the future; as we see the rise of driverless cars, NEST (Google sister company that provides home automation equipment) and a better understanding of compound, implicit queries. With the search engine able to understand more and more about human behaviour, it’s not Google trying to force people to spend more time on their computers, instead Google is trying to gain a better understanding of the humans it’s looking to target. Understand that machines aren't "fair"Everyone is guilty of feeling like the way their site is treated may not be fair; a site with a ‘suspect’ backlink profile might be ranking above yours and that just doesn't seem right, after all the hours you put in to outreach. But what if it's outperforming you on another factor that you simply cannot see? How to Implement ThisUnderstanding why it's important to adapt your approach to SEO is key to actioning change, so some of the experts also spoke about some of the best ways to do this: Identify your Customer's MomentsThe content on your site and marketing collateral you produce needs to be able to target potential customers at the moments where they need you. It’s important to identify what your audience is doing, and how they're thinking at that time, rather than just targeting keywords. Jono used the example of a person shopping for a new TV; is the awareness stage really where they start browsing types of TV or is it the point where they're looking for a way to fix their old one? Part of SEO needs to be identifying all of these moments where someone is visiting the SERPs as a potential point of contact with customers, rather than to only be chasing keywords which have previously converted for you. Optimise for what would happen IF you rankedIn order to optimise your site for people rather than robots, part of this comes from optimising the process of when a user does end up on your site. Whilst the time spent on page is unlikely to be a ranking signal (For more on this you should check out Rand Fishkin’s talk), Will Critchlow covered the impact of short-clicks on rankings. Your site needs to reduce the number of short-clicks it generates by ranking relevant pages for strong keywords, and providing the audience with what they need. Traditionally this task was seen to the be the work of a user experience expert or web designer but it is now an increasingly important part of your SEO strategy. Whilst this all sounds like a lot of change for how to approach an SEO strategy, one of the main things to remember is that change like this needs to be iterative (Ian Lurie). These suggestions look for what SEO may become in the future, not tactics that will immediately work. In the short-term we can’t simply dismiss the algorithm and the work that’s been extremely successful across the SEO industry, but longer term we can reduce our reliance and vulnerability to algorithm updates with strategies like this. The post Search Love – The Importance of SEO for People, Not Robots appeared first on White.net. |
| Keyword Cannibalistion: What is it and how can it be solved? Posted: 15 Oct 2015 12:00 AM PDT What is keyword cannibalisation?Keyword cannibalisation isn't often talked about in website reviews or discussed in SEO forums but the effects of cannibalising your website can be detrimental. Keyword cannibalisation occurs when multiple pages on a website target similar or the same keyword(s), making it difficult for search engines to decide which is the most appropriate webpage to display for that search term. Not only is this frustrating for the website owner but it can have a huge negative effect on a websites ranking with wrong or undesired page ranking for a particular search query. What causes it?It typically starts when the information architecture of a website requires a single term or phrase to be targeted on multiple pages across the website. Often this is done unintentionally, but has the power to result in several (or more) pages that have the same keyword target in the header tags or in the title. One of the key scenarios where we may see cannibalisation is when brands add additional content to their site by creating blog posts or by adding multiple landing pages which deliberately target identical keywords. Commonly there is the belief that this will result in more traffic for those keywords (a misconception!). The quality of the content that is produced will also be likely to diminish as the writer attempts to cover the same subject multiple times. Websites containing category pages with similar products or content can also experience keyword cannibalisation. In order to avoid similar category pages from competing against each other and to ensure the correct page you want is ranking, make sure you analyse how you structure your content and implement the keywords you want to target. Make it simple for search engines to understand that although your category pages may be around the same theme, they are in fact unique to an area of your business. Another scenario where keyword cannibalisation can occur is with content duplication issues as a result of the way the content management system (CMS) has been configured. Often this can lead to multiple page URLs containing the same or very similar content across the website. If there isn’t an appropriate canonical tag in place, instances of keyword cannibalisation can occur. How does it affect SEO?Search engines will crawl the pages on your website and see multiple pages all seemingly relevant to a particular keyword. Say the keyword is ‘dog toys’, have one or more pages targeting this keyword won’t mean Google will interpret your site as being more relevant to dog toys than your competition, rather this circumstance forces Google to choose between the variety of pages on your site and decide which one fits the query best. There’s a number of features your site will lose out on when this happens:
How can you prevent it?Merge your pages If your topic to write about was ‘WordPress’, creating just one article would be inconvenient as you would have an article with a million words. Instead, the article would be split into several posts with the titles being around the keywords we are targeting such as how to install WordPress, what are WordPress plugins, how to install WordPress themes. The target keyword of the articles is now split and isn’t the same, every article has its own keyword focus. Use a canonical tag If the pages can’t be merged there is still a solution. A canonical tag can help you to consolidate the equity of multiple similar pages, but without having to change the user experience. By using the canonical tag you can demonstrate a relationship to the search engine of which page is most important and should be ranked for generic searches. For example, if you have a product available in multiple colours, identify which version of the product has the highest search volume and use the canonical tag to point to that page. On a generic search of the product, the page with the canonical tags point to it will rank. If someone specifies the colour as well as the product name, then that specific colour page is still indexed and will rank instead, despite the canonical tags. Keyword themes/buckets Before you assign keywords to your website, or before you even shortlist your keywords, think about splitting your list of terms into buckets. “Buckets” is simply a term for keyword segments. Those buckets are made up of all the inbound search opportunities for users to find your website and help you to spread similar (but not the same!) keywords across the different sections of your site. Having a strong knowledge of what the buckets are for your website and knowing how to analyse the performance of those keywords can help in creating a more profitable SEO decision making process. See my example below.
Keyword Mapping When you have your shortlist of keywords and you’ve put them into buckets, map out your website and assign these keywords to the pages on your site. This will allow you (and others using the site) to see exactly where each keyword will be targeted, a strategic way to avoid duplication. Take a look at my example below for how you can map your keywords. I’ve used keywords from the bucket themes above.
Has your site ever been close to cannibalising itself? How have you avoided the issue? If you’ve got any more techniques for preventing the issue I’d love for you to get in touch!
The post Keyword Cannibalistion: What is it and how can it be solved? appeared first on White.net. |
Despite this heart-warming sentiment from the Grinch (look it up!), 'packaging', so to speak, for your PPC campaigns is key. It's time to get creative and ensure your new holiday campaigns/promotions are packaged with shiny new ads, complete with holiday messaging and language.
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