A must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers

A must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers

30-second summary:

  • Accessibility underpins stellar user experience and positive brand perception, the key factors that appeal to value-driven consumers
  • According to WebAIM, 98 percent of US-based websites aren’t accessible
  • Though not a sparkly aspect of digital marketing strategies, there are multiple layers to “why?” and “how?” brands must be accessible across the internet

Marketers develop and execute numerous strategies to broaden their business reach. But one critical factor that most marketers neglect is web accessibility. And this neglect leads to their business being closed off for a large majority of potential customers.

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility ensures that the internet is accessible, usable, and beneficial for everyone alike. It considers all possible disabilities to ensure marketing messages are delivered to every kind of audience and get the most value out of the website.

As important as it may seem right now, web accessibility is often the last thing marketers think of when building a website. And then, too, it is often brushed under the rug.

Despite the World Wide Web Consortium, commonly known as W3C developing dedicated web content accessibility guidelines to make the internet more accessible, digital inclusivity remains a rarity.

And this unfortunate reality acts not only as an accessibility barrier, but a growth barrier as well.

The value of web accessibility in modern marketing initiatives

Acknowledging and adopting web accessibility enhances the customer experience, opens new doors for your business, uplifts marketing outcomes, and boosts revenue in more ways than just one.

1. Extends your market reach

15 percent of the world’s population is disabled and belongs to a highly valuable market segment with strong spending powers.

With a digitally inclusive web presence, your business interacts with an increased volume of people who it would’ve missed otherwise. In this way, web accessibility brings a whole new community of prospects you can interact with, win as customers and boost your revenue.

2. SEO benefits

Search engines prefer to rank websites that are secure, accessible, and valuable to all kinds of users. Moreover, they perceive digitally inclusive websites as authentic sources of information and favor them in rankings.

As a result, enhancing web accessibility undeviatingly supplements your online marketing with an SEO boost, helping you get to the coveted top position in SERPs. It opens another channel for web traffic that connects you with your target audience.

3. Enhanced user experience

User experience is at the heart of your digital presence as it relates directly to conversions. The basic principle of UX optimization dictates that you research what your target audience wants and deliver it.

In the case of differently-abled audiences, it’s common sense that they would want you to deliver a website they can interact with and benefit from.

By optimizing your website’s accessibility, you boost its usability which is a core element of user experience.

If all other elements of UX are optimized, enhanced usability wins customer satisfaction and gives the prospect a final push towards conversion, contributing to your revenue.

4. Positive brand perception

Web accessibility enables your brand to appear as a strong advocate of digital inclusivity and works to build positive brand perception. Now isn’t that a critical outcome of modern marketing?

Today where people seek a business’s values before engaging with it, a concrete stance on digital inclusivity reflects your values of empathy, compassion, and equal opportunities for all. This builds your community of like-minded people who then contribute to your revenue.

Five-point checklist to get started with web accessibility

For maximum effect, web accessibility should be considered a priority rather than an afterthought and must be included in your digital and marketing strategy.

Following are a few ways through which you can uplift your digital inclusivity and leave a larger impact:

1. Multilingual SEO

Web accessibility not only aims at eliminating accessibility barriers for people with permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities. It also removes linguistic barriers, so people from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds can have equal access.

Given that English is spoken by a meager 4.83 percent of the world’s population, multilingual SEO eliminates linguistic barriers and helps searchers from all linguistic backgrounds to benefit from the internet.

Here’s a guide I created on multilingual SEO to get you started.

2. Voice search

The introduction of smart assistants such as Alexa has pioneered a new era of voice search ubiquity and the consequent web accessibility.

As an excellent avenue to pursue for businesses looking to be more digitally inclusive, voice search unlocks your website’s chances of interaction with people who cannot search the conventional way.

Here are some best practices to optimize voice search SEO:

  • Use long tail keywords that are specific, descriptive, and natural for users’ language
  • Serve up content that gives direct answers
  • Optimize your ‘Google My Business’ account
  • Create voice search FAQ pages
  • Implement schema which is a code that you can add to your website that improves search visibility

For more depth, check out this voice search SEO guide for trends and best practices.

Example of schema that improves web accessibility
Example of schema that improves web accessibility

3. Alternate (Alt) text

Alt text helps visually impaired visitors understand what a web image depicts. Hence image optimization allows web visitors to absorb the information your website offers in its totality and ties back to enhanced user experience.

Tips for using alt text:

  • Keep it descriptive and keyword specific, this will show up in case your page loads slow or if there was an audio description needed
  • For ecommerce sites, make good use of structured data to give the search engine more specific details about your products’ color, type, size, and a lot more

If you need more details, here’s an evergreen image optimization guide.

4. Hierarchical organization or content using H tags

Hierarchical layout shapes your web content in an easy-to-read structure. A critical part of web accessibility (and SEO), a hierarchical organization can make your website usable and understandable for users with certain cognitive disabilities and people with short attention spans, boosting their satisfaction and your websites’ overall UX.

Check out this guide on optimizing meta tags.

5. Color contrast

Color contrast involves adjusting the color of foreground web elements (for instance, fonts) against the color of the background elements to ensure that the foreground elements, which bear value, stand out and are easily readable for people with visual impairment.

The Bureau of Internet Accessibility has identified a color contrast ratio that ensures that your website is visible and readable for people with color-related visual impairments.

Conclusion

Web accessibility is a necessity, but unfortunately, it doesn’t get the same limelight as other digital marketing avenues that promise increased reach, better perception, and higher revenue.

This reality can work in your favor if you capitalize on the lack of web accessibility and gain a competitive edge by adopting digital inclusivity.

There are numerous marketing benefits of web accessibility, most significant of which may be the development of positive brand perception in an era of value-driven shoppers.

Inclusive marketing initiatives are commendable. But they are only valuable when backed by conscious efforts of enhancing your business’s digital accessibility. So, endeavoring to actualize web accessibility strategies can help you become the pioneer of an internet era where digital inclusivity is a priority.


Atul Jindal is a web design and marketing specialist, having interests in doing websites/apps optimized for SEO with a core focus on conversion optimization. He creates web experiences that bring conversations and transform web traffic into paying customers or leads.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

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The post A must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2022/01/13/a-must-have-web-accessibility-checklist-for-digital-marketers/




Four Google SERP features for ecommerce SEO

30-second summary:

  • Holiday season shopping is on and your ecommerce store whether a local shop or an international ecommerce brand needs visibility for sales
  • How do you jump right in front of your potential customers and drive sales in a highly competitive space?
  • SEO pioneer, former Pepperjam founder, and serial entrepreneur, Kris Jones shares a practical ecommerce SEO guide

There is perhaps no type of business that is more primed for SEO than ecommerce companies. Think about it: where a local law firm can put up a billboard or buy ad space in a regional newspaper in addition to doing SEO, ecommerce businesses essentially have one resource available to them, the internet.

That’s where they do 100 percent of their business, and it’s where they’re going to reach the customers they want. So, ecommerce companies should spend a lot of time getting their SEO just right. One crucial way of doing that is to optimize your site to appear in Google’s various SERP features.

There are so many ways you can tell users about your business just from the SERP even before they get onto your website. And the information you present could mean all the difference between capturing your ideal traffic and losing it to competition.

Therefore, to market yourself in the best light to all potential customers searching for your products, you have to optimize your website specifically for the SERP features that drive conversions.

How do you do it? Here are four of the most vital Google SERP features for which you should be optimizing your ecommerce business’ SEO.

1. Rich cards

Back in 2016, Google introduced a new mobile SERP feature called rich cards. By using structured data, SEOs could make a business’s results “richer,” that is, more visually appealing, clickable, and therefore more likely to generate an organic click.

If you search for a certain type of product, results marked up with the proper language tell Google to show the product along with an image that can help users know if they want to explore more. Users simply swipe to see more items.

Now, why am I recommending a SERP feature from 2016?

It’s because in the first quarter of 2021, mobile traffic accounted for almost 55 percent of online traffic worldwide, and that number is only going to increase. Basically, mobile search results are even more relevant today than they were in 2016.

With that in mind, how can you optimize your ecommerce products for rich cards?

You need to use the JSON-LD method of marking up your products. You can then test your work with the various free rich results tools on offer from Google.

2. Google Images results

Somewhat related to rich cards is the need for ecommerce businesses to optimize their content for Google Images results. Relevant images will appear at the top of a SERP, before any organic results.

A good product description does indeed go a long way, but don’t forget to think simply, as well: if customers can see clear, high-quality images of your products, that will help your credibility along, and hence drive conversions.

How do optimize for Google Images results? Well, Google doesn’t read images like it reads text, so it’s all going to come down to how you prepare your images on the back end.

First of all, ensure your images are originally yours. You don’t stand much of a chance trying to rank for stock photos.

Next, give your photos descriptive file names that tie into the pages where they will be placed. In the case of ecommerce, since you’ll probably have a series of photos for each product, give the image files titles that reflect the product, with words separated by hyphens.

Here’s an example: unisex-sneakers-blue-brandname-yoursitename

And don’t forget to provide descriptive alt text to each image in case it can’t load and be seen.

Finally, be sure you’re not uploading huge image files that will weigh down a website. Compress them down as small as you can to give your site enough breathing room while still ensuring the images show what you need them to show. Check out this comprehensive guide on image optimization.

3. Rich snippets

Wait a minute, you might say, why are you talking about both rich cards and rich snippets?

With ecommerce products, rich cards will stop you at the images. You can choose to go a step further for appropriate products by optimizing for rich snippets.

Rich snippets add in extra details about your products. These get placed inside your search results, under the meta title, and above the meta description.

To get rich snippets on your product results, you’ll use structured data just like you did for rich cards. You can choose which information to enter based on what specifically can grab your potential customer’s attention and satisfy their search query.

For ecommerce companies, it makes the most sense to optimize your rich-snippet products for prices, in-stock status, sales, different brands, customer reviews, and star ratings.

Think about each of these features. Doesn’t it make sense that a customer searching for this type of product would want to see this information from your online store?

Rich snippets are one great way of reaching users with extra information without the need for the users actually to click on your result. You’re taking the most concentrated bits of data about your product offerings and jumping right out onto the SERPs at the user.

Sure, you can choose not to do this for your products. But if your competitors are, who do you think stands the better chance of getting a click and making a sale?

Rich snippets are just good ecommerce SEO, plain and simple.

4. Sitelinks

Finally, you should attempt to optimize your site for SERP sitelinks.

I say “attempt” to optimize because this isn’t a SERP feature you can just click on and off, like alt text or structured data.

So we’re all on the same page here, sitelinks are the clickable buttons below your result’s metadata on a SERP. They typically offer opportunities for users to navigate directly to sections of your website.

In the case of ecommerce, the most logical sitelinks you would want to get listed in your result would be for your most popular product categories.

But again, I’m saying “would want” because sitelinks are chosen by Google’s algorithm. That doesn’t mean you can’t influence which sitelinks Google places there. Which pages Google links in your results is based primarily on your site’s navigation.

As SEOs, we always recommend having a direct and easy-to-navigate website structure. It helps the user experience, supports navigation, and prompts Google to crawl your pages.

Other things that help Google crawl your site include keyword-optimized content, smart internal linking, and simple, intuitive menus.

It is through these elements that you stand your best chance of defining what your SERP sitelinks will be. When you tell Google which pages are most important to you and your customers, the search engine will respond in kind by generating helpful sitelinks.

This is yet another example of having your SEO jump right to the SERP at users without them having to do anything.

And when you’re in the competitive ecommerce space, that really matters.

Go forth and optimize

Businesses always have it tough when going up against the competition. Whether you’re a local shop or an international ecommerce brand, there’s always someone else trying to beat you at your own game.

While SEO can never make anyone do anything, we put ourselves on the best possible footing when we take the above steps to optimize our websites for the SERP features.

If you’re not doing these things already, you’ll want to get started as soon as you can! And then sit back and watch what happens.


Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

The post Four Google SERP features for ecommerce SEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/11/18/four-google-serp-features-for-ecommerce-seo/




The Future SEO: Boardroom edition

30-second summary:

  • SEO’s dynamic nature and Google’s mysterious algorithm specifics keep the industry on its toes
  • Is it possible to simply spot the inefficiencies of SEO in its infancy and foresee trends?
  • With over 20 years of leadership roles, SEO pioneer Kris Jones taps into his experience to help SEOs derive more strategic value

Pretty much anytime we speak about something’s future, we’re doing something called extrapolating. By definition, extrapolating involves extending existing data or trends to assume the same procedure will continue in the future. It’s a form of the scientific method that we probably use every day in our own lives, quite reasonably, too: the summers will be hot, the downtown traffic will be bad at 9 AM, and the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

But how can we look into the future of something as complex and ever-changing as SEO? As with all cases of hindsight, we are clear on how SEO began and how it has transformed over time.

We see the inefficiencies of SEO in its infancy and how advancing search engines have altered the playing field.

The catch is this: how can we surmise about the future of SEO without having access to all the mysterious algorithm specifics that Google itself holds?

The answer is simple: we have to extrapolate.

I’ve seen SEO from the boardroom perspective for more than 20 years. I’ve seen the old days of keyword stuffing to the semi-modernization of the late 2000s to the absolute beast that Google has become now, in the 2020s.

Given that, where do I think SEO is going in the not-too-distant future? Here are some thoughts on that.

User intent will remain crucial

One aspect of SEO that is essential right now and will become only more vital as time goes on is user intent in search queries.

It’s an antiquated view to think that Google still cares much about exact-match keywords. Maybe 15 to 20 years ago, getting keywords exactly right in your content was a huge deal. Google matched queries to corresponding word strings in content and then served the best of that content to a user.

Today, trying to optimize for exact-match keywords is a futile effort, as Google now understands the intent behind every query, and it’s only going to get better at it as time goes by.

If you recall Google’s BERT update from late 2019, you’ll remember that this was the change that allowed Google to comprehend the context of each search query, or the meaning behind the words themselves. And the latest Multitask Unified Model (MUM) update adds further depth and dimensions to understanding search intent.

No longer does Google look only at the words “family attractions.” It knows that that query references children’s activities, fun activities, and events that are generally lighthearted and innocent.

And all of that came from two words. How did Google do it? Its consistent algorithm updates have allowed it to think like a human.

All of this is to say that user intent has to be part of your keyword and content strategy going forward when you’re doing SEO.

Produce more evergreen content

Sometimes, over the years, I have heard people mention that devising an effective content marketing strategy is difficult because as soon as a topic’s period of relevance is over, that content will never rank again. Use your data to analyze content performance and strike the right balance between content and formats. 

If you don’t know any more about this subject, you might be tempted to believe that. Maybe, at one time, you got a content piece entitled “Top Furniture Brands of 2019” to rank for the featured snippet. That makes sense. The post was probably a long listicle that described the best brands and linked out to the manufacturers’ websites or retail stores that carried those brands.

But maybe, as spring of 2019 transitioned into fall and winter, that post fell way down the rankings and now can’t be found anywhere anymore.

The reason is obvious: you haven’t made the content evergreen. The best furniture brands of 2019 may not be the best brands of 2020 or 2021 or 2022. So, what do you do? You put the work in to make the blog post evergreen by updating it. Go through and change out the best brands, change the content, change the post’s title, and then republish the post.

You can also just plain focus on subjects that will almost never need any updating at all:

  • “Top 20 Christmas cookies to bake this year”
  • “How to train a dog”
  • “10 Steps for Hanging Heavy Objects on the Wall”

Whether it’s 2021 or 2050 or 2100, there are going to be people who have never hung a thing on a wall before and will need some help online.

Whatever your market niche is, do some topic research in Answer the Public, Semrush, or BuzzSumo to find relevant subjects for you. You can also mine the SERPs to see what kinds of content are ranking already for your desired topics. Just remember to mix in plenty of evergreen content with your more timely content posts. Google will reward you for it.

Mobile will remain first

This final point is about mobile-first indexing, but you likely already know about that. It’s certainly no secret that Google is going to rank your website’s mobile version when it crawls your pages. About 60 percent of all searches are now performed on mobile devices, and so Google now prioritizes a site’s mobile web pages over the desktop versions.

As I said, you knew all that.

What some people still may not know is that Google’s new Core Web Vitals should be a major part of your mobile page optimizations.

The Core Web Vitals are primarily a web-dev task. Overall, the three vitals work together to give users positive, seamless experiences when they access a web page.

The vitals are Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and First Input Delay (FID).

CLS refers to the amount of moving around that a web page’s content does before it actually loads fully.

If you have a high CLS, that’s bad. It means some elements are appearing before the page loads all the way, which increases the chances of a user clicking on something that then moves elsewhere. That, in turn, means the user will probably click on something unintended.

LCP, meanwhile, is the time it takes for a page’s content to appear. It specifically refers to the amount of time between when you click on a URL and when the majority of that URL’s content appears for you to see.

Finally, FID measures how long it takes users to be able to interact with a web page in any way. These actions could be typing in a field or clicking menu items.

Even if you don’t work in web development, you can see how useful these three measures actually are. They all take user experience into account, which, coincidentally, is why they are part of Google’s larger 2021 Page Experience update.

The Core Web Vitals are essential in and of themselves, but I think my “boardroom” perspective on them is one we can all safely adopt: that they are just examples of more great things to come from Google.

The search engine giant is always thinking of new ways to make users have better, more helpful, and more positive experiences on its platform. As SEOs, we need to be ready to respond so we don’t get left in the dust.

To know the future, look to the past

We know that extrapolation can be taken only so far, but that’s why the past is so vital to understand. It can give us hints at what lies ahead.

What will Google think of next? It’s going to respond to whatever need is out there for improved online search experiences.

Think of 2020, when the pandemic was in its infancy. People needed information, and Google responded. Within months, you could tell whether restaurants were requiring masks indoors, how many virus cases were in your county, and where you could go for more information or help.

What, then, is the future of SEO? It’s going to be whatever the masses need it to become.

Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/09/15/the-future-seo-boardroom-edition/




Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022

30-second summary:

  • Confused users don’t spend money
  • Your search marketing needs to thread in your brand’s messaging, targeting, design, and overall experience to ensure trust, clarity, and eventual sales
  • SEO pioneer, serial entrepreneur, and best selling author, Kris Jones helps you weave a tight SEO and search marketing strategy before 2022 ushers in

If you spend enough time in the digital marketing space, even if you focus on just one area of it, you’ll eventually catch wind of the intersection of SEO, paid media, web design, and link building. There’s no avoiding it since all these areas run together to ideally form a strong online presence for a business. Within that context, if you’ve ever been the one to devise a digital strategy for yourself or your clients, you’re probably familiar with the types of market niches that would push a business to focus more on SEO or paid search marketing.

SEO is obviously a fantastic tool for just about anyone, but don’t discount the power of paid media. Each has its pros and cons, and when done the right way, neither is going to hurt you.

What will hurt you, however, is making mistakes in your efforts and then letting them go for a long time. Weak points in your SEO and paid media can be tricky things. They can harm your digital presence in the long term and yet be difficult even to detect unless you really know what you’re doing.

With the home stretch of 2021 right around the corner, now is the best time to stitch up those holes in your search marketing for 2022. Here are four tips for cleaning up your SEO and paid media marketing.

1. Stop writing for keywords over topics

SEOs know the old story, but here it is again for anyone who doesn’t. Ten to twenty years ago, it was a popular practice to keyword-stuff on web pages. That just meant overusing a certain keyword on a page in an attempt to get Google to rank the page more highly.

In 2021, we know this is a bad practice because it doesn’t help users to answer their questions. What answers questions for online users today is content that discusses popular topics rather than just keyword-spamming.

You can use popular topic-research tools such as BuzzSumo, Answer the Public, or Semrush to find topics relevant to your desired industry niche. Then, do your own research to generate content that’s useful. Always think of the user first.

Keywords still have their place, though. Google needs to match up queries with content, and the content that makes the smartest, most useful, and natural use of keywords will tend to perform better. Content needs to have keywords in its headings and also use naturally within the body. But don’t think that you need to overuse keywords or focus your content completely around the keywords. Instead, determine the intent of the keywords and align that with your topic research to create killer content that ranks.

2. Don’t abandon paid media message consistency

When your search marketing includes paid media, too, you have a whole other set of guidelines to follow. Again, everything you do should be with users in mind. Put yourself in their place. How would you respond to this ad if you saw it?

Then, click through to the landing page to make sure everything still makes sense. The thing is, here is where PPC specialists can fail if they aren’t careful.

With paid media, you’re using ads to get people to do things. That’s what you have available: words and images on little square ads on web pages or paid search results on the SERPs.

Sounds straightforward, right? As long as you do your research and get the ads’ messaging correct, you should be golden.

Except you can go way wrong if your messaging isn’t consistent across the entire paid search journey. Your landing pages need to contain the same type of messaging as your ads. They need to reference the information users saw when they first clicked the ad.

That shows continuity across your paid campaigns. Without that continuity, without landing pages that reference offers or claims made in ads, users will be confused. They’ll wonder if they clicked the wrong ad or got taken to the wrong website.

And confused users don’t spend money.

Think about it this way: it’s been estimated that it takes between five and seven impressions before one user remembers a brand. Five to seven! It can be challenging enough to reach those numbers but imagine if you tried to get there without brand consistency. You’d be setting yourself up for failure, plain and simple.

The solution is once again to think like a user. Go through all the elements of a paid search user’s journey. If the messaging and branding flow logically and actually make sense, you may have a winning campaign on your hands.

3. Don’t ignore poor site UX

I said at the outset that the different areas of digital marketing all have the potential to intersect and flow together. Here is where SEO and web design meet up: website UX.

SEOs can spend all day researching keywords, writing content, optimizing meta tags, and building backlinks, but users probably aren’t going to do what you want if your website has a terrible layout and design, not to mention if it isn’t optimized for the mobile experience.

But don’t just listen to me – read the numbers. According to Intechnic, 67 percent of online users say that a badly designed website negatively affects their impressions of a brand. That is a huge figure, to put it mildly.

When Google’s spiders crawl a site, they do so logically, as a human would. That means the main navigation needs to set out the content your site has and be clear about where users can go to find certain information.

Now, what qualifies as a “good” layout? It’s simple when you think about it, and yet so many websites struggle to do it. The main navigation needs to show users all the vital areas of a site. Whatever business you’re in, your nav should show your main services first, followed by a blog if you have one (you should), an “about us” section, and a contact tab.

That setup right there covers all the main points that you’ll need to keep users engaged. Now, how everything else breaks down from there is up to you, but again, keep it logical. Your main services tab should have a submenu of all your main services, your locations tab can break down to show your different business locations, and so on.

Also, you absolutely cannot forget accessibility when you’re talking about website UX today. Accessibility, of course, is the capability of any piece of website content to be consumed and understood by people with a range of physical or mental disabilities. Not only is this simply a good business practice, but it’s also just inclusive and courteous.

Website accessibility includes considerations such as making content available to the visually and hearing impaired, ensuring your web pages are navigable with a keyboard only instead of just with a mouse, and choosing colors that don’t clash so color-blind people have no trouble reading your content.

Makes sense, right?

It’s important that it does make sense because if neither human users nor Google can understand how to navigate your website, you probably won’t rank for your desired keywords.

4. Don’t set and forget PPC

If you’re a business owner and are doing your own digital marketing, or if you employ one (possibly overworked) specialist to do it for you, it can be more than a little tempting to engage in the “set it and forget it” mindset.

Small to medium-sized businesses have so much to do just running themselves that putting sufficient effort into digital marketing can seem like too much of a stretch.

You may think that you’ve come up with a pretty effective PPC ad campaign that contains all the right visuals and messaging and hits all the right audience marks. And maybe you have, for now.

But you can’t set and forget anything in PPC or digital marketing more generally. Trends change, markets shift, consumers move on. You have to check in on your ads’ performance over time to see if you’ve recently fallen flat. Because if you have, then you’re wasting a lot of effort maintaining ads that aren’t converting.

Instead of letting things go like this – put the time into analyzing your ads’ performance, particularly in the time immediately following the start of the campaign. You want to ensure things are running as you predicted and tweak them if they aren’t.

While you’re at it, set aside some time to research how you can optimize your PPC campaigns’ resource consumption. The best campaigns are obviously the most efficiently performing ones, and so how can you do better?

Try reworking your ad copy. It sounds simple, but as you know, more relevant ad copy drives click-through rates and Quality Scores. And high-quality scores reduce your cost per click and cost per conversion.

Another money-worthy avenue you can take to hone in on your ads’ efficiency is to use dayparting and geolocation together. Dayparting will schedule your ads to appear at certain times of day, while geolocation will show your ads only in certain places.

This is particularly useful for local businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations and want to get customers through the doors.

This takes plenty of audience research to get it right, but it’s a smart and common-sense way to optimize the resources you’re using on your PPC ads.

A stale PPC campaign has the potential to be one of your biggest search marketing holes in 2022, so don’t wait on this one.

Jump on your 2022 fixes now

There truly is no time like the present for fixing your search marketing loopholes. Any mistake that’s out there for any length of time is probably going to hurt you. But with the second half of 2021 already here, lots of businesses are setting their sights on 2022.

Become one of them. Follow these pointers to get ahead in your search marketing efforts, and it could make all the difference.

Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.

Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.

Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/08/09/now-is-the-best-time-to-stitch-your-search-marketing-loopholes-before-2022/




The importance of accurate keyword difficulty scores

30-second summary:

  • Keyword difficulty (KD) scores help digital marketers understand potential search engine performance
  • KD scores are useful in building SEO strategies, filtering out ineffective keywords
  • Low competition keywords give an advantage in attracting traffic
  • Some KD calculating tools may be inaccurate due to the use of limited parameters
  • Semrush has developed a new formula for KD score calculations that it says has improved accuracy

With countless companies competing for the same audience, digital marketers need to develop a highly effective and targeted content strategy to find a way through the crowded market and connect with potential customers. Keyword difficulty (KD) is an essential metric to assist marketers in formulating an effective SEO strategy for reaching the top of search engine results pages (SERP).

Focusing on a keyword with a low KD score can achieve faster results with traffic from search engines as there is less competition. Whereas keywords with a higher KD score will typically have far more competition in search results, making it much harder to appear near the top of SERPs in the short term. Long-term improvements are achievable but will take time and require multiple SEO measures to be implemented.

KD calculation tools can determine how effective a keyword may be in search results. However, a lot can depend on the SEO tools that digital marketers are using. Such tools are not always accurate due to the limited parameters that can vary from developer to developer. The result is that the KD calculation may be inaccurate and even lead a digital marketer to believe that their keywords will perform better in practice than in reality.

Content created in partnership with Semrush.

Semrush, an online visibility management platform provider, has developed what it says is a proven formula to achieve an accurate KD percentage score based on in-depth research into SEO patterns and client feedback.

How Semrush’s Keyword Difficulty platform works

This year, Semrush released an updated version of its KD metric. The new formula was the result of extensive lab testing by the company’s team of data scientists and engineers. They studied patterns of SERP activity for approximately 120,000 keywords, covering more than 100 parameters and varying contexts to determine an accurate KD value. Alongside this, the teams analyzed the data to determine the difficulty that keywords would face in using SEO to appear on the first page of search results.

The three steps to decode your SERP standing and opportunities

Semrush’s platform has three steps to calculate the formula.

1. SERP analysis

The first involves SERP analysis, where the median value is identified for three metrics throughout URLs on the first page of search results. The three median values are:

  • The number of referring domains pointing to the ranking URLs
  • The authority score of the ranking domains
  • The ratio of follow/no-follow links to the ranking URLs

2. Keyword parameter analysis

The second step is an analysis of keyword parameters. This considers the above SERP factors, alongside a closer inspection of individual keywords. All factors are weighted differently in Semrush’s formula regarding the likelihood of influencing the first-page ranking.

The parameter weighted the highest by some way is the median number of referring domains for ranking URLs, totaling 41.22 percent. While the second-largest weighted share is the median authority score for ranking domains at 16.99 percent. Search volume is third with 9.47 percent, and the median follow/no-follow ratio for ranking URLs is a fraction lower in the fourth position at 9.17 percent.

Other parameters include featured snippets, branded keywords, and site links, with the weighted share becoming progressively smaller. Factors that can harm the KD score are keywords with a high word count and no SERP features.

3. The calculations

The third step is the calculation itself. The formula also adapts for each country, taking a nation’s population size and the number of websites into account when calculating the KD score based on Semrush’s regional database.

What KD scores mean for your SEO performance

On Semrush’s KD platform, the user can enter up to 100 keywords at a time to check the KD score. Crucially, the platform can help the user find valuable low-competition keywords. KD scores can also be calculated for both long-tail and local keywords. In addition, the tool allows the user to compare their SEO strategy with competitors to see what is performing well and identify any keyword gaps.

The results provide the user with the KD rating and advice on what they need to do next to gain hits. At the lower end of the scale, scores of 0-14 percent are classed “very easy” with the strongest likelihood of new pages appearing near the top of Google rankings without the need for backlinks.

The next step up is 15-29 percent, which is considered “easy”. While there may be some competition, it remains possible to achieve a high ranking for new web pages. However, this will require quality content based on the keywords.

Things get progressively harder as the KD scores get higher. A score of 85-100 percent, for example, is classified “very hard”, where keywords face the strongest competition and the odds are stacked against new websites breaking through. A ranking is still possible through features such as on-page SEO, link building, and campaigns to promote content. In this instance, pay-per-click advertising may prove more beneficial.


To find out more about Semrush and its Keyword Difficulty platform download its recent whitepaper.

https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2021/07/16/the-importance-of-accurate-keyword-difficulty-scores/




How NLP and AI are revolutionizing SEO-friendly content [Five tools to help you]

30-second summary:

  • Natural language processing (NLP) is one factor you’ll need to account for as you do SEO on your website.
  • If your content is optimized for NLP, you can expect it to rise to the top of the search rankings and stay there for some time.
  • As AI and NLP keep evolving, we may also eventually see machines doing a lot of other SEO-related work, like inserting H1 and image alt tags into HTML code, building backlinks via guest posts, and doing email outreach to other AI-powered content editors.
  • While it seems far-fetched right now, it’s exciting to see how SEO, NLP and AI will evolve together.
  • Writer.com’s Co-founder and CEO, May Habib discusses in-depth about SEO content and shares top tools to help you through the content creation process.

Modern websites are at the mercy of algorithms, which dictate the content they show in the search results for specific keywords. These algorithms are getting smarter by the day, thanks to a technology called machine learning, also known as artificial intelligence (AI).

If you want your site to rank in search results, you need to know how these algorithms work. They change frequently, so if you continually re-work your SEO to account for these changes, you’ll be in a good position to dominate the rankings. 

Natural language processing (NLP) is one factor you’ll need to account for as you do SEO on your website. If your content is optimized for NLP, you can expect it to rise to the top of the search rankings and stay there for some time.

The evolving role of NLP and AI in content creation & SEO

Before we trace how NLP and AI have increased in influence over content creation and SEO processes, we need to understand what NLP is and how it works. NLP has three main tasks: recognizing text, understanding text, and generating text.

  • Recognition: Computers think only in terms of numbers, not text. This means that any NLP solution needs to convert text into numbers so computers can understand them.
  • Understanding: Once the text has been converted into numbers, algorithms can then perform statistical analysis to discover the words or topics that appear together most frequently. 
  • Generation: The NLP machine can use its findings to ask questions or suggest topics around which a writer can create content. Some of the more advanced machines are already starting to put together content briefs. 

With the help of NLP and artificial intelligence (AI), writers should soon be able to generate content in less time as they will only need to put together keywords and central ideas, then let the machine take care of the rest. However, while an AI is a lot smarter than the proverbial thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters, it will take some time before we’ll see AI- and NLP-generated content that’s actually readable.

As AI and NLP keep evolving, we may also eventually see machines doing a lot of other SEO-related work, like inserting H1 and image alt tags into HTML code, building backlinks via guest posts, and doing email outreach to other AI-powered content editors. While it seems far-fetched right now, it’s exciting to see how SEO, NLP, and AI will evolve together.

Major impact from Google BERT update

In late 2019, Google announced the launch of its Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm.  BERT helps computers understand human language using a method that mimics human language processing. 

According to Google, the BERT algorithm understands contexts and nuances of words in search strings and matches those searches with results closer to the user’s intent. Google uses BERT to generate the featured snippets for practically all relevant searches. 

One example Google gave was the search query “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”. The old algorithm would return search results for U.S. citizens who are planning to go to Brazil. BERT, on the other hand, churns out results for Brazilian citizens who are going to the U.S. The key difference between the two algorithms is that BERT recognizes the nuance that the word “to” adds to the search term, which the old algorithm failed to capture. 

How NLP and AI Are Revolutionizing SEO-Friendly Content [5 Tools That Can Help You] - Google search query example

Source: Google

Instead of looking at individual keywords, BERT looks at the search string as a whole, which gives it a better sense of user intent than ever before. Users are becoming more specific with the questions they ask and are asking more new questions, and BERT breaks down these questions and generates search results that are more relevant to users.

This is great news for search engine users, but what does it mean for SEO practitioners? While it doesn’t exactly throw long-standing SEO principles out the window, you might have to adjust to accommodate the new algorithm’s intricacies and create more content containing long-tail (longer and more specific) keywords. Let’s move on to the next section to learn more about creating BERT-optimized content.

Developing SEO-friendly content for improved Google

When we perform SEO on our content, we need to consider Google’s intentions in introducing BERT and giving NLP a larger role in determining search rankings. Google uses previous search results for the same keywords to improve its results, but according to the company, 15% of all search queries are used for the first time. The implication here is that Google needs to decipher these new questions by reconstructing them in a way it understands. 

With this in mind, your SEO should factor in the criteria below: 

Core understanding of search intent

While keywords still play an important role in Google searches, BERT also pays close attention to user intent, which just means a user’s desired end goal for performing a search. We may classify user intent into four categories:

  • Navigational: The user goes to Google to get to a specific website. Instead of using the address bar, they run a Google search then click on the website link that appears in the search results. It’s possible that these users know where they want to go but have forgotten the exact URL for the page.
  • Informational: The user has a specific question or just wants to know more about a topic. The intention here is to become more knowledgeable or to get the correct answer for their question. 
  • Commercial: The user might not know what they want at the moment, so they’re just looking around for options. They may or may not make a purchase right away.
  • Transactional: The user is ready and willing to make a purchase and is using Google to find the exact product they want.

Unlike old search algorithms, the new Google algorithm captures user intent better because it considers the whole context of the search terms, which may include prepositions such as “of”, “in”, “for”, and “to”, or interrogative words such as “when”, “where”, “what”, “why”, and “how”. Your SEO strategy should produce content that:

  • Answers a user’s question or addresses a need right away
  • Provides value to the reader
  • Is comprehensive and focused 

You might need to conduct more research about ranking sites for your keyword and check out what kind of content gets into the top results. It’s also a good idea to look at the related searches that Google suggests at the bottom of the results page. These will give you a better idea of user intent and help you draw an SEO strategy that addresses these needs.

Term frequency-inverse document frequency

You might not have heard of the term “Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency” (TF-IDF) before, but you’ll be hearing more about it now that Google is starting to use it to determine relevant search results. TF-IDF rises according to the frequency of a search term in a document but decreases by the number of documents that also have it. This means that very common words, such as articles and interrogative words, rank very low. 

TF-IDF is calculated by multiplying the following metrics:

  • Term frequency: This may either be a raw count of instances of a keyword, the raw count adjusted for document length, or the raw frequency of the most common word. 
  • Inverse document frequency: This may be calculated by taking the total number of documents, dividing it by the number of documents that have the keyword, then getting its algorithm. If the word is very common across different documents, the TF-IDF gets closer to 0. Otherwise, it moves closer to 1. 

When we multiply the metrics above, we get the TF-IDF score of a keyword in a document. The higher the TF-IDF score, the more relevant the keyword is for that specific page. As an end-user, you may use TF-IDF to extract the most relevant keywords for a piece of content. 

Google also uses TF-IDF scores in its NLP engine. Since the metric gauges the relevance of a keyword to the rest of the document, it’s more reliable than simple word counts and helps the search engine avoid showing irrelevant or spammy results.

Sentiment importance

Consumer opinions about brands are everywhere on the internet. If you can find a way to aggregate and analyze these sentiments for your brand, you’ll have some powerful data about overall feelings about your business at your fingertips. 

This process is called sentiment analysis, and it uses AI to help you understand the overall emotional tone of the things your customers say about you. It involves three key activities:

  • Knowing where your customers express their opinions about your brand, which might include social media, review sites such as Yelp or the Better Business Bureau, forums, feedback left on your site, and reviews on ecommerce sites such as Amazon.
  • Utilizing AI and NLP to pull data from these sites in massive quantities, instead of gathering a random sample consisting of just a few comments from each platform. This gives you a clearer overall picture of customer sentiment.
  • Analyzing data and assigning positive or negative values to customer sentiments, based on tone and choice of words.

Crafting an SEO strategy that places importance on customer sentiment addresses common complaints and pain points. We’ve found that dealing with issues head-on, instead of skirting them or denying them, increases a brand’s credibility and improves its image among consumers.

Salience and category

If you want to better understand how natural language processing works, you may start by getting familiar with the concept of salience. 

In a nutshell, salience is concerned with measuring how much of a piece of content is concerned with a specific topic or entity. Entities are things, people, places, or concepts, which may be represented by nouns or names. Google measures salience as it tries to draw relationships between the different entities present in an article. Think of it as Google asking what the page is all about and whether it is a good source of information about a specific search term.

Let’s use a real-life example. Let’s imagine you do a Google search to learn more about how to create great Instagram content during the holidays. You click on an article that claims to be a guide to doing just that but soon discover that the article contains one short paragraph about this topic and ten paragraphs about new Instagram features. 

While the article itself mentions both Instagram and the holidays, it isn’t very relevant to the intent of the search, which is to learn how to document the holidays on Instagram. These are the types of search results Google wanted to avoid when it was rolling out BERT. Instead of trying to game the system to get your content to the top of the search results, you need to consider salience as you produce your online content. 

Five tools that can help you develop SEO-friendly content

Given all the changes that Google has made to its search algorithm, how will you ensure that your content remains SEO-friendly? We’ve gathered six of the most useful tools that will help you create content that ranks high and satisfies user intent.

1. Frase

Frase (frase.io) claims to help SEO specialists create content that is aligned with user intent easily. It streamlines the SEO and content creation processes by offering a comprehensive solution that combines keyword research, content research, content briefs, content creation, and optimization. 

Fraser - Tools to create SEO-friendly content

Frase Content, its content creation platform, suggests useful topics, statistics, and news based on the keywords you enter. If you’re working with a team, the Content Briefs feature tells your writers precisely what you need them to produce, reducing the need for revisions and freeing up their time for more projects. 

2. Writer

Writer (writer.com) realizes that we all write for different reasons, and when you sign up, it asks you a few questions about what you intend to use it for. For example, you might be interested in improving your own work, creating a style guide, promoting inclusive language, or unifying your brand voice. 

How NLP and AI Are Revolutionizing SEO-Friendly Content [5 Tools That Can Help You] - Writer

Writer’s text editor has a built-in grammar checker and gives you useful real-time suggestions focusing on tone, style, and inclusiveness. Writer also offers a reporting tool that lets you track your writers’ progress for a specific period, such as spelling, inclusivity, and writing style.

3. SurferSEO

Surfer (surferseo.com) makes heavy use of data to help you create content that ranks. It analyzes over 500 ranking factors such as text length, responsive web design, keyword density, and referring domains and points out common factors from top pages to give you a better idea of what works for a specific keyword. 

Surfer - Tools to create SEO-friendly content

You can see Surfer’s analysis at work when you use its web-based text editor. You will see a dashboard that tracks what the app calls the “content score”. It also gives you useful keyword suggestions.

4. Alli AI

Alli AI (alliAI.com) offers you a quick, painless way to perform SEO on existing content. All you need to do is add a single code snippet to your site, review Alli’s code and recommendations, then approve the changes. Once you approve the changes, Alli implements them in minutes.

How NLP and AI Are Revolutionizing SEO-Friendly Content [5 Tools That Can Help You] - Alli AI

Alli does this by finding the easiest links to build. If you prefer to do things manually, the tool also shows you link building and outreach opportunities. If you’re struggling to keep up with all Google’s algorithm changes, Alli claims it can automatically adjust your site’s SEO strategy.

5. Can I Rank?

Can I Rank (canirank.com) compares your site content to other sites in its niche and gives you useful suggestions for growing your site and improving your search rankings. Its user interface is easy to understand and the suggestions are presented as tasks, including the estimated amount of time you will need to spend on them. 

How NLP and AI Are Revolutionizing SEO-Friendly Content [5 Tools That Can Help You] - Can I Rank?

What we like about Can I Rank? is that everything is in plain English, from the menu to the suggestions it gives you. This makes it friendly to those who aren’t technical experts. It also presents data in graph form, which makes it easier to justify SEO-related decisions.

Bottom line

Google changes its search algorithms quite a bit, and getting your page to rank is a constant challenge. Because its latest update, BERT, is heavily influenced by AI and NLP, it makes sense to use SEO tools based on the same technologies.

These tools – such as Frase, Writer, SurferSEO, AlliAI, and Can I Rank? – help you create content that ranks. Some of them check for grammar and SEO usability in real-time, while others crawl through your site and your competitors’ sites and come up with content suggestions. Trying out these tools is the only way for you to know which one(s) work best for you. Stick with it, and you’ll stay ahead of the game and create content that performs well for years to come!

May Habib is Co-founder and CEO at Writer.com.

How NLP and AI are revolutionizing SEO-friendly content [Five tools to help you]




10 Effective ways to boost click-through rate (CTR) using SERPs

30-second summary:

  • Search engine ranking pages and algorithms are evolving quickly and you should keep pace with them to succeed.
  • Did you know, 51% of all searches end without a click?
  • Gone are the days when there are only organic text-based results on the page.
  • Today, there are paid listings, zero-click searches, images, videos, maps, featured snippets, people also asked for boxes, and even podcasts that result in dismal click-through rates (CTRs).
  • Branex’s digital marketing strategist, Irfan Ak has created a top 10 list that can boost your CTR in Google SERPs.

If you closely look at the first page of Google for any competitive keyword, you will find tons of elements on it. Gone are the days when there are only organic text-based results on the page. Today, there are images, videos, maps, featured snippets, people also asked for boxes, and even podcasts. Then there are paid listings which are visible on top of organic listings. SEO trends are changing quickly and it is impacting search engine results pages (SERPs). All this translates into declining organic reach, dismal click-through rate (CTR), and the rise of zero-click searches.

In fact, 51% of all searches end without a click. With search engines trying their best to fulfill user needs on search pages itself, fewer users will scroll down and click through your listing as they get the desired answer on the search page.

In this article, you will learn about ten effective ways to boost click-through rate (CTR) using SERPs.

How to increase click-through rate (CTR) - Stats

Source: SparkToro

1. Optimize for featured snippets

The coveted number one spot is no longer the target for digital marketers and digital marketing agencies. The focus has shifted to Position Zero. According to Ahrefs study, 12.3% of search queries have featured snippets. Search engines like Google pull data from the top 10 results to show as a featured snippet. If your blog or website is ranking on the first page of Google, you have an opportunity to grab the featured snippet and boost your visibility.

To do so, you need to understand the purpose of featured snippets. The main reason why search engines show featured snippets is that they want to provide a direct answer to a search query and if your listing does that, you have a bright chance of getting featured on a much sought-after position zero. 

Add featured snippets to increase click-through rate (CTR)

Source: Ahrefs

Secondly, featured snippets are displayed for long-tail keywords or questions-based queries. The focus is usually on offering short and precise answers to the user query and if your listing can do that while optimizing for long-tail keywords, it can rank on featured snippets. 

2. Improve your rankings

According to a study conducted by Backlnko which analyzed 5 million Google search results, moving one spot up can increase your click-through rate by almost 30.8%. Even though, this might vary depending on your current position and the position you have moved to. The same study also found that jumping from 10th position to 7th position did not have the same impact as moving from 6th position to 5th position or 2nd position to 1st position might have on your click-through rate. Instead of striving for ranking on the first page of Google, you should focus on ranking in the top three positions as 75.1% of all clicks go to the top three spots.

Click-through rate (CTR) organic - breakdown stats

Source: Backlinko

3. Write captivating headlines

David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising” and Founder of Ogilvy & Mather, once said,

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

What is the first thing that users will read when they look at your listing? It is the headline. It can literally make it or break it for you. That is why it is important to write attention-grabbing headlines. Add an emotional element to your headline as research has shown that including positive or negative sentiments to your headlines can increase its click-through rate by 7%. Backlinko’s study I referenced above also found that titles that contain 15-40 characters have the highest organic click-through rate.

4. Meta description and URL

Have you ever seen a search result closely? What does it contain? A search engine listing usually comprises of three things

  • Title
  • URL
  • Meta Description

After optimizing your title, you should focus on optimizing your URL and meta description for click-through rate. Add your keyword in the URL as it will increase your clickthrough rate by 45% as compared to URLs that don’t contain the keyword.

Just like the title and URL, add your keyword in the meta description as well. Write a meta description in active voice and try to make it as actionable as possible. Don’t forget to add a call to action to persuade users to click on your listings. Make sure all the pages on your website have a meta description because pages that contain the meta description generate 5.8% more clicks than pages without meta description.

5. Add a schema markup

Search engines use a spider to crawl web pages and create an index of all those pages. The easier it is for search engines to crawl your website, the faster they will crawl your website and more likely your website to get indexed and ranked. By adding schema markup to your website, you can make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is all about and how different pages on your website covers.

There are different types of schema markups and implementing the right kind on your website can do wonders. For example, a review schema markup allows search engines to display ratings in your organic results. If your rating is good, it can increase your credibility, build trust, and help you attract new customers while increasing your click-through rate.

6. Optimize for Google My Business

Do you have a Google My Business page? If your answer is no, then you are missing out. Get your business featured on Google My Business and enter all the business details. Whether it is location-based searches, branded searches, or business-related or service-related searches, Google My Business results tend to show up.

Another advantage of using Google My Business is that it allows you to collect reviews and ratings from customers as well as allows your business to answer user questions. Both can help you build trust and win new customers. The more positive reviews your business has or the higher the rating, the better. It also offers some useful features to customers such as sharing business information with others or contacting the business directly.

7. Run well-targeted PPC ads

One of the best ways to overcome declining organic reach is to invest in PPC ads. Yes, they might be expensive in certain industries and might not work that well in other industries but if you are looking for quick results, PPC ads are your best bet, provided your PPC targeting strategy is on the money. Run PPC ads on branded keywords and prevent others from occupying your ad space. 

When you run PPC ads, it attracts targeted traffic that is more likely to convert into paying customers. This means that it not only increases your click-through rate but also increases your conversion rates too. The key to success with PPC ads is to choose the right ad type according to your industry.

8. Optimize images and videos for SEO

As mentioned before, SERPs are no longer limited to showing organic results anymore. They also show images, videos, and featured snippets to name just a few. What’s even more interesting is the fact that SERPs showing images and videos are slowly but surely increasing in number. This means that you can optimize your images and videos to increase your chances of ranking on these SERPs.

Here are some of the ways you can use to optimize images for SEO.

  • Use targeted keywords in image and video title, description, and alternate text
  • Place the image and video in a section of the page or in content where it best matches the keyword intent
  • Compress large size images and videos
  • Add a caption to images
  • Use common image sizes and optimal image formats

9. Give an irresistible limited time offer

Create a sense of urgency and use tactics such as countdown timer or mention the number of items remaining. When a user sees these things on your page, they are rushed into taking the desired action. Give a limited time offer that your target audience cannot resist, and you will see your clickthrough rate shoot through the roof. Don’t forget to add a call to action that tells users which action they should take next.

10. Optimize social media channel to show up in knowledge panels

Last but certainly not least is to optimize social media pages for knowledge panels. Search engines display these knowledge panels in order to present all your business information in a concise way. As a business, you can use this as an opportunity to connect your social media accounts and let users contact you directly from search engine results pages. For this process to work, all your social media accounts should pass the verification by Google. You can also use schema markup to highlight your social media accounts.

How do you boost your click-through rate using search engine result pages? Let us know in the comments section below.

Irfan Ak is an experienced digital marketing strategist, growth hacker, digital transformation expert at Branex. He can be found on Twitter @irrfanAK.

10 Effective ways to boost click-through rate (CTR) using SERPs




Top six reasons you should caption your social media video content

30-second summary:

  • Video marketing is more than a trend; it’s a must. But most companies are leaving out a key ingredient to ensure customers engage with their videos: captions and subtitles.
  • Captioning videos in English or subtitling them in other languages has been proven to greatly boost the success and accessibility of online video content.
  • Adding captions, subtitles or a transcript to videos allows Google to index the entirety of video content, rather than just indexing the video title.
  • Captions and subtitles ensure videos are accessible by all: those who don’t have their volume on and the 37.5 million Americans who are deaf or hearing impaired.

No matter what industry you’re in, video content is likely part of your marketing strategy. And if it’s not, it should be. According to a report by Cisco, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022. And 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by video. Even still, videos aren’t some magic token that’ll get you to the next realm of marketing success and customer engagement. The online landscape is crowded, competitive, and moving at lightning speed. You don’t just need users to slow their scroll, you need them to engage. And when it comes to video content, the solution is quite simple, but often overlooked: closed captions.

Captioning your videos in English or subtitling them in other languages will greatly boost the success of your online video content. As a professional captioner and subtitler, I’m here to help you understand why:

1. Google can’t watch videos, but it can crawl captions

If you’re looking to improve your video’s SEO, adding captions is a quick and easy way to do it. Search engines like Google can’t watch your video content, but they can crawl your captions or transcripts and rank your video based on the keywords they find. Although your video will also be indexed for SEO by its title, description, and tags, captions will increase your keyword density and diversity even further. 

Google can't watch videos but can read captions

Next time you’ve got video content creation on the horizon, make sure you incorporate keywords into the script with this tip in mind, as it will pay off when it comes to video performance and SEO results in the long run.

2. Video captions drive more social engagement 

Adding captions to your videos is almost guaranteed to boost engagement, interaction, and conversion. According to a case study by Instapage, call-to-action clicks increased by 25% after they added captions to their Facebook videos. Another study found that captions increase the time viewers spend watching a video by almost 40% and make viewers 80 percent more likely to watch a video through the end. Simply adding captions to video content drives up clicks, overall view time, and view longevity.

3. A lot of people don’t (or can’t) turn on video sound

Have you ever insomnia-scrolled through Facebook for some entertainment while your partner slept soundly next to you? Or decided to take a peek at your feed during a boring class lecture? Or what about when you’re riding the public bus, having a cup of joe at your favorite coffee shop, or dining out solo? In all cases, playing a video aloud is not ideal… or socially acceptable.

Example of how captions support video experience without audio

As much as 85% of Facebook videos are played without sound. That means, if you don’t have captions on your video, it’ll be skipped by anyone watching with the mute button on, which could be a sizable chunk of your target audience. If you want to ensure your followers can view your content no matter where they are when they watch it, then do your part by adding captions. 

4. Captions boost comprehension, memory, and attention

Hundreds of studies have proven that captions improve comprehension of, attention to, and memory of video content. I’m a native English speaker, but my husband is Spanish. To improve his comprehension while watching TV shows and movies in English, we always watch content with the captions on. I was surprised to find that this also improved my comprehension and understanding of the content, and I now watch all video content with subtitles, whether or not my husband is sitting next to me on the couch. Including captions is the best way to ensure your takeaway hits home and leaves its mark on your viewers.  

5. Captions make videos more inclusive and accessible

Over 37.5 million Americans are deaf or have trouble hearing, so video audio serves little to no purpose to this group. And, only 36% of organizations caption all their video content. So why not get on the right side of that number? Without captions, you’re missing out on connecting with a huge audience. But remember, it’s not all about business and money, ensuring your video content is inclusive of all viewers is simply the right thing to do.

6. Most of your viewers likely live outside of your country of origin 

Making your content available worldwide is another way to grow your reach and the impact of your video content. According to YouTube, approximately “two-thirds of a channel’s views come from outside the creator’s home country.” Think about that: a huge portion of your audience might not fully understand your message or recognize your call to action. That’s a deep pool of potential customers you are missing out on.

Look at your analytics, figure out where your viewers live and consider creating subtitles in other languages to reach new markets. Make this a very strategic decision. Quality translation and subtitling are an investment, so you’ll want to make sure you choose the right language(s) to reach the target markets you’re able to serve. 

A word of caution: Resist the urge to DIY your captions and subtitles

While there are free machine translation, transcription, and captioning tools available on the market, take it from me: you don’t want to DIY your video captions. Leave this task to the experts. 

Captioning and subtitling are skills unto themselves, and without training and experience, can be time-consuming and delicate tasks. Captions and subtitles must follow strict rules, including character limits, reading speed, and cue-in and -out times (when the text appears on-screen and when it’s taken off the screen). Poorly timed captions and subtitles are difficult or impossible to read, which defeats the purpose of captioning or subtitling in the first place. 

word of caution on DIY captioning

Use resources such as the American Translators Association Directory (go to “Translation Service(s)” and choose “Dubbing/Subtitling” from the dropdown list) or visit GoSub’s job board to find a professional subtitler or captioner.

Don’t spend tons of time, money, and effort on creating the perfect video and leave out the key ingredient to ensuring your message reaches as many people as possible. Well-captioned and -subtitled content will increase your views, boost engagement and comprehension, and improve the overall success of your social media video content. Plus, for once, this is a quick and easy marketing fix that can make a big impact!

Molly Yurick is a Spanish to English translator, professional captioner, and subtitler. She is also Deputy Chair of Public Relations for the American Translators Association (ATA), which represents more than 10,000 translators and interpreters across 103 countries. 

Top six reasons you should caption your social media video content




‘People also ask’ (PAA) feature: Uncovering Google’s hidden gem

30-second summary:

  • Signaling rapid growth, PAA boxes are now present across half of all SERPs.
  • With 75% of PAA results appearing within the top three results in Google, the PAA block opens up visibility opportunities for sites that are struggling to make it to the first page of Google’s SERP.
  • The key to PAA success lies in producing PAA-friendly content that meets PAA best practices – from tackling longer search queries to focusing on brevity and including question words.

With the rise of voice assistants and Google’s mission to turn into a “knowledge engine”, we can spot the proliferation of Google’s SERP features that support these shifts. Embracing these trends, SEMrush decided to take an in-depth look at Google’s ‘People also ask’ (PAA) feature and analyze its ins and outs to help businesses get more visibility with PAA boxes.

Presenting the key highlights from a recent SEMrush 2020 ‘People Also Ask’ study that analyzed over one million keywords for the US, this post provides insights into building a PAA-centered SEO and content strategy.

The rise of the ‘People also ask’ feature

According to SEMrush Sensor, the number of SERPs containing a PAA box has grown by 40-42% since the feature was first introduced back in 2015.

PAA appears to be present within half of the search results pages, with a slight increase when looking at mobile search results. In fact, Google is now six times more likely to return a SERP with a PAA box than with a featured snippet result.

People also ask feature vs Google featured snippets

Note: The drop on the chart comes as a result of Google’s March 2020 adjustment

Although remarkable, this trend towards PAA expansion is not consistent across all industries. With the lowest presence of PAA within the Real Estate industry (9.5%), the highest number of PAAs was spotted within the Computer & Electronics category (64.2%).

The full industry breakdown can be found in the study.

The nature of PAA

On average, the initial PAA block includes four questions:

Number of questions in the people also ask (PAA) box

While in 58% of all cases analyzed the PAA box appears after the first organic result – be it a regular blue link or a featured snippet – in 75% of cases, it is featured within the top three results.

Hidden opportunities

Although 13% of sites making it into the PAA box have a top three ranking, 74% aren’t even present within the first page of the SERP. This implies that the PAA feature opens up opportunities for sites that cannot immediately boost their organic rankings to appear on the first page of search results.

To leverage this opportunity, though, they should understand the inherent features of PAA and meet some of the key requirements we managed to spot.

Unleashing the power of ‘People also ask’

To understand how to leverage the PAA feature for your site and overall business, we have to examine which features impact the occurrence of a PAA block and which ‘content factors’ effect Google’s decision to include this or that piece of content within the PAA box.

‘Outside’ factors, or PAA-centered keyword optimization

1. Search query length

PAAs normally get triggered by longer keywords or complex search queries. With a clear correlation between the length of a search query and a PAA, we can see that a 10-word keyword triggers a PAA 72% of the time, while search results for a two-word query only showcase a PAA in 28% of the cases:

Probability of triggering a Featured Snippet together with PAA

2. Search query type

Questions or question-type queries tend to produce SERPs with a PAA block. 86% of the time, search queries starting with question words like “what”, “why”, “when”, “where” and “who” trigger a PAA.

SEMrush PAA Blog Graphics 20200930_Types of Queries That Trigger the 'people also ask' (PAA)

‘Inside’ factors, or PAA-worthy content features

79% of PAA boxes are filled with paragraphs taken from website content, followed by lists (13.8%) and tables (4.3%).

People also ask (PAA) results format

1. Paragraph length

The average number of words within a paragraph featured in PAA stands at 41 words, implying that brevity is a valuable asset when crafting content for a site.

2. List length

Within our dataset, we found no lists that went over 8 items, with the minimum length standing at a mere two items.

3. Table length

A standard PAA box has space for 14 rows and three columns, although we saw tables that only showed one column and two rows. Since the tables are less popular, we couldn’t make any conclusions regarding best practices when it comes to creating tables specifically for PAA.

Action plan for businesses willing to optimize for PAA

If today optimizing for PAA is a matter of wants, tomorrow, it could be a matter of needs, as search is already moving towards providing users with instant answers at their first command, be it voice or text.

The best feature of PAA is that it’s often a quicker win strategy than a more long-term traditional “blue link” ranking optimization.

In a nutshell, PAA optimization comes down to the following key steps:

  • Reviewing existing SERP features, where it all starts with analyzing if your target keywords currently trigger any PAAs.
  • Discovering missing opportunities by exploring whether your or your competitors’ site ranks for the keywords that generate a PAA block within the SERP but do not appear within the PAA box.
  • Uncovering ideas for PAA-worthy content by integrating the keywords within the PAA box into your keyword strategy and using the PAA block as a goldmine for content ideas.
  • Ensuring your content is as SEO optimized as it gets.

Olga Andrienko is SEMrush’s Head of Global Marketing. Olga can be found on Twitter @Olgandrienko.

‘People also ask’ (PAA) feature: Uncovering Google’s hidden gem




Pivoting with SEO: How Wildgoose reinvented itself during the COVID-19 crisis

30-second summary:

  • Distinctly’s SEO Manager, Matt Finch provides insight on how the team worked with events company Wildgoose to pivot quickly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • When lockdown began, Wildgoose’s sales and pipeline took an immediate downturn, with a year on year drop in sales of 62% for the month of April.
  • Operational costs were tightened along with evaluations of the marketing and tech spend, and Wildgoose was forced to downsize its workforce by over 50%.
  • The company had to act quickly, having just launched a new website in anticipation of a record-breaking 2020.
  • What were the make or break moments and how did Wildgoose turn around the situation? Let’s find out, we hope you’re ready to make notes.

Matt Finch, SEO Manager at Distinctly, provides insight on how the team worked with events company Wildgoose to pivot quickly in the face of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Founded in 2003, Wildgoose is a global leader in corporate events and team building, winning numerous awards for the thousands of experiences it delivers across the world annually. When lockdown began, Wildgoose’s sales and pipeline took an immediate downturn, with a year on year drop in sales of 62% for the month of April.

Operational costs were tightened along with evaluations of the marketing and tech spend, and Wildgoose was forced to downsize its workforce by over 50%. The company had to act quickly, having just launched a new website in anticipation of a record-breaking 2020.

A swift decision was made to repurpose Wildgoose’s offering into a set of remote team building activities to connect people virtually. This pivot would ultimately prove not only to protect the company’s immediate future but to help it thrive, and was backed up by an SEO campaign from Distinctly with three-month areas of focus in place.

What focus areas were targeted?

  • Using SEO experience to predict changing search keyphrases after lockdown for queries at the top of the conversion funnel – weekly analysis using specialist SEO tools to tweak the optimization and hone phrases towards the key converting audience.
  • Focus link building activity to build the authority and organic visibility of the brand new remote team building pages.
  • Driving product awareness through an expert comment from Wildgoose founder Jonny Edser talking around the new products.

What was achieved?

The move has led to an overall increase in organic traffic of 56% and a sales increase of 158%, since the company’s lowest point in April. In addition:

  • 40 backlinks returned from relevant HR and business publications via linkable asset press release promotion.
  • Features in Forbes, the Chartered Management Institute, and Thisismoney.co.uk.
  • Wildgoose has seen a huge spike in demand for its virtual events, with recent web traffic figures up by 54% YoY and website conversions up 158% YoY in the 3 months since launch.
  • The same is happening with total revenue figures, with an increase of 180% in gross profit from April to May and 26% from May to June.
  • The website is now ranking in the top three search results for key traffic-driving queries including “virtual team building uk”, “virtual away day”, “virtual treasure hunts”, “virtual team quiz”, “remote team building solutions”, “team quizzes for work” and “virtual team escape room”.
  • The virtual team building products received excellent reviews and an average rating of 5* on TrustPilot. This is particularly crucial when encouraging people to enquire about a new product.

How it was done: Rethinking Wildgoose’s business model

Within days of the main revenue drivers effectively disappearing, Wildgoose founder Jonny Edser and the team were working on a way to secure the future of the business. The solution they came up with meant they could not only reshape their existing offering but take advantage of the sudden upswing in demand for virtual communication during the lockdown.

Jonny Edser says,

“By working proactively to deliver a brand new portfolio of remote team building activities that could be used to motivate employees while they worked from home, we could successfully evolve in this new socially-distanced world. At the same time, we could help thousands of companies to keep their teams engaged and connected during an uncertain and challenging period.

Having invested heavily in industry-leading technology in the years prior – and incorporated a new tech division in 2019 – we found that Wildgoose had a real headstart on competitors in the market who were all trying to switch their team building offering to something more technology-based.”

Using SEO for a successful launch

Before coronavirus, Wildgoose wasn’t ranking in the search results for any queries relating to “remote”, “virtual”, or “online”. With the business model shifting, search visibility needed to follow suit, so this needed to change as soon as possible. Wildgoose’s new products were one of the first to market, but they needed to be put in front of the right people.

Matt Finch, SEO Manager at Distinctly, says,

“The speed at which the market was evolving made traditional SEO more challenging than usual. We were (and still are) tweaking the optimization of the key Wildgoose pages a couple of times per week, as new data keeps showing up in Search Console . digital PR promotion of the new Wildgoose products were identified as key targets.”

Keyphrase and content optimization

People’s searching habits have changed since lockdown set in, so traditional keyword research has had to change with it. Instead:

  • Distinctly set about ‘guesstimating’ what people might be looking for, optimizing the key product pages for short-tail keywords and ‘top of the conversion funnel’ queries.
  • Once these started ranking, Google Search Console could then be used to see exactly what search terms were bringing users to Wildgoose’s product pages.
  • The pages could then be better optimized around these terms, becoming more targeted.
  • This was checked multiple times per week, representing the extraordinary circumstances (normally it would be once a month to once a quarter for websites in stable verticals).
  • This meant that new product and hub pages could rank highly for people’s new search queries. Rather than targeting “team building activities”, the site could now target and rank for specific, long-tail keywords like “remote team building solutions”, “virtual team building for employees working remotely”, “virtual away days” and more.
  • Speed was of the essence in the race to get ranking, as not many sites were originally targeting these queries.

Digital PR and link building

Wildgoose’s unusual experience of redesigning its business offering meant there were unique data and content that could be used in relevant publications to promote the new products. A survey into people’s experiences of remote working secured coverage and backlinks in over 40 HR and business publications, allowing links and authority to be built into the new product and category pages, aiding ranking chances.

An effective internal linking structure was also utilized, meaning pre-existing powerful pages were funneling authority to the new pages to boost them further.

MD Jonny Edser was promoted as an expert in the field of virtual team building, leading to features in Forbes, the Chartered Management Institute, and Thisismoney.co.uk. All of this combined to show Google that Wildgoose was leading the way in the field, and so deserved to rank highly for its new target keywords and queries.

Turning Wildgoose’s fortunes around

Wildgoose is now firmly focussed on the future, with a renewed energy around product development and new gameplay formats. The company is streamlining its sales and operational processes and scaling its business model based on updated forecasts for the months ahead. Expect to see more traditional team building activities made virtual over the coming months.

Matt Finch is SEO Manager at Distinctly, an award-winning search marketing agency.

Pivoting with SEO: How Wildgoose reinvented itself during the COVID-19 crisis