Phone call optimization is becoming an integral part of digital marketing. Here are six ways to make a phone-friendly landing page.
The post 6 Ideas (and Examples) to Optimize Your Landing Page for Phone Calls by @seosmarty appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3496223
Prioritizing content creation can be difficult but it’s pivotal in focusing on one topic rather than stumble over many. This allows you to better serve one population of readers and become an expert in your industry.
The post How to Prioritize What You Should be Creating in a Sea of Content Ideas by @JuliaEMcCoy appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3495654
There is a reason storytelling has become somewhat of a buzzword in the marketing industry lately. It’s a simple, natural way to make interesting content that motivates your audience to act. What more could you ask for as a content marketer?
The post 5 Benefits of Using Storytelling in Marketing by @KatyKatzTX appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3495294
The Google app for iOS is now faster according to an official announcement from the company. In addition to cutting down loading times the app is been updated with the new features that are designed to help people save time and get information more quickly. Opening the app and conducting a search will be just a bit quicker now than it was before. Google says this incremental boost in speed will save users a collective 6.5 million hours this year. For the first time Google’s accelerated mobile pages will now be surfaced in the Google app for iOS. AMP articles […]
The post Google App for iOS Gets a Speed Boost by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
From http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/3489931
Last week we launched ClickZ Intelligence, a new service providing actionable insights into the worlds of digital marketing and ecommerce.
One of the reports we launched with is the first in a series of in-depth and practical guides to achieving m-commerce success: The DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site, Part 1: Planning.
With the number of consumers who want to purchase products and services using a mobile device rapidly increasing, there is considerable pressure for companies to embrace mobile commerce, or m-commerce, as quickly as possible. However, in their rush to enter the m-commerce market, business owners shouldn’t neglect the planning stages of their project, which are vital for a successful venture.
In the report, author Andy Favell breaks down the process of planning, researching and evaluating your m-commerce project to get it off to a flying start. Search and search tools form an important part of this process, not just for SEO, but in performing research on competitors, understanding your audience, and getting to grips with how the mobile experience differs from desktop.
Here, I’ll be giving a sneak peek into the ways Favell and other expert contributors recommend using search tools to plan out your m-commerce strategy.
Carrying out keyword research is useful for far more than just SEO. In fact, keyword research plays into the planning process in multiple ways, from understanding your site’s visitors and what they search, to using relevant keywords to identify competing websites.
Andy Favell points out that keywords can be a great way to determine the intent of users visiting your site, allowing you to plan the content, product mix and navigation of your m-commerce project according to what you’ve learned.
People carry out searches differently on a mobile device compared to on a PC. Mobile searches are highly contextual, often dependent on time of day and location. There is also a rising trend of using voice commands to search on mobile, through digital assistants like Siri and Google Now. Voice search tends to use natural language, taking the form of whole sentences rather than isolated keywords, which is a trend you also need to bear in mind and accommodate on your m-commerce site.
Favell recommends using Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines to get an insight into what people search for on mobile, and how. The section on Understanding Mobile User Needs is invaluable for understanding how mobile users search and what their intent is likely to be. Google’s guide breaks down different types of mobile search query into categories, such as “Do queries”, “Know queries” and “Visit-in-person queries”, according to what their aim is.
“Success in m-commerce,” writes Favell, “starts with understanding what your mobile users want from your site or app and delivering it.” Applying this system to your keyword research will help you get to grips with what users are looking for when they visit your m-commerce site, and adapt the site to accommodate them.
Of course, understanding your audience doesn’t end with search, and Favell goes into an immense amount of detail in the report about other means of conducting customer research, including web analytics, heat maps, surveys and user testing.
It’s unlikely that your idea for a great m-commerce project is completely original, and there will always be competitors. That’s why researching and analysing the competition for your m-commerce site or app is a vital stage of the planning process.
Identifying the competition can help you to get a sense of how crowded the market is, what the gaps are that you can exploit, and also what your competitors are doing right that you can learn from. And the first step in discovering who the competition are is to use search.
Favell writes that “There are tools that can help, but for m-commerce sites there really is no substitute for getting your mobile device(s) out and conducting web searches.”
Search expert Bryson Meunier, SEO Director of VIVIDSEATS, observes in the report that m-commerce product pages will probably be similar across desktop and mobile, but emphasises the importance of understanding how mobile queries differ from desktop queries, as well as the need to optimise your pages with the right keywords and topics.
Meunier also believes that Google may well be working towards a separate mobile index in search, making it even more essential to conduct research into mobile SEO and make sure your m-commerce project is optimised properly.
Meunier recommends the following search tools for conducting keyword and competitive SEO research:
1) Google Keyword Planner: Google’s free AdWords Keyword Planner only gives a single, unified figure for traffic from different kinds of devices, but you can also view a breakdown by device type to find out which devices are responsible for which percentage of traffic. As Meunier puts it, this can be useful to get a sense of whether a particular keyword is mostly used by mobile audiences, such as “navigate to” or “gas stations near me”.
If your site has a large percentage of mobile traffic, this can also help immensely with proving a use case for a new, or improved mobile site.
2) Google Search Console only shows which keywords are already bringing users to your site, making Google Keyword Planner stronger for general research, but it has one key feature to recommend it: the ability to view exactly how much traffic is reaching your site from different devices (smartphone, tablet and desktop) for specific keywords.
Google Search Console also has a ‘mobile usability’ section which will identify any problem areas with your site’s functionality on mobile and recommend how to fix them. Alternatively, you can get ahead of the game with our handy mobile friendliness checklist!
3) SEMRush is useful not just for carrying out keyword research, but for the ability to see which percentage of your indexed pages are mobile-friendly and compare these with competitors. With this information, you can isolate which keywords might present an opportunity to overtake competitors who are less mobile-friendly.
For much more insight into the DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site and other detailed reports and best practice guides on achieving digital dominance, head over to ClickZ Intelligence or browse our Reports Library.
from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/06/01/how-search-can-help-with-planning-your-m-commerce-site/
From http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/145257545659
Internal linking is a key SEO tactic, one which allows websites to send clear signals to Google on the relative importance of various pages.
It also works from a user experience perspective, helping visitors find pages that are relevant or potentially useful to them.
It’s something I place great importance on as an editor, as it’s one part of SEO that I can control, and I’ve seen the benefits for sites I’ve worked on.
Let’s take an example from Search Engine Watch. I wrote this article on internal linking, with examples and tips, back in September 2015.
I’ve since linked to it using that exact anchor text (and variations on it) on at least 10 occasions. Essentially, I’m telling Google that this is the page I want Search Engine Watch to rank for that term.
As we can see, it’s worked well. Third on Google, and first for related terms (internal linking best practice for example).
Then there’s Mail Online. The most visited English language newspaper on the web had a relatively haphazard approach to internal linking until recently.
For common, high traffic terms (world leader’s names, celebrities etc) would be used regularly in articles.
The result was that each article would end up competing against previous articles for the same keyword or phrase.
The chart below shows its rankings for ‘David Cameron’ over a six month period. 80 different URLs were returned from the Mail for that search, but it didn’t rank consisitently for the term.
The answer was a consistent internal linking and hub page strategy. Mail Online created hub pages for common terms and consistently linked to them.
The result is a more consistent ranking from November 2015 onwards, when the changes were implemented.
There have been some fluctuations, perhaps due to inconsistent implementation of the linking strategy, but the page is performing much more effectively. As a result, the site will pick up more traffic for that term. Applied across the whole site, this can make a big difference.
This is the question Shaun Anderson from Hobo Web sought to answer recently.
In the examples above, the pages targeted with internal links all contain the keywords used in the anchor text. So, Google could be using the content of the page, and the fact that several pages link to it to decide on the ranking.
In other words, this doesn’t prove that Google is taking note of the anchor text when choosing to rank a particular page.
So, Shaun set up a test. He added an internal link to one page on his site using the target keyword as anchor text.
It’s important to note that the target page did not contain the keyword used, so the only signal that it was relevant to said keyword was the anchor text on the link.
As we can see from the chart, a number of days after the test was implemented, the page ranked for the target term. When it was removed, the page dropped again.
As that page had no other relevance to the term other than the link, the anchor text appears to be the only reason for the page’s ranking.
It’s worth reading Shaun’s blog post for more detail, and for further variations on the test, but the indications are that the answer to the question in the headline here is yes.
It would be good to see other tests to back up this with more evidence. In fact, I’ll see if I can devise one on this site along similar lines.
from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/31/does-google-count-anchor-text-in-internal-links/
From http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/145257545384
In this month’s column, we talk about the ongoing challenges of getting approved to publish via Facebook Instant Articles — many of which are caused by Facebook’s own plugin.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
