How to Craft a Remarkable SEO Strategy for 2017 – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

From understanding the big-picture search trends to making sure your SEO goals jive with your CEO’s goals, there’s a lot to consider when planning for 2017. Next year promises to be huge for our industry, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to craft a truly remarkable SEO strategy to help you sail through 2017.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this special New Year’s edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you have all had a wonderful holiday season and are about to have a wonderful New Year’s.

This week, we’re going to chat about how you can have a remarkable, amazing SEO strategy in 2017. The first thing I’m actually going to start with is not the broad-spectrum, strategic picture, which we talked a little bit here on Whiteboard Friday about, and I’ll reference some of those, but is actually understanding some of those big-picture search trends. What are the search engines doing? How is that affecting my strategy? How does that mean I should influence and affect my specific tactics for 2017? So I’ll walk through a few of these big ones. There are others, but I think these encapsulate many of the big things we’ve been seeing.

I. Understand the big-picture search trends

• A huge rise in SERP features, meaning that Google is showing many more types of data and types of markup in the search results. We have, I believe, 17 that we record for Keyword Explorer, but there are another 7 or 8 that we do not record, but that we see in between 1% and 2% of queries. So there’s just a ton of different features that are going in there.
• A rise in instant answers. This is especially true on mobile, but it’s true on desktop as well. Google is trying to answer a lot of the queries themselves, and that can mean they’re taking away traffic from you, or it can mean there’s opportunity to get into those features or those answers.
• Intent > keywords: We’re also seeing this trend that started with Hummingbird and now, obviously, continued with RankBrain around intent, searcher intent being more important than keywords in how we target our content. This does not mean you can remove keywords from the equation. You have to understand what the searcher has typed into the engine before you can serve their intent, and very small variations in keyword structure can mean real changes in searcher intent. That’s a critical part of how we craft content for people.
• The value of comprehensiveness has clearly been on the rise. That’s been true for a couple of years, but it definitely is a trend that continued in 2016 and we expect to continue into 2017. You can see a bunch of examples of research in that area, including some from Whiteboard Friday itself.
• Multi-device speed and user experience, Google’s been harping on this for several years now, and I think what we are observing is that speed is not the only user experience element. Google has taken action against overlays and pop-ups. They’ve taken action, clearly, that suggests that there are some engagement metrics that are going on there, and that sites that have better user experience and that garner better engagement are doing better in the search results.
• We’ve seen a bunch of trends around unreliability of Google data. That includes search volume data. It includes data in AdWords, around Google showing you which keywords are in there. It includes inaccuracies in Google Search Console, formerly Webmaster Tools, around rankings. My colleague, Russ Jones, has just put out a big piece on that showing, essentially, that if Google says you got this many impressions and this many clicks, that may be totally wrong and false, so be cautious around that.
• Voice search, clearly on the rise. Not yet a huge trend in terms of an addressable market that search marketers can go after, but we’ve talked a few ways here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz about how you can think about voice search impacting your results in the future and what types of content you might want to produce to be in front of voice searchers.
• Machine learning and deep learning, Google has clearly made a shift to that in the last 18 months, and we’re seeing it affect the search results in terms of how they’re considering links, how they’re looking at keyword searches, and how they’re looking at content.
• Multi-visit buyer journeys have always been important, but I think we are now seeing the trend to where not just search marketers but marketers of all stripes recognize this, and a lot of us are optimizing for it, which means that the competitive landscape now demands that you optimize for a multi-visit buyer journey, that you don’t just consider a single visit in your conversion path or in your optimization path, and that means, for SEOs, considering what are all the queries someone might perform as they come to and come back to my site.
• Bias to brands, that is a continuing trend over the last few years. We’re still seeing it, and we’re seeing it even more so. I would say we’re seeing it even when those brands have not necessarily earned tons of links, which used to be the big dominating factor in the world of is a brand stronger than a non-brand. A lot of times that was about links. Now it seems that those are decoupled.
• That being said, we’re kind of feeling an undiminished value of links. If you’ve built a brand, if you’ve done a lot of these things successfully, links are certainly how you can stand out in the search results. That’s pretty much as true in 2016 and ’17 as it was in 2011 and 2012. Only caveat there is that the quality of links matters a lot more.

So, knowing all those things, I think we can now craft some very smart SEO tactics. We can apply those to the SEO problems we face.

II. Map your organizations top-level goals to how your SEO efforts can best assist:

Step two is to map your organization’s top-level goals to your SEO tactics, and that can look something like this.

Here’s Zow Corporate, the opposite of Moz, which is hopefully not very corporate. Zow Corporate’s big three for 2017, they want to grow revenue with new enterprise customers, they want to lower their costs to get more profitable, and they want to improve their upsell to existing customers. So SEO can help with these things by — and this is a really smart framework — you want to take the things that your organization wants to accomplish at its executive or board level, and you want to show that SEO is actually doing those things, not just that you’re trying to rank for keywords or bring more traffic, but that you’ve mapped your priorities in this way.

So I could say SEO can help by identifying searchers that enterprise targets and influencers perform and then ranking for those. We can lower our costs to get more profitable by reducing the cost per acquisition. We’ll drive more traffic with organic search, thus reducing our dependency on advertising and other forms of marketing that cost a lot more. Those types of things.

III. Build a keyword-to-content map

Step three is to build a keyword to content map. We talked about this here on Whiteboard Friday. I’d urge you to check that out if you haven’t already. But the basic concept is to have a list of terms and phrases that come out of your tactics and your goals, that you build a map for and then show like, “All right, here’s how we’re ranking today. Here’s the URL which we’re ranking with,” or, “We don’t yet have a URL that’s targeting this keyword phrase, and thus, we need to build it,” and then the action required there and what the priority is.

IV. Break down the SEO efforts into discrete projects with ETAs and people assigned, ordered by expected ROI

You can also think about adding some additional things to your content-to-keyword map or to your project list by breaking down all the SEO efforts that you’re going to do to hit all these goals into discrete projects with a few things — an estimated time of delivery, the people who are assigned to it, and an ordering based on the expected return on investment. You can be wrong about this. It’s okay to be, “Hey, we’re taking our best guess, thumb in the air. We don’t really know for sure, but we’re going to try. Here’s the project. It’s link building for the home page. It’s our number-one priority. The value estimate is high because we currently rank number two or three for our own brand name. It’s assigned to this person, to Rand, and the ETA is March 30th.” Great, terrific, and now I know. I’ve taken this from here and from my projects list. It’s part of my goals. It’s where I think I can have a big impact. Terrific.

V. Build a reporting/measurement system that shows progress and ties revenue/goals to clear metrics:

Then, step five, the last one here is to build a reporting and measurement system that’s going to show progress, not just to you internally, but to your entire team, or to your client if you’re a consultant or an agency, and that anyone can look at and say, “Ah! This is where they’re going with this. This is how they’ve done so far.”

So you want to take any tactic or any project and add the metrics by which you will measure yourself. So if we’re trying to rank in the top three for our competitor comparison searches, Zow versus whatever companies Zow’s competing with, and the metrics there are ranking first, then search volume, the traffic we get from it, the conversions, and the retention of those customers who’ve come through, now you’ve got a real picture of how your SEO efforts map up to these big-picture goals. It’s a great way to frame your SEO.

So, with that being said, I am looking very much forward to hearing how you’re planning your 2017 SEO strategy. If you have recommendations and tips that you’d like to see here or questions, feel free to leave them in there, and despite the holiday break, I will be in there to answer your questions as best I can.

Look forward to joining you again next week and next year for a wonderful year of SEO and Whiteboard Fridays. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Improve Your Site’s Performance When Using GIFs

Posted by Web_Perfectionist

The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) format was originally developed in 1987. Debuted by Steve Wilhite of Compuserve, GIFs improved on the black-and-white images in use during that time by allowing the use of 256 colors while maintaining a compressed format that could still be loaded by those utilizing slow modems. Furthermore, web developers and designers could create animations via timed delays. And to this day, little has changed regarding GIFs.

Due to its simplicity, the widespread support for this format, and the ease with which it can be used to stream video clips, the GIF format is the oldest file format still commonly used today. This frame animation feature of GIFs ensures that the format remains popular, despite the rise of JPEG and PNG images.

In spite of their popularity and ubiquitousness on the Internet (especially with regards to animated GIFs), GIFs are not the most performant of image options. If you are using GIFs on your sites, it’s important that you take care to optimize your GIFs so that they do not create too much overhead.

This article will cover ways to optimize your GIFs, both static and animated, and will offer an excellent alternative you can use to eliminate the page bloat resulting from use of GIFs as animation.

Why should you optimize your GIFs?

Performance matters when it comes to designing your web pages, and GIFs are not the most performant of image options. While they are excellent for capturing your user’s attention and are universally liked for providing short bursts of information in an entertaining way, GIFs were not designed for animation (despite them being commonly used for such). As such, usage of GIFs leads to heavy page weights and poor user experiences resulting from slow page load speeds.

How to improve the performance of your site while using GIFs

In this section, we’ll cover several ways you can improve the performance of your site with regards to using GIFs. We’ll first dig into ways to handle static GIFs, and we’ll end by discussing ways to minimize the overhead resulting from animated GIFs.

There are two methods for compressing images:

One of the primary methods for optimizing GIFs is to compress them. There are two methods of compression that are commonly used:

• Lossy compression: Lossy compression removes some of the data from the original file, resulting in an image with a reduced file size. However, every time you save the file after compression, the quality of the graphic degrades somewhat, which can result in a fuzzy, pixelated image over time.
• Lossless compression: Lossless compression preserves all of the data from the original file, which means that the compressed file can be uncompressed to gain the original file. While your file size remains larger than if you had used lossy compression, your image’s quality does not degrade over time.

Later on in this post, we’ll cover the impact of both types of optimization on GIFs.

Improve the performance of sites that are using static GIFs by converting to PNG.

The easiest way to improve the performance of your site is to render your image using the PNG format instead of the GIF format. While the two formats are very similar in terms of being good choices for displaying simple graphics, PNG files have the advantage of being able to compress to a size 5–25% smaller than the equivalent GIF file. GIFs were originally created to use a lossless compression technique called the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm, which was defined in the 1970s. However, modern compression techniques are much more performant than LZW, and you can take advantage of this by using formats that utilize these techniques, such as PNGs.

Such file format conversions are pretty easy to do, and there are an abundance of software options you can choose from, including free web-based utilities such as the ones from Pic.io and Convertio.

Improve the performance of sites that are using animated GIFs one of two ways:

Animated GIFs, while extremely popular, can be huge files that require lengthy load times. For example, a GIF that is just a few seconds long can be a few megabytes in size. To improve the performance of your site, use one of the following techniques:

• Lossy optimization
• Converting your animated GIF to a HTML5 video

Lossy optimization on animated GIFs

Because the vast majority of data comprising animated GIFs is graphical data, and because lossless optimizations cannot modify graphical data, you have only one viable option when it comes to optimizing an animated GIF beyond the bare minimum: lossy optimization techniques.

Lossy optimizations work because the human eye does not do a very good job at distinguishing between subtle changes in color. For example, an image might contain thousands of shades of one color, with one pixel showing as only slightly different from the ones next to it. Because your eye won’t be able to differentiate between the two shades, the image file can easily be manipulated: One of the colors replaces the other, making the file smaller.

Because animated GIFs are essentially a series of individual GIFs, you can utilize these techniques to decrease the size of your animated file. By making each individual file smaller, your overall file is smaller as well. One way you can do this is by utilizing a simple software suite that can automatically perform such compressions (such as a modified version of gifsicle).

Converting animated GIFs to HTML5 videos

While you can minimize the size of an animated GIF, you may still end up with a file that is larger than it needs to be. GIFs were never intended to store video, and what is now considered animation is really the result of an attempt to reduce overhead on the storage and transmission of multiple images that share identical metadata. Today, however, we have another option that could potentially make your GIFs up to 95% smaller: converting your animated GIFs to HTML5 video.

HTML5 video is a catch-all term for a modern web browser’s ability to play video content using the <video> tag without needing to use external plugins. When this feature was first released in 2009, there was a lot of debate over how such videos would be stored and how they would be encoded. Today, though, the accepted standard is an H.264-encoded video stored in an MP4 container file (which, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll refer to as an MP4 video from here on out). In addition to looking a lot better due to its being designed to stream video, MP4 files are much smaller as well:

Over 90% of modern web browsers support MP4 videos.

There are many ways to convert your animated GIF to MP4, such as the popular open-source command-line tool ffmpeg and the web-based utility Cloud Convert. Using the latter, you can see the file size savings possible by making the conversion.

Here’s the original animated GIF:

Here is the MP4 video that’s created from the GIF:

Sadly, your browser doesn’t support the video tag. This is a smooth MP4 video of the above GIF, which features Oaken from Disney’s Frozen.

Looking at the sizes of the files, we see that the original was 100 KB. By converting the GIF to MP4, we end up with a file that is just 23 KB, which is 75% smaller:

Conclusion

GIFs are the oldest file format still commonly used today due to their simplicity, near-universal support, and ability to be used as animation. Despite these positive features, GIFs tend to be large files, resulting in page bloat that can negatively impact the performance of your webpages and lead to poor user experiences. As such, you should consider serious optimization of static GIFs, moving away from animated GIFs, and implementing video clips using more modern techniques such as HTML5/MP4 videos. And for additional in-depth information on implementing these changes, download Rigor’s free ebook, The Book of GIF: A Comprehensive Guide to Optimizing GIFs.

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Hunting Down SERP Features to Understand Intent & Drive Traffic – Next Level

Posted by jocameron

Welcome to the seventh installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, Jo showed us how to better optimize our sites when we think we’ve done it all (but still aren’t ranking). This time around she’s giving us the tools and the knowledge to finally capture ourselves a SERP feature. Read on and level up!

Are you within striking distance of traffic-bumping SERP features?

The content on your freakin’ awesome site better be targeting the intent of the searcher.

People of the world want different types of content depending on what they search. If you get this right, your content will earn the engagement signals that tell search engines you’re fighting the good fight.

The stakes are even higher now. Not only are you battling it out in the organic results, but there are attention-grabbing features that draw clicks away from organic results.

But, hey now, chin up! You can use these features to focus on keywords with higher opportunity and win those bobby-dazzlers to drive even more traffic.

I’m going to show you how to use the ever-impressive SERP features to check whether you’re targeting intent and whether the entirety of your content satisfies searcher intent, putting you within striking distance of owning some of those queue-jumping features.

Follow along in your Moz Pro account or start a free trial, it’ll be fun, trust me.

What is searcher intent?

Intent is the nuanced language people use to search different things, and it drastically changes what they’re really, truly seeking.

Every single time a human inputs their heart’s desire into that blank, judgement-free rectangle, they’re asking Google to satisfy their intent.

Show me your best “headphone reviews,” your most reliable “sewing machine repairs,” your funniest “cat vs printer gifs,” I command thee!

Headphone reviews – I want comparisons, specs, images, first-hand experiences. Maybe I’ll buy something, eventually.

Sewing machine repairs – I’m looking for a local business who I can call or visit. Or an instructional article or video.

Cat vs printer gifs – Desperately seeking images in the .gif format of a furry friend freaking out over a machine friend.

With a few simple clicks on my keyboard, my intention is revealed. As a marketer, if you’re targeting keywords with particular intent, then this needs to be reflected in your content. As a searcher, I haven’t got time to read a long article about cat gifs and printers. I want an array of images to choose from. Likewise, I don’t want to scroll through an image gallery when I’m looking for a service, or an in-depth guide when I’m on the precipice of entering that ever-so-tempting sales funnel.

Now let’s look more specifically at the headphone niche. If you sell headphones you might think, “If I can stuff my landing page with a bit of jazzy content and get it in front of every person who searches for ‘headphones’ in every weird and wonderful way, I’m bound to get a chunk of traffic and *bam*, I’ll sell a bunch of headphones.”

It doesn’t really work like that. If your content doesn’t satisfy the intent indicated by the searcher, they’re likely to head back to search — and you just know Google is paying attention to this behavior. So you could end up sending signals to Google that your content isn’t all that good as it sends your visitors back to search. And because Google wants everyone to find what they’re after, your rankings could take a trip to page-two obscurity.

The different types of searcher intent

Intent for the purpose of marketing your content can be lumped into three different types that broadly encapsulate what warm bodies are looking for. This is explained in more detail in this post by Tom Anthony. Here is a brief recap that looks at how searches in the headphone niche can fit into vastly different intent types:

Informational: what were the first earbud headphones?*

Navigational: cnet headphone reviews

Transactional: cheap travel headphones

* I’m going to go all hipster on you and say it was the stethoscope, which morphed into it’s current shape around the 1850s according to Wiki.

Can you see how the implied intent varies depending on the phrasing around the search term? As you research your own target keywords, build up lists, and use those lists to formulate content, the implied intent of the searcher plays an important role in what form your awesome content will take.

It also goes hand-in-hand with your journey into long-tail keywords.

As the marketers of the world have been paying attention to the implied intent to guide their content creation, so indeed has the biggest website on the planet. The website that reduced internet usage by 40% when it went down for 2 minutes a few years ago. Yeah, you’ve heard of them, right? Well, they’re taking a big, old, sloppy bite of the intent pie. In their quest to give the people what they want right in the results pages, Google unleashed The Glorious SERP Feature.

What the wicky-wack are SERP features?

The fancy-schmancy SERP feature is Google’s way of dazzling users with its more-than-a-result result.

It’s Google’s way of saying ‘I hear you’ with its finger guns out, blowing imaginary smoke and reholstering them back into its pockets whilst leaning over the back of your chair, all pleased with itself.

Features might pop up all over the results, like this:

The one with its paw in the air ready to swat? Argh, too cute.

Or they might shuffle into the results, like so:

Then again, they may hang out over here, all nonchalant but desperate to please at the same time:

With 16 different varieties currently documented, they’re like the chameleon of the SERP kingdom: taking relevant content and reinventing itself like a shapeshifting lizard queen (or Madonna).

What SERP features can I win?

There are a handful of features you can reasonably have a punt at without throwing cash at Google: Featured Snippets, Related Questions, Image Packs, Site Links, Tweets, Videos, and the News Box. I’m going to focus on Featured Snippets, Related Questions, and Image Packs.

The rest of the features are within the reach of larger sites, Google partners, or local businesses. I’m not going to dive into the local aspect in this post, as our Local Learning Center is a good place to start that journey.

For regular schmoes like us, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on all 16 features and their presence in the results for keywords you’re tracking. Even if you can’t win them they will elbow out organic results.

Featured Snippets: These are like having those fast-track passes at your local theme park. You can jump from somewhere else in the results to position ZERO, and then you’re pretty much owning that SERP.

Rob Bucci is my featured snippet guru and you’ll probably join the ranks after watching his talk at Brighton SEO.

Related Questions: If you’re tracking Featured Snippets, then you’ll want to familiarize yourself with their buddies, the Related Question.

Winning a Related Question will most likely get you a small bump in clicks through to your site; nothing wrong with that. However, the treat you don’t want to miss out on is grabbing those questions and adding them to your tracked keywords in Moz Pro. Often, this will help you sniff out a Featured Snippet you can target.

Image Packs: I looove image packs — there aren’t enough ways to display that in text form. I’m very visually motivated and I spend a fair bit of time searching for animated .gifs. If you watch Rob Bucci’s talk then you’ll know that they didn’t tend to find overlap with Featured Snippets. So these are a good opportunity to target the visually minded and increase your chances of getting traffic through features across more keywords.

How to use SERP Features to target intent

Back in the olden days, like 6 months ago, you would look at keyword modifiers and find transactional terms like ‘buy,’ ‘cheap,’ and so on, then bundle these into the ‘transactional’ pile, and so on and so forth and rinse and repeat.

Now, in the bright and shiny land-of-the-future, we can use the presence of particular features to understand the intent as Google sees it. You’re doing two very important things here: lumping your keywords into piles to understand intent that you will use to guide your content, AND identifying features you can win and those that may push you out of the results.

Identify the features present for your target keywords

As with every job there is a manual method and a tool-based method. Manual is totally fine for people with small sites, like a personal blog, and a handful of keywords. I hope that by explaining the basic manual method it will lay the foundation of understanding when we ramp up to the tool-based method.

Okey dokey spreadsheet fans, get ready for the keyboard + mouse dance we do when filling up a spreadsheet with lovely data. Start by searching your keywords one-by-one, use incognito mode to avoid personalised results, and add a mark to the sheet next to the features that are present.

Here’s a sheet with all the features already added to get you started. I even added some gentle colors inspired by the first episode of Black Mirror Season 3. Lacie’s giving it 5 stars.

Don’t forget to check out the second tab with your handy-dandy SERP feature cheatsheet.

This is a good way to start understanding more about the different SERP features, identify what they look like, where they hang out, and how intrusive they are.

Identify and track SERP features with Moz Pro

Got more than a handful of keywords? Want all this data for your site and your competitors? Want a tool to do the heavy lifting for you? Don’t we all.

Did I mention before about the Moz Pro has a 30-day free trial? I’m pretty sure I did, but it was so far up the page and the follow-along-with-me part is starting right now! It will do all the SERP feature hunting, tracking, and cataloguing for you.

Moz Pro will identify the presence of all 16 SERP features and will also be able to show you if your site is present in Featured Snippets, Image Packs, In-depth Articles, Local Packs, Reviews, Site Links, and Videos.

First off, head to the SERP Features tab under Rankings.

You’ll see the percentage of features present for the keywords you’re tracking (in gray), along with the percentage of features your site is present in (in blue).

Find out how you are performing against your competitors

Underneath the Overview chart look for the filter icon, click it and scroll down to choose SERP Features and enter your desired feature. I’m going to start with Image Packs. It’s fairly easy to optimize some image — don’t forget to add informative file names, alt text, and correctly compress your images.

This little feature key will help you decipher the results:

	Blue: Your site is in the feature.
	Orange: You and one or more of your competitors are in the feature.
	Red: You are not in the feature, but one or more of your competitors are.
	Gray: A SERP Feature exists but no one in your campaign is present.

Keep an eye out for features your competitor is dominating by clicking the SERP Features header to filter the results.

Identify keywords you’re on page one for with features that you could win

If you’re on page one for your desired keyword, and there is a Feature Snippet present, then there is a gift there, just waiting for you. Kind of like when you had that Amazon parcel sitting on your front doorstep, getting chewed on by your neighbor’s dog and piddled on by their cat and you’re in your house just meters away, blissfully unaware.

Become aware by heading to the SERP Features tab and filtering by Featured Snippets.

Hit that Rank header until the arrow is pointing up, then scroll down to peruse keywords with Feature Snippets present sorted by your rank. The tooltip Insights indicates I’m within striking distance of owning this snippet.

Ronell outlines a strategy for winning and keeping a Featured Snippet. At its heart, it’s about pure laser-focus on intent, find the question, answer said question, add value, and make it accessible to humans and bots.

Identify pages that are dropping in the rankings and check that the content matches intent

For this I’m going to head to my Rankings tab, containing all the keywords I’m tracking in my Moz Pro campaign.

Double click the little up/down icon header twice to filter all the down-arrow keywords to the top of the pile.

I’ve noticed that my rankings have dropped for my coveted keyword ”learn how to moz,” and I want to figure out if there are some SERP features present that could indicate whether my content could be targeting intent better. So I’ll click the keyword to open up the Keyword Analysis. Then scroll down to Your Performance and toggle to SERP Features from the drop-down menu.

You’ll see all the different types of features on the left-hand column and when they were present in the results for your keyword indicated by the light gray line.

I’m not seeing any Featured Snippets or Image Packs, but lookie here! A Related Question…

Remember what we said about Related Questions? Track those beauties down and add the questions to your bundle — you might just find a Featured Snippet hiding out there.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll snap up those questions and add them to my Moz Pro campaign.

Now the next time my campaign updates I can check for tasty little Featured Snippets to target.

Now back to analyzing intent. I’m going to look at that page and see what can be improved to better match the intent as implied by Google.

I can see that videos are present, so I’m going to pop a video into my content. It may not show up as a feature on the results page, but I’m responding to what the searchers of the world are seeking, and I’m also thinking this will keep people on the page whilst serving their needs.

Repeat, and sort your Tracked Keywords by Rank

You can also follow this same process by sorting by Rank to find keywords where you’re on the bottom of the first page or the top of the second page to suss out the intent as indicated by the presence of certain SERP Features.

Then zip back up to the last step and repeat the process of analyzing keywords for features to figure out intent and hunt down those tasty features.

Wrapping up

Here’s a quick recap: SERP features are your insight into what content Google thinks best serves the needs of searchers for any given keyword.

You can use the presence of features to quickly understand the implied intent for your target keywords and cross-reference this with a drop in rankings to improve how your content meets the needs of searchers.

By combining the feature power of Image Packs, Related Keywords, and Featured Snippets you’ll be covering the most effective organic features and potentially queue-jumping your way to position ZERO.

For the organic fanatics, you’ll also be able to track all 16 features and give more love to those with features you can win whilst artfully stepping around keywords with unobtainable features overcrowding the results and pushing your tasty URL into the lost land of page 2.

Happy hunting!

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Exchanging More Value with Contributors to Your Content and Community Efforts – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

At risk of sounding cliché, we’re right smack in the middle of the season of giving. And when it comes to giving, there’s no better example in our industry space than the topic of communities. Moz itself is a great example: You — the reader, the commenter, the Q&A inquisitor, the subscriber — are what sustains and inspires us. What kind of value does your community add to your site, and how can you provide incentive and value to your site contributors, social media fans, and influencers?

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores ten fresh, actionable strategies you can use to encourage and promote an exchange of value with your contributors to feed your content and community efforts.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This is a special Whitebeard Friday edition of our show. We, of course, have the annual tradition where I wear the beard, but you know the beard gets in the way of a lot of me talking to you. So I’m just going to wear the hat for today. I hope that’s all right. And I hope you’re all having a wonderful holiday season. Christmas and Hanukkah start the same day this year. New Year’s, of course, Kwanzaa, whatever you’re celebrating, a very happy holiday to you.

So let’s chat about exchanging more value with the contributors to your content and community efforts. So basically, I think, in the holiday season, we talk a lot about exchange of value and exchange of gifts and of giving, and that’s wonderful. We do this on our websites as well.

So you’re watching Whiteboard Friday. You might leave a comment in our comments section. You might tweet about this. You might put it on Facebook. You might share it on LinkedIn. There’s sort of a community of things going on here.

Most of the ideas that I have for Whiteboard Friday come from people like yourself in the community who have ideas and questions, concerns and issues, and that’s a wonderful thing. But what I found is that 99% of the time we all follow exactly the same patterns in our content and our community efforts with how we basically use each other’s value and exchange value with each other. So here’s the challenge.

(The hat’s just swinging around and hitting me. It’s great.)

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3 major groups make up your community exchangers of value

So you have kind of three groups, three major groups that I would consider community exchangers of value. Those are people like commenters and on-site contributors, your social media followers and fans and people who engage with you through social, and then influencers and experts and, broadly speaking, amplifiers, people who do this.

Look, lots of the people who might be commenters are also influencers. Lots of the people who are social media followers may also be on-site commenters. That’s definitely the case.

1. Commenters and on-site contributors

But traditionally, the contributions look like this. For these folks, when they leave comments, they are seeking answers and visibility. So they want to show maybe something that they have done, and they also want an answer or a reply from you or from someone in the community. They have questions about it. And for you, you know they’re creating — well, I promised myself I was going to do red and green so I’m a very Christmassy Jew this year — more content and SEO for you, which is great.

That’s one of the big values of comments, absolutely speaking. That’s one of the reasons we try and render comments on the page so that the engines can crawl them. It can help you rank for more long tail stuff. It can certainly help you with engagement metrics and all those kinds of things.

Now, for guest content, which a lot of folks do create and allow, Moz certainly has historically through YouMoz and soon we’re going to be allowing that through the main blogs, so you might be seeing more guest contributions there, visibility for them and content and SEO for you. Same story there.

2. Social media followers and fans

Now, shares and replies on social, it’s essentially you are helping to … when you create content and when you, whether that’s content on the social media platform or on your own website, that you’re amplifying, when other people share that content or they like it, they reply to it, they amplify it, that’s new fans and followers and content for them, hopefully, and it’s more reach and visibility for you.

3. Influencers, experts, and amplifiers

With influencers, experts, and amplifiers, pretty much the story is like more influence for them through contributing to your content or promoting your content, and more reach for you through those influencers and experts’ audiences. This is certainly powerful and useful too with roundups, which I think, unfortunately, have become the default style in which people use influencers and experts in many, many fields. It’s more visibility for them, hopefully, because they appear in that roundup. They have their names cited and all that kind of thing. You’re hoping that they’re going to share it and amplify that content so that you get more reach to their audience. Maybe they’ll even link to it, which will get you links.

How to exchange value by thinking broadly and daring to be different

I want us to think broader. What I believe is that being the exception to this rule can be hugely helpful. Essentially, if everyone else is doing something in one way, doing it another way, doing it a different way will fundamentally add more value to your content and SEO efforts.

Personal profiles

So if we’re talking about these commenters and on-site contributors, I want you to think about profiles. This is something that most comment plug-ins don’t allow by default. Disqus creates a profile, but that profile lives on Disqus’ site, not on your site. Think about your Moz profile. Think about your LinkedIn profile. Think about the profile that you create on lots of community-focused websites, like an Inbound.org or a Hacker News or something. Like there’s fundamental value to having that. You can own that content. You can now promote that page. You can rank in search engines with it. All those kinds of things.

Edit/citation suggestions and highlights

Edit and citation suggestions like places like Wikipedia have. Others have notable ones. Medium, obviously, has the highlighted section. It’s a little more creative.

Featured comments

Featured comments, which places like The New York Times do, I think if you are an editorial content creator and you want to amplify the visibility of comments and encourage people to share great comments, a featured comment system is a valuable one. Here on Moz, we used to show comments ordered by the date in which they were left or the timestamp of when they were left, and now we order them based on thumbs, which encourages people to have a great comment because it will have the most visibility because it got the most thumbs up.
With social media folks, I would think about some of the content. You can create content that features social contributions, thus encouraging people to follow you and contribute and reply to and amplify your tweets or Facebook shares or LinkedIn because they will get additional visibility from that.

Data via polls and surveys

You can think about collection and amplification of data that you collect through polls and short surveys. Facebook and Twitter are great about allowing those.

Sharing others’ social accounts

Promotion of other people’s social accounts. One of the things that I think far too few social accounts do is actually call someone out by name and say, “Hey, this is another really valuable page on Facebook that you should check out.” Or, “This person did this wonderful thing.” I see too few Twitter accounts, including the Moz Twitter account doesn’t call out as many people, in non-reply tweets, as we probably should or could, and I think that’s another wonderful thing that we can do.

Using social for testimonials and promotional content

Use of social, of course, in testimonial and promotional content. We started doing that where we actually said, “Hey, someone said something really nice about us on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn. Let’s reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, could we use that on our website, on our product page, to help get you visibility and show that you’re an expert in this field, but also to help us sell this product that you apparently love?'” Win-win there. Again, a wonderful way to creatively use that same type of content.

Smart influencer roundups, such as helpful email lists

And last, with influencers, with experts, with amplifiers, I think there’s vastly more ways to do this in roundups. First off, I’ve seen some folks create some great email discussion, the help-each-other type of lists. I’m part of a few of those. I love them. There’s great content on there. I think this is a wonderful way to get influencers and experts on your side in the long term and to help them help each other as well as you.

I’ve also, just recently, become part of a few BCC email lists, where a couple of content creators in the technology and entrepreneurship space, when they have new content to share, they share it first with this BCC email list before they even promote it to their regular audiences. That’s awesome. That gives me a chance to be one of the first people to show it to everyone. I, of course, benefit from that through sharing with my audiences, and they benefit through the additional visibility that I give them.

Focus on data above quotations alone

Surveys and data gathering, I’m a much bigger believer in surveys and in showing data than in roundups. I think roundups that just are text only and have a bunch of text, rather than show data from a lot of influencers and saying, “Hey, you know, we interviewed 100 startup CEOs and we got these 5 data points from each of them, and here are the distributions.” Vastly more interesting than, “Here are the two sentences of advice that every startup CEO gave about how to hire your first engineer.” That kind of thing.

Featured commentary

Featured commentary and input on content is another way to do this. So, essentially, you share content with influencers. You say, “Hey, if you have some featured comments or some ideas around that, send that back and we will include it in the launch of that content.” Lovely stuff there. I’ve been part of a few of those and I love those.

Discussion and debate as content

Discussion or debate as actual content. The FiveThirtyEight folks have been brilliant about this, where they invite on guest contributors and experts and then they feature that discussion. Some other political sites and places like The Stranger have done that. Wonderful stuff.

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Getting creative with how you exchange value with your content and community contributors is an awesome way to go. I hope, in 2017, I see a lot more of this stuff and maybe even a little less of this stuff.

All right, everyone. Hope you have a great holiday season and a great year. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Treat Yo’self: Warm Holiday Wishes from Moz!

Posted by FeliciaCrawford

In almost the blink of an eye, 2016 is coming to a close. And yet as fast as it went, this year absolutely brims with memories. Now that we’re full-swing into the season of warm, fuzzy feelings and excruciatingly long lines at the store, the time is ripe to reflect back on all that’s passed. And in classic Internet fashion, what better way to reflect than with a quick quiz?

1. So, how are you feeling about this year’s wintry season (also known as Q4)?

A. Fantastic! I’ve been listening to Neil Diamond’s rendition of Walking in a Winter Wonderland since before Halloween. Pass the nog, please! ☃️

B. It’s been tough. I miss Prince and Bowie and Leonard Cohen. 2016 can’t end soon enough!

C. My inbox is full to bursting and I’ve yet to wrap up that big project. Can we tack on a couple extra weeks?

2. When was the last time you took a vacation, even if it was just a cozy weekend alone with a good book?

A. I’m on vacation this very instant, baby!

B. There’s a vague memory of sunlight and warmth, of laughter and joy… but the full picture eludes me. It’s been so long…

C. “Vay-cay-shun?” What is this strange tongue you speak, and why do you tease me so?

3. How did you spend your last day off?

A. Slept in ’til [time o’clock], poured myself a steaming mug of [favored beverage], and relaxed by binge-watching [latest season of original Netflix/HBO series].

B. Ran errands, did some chores, caught up on email — you know, everything I didn’t have time for during the workweek.

C. You’ve lapsed into that weird language again. Do you even realize you’re doing it?

4. When I say the word “traffic,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

A. My “Greatest Hits of The Cars” album sitting neglected on the turntable. Time to dust it off — I feel a boogie coming on!

B. Crowded commutes and stressful driving conditions. Everybody and their mother is hogging the road this time of year.

C. Oh, please don’t say that word! My site’s holiday seasonality is giving me indigestion.

How’d you do? If you answered “B” or “C” to any of the questions above, we think you might need to hear a little holiday story…

http://ift.tt/2iin6zx

Many thanks to our awesome video specialist, Michael Bird, our talented star, Rachel Moore, Sadie the Goldendoodle, and a smattering of fantastic Mozzer extras for this poignant vignette!

No matter your method of relaxation — be it eagerly awaiting Season 2 of Westworld, settling Catan with a few good friends, baking cookies with your niblings, or a twelfth reread of Harry Potter — we think you’ve earned yourself a breather. You work hard at what you do. You stuck with us through thick and thin this year, smiling and commenting and thumbs-up-ing all the way. We couldn’t be here without you, and so we insist: Soak in all the goodness this season has to offer and take a moment to treat yourself and those you love. You deserve it!

Happiest of holidays from Roger Mozbot and everyone at Moz!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Creating a Local SEO Welcome for New Neighbors and Travelers

Posted by MiriamEllis

In our ongoing quest for local prominence, are we leaving anybody out in the cold? For years, a fundamental message I’ve shared with almost every incoming local business client is that they need local SEO, specifically, because they need to be found on the web by local people. I’d estimate that 98% of everything our industry writes about is tied to this concept, and while this focus is sensible, today I’d like to highlight an underserved (but enormous) target local market: non-local people.

Consider these statistics:

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 40,093,000 residents move annually — averaging 14.19% of the population.
• According to AAA, 35% of US families planned to take a vacation of 50+ miles in 2016.
• According to the Global Business Travel Association, Americans took an estimated 488.1 million business trips in 2015 — that’s 1.3 million work-related trips happening every day of the year.

These numbers create a context in which there are literally millions of consumers arriving in unfamiliar towns on a daily basis, in need of a variety of local resources they’ll discover using the Internet. In this article, I’d like to help your local business get discovered with a welcoming, supplementary local SEO strategy based on the understanding that newcomers matter. We’re going to dive into location data management, attribution, and reviews, with an eye to newcomer needs.

What do newcomers really need?

Residents of your city or town have likely already established their favorite restaurant, grocery store, doctor, school, place of worship and pet supply shop. While there are certainly tactics you can employ for trying to edge out the competition to become someone’s new favorite destination, chances are good that longtime locals won’t have too much trouble actually locating you at 123 Main St. if you’re doing good, essential local SEO.

They already know where Main St. is in relationship to other streets, how long it will take to get there and, if they’re established neighbors, what the parking situation is like in that part of town.

Non-locals know none of this. Your city is a blank slate to them, and they’ll be using their desktop and mobile devices to start filling in that slate to create a picture of their destination, both before and after they arrive in town. If you’re not providing the necessary signals to foster transactions with newcomers, if they never learn that your local business exists, it’s a direct hit to your wallet, week after week, year after year.

Which types of local businesses need to appeal to new neighbors and travelers to avoid foregoing desirable revenue? Let’s break that down by industry:

As we can see, a significant number of industries can serve either new neighbors or travelers, and in some cases, both. Let’s look at three intelligent ways to put out the welcome mat for these important consumers.

1. Basic location data management

While settled residents may be able to parse out that your business is actually located on 5th Street rather than 5th Avenue when encountering inconsistent data about your company on the web, don’t expect newcomers to inuit this. Step one in welcoming this user group is to ensure that you’ve got your core name, address, and phone number (NAP) correct in two places:

A) Your website

For the single-location business, this should be easy. Audit every page and element (like the header and footer ) of your website where you mention any part of your NAP for accuracy. Correct any errors. Pay particular attention to your branding. Don’t be The Tree Restaurant on your Contact Us page, The Green Tree Restaurant on your About page, and Green Trees Cafe in your logo. You want to make a cohesive brand impression on your website so that consumers can clearly match it to your real-world signage as they drive through town.

For multi-location businesses, things are a little more complex. In addition to checking that NAP is correct on each of the landing pages you create for each location, be certain those pages are accessible via a well-functioning store locator widget which enables users to search by city (not just by zip code, as most newcomers will not know local zip codes).

B) Your local business listings

Hopefully you’re already engaging in active location data management of your local business listings/citations to help local consumers find you, but know that inconsistencies on major platforms could result in particularly heavy newcomer losses as users get misdirected, lost, and drift away, never to return.

You want a clear NAP dataset on the most important platforms, keeping in mind that even if a particular platform isn’t that popular in your own city, it may be significant in the regions from which newcomers hail. You can do a speedy citation health check for free using the Moz Check Listing tool, which audits your listings on foundational platforms like Google My Business, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook, etc. Correct any inaccurate data the tool surfaces for you, and back up this work with a manual check of any niche directories that apply to your city or industry.

If you find you’ve got significant inconsistencies, or have a large number of locations to manage, you may want to consider purchasing an automated location data management service like Moz Local.

Beyond basic NAP

In addition to managing the NAP on your website and citations, there are 5 elements that are crucial to ensuring newcomers connect with your business:

1. Driving directions
   Be sure directions and map place markers are accurate on your major citations and, for newcomers, put additional effort into writing up the best possible set of driving directions on your website. Write them out coming from the four cardinal directions and be sure you are associating your business with any major local landmarks that are easily seen from the road. Alert consumers to the presence of hazardous road conditions they may encounter coming from a particular direction and offer detours or shortcuts. Don’t leave out how to navigate large shopping centers if you’re located in one.
2. Hours of operation
   It’s especially important if your business has seasonal/holiday hours to ensure that you are updating all relevant pages of your website and all of your major local business listings to reflect this for newcomers. If your business is seasonal (like a farm stand or pumpkin patch), set your Google My Business hours when you open for business, and when your season closes, remove them so that they appear ‘un-set,’ with the plan to re-set them next open season. If you have special hours for Christmas or other holidays, follow these directions to avoid Google stamping your listings with a warning that the hours may be inaccurate.
3. Parking information
   Urban parking can be so appallingly complicated that it has led to the launch of booking services like Parkwhiz, but be sure you’re detailing parking information on your own website, regardless of city size. Don’t forget RV parking accessibility for travelers, whether parking is free, or if paid, the forms of payment local meters/lots accept. Parking info can be especially helpful for people with health concerns, so if on-site parking is unavailable, estimate how far the consumer will have to walk to reach your destination. A lack of parking data once caused me to have climb over cement barriers in a split-level parking lot in search of a salad on a 90+ degree day — it would have been courteous for the grocery store to have saved me from this silly situation with clear directions.
4. Description
   Google may have replaced their former owner-authorized business description display with their in-house custom description, but most other local business listing platforms still allow you to pen your own. To play to a newcomer audience, which may be forming a very fast impression from your listings via a mobile device, pack your descriptions with the most persuasive information you can think of to help them make a decision. Is it that you’re kid-friendly, carry a certain brand, won a best-in-city award? In the fewest words possible, highlight the most impactful elements of your business to connect with high conversion, targeted newcomers.
5. Forms of payment
   Failing to inform travelers that your business is cash-only is a deal-breaker, and many major retailers now even refuse to accept checks (which can come as an inconvenient surprise to out-of-towners). Numerous local business listings enable you to specify forms of payment accepted, and you should also at least include a visual representation of supported transaction methods on your website. For your most sophisticated consumers, if you support digital wallets, Bitcoin, or other popular payment alternatives, be sure to highlight this fact.

I recommend that you give first priority to getting your basic location information into beautiful shape on your website and local business listings so that the process of finding your business is as foolproof as possible for newcomers. Now let’s look at some elements that can influence being chosen once you’ve been found.

2. Attribution

It’s no secret in the local SEO industry that Google, Yelp, and other powerhouses are now actively crowdsourcing attribution from reviewers, but if local business attributes are new to you, let’s summarize.

Basically, attributes are snippets of descriptive content that differentiate the nature or features of a given business. Some of the data in the previous section would actually be considered attributes, such as whether a business features free parking, accepts Apple Pay, or offers 24-hour services. In practice, attributes are valuable to search engines in helping them determine the relevance of a result to a given user, and they’re valuable to users in helping to make decisions about whether a specific business provides exactly what they’re seeking.

Significantly, in May of 2016, Google rolled out version 3.0 of the Google My Business API, a new feature of which is the ability for developers to directly add attributes to Google My Business listings. And, as the year closes out, many users are finally seeing promised attribute functionality within the Google My Business dashboard. We can take all this as a clear signal that Google is zooming in on attribution, which they base on business categories. While dashboard attribution is still limited as of writing this, I predict we’ll see it expanding in 2017.

To conceptualize the practical application of attributes, I find it’s helpful to imagine consumer personae. Let’s hypothesize that our restaurant franchise is hoping to win a transaction from a group of six travelers on a family vacation. They are on the road a bit late one evening near one of our locations and are hungry for supper:

• Dad would be glad to find an all-you-can eat buffet.
• Mom would love to hear some live music.
• There are three children; one is gluten-intolerant, one is a vegetarian, and one is a toddler who needs a booster seat and can’t eat full portions.
• Grandmother urges that they find a salad bar because everyone has been eating too much fast food on this trip.
• The dog would prefer not to be left in the car all evening.

Look through this very abridged list of Google My Business API attributes applicable to restaurants to see if you can match them to the family members (hey, this is like a game!):

If some or all of these attributes describe our restaurant location, and we’ve either added them to Google My Business or are earning them from our reviewers on Google, Yelp, or Trip Advisor, we’re making a strong case for being shown as a relevant answer to the family’s search query, and to being chosen by them. Good start! But, I’d like to take the concept of attribution one step further as it relates to local SEO.

I’m not privy to the methodology Google used to come up with their extensive list of attributes for all sorts of business categories, but I’d invite local enterprises and agencies to view attributes as a fascinating roadmap to website content development. Imagine taking the above set of descriptors and writing something like this, in natural language, on the website landing page for our restaurant’s location in Santa Fe:

What we’ve done here is to take Google’s attribute hints as to what consumers are looking for and have turned them into a statement that helps a newcomer make a quick, informed mobile decision (call it a ‘micro-moment’ and you’re really being cool!).

For thoroughness, I would recommend combining Google’s attributes with those you are personally prompted to enter when leaving your own reviews on various platforms, and fine-tune it all based on your unique expertise drawn from serving your customer base. It could be that a driving motivation for newcomers to your city and business would be proximity to a point-of-interest, accepting mobile payments, or serving organic food. Think of attributes as clues from search engines, review sites, and directories that you can pass along to customers to qualify your business as the answer to their needs.

Finally, I’d like to take the exploration of attributes one step further. I reached out to TouchPoint Digital Marketing owner, David Deering, who is one of our industry’s foremost experts on local business Schema. I asked if there was a direct relationship between attributes and Schema, and he explained:

“Unfortunately schema.org does not have corresponding properties and values for local business attributes. But there are ways to mark them up anyway. Some are rather straightforward and others take a little more coding but they all can be marked up in one way or another.

Schema.org recently added the “amenityFeature” property for the Place type (which includes the LocalBusiness type) and for LodgingBusiness of which Hotel is a subtype of. So a local business can do something like this to say that it offers free parking, free wifi, that it’s wheelchair accessible and so on:

"amenityFeature": [  
    {  
    "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",  
    "name": "Free Parking",  
    "value": "True"  
    },  
    {  
    "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",  
    "name": "Free WiFi",  
    "value": "True"  
    },  
    {  
    "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",  
    "name": "Wheelchair Accessible",  
    "value": "True"  
    },  
    {  
    "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",  
    "name": "Serves Breakfast",  
    "value": "True"  
    }, 
    {  
    "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",  
    "name": "Has All-You-Can-Eat Buffet",  
    "value": "True"  
    }       
],

By the way, that is the structure that would need to be used if a business was marking up more than one amenity or attribute.

A hotel could also do something like this to mark up the fact that they have an indoor swimming pool that is open everyday from 7 AM to 10 PM. It’s possible that a similar structure could be used to mark up, say, Happy Hour (I guess that depends if a restaurant’s Happy Hour could be considered an “amenity” or not. I’m not sure.).

"amenityFeature": {   
    "@type": "LocationFeatureSpecification",   
    "name": "Indoor Swimming Pool",   
    "hoursAvailable": [   
    {    
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",    
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hTG0QP">"http://ift.tt/2hTG0QP"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"    
        },
        {    
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hZ9vh9">"http://ift.tt/2hZ9vh9"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"    
        },
        {    
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hTFpyv">"http://ift.tt/2hTFpyv"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"
        },
        {
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hZiSxs">"http://ift.tt/2hZiSxs"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"
        },
        {
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hTNN0V">"http://ift.tt/2hTNN0V"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"
        },
        {
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hZ8hCF">"http://ift.tt/2hZ8hCF"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"
        },
        {
        "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
        "dayOfWeek": <a href="http://ift.tt/2hTFqCz">"http://ift.tt/2hTFqCz"</a>,
        "opens":  "07:00:00",
        "closes": "22:00:00"
        }
        ],

And schema.org does have a direct and simple way to mark up the fact that a restaurant accepts reservations and whether or not smoking is allowed. It would simply be:

  "acceptsReservations": "True",
  "smokingAllowed": "False",    

The same goes for if a hotel or lodging business allows pets:

 "petsAllowed": "True",

Now how much of this Google and the other search engines will use, it’s hard to say. But it certainly can’t hurt for a business to mark up their attributes and amenities on their site. If a website’s markup matches the attributes they’ve included on their Google My Business listing, I think that can only help. And we never know what Google will begin pulling out of a site’s structured data to use for something, so I stick by my motto: Mark up as much as possible and be as thorough as possible.”

In sum, in markets where you are looking for a competitive edge, exploration of thorough Schema amenity markup can dovetail, and might sometimes even correlate, with attribution development, enabling you to define features of your business is way your competitors may be overlooking.

3. Reviews

Here on the Moz Blog, we’ve previously discussed the vital importance of giving special treatment to reviews and testimonials on your website. And, as for reviews on third-party websites, I’m going to make a guess that you’ve already seen studies like this one indicating that a whopping 92% of consumers now read online reviews. Most recently, we’ve covered how to make maximum use of the owner response function available on many review platforms as a form of customer service, reputation management, and free marketing.

But there’s a subject we haven’t yet broached regarding reviews that is highly relevant to serving newcomers, and which recently came up in an exchange I had with Phil Rozek surrounding his excellent article, If Nobody in Your Area Cares About Yelp, Should You Still Bother Getting Reviews There?.

Phil brainstormed 7 great reasons for caring about review giant Yelp, including the visibility of Yelp in-SERP stars for your brand searches in Google, and the fact that Yelp feeds reviews to a number of other important platforms like Apple Maps and Bing Places. What I added to Phil’s list is that, even if Yelp isn’t big in your town, it may be huge in the cities from which your newcomer customers hail.

Surveys have repeatedly cited that Yelp is a much bigger deal on the coasts than in the interior United States. Yet, imagine a large hotel located within 3 miles of the newly-built Minnesota Viking’s U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Local people may not be leaving a ton of Yelp reviews of this hotel. Now, imagine that the San Francisco 49ers (having a MUCH different season than this one) are playing in the NFC Championship game at U.S. Bank Stadium on their way to Superbowl glory. San Franciscans are about to pour into Minneapolis, and they’ll be looking at Yelp in extraordinary proportions to find a hotel. If our hypothetical lodging facility has neglected Yelp because it’s no big deal in their home city, they could be losing out on a very lucrative moment.

This scenario is applicable to all third-party review platforms and all relevant local businesses located near major points-of-interest or event sites. This past summer, Wesley Young used his hometown of Frisco, TX to estimate that that 33% of local commerce was generated by non-locals. Meanwhile, here’s an interesting map of the places Americans were moving to and from in 2016. I would recommend that all local businesses consider gathering intel as to the cities that send them the most newcomers, and the review platforms most used in those cities of origin, to be sure a strong reputation is being developed there.

Completing the welcome

In addition to utilizing local business listing data management, attribute-driven website content, and city-of-origin review management to attract newcomers, here are a few more things you can do to round out the welcome message:

• If you’ve discovered that certain cities tend to send your city of location a significant amount of newcomers, geotarget paid advertising to be shown to that demographic.
• Your resident local customers may have the leisure to research your business from their desktop computers, but most of your traveling customers will be on their mobile devices. The quality of the mobile experience your website provides is especially critical to this user group.
• Most good-sized towns and nearly all cities have welcome centers or tourism boards, many of which produce print materials for visitors. Consider advertising in these publications if your industry is included in my above infographic on local needs. And, if you print your own brochures, seek to have them included in the lobbies of as many local hotels and other businesses as possible.
• Consider offering a new neighbor discount if you’d like to capture this demographic. Businesses like the Welcome Wagon have been facilitating this form of advertising for almost a century. Or, be your own welcoming committee utilizing both print and social media to promote one-time discounts for new homeowners in your area.
• Look for tie-in opportunities with other local businesses. If our hypothetical family of 6 vacationers dines at Salsa Roja restaurant, could your auto garage, pottery shop, or swim center advertise on the back of the menu, alerting the family to your existence for tomorrow’s things-to-do agenda? How about getting a coupon code included in that ad, or doing some other form of cross-promotion with the restaurant?
• Speaking of things-to-do, realize opportunities for publishing best-in-city guides to a particular subject that ties into your business model. For example, a gift shop specializing in nature-themed merchandise near a state or national park could write a wild bird guide listing species to be spotted in the area. A gym could publish a guide to the healthiest restaurants in the city or the best places to run. A pediatrician could write about fun places to take kids in their town. A cell phone store could map out areas of highest connectivity in a rural area. A key benefit to this type of relational topic development will be brand discovery by new neighbors and travelers while they are engaging with the useful content.

If your business is tourism-based (like a hotel chain), it’s likely you are already implementing most of these techniques, but it’s my hope that this article will have helped many more industries consider how crafting an appeal to new or non-locals is both applicable and savvy.

At the opening of this piece, I called this a ‘supplemental’ local SEO strategy, to be implemented as appropriate in addition to all you are already doing well to serve your resident population. The amount of resources you devote to this supplemental effort should be based on a) research as to the number of newcomers and tourists your city receives annually and b) the need for your business to distance itself from competitors with a superior effort.

If your findings are good and your need to compete is strong, why not make 2017 the year you extend a well-planned welcome to your share of those millions of consumers who will be on the move?

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Featured Snippets: From Start to Finish

Posted by Dr-Pete

You’ve been hearing a lot about featured snippets from us at Moz lately, including how they power answers on the latest technology wish-list item, Google Home. I hope by now that you understand the value of ranking “#0,” but you might be left wondering where to start. How do you find questions, determine if they have featured snippets, and track them over time?

I’m happy to say that, between Keyword Explorer and Moz Pro, we now have all of the tools you need to practically tackle featured snippets in a way that will be familiar for almost any SEO. This post takes you through the full featured snippet discovery and tracking cycle, from start to finish.

Step 1 – Finding questions

Finding question phrases that might trigger featured snippets is, first and foremost, a keyword research problem. So, let’s fire up Keyword Explorer and check out some keywords for “seo.” Click on “Keyword Suggestions” and you’ll see a list like this one…

The third phrase on this list — “how to do seo” – certainly looks promising. Indeed, if I run a Google search for that phrase, I see a featured snippet from Search Engine Land:

This is all well and good, but it’s going to take a lot of manual digging through keywords to find questions. Isn’t there an easier way? Thankfully, yes. On the pull-down on the upper left, the last option is [are questions]. Give it a try, and you’ll get back something like these results…

I’ve filtered the list to contain only phrases with search volumes of 101+, and now we’ve got a pretty solid list. These questions are a mix of machine-gathered and machine-generated, so some of them will need a human touch, but it’s a great starting point.

Step 1b – More questions

Here’s another trick to try out. What if you’re interested in a specific type of question, like “Why…?” questions? Try entering a generic question into Keyword Explorer, such as “why seo.” You’ll get back ideas like these:

Non only do some of these queries show featured snippets, but this kind of research is also great for content brainstorming. These are exactly the kinds of questions people want answered, including prospective customers.

Step 2 – Choosing questions

So, let’s put our first list to work. You might want to verify the presence of featured snippets manually, in some cases, but since I’ve only got 38 questions to deal with, I’m going to go ahead and track all of the ones that seem reasonable. So, I’ll select what I want from my list, and then, using the pull-down above the keyword list, I can add those keywords to a list in Keyword Explorer:

In this case, I’ve selected 20 keyphrases of the 38 I filtered out. Give the list a little time to collect stats, and then you can visit the list page directly. At first glance, we’ve already got some good news on the list page – 16 of 20 phrases are showing featured snippets:

Scroll down to the full list details, and you can see more stats for the keywords/questions. You can use these stats to filter your options down even more, but since I’ve only got 20 in this list, I’m going to go ahead and add them all to one of my Moz Pro campaigns. Just select “I want to…” at the top-left and then [Add … to campaign]:

You’ll get a pop-over (which is hopefully self-explanatory) asking you to select a campaign.

Step 3 – Tracking questions

This is where the fun really begins. Once we’ve collected campaign data on the new keywords, go to your campaign, select the “Rankings” menu, and then go to “SERP Features.” I’ve added the label “questions” to my new keywords, just to make tracking easier. You’ll see a graph of all features across the top, and then a search filter and list below. I’m going to filter on my label, and I end up with something like this:

From here, I can easily see which keywords have which features (featured snippets are marked by the scissors icon). For featured snippets, the color codes also show which snippets my campaign is represented in vs. my campaign competitors. For example, the snippet for “how to do SEO” is occupied by a competitor I track. Notice, though, that I also rank #2 for that query, and there’s an additional option labeled “Insights” next to the ranking. Click on that, and you’ll see a message from our lead SEO, Britney Muller:

Featured snippets are organic results that Google visually enhances and places above organic position 1. For this reason they appear more authoritative to users and experience higher click-thru rates. Since you are in the top 5 organic results, you may have a chance to win this featured snippet and increase your traffic.

We’ve determined that, if you rank in the top 5 and don’t currently occupy the featured snippet, this is a good opportunity to invest in rewriting your content to better target that question and potentially take the “#0” spot. Looking across my entire list, which I pruned down to only 20 questions, I can immediately spot a solid handful of opportunities – specific query/page combos to target for featured snippets.

Step 4 – Getting to work

I’ve written more in other posts about how to win featured snippets, and Ronell Smith had a good post recently on keeping those hard-won snippets. The next step is doing the work and continuing to track your question keyword list until the scissors finally turn blue:

I’d like to say that featured snippets are something you get to keep forever, but like organic rankings, they’re awarded in real-time and are an ongoing battle. Fortunately, with Moz Pro, you can monitor featured snippets just as you would organic rankings.

You can try out some question research in Keyword Explorer for free (even if you’re not a Moz Pro customer), so give it a spin and start thinking about how you can provide better answers for search users.

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SEO and Digital Trends in 2017

Posted by gfiorelli1

Disclaimer: This post, as with every post that aims to predict the future, should be taken with a grain of salt — no matter how authoritative the author.

The main purpose of this post is to offer ideas and open a constructive discussion around the future of SEO and digital marketing over the next 12 months.

2016 is, finally, close to its end.

It was an intense year, especially when it came to SEO and Google in particular. Because I’m deeply convinced that we cannot attempt any preview of the future without considering what happened in the past, I invite you to look back at the events that have marked the evolution of Google in the past 10 months.

It is important to note that, contrary to more classic Google timelines, I prefer to see all Google-related events in the same place. I believe it’s the only way we can escape from a too-narrow vision of where Google is headed:

Click to view a larger image

Blue: Official Google Updates
Red: Businesses/companies acquired by Google/Alphabet
Green: Main posts in Google Webmaster Blog
Purple: Main Google patents published
Brown: Products Google launched in the market

What we can learn from this timeline?

This:

1. Google is steadily moving to a mobile-only world. Mobile-first indexing seems like the inevitable consequence of a year (or more) almost exclusively dedicated to evangelizing and forcing a change of mindset from desktop to mobile.
2. Albeit links are still essential for rankings (see Penguin 4.0), Google’s investigative efforts seem almost fully devoted to entity, predictive, and personalized search. Again, quite logical if we consider deeply personal devices like mobile and home assistants.
3. For the same reason, voice search seems to be the next frontier of search, partly because Bing — using a different business strategy than Google — may represent a big competitor in this arena.
4. Since John Giannandrea has become the Senior Vice President of Search at Google, machine and deep learning began to be used by default in every facet of Google Search. Thus, we should expect them to be used even more in 2017, perhaps with specific algorithms improving Hummingbird at every phase.
5. In a mobile-only world, the relevance of local search is even higher. This seems to be the strategic reason both for an update like Possum and all the tests we see in local, and also of the acquisition of a company like Urban Engines, whose purpose is to analyze the “Internet of Moving Things.”
6. The acquisition of startups like MoodStock and EyeFluence (but also Anvato and Famebit) seems to suggest that video/images and video/images marketing will be a central focus for Google, perhaps also because YouTube is struggling against Facebook (and not just Facebook) when it comes to videos/images and their monetization.

The shift from desktop-first to mobile-first

Until now, SEOs have considered mobile search to be one of the many specializations of SEO, on the same level as local search or international SEO.

That mentality did not change much when, back in 2015, Google announced AMP. Moreover, us SEOs considered AMP just another (often annoying) “added task” to our implementation checklist, and not as a signal of the real intentions of Google: Mobile search is all search.

With the announcement of mobile-first indexing, though, these intentions are now 100% clear, and somehow they represent a Copernican Revolution: After 18 years of prioritizing desktop, now we have to prioritize mobile.

The reason for this epochal change is evident if we look at the source of the search traffic (both organic and paid) for our sites:

Click to view a larger image

I designed this chart using the search traffic data Similarweb offers us. For all the industries categorized by Similarweb, I took the first five websites per search traffic volume in the USA during last November, and saw for each one of them how much traffic was from desktop and how much from mobile during the past three months.

Even though this analysis cannot be considered exhaustive and granular, as I hadn’t considered the industries subcategories and I hadn’t considered the “long-tail websites,” surely it’s indicative of a trend.

The results are clearly telling us that mobile search is bringing more traffic to websites than desktop: 20 industry niches out of 24 see mobile as their first source of traffic.

The four industry niche exceptions to this general rule are important ones, though:

1. Computer & Electronics
2. Internet & Telecom
3. Science
4. Travel

A good example of a website that still sees desktop search as its main source of search traffic is Tripadvisor.com:

• Desktop search traffic represents 71% of all traffic from desktop
• Mobile search traffic represents “only” 55.79% of all traffic from mobile

However, these same percentages should also make us reflect. They don’t mean that TripAdvisor isn’t visited on mobile, but that other channels are relevant traffic sources on mobile more than desktop (such as direct, not to mention the mobile-only app).

AMP, then, was the main character in the Google Search-branded storytelling about mobile this year.

Google announced AMP in October 2015, and by April already 37% of news sites’ articles had an AMP version, according to a study by the GDELT Project.

However, the same study reported that, globally, only 40% of all news sites articles had a mobile version of any kind.

It must be underlined that the GDELT Project study refers only to news sites and not ecommerce or other kinds of websites, which see heavier use of mobile or responsive versions. Nevertheless, it can still be considered a good barometer of the reality of the web overall.

Speaking of “barometers,” the Consumer Barometer with Google for 2016 is showing us important trends for the USA, like this one:

The percentage of people mainly using a smartphone is growing, while the percentage of people mainly using desktop is decreasing with respect to 2015 (or is stable if we consider the last 5 years).

Beware, though: If you analyze the trends in other countries, like some Asian or European ones, the percent of people using mainly smartphones is even greater.

Does this mean that we should neglect desktop search? No! If wid, it would be a big mistake, especially if our website were an ecommerce site.

The chart below, based on the same Consumer Barometer with Google data, tells us clearly that desktop is still by far the most-used device for product research (desktop is in orange):

Click to view a larger image

This insight must be considered if we’re planning to redesign our site, to find a balance in terms of site usability for both desktop and mobile… and I cannot help but think that the subtle (and recently not-so-subtle) suggestion from Google of moving from mobile/responsive to PWA is also influenced by this reality.

What to plan for 2017?

Prepare for mobile-first indexing

When Google announced mobile-first indexing last November 4th, it did not say that the change would happen that same day, or even after a few days.

Google, instead, said this:

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first.

This means that we are still in a desktop-first index, but it’s almost sure that it’ll switch to mobile-first in 2017.

As happened with Mobilegeddon in 2015, Google is giving us plenty of time for:

1. Creating a mobile version with any possible format (m. site, responsive, adaptive, PWA) of our site if we still haven’t (remember how few news sites’ articles have a mobile version?).
2. Making the content and pages presented both in mobile and desktop versions the same. Be aware that this is the only possible way to really lose rankings, because if in desktop search we have visible content and pages that were discarded in our mobile version, when mobile-first deploys, it will lose that SEO visibility. For this reason, Google suggests responsive as the easiest way to avoid this problem.
3. Implementing structured data in our mobile versions, because it’s usually neglected in the interest of speed (and Google needs that information!).
4. Eventually — and hopefully — reconsidering all the user experience and conversion optimization we offer on desktop and mobile (check out this deck by Talia Wolf from MozCon). For instance, in recent months — because of the Google demotion of tabbed content — many websites started to get rid of tabs and present all their content at once. This limitation won’t apply anymore once mobile-first comes.
5. Rethinking and planning a new link building strategy if we have a separate m. mobile site. This is more of a defensive strategy suggestion, though, because we still don’t know what will happen to inbound links to desktop versions in a mobile-first indexing world. It may happen that Google will find a way to make the Link Graph independent from the nature of the sites.

In light of what Google has told us about mobile-first indexing, and that you can find finely discussed here in this Q&A on Search Engine Land, If I had to give an extreme suggestion, it would be this:

if you have a very bad mobile version, and if you know that you’re not going to have a new, fully functional one in time for the end of 2017, then (absurdly) it could be better for you to have a desktop-only site.

In fact, Google has repeatedly said that mobile-first does not mean that it won’t index the desktop version of a site. To the contrary: If a site doesn’t have any mobile version, Google will index and consider for rankings its desktop one. And this will be the case even if that same website has an AMP version.

Finally, I strongly urge you to update (or download, if you still don’t use it) Screaming Frog.

In its very recent 7.0 version, Screaming Frog allows us to fetch and render crawled pages, something that before was only possible (and with a painful one-by-one URL process) via Google Search Console. Obviously, remember to set up Screaming Frog to emulate the Googlebot smartphone crawler.

Moreover, Screaming Frog now also alerts us to any blocked resource that could impede the correct rendering of our pages, again just as GSC does — but without the pain.

AMP

Despite some concerns AMP is generating amongst some bigs news sites, web owners, and SEOs, it doesn’t seem that Google will reduce pressure for a large number of websites to adopt it.

On the contrary! In fact, if AMP was at first directed to news websites (and blogs), recently Google started presenting AMP results for recipe sites too:

And for an ecommerce website like Ebay (one of the founders of the AMP Project):

Therefore, if your website is already receiving a great volume of traffic from mobile search, you might start scheduling the creation of an AMP version.

This should be a priority for a blog, a news site, or a recipe site.

However, if you have an ecommerce site, it could be interesting to AMP-lify a category to test the performance and ROI of creating an AMP version of it, as the AMP Project suggests here. Not every functionality that’s standard in ecommerce is possible with AMP, but if I had to bet, this is the niche where the AMP Project will see its biggest enhancements; Google and Ebay are too deeply involved to ignore it.

That said, if you are an ecommerce site, while it can be exciting to experiment with AMP, your real strategic choice should be going PWA.

Resources about AMP

• What You Need to Know About Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) – Whiteboard Friday – Moz
• How Google’s AMP Will Influence Your Online Marketing – Moz
• Should You Implement AMP Pages on Your Site? – Builtvisible
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) – What You Need to Know – TheSEMpost
• AMP Validation and Troubleshooting – AMPProject.org
• How to implement Google AMP on your WordPress site as easily as possible – Search Engine Watch
• wbAMP: Accelerated mobile pages for Joomla
• AMP for Drupal 7 and 8

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

I am quite confident that If there’s a main trending topic for 2017, it will be Progressive Web Apps.

Not only has Google already started evangelizing it publicly via its Webmaster blog and developer website, but Googlers are informally suggesting it in conferences and private chats.

As we’ve seen above, ecommerce websites are not yet fully AMP-lifiable.

Moreover, three seconds is the new fast, according to this study Google presented last September. Even a very well-optimized responsive or m. site can barely perform with an average SiteSpeed like that if we consider how heavy web pages are right now.

Then comes the other obsession of Google: security… and PWA only works with HTTPS.

So, it’s as easy as summing 1+1 to foresee how Google will push websites’ owners to go PWA.

The only setback to this evangelization, ironically, could be mobile-first indexing, which is still very uncertain in all its details, hence causing people to hold off.

However, if you’re an ecommerce site, don’t have an app, or are reconsidering the opportunity of constantly maintaining two apps (iOS and Android) because of the need to rationalize costs, then Progressive Web Apps can be your best choice, as they allow a website to work as if it were an app (and offline, too).

Again, as we sometimes forget, SEO’s future will be determined on a macro- and micro-scale by business decisions.

Resources about PWA

• Introducing Progressive Web Apps: What They Might Mean for Your Website and SEO – Moz
• A Beginner’s Guide To Progressive Web Apps – Smashing Magazine
• Intro to Progressive Web Apps by Google on Udacity

Understanding language is the holy grail of machine learning

This phrase is the headline of the Natural Language Understanding Team page page on Google’s Research website. The author of this phrase? John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President for Search at Google.

On that same page, we also find this:

Recent research interests of the Google NLU team include syntax, discourse, conversation, multilingual modeling, sentiment analysis, question answering, summarization, and generally building better learners using labeled and unlabeled data, state-of-the-art modeling, and indirect supervision.

With that declaration in mind, we have a better understanding of what Google is doing by simply looking at some patents this team has published:

• Annotating Topic Development in Information Seeking Queries
• Contextual LSTM: A Step towards Hierarchical Language Modeling
  
• Conversational Contextual Cues: The Case of Personalization and History for Response Ranking
  
• Transforming Dependency Structures to Logical Forms for Semantic Parsing
  
• Learning N-gram Language Models from Uncertain Data
• et al (see them all here)

Context, as you can see, tends to be recurrent, and — as anyone who’s studied linguistic and semantics knows — this is a very easy thing to understand.

A classic example is how “carro” means “car” in Mexico and means “carriage” or “wagon” in Spain. The meaning of a world can radically change because of context, in this case cultural context.

Context is fundamental for understanding the meaning of the implicit and compound facets of any conversation, which is fundamental for the successful development of completely new search environments like Google Assistant and Google Home. Will Critchlow (with the collaboration of Tom Anthony) explained this well at The Inbounder last May:

http://ift.tt/2hzf4oK

Finally, context and natural language are partly the basis (for what we know) of the infamous RankBrain, as vectors too are contextual (and contexts by themselves), as Bill Slawski explains in this post.

Moreover, Google finally seems serious about understanding one of the most common (and most complex) aspects of natural language: metaphors. And once they’re able to understand the meaning of metaphors, understanding the meaning of all the other rhetorical figures people use when talking (and writing) will be an easy incremental step for Google.

Why does Google have this irresistible interest in natural language?

Sure, on an ideal level, it’s because Google wants “to provide the better answer to users’ needs,” and to do that, Google must:

1. Understand what each web document is about (semantics);
2. Understand what users are actually searching for, now more and more using their voice and typing in the search box (natural language processing).

Another ideal reason is that “You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer“.

But then there are more earthly (aka: business) reasons:

1. Voice Assistants adoption is growing, as reported by MindMeld;
2. 40% of Voice Assistant users started using it only 6 months ago, which is a sign that the “early adopters” phase seems passing testimony to the “mainstream users” phase;
3. Already 20% of mobile queries are Voice Search (and will be 50% in 2020, according to Microsoft);
4. The primary setting for voice search is our home (followed by our car), according to a KPCB study;
5. Already in 2014, Google was reporting that the biggest percentage of voice search users were teens. Those teens are growing, getting jobs, and becoming parents;
6. Amazon sold about 5 million Amazon Echo in the last two years, and Amazon reported that “Echo Dot and Echo Tap, two smaller and cheaper versions of the traditional Echo device, accounted for at least 33 percent of sales in the past six months” (source: Geekwire).

These are some of the reasons why Google developed Google Assistant (a completely new search environment, as defined by Google itself at Google I/O) and Google Home, and that’s why Google announced that Voice Search reporting will come to Google Search Console in the future.

As in the past with Android, Google is entering in the market when all its competitors are already established. Let’s see, thanks to the adoption of Android as a mobile OS, if it will be able to recover its position and eventually become the market leader.

What to plan for 2017?

When it comes to natural language, voice search, and intelligent voice assistants, what SEOs can do is more related to optimizing for the parsing and indexing phases of the Google algorithm than to rankings themselves.

I talked about this idea in my last post here on Moz — Wake Up, SEOs – the NEW New Google is Here — so I won’t repeat myself, but I do suggest you go read it (again).

More concretely, I would plan these tasks for the first month of 2017:

• Implement structured data in the mobile version of my website.

This is needed not only because Google will eventually use mobile-first indexing and these usually don’t have schema implemented, but also because structured data is one of the fundamental tools Google uses for understanding the meaning of a web document. Moreover, Google is really pushing rich cards for mobile search, somehow replicating the incentivization strategy used in the past with rich snippets.

Are you worried about performance? Then it’s time to adopt JSON-LD (paranoiac thought: is this also a reason why Google strongly insisted on JSON-LD for structured data?).

• Optimize for #0

Featured snippets are even more prominent on mobile search, and also used by Google Home to offer answers, even though — as wisely said by Dr. Pete here on Moz — it’s still not clear how that will translate into a click to our website.

Right now there are several tools that allow us to investigate and know what queries fire up a featured snippet (apart from all the other SERPs features). The ones I use are these:

• GetStat
• Moz, both Keyword Explorer (SERPS Analysis) and Moz Pro Campaigns (SERP Features and Analyze Keywords in the Rankings section)
• SEMRush, in the Positions page of the Organic Research section of its Domain Analysis, which also offers to visualize a snapshot of the SERP for each keyword

SEMRush SERP snapshot, and an example of how a featured snippet can be generated from an ecommerce category page (the SEO for Amazon must be very happy, I bet).

• Start using the Google Assistant API and experiment with custom voice commands
• RankBrain is one of the fundamental bricks toward a natural language based search engine, so if you have not already done it, start rethinking keyword research, and stop generally talking about “topics” with no real actionable strategy behind it.
• Consider branding as an SEO strategy

One of main characteristics of Google, enhanced by entity search and context, is personalized search.

Personalization, then, seems to be even more important if we consider personal assistants.

Personalization means that Google will more often present content from websites that are in our search history or — through search entities — linked from websites already present in our search history.

This means that if, on a short, tactical level it’s important to target long-tail queries, on a longer, strategic level the ideal is making our brand synonymous with our products and services. This can be achieved by targeting higher up the funnel with the right content in the right format, published and promoted at the right moment to the right people. This is very well described Jono Alderson at Searchlove London in 2015 (here’s the video recording):

http://ift.tt/1GZ5DSp

Searching higher up the funnel from Jono Alderson

• Reconsider Bing!

If you think that Bing is only “that search engine with cool background photos,” it’s time to change your mind. Bing is fueling the search of Siri and Alexa, apart from being the default search engine of Cortana. If you calculate how many iOS/OS X, Windows 10, and Amazon Echo devices are used, then you have a rough idea of how Bing could be important as voice search grows. You can read more about voice search, Cortana, and Bing in this post by Purna Virji.

SE.LO.MO (Search Local Mobile)

Only a few years ago digital marketers used to talk a lot about SO.LO.MO. (SOcial, LOcal, and MObile).

We were all talking about Foursquare marketing. Then Foursquare changed to Swarm, and we no longer talk about SO.LO.MO., partly because the marketing philosophy behind it has become a default practice.

However, now with mobile as the first search traffic source and the unstoppable success of personal assistants and chatbots (I invite you to look this deck by Jes Stiles), the idea of doing marketing locally and mobile is even more pressing and promising, although there are technologies like beacons that don’t seem able to conquer the market, maybe because they’re too advanced with respect to consumer behavior.

Returning to TripAdvisor as an example, if we look at which queries bring more organic traffic from mobile (and excluding branded searches), we see these:

Click on the image to see a larger version

Apart from telling us that people in the USA really like to go out for dinner without any clue on where to go, what this simple analysis shows is that people search on the go more and more. They’ve finally understood that searches are localized and they don’t need to explicitly indicate their location. Perhaps even more important, they now fully know that their results pages are personalized.

What this snapshot above is not telling us, though, is a trend that could become the new normal in the next future: longer verbose queries because of voice search.

In fact, if we dig into the Similarweb mobile keyword report, we can start finding these kind of queries:

• hotels on highway 41 near grand ave and rogers ct near waukegan il;
• places in clarksville arkansas that fix cracked windshields;
• restaurants open late in west side of south bend indiana;
• five star restaurants like salvatores in western new york;
  
• where to get breakfast near grand hotel francais paris.

The SERPs answering these queries, though, also show us one problem and one opportunity:

1. The problem is that these SERPs, while having a clear local intent, quite often do not present any local search pack.
2. The opportunity is that, despite these queries indeed being “local,” Google fails to offer relevant results able to answer them (see the “five star restaurants like salvatores in western new york” as an example).

Therefore:

1. Thinking of local search only as MyBusiness optimization may limit the opportunities businesses (especially local businesses) can have to earn SEO visibility and traffic.
2. Also, local business websites should start working to intercept the potential traffic generated by those kinds of queries. There is a real opportunity in those kind of queries, simply because (still) nobody is really thinking about them (apart fromTripAdvisor, as its result for “where to get breakfast near grand hotel francais paris” testifies).

How to achieve that?

Probably not by trying to target all the infinite possible combinations of local searches a user can do in relation to our kind of business and our location. That would be equal to creating content of very poor quality, when thinking about how Hummingbird and, in many aspects, RankBrain work.

This leads me to redirect you back to the previous chapter of this post about semantics, natural language, and context.

David Mihm advises to Think of your website (or your client’s websites) as an API, adding that:

Even if you’re not a publisher in the traditional sense of the word, you should prepare for a time when no one ever visits your website. Awareness, research, and conversion will all happen in search results, and the companies whose websites facilitate that paradigm on the leading edge will be rewarded with more customers while competitors scramble to catch up. This means as much Schema.org and JSON-LD markup as possible, and partnering with third parties that have cut deals with Google to facilitate transactions (see: OpenTable and ZocDoc).

Because David is surely more expert in local search than I, if you want to dig into what could be the trends in this very important SEO area, I invite you to read his predictions in the Tidings blog.

THE IRRESISTIBLE ASCENT OF VIDEO (and the images strike back)

Video

This post by Content.ly is old (July 2015), but it shared still-interesting stats via an Emarketer study about the growth of video consumption online.

Consumption of video online is growing, even though — apparently — it’s not really stealing time away from TV.

Things look different if we look at “generations” (I don’t really like marketing segmentations such as “millennials,” but we can still use them for brevity):

What this chart is forgetting, though, is the youngest audience (from 4–13 years old). If you have a child around those ages, you’ll agree that she consumes video mostly online. For instance, my kids’ idols are Iron Man, Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, and DanTDM, a YouTuber, who shares his videos while playing games like Minecraft.

Let’s add a final stat about what device is used the most for watching videos online:

Laptop & desktop are still the most-used devices, but smartphone is quickly growing.

Consider that:

1. The average age kids start owning a smartphone is 10.3 years;
2. Children from 5 to 13 years old (and also young people up to 20 years old) tend to me more visual than textual;
3. Their influence on the buying habits of their parents has been known for many years and, in 2012, it was equal to $1.2 trillion USD in spending.

I talk a lot about kids because they are the most crystal-clear example of why every technological platform is so devoted to video and video live streaming right now (Instagram being the last one announcing it on 11/21). However, this trend in consuming videos online (and YouTube still is the most-used channel) is common to almost every age group of Internet users.

Finally, if we pair to this video frenzy the equally irresistible rise of native advertising (pro tip: follow Melanie Deziel), then see that Google acquired companies like Anvato (a “video platform that guarantees video playback and monetization from signal to every screen” as it describes itself) and Famebit (an “Influencer Marketing Platform for YouTube, Instagram, and More”, as its title tag recites) is not a surprise at all.

Google needs to find new ways of monetizing videos… and YouTube is not enough anymore.

More concretely, if we think about our 2017 SEO and digital marketing strategy, video seems to be a channel that we should start exploring more seriously, if we did not consider it before.

And when it comes to digital PR, we should start considering online videos stars as much (if not more) influencers as any classic blogger.

Images

In 2017, for almost the same reasons explained above for video, we should expect a return in interest for images marketing, especially in Google search.

Let’s be honest: Images search, as it is right now, is the dinosaur of Google search. For us SEOs it hasn’t been useful in bringing traffic to our websites for many years and, for Google, it’s not profitable.

Maybe this is one of reasons why Google bought Moodstock and invests so much intellectual and machine learning efforts in image recognition.

People do showrooming… They go into a store, take photos of products with their smartphone, and then search for online offers for those same products.

It should not be silly to think that Google could “help” this search thanks to image recognition, because it already does it quite well with its reverse image search feature.

Moreover, with Schema.org/Product, we can tag the images of our products so that Google can easily pair product images to other characteristics like prices, offers, and stock availability.

With this data, it could start monetizing the Images vertical once for all.

[NOTE: As I was writing this, Google announced that it will start showing product schema rich snippets in image search results… so this is no longer a risky preview, but partly a reality!]

VR

What is the last company did Google acquire? Eyefluence.

What physical product did Google launch in October? The DayDream VR headset.

What was the most exciting feature that YouTube (and other platforms) rolled out? 360.

I’ll let you fantasize about the opportunities VR represents for the smart digital marketers.

Maybe in 2017 VR will still be an “early adopters” technology, but if I were you, I’d start preparing myself and clients to it.

---

Credits: The images in this post, if you didn’t guess it already, are from the HBO show Westworld.

The captions in the photos are from sci-fi movies and TV series titles (have fun discovering them)

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Twitter Deep Dive: How to Use Social Media to 10x Your Website Traffic – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by TaraReed_

This week, Whiteboard Friday is hosted by the amazing Tara Reed who’ll walk us through how to use social media broadly and Twitter in particular not only to earn engagement and a following, but to drive visitors directly to our websites and to the content that converts. Let’s dive in!

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Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey. My name is Tara Reed. I’m the CEO of appswithoutcode.com, and you’re hanging out with me today for Whiteboard Friday. Today, we’re talking about how to use social media to 10x your website traffic. Specifically, we’re talking about how to use Twitter. We’re doing a deep dive of Twitter and how to use Twitter to do that 10x-ing of your website traffic. How do you take people from your social media content to your actual website and flow them through that funnel? I’m going to be giving you a process today to automate a lot of that work that sometimes we do manually.

Before we jump into that, I just want to ask you a quick question. How many of you feel like you have a well-oiled machine that is taking people from your social media content through and all the way to your site? If you don’t feel like you have a really strong, well-oiled machine, I’ve got one here for you, and you can implement all three parts of this three-step process I’m going to show you in order to really, really drive a lot more traffic, squeeze a lot more traffic out of your social media following and your social media presence.

Reach

So this process has three steps. The first step is reach. This is something that most people skip over entirely. They sit back passively, and they wait for people to find their social media site. So I want to offer an alternative for you that’s going to be a lot more proactive, and here’s how it works.

There are thousands, if not millions of people out there who are actively posting, tweeting, and saying that they want your product, your service, whatever it is that you have. So for example, if you have a company that helps people find apartments, there are thousands of people every day who are posting, “I’m thinking about moving to Seattle next month,” “thinking about going here.” They’re actually saying these things in their social media posts, and you’re just letting them say these things and you’re not actually engaging with them. But there’s a really awesome way that you can do that, and I want to walk you through how.

Keywords

So what you’re going to want to do first, in order to find these people, is write down a couple really clear keywords around the types of things that people are saying in social media to indicate high interest.

These keywords are going to be slightly different than the keywords that someone might type into Google or into a search bar, because the types of things you say on social media are just slightly different. So for example, you might say “looking for an apartment” on social media, but on Google search you might type in “apartments in Seattle,” and that’s a slight difference there. So you want to be conscious of the social media platform that you’re on when you’re writing out your keywords.

Automated workflow

Once you have your keywords, the next thing you want to do is build an automated workflow to engage with these people. There are a couple different things that you can do to create an automated workflow. You get to decide which of these four elements you want to use to create the most organic experience for you and for your brand. But there are four different types of ways you can engage with these people who are actively saying that they want whatever it is that you have. So you can:

• Like their posts
• Follow them
• Add them to a list
• Send them a DM that says, “Hey, Tara, saw you were interested in apartments. Check out this blog post of the top apartments in Seattle that we put together last week,” whatever it might be.

But what you’re going to want to do is use some of these, maybe not all four of them. But come up with a strategy that feels really organic and an outreach, because you don’t want to just leave these people hanging out there. You want to make sure that you’re engaging with them in some way. It’s low-hanging fruit, and it’s really going to help you squeeze a lot of value out of your social media content.

Resources

So I’ve outlined some resources for you to use in order to do that. These are two of my favorite tools.

Socedo does a really good job automating this workflow of reaching out to people who are prospective customers, prospective users, prospective visitors of your website. There’s also a tool called Narrow.io that you can use.

Click

So once you’re doing this outreach, you’re not passively sitting back, you’re actually engaging with the people who really want whatever it is that you have, we’re going to move over to the second strategy — to click. Now, what you want to do here is have something really valuable for these people to actually click on, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to click on your profile link and they’re going to arrive here. That is why I recommend people implement something I call a 14-day experiment.

14-day experiment

A 14-day experiment is when you take your top blog posts and for 14 days, every single day you post 14 posts, different blog posts. You can mix them up. But every day you are posting 14 links to a blog post with some interesting, unique content. The reason you want to do this is that the average user spends just 13 minutes on Twitter at a time. So the chances of them seeing more than one of those posts in your day is really slim. So you want to do 14. It may feel like a lot for your company and for your brand, but really that’s where you want to be in order to really squeeze out all that value on your social media site.

Spreadsheet

Now, in order to get prepared for this 14-day experiment, what you’re going to want to do is get out a spreadsheet. In the first column of your spreadsheet, you’re going to want to put links to all of your top blog posts. I’d say grab somewhere between 14 and 25 blog posts that you want to use.

In the next column, for this specific blog post, you’re going to write a tweet, a piece of content. You can grab out a quote from the blog post, or you can do a summary of the blog post, whatever it might be. But you’re going to write a tweet about that blog post, and if you want, you can add an accompanying image.

You’re going to do that again for the same blog post, but you’re going to put a new piece of content, a new tweet, and a new image. This spreadsheet will go on for about 28 rows, because you’re going to do about 14 different posts for each blog post. It’s going to really push you to think about different angles and different ways that people can think about the content that you’ve already written. Most of us just post one or two times on our blog post, but you can really push out 14.

Resources

Some resources to help you do this, obviously a spreadsheet. Really easy, that is all you need. But I also have a book recommendation for you. It’s called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” by Gary Vaynerchuk. I’ve had my team and other teams read this book as a group. As they go through putting together their 14-day experiment, it’s a really great way to rally your team around the ideas and get everyone involved. So if they want to contribute some content into this spreadsheet, they’re already on board and excited to do it.

Recycle

Now, then you move on to the third part of the strategy, which is to recycle your content. Again, most of us are posting again and again and again on social media, but people are only seeing a few of those posts, because the average user is only spending a few minutes on Twitter every day. So what you’re going to want to do is use a tool to recycle your content.

Resources

You’re not just going to want to post your blog post one or two times. You’re going to want to take everything you put in the spreadsheet and put it into a tool like Edgar. Edgar is a tool that allows you to recycle content. So after the blog post has gone up one day, 14 days later, a month later, it’ll show up again, that same exact post. People probably haven’t seen it yet, and so it’s going to allow you to recycle your content on auto-pilot.

These two elements on the side of me — the outreach part and the recycling part — those are things that you can get going on auto-pilot. They’re running on their own. This middle piece, you’re going to have to do some upkeep. You’re going to have to maintain content, add new content to your funnels. But for the most part, this is going to allow you to cohesively build a really cohesive strategy that’s going to automate the experience. It’s going to really squeeze a lot of the content, a lot of the engagement that you can get to get people from just looking at your social media profile, bring them to your social media profile, and then funnel them through to actually be on your website.

Thanks for hanging out with me on Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Reach and Influence: Your First Marketing Priority

Posted by EricEnge

When you first start out with content marketing, you often have a very basic challenge: you have to build an audience for your content. Even if you’re a large brand with lots of people who are passionate about you, they’re not yet conditioned to see you as a publisher of valuable content. In other words, either way, you’ve got work to do.

In today’s post, I’m going to outline why you should focus on reach and influence, and how to do it so that your content marketing efforts can deliver the maximum ROI.

Map your marketplace

The first thing to realize is that number of potential customers in a marketplace is finite, and so are the number of major media sites and blogs that have any real audience. A typical audience reach for the bloggers and media in a marketplace might look something like this:

Traditionally, SEOs have focused on trying to publish content on as many different domains as possible. In the early days of SEO, the theory was that getting links from as many different domains as you could was how you maximize overall rankings impact.

This still has an element of truth to it today if you view the Google algorithm from a narrow perspective, but I believe it’s best to take a more holistic view of the market. Frankly, I don’t want the hard task of fighting for every link I get; I want people to give them to me because I’ve shown I deserve them.

I don’t want to fight for every link I get; I want to earn them because I’ve shown I deserve them.

For that reason, we urge our clients to focus on building authority, reach, and influence. If you do this well, you establish a solid base for earning links organically. Consider the value of publishing content and having it get links with minimal effort on your part.

While you all shudder at the concept of “build it and they will link to you,” if you implement a fully integrated campaign with an audience that is anxious to see what you have to say, the task of attracting links becomes significantly easier.

To make that work for you, you’ll need relationships with key influencers, bloggers, and media people, and you’ll need to prioritize who are the people who can help you most.

The catch is, the most influential players in a marketplace have assets to protect (their relationship with their audience), and they’re not going to help you unless you find ways to help them bring even more value to their audience.

That means you’ll need to establish your business as a top source of content and ideas. You’ll also need to be seen by them as a partner, and that you support their goals, not just your own. So now, let’s get to work!

Identify your real audience

First, let’s look at another map, this time looking at the makeup of the people in a given market:

Who in this chart do you think might reshare your content or link to it? It’s certainly not the laggards, or even the early or late majority. Generally speaking, these are not the people with large social media followings, or highly popular blogs or columns on your market. The people who do have these things are highlighted here:

Innovators and Early Adopters are the ones that might share or link your content in a way that has a large impact. If your content is not good enough to interest them, then you’ve failed. Not only can they get more eyeballs on your content, but when they reshare it, it acts as an endorsement of its value.

Cater to this audience. Even for a large brand, it’s essential that you get good engagement here, as it helps give your content credibility.

Go to where your target audience resides on the Interwebs

Your target customer spends a lot of time in various places across the Internet. Consider engaging with them where they are.

The reason for doing this is to accelerate the growth of your audience and their engagement with your content. I often refer to this as getting in front of OPA (“Other People’s Audiences”). It’s one of the most powerful ways to increase your own audience and loyalty. It also creates opportunities to build your own direct audience.

That said, you need to do this with great care. If you dive willy-nilly into public forums with commercial messages you’ll be seen as self-serving and overly aggressive. Better approaches include:

1. Establish columns on high-authority media sites
2. Share valuable info via your social media presences
3. Interact with influencers online
4. Participate in online and offline events (webinars, conferences)

These are just a few ideas. Remember, you’re there to add value, and adding value doesn’t mean showing people all the great things they can do with your products. Create useful, non-commercial, content, or address questions without your products or services being the explicit answer.

Adding value doesn’t mean showing people all the great things they can do with your products.

The role of columns

As we’ve established, the top media sites have the most influence in a marketplace. Here’s another way of looking at it:

If you’re looking for OPA, the top media sites that cover your market have plenty of it, and if you’re allowed to publish on their sites without having to pay for it, they also provide an implied endorsement. Old-school SEO would tell us that columns are not that valuable because Google used to value visibility on a larger number of domains more than they valued repeat presence on the higher-authority sites, but digital marketing life is no longer that simple.

You can argue about how far that pendulum at Google has swung, but you can’t deny that it makes sense that an ongoing relationship with an authoritative site is a stronger indication of your authority than ten meaningless one-time relationships with sites no one, or almost no one, ever visits. If you don’t think that Google gets this, you’re definitely stuck far in the past.

Other publishing efforts

It’s great to get high-value columns, but not every major media site will grant you that opportunity. Let’s say you manage to get a column on three of the top sites. This may expose you to this type of reach:

There will also be major media sites where getting a column or publishing content is not an option. But, can you build relationships with their editors and writers? Will they reach out to you for fact checking or quotes when they write a related story? Are they interested in interviewing you?

A deliberate program to build these relationships is a must in any reach and influence building strategy. Some of the key steps are:

1. Build a list of the top relationships you should target
2. Try to obtain info on their social accounts and email addresses
3. Study what they’re about, and what’s most important to them
4. Actively reshare their relevant stories via your social media
5. Engage with them in ways that will add value, and that shows them why a relationship with you would be valuable for them
6. Consider implementing targeted paid social campaigns that will expose them to your best content
7. See if you can structure opportunities to meet them face-to-face.

Use all of these tactics to map out your strategy and show yourself as a leader in your market, and to show your willingness help them with their needs.

The role of influencers

Media people are influencers in their own right, but there are types of influencers as well. Their presence may be in other places, such as social media or streaming media, and there are usually many of these out there in any given market. With these types of influencers you can potentially leverage a few additional tactics, such as:

1. Interview them and publish the result on your site
2. Pay them to reshare your content on social
3. Pay them to write for you (and ask them to share the article via their social)
4. Engage them to help you more broadly as a spokesperson
5. Find ways to collaborate on projects with them and then co-promote the results
6. Or, try a more limited project-based engagement

The value here is very similar to that of major bloggers and media. Their engagement with you reinforces the quality and value of what you’re doing online. As with the media, there are probably a small number of influencers with significant reach. The cool thing here is that the people they influence only overlap partially with the people reached by media. Let’s look at how they overlap:

If you are able to establish relationships with a few of the top ten (non-media) influencers, your reach and influence will go up yet one more notch.

Organic social media

Social media is a great way to build relationships directly with bloggers, media, influencers, and to access your target customer base. Too many businesses view social media in a very tactical way. Either they focus on pushing commercial messages through their accounts, or they work towards shallow goals, such as increasing likes or followers.

If you’re looking to expand your true reach and influence, you should leverage the strengths that social media has to help you accomplish that. Even in a world where major social platforms such as Facebook are limiting organic reach, there is still much to be gained by posting high-value content on these platforms. First of all, not all of the social media platforms limit your organic visibility, and there are also many community opportunities on them as well. And second, you can use that content as a sort of “credibility calling card” as you try to build relationships on social with influencers. If they look at your profile, your content serves as a resume that says you’re worth engaging with.

But nothing free lasts forever, so make a point of finding ways to migrate the relationships you create on social media sites onto other platforms.

Make a point of finding ways to migrate your relationships on social media sites onto other platforms.

One way to do that is to share great content published on your site, and then find ways to lure people into signing up for a newsletter, your app, or find some other way to get them connected with you going forward. By all means, don’t abandon your connection with them on the social media platform where it started, but don’t be wholly dependent on that platform either.

Paid social

There are tons of opportunities in the world of paid social, and they are worth exploring. Some of the platforms, such as Facebook, offer tremendous targeting options that allow you to get extremely granular with your campaigns. Have a mailing list of 10,000 people? Imagine targeting a Facebook ad campaign that runs solely in front of that audience. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

You can actually do this, but the only catch is that the email address you have for them has to be the one that’s used for the user’s Facebook account. In our experience, that may cut the actual list reached by half or so, but this type of campaign is still an enormous value add.

There are other effective ways to target on paid social media platforms, but the big key is to invest the time to get your targeting right. So many companies dabble in social media advertising, try a few things, look for an instant return, and then give up. You need to have patience to figure out your best targeting options, and work to get it right.

To do that, you’ll need to invest some money with a not-so-great ROI for a while, in order to get enough data to get your targeting where it needs to be. If you’re willing to do this, you can gain a nice market edge for yourself, especially since it’s very possible your competition isn’t willing to put in that effort.

One approach to help with extending your reach and influence is to build a list of bloggers, media, and influencers, and do the hard work of building targeted ad campaigns just to that list. This is a great way to get your content in front of those that matter most.

We’ve seen results in campaigns like this that deliver engagement (likes, clicks, reshares) for as little as $0.30 per action. Other campaigns we’ve run have shown action rates in the $1 range, but this is still a phenomenal value.

Summary

Keep your focus on the goal of extending your reach and influence. No matter how large your brand is today, you’re living in an uncertain world. If you’re heavily dependent on organic search results in Google, know that the concept of the search box is likely to disappear in the next five years. Or, if you’re heavily dependent on people walking in to your stores, you’ve already seen the massive shift of activity online. More change is guaranteed, and the exact shape it will take is not clear to anyone.

Your best defense in a rapidly changing world is a passionate and engaged audience that feels loyalty directly to you, and that you have ways of connecting with directly. Build this. Cultivate this.

Then, no matter what direction things go in the future, you’ll be in a position to continue to grow and prosper.

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