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.

http://ift.tt/2iLPYoe

http://ift.tt/1GaxkYO

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

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

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!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2iLoGKe

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2iokcwX

The 21 Best PPC Marketing Articles of the Year

It’s the end of the year as we know it, and we’re feeling fine. Why? Because this year we read – and fell in love with – some truly amazing articles about all things PPC.

In fact, what you’re about to read are my picks for the 21 best PPC marketing articles that were published around the web in 2016. These articles are the unicorns that managed to stand out from a sea of donkey articles.

Here’s a look back at the best of the best content this year on paid search, remarketing, conversion rate optimization, and paid social.

Paid Search, Case Studies & Research

1. Google’s right-side Adpocalypse: What really happened (DATA) – Search Engine Land

When Google changed its layout earlier this year, PPC marketers freaked out and warned the end was near for all of us. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, as I showed in this post. CTRs and traffic increased while CPCs remained static.

Takeaway: Don’t panic whenever Google makes a change to AdWords or the SERPs. Patiently collect and analyze your data so you can react wisely.

2. 5 ingredients for writing the perfect expanded text ad – Search Engine Land

Speaking of collecting and analyzing data, the brilliant Frederick Vallaeys of Optmyzer studied 1.2 million ads after AdWords started rolling out Expanded Text Ads (ETAs). He wanted to figure out what all the best performing ETAs had in common.

Takeaway: Just as I suspected, it’s time to break up with dynamic keyword insertion (DKI)! Also, don’t worry too much about headline length; worry more about writing great headlines (emotional triggers FTW!).

3. Bing’s Expanded Text Ads Even Outperform Google’s [Data] – WordStream

We can’t leave the topic of ETAs before checking in with Mark Irvine (not once, not twice, but THRICE). First up, our chief data scientist looked at aggregated data from WordStream client accounts to assess the performance of Bing ETAs, which look identical to AdWords ETAs. And the winner was… Bing Ads:

Takeaway: Many advertisers get higher CTRs and lower costs from Bing Ads than they do on AdWords. So don’t forget about Bing.

4. Did Google’s New Green Ad Labels Affect Ad CTR? – WordStream

Next up, Irvine wanted to see how the change from yellow to green ad labels was impacting CTR. What he found after looking at nearly 3,000 WordStream client accounts: the quantity and quality of ad clicks had improved significantly.

Takeaway: Test in times of uncertainty. You’ll almost always find the answer you seek in your data.

5. Google AdWords Benchmarks for YOUR Industry [NEW DATA] – WordStream

Our Mark Irvine trilogy concludes with a look at click-through rates, cost-per-click, conversion rates, and cost-per-action by industry. Truly awesome stuff here:

Takeaway: Unless you’re a unicorn, there’s always room to improve your PPC campaigns. Use these benchmarks to figure out whether you’re on the low end or about average for your industry – and if so, strive to exceed these benchmarks and become a unicorn.

6. The Best Hidden Features of the AdWords Editor – Certified Knowledge

This post by Frederik Hyldig highlighted some hidden gems in AdWords Editor that serious PPC marketers should check out. Shortcodes for smarter bulk edits, hiding empty types from the navigation, and duplicate ads or keywords within their respective ad groups are particular worth a read.

Takeaway: AdWords Editor has so many amazingly helpful features, but not all of them are obvious. Always be educating yourself about the tools you use so you can make something that’s already great even that much better.

7. 3 Google AdWords hacks to drive high-quality leads – Search Engine Land

Do you know how to bulk modify broad match modified keywords? Or how having one keyword per ad group can improve your Quality Score? Or how to enable call-only campaigns? If not, you’ll want to check out this helpful post from Todd Saunders.

Takeaway: As Saunders puts it, using these hacks will “keep your accounts lean, precisely targeted and better optimized to drive high-quality leads.”

Remarketing & RLSA

8. 33 Retargeting Campaigns You’ve Never Heard Of Before – KlientBoost

In this truly exciting post, Johnathan Dane shares 33 types of remarketing campaigns and how to take advantage of them. He covers so many awesome types of remarketing: from CRM, to search, to content, to mobile app retargeting.

Takeaway: Remarketing is an incredibly powerful tool and, when done right, can outperform any other marketing channel.

9. RLSA for Competitive Markets: A Ridiculously Awesome Way Forward in PPC – WordStream

Larry Kim (hey – that’s me!) says you should break up with unbranded vanilla search ads and only do RLSA. Why? RLSA brings you people who will click through at twice the rate, for half the costs, and convert at triple the rate. Really, you’d be better off using the power of social media ads to start making people aware of and familiar with your brand.

Takeaway: RLSA campaigns have huge potential when combined with a viral marketing strategy. Dramatically increasing the size of your cookie pools will give you the power you need to make the most of RLSA.

10. Using Paid Media to Drive Loyalty & Advocacy – Moz

Most PPC strategies focus on the purchase stage of the conversion funnel. But in this excellent edition of Whiteboard Friday, Samantha Noble shares some brilliant tips on how you can use paid media at the loyalty and advocacy stages.

Takeaway: Get more lifetime value out of your existing customers with the help of remarketing lists (to bid on competitors names, offer unique discounts, and cross-sell or upsell). It’s much cheaper than acquiring new customers.

11. All the Remarketing Audiences You Should Be Targeting in PPC – WordStream

Speaking about the funnel, Maddie Cary does a great job of breaking down all the remarketing audiences you should be targeting by the stage they’re at right now, whether it’s research, awareness, intent, action, or loyalty.

Takeaway: PPC doesn’t stop with a conversion. Go beyond acquiring new customers and find ways using PPC to create continued loyalty and lifetime revenue from your consumer base.

Landing Pages & CRO

12. Boosting B2B Leads by 9x with PPC and Landing Page Best Practices [Case Study] – Unbounce

Boosting lead generation by 9x and conversion rate by 290 percent? Yes, please. Andy Beohar shows us how he helped one client by following PPC optimization and landing page best practices.

Takeaway: Never settle for average. You can always turn your PPC donkeys into magical unicorns if you do the work

13. Boost your conversion rate by 45% today… no, really! – Search Engine Land

Jacob Baadsgaard asks an important question: are you tracking all of your conversions. After looking at more than 2,000 accounts he discovered that 42 percent of advertisers didn’t track any conversions – and only half of the advertisers who were tracking conversions were only tracking a portion of possible conversion actions. All these advertisers have no idea whether their campaigns are unicorns or total donkeys.

Takeaway: Set up conversion tracking (duh!).

14. 10 CRO Truth Bombs That Will Change the Way You Think – Moz

Most CRO efforts focus on on-page elements. But really, if you want to dramatically increase conversions, you’re better off doing what I do: focus on increasing brand awareness and making your offer far more compelling.

Takeaway: Start biasing people toward your brand using social media ads, remarketing, RLSA, and video ads. As for your offer, it must be massively different and more valuable from what your competitors are offering. If you can get people excited enough to click on your offer, then they’re more likely to convert!

15. Why Facebook and Google Analytics Conversions Don’t Add Up – PPC Hero

Why are your Facebook conversions higher than Google Analytics? Simply, the way Facebook and Google report conversions differ. But Cassie Oumedian explains how you can close the gap in this helpful post.

Takeaway: Figure out how Facebook and Google Analytics track and report conversions so you don’t end up comparing apples and oranges. (P.S., PPC Hero rocks – thanks for all the awesome PPC content this year!)

Facebook Ads

16. How to Target Your Audience With Facebook Ads – Search Engine Journal

Facebook ad targeting is both extensive and complicated. There’s a lot to know if you really want reach your target audience. Luckily, WordStream put together an epic infographic (reported on by Danny Goodwin) to help you do just that.

Takeaway: Use this infographic as a checklist or cheat sheet when you’re planning your Facebook advertising strategy.

17. 9 Tips for Better Facebook Video Ads – Social Media Examiner

If you want more engagement and brand recall, then Facebook video ads are one way to get it (and for cheap!) – as long as you’re posting memorable content. Mari Smith shares advice on how you can create more attention-grabbing Facebook video ads.

Takeaway: You never know which one of your Facebook videos will become a unicorn, so make sure any videos you do upload have a great headline, great visuals, some personality, and a compelling offer.

18. We Tested 48 Facebook Ads To Bust 6 Marketing Myths – SketchDeck

Facebook ads must be relevant; you should use text on images; it’s better to show people rather than products or objects; smiling women are better than unhappy men; using your logo is bad; and super simple images work best. Fact or fiction? This article reveals some surprising truths.

Takeaway: Do research, testing everything, and collect real data. Never assume that “best practices” will work for you.

19. How to Create an Evergreen Facebook Ad Campaign – Jon Loomer

Is there a way you can create a Facebook campaign that doesn’t die after a while? Absolutely – and Jon Loomer shares a process you can implement in this fantastic article.

Takeaway: By creating some smart website custom audiences, and targeting those audiences at the right time intervals, you can do magical things to help sell your product.

Twitter Ads

20. How to Use Twitter Retargeting Ads to Generate More Customers – HubSpot

Is Twitter an effective channel for influencing the lead-to-customer conversion rate? To find out, Lauren Mattos ran an interesting experiment splitting a list of leads into two groups: one that saw remarketing ads on Twitter, and one that did not. She found that the former group converted into customers 64 percent better than the latter group.

Takeaway: Twitter remarketing works. There are many reasons to love remarketing – more leads and conversions, higher visitor engagement, and improved brand recall, to name a few. (Also, check out my post on how to run a Twitter lead generation campaign.)

21. We Analyzed 7,712 Twitter Ads And Here’s What We Learned – AdEspresso

What makes for a successful Twitter Ad? Andrew Tate analyzed nearly 8,000 ads to answer that question, looking at elements like text length, usage of words, numbers and hashtags, and sentiment.

Takeaway: 90 percent of the tweets in this study featured an image, but most of images people see on Twitter are boring donkeys. Make sure you use an image that stands out. Be the unicorn!

What was your favorite PPC marketing article from 2016? 

from Internet Marketing Blog by WordStream http://ift.tt/2iubz0Q

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2hwzEpt

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.

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!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2iDhrUN

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2i6t0GZ

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!

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!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2hoT67i

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2icxqwt