Declining Organic Traffic? How to Tell if it’s a Tracking or Optimization Issue

Posted by andrewchoco

Picture this scenario. You’re a new employee that has just been brought in to a struggling marketing department (or an agency brought on to help recover lost numbers). You get access to Google Analytics, and see something like this:

(Actual screenshot of the client I audited)

This can generate two types of emotional response: excitement or fear (or both). The steady decline in organic traffic excites you because you have so many tactics and ideas that you think can save this company from spiraling downward out of control. But there’s also the fear that these tactics wont be enough to correct the course.

Regardless of whether these new tactics would work or not, it’s important to understand the history of the account and determine not only what is happening, but why.

The company may have an idea of why the traffic is declining (i.e. competitors have come in and made ranking for keywords much harder, or they did a website redesign and have never recovered).

Essentially, this boils down to two things: 1) either you’re struggling with organic optimization, or 2) something was off with your tracking in Google Analytics, has since been corrected, and hasn’t been caught.

In this article, I’ll go over an audit I did for one of my clients to help determine if the decline we saw in organic traffic was due to actual poor SEO performance, an influx in competitors, tracking issues, or a combination of these things.

I’ll be breaking it down into five different areas of investigation:

1. Keyword ranking differences from 2015–2017
   1. Did the keywords we were ranking for in 2015 change drastically in 2017? Did we lose rankings and therefore lose organic traffic?
2. Top organic landing pages from 2015–2017
   1. Are the top ranking organic landing pages the same currently as they were in 2015? Are we missing any pages due to a website redesign?
3. On-page metric
   1. Did something happen to the site speed / bounce rate / page views etc.
4. SEMrush/Moz keyword, traffic, and domain authority data
   1. Looking at the SEMrush organic traffic cost metric as well as Moz metrics like Domain Authority and competitors.
5. Goal completions
   1. Did our conversion numbers stay consistent throughout the traffic drop? Or did the conversions drop in correlation with the traffic drop?

By the end of this post, my goal is that you’ll be able to replicate this audit to determine exactly what’s causing your organic traffic decline and how to get back on the right track.

Let’s dive in!

Keyword ranking differences from 2015–2017

This was my initial starting point for my audit. I started with this specifically because the most obvious answer, for a decline in traffic is a decline in keyword rankings.

I wanted to look at what keywords we were ranking for in 2015 to see if we significantly dropped in the rankings or if the search volume had dropped. If the company you’re auditing has had a long-running Moz account, start by looking at the keyword rankings from the initial start of the decline, compared to current keyword rankings.

I exported keyword data from both SEMrush and Moz, and looked specifically at the ranking changes of core keywords.

March was a particularly strong month across the board, so I narrowed it down and exported the keyword rankings in:

• March 2015
• March 2016
• March 2017
• December 2017 (so I could get the most current rankings)

Once the keywords were exported, I went in and highlighted in red the keywords that we were ranking for in 2015 (and driving traffic from) that we were no longer ranking for in 2017. I also highlighted in yellow the keywords we were ranking for in 2015 that were still ranking in 2017.

2015 keywords:

2017 keywords:

(Brand-related queries and URLs are blurred out for anonymity)

One thing that immediately stood out: in 2015, this company was ranking for five keywords, including the word “free.” They have since changed their offering, so it made sense that in 2017, we weren’t ranking for those keywords.

After removing the free queries, we pulled the “core” keywords to look at their differences.

March 2015 core keywords:

• Appointment scheduling software: position 9
• Online appointment scheduling: position 11
• Online appointment scheduling: position 9
• Online scheduling software: position 9
• Online scheduler: position 9
• Online scheduling: position 13

December 2017 core keywords:

• Appointment scheduler: position 11
• Appointment scheduling software: position 10
• Online schedule: position 6
• Online appointment scheduler: position 11
• Online appointment scheduling: position 12
• Online scheduling software: position 12
• Online scheduling tool: position 10
• Online scheduling: position 15
• SaaS appointment scheduling: position 2

There were no particular red flags here. While some of the keywords have moved down 1–2 spots, we had new ones jump up. These small changes in movement didn’t explain the nearly 30–40% drop in organic traffic. I checked this off my list and moved on to organic landing pages.

Top organic landing page changes

Since the dive into keyword rankings didn’t provide the answer for the decline in traffic, the next thing I looked at were the organic landing pages. I knew this client had switched over CMS systems in early 2017, and had done a few small redesign projects the past three years.

After exporting our organic landing pages for 2015, 2016, and 2017, we compared the top ten (by organic sessions) and got the following results.

2015 top organic landing pages:

2016 top organic landing pages:

2017 top organic landing pages:

Because of their redesign, you can see that the subfolders changed between 2015/2016 to 2017. What really got my attention, however, is the /get-started page. In 2015/2016, the Get Started page accounted for nearly 16% of all organic traffic. In 2017, the Get Started page was nowhere to be found.

If you run into this problem and notice there are pages missing from your current top organic pages, a great way to uncover why is to use the Wayback Machine. It’s a great tool that allows you to see what a web page looked like in the past.

When we looked at the /get-started URL in the Wayback Machine, we noticed something pretty interesting:

In 2015, their /get-started page also acted as their login page. When people were searching on Google for “[Company Name] login,” this page was ranking, bringing in a significant amount of organic traffic.

Their current setup sends logins to a subdomain that doesn’t have a GA code (as it’s strictly used as a portal to the actual application).

That helped explain some of the organic traffic loss, but knowing that this client had gone through a few website redesigns, I wanted to make sure that all redirects were done properly. Regardless of whether or not your traffic has changed, if you’ve recently done a website redesign where you’re changing URLs, it’s smart to look at your top organic landing pages from before the redesign and double check to make sure they’re redirecting to the correct pages.

While this helped explain some of the traffic loss, the next thing we looked at was the on-page metrics to see if we could spot any obvious tracking issues.

Comparing on-page engagement metrics

Looking at the keyword rankings and organic landing pages provided a little bit of insight into the organic traffic loss, but it was nothing definitive. Because of this, I moved to the on-page metrics for further clarity. As a disclaimer, when I talk about on-page metrics, I’m talking about bounce rate, page views, average page views per session, and time on site.

Looking at the same top organic pages, I compared the on-page engagement metrics.

2015 on-page metrics:

2016 on-page metrics:

2017 on-page metrics:

While the overall engagement metrics changed slightly, the biggest and most interesting discrepancy I saw was in the bounce rates for the home page and Get Started page.

According to a number of different studies (like this one, this one, or even this one), the average bounce rate for a B2B site is around 40–60%. Seeing the home page with a bounce rate under 20% was definitely a red flag.

This led me to look into some other metrics as well. I compared key metrics between 2015 and 2017, and was utterly confused by the findings:

Looking at the organic sessions (overall), we saw a decrease of around 80,000 sessions, or 27.93%.

Looking at the organic users (overall) we saw a similar number, with a decrease of around 38,000 users, or 25%.

When we looked at page views, however, we saw a much more drastic drop:

For the entire site, we saw a 50% decrease in pageviews, or a decrease of nearly 400,000 page views.

This didn’t make much sense, because even if we had those extra 38,000 users, and each user averaged roughly 2.49 pages per session (looking above), that would only account for, at most, 100,000 more page views. This left 300,000 page views unaccounted for.

This led me to believe that there was definitely some sort of tracking issue. The high number of page views and low bounce rate made me suspect that some users were being double counted.

However, to confirm these assumptions, I took a look at some external data sources.

Using SEMrush and Moz data to exclude user error

If you have a feeling that your tracking was messed up in previous years, a good way to confirm or deny this hypothesis is to check external sources like Moz and SEMrush.

Unfortunately, this particular client was fairly new, so as a result, their Moz campaign data wasn’t around during the high organic traffic times in 2015. However, if it was, a good place to start would be looking at the search visibility metric (as long as the primary keywords have stayed the same). If this metric has changed drastically over the years, it’s a good indicator that your organic rankings have slipped quite a bit.

Another good thing to look at is domain authority and core page authority. If your site has had a few redesigns, moved URLs, or anything like that, it’s important to make sure that the domain authority has carried over. It’s also important to look at the page authorities of your core pages. If these are much lower than when they were before the organic traffic slide, there’s a good chance your redirects weren’t done properly, and the page authority isn’t being carried over through those new domains.

If, like me, you don’t have Moz data that dates back far enough, a good thing to check is the organic traffic cost in SEMrush.

Organic traffic cost can change because of a few reasons:

1. Your site is ranking for more valuable keywords, making the organic traffic cost rise.
2. More competitors have entered the space, making the keywords you were ranking for more expensive to bid on.

Usually it’s a combination of both of these.

If our organic traffic really was steadily decreasing for the past 2 years, we’d likely see a similar trendline looking at our organic traffic cost. However, that’s not what we saw.

In March of 2015, the organic traffic cost of my client’s site was $14,300.

In March of 2016, the organic traffic cost was $22,200

In December of 2017, the organic traffic cost spiked all the way up to $69,200. According to SEMrush, we also saw increases in keywords and traffic.

Looking at all of this external data re-affirmed the assumption that something must have been off with our tracking.

However, as a final check, I went back to internal metrics to see if the conversion data had decreased at a similar rate as the organic traffic.

Analyzing and comparing conversion metrics

This seemed like a natural final step into uncovering the mystery in this traffic drop. After all, it’s not organic traffic that’s going to profit your business (although it’s a key component). The big revenue driver is goal completions and form fills.

This was a fairly simple procedure. I went into Google Analytics to compare goal completion numbers and goal completion conversion rates over the past three years.

If your company is like my client’s, there’s a good chance you’re taking advantage of the maximum 20 goal completions that can be simultaneously tracked in Analytics. However, to make things easier and more consistent (since goal completions can change), I looked at only buyer intent conversions. In this case it was Enterprise, Business, and Personal edition form fills, as well as Contact Us form fills.

If you’re doing this on your own site, I would recommend doing the same thing. Gated content goal completions usually have a natural shelf life, and this natural slowdown in goal completions can skew the data. I’d look at the most important conversion on your site (usually a contact us or a demo form) and go strictly off those numbers.

For my client, you can see those goal completion numbers below:

Goal completion name	2015	2016	2017
Contact Us	579	525	478
Individual Edition	3,372	2,621	3,420
Business Edition	1,147	1,437	1,473
Enterprise Edition	1,178	1,053	502
Total	6,276	5,636	5,873

Conversion rates:

Goal completion name	2015	2016	2017
Contact Us	0.22%	0.22%	0.23%
Individual Edition	1.30%	1.09%	1.83%
Business Edition	0.46%	0.60%	0.76%
Enterprise Edition	0.46%	0.44%	0.29%
Average	0.61%	0.58%	0.77%

This was pretty interesting. Although there was clearly fluctuation in the goal completions and conversion rates, there were no differences that made sense with our nearly 40,000 user drop from 2015 to 2016 to 2017.

All of these findings further confirmed that we were chasing an inaccurate goal. In fact, we spent the first three months working together to try and get back a 40% loss that, quite frankly, was never even there in the first place.

Tying everything together and final thoughts

For this particular case, we had to go down all five of these roads in order to reach the conclusion that we did: Our tracking was off in the past.

However, this may not be the case for your company or your clients. You may start by looking at keyword rankings, and realize that you’re no longer ranking on the first page for ten of your core keywords. If that’s the case, you quickly discovered your issue, and your game plan should be investing in your core pages to help get them ranking again for these core keywords.

If your goal completions are way down (by a similar percentage as your traffic), that’s also a good clue that your declining traffic numbers are correct.

If you’ve looked at all of these metrics and still can’t seem to figure out the reasoning for the decrease and you’re blindly trying tactics and struggling to crawl your way back up, this is a great checklist to go through to confirm the ominous question of tracking issue or optimization issue.

If you’re having a similar issue as me, I’m hoping this post helps you get to the root of the problem quickly, and gets you one step closer to create realistic organic traffic goals for the future!

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How to Optimize Your Marketing Resume Like an SEO Pro

What’s up with your marketing resume?

You’re a marketing wizard. You know what users want better than they do. You speak their language and take copy from meh to wow.

Yet your marketing resume doesn’t show that. How come?

You’re so good at your job you could sell links to Google. But once you start typing your resume, you turn from Rick to Morty.

Trust me, you already know everything there is to know about writing the perfect marketing resume.

I’ll prove it to you in 5 minutes.

Keywords, Bots, and Search Intent

So you’ve found a marketing job you love. You know more than enough to get it, but not enough to bore yourself dead once you’re hired.

Just submit your resume and wait!

Well, that’s what many a marketer would do anyway.

But not you—you know that your resume will be scanned first by an ATS, or applicant tracking system. You need to get through that first ATS hurdle before a human ever sees your marketing resume. Here’s how.

1. Create a spreadsheet of all the skills and qualifications you possess.

To save time, create a really extensive master resume. Like seriously long. A never-ending scroll page, really. You won’t ever send it out, you’ll simply customize it for every application.

2. Reread the job ad.

You’re the job search Moses and you just got handed Stone Tables.

The job ad is like a keyword package handed down from the Almighty. Extract the most important keywords. These are usually marketing skills, requirements for experience or background. (You don’t need to be an SEO researcher to get this right!)

3. Compare your master list with the keywords.

Yes, we’re working on your resume content–keyword map.

Resume keywords matter a whole lot. Much like Google in its early days, Applicant Tracking Systems crawl resumes in search for specific keywords. There’s no guesswork—these are exactly the keywords you extracted from the job posting.

Now, about those bots—

The more relevant keywords they find, the better you rank. Don’t worry if you miss a few, though. Most ATSs will OK resumes as long as they score high enough (i.e., contain at least 75–80% or the crucial keywords.)

If you don’t meet most expectations, you’ll get rejected. But don’t treat this as an invitation to keyword-stuff your resume. In the end, it’s going to be read by a human. If you try to game the system, they’ll see through it—32% of them will desk reject your resume.

Be honest with yourself: If you don’t meet the employer’s requirements, you aren’t going to pass the ATS.

And if your resume does make its way to the human reader, it’s not going to answer their search intent. That means a 100% bounce rate. No conversions for you!

4. Understand search intent.

Figuring out search intent is rather straightforward. The job listing tells thou what thou shall—in bullet points. Verbatim.

If the job posting mentions a requirement you don’t meet, come up with a similar strength you could offer. Have a look at similar job postings (the good ol’ people-also-search-for hack.)

Plus, go through a few Linkedin profiles of people in this position (i.e., research your competitors.)

5. Target search intent and personalize your outreach campaign.

Would you suggest people buy a black chopper if they came to your site looking for a silver Vespa?

Unlikely.

Listen, I understand you could sell pasta to a Crossfitter doing keto. But would you really like to work for someone who fell for a resume equivalent of the Nigerian prince scam?

Don’t email-blast your cookie-cutter application to everyone. Instead, target your resume for a specific job offer. To be precise, you need to customize it to the employer’s needs as expressed in the ad.

If you don’t, 36% of recruiters are adamant about this: they will auto-reject your application if the resume doesn’t feel customized.

Remember that master resume file I suggested you set up?

Time to let it do its magic.

Come back to the keyword list you extracted from the job ad. Start trimming your resume and leave off fluff that doesn’t address the employer’s search intent. Get some good keyword density.

Again, don’t overfit your model!

Simply remove non-relevant entries, tweak the wording to better reflect the employer’s intent. Focus on your work experience section.

Use bullet points to prove you can do what the new job requires of you when talking about previous jobs.

If you don’t meet a certain requirement, mention a close alternative. Don’t worry too much about details. If the job listing requires candidates to have 5 years’ experience in content editing, your 4 years of experience don’t have to be a dealbreaker. Never used Trello, but you used Asana? Close enough.

Optimization: Content, Copy, and Design.

Recruiters only spend 6 seconds scanning a resume. Can’t find what they’re looking for? Bounce.

You need to keep the bounce rate down. Here’s how to get them hooked and prevent them from going alt + F4 on your resume:

1. Optimize your above-the-fold real estate.

Enter eye-trackers and heat maps. You know how this goes on websites, so you’ll understand what I’m about to explain:

First, recruiters look at is the header. They’ll double-check they’ve got the right resume first, and move on to scanning the headings.

Next, they’ll focus on the most recent position and company. They’ll check the date to make sure it’s not suspicious. Rinse and repeat for older positions.

Finally, they’ll move on to the education section. Everything in the familiar F pattern.

So how to optimize the top third of your resume?

Create a professional career summary. It’s your one-minute elevator pitch that answers the most common of all interview questions: Tell me about yourself.

You’ll make the most of this section if you first get the rest of your resume in tip-top shape. Once you are clear on the search intent and have relevant skills and accomplishments, put this knowledge to use in the heading section.

What’s the pattern? Position + years of experience + quantified achievement. For example:

Digital marketer with 5 years of experience in content marketing. Boosted organic traffic for PaperClipMaximizer.com by an average of 300% by improving content marketing strategy…

2. Optimize the UX and usability of your resume.

Here’s a comparison of resume formats.

TL;DR—

The functional resume format is to an ATS in 2018 what Flash was to Google in 2005. It hides all the goodies from the bots.

Tortured comparison, sure, but the bottom line is: the functional resume format is dysfunctional.

The combination resume format might work for some; for most, it’s best to forget about fancy formatting.

Go with the most intuitive resume layout: chronological (well, technically it’s reverse-chronological.)

The classic chronological resume format is readable, scannable, and makes for the perfect reader’s journey. It’s intuitive because it starts with your most recent and relevant job.

It the perfect storytelling device. It lets the reader understand how this hero went from zero.

What’s more, it provides the reader with a hierarchical overview of your candidacy. According to the Jobvite Recruiter Nation Report 2016, employers value job experience above all else and with this format, you’ll serve it on a silver platter.

3. Boost your resume readability.

Use power words and action verbs. No more responsible for this, managed that. That’s weak copy. Start each bullet with a different verb: created, oversaw, introduced.

Know what will get recruiters really excited? Reduced, increased, saved, won.

Scan your resume with readability tools like readable.io, hit F7 in your word processor, and double-check with Grammarly. Typos are deal breakers for 58% of recruiters.

According to another study, typos are a greater turn-off than college prestige is a turn-on.

Pro Tip: Easy with buzzwords and obscure job titles! No more social media ninjas, marketing gurus or thought leaders. If you truly were a “results-driven best of breed go-to go-getter with a proven track-record who proactively thinks outside the box about synergy,” you wouldn’t have to put it in writing. The experience section would deliver (and drop the mic.)

4. Do solid on-resume ATS optimization.

You need to sprinkle resume keywords throughout your resume: two or three main keywords you’re optimizing for should show up in your resume summary, and all of the most important ones should show up in the experience section and be repeated in the skills section.

You can include a few extra skills in the skills section, but bear in mind that if you list too many, it will make the reader roll their eyes in disbelief or sigh at your lack of specificity.

And no, the skill section is not “so 1999.” A third of all employers get annoyed when it’s missing. It doubles as a convenient checklist, after all.

Sure, ATS scanners aren’t that smart yet, but some can tell when you over-optimize or do blackhat resume optimization (no white text on a white background and separate pages with keywords.)

Finally, use Jobscan’s ATS testing tool to make sure ATS crawlers will index your resume and give it a high rank.

5. Talk about benefits, not features.

When you list relevant jobs, make sure you talk about benefits, not features. And when I say benefits I mean it. Literally—

The Problem, Action, Result method works wonders. The basic scheme is Reduced X by 50% by implementing Y.

Here’s an example of the PAR method in action:

Reduced advertising costs 68% by targeting long-tail keyword variants and optimizing audience targeting on Facebook.

In other words: don’t list responsibilities, talk about achievements. Employers know what you did, they want to know how well you did it.

Also, quantify whenever possible. Numbers speak louder than words (louder even than words in ALL CAPS.)

Test: Focus Group, Feedback, and Rewrites.

You’re almost there. Your marketing resume is already better than 200 other resumes. Time to beat the remaining 49, and rank number one.

Ask a few friends and industry insiders to read your resume. If they’re honest, they’ll tell you if it’s confusing, boring, too long, too short, not enough, too much…You know how it goes.

Get feedback, revisit your resume every now and again, and soon you’ll have a resume that would make Ogilvy want to intern with you.

The Finishing Touch.

Cover letters aren’t dead. And if they are, they’re still walking.

You need to write a cover letter even if there is no guarantee anyone will read it.

Why?

It’s hard to tell if you’re contacting a company that doesn’t care for cover letters. Plus, even if recruiters are unlikely to read it, hiring managers might just do it. This is especially true for employers in smaller businesses.

Why the hate? Because most cover letters are terrible. No one wants to waste time on generic Dear Hiring Manager letters. They all read like really long “plz hire” notes.

Do you want to play employment Russian roulette with two or three bullets in your six shooter?

That’s what I thought.

Plus, you’re a marketer. You do copy for a living. Surely you can write a cover letter that lands you in that brand-new ergonomic chair at Dream Company, Inc.!

Done.

Well, here you are: a marketer with a resume so good Moz could do a Whiteboard Friday about it:

• You figured out what the prospective employer wants.
• Learned how to speak their language.
• Made sure you’re not unintentionally watering down your 190 proof resume.
• And, finally, you’re marketing resume is user- and bot-friendly.

When can we expect some new-hire swag from you?

Want to learn a few more resume-related hacks? Give us a shout out in the comments!

About the author

Bart Turczynski. Career expert. Content editor. Proper noun. His career advice has been published by Workopolis, HuffPost, CareerBuilder, and the Financial Times. Bart enjoys binging on podcasts, audio books, Netflix, and ramen. Pun always intended.

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The #1 Reason Paid Ads (On Search, Social, and Display) Fail – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Pouring money into a paid ad campaign that’s destined to fail isn’t a sound growth strategy. Time and again, companies breaking into online ads don’t see success due to the same issue: they aren’t known to their audiences. There’s no trust, no recognition, and so the cost per click remains high and rising.

In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand identifies the cycle many brands get trapped in and outlines a solution to make those paid ad campaigns worth the dollars you put behind them.

https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/x2x7sd5t31?seo=false&videoFoam=true

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about the number one reason so many paid ad campaigns, especially from new companies and companies with new products or new ventures that they’re going into, new markets and audiences they’re addressing, fail. They just fall apart. I see this scenario play out so many times, especially in the startup and entrepreneurial world but, to be honest, across the marketing landscape.

Here’s how it usually goes. You’ve got your CEO or your CMO or your business owner and they’re like, “Hey, we have this great new product. Let’s spread the word.” So they talk to a marketer. It could be a contractor. It could be an agency. It could be someone in-house.

The marketer is like, “Okay, yeah, I’ll buy some ads online, help us get the word out there and get us some traffic and conversions.”

Then a few months later, you basically get this. “How’s that paid ad campaign going?” “Well, not so good. I have bad news.”

The cycle

Almost always, this is the result of a cycle that looks like this. You have a new company’s campaign. The campaign is to sell something or get exposure for something, to try and drive visits back to a web page or a website, several pages on the site and then get conversions out of it. So you buy Facebook ads, Instagram ads, maybe LinkedIn and Twitter. You probably use the Google Display Network. You’re probably using AdWords. All of these sources are trying to drive traffic to your web page and then get a conversion that turns into money.

Now, what happens is that these get a high cost per click. They start out with a high cost per click because it’s a new campaign. So none of these platforms have experience with your campaign or your company. So you’re naturally going to get a higher-than-normal cost per click until you prove to them that you get high engagement, at which point they bring the cost per click down. But instead of proving to them you get high engagement, you end up getting low engagement, low click-through rate, low conversion rate. People don’t make it here. They don’t make it there. Why is that?

Why does this happen?

Well, before we address that, let’s talk about what happens here. When these are low, when you have a low engagement rate on the platform itself, when no one engages with your Facebook ads, no one engages with your Instagram ads, when no one clicks on your AdWords ad, when no one clicks on your display ads, the cost to show to more people goes up, and, as a result, these campaigns are much harder to make profitable and they’re shown to far fewer people.

So your exposure to the audience you want to reach is smaller and the cost to reach each next person and to drive each next action goes up. This, fundamentally, is because…

• The audience that you’re trying to reach hasn’t heard of you before. They don’t know who you are.
• They don’t know, trust, or like you or your company product, they don’t click. They don’t click. They don’t buy. They don’t share. They don’t like.

They don’t do all the engagement things that would drive this high cost per click down, and, because of that, your campaigns suffer and struggle.

I see so many marketers who think like this, who say yes to new company campaigns that start with an advertising-first approach. I want to be clear, there are some exceptions to the rule. I have seen some brand new companies that fit a certain mold do very well with Instagram advertising for certain types of products that appeal to that audience and don’t need a previously existing brand association. I’ve seen some players in the Google AdWords market do okay with this, some local businesses, some folks in areas where people don’t expect to have knowledge and awareness of a brand already in the space where they’re trying to discover them.

So it’s not the case always that this fails, but very often, often enough that I’m calling this the number one reason I see paid ads fail.

The solution

There’s only one solution and it’s not pretty. The solution is…

You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.

Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.

Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.

The second option is to…

Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.

The way you can do this is through systems like Google’s retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.

But if you don’t do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don’t want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You’re going to be a lot happier.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your comments. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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10 Ways Voice Assistants Are Changing Marketing

Voice technology was everywhere at CES this year – toilets included – which means we are undoubtedly in an era dominated by voice assistants. This, in turn, means the way consumers perform even the most mundane day-to-day tasks is changing.

And, as a result, the way brands and marketers interact with said consumers is changing, too. The time respond to this technology is now.

Here’s a closer look at ten ways voice assistants are impacting marketing strategy.

1. Voice assistants are emphasizing the Featured Snippet.

The most obvious change in marketing as a result of voice assistants is the emphasis on featured snippets.

In other words, voice assistants like Google Assistant frequently pull answers to voice queries from sites that are ranked in position zero for given queries, thus making getting a featured snippet a popular optimization tip for voice search. And, coincidentally, Danny Sullivan, former chief content officer at Search Engine Land publisher Third Door Media and current public liaison for search at Google, just published a blog post “reintroducing” featured snippets, including an explanation of what they are, as well as how Google is working to improve them.

“Conventional SEO strategies are predominantly focused on the way users perform text searches,” said Tom Caulton, digital marketing executive and SEO consultant at digital marketing firm Dijitul. “It’s predicted that by 2020, 50% of all searches are to be voice initiated. Therefore, it’s now more important than ever to optimize your website for the different types of searches.”

2. Voice assistants are yielding more web traffic.

In addition, Matt Jones, SEO executive at online tutor platform Tutorful, said Google Assistant will now tell users they can open the Google Home app to see more at the end of a verbal answer.

“So not only are you raising brand awareness through the initial answer, Google is now directing users to head to the app and navigate to your website to read more,” he said. “As time goes on, this will become more and more common with more users navigating to websites – meaning you’ll get more traffic coming through to your site from voice assistants. It’s also worth noting that these users have fairly high intent.”

3. Voice assistants are resulting in better content – and better stories.

As voice search has yielded longer queries with more natural language, voice assistants are changing the way marketers tell stories.

“The first thing that comes to mind when I think of how voice assistants are changing marketing is the Alexa Super Bowl ad,” said Anna Crowe, product marketing manager at Search Engine Journal. “In the closing moments of the ad, [she says], ‘Thanks, I’ve got this.’ This is Amazon telling us they’ve got our back. Alexa has it. They are taking care of things in the background that we don’t have time to think about.”

Voice assistants have also been pushing brands to create new kinds of content.

For his part, Justin Shaw, managing director of One & Zero digital marketing agency, pointed to the Ask Purina Alexa skill through which dog owners can ask Alexa questions about their pets, enabling Purina to be an authority in the space on a broad spectrum of dog-related information, which, in turn, builds trust and mindshare.

“For brands to get their message across they need to think about their customer experience, both in how their audience engages with content, but also the ways in which their products can integrate with AI from a technological standpoint,” he added.

Steve Pritchard, search content manager at mobile network giffgaff, agreed voice assistants are driving diversity and variety in marketing.

“In order to keep up, marketers need to revise their communication production process to make sure they can deliver a variety of content across a broader range of channels,” he added.

4. Voice assistants are driving new forms of advertising.

And, naturally, voice assistants have prompted advertisers to think about how they can capitalize in new ways.

Robb Hecht, adjunct marketing professor at Baruch College, called voice assistants “the true first interactive tool in the home that provides brands the capability to dynamically offer up ads in the future that could be user controlled.”

Via Chatbots Magazine

In other words, he said, “Today, Alexa and Google Home don’t offer much advertising outside of allowing brands to build content and sponsor skills or apps within Alexa. Skills are functions that allow Alexa to react to a customer’s audio commands.”

But, he added, that may soon change if Amazon allows brands to sponsor skills directly.

“In the future, we can imagine ‘pick your story’-type advertising,” he said. “So, for example, if Ford wanted to advertise on Alexa, they might do so within a skill about ‘how to buy a new car.’ As the user answers various questions, Alexa responds with differing answers or information choices, based on how the user responds.”

5. Voice assistants are enhancing personalization.

But voice assistants also offer the potential for far more personalization for individual consumers.

Per Tyler Riddell, vice president of marketing for eSUB Construction Software, the specificity of a voice search helps give details about a user’s context, which yields a more personalized result.

Via WCSA

In addition, both Google Assistant and Alexa can recognize individual voices, offering catered results for things like messaging, briefings, shopping and music.

And Pete Meyers, marketing scientist at SEO software firm Moz, said Google has been pushing toward individual voice print identification on all of its devices, which has even more implications for personalization, like using someone’s voice to access their own settings, search history, etc., just as logged-in search normally does. But, he said, it’s still early.

“Unlike a computer or phone, where profile switching takes a couple of steps, this would be automatic,” he said. “I could ask for something like, ‘My flights,’ and my wife could turn around and ask the same question ten seconds later and get an entirely different answer.”

Meyers said there’s also been talk about factors like a user’s accent or emotional tone triggering different results from a voice assistant, but, he said, “that’s longer-term and there are a lot of potential issues to overcome.”

6. Voice assistants are yielding more insights.

The ability to distinguish voices and manage account profiles also means marketers will have more insights into multiple users in a single household who make different purchase decisions, have different brand preferences, wish lists, music playlists and other personalized characteristics, said Miné Salkin, digital marketing manager at Absolute Marketing Solutions.

7. Voice assistants are better enabling retention.

For his part, Marty Weintraub, founder of Aimclear marketing agency, said it’s fabulous for marketers to have the ability to inject retention and up-sell brand messaging with assistant information design to enhance customer service.

“At the heart of all assistants is a flow chart, a diagram, if this then that, so the system knows where to go next,” he said. “That sort of system has been around forever – think airline or hotel systems on the phone. With AI and machine learning, the system can learn and skew assistant verbiage towards effectively applied flow. Online assistants may learn more easily than fixed systems.”

As a result, brands can weave retention and up-sell into the assistant’s flow.

“For example, as users zero in on the hotel room they seek, know to test the up-sell interjection after the user enters a credit card with which the hotel has a partnership, saying, ‘a $57 upgrade gets you 7X credit card points, say yes to take the offer or no to complete booking,’” he said. “There is little friction. It’s great branding for the credit card partner and the user might feel special.”

Weintraub also pointed to user data, which can help refine assistant verbiage.

In other words, when the assistant knows the user is close to re-upping a cell phone contract, the assistant can offer the user a free month to do it now. And if the assistant knows the user has been checking out Samsung phones, but has been a long-time iPhone user, the assistant knows to echo the existing online offer or sweeten the pot.

“The key here is the ability to gather data and business intelligence. Assistants can monitor market conditions, meaning competitive intelligence,” Weintraub said. “Marketing is the same as it ever was: We communicate by design, testing timing, words used, etc. Dream what you wish your assistant can know and apply creativity to solving marketing challenges with clever marketing flow. After all, assistants are a UI, not a strategy.”

8. Voice assistants are pushing products in new ways and enabling new experiences.

According to Anna Lebedeva, head of media relations at SEO tool SEMrush, one of the greatest ways voice assistants are disrupting marketing is the way they can push companies and products to customers.

Take Domino’s Pizza, for example.

“Prior to the Super Bowl of 2016, they synced with Amazon’s Alexa to promote voice-enabled pizza orders. And they justly got big buzz out of it,” she said. “But what was different is the positioning of that move – they promoted the idea of having no need to actually do anything to order a pizza – you can simply lie on your couch watching the Super Bowl, give Alexa a command and receive your pizza from the nearest Domino’s. Isn’t that impressive?”

And that, in turn, created a new experience.

“Locally focused advertisers can learn a great deal from the way Domino’s employed voice assistants in its brand positioning – it simply pointed out that no one needs distractions on Super Bowl Sunday, so logging in to an app, or, worse, switching on your laptop or making a phone call to order a pizza delivery is so 2015,” she added. “In 2016, you can do it all with your voice – just as when you’d ask your mother for an ice cream and it would be right there with you without any extra effort. That’s what the new wave of marketing looks like: marketing for the sake of human comfort without any additional push.”

Nikki Lam, SEO account manager at Power Digital Marketing, noted the rise of voice assistants is a reinforcement of something digital marketers have known for a while: Consumers want everything as quickly and easily as possible without sacrificing quality.

“Whether it’s restocking their laundry detergent, finding healthy recipes, or comparing pricing on shoes, consumers are favoring brands that nail speed, convenience and quality experiences,” she said.

Brett Downes, SEO manager at digital marketing agency Traffic Jam Media, agreed voice assistants should soon have the ability to integrate with a user’s favorite brands so they won’t need to sign into a specific app/website each time, but can rather access brands with simple commands, like, “What’s my bank balance?” for a bank app, “When’s the next train to London?” for Google Maps, and “I’m hungry” for Just Eat.

“This simplifies and increases the efficiency of queries and objectives,” he said.

Lam pointed to brands like PayPal, Patron and, yes, Domino’s, as good examples.

“PayPal customers can send money with a simple, ‘Hey Siri, send Sam $20 using PayPal.’ Patron’s Bot-Tender offers consumers personalized cocktail recipes from bartenders via Amazon Echo and Domino’s customers enable the brand’s Alexa skill, they can order their favorite pizza on Echo without lifting a finger – or their butt from the couch,” she said. “A virtual door has opened, allowing brands to interact with consumers in endless ways on more platforms. These voice interactions are molding branding into a set of interactive experiences that consumers are happily opting into.”

9. Voice assistants are emphasizing conversation.

Because voice assistants have names like Alexa, Siri and Cortana – and related personalities – interaction with them is much more conversational.

“With their conversational UI, voice assistants are embracing humanity into technology, with customers communicating with these gadgets like a friend, not a machine/computer,” Downes said. “Brands are able to connect with a wider demographic, especially children and seniors.”

Through third-party skills, Purna Virji, senior manager or global engagement at Microsoft, said brands can reach their customers in more natural and compelling ways. And, thanks to skills suggestions, she said Cortana can understand a much wider range of topics and recommend the right skills for users.

“You don’t need to remember the name of every skill she has – just tell her what you want to do and she will suggest three or more relevant skills that can help you,” Virji added.

And, noted Beerud Sheth, CEO of AI and bot developer Gupshup, conversations are proving to drive conversions.

“A rich, engaging, meaningful conversation catered to the user’s needs is more likely to convert to transaction or, at the very least, identify a lead,” he said. “Conversations offer brands a chance to fully understand customer requirements and to position their products just right. Just like in offline retail where a good shopping assistant can convert customers and upsell or cross-sell products, while an overly aggressive salesperson will likely drive customers away. Whether your brand appears to be a friendly shopping assistant or a used-car salesman will now determine your conversion rate.”

10. Voice assistants are underscoring the importance of editorial.

And, at the end of the day, advancements in voice assistants and related content increases demand for writers and editors.

“With the rise of Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Homepod and Google Assistant, your content not only has to be written well, without any grammar and spelling errors, but it has to read well, too,” said Stan Tan, digital marketing specialist at sign company Selby’s.

Everyone needs editors

Has the rise of voice assistants changed how you think about marketing yet? It will!

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How to Diagnose SEO Traffic Drops: 11 Questions to Answer

Posted by Daniel_Marks

Almost every consultant or in-house SEO will be asked at some point to investigate an organic traffic drop. I’ve investigated quite a few, so I thought I’d share some steps I’ve found helpful when doing so.

Is it just normal noise?

Before you sound the alarm and get lost down a rabbit hole, you should make sure that the drop you’re seeing is actually real. This involves answering two questions:

A.) Do you trust the data?

This might seem trivial, but at least a quarter of the traffic drops I’ve seen were simply due to data problems.

The best way to check on this is to sense-check other metrics that might be impacted by data problems. Does anything else look funky? If you have a data engineering team, are they aware of any data issues? Are you flat-out missing data for certain days or page types or devices, etc.? Thankfully, data problems will usually make themselves pretty obvious once you start turning over a few rocks.

One of the more common sources of data issues is simply missing data for a day.

B.) Is this just normal variance?

Metrics go up and down all the time for no discernible reason. One way to quantify this is to use your historical standard deviation for SEO traffic.

For example, you could plot your weekly SEO traffic for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation (using the STDEV function on Google Sheets or Excel makes this very easy) to figure out if a drop in weekly traffic is abnormal. You’d expect about 16% of weeks to be one standard deviation below your weekly average just by sheer luck. You could therefore set a one-standard-deviation threshold before investigating traffic drops, for example (but you should adjust this threshold to whatever is appropriate for your business). You can also look at the standard deviation for your year-over-year or week-over-week SEO traffic if that’s where you’re seeing the drop (i.e. plot your % change in YoY SEO traffic by week for the past 12 months and calculate the standard deviation).

SEO traffic is usually pretty noisy, especially on a short time frame like a week.

Let’s assume you’ve decided this is indeed a real traffic drop. Now what? I’d recommend trying to answer the eleven questions below, at least one of them will usually identify the culprit.

Questions to ask yourself when facing an organic traffic drop

1. Was there a recent Google algorithm update?

MozCast, Search Engine Land, and Moz’s algorithm history are all good resources here.

Expedia seems to have been penalized by a Penguin-related update.

If there was an algorithm update, do you have any reason to suspect you’d be impacted? It can sometimes be difficult to understand the exact nature of a Google update, but it’s worth tracking down any information you can to make sure your site isn’t at risk of being hit.

2. Is the drop specific to any segment?

One of the more useful practices whenever you’re looking at aggregated data (such as a site’s overall search traffic) is to segment the data until you find something interesting. In this case, we’d be looking for a segment that has dropped in traffic much more than any other. This is often the first step in tracking down the root cause of the issue. The two segments I’ve found most useful in diagnosing SEO traffic drops specifically:

• Device type (mobile vs. desktop vs. tablet)
• Page type (product pages vs. category pages vs. blog posts vs. homepage etc.)

But there will likely be plenty of other segments that might make sense to look at for your business (for example, product category).

3. Are you being penalized?

This is unlikely, but it’s also usually pretty quick to disprove. Look at Search Console for any messages related to penalties and search for your brand name on Google. If you’re not showing up, then you might be penalized.

Rap Genius (now Genius) was penalized for their link building tactics and didn’t show up for their own brand name on Google.

4. Did the drop coincide with a major site change?

This can take a thousand different forms (did you migrate a bunch of URLs, move to a different JavaScript framework, update all your title tags, remove your navigation menu, etc?). If this is the case, and you have a reasonable hypothesis for how this could impact SEO traffic, you might have found your culprit.

Hulu.com saw a pretty big drop in SEO traffic after changing their JavaScript framework.

5. Did you lose ranking share to a competitor?

There are a bunch of tools that can tell you if you’ve lost rankings to a competitor:

• BrightEdge’s Share of Voice
• GetStat’s Share of Voice
• SEMrush’s Rankings Distribution Report

If you’ve lost rankings, it’s worth investigating the specific keywords that you’ve lost and figuring out if there’s a trend. Did your competitors launch a new page type? Did they add content to their pages? Do they have more internal links pointing to these pages than you do?

GetStat’s Share of Voice report lets you quickly see whether a competitor is usurping your rankings

It could also just be a new competitor that’s entered the scene.

6. Did it coincide with a rise in direct or dark traffic?

If so, make sure you haven’t changed how you’re classifying this traffic on your end. Otherwise, you might simply be re-classifying organic traffic as direct or dark traffic.

7. Has there been a change to the search engine results pages you care about?

You can either use Moz’s SERP features report, or manually look at the SERPs you care about to figure out if their design has materially changed. It’s possible that Google is now answering many of your relevant queries directly in search results, put an image carousel on them, added a local pack, etc. — all of which would likely decrease your organic search traffic.

Celebritynetworth.com lost most of its SEO traffic because of rich snippets like the one above.

8. Is the drop specific to branded or unbranded traffic?

If you have historical Search Console data, you can look at number of branded clicks vs. unbranded clicks over time. You could also look at this data through AdWords if you spend on paid search. Another simple proxy to branded traffic is homepage traffic (for most sites, the majority of homepage traffic will be branded). If the drop is specific to branded search then it’s probably a brand problem, not an SEO problem.

9. Did a bunch of pages drop out of the index?

Search Console’s Index Status Report will make it clear if you suddenly have way fewer URLs being indexed. If this is the case, you might be accidentally disallowing or noindexing URLs (through robots.txt, meta tags on the page, or HTTP headers).

Search Console’s Index Status Report is a quick way to make sure you’re not accidentally noindexing or disallowing large portions of your site.

10. Did your number of referring domains and/or links drop?

It’s possible that a large number of your backlinks have been removed or are no longer accessible for whatever reason.

Ahrefs can be a quick way to determine if you’ve lost backlinks and also offers very handy reports for your lost backlinks or referring domains that will allow you to identify why you might have lost these links.

A sudden drop in backlinks could be the reason you’re seeing a traffic drop.

11. Is SEM cannibalizing SEO traffic?

It’s possible that your paid search team has recently ramped up their spend and that this is eating into your SEO traffic. You should be able to check on this pretty quickly by plotting your SEM vs. SEO traffic. If it’s not obvious after doing this whether it’s a factor, then it can be worth pausing your SEM campaigns for specific landing pages and seeing if SEO traffic rebounds for those pages.

To be clear, some level of cannibalization between SEM and SEO is inevitable, but it’s still worth understanding how much of your traffic is being cannibalized and whether the incremental clicks your SEM campaigns are driving outweigh the loss in SEO traffic (in my experience they usually do outweigh the loss in SEO traffic, but still worth checking!).

If your SEM vs. SEO traffic graph looks similar to the (slightly extreme) one above, then SEM campaigns might be cannibalizing your SEO traffic.

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That’s all I’ve got — hopefully at least one of these questions will lead you to the root cause of an organic search traffic drop. Are there any other questions that you’ve found particularly helpful for diagnosing traffic drops? Let me know in the comments.

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