Month: July 2019

Categories
SEO

How to Rank Your Old Content

Do you know what percentage of your search traffic comes from your top 10 pages? When’s the last time you looked? Chances are, it’s a pretty big part of your total monthly website traffic.  The older your website is and the more content it has on it, the less those 10 pages tend to account for a larger portion of your traffic.

Generally, with smaller sites, the percentages are much higher where the top 10 pages make up the majority of their search traffic simply because there isn’t that much material available on the website. Does that mean you should just focus on your top 10 pages and ignore the rest, or should you focus just on generating more new content?

Quality Matters Over Quantity

Many people seem to believe that when it comes to web content, the philosophy of more is better applies. There are people who crank out dozens of articles every week and sometimes publish more than one article a day on their blog. And over time, they see their traffic grow, but not by much. They spend all of this time writing just to realize the majority of the content they publish never even ranked. So what should you do in this situation?

Begin focusing on your old and outdated content to boost your traffic. Consider this. You can publish one new piece of content a week to keep things fresh, but your team can update older articles as you work on new content.

When you write more frequently, your top 10 pages will typically make up a larger portion of your search traffic. By updating your older content, you can increase your search traffic exponentially and reduce your reliance on your top 10 pages.

Start with the Google Search Console

In the Google Search Console, you have access to data for up to 16 months. Compare this month’s results to the same period as last year. Click on date and then compare. Next, choose your older date first and then today’s date.

Look for Pages That Used to Get a Lot of Traffic

On the generated report, look for articles that used to get a lot of traffic but have less now.  This way, you’ll see old content that Google used to love but no longer pays attention to.

Look for Pages That Never Got a Lot of Traffic

After we’ve located those, it’s time to find content on your site that Google has never loved. Go back into the search console and look for pages that have a high impression count but never got any real clicks. The easiest way to find these pages is to choose a date range in the last month and look at each page  metric from an impression, click, and click through rate perspective. Sort the click through rate column in descending order so the lowest percentage is at the top and the highest person is just at the bottom.

Generally, the pages  at the top of the list have the most potential because it means Google is ranking you but you  just aren’t getting enough clicks. Most of the time, it isn’t just related to your title tag and meta description and has to do with the content on the pages.

With this information, it’s time to create a list of pages that have the greatest potential.

Prioritize Your Content Updates

Most often, the pages that have the highest potential are ones that used to rank but no longer do so. Google used to rank in like them which means that if you give those pages a bit of TLC, you can easily get Google to love them again.

The second group of pages may have potential but not as much as the first. These are the ones that have a high impression count but a low click through rate. These pages are more difficult to fix because they never really performed well.

Start Updating Old Content

Find the first article you want to update in your Google Search Console, and click on it. Then, click on “Queries.” If you see keywords that don’t rank in the top five or have a high impression value, go to your ranking article and check to make sure it is relevant to that term.

If it’s not, edit the article so that it at least includes that term and covers the topic.

For terms where you’re already ranking in the top 5 spots, use a keyword tool to get more keyword ideas. You should see long-tail variations of the keyword, so you can edit the article to include any of the long-tail phrases, you should see some quick gains in traffic.

Beyond including the right keywords, update the content to make sure all of the information is relevant, the photos are current and if you could include any kind of multimedia such as embedding relevant YouTube videos. This will help you increase the time on site of your visitors.

User Experience

Because user behavior is one of the biggest influencing factors with Google’s algorithm, you’ll need to optimize your newly updated content for these are signals to help boost its rankings. Takes time to optimize your title tags and meta description.

Why? If everyone searched keyword on Google and clicked on the second result instead of the first, Google eventually learns that the second result is more relevant and it should be ranking in the first spot rather than the second. Eventually, Google would change the ranking of the two sites.

By using persuasive copy and convincing people to click on your search listing rather than the competition, you’ll see your rankings climb.

Promote your content again because you’ve updated it and optimized it. Once you’ve updated the content, update the published date or the last updated date within your WordPress platform to signal to readers and the search engines that your content is changed, up-to-date, and more relevant. Share it on social media to get it circulating again and traffic will start coming in.

Build Links

Links are an important part of the ranking equation. You should create a new strategy or continue working on your old one to build more links to the newly updated content.

Once your website has 150 pages or more, consider focusing the majority of your time and effort on updating old content instead of creating new content.

If you have more than 1,000 pages, spends at least 80% of your time updating old content rather than writing new content.

The key to getting that old outdated content ranking again is a focus on the content that used to rank but doesn’t anymore.

Categories
SEO

No More Support for Robots.txt Noindex

Google has officially announced that GoogleBot will no longer obey robots.txt directives related to indexing. If you are a publisher relying on robots.txt and no index directives, you have until September 1st 2019 to remove it and start using an alternative.

Why the Change?

Google will no longer support the directive because it’s not an official one. In the past, they have supported the directive but this will no longer be the case. This is a good time to take a look at your robots.txt  file to see where you’re using the directive and what you can do to prepare yourself when support officially ends.

Google Mostly Obeyed the Directive in the Past

As far back as 2008, Google has somewhat supported this directive. Both Matt Cutts and John Mueller have discussed this. In 2015, Perficient Digital decided to run a test to see how well Google obeyed the command. They concluded:

“Ultimately, the NoIndex directive in Robots.txt is pretty effective. It worked in 11 out of 12 cases we tested. It might work for your site, and because of how it’s implemented it gives you a path to prevent crawling of a page AND also have it removed from the index. That’s pretty useful in concept. However, our tests didn’t show 100 percent success, so it does not always work.

Further, bear in mind, even if you block a page from crawling AND use Robots.txt to NoIndex it, that page can still accumulate PageRank (or link juice if you prefer that term).

In addition, don’t forget what John Mueller said, which was that you should not depend on this approach. Google may remove this functionality at some point in the future, and the official status for the feature is ‘unsupported.’”

With the announcement from Google that noindex robots.txt is no longer supported, you cannot expect it to work.

The official tweet reads: “Today we’re saying goodbye to undocumented and unsupported rules in robots.txt. If you were relying on these rules, learn about your options in our blog post.”

In that blog post, they went on to say: “In the interest of maintaining a healthy ecosystem and preparing for potential future open source releases, we’re retiring all code that handles unsupported and unpublished rules (such as noindex) on September 1, 2019.”

What to Use Instead

Instead of using noindex in the robots.txt file, you can use noindex in robots meta tags.  This is supported in both the HTTP response headers and in HTML making it the most effective way to remove URLs from the index when crawling is allowed.

Other options include:

  • Using 404 and 410 HTTP status codes: Both of these status codes mean the page does not exist which will drop the URLs from the Google index once they are crawled and processed.
  • Disallow in robots.txt: Search engines are only able to index pages they know about so blocking a page from being crawled typically means it won’t be indexed. A search engine may also index URLs based on links from other pages without seeing the content itself so  Google says they aim to make those pages less visible in the future.
  • Password protection: Unless you use markup to indicate paywalled or subscription-based content, hiding a page behind a login generally removes it from Google’s index.
  • Search Console Remove URL tool: Use this tool to quickly and easily remove the URL from the Google search results temporarily.

Other Changes to Consider

All of this comes on the heels of an announcement that Google is working on making the robots exclusion protocol a standard and this is likely the first change that’s coming. Google released its robots.txt parser as an open source project alongside this announcement.

Google has been looking to change this for years and by standardizing the protocol, it can now move forward. In analyzing the usage of robots.txt rules, Google focused on looking at how unsupported implementations such as nofollow, noindex and crawl delay effect things. Those rules were never documented by Google so their usage in relation to the Googlebot is low. These kinds of things hurt a website’s presence in Google search results in ways they don’t believe webmasters intend.

Take time to make sure you are not using the no index directive in your robots.txt file.If you are, make sure to choose one of the suggested methods before September 1st. It’s also a good idea to look to see if you’re using the nofollow or crawl-delay commands. If you are, look to use the true supported methods for these directives going forward.

NoFollow

In the case of nofollow, instead of using the robots. Txt file, you should use no  follow in the robots meta tags. If you need more granular control, you can use nofollow and the Rel attribute on an individual link level.

Crawl Delay

Some webmasters opt to use the crawl delay setting when they have a lot of pages and many of them are linked from your index. The bot starts crawling the site and may generate too many requests to the site for a short period of time. The traffic peak could possibly lead to depleting  hosting resources that are monitored hourly. To avoid problems like this, webmasters set a crawl delay to 1 to 2 seconds so the bots crawl a website more moderately without causing load peaks.

However, the Google bot doesn’t take the crawl delay setting into consideration so you shouldn’t worry about the directive influencing your Google rankings. You can safely use it in case there are other aggressive bots you are trying to stop. It’s not likely you’ll experience issues as a result of the Googlebot crawling, but if you want to reduce its crawl rate the only way you can do this is from the Google Search Console.

Take a few minutes to look over everything in your robots.txt file to make sure you make the necessary adjustments ahead of the deadline. Though it may take a little bit of time to sort through everything and  execute the changes, it will be well worth it come September.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Macro-Influencer Mistakes: Failing to Engage Your Audience

Reaching macro-influencer status in itself is difficult and time consuming. You have to produce quality content that attracts followers, build your following, interact with your followers, and adapt to a variety of algorithm changes. For those of us who are following those influencers, it can feel like everyone’s doing the same thing – and that’s why many macro-influencers struggle to grab hold of their audience and keep it.

Because influencers get their name from the fact that they influence their audience to do something – whether it’s support a cause or buy a product – it makes sense to work with them when you want to spread brand awareness and grow your own audience.

I’d like to share a story of an Instagram macro-influencer with more than two million followers – Arii. You’d think that with a following that large, she’d be able to market herself as a successful influencer. But sadly, all she can say is that she has over 2 million followers. When she tried to use her “influencer” status to sell t-shirts and launch her online clothing – she found that she couldn’t even sell 36 shirts.

Arii is an 18-year-old influencer with 2.6 million followers. Though the post has since been deleted, she wrote that the clothing company she was working with had rules regarding her first sales, which included selling at least 36 pieces from her line.

The post read: “Hi, it breaks my heart to have to write this post. As ya’ll know, I released my brand. I’ve poured my heart into this drop. For my photoshoot, I flew out a photographer & makeup artist…. & and I planned weeks ahead & was lucky enough to gather some friends who modeled for me…. I rented out a huge photo studio for the day so I could [get] as many shots & video promo shots as I could….Unfortunately the company that I’m working with goes based on your first drop sales. In order for them to order and make my products (even to keep working with them) I have to sell at least 36 pieces (knowing I’ve become super irrelevant, I already knew it was gonna be hard) but I was getting such good feedback that people loved it and were gonna buy it. No one has kept their word so now the company won’t be able to send out the orders to people who actually bought shit and it breaks my heart.

While the situation is sad for her, she made mistakes… and rookie ones at that.

Followers Do Not Equal Customers

The number one rule of business is to make sure you know who your customer is, and then create content that’s helpful and appealing to those customers. Just because someone follows you on social media doesn’t mean that they will ever become customers.

And if you make the mistake of buying followers (I don’t know that she did or didn’t – or how long it took her to amass that many followers) to inflate your numbers and make yourself look good, you’ll definitely lack the targeted fans and followers you’ll need to convert them into paying customers later down the funnel.

By creating content the type of people you want to buy your product or service want, the idea is that you will attract targeted potential customers, who over time, will develop a relationship with you. They will trust your authority and suggestions, thus being more open to the idea of buying products and services you suggest, or products and services you sell.

She fails here because people liking a bunch of selfies doesn’t mean they’ll ever buy anything – especially if you don’t even tell them where to buy the elements of the outfits you’re wearing.

Engagement on Photos Doesn’t Mean You Have a Brand

Looking at Arii’s feed, many of the photos are just her doing whatever. There’s not a cohesive theme. She’s not sharing any of her products. While she does get plenty of engagement in terms of likes and comments – it’s many people asking where her outfits are from, where she bought something, how old she is, or since the deletion of her brand failure post, even giving her advice about how to build a brand online.

She mistook the likes and engagement she got from her followers as liking her aesthetic as the brand. There’s nothing there but photos of herself – nothing that tells you who she is. Nothing of any inspiration, nothing that tells people why they should consider following her and what value she’d bring to their feed.

And though people are taking the time to like and comment, there’s little to no evidence that Arii actually responds to people when they reach out to her. If you don’t interact with your followers, you’ll never build the two-way relationship that’s necessary if you want sales.

There’s not even a bio to explain who she is – just an email address that’s associated with an influencer marketing platform or talent agency, Fullscreen.

Twitter Had a Heyday

Twitter users were quick to point out her mistakes – and though it may seem a bit cruel, they actually had valid points as to why she failed.

Jack Appleby provided this side-by-side look at the photos she shared on her feed, compared to the clothes in her brand.

As you can see, the aesthetics between the two are wildly different. If you can’t see her wearing any of the clothes from her line, why would her followers?

Others, such as now inactive user biculturalfamilia, pointed out that she didn’t do enough to promote it.

Jack Appleby gave us another comparison of her feed, suggesting that while he may have missed her IG stories or promoted posts, it appears that she announced it with a single video, put up an additional video and then claimed she failed 13 days later. The feed shows no photos of her products. Watching the video tells us nothing about the brand, what it is, or even what it looks like.

 

Ultimately, no matter how many followers you have – cultivating a relationship with them and learning who they are is the only way to build a successful online business. I admire Arri’s efforts to build the following, but she’s got a long way to go before she can leverage it as a brand or business.

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

Aligning Your Marketing Strategy with the Customer Journey

For a successful digital marketing campaign, you must align your marketing strategy with the customer journey so that you can reach your audience and then guide them from discovery to conversion. If you’re not working to support the customer journey, you’ll struggle to get conversions – and without conversions, you’ll have a terrible return on your paid media channel investments.

Know Your Audience

Before you start doing anything, you must know your audience. Who are they? What do they want? How much money do they make? Where are they located? What is their gender? Are they a parent? What’s their budget? What hobbies and interests do they have? How does your product or service solve their major pain points? What objections do they have to investing in your product or service?

But more than knowing your audience, it’s crucial to know your audience segmentation. Do some research and planning to determine which product and service is the best fit based on the problems you’re trying to solve. In addition to figuring out the best fit, try to figure out the users that would be the worst fit for your business.

Separate the Buyer’s Journey from the Sales Journey

The buyer’s journey and the sales journey are two different things – despite the fact that many consider them to be the same. The sales team looks at their job performance and taking the best course of action to get users to convert and becoming paying customers. The buyer, on the other hand, is becoming aware of a problem in their lives, researching what to buy, and where to buy it from to solve the problem.

As marketers, we have to figure out who the audience is. However, because customer journey paths can be completely different, it’s important to research audiences in ways that make sense for each user.

Use Audiences Strategically

As people take various turns along their buyer journey, we can use audiences to better tailor our strategies and market to those users. Most of the major advertising platforms offer audience insights tools. These tools let you know how your audience or personas translate to the targeting options available on the platforms.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers in-market and affinity data in a broad scope compared to other tools, but it’s possible to add additional layers of demographics for more insights.

Google Ads Audience Insights

Your audiences must have at least 1,000 users in them before the insights data generates. Once you hit that threshold, you can look to see which affinity and in-market audiences your base audience belongs to. Look at your customer lists, the ones who have converted, the high-volume purchasers, and more to get a better understanding about who is part of these audiences.

Facebook Audience Insights

This tool is a good option for creating personas to target. You can identify the top converting demographics and focus on those first. Then segment further by layering other demographics and interests. You can find new interests to target and then monitor performance to finish creating personas, and validate them.

Examine your audience data between platforms and look for patterns. This will help you determine what to test first depending on the persona and where the persona may be in the buyer’s journey. Map the path to purchase so you know what information the users need, the device they typically use, the action you want them to take, and how you’ll measure the success of that action. As you create different actions from each persona, build audiences of the actions to create remarketing audiences so you can continue to guide the user to purchase.

Optimize Your Calls to Actions

Always consider what you are asking users to do. It’s not about what we want the user to do, it’s about what’s best for the user to do in that moment. You’ve already mapped out the path to purchase, but what is action is preventing the users from moving forward. Figure out this out to make sure you have the right content and call to action to keep them moving forward.

Create a chart to find where you have gaps. On the chart, make a list of the funnel stages – awareness, interest, consideration, and action. Then, for each stage identify the call to action, the cost to the user, and the value it offers you. You should have a call to action for each stage of the funnel. Video views are an excellent thing to have at the top of your funnel because you’re not asking for a firm commitment, since that person may have no clue about your brand. This is more effective than asking for a demo on the first interaction, because it gives the user a chance to learn more about your company and brand. However, as the user moves through the funnel, it’s okay to be more aggressive with the calls to action because the user has shown more interest as time moves on.

Use Messaging in Multiple Channels

One of the most important things to remember is that people use multiple channels throughout their buyer’s journey. Users don’t only use Google or Facebook. You can’t force people to use a channel. You must go where your users go. Many channels can be used throughout the funnel, and as you expand marketing messaging through the channels, it’s important to make sure the calls to action match across the channels to ensure you’re sending the same message to users depending on their persona.

Top of the Funnel

At this stage, use interest-based targeting, lookalike audiences, affinity, and in-market audiences, along with other custom audiences to fill the funnel. Exclude the lower funnel targets to make sure your top of the funnel messaging isn’t repeated as customers move through the journey.

Middle of the Funnel

At this phase, you’ll want to go after visitor traffic, repeat customers, loyalists, and anyone who has engaged with social media posts or other mid-funnel content.

Bottom of the Funnel

At this phase, target the people who are abandoning carts, abandoning forms, people who visit high-intent pages such as pricing, and low funnel customer match audiences.

You must allow your users to choose the channel they want to convert on. Create identical audiences for each stage of the funnel on applicable channels. Make sure you’re creating identical exclusions so you’re not showing ads to users in areas outside of where they are in the funnel. The more you keep the ad message and audience targeting to the person across each channel, the better chance you have to get the user to progress through the funnel.

Categories
SEO

June 2019 Broad Core Update

In a move very unlike the search engine giant, Google announced a broad core update in June, before it actually happened. The update will continue to roll out for a while, and as of this writing, there’s no indication when it will be complete. It’s still too early to determine the full impact of the update, but it’s important to be aware of.

What is a Broad Core Update?

According to Google SearchLiason on Twitter, every day Google releases at least one change geared toward making the search results better. While some of the updates are focused on specific improvements, the others are considered broad core changes. They say these updates are routine and take place multiple times a year.

When these updates occur, there’s nothing wrong with the pages that notice drops. It’s a reflection of changes in the system that were benefiting previously under-rewarded sites. There’s no “fix” to regain rankings you lost as a result of one of these broad core updates. Google suggests focusing efforts on quality content creation, as this may help your site rise through rankings relative to other pages.

My understanding is a broad core update makes changes to the main search algorithm, as there are at least 200 (and likely many more) ranking factors that are part of it. A broad core update may make adjustments to the order, importance, or weight of any given one of these factors in an effort to make overall search results better.

What Happened in June?

The update began June 3rd, and continued until all data centers were updated. Google announced on June 8 that the update had been fully rolled out.. Google doesn’t typically announce these sorts of changes before or as they occur, but it may have something to do with the fact that the SEO community has been asking Google to announce when these kinds of updates would occur to allow them to prepare and remain proactive about any changes that occur because of the updates. Google’s Danny Sullivan said in a tweet, “Nothing special or particular ‘big.’ It’s the usual type of core updates that we regularly do. We just wanted to be more proactive. Rather than people scratching their heads after-the-fact and asking ‘hmm?,’ we thought it would be good to just let folks know before it rolled out.”

With this update, as well as other broad core updates, we don’t see anything extraordinary. Google just wanted to alert the community so they knew what was going on and didn’t stress about any changes they may notice.

What the Data Says

In the wake of the updates, many large data providers released reports about how this update has affected them. RankRanger, Moz, SearchMetrics, and Sistrix have amassed large datasets around Google rankings, allowing them to see the bigger picture when it comes to algorithm updates and how they affect rankings.

RankRanger found that gambling, health, and financial websites were hit the hardest in terms of visibility loss. They noted that while many sites fluctuate in the search results, the fluctuation wasn’t as strong as seen in the past.

Dr. Pete Myers, the Marketing Scientist at Moz, shared his early findings on Twitter. He says though it’s not an in-depth analysis, there was high flux across verticals, but unusually high for health, and food and groceries. Day over day flux was high, but 22 days in 2019 have been at or over that temperature.  In another update, he said there was some flux on the 4th, but by the 5th it was stabilizing. Sites that had gained or lost big on the first day continued to lose or gain, but at a smaller scale.

SearchMetrics found, at least in preliminary analysis, that many parts of the March broad core update were reversed. It appears that Google changed some factors to brand and authority too much in March, and used the June update to revert it. The reason for this line of thinking is that many websites, especially in the medical niche that lost visibility as a result of the March update gained back that visibility. But in other areas, they’re not seeing the same pattern. They also found that trusted aggregator sites, such as Yelp and YellowPages were boosted.

Sistrix found that in comparison to the previous days results, you could definitely see the impact of the core update. Sites like Mercola.com and Daily Mail were among the hardest hit, whereas sites like Mirror, HuffPost, and Healthline were among the ones to receive the biggest gains.

Bonus: Separate Algorithm Update Launches Alongside Broad Core

What’s interesting to see is that on June 4th, just one day after starting the broad core update, Google also released what they dubbed as a Diversity update. The fact that updates came out so close together makes analysis a bit more confusing, but it’s nice to see Google providing more information about the updates.

In a June 6 tweet, Google announced they were making a change to search results because they’ve received feedback indicating that many searches provide several results from the same site. As a result of the change, you typically will not see more than two results from the same site in the top results. There are some instances, though, such as when the system determines it is especially relevant, to show more than two results from the same site.

The site diversity update will treat subdomains as part of a root domain so results from a subdomain will be considered the same as results from the root domain in terms of diversity. However, when deemed relevant, they are to be treated separately.

At the end of the thread, Google made it know the launch of the diversity update was separate from the core update that had also launched that week – as different, unconnected releases.

I, for one, am glad to see Google keeping us up to date on what’s going on before it happens because it lets us keep our clients informed about the process and what they may be able to expect.

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