In today’s post, I give you some easy ways to boost your email open rates, and most of them will take very little time. As home business owners with precious little time to grow your business, you need to do whatever you can to boost your results in as little time possible. If you’re using […]
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Last month I spoke in two sessions at SMX West about YouTube and video SEO. Here I answer some audience questions I was asked, as well as address some recent questions that have come up around the current situation with social distancing. What recommendations do you have on getting company buy-in to have a YouTube presence? There are tons of stats on how video and YouTube are huge platforms with tons of traffic. I like to point out three tangible benefits. One, with Google putting more emphasis on the video carousel in SERP (55% of searches have video), videos are a great way to jump to the top of your target keyword. Two, it’s a great way to reach a new audience (viewers are 3x more likely to watch a video that relates to their interests over featuring a famous personality). Three, unlike other social networks that are pay to play, YouTube videos have a much greater long tail, especially if their metadata is optimized (70% of what people watch is determined by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm). That said, it’s important to set appropriate expectations. YouTube videos don’t have the same direct ROI as running a Facebook ad and seeing how many sales it generated. YouTube is a longer game that requires consistency but can return great dividends. Is creating auto-generated videos from existing images a viable strategy (for example, creating a virtual tour of a home from realtor photos)? When creating YouTube content, you want to put yourself in the viewer’s shoes. “Would I watch this if I saw it on YouTube?” Also, ask yourself if video is the right medium. Probably the only people that would watch a slideshow tour of a house are people that are in the market to buy that house. But they’d probably be watching the video from the listing’s website and not organically through YouTube. In this case, you just need a video hosting platform. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for home tours on YouTube. You just need to bring value – like a narrated tour of the listing’s benefits or shooting video for higher budget listings (Erik Conover’s channel has luxury listing videos and 1 million subscribers). Our brand channel on YouTube has about 1,200 videos that haven’t been SEO optimized. Should we prioritize going back and optimizing with keywords or just focus on new videos? Yes to both – but you want to be smart about it. By having such a huge amount of content you have a great amount of data on what types of content works well and connects with your audience to inform creating future videos. The back catalog of 1,200 videos is a great problem for the 80/20 rule. Chances are about 20% of your videos are driving most of the views and watch time on your channel. Go to your analytics and find the videos that have a high view count and a high percentage viewed. Videos with a high percentage viewed (meaning people watched most of the video) but a lower view count are the best ones to start with because it means the content is really good but people aren’t finding it. Then focus on optimizing the other high views / high percentage viewed videos. Then expand out to the rest of your content (in some cases with outdated or zero view videos, it might be good just to clean house and remove them). TubeBuddy and VidIQ both have batch editing features which can also help make metadata changes faster. I have a whole article on bulk updating videos with these tools. Does Google look at the self-hosted videos on our site differently than the videos that we keep on YouTube? If you upload the same video to YouTube and a self-hosted version on your website, Google will look at it as two different videos. Google won’t even identify your page with the self-hosted video as a video unless the page it’s embedded on has the proper video object schema markup. In most cases, I’d advocate for sticking with one platform for each individual video. However, one beneficial use case would be if your video is targeting a very easy keyword on Google. You could get both your YouTube video and self-hosted video to show up in the video carousel – double win! What are thoughts on using YouTube as a hosting site for videos behind a paywall for a membership platform? YouTube works really well for public videos. It is not the best platform for hosting private videos on your own website behind a paywall. While it’s technically doable by setting privacy settings to unlisted, YouTube offers very little control over how the player looks, what the user can do with the video, and what happens after the video ends. For a membership site, you’ll want to use something like Vimeo or Brightcove. We had to cancel our in-person event due to COVID-19. Should we postpone to next year or use live streaming to create a virtual event? So SMX West happened in February, which now feels like a different era. We’re facing new realities now, especially when it comes to in-person events, and questions about live streaming virtual events have come up with events I was going to participate in and events I’m helping plan. The short answer, in my opinion, is you should strongly consider moving forward with a virtual event rather than postpone. Virtual events do not have to be a faceless webinar of a slide deck. Everyone can stream from a webcam and there’s a variety of programs out there that can easily produce professional-looking video feeds that create a really dynamic event. I just created a guide detailing every step to producing virtual events. Will it be exactly the same as in-person? No. However, if you reframe some of your goals and ideas of what an online event can be, your virtual event can reach a wider audience through streaming and connect with even more speakers and attendees without being bound by geographic limits. More from SMXThe post SMX Overtime: Creating a video-first content strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2WVZk3Y On Friday we hosted our second Live with Search Engine Land, with four leading local SEOs discussing how local and multi-location businesses are coping with the coronavirus crisis. Google My Business was a central topic and there were numerous questions about how to handle business hours updates and specifically when and how to use “temporarily closed.” As a follow-up, I asked Rio SEO’s Krystal Taing, a GMB Gold Product Expert, to summarize and clarify some of the discussion around business hours for those who didn’t get a chance to attend. SEL: When should you use “special hours” and when should you use “temporarily closed”? KT: If your business has adjusted hours or is temporarily closed for a short period of time (less than two weeks), you should use special hours. For longer extended closures, two weeks or more, you should use the temporarily closed status if you’re able to. SEL: Are there different rules or advice for chains/franchises vs. individual locations? KT: Marking a business as temporarily closed can only be done manually in the GMB UI, so my suggestion is to only use this option if you’re managing a small set of locations or your franchisees are managing each location themselves. This is not ideal management for a multi-location business or agency that supports chains. SEL: Is it true that when you use temporarily closed the business will disappear from the rankings? KT: This was true previously but given the increased use of this feature, the GMB team worked to ensure temporarily closed businesses are treated the same as open businesses. SEL: Are there any long term ranking implications to using temporarily closed vs. special hours? KT: With the recent update, we can confirm there are not. SEL: Will marking my business temporarily closed create a competitive disadvantage, if my competitors aren’t doing the same? KT: Now that we can confirm there is no impact to ranking, I would advise to do what you need to keep consumers informed. If you’re temporarily closed and you need to ensure people stop showing up to your location, you should update your GMB listing to reflect this. Thankfully, you no longer have to consider how this could impact long term rank or visibility. SEL: Hotels seem to be a unique case. Are there any special rules or advice here? KT: Hotels are treated much differently on Google. They have limited options to communicate updates to customers within their GMB Profile. They are ineligible for posts, unable to edit their description, and hours do not display. Currently, hotel options are limited to marking the business as temporarily closed and enabling messaging as an additional communication channel. This is unfortunate as I know many hotels converting into medical centers and offering free lodging to healthcare workers. At this point, we can just continue to raise the issue with Google in hopes that they will provide some guidance or options. SEL: What should I be doing with Posts to complement any hours changes? Is that strategy different if a business is using temporarily closed? KT: Posts can and should be used in addition to any hours adjustments to provide context to consumers about what you’re adjusting about your business services. For example, if you’re temporarily closed but plan on offering delivery or pick up service soon, this can be communicated via a Post. For businesses that are still open, you can leverage Google Posts to explain how you are keeping employees and customers safe. To see the full discussion featuring Krystal Taing, as well as Reputation.com’s Adam Dorfman, LocalU/SterlingSky’s Mary Bowling and Two Octobers’ Niki Mosier watch below. The post Google My Business: When should you use ‘special hours’ vs. ‘temporarily closed’? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2xwPLxE ConvertKit founder and CEO, Nathan Barry, returned to the podcast this week and joined host Darrell Vesterfelt to talk about... The post The Advantage of Email Marketing, Featuring Nathan Barry of ConvertKit appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/2UMpPpB Last week, Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling hosted an hour-long discussion with leading local SEOs to talk about how local or multi-location businesses are coping with the economic and human effects of COVID-19. They spoke extensively about Google My Business and offered actionable tips about using new features to update profiles (and navigating the platform at a time when bugs are rampant and support is not exactly responsive). The talk was the second in our Live with Search Engine Land series of virtual events designed to bring the search community together at a time of such uncertainly. We will be hosting another one of these this week with our Editor-in-Chief Ginny Marvin and other PPC experts discussing disruption in paid search right now. Stay tuned for more details. Click on the video above to watch our Local SEO session. More about marketing in the time of the coronavirus
The post Live with Search Engine Land: Local SEOs talk ‘buggy’ Google My Business, COVID-19 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3aGisqo “This is definitely a pivotal moment,” said former teacher turned entrepreneur Lisa Abel last week. Her business, selling the series of specialized classroom materials she developed, is in its second year. Abel sells exclusively on Amazon and relies on its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) program for all order processing and shipments. Amazon’s decision to stop accepting inventory shipments for non-essential items to its warehouses for a four-week period has left sellers like Abel scrambling. Further, once unimaginable supply chain disruptions have rendered existing, best-practice processes anything but reliable. ‘Expect the unexpected’“We see various things. So expect the unexpected,” said Frank Koshenash, president of Wunderman Commerce North America. “We’ve seen an essential FBA seller get disrupted because the factory is disrupted rather than Amazon. We’ve seen some [purchase orders from Amazon] come through when we would have expected otherwise. It’s hard to predict.” Non-essential items may take a month or more to ship. “Amazon is showing our products will ship in late April or early May,” said Bryant Garvin, CMO of Groove Life, a Nashville, TN-based maker of silicon rings and watchbands. Groove Life sells via FBA on Amazon, directly on its own site and through small local businesses around the country. Potentially crippling for sellers“I became highly concerned about quarantining at my manufacturer and decided to restock on all of my SKUs — thousands of dollars in inventory,” said Abel. “Now I’m ready to ship but have nowhere to ship to. This could be crippling on a business.” Abel has seen demand for her products shoot up as more parents are looking for home school materials while schools are closed. Suddenly, she had no way to restock her inventory just as sales are rising. Abel’s situation highlights just how widespread the supply-chain challenges have become for merchants, regardless of where their products are manufactured. Related: Get the Periodic Table of Digital Commerce Marketing Chinese manufacturers, which supply most Amazon FBA sellers, were closed for seven to eight weeks starting in mid-January due to the coronavirus outbreak. Abel was insulated from those supply chain issues because all of her materials are made in the U.S. But, we are now seeing disruption across the U.S. supply chain, with slow or closed manufacturing plants and unprecedented strain on last-mile delivery logistics and resources. Forced to rethink logisticsAbel says her constant networking with other Amazon sellers since she launched her business is paying off in this moment. She’s coordinating with her manufacturer to ship the new inventory to a company in Indiana that produces automotive goods and fulfills their Amazon orders directly. They have agreed to fulfill her Amazon orders for the time being. “We’re recommending clients diversify fulfillment,” said Kochenash. “If they have MFN in-house or can spin it up they should consider doing so.” Companies need to consider the time and cost of setting up their own fulfillment versus waiting for Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities to normalize. “For most, the MFN option will end up being non-Prime, but that’s still better than some of the promised delivery dates that are out there,” said Kochenash. “We are talking internally about switching to FBM [Fulfillment by Merchant],” said Garvin, as FBA fulfillment can now take weeks not days. Groove Life is fortunate that it already has its own fulfillment capabilities, plenty of inventory on-hand and can ship orders direct to customers in a couple of days. Groove Life is also fortunate that its products are small, which means the FBA storage fees it pays to Amazon are relatively minimal. Manufacturers with larger items and higher storage fees need to factor those costs into their calculations. Renewed focus on process, channel diversification“This is a prime example of why you have to have a channel that you own,” said Garvin. “You can control the customer relationship and aren’t at the whim of another company.” Abel already had diversification on her 2020 roadmap, but says this experience prioritizes those efforts. While these weeks have been trying, and more challenges lie ahead, Abel is looking at the positives. “I suddenly have to create a new business model and processes in 48-hours. Your business model is your process, so it’s really asking small businesses to redefine themselves,” said Abel. “I will know how to do FBA and FBM [fulfillment by merchant]. Those pivots will benefit us in the long-term though.” The post Amazon FBA challenges highlight broader vulnerability in e-commerce ecosystem appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/39t6241 Kevin Doory and I have an unusual history, he is good friends with two of my employees at RustyBrick. In fact, he use to work with one of them about a dozen years ago. So sitting down and chatting with Kevin was espesially fun. Kevin works at AutoRevo as the director of SEO. Kevin told me that he feels local SEO is more challenging than traditional SEO because you have all of the complexities with traditional SEO and then add on that local SEO factors like proximity, reviews, and more. We also briefly talked about Google November local update, where Google added neural matching to local search. He also shared some tips around Google My Business, specifically how to use Q&A to help customers and build content. You can follow Kevin on Twitter @kevindoory. Here is the video: I started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up to be interviewed, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here. The post Video: Kevin Doory on difference between traditional SEO and local SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2UrfnFg Google announced this morning on Twitter that it has launched a couple of new features in Google Search Console including a new way to choose whether to show performance data for your property directly in search results. Google also now lets you choose which types of emails you want to get. Performance data controls. Google said you can now choose to show performance data for your property directly in the search results. You know, that is when you do a search in Google and Google shows that box at the top from Google Search Console. Here is what that looks like: You can control if you see this now in these settings: Email preferences. You can now also tell Google which types of emails you want to get from Google. Here is a screenshot: Why we care. One of the bigger pet peeves some SEOs have with Google Search Console is getting too many emails from Google and seeing this box pop up for all their clients in Google search results. Now you can control these notifications. You can learn more over here. The post Google Search Console adds performance report and email preferences appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2UtRKM5 Microsoft Advertising unveiled the new look for its web interface in October. A select number of advertisers have had access to the new look for the past few months. Now those users will see the new look on more pages, including Manager accounts. The redesign preview now includes search terms, change history, reports, dimensions and more, the company announced Monday. Why we careThe new UI, like the Google Ads redesign a couple of years ago, is aimed at helping advertisers access and act on information faster. For agencies and brands managing multiple accounts using a Manager account, the Manager Account Overview page will be the new default landing page in the new look. To start, it features four “insights tiles,” as shown in the screenshot above: Performance, Top changes: Accounts, Accounts and Devices. More on the news
The post Microsoft Advertising expands UI redesign to more pages appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2UOUhzk The post SEL 20200330 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2yjRqXP |
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