Whether paid or organic, when it comes to search marketing, keywords are king. Good keyword research is at the heart of any successful search marketing campaign, so it pays to get it right from the get-go. Good keyword research, however, isn’t just about search volume, competition level, suggested bids or any of the other metrics you see in a keyword research tool like Google’s keyword planner. While all of these metrics are helpful, the most important trait of any keyword is the intent behind it. From a data perspective, a keyword can look like a perfect fit, but if most of the searches related to a term aren’t related to your business, that keyword probably isn’t worth your time or money. Unfortunately, Google’s keyword planner doesn’t tell you a lot about the intent behind a keyword. But that doesn’t mean you have to guess. Google can still tell you a lot about the intent behind a keyword; you just have to know where to look. In this article, we’ll take a look at why intent is such an important part of keyword research, how to get at the intent behind a keyword and ways to use intent to guide your search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) keyword strategies. To begin, let’s start by taking a look at how the intent behind a keyword can affect your SEM and SEO efforts. Intent and SEMThe easiest way to demonstrate the importance of intent in search marketing is to look at a search engine marketing example. Why? With SEM, you pay for every click, so if you’re targeting the wrong intent, you can waste a lot of money… fast! For example, one of my company’s clients offers business translation services (documents, international deals and so on). During our initial audit of their accounts, I noticed something interesting: They were bidding on the keyword “translate.” At first glance, this keyword seems to make sense. Their business is all about translation, so “translate” seems like a no-brainer keyword, especially when the keyword gets hundreds of millions of searches every month. Not surprisingly, bidding on “translate” had won them a lot of clicks: $150,000 worth of clicks, to be precise. This would have been great, except for one little thing: Those clicks didn’t turn into sales. Despite the fact this keyword and many others looked relevant to their business and had great search volume, their SEM campaigns were a colossal waste of money. The intent behind their keywords was wrong. While “translate” is a great match for what this business does, most people who use the word “translate” in an online search aren’t looking for business translation services. In other words, the keyword was right, but the intent was wrong, and the end result was $150,000 down the drain. Intent and SEOIntent isn’t just an SEM problem, though. For example, someone in my company recently wrote an article focused on pay-per-click (PPC) tactics. It was a cheeky piece that used Wes Craven’s Freddie Krueger slasher film as a framework for discussing why different PPC branding tactics were so effective. Almost overnight, traffic to our blog increased 497 percent. It was our first real blogging breakthrough! Which would have been great… except that no one was converting. Our traffic wasn’t finding us because they were not searching for things like “PPC branding” or “branding tactics,” they were searching for “freddy krueger tactics.” Somehow, we had ended up as the #1 article for “freddy krueger tactics,” and we were getting hundreds of clicks a day from fans of the knife-fingered serial killer. Our content was targeted on the right keywords, but the intent we were targeting was wrong, horribly wrong. Bad traffic is bad newsNow, before you argue that free traffic is always good for your content, even if the intent is wrong, try searching on Google for “PPC branding tactics”: Yes, our company article ranks #1, but it isn’t our Freddy Krueger article. Even after all those thousands of clicks, that article doesn’t rank on the first page for the keyword it was optimized for. In fact, it doesn’t even show up for this search. Instead, the article that matches the intent behind the keyword “PPC branding tactics” is the one that ranks. Wondering why? Because Google is dedicated to understanding intent. For Google’s algorithms, an article that gets a lot of clicks from people searching for “Freddy Krueger tactics” probably isn’t a good match for people who are searching for “PPC branding tactics,” even if that’s what the article is actually about. Obviously, we didn’t write this article with the goal of dominating the keyword “Freddy Krueger tactics,” but the article was written to catch the eye of “Nightmare on Elm Street” fans, so we inadvertently ended up targeting the wrong intent and completely missing our target audience. Whether it’s SEM or SEO, the intent behind your keywords has an enormous effect on the success of your marketing. This doesn’t mean that you can’t get clever with your content or ads, but if you want to succeed at search marketing, you need to match your marketing to the intent behind your keywords. Figuring out intentFortunately, when it comes to intent, you don’t have to guess, Google has actually done a lot of the work for you! Google is dedicated to understanding search intent. It has invested enormous resources into creating algorithms that can identify the intent behind a search and deliver the results you’re looking for. Instead of picking keywords that seem right and hoping for the best, why not use Google’s algorithms to identify the intent behind your keywords? Warning signsTo show you how this works, let’s jump back up to our translation company example and take a look at the search results for “translate”: First off, the fact that the first result is a giant Google Translate widget should be a big red flag. If so many people type in “translate” because they want to quickly translate a word or phrase that Google has created a dedicated widget for meeting that need, that keyword probably isn’t one a business to business (B2B) translation business should be targeting. Even if we ignore the widget, none of the first-page results are related in any way to business translation. Same goes for the second page of results. In fact, translation services of any type don’t show up until the third page, and those translation services are for individuals, not businesses: Now, I’m not saying Google is perfect at predicting or interpreting intent, but based on the results Google is showing here and 450 million other times a month, I’d wager that almost no one who types in “translate” is looking for a business translation service. Positive indicatorsOn the other hand, let’s take a look at what we get if we search for “business translation”: First off, unlike the “translate” keyword, the first thing you see from this keyword is ads. If you’re thinking about running SEM ads, that’s actually a good sign. Yes, it means you’ve got competition, but it also means that other companies think the intent is good enough to run their own ads on the keyword. But let’s see what Google thinks people who search for “business translation” are after. Here are the organic search results: The keyword “business translation” could imply a lot of different intents, ranging from educational intent (“what is business translation?”) to the actual desire to know what the word “business” is in another language. However, from these business listings, it looks like Google thinks people who search for “business translation” are looking for a business translation service. This seems like a good intent to target. Of course, the monthly search volume for “business translation” is several orders of magnitude lower than the search volume for “translate,” but it’s much better to get 100 conversions a month than 1 million clicks a month from the wrong traffic — especially when you’re paying for those clicks. As a quick aside, if you want a real eye-opener, take a look at your search terms report and try typing in the searches your ads are showing up for. Your ads just might be showing up in some of the most unexpected places. SEM vs. SEO: Targeting the right intentWhile checking the search engine results page (SERP) for a keyword seems simple, in my experience, many search marketers, especially paid search marketers, never bother to look at what Google thinks is relevant content for a keyword. That is unfortunate, because the wealth of insight Google offers can save you from wasting a ton of money and/or time on the wrong keywords. Depending on whether you’re trying to pick the right keywords for an SEM or an SEO campaign, however, the “right” intent can mean very different things. Here are some things to keep in mind while picking SEM and SEO keywords:
Creating content around those keywords will help put you in front of the right audience and will eventually improve your organic ranking for high purchasing-intent keywords. So it’s a double win! ConclusionWhether you’re trying to pick SEM keywords, SEO keywords or both, the key to successful search marketing is picking keywords with the right intent. No matter how much search volume a keyword might have, if those searches aren’t relevant to your business, they aren’t worth your time and/or money. Fortunately, you don’t have to guess why people use certain keywords in their searches. By conducting those searches yourself and taking a hard look at the results, you can use Google’s algorithms to get at the general intent behind a given keyword. The post Intent-based keyword research: Let Google be your guide appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2qZ1waa
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Polish up your apples for another week of content marketing school. ? This week combined ways you can excel as a writer and a marketer. On Monday, Stefanie Flaxman wrote about a seeming paradox — how can we be prolific enough to succeed as professional writers and continue to improve our craft at the same The post How to Get an A in Content Marketing appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/2qZSt7K Fanny Blankers-Koen Google doodle honors Olympic runner who broke records & shattered stereotypes4/26/2018 Today’s Google doodle marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Olympic athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen, the first woman to win four gold medals in a single Olympics. The Dutch-born runner’s first Olympic competition was during the 1936 Berlin games when she was 18. Twelve years later, Blankers-Koen would shatter records and tear down false assumptions around female athletes when she took home the gold in four different races as a 30-year old mother of two at the 1948 Olympic games in London. “After the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled, many thought Blankers-Koen would never make another Olympics. When she declared her intentions to compete in the 1948 London Games, she received letters from many criticizing her for continuing to race despite being a mother and insisting she stay home,” writes Google in its Google Doodle blog post about the Olympian. Blankers-Koen’s refusal to fall in line, or be bullied by people who believed a woman couldn’t be both a mother and an Olympian, earned her the nickname “The Flying Housewife” when she took home gold for the 100m, 80m hurdles, 200m, and 4x100m relay during the London Olympics. The doodle leads to a search for “Fanny Blankers-Koen” and is being shared on Google’s homepages in the US, the Netherlands, Iceland, Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Greece, Australia and New Zealand. In addition to being the first woman to win four gold medals in a single Olympics, Blankers-Koen also set a record that still stands today, winning the women’s 200m by 0.7 seconds — the highest margin in Olympics 200m history. The post Fanny Blankers-Koen Google doodle honors Olympic runner who broke records & shattered stereotypes appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2KeTWju
Some billionaires come from wealth, but others have overcome extraordinary hardships to get where they are. Here are 10 entrepreneurs who used to be flat broke.
via ShoeMoney https://ift.tt/2qYLDj9 Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:
The post SearchCap: PPC branded content & bad local reviews appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2FgmxkZ Branded content and pay-per-click (PPC) aren’t ordinarily included together in the same section of a digital media plan, but there are definite synergies between these two marketing disciplines. One way to increase the efficiency and profitability of a PPC budget is to examine how PPC can be used to support really fun and creative branded content. Branded content is evolvingThe category of branded content has exploded online within both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, according to data from PQMedia and Polar. Branded content goes by many names, but it originated as “advertorial” content (in print) and as “infomercials” (in broadcast TV). This form of content is still very popular, particularly in certain industry segments in which the use of the brand in advertorials can be authentic and compelling. In the digital domain, branded content has now evolved to more closely resemble the soap opera model of days long past. The media strategy behind soap operas was brilliant: Unlike product placement within shows (another form of branded content), large soap manufacturers collaborated with the major television (TV) networks to underwrite the production cost of shows they knew their target audience would love and watch religiously. Of course, the soap brand names were announced prominently at the beginning and end of any particular episode, and sponsorship arrangements also specified the airing of a certain number of regular advertising spots mentioning the brand. Where PPC comes inIf the stats are any indication, your company (or client) is probably doing some form of digital branded content already, and this content lies somewhere along the continuum of advertorial, digital product placement (influencers) to sponsored content. Like the soap opera sponsors of yore, the hope is to make sure the content is interesting, too, and resonates with the right audience. That’s great news for you as search marketers. With the tools at your disposal, you can make sure more people who are interested in the branded content actually have an opportunity to see it. In nearly every case, the branded content is centered around keywords that are NOT currently in your PPC campaigns. The team working on that initiative probably isn’t thinking about amplifying the impact of that branded content (much of which is expensive to produce and place) using PPC search. Branded content opens up a whole segment of keywords you can potentially bid on (some might require specific contractual language). Here are some general buckets of keywords that probably are new to your campaigns (unless you’ve been developing and hosting a lot of informational and educational content on your site): 1. Keywords related to the topic of the article or content your marketing team is sponsoring. A food brand might be paying for inclusion within a section of an online publisher’s pages where recipes are featured (including that brand as an ingredient). Why not bid on keywords relating to each recipe? For an athletic-wear brand sponsoring the college soccer coverage on a sports publisher site, why not bid on team names and/or team member names (in conjunction with the sport or team name)? Or (my favorite), if I were on the marketing team of Smith & Forge Hard Cider, I would be using PPC search to support the amazing Thrillist-produced content in which Thrillist disguised competitive athlete Kenneth Leverich as a senior citizen at Muscle Beach to challenge bodybuilders. In this example, keywords could be included that include the terms “muscle beach” along with each of the lifts, tricks, moves and even equipment names related to this fun video. 2. Keywords related to the problem solved by the content. When Chase, Ritz-Carlton and The Wall Street Journal teamed up for “Inside the Moment,” they could have bid on the cities, neighborhoods and featured places in their virtual reality (VR) tours of notable cities and places. 3. Keywords related to celebrities or other VIPs used in the content. This may require a line in their contracts to allow their names and likenesses to be used to promote the content, so be sure to check that out before getting started. For example, 1800 Tequila and Billboard Magazine’s features of “Hip-Hop History” by city included mentions and participation of a lot of popular performers. (To further filter this and other alcoholic beverage PPC support campaigns, remember to use “age” as a demographic filter for bid depression and bid boost.) Bridging across marketing silosAgencies play an important role in making sure branded content is on-message and on-brand, particularly if it talks about the brand. If the content being sponsored is more of an audience-focused strategy to get the brand in front of the right people, then the level of editorial control exerted by the agency should be less, particularly if a very important person (VIP) or influencer is being used. Things need to be authentic. I’ve always said PPC search doesn’t sit in a silo. Expanding a PPC campaign to support branded content that costs a pretty penny to produce is a great way to get involved in the broader marketing of your brand. Because I have a strong interest in nonprofit causes, I especially liked a piece of branded content done by Gawker to educate on the risks of smoking, not just to humans, but also to cats that live with humans, in a simple game called “Catmageddon.” I’ve become such a fan of branded content and the power of collaboration between publishers/broadcaster/influencers with agencies and clients that I’m actually crazy enough to be bidding on Gawker to apply cause marketing best practices to publishing. ConclusionCheck with your teams and see if they are doing branded content, and take the opportunity to add significant value to the company and expose you to new PPC strategies. The post How to use good ol’ PPC to support fun and creative branded content appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2qZPj43 Details such as name, address and phone number (NAP) found in business listings and online directories are still considered important for ranking in localized organic rankings. But not everything’s about rankings, is it? Accurate citations are still a foundational tactic for any business, as they increase online visibility by placing businesses in the listings and directories where potential customers are looking for them. That’s if they are accurate. What happens if they’re not? Recent research published by BrightLocal (my company) suggests 93 percent of consumers are frustrated when they come across incorrect business information online, and 80 percent lose trust in businesses that show inaccurate details online. Ouch. That’s a lot of unhappiness. The first remedial course of action is to make sure your online citations and business directory listings are 100 percent accurate (not an easy feat for businesses with hundreds of locations, but clearly worth the effort), but what else can you do in the meantime to ensure this kind of experience, if it does occur, doesn’t damage trust in your business? Here are a few ways you can ensure your potential customers don’t head to your nearest competitor while you are fixing your listings. An accurate website= happy customersMy first tip is an obvious one for smaller businesses, but it presents potentially more of a risk for larger businesses with multiple location pages on their sites: Make sure your physical (location) address(es) is accurate on your website. If you are a search engine optimization specialist (SEO) working with a multilocation business, get them to build a database of all current location addresses and perform a site audit to make sure they are all consistent. From my experience, you’d be surprised how often I’m told multilocation businesses don’t have a centralized location for all business addresses. To the layman, this sounds like a no-brainer, but to the in-house marketer or data wrangler sitting before a gigantic, regularly changing spreadsheet of hundreds of ZIP codes, it’s a ton of work. However, it’s foundational work that needs to be done. After all, without having a database of all location addresses in the first place, there’s no way you’ll be able to ensure correct citations and business listings when going ahead with citation cleanup work. Update local content silosIf you’re creating local content silos, then, along with the long list of addresses, you’ll need to gather URLs of every place on the site where address or location information is displayed. Local content silos will have a great deal of location information on them, and if a business location closes or changes address, these local area-focused parts of the site will end up doing more harm than good. Ultimately, if you don’t update your website immediately once location information changes, when someone suspects your listing data is wrong and comes through to see those details confirmed on-site, you’ll be sending them on a wild goose chase and directly into the hands of nearby competitors. Include social proof on your websiteThanks to widespread research, we now know that consumers tend to trust their peers more than businesses and organizations (although, quite depressingly, even trust in “people like me” has fallen, according to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer), so, to boost trust for the visitor who’s come to your site to check your phone number and address, include testimonials from happy customers and, if possible, user-generated content that showcases your products and services in an authentic way. When gathering and putting together testimonials for your site, there are some key things to remember and to include:
Educate staff at bricks-and-mortar locationsAs you can see below, 43 percent of consumers said they would call the business if they found incorrect or inaccurate business information online. Now, it goes without saying that if an incorrect address dovetails with an incorrect phone number, you’re out of luck. But if you’re aware of a situation in which incorrect addresses, services or products are being displayed online, it’s crucial that you inform all staff that deals with the public of the error. Employees manning the phones are going to be the first port of call (if you’ll pardon the pun) when a potential customer wants to clarify a location’s address, so to keep your staff from sounding shocked or dismissing people’s comments when a frustrated prospect calls. Get your location managers to share the details of the error with staff and ensure them that it’s being rectified. Saying “Sorry about that; we’re aware of the issue and are working on fixing it,” provides a far better experience to someone on the receiving end of incorrect information. Providing you’re taking the appropriate steps to clean up your location citations, your staff and customers should forgive the error and, in some cases, even see the funnier side of it. Maintain a positive reputationSo far, these suggestions have focused on online and in-store experiences, but you may well be able to head the issue off at the pass if you can create and maintain a positive reputation at the source. A great many citations exist on sites with reviews attached to listings (e.g., Google My Business, TripAdvisor). So, carefully managing your online reputation by responding to negative reviews politely and considerately, and in a timely fashion, will build up extra trust in your business before the searcher discovers the near-fatal flaw in your business information. This practice is obviously something every business should be serious about, but the added incentive of buffering the business against any potentially frustrating online and offline experiences before they happen should serve as an additional benefit of solid reputation management. It’s worth taking a moment to talk about how reputation management, and the fight against incorrect online info, extends to Google My Business’s relatively new Q&A feature. Although I’d say the feature is still in its nascent stages, it’s another way for potential customers to gauge the sentiment around a business before getting in touch or visiting the website. In fact, I’ve seen several cases in which Google My Business question and answer (Q&A) has been used to directly question business information (see below). Monitoring and managing Google My Business Q&As is clearly a good way of ensuring that, even if you’re aware of incorrect business information appearing online, you can directly respond to people who are having issues contacting or visiting your business. It could even be the way you’re informed that your details are out of date in the first place. ConclusionClearly, if a business is not paying enough attention to their online data, and unless measures are taken to fix it while reinforcing trust in other ways, there’s a very real risk of customers going elsewhere. Now might be a good time to do some spring cleaning of your online business details! The post How to regain trust lost by bad business listings appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2qXS3Qp Recently, a student of ours asked whether “we” (content-based marketers who might prefer a more subtle approach) can learn anything from “those” marketers who use somewhat obvious tactics like silly quizzes or hyped-up headlines. In the course of answering this question, the phrase “orange hat marketer” occurred to me. (Don’t worry; this has nothing to The post Aggressive Sell, Soft Sell … What Works? appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/2KecBvV Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:
The post SearchCap: Google earnings, fake online reviews & paid search appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2qTfhHo As reviews have grown in importance, so have efforts to game the system. The problem is growing on both Google Maps and Amazon, according to third-party analysis and reporting. A report yesterday in The Washington Post found that the buying of fake reviews by merchants hoping to boost sales of their products is a widespread problem on Amazon. According to the report:
The Post says “many of these fraudulent reviews originate on Facebook.” Accordingly, fake review solicitation becomes another variation on the “fake news” problem for the company. The Post’s investigation also found that in some categories (e.g., bluetooth headphones) on Amazon, fake reviews comprised at least half of all reviews. Positive reviews influence consumer buying and visibility on the site. Reviews are an explicit ranking signal at Google for local results (i.e., “prominence”). However, the company is substantially relying on volunteer contributors to fight map and local review spam. Among those trusted volunteers are Joy Hawkins and Mike Blumenthal, who contend that the review spam problem — often driven by services that pay people to write fake reviews, as on Amazon — is only getting worse. Yelp is cited in the same piece by CNBC, as the site that does the best job of controlling and cracking down on review spam. It’s well-documented that consumers rely heavily on online reviews in making buying decisions. The majority tend to trust them unless there are no critical reviews present. Amazon and Google have periodically made corporate-level efforts to crack down on the problem. For example, Amazon filed a lawsuit in 2015 against a review solicitation company. And Google has taken steps from time to time to reduce local and review spam. Yelp has been more consistent, however, adding a “consumer alert” to business profiles when its review guidelines have been violated. Unless and until there’s consistent enforcement (e.g., lawsuits, penalties) by major sites against the companies and in the places were fake reviews are solicited, the problem will only continue to intensify. The post Reports: Fake reviews are a growing problem on Amazon, Google appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2qWjzwE |
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