Loading ...Last week we featured articles on link audits, how to gather emotional intelligence with SEMrush (plus a free downloadable PDF!) and digital marketing in 2015 — can we really predict anything?
If you missed any of these posts on the blog last week, continue reading after the jump. (more…)
Loading ...What is Search Engine Saturation?
Search engine saturation is the amount of space that search results occupy on a single search engine result page (SERP). This includes everything from images and advertisements to organic results.
Search engine saturation is a tactic used not only in lieu of high ranking results, but also in conjunction with them; providing the searcher with multiple opportunities to reach your site. (more…)
Loading ...There is nothing better than over-delivering for a client. That is what our company was built on, and it’s one of the most important things we live up to.
Every client is different. But in the case of one client, we were able to skyrocket their rankings through competitive backlink analysis. For those of you who don’t know, using online tools you can easily find out the links that are delivering the most authority to your competitors. This is one of the first things I like to do when I get a new client. One of two of the really important links can mean all the difference.
Let me tell you how we do this, and a little about this one particular situation. (more…)
Location, location, location!
This is one of the quintessential business statements that is as true today as it was when it was first uttered. The difference between then-and-now is the context for why it’s still true.
Originally it was meant to describe the natural foot traffic of a city. If your retail operation was off the beaten path, there would be no foot traffic, and thus none of that traffic would ever convert to customers. The same principle is true today; it’s just that the traffic is digital and the equivalent of first floor real estate on Main Street is now the top 10 on Google.
I’m an investor in startups; I’ve dedicated my entire life to this stage of business and love every second of it. I’ve acquired part of just under one hundred companies in the last three years alone. I mention this not to brag, but to establish the credibility necessary for you to keep reading if you’re an early stage entrepreneur. I’ve watched some of my portfolio fail at SEO, some succeed and some plateau in that average range for which feels like they’ll remain perpetually stuck.
This article will touch on some of the basics required for a high-quality search engine campaign. But for the most part, it’s a macro-oriented attitude adjustment. (more…)
Loading ...First off, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! We hope you’re having a wonderful holiday season with family and good friends.
This week we’re featuring two articles on FFTF: how behavioral psychology can affect your content marketing, and a Bing Ads Mobile PPC Roadmap.
Continue reading after the jump! (You might just find some holiday photos from the US Office). (more…)
Startups need to be scrappy and resourceful as a rule. Whether you’re bootstrapping your business or in a mad scramble for venture funding, you know that resources are limited, and you need to make the most of what you have.
So when it comes to content marketing, you’re probably not in a position where it would be wise to hire a dedicated content marketing manager, as tempting as it might seem. If you’re still uncertain of your company’s financial prospects, the $75,000 to $100,000+ it would take to hire someone experienced enough for the role is a lot of money to set aside.
Instead, startups should consider taking a scalable approach to their content marketing strategy. On a budget of $2,000 to $4,000 per month, you can develop a successful, highly targeted content marketing strategy.
Here’s how. (more…)
I continue to guest post on top quality blogs by submitting high quality content that adds value to that blog’s audience. And so should you.
A bigger question on most people’s minds though is: how do I find guest posting opportunities in my niche. Especially since most blogs have shut down their guest posting all together, or only accept people they know.
It’s actually not as hard as you might think.
And the following examples will show you some easy to use tools (some of which you already use daily) can help you find guest posting opportunities very quickly and simply.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from the SEMrush Team!
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Did you know that more than 66% of PPC users are unhappy with the return on investment that they’re getting from their AdWords accounts? That means that users are spending millions of dollars on a key component of their overall digital marketing strategy that they aren’t even sure is working for them. That’s crazy!
Our colleagues at WordStream have research that shows that the average enterprise AdWords account wastes more than $3,600 per year due to inefficiency. Keep in mind that the estimated number of AdWords accounts numbers in the millions. That’s a lot of wasted money.
With numbers like that, it’s no wonder then that so many users are unhappy with the results they’re getting from their PPC campaigns. (more…)
It’s that time of the year again, when every content marketer — professional and amateur alike — is thinking about next year’s resolutions; when every content marketing article and blog seems to be about the big trends that stand ready to shape 2015.
Many of us have paused over the last few weeks to think about which technologies and platforms we need to embrace in order to stay relevant next year; which strategies to uphold, and which to discard. We’ll likely consider boosting our content marketing spend, and perhaps also our content marketing time commitment.
All of this is good and reasonable, and there is something to be said for making big resolutions. The problem is twofold. (more…)
SEMrush offers a wide range of functions for analyzing webpages and their performance in search engines. In this article, I am going to explain how you can perform an SEO audit with SEMrush tools and identify opportunities for optimization, as well as how you can determine how your competitors are doing.
For this analysis, we’ve chosen to look at the Spanish version of Samsung.com and see how it is applying Google-quality guidelines. The only search engine that we are going to use in our study is Google.es, because it holds over 90% of the Spanish market share.
Loading ...One of my all-time favorite commercials was Electronic Data Systems’ “Cat Herders” from Superbowl XXXIV.
Though it’s 15 years old, the commercial is still relevant. Today, digital marketers commonly refer to themselves as “cat herders,” and for good reason.
No matter how well we light the path, online visitors still dart in every direction — seemingly at random. Clicking elements with no links. Getting distracted by almost anything. Screwing up the simplest form fields. And visiting pages that don’t matter (919 visits to my privacy policy, really!?)
If your site had a dusty old sock drawer, you’d find 10 visitors curled up inside.
When users visit, you want them to end up on a high-converting path. But too often they never make it.
The nature of high-converting pages often precludes them from getting large amounts of organic traffic. These pages usually have limited content, and focus on a single offer — both things Google’s algorithm doesn’t like. Instead, homepages often get the majority of visits — much to the chagrin of anyone working in the conversion optimization industry.
Homepages have always reminded me of those terrible buffets that serve both Western and Chinese food, and do a lousy job of both. When appealing to so many audiences at once, it’s difficult to develop a strong conversion funnel — and everyone leaves unhappy.
So all this begs the question: how can marketers keep their users on engaging pathways that increase our chances of converting them to customers? And if possible, can we funnel traffic from low-converting pages to high-converting pages without disrupting the user experience?
The tactic I’ll discuss in this post is designed to do just that. (more…)
Last week we featured articles on how to make your business social media accounts secure, how to optimize your Google Shopping Campaigns and six tips for better headlines.
Did you miss any of these stories on the blog? Keep reading and continue after the jump. (more…)
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What comes to mind when developing a content marketing plan? If you’re like most companies, it’s a combination of trying to answer two key questions:
Who will write my content?
How will I generate leads from the content I create?
While I could suggest the traditional route of creating frequent, high quality, long-form content with actionable advice, I’m going to take you down another road.
Those elements are still very much in play, but everyone likes a twist; don’t you think? (more…)
Loading ...The Internet has become a pretty noisy place, and building an audience from scratch can take a very long time.
Chad Pollitt of Relevance.com reveals the results of how converging owned, paid and earned media can drive millions of media impressions while drastically improving brand awareness, conversions and traffic and ROI in the quarter the campaign is launched.
Join Michael Stricker of SEMrush and Chad for a free webinar on effective content promotion in 2014 and beyond.
We will also give away a copy of Chad’s e-book after the webinar. Learn more after the jump! (more…)
It’s no secret to most SEOs and web content writers that Google seems to release a never-ending amount of updates to their search algorithm these days.
Although most SEO experts agree that the major changes that really shifted the web marketing landscape (and began to mold it into what we know today) started in 2011, the most recent update, Google Pigeon (so-named by Search Engine Land), has thrown many local search enthusiasts and SEO copywriters into a tizzy trying to keep up with it.
Local businesses whose rankings were negatively affected by the Pigeon update started flooding the internet with talk about what was happening as soon as the change took place, and SEO experts scrambled to mine and analyze the data, trying to determine what the results meant to their clients and the local search field in general.
To make a long story short, Pigeon seemed to cause so much confusion at first that now, several months after the original update, the best explanation of what actually happened can be viewed in a chronological timeline of events. (more…)
Google has a global goal to secure the web. While a noble goal, it requires website owners to become more tech-savvy and invest more in securing their websites. Secure search means Google will give more ranking authority to content and e-commerce websites that have an SSL/TLS certificate.
The easy barrier of entry to websites development for entrepreneurs and local small businesses might become more technically challenging and more expensive; thus, the importance of having a detailed SEO tutorial.
(more…)
Most businesses have a Twitter account today and that’s great. But if a lot of them are using it to share content and reply to customer requests, few are weaving social into their business strategy to generate traffic and leads.
This article doesn’t focus on the content strategy distribution on Twitter but rather, on all the other aspects of the social channel that you can take advantage of to make yourself known and reach out to potential targets.
Here are a few ideas you should try out. (more…)
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It’s time to talk about Universal Analytics in detail. Since it was released out of beta on April 2 — with a whole bunch of features available in classic Google Analytics — most GA fans have been trying to migrate to Universal Analytics and take advantage of all of its innovations.
Just as with all innovations, these require some time, attention and experimentation to get used to. And while all relevant blogrolls are brimming with content-rich articles on how to implement UA into your projects, what I would need most, personally, is a laconic visualized algorithm of implementation. This could be a starting point for any further research on this new environment.
So let’s start our guide with one of these algorithms and some explanations. An important factor that often makes people worry about migrating to Universal Analytics, with its analytics.js, is event tracking. So, what’s changed? (more…)
The way I see it, there are two overall strategies when it comes to content marketing.
The first is to create content about yourself, your business and your industry in an effort to educate your target audience on all of these things. The second is to create content that is catered to your target audience that doesn’t necessarily have much to do with you at all in an effort to build an audience of your own that you can reach at any time.
Each of these content marketing strategies are tried and true, but it’s important to understand the benefits and downfalls of each system to make sure you are heading down the right road for your business. It’s possible that a combination of both marketing strategies would take your marketing efforts to the next level.
Let’s take a closer look. (more…)
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In the past several years, content curation has taken the Internet by storm by confronting the problem of having too much information to choose from.
Essentially, content curation gives you the ability to easily and effectively filter out the information you actually need from all the other information cluttering the Internet. Instead of reading random articles that bulk their inbox or found on the web, readers can take the advantage of someone who is better familiar with the topic, and already did the filtering for them.
This gives brands the opportunity to create entertaining and informative content for their targeted audience without having to spend hours and hours writing content themselves. (more…)
When visitors land on your website, there should be one primary objective that you want them to take — to read, click, watch, whatever. What the objection is depends on the content of your site.
According to Jakob Nielsen, you’ve only got 10-20 seconds to capture the majority of your visitors’ attention. As a marketer, designer or small business owner, this means you need to focus your content in a way that drives people to your objective as quickly as possible, and definitely in less than 20 seconds.
Image source: Nielsen Norman Group
Unfortunately, many websites are not designed with such an action-oriented mindset.
Content is hodgepodged in different sidebars, sliders, widgets, menus and myriad other places. A visitor arrives on your website and rather than taking the action you’d intended, they waste time searching the page.
Heat maps are graphical overlays of your website that help show which content is hot (or not) by tracking eyeballs, either literally or via clicks, providing you with the information you need to optimize the design, flow, and layout of your website. Today we’re looking at click-tracking heat maps.
Tyler Vawser of AppSumo wrote a comprehensive guide on what he learned from 1,000,000+ heat map clicks. In this post, we’re going to walk through the basics of Tyler’s guide. We’ll cover how to use heat maps to solve the problem of errant, non-converting visitors to your website.
Focusing on the most-trafficked page on your site, we’ll consider what kind of objective it should have, walk through how to set up a heat map on it, and then look at how to use the heat map to drive more conversions for your business. (more…)
Managing your social media profiles can be a daunting task. Each major network has its own rules, and some of them even lack crucial statistics and the ability to schedule posts.
If you want to improve your level of interaction with social media, improve user engagement and make the process of social media marketing less time-consuming, then you should definitely use tools. Today, I’d like to share some of my favorites in detail.
Every start-up needs to have some tactics for growth marketing, otherwise known as growth hacking.
The way to zero-in on where your company needs to focus their efforts is to take those mounds of data you’ve collected and find a repeatable method for growth. Use your creativity to look beyond the use of AdWords or SEO to find the nirvana of self-perpetuating marketing.
Growth isn’t something that is just handed to you — you can’t copy and paste another company’s method to apply it to your own. Therefore, check out my list of the 13 must-have tools that any growth marketer needs to be successful. (more…)
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2014 was definitely a busy year for Google.
We went through many changes and had a lot of surprises. Some major updates caused shake-ups, some of Google’s initiatives came to a dead end and, in some ways, SEO as we knew it the year before has ultimately changed.
But one thing is for certain: whatever happened in 2014 will certainly affect us in 2015. Understanding the current processes from their starting point until now will help us make the right decisions in the future.
We asked 10 great SEO experts about how the main changes of 2014 are going to affect us next year. Here is the Ultimate Guide to 2014’s SEO Changes.
Our participants:
Aaron Wall, Author, Blogger, and the Founder/owner of SEO Book
AJ Ghergich, Founder of Ghergich & Co.
Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant and Founder of Orainti
Andy Crestodina, Strategic Director of Orbit Media Studios
Barry Schwartz, Founder of Search Engine Roundtable and News Editor of Search Engine Land
Brandon Seymour, Director of SEO at BodyLogicMD and the Founder of Beymour Consulting
Eric Enge, CEO/Senior Director of Online Marketing Stone Temple Consulting
Gianluca Fiorelli, SEO and Inbound Marketing Consultant of ILoveSEO.net
Michael King, Founder & Digital Marketing Consultant of iPullRank
Will Critchlow, Founder and CEO of Distilled
SEMrush offers a wide range of functions for analyzing webpages and their performance in search engines. In this article, I am going to explain how you can perform an SEO audit with SEMrush tools and identify opportunities for optimization, as well as how you can determine how your competitors are doing.
For this analysis, we’ve chosen to look at the Spanish version of Samsung.com and see how it is applying Google-quality guidelines. The only search engine that we are going to use in our study is Google.es, because it holds over 90% of the Spanish market share.
We have a new buzz-term — growth hacking! And it appears to be really buzzing.
Seems that everyone we speak to these days is looking for a “Growth Hhacker.” Like most new terms we wondered whether this might be just a new fad, but it appears not, because growth hacking is increasingly in high demand for startups. Some stand-alone info sharing sites like GrowthHacker.tv and GrowthHackers.com, plus the annual Growth Hackers Conference, have been developed solely to better serve startups’ marketing strategies.
It’s certainly great that more and more businesses are taking growth seriously, and it’s definitely very important that business owners be aware of creating sustainable companies and networks. But, what exactly is it? (more…)
Loading ...One of my all-time favorite commercials was Electronic Data Systems’ “Cat Herders” from Superbowl XXXIV.
Though it’s 15 years old, the commercial is still relevant. Today, digital marketers commonly refer to themselves as “cat herders,” and for good reason.
No matter how well we light the path, online visitors still dart in every direction — seemingly at random. Clicking elements with no links. Getting distracted by almost anything. Screwing up the simplest form fields. And visiting pages that don’t matter (919 visits to my privacy policy, really!?)
If your site had a dusty old sock drawer, you’d find 10 visitors curled up inside.
When users visit, you want them to end up on a high-converting path. But too often they never make it.
The nature of high-converting pages often precludes them from getting large amounts of organic traffic. These pages usually have limited content, and focus on a single offer — both things Google’s algorithm doesn’t like. Instead, homepages often get the majority of visits — much to the chagrin of anyone working in the conversion optimization industry.
Homepages have always reminded me of those terrible buffets that serve both Western and Chinese food, and do a lousy job of both. When appealing to so many audiences at once, it’s difficult to develop a strong conversion funnel — and everyone leaves unhappy.
So all this begs the question: how can marketers keep their users on engaging pathways that increase our chances of converting them to customers? And if possible, can we funnel traffic from low-converting pages to high-converting pages without disrupting the user experience?
The tactic I’ll discuss in this post is designed to do just that. (more…)
As we end a very tumultuous year of major updates in key SEO algorithms and many significant changes in marketing strategy with popular social media platforms, I thought it would be a good idea to review the essential basic facts of SEO and website optimization.
After all, in order to maximize the ROI of your digital marketing investment, a w3c compliant, mobile responsive and adaptive website that is fully optimized with the latest white hat SEO tactics, is absolutely necessary.
You want to start 2015 off with some impressive and lucrative search engine rankings, right? (more…)
Bounce rate really is an important metric to track when you’re trying to analyze the performance of your website. It’s one of a number of metrics that can help you understand how engaging your site is and whether or not your audience approve.
A high bounce rate always means fewer conversions, which nobody wants.
So how do you go about reducing the bounce rate of a site, which in turn, should help you boost conversions?
