Heres What Really Matters for SEO in 2016

To many people, SEO is a minefield of misinformation and conflicting advice.

Trust me, I’ve been there. When I Googled “SEO” for the first time, I was quickly overwhelmed with a mountain of anecdotes, case studies and “best practices”. I picked up a few tips, but for the most part, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I read.

After years of in-the-trenches online marketing and PR work, I eventually put the pieces of the puzzles together. But I’m no SEO guru. In fact, most of my best SEO successes have come from old-school PR. That’s because, when you do it right, PR equates to link building, or the practice of building backlinks to your site to get higher rankings in search engines.

But over the last few months I’ve read that “link building is dead” and that “Google doesn’t care about keywords anymore.” Instead, the search engine is supposedly more concerned with high-quality content, schema markup and social media shares.. I’ve been busy with my startup, so I haven’t had time to keep up with the latest trends in the SEO world.

Fortunately, someone else recently took the time to make sense of the topsy-turvy SEO landscape. Brian Dean and a team of data partners at Backlinko recently analyzed 1 million Google results to see which ranking factors are important for SEO in 2016.

Social Media Engagement Drives Sales

Research from LoyaltyOne, Northwestern and Ivey Business School demonstrates up to 30% increase in purchase behavior from social media participants.

Research released by LoyaltyOne and two leading North American academic institutions provides empirical proof that social media interaction between a customer and a brand drives immediate and long-term sales increases.

The research constitutes a social media marketing breakthrough because it establishes the accountability link long sought by brands that have showered dollars on social media outlets while attempting to prove the return on investment to C-suite skeptics.

Transaction-based proof that social media participation increases purchases is the outcome of a research effort undertaken as the 2012 LoyaltyOne Social Media Transaction Impact Study.

The research findings are based on a two-year analysis of brand-customer social media engagement and actual transaction data with Canada’s more than 10-million member AIR MILES Reward Program. Consumers who participate in LoyaltyOne’s AIR MILES loyalty program earn reward miles by making purchases from its affiliated business partners (sponsors) and services across Canada. Collectors of the program redeem reward miles for a wide range of travel, entertainment and merchandise rewards.

Which Social Media Marketing Tactics Work Best?

(eM+C)—Now that marketers’ tenure on social networks is at least a few years old, they are zeroing in on what they are best able to accomplish on the sites, what their biggest challenges are and how to most effectively track their performance.

Ascend2, an agency consulting company, surveyed marketing professionals around the world in February 2013, and the greatest percentage of respondents from both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies considered customer engagement to be the primary purpose of their social media marketing. Website traffic also ranked high for both types of marketing professionals.

Leads were a more important end for B2Bs than B2Cs. Twenty-nine percent of B2Bs used social to generate better quality leads, and 27% sought to get more leads with the tactic.

Search engine rankings remain an important part of businesses’ digital strategy, and social media plays a role here too. Approximately one-quarter of both B2Bs and B2Cs used social media outreach to improve search rank.

The fundamental goal of increasing sales revenue was a social goal for over one-third of marketers from both B2Bs and B2Cs.

To best achieve social objectives, the greatest percentage of respondents cited creating articles and blog post content. These tactics fall directly in line with driving the goal of customer engagement. Other forms of content creation also ranked high, including research and whitepapers for B2Bs, and video and audio for both types of companies.

Big Social Media Plans + Small Budget = No Problem.

Step #1:   Develop ideas with endemic potential.

Marketers who view social media as efficient channels through which they steadily self-promote, where they do more talking than listening, or where they attempt to impose brand messaging and force brand loyalty instead of encouraging it are looking at it all wrong.

Social media is efficient because it’s viral. It isn’t designed for bragging about how great your business is.  It’s about enticing people to brag about your business for you. Essentially, social media offers smart marketers the opportunity to turn a handful of people into an enormous labyrinth of loyal brand ambassadors.

Step #2):  Be ‘resource wise.’

Probably one of the biggest myths about marketing on the social web is that it’s free.  It isn’t and it never was.
Marketers familiar with social media understand it takes a great deal of resources to be successful, including time spent strategizing, developing and implementing campaigns, and consistent man hours dedicated to routinely engaging with audiences. Costs for design and production, analytics, content creation and research can all put a significant dent in budgets too.

Following are a few suggestions to help marketers cut costs and improve ROI.

Focus on identifying trends surrounding posts and tweets that net the biggest reactions and interactions. Replicate those strategies.
Like the Ford Fiesta campaign, leverage User Generated Content (UGC) to reduce development and production expenses whenever possible.
Rely on turnkey social media management apps to automate posts and updates, gather data or monitor conversations to alleviate the burden of time consuming tasks.
Take a page out of Marketing 101 by integrating your efforts.  Messaging of traditional campaigns should align with social media messaging.  Post broadcast ads to your company’s branded social sites.
Enable your social media audience to share special offers or discounts with their friends.
Make your customers the star of your social media campaign.  Post photos of contest winners or reward your most influential followers with exclusive sneak peeks or special discounts.  Fan inclusion is a simple and cost-effective way to build brand awareness.





Step #3): Simplify the sales path.

In Michael Stelzner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, it revealed that by spending as little as six hours per week in social media marketing, 61 percent of marketers surveyed saw lead generation benefits.

Social media isn’t all fun and games.  As marketers, our bottom line goal is to positively impact the bottom line of our business.  What this means is that any social media marketing campaign – any good marketing campaign for that matter – should include 1) clearly defined goals 2) performance analytics and 3) calls-to-action.

12 Valuable Tips for Video SEO Beginners

1. Content Quality Check

Ensure your videos are relevant, informative, and rich with content. Don’t waste time producing videos that have nothing to do with your brand or service.

Videos demonstrating step-by-step processes or videos expressing opinions about topics can be quite useful. Videos should be fun, memorable, short, and leave the viewer wanting more.

If using a video production company, trust one that understands the importance of these concepts. If you’re hesitant of their services, make sure to scan their existing video portfolio in detail for videos that match these qualities.





2. Title

Capture the potential viewer’s attention with a catchy title that contains related key phrases that are relevant to your brand or service. Do some keyword research and find the words that your audience will most likely be searching, but remember to keep the title interesting, not just filled with keywords.

Create a title that will catch the eye of a user. Brainstorm some titles that catch your eye when passing a magazine rack. What compels you to pick up a magazine?




3. Tags

Optimize your video with important key phrases or keywords. Don’t use complicated words or terminology that may not be common to the average person.

Refer back to your keyword research and think in terms of what your targeted audience might be searching for when looking to find your brand or service. Tag your video with these terms and consider naming the file of the video with these terms in mind.




4. Description

Optimize your video’s description with relevant keywords and include a keyword-rich description of your video to allow search engines to index it and rank it higher, and for users to better understand your video before viewing.




5. Links

Use video as a portal to other content on your site. Upload a couple of videos to portals like YouTube and Vimeo, and consider providing links back to related content and other relevant videos on your site.




6. Transcripts

Provide transcripts of your videos. Good old HTML content is still a favorite with search engines.

If you want your video to rank well, you need to give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround your videos with on-page copy that can be indexed by search engines.




7. Length

Keep your video at five minutes or less. The average amount of time a user spends on a YouTube video is around 1 minute 30 seconds. People do not want to sit through a boring video, and most will not do it.

If you have video content that is of long duration, consider breaking it up into smaller pieces and tagging each accordingly, to be more appealing to the viewer. Not only does this make for better viewing pleasure, multiple videos are also better for optimization efforts.

YouTube is now paying close attention to viewership and engagement. It is critical that viewers watch your video for as long as possible.

8. Video Sitemaps

Submit a video sitemap to Google to make sure that the search engine spiders can find your video content and index it accordingly. This is the easiest way for search engines to find your video content.

Take advantage of Google Webmaster Tools for creating a video sitemap. Use important keywords in the anchor text that links to your videos featured on your sitemap.





9. Branding

As video is a great way to generate brand awareness with prospects, take advantage of this opportunity to incorporate your brand and logos into your videos.




10. Embedding Options

Help your video go viral. Allow other users access to the coding that will allow them to embed your video on their website or blog. This can help gain valuable back links and shares that will boost your rankings in search engines.





11. Syndication

Submit your video to RSS feeds and syndicate your videos to drive exposure across various online platforms and to optimize your videos even more.





12. Share, Share, Share!

Get on your social networks, look through your email contacts, write on your blogs, and get the hype going. Share your video with everyone, because if you have content worth sharing, it will continue to be shared to grow an expanding audience, and in turn develop more exposure for your brand or service.

7 SEO Tips for not provided in Google Analytics

Ever since Google announced they would no longer report referring keyword data from logged-in users, webmasters and SEOs have become increasingly frustrated dealing with the dreaded (not provided) keywords.

Google assured us this would impact less than 10% of queries. Although that has proved to be the average, some webmasters have observed 50% of their keyword information wiped clean away from their data.

1. How Big is Your (not provided) Impact?

If Google reports less than 5% of your organic keyword traffic as (not provided) then you probably don’t have much to worry about. On the other hand, if you are one of the unlucky few who experienced 25-50% in lost keyword data, then you want to hustle to get that data back.

The simplest way to measure impact, of course, is to look at your referring keyword information. Here you can easily track the percentage of “not provided” keywords





2. Take an Accurate Look

Once you understand how much referring keyword traffic is hidden by Google’s privacy veil, now is the time to fill in the missing holes in your analytics..





3. Get Smarter Data Analysis

Using clear, step-by-step instructions he shows how to:

Establish Macro Content

Understand the Performance Profile of not provided traffic.

Match up Performance Profile to Brand & Non-brand Visits

Establish Conclusions

Landing Page Keyword Referral Analysis





4. Mine Your SEO Report in Google Analytics


Google’s own answer to this predicament is the new SEO reports in Google Analytics. The reports are found under the “Traffic Sources” section.


Although it’s true that these SEO query reports list most of the keywords searchers used to find your website, they are limited in value by several major drawbacks.

The data is limited to the top 1000 daily search queries and top 1000 daily landing pages for the past 30 days.

The reports are often criticized for their inaccuracy and confusion they produce.

The query reports aren’t tied to landing page reports, or vice-versa, severely limiting their usefulness.




5. Got Ca$h? Buy the Data


The same privacy loophole which angered so many webmasters also allows web marketers to buy the keyword data. This is because although Google hides referring keyword query data from everyone else, it does make this data available to customers who purchase advertising through Google.




6. Send Google Your Love

…or not. Personally, I love Google and what they have done for our world, but it’s best to let our voices be heard. If you have strong feelings about Google’s “not provided” actions, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz suggests you voice your concern.



7. Don’t Worry

Although we find the development of “not provided” keywords troubling, one thing that will always be true is that SEOs are resourceful – incredibly so. Through 1000s of algorithm changes and a rapidly shifting web landscape, savvy web marketers have found ways to keep up with evolving search engines. In fact, the reverse is often true – search engines find themselves keeping up with web marketers.

The “not provided” story is long from over. That said, we’ve been through worse storms than this. By working together for a better understanding of the web, as SEOs do, we will arrive on the other side stronger than ever.

Fixing 5 common SEO problems with HTML5... today!

Problem 1: Pagination

You have a tonne of pages, e.g listing products in a particular category, which are completely identical asides from which subset of your products are listed on them. Now you want to ensure that you rank, but you also do not want to run into duplicate content issues, or waste your crawl budget letting Google crawl hundreds of pages which add no value. However, maybe you do want them to be crawled to ensure the content is indexed? Maybe you want them crawled but are aware these same products are listed in different groups and sequences in varying categories and you are worried about the implications of this. If only you could just tell Google: “Hey! These pages are paginated listings, so please treat them accordingly!”.

This is a common scenario for many sites, especially eCommerce sites; however, whilst a common problem, it is still something we see many clients struggling with. Furthermore, often clients will have some specific site quirk or preference which makes this less straightforward than it should be.

Problem 2: Page structure


For years now we have been reminded over and over to focus on semantic HTML. Originally the focus on this was that it makes rendering content across devices and formats far easier when it is neatly categorised: HTML for content and meaning, CSS for presentation and style, and Javascript for additional behaviour. Removing anything in your HTML that was just there for presentation was not too difficult, but managing to fully define the meaning of the content with HTML was pretty much impossible - HTML simply wasn’t a rich enough language. Microformats started flooding in trying to fill some of the gaps, but the fact is that HTML remained ill equipped for the task.







Problem 3: Internal search pages


What happens if you Google Bing’s results page for Googling Bing? Well, nothing actually because they block it with robots.txt, but my point is when a search engine starts crawling another search engine’s results pages the universe gets uneasy.

Now if you have an internal search feature on your site, the standard answer would be to block it with robots.txt and stop the hellish nightmare that can otherwise ensue. However, some sites actually blend the search feature with weird navigation systems or even use the search results as a way to list certain product categories that they then link to. The best solution is to fix the site IA and make this a non-issue but it isn’t always as easy as it should be.





Problem 4: Microformats != schema.org

Microformats and RDFa are two forms of embedding machine readable meta data into our web page that are both quite well known in the SEO community.

Microdata is another such format, and is part of the HTML5 spec, but has remained somewhat in the shadows and hasn’t seen the widespread adoption of the others.

Schema.org is not a format or a language in itself, but it actually a vocabulary which the search engines have all agreed to understand and respect. It lays out what types of entities and attributes you can insert into the metadata on your web pages and guarantees that all the engines will understand these.





Problem 5: AJAX and URLs



This one is well known and disliked by pretty much every SEO that there ever was. AJAX sites are really nice for users and improve the user experience greatly.... right up to the moment the user tries to bookmark the page they are on, or email it someone, or share it via social media, or use the back button, or find the page in their history the next day.

AJAX and SEO simply were never designed to mix, and now we are in a world where people want both. If you have somehow managed to avoid this problem and aren’t aware of is then I’ll briefly outline it... AJAX allows a webpage to, via the use of javascript, update the contents of a page without actually reloading the page; a new HTTP request will be sent and the new content will probably replace some old content on the page but because the page does not reload the URL does not change.

The traditional method to address this to ensure the Googlebot can spider the content is simply to ensure the AJAX calls are hooked to traditional <a> tags so you can include an href to a version of that same content which Google will pick up (and far too often even this hasn’t been done - meaning the content is stranded and will never get indexed). This is fine for the crawling aspect of SEO, but nowadays we need to consider the fact that social shares are an important aspect of SEO too and if the user can’t copy and paste the correct URL then you are already handicapped.