Content marketing is a long game. In one way, that’s excellent — because all of your lazy or undisciplined competitors...
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In the era of Modern Marketing, most marketers are equipped with the technology needed to act on customer insights and deliver tailored, multi-touch experiences. Unfortunately, most marketing teams are not prepared to realize the full value of their technology ecosystem and struggle to innovate their marketing programs.
As Customer Success Manager (CSM), my clients often request that I provide ‘tough love’ and look to me for product adoption guidance. In one recent meeting, the VP of Digital Marketing said, “It feels like we’ve purchased a sports car, but we still only have our learner’s permit!”
When it comes to product adoption, no one team can own the transformation. Here’s a checklist for defining and managing a path to value:
Assess the Current StateTo understand the current state, it’s important to establish baselines for measuring future outcomes. This starts by:
Over time, stakeholders may change and knowledge gaps may impede program innovation. Ongoing training and enablement are both key to successful product adoption by end users. To elevate product awareness with all stakeholders, time should be designated quarterly towards:
To advance product adoption and program maturity, teams will need guidance on what they can aspire to achieve with the technology. Recommendations should keep careful consideration to questions such as:
A Success Plan serves as a joint-execution proposal that defines an action path for all prioritized recommendations and establishes accountability for all stakeholders. The success of technology solutions will be at risk without an internal champion that owns the path to value and transformation. The champion does this by:
Most of my clients acknowledge that marketing systems are complex and no one team can own the transformation. The path to value is truly a joint cross-functional effort rooted in alignment, accountability and a shared commitment towards achieving transformational business outcomes.
Can you relate? Don’t be left feeling guilty for under-utilizing the tools you have, and ask for help if you need it, especially if you have access to subject matter experts that can lend a hand
Oracle’s Customer Success Advanced Services, for example, are here to guide your success with your Oracle SaaS solution. Their team is 100% focused on helping customers achieve faster value and realization of business objectives. Don't be afraid to reach out.
The entire customer experience needs to be considered to create a positive business outcome. Find out what you can do to better engage your customers and win them over with personalized content by reading "Go Further with Customer Experience Optimization."
Cut it out. Cut out the boring parts. Cut out the irrelevant. Cut out the extraneous details that take away...
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If I write a blog post on any topic, what do you think happens?
It typically gets indexed by Google the same day I publish the content and within a week it tends to rank high on Google.
Then again, I have a domain score of 94 and I have 633,791 backlinks. Just look at the image above. (If you are curious what your link count or domain score is, put in your URL here.)
But if you have a lot fewer backlinks and a much lower domain score, what do you think would happen?
Chances are your content won’t get indexed fast and it won’t rank as high as you want.
But there has to be a way to change this, right? Especially without building more backlinks because we all know that’s time-consuming and hard.
To find the most ideal solution, I decided to run a little experiment.
Around five months ago, I sent out an email to a portion of my mailing list asking people if they wanted to partake in an SEO experiment.
As you could imagine, I had well over a thousand websites who were willing to participate. I had to narrow down the list because for this experiment to be effective, a website had to have a domain score of 30 or less and no more than 40 backlinks.
That way it’s at least a challenge to figure out how to rank new content higher.
In addition to that, the site couldn’t be a subdomain, such as domain.wordpress.com. It had to be a standalone site.
Once I removed all of the outliers, I was left with 983 people who agreed to participate in the experiment. Of those, 347 stopped replying or backed out of the experiment due to time commitments, which means I was left with 636.
For all of the sites, we had them write a piece of content. We didn’t make it a requirement that the content had to be about any specific topic or that it had to be written a certain way… we just had them write one piece of content that was between 1,800 and 2,000 words in length.
We enforced the minimum and maximum length limit because we needed the post to be long enough to naturally include keywords, but if it was too long… such as 10,000 words, it would have a higher chance to rank on Google.
Each site had 30 days to write the piece of content and publish it on their site. Within 30 days of the content being published, we looked up the URL in our Ubersuggest database to see how many keywords the post ranks for in the top 100, top 50, and top 10 spots.
We also repeated this search 60 days after the article was published to see if there were any major differences.
The Ubersuggest database currently contains information on 1,459,103,429 keywords from around the world in all languages (a lot of keywords have low search volume like 10 searches per month). But for this experiment, we focused on English speaking sites.
We then split the sites up into 9 groups. Roughly 70 sites per group. Each group only leveraged 1 tactic to see if it helped with rankings.
Here’s a breakdown of each group.
Before I dive into the data, keep in mind that if someone was in one of the groups, we did our best to make sure that they weren’t leveraging any other tactic. For example, for everyone who wasn’t in the sitemap group, we had them remove their existing sitemaps for Google Search Console (other than the everything group).
So how many keywords does an average website with a domain score of 30 or less rank for in Google within a month and even two months?
I was shocked at how many keywords a site could rank for when it barely has any links and a low domain score.
But what wasn’t as shocking is how a web page’s ranking can increase over time. The orange line shows the number of keywords that ranked within the first 30 days and the green line shows the number over the first 60 days.
You know how people say you need an XML sitemap, well it is even more important if you have a low domain score. At least, that is what the data shows.
When your site has very few links and a low domain score, you’ll find that Google may not crawl your site as often as you want. But by leveraging a sitemap, you can speed up the indexing process, which helps decrease the time it takes for your site to start ranking for keywords.
Links, links, and more links… it’s what every site needs to rank well. Technically they are external links, but internal links are better than nothing.
When you add internal links from your old content to your newer articles, it helps them get indexed faster and it helps push them up in the rankings.
Especially when these internal links come from relevant pages that have some decent rankings on Google.
Articles that leveraged 3 internal links had more page 1 rankings than sites that just used an XML sitemap.
If you aren’t familiar with the URL inspection feature within Google Search Console, it’s a quick way to getting your content index.
Just log into Search Console and type in your article URL in the search bar at the top. You’ll see a screen that looks something like this:
All you have to do is click the “request indexing” link.
Leveraging this feature has a similar result to using the sitemap.
I’ve noticed a trend with my own website, in which if I create a piece of content that goes viral on the social web, my rankings for that new piece of content skyrocket to the top of Google… at least in the very short run.
And after a few weeks, I notice that my rankings drop.
Now, my site isn’t a large enough sample size and there are many reasons why my site ranks really well quickly.
Nonetheless, it was interesting to see how much social shares impact rankings.
Getting social shares substantially performed better than the control group, but similar to my experience with NeilPatel.com, the rankings did slip a bit in month 2 instead of continually rising to the top.
Social shares may not have a direct impact on rankings, but the more people who see your content the higher the chance you build backlinks, increase your brand queries, and build brand loyalty.
Do you know how people are saying that Google is using data from Google Analytics and Chrome to determine how high your site should rank?
Well, I wasn’t able to prove that from this experiment.
I had 40 random people directly type in the URL of each new article into Google Chrome. I spread it out over a week, making sure they clicked around on the site and stayed for at least 2 minutes.
The ranking results were very similar to the control group.
Now this group performed very similarly to the group that leveraged internal linking. And the month 2 results outperformed all other groups.
User metrics are a key part of Google’s algorithm. If you can create a compelling title tag and meta description, you’ll see a boost in your click-through rate and eventually, your rankings will climb.
If you want to boost your rankings through your meta tags, it’s not just about adding in the right keywords, you’ll also want to boost your click-through rate. Follow these steps to do just that.
The 8th group tested if URL length impacts how high a new piece of content ranks on Google.
Based on the graph above, you can see that it does. It didn’t have as much of an impact as internal linking or meta tags, but it did have an impact.
The key to creating SEO friendly URLs is to include a keyword or two and keep them short.
If your URL is too long and descriptive, such as:
neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-optimize-your-meta-tags-for-search-engines
The article will rank for very long tail phrases but will struggle to rank for more popular terms like “meta tags” compared to URLs like:
neilpatel.com/blog/meta-tags/
The beautiful part about the short URLs is that they rank well for head terms and long tail phrases.
The charts clearly show that little things like meta tags, URLs, internal linking, social shares, and even sitemaps help.
But the key to doing well, especially if you want your new content to rank well is to not just do one of those things, but instead do them all.
As you can see from the chart, doing everything gives you the best results. Now sure, some of the things are redundant like using an XML sitemap and using the URL inspection feature, but you get the point.
You’ll also notice that when you leverage everything together your results aren’t exponentially better… SEO is competitive and has turned into a game where every little thing adds up.
If you want to do well and have your new AND old content rank faster and higher, you need to do everything.
I know the tactics above aren’t anything revolutionary or new, but it’s interesting to look at the data and see how specific tactics affect rankings.
So, what do you think?
The post How to Rank New Content Faster appeared first on Neil Patel.
How do we stay consistent and disciplined in our business?
Amidst all the different strategies and business hacks out there, what are some simple ways to build and keep the momentum?
How can we do things today, so that the snowball of tomorrow helps itself down the hill?
If we can harness the energy of consistency and discipline, everyday, the long term results are often beyond our wildest dreams!
Staying on course on a daily basis can create a sense of self pride and purpose that is hard to find elsewhere.
These practices can help clear a path to success and prevent us trudging blindly through the wilderness.
In this episode we talk about how to steer clear of new gimmicky strategies for your business, creating and maintaining momentum and staying present and committed to your goals. We get into why starting with intention, in this regard, can go such a long way and why it is hardest in the beginning.
Today on the show we are joined by Vickie Velasquez from the Vegetarian Zen Podcast and our very own Jen Rao! Our guests help Chase and Aiden unpack stories of discipline and consistency and how they have proved so important in each’s journey.
We also talk about how this discussion fits into the next series of shows we are doing, which will provide a refreshed roadmap for you and your work.
These concepts that we are talking about can be such trustworthy tools in your box of tricks and can ultimately make a world of difference!
For all that and all the usual Fizzle goodness, join us today!
iTunes | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Stitcher | Soundcloud | RSS
Photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash
The post How Discipline and Consistency Lead to Success with Vickie Velasquez (FS322) appeared first on Fizzle.
“Quality content” isn’t just about the type of content you create. It’s about all the care behind the scenes that...
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In the world of commerce, the use of visual and voice searches is increasing. Over the last several months, voice and visual queries have surged, particularly over the last holiday shopping season. This should hardly be a surprise when you realize that just about everyone with a smartphone has a voice-enabled device. Therefore, retailers have to adapt and use visual search as one of their tactics to engage with customers.
Increases in Visual SearchIt is vital to understand the progress visual search has attained—and how such technology can aid merchants in growing (and keeping) their customer base.
Various social networks, including Instagram, as well as hundreds of retailers, have utilized visual search, and those figures don’t show any signs of slowing down. Currently, consumer experiences are more than just the purchase of goods and services. Visual search helps customers make buying decisions better than traditional retail tools can.
Most smartphone shopping list apps lack simplicity, which causes users to stop using them altogether. Visual search answers questions for consumers, and in turn, creates a shopping list they can use at retail stores. Further, visual search can accommodate baby and gift registries, too. It can integrate with augmented reality, and give customers a positive experience with a store’s inventory.
For instance, in apparel retail, a potential customer might be on the hunt for a white t-shirt. Big picture-wise, this customer might be seeking out an outfit that comes with a white t-shirt. They might be trying to coordinate a particular style rather than one piece of attire. A visual search tool helps both the retail clerk and the customer locate a white t-shirt, as well as suggest product alternatives that would accentuate the attire. This is what is occurring in various retail shops who are utilizing visual search, which emphasizes the connection between the shopper and the clerk.
Store UtilizationClerks are the ones who use this technology more than anyone. Visual searches tend to occur from within stores more than anywhere. Outfit and apparel recommendations give consumers more satisfaction with their overall shopping experience, stimulating conversions in the process. Such outcomes have taken place in home decor and furniture stores in addition to clothing retail shops.
Visual search does have its fair share of problems, though.
Data determines the level of success with visual search. Just about everyone can attain a match range of 40 to 70%. However, retailers require matching rates of at least 95%. This warrants scraping photos online based on various relevant product images, sending data to an AI engine. Ultimately, when it comes to visual search, the “garbage in, garbage out” principle is in full effect.
According to Crowd Work News, “no matter how high the visual search match rate is, there is the potential that a customer, maybe one who scanned a picture from an outdated catalog, is looking for an item that the merchant doesn’t sell anymore, or is sold out of it. If that shopper lands on a product page that doesn’t deliver what they’re looking for, the sale is as good as lost.”
Other Visual OptionsVisual search can be used to suggest other options, like a t-shirt in a different color that has the same features the customer was initially seeking out. You’ll need to be proactive to ensure that visual search operates as a strong tool to stimulate sales and attract customers. Expectation management is essential in this regard, and if it can be provided, a visual search feature will be especially helpful.
Will voice and visual searches be integrated down the line? Is there potential for these features to be used in conjunction with one another? In several instances, they can play off one another. They can both serve as search bar tools to optimize customer shopping experiences. Each method comes with its own pros and cons.
Visual search is making progress with each passing day, offering better shopping experiences for consumers and increased traffic for retailers.
Visual search is only one tool you can use to optimize and enhance your customer experience. Read “Go Further with Customer Experience Optimization” and realize how you can craft a more pleasing and rewarding experience.
