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Understanding the Weight and Impact of Search Ranking Factors

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By Peter Roesler

You know that abiding by Google’s rules is a must, but did you know not all search ranking factors are applied equally?

As a business owner or marketing professional, you know the importance of competing for the top positions in SERPs (search engine results pages). For years, I have explained how important it is to mix relevant, targeted content with well-constructed pages and sites that load quickly (among other things) to achieve favour from the search engine deities (i.e., algorithms).

Search ranking factors are complex. They also change all the time. This is one of the most frustrating parts of this industry.

However, I’m here to help and demystify the ever-changing ranking factors for you. Remember, the search ranking factors are essentially a minimum bar you need to cross. This doesn’t mean your site is guaranteed to rank.

Achieving Search Engine Success

Now it’s time to figure out what will help you achieve the success in search engines you are hoping for.

There’s no question that Google is the top authority when it comes to search results. It also offers guidance and guidelines on the “Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines” page. Here you can find a selection of tips that, when combined, impact each piece of ranking content.

What are these principles? Glad you asked.

The Top Principles Used for Search Ranking Results

Google makes it clear what the search engine’s intent is. These principles help to clarify this even more:

  • People are searching online for several purposes. They may want to accomplish something quickly or dive deep into a specific topic.
  • It’s the role of search engines to provide a diverse array of high-quality, helpful search results in an order that makes sense based on quality and helpfulness.
  • Different search types require different search results.
  • Search engines are used worldwide, which means diversity in search results is a must to satisfy the diverse people using search fully.
  • Search results need to be helpful to people who are searching for something. The results need to provide trustworthy and authoritative information rather than leading people off-topic by presenting misleading information.

When you understand the guiding principles related to search quality, it is pretty clear what Google is saying.

Any given webpage may be ranked uniquely for a specific search. The search engine will determine ranking for keywords differently based on (along with other external variables) the intent and location of the person who is searching.

What does this mean for you?

Well, it means that the ranking factors you are trying to optimize for aren’t always applied equally.

Understanding the Search Ranking Process

At the very heart of SEO, the goal is to maximize the main opportunities. This begins by knowing where these opportunities are and then creating content that helps you capitalize on these opportunities.

While it can be challenging to grasp, understanding this important concept (and the principles used by Google) will help you create content that better serves search intent.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Peter Roesler

President, Small Business SEO@KickAss_SEO

Sourced from Inc.

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‘Advertisers are starting to lose trust’: Why media buyers say Facebook is losing its grip on social ad spend

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By Kimeko McCoy

For the last few years, Facebook and Instagram have dominated advertisers’ media mix. But recently, media buyers say ad spend on social media’s biggest platforms has started to deteriorate.

It’s more of a slow leak than a mass exodus, with client ad spend dedicated to Facebook and Instagram recently declining by 5-10% over the last year, according to Hallie Wyckoff, group director of social media at Wunderman Thompson Commerce.

“It’s happening now because of the pandemic, in all honesty,” Wyckoff said. “There were so many changes in marketing budgets last year where a lot of brands pulled back for a bit or had to be more lean with what they were willing to spend.”

For Wunderman Thompson, with clients including major marketers like Unilever and Coca-Cola, ad dollars that may have gone to Facebook and Instagram have recently shifted to alternative platforms like TikTok — or to efforts to improve or build out social commerce opportunities, as well as working with influencers, Wyckoff said.

Given Facebook and Instagram’s scale, targeting capabilities and range in ad unit offerings, advertisers and media buyers predict it won’t lose its crown any time soon. In fact, the platform’s ad business is holding up for now, per previous Digiday reporting. However, the platform’s flaws like waning interest from younger audiences, rising cost per impression and mounting data privacy issues are giving way to challengers like TikTok, Snap and even Pinterest. The flaws have gotten worse because the pandemic has made for an uncertain future and constant shifts in people’s shopping habits, which has advertisers looking for alternatives.

When asked for comment, a Facebook spokesperson pointed to the platform’s Q2 2021 earnings call, in which Facebook reported strong business growth and noting that total revenue for Q2 was $29.1 billion, which is a 56% year-over-year increase. According to chief financial officer David Wehner, speaking during Facebook’s most recent earnings call on July 28, the growth was predominately driven by verticals that performed well over the course of the pandemic, like online commerce and consumer packaged goods.

At least one marketing agency, Tinuiti, which Facebook pointed to as an example of increasing investment on its platforms, hiked it’s year-over-year spending on Facebook and Instagram alongside increased ad spend for platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest.

“We’ve seen this increase 37% YoY on Facebook and 75% YoY on IG (24% growth in Q1 and 53% growth in Q1, respectively). And we’re on pace to spend 61% more on Facebook and Instagram than we did in all of 2019,” said Avi Ben-Zvi, vp of paid social at Tinuiti.

But according to Pew Research, Facebook and other major social media platforms’ growth stalled over the past five years. Facebook’s brand reputation suffered last year after advertisers boycotted the platform with the “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign. And new research from analytics and insight company Skai, shows that social media CPMs have been steadily increasing, up about 12% from 2019. According to Skai, CPMs hovered around $5.71 this time in 2019 and are now at $6.37.

Also buffeting the social giant is the fact that it is facing a serious challenge in Apple’s data privacy changes, noted Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing shop DigiShop Media via email.

“The biggest cause has certainly been because iOS14 removed some of the most powerful targeting options,” she said. “Also, I imagine that some of the usage has also slipped as the world came out of the pandemic and that removed some inventory and drove up CPMs.”

Elijah Schneider, CEO of social marketing agency Modifly, backs up Constantine’s claims.

“Advertisers are starting to lose trust that consumers lost a long time ago,” Schneider said.

And challenger brands have seen the writing on the wall. Modifly, with a client list that includes startups and direct to consumer brands like Super Coffee drink brand and Beam wellness brand, has seen clients press for serious ad dollar diversification since late last year, said Schneider who added that in 2019 and 2020 at least 80% of Modifly client spend was in Facebook products. At present, that ad spend now sits at 55% on Facebook and 45% on alternative social platforms, like TikTok and Snapchat. (Schneider didn’t share what these breakdowns looked like in actual dollar figures.)

“For brands that are really focused on Gen Z, Facebook is part of the mix. But they’re not necessarily the dominant part of the mix,” said Noah Mallin, chief strategy officer at IMGN Media, where client ad spend on Facebook and Instagram has decreased from 95% of budget in prior years to 75% at present. “They’re much more evenly matched for established big brands where Gen Z is a segment among many,” he added.

In a rush to diversify ad spend, advertisers have divided their digital dollars up amongst everything from alternative social media platforms to digital tools to support a brick-and-mortar presence. There’s no clear kingpin coming to dethrone Facebook and Instagram, although many marketers see promise in TikTok given the platform’s scale and massive audience.

If nothing else, the decline continues to push along the industry-wide conversation around the need to diversify media spend, making for healthy competition among the platforms and more viable options for media buyers, Mallin said.

“I don’t necessarily see [Facebook and Instagram] diminishing to nothing,” Mallin said. “But if you want to have a smart mix and you’ve got the budget for it, you’d want to have Twitch in there and you want to have TikTok in there too.”

That’s not to say Facebook couldn’t make a few changes to delay its decline — and this could just be the latest interaction of changes in the social media landscape, marketers say. When it comes to digital and social media, that landscape is always changing, meaning advertisers will always need to adapt. This pandemic made flexibility a priority, said Wunderman Thompson’s Wyckoff.

“If we start to see CPMs or CPCs go down, you might see an influx back to Facebook and Instagram,” she said. “It’s an ever-evolving world and marketers are going to continue to pay attention and see what’s best.”

Feature Image Credit: Ivy Liu 

By Kimeko McCoy

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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Google is doubling down on a powerful new AI tool for Search

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By Hayden Field

But the technology has drawn criticism from the AI community

Google wants your search queries to look less like a Jeopardy! answer and more like a chat with your friend—filled with the kind of slang and shorthand only a human would understand.

To get there, the tech giant is enlisting a powerful AI tool you all might remember: a large language model, specifically one called MUM (multitask unified model).

  • Large language models, which are trained on datasets as large as one trillion words, help computers process and produce human-like language.

But, but, but: The tech has drawn criticism from parts of the AI community. In the past year, Google fired both co-leads of its AI ethics team after a dispute over their research on the dangers of large language models.

  • One of experts’ top concerns? Models trained via internet data will naturally learn biases—then can easily replicate those patterns and multiply the resulting harms.

Case study

Google hasn’t yet announced a timeline for when it’ll incorporate MUM into live search, but it’s already experimenting with one-off projects.

Then vs. now: In 2020, Google team members spent hundreds of hours compiling the different ways people could refer to Covid in order to accurately route pandemic queries. This year, they wanted to do the same thing for queries about the Covid vaccine—so they used MUM to “generate over 800 names for 17 different vaccines in 50 different languages” within seconds, Pandu Nayak, Google’s VP of search, told Popular Science.

Big picture: Google announced MUM at its developer conference in May alongside other language model initiatives, and now it seems to be doubling down on how important the tech is to its future business model. More sophisticated searches and answers will likely lead to more valuable targeted ads, which could mean big changes for the ad pricing model, reports the FT.—HF

Feature Image Credit: Francis Scialabba

By Hayden Field

Sourced from Morning Brew

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Is Out of Home Ready for Outer Space?

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By Rafael Canton

One small step for billionaires is one giant leap for advertising.

Canadian start-up Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC) recently announced the Doge-1 Mission to the Moon. An 88-pound satellite called CubeSat will hitch a ride aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX during a lunar payload mission in Q1 of 2022.

Once in orbit, the CubeSat’s screen will display ads, logos and art; airtime can be purchased exclusively using the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. The feed will be broadcast to livestreaming platforms such as Twitch and YouTube.

So, no, we will not be watching ads in space like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

As GEC co-founder and CEO Samuel Reid noted on Twitter, the endeavour features “disruptive, non-obtrusive space ads.”

“Having officially transacted with Doge for a deal of this magnitude, Geometric Energy Corporation and SpaceX have solidified Doge as a unit of account for lunar business in the space sector,” Reid said in the announcement of the launch.

Marketing possibilities

Space is becoming crowded with marketing opportunities.

Sierra Space purchased 30- and 15-second preroll ads for Elon Musk’s SNL appearance on YouTube, looking to capitalize on Musk’s popularity and public pursuit of space. Musk has used the marketing strategy for his own benefit, having the first car in space take a spin around the globe.

Brands such as Disney, Coca-Cola and Hello Kitty have launched products into space and reached the stratosphere—literally and figuratively—of marketing.

Barry Frey, president and CEO of the Digital Place-based Advertising Association, told Adweek that the stunt will likely find success. “Whatever is run will get so much enhanced value to the brands and the advertisers,” he said. “The audience will come from social amplification.”

Who will pursue ads in space?

These kinds of ad placements are not for everyone. Ad time can be purchased with tokens that will determine where, how long and how bright the advertisement will be.

It will take some time to see what ads make sense in this new platform. “Not only will metrics have to be developed but also a proper way of vetting ads for taste, environment, etc.,” Frey noted.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article

Feature Image Credit: SpaceX will launch the CubeSat satellite in 2022.ESA/ Getty Images

By Rafael Canton

Sourced from ADWEEK

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Study Indicates Ads Placed In News Media – Especially Print – Outperform Social

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Ads placed in news media consistently outperform ads on Facebook and YouTube, according to a study conducted by Australia’s ThinkNewsBrands.

The cross-platform analysis found that while ads in both print and digital news publications perform better than ads in the social media channels, print ads specifically had a much greater memory impact on readers.

The study included more than 5,350 participants who experienced ads from seven Australian brands in 11 forms of media.

For six days, 42 custom print runs were sent each morning across Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth.

To cut down on bias dependent on ad-placement, seven versions of each newspaper were also distributed each morning. Two hundred and fifty-two websites were also created, with more than 6,000 unique brand exposures.

To maintain the same creative assets for all platforms, the study provided three different print sizes — full-page, half-page, and quarter-page ads — and 6-second, 15-second and 30-second ads for digital display and video.

Duane Varan, CEO of MediaScience, who oversaw the study, describes it as “a monumental effort” that is intended to assure advertisers that it was a true “apples to apples comparison.”

Results show that newspaper ads, regardless of ad type, outperformed Facebook up to four times.

On mobile and desktop, ads in news outlets delivered 1.7 times the unprompted recall of 6-second YouTube ads and were equal to 15-second YouTube ads.

News outlets also proved most effective for short-term ROI, with 10% stronger sales growth than social media.

“The thing about news is that it’s cognitively engaging,” Varan explains, adding: “When you watch the news, you’re thinking about what’s going on. You go into the ad break with your brain wired and fired up, and so you have better access to your memory pathways as a consequence.”

According to Varan, ad recall in news outlets was consistent across three stages of memory:

1. Attention (seeing and absorbing content) was measured by brand recognition.

2. Message-processing was measured by queue recall.

3. Memory retrieval was measured by unaided/free recall.

“It’s telling the story, again, around this clear superior memory effect for news,” Varan says. “It’s consistent with what we’ve seen across many other studies that we’ve done for news clients.”

Varan believes there is too much “assumption” in the market and that various media ad-effectiveness propositions “need to be weighed.”

“We can’t just make assumptions about what effects we think things deliver. We have to have some data that informs it.”

Out of all the study’s findings, Varan says he was most surprised by the comparison of print ads to Facebook ads.

“Just to see how much stronger newsprint was vis-a-vis a Facebook ad, you’re getting a much greater impact,” he says. “A print ad is even outperforming a video ad. That’s pretty telling.”

Varan thinks advertisers have forgotten how good print ads look.

“We just have not been around the medium enough to remember,” he said. “A print ad is very rich. Compare that to the fleeting experience of seeing an ad and scrolling through it.”

Overall, the study suggests how powerful context actually is.

The success of an ad may depend heavily simply on where an ad is placed, Varan says, noting: “Think about how hard it would be to get a 10% lift. Here we’re talking about much more dramatic effects.”

While the study is based on Australian consumers and media outlets, Varan believes that if the study was replicated overseas it would show similar results.

“The numbers might not be exactly the same, but the trend would be,” he says.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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5 Ways That Gen Z Differs from Millennials That You Must Take Into Account When Promoting Your Business

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If you take a look at consumers from small towns to the world’s biggest cities, you will find that there is always a huge gap in age. Companies recently had to figure out what makes Millennials tick, now the focus has shifted to Generation Z. So what does Gen Z mean for your business? Some corporations have decided to put them in the same boat as Millennials, however, that is a mistake. Although Gen Z consumers share similarities with Millennials, there are important differences for advertising your business to this new generation that you’ll need to take into consideration.

Here are five ways that Generation Z differs from Millennials when you set out to promote your company.

1. Generational gap

Every generation has quirks that make them different from one another, and sometimes these differences can make it hard to have a one-size-fits-all approach for marketing to a general audience.

Let’s look at social media usage across three generations — Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z. Gen-X’ers tend to use platforms like Twitter and Facebook more frequently, meaning that ads through these social media sites would be effective. Generation Z, on the other hand, prefers snappier ads in the form of posts or videos on Snapchat and Instagram, or ads taken out on YouTube and TikTok. They also respond well to witty marketing messages and tend to value the social media presence of a brand.

2. Diversity and inclusion

Generation Z is big on diversity and this effect can be seen in how they consistently advocate for more progressive stances from companies. Gen Z feels it is most important for companies to work with a diverse group of people with various skill levels. They want to bring everyone they can to a discussion as that is how they think the best results will be produced. Although many companies have adapted this mindset, as this generation gets older and becomes a more prominent part of the consumer base, businesses will be further encouraged to become more inclusive.

3. Consumption and expression

Generation Z tends to continue buying from brands that promote their sense of self. As discussed in a study by McKinsey & Company, Gen Z is more likely to buy a product that they can personalize or utilize in self-expression, that supports a charitable cause they believe in, and one that doesn’t explicitly advertise towards male or females. This is all in stark contrast to previous generations where, now more than ever, consumerism is being pushed in a new direction as this generation is using consumption as a means of expressing individual identity. What they buy isn’t just a commodity in some cases, it is a piece of what makes them themselves, and it’s important that companies take advantage of this when marketing to them.

4. Environmentalism

Along with progressive causes, Generation Z responds extremely positively to companies that actively promote environmentally beneficial products and practices. For clothing brands, since they are sometimes more likely to thrift than buy fast fashion products in some cases, it’s important for companies to make sure that they are producing options that make this generation feel like they are making a difference. The changes can even be small ones at first, like fully recyclable or compostable packing materials, and eventually progress into larger efforts towards sustainability.

5. Human Element

This generation is the first that is completely surrounded by technology, but despite that they largely prefer to have a human element present when a company is promoting to them. This is because of how surrounded by technology they are and that they can more easily detect when a company is being authentic and honest with them. Gen Z can see through companies’ attempts to save face or recover from a controversy, and will not purchase from a company that they view as deceitful or trying to only get their money without providing them their money’s worth.

As a company it is important to recognize that traditional methods of promoting to consumers won’t always work with Gen Z. To appeal to this group, you’ll want to focus on branding yourself as an organization that provides the right environment and benefits they seek. When advertising, if you can show how your company is embracing this younger generation as individuals, as well as demonstrating a more progressive stance, you can become very attractive to its members.

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Founder & CEO of Believe Advertising & PR

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Will Google ever lose its throne as king of search? Here are its main contenders

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By Shubham Agarwal

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.

Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.

An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?

The rise of private search engines

Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”

Screenshot of Brave Browser on mobile and desktop.
Brave Browser

Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.

The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”

Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.

Would you pay for a private search engine?

While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.

iPhone screens comparing what it's like without Neeva versus with Neeva.
Without Neeva versus with Neeva Neeva

Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”

Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.

Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.

“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”

Not a level playing field

Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.

Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.

“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”

But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.

DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.

Fighting for a future without Google defaults

Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”

Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.

“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”

If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.

Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.

In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”

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By Shubham Agarwal

Sourced from digitaltrends

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How to Boost Your WordPress.com Website’s SEO Rankings

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By Danny Maiorca

If you’ve spent any time trying to grow website traffic, you’ll have heard of search engine optimization (SEO). Excelling with SEO makes it easier to attract new website visitors, netting more leads and more revenue.

Getting your SEO right takes time—and a lot of trial and error. But if you use a website built on a platform like WordPress.com, you’ve got plenty of options when it comes to increasing your visibility in search engines.

In this article, you’ll discover several ways to rank for SEO on your WordPress.com website.

Differentiating Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

Before we look at how you can rank for SEO with WordPress.com, it’s essential to identify the differences between it and WordPress.org. Often, users think they’re both identical—but that’s far from the truth.

Building a website with WordPress.com means that the platform will host your site. Though you can subscribe to various paid plans, you can also choose to use a free version. Unfortunately, this practice will severely limit customization.

On the flip side, WordPress.org is open source. While using WordPress.org is free, you’ll need to buy a hosted domain. WordPress.org gives more control than its .com counterpart, but it also requires more effort from you to maintain the site.

Okay, so now you know the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Next, let’s take a deeper dive into how you can rank for SEO with a WordPress.com site.

Use SEO Plugins

If you’ve got a WordPress.com Business plan or higher, you can install a selection of SEO plugins with WordPress. One of the most common is Yoast, which offers a comprehensive solution to optimize SEO on your pages.

Once integrated, Yoast will rank your SEO with a traffic light system—red means you’ve got a lot of room for improvement, amber means that it’s okay (but nothing more or less), and green means you’re good to go.

Yoast also enables you to choose keywords and phrases while offering a readability score to help you create content that is easier to understand.

Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Yoast is an excellent tool for improving SEO on your WordPress.com website, but it’s a good idea to use the plugin in conjunction with others. Two commonly used SEO-related tools are Google Analytics and Google Search Console—both of which are free.

Google Analytics is the Silicon Valley giant’s free analytics tool and offers a broad range of valuable insights. Some of the areas you can gather useful information about include:

  • Your website’s bounce rate.
  • Average session times.
  • How people find your website.
  • The time of day that people visit your website.
Screenshot showing some of the categories available on Google Analytics

As for Google Search Console, you can find out how your website performs specifically in search rankings. Search Console will also help you:

  • Discover your average clickthrough rate (CTR).
  • Find out which search terms lead users to your site.
  • Learn what your average search engine ranking is.
Screenshot showing interface of Google Search Console

To use Google Analytics and Search Console, you’ll need to manually set them up for your website. But doing so is a reasonably straightforward process.

Another perk of Google Analytics and Search Console is that you don’t need a WordPress.com Business plan to use either. So, if you’re on a budget, the tools can help minimize your SEO expenses.

Think About Your Imagery

 

Optimizing the text on your WordPress.com website is crucial if you want to rank highly with search engines. However, your image optimization is just as important.

The size of any visuals you add to your website will impact your web page’s performance. If your page takes too long to load, users will go elsewhere—and your rankings will suffer as a result. So, you need to ensure that photos aren’t too big and your pages load fast (both on desktop and mobile).

When adding images, you also want to ensure the dimensions fit your page. You’re not going to find a one-size-fits-all solution for this; it’ll depend on your theme and other factors.

Customizing the image title and alt text also helps Google understand your picture and why it’s relevant. So, it’s worth keeping both of these goals in mind when adding featured and in-text photos.

Post Consistently and Add Value

Regardless of how well you’ve optimized your page for search engines, it doesn’t mean much if the content itself isn’t attractive to your audience. To gain traction, you must post relevant and original content and add value for users visiting your site.

If you’ve just set up a WordPress.com website, challenge yourself to publish at least one blog post every day for a year. As long as you adapt and fine-tune what you write, you’ll see your traffic grow. And as a side benefit, your writing will improve with the extra practice.

Alongside posting consistently, you can also improve your search rankings by updating old content regularly. For example, refresh the text, edit the links, and remove anything that is no longer accurate, such as old statistics.

Choose a Well-Functioning Theme

Screenshot of theme selection options on WordPress

Regardless of whether you have a free or paid WordPress.com plan, you’ll have access to a wide selection of themes. When choosing one, it’s important to think about more than how it’ll look once your website goes live.

Like the images on your website, the theme you choose can dictate how fast pages load. Rather than pick a theme that loads slowly, you’re better off choosing something that’s less attractive but won’t frustrate visitors.

You can experiment by trying different themes, and it’s worth reading online reviews to see which ones work the best.

Use WordPress.com to Build Your Online Presence

With hundreds of millions of blogs out there today, standing out is a lot harder than it used to be. However, complicated doesn’t mean impossible—and despite what many people think, it’s not too late to start your blog.

Although growing a WordPress.com website’s presence takes time, you can speed up the process by thinking about the areas we’ve listed in this article. Additionally, more users will find you if you optimize your site content and track your performance using analytics.

By Danny Maiorca

Danny is a freelance technology writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, having moved there from his native Britain in 2020. He writes about a variety of topics, including social media and security. Outside of writing, he is a keen photographer. More From Danny Maiorca

Sourced from MUO

 

 

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How to Optimize Your Content for Semantic SEO

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By Irwin Hau

Google’s progress over the last 20 years is mind-blowing when you think about it. Not long ago, users were impartial to the likes of Yahoo, Bing or even Ask Jeeves. Those names have since faded into the periphery while Google has gotten better at serving up relevant answers in record time – even if we’ve entered incoherent phrases littered with typos. Basically, Google gets us. And it keeps getting better at it.

The ever-evolving game of SEO has been largely dependent on the smarts of the Google Algorithm, and it’s changed a lot over the years. The latest development? Semantic SEO. But what is it? And how do you optimize your content in a way that keeps the Google robots happy? Let’s take a closer look.

Where did semantic SEO come from?

To understand how to optimize for Google, it helps to understand a bit of its history.

Initially, SEO relied on singular keyword-focused algorithms. Then came some pretty catalytic jumps, namely with ‘Knowledge Graph,’ ‘Hummingbird,’ ‘RankBrain,’ and ‘BERT’ between 2012 – 2021.

Knowledge Graph was revolutionary in creating a mindmap for Google to see the links between words. And Hummingbird made it possible for Google to understand a search queries’ full meaning rather than just as a string of individual keywords. It was also able to interpret a webpage’s overall topic, rather than just scan for certain words – a big reason that nefarious black-hat SEO technique keyword-stuffing fell out of favour.

With a priority in understanding users’ search intent better, the context of these search terms is also judged against existing search histories, considering their relevance within local and global parameters. Or in other words, it added context.

So say, for example, you typed ‘corona’ into your search bar. Currently, Google will predict that you’re more likely interested in the COVID-19 situation affecting your city, rather than the beer. So the first results you see will be related to just that. Semantic SEO is a step forward in the world of Google contextualizing.

What is semantic SEO?

To get to grips with semantic SEO, it’s helpful to unpack the word semantic.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, semantics is “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical semantics, concerned with matters such as sense and reference and presupposition and implication, and lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them.”

Semantic SEO is based on lexical semantics – so how the words relate to one another.

1. How to optimize your content for semantic SEO

Google aims to respond to users’ questions with articles containing the most valuable information and predictively answer follow-up questions. It knows humans are curious creatures, after all. So we will teach you how to optimize your content for quality AND be picked up favourably by Google’s radar.

First, you need to understand the intent of your article. Or in other words, which of the reader’s needs are you answering? Intent falls into 3 categories – and it’s crucial to know which of these your piece falls into if you’re going to keep readers happy. Users are browsing on the internet to either –

  1. Learn something;
  2. Buy something; or
  3. Find something specific (e.g., a shop their friend has just mentioned).

The breakdown of this intent falls roughly into 80%, 10% and 10%, respectively. Most users are on the internet with specific questions that they want answers to. So it’s important to understand the questions your article is trying to answer — otherwise, your website won’t convert, your bounce rate will be sky-high, and Google will penalize you for not being what your readers want.

2. Create quality content (not pieces jammed with keywords)

Most users don’t jump on Google to open a digital encyclopaedia and sift through information. Remember that. They want the specifics, and the worst thing you can try to do is provide a short, surface-level general overview of the subject. Google Knowledge Panels and Wikipedia already exist for this exact reason.

Knowledge panels are snippets of ‘general info’ pinned to the top of search results. So really, your general info article is getting into the ring with Google, and you can guess who we’d place our bets on.

Once you have the question your article is trying to answer, really unpack the value in that. Ensure your piece is thorough. You can even go as far as answering other questions related to that route of curiosity.

Top tip: According to recent web design statistics, content you wrote years ago can still work to boost your SEO and organic Google traffic. Google bots actively crawl every page of your website to find relevant matches to users’ search queries. Maintaining an active blog increases your chance of multiple pages being picked up and shown on the first page of Google.

At the end of the day, your piece should be chock-full of long-tail keywords connected to the topic of interest. Google will pick up on the quantity and quality of the semantically connected phrases peppered through your article and increase the relevance score of your article.

A quick example…

Say you’re writing an analytical piece about Harry Potter. Your semantically connected phrases could include ‘seventh Harry Potter book,’ ‘The Boy Who Lived Next Door,’ ‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Neville Longbottom’, and ‘understanding the prophecy.’

Google would crawl this article and understand it is suited for readers who want to understand the relationship between Potter and Longbottom. In contrast, semantically connected phrases for an entertainment piece about the cast could include ‘child actors,’ ‘cast of Harry Potter,’ and ‘film journey.’

Ten years ago, the SEO strategy for both articles would have been to stuff the keyword “Harry Potter” in as many times as sanely possible. Thankfully, Google’s comprehension skills have improved, so we can focus more on writing richer pieces of content, without repeating ourselves unnecessarily.

3. Long-form content is better than short

It is difficult to cover a topic well in less than 300 words. So don’t waste the precious chance with a case of cat-got-your-tongue when people arrive at your show.

Google doesn’t want its users to have to hop through various pages to get the answers – that would be a bit like phoning up a customer service helpline that kept redirecting you to a different department member for every question you had (oh wait…been there). Frustrating!

No one’s limiting your time on stage, so go long. Instead, write pieces of 2,000-2,500 words that cover more ground and cast a wider safety net in answering a multitude of questions.

These longer articles can really help boost your lead conversion and drive organic traffic to your site. They also provide you with more opportunities to add semantically linked phrases – and when it comes to optimizing your site for semantic SEO, that’s definitely a good thing.

4. Increase the relevance of your article by reverse-fitting it to Google

Look at what comes up in the Google dropdown search bar. This will give you ideas for semantically related phrases you can tie into your article. It’ll also give you a better understanding of your user’s interests.

Google’s dropdown list will help you understand your user’s interests.

Additionally, you can scroll down to the end of the search results page, and record the small list of ‘Related Keywords’ displayed here.

Collectively these can guide what you cover in your piece, give you a mind map of LSI keywords (aka long-tail keywords) and the kinds of medium-tail keywords you can use. Incorporating more of both of these is preferable. It means you’ll cast a wider net for your article because Google will automatically include you for the longer-tail keywords.

5. Rank well for informational queries to earn a ‘Featured Snippet’

Everyone used to covet the Position 1 spot on a Google search results page. But now, people are aiming for Position 0. Why? Because you’re not only first, but Google additionally shows an open sliver of your content. It’s really like getting a foot into the door of attention, increasing traffic to your page from the users who’d like to read more.

You can aim to be chosen for these ‘featured snippets’ through structuring your content with question headlines, followed by bullet point answers or scannable content. Incorporating various headlines with popular questions and relevant answers will improve your chance to rank better for the overall topic. Instead of just reeling in people based on one keyword, you can catch people who asked various kinds of questions to do with your topic.

If you don’t get the Position 0 spot, don’t fret: aim for another highly-placed spot instead. You will recognize Google shows an accordion-style FAQ of follow-up questions underneath the ‘featured snippet.’ When clicked on, a snippet of the answer opens up, so it’s a very respectable runner-up prize.

6. Use structured mark-up and semantic tags in your code

Not seen by users, this backend advanced SEO technique helps the Google machinery understand the organization of your article. Using semantic HTML elements enhances the accessibility and searchability of your article. It also improves your chances of achieving the coveted Google 0 position.

Using semantic tags tells the browser a little more about the meaning and the hierarchy of the content. Instead of seeing <div> and <span> for differing blocks of content — use semantic tags like <header> <nav> <article> <footer> to organize your content. And within content blocks, use element heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and paragraph). These break up the text and order your copy according to importance.

Final thoughts

There’s an opportunity to delve deeper into topics to rank well as a specialist article covering a niche topic. You can also feature it as an informational snippet in Position 0. Now Google has caught up in leaps and bounds; you can worry less about gaming the system with keyword-stuffing — and instead, challenge yourself to write even more meaningful content.

Feature Image Credit: freeboilergrants; pexels

By Irwin Hau

Irwin Hau is a private business consultant and Founder of Chromatix, a multi-award-winning web design and conversion agency based in Melbourne, Australia. Since opening shop in 2009, he’s gone on to amass over 70 awards and mentions for work in web design and digital solutions.

Sourced from readwrite

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Your Messaging to Older Audiences Is Outdated

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By Hal Hershfield and Laura Carstensen

One of the most pressing concerns in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic was how to best communicate information to those who were at greatest risk — particularly, the elderly. Unfortunately, many attempts were riddled with stereotyped depictions of older people as frail, lonely, and incompetent. In doing so, messages from advertisers, public health officials, and policymakers may have failed to resonate with large swaths of their targeted audience. Given a rapidly aging population, effective messaging to older people holds national importance for public health as well as marketing of goods and services.

Arguably, the greatest challenge is market segmentation. Older people make up an incredibly diverse demographic that varies in terms of physical and cognitive ability, economic power, and social connection. Aging is also changing over historical time. Several studies have shown that the incidence of dementia appears to be decreasing over time; some research suggests this is due to higher educational attainment and improvements in cardiovascular health. Today’s older generations are less lonely and happier than their younger counterparts. As a result, market segmentation based on chronological age is becoming increasingly difficult, if not futile.

A more telling predictor of behaviour and a better approach to age segmentation may be time left in life rather than time since birth. Healthy versus sick offers more meaningful insight than whether someone is in their 70s or their 80s.

In addition to physical health, subjective age influences decisions and preferences. Our time horizons — whether we see our futures as vast or constrained — shape our goals. When time horizons are expansive and nebulous, people focus on goals that prepare them for lengthy, uncertain futures. They prioritize novelty and exploration. By contrast, when time horizons are perceived as limited, people place more weight on emotionally meaningful goals. As time grows increasingly limited, it becomes more valuable, leading people to want to fill it with activities and people that “count.” Focusing on goals that will be realized in the here-and-now as opposed to ones that pay off in the future are more relevant when time horizons are limited.

These findings hold important implications for communicating effectively with older populations. Communication with older adults needs to take into account the different ways that motivations change when time horizons grow shorter. We recommend three actions public officials, advertisers, and policymakers can take to better reach older populations:

Focus on emotionally meaningful material.

Because goals direct cognitive processing, perceived future time not only shapes plans, it influences what people see, hear, and remember. Take social preferences: When asked to choose between spending time with a newer social partner or a close loved one, older people preferred the loved one, whereas younger people preferred the new friend. Yet, when older people were asked beforehand to imagine that a new medical advancement would greatly extend their lives, or when younger people were first asked to imagine an impending move across country, age had no bearing on who people preferred to spend their time with.

Advertisements that focus on emotionally meaningful rewards will be more appealing to older adults and better remembered. One study found that older people preferred an advertisement for a camera with the slogan “Capture those special moments” over an identical ad with the slogan “Capture the unexplored world.” Along these lines, recent research compared different financial incentives aimed at encouraging older people to walk more. Making incentives emotionally meaningful made a difference: Older — but not younger — people increased their step counts to earn money for charities.

Prioritize the positive.

Shifting time horizons also change the type of information people pay attention to and process. Older people, compared to their younger counterparts, pay attention to and remember more positive than negative information. That is, whereas younger peoples’ attentions are captured by negative information, older people focus on positive information. This developmental shift from a negativity bias in youth to a positivity bias with age is termed the positivity effect. Researchers have shown that older people prefer faces with positive expressions compared to angry or sad ones (whereas younger adults show no preference between these types of faces), place more weight on positive (relative to negative) information in decisions, and positively revise their autobiographical memories.

Framing emotional content in positive, rather than negative, ways will capture the attention of older adults. It’s clearly not enough (nor always wise or ethical) to just remove or avoid the negative. Instead, reframing negative consequences in terms of benefits is likely to motivate older adults more. For example, older adults who were informed about the benefits of walking were more likely to increase step counts over a month-long period compared to those who were instead informed about the risks of not walking.

Identify with the elderly — and ditch the stereotypes.

Most older people refer to “older people” in the third person. This doesn’t mean that they see themselves as youthful hipsters, but rather that they report feeling subjectively younger than they actually are. Seventy-year-olds report feeling as much as 15 to 20% younger than their chronological age. Shifting subjective views likely reflect a distancing from the negative stereotypes that surround aging.

A study of more than 1,000 online images posted on sites with at least one million followers found widespread evidence of age stereotypes. For instance, about seven in 10 images depicted older adults as isolated. Even though substantial numbers of older people dye their hair, advertisements overwhelmingly feature grey-haired consumers. There is good reason to believe that advertisements will be more effective when older people are portrayed as they see themselves, rather than how younger generations see them.

As societies age, it’s increasingly important to engage in best practices for communicating important information to older populations. Most existing strategies are based on stereotypes and outdated assumptions, which may discourage the very populations they are meant to reach. Whereas much of psychology and marketing has relied on time since birth as the best way to measure age, perceived time left in life is often a better yardstick. Our time horizons shift throughout our lives, as do our values, priorities, and goals. Unless policymakers and marketers modify their messaging to be more emotionally meaningful and positive, and depict older adults as they see themselves, they risk further alienating a growing segment of our population. Only then will important messages be heard by the audiences for which they were intended.

Feature Image Credit: RyanJLane/Getty Images

By Hal Hershfield and Laura Carstensen

Hal Hershfield, Ph.D. is the UCLA Anderson Board of Advisors Endowed Term Chair in Management and professor of marketing, behavioral decision making, and psychology at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.

Laura Carstensen, Ph.D. is a professor of psychology and  the founder and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor in Public Policy at Stanford University.

Sourced from Harvard Business Review

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