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Let’s just come out and say it: Google Analytics reports make our life easy as SEO marketers. Here I dish on what Google Analytics reports bring my holiday cheer this season!

The post 6 Google Analytics Reports That Will Bring Every SEO Lots of Cheer! by @annaleacrowe appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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Video is one of the search marketing trends to look forward to so now would be the perfect time to add video to your marketing strategy. But what’s the best platform to publish videos? Look no further because we’ve got answers from our #SEJSurveySays poll!

The post 85% of Digital Marketers Publish Videos on YouTube [DATA] by @rinadianewrites appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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When it comes to customer dissatisfaction, Spirit Airlines has consistently been the forerunner in the airline industry. Even in the recent travel report published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index it had the lowest score, much below the average benchmark.

Having said that, you’d expect those numbers to reflect on the company’s growth rate, right?

Wrong. Despite the mounting discontent among its customers, Spirit was the second most profitable airline company in 2015, and its growth rate is far from plateauing.

So what happened here?

Well, all those customers who were “dissatisfied” with Spirit’s poor service were still opting to travel on Spirit, as their deciding factor wasn’t the quality of the service, but the ticket fares. Spirit knows this, and keeps giving customers precisely what they want – nothing more, nothing less.

Numbers can be deceptive; and many times, they don’t necessarily speak the truth. If you’re taking numbers at face value, without digging deeper and getting to the bottom of it all, then you’ll most probably get blindsided.

And in the case of churn, it couldn’t be truer.

It’s well-known that churn is of two basic types: voluntary and involuntary.

While involuntary churn occurs when payments fail due to expired credit cards or any similar reason, voluntary churn predominantly occurs when a customer doesn’t receive the value that they had expected to receive from your product.

The solution to involuntary churn is pretty straightforward – a smart dunning mechanism in place can tackle most of the payment failure scenarios. It’s voluntary churn that needs a bit more thinking through.

And that’s what this post is about – effectively handling (not reducing/mitigating) voluntary churn.

Put simply, should you try to get back every one of those two groups of churned customers?

The Churned Customers Worth Fighting For

First off, not all users who choose to leave your product would’ve been good customers to your business in the long run. Not all of them would’ve found a perfect fit with your product. Peter Fader puts it well:

“Not all customers deserve your company’s best efforts. And despite what the old adage says, the customer is most definitely not always right. Because in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers…and then there is everybody else.”

The “everybody else” mentioned above are whom Lincoln Murphy refers to as “Bad Fit” customers. According to him, if a customer neither receives value from you immediately, nor in the future (under realistic assumptions), then those are the ones who’d come under this category.

And when a Bad Fit customer leaves you, it is, in fact, good churn. And spending your limited resources in bringing them back will be nothing less than futile.

Then there are customers for whom you — apart from delivering immediate value — will be able to deliver future value, in a particular timeframe. Lincoln calls them “Stretch” customers, and these are the ones whom you can strive to get back, provided the stretch is worth it.

Filtering out the 5%

A freemium model is infamous for papering over the cracks, by showing a huge number of sign-ups, and concealing the actual count of the right, engaged customers (again, numbers can be deceptive).

For instance, Chargebee also caters to the early-stage startups, and a majority of the churned customers left because they were shutting down their business. Here there would be no point trying to retain them, and this will again get classified as good churn.

So it’s our job to dig through the fluff and identify the churn that matters. By experience, we’ve learned that those Stretch customers account for only about 5% of the churn.

And to identify that 5%, we implemented a top-down approach, with three major activities:

Capturing the ‘right’ data from the people who’re leaving
Using the captured data to influence our next move
Spot our mistakes, and then prevent them from happening again

Capturing the Right Data

When a user has decided to leave your product for good, filling up an elaborate questionnaire will be the last thing that they’d want to do.

Put yourself in their shoes – they’re clearly not in a pleasant mood while taking the call, and you shouldn’t be rubbing salt to the wound by making the process harder. Adding to that, most businesses fail to capture the true answers; their forms are not designed that way. In short, this turns out to be a double-edged sword, affecting both the sides.

So the key is to design your customer exit process in a way that you can discover the right reason for their account cancellation, in the most non-intrusive manner.

Number one, do away with open-ended questions, for in most cases, the users would simply skip the step (if it’s an optional field), or would type in some gibberish and get it over with (if it’s made mandatory).

This type of question generally won’t lead to great insights from your customer.

Instead, give them, in the cancellation screen, a list of specific reasons for cancellation, and towards the end, make it optional for the users to type out their feedback (we’ve had customers who were kind enough to give us a descriptive answer, but they make only a small percentage of the total respondents).

Here’s how Chargebee’s form looks (we got the inspiration from Freshdesk’s form, and made our own set of tweaks to fit our use case):

Number two, only include those reasons that are the most important for your team to learn about and act upon (because, the paradox of choice), and arrange them in the most effective order (start with the most crucial of the lot).

Using the captured data

From a bird’s eye view, the evaluation process will look something like this:

1. Are they a Stretch customer?

To answer this question, we evaluate the behavioral data of customers, in terms of pre-set yardsticks.

By keeping track of the most important engagement metrics (specific to the life-cycle stage of the customer), we’re able to clearly pinpoint those users who’d been receiving value from the product, before they chose to call it quits.

For Chargebee, these metrics would be completing the account setup, inviting other users from their organization on board, customizing the invoice, configuring the hosted pages, and the like.

A churned customer who passes these yardsticks will be deemed a Stretch customer, who’ll then be considered for the next question.

Another activity that has helped us is the classification of churned customers based on the acquisition channels (Organic, SEO, SEM, AdWords, Third-party review sites, etc). Segment the customers, and figure out the churn rate (both revenue churn and customer churn) for each segment. Note that analyzing the revenue churn as well as customer churn for each channel is important, especially if you have a freemium model.

In fact, this segmentation revealed that customers who were acquired from a particular channel (with low acquisition cost), and had an effortless onboarding process, were showing a higher churn rate than their counterparts. To top it off, we also found out that their servicing cost was also comparatively higher. In short, they belonged to the Bad Fit category.

2. Will rectifying their pain-point align with your product vision?

“In trying to please all, he had pleased none.”
Aesop, Aesop’s Fables

Listen to Aesop.

Des Traynor refers to a product’s vision as its guiding principle – the hub of the product wheel that holds every other activity. And the essence of that vision is the fundamental value that you want to offer to your customers.

Being a Yes-Man and developing features to achieve the short-term goal of retaining a single customer will only take you further away from long-term vision, eventually making your product bloatware (gasp!). The assumption that a single customer’s feature requirement perfectly matches with the needs of all the other users every single time, leads to stuffing your product with unnecessary functions and over complicating it. This, in other words, is known as feature creep.

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In 1988, Seth Godin’s book packaging company let go of their biggest customer, who was making up for more than half of their revenue, and he doesn’t seem to regret it. He claims that the move made his team “happier and more successful”.

Is going the extra mile to please the Stretch customer worth the effort? Will solving their problem enhance the value that you’re delivering to your other customers as well? Is the particular solution aligned with your product vision?

Only, and only if you find yourself saying a “Yes” to these questions, should you take the plunge.

Spotting mistakes and preventing them from happening again

Once you’ve separated the Bad Fit customers from the Stretch counterparts, your next step will be to figure out how to prevent less of the former from onboarding and more of the latter from churning, in the future.

We’ve got three words for you: Root Cause Analysis

Andrew Tate gives a neat framework to trace every cancellation back to a root problem. According to him, based on the results from your exit survey, you can box your churned customers into one of these four reasons:

Bought away – When the customer feels that your product is too expensive, or is not worth the price that you’re charging them.
Moved away – When the customer pivots their business, and shifts to either a more stripped-down, or a more elaborate, enterprise-y solution, compared to yours.
Pulled away – When the customer simply wants to switch to a competitor.
Pushed away – When a member in the customer’s team vouches for another solution (intentional push), or when the customer feels that your service isn’t up to the mark (unintentional push).

Now let’s look at how each of these problems reveal the hidden mistake (and hence the solution):

1. Bought away
Your pricing is not aligned with the right buyer persona, and/or the value that it proposes to deliver.

Solution: Pick the right value metric to device your pricing strategy, and target the right buyer persona while marketing your product.

2. Moved away
Your target market does not include this particular buyer persona.

Solution: Expand your offering to include the new persona, if they fit your long-term objectives. If not, then just cut them loose.

3. Pulled away
The competitor’s offering is more attractive than yours – either because of their marketing or the presence of a feature missing in yours.

Solution: If it’s the former, work on a better positioning of your product in the market. If it’s the latter, go to the second question from the previous section (Will rectifying their pain-point align with your product vision?), and start from there.

4. Pushed away
There’s a lack/inadequacy of communication and customer support.

Solution: Double down on your customer support and customer success efforts.

Conclusion

Trials and errors form an integral part of the startup realm.

Businesses take a stab at bringing an idea to life, and take the help of other B2B businesses to build and grow theirs, some of whom they find to be a perfect fit with their business, while others they don’t. And as a fellow startup comrade, when we realize that the value we’re offering doesn’t match with the value that they’re seeking, we’re obliged to understand and respect their choice, and step aside.

The freemium model is of great help here, by providing the startups with ample leeway to experiment, without consuming much resource.

And it’s our job as a service provider to identify those businesses that have already crossed the initial phase of uncertainty, have built sufficient momentum and have acquired considerable value from us, and help them in advancing to the subsequent levels of growth.

Marketing to the right customer is the first step towards solving churn. Want to solve customer churn? Make sure you’re marketing and selling to the right customer. Don’t know who your best customers are or where they’re coming from? Kissmetrics analytics shows you. Learn more in our new SaaS retention PDF

About the Author: Sadhana Balaji is a Product Marketer at Chargebee. She writes about the fascinating workings of the SaaS realm. Head over to Chargebee’s SaaS Dispatch to read more of her work.

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Columnist Anna Shirley discusses some of the most useful reports in Bing Ads and how they can be used to further refine and optimize your ad campaigns.

The post The next Bing thing: Get your Bing campaigns in top shape for 2017 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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It’s that time of year — when we look back at the last 12 months and reflect on the trends that defined the year in Google Search. From Powerball numbers to Olympic champions, whether making dessert or becoming a mannequin, this year affected us all in different ways. Through all the highs and lows, people came to Search to learn more and understand.

So to celebrate the end of 2016, here’s a peek at some of the trending U.S. topics that caught our attention as especially unique to this year.

Powerball: It may seem like a distant memory now, but back in January a record-breaking jackpot made Powerball a hot topic. Search interest in Powerball spiked more than 166 percent, and it’s the top trending search for all of 2016.

Politicians and athletes: In a year with the Olympics and U.S. Election, it’s not surprising that nine of our 10 top trending people of the year fell into one of these two categories — from Donald Trump to Michael Phelps and Hillary Clinton to Simone Biles. The one outlier? Steven Avery, the subject of Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” documentary.

Pokémon Go: Pokémon Go took our lists — and the world — by storm this year. The addictive game appeared four times in our list of top 10 “How to…” questions, with “How to play Pokémon Go?” at the top. Clearly searchers were eager to learn how to catch ‘em all!

Quinoa and Budweiser: From Big Macs to quinoa, Budweiser to Maui Brewing, Brussels sprouts to Buttercream Frosting, it’s clear from our trending calorie, recipe and beer lists that we’re a country of many tastes. One of the new trending recipes this year? Snow cream, a dessert that’s the perfect winter treat with some fresh snow, sugar, milk and vanilla.

Slime and… mannequins: “How to make slime” isn’t a phrase we hear often — until now. Maybe it was the new “Ghostbusters” movie, but while voting and Pokémon dominated much of this year’s “How to…” list, one green, slimy question made its way up to #4. Meanwhile, on the “What is…?” list, the mannequin challenge is standing proud — and very, very still — at #7.

These are just a few of the trending terms that made up 2016. From remembering past icons like David Bowie and Prince, to searching for current ones like Beyoncé and Alexander Hamilton (a.k.a. Lin-Manuel Miranda), to looking for information on Brexit, Zika, Orlando and Brussels, Search brought us together in dozens of ways this year. Dive into google.com/2016 to see lists from around the world.

Here’s to finding what we’re searching for in 2017.

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Optimizing the customer experience is a great way to get new customers. It’s also one of the best ways of fostering customer loyalty.

According to Teradata, only 41% of marketing executives are using customer engagement data to inform their marketing strategy.

Despite this, marketers and other organizational leaders alike are neglecting the customer before and after the sale. The biggest barrier to even beginning is usually the lack of a deep understanding of the customer in the first place.

Having a comprehensive understanding of your customers is key to achieving core business goals. Whether you’re trying to build (or optimize) the customer experience, creating more engaging content or increasing sales. Knowing your customers better than they do is key.

In this article, I’m going to outline 5 techniques you can implement to understand your customers better. We’ll look at both qualitative and quantitative data, as well as at the tools and mindsets you need to equip to get started successfully.

1. Apply Intelligent Customer Engagement

An optimized customer experience is valuable for revenue and retention. If you get it right, it can be a source of customer insight.

Engaging with your customers in real-time has become more easily accessible thanks to new tools. Messenger is becoming an ever more popular customer service channel, while tools like Drift allow you to talk with your customers as they browse your website:

These channels are a means of collecting customer insight. Your proprietary data from interacting with your customers, regardless of the channel, can help you understand them better. Work with your customer service teams to look for patterns and react to the insight you generate.

On top of this, nothing beats customer development. Getting your customers on the phone on a regular basis can help you go deeper into their pains, needs and challenges.

This is exactly what Alex Turnbull, Founder of Groove does, in order to understand his customers more. He schedules regular calls so he can fully understand what they love or dislike about his product.

As a result, he’s helped improve his onboarding process, turned unhappy customers into happy customers and created more sophisticated buyer personas.

As you work to keep your customers engaged during the first stages of the customer journey, think of your budding relationship as a two-way street. Encourage customers to share their thoughts and opinions by including a customer satisfaction survey into your email drip.

SurveyGizmo suggests these three key principles to follow when designing a survey:

Remove bias: Ask the customer for their opinion without projecting your own. Get their uninfluenced, impartial opinion. You want genuine insights, even if they’re negative. An example of this could be something as simple as “What do you think we could do better?”
Be concrete: Use simple language that asks for feedback on a specific topic. For example, “How have you improved marketing effectiveness using our software?” will help to determine the value your customers are getting from you.
Focus: Your surveys should address one area of the customer experience. The aim is to get insights that you can then act upon.

Keep these things in mind as you personalize your customer survey with questions pertaining to your brand and product.

2. Create More Robust Buyer Personas

Many marketers make the mistake of using generic demographics like age, profession, and location to develop their buyer personas. These data points simply don’t provide enough information to create messaging that resonates with your audience on an emotional level.

One way to dig deeper into customer preferences is to use the Acquisitions tab on Google Analytics to see which social media outlets, industry blogs and professional forums your site traffic comes from. Then, apply this information to your personas so you can find out where and when to reach them more effectively.

Did you know? With Kissmetrics, you’ll see exactly which backlinks are bringing signups and customers, not just traffic. Click this blog post to learn more.

Additionally, acquiring keyword data is a helpful way to discover the terms and descriptions that certain buyer personas use to describe your services.

To segment customers based on keyword searches, for example, use Google Webmaster Tools to create a list of common keywords that drive people to your site. Then, group the keywords into overarching themes and assign to different personas based on the data you have available.

This video by Bryan Harris will help you find ways to get around “keyword not provided” and help you identify keywords people are using to get to your website.

To put this language into action, incorporate these keywords across your website copy, content marketing efforts, and other online interactions. Speaking the same language as your customers is a subtle way to make your current audience feel more welcomed.

3. Generate Data from Customer Analytics

From clicking on a link to reading through a web page, every customer action offers valuable insight into customer behavior.

To determine how customers interact with your website, you can try a user behavior tracking tool. Tools like Google Analytics and Inspectlet are great tools for gathering insights such as time on page and bounce rate. Inspectlet can even provide short videos of users on your page in real time.

Another obvious tool is Kissmetrics. Their platform tracks the behavior of each of your customers, allowing you to manage and gather insights on specific segments.

The behavioral data you collect should lead you to conclusions about what your audience doesn’t understand, what they do and don’t like, and how you can create a stronger website experience.

If people had trouble navigating to a certain sales page, for example, adjust the interface to allow for a more user-friendly experience.

If there’s one page people spend more time on than others, analyze that page’s content to see what’s retaining people’s attention. Most importantly, if there’s a page with a high bounce rate, try to see what’s making people leave.

4. Anticipate, Predict, and Plan for the Future

Creating a plan for future customer engagement is just as important as creating a plan for the present. This puts customer experience teams in the right frame of mind to respond to customers during stressful or challenging situations.

Predictive modeling software mines existing customer data to identify cyclical patterns and trends that can inform decision making. Two great tools are RapidMiner and Angoss’ customer analytics, both of which create realistic future models.

To see how predictive modeling informs customer strategy, imagine you work for a SaaS company that wants to adjust its product roadmap to anticipate customer needs.

Looking at historical behavioral data will show you which features customers have found most valuable over time, and which features they didn’t use. Understanding your most popular and most visited pages can also inform your content strategy, focusing on topics and formats that will best solve your audiences challenges.

Draw trends across the most commonly-used features to determine why your customers liked them. Additionally, looking at market trends and analysis will give you a good idea of what other companies in your space have already accomplished, so you can devise new features that explore these areas.

Julia Cupman of B2B International emphasis the importance of market research:

“Many companies turn to disciplined market research as a form of insurance, i.e. as a means of reducing business risk. The next section looks at how market research is used in product development – not only as insurance, but also as a tool to establish needs and to obtain intelligence on market potential.”

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The above image shows how all stages of the product lifecycle benefits from market research. As you can see, continuous market research throughout the product roadmap naturally leads to more sales. The more you understand your market, the better product/market fit you have.

5. Traverse Your Customer’s Path

The only way to understand the unique and dynamic customer buying journey is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

This is made possible by an advanced technique called customer journey mapping — a method where companies create a detailed, graphical representation of the customer journey based on critical touch points — interactions between a customer and your brand before, during, or after purchase.

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Let’s use Uber as an example to define touchpoints and see how they apply to customer journey mapping. Minor touch points include activities like downloading the app, or following the app on social media.

Major touch points, on the other hand, include things like requesting a ride, or completing driver training. Once touch points are defined, explore the circumstances affecting each touchpoint.

For example, a marketer at Uber might ask: what influenced the rider to download the app for the first time? Was it related to Uber’s customer referral program? Engage your internal team with these issues to get a well-rounded perspective and promote collaborative problem solving.

When you identify failed touchpoints, such as when a customer fails to use the Uber app they downloaded, establish a plan for contacting these customers.

You may want to create milestones, such as when an app user hasn’t logged into their account in three months, or when an avid customer suddenly stops using the product. It’s best if your customer experience team is able to call, write, or meet with customers directly to understand why they’re disengaged.

If you don’t have these resources, create an email marketing drip specifically focused on re-engaging your customers based on certain milestones.

Conclusion

Thanks to advanced analytics, behavioral recording tools, and stronger customer touchpoints, understanding customer behavior has gotten easier than ever.

The techniques outlined in this article are common practices meant to inform and inspire your customer engagement efforts, but they should always be catered to what’s right for your audience.

What are your favorite tools and strategies for increasing customer engagement? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.

About the Author: Brad is a Content Marketing Strategist at Pipedrive, a sales tool for small teams with big ambitions. Get access to their free email course Sales Pipeline Academy.

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The post SearchCap: Google AMP, Bing top searches & ranking factors appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Posted by EricEnge

When you first start out with content marketing, you often have a very basic challenge: you have to build an audience for your content. Even if you’re a large brand with lots of people who are passionate about you, they’re not yet conditioned to see you as a publisher of valuable content. In other words, either way, you’ve got work to do.

In today’s post, I’m going to outline why you should focus on reach and influence, and how to do it so that your content marketing efforts can deliver the maximum ROI.

Map your marketplace

The first thing to realize is that number of potential customers in a marketplace is finite, and so are the number of major media sites and blogs that have any real audience. A typical audience reach for the bloggers and media in a marketplace might look something like this:

Traditionally, SEOs have focused on trying to publish content on as many different domains as possible. In the early days of SEO, the theory was that getting links from as many different domains as you could was how you maximize overall rankings impact.

This still has an element of truth to it today if you view the Google algorithm from a narrow perspective, but I believe it’s best to take a more holistic view of the market. Frankly, I don’t want the hard task of fighting for every link I get; I want people to give them to me because I’ve shown I deserve them.

I don’t want to fight for every link I get; I want to earn them because I’ve shown I deserve them.

For that reason, we urge our clients to focus on building authority, reach, and influence. If you do this well, you establish a solid base for earning links organically. Consider the value of publishing content and having it get links with minimal effort on your part.

While you all shudder at the concept of “build it and they will link to you,” if you implement a fully integrated campaign with an audience that is anxious to see what you have to say, the task of attracting links becomes significantly easier.

To make that work for you, you’ll need relationships with key influencers, bloggers, and media people, and you’ll need to prioritize who are the people who can help you most.

The catch is, the most influential players in a marketplace have assets to protect (their relationship with their audience), and they’re not going to help you unless you find ways to help them bring even more value to their audience.

That means you’ll need to establish your business as a top source of content and ideas. You’ll also need to be seen by them as a partner, and that you support their goals, not just your own. So now, let’s get to work!

Identify your real audience

First, let’s look at another map, this time looking at the makeup of the people in a given market:

Who in this chart do you think might reshare your content or link to it? It’s certainly not the laggards, or even the early or late majority. Generally speaking, these are not the people with large social media followings, or highly popular blogs or columns on your market. The people who do have these things are highlighted here:

Innovators and Early Adopters are the ones that might share or link your content in a way that has a large impact. If your content is not good enough to interest them, then you’ve failed. Not only can they get more eyeballs on your content, but when they reshare it, it acts as an endorsement of its value.

Cater to this audience. Even for a large brand, it’s essential that you get good engagement here, as it helps give your content credibility.

Go to where your target audience resides on the Interwebs

Your target customer spends a lot of time in various places across the Internet. Consider engaging with them where they are.

The reason for doing this is to accelerate the growth of your audience and their engagement with your content. I often refer to this as getting in front of OPA (“Other People’s Audiences”). It’s one of the most powerful ways to increase your own audience and loyalty. It also creates opportunities to build your own direct audience.

That said, you need to do this with great care. If you dive willy-nilly into public forums with commercial messages you’ll be seen as self-serving and overly aggressive. Better approaches include:

Establish columns on high-authority media sites
Share valuable info via your social media presences
Interact with influencers online
Participate in online and offline events (webinars, conferences)

These are just a few ideas. Remember, you’re there to add value, and adding value doesn’t mean showing people all the great things they can do with your products. Create useful, non-commercial, content, or address questions without your products or services being the explicit answer.

Adding value doesn’t mean showing people all the great things they can do with your products.
The role of columns

As we’ve established, the top media sites have the most influence in a marketplace. Here’s another way of looking at it:

If you’re looking for OPA, the top media sites that cover your market have plenty of it, and if you’re allowed to publish on their sites without having to pay for it, they also provide an implied endorsement. Old-school SEO would tell us that columns are not that valuable because Google used to value visibility on a larger number of domains more than they valued repeat presence on the higher-authority sites, but digital marketing life is no longer that simple.

You can argue about how far that pendulum at Google has swung, but you can’t deny that it makes sense that an ongoing relationship with an authoritative site is a stronger indication of your authority than ten meaningless one-time relationships with sites no one, or almost no one, ever visits. If you don’t think that Google gets this, you’re definitely stuck far in the past.

Other publishing efforts

It’s great to get high-value columns, but not every major media site will grant you that opportunity. Let’s say you manage to get a column on three of the top sites. This may expose you to this type of reach:

There will also be major media sites where getting a column or publishing content is not an option. But, can you build relationships with their editors and writers? Will they reach out to you for fact checking or quotes when they write a related story? Are they interested in interviewing you?

A deliberate program to build these relationships is a must in any reach and influence building strategy. Some of the key steps are:

Build a list of the top relationships you should target
Try to obtain info on their social accounts and email addresses
Study what they’re about, and what’s most important to them
Actively reshare their relevant stories via your social media
Engage with them in ways that will add value, and that shows them why a relationship with you would be valuable for them
Consider implementing targeted paid social campaigns that will expose them to your best content
See if you can structure opportunities to meet them face-to-face.

Use all of these tactics to map out your strategy and show yourself as a leader in your market, and to show your willingness help them with their needs.

The role of influencers

Media people are influencers in their own right, but there are types of influencers as well. Their presence may be in other places, such as social media or streaming media, and there are usually many of these out there in any given market. With these types of influencers you can potentially leverage a few additional tactics, such as:

Interview them and publish the result on your site
Pay them to reshare your content on social
Pay them to write for you (and ask them to share the article via their social)
Engage them to help you more broadly as a spokesperson
Find ways to collaborate on projects with them and then co-promote the resultsOr, try a more limited project-based engagement

The value here is very similar to that of major bloggers and media. Their engagement with you reinforces the quality and value of what you’re doing online. As with the media, there are probably a small number of influencers with significant reach. The cool thing here is that the people they influence only overlap partially with the people reached by media. Let’s look at how they overlap:

If you are able to establish relationships with a few of the top ten (non-media) influencers, your reach and influence will go up yet one more notch.

Organic social media

Social media is a great way to build relationships directly with bloggers, media, influencers, and to access your target customer base. Too many businesses view social media in a very tactical way. Either they focus on pushing commercial messages through their accounts, or they work towards shallow goals, such as increasing likes or followers.

If you’re looking to expand your true reach and influence, you should leverage the strengths that social media has to help you accomplish that. Even in a world where major social platforms such as Facebook are limiting organic reach, there is still much to be gained by posting high-value content on these platforms. First of all, not all of the social media platforms limit your organic visibility, and there are also many community opportunities on them as well. And second, you can use that content as a sort of “credibility calling card” as you try to build relationships on social with influencers. If they look at your profile, your content serves as a resume that says you’re worth engaging with.

But nothing free lasts forever, so make a point of finding ways to migrate the relationships you create on social media sites onto other platforms.

Make a point of finding ways to migrate your relationships on social media sites onto other platforms.

One way to do that is to share great content published on your site, and then find ways to lure people into signing up for a newsletter, your app, or find some other way to get them connected with you going forward. By all means, don’t abandon your connection with them on the social media platform where it started, but don’t be wholly dependent on that platform either.

Paid social

There are tons of opportunities in the world of paid social, and they are worth exploring. Some of the platforms, such as Facebook, offer tremendous targeting options that allow you to get extremely granular with your campaigns. Have a mailing list of 10,000 people? Imagine targeting a Facebook ad campaign that runs solely in front of that audience. Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

You can actually do this, but the only catch is that the email address you have for them has to be the one that’s used for the user’s Facebook account. In our experience, that may cut the actual list reached by half or so, but this type of campaign is still an enormous value add.

There are other effective ways to target on paid social media platforms, but the big key is to invest the time to get your targeting right. So many companies dabble in social media advertising, try a few things, look for an instant return, and then give up. You need to have patience to figure out your best targeting options, and work to get it right.

To do that, you’ll need to invest some money with a not-so-great ROI for a while, in order to get enough data to get your targeting where it needs to be. If you’re willing to do this, you can gain a nice market edge for yourself, especially since it’s very possible your competition isn’t willing to put in that effort.

One approach to help with extending your reach and influence is to build a list of bloggers, media, and influencers, and do the hard work of building targeted ad campaigns just to that list. This is a great way to get your content in front of those that matter most.

We’ve seen results in campaigns like this that deliver engagement (likes, clicks, reshares) for as little as $0.30 per action. Other campaigns we’ve run have shown action rates in the $1 range, but this is still a phenomenal value.

Summary

Keep your focus on the goal of extending your reach and influence. No matter how large your brand is today, you’re living in an uncertain world. If you’re heavily dependent on organic search results in Google, know that the concept of the search box is likely to disappear in the next five years. Or, if you’re heavily dependent on people walking in to your stores, you’ve already seen the massive shift of activity online. More change is guaranteed, and the exact shape it will take is not clear to anyone.

Your best defense in a rapidly changing world is a passionate and engaged audience that feels loyalty directly to you, and that you have ways of connecting with directly. Build this. Cultivate this.

Then, no matter what direction things go in the future, you’ll be in a position to continue to grow and prosper.

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In SEO, there’s no shortage of theory and best practices. But experimentation is what really keeps this great industry moving forward.

All of today’s best practices came as a result of past experiments – both failures and successes. Everything we do in SEO is an opportunity to learn and improve.

That’s why I love doing experiments. While Google may reveal a few bits and pieces of information, they’ll never tell us everything we need to know to evolve our SEO strategies from the ordinary into the realm of unicorns.

Today I’d like to share six mind-blowing SEO experiments we did this year, what we learned from them, and what it all means.

1. Does Organic Search Click-Through Rate Matter?

We know that machine learning – including Google RankBrain – is changing SEO as we’ve known it. Already, Google uses RankBrain for every search, and it impacts “a lot” of queries.

Is RankBrain (or other machine learning-based elements) impacting rankings? If so, how? Well, that’s exactly what wanted we wanted to find out: what’s a good click-through rate for organic search.

For this experiment, we looked at a set of 1,000 keywords from Google’s Search Console for the WordStream site. What we found is very interesting. In April, the average CTR for the top position was 22 percent. That increased to 24 percent by July and 27 percent by September.

So our data clearly showed that are top ranked results had its highest CTRs by September. Meanwhile, on the other end, the data showed that lower positions (4-10) were being clicked on less than ever.

Clearly, the click curve is bending. I believe this is exactly what you would expect to see from a machine learning algorithm – it’s about providing the best answers (based on the highest user engagement), which means fewer people will need to scroll down and click lower results.

So does organic search CTR matter? YES! More than ever before.

2. Is Organic CTR an Organic Search Ranking Factor?

So we’ve established CTR is important. But what’s the relationship between organic CTR and organic search rankings?

Numerous people who work at Google have said they don’t use click-through rate for the purposes of ranking. But when they say this, they mean they don’t use it as a “direct” signal. Could it be that clicks have an indirect impact on Google’s search results?

We decided to find out the answer to this question with an experiment designed to figure out whether CTR impacts SEO rankings.

The goal of this experiment was to see whether there was any clear relationship between organic search CTR and organic search position. The biggest challenge was that separating CTR and ranking is like separating Kanye West from his ego.

So we attempted to isolate the natural relationship between CTR and ranking by taking the difference between an observed organic search CTR minus the expected CTR:

After looking at our data, we found that, on average, pages that beat the expected average organic CTR for a given position were far more likely to rank in the top four positions. These are unicorns! For example, a page that beats the expected CTR for a given position by 20 percent will likely appear in position 1.

Also, pages that failed to beat the expected organic search CTR were more likely to appear in positions 6–10. These are donkeys. For example, a page that falls below the expected CTR for a given position by 6 percent will likely appear in position 10.

So, based on the data, does CTR impact organic search rankings? It certainly seems that way!

3. Can Rewriting Your Titles Boost Your CTR?

So if you’ll be rewarded for having a higher click-through rate, what’s the best way to raise your CTR?

If people see nothing else, they will see your headline in the SERPs. Your content may be totally awesome – but they won’t click on it if the headline is boring.

SEO has evolved. It’s silly to write title tags like it’s still 2008!

WordStream has been trying to move away from overly “optimized” “SEO titles” like this one: “Guerilla Marketing: 20+ Examples and Strategies to Stand Out.”

That old headline followed “SEO best practices.” The most important keyword was at the front and everything fell within 60 characters. But it’s kind of a snore, right?

So we ran a little CTR optimization experiment. Our content and SEO manager Elisa Gabbert changed only the title of the post – to “20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples.” The new headline is closer to this super-successful headline template that foregrounds the list format, the emotional impact and the content type (examples):

The article text, images, links, or anything else you can think of were left untouched.

After updating the headline, the article CTR increased to 4.19 percent (up from 1 percent) and it ranked in position 5 (up from position 8).

So can you increase your CTR just by changing your title? Yes!

Don’t be boring! Write brilliant headlines that people will click on like crazy. (Just make sure the content behind them backs them up.)

4. Do Website Engagement Rates Impact Organic Search Rankings?

It’s super important to create clickable headlines, but the goal isn’t just to create clickbait. You also must have great engagement metrics. If people feel cheated and go right back to the SERP, Google can detect that.

Dwell time is really the thing that matters. And time on site is a much better proxy for dwell time than bounce rate.

My theory is that Google uses dwell time (which we can’t measure, but is proportional to time on site) to validate click-through rates. These metrics help Google figure out whether users ultimately got what they were looking for (i.e., a successful search).

So do engagement metrics (bounce rates, time on site, conversion rates) impact organic search rankings?

To put this theory to the test, we gathered some engagement rate data. First, we looked at whether the bounce rate of the pages/keywords we rank for had any relationship to their ranking:

See that “kink” in the graph? Kind of hard to miss, right?

Landing pages that had a bounce rate below 76 percent were more likely to show up in one of the top four positions. But landing pages that had a bounce rate of 78 percent or higher were more likely to show up in position five or lower.

What about time on site?

This graph shows that if your keyword/content pairs have decent time on site, then you’re more likely to be in top organic positions 1–6. If engagement is weak on average, however, then you’re more likely to be in positions 7 or lower.

And how about conversion rates? This data shows that higher CTRs tend to lead to higher conversion rates:

Why is this? Because if you can get someone excited enough to click on your offer, that excitement typically carries through to a purchase or sign-up.

Higher CTRs, engagement rates, and conversion rates lead to more leads and sales. But I believe this data clearly shows proof that improving engagement metrics and conversion rates will also lead to better organic search rankings.

5. Do Engagement Metrics Impact the Selection of Featured Snippets?

Google’s Featured Snippets, which appear in so-called Position 0 above the organic search results, come in the form of text, lists, images, and charts, among others. But how does Google’s algorithm pick Featured Snippets?

First, I wanted to find out whether Google’s traditional organic search ranking factors impacted whether your site gets snipped. So I looked at data for 981 snippets that the WordStream site has earned.

Clearly not. Otherwise, the top ranked position would get the snippet every time. Google is featuring snippets from content that ranks on page 2 to as far back as the 71st position!

Having on-page copy that is clear and concise is also clearly important. But, again, word count isn’t the full picture.

So we dove deeper and investigated this page after seeing it as a snippet for searches relating to getting Bing Rewards points. We discovered two interesting things from our Google Analytics and Search Console data:

An unusually high CTR (21.43 percent), even though it had an average position of 10
Unusually high time on site (14:30), which was 3x above the site average.

So do engagement rates play a role in the selection of Featured Snippets? I absolutely believe so!

6. What’s the REAL Relationship Between Organic Rankings & Social Shares?

We’ve heard about the ridiculously high correlations between social shares and organic search rankings for about five years now (see the ranking factor studies done by SearchMetrics and Moz). Many people have assumed that social shares are a ranking signal, even though Google shot this down every single time.

My belief was that it’s not the visible social share counts that matter. What’s more important is having high social engagement.

So we tested it out to find the real relationship between organic rankings and social shares. Here’s what we found:

This data showed that Facebook posts with super high engagement rates (above 6 percent) also had an organic search CTR that beat expectations. In other words, if you have Facebook engagement that is 4x higher than average, you’ll have an organic search CTR that is 4x higher than average.

Why is this? Well, I believe that the same emotions that make people share content on social media also make people click on those same pieces of content when they see them in the SERPs. This is especially true for headlines with unusually high CTRs.

The correlations were much stronger with unicorn content (those “blockbuster” pieces of content that drive 10-100x more traffic to your site than most of your other donkey content put together). Unicorns with high social engagement rates almost always had high organic CTR, and vice versa.

The correlations were substantially weaker with donkey content. Donkeys sometimes had high engagement rates, sometimes low engagement rates. The same was true with CTR, some high, some low.

So yes, high social engagement rates correlate with high CTR, and vice versa. That’s the real relationship between search and social. It’s all about how engaging your content is!

What Does It All Mean?

As these five experiments highlight, SEO is continuing to evolve in a way that rewards your pages and site based on how people engage with your content.

That means it’s mission critical to optimize for engagement.

In other words: Optimize for PEOPLE! Write headlines that will make them click and then reward them for that click by publishing amazing and memorable content that will make them want to stay on your site and share your stuff.

Check out all six experiments summarized below:

Did any of these experiments surprise you? What SEO experiments would you like to see next?

This article is an abridged version of Larry Kim’s original post on WordStream.

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Facebook has announced the addition of 360 video to the Facebook Live experience. Facebook’s 360 videos and live feature were announced over a year ago, and integrating them seemed inevitable as demand for engaging, immersive, and interactive content continues to rise.

The post Facebook Introduces Live 360 Videos by @rinadianewrites appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

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