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Ranking among the top Google search results is increasingly driven by dynamic factors, such as content relevance and user intent, rather than static factors, such as the number of keywords and links on a webpage, according to recent research from Searchmetrics.
The annual Searchmetrics ranking factors report was based on an analysis conducted in 2016 of Google search results for 10,000 keywords. The researchers examined which webpages were presented in the top 10 mobile and desktop results for each keyword and then determined which factors correlated to high rankings.
The presence of a few technical requirements, such as H1 tags and HTTPS encryption, help pages rank well across almost all keywords, the analysis found.
However, many of the other factors that influence high search rank, such as time spent on site and click-through rate (CTR), are dependent on individual searchers and pieces of content.
The fact that top search results for keywords are now driven less and less by universal factors led Searchmetrics to conclude that marketers should increasingly focus on topic-specific SEO/content tactics rather than broad approaches....
Marketers have no shortage of metrics on their dashboards, but they are still often flying blind. Marketing visibility can be simultaneously clear and opaque. To paraphrase Coleridge, the state of marketing is “metrics, metrics everywhere, and not sure what to think.” OverstateGate brought a colorful rise out of Branding Professor Mark Ritson: “This little debacle once again confirms that nobody actually knows what the fuck is going on with digital media. Not media agencies, not big-spending clients and not armchair digital strategists. From the shadowy box of turds and spiders that is programmatic to the increasingly complex and deluded world of digital views, the idea that digital marketing is more analytical and attributable than other media is clearly horse shit. Sure, it has more numbers and many more metrics but that does not make it more accountable, it makes it less so.” In general, marketers can’t always take metrics at face value. We have to get savvier and more sophisticated at questioning the numbers we use. We have to beware of faux metrics and fuzzy math....
Ask any communications practitioner what the measure of success is for their campaigns, and most often the response will be a list of well written coverage pieces, shared aggressively across social channels. Ask any marketer what the measure of success is for their campaigns, and they will reply with a litany of metrics. Guess what, social media pros — you’ve been doing it wrong. It is time to measure like a marketer....
But in many areas of marketing, more doesn't always mean better. Take your marketing data, for example. Though having data about your marketing programs is crucial to analyzing your success and making changes to future programs, some individual metrics aren't actually that helpful. And with only so much time in your day, you can't afford to spend your time analyzing data that won't help you make better marketing decisions.
If you want to get a full run-down on the metrics you should (and shouldn't be tracking, tune into our webinar on March 11 called Smart Reporting: How to Stop Wasting Time and Make Better Marketing Decisions. To register for that webinar, click here.
In the meantime, let's take a look at some of the metrics you might not want to track -- and give you suggestions for different metrics to look at instead....
The evidence for social media as a viable means of marketing is overwhelming, even for businesses traditionally unaffiliated with social media marketing. But many companies, even major marketing and advertising agencies, use objective numbers like Facebook likes or Twitter followers to measure a campaign’s health or success.
It’s tempting to use objective measures like these because they’re verifiable, quantitative, and logical, but the true significance of likes and followers to the success of a social marketing campaign is greatly overestimated....
Looking to improve your marketing? Here are 11 metrics that you should be measuring to gauge your performance.
... Writing a marketing plan without doing a review of recent marketing performance is like using Google Maps without a starting point. Knowing where your marketing is today (that is, what it's doing for you today) is absolutely essential for deciding where you want it to take you next year.
If your CEO asked you today to start pulling together a report card for 2014 YTD marketing performance, what would you report on and how would you grade it? In our primarily B2B world, here are some of the measures we suggest would make appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for assessing marketing performance:...
...Measuring awareness is relatively straightforward. If you’re a coffee shop, for example, the number of people who walk by the front door, stop, look inside, maybe even poke their head in, is your level of awareness.
Measuring trust is significantly harder because it’s subjective and qualitative. Trust is less of a “what happened” question and more of a “why” question, and you can never measure “why” questions with web analytics (which only measures “what happened” questions).
With that in mind, let’s look at two simple ways using web metrics that you can start to see the impact of your public relations program on growing new audiences. The screenshots below are taken from the most popular web analytics program, Google Analytics, but other programs provide (or should provide) substantially similar metrics....
A new study by Y&R and Dr. Joel Weinberger of Adelphi University shows that consumers' unconscious desires are at odds with what we say we want.
Ad firm Y&R teamed up with psychologist Dr. Joel Weinberger of Adelphi University to design a study that revealed respondents’ subconscious preferences using implicit association testing. The study, tellingly named “Secrets and Lies,” has been released and is available here.
Three key findings:
1. What consumers say is important is often the opposite of what truly is important to them.
In the chart below “conscious preference” is what people said they held to be of value. “Unconscious preference” shows how testing determined what they actually, subconsciously, valued. These global responses came from Brazil, China, and the US...
Shift the way you think about content by seeing how it can actually save you time and money in the long run.
Think of content as an investment, if only for the SEO value it will provide. When you create one blog post -- just one day of content creation effort -- it's indexed in search engines forever. If you create one blog post, and create it well, that can drive results for your business in the form of traffic and leads for years and years to come.
So while one hour today may seem impossible, that one hour of work could drive hundreds or thousands of leads in, say, ten years
Talk about ROI.
This concept of creating once, and creating well, should be applied to marketers at any stage -- but none is more critical than marketers undergoing a website redesign. If that's you, now is the ideal time to invest in carefully choosing your page structure, and thoughtfully crafting content to perform well for both readers and search engines. A successful build (or rebuild) will make your website an enduring presence online. A great keyword strategy combined with appropriate content and site structure turns your website into a 24-hour marketing machine for your company!...
Pinterest isn’t just for sharing photos of delicious recipes or crafts anymore. Check out this infographic to see how retailers are driving traffic to their brick and mortar locations using Pinterest....
When it comes to social media, there is an ongoing focus on driving traffic to your digital home bases and outposts such as websites, blogs, and social networks. But how about using these channels to drive traffic to your physical store?
In a recent post on Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel presents a series of data-driven Pinterest tactics that drive sales to brick and mortar retail locations. These findings are part of larger study, From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, that offers some great insight on the factors that impact consumer social purchasing decisions.
This infographic summarizes the 5 key tactics that retailers can use to help drive in-store traffic....
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Google Analytics (GA) provides very powerful analytics tools right out of the box. However, most marketers are not familiar enough with what those tools can do, and are therefore not using them to their full advantage. But to achieve true content marketing success, customizing GA to your hub architecture and business goals are essential first steps. Failure to do this results in not just bad data, which will impact your ability to strategize correctly, but will also make you miss out on one of the easiest and more impactful methods of tracking ROI metrics that your CMO will really respond to. In this blog post, I’m going to break down your essential GA setup into two distinct sections:...
The key to a successful Twitter marketing strategy involves frequently studying the data you have on hand to inform your strategy moving forward. It’s easy to guess what kind of content will perform well if you know what has worked in the past. One of the best ways to dig into the data you have is to perform your own Twitter audit.
Though the term audit may jog unpleasant thoughts of the IRS, you can leave your W2s in the shoebox under your bed. Instead, this article shows you how to pull, visualize and make sense of your Twitter data so that you can make informed decisions about your future strategy....
There are so many metrics that can be measured in social media, that sometimes it can be overwhelming to narrow it down to something bite-sized, and find a good measure of success. Since social media also touches everything from attracting prospects to delighting customers in the buyer’s journey, figuring out what metrics to report on can be a challenge.
In this post, I will break down the metrics we observe at HubSpot, how we define success, and how we make that decision each month. And the best part: we'll wrap up with how to actually measure those metrics at HubSpot....
Today Google announced the launch of a mobile-friendly test tool to see if your website passes Google’s criteria for what it consider to be a mobile optimized site.
In case you’re wondering why it’s important to meet Google’s mobile-friendly criteria, it’s because they’re adding a “mobile-friendly” label in its search results next to sites that pass this criteria.
Since this is a brand new addition, there’s no way to know how it will affect click-through rate, but I think it’s a safe bet that mobile searchers are going to visit a page labeled “mobile-friendly” before visiting a page without that label.Here’s another big reason why it’s important for your site to meet Google’s criteria — it may impact your rankings....
Analytical tools can get you the feel good numbers, but they’re also about more than that. They’re about incisive, actionable data that gives reliable feedback on your current campaigns and practical insights to inform your next one. Marketers who think they’ll only get ‘soft’ metrics out of the data either haven’t been using powerful enough analytics tools, or they haven’t been using them properly. Social media isn’t a baby anymore, it has grown into a vital channel with powerful analytics available that can help you find the money amongst the noise.
Intelligent use of social analytical tools means that there is absolutely nowhere for substandard marketing campaigns to hide. Spending on social analytics is expected to grow from $620 million in 2014 to $2.73 billion by 2019.
With a few clicks you can get all the lowdown on how your campaign is performing online, what’s making you the most money, and how to change it if necessary. The best marketers will use this information to streak ahead of their competition with campaigns that are on trend, responsive, and deftly efficient at delivering results that their CFOs cannot ignore. Here’s how you can join them....
It’s the end of the month, time to review your content marketing results from the past 30 days and analyze…but what do you focus on? Of everything you could be reporting, which statistics should you care about? What do they mean, and how do you know if your findings are beneficial or not? Below are 11 content marketing statistics you should know that will make your end of month reports outstanding!...
My client's objective was to design and take advantage of new technologies and trends to develop a new approach to accurately measure media effectiveness.
...There are four stages to follow. Initiation, Integration, Intelligence, and Value Creation.
Every action my client takes – from answering the phone at the front desk to the most complex product installation – makes a statement about how that company values customers. These moments in time are when a brand comes to life, when promises made are either kept or broken. Jan Carlzon, former President of Scandinavian Airline Services called these instances “moments of truth”. He defined them as “any time a customer comes into contact with any aspect of your business, however remote, the customer has an opportunity to form an impression.
”Moments of truth, when repeatedly resulting in positive outcomes and experiences, lead to customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is a state of being that is defined by behaviors and experiences on BOTH sides of the relationship – vendor and customer – that lead to a state of value creation for both parties. Loyalty can’t be measured by repeating business alone...
How’s your social media ROI?
Here’s a better question, perhaps: how are you measuring it?
The tried and tested methods of evaluating return on investment don’t always apply quite as explicitly when it comes to gauging success on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. While these tools can be used effectively to drive orders and boost sales, your efforts are perhaps better measured in different metrics, such as growth of community, brand awareness and website footfall, certainly in the early stages of your strategy.
Ultimately, of course, it’s social media’s impact on your bottom line that will determine your success or failure – certainly when it comes to appeasing your boss – and this infographic from Psoshul provides 10 very convincing examples of ROI in social media.
Big data is all the rage right now. Marketers are scrambling to extract value from the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that are being created each and every day. This data can lead to insights about buyer intent, customer engagement, content marketing effectiveness, and more. In fact, in my last post for Content Marketing Institute I offered 3 ideas on how content marketers can use big data to improve or enhance their content marketing efforts.
But it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and data at hand. Once you have your goals in mind, how do you uncover the best insights for informing your content marketing strategy without being bogged down by the data deluge? Here’s a look at the best of the usual suspects — as well as some sources you may not have considered yet — to better inform your content marketing program...
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