Weekly Marketing Update: Google Quality Guidelines, SEO Landscape

Google once again captures the headlines in this week’s digital marketing news, as the latest version of its search quality guidelines are leaked (once again).

Quality is also the theme for SEO topics this week, featuring articles from the community on conducting authentic SEO audits and setting priorities, as well as a Bright Ideas blog interview with Macys.com director of SEO and organic content, Lauren MacPhail, on the evolving SEO landscape.

Other highlights include BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu’s Huffington Post column on how to revitalize your content marketing using “Think Like a Freak” principles, and a beginner’s guide to finding your audience in social media.

Enjoy!

Content from the CEO

“Why ‘Thinking Like a Freak’ Is the Best Way to Change Up Your Marketing Program” by Jim Yu

In his column for the Huffington Post, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu applies the tips to digital marketing that co-authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt offer readers in their latest book, “ Think Like a Freak .”

Jim writes, “Thinking like a freak means putting a new spin on the way you’re used to thinking, and mixing things up to keep solutions flowing.”

He continues:

In marketing, it’s essential to think like a freak. We often get stuck in the same routine of repetitive campaigns, social media posts and branding exercises, so much so that outside ideas can start to feel unwelcome and strange. After all, 90 percent of consumers are using more than one device to complete everyday tasks; that alone is enough to want to vary your strategy. Plus, now that 91 percent of consumers have a mobile device within reach at all times — and when consumers engage with over 11 pieces of content before making a purchase — finding new ways to reach and entice consumers is more essential than ever.

Based on a few of the tips shared by Dubner and Levitt for thinking like a freak, Jim shares four ways that digital marketers can apply the same creative thinking to their content marketing:

1. Put away your moral compass.  Using Uber as an example, Jim says that “this is especially important in marketing: if you’ve gotten stuck in a rut with your marketing program, you probably can’t see things from the outside anymore.”
2. Learn to say, “I don’t know.”  Pointing to stats that indicate marketers rely on data for only 11 percent of decisions about their customers, Jim says that “learning to admit what we don’t know about our consumers, and about how our marketing programs are and aren’t working, is the first step to closing the gap between marketing knowledge and data support.”
3. Learn to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded.  Citing Red Bull’s highly successful use of new channels, like Instagram and Tumblr, to engage new consumers that might not otherwise have been aware of the brand, Jim states “As Dubner and Levitt point out, getting the attention of those who might not be in the market to be persuaded is the key to turning your strategy around.”
4. Learn to appreciate the upside of quitting. Quoting Dubner and Levitt’s statement that “you can’t solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud,” Jim says “that’s where the rebrand comes in.” He points to the example of Old Spice. “Old Spice has rebranded their image beautifully … Before, the men’s hygiene brand was mediocrely known, and certainly not an internet sensation … Old Spice ditched the unsuccessful marketing ventures of their past, learning the benefits of leaving old ideas behind and starting fresh.”

One of the “Think Like a Freak” authors, Stephen Dubner, will be outlining these tips and more at BrightEdge’s Share 14.

Content from the Bright Ideas Blog

“The SEO and PPC Handshake” by Andy Betts

“One of the smartest ways to both streamline and coordinate the search marketing strategy for your company – and maximize its ranking, conversions, and ROI – is to have your SEO and PPC teams ‘on the same page’ (literally),” writes Andy Betts for the Bright Ideas blog.

Drawing on research by Google and Kenshoo, Andy describes how paid ads boost organic search click-through rates. Among the findings Andy discusses is that “even for sites claiming a No. 1 organic ranking, paid ads provided 50 percent incremental clicks (meaning, half of the top-ranking site’s visits would not have happened without the presence of paid ads).”

Andy says that similarly, SEO can help inform PPC strategy. For instance, writes Andy, an analysis of Web page performance culled from SEO data “can lend insight into how your PPC landing pages might be improved, or help you to make decisions about which pages to drive PPC traffic to if two pages could be just as relevant to an ad.”

Also, organic rank can be leveraged “to determine and control your PPC spend,” he reports.

Andy concludes:

Clearly, the relationship between organic and paid search means that your SEO and PPC teams have valuable information to share, which could lead to better site performance in terms of rankings, click-through rates (CTR), conversions and ROI.

The best way to secure that friendly handshake between SEO and PPC is to ensure your organization’s organic and paid teams have the data they need to support the relationship, and know how to collaborate using that data.

In-Depth Articles from the Marketing Community

“The World’s Quickest (Authentic) SEO & Marketing Audit In 12+1 Steps” by Stoney deGeyter

SEO professional Stoney deGeyter outlines 12 key SEO/marketing areas to assess when drafting a proposal for prospects for Search Engine Land’s “All Things SEO” column.

Stoney writes that by reviewing each of the 12 areas, an SEO consultant “should be able to uncover some definite actionable tasks and get a broader understanding of the site’s overall marketing needs.”

The website audit steps he lists are as follows:

1. Keyword Focus
2. Architectural Issues
3. Navigation Issues
4. Category Page Optimization
5. Product Page Optimization
6. Local Optimization: Off-Site
7. Local Optimization: On-Site
8. Inbound Links
9. Internal Linking
10. Content Issues
11. Social Presence
12. Conversion Optimization Issues

Stoney adds PPC issues as a “bonus” (the +1) area to review. He emphasizes that a brief assessment of each of these areas is just “the starting point.” He concludes: “This is the most authentic quick SEO and marketing review you can give, without getting lost in the details or in an endless pit of time.”

“The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Finding Your Audience In Social Media” by Alison Zeringue

In the first of a two-part series that focuses on the fundamentals of social media marketing, Alison Zeringue discusses how to define your target market and choose the right channels to reach them for Marketing Land readers.

Alison starts with how to create a customer persona for your target market, beginning with basic demographics. She then refines the demographics into “psychographics,” aimed at defining who your customer is as a person.

She advises businesses to “collaborate” with their “front-line employees” who work directly with their customers, in addressing four key questions:

1. What are your customers’ likes and dislikes and what does that tell you about them?
2. What types of television shows do they watch? What magazines or website might they read?
3. What are their values?
4. What kind of lifestyle do they lead? How does your product or service fit into their lifestyle?

For choosing the right social network to reach your target market, Alison shares key takeaways from a Business Insider report on the demographics of social media users, including:

• Fast-moving consumer goods will perform better on Facebook than luxury goods because the user base skews younger.
• Twitter is primarily a news source for its users.
• Pinterest is the place to be for food and drink related products or content, as well as family or parenting content.
• Instagram’s audience is primarily female (with projections to even out by 2016) and between the ages of 18 and 44. Clothing, accessories and entertainment-related brands find Instagram attractive for this reason.

Alison says that her next column, Part 2 of the beginner’s guide, will include a review of steps to start a content strategy.

“3 Ways to Help Prioritize Your SEO Efforts” by Erin Everhart

“Today, where in most organizations SEOs don’t ‘own’ any one part of business but touch everything, and where SEOs are experts in dozens of tactics rather than specialists in one area, prioritization can be a game changer” says Erin Everhart in her Search Engine Watch article.

She continues: “The most successful SEOs – the ones who get the most links, garner the most traffic, and reap the benefits from algorithm updates – are the ones who’ve mastered it.”

Erin then details three ways SEO professionals can prioritize their efforts:

Define goals.  “Focus on business goals rather than SEO goals” she advises. “Instead of focusing on the keyword with the highest average search volume, focus on your best-selling product or service (or the one with the highest profit margin).”

Audit the site.  Erin lists several questions to address for determining where you’re at in making you site perform as you want it to. Then she lists four things to think through in the process of prioritizing within the audit itself:

• How much time and resources will this change take?
• How much impact will this change have for SEO? For the overall business?
• How long will it take to see that impact?
• Can I, or someone on the team, actually make this change? She adds this last point “will really only come into place in enterprise companies or for issues relating to overall architecture and technology of your site.”

Implement on small scale.  Erin advises: “Instead of making drastic changes to every part of your site, implement these changes on a small scale,” and test the changes to see if they work, adding that this approach is “especially beneficial if you’re working on huge websites with thousands of URLs.”

Search Marketing News

Google Search Quality Guidelines Now Reward Expertise, Authority, Trust

Google’s latest version (5.0) of its search quality guidelines has leaked once again, reports Jessica Lee at Search Engine Watch, revealing “more clues into how Google determines quality.”

Version 5.0 of Google’s “human rater handbook” (search quality evaluation guide), dated March 2014, “contains updated information about expertise, authority, trust and reputation” for the search giant’s human raters (“search quality evaluators”) who help it rate sites for quality.

In the latest version of the guidebook, “we saw the addition of language around expertise, authority, and trust as a decision-making factor,” Jessica reports.

The updated guidelines gives some examples of what “E-A-T” means, says Jessica, and includes a statement that there are “expert” websites of all types, “even gossip websites, fashion websites, humor websites, forum and Q & A pages, etc.”

Events

Adapting to SEO Change At Share 14

BrightEdge is ramping up for Share 14 , our premier digital marketing event featuring the best and the brightest of global brands and industry leaders.

It’s coming up fast! We’ll be holding it at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, August 20 to 22. If you haven’t registered yet, act soon! Discount pricing ends August 7.

Among our featured speakers is Macys.com’s director of SEO and organic content, Lauren MacPhail. You can grab a sneak peek of Lauren’s Share14 session about the changing SEO landscape via her interview by Andy Betts on the Bright Ideas Blog.

Feel free to test your knowledge with BrightEdge  Digital Marketing Quiz  or SEO Quiz .

And with that, have a great weekend!