The importance of SEO in omni-channel marketing, part 2

Search engine optimization is a critical component of digital marketing, but how can you incorporate it into your omni-channel marketing strategy? Columnist Trond Lyngbø lays out his process for doing just that. The post The importance of SEO in omni-channel marketing, part 2 appeared first on...

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Google PLAs: Testing scrollable carousel on desktop & numbered rankings for “best” products go live

The desktop carousel test simulates mobile. A new ranking treatment for "top rated" products is now live on mobile and desktop. The post Google PLAs: Testing scrollable carousel on desktop & numbered rankings for “best” products go live appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Searchmetrics study shows most apps are not utilizing the Google App Indexing API

While most top web sites have apps, only 30% of those Android apps & 19% of those iOS apps have deployed App Indexing. The post Searchmetrics study shows most apps are not utilizing the Google App Indexing API appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, or SMM: Which Services Sell Best?

Posted by Alex-T

[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]

Each search query in Google is a demand signal for us digital marketers. If you know exactly what users are looking for, you can easily spot what they’re likely to buy.

From a common sense point of view, it’s quite logical to say that if users search for something more, they are able (and likely) to buy more. As it turns out, this correlation doesn't work within digital marketing niches. The commercial potential of a certain digital marketing service is not in direct proportion to the search volume it receives. In other words:

In the digital marketing industry, popularity doesn’t influence salability.

In the four digital marketing niches analyzed, I discovered:

1. SEO is still the most desirable service and it has the highest chance of leading to conversion.
2. Users want to know more about social media and content marketing, but they’re not ready to pay for it.
3. Users who are searching for PPC are the most likely to be converted.

After digging further into this article, you’ll discover which digital marketing services are the best to sell and why. Armed with this data, you'll inform your strategy and have a leg up on your competitors.

Are the digital marketing services you’re selling the ones users are ready to buy?

Nowadays, we see how the digital marketing sphere is moving more and more towards content marketing and social media marketing (SMM). Everybody talks about these services — I'm no exception here. Moreover, there are plenty of digital marketers who are confident that without social media you can't rank properly in Google (I'm not one of them).

However, it's true that SMM and content marketing are now more important than ever. I was recently browsing through some BrightonSEO speeches and noticed that a substantial proportion of those talks were about content, SMM, copywriting, and even PR. I noticed the same situation with SMX events and many others. SEO seems like it's becoming less important.

But what about market demand? “What are our potential clients really interested in purchasing?” I asked myself. I conducted a study to find out.

User search behavior in SEO, PPC, SMM, and content marketing niches

I analyzed 4 digital marketing niches: SEO, PPC, content marketing, and SMM.

Why did I choose these niches? They represent the top four services offered in the US digital marketing industry. Recently, I conducted a survey regarding the current state of digital marketing agencies’ services, costs, and payment models. Among the insights that I gained, I determined the most and least popular digital marketing services that agencies are selling today.

Top digital agency services offered in the US market.

However, this data was gathered solely from service providers, including agencies and freelancers. After considering these results further, I came to the conclusion that they don't necessarily correlate with what clients want to buy. This all-important factor is completely missing from the data.

It was time to do some research on market demand via the most accessible information I could get: search queries.

Over 112,800 search queries were analyzed.

Because I’m experienced in keyword research, it was an easy task for me. I took the top four services offered in the US and created lists of keywords that are related to SEO, SMM, PPC, and content marketing. These keywords were mostly collected with the help of Serpstat and SEMrush. After I created a final list, I used Google Keyword Planner, which provided me with the most accurate cost-per-click and search volume metrics. In the following graphic, you can see sums of search volumes of queries concerning these niches:

To figure out how the popularity of a niche influences its commercial potential, I divided all queries related to these four niches into two groups – general queries and those that are agency-related. I put search queries in the “agency-related” category if they had any kind of commercial interest, e.g. if they included words like “fees,” “costs,” “prices,” “consultant,” “service,” “company,” “agency,” etc.

Agency-related queries spot the cases when users are ready to buy a service, while general queries are simply informational queries.

This distribution reflects the balance between what users are looking for versus what they are ready to buy, so here are my top hints:

1. SEO is still the most desirable service and it has the highest chance of leading to conversion.

SEO is a leading niche that attracts the highest search interest, as well as the most potentially commercial queries. If you're already selling SEO services, don't stop. And if you aren’t, perhaps you should start.

2. Users want to know more about social media and content marketing, but they’re not ready to pay for it.

The social media niche attracts a lot of searchers, but they're less likely to pay for it. Although content marketing generates quite high search volumes, users aren't likely to pay for it, either, as only four percent of queries are commercial.

3. Users who are searching for PPC are the most likely to be converted.

PPC, on the contrary, attracts less searchers; as we can judge from the sum of its search volumes, PPC is 10 times less popular than SEO. Nevertheless, it enjoys a higher frequency of agency-related keywords than the content marketing niche, and about 10 percent of its agency-related queries are likely to result in the purchase of PPC management services.

I also took a look at the most searchable and the most expensive keywords connected with these four niches and compared them. I assumed that they wouldn't correlate. Market demand is represented by search volumes, which means that the most searchable keywords are the queries a lot of people use.

However, the most expensive keywords mirror the most competitive niches, which have a really limited audience of potential clients. In order to determine if I was correct, I compared the top five most searchable and most expensive keywords in each of the four niches.

The most expensive keywords show low search volumes.

By looking at the table below, you can see that my hypothesis was absolutely correct. The higher the suggested bid, the lower the number of searchers.

The average search volumes of the top five most expensive keywords for each investigated niche do not exceed 100 searches.

	Average Suggested Bid	Average Search Volume
SEO	$91.5	100
PPC	$87.74	40
Content Marketing	$84.96	36
Social Media	$107.4	28

Average search volume and suggested bid for the top 5 most expensive keywords

The opposite trend was revealed for the most searchable keywords, where the average suggested bid is less than $20 USD, but the average search volume exceeds 5,000 searchers.

	Average Suggested Bid	Average Search Volume
SEO	$16	27,460
PPC	$18.2	5,340
Content Marketing	$15.2	26,640
Social Media	$6.8	27,980

Average search volumes and suggested bids for the top 5 most searchable keywords

Based on this data, it’s obvious that you'll pay less for keywords that have a larger search volume. Those keywords are informational search terms, rather than commercial ones.

8 facts about the most searchable and most expensive keywords

In the following diagrams you can see the top five most popular keywords and their search volumes in Google US, as well as the top five most expensive keywords and suggested bids.

SEO niche

Fact 1: A lot of people choose to deal with SEO issues themselves — at least, they try to with the help of special tools.

In the SEO niche, the most searchable keywords are general queries like “SEO” and “search engine optimization.” Also, a lot of users search for “SEO tools,” which is the fourth most searchable query. The search volumes of these keywords indicate that a lot of users would rather deal with SEO issues on their own, and that they’re looking for professional SEO tools. It's no secret that new analytic tools are released every day to compete for rule of their respective marketing niches. On the other hand, quite a lot of users search Google for “SEO company,” which is the fifth most searchable query, and that indicates they're eager to delegate SEO problems to paid professionals.

Fact 2: "SEO strategy template," with a CPC of $120.28, is used by Google to promote AdWords.

As for the top five most expensive SEO keywords, I found they're quite a curious set. The most expensive SEO-related keyword is “SEO strategy template,” which costs $120.28. This is a consulting query, so why has it become so expensive?

To find it out, I analyzed this query with the help of SEMrush’s Keywords Analytics tool. The results were eye-popping to me. The most mind-blowing thing here is Google’s actions. It turns out that Google itself is paying for this keyword to appear in paid search.

What’s even more interesting: Google is also paying for “SEO strategy template” to show the Adwords page in paid results. This would seem to prove that not all rules apply to everyone: we have to maintain the relevancy of landing pages and keywords for pages appearing in Google ads... but Google may not be subject to those restrictions. A campaign's quality score is based on CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. It's obvious that users searching for "SEO strategy template" have no interest in using Google AdWords!

Keyword ads history for "SEO strategy template"

PPC niche

Fact 1: Users don't want to deal with PPC on their own.

It's worth noting that the top five most expensive keywords are agency related. They are “PPC management agency,” “top PPC companies,” and “pay per click management service.”

Fact 2: The majority of the top five most expensive PPC keywords are agency-related search terms.

As we've already discovered, the PPC niche isn't the most searchable digital marketing topic; remember, it receives 10 times less searchers than SEO. Nevertheless, it receives a rather large proportion of agency-related queries. Ironically, people are ready to spend their time running SEO on their own in order to make it “free." But when it comes to ads campaigns, they prefer to find an agency or consultant.

Social media marketing niche

Fact 1: SMM education is getting popular.

In the social media marketing niche, all of the most searchable keywords are also general queries, like “social media” or “social media definition.” Also, almost all of the top five most expensive keywords for SMM are connected with education in the SMM sphere, namely obtaining a masters degree and online courses: “MBA in social media marketing,” “social media masters,” “masters in social media marketing,” and “online social media marketing course.”

Fact 2: Users have realized that managing social media also requires a strategy.

The query “What is social media strategy” appeared in the top five most expensive SMM-related keywords. I'm sure we can qualify this query as consultancy-related. There's a high probability that users who are searching for an SMM strategy are willing to hire an expert to master their SMM channels.

Content marketing niche

Fact 1: Contently is the ultimate leader.

In the content marketing niche, there's a brand search query in the top five most searchable keywords — “Contently" — which is a great example of how a company that provides content marketing software can achieve a wide presence in their niche. Also, one of the most searchable queries is “content management system.” I would say that such queries are likely to lead users to purchase professional content marketing services.

Fact 2: The most expensive keywords are related to content management tools.

The content marketing niche, unlike the other digital marketing niches I’ve analyzed, has a strong correlation between market demand and PPC rates. All of the most expensive keywords are also connected with content management systems: “content management system database,” “Drupal content management system,” “what does a content management system do,” and the niche query “healthcare content management.”

Obviously, many people are struggling to organize their content strategies and processes and are looking for a proper management system. The high prices for these keywords are in direct response to market demand.

Best SEO and PPC companies according to Google US

“That’s all interesting,” I thought, “but how does the situation look from the point of view of a potential client who's unaware of what’s going on in the market?”

Let’s suppose that this potential client is a perfectionist and they want to buy services from the very best company. They would ask Google "what are the best SEO and PPC companies?", so I did as well.

Hint: I bet you've never heard of a majority of them.

I analyzed Google’s SERPs for the queries “best SEO company” and “best PPC company” and chose agency domains that appeared in the first 10 results for each of these SERPs. You can see the results in the following graphics.

For the query “best SEO company,” agency domains that appeared in the first 10 results were Highervisibility.com, Boostability.com, Pagetraffic.com, and Outspokenmedia.com. I used SEMrush to analyze the organic search visibility these domains received from December 2013 to October 2015.

Because SEMrush only reports on traffic based on keywords, I decided to add Similarweb and watch organic search visits for these domains for the year 2015. Actually, I discovered absolutely non-positive trends — you can see this in the graphic below.

The following digital agencies appeared in the first 10 results in Google’s SERP for the query “best PPC company”: Jumfly.com, Wordstream.com, and Straightnorth.com. For these domains, I analyzed data concerning their paid search visibility with the help of SEMrush. In the following graphic, you can see the results:

For more detailed data for 2015, I created a Paid Search Visits report for these domains with the help of SimilarWeb.

As you can see, the majority of the best SEO and PPC companies according to Google are not the ones you might expect. Google’s ranking algorithms, despite constantly being improved and moving increasingly towards human-centered logic, are still far from perfect.

View the complete infographic here.

SEO, PPC, content marketing, and SMM thrashed out

Now that we've discovered the current market demand for the most popular digital agency services, you can use this data to better understand your potential clients and create more effective strategies.

Here's a short recap to help kick off the conversation in the comments. The major findings are as follows:

1. High search volumes for certain topics don't always mirror high-converting niches. You should always further investigate this correlation. (Note: You can easily apply this to any market’s landscape research, not just the digital marketing industry.)
2. SMM and content marketing are relatively new spheres, and they enjoy very high search volumes compared to PPC and SEO. But be aware that SMM and content marketing receive less commercial queries that are likely to be converted.
3. I have no idea why, but SMM education has become an extremely competitive niche. In fact, there are more experts who are ready to provide SMM courses than those who want to receive SMM education. If you want to sell SMM training courses, be prepared to enter into a highly competitive market!
4. As for content marketing, content management services are now competing against content management systems; so far, Contently is winning this battle.

Do you have any other thoughts, questions, or ideas? I'm super excited to hear them — sound off in the comments!

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Does Google ignore nofollow?

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How to Feed a Hummingbird: Improve Your On-Page SEO with Related Topics in Moz Pro

Posted by jon.white

SEO is changing. We can no longer rely on keyword targeting alone to optimize our content. Whether we should focus on topics or keywords is a debate in progress. But figuring out which topics can influence the SERP is, at best, a manual process; at worst, it's a timesuck that can take hours out of your day.

TL;DR

Today we've launched a new feature in Moz Pro that can help you make sense of how search engines understand topics and phrases.

You can use this data to build deeper content, improve your topical authority, find keyword ideas, and generally better understand the SERP. It uses machine learning and topic modeling to mine related topics from the SERPs. We see this as another step on the journey to help marketers better understand the complex world of SEO in 2016.

Want the quick run-down? Tori explains it all in this brief 1:39 minute video, complete with snazzy music.

Can't wait to dive in? Already an avid Moz Pro user? Head to the Keyword Rankings section of any campaign and get started. And if you're not a Moz Pro subscriber, you can satisfy your curiosity with a free trial, too:

Try it for 30 days!

Pandas, Hummingbirds, and the relationship between keywords and pages

We've all noticed that SEO has become a lot more complex in the last few years. When Google started to figure out the meaning of words and phrases, simple keyword usage alone no longer guaranteed us results. Then Hummingbird spread its wings, and now in some cases, pages in the SERP don’t contain the keyword at all. Utter chaos, right?

Panda made sure we put effort and research into our content. And while it’s still a good idea to ensure your target keywords appear in key parts of your page, the simple on-page optimization of the past can no longer move the rankings needle on its own.

Related Topics is a new feature in Moz Pro that helps you understand how phrases and topics influence the SERP, allowing you to broaden your content and build out pages instead of devoting yourself to time-consuming (and let’s be real, sort of boring) research. As of today, Moz Pro is one of the few places you can get this kind of data.

That all sounds well and good. But how do we get insight into how Google understands the relationship between topics? Well, it turns out they give us a handy clue: the SERP itself.

Related Topics examines all of the pages that rank in the top 20 for a given keyword. Using machine learning and topic modeling, it figures out which unique sets of terms and phrases those pages include. It then removes the topics that your page already talks about and presents the resulting list, along with the ranking URLs. Armed with this mighty list, you can now understand which topics have influence in the SERP and decide whether to integrate these into your own pages and content. It lives within the Page Optimization feature in Moz Pro, which you can now get to by clicking the "Optimize" next to any keyword in the ranking table.

While it’s impossible to say for sure that including topics in your page will result in a higher ranking (that ol’ correlation versus causation thing), we do know that pages that rank well are already including these topics in their content. If you’re looking to diversify and broaden your page’s subject coverage to try and win more authority, Related Topics is the place to start. Bonus points: it’s also quite likely that including coverage of these topics will improve the user’s experience of your content.

How can I use this data to get ahead?

1. Experiment with including different topics and content to build authority

Adding topically similar content to your page can help Google understand what that page is about, establishing yourself as an authority on those topics.

I'm a fan of Tim Ferris and his productivity hack blog, fourhourworkweek.com. Let’s take this article on speed reading. Looks like the page is optimized pretty well for the target keyword and has a decent link profile and PA. Now, let’s look at some other topics that have influence on the SERP.

Here I can see a couple of variations I might want to play around with, but a couple in particular catch my eye. I notice the topic “reading comprehension” seems influential (it's included in 3 of the top 5 ranking pages), and it’s not syntactically related — this is a topic I might not have discovered manually by looking at variations of the target keyword. I also see “subvocalization” being influential. This is a term I might not be familiar with, but using Related Topics, I can drill into the actual URLs mentioning that topic, learn about it, and get some inspiration for how I could build out my content to include it.

This is a particularly interesting case, as “speed reading” has a somewhat reasonable search volume of 9,900 (from Keyword Planner). In contrast, “reading comprehension” has a search volume of 18,100. If I can integrate it well, I have an opportunity to broaden my audience.

2) Avoid thin content and go deeper

You’ve got to pacify the Panda. If you’re looking for ways to expand on thin content, go deeper or broader on an existing page, or convert shorter content to long-form, using Related Topics suggestions can give you inspiration for subject-matter expansion. Multiple studies have shown that deeper and more topically relevant content correlates with better ranking performance.

In the example below, I have a page about Product Management Events, if I wanted to make it broader I might do a deep dive on the subject of Product Design, or even talk about some of the branded topics that were discovered.

3) Save time on topical, competitive, and SERP research

This can be especially helpful when you’re wearing many hats, and tackling a new domain you're not as familiar with. Using Related Topics — and especially researching the ranking pages they appear on — can give you a head start for topic-appropriate language to use, or inspiration for areas to research.

At Moz, we all think we're experts on the housing market since we watched "The Big Short." But challenge us to write about the more technical terms and we might struggle! Here's another example using a US real estate blog recommended by our own in-house real estate guru Tim Ellis.

Let’s say we want to understand a bit more about the SERP for the keyword "real estate forecast," and perform some industry research on terminology. Here are some topics that have influence:

I notice there are a few technical terms in here that I'm not familiar with, and if I want to learn more I can jump right into the ranking URLs that contain the topic and research them instead of trying to manually pull them out of the SERP.

4) Keyword Ideas

The list of topical suggestions also double as suggestions for other keywords to target, or as seed keywords for keyword research (we have some new keyword research tools coming very soon).

How does it actually work? (Tech jargon alert!)

Wondering how Related Topics knows just which content is on the page? Well, we use Moz’s proprietary Context API, which also powers other tools around here (such as Moz Content). Here are a few words from Dr. Matt Peters (Moz’s Chief Data Scientist) on how it works:

Moz's topic modeling algorithm extracts relevant keyword phrases from English language web pages. We use natural language processing algorithms to analyze the page content and create a list of candidate topics. Then, a machine learning model assigns each candidate phrase a relevance score and ranks them from most-to-least relevant. The relevance score is a combination of traditional information retrieval techniques like term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and language modeling, syntactic and semantic signals such as part of speech tags, and graph-based features. The resulting lists of highly relevant topics and relevance scores are used in both Moz Pro and Moz Content.

As mentioned above, Related Topics takes the top 20 ranking pages on the SERP, extracts topics from them using the Context API, and then applies a series of filters and rules to show topics that we think are relevant. We exclude topics we find on any URLs that you rank with for the keyword. During feature development, we were faced with a choice: show topics that occur more frequently, but show less of them; or show more topics with varying ranges of frequency. We decided that our customers prefer having more data, and often we find gems near the bottom of the list. For this reason we went with the “more data” option. You might find the odd strange suggestion in there, but we think that’s outweighed by having more data to choose from.

See it in action!

Want to take it for a spin? If you're already a Moz Pro subscriber (hey, pal!), head to your Keyword Rankings section in any Moz Pro campaign and hit the "Optimize Keyword" button.

Curious but not ready to commit? Check it out with a 30-day free trial:

Try it for 30 days!

As always, we want your feedback / comments / experiences in the comments below!

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SearchCap: Google PageRank dead, Google Travel expands, Bing period table & more

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google PageRank dead, Google Travel expands, Bing period table & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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