Atomic Media

Future of in-person events: Marketers likely to return in 2023

Written on September 20, 2022 at 2:50 pm, by admin

Marketers are looking forward to returning to in-person events in the first half, and especially the second half, of 2023.

As far as the rest of 2022? Marketers are split down the middle.

That’s according to MarTech’s 2022 Event Participation Index.

A year ago, marketers told us they were less likely to attend upcoming in-person conferences due to fears of an Omicron wave.

Indeed, we saw an enormous surge in COVID cases at the beginning of this year, when many first-half conferences had already been planned. Although the new variants were highly infectious, they seemed less damaging.

The number of cases quickly declined and have remained fairly flat. Nevertheless, the uncertainty seemed to shut down the in-person option for about half of the roughly 200 respondents who were part of the Event Participation Index.

Fifty-three said they were “extremely unlikely” to attend a live event in what remains of 2022; 62 said they were “extremely likely” to go to an in-person event. The rest of the sample was spread unevenly between those extremes.

This year, once again, we asked marketers to rate their likelihood of returning to in-person events. We also asked how many events they have actually attended, as well as the extent to which they have a budget for attending, or exhibiting at, events.

Here are the results.

Marketers ‘extremely likely’ to attend in-person events

Things look brighter for next year. About twice as many respondents were “extremely likely” rather than “extremely unlikely” to attend in-person events in the first half of 2023.

For the second half of next year, optimism reigns, with 80 “extremely likely” to go to live events, and 40 more checking in as likely or highly likely. Only 19 were still “extremely unlikely” to jump aboard.

At the same time, many thought that a virtual element should still be included. Said one Event Participation Index respondent:

• “Given climate change, travel challenges and increased viruses I think events should have online virtual opportunities that are both synchronous and asynchronous and facilitate in-person gatherings in the locale where people are. For example you have attendees from Chicago, London, and Philly. Create small, intimate networking events in each city so that attendees can go in their backyard while also attending the conference sessions that could be streamed from anywhere.”

Should event organizers mandate vaccination?

A strong majority continued to believe not only that attendees should be vaccinated (and presumably, although we didn’t ask, boosted), but that event organizers should mandate vaccination.

Logically, that probably means checking evidence of vaccination, too.

More than half of our sample, 121 respondents, wanted to see vaccinations made mandatory. Although 77 said no, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re against vaccination (or unvaccinated).

Attendance levels: What is the new normal?

The return of in-person events doesn’t necessarily imply a complete return to normal.

“Attendance will be at pre-pandemic levels,” predicted one Event Participation Index respondent, and for 2022 at least that seems likely to be true.

HubSpot estimated a decline in Inbound attendance of around 10-15% compared with 2019. That said, Inbound had an extensive virtual component, so the overall audience may have been larger than past live-only editions of the conference.

It remains to be seen whether offering audiences the choice of virtual or in-person will depress live attendance. After all, viruses aren’t the only problem – there’s the expense and rampant chaos of air travel.

As one Event Participation Index respondent told us:

• “Expensive air travel and brutal travel experiences make me not want to recommend in-person events.”

Another respondent told us:

• “If event attendance is down, I don’t think it’ll be due to COVID. I’ve been to concerts, ball games, and other crowded events. People seem to be back living their lives.”

Here’s what the survey sample actually did (or are doing) this year:

There was a fairly even split between those who went to zero events (77) and those who went to one or two (I went to two or three).

There was a sharp decline when it came to multiple event attendance, with only eight brave warriors experiencing ten or more in-person shows.

• “Seeing how accessible events can be online has made it more difficult to justify spending money and time away from family on travel for in-person events. While it’s true that networking might be a missing component in the online space, networking isn’t always a strong enough justification to attend in person.”

Marketers have budget for events

A strong majority of respondents (154) had budget to travel to at least a few events the rest of this year and into next year. A small minority (22) had the budget to attend many events.

When it came to exhibiting, 46 had the budget for at least some events, while 19 had the budget for many. Added together, that means around one-third of this sample have the costs of at least some exhibiting covered.

Of course, there’s no pleasing some people: “Do something different. I’m bored with in-person and online events.”

The post Future of in-person events: Marketers likely to return in 2023 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google launched additional support and troubleshooting for Consent Mode

Written on September 20, 2022 at 2:50 pm, by admin

Google is rolling out new features to give advertisers additional help with setting up and troubleshooting Consent Mode. A new certified partner program is also available with additional support with implementation and tech challenges.

About Consent Mode. Consent Mode allows advertisers to adjust how your Google tags behave based on the consent status of your users. It also enables Google to model for gaps in conversions. The Google tags will dynamically adapt, utilizing cookies for specified purposes when consent has been given by the user. using the consent signals, Google will apply conversion modeling to recover lost conversions due to consent changes.

Consent Mode status and diagnostics. Google has built new support and features to help advertisers set up Consent Mode correctly. The Google Tag Assistant troubleshooting guide covers possible cases and solutions if Consent Mode is not detected or consent is lower than expected.

Diagnostics can be directly accessed on the conversion summary or action settings page.

What Google says. “In coming months, you’ll be able to view troubleshooting alerts in your diagnostics tabs and see domain-level insights about your tagging and consent rate. You’ll also be able to download a list of URLs and access Google Tag Assistant’s consent debugging tools to help you fix issues with your setup.

Soon, we’ll be surfacing troubleshooting recommendations in the diagnostics tab. In the meantime, you can access the recommendations tab to ensure Consent Mode is properly set up and that you’re receiving the full benefits of conversion modeling” says Shirin Eghtesadi, Senior Product Manager, Privacy Centric Measurement, in the Google announcement today.

Activating Consent Mode. Advertisers can review eligibility requirements here. Google has also partnered with Consent Management Platforms (CMP) and is launching a new partner management platform with partners such as One Trust, Osano, Cookiebot, and more.

It should also be noted that in order to meet the thresholds, advertisers will need to have a presence in the European Economic Area (EEA) or the UK.

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CMP partners. CMP partners are integrated with Consent Mode and Google Tag Manager, which help ensure proper implementation and address any technical issues. CMPs help manage cookie consent banners and direct the consent management process which begins when a user lands on your website and makes a consent choice on a CMP banner. The CMP then communicates that choice to the Google tag via Consent Mode, and the tag adjusts its behavior accordingly. 

Why we care. Most of us are fully aware that new regulations concerning privacy are at the forefront of our jobs as advertisers. Consent Mode ensures that websites protect the confidentiality and security of user data, while still allowing for accurate conversion and targeting data.

If you meet the requirements, check into partnering with a CMP to implement Consent Mode.

The post Google launched additional support and troubleshooting for Consent Mode appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to handle PPC landing pages for SEO

Written on September 20, 2022 at 2:50 pm, by admin

Every competent SEO knows that “SEO is not an island.” We need to work with different stakeholders to align our marketing efforts.

But one of the most underutilized relationships in marketing teams is between SEO and PPC specialists.

From my experience working with agencies and in-house, collaborating with PPC specialists can bring tremendous value to an SEO strategy and vice versa.

After all, it is not uncommon for an online business to leverage PPC and SEO strategies to grow. Both channels are essential for any online marketing strategy.

While the tactics for PPC are different than SEO techniques, there are a few cases where both channels should collaborate to improve overall business performance.

A look at PPC landing pages

One of the touchpoints between PPC and SEO is landing pages created specifically for PPC campaigns. Creating alternative PPC landing pages is a great way to optimize pages for conversions – and not necessarily for search.

Take a look at this sample landing page used for PPC ads.

The page has very little text and no schema (which isn’t surprising since it’s not an SEO page).

And if you look at the organic keywords this page is attracting in Semrush, it’s only ranking for two keywords, and one of them is branded.

(The actual number of organic keywords may be higher, but it’s expected to be branded, and low rankings on non-branded keywords, if there are more.) 

This is an example of a landing page not optimized for search but utilized for PPC purposes. PPC campaigns may require pages with more focus on branding or creative titles, less text, more graphics and clear calls to action. 

And because SEOs can get really touchy about their titles, keywords, length of content, and more, PPC pages offer a PPC manager a way out.

Can PPC pages interfere with SEO efforts?

The short answer is yes. Any page that is indexed in search needs to be optimized for search.

Creating PPC pages without taking into consideration the impact they can have on SEO can interfere with organic performance in two ways:

• Cannibalization. When there’s a PPC page version of an existing SEO page, the PPC landing page can potentially jeopardize the performance of its counterpart SEO page.
• Creating PPC landing pages means having pages on your website with low word count and minimal content, which in the time of Google’s helpful content update, can actually impact the overall performance of the website, including pages that are well optimized and provide value to the users.

Why have PPC landing pages?

A landing page can be used for both SEO and PPC purposes, so why would we need to create a PPC landing page? 

From a marketing standpoint, PPC pages attract customers from ads. Thus, the content on the page should align with the ads’ messaging. This means that the most prominent text on the page can be the same as the messaging used in the PPC ad.

So, for example, if your PPC ad says something like, “We’re the best in the Canadian market,” your H1 can be the exact same text. Some PPC managers even use the ad title as the H1 and the ad description as the H2 to improve the CRO of their ads. 

Another issue with PPC landing pages is that they are built to eliminate distractions. They are focused on getting the user that clicked on the ad to convert. In SEO, the content serves both the users and a search algorithm that decides whether this page brings the best value to the user.

How to handle PPC pages from an SEO standpoint

You can do any of the following tactics to deal with PPC landing pages on your website before they are created.

1. Mark your PPC landing pages as noindex

This is the simplest solution and the noindex tag will not impact the PPC campaign performance.

2. Create your PPC landing pages on a subdomain

Creating PPC landing pages on a subdomain:

• Does not require cross-domain tracking.
• Keeps your website organized. 
• Will not impact the organic performance of your main domain as Google treats subdomains as a separate domain. 

This solution may not be 100% reliable. Google’s Danny Sullivan answered a question on whether the helpful content update considers subdomains as part of the main domains saying, “We tend to see subdomains apart from root domains but it can also depend on many factors.”

3. Do both

Given all of this information, you may want to do both if you are handling PPC pages before they are created. In short, create the PPC pages on a subdomain and mark them as noindex.

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What if PPC landing pages already exist?

The solution can be a bit more complicated if you just started working on a website and found that PPC landing pages already exist.

First, you’ll need to look into the performance data of those pages in Google Search Console and evaluate the impressions and clicks those pages are getting from search.

If the PPC landing page is not performing well

If the page is not performing well in search and there’s an alternative SEO page alternative for it, then you can just mark it as noindex and move it to a subdomain. 

You can try canonicalizing the PPC page instead of using the noindex tag on its alternative ​​SEO page. However, this may not help resolve duplication or cannibalization issues, as Google can ignore the canonical tag and choose to index both pages.

That said, because this solution requires the least effort, you may want to test it first and try implementing proper canonicals on a few PPC landing pages and see whether Google executes your canonicals.

If the PPC landing page is performing well and there’s no alternative SEO page

If the PPC page is performing well in search or has the potential of performing well in search if optimized (something that can be indicated by seeing that the page is getting plenty of impressions in GSC) and there’s no corresponding SEO page, you can copy the content of the PPC page to a new SEO page with an optimized URL path. 

Then you can redirect the existing PPC page to that newly created SEO page. Finally, you can re-create the PPC page on another URL and mark it as noindex, so the PPC campaign doesn’t get interrupted. 

Use this approach if you want to have two separate pages for PPC and SEO and want the URL to be optimized, and the PPC page will have fewer content optimizations. 

Note: If the PPC page URL is good, and you are allowed to optimize the PPC page for SEO, then definitely go with this much simpler approach.

If the PPC landing page is performing well and there is an alternative SEO page

If the PPC page is performing well and attracting some clicks from search and there’s an SEO alternative for it, you can simply redirect the PPC page to the SEO page, create a new PPC page on a different URL and mark it as noindex.

Here’s an infographic summarizing the SEO process for handling PPC landing pages.

What to consider before making changes

There’s a line between ideal SEO recommendations and what you can actually execute in real life.

It won’t always be feasible to noindex every PPC page and move it to a subdomain. We need to consider the following:

• The number of pages: Does the issue occur on 2-3 pages or hundreds of pages? If you’re only dealing with a few pages, you should be easily able to implement “noindex then move to subdomain” approach.
• The backend: Does the client have the resources to create and move pages to a subdomain? If that’s not the case, you can skip this part and stick to the noindex.
• Impact/effort: It takes resources to create new pages and redirect existing PPC pages. Is it worth the effort? Does the impact of handling the existence of PPC pages vs. just doing minimal SEO tweaks for the PPC page justify the expected outcome? 

The approach in practice

For one client, a small ecommerce business, I decided to do minimal SEO tweaks to their existing PPC pages and let them be. I optimized the title tag, didn’t change the H1, changed H2s where applicable, and added keywords when needed.

I decided to use this approach because:

• The client’s website was small. The effort will not justify the impact with only a few PPC pages.
• The existing PPC pages were not jeopardizing or cannibalizing any important pages on the website.

Before rushing to execute SEO recommendations for handling PPC pages, evaluate the situation first. Look at the data and the expected outcome/impact before deciding.

The post How to handle PPC landing pages for SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

4 smarter ways to measure SEO effectiveness

Written on September 20, 2022 at 2:50 pm, by admin

I find myself answering a lot of the same questions from new clients about ways to measure SEO. My answers generally fall into one of two categories:

• Why basic/boilerplate SEO metrics aren’t good KPIs and how to make them better.
• Which (more advanced) metrics we should establish to determine actual business impact.

This article will tackle the first category and show how to apply an advanced approach to make basic SEO KPIs far more effective indicators of success. The KPIs I’ll discuss include:

• Traffic (visits)
• Ranking
• Conversions
• Links

Let’s get started.

1. Traffic

Measuring SEO traffic week over week is as basic as it gets – and it’s missing nuances that can become clear with a couple of adjustments.

First, use Search Console to split traffic into brand and non-brand buckets.

There’s a simple reason for this: brand traffic is generally not a function of SEO. Instead, it’s influenced by awareness campaigns, including billboards, CTV (or linear TV) ads, programmatic campaigns, PR, and more. Brand search, in short, is a function of your overall marketing portfolio.

Non-brand search is where SEOs can shine, especially when you identify keywords at the most important stages of your funnel and prioritize them by potential impact. This often functions as the level of intent.

Educational keywords (e.g., “SEO best practices”) equate more or less to the top of the funnel and more transactional keywords (e.g., “best SEO agency for B2B”) align with the bottom of the funnel. 

Second, remember that seasonality impacts SEO as any other channel.

For this reason, it’s crucial to set up month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year windows. I prefer QoQ and YoY over shorter comparisons.

Big SEO shifts, whether forced by an algorithm change or internally directed, require longer measurement cycles to prove real change.

2. Ranking

Relying on moment-in-time screenshots of your current keyword rankings will get you a limited idea of your overall campaign success.

Instead, consider these factors:

• How are your target keywords ranking over time (MoM, QoQ, YoY)?
• How are individual pages ranking?
• Are you achieving actual milestones?
• What are your trends?

Evaluating rankings over time will show you progress across possible calendar events and seasonal shifts. 

Instead of looking at a blended portfolio affecting a keyword, which offers less actionable insight, look at individual pages using Google Search Console. This allows you to isolate which specific properties are impacting rankings for a single keyword.

On the topic of milestones, not all ranking changes are created equal. You can move up 50 spots from 61 to 11, but that may have less impact than moving up a single notch from the top spot on page 2 of the SERPs to the last spot on page 1. 

Last, dig deeper to see the actual deltas of impressions and clicks that any rankings changes are driving. This also incorporates external trends. For instance, consider that you could have seen huge increases in impressions and clicks for “video conferencing software” in March 2020 without a change in your ranking for that keyword. 

The more activity around the keyword, the more competitive it will get – and the more potential impact it has on your portfolio.

3. Conversions

The 1.0 way to measure acquisition is to aggregate last-click conversions from organic search. Incorporating GA4, which uses a cross-channel, data-driven model with a 30-day lookback window for acquisition, will give you a more nuanced view of attributed credit for conversions. 

We could add many more layers here, including measuring the effects of SEO on other channels’ acquisition costs. 

For this post, which is meant to help you derive more meaning from relatively basic KPIs, let’s talk about building different conversion events aligned with the level of intent of the keywords you’re targeting (e.g., “download the guide” for educational keywords or “book a demo” for transactional ones). 

Your report might look like this:

Different conversion events, when used strategically with back-end CRM data, will have different values.

When you use a variety of conversion events that align strategically with your keywords, you should see an increase in conversion rate and get a more accurate picture of the value those keywords are driving.

4. Links

Links are important. They’re still a ranking factor, and they can help measure the impact of your content.

That said, link quantity is a shallow metric. Links are simply a means to an end.

SEO’s overall purpose is to drive meaningful traffic and acquisition. Focusing on downstream KPIs without rolling them up to business impact (which is admittedly more complex) will do little to move the needle in important ways. 

If you focus on counting links, you’re incentivizing yourself to chase more links. The incentive should be actual impact.

Counting will give you a quantity bias and will shift the way you run your SEO program. If you focus on business drivers, you’ll be incentivized to deliver value, not volume. 

Volume is easy. Value is harder.

Prove the value of SEO with better metrics

For the most part, these are fairly easy adjustments to make, and they’ll help you paint a much clearer picture of the value you’re driving with your SEO program and how that’s trending over time.

In my next post, I’ll show how to take measurement to the next level by helping you understand how SEO is affecting your overall marketing efforts in relation to other channels. 

The post 4 smarter ways to measure SEO effectiveness appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

11 tips for using social to become an authority in your niche

Written on September 19, 2022 at 11:40 am, by admin

It’s no secret that Google’s helpful content update has caused quite a stir in the SEO community.

While Google’s emphasis on “people-first” content may have come as a surprise to many content creators, users (and many SEO professionals) have been craving this change since the gain in popularity of the pre-recipe life stories that trended on food blogs for many years. 

Here are some tips on using the helpful content update as a guide in making your social media channels an authority in your local niche.

Creating authoritative ‘people-first’ social media content 

How do we create great content that serves users and ranks well as an authority in the SERPs?

One way to assist your website in solidifying your reputation is to make your brand a helpful authority in your online communities. Social media supports and promotes your website content and reinforces your position as a community authority within your niche.

I care about Google – why are we talking about social?

In case you haven’t noticed, social media sites rank well in the SERPs. Additionally, Google not only pulls review content from social but can see all of your content on your brand pages, in public groups and on other brand pages. 

So while your social media profiles may not be a direct ranking factor, your presence and activity on social can affect Google’s interpretation of your brand’s authority and helpfulness on social media.

Here are 11 ways to use social media to become an authority in your niche.

1. Stay relevant

If you are sharing news, best practices, or industry-specific information, ensure it is relevant and up to date. Don’t share old advice and expect your followers to swoon.

Stay on top of current trends – both within your industry and social media in general. The more relevant your content is to your audience’s everyday lives, the more likely they are to like, engage, and share that content. Regular engagement expands your reach and your authority.

2. Keep it interesting

Alongside relevance, you want your content to be interesting. Sharing the same tip or news article that thousands of other pages share will not favor you. How can you put a unique spin on your content to push it to the top of the heap? 

Adding unique commentary or analysis to already popular ideas or articles and niche-specific information will attract the interest of your audience. Doing this regularly will also earn their loyalty, making you their chosen authority within their niche.

3. Engage, engage, engage!

Engagement is a two-way street. Many business owners contact us with requests for help with their social profiles. Their biggest complaint? Low engagement and stalled audience growth. 

Often, it’s because they are pushing out information to their audiences without ever going back to host the conversation they’ve started on their post. 

Respond to comments, reviews, recommendations, and even questions or comments within groups relevant to your community or brand. This will subconsciously create trust with your audience, further helping build that brand authority. 

Two-way engagement (or conversation, as some of us like to call it) shows your audience that you care about what they have to say and that your brand has actual humans behind it who want to get to know them. This makes them want to get to know you as well. 

Increased effort into engagement and relationship building also makes them more likely to trust your brand with their families, friends, and community members through referrals and recommendations.

4. Solve their problems

Do your users have a question? Even if it has nothing to do with your brand, be the one to answer it! Be helpful, whether this is on your brand page, a community group or a conversation thread. 

They will remember you going above and beyond to help them out when you had nothing to gain from the interaction and will choose or recommend you when it is time to spend money on what you have to offer. 

Know complimentary companies that can further help them after your job is done. If you’re a landscaper, make sure you’ve got great recommendations for concrete, decks, and exterior painting companies.

Want to take it to the next level? Be ready to recommend your favorite taco shop, give them helpful tips on the perfect weekend getaway, or tell them about your favorite pediatrician in town when they ask in local community groups or on other pages. 

Helping people when you won’t directly profit from the interaction increases your trustworthiness and makes you more memorable.

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5. Make it about them

Being helpful and authoritative involves going above and beyond when engaging with social media communities and users. How can you better serve them? 

While they may not care so much that your carpet cleaning business just spent a small fortune on a new van, they probably do care that you now have equipment that is 30% more efficient, doing a better job cleaning their carpets while using fewer chemicals where their family eats, sleeps and lives. 

Your restaurant customers may not care much about your new logo design, but they will be happier to celebrate it with you when you’re handing them a new t-shirt with that logo. 

Small touches can go a long way with your social media audience. Make it about them, and they will reward you with their time.

6. Share content they want to see

Social media is not about pushing promotional content at people until they give you their money. The helpful content update understands the value and importance of giving people what they want, not what you want to sell them. Social media communities are similar. 

Give audiences what they want, not what you want. What does this mean? 

Scale back on promotional posts and increase the amount of valuable, helpful information you share with them. Try not to link to your website or sales content more than once every three to five posts. 

What do you share in between? That depends on your brand, but some things community members tend to engage with include helpful tips and tutorials, user-generated content, and feel-good content. This will show your users that you’re interested in them and what they want, not just using them for their wallets.

7. UGC shows that you care

A great way to increase engagement in a local community online is to share user-generated content (or UGC). Share photos from a community event and encourage people to tag their friends or share the post. People love seeing themselves and the people they know, creating a subconscious connection to your brand. 

Local customers don’t want stock images or photos of models in your local business. Show them that you know the same community. Encourage them to tag friends they see in photos or share the photo of their child in your shop with friends and family. 

UGC is an inexpensive way to promote your brand while showing that you are an active part of your community. You’re not some shareholder living 2,000 miles away. You live, work, shop, and play in the same places they do. 

This makes you relatable and more human, even if they don’t know you personally. In turn, local customers feel like they know you and are faster to trust you with their recommendations and dollars.

8. Know the micro-influencers

In most local communities, a local influencer will do more for your local brand than an endorsement from a Kardashian. Whether that is a local player from your state’s favorite professional sports team or a local blogger who always has the scoop on where to be and what to do around town. 

They trust the recommendations from people who live, eat, shop and engage with the local community more than they will take your word for it or even those of a famous mega-celebrity with no connection to them. 

How can you use micro-influencers to help increase your authority? 

• Invite the local mayor into your restaurant for a meal.
• Host a meetup at the park with a local moms’ group.
• Provide items from your boutique to people you see promoting local brands in the larger Facebook groups or on Instagram. 

Be sure to provide fantastic service without asking anything in return. If you turn them into raving fans, they’ll bring you a ton of business.

9. Stop focusing on ‘the algorithm’

I cannot count how often I see people posting promotional content and saying something like “adding a photo for the algorithm” or “posting about this for the algorithm.”

This is not how it works, people. 

Create great content that benefits your audience, not your brand or what you think feeds “the algorithm.” 

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and all other social platforms want users on the platforms. Do you know what keeps users on the platforms? 

Engagement. 

Conversations, entertainment, shopping, and helpful information encourage them to spend time interacting with others on social media. 

Give them what they want, and they will stick around. If they stick around, the platforms will reward you by showing your content to a larger audience. 

You will become a local authority to these audiences, and your brand will grow. This will increase your brand awareness and profit over time. 

10. Be helpful

Many brands are always looking for that quick fix or secret trick on social media platforms that will propel their business forward and make them the popular choice in their local community. Guess what? There’s none. 

Stop trying to game the system and focus on providing helpful, relevant information to your audience. Be authentic and help by providing the information they need. Brands spend resources going viral or growing their followers that they forget to provide value. 

Do something for your audience. Give them a reason to pay attention to what you have to say.  

11. Have some fun

Seriously! Users can see when you’re just cranking out content to feed “the algorithm.” Stop doing this. (And while we’re at it, can we please stop with the whole “the algorithm” thing? Please?) 

Share content that you enjoy creating. This will carry through in your messaging, and your fans and followers will enjoy it more.

It’s also OK to poke fun at your brand or industry. Many business owners fear their industry is too boring or technical for social media. Give your audience a chance; they may surprise you. 

While plumbers and insurance agents may not have the most exciting topics, they can provide incredibly helpful content to their local communities. They can also share some relatable, entertaining information. Who hasn’t had to call a plumber in the middle of the night or take on an insurance claim? 

Align with your audience and show them how you can make these stressful situations less awful. Sure, it may not be as fun as selling snarky T-shirts or cute photo sessions on social media, but you’re meeting your audience where they already are, and what is more helpful than that?

From Google to social to real life

While the helpful content update has created a stir, providing helpful, useful and relevant information to your audience has always been – and will continue to be – incredibly important. 

This is not just about rankings and charts. It’s about providing valuable information to real people in your community.

The post 11 tips for using social to become an authority in your niche appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

11 tips for using social to become an authority in your niche

Written on September 19, 2022 at 11:40 am, by admin

It’s no secret that Google’s helpful content update has caused quite a stir in the SEO community.

While Google’s emphasis on “people-first” content may have come as a surprise to many content creators, users (and many SEO professionals) have been craving this change since the gain in popularity of the pre-recipe life stories that trended on food blogs for many years. 

Here are some tips on using the helpful content update as a guide in making your social media channels an authority in your local niche.

Creating authoritative ‘people-first’ social media content 

How do we create great content that serves users and ranks well as an authority in the SERPs?

One way to assist your website in solidifying your reputation is to make your brand a helpful authority in your online communities. Social media supports and promotes your website content and reinforces your position as a community authority within your niche.

I care about Google – why are we talking about social?

In case you haven’t noticed, social media sites rank well in the SERPs. Additionally, Google not only pulls review content from social but can see all of your content on your brand pages, in public groups and on other brand pages. 

So while your social media profiles may not be a direct ranking factor, your presence and activity on social can affect Google’s interpretation of your brand’s authority and helpfulness on social media.

Here are 11 ways to use social media to become an authority in your niche.

1. Stay relevant

If you are sharing news, best practices, or industry-specific information, ensure it is relevant and up to date. Don’t share old advice and expect your followers to swoon.

Stay on top of current trends – both within your industry and social media in general. The more relevant your content is to your audience’s everyday lives, the more likely they are to like, engage, and share that content. Regular engagement expands your reach and your authority.

2. Keep it interesting

Alongside relevance, you want your content to be interesting. Sharing the same tip or news article that thousands of other pages share will not favor you. How can you put a unique spin on your content to push it to the top of the heap? 

Adding unique commentary or analysis to already popular ideas or articles and niche-specific information will attract the interest of your audience. Doing this regularly will also earn their loyalty, making you their chosen authority within their niche.

3. Engage, engage, engage!

Engagement is a two-way street. Many business owners contact us with requests for help with their social profiles. Their biggest complaint? Low engagement and stalled audience growth. 

Often, it’s because they are pushing out information to their audiences without ever going back to host the conversation they’ve started on their post. 

Respond to comments, reviews, recommendations, and even questions or comments within groups relevant to your community or brand. This will subconsciously create trust with your audience, further helping build that brand authority. 

Two-way engagement (or conversation, as some of us like to call it) shows your audience that you care about what they have to say and that your brand has actual humans behind it who want to get to know them. This makes them want to get to know you as well. 

Increased effort into engagement and relationship building also makes them more likely to trust your brand with their families, friends, and community members through referrals and recommendations.

4. Solve their problems

Do your users have a question? Even if it has nothing to do with your brand, be the one to answer it! Be helpful, whether this is on your brand page, a community group or a conversation thread. 

They will remember you going above and beyond to help them out when you had nothing to gain from the interaction and will choose or recommend you when it is time to spend money on what you have to offer. 

Know complimentary companies that can further help them after your job is done. If you’re a landscaper, make sure you’ve got great recommendations for concrete, decks, and exterior painting companies.

Want to take it to the next level? Be ready to recommend your favorite taco shop, give them helpful tips on the perfect weekend getaway, or tell them about your favorite pediatrician in town when they ask in local community groups or on other pages. 

Helping people when you won’t directly profit from the interaction increases your trustworthiness and makes you more memorable.

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5. Make it about them

Being helpful and authoritative involves going above and beyond when engaging with social media communities and users. How can you better serve them? 

While they may not care so much that your carpet cleaning business just spent a small fortune on a new van, they probably do care that you now have equipment that is 30% more efficient, doing a better job cleaning their carpets while using fewer chemicals where their family eats, sleeps and lives. 

Your restaurant customers may not care much about your new logo design, but they will be happier to celebrate it with you when you’re handing them a new t-shirt with that logo. 

Small touches can go a long way with your social media audience. Make it about them, and they will reward you with their time.

6. Share content they want to see

Social media is not about pushing promotional content at people until they give you their money. The helpful content update understands the value and importance of giving people what they want, not what you want to sell them. Social media communities are similar. 

Give audiences what they want, not what you want. What does this mean? 

Scale back on promotional posts and increase the amount of valuable, helpful information you share with them. Try not to link to your website or sales content more than once every three to five posts. 

What do you share in between? That depends on your brand, but some things community members tend to engage with include helpful tips and tutorials, user-generated content, and feel-good content. This will show your users that you’re interested in them and what they want, not just using them for their wallets.

7. UGC shows that you care

A great way to increase engagement in a local community online is to share user-generated content (or UGC). Share photos from a community event and encourage people to tag their friends or share the post. People love seeing themselves and the people they know, creating a subconscious connection to your brand. 

Local customers don’t want stock images or photos of models in your local business. Show them that you know the same community. Encourage them to tag friends they see in photos or share the photo of their child in your shop with friends and family. 

UGC is an inexpensive way to promote your brand while showing that you are an active part of your community. You’re not some shareholder living 2,000 miles away. You live, work, shop, and play in the same places they do. 

This makes you relatable and more human, even if they don’t know you personally. In turn, local customers feel like they know you and are faster to trust you with their recommendations and dollars.

8. Know the micro-influencers

In most local communities, a local influencer will do more for your local brand than an endorsement from a Kardashian. Whether that is a local player from your state’s favorite professional sports team or a local blogger who always has the scoop on where to be and what to do around town. 

They trust the recommendations from people who live, eat, shop and engage with the local community more than they will take your word for it or even those of a famous mega-celebrity with no connection to them. 

How can you use micro-influencers to help increase your authority? 

• Invite the local mayor into your restaurant for a meal.
• Host a meetup at the park with a local moms’ group.
• Provide items from your boutique to people you see promoting local brands in the larger Facebook groups or on Instagram. 

Be sure to provide fantastic service without asking anything in return. If you turn them into raving fans, they’ll bring you a ton of business.

9. Stop focusing on ‘the algorithm’

I cannot count how often I see people posting promotional content and saying something like “adding a photo for the algorithm” or “posting about this for the algorithm.”

This is not how it works, people. 

Create great content that benefits your audience, not your brand or what you think feeds “the algorithm.” 

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and all other social platforms want users on the platforms. Do you know what keeps users on the platforms? 

Engagement. 

Conversations, entertainment, shopping, and helpful information encourage them to spend time interacting with others on social media. 

Give them what they want, and they will stick around. If they stick around, the platforms will reward you by showing your content to a larger audience. 

You will become a local authority to these audiences, and your brand will grow. This will increase your brand awareness and profit over time. 

10. Be helpful

Many brands are always looking for that quick fix or secret trick on social media platforms that will propel their business forward and make them the popular choice in their local community. Guess what? There’s none. 

Stop trying to game the system and focus on providing helpful, relevant information to your audience. Be authentic and help by providing the information they need. Brands spend resources going viral or growing their followers that they forget to provide value. 

Do something for your audience. Give them a reason to pay attention to what you have to say.  

11. Have some fun

Seriously! Users can see when you’re just cranking out content to feed “the algorithm.” Stop doing this. (And while we’re at it, can we please stop with the whole “the algorithm” thing? Please?) 

Share content that you enjoy creating. This will carry through in your messaging, and your fans and followers will enjoy it more.

It’s also OK to poke fun at your brand or industry. Many business owners fear their industry is too boring or technical for social media. Give your audience a chance; they may surprise you. 

While plumbers and insurance agents may not have the most exciting topics, they can provide incredibly helpful content to their local communities. They can also share some relatable, entertaining information. Who hasn’t had to call a plumber in the middle of the night or take on an insurance claim? 

Align with your audience and show them how you can make these stressful situations less awful. Sure, it may not be as fun as selling snarky T-shirts or cute photo sessions on social media, but you’re meeting your audience where they already are, and what is more helpful than that?

From Google to social to real life

While the helpful content update has created a stir, providing helpful, useful and relevant information to your audience has always been – and will continue to be – incredibly important. 

This is not just about rankings and charts. It’s about providing valuable information to real people in your community.

The post 11 tips for using social to become an authority in your niche appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Here’s how Google’s helpful content update is going to make AI better

Written on September 19, 2022 at 11:40 am, by admin

Almost as soon as word broke out about Google’s latest algorithm, an update that advocates for “original, helpful content,” the questions started flying: Is this targeting AI content tools? Does this mark the end of artificial intelligence in content creation?

At Jasper, an AI Content Platform, we heard quite a few of these. Some of the questions came from our users who rely on Jasper daily to help flesh out ideas, repackage their content into different formats, and generally break through writer’s block. Others came from the broad public or pundits who are trying to figure out AI’s place in the creative world. We say to each of them and you that Google’s Helpful Content Update is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the internet broadly, and it’s a good thing for the long-term evolution of AI in content creation.

Here’s why: no one wins when the internet is littered with junk content. Like the internet itself, AI is technology that can be used to make things better or to make things worse. Humans decide which path we take. We can use both the internet and AI to create some pretty mindless things. We can also use them to remove barriers in the way of our vast creative potential. Technology is an enabler. We need to choose how to use it. In every article we write and every link we share, we need to ask ourselves: Is this piece of content adding value, or is it just filling space?

Having incentives like better distribution for higher quality content will help raise the bar for better use of generative AI. The use of AI as a tool in creative fields is still in its early days. These are the moments in which we can come together to form the standards we want to see. Standards will evolve and improve over time, and with them, we’ll see new examples of how AI can unlock creative potential. 

How to use AI to create high-quality, original content

Dave Rogenmoser, CEO and co-founder of Jasper, put it nicely in a Jasper user group the other day. Addressing questions about AI and the new Google update, he wrote, “If your AI-written content is low quality and doesn’t help readers, it’ll get dinged. If your HUMAN written content is low quality and doesn’t help readers, it’ll get dinged. How do you make sure you’re safe? Know your intended reader deeply. Write content that solves their needs and answers their questions.”

Google has long asked content creators to stop writing content for search engines and start writing it for people. But the pressure to rank in business writing is ever-present, and despite Google’s own advice, creators are still trying to crack some Konami Code of SEO in how they write and structure content. I’ve been writing professionally for decades now and have seen every variation: specific word-length targets, hyper-frequency in publishing cadence. You name it. When you take those fictional hoops and add in tight deadlines and resource shortages, you’ll likely see even the highest skilled and best-intentioned writers make bad choices.

There are already great articles about how to ground your writing in good practice for Google’s latest update. Google’s guidelines are fairly clear here. Stay away from writing about topics that fall outside of your site’s core expertise just because you think they’re traffic magnets. Don’t create bandwagon content that just repeats what has already been said. Don’t write shallow summary content that never delivers on its promise. Don’t chase arbitrary word counts. These are pretty core to good writing regardless. Now, there’s also the matter of AI-generated content. Google mentions that creators shouldn’t use “extensive automation to produce content on many topics.”  That is open to some interpretation, so let’s go a step deeper into what we think constitutes good use of AI in content creation. 

AI should be your partner, not your replacement

Could you write an entire article using AI commands without a single original thought? Probably. Would the resulting content be shallow and a waste of everyone’s time? Most definitely. AI tools like those within Jasper’s Content Platform are built to help people convey their ideas. But you have to have original ideas for that partnership to work. AI works best when it helps you through common barriers writers face: suggesting a transition paragraph, for example, or rephrasing a line you can’t seem to get right. Every week writers and content creators lose precious time stuck in their own work. Think about how many books have gone unwritten and how many ideas are left to wither away in a digital doc somewhere because their originators got stuck and walked away. This is where AI shines.

Google’s new update says that articles with “extensive automation” are likely unhelpful, and we agree. If you’re looking back at your content and AI has written most of it, you probably haven’t used AI well. There is no specific line denoting what an acceptable volume of AI-assisted sentences is in a given article, but this is where good human judgment comes in. Similarly, don’t take every AI-recommended line as is. If you’re blocked, pull up some suggestions, then either keep them or modify them to work. The point is not to let writer’s block stop you from communicating an idea or educating people on a topic in a way you’re uniquely qualified to do.

Don’t rely on AI for your research

I used to teach a writing course at Boston University. One of the most common errors I saw in papers was when a student would cite Wikipedia or Google as the source of a particular reference rather than the original study. I still see this behavior all the time in business writing today. Content marketers will cite Statistica or another blog rather than the original source. In pulling stats, they’ll write first and add evidence later rather than starting with research. This results in cherry-picked stats that are often outdated or from a misused sample set.

 Similarly, AI content assistants – at least as they stand today – are not meant to conduct research for you. They are meant to help you package what you’ve learned from your research into a well-written article, email, or post. The good news is the time you save using AI tools to write your content can be put toward more in-depth research to strengthen the substance of the content. Research or first-hand experience is what turns a shallow, summary piece into an article of substance.

Leave the content farm for the editorial table

Google has struggled to shake the perception that more content is the most reliable route to more traffic. Their team has been clear in update after update that quality, intent, structure and authority matter much more than volume. And yet, companies still churn out content like it’s a race to cover every last keyword. For the “more content” brigade, AI has an obvious allure. It helps you move through content creation more efficiently, so it’s not a hard leap to assume this means you can and should exponentially grow your content output. 

But content farms are bad for consumers and writers alike. And as a result, they’re pretty damaging to the reliability of search engines and the future of AI too. There’s no doubt about it. You will get your writing done faster with AI, but we can’t lose the plot here. The benefit of becoming more efficient in your writing is not that you can suddenly churn out twice as much content. On the contrary, the benefit of becoming more efficient is having twice as much space in your day and mind to pursue and develop original ideas. If you use it right, AI should unlock creative potential, getting content creators off the content hamster wheel and onto a more strategic and editorial track. Google’s Helpful Content roll-out was completed on September 9, 2022, and while we’re still waiting to see how it will manifest in rankings, the intent here is one we support. We all want an internet with better quality content and writers who are incentivized and enabled to create their best.

The post Here’s how Google’s helpful content update is going to make AI better appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Here’s how Google’s helpful content update is going to make AI better

Written on September 19, 2022 at 11:40 am, by admin

Almost as soon as word broke out about Google’s latest algorithm, an update that advocates for “original, helpful content,” the questions started flying: Is this targeting AI content tools? Does this mark the end of artificial intelligence in content creation?

At Jasper, an AI Content Platform, we heard quite a few of these. Some of the questions came from our users who rely on Jasper daily to help flesh out ideas, repackage their content into different formats, and generally break through writer’s block. Others came from the broad public or pundits who are trying to figure out AI’s place in the creative world. We say to each of them and you that Google’s Helpful Content Update is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the internet broadly, and it’s a good thing for the long-term evolution of AI in content creation.

Here’s why: no one wins when the internet is littered with junk content. Like the internet itself, AI is technology that can be used to make things better or to make things worse. Humans decide which path we take. We can use both the internet and AI to create some pretty mindless things. We can also use them to remove barriers in the way of our vast creative potential. Technology is an enabler. We need to choose how to use it. In every article we write and every link we share, we need to ask ourselves: Is this piece of content adding value, or is it just filling space?

Having incentives like better distribution for higher quality content will help raise the bar for better use of generative AI. The use of AI as a tool in creative fields is still in its early days. These are the moments in which we can come together to form the standards we want to see. Standards will evolve and improve over time, and with them, we’ll see new examples of how AI can unlock creative potential. 

How to use AI to create high-quality, original content

Dave Rogenmoser, CEO and co-founder of Jasper, put it nicely in a Jasper user group the other day. Addressing questions about AI and the new Google update, he wrote, “If your AI-written content is low quality and doesn’t help readers, it’ll get dinged. If your HUMAN written content is low quality and doesn’t help readers, it’ll get dinged. How do you make sure you’re safe? Know your intended reader deeply. Write content that solves their needs and answers their questions.”

Google has long asked content creators to stop writing content for search engines and start writing it for people. But the pressure to rank in business writing is ever-present, and despite Google’s own advice, creators are still trying to crack some Konami Code of SEO in how they write and structure content. I’ve been writing professionally for decades now and have seen every variation: specific word-length targets, hyper-frequency in publishing cadence. You name it. When you take those fictional hoops and add in tight deadlines and resource shortages, you’ll likely see even the highest skilled and best-intentioned writers make bad choices.

There are already great articles about how to ground your writing in good practice for Google’s latest update. Google’s guidelines are fairly clear here. Stay away from writing about topics that fall outside of your site’s core expertise just because you think they’re traffic magnets. Don’t create bandwagon content that just repeats what has already been said. Don’t write shallow summary content that never delivers on its promise. Don’t chase arbitrary word counts. These are pretty core to good writing regardless. Now, there’s also the matter of AI-generated content. Google mentions that creators shouldn’t use “extensive automation to produce content on many topics.”  That is open to some interpretation, so let’s go a step deeper into what we think constitutes good use of AI in content creation. 

AI should be your partner, not your replacement

Could you write an entire article using AI commands without a single original thought? Probably. Would the resulting content be shallow and a waste of everyone’s time? Most definitely. AI tools like those within Jasper’s Content Platform are built to help people convey their ideas. But you have to have original ideas for that partnership to work. AI works best when it helps you through common barriers writers face: suggesting a transition paragraph, for example, or rephrasing a line you can’t seem to get right. Every week writers and content creators lose precious time stuck in their own work. Think about how many books have gone unwritten and how many ideas are left to wither away in a digital doc somewhere because their originators got stuck and walked away. This is where AI shines.

Google’s new update says that articles with “extensive automation” are likely unhelpful, and we agree. If you’re looking back at your content and AI has written most of it, you probably haven’t used AI well. There is no specific line denoting what an acceptable volume of AI-assisted sentences is in a given article, but this is where good human judgment comes in. Similarly, don’t take every AI-recommended line as is. If you’re blocked, pull up some suggestions, then either keep them or modify them to work. The point is not to let writer’s block stop you from communicating an idea or educating people on a topic in a way you’re uniquely qualified to do.

Don’t rely on AI for your research

I used to teach a writing course at Boston University. One of the most common errors I saw in papers was when a student would cite Wikipedia or Google as the source of a particular reference rather than the original study. I still see this behavior all the time in business writing today. Content marketers will cite Statistica or another blog rather than the original source. In pulling stats, they’ll write first and add evidence later rather than starting with research. This results in cherry-picked stats that are often outdated or from a misused sample set.

 Similarly, AI content assistants – at least as they stand today – are not meant to conduct research for you. They are meant to help you package what you’ve learned from your research into a well-written article, email, or post. The good news is the time you save using AI tools to write your content can be put toward more in-depth research to strengthen the substance of the content. Research or first-hand experience is what turns a shallow, summary piece into an article of substance.

Leave the content farm for the editorial table

Google has struggled to shake the perception that more content is the most reliable route to more traffic. Their team has been clear in update after update that quality, intent, structure and authority matter much more than volume. And yet, companies still churn out content like it’s a race to cover every last keyword. For the “more content” brigade, AI has an obvious allure. It helps you move through content creation more efficiently, so it’s not a hard leap to assume this means you can and should exponentially grow your content output. 

But content farms are bad for consumers and writers alike. And as a result, they’re pretty damaging to the reliability of search engines and the future of AI too. There’s no doubt about it. You will get your writing done faster with AI, but we can’t lose the plot here. The benefit of becoming more efficient in your writing is not that you can suddenly churn out twice as much content. On the contrary, the benefit of becoming more efficient is having twice as much space in your day and mind to pursue and develop original ideas. If you use it right, AI should unlock creative potential, getting content creators off the content hamster wheel and onto a more strategic and editorial track. Google’s Helpful Content roll-out was completed on September 9, 2022, and while we’re still waiting to see how it will manifest in rankings, the intent here is one we support. We all want an internet with better quality content and writers who are incentivized and enabled to create their best.

The post Here’s how Google’s helpful content update is going to make AI better appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

The by-no-means-definitive keyword size showdown: GSC vs. Ahrefs vs. Semrush vs. Moz

Written on September 19, 2022 at 11:40 am, by admin

When it comes to tools, we all have our favorites as SEO professionals. Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush aim to accomplish the same things at a high level, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an SEO professional who doesn’t have strong opinions on each tool’s ability to do so.

Any seasoned SEO practitioner knows opinions alone can get you roughly as far as asking Google’s John Mueller about domain authority (hint: not far). 

Our SEO team recently put our opinions to the test and biases to the side to compare the keyword size of Google Search Console (GSC), Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz for the clients we manage.

While you can read more in the Methodology and Caveats and considerations sections below, the nod to this data not being definitive in the title is that it isn’t. The data was only pulled for 51 domains, all of which live in the pharmaceutical space. So, it’s a small, non-representative sample. You’ve been warned. 

GSC had over 36% more keywords than the other sources combined 

A comparison of Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz for the average number of ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression among 51 domains in May 2022.

Patrick Stox from Ahrefs published a fantastic study about keywords hidden in Google Search Console. I encourage you to read it, but the gist is while the number varied greatly by site, almost half of the overall clicks were attributed to hidden terms.

Given that Google Search Console hides lower volume keywords, which make up the majority of search queries, this likely means significantly more than half of the keywords are obstructed to the end user.

But here’s the reality. GSC still might be the best we have when it comes to keyword visibility size.

Among the three, Ahrefs had the most keywords for 98% of websites

Relative keyword ranking size by domain

Source	1st	2nd	3rd
Ahrefs	50 domains	0 domains	1 domain
Semrush	0 domains	50 domains	1 domain
Moz	1 domain	1 domain	49 domains

A ranked order of Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz by keyword ranking size of 51 domains in May 2022

In many ways, it’s unfair to compare Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz to Google Search Console. GSC’s metrics and intended use contrast quite a bit from the other three tools.

So, when removing GSC, we ranked the keyword size for each of the 51 sites in our data warehouse. I’ll be honest; I was shocked at the consistency in the results.

Ahrefs nearly had a clean sweep of first-place finishes, with Semrush and Moz continually coming in second and third. 

On average, Ahrefs had twice the ranking keywords as Semrush, which had over twice as many as Moz. Ahrefs had nearly five times the amount of ranking keywords for our clients as Moz. That’s an incredible disparity!

You might be wondering, if Ahrefs has such a dominant lead on Semrush and Moz, why not just use Ahrefs?

As strong as Ahrefs was, it missed 87% of keywords

First chart: The total ranking keywords in Ahrefs compared to the total ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression found in Moz, Semrush and/or Google Search Console and not in Ahrefs for 51 domains in May 2022.

Second chart: The total ranking keywords in Ahrefs compared to the total ranking keywords found in Moz and/or Semrush and not in Ahrefs for 51 domains in May 2022.

First, the fact that Ahrefs is even able to be compared to the other sources stacked together is powerful. This is far from a knock on it. However, if all of our eggs were in the Ahrefs basket, we would be missing out on a consequential amount of keyword data.

Even if you remove Google Search Console, Ahrefs still didn’t contain 32% of keywords.

At the same time, not using Moz (our smallest source), leaves some blindspots.

When compared to Ahrefs and Semrush, 13% of keywords were exclusive to Moz

First chart: Total ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression exclusive to one source comparing Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush and Google Search Console for 51 domains in May 2022.

Second chart: Total ranking keywords exclusive to one source comparing Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush for 51 domains in May 2022.

When looking at the chart on the right, missing out on 13% of total keywords is hard to ignore. 

Moz’s exclusive numbers dropped drastically when GSC was added to the mix with under 2% of keywords. But as I’ve previously mentioned, these tools aren’t exactly equivalent in what they cover.

Semrush’s exclusivity percentage jumped to 24% when compared to Ahrefs and Moz, but it was also sitting at under 2% when GSC was included.

Let’s look at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead of exclusivity, where was there complete coverage? If we drew a random keyword out of a hat, how likely would it be found in each of the four sources we analyzed?

Fewer than 1% of keywords were found in all four sources

Number of ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression by represented source count among Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Moz and Ahrefs for 51 domains in May 2022.

A staggering amount of keywords in our dataset were only found in one source. Conversely, just a select few were represented in all four sources.

The keyword counts increased modestly from 0.4% to 2.6% when moving from four sources to three. Even two sources didn’t cover 10% of the total keywords. 

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Methodology

Data collection

• Google Search Console: Unfiltered, query-level search data was stored in our data warehouse via Google Search Console’s API each day from May 1 to May 31 for 51 client domains. Keywords were deduplicated by domain and aggregated into a monthly total.
• Semrush: One live API call via Semrush’s Domain Organic Search Keywords report was stored in our data warehouse in May for 51 client domains. The U.S. was the designated region.
• Moz: Organic search keyword rankings were manually exported from the front end of Moz’s Keyword Explorer using the default settings in May for 51 client domains.
• Ahrefs: Organic search keyword rankings were manually exported from the front end of Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer using the default settings in May for 51 client domains.

Processing and analysis

A query-source matrix was created in order to determine where there was overlap and exclusivity among Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Moz and Semrush per client domain and in aggregate.

Caveats and considerations

Data sample

I mentioned this in the introduction, but it’s worth repeating. Our analysis featured both a small and industry-specific sample of domain rankings. You should not draw any conclusions around overall relative keyword size comparisons of these tools.

So, why publish the results? As also touched on in the key takeaways section below, beyond the data being interesting and potentially sparking beneficial dialogue, I wanted to stress the value of analyzing these tools under the lens of your industry. 

Source availability

Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Moz and Semrush are not the only products with unique keyword visibility datasets. Serpstat, seoClarity, Brightedge’s Data Cube and other tools could have been part of this study to make it more comprehensive. If any reps from those tools are reading this, we would be interested in comparing your tool to the rest next time around. Hit me up!

Source comparability

With Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush, these were one-time data pulls within the month of May. However, with Google Search Console, 31 separate API calls were made. This may have inflated GSC’s numbers a bit.

Had we pulled rankings each day in May for the other tools, more unique keywords would have been added either from shifting domain rankings or keyword database updates. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it would have impacted any overarching trends or takeaways.

Additionally, Google Search Console data included mobile and desktop keywords from all countries, while we only included U.S. desktop rankings from the other sources. This again would inflate GSC’s numbers, but not likely to a degree that would change any of the trends in a meaningful way.

Keyword volume exclusion

Keyword volume was not included in this exercise, which limits its potential value. With all else being equal, I’d be more worried if Moz missed a 25,000 MSV keyword than a 25 MSV keyword.

The next time this analysis is run, we plan on incorporating volume. However, we’ll need to create logic around how to best include GSC impressions as an MSV proxy, as well as how to calculate the volume for keywords found in multiple tools.

Data freshness

Data freshness was not considered in this analysis. Due to the way its metrics work, Google Search Console is inherently fresh. In other words, if we pulled GSC data from May, those keywords were definitely visible in May (even if only for a moment).

However, it’s possible the other sources contained keywords without a refreshed rankings pull since before May. If any of these tools had disproportionately stale data, it could have altered the results.

Key takeaways

1. Challenge your assumptions 

Before revealing the results to my team, I asked them to rank the four sources in order of keyword coverage based on their own gut feeling. Around 10 people guessed, including me, but not one of us was correct!

Semrush was routinely ranked lower than we predicted, and GSC was not given nearly enough credit. However, with GSC, that’s more likely due to them being used to pulling the data from the front-end user interface.

We all can be guilty of trusting our gut feelings and hunches a little too much, and this goes far beyond SEO tools. As marketers, we should continually pressure test our positions and be willing to change our minds.

2. Use the GSC API

When pulling data directly from Google Search Console’s user interface, you are limited to 1,000 rows of data. If we had simply downloaded data from GSC with the date range of May 1 to May 31, this tool would no longer have been leading the pack (far from it).

Querying GSC from the API still has its limitations, but it increases the amount of available data by a considerable margin. 

3. Use all the tools

Admittedly, this takeaway is a bit of a contradiction coming from me. As stated in the section above, we don’t even use all of the tools, nor do we plan to. However, I have consistently advocated for not using just one SEO tool.

My actual advice is this: invest in one-month subscriptions and/or free trials to gauge the relative performance in your specific category. From there, you can choose the best tool(s) for you based on your particular verticals, budget and goals. Our pharmaceutical client ads often say, “Results may vary,” and the same is true with this. Take the extra time to see what’s best for you.

Also, when testing out tools for your specific industry and needs, don’t just look at keyword sizes. Size, accuracy, user experience, customer support, technology integrations and so much more can also be considered. 

4. Repeat and improve your tests

Our first official test is done, but we don’t plan on calling it quits. Semrush recently went public. Moz was acquired just over a year ago. Ahrefs launched a search engine.

This is an arms race, and if we don’t refresh these results periodically, we could be making decisions on outdated and inaccurate data.

The post The by-no-means-definitive keyword size showdown: GSC vs. Ahrefs vs. Semrush vs. Moz appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

The by-no-means-definitive keyword size showdown: GSC vs. Ahrefs vs. Semrush vs. Moz

Written on September 19, 2022 at 11:40 am, by admin

When it comes to tools, we all have our favorites as SEO professionals. Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush aim to accomplish the same things at a high level, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an SEO professional who doesn’t have strong opinions on each tool’s ability to do so.

Any seasoned SEO practitioner knows opinions alone can get you roughly as far as asking Google’s John Mueller about domain authority (hint: not far). 

Our SEO team recently put our opinions to the test and biases to the side to compare the keyword size of Google Search Console (GSC), Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz for the clients we manage.

While you can read more in the Methodology and Caveats and considerations sections below, the nod to this data not being definitive in the title is that it isn’t. The data was only pulled for 51 domains, all of which live in the pharmaceutical space. So, it’s a small, non-representative sample. You’ve been warned. 

GSC had over 36% more keywords than the other sources combined 

A comparison of Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz for the average number of ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression among 51 domains in May 2022.

Patrick Stox from Ahrefs published a fantastic study about keywords hidden in Google Search Console. I encourage you to read it, but the gist is while the number varied greatly by site, almost half of the overall clicks were attributed to hidden terms.

Given that Google Search Console hides lower volume keywords, which make up the majority of search queries, this likely means significantly more than half of the keywords are obstructed to the end user.

But here’s the reality. GSC still might be the best we have when it comes to keyword visibility size.

Among the three, Ahrefs had the most keywords for 98% of websites

Relative keyword ranking size by domain

Source	1st	2nd	3rd
Ahrefs	50 domains	0 domains	1 domain
Semrush	0 domains	50 domains	1 domain
Moz	1 domain	1 domain	49 domains

A ranked order of Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz by keyword ranking size of 51 domains in May 2022

In many ways, it’s unfair to compare Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz to Google Search Console. GSC’s metrics and intended use contrast quite a bit from the other three tools.

So, when removing GSC, we ranked the keyword size for each of the 51 sites in our data warehouse. I’ll be honest; I was shocked at the consistency in the results.

Ahrefs nearly had a clean sweep of first-place finishes, with Semrush and Moz continually coming in second and third. 

On average, Ahrefs had twice the ranking keywords as Semrush, which had over twice as many as Moz. Ahrefs had nearly five times the amount of ranking keywords for our clients as Moz. That’s an incredible disparity!

You might be wondering, if Ahrefs has such a dominant lead on Semrush and Moz, why not just use Ahrefs?

As strong as Ahrefs was, it missed 87% of keywords

First chart: The total ranking keywords in Ahrefs compared to the total ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression found in Moz, Semrush and/or Google Search Console and not in Ahrefs for 51 domains in May 2022.

Second chart: The total ranking keywords in Ahrefs compared to the total ranking keywords found in Moz and/or Semrush and not in Ahrefs for 51 domains in May 2022.

First, the fact that Ahrefs is even able to be compared to the other sources stacked together is powerful. This is far from a knock on it. However, if all of our eggs were in the Ahrefs basket, we would be missing out on a consequential amount of keyword data.

Even if you remove Google Search Console, Ahrefs still didn’t contain 32% of keywords.

At the same time, not using Moz (our smallest source), leaves some blindspots.

When compared to Ahrefs and Semrush, 13% of keywords were exclusive to Moz

First chart: Total ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression exclusive to one source comparing Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush and Google Search Console for 51 domains in May 2022.

Second chart: Total ranking keywords exclusive to one source comparing Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush for 51 domains in May 2022.

When looking at the chart on the right, missing out on 13% of total keywords is hard to ignore. 

Moz’s exclusive numbers dropped drastically when GSC was added to the mix with under 2% of keywords. But as I’ve previously mentioned, these tools aren’t exactly equivalent in what they cover.

Semrush’s exclusivity percentage jumped to 24% when compared to Ahrefs and Moz, but it was also sitting at under 2% when GSC was included.

Let’s look at the opposite end of the spectrum. Instead of exclusivity, where was there complete coverage? If we drew a random keyword out of a hat, how likely would it be found in each of the four sources we analyzed?

Fewer than 1% of keywords were found in all four sources

Number of ranking keywords or keywords registering at least one impression by represented source count among Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Moz and Ahrefs for 51 domains in May 2022.

A staggering amount of keywords in our dataset were only found in one source. Conversely, just a select few were represented in all four sources.

The keyword counts increased modestly from 0.4% to 2.6% when moving from four sources to three. Even two sources didn’t cover 10% of the total keywords. 

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Methodology

Data collection

• Google Search Console: Unfiltered, query-level search data was stored in our data warehouse via Google Search Console’s API each day from May 1 to May 31 for 51 client domains. Keywords were deduplicated by domain and aggregated into a monthly total.
• Semrush: One live API call via Semrush’s Domain Organic Search Keywords report was stored in our data warehouse in May for 51 client domains. The U.S. was the designated region.
• Moz: Organic search keyword rankings were manually exported from the front end of Moz’s Keyword Explorer using the default settings in May for 51 client domains.
• Ahrefs: Organic search keyword rankings were manually exported from the front end of Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer using the default settings in May for 51 client domains.

Processing and analysis

A query-source matrix was created in order to determine where there was overlap and exclusivity among Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Moz and Semrush per client domain and in aggregate.

Caveats and considerations

Data sample

I mentioned this in the introduction, but it’s worth repeating. Our analysis featured both a small and industry-specific sample of domain rankings. You should not draw any conclusions around overall relative keyword size comparisons of these tools.

So, why publish the results? As also touched on in the key takeaways section below, beyond the data being interesting and potentially sparking beneficial dialogue, I wanted to stress the value of analyzing these tools under the lens of your industry. 

Source availability

Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Moz and Semrush are not the only products with unique keyword visibility datasets. Serpstat, seoClarity, Brightedge’s Data Cube and other tools could have been part of this study to make it more comprehensive. If any reps from those tools are reading this, we would be interested in comparing your tool to the rest next time around. Hit me up!

Source comparability

With Ahrefs, Moz and Semrush, these were one-time data pulls within the month of May. However, with Google Search Console, 31 separate API calls were made. This may have inflated GSC’s numbers a bit.

Had we pulled rankings each day in May for the other tools, more unique keywords would have been added either from shifting domain rankings or keyword database updates. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it would have impacted any overarching trends or takeaways.

Additionally, Google Search Console data included mobile and desktop keywords from all countries, while we only included U.S. desktop rankings from the other sources. This again would inflate GSC’s numbers, but not likely to a degree that would change any of the trends in a meaningful way.

Keyword volume exclusion

Keyword volume was not included in this exercise, which limits its potential value. With all else being equal, I’d be more worried if Moz missed a 25,000 MSV keyword than a 25 MSV keyword.

The next time this analysis is run, we plan on incorporating volume. However, we’ll need to create logic around how to best include GSC impressions as an MSV proxy, as well as how to calculate the volume for keywords found in multiple tools.

Data freshness

Data freshness was not considered in this analysis. Due to the way its metrics work, Google Search Console is inherently fresh. In other words, if we pulled GSC data from May, those keywords were definitely visible in May (even if only for a moment).

However, it’s possible the other sources contained keywords without a refreshed rankings pull since before May. If any of these tools had disproportionately stale data, it could have altered the results.

Key takeaways

1. Challenge your assumptions 

Before revealing the results to my team, I asked them to rank the four sources in order of keyword coverage based on their own gut feeling. Around 10 people guessed, including me, but not one of us was correct!

Semrush was routinely ranked lower than we predicted, and GSC was not given nearly enough credit. However, with GSC, that’s more likely due to them being used to pulling the data from the front-end user interface.

We all can be guilty of trusting our gut feelings and hunches a little too much, and this goes far beyond SEO tools. As marketers, we should continually pressure test our positions and be willing to change our minds.

2. Use the GSC API

When pulling data directly from Google Search Console’s user interface, you are limited to 1,000 rows of data. If we had simply downloaded data from GSC with the date range of May 1 to May 31, this tool would no longer have been leading the pack (far from it).

Querying GSC from the API still has its limitations, but it increases the amount of available data by a considerable margin. 

3. Use all the tools

Admittedly, this takeaway is a bit of a contradiction coming from me. As stated in the section above, we don’t even use all of the tools, nor do we plan to. However, I have consistently advocated for not using just one SEO tool.

My actual advice is this: invest in one-month subscriptions and/or free trials to gauge the relative performance in your specific category. From there, you can choose the best tool(s) for you based on your particular verticals, budget and goals. Our pharmaceutical client ads often say, “Results may vary,” and the same is true with this. Take the extra time to see what’s best for you.

Also, when testing out tools for your specific industry and needs, don’t just look at keyword sizes. Size, accuracy, user experience, customer support, technology integrations and so much more can also be considered. 

4. Repeat and improve your tests

Our first official test is done, but we don’t plan on calling it quits. Semrush recently went public. Moz was acquired just over a year ago. Ahrefs launched a search engine.

This is an arms race, and if we don’t refresh these results periodically, we could be making decisions on outdated and inaccurate data.

The post The by-no-means-definitive keyword size showdown: GSC vs. Ahrefs vs. Semrush vs. Moz appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing