Benchmark Magazine - Issue 5 - Spring 2019 by ClickConsultLtd

SEARCH MARKETING MAGAZINE

L i nk ac q u i s i tio n Sow i n g t h e seed s o f S EO Data St u d i o

Expa nd yo ur b usi ne s sâ&#x20AC;¦ Spring 2019

A WORD FROM THE CEO Hello and welcome back to the Benchmark Search Magazine, a quarterly publication from the team here at Click Consult looking at search marketing and bringing you a mix of news, features and opinions from across the industry. This is the fifth issue of the magazine and the first of 2019. At the time of writing we are gearing up for the launch of our fifth Benchmark Search Conference. The event, which returns to Manchester, UK in September, will explore a variety of topics and push the boundaries of search marketing. We have a stellar lineup and the speakers that we are planning to welcome will make this our biggest and best conference to date. In this issue we have features and infographics on evolving your business, link acquisition, using Data Studio, PPC, content marketing and social media. I hope that you enjoy this issue and that you pick up on a few of the valuable insights our writers have provided. Until next timeâ&#x20AC;Ś.

Matt Bullas, CEO

This magazine represents progressive journalism and is a resource for all those in the industry. Our team of experts work hard to produce the content contained within, but weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to hear from you also. If you would like to feature in the next issue of the magazine, feel free to drop an email to:

Published By Click Consult Ltd

scott.rumsey@click.co.uk

Phone: 0845 322 5213

DESIGN Chloe Ridgway

Digital Design Executive

VLOG Chris Tucker, Jacob Booth, Dave Karellen

Address: Willow House Oaklands Office Park Hooton Cheshire, CH66 7NZ

Website: www.click.co.uk

CONTENTS

4 INDUSTRY NEWS

20 THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING CONTENT CALENDARS

A round up of everything search marketing, bringing you the most important updates of the last few months

Scott Rumsey looks at the importance of organising your content

THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL Adam McKinley covers all of the latest social media developments and stories of the last 12 weeks

LINK ACQUISITION, INFOGRAPHICS AND EYE TRACKING Understand this multipurpose

FROM OUR EXPERTS

INFOGRAPHIC

Mark McGonigle tells us how to sow the seeds of SEO and grow your business

Evolve your SEO strategy in 10 easy steps

ON.CLICK VLOG Hear what four of our experts think will be the biggest trends in 2019

36 CREATING REPORTS, USING FILTERS AND SEGMENTATION IN DATA STUDIO John Warner goes behind the numbers to create bespoke reports

43 OUR RESOURCES The chance to download two of our free resources. In this issue we showcase our ‘Data Series’ eBooks

44 GROWING YOUR BUSINESS WITH SEO Stefan Mustieles explores some of the tactics brands can use to propel their business

LINK ACQUISITION AND AHREFS

7 WAYS TO OPTIMISE YOUR GOOGLE ADS CAMPAIGN STRUCTURE

Chloie Brandrick looks at the best way to find link acquisition opportunities

Chloie Brandrick helps you to understand Google Ads structure and the importance of optimisation

INDUSTRY NEWS

INDUSTRY NEWS Keeping up to date with everything that the search marketing world throws up can be difficult, but as you know by now, here at Click Consult we are dedicated to keeping you informed and making the constant updates easily digestible. With that in mind let’s look at what the industry is talking about in this quarter in search…

CTRs on organic results on the decline Research from SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin and Jumpshot shows a drop in organic click through rate (CTR), on both desktop and mobile across the UK and US, with ads (PPC) and answers beginning to take some of their share (see tanles below). According to Fishkin, this is due to

“Google siphoning away large percentages of traffic to their own properties and answers in the SERPs.” The steeper decline on mobile could be because carousels, answer boxes, local packs and ads dominate mobile search results.

INDUSTRY NEWS Twitter testing ‘original tweet’ tag Twitter is taking a step to try and make it a little easier for you to identify the originator of a tweet thread, in the event that it isn’t obvious. The company is testing a new tag that appears under a tweeter’s name and leaves no doubt that person is the original tweeter. The tag appears to have been rolled out only to a small percentage of Twitter users.

Google experts to take over paid search campaigns Google has begun notifying some advertisers that it will take over management of their campaigns unless they opt out. Google’s email says Google Ads reps will start making changes to advertiser accounts if advertisers don’t opt out.:

“Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation. As part of this work, we’re exploring adding more context to discussions by highlighting relevant replies – like those from the original Tweeter,” Twitter’s director of Product Management Sara Haider told TechCrunch in a statement.

‘People Also Ask’ on the rise in SERPs A number one organic ranking in search results isn’t what it used to be according to Ryan Johnson from Search Engine Land, with featured snippets and ‘People Also Ask’ terms filling the top spots. In the past year, in addition to AdWords, increasing amounts of SERP space are being taken up by elements like knowledge panels, local packs and featured snippets. In fact, for non-branded search, the average CTR for the first position is now 19.3%. Speaking about the increase, Ryan said: “The answer box was Google’s most noticeable attempt to provide a definitive answer to queries. Unfortunately, this prime real estate was only limited to one answer. Google began to remedy this with the “People Also Ask” snippet (PAA), which allowed for variations in answers to the question and for searchers to see related queries. “In the past year, PAA has started dominating SERPs and had become almost ubiquitous by year’s end. This featured snippet became very prominent in July, 2018, when PAA started appearing in more than 40% of SERPs. When I last checked, according to MOZ, related questions/PAA are now appearing in 79% of SERPs.” Google said: “The old Search Console still has some features that are not yet available in the new one, we believe that the most common use cases are supported, in an improved way, in the new Search Console… When an equivalent feature exists in both old and new Search Console, our messages will point users to the new version.” The old reports are still available in the sidebar, but Google said, that after a reasonable period, this will be removed.

A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land,

“Our sales teams are always looking for ways to help customers get the best results from Google Ads. We are rolling out a pilot program that we believe will help businesses optimise their accounts. As always, we build customer feedback into the final product. Customers are in full control of the account and can accept or reject recommendations as they desire.”

Facebook tightens up on content quality

Here’s a screenshot:

Facebook has introduced a Page Quality tab “designed to help people who manage Pages understand how well their Pages comply with our guidelines… To start, we’re including content removed for policies like hate speech, graphic violence, harassment and bullying, and regulated goods, nudity or sexual activity, and support or praise of people and events that are not allowed to be on Facebook.” It includes two sections: 1. Content we recently removed for violating a subset of our Community Standards and; 2. Content recently rated “False,” “Mixture” or “False Headline” by third-party fact-checkers.

The platform also said it will be removing Pages and Groups that are connected to ones that are violating its standards.

INDUSTRY NEWS

Google fined €50 million for breach of GDPR Google slapped with a major fine by French over lack of transparency, incomplete information, and failure to properly obtain user consent as required by GDPR. In the first major enforcement of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), France’s National Data Protection Commission (CNIL). said it had levied the record fine for “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalisation”. The enforcement action stems from two complaints made by None of Your Business (NOYB) and La Quadrature du Net (LQDN) on the 25th and the 28th of May, 2018. These organisations accused Google of lacking the legal basis for collecting and processing user data in connection with their ad personalisation system.

Facebook gets interests data wrong 27% of the time Three quarters of US Facebook users say they didn’t know that the platform classifies and half say they aren’t happy about this. In addition, 27% of Facebook users say the platform’s classification of their interests is inaccurate. These statistics are based on a study from Pew Research Center, who asked a representative sample of users to reflect on the data that had been collected about them. The findings of this study are particularly relevant to Facebook marketers who target ads to users based on their interests.

This enforcement has already sent shockwaves through the internet as it has massive implications for companies reliance on Terms of Service Agreements for all sorts of data collection. Streaming giants including Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Spotify have been accused of breaking the EU’s data regulations.

GMB update Google has released an updated version of its ‘Google My Business’ (GMB) app to allow users to share the service-areas and information about their business via Maps and Search, increasing their chances to be discovered. Google will guide new users through the setup process with prompts for local service area businesses and existing GMB users will now be able to edit their business information from the app dashboard.

INDUSTRY NEWS

Amazon Sponsored Products ads now support dynamic bidding, bid adjustments Amazon has added more bid management features for Sponsored Products ads in its advertising interface. The updates take a page from the Google Ads interface, so paid search marketers will be familiar with both the automated bidding option and the page placement report Amazon has rolled out. Sponsored Products ads are targeted by keyword and can be used to promote sellers’ individual products. They can appear at the top of search results pages, and further down on the results pages as well as on related product pages.

DuckDuckGo map and address searches now powered by Apple Maps DuckDuckGo has announced it was adopting Apple’s MapKit JS framework for both desktop and mobile searches. All the features available in Apple Maps will now be available for local and map-based searches on DuckDuckGo. The company had been using OpenStreetMap (and MapBox) for local results. While Apple Maps and Google Maps are visually quite different, many users may not immediately notice the change from OpenStreetMap. DuckDuckGo said it it’s one of the first global companies using Apple MapKit JS. It also stressed that it doesn’t send any personally identifiable information to Apple or any other third parties in the process of delivering map results.

INDUSTRY NEWS

New Twitter interface Twitter is rolling out a new interface for web-users that comes with some shortcuts, an updated trending section and a newly-designed emoji button. “A new Twitter is coming. Some of you got an opt-in to try it now. Check out the emoji button, quick keyboard shortcuts, upgraded trends, advanced search and more,” the company tweeted early on Wednesday. With this update, Twitter has kept in mind little aesthetic updates to make it easier to see who all are involved in a conversation. “These changes, alongside the way Twitter’s desktop version has condensed from three columns into two, should make it easier to both read and send tweets,” The Verge reported.

Some of you got an opt-in to try it now. Check out the emoji button, quick keyboard shortcuts, upgraded trends, advanced search, and more. Let us know your thoughts!

READ NOW

Facebook expands branded content features To coincide with Facebook expanding it’s ‘Brand Collabs Manager’ to several new countries, the social network has updated its branded content feature. You’ll recognise this when brands or influencers are working together and promoting posts it will say “Paid”, well this will now read “Paid Partnership” and they’re adding a “About this Partnership” icon for users to gain more information on where it has come from, and information on the pages involved in the partnership.

THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL Have you tried Facebook’s 3D pictures? You might have seen a few brands or individuals testing this new feature out this month, and we feel it is very effective for markets, 3D pictures on your timeline. It’s not available to everyone at the moment, but if you are one of the lucky ones it’s been rolled out to, and you have a iPhone with dual cameras (anything after iPhone 7 will work), then you are able to create these. 3D photos draw from the depth map that is automatically created using the dual cameras and creates a 3D rendering that moves as the user scrolls and moves their mobile device whilst viewing it on Facebook. Some advice from Facebook… make sure the photo is about 3 feet away, think about the contrast and use texture such as straight edges. We can’t wait to see how brands and influencers will utilise this feature.

Major advancements to Periscope’s live streaming As you’ll know, the majority of live streams through Twitter are with third party app, Periscope, and they’ve released a whole load of new updates with their latest release. So what’s included? Well, they’re really focused on the stream replays part of their function, allowing for broadcasters to create more shareable assets once the stream has been completed. Broadcasters and social media managers alike can now edit the thumbnail to their creation, which can show off the best part of their stream. The thumbnail previously was aut-picked by Periscope, with no control over what is picked. There’s also now the option to edit titles afterwards, which is great for search marketing purposes (include those keywords!) and to avoid any spelling mistakes. Lastly, you can now set a custom start spot, so if the video is over an hour long, and you want to showcase a specific part when sharing, then you can pick a custom start spot for this. 10

The second update involves those pages and brands that have partnerships with other pages or influencers, but without payment. They are currently rolling out the option to tag another page in their post (as a partnership), which is only available for paid partnerships at the current moment.

Major updates to Instagram for businesses and users It seems like the majority of news around social media is Instagram focused this month, with the app announcing it’s cracking down on accounts with fake followers and likes. This has caused a mass panic to those who have bought their high follower base numbers. It’s good news for marketers though, as it means influencers with a large amount of followers are genuine and worth working with. This coincides with the app testing out new design features for users, allowing for extra contact buttons at the top of a profile, and a new position for bios and profile pictures. So what else has improved for businesses on Instagram? Well, following on from last month’s product stickers in Stories, they’ve now improved their shopping features further with the introduction of “shopping collection”, the ability to save items to purchase at a later date, and shopping in feed videos, which means you can now tag your videos with products in the same way, prompting people to click through to an external site to buy.

THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL

Introducing the new LinkedIn Pages

Chronological timelines for Twitter

It feels like every month we’re talking about new LinkedIn updates, and the site is really making changes to challenge some of the big hitters. At the moment we are talking about the new LinkedIn Pages, a function to the site to help build communities between employees, partners and customers.

Apart from the edit button (which we don’t think would be beneficial), Twitter users are crying out for their chronological timelines back, which is particularly important if you follow a lot of accounts that publish live updates of events, sport or news and you want it in the correct order.

What does it involve then? It’s based around community managers fostering daily interactions with their community. The admins are now able to post updates and respond to comments on the go with the mobile app, associate the page with hashtags and join conversations about the brand or relevant topics. It’s really a step in the right direction for LinkedIn, as we see it taking elements of other social channels to finally bring itself up to date.

The company tweeted saying it is testing a button to display tweets by post time, in a similar way to what Facebook allows you to do. It’s being tested and available to a small number of iOS users and all Twitter employees. Keep an eye out for this one!

THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL

Instagram adds even more functions to Stories It seems Instagram are really pushing their stories feature to become the main part of the app, with more and more users turning to stories as their main use for logging in, really taking the competition to Snapchat. Instagram’s latest stories update? Well, it seems they’ve improved on their feature on allowing users to share music through ‘stickers’, which already allowed users to add music from Facebook and Instagram’s library of songs, but now people are able to connect more than ever with by using the questions sticker for music recommendations in Stories. Whilst the music is playing, you can also turn on the camera to see effects that respond to beats and sounds in the music. This coincides with their other updates including a countdown sticker and the new ability to create question stickers in Instagram Live broadcasts, which makes it a lot more exciting and interactive to ask questions.

THIS QUARTER IN SOCIAL

LinkedIn has made it easier to find new content Back in December, whilst scheduling and researching content for our social media engagement clients here at Click Consult, we noticed a slight update on the LinkedIn channel, with the social network giving us the option to find content that might be relevant to our brand.

On initial look at the feature, it allows you to pick and choose from a variety of LinkedIn â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;industriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, with the ones most relatable to your business appearing first, and it allows you to filter by location and seniority of the author. Once these details have been added in, it then gives you a variety of articles that have been written on LinkedIn for you to decide which ones your audience might be interested in most. This is also great news for authors on LinkedIn, as your content is more likely to be seen and shared by pages on the channel.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

SOW THE SEEDS OF SEO IN 2019 - MARK MCGONIGLE There have been many features from SEO experts about developments for 2019 and what they expect Google to unleash on the SEO community and online businesses. Now let me be clear, these are valid points and views which I am not taking anything away from them as these experts have more industry experience than I have. What I am saying is that there are still a large amount of sites in 2019 that are not adhering to SEO basics and in some cases are just chasing the algorithmic updates (Algo chasers!).

N W

E S

Don’t start amending your site in order to chase the voice search market, which is predicted to become more popular in 2019, if the quality of your content isn’t currently serving your target market. You need to have a solid foundation to build upon and also look to future proof from any negative down turn from any future update – thus not majorly fearing any update. Time, and revenue, can be wasted fixing a site if the SEO foundation isn’t solid. In my opinion this is what Google’s updates during 2018 actually told the SEO community.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

So what did we learn in 2018 Quality matters as it is as simple as that. Google is a business at the end of the day and the products it is serving to its customers are your results. Yes, they make their money from paid, but the organic positions are just as important to Google and will look to serve the best results – well duh!!!! This is refelcted by all of the updates of last year, mobile, speed, quality of content, user focused content and quality of link authority. There was a large amount of talk in 2018 about on-page quality but very little around links, with an assumption that Penguin would mop up these issues. Well no, at the end of 2018 there were rafts of emails sent out from Google in relation to actions to be taken to their link profiles (none of Click’s clients I must add). I feel that this was Google’s way of saying: “look you’re all concentrating on content and speed but don’t forget about the quality of links which are passing authority through.”

Going back to basics? Google will look to again build up the quality of its SERPs in 2019, therefore you need to ensure that you have the right foundation. This will be a combination of on page technical, site structure, site content, meta descriptions and building good quality links through well thought out campaigns that has unique data and is shareable. So let’s start at the front door.

Those bots! If the bots from various search engines have difficulty in crawling your site then being able to rank for competitive key terms will be tough, so you need to ensure that these bots can easily roam through your site and gain a full understanding of the sites purpose. After all this is what you spent significant time on, over the last two years in creating good quality content. Using the robots. txt file correctly can help direct and assist the bots when crawling your site. There will be pages that you probably won’t want the bots to crawl and waste their crawl budget on, so look to disallow these – your basically giving the heads up to ignore these pages and to focus on the main category pages.

Most of the time this can be the search results or forum comments (should your site have one), so specifying a rule can help, such as Disallow: /search?/ Disallow: /forum-comment/ Just make sure that you don’t block important sections of your site that may hold valuable content which could get you ranking sky high.

Everyone needs a map The bots are no different. Providing an up-to-date XML sitemap, a blueprint of your site, will help guide the bots around and will assist indexing the pages. Now this all seems to be simple but we are still coming across sites which are missing these basic first steps, yes even in 2019, so it is important to get these right. Dynamic sitemaps should be standard especially on eCommerce sites as products come in and out of stock so quickly that a sitemap can quickly become out of date. If you are guiding the bots to an area which is out of stock via an out of date sitemap then the bots will soon catch on and this could then affect other parts of the site. Always remember to check the sitemap status in Google Search Console on a regular basis. Ensure that the bots don’t get lost or stuck. There are occasions where bots can get stuck around a specific file or folder on a site and can be the cause of a drop in performance rather. Undertaking Log File Analysis can help identify if the bots are struggling on the site and the remedial action can be as simple as removing an old .js or telling the bots to exclude the file in its crawl through the robots.txt.

Site structure So, yes, the bots will have sitemaps to get around but even with a map they can still get confused, as can users, so the structure of the site should flow in a natural and logical way. Having a site structure that naturally flows will add to your customer’s experience, the bot’s experience, and will ultimately assist with rankings. The menu and navigation will take time but this is outweighed by the performance that will come from a straight forward journey. Make sure logic is taken into consideration and different categories don’t include the same sub-categories as this is likely to confuse both bots and users.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

So, for example, if you have ‘Tents’ as a sub category but you have this under categories ‘Outdoor Living’ and ‘Camping’ with the same products and same content then what are the bots going to think when looking to return keywords around tents – it won’t and it will likely be confused on which the best result will be to return. User journey and mobile user journey are the key areas to focus on.

You are telling Google you are on top of the quality of links that are pointing to your site and that the authority earnt is correct and natural.

Page structure

And don’t get too hung up should this campaign only get ‘no-followed’ links as these are natural.

Meta titles, meta descriptions, keywords, content and use of H tags are some of the most basic elements of SEO. Whereas content, and user focused content, has been picked up as a key point in 2018 a review of keywords and how these filter back into the metas on the site can often be overlooked – remember the markets, competition and algorithms are continually changing and therefore these are key elements to keep reviewing. What was working in 2017 may not necessarily work in 2019, so don’t rest on what previously worked well. Google may not use descriptions as a direct ranking signal, but that doesn’t mean it ignores them; a good description can act as a click through factor and if search engines can see this engagement then they will obviously review the sites search visibility. Ensure keywords are used correctly throughout the content and that they are used in building up a picture for what you want the page to say. Ensure that H tags are used for structural purposes and not just for style purposes, these are here to provide a structure of a site and only 1 H1 tag should be used per page.

The authority In 2018, in my opinion, there was less talk around authority building than in previous years and which is why I believe Google sent out the messages at the end of year in order to say “hey, don’t forget about reviewing the quality of links going through to your site”, and so it shouldn’t be forgotten. The black hat days are way behind us, and the creeping in of such tactics should be punished to avoid manipulation. Undertake a full review of what is pointing to your site as a starting point and if there are any major issues then ensure that they are immediately actioned in the disavow file and to not rely on Penguin.

But you will still need links, this is how I interpreted the ‘Authority’ part of EAT, but don’t go chasing authority. Instead look to build out natural, unique and shareable campaigns which tell a story and will naturally get picked up.

So… This may seem a basic SEO 101, but I am still seeing sites that are not adhering to these basics in order to form a solid foundation, but will then look to chase the latest algorithmic update because it has been mentioned heavily in forums. It’s amazing what a few simple tweaks and adjustments can do for your site and overall digital strategy. Make sure the basics are in place, even in 2019, or at least re-visit them.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

As brands look to grow their business there are a wide range of considerations and none more important than making sure their search and digital marketing strategy is progressive.

- Dave Karellen, Click Consult’s Head of Paid Search on the rise of paid social

We decided that in order to help our clients and give back to the wider industry we’d ask some of our highly trained experts for some tips. We’ve put together the vlog and infographic below in order to look at the 20 biggest factors at the start of 2019.

- John Warner, Marketing and Content Executive argues that voice search will make no real progress

In the video you will hear from the following:

- Our Senior Content Strategist, Chris Tucker explains how personalised content will get even bigger

- Stefan Mustieles, Senior Organic Search Strategist says why you should put more focus on EAT So what are you waiting for? Check out the On.Click vlog here...

WATCH NOW 18

To find out more - visit the Benchmark Website

101

THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING A CONTENT CALENDAR - SCOTT RUMSEY We all know the importance of content and its effect on search engine optimisation (SEO), but one thing that is often missed is the best way to collect, curate, create and share your content. For this you’ll need a content calendar.

As regular readers will know, these 101s look at the best ways to implement various parts of your search and digital marketing strategy and over the course of the following blog post we’ll look at the main reasons and benefits for creating, updating and using a content calendar.

Organisation If the content that you create is engaging and relevant it will become an integral part of your business development. It will help to build brand awareness, harness the power of keywords in SEO and can encourage consumer engagement. For this to all work you will need to have a lot of content and it will need to fit the brief of being informative, engaging shareable and relevant. The use of a content calendar will allow you to organise all of your work and will make it easily accessible. You can set up a calendar that covers the content that you already have, the content that you need to produce and is a place that can also hold all of the social links, links to images and URLs so that you can practice good internal linking. A blog post that contains information about one of you products or services can be a useful tool to provide the reader with more information and may be the difference between a conversion or a customer dropping out of the sales funnel.

Businesses will have a set tone of voice and depending on the size of the business it may be a case that there are only one or two people working on the content for your site, blog and social media. If this is the case it is inevitable that there will be periods of annual leave, this could be a business critical consideration. If you are organised then it will be much easier for another member of the team to pick up on the content creation and sharing. Businesses, especially those online are no 24/7 operations so you must have a system in place that’s works even when there are changes in personnel.

Time management Time is precious and as we mentioned in the earlier section the ability to access huge amounts of information quickly and in an organised manner is very important. If you are able to search within the calendar and find a useful link or image quickly then you stand the best chance of providing a good user experience (UX). Another time saving is that within a content calendar you could incorporate ‘ideas tabs’ so that others within your organisation are able to quickly generate content or so that they’re able to read up on related research that might be of use. Another thing you can do from a central calendar is include new social media posts about your new blog content as well as always share and re-share older pieces that are timeless, relevant and up-to-date.

101

Your content calendar should also include key local, national and international dates to ensure topical content is covered. Dates such as Valentineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Day, Christmas, Black Friday, bank holidays, and business anniversaries, should all be included so you have topical content prepared and the dates donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t catch you out. This forward planning is a great way to save time.

Social

Competitor analysis

You can use your calendar to make sure the write text, images and links are in the right place and that they are different for each of the social media platforms. Writing these posts out once saves a huge amount of time and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s far easier to make small tweaks to an original piece of social copy, with the relevant links and images, especially as you look to engage or re-engage with your audience.

Competitor analysis is nearly as important as content when it comes to a successful SEO strategy. A great way to do this is by looking at the keywords and industry updates that they (your competitors) are using and that resonate with your audience or potential audience.

One of the best ways to generate relevant traffic to your site is to make sure that you content is shareable and that you have a social media plan. Making sure that you are able to plot a course for every piece of content you produce is vital.

Looking for keywords that you do not rank for but for which others do is imperative. This data will give you great examples of potential keywords that could be valuable to your business and the types of content your competitors are using to rank for those keywords. Once you have this information you can break it down into three distinct groups. First you can place the competitors with the most shared keywords into a group. These are the brands or businesses that are perhaps your biggest competitors. These businesses will be proven in terms of the traffic that they receive and you can learn from the way that they produce content. The next group should be the competitors that have a high amount of total keywords. These are the businesses that you can assume have already done a large amount of research and that have cast the net over a wider set of parameters. This is useful research for you to compare to and which you can base content on, filling any gaps. The final group are the competitors who have the highest volume of traffic. You can use a number of platforms, such as Searchmetrics to run a competitor analysis. This allows you to see the traffic and the visibility as well as the winners and losers in terms of keywords. This insight will give you a list of potential low hanging fruit and will also point out where you can create content that will aid progress in terms of your rankings.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

LINK ACQUISITION, INFOGRAPHICS AND EYE TRACKING A MULTIPURPOSE SOLUTION SCOTT RUMSEY In almost every single blog that we write here at Click Consult we tell our audience that there is no set way to build links or to ‘do’ search engine optimisation (SEO). We explain that businesses and brands must work hard to ensure that their strategy is flexible and that they are covering all bases if they are to achieve the best results.

A blog post that contains information about one of you products or services can be a useful tool to provide the reader with more information and may be the difference between a conversion or a customer dropping out of the sales funnel.

Start of link tag: Called an anchor tag (hence the “a”), this opens the link tag and tells search engines that a link to something else is about to follow.

What is link acquisition? Link acquisition is the core principal of growing your business’ online presence. Whilst we know that Google has well over 200 different ranking factors, and that they place a varying amount of importance on them, links especially good, high authority links from reputable sites are vital. According to Moz: “Link acquisition is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link acquisition is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.” In order to understand the importance of link acquisition, it’s important to first understand the basics of how a link is created, how the search engines see links, and what it can interpret from them.

Link referral location: The “href” stands for “hyperlink referral,” and the text inside the quotation marks indicates the URL to which the link is pointing. This doesn’t always have to be a web page; it could be the address of an image or a file to download. Occasionally, you’ll see something other than a URL, beginning with a # sign. These are local links, which take you to a different section of the page you’re already on. Visible/anchor text of link: This is the little bit of text that users see on the page, and on which they need to click if they want to open the link. The text is usually formatted in some way to make it stand out from the text that surrounds it, often with blue colour and/or underlining, signalling to users that it is a clickable link. Closure of link tag: This signals the end of the link tag to the search engines. There are two fundamental ways that the search engines use links: - To discover new web pages - To help determine how well a page should rank in their results In terms of infographics, the link or links within the image can navigate the user to a dedicated landing page and the key to this is they can add value to multiple other resources and pieces of content in the same image.

your content, but the process and interpretation can be quite complex.

What are infographics? Infographics are a phenomenal way to get you message across to your audience. They are often one of the richest forms of content and the ease at which they can be digested, shared and written about means that they are perfect for the time savvy reader. They are one of the most-used formats in search marketing and brands know that they are vital for link acquisition. Looking at some of the top level stats, infographics are proven to increase web traffic by around 12% and over the last four years they have been adopted as a link acquisition tactic by 65% of B2B marketers – the largest single increase in the industry. My favourite stat however revolves around research by the Springer group who found that an incredible 323% more people respond positively to directions with text and illustrations than those that do not contain images. One difficulty when it comes to links is that marketers need to test different methods if they are to get the best from them. Like all good SEO strategies data analysis is crucial so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. A nice way to interpret the power and performance of an Infographic is through eye tracking.

What is eye tracking? Eye tracking is the measurement of eye activity, a fastgrowing technology that allows us to get behind the emotion of a piece of content and allows the business who are adopting it to ask the following questions: - Where do customers look? - What do customers ignore? - How does the pupil react to different stimuli? The concept is basic: you get hard data about where the audience is looking and how they are interacting with

Eye tracking data is collected using either a remote or head-mounted ‘eye tracker’ connected to a computer. While there are many different types of non-intrusive eye trackers, they generally include two common components: a light source and a camera. The light source (usually infrared) is directed toward the eye. The camera tracks the reflection of the light source along with visible eye features such as the pupil. This data is used to understand the rotation of the eye and ultimately the direction of gaze. Additional information such as blink frequency and changes in pupil diameter are also detected by an eye tracker. The aggregated data is written to a file that is compatible with eye tracking analysis software. Taking on board the general movement of the eye and how the user reacts is vital. We know that in western culture users read top to bottom and left to right. This means that the most important data or indeed the title should be top left, indeed over 70% of users tend to look at the left half of webpages and infographics. Another stat for designers to consider is that 80% of users only read above the fold which means that the piece has to be engaging from the off and this will encourage scrolling. Based on the data that eye tracking provides here are the most important factors for your infographics: - Add your branding in the top-left - Titles should be front and centre at the top of the piece - The leading image must be relevant and visually appealing - Start your content on the left and make it flow from top left to bottom right - Keep the text punchy as the drop off rate can be high if it isn’t - The first two paragraphs or intro should contain the most important information as it is the only piece of content that you can guarantee will be read - Add links to the content but make sure that they open in a new window so that the rest of the Infographic is still accessible

Evolve your ... sEo strategy

Fig.4 Fig.5 Fig.3

Fig.6 Fig.2 Fig.1

... in 10 easy steps

Fig.3

Know your audience This is vital; if you know who your audience is then you have the best chance at marketing to them. You need to understand both where and how they search and make sure you will appear in those searches.

Fig.10

Fig.4

Know your competition Competitor research can help identify gaps in both content and your route to market. Fig.5

Keyword research These are the terms that you need to rank for in SERPs if you are to increase traffic and ultimately sales. Think about how your audience will find you and the types of search that have plenty of volume. Fig.6

Website optimisation Optimise, optimise, optimise. Everything on your site needs to go with the times. Prepare for mobile search, voice search, AI, AR, VR and beyond. Another significant consideration is site speed. Makes sure all of your images are formatted correctly. Fig.7

Add/update Title tags and Meta descriptions Meta descriptions tell Google what your webpage is about and allows it to pull in keywords to form a search engine results page. In your meta descriptions, write out the question youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re addressing while targeting the proper keywords. Fig.8

Get writing Content is one of the most important parts of a website. It must contain both the keywords and general information regarding a product or service and needs to adhere to the EAT guidelines that have been made something of a priority in the latest Google algorithm update.

Fig.7 Fig.8

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Build links

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Understand your business

Link acquisition is a vital component of any SEO strategy. It allows businesses to connect with bloggers and influencers to build up a network of trustworthy links. These links boost performance in SERPs as they allude to the relevance of your site for a particular search term.

The first step is to know the products and services that you are offering and the how you want to take them to market.

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Hire an agency Fig.2

Understanding the nuances of SEO can be tricky and it is for that reason

Build a website

so many brands turn to expert agencies. Having an agency onside allows

Building a website from scratch is a good way to launch or relaunch

you to form a bespoke strategy and to constantly ensure that you are adapting to Googleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ever changing ranking methods.

a business. Brands that already have a website may consider refreshing it with a new design and technical SEO.

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The basics for finding link acquisition opportunities in Ahrefs - CHLOIE BRANDRICK Ahrefs is a subscription-based search engine optimisation tool used for monitoring and analysing backlinks, and page metrics. We use Ahrefs (headline sponsors of the 2019 Benchmark Search and Digital Conference) alongside other tools to analyse backlink profiles, anchors, link quality and content metrics. It is widely known as an industry leading tool for its ability to export large amounts of information about a websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s backlink profile, including newly discovered or recently lost backlinks. 28

FROM OUR EXPERTS

Here’s how to analyse your competitors’ performance to uncover actionable insights and opportunities to enable you to create more relevant content and build backlinks more efficiently.

Getting started For this we used the Site Explorer part of Ahrefs. Log in to https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer

Let’s look at the tabs for

- Backlinks

- Referring domains

The main – ‘live’ index shows all the links that were live when Ahrefs last crawled the site Below the main metrics there are two other figures:

Type in the URL or domain that you want to analyse. This gives you a top level view of the website.

- Recent and referring domains

The example we’ll use here is bbc.co.uk

- Historical backlinks and referring domains

From the dropdown menu you can explore these in more detail.

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Recent This index contains all live links plus lost backlinks that were removed within the last 90 days. This can be because the website had temporary downtime when Ahrefs last crawled it or because no longer exists at all.

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Historical This contains the history of all links, whether dead or alive. The graphs are interactive and show you the dynamics of link acquisition over time for referring domains and referring pages. You can also filter by time period: all-time, the last year, or the last 30 days. These graphs are most useful when you compare another website sideby-side as it reveals which website is more effective at earning backlinks.

New and lost referring domains and backlinks These graphs show you a noncumulative view of a websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s or a URLâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s backlink growth. They allow you to quickly scan for spikes that will help you identify new link-worthy pages that your competitors are creating, and help you to reverse engineer link acquisition strategies or campaigns that were implemented over a specific period of time.

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Backlinks report This shows you backlinks pointing to your chosen competitor’s website or webpage, including the following columns:

- Referring page: Shows the total number of unique pages linking to a target website or URL.

- Anchor text and backlink: Shows the anchor text of the backlink (along with a snippet of the text that surrounds it) and the URL where the backlink points to.

- Traffic: The estimated amount of monthly organic search traffic coming to the referring page.

- First seen: The date Ahrefs’ crawler first found a backlink to the target website or URL on a given referring domain.

Find replicable backlink opportunities Identify what you want to achieve: - Find link-worthy topics on which to create new content. - Find out where competitors’ links are coming from.

Discover popular content by backlink volume For this you need to find competitor pages that have a lot of backlinks and/or traffic (you always want to research backlinks to a competitor’s individual pages, rather than the site as a whole). You can use this information to identify what’s working for competitors to inform your future content creation strategy in terms of the breath of information covered, as well as the type of content that is popular in terms of attracting backlinks.

Say you had an online meal-kit delivery service and considered hellofresh.co.uk a competitor. One of the first things you’d want to do would be to find out which pages are attracting the most links, then look at the content on them.

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I then filter to see find the page with the most ‘dofollow’ links (ie, the ones that are passing link equity).

Which of your competitors’ pages are generating the most backlinks? For this, go to Pages>Best by links. Then, to make sure the pages you’re looking at are working properly, filter by HTTP code 200 in the top dropdown lists:

As you can see, the homepage has by far the most backlinks. This is common to find, but not really relevant to this task as the homepage will contain content very specific to that website and nothing that we can really learn from or replicate. The next most linked-to is a flavour-generator hosted on Hello Fresh’s blog. This shows us that interactive content has been successful at attracting links.

Filtering links by content type Say you’re specifically looking for blog post topics – we can filter down to blog content only by typing blog.hellofresh into the prefix mode at the top of the page:

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What does this mean for your own content strategy? Look at popular content topics. Unsurprisingly, for a food-based site, six of the top Hello Fresh pages with followed links are recipes and specifically, those relating to particular seasonal themes, such as Christmas, Easter and Valentine’s Day. - Could you create content clustered around specific topics (hub-and spoke copy)? - Can you create content that covers the same topics, but ‘outperform ‘by adding more value, eg, are there subtopics that the competitor pages touch upon that you could expand upon? What you find may suggest that you don’t even need to create brand new content, but improve existing content and/or tweak how it’s positioned. - Could you combine popular topics with successful formats to create content that relevant sites would want to link to? For example, recipes with recipes a hot topic, an interactive step-by-step recipe post could be an, idea to consider.

Referring domains report This gives you a table of all of the unique linking websites to a target domain. If the site has a lot of referring domains, manually reviewing it will be an arduous task, but you can use some of the filters in this report to narrow down the results. If you set the link type filter to ‘dofollow’, you can find only the domains that are passing link equity. All of these columns are sortable. If you sort by the number of dofollow links in descending order for HelloFresh. co.uk, you’ll notice that the sites with the highest number of domain linking back are national press, such as theguardian.co.uk, wsj.com and telegraph.co.uk. This gives you some direction as to where to focus your link prospecting efforts.

FROM OUR EXPERTS

Discover linking domains to target The idea here is to try to replicate a competitors’ linking strategy by examining referring domains and backlinks. For this you need to look at the sites that link to your competitors’ content to pinpoint who you should be targeting as potential backlink sources (yes, this is a bit sneaky, but can be very effective).

Backlinks report If we go back to the backlinks report, this allows you to see all of your competitors’ backlinks. This report might look overwhelming, but you can help to filter out non-English and nofollowed links, and also to the platform (in this case, blogs). In this case I’ve selected ‘group similar links’ to cut down on the number of results from other regional Hello Fresh sites, such as hellofresh.com and hellofresh.co.au. This gives us a more manageable and better quality of backlinks to investigate and target:

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CREATING REPORTS, USING FILTERS AND SEGMENTATION IN DATA STUDIO - JOHN WARNER

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As with all of my articles on Data Studio, this results from me having to try to do something, not knowing how to do it and not being able to find out online – this time I’ve been trying to use the native filter and segmentation in Data Studio.

What is Data Studio?

Setting up a basic Data Studio Report

Part of the “Google Analytics 360” package released in March of 2016, Data Studio is a data visualisation tool that allows you to create and maintain a host of report types in more easy to comprehend, more visual formats which can be shared via a link or downloaded as a PDF.

First things first, you’ll need to ensure you have your access to Google Ads and Google Analytics, but assuming you have these set up and linked to the account you will be using for Data Studio, the next step is to sign in to Data Studio. Once there, you’ll have the option to create a new report – which you can select:

I’m a content writer – I write articles about marketing for marketers – but primarily I’m a curious person, and I like to know about the subject I’m writing on. Thankfully for me, I don’t have to move from client to client and, therefore, subject to subject – I’ve been able to stick to search and digital marketing and, as a result, learn a bit about it. For the most part, I’m following in the footsteps of hundreds of professional search marketers; but Data Studio has actually happened within the limited span of my time in the industry, as such, it’s required a little more research and tinkering. My first foray in to automating reporting took advantage of my slightly more extensive knowledge of spreadsheets, for example (you can see how here), but due to increasing demand for Data Studio reporting in the industry, I thought it was about time I saw what I could do with direct connection between Data Studio, Google Analytics and Google Ads.

You’ll then be taken to an ominously blank page – name it and make it your own.

I have found that there are reports I cannot create directly in Data Studio (one of which should be rendered achievable if I’m given access to the custom dimension creation in blended data that Google are apparently rolling out in beta at the moment) like a goal summary that combines ten individual goal sets (each goal set represents a ‘data source’ and you can only blend five at a time as things stand), the majority of the report I spoke about at Benchmark Search Conference 2018 is achievable using only the basic Data Studio interface. One of the things I struggled with – perhaps because I don’t use the platform daily, but nevertheless – was how to use the filter and segment options to report on specific subfolders of site content. What I’m going to do here, then is give a quick rundown of how you can set up a basic report before then refining this using the ‘Add filter’ and ‘Add Segment’ options. There’ll be an eBook later in the month with some more advice that I’ll drop a link to when it goes live.

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Once this is done, you can connect your Analytics and Google Ads accounts by creating a new data source using the menu bar that should be to the right of your blank page.

You will then need to authorise the connection, then select the account, property and view.

This will auto load the dimensions/metrics etcetera that are currently part of that view in analytics or Google Ads. Select ‘Add to report’ to make these available to you when setting up the report.

This will then bring a list of the currently available (built by Google) data sources – you can then select Ads or Analytics. These data sources can also be augmented by third party tools – like Supermetrics – if you want to add in things like social media followers without taking the long road.

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Once you have allowed Data Studio access, it will return you to your blank report – this will now at least have some gridlines to ease your mind, it will also have a new menu bar on the right with ‘layout’ and ‘theme’ as tabs. Using these two tabs, you can choose the colour palettes and other various presentation attributes – useful if you’re looking to use brand colours or, unlike me, have any kind of design aptitude.

Scorecard – a simple return of a count or total for a metric.

Once you’ve set your theme and layout, you can then begin creating your report using the various chart types in the top toolbar.

Pivot table – allows you to show a metric distributed between two or more dimensions (with a minimum of one per column and row).

You begin by selecting your chart of choice then drawing the area it will occupy – the chart types (from left to right) are: Time series – a line chart plotting a metric over time. Bar chart – showing comparisons of a metric vs. a stated dimension.

Scatter chart – allows you to plot a source on a chart with an x and y axis that are both metrics. Bullet chart – used for showing progress toward a target (goal completions for example).

To begin with, I’m going to set up a table – with a view to then refining this in the next two sections using either a segment or a filter.

Whenever I draw a table, it auto-populates with the Data Source I nominated initially (the view), the dimension ‘Source’ and the metric ‘Sessions’ and looks like this:

Combo chart – literally a combination of the previous two types. Pie chart – showing the share of a metric apportioned to a chosen dimension. Table – a versatile format allowing multiple metrics to be shown according to their relationship with a dimension. Geo map – allowing you to display the spread of a metric across a map (you can refine the level from global down to various subcontinental areas).

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For a top level report table, however, using the menu on the left, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to select some of the most important metrics and use the dimension â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;month of the yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; to create a month by month breakdown which will be sorted using the dimension in descending order to place the current month top of the list.

You can then style the chart to your taste (or lack of it) and add widgets such as the date range picker so that the date can be selected by the report viewer.

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Using filters With this table giving us a starting platform, we can then look to narrow our focus and initially we’ll do this using a filter – which you can do by selecting ‘add a filter’ in the right hand menu (under the ‘data’ tab). So, having copied the table and pasted it in to a new report page, you can select the ‘add a filter’ option. This will bring up the filter creation menu:

You can use the basic include/exclude options with any metric or dimension, refining it with ‘contains’, ‘equal to’, ‘starts with’ and other options. The full row is referred to as a ‘clause’ – which can be augmented with additional clauses to refine the filter further. If, for example, you wanted to look at a specific subfolder on your site, you would use the following options (where ‘/blog/’ is equal to the specific name of the subfolder you want to look at):

This gives us the same report as previous, only this time it will only include sessions that include a visit to that particular subfolder:

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Using segments We can then refine this report further using ‘segments’, so if we copy the table across to a third page, then select ‘add segment’, we’ll be presented with two options in a ‘segment picker’: ‘System segments’ and ‘Custom segments’. We’ll be using the former here – the latter is defined in Analytics, so you will be aware already if you have any and what purpose they could be used for.

This list is fairly self-explanatory if you’ve spent any time in Google Analytics – allowing you to restrict the data in your table by one of a number of factors – ranging from user specific, like ‘New User’ and ‘Multisession User’, to general source, like ‘Organic Traffic’ and ‘Paid Traffic’. By using the ‘Organic Traffic’ segment, we now have a table which shows the organic traffic, to the specific subfolder, as part of the overall site – giving us different levels of depth to a fairly basic chart type.

This process – or, at least, a similar one – can be used across the full spectrum of available charts, allowing you to produce geo maps for conversions, device specific traffic reports and a whole range of others that can help you to better communicate your success with stakeholders.

BACK CATALOGUE

INTRODUCING - DATA SERIES Data, without question, is the most powerful tool that businesses have at their disposal. The sheer volume of information that we are presented and are able to harvest, allows brands to form future strategies and to tweak existing ones. If you want to get ahead, and stay ahead of the competition, then it is vital that you look at everything you are presented with and that you are able to plan accordingly based on the behaviour of your audience.

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We are forever telling our clients and indeed our readers on the blog that a data-driven search strategy is the best route to success. With that in mind we have launched our â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Data Seriesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; which will highlight the benefits of getting behind the numbers and widening your approach to hard data. The series includes: Chapter 1 - Metrics Chapter 2 - Audience Profiling Chapter 3 - Audience Behaviour - Coming soon...

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Growing Your Business with SEO - STEFAN MUSTIELES

When it comes to SEO, there are a plethora of different skillsets, strategies and techniques that will help you improve your business’ visibility within Google and for some… Bing. But with so many of these to think about, and so many different guides ranking for the term ‘SEO Strategy 2019’, it is difficult to know where to begin, or even which parts of your site you should focus on. Think about it. Should you fix the 404 errors first, sort out your meta titles, or maybe you should put out that PR piece that is time sensitive, add a new blog post or add some content to your category pages?

Let’s choose adding content to your category pages. Wait a minute…. you have got 200 category pages each with an average of three to four sub category pages. Which page do you start with, what keywords should be included, how should your meta title look, will your boss agree with you, will you meet this quarters organic revenue target?!! Before you start to panic and sit in a corner of the room rocking yourself silly, here is how you can focus your SEO strategy to target the key growth areas for your business and understand what it will take to get you to your goal.

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Technical SEO & log file analysis Firstly, it is essential you get your house in order, with a full technical SEO audit. For larger, ecommerce sites, log file analysis should also be included at this stage (more on this on page 14 from Mark). A website that is not technically sound, is very similar to a bucket with holes in it. No matter how much great work you do, how much authority you drive to your site, if your meta robots tags are set to noindex, page load speeds are poor, poor mobile optimisation, or god-forbid youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re blocking Google via your robots.txt file, you simply will not overtake your competitors. Once you have plugged the holes in your website, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to set out your plan of attack.

Opportunity forecasting A common phrase within business can also be applied to SEO. Opportunity forecasting is the ability to understand: 1. Where the opportunity lies for growth 2. How big that growth will be (traffic, revenue, sales) 3. What it will mean to the business (ROI, profit, brand awareness) 4. What it will take to get there (content, links, reporting) Essentially this is talking the same language as your boss and your bossâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boss.

101 Pulling all of the data To start, we need data, lots of it. Start by using Google Search Console to collect the impressions, CTR% and average position of each URL and keyword on your site. Combine the keywords by page using a pivot table in Excel or Google Sheets.

The overall impressions here are the market opportunity. Using the Screaming Frog SEO Crawler, we can now add much more data to our table such as internal link numbers, Link Score (Screaming Frogs Page Rank emulator), Meta data and lots more. Adding the APIs for Google Analytics and a Link Analysis tool such as Moz or Majestic, we can include much more data such as sessions, transactions, revenue, and conversion rate, Domain Authority, backlinks, linking domains etc. I have reduced the number of columns but your table should eventually look something like this:

The next step, is understanding the size of the opportunity.

Sizing up the opportunity Using predicted CTR% based on positions in Google, we can start to work out what the estimated traffic would be, and therefore estimated revenue uplift, if we were to rank in positions 1 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 3. You will already have an idea of what certain metrics your business deems valuable. For example, in ecommerce it may be AOV (Average Order Value), in B2B Lead Gen it may be VTL (Visitor to Lead) or in the affiliate industry it may be something like RPV (Revenue per Visitor). Either way you can use these metrics to work out per URL, what the uplift in traffic means to your business. GetStat produced a great CTR table by industry. We can use this in our calculations.

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By taking the average CTR of the top 3 positions in a related industry to your own, we can then look to apply this to the impressions our pages already get and look to work out the estimated traffic increases. Based on the GetStat table, in the fashion industry, the average of the top 3 positions in Google gives us a 12.6% CTR for non-branded traffic. If every other metric, such as on-page CR% and AOV were to stay the same what would the potential uplift be per page?

By multiplying the current impressions by the new average CTR% we can work out an estimate of traffic. Using this traffic, the current CR% and AOV, we can work out what the revenue uplift will be for each URL. In the table above we are looking at a potential increase of over £270K in revenues. So now we are starting to talk the CEO’s language! Based on the revenue numbers we now have, we can start to plan out some short, medium and long term strategies. Not only that, but total revenue uplift can give you an ROI you can use to ask for additional resource and budget for your SEO efforts.

Sizing up the competition So we have decided which URLs we are going to be focusing on and what the target keywords are for that page. Now we need to figure out how we are going to get there. Before we dive into the hard metrics, first let’s look at the actual SERP we are competing in. This tweet from Gianluca Fiorelli, is excellent both in its simplicity and its accuracy.

The top URLs with the most impressions are going to be our long term focus as these will have the most competition. Outside of the top two URLs, on row 8 and row 14, you can see some big potential revenue winners, these will be our short to medium goals; these are the URLs we will look to improve in the next three to six months. There may not be as much competition around the terms these pages are attracting so could be classed as ‘Quick Wins’. But just how much effort will it take to ‘move the dial’ for these URLs?

Looking at the SERP we can make so many assumptions in regards to the user intent behind our target keywords, how our competition are formatting their meta data and content, what are the related keywords and what questions do ‘People Also Ask’. This can inform straight away, whether you need to rewrite your content and meta data to match the user intent, how your content will be formatted, what other content can be added to your page, video, images etc. So just from a 1 hour look at the SERPs and the competition, we already have a lot of information and potential improvements for one of our target URLs.

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What are the hard metrics we need to work on? So from our previous crawl, we already have data showing the number of internal links, word counts, external linking domains, but how does that compare to that of the top 3 competitors. Again using Screaming Frog, we can crawl our competitor’s websites to get the same data as above. I will let you figure out all the Excel formatting and formulas, but what you want is something that looks like this for each of your target pages. Taking the average of all the metrics for each of our competitors, we can see where we are falling short. In the above example (for dramatic effect of course), we need to add more content to our page, build more external links and add more internal links to our page. Remember this is a simplified overview of the process. We could drill much deeper into the data. For example, rather than a URL level, we can look at this at a keyword level. For each keyword, we can get the current rank in Google, its potential ranking position and from that the estimated CTR and traffic we could hope to achieve. We could pull in PPC data, to understand CR% per keyword, highest converting ad copy to help optimise titles. At a keyword level we could also see the potential opportunity in ‘low hanging fruit’ keywords. These are the keywords that are on page two or three and could be moved on to page one with some small changes.

Talking your CEO’s language So there you have it, you now have your short, medium and long term targets and goals. You have a potential revenue uplift of over £270K, you know where the focus of your strategy needs to be and you know how you are going to get there. How deep you want to dig into the data depends on what your strategy deadline is and how much you love data. You can map this entire process out into a presentation for your CEO, which will give them confidence in the plans you are putting forward to achieve these goals. Not only that, but it makes asking for and getting sign off on your required budget and resources for the new financial year so much easier. All that’s left to do now is put it into action.

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7 WAYS TO OPTIMISE YOUR GOOGLE ADS CAMPAIGN STRUCTURE

- CHLOIE BRANDRICK A well-structured Google Ads search campaign allows you to control how you want your ads to be triggered and when you want them to appear. Like a house, your account needs a solid foundation and frame before you can begin the process of building and cultivating it. The aim of this blog is to allow you to get more from your Google Ads search budget, lower your cost per click (CPC), improve the quality of your traffic and increase your profits 49

FROM OUR EXPERTS

Campaigns should be structured around your business and campaign objectives. For example, own brand keywords should always be in their own campaign because they are expected to perform very well. Likewise, generic keywords would be in a separate campaign because they are expected to have a lower click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. It may be the case that your search campaigns and ad groups need to be restructured, particularly if they are not split out enough and ad text is too generic and not keyword dense. Similarly, if the account is the structure is convoluted, this unnecessarily dilutes the data, making it more difficult to complete simple admin tasks and to spot trends which would allow you to focus on the most important and profitable terms. Ensure your ads appear for relevant searches and audiences to maximise conversion and save on wasted clicks.

- buy hp ink cartridges - black hp ink cartridges - amazon ink cartridges hp - tesco hp ink cartridges - refilling hp ink cartridges Ad groups set up such as these mean that neither the ad copy nor the landing page can be relevant for such disparate keywords. There is also a large difference in a searcher’s position in the purchase funnel between the first and last keywords in the above list. ‘Buy hp ink cartridges’ is quite specific and shows purchase intent, whereas ‘refilling hp ink cartridges’ is much more research focused. Here’s an example of how a cosmetics supplier may structure their ad groups within campaigns for lipstick, eye shadow and foundation:

Improve your Quality Score, Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads, which impacts your costs, ad position and eligibility for auctions. Keep your account organised and make it easier to see what’s working and what isn’t so that you can make tweaks to increase performance. 1. Ensure your ad groups are well split out and tightly themed If ad groups contain keywords with varying intent, it’s likely that the ads will appear to searchers are looking for different products or services and/or are at different sections of the purchase funnel. Take the example of this ad group: - ink epson printers - cheapest epson inks - quality epson ink - epson picturemate ink The completely different search intents, eg, ‘cheap’ and ‘quality’ make it impossible to get a keyword dense ad that perfectly encapsulates the theme of both of these search terms. This can impact your Quality Score. Ensuring ad groups are well split out means that ads can be highly targeted to their keywords, which will increase your Quality Score. Similarly, it’s unwise for an ad group to have a large number of disjointed themes, including keywords such as:

… then segmented to keyword level:

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2. Split out campaigns not just by intent but also position in the purchase funnel This is because as different call to actions work best for each. By segmenting these into their own campaign, we can accurately monitor search funnels, and whether these users go on to convert at a later time after revisiting the site. Importantly, the research campaign can be used to create an audience list, which can then be used to remarket to, and bring back the users to convert.

5. Don’t set up your campaign as Standard Search All campaigns should be set to ‘All features’ and not simply ‘Standard’. This is an easily fixable error that should be rectified immediately to improve campaign efficiencies.

3. Avoid having multiple locations in same ad group An example of this would be: “no win no fee solicitors glasgow” “no win no fee claims surrey” “no win no fee birmingham” “no win no fee manchester” Keywords relating to different locations should be placed in their own ad group for each location, ideally in a purpose built location tailed campaign. People using locations in their search terms want to be reassured by the ad copy that the business has an office in their specified area. By not splitting these out, it is not possible to have location specific ad copy within the ad text, which would greatly increase click through rate for these terms. 4. Separate brand keywords from non-brand campaigns This can positively skew the perceived performance of these non-brand campaigns, which makes it difficult to see where optimisation should be focused and where to apportion budget at a top level. All brand keywords should be placed in their own dedicated brand campaign, so that their performance can be judged independently from non-brand search terms. As an example, Click Consult bids on its own brand keywords:

Why? The standard setting with search campaigns does not allow you to apply bid modifiers such as segmented location targeting or ad scheduling. There is also no option to apply all ad extensions such as callout. This is greatly limiting the potential for your campaign to maximise profitability and click through rate. 6. Build a call-only campaign This should be something you consider if driving calls is an important KPI for your business as it provides a focus for generating calls for your business. As you are charged per click to call, and each call is treated as a conversion, it can be a very cost effective way of driving more conversions. 7. Have the optimal number of live ads per ad group Best practice is to create three keyword relevant ads per ad group to split-test with different calls to action, to determine work best. Fewer than this does not allow sufficient testing, and is an indication of little emphasis being placed on ad optimisation, which is crucial for keeping campaigns fresh, and increasing CTR. However, if the number of ads per ad group is too high, there will be too many variables to determine which is working best.

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