الاثنين، 4 يناير 2016

DuckDuckGo Ends 2015 On A High Note, Reaches 12M Searches In A Single Day

The privacy search engine averaged more than 10 million searches per day by the end of the year. The post DuckDuckGo Ends 2015 On A High Note, Reaches 12M Searches In A Single Day appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Authors Guild Appeals Lower Court Decision Backing Google’s Book Digitizing Project

The issue is whether Google’s project violates the copyrights of some of the millions of scanned books, or whether it has a valid “fair use” exception. The post Authors Guild Appeals Lower Court Decision Backing Google’s Book Digitizing Project appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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10 Ways To Simplify Your Local Marketing Strategy In 2016

Looking back at lessons learned last year and expected trends for this year, columnist Wesley Young cuts through the clutter and suggests ways to make your marketing strategy simpler, clearer and easier to execute. The post 10 Ways To Simplify Your Local Marketing Strategy In 2016 appeared first...

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Forget Your Testimonials Page, 2016 Is The Year Of Reviews

Let's face it: Customers aren't reading your testimonials page. So what can you put in its place? Columnist Greg Gifford shares his ideas. The post Forget Your Testimonials Page, 2016 Is The Year Of Reviews appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Don't Just Manage Your Reputation—Improve it

Posted by MaryBowling

In ranking businesses in the local search results, Google's goal has always been to model the real world. It aims to reward the companies that are the most popular and prominent within their own market areas — those that are the most highly regarded by their customers, considered to among the best at what they do and that people generally patronize, talk well about and recommend to their friends. Those are the local businesses that Google wants to show in its local search results.

That’s what searchers want to see in their results, too! After all, no one wants to get awful or even so-so service if they can choose to use a business that has a history of making its customers very happy, instead. Whether people think you’re doing a stellar job or a stinky one, there’s no way to hide from your reputation anymore. Prospective buyers can now see the collective history of a business’s ability to keep its customers happy 24 hours a day via online reviews.

Why are reviews so important?

Depending on which survey you see, somewhere between 75% and 90% of consumers read online reviews when considering a purchase. A slightly smaller number of us trust online reviews as much as we trust recommendations made by people that we know.

While it may at first sound a little crazy, that trust is developed via our ability to read multiple opinions on a variety of websites made by a diverse group of people with differing standards and tastes. Then, while considering the public’s overall opinion of a business, we take into consideration the factors that are most important to us.

For example, a light sleeper may be more concerned about the noisiness of a hotel than they are about whether it offers a hot breakfast or a clean pool, and a traveler with an early flight may be looking at guests’ opinions of the reliability of a hotel’s airport shuttle service more than at any other amenity.

Moving beyond reputation management

Marketers have long used the term reputation management to refer to a company’s efforts to impact what prospective customers see about them online. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of that term:

The practice of managing one’s online reputation has mainly consisted of getting more good reviews to help drown out the poor ones, owning the first page of the SERPs for brand name searches, and using the ability to respond to reviews on many sites as a method of damage control.

However, in 2015 and beyond, we need to think less about reacting appropriately to poor opinions and trying to reduce the visibility of bad online reviews. We need to concentrate on reputation development, instead.

Developing a better reputation

In the past, it wasn't hard to for a small business to survive and perhaps even thrive while providing poor to mediocre products and services. If there was enough foot traffic to a shop or office or store, or if it was in a good location, or if it did enough advertising in the places people used to find that type of business, new people would keep coming in the doors and buying from it — despite how bad it might actually be. While its customers might share their experiences with the people in their social circles, those circles were relatively small and word of mouth didn't travel very far unless extraordinary measures were taken.

However, in the age of the Internet, a business can no longer hide from its customers' opinions. We’re connected to each other online in ways that were not possible in the past. Most consumers have at least one mobile device with them at all times. We have our smartphones in our pockets and purses. They lie next to us while we sleep. We use them while we’re driving to be entertained and educated. We use them to communicate, get directions, and gather information, and we use them to find businesses to patronize and to learn about the experiences others have had there. People can read others’ opinions of local enterprises just about anytime and anywhere.

Reviews as a ranking factor

In the first years of local search, reviews weren’t much of a ranking factor. That changed in 2009 when Yelp rejected acquisition by Google. The search giant then made reviews a significant ranking factor in the local algorithm in order to incentivize small businesses to encourage more online reviews at Google.

We quickly suffered a plague of fake reviews and Google then had to take steps to reduce them. Among its tactics were the reduced impact of reviews on rankings, the development of a Yelp-like reviewer algorithm, and the requirement by Google+ to have a legitimate-looking profile in order to leave a review.

In 2015, reviews still have an impact on ranking in Google Maps and the local pack results, but the crowd-sourced opinion of local search practitioners pegs it at less than 9%. We can still get rating stars showing in some of the SERPs once we have 5–6 Google reviews, and it’s generally believed that 10 reviews left at Google provides a little bit of a ranking boost. Google may also be trying to incorporate review sentiment into its ranking algorithms. If and when this becomes a reality, Google will have come quite close to its goal of modeling the real world.

Beyond reviews as a ranking factor

While you should definitely take advantage of these features, we really need to look beyond rankings for motivation for getting reviews. Instead, we need to think about getting more and more good reviews over time in order to develop our reputation, rather than just managing it.

The newish Local Finder results shown below give users the opportunity to sort the results they see by ratings in some verticals. I anticipate that more industries will get this feature in the future, allowing us to choose just how good a local business must be before we’ll consider patronizing it. So, ranking well probably won’t do much for your enterprise unless those rankings are accompanied by ratings that are average (3 stars) at the very least.

People are also learning to search in better ways and many of them are asking to see the "best of something," rather than just "something." No one wants to go to an average or below-average oral surgeon, for example. If I need a root canal, I want the best dentist that I can find in my area to operate on me. And if I can’t find a good one in my town, I’ll likely be willing to travel elsewhere to be seen by a specialist that nearly everyone raves about.

Understanding Net Promoter Score

A company’s Net Promoter Score® is an easy way to determine how your reputation is developing over time. Customers are asked a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?

A score is then calculated using a simple formula.

If the NPS increases over time, the company is doing a good job of keeping its customers satisfied, which is reflected in the body of online reviews about it and in the steady overall growth of the business.

While you may or may not wish to use Net Promoter Score® to assist you in improving your business, the idea behind it is a solid one. Actively ask for feedback from all of your customers. Then act on what you learn to constantly improve your products and services.

Refining the process allows you to quickly respond those who have complaints or concerns and to make things right before they get a chance to criticize you in public, while those who are happy with you can be encouraged to tell others about their experience, both on- and offline.

Contrary to what some business owners believe, most customers are not anxious to leave bad reviews. People tend to leave reviews only when their experience is exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Mitigating bad experiences by sincerely asking for feedback and doing what’s needed to immediately make the customer happy is a fairly clear path to getting more good reviews and fewer bad reviews online.

Fixing problems takes more than talk

It’s easy to find examples that demonstrate how a business’ refusal to correct deficiencies when they’re brought to the staff’s attention can result in scathing reviews. It’s obviously much better to listen and correct a problem than it is to keep writing apologies for bad service. The hotel referred to in the examples below has dozens of reviews similar to this one commenting on poor experiences with its housekeeping department.

And the manager keeps writing insincere apologies that do nothing to reassure readers that the problem has been corrected.

A serious commitment to a cycle of continuous improvement based on customer feedback is what it takes to be one of the best businesses of its type in your area. This type of strategy will bring in more and more new customers over time and encourage past customers to return.

Google’s local algorithms have improved exponentially since 2004. Google wants to reward us online for being prominent and popular in the offline world, so we have to make sure our companies shine. Businesses that are unwilling to do so are doomed to a slow death because there’s no longer anywhere to hide from a bad reputation.

Best practices for reputation development

Get company-wide buy-in.
Everyone within the organization must be committed to asking for feedback from customers and sincerely listening for areas that can and should be improved. This needs to start at the top and flow through the entire organization. Always keep in mind that you have asked for ways to improve your business, so even the happiest customers are very likely to make suggestions. Take this as a positive, not a negative.

Problems should be identified and mitigated as soon after the customer has experience with the business as possible.
Ideally, that’s before the person leaves the business location or before the service provider leaves the location where work was performed. This is your best opportunity to learn from your customers and to delight them.

Provide a way for customers to complain right on your company’s website.
Even at the most conscientious businesses, people can have less-than-ideal experiences and sometimes people just need to vent, so give them a place to communicate with you away from the public eye. Closely monitor your on-site complaints and respond immediately.

Contact the customer soon after their visit with you to thank them and ask about their experience.
While a phone call is sometimes in order (such as with an oral surgeon checking up on a patient), in most cases, an email works fine. Send it out within a few days after the interaction asking about their experience and asking for suggestions on how it can be improved. Even those thrilled with their experience may have good ideas for your consideration.

Provide an appropriate response to the customer’s comments.
Address both their praise and concerns and thank them for helping you to improve your business.

Politely ask happy customers if you can use their comments or your website and if you can also include their name and photo.
Also suggest that they can help you and others by commenting on their positive experiences at popular online review sites. Provide links to your listing on several popular review sites to make it easy for them to do so.

Honestly address the concerns of those who had negative experiences.
Offer what you can to make it right and tell them what you plan to do to prevent it from happening again.

Take suggestions to heart.
Enthusiastically do what you can to continuously improve your business to satisfy the needs and wants of your clientele. In this way, you’ll always be improving your online and offline reputation and growing your business.

Resources


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الجمعة، 1 يناير 2016

How to Build the Right Traffic Metrics Dashboard for 2016 - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

What you measure is what you're able to improve. While there's no one magic solution that works for everyone, setting yourself up for success involves measuring your traffic metrics the right way, so you can identify areas to work on and implement the right actions. In the first Whiteboard Friday of 2016, Rand explains what you need to include when building your own traffics metrics dashboard in the new year.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and Happy New Year. Welcome to 2016. It's going to be a very exciting year in search, in all things digital, in the web marketing world. We have an incredible year ahead of us. I want to help this year by celebrating some of the success of 2015, but also by assisting you in measuring and being able to answer critical questions about your success in 2016.

To do that, one of the things we need is a better metrics dashboard. Now look, there is no perfect solution out there. There's no plug-and-play, one-size-fits-all. What I'm going to give you here is a methodology for how you can set your team and yourself up for success, in 2016, with a great metrics dashboard that shows you how things work through your funnel.

But you're going to have to tweak this. What I'm going to show you today is not going to be perfect. It's not going to apply to you or to everyone. It's going to need some personalization on your behalf. So what I want to give you is the framework to do this and some of the ways that we think about funnel and web traffic here at Moz.

Let's start with awareness

We've got our classic web marketing funnel here. It goes from awareness to "I've heard of your brand. I know something about who you are. I first visit your website. I make returning visits to your site. I make a conversion at some point." Then what happens from there is very individually tailored, and so I won't get into retention marketing and retention analytics here.

But if you have a great dashboard that can show you these phases and give you the numbers to walk through, you can do something that very few organizations can do, and that is answer the key four questions that always come up around performance: How are we doing? What are we doing?

What are we doing means how many people visited this? Did that change perform well for us? Are we improving over last month? Are we improving quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year? How much did we grow or shrink in what capacities? When did it happen? And the most important part — why? If you build this dashboard correctly, you can answer all of those. It's really a beautiful thing.

So let's start at the awareness phase. When I talk about awareness from a web traffic perspective, what we want to try and center in on is things that are happen largely outside of our site or our properties before people get to us, like how are they hearing about us and potentially getting to us?

Social media

So, from that perspective, some of the metrics we could think about are things like social media, your social media mentions. You could potentially put followers in here and fans in here and things like that.

Press and brand mentions

I use Moz's Fresh Web Explorer for this and sort of get a count of mentions that I have, both in the Fresh Web as a whole and then in only sources that are in Google News. I like that. Mention.net is another good one for this.

Referring links

You can get that through something like an Open Site Explorer. You could use Google Webmaster Tools. You could use just your Google Analytics numbers in there and branded search volume. I say branded search volume because what I'm trying to measure are things before they get to me. So I want to know how many people are searching for my specific branded terms and phrases. How many people are looking for Moz and for Open Site Explorer and are looking for Moz Analytics or Followerwonk or those kinds of things?

Next, build your dashboard

Now, what you want to do from there is build a dashboard with the numbers that you need. You can determine what those are. For some folks, they might even want to get bigger and broader in here. So you might say, "Hey, I want to get statistics on how many keywords SEMrush saw us ranking for." So I'm going add that in and I'm going have my numbers — the number of tweets about me, Facebook posts, brand mentions, new links, referring links, etc. — for each of the months and then have a column in there that's giving me a percentage increase and hopefully some year-over-year numbers. You could do that quarterly. You could do that monthly.

Now that I have this, if somebody says, "Hey, we saw traffic decline this month," you can say, "Actually, we didn't just see traffic decline, we also saw our brand efforts fall down." We can tie that back to, "You know what? We did a lot less press and PR this quarter than we did last quarter. You know what? We did a lot more advertising dollar spend here and a lot less tradeshow. It looks like that did not equate to what we were hoping, which is more stuff at the very top of the funnel building more awareness. It looks like tradeshows were actually a great thing for us."

You can't make these perfectly because these numbers don't tie exactly to every offline kind of activity and word of mouth. But this will give you a baseline, and this will tell you indicatively: What's going on with our brand on the web? How are people thinking about it? How much are people thinking about us versus some competitor?

I do like that you can do this competitively. So I could take these numbers. I can replicate this for a few competitors, and then I can compare myself, me versus XYZ, and see who's doing well and who's doing how well.

Total visits and total new visits


I like seeing total visits & I like seeing total new visits. Then I want to look at visits by channel. So channel could be search, and I could split that out into paid and organic. I want to look at social. I want to look at referring links. Maybe I want to look at email, whatever it is that are the channels that are sending traffic to me. One of the really important things here that I strongly suggest you do is define some metric of engagement, a minimum metric of engagement.

So, for example, I like seeing engaged versus non-engaged. For Moz, that might be something like, "Hey, did they browse at least three pages on our site during that visit?" Either that or they spent four minutes. So it could be three pages per visit or a four-minute duration time on site equals engaged.

Then I can measure by each channel, "Did I get non-engaged versus engaged visits from that channel in new visits?" Then I can see over time, like, for example, this happens all the time. We'll see a huge spike in social and referral traffic to a page that sort of had some viral component to it. Maybe it was a particularly salient article. It got lots of broad tech media attention. It didn't really send us lots of SEO professionals, folks like yourselves who are in the web marketing field who are deeply interested in the products that Moz has to offer. So maybe that's low converting traffic. It's low engaged traffic. But we see a big spike and we go, "Hang on a sec. What's going on there?"

Well, now we can say, "Aha, that was from social. It was non-engaged. That was jumping up our visit counts, but it's probably not going be an indication of converting traffic later on down the line." We'll probably see nice brand mentions and press and that kind of stuff. That could lead to things further on. Now we know whether we should keep investing in that type of broad targeted content or whether it's not worth it at all. Great for being able to do that.

My returning visits...that's my community!

My first-time visits, those are new people in my funnel, new people I could potentially reach. My returning visits, this is like my crowd. That's my community. These are people that I'm reaching with my content and my tools, my software, whatever my product is. People that I know are interested, they're coming back 2 to 10 plus times. I actually like segmenting these out.

So I've got in here that I like seeing total returning and then broken down — second, third time, four through nine, ten plus. Google Analytics actually makes this really easy. So does Omniture if you're using that. In addition to this, I want to see two key metrics about engagement levels, and that is browse rate and average time on site.

Browse rate meaning pages per visit. If I see that start to decline overall or in one of these groups, that tells me something interesting. That tells me that maybe I've made a navigation change that was poor and now I'm not driving people from one section of my site to others. Maybe I've changed calls-to-action inside my content. Maybe I'm not linking to my own stuff as much as I used to with the new content I've been publishing, whatever it is.

Then I can start to reverse engineer and say, "Aha, that's why these things are happening." If I don't have these kinds of metrics, I can't even answer the question of, "Well, what are some hypotheses about what could have happened?" If you have this, you're in good shape.

And then, finally, conversions

This is the most unique part. These three, there's some variation in top of funnel awareness stuff. These two really, really consistent across almost very site if you follow these models. But conversion, that's going to be totally dependent on what you are converting someone to do.

If it's an email signup that's very different from an ecommerce process, which is very different from a subscription product which is going to be pretty different from an advertising-based site where your conversion might just be a page load or a number of page loads in a visit, those kinds of things.

What I like to do is I like to segment out the places where conversion events happen on your site. For the purposes of this Whiteboard Friday, let's call that the product pages. So I want visits to the product pages. I might choose to do new and returning, again split out. I want to see the checkout completion rate, meaning the people who make it through whatever conversion process that is. Maybe that's just a form field for an email capture. Maybe it's checking out through a shopping cart, whatever that is.

Then I want to see new versus retuning customers, different than visits. This is anyone whose email address or organization I previously have in my customer database so I know that, "Aha, this is a new customer. This person has never converted with me in the past." Or, "Oh, I've seen them before. They're coming back and doing something with me again."

Then I want total revenue. You can break this down. I would break this down something like product page visits, the completion rate of whatever it is that the conversion event is, new buyers, retuning buyers, average revenue per buyer, total transactions, and total revenue. That might be a reasonable ecommerce type of approach. It will change if you're SaaS. It will change if you're email lead capture, but this is fine.

What's great about this is if you set this up now, if you set this up and you have this data for January, you can set it up any way you want — a Google spreadsheet and you manually fill some stuff in, you pull in some stuff through APIs, you ask one of your developers to build something for you, great. It's very imperfect, but you can set up a custom Google Analytics dashboard that gets close-ish, approximate-y, depending on how much sophistication you need. You won't be able to get any of this stuff in the awareness side from GA, but the rest of it you can get close to.

If you do this in January and you measure it throughout the year and you can get year over year data, go back to 2015, or at least in 2017 be able to look back at 2016, you will set yourself up for so much more success than was ever possible before you measured things. I tend to find that what we measure is what we were able to improve. If you measure this stuff, you'll be improving the right stuff.

All right, everyone. Congratulations on making it through 2015. I'm looking forward to a great 2016 with you and lots of great Whiteboard Fridays to come. Take care and Happy New Year.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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الخميس، 31 ديسمبر 2015

A Year In Review: Search Engine Land’s Top 10 Columns Of 2015

Which columns truly captivated our readers this year? We conclude our year-in-review series by highlighting our most widely read columns of 2015. The post A Year In Review: Search Engine Land’s Top 10 Columns Of 2015 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.


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