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5 Online Marketing Trends in 2018

Online marketing has opened up marketing avenues for businesses. Every year new technologies appear making it easier for companies to target and market to their potential customers. The Internet has changed the face of how a business communicates, tells its brand story and obtains new business. From the tried and true SEO and Email marketing to AI and PPC, is your business keeping up?

 

Top 5 Online Marketing Trends in 2018

 

  1. AI – Artificial Intelligence & Chatbots – Chatbots aren’t new in the world of digital marketing; however big improvements have been made. In 2018 more and more businesses jumped on board the chatbot bandwagon. Generally, most brands are using AI for customer service.
  2. Stories – Storytelling took on a new form in 2018. Social Media ‘stories’ grew in popularity. Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube all have their own version of stories, generally designed for a user to share moments of their day. Because stories generally disappear after a certain amount of time, stories play on our ‘fear of missing out’.  FOMO means that followers, fans and consumers will be eager to consume your content before it goes away.
  3. Video – Video is a fantastic tool in your online marketing tool belt? Why? People love videos. It’s an easy way for people to consume information. This increased engagement in your content can work wonders for your SEO and marketing campaigns.
  4. Voice Search – People still head to search engines such as Google to find products, services and information. Now, with more and more homes getting ‘smart-assist’ devices, along with Bluetooth enabled devices, voice queries are a growing trend. Ensuring your website is found how people are searching was a key trend in 2018 that will continue to grow next year.
  5. Personalization – It might seem a bit creepy, but brands and businesses have the ability to monitor your digital footprint through your cookies. When a brand can leverage this data to provide you with personalized content (whether in an ad, email or website content) you are more likely to convert. It’s like when those shoes you’ve been coveting online suddenly start following you around the Internet. Or, when you spent some time on a website devouring a piece of content and next time you visit they serve you something similar.

 

As we head into 2019, one thing remains clear. Good content that provides visitors with what they’re looking for is key. This helps with search engine positioning, digital marketing and social media. When you can layer your efforts and cover the digital landscape your brand is poised for success.

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SEO Voice Search Trends in 2017

There’s a lot of discussion lately about SEO for voice search and how it’s going to change SEO in many aspects. I tend not only to agree but to also suggest that the acoustic nature of voice search will hasten the development of new ways to present your website data specifically targeted to those using voice search devices.

Many articles about voice search marketing refer to the necessity of preparing for voice, but few make reference to little more than the importance of long tail keywords and lengthier query structures associated with voice search. This, in turn, will mean lengthier content more aptly zeroed in on the voice searcher.

While these might be part of an advantageous SEO strategy to optimize for voice, it can be very difficult to accurately and effectively annotate for mobile search intent and voice search intent within a single website page.

In this article, we will explore several voice search considerations for 2017.

Keyword Text Content vs Voice Content

Some voice search keyword strategies may work for a while, but voice searchers are looking for more than text content. They’re looking for voice content. And as Amine Bentahar wrote in his Forbes article 2017 Will Be The Year Of Voice Search,

“No longer can you simply target a specific keyword, but content and websites need to be more complex, ready to answer the questions that your users have.”

The complexity of presenting for voice search is still in its infancy, and research has presented us with some interesting tangents to follow. In a paper titled Understanding User Satisfaction with Intelligent Assistants,  from March of 2016, Julia Kiseleva et al. studied “how user satisfaction varied with different usage scenarios and what signals can be used for modeling satisfaction in different scenarios.”

We know that Google is all about searcher satisfaction, and they aren’t afraid to reduce the rankings of sites not keeping up with the rest of the flock. Check out our recent article about Google’s interstitial ads penalty update as just one example of their prioritized commitment to the searcher. And, rightfully so. It is the needs of the searcher on which Google’s empire has flourished.

Voice Search Behaviour is Complex

Julia Kiseleva et al went on to write:

“We also study how the nature and complexity of the task at hand affect user satisfaction and found that preserving the conversation context is essential and that overall task-level satisfaction cannot be reduced to query-level satisfaction alone.”

Starting to see what we mean about complexity?

Granted, their voice search research is on intelligent personal assistants, but the searching via these assistants for in-depth queries through online channels are in many ways what will push the edges of emerging dialogue surrounding how voice searches might be optimized.

SEO Keywords for Voice Search Differ from Text Search Keywords

Add to all of this the fact that voice searches and text searches are very different.

At the moment, there’s a lot of theory, conjecture, and hyperbole about SEO for voice search, but little clear direction. In the Forbes article, Bentahar also indicated that “[k]eyword research is needed for how people like to phrase questions out loud, understanding the search terms consumers are likely to use.”

This in and of itself opens an enormous can of regionally-specific, colloquial worms. I can’t help think of the off-kilter, axiom-like joke that Canadians sometimes pass around at parties. It goes something like this. Canadians ask “How’re you doin’, eh? Someone from New York might ask “Eh, how you doin’?

Voice Search Behavior and Good Abandonment

As Julia Kiselev et al. wrote in their paper:

“We know that user satisfaction for mobile web search is already very different. So we cannot assume that users who do not interact with the SERP are dissatisfied. This problem of ‘good’ abandonment received a lot of interest in recent years.”

I have found the same. After reading a couple of papers on good abandonment including  Good Abandonment in Mobile and PC Internet Search, and Detecting Good Abandonment in Mobile Search I came to the conclusion that good abandonment (the act of nothing after mobile search results are displayed to the mobile searcher) can’t possibly be construed as much of anything. The absence of something (searcher action post-query), does not indicate the presence of something else, (searcher satisfaction).

I think that the search engine research community have aligned themselves so closely with good abandonment because frankly, there are yet no other identifiable means of determining what an abandoned search means. Stop and think about this logic …

Picture yourself sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to be called into the examination room. You pull out your phone and enter a search into Google for a company name that you saw on the side of a vehicle on your way to the doctor’s office. Just as the SERP finishes loading, you’re called into the examination room. You put your phone to sleep, but the browser is still open. You forget about it until you are about half way home again. Is that too considered good abandonment?

There are dozens of similar scenarios where good abandonment makes no sense whatsoever. You can’t assume something about voice abandonment any more than you should associate lack of interaction with the browser post-text-search as good abandonment. The phrase good abandonment is at best a term used because there is no other data on which to quantify abandoned search results.

Voice Search Optimized Content for User Experience

In his article SEO Trends for 2017: Why Voice Search and Mobile Could Be Big, Sam Saidman wrote that SEO companies need to “provide voice search-optimized content that benefits the user’s experience.”

But no one clearly knows for certain what voice search-optimized content looks like yet. At the moment, the search engines hold all the cards, and the closest SEOs could hope for is a glimpse at server logs for voice searches.

Additional Voice Search Usage and Statistics – Voice Search Queries Still Far From Natural Language

Fortunately, researchers like Ido Guy can give us some ideas of what to focus on. Guy is a Principal Research Engineer at Yahoo Research. In his paper Searching by Talking: Analysis of Voice Queries on Mobile Web Search, Guy shares “we (presumably Yahoo!) perform a query log analysis of half a million voice queries, issued to the mobile application of a commercial web search engine, over a period of six months.”

Not only was the voice query log analyzed, it was compared to sample text queries on mobile of the same relative size.

Guy further reports that:

“…(w)e provide empirical evidence, based on language modeling, that voice queries are closer to natural language than text queries, yet are still distant from natural question language.”

The analysis was based on 500,000 random voice queries performed by 50,000 unique searchers, over a period of 6 months in 2015. Voice queries were predominantly more frequent during the day from 8am to 8pm, and text queries were more frequently carried out from 8pm to 8am. These stats were consistent 7 days a week.

Voice query lengths of 5 words or more comprised 34.5% of all voice queries, as compared to only 21.2% of text queries. On average, voice queries are definitely longer than voice. But what I find most interesting is the distinctive term set used by voice as opposed to what is used during text queries.

Terms most used on the voice list include:

  • Pronouns
  • Question words
  • Function words like determiners
  • Prepositions
  • But rarely any nouns.

On the other hand, the text search list included numerous abbreviations for states, such as nc, tx, ca, etc. These were almost never used on voice searches.

Voice queries usually began with question words How and What. The most distinctive words used on a text search were Facebook and Pornhub.

Guy also wrote that “A recent survey of 1400 U.S. smartphone users found that 55% of the teenagers use voice search every day.”

In an article titled How Voice Search Will Change Digital Marketing — For the Better,  Purna Virji refers to a voice search study by Thrive Analytics that indicates 71% of mobile personal assistants users are 18-19, and 59% are 30 to 43.

But even with widespread usage of voice for this particular age group, click-through rates are substantially higher for text searches than for voice searches, and at greater than 2:1 ratio. Not surprisingly, voice searches focused more on audio/video content. And that is where the most dramatic rift between text and voice search begins to occur.

Voice Search Trends and Behaviour

Overall, voice searches also tended to focus on topics that required less screen interaction than text searches. This is another clue for the SEO community that voice is undoubtedly evolving into its own, distinct taxonomic search group.

Guy goes on to write in his study that his “…findings suggest that voice queries pose their own type of language, in-between traditional text queries and natural-language questions” and that “…new metrics for evaluating user satisfaction of voice queries should be developed.”

These glimpses of a new taxonomy of searcher, slowly being revealed through research paper after research paper, is beginning to outline how differently everyone will have to examine the voice search aspect of SEO.

Voice searchers use distinctly different queries than text searchers on mobile. And even though there may be similar, overlying characteristics, voice searchers are not using natural-language questions per se.

The Future of SEO for Voice Search

Voice search will require a whole new set of measurement devices, an entirely new lexicon of terminology, and a willingness by SEO strategists to explore all avenues of presentation to voice search users. With so many details still to be examined, and so many questions to be explored, 2017 is certainly going to be interesting for SEO.

If you have any questions about voice search, how to develop a voice search strategy that makes sense for the shifting landscape of vocal search, or just want to contribute your two cents worth to the discussion, contact us today!

Phone: 1-888-262-6687

Email: contact@1stonthelist.ca

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Voice Activated SEO Strategy for Google Home Device

Google Home is a voice-activated speaker powered by Google Assistant. You can ask it questions or tell it to do things, much like the Google Search function on your computer or phone, but in a hands free speaker version.

As Google’s entry into the home market, the Google Home device was released in October 2016 (just in time for people to add to their Christmas wishlists) and is expected to ship nearly 3 million Google Home devices in 2017 (according to Strategy Analytics).

With voice only search devices like Google Home and the Amazon Echo entering the home it is important to recognize voice only search within your SEO strategy.

As a business owner invested in an SEO Strategy for your website you may be wondering what does this mean for you?

To ride the upcoming wave of voice-activated SEO there are two significant concepts to become familiar with:

  1. Featured Snippets
  2. Good Abandonment

Why Did Google Create Featured Snippets?

Ever since the first iPhone was released in 2007 the search engines have continually evolved and adapted their results to more effectively present Search Results to mobile devices. Google’s Featured Snippets were part of that evolution. The thinking was (and is even more so now) that short, concise answers to questions right in the search result would more readily adapt to responsive design. It turns out, they also translate well (in most instances) to voice.

What none of the Search Engines had during the first years of smartphone devices was a means of successfully measuring or monitoring the satisfaction level of the answers shown in a Featured Snippet search result. For example, a mobile user would search a term, and if Google found an appropriate answer online, it would likely present it as a Featured Snippet to a mobile device.

If the answer satisfied the searcher, no further clicks occurred on the device (this is what we call “good abandonment” and will discuss next). Google was left wondering how to gauge the results, and most SEO firms were left trying to figure out how to utilize this information for their clients.

What is Good Abandonment?

Good abandonment is an abandoned, informational query addressed successfully on the results page which requires no further click or query refinement.

In a 2009 paper titled Good Abandonment in Mobile and PC Internet Search (Google et al.), they used the term Good Abandonment to describe just such a query. Essentially, the absence of any action on the part of the mobile user after the initial query was deemed to be Good Abandonment. The logic was, the user was satisfied with the answer (Featured Snippet) provided at the top of the result and no further action on the part of the searcher was required.

In a 2016 paper titled Detecting Good Abandonment in Mobile Search (Microsoft et al.), the research logic focused on gestures on mobile devices as underlying indicators of Good Abandonment. But in both studies, the principle units of measurement seemed to remain relatively the same. The absence of actions post-query was interpreted as the presence of a degree of satisfaction.

SEO for Google Home Device

So what do these things all mean for Google Home and voice activated SEO?

The SEO community is already writing articles as a result of what Google Home presents to users. A Moz piece titled How to Rank on Google Home is an interesting peek into what Google Home finds for a variety of different searches.

Google Home does a better job of presenting results for specific queries than it does for more general questions. And Google’s Explore Features section of Google Home helps provide a list of topic areas currently addressed by the device.

As Search Engine Land expresses in another article titled SEO without SERPs, I feel that the most applicable areas for SEO will currently be Facts & Info searches on Google Home, and Local Guide. While these regions may not leave much travel space for introduction into your specific SEO portfolio, look for Google to expand Home’s repertoire of responses in the coming months and years as they will no doubt refine and expand its infrastructure.

Focus on Featured Snippets

Until the SEO community does some research and exploration into other ways to optimize websites for Google Home, intensive focus on Featured Snippets seems to be the most likely method of gaining voice-activated entry in Home’s world.

The ability to summarize a question and uniquely answer that query in a way that garners Google’s attention for Home is likely to become a very specialized skill. The categories of questions (Facts & Info and Local Guide) available to pursue for Home do not provide much room to explore. They are not as much roadmaps for definitive voice search success but rather points of interest on a vocal highway which Google will undoubtedly continue to widen and pave as they explore.

If you have any questions about Google Home and SEO, call us today for more information at 1-888-262-6687.

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Guide to Writing Search Engine Friendly Content

A good SEO content strategy is an essential part of every Internet marketing campaign, so if a client is unwilling or reluctant to make changes to their existing content, then we offer to develop what we call information pages; SEO website content writing designed to support the keyword terms the client is targeting.At 1st on the List we continually get clients who are in serious need of not just more content, but also good search engine friendly content on their website. Yet, many are hesitant to make the necessary changes to their existing site page text.

SEO Content Writing Tips & Advice

[tooltip tip=”Search Engine Optimization”]SEO[/tooltip] content pages can be written in the same voice or tone as the main site pages, but include optimized text copy that supports the target keyword phrases while helping to describe the main products or services to website visitors.

In SEO content writing you will need to naturally integrate proper “key” words (keywords) so that the supporting text will increase search engine rankings and make the website more visible to online searchers.

In addition to naturally representing your targeted keyword phrases on your website, SEO content writing also:

  1. Provides Information that help visitors make purchasing decisions
  2. Includes strong “calls to action” or “closing” action statements
  3. Generally acts as “higher converting” web pages on your site

Developing a good SEO content strategy is essential to both new and existing websites because they provide pages that can achieve high rankings, increase conversions and significantly raise your return on investment.

SEO Content Strategy

Optimized website pages can increase the quality and number of leads both online and offline. Here are three SEO content writing tips that do justice to your products and services, help your content look professional and organized, and send the right messages to the Search Engines.

1.  Crafting Optimized Titles, Headings & Sub-Headings

For search engines and searchers alike, a catchy title or page heading that summarizes the page content can be attention grabbing, creating more interest for the information the page has to offer.

For visitors, optimized page titles may cause intrigue, compelling them to read on. For the search engines it helps them understand the core focus of the copy and the relevant keyword phrases plus, it can help increase rankings for both the targeted keywords as well as the site’s overall theme.

Page sub-headings can do the same but they also help make the page more reader friendly, allowing the reader to scan the page for pertinent information that keeps their interest.

2. Researching and Creating Search Engine Friendly Content

As a copywriter who doesn’t necessarily know the company as intimately as the owner or marketing manager, it is necessary to examine the content within the website before beginning to create copy or text content.

Understanding the tone, branding and unique positioning or value proposition is important and it needs to be consistent across the website, which means it must be incorporated into any new SEO content writing.

Additionally an SEO copywriter may need to conduct general industry research to ensure that they have enough information to draw from when writing the optimized website content.

Product or service features are essential but it’s more important to write about the benefits of the product or service, since this is what the reader is after most.

One last useful step in the writing process is to compare products against competitors to gauge any additional benefits potential customers would receive by choosing your products or services over your competitors. These added benefits are then incorporated into the SEO content writing.

3. Strong Calls to Action –
The Signals that “Closing” Statements Send

Some may think that a call to action or “closing action” statement (as it is sometimes called) is not something a search engine would care much about; quite the contrary!

The search engines care more about your call to action than a visitor does. Your call to action helps the search engines understand what type of visitors you want to have at your website.

Information Based – When you have a call to action that says, “read more” or “find out more” or “learn more”, that sends a message to Google and the other major search engines that you are providing information. In turn your website would be more likely to show up for keywords or phrases where the users intent is to gather information; such as phrases that utilize words like “info”, “information on …”, “how to…”, “what is…” etc.

Purchase Based – If your call to action or closing action statement leans more towards “order now” or “buy today” or “contact us”, this sends a message to the search engines that you want to reach searchers who are looking to order your specific products or services as opposed to searchers who are information gatherers. This will cause your website to be shown more when phrases like “order….”, buy….”, “….prices” and “…..comparison” are typed in.

It is crucial for you to reach web searchers throughout the buying cycle. Strong calls to action:

  • Help to increase visitor conversions
  • Compel visitors to complete the next step to contact you or order from you
  • Communicate your intentions to the search engines
  • As well as align your website’s intentions with the searchers intent

What’s the Difference?
Copywriting Verses SEO Content Writing

Generally a copywriter writes creative and compelling copy and titles (headings) to engage the reader and communicate a message or brand.

Straight ahead copywriting may be effective for communicating to your visitors but they do not always provide the search engines with what is needed for high rankings, which is necessary to get your message in front of online visitors.

SEO content writing differs because while it still needs to be good copy, it is created based around the theme of the keywords or phrases you selected during the keyword research phase of your search engine optimization campaign. In this way each informational content page is focused on a very specific topic.

Creativity is required to craft copy that is compelling while incorporating targeted keyword phrases and supporting text with strong “calls to action”. Often times, this is what the average copywriter misses.

The end goal of your SEO content strategy is to provide valuable, relevant content for your visitors that will help inform and motivate but at the same time meet the criteria of the search engines for top search engine rankings.

IF SEO content writing is a priority and you need assistance developing a good SEO content strategy, we invite you to visit our Website Content Optimization page for more information.

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