Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Novedades sobre las funciones de rastreo e indexación de Google para teléfonos de gama baja

Los dispositivos móviles limitados, también llamados "teléfonos de gama baja", requieren un tipo especial de lenguaje de marcas o un transcodificador del contenido web. La mayoría de los sitios web han dejado de ofrecer contenido compatible con este tipo de teléfonos en WAP/WML. Por este motivo, hemos modificado la forma en que rastreamos el contenido para teléfonos de gama baja (estos cambios no afectan al contenido para smartphones):
1. Hemos retirado el robot de Google para teléfonos de gama baja


A partir de ahora, dejaremos de usar los user-agents para teléfonos de gama baja para rastrear la búsqueda.
2. Utilizaremos anotaciones de enlace "portátiles" para la publicación dinámica de contenido para teléfonos de gama baja


Algunos sitios web ofrecen contenido para teléfonos de gama baja mediante la publicación dinámica en función del user-agent del usuario. Para comprender esta configuración, asegúrate de que las páginas para ordenadores y smartphones de tu sitio web cuentan con otro enlace a la URL autorreferente para dispositivos (teléfonos de gama baja) portátiles:
<link rel="alternate" media="handheld" href="[URL de la página actual]" />
Esto supone un cambio, ya que antes había que utilizar solo la cabecera HTTP "vary: user-agent", por eso hemos actualizado la documentación sobre cómo crear páginas para teléfonos de gama baja. Esperamos que añadir este elemento de enlace te resulte sencillo; gracias por tu ayuda en este tema. Seguiremos mostrando URLs para teléfonos de gama baja en la búsqueda cuando sepamos reconocerlas y sean apropiadas para los usuarios.
3. Retiraremos las herramientas para teléfonos de gama baja en Search Console.


Al desaparecer el robot de Google para teléfonos de gama baja, las opciones de la herramienta Explorar como Google, los errores de rastreo y las extensiones especiales de sitemaps para estos dispositivos dejan de tener utilidad. Las extensiones de sitemaps habituales y otras extensiones de este tipo (como las extensiones para vídeos o Google Noticias), así como las demás opciones de Explorar como Google en Search Console, seguirán estando disponibles.
Hemos hecho todo lo posible para que los cambios fueran mínimos. La mayoría de los sitios web no publican contenido para teléfonos de gama baja, de modo que no deberían verse afectados. Si tu sitio web ofrecía este tipo de contenido, te damos las gracias por facilitar el acceso a Internet a los usuarios de teléfonos de gama baja de todo el mundo.
Si tienes alguna pregunta, no dudes en plantearla en los foros de ayuda para webmasters.
Escrito por John Mueller, analista de Tendencias para Webmasters, Google Switzerland. Publicado por Joan Ortiz, Equipo de Calidad de Google.


from El Blog para Webmasters http://ift.tt/2gW2i4l
via IFTTT

Lanza el mensaje ideal para estas fiestas

En estos instantes, los supercompradores están navegando por Internet en busca de los mejores regalos con que agasajar a familiares y amigos estas fiestas: desde los gadgets más originales hasta las últimas tendencias. De hecho, cuatro de cada cinco compradores utilizan su smartphone durante las fiestas mientras hacen otras actividades o en sus ratos libres.1 Esto significa que es importante estar presente en los momentos del día en que los usuarios, dondequiera que se encuentren, consultan información en sus aplicaciones y sitios web favoritos. Para llegar a estos consumidores con un mensaje diseñado especialmente para estas fiestas, te sugerimos tres de nuestras más recientes innovaciones en anuncios de display:

Envía anuncios increíbles con formato de catálogo en Gmail

Durante las fiestas, los compradores consultan el correo electrónico para ver las novedades de sus marcas favoritas. Ahora puedes deslumbrarlos con atractivos anuncios con formato de catálogo: cuando hagan clic en tu anuncio de Gmail, este se expandirá para mostrar hasta cuatro vídeos o imágenes multimedia con su correspondiente descripción. Por ejemplo, una marca de productos de belleza podría mostrar a los clientes ofertas de sombras de ojos tricolor con lápiz de ojos a juego en Black Friday. Estos anuncios se adaptan automáticamente a todo tipo de dispositivos, de modo que los usuarios pueden desplazarse por las imágenes cuando utilicen Gmail, en cualquier momento y estén donde estén.



Atractivos anuncios con formato de catálogo en Gmail

Personaliza tu mensaje con anuncios adaptables

Nunca había sido tan fácil crear anuncios específicos para cada temporada. Con los anuncios adaptables que presentamos hace poco podrás llegar a más usuarios, ya que se adaptan para mostrarse en millones de sitios web y aplicaciones de la Red de Display de Google (GDN). La flexibilidad que ofrecen estos anuncios también te permite personalizar el mensaje de tu marca para las fiestas con el mínimo esfuerzo. Solo tienes que proporcionar los títulos específicos para las fiestas, una descripción, una imagen y la URL del sitio web de la empresa, y Google se encargará de diseñar automáticamente atractivos anuncios adaptables para toda la Red de Display. Ahora, añadir productos de temporada y promociones para estas fiestas a tus campañas es rápido y fácil. La empresa de tecnología de pagos iZettle utilizó anuncios adaptables y duplicó el porcentaje de conversiones que anteriormente obtenía con los anuncios de texto.

Usa extensiones de ubicación para que los clientes te encuentren fácilmente

Si estas fiestas los consumidores saben dónde encontrarte, es más probable que se dejen caer por la tienda. Las extensiones de ubicación para anuncios de display permiten destacar la dirección y las fotos de la empresa, así como las indicaciones de Google Maps, para que conviertas los clics online en tráfico de visitas a la tienda. The Home Depot utilizó extensiones de ubicación en anuncios de display para llegar a los consumidores que consultaban información en su teléfono cuando se hallaban cerca de las tiendas más populares de la marca. El resultado fue un aumento del 800% en el ROI en tiendas.

Esta es la época del año más importante para muchas empresas. Lanzar el mensaje adecuado es clave para que los clientes elijan tu marca frente a la de la competencia. Tanto si el objetivo de tu empresa es incrementar las ventas en el sitio web como incentivar las visitas a las tiendas, esperamos que estas innovaciones te ayuden a contar tu historia para captar a más clientes durante estas fiestas.

Publicado por Brad Bender, vicepresidente de Publicidad de Display y Vídeo


1 Google/Ipsos, "Post-Holiday Shopping Intentions Study—Total Shoppers Report" (Estudio posnavideño de intención de compra: informe sobre número total de compradores), base: encuestados que han utilizado un smartphone para las compras navideñas, n = 410, enero de 2016


from Dentro de AdWords - España http://ift.tt/2fPQGxX
via IFTTT

5 Takeaways from Earning Links in 130 Countries

Posted by kerryjones

I was in Peru earlier this year for a digital marketing conference, and I overwhelmingly heard the same frustration: “It’s really hard to use outreach to earn links or PR coverage in our country.”

This wasn’t for lack of trying. As I continued to hear this sentiment during my visit, I learned there simply weren’t a lot of opportunities. For one thing, in Peru, there aren’t nearly as many publishers as in more populous countries. Most publishers expected payment for mentioning a brand. Furthermore, journalists did a lot of job-hopping, so maintaining relationships was difficult.

This is a conundrum not limited to Peru. I know many people outside of the US can relate. When you see the Fractl team and others sharing stories about how we earn hundreds of links for a single content piece, you might think it must be nice to do outreach somewhere like the US where online publishers are plentiful and they'll feature great content with no strings attached. While the work my team does isn’t easy by any means, I do recognize that there are ample opportunities for earning links and press coverage from American publishers.

What can you do if opportunities are scarce in your country?

One solution is focusing your outreach efforts on publishers in neighboring countries or countries with the same language and a similar culture. During conversations with the Attachmedia team (the company hosting the conference I was at), I learned they had much greater success earning media stories and building links outside of Peru because publishers in surrounding South American countries were more receptive to their email pitches and publishing third-party content.

But you may not need to do any international outreach if you know how to create the type of content that will organically attract attention beyond your borders.

At Fractl, many of our top-performing client campaigns have secured a lot of international links even without us doing much, or any, international outreach. To dig deeper, we recently conducted an analysis of 290 top-performing client content campaigns to determine which content naturally attracted coverage from international publishers (and thus, international links). Altogether, these campaigns were featured by publishers in 130 countries, earning more than 4,000 international media stories.

In this post, I’ll share what we found about what causes content to spread around the world.

1. Domestic success was a key factor in driving international placements for Fractl’s campaigns.

For years, we’ve noticed that if content gets enough attention in the US, it will organically begin to receive international press and links. Watch how this happens in the GIF below, which visualizes how one of our campaigns spread globally after reaching critical mass in the US:

Mapping-Viral-Content.gif

Our study confirmed that there’s a correlation between earning a high number of links domestically and earning international links.

When we looked at our 50 most successful client campaigns that have earned the highest number of media stories, we discovered that these campaigns also received the most international coverage. Out of the 4,000 international placements we analyzed, 70 percent of them came from these 50 top-performing campaigns.

We also found that content which earned at least 25 international media pickups also earned at least 25 domestic pickups, so there’s a minimum one-to-one ratio of international to domestic pickups.

2. Overcome language barriers with visual formats that don’t rely on text.

Maps showing a contrast between countries were the visualizations of choice for international publishers.

top-50-by-format.jpg

World maps can be easily understood by global audiences, and make it easy for publishers to find an angle to cover. A client campaign, which looked at how much people eat and drink around the world, included maps highlighting differences between the countries. This was our fourth-highest-performing campaign in terms of international coverage.

calories-map.png It’s easy for a writer whose primary language isn’t English to look at a shaded map like the one above and pick out the story about his or her country. For example, a Belgian publisher who covered the consumption campaign used a headline that roughly translated to “Belgians eat more calories than Americans”:

belgian-publisher.png

Images were the second most popular visual format, which tells us that a picture may be worth a thousand words in any language. One great example of this is our “Evolution of Miss Universe” campaign, where we created a series of animated and interactive visualizations using photos of Miss Universe winners since 1952:

The simplicity of the visuals made this content accessible to all viewers regardless of the language they spoke. Paired with the international angle, this helped the campaign gain more than 40 pickups from global sites.

As we move down the rankings, formats that relied on more text, such as infographics, were less popular internationally. No doubt this is because international audiences can’t connect with content they can’t understand.

When creating text-heavy visualizations, consider if someone who speaks a different language can understand it — would it still make sense if you removed all the text?

Pro tip: If your outreach strategy is targeting multiple countries or a country where more than one language is widely spoken, it may be worth the effort to produce text-heavy visuals in multiple languages.

3. Topics that speak to universal human interests performed best internationally.

Our top-performing international campaigns show a clear preference for topics that resonate globally. The six topics that performed best internationally were:

  1. Drugs and alcohol
  2. Health and fitness
  3. Entertainment
  4. Sex and relationships
  5. Travel
  6. Technology

Bear in the mind that these topics are reflective of our client campaigns, so every topic imaginable was not included in this study.

We drilled this down a little more and looked at the specific topics covered in our top 50 campaigns. You’ll notice many of the most popular topics would make your grandma blush.

international-data-by-topic.jpg

We know that controversial topics are highly effective in grabbing attention, and the list above confirms that pushing boundaries works on a global scale. (We weren’t exactly surprised that a campaign called “Does Size Matter?” resonated internationally.)

But don’t look at the chart above and assume that you need to make your content about sex, drugs, and rock and roll if you want to gain international attention. As you can see, even pedestrian fare performed well globally. Consider how you can create content that speaks to basic human interests, like technology, food, and … Instagram.

4. A global angle isn’t necessary.

While our top five international campaigns did have a global focus, more than half of our 50 top-performing international campaigns did not have a global angle. This tells us that a geographic angle doesn’t determine international success.

Some examples of non-geographic ideas that performed well are:

  • A tool that calculates indirect sexual exposure based on how many partners you’ve had
  • The types of white lies people commonly tell and hear
  • A face-off between Siri, Cortana, and Google Now performance
  • A sampling of how many bacteria and germs are found in hotel rooms

We also found that US-centric campaigns were, unsurprisingly, less likely to succeed. Only three of our campaigns with America-focused titles received more than 25 international placements. If your content topic does have a geographic angle, make sure to broaden it to have a multi-national or worldwide focus.

Pro tip: Consider how you can add an international twist to content ideas that already performed well domestically. The Miss Universe campaign example I shared above? That came to fruition after we successfully did a similar campaign about Miss America. Similarly, we could likely reboot our “Tolerance in America” campaign to look at racism around the world and expect it to be successful, as this topic already proved popular at home and is certainly relevant worldwide.

5. The elements of share-worthy content hold true internationally.

Over the years, we’ve seen time and time again that including certain elements in content greatly increases the chance of success. All of our content that achieved international success included some combination of the following:

  • Surprising information
  • An emotionally resonant topic
  • A universally appealing topic
  • Comparison or ranking of multiple places, things, or ideas
  • A geographic angle
  • A pop culture angle

Look back at the content examples I shared in this post, and make note of how many of the characteristics above are present in each one. To increase the likelihood that your content appeals to global audiences, be sure to read this post about the vital role these elements play in creating content that earns a lot of links and social shares.

What has your experience been like using content to attract international press and links? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you — leave a comment below!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2gUnDLi
via IFTTT

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The 7 Citation Building Myths Plaguing Local SEO

Posted by JoyHawkins

Previously, I wrote an article unveiling some of the most common myths I see in the Local SEO space. I thought I’d do a follow-up that specifically talked about the myths pertaining to citations that I commonly hear from both small business owners and SEOs alike.

Myth #1: If your citations don’t include your suite number, you should stop everything you're doing and fix this ASAP.

Truth: Google doesn’t even recognize suite numbers for a whopping majority of Google business listings. Even though you enter a suite number in Google My Business, it doesn’t translate into the "Suite #" field in Google MapMaker — it simply gets eliminated. Google also pays more attention to the location (pin) marker of the business when it comes to determining the actual location and less to the actual words people enter in as the address, as there can be multiple ways to name a street address. Google’s Possum update recently introduced a filter for search queries that is based on location. We’ve seen this has to do with the address itself and how close other businesses in the same industry are to your location. Whether or not you have a suite number in Google My Business has nothing to do with it.

Darren Shaw from Whitespark, an expert on everything related to citations, says:

“You often can’t control the suite number on your citations. Some sites force the suite number to appear before the address, some after the address, some with a # symbol, some with “Ste,” and others with “Suite.” If minor discrepancies like these in your citations affected your citation consistency or negatively impacted your rankings, then everyone would have a problem.”

In summary, if your citations look great but are missing the suite number, move along. There are most likely more important things you could be spending time on that would actually impact your ranking.

Myth #2: Minor differences in your business name in citations are a big deal.

Truth: Say your business name is "State Farm: Bob Smith," yet one citation lists you as “Bob Smith Insurance” and another as “Bob Smith State Farm.” As Mike Blumenthal states: “Put a little trust in the algorithm.” If Google was incapable of realizing that those 3 names are really the same business (especially when their address & phone number are identical), we’d have a big problem on our hands. There would be so many duplicate listings on Google we wouldn’t even begin to be able to keep track. Currently, I only generally see a lot of duplicates if there are major discrepancies in the address and phone number.

Darren Shaw also agrees on this:

“I see this all the time with law firms. Every time a new partner joins the firm or leaves the firm, they change their name. A firm can change from “Fletcher, McDonald, & Jones” to “Fletcher, Jones, & Smith” to “Fletcher Family Law” over the course of 3 years, and as long as the phone number and address stay the same, it will have no negative impact on their rankings. Google triangulates the data it finds on the web by three data points: name, address, and phone number. If two of these are a match, and then the name is a partial match, Google will have no problem associating those citations with the correct listing in GMB.”

Myth #3: NAP cleanup should involve fixing your listings on hundreds of sites.

Truth: SEO companies use this as a scare tactic, and it works very well. They have a small business pay them for citation cleanup. They’ll do a scan of your incorrect data and send you a list of hundreds of directories that have your information wrong. This causes you to gasp and panic and instantly realize you must hire them to spend hours cleaning all this up, as it must be causing the ranking of your listing on Google to tank.

Let’s dive into an example that I've seen. Local.com is a site that feeds to hundreds of smaller directories on newspaper sites. If you have a listing wrong on Local.com, it might appear that your listing is incorrect on hundreds of directories. For example, these three listings are on different domains, but if you look at the pages they're identical and they all say “Local.com” at the top:

http://ift.tt/2gEl2SH

http://ift.tt/2gEixjk

http://ift.tt/2gEfBDy

Should this cause you to panic? No. Fixing it on Local.com itself should fix all the hundreds of other places. Even if it didn’t, Google hasn’t even indexed any of these URLs. (Note: they might index my examples since I just linked to them in this Moz article, so I’m including some screenshots from while I was writing this):

If Google hasn’t even indexed the content, it’s a good sign that the content doesn’t mean much and it’s nothing you should stress about. Google would have no incentive or reason to index all these different URLs due to the fact that the content on them is literally the same. Additionally, no one links to them (aside from me in this article, of course).

As Darren Shaw puts it,

“This one really irks me. There are WAY more important things for you to spend your time/money on than trying to fix a listing on a site like scranton.myyellowpageclassifieds.biz. Chances are, any attempt to update this listing would be futile anyway, because small sites like these are basically unmanaged. They’re collecting their $200/m in Adsense revenue and don’t have any interest in dealing with or responding to any listing update requests. In our Citation Audit and Cleanup service we offer two packages. One covers the top 30 sites + 5 industry/city-specific sites, and the other covers the top 50 sites + 5 industry/city-specific sites. These are sites that are actually important and valuable to local search. Audit and cleanup on sites beyond these is generally a waste of time and money.”

Myth #4: There's no risk in cancelling an automated citation service.

People often wonder what might happen to their NAP issues if they cancel their subscription with a company like Yext or Moz Local. Although these companies don’t do anything to intentionally cause old data to come back, there have been some recent interesting findings around what actually happens when you cancel.

Truth: In one case, Phil Rozek did a little case study for a business that had to cancel Moz Local recently. The good news is that although staying with them is generally a good decision, this business didn’t seem to have any major issues after cancelling.

Yext claims on their site that they don’t do anything to push the old data back that was previously wrong. They explain that when you cancel, “the lock that was put in place to protect the business listing is no longer present. Once this occurs, the business listing is subject to the normal compilation process at the search engine, online directory, mobile app, or social network. In fact, because Yext no longer has this lock in place, Yext has no control over the listing directly at all, and the business listing data will now act as it normally would occur without Yext.”

Nyagoslav Zhekov just recently published a study on cancelling Yext and concluded that most of the listings either disappear or revert back to their previous incorrect state after cancelling. It seems that Yext acts as a sort of cover on top of the listing, and once Yext is cancelled, that cover is removed. So, there does seem to be some risk with cancelling Yext.

In summary, there is definitely a risk when you decide to cancel an ongoing automated service that was previously in place to correct your citations. It’s important for people to realize that if they decide to do this, they might want to budget for some manual citation building/cleanup in case any issues arise.

Myth #5: Citation building is the only type of link building strategy you need to succeed at Local SEO.

Many Local SEO companies have the impression that citation building is the only type of backlinking strategy needed for small businesses to rank well in the 3-pack. According to this survey that Bright Local did, 72% of Local SEOs use citation building as a way of building links.

Truth: Local SEO Guide found in their Local Search Ranking Factors study that although citations are important, if that’s the only backlinking strategy you’re using, you're most likely not going to rank well in competitive markets. They found also found that links are the key competitive differentiator even when it comes to Google My Business Rankings. So if you're in a competitive industry or market and want to dominate the 3-pack, you need to look into additional backlinking strategies over and above citations.

Darren adds more clarity to the survey’s results by stating,

“They’re saying that citations are still very important, but they are a foundational tactic. You absolutely need a core base of citations to gain trust at Google, and if you don’t have them you don’t have a chance in hell at ranking, but they are no longer a competitive difference maker. Once you have the core 50 or so citations squared away, building more and more citations probably isn’t what your local SEO campaign needs to move the needle further.”

Myth #6: Citations for unrelated industries should be ignored if they share the same phone number.

This was a question that has come up a number of times with our team. If you have a restaurant that once had a phone number but then closes its doors, and a new law firm opens up down the street and gets assigned that phone number, should the lawyer worry about all the listings that exist for the restaurant (since they're in different industries)?

Truth: I reached out to Nyagoslav Zhekov, the Director of Local Search at Whitespark, to get the truth on this one. His response was:

“As Google tries to mimic real-life experiences, sooner or later this negative experience will result in some sort of algorithmic downgrading of the information by Google. If Google manages to figure out that a lot of customers look for and call a phone number that they think belongs to another business, it is logical that it will result in negative user experience. Thus, Google will assign a lower trust score to a Google Maps business record that offers information that does not clearly and unquestionably belong to the business for which the record is. Keeping in mind that the phone number is, by design and by default, the most unique and the most standardized information for a business (everything else is less standardize-able than the phone number), this is, as far as I am concerned, the most important information bit and the most significant identifier Google uses when determining how trustworthy particular information for a business is.”

He also pointed out that users finding the phone number for the restaurant and calling it continually would be a negative experience for both the customer and the law firm (who would have to continually confirm they're not a restaurant) so there would be added benefit in getting these listings for the restaurant marked closed or removed.

Since Darren Shaw gave me so much input for this article, he also wanted to add a seventh myth that he comes across regularly:

Myth #7: Google My Business is a citation.

“This one is maybe more of a mis-labelling problem than a myth, but your listing at Google isn’t really a citation. At Whitespark we refer to Google, Bing, and Apple Maps as 'Core Search Engines' (yes, Yahoo has been demoted to just a citation). The word 'citation' comes from the concept of 'citing' your sources in an academic paper. Using this conceptual framework, you can think of your Google listing as the academic paper, and all of your listings out on the web as the sources that cite the business. Your Google listing is like the queen bee and all the citations out there are the workers contributing to keep the queen bee alive and healthy.”

Hopefully that lays some of the fears and myths around citations to rest. If you have questions or ideas of other myths on this topic, we’d love to hear about it in the comments!


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2gB1YXW
via IFTTT

Monday, November 28, 2016

Despídete del informe "Palabras clave del contenido"

Al principio, cuando Search Console todavía se llamaba "Herramientas para webmasters", la función "Palabras clave del contenido" era la única opción para ver lo que detectaba el robot de Google al rastrear un sitio web. De hecho, era útil para saber que Google podía rastrear las páginas de tu sitio web o detectar si este había sido pirateado.
Ahora dispones de muchas más opciones: puedes comprobar fácilmente cualquier página de tu sitio web y ver cómo el robot de Google la explora al instante, la función Análisis de búsqueda te indica las palabras clave para las que hemos mostrado tu sitio web en la búsqueda y Google te informa de muchos tipos de piratería automáticamente. Por otro lado, a menudo los usuarios no entendían por qué ciertas palabras clave se incluían en la lista que mostraba la función "Palabras clave del contenido". Por eso, ha llegado el momento de retirar esta función de Search Console.
Las palabras, es decir, las palabras clave, siguen siendo importantes para que Google (y los usuarios) entiendan las páginas de tu sitio web. Sin embargo, aunque nuestros sistemas han mejorado, no pueden leerte el pensamiento, de modo que es importante que describas claramente el contenido de tu sitio web y aquello por lo que quieres que los usuarios lo encuentren. Explícales qué hace que tu sitio web, así como los productos y servicios que ofreces, sean únicos.
¿Cuál ha sido la palabra clave que más te ha gustado o sorprendido de las que se han mostrado con esta función? Cuéntanoslo en tus comentarios.

Escrito por John Mueller, analista de Tendencias para Webmasters, Google Switzerland. Publicado por Joan Ortiz, Equipo de Calidad de Google.


from El Blog para Webmasters http://ift.tt/2gAoIUq
via IFTTT

5 Lead Generation Ideas to Help You Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rates

Posted by lkolowich

It’s been years since the power’s shifted away from marketers and advertisers and in favor of Internet consumers. Now more than ever, people are empowered to choose their own experiences online. They’re actively avoiding ad content — and instead of living by advertisers’ rule books, they’re deciding what to click on, what to read, what to download, and what to buy … and what not to.

And they have a lot of choices.

When inbound marketers like us are looking to generate more leads from our website, we need to think not just about how to capture people’s attention, but how to capture it in a way that makes people want to learn more from us. A smart lead generation strategy includes creating valuable offers and experiences that fit seamlessly into the context of what people already like and want to do online. It’s the consumer’s world; us marketers are just living in it.

People read calls-to-action that say things like “Sign up here!” as basically synonymous with “We’re gonna spam you.” If you’re recycling these same old lead generation tactics over and over again, it’s quickly going to become white noise. But calls-to-action that fit into the context of what a person’s doing already? That’s smart marketing.

If you want to increase the conversion rate on your website, you need to get smart and creative with your lead generation tactics. Asking for blog subscriptions and gating high-quality content like comprehensive guides, ebooks, and whitepapers behind landing pages still works, but you have to be smart about where you’re offering them on your website. And they shouldn’t be your only lead generation plays.

There are many ways to get creative with lead generation to make sure you’re reaping the benefits of the traffic you’re working so hard to get. Here are some lead generation ideas for B2B and B2C marketers to try. Test them out, tweak them according to your audience’s preferences, and share your own ideas you have in the comments.

1) Put your calls-to-action in people’s natural eye path.

CTA placement can have a profound effect on the number of leads you’re generating from your site. And yet, not many marketers are spending a whole lot of time thinking about, testing, and tweaking CTA placement to optimize their conversions. Many claim that as long as they place their primary CTA above the fold, they’re good to go. (Side note: Even though putting primary CTAs above the fold is often considered a best practice, even that is still up for debate.)

Start your CTA placement tests by putting them where people’s eyes naturally go on a webpage. An eyetracking study found that when people read a webpage, we naturally start by looking in the upper lefthand corner of the page, and then move our eyes in an F-shaped pattern.

f-pattern-eye-tracking.jpg

[Image credit: Nielsen Norman Group]

Here’s what that looks like:

f-pattern-wireframe.jpg

[Image credit: Envato Studio]

You can capitalize on this natural eye path by placing important information in these key spots. Here’s an example of what that might look like on a website:

f-pattern-with-content.jpg

[Image credit: Envato Studio]

Notice how the business name is placed in the top left, which is where a person would look first. The navigation bar takes over the #2 spot, followed by the value proposition at #3 and the primary CTA at #4.

Does this order look familiar to you? When you’re browsing the web, you might have noticed that many of them put the primary CTA in the top right corner — in that #2 spot. Here are a few real-life examples:

prezi-business-homepage.png

[Prezi’s homepage]

uber-homepage.png

[Uber’s homepage]

barkbox-homepage.png

[BarkBox’s homepage]

In the last example from BarkBox, you’ll notice that the secondary CTAs still follow that F-pattern.

Keep this in mind when you’re placing your CTAs, especially on your homepage and your other popular webpages — and don’t be afraid to experiment based on how it makes sense for your own marketing story should be told.

2) Use pop-up and slide-in forms the right way.

Pop-ups have been vilified in the last few years — and quite understandably, too. Far too many marketers use them in a way that disrupts people’s experience on their website instead of enhancing it.

But pop-ups do work — and, more importantly, when they’re used in a way that’s helpful and not disruptive, they can be a healthy part of your inbound strategy. So if you’re wondering whether you should be using pop-up forms, the short answer is yes — as long as you use them in an inbound-y way. First and foremost, that means offering something valuable and relevant to the people visiting that site page.

When you’re considering what type of pop-up to use and what action should trigger them, think about how people are engaging with your pages. When someone reads a blog post, for instance, they’re typically going to scroll down the page to read the content. In that case, you might consider using a slide-in box that appears when someone’s scrolled a certain percentage of the way down the page.

Here’s a great example from a post on OfficeVibe’s blog about how managers gain respect. While I was scrolling, a banner appeared at the bottom of the screen offering me a live report of employee engagement — an offer that was perfectly relevant, given the post was aimed at managers.

officevibe-banner-pop-up.png

It felt helpful, not disruptive. In other words, it was a responsible use of a pop-up.

Similarly, someone who’s spending time reading through a product page might find value in a time-based pop-up that appears when a visitor’s been on the page for a certain number of seconds, like this one from Ugmonk:

ugmonk-pop-up.png

The most important takeaway here is to align what you offer on a pop-up with the webpage you’re adding it to, and make sure it’s actually adding substantial value.

If you’re looking for a good free tool to get started with inbound-y pop-up forms, I’d recommend you try HubSpot Marketing Free. We built the Lead Flows feature within this free tool to help marketers generate more leads across their entire website without sacrificing user experience.

3) Add anchor texts to old blog posts that align closely with your gated offers.

It’s common for business bloggers to add an end-of-post banner CTA at the end of every one of their blog posts, like this one:

hubspot-banner-cta-example.png

In fact, you might already be including CTAs like this on your own business blog posts. At HubSpot, we include an end-of-post banner CTA on every single one of our posts, and we also add slide-in CTAs to blog posts that prove themselves to convert visitors into leads at a high rate via organic traffic.

But let’s admit it: At first glance, these types of CTAs look a little bit like ads, which can result in banner blindness from our readers. That’s why it’s thanks to a recent study conducted by my colleague Pam Vaughan that our blogging team has added one more, highly effective lead generation tactic to their arsenal: anchor text CTAs.

In Vaughan’s study, she found that anchor text CTAs are responsible for most of our blog leads. On blog posts that included both an anchor text CTA and an end-of-post banner CTA, she found that 47–93% of a blog post's leads came from the anchor text CTA alone, whereas just 6% of the post’s leads came from the end-of-post banner CTA.

What’s an anchor text CTA, you might be wondering? It’s a standalone line text in a blog post linked to a landing page that’s styled as an H3 or an H4 to make it stand out from the rest of the post’s body copy. On HubSpot’s blog, we’ll typically put an anchor text CTA between two paragraphs in the introduction, like this:

hubspot-anchor-text-cta-example.png

What makes anchor text CTAs so effective? Let’s say you search for “press release template” in Google, and you click on the first organic search result — which is currently our blog post about how to write a press release, which I’ve screenshotted above.

As a searcher, the next thing you’d probably do is quickly scan the post to see if it satisfies your search. One of the first things that’ll catch your eye is an anchor text that reads, “Download our free press release template here” — which happens to be exactly what you were looking for when you searched "press release template." There's a pretty good chance you're going to click on it.

This is where relevancy becomes critical. The anchor text CTA works really well in this case because it satisfies the visitor's need right away, within the first few paragraphs of the blog post. The more relevant the anchor text CTA is to what the visitor is looking for, the better it’ll perform. Simply adding an anchor text CTA near the top of every blog post won’t necessarily mean it’ll generate a ton more leads — and frankly, you’ll risk pissing off your loyal subscribers.

If you decide you’d like to experiment with anchor text CTAs, be selective about the posts you add them to. At HubSpot, we typically add them to old posts that rank well in search. We purposely limit our use of anchor text CTAs on brand new posts — because most of the traffic we get to those posts are already leads and some of the biggest fans of our content, whom we want to have the best possible user experience. (You can read more about anchor text CTAs here.)

4) Support the launch of a new campaign with a launch post and other blog posts on related topics.

Every time you launch a new marketing campaign, posting the good news on your blog should be a key part of your launch plan. It’s a great way to let your existing subscribers know what new content, products, and features you’re putting out there, and it also helps introduce these launches to brand-new audiences.

At HubSpot, we’ve found the best strategy for promoting campaigns on the blog is to write one official launch post, followed by a handful of follow-up posts that are relevant to the campaign but are written in the style of a normal blog post. We typically scatter these follow-up posts over the weeks and months following that initial launch.

When done correctly, launch posts and their supporting blog posts have very different formulas:

  • A launch post is between 150–300 words long. It includes a captivating introductory paragraph on the general topic or pain point the campaign is about, followed by a paragraph or two describing how the offer can help and a list of 4–6 bullet points on what the offer includes. It includes one or two in-line text CTAs leading to the campaign, followed by a banner CTA at the end of the post.
  • A supplemental blog post can take on any post format and length typical of what you’d normally publish on your blog, such as a how-to post, a list-based post, or a curated collection post. It includes an end-of-post banner CTA leading to the campaign, and an anchor text CTA in the introduction, if applicable.

Let me show you an example. Earlier this year, HubSpot partnered with Iconosquare to write an ebook on how to use Instagram for business. A few days after we launched the offer online, we published a launch post on HubSpot’s Marketing Blog specifically promoting it to our own audience. Here’s what that launch post looked like:

hubspot-launch-post.png

Notice it has a brief introduction of the topic, an introduction of the ebook as a helpful resource, a bulleted list of what’s inside the ebook, two in-line text CTAs pointing toward the ebook, and an end-of-post banner CTA.

Once we published that initial post, we published a series of follow-up blog posts about the same topic — in this case, Instagram for business — that supported the launch, but promoted it much more subtly. These posts covered topics like:

In each of these cases, we used keyword research to find long-tail keyword phrases related to our offer topic, and then wrote blog posts related to those highly searched terms and included CTAs to our offer.

The goal here? Both to expose our own audience to more content related to the offer and to expose our offer to a new audience: specifically, people who were searching for related topics on search engines, as we’ve found visitors who find our posts through organic search tend to convert at higher rates.

When you’re planning out your next campaign, be sure to include both a launch post and supportive, follow-up blog posts like these — and plan them all out using a blog editorial calendar like the simple one HubSpot’s blogging team uses with Google Calendar.

5) Use social media strategically for lead generation.

Top-of-the-funnel marketing metrics like traffic and brand awareness isn’t all social media is good for. It can still be a helpful — not to mention low-cost — source for lead generation.

In addition to promoting new blog posts and content to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social sites, be sure to regularly post links to blog posts and even directly to the landing pages of offers that have historically performed well for lead generation. You’ll need to do a lead generation analysis of your blog to figure out which posts perform best for lead generation.

When you link directly to landing pages, be sure the copy in your social posts sets the expectation that clicking the link will send people to a landing page, like Canva did in this Facebook post:

canva-facebook-page.png

Contests are another way to generate leads from social. Not only are they fun for your followers, but they can also teach you a whole lot about your audience while simultaneously engaging them, growing your reach, and driving traffic to your website.

In addition to posting links to lead generation forms, you’ll also want to make sure you’re using the real estate for lead generation that’s available to you on the social networks that you’re using. On Facebook for example, use the feature available for Pages that lets you put a simple call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Page. It can help drive more traffic from your Facebook Page to lead generation forms like landing pages and contact sheets.

dollar-shave-club-facebook-CTA.png

Here are more lead generation tips for Facebook, and for Twitter.

In addition to optimizing your webpages and social presence for leads, always be looking for opportunities to increase the traffic of your highest-converting pages by optimizing these pages for the keywords they're already ranking for, and linking to these pages internally and externally.

I hope this list has helped spark some ideas for lead generation tactics to test for your own audience. If you’ve tried any of the tactics I’ve listed above, tell us about your experiences in the comments — and feel free to add more ideas to the list.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2gmKvjb
via IFTTT

Friday, November 25, 2016

Más ayuda sobre la Navegación Segura para webmasters

Durante más de nueve años, la Navegación Segura ha ayudado a los webmasters, a través de Search Console, proporcionándoles información sobre cómo solucionar los problemas de seguridad de sus sitios web. Entre otras cosas, han contado con artículos relevantes del Centro de Ayuda, ejemplos de URL útiles para diagnosticar la presencia de contenido dañino, así como con un proceso para solicitar revisiones del sitio web después de que hayan solucionado los problemas de seguridad de su sitio. Con el paso del tiempo, la Navegación Segura ha ampliado su protección para cubrir amenazas adicionales en la seguridad del usuario, como los sitios web engañosos y el software no deseado.

Para ayudar a los webmasters a resolver los problemas de forma más efectiva todavía, nos complace anunciar que hemos actualizado la información disponible en el informe Problemas de seguridad de Search Console.
Información mostrada a webmasters con problemas de software malintencionado o no deseado, y de suplantación de identidad


La información actualizada proporciona explicaciones más específicas sobre seis problemas de seguridad diferentes que ha detectado la Navegación Segura, incluidos el software malintencionado, las páginas engañosas, las descargas dañinas y las descargas poco habituales. Estas explicaciones proporcionan a los webmasters más contexto y detalles sobre lo que detecta la Navegación Segura. También ofrecemos recomendaciones adaptadas a cada tipo de problema e incluimos ejemplos de URL que los webmasters pueden usar para identificar el origen del problema, además de las acciones de resolución específicas que pueden llevar a cabo para solucionarlo.


El equipo de Navegación Segura te recomienda realizar el registro de tu sitio web en Search Console, a pesar de que en este momento no tengas ningún problema de seguridad. Enviamos notificaciones mediante Search Console para que los webmasters puedan solucionar cualquier problema que surja lo más rápido posible.


Nuestro objetivo es ayudar a los webmasters a proporcionar una experiencia de navegación segura a sus usuarios. Agradeceremos cualquier pregunta o comentario sobre las nuevas funciones en el Foro de ayuda para webmasters de Google, en el que los colaboradores principales y los empleados de Google te pueden ayudar.


Para obtener más información sobre el trabajo constante del equipo de Navegación Segura, que se dedica a arrojar luz sobre el estado de la seguridad de los sitios web y a recomendar prácticas de seguridad más efectivas para los sitios web, consulta nuestro resumen de tendencias y resultados en el Informe de transparencia de Navegación Segura. Si estás interesado en las herramientas que Google proporciona a webmasters y desarrolladores que tienen que tratar con sitios web pirateados, consulta este vídeo, que proporciona una buena descripción.


Escrito por Kelly Hope Harrington, Equipo de Navegación Segura. Publicado por Joan Ortiz, Equipo de Calidad de Búsqueda.


from El Blog para Webmasters http://ift.tt/2gcdpCn
via IFTTT

Backlinks from Client Sites, Sites You Own, Widgets, & Embedded Content: How to Maximize Benefits & Avoid Problems - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

When it comes to certain kinds of backlinks, avoiding penalties can be a real gray area. How can you earn the benefits without gaining the scrutiny of Google? In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand will teach you which rules to follow to keep you safe and on the up-and-up, all while improving your link profile.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat about a question we see a lot here at Moz, around what you should do with websites that you maybe design or build or do work for, your clients' websites if you're an agency or consultant, or a web designer or builder, sites that you own but are not your primary website, and widgets and embeds, blogrolls, all these kinds of things where you control the link infrastructure, or could control it, and should you.

I think one of the challenges here is to understand that many folks have recognized that, over the years, widgets, embeds, links from client websites have gotten other sites penalized, potentially even your sites penalized over the years, because you had all these links that you control pointing back to places, and to Google that can look really sketchy. So I want to talk through some best practices about how you can get link benefit and value from these places without getting yourself into trouble.

The challenge

All right. The challenge here is let's say that I own sneakerobsessed.com, but it is not my primary website, or maybe it's a client's website. But I do own sneakysneakers.com, and I'm thinking to myself, "Gosh, you know the fact that I control, I have the login for the admin here, the site owner, or me, would be fine with linking from these pages to these pages. What should I do there? I don't want to get into trouble. But I would love to get some benefit, and I think that these links could help me. Should I:

A. Add a link from every page here to a bunch of pages here or to my homepage?

B. Should I link to a variety of my pages, like take a few of these and link them to my homepage, take a few others and link to some internal pages?

C. Should I use a single page on this website to link back to maybe my homepage?

The answer is kind of, it depends. It depends.

My recommendations

Client websites

If it is a client website or a site you've done work for, a site you designed or built, or your agency did, if you have clientdomain.com, what I'm going to suggest is that you take a page, the About page or a page you specifically built like About This Site, and you link to that page from the footer or the sidebar or the header. It's kind of one of those things that gets us linked to from a lot of pages. It's like the About page or the Contact page or the Privacy Policy, those kinds of things would get on clientdomain.com. You make that the only page where you intentionally specifically link back to your domain. You essentially have some blurb about, "Here are the details about the designer or developer, the technologies used on this website," those kinds of things. "If you would like to get in touch with the creator of this website, it is these folks over here," and that points over to you. That means you essentially have a site-wide link to one page, which is flowing a lot of link equity to that single page on your client's website, and that link is pointing over to you. This is very unlikely to be penalized. It's very likely to draw in clicks. It has all these beneficial properties.

Site(s) you own

For sites that you own, so myothersite.com and mymainsite.com, what I'm going to suggest here is that you don't have an intentional specific link strategy like, "Okay, one out of three pages I'm going to have a link. I'm going to have them link to these pages in particular. I'm going to have the anchor text always be this." Don't set up that kind of policy or process. Instead, I want you to focus on providing visitor value. Reference things on your main site when they are relevant to content on your other site, and this should happen naturally and organically.

Anytime you're referencing other content you've created or things that you've done, or recognition that you have, or someone else from your organization, you would naturally link over here. That's the way you should play it, not with some specific process and checklist. Anything that matches a very standard pattern is going to be easily recognized by Google, and that can get you into trouble.

Blogrolls, syndicators, etc.

With blogrolls and syndicators and those type of sites, it's a little less stringent, because blogrolls and syndicators have these unique attributes of basically saying it is the right thing to do for a blogroll when it exists usually on one of the sidebars of a blog, sometimes the blog's homepage, sometimes every page of a blog, it's usual for those to be kind of site-wide style links that always point back to the other blogs' websites' homepage or blog pages. That's okay here too. That is not a big problem.

The only time you get into real trouble is if that blogroll is essentially just a paid manipulation. It's technically a blog network. It's not that you're being editorially endorsed by someone else. They're only linking to you because you're linking to them. You get into that reciprocity challenge. That's not to say you should never link to anyone who has you in their blogroll either. It's just that this has to look natural and editorial to Google, or you can get in trouble.

Syndicators, by the way, it's okay to link from every syndicated piece of content back to the original piece of content. In fact, that's the way it should be. If you do your own syndication, like I do sometimes on Medium, where I put up my blog posts that I've already put on moz.com/rand on medium.com/randfish, then you should have each of those link back to their original pieces, and that's just fine.

Widgets & embeds

For widgets and embeds, things get a little dicier, and this is actually where we see a ton of penalties. Not to say that people don't have problems with their client sites too a lot of the time, but widgets and embeds have been particularly taken to task by Google in the recent past.

So the idea here is that you have this piece of content here that's being embedded from your site. So Sneaker Obsessed, maybe the guys there went to Sneaky Sneakers. They saw a data graph of Nike shoes versus Adidas shoes sales over the last 12 months, and they were like, "Oh, man. I really want to show that. That's awesome." In fact, there's a little "embed this graph onto your own website." So they took that, and they put it on there.

More dangerous

You get into more dangerous territory with this type of thing when in the link between here there's:

  • Keyword-matching anchor text
  • No opt-out option, meaning there's no way to say, "I don't want to include the link to the original"
  • When visitors are very unlikely to click that link; when there's no sort of, "Oh, why would I ever click on the attributed link from the embed?"
  • Remotely controlled via JavaScript, meaning you can remotely update this link and anchor text, that gets real sketchy.
  • Widget's purpose feels like it exists only for links, like it's not particularly useful, there's not a clear reason why this is a widget instead of just a graphic that other people can use or content they can syndicate, why make it a widget as opposed to something like a graph whose data can change, or an interactive content element, or a video player, or something like that?
  • Any sort of payment or discounts that you offer or coercion to get people to embed it gets you into more dangerous territory.

Less dangerous

You're much less likely to have problems if you:

  • Keep that anchor text branded or omitted entirely. It's non-branded anchor text. It's just your brand name, or it's very limited. It just says "Data Via," and via is the link itself.
  • Opt-out of the link is available, meaning that someone could say, "Yeah, I want to embed that. Include a link back to sneakysneakers.com? No. No, thank you."
  • There should be a compelling reason to click.
  • That embed is static.
  • It's not controlled by JavaScript.
  • The widget feels like it's reference-focused, so there's actually some value there.
  • Only embedded intentionally by those who are naturally and editorially choosing to include it.

That will keep you safe.

Hopefully, you will not encounter these problems. I think if you follow these rules, you'll be in the safe zone, and you'll also be benefiting from the link value that these can provide. I look forward to your comments. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!



from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/2gmCn1d
via IFTTT