McCann Worldgroup has announced the appointment of Samantha Giles as EVP, Global Business Leader on the agency’s global Nestle business. She joins from Ogilvy & Mather where she has been Worldwide Managing Partner. Giles, who will remain based in London, will succeed Julian Ingram who has headed the Nestle business for the past two years, [more…]
Category: Uncategorized
UK insurers beat US for digital customer experience
Despite the growth of digital channels, US insurers seem to be stuck in an analogue world, unable to respond accurately, quickly or consistently to customer queries asked via the web, email, Twitter, Facebook or chat, according to new research from multichannel customer engagement software provider Eptica. US performance trails the UK, where insurers answered 54% [more…]
from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2016/10/uk-insurers-beat-us-for-digital-customer-experience/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=uk-insurers-beat-us-for-digital-customer-experience
How to Detect, Repair & Profit From Underperforming Content
As a marketer, you’re used to leveraging a variety of channels to promote your business, up to and including content marketing.
According to HubSpot’s annual State of Inbound report, 60% of marketers reported “blog content creation” as one of their top priorities — with interactive content creation (41%), long-form content creation (33%), and visual content creation (33%) not far behind.
Unfortunately, not every piece of content you create is going to be a winner. There are millions of blog posts being published every day, and many of those posts will never see a lick of traffic. 
Sure, it’s discouraging to see content underperform, but the real issue arises when you leave that underperforming content on the table. To prevent that, I’m going to walk you through how to identify, reposition, and optimize that lackluster content to help your business start generating more views and leads.
Is the Content Really Failing?
Before we dive in, it’s important to first make the distinction between the content that is actually underperforming and the content that hasn’t ramped up or gained traction yet.
HubSpot’s Principal Marketing Manager of Optimization, Pamela Vaughan, did some extensive research into HubSpot’s seemingly-underperforming content, and what she found was really interesting. (Download this ebook for an in-depth explanation of Vaughan’s research.)
Vaughan’s analysis was intended to determine which of their posts were the most influential in generating leads, and which posts weren’t pulling their weight. In doing so, she discovered that 76% of HubSpot’s monthly blog views came from old posts (anything published prior to that month), and that 92% of their blog-generated leads came from old posts.
The most important point you should take from her study is that it can take time — sometimes several months — for content to gain traction. Before you flag content as underperforming, you need to set realistic time scales as part of your strategy, KPIs, and measurement methodology for success.
If you already have a fair amount of content, you can use metrics over the life of those content pieces to create performance benchmarks for other current pieces and any new additions.
How to Identify Underperforming Content
Before you can flag any performance issues, you need to understand the components of 10X content that contribute to better performance and higher engagement. This type of content is generally:
- High quality
- Entertaining
- Solutions based
- Fresh
- Non-promotional
- Educational
- Thought leading/innovative
- Highly relevant
It might seem easy to hit a lot of those points — and you may feel like your content includes all of these components — but it’s actually not as easy as it might appear.
Roughly 60% of marketers still struggle with creating engaging content, even when including many of the components above — and the problem goes well beyond just the traffic a piece of content is getting.
Source: CMI
So how do you identify underperforming content? Look for the following:
- Loss of organic traffic. Sometimes, a post will gain traction — even a substantial amount — and then suddenly lose its traffic. This can happen in the wake of social promotion, a loss of referral links on high traffic sites, or a shift in organic search rank.
- No direct engagement. Even a well-trafficked post could have poor direct engagement. This could point back to an issue with a call-to-action, or perhaps concerns that the content doesn’t match the user’s search intent.
- No organic traffic. It’s frustrating to publish a post and hear crickets. Organic search can be one of your greatest traffic sources, but not if your content is poorly optimized.
- Little to no social engagement. Limited shares on social media are a sign that there’s an issue with the content, especially if you’re getting steady traffic to your article or post.
- Poor post metrics. Another indicator of underperforming content is a low on-page time/session duration per page, with a high-exit or drop-off rate.Ideally you want people to linger, showing that they’re reading a long-form post in full. You also want the reader to visit other pages, as opposed to using that same landing page as an exit page or bouncing from the site without taking other actions.
- No follow through to content despite social promotion. If you’re seeing a fair number of shares, but you’re not seeing follow through from an extended audience, you may want to consider why the conversion on shares is so low.
The Solution? Historical Optimization.
Every piece of underperforming content can be made into a center-stage star with a few tweaks and adjustments. In the above mentioned study from Pamela Vaughan around HubSpot’s content, historical optimization of underperforming content helped to double the number of monthly leads generated by old posts. (Again, you can read more on that in this ebook.)
Once you’ve identified a piece of underperforming content, here are some things you can do to give it a boost:
1) Improve long-tail keyword use.
If organic visibility is an issue, or if you’re seeing poor post engagement as a result of traffic, try improving the optimization. Find long-tail keywords that better match user intent against the context of the article. (New to keyword research? Start with this beginner’s guide.)
2) Optimize headlines to boost CTR.
Google uses over 200 ranking factors to rank results based on search query and its perception of user intent. Despite that, clickthrough behavior carries a significant weight in how Google ranks content.
Improve your headlines to make them more compelling in order to garner more clickthroughs in organic search. This will contribute to a gradual increase in your position within the search results. (Download this ebook for data-driven tips on writing catchy headlines.)
Need a second opinion on a headline? Check out Title Tester. This testing tool makes it easy to create headline polls that’ll help you decide on the most clickable option.
3) Create compelling meta content.
The SEO value of meta content has greatly diminished in recent years, but there’s still value to be had. As in the case of the headline or title of your content, it can have a profound impact on user engagement and clickthrough rate. Write it like your sales copy to boost engagement. (Or, steal tips from this article.)
4) Adjust content to match user intent.
You may have hit on a fantastic topic but perhaps the way you addressed it missed some key points, creating a mismatch in content vs. search intent.
See if there’s something else the audience is looking for regarding your topic and find ways to adjust your existing content to include new or better targeted information. For example, a reader might not be interested in how to write Instagram captions, but they could be interested in how to earn more followers on Instagram.
5) Add internal links and cross link content.
Sometimes, a piece of content doesn’t garner a lot of engagement because it’s all “me, me, me.”
Without external links or reliable sources your audience might just feel like it is merely opinion and conjecture. External links can add credibility and authority to your content. (Check out this list of 33 white hat ways to build backlinks to get started.)
6) Consolidate content.
If you have multiple pieces of content seeing little traffic, try combining them into a more comprehensive piece that packs greater value. Then, redirect links from the most underperforming pieces to the new consolidated piece.
7) Cluster content.
HubSpot’s Matt Barby talks about cluster content in a piece for Search Engine Journal that I highly recommend checking out. The idea is that a topic cluster is a collection of semantically relevant content pieces that individually cover smaller themes within an overarching topic.
“Any big piece of content that I’m targeting against hyper-competitive search terms will be marked as pillar content. Then a range of content will be created covering subtopics related to the main pillar that internally link to it,” according to Barby.
Source: Search Engine Journal
8) Add visual elements to content.
When dealing with low engagement, make sure you’re leveraging visual assets within your content. According to research from Xerox, visuals can increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.
Whether it’s images or video, use it in every post and use it often. According to Buzzsumo, articles with an image once every 100 words or so get double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images. (Download 195+ visual design templates to get you started here.)
9) Include the almighty call-to-action.
If you’re suffering from low engagement, look to your call-to-action. Make sure you’re telling your audience exactly what you want them to do (share, comment, opt in, etc.) once they finish reading your post. (You can start improving your conversions with these 50 customizable call-to-action templates.)
Getting Started
Ultimately, one of the best ways to deal with underperforming content is to have a strategy that prevents it in the first place. Make sure your content includes all the most important components and create a plan for promotion as part of your strategy.
Remember to consider the time it takes for content to gain traction among your audience — it varies for everyone.
Use your past analytics as a model to monitor future content, and be proactive about historical optimization in the future to consistently keep up the engagement and performance of all of your content.
How do you correct underperforming content? Share your tips in the comments below.
from HubSpot Marketing Blog http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/detect-repair-profit-underperforming-content
Congrats : Marketscan wins ‘Outstanding Data Provider’ for a record 5th year
Marketscan Wins ‘Outstanding Data Provider’ For A Record 5th Year! on @Marketscan https://t.co/ZDiy9SWmxo retweet pic.twitter.com/3PUG0eVGtB — Will Corry (@slievemore) October 7, 2016
Understand why traditional marketing techniques are no longer effective
A Director’s Guide to reducing the B2B Software Sales Cycle
from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2016/10/97232/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=97232
“The world’s first Facebook Live escape room concept”
UKTV Channel Alibi are launching the world’s first Facebook Live escape room concept, where members of the public will be virtually transported into a modern murder mystery and will be able to debate, argue, and ultimately decide on the fate of the main character. The full Facebook Live event is set to occur on the [more…]
Penguin 4.0: How the Real-Time Penguin-in-the-Core-Alg Model Changes SEO – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
The dust is finally beginning to settle after the long-awaited rollout of Penguin 4.0. Now that our aquatic avian friend is a real-time part of the core Google algorithm, we’ve got some changes to get used to. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains Penguin’s past, present, and future, offers his analysis of the rollout so far, and gives advice for going forward (hint: never link spam).
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, it is all about Google Penguin. So Google Penguin is an algorithm that’s been with us for a few years now, designed to combat link spam specifically. After many, many years of saying this was coming, Penguin 4.0 rolled out on Friday, September 23rd. It is now real-time in Google’s algorithm, Google’s core algorithm, which means that it’s constantly updating.
So there are a bunch of changes. What we’re going to talk about today is what Penguin 1.0 to 3.x looked like and how that’s changed as we’ve moved to the Penguin 4.0 model. Then we’ll cover a little bit of what the rollout has looked like and how it’s affecting folks’ sites and specifically some recommendations. Thankfully, we don’t have a ton.
Penguin 1.0-3x
But important to understand, if people ask you about Penguin, people ask you about the penalties that used to come from Penguin, you’ve got to know that, back in the day…
- Penguin 1.0 to 3.x, it used to run intermittently. So every few months, Google would collect a bunch of information, they’d run the algorithm, and then they’d release it out in the wild. It would now be in the search results. When that rollout happened, that was the only time, pretty much the only time that penalties from Penguin specifically would be given to websites or removed.
This meant that a lot of the time, you had this slow process, where if you got penalized by Penguin, you did something bad, you did some sketchy link building, you went through all the process, you went through all the processes of getting that penalty lifted, Google said, “Fine, you’re in good shape. The next time Penguin comes out, your penalty is lifted.” You could wait months. You could wait six months or more before that penalty got lifted. So a lot of fear here and a lot of slowness on Google’s side.
- Penguin also penalized, much like Panda, where it looks at a portion of the site, these pages maybe are the only ones on this whole domain that got bad links to them, but old Penguin did not care. Penguin would hit the entire website.
It would basically say, “No, you’re spamming to those pages, I’m burying your whole domain. Every page on your site is penalized and will not be able to rank well.” Those sorts of penalties are very, very tough for a lot of websites. That, in fact, might be changing a little bit with the new Penguin algorithm.
- Old Penguin also required a reconsideration request process, often in conjunction with disavowing old links, proving to Google that you had gone through the process of trying to get those links removed.
It wasn’t often enough to just say, “I’ve disavowed them.” You had to tell Google, “Hey, I tried to contact the site where I bought the links or I tried to contact the private blog network, but I couldn’t get them to take it down or I did get them to take it down or they blackmailed me and forced me to pay them to take it down.” Sometimes people did pay and Google said that was bad, but then sometimes would lift the penalties and sometimes they told them, “Okay, you don’t have to pay the extortionist and we’ll lift the penalty anyway.” Very manual process here.
- Penguin 1.0 to 3.x was really designed to remove the impact of link spam on search results, but doing it in a somewhat weird way. They were doing it basically through penalties that affected entire websites that had tried to manipulate the results and by creating this fear that if I got bad links, I would be potentially subject to Penguin for a long period.
I have a theory here. It’s a personal theory. I don’t want you to hold me to it. I believe that Google specifically went through this process in order to collect a tremendous amount of information on sketchy links and bad links through the disavow file process. Once they had a ginormous database of what sketchy and spammy bad links looked like, that they knew webmasters had manually reviewed and had submitted through the disavowal file and thought could harm their sites and were paid for or just links that were not editorially acquired, they could then machine learn against that giant database. Once they’ve acquired enough disavowals, great. Everything else is gravy. But they needed to get that huge sample set. They needed it not to just be things that they, Google, could identify but things that all of us distributed across the hundreds of millions of websites on the planet could identify. Using those disavowal files, Google can now make Penguin more real-time.
Penguin 4.0+
So challenges here, this is too slow. It hurt too much to have that long process. So in the new Penguin 4.0 and going forward, this runs as part of the core algorithm, meaning…
- As soon as Google crawls and indexes a site and is able to update that in their databases, that site’s penalty is either lifted or incurred. So this means that if you get sketchy links, you don’t have to wait for Penguin to come out. You could get hurt tomorrow.
- Penguin does not necessarily any longer penalize an entire domain. It still might. It could be the case that if lots of pages on a domain are getting sketchy links or some substantive portion or Google thinks you’re just too sketchy, they could penalize you.
Remember, Penguin is not the only algorithm that can penalize websites for getting bad links. There are manual spam penalties, and there are other forms of spam penalties too. Penguin is not alone here. But it may be simply taking the pages that earn those bad links and discounting those links or using different signals, weighting different signals to rank those pages or search results that have lots of pages with sketchy links in them.
- It is also the case — and this is not 100% confirmed yet — but some early discussion between Google’s representatives and folks in the webmaster and SEO community has revealed to us that it may not be the case that Penguin 4.0 and moving forward still requires the full disavow and whole reconsideration request process.
That’s not to say that if you incur a penalty, you should not go through this. But it may not be the case that’s the only way to get a penalty lifted, especially in two cases — no fault cases, meaning you did not get those links, they just happened to come to you, or specifically negative SEO cases.
I want to bring up Marie Haynes, who does phenomenally good work around spam penalties, along with folks like Sha Menz and Alan Bleiweiss, all three of them have been concentrating on Google penalties along with many, many other SEOs and webmasters. But Marie wrote an excellent blog post detailing a number of case studies, including a negative SEO case study where the link penalty had been lifted on the domain. You can see her results of that. She’s got some nice visual graphs showing the keyword rankings changing after Penguin’s rollout. I urge you to do that, and we’ll make sure to link to it in the transcript of this video.
- Penguin 4.0 is a little bit different from Penguin 1.0 to 3 in that it’s still designed to remove the impact of spam links on search results, but it’s doing it by not counting those links in the core algo and/or by less strongly weighting links in search results where many folks are earning spammy links.
So, for example, your PPC, your porn, your pills, your casino searches, those types of queries may be places where Google says, “You know what? We don’t want to interpret, because all these folks have nasty links pointing to them, we are going to weight links less. We’re going to weight other signals higher.” Maybe it’s engagement and content and query interpretation models and non-link signals that are offsite, all those kinds of things, clickstream data, whatever they’ve got. “We’re going to push down the value of either these specific links or all links in the algo as we weight them on these types of results.”
Penguin 4.0 rollout
So this is what we know so far. We definitely will keep learning more about Penguin as we have more experience with it. We also have some information on the rollout.
- Started on Friday, September 23rd, few people noticed any changes.
In fact, the first few days were pretty slow, which makes sense. It fits with what Google said about the rollout being real-time and them needing time to crawl and index and then refresh all this data. So until it rolls out across the full web and Google’s crawled and indexed all the pages, gone through processing, we’re not going to get there. So little effect that same day, but…
- More SERP flux started three to five days after, that next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. We saw very hot temperatures starting that next week in MozCast, and Dr. Pete has been detailing those on Twitter.
- As far as SEOs noticing, yes, a little bit.
So I asked the same poll on Twitter twice, once on September 27th and once on October 3rd, so about a week apart. Here is the data we got. “Nope, nothing yet.” “Went from 76% to 72%,” so a little more than a quarter of SEOs have noticed some changes.
A lot of folks noticing rankings went up. Moz itself, in fact, benefitted from this. Why is that the case? Well, any time a penalty rolls out to a lot of other websites, bad stuff gets pushed down and those of us who have not been spamming move up in the rankings. Of course, in the SEO world, which is where Moz operates, there are plenty of folks getting sketchy links and trying things out. So they were higher in the rankings, they moved down, and Moz moved up. We saw a very nice traffic boost. Thank you, Google, for rolling out Penguin. That makes our Audience Development team’s metrics look real good.
Four percent and then six percent said they saw a site or page get penalized in their control, and two percent and then one percent said they saw a penalty lifted. So a penalty lifted is still pretty light, but there are some penalties coming in. There are a few of those. Then there’s the nice benefit of if you don’t link spam, you do not get penalized. Every time Google improves on the Penguin algorithm, every time they improve on any link spam algorithm, those of us who don’t spam benefit.
It’s an awesome thing, right? Instead of cheering against Google, which you do if you’re a link spammer and you’re very nervous, you get to cheer for Google. Certainly Penguin 4.0 is a good time to cheer for Google. It’s brought a lot of traffic to a lot of good websites and pushed a lot of sketchy links down. We will see happens as far as disavows and reconsideration requests for the future.
All right, everyone, thanks for joining. Look forward to hearing about your experiences with Penguin. We’ll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Hot ad girls : “Natural beauty with the unique Australian landscape”
Seafolly Launches 'Welcome To Broome' Work for Summer 16 with Ogilvy @LBBOnline https://t.co/UNBUjtL14T retweet pic.twitter.com/hALlgwpsfj — Will Corry (@slievemore) October 7, 2016
LiveRamp becomes first EU data onboarding specialist to Certify for EU-U.S. Privacy Shield
LiveRamp, an Acxiom company and leading provider of data onboarding and connectivity services, has become the first EU data onboarding specialist to be fully accredited under the new Privacy Shield regulations. Certifying for Privacy Shield extends the data protection LiveRamp is now able to offer its clients the protection of Privacy Shield’s important safeguards to [more…]
Acxiom Certifies for EU-U.S. Privacy Shield
Certifying for Transatlantic Personal Data Transfer Mechanism Underscores Companies’ Ongoing Commitment to Excellence in Data Protection Acxiom® (NASDAQ: ACXM), the enterprise data, analytics and software-as-a-service company, today announced its certification to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework. Certifying for Privacy Shield extends the data protection Acxiom and LiveRamp, an Acxiom company, are now able to offer [more…]
from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2016/10/acxiom-certifies-for-eu-u-s-privacy-shield/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=acxiom-certifies-for-eu-u-s-privacy-shield
London SEO Services 