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Day: November 2, 2019

The Top Holiday Email Marketing Tips of 2019

Top Holiday Email Marketing Tips for 2019

Black Friday is less than a month away. Are your promotional emails ready?

Implementing an effective holiday email marketing strategy can help drive ecommerce and online sales, increase charity donations, or get your subscribers directly to your store.

But don’t wait until the last second to get started on your emails: Winter holidays are the top consumer spending events of the year, according to the National Retail Federation, and some businesses are already sending holiday emails.

That’s why I’m hosting a Facebook Live on November 5, 2019 at 1 p.m. ET on AWeber’s customer community page. Tune in to learn how to:

  • Create a revenue-driving email marketing plan for the holiday season.
  • Execute exciting holiday promotion ideas.
  • Write must-open holiday subject lines. 
  • Add holiday cheer to your email design.

And more!

Watch on November 5th. Even if you can’t stream it in real time, you can always catch it later. The video will stay up on AWeber’s Facebook customer community page.

Not an AWeber customer yet? To catch more Live videos from our email experts, sign up for a free trial of AWeber and join our private Facebook community. (Only AWeber customers can join!)

The post The Top Holiday Email Marketing Tips of 2019 appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing

Google announced that it has been rolling out a new update called Bert.

I know what you are thinking… does this update really matter? Should I even spend time learning about it?

Well, Bert will affect 1 in 10 search queries.

To give you an idea of how big of an update this is, it’s
the biggest update since Google released RankBrain.

In other words, there is a really good chance that this impacts your site. And if it doesn’t, as your traffic grows, it will eventually affect your site.

But before we go into how this update affects SEOs and what you need to adjust (I will go into that later in this post), let’s first get into what this update is all about.

So, what is Bert?

Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from
Transformers.

You are probably wondering, what the heck does that mean, right?

Google, in essence, has adjusted its algorithm to better understand natural language processing.

Just think of it this way: you could put a flight number into Google and they typically show you the flight status. Or a calculator may come up when you type in a math equation. Or if you put a stock symbol in, you’ll get a stock chart.

Or even a simpler example is: you can start typing into Google and its autocomplete feature can figure out what you are searching for before you even finishing typing it in.

But Google has already had all of that figured out before
Bert. So let’s look at some examples of Bert in action.

Is Bert even useful?

Here are 4 examples
of Bert
.

Let’s say you search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need
visa”.

Before Bert, the top result would be how US citizens can travel to Brazil without a visa. But look at the search query carefully… it’s slight, but it is a big difference.

The search wasn’t about US people going to Brazil, it was
about people from Brazil traveling to the US.

The result after the Bert update is much more relevant.

Google is now taking into account prepositions like “for” or
“to” that can have a lot of meanings to the search query.

Here’s another example… “do estheticians stand a lot at work”…

Google used to previously match terms. For example, their
system used to think “stand” is the same as “stand-alone”.

Now they understand that the word “stand” has the context of physical demand. In other words, is the job exhausting… do you have to be on your feet a lot?

And one more, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” …

As you can see from the before and after picture, it’s clear
that the new result is more relevant.

Same with this one on “math practice books for adults” …

Is that the only change?

It isn’t. Google also made changes to featured snippets.

For example, if you searched for “parking on a hill with no
curb”, Google used to place too much emphasis on the word “curb” and not enough
emphasis on the word “no”.

That’s a big difference… and you can see that in the
results.

The new changes this algorithm update brings makes it much more relevant for searchers and it creates a better experience for you and me and everyone else who uses Google.

But how does it affect SEOs?

You need to change your SEO strategy

There are three types of queries people usually make when
performing a search:

  1. Informational
  2. Navigational
  3. Transactional

An informational query is like someone looking to lose
weight. They aren’t sure how so they may search for “how to lose weight”.

And once they perform the search, they may find a solution such as different diets. From there they may search for a solution, using a navigational query such as “Atkins diet”.

Once someone figures out the exact solution, they then may perform a transactional search query, such as “the Atkins diet cookbook”.

From what we are seeing on our end is that Bert is mainly impacting top-of-the-funnel keywords, which are informational related keywords.

Now if you want to not only maintain your rankings but gobble up some of the rankings of your competition, a simple solution is to get very specific with your content.

Typically, when you create content, which is the easiest way
to rank for informational related keywords, SEOs tell you to create super long
content.

Yes, you may see that a lot of longer-form content ranks well on Google, but their algorithm doesn’t focus on word count, it focuses on quality.

The context of the tweet from Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, is that he wants SEOs to focus on creating content that is fundamentally great, unique, useful, and compelling.

So when you use tools like Ubersuggest to find new topics to go after, you need to make sure your content is super-specific.

For example, if you have a business about fitness and you blog about “how to lose weight without taking pills”, your content shouldn’t focus on diet shakes or supplements or anything too similar to diet pills. Instead, it should discuss all of the alternative methods.

I know what you are thinking, shakes and supplements may not be diet pills and they aren’t the same keyword but expect Bert to get more sophisticated in the next year in which it will better understand what people are really looking for.

Additionally, you should stop focusing on keyword density.

Yes, a lot of SEOs have moved away from this, but I still
get a handful of emails each day asking me about keyword density.

Keyword density will even be less important in the future as
Google better understands the context of the content you are writing.

So, where’s the opportunity?

As I mentioned, it’s related to creating highly specific content around a topic.

It’s not necessarily about creating a really long page that talks about 50 different things that’s 10,000 words long. It’s more about answering a searcher’s question as quick as possible and providing as much value compared to the competition.

Just like when you search for “what is it like to be in the
Olympics”, you’ll see a list of results that look something like this:

Although the first result has the title of “What it’s like
to go to the Olympics”, the article doesn’t break down what it is like to go as
an attendee, it breaks down what it is like to go as an athlete. Just like a
searcher would expect based on the query.

Bert was clearly able to figure this out even though the title could have gone either way. And the article itself isn’t that long. The article itself only has 311 words.

If you want to do well when it comes to ranking for informational keywords, go very specific and answer the question better than your competitors. From videos and images to audio, do whatever needs to be done to create a better experience.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t work. It’s just that every SEO already focuses on long-form content. They are going after generic head terms that can be interpreted in 100 different ways and that’s why the content may be long and thorough.

In other words, focus more on long-tail terms.

You may think that is obvious but let’s look at the data.

It all starts with Ubersuggest. If you haven’t used it yet, you can type in a keyword like “marketing” and it will show you the search volume as well as give you thousands (if not millions) of keyword variations.

In the last 30 days, 4,721,534 keyword queries were performed on Ubersuggest by 694,284 marketers. Those 4,721,534 searches returned 1,674,841,398 keyword recommendations.

And sure, SEOs could be typing in head terms to find more long-tail phrases, but when we look at what keywords people are selecting within Ubersuggest and exporting, 84% of marketers are focusing on 1 or 2-word search terms.

Only 1.7% of marketers are focusing on search terms that are
5 or words longer.

Following the strategy of creating content around very specific long-tail phrases is so effective that sites like Quora are generating 60,428,999 visitors a month just from Google alone in the United States.

And a lot of their content isn’t super detailed with 10,000-word
responses. They just focus on answering very specific questions that people
have.

Conclusion

Even if your search traffic drops a bit from the latest
update, it’s a good thing.

I know that sounds crazy, but think of it this way… if
someone searched for “how to lose weight without diet pills” and they landed on
your article about how diet pills are amazing, they are just going to hit the
back button and go back to Google.

In other words, it is unlikely that the traffic converted into a conversion.

Sure, you may lose some traffic from this update, but the
traffic was ruining your user metrics and increasing your bounce rate.

Plus, this is your opportunity to create content that is super-specific. If you lose traffic, look at the pages that dropped, the search queries that you aren’t ranking for anymore, and go and adjust your content or create new content that answers the questions people are looking for.

If you don’t know how to do this, just log into Search Console, click on
“search results”, and click on the date button.

Then click on compare and select the dates where your
traffic dropped and compare it to the previous periods. Then select “Queries”
and sort by the biggest difference.

You’ll have to dig for the longer-term search queries as those are the easiest to fix. And if you are unsure about what to fix, just search for the terms on Google that dropped and look at the top-ranking competitors. Compare their page with yours as it will provide some insights.

So, what do you think about the latest update?

The post How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Embed Video in Email [Quick Tip]

Nowadays, video is an undeniably popular channel for marketing purposes.

In fact, in 2019, 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tactic — a number drastically higher than just two years prior, when only 63% used video.

If you’re an email marketer, I’m willing to bet you’ve considered how you might spruce up your subscription and click-through rates with video. It’s a good idea in theory, with two-thirds of consumers preferring video over text when learning about new products or services.

In reality, however, it can be tricky. Major email clients including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook don’t support embedded videos, so your subscribers either won’t be able to watch your video within the email, or worse — they won’t see your email at all, because it’ll end up in their spam folders.

Fortunately, there’s a creative workaround to help you embed part of your video within your email, and incentivize subscribers to click-through to watch the rest. Here, let’s explore how to do just that.

Embed YouTube (or Any Other) Video in Email

There are two options you might consider when embedding a video within your email — you can either embed a GIF of your video with a “click here to watch full video” CTA, or you can embed a still photo of your video, and when subscribers click the “Play” button, they’ll be re-routed to your video’s URL.

Let’s explore the GIF option, first.

You can use the following instructions on any video from a video hosting platform of your choosing, including YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, DailyMotion, etc. In the following examples we used a Facebook URL, but a YouTube URL would work just as well. 

1. Find the URL of the video you want to include, or download and save your video to your computer. To create a GIF of a video I wanted to include in my email, I first went to HubSpot’s Facebook page and copied the URL of a recent video the team uploaded to the site — “How a Senior SEO Strategist Sees the World”.

embed-video-in-email-step-one
2. Next, I went to Imgflip.com, a tool that enables you to create GIFs of videos. You can upload a URL directly to Imgflip, or you can upload a video you have saved on your computer. For our purposes, I copied and pasted the URL from HubSpot’s Facebook page. Alternatively, you can copy and paste a YouTube URL or website URL. 
embed-video-email-step-two
3.
Once your video is finished downloading, you’ll see this pop-up. There are two triangles that can help you choose where you’d like to start and stop your GIF — if you move the green one you’re choosing a starting point for your GIF, and if you move the red one you’re choosing an end point.
 
(It’s important to note, for non-Pro accounts, you can’t create a GIF that lasts longer than 20 seconds on Imgflip.)

Once you’ve chosen a clip you’d like to use for your GIF, click “Generate GIF”.

embed-video-step-three

4. Once your GIF has been generated, you’ll have the option to copy-and-paste the image link or image URL. Instead, click “Download .gif”.embed-video-email-step-four

5. Now comes the fun part! Simply create your email to send to your subscribers, and drag-and-drop your GIF from your desktop into the email itself. Below the GIF, create a video CTA, like “Click to view full video here” with a URL to your video (the URL will likely lead to your own website, YouTube, Facebook, or another social platform).

video-in-email-embed

You can spruce up your email subject line with “Video included” to further incentivize click-through rates.

Of course, you’ll want to use email marketing best practices when embedding a GIF, and ensure the video you want to include is truly a compelling, interesting piece of content for your email subscribers.

This is a unique opportunity to further engage with your prospects and customers, so make sure to use it wisely — don’t just send a video advertisement for your products or services.

Next, let’s explore how you might include a still image of your video with a “Play” button.

1. For this example, I’ll use the same video as before. Instead of copying the URL, however, I simply screenshotted a paused section of the video.

embed-video-in-email-how-to

2. When I paused the Facebook video, it automatically included a “Play” button. However, if you screenshot a video while it’s playing, you might not have a “Play” button. To add one to a still image, go to the website Add Play Button to Image, upload your image, choose a play button design, and click “Create Play Button Image”.

Then, click “Download Image”.

embed-video-email

3. Next, simply click “Insert Photo” in your email to include the image with the Play button. Then, highlight the image and select “Insert Link”. Copy-and-paste the link to the full video (in this case I pasted the Facebook URL, but you can also paste a URL to a website with your video, or YouTube).

embed-video-email

4. And that’s it! Now, when a subscriber clicks on your image, they’ll be redirected to the full video. Ensure the video auto-plays so the subscriber doesn’t have to click “Play” again.

embed-video-email

Finally, some email clients do support embedded video. If you feel it’s the right strategy for your subscribers, you can embed a video within email using HTML5.

Here’s an example of an HTML5 code you might use in your email:

<video width=”300″ height=”200″ controls>

<source src=”movie.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″>

<source src=”movie.ogg” type=”video/ogg”>

https://www.facebook.com/hubspot/videos/2321291574789962/

</video>

If the video isn’t supported, your subscriber can see a static image linking to another page, instead.

If you don’t have experience coding, you might consider asking a developer to help you, or take a look at W3 School’s HTML5 Video article.

However, it’s important to note — we don’t recommend this strategy, since you risk either ending up in your subscribers’ spam folders, or using code that many of your subscribers’ email clients won’t support. Ultimately, it could be more trouble for many of your subscribers’ than it’s worth.

To ensure your video can be seen by all your subscribers, I’d recommend one of the strategies listed above, instead.

If you’re looking for other opportunities to boost email click-through rates and conversions, take a look at HubSpot’s free email marketing tool.

 

How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing

Google announced that it has been rolling out a new update called Bert.

I know what you are thinking… does this update really matter? Should I even spend time learning about it?

Well, Bert will affect 1 in 10 search queries.

To give you an idea of how big of an update this is, it’s
the biggest update since Google released RankBrain.

In other words, there is a really good chance that this impacts your site. And if it doesn’t, as your traffic grows, it will eventually affect your site.

But before we go into how this update affects SEOs and what you need to adjust (I will go into that later in this post), let’s first get into what this update is all about.

So, what is Bert?

Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from
Transformers.

You are probably wondering, what the heck does that mean, right?

Google, in essence, has adjusted its algorithm to better understand natural language processing.

Just think of it this way: you could put a flight number into Google and they typically show you the flight status. Or a calculator may come up when you type in a math equation. Or if you put a stock symbol in, you’ll get a stock chart.

Or even a simpler example is: you can start typing into Google and its autocomplete feature can figure out what you are searching for before you even finishing typing it in.

But Google has already had all of that figured out before
Bert. So let’s look at some examples of Bert in action.

Is Bert even useful?

Here are 4 examples
of Bert
.

Let’s say you search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need
visa”.

Before Bert, the top result would be how US citizens can travel to Brazil without a visa. But look at the search query carefully… it’s slight, but it is a big difference.

The search wasn’t about US people going to Brazil, it was
about people from Brazil traveling to the US.

The result after the Bert update is much more relevant.

Google is now taking into account prepositions like “for” or
“to” that can have a lot of meanings to the search query.

Here’s another example… “do estheticians stand a lot at work”…

Google used to previously match terms. For example, their
system used to think “stand” is the same as “stand-alone”.

Now they understand that the word “stand” has the context of physical demand. In other words, is the job exhausting… do you have to be on your feet a lot?

And one more, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” …

As you can see from the before and after picture, it’s clear
that the new result is more relevant.

Same with this one on “math practice books for adults” …

Is that the only change?

It isn’t. Google also made changes to featured snippets.

For example, if you searched for “parking on a hill with no
curb”, Google used to place too much emphasis on the word “curb” and not enough
emphasis on the word “no”.

That’s a big difference… and you can see that in the
results.

The new changes this algorithm update brings makes it much more relevant for searchers and it creates a better experience for you and me and everyone else who uses Google.

But how does it affect SEOs?

You need to change your SEO strategy

There are three types of queries people usually make when
performing a search:

  1. Informational
  2. Navigational
  3. Transactional

An informational query is like someone looking to lose
weight. They aren’t sure how so they may search for “how to lose weight”.

And once they perform the search, they may find a solution such as different diets. From there they may search for a solution, using a navigational query such as “Atkins diet”.

Once someone figures out the exact solution, they then may perform a transactional search query, such as “the Atkins diet cookbook”.

From what we are seeing on our end is that Bert is mainly impacting top-of-the-funnel keywords, which are informational related keywords.

Now if you want to not only maintain your rankings but gobble up some of the rankings of your competition, a simple solution is to get very specific with your content.

Typically, when you create content, which is the easiest way
to rank for informational related keywords, SEOs tell you to create super long
content.

Yes, you may see that a lot of longer-form content ranks well on Google, but their algorithm doesn’t focus on word count, it focuses on quality.

The context of the tweet from Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, is that he wants SEOs to focus on creating content that is fundamentally great, unique, useful, and compelling.

So when you use tools like Ubersuggest to find new topics to go after, you need to make sure your content is super-specific.

For example, if you have a business about fitness and you blog about “how to lose weight without taking pills”, your content shouldn’t focus on diet shakes or supplements or anything too similar to diet pills. Instead, it should discuss all of the alternative methods.

I know what you are thinking, shakes and supplements may not be diet pills and they aren’t the same keyword but expect Bert to get more sophisticated in the next year in which it will better understand what people are really looking for.

Additionally, you should stop focusing on keyword density.

Yes, a lot of SEOs have moved away from this, but I still
get a handful of emails each day asking me about keyword density.

Keyword density will even be less important in the future as
Google better understands the context of the content you are writing.

So, where’s the opportunity?

As I mentioned, it’s related to creating highly specific content around a topic.

It’s not necessarily about creating a really long page that talks about 50 different things that’s 10,000 words long. It’s more about answering a searcher’s question as quick as possible and providing as much value compared to the competition.

Just like when you search for “what is it like to be in the
Olympics”, you’ll see a list of results that look something like this:

Although the first result has the title of “What it’s like
to go to the Olympics”, the article doesn’t break down what it is like to go as
an attendee, it breaks down what it is like to go as an athlete. Just like a
searcher would expect based on the query.

Bert was clearly able to figure this out even though the title could have gone either way. And the article itself isn’t that long. The article itself only has 311 words.

If you want to do well when it comes to ranking for informational keywords, go very specific and answer the question better than your competitors. From videos and images to audio, do whatever needs to be done to create a better experience.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t work. It’s just that every SEO already focuses on long-form content. They are going after generic head terms that can be interpreted in 100 different ways and that’s why the content may be long and thorough.

In other words, focus more on long-tail terms.

You may think that is obvious but let’s look at the data.

It all starts with Ubersuggest. If you haven’t used it yet, you can type in a keyword like “marketing” and it will show you the search volume as well as give you thousands (if not millions) of keyword variations.

In the last 30 days, 4,721,534 keyword queries were performed on Ubersuggest by 694,284 marketers. Those 4,721,534 searches returned 1,674,841,398 keyword recommendations.

And sure, SEOs could be typing in head terms to find more long-tail phrases, but when we look at what keywords people are selecting within Ubersuggest and exporting, 84% of marketers are focusing on 1 or 2-word search terms.

Only 1.7% of marketers are focusing on search terms that are
5 or words longer.

Following the strategy of creating content around very specific long-tail phrases is so effective that sites like Quora are generating 60,428,999 visitors a month just from Google alone in the United States.

And a lot of their content isn’t super detailed with 10,000-word
responses. They just focus on answering very specific questions that people
have.

Conclusion

Even if your search traffic drops a bit from the latest
update, it’s a good thing.

I know that sounds crazy, but think of it this way… if
someone searched for “how to lose weight without diet pills” and they landed on
your article about how diet pills are amazing, they are just going to hit the
back button and go back to Google.

In other words, it is unlikely that the traffic converted into a conversion.

Sure, you may lose some traffic from this update, but the
traffic was ruining your user metrics and increasing your bounce rate.

Plus, this is your opportunity to create content that is super-specific. If you lose traffic, look at the pages that dropped, the search queries that you aren’t ranking for anymore, and go and adjust your content or create new content that answers the questions people are looking for.

If you don’t know how to do this, just log into Search Console, click on
“search results”, and click on the date button.

Then click on compare and select the dates where your
traffic dropped and compare it to the previous periods. Then select “Queries”
and sort by the biggest difference.

You’ll have to dig for the longer-term search queries as those are the easiest to fix. And if you are unsure about what to fix, just search for the terms on Google that dropped and look at the top-ranking competitors. Compare their page with yours as it will provide some insights.

So, what do you think about the latest update?

The post How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing

Google announced that it has been rolling out a new update called Bert.

I know what you are thinking… does this update really matter? Should I even spend time learning about it?

Well, Bert will affect 1 in 10 search queries.

To give you an idea of how big of an update this is, it’s
the biggest update since Google released RankBrain.

In other words, there is a really good chance that this impacts your site. And if it doesn’t, as your traffic grows, it will eventually affect your site.

But before we go into how this update affects SEOs and what you need to adjust (I will go into that later in this post), let’s first get into what this update is all about.

So, what is Bert?

Bert stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from
Transformers.

You are probably wondering, what the heck does that mean, right?

Google, in essence, has adjusted its algorithm to better understand natural language processing.

Just think of it this way: you could put a flight number into Google and they typically show you the flight status. Or a calculator may come up when you type in a math equation. Or if you put a stock symbol in, you’ll get a stock chart.

Or even a simpler example is: you can start typing into Google and its autocomplete feature can figure out what you are searching for before you even finishing typing it in.

But Google has already had all of that figured out before
Bert. So let’s look at some examples of Bert in action.

Is Bert even useful?

Here are 4 examples
of Bert
.

Let’s say you search for “2019 brazil traveler to usa need
visa”.

Before Bert, the top result would be how US citizens can travel to Brazil without a visa. But look at the search query carefully… it’s slight, but it is a big difference.

The search wasn’t about US people going to Brazil, it was
about people from Brazil traveling to the US.

The result after the Bert update is much more relevant.

Google is now taking into account prepositions like “for” or
“to” that can have a lot of meanings to the search query.

Here’s another example… “do estheticians stand a lot at work”…

Google used to previously match terms. For example, their
system used to think “stand” is the same as “stand-alone”.

Now they understand that the word “stand” has the context of physical demand. In other words, is the job exhausting… do you have to be on your feet a lot?

And one more, “can you get medicine for someone pharmacy” …

As you can see from the before and after picture, it’s clear
that the new result is more relevant.

Same with this one on “math practice books for adults” …

Is that the only change?

It isn’t. Google also made changes to featured snippets.

For example, if you searched for “parking on a hill with no
curb”, Google used to place too much emphasis on the word “curb” and not enough
emphasis on the word “no”.

That’s a big difference… and you can see that in the
results.

The new changes this algorithm update brings makes it much more relevant for searchers and it creates a better experience for you and me and everyone else who uses Google.

But how does it affect SEOs?

You need to change your SEO strategy

There are three types of queries people usually make when
performing a search:

  1. Informational
  2. Navigational
  3. Transactional

An informational query is like someone looking to lose
weight. They aren’t sure how so they may search for “how to lose weight”.

And once they perform the search, they may find a solution such as different diets. From there they may search for a solution, using a navigational query such as “Atkins diet”.

Once someone figures out the exact solution, they then may perform a transactional search query, such as “the Atkins diet cookbook”.

From what we are seeing on our end is that Bert is mainly impacting top-of-the-funnel keywords, which are informational related keywords.

Now if you want to not only maintain your rankings but gobble up some of the rankings of your competition, a simple solution is to get very specific with your content.

Typically, when you create content, which is the easiest way
to rank for informational related keywords, SEOs tell you to create super long
content.

Yes, you may see that a lot of longer-form content ranks well on Google, but their algorithm doesn’t focus on word count, it focuses on quality.

The context of the tweet from Danny Sullivan, who is Google’s search liaison, is that he wants SEOs to focus on creating content that is fundamentally great, unique, useful, and compelling.

So when you use tools like Ubersuggest to find new topics to go after, you need to make sure your content is super-specific.

For example, if you have a business about fitness and you blog about “how to lose weight without taking pills”, your content shouldn’t focus on diet shakes or supplements or anything too similar to diet pills. Instead, it should discuss all of the alternative methods.

I know what you are thinking, shakes and supplements may not be diet pills and they aren’t the same keyword but expect Bert to get more sophisticated in the next year in which it will better understand what people are really looking for.

Additionally, you should stop focusing on keyword density.

Yes, a lot of SEOs have moved away from this, but I still
get a handful of emails each day asking me about keyword density.

Keyword density will even be less important in the future as
Google better understands the context of the content you are writing.

So, where’s the opportunity?

As I mentioned, it’s related to creating highly specific content around a topic.

It’s not necessarily about creating a really long page that talks about 50 different things that’s 10,000 words long. It’s more about answering a searcher’s question as quick as possible and providing as much value compared to the competition.

Just like when you search for “what is it like to be in the
Olympics”, you’ll see a list of results that look something like this:

Although the first result has the title of “What it’s like
to go to the Olympics”, the article doesn’t break down what it is like to go as
an attendee, it breaks down what it is like to go as an athlete. Just like a
searcher would expect based on the query.

Bert was clearly able to figure this out even though the title could have gone either way. And the article itself isn’t that long. The article itself only has 311 words.

If you want to do well when it comes to ranking for informational keywords, go very specific and answer the question better than your competitors. From videos and images to audio, do whatever needs to be done to create a better experience.

Now to be clear, this doesn’t mean that long-form content doesn’t work. It’s just that every SEO already focuses on long-form content. They are going after generic head terms that can be interpreted in 100 different ways and that’s why the content may be long and thorough.

In other words, focus more on long-tail terms.

You may think that is obvious but let’s look at the data.

It all starts with Ubersuggest. If you haven’t used it yet, you can type in a keyword like “marketing” and it will show you the search volume as well as give you thousands (if not millions) of keyword variations.

In the last 30 days, 4,721,534 keyword queries were performed on Ubersuggest by 694,284 marketers. Those 4,721,534 searches returned 1,674,841,398 keyword recommendations.

And sure, SEOs could be typing in head terms to find more long-tail phrases, but when we look at what keywords people are selecting within Ubersuggest and exporting, 84% of marketers are focusing on 1 or 2-word search terms.

Only 1.7% of marketers are focusing on search terms that are
5 or words longer.

Following the strategy of creating content around very specific long-tail phrases is so effective that sites like Quora are generating 60,428,999 visitors a month just from Google alone in the United States.

And a lot of their content isn’t super detailed with 10,000-word
responses. They just focus on answering very specific questions that people
have.

Conclusion

Even if your search traffic drops a bit from the latest
update, it’s a good thing.

I know that sounds crazy, but think of it this way… if
someone searched for “how to lose weight without diet pills” and they landed on
your article about how diet pills are amazing, they are just going to hit the
back button and go back to Google.

In other words, it is unlikely that the traffic converted into a conversion.

Sure, you may lose some traffic from this update, but the
traffic was ruining your user metrics and increasing your bounce rate.

Plus, this is your opportunity to create content that is super-specific. If you lose traffic, look at the pages that dropped, the search queries that you aren’t ranking for anymore, and go and adjust your content or create new content that answers the questions people are looking for.

If you don’t know how to do this, just log into Search Console, click on
“search results”, and click on the date button.

Then click on compare and select the dates where your
traffic dropped and compare it to the previous periods. Then select “Queries”
and sort by the biggest difference.

You’ll have to dig for the longer-term search queries as those are the easiest to fix. And if you are unsure about what to fix, just search for the terms on Google that dropped and look at the top-ranking competitors. Compare their page with yours as it will provide some insights.

So, what do you think about the latest update?

The post How Google’s Bert Update Will Affect Content Marketing appeared first on Neil Patel.

Instagram Stories Branding: Marketing That Benefits Your Business

Are you using Instagram Stories to its fullest potential? Want to make your stories more consistent and engaging? To explore how to use Instagram Stories for your brand, I interview Sue B. Zimmerman on the Social Media Marketing Podcast. Sue is an Instagram marketing expert and author of The Instagram Strategy Guide. Her online course […]

The post Instagram Stories Branding: Marketing That Benefits Your Business appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.