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 […]
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.
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!)
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.
We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.
Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.
Should you be replying to everyone?
How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?
What are the best ways to respond quickly?
In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.
We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.
Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.
We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.
1. Social media engagement is public
With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.
(DMs excluded.)
Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.
You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.
With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.
Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.
Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.
2. Social media engagement is fast and focused
You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.
With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:
The barrier to entry for your audience drops dramatically. They have an easy way to converse with you, anytime.
Focused and specific topics mean you can reply faster and engage deeper. We love diving into a marketing conversation with our audience members in a Twitter thread or helping answer questions in a DM
And one big factor that affects the bottom line — Faster responses equal happier customers, which equals more ROI. Research shows faster responses actually generate revenue for brands.
Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.
3. Social media is where your customers are. You can achieve a huge scale of engagement by being responsive on social media.
At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.
We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!
Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.
One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.
Getting the most out of Facebook & Instagram engagement
The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.
It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.
1. Fill out your contact information completely
You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.
But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.
The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.
As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!
2. Take full advantage of social engagement features
The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.
Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.
Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.
One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.
Universal tips for social media engagement
1. Add team member signatures to replies.
Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care. You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.
And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.
2. Use a social media inbox
Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.
Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all
@mentions`
all direct messages, of course
but also all the times when your brand is referenced on social outside of a direct outreach
By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
The 10 marketing executives on this year’s list see opportunities where others see obstacles. They help their brands stand out by uniting behind a common purpose. And they never lose sight of who they’re really working for–namely, their customers. But there is one thing these Brand Genius honorees don’t know: the meaning of the term…
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.
We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.
Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.
Should you be replying to everyone?
How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?
What are the best ways to respond quickly?
In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.
We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.
Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.
We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.
1. Social media engagement is public
With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.
(DMs excluded.)
Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.
You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.
With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.
Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.
Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.
2. Social media engagement is fast and focused
You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.
With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:
The barrier to entry for your audience drops dramatically. They have an easy way to converse with you, anytime.
Focused and specific topics mean you can reply faster and engage deeper. We love diving into a marketing conversation with our audience members in a Twitter thread or helping answer questions in a DM
And one big factor that affects the bottom line — Faster responses equal happier customers, which equals more ROI. Research shows faster responses actually generate revenue for brands.
Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.
3. Social media is where your customers are. You can achieve a huge scale of engagement by being responsive on social media.
At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.
We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!
Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.
One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.
Getting the most out of Facebook & Instagram engagement
The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.
It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.
1. Fill out your contact information completely
You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.
But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.
The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.
As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!
2. Take full advantage of social engagement features
The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.
Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.
Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.
One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.
Universal tips for social media engagement
1. Add team member signatures to replies.
Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care. You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.
And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.
2. Use a social media inbox
Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.
Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all
@mentions`
all direct messages, of course
but also all the times when your brand is referenced on social outside of a direct outreach
By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.
We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.
Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.
Should you be replying to everyone?
How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?
What are the best ways to respond quickly?
In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.
We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.
Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.
We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.
1. Social media engagement is public
With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.
(DMs excluded.)
Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.
You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.
With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.
Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.
Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.
2. Social media engagement is fast and focused
You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.
With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:
The barrier to entry for your audience drops dramatically. They have an easy way to converse with you, anytime.
Focused and specific topics mean you can reply faster and engage deeper. We love diving into a marketing conversation with our audience members in a Twitter thread or helping answer questions in a DM
And one big factor that affects the bottom line — Faster responses equal happier customers, which equals more ROI. Research shows faster responses actually generate revenue for brands.
Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.
3. Social media is where your customers are. You can achieve a huge scale of engagement by being responsive on social media.
At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.
We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!
Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.
One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.
Getting the most out of Facebook & Instagram engagement
The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.
It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.
1. Fill out your contact information completely
You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.
But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.
The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.
As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!
2. Take full advantage of social engagement features
The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.
Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.
Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.
One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.
Universal tips for social media engagement
1. Add team member signatures to replies.
Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care. You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.
And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.
2. Use a social media inbox
Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.
Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all
@mentions`
all direct messages, of course
but also all the times when your brand is referenced on social outside of a direct outreach
By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
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.
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:
Informational
Navigational
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.
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 […]
