Given Google's recent changes to SERPs and their April 21 mobile deadline, does SEO still come first? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through tactics you can use to build a loyal audience before you need to do SEO.
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Video transcription
Howdy Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting on some of the changes that Google has made that are forcing marketers to invest more and more in building loyal audiences before they do SEO. This is kind of a reverse of years past where we could use SEO as that initial channel where we attracted visits who would become our customers, our email subscribers, our social media fans and followers. All of these things have kind of switched direction.
Why move SEO later in the process?
There are some reasons why. First off, Google has for a lot of broad, head of the demand curve queries, they've taken some of the value and equity away from those with things like instant answers and Knowledge Graph, along with lots and lots of other verticals.
Knowledge Graph
I do a search for "plaid shirts" and I get this instant answer showing me what a plaid shirt looks like and a Knowledge Graph. This is a fake example. I don't think they actually do this for plaid shirts yet, but they will.
Personalization
Personalization by history, we're seeing a ton of personalization. I think history is one of the biggest influencers on personalization. Google+ still is a little bit, but your search history and what you've clicked on in the past tends to be big predictors of this. You can see this in two areas, not just in the results that Google shows, but also in what they're suggesting to you in your Search Suggest as you type.
Now, where Google is trying to predictively say, "Hey, we think you're going to want coffee right now because we see that you stepped out of your office and you live in Seattle, and you are a human being. So you must want coffee." They have these ranking signals, that are relatively new over the past few years and certainly much stronger than in years past around user and usage data, around search volume and what you searched for using quality raters and human and manual controls. Signals that are heavily correlated with brand, even if brand itself isn't necessarily a ranking factor.
Fewer results
Of course, there are fewer results now. I don't know if you guys caught this, but I thought one of the most fascinating things that Dr. Pete showed off recently in his MozCast data set was that it used to be the case that Google would show 10 results even if they had a set of images, a news result, and a local pack. Now basically these count as individual results. So you're not getting 10 results on a page. If you've got images and a couple of news things, you're getting seven results that are web results. Ten domains appear, ten big domains, powerful domains, places like Amazon and Yelp and those kinds of things, at least for U.S. search results, appear on 17% of all page one queries. There are a little fewer results to work with and more results biased to these bigger, better-known sites.
All of these things are contributing to this world in which doing SEO first and then earning loyalty through two other channels through SEO is really, really hard. It's making the value of having a loyal audience before you need to do SEO that much more valuable, which is why I figured we'd run through some of the tactics that you can use to build a loyal audience.
This is actually a question from one of our Whiteboard Friday loyal audience members. Thank you very much. Much appreciated.
How to build a loyal audience
Some tactics to build loyalty, we talked about a few of these, but creating an expectation that you can consistently deliver upon is a huge part of how loyalty is created. Humans love to form habits. Thankfully for marketers, we're terrible at breaking those habits.
Consistency
If you can form a habit, you can create a loyal member of your audience, but this is very challenging unless you deliver consistency. That consistency needs to be created through an expectation. That could be when you publish. That could be what you're going to do. That could be the format of the content that you're providing. That could be how your solution or problem or product is delivered. But it needs to create those things in order to build that loyal audience.
Reach your audience where they are
Secondly, provide your content through the channels, the apps, the accounts, the formats that your audience is already using. If I say, "Hey, in order to get Whiteboard Friday, you need to sign up for a Moz account first," the viewability of Whiteboard Friday is going to go down. If on the other hand, which we don't have this but we really should have it, there was a subscribe on iTunes and you could get each Whiteboard Friday as a podcast, gosh, that is something that many Whiteboard Friday viewers, in fact, many people in the technology and marketing worlds already have access to. Therefore it reduces the friction of subscribing to Whiteboard Friday. We might build more people into our loyal audience.
This is definitely something to think about. You need to be able to identify those channels and then be there.
Where SEO fits
I'm saying don't start with SEO as your primary web marketing tactic anymore. I think we have to build into it. These challenges are too great. Not only are they too great, I think they could be overcome today, but they are growing. All of them are growing so substantially, instant answers and Knowledge Graph are becoming a bigger and bigger part of search results. Google Now is something that Google is pushing on so incredibly hard. I think they're going to be pushing it with new devices. They're clearly pushing it with app results inside of search results. I think these ranking signals are only going to get stronger. I think there's going to be more personalization. I think every one of these you can see an up and to the right trend.
Therefore, when we do SEO, we have to think about it as, "How do I earn a loyal audience and then use their amplification to help me perform in search?" Rather than, "How do I do SEO for my website to earn visitors that I can convert into a loyal audience?" That's a new a challenge, a new paradigm for us.
Be unique and memorable
Craft a stylistically unique and memorable approach to solving your audience's problem. One of the things that I find is challenging in a lot of businesses that we talk to, that I get to interact with is that they think, "Hey, we're the best player in this field. We're the best at doing this. Therefore, we should be able to earn a great customer audience." I think this ignores why marketing exists and ignores the power that marketing has and the power of influencing human beings overall.
The best really is not necessarily enough. We are not perfectly logical creatures where we go, "Hey, I am thinking about a new social media monitoring solution. I need to watch Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Instagram for my business. Therefore I'm going to create my criteria. I'm going to evaluate all 716 providers that are in the market today that fit my price range and those criteria. Then I'm going to choose effectively the best one. No, we're biased by the ones we've heard of, the ones our friends recommend, the ones we stumble across versus don't stumble across, the ones that have a loud voice, the ones that have a credible voice. These things bias us. Therefore, being stylistically unique and memorable have outsized power to determine whether people will become part of your loyal audience.
More isn't necessarily better
I've talked about this a few times, but I'm strongly of the opinion, especially when it comes to loyalty, that more content may actually be worse than better content. Moz publishes between 7 and 10 blog posts a week. That's a lot of content. I think there are weeks where we published 12 blog posts. For me to say this is a little odd. But the challenge here is prior to building a loyal audience. Once you have a loyal audience, you can start to expand that audience by reaching out and broadening the spectrum of content that you create, and you can afford to be a little more risk taking in that. When you are trying to build loyalty early on, you need to have that consistency of quality.
People are going to return because you keep delivering great stuff again and again. When that suffers, your audience will suffer as well. If I watch my first three Whiteboard Fridays and then the fourth one is not great, I expect to lose a ton of those viewers. But if I have tens of thousands of people who are watching Whiteboard Friday and I deliver one bad one out of twenty, maybe I have a little more room to play there.
Focus your efforts
Focus. This is a big challenge because I think a lot of us think very broadly about who we want to appeal to, the types of content we want to create, the types of marketing we want to do. This is very challenging from a loyalty perspective because passionate fans tend to congregate around very, very focused causes and very focused creators of content or focused brands or focused organizations. Its much tougher to build that passion into a group of users if you're trying to appeal to a very broad set. That's just how it is.
Don't forget engagement
Lastly, but not least, this is very tactical, but I found it extremely powerful when a brand is starting out, when a project is starting out, to engage and respond as much as possible with your customers. That could be over social channels, that could be in comments, that could be in emails, that could be directly in outreach, whatever it is. But if you see someone who you can reach out to engaging with you, replying to them, talking to them, conversing with them in some way, forming a connection is extremely powerful. It especially is important for first interactions.
I'm not going to say, "You need to respond to everything all the time, always." If you can identify, "This is the first interaction that we've had with this person," if you interact and if that interaction is positive, it can create loyalty just on its own. That's a lovely way to start scaling up from a small starting point.
All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again next week. Take care.
Great WBF.
Google's changes simply make it harder for new brands to get new organic traffic. But in my opinion, even beforehand brands were 'supposed to' invest first of all in providing an awesome, reachable product, and only then invest in SEO or acquisition in general.
All types of sites, including blogs and magazines want loyal readers in the same way that E-commerce sites want conversions and then returning, loyal buyers.The understanding that the PRODUCT is first sounds so simple to us, yet it is not clear to so many c-level fellows, when they take business related decisions for their new companies.
On a different note, I'm fascinated by Google Now, there are so many great examples but the easiest one is "Time to Home". Google knows where we live, where we work, and at what time we would usually leave the office. Very often I find myself staying longer because of traffic, and I wouldn't think checking out Google Maps (or Waze) by myself for that.
A quick recent example I have for users’ habits: Every Thursday at 9:00 EST we publish our weekly comic, an illustration of a hot topic of the same week. Last week, because of Passover, we skipped it. Within 2 hours, tens of users sent us messages and emails asking what's going on, even users that usually don't engage with the comics. So yeah, once your users get used to something, don't take it away from them.
And speaking of reaching your audience where they are, I never understood companies that provide you with the first paragraph of a story and then ask you to subscribe to read the rest of it. I understand they want more email subscribers but that really just isn't the way to do it IMHO.
I hate to sound negative because I wholeheartedly agree with your observations and conclusions BUT, the game just got a whole lot tougher AGAIN for small business owners.
Hey Donna, I invite you to elaborate. Why do you think "the game" got tougher? In recent years, social sites have offered an immediate avenue to customers, great for potentially contacting, but in 'listening' to concerns, wants, and needs. Moreover, unless you mean keyword stuffing, same-anchor-text links, and spammy techniques, a lot of factors determine whether you're successful in reaching and maintaining customers online. From another angle, the fact that ten large sites account for a significant number of searches (and growing), may mean people will learn to search for sought products/services in other ways. For example, I'm working on a campaign that involves a small business owner using forums to answer questions. They are answering open questions, and answering previously visited questions better than their competition. That is just one anecdote, but other than filtering out potential customers who want a cheaper (the cheapest) price or lazy in finding quality vendors, I think the Web invites more opportunity for the small business owner.
I don't want to speak for Donna but I think there are a couple points I think that are very much 100% on point that makes it harder for SMBs.
For starters, Google is seemingly focused on the avenue of customer loyalty. That is not necessarily the case for all types of business. My business, a wedding DJ business, very very seldom gets return customers. Matter of fact most of the time the lifecycle of a potential customer is person searches, lands on my page, will typically go through 2-5 pages (although most being 2-3), and then proceeds to fill out a contact form, sends and email, or places a call. That is it, in it's entirety. They have no reason to ever go back to my site. When their wedding is concluded I invite them to write a review up on G+, FB, Yahoo, Yelp, or other review site. I then write a blog post about their event, along with their testimonial. But the customer again never hits my site. If they are a return customer, it's because god forbid they are divorced. And yet Google ranks what amounts to a pay link site (e.g. extortion sites like The Knot) above all real wedding DJs because their site offers far more, and that puts every real DJ at a disadvantage.
This also means from a regular SMB perspective they have to spend incredible amount of time to build up even more content just to satisfy the constantly changing algorithms to try to either break into page 1 or maintain. So that means a constant learning curve that makes things harder to achieve or have to spend larger budgets to firms to get that information to not only exist, but to get everyone to talk about it (and in which Facebook demands fees for even "natural" inclusions into people's feeds).
So yes, this is a constant struggle for the SMB. I am a lucky one because I spent years in web design and hell 508 compliance which helped prime me for my business, and I even feel overwhelmed.
LT, I gave you a thumbs because I appreciate the conversation. I have to agree; it's growing difficult to 'rank' for keywords, but I was referencing that the Web offers more opportunities (other than search) for SMBs. For wedding DJs, I would assume one of the best things to do is to get referrals from previous clients? On those 2-5-page-deep perusals, you could have pictures showing people dancing at your weddings. You could record sound bites at the wedding as testimonials. Put testimonials with (actual peoples') Twitter accounts (ask your clients if they wouldn't mind providing their Twitter handle). Show versus tell on your blog/website that you're the person who should DJ their wedding. You only do weddings? Maybe you'd get repeat customers who have parties at their homes, catered venues, etc?
I think Rand's suggestions concentrate on marketing beyond page-one expectations. If you do web design, think about extending your services; offer to design a personalized wedding page (from your own website) for each couple.
To reiterate above, there's a lot to be done with the Web (as well as off the Web) to compensate for the inability to get on page one for your desired keywords. It's not as easy for those with a lack of time/creativity for sure. As another idea, perhaps look to get involved with local charities; people know people and may appreciate you're the kind of person who 'gives back.' As a DJ, I'd look toward my community rather than Google for new clients. Maybe look at doing functions at local colleges (assuming students will be your target market in coming years). These are all just ideas to try; I understand they are not definitive solutions for you. I'm not sure producing more content or keeping up with Google's algorithm is the answer; if it's proving unsuccessful, look to make a change, which may be even better than attempting to rank on Google.
All the above is not an invitation to debate, but some things to think about other than ranking on page one, which, again, is what I think Rand was suggesting too. Again, thanks for the conversation and making me think.
I think your point about there being much more than ranking to worry about is something given far too little importance. For many sites they just are not likely to rank on the top 10 for any searches. If they focus on providing value and showing why buying their product of service will help the customer the web can be a huge aid in building sales.
Granted moz exists to aid people historically focused on ranking (moz seems to be evolving...). And that is important for sites with lots of money or time and energy or a focused market where they can make huge gains with a bit of intelligent action. But many sites need to focus on things other than SEO.
SEO matters but I think web consultants that integrate SEO, Ux, social media... are much more useful today. In the past silo focuses could do ok (also when things are super fluid it is hard to stay current on a broad array of topics). When you focus on SEO every day it can seem it is super fluid but really it seems to me 95% is now pretty fixed and the discussions is often about the small bit that is in flux and so you can forget it is a small bit of the overall picture.
Content.Muse / LTParis: Neither my local garage (which I've been using for over 10 years) nor my builder use any form of 'digital marketing'. Both very successful and get all their business through WOM. The builder only started his business in 2012 and is proud of the fact that he doesn't have a website. He's got an email address but that's it - his only form of marketing is a red van with his name, phone no. and profession in BIG LETTERS. He doesn't exist online - I tried googling him. I live in a capital city (Edinburgh, Scotland).
I agree, therefore, with Content.Muse to think outside the box - not all businesses need digital marketing and not all businesses need social media.
Incidentally, I have a feeling that old skool tactics (such as responding on forums) will make a comeback - especially now that organic social is dead. People will want to get back to the real internet, not this commercialised version.
Oh there is no question that WOM is huge, and it represents about 30-40% of my business at any given time. However there is no question that I get a significant percentage (30% or so) of my leads from search. The remaining is from "extortion sites" like The Knot or Wedding Wire, which demands thousands of dollars to be listed, and usually the quality of the listing can be poor. But they have such high organic placements and many brides and grooms hit their site. i just wish I thought of the business model so I could be paid. :)
But no one should lose sight that there is more than just organic search in play here to get business.
Hey Rand,
Thanks for the another interesting edition. You're absolutely right, loyal audience or Brand royalty is really important for any company.
Rand, We recently did something for a client that boost up their social following & sales multiple times. We have a start-up E-Commerce client that deals in selling "dog collars". While checking their regular reports on magento two months ago, we saw that they just sell out the 1000th item. We decided to celebrate this milestone on social media just to gather some traction but then I got the idea to contact the first customer who ordered on their site and let him know about this milestone by sending him a hand-written post card with a free dog collar for his puppie. We did similar thing to our 1000th customer.
As soon as they got our packages, a client said they recieved calls from those customers on that very day with great wishes and appreciation. Not only that, they shared the whole story with the pictures on their social channels by tagging our client handle.
It's been a month now and we're still seeing the good response on the social channels. And last week, the client doubled our monthly fees with the commitment that we will continue with them at least for a year :)
I'd say this is the power of loyal audience!
Can not hear the audio after 1.14. Could you please have a look. Thanks
yup!!! i'm also having the same problem.
Great WBF!
Getting customers is often more laborious than it seems.
I agree with you that it is much better to have quality content that amount to attract and retain customers. Once loyal customers can begin to expand the amount of content. And of course, as you said, very important otherwise, is to be committed to our customers, answering your questions about our products and treating them with kindness. A satisfied customer will always speak well of you and attract more people.
Being in social media and answer the questions that customers have in them, will also make loyalty of these.
Thanks for your article.
That is very good information but how I am going to sell this to my customer? Hey, prepay for the SEO now and once you build loyal customers I will start doing the link building etc.???
Or may be you can start with a comparisons of traffic and conversion with and without SEO. This can get their attention plus you can further describe them the utlimate benefits of SEO
Hi Rand,
Forgive me if I ask anything incredibly simple. I'm a beginner. Here are a few things I was curious about:
1) Can you gain loyalty optimizing a blog's SEO? Let's say you research trending topics and then do some keyword research before you create your blog content. Would using keywords in your blog content that your site would rank for a good idea for starters?
2) I have found that connecting with people on an individual level can be done quite efficiently on social. However, I find that over branding can limit a business's ability to connect with people. I feel designing content based on your audience is as important, if not more important than being on brand. What do you think?
Thanks for always sharing your thoughts and insights!
Hey Joseph,
Not wanting to answer on Rand's behalf, but my 2 cents for your questions :
1) Online "loyalty" requires (and begins with) an initial touch-point - a way of someone liking, engaging or sharing your "asset" (web page content/blog post, a widget, PDF etc). To do this, they must have a "need" to go looking for something online. Therefore, if your blog post ranks well, is clicked on, as it entices them in the SERPs (search engine ranking pages) and fills their explicit need, you've got interest - although just for now and just for their initial need. If you then provide ways for them to follow you (on multiple channels), they can become a loyal follower, because they like what you share, write etc. So, as an introduction to you / your brand (needed before they can "become" loyal), optimising a blog post is a good idea.
2) If the content you design resonates with them, entertains them, hacks them off but makes them think, gets them to act in some way or compels them to share, they'll do so because they read the words of a human being, not a "brand". The brand is the glossy wrapper, it's the human(s) inside that make the sweet tasty ;)
Good luck :)
Interesting post. Do you think it will get to a point that businesses with lots of followers on twitter/facebook that have minimal engagement will get penalised because it shows that they aren't really fans/loyal?
Search engines never penalise the website just because of feeble social engagement. To understand this you first go insight into the search ranking factors Google consider especially social media part.
As per current scenario Google is more ahead of all these(facebook likes, twitter followers, G+ followers etc.) because people easily increase these base by applying genuine and deceptive way. So if one have a large number of alienated followers, Google & other search engines don't give credit for it. In other words it is not ranking signals.
If you will not get benefit of it(followers and likes) then it has no chance of get penalty as well.
Great Article Rand, Thanks for sharing it! I agree that Loyal Audience are very important compared to Custom audience. We do SEO for one of our client eCommerce store. They used to sell "Branded used bags" instead of targeting on Keywords, the product quality relates with customers provides quality customers. Equally targets on keywords & products in search.
So here loyal customers are important, Since already they are selling branded products.
Very nice post, Another good thing to concentrate for SEO People.
Love the point about "more content < better content". There are a few blogs I read and I appreciate less posts but higher quality content. What irks me is when blogs post content that isn't complete or has idea's that are overdone or underdeveloped. Feels like a waste of my time and I tend to not visit those sites as often.
What makes this difficult is for companies like mine (I happen to be a mobile wedding DJ) there really isn't too much in the way of brand loyalty, returning customers, and the like. Sure from a social perspective you can get a few champions of your brand to spread the word in an organic fashion, but i typically rely on customer reviews of my service which are almost always once-in-a-lifetime customer.
So this makes my capability to keep up with the evolution of Google search to be difficult.
So True! thanks Rand!
More and more we see how SEO is struggling to to create loyal customers if there is no work done on the brand side. In particular I've seen how SEO helped to back up a decline in brand awareness driving new customers but yet it requires a excellent work by paid media and brand activities to generate conversions.
Uff, scares me when I read some changes in Google's algorithm but sure we can continue to adapt to the fullest. Thank you !!
Its good article about the How Google's Evolution is Forcing Marketers to Invest in Loyal Audiences. I like the attached video on this post. Its really helpful. Please continue post this kind of any update on Google.
Preach It! Consistency is the new key element that Google wants to see ... in a good way. In this new post panda era, you've gotta throw out the old consistent habits - like article marketing and guest blogging and fixate yourself on SEO discipline. This means keeping your blog current (at least a post per week, more is better); posting to the various social networks despite the fact that they're no-follow now; and, chasing good writers/journalists enough to impress them that you are a specialist in your field so they'll feature you with a good do-follow link some day.
Good Luck All!
Solving your audiences problems - glad to see that some things haven't changed! Building a loyal audience is likely to make SEO easier, and whilst it works the other way around I agree that SEO is growing ever harder without a loyal audience.
In regards to focus, one of the issues we face as an agency is the different services that we offer and being able to provide specific information on those services without distracting the audience or providing them with information that they do not want to hear about. Push notifications of new articles to a segmented database is one the ways in which we have got around this.
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Hey Rand,
Great article and I agree on the concept of personalization and loyal audiences. This will be a great practice to focus on own demographics rather than wandering around. Consistency and User engagement is important factor what builds loyal audience. One should keep trying to be unique and appear to be selfless.
I know users largely stay in the top 10 results (even the reduced top 10 you mention) but I don't understand why. I have always displayed 50 results and frequently scanning down the pretty obvious bets candidates are not in the top 10. It seems to me users are doing a poor job of using search engines to meet their needs if they just take the top 3 - which is often the case.
It was a bit more obvious this would be lame if you just looked at the first 3 items in the yellow pages. And yes Google... try to put them in order of most likely to be useful (not just alphabetical - and really Google results now are not far from the yellow pages if they just put it in market cap order instead of alpha order) but it is far from perfect and users not understanding this do themselves a great disservice.
Soooooo much easier to write for the user first, spark curiosity, engage....THEN go back through and sprinkle in a little SEO...I've always found that is the content that performs the best on both fronts. Great topic!
Thanks for giving information.i am also same problem.
I'm not sure we ever should've been choosing SEO as the #1 primary tactic. I've thought PPC & social are great starting places because you connect with your actual customers (and get quick insight into what's working & what isn't.)
The people who mainly start with SEO are SEO agencies - because they aren't doing a whole lot else. You can't start with anything if you only sold SEO. This is the reason we transitioned into more of a complete marketing package where our focus is PR, social, then PPC and SEO before heading into things like CRO, community building, etc. all while A/B testing everything along the way and doing full marketing optimisation. That's really the only sustainable, long term way IMHO.
Adding to it, being a Google News user. I had seen that google is also forcing up the webmasters to deliver the unique content. If you keep releasing updates for an article it would give negative results
Like I had written an Article on
WhatsApp updated XXX Version
and I will write another on WhatsApp updated YYY Version
Effect of SEO would reduced as we write more article about same thing now a days
Rand-- You sound just like Joe Pulizzi! (haha) I love this WBF. It seems that everywhere I turn, our industry thought leaders are all becoming increasingly more in agreement that the key to this whole inbound & content marketing thing is centered around building an audience. Without an audience building focus, your chances of long term success through channels like social, SEO etc. are slim.
Awesome stuff.
Ricky
Personalization of search results for users is something which goes out of a marketers way. A marketeer should only reach to people or prospects who are showing keen interest over Google, leaving their digital footprints along the search behavior they execute. That's good in a way as you can reach customers who are actually looking for brands/products/services offered by you. Making them loyal is where the battle has to be won. Being able to stand out in SERP's is where the focus needs to be paved upon. Awesome post Rand!!
Thank you for the great post.
I do agree with yourself, these days where as competition is so high and everyone is trying to charm more. Its vital to have loyal visitors and customer. In order to have loyal audience and customer. There are so many factor involve in it. It help me to understand the other possible way of building trust. As mostly we use to focus on traditional style of bring trustworthiness.I can see the approach of this concept is changing now.
Reciprocity principle, if you give people valuable information, publish good posts, guides etc (and don't blast them every day with commercial emails, buy this buy that), they will gladly share, engage, subscribe etc.
Reply to visitors who comment at your blog. If there are 20 comments and author do not reply to any, that's good sign he don't care about his audience, just want to sell them something. People must trust you if you want them to become loyal audience.
And don't forget, trust is very hard to get but very easy to lose.
Highly thought provoking. This is a progressive approach.
As a smaller and smaller niche marketer, the fruits of my past labor by doing as you say Rand have been returning to me...my biggest fault is responding & helping to all as much as possible!
thank you
Great post, Rand! It is amazing how much Google knows about us but it is staying true to what it always wanted from the beginning - to give people content as close to what they wanted as possible. Now they are almost in our heads, and getting even closer to that than ever. I think brand awareness is getting popular again, but the winning combination is 1. Creating something valuable on the website. It could be a news section that has to do with your industry, or your products have the most product reviews of any manufacturers website in your industry (do a campaign to get those reviews first), whatever it is build value and then promote, promote, promote!! That will help make people loyal and keep coming back for more. Be shareable, be recommendable, be interesting enough to talk about.
1:04 "This is a fake example" awesome ! :D
Hi Rand, great educational post as awlays. Love it. I agree, promoting content first in social media to boost sharing and increase social signals is the definitely the easily way to create loyal fans and to skyrocket your SEO rankings in Google and other search engines.
But, the biggest challenge is creating a consistent plan to drive focus and results.
Thanks for sharing
Alex
hi rand,
firstly thank you for the post.
if a there is help desk feature on a eCommerce site and a buyer has to register with the site in order to track their order or to communicate with the site regarding any support they need. i.e every time they want to get in touch with seller, buyers will have to come back to the site and log in their account and communicate.
Will such a feature make the returning customers counted as "loyal audience" as they keep coming back on the site.
No - that's not what I mean when I say "loyal audience." It means more than just forcing people to come back to your site regularly to accomplish tasks (in fact, I'd guess that would actually hurt the loyalty of your audience - people hate to be inconvenienced or waste time).
I'm really talking about building up a group of people around your brand who love what you do, and consistently want to experience and share your content/product/tool/date/resources/service/brand/etc.
Thank you for your response.
Cheers !
Whole new ballgame, Rand. Now how to gather the flock around the brand when they don't even know your brand. You think an awesome YouTube programme lineup of fascinating topics related to brand with the new mobile tagging to specific product or using labels is the best way to indirectly introduce products and services from video marketing?
My question after reading your post and other post is: the effect and penalization will be automatic? they will take additional time to analyze different situations? mobile sites are the future, and i think we need clear instructions or help of google and other search engines
Rand,
Always inspiring and enlightening, but more than anything I find that this really gives a great strategy to the new algorithm changes that are being implemented. One of the biggest take aways from this is how the importance has shifted from the amount of content to now making the content you have count. In someways it seems this is the overall intention for Google and a Users experience.
Also making a connection with a visitor on the first time is something that I have personally experienced and it truly has made me go back to the site just because it provided a connection that made me stick around the site a little longer to see what they had.
Loyalty from the get go is what keeps a site at the top of the rankings, and we know this because if you have 10,000 pages and they are all ranking well at first but the bounce rate is 100% then really you have nothing, but instead 10 pages that keep visitors intrigued and tuned in will continue to drive and convert users.
Thanks for the breakdown, but more than anything thanks to the entire Moz team for making us all better SEO's.
Hey Rand, great insights into building raving fans! You hit right on! Thanks for consistently delivering timely information that we can leverage upon. Being ahead of the information curve is a huge task, but I can see the results in the quality and consistency of your whiteboard Fridays.
I'm saying don't start with SEO as your primary web marketing tactic anymore. I think we have to build into it.
Yikes that statement would not have been made like a year ago. But Yeah, SEO is changing quicker than it has in the past. The Day S-E-O Died... bye, bye SEO pie. lol
good thing you dropped that SEOmoz
Happy Friday
SEO didn't die (although apparently it dies every year, if you read all the seo blogs). The thing is, it's becoming more and more difficult to get into the top 10, the serps are shrinking and considering the costs, for many small and medium businesses seo is not a good investment (short term investment). I don't think seo is dead, I just think that there are other ways to bring in traffic to your website and yes, you should not rely ONLY on seo for traffic.
Hey Rand
Great WBF on a really important topic.
Publishing the WBF regularly to youtube would be a great help, also getting an email notification when you release the latest WBF would help.
You are saying right but it is not possible easily.
i´ll learn about it, thank u for share it with us
cheers
nice blog thanks for sharing this blog .
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