Search Engines Archives - Direct Online Marketing

SEO For Marketo: 5 Advanced Tips For Marketo Success In 2024

Jim Foreman — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Updated 8/26/2024

As highly capable digital marketers, we have an unprecedented number of tools to help us do our jobs. Last time we checked (a few minutes ago), the most popular marketing automation software, coming in with around 20% of the market share, was Adobe’s Marketo platform. If you have anything whatsoever to do with digital marketing, you know how prevalent Marketo is. Most implementations are centered around their handy landing pages. So most of our Marketo SEO tips are most relevant for the landing page templates, though you can use that platform for other things, too.

Just like anything else you want your customer to find via a search engine, your Marketo pages need to be optimized for SEO. Here are our top tips to get the most out of your SEO for Marketo.

Marketo SEO Tip 1: Just do the SEO thing.

You know the thing we’re talking about: optimize that page for search engines! If you want to know more about how to do that, we have a whole bunch of resources to help you. Trust us, we’re experts. In fact, below is a list of blog posts we’ve written over the years to help you out with some of the SEO basics.

That said, if you’re up to speed already on the SEO basics, this post is for more advanced users who really want to squeeze the most value they can out of their Marketo assets.

Marketo SEO Tip 2: Learn how to edit html.

We’re not trying to be glib (well, maybe a little), but you will get a lot of mileage out of the simple small step of popping open a copy of HTML Programming for Stupid People, or whatever those books are called, and teaching yourself some basic coding. It’s not difficult—html is definitely one of the easier programming languages to learn—and you’ll enable yourself to do stuff like these sub-tips.

Need a reason to learn to code HTML? Here’s why you should learn to code HTML in case you want some reasons why.

Marketo SEO Sub-Tip A: Add canonical links to your header tags.

Don’t be alarmed, it’s easier than it sounds. You can freely edit the HTML of the Marketo headers (everything between the tags on a webpage). One of the most useful ones is the canonical link. We use canonical links all the time as a way of telling search engines that potentially duplicate content is intentional and need not be indexed. Google famously dislikes duplicate content, and we all know what happens to content Google doesn’t like.

It gets ranked lower. That’s all.

You won’t lose your listing, but your organic searches will suffer. This is especially true for Marketo pages because they tend to multiply based on the SKUs, products, or services being marketed, and similar page content can trigger false duplicate flags to Google’s crawlers. That’s the opposite of what we want.

Marketo SEO Sub-Tip B: Add Google Analytics code and various pixels to the header tag manually.

While you’re editing the header, you might as well take this step while you’re there. By “manually” we mean “by hand,” as in “you have to code it yourself” because Marketo doesn’t let you do it as easily as other web design interfaces (like WordPress, for example). You can get the embed codes from the websites you use to track whatever it is you’re tracking, and your little bit of coding knowledge will come in very handy.

Marketo SEO Tip 3: Make sure your gated content is protected by noindex tags.

One of the most useful techniques for a digital marketer is to put valuable content behind a conversion link, like a newsletter signup. This lets us get something valuable in exchange for something valuable, which your gated content most definitely should be. But if that valuable content is visible to Google, then simple searches can bypass your gate and your hard work goes unrewarded.

Make sure to add the noindex tag in the headers of the pages that host your content, not the landing page itself. That’s a great way to make sure Google loses track of your page, which, again, is the opposite of what we want. Don’t take our word for it—check out Google’s own knowledge base about noindex tags.

Want to get more in-depth on our tips for gated content besides making sure search engines can’t crawl it? Check out our definitive guide to gated content.

Marketo SEO Tip 4: Link to your landing pages on your website.

This could probably be included in Tip 1, technically, but we see it so often that it merits its own mention. The tendency is to pretend like your landing pages aren’t part of your website’s ecology, but that’s not doing your SEO any favors. We’ve already seen how much Google likes links, so don’t be afraid to link it in your site navigation, in blog posts, wherever your favorite links live.

Marketo SEO Tip 5: Make sure you’re secure.

You have to make certain you’re using the https prefix with Marketo, especially when you’re linking to it from your website. Not only does Google prefer secure pages, but a link from a secure site to an insecure one might raise a flag on your customer’s browser. And flags are bad.

Marketo SEO Services

Those might be our most important MarketoSEO tips, but we could go on. If you’re using Marketo then SEO is extremely important for driving leads and sales to your website. Luckily, we’re experienced in optimizing Marketo sites and helping drive growth for your Marketo stores with our SEO services. Schedule a free consultation today and maybe we’ll share them with you.

The post SEO For Marketo: 5 Advanced Tips For Marketo Success In 2024 appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Google SGE: What Is It And Should You Be Afraid?

Billy Wright — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 20:30:57 +0000

Updated 5/14/2024

EDIT: Google SGE is finally here! Today, May 14th, 2024, Google announced that Google SGE, AKA Google AI Answers, will be rolling out to all United States users by the end of the week. But what are these new Google AI Answers, and what do they mean for the future of the search engine and your website’s traffic? Read on to learn more!

Everything changes all of the time. Especially in the world of SEO.

Google Search Results could likely be unrecognizably different by this time next year. With the growth of AI and Google SGE (Search Generative Experience), the world of SEO will get considerably more exciting and challenging moving forward.

But what do we expect to happen when Google launches the SGE version of Search? How will optimizing your website change because of Google SGE? How will Google SGE impact how users interact with the search engine and your website?

We’ve asked our in-house SEO experts here at Direct Online Marketing for their opinions and we have compiled a guide of best practices we expect to help your website thrive, as you optimize for Google SGE.

What Do We Know About Google SGE AKA Google AI Answers?

What Are Google AI Answers?

Google AI Answers are the generated content you see at the top of search results within the United States as of May 14, 2024. Google AI Answers are pulled by the new system known as Google SGE.

What is Google SGE?

Google’s Search Generative Experience – AKA Google SGE – is an innovation to its search engine, powered by its generative AI.
This new experimental feature aims to transform search engine experiences from being passive, as they were historically, to more interactive, personalized and dynamic. SGE uses AI to generate quick, concise overviews of search topics, enhancing user experience (sure, Google…) and providing new ways to interact with search results.
It also means there could be a significant shift in strategies previously employed towards gaining visibility in search results.

Will Google SGE Replace Rich Results?

As of this writing, no explicit information suggests that Google SGE will entirely replace rich results, but it is very likely to have an impact. Rich results, which provide additional data in the SERPs, differ from SGE’s AI-powered overviews and interactive content.
As SGE is still experimental and not live out in the wild, its exact impact on existing features like rich results remains to be fully understood.

“While I anticipate seeing organic traffic drop for many sites, thorough and well-written content can enhance click-through rate to mitigate this decline by becoming the source of information that SGE quotes from, with the best, most relevant content available on the subject in question providing Google’s AI with all the information it needs on the query in an easily digestible way.”
– Brian Slonka, Digital Marketing Account Manager

When is Google SGE Coming?

Google SGE is already available as an experimental feature in 120 countries (excluding Europe), supporting multiple languages. Its full implementation and potential expansion remain under development, with access to the Google Labs experiments open until the end of December 2023. There is much speculation that it will launch much sooner than many users originally anticipated.

Will My Site Lose Traffic Because of Google SGE?

There are concerns that SGE could lead to reduced visibility for organic search results. The AI-generated overviews at the top of search results might reduce the need for users to click on individual websites, potentially lowering click-through rates (CTR) and organic traffic.
This shift may require websites to adapt their SEO strategies. Images that accompany your top-ranking results on Google may become much more important as they can help guide users to click into your website since the URL of the site itself may be more obscured.

Are There Certain Types Of Sites That Google SGE Will Impact More?

Short answer: Possibly.

Google SGE may impact certain types of websites more than others. Particularly, sites that produce content tailored for Google Rich Results, such as recipe blogs and video game walkthrough sites, could see a decrease in search engine visibility. This is because their content might be incorporated directly into Google’s SGE results section, potentially reducing the need for users to visit the original websites for information.

“This advancement will likely enhance user experience by providing more intuitive, context-aware, and interactive search results. For website owners and content creators, this means adapting to a more AI-driven approach in content presentation and SEO strategies, focusing on quality, relevance, and structured data to align with how AI interprets and ranks content.”
– Alicia Cleary, Digital Marketing Strategist

Will Google SGE Mean More Ads in Search Results?

There is no direct company-issued information that Google SGE will lead to an increase in ads within search results, as Google says the focus of Google SGE is on enhancing the user experience through AI-generated content and interactive features.

There is some speculation, however, that there will be more screen real estate taken up by Google SGE content in addition to ads, but this remains to be seen outside of what appear to be tests and experiments.

How Will Google SGE Impact My Analytics?

“Analyzing and optimizing for user experience is going to be more and more critical in the SGE world. Additionally, segmenting your organic data is going to be an absolute necessity for drawing insightful conclusions about the impact of SGE.

“Looking at your data by content grouping, funnel stage, device type, keyword intent breakouts, etc. will help you better mitigate and optimize for the new SGE landscape.”
– Dana Schumacher, Sr. Digital Analyst

Prepare For A New Search Engine Experience

In summary, Google SGE represents a significant evolution in search engine technology, focusing on AI-driven interactivity and personalized experiences. While its full impact on SEO, organic traffic, and ad integration is still unfolding, dynamically adapting to this rollout will be crucial for website owners and content creators.

“SGE provides a unique opportunity for businesses to revisit how well their websites define their customers’ unique problems and how clearly they present solutions at a high and granular level.

“The depth, clarity, and formatting of website content is more crucial than ever. Website content that prioritizes these fundamentals will be in the best position to be present within SGE results and, most importantly, to convert traffic.”
– Gary Kramer, Sr. Digital Strategist

How Can I Try Google SGE Today?

Update: As of today, May 14th, 2024 Google SGE AKA Google AI Answers has begun rolling out to all Google users within the United States. Google SGE should be live for all US users by the end of week, but if you are outside of the US the following instructions may still be available for you.

If you want to try out the experimental version of Google SGE before it rolls out to the wider world, you can do so simply using Google Labs. Here is a short guide on how to use Google SGE today.

How To Try The Beta Of Google SGE

Log into Your Google Account:

Open Chrome on your desktop or laptop.

Click the profile icon in the upper right corner and select “Turn on sync”.

Enter your Google account email and password.
If you’re already logged in with Sync enabled, skip this step.

How To Access Google Labs:

Open a new tab in Chrome.
Click the small beaker icon to the left of your profile icon to open Google Labs.

How To Enable Google SGE:

In Google Labs, find the SGE card.
Click the On/Off slider on the SGE card to the On position.

Close the Google Labs tab.

How To Try Google SGE:

In the Google search field, type a query.
On the Google search results page, click the “Generate” button above the standard results to activate an AI response.

Google will return results personalized to your search using AI.

“SGE is going to impact user behavior away from visiting some websites entirely – particularly those sites that solely exist to answer questions Google can easily steal an answer and showcase in their SERP. I like to think of SGE’s impact being similar to the impact felt by the wide release of People Also Ask answer boxes and Featured Snippets, but on a much larger scale.

“Because of that, companies need to make sure they connect their top-performing webpages to keywords where Google users are more likely to need to take action, not just research something to get a surface-level understanding.

“Industry-leading sites have already been strategically growing with Google this way, but now every business that wants to grow using SEO will need to follow suit.“
– Jonathan Bentz, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist

How To Optimize Your Website For Google SGE

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) represents a significant shift in how search engines function, leveraging generative AI to enhance user search experiences. This article explores key strategies for optimizing your website for the upcoming Google SGE.

Content Quality & Google SGE

User Focus: Consider what makes your website valuable to users. Why should someone choose your content over others? Ensuring your content serves the user’s needs is crucial.
Google’s Perspective: Reflect on why Google should prioritize your content. It’s essential to align your content with what search engines consider valuable.
AI-Generated Content: If you use AI to generate content, ensure it’s carefully edited and refined before publishing. Authenticity and quality remain paramount.

“A good content approach will be unfazed by SGE or, really, any Google algorithm changes. Since the beginning of the web, the mandate for content creators has always been to write the best stuff we can that informs the reader and answers the questions they have.

“We aren’t just writing for robots; we’re writing for people. The better we do our jobs, the better the search results get, and the better Google will get at recognizing (and delivering) the content we write.”
– Jim Foreman, Sr. Content Specialist

Authority & Google SGE

E-E-A-T Framework: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google values these traits extremely highly when deciding whether or not to show content currently, and it will only get more important as Google SGE rolls out in the wild. To build authority, focus on creating high-quality, expert content.
Establishing Authority: Develop your website’s authority by showcasing expertise and providing valuable, well-researched content.
Author Persona: Having content written by individuals with verifiable expertise is beneficial. This adds a layer of credibility to your website.

“User Experience is one of the most under-optimized parts of SEO, and it will only become more important as we move into the world of Google SGE. If a user has a bad time on your website, they’re unlikely to return, make a purchase, or recommend your content to a friend. Why would an AI version of Google continue to show your website if it doesn’t delight users?”
– Billy Wright, Lead Digital Marketing Strategist

User Experience & Google SGE

Accessibility: Ensure users can easily find what they’re looking for on your site. Navigation should be intuitive and straightforward.
Website Speed: A fast-loading website enhances user experience, which is a critical factor in SEO.
E-commerce Optimization: For e-commerce sites, streamline the purchasing process to be as quick and user-friendly as possible.

Images & Google SGE

Click-Through Rate (CTR): With SGE, images will play a more significant role in influencing CTR. Optimize images to be engaging and relevant to your content.

Video & Google SGE

Growing Importance: Videos are likely to gain more importance in search results. Incorporating unique video content on your site can enhance user engagement and SEO.

SGE’s focus on interactive, AI-generated content emphasizes the importance of quality, authority, and user experience in website optimization. By adapting to these evolving standards, websites can enhance their visibility and effectiveness in Google’s AI-driven search landscape

April 2024 Google SGE Update

Beginning at the end of March 2024 Google began testing the Google SGE AI results directly within the normal Google search results for some users within the United States. This caused lots of controversy as some users noted that they could not opt-out of getting the Google SGE results, and that it was taking up so much search real estate that it became problematic for their user experience. Whether this test is reflective of an upcoming roll-out of Google SGE in 2024 is yet to be seen.

May 14, 2024 Google SGE Update

At Google I/O today, May 14th, 2024, Google announced that Google SGE AKA Google Ai Answers was rolling out live for all United States users, and would be fully available across the US by end of week. Their language also focused mainly on calling it AI Answers, which reflects the most recent change to the text surrounding the generated content within the search results.

SEO will keep changing, as it always has–Google SGE is just the latest development to shake things up. At Direct Online Marketing, we’re all about helping you adapt and thrive in this new search era, no matter what happens. Got questions about how your site will work with Google SGE? Looking for smart strategies? We’ve got you covered. Drop us a line for a free SEO chat, and let’s team up to make your online presence shine in the world of Google SGE.

Note: This article has been updated to include the end of March 2024 / April 2024 Google SGE updates where it was tested among users who were not white-listed for Google SGE in Google Labs.

The post Google SGE: What Is It And Should You Be Afraid? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

How To Get More Views On YouTube – The DOM Guide

DOM Team — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 18:50:00 +0000

This article was updated 05/28/2024

How Can I Grow My YouTube Channel?

Back in 2006, Google bought a little website by the name of YouTube for the bargain price of $1.65 billion. Since then, YouTube has become, in effect, the internet’s second most popular search engine. Now was YouTube already on a path to web prominence? Or was its acquisition by Google key to YouTube’s success? The world may never know. (Much like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.) No matter how it happened, YouTube’s rise is clearly our new reality. Ignore YouTube at your peril. Embrace it and bask in its glory. Here’s how to get the most out of YouTube’s video marketing.

Make Great Content To Grow Your YouTube Views

This seems like a no-brainer, but most YouTube videos tend to be, generally speaking, less than broadcast quality. Whether you’re showing off the new fishing rod you just bought or teaching college students how to unclog an apartment shower drain, the jump from “barely good enough” to “great” is smaller than ever. In other words, you can easily improve your game just by following some simple guidelines. A cheap clip-on microphone, compatible with every phone on the market, will immediately elevate your videos’ quality and help you grow your YouTube views.

Utilize Closed Captioning For Your YouTube Videos

YouTube offers automatic captioning, but you should upload a verbatim transcript whenever you can. This will provide a better user experience for anyone who relies on closed captions. Heck, even people who don’t rely on closed captions often use them, especially if they’re using YouTube to learn something. Captions allow users to get the information without turning up the volume on their phones or computers.

Not only is providing captions the friendly, neighborly thing to do, but it can also help your SEO, too. YouTube indexes all of the words contained in your uploaded transcript, which is like getting the milk and the cow for free.

Use the Appropriate Ad Format On YouTube

The variety of ads you can implement on YouTube include 6-Second Bumpers, Pre-Roll Ads, and In-Stream. Are you looking for awareness and brand recognition? Deploy some 6-Second Bumpers. Do you want clicks and conversions? Then you’re probably in the market for Pre-Roll ads. They can’t be skipped and run 15-20 seconds in length. Do you have a 30-second commercial that you want to repurpose? Think about using that for an In-Stream ad. If you want to see all of these in action, just open YouTube and search for something. You’ll see it all.

Target Precisely When Using YouTube Ads

While it’s a bit tongue in cheek to describe YouTube as the second biggest search engine, it does still have the world’s biggest search engine powering it. They inform each other, too, so what’s good for one is often good for the other. You should leverage that enormous YouTube/Google data network through targeting. Target and find your desired audience using the options for gender, parental status, and personal interests. Narrow down your video placements by searching for specific channels that would be of interest to your ideal viewers. If you find that one type of audience is responding better to your message than another, you can always re-target. That’s the beauty of digital marketing.

Use an End Screen To Grow YouTube Engagement

You’ve made some great content, added closed captions, and targeted the appropriate viewers. Now you should reinforce your brand and inspire your viewers to take their next action. Use the end card as a digital signpost, directing your viewers to their next destination–a landing page with more info and a form to fill, or a product listing or external website, or even a link to your YouTube channel with more videos.

Support Your YouTube Growth Efforts

YouTube is great for extending your brand and driving conversions. However, a multi-faceted strategy embracing many platforms is going to open the door to more success. Use multiple ad types on YouTube, and experiment with your targeting options. Consider running companion campaigns in Microsoft Bing and Google Ads while leveraging your common keywords and targeting wins across every platform you use, whether you use YouTube advertising services or you use SEO services.

If you want even more help upping your YouTube game, get in touch with us today.

The post How To Get More Views On YouTube – The DOM Guide appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

12 Profitable Holiday Marketing Ideas To Make This Your Best Year Yet

Jonathan Bentz — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 15:13:17 +0000

If your holiday marketing ideas aren’t ready to roll by the middle of October, you’re going to be behind. Don’t start your digital marketing from behind – that doesn’t help your customers connect with your amazing product, and it doesn’t help your bottom line, either.

Below you will find a nice even dozen of our favorite holiday marketing ideas for 2022. Consider these our free gifts to you in an effort to make this wonderful time of the year the most successful for your business.

Offer Some Limited Time Holiday Deals (Even If You’re In B2B)

Although Black Friday is looking less and less like the insane rugby scrum of years past, it is still “a thing” after the world of retail essentially canceled it in 2020 at the height of the global pandemic.

If there’s one thing we associate with Black Friday, it’s getting those amazing deals.

You might think this kind of strategy only makes sense with retail, but it can work for B2B marketing, too. Don’t forget that even though your office may be closed for the holidays, there are many companies that are open during the holidays because they are serving those who are traveling or taking time off. Aside from traditional consumer retail, other industries that regularly operate during holiday time periods include:

Convenience Stores
Emergency Healthcare
Entertainment Venues (think movie theaters, sports arenas, etc.)
Hospitals
Hospitality
Pharmacies
Restaurants
Travel and Transportation

For a few standout holiday marketing ideas, you could offer a discounted rate for one of the services you offer tailored to these specific industries. Or a coupon code that accomplishes the same thing. Just remember to make these offers redemptive. Instead of simply giving the deal away, offer it in exchange for completing a contact form, or gate it off with a form to capture some basic information.

If you identify these markets as high relevance for your products and services, prospective clients working during holidays will likely interested in your discounted services.

That’s what we call some “solid leads,” what about you?

Need to DOMinate Black Friday?
Watch This Webinar On-Demand.
Achieve Your Goals!

Setup A Google Performance Max Campaign

If you have an e-commerce site, there is no reason not to run Google Shopping ads. As far as holiday marketing ideas go, Google Shopping should be your bread and butter if you rely on digital channels to generate direct response sales.

However, in today’s modern digital advertising landscape, there is only one way to get your ads showing in Google Shopping… setup a Performance Max ad campaign in Google.

One of the things we’ve always liked the most about Google Shopping is that the ads are a combination of text search and visual ads. The user sees a picture of the item and also relevant information pulled from your feed by Google.

When it comes to setting up a Performance Max campaign so that your ads can be seen in Google Shopping, we are taking a more cautious approach. Instead of telling you to go all in on Performance Max, we strongly suggest running it with a “test and see” mindset.

If this is the first time you are hearing about Performance Max, or simply want to learn more about the basics of Performance Max campaigns before deciding to go all-in on them for your 2022 holiday campaigns, learn more by pressing play on the video below.

Once you are up to speed on Performance Max and have your campaigns set up to run Google Shopping, here’s the most important thing you can do when running a this campaigns: optimize your feed! Without feed optimization, you will be completely dependent upon Google to show your product for the right searches.

Like we said above, you should be taking a “test and see” approach to Performance Max campaigns. So, while you can still have some type of manual control over where your products are being shown, we recommend you continue to use it.

Along with that, if your feed is optimized, Google will be able to automatically pull information such as free shipping and place it in your Product Ads.

During the holiday shopping season, it is more important than ever to keep your feed as updated as possible. What do you think happens if someone clicks on an ad for a product, only to find out that you are sold out? They go somewhere else.

Don’t miss out on sales because of Google’s machine learning putting your products in front of the wrong buyers or because you have overlooked your feed management.

If you have doubts that your Performance Max campaign is ready for the holiday season – mind if we take a look with a complimentary PPC consultation?

Submit Your Product Feed For Free Clicks

At the beginning of the pandemic, we shared an important update Google made to it’s Shopping platform – online retailers could sell products for free through the platform.

Fast forward more than two years later… and those free to sell options are still available on the platform.

If you haven’t submitted your product feed to Google so that your products can be listed in free “Popular Products” search results like the one shown above – what are you waiting for?

Sure, we know these search results look awfully similar to the Google Shopping ads shown above, so how can you tell the difference?

Simple… shopping listings that are supported with advertising will always be labeled with “Sponsored” or “Ad” in the heading before the actual listing.

If you already use Google Merchant Center or Performance Max, you do not have to change a thing to receive these unpaid clicks. While the amount of impressions your products will receive for unpaid clicks will not be as high as if you were paying per click in Performance Max, this can still be a revenue generating strategy for the holiday shopping season.

Want to review your Merchant Center to see your unpaid clicks?
Learn How Here.

Change Up Your Ad Text

Customers are so used to seeing “50% Off. Order Now!” or “Great Deals!” Instead, show them what they want to see… specifically what it is you can offer them this holiday season.

So, be creative with your marketing campaigns!

If you sell gloves, use some copy that reads, “Baby, it’s Cold Outside! Warm Up with a New Pair of Gloves.”

If you sell products that are irrelevant to the cold season, no worries. You can still find ways to use the season to your advantage and inject a little “holiday spirit” in your campaigns.

Dynamic Search + Shopping = Re$ult$.
Learn How This Online Retailer
Improved Sales 115% During Busy Season.

Embrace Retargeting

When done right, retargeting can take your accounts to the next level when it comes to low-cost conversions.

This is the nice thing about retargeting: based on how your audiences are built, you can segment customers by intent.

If you have an audience for an informational page such as About Us, you know that there is some interest, but the customer is probably not ready to buy yet. You can tailor ads specifically for that audience with messaging to entice them to come back and learn more.

Along with that, if you have an audience for cart abandoners, you know there was intent to buy there – but something changed that. If you create ads that give the customer a reason to come back, you can create conversions from missed opportunities.

Learn more about our retargeting services if this isn’t already a part of your digital advertising plans for the holidays.

Lean On Email, Social, And Automation

Your messaging doesn’t need to slow down too much while you’re sipping eggnog, spinning the dreidel, lighting the candles, prepping for a fast, or ordering Chinese food with your dog.

And you don’t have to be on the stick (or at the keyboard, if you’re not a pilot) prepared to make a correction.

Most people aren’t going to be sitting in front of their computers or visiting their favorite websites for new content during the holidays. Rather, this is a perfect time to engage them where they are: on their phones, scrolling social media, and reading email.

The great news about those avenues is that you can write your social media and email marketing messages early, and then schedule them to roll out at predetermined times.

Just make sure nothing newsworthy happens that might make your subject lines or messaging seem tone-deaf.

Learn more about our social media advertising services if you may need a performance boost in these areas for the holidays.

List Holiday Sales Prominently

No one can participate in your sale if they don’t know it exists. To help boost your 2022 holiday sales, make sure your biggest promotions are front and center.

One of the best ways to do this is by incorporating your sale into your branded color design, using a holiday themed banner or other top-of-page display. This immediately makes the connection between your holiday promotions and the holiday shopping rush. Add a call to action and a link to your perfect gift products, or gift cards, and you’ll be ready to go.

Discounts should also be displayed prominently, especially around top selling products. In addition to displaying discounts on product cards and pages, special Black Friday deals, holiday specials, and gift guide call outs can be displayed both on your product pages and other holiday campaign landing pages.

Make It Easy To Convert

This is a year-round tip, but it’s especially important during the peak of the holiday shopping season.

Make sure each product on your landing page is designed with a clear purchasing path, which can be used on both desktop and mobile devices.

In the simplest instances, you can create a button that adds the product directly to the shopper’s cart. You can also display a sidebar with the current cart contents, allowing customers to see what they’ve chosen, and seamlessly check out when they’re ready.

For all your sales processes, the key is to minimize the steps it takes to purchase. The easier the conversion path, the fewer abandoned carts you’ll see all year.

Optimize Your Pages For Mobile Devices

According to Forbes, holiday spending on mobile reached $88 billion dollars last year. While the pandemic brought a lot of us in front of our bigger screens, mobile sales still increased as the calendar flipped closer to the big holidays.

Suffice it to say if your holiday landing pages aren’t optimized for mobile, you’re losing out on a huge consumer opportunity.

To optimize your seasonal landing pages for mobile:

Make sure that the buttons are large enough to be seen and interacted with on smaller screens.
Format holiday banners for mobile devices, keeping text size in mind.
Don’t overload your mobile landing pages with too much text.
Ensure that getting from products to checkout is simple, minimizing the number of “touches” between your product and cart pages.

Don’t Forget About Microsoft

Think Google is your only option when it comes to search engine advertising for your holiday marketing campaign? Think again. Microsoft can be one of those great holiday marketing ideas because it is an easy to deploy, high volume secondary platform to use to reach your target audience. Why would you want to pass up 20% of the search market?

Microsoft does not have the reach Google has, but it has an audience that has spending power. Microsoft’s search advertising solutions on Bing and across their entire network are great for reaching those that are not as tech-savvy (*cough* parents and grandparents *cough*) because they are less likely to use a browser, or a search engine, other than what Windows devices provide as the default.

Learn more about our Microsoft Ads account management services if this isn’t already a part of your digital advertising plans for the holidays.

Create A Sense Of Urgency

This is true for all product pages, all the time, but the holiday season is a fantastic time for retail sites because the urgency is already built-in!

What you can do is emphasize the timeliness of your sales on your site, reminding your customers that they need to act now if they want to surprise their special someone on time.

One of the best ways to do this is with the popular holiday countdown timer. You’ll see Amazon do this with their Cyber Monday deals, counting down the hours until each product special is gone forever—and it works.

Display your timer above the fold or along a sidebar, where your customers can easily see how much time they have left, and prepare to watch this be one of those holiday marketing ideas that will automatically push your holiday sails up!

Finally, Don’t Forget To Be Sincere

Your employees love each other, even if they fight like siblings sometimes. Your clients think you’re doing a great job, and you’re thankful for the ability to provide them with goods or services this time of year.

The holidays are also about love, acceptance, and gratitude. Don’t be afraid to show that side of yourself to the people who matter to you. We could all use a little more joy these days.

Don’t shy away from incorporating some of these timeless feelings and emotions that well up in the people who will consume the content you create for your holiday marketing strategy.

You might be surprised how far a little “I appreciate you” or “We understand what you’re going through” messaging can go in spreading more of that holiday cheer.

As the calendar year draws to a close, do you find yourself behind pace with your lead generation or sales goals? Even though the holidays are drawing close, there’s still time to meet, achieve, or exceed your goals. Contact us for a free consultation to learn how our digital marketing services can help you accomplish your best year yet!

The post 12 Profitable Holiday Marketing Ideas To Make This Your Best Year Yet appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics

DOM Team — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 17:49:05 +0000

You might have noticed a lot of talk around the web community about the benefits and challenges in campaign measurement when comparing Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics.

Recently, the majority of this chatter came because of a Google announcement heard around the digital world… that they planned to sunset Universal Analytics by July 2023.

The initial reaction to the news among marketers and website owners seemed to range from dread and apprehension to begrudging acceptance of a new way of life.

While Google had largely made it known that the transition to GA4 would likely happen in the not-so-distant future, presenting a hard deadline and conveying to users that historical data would not be maintained in Universal Analytics past a certain date represented a harsh wake-up call to reality for many. The debate about Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics has suddenly moved from a theoretical conversation to grudging acceptance.

Having to migrate a custom installation from Universal Analytics or setting up a brand new configuration represents an investment of time, money, and an acknowledgment of sunk costs into a system that is on its way to being deprecated.

But the switch to GA4 isn’t a negative change – far from it – as it represents a badly needed overhaul and presents a unique opportunity for businesses to gain a competitive advantage against direct competitors who are slow to adapt to GA4.

Why the Shift to GA4?

Universal Analytics is an amazingly popular tool that is used by just under 30 million websites. Despite this popularity, Universal Analytics (UA) is based on a data model that is over 20 years old and is in need of a hard reset.

New challenges such as privacy concerns over cookie usage, or maintaining accuracy of cross-device tracking have presented obstacles that have necessitated a data paradigm shift that can adapt with an evolving landscape. As a result, GA4 is not simply an enhancement to UA, but an entirely new product using a new data model.

Comparing Data Models In Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics

GA4 uses an event-based data model, while Universal Analytics is a session-based model.

Arguably the biggest differences between UA and GA4 are the changes in the data model, which is the foundation that every previously deployed Google Analytics is built upon. Universal Analytics is a session-based data model. Within a session, UA collects and stores various interactions (called hits) that are grouped within these sessions. These sessions are the foundation of Universal Analytics reporting.

Some examples of Universal Analytics hit types are:

Pageview
Screenview
Event
Transaction
Item
Social
Exception
Timing

GA4’s event-based model processes each interaction/hit as a standalone event. Put simply, everything is now an event. Similar to how hits are grouped under Sessions in UA, event parameters are grouped under events in GA4 and serve as additional pieces of metadata to add context to the event data.

Having these additional granular pieces of information can provide real benefits to your analytics. For example, it is very common for organizations to have countless forms, built using different tools, with different offers speaking to different parts of the funnel, scattered across your main site and subdomains.

Let’s say in this specific example, a SaaS client is using Contact Form 7, HubSpot Forms and Gravity Forms across their web properties for demo requests, free trials, newsletter signups and gated whitepaper downloads. We could pass the following custom event parameters for all form submission events (i.e, sign_up and generate_lead).

form_type: cf7, hubspot, gravity.

form_offer: demo, free trial, newsletter, whitepaper

form_id: passes the unique ID of each form so that you can map back to it in the tool it was built in.

This would allow the client to see which form types and/or offers are performing best and easily differentiate between the forms using a unique ID.

How Do You Measure Sessions In Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics?

The concept of a session is a fundamental consideration in how we analyze user behavior. So even though GA4 has moved away from the session-driven model of UA, never fear, sessions themselves are still present and able to be analyzed in reports.

However, the method for how the sessions are calculated has changed.

The session_start automatic event is the new method for how sessions are calculated in GA4. The session_start event initiates when a user opens your website or app in the foreground, or views a page or screen when no session is currently active (e.g. the previous session has timed out).

A session can expire or timeout based on a period of inactivity. The default session timeout in GA4 is 30 minutes (the same as in UA), but can be adjusted up to 7 hours and 55 minutes.

Google measures inactivity based on the user_engagement automatic event. This event acts as a timer periodically sending events to GA4 as long as the site/app is in the foreground. So if a user_engagement event does not fire in the allotted duration set (default 30 minutes), the session times out.

Why The User Engagement Event In GA4 Is A Better Way To Measure Sessions

The user_engagement event further enriches session measurement by adding additional session-related metrics. Session related metrics include:

Sessions: The number of sessions that began on your site or app (the session_start event was triggered).
Engaged sessions: The number of sessions that lasted 10 seconds or longer, or had 1 or more conversion events or 2 or more page or screen views.
Engaged sessions per user: The number of engaged sessions / the number of users
Engagement rate: The ratio, represented as a percentage, of Engaged sessions relative to total sessions.

So while this shift in how sessions are calculated will certainly take some getting used to for marketers familiar with UA, from our perspective, this new model allows for new, useful, session related metrics that can provide more flexible and insightful behavioral analysis when compared to UA.

How GA4 Is Going To Enable Better Engagement Measurement

One of the biggest frustrations analysts have with Universal Analytics is the inability to measure engagement on a page. Bounce rate has long been the de facto stat for measuring engagement in UA. A bounce is when a user visits a single page and exits without navigating to a second page (bounce rate = bounces ÷ sessions).

However, there are plausible scenarios where users interact by only visiting a single page of your site. Although instead of that visit being a low or no value visit, the single page visit of your site actually signals that visitors are finding exactly what they need right away. Situations like this could include reading a blog post or finding an answer on a frequently asked question page.

In these scenarios, many casual Universal Analytics users will use time-based metrics such as “Average Session Duration” for users who landed on that page. Unfortunately, Average Session Duration is one of the most misleading and misused metrics in UA, as many do not realize that UA can’t measure the time a user spent looking at the last page of their session.

So what you are actually viewing is the average session duration for sessions where the user visited multiple pages. The new engaged sessions metric helps fill this gap. As we can see, the pain behind a Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics conversation loses a little bit of its sting with the right implementation.

(Reference: Google’s documentation comparing Session in Google Analytics 4 vs. Universal Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9964640?hl=en#sessions&zippy=%2Cin-this-article
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11986666#sessions&zippy=%2Cin-this-article )

How Does Event Measurement Change in Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics?

At this point, we have all grown accustomed to Universal Analytics’ event taxonomy of Event Category, Event Action and Event Label. While the structure is certainly a useful framework through which we have constructed our event naming conventions, it is somewhat rigid and has several drawbacks.

For example, we have a standard naming convention for measuring UA link click events that we use for the purpose of measuring several things.

Event Category = “All Link Clicks”. The logic is to have a uniform name for all link clicks to keep reports clean and to easily be able to track unique link clicks on a given page.
Event Action = {{cJS – Click Type}}. This is a custom JavaScript variable created in Google Tag Manager that returns whether the link click was Internal, Outbound, Click to Call, mailTo Click, or a PDF Download Click. This allows us to segment link clicks by user intent and to better understand user behavior.
Event Label is {{cJS – Lowercase Click Text}}~{{Click URL}}. This combines the text of the link with the URL of the link so that we are able to differentiate between different links.

How GA4 Removes Event Taxonomy

As you can see from our example above, we are trying to implement workarounds to squeeze more information out of the event than the three standard event fields allow by concatenating multiple variables in the event label field. We could use hit-scoped custom dimensions to collect this data, but there is a limit of 20 custom dimensions per Google Analytics property built using UA, so custom dimensions have to be used sparingly in those installations. The ideal solution would be if we could add additional fields to the event as needed to collect the data–that is exactly what new GA4 property installs allow you to do.

GA4 totally removes UA’s event taxonomy. Event Category, Event Action and Event Label are no more, now the only standard field is Event Name. Additional event data can be collected via parameters; which are additional pieces of metadata that add context to events. Some parameters (e.g., language, page_title, page_location, page_referrer & screen_resolution) are sent automatically. In addition to automatically sent parameters, up to 25 custom parameters can be sent for each event.

When you consider the previous workarounds we had to utilize in my UA link click example, you can see one example of how the flexibility of GA4’s event-based model can, if properly configured, unlock more granular insights than its predecessor was ever capable of.

Types of Google Analytics 4 Events

There are four types of events in GA4:

Automatically collected events
Enhanced measurement events
Recommended events
Custom events

Automatically collected and Enhanced measurement events are what we would consider out of the box event tracking.

Automatically collected events

As the name suggests, these events are collected automatically when you set up your data stream for GA4 and are triggered by basic interactions with your site or app.

Here is a full list of GA4’s automatically collected events.

Enhanced Measurement events

Enhanced measurement events allow you to measure events right in GA4’s user interface. No Google Tag Manager configuration or coding required! Within the Admin section of GA4, you can enable any (we recommend all ) of the following events:

Page views (page_view)
Scrolls (scroll)
Outbound clicks (click)
Site searches (view_search_results)
Video engagement (video_start, video_progress, video_complete)

You can read additional information related to GA4’s Enhanced measurement events here.

While out of the box event tracking (Automatically collected events and Enhanced measurement events) can fulfill basic needs, you must go further to get the most of your GA4 implementation. This can be accomplished via Recommended Events and Custom Events.

Recommended Events

Recommended events are events that you implement that are not easily configured out of the box. Because these events require additional context to be meaningful, they’re not sent automatically.

While the firing/trigger logic of the events need to be customized, they have names and parameters that are predefined by Google for the purpose of unlocking existing and future reporting capabilities. Adding these events are crucial for getting the most value of GA4 reports, helping you better understand user behavior.

An example of a recommended event would be sign_up, set to be triggered when a user signs up for an offer. You can then use GA4 reports to analyze which user sign-up methods are the most popular or convert the best.

Here is a full list of GA4 Recommended events.

Custom Events

Finally, custom events act as a sort of catch-all. Meaning if an event you have identified as valuable is not captured by any of the three other event types, it must require a custom implementation.

Why Google Analytics 4’s Data Model is Superior To Universal Analytics

It is clear that Google designed GA4 to be a more customizable future-proof tool than its predecessor. By moving to the event-based collection, Analytics is more flexible, scalable, and customizable.

The event-based model allows for all hits to be stored as a single data type. This is a welcome shift for analysts who have longed for improved granularity and have used workarounds (via hit-scoped custom dimensions) to segment and analyze data on a hit-by-hit basis. This constant and granular measurement of interactions across web streams provide you with even richer insights from your data.

Implement a Customized Measurement Strategy

Look beyond platform defaults. GA4 out of the box is actually a much more robust solution than UA. As we previously discussed, enhanced measurement allows for default recommended events to be added, while UA requires events to be configured using Google Tag Manager or with the help of a developer. Despite this, in any comparison of Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics, GA4 still does not cater to the unique needs of every website.

Every business and every website are unique, meaning that every analytics implementation must be unique as well. To implement analytics in a way that is tailored to your business’s unique needs, custom events, custom dimensions and custom metrics are a necessity.

Out of the box measurement is a good place to start, but you must invest time in customizing your analytics implementation to get the insights that your business needs.

Contact DOM today for a free measurement strategy session for implementing GA4.

The post Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth (Updated March 2022)

Jonathan Bentz — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 19:07:23 +0000

Over the last several years, substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities have had to make multiple shifts in the tactics they use to perform successful addiction treatment marketing campaigns.

Simply put: it’s not easy to be in charge of kickstarting growth for treatment facilities and rehabilitation centers.

Scammers and third-party lead generators have increased the difficulty for organizations to rank their websites to be found by the 23-million-plus Americans in need of treatment.

But the biggest Google change challenging SEO efforts for treatment facilities and rehabs isn’t the scammers…

Instead, it’s the government.

Learn how the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has been impacting your ability to rank at the top of the search results. Then, get a glimpse into 12 of our top ideas to rise above SAMHSA in the search engines so you can get your growth plans off the ground.

SAMHSA’s Impact on Digital Marketing for Addiction and Mental Health

Back in February 2018, Google rolled out a significant change to how it presents search results in the United States when users look for services and information related to substance abuse and mental health.

That change? The placement of the National Helpline page provided by SAMHSA as one of the top three search results for high volume keywords like:

“anxiety symptoms” — 77,500 monthly searches*
“drug addiction” — 22,200 monthly searches*
“signs of alcoholism” — 18,100 monthly searches*

The rise in the ranking presence of this page was exponential. According to data from SEMrush, its presence in the top 10 of Google results increased by over 1,100% in just the first month.

But that was just the beginning. Today, many of those same searches continue to show the SAMHSA National Helpline, and the number continues to grow.

For instance, as of August 2020, you can now find it listed on the first page of Google for over 89,000 terms. As a result, traffic estimates to the site have also grown by enormous leaps and bounds.

If you are responsible for confidently growing admission applications at a substance abuse or mental health facility, this change has forced you to rethink a few of your tactics. The good news is that rehab facilities like yours can respond and succeed despite this.

Get started with the extensive list we’ve created for you below.

Below, you will find 12 alternative marketing tactics – three using PPC strategies, and 9 using SEO strategies – that you can leverage quickly to compensate for SAMHSA’s ownership over the most clicked-through keyword positions in the search engines.

Our 12 Top Addiction Treatment Marketing Tactics

PPC And Digital Advertising Tactics

Go ‘Legit’ to Run Search Ads
Advertise On The ‘No. 2 Search Engine’
Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On The ‘GDN’

SEO And Content Marketing Tactics

Get Listed in SAMHSA’s Locator
Create Content For Every SERP Feature
Market The Map With Local SEO
Explore New Markets With Hyperlocal Pages
Review Your Past (Optimize It For The Future)
Capitalize On Question-Based Searches
Expand Upon Your Program Features
Blog For Your Decision-Making Audience
Barnacle To Top Content Publishers

1. Go ‘Legit’ and Get Approved to Run Ads In Search Engines

For a long time, Google and Bing accepted search engine advertising from rehab and mental health facilities in the same way they accepted ads from other medical service and healthcare providers. But, as the opioid crisis in the United States continued to escalate, the rules for addiction treatment centers started to change.

Why? Because scammers started taking advantage of those in need.

To help separate the scammers from the legitimate treatment facilities, Google partnered with LegitScript to setup an independent, third-party verification system. Since then, any in-person treatment facility, crisis hotline, or support group has been required to be LegitScript certified to advertise in Google. You can learn more about the LegitScript certification process from our friends at FHE Health, a healthcare institution that delivers quality, medically integrated personalized treatment for those suffering from behavioral health disorders located in Deerfield Beach, FL.

Why LegitScript Certification For Search Ads Became A Need

In case you missed it, here’s a timeline of how the bans and reinstatements of rehab facility advertising in search engines progressed:

September 2017: Google began restricting ads from showing for searches related to addiction treatment after it noticed that some facilities running ads did not provide a high enough quality of care to help patients recover.
January 2018: Google followed suit in the UK as well and eventually Google extended the ban globally.
April 2018: Google announced its partnership with LegitScript. By July, LegitScript planned to verify about 30 facilities and Google would once again reopen advertising to in-person facilities, crisis hotlines, and support groups.
February 2019: Bing announced it would also require LegitScript certification for all addiction treatment advertisers and would no longer accept third-party lead generators.

To be fair, there’s no doubt that running PPC campaigns in substance abuse and mental health niches is a costly marketing strategy. In addition to your monthly PPC marketing budget and associated agency fees, LegitScript requires an application fee per facility and an annual fee for verification.

With that said, search engine advertising is likely to be an ROI-positive endeavor if managed correctly. It’s also the only 100% viable option for getting a top page position for a keyword currently occupied by SAMHSA.

Plus, LegitScript certification keeps a lot of the less ethical facilities and scammers from competing for clicks and driving the costs per click higher.

Similar to becoming a listed facility in the Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator from SAMHSA (more on that below), getting your facility listed will take some time, but the process is pretty simple.

If you are a representative of a facility interested in starting a LegitScript application, you can click here to submit one.

2. Advertise On YouTube, The Internet’s ‘No. 2 Search Engine’

If you clicked here, you were expecting this to be all about advertising on Bing, weren’t you? Or maybe one of the search engines that’s popular in international markets, like Baidu or Yandex?

Well, it’s not. Instead, you need to take a moment and think about leveraging the search opportunities provided by advertising on YouTube. A site that generates more searches on its platform than Bing, Yahoo!, AOL, and Ask.com… COMBINED.

Added bonus: it’s also widely considered to be the no. 2 social network, making it a great place to boost your social media marketing.

While it’s not a traditional “search engine” in the way you might normally think about them, there are nearly 3 BILLION searches per month done on the site, according to data compiled by Mushroom Networks.

That breaks down to over 1,100 searches per second.

Although it was acquired by Google back in 2006, LegitScript certification is not required at this time to advertise on YouTube. Therefore, it can be a more attractive advertising solution for smaller facilities with cost barriers to traditional search marketing on Google and Bing.

4 YouTube Advertising Tips To Maximize The Performance Of Your Videos

While LegitScript certification isn’t required, you’re still going to need to have a commercial or video ad ready to go for a YouTube promotion. Once you have your creative completed, here are a few ideas on how to get the best performance from a YouTube campaign.

Use the appropriate format. Here’s a quick list of which type of YouTube ad is best for your campaign, based on your goals.
- Brand recognition: 6-second bumpers.
- Clicks: 15-20 second pre-roll ads (bonus: they can’t be skipped).
- Conversions: 15-20 second pre-roll ads
- Re-purposing a TV commercial: 30-second In-Stream ads.
Utilize closed captioning. Provide the best user experience for your viewers with accurate, verbatim transcriptions.
Target smartly. Find your audience using the options for gender, parental status, interests, or target specific channels they are likely to watch.
Deploy an end card. You’ve made some great content, now reinforce your brand and inspire the viewer to take their next action by directing your viewers to their next destination – a landing page, your website, or your YouTube channel page.

There are definitely some benefits YouTube can bring to your marketing efforts with a dedicated advertising budget.

In addition, leveraging YouTube can also bring benefits to your traffic and visibility through SEO and referral traffic. Interested in learning how it can help you in these areas? Check out one of these helpful links.

3. Strategically Stay Top Of Mind On Google’s Display Network

According to Google, its far-reaching Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users around the world.

Websites. Blogs. News sites. Even Google-owned properties like Gmail and YouTube.

All of them have an advertising opportunity available to your facility through the Google Display Network.

Depending on the business goals you have for your campaign, Google can also manage the campaign for you on autopilot. Just set your budget, upload your ads, and off you go!

But just because it sounds easy, however, doesn’t mean it’s that simple. Sure, automated bidding is handy, but it’s only as useful as the strategy you put behind it. Similar to YouTube advertising and LegitScript approved PPC advertising, you’re going to want to pay a lot of attention to your targeting if you want a display campaign that will lead to conversions.

Oh, and you’re going to want to keep your ads fresh. You ever get tired of seeing the same ads from leading brands over and over? If you answered yes, then you can assume your audiences will too. Don’t bore them to death with your creative.

With the Google Display Network, you can proceed with confidence. Just be aware that patience and persistence are going to be key in this channel if you want it to pay off.

THIS TREATMENT CENTER
IMPROVED THEIR ADMITS BY 300%
USING DIGITAL ADS. LEARN HOW.

4. Getting Listed in SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

One of my favorite online marketing strategies comes from the adage, “…if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” From some of our research into how Google presents this SERP listing for SAMHSA, the link for the National Helpline will often include a site link to SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator right underneath its meta description.

The fact is that Google favors displaying links from SAMHSA over other possible search results prominently, so getting your original content or sales-driven pages to rank above SAMHSA will be extremely difficult — almost near impossible.

However, SAMHSA has an online treatment finder, and rehab facilities can request to be added to that list of treatment providers.

How To Get Listed In The SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator

Getting listed in the SAMHSA services locator is a great SEO tactic for your campaign. For starters, you’re gaining a backlink from a .gov domain — one of the highest-value links you can obtain.

Need a reason beyond that? The site generates an estimated 60,000+ visits per month in the United States from Google searches alone. The high volume and highly specific type of people visiting the site and then being referred to your facility create a great source of well-qualified traffic for your site.

If you represent a newer facility, or your facility is not currently listed in SAMHSA’s locator, getting listed will take some time. Overall, though, the process is pretty simple. Here’s how it works according to the FAQ on the locator’s website:

You request the addition of your facility by completing the I-BHS Facility Application Form.
The BHSIS Project Office verifies that your facility is eligible by contacting your local representatives or SAMHSA/CBHSQ. As an alternative, you can also contact your state mental health or substance abuse agency to help with verification.
You receive a survey in the mail from I-BHS, complete it, and return.
About a month passes, and pending final approval, your facility should be good to go. Just know that they typically add new facilities on a monthly basis.

To maintain your listing, you are required to respond annually to either:

the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), or
the National Mental Health Services Survey (N-MHSS)

These surveys go out every March, and your facility will be required to provide updated information each year after your facility was added to the list.

5. Create Content For Every SERP Feature

If you have spent time doing searches on Google and Bing for answers to almost any question, or for information on any general topic, then you have probably been served with a featured snippet result in the past.

What’s a featured snippet? According to Google, it’s that special box at the top of the search result before the standard listings. Featured snippets include:

a quoted block of text from a webpage in paragraph, list, or table format
a link to the webpage the text was originally quoted from

The content is also frequently read aloud by the Google Assistant if you do a voice search.

While that is the general description of a featured snippet straight from Google, they are just one of many top-position-snatching Google features. Google search engine results page features (SERP features) can take many different forms and shapes. In fact, according to SEMrush, there are over 20 different SERP features to keep in mind if you are using SEO as a growth strategy for your facility.

While some of the features SEMrush monitors will not have a direct impact on an addiction treatment or mental health campaign, many of them will.

12 Actionable Ideas You Can Use To Put SERP Features To Work

6 Ideas That Are Completely Within Your Control

Local Pack: verify your GoogleMyBusiness listing and get citations on as many of the major local directories as possible (more on this in tip no. 6)
Site Links: add links to your top resources and services pages in the footer of your website.
Top Stories: Have your blog added to Google News.
Knowledge Panel: if your facility has a Wikipedia page, or if one of your executives is a published author, one of these may be available for you to claim.
Reviews: deploy schema markup in your site header files with star ratings and review counts from sources like the National Rehabs Directory, the fix, ChooseHelp, or Rehab.com.
Twitter: publish your most valuable blog content and resources in your Twitter feed using keyword-rich hashtags at the end of each tweet.

6 Ideas You Can Influence (But Google Controls)

Featured Snippets: if you have a page that ranks in the top 5 of a search term with a featured snippet at the top, create a subheading that includes the keyword, then publish content that matches the featured snippet type, using the keyword phrase 2-3 times in your text.
People Also Ask and FAQ: answer the questions Google showcases in the People Also Ask box in an FAQ section on a top traffic page.
Image Pack and Image: optimize the file size and dimensions of your image files and utilize up to 100 characters of your alt tag for keyword-rich descriptions.
Featured Videos, Video Carousel, and Video: embed your YouTube videos on pages of your site that also rank well for terms with video carousels.
Instant Answer: provide calculations and short, simple to answer questions on your top-performing webpages.
Jobs: deploy schema markup in your site header files for the pages featuring any of your open job listings. Note that this only applies if you are hosting your job openings on your site. Platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed already do this for you.

6. Leverage Local SEO To Rank Where SAMHSA Can’t Be Featured

While SAMHSA will continue to dominate organic search results, they technically only have one physical location in Rockville, Maryland. As far as Google is concerned, SAMHSA can’t be featured in local SEO search results because they are not considered to be a provider of local treatment services. SAMHSA will always be your biggest competitor for traffic in the search engines, but one area Google is leaving open for you to own continues to be local SEO.

On desktop searches, a map listing with three facilities is included with nearly every top searched keyword phrase related to substance abuse and mental health services.

On mobile devices, the map takes over all of the SERP real estate above the fold. At a bare minimum, if you have not taken over ownership of your Google My Business listing, or verified your business with the following top local directories, opportunity is leaving you behind:

Apple Maps
Bing Local
SAMHSA
Yelp

If you already have your business confirmed on all five of the platforms listed above, you are off to a great start with maximizing your online presence in your local area. But you’ll want to take it further with local SEO as there are still as many as 22 other local directories we deem to have a “high” or “very high” citation value.

Because of the presence of the SAMHSA listing at the top of the search results, the fact that you want to reach your target audience on a local or national level will not matter – you’re going to want to leverage every ounce of opportunity local SEO has to offer. Don’t get left behind — local SEO needs to be a critical part of your drug rehab SEO strategy.

7. Go Hyperlocal

There are a lot of well-established websites in the substance abuse and mental health niche that have leveraged hyperlocal keyword searches very effectively over the years for their own addiction treatment marketing.

In fact, many of the most highly trafficked sites in this niche leverage creating a directory of treatment facilities and drug rehab centers as one of their main marketing tools to drive referrals to advertisers. Sites like SoberNation and Rehabs.com have done this for years and become so successful with this as a marketing strategy that they can now get you to pay them for traffic.

Because of how well sites like this perform in the SERPs, these types of directories can be a good source of both relevant referral traffic as well as qualified admissions leads. It can be tough to justify paying to be listed in a directory, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore these opportunities entirely.

Think of it this way — if you can justify paying to be part of your local chamber of commerce, you could probably justify paying to be listed in a directory that can help grow your admissions. Outside of becoming listed in rehab focused directories, you can also apply a hyperlocal approach to your website. If you know zip codes, names of popular suburban areas, or names of specific cities and towns within a dedicated drive radius of your facility, then you can leverage localized content to rank for some highly targeted long-tail keyword searches.

Want to go into more depth on hyperlocal digital marketing? Here’s a few blog posts worth your click.

8. Revise Your Past (Then Optimize It For Your Future) In Addiction Treatment Marketing

Historical optimization is the practice of updating old content on your site and improving its SEO value for the present and future. Over the past few years, this tactic has become an incredibly valuable SEO play for facilities with a large archive of content.

To briefly summarize this tactic, find a blog post or article on your site that was published at least six months ago. Prioritize pages on your site that either:

Generate a lot of traffic, or
Convert into admission inquiries

Then refresh the content, improve the on-page SEO, add an author bio, and re-publish it with a more recent “updated” date.

Search engines reward webpages they can rely on being “there” when the crawl the internet. This tactic presents your facility with the opportunity to avoid writing about the same topics over and over again. Instead, it helps your website establish cornerstone pieces of content that will reliably provide your site with traffic from search engines.

As an added bonus, historical optimization can help you establish your administrators and clinicians as thought leaders in the addiction and behavioral health industry.

Historical optimization in your addiction treatment marketing is a great way to get long term value out of content you published long ago.

9. Take Advantage of Question-Based Queries In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

According to research compiled by Jumpshot and analyzed by Moz in March 2017, roughly 8% of Google searches are phrased as questions. With voice search only continuing to rise in popularity, the percentage of question-based searches are sure to grow accordingly.

Do you have an FAQ page on your facility’s website?

When you publish blog content, are you writing titles and subheadings in your posts in the form of a question? Take the time to answer both common and uncommon questions. Try to compile questions you may often get from admission prospects and their families about your treatment approaches, facilities, or warning signs that a loved one needs to know. There are two major benefits to taking this approach with your addiction treatment marketing strategy:

You will be building trust and helping inform people who need help but are not ready to call.
Your site will benefit from a larger number of entry points from keyword searches, lessening the impact that SAMHSA’s top positioning will take away from search traffic to your facility.

What questions are your admissions team, or your clinical staffers, uniquely qualified to answer? Give them a laptop and have them start writing!

10. Don’t Forget About Your Program Features In Your Addiction Treatment Marketing

Of the over 89,000+ keyword phrases where Google displays the SAMHSA National Helpline link in the top three results, above you will see just a small sample of the monetary worth of some of the terms, sorted by top monthly search volume estimates.* That’s a very small sampling of the data SEMrush has on rankings for the National Helpline page, but with a pretty quick glance, you will notice some trends across the keywords that Google is using to trigger this result.

Different forms of addiction
Someone researching reactions to substance abuse (withdrawal, side effects, etc.)
Someone is looking to find/get help (AA, NA, rehab, etc.)

Now, in contrast to that, you may have noticed that keywords related to general program features were not in the above example. These days, no substance abuse or mental health facility is the same. Dig in to communicate what makes the approach of your recovery centers unique from other facilities.

3 Questions You Should Think About Answering In Your Content Marketing Plan For Your Rehabilitation Center

Does your program take a mindfulness approach to relapse prevention?
Do you leverage the outdoors as a therapy method?
Does your staff have multiple advanced certifications or education credentials?

Whatever makes your facility stand out from the rest of the facilities out there, now is the time to capitalize on it. Make sure your site has dedicated pages related to those treatment programs and features and support those dedicated pages with press releases or blog post content. Optimize the dedicated pages for maximum search visibility by applying on-page SEO best practices and leverage link building strategies from the supporting content to heighten the importance of the dedicated pages to search engines.

With this addiction treatment marketing tactic, every page on your website can be an entry point to put you in touch with those in need of help.

11. Addiction Treatment Marketing Should Cater Content to Your Audience

Image Credit: rehab4addiction

In response to these developments in Google search results, a lot of digital marketing agencies are going to suggest you try to leverage content marketing strategies only with the intention of generating interest from top-tier publishers. The idea here is that getting coverage in front of a national audience should generate backlinks and a lot of impressions. The concept can also be referred to as viral marketing — because “going viral” is super easy, right?

To us, this feels like an expensive fool’s errand; unless, of course, the idea of a campaign with a large expense and little to no attributable ROI sounds like something your facility wants to try out.

Addiction treatment marketing shouldn’t be about more awareness of your facility. Instead, it should be about connecting with people who love and care for those who need your help.

5 Content Ideas To Help Establish A Better Connection With Those Who Need Your Help

Going with a “10X content” approach that will have an impact on the attention your brand receives and little else, the more sensible approach is to cater your content directly to your audience. Here are several alternatives to making “viral” content that could be better suited to get your facility highly-relevant traffic:

Answering questions for the family members of potential admits
Recapping research conducted in the industry that validates your approach to healing
Sharing video testimonials from alumni who have dramatically improved their lives after release
Providing helpful guides on niche topics related to attending a treatment facility, such as a legal term glossary
Reviewing national and international news topics and explaining how they are directly impacting addiction and mental health treatment

For all types of people, it’s tough dealing with substance abuse and mental health. If you seek to be a resource for people by providing useful information at the right time, they will reach out when they need you the most. Don’t rely on occasional brand mentions in big publications with the hopes that people will remember you when the time is right.

12. Barnacle Your Brand To Top Ranking Content Publishers

Barnacle SEO is not a new strategy, but it can be a highly successful approach when situations like this occur. The term was coined by Will Scott of Search Influence about a decade ago and there was a must-watch Whiteboard Friday about it several years ago, too.

The idea behind Barnacle SEO for rehab centers as an addiction treatment marketing tactic is pretty straightforward – leverage the top rankings of other sites for your gain. Ever since April 2018, ranking for the top keywords in the substance abuse and mental health space became exponentially harder due to the update of SAMHSA’s National Helpline. Now, in addition to competing with other facilities and online publishers for top keyword rankings, getting them is almost impossible because of the injection of SAMHSA.

What can you do? Create content specifically on other sites that rank for your targeted keywords. Five of our favorite target domains to leverage for this strategy include:

Medium
Pinterest
Quora
Wikipedia
YouTube

The value of links from these domains to help boost your search rankings is debatable. However, the referral traffic opportunity from all of them is great, and the frequency with which content on these sites ranks on the first page of Google results is high. While getting a Wikipedia page about your facility may be difficult, creating a profile and submitting content to all of these platforms should become a high priority online marketing strategy this year.

Closing Thoughts On Addiction Treatment Marketing Strategies

Many people are turning to Google to find answers to their troubles. With locations in Wheeling, WV, and Pittsburgh, PA, the team at DOM is well aware of the US’s opioid crisis. We are also sensitive to the fact that there is no “one size fits all” fix.

We think it’s a good thing that Google is trying to get people help when they need it from a neutral source. This is also not unfamiliar territory for Google. Back in November 2016, they made a similar change to the top of results for searches related to suicide.

But this change over the last two years does force substance abuse and mental health treatment facilities to shift. They can still use search engine marketing strategies to create opportunities for themselves.

They just need to get more creative in order to provide care to the nearly 23 million Americans in need.

The top 12 ways we suggest facilities shift their addiction treatment marketing strategies are:

Become a LegitScript certified advertiser so your facility can run Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising
Extend the reach of your commercials and video content with YouTube advertising
Strategically tap into the near-limitless advertising opportunities in the Google Display Network
Get listed in the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Services Locator
Find keywords you already rank well for and structure your content for Featured Snippets
Maximize visibility in local SEO by completing and verifying any available citations
Create content on your site dedicated to hyperlocal communities that are in need of your services
Keep top-performing pages up to date by adding more text and updating visual content every three to six months
Invest time in creating a comprehensive FAQ or writing blog posts to answer common questions
Optimize pages on your site for rankings around the unique features of your programs
Create content tailored to the families and individuals struggling with these issues
“Barnacle” content published by your facility to top publishing platforms for better exposure

Want to check out more of our actionable ideas from our Pittsburgh marketing firm to grow confidently online in the medical and health industry? Check out some of these blog posts below.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post 12 Marketing Plans For Your Rehab Center To Kickstart Its Growth (Updated March 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Which Site Speed Tool is Better? Google PageSpeed Insights vs Pingdom (Updated 2022)

Jim Foreman — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 01:19:12 +0000

As good stewards of the websites under our purview, we track a series of vital metrics and make our recommendations based on verifiable data. One of the most important of these is how fast a web page loads. Here at DOM, we typically default to two tools – Solarwinds’ Pingdom page speed tool and PageSpeed Insights from Google.

That said, there are several options for getting performance grades on how fast your website content gets delivered to your visitors. You may use something like GTMetrix, YSlow, or Uptrends – and we can’t blame you for that.

However, one thing that can’t be debated is that Google recently included page speed in its updated focus on core web vitals, and that was for a good reason:

if your page is slow, people won’t want to visit it.

Considering that’s exactly the opposite of what we want as SEO professionals, we use a couple of important tools to speed. We wanted to know and maybe you want to know, too: which is better, PageSpeed Insights vs Pingdom?

One Good Tool Is Good, More Is Better

We use both tools as part of our SEO site audit processes. The most common implementation is to use Google’s insights tool as the default with the backup use of Pingdom if a page doesn’t have a lot of traffic. Both have their benefits.

Why yes, we do have a PageSpeed Insights Score of 99/100 for our homepage.

Google PageSpeed Insights

If there’s an official tool by Google, we’re going to use it. After all, their search engine is the one we want to rank for.

And we don’t need to cite data here to prove that it’s the top search engine in the world—okay, fine, here you go: according to statista.com, Google has 86% of the search engine market share.

Google’s tools are always going to give us the most accurate data as it relates to metrics that are important to Google. If the metrics matter to Google, then that means the metrics are important to us. Contentful paints, input delays, layout shifts, all of them.

As long as it has so much of the search volume, supplying a gargantuan share of the organic traffic on the internet, then we would be silly to ignore it.

Pingdom Page Speed Test

You might be wondering why we would use anything other than Google PageSpeed Insights, if the results we get from it are so valuable. We don’t do anything without data, and that’s where Pingdom helps us—it provides good data, sure, but it also has a bonus feature that Google doesn’t: transparency.

The primary measurement of page speed is called ping time, which is another term for latency, or how long it takes for the data to go from your device to the page you’re visiting, and then back to your device.

We don’t know the actual source of Google’s site speed measurements, whereas Pingdom, on the other hand, tells us exactly where its servers are.

That’s good because, even in this age of fast-as-light data transfers, distance still matters. A page that is hosted in a location thousands of miles from a person visiting it is prone to higher latency, or ping time. After all, we haven’t invented a technology that can move faster than light.

Not only does Pingdom tell you where the servers are, it lets you choose which server to use in your latency tests. That’s something Google doesn’t offer, and it can be really useful when your website’s traffic tends to come from one specific place. You can also use Pingdom to find out whether the site speed differences you might be seeing are geographic.

Pingdom, of course, is just one of a “comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations” from Solarwinds. Without getting too promotional for this solution, Pingdom also has additional products to do transaction monitoring, alerting, and more.

Pingdom’s Onload Time vs. Google Page Speed’s Time to Interactive

Onload Time (a Pingdom page speed metric) factors in that some elements on the page may not load before the browser requests it—like a JavaScript-based image carousel. While things like browser caching and lazy loading of images are great, this setup can create a false sense of security for marketers because Pingdom will often report faster page load times than what a user actually experiences.

This is especially true on sites with high mobile device usage and sites with a global reach to areas reliant on 3G or slower connections for internet access.

Time to Interactive (Google’s metric) is the amount of time it takes the page to fully load every element and function. You have more extreme timings in these reports, but you also have a more honest look at how long it can take for a user to gain access to the complete site experience on a device.

Instead of Google’s Time to Interactive metric, a better comparison for Pingdom’s Onload Time metric is Google’s Speed Index metric.

Here’s a comparison of those two for a random page on the internet.

Pingdom Load Time: 3.69 seconds
Google PageSpeed Mobile Page Speed Index: 16.2 seconds
Google PageSpeed Desktop Speed Index: 5 seconds

Clearly, the desktop results from both Google and Pingdom are much closer to each other. But we’re also seeing a pretty wide gap between the desktop experience and the mobile experience.

How does that happen?

Emulation

The leading theory, and one that seems to match the data, is that Pingdom likely uses a real world browser simulation to do its speed testing and page evaluation. While Google Page Speed uses an emulated browser in situations where there is no field data or lab data collected in Google Chrome.

That emulation can cause a discrepancy that is important to keep in mind.

The Conclusion: Which One is Better?

The answer… is both! We told you from the top: we use Google Page Speed Insights most of the time, and Pingdom page speed is great for filling in the cracks that can appear.

Of course, there are other options out there in the market for page speed testing. We would be short sighted to not acknowledge tools like GTMetrix, YSlow, Uptrends, and a variety of other proprietary and open source solutions.

As with so many measurements, you’re almost always better off relying on more than one source for your web performance data.

Of course, neither of these free to use tools are a replacement for getting real user insights in real time. But both can be a great place to start if you want some easy pointers on improving page performance and the timings of delivery for your site.

To get more information on the topic of website speed, we have multiple resources for you to check out.

Or, if you’d rather just speak to someone about how to make your mobile and desktop pages faster, you’re welcome to contact us today for a free consultation.

Not quite ready to speak to us? No problem, you may want to start out by learning more about our status as a Google Premier Partner and what that means for you.

The post Which Site Speed Tool is Better? Google PageSpeed Insights vs Pingdom (Updated 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

How to Optimize for Voice Search

Jim Foreman — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:24:08 +0000

You should optimize for voice search no matter how you personally feel about giant corporations listening to you. They’re listening to all of us, and a non-zero number of us is telling those corporations that we want more of these devices that listen to us. Some of us might find it a little weird that these little devices are listening to us, but the rise in voice searches shows that we’re happy to use those listening devices when they can help us answer our questions.

Through all of the consternation about which companies are passively listening to every noise we make, from the airy grunt when we pick up a laundry basket to the curse words that fly when we drop the basket on our foot, the reality of market commerce is this: those devices wouldn’t be so ubiquitous if people weren’t using them. According to Google, around 27% of us are already using our voices to search–and that’s just on mobile devices.

We don’t need to tell you what you’ve already learned from all those context clues (and the title of the blog): optimize your site for voice search. Here are our six top tips for doing it.

Tip 1: Don’t Be Afraid of a Conversational Tone

Specifically, those headings that ask a question. Whenever we write something that we want to communicate to an audience, we tend to use a more formal approach. This probably has something to do with what we learn makes for a good heading on papers we write for school. This is why a lot of blogs opt for a more serious, informative, professional-sounding heading.

The Appearance of Formal Headings

See how formal that is? It’s SO formal. It’s not at all how people talk, is it? This wouldn’t be as big of a problem if voice search weren’t becoming so prevalent. People tend to use voice search the same way they talk. One of the reasons why we use headers at all is to delineate the content we present in chunks. Since Google is getting better and better about crawling pages and identifying the chunks we prepare for it, we should be making our headers look like the searches people are making.

What Does a Conversational Heading Look Like?

You’ll see a lot of headers that look like the above–chunks of content that pose questions followed by content that answers it. This is one way to optimize for voice search, sure, but increasingly we are finding people are typing searches like that, too. What a world!

Tip 2: Use That Schema

You might be wondering why you should use schema on a blog post that isn’t anywhere near the zeroth position. We’ll give you a big one, and you probably already guessed what it is. That’s right, for voice search!

Schema doesn’t just give Google a ready-made outline for presenting your content to searchers, it also has another big benefit: it contextualizes your page so Google gets a better understanding of what’s on it. If you include FAQ schema on your page, Google sees that your page is answering questions, and will use that information to populate searches. This might not instantly create higher rankings, but it will let readers, especially long-tail searchers, quickly find exactly the answer they’re looking for.

This doesn’t just apply to FAQ schema, either. There are tons of different kinds of structured data you can use, and each one will help contextualize your page for Google and, by extension, the folks who find your page.

Tip 3: CWV and We Really Mean It This Time

How many times do we have to tell you to optimize your page for core web vitals? Well, whatever that number is, here’s one more:

Core web vitals are more important than they’ve ever been! Your pages need to be fast, they need to load quickly, and they need to do all the other stuff that Google says to do which you can read about in this post about core web vitals.

Tip 4: Get Local

A lot of voice searches are made by people looking specifically for something local to their current whereabouts. In fact, voice searches are somewhere around 3 x more likely to be local than other types of search. If you have a business that could benefit from that local footprint, make sure those search engines know about it. If you need some help getting your business up to snuff for those “near me” searches, check out our Guide to Local SEO.

Tip 5: Go For the Longer Tails

There’s a joke here about cats and rocking chairs but there’s nothing funny about long tail keywords! Actually, there’s a lot that’s funny about long tail keywords because they go against what we’ve been led to believe about writing for the internet. They’re not short and simple, they’re big and occasionally complicated.

Longer tail keywords tend to be lower-funnel searches and are usually used by people who are ready to buy. If I want to know “what is the best litter box,” it’s going to look different than somebody who’s learning what a litter box is. That conversational, longer-tail key phrase is also, coincidentally, how we use our voices to search.

Tip 6: Optimize for Mobile

It only follows that if most searches voice searches are made on a mobile device, then you need to optimize for mobile results, too. Your website and the design template you use should already be doing most of the heavy lifting for you regarding how your website presents on a mobile device, but it doesn’t hurt to check on it yourself. You have a phone, right? Look at the page you’re optimizing in a phone browser.

Hey Siri, these tips hopefully helped you get a handle on optimizing your page for voice search. If you liked what you saw, stick around and read more. Here are a few blogs to get you started:

The post How to Optimize for Voice Search appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Event SEO in These Uncertain Times — and Beyond!

Jim Foreman — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 15:47:20 +0000

Just when we thought things were going back to normal, the delta variant popped over for some tea and forced us all back to our home offices where we doom-scroll the latest COVID-19 news and cancel our autumn vacation plans. Social media managers hastily swapped their Let’s Get Back to Normal posts with How To Adapt to Another Wave of COVID and content marketers who wanted to write something timely had to rework their blog posts about event SEO.

Google Loves Your Event

Don’t get carried away, it’s not just your event that Google loves–it loves every event. It wants to help us promote our events on its search engine and provides us with lots of juicy SERP features that we can use.

If you’re using an event hosting platform (like your Eventbrites, for example), you don’t need to do much of anything at all, except make sure the platform is cooperating with Google and supplying Google with the code it needs. Each platform will have a support page that should tell you what you need to know.

If you know how to code html, and you have the ability to add code to your website (not all platforms allow it, but most do), you can also add the event information yourself.

Google Also Loves Structured Data

Structured data and events are two great flavors that taste even better together, like peanut butter and chocolate, or, if you’re from Pittsburgh, french fries and, well, just about anything. Structured data is something else Google loves, and if there’s anything you need to know about SEO, it’s that we try to give Google the stuff it loves as much as we can. Google is absolutely over the moon in love with structured data (also called schema and markup).

How Do I Add Structured Data to My Event Page?

If you’re doing this yourself, that’s great. We love to see people get out their toolset for a little DIY webwork (don’t be scared, it’s not hard). Here’s how you add it:

Focus on one event per page. This is how Google prefers it, but it will also make it easier to update. It’s fine to have one page that lists all of your events (like a Calendar of Upcoming Events) but make sure you’re not implementing the event schema on that page instead of the individual event page.
Generate and implement the proper markup text. There are two main types of markup: microdata and JSON. Which one you use is up to you, but Google uses JSON in its examples, so that’s the one we tend to use. Some web developers have a preference, so if you’re working with one, ask them.
1. You might be wondering how to generate the markup you need. Schema.org is a great place to start and you can learn an awful lot about structured data there.
Verify that your page is sending the right event signals to Google by using their rich results status report in Google Search Console, and fix any errors you find.

Do Webinars Still Matter?

Yes, webinars definitely still matter. They’re the best way to engage with your audience and peers in real-time, no matter where they live. The pre-COVID attendance rate for webinars was around 40% and that number has likely gone up since so many of us went remote. Webinars went from becoming the best way to gather as a group to the only way to gather as a group. We have our own webinar coming up, and we wouldn’t be doing them if we didn’t find value in them.

A lot of the best practices for event SEO apply to webinars and real-life events, too. After all, we’re talking about how we can leverage organic search to get people to participate in a shared experience on a specific day–the same principles matter whether they’re meeting in person or over webcam.

Is Structured Data Really the Only Way to Promote my Event Using SEO?

No, of course not! Markup code is never the only option, but it’s one that you absolutely cannot overlook. Using schema to optimize for Google’s rich SERPs will help you rank higher on organic search results, which is what SEO is all about. In addition to adding event schema, you need to make sure you’ve optimized your event page for SEO.

You’ll notice that in the above text, we didn’t get into broader SEO best practices or organic search optimization recommendations. For those, you can read some of these other posts we’ve done on the subject:

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

The post Event SEO in These Uncertain Times — and Beyond! appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Zero-Click Searches and the Future of SEM

Jim Foreman — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 19:58:26 +0000

If you want to give digital marketers a panic attack, go back in time to about 2010 and tell them that in the near future people will stop clicking on links in SERPs—and Google will actively encourage this. Today those panic attacks are happening across SEO offices all over the world: Zero-click searches are starting to erode page views. It’s a slow but inexorable movement toward a future that may or may not include monitoring mouse clicks (or finger-taps on mobile). It’s a premonition that’s causing some heart palpitations.

Change is inevitable

If there’s one thing we SEO folks know, it’s that change is going to happen and it’s pointless to fight it. Actually, that’s two things. We’re good at handling change but bad at counting.

Need we enumerate the changes we’ve endured just in the last ten years? The rise of mobile alone was nigh unimaginable back when we rocked our Razrs and had to pay extra just to send a text message with a photo in it. It’s not the change itself that surprises us, and nobody who’s been paying attention should be very surprised by the rise of zero-click searches.

You don’t have to click a SERP

We’re used to thinking about the act of searching online as an activity with a very specific flow that starts with intent. Google loves to think, write, and talk about search intent. Google doesn’t want to just provide search results; they want to satisfy a need. A search is just another way of saying “I want to learn more about this,” and Google wants to be able to fulfill that need with as little friction as possible.

Making somebody click is causing them friction

Providing the answer to the searcher’s question without making them click the link is a way for Google to eliminate friction in the search process. The answers to those questions are still out there on the wild old world wide web, but rather than making users click on a link to the page with the information that answers the searcher’s question, Google has created ways for those pages to display their information to searchers without leaving those Google SERPs.

That means “What is that actor’s name?” can be answered without you leaving Google’s search pages. Pause the movie you’re watching, put the name of the movie into Google, and you get all the answers you need without clicking a single thing:

If “without leaving Google” jumped out at you, then you might just be a digital marketer. Google loves nothing more than itself, and if it can convince you to spend more time looking at its SERPs instead of, say, imdb.com, the more money they make from your eyeballs. Google is not a charity.

But don’t take one SEO’s word for it. We asked the experts about the scary future of zero-click searches, and here’s what they told us:

Google is naturally moving towards Zero-Click Searches as they want the user to remain within the Google Ecosystem for the duration of their online search experience. The best way to optimize, then, is to give Google exactly what it wants, while also making sure the content is enticing enough that a user will return to hear more about what you have to say on your site.

Use language that is targeted towards Voice Searches by deliberating Asking and Answering questions within your own content, ala,

“Q: What ingredients do I need to make homemade ice cream?”

“A: To make our award-winning homemade ice cream recipe that will taste BETTER than the kind you buy at the store, you need Cream, Eggs, Sugar, and Vanilla.”

Give Google what they want, but hook the user in with something truly unique.

—Billy Wright, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

Zero-click searches, especially for informational queries, will continue to increase over time as Google continues to insert more features into the Google SERP pages. Featured Snippets, Knowledge Panels, and People Also Ask continue to become more prominent and are becoming more important for SEOs to try and optimize for or “feature bait.” The increased relevance of voice search only adds to the importance for websites to start optimizing around the FAQ or Q&A format in their content.

In terms of measuring SEO performance, website owners should pay more attention to their impression metrics. It’s easy to confuse zero-click with worse SERP performance, when in actuality it suggests that both the way you approach SEO and the way you evaluate metrics need to adapt as well.

—Jason Ohsie, SEO Department Manager

So, what can you do about zero-click searches?

Here’s an easy guide:

Have good content that’s written well, clearly communicates the information, and doesn’t do any of the things that Google specifically tells you not to do.
If you’re going for specific keywords, make sure they’re Featured Snippet-ready. While you’re at it, you might as well code those other schemas, too.
Learn the difference between impressions and clicks—your data analyst will thank you.

For more information about improving your SEO, check out these blogs. If you like what you see, you can also get in touch for a free assessment of your own digital marketing needs.