RankBrain Judgment Day: 4 SEO Strategies You'll Need to Survive | WordStream - 0 views
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The future of SEO isn't about beating another page based on content length, social metrics, keyword usage, or your number of backlinks. Better organic search visibility will come from beating your competitors with a higher than expected click-through rate.
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In “Google Organic Click-Through Rates” on Moz, Philip Petrescu shared the following CTR data:
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The Larry RankBrain Risk Detection Algorithm. Just download all of your query data from Webmaster Tools and plot CTR vs. Average Position for the queries you rank for organically, like this:
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Our research into millions of PPC ads has shown that the single most powerful way to increase CTR in ads is to leverage emotional triggers. Like this PPC ad: Tapping into emotions will get your target customer/audience clicking! Anger. Disgust. Affirmation. Fear. These are some of the most powerful triggers not only drive click through rate, but also increase conversion rates.
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No, you need to combine keywords and emotional triggers to create SEO superstorms that result in ridiculous CTRs
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Bottom line: Use emotional triggers + keywords in your titles and descriptions if you want your CTR to go from "OK" to great.
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Bottom line: You must beat the expected CTR for a given organic search position. Optimize for relevance or die.
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Let's say you work for a tech company. Your visitors, on average, are bouncing away at 80% for the typical session, but users on a competing website are viewing more pages per session and have a bounce rate of just 50%. RankBrain views them as better than you – and they appear above you in the SERPs. In this case, the task completion rate is engagement. Bottom line: If you have high task completion rates, Google will assume your content is relevant. If you have crappy task completion rates, RankBrain will penalize you.
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4. Increase Search Volume & CTR Using Social Ads and Display Remarketing People who are familiar with your brand are 2x more likely to click on your ads and 2x more likely to convert. We know this because targeting a user who has already visited your website (or app) via RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) always produces higher CTRs than generically targeting the same keywords to users who are unfamiliar with your brand. So, one ingenious method to increase your organic CTRs and beat RankBrain is to bombard your specific target market with Facebook and Twitter ads. Facebook ads are proven to lift mobile search referral traffic volume to advertiser websites (by 6% on average, up to 12.8%) (here’s the research). With more than a billion daily users, your audience is definitely using the Social Network. Facebook ads are inexpensive – even spending just $50 dollars on social ads can generate tremendous exposure and awareness of your brand. Another relatively inexpensive way to dramatically build up brand recognition is to leverage the power of Display Ad remarketing on the Google Display Network. This will ensure the visitors you drive from social media ads remember who you are and what it is you do. In various tests, we found that implementing a display ad remarketing strategy has a dramatic impact on bounce rates and other engagement metrics. Bottom line: If you want to increase organic CTRs for your brand or business, make sure people are familiar with your offering. People who are more aware of your brand and become familiar with what you do will be predisposed to click on your result in SERP when it matters most, and will have much higher task completion rates after having clicked through to your site.
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UPDATE: As many of us suspected, Google has continued to apply RankBrain to increasing volumes of search queries - so many, in fact, that Google now says its AI processes every query Google handles, which has enormous implications for SEO. As little as a year ago, RankBrain was reportedly handling approximately 15% of Google's total volume of search queries. Now, it's processing all of them. It's still too soon to say precisely what effect this will have on how you should approach SEO, but it's safe to assume that RankBrain will continue to focus on rewarding quality, relevant content. It's also worth noting that, according to Google, RankBrain itself is now the third-most important ranking signal in the larger Google algorithm, meaning that "optimizing" for RankBrain will likely dominate conversations in the SEO space for the foreseeable future. To read more about the scope and potential of RankBrain and its impact on SEO, check out this excellent write-up at Search Engine Land.
