Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

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.

No, you need to combine keywords and emotional triggers to create SEO superstorms that result in ridiculous CTRs

Bottom line: Use emotional triggers + keywords in your titles and descriptions if you want your CTR to go from "OK" to great.

Bottom line: You must beat the expected CTR for a given organic search position. Optimize for relevance or die.

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.

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.

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.

In my opinion, it’s best to leave syndicated content and press releases open. Let Google decide what has value and what does not.

Google’s official position on properly attributed syndicated content is that they would like to be able to crawl it and decide for themselves if they want to use it.

when evaluating the financial statements of an internet business you should sense check the SDE calculation of the broker and ensure it features only the right add backs, such as: Owner compensation Depreciation (uncommon but a legitimate add back) Travel expenses (if unrelated to the business) Office rent (if the business can be run from home)

Typically website valuations range from 1x to 5x annual net income with the vast majority of transactions occurring between 2x to 4x.

Content and lead generation sites can often be high workload and search-dependent, respectively, so tend to be discounted for these factors.

Strategic investors. Buyers with an existing interest in the same or a complementary niche may look at an acquisition target as a bolt-on or merger with the current asset and be able to realize significant cost and revenue synergies

research by Centurica suggests that industry-wide, multiples have increased from an average of 2.4x in 2010 to 3.3x in 2017.

Tools like Buzzsumo and Text Optimizer can give you a good insight into questions people tend to ask around your topic:

Note that Search Console labels featured snippet positions as #1 (SEO used to call them position 0). So when you see #1 in Google Search Console, there’s nothing to do here. Focus on #2 and lower.

MyBlogU (disclaimer: I am the founder) is a great way to do that. Just post a new project in the " Brainstorm" section and ask members to contribute their thoughts.

1. Aim at answering each question concisely My own observation of answer boxes has led me to think that Google prefers to feature an answer which was given within one paragraph. An older study by AJ Ghergich cites that the average length of a paragraph snippet is 45 words (the maximum is 97 words), so let it be your guideline as to how long each answer should be in order to get featured. This doesn't mean your articles need to be one paragraph long. On the contrary, these days Google seems to give preference to long-form content (also known as " cornerstone content," which is obviously a better way to describe it because it's not just about length) that's broken into logical subsections and features attention-grabbing images.  Even if you don’t believe that cornerstone content receives any special treatment in SERPs, focusing on long articles will help you to cover more related questions within one piece (more on that below). All you need to do is to adjust your blogging style just a bit: Ask the question in your article (that may be a subheading)Immediately follow the question with a one-paragraph answerElaborate further in the article

2. Be factual and organize well Google loves numbers, steps and lists. We've seen this again and again: More often than not, answer boxes will list the actual ingredients, number of steps, time to cook, year and city of birth, etc. Use Google’s guide on writing meta descriptions to get a good idea what kind of summaries and answers they are looking to generate snippets (including featured snippets). Google loves well-structured, factual, and number-driven content. There's no specific markup to structure your content. Google seems to pick up <table>, <ol>, and <ul> well and doesn't need any other pointers. Using H2 and H3 subheadings will make your content easier to understand for both Google and your readers. 3. Make sure one article answers many related questions Google is very good at determining synonymic and closely related questions, so should be you. There's no point in creating a separate page answering each specific question. Creating one solid article addressing many related questions is a much smarter strategy if you aim at getting featured in answer boxes. This leads us to the next tactic: 4. Organize your questions properly To combine many closely related questions in one article, you need to organize your queries properly. This will also help you structure your content well. I have a multi-level keyword organization strategy that can be applied here as well: A generic keyword makes a section or a category of the blogA more specific search query becomes the title of the articleEven more specific queries determine the subheadings of the article and thus define its structureThere will be multiple queries that are so closely related that they will all go under a single subheading For example: Serpstat helps me a lot when it comes to both discovering an article idea and then breaking it into subtopics. Check out its " Questions" section. It will provide hundreds of questions containing your core term and then generate a tag cloud of other popular terms that come up in those questions:

5. Make sure to use eye-grabbing images

How about structured markup? Many people would suggest using Schema.org (simply because it's been a "thing" to recommend adding schema for anything and everything) but the aforementioned Ahrefs study shows that there's no correlation between featured results and structured markup.

Keyword Mixer — Combine your existing keywords in different ways to try and find better alternatives. Also useful for removing duplicates from your keywords list.Note: MergeWords does (almost) exactly the same job albeit with a cleaner UI. However, there is no option to de-dupe the list.

LSIgraph.com — Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords generator. Enter a seed keyword, and it’ll generate a list of LSI keywords (i.e. keywords and topics semantically related to your seed keyword). TextOptimizer is another very similar tool that does roughly the same job.

Small SEO Tools Plagiarism Checker — Detects plagiarism by scanning billions of documents across the web. Useful for finding those who’ve stolen/copied your work without attribution.

iSearchFrom.com — Emulate a Google search using any location, device, or language. You can customise everything from SafeSearch settings to personalised search.

Delim.co — Convert a comma-delimited list (i.e. CSV) in seconds. Not necessarily an SEO tool per se but definitely very useful for many SEO-related tasks.

Am I Responsive? — Checks website responsiveness by showing you how it looks on desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile.

SERPLab — Free Google rankings checker. Updates up to 50 keywords once every 24 hours (server permitting).

Varvy — Checks whether a web page is following Google’s guidelines. If your website falls short, it tells you what needs fixing.

JSON-LD Schema Generator — JSON-LD schema markup generator. It currently supports six markup types including: product, local business, event, and organization.

KnowEm Social Media Optimizer — Analyses your web page to see if it’s well-optimised for social sharing. It checks for markup from Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Where Goes? — Shows you the entire path of meta-refreshes and redirects for any URL. Very useful for diagnosing link issues (e.g. complex redirect chains).

Google Business Review Link Generator — Generates a direct link to your Google Business listing. You can choose between a link to all current Google reviews, or to a pre-filled 5-star review box.

PublicWWW — Searches the web for pages using source code-based footprints. Useful for finding your competitors affiliates, websites with the same Google Analytics code, and more.

Keywordtool.io — Scrapes Google Autosuggest to generate 750 keyword suggestions from one seed keyword. It can also generate keyword suggestions for YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and more.

SERPWatcher — Rank tracking tool with a few unique metrics (e.g. “dominance index”). It also shows estimated visits and ranking distribution charts, amongst other things.

GTMetrix — Industry-leading tool for analysing the loading speed of your website. It also gives actionable recommendations on how to make your website faster.

Mondovo — A suite of SEO tools covering everything from keyword research to rank tracking. It also generates various SEO reports.SEO Site Checkup — Analyse various on-page/technical SEO issues, monitor rankings, analyse competitors, create custom white-label reports, and more.

Now it is only recommended to make use of the disavow file when a site has received a manual action, in order to remove the offending links.

while there are plans to introduce a speed update later in 2018, Google only uses speed to differentiate between slow pages and those in the normal range.

Using the information from your content analysis, create an SEO outline, and have your company’s SMEs fill it out. This provides the trustworthy content you need, while still giving you control over how the content is written

t is perfectly acceptable to include trustworthy research from other sites. Outbound links can help users find out more about a topic and allow them to check your sources.