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Showing posts from December, 2020

What Readers Want During COVID-19: Content Ideas for Every Niche

This is a stressful time to say the least. Everything is impacted by COVID-19 in some way, including our work. Once we’ve taken time to acknowledge how lucky we are to work in digital, it’s time to assess if our current content strategy needs any adjusting based on current events. Many marketers are finding themselves: Wanting to write about something topical Needing to add more content to their calendars At a loss for how to contribute at a time like this So, I spent hours using Ubersuggest, putting myself in the shoes of various Americans. I tested a variety of keywords to see which ones have exhibited a trend during the COVID-19 outbreak and might warrant some attention from content marketers. The results below are for the term “Coronavirus,” so for the other keywords identified, I looked for a noticeable spike in the months of January, February, and March to make sure they matched up accordingly. My findings reveal potential topic ideas for several primary industries. See if any pr

Avoiding False Conversions in Google Analytics

  Preface The first half of this post is a quick rundown of some of the standard ways in which your conversions could be going awry. The  second half  of this post — everything after “How to filter conversions with Tag Manager” is an advanced way of intelligently filtering conversions using Tag Manager and cookies. If you’re confident you’ve already covered your bases, feel free just to skip to the advanced section, I just feel it’s important to go through some of the basic stuff before diving into more complex solutions. Avoiding false conversions Aside from failing to record important data, one of the best ways to screw up your analytics is to record the wrong thing and lump it in with all the times you’ve recorded the right thing. For example: if you’re counting conversions when you shouldn’t be, that can screw up automated ad bidding, how much you value individual channels, or even how well you think your business is doing. For this post, we’ll be referring to this issue as “false

The Local SEO Stats & Practical Tactics of Google’s Top-Ranked Grocery Stores

  Grocery stores belong at the center of the 2021 local SEO industry conversation. Other than medical facilities, no enterprise stands out more clearly on the map as essential to daily life in the US, and few verticals have had to adapt more rapidly in mid-flight than our neighborhood food stores in the COVID-19 era. From independent grocers to major supermarket chains, there are heroes in every aisle keeping the nation fed. Any data that supports the strong continuance of these businesses is well worth sharing. In this article, I’ll provide results from 900 data points I pulled while analyzing the top local-pack-ranked grocery store in each of the 50 US capital cities. I’ll also summarize the practical tactics I’ve learned from listening to grocers and their marketers, highlighting how they’re adapting and succeeding in unprecedented times. It’s my hope that both in-house and agency grocery marketers will discover important takeaways in my analysis to ensure a successful 2021 for each

Google's December 2020 Core Update: By the Numbers

On December 3rd, Google announced that they were rolling out the   latest Core Update . Initially, the bulk of the impact seemed to arrive on that date, with MozCast spiking at 112.4°F: We measured above-average ranking flux in the three days prior to the update announcement, and a few days after the announcement, but the bulk of the flux seemed to occur on the roll-out day. (The dotted line represents the 30-day average prior to December 3rd.) How did December 2020 compare to other Core Updates? While technically the third largest named core update, Google's December Core Update was very close in measured impact to the May 2020 Core Update and the August 2018 "Medic" Update. Winners and more winners Back in May, I  came down pretty hard  on winners and losers reports. I don't want to discourage all core update analyses, but our rush to publish can produce misleading results, especially with multi-day updates. In May, I settled on a 7-day update analysis, comparing th

How Lead Generation Tactics Can Boost Your Link Building Results

How effective is your link building campaign? I bet your answer is “I wish it could be better.” Talking to business owners and executives on a daily basis, I have yet to meet one who would be satisfied with their link building strategy. Everyone needs links, yet they are getting harder and harder to get. The solution? Change your link building mindset. How link building is similar to lead generation In any business marketing strategy, we’re really interested in one thing: sales. Yet, if we keep focusing on that end goal, we won’t achieve much. A customer may need up to eight touchpoints before they finally make a purchase. If you only focus on that final sale, you’re missing out on all those extra steps that drive your customer to buy. It may sound obvious (so I’ll stop here) but the point I’m trying to make is: Marketers cannot focus on the final sale. We need something in between — a secondary metric that will bridge the gap between “a stranger” and a “a buyer”. DigitalOye is one of

10 Basic SEO Tips to Index + Rank New Content Faster - Best of Whiteboard Friday

When you publish new content, you want users to find it ranking in search results  as fast as possible . Fortunately, there are a number of tips and tricks in the SEO toolbox to help you accomplish this goal. Sit back, turn up your volume, and let Cyrus Shepard show you exactly how in this popular and informative episode of Whiteboard Friday. Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard, back in front of the whiteboard. So excited to be here today. We're talking about ten tips to index and rank new content faster. You publish some new content on your blog, on your website, and you sit around and you wait. You wait for it to be in Google's index. You wait for it to rank. It's a frustrating process that can take weeks or months to see those rankings increase. There are a few simple things we can do to help nudge Google along, to help them index it and rank it faster. Some very basic things and some more advanced t