Google Analytics offers in-depth traffic analyses on a wide variety of metrics, but in my experience, one of the most telling is direct traffic.

Here’s what direct traffic is, what it means for your marketing campaigns, and how to utilize Google Analytics to generate direct traffic reports.

What Exactly Does Direct Traffic Involve?

Plenty of marketers get confused about direct traffic and what it exactly is.

By definition, direct traffic simply means that visitors arrive on your website through one of two ways – either by typing in your website’s URL directly in their search bar, or by accessing it through a bookmark.

However, this doesn’t necessarily give you the full picture, because direct traffic can come from a variety of other sources as well.

An article from Analytics Toolkit points out some additional scenarios:

 A user clicks on a link in an e-mail from Outlook or Thunderbird or similar desktop software

 A user clicks on a link in Skype or other desktop messengers

 A user clicks on a link in a PDF, DocX, ODF, XLSX or a different type of document

 A user clicks on a link in a mobile app

 A user clicks on a link from a secured site (https://something) to your non-secured site (just http://something)

 A user clicks through a URL-shortener or in a different scenario where certain JS is being used (though this is rare)

 A user clicks on a link in any desktop software in general

As you can see, the specific source of direct traffic can be a little murky at times.

Typically, direct traffic occurs whenever Google cannot determine another referrer (e.g. search engines, blogs, social media, other websites, etc.).

More often than not, however, direct traffic does come from someone directly typing in your URL or through a bookmark.

The Value of Direct Traffic

So what’s the big deal with direct traffic?

Why should you report on it, and what exactly does it mean for your brand?

Generally speaking, direct traffic can mean one of four possibilities.

1. Repeat Visits

Let’s say that your direct traffic is coming from one of the two traditional routes, where visitors are either directly typing in your website’s URL or accessing it via a bookmark.

This often means that you’re getting repeat visits and that people are interested enough in your brand to return to your site.

For an eCommerce store, this can mean that you’re getting repeat sales, which is indicative of a positive customer experience.

Consumers were pleased with the value of your product or service, your website interface, your navigation, etc., and are potentially interested in making another purchase.

Alternatively, if you’re a blogger, direct traffic indicates that readers were impressed enough with your content to return for more. It interested them to the point that they want to explore the rest of your content in greater detail.

This is beneficial for obvious reasons. Although it’s not always easy to pinpoint the exact reason you’re getting these visits, you’re generally doing something right if you’re generating a sizable volume of direct traffic.

2. Word-of-Mouth

If one person recommends your brand to a friend, family member or colleague, this could result in direct traffic, suggesting that they arrived on your site by directly typing in your website’s URL.

In other words, this traffic came via word-of-mouth recommendations.

Generating traffic this way is encouraging because it suggests that you’ve established some degree of brand loyalty.

It shows that one person was happy enough with your brand to personally recommend it to another person.

It also shows that the person they recommended your brand to was compelled enough to manually type in your URL.

Another advantage of word-of-mouth traffic is the positive impact that it can have on conversions.

A study by Ogilvy, Google and TNS found that “74 percent of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision.”

If you’ve obtained direct traffic through word-of-mouth, your likelihood of making a sale increases significantly.

3. Offline Marketing

Traditional offline marketing techniques such as print publications, direct mail and face-to-face networking have lost some of their momentum thanks to the growth in digital marketing, but they still play a role in lead generation for many brands.

In some cases, direct traffic is the result of someone learning about your brand offline and directly entering your website’s URL.

This differs from a branded search, where someone types in branded keywords (e.g. your company name) in a search engine and finds your site through the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Acquiring direct traffic tells you that a visitor knew your specific URL and immediately went to your website.

If you’re placing a heavy emphasis on offline marketing, direct traffic suggests that it’s working. You were able to captivate people enough to motivate them to directly visit your website.

4. Brand Strength

Put all of these points together, and they mean one thing: your brand is beginning to materialize and strengthen.

Consumers have become familiar and at least somewhat comfortable with your brand to the point that it’s what pops into their heads when they’re looking for a particular product or service.

The more direct traffic you receive, the stronger your brand equity typically is.

This is important because “77 percent of consumers make purchases based on a brand name.” Women in particular are more likely to factor a product’s brand name into their purchasing decision.

Landing directly on your site doesn’t necessarily mean visitors are ready to buy right away. The majority of your leads – even those acquired through direct traffic – will still require some nurturing.

But it does show they’re at least willing to visit your site directly and perform some preliminary research. This indicates that you’ve established a solid level of brand equity and that you’re heading in the right direction.

How to Analyze Your Website’s Direct Traffic

Accessing your direct traffic metrics on Google Analytics is fairly simple. From your main dashboard, click on “Acquisition.”

Then click on “Overview.”

Toward the top of the page, you’ll see a pie chart called “Top Channels.”

This will provide you with a quick glimpse of how your direct traffic compares to your other traffic sources like organic search, referral, social and so on.

As you can see here, direct traffic accounts for 35.7 percent of this site’s overall traffic.

To take it one step further, click on “Direct” under “Acquisition.”

From there, you’ll be able to see which specific pages on your website visitors initially landed on. In other words, these are the pages that visitors typed in their URL bar or bookmarked.

At this point, you should be able to get a pretty good sense of which pages are being directly accessed most frequently.

In many cases, this will simply be your homepage. Other times, there may be particular landing pages, product pages or even a blog post that people are overwhelmingly interested in.

For instance, I had a client a while back who had a product page that was receiving a high volume of direct traffic. From that, we concluded that the page in question was particularly popular with his demographic.

Analyzing this information will provide you with valuable insights you can use to fine-tune your marketing campaign moving forward.

The Potential for Deceptive Reporting

It’s important to note that, while Google Analytics is a highly-effective tool, its direct traffic reports aren’t always 100 percent accurate.

According to Gene McKenna of Search Engine Land:

Everyone knows that browsers don’t always report where visitors came from when they arrive at a website. When they don’t report where they were in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) referrer header, often the traffic is considered ‘Direct’ — which really means, ‘we have no clue where they came from, maybe they typed the URL in or hit a bookmark.’

Search Engine Land even performed a study analyzing Groupon’s direct traffic which found that, “Up to 60 percent of ‘direct’ traffic is actually organic search.”

So whenever Google Analytics is unable to identify a specific referrer, they’ll classify that traffic as being direct when, in reality, it came through organic search.

This isn’t to say that 60 percent of your direct traffic is inaccurate and actually came via search, but it’s definitely something to keep in mind when analyzing your reports.

Looks can be deceiving at times. Nonetheless, you can still get a good idea of the state of your direct traffic.

The popularity and universality of Google Analytics is a testament to its reporting capabilities. A big part of its appeal is its intuitive, easy-to-use interface, as well as the fact that the basic version is free.

Although Google Analytics offers a wide array of features, marketers will definitely want to become familiar with direct traffic reports.

Not only is this an efficient way to gauge the effectiveness of your word-of-mouth and offline marketing techniques, it will give you a general sense of how strong your overall brand is.

Put it all together, and Google Analytics can be a huge asset to your marketing campaign and can provide key insights to shape your strategy moving forward.

What other insights have you uncovered from exploring your direct traffic in Google Analytics? Leave me a note below sharing your experiences:

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

In a recent study by Cisco, it was estimated that global internet traffic from videos will constitute 80% of all internet traffic by 2019.

With the widespread adoption of high-speed internet (and in recent years, mobile internet), people can finally fulfill their desire for vibrant, stimulating visual content whenever and wherever they are.

When you consider that 6 out of 10 people prefer online video streaming to live TV and that 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, it’s clear that YouTube is the perfect platform for brands to communicate with their audiences.

As with all types of content marketing, one of the biggest challenges in producing videos is selecting topics that people are genuinely interested in. It can take hours or even days to create a high quality video. But if the topic isn’t something that people care about, don’t expect to get any views.

Instead of using the “post and pray” approach to video production, it’s far more effective to research what kinds of things people are actually looking for, and then seek to fulfill their demands.

You can accomplish this by using a selection of YouTube keyword research tactics. For maximum engagement, it’s crucial to find keywords that people are searching for on YouTube, but also on Google.

YouTube Autocomplete Options

The best place to start performing keyword research is within YouTube itself.

When you type in search terms related to your niche, you’ll receive a selection of suggested results. This feature was designed to help users find content which relates to their interests, but it can also be leveraged by marketers as a keyword research device.

For further options, enter your keyword followed by each letter of the alphabet and see what kinds of results show up. At this stage, you may wish to start recording your findings on a spreadsheet.

Because you can’t receive extended data (such as search volume) about the keywords, it’s not wise to make your decisions solely based on YouTube’s autocomplete options. However, you can get some great insights before moving onto other tools.

Competitor Research

In order to determine what types of videos are ranking well in your niche, check out your competitors.

With the free Chrome tool, Tags for YouTube, you can easily analyze the titles and meta tags used by your competitors. You can learn more about these keywords once you enter them into some of the other tools shown below.

AdWords Keyword Planner

YouTube’s own keyword research tool became obsolete in 2014. The company recommends moving over to AdWords for keyword research – so this is the next place you should visit.

Although you have to sign up to AdWords in order to do keyword research, it’s free and takes very little time. You can click here to get started.

In the “ads formats and sizes” tab, make sure that “video” is the only format checked. Next, run the keywords you found on YouTube through this tool and see what kind of results you get.

Adwords Keyword Planner is extremely helpful because it displays the search volume for specific keywords. Obviously you’ll want to utilize the keywords that are receiving the most searches.

You can also input the URL of other high ranking videos into Keyword Planner and see what keywords come up. These results will give you excellent insights into how to rank well for your niche.

For more unconventional and smart ways to use the AdWords Keyword Planner, check out this post from Dan Shure.

Keyword Tool Dominator

If you’re just starting out with YouTube videos, Keyword Tool Dominator is a great resource. It allows you to input 3 seed keywords per day for free, generate a list of relevant keywords and download the ones that are most useful as a .CSV file.

For unlimited daily searches and to view keywords in order of search volume, you can subscribe to the YouTube edition of Keyword Tool Dominator for a one-time fee of $39.99 USD.

There are more comprehensive (and expensive) keyword research tools available, but if you’re a beginner – this is an excellent starting place.

Google Trends

Google Trends has long been one of the most popular research tools for marketers. Fortunately, this tool allows you to look at search queries which specifically pertain to YouTube.

Select this option under the “Web Search” tab, enter your keyword and voila! You’ll receive some excellent insights into the rising or falling popularity of your search term.

When analyzing related queries, ensure you don’t blindly use keywords that have no relevance to your niche. For instance, when looking for queries relevant to SEO, it’s important to note that Korean performing artist, Seo In Guk, has absolutely nothing to do with search engine optimization.

If you have a brick and mortar store or your content pertains to a specific country, Google Trends allows you to generate results by location. Simply click the “Worldwide” tab and scroll down until you find your desired country.

If you’re marketing to more economically developed countries or just to English-speaking countries, it’s useful to play around with this feature and also check out the “Interest by Region” tab. It’s important that your keywords are applicable to your target demographic and not people from nations who aren’t interested in buying from you.

Conversely, you may discover entirely untapped markets that you wouldn’t have expected to have an interest in your products and services. This is why Google Trends is such a powerful research tool.

Keyword Keg

Keyword Keg is one of the most comprehensive research tools on the internet. It allows you to filter your data by YouTube searches.

In order to get highly specific results, you can also filter by language and by country.

With this tool, you can learn about each keyword’s search volume, keyword power, world value and world cost per click. The only downside to this tool is that if you want to see all the data pertaining to each seed keyword, you have to pay.

Depending on how much information you want access to, you’ll pay anywhere from $8 to $24 USD per month in order to use the Keyword Keg service. Fortunately, there is a 30 day money back guarantee, so if you sign up and don’t consider it to be a worthy investment, you can cancel your membership with no loss.

If you’re serious about generating engagement for your YouTube videos, I believe you’ll find Keyword Keg to be a worthy investment.

Keyword Tool

If YouTube plays a significant role in your company’s marketing strategy (i.e. the people who watch your videos are consistently converting into paying customers), consider subscribing to Keyword Tool.

Of the tool’s many data insights, the ability to filter using buyer intent is particularly useful. With this functionality, you can hone in on keywords that lead to conversions instead of just views.

Depending on what functionalities you require, you’ll pay anywhere from $48 to $88 USD per month for a subscription to this service.

With the free version of the tool, you’ll receive a huge list of results per search (pulled from YouTube Autocomplete and Google). However, in order to know how valuable each keyword will be for your campaign, you’ll have to subscribe to one of the paid packages.

All pricing packages allow you to export your data to a .CSV file. If you want to view keyword search volumes and find out the AdWords competition or CPC for your keywords, you’ll need to go with the Pro Plus package at $88 USD per month.

You’ll definitely receive excellent keyword insights with this tool, but if your budget is low or you’re just getting started with YouTube, it’s better to start with cheaper or free tools.

YTCockpit

If YouTube is your only or most dominant channel for bringing leads to your website, consider using YTCockpit.

Unlike other software packages which can be used for a variety of SEO applications, YTCockpit is completely focused on YouTube. Because the tool is so specifically targeted, its functionalities are unrivaled for video marketers.

YTCockpit will deliver keyword ideas based on data from YouTube Autocomplete, Google AdWords and Google Suggest. However, you’ll also receive intel about the likes, subscribers, video lengths and video qualities pertaining to your search results.

This tool is excellent for performing competitor analysis and you can also see the traffic trends for each keyword.

Depending on the package you want, prices range between $19 to $99 USD per month (you will receive a discount if paying for a year in advance).

Summary

If you’re just getting started with YouTube and want to perform basic keyword research, I would explore free options such as YouTube Autocomplete, Google Trends and AdWords Keyword Planner.

If you’re already up and running and want to maximize the impact of your video marketing campaign, I would suggest looking into more premium tools, such as Keyword Tool and YTCockpit.

Whichever path you choose, know that when you consistently integrate researched keywords in your YouTube uploads – you’re already ahead of the majority of publishers who are using the haphazard “post and pray” approach to YouTube video optimization.

Can you think of any other methods for performing YouTube keyword research? Please let me know in the comments below.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

The rest of the marketing world is just so much more captivating: the beautiful cheerleader (PPC), the almost-as-cute-and-popular clique that hangs on her every word (social media), the captain of the baseball team and king of the prom (content), and the brilliant but outcast computer club playing Pokemon Go out on the football field (analytics).

But SEO? She blends into the background. That said, if high school taught us nothing else, it did reveal this one truism: the brainy one is always the keeper. That’s SEO for you. It delivers, but it’s often overlooked.

That’s your challenge as an SEO marketer. Clients want the head cheerleader. They want the prom king. They want the instant gratification and control that comes with seeing exactly where their money is going and what it’s accomplishing.

SEO is often far down their list of priorities.

You know differently, and your pitch needs to show them in concrete, explicit terms why they’re wrong.

SEO vs PPC

Search engine marketing (or SEM) comes in two flavors: organic (aka natural), and paid. They each have their pros and cons. Both will show up on the SERPs whenever someone searches for a related keyword or phrase.

Clients often get fixated on the PPC channel. It’s fast, immediate, and has a clear cost and return attached to it. If they increase the budget and bid, they can increase their exposure. It’s easy.

Your first task is to demonstrate the value of search engine optimization to your clients. To woo them away from a pay-per-click only mentality.

Demonstrating SEO Value

Keep It Simple

First of all, limit the amount of hard data you throw at them. There’s a lot of metrics and stats and figures you could regurgitate…but that doesn’t mean you should. Think back to your early days as an SEO sensei and remember how overwhelming it all was to you. Don’t subject your clients to that same avalanche of jargon and numbers.

The quickest way to not prove the value is to make them feel stupid. Focus on only one or two key metrics – the ones that relate directly to their current marketing goals – so you can explain them in detail and appropriately simplified terms.

Organic revenue and visits over time are two good ones to start with, and even better if you can tie organic traffic (i.e. SEO) to a percentage of overall revenue (organic search that resulted in X dollars). Clients love a dollar figure. Monitor and measure conversions in analytics and share those results.

What SEO is Not

SEO is different from PPC, social media, and content marketing because it’s not really marketing at all. Not in the literal sense of the word.

It’s a necessity in the digital, connected world we call home. With those other tactics, you’re typically promoting a specific product, service, event, expertise, or idea. With SEO, you’re just trying to get to the top of the page.

Business transactions increasingly take place – or at least start – online. But if prospects and customers can’t find you, you’re finished before it even begins.

That’s the true value of SEO.

Show Them the Numbers

Most clients appreciate the importance of generating a steady stream of traffic to their website, but many might be under the impression that PPC ads bring in the lion’s share.

That, to put it mildly, is far from the truth. Organic search accounts for as much as 64% of all traffic. The paid ads that everyone loves so much? They account for only 5-10%. A focus on paid over organic is opting to focus on only one-tenth (or less!) of their potential. SEO brings in nearly two-thirds of visitors to their online portal.

If that’s not enough to sway them, offer up this tasty tidbit: organic search-acquired leads have a close rate of nearly 15%, while paid ads on the Google Search network average a 2.70% conversion rate. And there’s more:

• 80% of local searches on mobile devices lead to a purchase, often within a few hours.
• The first three results on the SERP capture 60% of organic clicks.
• Over 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Whether we’re looking to browse, research, find, investigate, explore, buy, eat, travel, or whatever, we almost always turn to Google and Bing as our first step.
• Being on the fourth or beyond SERP is the same as not being on it at all. The first page gets 91.5% of clicks, the second gets 4.8%, and the third a miniscule 1.1%.
• In a study of 1.4 billion search queries, users clicked on an organic (vs paid) result 94% of the time.

We click on organic search results. We trust them. Your pitch should include a few choice numbers to highlight that fact.

Show Them the Money

But many clients still want to see dollars and cents. So provide it. While it may not be possible to demonstrate as you would for a PPC proposal, you can still show them some educated estimates with expected value.

SEO is no guarantee. You’re not going to promise the top spot because there are so many variables and unknowns that can influence it.

But if you know what you’re doing, you should be able to offer an improvement. And that’s where expected value comes in.

If a client is currently ranking fourth on the first page for their targeted keyword, you can show an expected dollar amount for hitting the third, second or first spot.

You need a few figures to work this out:

1. The keyword average monthly search volume according to Google.
2. The average organic clickthrough rate for each position on the page. There are a few sources of this information available, but this study from 2014 is one of the most recent.
3. The expected or average conversion rate based on industry studies, past experience, or best-guess estimates.
4. The dollar value for each successful conversion.

Once you have this data, you can easily demonstrate the expected value of moving from fourth place to second, for example, using a basic 3-step formula:

• search volume x click-through rate = potential traffic
  • potential traffic x conversion rate = potential conversions
    • potential conversions x dollar value = expected value.

Is it an exact science? No, and it shouldn’t be presented as such. But for the currency-conscious client, it does provide a concrete number to work with when considering a proposal. Would they be willing to spend $1000 for an expected value return of $2100? Probably.

Show them the money that’s being left on the table.

The Proposal Building Blocks

The exact contents of your proposal depend, of course, on what you’re able to do and provide for them. There is no cookie-cutter template for everyone.

A good proposal is going to present in explicit terms:

• The offer (what specifically are you going to set up, monitor, tweak, and do for them?)
• Your background (what are the credentials and experience that make you the best choice for the job?)
• The terms (how long is the agreement, what’s the cost, what’s included and excluded?)

Your offer should discuss all the elements of a comprehensive SEO plan – social media, keywords, link building, content, and on-page optimization for their website or blog.

A great proposal is also going to include all of these, too.

SWOT Analysis

A robust strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis puts the client in context to the market, with their target, and against their competition.

In it, you identify everything working well in their current plan, the problems and issues as you see them (and suggested solutions), areas to expand their keyword focus (where their competitors are falling short), and areas to invest more time and effort (where their competitors are beating them).

Website Audit

A thorough website audit of both the potential client and at least one of their competitors is the foundation of a powerful SWOT analysis. You can’t have a proposal without it.

Show them what’s working, where they’re killing it, and where you can improve their performance. Support your claims and ideas with concrete evidence and stats provided by your audit. SEO is hard to conceptualize without it.

Tools to collect this data include SEOptimer, Screaming Frog, Raven Site Auditor, Crawl Test, WooRank, SE Ranking Website Audit, and more.

Use whatever your tool of choice is, and crunch those numbers. Disseminate that data.

Ranking Report

Clients will already have a set of keywords that they’re targeting. Your job is to analyze how well they’re doing it, and to identify new keywords to introduce to the mix.

Show some select keyword performance and URL ranking for key terms as they relate to the client’s goals. Use a side-by-side comparison with a main competitor to emphasize your plan of attack to increase their market share.

You might use Ahrefs, SEMrush, Rank Tracker or AWR at this stage.

Are there any unusual dips to account for? Consider the Mondovo Rank Drop Quadrant to categorize them and draft a plan of attack.

The SWOT analysis, website audit, and rank report will serve as the baseline to measure your performance. This data makes it easy to see just how much you’ve improved their overall optimization down the road.

Should the client approve your proposal – and if you follow the advice here, they most definitely will – you’ll have everything in place and ready to launch.

In the teen movies, SEO and content (the brainy one with the heart of gold and the most popular kid at school) always end up together because they’re a perfect match. Clients already love content (it’s king, after all), but they still need a little convincing about SEO.

So convince.

What does your current proposal include? Have we forgotten anything here? Leave your comments below:

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

And just like with any new feature Google rolls out, SEOs and webmasters want to know:

Can AMPs help improve rank?

Now that the dust has settled on the rollout and webmasters have started using them, I’ll give a data-driven answer.

But first, a little overview for those of you not familiar with AMPs.

What are AMPs?

According to the AMP Project site, “The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.”

The project relies on HTML to create a simplified version of your site that loads quickly.

And if your pages are AMP-enabled, they can appear in a special carousel in Google search results:

Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn are some of Google’s partners integrating AMPs.

In early tests, Jon Parise of Pinterest found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than regular mobile-optimized pages, so you can see why AMPs would be appealing to mobile users.

Are they a rank signal?

Since Mobilegeddon came along, we already know that if your pages are mobile friendly is an important rank factor.

But what about AMPs?

At a special press event back in December, Search Engine Land gleaned that AMP pages might get a ranking boost or a “fast” label designation, similar to how Google labels mobile-friendly pages.

But Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at the SEJ Summit in June that AMP is NOT currently a ranking factor.

Can AMPs help SEO?

AMPs aren’t a magic tool to get a ranking boost, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter at all for SEO. Here are the roles AMPs can play to improve your rank:

Better user experience

Google’s Mobilegeddon update, which basically mandated that webmasters make their sites mobile friendly or suffer in rank, was in response to a huge user experience problem. Accelerated Mobile Pages are just the next step in that response.

Mobile users are fed up with Google sending them to pages that are hard to read, difficult to navigate, or slow to load – especially if they’re using mobile data.

Check out this statistic from Think with Google:

But here’s the one that matters: 70% of those who switch sites do so because of slow loading times.

So yes, if your pages are AMP-enabled, it can do wonders for your user experience. And better user experience leads to better SEO, such as:

Lower bounce rate

As the above statistic demonstrated, improving your site speed can keep people from getting frustrated and leaving your site.

Google doesn’t want to deliver searchers to sites that just frustrate them, which is why bounce rate is an important ranking factor.

Think your pages load okay? Even one second makes a huge difference:

AMP pages can load 15-85% faster than regular pages, offering a great solution to help lower your bounce rate.

Better clickthrough rate

If searchers who visit your AMP-enabled pages are less likely to bounce, this also means they’re more likely to click through to other pages.

Google considers user interaction with your site as an important indicator of value. Doing something as simple as improving your page speed can do wonders to improve these metrics and help your search rank in the process.

Better visibility

Google’s News carousel appears above-the-fold on mobile – so carousel content receives way more impressions than the organic results shown below. Illyes confirmed as much at the SEJ Summit: 80% of publishers using AMP pages are getting more views.

Views are good for brand awareness, but better visibility with AMP pages can also influence factors that directly improve rank:

Clicks from search

If your page is shown prominently in Google’s News carousel, it’s more likely to get clicks. Research by Rand Fishkin and others has shown that Google does consider a link’s click volume when determining rank in organic results.

So if the better visibility your AMP pages have in search results improve clicks from search, it should impact your organic results overall.

Backlinks

Better visibility leads to more clicks, and more clicks lead to more people reading your content. If it is newsworthy, informative, and altogether high quality, then better visibility can lead to more backlinks as well.

This matters for rank, a lot. Links are one of Google’s top three rank factors.

And when you’re marketing news content to search, the competition to get links can be stiff.

Every news site and niche blog is covering the same story, so referring domains have a lot of options to choose from when linking. The visibility your content receives in Google’s News carousel gives a competitive edge.

Social signals

The same logic for backlink building can be applied to social sharing. Appearing above organic results improves your clicks, meaning interested readers are more likely to share your content as opposed to a site without AMP pages.

And while Google won’t admit that social signals are a ranking factor outright, they appear to matter a lot.

Research from Searchmetrics found correlations between search rank and social signals on many major social media platforms.

At the same time, getting these social shares means even more visibility, which can lead to more site traffic, more links, and better SEO.

Improve conversions

Just as improving site speed helps reduce your bounce rate, it can also improve clickthrough rate: 90% of publishers using AMPs have a higher CTR, which has to impact on-site conversions.

Sure, you can argue that SEO and conversion optimization are two different things, but isn’t getting conversions the whole point of drawing web traffic from search?

Creating AMP pages as part of your SEO strategy could have a huge impact on your return on investment overall.

Prepare for future changes

Back in May 2015, Google announced officially that more searches happen on mobile devices than desktop, showing a big change compared to previous years:

The trend is only continuing – a recent report found the ratio is now 60/40.

One of Google’s main goals as a business is to deliver what people are looking for, not just in terms of relevancy, but also user experience. That’s why they’ve rolled out two Mobile Friendly updates in the course of a year and are talking of adding more mobile UX metrics, like site speed, as rank factors in the future.

AMPs or mobile page speed in general might not be rank factors at the moment, but if you ask me, that’s bound to change.

Even if the secondary SEO benefits of AMP pages aren’t enough to convince you to use them, keep this in mind:

Preventing an algorithmic penalty is a lot easier than recovering from one.

So instead of waiting to see Google’s next move, stay ahead of the curve with AMPs.

Does your site use AMPs? If not, do you plan to start using them? Tell me in the comments:

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

That’s because, in order to both plan and launch a successful SEO strategy, it must be cohesive and consistent across departments, as well as the various goals of the company.

That’s an easy task to pull off when you’re a small shop with a ten-page website.

It’s another challenge entirely when your organization boasts thousands of employees and even more pages of web content.

The vast majority of SEO advice out there – as well as the research that measures a strategy’s success – is geared towards small to medium businesses.

These are the basic steps for an enterprise SEO strategy:

1. Choose the right technology and tool that suits your needs.
2. Train your team to use the tool/s.
3. Set goals and standards and make sure they’re reached by designating SEO leaders.
4. Develop formal agreements and communication channels between departments, such as sales and marketing.
5. Establish the right KPIs and track ROI.

However, there are certain tools and strategies that work best for the unique challenges of complex organizations. I’ll review them here to help even the biggest of players maximize their search exposure.

The Top Challenges

According to Hubspot’s 2015 State of Inbound Report, the biggest marketing challenges for large companies are proving ROI, securing a budget, managing their website and identifying the right technologies.

It’s important to note that all of these problems are ultimately connected to the unique challenges of complex enterprise organizations, such as:

• Developing a centralized SEO program
• Facilitating cross-company SEO collaboration
• Guiding and training across departments
• Having thorough and consistent metrics for a large company

By having an actionable plan in place to address these challenges, complex organizations can simultaneously improve their effectiveness at tackling other important business efforts while improving their SEO performance.

The Right Technology

Your company probably has a person or team of SEOs in house who know exactly how to research keywords and implement an SEO strategy.

Their role in the company is vital, but it doesn’t negate the need for an SEO platform.

For smaller businesses, manual keyword gathering techniques and simple browser plug-ins may be enough to help them execute their strategy.

However, when your website has hundreds or even thousands of pages, a cohesive SEO process becomes even more difficult to manage.

SEO platforms allow you to research, implement and analyze all in one place with one tool. If your in-house SEOs can benefit from the simplified process on an SEO platform, then they can spend more effort on strategy and execution, an important focus for a successful campaign.

There are a wide variety of enterprise SEO platforms available, including BrightEdge, AWR Cloud, Conductor, Rio SEO, and SEOmoz, among others. Search Engine Land offers a great buyer’s guide to enterprise SEO platforms.

It’s interesting that identifying the right tools and measuring ROI both appear as top challenges for large businesses, because they seem to be intrinsically linked.

Specifically, Hubspot’s report found that companies that use tools like marketing automation systems not only achieve greater ROI for their campaigns…

…they were also able to lock in higher budgets, further enhancing their ability to enact SEO best practices effectively.

While having a platform specifically designed for a complex organization is the most essential tool you’ll need to implement and effective SEO strategy, there are a large number of other tools that can add extra layers of data.

I made a comprehensive list a while back: 30 of the Best Tools for Enterprise SEO. Give it a closer look to identify the tools your team needs.

Managing Your Teams

When it comes to larger, more complex organizations, the task of managing your website is more about managing the people who work on it.

This isn’t limited to the SEOs in your company, but encompasses anyone who influences the way your website looks and works, such as content creators, designers, merchandisers and IT workers.

All of their work can impact SEO.

Training

For complex organizations, there’s no way for SEO to rest on the shoulders of one or two trained individuals. Since it’s inherently a team effort, the biggest role of the SEO is ensuring that everyone involved understands how to achieve the company’s overall goals.

For this reason, SEOs must develop training programs for relevant departments, such as marketing, product, development, engineering, and creative services.

But setting up a one-time training that isn’t tailored towards the tasks of specific departments won’t be enough. Comprehensive, personalized training with periodic refresher seminars will be essential for developing consistently informed teams.

Setting Standards

Beyond just training individual team members, it’s important to identify SEO leads in every department – someone who can be put in charge to guide other key players and ensure that everyone is connected and informed.

Every time new SEO targets are defined, the SEO leads can then work to disseminate information and keep everyone on track.

Encouraging Communication

I’ve stressed the importance of SEOs communicating with different teams, but it’s equally important to encourage relationships between individuals across departments.

One important way to do this is to develop formal agreements between departments whose work affects each other, such as sales and marketing.

Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2015 found a strong relationship between this kind of agreement and increasing ROI:

Taking the time to set up meetings with important team members across departments and creating formal agreements can be incredibly valuable for overall strategy success.

ROI and Budget

Another major challenge for implementing SEO within complex organizations is that individuals in charge of the task are often not allowed to make decisions on their own, especially when it comes to allocating and securing departmental budgets.

Instead, they have to get buy in and approval from the upper ranks – which can seriously slow down progress.

However, there are strategies that can be implemented to simplify the process of securing budget and approval. The most important, surprisingly, is proving the ROI of your SEO efforts.

Hubspot also found a strong relationship between proving ROI and securing budget:

In fact, even just tracking ROI – without proving it – is enough to secure a higher budget in many cases.

When your team is better able to prove its ROI, you’ll facilitate the trust needed with the C-suite to remove budgeting barriers that would otherwise slow its ability to act quickly in the face of changing SEO priorities.

Demonstrating ROI

There are plenty of different methods for demonstrating SEO ROI. Optimize Smart offers a helpful walkthrough of one method. KissMetrics has also made a useful infographic on how to do it, as has QuickSprout.

However, the important thing to remember is to determine the ROI of specific SEO strategies – not just your overall effectiveness. This data will be valuable for proving the necessity of certain SEO techniques to company stakeholders.

Forecasting ROI

While demonstrating ROI after the fact can be a difficult task, it’s nothing compared to the challenge of forecasting ROI before any changes have been made. But if you want to get buy in, forecasting ROI is an essential step.

SEO can do this manually by estimating web traffic and resulting conversions month by month, or they can take advantage of the enterprise SEO platforms listed above (many of which are equipped with an ROI forecasting tool).

Delivering on ROI

The most important part of ensuring future budget increases and the freedom to implement the right SEO strategy is to deliver results.

And if you’ve identified the right tools for your organization and worked hard to train your teams, then much of the work of delivering on ROI is already done.

The important thing to remember to help ensure a positive ROI for your efforts is the necessity of regular meetings and adjustments with team leaders.

Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2B Content Marketing Report found that businesses increase their content marketing effectiveness the more they meet (61% meet daily or weekly).

Considering the intrinsic connection between content marketing and SEO strategies, it’s safe to assume similar results will apply here.

So regardless of how your SEO teams are performing, it’s important to set up regular meetings to evaluate progress and develop strategy. Alex Volk, search marketing director at Microsoft, recommends weekly, monthly, quarterly and ad hoc meetings and performance updates:

The Takeaway

Implementing enterprise SEO successfully within complex organizations comes with its own unique challenges – especially for large companies with many locations and departments.

The key to implementing a successful SEO strategy in this environment is to bridge the gaps between the company’s disparate parts.

A combination of helpful technology and SEOs who focus most of their efforts on training and guiding individuals that have a say in the website’s content and design is essential for this goal.

Understanding and facilitating the necessary task of convincing company leaders of the merits of certain SEO strategies is equally important, and can be most easily achieved by demonstrating past and future ROI from SEO.

Unlike in smaller businesses, the SEO strategies of complex organizations require special care and maintenance. While the challenge of doing this is greater, the payoff of a successful enterprise SEO system can be exponential.

Are you working on SEO for a larger enterprise company? If so, what else would you add to this list? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below:

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

That being said, here are seven ways to use Google Trends you’ve never thought of before, leveraging some of the service’s newly released and often-underused features:

Dig deeper into trending topics

Google Trends now boasts a “story-centric” homepage, where it aggregates data from Google Search, YouTube and Google News and ranks the most searched for stories. This is by far the most comprehensive trends aggregate you’ll find on the web.

So if I click on iOS Apple Inc., which is number 3 on the trending list above, I’m taken to a dashboard about the story everyone’s talking about: a security flaw in iOS 9 & iOS 9.0.1.

The dashboard shows me the relevant articles on the topic, a trending video, as well as changes in interest in the topic over the past few days.

If your business is in the tech niche, then this would be a great opportunity for content creation – posting a piece on a widely trending topic will help draw traffic to your site. You can even make sure that you capitalize on the topic when you see evidence that interest is growing.

Find real-time marketing opportunities

Google Trends is now offering minute-by-minute, real-time data from more than 100-billion searches through the engine monthly, which allows you to evaluate search trends during different times, or even at major events, such as the Oscars or the World Cup. You can choose any time period from the past week to see the minute-by-minute data.

So how can you use this data for real-time marketing? By watching spikes in search terms during major events, you can quickly determine what topics are grabbing people’s interest.

A classic example of real-time marketing using Google Trends information comes from Oreo’s timely tweet during Super Bowl in 2013, when the lights went out in the New Orleans Superdome for 34 minutes.

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Oreo’s marketing team threw this ad together on the fly. Twitter users loved it and shared it — the single tweet has had more than 15,000 retweets up to today.

Think about events that would be a good marketing venue for your brand and look for fast opportunities to employ real-time marketing to increase your brand’s reach on social media.

Research niche topics by geography

Now, you can search for just about any topic in Google Trends and see the popularity of the topic in searches by geography. If you haven’t started a local marketing campaign yet, this is a great place to begin. If you’re hoping to expand or improve it, this is also a great resource.

Let’s say I’m an organic chicken distributor looking to expand my business. Where should I set up shop?

Just type “organic chicken” into Google Trends and it comes up with helpful data about regional interest in the search term, including a ranking of search by city.

So if I already have locations in Vancouver, Portland and Seattle, San Francisco might be a viable option for me.

I can also dig deeper by scrolling down and looking at the related searches that might apply to my product (such as “buy organic chicken”) or other products I offer (“organic chicken food”).

Click on any of these items to see their niche topic details, including super-helpful geographic data.

Research brand health

Google Trends is a great way for larger brands to understand their brand health compared to their competitors. This kind of information can help inform where companies need to work harder to increase their influence.

Let’s say I work with Nissan, and I want to see how our brand measures up to other auto companies in the state of Florida. I just set the following terms on my Google Trends search:

And instantly, I can see the top auto/vehicle queries for Florida in the last 30 days.

Looks like Ford, Honda and Toyota are doing better in this state, so I know I’ve got some work ahead of me. Depending on the goals you have for your brand, you can also search by certain city in Florida, by the entire US, by a different country, or worldwide.

Research local shopping trends

Another great (and underused) feature of Google Trends is the ability to search for shopping trends in isolation. This data will show you consumers’ purchasing intent for different searches. If you’re a realtor, or looking to be one, this kind of information can be very valuable.

Check out this map put together by Benjamin Spiegel from Marketing Land:

To create this compelling graphic, he searched Google Shopping for the highest purchase intent for beauty products for each state last February. The resulting map shows us the products people most want to buy in these states.

If you sell beauty products, this data could show you where you’ll get the most value for your advertising spend. Adjust your marketing and content campaigns to match the demand in each market.

Brainstorm content with Google Correlate

Google Correlate can help you figure out what topics people want to read about, which can ultimately help you figure out what topics you should be writing about, or how to relate a topic to others that people are interested in.

Using Google Correlate, you can find associations between search trends and any other data point that you want to write about. It’s the only tool on the internet that can do this with search data, yet it goes largely unused.

The Google tutorial explains that Correlate is like the opposite of Trends:

Google Correlate is like Google Trends in reverse. With Google Trends, you type in a query and get back a data series of activity (over time or in each US state). With Google Correlate, you enter a data series (the target) and get back a list of queries whose data series follows a similar pattern.

Let’s say I run a niche blog for baking recipes, and I want to draw more traffic to my site. I can type “baking” into Google Correlate:

And I see instantly that baking has a pretty high correlation with the search terms “egg free,” “sausage,” and “broccoli.” Knowing this, I might decide to write up some new recipes with these ingredients in mind, since that’s where search interest lies.

If you’re statistically inclined, Google Correlate even allows you to upload your own dataset to see what search terms correlate with it. Just click the “Enter your own data” link next to the search bar and upload your Excel file.

Let Google do the analysis for you

In a recent change to Google Trends, the Google News Lab has begun doing their own analyses of trending stories every day and offering useful information about the topics, which you can download from the Google Trends Datastore. If you’re a journalist or content creator, or if you have one on your team, this can be an invaluable tool.

What if I’m writing a story about the latest GOP debate? I can use this tool to find data about the most searched for GOP candidate by county, the debate issues ranking by minute, and the candidates’ rankings post-debate, among many other relevant topics that can serve as useful statistics to add meat to the story.

This is a great way to add credibility to what I’m going to say in a written piece about public interest, without waiting for the next Gallop Poll.

So those are my favorite seven new or underused features of Google Trends that you can use to develop a marketing strategy, improve your SEO, or brainstorm content.

It might be difficult to visualize how exactly you can apply these tools to your own business goals, which is why I recommend trying them out and checking back often – opportunities will arise and the ways to stay on top of the game are endless.

Have you ever experimented with these Google Trends features? Have another great tool to share? Leave me a note in the comments section below:

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

You’ll often see a very black and white discussion about branding and SEO. Experts feel compelled to argue over which one is better. It’s as if these two integral dynamics can’t work together to support your business.

Well, guess what? They can. And they should.

Let’s stop taking part in this arbitrary competition. When we waste time arguing about how two things don’t work together, we’re missing out on the chance to uncover real opportunities. And that type of behavior leads to less-than-optimal results, lost time and subpar marketing ROI.

The reality is: these two strategies not only support one another, but reinforce each other’s efforts to create a synchronized marketing front. And when you do it right, this combination can be targeted, measurable and long-lasting.

Don’t make the same mistake as so many of these other marketers.

It’s time to develop smart strategies that get all aspects of your efforts in sync. Modern marketers can’t waste time arguing over which tactic is more important. Successful marketing requires a holistic, top-level view of today’s top strategies.

There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for businesses that embrace this idea, but it’s up to you to learn about the strategies that help you get the best of both worlds.

Build Brand Awareness Through Link Building

Brand awareness is all about increasing acknowledgement of your company’s identity. In the online realm, this can happen through strategic link building.

As you build links, you’re getting the intellect and message of your brand in front of large audiences. This type of increased awareness brings several benefits to businesses:

• Strengthening customer loyalty
• Recapturing the attention of lost leads
• Lowering customer acquisition costs

Link Building Tactics That Work

Scalable, high-quality link building doesn’t happen overnight. But with a few different tactics – such as the three below – you can see great branding and SEO results.

• Broken Link Building. Identify authority websites in your niche that have pages with broken links. Reach out to the website owner with a personalized email that points out the link issue. Offer your relevant link as a solution to the problem.
• Designing infographics. Although this tactic isn’t as effective as it used to be, good infographics still generate branding and SEO results.
• Getting active on social media. In addition to general social media posting, getting active in the community is a great way to build links. Consider submitting your articles to places like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Growth Hackers.

Once you’ve built a strong brand, you’ll begin acquiring backlinks naturally through brand recognition and SEO results. It’s a never-ending cycle of growth.

Modern marketers should focus their link building efforts on increasing brand awareness to drive a huge win in both branding and SEO. Don’t just try to build links for high rankings. Build links to gain more customers, increase revenue and build your brand.

Infuse Optimization with Branding for Stellar Content

There’s no denying the importance of content marketing when it comes to your overall digital marketing results.

Content that wins combines both SEO and branding best practices.

For best results, start SEO writing for both the search engine and your audience. If you only write for your audience, you may never see a corresponding improvement in your rankings. Abstract content that lacks optimization will only go so far.

Embrace SEO best practices while also focusing on your audience. Doing so will create a powerful content marketing engine that helps your rankings soar and your branding become stronger than ever.

Rank for Keywords in Various Parts of the Sales Cycle

Each and every keyword out there has an underlying search intent:

• Navigational: Direct searches for a person, company or brand (e.g. Adidas, Apple).
• Informational: Searches trying to find quick answers (e.g. recipes, news).
• Commercial: Searches that lead up to a purchase (e.g. pricing, product description).
• Transactional: Searches trying to complete a task (e.g. sign up, purchase).

For optimal branding strength, your web pages should align with your users’ intent. You can accomplish this through keyword research, optimization and implementation.

Let’s say I own a surf shop and I created a landing page to sell my custom surfboards. I wouldn’t want that page to rank for how to clean a surfboard. It’d be better for my brand to rank for something like custom surfboard prices.

That kind of alignment only happens when you first have your brand goals and SEO research coordinated together. And once that happens, everyone wins.

Use Keyword Research to Focus Brand Identity

I’ve seen a lot of small businesses that try to please everyone. They lack a hyper-focused brand in an attempt to win more customers. Consequently, this leads to the exact opposite effect. Because they haven’t established a clear niche, the right customers don’t feel a strong connection to the brand.

In my experience, smart keyword research can help businesses overcome this obstacle by benefiting companies in a couple of ways:

• Narrowing down your niche. You’ll see much more success if you niche down rather than trying to please everyone. A narrow niche gives you the opportunity to hone in your messaging, target your offers and connect with customers.
• Finding new branding pathways. Exploring a smaller subset of your industry brings a host of new ideas. Keyword research can enlighten you about new content, offerings and services you could provide to your niche.

Suppose you’re a new financial services company looking to enter the market, like Currency Liquidator. Using Google’s related searches could give you plenty of ideas for ways to differentiate your brand while targeting keywords with established SEO value:

A focused brand identity has the opportunity to dominate. And keyword research can help you see all the great opportunities that lie within your chosen niche.

Write Image ALT Tags to Reinforce Visual Branding

A lot of branding comes down to visual recognition. If you can get people to recognize your design, logo and style, then you’ve created a strong brand.

When it comes to SEO, you can help level up this branding tactic through the use of optimized ALT tags on your images.

Any time you contribute images online, whether through advertising or other websites, your imagery should contain an ALT attribute that has branded text.

Don’t let your branded searches land on a boring, visually lacking SERP. Use ALT tags to ensure that the visual identity of your brand gets strengthened every time someone searches for your business.

Implementing Image ALT Tags

Start by going through your website and writing proper ALT tags for each of your branded images. It’s a simple step that can lead to great results. You can also take your brand strength up a notch by using ALT tags to optimize non-branded images on your site with your target keywords.

Keep in mind, Google still wants high-quality optimization, even in something as simple as image tags. Avoid keyword stuffing, and use natural language to describe each image.

Manage and Optimize Your Local SEO Results

Branded searches will likely bring up a local listing if you run a brick-and-mortar business. For this reason, it’s important to keep your branding on-point for these types of results. Many companies fall short because they don’t take time to manage and optimize this data.

Including the Right Data

The importance of local search lies in the data. It not only needs to be accurate, but the data must remain consistent across the various databases that include your company’s information.
It’s shocking how many directories lack correct data.

To keep all information on the up-and-up, I like to employ the help of a local listing management solution. These kinds of tools make sure all the local SEO ducks are in a row for my clients (though it’s possible to do this manually as well). Ultimately, it’s just a matter of checking, updating and managing the data.

Just think about the business disaster that would occur if your local search results featured inaccurate data about things like your location, store hours or phone number. You could end up with a customer service nightmare if you don’t invest in proper local SEO.

The Local SEO Secret Sauce: Reviews

Another way local SEO strengthens branding is through reviews. The number and quality of reviews your brand captures will directly affect your rankings. But they also have a huge impact on your brand.

Has there ever been a time where you didn’t check out a new restaurant or business based on bad reviews? I know I have. Likewise, I’ve made a decision to go to a new restaurant because of the amazing reviews.

It works both ways – and it’s something you need to take into account when it comes to SEO and branding performance.

So what do you think about the intersection of SEO and branding? Do you think it’s important to integrate these two marketing tactics into a synchronized powerhouse?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.