Facebook introduced a new corporate logo Monday that will soon appear across its products.
The plain all-caps logo has been “designed for clarity” to help differentiate the corporate entity from the social networking app, Facebook CMO Antonio Lucio said. Facebook the brand will still be indicated by its familiar blue and white lower-case “f” and “facebook”.
The corporate logo also will be added to Facebook-owned services and platforms, including Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal, and Calibra. Facebook first announced the branding plan in August.
Why we should care. While marketers understand the full breadth of Facebook’s portfolio, surveys indicate that many consumers do not know that Facebook owns Instagram or WhatsApp, for example. With Facebook’s less-than-sparkling reputation, it’s an interesting choice to make the connection clearer to consumers. The company isn’t shying away from its dominance, though, even with (or in spite of) mounting antitrust scrutiny.
As Facebook moves to enmesh the backends of its apps with encryption, it has also been building more options for advertisers to enable advertisers to reach users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger through the single Ads Manager hub.
About The Author
Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.
Spotify has expanded its ads capabilities with podcast listener targeting. Advertisers can reach Spotify Free podcast listeners, and in select markets, they’ll also be able to narrow their campaigns to certain podcast categories, such as “Comedy,” “Lifestyle & Health” and “Business & Technology.”
Spotify is investing heavily in podcasts. Earlier this year, Spotify spent a total of $400 million to acquire podcast companies Parcast, Gimlet and Anchor. On top of bringing those firms under its wing, the music streaming service has built up a respectable repertoire of exclusive series, including a multiyear deal with the Obamas.
Spotify has a new interface for paid subscribers with Music and Podcast sections.
Spotify has also begun rolling out a refreshed UI for paid subscribers. The update divides a user’s library into two main categories (music and podcasts) that reflects Spotify’s emphasis on podcasting as a potential revenue stream.
Why we should care. U.S. podcast ad revenue grew 53% in 2018, according to the IAB, and with 32% of Americans (age 12+) having listened to a podcast in the past month, according to Edison Research, marketers and platforms are seeing untapped potential. Spotify is looking to entrench itself early to become a leading platform in the sector.
Insufficient campaign conversion data has been a barrier to growth for podcast advertising. Marketers have attempted to overcome this by using direct response calls to action (such giving listeners a unique code or URL) or by launching campaigns aimed at awareness. Targeting at scale has also been limited. Spotify’s newest capabilities help begin to address those limitations.
About The Author
George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing, journalism, and storytelling.
It is Saturday night and I am just about done watching a new movie Google released a couple of weeks ago about how Google Search works. The video is named “Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works.”
Salesforce revealed new Einstein AI capabilities available for its Marketing Cloud users, on Monday at its annual Salesforce Connections conference. The new features, available to customers now, aim to help marketers reach their customers more efficiently and effectively with email through the use of artificial intelligence.
Why we should care
Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest trends in martech right now, and it was only a matter of time before Salesforce enabled its Einstein AI in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
The new tools and capabilities could prove valuable to email marketers by predicting the best time and frequency to send emails. Digital marketers and organizations who embrace — and trust — the technology’s ability to make these decisions for them will need to learn to let go of making those decisions, which may be easier said than done.
More on the news
The Marketing Cloud enhancements are available as of Monday’s announcement. The new capabilities include:
Einstein Engagement Frequency: It takes more than one email to engage a customer. Einstein Engagement Frequency helps marketers know exactly how many emails to send to customers to keep them engaged.
Einstein Send Time Optimization: Knowing when to send emails to a customer is equally as important as knowing how many to send. Einstein Send Time Optimization leverages AI to predict the best times to send marketing emails.
Einstein Content Tagging: Marketers turn to their content libraries for the best images for their emails. To request and manage these assets, marketers historically had to manually create image tags. Einstein Content Tagging uses image recognition to automatically and accurately tag thousands of images in a content library, helping marketers save time.
Transactional Messaging: There are two types of email and mobile messages that brands send to customers: promotional and transactional. Transactional messages include purchase confirmations, shipping notifications, password resets, financial alerts and appointment reminders. With Transactional Messaging now part of Marketing Cloud, customers can easily integrate transactional and promotional messages into the same campaign. Now, companies can understand the complete customer journey, ensure a single voice is being used for all messages and embed promotional content in transactional messages.
About The Author
Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Project management platform Wrike has joined Marketo’s LaunchPoint, an Adobe partner program. The partnership is expected to improve end-to-end marketing campaign workflows and work management processes. The announcement was made only a few weeks after Wrike launched its new Wrike for Marketers Performance solution.
Why we should care
The integration will
provide users with campaign performance data from Marketo Engage and tie it
directly to specific projects and tasks in Wrike. This level of insight will
help marketers not only measure campaign performance but also how their efforts
directly impacted marketing outcomes. The real-time flow of information could
give marketers the ability to make adjustments to optimize their active
campaigns.
“This
collaboration transforms how marketing teams track and report on the outcomes
of the integrated campaigns they plan, manage and complete in Wrike,” said
Wrike founder and CEO Andrew Filev. “Marketing has become increasingly
performance-driven, making it imperative that effort is aligned with not only
final results, but progress as well. All of the data related to the planning
and execution of a campaign is within Wrike, while the performance data is in
Marketo Engage. It was only natural that we enable teams to pull Marketo Engage
data into Wrike so they can actually see the impact their hard work is having
on strategic initiatives in real-time and report on the outcomes of their
carefully crafted campaigns.”
More on the news
LaunchPoint by Marketo is an Adobe company partner program that allows partners to co-sell and co-market with Marketo Engage.
Last month, Wrike announced Wrike for Marketers Performance, a solution that seeks to unify marketing departments and manage the full work lifecycle.
About The Author
Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.
We all know Facebook Pixel. The little snippet of code that is tasked with sending interaction and conversion data back to Facebook Ads algorithm for delivery optimization and tracking. With its set of standard events and the ability to track Custom Conversions, Facebook Pixel is a key element of the Facebook Ads platform.
While the standard events cover different scenarios for a variety of common conversions such as purchases or downloads, but what if we need to track and optimize for something that’s not “standard”? In this post, we will take a look at some unconventional use-cases for implementing Facebook Pixel custom conversion with a focus on optimizing for content engagement.
In order to follow the instructions provided in this post, you will need basic Google Tag Manager knowledge. If you’re not familiar with GTM or need to refresh your mind about it, make sure to check out Google Tag Manager Basics.
Base Facebook Pixel installation using Google Tag Manager
Before diving into our use cases, let’s quickly go through installing Facebook Pixel through GTM. All of the custom event codes that we will add later will rely on this base code. It’s not necessary to install the Pixel using GTM, you might as well do a manual installation.
Google Tag Manager has native integrations for a wide range of platforms but Facebook Pixel needs to be installed as a Custom HTML tag.
Name your Tag, something like Base Facebook Pixel.
Select Tag Configuration and then pick Custom HTML as the tag type.
Copy your Facebook Pixel code, paste it here and save the tag.
Now it’s time to define a trigger and set the conditions for firing the tag we just defined. We want the Facebook Pixel to be fired on every page of our website. Set the Trigger to Page View on All Pages. Don’t forget to save your tag.
Make sure to test your new tag using Preview mode and also through Facebook Pixel Helper plugin for Chrome.
Now that we have our base Pixel set up, let’s look into use cases for Custom Conversions.
1- Delayed Pixel fire
A while back we were asked by a client about optimizing Facebook campaigns towards content consumption. Optimizing for Landing Page View seems to be a good way for achieving that goal if you see the engagement you expect but in this case, we needed to make sure the visitor spends a minimum amount of time on the landing page. That’s why we started to look for ways to define that as a custom conversion and optimize for it.
The first thing we need is to fire a conversion pixel for the desired web page engagement. Here we want to create a custom conversion if a visitor spends 7 seconds or more on our page In Tag Manager, create another Custom HTML tag and type the code below.
As you see we’re taking advantage of Facebook Pixel’s fbq function to define a custom event called Content Engagement.
The script we just wrote is dependent on the base Facebook Pixel code and for this reason, we need to make sure it fires up after the base code is loaded. We will be using the Tag Sequencing feature under Advanced Settings to load the custom event code after the base Pixel tag.
Expand the Advanced Settings section and check the box next to “Fire a tag before [your tag name] fires”. Select the base Facebook Pixel tag from the dropdown menu.
Now it’s time to define the trigger. Click on Triggering panel and then on the (+) sign on the top right of the page. Select Trigger Configuration so you can see the list of all triggers. Select Timer trigger type. As you see, we’ve named our trigger “7 Seconds”.
Enter the amount of time that you like to delay your pixel fire (aka when your custom event fires) under Interval. As you see this is in milliseconds so we have entered 7000 for 7 seconds.
Another important setting here is Limit, we want the custom event to only fire once, so we have entered 1. If you leave this blank the custom conversion will fire every 7 seconds (or whatever interval duration you have defined).
Finally, we need to define the conditions for firing the tag. We would like to record our Content Engagement custom event on every page of your website and have used the RegEx (regular expression) operator to include all pages. Save your work!
Publish your Tag Manager workspace with all new changes. It’s time to test now. You can use GTM’s preview and debug mode or Facebook Pixel Helper like us. In addition to the PageView event which shows the base Pixel is fired we should also see our custom event loaded after our defined interval. This is how it loads in our example: it takes a couple (7 seconds to be exact) for the conversion action to load:
Voila! We got our Custom Event fired, all we need to do next in order to be able to optimize our campaigns for this conversion is to define a Custom Conversion.
Navigate to Custom Conversions in Events Manager and create a new conversion. Select the Custom Event you created in previous steps under Website Event dropdown. You can add rules to your custom conversion if you wish to track it only on certain pages of your website. Assign a name, a category, and a value. The last two are optional but very helpful when it comes to reporting and measuring the RoAS (Return on Ad Spend).
That’s it! You have successfully created your Custom Event and also Custom Conversion for a delayed Facebook Pixel. In the following sections, we apply the same process to other use cases of deploying Facebook Custom Events using Google Tag Manager.
2- Page Scroll Depth
Defining page scroll depth as a Custom Conversion can work as a proxy for how well the audience is engaged with the landing page. Examples are more complex products or services with content-heavy and long landing pages or simply on blogs, news websites and other content distribution businesses.
The process for defining our Custom Event and Conversion is the same as what we just went through for the Delayed Pixel fire example. The only thing that changes Step 4 from the previous section and that is the Trigger Type that we need to select in GTM. This time we will be using the Scroll Depth trigger.
You have options for making our Custom Event tag fired for vertical, horizontal or a hybrid of both depending on the user experience on your website or app. And the measurement of the scroll depth can be based on the percentage or pixels. So for example, you can define your Custom Event tag to fire only when the user has scrolled down 75% of your landing page.
3- YouTube Video Views
This will be a great fit for those who use videos embedded from YouTube on their pages. It can be a recorded webinar, a video course website or a vlog. You can tie your Facebook Custom Conversion to YouTube Video trigger in GTM and optimize towards different sorts of video content engagement.
Again, the main process stays the same as our first example of Delayed Pixel fire. The only different step is the Trigger Type and this time we are using YouTube Video.
You can track video start, completion, pause, seeking and most importantly video watch progress. Make sure you’re creating separate tags in case you’re interested in testing different optimization actions as it can muddy up your results. You can define either percentage or time-based event captures depending on your video length and user experience.
4- Element Visibility
There can be cases where you are interested in tracking and optimizing for actions like the visibility of a certain element on your landing page. Examples can be firing a Custom Conversion when a user stays on a certain image for more than 2 seconds. Or, if they made it to at least the 3rd photo in your product photo gallery. The Trigger Type that allows us to define such engagements to fire a Custom Conversion tag is Element Visibility.
Follow the same process that is explained in the first section of this post. Element Visibility tag gives us options to identify the desired page element(s) with their element ID or CSS Selector. You can define a minimum time for the on-screen duration (in milliseconds) and also there are other settings that you can tweak to get the right combination of conditions that you like to be considered as a conversion.
As you see the options for firing your Custom Conversion code using Google Tag Manager are almost endless. You can track and optimize your Facebook conversion campaigns for different types of user interactions depending on your use case and user experience.
I hope this blog has given you some great ideas for optimizing your Facebook campaigns with creative Custom Events that are representative of high-quality content engagement. If you’re interested in learning more about Google Tag Manager and tracking important interactions on your website or apps, this Google Analytics Academy course is a great place to start.
I’ve found that most of my clients know a little something about SEO, but they’re not exactly sure how to make it work for them as well as it should. Teaching SEO to clients should be part of the client management services that you provide during SEO sales presentations.
SEO is a broad topic that covers a lot of ground. The challenge lies in how to explain SEO is communicating all the ways that you can enhance SEO in terms that clients can understand so that it doesn’t seem so much like a foreign language.
I’ve found that my clients have a better understanding of the value of SEO when I can help them understand its significance in today’s digital marketing plans and speak to them about it without being too technical with the terms.
I’ve found some effective ways on how to pitch SEO services and with their help, I develop a custom SEO plan that’s designed for success. The points shared below will help you convey a lot of crucial information to your clients.
Whitepaper
Why SEO is necessary for your business
When teaching new clients about SEO and demonstrating how to show SEO value, I keep three things in mind:
Explain SEO using a language they’re familiar with
Demonstrate that SEO is still relevant today
Explain the value of SEO in the simplest way possible
In getting acquainted with my clients, I like to start by explaining that SEO is a vital tool for success as a jumping-off point to a more pointed conversation about how to show SEO value.
Clients who don’t hurry to embrace SEO unless they fully understand one simple thing – online is the new offline. Virtually every business is now present online and people are used to doing everything online, too.
Why do SEO? Customers should focus on SEO because people go to Google to explore almost everything, from medical symptoms to new restaurants. This re-emphasizes that online is the new offline. Organiс search is the primary source of the traffic to most websites, and your online visibility depends heavily on how high you rank on Google. If you decide that you want to go out for dinner to a nice Italian restaurant this evening, you’ll browse online and find restaurants in your area in Google Maps, take a look at the pictures, the menu, and read the reviews.
Important points to refer when explaining why SEO is important
Organic search is the primary source of web traffic
SEO builds trust in your products and company
SEO improves the buying cycle because it puts your business where the audience is
While most clients know what SEO means, they’re not usually as familiar with related terms. I try to gauge their knowledge base of SEO as quickly as I can, so I can help fill in their gaps in knowledge.
Whyeducateclients about SEO?
Providing SEO services isn’t just about getting results, although, that’s a big part of it. Our society is more tech-savvy than they used to be. It’s important to give our clients credit for what they know and educate them on the “behind the scenes” factors that are at work with SEO.
SEO is a valuable tool and when we can help our clients better understand how it works, they can more easily see its value. Our credibility, and livelihoods as SEO professionals, depend on our ability to explain and demonstrate value.
I also recently had a conversation with Eugene Levin, CSO of SEMrush, who believes that it’s important to educate the leadership in companies.
Here’s what he said
“We do our best to educate both our employees and our clients. Each of our employees should understand SEO and know how to use SEMrush and all its tools. While with the clients we often meet in person to find some tailored tactics that would help them increase online visibility and drive sales. We meet with companies’ SEO teams and figure out even more efficient ways to boost online rankings.”
Giving client education a deeper thought
SEO skills are important but don’t overlook the importance of assuring your clients that you have worth as a specialist who can help them take their business from good to great. Your clients aren’t going to be satisfied with you sending them links on marketing blogs, videos, or informational emails alone. It requires time, work, and energy to educate clients, but your client management skills will eventually pay off.
As you spend more time with your clients, they will learn a little more from you each time about SEO which will bolster their trust in you as their SEO advisor and create a stronger mutual trust between you. While you are the SEO expert, don’t forget that they are the expert on their business. Their input during collaborations is a vital component of their ultimate success in SEO campaigns.
1. Clarify goals and expectations
I make sure the goals and workflow are clear, so the report ties in with monthly deliverables. These are the details that prove how hard you are working behind the scenes for your clients.
2. Share reports
During the course of planning for improving SEO results, clients will learn that much more time goes into it than they probably thought. To help them realize this, I always share reports as the ones mentioned below:
Reporting in calls
Emails
Reports with custom KPIs
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3. Make SEO easy to understand for your clients
While I educate my clients as well as I can when I meet up with them, I supplement my teachings with blogs on my website that correlate to different aspects of SEO as resources if they’re interested in understanding more about a particular aspect of SEO. Over time, they will come to rely on my site for the latest information in SEO, which is a great way to reuse your content. They will probably even share it with others, which will help to expand your business.
Every client is in a different place in understanding their digital marketing needs, so I try to cater my teaching to their level of understanding.
My process of educating clients involves one or more of the following steps:
Learning how much the client knows about SEO and the internet
Determining their learning style
Breaking down the meaning of SEO and what it does
Choosing an analogy that has meaning for them
4. Gauge your client’s understanding levels
When having discussions with clients, I make eye-contact with them. If I start getting puzzled looks when I mention things like search engines and backlinks, it helps me pick signals whether I need to explain some of the technical terms or whether I can offer a simple definition and move on.
5. Understand and choose an ideal learning style for your client
I know that there are three main learning styles – verbal, visual, and physical. Using one or more of these styles helps drive home certain points.
I know that some of my clients do well when we have discussions in person or on the phone. Other clients need the help of a chart, diagram, or a simple drawing. Physical learners need me to demonstrate the concept. The best way to do this is by giving them an analogy or showing them an example on the computer.
Clients that are new to technology may need to understand what SEO is, so I like to start by explaining that the acronym, search engine optimization is. I also explain what optimization means and how it helps to rank websites higher on a page and how authority gives the search engine a way to rank its importance.
6. Use analogies to make SEO relatable
Finally, an analogy is always a great teaching tool because it gives my clients a way to compare a challenging concept. In the course of the discussion, I usually grab onto a comment they made. If they mentioned they were late because they had to meet with their insurance agent – I present an example using the same context in which I can show how an insurance agent can use SEO to rank high on a web page.
His insurance agent has a website. Most likely the agent has a blog and some testimonials. The more content the agent has, the higher the site ranks. Ranking higher will mean that the agent’s site takes advantage of titles, product descriptions, and summaries. It will have photos and videos and it will link to other pages. Because the agent is looking for local business, he or she will target customers within a certain radius of the office. The agent may also have a target audience of married people who are homeowners, so it’s important for them to advertise in places that will attract that market rather than online locations that attract millennials.
Extra tip
I often spend some time on my clients’ websites before a scheduled appointment. That gives me additional opportunities to apply some of the concepts we’re discussing to the work that we can begin doing together.
Closing note
I never anticipated that teaching would be part of my job as a digital marketer. What I enjoy so much about the client management aspect of my job is that I’m continually finding out new information about SEO and it makes me eager to share it with my clients. It’s rewarding for both of us to share details that will help them to become a success.
Which of these tips would you practice to help educate clients about SEO? Feel free to share your thoughts, experiences, and tips in the comments section.
Karina Tama is a contributor for Forbes, Thrive Global and the El Distrito Newspaper. She can be found on Twitter .
Whitepapers
Related reading
Google hires real humans known as “Search Quality Raters”. Page Quality rating (PQ) is a grade given after analyzing “how well a page achieves its purpose”.
Creating SEO-friendly how-to content is a good way to engage your audience, fuel SEO, and take on the customer journey from brand awareness to sales.
What if I told you that accessibility and SEO could go hand in hand? Let’s see how it can be done with site and page structure, images, and more.
It’s been eight years since schema was introduced, many brands are yet to implement it. A look at what structured data is with samples, and its benefits.
Danny Sullivan has confirmed that the reports submitted about the rich results for recipes not working properly are being reviewed. A couple of weeks ago we reported there was an issue but the issue is still not resolved but Google is looking into it.
The issue is that the images of their recipes disappear from Google’s search results. Forcing a new crawl fixes the issue temporarily and then it may disappear again. I shared examples in our original story.
Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter it is being investigated. He said “Yes, we have the reports. It’s been passed on for review.”
Yes, we have the reports. It’s been passed on for review.
The internet has become the go-to source for everything from trivia about celebrities to fixing our kitchen sinks. But AI SEO may be changing the way marketers help their sites rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Failure to rank may result in your business missing out on valuable search traffic. Which means far less revenue for your business.
For a long time, you could get by with basic SEO strategies.
But not anymore.
With artificial intelligence (AI) taking over the world, you need to up your game.
What does that mean for your SEO strategy?
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term that covers several different technologies, including machine learning (ML), computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and other, still emerging technologies.
What’s the point of AI?
AI has one principal goal – to perform (often laborious and mundane) cognitive tasks better and faster than humans. It is a technology designed to make our work and life easier.
In business, AI has already proven to be effective in increasing revenue.
In sales and marketing, 30% of AI adopters cited a 6-10% increase in revenue after implementing the technology.
These are pretty impressive results.
And yes, AI can also be beneficial to your SEO.
But, will AI replace SEO?
Emphatically – no!
Let’s talk about how AI is impacting SEO and why it won’t be taking over.
What is AI SEO?
AI has become a core component of major search engine algorithms, including Google’s Rankbrain and BERT.
This factor means if you understand AI and how it impacts search engines, you can boost your SEO using AI.
But that’s not all.
AI is also an excellent tool for data analysis, which is a significant part of designing an effective SEO strategy.
From helping you spot trending topics to discovering content gaps, you can do tasks faster and more efficiently with AI-powered SEO software.
AI and SEO are a match made in digital heaven.
Why is AI SEO Important?
Although both AI and SEO are complex disciplines, used together, they make it easier for you to boost your website’s rankings.
One thing to keep in mind about search engines is they always put the user first. They aim to deliver content that’s as relevant as possible.
Because of this, SEO is not just about keywords anymore. It’s about:
Concepts: What is the idea behind the searchers’ query?
Context: What is the intent behind the searchers’ query?
Customer satisfaction: What are the most relevant answers to the user’s query?
So, keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore (and hasn’t since Hummingbird). For your content to rank, you need a great link building strategy and to optimize for AI-powered search engines.
Today (and in the future), one of the main factors that impact ranking is user experience. And AI is one of the best ways to provide website visitors with a positive experience.
Let’s quickly look at six ways it can help boost your SEO.
AI SEO: 6 Ways to Use AI to Improve Your Website
Now that you understand what AI is and how AI SEO can impact your site, let’s look at a few ways you can use AI SEO to keep up with modern SEO tactics.
Opportunity Discovery With AI SEO
One of the most important aspects of SEO is discovering hidden ranking opportunities that haven’t been exploited.
That’s one of the areas artificial intelligence SEO is proving to be effective in helping boost your website’s rankings. Powerful AI-powered SEO tools have emerged in the last couple of years, giving you more in-depth insight into:
Keywords you should be targeting
Link building opportunities
These and other insights that you can get from AI-powered SEO software are crucial to crafting a content strategy that will exponentially boost your website’s SEO.
With the competition to rank becoming fiercer by the day, you need to find keywords, topic ideas, and other SEO opportunities that aren’t too common.
Find opportunities that your competition is not exploiting, and you’ll have a much better chance at ranking.
Granted, finding these opportunities manually takes a lot of creativity, time, and hard work.
However, with the help of AI-powered SEO software, like BrightEdge, you can uncover golden SEO opportunities faster.
This is one of the main reasons AI must be a part of your SEO strategy.
Content Creation With AI SEO
Discovering content opportunities is only a small part of the battle to dominate the SERPs.
You also have to create content that hits the mark.
This is where AI can help improve your SEO.
How?
Once you’ve used a tool like BrightEdge to find keywords, you can use AI to help you know what kind of content you should create.
Once fed with your target keyword, AI-powered tools scour the web for content created around that keyword. In a few seconds, you’ll find:
Content gaps to exploit
Trending topics
The average number of sections to include
With insights like these, it becomes easier to create content tailored to solve specific problems for your audience, in short, personalized content that satisfies user intent.
Not only that, but AI can help you ensure that the content you create is relevant for each stage of your funnel.
Content creation is no longer just about creating poor quality content that ranks. It’s about creating content that users will find helpful.
And that’s exactly what AI will help you do.
Content Optimization With AI SEO
For a long time, content optimization has been about keywords, internal links, backlinks, and other on-page SEO tactics.
Those things still matter.
But search engines now look at more than just those indicators. Search engines are getting better at figuring out precisely what searcher’s intent is while searching.
How can you optimize your content for user intent?
You guessed it – with the help of AI.
AI SEO tools help you:
Create topic clusters that answer user questions and rank
Know the optimum length of content on your given topic
Use keywords and LSI keywords correctly
With AI, you can optimize your content to meet Google’s E.A.T standards found in their search quality raters, guidelines. You can create content that expertly answers user queries authoritatively. And that’s the kind of content Google loves to serve its users.
But AI doesn’t end at helping optimize content for search engines. AI-powered writing tools like Atomic Reach and Grammarly (among a slew of others) also help ensure your writing makes for a pleasant read.
This also helps increase dwell time, another factor that indicates to search engines that your content is useful.
The bottom line is AI can help you create better optimized content that your readers will love and engage with.
Optimizing for Voice Search
One of the fastest evolving areas of search is voice search.
With more people relying on their voice-activated devices to search the internet, voice SEO (VSEO) has become an aspect of SEO you can’t ignore anymore.
Statista forecasts that the number of voice assistants globally will reach 8.4 billion in the next few years — which is more than the world’s population.
Most voice searches are in the form of questions, so one of the main ways to optimize for VSEO is by answering the questions people are asking.
This is where AI tools come into play.
For example, tools like Frase help you create VSEO optimized content by showing you the questions searchers are asking. You can then create content around these questions.
Another aspect of voice search is that it’s conversational. This is where AI principles like NLP come into play.
AI-powered content tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway can help you create more conversational content by recommending tone changes and highlighting hard to read passages.
One thing to note about VSEO is that it is hyper-competitive. That’s because voice assistants only give one answer – the one right at the top of the SERPs.
This means you have to pull out all the stops to ensure you rank well for VSEO.
Scale Your SEO
A significant part of SEO is tedious manual labor that has made it difficult for marketers to achieve results quickly.
AI has changed that.
AI-powered tools have taken a lot of the grunt work out of SEO by gathering data, analyzing it, and translating it into actionable steps,
More than that, however, you’ll find that artificial intelligence SEO software, like Alli AI, can help with your technical SEO as well. For example, it can help you:
Conduct website audits
Automatically optimize content
Fix duplicate content issues
On the on-page SEO front, AI SEO software can help you scale your content creation by analyzing top-performing content. The software can then help you create content strategies and briefs for optimized content.
As a result, you can quickly scale your SEO efforts — without overworking your team.
AI can take over the laborious, mundane, and time-consuming (and sometimes soul-sucking) aspects of SEO. This will free up your team to do other things that need human attention.
User Experience
Remember – Google’s (and other search engines) primary focus is the user.
This means user experience (UX) is a crucial element of SEO.
That’s probably why, in a rare announcement, Google let people know that page experience will be a significant ranking factor starting from the year 2021.
But what is page experience?
According to Google, page experience is a set of signals that measure a user’s satisfaction (or lack of it) when interacting with a web page. This goes beyond the page’s informational value.
It takes into account the overall UX the page provides.
Of course, pages with negative user experience won’t rank and those that offer users a positive user experience.
Where does AI come into play here?
With search engines thinking more like real human users, they can determine whether your page will provide users a positive UX or not.
This means when a user inputs a search query, search engines want to make sure they serve up:
Relevant and authoritative content
Pages with proper structure
Pages with easy navigation
Pages that load fast
Mobile-friendly websites
If users can enjoy a personalized experience on your website, this will increase dwell time and encourage sharing your content. Both are signals to search engines that your content is worth ranking higher on SERPs.
Today’s AI-powered SEO tools, like Market Brew, can mimic search engines and give recommendations on what you can do to improve your website’s UX.
As a result, you don’t have to guess whether the SEO gods will smile on your website with favor or not. You can know what pleases them (to a greater degree) and implement that on your website.
By marrying these two disciplines, you can create a robust SEO strategy that’s bound to get you noticed. More than that, it will help you build a loyal audience.
Of course, for every business, that translates to a healthier bottom line.
Top-ranking SEO performance requires attention to many metrics, including traffic, backlinks, and social shares — to name just a few. Our guide gives you insights into some of the most relevant and timely search engine optimization trends to anticipate for 2021, allowing you to prepare your SEO strategy accordingly.
