5 Actionable Talks from Conversion Experts

Posted by christinew603

As marketers, we can’t turn a corner without hearing about how to generate leads with existing content. But CRO [Conversion Rate Optimization] is about so much more than just leveraging content in different ways; optimization is really the process of finding out and testing how to convert people on your site pages, landing pages, blog posts, and marketing efforts.

Don’t know where to start? Listen to these five actionable talks from a few of today’s top conversion experts. Hear directly from the landing page, copywriting, mobile, and conversion design experts on how to optimize your marketing for lead conversion. (And save your spot in a live Google Hangout with these experts and HubSpot on June 1st!)

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1. Peep Laja – How to Turn Data into Insights & Customers

Bio via ConversionXL:

As ConversionXL founder, Peep is an entrepreneur and conversion optimization expert with 10+ years of global experience. He has extensive experience across verticals: in the past he’s run a software company in Europe, an SEO agency in Panama, a real estate portal in Dubai, and worked for an international non-profit.

In this talk from TractionConf, Peep covers:

• 6 steps to thinking of conversion optimization as a process and not tactics
• Why “best practices” aren’t necessarily the best ways to optimize your own blog posts and landing pages
• Digging into the formula for conversion success (hint: it starts with the number of tests run, the percentage of winning tests, and impact per successful experiment)
• Getting better data, not more
• Gathering qualitative and quantitative data to find out if your ideas are actually good
• Identifying problems and holes for conversion on your site

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2. Oli Gardner – 4 Corners of Conversion

Bio via Inbound.org:

Unbounce’s legendary Oli Gardner has seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet. His disdain for marketers who send campaign traffic to their homepage is legendary. He is a prolific webinar guest and writer, and speaks internationally about conversion-centered design where he is consistently ranked as the top speaker.

In this presentation from INBOUND15, you’ll learn:

• Bull sh*t marketing and how to spot it on your own landing pages
• Conversion-centered design and utilizing psychology for conversion
• How to apply the 4 corners of conversion — copy, design, interaction, and psychology — in all forms of your marketing, not just landing pages
• Utilizing information hierarchy and ensuring your copy comes before design

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3. Joanna Wiebe – 3 Undeniably Real Test-Proof Truths That Will Shake What You Know About Copywriting

Bio via Inbound.org:

As copywriter and creator of Copy Hackers, Joanna helps startups use their words so people fall in love with them, flood them in cash, tell all their friends about them, and name their firstborn after them. (“Buffer Anastasia McGillicuddy. That’s got a nice ring to it.”)

In this particular talk from CallToAction Conference 2014, she covers:

• How to approach “clever” copy and learning to write for conversion
• How to lead a headline: what we’ve learned from the advertising world of David Ogilvy and modernizing those ideas
• What color your buttons should actually be
• How to break patterns in language and copy when you’re stuck
• Ideas for new tests to run on your pages

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4. Tim Ash – Mobile Conversion Strategies

Bio via SiteTuners:

Tim Ash is the author of the bestselling book, Landing Page Optimization, and CEO of SiteTuners. A computer scientist and cognitive scientist by education (his PhD studies were in Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence), Tim has developed an expertise in user-centered design, persuasion and understanding online behavior, and landing page testing. In the mid-1990s he became one of the early pioneers in the discipline of website conversion rate optimization.

At INBOUND15, Tim covered:

• Top 10 things to stop doing on your mobile pages
• How to manage navigation on mobile and prioritize content
• Setting expectations for your mobile users and acknowledging their attention spans

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5. Angie Schottmuller – 7 Secrets to Drive Epic Conversion with Hero Shot Images

Bio via LinkedIn:

Angie is an inbound marketing thought leader skilled at wielding magnetic content optimized for search, social, conversion, and mobile. With over seventeen years in multichannel B2B and B2C experience in both agency and corporation settings leading successful marketing technology projects for brands like Nestle USA, Gerber, Red Wing Shoes, Andersen Windows, The Home Depot, and more, she’s adept at harnessing online and emerging technologies to drive tangible results for improving business — social engagement, lead generation, sales conversion, customer loyalty, and brand advocacy.

At Conversionista Conference, Angie talks about:

• 7 hero shot persuasion factors to learn and test from
• How to say more in a visual than header text
• Connecting hero images in your marketing
• How to persuade through credible imagery and encourage prospects
• Staying away from “fancy” brand images and gearing hero shots for conversion

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Want to see some of these experts in action? Learn all about how to increase your lead conversion in a live Google Hangout on June 1st!

Save me a seat!

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Is Your Writing Readable? 3 Concepts to Master for Copy That Converts

Posted by Isla_McKetta

You know you’re supposed to write scannable copy. But do you know why?

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.
– Jakob Nielsen

Nope, it’s not just that. Although the tiny fraction of attention readers have for your content is always important to keep in mind. But instead of another “write for the F-pattern reader” article, let’s dig into the psychological underpinnings of how readers process information. You’ll learn ways to make your content more memorable and how not to disenfranchise any audience members who struggle with legibility, however unintentional.

Don’t worry; you don’t have to immerse yourself in academic theories for the next three weeks. I’ve waded through those dusty tomes for you, and I’m here to report back on how readability actually works. I’ll also suggest some implications for your content. This’ll get a little wonky at times, but I hope you’ll learn something from my research. I know I did.

These are the concepts I’ll cover and where they fall on the legibility, readability, and comprehension spectrum:

1. Chunking (readability)
2. Word recognition (comprehension)
3. Universal design (legibility)

1. Chunking (readability)

In the field of user-experience design, ‘chunking’ usually refers to breaking up content into small, distinct units of information (or ‘chunks’), as opposed to presenting an undifferentiated mess of atomic information items.
– Kate Meyer

Chunking was first identified by George A. Miller in “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” While the article focuses on how many items we can hold in our memory, Miller goes on to suggest that we can remember more items if that information is properly separated out for us. For example, this string of numbers (even though it only contains eight digits):

is harder to understand or remember than this unforgettable number:

Those slashes help us parse the numbers into shorter (and more recognizable) units, which makes it easier to understand and remember the information.

The span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember. By organizing the stimulus input simultaneously into several dimensions and successively into a sequence of chunks, we manage to break (or at least stretch) this informational bottleneck.
– George A. Miller

So when you’re dividing up your web content with headers, images, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs, consider how those chunks of information are working for you. A listicle of the 100 greatest things about summer might be a lot more memorable if you subdivide that list with headers every 5–9 items. Likewise, if you write single-line-paragraph after single-line paragraph, your reader might get lost on the screen and miss something important. Instead, improve the readability of your content by varying the length of those paragraphs every so often.

2. Word recognition (comprehension)

That wasn’t too painful, was it? This next concept, an area of research into psycholinguistics called the “cohort model,” is a little harder to wade through, but since it speaks to our ability to comprehend information, I’m going to do my best to model that.

First, though, you might be thinking “psycho….what?” That’s exactly the point. We’re going to look at some incomprehensible content and then delve into how that affects readers. Then we’ll consider how we can convey whatever information we need to and still keep people reading.

Faced with a paragraph like this:

The cohort model relies on a number of concepts in the theory of lexical retrieval. The lexicon is the store of words in a person’s mind; it contains a person’s vocabulary and is similar to a mental dictionary. A lexical entry is all the information about a word and the lexical storage is the way the items are stored for peak retrieval. Lexical access is the way that an individual accesses the information in the mental lexicon. A word’s cohort is composed of all the lexical items that share an initial sequence of phonemes, and is the set of words activated by the initial phonemes of the word.
– Wikipedia

All but the most dedicated linguistics nerd would be lost inside that mouthful of incomprehensible information. I know I was. Not only were the concepts foreign, but I hadn’t seen a lot of those words since college. So let me try to capture the gist:

The cohort model looks at the way we connect a spoken (or in the case of web content, written) word with meaning. The potential meanings for a word start out broad, based on the initial sound/letter. As we see or hear more of the word, the potential meanings narrow down until we can choose which word we are seeing or hearing.

We read so quickly that it’s difficult to even recognize how our own reading happens. It’s easier to think about a word we don’t encounter every day like “psycholinguistics.” The cohort model suggests our brains first pull out a list of words that start with “psy” and begin to narrow down what word we might be looking at:

As we read further into the word so that our brains have processed “psycho,” the options narrow:

Note that although “psycho” could have been one of the words we initially thought of, by this point in our attempt to comprehend this word, we’ve likely also taken in the fact that the word is well over five letters.

As we process letters and sounds in reading “psycholinguistics,” most of us will find that this is an unfamiliar word — that it does not match up to any word already in our lexicon — and so our brains look for alternate ways to comprehend its meaning. In this case, we’d likely break it down into the most familiar component parts: “psycho” and “linguistics.” We might still not fully comprehend the word, but we have two possible meanings: 1. something related to both psychology and linguistics, or 2. the linguistics of a psychopath. One of these is more likely than the other…

So why do you care?

Stop words

In this case, it’s easy to see how using unfamiliar terminology (or overly jargon-y terms like “terminology” when I mean “words”) slows the reader down. Using these kinds of stop words might even stop a reader entirely and lead them to close your tab and move on to the next site.

Ambiguity

Ambiguous words, or those with more than one meaning, might be expected to cause difficulties in lexical processing.
– Treiman et al.

That’s just another way of saying that you can slow a reader down by using words that have more than one meaning.

Even very short words can be ambiguous.

Context clues do help with comprehension, but if your goal is to convert a reader to a customer, there’s no reason to make them think harder than they have to about your copy. So unless you have the linguistic command of a poet and are slowing readers down on purpose, think carefully about possible misunderstandings when you use ambiguous words.

Multiple meanings

Processing a polysemous word in one of its senses can make it harder to subsequently comprehend the word in another of its senses.
– Treiman et al.

“Polysemous” simply means “having multiple meanings” and it can contribute to the ambiguity we just discussed. But the point here is that if you first use a polysemous word like “bank” in one context, you should carefully consider whether and how to use that word again.

Because we all want to be able to bank on our bank, but sometimes customers would rather throw it over a bank.

Have trouble moving from one meaning to the next in that last sentence? Me too, and I wrote it.

3. Universal design (legibility)

Legibility can feel like the one aspect of intelligibility that we writers have the least control over (at least on the web). It’s rare for us to get asked what font to use or how the color of our text should contrast with the background.

But legibility is important to accessibility. To borrow the universal design principle from architecture, if we design our sites (and our content) to be legible by all, we’re removing potential blockers for all readers. Felicia, the tireless editor of the Moz Blog, is in talks with our UX crew about making our blog more accessible overall. Having worked at an organization that loved the look of light blue links against grey (and tiny) text, it’s something I wish more sites thought about.

I’m only picking on AIA Seattle because I was party to some of the website redesign discussions there where members mentioned this very issue. Not only is there very little contrast in color between the links and text, but the links in the left nav are gray while those on the rest of the page are blue. I’d show you their redesigned page, but now you have to hover over text to even see if it’s a link. Instead, take a quick look at the page for the national AIA:

Writers can help! As Laura Lippay wrote last week for the Moz Blog, by creating and implementing effective title tags, we can improve navigation for people with vision, memory, and mobility impairments. Properly structured headings, something we’re using for readability anyway, also help with navigation.

Having recently had a baby, I’m finally starting to empathize with readers who are sleep-deprived, having trouble seeing, reading in a second (or third) language, or in a screaming rush. Not to mention people who are dyslexic, grew up in crappy school districts, or are naturally much more gifted in some other area of life than reading.

I hope these investigations into readability, comprehension, and legibility can help you create better copy. Your audience is counting on you. And by creating easily intelligible content, you just might keep them around long enough to convert.

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eatsleepdraw: Exhale Of The Soul Mixed media (color pencils,...

The Landscape of Mobile Search is Changing – How Will You Adapt?

Posted by bridget.randolph

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

Note: this post is based on a recent presentation I gave at LearnInbound Dublin. You can find the slides here.

Mobile search as a topic has changed a lot over the past few years. When I first started looking at this, back in 2012, there was already a lot of discussion happening around the topic of mobile. And back then, the big question everyone was asking was, “what should my mobile strategy be?”

Even then, things were shifting. At one of my early conference presentations on the topic, I made the point that we should stop thinking about a “mobile strategy” as different from our web strategy, because mobile technology was becoming simply another way to access the Internet. This isn’t surprising; after all, global purchases of smartphones are increasing at an exponential rate:

Source

And because of this, the questions we’re asking have changed.

• We used to ask whether we needed a separate mobile site (and it was around this time that Google really began to encourage the use of responsive design), whereas now “mobile-friendliness” often seems to be used interchangeably with “responsive.” (This is, of course, a whole other topic!)
• We used to worry about treating mobile users differently because we thought they were always “on the go,” whereas now we realize that most people use mobile devices all the time, and in fact most of the time these devices are used even when other options are available, such as at home or at work. And most recently, Google have started speaking in terms of “micro-moments,” the various use cases of search: Do-Go-Know-Buy, which apply equally to mobile users as to desktop.
• And we used to talk a lot about apps, and about whether to use an HTML web app vs a native app, how hard it was for the average app to stand out from all the noise in the app store, and about app store optimization (ASO) harking back to the old days of SEO, with its emphasis on keywords for ranking. Now, we talk about the other ways in which people can use and discover our apps — such as app indexation and app streaming.

This shift is hardly surprising, when you consider that, in 2015, 52% of UK internet users have stated that mobile is their “preferred way to access the web” — up from only 24% in 2013. This means the number of people who view mobile as their primary web device has doubled in just 2 years, and we have every reason to believe that this trend with continue.

It just makes sense, because (as Benedict Evans recently wrote), “it’s actually the PC that has the limited, basic, cut-down version of the Internet…it only has the web.”

Whereas our mobile devices have so much more information to draw on (photos, geolocation, friends, physical movement) and greater interactivity: with the external world (through technology like beacons), with you when you’re not using it (through notifications), and with your personal identity (because a phone is always signed-in and it is almost always an individual device rather than a shared one).

So what are the key ways in which we’re seeing this shift in user behavior change our approach to SEO?

To answer that question, I’d like to focus on four key areas in which Google seems to be shifting its approach to mobile search, and some things we can do about it:

• Mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor
• Site speed and page load times
• Mobile-first design of SERPs
• App integration with web search

Mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor

In 2015, when Google first rolled out the Mobile-Friendliness Update (or “Mobilegeddon” as it was nicknamed), the impact was felt in two ways. More directly, by those sites which were impacted by the rollout — some sites lost up to 35% of their mobile rankings within the 1st month after the rollout — and indirectly, by the move towards mobile-friendliness in the lead up to the update. Google announced that they saw a 4.7% increase in the number of mobile-friendly sites in the two months between announcing that the update was coming and when it actually rolled out.

A new version of the update has recently rolled out, so we can expect to see further impact from this in the next few months.

What should we do about it?

The key action here is to ensure that your site passes the mobile-friendly test, and to check Google Search Console reports for mobile-specific errors.

Site speed and page load times

Hand in hand with the focus on mobile-friendliness, there is also a push towards improving site speed and page load times. This is particularly noticeable on editorial sites, where an ad-revenue business model leads to lots of different elements required to load a page, despite the actual content being fairly lightweight.

Google are not the only ones addressing this issue: Facebook Instant Articles and Apple Newsstand both use in-app versions of content pages to speed up the loading process, and some publishers have also created their own native apps to help solve this.

Google’s solution to this is their Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), which allows publishers and creators of editorial content to build versions of their pages with stripped-back, skeleton HTML, following a set of rules which guarantee speed and force distribution (an important thing to be aware of if you choose to utilize this approach).

This set of rules allows the page to:

1. load quickly (speed), and
2. be cached by Google and served directly in the SERP (distribution).

Example (L–R): primary URL, AMP version on primary website, and AMP version cached by Google.

What should we do about it?

The first step is to decide whether AMP is relevant for you.

You should use AMP if:

• Google News is an important traffic source for you;
• You make a lot of content, particularly editorial content;
• You want wider distribution of your content;
• You have a high proportion of mobile traffic.

If this is a good approach for you, you can learn more about how to implement it here.

Mobile-first design of SERPs

This third key area is around Google making desktop search look and feel more like mobile search.

There are two major ways that this has happened:

1. The card-style layout, which makes the distribution of content easier on a variety of different screen sizes and types:

2. And the move to get rid of the sidebar ads on desktop search in favor of more ads at the top of the page (on “highly commercial” searches):

“Old” Google desktop SERP

“New” Google desktop SERP without sidebar ads

What should we do about it?

There’s not a huge amount that can be done to address this trend head-on. However, it’s important to ensure that, for these “highly commercial” SERPs, you are taking account of the changing SERP layout in your tracking and reporting.

In addition, you may want to shift some of your focus towards building out your top-of-funnel search strategy, to target less commercial keywords where you will have fewer paid ads to compete with.

App integration with web search

Google needs to find a way to integrate app content with the rest of the web, or they risk becoming irrelevant. The “walled garden” effect from having apps on your phone’s home screen, coupled with recent stats which show that around 85% of users’ time on their mobile devices is spent on apps rather than on the mobile web, means that apps present a very real threat to Google continuing to act as an intermediary between users and content discovery.

The solution for Google is to start indexing and serving app content in the web search results, and this is what they are trying to do with their work around app indexation and app streaming.

App indexation involves setting up your app so that the same http:// web link can be used to link to a page on your desktop site, its mobile version (responsive design or dynamic serving), and the equivalent content inside your app (deep linking). This allows Google to serve the most relevant version based on the context which they have around that particular user and how they prefer to use the web.

Image credit: http://ift.tt/1TAzAAq…

In the longer-term, they seem to be moving towards the option of “app streaming,” which would allow a user to access app content without having the app installed on their device. The content would instead be served via Google search interface, again firmly positioning Google in the middle between the user and the content provider:

Example of app streaming in SERP

What should we do about it?

If you don’t already have an app, this may not be relevant to you. However, it is worth considering whether you should create one. To determine whether or not you should have an app, you can ask the following questions:

Would my app…

• Add convenience?
• Offer unique value?
• Provide social value?
• Offer incentives?
• Entertain?

If the answer is no to all of these, you probably don’t need an app.

If you do have an app, though, make sure that it supports http:// web links, and then head over to my post on app indexation for a walkthrough on how to set this up.

Where’s this all heading?

I believe that all of these trends are supporting a wider push by Google towards their goal of building the ultimate, intelligent personal assistant.

Sergey Brin stated in 2013: “My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually, you wouldn’t have to have a search query at all.”

This may seem impossible, but when you consider the implicit signals which Google is now able to access through the enhanced features on a mobile device, it seems less farfetched. Already, they are able to access data around:

• Search history
• Language
• Social connections
• Time of day
• Browser
• Device
• Location

And already, users are realizing that they can provide fewer contextual signals within their keyword search and the search engine will still know what they’re asking. In addition, the technologies are becoming more finely tuned and gathering more data all the time:

• wearables that can monitor physical activity and health signals (like heart rate),
• beacons which can pinpoint a location down to which side of the street you’re standing on, and
• phones which can tell whether you’re walking, running, cycling or riding in a car.

These are all signals which in the future could be used to determine the most relevant results to serve - potentially before you even ask.

When you combine all of these signals with the integration of the public index (what we currently think of as the Google search index), the private index (your emails, photos, calendar, etc) and app content, Google could have the ability to know as much about your day to day activities as any human PA. This means a single interface for all types of searches, and eventually, an intelligent personal assistant which can anticipate your next question before you ask it.

So maybe, instead of focusing just on keywords, or even topics, the next question we should start asking is: “How can I be the most useful source from a personal assistant app’s perspective?”

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If you’re interested in learning more about these trends which are shaping the future of search, like implicit signals, the changing Google interface, intelligent personal assistants, beacons, wearables, and other new devices, and more, we’ve been writing and discussing our predictions over on the Distilled blog for our new #Searchscape project.

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How have you seen the mobile search landscape shift over time? Do you agree that it’s heading towards the development of intelligent personal assistants? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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Getting Local Store Locator SEO Right

Posted by MiriamEllis

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

Right now, a customer is trying to find your local business. How quickly are you delivering the NAP, directions and other details he needs, on the go?

Volumes of excellent free advice have been written for small businesses about creating quality, optimized local landing pages, but today, I’d like to talk about a topic that has received much less attention: helping customers discover locations when you’ve got a ton of them. This article is for the medium-to-large business with 20, 100, 500 physical locations and a pressing goal to have each one be found by the customers local to it. Let’s talk about store locators!

Shopping wisely for store locators

A business with 5 or even 10 locations can easily work them into a menu tab labeled ‘Locations’ and trust that customers hitting the site will be able to click to their landing page of choice to access NAP, hours of operation, photos, reviews, etc. But when your company has grown beyond this, it simply isn’t practical to list dozens of locales in your top level navigation, whether on desktop or mobile devices. The solution, then, is a store locator widget that enables customers to enter a city and/or zip code, or click on an interactive map, to be guided to the right resource.

There are six main things you are looking for when assessing the quality of a store locator widget:

1. Does it let me build and/or link directly to a customizable, permanent landing page for each of my locations? If so, this is a good sign. If not, your SEO opportunities will be severely limited.
2. Does it allow me to search by city as well as zip code? If not, then you’ll have a problem with all travelers who may be trying to find your business in a strange city and have no idea what the local zip codes are.
3. Does it work properly on all devices? This is must these days, given that as many as 50% of mobile queries may have a local intent.
4. It’s a must that the widget will work with your existing website, whether that’s running on Wordpress, Magento, Shopify, or what have you. You don’t want to have to redevelop your website, just to get your widget to function.
5. A bonus to look for would be automatic geolocation detection — the ability of the widget to detect where a customer is searching from. This provides convenience.
6. And, finally, there may be extra features you’d like to have to ensure the best possible experience for both users and your business. This might include search text autocompletion, the ability to sync with Google Docs to upload location data, or search filters that allow users to refine results based on personal criteria.

Keep all of these necessary and optional features in mind when evaluating Store Locator widget choices. Captera has recently done a good job of profiling a number of popular options which should help you hone in on the right solution for your company.

Pricing varies widely, from free to upwards of a $1,000 initial investment with reduced rates for subsequent years of service. Wordpress offers a number of free and premium store locator plugins with varying degrees of popularity. For any paid product, I recommend choosing only those which offer a free trial period of at least 1–2 weeks so that you can be sure the solution works for you.

Weak landing pages? Weirdly, not a big worry!

I’m now going to write something kind of shocking you thought never thought you’d read on the Moz Blog: you can evidently get away with thin and duplicate content on location landing pages — if your brand is established enough.

I’m writing this because, having looked at a considerable number of live store locators while researching this article, I found landing pages like this one with next to zero content on them, landing pages like this one with a very meager attempt at content that is observably duplicative, and landing pages like this one with some duplicate content, but also, some added value for local users. Not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, but, with the exception of the last example, the sheer volume of locations operated by these companies has likely caused their marketers to settle on the most minimal effort possible to differentiate between landing pages. The last of these (REI) has actually done a good job of adding interest to their pages by including a regional event schedule. I like what they’ve done, but is it necessary?

The answer may surprise you

In a word: no. Google is correctly finding for me each of these businesses in the right cities, both organically and locally, when I search for them. While I would never advise a small business to take a least-effort approach with their store landing pages, it’s my conclusion from my research that established brands can get away with a great deal, simply because they are established. It seems you can get the right data in front of the customer with a very minor effort, and that the minimum requirements for data on those pages would be that they have correct company NAP on them and are indexable.

Am I handing out a lazy pass for all?

Are lax standards a good reason to go with the minimum effort and call it a day? In another word: maybe. The investment you make in landing page development for your brand is going to be dictated by:

• Funding
• Scalability
• Creativity
• Competition

If funding is modest, you may need to spend elsewhere in your marketing for now. If you have hundreds of locations, the cost of going the extra mile on your store landing pages may not show any easily-discernible ROI. If your marketing department throws its hands up in the air regarding differentiating store #157 from store #158, there may be a lack of available creative solutions to the scenario. But this last bullet point — competition — this is where things get interesting.

Besting your toughest competitors

Let’s say you’re operating one of three sporting goods stores in town. Competitor A has zero content beyond NAP and hours on his landing pages. Competitor B has thin, duplicate content on her landing pages. But, you, you smartie, have not only got a unique paragraph of text on your pages, but also store-specific reviews, and a maintained schedule of guided hikes in the region. All three of you link to your respective landing pages from your Google My Business listings. If you were Google, would A, B, or C look like a more authoritative resource to you?

And let’s look at this from the perspective of me on my cell phone on a winter’s day, looking for a high end snowboard and being given raw NAP by one competitor, a generic message by the second, but a promise of a free cup of hot cocoa (according to your reviewers) and a welcome message from you that states that every employee at your shop is a fanatical outdoors enthusiast, ready to show a novice like me the ropes of investing in sporting goods.

In a competitive scenario, if your store is the only one maximizing the potential for consumer engagement on your store landing pages, you are working towards impressing not just search engines, but customers, too. You could end up earning more than your fair share of those 50% of local-intent mobile queries, in city after city.

Supercharge your landing pages

Here’s a quick brainstorming list of both typical and optional content you could include on store landing pages to make them extra useful and extra persuasive:

• NAP
• Hours of Operation
• Driving Directions
• Unique welcome message
• Proofs of local community involvement
• Store-specific reviews or testimonials
• Links to major review profiles for the store
• Social media links
• Live chat apps
• Store-specific specials, including coupons
• Location-specific schedule of in-store or topically related regional events
• A summary list of brands, goods and/or services offered at that location
• Indoor/outdoor imagery of the specific store
• Video content relative to the store or region
• A statement of guarantees offered at the store
• An interactive map
• Calls-to-action for how to communicate with the brand after hours
• Education about the availability of beacons or other in-store apps

Looking for more inspiration? Try this Moz Academy video to spark extra landing page content ideas.

You may necessarily end up with a minor amount of duplicate content, but by brainstorming a list like the above, you will be making a maximum effort to inspire bots to consider your pages authoritative and to inspire searchers to become customers.

Discovery and indexing: Making landing pages pay off

Now that you’ve made the effort to create all of these individual landing pages for your locations, your top priority is to be sure they can be discovered by customers and indexed by search engines.

Simple enough

The first is really easy: be certain your Locations or Stores link is in your top level navigation, at the top of every page of your website. Don’t count on users finding it if you’ve stuck it in a box somewhere within your homepage layout. Many users will not be entering your website via the homepage and you want to deliver the link to find the store nearest them immediately. Don’t make them search for it.

Take care here

Ensuring that search engines can crawl and index your local landing pages requires a bit more thought, given that different store locator widgets are developed with different types of code. Google can crawl CSS, and they can typically crawl Javascript and AJAX. Hopefully, the widget you choose will facilitate your landing pages being properly indexed with no additional effort.. But, to make this foolproof, here are additional things you can do:

1. Be sure you are linking from the Google My Business listing for each location to its respective landing page on the website.
2. Be sure your other citations also consistently link to the landing pages instead of to the homepage.
3. Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
4. Create a permanent sitemap on your website, that includes links to all of the landing pages.
5. On the main Locations page of the website, include an alphabetical directory of all locations with crawlable links. You can see an example of this at REI.com.
6. Earning inbound links to these pages from third parties and, also, linking internally to landing pages from other pages of the website or blog posts, where appropriate, are other forms of insurance that they will be discovered, crawled and indexed.

You say “local landing pages,” I say, “customer service!”

Comscore/Neustar Localeze have estimated that more than ½ of desktop local searches and more the ¾ of mobile local searches result in an offline purchase. The same study asserts that almost half of the searches surrounding services, restaurants and travel are performed by users looking for companies with whom they’ve never had any previous transactions.

In this lively scenario, the smart business will be that one which gets name, address, phone number and driving directions in front of the customer fast. The winning business in a competitive environment may be the one which not only extends the courtesy of basic data to the customer, but which offers extra inducements (in the form of additional useful information) to be that customer’s choice.

Store locator widgets and local landing pages have become an established component of customer service. Properly implemented and developed, they may be the very first sign you give to a major percentage of your incoming customers that you are there to serve their needs. Serve them well!

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Building Brand Value & Customer Loyalty: Videos from MozTalk in Philly

Posted by Danielle_Launders [Estimated read time: 3 minutes] In April, we hopped on a plane to go visit our friends in the City of Brotherly Love to share an evening of learning, networking, and, of course, eating, for our latest MozTalk. Wait, what’s a MozTalk, you ask? Well, let me tell you! MozTalks are after-work events, featuring two-four speakers, focusing on topics relevant to online marketing. These one-night events are a way to engage and share ideas amongst the community, meet old friends and new (that’s you!), and learn great tips from some brilliant minds. Oh, did I mention there is food and some awesome swag? Yes, let’s not forget the most important parts. Our most recent MozTalk focused on innovative strategies for building brand value and keeping your customers coming back. Topics ranged from human interaction through customer service to tailoring PPC ads to keep your customers coming back for more. We had a lineup of four outstanding speakers: Adam Melson from Seer Interactive, Erin McCaul from Moz, Purna Virji from Microsoft, and Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive. Watch the presentations below for the full scoop: Adam Melson: Branding & Revenue Wins That Ignore Traditional SEO Top takeaways Fixing broken customer experiences should be a priority; make sure to measure everything. By doing so, you may find new key opportunities to enhance the customer experience and gain loyalty. Look past the basic search results; more and more people are using websites outside of Google to search, including Reddit. Erin McCaul: Customer Engagement: Why Your Help Team Should Have a Seat at the Table Top takeaway Excellent customer service is about empathy and should be the foundation of any good brand. Purna Virji: Clever Ways the World’s Most Valuable Brands Use PPC Top takeaways Build your brand with PPC by focusing on making the customer’s life easier, showing them that you care, and making it easy to be a loyal customer. With the increase in the use of voice search, be prepared for search results with misspellings. Make sure to account for that as a brand and in PPC. Utilize sitelink extensions by focusing on the stage of interest of a customer or according to the customer’s needs. Wil Reynolds: A Modern SEO’s View on Authority vs. Trust Top takeaway Don’t confuse popularity with trust, and remember, rankings don’t equal trust or equal money. Missed the previous talks? Now that your brand value is at all-time high and your customers love you, it’s time to level up even more. Our first MozTalk covers Need-to-Know SEO and Making Your Blog Audience Fall in Love with Rand Fishkin and Geraldine DeRuiter, while our second MozTalk dives into 5 Years of SEO Changes and Better Goal-Setting with Rand Fishkin and Dr. Pete Meyers. Join us for the next one! We are excited to announce that we are headed to Denver for our next MozTalk on July 19th to learn all things content. Join us for a night full of learning, networking, and fun. Keep an eye on our Events page for more details to come, and we hope to see you there! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! from The Moz Blog http://ift.tt/27EwVNf via IFTTT
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Optimizing for Accessibility + SEO: Site & Page Structure Overlaps

Posted by Laura.Lippay [Estimated read time: 9 minutes] (header image photo by H.L.W. from the Blind Photographers Flickr Group.) Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! 39 million people are blind. 285 million are visually impaired. 15% of the world’s population — over a billion people — have some form of disability. Disabilities can come in many shapes and forms: physical, cognitive, visual, hearing. How does someone who is blind check their email? How does someone who can’t hear decipher any of the tens of millions of videos on YouTube? How do disabled students keep an upper hand when all of their classmates are using the Internet for research? Many use assistive technologies to help with these tasks. Screen readers are like search engines in that they can’t see the content of a page, and instead rely on signals in the code to navigate the web and understand the content of a page. In this, and in two follow-up posts, we’ll explore the overlaps between optimizing for search engines and optimizing for screen readers and assistive technologies. But first, let’s get a better understanding of what screen readers are all about. In the video below, Kyle Woodruff navigates the web without his sight, quadriplegic web user Gordon Richins navigates the web without his hands, and Curtis Radford navigates the web without his hearing. You’ll see that they still face challenges because of the gaps between what assistive technology (AT) can do and what is actually built in a way that can be accessed and navigated by assistive technologies. Because he’s so entertaining (even has his own Amazon series), I also must introduce you to Tommy Edison, The Blind Film Critic. See how he’s easily using Twitter and YouTube with the assistive technologies built into the iPhone. Give it a shot Here’s a simple way to try something like this out for yourself right now: Open a Chrome browser Install the screen reader extension ChromeVox and enable it. For a better experience, utilize some of this ChromeVox help: ChromeVox tutorial (quick, easy, and highly recommended) ChromeVox shortcuts reference (print it and tape it to your monitor (if you’re sighted)). Go for it. Navigate. Optionally, you can also enable these more complex free screen readers on your device: VoiceOver on Mac OSX, iOS. User Guide. Shortcuts. NVDA free screen reader for Windows machines. User guide. Shortcuts. Try any of these on your own website. How painful is it? Do something about it Consider going beyond simply being aware of accessibility (A11y) for Global Accessibility Awareness Day by utilizing some of your technical code optimization chops to help millions of disabled fellow humans have a better experience on the web. Let’s be very clear though: learning web accessibility is no small task. This is a complex industry where assistive technologies go beyond just optimizing a bit of web code for screen readers. But here’s where it’s simple for you to start: Some of the tasks of optimizing for web accessibility overlap with the things we look at for search engine optimization (SEO). At the most basic level, it’s important not to cannibalize the screen reader experience by over-optimizing for SEO by doing things like keyword stuffing. At a more advanced level, you’re top-notch if you can recognize the overlaps and consider how to optimize for both screen readers (AKA humans, in essence) and for search engines (bots). In this post we’ll look at some simple structure overlaps. In next week’s post, we’ll dive more into overlaps in formatting and links, including what may be somewhat controversial: hidden text. And in the final post, we’ll look at accessibility and SEO overlaps optimizing video, images and non-text elements, including making infographics accessible. SEO/A11y Overlaps: Structure Markup on a page helps both search engines and assisitive technologies (AT) like screen readers to understand what elements are in a page. For SEO, different elements like title tags, headings, or some schema markup can have more weight or value than other markup. People using assistive technologies are reliant on these structural elements to navigate through the page without being able to see it or without being able to use a mouse. We’ll start with some easy SEO + accessibility overlaps: structural elements that you might deal with in your every day coding or optimization. Consider the accessibility side of implementing and optimizing these elements to provide a better experience for disabled visitors while you also build for SEO. Title tags Title tags (not to be confused with title attributes) are important in search engine optimization for (1) providing context as to what the page is about when Google crawls it and (2) how the page appears in the search result display. Over the years, while SEO techniques have come and gone and fluctuated in perceived effectiveness, page titles have continued to be one of the more highly valued on-page tactics. When considering accessibility, W3C provides these specific benefits of the page title for various disabilities: This criterion benefits all users in allowing users to quickly and easily identify whether the information contained in the web page is relevant to their needs. People with visual disabilities will benefit from being able to differentiate content when multiple web pages are open. People with cognitive disabilities, limited short-term memory, and reading disabilities also benefit from the ability to identify content by its title. This criterion also benefits people with severe mobility impairments whose mode of operation relies on audio when navigating between Web pages. Here’s a sample of the ChromeVox extension announcing the content of several tabs in a browser window by reading the title tags (and page focus). Title tag do’s and don’ts Do continue to follow page title best practices for SEO. This should work hand-in-hand with titling for accessibility. Do not keyword stuff. In case keyword stuffing is still your thing, consider how something like this reads (“Buy Soap Dispensers, Pump Soap Dispensers, Sensor Soap Dispensers & more | MyStore”) versus “Soap Dispensers from MyStore.” Keep it simple and relevant (and split content into separate pages if you need to). Headings In search engine optimization, there’s a lot of focus on the H1 tag, and much less on nested H2–H6 headings. An H1 heading indicates the main topic of a page, while H2–H6 indicate subtopics or page sections. SEOs will sometimes use multiple H1 headings in an attempt to give more emphasis to more of the keywords and content on the page. SEOs will also sometimes tag other text on the page or in the footer as an H1 heading, in an attempt to get more keyword-rich H1 text in front of search engines. This can really mess with screen readers, and here’s why. Headings allow assistive technologies to quickly navigate a page. Headings define the structure of the page and a screen reader user will oftentimes use these as the first method to move to a particular module or region of content. Here’s an example of tabbing through headings using ChromeVox on the Santa Cruz Good Times news website: Compare that to the Lehighton Times News, where only one heading was used, and it’s on the Calendar. Heading do’s and don’ts Do use headings. It’s important not to skip headings altogether, like in the Times News website example above. Don’t use more than one H1 heading: HTML5 allows for multiple H1s, but this is not well-supported by browsers/assistive technology. Do use headings to define sections of content. For example, use H2 headings for subheader or key sections of the page and H3 headings for content modules. Don’t use headings if there’s no following content. Headings define sections of content, so if there is no content section, it shouldn’t have a header. HTML5 elements and schema markup HTML 5 introduced more detailed tagging of page elements, like , , , , and a whole bunch more. Additionally, schema markup was developed by Google, Yahoo, and Bing to better understand elements of a page. We know that Google uses some schema elements for rich snippets in search results, like review markup to get star ratings to appear in search results. What we don’t know is how many of the 571 schema types that the search engines pay attention to when indexing and forming context around a page and its elements, and/or what HTML 5 elements are considered and how they’re weighted. Regardless, this tagging allows various assistive devices via different browsers to better understand and navigate through content. Check out these accessibility scores of HTML 5 elements via different browsers from html5accessibility.com. The page has a lot more interesting detail. Semantic markup do’s and don’ts Do markup your content with relevant tags. It’s likely good for everyone. Do not use divs or spans for buttons. Div and span-based buttons are not accessible. If it looks and acts like a button, use a button. Page structure & navigation Some SEO camps might be zealous about putting the body copy or most important content of the source code at the very beginning of the source code, in an attempt to either make sure it’s indexed before Google leaves the page or to attempt to indicate that content is more important. Whether you’re of that camp or not, it’s not a great idea for accessibility. The order of the source code content is important for being able to easily tab through content with your keyboard in the correct order. Ideally this looks something like: H1 heading, main navigation, site sections, and then footer. You can make modifications via the CSS, as long as your source code order is logical. It helps to have good semantic markup. Page structure and navigation do’s and don’ts Do make sure your source code is in order. You can change things around via CSS, but a keyboard will tab through page content as it is listed in the source code. On-site sitemaps This one is pretty straightforward. When search engines and screen readers are having trouble discerning the complex, convoluted, complicated navigation or otherwise hard-to-reach sections and pages of your website, a simple outlined sitemap with links to all the sections and pages can provide a quick and easy solution to fuller indexation and understanding the contents of a website. Sitemap do’s and don’ts Do provide an on-site sitemap, if it’s possible. Link to all sections of the site, present the same organization as the site presents, and keep the links updated. Don’t keyword stuff. We’re all familiar with those sitemaps that repeat the site’s keyword in every link, like used cars alabama, used cars alaska, used cars arizona, used cars arkansas. You’re likely to drive a screen reader user to drink. Don’t do it. Resources & tools General: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 - W3C.org’s recommendations for making websites more accessible WebAIM Screen Reader Survey - Lots of interesting stats about what blind users use, how they navigate, sites they like and avoid, etc. WCAG Checklist WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool JAWS screen reader - the popular Windows screen reader Chrome screen reader extension ChromeVox Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools extension for Accessibility and Structure: W3C Headings & Accessibility WebAIM Keyboard Accessibility W3C Making the DOM order match the visual order W3C Positioning content based on structural markup Getting started with schema.org using Microdata A great sitemap example: The Web Accessibility Sitemap Next Week: SEO/A11y Overlaps: Formatting & Links Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read! from The Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1NzCCFR via IFTTT
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