1. Growth in mobile traffic
A recent blog post on Stone Temple Consulting blog studies the mobile versus desktop traffic trends between 2016-2018, based on data from SimilarWeb. This data is from US web traffic, so there may be differences in the proportion of web traffic in India. However, some of the patterns of web traffic will be interesting for users in other parts of the world too.

The key data reported in this article are: a) mobile traffic accounts for almost 58% of visits to websites while desktop traffic is 42% b) desktop users spent more time on websites; moreover the average time spent per visit is getting shorter for mobile users c) the bounce rate of mobile visits continues to be higher than that of desktop users.

The implication is that online marketers will not only have to make their websites mobile friendly but they’ll also have to ensure that the mobile experience is truly optimised as mobile users seem to be a lot more impatient!

Read the report here.

2. Building authority in local SEO
As Google continues to give a lot more weightage to local results in the main SERP, it makes sense to continue to understand the nuances of local SEO. The fundamentals remain the same: ensure that you are giving a lot of local signals to Google in the content you offer, whether it be in the content or the links you obtain for the site. Ensure that you are getting a lot more local links.

Read this article by Jesse McDonald on how to build authority in local SEO.

As we gain experience in the entire content marketing cycle- from strategy & planning to content creation to content distribution- we continue to learn interesting lessons in the do’s and don’ts of this marketing strategy.

Recently, we carried out a fairly successful content marketing campaign for a start-up entrepreneur in the health & wellness sector in India. Being very new in the market, the primary objective of the campaign was to create as much visibility for the entrepreneur as possible in relevant channels, while at the same time, maximise opportunities for getting organic search engine (SEO) traffic.

While the results from the campaign more than fulfilled the objectives we set out to achieve, there were quite a few takeaways from the hassles and challenges we faced during the entire process. We list below some of these takeaways for the benefit of anyone who is considering a PR/ guest blogging outreach campaign.

Define and agree on the process to be followed

This may seem obvious but better to state it than not: it is good to define the process to be followed for the campaign with the different stakeholders. Whether you first create pieces of content and then find the right channel to get it published on, or you approach a few publishing platforms first and then create custom content for them— these are decisions that you can agree on upfront. Both of these approaches work and we’ve realised that there are advantages and disadvantages, efficiencies and inefficiencies.

If I were to stick my neck out and indicate a personal preference, it is for the latter approach: identify potential publishing platforms, engage with them and then create something useful and valuable specifically for that platform.

Remember that a PR/guest blogging outreach campaign is fairly labour intensive. While you can create a standard process to follow, it really works optimally in the pre-reachout stage. Beyond that, you will often have to alter approaches on the fly and take actions depending on the responses that you receive. Build in some degree of flexibility into the process.

Another aspect you should define and agree early in the process is related to communication with the target publishers. This is particularly true when you are doing such a content distribution/ outreach campaign for an ‘external’ client. Some clients can be unnecessarily fastidious about every tiny detail.

The client I mentioned above was one such ‘control freak’, which we thought significantly slowed down the process and success rate without adding any additional value. In hindsight, we would have done better to set in stone the entire process, communication details and the boundaries of ‘interference’ before we commenced the campaign.

Get a realistic assessment of the content creation capabilities
After we embarked on this content marketing initiative, we were soon faced with a different problem. The response rate was better than anticipated, so it meant that the number of publishers who were willing to accept contributions from our client was higher than the volume of content that we could expect our client to generate within the stipulated time frame.

This is not a bad problem to have, but it meant one of two things: either scale up content generation capabilities or slow down and delay some of the pieces that were to be submitted. Scaling up the volume becomes a serious problem when the subject matter is very niche and it does require a specialist to offer knowledgeable insights. In the case we are discussing, it did require the specialist who had some strong views to create the content, and so we had to drop off a few publishers who had agreed to publish our content.

The lesson we took away from this experience is that we needed to have a better sense of how much content could be created in what time frame, and the need to better regulate the outreach effort.

Agree on the websites you are going to target for outreach

Set up some broad criteria on the type and “nature” of websites you want to approach for potential content contribution and publication opportunities. The holy grail is, obviously, channels that have a high volume of relevant audience reach/ traffic and also willing to link to you. However, these are also not easy-wins, so make sure that you have alternatives too. For example, you might find sites that aren’t top-draw, but are reasonably relevant and there is an easier opportunity to get a link. In terms of effort-to-return, this tier 2 site could yield a better return in the short term.

In the selection of the site, evaluate whether the content is good in general. Will it be appropriate for the author/ expert to have his/her name there? Review some of the other articles covered by the media to determine the overall quality of the site.

Some of the yardsticks or factors we have used to identify potential websites for outreach are given below.

Get complete clarity from the content platform on what you will get
Once you start approaching the websites/blogs for publication of your content, it is very important to get full visibility on what you can expect from contributing your original content to that channel. The sooner you have clarity, the easier it is for you to bail out in case you feel that the benefit you will get is not commensurate with the effort you have to put in.

Some of the aspects to get clarity on are:

Ensure you get due credit for your content

There is nothing worse in content marketing than seeing somebody else take full credit for a piece of work that you have crafted assiduously. Mind you — we are not talking about some obscure blogger or web publisher aggregating content from multiple sources without permission. We were surprised to find that websites operated by some well-known media houses did this!

For example, a couple of large publishers used almost everything almost verbatim, bar one or two edits, from a piece that was written by our client. The by-line for the article was given to some writer from the publication, and they converted a couple of sentences in the article inot quotes from our client- a recognised expert in that field- thus trying to give the impression that the entire piece was researched and written by the staff writer. Worse, in attempting to make the minor edits to give that perception, the rather incompetent editorial team left behind a trail of spelling and grammatical errors!

We realised that not getting a confirmation from the publication that the article would be published with a by-line for our client was a mistake.

To conclude, some of the specifics of each content marketing or guest blog outreach campaign could vary, but we feel many of the bigger lessons we learnt here could be applied to all campaigns.

- By Manoj Aravindakshan
Manoj Aravindakshan is a search marketing consultant and content strategist. He is the founder of Singapore SEO agency & digital media company, On Target Media.

This article was originally published on the On Target Media website.

In the 11-minute video (embedded below), Ohye provides companies looking for external SEO consultants some useful do’s and don’ts and the process to follow in identifying the right individual or firm to work with.

As a SEO service provider, operating primarily in markets like Singapore and Mumbai where this practice has often been treated as a commoditized service, the video resonated with me on several counts.

I’ll list some of the key takeaways from the video, many of which we reiterate to our prospective clients during the pitch stage. Some of the points below are taken verbatim from the video while some others are edited or elaborated with my views.

• No magic bullet: If you aspire for long-term SEO success, there are no magic tricks that any SEO professional or company can provide. Typically, “SEOs need 4 months to a year to help a business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit”.

  
  

  The duration for seeing favorable results may vary from business to business, website to website, but when companies claim that they can “guarantee” 1^st page rankings on Google within a month, alarm bells must ring very loud.

• Quality matters: “A SEO’s potential is only as good as the quality of your business or website.”
  

  

  Though I don’t agree with the above statement in its entirety, it holds true in the long term.  I’ve seen several instances where very large and successful businesses don’t do nearly as well in search results. On the other hand, we ourselves have helped several SMEs outrank some well-known brands, without resorting to any black-hat SEO tactics or taking risky short-cuts. 

  So while a good SEO consultant won’t be able to take a poor quality business anywhere for too long, he can certainly work with a business that has a decent level of quality and help it compete and succeed.

• Ability to look beyond search rankings: “A good SEO does not focus only on search engine ranking but how they can help the business. It is difficult to do good SEO without knowing a business’ goals, customers and other existing marketing efforts. SEO should complete your existing work.” I couldn’t agree with Maile Ohye more here. It is of course expected that the consultant will recommend best practices for search-friendly websites. However, for too long, both SEO consultants as well as the companies hiring them- especially in the SME segment- have been obsessed over the technicalities of the medium aka the search engine (Google, in most cases).
  

  
  

  As search and search marketing has evolved, I think it is critical for SEO consultants to have a strong marketing mindset. They have to be able to look beyond meta data, java scripts, CSS and server response codes (these are important, of course), and be able to understand and appreciate the nuances of great content and usability and user experience. The ability and instincts to “connect different sets of dots” from across the business and leveraging those to catalyze SEO efforts, are other essential attributes.

  It is important to understand and more importantly, be aligned with, the outcome for the business: be it just traffic, leads or online sales. This focus and alignment on desired outcome can happen only if the consultant has asked for and obtained complete clarity on the stated business goals, its unique value propositions, profile of their target audience and business/revenue model, other marketing methods and channels used (including offline marketing) and competitors.

• User experience & SEO are linked closely: “In a majority of cases, doing what is good for SEO is also good for your users online customers”. Bingo!For a long time, too many people viewed SEO as a silo that was completely detached from the rest of the user experience. It was almost like these were two mutually exclusively phenomena, and the only way one could succeed in the “SEO game” was by throwing usability and user experience out of the window.This disconnect between SEO & usability manifested itself in several forms: lots of keyword-stuffed copy in the lower part of the pages (even top sites like eBay seemed to have resorted to these tactics in the past); text in tiny fonts on the side bar, and so on.

  
  

  Now it is increasingly acknowledged that the user experience matters considerably. There have been several hypotheses that bounce rate and the time spent on a site have a bearing on search rankings (though I don’t think this correlation has been definitively proved). Also, common sense dictates that if the user experience upon landing on a web page isn’t great or trustworthy, the user will abandon the page and defeat the very purpose for which he was brought there.

  So, the key message is: don’t disregard user experience while doing SEO, and don’t treat the latter as something very different from how the user engages with your website. The two can and should go hand-in-hand!

• Active participation in strategy execution is necessary: “One of the biggest holdups is the unwillingness of the organisation to implement the SEO recommendations.” We’ve encountered this scenario several times. We formulate a SEO strategy and provide a list of recommendations for implementation. And then, things come to a standstill. With SMEs it is a case of resource constraints or issues with third-party vendors that we have to deal with, while with some larger organisations, it is the bureaucracy.For example, we did some consulting work for a European subsidiary company of a global industrial giant. Twenty four months after we presented our strategy and execution plan, we managed to get about seven out of the 30+ recommendations we had made.At every stage, there were several reasons why something couldn’t get done sooner:: IT department couldn’t move forward without approvals from the marketing department who couldn’t do much without approvals from their corporate headquarters and so on.Though financially rewarding, the above project was quite frustrating because the strategy we defined never even came close to getting executed.
  

  
  

  If you are a marketer that is hiring a SEO agency, beware of such a scenario playing out and putting the entire initiative at risk. 

  Make sure you have the buy-in of all stakeholders and you will commit the time and resources to actively participate in the process with the SEO consultant. Only then will you have a fair shot succeeding with the SEO campaign.

- Manoj Aravindakshan

Manoj Aravindakshan, a well-known Singapore SEO consultant & content strategist, is the founder of Navi Mumbai digital marketing agency, On Target Marketing that provides SEO, SEM & Social Media Marketing services.

If you are looking to formulate and execute a SEO & inbound marketing strategy for your business, contact us now!

Originally published on On Target Marketing Solutions : SEO lessons from Google: Essentials for contemporary SEO

Images courtesy: Pick the Brain | LaneTerraLever | Website Designs |

SearchMetrics lists some of the big winners and losers in the battle for visibility in the US following the mobilegeddon update. The prominent losers include the social site Reddit, Fool.com, NBCSports.com. One of the world’s leading SEO/ inbound marketing sites, Moz.com is also reported to have been affected by this update (not officially verified). An article on TFM&A insights indicates that Wikipedia and even the BBC may have taken a hit for not being mobile friendly.

India’s leading online retailer, Flipkart.com is likely to have been impacted by this update.

Mobilegeddon is one of the rare Google algorithm updates about which Google had given a strong heads-up back in February.

These are early days yet, and the dust is yet to be fully settled on this one. Over the next few months and weeks, we can expect to see mobile traffic to websites facing some flux. Marketers, especially targeting the consumer segment, can ill-afford to ignore the mobile search segment as part of their marketing mix, as search volume via mobile devices continues to rise. In fact, 2015 is touted to be the inflexion point where mobile search will overtake desktop search.

- The NetMarketer Editorial Team

We gratefully acknowledge the image source: thecodelesstravelled.com.au

The Penguin algorithm is intended to penalise sites with poor link profiles or those deemed to be indulging in unnatural link acquisition activities. The first of the Penguin series of updates was rolled out on April 24, 2012. There was another major Penguin update on May 22, 2013 which was among the most severe ones, affecting several well-known sites. Subsequently, Google rolled out another version of this update in early October last year.

As with any algorithm update, some sites seem to benefit from it, while many others seem to get penalised. However, the buzz in the SEO industry about this latest Penguin update has been considerably muted, indicating that this update may not have been as severe as a couple of the previous updates.

The Penguin updates over the last two years has forced SEO agencies as well as natural search marketers in general to re-evaluate how and where they acquired inbound links to their websites from. Two well-accepted tactics of the past, viz. guest blogging and online press release distribution have also come under Google’s radar, with the search engine either devaluing or penalising links obtained from such sources. The question that search engine marketers face is, what really is a “good” and “natural” link? Should they even consciously try to obtain links, because as some pros say, the good links are the ones obtained without asking.

-The NetMarketer Editorial Bureau

The Yahoo Directory had lost most of its appeal to SEO professionals over the past few years with successive algorithm updates by Google progressively devaluing links from directories, including ones like Yahoo that did have an editorial control on the quality of websites that got added to the directory. However, the annual listing fees of over $200 certainly did not seem justifiable for marketers considering both the declining link value as well as the lowering popularity and usage of Yahoo as a search engine.

There was no statement from Yahoo regarding refund of amounts for websites that have already been charged a full-year’s listing fees. We suspect that Yahoo might consider offering pro-rated online advertising credits instead of refunding the money paid by those listing in the directory.

The general directory model seems to certainly be coming to its end, with Microsoft’s bCentral directory having already been shut down several years ago. There are a couple of large directories with significant annual listing fees, such as Business.com and BOTW.com; however, it remains to be seen how long these sites can continue to operate a business model based on directory listing fees.

- The NetMarketer Editorial Bureau

The latest update, referred to as Panda 4.1 by sites like SearchEngineLand, comes about 4 months after the last Panda update that was rolled out around May 22.

According to the announcement by Pierre Far, this update will use some new signals gathered from user and webmaster feedback that may help small and medium sized websites rank higher.

The last Panda update had affected search engine visibility of several large websites including eBay. Thus far, reports of websites affected have been relatively few following this update. SearchMetrics, however, published its list of winners and losers from the latest Panda update. Prominent among the losers is Office365.com. The SearchMetrics concludes that news, content and download sites have benefited from this Panda update while some game sites and medical portals have lost search visibility.

The latest Panda update comes in the same week that there have been reports of Google clamping down on some private blog networks.

Our response is that we have not seen large correlations in the case of clients for whom we manage both paid and organic search marketing campaigns. Intuitively, it is also not in a search engine’s interest to help a site move up higher in organic search results as it can potentially reduce the budget a company allocates for paid marketing efforts and thereby, directly impact its revenues.

This is not to say that these two forms of search marketing are completely disparate with performance in one having no bearing on the other. Setting aside all “conspiracy theories” pertaining to manipulation of natural search results to drive paid advertising revenues, let’s consider some scenarios that highlight the intersection between the two and how one can influence the other.

How paid search advertising may affect your natural search results
Search marketers have typically used their learning from what is happening with PPC results to fine-tune their SEO strategy, especially with the keywords that need to be focused on, what content needs to be created, etc.

Occasionally, you might see some uptick in the organic traffic shown by your analytics while you are running a PPC campaign. This may be the reason behind the question I alluded to at the beginning of the article. Rather than any artificial boost given by the search engine, the increased organic traffic may be due to an increase in brand searches or influence of personalisation/ past search history in the organic search results.

For example, let’s say a user has clicked through a PPC ad, browsed the destination site and exited. Subsequently, the user does a brand search as he remembers company name – even if not in its entirety- but not the exact domain name, sees the name in organic search results and clicks through once more to the site. Similarly, we know that sites we have visited in the past tends to get shown to us higher in search results, especially when we are “logged in”. This increases the probability of more click-throughs from organic search results and a rise in organic traffic that could owe itself to paid advertising.

How natural search results affects paid search advertising
Let’s say that you are running a paid search campaign targeting both the search network (‘intent-based advertising’) and the content/placement network (passive, contextual advertising). One fine day, you notice that the number of leads you were generating has dropped sharply. Nothing much has changed with the results from the search network, but you find the results from the content network has inexplicably fallen-off a cliff. If you are like most of us, the tendency is to focus on key parameters like bids and budgets, ad creative and landing page to figure out if something has gone awry.

On a project that we managed, here’s what actually went wrong. In the immediate aftermath of the well-publicised (and much dreaded) Penguin algorithm update, a large number of websites were hit by a huge drop in search engine traffic. This included some fairly well-known mainstream media websites/ portals which one wouldn’t expect to be affected by either content quality issues or “shady” SEO practices. Consequently, there was a direct impact on the number of impressions that our clients’ ads were getting and as a result, the number of leads generated for them.

Google tests thousands of changes to its search algorithm in a year with a percentage of results changing rankings on a daily basis. Any advertiser targeting the content/placement/display network needs to be wary of significant changes to organic search results that could potentially throw their paid campaign off-the-rails.

PPC professionals need to keep themselves abreast of happenings in the world of SEO/ organic search, in order to be able to respond faster and more effectively. For example, if trends indicate that organic search results for a particular type of query are giving greater weightage to a particular type of site, determine how you can have your ads on those websites. If you see a lot of YouTube videos ranking high on search results, consider getting YouTube into the advertising mix.

Similarly, you might see a high proportion of job sites showing up (rather surprisingly) for online marketing services-related queries, work out how you can get your ads in there even though they may not seem to be the most appropriate channels for targeting at first.

Key takeaways
In conclusion, here are some key takeaways for search marketers:
- Don’t view SEO and PPC as two water-tight compartments. Take from PPC campaigns to fine-tune your SEO strategy ie. what keywords are better converting, what keywords to build content around etc.

- Monitor what’s happening in the world of natural search results and how rankings are getting affected. In particular, regularly check the websites/ type of websites that are ranking for the queries/ topics that will be of interest to your target audience.

- Be aware of the risk of over-reliance on the contextual network.

- Accept that even paid search advertising may not be entirely within immediate control (it is generally accepted – and rightly so- that paid campaigns offer greater control and predictability than organic search traffic).

- By Manoj Aravindakshan

Manoj Aravindakshan is CEO of Navi Mumbai-based digital marketing agency On Target Marketing Solutions which specialises in search and social media marketing for generating leads and online sales.

See also: Articles by Manoj Aravindakshan | Articles on Google Adwords | Articles on SEO | Articles on Search Engine Marketing

What does the removal of Google Authorship mean for webmasters and SEO professionals?
a) Google search results (non-personalised) will no longer feature author information as they used to previously. Google had already removed showing author images since June 2014.
b) No support for Google Authorship is available via Webmaster Tool
c) In personalized searches, ie. searches performed in a logged-in state, searchers may find Google+ posts from friends or “socially connected” pages. According to John Mueller, the killing of authorship does not impact such social features.

One of the reasons cited by Google for the decision to kill the authorship mark-up might seem very surprising- that there was not much difference in how users interacted with the authorship results in search results. A number of experts in the SEO industry had conducted studies and experiments pointing to a lift in click-through rate from search results when the result featured an authorship profile. Of course, Google has the ability and processing power to decide based on a significantly larger data set than what SEO experts would have been work with. That there was insufficient take up by publishers is a lot more plausible— the process of implementation of Authorship wasn’t very easy by any means.

The ‘execution’ of Google Authorship once again raises questions over the life expectancy of Google+. Increasingly, the question seems to be “when” rather than “if” Google+ will also be put down. For now, though, Google+ seems to have the benefit of life support.

- NetMarketer Editorial Team

Coincidentally, this major update was made almost a year to the day since the roll-out of Google Penguin update on May 22, 2013, which was one of the most devastating algorithm updates for websites around the world in terms of loss of traffic from Google. The first major Panda update was released in April 2011 and since then several updates and data refreshes have been released from time to time. Last year, Google divulged that they will be releasing such refreshes more frequently, even as much as once a month.

While the Penguin update was primarily targeted at penalising websites with unnatural and undesirable in-bound link profiles, the latest version of Panda (as was the case with previous iterations of this algorithm) is aimed at weeding out lower-quality content or penalising websites with ‘manipulative’ content. Consequently, it seems that many content aggregators have been hit the hardest following the update. At the same time, it seems surprising that some of the websites that have allegedly lost search visibility had a reputation for being useful sites offering reliable and good quality content. A clearer picture regarding the exact impact of this update will emerge in the next few weeks.

NetMarketer.in will be analysing both the winners and losers from this algorithm update and present the analysis in the near future. Watch this space as we also attempt to gather intelligence about the impact of Panda 4.0 on large Indian web properties.