The Local SEO Agency's Complete Guide to Client Discovery and Onboarding

Posted by MiriamEllis

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

Why proper onboarding matters

Imagine getting three months in on a Local SEO contract before realizing that your client's storefront is really his cousin's garage. From which he runs two other “legit” businesses he never mentioned. Or that he neglected to mention the reviews he bought last year. Worse yet, he doesn't even know that buying reviews is a bad thing.

The story is equally bad if you're diligently working to build quality unique content around a Chicago client's business in Wicker Park but then realize their address (and customer base) is actually in neighboring Avondale.

What you don't know will hurt you. And your clients.

A hallmark of the professional Local SEO department or agency is its dedication to getting off on the right foot with a new client by getting their data beautifully documented for the whole team from the start. At various times throughout the life of the contract, your teammates and staff from complementary departments will be needing to access different aspects of a client's core NAP, known challenges, company history, and goals.

Having this information clearly recorded in shareable media is the key to both organization and collaboration, as well as being the best preventative measure against costly data-oriented mistakes. Clear and consistent data play vital roles in Local SEO. Information must not only be gathered, but carefully verified with the client.

This article will offer you a working Client Discovery Questionnaire, an Initial Discovery Phone Call Script, and a useful Location Data Spreadsheet that will be easy for any customer to fill out and for you to then use to get those listings up to date. You're about to take your client discovery process to awesome new heights!

Why agencies don't always get onboarding right

Lack of a clearly delineated, step-by-step onboarding process increases the potential for human error. Your agency's Local SEO manager may be having allergies on Monday and simply forget to ask your new client if they have more than one website, if they've ever purchased reviews, or if they have direct access to their Google My Business listings. Or they could have that information and forget to share it when they jump to a new agency.

The outcomes of disorganized onboarding can range from minor hassles to disastrous mistakes.

Minor hassles would include having to make a number of follow-up phone calls to fill in holes in a spreadsheet that could have been taken care of in a single outreach. It's inconvenient for all teammates when they have to scramble for missing data that should have been available at the outset of the project.

Disastrous mistakes can stem from a failure to fully gauge the details and scope of a client's holdings. Suddenly, a medium-sized project can take on gigantic proportions when the agency learns that the client actually has 10 mini-sites with duplicate content on them, or 10 duplicate GMB listings, or a series of call tracking numbers around the web.

It's extremely disheartening to discover a mountain of work you didn't realize would need to be undertaken, and the agency can end up having to put in extra uncompensated time or return to the client to renegotiate the contract. It also leads to client dissatisfaction.

Setting correct client expectations is completely dependent on being able to properly gauge the scope of a project, so that you can provide an appropriate timeline, quote, and projected benchmarks. In Local, that comes down to documenting core business information, identifying past and present problems, and understanding which client goals are achievable. With the right tools and effective communication, your agency will be making a very successful start to what you want to be a very successful project.

Professional client discovery made simple

There's a lot you want to learn about a new client up front, but asking (and answering) all those questions right away can be grueling. Not to mention information fatigue, which can make your client give shorter and shorter answers when they feel like they've spent enough time already. Meanwhile your brain reaches max capacity and you can't use all that valuable information because you can't remember it.

To prevent such a disaster, we recommend dividing your Local SEO discovery process into a questionnaire to nail down the basics, a follow-up phone call to help you feel out some trickier issues, and a CSV to gather the location data. And we've created templates to get you started...

Client Discovery Questionnaire

Use our Local SEO Client Discovery Questionnaire to understand your client's history, current organization, and what other consultants they might also be working with. We've annotated each question in the Google Doc template to help you understand what you can learn and potential pitfalls to look out for.

If you want to make collecting and preserving your clients' answers extra easy, use Google Forms to turn that questionnaire into a form like this:

You can even personalize the graphic, questions, and workflow to suit your brand.

Client Discovery Phone Script

Once you've received your client's completed questionnaire and have had time to process the responses and do any necessary due diligence (like using our Check Listings tool to check how aggregators currently display their information), it's time to follow up on the phone. Use our annotated Local SEO Client Discovery Phone Script to get you started.

No form necessary this time, because you'll be asking the client verbally. Be sure to pay attention to the client's tone of voice as they answer and refer to the notes under each question to see what you might be in for.

Location Data CSV

Sometimes the hardest part of Local SEO is getting all the location info letter-perfect. Make that easier by having the client input all those details into your copy of the Location Data Spreadsheet.

Then use the File menu to download that document as a CSV.

You'll want to proof this before uploading it to any data aggregators. If you're working with Moz Local, the next step is an easy upload of your CSV. If you're working with other services, you can always customize your data collection spreadsheet to meet their standards.

Keep up to date on any business moves or changes in hours by designing a data update form like this one from SEER and periodically reminding your client contact to use it.

Why mutual signals of commitment really matter

There are two sides to every successful client project: one half belongs to the agency and the other to the company it serves. The attention to detail your agency displays via clean, user-friendly forms and good phone sessions will signal your professionalism and commitment to doing quality work. At the same time, the willingness of the client to take the necessary time to fill out these documents and have these conversations signals their commitment to receiving value from their investment.

It's not unusual for a new client to express some initial surprise when they realize how many questions you're asking them to answer. Past experience may even have led them to expect half-hearted, sloppy work from other SEO agencies. But, what you want to see is a willingness on their part to share everything they can about their company with you so that you can do your best work.

Anecdotally, I've fully refunded the down payments of a few incoming clients who claimed they couldn't take the time to fill out my forms, because I detected in their unwillingness a lack of genuine commitment to success. These companies have, fortunately, been the exception rather than the rule for me, and likely will be for your agency, too.

It's my hope that, with the right forms and a commitment to having important conversations with incoming clients at the outset, the work you undertake will make your Local team top agency and client heroes!

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!

Taking your analytics practice to the next level

As both a Googler and ClickZ team member, I recently attended and participated in the always-inspirational ClickZ Live New York event.

Along with Katie Morse, Vice President, Social and Search at Nielsen and Pierce Crosby, business development and experienced data analyst at StockTwits, we had a panel discussion on how brands can take their analytics practice to the next level.

First, a quick description of the panel:

Data has become everyone's domain, in all aspects of your marketing and business. Most companies do a good job at collecting and reporting data and have a basic process in place. But many are stuck as to what to do next to elevate value of data in their company.

As our conversation, and those questions the audience asked, were so good, I wanted to pull out some of the best questions and summary of answers we shared with attendees.

Pierce, Katie, and Adam presenting at ClickZ Live NYC. Photo by Search Engine Watch columnist Thom Craver (used w/permission).

1. Most companies have varying groups that need access to analytics insights. How do you efficiently get them all what they need and how do you ensure it's most useful for them?

The answer is process. Ensure that you have the right metrics delivered to the right people at an anticipated frequency. Also ensure that you have conducted proper resource allocation in order to allow time not just to share dashboards, but flesh out insights for your teams to take action on.

If you are just delivering dashboards without context, you're not doing your job. Actually, you're performing the job a script can do – which isn't a good place to be.

The more formalized you can be with your processes, the better, as this will make you incredibly efficient and free up time for the creative, valuable (and fun!) analyst projects.

2. How do you see a breakdown of time spent on analytics between data capture, reporting, and analysis? What are the best ways to help get organizations to move up the value chain?

The more time you can spend on analysis, the better. But if you're not capturing the right data and reporting it in an articulate way, your analysis won't be accurate or defensible. That's why it's important to spend time up front on ensuring your data quality is excellent and you're effortlessly generating beautiful reports.

Need some hard numbers to serve as a guideline? Aim for 10% of time spent on data capture, 20% on reporting, and 70% on analysis and delivering insights to your team (my previous ClickZ column goes over the reporting part in more detail).

The way to get an organization to move up the value chain is easy: trend down the time you spend on capture and reporting. It'll happen organically.

3. Can you talk about how you are using data across tactics - such as how does search inform social, email or other areas of marketing?

Data should not exist in a silo. You should be using it to inform everything you do, and you should be using it to understand your users, not simply to fill in dashboards.

For example: if you notice visitors to your ecommerce site are frequently querying a product name or type you don't have in site search, you should share this data with your product team and persuade them to offer it. Marketing isn't just about promoting products anymore.

Marketing now needs to be involved in the actual strategic decisions companies make, and data is how we get a seat here. Our user data should be informing what we do next, not just showing successes of our sites and apps. This all starts with breaking down silos and using insights cross functionally – beyond marketing.

4. Let's talk about goal setting: how you can quantify success outside of just ROI? What are some other metrics that we might want to take a look at?

ROI in dollar terms is great. Everyone can understand this, especially your CFO. But generating revenue is just one outcome from your marketing and content, and just one thing to optimize.

For example, if your call center or social CRM team notices a recurring question about your company's product they have to answer repeatedly, that's a huge opportunity. What you need to do in this type of situation is measure what your user's problems are and use this information to power answers in an automated / self-service fashion such as an FAQ page on your site or chatbot.

Creating this type of content in a data-driven manner can help trend down easily answered questions, freeing up your customer service team to focus on tougher problems which require a human touch and making your customers happier by simply getting the information they need immediately. That's a win-win: and very measurable!

5. What are some actionable ways or things we could all do to become better at analyzing the “what happened” and “why” at our metrics?

This is an area of practice makes perfect. The answer is to hire skilled leaders for your team that can inspire and grow your team's analyst skills. But personal growth helps too: so attending events like ClickZ Live, trainings and courses (such as our Analytics Academy) and reading blogs and books (like Avinash's definitive book, Web Analytics 2.0).

Although, there is simply no substitute for hands on experience at making data-drive decisions and becoming fluent in the world of digital measurement.

Working at an agency and on hundreds of clients across industries helped me get to where I am, so that's a path I can personally recommend. Although there's no reason you can't build your skills in-house too.

To learn more about the changing face of digital marketing, come to our two-day Shift London event in May.

17 fascinating stats about beacons and location marketing

Today we embark on our fifth weekly #ClickZChat, where the good people of SEW and ClickZ take to Twitter to discuss with our expert friends and followers a particularly burning digital marketing related issue.

For this week's chat, we'll be talking about location marketing, NFC, beacons, and their usefulness for marketers, so please join us at 12pm EST (5pm UK) on Wednesday 27 April.

As preparation for the discussion, I've pulled together as many stats relating to beacons as I could possibly find, many of which should provide fuel for the conversation and maybe aid your own location marketing strategy.

1) The value of in-store retail sales influenced by beacon-triggered messages in the United States in 2015 and 2016 was $4.1 billion.

2) In 2016, an extraordinary $40 billion increase is estimated. Statista suggests that beacon messages will trigger retail sales worth $44.4 billion in the US.

3) Men are more likely than women to make a purchase based on personalized advertising they saw on an in-store beacon or display.

4) Among responding male internet users aged between 18 and 34 years, 91% said they were influenced by personalized in-store advertising. Female internet users influenced by in-store beacon tech amounted to 76%.

5) More than 42% of companies already have proximity marketing (such as beacons and geolocation) in place. 39% say they will implement it in the next three years. 18.6% say they have no plans for beacons.

6) The future plans for beacon technology integration is trailing in popularity behind online basket comparison (42%), in-store Wi-Fi (54.3%), scan-and-go (59.3%) in-store bookmarking (62.8%).

[Source: Statista]

7) 46% of retailers have launched beacon programs in 2015, up from 15% in 2014.

8) 71% retailers are able to track and understand customers' buying patterns using beacons.

9) 65% feel they are able to target customers down to the aisle level.

10) 59% feel customers are more engaged in the store.

11) 53% retailers feel they are able to create more relevant and compelling offers in the store.

12) 24% retailers saw an increase in sales.

13) 24% retailers saw an increase in offer redemption,

[Source: Retail Touchpoints and reported by Beaconstac]

14) 82% of customers make purchase decisions in-store. [Google]

15) By 2018, the beacon installed base will consist of 4.5 million active beacons overall, with 3.5 million of these in use by retailers.

16) Half of the top 100 retailers in the US tested beacons in 2014, this was expected to increase to one-third of their store locations by the end of 2015.

17) Globally, it's estimated that 570 million Android and Apple smartphones are compatible with Bluetooth low energy (BLE), the signal used by beacons to trigger smartphone apps. This is one-third of the smartphone installed base.

[Source: Business Insider]

What 300+ Content Marketing Campaigns Can Teach You About Earning Links

Posted by KelseyLibert

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

In a recent Whiteboard Friday about 10x content, Rand said to expect it to take 5 to 10 attempts before you'll create a piece of content that's a hit.

If you've been at the content marketing game for a while, you probably agree with Rand. Seasoned content marketers know you're likely to see a percentage of content flops before you achieve a big win. Then, as you gain a sense for why some content fails and other content succeeds, you integrate what you've learned into your process. Gradually, you start batting fewer base hits and more home runs.

At Fractl, we regularly look back at campaign performance and refine our production and promotion processes based on what the data tells us. Are publishers rejecting a certain content format? Is there a connection between Domain Authority (DA) and the industry vertical we targeted? Do certain topics attract the most social shares? These are the types of questions we ask, and then we use the related data to create better content.

We recently dug through three years of content marketing campaigns and asked: What factors increase content's ability to earn links? In this post, I'll show you what we found.

Methodology

We analyzed campaign data from a sample of 345 Fractl campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2016. To compare linking performance, we set benchmarks based on the industry averages for links per campaign from our content marketing agency survey: High success (more than 100 placements), moderate success (20–100 placements), and low success (fewer than 20 placements).

We looked at the relationship between the number of placements and the content's topic, visual assets, and formatting. "Placement" refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. In terms of links, a placement could mean dofollow, cocitation, nofollow, or text attribution.

Which content elements can increase link earning potential?

The chart below highlights the largest differences between our high- and low-success campaigns.

We found the following characteristics were present in content that earned the most links:

1. Highly emotional


2. Broad appeal


3. Comparison


4. Pop culture-themed

The data confirmed our assumptions about why some content is better than others at attracting links, as all four of the above characteristics were present in some of our biggest hits. As an example, our Women in Video Games campaign checked all four of those boxes.

It paired a highly emotional topic (body image issues) with a strong visual contrast. It also included a pop culture theme that appealed to a niche audience (video game fans) while also resonating with a broader audience. To date, this campaign has amassed nearly 900 placements, including links from high-authority sites such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, MTV, and Vice Motherboard.

Read on for more takeaways on how to increase your content's link-earning potential.

Content that evokes a strong emotional response is extremely effective at earning links.

Emotional impact was the greatest differentiator between our most successful campaigns and all other campaigns, with those that secured over 100 placements being 3 times more likely to feature a strong emotional hook than less successful campaigns.

Example: The Truth About Hotel Hygiene

Our Truth About Hotel Hygiene earned more than 700 placements thanks to a high "ick" factor, which gave it emotional resonance paired with universal interest (most people use hotels). We've also found including an element of surprise helps strengthen the content's emotional impact. This study definitely surprised readers with a shocking finding: The nicest hotels had the most germs.

Example: Perceptions of Perfection

In our Perceptions of Perfection campaign, audiences were surprised to see drastically how designers altered a woman's photo to fit their country's standards of beauty. The surprise factor added an additional layer of emotionality to the already emotional topic of women's body image issues, which helped this campaign get nearly 600 placements.

Choose content topics with wide appeal to increase potential for high-quality links.

So we've proven emotionally provocative content can attract a lot of links, but what about high-quality links? We found a correlation between high average domain authority and content topics with mass appeal. Broad topics appeal to a greater range of publishers, thus increasing the number of relevant high-authority sites your content can be placed on.

Some verticals may have an advantage when it comes to link quality too. Campaigns for our travel, entertainment, and retail clients tend to have a high average domain authority per placement since these verticals naturally lend themselves to content ideas with mass appeal.

Some examples of campaign topics with a DA-per-placement average above 55:

• Cities That Hate Tourist


• Most Googled Brands in Each State


• Data Breaches by State and Sector


• Airline Hygiene Exposed


• Deadliest Driving States

Pro tip: A site's influence matters more than the type of link you'll acquire from it. Don't fear nofollow links; for two of our best-performing campaigns of all time, the initial links were nofollows from high-authority sites. A nofollow link on a high-authority site can lead to syndication on hundreds of other sites that will give dofollow links.

Use rankings and comparisons to fuel online discussion.

Contrast was a recurring theme in our high-performing campaigns, with strong contrasts achieved through visual or numerical comparisons. More than half of our highest-performing campaigns centered around a ranking or comparison, compared to just a third of our lowest-performing campaigns. Pitting two or more things against one another fuels discussion around the content, which can lead to more placements.

Example: Comparing Siri, Cortana, and Google Now

Comparing Cortana was a hands-on study for which participants gave a command to their virtual assistant and rated their satisfaction with the response. Comparing the three most widely used smartphone assistants attracted the attention of techies (especially Apple fans) as well as the broader public, since most people have one of these assistants on their smartphone.

Example: Airport Rankings

The Airport Rankings campaign looked at which airports offered the best and worst experiences, based on data including the volume of canceled flights, delays, and lost luggage. Local publishers loved this campaign; many focused on the story around how their regional airport fared in the rankings. Since most travelers have lived through at least one terrible airport experience, the content was extremely relatable too.

Pro tip: Side-by-side visualizations pack a high-contrast visual punch that helps drive linking and social shares. This type of contrasting imagery is extremely powerful visually since it's easy to process. It helps evoke an immediate response that quickly engages viewers.

Incorporate a geographic angle to earn international or regional links.

Did you notice a majority of the broad-topic campaigns with a high domain authority listed above also had a geographic angle? In addition to broad appeal, geography-focused topics help attract interest from international and regional publishers, thus securing additional links.

Example: Most Popular Concert Drugs

The Most Popular Concert Drugs, one of our most successful campaigns to date with nearly 1,900 placements, examined the connection between music festivals and drug mentions on Instagram. Many global sites featured the story for its worldwide festivals, including publishers in the U.K., France, Italy, Australia, and Brazil. Had we limited our selection to U.S. festivals, it's doubtful this campaign would have attracted as much attention.

Example: Most Instagrammed Locations

As with the example above, pairing a geographic angle with Instagram data proved to be a winning formula for the Most Instagrammed Locations campaign. We featured the most Instagrammed places in both the U.S. and Canada, which helped the campaign secure additional coverage from Canadian publishers.

Pro tip: To extend a campaign's reach to the offline world, consider pitching relevant TV and radio stations with geo-themed content that offers new data; traditional news outlets seem to love these stories. We've had multiple geo-focused campaigns featured on national and local news stations simply because they saw the story getting covered by online media.

Include pop culture references to pique audience interest.

Our campaigns with more than 100 pickups were nearly twice as likely to incorporate a pop culture theme than our campaigns with fewer than 20 pickups. Content that ties in pop culture is primed for targeting a niche of dedicated fans who will want to share and discuss it like crazy, while it simultaneously resonates on a surface level for many people. Geek-culture themes, such as comic books and sci-fi movies, tend to attract a lot of attention thanks to rabid fan bases.

New School vs. Old School

Trending pop culture phenomena are best for making your content feel relevant to the current zeitgeist (think: a Walking Dead theme that appeals to fans of the show while also playing up the current cultural obsession with zombies).

On the other hand, old school pop culture references are effective for creating strong feelings of nostalgia (think: everything in BuzzFeed's '90s category). If your audience falls within a certain age bracket, consider what would be nostalgic to them. What did they grow up with, and how can you weave this into your content?

Example: Fictional Power Sources

Fictional Power Sources looked at which iconic weapons, vehicles, and superpowers featured in movies were the most powerful. Rather than focusing on one movie, we featured a handful of popular movies - including Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix - which increased it the campaign's appeal to movie fans.

Example: Sitcom Cribs

Sitcom Cribs looked at the affordability of the living spaces on various TV shows - could the “Friends” characters really afford their trendy Manhattan digs? By featuring a lot of older TV shows, this campaign had a high nostalgia factor for audiences familiar with classic '90s sitcoms. Including newer TV shows kept the campaign relevant to younger audiences too.

Pro tip: To increase the appeal, feature a range of pop culture icons as opposed to just one, such as a list of movies, musicians, or TV shows. This adds to the range of pop culture fans who will connect with the content, rather than limiting the potential audience to one fan base.

Earning high-quality links is just one benefit of creating content that incorporates high emotionality, contrast, broad appeal, or pop culture references. We've also found these characteristics present in our campaigns that perform well in terms of social sharing.

In particular, emotional resonance is a key ingredient, not only for earning links but also for getting your content widely shared. Our campaigns that received more than 20,000 social shares were 8 times more likely to include a strong emotional hook than campaigns that received fewer than 1,000 shares.

How can you ensure these elements are incorporated into your content, thus increasing its linking and sharing potential? In a previous post, I walk through exactly how we create campaigns like the examples I shared above. Check it out for a step-by-step guide to creating engaging, highly shareable content.

What observations have you made about your most successful content? I'd love to hear your thoughts on which content elements attract the most links and shares.

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!

Beyond local SEO: Greg Gifford on how to win the visibility race

Last Friday at a packed-out Brighton SEO conference, expert local search consultant Greg Gifford delivered a fast and furious presentation on the secrets of local marketing visibility: it's not just about local SEO.

In a slide-show brimming with references to classic car movies, Greg Gifford raced through a host of tips and tricks that can massively improve your business's local visibility and let you storm ahead of the competition.

The days of “just having a website” and trying to make it rank near the top are over; it takes more than just SEO to market to local customers. That's not to say that local SEO isn't important, of course, but it shouldn't be your only consideration.

By thinking about local SEO as just one part of a wider visibility strategy, you can ensure that your business has a presence across multiple channels, not just in search. That's better for your customers as well as for you.

In his talk, Gifford gave a run-down of other key areas to pay attention to, and how to optimise each one to target exactly the local audience you want to attract.

But first, because search is still hugely important for a local business, here are some handy tricks that Greg Gifford shared which will help you get ahead in the SEO game.

Quick tips for local SEO

Future-proof your SEO tactics

You only need to look at pizza delivery for an example of how much weight local visibility now carries in search, more than ever before. If you Google “pizza delivery”, even without specifying a location, Google will serve you local results – whether you asked for them or not.

Any algorithm changes that Google makes to its local search results have the potential to shake things up hugely, and the businesses who adapt fastest are often those who end up on top.

Google's 'Pigeon' update in 2014 was a massive game-changer for local SEO, and mobile-oriented ranking changes like Mobilegeddon can have a huge impact on local given that 94% of mobile searches have local intent.

But if you live outside the US, you're in luck (for once!): Google algorithm updates always hit the US before they roll out anywhere else, so by keeping an eye on what's happening in the States, you can 'future-proof' your SEO tactics and know exactly what to do by the time the update comes to you.

And even if you live in the US, there's still a way you can get ahead: Gifford recommends keeping an eye on Moz.com's local search ranking factors research, an extensive survey conducted across SEO experts analysing the changes in ranking factors they have observed over the past year. This will give you the low-down on what changes search experts sense in the winds and how they recommend dealing with them.

Make your blog a local destination

Maintaining a blog is still an excellent content and SEO strategy, giving businesses a platform to publish regular, fresh and insightful content and build a relationship with their visitors.

But in the words of Greg Gifford, “Don't just market your shit!” Make your blog a local destination; share all sorts of things that people want to read.

Visitors will be turned off by a blog that is clearly just another mouthpiece for the company to promote its products. By thoughtfully curating all sorts of valuable local content, you can turn your blog into a go-to destination, boost its visibility and build relationships and links with other local blogs and businesses.

And speaking of local businesses…

Get those local business links!

When it comes to inbound links to your website, businesses will fight tooth and nail to try and get links from sites with the most domain authority. But Greg Gifford's tip is one that many businesses wouldn't even consider: go after “crappy little church websites”. You know the ones, with Microsoft Word clipart and neon green Comic Sans font in the header.

These kinds of tiny hyper-local websites have a huge amount of local relevance, and so their links carry a lot of weight. Best of all, none of your competitors will be going after them, so you can snap them up and enjoy the boost.

Increase your local SEO with inbound links from highly hyperlocal websites – even if they aren't always of the best quality. Photo by Lincolnian, made available via CC BY-SA 2.0

Build 'local silos' to show up in nearby cities

If you want your site to show up in search for a city you're not located in, Gifford recommends building what he calls 'local silos' targeted at nearby cities.

A silo is the name given to a system or sector that operates in isolation from others. You've probably heard a lot about we should be breaking down silos, but in this case, they can work to your advantage.

To build 'local silos', create little self-contained zones of information within your site that are based around the city or neighbourhood you want to target and optimise the heck out of them.

Publish blog posts about that city, get links back from local businesses, and make sure they point to pages within the silo; and before too long, you'll see your silos start to rank in local searches for that area.

Building silos can be a good thing, when it comes to local SEO. Photograph by Doc Searls, made available via CC BY 2.0.

Track your Google My Business clicks

In the midst of all the cool local SEO hacks, it pays to remember the basics, like making sure your business is listed on Google My Business and your profile is complete.

Gifford also advises adding tracking parameters to your Google My Business links in order to monitor the traffic coming to your site via that page. Local SEO Guide has a good guide on how to do this with Google's URL builder tool.

It's also worth keeping an eye on developments with Google Posts, which Google seems to be prepping as a significant platform for business promotion, and which could possibly be the next major development in local search if Google rolls it out on a larger scale.

How to optimise your email marketing

So we've covered the 'local SEO' part of local visibility; how about the 'beyond'? Greg Gifford's first tip might seem a little old-school, but it's still one of the most effective marketing tools at your disposal: email marketing.

Gifford advises making sure that you're using a responsive email design. Brands who have fully embraced responsive emails see 55% more Clicks to Open (CTO) from mobile and 23% more from desktop compared to brands who haven't, according to research by Yesmail.

Adding video to your emails can increase their attractiveness and interactivity, and a survey conducted by Forrester Marketing Group found that including a video in email marketing increased Click-Through Rate by 200 to 300%.

That statistic is from 2010, but more recent statistics have shown that just including the word “video” in an email subject line can raise open rates by 19% and Click-Through Rates by 65%.

Having a carefully curated list of email addresses to target can also come in handy when using Facebook Ads, as we'll see later on.

Go beyond YouTube

If you're going to commit to using video in your marketing strategy, Gifford has one key recommendation for you: don't use YouTube. Instead, the video hosting service that Gifford recommends for keeping control of your content and tracking the important metrics is Wistia.

Here are some of the reasons he lists for opting for Wistia instead of YouTube or another major video host:

• Wistia provides detailed video analytics, including engagement statistics, trend graphs, and individual viewer 'heatmaps' which show the parts of a video each user watched, skipped and rewatched.


• You can tie user information to email addresses, and also use Wistia's 'Turnstile' tool to add a form that requires users to input their email address at any point before, after or during the video.


• Wistia allows you to give your videos a custom play button, which according to Wikia's former Director of Growth and Acquisition Casey Henry can increase your play rate by 19%.


• Similarly, you can also add a custom thumbnail to your videos, which can potentially boost your play rate by as much as 35% (and often winds up looking much nicer).


• Wistia embeds on Facebook play in the news feed, and on Twitter will expand into a Twitter card that also allows users to play them in-stream.

Facebook ads

“Facebook ads used to be the drunk guy that showed up late to the party; now, they're the cool guy that everyone's stoked to see,” says Gifford. And if you're looking to gain local visibility, Facebook ads have a lot of valuable advantages.

• Facebook's demographic targeting is incredibly diverse and exact, allowing you to target users based on location, age, gender, interests, and some mind-bogglingly specific parameters like education level, device and mobile connection.


• You can also load in email lists and use them to create a custom audience of Facebook users who have accounts registered with those addresses.


• Facebook also allows you to create Lookalike Audiences which will target new groups of people who are similar to audiences you're already targeting.


• Facebook's 'local awareness ads' are an incredibly powerful local advertising tool. Google research on local search showed that roughly 70% of users want ads customised to their city or zip code, and between 60 and 70% want ads customised to their immediate surroundings.

Facebook's local awareness ads allow you to drop a pin on any point on a map, and ads will be shown on mobile devices within a certain radius of that point. Try dropping a map pin on your competitors, on an event or at a conference!

Use Beacons

Gifford's final hot tip for local visibility is to use Beacons. Beacons are “small, Bluetooth-enabled hardware devices that can be installed in physical locations, like retail stores. They silently broadcast a message to any Bluetooth-enabled devices in their proximity, kind of like a lighthouse with text”, as Dan Cristo writes.

Usually Beacons require a dedicated app to work, but Beacon providers have begun setting up app networks which will allow Beacons to pop up a message on someone's phone as long as any app in the network is running.

The apps are location-aware, so they can be tagged by the Beacon even if they aren't running. You can then connect directly to Facebook's API, allowing you to retarget ads at actual foot traffic.

DealerOn, Gifford's marketing and advertising company, ran some tests with Beacon and found they led to anything from a 34.6% to a 45.7% increase in Click-Through Rate on ads. At a recent conference, the Beacon at DealerOn's booth tagged 687 unique users.

Beacons are still an emerging technology, but they have the power to improve the customer experience and potentially revolutionise search – especially in a hyperlocal context. So watch out for opportunities and get creative with how you use them.

Smarter digital assistants and the future of search

It's search Jim, but not as we know it.

The dream of an ultimate personal assistant isn't a farfetched sci-fi fantasy like the interactive computing systems in Star Trek. It's technology available today already being applied to search engines.

Leading visionaries in search technology, including Google's Beshad Behzadi in his keynote speech at the SMX West Keynote to Satya Nadella at Microsoft's Build conference, are articulating a vision of smarter and more capable personalized help that will drive efficiency, focus and ultimately, happiness.

Nadella believes the next big bet for Microsoft is “conversation as a platform.” This is a more intuitive and accessible canvass integrating into apps, as well as artificial intelligence (A.I.) and bots that can interact with other bots. While the devices and technology used to access search are evolving, search will still be an increasingly integral part of everyday life.

Understanding intent through voice search

Today's digital assistants like Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Google Now are voice-search enabled and growing smarter with every interaction. According to comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.

Since voice search is more conversational and uses natural language, the A.I. is evolving to understand user intent and context based on the previous search queries, multiple step queries and user behavior.

Words can provide invaluable substance to A.I. technology during the search process. For marketers, the longer query strings from voice search as compared to text provide richer user intent data. While a text query would typically be one to three words, a spoken query is often three or more.

For example, on my desktop I would search for “blue t-shirt.” But when it comes to a voice query, I might ask, “Hey Cortana, where can I find a cool blue t-shirt?” The conversational tone provides a signal of intent to purchase, style preference and desired shopping locations if I granted access to my location. It permits marketers to:

• Build user-intent models to understand where the user is in the customer journey.


• Match advertising campaigns (messaging and landing pages) to the right stage of user intent.


• Develop site content with a conversational tone, providing specific answers to users' needs and top questions. Voice searchers are looking for quick answers. Content answering specific questions will make your site a go-to resource.

AI, the 'Added Ingredient' for enhanced consumer experience and engagement

Technology giants like Microsoft, IBM and Google are focusing on new ways machine-based learning, A.I. and bots can analyze data. Personal assistants like Cortana, powered by Bing search intelligence, can request permission to gather data from email accounts, calendars, social networks, geo-locations and mobile apps to start learning about behaviors and preferences.

The A.I. engine analyzes the information to make recommendations before they have a chance to ask a question. The more interactions a user has with their assistant, the more accurate the predictive models can be – and the more her serendipitous proposals will delight us and make life easier.

For many, the end of the day reads like a frustrating laundry list of stuff that still needs to get done – including the laundry! Efficiency is now one of the keys to happiness, and technology give us back time to be in the moment.

If I give my personal assistant access to the locations that are important to me and my calendars, she can send reminders when I need to leave to make it on time to my next appointment.

The predictive component A.I. can monitor traffic and figure out if I need to leave work now to pick my son up from day care because of a freeway accident.

It can deep link into apps, such as Waze, and suggest the best alternative routes based on current road conditions.

Soon, this intelligence will integrate into shared intelligence across A.I. bots, and tasks such as renewing your driver's license will be done on my behalf and save me time.

For marketers, it's important to understand and adapt to this new technology to build immersive customer experiences. As deep-linking and intelligent agents are integrated into apps and products, consumer engagement with brands will reach the next evolution. This means there is more potential than ever to influence the path to purchase in the customer journey.

While “Beam me up Scotty” and journeys to the final frontier are not yet a reality for most of us, the capabilities and technology for building the ultimate digital assistant are almost here.

This new “other” way to get things done will make it more appealing for consumers to share personal data so that assistants can become more predictive and take actions on our behalf.

We'll continue to use search, websites, and apps. But how we interact with them will provide more intent and context for A.I.s and bots to help us get things done in our daily lives. This way we can focus and be fully present in the moments that matter the most.

Steve Sirich is GM Marketing, Bing Ads, Microsoft and a contributor to Search Engine Watch. 

For lots more information, download our Marketer's Guide to Artificial Intelligence report, which takes a look at how AI can be used for marketing, now and in the future.

Can We Predict the Google Weather?

Posted by Dr-Pete

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Four years ago, just weeks before the first Penguin update, the MozCast project started collecting its first real data. Detecting and interpreting Google algorithm updates has been both a far more difficult and far more rewarding challenge than I ever expected, and I've learned a lot along the way, but there's one nagging question that I've never been able to answer with any satisfaction. Can we use past Google data to predict future updates?

Before any analysis, I've always been a fan of using my eyes. What does Google algorithm "weather" look like over a long time-period? Here's a full year of MozCast temperatures:

Most of us know by now that Google isn't a quiet machine that hums along until the occasional named update happens a few times a year. The algorithm is changing constantly and, even if it wasn't, the web is changing constantly around it. Finding the signal in the noise is hard enough, but what does any peak or valley in this graph tell you about when the next peak might arrive? Very little, at first glance.

It's worse than that, though

Even before we dive into the data, there's a fundamental problem with trying to predict future algorithm updates. To understand it, let's look at a different problem - predicting real-world weather. Predicting the weather in the real world is incredibly difficult and takes a massive amount of data to do well, but we know that that weather follows a set of natural laws. Ultimately, no matter how complex the problem is, there is a chain of causality between today's weather and tomorrow's and a pattern in the chaos.

The Google algorithm is built by people, driven by human motivations and politics, and is only constrained by the rules of what's technologically possible. Granted, Google won't replace the entire SERP with a picture of a cheese sandwich tomorrow, but they can update the algorithm at any time, for any reason. There are no natural laws that link tomorrow's algorithm to today's. History can tell us about Google's motivations and we can make reasonable predictions about the algorithm's future, but those future algorithm updates are not necessarily bound to any pattern or schedule.

What do we actually know?

If we trust Google's public statements, we know that there are a lot of algorithm updates. The fact that only a handful get named is part of why we built MozCast in the first place. Back in 2011, Eric Schmidt testified before Congress, and his written testimony included the following data:

To give you a sense of the scale of the changes that Google considers, in 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change. Ultimately, the process resulted in 516 changes that were determined to be useful to users based on the data and, therefore, were made to Google's algorithm.

I've highlighted one phrase - "516 changes". At a time when we believed Google made maybe a dozen updates per year, Schmidt revealed that it was closer to 10X/week. Now, we don't know how Google defines "changes," and many of these changes were undoubtedly small, but it's clear that Google is constantly changing.

Google's How Search Works page reveals that, in 2012, they made 665 "improvements" or "launches" based on an incredible 118,812 precision evaluations. In August of 2014, Amit Singhal stated on Google+ that they had made "more than 890 improvements to Google Search last year alone." It's unclear whether that referred to the preceding 12 months or calendar year 2013.

We don't have a public number for the past couple of years, but it is incredibly unlikely that the rate of change has slowed. Google is making changes to search on the order of 2X/day.

Of course, anyone who has experience in software development realizes that Google didn't evenly divide 890 improvements over the year and release one every 9 hours and 51 minutes. That would be impractical for many reasons. It's very likely that releases are rolled out in chunks and are tied to some kind of internal process or schedule. That process or schedule may be irregular, but humans at Google have to approve, release, and audit every change.

In March of 2012, Google released a video of their weekly Search Quality meeting, which, at the time, they said occurred "almost every Thursday". This video and other statements since reveal a systematic process within Google by which updates are reviewed and approved. It doesn't take very advanced math to see that there are many more updates per year than there are weekly meetings.

Is there a weekly pattern?

Maybe we can't predict the exact date of the next update, but is there any regularity to the pattern at all? Admittedly, it's a bit hard to tell from the graph at the beginning of this post. Analyzing an irregular time series (where both the period between spikes and intensity of those spikes changes) takes some very hairy math, so I decided to start a little simpler.

I started by assuming that a regular pattern was present and looking for a way to remove some of the noise based on that assumption. The simplest analysis that yielded results involved taking a 3-day moving average and calculating the Mean Standard Error (MSE). In other words, for every temperature (each temperature is a single day), take the mean of that day and the day on either side of it (a 3-day window) and square the difference between that day's temperature and the 3-day mean. This exaggerates stand-alone peaks, and smooths some of the noisier sequences, resulting in the following graph:

This post was inspired in part by February 2016, which showed an unusually high signal-to-noise ratio. So, let's zoom in on just the last 90 days of the graph:

See peaks 2–6 (starting on January 21)? The space between them, respectively, is 6 days, 7 days, 7 days, and 8 days. Then, there's a 2-week gap to the next, smaller spike (March 3) and another 8 days to the one after that. While this is hardly proof of a clear regular pattern, it's hard to believe the weekly pacing is entirely a coincidence, given what we know about the algorithm update approval process.

This pattern is less clear in other months, and I'm not suggesting that a weekly update cycle is the whole picture. We know Google also does large data refreshes (including Penguin) and sometimes rolls updates out over multiple days (or even weeks). There's a similar, although noisier, pattern in April 2015 (the first part of the 12-month MSE graph). It's also interesting to note the activity levels around Christmas 2015:

Despite all of our conspiracy theories, there really did seem to be a 2015 Christmas lull in Google activity, lasting approximately 4 weeks, followed by a fairly large spike that may reflect some catch-up updates. Engineers go on vacation, too. Notice that that first January spike is followed by a roughly 2-week gap and then two 1-week gaps.

The most frequent day of the week for these spikes seems to be Wednesday, which is odd, if we believe there's some connection to Google's Thursday meetings. It's possible that these approximately weekly cycles are related to naturally occurring mid-week search patterns, although we'd generally expect less pronounced peaks if change were related to something like mid-week traffic spikes or news volume.

Did we win Google yet?

I've written at length about why I think algorithm updates still matter, but, tactically speaking, I don't believe we should try to plan our efforts around weekly updates. Many updates are very small and even some that are large on average may not effect our employer or clients.

I view the Google weather as a bit like the unemployment rate. It's interesting to know whether that rate is, say, 5% or 7%, but ultimately what matters to you is whether or not you have a job. Low or high unemployment is a useful economic indicator and may help you decide whether to risk finding a new job, but it doesn't determine your fate. Likewise, measuring the temperature of the algorithm can teach us something about the system as a whole, but the temperature on any given day doesn't decide your success or failure.

Ultimately, instead of trying to predict when an algorithm update will happen, we should focus on the motivations behind those updates and what they signal about Google's intent. We don't know exactly when the hammer will fall, but we can get out of the way in plenty of time if we're paying attention.

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How to Influence Branded Searches and Search Volumes to Earn Big Rewards - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

What have you been doing with branded searches? If the answer is "not much," it may be time to shift your focus a bit. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the huge benefits of turning some of your unbranded searches into branded and offers some key tactical advice.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about how to influence branded search and get a load of benefit out of that. Some of these things that I'm going to talk about today are more theoretical. Like we think they work. We've experimented. We've seen some other folks experiment. We're pretty sure. Then some of them are solid. We know that these things influence. Regardless, I think I can persuade you that trying to turn more of your unbranded search into branded search is a hugely positive thing. Generating more branded search in general is also hugely positive. Let me show you what I mean with some examples first.

Non-branded search

Non-branded search, these are essentially the search terms, the queries and phrases that we are all pursuing. We're trying to rank for them. This is searchers who have not yet expressed a brand preference. They're searching. Let's say we're talking to a chemist or a lab instructor at a school and they're trying to put together all their materials for their lab. So they're searching for things like test tubes and lab equipment and chemical safety goggles. They're trying to figure out the best prices and the best products, the ones that'll be the safest, the ones that'll be best for their class. Those are unbranded. They have expressed no brand preference. They haven't said, "Oh I want this kind and I know that."

Branded search

Branded searches are more like, "Oh I know I want a Fisher test tube, Fisher Scientific." Fisher test tubes is what I'm looking for, or lab equipment from Thermo. Thermo Scientific makes a bunch of lab equipment that you can buy prepackaged, kind of all together. Or chemical goggles, "I know I want the 3M variety." 3M has, like, these awesome chemical goggles. They're very safe, very good for this stuff.

These branded searches are preferable in many ways for the brands that own and control these companies than the non-branded searches. Here's why.

A. Increase ease of ranking and conversion

Obviously it is way, way easier to rank well for "3M chemical goggles" if you are 3M than ranking for just "chemical goggles" if you're 3M. You're competing against far fewer folks. A lot of people won't even use your brand name. Even the people who do, like maybe on Amazon.com, you'll still get some benefit from that because they're searching for your brand.

It also increases the propensity to convert, meaning that if someone performs that branded search, they're more likely to actually buy that product. They're generally speaking further down the funnel. They've sort of decided to at least investigate your brand, and now you have a chance to pitch them. They're familiar. They know your brand name at least. That's a real positive thing.

B. Affecting search suggest

The second thing that's nice is you can affect search suggest, meaning that if lots of people, for example, started searching for "3M chemical goggles" instead of "chemical safety goggles" or "chemical goggles," it would actually be the case that over time what you'd see Google do is in the dropdown box for "chemical safety goggles," 3M, the word, would start to be associated with it. You'd see that in search suggest. It might be at the very bottom.

For example, if you do a search for "whiteboard," today in Google, Whiteboard Friday is somewhere on that list, but it's usually way down towards the bottom. In some geographies it's probably not there at all. Over time if we get more and more people searching for Whiteboard Friday, it'll move up in search suggest. So that means people will be more likely to perform that query. At least they'll see it and say, "Oh that must be a brand," or "I must have some association with that, or maybe I'm supposed to," or "I want to investigate that, I'm curious about it."

C. Improve rankings for non-branded queries

This is one of those speculative things. We believe that right now search volume for branded terms does have an impact on ranking for the non-branded version of the query.

We saw Google file some patents around this, but we also saw some tests in this direction that looked promising, basically saying that if . . . Let's do Fisher for this one. Let's say people start searching for Fisher test tubes a lot more. Google might say, "You know, I think Fisher is very relevant to the search query 'test tubes.' Let's move Fisher up in the rankings for just the unbranded phrase 'test tubes,' because that volume is suggesting to us that this brand is more relevant to this query than maybe we initially presumed." That's huge as well. If you can drive up that search volume, now you can start to get benefit in the non-branded rankings.

D. Appear in "related searches" feature

You can appear in the related search feature. Related searches is usually somewhere between the middle of the page and the very bottom of the page, most of the time at the very bottom of the search page. That's a powerful way for those 10% to 20% of people that scroll all the way to the bottom before making a click selection or before deciding to change their query, those related searches are a powerful way to suggest, just like search suggest is, that they should, instead of searching for the non-branded term, search for your branded query. The related searches, by the way, is also we think influenced by content, which I'll talk about in a second.

E. Create an association between your brand and a keyphrase

Create an entity-style association. This is essentially the idea of co-occurring keywords. If Google is crawling the web and they see tons of documents, high-quality, trustworthy documents that contain the word "test tubes" that also contain the word "3M," oftentimes in close proximity to the word "test tubes," they'll over time start to associate the word "test tubes" with the word "3M." That can impact suggest. It can impact related. It can impact rankings. It has a bunch of positive potential impact. That can make you more relevant for all sorts of things around search that are just awesome.

F. Affect future searches and personalization

Then the last one, which is also cool and powerful, is that this can affect search personalization, meaning, for example, let's say someone does a search for "3M chemical goggles." They click on 3m.com. Maybe they buy them. Maybe they don't. Next time they do a search, for example let's say "chemical aprons," well it turns out that Google already knows that person has visited 3M in the past. They might see that behavior and, because they're logged into their account, they might show them 3M higher up in the rankings. They might show them 3M higher in the search suggest as they start typing. That personalization is another powerful way that you're getting benefit from branded search.

There are all these benefits. We want to make this happen. How do we do it?

What are the tactics that an SEO can actually use?

It turns out SEOs, we're going to have to work pretty cross-departmentally in our marketing teams to be able to make this happen because some of the best tactics require things that SEO doesn't always own and control entirely. Sometimes you do, sometimes not.

The first one, if we can create curiosity and drive search volume via brand advertising, that's an awesome way to go.

You've seen more and more of this. You have seen advertisements probably on television and YouTube ads. You've seen branded ads on display ads. You've probably heard things on the radio that say search for us, all that kind of stuff. All that classic media, everything from billboards to radio - I know I'm drawing televisions with rabbit ears still. There are probably no TVs in the US that still have rabbit ears. Magazines, print, whatever, billboards, all of that brand advertising can drive people to then be curious about the brand and to want to investigate them more. If you hear a lot about 3M goggles and the cool stuff they're doing, well, you might be tempted to perform a search.

You can embed searches as well.

Be careful with this one. This can get spammy and manipulative and could get you into trouble. You can do it. If you do it in authentic white hat ways, you'll probably be okay.

The idea is basically telling customers like, "Hey, if you want to research us, learn more about 3M's goggles, don't just take our word for it. Search Google. Go find what people are saying, what reviews are saying about our product." You see I think it was LG or Samsung ran a big one of these where they were suggesting people do a Google search, because it turns out their phone had been very, very highly rated by all the top folks who'd done a review of them. You can do that in email. You could do it over social networks. You could do it in content. You're essentially driving people directly to the Google search result page. That could be an embedded link, or it simply could be a suggestion to search and check people out.

You can also use public relations and content marketing, especially guest contributions and content marketing.

You can use events and sponsorship, all of that stuff to essentially drive latent interest and curiosity, kind of like we did with brand advertising but in a little more organic fashion. If The New York Times writes a piece about you, if you speak at a conference . . . This is me wildly gesticulating at a conference. It looks like I'm very dangerously, precariously perched to fall into the crowd there. Guest contributions on a website, maybe something like a Fortune.com, which takes some guest posts, driving people to want to learn more about the brand or the product that you've mentioned.

Then finally, you can create those keyword associations that we talked about, the entity-style associations, through word proximity and co-occurrence in web documents.

I put just web documents here, but really it's important, trustworthy web documents from sources that Google likes and trusts and indexes. That means looking at: Where are all the places potentially on the web that lab equipment is talked about or would be talked about maybe in the future? How do I influence those authors, those creators, those publications to potentially consider including my brand, Thermo Scientific, in their documents? Or how do I create content for places like these that include my brand and include the unbranded term "lab equipment?"

Bunch of tactics, bunch of great opportunities here. I'd love to hear from you folks about what you've done around influencing branded search and how you've seen it affect your SEO campaigns overall. I'll look forward to catching up with you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Understanding our love of visual content

We are experiencing an omnipresent visual domination lately and it's not expected to change any time soon. So what makes us love visual content?

Whether it's an image, or a video, people prefer consuming information in a visual form, as it's more appealing, which leads to an increased engagement. Human beings are naturally drawn to visual content and any type of it may enhance a post's performance.

Types of visual content

Visual content is a broad term that includes many types of content and the main ones are:

• Images (photography, quotes, memes, screenshots, GIFs, etc)


• Infographics


• Videos


• Podcasts


• Presentations


• Data graphs

All of them can be very engaging and a mixed use of them can create an effective content marketing strategy, provided that they are used appropriately for each medium, always by taking the audience into consideration.

Visual marketing at the forefront of social media

Social media has significantly relied on visual content, as it manages to grab the users' attention, while its varying types (eg. the rise of infographics, or the domination of videos) allow it to maintain its popularity.

It is estimated that 63% of social media is made up of images and we assume that this number will only increase in the next years (especially if we also add videos to it).

Every popular social network could attribute its success to the right use of visual content and the way it is offered to the users, in order to create the right balance between words and visuals.

According to BuzzSumo, Facebook updates that include an image had 2.3x more engagement than those without one.

Moreover, Buffer reported that tweets that contain images lead to 150% more retweets.

Away from Facebook and Twitter, visual appeal has contributed to the rise of new platforms that exclusively rely on visual content, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.

All of them (almost exclusively) focus on images and videos and that's what makes them so popular, with users loving the simplicity of adding content to them, while brands face the challenge of experimenting with new types of (visual) content to maintain and increase engagement.

Why do we prefer visual content?

According to Jakob Nielsen, users only read 28% of words when visiting a website, with the trend of skimming rather than reading a text becoming prevalent in the online information overload.

Thus, visual content engages with a reader as fast as possible and in the most interesting way and that's why publishers tend to rely on it even more every year.

The main reasons that we prefer visual content over plain text are:

• It beats our short attention span


• Its simplicity is tempting for any subject


• It manages to engage with the reader and increase the time spent on content


• It manages to communicate complex concepts in an appealing way


• Its appeal increases the chances for the readers to share the content


• It stimulates our minds, especially when it is linked with an emotion

Column Five has created an infographic on the power of visual communication and it presents three main reasons why we love visual content: Appeal, Comprehension, Retention.

Appeal refers to the natural attraction towards visual content, and the way it succeeds even in a short attention span, comprehension is linked to the way our brain translates data to simplify them and retention is related to the memorable experience that visual content tends to create.

How science proves our love for visual content

It has been observed that 90% of the information sent to our brains is visual, with our brain responding to it 60,000 faster than it does for text.

Thus, our brains need a visual representation to process information faster and create a connection between the visual object and its concept. It's impressive how the visual perception in our brain makes such a complex task easy and this could also be the scientific reason why an “image is worth a thousand words.”

However, this is not an automatic process, as our brain still needs to rationalise the connection. Visual perception and the calculation of the surroundings rely on the person's past experiences and memories that could be relevant to the exposure to the specific information.

According to neurobiologist Semir Zeki of the University of London,

“The brain has to actively construct or invent our visual world. Confronted with an overwhelming barrage of visual information, it must sort out relevant features and make snap judgments about what they mean.”

Scene perception, or else the perception of scene gist is the process that our brain performs to perceive the world, from the objects, to the connections they create to our brain, and Monica S. Castelhano and John M. Henderson proved in an experiment in 2008 how even the colours may affect the activation of a scene gist.

Visual content may even become appealing in a way that we cannot explain and this is usually related to the emotions it may evoke.

The magic connection between visual content and emotions

The effectiveness of visual content can be further enhanced with the use of the right emotions.

A visual stimulation can create a visceral reaction by evoking a feeling that may even be subconscious, and that's what makes it inexplicable to us when trying to understand what makes an image more appealing to us comparing to a similar one.

Visceral reactions form the strongest connections on visual content and they occur from the brain's part that is also related to our survival instincts, which means that the reaction may be more direct and intense.

Visual content needs to indicate somehow the emotion it aims for, either with the colours, the subject, or even with associations that lead to an easier connection which can elicit the right feeling.

For example, this photo brings out the feelings of security and positivity with both the colours and the people contributing to it, appealing to the idea of the family and the bonding it creates as an association.

Image: negativespace.co

Five tips for amazing visual content

Focus on quality

People appreciate the quality of the visual content, so don't ignore it when creating visual assets. If you feel that you can't find the right images, then here are some great free image resources of high quality images.

Image source: Unsplash

Use visual assets in context

Visual content can be very effective as part of a content marketing strategy, but always when it is created and distributed in context, by delivering what your target audience will appreciate. For example, a high quality picture of an airplane you just found may be impressive, but can you add the right text to make it relevant to, say, young mothers you are targeting?

Be consistent with colours and filters

The choice of colours in visual content is very important, as this will associate a series of emotions afterwards, which means that the consistent use of colours should lead to a commitment regarding the emotions you want to elicit with your content.

Image source: Aftercopia

Don't underestimate typography

Typography can be interpreted as the first visual impression of your text and you want to make sure you engage enough with the reader to keep reading the text.

Thus, typography is a crucial part of your visual content, whether it's a blog post or even an infographic, and it's time to focus more on it from now on.

Designer: ligatureloopandstem.com 

Text is still important

Last but (certainly) not least, visual content can boost your content marketing strategy, but it cannot replace the actual written content.

Find the right balance between words and visual content and don't reduce the quality at any point to both of them.

Image: Gfaught.tumblr.com

Be precise, informative and interesting and appealing visual content will serve as the right boost for your text.