Hello and Happy Tuesday!
This week we're covering strategies to deal with a competitor bidding your brand search terms, under-utilized schema markups, and how to increase conversation rates for your blog. We also look at the importance of fixing broken internal links and backlinks as part of your SEO Audit, and Facebook's new Augmented Reality drawing tool for Stories.
What to do About Competitors Bidding on Your Brand Terms in Paid Search
Whether right or wrong, search engines allow competitors to bid on each other’s brand terms. If you find yourself in a situation where a competitor is sitting in the number one position for your brand search terms, here’s what you need to know. First, take back control and start bidding on your own terms! You should be able to claim position 1 immediately and as a bonus your CPC will be lower and as a result drive up your competitor’s CPC. Try reaching out to your competitor and request that they stop bidding on your terms, but expect that this will not happen. If there is a trademark included in the ads, file a trademark complaint. If this doesn’t apply, the last option is to bid on your competitors’ terms but realize that it may not end well for either of you. Best case is that they’ll remove your ads as a result and the worst case is a bidding war driving up CPC costs for you both.
Facebook Gets Instagram’s ‘Boomerang,’ and an AR Drawing Tool
Facebook has launched two new updates to its Stories—the Boomerang feature from Instagram has been added, along with an AR drawing tool. The drawing tool is a unique feature—while platforms like Snapchat and Instagram let a user draw on top of videos, the AR tool allows a user to create 3D drawings that actually stay in place no matter where the camera is aimed. The existing Boomerang feature can now be used for Stories and remains as a 3-second looping video.
How to Find and Fix Broken Links (to Reclaim Valuable “Link Juice”)
Broken links and backlinks are not only annoying to the user experience but they can hurt your SEO. They’ll chase away any visitors and so making links a part of your SEO Audits should be an ongoing process. Some common reasons for a broken backlink are a deleted or moved page, or the linking site has made a mistake with the URL. A few ways to fix these backlinks are to reach out to the linking site and request a fix, redirect the broken page to a new location or redirect to another relevant page. Broken internal links point to non-existent resources. They can give a search engine the impression that your site is not properly maintained so it’s good practice to perform a check to ensure that nothing is missed. It’s important to note that there are tools that help detect broken internal and external links and that these checks are not a one-time task.
4 Underutilized Schema Markup Opportunities That Impact SEO
There are schema markups that you can add to your HTML that will indirectly help your SEO. Tony Edward looks at four underused structured data: brand, image, application, and person. Structured data helps a search engine categorize and index your content. If your brand is searched for under different variations, it’s an opportunity to help a search engine understand them. An image gallery schema markup is great for product pages. Google is able to recognize your images and then use them for different results. Another great markup opportunity is for your employees. Almost all company sites include a staff page with information about executives. This type of markup can help enrich a knowledge graph and also have staff appear in certain results.
7 Tips on How to Improve Conversion Rates with Your Blog Visitors
There are many reasons why blogs fail to convert a reader into a paying customer. But with the right strategies and tools in place, you could turn your blog into a source for conversions. Strategies like choosing the right blog topics that are relevant to your target audience can help drive the rate up. Good practices such as using visuals, or creating “How-To” posts will not only keep your reader engaged, but by addressing their ‘pain-points’, your content is answering their questions making conversion more likely. Writer Jessica Davis also advises including commenting and testimonials.
Check out these additional articles for more internet marketing news!
Chatbots & Artificial Intelligence: The Future of Customer Service
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The Biggest Social Media Changes So Far in 2018 - And How to Keep Up
