SEO is top of mind for any consumer-facing brand or retailer looking to cut through the clutter online. And one way to boost performance is through leveraging different types of user-generated content. A column in Multichannel Merchant reviews the benefits of increasing the volume of product ratings and reviews, implementing Q&As on product pages, and enabling authentic, visual UGC.

The post How to Boost SEO Performance With UGC appeared first on Chief Marketer.

It never hurts to brush up on your SEO practices. Check out these 13 steps to a content refresh of your website, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant, that can help drive SEO, improve engagement and increase the relevancy of your brand.

The post A Content Marketing Refresh in 13 Steps appeared first on Chief Marketer.

A brand’s online presence is more critical than ever, most would agree. But first, consumers have to find it. Following are five key principles an effective SEO strategy should contain, from keyword optimization to title tags to meta descriptions, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant.

The post Building an SEO Strategy: Five Key Principles appeared first on Chief Marketer.

But though the brand, like consumers, is eager to embrace a return to normalcy, Grey Goose is not abandoning the pivots that helped it through the pandemic. “The core of the brand is nature,” says de Dreuille, who details the origins of the only two ingredients of the core vodka: the wheat (“the best wheat you can buy, from Picardy”) and the water (from a natural limestone well in France’s Cognac region). The brand is using nature as a way to emotionally connect with its audiences through experiences, he says.

Case in point: The campaign’s ad and related digital assets don’t spell out the quality and purity of the ingredients or the manufacturing process. Instead, they show a man who, as he sits on a chaise to enjoy a cocktail, slides out of the chair and along a curvaceous path in a picture-perfect landscape. “It’s not meant to portray nature but to show how the experience of Grey Goose can make you feel smooth,” de Dreuille explains.

Paying tribute to the joys of nature was also key to the spring Grey Goose Essences launch. There the campaign focused on a woman being enveloped by graceful whirlwinds and avalanches of flower petals and leaves. Beyond the ad and digital creative, Grey Goose and platinum-selling singer/songwriter SZA partnered on a live virtual concert scheduled for July 1. The show, called “In Bloom,” will be a high-tech, multisensory experience where SZA will debut music from her upcoming sophomore album, aptly-titled “Sophomore.” Those who register on the Grey Goose site to experience the streamed event will receive a discount code for a Grey Goose Essences cocktail kit.

In general, cocktail kits have allowed Grey Goose to compensate for an inability to produce experiential activations during the pandemic. For instance, when the 2020 U.S. Open tennis tournament banned attendees, the long-time sponsor partnered with Sourced Craft Cocktails to sell a limited-edition kit online so that fans watching at home could still enjoy the signature Honey Deuce cocktails that Grey Goose has sold every year at the event. During the holiday season, Grey Goose added a trendy update of the Christmas sweater into the mix, selling a limited-edition punch kit that included a specially-designed sweatshirt by streetwear designer Anwar Carrots.

Offering these kits exclusively online was part of Grey Goose’s increased emphasis on digital during the past 18 months. “It was critical for us to really improve our digital ecosystem,” de Dreuille says. That included ensuring that its partners deliver a consistent brand experience and bolstering its search optimization. Increases in Google searches for cocktail recipes along with Grey Goose’s optimization efforts led to an almost 100 percent increase in the brand’s SEO traffic during the past year.

Continuing with search optimization is one of the top marketing tactics de Dreuille has his eye on going forward. Improving conversion is another: “We’re taking the opportunity to have a much smarter approach to our media buys and analyzing the response, whether search, social, TV…” A third is QR codes. He asserts that QR codes on the back of the Grey Goose Essences labels, for instance, enable a “depth of storytelling and information” close to the point of purchase.

That’s not to say that Grey Goose is turning its back on what worked for the brand pre-pandemic. TV will continue to be important and “experiential will play a role, bigger than in the past two to three years,” he says. “In the world of luxury, experiential has an important role to play emotionally.”

An example of the brand’s experiential activations: the Smooth Putt mini-golf events in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver this summer. Adults can reserve a tee time for nine holes of golf on a pop-up course and sip a Grey Goose cocktail. The activation allows attendees to savor the outdoors while also being mindful of COVID-19 restrictions and concerns. “We have to take things very seriously but also be playful,” he says. “We have been working on how we want to bring people together.”

The post Grey Goose Prioritizes SEO, QR Codes and Experiences in Its Post-Pandemic Marketing appeared first on Chief Marketer.

A few trends will influence marketers’ SEO strategies. For one, Google will use site usability as a major ranking factor in 2021. Secondly, new consumer shopping behaviors, including curbside pickup and online ordering, now requires brands to provide services like product ratings and nutritional information. Third, policing online misinformation will heat up even more in 2021, which means brands must establish themselves as authorities in their fields in order to avoid increased scrutiny. Ways to do that include:

Focus on Content. Avoid fringe topics and focus on your brand’s primary field of expertise.

Keep it Fresh. Rather than relying solely on evergreen content, keep your site’s content fresh to show Google that you’re adding to your field’s knowledge base.

Leverage Real Experts. Thought leadership from established sources should be featured prominently on your site in order to establish legitimacy.

Security Updates. Keep up to date on security and performance certifications.

For more on SEO trends to follow in 2021, read on in PRNEWS.

The post SEO Trends for Marketers in 2021 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

“SEO influences everything in the organization, but too often, the SEO team are only ones responsible for SEO,” says Jessica Bowman, founder of SEOinhouse.com. “The SEO team doesn’t control all the levers needed to improve SEO, and other teams don’t know how or when to work with the SEO team.”

At MarTech East in Boston, Bowman shared 10 pillars to consider for search success, and ideas for making everyone in an organization accountable for SEO.

1 – Crawling and Indexing: Start off with the basics: Is the site SEO friendly? Are the right number of URLs being indexed to optimize search?

2- Content: Content on your site should be relevant for what people are searching for, in tune with authoritative conversation on the topic, says Bowman. Does it contain the right buzzwords to be found? Content needs to be crafted with smart devices and voice search in mind. Remember to write for things like Google’s Rich Snippets and “people also ask” questions. “All of these things need to be in the SEO conversation,” she notes.

3- Internal Links:  For big brands with lots of webpages, this can have a significant impact on SEO, so make sure you are linking relevantly and often within your site.

4- External Links and Mentions: This can be one of the influential pillars when it comes to improving your search ranking, says Bowman. Work on increasing the number of links and mentions on sites where your audience is frequently present.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Focus on SEO Boosts Traffic for SmarterTravel
• Google Launcyes B2B Search Campaign
• Speak Up: How Voice Search is Changing Shopping Behavior

5- Social Media Activity: Here, it isn’t so much the actual tweets or posts that will make the SEO impact, she says. Rather, it’s the halo effect of those posts—will they engage people and lead to external links?

6- User Experience: Companies often think about the user experience of their website, but they don’t often don’t pay enough attention to search user experience. Study the path of searching not only for your brand but that of competitors in your space.

7- SEO Team: Is your SEO  team empowered to reach out and encourage folks from other parts of the organization to improve the SEO experience.

8-Non SEO Teams: Involvement should be encouraged throughout every facet of the organization. “Everyone needs to be doing SEO,” she says.

9- Processes: Consider how SEO can fit into your workflow and annual strategic planning, says Bowman. “SEO data is a huge opportunity but not many companies are using it for big picture planning.”

10- Metrics: Most companies have metrics on what has already happened, but SEO data can also be leveraged to consider future patterns and behavior, and help editorial teams consider what content audiences want to see in the coming months.

The post 10 Pillars for SEO Success appeared first on Chief Marketer.

This month in the UK, Google is launching its first-ever campaign to promote B2B search.

“Find What Matters” is a  two-month initiative, and was intentionally designed to feel like a B2C campaign to create enthusiasm and excitement for using search in a media plan. As NetImperative reports, the campaign will run on social, as well as on YouTube, display, search, out-of-home and print media.

“The things that are most useful in life we often take for granted. Like with running water or electricity, it’s easy to forget about the remarkable, complex system that brings you what you want when you turn the tap or hit the switch,” says Gemma Howley, search lead at Google UK & Ireland. “Search is the first digital utility—an incredible tool that allows people to cut through a noisy and cluttered world and find what they are looking for, wherever they are.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• Speak Up: How Voice Search is Changing Shopping Behavior
• Lead Generation Resources on the Rise: Report
• Focus on SEO Boosts Traffic for SmarterTravel

The campaign is aimed at marketers and media planners, says Rey Andrade, deputy creative director at 72AndSunny Amsterdam, which created the campaign. “We chose to focus on the magic of search and simple human moments with everyday users.”

Those moments—as featured in the ad—include everything from finding the best ice cream nearby or the right tool to smooth out cake icing to sports tickets or what the weather will be at a vacation destination.  The voiceover explains why these little moments are important to B2B marketers: “Search is where your customers find what matters to them, so it’s where you can find what matters to your business.”

The post Google Launches B2B Search Campaign appeared first on Chief Marketer.

For example, for my mother-in-law’s birthday, we got her an Echo Spot. My in-laws tend to be intimidated by new tech, but they readily saw the appeal in bossing around a bot. I connected the Echo to their Prime account, Ring doorbell and Nest thermostat systems, and we were off to the races. For the next week, we used Alexa for lots of things—checking traffic, playing music, recommending gifts, finding recipe substitutions, creating shopping lists. It was a fun toy, and surprisingly useful. But we couldn’t ignore the obvious: Nearly every recommended action or purchase pointed exclusively to Amazon.

Of course, this isn’t unique to the Echo suite of products, and most of the time consumers don’t mind, because the speed and convenience of voice search outweighs just about any of the usual decision-making criteria, including brand preference, ratings and even price. Because we leverage voice search most when we’re multitasking—driving, cooking, grocery shopping, bathing our toddlers—we don’t have time to read, think, sift through options and click filters until we get the perfect result. In the multitask mindset we don’t care about perfect. We have no patience for a customer journey. We just want the destination.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Focus on SEO Boosts Traffic for SmarterTravel
• Search Helps Arbor Grow Senior Living Populations
• The Evolution of Voice Search: 3 Things to Know

Voice search is undoubtedly altering the way we shop. Traditional, desktop-based search empowered consumer spending habits with transparency and choice; mobile (which officially overtook desktop search ad spend in Q3 of last year) layered on locational relevance. Suddenly it was a buyer’s market. Voice search represents something of an adolescent rebellion against the values of its parents. The voice generation wants, counter-intuitively to prior generations, less choice and that concept is catching on. Our criteria have changed. We willingly trade relevancy for immediacy, and price for convenience, because time is our most lacking commodity. We’re loyal foremost to efficiency. This means, in maybe the ultimate demonstration of power, we’re handing the power back to brands. “Make it stupid-simple for us to find you when we need to,” we seem to be saying with voice search, “and you’ve got a deal.”

Although we’ve yet to see how voice search will really monetize through advertising, this behavioral shift should have marketers excited. For them, the convenience mindset presents massive opportunity to make customer connections less vulnerable than those based on features, price or even brand. But it’s far from simple. The gatekeepers, standing between brands and customers in this brave new world, are the giants of the tech world, the AI creators and device manufacturers. Successfully navigating these complex partner ecosystems will make or break the lasting brands of the future.

Once upon a time, consumers trusted merchants. Next, with the proliferation of customer reviews, they put their faith in each other. Tomorrow, in the hundreds of micro-decisions they make each day, it’s looking like consumers may prefer to just outsource the effort entirely. Voice search is propelling this motivational and behavioral shift in the way we buy. When we buy a device, we “hire” a bot, and in so doing, we choose an alliance with a walled garden, an operating system, a family of apps, a store. We do it eyes wide open, aware, if a little wary. Because when the experience of voice search works so well, it’s just, well … worth it. Though the ad dollars will follow, the winner of the race to build the best VR bot stands to gain something much bigger than marketing revenue—they’ll win the whole customer. And even my in-laws are comfortable with it.

Margo Kahnrose is SVP, marketing for Kenshoo.

The post Speak Up: How Voice Search is Changing Shopping Behavior appeared first on Chief Marketer.

One year into a new SEO strategy, SmarterTravel is seeing traffic increases of up to 70 percent for some brands.

SmarterTravel is the media arm of TripAdvisor and operates several different websites, each catering to a different type of travel audience. AirfareWatchdog.com, for example, offers information on travel deals, while Jetsetter.com shares intel on the hottest global destinations.

“Depending on what a user is looking for in their travel journey, we want to offer content to help them figure out where they want to go or find things to do at their destination,” says Melissa Sciorra, senior manager of SEO at SmarterTravel.

Before she joined the Boston-based company last summer, SmarterTravel had never focused on SEO. The company was acquiring traffic through paid acquisition and a robust CRM and email program. While editorial had some natural SEO baked in, no effort was being made to optimize content for search.

Her first job was to help the various brands’ editors understand the basics of SEO.

“We created a task force with an editorial lead from each of the brand websites,” she says. “These are the people I’m teaching how to fish. I’m dropping all of my knowledge on them and they share it with their teams.”

Coming in with a clean slate was a huge opportunity to hit the ground running, she says. An internal wiki was created to answer terminology and best practices questions quickly, and a variety of keyword research tools were implemented. All the hard work paid off, with traffic increases spiking upwards of 70 percent, translating into millions of visits.

“Because we have so much content on our site, and our domains are so old and we have great domain authority, these slight changes that we were making to topic and keyword selection made an impact quickly,” says Sciorra, who will be a featured speaker at LeadsCon’s Connect to Convert, Sept. 25-27.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Content Strategies for Better SEO
• PR Versus SEO: Which is Better for Online Reputation Management?

For millions of keywords, SmarterTravel’s sites average page one and page two on Google. What performs best varies from brand to brand. On Oyster.com, risqué content such as “what to bring to a nudist resort” or “hotels that make you feel sexy” does well. On the flagship SmarterTravel.com portal, more utilitarian content like “is traveling to Paris safe” or “products to help hide your money when you travel” gets the most clicks.

Last December, the company launches WhatToPack.com, its first website built with SEO in mind. “We’ve seen huge bumps in organic traffic based off of high-volume keyword research,” she notes.

Sciorra’s team looks at what keywords are resonating in different seasons, and then passes those insights along to not only editorial but the email and acquisition teams as well, to give them ideas on what types of campaigns to run.

Layout changes in Google have made it trickier to get on page one of results, she notes. Google has been moving into the travel space: If you Google “cheap flights to London,” you see the proprietary Google flight tool right at the top of the results.

“We used to be position one and top of the page, but those organic results are now pushed down due to these features,” she says, noting that optimizing title tags and meta descriptions help increase clicks. “Google now has Google Trips and Google Hotels, so for a lot of relevant travel queries that we historically performed well on, we might still be page one but further down the page.”

Other features impacting organic search include answer boxes in search results. “Our entire content strategy is based around answering people’s questions about travel, so our focus is getting into the answer boxes and the ‘people also ask’ questions,” Sciorra says.  “So when a query prompts that kind of feature we are above the fold and in people’s eyes.”

The need to clearly answer questions in search is also impacted by the increasing use of voice search. It’s hard to get insights on Google voice search, so a lot of manual testing is necessary to see what shows up when someone verbally asks a question to a personal device.

“We speculate that the answer box answer is what is read for an Alexa or Siri answer,” she notes. “It feels like a lot is from conversational queries, with people asking specific questions, so we’re capitalizing on that.”

Want to hear more from Melissa Sciorra on how to optimize your search engine marketing strategy, and discover the tools and tips you need to automate and improve your SEO performance? Join us at LeadsCon’s Connect to Convert Sept. 25-27 in Boston.

To help power its SEO efforts, SmarterTravel is using a number of tools like Answer the Public, Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Trends and SEMrush, as well as proprietary API tools built by TripAdvisor to analyze data. BuzzSumo is being used to help build out influencer programs for brands like AirfareWatchdog.

Of late, Sciorra’s role has expanded into working on the various brands’ unpaid social content strategy, through the lens of SEO analytics. “We’re [using what we learned] building out our SEO program and applying that to understand more about Facebook, Twitter and Instagram strategy, and see which content performs best for audiences across different channels.”

What works best? “We have different audiences that come to our site from Instagram versus Facebook versus email. It’s difficult to cater content to everyone, so we do a lot of A/B testing to see what resonates the best.”

SmarterTravel monetizes traffic in a number of ways, such as presenting users with hotel or flight booking options. Revenue is also generated through display advertising and affiliate links. “If we increase traffic from SEO, we can see through our tools the revenue per visit, and the number of searches,” she says.

The post Focus on SEO Boosts Traffic for SmarterTravel appeared first on Chief Marketer.

An integrated marketing strategy powered by search is helping The Arbor Company connect with seniors and their caregivers.

Arbor manages 40 senior living and assisted living communities in 11 states, and has 12 different brands. Like just about every other demographic today, seniors are starting their buying process with search, making it a crucial channel for Arbor to have a strong SEO presence in, notes Chris Harper, vice president of communications.

While the company markets to a number of different personas and segments, the typical target for assisted living decisions is often the potential resident’s oldest adult daughter or daughter-in-law. She is usually age 55 or older, and is searching on behalf of a parent or in-law in their 80s.

The challenge is not only to gather qualified leads, but to capture those leads before they reach out to a paid referral agency, which can be expensive, says Harper. Arbor works with SmartBug Media on its marketing program, and what performs best varies from geographic market to market, and even community to community within those markets.

In many areas, each individual community is promoted with a different strategy, But in Atlanta where Arbor is based, the company has a concentration of communities. It found it was starting to compete with itself on Google Ads, so marketing for the area was streamlined for all brands, to funnel down to one landing page.

“We haven’t found the secret sauce that works everywhere, and maybe that’s just because there isn’t one,” says Harper. “We just have to find what works best for each market and community.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• Direct Mail Helps EyeMed Get Seen By Prospects
• Pushing the Envelope: 10 Tips for Direct Mail Success
• The Evolution of Search: 3 Three Things to Know in 2019

People tend to look for a senior living community only five to 10 miles from where they currently live, only going further if they’re looking for a particular destination or want to be closer to a relative. While referrals from family, friends or healthcare providers are helpful, many people start the process to search for a community via search. Bing is the most popular search engine for the older target demographic, says Harper, most likely because it is the default engine on Microsoft Windows, and some folks don’t bother to change it when they get a new computer.

SEO works well for Arbor, and offers for educational content like ebooks, checklists to guide the first visit to a community, or cost calculators help build the relationship early in the funnel, says Mary Cate Spires, marketing strategist at SmartBug.

Direct mail works well to connect with independent seniors looking to make the next step. It doesn’t work as well for potential residents or caregivers who are in an emergent situation and need to move quickly to find a residence for a loved one who can no longer live on their own.

“It’s not for someone at their wit’s end. It works higher in funnel, to encourage independent seniors to take a tour early in their process, or to attend a seminar, happy hour or concert series,” says Harper. “People visiting newer communities are more interested in events, while [prospects] who lean toward older communities are more concerned about the [facility’s] reputation of care in the market.”

For independent living, the sales cycle from first touch to move-in is about 146 days. Because these seniors are anticipating selling their home and making a major life change, they go back and forth in their decision making, he says. “They consider whether they need to make this change and whether it is the right thing for them.”

The scenario is different in assisted living, because there is an immediate need, he says. “A lot of those decisions happen a lot faster.”

Once someone becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL) and are in the system, they often receive an email a few days later from another contact within the organization. “It helps move the needle and make sure they don’t fall through the cracks,” says Harper, noting that Facebook Advertising is also helpful to drive prospects to content, because seniors are such as fast growing audience on Facebook.

ROI is gauged by several factors, with data matched back to different marketing efforts via the CRM system, including the number of SQLs generated per source, and the number of actual move-ins generated per source.

The post Search Helps Arbor Grow Senior Living Populations appeared first on Chief Marketer.