Apple brings Siri to Mac, new exposure for non-Google search engines

Soon, you will finally be able to search the web from your Mac desktop -- and Google won't be a default provider.

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Google: Autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause

Google's communications team and Matt Cutts come out to call the allegations that Google altered their search suggestions in favor of Hillary Clinton false.

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How to Find Time to Meditate at Work [Infographic]

Everyone gets stressed at work at one time or another.

And hey, sometimes, that can be a good thing. When you're under some pressure and your brain's working hard, it can make you more efficient and productive in the end -- and you may even find more satisfaction with your work when it is done.

But whether the stress you're feeling is in healthy doses or not, there are ways to make it more manageable. It turns out that 42% of Americans say they aren't doing enough to manage their stress.

One great way to relieve stress without having to take much time out of your day? Meditation.

Don't worry: Successful meditation does not mean you have to sit cross-legged in silence for hours on end. Incorporating just 15 minutes of concentrated meditation a day into your workday can do wonders to reduce your stress levels.

Check out the infographic below from CashNetUSA to learn the benefits of meditation, along with how to do it -- from calming your mind, mind exercises, what to do with your body, and other tips for being mindful throughout the rest of your day. No matter how busy you are, making time for meditation can have a positive impact on productivity and happiness. 

Do Website Engagement Rates Impact Organic Rankings?

Posted by larry.kim

[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]

Your organic click-through rate is ridiculously important. While it may not be a direct ranking signal that's even part of Google's core algorithm, I believe CTR is an indirect signal that definitely impacts rank. And if you improve your click-through rate, you should see your rankings and conversions improve.

Although having a high organic CTR is crucial, having positive website engagement metrics is even more critical. What value is there in getting hundreds or thousands of people to click on your brilliant headlines if those people don't stick around for more than a few seconds?

If Google values dwell time, is there a way to see it? YES! Today I'll share some data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings.

One important note before we get started: Please don't focus too much on the absolute bounce rate and time on site figures discussed in this article. We are only looking at figures for one particular vertical. The minimum expected engagement will vary by industry and query type.

Does Google measure dwell time? How is that different from bounce rate & time on site?

Yes. We know Google measures dwell time, or how much time a visitor actually spends on a page before returning to the SERPs.

In 2011, Google announced a new option that allowed us to block domains from appearing in our search results. If you clicked on a result and then returned to the SERP from the website within a few seconds, Google's blocked sites feature would appear. Clicking it would let you block all results from that site.

Google told us they would study the data and considered using it as a ranking signal.

Although that feature is no longer with us, we know it was based on whether (and how quickly) you bounced back. So we know Google is definitely measuring dwell time.

The problem is, we don't have a way to measure dwell time. However, we can measure three engagement metrics that are proportional to and directionally equivalent to dwell time: bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate.

Does Bounce Rate Impact Organic Position?

OK, let's get the official Google line out of the way. Google's Gary Illyes tweeted the following in 2015: "we don't use analytics/bounce rate in search ranking." Matt Cutts said similar in the past. Pretty clear, right?

However, I'm not saying that bounce rate is used as a direct ranking factor. And Google definitely doesn't need Google Analytics to compute dwell time. What I believe is that, in some Rube Goldbergian way, bounce rate does in fact (indirectly) impact rankings.

Does the data back that up? We looked to see if the bounce rate of the pages/keywords we were ranking for had any relationship to their ranking. Check out this graph:

This is very peculiar. Notice the "kink" between positions 4 and 5? In mathematical terms, this is called a "discontinuous function." What's happening here?

Well, it seems like for this particular keyword niche, as long as you have a low bounce rate (below 76 percent) then you're more likely to show up in positions 1 through 4. However, if your bounce rate is higher (above 78 percent), then you're much less likely to show up in those coveted top 4 positions.

Am I saying bounce rate is part of the core search algorithm Google uses? No.

But I think there's definitely a relationship between bounce rate and rankings. Looking at that graph, it leads me to believe that it's no accident - but in fact algorithmic in nature.

My guess is that algorithms use user engagement as a validation method. Think of it more like a "check" on click-through rates within the existing algorithm that hasn't been quantified.

Undoubtedly, click-through rates can be gamed. For example, I could promise you the digital equivalent of free beer and have a ridiculously high click-through rate.

Image via Fox.

But if there's no free beer to be had, most (if not all) of that traffic will bounce right back.

Image via Fox.

So I believe Google is measuring dwell time (which is proportional to bounce rate) to check whether websites getting high CTRs actually deserve it and if the clicks are indeed valid, or if it's just click bait.

One other question this discussion obviously raises is: do higher rankings cause higher engagement rates, as opposed to the other way around? Or could both of these be caused by some a completely unrelated factor?

Well, unless you work at Google (and even then!) you may never know all the secrets of Google's algorithm. There are things we know we don't know!

Regardless, improving user engagement metrics, like bounce rate, will still have its own benefits. A lower bounce rate is just an indicator of success, not a guarantee of it.

Does time on site impact organic position?

Now let's look at time on site, another metric we can measure that is proportional to dwell time. This graph also has a "kink" in the curve:

It's easy to see that if your keyword/content pairs have decent time on site, then you're more likely to be in top organic positions 1–6. If engagement is weak on average, however, then you're more likely to be in positions 7 or lower.

Interestingly, you get no additional points after you cross a minimum threshold of time on site. Even if people are spending 2 hours on your site, it doesn't matter. I think you've passed Google's test - passing it by even more doesn't result in any additional bonus points.

Image via Fox.

Larry's Theory: Google uses dwell time - which we can't measure, but is proportional to user engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates - to validate click-through rates. These metrics help Google figure out whether users ultimately got what they were looking for.

Conversion rates: The ultimate metric

So now let's talk about conversion rates. We know that higher click-through rates typically translate into higher conversion rates:

If you can get people really excited about clicking on something, that excitement typically carries through to a purchase or sign-up.

So what we need is an Engagement Rate Unicorn/Donkey Detector, to detect high and low engagement rates.

Before we go any further, we need to know: what is a good conversion rate?

On average across all industries, site-wide conversion rate for a website is around 2 percent (the donkeys), while conversion rates for the top 10 percent of websites (the unicorns) get 11 percent and above. While absolute conversion rates vary wildly by industry, unicorns always outperform donkeys by 3–5x regardless of industry.

Remember, conversion rates are a very important success metric because you get the most value (you actually captured leads, sold your product, got people to sign up for your newsletter, or visitors did whatever else it was you wanted them to do), which means the user found what they were looking for.

How do you turn conversion rate donkeys into unicorns?

Image via Fox.

The way you don't get there is by making little changes. The difference between donkeys and unicorns is so huge. If you want to increase your conversion rates by 3x to 5x, then small, incremental changes of 2 or 3 percent usually won't cut it.

What should you do?

1. Change your offer (in a BIG way)

Rather than A/B testing button color or image changes, you might be better off trashing your current offer and doing a new one.

Ask yourself: Why in the world are 98 percent of the people who see your offer not taking you up on it? Well, it's probably because your offer sucks.

Image via Fox.

What can you offer that will resonate enough that +10 percent of people would be excited about signing up for it or buying it on the spot?

Be open-minded. The answer is probably something adjacent to what you're currently doing.

For example, for my own company, five years ago our primary offer was to sign up for a trial of our software. It was somewhat complicated, people had to learn how to use the software, and not everyone made it through the process.

Then I had an epiphany: Why don't I just grade people's accounts without having them do a trial of our PPC management software, and just give them a report card? That increased my conversion and engagement rates by 10x, and the gains persisted over time. There is much more leverage in changing the offer versus, say, the image on an existing offer.

2. Use Facebook Ads

You can influence users even before they do searches. Brand awareness creates a bias in people's minds which has a ridiculously huge impact on user engagement signals. We can do this with Facebook Ads.

You want to promote inspirational, compelling, memorable content to your target market. Although they'll consume your content, they won't convert to leads and sales right away. Remember, love takes time.

Image via Fox.

Rather, your goal is to bias them so in the future they'll do a search for your product. If it's an unbranded search, having been exposed to your marketing materials in the past, they'll be more likely to click on and choose you now.

Facebook and many other vendors have conducted lift studies that prove that Facebook ads impact clicks and conversions you'll get from paid and organic search.

You won't get away with promoting junk. You have to promote your unicorns.

For this, we'll use Facebook's:

• Interest-Based Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the things you're selling.


• Demographic Targeting to reach people who are likely to search for the stuff you're selling, maybe within the next month.


• Behavioral Targeting to reach the people who buy stuff that is related to the stuff you're selling.

For example, let's say you're a florist or jeweler. You can target Facebook ads at people who will celebrate an anniversary within the next 30 days.

Why would you want to do this? Because you know these people will be searching for keywords relating to flowers and jewelry soon. That's how you can start biasing them to get them to have happy thoughts about your business, increasing the likelihood that they'll click on you, but more importantly, convert.

It's not just Facebook. You can also buy image display ads on Google's Display Network. You can use Custom Affinity Audiences to target people who have searched on keywords you're interested in, but didn't click through to your site (or you can specify certain categories related to your business).

3. Remarketing

Image via Fox.

People are busy and have short attention spans. If you aren't using remarketing, essentially you're investing a ton of time and money into your SEO and marketing efforts just to get people to visit one time. That's crazy.

You want to make sure the people who gave you a look to see what your site was about never forget you so that subsequent searches always go your way. You want them to stay engaged and convert.

Remarketing greatly impacts engagement metrics like dwell time, conversion rate, and time on site because people are more familiar with you, which means they're more likely to be engaged with you for longer.

There's a reason we spent nearly a million dollars on remarketing last year. Investing in remarketing:

• Boosted repeat visits by 50 percent.


• Increased conversions by 51 percent.


• Grew average time-on-site by 300 percent.

These are huge numbers for a minimal investment (display ads average around $10 for 1,000 views).

It's your job to convert or squeeze as much money as you can from people who are already in the market for what you sell. So use remarketing to increase brand familiarity and increase user engagement metrics, while simultaneously turning the people who bounced off your site in the past into leads now.

4. Clean up your bad neighborhoods!

If you've tried all of the above (and other ways to improve engagement rates) and still have bad neighborhoods on your websites that have low CTR and/or user engagement rates - just delete them. Why?

I believe that terrible engagement metrics will lead to a death spiral where your site gets less clicks, less leads, less sales, and even lower rankings. And who wants that?

Now, I don't have any proof of this, but the software engineer in me suspects that it would be very difficult for Google to compute engagement rates for every keyword/page combination on the Internet. They would need to lean on a "domain-level engagement score" to fall back on in the event that more granular data wasn't available. Google does something conceptually similar in AdWords by having both account-level and keyword-level Quality Scores. It's also similar to how many believe that Google considers links pointing to your domain and also individual pages on your site when computing organic rankings (a moment of silence for our beloved Google PageRank Toolbar). Dumping your very worst neighborhoods - only if all attempts to resuscitate have failed miserably - would, in theory, raise a domain-level score, if it existed.

Obviously better CTRs, higher engagement rates, and improved conversion rates lead to more leads and sales. But I also believe that improvement in these metrics will lead to better organic search rankings, creating a virtuous cycle of even more clicks and conversions.

Conclusion

It's becoming increasingly clear that organic CTR matters. But you might not realize that high CTRs with low engagement rates aren't that meaningful.

Image via Fox.

So no cheap tricks, guys! Don't invest in sites that specialize in gaming your click-through rates. Even though they might work now to an extent, they won't work well in the future. Google is good at fighting click fraud on ad networks, so you can expect them to apply those same learnings to fight organic search click fraud.

I would prioritize click-through rate and conversion rate (or engagement) optimization at the very top of the most impactful on-page-SEO efforts.

At the very least you'll get more conversions. But if I'm right, you'll not only get more conversions, but you'll get better rankings, which will lead to more conversions and even better rankings.

So use the tactics and strategies from this post to diagnose your engagement rates, and then start optimizing them!

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Yandex updates their version of PageRank named Thematic Index of Citation (TIC)

The Russian search engine, Yandex, has updated their TIC scores, and webmasters took notice.

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A Milestone in the Inbound Journey: HubSpot Turns 10

Just ten years ago, we founded HubSpot and set out to make the world more inbound.

That meant transforming the way we market and sell to be more human, helpful, and empathetic. Before long, people from all corners of the globe started adopting this new way of doing business. The concept of inbound became a movement all its own.

Inbound really is everywhere. It's found where people are respected, whether by valuing their time, by solving for their needs first, or by not interrupting them with something they don't need.

We believe a more inbound world is a better world for everyone.

Tastes and technology change. What's important is to keep in mind what doesn't: People matter. They have choices, and they have power. People want to be valued and feel respected. That's not going to change, nor should it. It's just as true today as it was 100 years ago.

Without you, there is no HubSpot. We're extremely grateful to our customers, partners, employees, investors, alumni, friends, and members of the inbound community who have joined us on this remarkable journey. Today, we celebrate what we've built together. And as we look toward the future, we can already see that this is only the beginning.

Here's to the next 10 years,

Brian & Dharmesh

9 Strategies for Improving Lead Quality From B2B PPC Campaigns

You've poured thousands of dollars into your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search campaigns and have managed to generate a substantial number of leads. You're rocking your conversion rates and your cost per lead is great.

So what's the problem?

It's only when you start analyzing your results and dig a little deeper that you realize an overwhelming majority of these leads are in essence “junk leads”. Very few are turning into opportunities, let alone customers. The bottom line is, you're just not seeing a healthy ROI.

In this post, we provide nine proven strategies that you can use to generate better quality, bottom of the funnel leads from your B2B PPC campaigns. Let's dive in.

1) Set Up Proper Tracking

In order to accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, you need to make sure that you are able to track other important elements besides conversions. This data will allow you to determine which campaign and site a lead came from, the keyword they searched for, the device they were on, and so on.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use UTM Parameters and ValueTrack Parameters. These tags are data that you append to the end of your landing page URLs, and you've probably seen them when you clicked a link or ad. They look something like this

 http://www.yourlandingpage.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc

As a best practice, you should use the naming convention specified below and use at least these 6 parameters in your URLs:

In Google AdWords, the most efficient way to set up tracking parameters is in the “Campaign URL options (advanced)” section under campaign settings. Here, you can enter your parameters after “{lpurl}?” as shown below. The {lpurl} portion will be automatically replaced with the landing page URL that you have set up for each ad within your campaign.

 

2) Implement Opportunity Attribution

Once you have your tracking parameters, you need to capture them on your landing pages and store them-along with with other lead details-into the contacts database of your marketing platform. This is usually done by creating hidden fields in your landing page form. You will need one field for each UTM parameter that you have passed to your landing page:

You may first need to create custom fields or properties in your contacts database before you map them to the new hidden fields in your form.

Next, you need to make sure that your contacts or leads data is synced with your CRM and that you are able to view all opportunity data for your leads.

At a minimum, you should be able to view lead status or stage-whether they are a sales qualified lead, marketing qualified lead, opportunity, customer etc.-and the opportunity size or deal amount. If you have lead scoring data associated with each contact, this will be extremely beneficial as well.

Once you have all of the available data, you should create reports to isolate and segment your data. The most important data you want to extract are the number of opportunities, opportunity amount and customers won for each source, campaign, keyword and device, and the name, email, company, lead status/stage, lead score, opportunity amount, source, campaign, keyword and device for each lead.

You will now be able to determine which opportunities are being generated from a particular platform (Google, Bing etc.), campaign, device and keyword. When you combine this with the spend data from your ad platform, you will be able to get your true ROI. 

 

Next, isolate poor quality leads. If you use lead scoring, look at the leads with the lowest scores. Otherwise look for leads that have provided invalid or junk data in the name, email and company fields. Then check to see what campaigns, devices or keywords these leads have in common.

 

3) Segment Your Campaigns

Many companies make the mistake of setting up campaigns or ad groups for each product or service they have. They don't dig deeper into the many different ways in which their target audience is searching for the solutions they offer.

You can address this by carefully planning your campaigns in order to segment your offer into as many groups as possible. You can segment by each main feature, benefit, sub category, target industry or geographic location relevant to your product or service.

For example, let's say you provide web design and development services. You can segment your campaigns as follows:

• Sub category: Ecommerce Website Design, Custom Website Design, Responsive Web Design, etc.


• Feature: WordPress Web Design, Magento Development, PHP Development, etc.


• Benefit: High End Web Design, Agile Web Development, Enterprise Web Development, etc.


• Target industry: Real Estate Website Design, Restaurant Web Design, Healthcare Website Design, etc.


• Geographic location: San Francisco Web Design, California Web Design, New York Web Design, etc.

Once you identify the segments you want to go after, you can set up each campaign with the necessary assets: 

• Keywords: All keywords related to the associated segment


• Ads: Ad copy customized to that segment


• Landing Pages: Customized landing page that has content only about that segment

Setting up campaigns in this way allows you to focus your efforts, and will result in better quality leads and increased conversion rates.

4) Target Relevant Keywords

Keywords are at the heart of every paid search campaign, and you need to go wide and deep to identify the best ones for your business. 

The first step is identifying the most focused and relevant keywords. Segment your campaigns as described in the previous section and then search for keyword ideas within each segment. There are a lot of excellent keyword research tools that you can use to find the best keywords.

To attract the best quality leads at the bottom of the funnel, you have to target keywords with searcher intent in mind. For example, when someone searches for “WordPress Website Design Services” you know that they are looking for a company that provides WordPress services.

However, when someone just types in “WordPress Website Design”, you can't be certain about their intent. They could be looking for services or they could just be looking for a how-to design guide. Location-based searches also convey searcher intent adequately. For example, “San Francisco Web Design” indicates that the searcher is looking for a web design company in San Francisco.

Based on the volume of searches, you can also decide to further segment your campaigns to get even more focused. The more tailored your campaigns are-including keywords, ads and landing pages-the better your leads will be. For example, you could create a new campaign that combines two of the segments we just discussed titled “San Francisco WordPress Website Design”. Some of the keywords in this campaign could be:

Another way to get more focused with the keywords you're targeting is to find long-tail keywords-those that consist of four or more words. Searchers who type in these longer search terms have typically done their research and honed in on exactly what they are looking for, making them quality prospects.

A good tool to find long-tail keywords is Übersuggest, but you can also source them directly from Google. After conducting a search, simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and look in the section “Searches related to…”. A search for “Ecommerce Design Services”, for example, shows the following suggestions:

 

5) Filter Out Irrelevant Keywords

Targeting the kinds of keywords we discussed in the previous section, will go a long way in attracting high quality leads to your ads, but there are also steps you can take to proactively ward off less desirable clicks.

Look over your Search Terms Report to determine whether you are getting any irrelevant clicks to your ads. If you find any such clicks (or impressions), add those keywords to your negative keywords list-this tells Google or Bing not to show your ads for any of these keywords.

Going back to our earlier example of web design services, some negative keywords you would likely want to add are: cheap, free, themes, school, jobs etc. This will make sure you don't waste your money on clicks from users searching for keywords like “San Francisco Web Design Jobs” or “WordPress Website Design Theme”.

If you followed our guidelines for tracking and opportunity attribution described in sections 1 and 2, you will now have the ability to determine which keywords are leading to poor quality leads and which keywords are producing opportunities.

If you find that certain keywords are predominantly producing poor leads, you can add them to your negative keywords list to stop receiving traffic from these types of searches.

On the other hand, you will now have a list of keywords that have produced opportunities (and customers) for your business.

You can double down on these keywords in three ways:

• Increase their bids so your ads rank at the top of search results.


• Segment these keywords into a new group or campaign so you can have more customized ads and landing pages for them.


• Find other related keywords you may have missed the first time.

6) Use Ad Copy to Pre-Qualify Visitors

Writing ad copy that focuses solely on increasing click-through rates is a mistake. You should write ads that pre-qualify visitors, so that the traffic you do get will be a lot more relevant and targeted to your business. Some of the best ways of doing this, are by adding the following elements to your ad copy.

Business size

If you target businesses of a certain size, reflect that in your ad copy. For example, if you want to target larger businesses, you can add “Enterprise” to your ads and create copy such as “Enterprise Class WordPress Design”.

Industry

If you work with specific verticals, you can make that clear in your ads. For example, your ad could read: “WordPress Design for Healthcare”. This usually works best with segmented campaigns and keywords (see sections 3 and 4).

Pricing

Many companies are uncomfortable adding pricing to their ad copy, but this is a good way to weed out prospects who may not have the budget for your solution. You can do this by adding text such as “Starting at $499/month” or “Packages Starting at $10K”.

Target persona

Including your target persona in your ad copy is another excellent way of pre-qualifying your ad traffic and even personalizing your ads. You can do this with text such as “For Small Business Owners” or “For Discriminating Marketing Execs”.

It is also important to consistently A/B test your ads to optimize their performance. As a general guideline, you should always have two ads running for each ad group in your campaigns. You can then decide which ad is performing better by looking at the number of conversions and opportunities generated from each, in addition to the click-through rates.

7) Develop Tailored Landing Pages

Once a visitor gets to one of your landing pages you have already paid for the click. This means that measures such as adding extra form fields or validating for a business email address in an effort to reduce the no. of poor quality leads, are misguided. Instead, you should focus on maximizing the conversion rates of your landing pages by optimizing the elements below.

Customize landing pages to your ad groups

Tailor your landing pages to the needs, wants, and challenges of your ad groups, with particular focus on the content you have above the fold. While it is ideal to create unique landing pages for each ad group, sometimes this is not feasible-especially if you are working with dozens of different ad groups. Should this be the case, you can use dynamic headlines and subheadings on your pages. This will let you alter the content of your landing pages by passing in headlines and sub headings as parameters of your landing page URL.

Determine which offers drive the most results

Test multiple offers to see which get you the most traction. Make sure you look beyond conversions to see which offers are producing the most opportunities. Some offers to test include: Free Trial, Schedule Demo, Free Evaluation, Request Consultation, Request Proposal, Free Assessment, etc.

Test, test, test!

A/B test your landing pages to determine which variants are driving the most conversions, opportunities, customers and ROI:

Always A/B test a single element at a time to isolate the effect of that element on performance. Also, test only two variants of the page at a time. The most important elements you should run tests on are above the fold, and include: 

• Headline: Test different versions of your main selling point, benefit or offer.


• Call-to-Action (CTA): Try out different CTA copy, colors, sizes and placements.


• Hero Shot or Background: Test different images or videos for your hero shot or background


• Form: Test different lengths and placements for your lead generation form. You might display your form in the hero area, at the­­ bottom of your page or as a popup.

8) Make Adjustments Based on Mobile Performance

If you implemented device tracking as described in sections 1 and 2, you will now be able to determine which devices (computer, tablet or smartphone) are driving opportunities. If you find that mobile leads are not converting into opportunities, you can stop running your campaigns on mobile devices or reduce bids so that computers and tablets receive the bulk of your traffic.

9) Create an Ad Schedule

Even if you are running your ads 24/7, you should set up an ad schedule for your campaigns. You can add days of the week or break your schedule down further by adding hourly segments for each day of the week. Once this is done, you will be able to track performance for each day or hourly segment that you define:

Once you combine your opportunity data and your ad schedule, you will be able to determine which days or hours produce the most opportunities. From there, you can adjust your bids for each segment or stop running your campaign for those segments.

You should typically look at this data over a longer period of time-at least one quarter. If you find that you are not generating any opportunities on weeknights or weekends, and can stop running most of your campaigns during those times and move your budget over to regular business hours.

Conclusion

PPC campaigns are an effective way to attract B2B leads. However, many companies struggle at generating opportunities and driving a positive ROI from their campaigns. These nine strategies will help you create targeted campaigns optimized for high quality lead conversions, and boost your bottom line.