MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Ross Simmonds

Whether you recognize his iconic tweets or have read one of his content exposés on some of the world’s most powerful brands, Ross Simmonds has certainly made a name for himself in the content world. Through his experience working with clients both large and small, Ross has discovered the perfect recipe for developing and distributing content that will drive real results, and he’s ready to share it with our MozCon audience!

We're absolutely thrilled to welcome him back to the MozCon stage, and we connected with him ahead of the show to discuss how he broke into the industry, his content philosophy, and what he’s looking forward to at MozCon 2021.

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Question: You’ve been covering content creation and content marketing for quite some time, so could you tell us a bit about how you got your start? How did you set yourself apart?

Ross: I got started in content marketing accidentally. It was a time when content marketing really wasn't a thing. I got started by creating content online about fantasy sports. My first blog was all about fantasy football. I would create content three times a week writing about which players I believed were going to perform the best, and people from all over the world started to read this content and connect with it while I was living in my parents' basement in the middle of Nova Scotia, Canada.

This is when the light bulbs went off that the internet is going to be big and that this whole idea of creating content online can give you the opportunity to reach millions of people.As I started to grow that fantasy football blog, the traffic went up while my marks went down and I had to shift that fantasy football blog into a marketing blog so I could satisfy my mum's taste of wanting to make sure that I did good in school. She told me to start writing about marketing and so I did.

RossSimmonds.com became my website where I created content for years, and that eventually started to get traction and engagement from people again, all over the world, and eventually I transitioned, again, that RossSimmonds.com business, which was just me as a freelancer, into Foundation Marketing, which is a content marketing agency that works with B2B brands across the globe on content strategy, content creation, and content distribution. I have consistently been putting out new content on a regular basis on my blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and etc., for many, many years and as such, people have started to take notice and have been able to see my way of thinking around content.

Question: This year you’re discussing a new way of looking at content — seeing it as a long-term investment rather than a one-off creation. Why do you think this mindset is difficult for today's marketers to develop, and what's the best thing they can do to change their perspective?

Ross: The #1 reason why content is often seen as a one-hit thing and a one-time thing is because we live in a time where instant gratification has never been more easily acquirable and offers a dopamine hit. As such, marketers love the idea of pressing publish on a piece of content and seeing tons of notifications that people are interacting with it, liking it, sharing it, etc., and that is a great feeling to have.

But it is very temporary and what I'm talking about when it comes to content as an investment is taking a more long-term view, and recognizing that the assets and content that you create today can actually serve you consistently for years, if not decades to come from now, if you're able to optimize, improve, re-share, republish, and create things that actually have a life cycle that goes beyond today.

Question: You frequently conduct case studies on businesses like Masterclass, Shopify, and Gong, who are implementing incredibly successful content marketing strategies. What do you think these businesses have in common that is driving their success? What advice would you give to other businesses looking to achieve similar success?

Ross: Across the board, all of these companies have an internal commitment to understanding the value of content and its role in creating a competitive advantage. A lot of organizations don't view content as a force that can offer a competitive advantage long-term, but that is exactly what it offers you. If you create content for a significant amount of time that content is now going to be published and available to the public for years to come, and that content — if it's ranking in Google for high value keywords — is able to generate value for your business.

Some landing pages that exist today that were published in 2007 are still generating hundreds of thousands of dollars every single month for some companies, and these businesses that view content as an investment and recognize the power, value, and scalability of content are the ones that win, because they recognize that it's a great way to differentiate, that it is a very scalable methodology for growth and driving traction and engagement, and that is what truly differentiates some of these best-in-class content brands versus everyone else in the industry.

Question: At Foundation, you work with the full range of clients from startups to large Fortune 500 companies. How does your approach to content marketing change based on company size?

Ross: We start by understanding the goals and objectives with every single client that we're looking to provide services for, and by understanding their individual goals, we're able to tailor our recommendations and the ways in which we work with them based on their goals and what they're looking to accomplish — but we don't stop there.

We also dive deep into understanding what their existing resources are, how big their team is, the way that they internally communicate, the ways in which they're resourced in terms of their team structure, etc., and we use all of that to make a decision around how we can better serve them to accomplish that overarching goal. We also recognize that every single company is different. They have different people, different goals, different resource constraints, and different levels of funding, some are private, some are public, and etc.

All of these things fit into the way in which we can serve our clients, and thus we navigate each instance differently and in a bespoke kind of nature where it's custom and tailored to them.

Question: The way that consumers digest content is changing rapidly day by day. In your opinion, what has been the most dramatic change in content marketing in the last five years? What do you think is going to be the most important area for content marketers to focus on in the next five years?

Ross: Five years ago, everyone was talking about how you need to create more content and publish more content because all the gurus were on stage screaming "Content is king".

You fast forward to now, and guess what? Everyone has listened to that mantra and that idea but content has become very common. There's content everywhere you look. Right now, as somebody reads the words that are written on this screen or is listening to an audio version of it, they are consuming content.

Content has become easy to create and content has become essentially the bar. You're supposed to create content. Now it's more difficult than ever to stand out amongst all the noise, all of the hundreds and thousands of blog posts being published every day, and the hundreds of thousands of influencers on LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., and because it is so difficult to stand out amongst them, I believe that in the next five years, the increasing emphasis on creativity and solid distribution will never be higher.

If you're in a boring industry, you still need to be creative and understand your audience's pain points and needs and give that to them in a form of content that they will want. That is consistent across the board, and I believe that there's going to be an increasing demand for creativity if you want your content to stand out in the months — if not years — to come.

Question: What’s your favorite piece of content that you’ve ever created? How can people give it a read?

Ross: A few months back, I wrote a piece called the The SEO Moat: Why SEO Can Be A Competitive Advantage, and it really speaks to the value that SEO brings to the market that often organizations are overlooking, even though it can truly play a massive role in helping an organization unlock millions of dollars in value for their organization.

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

Ross: I'm super excited to hear what Flavilla has to say this year. She always brings the heat and her perspective on the science of purchasing behavior is definitely going to be something I will be looking forward to hearing.

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A big thank you to Ross for his time! To learn more about Ross’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

How Optimizing for Voice Search Will Impact Your SEO Plan in 2021

A decade ago, you could define SEO to a layperson by establishing the relationship between “search” and “text." Fast-forward to present day, and a sizable chunk of web traffic and online purchases now come from searches initiated by voice prompt. Because users ask for content differently when they use Siri or Alexa — compared to when they type a search query into a browser — optimizing content to capture more of that traffic is going to work a bit differently.

Voice search is different than browser search

You have to make a distinction early on between voice searches that simply transcribe a voice prompt into a search bar and return a list of results, or a search action that triggers a specific command from a digital assistant-style platform. Most content isn’t going to be able to accommodate optimizations for both the Google search bar and an Alexa voice command at the same time, and some content can’t be engaged by voice-enabled devices at all, like a screen-free home smart speaker that can’t display an article or play a video. Rather, if you want to reach audiences while they interact with voice-enabled devices, you can think of voice-optimized content as another arrow in your quiver.

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Not all content needs to be voice friendly

Creating content specifically geared to be findable and consumable via voice search is going to be more important for some users than others. As screen-free devices and voice-enabled search become more ubiquitous, some sites and pages would likely benefit from becoming more Alexa-friendly. For example, location-based businesses have huge opportunities to increase their foot traffic by optimizing their online presence to be discoverable via voice search. There are more users to capture every day who are likely to ask Siri or Alexa to “find a pizza shop nearby,” compared to those who might navigate to Yelp or Google Maps and perform a text search for “pizza delivery.”

That said, voice searchability isn't necessarily what you should build your entire SEO strategy around, even for those users likely to benefit the most from high voice search rankings. That’s because voice isn’t exactly replacing text search — it’s supplementing it.

For example, Siri will update a user on the score of a game, but won’t narrate the action blow-by-blow. If you want a page to rank because you want to serve ads to users interested in sports commentary, then trying to optimize all of your content to accommodate voice may not be the most effective way to drive engagement.

However, if you want to boost foot traffic for a retail sandwich shop, then you can absolutely optimize the business listing to be easier to find when users ask for “lunch spots near me” via voice command while driving, and tailor your approach with that goal in mind.

Smart devices and voice search see usage grow, but not yet dominate

Voice search is arriving quickly but has not yet hit critical mass, creating some low-hanging fruit for early adopters with specific content goals.

In July 2019, Adobe released a study suggesting that around 48% of consumers are using voice search for general web searches. The study did not differentiate between digital assistants on smartphones or smart speakers, but the takeaways are similar.

In Adobe’s study, 85% of those respondents used voice controls on their smartphones, and the top use case for voice commands was to get directions, with 52% of navigational searches performed via voice. Consistent with Adobe's findings, Microsoft also released a study in 2019 reporting that 72% of smartphone owners used digital assistants, with 65% of all road navigation searches being done by voice prompt.

A 2018 voice search survey conducted by BrightLocal broke out some common use cases by device:

• 58% of U.S. consumers had done a voice search for a local business on a smartphone

• 74% of those voice search users use voice to search for local businesses at least weekly

• 76% of voice search users search on smart speakers for local businesses at least once a week, with the majority doing so daily

Smart speaker adoption in US homes grew by 22% between 2018 and 2019 to an estimated 45% of homes having at least one smart speaker. Research released by OC&C Strategists projected the smart speaker to grow voice shopping into a $40 billion market by 2022, just in the US and UK alone.

But mass adoption of voice tech is still lagging, despite inroads made during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the 2020 Smart Audio Report by NPR and Edison Research found that consumption of news and entertainment using these devices increased among a third of smart speaker owners in early 2020, a two-thirds majority of non-owners were “not at all likely” to purchase a voice-enabled speaker in the next six months, and nearly half of non-owners who use voice commands felt the same. People who own smart speakers still perform lots of traditional text searches, in accordance with Microsoft’s 2019 study, and not everyone who has access to voice command tech likes to use it for every basic function.

Part of the delay in mass adoption may be attributed to unresolved trust and privacy questions that come with being asked to fill our homes with microphones. A majority of smart speaker owners (52%) and a majority of smartphone voice users (57%) are bothered that their smart speaker/smartphone is "always listening." However, a silver lining is that roughly the same numbers of users for each respective device trust the companies that make the smart speaker/smartphone to keep their information secure.

Market share of digital assistants across search

There are four major smart assistants processing the majority of voice search requests at the time of publication, each with their own search algorithms, but with some overlap and data sources in common.

Understanding the market share for each assistant can help you prioritize your optimization strategy to your top growth objectives. Each of these digital assistants are tied to different hardware brands with a slightly different appeal and user base, so you can likely focus your analytics tracking efforts to just one or two platforms depending on the audience you’re targeting.

The Microsoft 2019 Voice Report asked respondents to list which digital assistants they had used before, which provides a broad idea of how much voice search traffic we can expect to come from each of these engines. Siri and Google Assistant tied for first place, commanding 36% of the market each. Amazon Alexa accounts for 25% of all digital assistant usage, while Microsoft Cortana ranked third place, powering 19% of devices.

An interesting thing to note here is that the engine powering Cortana leans largely on a partnership with Amazon Alexa. Cortana provides voice command functionality to laptops and personal computers, such as “Cortana, read my new emails”, while Alexa sees more smart-speaker requests like “Turn on the lights” or “Play NPR.”

Optimizing for voice search vs. voice actions

Voice commands actually fall into two categories — voice search and voice actions — and each looks for different criteria to determine which response will be returned first for any given voice request. It’s really important to define which one you’re talking about when assessing an SEO plan for voice search, because they process content very differently.

A voice search essentially just replaces a keyboard input with a spoken search phrase to return results in a browser, such as using the “OK Google” command in a smartphone browser. This may impact how you tailor your keyword phrases, based on the user's tendency to phrase queries more conversationally when interacting with a voice AI.

Voice actions, on the other hand, are specific voice commands or questions from the user that trigger certain apps or automations, such as placing an order for takeout via smart speaker or checking the weather from your car. Screen-free devices like home smart speakers and some car assistants use voice actions. These commands don’t return a ranked page of results, but often a single spoken result, with a prompt for further action. If you ask an Echo Dot device for the weather, it will describe the weather out loud based on data pulled from a predetermined source. It can’t return a list of popular weather forecast sites, because there is no screen to display a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). This is an important distinction.

Smart assistants often pull data from secondary sites to return these vocal snippet results, like pinging WolframAlpha for mathematical conversions or Yelp for local business listings. One such use case would be a voice search for “order a pizza.” The AI would route the query to Yelp or Google Maps, and verbally return one result such as “I found a pizzeria nearby with five stars on Yelp. Would you like to call Joe’s Pizza to place an order or look up driving directions?” This is sometimes known as “position zero,” when a search engine returns an abstract or snippet from within the content itself to answer a direct question without necessarily sending the user to the page.

Achieving position zero depends on the device

Ranking position zero for a voice action prompt depends on where those results are being pulled from. Improving the voice search ranking for driving directions to a specific physical storefront, for example, is often a matter of improving that business's visibility on listing sites like Google Maps and Yelp, which you may already be doing as part of your SEO plan anyway.

The data source depends on the platform running the voice search. Google and Android devices utilize Google Local Pack, while Siri crawls Yelp to return results when prompted for “the best” in any specific category, otherwise prioritizing the closest results. Since Alexa pulls local results from Bing, Yelp, and Yext, having filled-out profiles and robust listings on those platforms will help a business rank highly in Alexa search results.

Each assistant also pulls NAP identity (name, address, and phone number of a business’s online listing). NAP pulls profiles for location-based results from slightly different and sometimes overlapping sources:

• Siri pulls local recommendations from the NAP profiles on Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, and Trip Advisor

• Android devices and Google Assistant pulls NAP profiles from Google My Business

• Alexa pulls NAP profiles from Yelp, Bing, and Yext

• Cortana, powered by Alexa, pulls from Yelp and Bing

Someone hoping to optimize their business page for voice search will want to max out their NAP profiles across all platforms by making sure that their listings at business.google.com, bingmapsportal.com, and mapsconnect.apple.com are completely filled out. This is also where a reputation management product like Moz Local can help businesses looking to improve their rankings.

Should you go after the voice snippet feature?

Again, many of the strategies you’d use to achieve first position on a text-based web search still apply to optimizing voice search. To improve voice performance specifically and appear in SERP features and voice snippets, on-page content should be structured so it’s easy to extract, basically reverse engineering the featured snippet you want to produce. But the question is, will it actually help you to rank well in that kind of search? That depends on your goal.

If the page you’re optimizing is built to sell more pizza to local customers, then yes, a featured snippet that pulls your NAP data from Google My Business and provides the pizzeria’s phone number to a hungry local parked nearby is a very good thing. But if the page in question is intended to serve sponsored content about diabetes management to drive clicks to an affiliate link for glucose monitoring strips, then you don’t necessarily want to build a page that helps Siri define Type II diabetes aloud to an eighth grader completing their homework.

Structuring the content headings with a question, followed by a concise answer in the paragraph below, makes it more likely that Siri will recite content from a given page when asked a similarly worded question by the user. The first answers a digital assistant gives when responding to a voice search query are typically the same type of snippets that show up in SERP features such as “People Also Ask” and Knowledge Graph results from Google.

In other words, Siri is unlikely to return your website to answer the voice prompt “What is the chemical composition of sugar?”, but you could rank highly with a featured snippet to answer a search like “Is sugar really bad for children with ADHD?”

The most valuable content for those seeking on-page visitors is the kind that addresses questions that are hard to answer with a single spoken response.

Rand Fishkin made his predictions on the role of the vocal snippet in search results as voice search was ramping up in 2016, and provided some advice on how you can plan your content around it in this Whiteboard Friday. According to Fishkin, it depends on whether you’re in the “safe” or “dangerous” zone for the content you’re trying to rank for, based on how easily a voice response can address the user’s query without sending them to your page.

“I think Google and Apple and Amazon and Alexa and all of these engines that participate in this will be continuing to disintermediate simplistic data and answer publishers,” Fishkin wrote.

He advises users to question the types of information they’re publishing, adding that if X percent of queries that result in traffic can be answered in fewer than Y words, or with “a quick image or a quick graphic, a quick number,” then the engine is going to do it themselves.

“They don't need you, and very frankly they're faster than you are,” Fishkin summarized. “They can answer that more quickly, more directly than you can. So I think it pays to consider: Are you in the safe or dangerous portion of this strategic framework with the current content that you publish and with the content plans that you have out in the future?”

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The takeaway

Voice-enabled devices are gradually becoming more embedded in consumers’ daily lives, but that doesn’t mean we should prioritize our content as though voice is bearing down on the traditional search engine results page, threatening to replace text all together in the role of SEO. Even if smart assistants and voice-enabled devices continue to become more popular year over year, they still fill a relatively niche role in most consumers’ technical gadget ecosystem at this time. That could change as the voice AIs become more sophisticated and talking to our gadgets starts to feel more normal, but the industry is still grappling with some serious growing pains.

Voice search and voice action technology still has some really exciting applications looming on the horizon, and marketers are already finding clever ways to insert their brands into the hands-free experience. Optimizing content for voice search is just one piece of that puzzle.

Give us your hottest takes and wildest predictions on where voice search is headed in 2021 in the comments!

Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?

A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.

It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.

Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.

But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.

If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.

Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.

Why video sales?

A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:

• First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.

• Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.

• When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.

• Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.

• The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.

At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:

• Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems

• Made product listings free

• Amped up their nearby shopping filter

• Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands

• Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)

• Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube

• Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels

Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.

Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.

And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.

To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.

Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.

Why QVC?

“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.

The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.

About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.

“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call

QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!

Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.

“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”

While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.

TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:

Main host

QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.

For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.

You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.

Guest hosts

Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.

Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.

Models

Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.

Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.

For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.

Callers

There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.

If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.

Method

“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America

There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.

Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:

“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”

Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.

Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:

• “These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.

• “Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.

• “Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.

• “Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.

Analytics

The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.

QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.

For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.

Three O2O advantages

In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.

I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:

1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility

Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.

2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity

QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.

70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.

3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands

Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:

• 84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases

• Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%

• 96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating

• The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand

• Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%

• Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%

If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.

Go n-éirí leat — good luck!

Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.

Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static

product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!

Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:

• 17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples
• The ABCs of Video Content
• 8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos
• How to Film Creative Product Videos
• YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020
• How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps

Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.

An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1]

Welcome back to Whiteboard Friday! To start us up after our break, guest host Cooper Hollmaier has put together a three-part series that shows how SEO and accessibility go hand-in-hand. 

In part one, he introduces us to what accessibility in SEO means, goes through some common myths associated with the work to make websites optimized and accessible, and discusses some of the major impacts that work can have. 

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility: the idea of optimizing not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.

I've been doing SEO since 2016, and I started out working on small businesses, local mom-and-pop shops. Then I found the allure of e-commerce SEO, and I've been doing that ever since. Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor e-commerce retailer.

The relationship between SEO and accessibility

Now, if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers' intent. Whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips as that mom-and-pop shop, or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to, in some way, make sure that it shows up in search engines.

So for me, as a technical SEO, maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or my paragraph tag or my title tag, for this example page here for Mozville Dog Rescue. 

Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for, can be seen, digested, consumed, and then essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.

Optimize for people, not just bots

But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there? Maybe it's more than just my bots. If you're thinking that way, you're moving towards the right direction. You're moving towards a more inclusive approach. You're thinking about more than just a search engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with it, and maybe even engaging with your business.

If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage. You can see that person front and center, but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because they're out there in the darkness. What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.

We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing. So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see that. We know that's important as an SEO.

How do people interact with your content?

But also think about can other people interact with, engage with, or be compelled by this content. If the answer is no, you have some issues. But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues. When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally and on a website or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.

Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust

Is my content perceivable? Is it able to be seen or understood, or does it exist for my user? Is it operable? Can they do something with it? Is it understandable? Am I writing at the right reading level? Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe not just somebody with a PhD? Is that content robust? Is what I'm building available in multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so that, regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given them? 

These are the four principles of web accessibility. These are the guidelines that the Web Consortium has given us, and you can apply them every time that you're building something new, or even retrofitting something old.

For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant. If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end up in a situation where someone who needs Braille, needs a screen reader, need some sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content, is going to be kind of left out in the dark.

They're not going to be able to do those things. In the example of a menu, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what they offer for me to order. So it's important that we make sure that our content and the things we're producing, the marketing materials that we're developing, are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. 

But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.

Types of disability

When I say "disability," what does that mean to you? You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk. You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when there's a math test coming up in class. If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure, shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane, or cognitive disabilities or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.

There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about until I learned about it. Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf-blindness, color blindness. I'm the first to admit here that this whiteboard being in blue and red and green and black may not be the most accessible for someone with colorblindness. That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video. These all make this content more accessible. 

Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure. You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive. There are a ton of different types of disability, and many of them aren't even perceivable by you or I. People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might not know.

So it's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots but for people as well. We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content. 

So how does this relate to your world as an SEO? Well, there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work, and I want to kind of break that down into some myths and legends.

Myths and legends

1. It has a small impact

Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people. We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay, they can see my content if I write it on the page. But the reality is one in five people in the United States are dealing with a disability. That's a lot of people.

That's almost 60 million people. So it's not a small problem if you ask me. For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a tag title tag, if I write a meta description, if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping a bot, but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.

I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title. I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to. So small impact is really a myth. Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people than I think we commonly realize.

2. It’s a short-term problem

Number two, it's a short-term problem. For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill is more than a short-term problem.

It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant. So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve our practices. We know that for SEO it's a zero-sum game, too. We know that the world is always changing. Search algorithms are changing. User intent and behavior is changing.

So it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation. So that way we're not falling behind our competitors, and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize we're disadvantaging.

3. Worry about it at the end

Number three, we should do it at the end. I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO but for accessibility especially, too.

Hey, I have this website. Maybe we should do an audit. Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible. It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go than to do it retroactively, and do this kind of retrofitting. For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need to answer.

If you trying to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven. It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't. You're coming in after the fact.

4. It costs too much

Number four, it cost too much money. You know what cost a lot of money? Lawsuits. If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost, in the beginning of the process and in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your business a lot more, and they can be detrimental.

But so can SEO and penalties. If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs, how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.

5. It’s distracting

Number five, it's distracting.

For accessibility, in a lot of cases the things that we're going to be implementing aren't going to be visible to your average user. They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone else is. But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.

For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious. We've seen keyword stuffing. We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value to my customer. That is more distracting I think, than doing the work to make it right. 

Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.

In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right. It's not a short-term problem. It's ongoing. We shouldn't do it at the end. We should be doing it at the beginning. It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong and get it wrong. Then number five is, in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic, it's ethical, it's honest.

The impact of accessibility work

So what's the impact of doing accessibility work and also I guess doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices?

1. Makes the impossible, possible!

Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost. It makes the impossible possible.

2. It helps businesses

Number two, it helps businesses. You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your public perception.

If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to thank you for that. They're going to say, "Oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities." It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers. When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.

It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that, where people have taken the short-term approach. I know you're going to love this. It's going to help your SEO. It's going to give you a bigger audience. You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the entire stage in front of you. So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business, and that means more money and more people and honestly a lot less problems.

I think we all know this one, but lawsuits. If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a lot less lawsuits. People aren't going to complain. They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any. It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.

3. It helps family and friends

Then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people with disabilities. It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities. It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that burden on family and friends.

It's also going to allow you, as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline, to have a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer, more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience. 

So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar, and it's important to recognize that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimize for bots, how can I get Google to see this, how can I get other search engines to see this, and think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.

Now what?

Okay, so now what do I do with this information? — is the question you might have. Well, you can learn and test. So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness Day. You can join a meetup. There are tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility, who can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.

You can subscribe to a newsletter. I've included a bit.ly link here, bit.ly/wbf-week, for White Board Friday. You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work on their own business. Then you can also test your actual pages. Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into your workflow, you can use either WAVE or Axe, and I've included the bit.ly links here and down below, and you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.

Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility. I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your own business. Thanks. Have a good one.

Daily SEO Fix: Advanced Keyword Explorer Metrics and Reporting Tips

Ranking highly for a keyword you’ve been targeting is a great feeling. However, it’s crucial to ensure that ranking will actually benefit you.

The keywords you target should be relevant to your business and have the ability to increase organic traffic and drive conversions. But how do you determine which keywords are going to be of value?

In these Daily SEO Fix videos, we show you how you can use Moz’s keyword metrics to help you evaluate how much of an impact ranking for certain keywords will have.

If you’d like some more tips on analyzing keyword metrics with Moz Pro, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our onboarding team. It’s a free, personalized call which will show you how to get the most out of Moz Pro.

Book Yours Today!

Using keyword metrics to analyze a list of keywords

In this video, Emilie shows you how to find out the average monthly volume, difficulty score, organic CTR, and priority within a keyword list.

You can use this information to examine the overall keyword metrics for a specific topic area and to pinpoint the most common SERP features.

Importing CSV to Keyword Explorer

Keyword research often involves collating data from a variety of sources. For example, you may be using a spreadsheet from a client alongside your own keyword research.

The data you have gathered can be pieced together to give you a clearer understanding of the value and relevance of your keywords.

Maddie shows you how to import a CSV of your own keywords into Moz Pro. You can use them to create a keyword list or you can track them in your campaign.

Keyword Explorer: Advanced Exporting Tips

Exporting a keyword list from Keyword Explorer will allow you to analyze your keyword data in a spreadsheet.

In this Daily SEO Fix, Emilie will explain how you can filter and export a CSV of your keyword list and show you what insights you can take from it.

Advanced Google Sheets Metrics Look Up

In this video, Jo shows you how to merge keyword data from Moz Pro with your existing keyword data.

This can be particularly helpful if you’re using a variety of data sources to research keyword opportunities. Adding all of your keywords to a single spreadsheet makes it easier to organize and analyze them.

MozCon Virtual 2021 Interview Series: Wil Reynolds

Wil is the Founder and Vice President of Innovation at Seer Interactive, and will be back at MozCon this year with his presentation: The 3 Most Important Search Marketing Tools…Your Heart, Your Brain, & Your [Small] Ego.

Ahead of the show, set to take place on July 12-14, 2021, we talked with Wil about the impact of 2020 on Seer Interactive, what challenges marketers must overcome when analyzing data, and the key insights he’ll cover in this year’s MozCon presentation.

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Question: 2020 was quite a year, how did the Seer team adjust? What were some of your favorite projects?

Wil: We went through all the emotions :)

Everyone stayed healthy for the most part, that was always my focus — how are our teams and their parents doing? The focus was on helping people manage this time.

My favorite project was the work we did to help our clients use all their warehoused data to find quick places to trim spending… The fact that our data was warehoused for all clients made it easy to support them, as they were being asked some pretty tough questions about budgets and how customers are changing.

Question: You have a long history of mind-blowing presentations at MozCon, which always include innovative ways of looking at data and strategy. What’s your creative process?

Wil: I read. I like to go back to psychology and how people buy. I love reading books on marketing before the web existed. How can I think differently if I’m reading all the same things as my peers?

I love taking books that have nothing to do with search and apply those learnings to our day to day. I usually am finishing my presentations up until the last minute because I keep pulling data, finding new ways to add value, and deliver, then practice, practice, practice.

Question: This year, you’ll be discussing how marketers can transform how they think about data by tapping into three tools they already have access to: the head, the heart, and their ego. What is the single most important takeaway our MozCon viewers should walk away with from your presentation?

Wil: That tools are not competitive advantages, yet we all obsess over “tips and tricks” and “tools” — but the best tools are your brain, your heart, and your small ego.

Question: At last year’s MozCon, you talked about how CMOs and marketing teams can increase visibility by speaking the language of CEOs and CFOs. Will we see any of the same themes come through in your presentation this year?

Wil: Always. I think one of the values I bring is I try to help us better understand how to connect our work to how the C-suite makes decisions. You know — profits, revenue, leveraging existing assets, ROI, customer acquisition, etc. That’s a different language than rankings, canonicals, MSV, etc. I want to be a translator between the two.

Question: What do you think is the biggest challenge for marketers when analyzing data?

Wil: Limits of tools, tools have UIs — UIs are critical, but you don’t get the full power of the data because often it's been pre-processed for the average customer. That limits innovation, to me.

The other challenge is siloed thinking. Oftentimes, we aren’t thinking about how we could use paid data to impact technical SEO, or whether COVID positivity rate influences SEO, or if medicare.gov data can benefit local SEO. That is my world though.

Lastly, learning the tools that allow you to slice data and combine it and visualize it is a big hurdle.

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

Wil: I gotta pick one? If I had to, it's Ross Simmonds. When he speaks, the stuff just makes sense, but I haven’t been doing it. I always think, I wish I was more like that dude. :)

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A big thank you to Wil for his time! To learn more about Wil’s upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!

How to Calibrate Your Brand Voice to Your SEO Advantage

It’s a competitive world out there. Everyone’s after a piece of the pie, and in these uncertain times, businesses need to work harder than ever to stand out from the herd.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to develop a unique brand voice for your company – one that will appeal to customers and get noticed via SEO.

What exactly is a “brand voice”? It’s simply the way your organization expresses its messaging in terms of style and tone. Your voice should demonstrate your core values and appeal to your target customers.

It’s vital that this voice is consistent across all aspects of your communications, from blogs to adverts to signage. If your content doesn’t stay on-brand, your audience won’t make the association between your latest product or service and the ones they’ve enjoyed before, and the crucial loyalty factor is gone.

This article will show you a few tricks to help develop a unique voice, structure your content, and turn Google’s algorithms to your advantage at the same time.

Source

Developing your brand voice

This isn’t quite as easy as you might think. Your brand voice has to reflect who you are as a business, and ensure it “speaks” to potential customers on the right level, whether they’re already familiar with your brand or they’ve just found you in a Google search.

This means really getting to know your customers – find out what they need and how they want it presented to them. Consider the demographics: age, gender, profession, financial situation, lifestyle. It’s also helpful to carry out a competitor analysis for companies in a similar industry and see how their brand voice works for them.

When you know who you’re talking to, you can tailor your brand voice to the people who are (hopefully) going to listen to it, and target them through clever SEO techniques.

For instance, if you’re targeting a youthful audience, you might use a chatty and friendly style with a few emojis thrown in. If your content is aimed at older professionals, it’s probably better to keep things a bit more formal.

Content should always be informative and helpful. You might use jargon if your audience is familiar with a subject, but simple language is often best for explaining something technical. Make sure you always back it up with trustworthy sources.

The key to creating engaging content that gets top rankings on search engines is to inject some personality. Some marketers like to push the boundaries with wacky ideas and irreverent humor, but only if it’s appropriate for the audience and the brand. Consider creating a tone and voice “style guide” to be used by everyone in your organization, ensuring consistency across all content. 

Optimizing your brand voice

So, you’ve developed your unique brand voice, now how do you let people hear it? Well, you need to optimize your content to pick up the most traffic from search engines.

The trick here is to respond to keyword trends without compromising your brand voice. Your SEO and marketing teams will need to work together on this. SEO will boost your website’s performance on search engines in order to reach the top positions on Google. Most people don’t read beyond the first SERP, so getting into the top ten is crucial for your company’s success.

We’ll show you some tips on how to get there by optimizing your content structure, title tags, and meta description copy.

#1 Define your keywords

Usually, it’s pretty easy to identify your own keywords: they'll include the name of your brand, its identity, and the things it sells or provides. Keywords are the major descriptors of your brand and its USP – and the hooks that will draw in your target customers. But if you’re not sure how to pick a primary keyword, you can use an online tool such as Moz Pro’s Keyword Explorer.

Keyword research is an important part of your SEO strategy – identify popular words and phrases that people search for, and structure your content around those topics while keeping your message on-brand.

#2 Create catchy title tags

A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page (not to be confused with the H1-tag, which is the displayed “title” on the actual page). Its main function is to tell visitors what they’ll find if they visit that web page.

The title tag is the first thing a potential visitor will see when your site pops up in an online search, so this is your chance to make a great first impression! You’re aiming to tempt the searcher to click through to the appealing content in your post.

Ideally, a title tag should:

• Include your primary keyword

• Use the keyword at or near the start

• Stick to 50 to 60 characters (or the search engine may truncate it!)

If you’re already a well-known business, make sure your brand name is included in the title tag. List posts are always popular, so using numbers in the tag is an enticing hook. For example, if you were writing about an alternative to Zoom, your title could be “8 powerful Zoom alternatives for video conferencing”.

People don’t want to read old information, so add a date to your tag – or at least say when it was last updated. They do like thorough and authoritative articles, though. Think "The Ultimate/Complete Guide To...".

Make sure all title tags are unique to avoid confusion, and ensure every page on your website has its own title tag. Finally, be aware that Google may rewrite your title tags if it doesn’t think they’re up to scratch!

Tip: Test your tags. A/B testing and measuring the traffic generated from new keywords will help you work out what you’re doing right or wrong.

#3 Write an enticing meta description

A meta description is the text block or “snippet” that appears underneath the title tag in the search results. This is where you have a bit more room (150 to 160 characters) to describe and summarize the contents of your page – and encourage the reader to click on your post.

Keywords are just as important here, as search engines will highlight those words in the SERP. But you can also optimize your meta descriptions to reflect your brand voice and appeal to visitors.

The more inviting the copy is, the more it will motivate people to click, thus increasing your SERP ranking over time. You can set up your meta descriptions to include your logo, an image, or a review – all things that will draw the reader’s eye.

Tip:If you don’t write a meta description, the search engine will probably create one for you – and it may not be what you want to say!

#4 Use the headline as a hook

Great, you’ve successfully enticed a visitor to click through to your site. Now you just have to keep them engaged, as highly optimized landing pages are essential to increasing conversions.

The reader is already interested in your organization, so pull them in further with an attention-grabbing headline. It’s a good idea to include a variation of your keyword, but you can add other wording to make the reader keen to learn more.

Most people will take a quick scan through the article before deciding whether or not to read the whole thing. Using catchy H2s and H3s with variations of the primary keyword will confirm that this is the article they were looking for – as well as breaking up the text and making it easier to read.

#5 Let your brand voice sing

The main article copy is where your brand voice really comes into its own. Great copy can make your brand memorable, so inject plenty of personality to keep the reader entertained as well as informed.

Scatter some keywords throughout the copy, but there’s no need to shoehorn in the exact phrasing if it’s grammatically clunky. It’s more important to meet the search intent and answer the questions that led the visitor to your door.

Choosing the right topic to write about is an important aspect of your brand communication. It should respond to your target customers’ needs as well as fitting with your marketing strategy. People enjoy reading hands-on, actionable content that will actually add value to their lives. If you can attract the right customers, you can help them build a long-term association with your company.

#6 Be picture perfect

Images are almost as important as words when it comes to promoting your brand. Posts with images get 94% more views, so it's vital to deliver appealing visual content.

Images improve the user experience by making your content more appealing and memorable, and providing a break from the body text. You can also use graphics to explain complex ideas in a visual way.

Pictorial content will give you a big SEO boost by increasing the time people spend on your site, and ensuring you also appear in the image search results.

For brand consistency, make sure your corporate colors and company logo appear across all channels. If these elements help to show off your brand personality, so much the better.

#7 Find a good influencer

Partnering with industry influencers is a good way to attract more traffic to your site, as their followers will be encouraged to connect with you. It’s best to build links with influencers who match your own brand voice and values, to make those connections more obvious.

Even if you don’t go as far as forging a partnership, you can still take inspiration from influencers by following and subscribing to their content. Remember, you’re not looking to copy someone else’s style – just learn from people who do it well.

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Looking to the future

Once you’ve calibrated your brand voice for SEO and your business is reaping the rewards, don’t stop there! There are a few more strategies to consider for future content campaigns.

Monitor social media

As social media continues to grow in popularity, it pays to monitor other companies’ channels and identify which social media posts get the best engagement. You can then use these insights to structure the tags and descriptions of your own pages, to increase the chances of traffic. 

Get ready for voice search

You should also ensure that your organization is optimized for voice search, which is set to take off over the next few years. Thanks to “digital assistants” such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, potential customers are conducting searches in a different way.

Because people tend to use complete questions in a voice search (rather than typing a few words into Google), search engine algorithms will focus on analyzing overall intent instead of exact keywords. This means long-tail keywords will become standard for all search rankings.

Think global

If your company wants to attract international customers, you should consider a multilingual marketing strategy. This will help your brand voice appeal to people around the world by making your content accessible across different languages and cultures.

SEO is the key to getting your brand voice heard

Your brand voice is one of your most important assets when it comes to attracting potential customers in a highly competitive world.

If you make the effort to understand those customers and their needs, you’ll be able to speak their language and work out the best ways to entice them in. When people buy into the values demonstrated by a consistent brand voice, visitors will be converted into loyal followers.

Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and web content successfully, and you’ll see an increase in site traffic – helping you rise up those all-important SERP rankings.