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[INFOGRAPHIC] How to tell a magnetic visual story on social media https://t.co/RODGynGVUI #SMM9/13/2018
Augmented reality. It sounds like a term that should be used to describe a science fiction movie. But augmented reality (AR) has become a force to be reckoned with in 2018. By definition, AR uses technology to superimpose computer-generated visuals on the user's view of their real-world surroundings, which creates a composite view. It sounds a bit complicated, but as you'll see shortly, it's actually a pretty basic concept you might be familiar with. Although this technology is seemingly still in its infant stages, as marketers, we need to keep a close eye on how augmented reality can affect our brands. The most successful businesses stay informed on the top marketing trends each year. AR is a topic that needs to be on your radar. You need to take AR into consideration when devising your search engine optimization strategy. SEO and AR? Yes, on the surface these two ideas may not seem to be related, but they are. I wanted to explain why. That was my inspiration for writing this guide. If you aren't familiar with augmented reality, I'll explain where this technology is now and how it's being used. I'll also show you some plans and predictions for the future and how you can apply this technology to your business. The basic concepts of augmented realityBefore we talk about the future of AR and how it will impact your SEO strategy, I want to make sure you really understand it works. In short, augmented reality uses technology to overlay visuals onto surroundings in the real world. A great example of this technology used in popular culture is the Pokemon Go app. Users find fictional cartoon characters in real-world locations surrounding them. Look at the image above. Obviously, this character isn't actually standing in the grass. If the phone wasn't there, all you would see is the grass, road, water, and a bridge. Furthermore, if the user turned and looked to their left or right, the character wouldn't be there either. It's a really cool concept that helped Pokemon Go become one of the most popular and successful gaming apps of all time. But we'll talk more about that later. Augmented reality isn't just used for games. Social media apps Snapchat and Instagram both have AR features. This technology is increasing in popularity and users are growing to accept its application in their lives. Understanding the differences between AR and VRAugmented reality and virtual reality are two terms that often get confused. That's because we don't use either of them every day, at least not yet. AR and VR are similar because they both allow you to experience something you normally wouldn't see in your life without the use of technology. That said, augmented reality and virtual reality are very different. Virtual reality has a much deeper impact on the user experience. Basically, an entirely new world is created using VR technology. New sounds, images, video, and senses are all part of the VR experience that gets generated by computers. Virtual reality typically requires special headsets or goggles in addition to headphones if users are experiencing it on their own, such as a virtual reality game. But games aren't the only way to experience VR. It's also used in movies, concerts, and education. Amusement parks have virtual reality rides. The military uses virtual reality to put soldiers in combat scenarios. What else do AR and VR have in common? They both have a bright future. As you can see from this graph, experts are predicting shipments of AR and VR equipment to astronomically skyrocket over the next few years. This will result in high revenues for businesses in these industries. Now, take a look at this graphic more carefully. VR equipment is expected to ship more than double the units of AR equipment by the year 2021. However, the AR revenue is expected to be two and half times higher on those units. That's what makes augmented reality so appealing. You can get a high ROI on this technology because the equipment isn't as cost-intensive and cumbersome as that of VR. How augmented reality affects search enginesNow let's dive into the SEO aspects of augmented reality. All of the major search engines have algorithms for displaying search results. That's how websites get ranked based on what terms people are searching for. Many factors go into these algorithms so the content that gets displayed is relevant to the searcher. Search engines use bots, also known as crawlers, to analyze your website content so that your pages can be ranked accordingly based on searches. With the growing popularity of augmented reality, we can expect these search engines to adjust their algorithms accordingly. As you can see from the graph, augmented reality has been implemented in a wide variety of industries. Each year, the number of installed AR apps has been increasing. I'm not expecting to see this trend slowing down in the near future. In fact, I'm expecting it to grow exponentially. So offering AR content could potentially improve your search ranking. Furthermore, these search engines themselves could employ augmented reality features to improve the search experiences of users. I'll show you some examples of this later on. If you want to stay on top of the latest technological advancements, you need to keep your eye on augmented reality trends. Right now, SEO marketers use all different types of visuals to improve their content and search ranking. That includes:
As a marketer, you may also want to consider ways to implement augmented reality into your content strategy. This is especially important if you're targeting users browsing from mobile devices. AR is a feature that can help improve the profitability of your small business mobile app. Local SEO and augmented realityFor starters, you need to recognize how AR can impact local SEO. Last year, 97% of consumers searched for a local business online. These types of local searches are different. For example, if you search for an electrician in Florida, your results will differ from those of someone who searches for an electrician in California. There are different factors in search algorithms that go into these local rankings. You need to plan for potential changes that augmented reality could bring in the future. Mobile apps used for rating or reviewing businesses could start to employ AR technology. The same goes for Google business listings. Here's how it could potentially work. A consumer walks by your store. Rather than searching for the name of your business, they just open their mobile app that has AR features. Now they can see reviews of your business just by pointing their mobile device in the direction of your store. Your listings need to be accurate and up to date. Plan accordingly for this type of feature because it's coming in the future. You'll also want to make sure that the details of your business are SEO friendly on all devices. People will be browsing on phones, tablets, and computers. The application of this AR concept would look something like this: Users would see the star ratings of your business and be able to read customer reviews and testimonials that increase your brand credibility. They'll see your contact information and be able to make a reservation or set up an appointment directly from these AR platforms. Google is already testing AR featuresWhen you're trying to predict the future of new technology, it's always a good idea to see how giant corporations are planning to implement new features. Google plans on making changes to improve Google Maps using augmented reality. This image is a prototype of what this AR feature could look like. There is no release date on this update just yet. It might be something the company is just experimenting with. That said, don't be surprised to see some version of this AR feature coming to its app soon. Google is also planning to release another new feature for its maps app that's going to offer recommendations to each user. This “for you” feature is something that Google actually plans to implement, as you can see with the tweet confirming this from earlier this year. Who knows, maybe Google is planning to pair this update with the AR features it's been experimenting with as well. Social media SEODoes social media relate to search engine optimization? This is a tricky question. Marketers have been trying to determine this for a while, but there haven't been concrete answers. Google says your social engagements don't have an impact on your SEO ranking. However, a recent study from Hootsuite suggests otherwise. This research suggests there is a correlation between social engagement and change in search ranking. As engagements increase, search ranking rises. Let's bring this back to AR. Social media platforms have been using augmented reality features. Your business needs to start taking advantage of those features on your social channels as well. This will increase your social engagement and, in theory, improve your SEO ranking. Some examples of basic social media features that have AR technology elements include Instagram stories, Facebook 360-videos, and Snapchat filters. While these applications of augmented reality are very simple, I'm expecting more in-depth forms of this technology to come in the future. Using augmented reality to improve ASOUnlike VR, AR depends on your location in the real world. I discussed this concept earlier, giving examples. Pokemon Go characters won't be the same everywhere. It depends on where you are located specifically. The same holds true for Google local listings and the potential implications for the future of those apps. Now it's time for you to use this information to your advantage. Implement AR in your mobile app and combine it with geofencing technology. Come up with a strategy unique for your business. Encourage your app users to use your augmented reality features. Give them incentives or rewards for using AR. These features will help your app grow in popularity and ultimately improve the ranking of your business mobile app. App store optimization, or ASO, is not quite the same as SEO. However, the two concepts are definitely in the same family. Just look at how the AR app Pokemon Go was able to succeed in the first month after its launch compared to the other top grossing mobile games: This app was this successful because people love the AR features. Adding AR to your app will help your ASO. Ultimately, improving your ASO will help with SEO because of the improved brand exposure and increased traffic to your website. You don't need to use social media or have a gaming app to use AR on your mobile app. There are apps out there right now taking advantage of this feature. A great example of this is the IKEA Place app: This app uses augmented reality to show users what different pieces of furniture would look like in rooms of their homes. This drastically improves the user experience since they can have an idea what their rooms will look like without having to buy and build the furniture first. Geotargeting with AR featuresYou can also expect geotargeting to be combined with augmented reality in the future. Marketers are already using location-based services to target consumers. AR will bring this concept to the next level. Here's a futuristic look at how AR might be used with geotargeting: In fact, 32% of consumers are already using augmented reality apps. The writing is on the wall. They're ready for changes to be made. It shouldn't be difficult for marketers to show proof of concept once they launch campaigns and app features like the hypothetical example shown above. Since the consumers are primed for this technology, you and your business need to be ready to adapt as well if you want to survive. ConclusionAugmented reality is here. It's time for your business to start planning for the implementation of this technology in the future. Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying you need to drop everything you're doing right now and start focusing on AR. We're not quite there yet. But as you've seen from the research, trends, and examples I've covered in this guide, the daily use of AR is right around the corner. Augmented reality is going to affect all of us when it comes to SEO. It might not be this year or next year, but it's coming. Those of you who are ready to adapt to these changes will have a huge advantage over your competitors. How is your business preparing for the future of augmented reality? User signals! It's the one thing SEOs don't optimize for. I don't know why most SEOs ignore this metric considering how important it is to Google. See, Google doesn't care to put the website with the most backlinks at the top or the best on page SEO… they want to put the website that you and other people love at the top. That's why they look at user signals. Now, if you aren't familiar with user signals, check out this experiment by Rand Fishkin that I discussed in a recent article. It shows that if everyone performed a Google search and clicked on the 4th listing instead of the first one, the 4th skyrockets to the top spot almost instantly. I'm not saying you should tell your users to click on your listings over the competition. Instead, you should focus on the user. Because if you can make users love your site, then you will rank higher over time. So, my team and I thought it would be fun to look at the Google Analytics accounts of websites that have never been impacted negatively from a Google algorithm update to see what type of sites Google loves to rank (and their user signals). By looking at metrics related to the user such as bounce rate, time on site, pageviews per visitors (and 5 other signals), we were able to come up with benchmarks that you should aim for. We ended up analyzing 518 sites. But before we go into our findings, here are some notes about the data:
Let's start. User signal #1: Bounce rateYou've heard the term bounce rate before. And you know that you want to get it as low as possible. But before I get into that, let's break down the definition: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. We found that Google loves sites that have a bounce rate between 26% and 69%: Based on the type of site you have, you should aim to have a bounce rate as close to (if not better than) the sites above. If you have a bounce rate that is higher, just follow these 13 steps to help reduce it. User signal #2: Mobile friendlinessRoughly 60% of all searches take place on a mobile device. Because more people search Google using a mobile device and due to the fact that they have a mobile-first index, we thought it would be wise to see if sites that are in the good graces of Google have a mobile-friendly site. As you can see, all 518 sites had a mobile-friendly site. In almost all cases, they didn't have a “separate” site just for mobile, instead, their website was responsive. This also makes sense because these days you have to think mobile first when you are designing or creating any website. If your website isn't responsive, you should get that fixed ASAP. And I know some of you are probably wondering about AMP. Most of the sites we looked at were not leveraging the AMP framework as they weren't all blogs. User signal #3: Average load timeThis is the only metric we didn't leverage from Google Analytics or Search Console. Instead, we ran each website through Pingdom. In general, the faster your website loads the better off you are. Why would you want people to have to wait 5 or 10 seconds for your site to load? I know I don't like waiting. Google not only uses it as a factor within their algorithm but the slower your site loads the fewer sales you will generate. If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a second in load time delay will roughly cost you $2.5 million in lost sales each year. If you want to improve your load time in the eyes of Google, check out this Page Speed Insights tool that they have. It breaks down exactly what you need to fix. Don't worry about getting a perfect score, just get as high as possible. User signal #4: Percentage of repeat visitorsNo one really knows the exact factors Google uses in their algorithm. And no one has proof if Google is using data from Google Analytics, Chrome, or toolbars (as far as I know). But if I had to guess, I would say there is a high chance they are assuming it is legal. One of the signals I would look at is repeat visitors. The fact that someone keeps going back to a website tells Google that it has loyalty and people love it. As you can see from the graph above, websites that have done well on Google have anywhere from 16% to 45% repeat visitors. When you are starting off, your repeat visitor count is going to be extremely high because it's going to be you and your friends continually going back to your site. But as you grow, you'll notice that it will drop to less than 10%. To get visitors continually coming back to your website, you'll want to use tools like Subscribers. It's a simple tool. It uses browser notifications to get people back to your site. As you can see from the screenshot above, I used Subscribers to get 42,316 people back to my site 174,281 times. User signal #5: Percentage of search traffic from brand queriesI've blogged about this in the past and have even shown you how my search traffic started to climb as my brand queries grew. Just as a quick recap, I found that as more people Googled “Neil Patel” or variations of it, Google started to rank my site for other terms like “online marketing.” Once I learned that brand queries help, I spent more time on building a brand. Now during any given month, I generate roughly 40,412 visitors per month from brand related terms: I even generate 3,806 brand queries on YouTube: It's not just me either. Sites that continually dominate Google also have brand queries as a portion of their search traffic. And these sites aren't just getting people to search for their brand, but a high portion of those searches land back to their site. In other words, their brand queries have a high click-through rate. If you want to dominate Google, you need to build a brand. The bigger your brand and the more loyal people are to it, the more search traffic you'll get over time. If you aren't familiar with how to build a brand, check out hack number 3 in this article that I recently wrote. User signal #6: Click-through rateSpeaking of click-through rate, we thought it would be interesting to analyze everyone's Google Search Console to see the click-through rate these sites had. Most of these sites had click-through rates between 1.9% and 3.1%. If your website has a low click-through rate, you can improve it by following these 13 steps. My best advice is to continually A/B test your title and meta description tag to see if you can make it more appealing so that more people want to click on your search listing as opposed to your competitor's. User signal #7: Pageviews per visitorIf someone continually browses your site and visits many pages, you are usually doing something right because it means that people like your content, product, service, or whatever else you are offering. Of course, you can game the system by writing a really long article and only putting a few hundred words on each page and make people click a “next” button to keep reading more. But that's a terrible user experience and you don't want to do that. You want people to naturally want to visit tons of pages on your website without having to trick them. So how many pageviews per visitor do high ranking sites have? Well, here's the average: If you want to boost your pageviews per visitor, just follow the tips in this article. User signal #8: Average time on siteYou don't want people to leave your site… unless they are going to buy something or click on ad. You want them to stay on your site as long as possible. As you can see from the chart above, websites that ranked well on Google were able to keep people around for at least 1.6 minutes if not all the way up to 5 minutes. Now the 5-minute number is going to be a bit tough, but if you can keep people on your site for over 2 minutes you are going to do well. Plus, you'll have fewer chances of getting hit by a Google Panda penalty. This article will teach you how to keep people on your website longer (without tricking them). ConclusionTo dominate Google, you need to think like Google. It's not just about gaming the system and tweaking your site so that Google loves you. It's more about understanding their main objective, which is to put the user first. That means that if you also put the user first, in the long run, your rankings should slowly climb. Now, this doesn't mean you can ignore normal SEO practices like on-page SEO and link building, but instead, you need to do all of that in parallel with focusing on the user. So how do your metrics stack up with the benchmarks above? The post What Do Sites That Have Never Been Penalized by Google Look Like? appeared first on Neil Patel.
Feel naked without your smartphone? You're not alone. That phenomena - and the move to smaller and smaller screens - has pushed marketers to adapt their practices and technologies to provide a mobile-optimized experience. That much isn't new. But as consumers have grown more and more reliant on their smartphones, a mobile-optimized site isn't enough. You have to reshape the experience to fit the new mobile-only behavior. When consumers pick up and unlock their phone, they enter a distinct mobile mindset, where whatever purpose they're looking to fulfill, they expect comfort and escapism. This new mobile mindset affects the content they're like to consume on their mobile device, and subsequently, has a huge impact on their buying behavior. That is the main conclusion of The Truth Behind Smartphone Behavior, Clicktale's latest research with The Wharton School. Our in-depth analysis of mobile taps, scrolls, zooms, and user journeys of more than a million consumers will bring you up-to-scratch on what guides smartphone buying behavior. Entertain Me When users are in their mobile mindset, they don't want challenging content or want to think too much. Which means that consumers are less likely to engage with scientific content or anything that is simply factual. Instead, they seek entertainment and relaxation. Our research found that, on a mobile device, consumers are 35 percent more likely to engage with feature articles and sports than hard news. The Need for Speed Most marketers know that the mobile experience needs to be slick in terms of speed. Google research recently found that 53 percent of visits are abandoned by users if the page doesn't load within three seconds. Three seconds! And our research found that the need for speed extends to user journeys and the content itself. The journey needs to be as short as possible. Also keep in mind that fast and functional content on brand websites or apps, including clearance items, coupons, and store locators tended to fare much better in terms of engagement than long-form content, such as Q&As or long features, for example. Convenience, Convenience, Convenience Because consumers are in a relaxed (borderline lazy) mobile mindset when they interact with their smartphones, convenience is everything. In fact, it's so important that nearly a third (31 percent) of consumers admit they are happy to pay more for a product or service if the mobile shopping experience is better. Millennials especially place great importance on mobile experience, with 43 percent saying they would pay more for something provided brands give them a five-star shopping experience. Mobile users are even happy to pay more in shipping fees than desktop users ($3.5 vs $3.3 respectively). Building the Mobile Marketing Mindset So, the three key takeaways from the research for marketers looking to improve the customer experience on mobile are: Make it entertaining, make it easy, and make it quick. But more than that, the research shows the importance of understanding the intent behind consumer decisions on mobile devices. In my experience, marketers are far too focused on metrics such as conversion rate and cart abandonment to notice what really makes their customers tick. Technology is partly to blame for that trend. Analytics on conversion rates, page clicks, social media impressions, and the like have been around for years now. The opportunity today is to move to experience analytics - where it's possible to gain a much deeper understanding of customer intent through the capture of app taps, scrolls, zooms, pinches, and more - and then use data science to interpret the data's meaning. Turn the pixelated view you have of your customers into crystal clarity.
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