SEO Digital Group

Posted by tombennet When it comes to direct traffic in Analytics, there are two deeply entrenched misconceptions. The first is that it’s caused almost exclusively by users typing an address into their browser (or clicking on a bookmark). The second is that it’s a Bad Thing , not because it has any overt negative impact on your site’s performance, but rather because it’s somehow immune to further analysis. The prevailing attitude amongst digital marketers is that direct traffic is an unavoidable inconvenience; as a result, discussion of direct is typically limited to ways of attributing it to other channels, or side-stepping the issues associated with it. In this article, we’ll be taking a fresh look at direct traffic in modern Google Analytics. As well as exploring the myriad ways in which referrer data can be lost, we’ll look at some tools and tactics you can start using immediately to reduce levels of direct traffic in your reports. Finally, we’ll discover how advanced analysis an...

Posted by kerryjones In my last post, I discussed why your top funnel content shouldn’t be all about your brand . Today I’m making a 180-degree turn and covering the value of content at the opposite end of the spectrum: content that’s directly about your business and offers proof of your effectiveness. Specifically, I’m talking about case studies. I’m a big believer in investing in case studies because I’ve seen firsthand what happened once we started doing so at Fractl. Case studies were a huge game changer for our B2B marketing efforts. For one, our case studies portfolio page brings in a lot of traffic – it’s the second most-visited page on our site, aside from our home page. It also brings in a significant volume of organic traffic, being our fourth most-visited page from organic searches. Most importantly, our case studies are highly effective at converting visitors to leads – about half of our leads view at least one of our case studies before contacting us. Assuming anyon...

Posted by Dr-Pete Over the past two years, we've seen a steady and substantial increase in Featured Snippets on Google SERPs. In our 10,000-keyword daily tracking set, Featured Snippets have gone from about 5.5% of queries in November 2015 to a recent high of just over 16% (roughly tripling). Other data sets, with longer tail searches, have shown even higher prevalence. Near the end of October (far-right of the graph), we saw our first significant dip (spotted by Brian Patterson on SEL ). This dip occurred over about a 4-day period, and represents roughly a 10% drop in searches with Featured Snippets. Here's an enhanced, 2-week view (note: Y-axis is expanded to show the day-over-day changes more clearly): Given the up-and-to-the-right history of Featured Snippets and the investments people have been making optimizing for these results, a 10% drop is worthy of our attention. What happened, exactly? To be honest, when we investigate changes like this, the best we can usual...

Posted by randfish You don't want to try to rank for every one of your competitors' keywords. Like most things with SEO, it's important to be strategic and intentional with your decisions. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his recommended process for understanding your funnel, identifying the right competitors to track, and prioritizing which of their keywords you ought to target. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. So this week we're chatting about your competitors' keywords and which of those competitive keywords you might want to actually target versus not. Many folks use tools, like SEMrush and Ahrefs and KeywordSpy and Spyfu and Moz's Keyword Explorer , which now has this feature too, where they look at: What are the keywords that my competitors rank for, that I may be interested in? This is actual...

Posted by EricEnge Should you AMP-lify your site in 2018? This is a question on the mind of many publishers. To help answer it, this post is going to dive into case studies and examples showing results different companies had with AMP. If you’re not familiar with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), it’s an open-source project aimed at allowing mobile website content to render nearly instantly. This initiative that has Google as a sponsor, but it is not a program owned by Google, and it’s also supported by Bing, Baidu, Twitter, Pinterest, and many other parties. Some initial background Since its inception in 2015, AMP has come a long way. When it first hit the scene, AMP was laser-focused on media sites. The reason those types of publishers wanted to participate in AMP was clear: It would make their mobile sites much faster, AND Google was offering a great deal of incremental exposure in Google Search through the “Top Stories news carousel.” Basically, you can only get in the Top St...

Posted by randfish It's common industry knowledge that PPC can have an effect on our organic results. But what effect is that, exactly, and how does it work? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the ways paid ads influence organic results — and one very important way it doesn't. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about AdWords and how PPC, paid search results can potentially impact organic results. Now let's be really clear. As a rule... Paid DOES NOT DIRECTLY affect organic rankings So many of you have probably seen the conspiracy theories out there of, "Oh, we started spending a lot on Goolge AdWords, and then our organic results went up." Or, "Hey, we're spending a lot with Google, but our competitor is spending even more. That must be why they're ranking better in...