Study: Rich Media In Search Drives Increased Click-Through
Is ranking in the number one position a guaranteed way to earn the lion's share of clicks from search? Columnist Nathan Safran's research suggests rich snippets may factor in, too.
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Nathan Safran's latest articles
The Shifts In Consumer Behavior Driving Google’s Maturation
Columnist Nathan Safran takes a look at where Google is heading -- and what challenges it faces -- in the age of mobile.
Research Reveals The Distinct Ways Users Search
Columnist Nathan Safran shares data and insights from a recent study conducted by Blue Nile Research that may change the way you think about keyword research.
To Grow Your Career, See The Whole Customer Experience
It's important for SEO professionals to be well-versed in search, but columnist Nathan Safran reminds us that true leaders understand the bigger picture as well.
It’s Time For Marketers To Attend To The Branding Benefits Of Search
Google recently released a study that concluded, “Search Ads Lift Brand Awareness.” The study tested brand recall for searchers who had seen the target brand in paid search ads against a control group who had not been exposed to the brand. The study concluded that brand-exposed searchers had a 6.6% increase (80% lift) over the […]
Competitive Analysis: The Most Valuable SEO Tactic You Ignore [Data]
When it comes to getting ahead in search, experts agree that competitive analysis is critical. International search engine optimization (SEO) consultant Aleyda Solis observes: One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial competitive analysis. In a nod to how important she thinks it is, she created a sophisticated workflow to […]
4 Intangible Benefits Of Content You Shouldn’t Overlook
The benefits of the ever-increasing intersection of digital marketing and technology are clear: we can measure the impact of our online efforts like never before. But, along with tracking valuable content metrics like traffic, downloads and bounce rate, we should remember that content has intangible benefits that should be part of any ROI discussion. The […]
Why It’s Good To Compete With Google
If you talk to a room full of veteran digital marketers, a topic that eventually comes up is competition — specifically, the fact that our competition in search is often not immediately obvious. You can miss out on understanding your online competition for a few different reasons. For example, marketers sometimes erroneously assume that brick-and-mortar […]
4 Revealing Facts About How Consumers Search And Buy Online
A recently released study by retail engagement firm Parago examined how consumers research and buy across several product categories. The research is chock full of insight about how people buy, with broad implications for digital marketers. I want to focus on one aspect of the research: insight into consumer behavior when the buyer is in […]
If Online Ad Targeting Works, Does More Targeting Work Better?
A former colleague at Forrester Research recently published a study that described his view of the future of online marketing. The study is available to Forrester clients only, but the crux of the argument is laid out in a blog post: Why Google – Not Facebook – Will Build The Database Of Affinity. The author, […]
Authority Is The New Links: Reading Between The Lines Of Matt Cutts’ Guest Post Critique
The SEO industry has been all aflutter over the last few weeks, ever since Matt Cutts stated that guest blogging is dead. In The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO — a headline that is a particularly strong statement from Google’s Head of Webspam — Cutts essentially said that if you are link building by […]
The Bing Dilemma: What To Do With The Little Search Engine That Can’t
The challenge that Microsoft faces in the online search landscape could be a business school case study: how to capture market share from a competitor whose very brand (“Google”) has become synonymous with the act of searching online. Imagine that you are the person at Microsoft responsible for Bing’s success and are tasked with moving […]
4 Recent Changes To SEO That Are Vital To Holiday Retail Strategy
It’s the holiday season again, and while certain sectors may be winding down for a relaxing month of festivities, online sellers are revving up their retail strategy. It’s a crucial, make-or-break time of year for retailers to excel in customer service, gift-wrapping services, and, of course, search. A lot has happened in digital marketing in […]
3 Ways Competitive Analysis Can Help You Boost Rankings & Get Great Content Ideas
I’ve noticed that many digital marketers tend to keep their heads down, laser-focused on their own site’s position in the SERPs. Some do so more by necessity than by choice, because budgets and headcount are limited, and there is more than enough to do in moving their own websites up the search rankings. Others do […]
Google Seeks Searcher Satisfaction: How Marketers Can Keep Up
In late September, Google announced it had been gradually rolling out Hummingbird, a completely new search algorithm. The algorithm emphasizes semantic search and focuses on understanding the meaning behind the user query rather than simply trying to match instances of words in its Web index. Take a look at Danny Sullivan’s great FAQ for more […]
The End Of One-Size-Fits-All SEO Reporting
If your organization is like most, the process of establishing KPIs to track natural search probably looks something like this: “Put together high-level KPIs such as X and Y, and run it by a few key stakeholders.” At first glance, that process likely seems to have worked pretty well — after all, few stakeholders make […]
Online Marketers: Make Sure You Surface The Right Content To Your Audience
When it comes to online marketing, the conventional wisdom has been that the overarching goal is to have content — any content, so long as it links back to my website — appear in front of the user. Put another way, the thinking for many has long been that the singularly-focused goal is to appear […]
“Big Data” Is Not “Big Data” Unless It Gives You Actionable Insight
Occasionally, marketers want something because the media attention around it demands it. There was a time, not too long ago, when CMOs sent urgent, late-night emails to their teams asking about their “link-shortening strategy.” In some ways, “big data” technology falls into that category. Mainstream tech media and even traditional media outlets write about it […]
Content Creation & Organizational Empowerment Key To Search Success
The SEO industry has undergone significant changes in the last 12+ months. Search has gained greater legitimacy as a marketing channel as budget holders increase head count and invest in advanced technology. And, the SERPs themselves have undergone changes that have had many implications, including adjustments to the underlying algorithms that surface content. Here at […]
How to Counter Your Ignorant Boss’ Misconceptions About SEO
Any in-house SEO professional (or consultant) who has been in the industry for even a short time has likely had to dispel misconceptions and inaccuracies about SEO to a senior manager, budget holder or client. These misconceptions can often be so embedded that they result in an underfunded, under-resourced and under “mind-shared” SEO program. To […]
SEO Branding: Appearance In Search Results Impacts Brand Perception
Stop a search marketer on the street, whether a grizzled veteran or relative newcomer, and ask him/her to list the top goals of ranking in the search results; they will talk to you about traffic, revenue and conversions. Likewise, in reflecting what is top of mind for search marketers, a perusal of industry websites shows […]
The Search Engine We REALLY Want To See Google (Or Microsoft) Build
When you sit down and think about it, search engines today have not changed all that dramatically in terms of depth-of-insight compared to their early days. Google recently added the Knowledge Graph for a subset of queries; but at its core, the level of insight available to the searcher remains primarily the Web links on […]
How A Slight Change In Reporting Can Change Your SEO Practice Forever
The past 12-18 months have seen a great deal of attention around the concept of Big Data in the marketing world. The numerous ways in which Big Data promises to increase insight into online behavior, customer profiling and more has been written about extensively. At Conductor, we agree that Big Data will lead (or has […]
The New SEO Professional: Master Of Both Left & Right Brain
Compared to its ultimate impact, the beginnings of an earthquake are actually quite small. Likewise, in terms of scope, the Penguin algorithm update was relatively miniscule, affecting only 3.1% of queries. Its impact on the industry, however, was far greater, as the de-emphasis of thin content in the SERPs drove SEO professionals to place […]
Hot & Cold Trends In Search Going Into 2013
The end of the year in any industry marks a good opportunity to look back on the year and reflect on changes. This is particularly true in the SEO industry, given the volume and intensity of changes that have occurred in 2012 — from algorithmic changes to how SEO is perceived in the organization to […]
Overcoming The Catch 22 Of Investing In Search Without Proof Of Success
Some readers may be surprised to discover that despite the opportunity organic search offers — a recent Shareholic study showed organic search drives nearly half of all traffic, 5 times more than social networks combined — many executive budget holders are still reluctant to make an initial substantial investment in SEO. Other, battle-scarred veterans will […]
Google Searchers 3x More Likely To Be Logged-in Than Bing
A study we recently did at Conductor found that search engines still have work to do when it comes to integrating social search results in the SERPs: 62% of respondents reported they do not want or gain benefit from social results mixed in with search results. In the same survey, we asked the 150 respondents […]
How To Leverage PPC To Discover High-Converting Keywords For SEO
When starting out with a new search effort or performing a keyword refresh for an existing website, the options for discovering new keywords are limited only by the SEO’s imagination. From the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to digging through analytics, to leveraging sites like Soovle that discover ‘suggest’ keywords across multiple search engines, keyword discovery […]
3 Ways To Advance Maturity In Your SEO Metrics
The sophistication with which companies analyze their natural search visibility and the metrics they use to do so can vary widely up and down the spectrum. There is often little correlation between how sophisticated a company is in other areas of their online business and their level of sophistication when it comes to their natural […]
Making The Case For Adding Keyword Segmentation To Your SEO Repertoire
Last month in The Forgotten SEO Strategy: Targeting Striking Distance Keywords we talked about how search professionals could approach their keyword strategy by targeting keywords based on their ranking position. Specifically, we showed how they can target striking distance keywords—keywords ranking on page 2—to obtain some quick traffic wins while simultaneously building link equity for […]
The Forgotten SEO Strategy: Targeting Striking Distance Keywords
How you strategically approach your own unique search marketing landscape may be the first of many decisions you make on your search marketing journey, but it is also the most important. A difference of inches when aiming the arrow can translate to feet downrange. SEOs can often approach selecting target keywords with a strict “I’m-going-to-focus-on-the-keywords-with-the-highest-search-volume” […]
How Big Data Changed Crime Fighting & Is Changing The Practice Of SEO
In the mid 1990’s, New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani introduced a technology-based crime measurement system called CompStat. The system enabled Police leadership, for the first time, to discern crime trends and respond to crime fluctuations on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis rather than the limited incident-by-incident view they previously had. The system is credited with a […]
Could DuckDuckGo Be The Biggest Long-Term Threat To Google?
Robin Wauters at The Next Web recently wrote about an interesting trend taking place at upstart search engine DuckDuckGo. DDG (DuckDuckGo) is self-described as: We are a search engine with: Way more instant answers. Way less spam and clutter. Lots and lots of goodies. Real privacy. Wauters reports that DuckDuckGo’s daily search traffic has grown by […]
Dear Google: Take Me To Dinner First Before You Try To Score
In the ongoing wake of Search Plus Your World, there has been a lot of piling on the ‘beat down Google’ bandwagon. Much that has been written has been fair criticism of the search giant, but more than a small portion has been a gratuitous ‘piling on’ frenzy. I myself admittedly took part in some […]
How The Era Of ‘Big-Data’ Is Changing The Practice Of Online Marketing
In the early days of ‘Mad Men’ marketing, half of all Marketing spend was famously wasted – the Marketer just didn’t know which half. Many a Marketer’s sleepless night was spent wondering what levers of their Marketing spend to push forward and which to dial back. Then, along came the Internet, and with it a […]
How America’s Search Trends From 2011 Makes Google+ Stand Out
More than 300 Billion searches were made in the US in 2011, according to ComScore. In December each year, the Big Three search engines publish the most popular searches of the year. In 2011, the top ten searches from the three search engines added up to more than 250 million searches alone. We thought it […]