SEO 101 states; the more* links pointing to your page, the better. But just how long does it take to influence the SERPs?
*by more, I mean more quality links and not spammy links obtained by blackhat techniques.
Kristina Kledzik, recently published an article on Moz about her findings after experimenting with some of her old posts.
She started by using some of her less-popular posts on Distilled (where she works) and set about picking out 76 links pointing to pages which are all similar to each other in content, and they didn't change that content (significantly) for 6 months. She focused on rankings for target keywords with a 25–35% Keyword Difficulty Rating (A Moz metric if you're interested) and she looked at two versions of their target keywords, so she could have a bit more data.
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In its latest update to investors Twitter reported poor user growth now with a total of 313 million monthly active users, the social network added only 3 million users in the past three months and added a total of 11 million new users since the first quarter of 2015.
This chart clearly shows how the growth rate of Twitter is lagging behind that of its competitors. Instagram recently passing the 500 million user mark while WhatsApp and most definitely Facebook are way ahead in terms of user growth.
Data: Company reports; China Internet Watch (compiled by Statista)
Source: www.statista.com
ComScore research has also shown that Facebook dominates both social media by audience and engagement, with 63% of the 18-34 age gap audience accessing the app on a monthly basis and 15 days on average per month that the app has been accessed. Both the ComScore…
Investing in social is all well and good, but you need a strategy first if you want it to get results
New data from the CMO's survey of 2016 report shows how major companies are planning on big increases in social media spending in coming years, yet are failing to properly integrate it into their digital strategies.
As you can see from the table below, social media spending is set to double from 10% of marketing budgets to 20% in coming years. B2C services are the biggest social spenders, with a full quarter of marketing budgets to be allocated to social by 2021.
When asked about how effectively their companies are integrating their social media efforts with the overall marketing strategy CMOs are pretty damning. Although there has been a very slight uptick of the past…
The average number of connected devices per consumer is 3.64
When we think of communicating with consumers through digital devices we know that mobile devices have become far more important in recent years with many businesses seeing more than 50% of consumers website sessions on mobile devices. This growth has led to the 'mobile-first' philosophy, yet we should remember that consumer usage is more complex than this. Many consumers and households are multi-platform, using a combination of smartphone, desktop and tablet devices.
This ownership is shown by this 2016 data which shows and average of nearly 4 devices per person. So typically that will be desktop, phone, tablet plus other devices such as connected TVs or consoles. Another survey by Pew Internet showed that 36% of Americans own a desktop, tablet and smartphone.
So a clear implication of the…
Digital trumps offline when it comes to return on investment
A survey of 200 US retail marketing executives with the power to make budget allocation decisions shows their views of whether digital or offline channels give greater ROI. Over three quarters reported that digital channels gave them better ROI in 2016 than offline channels.
This is good news for digital marketers who can show their strategies and tactics are paying off, at least in the context of US retail. It's also good for those pushing their company to engage in a meaningful digital transformation program. This can be a useful top-level piece of evidence to build the case for greater spending on digital.
Source: Retailmenot
Sample: 200 US retail marketers
Date: July 2016
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Recent analysis has highlighted how more often than not, longer-form content out-performs short-form.
The introduction of "Panda" changed the search landscape quite drastically. No longer was awful, poorly written content dancing around at the top of the SERPs, instead it is wallowing away in the "double digitted" results pages.
The ever-present Brian Dean over at Backlinko recently conducted some analysis of over 1 million Google search results, to answer the question...
Which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings?
It's a great piece, so I'd recommend checking it out. But one of the most pertinent takeaways for us here at Smart Insights, were the findings around content length. It's something as a editors and content creators we wrestle with on a daily basis.
Something that comes as no surprise is that there is a blatant correlation between…
With more than 100 billion calls expected to be made to businesses each year, here's a break-down of what is driving them.
Recently, Invoca published their Call Intelligence Index 2016 where they dissected the most influential marketing channels for driving calls to businesses.
It doesn't come as a shock to many that digital marketing outperforms more traditional forms of marketing, such as Newspapers, TV & Directory.
Again, somewhat unsurprisingly, mobile search outperforms all other channels of marketing by quite some distance. With over 48% of all calls to businesses coming from mobile search, it again highlights the growing importance and impact it has over our world. The ability to wrap CTA's such as Google’s call-only ad types and click-to-call buttons have proven too convenient to ignore.
Desktop search comes in as the second highest driver of calls to businesses, accounting for…
More than half of app users allow push notifications
Every wondered just how many app users enable push notifications? Well, wonder no more. It's crucial in the busy mobile app marketplace to use notifications sensitively to increase engagement and retention of app users, so this benchmark stat is surely good news to many app developers and marketers.
Data: MIDIA Research
Source: https://www.midiaresearch.com
This chart has been produced with data from 5 leading app vendors, which represent over 65,000 apps worldwide.
Further insights from MIDIA Research also include:
Travel and transport sectors have the highest push notification opt in rates. As opt in rates vary across verticals some sectors such as food and drink suffer low opt in rates, which could be because the app content isn't time or location specific.
More apps than ever are asking users to allow push notifications, which although rates are currently stable,…
Does your SaaS business measure these key metrics?
New research from Totango reveals the metrics that are being tracked by most Saas businesses. Their survey of over 300 SaaS businesses found that whilst the vast majority measure basic metrics like churn and web visitors, surprisingly few measure customer retention cost. Retention cost is important for SaaS businesses, because churn rates make a huge difference to long-term profitability. It's good to see 80% of SaaS businesses measuring churn, as this is crucial to long growth, as this post on ideas to reduce SaaS churn shows. Really that figure should be closer to 100%. If you're not measuring churn then your setting yourself up to fail.
For reviewing benchmarks of actual performance there are some great compilations including these SaaS business metrics in an updated Google Sheet from Nathan Latka…
With the ever changing digital landscape, where do our CMO's see the future of their marketing departments?
The economist recently published their report The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience, which is based on a global survey of 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives, plus in-depth interviews with leading CMOs to research which technologies and customer trends are likely to change marketing organisations.
The research eluded to some interesting trends, the first of which is that it takes into account that all CMO's have some form of strategy and a goal they are trying to achieve. At Smart Insights, we're big advocates of having a strategy in place to help you reach your goals. If you want to do a little further reading on developing your own strategy, have a read of this post.
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