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When it comes e-commerce, the most important goal is to drive sales. Read on to learn how you can start boosting your e-commerce conversions today.
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
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Your content has an expiration date. In general, 95 percent of the content you create will get most of its traffic within the first two to three days of publishing. Content can become “old” within just a few weeks in some industries, while some types of content may continue to drive solid traffic for anywhere from 3-5 years before, inevitably, you’ll see diminishing returns. With old content, you’ll eventually have a choice: you can either remove or update it. Here are 10 smart reasons why you should update that older content. 1. Your CTR Is Terrible Head into the Google […]
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Posted by randfish
One decision that you’ll have to live with for quite a long time is the domain name you choose for your site. You may have a list of options that you know are available, but what should you keep in mind when you sit down to make the decision? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers eight criteria for picking a winner.
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are going to chat about choosing domain names, and, in fact, I’ve got eight rules for you that will help guide your domain name choices.
Now, it could be you’re starting a new brand. It could be that you have an existing brand and you’re trying to take it online. It might be that you’re working with clients who are taking their brand online. It could be that you’re starting a new company entirely. I love entrepreneurship, congratulations. Any of these ways, you’re going to need a website.
Before you do that, you should really think long and hard about the domain name that you choose and, in fact, the brand name that you choose and how that’s represented through your domain name online. Domain names have a massive impact all over the web in terms of click-through rate, from search to social media results, to referring links, to type-in traffic, brandability, offline advertising. There’s a huge wealth of places that your domain name impacts your brand and your online marketing, and we can’t ignore this.
So first rule that Rand has for how to choose a domain name.
Brandable, meaning when you hear the domain name, when you hear yourself or someone else say it, does it sound like a brand, or does it sound like a generic? So that means that hyphens and numbers are a real problem because they don’t make something sound like a brand. They make it sound generic, or they make it sound strange.
For example, if I try and say to you, “Look, let’s imagine that our new company that we’re starting together, you and I, is a website that has pasta recipes and potentially sells some pasta related e-commerce products on it.” If I tell you that I have pasta-shop.com, well, that’s hard to brand. It’s hard to say. It’s hard to remember.
Speaking of, is this brand memorable? So generic keyword strings are a big no-no. Generic keyword strings really tough to remember, really tough to stand out in the brain. You want something unique, which means try and avoid those exact and partial keyword match domain names. They tend not to do so well, in fact. If you look at the numbers that we see in MozCast, for example, or in correlation studies, you can see that, over the past 10 years, they have done nothing but trend down over time in terms of their correlation with rankings and their ability to show in the search results. Dangerous there.
I would probably stay away from something like a PastaRecipesOnline.com. I think BestPasta.com, maybe that’s getting a little bit better. PastaAficionado, well, it sounds brandable. For sure, it’s a little bit challenging to say. But it’s definitely unique.
I really like PastaLabs.com. Very brandable, unique, memorable, stands out. I’m going to remember it. It has kind of a scientific connotation to it. Fascinating. I might think about the domain name space that way.
You might say to yourself, “Rand, why is it so important that it’s pronounceable? Most people are going to be typing this in or they’re going to be clicking on a link, so why does it matter?”
In fact, it matters because of a concept called “processing fluency.” It’s a cognitive bias that human beings have where, essentially, we remember and have more positive associations with things that we can easily say and easily think about, and that includes pronounceability in our own minds. This is going to be different depending on the language that you’re targeting and which countries you’re targeting. But certainly, if you can’t easily say the name and others are not easily able to guess how to say that name, you’re going to lose that processing fluency, you’re going to lose that memorability and all the benefits of the brandability that you’ve created.
So I might stay away from things like FlourEggsH20.com. It’s clever. Don’t get me wrong. It’s unique. It’s clever. It might even be brandable, but it’s very difficult to pronounce and to recall. When you see it, you don’t know if that zero is an O. There are questions about like what does it necessarily mean or not.
Raviolibertine.com. Even I’m having trouble saying it. Raviolibertine? I would stay away from a little bit of the getting too clever for yourself, and many, many domain names do try to do that.
I might say, “You know what? Something like LandOfNoodles.com, while it doesn’t fulfill every requirement that we’ve got here, it is eminently pronounceable, easy to remember.” These are easy words that many people are very familiar with, at least in English. LandOfNoodles, whoops, I like LandOfNoodles. I’m giving it a check mark. Well, now I’ve messed up the Whiteboard. Hopefully, Elijah took a picture before I did that. Oh, he’s giving me the thumbs up. Good.
This means obey these other rules before you just go for raw length. But length matters. Length matters because of the processing fluency stuff we talked about before. But the fewer characters a domain name has, the easier it is to type, the easier it is to say, to share, the less it gets shortened on social media sharing platforms and in search results. So when you’ve seen those long domain names, they get compressed, or they might not show fully, or the URL might get cut off, or you might see just the t.co, all those kinds of things.
Therefore, short as possible. Shorter is definitely better. I might go for something short like MyPasta.com, but I’d be careful about going too short. For example, PastaScience.com is a pretty good domain name. PastaSci, I’ve lost that pronounceability and a little bit of that memorability. It’s a little bit tougher. It’s clearly a brand, but it’s a little awkward. I would probably stay away from that one and I’d stick with PastaScience.
I know, it’s 2016. Why are we still talking about .com? The internet’s been around 20-plus years. Why does .com matter so much when there are so many TLD extension options? The answer is, again, this is the most recognized, most easily accessible brand outside of the tech world.
If you’re talking about, “Look, all I’m doing is addressing developers and my pasta website only wants to talk to very, very tech savvy individuals, people who already work in the web world,” well okay, maybe it’s all right to go with a .pasta domain name. Perhaps you can actually buy that TLD extension now that ICANN has approved all these new domain names.
But cognitive fluency, processing fluency says, dictates that we should go with something that’s easy, that people have an association with already, and .com is still the primary thing that non-tech savvy folks have an association with. If you want to build up a very brandable domain that can do well, you want that .com. Probably, eventually, if you are very successful, you’re going to have to try and go capture it anyway, and so I would bias you to get it if you can.
If it’s unavailable, my suggestion would be to go with the .net, .co, or a known ccTLD. Those are your best bets. A known ccTLD might be something like .ca in Canada or .it in Italy, those kinds of things. That’s your next best bet. I’d still bias you to .com. But the PenneIsMightier.com, I’m particularly proud of this one. I think it’s a terrible pun, but a man’s got to do.
MacaroniMan.net, would I potentially think about that if I couldn’t get the .com? Yeah, possibly if I thought I was targeting a little bit more of a savvy audience and if I was pretty sure that MacaroniMan.com was owned by a squatter who just wouldn’t give it up, or it was owned by a small restaurant somewhere that I never had to really worry about competition with and they wouldn’t sell to me, yeah, okay, I might do it.
What about Impastable.co? Avoiding the fact that this is another terrible pun of mine, I might consider that if I absolutely couldn’t get Impastable.com and that was already my domain name and I felt like I had the branding ability to make the .co something people would associate with. I could consider that too.
You have to be very careful here because it’s not whether you think it could be confused. It’s whether you think any judge in the jurisdiction in which they might take legal action against you would consider those two things to be potentially misrepresented or potentially confusable. So it’s not your judgment. It’s not even your audience’s judgment. It’s what you think a judge in the jurisdiction might have the judgment about.
So this is dangerous waters. I would urge you to talk to your attorney or a legal professional about this if you have real concerns. But there is the danger and this does happen regularly throughout the web’s history where a trademark owner will come and sue a domain owner, someone who’s owning the domain legitimately and using it for business purposes or just someone who’s purchased it and is sitting on it, and that sucks.
This can also create brand confusion, which is hard for your brandability. So you might be familiar with some pasta brands that have done particularly well here in the U.S., like Barilla and Ronzoni and Rustichella d’Abruzzo. Well, I probably would not go get Barzilla.com even if you have a hilarious, Godzilla themed pun that you want to make about the pasta. Just because your name might be Ron and you are covering pasta, I still would not go with RonsZoni. Oops, I’m going to X those both out. Likewise, Rustichella — apologies for my poor Italian pronunciation — but Rustichella owns Rustichella.it. They don’t seem to own Rustichella.com. I think that’s owned by a domain name owner. But I would not go start up a website there. Rustichella certainly could, with their U.S. presence, go and claim trademark ownership of that domain and potentially get it from you. I would think that was risky.
If you believe that a member of your target audience, the audience that you’re trying to reach now and in the future, could immediately associate the domain name with a good guess of what they think you do, that is a big positive. Being able to look at that domain name and say, “Oh, I’m guessing they probably do this. This is probably what that company is up to.”
So something clever and subtle, like SavoryThreads.com, okay, yeah, once I get to your site, I might realize, “Oh, I see it’s sort of a playful word game there and ‘savory,’ I get that it’s about food.” But it’s too clever, in my opinion, and it doesn’t instantly suggest to a majority of your audience what it is that you do.
Likewise, AnnelloniToZiti.com, well, yeah, maybe I could guess that these are probably pasta names and it probably means that the website has something to do with that. But they’re not traditionally very well-known pastas. At least here in the United States, those shapes are not particularly well-known, and so I might cross that one out too, versus something where it is clearly, clearly about recipes for and potentially sales of goods, PastaPerfected.com. That’s obviously, intuitively about what it is going to be, and anyone from your audience could figure that out.
Keyword use in domain names, you might think, is an important thing and that would be something that I would mention here from an SEO perspective. It can help. Don’t get me wrong, it can help. It can help mostly for this instant intuition portion and the cognitive fluency and processing fluency biases that we’ve talked about, but also a little bit from an SEO perspective because of the anchor text that you generally will accrue when people link over to your domain. But what we’ve been seeing, as I mentioned earlier, is that Google’s been biasing away from these exact match and partial match keywords.
I would say that if you can get a keyword mention in your domain name that helps make it obvious what you’re about, go for it. But if you’re trying to target what would be called keyword rich or keyword targeted domains, I would generally stay away from those actually in 2016. They just don’t carry the weight that they used to, and there are a lot of associations, negative associations that users and search engines have about them that would make me stay away.
So I would not do something like a RecipesForPasta.com. I wouldn’t do something like BuyPastaOnline.com. I would be tempted to, in fact, go for something very, very broad like Gusto.com. Think about a brand like an Amazon.com, which clearly has no association with what it is, or Google itself, Google.com, or a domain here in Seattle area that serves lawyers that’s called Avvo.com. These are very, very well-branded and associated with their niches, but they don’t necessarily need to have a keyword richness to them.
Another great example, the find a dog sitter or find pet care website, Rover.com. Well, “rover” has an association with dogs, but it’s not really keyword rich. It’s more of a creative association just like “gusto” means “taste” in Italian. So I might be tempted to go in that direction instead. Same thing with something like Handcut.com. People have that, especially foodies are going to have that association between handcut and pasta.
If your domain name is not available, last one, it is okay to go out there and add a suffix or a prefix. It is okay to use an alternate TLD extension, like we talked about previously, and it’s okay to be a little bit creative with your online brand.
For example, let’s say my brand name is Pastaterra. Maybe I’ve already got a shop somewhere maybe in the Seattle area and I have been selling pasta at my shop and now I’m going online with it. Well, it is okay for me to do something like ThePastaterra.com, or PastaterraShop.com, or even Pastaterra.net. If I wanted to be very targeting a much more tech savvy set and was aware of the branding difficulties, I could conceivably go with something like Terra.pasta, because that pasta TLD extension is now available. But I could get a little bit broader. In fact, I might prefer this and go with something like RandOfTheTerra or RandsTerra.com or EatAtTerra. If I were a restaurant, I might do something like EatAtTerra.com.
So with these rules in mind, I would love to hear from all of you about your domain choices and your domain name biases and what you think is working in 2016 and potentially not working, and hopefully we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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Google has updated its Local Inventory Ads with a feature that allows searchers to browse in-stock products when the name of a retail location is searched for.
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Posted by Isla_McKetta
Feel like you’re already over the term “storytelling” without ever really having understood how you can successfully apply it to your writing? You aren’t alone. Like so much jargon, this amazingly powerful and useful word is in serious danger of being consigned to LinkedIn profiles and marketing parody.
Even storytelling guru Annette Simmons is over the way we’re teaching storytelling as a content cure-all.
“We need to stop ‘telling stories’ that oxytocin or the magic of a ‘narrative arc’ explain storytelling. It’s much bigger than science can explain. Storytelling is an art – subjective, emotional, and as variable as humanity is diverse.” – Annette Simmons
We can do better. Instead of yet another “stories=good” post, today we’re going to apply the logic of storytelling to site content. After you’ve read the last word, you should have the tools you need to draw a concrete map of how to tell your brand “story” with site content.
Note: I’m not knocking storytelling here. I’m a novelist. That’s illegal. I am knocking throwing the latest buzzword at our marketing and pretending like using the word makes us better at our jobs.
I promised not to flog you with the “stories are engaging so be engaging by telling stories” line, but if we dig just a little deeper we can understand one of the concrete arguments for storytelling: persuasion.
In her compelling book, The Story Factor, Annette Simmons reminds us that we can throw facts and figures at people all day long, but stories hold the real power to change someone’s mind.
“Your story needs to take [potential customers] on a tour of the aspects that step by step convinced you to believe so they can step by step come to believe the same things” – Annette Simmons
Take a moment to check this against your own experience. When was the last time someone truly shifted your perspective? If they did so using anything other than a story, it’s okay to stop reading here and find a tactic that you think will work better. But my guess is that some sort of story was involved.
Simmons outlines six types of stories we can use as humans and marketers to overcome objections:
“Who I am” stories and “why I am here” stories establish the groundwork you need to build trust with your audience. They naturally assume you’re in it for yourself and these stories allow you to share your motivations. If you get human enough, your audience might find common ground on which to connect with you.
Vision stories tell how things could be. This type of story shows your audience what’s in it for them. If you’re holding an all-hands meeting, your vision story might include a tale about how the company has triumphed over obstacles in the past. If you’re marketing a product, your vision story might speak to a future state where a problem (that your product solves) no longer has to exist.
Teaching stories give your audience an opportunity to learn from a mistake without ever having to make it. They also help you shape that audience’s understanding of the potential solutions available to them. For example, if I were to tell you that a site audit can help you understand all the content resources you have available to you and use Moz Content as my auditing tool, I’d be pointing you in the direction of a solution for you and also making it easy for you to choose our solution.
Values-in-action stories are similar to vision stories and teaching stories, but they focus on the core values you want to reinforce and provide examples. Simmons suggests focusing on positive value stories rather than “war stories.” One way to do this would be if a wedding dress company that prided itself on proper etiquette wrote a blog post about a bridal consultant who hand-wrote a thank-you card to every bride who purchased a dress from her.
The final type of story, the “I know what you are thinking” story, allows you to neutralize concern without that concern ever being raised. It’s relatively easy to anticipate an objection from your audience and to use this kind of story to get ahead of it.
This is where I wish I had a gorgeous illustration of the marketing funnel and that I could neatly fit these six story types in and presto change-o, poof! Your site content is perfectly optimized for storytelling and conversion.
Alas, life is a little harder than that. But we can get a good sense of which types of content are best for telling which types of stories. I’ll use Moz as an example because that’s close to my heart.
Moz is about three things: helping people be better marketers, building a strong community, and being TAGFEE. Free educational content has been a huge part of who we are since the very beginning when Rand was blogging about everything from the Google Link Command to Sandbox. That strong community is here because all of you make it happen, and because we work to make TAGFEE happen every day.
You can see our desire to help people be better marketers and to connect with the community right up at the top of our site. Click on “Learn & Connect” to bring down a bucket of resources like our beginner’s guides to SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media, as well as our webinars, blog, and Q&A.
We also share who we are on our about, TAGFEE, and team pages.
You’ll note that all of this content is front and center because it helps our audience get to know us. Our audience becomes acquainted with our slightly quirky personality through our voice and the style of our imagery. We put our values out in the open for all to see so we can hold ourselves accountable and so our audience can know what to expect. And you can tell a lot about Moz by the fact that everyone who wants to be is listed on our team page (not just a selection of the top execs) and that each individual Mozzer’s page has their own voice.
Help your potential customers get to know you by sharing “who you are” and “why you’re here” stories in the content and form of your home, about, and team pages.
The homepage is a perfect place to introduce an audience to your vision story:
But to really shape their expectations about what life could be like if only they’d use your products, you’ll want to flesh out that vision story in content such as product descriptions and white papers.
Notice that all the vision stories, no matter where they are on the site, elaborate on and reinforce the same vision. Some pieces will speak to a greater ecosystem and others will pinpoint how your products bring that vision to life. Which role they play depends largely on where that piece of content sits in your funnel.
You’re reading teaching story content right now. I’m not trying to sell you anything at all, but I am trying to give you a new way of thinking about the work you do – to help you make better marketing. I’m also, on a meta level, teaching you about how Moz thinks about marketing, including how we see value in going beyond superficial monikers like “storytelling” and “keywords” to provide actual applied insight.
Although I mentioned our beginner’s guides as “who we are”-type stories, they are also teaching stories. You may have noticed that we don’t have a beginner’s guide to pay-per-click advertising. That’s not because PPC isn’t important, but it is because our story is about the difference you can make with SEO, content marketing, and influencer marketing.
Big content can also be part of your teaching story. We use our Search Ranking Factors and Local Search Ranking Factors surveys to explore and share the changing nature of search, which helps focus our potential customers on asking the right questions about ranking better (instead of “where can I buy links?”).
Mozcast plays a similar role by pointing people’s attention to potential signs of shifts in Google’s search algorithm. It is a useful tool, yes, for monitoring and predicting the search climate. It’s also a story that teaches how much the algorithm changes and that SEO is not a one-and-done project.
Depending on who you are, your teaching stories might help your audience see fashion from the lens of accessories, understand that the value of your products is in sending matching items to the developing world, or see how essential connection speed is to saving money. Shape that conversation on your blog and in your big content.
Our blog also tells values in action stories. We do this both through the teaching that is so core to who we are but also through the tone of content on the blog. This goes back to TAGFEE. Rarely (if ever) will you see a brand or competitor called to the carpet on our site. And our product and company updates are just as likely to tell you the ugly side of why we made the improvement as they are to celebrate the update, like this announcement of Keyword Explorer:
You’ll also find values in action stories in our help documentation as we try to provide straightforward but fun information to help you be the best marketer you can be.
Demonstrate your values in action by telling the story of efficient project management with a datasheet that doubles as a purchasing checklist to help your buyer overcome internal objections. Or teach your customers how to use the spices you sell by turning help documentation into recipes.
Wow, that’s a lot of talk about us. Most of our audience would be wondering right now if we can really live up to that hype. That makes this the perfect moment to share a “we know what you are thinking” story. Some of the best site content forms for putting the proof in your pudding are social proof (in the form of testimonials) and case studies.
Ready to put storytelling into your site content? The framework is universal, but the application of it will be very individual to your experience. I’d love to hear how you’ve incorporated these six types of stories into your site, along with what’s working for you and what isn’t.
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Champion Online Marketing 