Advanced Hack: How to Improve Your SEO in Less Than 30 Minutes

I’ve been testing a new SEO hack and it works no matter how old or how new your site is.

Heck, you can have barely any links, and I’ve found it to work as well.

Best of all, unlike most SEO changes, it doesn’t take months or years to see results from this… you can literally see results in less than 30 minutes.

And here’s what’s crazy: I had my team crawl 10,000 sites to see how many people are leveraging this SEO technique and it was only 17.

In other words, your competition doesn’t know about this yet!

So what is this hack that I speak of?

Google’s ever-changing search results

Not only is Google changing its algorithm on a regular basis, but they also test out new design elements.

For example, if you search for “food near me”, you’ll not only see a list of restaurants but you also see their ratings.

And if you look up a person, Google may show you a picture of that person and a quick overview.

Over the years, Google has adapted its search results to give you the best experience. For example, if you search “2+2” Google will show you the answer of “4” so you don’t have to click through and head over to a webpage.

But you already know this.

Now, what’s new that no one is really using are FAQ-rich results and Answer Cards.

Here’s what I mean… if you search “digital marketing” you’ll see that I rank on Google. But my listing doesn’t look like most people’s…

As you can see from the image above, Google has pulled FAQ rich results from my site.

And best of all, I was able to pull it off in less than 30 minutes. That’s how quickly Google picked it up and adjusted their SERP listing.

Literally all within 30 minutes.

And you can do the same thing through Answer Cards anytime you have pages related to question and answers.

So how can you do this?

Picking the right markup

Before we get this going with your site, you have to pick the right schema markup.

FAQpage schema is used when you offer a Frequently Asked Question page or have a product page that contains frequently asked questions about the product itself. This will let you be eligible for a collapsible menu under your SERP with the question, that when clicked on, reveals the answer.

It can also let you be eligible for FAQ Action that is shown on Google Assistant. This can potentially help get you noticed by people using voice search to find out an answer!

Q&A schema is used when people are contributing different types of answers and can vote for which answer they think is the best. This will provide the rich result cads under your SERP and shows all the answers, with the top answer highlighted.

After making sure you understand what these are used for, Google also has additional guidelines on when you can and can’t use these schema’s for:

Google’s guidelines

Google has a list of FAQpage schema guidelines.

Only use FAQPage if your page has a list of questions with answers. If your page has a single question and users can submit alternative answers, use QAPage instead. Here are some examples:

Valid use cases:

• An FAQ page was written by the site itself with no way for users to submit alternative answers
• A product support page that lists FAQs with no way for users to submit alternative answers 

Invalid use cases:

• A forum page where users can submit answers to a single question
• A product support page where users can submit answers to a single question
• A product page where users can submit multiple questions and answers on a single page
• Don’t use FAQPagefor advertising purposes
• Make sure each Question includes the entire text of the question and make sure each answer includes the entire text of the answer. The entire question text and answer text may be displayed.
• Question and answer content may not be displayed as a rich result if it contains any of the following types of content: obscene, profane, sexually explicit, graphically violent, promotion of dangerous or illegal activities, or hateful or harassing language.
• All FAQcontent must be visible to the user on the source page.

And here are the guidelines for Q&A schema:

Only use the QAPage markup if your page has information in a question and answer format, which is one question followed by its answers.

Users must be able to submit answers to the question. Don’t use QAPage markup for content that has only one answer for a given question with no way for users to add alternative answers; instead, use FAQPage. Here are some examples:

Valid use cases:

• A forum page where users can submit answers to a single question
• A product support page where users can submit answers to a single question 

Invalid use cases:

• An FAQ page was written by the site itself with no way for users to submit alternative answers
• A product page where users can submit multiple questions and answers on a single page
• A how-to guide that answers a question
• A blog post that answers a question
• An essay that answers a question
• Don’t apply QAPagemarkup to all pages on a site or forum if not all the content is eligible. For example, a forum may have lots of questions posted, which are individually eligible for the markup. However, if the forum also has pages that are not questions, those pages are not eligible.
• Don’t use QAPagemarkup for FAQ pages or pages where there are multiple questions per page. QAPagemarkup is for pages where the focus of the page is a single question and its answers.
• Don’t use QAPagemarkup for advertising purposes.
• Make sure each Questionincludes the entire text of the question and make sure each Answer includes the entire text of the answer.
• Answermarkup is for answers to the question, not for comments on the question or comments on other answers. Don’t mark up non-answer comments as an answer.
• Question and answer content may not be displayed as a rich result if it contains any of the following types of content: obscene, profane, sexually explicit, graphically violent, promotion of dangerous or illegal activities, or hateful or harassing language.

If your content meets these guidelines, the next step is to figure out how to implement the schema onto your website and which type to use.

How do I implement Schema and which to use? 

There are two ways to implement it… either through JSON-LD or Microdata.

I recommend choosing one style and sticking to it throughout your webpage, and I also recommend not using both types on the same page.

JSON-LD is what Google recommends wherever possible and Google has been in the process of adding support for markup-powered features. JSON-LD can be implemented into the header of your content and can take very little time to implement.

The other option is Microdata, which involves coding elements into your website. This can be a challenging process for some odd reason, I prefer it. Below are examples of how each work.

FAQpage Schema JSON-LD:

<html>

<head>

<title>Digital Marketing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Neil Patel</title>

</head>

<body>

<script type=”application/ld+json”>

{

“@context”: “https://schema.org”,

“@type”: “FAQPage”,

“mainEntity”: [

{

“@type”: “Question”,

“name”: “What is digital marketing?”,

“acceptedAnswer”: {

“@type”: “Answer”,

“text”:”Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic device”}

}]

}

</script>

</body>

</html>

FAQpage Schema Microdata:

<html itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/FAQPage”>

<head>

<title>Digital Marketing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Neil Patel</title>

</head>

<body>

<div itemscope itemprop=”mainEntity” itemtype=”https://schema.org/Question”>

<h3 itemprop=”name”>What is digital marketing?</h3>

<div itemscope itemprop=”acceptedAnswer” itemtype=”https://schema.org/Answer”>

<div itemprop=”text”>

<p>Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic device.</p>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</body>

</html>

Q&A Schema JSON-LD:

{

“@context”: “https://schema.org”,

“@type”: “QAPage”,

“mainEntity”: {

“@type”: “Question”,

“name”: “Can I tie my shoe with one hand?”,

“text”: “I currently have taken a hobby to do many actions with one hand and I’m currently stuck on how to tie a shoe with one hand. Is it possible to tie my shoe with one hand?”,

“answerCount”: 2,

“upvoteCount”: 20,

“dateCreated”: “2019-07-23T21:11Z”,

“author”: {

“@type”: “Person”,

“name”: “Expert at Shoes”

},

“acceptedAnswer”: {

“@type”: “Answer”,

“text”: “It is possible to tie your shoe with one hand by using your teeth to hold the other lace”,

“dateCreated”: “2019-11-02T21:11Z”,

“upvoteCount”: 9000,

“url”: “https://example.com/question1#acceptedAnswer”,

“author”: {

“@type”: “Person”,

“name”: “AnotherShoeMan”

}

},

“suggestedAnswer”: [

{

“@type”: “Answer”,

“text”: “It is not possible to tie your shoe with one hand”,

“dateCreated”: “2019-11-02T21:11Z”,

“upvoteCount”: 2,

“url”: “https://example.com/question1#suggestedAnswer1”,

“author”: {

“@type”: “Person”,

“name”: “Best Shoe Man”

}

}

]

}

}

Q&A Schema Microdata:

<div itemprop=”mainEntity” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Question”>

<h2 itemprop=”name”>Can I tie my shoe with one hand?</h2>

<div itemprop=”upvoteCount”>20</div>

<div itemprop=”text”>I currently have taken a hobby to do many actions with one hand and I’m currently stuck on how to tie a shoe with one hand. Is it possible to tie my shoe with one hand?</div>

<div>asked <time itemprop=”dateCreated” datetime=”2019-07-23T21:11Z”>July 23’19 at 21:11</time></div>

<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span

itemprop=”name”>Expert at Shoes</span></div>

<div>

<div><span itemprop=”answerCount”>2</span> answers</div>

<div><span itemprop=”upvoteCount”>20</span> votes</div>

<div itemprop=”acceptedAnswer” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Answer”>

<div itemprop=”upvoteCount”>9000</div>

<div itemprop=”text”>

It is possible to tie your shoe with one hand by using your teeth to hold the other lace.

</div>

<a itemprop=”url” href=”https://example.com/question1#acceptedAnswer”>Answer Link</a>

<div>answered <time itemprop=”dateCreated” datetime=”2019-11-02T22:01Z”>Nov 2 ’19 at 22:01</time></div>

<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span itemprop=”name”>AnotherShoeMan</span></div>

</div>

<div itemprop=”suggestedAnswer” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Answer”>

<div itemprop=”upvoteCount”>2</div>

<div itemprop=”text”>

It is not possible to tie your shoe with one hand

</div>

<a itemprop=”url” href=”https://example.com/question1#suggestedAnswer1″>Answer Link</a>

<div>answered <time itemprop=”dateCreated”datetime=”2019-11-02T21:11Z”>Nov 2 ’19 at 21:11</time></div>

<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span

itemprop=”name”>Best Shoe Man</span></div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

When you are implementing it on your website, feel free and just use the templates above and modify them with your content.

If you are unsure if your code is correctly implemented or not, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and you can add your code snippet or the page that you implemented the schema on and it will tell you if you did it right or wrong.

Plus it will give you feedback on if there are any errors or issues with your code.

You can also try Google’s Rich Result Tester. This will give you a brief look at how your structured data will look like in the results!

Getting results in under 30 minutes

Once you make the changes to any page that you think is a good fit, you’ll want to log into Google Search Console and enter the URL of the page you modified in the top search bar.

You’ll then want to have Google crawl that page so they can index the results. All you have to do is click “request indexing”.

And typically within 10 minutes, you’ll notice it kick in and when you perform a Google search you’ll see your updated listing.

Now the key to making this work is to do this with pages and terms that already rank on page 1. That’s where I’ve seen the biggest improvement.

Will Schema get me to rank for People Also Ask and Featured Snippets?

Will this help with People Also Ask and Featured Snippets? So far, there has been no correlation between schema markup and People Also Ask or Featured Snippets and you do not need them to be featured in them.

Optimizing your content for this will not hurt you though and can potentially improve your chances to be on here.

Google has been testing out how they can show these types of Q&A, FAQ, and How-To results and looking at structured data to help understand them.

It’s better to be early to the game and help Google understand your pages, as well as possibly participating in any of Google’s experiments.

Will this get me on voice search?

With more and more people using mobile devices to find answers to questions, this is a very relevant question!

Especially considering that over half of the searches on Google will be from voice search in the near future.

Answers from voice search get most of their answers from featured snippets.

And adding structured data on your website increases the chances of getting you into featured snippets, which increases the chance of you getting featured on voice search.

Conclusion

This simple hack can potentially increase the visibility of your brand and help improve the authority of your website. It’s a simple solution that can take a single day to implement across your main question, product, or FAQ page.

I’ve been using it heavily for the last week or so and as long as I pick keywords that I already rank on page 1 for, I am seeing great results.

And as I mentioned above, when my team analyzed 10,000 sites we only found 17 to be using FAQ and QA schema. In other words, less than 1% of the sites are using this, which means you if you take advantage now, you’ll have the leg up on your competition.

So what do you think about this tactic? Are you going to use it?

The post Advanced Hack: How to Improve Your SEO in Less Than 30 Minutes appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here

Empathetic Consulting: 3 Things to Remember When Working With Other Teams

Posted by LaurelTaylor

Whether you consult with teams within your company or with outside clients, the chances are fairly high that at least once, you’ve left a meeting frustrated by the actions of others, even asking yourself: “why would they do that?”

It’s easy to walk into a project thinking of it as a simple matter of “they brought me in to fix a problem.” But the reality is rarely so simple. Consulting with other teams always entails organizational and emotional nuance that you may not be privy to.

Every interpersonal relationship is unique, and hopefully the circumstances I’m discussing won’t apply to many engagements or projects you take part in. However, when you do end up in a difficult consulting situation, it’s helpful to have a bit of empathy for those you’re working with.

I’ve found that remembering these 3 points can help me put myself in the shoes of my point of contact and interact with them in a way that is sensitive to what they may be dealing within their environment.

1. Your point of contact may not have asked for your help

It is entirely possible that the person you are trying to help may not want to be helped.

Management has its own ideas sometimes and internal communication isn't always perfect at any company. This can lead to situations where your point of contact may feel defensive, especially if their job functions seem like they might cover what you are consulting on. The best intentions of a manager who wants to help by bringing in more resources may look like distrust or undermining to the employee who didn’t get a say.

At one point during my stint as an in-house SEO, I actually found myself in this exact position. Leadership brought in an outside agency to help with SEO during a domain migration, and while their intentions may have been to provide more help, they didn’t effectively communicate that to me.

As a result, since I was the one who was responsible for that area, it made me feel insecure about how management viewed me and my skills. I was lucky enough to work with a great consultant who was able to support me and help move forward the many projects that were already in-flight. But because I initially felt like they were undermining my credibility by being involved in the first place, it took a while to build that trust and be able to get things done effectively.

The best way to deal with this potential issue is to ensure that you respect the context and institutional knowledge that the team you are helping possesses. Work to have a collaborative relationship instead of an authoritative one. The more context and communication you have, the better the recommendations you can contribute.

2. If they did ask for help, they may be feeling vulnerable or insecure

Step back for a second and think about why a team might bring in an outside consultant, to begin with. There are tons of specific issues they could need assistance with, but all of this boils down to a problem that they presumably want or need help to solve — a problem that they couldn’t solve on their own. Regardless of whether they couldn’t solve it because of knowledge, resources, or even office politics, your contributions add something that they couldn't contribute themselves — and that can be hard to deal with.

This isn’t something that needs to be discussed with the client or another team, but it is something that you should acknowledge and keep front-of-mind when you communicate with them. Respect the vulnerability of seeking out help, and appreciate the trust that they have placed in you.

3. Your client is accountable for the results of their project

When planning a long-term strategy, making tactical recommendations, or accessing the results of a marketing campaign that you helped execute, it’s easy to feel invested or accountable for the results of a project. However, it’s important to remember that your point of contact is usually far more accountable for results than you are. Their job, success, and emotions are all on the line much more than yours.

As an outside subject matter expert, your job is to give them all the information and resources to make the best decision. At the end of the day, the choice is theirs. I know how hard it can be to see your recommendations or projects rejected, but it’s important to try not to take it personally if they, having all the facts, make what they believe to be the best decision.

If they seem like they are questioning everything you say, maybe it’s because they want to be 100 percent sure it’s the best approach. Perhaps their micromanaging comes from a place of good intentions — just wanting to follow through and get the best outcome with every aspect of a project. Even what can come off as argumentative or difficult could be them playing devils advocate to ensure that everything has been considered.

Wrapping up

All this being said, perhaps none of these circumstances apply to the client that you are finding it hard to work with. People can have bad days, hard years, or even just generally prickly dispositions. But more empathy and compassion in the world is never a bad thing. So, I would encourage anyone who works with other teams to avoid the impulse to judge a harsh response, and instead, consider what may be behind it.

Have you ever been faced with a complicated consulting situation? Share what helped you navigate it in the comments below!

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* This article was originally published here

The Definitive Guide to Mobile Deep Linking

The average consumer is spending five hours per day on their smartphones and this number is only going up.

We do everything on our phones these days, from shopping to browsing social media and managing our businesses.

This is why it’s more important than ever to optimize the user experience to keep people on your app for longer periods, enjoying it more, and sharing it with friends.

If you’re trying to optimize your mobile app, I’m sure you’ve already tinkered with the layout, fonts, copy, and more, but there’s one thing you probably haven’t…

Mobile deep linking.

It’s a small detail that can drastically enhance how users engage with your app but few are taking advantage of it.

That’s why I’m going to be teaching you what mobile deep linking is, why you need it, and how you can implement it yourself.

Let’s dive in.

What is mobile deep linking, anyways?

Mobile deep linking is the practice of funneling users deeper into your app through the use of a uniform resource identifier or URI for short.

This allows mobile app developers to push to a specific page within an application versus simply opening it.

Think of it as a website URL.

If you were trying to sell a product, would you want users landing on the homepage or being forwarded to a sales page found deeper in the website?

The latter, of course.

By helping users go to a certain page within an app, you’re making the customer journey easier by getting them closer to the end goal sooner.

Here’s a visual of what the process looks like:

While it might seem simple, mobile linking comes in three different forms that you need to be aware of. They include the following:

Standard deep linking

This is the straightforward deep linking that forwards a user to a specific part of the app. It’s also known as universal linking.

It only works if the customer already has the app installed.

The problem is within traditional linking is that when a user clicks a link, it won’t open the mobile app, but rather directs them to the browser version.

If someone is on a mobile device, the app version will always be more optimized and streamlined.

Here’s what happens if you search for my Instagram on Google for example with the app installed.

The results appear to be the exact same whether you have the Instagram app or not, but clicking it opens up the app seamlessly.

This is a good example of basic deep linking. 

Someone that doesn’t have the Instagram mobile application installed will be given an error or redirected to a fallback page.

Deferred deep linking

This form of deep linking works the same way as standard linking does with the exception that it will direct users without the app to the download location.

This is beneficial because it can help app developers and companies acquire more customers.

Once the app is installed, the user will be referred to where they were originally navigating.

Check out the Skip The Dishes app to see what I mean.

While a user is creating their order, they are able to download the mobile app for Android or iOS.

They are forwarded back to the exact step they were taking, except in the mobile app after downloading it.

This means that they don’t have to manually go through the entire process again to get back to where they were.

Contextual deep linking

Contextual deep linking, also known as onboarding, is commonly used for gathering information on customers to personalize the user experience of an app.

Data such demographics, how users navigate to the app, and more is recorded.

The app onboarding process can be different depending on if the user installed via the Google Play Store, the Apple Store, a Facebook campaign, or another source.

A mobile app downloaded through a Facebook Ad might look different than when it’s downloaded through a Google Display Ad, for example.

The landing page is able to be customized through what is known as a deep view in mobile app development.

Just as the deep link forwards users to a specific deeper page in the application, the deep view is the visual result they see that’s different than others.

URI schemes

Deep linking is only doable thanks to what is known as URI schemes. These schemes are similar to how a website URL can direct you to a specific page on a website.

They look something like this:

See the fetched URI? Its format is appname://path/to/location.

Custom URIs are simple to set up for developers (Often created by default) and present the opportunity to redirect users wherever you please.

The mobile customer journey and how it applies to deep linking

The mobile buyer’s journey is the individual’s steps a user takes to find, use, and share your application.

It’s similar to the regular funnel a customer goes through when purchasing a product with some small differences you need to be aware of.

Here’s how the various steps in the mobile buyer’s journey can be applied to mobile deep linking.

Discovery

The first step in the mobile customer journey is discovering your app in the first place.

While this can be achieved through strategies like content marketing and SEO, deep linking gives you a nice boost to these tactics.

Google indexes deep links from mobile apps, giving you more opportunities to rank and drive organic traffic.

Users can click the search engine listing and open the link directly through the app instead of an internet browser.

Look at this search for Google Analytics to see what I mean:

This helps businesses acquire more users and increase brand awareness versus having a single search engine listing.

Check out my video on skyrocketing mobile app organic traffic, and pair it with deep linking for mind-blowing results.

Compare

Once a user has narrowed down a few options, they’re naturally going to want to find the best app by comparing them.

They’ll look at factors such as pricing, ease of use, and features. 

Deep linking enables you to push users to the best features of your app, reviews, or customize the experience to make your application better than competitors.

By reducing the number of steps it takes to get to important functions of the app, you’re also decreasing the chance of users bouncing.

Decision

The third step in the mobile buyer’s journey is making a decision and commitment to a single app.

Having a clear value proposition and refined user experience is crucial here. 

Better yet, contextual deep linking helps you collect data to make the application as tailored as possible to your buyer’s persona. 

Marketing campaigns can also be optimized with this information to improve targeting and performance.

Retain

Once you begin acquiring more users, you need to keep them.

Standard and deferred deep linking will help navigate users back to your app when they are on search engines, social media, and other platforms. 

This keeps them using your app more often.

Data that can be collected as a result of deep links will assist you in understanding why and how they use your mobile application.

Doubling down on these is what we call Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 rule.

This rule can be seen everywhere and defines that 80% of results come from 20% of actions.

In the case of mobile app development, you might discover that users are only engaging with a few features and others are taking up space.

You could hypothetically update the features and pages that are used the most, boosting engagement and retention.

Businesses will miss out on discovers like this if they don’t use deep links to collect information.

Why mobile deep linking matters

I know what you’re thinking.

“Why should I bother with mobile deep linking?”

Let me explain.

It improves the user experience

If you can save the user from going through multiple steps instead of one, why wouldn’t you?

That’s exactly what deep linking does, and improves UX because of it.

You’re making the life of users easier by using deep linking to get them where they want to go faster.

This gives them a better experience and impression with your app as a result.

Here’s what the difference between not using mobile deep linking and taking advantage of it looks like:

Much simpler, right?

This brings me to my next point.

It increases customer retention and engagement

Wouldn’t it be nice if every user that downloaded your app stay active all year round?

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

It’s been found that 55% of users will churn after the first month of use. That means nearly half of the new downloads will be lost.

Look at mobile app user retention the same way you approach a website.

It’s common for nearly half of all visitors to leave a website and not take any action.

Do you just sit there and do nothing about it? Of course not!

You implement strategies like email options through popups and exclusive content to capture those users before they leave.

This is precisely what deep linking can be used for but in the sense for a mobile app.

Once a user has visited your app, you can retarget them and use a different style of deep linking to improve their experience.

It improves the onboarding of new users

When a mobile app uses a form of deep linking like the deferred approach, you are capable of acquiring more users.

This is because as a user goes through the mobile browser version of your application, they will be given the option or automatically forwarded to the appropriate download location.

The contextual linking technique can be used to onboard new users in different ways depending on where they originally download the app from.

If you understand that users coming from a Facebook ad campaign regularly navigate to a certain product category, you can push them there automatically.

Furthermore, perhaps users from Google like to learn more about your business first before purchasing.

You can use contextual deep linking to direct those users to the page detailing your company’s history.

You can re-engage users

Once a user has used your app, you have a small window of opportunity to retarget them.

Did you know that 46% of search engine marketers believe that retargeting is the most underused form of marketing right now?

It’s a hidden gem that deep linking enhances.

If a segment of users downloaded your app, viewed product pages, and bounced, you could retarget them in advertising campaigns and use deferred linking to forward them back to the high-interest product pages.

Strengthens your marketing

Personalization is key. Contextual deep linking allows you to customize the user experience, which improves marketing results.

Take into consideration that 39% of consumers will spend more money when given a mobile coupon.

You could collect data on users via contextual deep linking to discover what product categories they enjoy the most, then offer a discount for them to align with this behavior.

Similarly, mobile deep linking has the potential to increase conversion rates.

This is because you are pushing users through the sales funnel quicker. Normally this consists of:

1. The user lands on the homepage of your website.
2. They navigate to a product page and add a line item to their cart.
3. They visit the cart page to confirm their order.
4. Finally, they pay and check out.

Mobile deep linking can effectively cut the sales funnel in half by helping customers go straight to sales pages.

Take the ticket mobile app SeatGeek as an example. They were able to increase revenue by 10.6% and app open rate by 8.8% with deep linking.

Here’s how…

Firstly, they struggled with reminding users to finish their purchases and buy tickets through the app.

They resolved this issue by using deep linked mobile ads. These target ads based on past user activity would display relevant ads in other existing apps the customer used.

SeatGeek noticed that they were getting thousands of new users per day and had to keep them.

Their team began creating ads that would serve different audiences based on previous behavior.

An example of this would be a user adding tickets to their favorite basketball team’s game to cart, but then abandoning before checking out.

When this user was on another application that supported ads, they would see an advertisement for that same basketball game.

The ads were simple in nature, using a related image, and straight forward call to action.

Boosts app discoverability

Don’t you want to get discovered by more customers?

Of course, you do!

And that’s precisely why you need to implement more deep linking in your mobile app.

Deep links are indexed on Google, giving you more opportunities to rank and drive traffic to your business.

And seeing as Google receives over four billion searches per day, you don’t want to miss out on the free exposure.

Think about how a website like mine ranks for thousands of pages, and not just the homepage.

You can achieve that same performance but for your mobile app.

Users on search engines like Google will be able to visit deeper functions and features versus landing on the welcome page.

This creates the opportunity to optimize applications for SEO via keywords, meta descriptions, and title tags, as well.

Provides analytics and insight into campaigns

Mobile deep linking allows you to refine your buyer’s persona and better understand their behavior.

This information can be used to improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and the overall experience of your app.

You will also be able to discover which links are being clicked the most and by whom.

Doing so creates the opportunity to double down on the best-performing links and optimizing who you target in advertising campaigns.

Deep links also shine light in which parts of your app are used the most and which aren’t.

Google offers its Firebase product to track deep linking in an easy to use platform.

You can begin using it by selecting the Android, iOS, C++, web, or Unity options.

Using Android as an example, you will need to ensure that you meet the prerequisites Google outlines in their documentation.

Firebase’s SDK automatically captures various metrics, user properties, and allows you to create custom events if you wish to track a specific action.

This data is then relayed through the Firebase dashboard which has a very familiar look and feel to other Google products.

You will feel right at home if you’ve ever used Google Analytics.

Which by the way can be connected to Firebase if you need to add events specific to your business like e-commerce purchases.

How to perform mobile deep linking

Now that you’re excited to get started using mobile deep links, here’s how to implement it yourself.

Deep linking on Android

Android devices will select one of three options when a URI is requested:

1. It opens a preselected app with the URI.
2. It opens the only available app that can handle the URI.
3. The user is prompted to choose an available app.

To begin adding deep links to achieve this, you will need to navigate to the AndroidManifest.xml file of your Android mobile app.

You will then have to add the following elements to the file through an intent filter:

• Specify the ACTION_VIEW attribute in the <action> element.
• <data> tags which include the URI scheme, host, and path.
• CATEGORY_DEFAULT and CATEGORY_BROWSABLE attributes to move users from a browser to your app.

Here’s an example from Android’s official documentation on deep linking of what the code will look like:

The second step is to ensure that your app can read data from the intent filter you created.

This is achieved through adding getData() and getAction() methods like so:

Deep links should not require users to log in or perform other actions to visit the desired content unless desired like in the case of promoting app downloads through deferred linking.

iOS

Adding deep links to iOS apps begins by enabling them through what is known as Associated Domains Entitlement.

That’s a fancy way to say you’re letting search engines know what app belongs to what website.

This way when a user clicks on your website, it activates the specified type of deep linking you choose.

You will then have to add an Apple App Site Association file to your website to verify it.

This association file needs to contain the following code, as you can see from Apple’s official documentation:

Similar to how Android apps have the manifest file, the app delegate file acts as the root of iOS apps.

This is why you will have to program your app delegate file to respond to deep links like Apple shows in this example:

They are specifically handled through the NSUserActivity object and activityType value of NSUserActivityTypeBrowsingWeb.

Your iOS app will be prepared to handle and accept users that navigate to it from browsers like Safari after you complete these steps.

Conclusion

Mobile deep linking is a powerful technique to improve the user experience, on-boarding, and marketing of applications.

The three types of mobile deep linking are standard, deferred, and contextual. It’s important to understand each of these to know when to use them properly.

Standard deep linking is used when customers already have an app installed. When they click on a mobile link, it will give them the option to open it in the app or automatically.

Deferred deep linking works by forwarding users to the appropriate app store to download the app if they don’t have it, then pushing them to the originally intended page.

Contextual linking is the most complicated but allows developers to collection information on users to customize the on-boarding and overall experience of the app.

Mobile deep linking can be implemented in each step of the buyer’s journey to acquire and retain users, too.

How do you use deep linking to improve mobile app performance?

The post The Definitive Guide to Mobile Deep Linking appeared first on Neil Patel.

* This article was originally published here

The Ultimate Guide to SEO Meta Tags

Posted by katemorris

Editor's note: This post first appeared in April of 2017, but because SEO (and Google) changes so quickly, we figured it was time for a refresh!

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Meta tags represent the beginning of most SEO training, for better or for worse. I contemplated exactly how to introduce this topic because we always hear about the bad side of meta tags — namely, the keywords meta tag. One of the first things dissected in any site review is the misuse of meta tags, mainly because they're at the top of every page in the header and are therefore the first thing seen. But we don't want to get too negative; meta tags are some of the best tools in a search marketer's repertoire.

There are meta tags beyond just description and keywords, though those two are picked on the most. I've broken down the most-used (in my experience) by the good, the bad, and the indifferent. You'll notice that the list gets longer as we get to the bad ones. I didn't get to cover all of the meta tags possible to add, but there's a comprehensive meta tag resource you should check out if you're interested in everything that's out there.

It's important to note that in 2019, you meta tags still matter, but not all of them can help you. It's my experience, and I think anyone in SEO would agree, that if you want to rank high in search, your meta tags need to accompany high-quality content that focuses on user satisfaction.

My main piece of advice: stick to the core minimum. Don't add meta tags you don't need — they just take up code space. The less code you have, the better. Think of your page code as a set of step-by-step directions to get somewhere, but for a browser. Extraneous meta tags are the annoying "Go straight for 200 feet" line items in driving directions that simply tell you to stay on the same road you're already on!

The good meta tags

These are the meta tags that should be on every page, no matter what. Notice that this is a small list; these are the only ones that are required, so if you can work with just these, please do.

• Meta content type – This tag is necessary to declare your character set for the page and should be present on every page. Leaving this out could impact how your page renders in the browser. A few options are listed below, but your web designer should know what's best for your site.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

• Title – While the title tag doesn’t start with "meta," it is in the header and contains information that's very important to SEO. You should always have a unique title tag on every page that describes the page. Check out this post for more information on title tags.
• Meta description – The infamous meta description tag is used for one major purpose: to describe the page to searchers as they read through the SERPs. This tag doesn't influence ranking, but it's very important regardless. It's the ad copy that will determine if users click on your result. Keep it within 160 characters, and write it to catch the user's attention. Sell the page — get them to click on the result. Here's a great article on meta descriptions that goes into more detail.
• Viewport – In this mobile world, you should be specifying the viewport. If you don’t, you run the risk of having a poor mobile experience — the Google PageSpeed Insights Tool will tell you more about it. The standard tag is:

<meta name=viewport content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

The indifferent meta tags

Different sites will need to use these in specific circumstances, but if you can go without, please do.

• Social meta tags – I'm leaving these out. OpenGraph and Twitter data are important to sharing but are not required per se.
• Robots – One huge misconception is that you have to have a robots meta tag. Let's make this clear: In terms of indexing and link following, if you don't specify a meta robots tag, they read that as index,follow. It's only if you want to change one of those two commands that you need to add meta robots. Therefore, if you want to noindex but follow the links on the page, you would add the following tag with only the noindex, as the follow is implied. Only change what you want to be different from the norm.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

• Specific bots (Googlebot) – These tags are used to give a specific bot instructions like noodp (forcing them not to use your DMOZ listing information, RIP) and noydir (same, but instead the Yahoo Directory listing information). Generally, the search engines are really good at this kind of thing on their own, but if you think you need it, feel free. There have been some cases I've seen where it's necessary, but if you must, consider using the overall robots tag listed above.
• Language – The only reason to use this tag is if you're moving internationally and need to declare the main language used on the page. Check out this meta languages resource for a full list of languages you can declare.
• Geo – The last I heard, these meta tags are supported by Bing but not Google (you can target to country inside Search Console). There are three kinds: placename, position (latitude and longitude), and region.

<META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
<META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
<META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">

• Keywords – Yes, I put this on the "indifferent" list. While no good SEO is going to recommend spending any time on this tag, there's some very small possibility it could help you somewhere. Please leave it out if you're building a site, but if it's automated, there's no reason to remove it.
• Refresh – This is the poor man's redirect and should not be used, if at all possible. You should always use a server-side 301 redirect. I know that sometimes things need to happen now, but Google is NOT a fan.
• Site verification – Your site is verified with Google and Bing, right? Who has the verification meta tags on their homepage? These are sometimes necessary because you can't get the other forms of site verification loaded, but if at all possible try to verify another way. Google allows you to verify by DNS, external file, or by linking your Google Analytics account. Bing still only allows by XML file or meta tag, so go with the file if you can.

The bad meta tags

Nothing bad will happen to your site if you use these — let me just make that clear. They're a waste of space though; even Google says so (and that was 12 years ago now!). If you're ready and willing, it might be time for some spring cleaning of your <head> area.

• Author/web author – This tag is used to name the author of the page. It's just not necessary on the page.
• Revisit after – This meta tag is a command to the robots to return to a page after a specific period of time. It's not followed by any major search engine.
• Rating – This tag is used to denote the maturity rating of content. I wrote a post about how to tag a page with adult images using a very confusing system that has since been updated (see the post's comments). It seems as if the best way to note bad images is to place them on a separate directory from other images on your site and alert Google.
• Expiration/date – "Expiration" is used to note when the page expires, and "date" is the date the page was made. Are any of your pages going to expire? Just remove them if they are (but please don't keep updating content, even contests — make it an annual contest instead!). And for "date," make an XML sitemap and keep it up to date. It's much more useful.
• Copyright – That Google article debates this with me a bit, but look at the footer of your site. I would guess it says "Copyright 20xx" in some form. Why say it twice?
• Abstract – This tag is sometimes used to place an abstract of the content and used mainly by educational pursuits.
• Distribution – The "distribution" value is supposedly used to control who can access the document, typically set to "global." It's inherently implied that if the page is open (not password-protected, like on an intranet) that it's meant for the world. Go with it, and leave the tag off the page.
• Generator – This is used to note what program created the page. Like "author," it's useless.
• Cache-control – This tag is set in hopes of controlling when and how often a page is cached in the browser. It's best to do this in the HTTP header.
• Resource type – This is used to name the type of resource the page is, like "document." Save yourself time, as the DTD declaration does it for you.

There are so many meta tags out there, I’d love to hear about any you think need to be added or even removed! Shout out in the comments with suggestions or questions.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

* This article was originally published here

9 Tips to Integrate Organic, Paid, and Content - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by HeatherPhysioc

Search can't live in a silo. If you want to see success, cross-collaboration across your organic, content, and paid teams is absolutely key. But that takes a huge amount of effort, from untangling communication to cross-training to getting buy-in from everyone involved. What's a search marketer to do?

If you missed her talk this year at MozCon 2019, here's your chance to make up for it! In today's edition of Whiteboard Friday, Heather Physioc shares her framework for successfully integrating your organic, paid, and content practices for a smoother search experience.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Heather Physioc, and I'm Group Director of Discoverability at VMLY&R. Today we're going to talk about nine tips to help integrate your organic search, paid search, and content practices. 

1. Announce change all at once, but roll out changes one at a time

So your first tip is that you want to announce change all at once, but then you want to roll out the changes one at a time.

It can be overwhelming to integrate practices and change processes. So you don't want to try to do everything all at the same time. It's like trying to boil the ocean, and it's too much to stick. So while you want to get everybody on board and aligned to the benefits and challenges they'll be facing as you integrate, then you just progressively roll out the changes iteratively over time. 

2. Document new products & processes

Next, as you develop new capabilities and processes and offerings together, you're going to document those processes in a shared, living wiki, because those processes are going to continue to change.

So my team uses Confluence, where we document our shared workflows, but everybody on the team has access and total trust to continue refining those in the ways that they see are best for the team. 

3. Make recommendations and report together

Your next step should be obvious, but a lot of people are not doing it. You should be making recommendations and reporting together. So a lot of times we'll collect all our data for reporting from all our different channels.

We'll smash some slides together at the last minute before we throw it over the fence to the client. It ends up with a pretty shallow, almost meaningless set of data that doesn't tell a story. So we should be getting together, sharing our insights, observations, and findings in the room together to find the story that is the most meaningful and help prioritize for our clients the best marketing decisions they can make from that data.

4. Cross-train to build advocacy across teams

So your next tip is to cross-train so you can build advocacy across the teams. We host a lot of workshops and hands-on training. We've even done job swaps where we had SEOs writing performance content for product detail pages. It creates this wonderful sense of empathy and understanding for what others need in order to do their jobs well.

But it also creates these great mental checks where you ask yourself, "Am I including the right people at the right times? Is there anyone else who could add value here? Could my work be impacting someone else?" So the purpose here is not necessarily to know how to do each other's jobs so much as it is to empower people to be able to advocate for, speak about, and cross-sell your other teams.

5. Reintroduce the team or capability

Next, when you've done your integration of processes and people, everyone else in the organization may not necessarily know what that means for them. So you'll want to reintroduce your team or your new capability to the rest of the organization. Put faces with names.

Talk about what the new capability is and does and the value it brings to the organization. Tell people how to engage with that new offering and what it means for their project or initiative or client. 

6. Market the joint wins

Up next, we're going to market the joint wins. As you're continuously integrating, you should always be looking for wins or warnings that you can share with others so they can learn how to better engage with your offerings.

So if you have a great case study, where you integrated paid and organic or organic and content, make sure you're marketing those stories out to your colleagues, your clients, your bosses, and of course your team. 

7. Hold roundtables to deep-dive search opportunities

Up next, we're going to do roundtables so we can deep dive search opportunities with other departments. So of course it makes sense to have roundtables between organic search and paid search or organic search and performance content, but also think beyond your immediate team.

Think about other marketing teams, like social media and pairing search behavior insights with social listening data. Or think about geographic teams. What if you sat your organic search team down with your Europe group to figure out what opportunities make the most sense for that region? Or even sales and IT and finding those areas of intersection, where you can do great search work that supports more parts of the organization.

8. Host mutual lunch & learns to cross-pollinate

Next, think about hosting mutual lunch and learns so you can start to cross-pollinate different skill sets. So similar to the roundtables, this is where you're going to bring different groups together to talk about capabilities. But think about more than just presenting your capabilities to other people. Also be sure to invite them to present their capabilities to your group. For example, we've invited the project management team or the client engagement team to make us stronger in our search work through the value that they bring.

9. Give ownership of change to others

And finally, as you're making all of these changes, it can't just come from the top, one person just handing change down for everyone else to implement. It has to be organic, pardon the pun, and everybody should have ownership over the direction that we're heading together. So when we make changes to products or processes or we start to integrate different groups or spin up little teams to work on specific objectives, we make sure that those individuals from each side have ownership to make those decisions together and roll it out to the rest of the group.

It helps make sure we've considered all the angles and greatly impacts our ability to get buy-in across the team. So those are nine quick tips to integrate organic search, paid search, and content practices. Let us know what you think in the comments below. I want to hear your tips too, and we'll see you next time on Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

* This article was originally published here