Quora Marketing: ~1 Million Views Generated. Here’s How to Replicate Our Success

Si Quan from AHREFS breaks Quora marketing down and introduces a couple of cool hacks. Worth checking out!

Better Content Through NLP (Natural Language Processing) - Whiteboard Friday

Ruth breaking down how to write for NLP/entities.

TECHSEO BOOST LIVESTREAM

The whole Tech SEO Boost conference on tape!

Why Product Zeitgeist Fit Is Your Startup Cheat Code

Does your product connect with the Zeitgeist?

The Local Algorithm: Relevance, Proximity, and Prominence

I'm not very knowledgeable about local SEO. This is a really good introduction.

Google in 2020: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor

Google traffic is plateauing and we need to find more creative ways to get traffic from the search engine.

Dan Harmon Story Circle: 8 Proven Steps to Better Stories

A really cool break-down of good storytelling. Not just do I think this is perfectly adaptable for marketing, I also love the Dark Knight Batman series. Two birds, one stone.

The Anatomy of Top Performing Articles: Successful vs. Invisible Content – SEMrush Study

Fresh research around the question what makes good content. Pretty much confirms the common assumptions but good to get it in writing.

2019’s Most Criminal & Shady Marketing Tactics

The internet can be a nasty place. Check those scams out so you can protect yourself.

Knowledge Graph Algorithm Update Summer 2019 (a.k.a. Budapest)

I’m not sure what to think of this. Curious to hear your thoughts!

Top 100 Hottest Podcast Episodes of 2019

Naval Ravikant everywhere! No wonder, people are seeking meaning and that’s covered by philosophy. See Jordan Peterson & Co. Anyway, Breaker has compiled the 100 most successful podcast episodes this year.

how-superhuman-uses-video-game-design

I’m very intrigued by Superhuman. Luckily, I was able to get past the wait list and have been using it for a couple of weeks - and I’m 100% on board. It’s a great product with fantastic onboarding and the gaming-like features definitely come through.

FckdEx

Fedex is in deep **it because Amazon is soaking the logistics market dry. You can’t help but be in awe about Amazon’s moves. “In 24 months, FedEx will not exist in its current form. A lack of innovation, and a competitor who can overwhelm enemies with cheap capital and Jedi mind tricks, has featurized one of the great success stories of modern business.”

Two Types of Digital Marketers: The Tortoise and The Hare

I like the idea and I think it’s true: most marketers are either hares or turtoises. I also agree that good marketers are able to shift into either mode when they need to.

20 Podcast Predictions for 2020 from Top Industry Leaders

Very thought-provoking and inspiring trends in the podcast business.

How To Make 64 Pieces Of Content In A Day

I know many people hate Gary V but all feelings aside, this is a good content repurposing guide.

50 Lead Generation Activities to Get More Leads Now

Very much enjoyed this guide. It’s very well designed, contains all relevant information, and has input from thought leaders in the space. Well done.

Is martech headed for its “dot-com moment” in 2020?

Interesting development in martech. I agree that there are too many similar solutions that will have to consolidate over time. I’m not sure if a bubble is going to burst or not. What do you think?

How Should You Segment Your Email List?

Forget about tags. Use custom fields with finite states instead!

Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data

The Jumpshot scandal is in full swing. Proponents claim the company violates privacy and allows company to track personal identifiable information, opponents claim it does not because the tracking implications are clear and other companies do the same. What do you think?

How to do Keyword Research in 2020 w/ Nick Eubanks

Enjoyed watching Nick Eubanks on Ross Hudgen's show and nerd out about keyword research.

Age of Abundance: How the Content Explosion will Invert the Media Industry

4 years old but worth every moment: this piece is a great summary of the impact of content abundance. Couldn’t have written it any better.

BuzzFeed In 2020

I think this is a vital piece to read for any content creator that drives business, whether affiliate, SaaS, or ecommerce. Tons of gold on content strategy and monetization in this one.

Super Bowl ads have become more about brand values than the brands themselves

"More advertisers are buying pricey Super Bowl ads this year to sell you on their values, rather than their products."

Meta descriptions and branding have the most influence on search clickthrough, survey finds

Surprising findings from Ignite Visibility on meta-descriptions: https://ignitevisibility.com/seo-and-intent-2020-new-study-reveals-true-state-of-search/. I wonder what your thoughts are about the study?

Shutterstock 2020 Trends

Beautifully designed landing page with interesting stats. Check this out if you want to get inspired!

Game Design, Not Gamification, for Great Products

The founder of Superhuman speaks about game design for software products. I think every product owner and founder should listen to this, as it provides some really valuable tips about product design.

The algorithm that started google

The most basic explanation of Pagerank. Super basic.

No More “Double Dipping” on Featured Snippets—Does It Matter?

The friends from CXL pulled Wikipedia featured snippets and compared the changes with public traffic data. Very cool analysis!

SEO for 2020

Enjoyed the list of SEO tactics, but loved the intro: "Understand how those ranking factors apply to YOUR industry." YES. Nailed it.

How an Ad Campaign Invented the Diamond Engagement Ring

Fascinating insights into one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever: diamonds.

Pinterest Trends

Cool new tool for (consumer) topic discover: Pinterest Trends! Just like Google Trends, it allows you to compare search terms against each other and gives you their relative search volume.

Why Medium Lost Half of its Visibility

Really enjoyed this analysis by Bartosz and Izzy on medium’s visibility drop.

The ultimate marketing technology stack for 2020

What should a marketing stack in 2020 look like? Yours truly and a few others give you an idea.

A new way to find clothes, shoes and more on Search

Google launched a new integration of product feeds in the search results. This is a big deal!

Jack Ma and Elon Musk hold debate in Shanghai

I'm posting this video because it made me laugh. What a very uncomfortable conversation between Jack Ma and Elon Musk. Awkward.

How to Create 10x SEO Reports

Love that Cyrus talks about Share of Voice. We're introducing the metric at G2 as well and I'm a big fan because it's a better option for entity and topic based search.

5 Content Marketing Trends to Follow in 2020

We need to shift our perspective in 2020 on some content marketing practices.

Copy testing tool

Neat tool from my friends over at CXL I found. Haven’t tried it out, yet, but will!

What's Amazon's market share? 35% or 5%?

I like unit economics tear-aparts and this is a good one that puts Amazon’s market share into perspective. I would have guessed it’s way more, tbh.

Making a Living Off ‘Likes’: The New Influencer Paradigm

It seems to me there’s a ton we can learn from China when it comes to social media and tech. Especially their monetization models are interesting. Not as bland as ours in the west: either subscription or ads. I hope we can adopt more of that!

The Story of Spotify Personas

Good case study on how to create personas. I have to say, though, this reminds me a lot on jobs-to-be-done...

How To Conquer Your Marketing Dashboard One Metric at a Time

Dashboards are an important communication tool in marketing. Really liked this explainer.

Say Hello To The CRaP SERP

I'm going to be on vacation if they roll this out. More competition from Google incoming, friends!

What We Learned from Reading Jeff Bezos’ Patents

Jeff Bezos invents a lot and he invents more over time. Don’t underestimate the guy, he’s brilliant. All too often we think luck is the biggest contributor to success but we forget that it takes more than being lucky once to build an empire.

1,000 True Fans? Try 100

Kevin kelly’s 1000 true fans idea also holds true for 100 true fans who pay $1000 a year instead of $100. You just have to focus on a narrower niche and more engaged users. Truly exciting trend that we also see from individuals like Dave Gerhardt or communities like TrafficThinkTank.

Tech in 2020: standing on the shoulders of giants

There's a lot to be liked about Ben Evan's content, but what I also really enjoyed was the great storytelling in this deck.

Facebook’s biggest losers: Content hurt by the last product strategy update

A year old but still valuable! Facebook algo changes send 28% less traffic to publishers.

The Rx is UX: Tracy Rosecrans of Healthline on Marketing Smarts

Very insightful podcast on the success of healthline, one of the most successful health websites out there.

How to make hard facts easy to read

Clear writing is clarity of thought.

The Truth about 1000 True Fans + Pricing Our Attention

The original future thinker Kevin Kelly on future ad monetization model. 12 minutes that blew my mind.

Are H1 Tags Necessary for Ranking? [SEO Experiment]

Love the scientific approach here and that Moz ran an actual test. Sure, it’s just a single site and we need many more to run the same experiment in order to determine the real impact of H1s, but it’s a great start. Anecdotally, I also don’t think H1s have a big impact.

It’s Time To Reconsider Rank Tracking

Fantastic article by Mike King. As usual, he’s right: our concept of rankings is outdated and so is our rank tracking.

From €10M to €20M ARR In 12 Months: 10 Growth Lessons from Supermetrics

Growth lessons of another kind. No quick hacks or tricks. Just lessons learned along the way. Helpful!

Unpacking the CausalImpact of Google’s Double-Dipping Featured Snippet Update

Interesting case study. I wish they had separated desktop and mobile search and taken out brand queries. Thoughts?

The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript SEO

Very good and graphical summary of how to understand and deal with Javascript.

Recession Proof Business #1 — Supporting Small Business

Noah Kagan delivers some really good tips for small businesses to stay afloat in a recession.

How to Market in a Downturn

We have to confront the fact that our economy is likely to end in a recession. Here's some good material from 2009 showing that cutting marketing budget is not necessarily the right way to go. Instead, we need to understand the new segmentation of our customers and where our products are a necessity or a nice-to-have.

Marketing and Growth Lessons for Uncertain Times

How do you market in a recession? Don't cut spend, refocus. Be disciplined during boom times for greater flexibility during downturns. Love this passage from a Bain article: "Think of a recession as a sharp curve on an auto racetrack—the best place to pass competitors, but requiring more skill than straightaways. The best drivers apply the brakes just ahead of the curve (they take out excess costs), turn hard toward the apex of the curve (identify the short list of projects that will form the n

How to Navigate a Startup with Marketing and Communication through a Crisis

Another set of great tips for navigating the crisis we're in, this time form Dirk Schart from Reflekt.

Coronafied

Peak Ace started a site for leaders to keep track of the good/relevant Coronavirus content.

28 Moves to Survive (& Thrive) in a Downturn

Valuable tips in times of crisis. Not what we want to hear, but what we have to hear. One of them: "In a crisis, everybody must perform. Hitting 95% of your goal is missing your goal."

Why Google Search Console & Google Analytics Data Never Matches

Mike King breaks down how Search Console and Google Analytics data is different and why. In fact, Search Console seems to be based on Google's "log files" and measure a different kind of metric, whereas GA looks at javascript-tracked visitors.

The Coronavirus Is A Media Extinction Event

Newspapers are hit from lower ad spend during the Corona crisis, especially local newspapers.

Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus

Harari breaks down how we’re at a crucial point of decision making. Do we want to use surveillance technology and make us vulnerable to privacy restrictions but fight pandemics? We also need to ask ourselves if we want to leverage our biggest weapon, global cooperation, or stick to national isolation and selfishness?

How to Build a $216,000 Blog

What’s the secret to selling a blog for over $200K? Good, old hard work, freebies, and good content.

MARKETING INA RECESSION: BUDGET CUTS – THE SCALPEL VS THE SLEDGEHAMMER

Appreciate this case study around cutting the right data when having to save cost, instead of cutting across the board.

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO

Good reminder on management during peace vs war time. I guess we’ll have to think more about the latter right now. Also read this fantastic follow-up by Ed Batista: https://www.edbatista.com/2020/03/from-peacetime-to-wartime.html

How to Get Your Brand in Google’s Knowledge Graph Without a Wikipedia Page

Fascinating insights into the knowledge graph and sources Google uses to put it together. See the list here: https://tools.kalicube.pro/trusted-sources?region=uk

Great strategies depend on great inputs — here’s how to find them.

We marketers love tactics and love to ignore strategy. This is a thought-provoking piece on strategic inputs and synthesizing them.

Build a Search Intent Dashboard to Unlock Better Opportunities

You can create a search intent dashboard with Power BI. You might also need GetStat or another tool that allows you to track rankings at large scale. Otherwise, the dashboard doesn’t make a lot of sense.

What Will The New Normal Be Like? | Scott Galloway on The James Altucher Show

Good conversation about the new normal after COVID-19. The bottom line is optimism but a couple of hard years ahead.

What did we learn after 1 month of COVID-19? A behavioral analysis of search shifts using real GSC data

Ryte looked at 4,880 GSC account and identified COVID impact trends. As you can imagine, travel, vehicles, beauty, and real estate were negatively impacted the most.

IT’S TIME TO BUILD

If you haven’t, read this.

How To Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

What can you do to save your startup? Fast decisions, fast pivots, high magnitude.

Google not indexing new content again

I said it before and I'll say it again: Google is reaching its limits to crawl the web and stay up to date. That's why it will soon push hard for crawling APIs. BTW, the last indexing issue also happened in April ;-).

Google to cut marketing budgets by as much as half, directors warned of hiring freezes

Google cuts marketing budgets by half. I expect the next quarterly results to look pretty bad amid companies pulling their ad budgets back.

Even Senior Executives Need a Side Hustle

Everyone should have a side hustle, also senior executives. The many benefits include additional income streams, better networking, and development of new skills.

How to Succeed in Google Discover

Discover, Google's push channel, is an important new traffic sources for websites. Abby Hamilton took a look at 700 discover feeds and found that sports & entertainment were the most prevalent, seo has its own category, and brands are strongly represented. Furthermore, news sites received 99% of clicks, the remaining clicks go to blog articles, and the average shelf life of discover articles is 3 days.

Post Corona: The Four

Provoking but good thoughts on the impact of COVID and the future of our economy.

Facebook Ad Rates Fall as Coronavirus Undermines Spending

Advertisers pulling budgets back from digital and also classic tv/print advertising.

Marketers Think COVID-19 Will Be Worse For Advertising Than The 2008 Financial Crisis

An IAB study revealed that most advertisers are planning to hold budgets in Q1 and Q2, with out-of-home advertising being hit the most.

Mary Meeker's coronavirus trends report

A roundhouse kick of observations across the economy, politics, and sports in times of COVID-19 - all in the background of tech, of course.

When Tailwinds Vanish

Luttig's thesis is that future startups will be more driven by people than product or marketing growth. Since growth opportunities are limited, more startups will rely on sales, customers success, and other S&GA.

Startup offense and defense in the recession

Gil outlines an interesting format of things startups have to do to survive, e.g. expand their runway, and to thrive, e.g. buy competitors.

What We Do in the Shadow DOM

The shadow DOM is an important concept for technical SEO that helps them to better understand what Google can render and what not.

‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping

Tl;dr, there is no free lunch.

How to create content communities

This post is pure gold in the world of flywheels and growth. The thing is when Andy Johns writes, you read. He explains how to build several flywheels (a.k.a. loops) that help you grow UGC/communities.

Copytesting tool

Peep from CXL released a kick-ass copy testing tool. I had the chance to test it and can strongly recommend to try it out!

It’s Not All About PageRank

How dead is PageRank sculpting really? Depends on how you define it! Removing links to pages you don't care about still has an impact. "For a typical user, anything that takes them somewhere else with a click event is a link or a button. For search engines, this is not at all the case, and this gap is something we can work with." Yes!

Was there a Google Update Tool

Barry Schwartz built a tool that tells you whether there was an update or not. Seems like a database of searchengineroundtable articles but cool nontheless.

Featured Snippets Study: Results From 3,500+ Internet Users

More data about click behavior for featured snippets. This study took 3,500 mechanical turk testers and surveying them about their behavior.

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

Freaky story about arbitraging Doordash orders that highlights the crazy second-order effects of huge Softbank start fundings and how top line growth trumps everything (yet).

Google's May 2020 Core Update: Winners, Winnerers, Winlosers, and Why It's All Probably Crap

Dr Pete explains how we shouldn’t just judge a core update by a single day but instead look over the span of multiple days. Sites have natural volatility that we must take into account.

Does Position One In Google Matter More Now Than 10 Years Ago

How Google SERP Layouts Affect Searching Behavior

This study looked at 20 participants and tracked their physical response to a set of keywords. It found that, amongst other things, most attention actually goes to featured snippet when they’re present.

ZIRP explains the world

Zero-interest rate policy enables a lot of overhyped tech trends we’re seeing these days.

How to Write Absolutely Addictive Articles

A true master of his art, Eddie always has a gem to share about copy writing. This one is a big help in making content stickier. For example: never write for anyone, write for someone. Or: keep the reader nodding.

Joe Rogan Is the New Mainstream Media

This is a cool insight into the world and thinking of one of the largest one-man media empires in the world: Joe Rogan.

I Spent $6 Million on Google Ads Last Year

I honestly didn’t know about youtube’s custom intent ads but they sound like a nice little tool, even for SEOs. They target people on youtube who searched for something on google.

Introducing Web Vitals: A guide to using and visualising their data

SALT built a GA dashboard for web vitals and a wordpress plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/web-vitals/.

How to Crush it on Twitter: David Perell and Matthew Kobach Workshop

If you want to step you Twitter game up, check this out.

14 Proven Ways to Get More Views on YouTube

Helpful youtube seo tips like: * niche down * Create videos for keywords with search volume * Use the ahrefs content explorer to find google keywords that show videos * Use site:youtube.com inurl:watch title:topic

Profile cards in chrome

Interesting to keep an eye on.

November 2019 Google Update; Food Blogger Study

Tophatrank published a study on the 2019 November update and found that smaller blogs lost more traffic than big players.

Analysis: Why Google’s May 2020 Core Update is an E-A-T-Update

Interesting argumentation and examples of the May corer update. Did it revolve around EAT? User Experience? Check in to hear some opinions.

The Complete Guide to Content Pruning (+3 Step Pruning Process)

Devin Pickell from my content marketing team breaks down how he pruned our Learn hub and saw fantastic results.

Guest Blogging for SEO: How to Build High-quality Links at Scale

Every time I read the ahrefs blog, I learn something about the tool and SEO. This is great, I didn’t know you could insert urls into the content explorer.

International SEO for E-Commerce Websites

Aleyda's SEJ Summit deck on internationalization with shop platforms like Magento and Shopify.

The Best Rank Tracker

A tactical buyer's guide on picking the right rank tracker.

The Most Interesting Companies in the World are Both

The best companies in the world serve both sides, consumer and enterprises, in a trend called consumerization of enterprise.

SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF STARTUP CONTENT MARKETING

Good case study on someone with no prior SEO experience discovering the beauty of driving organic traffic with content marketing.

The May 2020 Google Core Update – 4 Case Studies That Emphasize The Complexity Of Broad Core Algorithm Updates

Glenn Gabe presents four case studies of the May algo update. Bottom line: it’s never just a single factor but always several that help a site recover. And you have you wait for the next update to see a change.

Content Research: 4 Ways to Find a Ton of Wins

Fantastic CXL post by Derek Gleason on the fallacy of time, social presence and size in the efficiency of attracting backlinks. When you normalize for these factors, you find truly outstanding content pieces.

How to Run a Smooth Content Operation at a Large Company

This article touches on a few important differences between content creation at a small vs large company: speed, dependencies, services, and goals.

World 2.0 Startups

World 2.0 startups - or web 4.0? - are the next step in the evolution that started with software. In essence, they bring software from on-premise and native app to the browser.

The Kindle and the Fire

Scalable vs unscalable strategies have different purposes for startups.

Do Links Still Matter for SEO in 2020?

Insightful backlink study from Perficient Digital and I like the methodology. Some of the findings indicate that backlinks might have gotten more leimportant over time, at least in terms of the sheer number. PA and DA seem to get more important. It also indicates that links are more important for the finance vertical and (relatively) less important for software related queries.

Enterprise SEO: Don’t Outsmart—Out Execute

Jared runs web optimization at Qualtrics and knows his stuff. His point on out executing in enterprise SEO can’t be overstated.

Non-Success Stories: 30+ Affiliate Marketers Share Their Niche Site Missteps

I love failure stories almost more than success stories. Understanding what didn't work is almost as important as what did.

If Everyone Else is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?

Almost 10 years old but a great reminder on a cognitive bias: thinking you’re smarter without knowing all the facts.

What comes after Zoom?

Interesting thoughts on video calls as a commodity, how Zoom grew (by removing defensibility), and what comes next.

In The First Golden Age of Martech, the US marketing ecosystem grew 50% faster than GDP

I like the stats in the article. There is some interesting stuff in there about the growth of the Marketing industry over the last decades and the explosion of Martech. However, I’m not so impressed by the stat of “Martech grows 50% faster than US GDPR”. Is 6% CAGR really impressive? I’m not so sure.

What Type of Company Are You and the Growth 2×2

Company growth tactics fall into 4 different pieces of a quadrant depending on how fast they yield returns and how high their impact is.

Ali Abdaal: How To Grow Your Side Hustle WHILE Working Full-Time

Love this video by the man Noah Kagan because it's so well edited and the content is fantastic. Not only that, it's also applicable to SEO! Start hyper-niche, with long-tail keywords, and then expand from there.a

How to Train a Content Marketer in 90 Days or Less

Ramping people up can be challenging. This post provides a 90 structure and helpful tips.

Is top of the funnel content under attack? How the SERP is set to change

Google’s filters at the top of shorthead keyword serps isn’t just a way to help searchers refine their query but to guide them stronger during their buyer journey.

Kevin Indig on searching for meaning and the meaning of search

In this podcast, I talk about: SEO in a crowded category Strategies for SaaS vs. e-commerce Google's transformation to an answer engine

You cannot be data-driven without experimentation

Good roundup about the importance of the testing mindset.

Visualising the shape of content strategy in SaaS businesses

I’m a fan of marketing strategy and really like the framework Marc put together here.

Search Console Explorer Studio (Google Data Studio)

Cool search console dashbaord for Hannah Rampton.

Navigating Fragmented Search Intent with Kevin Indig

In this podcast with Garrett Sussman, I go really deep on the idea of fragmented user intent.

Link Building For SaaS Companies: Our Playbook in 2020

Learned some new tactics like content injection.

B2C Content Marketing: How We Grew a B2C Blog to 70,000 Pageviews in 14 Months

Nice case study of an seo strategy that focuses on pain points rather than search volume.

How to show up on Google Discover: Google’s latest guidance

Google seems to be looking at way more than just large images and a mobile friendly experience for Discover. Doesn’t shock me, I’m sure there’s some sort of relevance algorithm behind the machine.

Do We Have the Math to Truly Decode Google's Algorithms?

Though-provoking but interesting article on the fallacies of correlation studies and comments from a real statistician. I was a bit hesitant to read this at first but I found a lot of value in it.

An Easy Three-Step Headline Formula That Grabs Customer Attention in Just Five Minutes (With Examples)

Writing clearly is hard. This formula provides a great framework to engage people to click on your headlines without coning across too clickbaity.

Why Wirecutter Wins: Opinionated Content

The value of expert opinions is high. I notice that all the time when ti comes to software: people want a recommendation from an expert, not a list of 10 things they have to pick from.

Crawl Budget: SEO Mythbusting

Very helpful crawl budget mythbusting from Martin Splitt. Found some good ones in there that help to put crawl budget into perspective.

SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Bringing Content Out of Tabs

Search pilot found that taking content out of tabs might increase organic traffic. I’d like to know how many pages the variant and control contained. Interesting nonetheless.

OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin

There’s lots of chatter around GPT-3 and, of course, content marketers and SEOs worry and are excited about its impact on content creation. It’s going to be interesting to watch where this goes.

How Oatly grew their brand

Cool Twitter thread on growing a brand with extreme measures. Sometimes necessary.

GPT-3 & SEO: What It Means for Content Marketing

What are possible consequences of GPT-3 for content marketing?

How Toby Howell grew Morning Brew’s Twitter to 65,000 followers

One of the writers of The Morning Brew explains how he runs their Twitter account and some cool hacks he found.

Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google

As someone who has spend the better half of 2020 to talk about exactly this problem, of course, I want to share this article. It comes with a few small flaws in the logic but overall present a good case interesting about The Markup: they collect their own data for any article they write.

Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You Do It, Exactly?

The thing everybody wants but nobody knows how to do. Not any longer.

Growth+Sales: The New Era of Enterprise Go-to-Market

The Enterprise segment is changing rapidly and attacked by bottoms-up products. Part of the reason is that old-school sales cycle are not in the interest of the user anymore.

On mathematics, experimentation and value

Rebuttal from Russ Jones for a pieces I linked a couple of weeks ago that claims we don't have the tools to do correlation studies around ranking factors. I personally very much agree to what Russ here says because I prefer having sub-par information over no information at all.

How Many Sites Pass the Core Web Vitals Assessment?

Richard from Screaming Frog looked at 22K keywords across mobile and desktop and checked whether the ranking pages would pass the Core Web Vitals assessment.

Everything is a remix

The basic elements of creativity are: copy, transform, combine. That leads to everything basically being a remix.

Adding FAQ Schema 2.0

FAQ schema is so hot right now but the impact varies by vertical and questions you have it for.

Amazon Giving Up Advertising Revenue to Promote Its Brands

Amazon seems to highlight its own products in search and not because customers favor them. Fits well into the Zeitgeist of antitrust conversations.

How to Build Category Pages for SEO

Category pages should be so much more than just a list of links. Cyrus explains how to enrich them with helpful content and elements.

Too Much Creative Marketing is Stifled by Attribution

Being overly diligent with channel distribution can be a detriment. Instead, Rand recommends using time-based attribution and two other alternatives.

15 Insanely Efficient Google Sheets Formulas for SEOs

An Email from Joe Biden's presidential campaign

This is an uncommon weekly find but I want to share it because it's a masterpiece of storytelling. I'm impressed how well it promotes Joe to the Jewish demographic.

Stories move people - literally.

Does social proof work?

Clearbit tested what happens when you show customized company logos to visitors based on their own company (social proof). The goal was to measure whether companies would be more or less inclined to sign up when they see a logo of a related company. The hypothesis predicted a lift of less than 10%. Clearbit separated companies into five buckets like open source or high-growth B2B. Clearbit created a mockup template and then set out to collect testimonials. The result is a stunning lift of 84%

Social proof works and we might already have the data to show it in our customer databases.

Bing uses user engagement metrics for ranking websites in search

A big bomb was thrown into the SEO community: Bing uses user behavior signals for ranking! Fabrice Canel and Christi Olsen mention very clearly that pogo sticking, bounces, and dwell time can be signals that impact ranking. And they are also query-specific, meaning Google understand the context this behavior happens in.

"We need to critically look at statements from Google that say user behavior is not used in search. It might be, as it is in almost every other big platform on the web. The question to ask ourselves is: how would that change what we do?"

SimilarWeb & Rand Fishkin Exploring Changes to the Internet Landscape

In this Similar Web webinar, Rand Fishkin looks at click data, Amazon channel traffic, and shifts in ecommerce.

Share of paid clicks have grown by 52% in the last 2 years. No surprise but good to see the data!

Media 2020: Rise of the Renaissance Creator

The creator movement is a result of tools: it’s now easier than ever to make money with good content. You just need to invest time. As a result, there are more creators than ever ans their brands become little businesses. It’s all part of bundling and unbundling. Creators are now unbundled from companies like newspapers.

A lot of times, it’s more about creating fans than hardcore customers. Sure, they find value in the content but they also want to support the creator.

The Word of Mouth coefficient

The WoM coefficient is a function that helps you measure word of mouth for digital products! It divides new organic users by returning users + non-organic new users. This is especially important in times of higher competition, rising CPCs, and less traffic from big platforms.

It seems that there are ways to measure WoM growth after all. The metric isn’t perfect (which one is?) in the short-term because it could be impacted by unattributable offline-advertising or podcast appearances/ads but when taking out seasonality, it seems very useful.

AMA with Camille Ricketts, Notion's Head of Marketing

Camille Ricketts, head of Marketing at Notion and formerly First Round, talks about the importance or putting interview subjects first and talking to your customers. When asked what channel drives the most growth at Notion, Camille answered: “1) We've been really lucky with organic growth and have only diversified our marketing channels recently. We're very active on social media. Invest a lot in community building. Have experimented with podcasting, and are now running campaigns on Facebook, I

Speak to your customers to really shape out what they need. If your product addresses many personas, find their common needs and wants.

Outreach Tips (that are better than anything you’ll find searching Google)

Bland outreach is a thing of the past. Instead, relationships are the future. Genuine win-win situations. But how do you create those? `

Building genuine relationships by giving something of real value first and asking second works much better than mass outreach.

Introducing v2.0 of the official AMP for WordPress Plugin

The AMP 2.0 WP plugin is out! If you’re a loyal reader, you know I’ve been traditionally very skeptical about AMP. Poor measurability. Poor monetizability. Poor implementation. Version 2.0 comes with a bit more flexibility to incorporate custom logos and fonts, automatically strips off CSS trees > 75kb, and an improved AMP editor. It also validates AMP your implementation, sends you error reports, and excludes plugins to run on the AMP if they’re not compatible.

The improvements of the AMP WP plugin are nice and were necessary. I don’t see the core issues fixed, though. For ad-driven businesses, AMP remains a cost factor.

Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate

Crus Shepard tested some common title tag SEO assumptions with Search Pilot and found interesting results. Removing the brand, for example, yielded a negative result but removing some boilerplate text had a very positive outcome.

"Adding or removing boilerplate text and the brand from titles can be better or worse depending on brand familiarity and value-add. -> testing, testing, testing -> there are no cookie cutter recommendations"

How to Launch A SaaS Startup to $7,000/month

Nice little case study that shows the importance of constantly chasing you customer’s pain points.

Churn isn’t always caused by your product, sometimes it’s pain related to it. That’s why it’s so important to stay in touch with customers and talk to both: churned and retained accounts.

25 ways to sign someone up for your newsletter

If email is a viable channel for your company or client, you want to check this deck out. It explains how to integrate newsletters in your site at scale.

Fancy isn’t always the best way to drive subscribers. Sometimes, simple does it. Depends on your audience preferences.

Toward a more relational Medium

I like Ev’s article not because it’s an update on where Medium is going - that’s also interesting - but because it explains the difference between relational and transactional content consumption. Reading from people vs reading about specific topics.

The web taught us to select via headlines but there’s another way: selecting via people a.k.a. Authors. A blog subscription is one example, before that we had newspapers. This relationship model got lost a hit with the internet but seems to come back due to the flood of content.

More Than Half of the People on Earth Now Use Social Media

2/3 of the world’s eligible population (older than 13) uses social media, mostly for staying up to date and geting news. The distribution is heavily geo-skewed: low in Africa, for example, and high in the Western world + Asia. The average user is on 9 different platforms with Facebook still ranking at the top (2.6b users). -> heavy overlap between platforms Interesting: younger people (16-24y) claim to use social media over search engines when conducting research. -> Google doesn’t like that

TikTok already has 800m users (Instagram: 1.08b). That could change with India’s restriction and the possible breakup enforced by the US government.

Get More SAAS Customers: SAAS SEO Masterclass with Tim Soulo

Ahrefs is an interesting company in many ways. Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, explains some of the things they do that make them so successful. One part is the power of brand. Ahrefs doesn't use Google Analytics, they don't use Schema, they don't break their head about keyword density. Instead, they focus on building a valuable brand, which Google rewards. One of the biggest issues is still that companies create content nobody wants to link to. They write about topics nobody searches for and they'r

Ahrefs also doesn't hunt users with popups. Instead of focusing on feeding their email list, they create content around problems and explain how to solve them with their product.

Study: How Often Google Ignores Our Meta Descriptions

Portent looked at 30,000 meta descriptions of page 1 results and found that 63% are rewritten by Google. They found, amongst other things, that Google's rewritten descriptions tend to be longer than the characters sites can use. Portent found that on average Google's rewritten descriptions are 5-20 characters longer.

"It seems Google is more likely to rewrite meta-descriptions on position 4-6 to give sites a boost and see if they rank higher/get more clicks. Also, mobile meta-descriptions have a higher rewrite rate than desktop."

Using monthly search volumes to measure seasonality

Sam introduces a way to determine keyword seasonality with KeywordsEverywhere's new historical search volume index. Once established, you can group them by topic and use the information to tweak your internal linking, title tags, and content creation.

Link to pages that target keywords that are seasonally in high demand from the homepage.

SHOULD WE ALWAYS CHARGE MORE?

The answer is yes. And maybe no. It depends on the perceived value your customers see. If they feel like they get a lot of your product, you should probably charge more and vice versa. Customer research and feedback makes it much easier to understand where your customers are. The key to find the perfect price is testing, in best case for different market segments. But when you start out, starting low isn't a bad idea.

Perceived value is hard to quantify and more a feeling. If your customers feel more productive when using your product, it provides value.

TikTok and the Sorting Hat

- Culture can be abstracted (by ML) - TikTok initially got more traction in the US than China - Bytedance copied musica.ly with Douyin in China (irony). Then Bytedance bought [Musica.ly](http://musica.ly) (bow TikTok) For $1b - To grow TikTok, Bytedance spent 8-9 figures on ads - Then, Bytedance applied the algorithms it already successfully used on Toutiao and other apps on the about you page in TikTok - Tiktok does not have a follower graph. Its algorithm matches people with preferences. It’s

we officially arrived in the age of sticky algorithms. TikTok is a not a social network. It doesn't rely on a people graph to create stickiness. Instead, the algorithm understands users so well that it knows exactly what they want (even more than Youtube).

The billion dollar blog

Nathan Barry shows some great examples of creators who monetized their audience with a startup, from George Clooney to the founder of Glossybox. Some of the biggest reasons creators fail to do that include not going all in and betting on the wrong platform.

Creators can turn they audience into a bootstrapped startup if they let their personal brand go and build a business on recurring revenue.

A Behind-the-Scenes Look into HubSpot's Newest Content Marketing Strategy

Alex markes the case for omnichannel marketing to support SEO based on where your target audience is. I've been beating the drum on this for a while

Everybody agrees that simple SEO isn't enough anymore. You need to be present in many channels to influence search results.

From Unknown Title to Viral Game: 12 Growth Lessons From Spellbreak

Interesting case-study of the game Spellbreak that got over 600,000 sign-ups by applying Growth tactics. My favorite tips from the video: 1. Put the dev blog on IMGUR. 2. Don't advertise too hard. 3. Gifs, gifs, gifs. 4. Set up a referral program. 5. Create a cool kids club.

It's really interesting to observe how games are grown like a software product. They think about testing, feedback, Product-Market Fit, expansion, etc.

April Dunford, Ambient Strategy - Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning

Great primer from April Dunford about positioning. It's based on 6 pillars: Market category - What context makes the value obvious to your customer segments? Alternatives - What would you use if [product] didn't exist? (Usually not a direct competitor to the product) Unique attributes - What features do you have that competitors/alternatives do not? Value - what value do the attributes enable for your customers? Customer segments - Who cares a lot about the value?

"What I enjoyed is the point that the classic positioning statement isn't simply something you ""just know"" but the method to figure it out."

Google Broad Core Updates Recoveries & How Google Reprocesses Core Update Scores

- Seems like a tedious conversation but it’s an important one - the difference between waiting for the next core update and being able to recover is that we better understand what updates are rewarding vs punishing if sites recover/dip at the same time a core update is rolled out

What I read between the lines is that the difference is in the type of algo update: broad core algorithm updates are big overhauls but there are smaller updates, too

How to earn your place in Google’s index in 2020

A lot of sites are either just partially indexed or have partially indexed pages on Google, including big names like Walmart, Medium, or Verizon. The partial indexing problem isn’t only caused by JS anymore. What to do - compare the desktop and mobile version of the same page side-by-side - run both version’s html code through diffchecker - check a page with turned-off Javascript and check whether Google can index the content you can’t see

I wasn’t familiar with partial indexing due to irrelevance before. It seems that Google skips unrelated parts of a page to save crawl resources.

Identifying Advanced GSC Search Performance Patterns (and What to Do About Them)

Google tests a lot of results. If a result jumps on page 1 but keeps a measly CTR, Google will kick it back on page 2. If that happens for many keywords of a site, Google might devalue it in a board core algorithm update. At the same time, it's important to optimize pages ranking for top 10 keywords for Featured Snippets when they enter the top 10. This article by my Ryte Technical Allstars sister Izzy Smith shoes some really cool examples of user intent and relevance.

What I found fascianting in this article are the many examples of Google figuring out the right keywords for a page.

Guest Posting: How to Get it Right (When So Many Get It Wrong)

Guest posting still works but high-quality placements aren’t that easy anymore. Instead of pitching other publications, build a following on social networks and then use Followerwonk or another tool to find followers that work at great sites for a warm intro. Use Ahrefs to discover guest post links to competitors.

I like the idea of including examples of previous guest blogs in your pitch. It’s a prove of experience and can even signal authority if the publications are good enough.

SaaS Websites: Is shorter copy really better?

Should online copy always be short? This post explains how many assumptions about short copy are outdated, such as people not reading long-form copy. This, by the way, is something Eddie Shleyner taught me (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0tXvpq0kFw): if people are curious about something, they're going to read. Part of the problem is also that lots of sites copy other sites and marketers copy marketers. It also seems that short-form copy is hardly ever tested against long-form.

The length of copy is not as important as the message, trustworthiness, and reducing friction.

The Entertainment Value Curve: Why TikTok is On Fire 🔥 and Quibi Isn’t

Platforms exist along a social/value curve. Snapchat, for example, has low production value but is very connecting. Netflix isn’t sociable but has super high production value. The best way to determine the sociability of a product is looking at how high the share of content creators from the overall users is. Content recommendation algorithms create a power curve that shows views per piece of content vs number of users. The result is the efficacy of content distribution. Snapchat has a flat curv

TikTok’s success is in part rooted in its frictionless loop of content creation, consumption, and sharing. The line between creators is blurred. #prosumer

Google Ads removes search terms for 28% of paid search budget

- Since early September, Google Ada provides less keyword data. - “the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click.” - that’s a huge problem because advertisers get less information about where their money goes. As a result, they might lose money due to inefficient targeting.

Seer found that about 28% of search terms were hidden. This is audacious! As a result, PPC becomes leas useful as an SEO testing vehicle, too.

How to Maximize ‘People Also Ask’ SEO Opportunities [Study]

SEMrush analyzed 1M keywords for PAA boxes. - They found PAA boxes in about half of the results, 86% of the time for question queries. - PAA boxes are 6x as likely to appear as a Featured Snippet. - 58% of the time PAAs appear after the first organic result. - 79% of PAAs contain paragraphs.

74% of sites ranking in PAAs were not ranking on the first page of the query. That’s very interesting and must mean Google uses a different way to evaluate what qualifies for a PAA versus, say, a Featured Snippet or regular organic result. PAA paragraphs are short: 41 words on average, 130 words max.

Long term shared hosting experiment

Bad neighborhood hosting can be an issue for SEO. Most people don’t pay enough attention to it. Shared hosting can mean your site shares an IP with a PBN. Experiment: come up with fake keyword and registered 20 clean domains. 10 on dedicated servers, 10 on shared servers with spammy sites. Scanned DNS A records to find spammy sites and checked with Ahrefs and Majestics. Normalized for other factors like speed, design, and content.

Sites hosted on a shared server ranked worse than those on dedicated servers. However, the impact wasn’t significant.

The Resurgence and Importance of Email Newsletters

- Email usage varies across countries. In Belgium, 28% of readers consume news via email. In the UK, only 9%. - most subscribers use email to escape the information flood on the internet and stay up to date. - readers above the age of 35 are more likely to subscribe. - Emails are easy to sample and consume. - Email is a great retention channel. It builds loyalty.

“Once just a series of automated links, the most successful emails are treated as an editorial product hosted by a senior journalist who brings an informal tone and personal touch which has often been lacking in digital media” This is the key point for me in the newsletter trend wave that popped up over the last years. It’s about personality and storytelling, not just a list of links. Btw, if you don’t think of yourself as a media company, you got a problem.

Fast Forward Episode 5: Benedict Evans

An interview with Ben Evans, former partner at a16z and publisher of a great newsletter shines light on the broader implications of Covid: - Unbundling happens at a faster rate (example: Transferwise unbundles international money wiring). - Everybody is now forced to try everything online. - We're going through multiple phases in Covid/lockdown and we don't know what "the new normal" will look like.

Covid is a moment of realization that accelerates many trends instead of changing them, except for the travel industry.

Quick Finds - Get your business ready for what comes next

- Rising retail categories now have an interview in Google Ads - It's like a Google Trends showing advertisers trending categories and products and lives in the Insights page. - Google will also show forecasting data (to encourage advertisers to spend more) - Google also launches a new automated campaign format, Performance Max Campaigns (what a name), that stretch across all advertising inventories: Display Network, Youtube, Gmail, Discover, Search, etc. The new format allows advert

Quick Finds - Google Shopping Is Not Attracting Sellers Despite 0% Fees

Google’s free shopping tab strategy doesn’t work out. The problem is that Google has nothing really to offer sellers over Amazon or Shopify.

Quick Finds - A new home for Web Stories on Discover

- Another Platform Confluence move: bringing more formats together and interweave them. Web Stories appear in Search, News, and now Discover. - Google shows Web Stories in the Discover feed.

How to Build Links in B2B or Niche Industries

Building links in niche or "boring" industries can be challenging. - look for broad topics to create content around and do outreach for. - when creating content for broad topics, pitch it in as many markets as possible. - look for topics that gain passive links.

Going for broad, adjacent, or related topics is a smart choice for link building. The challenge is sometimes to abstact the target market of a company in a niche space to the next higher-level topic.

Why most analytics efforts fail

Most companies have messy data without a shared language, knowledge transfer, or trust in the data. Instead, it’s important to focus on the users of that data as customers and tag events accurately to be able to act on the data. Just measuring is not enough. - create a data dictionary with visualizations

Love the idea of tracking journeys: what is the intent behind the data point; what does failure look like; what does success look like?

How To Improve Your Newsletter Welcome Emails: Best Practices & Examples

Good welcome emails are important because they set the tone for content quality of a newsletter. - The team from Newsletter Crew subscribed to +70 newsletters and found that most writers don't use the full potential of welcome emails. - The article features examples of creative subject lines instead of the generic "you're on the list". - Make sure to showcase your best issues and include your social accounts.

Welcome emails are entry points to solidify the connection with your susbcribers. They set the tone for the relationship.

SEO Split-Testing Lessons from SearchPilot: Restructuring HTML

Search Pilot tested what happens when you give load priority to the most important content of a page over sidebars and other secondary elements. The thesis is that by loading important content faster, users have a better exprience.

The experiment resultet in a 16% organic traffic uplift.

Content Marketing ROI: What and How to Measure Content Performance Using Attribution Models

Measuring lead attribution from content is hard. - Most companies measure conversion with last click attribution (= user converts on the current page), but this creates a flawed view. - GA’s Model Comparison Tool provides first click attribution. - GA's time lag report shows you how many days it takes for people to convert. Path length shows you how many interactions it takes.

The trick to compare attribution models per page is to select "landing page URL" as a dimension. Also, cross-device tracking doesn't reaaally exist yet, so tons of conversions are attributed to your homepage. The same is true for interaction gaps longer than 90 days or Word of Mouth (even though Reforge recently introduced the word of mouth coefficient).

Image Packs in Google Web Search – A reason you might be seeing high rankings but insanely low click-through rate in GSC

Certain SERP features like image packs shows non-Google URLs but lead to another Google search page (in this case, image search. That leads to a lot of confusion because Google Search Console does count the impression and ranking for such URLs but, of course, you don’t get the clicks.

My key takeaway is that search console becomes less valuable as Google moves further away from a “10 blue links” design of the SERPs.

How to Maximize your Pages CTR in Search Results Besides Improving your Rankings

There can be many reasons for low CTRs. Aleyda explanis how to handle the cases you can do something about: - Optimize meta data - Go after Rich Snippets and Featured Snippets - Differentiate pages that might compete against each other more clearly Aleyda shows a clear flow chart that helps you decide what to do about pages with low CTRs.

Aleyda showed me https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/, a really cool feature that allows you to compare CTR across many industries, SERP Features, categories, and types of keywords.

Writing copy for landing pages

Joanna Wiebe, founder of Copyhackers, explains how to rock landing page copy: - Focus your copy on value for the user, not your company - Varying sentence length creates "texture" - Add a strong adjective for "shine" - Address objections with “even if” - Create a landing page separate from your homepage

Good copy reflects the customer's stage of awareness. It ranges from (problem) unaware to product-aware.

Pinterest and Grubhub’s Former Growth Lead on Building Content Loops

The master Casey Winters explains how to build scalable content loops: 1. Find content from your users or product (what I refer to as “inventory”) 2. Get users to share the content. 3. Tweak your onboarding based on traffic source quality. 4. Add a bit of friction to drive sign-ups.

Grubhub built links by giving local bloggers and influencers promo codes in exchange for write-ups. It’s reassuring to note that even marketplaces like GrubHub has to invest in link building.

Sequencing Business Models: The Types of Marketplaces

When companies go from SaaS to Marketplace, they fall into one of five buckets. Each bucket is more "marketplace-y" or "SaaS-y" and comes with different vectors like fees, demand-side branding, or value props.

As companies move from SaaS to fully-integrated marketplaces, they also move from supply to demand-side value props. Over time, the whole defintiion of value changes.

Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups

Companies tend to grow through 3 channels: performance marketing, SEO, or virality. To find a channel, companies need to validate, commit, and become world-class at it. You can either choose a channel that’s a natural fit for your startup, or you look at your data. Natural fits for performance marketing: - customers aren’t looking for your product or you sell to them directly Natural fit for virality: - products get better with more users - the product is fun to share Natural fit for SEO: -

Adjusting Featured Snippet Answers by Context

Bill Slawski dug out a patent that could be related to Google's passage ranking. - Even the text before a passage can impact the relevance of the passage itself - The patent hints at distance of a heading to the search query as a potential factor

Google might use query-independent signals to rank passages like links or speed. Also, headings might become more important because they provide context for the content passage Google might rank.

Reducing the Site-Speed Impact of Third-Party Tags

3rd party tags often impose a heavy load on site speed. Andy Davis shows how to audit and optimize speed with 3rd party tags. Common advice is deferring or asyncing scripts, but the first step has to be an audit (with your page speed tool of choice). Then, you look for tags that aren’t used anymore. Finally, host libraries and other stylistic tags on your own servers or CDNs.

You don’t need every tag on every page, and sometimes expired subscription tags return a 403 status code. Divide tags into groups that load before and after the main content.

An Alternative Approach to XML Sitemaps

Can smaller xml sitemaps (10K URLs instead of 50K) lead to better indexing? It might! The article also outlines the idea of dynamic xml sitemaps that add and remove URLs automatically based on what you want Google to crawl.

Google’s recommendation to use more and smaller xml sitemaps in Google News could also transfer to regular organic search.

Google Search Mobile Market Share Likely to Drop Around 20% through Search Preference Menus

DuckDuckGo tested how 12,000 people across 3 countries would choose a search engine if they were presented with a choice. The result: 20% of people would not choose Google on average. This analysis, of course, was published amiid the discussion around Google's exclusive deal with Apple to be the default search engine and how anticompetitive that is.

I would love to see the a/b test to Google's partnership with Apple. If competition is just a cliick away, Google should test and see what happens when they're not the prefered search engine on Apple's devices.

Don’t be the best, be the only one

- In business, it doesn't matter whether you're first or how innovative you think a product is. All that matters is whether you make the life of your customers better or not. - Innovation is a matter of perception - Ask yourself: what can you do that others cannot?

I think about this statement a lot and how to transfer it to SEO and Growth: "I doubt Apple looks at itself as being in the business of building consumer products, if so then it competes with just about everyone. I think that Apple is in the business of experience design, and just so happens to make consumer products."

Charlie Munger’s “How to Start Coca Cola in 1884” Thought Experiment

Charlie Munger's Coca Cola thought experiment is an exercise in extrapolative and projective thinking. In short: it's a master class in thinking ahead. Munger draws from areas like consumer psychology, accounting, forecasting, and marketing. My criticism would be that many points seem to come out of the blue. The rationale behind them is not explained in a way the audience can recreate and reapply it. It's still a great and valuable example of thought experiments.

Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works

A couple of thoughts: - First time that I see all Google ranking engineers on camera. - Google makes sure to point out that revenue is generated through ads (correct), that spam is a major problem (also correct), and that ads are clearly marked (correct, but ads are getting much harder to distinguish from organic results)

At 34:00, Googler's speak about amping up authority in the search results to fight fake news and hoaxes. That could be one of the bigger algorithm changes we've seen in the search results in the last months.

A quest for the least spammy exit intent popup on the internet

Clearbit ran an experiment to test whether they could create a user-friendly exit popup. Usually, those are really annoying, but Clearbit was able to design it user-friendly. First, they only showed the popup to visitors who spent at least 30 seconds on the page and capped it at five timies. Second, they personalized the popup with Clearbit Reveal, which increased the chance of someone scheduling a demo because it shows the product in action.

The experiment led to a 13.4% conversion rate - stunningly good! One important takeaway: where the popup was shown mattered a lot. Pricing and plans landing pages performed by far the best.

How the Best Forecasters Predict Events Such as Election Outcomes

- Instead of a 180, the best in their fields change their minds gradually - A study of more than one million predictions shows that there are “superforecasters”, people who have a significantly higher success rate at predictions - They gradually update their beliefs - Sudden changes in mind can be signs of recency bias or the availability heuristic - This can be learned, for example by averaging or baselining

The Animalz Content Marketing Benchmark Report 2020

Animalz created a content marketing benchmark report based on 150M pageviews over 12 months. The highlghts: - Social, email, and communiities can kick start a publication - Define your internal linking strategy - Most articles contain no internal links To no ones surprise, most traffic came from organic search and social traffic doesn't really matter anymore. However, it seems smaller blogs get less organic search traffic and more from direct and dark social sources.

Of course, we see a power curve in the distribution of traffic: a few blogs get by far the most traffic. The median traffic is around 17K pageviews a month. It takes about 9 years to reach 1 million yearly pageviews. Those mega blogs show patterns of having posts that get 100K pageviews each. The median bounce rate is at about 80% and time on site at 3 minutes and 15 seconds.

Products on Amazon Have a Lot More Reviews

Amazon reviews are one of the mightiest flywheels they have. People even look at them when not shopping on Amazon. Since Amazon allows you to leave ratings without written reviews, the total number of reviews increased significantly (probably doubled). This might add more reviews to Amazon but not more utility because users prefer to read opinions and context of the rating.

Interesting Finds Feature Is Changing Mobile SERPs

“Interesting Finds” SERP Features gain more visibility and clicks in the SERPs, especially on mobile. Organic results are pushed further down the SERP and compete with SERP Features. Upbuild ran a test on 1,500 ecommerce keywords and found that roughly 30% display Interesting Finds.

A better clickthrough rate: How Pinterest upgraded everyone’s favorite engagement metric

How do you track user engagement beyond CTR? The problems of CTR, at least in the context of ads, are position bias, cliickbait, and a narrow perspective. Pinterest created a metric that weighs the engagement with the ad against the engagemeent with neighboring content.

Engagement beats scale: Inside Morning Brew’s approach to subscriber growth

How do you grow a million subscriber newsletter? The Morning Brew: - has a dedicated onboarding email to optimize delivery - tests the subject line for every email in four ways (3% of subscribers each) and then sends the winner to 88% of subscribers - weeds out churning subscribers (no clicks in the last 90 days, or no opens in the last 18 days) Core of The Morning Brew's growth is its referral program. Readers who subscribe through a referal seem to be way more engaged, but referrers also seem

The Morning Brew measures a metric called HQ CAC (high quality customer acquisition cost), which calculates the cost it takes to get an egaged subscriber.

How TikTok’s unique mix of social and broadcast media techniques sets it apart

TikTok is a phenomenon. It brings movement into consumer platform stagnation and Google’s and Facebook’s chokehold. TikTok is a departure from old social networks based on geography, following, and shared interest The challenge that brings to TikTok is figuring out how to provide good ad-targeting An opportunity might be shoppable ads, which collapse the traditional funnel NBC recently introduced shoppable ads on their properties, including TV They allow customers to buy products without le

How to Optimize for Google Featured Snippets [Research]

- Study looked at % of keywords that display a FS (160M on desktop, 46M on mobile) - Lessons: 79% of domains have the FS on mobile and desktop - Mobile traffic is growing - 19% of keywords on Google have a FS - 7.3% of SERPs have a double FS - The degree or FS appearance varies by degree - Highest in travel and computer tech, lowest in real estate - 70% of FS show paragraphs - The longer the query, the more likely it is to show a FS - Stick to 40-50 words, or 250-300 characters

Google Passages – What They Are & What They Are Not

Bartosz from Onely spoke with Martin Splitt about Passage Ranking. It's definitely worth watching, but none of Splitt's explanations are surprising. Splitt says "you can't optimize for passages", and, while I believe him, the change is supposed to impact 7% of worldwide queries. Anything that impacts queries also impacts SEO. So, there might be a way to learn something after all.

How to Use Templated Content and Cross-Cutting to Grow Your Blog Quickly

Love the idea and examples of templated content formats for content marketing. The article also explains the difference between horizontal and vertical topic expansion. You either explore new formats or cover more ground with the same one. Going after a narrative between the same content formats is called cross-cutting.

Using Micro Influencers on Your Site to Capture Enterprises

Micro-influencers can be a valuable tool for ABM campaigns and enterprise products in general. Joe Sinkwitz explains that micro-influencers often have more expertise, which makes them more impactful. Micro-influencer campaigns tend to be cheaper and therefore, better suited to test the channel. Channels vary in their feasibility for different types of content. Not every business should run campaigns on the same channels.

Lenny Rachitsky - How I launched a paid newsletter

Not just a geat presentation for anyone interested in starting a paid newsletter, but also just a great lesson in prodcut development. Lenny is an ex-Airbnb product manager who has one of the hottest newsletters out there. The deck shows his growth over time, and inflection points when Lenny wrote 10x articles that drove over 50% of susbcriber growth. Note that Lenny is only writing since April of 2019. His newsletter grew at rapid pace.