Apparently, yes.

Google’s John Mueller recently explained that the Google search engine algorithm might pick up if a website has a lot of negative reviews.

Some background info

You may not remember it but in 2010, NYTimes reported that an online merchant was ranking highly because the site had lots of backlinks, albeit from angry and dissatisfied customers. This prompted a response from Google and the introduction of “sentiment analysis”.

The idea for introducing sentiment analysis was to understand the context of links and recognize negative reviews that could harm search engine rankings. In 2010, Google explicitly said that negative comments would become negative votes.

Does it matter now?

Recently, John Mueller was asked if negative reviews would hurt a site’s rankings. Here is the question:

“If you have a “bad” reputation online and you see a lot of negative stuff about your company, would that hurt, potentially, your Google ranking for keywords?

Could Google look at that and say, ‘Oh this is a bad company, we’re not going to rank it as well because they have a lot of negative reviews.’”

Mueller confirmed that if most of the signals are negative, it may have an impact on the website’s search engine rankings. However, he also mentioned that negative reviews are a common thing, and having some negative reviews won’t affect a site’s rankings in the SERPs.

According to John, “That’s something where if all of the signals point in that direction [negative reviews], I could imagine that we might pick that up.

But if you’re talking about [that] there are a handful of people that are upset and they’re writing these random things online, and there are lots of people that are happy with your site, and everything is normal, then that’s not something where I would really worry about.”

In addition, John Mueller also confirmed that Google still uses the 2010 sentiment analysis algorithm. However, the specifics may have changed with the evolution of technology, and how people interact with online businesses and leave reviews.

Summary

The takeaway here is that:

• The sentiment analysis algorithm still affects, but most likely not in the exact same way it did a decade ago.
• Negative reviews are common and should not affect a site’s rankings most of the time.
• However, if a site has predominantly negative reviews, it may have an effect on search engine rankings.

The post Google search algorithm may consider negative reviews, John Mueller explains.. appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Some of the link-building techniques require a lot of research and, therefore, can be quite complex. However, sometimes, it is simply about asking.

Yes, you can get high-quality, powerful, and relevant backlinks from well-established websites in your niche just by asking. But you will have to do it the right way.

If you want to gather more powerful backlinks for your site, here are a few tips to help you craft a tactfully sound email outreach campaign.

Let’s begin.

1. Send individualized and personalized emails

Don’t use templates.

Templates can be tempting — especially if you have to reach out to dozens of people. But believe us, it rarely works.

In today’s age where almost everyone is so internet savvy, publishers can smell templates from a mile away. You won’t be able to get any backlink with a template, but you will lose credibility and the opportunity to make a lasting first impression.

Instead, carefully research about your email recipients and create personalized emails that speak to only them.

HubSpot’s example of a personalized email is spot on. Here, take a look.

2. The first 24 hours are crucial

People care about their recent articles the most. If you can reach out to them within the first 24 hours of them publishing a blog post, you may have a higher chance of scoring a backlink.

How do you ensure that you reach out to them within that time-frame? There are a few ways:

1. You can keep a close eye on your push notifications and RSS feed to see if your favorite blogs and publications have published any new piece of content.
2. You can also use a paid tool like Pitchbox that curates a list of websites that published something during the last 24-hour period.
3. You can also use BuzzSumo to search for any content that is published within the last 24 hours.

3. Lay the foundation

An important aspect of successful email outreach is to stand apart from the hundreds of emails that the other person would potentially be receiving.

One excellent way of doing that is to lay a foundation, and the best channel for doing that is social media.

Follow the other person on Facebook or Twitter and get the conversation going. First, get yourself noticed. Then you can reach out to them via email — or even on the same social channel — and you will have something to talk about and a foundation to build your working relationship on.

4. Leverage your social proof

Social proof is great, and every marketer should leverage it as much as possible.

Do you have any reputable clients? How many email subscribers do you have? Do you have any high-quality backlinks from recognizable websites?

These are all “social proofs” that you are not a nobody. Once you show a person that other bloggers are already linking to your content, they’d also be more likely to create a link to it.

With social proof comes perceived value, and sometimes that’s all it takes to get your foot in the door.

5. Research about the person you are emailing

Seriously. Do your research. Lots of it.

This is another reason why you shouldn’t be spamming dozens of publications — because good research takes time.

First, make sure that you are emailing the right person. You’d be surprised how many people don’t pay much attention to it and kill their link-building chances right away.

Second, if you mention that you “enjoy their blog posts on a certain topic”, make sure that they have written plenty about it. It won’t work if they have just written one or two posts on a topic and moved on. In short, mention what you think their interest is — not something that they may have worked on a couple of times for some reason.

Third, try to mention one of their recent posts. While there’s nothing wrong with praising an older post, recent posts may have a bigger impact on the writer as those would be still fresh in their mind.

Conclusion

Whether you are reaching out for pitching a guest post or just asking for a backlink, a well-crafted outreach email is the key. Use the tips mentioned in this article to make sure you are doing it right.

The post Link-building: 5 Tips for an Effective Email Outreach Campaign appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Google recently confirmed that web pages in more than 95% of countries have seen improved speeds. Apart from the increase in webpage speed, user-centric performance metrics have also improved by 15 percent to 20 percent last year in 2018. In comparison, 2017 saw no improvement in user-centric performance metrics.

It is important to note that Google made page speed a mobile search engine ranking factor in 2018.

More developers are realizing the importance of fast-loading web pages

Google also revealed that fast-loading mobile web pages are becoming a priority for developers. In 2018, developers across the world ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits for over 200 million unique URLs.

This proves that developers are coming around and finally realizing the importance of fast-loading mobile web pages.

The downfall of abandonment rates

Another interesting — although not at all surprising — fact that Google shared is that abandonment rates have decreased significantly.

After all, when a website loads faster, people are less likely to abandon it right away. On the other hand, if a website takes too long, online users simply abandon the page and click on another link. This is an engagement metric that may also have a big negative impact on a site’s search engine rankings.

Google noticed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate.

The announcement reads, “Thanks to these speed improvements, we’ve observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search.”

Keep focusing on page speed

While the internet has become faster, you still need to continue focus on how quickly your pages load. Moreover, continue to improve your website’s user experience to keep your engagement rate high and abandonment rate low.

You can use PageSpeed Insights and Google Chrome User Experience Report to learn more about how your pages are performing.

The post Websites are faster ever since page speed became a search engine ranking factor appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

1. Policy manager

The new ‘policy manager’ section in Google Ads will work as a central hub and allow users to monitor policy of restriction of keywords, extensions, and ads. You can access it by selecting the ‘Policy manager’ after clicking ‘Setup’ in the Tools Table.
The new ‘policy manager’ may also allow users to detect violations of Google’s ad policies during the ad creation process — minimizing the chances of ads disapproval.
In other words, if an advertiser is unknowingly going against Google’s policy, Google will provide real-time feedback to identify the issue. Any possible violations will be detected before they occur, so advertisers can comply with all policies before submitting ads for approval.
Some of the other upcoming features include:

• Recommendations for fixing ads
• The history of appeals
• An overview of account certifications

2. Additional insights

As you may know, Google started providing advertisers more information on why their ads were disapproved. This feature will be expanded soon.
Additionally, in the case of disagreements, users will be able to submit an appeal immediately.
The feature to appeal instantly from within Google Ads is expected to roll out in the next few weeks. More importantly, the feature will be available for text for most policy violations.
Advertisers will be able to resubmit their ads for review by selecting one of the two available options:

• “Made changes to comply with policy”
• “Dispute decision”

What’s next?

Google Ads getting disapproved isn’t considered too big a deal, but it does consume extra time and efforts and sometimes throw away original marketing plans.
By making everything more transparent and detecting policy violations during the ad creation process, Google will simplify things for advertisers.
What do you think of the latest upcoming changes in Google Ads? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

The post Google Ads to provide more assistance in case of ad disapprovals appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Google is super important; there is no doubt about that. However, it’s not the end of the world.

I hate to break it to you, but there are other search engines as well, e.g., YouTube.

Yes, YouTube is a search engine. In fact, it is the 2nd biggest search engine in the world in terms of online searches.

If you manage to get your videos ranked higher in the YouTube search results, you can create a lot of brand awareness, stamp your authority in your chosen niche, and acquire free traffic and potential leads for your business.

Here are a few proven tips on how to rank your videos higher on YouTube.

1. Keyword research

Keyword research is usually the first step for SEOs when they start working on a piece of content, such as a blog post. However, when content creators make a video, they don’t always do keyword research beforehand. That’s a mistake.

Be it Google, YouTube, or any other search engine, keyword research should be the first step. You need to know how many people are searching for a particular keyword or phrase before you invest your time in it.

Second, similar looking keywords may have different search volumes. You should be able to know which one to target. For example, “benefits of mangoes” and “advantages of mangoes” may refer to the same topic. Without keyword research, however, you will never know which keyword is more popular and, therefore, should be targeted.

Here are a few ways to start with keyword research:

• Shortlist a few high-performing YouTube videos and identify a pattern of keywords that you can emulate.
• Use YouTube’s autocomplete feature to see which keywords YouTube suggests.
• Use keyword research tools, such as VidIQ and io.

2. Optimise … Everything!

Only researching keywords won’t take you very far. You also need to optimize your content. Here are a few elements that you must optimise with the right usage of important keywords:

• Title — The title of the video is often the most important element on YouTube. The title should not only contain the important keywords that you are targeting, but it should also be interesting and compelling at the same time.
• Description — YouTube’s search engine algorithm also takes into account the description of your video. Unlike the title, you have ample room to include many keywords in it. Just make sure not to spam keywords. Keep it interesting, engaging, useful, and keyword-rich. However, keep in mind that although marketers can include up to 5,000 characters in the description, YouTube only displays the first ~160 characters and truncates the rest. Be strategic.
• Tags — Also, make your videos more easily accessible and discoverable by adding relevant tags with the right keywords.

3. Make your thumbnails interesting and compelling

The organic CTR your videos get may play an important role when it comes to moving up in the rankings. Apart from the title — which we have discussed — the thumbnail of the video also plays a vital role in improving the click-through rate.

Make it compelling, interesting, unique, and eye-catching. If the thumbnail seems flat and bland, it will not attract readers. A low CTR may signal YouTube that your video isn’t right and shouldn’t be appearing in the SERPs.

4. Don’t ignore the closed caption feature

Many YouTube content creators ignore it, but the seemingly innocuous CC feature has a pivotal role to play.

According to a study, videos with closed captions on average receive an extra 7.32% traffic.

Higher engagement sends positive signals and may help push your videos up in the YouTube search rankings.

5. Create interesting, useful, and engaging content

Just as it is with any other form of content creation and SEO, you need to consistently create high-quality and engaging videos that your viewers find interesting and useful.

More useful and engaging videos increase audience retention, views, shares, engagement, and subscribers. When YouTube receives all these positive signals about your videos, it increases the chances of your videos showing up under YouTube’s suggestions and higher in the SERPs when someone searches for the relevant keywords.

Conclusion

YouTube isn’t just for watching funny cat videos. It is an excellent resource for free organic traffic.

With a proper SEO strategy and a little bit of consistent traffic, you can turn things around and make YouTube one of the most valuable online assets for your business.

The post 5 Tips for Ranking Your Videos Higher on YouTube appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, offering a free trial can also sometimes backfire. While you may generate many leads by offering a free plan, you may not be able to convert a lot of them into paying customers.

In the end, paying customers and the revenue you generate from is all that matters.

In this blog post, we are sharing a few tips on converting free plan users into paying customers so you can increase your revenue.

1. Monthly plans vs. Annual plans

Before we dive into actionable steps, it is important to have a solid strategy in place.

Take a good hard look at the type of plan you are offering. Is it a monthly plan or an annual one?

While an annual subscription plan does have its charm and can be much more profitable, it will undoubtedly have a lower rate of conversion. People are often afraid to commit for the long-term, and this may get in the way of converting free plan users into paying customers.

Take a look at the following chart to see how these two plans have different conversion rates.

If your product/service is good, people will like to continue using it.

Therefore, asking for an annual service right away may not be a brilliant idea.

If you are getting a good conversion rate, by all means, stick with it. If not, you should try shifting to a monthly offering, and the conversion rate may increase.

2. A comprehensive lead-nurturing strategy

Lead generation is a step-by-step process, and lead nurturing is an important part of it.

You need to have a solid and comprehensive lead-nurturing strategy to convince your leads that they should subscribe to the paid plan.

Email is the perfect medium for it.

Craft a series of drip email campaigns that takes a step-by-step approach and drives potential customers through the sales funnel. Even a simple three-stage sales funnel would do the job:

• Awareness
• Research
• Consideration

Based on this model, each email should belong to one of these stages and drives the user forward.

3. Case studies

Case studies can make or break an onboarding or lead nurturing campaign. These case studies emails usually come in later when potential subscribers are researching or, ideally, considering to buy the product.

Make these case studies work as a final push.

Any case study that is backed by real testimonials and numbers is expected to work better. Therefore, make sure to include photos or videos of your customers, if possible. Use lots of numbers and showcase how your product managed to improve their lives or businesses.

Pro tip: It is highly recommended that you have a series of questions prepared when you are creating a case study. These questions to ask your existing customers should cover every base you’d need to create a solid case study.

4. Message personalization

Message personalization is another important aspect that unfortunately a lot of marketers do not truly understand.

First of all, it is much more than addressing your email subscribers with their first name, i.e., %%firstname%%.

Message personalization is about understanding who your audience is, at what stage of the sales funnel they currently belong to, what are their needs, preferences, and concerns, and how your product and messaging can help them.

For example, if you are trying to convert free trial users into paying customers, know that these are the people who are already using your product. Depending on the time for they have used your product, they may be familiar with most of its features.

Your job, therefore, isn’t to inform them how your product works. You can skip the entire ‘awareness’ stage of the sales funnel here.

At this stage, your job would be to convince them of all the other benefits they would get if they choose to subscribe to a paid plan. Upselling.

By personalizing the message to fit their current needs and mindset, you will be able to score a better conversion rate. The following graph highlights the most effective email marketing tactics. As you can guess, personalization tops the list.

Apart from the aforementioned tips, there are a few other ways that you may increase the conversion rate. Those tips are:

• Focusing on list segmentation and targeting the right people.
• Creating engaging and meaningful calls-to-action.
• Having an excellent pricing page that clearly focuses on the benefits of your paid plans.
• Testing and optimization are key elements to success. Keep testing and optimizing your marketing campaigns, marketing emails, website design, and landing page elements to see what works best for your audience.

The post Tips For Converting Free Plan Users Into Paying Customers appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Previously, advertisers would create campaigns without specifying their business goals. With the new workflow, however, advertisers can first define their goals — such as sales, leads or website traffic generation — which then brings relevant suggestions on setting up the rest of the campaign.

Here is an image of the new workflow.

The idea behind this new workflow design is to let advertisers select the most appropriate campaign type for a particular business and marketing goal. For example, advertisers would see recommendations such as Display and Video campaign if their goal is to increase brand awareness. For newbie marketers, this may be the difference between a fail and a successful ad campaign.

The extent of the suggestions offered by the new workflow isn’t limited to the campaign type. After selecting the goal and campaign type, more suggestions regarding other campaign settings will pop up, including ad formats, ad extensions, campaign subtypes, and bidding focus.

If you are wondering, here is a full list of goals that advertisers can select and their corresponding campaign types that will be surfaced as suggestions:

What do you think about this latest Google Ads update and the new workflow system?

Is it just an additional step — a gimmick — that the advertisers will have to waddle through or a meaningful automation system that may simplify online advertising, especially for newbie marketers?

Let us know what you think.

On the other hand, if you have any questions about search engine rankings or Google advertising, feel free to contact.

The post Google Ads’ New Workflow Lets Advertisers Create Goal-Based Campaigns appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, recently Google’s John Mueller has reminded everyone that app interstitials may also cause trouble when it comes to mobile-first indexing. According to John Mueller’s tweet, if an app interstitial replaces a website’s homepage, then Google will index that in the search engine results pages.

Nobody wants an app interstitial to be ranked. Everybody wants to rank the homepage of the website, so that is clearly a big issue.

Here is what Mueller said:

“On the topic of interstitials … With Mobile-First Indexing, an app-interstitial will be problematic. If it’s robotted, your homepage might be too. If it replaces your homepage, that’s what we index.”

Since a lot of organic traffic that comes from search engines lands directly on the homepage of a website, this may have a significant impact on your overall website traffic as well as the search engine rankings of your website.

How to avoid this issue?

Thankfully, this issue can be avoided.

In his tweet, John Mueller refers to a Google Webmaster Central blog post that contains examples of alternatives to app interstitials that are more acceptable.

As you may know that Google has specifically said that banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space would be allowed and, therefore, can be used without any problems. The idea here is to provide a great user experience. With app interstitials that takes the entire screen does not provide that experience.

According to the blog post that John referred to:

“Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible. For example, the app install banners provided by Safari and Chrome are examples of banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space.”

What to do?

It’s simple. Use interstitials that are of a reasonable size and which allow search engines to see the rest of the content on the homepage.

Another important thing is to make sure that the interstitial should not cause the page to change URLs whenever a search engine crawler (or a user) lands on it. This may affect search engine rankings.

Here is an example of a banner that uses a reasonable amount of screen space.

The post Google May Rank App Interstitials Instead Of Your Website’s Homepage appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

According to Bing, this latest change will help advertisers understand the customer journey and related conversion metrics. Equipped with this knowledge, they will be able to make better business decisions in the future.

What’s the big change?

As mentioned earlier, Bing Ads has updated how it counts conversions and assists. Therefore, there are two big changes:

1. Conversions will now be recorded and reported based on the time of the ad click.
2. Assists will now be recorded and reported based on the time of the ad click.

In its announcement blog post, Bing explained the change with the following example:

Suppose a user clicks on an ad (keyword 1), browses the website but doesn’t buy anything. The next day, the same user clicks on another ad (keyword 2). This time, she adds a product to her cart, but she still doesn’t buy it.

On day 3, she revisits the website to complete the transaction and buys the product she added into the cart.

Previously, the conversion and the assist would have been counted as a day-3 activity. Now with the latest change, it’s going to be recorded as an assist on day 1 and a conversion on day 2.

Conclusion

Bing warns that websites with longer conversion windows from the click event may see some fluctuations in the reporting for a short amount of time — until the new reporting data stabilizes. If you see discrepancies between third-party analytics software and Bing Ads conversion counts, you can refer to this help article.

The post Bing Ads Now Counts Conversions and Assists Based on the Time of Ad Clicks appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Here is a brief summary to catch you up with what’s new.

Language targeting at the campaign level

When creating Bing ads, marketers now have the option to target multiple languages at the campaign level. Previously, advertisers could only target language settings at ad group level. It meant that language targeting options had to be carried through multiple ad groups — which was often ineffective and unproductive.

This practice of targeting language was also not in line with how Google Ads work. As a result, importing ads from Google Ads to Bing was not a smooth process at all.

The latest update has made importing ads from Google to Bing much simpler.

Can I set language targeting at ad group level?

Yes, users now have the option to set language target either at ad group level or the campaign level.

How many languages can I select?

Bing ads allow 12 languages to be selected either at ad group level or at the campaign level. These languages are:

• Traditional Chinese
• English
• German
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Danish
• Finnish
• Italian
• Spanish
• Dutch
• French
• Norwegian
• Swedish

How to set language targeting at the campaign level?

This can be done easily in just two steps:

1. Set up your ad campaigns with the languages you want to target. You can either target one or multiple languages.
2. When setting up your ad groups, select ‘Use the campaign settings.’ That’s it.

Conclusion

The ability to target multiple languages at campaign level will help advertisers be more productive and efficient — especially if they are trying to import ads from Google Ads.

With multiple language targeting, advertisers can also reach more customers, create awareness in multiple regions, and show more customer-friendly and targeted ads.

The ability to target multiple languages is also important because Bing does not translate your ads into different languages. It recommends creating ads in the different languages you’re targeting. This latest update will simplify that process.

The post Bing Follows Suit: Now Supports Language Targeting at Campaign Level appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.