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The global adoption of digital technologies is transforming how consumers and businesses operate interact drastically. While CXOs continue to embrace — and implement — the concept of digital transformation, technology vendors like global CRM Salesforce continue to dominate the marketplace. Earlier this week, Salesforce announced a record $3.74 million in revenue in its first quarter of its fiscal year 2020, an increase of 24% year-over-year.

The marketing cloud and commerce solutions alone saw 33% growth. Its service cloud surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the quarter for the first time.

“Our strong revenue growth in the quarter reflects the strength of our business and the tremendous demand we’re seeing from customers worldwide,” said Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce in prepared remarks. “Companies of every size and industry are undergoing a digital transformation to better serve their customers and they are choosing Salesforce as their partner.”

Why we should care

As leaders shift organizational objectives toward digital transformation, the influx of new workplace technologies comes as no surprise to digital marketing teams. Most of us had to adapt to the ever-evolving martech landscape quickly — and before the rest of our organizations.

Salesforce’s growth this past quarter demonstrates that organizations are, in fact, adapting and embracing the necessary changes. And with CMOs reportedly investing roughly 30 percent of their budgets in martech, it’s clear that the transformation is here. Consumers expecting better customer experiences will continue to drive digital teams to adopt new technologies, increasing our reliance on vendors like Salesforce.

More on Salesforce

• At last week’s TrailheaDX 2019 Conference, the company revealed Salesforce Blockchain, a low-code blockchain solution that will be natively available to Salesforce users.
• Salesforce recently launched its new Datorama marketplace,  for brands and agencies to develop customer applications with a focus on marketing intelligence.

We all get them, the offers of free SEO audits, of thousands of backlinks from “DA 40 and above” sites for just $10 and the “helpful” list of spurious SEO issues with your website.

Checking your junk folder every morning reveals another round of emails offering the SEO-moon-on-a-stick for a low, low price. As an SEO working for a search marketing agency I used to find receiving these emails misplaced but amusing.

Email received listing questionable SEO issues with the Avenue Digital website

I no longer laugh at these emails. These annoyances, although easily ignored through the press of the “delete” key, reveal something more sinister about the SEO industry – really anyone can offer SEO services. What the SEO-literate might discard as part of their daily email purge others will read, digest and panic over. Receiving an email claiming you could be losing hundreds of dollars a day through the poor optimization of your website is enough to make anyone outside of the industry sit-up and take notice. Small businesses appear to be particularly vulnerable, and it’s not just emails that they are subjected to. During my time working as an in-house marketer, I became aware of just how often businesses are pestered over the phone by people claiming to work for Google, who, in reality, wanted to sell links or directory listings. I’ve also seen the regret of local businesses who have taken them up on their offer and then needed to turn to a legitimate SEO to fix their sites after they’ve accrued manual actions or dropped off the SERPs for their core, revenue-driving terms.

The problem, as I see it, is that “legitimate SEO” is a subjective term. Within our industry, there are no definitive criteria someone must meet before they can call themselves an SEO.  Whereas in other professions there are minimum qualifications before one can practice, with search engine optimization the barrier to entry is a laptop and enough knowledge of the lingo to convince a layman of your expertise.  How, then, are prospective clients supposed to determine if the practitioner they are looking to work with, or hire, actually has the ability to do a good job?

My agency, Avenue Digital, has been trying to combat this issue with education.  Our guide on how to find the best SEO agency for your business is the culmination of years of talking to clients about their previous disappointments with agencies and our own experiences of taking over the websites of clients who have suffered at the hands of mavericks. Unfortunately, this is just one step in the right direction. Does there need to be more done to protect vulnerable businesses from the expensive mistake of hiring a poor performing SEO or agency? Does our industry need to be regulated?

This is something I’ve been mulling over for a while, so I threw the question out to SEO Twitter, and was surprised and impressed by the volume of responses.

It appears that many SEOs in the industry are in favor of doing something to bring a quality standard to our work. There were many suggestions; qualifications, ongoing professional development, and governing bodies.

The issue

Unlike medicine which has a set of accepted premises and procedures that each aspiring doctor must train in and be tested on, SEO is highly disputed and one person’s “best practice” is another’s route to failure. In response to my question about regulation Dawn Anderson, MD of Move It Marketing raised a very good point that, “the industry is based largely on educated opinion. We cannot even agree on subdomains versus subfolders.” How then are we to regulate an industry that can’t even agree with what “right” is?

It’s true that as SEOs our methods often differ, but is there a way we can ensure that all people offering it as a service are upholding a minimum standard of quality?

Governing body

An obvious way of regulating the industry would be through the formation of a body that oversees the conduct of registered members. Through membership the SEO would agree to be subject to the governance of the body, adhering to its rules. Members could be recorded on a list that would be available to companies to access in order to check if the agency or contractor they are considering is a member.

This would have its own limitations, however. As previously discussed, agreeing on rules under which the SEOs would operate would be tough. It would be simple to agree on client treatment and standards of reporting for instance, but as there’s no universally agreed upon method of conducting search engine optimization. It would be hard to police the methods and results of these registered practitioners.

External auditing

For a governing body to be successful at monitoring the work of its members there would need to be a robust auditing process.  Stephen Kenwright, SEO speaker and trainer suggested, “The most obvious way for a regulator to work in this industry is to turn Google’s webmaster guidelines into a checklist and audit an agency’s accounts like Ofsted in schools.”

Twitter message from Stephen Kenwright suggesting regulation through a Google-inspired checklist

This would ensure that members are adhering to the guidelines that Google sets out for inclusion in its search engine and could help protect clients from suffering manual actions as a result of poor SEO practice.

External auditing checklists may need to be extended past Google’s guidelines. In order to ensure SEOs’ optimizing for other search engines are still monitored but not hampered in their efforts, the list would need to be more generic. There is also the question of how “grey hat” SEO would be treated under this system.

There might also be client privacy issues and the associated paperwork could be too time-consuming for sole-practitioners to bare. Fees would likely need to be charged which could be cost prohibitive for newer agencies or contractors.

Code of practice

Perhaps the answer isn’t in a series of rigid rules, but a code of practice that the practitioner signs up to?  As SEO Consultant Ric Rodriguez suggested, “regulating the industry is going to be really difficult. To start with, we’d need to establish a baseline code of practice, which given the subjectivity of the channel, is difficult in its own right”. This is a fair point, how does a code of practice get universally accepted in an industry that does not have an agreed upon standard of “good practice”? As Ric suggests, “given SEO is unpredictable, it’s hard to regulate mis-selling around results because no one can predict them”, so perhaps the code should center around tempering the promises made to prospective clients, to prevent unrealistic expectations following impossible claims.

Education

Suggestions have been made that the onus shouldn’t be on the SEO industry to regulate itself but on educating clients to make more informed decisions.  Rodriguez proposed, “what I think could work is an established body, that puts out information on “good advice”, offers a support function, that’s impartial […] it’s not regulation, but it may help filter out bad selling practices”

Through the formation of a trusted body that provides support and advice, businesses with little understanding of SEO good practice might feel more confident in what to look for in SEO support. They would have access to impartial experts who could provide advice on whether an agency seems trustworthy.

Ethics clauses

Another argument is that the risk is so great that SEO consultants should make a point of formalizing their commitment to their clients’ successes in their contracts. This would give clients legal recourse if they felt their agency had not met their agreement, however they would only be as enforceable as local laws allowed and it would be natural for agencies or individuals engaging in shady practices to opt-out of including these clauses or make them so loose they wouldn’t really protect the client from much.

Certification

If the industry and self-regulation are too hard to achieve then perhaps the answer lies in increasing the knowledge and expertise of SEOs and recognizing this through qualifications. Many tool providers and agencies offer SEO training programs of varying subject matter and complexity, often accompanied by a certificate. These go some way to reassuring clients that their prospective SEO partner knows a thing or two about the industry but they don ‘t necessarily guarantee that the knowledge gained through the course could be put into action effectively on their or others’ campaigns.

The other issue with training courses and certification is the qualifications are only good at certifying the knowledge gained at that moment in time. With the way digital marketing and SEO progress, it would be hard to prevent a certification from becoming outdated quickly.

Continuing professional development

Perhaps then, if the certification process isn’t sufficient due to the ever-changing nature of SEO, we need to look at continuing professional development. Institutes like the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) in the UK marries both the certification and ongoing development process well. Members of the Institute become “chartered” after displaying sufficient knowledge of marketing either through the CIM qualifications or work experience. Once they are chartered they need to undergo a certain number of hours to continue professional development each year in order to remain chartered. A similar system for the SEO industry would ensure that practitioners are kept current on developments through attendance at conferences, training courses, and meetups.

Conclusion

It’s important to ensure that clients and in-house teams are confident that the SEO they get support from knows what they are doing. How this is achieved is a more complex issue. As with SEO itself, there isn’t a cut and dry solution. One thing is clear however, for the quality of SEO provision to improve education is key – both for practitioners and the businesses who hire them.

Share your views, opinions, and suggestions in the comments.

Related reading

Basic image optimization tips that anyone can apply for any type of site, even WordPress. Lots of facts, stats and screenshots included.

“How-to” snippets provide step-wise instructions directly in SERPs for instruction-based queries. Understand schema types, errors, and more with examples.

Average position is misinterpreted as a metric that shows the actual position of ads on SERPs. How to accurately gauge the true page position of your ads?

SKAGs is the practice of placing single keywords in an ad group. With Google’s user intent evolution, is it still worth it?

In recent days I’ve started thinking about our second half of 2019 plan and came across an old file, a 2018 planning deck. I looked through a few slides, remembering how much time my team had put into getting campaigns aligned, our calendar precisely mapped out, and priorities outlined.

We barely followed any of it. As the boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Though we’re not in a boxing ring, the sentiment applies to marketing: needs and priorities change in the blink of an eye, other trends emerge and pull you in different directions, new executives shakeup the vision for your business strategy. And none of that you can truly plan for.

Marketers like planning because it gives us a sense of control, organization and vision for how things will rollout. While we go to painstaking lengths to create these plans that detail our actions, though, the market is evolving. By the time you’ve conceived the perfect plan, it’s no longer what the market needs anymore.

Time is the magical, but a forgotten ingredient in many marketing initiatives. But our antiquated “planning” mindset hinders us in today’s always-on world. Instead, you need to foster a scrappy mindset amongst your team. At its heart, marketing at its heart is about putting out a message. Scrappy marketing is about doing that quickly and resourcefully. Don’t worry about getting things perfect,; worry about getting things done.

Here’s how you can maximize your team’s time, get scrappy and get ahead of your competitors.

Become a trusted, go-to resource

All of us have websites we visit every day and trust. These have usually been news organizations, but more than ever there are brand voices that provide valuable content and insights. From CMO.com by Adobe or Woolly Magazine by Casper, more consumers are looking to brands for their expertise and opinions.

Developing your brand into a trusted news source is therefore a double-edged sword: readers are more receptive to taking your content seriously and engaging with it. But there’s more competition and noise than before. It’s critical that you carve out a strong voice and identify the areas where you truly want to be a thought leader. It’s best to start with a narrow focus and gain credibility for your expertise than to go broad initially and not be taken seriously. You can always expand the number of topics you discuss.

Many of us trust or don’t trust certain news sources in our personal lives; and that mindset is starting to bleed into our professional lives, too, as more people view brands as news producers themselves. You want your audience to trust and rely on your company’s insights.

Distinguish from competitors by being always on

The news cycle is 24 hours a day, and can change in the time it takes to publish a single Tweet. If your marketing is not always on as well, you’re already behind. You need to have a relentless, steady stream of content that’s ready for your audience whenever they are.

How so? Have a proactive, not reactive marketing strategy. Develop avenues to get real-time feedback from customers and prospects to understand what they’re most curious or concerned about, and adapt your marketing accordingly. This feedback will help you discover where there’s white space in your industry, and what you should focus on when it comes to content creation.

Then develop the channels to get that content out – like a webinar series with weekly insights. Conductor’s 30 | 30 webinar, which recaps the last 30 days in search, social and content, is a good example. So is App Annie’s weekly Mobile Minute blogs, which provides insights into how mobile is impacting current events and consumer trends.

Whatever your channel, don’t let perfect get in the way of good. If there’s a news cycle that’s breaking and set to impact your market, do a quick video or webinar explaining what it means for your audience and what they should be watching for in the days to come. Send out an email with a couple paragraphs explaining the latest trend in simple, digestible bits of content. Re-use that email copy for blog and social posts. Share a quote from your CEO with relevant journalists who can copy and paste it into articles they are working on about this breaking story. Creating a strong voice is half the battle, but beating your competitors to the punch is also vital.

Structuring your team for success

You can’t plan for the unexpected, but you can create a flexible team. As a marketing leader, think about how your team is structured: are channels from demand gen to brand to public relations siloed? In reality, what aspects of marketing aren’t related to demand gen, brand, and your public relations? They’re all interwoven and when you’re siloed by channel, that’s the opposite of agile marketing.

Agile marketing is about an integrated scrum mindset, where all can collaborate and move things forward, together. Marketing shouldn’t be an assembly line, with team members waiting on others to finish their job to keep the ball rolling. That’s why siloed teams create execution gaps. So if you’re struggling to get your team all pulling in the same direction, you should revamp your team’s organization to be agile and react in real-time. Just remember that any moment spent waiting to publish is a moment where a prospect could be consuming your content. Through an always-on approach, scrappy, agile marketing allows you to build both visibility and engagement as your prospects enter the buying journey.

As you gear up for your second half plans for 2019, know that you’ll have to always create a general outline of priorities and initiatives. But ensure that everyone understands how much these priorities will (and should) change. If you are doing quality marketing and if you truly value your prospect’s time, then your marketing will actually be aligned with the times — and not with any rigid, outdated plan.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Note: This is not a sponsored post.

Craig Campbell is a well-known SEO expert from Glasgow, UK. He has 17 years of experience in SEO Consulting and Digital Marketing. Craig owns an agency where he manages a small team so that he can deliver better results to his loyal clientele. He is also a regular SEMrush webinar host, SEO trainer, and speaker. Since Craig has been helping over a hundred businesses, he decided to start flipping websites for profit.

In this interview, Craig shared his ups and downs of his experience wearing different hats. He also offers actionable tips SEOs can utilize for their own business venture. His style is also very unique, as he is a straightforward guy who cuts straight through the noise – which is exactly why he has been invited to speak at several conferences all over the world, including Thailand, London, Paris, Italy, and more. He is very active on Social Media and has a large following on Twitter @craigcampbell03, where he oftentimes shares a lot of his mind-blowing tips.

Source: Chang Mai Conference 2018

Karina Tama: You have a lot of experience in Digital Marketing from owning an agency, being a conference speaker, webinar speaker, contributor, selling online courses, flipping websites for profit, and selling online. Which of these methods generates the most income? Which was the fastest to build?

Craig Campbell: From my own personal experience, the online courses and flipping websites are the most profitable and also the quickest to scale. Having an agency involves a lot of costs attached to the staff, office space, etc, and more time spent with clients as well which is always going to be harder to scale. But the great thing about this industry is that you can make money in a number of different ways, whether that is an affiliate, selling courses, digital agency owner or being a freelancer. Plus, you can niche it down even further by becoming the guy who catches expired domains, the site audit specialist or whatever.

What I highlighted is that I’ve made a lot of mistakes prior to getting myself into the position I’m in now, but this model suits me as a person, how I work, my personality and temperament.

The key is to do what you enjoy doing and model your business around that.

KT: Can you share your experience flipping websites for profit and how much money a person can make?

The answer to this is difficult because you can buy a website for 1 million dollars, and flip it for 2 or 3 times the price by doing some work on the site; however, not many people have that type of money to invest in projects.

But to give you an example, I bought a website for £10,000 and spend around 4k on the site getting some content and links done, and flipped the website for 48k within a 4 month period. There are folks out there doing a lot more than that.  Have a look at empireflippers.com to see what some of the websites on there are selling for.

These sites have to produce proof of analytics and revenue too, so it’s not pie in the sky stuff if you get in and do the right kind of work.

Source: Twitter

KT: You always said you’ve made massive mistakes over your years. Can you highlight the biggest and most costly ones?

CC: The mistakes I’ve made do vary and may not be something I would automatically discard for other folks. But I spent a lot of time and effort into building an agency, building up staff and using up a lot of time and energy into doing so. I would have been better spending my time working more efficiently in working on affiliate marketing websites at a much earlier stage. So that is one that I personally feel was a mistake.

But to be honest I’ve made more mistakes than most. I’m an impulsive guy and jumped head first into setting up businesses without doing research first. Years ago I set up a vaping ecommerce store and there was tons of search for the products. I had confidence in my ability to rank and make it work.

What I didn’t do was proper research into the legal side of things. Paid ads weren’t allowed, and taking payments via any source other than PayPal wasn’t allowed. There were so many other little legal niggles on top of having unreliable drop shippers and products, and brands that were constantly changing which resulted in me having a project that I put a lot of time and money into. I got little to no return, simply because I didn’t do any real research.

So do research on all aspects of the business, not just the keyword volumes as that is something I’ve done a number of times and it ended up in failed ventures and lost money.

 KT: What’s the minimum commission percentage someone needs to make in order to be able to fund their affiliate marketing business?

CC: This is real difficult to answer as Amazon pays on average five percent but if you get sheer volume, you can still afford to get the content, website maintenance, and everything else done properly. But on a personal level, I do feel Amazon affiliates are hard to get off the ground realistically on a low budget because the commissions are so low. Unless you have a budget to spend to get it off the ground, it is difficult to get going.

I’ve got a golf site and it cost me around 15k to get the site up to a level where it pulls in 1k per month. So it’s going to take me 15 months via Amazon affiliates to get my money back, providing they don’t cut the commission again, and providing Googles updates don’t impact my site. It’s not a cost-effective option choosing low commissions, and as a result, I have to look to private affiliate options to better monetize my golf site to make sure that I’m not constantly losing money on that particular project.

KT: Based on your experience, what is the minimum budget a person needs to start an online business?

CC: In general, I think you need to be realistic and you are likely to need around 10 to 20k to get a good start in the online business world. Of course, there are going to be instances where it can be done for a lot less in weak niches.

 KT: What are the most common client misconceptions about SEO? What’s the best way to deal with them as an agency owner?

CC: This is hard. I have always personally found clients hard to deal with, but I completely get their point at times as so many clients have been given the run around by agencies out there offering a poor service. I think client education is important. If you have an agency, by all means, you don’t give them the whole strategy. But they need to understand that SEO isn’t a quick solution and it can’t be done for a few hundred bucks per month. There is time, effort, and expertise alongside the costs for links, content, staff, offices and business profits to be made, so you do get what you pay for.

There are the clients who don’t mind spending money, but want to know way too much about SEO and spend more time on emails and calls talking about SEO than you do getting work done. In this instance, we tell clients we can offer them training and consultancy at an additional cost.

I do feel in our industry we get questions from clients like: where are you getting your links from?, What on page tweaks are you doing? The clients are basically digging deep into how the work is being done, and that will only result in them being fed a load of sales talk or misleads.

So in my opinion with SEO if you deal with clients, give them traffic rankings and improvements along the way. But keep them at arm’s length so that they don’t need to know the in’s and outs of the strategy. I do feel many people think that they can simply expect an agency to hand the secret sauce over on a plate with no questions asked. No other business in the world would do that, so why expect it from SEOs?

So set expectation levels from the get-go and make sure they know how and what you will be reporting on. The minute you let the client walk all over you, you are in big trouble.

KT: For a person that is just starting a small SEO agency and has a limited budget, what are the must-have SEO tools to get the job done?

CC: SEMrush is a good all in one SEO tool. You do have other low costs tools like contentcal.io which is a social media scheduling tool that I like. It helps me schedule and set up all my social media messages and it is very low cost.

Then as you grow you can look into other tools that will help you grow, but these are just two to begin with. Most agencies have five or six different tools if not more that will help them with their day to day work and processes.

KT: What time management tips do you have for someone starting an agency? How do you prevent burnout?

CC: Well, what I can say is in the past when I started out, I worked so hard I ended up with anxiety and depression at one point, working 18-hour shifts if not more, unsociable hours and having no real structure was tough.

Then I was young, naive and thought I wouldn’t ever break, but there comes a time when you do burn out and don’t become productive.

In the end, I removed emails from my phone. I worked 9-5 Monday to Friday, and I got away from the laptop in the evening and choose to spend time doing things I enjoy to relax with my family and friends. Also, I spend my weekends switching off.

So rather than replying to client emails in the middle of the night from your mobile in bed, relax, sleep and get into the routine of working normal business hours.

I know many of us have to put a serious grind in at the start to build a business and it might take a little bit more than nine-to-five Monday to Friday to get the business off the ground. But do try and take time out, do try and wind down and de-stress and do spend time with your family and friends as you only live once, and you work to live, not live to work.

 KT: You always said it’s important to be at the top of your game. How do you do it and what’s your advice to others about it?

CC: Network regularly, and surround yourself with the right people.

I regularly speak at events and network with people but I am also learning at the same time. I also go to private masterminds which is useful as you can learn and share with some of the top names in the industry and that for me is what keeps you at the top of your game.

Obviously, these things cost time, money and effort to get along too. But you need to invest in yourself if you want to be the best you can be. In recent years, it’s also important to give something back as no-one is going to accept some leach into the circle. So offering value in yourself is massively important. The more you open up, the more others will open up.

I potentially in the past thought this would be crazy to open up to your peers. But when you realize there is money for us all to make and no-one really cares about your specific niche, you will find that you can learn more and develop.

I would say speaking at events has also helped me massively with that type of thing as well. As speaking gets me to the events, but the information shared when talking one on one with people, or very often at the bar before or after events is where the golden nuggets come from. You need to be there to get them, or someone else will.

KT: In your experience with ROI SEO such as paying for traffic, and buying backlinks, have you ever had a website penalized for this?

CC: Through testing, I have crashed and burned websites to see how far I could push them. But never had a money site penalized by SEO work that I have done. However, I have negative SEO attacks and stuff like that where I have had some issues. But the intention is never to get my websites banned. I try and do things as ethically as I can. Of course, I would be lying to say I didn’t bend a few rules here and there, but who doesn’t?

But if you want to simply go out and pay for spammy links, it’s a sure way to ruin your business, mix things up, try and do as much as you can ethically. Then look at the other stuff as the icing on the cake is maybe the best way to look at things.

One thing I would say is, don’t believe all the scaremongering there is out there. Links still work well, keep them relevant, with sites with good DR and from websites that get traffic and you won’t go far wrong.

Avoid getting links from low-quality sites with no traffic, link farms and all of that stuff, work smart and know what your buying and you will be fine.

KT: You have been to conferences in so many countries. Do you have plans to do any conferences in the USA? 

CC: I’d love to do some in the USA. I’m fairly well known in the UK and Europe from speaking at events.

I would love to do if the opportunity came up. I have been to Thailand, India, Vietnam, Israel and a few others lined up this year. So I’m definitely up for traveling and speaking wherever I can.

I had the pleasure to get to know Craig much more during this interview and I can definitely say he is an authentic and well-rounded person. He has a good sense of humor and loves to collaborate. I am sure we will have Craig soon speaking in the USA.

Note: This interview has been condensed for publishing purposes.

Earlier today, Google announced plans to acquire unified data and analytics platform Looker for $2.6 billion in an all-cash transaction. Once the deal is complete later this year, Looker will join Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making. The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation,” said Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of Google Cloud. “We remain committed to our multi-cloud strategy and will retain and expand Looker’s capabilities to analyze data across Clouds.”

Why we should care

As martech investments continue to grow and digital transformation catches on, the need for data and analytics is highlighted more than ever. However, one of the biggest analytics challenges digital marketers face continues to be the underlying martech infrastructure and pulling the different pieces together to create meaningful, actionable insights.

“The data analytics market is growing incredibly fast as companies look to leverage all of their data to make more informed decisions,” said Frank Gens, Senior Vice President & Chief Analyst, IDC. “Google Cloud is one of the leaders in the data warehouse market, and the addition of Looker will further strengthen their ability to serve the needs of enterprise customers while also advancing their commitment to multi-cloud.”

The addition of Looker to the Google Cloud ecosystem could afford users the ability to strengthen their analytics, which in turn should lead to better decision-making and improve digital execution.

More on the news

• Looker is a unified data platform that integrates data into the daily workflow of users and enables organizations to extract value from the data.
• The acquisition builds on an existing partnership between the two companies where they share more than 350 joint customers, including Buzzfeed, Hearst, King, Sunrun, WPP Essence and Yahoo!.

SEO is one of the best ways to bring a wider audience to your blog or ecommerce storefront. It’s estimated that by 2020, business owners will spend around 82 billion dollars on their SEO marketing plan. In this sense, it’s obvious that SEO will continue to grow in popularity over the years.

We want to take a look at one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization, and that is understanding the intent of your user when they search for something online. It’s important to constantly think about the intent of your potential customers and what may drive them to your website.

Let’s explore user intent and find out how we can use this complex system to help improve your website’s ranking.

What is search intent?

Before we can dive into how to use searcher intent, it’s important to understand what we mean when we use this phrase. In a nutshell, searcher intent is the reason why someone would search for something.

Knowing the intention of your audience, and potential customers mean you’ll be able to plan ahead and pick keywords that will make them more likely to find your site while searching online. Now let’s take a look at the two major types of intent and how you can determine the best approach to your search engine optimization.

User intention types

A study out of Hong Kong called “Utilizing search intent in topic ontology-based user profile for web mining” divided the reason people search for something into two categories. You should view the first type of user intention as a wide fishing net. They are looking for something, but on a broad scale based on their keyword choice.

Here’s a great example to consider from a simple Google Search. We decided to look up “content marketing” so that we could analyze the results.

Source: Google search

Notice that there are a ton of different results here. We have the definition of content marketing, how to explain content marketing to someone else, a guide to effective content marketing, and how content marketing can effectively grow your business.

The broader the search, the more information the end user is likely looking for. You have to be willing to predict the searches potential customers may make and work towards ranking for those keywords with effective link building, content creation, building social proof, and by keeping an eye on your traffic as you implement new keywords into your website.

The second type of user intent mentioned in the Hong Kong study is a more specific, tight, and refined search. Instead of a broad net, the user is looking for something specific. If you’re able to anticipate what kind of questions, concerns, or pain points your audience is facing, you can better prepare for their searches and work on building pillars around those keywords.

Here’s an example of a specific search on Google. We looked for “how can email marketing help my business?” and this is what we found.

Source: Google search

Every single result is about the same topic, improving your business by using email marketing. In other words, the more specific the search query, the more tailored content you should make to fit that topic.

But how can we determine what someone is going to search?

Tools to improve your predictions

We all know that there are a ton of different tools designed to help you fine-tune your search engine optimization. Many business owners struggle with the idea of finding pain points and then using those problem areas as a jumping off point for better optimization.

The good news is that there are a couple of free tools available to help you come up with great ideas for keywords as well as popular topics that you can use to create your own pieces of unique content.

As far as keyword research goes, you should already have the Google Keyword Planner tool. This tool helps you determine whether a certain search is generating a lot of traffic, and how much competition there is for that particular word or phrase. Ideally, you’re going to want to pick keywords that have low competition but a high search volume.

But beyond that, there is also the task of coming up with keywords that fit the broad net approach, as well as the very specific niche topics. AnswerThePublic is a great resource for discovering keywords based on an initial search. Here’s an example of “email marketing” after the big map we will zoom in and see how you can pick quality keywords based on your user’s intent.

Source: AnswerThePublic

Every branch you see here is a different topic idea. It may seem overwhelming at first, but if you think about what your website does, why users may need your product and service, and what kind of problems they are encountering you’ll be able to choose the word or phrase that most likely lines up with their intent.

For example, let’s take a closer look at the “what” and “when” groups under email marketing. If you’re selling a service that helps with email marketing, which topic do you think would most align with the goal of your potential customers?

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Source: AnswerThePublic

It’s pretty obvious that potential customers are going to want to know “when to use email marketing” and have no need for “what is email marketing in Hindi.” How do you know this? Well, because your business is one that focuses on helping customers with email marketing, including their strategy. The percentage of people looking to learn email marketing in Hindi versus one who just wants to know when they should use email marketing is the difference between night and day.

Tools like AnswerThePublic are great resources for those who want to expand their search reach, but not quite sure where to begin.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that SEO is here to stay. If you want to make the most of your business it’s crucial that you think about the intent of your customers when they are using their search engines.

Try putting yourself in the shoes of a customer. What kind of questions would you have about the niche you cover (prior to finding your site.) Most importantly, you should try to think about what kind of content you can develop that will help answer those questions. The proof is in the pudding, valuable content ranks high on Google.

If you’re willing to take the time to explore your audience and their intent, as well as do everything you can to solve their problems with stellar content and smart SEO keywords, you’ll find that reaching that elusive first page of Google is not just possible, it’s probable.

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A new report released by Pega that examined consumer attitudes towards artificial intelligence indicates that despite the growing usage of AI technologies, consumers lack an understanding of how they can benefit from AI and are more likely to trust a real person to help make decisions.

“Our study found that only 25% of consumers would trust a decision made by an AI system over that of a person regarding their qualification for a bank loan,” said Dr. Rob Walker, vice president, decisioning and analytics at Pega. “Consumers likely prefer speaking to people because they have a greater degree of trust in them and believe it’s possible to influence the decision, when that’s far from the case. What’s needed is the ability for AI systems to help companies make ethical decisions. To use the same example, in addition to a bank following regulatory processes before making an offer of a loan to an individual it should also be able to determine whether or not it’s the right thing to do ethically.”

As a result of the survey’s findings, Pega announced the launch of its Customer Empathy Advisor, an AI tool that seeks to incorporate empathy and ethical-decision making in the framework of AI technologies.

Why we should care

AI and machine learning technologies are becoming increasingly more familiar to digital marketers and consumers, but the lack of trust can have a negative impact on the customer’s digital experience and ultimately, your brand’s reputation. Trust and transparency continue to be highly prioritized by consumers and touted by platforms, and AI’s imprint in the martech landscape is only going to grow. Marketers who can harness the capabilities of AI and integrate empathetic qualities and human-like characteristics should expect to see success among consumers.

As AI becomes more accessible to digital marketers, it will become more widely used by consumers. Thanks to tools like display ads featuring AI-enabled chatbots, digital marketers have more opportunities to drive personalized interactions. For teams considering implementing AI,  giving customers the opportunity to choose whether if they prefer an AI-based or human-driven experience to solve their inquiry could be a step towards building trust and transparency.

More on the news

• There are serious trust issues with AI: less than half (40%) of respondents agreed that AI has the potential to improve the customer service of businesses they interact with, while less than one third (30%) felt comfortable with businesses using AI to interact with them. Only nine percent said they were ‘very comfortable’ with the idea.
• Consumers are cynical about the companies they do business with: Sixty-eight percent of respondents said that organizations have an obligation to do what is morally right for the customer, beyond what is legally required. Despite this, 65% of respondents don’t trust that companies have their best interests at heart, raising significant questions about how much trust they have in the technology businesses use to interact with them.
• Many believe that AI is unable to make unbiased decisions: Over half (53%) of respondents said it’s possible for AI to show bias in the way it makes decisions.
• People still prefer the human touch: 70% of respondents still prefer to speak to a human than an AI system or a chatbot when dealing with customer service and 69% of respondents agree they would be more inclined to tell the truth to a human than to an AI system.
• Most believe that AI does not utilize morality or empathy: Only 12% of consumers agreed that AI can tell the difference between good and evil, while over half (56%) of customers don’t believe it is possible to develop machines that behave morally. Only 12% believe they have ever interacted with a machine that has shown empathy.