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Technical optimization is the core element of SEO. Technically optimized sites appeal both to search engines for being much easier to crawl and index, and to users for providing a great user experience. 

It’s quite challenging to cover all the technical aspects of your site because hundreds of issues may need fixing. However, there are some areas that are extremely beneficial if got right. In this article, I will cover those you need to focus on first (plus actionable tips on how to succeed in them SEO-wise).

1. Indexing and crawlability

The first thing you want to ensure is that search engines can properly index and crawl your website. You can check the number of your site’s pages that are indexed by search engines in Google Search Console, by googling for site:domain.com or with the help of an SEO crawler like WebSite Auditor.

Source: SEO PowerSuite

In the example above, there’s an outrageous indexing gap, the number of pages indexed in Google is lagging behind the total number of pages. In order to avoid indexing gaps and improve the crawlability of your site, pay closer attention to the following issues:

Resources restricted from indexing

Remember, Google can now render all kinds of resources (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). So if some of them are blocked from indexing, Google won’t see your pages the way they should look and won’t render them properly.

Orphan pages

These are the pages that exist on your site but are not linked to by any other page. It means they are invisible to search engines. Make sure your important pages haven’t become orphans.

Paginated content

Google has recently admitted they haven’t supported rel=next, rel-prev for quite some time and recommend going for a single-page content. Though you do not need to change anything in case you already have paginated content and it makes sense for your site, it’s advisable to make sure pagination pages can kind of stand on their own.

What to do

• Check your robots.txt file. It should not block important pages on your site.
• Double-check by crawling your site with a tool that can crawl and render all kinds of resources and find all pages.

2. Crawl budget

Crawl budget can be defined as the number of visits from a search engine bot to a site during a particular period of time. For example, if Googlebot visits your site 2.5K times per month, then 2.5K is your monthly crawl budget for Google. Though it’s not quite clear how Google assigns crawl budget to each site, there are two major theories stating that the key factors are:

• Number of internal links to a page
• Number of backlinks

Back in 2016, my team ran an experiment to check the correlation between both internal and external links and crawl stats. We created projects for 11 sites in WebSite Auditor to check the number of internal links. Next, we created projects for the same 11 sites in SEO SpyGlass to check the number of external links pointing to every page.

Then we checked the crawl statistics in the server logs to understand how often Googlebot visits each page. Using this data, we found the correlation between internal links and crawl budget to be very weak (0.154), and the correlation between external links and crawl budget to be very strong (0.978).

However, these results seem to be no longer relevant. We re-ran the same experiment last week to prove there’s no correlation between both backlinks and internal links and the crawl budget. In other words, backlinks used to play a role in increasing your crawl budget, but it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. It means that to amplify your crawl budget, you need to use good old techniques that will make search engine spiders crawl as many pages of your site as possible and find your new content quicker.

What to do

• Make sure important pages are crawlable. Check your robots.txt, it shouldn’t block any important resources (including CSS and JavaScript).
• Avoid long redirect chains. The best practice here, no more than two redirects in a row.
• Fix broken pages. If a search bot stumbles upon a page with a 4XX/5XX status code ( 404 “not found” error, 500 “internal server” error, or any other similar error), one unit of your crawl budget goes to waste.
• Clean up your sitemap. To make your content easier to find for crawlers and users, remove 4xx pages, unnecessary redirects, non-canonical, and blocked pages.
• Disallow pages with no SEO value. Create a disallow rule for the privacy policy, old promotions, terms, and conditions, in the robots.txt file.
• Maintain internal linking efficiency. Make your site structure tree-like and shallow so that crawlers could easily access all important pages on your site.
• Cater to your URL parameters. If you have dynamic URLs leading to the same page, specify their parameters in Google Search Console > Crawl > Search Parameters.

3. Site structure

Intuitive sites feel like a piece of art. However, beyond this feeling, there is a well-thought site structure and navigation that helps users effortlessly find what they want. What’s more, creating an efficient site architecture helps bots access all the important pages on your site. To make your site structure work, focus on two crucial factors:

1. Sitemap

With the help of a sitemap, search engines find your site, read its structure, and discover fresh content.

What to do

If for some reason you don’t have a sitemap, it’s really necessary to create it and upload to Google Search Console. You can check whether it’s coded properly with the help of the W3C validator.

Keep your sitemap:

• Updated – Make changes to it when you add or remove something from the site;
• Concise – Which is under 50,000 URLs;
• Clean – Free from errors, redirects, and blocked resources.

2. Internal linking structure

Everyone knows about the benefits of external links, but most don’t pay much attention to internal links. However, savvy internal linking helps spread link juice among all pages efficiently and give a traffic boost to pages with less authority. What’s more, you can create topic clusters by interlinking related content within your site to show search engines your site’s content has high authority in a particular field.

What to do

The strategies may vary depending on your goals, but these elements are critical for any goal:

Shallow click-depth: John Mueller confirmed that the fewer clicks it takes to get to a page from your homepage, the better. Following this advice, try to keep each page up to 3 clicks away from the homepage. If you have a large site, use breadcrumbs or the internal site search.

Use of contextual links: When you create content for your site, remember including links to your pages with related content (articles, product pages, etc.) Such links usually have more SEO weight than navigational ones (those in headers or footers).

Informational anchor texts: Include keywords to the anchor texts of internal links so that they inform readers what to expect from linked content. Don’t forget to do the same for alt attributes for image links.

4. Page speed

Speed is a critical factor for the Internet of today. A one-second delay can lead to a grave traffic drop for most businesses. No surprise then that Google is also into speed. Desktop page speed has been a Google ranking factor for quite a while. In July 2018, mobile page speed became a ranking factor as well. Prior to the update, Google launched a new version of its PageSpeed Insights tool where we saw that speed was measured differently. Besides technical optimization and lab data (basically, the way a site loads in ideal conditions), Google started to use field data like loading speed of real users taken from the Chrome User Experience report.

Source: PageSpeed Insights dashboard

What’s the catch? When field data is taken into account, your lightning-fast site may be considered slow if most of your users have a slow Internet connection or old devices. At that point in time, I got curious how page speed actually influenced mobile search positions of pages. As a result, my team and I ran an experiment (before and immediately after the update) to see whether there was any correlation between page speed and pages’ positions in mobile search results.

The experiment showed the following:

• No correlation between a mobile site’s position and the site’s speed (First Contentful Paint and DOM Content Loaded);
• High correlation between site’s position and its average Page Speed Optimization Score.

It means that for the time being, it’s the level of your site’s technical optimization that matters most for your rankings. Good news is, this metric is totally under your control. Google actually provides a list of optimization tips for speeding up your site. The list is as long as 22 factors, but you do not have to fix all of them. There are usually five to six that you need to pay attention to.

What to do

While you can read how to optimize for all 22 factors here, let’s view how to deal with those that can gravely slow down pages’ rendering:

Landing page redirects: Create a responsive site; choose a redirect type suitable for your needs (permanent 301, temporary 302, JavaScript, or HTTP redirects).

Uncompressed resources: Remove unneeded resources before compression, gziping all compressible resources, using different compression techniques for different resources, etc.

Long server response time: Analyze site performance data to detect what slows it down (use tools like WebPage Test, Pingdom, GTmetrix, Chrome Dev Tools).

Absence of caching policy: Introduce a caching policy according to Google recommendations.

Unminified resources: Use minification together with compression.

Heavy images: Serve responsive images and leverage optimization techniques, such as using vector formats, web fonts instead of encoding text in an image, removing metadata, etc.

5. Mobile-friendliness

As the number of mobile searchers was growing exponentially, Google wanted to address the majority of its users and rolled out mobile-first indexing at the beginning of 2018. By the end of 2018, Google was using mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results. A mobile-first index means that now Google crawls the web from a mobile point of view: a site’s mobile version is used for indexing and ranking even for search results shown to desktop users. In case there’s no mobile version, Googlebot will simply crawl a desktop one. It’s true that neither mobile-friendliness nor a responsive design is a prerequisite for a site to be moved to the mobile-first index. Whatever version you have, your site will be moved to the index anyway. The trick here is that this version, as it is viewed by a mobile user agent, will determine how your site ranks in both mobile and desktop search results.

What to do

If you’ve been thinking to go responsive, now is the best moment to do it, according to Google’s Trends Analyst John Mueller.

Don’t be afraid of using expandable content on mobile, such as hamburger and accordion menus, tabs, expandable boxes, and more. However, say no to intrusive interstitials.

Test your pages for mobile-friendliness with a Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool. It evaluates the site according to various usability criteria, like viewport configuration, size of text and buttons, and use of plugins

– Run an audit for your mobile site by using a custom user agent in your SEO crawler to make sure all your important pages can be reached by search engine crawlers and are free from grave errors. Pay attention to titles, H1s, structured data, and others.

– Track mobile performance of your site in Google Search Console.

6. Structured data

As Google SERPs are being enhanced visually, users are becoming rather less prone to clicking. They try to get all they need right from the page of search results without even clicking on any page. And if they click, they go for a result that caught their attention. Rich results are those that usually have the benefit of being visible with image and video carousels, rating stars, and review snippets.

Rich results require structured data implementation. Structured data is coded within the page’s markup and provides information about its content. There are about 600 types of structured data available. While not all of them can make your results rich, it improves chances to get a rich snippet in Google. What’s more, it helps crawlers understand your content better in terms of categories and subcategories (for instance, book, answer, recipe, map) Still, there are about 30 different types of rich results that are powered by schema markup. Let’s see how to get them.

What to do

• Go to schema.org and choose those schemas suitable for content on your site. Assign those schemas to URLs.
• Create structured data markup. Don’t worry, you do not need developer skills to do that. Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper that will guide you through the process. Then test your markup in Structured Data Testing Tool or in its updated version, Rich Results Testing Tool. Keep in mind that Google supports structured data in 3 formats: JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, with JSON-LD being the recommended one.

Don’t expect Google to display your enhanced results right away. It can take a few weeks, so use Fetch as Google in the search console to make your pages to be recrawled faster. Bear in mind that Google can decide not to show them at all if they do not meet the guidelines.

Don’t be surprised if you get a rich snippet without structured data implementation. John Mueller confirmed that sometimes your content is enough to produce rich results.

Summary

Technical SEO is something you cannot do without if you’d like to see your site rank higher in search results. While there are numerous technical elements that need your attention, the major areas to focus on for max ranking pay-off are loading speed, crawlability issues, site structure, and mobile-friendliness.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at .

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Over the past few weeks, senior-level marketers like you have told us the workplace challenges and pain points they’ve faced… and the creative and practical solutions they’ve devised to overcome them.

Those journeys are the foundation of the newly redesigned MarTech® agenda.

Marketing experts of all stripes will tackle some of the most vexing aspects of marketing operations and technology September 16-18 in Boston. Here’s a look at what’s in store:

On building collaborative and successful teams…

• How To Organize And Coach Outstanding Marketing Operations Teams, with Kimi Corrigan — Head of Marketing Operations, Duo Security at Cisco
• From Wild West To Business Best: Tales Of A New Martech Team, with Shannon Renz — Director of Marketing Technology, SAP Concur and Emily Cnossen, Martech Specialist, SAP Concur
• Rising To A New Martech Leadership Challenge And Building The Team That Will Help You Soar, with Erica Seidel — Founder & Executive Recruiter, The Connective Good and Dave Hsu — Global VP, Marketing Data & Technology, SAP Concur
• An SEO Framework For Marketing Operations & Technology Leadership, with Jessica Bowman — Author, The SEO Executive Playbook

On maintaining a thriving stack…

• Migration Machine: How PTC Integrated Martech Stacks Of 6 Company Acquisitions In 3 Years, with Patrick Slavin — Director, Web Strategy and Marketing Technology, PTC
• Securing Your Martech Stack: Partnering With IT And Enterprise Security, with Jorge Garcia — Sr. Manager, Marketing Technology, Akamai

On delighting customers…

• Outside-In, CX-Led Architectures To Drive Digital Transformations, with Henry Hernandez-Reveron — Technology Director, AKQA
• Putting The Customer In Custom Objects, with Justin Sharaf — Director, Marketing Technology and Operations, LogMeIn

… and that’s just the beginning. Stay tuned for the official agenda launch next week.

Ready to register? Secure your pass now and enjoy up to $900 off on-site rates!

Pssst… Attend with your team to boost company morale, cover more ground, and get your crew on the same page. Enjoy special discounts when you register as a group.

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

Podcasts have turned into a very popular option for content consumption. They are not new as a form of content type but there is an increasing number of people re-discovering them. They can actually make an interesting medium to explore when trying to grow your audience.

“Podcast SEO” is expected to be a growing term among SEO professionals, marketers, and podcast hosts over the next few years.

What do we mean by “podcast SEO” and how can you really optimize your podcast for search engines?

Here is everything you need to know.

Podcasts show up in Google searches

Google has announced earlier this year that podcasts will start showing up in search results.

You will be able to search for a podcast and find some of the episodes straight through the search results. The indexing of the podcast will return the audio content that you can consume directly.

There is also the potential for Google and its services to analyze the audio and automatically transcribe it to highlight a podcast in relevant search results.

What’s interesting is that Google Podcasts has recently started automatically transcribing the podcasts to use the content as metadata. Thus, people are able to find specific information as part of an episode without even knowing about the podcast before.

This is a big moment for anyone interested in SEO to understand that podcasts are becoming more important. With Google’s support, there is a clear indication that podcasts cannot be ignored as a source of content.

“Podcast SEO” is now a growing term and there is a great opportunity for successful podcasts to build their audience through search traffic.

Thinking of SEO when structuring an episode

How do these changes from Google affect your podcast? A good starting point is to think of your content structure.

A podcast can sometimes feel like a casual conversation but it still has a structure and a theme. Whether you’re producing formal or casual content, you want to be able to have a clear theme.

Think of what you want to talk about and how the questions can maintain a good flow.

It will be easier for Google to understand the content of your podcast and how to index it if you start thinking of your audience, and what they expect from you.

Moreover, a clear theme also helps your listeners understand your main focus without getting lost in the conversation.

Creating a site for your podcast

You don’t necessarily need a site to start your own podcast. All you need is a hosting provider. However, if you want to start thinking of SEO more seriously, you want to be certain that you own the data and the relationship with your subscribers.

You can also build an email list to grow your most loyal listeners.

A site can also help you improve your podcast’s SEO. It’s easier for search engines to discover your episodes when you provide additional context to them.

Many podcasts publish a new blog post for every new episode to describe their new topic. It’s a great way to build up the content for your podcast and make it easier for search engines to pick up the main theme and the focus keywords.

You can also treat your blog content as any other regular blog post to link from one episode to the other, add related posts, and keep your audience engaged.

Adding keywords to your podcast episodes

Your podcast’s title is your number one keyword. However, you won’t just rank for it once you create more episodes so you want to make sure that you increase your chances of building your audience.

When creating content for your podcast you want to pick one main keyword that will describe it. Think of your theme, the episode’s structure, and find the best keyword to describe it.

Make sure that you don’t pick the same keyword on every episode as you risk cannibalizing your own success. Even if there is a similarity from one keyword to another, it is still important to aim for one keyword per episode.

Your keyword should have a high search volume and ideally a low competition. You can aim for long tail keywords and you can find inspiration by searching in Google or through the use of tools like Ubersuggest.

Decide on the episode titles

Your podcast titles will determine whether your potential audience will spend the time to listen to your episodes.

Even when someone discovers your podcast, they won’t necessarily listen to every single episode if the titles aren’t appealing enough.

Your titles should be clear and descriptive while taking into consideration the limitation of characters.

A keyword can also be helpful in the episode’s title but you still want to make sure that you add it in context with the rest of the content.

Should you include the episode’s transcript?

Google may have just started automatically transcribing the podcasts but they are not yet perfect.

A transcription of your episode can help search engines understand your podcast in more detail.

It can improve the discoverability of the episode through the right focus on keywords, content structure, and key topics.

A transcription also makes your podcast more accessible to people and you can even split the topics that you’re talking about in time brackets to help everyone find them easily in your podcast.

Podcast transcriptions can be time-consuming though and not every podcast host might be ready for this step. If you’re serious about building your audience and improving your SEO, even in the longer term, it might be worth the effort.

Metadata

As with every other practice of SEO, metadata can provide additional details about your content.

A podcast’s description can explain what the episode is about. It should provide further information right after the title. The description is also helpful for search optimization to allow search engines to understand the topic of your episode. You can also add your main keyword to ensure that you are consistent with it.

Tags are also useful for your podcast. They allow people to discover them by looking at specific categories or genres. You can add several tags but you want to make sure that they are still somehow relevant to your podcast.

Think of your potential audience and what they should search to discover your podcast.

Link to your podcast on social media

Sharing is caring. A good indication of a podcast’s success is the number of shares and comments it gets on social media. You don’t need to have an extremely popular show to see a few positive comments or shares on social media.

As with every form of content, content marketing is an important factor in improving your success. Pick your social media channels and other forms of promotion based on your topic and target audience. This can be a consistent effort with the promotion.

Encourage people to share the link if they’ve enjoyed your show and create tracking links to find your best-performing channels.

This can be a great way to improve your SEO through “online word of mouth” as it can improve your levels of popularity and eventually your ranking.

Ask for reviews for social proof

Podcast reviews can also help your podcast’s success. It’s not just an indication of the quality of your podcast but they can also help improve the social proof.

Ask your listeners to leave a review if they enjoyed your podcast. Start with your most loyal fans and make it as effortless as possible.

Social proof can be very useful for SEO as it “notifies” search engines of the most successful pieces of content.

Add your podcast to Google Podcasts

As Google becomes serious about podcasts, Google Podcasts is now more important than ever.

If you’re not uploading your episodes to Google Podcasts yet, you can quickly do it by adding your podcast’s RSS feed.

It’s the easiest way to start improving your SEO presence while monitoring your rankings, and you’ll show up as an audio snippet in search results.

Quality first, SEO next

I assume that we’ll start spending more time with “podcast SEO” as podcasts keep growing as a content type. The fact that Google is paying more attention to them and the way that they can show up in SERPs is a good indication that the podcast market will only grow stronger.

What you need to remember though is that quality should still be a priority for your podcast.

Audio and content quality will be the key factors to your podcast’s success. Promotion and SEO will only work if you have a solid starting point for your podcast.

Find a creative title, a unique topic, and pay attention to your sound’s quality. These things will help your future audience connect with you and your podcast making success easier through marketing and SEO.

Got any queries or thoughts on “podcast SEO” that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.

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When Facebook first introduced video into the Newsfeed in 2013, it marked the first time a major player challenged the video space, which at the time, YouTube dominated. Before Snapchat stories, before Instagram Live, Facebook’s aggressive push into video changed the industry.

Six years later, Facebook is in the next phase of its video product: making its video inventory more appealing to advertisers. But the question remains – is Facebook successfully helping incentivize creators and publishers to upload content by enabling organic algorithmic success once again? In other words, can people go to Facebook with their content to make money?

A brief history

A year before Facebook stepped into video, YouTube moved away from ranking videos according to page view numbers in favor of video watch time. This algorithm change rewarded creators with more organic traffic, which created a more monetizable inventory and made the company even more profitable.

Facebook, too, counted video views but had a very different definition for what counts as a view – three seconds. The much-contested view counter, Facebook argued, signaled the “intent to watch” a video. Armed with this, Facebook went from zero to 4 billion daily views in less than two years. This news forced YouTube to finally publicly outline their viewing measurements (about 30 seconds) and harshly criticize Facebook for “intentionally and blatantly over-counting to the detriment of everyone except them.”

Nevertheless, Facebook showed promising advertising potential and creators began optimizing their videos accordingly. By 2016, Facebook publicized that people watch around 100 million hours of video a day, to which Google’s CEO responded by reminding investors that YouTube viewers watch hundreds of millions of hours of video a day.

Intent does not equal engagement

It wasn’t until Facebook’s views caught up with YouTube’s that the social media giant began to make changes that would more effectively monetize the product. Although views were climbing, its monetizable ad inventory wasn’t quite there due to the lack of watch time. So the company updated its algorithm to favor watch time over the percentage of completion, just like YouTube did five years earlier. Similarly, following in YouTube’s footsteps, Facebook launched Facebook Watch and Facebook for Creators, its first significant investment to bring creators to the platform.

But Facebook has many more challenges than YouTube as it pushes to monetize its video product. As a social media platform, Facebook emphasizes networks and connections. The Friends and Family algorithm update in 2018 deemphasized publisher and brand content in the feed, substantially hurting publisher and brand reach and requiring them to pay to play.

However, Facebook is striving to attract creators and make its video inventory more appealing to advertisers. The company recently recruited publishers like BuzzFeed, Condé Nast and Complex Networks to produce original content, while just recently outlining best practices for content creation and monetization on its platform.

Despite a rocky start, Facebook video does show promise. When looking at Fullscreen’s creator network across platforms, our top creators have seen significant gains in watch times on Facebook. We’ve seen a 14% jump in views on videos in the channels for brands and entertainment companies and long-form content has had a similar spike. Videos between five and 10 minutes have seen a 12% increase in views in the last year.

Our data, as well as the recent announcements, suggests that Facebook is starting to emphasize suggestion of library content to keep users engaged with specific types of video content for longer periods and increasing their ability to monetize that time through ads. This, in essence, is what YouTube learned back in 2012. This presents the possibility that monetized video as a format will ultimately be subjected to an alternative distribution algorithm than the one that currently governs the newsfeed.

Driving this possibility are the changes we’ve seen on the platform, Facebook’s continued investments in creators, and most importantly the company’s attempt to do what YouTube has done – but in its own way.

Ultimately, the opportunity for brands to take advantage of Facebook is similar to the promise of YouTube. Make unique content that people want to see. When brands create content that people want to see, it provides a real opportunity to drive organic viewership and monetization. That’s an advertisers dream.

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

Today’s digital marketers are facing unprecedented dilemmas when it comes to email marketing. Over the past 25 years, the adoption of email for personal and business use led to an increased volume of “batch-and-blast” emails. Illegal spam tactics targeting email users became more frequent and left users overwhelmed by managing their inboxes. In turn, email marketers noticed a change in how customer interact with their emails. By the late 2000s, email marketers began to doubt whether email would continue to be an effective marketing channel.

Today we are kicking off a weeks-long focus on email deliverability and the increasingly important role it plays in marketing. During my career in digital marketing, I’ve worked hands-on with email marketing in environments from SMBs to enterprise corporations. Deliverability is one of the most frequently overlooked — yet critically fundamental — components to successful email marketing. We’ll talk to email and deliverability experts, and dive into subjects from best practices to practical strategies your team can start implementing to improve your own deliverability.

To start, let’s take a look at current inbox structures and how these structures affect your email marketing.

What is a managed inbox?

The term “managed inbox” applies to email inboxes that use filtering systems and algorithms to prioritize incoming email messages for the end-user.

The inbox providers — from ISPs like Comcast and Verizon to apps like Gmail and Outlook — are the gatekeepers to the inbox. Using a series of filters, algorithms, spam traps and spam indicators, inbox providers aim to keep their users’ inboxes safe.

From the digital marketing perspective, successfully marketing to the managed inbox requires special attention to critical details.

The inbox providers’ solution to email overload

Inbox fatigue, compounded by increasing email from unauthenticated senders and spam complaints, prompted a response from Google: in 2013, it implemented features in Gmail to help manage its users’ inboxes. In doing so, Google assured marketers that deliverability and engagement rates would improve and users would have a better inbox experience.

Despite the reassurance, digital marketers didn’t react to the news very well. “The update shook marketers all around the globe, but it was needed,” said Vytis Marčiulionis, a deliverability manager at marketing automation platform Emarsys who works with digital teams to address deliverability challenges. “First, we need to consider why managed inboxes were introduced, and in this case I think Gmail did marketers a favor. The end-user now has a larger scope of classification available at their disposal and according to studies done by ReturnPath, they actually like it.” Email best practices needed to change and much of the dialogue among the martech community focused around how to ensure our emails end up in not only in the right tab, but in the inbox at all.

Despite the positive reception from users, marketers still fear the worst: our emails will end up in a tab that our recipients will never look at, and email ROI will drop. Today, nearly 20% of emails never make it to the intended inbox. Email gets blocked or filtered by ISPs and corporate system administrators. Whether sent in-house or through an ESP, non-delivery erodes response rates and program effectiveness.

We’re now marketing to the managed inbox

Your subscribers, customers and prospects aren’t managing their inboxes — the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are doing it for them. If their ISP doesn’t offer managed inbox support out-of-the-box, there are dozens of third-party applications and productivity tools available to solve the users’ inbox-woes.

According to Marčiulionis, the challenges posed by the managed inbox approach had two outcomes. “We had marketers who did their homework, researched their efforts who were rewarded with better open rates and user engagement,” he said. “On the other hand, marketers who campaigned the same as they had for the past 10 years ended up being disappointed. Email marketing as a field is constantly changing and everyone needs to adapt. The ones who manage to do that can stay on top.”

Highly reputable senders see the best deliverability rates and highest rates of inbox placement, a recently published ReturnPath benchmark survey found. “Senders scoring 91-100 (the best possible reputation score) had 91% of their messages delivered, according to the report. “This figure drops to 71% for senders scoring 81-90, and 44% for senders scoring 71-80.”

These numbers should be enough to prompt a look into your holistic deliverability health — and start outlining taking steps to improve it. It’s time for marketers to step forward and take ownership. Applying a deliverability strategy is just as important as — and often overlaps — segmentation and content strategies.

Take ownership of your deliverability

It is our responsibility as digital marketers to understand how ISPs and third-party tools work to improve our email marketing. For real insight into your deliverability, you need to know why your emails aren’t reaching your intended recipient — and how you can improve inbox placement rates — marketers need to take ownership of deliverability.

Unraveling and remediating deliverability issues is not something that happens overnight. You will likely need to work with your email service provider (ESP) to address complex infrastructure and for specific insights into inbox placement, but your team can implement processes to start taking ownership of deliverability today.

Marčiulionis said there are two critical questions that email marketers must ask themselves when thinking about deliverability. “First, what do your clients want from your email campaigns. You need to send emails your recipients wants to receive. Second, how is your campaign going to be viewed by the filters?” Reaching the inbox is imperative, but what underlying factors keep your emails out of your recipients’ inboxes? Your deliverability rate — high or low — will impact your email marketing ROI. If you’re not reaching the inbox, there is no opportunity for conversion.

You can hardly avoid facts that make you feel your age these days – I realized the other day there are people that are legal adults who have no idea that Netflix used to send you DVDs in the mail. Before becoming the most popular over-the-top (OTT) streaming service on earth, with almost 150 million global subscribers, it helped bridge the gap between the days of heading down to the local video store, and the way we consume media today. Many have tried to follow in Netflix’s footsteps and with so much choice, audiences have become ever more fickle and impatient. They want the best possible content at the lowest cost, and they want it available 24/7.

This year is set to be particularly crowded in the OTT subscription market, with Disney+, Apple TV+ and Britbox all launching to join Netflix, Amazon Prime, Now TV, Roku, Hulu, HBO Go…the list goes on. So, when launching a product like this, how can brands ensure they stand out from the (jam-packed) crowd?

Today I’ll be reviewing some of the key learnings we’ve acquired at my employer, Merkle, when marketing these kinds of services, many of which can be applied across a range of other verticals.

Exploring niche audiences

Unlike your internet or gas provider, streaming services have the unusual quality that users or households may choose more than one. In fact, a compelling argument for many of these big brands setting up new services is that almost half of UK households have more than one streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) subscription, and that number of multi-subscription households is growing each year. So knowing this, you might assume a prime audience for your new service is people that are already subscribed to another.

But let’s think about that compelling argument for a second. Netflix is king, so that’s likely streaming service number one in a lot of those cases. And number two? Amazon Prime. With 75 million global subscribers it’s a not-very-close second. But arguing that so many households have more than one streaming service means they clearly don’t mind paying twice, is ignoring Amazon Prime’s other purpose. Prime Video comes with an Amazon Prime subscription. The incredibly popular membership which means next-day delivery on millions of Amazon’s products. Speaking purely for myself, I’ve been a Prime member for almost a year (people finally got sick of me asking to use theirs for deliveries) and have never once logged into Video. While I’m just a focus group of one and I’m sure many Prime users do choose to take advantage of the added bonus of instant video alongside speedy delivery, it’s difficult to know how many “double streamers” would have chosen that second service for the video content alone.

That’s not to say people aren’t willing to pay for more than one service or that you should exclude current SVOD subscribers from your targeting, but you cannot rely on them alone. Instead, it’s important to identify other relevant, niche audiences that will respond to specific USPs. The best way to do this is by analyzing your first-party data, but short of having any (what with being a brand new service), there are a host of audience insight tools available such as Hitwise or Mintel that help you dive a bit deeper.

Each of the SVOD services available today and being released this year have something unique to offer users, and they need to make sure that they’re promoting that message to the right audience. Simply saying “here’s another streaming service to add to your list” will not be good enough.

App-install formats

While it might seem obvious that to get people using a streaming app, you should be putting some budget behind app install formats, what we’ve learned at Merkle is that particularly for a launch, that’s where the vast majority of budget needs to go.

Last year when launching a new sports streaming app, we’d originally planned for most of the budget to go behind ads leading to the website. Our thinking is that as this is a new product, users would want an opportunity to find out more about the brand before signing up to a free trial, and of course, eventually downloading the app. But we very quickly had to pivot our strategy as we found this was falling short of our free-trial targets. Instead, we started to plow around 80% of budget behind the variety of app-install formats available across our digital channels such as:

• Google app campaigns: Single campaigns that run across search, Google Play, YouTube and the Google Display Network. They’re easy to set up as they use text and assets from your app store listing to compose ads and run with automatic bidding and targeting. The disadvantage is you have limited control over where your ads appear so negative keyword and placement lists are vital.
• Facebook app install ads: Ads that can run across Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network, linking directly to your app listing. With 70% of traffic on Facebook is mobile, it’s a fantastic way to reach users when they’re in “app download mode.” However, it’s a good idea to complement these ads with some targeting desktop and leading to your website, so that the remaining 30% of users aren’t excluded.
• DV360 mobile campaigns: More recently, the ability to promote apps through DV360 has been released. Simply create a new line item and select “Mobile app install,” and you can choose the same kinds of targeting you would for any of your other campaigns in the platform.

When running any of these formats, it’s vital to have pixels in place to track who has downloaded the app. Not only to be able to report on performance, but also to build an audience of app downloaders that you can then exclude from these campaigns. Otherwise, you risk wasting money on users that have already taken your desired action.

Automation and personalization

One thing all SVOD services have in common is a lot of content. Some more than others, but we’re talking thousands of combinations of shows, actors and genres per platform. Even for the likes of Apple and Disney, their brand name alone is not going to be enough to convince people to take out a new or second subscription. Instead, they need to effectively promote their content at scale, and to the right audiences. Automation and personalization are vital for this.

There have been huge developments in automation across digital platforms in the last few years, which has eased the burden of manual labor when marketing extensive inventory like this. A handful of successful tactics tried and tested at Merkle are:

1. Inventory management

Available in Search Ads 360, inventory management uses a product feed, ad templates and rules to automatically build out hundreds, if not thousands of keywords, ad variants and extensions for search campaigns. In a fraction of the time that a manual build would take, you can have full coverage for every show and actor featured in your inventory, meaning you can serve highly relevant ads for even the most granular, niche searches. After building inventory management campaigns for an SVOD client last year, we saw a 59% reduction in CPA within three months.

2. Dynamic creative

Dynamic creative is something retailers, in particular, familiar with when retargeting users with specific products that have been viewed on site. But it can also be utilized for prospecting. Templates built in Google Studio can pull different ad components such as logos, show names, etc., from a feed to create multiple ad variants. These different variants can be run in rotation and optimized towards best performers over time. Or, you can layer over targeting to serve relevant ads to certain users with no manual build work. For a sports streaming service, we used geotargeting and audience segmentation to identify fans of particular football clubs and served them ads showing their team logo and upcoming fixtures. This achieved a 22% reduction in cost-per-free-trial compared to non-dynamic creative

3. Optimization rules on social

Facebook was a little behind the other half of the duopoly in terms of automation, but last year, they released automated rules within Ads Manager. These rules can monitor the performance of campaigns and ad sets and make automatic changes based on parameters that you set. For instance, we’ve created rules to increase bids on any ad sets that have led to more than X number of conversions below our target CPA. This means we’re able to react in real time to changes in performance without constant manual monitoring, driving the best possible performance from campaigns. This was particularly useful over weekends when launching new content, as naturally fewer people are in the office, and overall we saw a 60% reduction in cost-per-free-trial through social utilizing these rules.

Retention strategies

So your acquisition campaigns have been a huge success. You’ve met your app download and free trial targets – what’s next? Well, you’re not even close to the finish line. It’s important to have retention strategies in place from day one to make sure that acquisition translates into lifetime value.

Ninety percent of apps downloaded today are never opened again. To avoid ending up in the “scrAppheap,” create remarketing lists of users that have downloaded the app but not started their free trial and target them with app engagement campaigns. They aren’t going to remember it’s there by themselves; you need to provide that reminder.

As for users that have started their free trial, don’t let them slip away at 29 days. Make sure that when their free trial is about to end, they are reminded of some great content they haven’t explored yet, or maybe the option to refer a friend for a reduced price for a month. All too easily people jump from one free trial to another, so don’t assume that you’ll keep them as a customer without some investment.

Final thoughts

Streaming has revolutionized our media consumption, and the market is likely to get even more cluttered over the next few years. Users will not be willing to pay for a never-ending list of subscriptions, but there can be room in the market for a new service that taps into the right audience with relevant USPs, and strong marketing tactics.

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

As of January 2019, there are more than 1.94 billion websites. That’s a lot of competition. What’s one great way to stand out? Great images. In fact, vision dominates all other senses when it comes to interacting with and absorbing information.

Here are three quick facts to help you understand how critical images are for people (and for SEO):

• 90% of all the data the brain transmits is visual.
• The human brain processes one image in the same amount of time it would take to read 1000 words. (Yes, turns out the old adage is indeed rooted in scientific fact.)
• The recall value of visual content even after three days is 65%, whereas the recall value for written text is merely 10%.

With the majority of search volume coming from phones — and coupled with the fact that people’s attention spans have reduced to eight seconds — it’s essential for websites to be able to deliver a quick, frictionless, and delightful user experience.

Image optimization serves as a major part of this puzzle.

What can image optimization do for my users (and for SEO)?

1. By shaving seconds off your site speed, it can reduce bounce rate and improve site retention.
2. It helps improve page loading speed, which is a major Google ranking factor.
3. It can help improve your keyword prominence. Read more on that here.
4. It helps in reverse image search, which can be a big value add especially if you’re a product-based business.
5. Many devices and desktops use high-resolution screens, which increase the need for good quality images.

Basic image optimization tips

These are some tips that anyone can apply for any type of site (even WordPress), so you’re not solely at the mercy of your developers and designers.

1. Choosing the right type of image: Vector or raster?

• Vector images are simple, created by using lines, points, and polygons. Vector images are best applicable for shapes, logos, icons, and flat images. They have as good as no pixelation when you zoom in, making them apt for high-resolution devices. Additionally, you can use the same image file on multiple platforms (as well as for responsive website design) without having to use multiple variations.
• Raster images, on the other hand, are images that are made of rectangular grids, each packed with multiple color values (pixels). Raster images provide depth to the imagery you would want to convey, giving it an emotional and psychological appeal as these images look real. However, if not handled well, these can heavily hamper your site’s loading speed! Plus, you might have to save multiple file variations to ensure they’re compatible on different platforms and fit for responsive designs.

Here’s a table that Google shared to help understand the pixel-to-byte relation. In short, you’ll get an idea of how heavy one image can get based on its dimensions.

Source: Google

Google also mentioned that it takes four bytes of memory to deliver one pixel. Imagine if you had several images on a site with 800 X 800 pixels. our site would take at least something around 625 kBps. Or in simpler terms, imagine an elephant participating in a rabbit race.

Bottom line

I would suggest wisely using a mix of both. An ideal ratio could be 40% vector images and 60% raster images.

2. Picking the best image format – SVG, JPG, PNG, or GIF?

Best format for vector images:

SVG is the only, and the best, option for vector images. Due to its flat imagery, you also benefit from high quality that is easily scalable.

Best formats for raster images:

• PNG: Produces high-quality images with heavy file sizes. It can be suggested only for times when you want to save every detail of the image.
• JPG: Produces good quality images which aren’t heavy in terms of file size. However, these are lossy images, which means you’ll lose some minor image details permanently. JPG is undoubtedly the preferred image format, which gives you the convenience of hassle-free downloading and uploading of images. Because of this, they’re the most widely used — around 72.3% of websites use JPG image formats and most of the phones save images as “.JPG” files. They are especially suggested for ecommerce sites and social media.
• Gif: If you’re looking for animation, GIF is an ideal choice as it supports 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. As of now, just 26.6% of websites use GIF formats.

Here’s a chart that could help you take a call on which image format is best to use.

Source: W3Techs

Note: The data in the above chart is of May 15, 2019

3. Resizing images

With a cloud full of devices it’s obvious why people get confused about ideal image sizes.

Note that image size and image file size are two different things. Here we’ll explain how you can get ideal image size (also called image dimensions).

As part of image dimensions, we’ll also discuss aspect ratios.

What’s an aspect ratio?

Aspect ratios tell the width and height of an image and are written in an “x:y” format.

Why is it important?

Remember the time when you tried scaling an image and literally blew it out of proportion? This is exactly what it saves you from. Referring to an image aspect ratio while cropping or resizing images helps you maintain the viability and beauty of the image’s dimensions.

You could refer to this image Shutterstock created to enlist some commonly used aspect ratios.

Source for the image and the table data: Shutterstock

With reference to the table above, it’s best to focus on the 1:1 and 4:3 image ratio that are apt for social media, mobile screens, photography, and print.

You might have your own dimension templates based on the content management system (CMS) you’re using.

According to Squarespace, the most ideal size for image optimization on a CMS is 1500 and 2500 pixels.

Here’s a quick and simple answer to spot the most common image sizes for the web.

Source: Shutterstock

Bottom line

From personal observation, I can suggest using 1080 X 1080 pixels and 1500 X 2500 pixels.

If you’re feeling too lazy to go through all these details, you could also try scaling the image from the corner arrow while you’ve pressed the “Shift” key. Works for some platforms.

4. Naming images – Best practices

Search engines have brains without eyes, so unless you name your images right, they won’t be able to  “read” your images nor rank you accordingly. This is where your keywords come into play. As I’ve mentioned above, if you name your images well, you can improve your keyword density and chances of ranking.

Let’s explain this with an example:

• How people commonly save images – “Haphazard/random numbers and alphabets”, “Flowers can dance”, and “What was I thinking”
• How  people should save images  – “five-tips-for-image-optimization” and “the-ideal-method-for-naming-images-in-2019”

Name your images in all small letters with hyphens in between and leave no spaces. As you’ve seen, I’ve used the keyword “image optimization” in the “five-tips-for-image-optimization” example. You’ll be surprised with how much that helps in ranking.

Bonus

You could also use the following to improve keyword usage in your site content:

• Alt text (If your image is loading slowly, this text appears in place of the image so users can get an idea of what should be there.)
• Captions (Text that gives a short description, helping users know more about the image.)

Plus, if you have an ecommerce site, you could even make good use of structured data to give the search engine more specific details about your products’ color, type, size, and a lot more.

5. Compressing the byte size of the image files

Compressing a file is possibly the simplest yet the most crucial part of image optimization as it directly relates to the website’s loading time. Points one to four prepare you for this final stage of image optimization.

Two live examples of how much load time can cost your bottom line:

• Amazon.com observed a one percent decrease in sales for every 100-ms increase in the page load time.
• Google experienced a 20 percent drop in revenue for every 500-ms increase in the search results’ display time.

What’s the ideal image file size?

A file size below 70 kb is what you should be targeting. In case of heavy files closer to 300 kb, the best you can achieve is a 100 kb file size. Doing so saves your images from taking extra milliseconds to load while it gives you lossy, compressed images that do not compromise the visual quality.

How can you decrease an image’s file size?

All you need to do is drop these files on a file compression site and you’re all set. These are some good, free image file compression online tools:

• TinyPNG/TinyJPG – (Compresses .png and .jpg files – 135 kb reduced to 43.9 kb – Does up to 20 images at a time – Supports dropbox)
• Image optimizer – (Compresses .png and .jpg files – 135 kb reduced to 49 kb – Only does 1 file at a time)
• WeCompress – (Compresses .png, .jpg, and other files – 135 kb reduced to 48 kb – Only does 1 file at a time)
• EzGif – (Compresses .gif and other files – 2MiB reduced to 1.77MiB – Only does 1 file at a time. It also lets you edit the gif before compressing it.)

Bonus tips

• Use web fonts in place of images with text on them as they look better, do not need to be scaled with the image, take less space, and save loading time.
• Use 72dpi resolution for your images.

Closing notes

You could be using all these image optimization tips and still get stuck with a site that loads in 13 seconds or even worse. This is when you might want to ask yourself:

• Do I need all these images?
• Which images are redundant?
• What’s the best place to put images on the site?

Website content, both visual and written, has an intertwined relationship that stimulates emotions and inspires people to further engage with your product or service. People (or at least I) judge a business through its website so feel free to tell us, which was the last impressive website you visited? Or what have you done for image optimization?

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A widely accepted idea among retail technology providers is: consumers crave personalization. However, in a new study, Deloitte finds that personalization is last on a relatively long list of factors that consumers consider when choosing a retailer.

The report, entitled “The consumer is changing, but not how you think,” is based on a survey of over 4,000 U.S. adults. It explores nuanced demographic variables and shifts among consumers of various generational, ethnic and income categories.

More diverse shopping population. Deloitte explains, “The population has become increasingly heterogeneous: Millennials, now representing 30 percent of the population, are the most diverse generational cohort in US history, with roughly 44 percent consisting of ethnic and racial minorities. In comparison, only 25 percent of baby boomers belong to ethnic and racial minorities.”

These demographic changes are playing out in specific ways and in specific industries, which facile and widely repeated generalizations — such as e-commerce and mobile commerce are killing traditional retail — fail to adequately capture.

Price, product availability, convenience trump personalization. Deloitte says, “Consumers still look to value, product, and convenience as the overwhelmingly important attributes while making decisions.” This is consistent with historical findings. The firm adds, “often-noted attributes of the modern consumer like core values and personalized experiences ranked lowest among their priorities.” The company does say that these considerations have grown in importance over time but they’re not critical or fundamental to purchase decision-making.

It’s unclear how consumers understood the idea of “personalized experience” on a multiple choice survey. But it’s fair to infer that they had some idea of what that phrase meant. It may be the case that if you demonstrated or framed personalization more concretely you’d get a different response. Nonetheless, this finding seems to fly in the face of numerous other surveys and articles in technology and retail publications over the past few years.

Store visits up. Finally, the study discovered that offline store visits were up overall. “In 2018, consumers traveled to more stores, more often.” Although, when explored in more detail, visits vary by category. “Trips to hospitality, travel, and entertainment destinations rose by 8 percent in 2018. Trips to convenience, quick service restaurants and fuel stations jumped 16 percent. Even brick-and-mortar retail saw a 2 percent increase in traffic. The biggest gains were seen in grocery-related trips, which grew 7.7 percent in 2018, with a notable decrease in visits to traditional retail locations such as apparel stores (1.7 percent) and department stores (10.3 percent).”

Why you should care. These findings affirm the need to concretely understand your target audience and their attitudes and behaviors. With greater diversity than ever — as well as a significant urban-rural divide — it’s critical to not rely on assumptions but on data and experience. There’s a kind of herd mentality that one sees in technology, when it comes to “shiny new objects” or trends (e.g., voice search). But it’s important to question that conventional wisdom and not simply go along with “what the experts are saying.”

Google is always looking for the best ways to provide the most useful results to users. It’s what has allowed Google to dominate the search engine market for so long and, it has kept the SEO industry evolving.

In the beginning, there were quick answer boxes (remember those?) and, most recently, the introduction of “How-to” snippets.

“How-to” snippets aim to provide step-by-step instructions directly in the SERPs for instruction-based queries. There are two types of “How-to” snippets that you can find in the wild.

• A standard, accordion list view of instructions.
• A carousel of images showing each individual step.

This type of schema is mobile specific. And that’s important because it means absorbing huge amounts of SERP real estate. It has also been confirmed by Glenn Gabe, that you can capture both a featured snippet and the “How-to” carousel/list view.

This left very little space for your competitors but also, forced websites to now think more logically about how they structure their content.

Accordion vs carousel

The immediate question is “which type of How-to snippet is best for my audience?” You guessed right, it depends.

Take, for example, a crafting site audience. Visual and creative people. In this instance, you may consider using image rich snippets.

It’s like anything else in SEO, test it and tweak based on your results.

Here’s how it looks

Source: Google Search developer tools

Pretty eye-catching, isn’t it?

And then the accordion view (the standard “How-to” rich result).

Source: Google Search developer tools

My immediate preferred option is the accordion. For a number of reasons:

• It’s easier to markup.
• Each list item can have a few lines of text to explain the step.
• It’s familiar. People recognize featured snippets and the standard “How-to” result, isn’t disruptive to that experience.

The only major difference which may influence user behavior after the click is the ability to anchor link to each step. The standard markup doesn’t allow for this to happen, however, the image carousel does.

Interesting to see how that changes user engagement in the future.

Understanding “How-to” schema objects

Your best source of information is Google’s search developer tools.

However, we often find that it can become complicated for those less-techy SEOs, which could dissuade implementation and testing.

We don’t want that. Which is why we’ve broken down each element of the schema and explained what it means.

Type

This solely defines which type of schema you’re using on the page. In this instance, we’re going to use the type “HowTo”.

Name

You can think of this as the title of your snippet. In basic SEO terms, it’s the equivalent to the page title attribute of a normal webpage.

Description

Here is your chance to describe what you’re breaking down into steps. Keep this short, precise, and interesting enough to still encourage the click.

HowToStep

The “HowToStep” is where we tell Google we’re about to outline a numbered step to appear in the SERPs. Google counts the instances of the “HowToStep” to understand how many steps are there in total.

Text

This sits underneath the “HowToStep”, “HowToDirection”, or “HowToTip”. This is your basic explanation of one of the three aforementioned “HowTo” elements.

HowToDirection

This is where it can get tricky. Using the “HowToDirection” allows you to bullet point your text, rather than use a single paragraph. In our view, “HowToStep” is the easiest element to implement.

URL

The best approach here is to add anchored links to each step of your “How-to” snippets. It’s only used for image-rich results. So, if you’re using the accordion, just add the main page URL to this element.

Image Object

This can be used to define the main image of your snippet. It can also be used to populate the carousel steps found in image-rich “How-to” schema.

Total Time (ISO 8601 format)

This is a critical element. The time defines, to your user in the SERPs, how long something will take to complete. If you’re not familiar with the ISO 8601 format, it’s worth visiting this Wiki page.

Creating your own “How-to” schema

We, as SEOs, are always looking for simple ways to complete complex tasks. Adding this markup to your pages should be no different.

We recommend letting Google do the hard work for you. You shouldn’t have to be a full-fledged web developer to start working with Schema markup.

Use the code generated in Google’s example to then tweak as you see fit.

Example image used for educational purposes, Ryan Roberts, Zazzle Media

You can easily change all elements of valid How-to Schema, generated by Google itself.

Some of the HowTo markups may not be relevant for what you’re trying to do, so, just begin removing sections which are relevant.

“How-to” schema example

Let’s say I own athomefitness.com and I have an article about how to do crunches.

I’d take the code generated above, and tweak where I see necessary. Here’s how that might look:

Example image used for educational purposes, Ryan Roberts, Zazzle Media

And, to preview how this looks in the SERPs, you just select ‘preview search result’ in your code generator and it’ll give you two options to choose from.

• Result type one (image carousel)
• Result type two (standard list application)

In this instance, I’ve marked up my page to display a standard list.

Example image used for educational purposes, Ryan Roberts, Zazzle Media

Common markup errors

Unfortunately, Schema is a fickle character and will very quickly point out mistakes that you’ve made.

The most common errors normally come from missing required properties (known as class type) or syntax errors (uncategorized errors).

1. Parsing error: Missing “,” or “]” in an array declaration

Source: Schemaapp.com

This usually means you haven’t closed an open bracket somewhere in your code. Unfortunately, you have to dig into the code itself to find it. Thankfully, Google highlights the line in which the error appears on the Schema generator.

2. Parsing error: Missing “,” or “}”

Source: Schemaapp.com

Very similar to the syntax error above, this error means you have not successfully closed your {, or you have forgotten to add a comma before the start of your next opening {.

3. Incorrect value type

Source: Schemaapp.com

This type of error means you’ve omitted or mistyped the value of your “How-to” step. In this scenario, it could be:

• HowToStep
• HowToDirection
• HowToTip

Note: A simple spelling mistake could throw your whole script out of sync.

Make Google crawl your URL

You can jump the queue and request that Google crawls your URL sooner to make sure it gets around to your content and (hopefully) finds your new “How-to” markup.

An easy way to do this is with the URL Inspection Tool (similar to “Fetch as Google”).

Source: Google Search Console for zazzlemedia.co.uk

From our initial testing, we’ve found that indexing happens pretty much immediately; irrelevant of the size of your site.

So, if you’re impatient and eager to see if your hard work has paid off, this is a great way to validate that Google has identified the changes to your URL.

Track your performance in the Google Search Console

After successfully implementing your Howto markup, it’s important that you track content performance.

Are clicks increasing/decreasing? Are impressions going up/down?

You can assess this within the Search Console’s performance report

Source: Google Search Console for papanicksdriving.co.uk

The likelihood is you’ll be a very early adopter of this markup, which will make it a quick way to eat up large amounts of SERP real estate.

However, it’s always important to monitor whether or not this markup is a real benefit to your site. This markup aims to enhance your content, not pay detriment to it.

In conclusion

“How-to” schema should begin making its way onto sites much more in the near future as clients (and SEOs) start to see the immense benefit of absorbing as much SERP real estate as possible. Despite the negative connotation of a zero-click search.

We’d love to hear about any tests and progress you’ve made, please feel free to leave any comments below to let us know!

Ryan Roberts is an SEO Lead at Zazzle Media.

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