Find out what the rise of voice search means for your business and your SEO strategy.

The Story of Modern Voice Search

Although Siri was first introduced to Apple users in 2011 with the release of iPhone 4S, its
origins date back to 2010 when it was invented as a standalone app by a similarly named
startup that Apple would later acquire for a staggering $150 million to $250 million.

In its earliest incarnation, Siri was a wise-cracking voice assistant with an irreverent attitude and fleshed-out back story. It had the ability to collate information from diverse sources like Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo! Local, and Rotten Tomatoes, and to deliver an answer that integrated the details it had gathered from its search. It could book tables, purchase tickets, and hail cabs without requiring the user to open a separate app.

Then Apple stepped in, purged its vocabulary of colorful swear words, expanded its linguistic capabilities to include foreign languages, and scaled the app to serve millions of consumers in a global market.

Despite the lukewarm response to iPhone 4S, Siri was well-received, with the Harvard Business Review calling it “as revolutionary as the Mac”, a remarkable feat that combined artificial intelligence and human speech in a way that was compelling.

Less than a decade later, voice search would become the new battlefront for tech giants in their bid to take control of the smartphone market, with similar apps like Alexa, Cortana, and Hey Google entering the fray.

In 2017, Google’s machine learning systems reached a 95% accuracy threshold for voice
recognition in the English language – the same threshold for human accuracy – while Baidu’s speech recognition system reached 97% accuracy in 2016 and is currently aiming for 99% amidst a rapid surge in voice adoption among Chinese users.

The Rise of Voice Search

Today, voice search has become an integral part of daily life for many consumers. According to Strategy Analytics, smart speaker shipments increased by almost 200% globally year-over-year in Q3 2018, with Amazon shipping the most devices, followed by Google and Alibaba.

Shipments would increase 95% from 22.6 million units in Q3 2018 to 38.5 million units in Q4 2018, edging out the total number of shipments for 2017. The year-end tally for 2018 was 86.2 million units.

A February 2018 survey by PwC also found that 65% of users aged 24 to 49 spoke to voice-enabled devices at least once a day.

Moreover, OC&C Strategy Consultants predicts that household adoption of smart speaker devices will grow to 55% in the United States and 48% in the United Kingdom by 2022, more than double the household adoption rate of 13% and 10% respectively in 2017.

Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report found that voice search queries have increased 35-fold since 2008, the year the iPhone and Google Voice Search were launched.

How Voice Search Impacts Your Business

Customers now look for the same information through voice as they would via text. A sizeable chunk of these queries have to do with local information.

The 2016 Internet Trends Report found that 22% of voice queries have to do with local information such as business hours, nearby establishments, and things to do within the immediate vicinity.

Local businesses that rely on foot traffic must make sure that their listings contain accurate information to increase the chances of that information being delivered effectively through voice search.

Moreover, users expect quick, concise, and fact-based answers when conducting voice search – few of them are willing to take a deep dive in order to find information. This means businesses must ensure that their content is conversational but straight to the point in order to match these queries.

Since traffic is essential to gaining customers, and traffic can only be increased by being more visible and trustworthy, you must optimise your content and overall site for voice search queries.

Although voice search has yet to be factored into Google’s algorithm, the rise of voice search and smart speaker adoption means that it will only be a matter of time until the search engine incorporates a voice search element to its rankings, as well as prioritise businesses that have added voice search optimisation into their SEO strategies.

Businesses that neglect to include voice search in their strategies run the risk of losing to competitors who are early adopters of voice search by the time Google includes voice search in its updated algorithm.

The 2018 PwC Consumer Intelligence Series Voice Assistants Survey also found that 80% of consumers who used voice assistant to shop were satisfied with their experience, and as a result of that experience:

• 39% purchased again from the same retailer
• 24% spent more money on the retailer
• 36% developed a more positive opinion of the retailer
• 39% talked about their positive experience with family and friends

A positive shopping experience also translates into deeper brand loyalty and more trust in your business.

Voice Search SEO and Digital Marketing Tips for Your Business

There are several ways to include voice search in your SEO strategy:

• Use natural language in your content and SEO – Work with an SEO team that knows the difference between voice search language and typed search language. Write content in a natural and conversational tone, and have your team optimise that content for high-value natural language search queries.
• Roll out an FAQ strategy – Gear your content towards answering questions – Bruce Clay notes that there has been a 61% increase in queries that start with Who, Where, What, and How.

Nearly 10% of all voice search queries begin with the five Ws and one H as opposed to 3.7% of text search queries. 3.6% of voice search queries begin with “How” while 3.5% start with “What”.

• Pay attention to long-tail keywords – Voice search queries tend to be longer than text-based queries, with average voice search query containing 4.2 words compared with the 3.2-word average for text search queries.

Select and adjust your keywords based on search user intent. Optimising for longer key phrases often means targeting a niche of the market, but intent will be stronger since users will reach your site based on content that is highly relevant to their queries.

• Use Featured Snippets – Voice search results come from Featured Snippets, also known as Google’s Answer Box and Position Zero. Optimise your content for Featured Snippets in order to benefit from voice search. These snippets work well for searches concerning the following types of content:
  • How-to articles
  • FAQs
  • Question-based queries
  • Conversions and calculations
  • Health symptoms
  • Requirements
  • Processes

Your content is more likely to appear in Featured Snippets if it ranks well organically, directly answers questions, broken up into short and easy-to-digest paragraphs, optimised for long-tail question-based keywords, and contains lists that the search engines can easily read and understand.  

• Go local – As mentioned previously, 22% of voice search queries are intended to find local information. Use this to your advantage by making use of words and phrases that describe your neighborhood, location, or landmarks. Include “near me” in title tags, meta descriptions, anchor text, and internal links.
• Get positive reviews – These reviews will help your business get into “Best of” lists that often appear in Featured Snippets.

Work with top SEO talent when optimising for voice search. Contevo stands for “Continuous Evolution” – the need to adapt to changing industry trends and practices in order to keep our clients relevant. Get in touch with us today to include voice search in your digital marketing strategy.

 Social media marketing costs differ by platform and agency type. Getting an estimate of how much marketing services cost will give you an idea of how much your business can afford. 

Get in touch with Contevo today to get a quote. 

Social Media Marketing Cost By Platform

Facebook Marketing

Account set-up: $1,000 – $4,000
Employee training: $3,000 – $15,000
Community management: $800 – $4,000 monthly

Source: Social Media News

Facebook is one of the largest platforms in Australia, with over 15 million monthly active users (MAUs). That means roughly 60% of the population is active on the platform. Moreover, 50% of Australians log into their FB accounts at least once a day.

That makes FB a powerful platform for marketing. However, the complexity of this platform can also make it challenging, hence the need to hire a qualified professional. 

Services that fall under Facebook marketing include campaign management, content development, content publishing, graphic design, community engagement, and live events, just to name a few. The social media marketing cost for this platform varies depending on the service package you avail. 

Instagram Marketing 

Account set-up: $200 – $2,000
Employee training: $800 – $5,000
Community management: $1,500 – $8,000 monthly

Source: NapoleonCat

9,037,000 Australians, or 35.8% of the population, used Instagram in May 2019. Instagram marketing helps you reach a percentage of those numbers. A social media marketing agency will set up, optimise, and manage your profile for the best results. 

LinkedIn Marketing

Account set-up: $1,000 – $5,000
Employee training: $3,000 – $20,000
Community management: $2,000 – $15,000 monthly

Source: Omnicore

With more than nine million Australian users, LinkedIn should be part of your social media marketing plan. Omnicore also states that it’s the top social media channel among B2B marketers. An agency can help manage your profile and publish engaging content to grow your LinkedIn following. 

Twitter Marketing

Account set-up: $0 – $3,000
Employee training: $3,000 – $8,000
Community management: $2,000 – $15,000 monthly

Source: We Are Social & Hootsuite

There are 4,700,000 Australian MAUs on Twitter. The social media marketing cost for Twitter depends on the frequency of updates, whether or not the account manager has to live tweet events, and so on.   

Social Media Marketing Cost By Resource Type

In-House Social Media Marketing

Estimated yearly cost: $65,000 – $120,000

The majority of Australian businesses look into assembling an in-house social media marketing team before considering hiring a partner agency. This involves finding, screening, and retaining talent. This also involves setting KPIs, deliverables, and goals to guide in-house marketing efforts.

As you can imagine, all this takes a lot of work. The hiring process alone can take weeks or months, and can be difficult for business owners who may not know what qualities to look for in a social media manager. And after you’ve put the entire team together, you’ll have to supervise them.

That takes time out of your work schedule, when you could be channeling your energies towards growing your business. 

The social media marketing cost of an in-house team will also depend on the caliber of the employees you hire. Marketers with substantial experience will naturally command higher rates. 

You’ll also have to invest in tools, apps, and subscriptions to help them do their jobs effectively. Otherwise, the quality of their output might suffer. 

But the rewards of having an in-house team are remarkable. Working closely with your social media marketing team means that everything can be done exactly as you like. It also ensures brand cohesion across different channels.

Is In-House Social Media Marketing Right For You?  If you want more control and involvement in social media marketing, then it’s worth investing in an in-house team. However, you must be prepared to put more of your resources towards supervising the team and retaining top talent. 

Full-Service Social Media Marketing Agencies

Estimated monthly cost: $4,000 – $22,000

An agency of this scale has the capacity to deliver all marketing-related services. Aside from social media, they also cover websites, TV commercials, and printed collateral. A one-stop-shop for all your marketing needs, these agencies are staffed by locally based marketing professionals, and often consist of several departments. 

The main benefit of working with one such agency is that they can deliver all the marketing solutions you need. This saves you time looking for agencies and contractors who can take charge of marketing for other aspects of your business.  

The resources and expertise at their disposal give them a can-do attitude that also gives clients peace of mind. 

Expect their output to be original, engaging, and visually appealing. You can also expect these agencies to be on-trend when it comes to social media, which gives your business a huge advantage. 

However, the price of their services certainly reflects their capabilities as an agency. That means your social media marketing costs will be higher than normal. 

The sheer number of departments and staff members also means that you’ll have to deal with more than one person, which can muddle communication. Service can also feel impersonal, since the agency will be handling more than one client account at a time. 

Moreover, be aware that despite the presence of marketing experts on the agency’s roster, your social media account can very well be passed onto an intern, with little more than a set of instructions to guide them. 

Is A Full-Service Social Media Marketing Agency Right For You? If you have a sizeable budget, and if your business has extensive social media marketing requirements that a smaller agency can’t handle, then you should go for a full-service social media marketing agency. 

Specialist Social Media Marketing Agencies

Estimated monthly cost: $1,000 –$8,000

These agencies are staffed by a small number of locally-based social media experts who render a host of services, including account management, community management, and content delivery. 

These services are often rendered by a single person who is in charge of your account, which is why the biggest benefit of working with a specialist social media marketing agency is the consistency of tone and voice across multiple channels. 

It also makes communication easier, since you only have to deal with one person who performs all tasks related to your account. 

You can also expect to get original content that has been tailored to your needs and reflects your brand personality. The account manager will take the time to get to know your brand and business in order to do this. 

Is A Specialist Social Media Marketing Agency Right For You? If you have already defined your brand identity and need an agency to stay consistent with it across different social media channels, then it’s worth investing in the services of a social media marketing agency. 

Outsource Volume Providers 

Estimated monthly cost: $200 – $900

These agencies have a local presence in Australia, but work with an offshore team or contractor that renders the majority of their services from overseas. Using a remote team allows these agencies to keep social media marketing costs low and offer entry-level prices to Australian businesses that have budget constraints.   

Therefore, one of the main advantages of using an outsource volume provider is affordability. It’s a great option for Australian businesses that want to dip their toes in social media marketing waters before allocating more of their budget to it.  

When working with this type of agency, you can expect a tremendous volume of content and limited account management by the Australian team. However, expect that content to only loosely align with your branding. Moreover, content is cycled through multiple clients, so you might see similar content on other sites. 

Is An Outsource Volume Provider Right For You? It’s the classic quantity versus quality dilemma many businesses face. If you’re working on a tight budget but want to get started on social media marketing, working with an outsource volume provider can get the job done.       

Contevo’s Social Media Marketing Promise

Contevo is a locally based digital marketing agency specialising in social media. Trusted by companies of all sizes, we offer price-sensitive service packages to boost your social media presence. 

We offer a free social media audit to clients who want to optimise their social media accounts. Our team of dedicated social media marketing experts executes social media campaigns flawlessly, and with the best possible results in mind.   

The key to our success is Continuous Evolution – we believe in steady growth and non-stop learning so that our clients may benefit from our insight and experience. Call us today to get your complementary social media audit. 

According to Digital Authority Partners, about 93% of the most successful B2B content marketers say their organisation will be ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ committed to content marketing in 2019. The rest of the industry, however, is struggling to keep up the pace – as only 67% of all companies want a content marketing strategy, and even less (39%) have an actual plan. 

This is an open invitation to be part of that 39% – but you can do better – because you have a plan. A detailed, well thought out plan. With the right tools, a ton of motivation, and a ‘handy guide’ like this one, you’ll be sure to stay on top of the playing field. 

Our digital marketing agency has created the 8 Best B2B Marketing Strategies: 

The Research

According to Pardot’s 2013 State of Demand Generation Report, 72% of product research for a future business purchase start on Google. 

Research is the foundation of all B2B marketing strategies. Before you take the plunge, you need to know how ‘deep’ the market is. Conducting a great deal of market and brand research will help you understand the flow of things – allowing you to develop the best kind of strategies for your business. 

According to SkillsLab.io, research helps you understand the market and your clients, presenting you with data that can help you craft a solution that appeals to those clients. Through this and market research, you can gauge how your solutions are faring and which services or processes you need to change to improve your business’ overall performance.

Professional Website Design 

Blue Corona states that having a professional website design plays a huge role in every single stage of the buyer’s journey – half of all B2B customers today expect a supplier’s website to be a helpful channel and more than a third expect the site to be their most helpful channel. 

They listed down these five ‘must-haves’ for successful B2B lead generation and sales: 

1. It has to be fast – 40% of users will abandon a webpage if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
2. Keep it secure – 85% of consumers won’t browse an unsecured site. The padlock visualises what the HTTPS already announces – the data being sent through the website is encrypted and secure. 
3. Make it mobile-friendly – Mobile drives an average of more than 40% revenue in leading B2B organizations, and 50% of B2B search queries today are made on smartphones. 
4. The page has to be actionable – Approximately 44% of B2B marketers say the main reason they abandon websites is that there’s no contact information that’s immediately visible. 
5. Have it professionally designed – 37% of buyers will leave a website because of poor design or navigation, and 46% will leave if the page lacks a clear message.

Visual Content Marketing

According to SEO Expert, 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content – with 51% of B2B marketers prioritising creation of visual assets as part of their content marketing strategy. 

Improve your business’ usage of visual content through the creation of highly informative and engaging infographics. HubSpot states that infographics have had the biggest increase in usage among B2B marketers in the last four years (now at 65%), and that people who follow directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than those who don’t.

Image Source: Lyfe Marketing

Another great reason as to why B2B content marketing really works is that it makes the whole selling part so much easier. According to Lyfe Marketing, when you regularly publish relevant high quality content for your target audience, you achieve two important things that help your audience trust your brand:

1. It positions your company as an industry expert that people can count on.
2. It helps your target audience find the answers or solutions to complex niche-specific problems.

Search Engine Optimisation

Image Source: Google

According to Google, 90% of B2B researchers use online  search to do research on business purchases. On average, B2B researchers do a total of 12 searches prior to engaging a specific brand’s site. 

This image from Blue Corona shows the percentage of users that click on the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth positions – with 55% choosing the first three entries at the top of Google’s search page. From a technical standpoint, this means that you need to make sure that search engines can easily crawl, understand, and index your website. How exactly? You can start by having your SEO audited for FREE. 

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing drives an average total of more than 40% revenue in leading B2B organisations – with more than 90% of buyers stating that they are more likely to buy again from a vendor that delivered a superior mobile experience over those that didn’t (poor mobile experience).

Think with Google also states that B2B researchers are not just using mobile when they are out and about, but rather wherever they are – with 49% of B2B researchers using their mobile devices for product research while at work.  

Social Media Marketing

Content Marketing Institute published their 6th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America Report, in which they highlighted the following:

1. 93% of B2B marketers use social media content for their content marketing tactics – with case studies and blogs close behind at 82% and 81% respectively.
2. B2B marketers rated LinkedIn (66%) as the most effective social media platform of all.
3. LinkedIn is also the most used social media platform for B2B content marketing, raking in a total of 94%, surpassing Twitter at 87% and Facebook at 84%.

Over half of all the people on social media interact with brands more than once a month, and that 88% of companies are now marketing on social media.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

According to Blue Corona, over 41% of clicks go to the top 3 paid ads on the search results page. These are called Pay Per Click Ads. The term ‘PPC’ is pretty much self-explanatory. Every time your ad gets clicked on, you pay the business that is showing your ad. 

One perk of this strategy is the freedom to choose  which exact keyword/s to use, where your ad will show up, and how much you’re willing to spend on it. You may also exclude certain keywords, target specific locations, and more! 

Event Marketing 

The Bizzabo Blog defines B2B Event Marketing as an offline marketing channel where real-life experiences are leveraged to facilitate in-person interactions that result in actualised business goals like customer retention, increased event revenue, sales acceleration, and investor relations.

This image from Marketing Charts is based on a survey of 424 exhibitors who had participated in a B2B exhibition within 2 years prior to the survey. Televerde also revealed that B2B salespeople believe industry events are the most useful activity undertaken by marketers in their organisations.

Affiliates and Partnerships

A recent research from Innovative Enterprise suggests that the affiliate marketing industry will soar to nearly $7 billion in the next four years – with 90% of marketers indicating that affiliate programs were either important or very important to their advertising strategies.

Image Source: Big Commerce

According to a study conducted by the National Retail Federation, 81% of brands are using Affiliate marketing as part of their customer acquisition methods. It works by extending the responsibilities of product marketing across parties, allowing them to leverage the abilities of a variety of individuals for a more effective marketing strategy while providing contributors a share of their profit.

Remarketing 

Blue Corona defines Remarketing as the practice of serving ads across the internet to people who have already visited your website. It allows your company to seem like they’re ‘following’ people around the internet by serving ads on the websites and platforms that they use most.

On average, only 2% of your website visitors convert. Remarketing goes after that other 98%. This chart by Wordstream shows exactly how conversion rates increase as more users see ads under remarketing campaigns. 

For example, Google Display Network reaches 90% of Internet users worldwide – 65% of whom they reach every single day. With GDN, more than a trillion impressions are served to over 1 billion users every month.

Marketing Automation  

Marketing Automation refers to the processes and practices that a company can adopt to improve the efficiency of their marketing based on several online channels. In 2015, 80% of marketing automation users reported generating more leads – with 77% seeing an increased number of conversions.

VentureBeat reports that brands typically see a 20-50% increase in revenue after adopting Marketing Automation. You can make your approach as intricate and data-driven as possible with this tool in tow.

Testimonial Videos

Image Source: Boast.io

Before people make a purchase, they look for product reviews. For services, they look for client testimonials. Reviews and testimonials are a powerful, unbiased tool for establishing trust and making a positive impression on your page visitors and potential buyers/clients.

Here are 4 of the best testimonial statistics curated by Boast, a leader in professional video testimonial production:

1. 65% of your audience is inclined to visual learning.
2. Website visitors are 64% more likely to follow through with a conversion after watching a video.
3. 63% of online shoppers will purchase a product if it has reviews and ratings.
4. 90% of online shoppers confirm that their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews.

According to Boast, video testimonials are a huge factor when it comes to buying decisions, and if you aren’t utilising a video testimonial service to capture and show your customers’ praises, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to have your current customers help you sell your products/services to even more prospects. 

Image Source: Marketing Insider Group

B2B marketers are also starting to think more strategically with their video content because it allows them to fit more video into the same budget. Hubspot’s The State of Video Marketing in 2018 Report revealed that 81% of businesses use video for their inbound marketing strategy, compared to 63% in 2017.

How keyword intent impacts conversion rates

Search engines try to give users the most relevant results possible, and they do this by delivering pages that help them get things done. In other words, they go beyond technical considerations like domain age and back links to create the best experience.

This is where user intent comes in. The term refers to the goal that the user wants to achieve when typing in a keyword, key phrase, or search query.

Aligning yourself with user intent allows you to produce content and headlines that match search queries, leading to better rankings and higher conversion.  

But make no mistake, the technical aspects of SEO still matter – definitely, don’t neglect your meta tags – but getting to the heart of a simple question such as “What do users really want?” can do wonders for your bottom line.  

More so if you optimize for keywords with commercial intent, or keywords that users type into the search bar when they’re ready to make a purchase. More on that later!

Understanding the different types of keyword intent

Before you can incorporate search intent keywords into your content, it is crucial to identify the underlying goal of the user’s search and to comprehend search intent in marketing funnels.

These are the different types of keyword intent and their place in the marketing funnel:  

Informational intent. Users enter keywords with informational intent when they are ready to learn more about a topic, product, or service.  Sometimes referred to as “know” keywords, users conduct searches containing informational phrases and industry terms such as:

• Best Bondi Beach hotels
• How to make lasagna
• Benefits of losing weight

These users are often in the awareness and discovery phase of the marketing funnel. Marketers who want to capture the attention of users with this kind of intent must produce relevant content using informational phrases related to their industry, products, and services. Infographics, checklists, listicles, and how-tos typically work well for these users.

Why target informational intent keywords? They may not be as high converting as commercial intent keywords, but Jumpshot found that about 8% of search queries were phrased as questions, starting with the usual “what”, “why”, “how”, “where”, “when”, and “am I?”, which still presents an opportunity for marketers.

Moreover, older data from a 2008 Penn University study found that a whopping 80% of search queries are informational, while Moz pegs it between 50% and 80%.

Navigational intent

When users enter keywords mentioning the name and description of a brand or business name, they express intent to navigate their website.

In some cases, they already have an idea of what they’re looking for, and they want to see if the company has the product or services they need.

These users are in the consideration phase. Also known as “go” keywords, users type keywords or phrases that will lead them to the website, rather than type the URL.

Marketers who want to target these keywords can use a combination of brand names and navigational phrases:

• [Brand name]
• [Brand name] site
• [Brand name] Facebook

To spark users’ interest, marketers must create and optimize web pages with navigational keywords in mind, and make sure that those pages are easy to find.  

Ahrefs found that the majority of Top 100 Bing global searches as of April 2019 were branded and navigational in nature, with searchers using the engine to get to Google (#1), YouTube (#2), Facebook (#3), Gmail(#4), Yahoo (#6), Amazon(#7), eBay (#13), Netflix (#18), and many other companies.

In fact, there are 46.67 millions searches for Google on Bing each month, accounting for 14.79% of the engine’s search volume worldwide.  

Investigational intent

Status Labs found that 90% of users have yet to make up their mind about a brand or company before starting the search. Moreover, a 2016 Conferences Survey Report states that buyers view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative, which is why marketers shouldn’t neglect keywords with investigational intent.

Users with investigational intent are midway between informational and transactional intent. They use online search to make comparisons between wedding suppliers in their area, find the best courier that can ship their products to New Zealand, or observe seasonal fluctuations in hotel prices.

These users want more in-depth knowledge of a brand, product, or service versus its competitors. They are not ready to engage, but they are open to doing a transaction.

Similar to their informational counterparts, investigational keywords include informational phrases and industry or brand names.

These queries should lead to product pages instead of content pages. Give these users a nudge in the right direction by making it easy for them to complete a transaction. Include brand or product keywords, clear links, meta descriptions, and images.

Make sure that the path to checkout is fast and clear – Vouchercloud found that 29% of buyers will bail out on a purchase if asked to register during checkout, while 10% will abandon the whole checkout process  altogether if it takes too long.

Transactional/commercial intent

Users with transactional intent are in the conversion phase and are ready to make a purchase. Known as “go” keywords, transactional keywords typically include action phrases and sales lingo coupled with product or brand names:

• Buy [product name] in Melbourne
• [Brand name] clearance sale
• Cyber Monday [company name]
• Download [eBook title]
• Bookings [hotel name]

Commercial intent keywords fall under these categories:

• “Buy now” – Buyers with a sense of urgency and are ready to take action will use these keywords, which have the highest likelihood of converting. These are strongest commercial keywords.
• Product – Somewhat tied to navigational search queries, these keywords include the names of brands, products, services, or product and service category.
• Tire-kicker – Users who want to get a product or service without any intention of buying or spending money use tire-kicker keywords, which often contain the words “free” and “download”.

To optimize for commercial intent keywords, make sure your PPC ads and landing pages are on point – Wordstream founder Larry Kim found that companies lose 97% of their leads on leaky multi-step landing pages, or landing pages with links that take users off the page.

The solution? Kim suggests using Call Only buttons.

High intent versus low intent keywords

High intent keywords are known to have strong commercial intent.  If keywords are signals from customers, then these keywords have the most potential, as they indicate a strong intent to initiate a transaction.

Keywords with high commercial intent tend to have higher click-through rates and conversions. Targeting these keywords allow you to attract qualified traffic and take a cost-effective approach to marketing, as advertisers who target high commercial intent have lower wastage.

Taking a zero-waste attitude towards PPC campaigns is more crucial than ever as firms start allocating more resources towards online marketing – Impact statistics show the average company is expected to distribute 41% of its marketing budget to digital marketing this year, and that rate is expected to increase to 45% by 2020.

A 2012 Wordstream research study based on advertiser data over a 60-day period in the United States found that PPC accounts for 64.6% of clicks high commercial intent keyword searches, which means that PPC marketing and search user intent play a vital role in attracting qualified, high ROI traffic.

Invespcro also found that of paid ads for high commercial intent keywords span 85.2% of above-the-fold pixels.  

Low intent keywords, on the other hand, tend to be informational or navigational in nature. Someone who is still in the early stages of gathering information and assessing a brand or product is less likely to commit to a purchase, meaning their commercial intent is much weaker.

There’s also deep and shallow intent. The former indicates a greater sense of purpose from the user, as it requires them to click through links, read articles, or watch and listen to media – that’s your content.

The latter, meanwhile, involves questions that an app like Siri can readily answer, and does not require much effort on the user’s part.

Marketers would do well to target deep intent, since it targets users who are actively looking for information – zero click searches, or searches where users don’t click on any sites as they readily find the information they’re looking for – have increased by 11% over the last two years, with Google scraping and displaying information from sites to answer search queries before any clicks can take place, and before any value can be added to your content.

How to identify commercial search intent keywords

Despite the existence of keyword types, marketers can never be 100% certain of user intent. For example, marketers can mistakenly classify keywords as commercial when they are, in fact, informational.

One way to identify commercial intent is to search the keyword yourself and review high ranking content in order to assess what Google perceives as user intent. Go on incognito mode and clear your cache to prevent biased results, and analyze the turn out for comparable keyword groups to see what kind of pages Google deems most relevant.

You can also identify commercial intent through user intent profiling, which allows you to understand the intent, relevance, and context behind keywords.

Relevance determines how closely related the keyword is to user intent, while context pertains to the background or setting of a topic.

To incorporate user intent profiling into your overall SEO and marketing strategy, you must:

• Identify topic clusters that will result in the most conversions
• Assess existing content on the bases of context and relevance in order to address user intent
• Make existing content more comprehensive by covering subtopics and related topics
• Think of other user intents that may be relevant to your goals
• Use research findings to produce content briefs with actionable instructions

The best tools for keyword research

Google Ads Keyword Planner. This powerful tool is a must in any marketer’s arsenal. Signing up for an account lets you find the most relevant search intent keywords for your campaign.   

Google Search Console. Measure site traffic and performance and identify issues to help you site perform better in Google Search.

Longtail Pro. This lets you run keyword and competitor analysis on as many as 13 metrics, as well as evaluate keyword profitability.

SEMRush. An all-around marketing tool covers PPC and competitive research.  

The goal is Searcher Task Accomplishment

Searcher task accomplishment takes place when user intent is successfully met by your content and online strategies. To determine search task accomplishment, Google evaluates the following elements:

• Search queries
• User intent or goals
• Results and ranking of relevant content
• Clicks
• Task completion
• Follow-up search

Based on these elements, Google decides which pages are relevant and ranks them accordingly.

How Contevo drives attract qualified traffic to your site

The experts at Contevo believe in conversion focused digital marketing. We employ smart content marketing techniques to improve rankings, enhance traffic, and ultimately, maximize sales.

The secret to our success is Continuous Evolution. With over 15 years of experience, we execute industry leading strategies to improve your bottom line.

Last 2017, a whopping estimate of more than 200 million people got their first ever mobile device – making two-thirds of the world’s 7.6 billion population become mobile phone users. Social media usage isn’t going in without a fight too, as the number of social media users for 2018 raked in a total of 3.196 billion – with 9 in 10 of those users accessing their social platforms via their mobiles.

Here are some of the world’s biggest Social Media and Internet Data Usage by the numbers:

The top 3 Global Social Media Platforms include Facebook (2.1 Billion), YouTube (1.5 Billion), and Instagram (800 Million).

The top 3 countries conquering the Annual Growth Report for Social Media are Saudi Arabia with 32%, India with 31%, and Indonesia with 23%.

For the top 3 countries with the highest spent average hours on the internet per day, Thailand takes the first spot with 9H 48M, Philippines at second with 9H 29M, and Brazil at third with 9H 14M.

Top 7 Social Media Marketing Best Practices of 2019

Let’s kick things off with this year’s best Social Media Marketing best practices now, shall we? Here are Contevo’s top seven picks:

Video is the New Visual  

People are visual. With so many ads and marketing tactics being spread like wildfire all over the internet, you have to acquire a powerful and grasping ability to catch your viewer’s eyes in a split second using video ads. According to WordStream’s video marketing statistics, viewers retain 95% of a video ad’s message, compared to 10% of when read in plain text.

With the average user spending 88% more of his/her time on a website with video, it is obvious that 2019 will be highly dominated by this powerful media platform – its new traffic percentage accounting to a total of 80% consumer internet traffic worldwide.

Here are some of the most notable facts you should know about video marketing:

• YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users.
• More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day.
• 72 Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds.
• 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter.
• Over 500 million people watch video on Facebook daily (via Forbes).
• 87% of online marketers use video content.
• Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more.
• Native videos on Facebook have 10x higher reach compared to YouTube links.
• Video drives a whopping 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs.
• Marketers who utilise video content grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

The Reign of Instagram Stories

Instagam Stories have become an essential tool for every social media strategy. For a Social media marketing platform that has the most power to glamourise life and all things people fancy, there’s Instagram. Instagram Stories have become the ultimate ‘crowd-favourite’ for video-type contents – giving users various options in customising their personal clips and posts in the way they want them to be – fun.

What makes this feature highly valuable for brands, is the limitless option of sharing their chosen, personalised photos and brand’s contents at absolutely zero cost.  There are currently 1 billion active monthly users on Instagram, of which more than 400 million people are consuming Stories on a daily basis.

Live Streaming

Live streaming has taken video channels to a whole new level and is a clear social media best practice for 2019. Social media managers can now efficiently live stream what they’re doing ‘live’ – giving potential customers a closer, more intimate look at how things are around the office or even publicly showcase a short, live glimpse of how their products are being made in real-time.

Live streaming helps marketers offer a more natural, organic CTA or ‘call-to-action’. For example, a business can offer a one-time promotion via the live stream feature – interacting with their audiences directly through the main comment section. The interactivity of live video makes it a substantial tool for marketers to engage with their viewers and strengthen their overall branding.

For Facebook Live’s 2nd year Anniversary, they were able to proudly showcase these amazing live usage statistics, making them become the leading live-streaming platform in the world:

According to Web.com, Facebook Marketing also ranks as the number one driver of (ROI) Return of Investment for businesses and advertisers; taking in a total of 95.8%, with both Twitter (63.5%) and Instagram (40.1%) placing in the second and third spots respectively.

Messaging Apps + Chat bots

Next one on our list? Messaging Apps and Chatbots. According to Medium.com, there are now more people using the top four social messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) over the top four social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn).

Facebook Messenger is on the phones of over 1.2 billion people, with Facebook stating that there are now more than 2 billion messages sent between businesses and people on Messenger each month.

The combination of messaging platforms with chatbots (powered by AI) will make it possible for companies to engage in more relevant, personalised and helpful customer conversations at a much higher scale.

AI can also come in providing automated messaging to customers who want an answer to a common question. Brands can easily set up this bot feature that can help them save time and money more efficiently – all while still giving their page visitors the ‘great customer service’ that they are aiming for.

User-generated Content

According to B2C.com, user-generated content is content created by unpaid fans of businesses that businesses can use to promote their products. It can come in the form of photos, videos, or memes. Utilising these raw and personal contents are an essential way of getting the customers highly involved within the business’ main strategy – which leads to an improved overall customer experience.

Crediting your customers for these contents can also help grow out your base and give your audience a more personal sense of connection.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing has become an established key element of social media best practices. Influencers earn thousands of dollars seamlessly through paid ad sponsorships. Any time you see a sponsored video by anyone with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, chances are you’re probably watching someone who’s considered as an Influencer.

By reaching out to Influencers on YouTube and (even on) Instagram, your business is able to successfully hire Influencers who come off as normal, everyday people to their audiences, while also promoting your products in their daily lives – naturally.

Influencers gain fame and followers by putting out content that relates to specific audiences. The bigger the account, the higher audience impressions your business gets. When an Influencer talks about a certain product or service, they’re also taking advantage of social proof to help give off the feeling that the product or service that they’re marketing plays a significant role in their lives.

Customer’s Trust & Transparency

While all the things we’ve discussed so far has been pretty wonderful, let us also not sugarcoat the obvious, 2018 has represented (probably) the biggest crisis year for ‘trust’ on social media. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytic scandal and a Congressional hearing, Facebook faced pressure from users and regulators to improve their security, transparency, and accuracy.

Meanwhile, Twitter fought controversies over the large presence of bots on its platform, purging millions of fake accounts. The result? 60% of people no longer trust social media companies.

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brands and Social Media – a nine-country study composed of 9,000 respondents; revealed that a vast majority of consumers around the world want brands to pressure social media platforms to more effectively safeguard personal data (71%), curb the spread of fake news (70%), and shield them from offensive content (68%).

Based on Hootsuite’s social media best practices data, smart brands are focusing less on maximising reach, and more on generating high quality engagement. Companies like Adidas and The New York Times for example, are working to develop intimate, more meaningful dialogue with smaller audience groups. They’re creating communities and sharing insightful content – then getting out of the way and letting passionate users talk to one another.

How Contevo Can Help Maximise Your Social Media Marketing ROI

Here at Contevo, we are driven by one thing – ‘Continuous Evolution’. We help our clients design and execute their sales blueprint so that they can grow and scale their businesses using advanced market-leading technology.

We have over 15 years of social media marketing experience, we can help you maximise your full business potential by enabling you to make intuitive decisions – every step of the way.

In this blog, we give you our 25 handpicked best trends and Facebook statistics across Facebook advertising and marketing. Start reading them down below! Ohhhh, and you’re welcome.

Key Demographics

1. Facebook has boasted 2.23 billion monthly active users (Q2 of 2018) – with 68% of Americans using the social media platform.

2. Facebook gets 400 new sign-ups per minute.

3. More than 85% of Facebook users come from outside the US and Canada.

4. On average, Facebook users access the site or mobile app at least eight times per day.

Image Source: DMR

5. Facebook earned a whopping total of $13.2 billion in revenue (Q1 of 2018) – which equates to a huge chunk of 42% increase, year over year.

Usage & Data

Image Source: TechCrunch

6. Facebook generates 4 petabytes of data per day—that’s a million gigabytes. All that data is stored in what is known as the Hive, which contains about 300 petabytes of data.

7. 66% of all monthly users of Facebook use the social network on a daily basis. On a worldwide note, that’s about 1.47 billion people.

8. 96% of Facebook users access it via their mobile devices – with only 31.8% visits made on laptops or desktops.

9. Facebook deleted a total of 583 million fake accounts during 2018’s first three months. That’s an average of over 6.5 million attempts to create a fake account every day, from January 1 to March 31.

10. There are almost 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook every single day.

Image Source: Medium

11. 85% of Facebook users watch videos with the sound off – with one among five videos being a Facebook live broadcast.

Facebook Mobile

12. 19% of all the time spent by users on their respective mobiles is spent on Facebook.

13. 47% of Facebook users only access the social network via their mobile app. In fact, the company reached a total of 1 billion ‘mobile-only’ monthly users in November of 2016.

14. In 2017, Facebook released Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite – apps which were designed for people living in developing countries with slow internet. As of June that same year, there were already a total of 200 million ‘Facebook Lite’ users.

15. Facebook’s total mobile ad revenue increased by 50% – year over year in June 2018.

Image Source: MindSea

16. Facebook and Google own 8 of the top 10 most used mobile apps (June 2017). More than 80 percent of all mobile phone users have the Facebook app installed on their device/s. (Source via ComScore)

Facebook Ads

17. According to the company’s released 2018 Q2 earnings, Facebook fell short of its projected earnings of $13.36 billion with actual earnings of $13.23 billion. Ad revenue also pulled up short of the anticipated $13.16 billion, garnering an actual earning of $13.04 billion instead.

Image Source: Kinsta

18. With 93% of marketers regularly using Facebook advertising, the company raked in a total of $11.8 billion from advertising alone during the first quarter of 2018. (Source via Kinsta)

19.The average cost per click (CPC) for Facebook Ads is $1.72 across all industries, and average clickthrough rate (CTR) is 0.9%.

20. 70% of the 3 million businesses that use Facebook Ads as part of their marketing campaigns are based from outside the US – with 91% of Facebook’s ad revenue all coming from ads targeting mobile devices.

21. Facebook cashed out with nearly $40 billion ad revenue in 2017, making up 20% of the total $203 billion global advertising market.

Facebook Video Marketing

22. On a daily average, Facebook generates more than 8 billion views of video content – with more than 100 million video hours watched per day.

23. Captioned video ads increase viewing time by an average of 12%.

24. 47% of Facebook ads get valued within the first three seconds – as per Facebook’s video statistics.

Image Source: AdEspresso

25. Native Facebook videos have 10 times more reach than YouTube links, which is one of the reasons why more companies are uploading video content through their Facebook pages rather than just sharing their links.

26. Another brilliant way advertisers are starting to practice altogether is the adjustment of their video contents to square videos – which take up 78% more space in the mobile news feed compared to landscape ones.

How Contevo Can Help Maximise Your Facebook Marketing

Our Social Media Marketing Agency in Melbourne specialises in connecting your brand with your potential customers and ultimately giving your site the target traffic and sales that it deserves.

As your digital knowledge partner, we can help you maximise your full business potential by enabling you to make intuitive decisions – every step of the way.

Let’s begin today, shall we?

Resources

1. http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/
2. https://www.esocmedia.com/facebookmarketing/top-40-facebook-statistics-of-2018-to-remember-in-2019/
3. http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
4. https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/social-network-landscape-chartoftheday/
5. https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/internet-trends-report-2018
6. https://research.fb.com/facebook-s-top-open-data-problems/
7. https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q2/Q218-earnings-call-transcript.pdf
8. https://kinsta.com/blog/facebook-statistics/
9. https://venturebeat.com/2015/11/04/47-of-facebooks-users-never-touch-the-service-on-desktop/
10. https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/08/facebook-lite-app-update/
11. https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations-and-Whitepapers/2017/The-2017-US-Mobile-App-Report
12. https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2018/Facebook-Reports-Second-Quarter-2018-Results/default.aspx
13. http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/report/
14. http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/02/28/facebook-advertising-benchmarks
15. https://www.facebook.com/business/news/3-million-advertisers
16. https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-advertising-market-share-chart-2018-3
17. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/facebook-stats-for-marketers/
18. https://www.adweek.com/digital/instagrams-box-shaped-videos-are-influencing-facebook-marketers-172490/

The new year has finally come upon us, which means new trends are also making their SEO strategy debuts for marketers far and wide. If you want to continue earning the highest rankings for your website, these vital SEO practices for 2019 will be key to your success.

In this handy guide, we have compiled for you the 6 Best SEO Practices for 2019. Keep reading as we show you what new strategies you may need to implement and how these tactics will help you drive more traffic.

Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are handy little text boxes that appear at the top of most Google searches. They provide the most convenient way of showing the quickest answers to our searched questions at first glance – not requiring page visitors to click on any links beforehand. The displayed excerpts come from websites that Google decides as the most suitable form of answer to the user’s main question.

If you want to rank your content in Google’s featured snippets, you can implement a Q&A sequence on your page which answers questions that your customers might be asking when researching on Google. Even if you have some large competitors dominating search terms, “smaller” sites have a fair chance of gaining these top positions; should they be able to supply well structured answers that Google can easily utilise.

High Quality Content

Last August 2018, Google confirmed a sweeping global Core Algorithmic Update that took an entire week to get completed and fully rolled out.

According to SEO-ers like Barry Schwartz and Glen Gabe, this Google update was all about quality – particularly affecting sites that had low E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).

Google references its advice from the previous core updates, saying there’s “No fix for pages that may perform less well, other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages.”

It seems that this massive August 2018 update had a larger impact in the health and medical space, as well as on YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) types of pages. Google’s advice overall has been to make your site, content and user experience better and to keep on working at the small changes that can have a large and immense impact on your site rankings.

Moz also posted their data after this story was published. Much like the rest, they saw more activity in the health industry compared to others.

User Experience

The main key to having a successful online business all boils down to one thing – your users’ happiness. Keep in mind that no matter how good and impressively optimised your website is, if it is not highly beneficial and convenient for your visitors to navigate, it will have zero positive effect on your overall search presence.

User experience is the heart of all website and marketing goals. This is about being well established in the industry as an authoritative and trustworthy resource that your visitors can credibly rely and count on and then having a website that is tailored to your users on various devices. One way of improving this across your website is by hiring a conversion rate optimisation agency who analyses your user journeys and helps you make the decisions that improve their experience.

Voice Search

According to Stone Temple’s most recent voice usage trends survey, more people today are becoming comfortable with the use of voice commands and voice search on their respective mobile devices.

With a survey comprising of over 1,000 people, Stone Temple were able to gain a very precise and detailed data analysis on how people use voice, when they use voice, and why – with a whopping 61% answering YES to the question “Are you comfortable activating/accessing Siri or Google using your voice commands via (Siri/Google/Alexa)?” and only 14% saying NO.

10 out of 12 categories from this next chart also gained a total boost in their usage percentage when compared with the 2017 data – marking ‘office use’ and ‘on public transportation’ as the highest environments that people use their voice searches on.

According to Google, every fifth search query on all mobile devices are now made via voice input. Due to the increasing use of digital assistants and smart home devices, users will most probably opt for Voice Search features more frequently this year and in all the other years to come so its important we tailor to how words are spoken versus how they are typed only.

Google’s Mobile-first Indexing

Back on March 26, 2018, Google officially announced that they were rolling out Mobile-first indexing via their Webmaster Central Blog. According to Google, this meant (and in quote) “We will continue to have one single index that we use for serving search results. We do not have a ‘mobile-first index’ that’s separate from our main index. Historically, the desktop version was indexed, but increasingly, we will be using the mobile versions of content.”

Mobile-first indexing is about how Google gathers content and not about how the content itself is ranked. Content gathered by this procedure has no ranking advantage over mobile content that’s not yet gathered this way or desktop content.

Google also laid out this 4 key notes regarding Mobile-first indexing:

• Being indexed this way has no ranking advantage and operates independently from our mobile-friendly assessment.
• Having mobile-friendly content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better in mobile search results.
• Having fast-loading content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better for mobile and desktop users.
• As always, ranking uses many factors. We may show content to users that’s not mobile-friendly or that is slow loading if our many other signals determine it is the most relevant content to show. 

RankBrain

One of the biggest SEO practices for this year is the high emphasis on RankBrain. This is a part of Google’s 2015 core algorithm that uses machine-learning to serve users with better search results based on search intent.

RankBrain helps the algorithm interpret complex, long-tail search queries and the main intent behind them. It can “see patterns between seemingly unconnected complex searches to understand how they’re actually similar to each other.” Additionally, it can also “understand future complex searches and whether they’re related to particular topics.”

Artificial intelligence has been responsible for answering the type search query that has never been made before. Apparently, that constitutes to about 15% of the daily search queries on Google. In other words – RankBrain is smart, and the more data it collects, the smarter it gets about the user’s search intent.

How Contevo Can Help Maximise Your Search Engine Optimisation

Here at Contevo, we are driven by one thing – ‘Continuous Evolution’. We help our clients design and execute their sales blueprint so that they can grow and scale their businesses using our advanced market-leading strategies. Get in touch if we can help your business.