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Reddit is the largest forum at the moment. As of January 2020, Reddit has 430 million monthly active users. So many people visit Reddit that content on its first page will sometimes receive 500,000 clicks in just 24 hours. Websites that can’t handle the visit load often crash in what’s been nicknamed Reddit’s “hug of death”. Chances are, if you see a piece of content on the front page of Reddit, you’ll see an author use it in a story on Huffington Post, Yahoo News, or Buzzfeed just a few hours later.  So how can Reddit help content marketers?

Why is Reddit valuable to content marketers?

Reddit is an amalgamation of smaller forums called “subreddits” where each subreddit is dedicated to content and discussion around a particular topic. There are subreddits for DIY projects, restaurant chains, men’s fashion, politics, just about everything under the sun (good and bad). Reddit users subscribe to the subreddits they’re most interested in and can vote on whether they like content posted to that subreddit by upvoting the content or downvoting it. Users can also post content themselves and even comment on the content in long discussion threads. The content that users like best gets upvoted to the top of the stack. This upvoting mechanism is incredibly useful because thousands of things are posted to Reddit every hour, which could get overwhelming. But upvoting helps separate the gold from the dirt.

From a marketer’s perspective, it almost seems too good to be true. A massive online forum where people automatically segment themselves into different markets and demographics and then vote on what content they like best?! Sign me up.

Using Reddit, content marketers can tap into ideas that are already verified by upvotes and vetted by their target audience. Ideas that have already been done and were well received can be done again. Content that was good but maybe a little off the mark can be upgraded and released as part of a new marketing campaign. Content that worked well for one industry can be adapted to yours. By finding subreddits with subscribers that represent your target audience and then looking at those subscribers’ favorite content, you can take your online marketing to another level.

Here are the steps I’d recommend to get started digging through the treasure trove of content ideas.

Become an active member of the Reddit community

There’s no better way to grasp what Reddit is all about than diving in yourself and becoming part of the community. Sign up for an account (don’t use your real name or anything company related), and start commenting on the content you see. Read Reddit’s general rules and pay attention to any content guidelines created by the subreddits you subscribe to (example below). Post content you like and watch people’s responses. Try to gain some karma — the points attributed to your user account when other people upvote your content.

There’s no need to go all out, though you certainly can if you want to (if you really dive in, you may get invited to a private Reddit group called the Eternity Club for users who have posted content that made it to the top of Reddit’s first page). But just a few comments and posts will give you a good enough understanding of how top content rises with upvotes and gets in front of other Reddit users.

Get familiar with Reddit’s search functions

Reddit’s search function can be a content marketer’s idea machine if you know how to use it right. On the right sidebar of any subreddit is a classic search bar with a magnifying glass icon. The search bar works like any other, and generally turns up decent results. But you can actually get more granular by restricting your searches to particular subreddits, only looking for submissions from particular websites, or even using Boolean Operators. These search mechanics will become a critical part of your content mining process down the road. Creating content for a burger chain? Searching for “hamburger” and limiting the results to the r/Food subreddit will deliver some fresh ideas. Running an SEO campaign for a non-profit? Going to r/UpliftingNews and filtering the posts from the last year by the most upvoted can show you the phrasing for the stories that get the most attention. There are so many subreddits, that you could repeat this process across thousands of industries.

Typically, the most useful steps are (1) typing in a word that represents the type of content you’re trying to create and (2) filtering the results by the most upvoted. It’s simple but incredibly effective at showing you what content works and what doesn’t. You’ll know you have hit a winning idea when the same type of content (e.g. instructive “How-To” GIFs for household items) shows up in the top results multiple times. But if you ever want to get really detailed, Reddit has outlined their search mechanics at length here: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/search

The limitations of finding content ideas on Reddit

The Reddit demographic is skewed. Over 50% of Reddit’s user base is in the 18-25 age range and its also nearly 65% male. Granted, the 18-25 demographic is incredibly valuable to most marketing and advertising campaigns. But it’s good to know that your sample size is predominantly young and very, very male.  A few other things to note about the Reddit audience — it’s more than 80% white, almost 59% single, and sees strong participation from grade school and college students.

It’s also important to know that not everything that is successful on Reddit can translate into successful content marketing. If you’re running a content marketing campaign for a jewelry company and your Reddit research shows you that Star Wars themed rings are upvote gold mines, you probably can’t translate that into content for your company without getting an angry letter from Lucas Film lawyers. You can still get around these limitations with slight tweaks (space-themed engagement rings for example), but not every idea can be a one-to-one translation to your content strategy.

Other forums to be aware of

Reddit isn’t the only forum on the internet obviously. Here are a few others worth knowing about:

 Voat – a near pixel-for-pixel knockoff of Reddit with a much smaller user base and less content regulation

 GrowthHackers – a smaller vote-based forum for “business growth” content that typically features blog posts and news articles

 Hacker News – Y Combinator’s version of Reddit that caters to programmers and startups

In conclusion….

Online forums are goldmines of good content ideas and Reddit is the biggest forum. Join Reddit’s community, learn how to use its search functions, and understand its limits, and you’re well on your way to some of the best content marketing you’ve put out yet.

How to Find Winning Content Marketing Ideas on Reddit is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Because there’s a lot to discuss below and because so many specifics around the Article are still up in the air, here’s the tl;dr summary of what matters most—

What we know for sure:

• Article 11 does NOT apply retroactively.  Old links are safe 
• Google, Reddit, and other major platforms that aggregate news will have to either make significant adjustments or fight to repeal the law
• Article 11 will require major search algorithm adjustments to accommodate radically different linking behavior and the fact that almost all news links will now be “paid”
• Links with no excerpts or summaries are still allowed if the hyperlink text is composed of individual words
• Individuals using news links for private or non-commercial use will be exempt from the licensing fees
• European Union member nations will have two years to implement the Article

Things we might not know until countries start enforcing it:

• While Article 11 is meant to apply to news organization content links, non-traditional news sources like blogs, influential social accounts, etc. might count as “news organizations” under the law
• Though the Article is targeted at news aggregators like Google and Reddit, a private company that links out to news sites might not qualify as an “individual” under the law’s exceptions
• Furthermore, a private company’s blog may not be considered “non-commercial” even if the blog itself is not monetized

What does Article 11 say?

Article 11 is an extension of the 2001 Copyright Directive (or the Information Society Directive) which was put in place to help implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty across the EU.

In its original form, Article 11 set up the legal framework for news publishers to be able to require that online platforms pay a licensing fee when linking to or featuring snippets from those publishers’ content.  There were a lot of vagueries in the original wording like (1) what counts as a publisher, (2) does linking mean any sort of hyperlink or just links in an aggregator format, (3) how long is a snippet; is it a few words or a few sentences or something else?

The EU later amended Article 11 to give some clarification. You can see the original and amended versions of the full document here. Article 11 starts on page 54. The PDF pages of the Article can be downloaded from that link as well.

When the Article was first published, it seemed like individuals would be penalized by the law and hyperlinks to personal blogs could potentially be taxed with publisher licensing fees. But in the clarifying amendment, the authors updated the language to say that the restrictions would “not prevent legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users” and that the “rights referred to… shall not extend to mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words.” 

Questions that the European Union will hopefully answer

In theory, these updates sound pretty good.  Individual users can continue sharing the news links non-commercially? Great. Hyperlinks that are linked with individual words won’t count? Fine. But this still creates major issues for SEO.

For example, what happens if an individual is linking out to a news story in their personally-authored blog post on a company’s blog?  Does the fact that it’s done as part of an organization violate the “individual” requirement? Also, say the company hasn’t monetized the blog directly (they don’t run ads), but the blog does boost the company’s online presence and thus drives leads and revenue.  Does that disqualify them from the non-commercial use aspect?  If blogs do count as news sources, SEOs could be in big trouble.  How are you going to get people to link to your content if they have to pay you a fee for it?  Will all blogs have to add a notice that they are opting out of the link tax so that prospective backlinkers will know they don’t have to pay a fee?

Hyperlinks using “individual words” is better than nothing, but certainly cramps a writer’s style and definitely has process implications. Right now, you could make a full sentence or phrase a hyperlink when you really want to draw attention to it, but the new process might be to find the longest relevant word possible to create a hyperlink.  You’re now limited to only using a single keyword when, before, you had more flexibility to be strategic about hyperlink text for SEO purposes.   

Link behavior will certainly change and Google will have to adjust its algorithm accordingly.  The answers to the questions above will alter the scale of the changes.

Case studies and likely scenarios

Luckily, we don’t have to go into this blindly.  We have two case studies to learn from:

Spain introduced a link tax back in 2014 and Google News decided to pull out of Spain as a result.  When the law was first introduced, publishers on average saw a 6% decline in traffic to their websites, with small publishers seeing a 14% drop.  Publishers impacted the most either had to close their doors or begin covering news that took place outside of Spain. AEEPP did a full study on the after effects and you can that here: https://www.aeepp.com/pdf/InformeNera.pdf

Germany introduced a similar link tax in 2013.  Unlike the law Spain would pass in the following year, Germany’s link tax allowed publishers to opt-out.  The hope was that groups that would be negatively affected by the law (like small publishers) could opt-out and not require Google to pay a licensing fee.  But Google, being the profit-driven business that it is, booted all publishers from its platform and required them to opt-out of the link tax if they wanted to sign back on to have their content carried on the aggregator.  More background and analysis of Germany’s experience can be found here: https://niemanreports.org/articles/history-lessons-why-germanys-google-tax-wont-work/

Now that the EU version of these laws has been passed, the 28 different EU nations will have two years to implement Article 11.  Each country will probably take a slightly different approach, but one thing’s for sure – any implementation of the current law will be messy.  If Article 11 is not repealed, or if it’s not further amended by the European Commission, here are a few likely scenarios to help you plan since so much is still up in the air:

• Best Case Scenario: non-news platforms like company blogs will not be required to pay licensing fees or ask for licensing fees for links and news snippets on their websites.  Most news sources will opt-out of the link tax and the Article’s targets, like Google News, Facebook, and Reddit, will be able to mostly continue business as usual with only small tweaks to their algorithms and the way they display data
• Moderate Case Scenario: like in the first scenario, blogs will not be required to pay or ask for licensing fees or will, at least, have an opt-out option.  Aggregators will follow what Google did with Google News in Germany and kick every publisher off their platform and require them to opt-out if they want their content back on the platform
• Worst Case Scenario: all links from organization/company blogs etc. will be considered news links and licenses will be required no matter what (no opt-outs).  Websites will largely stop linking to each other or completely change their linking behavior.  Smaller publishers and websites that depended on traffic driven by Google News, Reddit, or other link aggregators will have to start planning for some alternate traffic means

Conclusion

Article 11 is going to make things crazy for a while.  It’s clear in the amendments that not even the European Commission is fully sure what they’ve wrought, so more textual changes may be coming.  Furthermore, the EU nations will be putting their own spin on things when they begin implementing the directive.  What worries you most about Article 11?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

If you want to see more on the subject, here is some more (slightly older) reading:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/13/17854158/eu-copyright-directive-article-13-11-internet-censorship-google
https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/extra-copyright-for-news-sites/

What Does Article 11 or “The Link Tax” Mean for SEO in the EU is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Transcript of Yelp Content Guidelines and Flagging

Hello! My name’s Daniel Russell and here at Go Fish Digital we’ve made a series of videos about how your business can improve its Yelp star ratings and reviews. Today, I’ll be talking specifically about how your business can improve its Yelp star rating and reviews by using Yelp’s content guidelines and flagging procedure.

Every person that signs up for Yelp has to agree to abide by certain content guidelines when they go through the signup process. Now, while I never read these guidelines when I first signed up and you probably didn’t either, since signing up I’ve become very familiar with them because they can become incredibly helpful when it comes to removing negative reviews about your business. The key is that if any reviews violate any of Yelp’s content guidelines, you can flag these reviews and have them removed. If any of these reviews happen to be negative, removing these reviews can help boost your company’s score on Yelp. The way you can get these reviews removed is by flagging them when you’re signed into Yelp. When you’re signed into Yelp, go to a review.  It can be a negative review or positive review. When you scroll to the bottom of that review’s box, in the bottom right hand corner, you’ll see a small gray flag. When you click on this, it will begin the flagging process for that specific review. Now in order for Yelp to approve a removal of a review, it has to violate one of their guidelines. Today, I’ll be talking about seven of Yelp’s guidelines that could come in handy.

1. Inappropriate Content

The first content guideline I’ll be talking about is Inappropriate Content. They define inappropriate content as including swearing, lewd speech, threats, and even harassment. If a review contains swear words or threats against any of your employees, you can have it removed by flagging it.

2. Conflicts of Interest

The second guideline that Yelp gives for its content is Conflicts of Interest. If a review has obviously been left by one of your competitors or if a review has been left by someone inside your own network, you can flag it and have it removed. Granted, reviews that have been left by people in your own network are typically not negative, but if it’s a former employee or something like that, you can still flag it and have it removed.

3. Promotional Content

Next up is Promotional Content. Now most promotional content typically comes from within a business, but occasionally people will come onto your Yelp page and leave reviews promoting their own business or promoting something else that’s not even Yelp-related.  If any of these reviews happen to be negative, you can have them removed as well.

4. Relevance

Guideline number four is Relevance. The key to this guideline is that a review must be about the “core consumer experience” that your business offers. If a person has left a review about your business, but all they’re doing is ranting or complaining about your company’s ideology, or even if they just take issue with some of your business practices, you can have that review removed. Now what exactly does “core consumer experience” mean? I don’t know and Yelp quite honestly doesn’t know either. So this is when you have an opportunity to craft a really strong argument about why that review does not relate to the core consumer experience that your company offers. Because Relevance is such a broad guideline, it gives you a lot of opportunities to look at the different reviews that have been left on your company’s page and identify if any of them could potentially maybe not be so relevant.

5. Privacy

Guideline number five is Privacy. If a review has been left on your page and mentions one of your employees by their full name, you can have it flagged for a privacy violation and removed. Yelp also typically doesn’t allow close-up video or pictures of your employees and so if people have attached those to their reviews as well, that also violates the guideline.

6. Intellectual Property

Next up is Intellectual Property. If any review seems like it has been copied verbatim from another website, maybe they wrote a TripAdvisor review word-for-word onto your Yelp page,  this technically constitutes a violation of Yelp’s Intellectual Property guideline and you can flag it for that as well.

7. Demanding Payment

Finally, guideline number 7. A reviewer cannot demand payment or a refund in their review. If somebody has left you a review asking you to refund the price of the product and is asking for some form of payment, whether it be in cash or coupons or vouchers, Yelp is not a big fan of that and they will remove it for you.

Those are Yelp’s seven core guidelines and if you become familiar with them, you’ll be surprised about how often they can come in handy for your business. By staying on top of the new reviews that show up on your Yelp page and flagging the negative ones as they come in if they happen to violate any of these guidelines, you can boost your business’s Yelp score and then also improve the review content on your page. I hope this has been helpful! Thanks for watching. And of course, if you ever have any questions please feel free to contact us. Thank you!

How to Increase Your Yelp Rating Using Yelp’s 7 Content Guidelines is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

How to Get Your Business Started on Snapchat in 4 Steps is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Transcript on App Store Optimization – increase mobile app downloads with these 4 easy steps

Hi, my name is Daniel Russell and welcome to another tech talk. Today I’ll be going through App Store Optimization.

Just like any search engine, app stores have a search algorithm that determines which apps show up first and which ones show up last. As I’m sure you can imagine, the apps that show up first get a whole lot more downloads than the apps that show up last. If you want to get more downloads, there’s a couple of things that you can do to improve your app’s rankings in the app store. These include modifying your title, the app’s description, improving your app’s reviews and ratings, and increasing your app’s download rate. Now the title and description are fairly similar – it all comes down to keywords and keyword research.

Title

For the title we recommend including your app’s name as well as two or three carefully chosen keywords. These keywords are typically higher in search volume and very accurately describe your app. For example let’s say I have an app called “Pulse” and monitors people’s heart rates. After doing some keyword research, I find that heart rate and heart rate monitor are very frequently searched terms. They also happen to accurately describe my app. So, in the app store, it would make sense to make my title “Pulse”, maybe with a dash after it, heart rate monitor or even heart rate monitor app.

Description

Next up is the description. The description gives you a lot more room for keywords than in the title, but it’s still good to be fairly judicious with your keyword selection in your description as well. Make sure that your app is accurately described. But then also make sure you do a good job selling why people should download it because again download rates will impact the ranking of your app.

Reviews & Ratings

Next up is reviews and ratings, and unfortunately this is an area where you don’t have a ton of control. Apps with higher star ratings and more reviews typically rank better in the app store. One of the best ways to increase the number of reviews for your app is to ask for reviews inside the app. Something that’s a little more difficult is improving the rating. Now besides just improving your app and making it a better user experience, we also recommend making sure that your customer service is properly set up so that if people have issues with your app they can contact you and report a problem rather than going on the app store and writing a long review about the problem and giving you a low star rating.

Download Rate

Finally, the download rate. If an app store sees that almost every person that comes to your app’s page is downloading your app, chances are you’re going to go up in the rankings. Now again besides just making a killer app it can be difficult to increase these download rates on the app store. But there are a few things that you can do to improve your chances. We recommend doing some A/B testing with a couple of different items. These include the app icon, the screenshots of the app that you include, the description, and of course the price. By tracking your ranking in the app store and the number of downloads that you receive over time, you can start to get a pretty good idea of which of these items has the most impact for your app.

I hope this has been helpful and again if you have any questions please feel free to contact us. We’re happy to describe it in detail. Thanks, have a great day!

How to Increase Your App Store Ranking in 4 Easy Steps is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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For example, the graph below shows the percentage of the U.S. population (age 12+) that has used Snapchat before.  As you can see, Snapchat has outpaced Twitter in the matter of 3 short years.

Snapchat’s hold on the prime 18-24 demographic is incredibly strong, and it’s gaining in the 25-34 demographic as well.  These younger groups tend to be trend setters for older generations and often dictate which social media is adopted on a society-wide scale.  Younger demographics are also prized by advertisers and are likely a big reason why Snapchat is trying to roll out several advertising platforms this year.  As you can see below, Snapchat’s “reach” (its potential audience) among younger demographic groups is huge.

Though Snapchat started as an app that seemingly catered to sexters and other ne’er-do-wells, it has become a major facet of communication for millions of people who just use it for ordinary purposes.  In fact, when college students were asked why they use Snapchat, half responded that it was good for keeping in touch and easier than texting.  A whopping 37% thought that Snapchat allowed them to be more creative than other platforms.  Meanwhile, a minuscule 2% mentioned sexting.

Snapchat has evolved beyond photos.  Now that you can send videos and video chat in the app, Snapchat has become a player in the great “video game” between Facebook and YouTube.  And while YouTube still holds the top spot by a sizable margin, Snapchat is quickly gaining ground on Facebook.  Before long, an average of 1,000 hours of video content will be consumed on Snapchat every second (that’s 88 viewings of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy every second).

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, keep in mind that Facebook is still king when it comes to total user numbers.  Though Facebook is fading slightly here in the U.S., it is still fresh, exciting and excelling outside of the States.  Facebook had 16x the number of monthly users as Snapchat (which has a lowly 100 million users approximately) in Q1 of this year.  But, as we saw before, the real magic is in Snapchat’s hold over the 18-24 year olds. Don’t laugh when you see Google+’s user count.

What do all these numbers mean?  Well for one, it means that Snapchat is worth a lot of money, even if it’s not actually pulling in a lot of revenue right now.  In fact, Snapchat was recently valued at around $20 billion.  That means the market has placed a higher value on Snapchat than on Under Armour, Burger King and Pinterest just to name a few.  And in all likelihood, that valuation number will just keep growing due to the app’s popularity with young people.  You can see each of Snapchat’s valuations since its founding in the chart below.

These Snapchat numbers also mean that the communication landscape is changing.  Of course, the landscape always changes, but Snapchat gives us a great indication of how it’s changing.  The newest generation has seen the data leaks, hacks, and mishandling of information, and seems to want more privacy in its social interactions as a result.  People also want to be able to express their creativity and do more with the text, videos and pictures they send.

What do you like about Snapchat?  Why do you think it is taking off so quickly?  Let us know in the comments below.

Snapchat Numbers: How Millennials Picked the New King of Social is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

In order to help you find out the cause of the drop, I’ve put together a checklist you can use to help find the problem. I’m sure some of you are pros and know this already, but just in case, here are 5 things that you should check first when analyzing a drop in your website traffic.

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If the answer to any of these questions is no, keep moving down the list.

☐  Has there been a drop in your keyword rankings?
☐  Does year-over-year traffic show that traffic always dips this time of year?
☐  Does Google Trends indicate that interest in your overall industry has declined?
☐  Do your URL parameters break up traffic on your top pages?
☐  Is your analytics tracking functioning properly?

Check keyword rankings

More often than not, a drop in organic traffic is the result of a drop in you website’s keyword rankings. Organic traffic is a metric that measures the number of visitors that arrive at your website via a search engine like Google. Say you have a website that sells garden gnomes and you show up as the first result when someone types in “buy garden gnomes online” into Google. It’s very likely that people searching that phrase will click on your website and each one that does becomes a visitor in the organic traffic bucket. But, if all of the sudden your website drops from Google’s first page and doesn’t show up until Google’s 2nd, 3rd, or 4th page for “buy garden gnomes online”, fewer people will be clicking on your website and you’ll see less organic traffic.

Why would your keyword rankings drop? Maybe Google shifted its algorithm. Maybe you released a site-wide update. Maybe your website has been penalized. There could be many, many reasons why your keyword rankings have fallen – more than can be discussed here.  But if your keyword rankings have fallen, you can be fairly confident that the fall is the cause of your drop in organic traffic.

Keyword rankings still look peachy? Then move onto checking your organic traffic history with a year-over-year comparison.

Check year-over-year organic traffic

Most businesses see an ebb and flow of interest over the course of the year. For example, most people aren’t searching for “Christmas trees” in March, but there are tons of searches in the months leading up to December. Not in the Christmas tree business? Well your business will still see ups and downs in traffic throughout the year. Maybe your organic traffic dropped because fewer people have been searching for words where you rank. Maybe your traffic has always dropped around this time of year and that’s just the nature of the business. You can find out for sure by checking your organic traffic history with a year-over-year comparison and looking for up or down trends across the years.

You can easily check your year-over-year stats using Google Analytics by going to “Audience Overview” and clicking the date range selector in the upper-right-hand corner.  You can set your initial date range (I’d recommend a range of at least 3 months), then click the “Compare to” box and select “Previous Year” using the drop down bar.

Was your organic traffic doing swell this same time last year? Check Google Trends next.

Check Google Trends

Google Trends is a very useful tool, especially when it comes to keeping a pulse on public interest in your industry. If you look at your year-over-year comparisons and your organic traffic has never dropped like this before, it could be that the drop is just part of a worldwide trend. It’s possible that overall interest in your industry has just fallen for one reason or another. Here’s an example – self-balancing, motorized boards (often referred to as “hoverboards”) were all the rage during the last quarter of 2015. Celebrities, athletes, YouTube personalities, everyone was riding them. The websites that ranked #1 for the search “hoverboard” were raking in the cash in December just before the holidays. But then a few of them caught on fire, people kept falling off of them and the holidays passed and by February, search volume for these hoverboards had all but disappeared. Now, this is a pretty dramatic example. It’s unlikely that your business has had to ride the wave that these hoverboard manufacturers saw, but the concept still applies. Sometimes people just stop searching for what you offer.

Go into Google Trends and start entering your highest-ranking and highest-traffic-driving keywords. If you see a large dip in one, or many, it’s likely a contributing factor to your drop in traffic. While seeing a dip in Google Trends presents you with a problem to overcome, you can still take comfort in knowing that all of your competitors are feeling the same squeeze.

No dips in keyword rankings, year-over-year organic traffic, or Google Trends? Then it’s time to get a little more technical and check URL modifiers.

Check your URL parameters

A/B testing, attribution, referral tracking and other projects can all require modified URLs at times, where parameters are added to the end of your URLs. Unfortunately, URL parameters can occasionally throw a wrench in your analytics. If you have a single page, but different URLs that resolve to that page, your analytics (and possibly Google Search) may treat those URLs as separate entities. This means each URL is receiving it’s own amount of views in your analytics even through the content is the same. Say you run Acme at acme.com and your homepage is your most visited page. If you want to start tracking your visitor sources using a UTM parameter, you may end up with a URL that looks like this: acme.com/?utm_source=google. Once you start that tracking project, your analytics makes it appear as if traffic to your homepage, acme.com, is falling. In reality, people are still ending up on your homepage, but your analytics sees your tracking parameter as a separate entity.

SEO implications aside, this an easy fix for your traffic problem. First, try to find the different versions of your modified URL. Google’s URL Builder can give you an idea of the different URL combinations that your analytics could be tracking. Next, add the traffic numbers for the root URL and it’s modified siblings. Some analytics platforms allow you to group certain URLs together, in which case, you can group all of the modified URLs with the root URL. Or, if that’s not available, you can just add the numbers together manually.

URL parameters not the issue? Well there’s one more thing I’d recommend you check: analytics tracking.

Check your analytics tracking

I recently worked with a company where 25% of their traffic was going unreported in Google Analytics. As we started to dig through things together, we noticed that there was zero traffic from Safari browsers. Google, Firefox, and others were all represented with at least some visitors apiece. But Safari traffic was completely absent. It turned out that the Google Analytics tracking code that was responsible for tracking Safari visits to their website was broken. After fixing the issue, their traffic saw a substantial bump back up to where it should’ve been all along. While it was unfortunate that we now knew that we missed out on some historical data from the broken code, we were relieved nevertheless to know that traffic was still coming in strong.

If there’s a problem with your analytics, it’s likely that it could be hard to spot. Looking at referrals, channels and other segments can help you narrow down your search. If you come across a channel with lower traffic than you would expect (like 0 visitors using Safari), you’ve likely found your issue. It can also be useful to work through a step-by-step checklist. Brian Massey provided a great technical checklist if you think the problem might be buried in some complicated code.

Well, there you have it. A quick scan through these 5 items typically reveals the problem. Are there other telltale signs you look for? Let me know in the comments below.

The 5 Things to Check First When Your Organic Search Traffic Drops is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Well, truth be told, no one knows for sure.  Google (in typical fashion) hasn’t shared the details.  But we here at Go Fish Digital have done a lot of research and experimentation, and we have a pretty good idea of where, how and why Google creates KPs.  Here’s what we know.

There are 2 main KP types

There are two types of knowledge panels: brand and local.  Brand panels contain general entity information including social profiles, product descriptions, and the entity’s creation date, among others.  Local panels contain locally focused details including locations, building addresses, Yelp pages and reviews.

Here’s an example of a real estate company’s local KP.  You’ll notice it shows photos, contact info, reviews and a “People also searched for” section.

It’s generally easier to prompt Google to display a local panel for your business rather than a brand panel.  In fact, if you have a verified company Google+ page and your website is old enough, you may already see a local KP when you search for your company name.

Here’s an example of a brand KP from a company in the same industry.  Unlike the local KP, the brand KP includes a logo, a Wikipedia summary, key organizational information, and interestingly enough, no reviews.

Google usually requires a few more verification signs and trust signals before it decides to display a brand KP.  A few of the trust signals that Google most frequently relies upon are outlined below.

Sometimes, Google will display a brand KP or a local KP depending on what was searched.  For example, typing in “Verizon Laurel, MD” yields the local KP on the left, but typing in “Verizon” only yields the brand KP on the right.

As you can see, the more localized your search gets, the more likely it is that Google (understandably) will serve up a local KP.  So, keep in mind that it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to replace your local KPs with brand KPs for all searches.  But “Verizon” gets far more searches than “Verizon Laurel, MD” so the KPs visibility in those localized searches

Many data sources are scraped, but not all information is displayed

Google frequently scrapes information from online databases, social profiles, and other websites when creating its knowledge panels.  Here are 5 databases we’ve identified that Google relies on to populate KPs:

• Wikipedia – Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia.  Google frequently scrapes Wikipedia entries when building the KP.
• Structured Data – Schema markup on a website that gives Google instructions on what the date and text on a page mean.
• G+ Page – Google+ is Google’s social media platform and is used by Google when forming both brand and local KPs.
• Freebase – Freebase is an online database.  It is not as large as Wikipedia, but it is still a large source of structured data.  Freebase entered read-only mode in early 2015, so the database is no longer editable.
• Wikidata – Wikidata is a structured database that is maintained by Wikimedia, the same company that runs Wikipedia.

KPs have a lot of positive side effects

Adding a knowledge panel for branded searches helps bury the ads on the right side of the search result.  These AdWords ads are typically from your competitors, and generating a KP for your brand pushes these down below the fold, and in many cases Google ceases to include the sidebar ads altogether.

Additionally, one of the most effective ways to reduce the visibility of negative Google+ reviews in branded search results is to switch Google from showing a local knowledge panel to a brand panel. A brand knowledge panel does not focus on the local aspects of a business (their address, phone number, hours, and reviews), but rather focuses on more important things for a brand – what they do, who their leadership is, what their social profiles are, etc.  You’ll note that the panel for Century 21 shown above does not display any reviews or star ratings.  This is a big win if you’re company is combating negative Google+ reviews.

KPs also come with risk

Making sure your organization is listed in the KP data sources above has the potential to create some negative side effects.  For example, creating a Wikidata profile will be very simple as long as you have the reliable sources, but creating a Wikipedia page could potentially be far more complex.  Because Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, including detractors with their own agendas, setting up a Wikipedia page could do some harm. Editors frequently add negative elements to company Wikipedia pages and sometimes add entire “Controversy” sections.  Here is an example of such a section from Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Wikipedia page:

Take a moment and evaluate whether the upside of pursuing a brand KP outweighs the potential downside before you start building out your company profiles. You can do this by assessing all of the reliable sources that exist for your brand, determining the weight of any negative content they contain, and deciding if the potential for that information to be included in Wikipedia is worth the risk when weighed against the upside of generating a KP.

We created the following flow chart, which contains a likelihood percentage for each option, to help our clients with that deliberation process:

How do I get a brand KP?

So, what should you do to get a brand KP created for your organization?  We recommend following these steps:

1. Find someone to create your Wikipedia page or learn about the Wikipedia ecosystem and create it yourself
2. Find someone to add your organization’s info to Wikidata or learn about the Wikidata ecosystem (which is very similar to Wikipedia’s) and create it yourself
3. Create a Google My Business page for your organization and verify it
4. Add structured data to your website
5. Take stock of your competitors to see which ones have brand KPs vs. local KPs and which ones have neither.  We use a spreadsheet to see where there’s overlap between competitors with brand KPs (e.g. they all have a Wikipedia page, Google+, and Twitter profiles) and where there are holes.  You can then try to copy everything that your brand KP competitor has done.  Here’s a template we created that you’re free to use: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bJLY4AxRylA_waDVvyCgPxS2yxH7DHyZx1w7uJxFflU/edit?usp=sharing
6. Generate online reviews on sites like Yelp, Google My Business, or industry specific sites reviewcounsel.org.

Google has its own schedule, so don’t be disheartened if your changes don’t make a difference overnight.  In our experience, KPs can take weeks to months to show up.  Sometimes they don’t show up at all, especially if the website isn’t old enough or there’s not enough signals to tell Google your organization is important.

How to Create a Knowledge Panel for Your Organization is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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Despite these challenges, our marketing campaigns for Attentiv were successful.  So successful in fact, that I’ve now been invited to speak about the Attentiv marketing campaign several times just in the last couple months.  Now I’m putting my strategy out there as a resource.  Hopefully you’ll find it useful!

My strategy can be broken down into 3 main parts.

1. Testing Channels.  
2. Focusing on High-Value Content.  
3. Amplifying Opportunities.

When you put everything together, the goal is to test your potential marketing channels to find the most effective channel for your campaign, create some high-value content for that channel, and then amplify the heck out of any opportunities that arise from the content you create.

(1) Test Channels

Marketing experiments have been invaluable for me.  Because every situation, every company, every news cycle is different, I have to test things out before I invest time and resources.  So, before I start a marketing campaign, I test out each of the channels I could potentially use to promote my campaign.  For me, most of these channels have been internet-based – like social media, online forums, or web publications – but print and other media could be good options as well.

As part of my channel tests, I also cycle through different genres of content to make sure I have data on what types of content do best.  For Attentiv, I started with funny content, posting jokes about meetings, making fun of bosses, etc., and I saw a decent response.  I tested “How To” guides next, and then news items after that.  But, it wasn’t until I started posting statistics as my content that I saw a really strong response.  Because I had run these tests, I figured out that our best channel was online forums and our best content was statistics that fit our brand message.

(2) High-Value Content

Now that my experiments were finished,  it was time to start building my content.  Luckily, I knew right where to focus because I had tested my channels earlier.  All of our content was focused towards our most successful channels, in this case, statistics and online forums.  I did some research, looking into census data and business studies done by psychology professors and business schools.  I found some amazing statistics on meetings that aligned incredibly well with Attentiv’s brand message.

Next, I had to make the statistics I had found viral-ready.  I’ve found that viral-readiness is incredibly key for most marketing.  Lots of content gets the opportunity to go viral, it just isn’t shareable enough.  Having small, interesting snippets of information that can appeal to different personality types and backgrounds leads to far more shares and a much higher likelihood for a viral hit.

So, I took these stats and packaged them together into small, ultra-shareable snippets.  I wanted the content to be “snackable” – where people could browse through and share the parts of my content that they found most interesting.  To accomplish this, I created several small images instead of one large infographic.  One image said “63% of meetings are conducted without a pre-planned agenda” and another “$338 – the average cost of a meeting”.  By breaking what could have been a lengthy image into bite-size pieces, I made it much more likely that my content would go viral if it was given the opportunity.

The success of the Attentiv campaign also came down to the fact that the content was high in value.  I couldn’t cheat my way to massive marketing success.  I might fool 10 people or maybe even 100, but there was no way I could convince 100,000 people to share my content unless it was actually good stuff.  So, we painstakingly made the piece something worthwhile, that people would revisit and other writers would link to.  Something high enough in value that people would want to share it, just to make themselves look smart.

The next goal was to cultivate what I like to call a “get the ball rolling” base.  I like to compare marketing to rolling a snowball down a hill.  If your campaign can gain momentum, it can build bigger and bigger as it rolls forward just like a snowball.  But someone has to make the small ball of snow and push it down the hill to get it started.  

This is where the “get the ball rolling” base comes in.  Every campaign needs an initial push, and for us that came from coworkers, friends and family.  We gathered about 30 contacts who could retweet, like and upvote the content we sent them.  These people were critical to getting our campaign going, and I’ll never do another campaign again without some base to build from.

(3) Amplify Opportunities

If things go well at all after you start promoting your content, additional marketing opportunities will crop up.  These can take the form of a news outlet picking up your content, a blogger using one of your images, or even a tweet from someone with a lot of followers.  The key is to be aware of when these opportunities arise and take advantage of them as soon as you can.  One of the best ways to I found to track potential opportunities is web analytics (I use Google Analytics).  If a big spike of visitors starts coming from Twitter, it’s likely an influencer tweeted out your content.  If visitors start rolling in from the Washington Post, it’s likely they picked up your campaign.

It’s tempting to sit back and high five when your content gets picked up, your snowball is getting bigger after all.  But the ball could really get going if you start promoting these new opportunities.  I always assume that people are terrible at promoting their own content (the truth is they often are.  Maybe they’ll tweet it, but that’s it).  So, apply the same channel strategies that made your content a success to this outside content.

This means that sometimes you have to make their message more shareable.  Attentiv was once covered by a news outlet whose article tagline stated “New startup comes out of DC”.  Completely true, but completely boring.  So we dug through the article and found a line that stated “This software enables introverts in the workplace”.  Introverts were a hot topic at the time because of the success of Susan Cain’s book Quiet – much more interesting, much more shareable.  So when we started promoting the article on social forums, we titled our posts “This software enables introverts in the workplace” and it led to some strong engagement.  In fact, the author of the piece contacted me afterwards and asked that I keep in touch because she wanted to write about us again.  I’m sure she saw the shares and visit count climbing as we were promoting it.

Conclusion

This type of approach probably doesn’t fit every campaign.  If you’re Nike or Toyota or if you have $1 billion dollars in ad spend, there’s likely a better strategy for you.  But, if you’re planning on creating interest in a new or low-profile business, you can’t go wrong with these 3 steps.  Remember to (1) test your potential marketing channels to find the most effective channel for your campaign, (2) create some high-value content for that channel, and then (3) amplify any opportunities that arise from the content you create.

Have you had something go viral?  What makes your content more shareable?  Let me know in the comments below.

How to Build your Digital Presence from Scratch is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.