Fuel versus friction

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When it comes to marketing, there are two main directions you want to work to push — adding more fuel, or reducing friction.

This works in many areas of life, as explained wonderfully in a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, but it’s particularly interesting with marketing.

Fuel

When it comes to marketing, fuel is generally the area people focus on. Work to improve your search rankings, buy Google Ads, promote more via social media — these are all great things to do. Getting users into your marketing funnel is essential, and getting more users is generally a great thing.

Friction

The other side is reducing friction, which generally means improving your conversion rate; the percentage of visitors that end up completing one of your goals (buying a product, filling out a contact form, etc). The more friction you can reduce, the higher your conversion rate will be.

This can be simple things like reducing the number of fields on your forms, or may involve a bit more digging through the use of Analytics and heatmaps to see where users are falling off.

Fuel versus friction

With limited time in your day, though, which angle should you pursue? While both are important, I notice that fuel is often over-emphasized and working on reducing friction may yield better results.

For example, suppose your site receives 1,000 visitors per day and your conversion rate is 1% — that means you’re closing 10 customers per day.

If you were to push hard on your fuel and double your traffic to 2,000 visitors/day, you’d then be closing 20 customers. Not bad.

Instead, though, if you put that effort into smoothing out the process and raised your conversion rate from 1% to 3%, you’d go from 10 customers/day to 30! That kind of jump in conversion rate might be tough to accomplish, but if you’ve been ignoring friction for a while, you might find some easy wins to jumpstart things.

For more on this entire concept, though not really from a marketing angle, I recommend you check out this episode of Hidden Brain.

News websites are starting to realize they should have worked to own the conversation

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I’ve made no secret that I think individuals and organizations should work hard to own their content. This includes not only the primary content (like the actual story or post), but also the comments and interactions to the extent possible.

The second part of that is difficult, as social media is the default for most folks for conversation, but news organizations worked hard to accelerate that and now many are wishing they hadn’t. As a user, I really wish they hadn’t either. If I want to see more info about a particular story, it’s much easier to just scroll down and see the comments versus going off to social media to try to find all of the scattered commentary.

For example, I was surprised that I hadn’t gotten a system update on my new Pixel 6 yet, and Android Police had a story about that. The real benefit for me, though, were the dozens of comments on that same page where users shared what they tried, what worked, and what didn’t. It was fantastic.

Karl Bode at Techdirt recently wrote a great article that digs into this, and I thought I’d share a few of his thoughts. First is the idea that having comments on your site gives you a chance to more directly engage with users:

So is it better to at least keep one forum where the outlet has control and the potential to monetize commenters into subscribers? And how do we make that forum as good as it can possibly be?

The bigger issue is what Facebook has become, and how news outlets helped accelerate that growth:

The untapped irony is that many of these same major outlets that outsourced all discourse to Facebook over the last five to ten years, now complain incessantly about how Facebook has too much power over discourse, ad markets, and everything else. It’s pretty rare you’ll see anybody acknowledge that the decision to muzzle local communities and outsource all discourse to Facebook helped create at least some of the problems they’re now complaining about.

In some ways, this is pretty simple (though not easy) to fix. If you have a popular news site, you can turn comments back on and then take the time to build that community. It’ll take some work, but it’ll help drive more revenue back to news organizations and away from Facebook, which I think most people would agree is a good thing.

Check out Karl’s full article for more.

Why click through rate doesn’t affect search rankings

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There’s long been a myth that click through rate affects how well you rank in Google. In short, many people believe that if your results get clicked on frequently on Google, you’ll move up the rankings. It’s been claimed for years, and Google has always insisted that it’s not true.

In a recent Tweet, Google’s John Mueller gave a brief explanation as to why:

If CTR were what drove search rankings, the results would be all click-bait. I don’t see that happening.

We see click-bait everywhere, particularly on social media, and having the search results filled with that would be awful. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable summed it up nicely:

Yes, Google wants the title links in the search results to be representative of what the content is about but it does not want the titles to be used in a way where people would drive clicks above and beyond so that it influences rankings.

There are a lot of things that affect how well you rank on Google, and the SEO category of this site digs into many of them, but the click through rate of your listing in the search results isn’t one of them.

Images on your website pages don’t help with rankings

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Over the years, much has been said about optimizing images to help rank better in Google, and it’s mostly accurate. The key is that images will generally only help you rank better in Google Image Search, not in the main search results.

Google’s John Mueller laid it out pretty clearly in a recent SEO Office Hours (via SE Roundtable) when he said:

We basically use those images in image search. And that’s where we care what the content of the images are. But within web search we don’t really care if it’s a gray square or if it’s a picture of a beach.

That’s not to say you should just leave images off of your post. Not only can they rank in Google Image Search (which is better than nothing), images can really make for a better post. A better post is more likely to be read and shared, which is the goal.

If you’re going to add images to your page, though, there are a few key things to keep in mind:

  1. Use proper alt text. Not only is this good for Google, but it’s essential for users with disabilities and helping with accessibility. If you’re going to use images, put proper alt text on them.
  2. Size them properly. If done poorly, adding images to your page could actually make your page rank lower. Slow loading pages don’t tend to rank as well, and if you use bloated mis-sized images, that can hurt. Take time to size them properly and compress them to balance speed and quality.

Great images can make or break a site, but don’t expect a magic bonus from Google for using them. I include them on many of my posts when I feel they add value, and leave them off other posts (like this one) when they won’t be of much help to explain a concept.

Google sees different types of web pages essentially the same way

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Your website likely includes a wide variety of content types. You have some normal pages, some blog posts, maybe a custom feed for podcast, some category pages for your blog, things like that. Which does Google prefer? They don’t really care.

It’s not that every page will rank as well as the others, but that Google doesn’t give special boosts based on what type of page it is. If you have a page that is loaded with great content, and it’s technically a “blog category” page, that’s fine — Google will love it!

There are two main things that will impact rankings for content on your site:

  1. The quality of the content, how well it’s written, how close to the keyword it is, etc.
  2. How easy it is to find. Prominent pages on your site are likely to have more internal links pointing to them, which is an important signal to Google.

The info above isn’t a best guess about how Google treats those items, as it comes directly from Google.

In a recent “SEO Office Hours”, Google’s John Mueller addressed all of the above info. Regarding the main topic of this post, here is what John said regarding content types:

We don’t try to recognize the difference between different category pages or filter pages or search pages. Essentially we see all of these pages as being equivalent and it’s more a matter of the kind of content that you’re providing there.

As for item 2 in my list above and making pages easy to find, John gave a slightly longer response:

Look at your internal linking structure and see what you can do to make it so that we can find those pages a little bit easier. And that could be something like on your home page you list a section of popular categories or popular kinds of products and then you link to those pages directly. Or maybe do occasional blog posts with information about a specific kind of product and then from there you link to that kind of product page on your side. Which could be like a filter page it could be a category page whatever you want to do.

It’s what I said a few weeks ago: don’t overthink SEO. If you produce great content and make your site easy to browse, Google will respect and reward you for it.

Be careful when measuring your targets

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A few weeks ago, Seth Godin shared a pretty simple statement from Charles Goodhart: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“

To be honest, it took me a little while to understand what he meant. We set a lot of goals at our company, and we measure our progress toward them. How could that be a bad thing? It’s not, necessarily, but I think it works better when the work you do impacts the measured item, but isn’t something you can do directly.

Will Koehrsen shared a great summary on his blog that explains it well:

In order to increase revenue, the manager of a customer service call center starts a new policy: rather than being paid an hourly wage, every employee is compensated solely based on the number of calls they make. After the first week, the experiment seems like a resounding success: the call center is processing twice the number of calls per day!

The manager, who never bothers to listen to his employees’ conversations as long as their numbers are good, is quite pleased. However, when the boss stops by, she insists on going out to the floor and when she does so, both she and the manager are shocked by what they hear: the employees pick up the phone, issue a series of one word answers, and slam the phone down without waiting for a good-bye. No wonder the number of completed calls has doubled!

Without intending to, by judging performance only by the volume of calls, the manager has incentivized employees to value speed over courtesy.

That’s a very real problem, and it can happen to all of us.

If your goal is to increase your engagement on social media, then it’s easy to post silly quizzes (that have nothing to do with your business) in pursuit of that goal.

If your goal is to increase traffic to your website, there are a lot of easy ways to drive useless traffic to a site.

Go a step deeper

A good way to avoid this is to set your real goal a step deeper. Most companies don’t need more website traffic, they need better website traffic. The problem is that “better” is harder to measure than “more”, so “more” becomes the goal.

Instead, look deeper at your marketing funnel. More traffic at the top might help, but it’s what comes out the bottom of the funnel that really matters. The goal of many businesses is likely to gain more clients and revenue, and in the context of your marketing funnel, getting more traffic to your website might be a good tactic to help get there.

Knowing your numbers can help with this too. You should have a good idea what percentage of visitors make it to each step of your funnel, which makes it easier to spot bogus numbers. If you notice that your website traffic has doubled but visitors that sign up for your lead generation piece stayed flat, the excess visitors on your website are mostly useless.

Measuring your data is essential, but make sure your measurements aren’t creating false hope.

You don’t need more website traffic

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A goal of almost every website owner in the world is more traffic. “If I’m making $100/day with 1,000 visitors, then if I double my traffic I’ll double my revenue!“

It’s not always that easy.

Getting more traffic on your site isn’t a bad thing, but rather than getting more traffic you should work on getting better traffic.

A few years ago we rebuilt a website for a client and consolidated it quite a bit. After the launch, traffic dropped considerably but leads and revenue from the website rose — which was exactly the plan. Instead of working to attract more people, we worked to attract the right people.

Higher numbers in your Google Analytics aren’t a bad thing, and I love “up and to the right” as much as anyone, but just be sure your traffic is going up for the right reasons.

Don’t overthink SEO

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There is a tendency to think that ranking well in Google is a big, mysterious, complex thing. It’s really not. I said years ago that Google doesn’t change the rules for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and that still holds true. Things change frequently, for sure, but most of those are just Google getting better at understanding content and clearing out spam.

At the end of the day, there are just three things you need to do to get 90% of the benefits of Google:

  1. Produce great content.
  2. Don’t do anything stupid with your site (slow load times, get hacked, etc).
  3. Get others to reference your content, ideally with links.

That’s it. Those aren’t necessarily easy to do, but if you conquer those you’re all set.

Now here is a partial list of what you need to worry about to get the last 10%:

  1. Have great alt text on your images
  2. Use H1 tags for your titles
  3. Customize your meta descriptions
  4. Set up Google Search Console
  5. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools
  6. Submit your sitemap to Google
  7. Install an SEO plugin
  8. Create a robots.txt file
  9. Check canonical tags
  10. Add structured data / schema markup
  11. Organize topic clusters
  12. Optimize for Google AMP
  13. Set up goals in Google Analytics
  14. Disavow bad links to your site
  15. Add great tags
  16. Use solid categories
  17. Add social sharing icons
  18. Make your content a specific length
  19. Link out to other high-quality sources

The list could go on and on. Don’t get me wrong — those are all good things to do! If time allows, every one of those items can be helpful. I just see people get hung up on them far too often and make content generation a giant chore that scares them away.

Goals Matter

Your goals will impact how your posts are shaped. If we’re doing heavy SEO optimization for a client, we’ll do everything on that list to get the absolute most we can out of every piece of content.

For most folks, though, just producing great content on a solid site would be a massive win. I have a friend that is constantly struggling to attract clients, but he’s written zero blog posts in 2021 (and very few in past years). He’s trying to come up with the perfect post and instead he hasn’t published anything. You don’t need to go nuts trying to blog every day, but consistent content wins. Don’t overthink it.

Spot the imposter

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When dealing with a professional of any kind, you expect that they know the lingo. For example, I’m not very knowledgeable about how a car works, but if I’m talking to a mechanic and I mention that I think I might have an issue with my transmission, and he responds with “what’s a transmission?”, I know I’m in trouble.

Here are four that I see quite often, and each makes me question things a little bit.

Banks that require password changes

Our bank requires us to change our password every 90 days, yet they can offer no good reason for it. Both Microsoft and the FTC have said that such changes are silly to enforce, which makes me question the security that the bank offers.

Our bank talks a lot about how secure they are, but doing this kind of “security theatre” erodes a lot of trust.

An SEO expert that says “alt tags”

When describing an image for vision-impaired users, “alt attributes” are essential. For a normal user, if they say “alt tags”, we know what they mean. For a web professional (particularly one that focuses on SEO, where these are crucial), there is a big difference between an “attribute” and a “tag”, and they should know better.

An accessibility expert that uses #lowercasehashtags

This is another one that is acceptable (though ideally will change) when normal users do it, but for those that claim to work hard for the sake of accessibility, it’s a bad one.

We should all be using #CamelCaseHashtags, but if you’re big into accessibility issues, you already knew that.

Any web company that puts their link in the footer of sites that they build

This is just a scummy thing to do, as it hurts the rankings of your site and helps the rankings of the company that stuck their link down there. As I’ve mentioned before, there are only two reasons that a company would do this:

  1. They don’t know any better, in which case you should be nervous as they don’t know how Google works.
  2. Worse, they do know better, and they’re stealing your rankings on purpose.

Neither one is a good answer.

Nobody is perfect, and I suspect plenty of people will keep using lowercase hashtags, just as I’ll likely keep asking dumb questions to my mechanic. They’re the expert, so as long as they know what a transmission does I won’t be immediately concerned.

Users don’t click on your blog page, and that’s ok

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You’ve probably heard that having a blog on your site is a great way to increase traffic and awareness, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, most users that visit your site won’t go over and visit your blog page. If that’s the case, then why blog at all? Because it’s intended for everyone else.

For a great example, let’s look at the GreenMellen blog. That page I just linked you to is incredibly unpopular. Of the 25,000 visitors we’ve had on our site this year, only 433 have gone to that page. Here’s a heat map that shows that relatively unpopular link at the top, with only about 3.3% of our home page visitors clicking over to the blog. Even that measly 3.3% is higher than most sites see. When someone visits your home page, they rarely go in search of your blog.

However, visitors have read our individual blog posts thousands of times, and we have five different posts that have more than 433 views each. Across our site, users have read content from 1,159 different pages this year, many of those being individual posts.

Google loves blog posts

Why does it work this way? It’s really two reasons:

  1. Search engines love blogs
  2. Blogs can be great content for social media.

As I shared earlier this year, Google ranks pages, not sites. Generally speaking, the more high-quality pages you have on your site, the more chances you have to rank well for any given search. Great blog posts are a perfect way to build that inventory. If you can continually write excellent content on your site, each piece of content can turn into a great place for Google to send people.

Users hate “blogs”

If you write great content, users will find those individual posts (very often through Google) that help answer their question and that’s a win for everyone. You helped someone solve their problem, and you attracted a user to your site (who now knows you as someone that helped them, which is always good).

As a whole, though, users don’t like blogs. They have nothing against them, but they don’t have time to just read through them to see if anything is interesting. They want answers to their questions, and Google may guide them to one of your posts that has the perfect answer. Take the win, and don’t worry when the clicks to your main “blog” link end up looking a little weak.

We’ve had 25,000 users visit our site this year, only 433 clicked on the blog, and it’s working perfectly.