Perhaps you’ve found this post because you’ve spent hours pouring your soul into a piece of writing and now you’ve realised people will only read it if you write a good 50-60 characters. Or maybe it’s just that your boss told you that he needs quick wins for your product pages and so you’re turning in desperation to the ol’ title tag. Writing a good title tag is part art, part science. How do you do it?

Contents
What is a title tag?
How long should a title tag be?
What do we want a title tag to do?
How to write a title tag for a single article
How to write hundreds of title tags for a template
What are the chances you write a good title tag?
How much impact do title tag changes have?
7 learnings from title tag split tests
How long does it take to see the impact of a title tag change?
What is a title tag?
The title tag of a page is the HTML tag which is used to summarise the content of your webpage. It’ll be used by search engines as the title in the search engine results:

Images and Visual Search is a topic I talk about and write about since when Google started experimenting with the Images Search tags almost 4 years ago, a time when the majority of the SEOs were dismissing them saying it was just Images SEO, hence something that did not need to be prioritized.

Dismissing Images and Visual Search as a secondary SEO task would be deeply myopic now as it was before.

The worldwide status of crisis and suspended activity for practically any kind of physical shop makes it even more urgent that Ecommerce owners and businesses focus all the attention and efforts on visual shopping.

This guide is a humble attempt to guide you and offer you ideas and ways to optimize your category and product pages for it.

Contents [hide]

1 Why Visual is so important?
1.1 Ok, but why Visual Search is important for SEO?
2 Images and Search now
2.1 The Images Search vertical
2.2 Google Lens and the opportunities of Visual Search
2.3 The potential of Collections
2.3.1 How do Collections work?
2.4 From searching inspiration to buying in a few taps
3 Images in Universal Search
4 Rich Results, Images, and Structured data
4.1 What must we consider when doing Images SEO specifically for structured data and Rich Result?
4.1.1 Images XML Sitemap
4.1.2 Images specification for Rich Results
4.1.3 The Image License Metadata
5 How to do SEO for Google Images Search?
5.1 Alt text
5.2 Descriptive file names
5.3 Captions
5.4 The text surrounding the image
5.5 Correct image sizes, formats, and file types
5.6 How to have high-quality images and a good PageSpeed at the same time?
6 How to do SEO for Google Visual Search?
6.1 Images SEO
6.2 Using structured data and correct images specifications
6.3 Using high-quality images and photos
6.4 Avoiding mess
6.5 Trying not using stock photos or…
6.6 Letting your images to be used by others
7 Conclusions
Why Visual is so important?
Amazon once gave the perfect answer to this same question:

Visual Search is perfect for shoppers who face two common dilemmas:

I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it;
I know what I want, but I don’t know what it’s called.

However, the transformation of Google from a simple search engine to a complex “database of answers” and the exponential growth of SERP features, which tend to keep users in the search engine itself, is just one of the reasons why the work of SEO has become more complex.

If we look at the mission statement of Google, we can easily understand the “most honest” reason why of the complexity of achieving the most organic visibility possible now:

Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to everyone.

To be useful and offer the best answer, the first thing to do is to really understand why a person is asking a question or, in search engine terms, understand a person’s search intent.

This need for understanding is central to any marketing discipline.

In fact, if we do not know what our target audience wants and what are the pain points, which they want to see resolved, we will hardly be able to direct our messages in the best and most effective way.

In the case of SEO, however, there is a special peculiarity: our message passes through a medium – the search engines – that ask the same questions as we do about their users.

This means that if, on the one hand, it is true that we must know the desires and pain points of our users (God forbid!), on the other hand, however, we must know what the search engines determine these users want and search as an answer to their questions.

In this post, I will not go into the details of patents and papers (if you are interested in them, I invite you to follow and read Bill Slawski and Dawn Anderson). On the contrary, I will present empirical methods that some will consider “unscientific”, but which in reality have a lot of practical science backing it and proved to be correct and effective in identifying the search intent of my clients’ users.

Contents [hide]

1 Fundamental concepts
1.1 Search Intent
1.2 Relevance
1.3 SERP
2 Search Intent and Search Journey
3 I Want to Go micro-moment, or about the Navigational Search Intents
3.1 How can we tell if a query implies an I Want to Go Search Intent?
4 I Want to Know and I Want to Do micro-moments, or about the Informational Search Intents
4.1 What kind of information people is looking for most with their informational queries?
4.2 How to tell if a query has an informational Search Intent (and what kind)
4.2.1 Know Simple
4.2.2 Classic informational
4.2.3 Fresh informational
4.2.4 Visual informational
5 I Want to Buy Micro Moment, or the different shapes of the Transactional Search Intent
5.1 “I am ready to buy”
5.2 “I’m ready to buy, but I need help…”
6 TL;DR

I’ve found myself in this position all too often. Going through the motions of business as usual without getting a good sense of the value of my work or being strategic about it.

In this article you’ll learn how to build a case to give yourself some strategy time by showing the long term value of it, and how to maximise the benefits of keyword mapping in your SEO strategy.

What is keyword mapping and why does it matter?
Keyword mapping is the process of pairing your target keywords to their goal landing pages.

The main benefits of keyword mapping are:

An informed internal linking strategy
Easily measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts
More persuasive reporting
Being able to notice and react quickly when things aren’t going well
So what are we looking to achieve? Ranking with the right pages for the right keywords at the bottom of the funnel.

A step-by-step guide to keyword mapping
Now that we know why we want to do this exercise and what we’re looking to achieve, let’s look at the “how”.

Use this guide as an orientation. Depending on the maturity of your site and your SEO efforts on it so far, some steps might not make sense to you.

But it’s not enough to just spy on your competitors’ social media accounts and subscribe to their email lists. You need a strategy behind your efforts to ensure you’re effectively monitoring your competitors on an ongoing basis and updating your view of the competitive landscape as it changes.

Enter the competitive analysis: a document that gives you both a bird’s-eye view and an in-depth understanding of the key players in your market.

In this post, we’ll outline a method for conducting a competitive analysis of your own, geared towards ecommerce businesses.

Whether you’re a seasoned store owner re-evaluating your view of the current market, or you’re getting ready to bring your product to market for the very first time, here are the steps, tools, and even a template (skip to the template) to help you put together your own competitive analysis.

Free: Competitive Analysis Template
By evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you can begin to formulate how to give your company an advantage. Download our free competitive analysis template and gain an edge over the competition.

What is a competitive analysis?
A competitive analysis is the analysis of your competitors and how your business compares. By evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of your competition, you can begin to formulate how to give your company an advantage.

Competitive analysis helps a business determine potential advantages and barriers within a target market around a product or service, and generally helps brands monitor how direct and indirect competitors are executing tactics like marketing, pricing, and distribution.

In this guide, you will learn how to conduct a competitive analysis: understand market trends, identify your competitors, evaluate opportunities, analyze threats to your organization, and adjust your go-to-market and positioning strategy accordingly.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1: The Basics of Competitive Analysis
What is a Competitive Analysis?
Why should You Should Conduct a Competitive Analysis?
How Not to Use a Competitive Analysis
Part 2: How to Select Competitors for Analysis
How to select competitors for analysis
Part 3: How to Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Company Overview
Go-to-Market Analysis (Customer Acquisition Analysis)
Product Offering and Pricing
Channel
Customer Experience and Customer Success
Tools and Resources and Techniques
Part 4: The Next Steps
Summary

It’s no surprise that those companies who DO have a strategy are most likely to feel that their content marketing efforts are successful.

Without a strategy, success or failure is just a matter of luck – and you risk all your efforts going to waste.

Recommended Resource: Need to jumpstart your content marketing results? Get more traffic and conversions with our Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2020.

That’s likely why a similar percentage (64%) say that learning how to build a content strategy is one of their greatest educational needs.

CMI-Greatest-Content-Management-Educational-Needs-Jul2017
If you’re in that group and have been wondering how to create a content strategy for your business, we’re here to help.

We’ve successfully used content marketing to grow our own traffic and boost conversions since OptinMonster first launched in 2013, and we want to share with you what we’ve learned along the way.

This guide will walk you through 11 simple steps to developing and executing a content marketing plan that’ll help you grow your business without wasting time and money.

Here are the steps for easy reference:

Step 1. Set Your Mission and Your Goals
Step 2. Establish Your KPIs
Step 3. Know Your Audience
Step 4. Assess Your Current Position
Step 5. Figure Out the Best Content Channels
Step 6. Decide on Content Types
Step 7. Identify and Allocate Resources
Step 8. Create a Content Calendar
Step 9. Create Content
Step 10. Distribute and Market
Step 11. Measure Results

The challenge: she wants to see a content marketing plan . . . and you have NO IDEA what that’s supposed to look like.

I’ve been there.

It’s a tough situation, because you’ve been doing content marketing with your gut this whole time, and now you’re being asked to put all that into a document. (And the gut-to-document process can be pretty painful.) Plus, you know that awesome content marketing involves a lot of flexibility—how do you build that into a strategic document?

Good news: we’ve scoured the Internet for content marketing strategy templates, tried a few, and put together an approach to building your own content marketing plan step-by-step.

(This is built with both the in-house content marketer and the agent in mind, BTW!)

Let’s go!

Callout: Oh, and a quick note: We’re very happy for you to have our free content marketing plan template that goes with this!

Table of contents
Preface

1. Start with an outline

2. Write down what you’re trying to accomplish

3. Write down what you’re selling (optional)

4. Now, who’s going to consume your content?

5. Map your personas’ needs to your product or service

6. Heroes and watering holes

7. Look to the competition’s content marketing efforts for inspiration

8. Take inventory of your content

9. Evaluate your existing content

10. What sticks?

11. What should we fix?

12. What should we nix?

13. What should we add to the mix?

14. Sort your effective and prospective content marketing assets by theme

15. List the types of content you’ll be dealing with

16. Snapshot the content team and the workflow

17. Estimate your content capacity

18. Map out your editorial calendar

19. Make a content promotion workflow

20. Write the epilogue

21. Write the executive summary

But then you don’t.

To realize the potential content marketing offers, it’s critical to have a plan. It sounds simple, yet it’s a step many content marketers don’t take. Seventy percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy (Altimeter), and only 29 percent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose content (Curata).

That’s because creating such a plan is daunting. It requires marketers to analyze where their marketing efforts have been and what they want it to achieve in the future.

If you are one of the 70 percent of marketers operating without a plan, take heart: we’ve got the information and templates you need to guide you through the planning process and produce a content plan that can generate results.

Content Marketing Plan Is More than Just Content
Why is it so hard for marketers to create a strategic plan for their content? Let’s start by taking a look at what content marketing is:

The Content Marketing Institute defines it this way:

Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Note the emphasis on strategy in this statement. Taking a strategic approach to your content plan ensures your message cuts through the clutter and reaches your target audience with the right information at the right time.

Content marketing strategy, content strategy, and content plan.

People often use these terms interchangeably (which is understandable, as the lines are somewhat blurry), but each is a bit different:

Content marketing strategy
At its core, your content marketing strategy is your “why.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable results: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.

Content strategy
On the other hand, content strategy delves deeper into (in Kristina Halvorson’s words) the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” Note that content strategy often goes beyond the scope of a content marketing strategy, as it helps businesses manage all of the content they have.

Content plan
In contrast to the other two, a content plan is very tactical. It documents the specifics of how you will execute your strategy, and who on your team will be handling each task. It’s important to understand that you need a content marketing strategy BEFORE you build your content plan. Think of it as a marketing plan that specifically relates to content; thus, it should include details such as the key topic areas you will cover, what content you will create, when and how to share your content, and specific calls to action you will include.