A well-crafted Meta Description can be as important to your brand as your tagline. Companies spend thousands of dollars developing phrases that help customers understand the essence of their brand. Nike’s “Just Do It” or General Electric’s “Imagination at Work” are excellent examples. For consumers using a search engine, your Meta Description helps them quickly grasp what you have to offer and invites them to enter your virtual front door.

Here’s a great example from Exact Target:

ExactTarget is the preferred targeted email marketing provider for Fortune 500 enterprises and Small Businesses alike. Find out why.

And results in a SERP display like this:

A well-written Meta Description achieves its objective if the reviewers next step is to click and learn more

Google has pulled Exact Target’s Meta Description to display along with their search result. Although it no longer has any influence on SEO rankings, the thoughtfully-written Meta Description is still playing a valuable role in driving traffic to Exact Target’s website.

Today we’re going to delve deeper into Meta Descriptions – exploring what makes a good one, looking at usage, and discovering what competitive intelligence you can glean from a side-by-side comparison. Read on!

Is your Meta Description a friendly doorman or an angry bouncer?

A thoughtfully-written Meta Description will crisply articulate what sets you apart from your competitors in a warm tone that welcomes visitors to come explore your website. Just like the doorman who offers a friendly greeting and holds open the door – your Meta Description can create a great first impression.

With that said, if you aren’t proactive, search engines will create a first impression for you, displaying seemingly random and definitely generic text to explain what their users might expect to find on your site. Like being greeted by an unfriendly bouncer, many visitors are moved along – clicking through to a competitor’s site instead.

Here’s a real-world example:

Unbounce, a leading landing page optimization company, has spent time perfecting a Meta Description that delivers results.

Unbounce’s well-written Meta Description prior to an accidental change

Rival IQ identified that Unbounce had released a beautiful new home page but had inadvertently wiped out their Meta Description.

Rival IQ tracks the change to the new Unbounce homepage and accidental deletion of their Meta Description

The impact on their SERP was immediate. Gone was any mention of who uses Unbounce and what makes their offer different from the competition. Instead, Google had put a bland face on their welcome.

The impact of a missing Meta Description is obvious on Unbounce’s new SERP

It didn’t take the on-the-ball marketers at Unbounce long to get their proven Meta Description restored.

Writing Meta Descriptions that deliver clicks.

I find distilling a company’s value proposition down to 155’ish characters of goodness (the length SEOmoz recommends) a real challenge. Thankfully, there are some great resources to out there to help. Here are a few I found helpful:

At Rival IQ, we track thousands of websites for our customers. Can you believe when this article was originally published, 28% of homepages didn’t have a Meta Description? Another 30% had Meta Descriptions that are too long, abruptly cutting off after 155 characters. This means that a mere 41% of companies had a Meta Description that is the right length. 

In 2013, over 50% of companies do not have a Meta Description or have one that is too long

In 2015, Moz ran a similar experiment of 92,600 Meta Descriptions. And boy did those two years make a statistical difference! I recommend reading the full analysis! According to Dr. Peter J. Meyers of Moz,

“Most of the snippets (62.1%) cut off as expected, right in the 141-160 character bucket. Of course, some snippets were shorter than that, and didn’t need to be cut off, and some broke the rules. About 1% (1,010) of the snippets in our data set measured 200 or more characters. That’s not a huge number, but it’s enough to take seriously.”

Analysis Courtesy of: Moz.com

Meta Descriptions Are All About Positioning

You can gain valuable insight into how your competitors are positioning themselves by doing a side-by-side comparison of their Meta Descriptions. (Assuming, of course, that they have them!)

This might sound daunting, but we’ve made it easy! Rival IQ allows you to easily collect and compare the Meta Descriptions of companies in your competitive landscape and analyze for positioning changes. If you are looking to quickly analyze Meta Descriptions for a set of companies, try our free Competitive Meta Description micro-app.

What You Can Learn From Meta Description Comparisons

To demonstrate what we can learn from a side-by-side comparison of Meta Descriptions, I’m going to explore examples from two different industries. First, I’ll examine the dynamic, technology-oriented landing page optimization market, and then follow it with a look at the much more mature auto insurance market. In both cases, it is amazing to see the insights you gain from studying how companies describe themselves in less than 160 characters.

Landing Page Companies’ Meta Descriptions (circa May 2013)

3 Key Learning:

• Missing Descriptions. Two companies have blank Meta Descriptions, including Visual Website Optimizer (another leader in this space).  Just to drive home my earlier point about random text getting displayed, here’s a look at their search result – it’s definitely in the “bouncer” camp:

The impact of a missing Meta Description is clear in the SERP for Visual Website Optimzer

• Minimal Differentiation. Most of the landing optimization companies tout the same benefits – making more money, increasing conversions, and being easy to use. Only Unbounce gets specific about what they do and why it’s easy. Perhaps that’s enough to let them stand out.
• Social Proof Stands Out. Ion Interactive is the only competitor to leverage social proof in their Meta Description, calling out Dell, DHL, and Western Union as customers.

As a marketer, I’d walk away from this analysis determined to get more specific about what I’m offering prospects (like Unbounce) and possibly incorporate recognizable customer names (like Ion) into my Meta Description.

Landing Page Companies’ Meta Descriptions (2 Years Later)

A little over two years later, we are happy to report that all the companies in this landscape now have Meta Descriptions! All except for Optimizely are a “good” length. See how their Meta Descriptions have evolved — kind of like our product interface!

Auto Insurance Companies’ Meta Descriptions (circa May 2013)

3 Key Learning:

• It’s a mature market. There are no missing Meta Descriptions, and most of them are tightly honed.
• Key messages. Some companies are building credibility and differentiation by emphasizing their longevity in the market. Others are specifying the type of insurance they offer. Very few of them tout benefits beyond price. (This might be a positioning opportunity.)
• Free offer. Six of the eleven companies promote the offer of a free quote to discover how prospects can save. This is a great example of leveraging a Meta Description to perform advertising in organic search results. Clever.

As a marketer in this industry, I would see if emphasizing benefits other than price resulted in a better outcome. Allstate’s tag line, “You’re in Good Hands…” comes closest to doing this. And if I were GEICO, I’d be weighing whether the 35 characters I’m using spell out the acronym that is my known name (Government Employees Insurance Company) is worth the real estate.

Auto Insurance Companies’ Meta Descriptions (2 Years Later)

Unlike companies within the digital marketing world, these auto insurance companies don’t seem to evolve as quickly. 2 years later, GEICO still believes spelling out their acronym is worth the used online real estate and length doesn’t seem to be a concern for most of the companies in this landscape.

3 Easy Steps to Winning Meta Descriptions

1. Spend the time to craft a Meta Description that welcomes customers with a concise articulation of your value proposition.
2. More than 50% of businesses either don’t have a Meta Description or have one that is too long. Your first step to winning is to get in the game and follow the basic rules.
3. You can gain key market-positioning insights by doing a side-by-side comparison with your competitors’ Meta Descriptions.

What is the best Meta Description that you’ve seen? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

The post Is Your Meta Description Working As Hard As Your Tagline? appeared first on Rival IQ.

Title Tags 101

The keywords in your tag are used in search algorithms, which determine where your page will rank among the returned results. Then, that same phrase will appear as the first line of your SERP listing – the first copy potential prospects read as they scan their search results to decide what is worthy of further investigation.

To ensure that we’re all working from the same understanding of what makes a good title tag, I’ve summarized the best practices recommended by SEOmoz.

• No more than 70 characters – click to tweet this fact
• List keywords first, save the company name for the end – click to tweet this fact
• Prioritize keywords. Those at the start have the most impact – click to tweet this fact
• Write for humans and search engines. Tags that read as sentences will be more compelling to your audience – click to tweet this fact

Interesting Trends: Are Title Tags Still Important?

A recently published SEO Ranking Survey shows that there are more factors than ever affecting search results. While all of these variables are important, the good ‘ol title tag takes the number one spot for most instrumental page specific ranking factor.

The title tag is still ranked as the #1 page specific ranking factor in a survey of over 200 SEO experts

Top Five Best Title Tag Improvements

To compile the list, I reviewed the 12,000+ companies Rival IQ tracks on behalf of our customers, selecting the best title tag changes made in the last 60 days. To be considered, a company had to improve on a title tag that was more than just the company name. Yes, this was a subjective exercise, based on my opinion of improvement in keywords usage and expected overall impact on SEO strategy. Please use the comments section if you disagree, have feedback, or have other great examples. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

IN FIFTH PLACE  . . . Downard & Assocaitates

The addition of a location specific keyword, branded name, and increased readability make this upgrade a winner.

 Key Improvements:

• A valuable SEO move for a regionaly oriented business is to put a location keyword in the title
• Increased customer readability by moving to a sentence format
• Addition of the branded company name to the end of the title tag helps ensure successful branded searches

Comments:

This was a great opportunity to highlight how all sorts of business categories can benefit from tuning their title tag. Downard & Associates already had decent keyword, but the improvement in readability as well as the addition of location and the company name makes this a winner.

IN FOURTH PLACE  . . . THINK | DIFFERENT [LY]

A small but valuable change that makes the value proposition that much clearer.

Key Improvements:

• A great application of “say it clearly” with this change
• I would guess that “Small Business” is going to have a higher search volume than “Lean”

Comments:

I really like this simple but valuable modification. It is amazing how much clearer the title tag is now. This may or may not improve search results, but I’m very confident that when THINK | DIFFERENT [LY] appears in a SERP, their reader will know if they are the target market or not. I expect click through rates to increase.

IN THIRD PLACE  . . . Pixlee

Strong iterative optimization by Pixlee results in a clear, keyword rich title tag.

Key Improvements:

• Great to see the iterative work at title tag improvement – final product is a much clearer statement of the business value
• Following best practices by moving company name to the end

Comments:

It’s nice to see the hard work that went into clearly describing their business in a way that makes sense for both search and customers. I wonder if by taking it a step further and making their title tag a complete phrase would be even more powerful?  “Personalized Visual Marketing Using Customer Photos | Pixlee”

IN SECOND PLACE  . . . Scringo

Fine tuning over 3 months to get to this optimized & clear value proposition

 Key Improvements:

• Iterative work at improving clarity of the value proposition and improving keyword value
• Final product has two keyword rich statements
• Cherry on top by moving the company name to the end, as per suggested best practice

Comments:

This was a fun one to research since it was clear the folks at Scringo have been hard at work fine tuning their title tag over the last three months. From the ethereal “swipe. discover.” three months ago to the clear, keyword rich “Mobile App Development Tools & Monetization Platform”, it has been a journey. Well done Scringo!

AND THE WINNER IS . . . InsightSquared

Small but powerfully focusing change to the InsightSqured title tag to bring home the prize.

Key Improvements:

• Simple change that clarifies what exactly InsightSquared offers
• From an SEO perspective, “Data Intelligence” is an ambiguous term and will likely be difficult to rank on. The more focused “Salesforce Analytics” is a much more likely SEO winner.
• There is room to add the company name to the end of the title tag, while still remaining under the recommended 70 characters; I would suggest this as an additional improvement.

Comments:

Another application of “be clear” that I believe will bring great results for InsightSquared. A small change, but it packs a punch. Nice job!

Key Takeaways.

You can’t set and forget your title tags – they need to be reviewed regularly to ensure you’re leveraging best practices and popular search terms. In this round of SEO inspiring title tag changes, we saw the application of clarity of value proposition being a key theme. Do you have an example of a great title tag improvement to share?  Let’s hear about them in the comments.

The post SEO Strategy Ideas | Top 5 Title Tag Upgrades, Round #2 appeared first on Rival IQ.

Hey happy blog readers!  This week we partnered up with Unbounce and did a guest post on their blog about how to do a review, refresh and upgrade on your social media bios.  Something you should do at least every 3 months. Think about it, they really are your elevator pitch of the digital age, so make sure yours are doing their very best for you!

You can check it out here – The Digital Elevator Pitch: How to Create Click-Worthy Social Media Profiles.  When you are done come back and look at some more Rival IQ blog goodness.

Your social media profiles are just like an elevator pitch. Perfect yours today!

The post How to Create Click-Worthy Social Media Profiles – Unbounce Guest Post appeared first on Rival IQ.

The keywords in your tag are used in search algorithms to factor where your page will rank among the returned results. Then, that same phrase will appear as the first line of your SERP listing – the first copy potential prospects read as they scan their search results and decide which is worthy of further investigation.

Are your title tags working hard enough?

To help you decide, I’ve pulled a couple of examples of homepage title tags – one that’s optimized to make the most of the 70 character limit and another that isn’t. Take a minute to decide where your homepage title tag falls on the spectrum:

The Contenders:

Which title tag is more like yours? Do you need an upgrade?

 And Their Search Results:

There is a broad spectrum of title tag effectiveness. Make sure you are headed toward the strong end.

Clearly, HTC hasn’t spent any time on their SEO strategy, but the effort Salesforce took to craft their title tag paid off. Not only are they making good use of their keywords, they’ve crafted phrasing that engages prospects and invites them to click through. Could they have written a meta description that was less repetitive, more complimentary to the title tag? Yes…but that’s another blog post ;-).

Title Tags 101

So we’re all working from the same understanding of what makes a good title tag, I’ve summarized the best practices recommended by SEOmoz.

• No more than 70 characters
• List keywords first, save the company name for the end
• Prioritize keywords. Those at the start have the most impact.
• Write for humans and search engines. Tags that read as sentences will be more compelling to your audience.

I also wanted to share the cumulative wisdom revealed in SEOmoz’ survey of SEO Thought Leaders ,“the title tag is the most important place to use keywords to achieve high rankings.” The companies in my top five ranking not only got the memo, they did an outstanding job of re-crafting their title tags.

Introducing the Top Five Best Title Tag Upgrades

To compile the list, I reviewed the thousands of companies Rival IQ tracks on behalf of our customers, selecting the best title tag changes made in the last 60-90 days.  To be considered, a company had to improve on a title tag that was more than just the company name.  Yes, this was a subjective exercise, based on my opinion of improvement in keywords usage and expect overall impact on SEO strategy. Please use the comments section if you disagree, have feedback or have other great examples.

IN FIFTH PLACE  . . . KOGNITIO

Kognito applies multiple SEO best practices with the changes to their title tag.

 Key Improvements:

• According to SEO best practices, moved the branded name to the end
• Increased customer readability by moving to a sentence format
• Tuned their keywords, moving the more specific “Memory Analytics” to the front position and swapping “Business Analytics” for “Cloud”.

Comments:

Strong application of SEO best practices along with keyword tuning should deliver for Kognito. I’m trusting Kognito that “Business Analytics” wasn’t performing for them – it was likely too broad a term.

IN FOURTH PLACE . . . EPINIONS

The addition of powerful keywords is a clear winner for Epinions SEO strength

Key Improvements:

• Clear upgrade from “Reviews” to two search friendly keyword bundles “Product Reviews” and “Trusted Ratings”
• Continued effective use of “…from Epinions” to help engage prospects in their search results

Comments:  

Moving from the generic to the specific with two powerful keyword bundles should deliver strong SEO results for Epinions.

IN THIRD PLACE. . . LEADPILE

A move to stronger keywords in terms of SEO strength for LeadPile. A question about too many “qualifieds”

 Key Improvements:

• Good shift from the inspirational, but ineffective as keywords, “Buyers, Meet Sellers. Meet Profits.” to three clear keyword bundles that read nicely for prospects.

Comments: 

• Moving the brand name to the end of the tag will give the keywords more impact.

Call Out to Optimizers:  

I’d love to hear the experts’ opinion on the impact of using “Qualified” three times in this tag.  Is there a chance it gets highlighted as keyword stuffing? Or, because “qualified” is used in logical keyword groups, there’s increased likelihood of ranking on the term?

IN SECOND PLACE . . . 15FIVE

A clear improvement in keyword strength with 15five’s title tag upgrades

Key Improvements:

• Eliminated the double use of their brand name
• Tuned their keywords. Moved from the reasonably strong “Employee Feedback” (880 Monthly Global Google Searches on Exact Phrase) to the more powerful “Employee Engagement” (18,100 exact phrase searches/mo)
• Added a second keyword group “Team Communication & Reporting” which also has strong number of monthly exact phrase searches—1,000/month.

Comments:  

• These were strong changes and I expect them to deliver improved SEO performance for 15Five.
• To increase the impact of the “Employee Engagement” keyword bundle, they need to move the brand name to the end of the tag.

AND THE WINNER IS . . . APPTIO

Apptio wins with clear application of SEO best practices and stronger keywords

Key Improvements:

• Left the keyword ambiguous “Innovation is your business” behind and moved to two keyword groups “Information Technology Service Costing” and “IT Benchmarking”
• Successfully utilized both “Information Technology” and “IT” in the tag to capture both keywords.
• Applied the best practices for human readability and brand name placement.

Comments:  

Excellent keyword upgrade and application of best practices.  I expect this to perform well for Apptio.

Key Takeaways.

You can’t set and forget your title tags – they need to be reviewed regularly to ensure you’re leveraging best practices and popular search terms.  Understanding how your competitors are optimizing their title tags over time – something my company, Rival IQ makes easy – will give you insight on how to fine tune your tags and adjust your overall SEO strategy.

The post SEO Strategy Inspiration | Top 5 Recent Title Tag Upgrades appeared first on Rival IQ.

In our last few posts we’ve explored a couple of key SEO techniques by comparing key players in specific markets and drawing competitive insights from what we saw.

And that got me wondering…are tech companies more savvy when it comes to digital marketing?

Lucky for me, through our partnership with Geekwire, Rival IQ monitors and benchmarks the digital activities of approximately 297 Seattle-area tech companies that move in and out of the GeekWire 200 ranked index every month. So it didn’t take long to find answers…

Drumroll please…

I decided to compare these high-growth tech companies to the thousands of companies Rival IQ tracks regularly.  Specifically, I looked at the quality of their meta descriptions and whether or not they were exposing their keywords to the world.

Top-Notch Meta Description? No better than the average bear.

Even though homepage meta descriptions play an important role in getting people to your website, Rival IQ determined that 56% of the companies in our database had left their meta descriptions blank or had descriptions that were too long to be effective. (Read more at – Is Your Meta Description Working As Hard As Your Tagline?)

How did the tech companies compare?

Companies in the GeekWire 200 fare no better than the typical company on meta description quality

Turns out 36% of the GeekWire 200 had missing meta descriptions and another 19% had written descriptions that were too long and therefore getting cut-off mid sentence in the search results. So 55% of the tech companies rated a fail.

Score:  TIE

Keyword Savvy? Not so much.

Even though the search engines no longer leverage meta keywords in their algorithms, quite a few companies, over 50% in our database, are still populating these fields on their website and 27% of those are optimizing their content. As a result, they’re exposing their keyword strategy to the world. (Read more at – Are you accidentally exposing your keyword strategy?!)

Are tech companies on the ball?

Slightly fewer GeekWire 200 companies are not exposing their meta keywords

I’ll give this a qualified yes. Only 35% of the GeekWire 200 is sharing their keywords with the world and fewer are actively optimizing them. Better, but that’s still a lot of opportunity for market-watchers to gain valuable insight on how to compete against these market-leading tech companies.

Score: Point to the Tech Companies.

Conclusion? Technology DNA Doesn’t Necessarily Raise Your Digital IQ

Running With The Social Media Big Dogs

Many of the GeekWire 200 leverage social media in their marketing mix. Analyzing their activity on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn gave me a great opportunity to explore the strategic insights available to marketers, including:

• Channel choice
• Market movers
• Audience engagement

Let’s take a look. It’s time to get off the porch and run with the big dogs!

Twitter Standing, Movement & Engagement.

I always recommend having a baseline understanding of how your following on social media compares to others in your market. Here’s an example:

Cheezburger is the big dog in the GeekWire 200 based on twitter followers

In terms of a raw following on Twitter, the humor site Cheezburger is the big dog in the GeekWire 200.  Lockerz, the social commerce and sharing site, comes in second with less than half as many followers.

We also have two video game developers in this analysis⎯Bungie and Runic Games⎯with Bungie being the big dog with over 130,000 more followers.

Insight: As a marketer at Runic Games, I’d be looking more closely at Twitter. Assuming the companies have similar target audiences, Twitter could be a powerful channel to engage Runic’s customers and prospects.

Who’s Making a Play?

Benchmarking alone doesn’t provide insight on who’s achieving success via a specific channel. If we look at who gained followers in the last 30 days, we discover that RootMetrics, a company specializing in wireless coverage mapping, made the big play⎯increasing their followers by 200%.

RootMetrics Tops Percentage Change in Twitter Followers Over the Last 30 Days

If you’re looking at percentage increases, it’s important to confirm you’re beginning with a respectable base. Adding 20 new followers to a base of 10 is a 200% increase, but isn’t worth getting  fired up over.

RootMetrics had a reasonable base for their 200% increase to be considered significant

In the case of RootMetrics, they’ve grown from a base of 744 followers to 2,226 in 30 days. That’s 1,482 new followers. Movement worth watching and understanding.

Insight: A deeper look reveals that RootMetrics has upped their tweet volume and the number of audience retweets has also increased significantly.

As a marketer in the same industry, I’d be looking closely the level of my Twitter volume and investigating the RootMetric’s tweet topics that resonating enough to merit retweeting.

Insights from the Facebook Big Dogs.

Again beginning with the benchmark view, we discover that among the GeekWire 200, free online photo editor PicMonkey is the biggest dog on Facebook. But there are several other big dogs nipping at their heels. It’s also interesting to note that the Facebook big dogs are all chasing consumers.

PicMonkey is the big dog in the GeekWire 200 based on Facebook likes

Z2 is making a Facebook play.

A look at the percentage change growth in Facebook Likes indicates mobile online game developer, Z2, is making a move.

Z2 had the biggest percentage change in Facebook likes amongst the GeekWire 200

Z2 chalked up a 9x growth spurt in Facebook followers, growing from 1,619 to 16,835 in the last 30 days. Definitely something to know if you’re competing for mobile gaming mind share.

But wait… there’s movement from the back of the pack.

A check of posting activity for the month reveals that DreamBox Learning, creators of math learning games for kids K-5, has drastically increased their Facebook activity in March.

Dreambox Learning stands out in increase in posting activity with their recent concerted engagement on Facebook

Insight: Big changes in posting volume can highlight a shift in market strategy. If I were competing against DreamBox, I’d be watching their growth in engagement via Likes and Talking About numbers to determine if Facebook is a channel I should leverage more.

Tableau Dominates LinkedIn.

Unlike Facebook, there’s only one big dog in the GeekWire 200 when it comes leveraging LinkedIn. Tableau Software, developers of data visualization products for business intelligence, dominates this channel.

Tableau is the leader by far in the GeekWire 200 in LinkedIn followers

Domination requires dedication.

Tableau posted to LinkedIn twenty one times in March – approximately once every business day in the month. That’s nearly twice as often as the next tier of companies the pack.

Tableau also leads GeekWire 200 in LinkedIn updates

Tableau’s is hitting their target audience.

The content of Tableau’s posts on LinkedIn is resonating with their followers. In March, they received 44 LinkedIn Likes. That number may not seem significant, but it turns out only 16 companies in GeekWire 200 received Update Likes in March. Context is everything.

Tableau has significant LinkedIn engagement amongst the GeekWire 200

Insight: Tableau’s domination of LinkedIn stems from both the frequency and quality of their posts. If I were competing against them, I’d closely review Tableau’s LinkedIn content for insights on topics that are top of mind with my audience and use their post frequency to set my activity objectives.

Have we learned from Seattle’s Tech Community?

So while the GeekWire 200 failed to make the case that technology companies are better digital marketers, I think taking a closer look at their efforts yielded some important learning:

• Check Your Meta Description. Given that 50% of the companies in Rival IQs database are failing to optimize their homepage meta descriptions, you should probably confirm that yours is encouraging searchers to click-through to your site with a read-through. 
• Don’t Broadcast Your Keywords. It’s also worth checking that you aren’t one of the 35% – 50% sharing your keyword strategy with the world.
• Monitoring Social Networks Informs Strategy. Knowing how your use of social media compares to others in your market sheds light on whether you should be leveraging a specific channel. It also provides insight on topics that resonate and the level of activity that will help you gain engagement with your audience.  It also shines a light on activity that merits your attention⎯competitors who are upping their game or adopting new strategies for reaching your audience.

Want to Dig Deeper Into the GeekWire 200?

If you want to do your own deeper analysis, Rival IQ is happy to give you access to the data and our analysis tools.  Click here to add the GeekWire 200 profile to your existing account or to signup and we will populate a profile with information on the 297 Seattle Tech companies monitored in this index.

Is Rival IQ Right For You?

The post Are Tech Companies Better Digital Marketers? appeared first on Rival IQ.

In this modern time of SEO consultants and marketing automation tools, you might imagine that there are relatively few people who still follow the now 10-or-more-year-old advice to populate the meta-keywords tag in their web pages, but a quick look into our data reveals that more than 50% of companies populate their meta keywords.

What, you’re still updating your meta keywords and need the quick fix? Go remove your website meta-keywords tag from your site now!  Then come back here and read about how to gain insights about your less savvy competitors.

Google and Bing don’t use meta keywords as an input to their ranking algorithms

Few, if any, SEO experts advocate the use of meta keywords for SEO purposes.  Matt Cutts (from Google) explains Google’s take on the matter,  and many others point out that Bing uses it only as a negative signal that decreases your page relevance.  If that weren’t enough evidence for you, go read the consensus of opinion on SEOmoz’s community forum.

In addition to pointing out the lack of relevance to search, most bloggers on the topic go one step further and actively advocate that research your competitors’ sites to gain insight into their keyword strategy.  I couldn’t agree more, so let’s look at how to quickly gain that insight.

Explore your competitors’ meta-keywords tag for insights into their keyword strategy

Despite my rant about meta-keywords being a waste of time,  researching your competitors’ use of them can be a quick and fruitful exercise.  A few minutes of time invested may provide valuable inspiration for keywords you may want to optimize for during your own SEO or PPC activities, or clue you in to shifts your competitors may be planning.

To quickly examine meta tags as you browse the web, find one of the many browser add-ons that surface many of the non-visible details the page you’re viewing contains.  My favorite add-on at the moment is the SEOmoz SEO Toolbar, and it is definitely worth checking out.

For longer term monitoring or for a broader survey of many websites simultaneously, you can use a tool such as Rival IQ (our app) to assemble your competitors and track a variety of information including meta-keywords tags.  As an example, I used Rival IQ to review the meta keywords for an insurance industry competitive profile I am monitoring.  This is a mature industry with large marketing and IT budgets, and nearly all of the companies had meta-keywords but have not been actively modifying them.  Have a look:

In the mature insurance industry most companies still have populated meta-keywords

Another competitive landscape I reviewed while writing this post was the gamification market, a technology-driven space where you might expect complete adherence to modern SEO best practices.  Yet, even in this tech-heavy marketplace, 5 out of 11 companies still populate their meta-keywords tag, and at least two of them have spent time changing them during the last 3 months.  And no, I’m not going to say who! You could go sign up for Rival IQ and figure it out though ;-).  Again, have a look at who’s doing what:

Multiple companies in the tech-savvy gamification industry also still populate meta-keywords

Believe it: 50% of companies still populate their meta-keywords tag

At Rival IQ, our systems peruse thousands of websites every day on behalf of our customers.  Among the things we examine are meta-tag contents (including keywords) and how they change over time.  Looking at some recent data from our system, I realized that more than half of the companies we monitor still populate their meta-keywords tag (surprising, yes!).  You could potentially write off many of these instances as yet-to-be-discarded relics of a different time.  But seeing indications that, at least for many companies, meta-keyword editing is a commonplace activity makes me cringe.  Not only have you wasted your time, but you’ve given your competitors an insight as to your awareness of best practices (and your thoughts on important keywords, too).

51% of companies populate their meta-keywords tag

Perhaps a more shocking  statistic is that 27% of companies with a keywords tag made changes in the last 90 days!  In other words, that’s about 1 in 8 companies we track.  Clearly, there is still plenty of room for improvement in the world of digital and online marketing.

27% of meta-keywords tags changed in last 90 days

Now, to repeat my earlier call: if you still have a populated meta-keyword tag, go make it so that you don’t!

Think I’ve got it wrong?  Do you still use a meta-keywords tag at your company?  Tell me why?  I’d love to hear from you.

The post Are You Accidentally Exposing Your Meta Keyword Strategy? appeared first on Rival IQ.

A new baby and an Activity Matrix for profiles

Rival IQ baby #2 arrived Friday! Congratulations to Doc (Seth Bridges) on his new baby boy, Parker. Parker was a couple of weeks early so there was a mild scramble as it became apparent Doc was going to disappear a bit earlier than anticipated. All that said we were able to push out a powerful new feature today and want to tell you a little about it.

Turning data into insights.  Rival IQ present lots of data, and sometimes its hard to see the forest for the trees, cones, and needles. We’ve heard you loud and clear that you want more help summarizing the key things that have happened in your competitive landscape. We are excited about our new Activity Matrix. For each profiles, we summarize the significant recent developments (if any), with progressive reveal: first at the overall profile level, then by company within the profile, and then by activity type for each company, finally linking to other parts of the app for those cones and needles. Did a competitor make a positioning change, overhaul their website, make a big move in social, or ramp up their website link building? You’ll find it here first. We think you’ll find its a big step in moving from data to insight… and there is more to come. This is available within the Profile Manager.

Competitor Activity Matrix

Help us out!

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Shout outs to extra special supporters from the past couple of weeks. We love the comments and feedback and a big thanks to:  TraciF, MaritaR, LynnR, MattT, SeanN, LionelC, MattH, FrantzN, WilM, ToddB, and WillF.

Thank you for your continued support.

The Rival IQ Team: John, SethP, and Doc

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New website rollouts are one of the things we monitor at Rival IQ, because our users gain market insights from learning that their competitors or peers just launched a large-scale online shift.  Rolling out a new website involves many moving parts — content, photography/art, look & feel, and technology changes.  Having been down this road many times before, I freely admit that updating an entire website can be a tedious and thankless job.  However tedious the process can be, it is important that you “do no harm” to your search performance by making your SEO strategy a first-class component of the upgrade process.

Keeping “do no harm” in mind, I’ll use today’s post to show you one example of a recent website upgrade and discuss how a forgotten SEO detail will negatively impact the search results for this site.  Certainly, web site migration is a much larger topic, and if you’re interested in reading more, I recommend you have a look at this great migration guide by Modesto Siotos that covers these topics in detail.

Take your existing site structure into account to avoid losing your SEO link juice

Your existing site has been indexed repeatedly by the world’s search engines, and the external links that carry searcher to you have accumulated valuable link juice (ranking & relevance) over their history. If you are changing the link structure of your website during your migration, redirecting those old links to the new versions of their respective pages will pass the link juice from the old pages to the new ones.  As you may expect, failing to do will an eventual loss of the valuable link juice you had accumulated on those links.  DON’T BE THAT GUY (OR GAL)! Not sure how to redirect things?  Go read more over at SEOmoz!

Let’s explore this idea with an example.  While reviewing web change activity on Rival IQ last week, I noticed that Nextpoint had rolled out a new website (see fig 1).  They did a great job on the site as it both looks good and reads well.  However, I also saw they restructured the navigation and internal link structure of their website and failed to redirect links from old pages to the appropriate new pages (see fig 2).

Fig. 1 – How I noticed Nexpoint’s broken links via Rival IQ

Looking at before vs. after indicates broken links on the Nextpoint website during a site rollout.

Fig. 2 – Deeper exploration via Rival IQ and directly on Nextpoint’s website

In the process of rolling out a new site, Nextpoint broke the existing links to pages, costing them link juice from an SEO perspective.

At Rival IQ, we have learned from a number of examples how easy it is to accidentally break links, eliminate your meta tags, or make other changes that have unintended negative consequences.  Always remember to protect your SEO performance and link juice when making changes to your site by checking for broken links with a tool such as W3C Link Checker and validating all the key SEO elements with a tool such as the SEOmoz MozBar.  Also, you may want to consider monitoring website and other digital-presence changes for yourself and your competitors with Rival IQ.

How do you make sure you don’t accidentally damage your SEO efforts?  Let us know via a comment to this post.

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