The Real Story on Video Rich Snippets Optimization
•Als PPTX, PDF herunterladen•
1 gefällt mir•1,674 views
Marketers trumpet the importance of schema and rich snippets to their search marketing success. But what do we know for sure? In this C3 session, Derrick Hicks of BodyBuilding.com talked about why his team came to suspect rich snippets might be hurting their search traffic, and share the tests and valuable takeaways that followed.
Empfohlen
Empfohlen
Weitere ähnliche Inhalte
Andere mochten auch
Andere mochten auch (16)
Ähnlich wie The Real Story on Video Rich Snippets Optimization
Ähnlich wie The Real Story on Video Rich Snippets Optimization (20)
Mehr von Conductor
Mehr von Conductor (20)
Kürzlich hochgeladen
Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)
The Real Story on Video Rich Snippets Optimization
- 1. THE REAL STORY ON RICH SNIPPETS Derrick Hicks Sr. Acquisition Marketing Manager
- 2. #C3NY 2 DERRICK HICKS Sr. Acquisition Marketing Manager Bodybuilding.com DerrickHicks.org derrick.hicks@bodybuilding.com
- 3. #C3NY 3
- 4. #C3NY 4
- 5. #C3NY 5
- 6. #C3NY 6
- 7. #C3NY 7
- 8. #C3NY 8
- 9. #C3NY 9
- 10. #C3NY 10
- 11. #C3NY 11
- 12. #C3NY 12
- 13. #C3NY 13 WAIT WHAT?
- 14. #C3NY 14 WAIT WHAT?
- 15. #C3NY 15 WAIT WHAT?
- 16. #C3NY 16 WAIT WHAT?
- 17. #C3NY 17 WAIT WHAT?
- 18. #C3NY 18 WAIT WHAT?
- 19. #C3NY 19 WAIT WHAT?
- 20. #C3NY 20 WAIT WHAT?
- 21. #C3NY 21 WAIT WHAT?
- 22. #C3NY 22 WAIT WHAT? 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Domain Authority
- 23. #C3NY 23 WAIT WHAT? 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 - Linking Root Domains
- 24. #C3NY 24 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text WAIT
- 25. #C3NY 25 WAIT WHAT? 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 mozTrust
- 26. #C3NY 26 WAIT WHAT? 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 - Google Plus One Shares
- 27. #C3NY 27 WAIT WHAT?
- 28. #C3NY 28 WAIT WHAT?
- 29. #C3NY 29 WAIT WHAT?
- 30. #C3NY 30 WAIT WHAT?
- 31. #C3NY 31
- 32. #C3NY 32
- 34. #C3NY 34
- 35. #C3NY 35 NOPE!
- 36. #C3NY 36 NOPE! NO!
- 37. #C3NY 37 NOPE! NO! NOOOOOO!
- 38. #C3NY 38 OH COME ON!
- 39. #C3NY 39
- 40. #C3NY 40 VIDEO PLAYER JAVASCRIPT
- 41. #C3NY 41
- 42. #C3NY 42
- 43. #C3NY 43 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question)
- 44. #C3NY 44 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question) • We looked at a bunch of SEO data. (Research)
- 45. #C3NY 45 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question) • We looked at a bunch of SEO data. (Research) • We wondered if Video Rich Snippets were hurting us. (Hypothesis)
- 46. #C3NY 46 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question) • We looked at a bunch of SEO data. (Research) • We wondered if Video Rich Snippets were hurting us. (Hypothesis) • We deleted the video thumbnail as a test. (Experiment A)
- 47. #C3NY 47 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question) • We looked at a bunch of SEO data. (Research) • We wondered if Video Rich Snippets were hurting us. (Hypothesis) • We deleted the video thumbnail as a test. (Experiment A) • Our first test had a partial confirmation. (Troubleshoot Experiment)
- 48. #C3NY 48 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question) • We looked at a bunch of SEO data. (Research) • We wondered if Video Rich Snippets were hurting us. (Hypothesis) • We deleted the video thumbnail as a test. (Experiment A) • Our first test had a partial confirmation. (Troubleshoot Experiment) • We placed the video player behind JavaScript. (Experiment B)
- 49. #C3NY 49 QUICK RECAP Video Rich Snippets • We asked why our Category pages weren’t ranking better. (Question) • We looked at a bunch of SEO data. (Research) • We wondered if Video Rich Snippets were hurting us. (Hypothesis) • We deleted the video thumbnail as a test. (Experiment A) • Our first test had a partial confirmation. (Troubleshoot Experiment) • We placed the video player behind JavaScript. (Experiment B) • Traffic basically doubled! (Hypothesis Confirmed)
- 50. #C3NY 50
- 51. #C3NY 51
- 52. #C3NY 52
- 53. DERRICK HICKS LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/derrickhicks Email: derrick.hicks@bodybuilding.com Site: www.DerrickHicks.org
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hi Everyone! Derrick Hicks Sr. Acquisition Marketing Manager at Bodybuilding.com The title of the topic I will be covering today is “The Real Story On Rich Snippets” We will be looking at hard evidence and data on how Structured Data and Rich Snippets can impact your sites traffic. NEXT SLIDE
- So... Like I mentioned, I work at Bodybuilding.com I currently have the honor of leading a team of Awesome SEO, SEM, & Affiliate marketing people. Doing Internet Marketing for around 6 years Started out in the Local SEO space at Dex Media... Local business listing provider. 3 Years at Bodybuilding.com Started out as an SEO Specialist and moved on from there. I’ll try to make sure we have some time for questions after my presentation But, make sure you get in touch with me if you have any questions that don’t get answered. Cool? NEXT SLIDE
- First off... What is Bodybuilding.com? NEXT SLIDE
- We are currently the largest & most visited Fitness Site in the world. More than 1 million unique visitors a day, And over 60% of that traffic comes from search engines. NEXT SLIDE
- Our business model is completely centered on: Content, Community, & Commerce We have sold out on that model completely and it is working very well. We actually started doing content/inbound marketing before it was the thing to do. We did it because it was the best way we could meet the needs of our customers. NEXT SLIDE
- When it comes to content, We have over 25,000 awesome articles on our site & currently publish 4-5 new articles every day. On top of that, we also have over 9,000 videos & many complete video trainers that include full 12 week fitness programs & nutrition plans. All for free. NEXT SLIDE
- Our community, BodySpace, now has more than 9 million members and growing. You can track workouts and your fitness journey as well as connect with like-minded people. Oddly enough, we also have one of the top 5 largest forums in the world. Our forum was our original community. NEXT SLIDE
- And lastly, we are an ecommerce company that sells sports nutrition supplements. We have over 10,000 skews and 120 country specific catalogs. NEXT SLIDE
- Headquarters is based in Boise, Idaho. But, we have 5 distribution centers & 2 offices around the world... And growing. NEXT SLIDE
- Enough about me already! Let’s talk about what I hope you get out of this presentation. NEXT SLIDE
- The foundation of my talk will be on testing Structured Data & Rich Snippets. It’s pretty nerdy stuff, but it’s super important & can significantly impact your site’s traffic. NEXT SLIDE
- My Goal with this talk is for you to leave here ready to act like a Scientist Or give you some new ideas to test if you already are acting like a Scientist. I want you to leave here willing to question just about anything And back up what you know to be true with tests and your own hard data. Don’t just take the SEO community, Google’s recommendations, or even my ideas as Gospel. Be an SEO Scientist! NEXT SLIDE
- Just incase a few people here are unfamiliar with Structured data Here is a quick rundown. NEXT SLIDE
- When it comes to code on the web, Some things have kind of been like the Wild West. This poses a problem if want to index and understand content on the web Like Google, Bing & Yahoo do. They are trying to truly understand what the content of a page is about, Not just see what keywords exist on a page. NEXT SLIDE
- To put it another way, Currently every website presents data in a way that is unique to them. Even if the data is similar to other websites. Just like the Wild West, many sites are kind of lone rangers and do things their own way. This makes it challenging for search engines to truly “Understand” what a page is about. They don’t know exactly what is on the page unless we tell them in some kind of universal way. NEXT SLIDE
- A perfect example of this data challenge would be recipe websites. They all will typically include similar “data” like: Cook Time Avg Recipe Rating Number of Reviews Ingredients Etc. Even though it’s the same kind of data, It can be displayed very differently on every site. If Google just tried to algorithmically guess what certain kinds of data was on a page They could end up making quite a few mistakes. I’ll show you some of those mistakes in a minute. NEXT SLIDE
- That’s where structured data comes in. By creating a standard model of displaying certain types of data Search engines are better able to understand content across the web. Popular structured data markup includes Schema.org, Microformats, RDFa, etc. Ok, now that we got some of those details out of the way, Let’s move on. NEXT SLIDE
- So, I’d like to take a quick poll by show of hands. How many of you are using some kind of Structured Data markup on your sites? How many of you have seen traffic increase because of Structured data? How many of you have seen traffic drop like crazy because of Structured data? Ok great! For those of you who have never tested the impact of Structured Data markup, this should hopefully be helpful. For those of you that have experienced the impact of Structured Data markup, this presentation should serve as confirmation. NEXT SLIDE
- Alright, let’s dive into our recent rich snippet problem. It was significantly impacting traffic to most of our category pages in our store. In case you are unfamiliar with category pages, they are common on e-commerce sites and usually group products together by ingredient, style, etc. Most of the time, category pages tend to drive a significant amount of traffic to a site. In our case, a large chunk of our category pages are organized by common Sports Nutrition Supplements like Protein or Creatine for example. NEXT SLIDE
- Here is an example of one of our category pages for Protein. We probably have around 500 categories like this one on our site. About 300 of them have quite a bit of unique content And even include a video talking about the category. As a whole, our category pages bring in 100s of thousands of visitors a month Just from organic search alone These pages have always done very well for us from a traffic perspective, However, we thought we could be doing better. Call it a gut feeling. NEXT SLIDE
- We ended up basically using the scientific method To follow our hunch of getting better performance from these pages. We looked at traffic & ranking data and asked, “Why aren’t we doing better?” Dug into every possible SEO metric we could measure And compared the same metrics to every page ranking on the first page. We created a few hypotheses And then planned out a way we could test them. Some of the tools we used where: Moz, Majestic SEO, & tools like Conductor Here are some of the metrics we looked at in the research phase... NEXT SLIDE
- Domain Authority Here you can see how we looked at the data. For every metric we compared, we organized them in order of the pages ranking on the first page. In many ways, we were basically trying to reverse engineer why Google was ranking the sites they were. Our goal was to find any systemic weak points across all our categories. NEXT SLIDE
- We also looked at The # of Linking Root Domains NEXT SLIDE
- # of Linking Root Domains with Exact Anchor Text NEXT SLIDE
- MozTrust NEXT SLIDE
- Social counts like Google +1s And on and on. NEXT SLIDE
- Had a big mess of data in an excel doc Data confirmed that we should be performing better than we where We then started brainstorming what else could be the cause We started to notice we were the only one with a rich snippet showing. NEXT SLIDE
- A video rich snippet Discussed theory that Video Rich Snippet may be impacting CTR For commerce searches, people didn’t want to watch a video, they wanted to buy a product We decided to test what would happen if we turned it off on a couple categories. The easiest/quickest way we could get this done was by simply deleting the video thumbnail URL on the page. Now, at the time we started talking about doing this test... NEXT SLIDE
- It felt as though we should Schema Markup all the things! Structured data was the new hotness in the SEO community. We all thought just about any Rich Snippet should help increase traffic. I went into this test truly expecting a different result than we saw. However, we needed to know for sure before we moved on. NEXT SLIDE
- Here is what our listing looked like after we removed the image from the page. No more video Rich snippet. NEXT SLIDE
- The result? It worked! Our hypothesis seemed to be confirmed for the most part. No other categories saw a bump in traffic except this one during this time. This graph shows weekly organic search entries for 1 of the pages we tested. Weekly organic search traffic went from 3,500 to almost 5,000 visits a week! It was time to up our game. So, we rolled this “fix” out site-wide across all 300 categories that had videos. NEXT SLIDE
- Traffic basically doubled over the next month and a half. Went from around 50K a week to about 100K. No other changes were made at this time. No other category pages saw an increase either. Just the 300 category pages that had videos that we deleted the thumbnail for. NEXT SLIDE
- I was feeling pretty dang good at this point. Everything was going great... Until Google decided they wanted to help us out a bit. NEXT SLIDE
- Google started picking random images to show as Rich Snippets. NEXT SLIDE
- Some of the images... NEXT SLIDE
- weren’t even on the page! NEXT SLIDE
- They were images on pages linking to category pages. NEXT SLIDE
- I still don’t know why they did that. I mean look at that last Video Rich Snippet. That image wasn’t even listed on the page! It was literally an image on an internal page that was linking to this category page! If you have any idea why Google did that or how, please let me know. I have no clue on that one. The result of them doing this? NEXT SLIDE
- Devastating. Back where we started. At least we knew exactly why this was happening. We just needed to find a different way to turn off that rich snippet. Time for Plan B... NEXT SLIDE
- We came up with the idea that if we placed our video player behind some JavaScript, Google probably wouldn’t see the video player on the page. No video. No video rich snippet. Now, people click an image and THEN the video player loads on the page. It actually slightly improved the page load time as well. Overall it was a better user experience anyways. The results? NEXT SLIDE
- Results were amazing! Traffic and Revenue basically doubled and is continuing to do very well. We went from 50k weekly visits to almost 110k. Again this is just for the 300 categories that had videos on the page. All 200 of our other category pages did not see any traffic changes. Hypothesis confirmed. Video Rich Snippets can hurt traffic. Quick side note. Google recently pulled back how often they show video rich snippets. NEXT SLIDE
- Ok. Let’s take a quick breather! I know that was a lot to take in. Let’s do a quick recap on how we did this test and start wrapping this up. NEXT SLIDE
- First off, we started with a question: Why aren’t our Category pages performing better?
- Then we moved to the background research phase By looking at a bunch of SEO data and comparing it to our competitors.
- We formed our hypothesis which was centered around if Video Rich Snippets were hurting us.
- Then we preformed our first test by Deleting the video thumbnail from our category pages. (Experiment A)
- Our first test had a partial confirmation, but we had to troubleshoot and find a different path forward.
- We then launched Experiment B by Placing the video player behind JavaScript.
- Then we got our confirmation! Traffic basically doubled! We really just followed the scientific method and let the data speak for itself. NEXT SLIDE
- Does that mean we should turn off all our Schema markup? Absolutely not! You need to systematically test everything you possibly can. Let data guide your decisions. Let me show you a quick example of Schema markup positively impacting our traffic. NEXT SLIDE
- We implemented review schema markup on a section of our site where it absolutely made sense to. The results have been stellar so far. Weekly organic search traffic went from 200k to around 275K for this site section. NEXT SLIDE
- So to wrap things up, I wanted to show you this slide again. I hope you leave here today not with the intention of adding Structured Data markup to your site or ripping it out for that matter. But rather with the intention of testing everything you possibly can. Be willing to question weird things, things that go against the grain a bit, or even things that have “always been that way”. Systematically approach your tests using the scientific method in some way and let solid data make your final decisions. Don’t just “schema markup all the thingz!”. Find a way to test it first. NEXT SLIDE
- And that’s a wrap. Questions?