How to Use Strong Business Credit to Unlock the Power of Advanced Business Vendors

We always talk about building business credit, and how a strong business credit score can help you get funding for your business. It can help you fund your business without overloading your personal credit. Also, it can help you reduce your need for a personal guarantee when you need business financing. Yet, there is one huge benefit to strong business credit that is rarely mentioned. That is access to advanced business vendors.

Advanced Business Vendors are One of the Real Benefits of Business Credit

There is a misconception among many business owners that are just starting to understand business credit. It is that a good business credit score can help you get a business loan without a personal guarantee. However, the truth is, pretty much every small business loan from a traditional lender will require a personal guarantee.

That being the case, is it really necessary to build business credit? Wouldn’t it be better to work on personal credit so a lender will accept your personal guarantee? What is business credit good for if not to help you get a business loan?

What frustrates you the most about funding your business? Check out how our free guide can help.

First, it can help you get a business loan. If your personal credit isn’t great and you have good business credit, underwriters will see that as a positive. Also, good business credit can help reduce the reliance of lenders on a personal guarantee, even if it doesn’t go away completely.

But the real benefit of business credit is that it allows you to access advanced business vendors.

What are Advanced Business Vendors?

These are vendors that offer credit to businesses that have strong business credit, but they may not report your payments. That means they don’t help build your business credit score. Still, they are pivotal to running a thriving business.

Unlocking access to these vendors is a little realized benefit of a strong business credit score. If you have access to credit with advanced vendors you can grow your business in ways you may have never imagined

For example, you can bid on the big project even if you don’t have the cash flow to buy the supplies. You can offer the latest new product despite not having cash flow to keep up with demand. Basically, it opens up a whole new world as far as what you can and cannot do in your business.

What Does This Look Like Practically?

It may be hard to wrap your mind around exactly what this looks like in real life. Especially when you are just thinking about credit cards and business loans. Some examples may help.

Example 1: Remodeling Contractor Needs Supplies Before Payment

Suppose a contractor is hired to remodel a kitchen. The supplies are going to cost money, but the client isn’t going to pay until the job is done. However, if the contractor has business credit with advanced vendors to purchase the supplies, he or she can still take the job. They will pay suppliers when the customer pays.

Example 2: Restaurant Owner Must Keep Up With Customer Demand

A restaurant owner needs to keep up with customer demand. Dishwashers are not keeping up, and they need more utensils and serving dishes. A vendor account with a restaurant supplier makes this a non-issue. Just purchase what you need now, and pay the next month when meeting the increased demand pays off.

Example 3: Music Teacher Needs to Provide Various Instruments to Beginner Students

A music teacher has a studio to offer lessons to children. As beginners, many of them do not have an instrument at first, They likely do not even know what they want to play. Business credit accounts with instrument suppliers, as well as suppliers of those things needed to maintain instruments can help. They will allow the teacher to provide a number of various types of instruments for students to try.

Students may even purchase instruments from the school once they choose what they want to play. This may offer an incentive to choose lessons at that specific school, as parents will not be spending on an instrument that may or may not get played.

Each example shows how advanced business vendors can help a business grow in a way that would not be possible otherwise. Of course, business credit cards may work. However, with vendors you usually have net terms. That means you cannot carry a balance, which reduces the risk of racking up huge amounts of debt. Accounts like this are the reason you work to build strong business credit.

What frustrates you the most about funding your business? Check out how our free guide can help.

How To Find Advanced Business Vendors

Not all suppliers will offer this type of credit. The ones that do don’t necessarily advertise it. You typically have to know to ask for it or develop a relationship with them first. This can take a lot of time.

Luckily, you can speed up the process by working with someone who knows who these vendors are. You need someone who already has a relationship with the vendors. They can help you find the ones that will work best with your business. Of course, whoever you are working with has to know and understand your business as well. Then, they will know which vendors you will qualify for advanced business credit with.

The Benefit of the Credit Suite Business Credit Builder

This is a little known benefit of the Credit Suite Business Credit Builder. You have access to the platform for 5 years! So, after you work through the business credit building process, you still have access to our huge database of advanced business vendors.

Furthermore, we tell you just what is required to get approved with each one. Of course, there are too many vendors to list in one presentation. Still, a little taste of what is available can help you see that advanced vendors are just what you need.

Then you can run your business the way you need to.

Access Hardware Supply

Access Hardware Supply is a leading wholesale distributor of products from the top names in door hardware and security technology.

Qualification requirements include:

Entity in good standing with Secretary of State
EIN
Business address- matching everywhere
D & B number
Business License- if applicable
Business Bank account
Bank reference
Trade references
A good Experian business credit score

There is no minimum time in business necessary, and terms are net 30, 60, or 90. You can apply online or on the phone.

Central Restaurant Products

Central Restaurant Products has beens selling pretty much anything needed for the food service industry since 1981.

Qualification requirements include:

Entity in good standing with Secretary of State
Business credit history
EIN
Business address- matching everywhere.
D&B number
Business License- if applicable
Business Bank account
Bank reference
Trade/credit references
At least 1 year in business
D&B paydex score of 80 or higher

Terms are Net 30.

Sherwin Williams

Sherwin Williams is a widely known provider of paint and coatings for over 150 years.

Qualification requirements include:

Entity in good standing with Secretary of State
EIN number with IRS
Business address- matching everywhere
D&B number
Business License- if applicable
Business Bank account
3 Trade references

If there is not enough business credit history, a personal guarantee (PG) is required. You have to apply for the account in the store, and terms are net 20.

Personal Guarantee

Sherwin Williams is a great example of how business credit can help your business, and help you avoid a personal guarantee in some instances. If you give a personal guarantee, the account may show up on your personal credit report. However, without a personal guarantee, using your business information, that is likely not to be the case.

Remember, a personal guarantee isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it may be the only option you have to get the funding you need until you build strong business credit. At least, that is, if you have good personal credit and you want to avoid very high interest rates.

But not using a personal guarantee keeps your personal credit available for personal financial needs.

Trade References

You may also notice that each of these vendors requires trade references. A trade reference is a report that details the payment history between a company and a vendor. It can come verbally, in a letter, or on a business credit report. Vendors that do not report to the business credit reporting agencies may be willing to provide a trade reference. As a result, they can still help you get funding.

What frustrates you the most about funding your business? Check out how our free guide can help.

Unlock the Power of Advanced Business Vendors

Access to advanced business vendors is a huge benefit of strong business credit. They offer funding to help you build and grow your business, without paying unnecessary interest. They also help you avoid the temptation of carrying a large balance unnecessarily.

Of course, you have to manage the vendors in your credit portfolio carefully. Be sure you can repay and do so on time. Even if they do not report positive payment history, they are likely to report negative payment history. Plus, you want to keep a good relationship with them. Not to mention, if you do not pay responsibly, you will not be able to get good trade references from them.

Ready to get started business business credit and unlock the power of advanced business vendors? Try a free consultation with a business credit specialist.

The post How to Use Strong Business Credit to Unlock the Power of Advanced Business Vendors appeared first on Credit Suite.

How to Use Twitter Advanced Search to Drive 100% More Leads

There are 69.3 million U.S.-based users active on Twitter, meaning it’s a platform full of potential when it comes to lead generation within the states.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to know how to find leads effectively on Twitter—unless you know how to use Twitter’s advanced search queries. That’s why I’m going to tell you what advanced search queries are and how to use them to help drive more leads.

Why You Should Use Twitter’s Advanced Search

Twitter’s Advanced Search function allows you to narrow down your searches to precisely the type of user you want, including location, interests, and more. You can even find users who are talking about your company without tagging (or @ing) you.

Chances are, you have already used Twitter’s search panel on the right-hand side of your desktop screen or the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of your mobile screen to search for basic things like hashtags and users.

Say you search for a company, such as Converse. You’ll be able to see accounts related to your search, top tweets, and recent tweets mentioning that keyword.

These searches are general, so you probably couldn’t learn much from them.

And if Converse was your company or competitor, that’s disappointing.

Millions of tweets go out each day, so finding exactly what you’re looking for means you need some filtering tools to narrow down your search.

Twitter’s advanced search option does just that.

Ways and Reasons to Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Options

There are a multitude of reasons you may want to use advanced search functions in Twitter. The way you perform the search depends on what information you are seeking.

1. Use Twitter’s Advanced Search Functions via the Search Bar

You can see tweets from people or companies in any location with any particular phrase you can think of with Twitter Advanced Search. It’s just a bit more complicated than the normal search option.

Currently, you can only access Twitter’s advanced search tool on their desktop site or web app, not the actual Twitter app on your phone or tablet. The next several suggestions can be used on the app or website, but frankly, the desktop advanced search function is easier, and we suggest going that way if you can.

2. Search Twitter by Sentiment

Sentiment searches can help you understand what keywords people use and why they use them via a basic form of natural language processing (NLP). Such searches are generally categorized as positive, negative, and neutral.

Knowing both what and why people search can help you figure out what your potential customers need.

You can purchase programs to run complete NLP analyses on Twitter, but you can do this on your own to a certain extent. For starters, search for happy or sad faces and punctuation combined with your chosen keywords.

In the example below, I searched for the phrase “iphone?” to find people asking questions about iPhones. You can filter results to see top tweets, latest tweets, people, photos, or videos. There are more options on the app, though they sometimes changed based on current events.

Twitter advanced search sentiment options for iPhone?

A simple search like this is a great way to determine what questions people are asking in your industry or about your products or even your competitors’ products.

Be sure to read through the context of each tweet, though, because sentiment filters depend on context.

Someone asking questions about an iPhone could be looking for apps, security information, or troubleshooting guides. However, they could also be looking for a buyer for their used phone, making some kind of joke, or asking a totally unrelated question—it only looks for the word and the punctuation in this search.

Even with the less relevant results still included, sentiment search narrows things down a bit and could be a great way to find users looking for answers or recommendations. If you can answer your questions, showing your brand’s authority, you could find yourself with a new lead.

This method may be more successful if you run a local brand and aren’t competing against international players.

3. Use Location Filters

Find tweets in any country or city with geolocation filters.

That way, you’ll be able to weed out the tweets from faraway places. This is important if you’re a small local business because you can target leads right in your area.

Just add ‘near:(city/country)’ and ‘within:(X mi)’ to find tweets from any specific location worldwide.

The ‘near:’ addition filters out exactly where you want to see tweets from. The ‘within:’ addition lets you pick the distance from that location you want to see tweets from.

Essentially, it creates a radius around the city, county, or other region you specific with the ‘near:’ filter.

For instance, if you own a restaurant in a particular location, for example, you could find anyone who’s looking for a place to eat and send them to your business.

Do this by entering a keyword related to your industry (like ‘Japanese restaurant’) and add ‘near:(your location) within:(X mi)’ to find potential local customers. We recommend looking at “Latest” for this so you can find people who are hungry right now.

Your results should look something like this:

Finding new customers could be as simple as that.

And providing help to users with questions—like where they can find good soba!—can boost your online reputation, which is an added perk of using sentiment searches.

Sentiment searching can give you insight into what people are saying to your competitors and asking them about, too.

If you find that customers are unhappy with one of your competitor’s features, tweet back at them with relevant information about your service.

You can dive into any conversation and add your opinions and answers to build an engaging relationship with Twitter users.

4. Track Twitter Mentions by Searching for Usernames

One of the easiest ways to track new leads is to do username searches to track mentions.

All you’ve got to do is add “to:” or “from:” before a username.

The “to:” search reveals tweets sent to that user. For example, if you search for “to:NeilPatel,” you’ll be able to see tweets that other Twitter accounts sent to me, whether in response to my Tweets or independently.

If you enter in ‘from:’ before my name, you’ll see tweets that I have sent out instead:

twitter advanced search - mentions example of using "from"

You probably would use this option more to search for tweets from your competitors, not yours.

Say I’m interested in seeing if anyone has questions for me about branding. All I would have to do is add that keyword to a ‘to:’ search, like this:

Twitter advanced search to: with question

Note I added the question mark back in to help narrow it down to questions only.

Then, all I’ve got to do is engage with those users.

5. Save Your Twitter Advanced Searches

Twitter lets you save as many as 25 searches per account. That’s plenty of searches to keep tabs on.

To save a search, all you’ve got to do is click the three dots on the right-hand side of your search query. Then, select “+ Save search.”

That way, you can keep an eye on people sharing your blog posts, mentioning you or your competitors, or tweeting about certain keywords.

6. Use Twitter Advanced Search to Exclude Irrelevant Results

Cut out the search results you don’t want by using the exclusion filter.

All you’ve got to do is add the “-” symbol before a keyword, filter, or Twitter user.

For example, if you want to find Twitter users who are talking about smartphones, but you don’t want to see tweets from a competitor (let’s say Samsung), just search for ‘smartphone’ -samsung.

twitter advanced search - samsung example

Getting refined results really can be that easy.

7. Create Hashtags and Search for Them

If you use hashtags correctly, you can build your own filter for driving leads.

Use just one hashtag at any given time, ensure it’s branded and creative, and add it to the majority of your posts.

One of the most successful branded hashtags was Redbull’s #PutACanOnIt:

The hashtag became popular worldwide because it encouraged people to use Red Bull cans creatively, take a photo, and share it with the hashtag.

This not only allows your customers to do your marketing and product placement for you, but it also creates a branded hashtag you can search later to interact with Twitter users.

Hashtags like this might encourage people who have never purchased your products to buy them so that they can participate in the fun.

You don’t have to do advanced searches manually, though. Save yourself some time by letting Twitter do the work for you.

8. Use the Advanced Search Function on the Web

As mentioned, the actual advanced search function is only available on Twitter’s website, not the app. If you have a computer or access the site through your browser on your mobile device, this method can shorten the time you spend searching.

Next to your search bar, you can see three dots. Click those dots, then choose “Advanced search.”

From there, it will take you to this form where you can do a variety of different things. You need to scroll multiple times to see all the available options; that’s how advanced this function has become. What shows up on each scroll may vary a bit by your computer, but here is what you can generally expect.

The first screen shows the basics: words to use, words to exclude, and hashtags to search.

After your first scroll, you can choose a language, tweets to and from accounts, tweets mentioning accounts, and the top of the choices regarding filtering replies.

Your next scroll gives you additional options regarding replies, allows you to choose whether to include links, and the amount of engagement you want a post to have had before you view it.

Your final scroll allows you to choose the date ranges of the tweets you want to see.

You can choose as many filters as you want, then hit search.

The only thing this option can’t seem to do with advanced search is the specific distance option. If I wanted to search Tweets regarding Japanese restaurants within 10 miles of Seattle, I should do that through the regular search bar. However, I can search for Japanese restaurants in Seattle via advanced search by including “Japanese restaurants Seattle” in the first search filter.

I recommend narrowing down dates with every search you do. Tweets from seven years ago aren’t going to help you drive more leads, but recent ones may.

You can look for tweets from the last few days, weeks, or months, or even the last year.

If you want to shell out a few extra bucks each month for even more advanced Twitter searches, there are various paid programs out there, such as Twilert.

How to Connect with Your Twitter Advanced Search Leads

All of this could be for nothing if you don’t talk to Twitter users who could be within your target audience. Once you’ve filtered your search to the types of tweets you’re looking for, start to connect with users.

Respond to the User
Whether a user tweeted directly at you, asked a question you can answer, or was looking for advice on what to purchase, if you can respond in a relevant way, do so.

Here’s how Apple does it:
Follow Your Leads
Once you’ve identified a lead, head to their profile and follow them. If they follow you back, you may be able to engage further and more efficiently.
Include a Link to Your Website
No matter why you engage with a customer, if it’s appropriate, add a link to your website somehow. Only do this if it’s directly relevant to their query, though—just tacking one on could make you seem like a salesman rather than a person using their expertise to help.

Best practice may be to simply add a link to your first response, then simply answer follow-up questions unless a link is necessary to expand upon the answer.

For instance, if someone asked “What’s the best Japanese restaurant in Seattle?” and you run one, respond with something friendly and include a link. For instance, “Hey, we think we’re pretty good! Come give us a visit! [Link]”

Then, if they ask, “do you have soba?” you can simply answer with “Yes, and it’s awesome!” or “no, but we do have [acceptable replacement.].”

Advanced Twitter Search Conclusion

There are millions of users on Twitter, potentially making it a great place to drive leads. But you’ve got to know how to use advanced search options to find them first.

Advanced searches let you find specific leads to target and build relationships with by adding extra filters to Twitter search queries.

If you’re on a mobile app, you do this by manual searches through the standard search function. If you’re on a browser, try out their advanced search function in all its glory.

Be sure to connect with your potential leads personally and remain engaged with them over time.

That said, if you simply don’t have the time to run all this yourself, we’re here to help.

Which advanced search queries help you drive the most leads?

7 Advanced Facebook Search Operators

Facebook might have started as a way to connect college students, but today it is a full-fledged search engine, much like Google or Bing. The social media giant’s rise to search engine status includes the addition of advanced features, like Facebook search operators.

What are Facebook search operators, and why should you care about them?

Search operators are a powerful tool for filtering search results, but they also have added benefits for marketers and business owners.

Before we get into that, let’s first talk about what search operators are and why they matter.

What Are Search Operators?

Search operators are advanced search commands that make it easier to filter search results based on what you do (or don’t) want to see in search results.

For example, if you were looking up recipes for chicken soup but didn’t want to see results from Pinterest, you could use a search operator to remove Pinterest results by typing in:

“Chicken soup -pinterest”

facebook search operators - pinterest example

Google uses a wide range of these search functions that make it easier to use the search engine, including:

@: to search social media sites
$: to search for a price
–: to leave a word out
“Quotes”: to search for an exact match
. . .: to search a range of numbers
OR: to combine searches
Site: to search a specific site
Related: to search for similar websites

You can also combine these commands if you want to get fancy. For example, you could use “@ neil patel OR kelsey jones” to search for social accounts for both Neil Patel and Kelsey Jones.

Search operators make it easier to find the exact data you are looking for, but they also come in handy for marketers.

4 Reasons to Use Facebook Search Operators

Facebook used to have a feature called the Facebook Graph Search, which allowed users to search for specific content on the platform by using sentences rather than just keywords. It also allowed you to find who liked a page or visited a specific city.

Facebook Graph was changed in 2019, making it much harder to search the platform. Search operators, however, fill that gap by allowing users to search for highly specific content.

How can Facebook search operators help marketers? Here are a few ways you can use those advanced search features:

Research your competitors: See what your competition is up to, including what type of content they share and what topics they talk about. You can also find new competitors in your geographical area.
Find content to share: Search for multiple topics or exact phrase matches to find content your audience will connect with.
Find user-generated content (UGC): Search for your brand name (and common misspellings of your brand name) to find content users have shared about your brand, even if they didn’t tag you.
Research your audience: Understanding who your audience is and what type of content they like can help you build a stronger relationship. Use Facebook search operators to find content on related topics or specific phrases.

7 Facebook Search Operators to Try (and How to Use Them)

Facebook search operators use Boolean operators, which are the basis of database logic. In layperson’s terms, Boolean operators are terms that allow you to broaden or tighten the search results. For example, you could use AND to search for two search terms at the same time.

Below, I’ll cover how to perform each type of Facebook search, explain what information it will help you find, and explore how to use the search operators to grow your business.

I know it might sound complicated, but I promise it’s pretty simple, and the results are worth the effort.

1. Basic Boolean Facebook Search

Boolean searches don’t work using Facebook search, so you’ll need to use Google to perform all the searches we’re about to cover.

Using site: before the name of a site will display search results just for that specific website. Here’s how it works in practice. Type in site:facebook and then whatever search term you’re searching.

Example:

site:facebook.com my favorite murder podcast

This will display the results of groups or posts about the My Favorite Murder podcast.

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Use this to find groups, pages, and users related to a specific topic. For example, if your target audience is small business owners, you could search for groups and pages for small business owners.

Pro tip: This search works for all websites, not just Facebook. Say you want to find a post from your favorite digital marketing blog or by a specific writer. Then you would perform a search for “site: <website URL> <the term you’re looking for>.”

2. Boolean Facebook Search for Two Terms Needing to Be Present

Using the AND Boolean search function, you can search for two terms simultaneously. For example, if you want to find information about digital marketing and small businesses, you would search:

site:facebook.com digital marketing AND small business

This will display search results related to both digital marketing and small businesses:

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search for Two Terms Needing to Be Present

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Perform competitive research for a specific niche or find groups your target audience belongs to on Facebook.

3. Boolean Facebook Search for One of Two Terms Needing to Be Present

Similar to the AND function, this search operator allows you to find results for one term or another. Unlike AND, which requires both terms to be present, the OR function allows you to find results including either term.

Let’s say you have a software company that targets customers who have SaaS (software as a service) or those who have a membership site. You would search:

site:facebook.com SaaS OR membership sites

The results will display groups, pages, and posts related to SaaS or membership sites.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Research several competitors simultaneously or search for content related to your brand using both your official brand name and a misspelling or commonly used term.

For example, site:facebook.com Moz OR Hubspot would return terms related to both brand names.

4. Boolean Facebook Search for Terms That Should Not Be Present

What if you want to search for a specific term, but you keep getting unrelated results? The NOT Boolean function allows you to remove unrelated search terms.

For example, let’s say you are looking to hire a web developer, but you keep seeing results for designers. You would search:

site:facebook.com web developer NOT designer

The results will include videos, pages, and profiles related to web developers but not web designers.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Search for employees or more specific content related to your industry by excluding specific terms. You can also use it to narrow geographical areas with the same or similar names, such as Paris, Georgia NOT France.

5. Boolean Facebook Search for Exact Phrase

Google and Facebook’s search features have gotten smarter in recent years, but sometimes they still don’t get it quite right. If you find your search results are slightly off, you can use the exact phrase match search operator.

This Boolean function tells search engines to only return matches that are precisely the same as your search.

To use this function, add quotation marks to the term you want to search.

Example:

site:facebook.com “mexican restaurant in kansas city”

A list of Mexican restaurants’ Facebook pages will appear in the SERPs, like this:

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search for Exact Phrase

Remember this is an exact match search. The search engine won’t return results that deviate even slightly. Search results for “mexican restaurant in kansas city” versus “mexican restaurants in kansas city” could be extremely different.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Find competitors in your area or look for groups or videos related to a specific key term. It might also help you find UGC if your brand name is very similar to another brand or phrase.

6. Boolean Facebook Search to Fill in Blanks

What if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for? The fill-in-the-blank function might come in handy. For example, if you’re looking for a specific person but can’t quite remember their name, you can use an * (asterisk) to tell Google to fill in the blank.

Say you work for Hardrock Cafe and are looking for UGC. Some users might type in Hard Rock Cafe, while others might use Hardrock Cafe. The fill-in-the-blank search operator will return results for both.

Here’s how to use it:

site:facebook.com hard * cafe

Note that this will turn up more than just Hard Rock and HardRock; it returns any results that include Hard and Cafe, no matter what is between them.

Facebook Search Operators to Try - Basic Boolean Facebook Search to Fill In Blanks

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Use the fill-in-the-blank function to find information about terms that are often misspelled or formatted differently, or if you can’t remember the exact spelling. This search operator is ideal when users might not remember the exact format of your brand name. It can also help with competitive research by broadening searches.

7. Boolean Facebook Search for Local Businesses

Facebook is a powerful tool for local SEO, with more than 1.85 billion daily active users in the United States alone. Using a search operator for local searches can help marketers and business owners find local businesses.

Say you are considering opening a coffee shop in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. You could use this search:

site:facebook.com coffee shop rogers park chicago

This returns a list of all the coffee shops in that neighborhood.

How to Use This Facebook Search Operator to Grow Your Business

Local businesses can perform competitive analysis or market research to find local businesses in their niche. It might also help you to find brands for a cross-promotion strategy.

Conclusion

Search algorithms have come a long way in recent years. However, they aren’t perfect.

Facebook search operators let you filter and refine search results for competitive analysis, find content to share with your users, and even locate groups where your target audience hangs out.

If you want to improve your Facebook marketing strategy, search operators are another tool in your toolbelt.

Have you used Facebook search operators before? Which one is most useful?

The post 7 Advanced Facebook Search Operators appeared first on Neil Patel.

Mechanical Engineer to build advanced bio-automation at Volta (YC W19)

Article URL: https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/42290 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26236293 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

The post Mechanical Engineer to build advanced bio-automation at Volta (YC W19) first appeared on Online Web Store Site.

The Advanced Guide to Facebook Watch

In 2017, Facebook launched its answer to the burgeoning streaming video market: Facebook Watch. Through Watch, users could view both scripted and live video from professional networks, brands, influencers, and everyday people.

Facebook released Watch to a limited group of users, and for that first year, it flew pretty much under the radar. In 2018, they launched it globally, and the service took off like a rocket.

By 2019, Watch had 270 million monthly users, and by 2020, that number had shot up to over 1.25 billion, according to Facebook.

I covered Facebook Watch in a previous post when it initially launched. Since then, they have expanded their content offerings (even getting into the music space!) and added a ton of features for brands and marketers.

In this post, I’ll dive deep into how to use Facebook Watch for marketing, now that the platform has matured.

Content on Facebook Watch

Facebook is still experimenting with different content types by adding, subtracting, and tweaking to find the right balance for their platform. In 2019, Facebook’s head of global creative strategy Rick Van Veen told Variety,

We’re still figuring it out and learning. When you start a new platform, you’re going to have to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what works and what doesn’t.

Scripted Content

Facebook’s scripted content can be found under the Show tab. This section is where they’ve entered the ring with the likes of Netflix, Apple+, and Hulu. Here, users can find everything from comedies to critically acclaimed dramas to reality and talk shows.

“Red Table Talk,” for example, is a popular show starring Jada Pinkett Smith, where she brings on guests to discuss sensitive topics such as divorce and gender identity. Meanwhile, Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame stars in “Return the Favor,” which won a Daytime Emmy.

However, they’ve recently scaled back on their scripted content, canceling some of their popular shows in favor of live and sourced content from brands and users.

Live Content

Facebook Live predates Watch by a year. When Watch launched, however, Live was bundled in with the rest of the video content.

Types of videos on Live range from U.S. Senate committee hearings to live author readings and skiers showing off their tricks.

Small businesses have also rushed to Live, creating events and classes to increase revenue.

Music Videos

In August 2020, Facebook launched its new music discovery platform, Facebook Music. Here, users can explore videos by genre, trending topics, artist, and even mood. Currently, the app is only available in the U.S., India, and Thailand, but it’s already garnered a lot of attention.

For instance, Katy Perry debuted her music video “Smile,” the title track of her fifth album, on Facebook Watch.

How Facebook Watch Works

When you create a video on Facebook Watch, whether it’s a live event or a scripted show, you upload it to Facebook using their Creator Studio.

The Creator Studio is the hub for all of your business content for Facebook. From here, you can bulk upload videos, crosspost to different pages, schedule posts, consolidate engagement, and monetize. You can also use their in-depth analytics tools to monitor your content.

On the videos you upload, Facebook places mid-roll ads. Forty-five percent of the revenue from those ads goes to Facebook, while the remaining 55 percent goes to you.

Helpful Hint: Facebook prioritizes longer videos (3+ minutes) and content that engages the audience and sparks conversation. They’re looking for content creators who respond to user comments and pin the best comments to the top of the feed.

How Your Business Can Benefit from Using Advanced Facebook Watch Features

In France, according to Facebook, national broadcaster M6 began creating videos for Watch. Their one-minute video views more than doubled in nine months and they acquired 6 million new follows organically.

Here in the U.S., says Facebook, Buzzfeed has increased their revenue by creating videos over three minutes across their Tasty, Goodful, Nifty, BringMe, Cocoa Butter, and Pero Like pages.

“We moved quickly and increased our payout from total in-stream ads by 20% compared to the previous half,” Maycie Timpone, Executive Director, Video & Publishing at BuzzFeed, told Facebook.

Facebook Watch has become a powerful tool in marketers’ pockets. Let’s take a look at a few ways Watch helps you increase revenue and attract new followers.

Hyper-Personalized Content

Facebook is all about personalized content, and Facebook Watch lets you upload videos right to your target audience. Your videos will also appear in specific categories, such as “Shows Friends Are Following.”

Facebook will also categorize your videos by genre, topic, and even mood.

Recently, Facebook introduced Topics to mobile users. Topics allows users to further customize their video feed by choosing categories that interest them.

Show Pages

Show pages allow users to interact with show creators and fans. They can leave comments, ask questions, or even engage in interactive video content. Just like any other Facebook page, they can like, follow, and share pages with friends.

Real-Time Engagement

This feature is particularly helpful with live video. Viewers can react to, share, and comment on a video in real-time.

Real-time engagement is a great opportunity to get initial feedback on your video and engage with your audience by asking and answering questions and becoming part of the conversation.

Facebook Watch Parties

Facebook’s number one goal is to bring people together. It’s why they added groups a few years back, to allow people with similar interests to find each other.

With Facebook Watch Parties, viewers can bring a group of friends together to watch videos and chat about them in real-time.

Video creators can make content tailored to watch parties to boost engagement.

Playlists

Playlists allow video creators to group videos and post them to their pages. Videos play consecutively to boost views.

Marketers can use playlists for video series or to group videos by topic.

Optimizing Your Facebook Watch Videos

You may be creating killer content for YouTube already, but optimizing Facebook Watch videos is a little different. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your Facebook video content:

First, Make Sure It’s Original

Pulling content over from YouTube or even your website won’t work for many reasons. First, the aspect ratio may be wrong (more on that next). Second, original content exclusive to Facebook will keep people coming back, allowing you to take advantage of Facebook’s monetization tools.

Pay Attention to Aspect Ratio

Facebook gives video creators specific aspect ratios for all pages on both Facebook and Instagram.

You’ll want to follow those guidelines, but in general, make sure your video is shot for mobile. The vast majority of Facebook users access it via mobile, and more than half of ad revenue comes from mobile-first video ads.

Add Captions

Eighty-five percent of videos on Facebook are watched without sound. So, adding captions to all of your video content will naturally boost engagement.

Include a CTA

When you upload a video, Facebook allows you to add a CTA at the end. Whether it’s an invitation to watch more videos, check out a product, or simply like your page, adding a CTA can increase engagement and even boost conversions.

Beyond the Basics: Advanced Uses and Features of Facebook Watch

Recently, Facebook has added a bunch of cool new features that marketers can take advantage of. Let’s take a look at them.

ThruPlay

ThruPlay is a default setting and one you should keep on. With ThruPlay, if your video is shorter than 15 seconds, it will post it to users who are more likely to watch the whole thing. If it’s longer than that, it will deliver it to users who generally watch videos longer than 15 seconds all the way through.

Paid Online Events

Paid online events are a function of live video and have become an essential tool for businesses. Brands can create, host, and promote an event all in one place. They can also set a price and collect payment easily.

Helpful Hint: Facebook normally collects a fee for a paid online event. At least until August 2021, however, they have waived their fees.

Fan Subscriptions

Creating the ability for fans to subscribe to your video page boosts engagement. It also allows you to foster customer loyalty through exclusive offers and content for subscribers.

According to Facebook, it also allows you to predict revenue monthly.

Stars

Another feature is Stars, a tool that allows fans to support your work. Users can purchase stars to send to you. For every star a fan sends to you, Facebook gives you 1 cent.

(Think “Ralph Breaks the Internet” and the hearts he had to earn on his videos.)

The more you engage with users, the more likely they are to send you stars.

Facebook is still rolling out this program to a limited number of users, but you can sign up to show your interest.

A/B Testing Tools

On the back end, Organic Video Post Testing allows video creators to test between two and four variations of a video at a time. Videos are distributed to your target audience, but they’re not posted to your page. The video with the most engagement after a period of time is then posted to your page automatically.

In-Stream Ads

According to Variety, Facebook takes in 22 percent of U.S. digital ad spend. Before Watch, ads that appeared in newsfeeds and the right rail kind of got lost in the mix, right?

However, as pointed out previously, ads that would usually get lost in Facebook feeds get a lot more attention when they appear in the middle of a video.

Mining Audience Data from Your Facebook Watch Viewers

When it comes to analytics, Facebook Creator Studio is a veritable treasure trove. Here are some of the cooler stats you can mine from your dashboard:

Views

There are so many different ways you can parse these metrics. For example, if you want to see the number of minutes viewed, you don’t have to settle for a lump sum. You can break it down by minutes viewed on your page, in shared posts, and crossposts.

You can also see how many views were over three seconds long or how many people viewed the whole video, depending on what comes first.

You can also filter by auto-played vs. click-played and paid vs. organic.

All of the views are measured over a 28-day period.

Audience Engagement and Retention

To get a quick overview of your posts, you can look at the number of reactions, comments, and shares for videos with at least 100 views.

You can also go way beyond that. You can see audience demographics, and you can filter by fans and non-fans to know who you’re truly reaching.

If a video is performing well, you can choose to boost it right from your dashboard.

To dig even deeper into each video, Facebook shows your viewer retention through the entire length of the video. Line graphs like this one show you exactly where viewers dropped off in your video so you can make adjustments.

What’s really neat: when you hover over the line graph, each point of the line displays your video’s corresponding frame.

Finally, you can measure each post against other posts to assess which types of videos and content are working well (or not) for you.

Negative Feedback

Just as important as the positive metrics are the negative ones. Facebook can show you negative comments, as well as how many times people hid your video from their feed or reported it as inappropriate.

Click-Throughs

Finally, Facebook can differentiate between clicks to play your video, clicks on links embedded in your video description, and clicks on your CTA.

Increasing User Engagement Via Facebook Watch (and Why This Matters!)

We’ve talked about all the levers you can pull with Facebook Watch, but how do you use them to increase user engagement? Here’s how to use all their cool features to do just that:

Take Advantage of Real-Time Commenting

Comments give context to all those reactions and shares, but you probably knew that. Of course, you can use them to improve your content by creating more of what gets positive comments and less of what doesn’t.

More importantly, you should be responding to comments, not only on your videos but also on your pages. Show your fans that you’re paying attention, and they will be engaged followers.

Spark Conversations

Instead of simply reacting to conversations already happening, create and direct the discourse yourself. Invite fans to comment on specific elements of your videos, share their tips, or ask questions.

If you’re a part of the Star program, this is a great way to encourage people to send some your way.

Use the Subscription Function

Subscriptions are a great way to create that velvet rope effect. Create an exclusive space for fans to get updates on content before anyone else. Offer content and giveaways for subscribers.

Make them feel special, and they’ll keep coming back for more.

Put That Mined Data to Good Use

As you’ve seen, Facebook gives you a wealth of analytics about your videos, right down to the minute viewers stopped watching your videos.

Use that information to compare and tweak content, experiment with longer or shorter videos, or introduce and keep track of new content.

Don’t Neglect the A/B Testing Functionality

While it is time-consuming to create more than one video, A/B testing multiple versions of videos will only increase your engagement, and you can’t deny how easy Facebook makes it.

Since they don’t post anything to your page until the end of the testing period (which they do automatically), you really have nothing to lose.

Conclusion

Facebook Watch has had explosive growth and attracted the attention of brands, celebrities, small businesses, and influencers. The sheer number of viewers and the amount of ad revenue on the table makes creating original content for Facebook a no-brainer.

The real trick is pulling the right levers to create engaging videos that get reactions, shares, and comments. If you can get subscriptions, even better.

Dive into your Creative Studio to look at all the advanced tools Facebook offers.

How will you use Facebook Watch to build your audience and boost your revenue?

The post The Advanced Guide to Facebook Watch appeared first on Neil Patel.

7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020

Google makes over 3,200 algorithm changes per year.

That’s a lot of changes.

Just think about that for a minute… and let that sink in. It’s
roughly 9 changes per day.

So how can you beat this gigantic company at their own game and rank high? Especially when you consider that they generate over $100 billion+ per year in ad revenue?

You could follow their advice on how to rank well but that won’t do much for you.

The real trick to rank well is to leverage technology.

See, although Google has made things harder, there are things you can do now that I couldn’t when I first started. For years now technology has evolved, which has made your life easier as an SEO.

Here are 7 advanced SEO strategies that I’m implementing as we speak and you should too.

Advanced SEO Strategy #1: SEO A/B Split Testing

To improve your rankings, what do you have to do?

You have to go in and manually make changes to your site.
And if you aren’t sure what changes to make, just put in your URL into this SEO Analyzer and it will spit
out a report like the one below.

But there is one issue with making changes manually, and I
know this because I own an ad agency and I
do the SEO for my own website.

It takes forever to make changes.

Heck, I can barely keep up with the changes I need to make on NeilPatel.com as I have far too many pages.

But now with companies like Rank Science and Distilled ODN, you no longer have to make changes to your site.

I know that sounds crazy, but think about what I just said.

You no longer have to make changes to your site.

You are probably wondering how right?

When you want to track your website, you just install a
piece of javascript like the one Google Analytics gives you and you are off to
the races.

Rank Science and Distilled ODN are similar. You install a piece of javascript and that’s it. From there it doesn’t matter if you have a CMS, or how your website is built, or any of that… they can make changes to your HTML code without you needing to do anything.

You don’t even have to give them your server password or an FTP login. The technology has changed so much that the simple javascript you add to your website can now make the changes for you.

I know that may be hard to believe, but that is how A/B testing worked for years. If you use Optimizely, VWO, or Crazy Egg… you just add a javascript and from their end, they can adjust your site.

So why can’t the same be done for SEO? Why do you have to manually make changes still?

The cool part about tools like ODN or Rank Science is they can make the changes automatically, which is really useful if you have thousands of pages.

Here’s how they work:

This way your site can always be SEO-friendly without you having to make any of the adjustments yourself.

Advanced SEO Strategy #2: E-A-T

In the SEO world, there has been an acronym that has been thrown around a lot and it is E-A-T.

It stands for expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

Google no longer wants to rank just “good” content. Now, they are worried that a piece of content that ranks is inaccurate and can hurt the potential searcher.

For example, let’s imagine you are giving medical advice on your site. You have a ton of links and all of the right signals to rank well but your content is inaccurate. Now imagine someone injures themselves after taking your advice… well, that would be bad.

In the SEO world, you see sites in the health space or financial space having more issues with Google algorithm updates because their information may be inaccurate and Google is looking for sites to prove their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.

But my hunch is, over the next year or two, they will crack down on many more industries.

If you are going to rank a site, everyone these days can manipulate SEO signals, but it is hard to manipulate things like expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Especially when you combine all three.

One thing I’m focusing on in the next 12 months is to increase what I believe will help boost my rankings in the long run.

How you may ask? Well, I’m going to leverage a handful of
tactics:

Guest post – guest posting on popular industry and news sites should help increase my brand recognition over time. I used to do this more frequently in the past and I will kick this off again. If you don’t know how to guest post, check this out.
Speak at conferences – I’ve slowed down on this a bit, but I will pick it up for the same reason above. It should help with E-A-T. If you haven’t spoken at many events, the key is to just apply to a lot of them and eventually some will accept you.
Awards and recognition – continually apply for more awards. I used to do this when I was much younger and I’ve gotten lazy about it these days. The same goes for publishing more books… I already have one New York Times bestseller, why not go for a few more?

A simple thing that you can do if you believe you have been negatively impacted by some of the more recent Google updates is to include an author bio box on every piece of content you write. And, of course, use author schema markup.

A good example of this is my author box…

Using this should help boost your long-term rankings.

Advanced SEO Strategy #3: Host HTML Files From a CDN

We all know that speed impacts rankings. It also impacts conversion rates. Walmart, for example, boosted their conversion rate by 2% for every second of load time they reduced.

And nowadays more Google searches happen on mobile devices, hence load time and speed really matter.

I already have a faster server… my hosting bill is a bit
more than I would like.

And it’s actually going to get a bit worse.

Currently, I have a server where my site is hosted. That server is somewhere in the United States… I believe the east coast.

That means if someone wants to visit my website from let’s say New York City, it should load fairly fast. However, if someone from São Paulo, Brazil wants to visit NeilPatel.com, it would take a bit longer as they are further away from my server.

To solve this, I’ve been using a CDN. A CDN is a content delivery network.

Services like Cloudflare cache your images and static content and server it from the closest server to the person visiting your website.

So now when someone from São Paulo visits my website, they are usually served up cached content from a server in Brazil. This makes their experience load much faster.

But as your content changes, and with things like WordPress
blogs where you are constantly getting comments and going through page changes,
not all of your content is served up through a CDN.

My team is now making a tweak to improve my load time even more. So instead of serving up my HTML pages from my server, we are now going to serve them up from a CDN.

In other words, we are trying to serve as much of our site from a CDN.

As you can see from the Trello list above, that’s all of the
stuff we are working on serving up from our Cloudflare account in order to
speed up our site and eventually boost our search rankings and conversion
rates.

I wish I can walk you through how to do it step by step, and maybe that could be a future blog post, but the easiest is to just find a developer from UpWork to do it for you.

Advanced SEO Strategy #4: Multi-lingual Title Tag Tests

Similar to Rank Science, there’s a tool I currently use to
test my title tags.

It’s called Clickflow.

I use to automatically test my title tag and meta description to maximize my click-through rate. And like Rank Science, you just add a piece of javascript and it can start running tests for you automatically.

That way, you don’t have to manually keep changing things.

And Clickflow has worked well for me for over the past year… really well. Just look at my month-over-month growth from the past couple of months.

Just in the last 31 days, I saw an increase in organic
traffic by 96,723 just through title tag split tests.

But here is the kicker: I’m only able to effectively use the software for my English content. Now just imagine if I did this in less competitive markets like Brazil where I am generating 418,953 unique visitors a month.

Or what if I did that with my German blog or Spanish blog? The possibilities are endless!

Sure in English, not many SEOs are doing title tag split testing but some still are. In other regions, many marketers haven’t even heard of this yet.

So, over the next few months, my team will have to manually
do this to figure out what works in these markets.

If you haven’t done it yet in English, check out this post. Here you will see some of the basic findings when it comes to boosting CTRs were:

Title tags that contain a question generate 14.1% more clicks on average.
Title tags between 15 and 40 characters generate the most clicks.
Leveraging emotions can increase clicks. Meta tags with a positive or negative emotion generated roughly 7% more clicks.

And if you want something really simple, I’ve found that adding the year in your title tag can drastically increase CTR.

For example, look at a lot of the top results that rank for
the phrase “how to start a blog”.

3 of the top 5 results contain the year in the title tag.

Advanced SEO Strategy #5: FAQpage Schema Markup

I blogged about this in the past, but less than .17% of
sites are leveraging it.

Before I get into it, just look at my search traffic from
the term “digital marketing”.

Sure the chart is bouncing up and down a lot, but I’m getting way more traffic than I was before I implemented the FAQpage markup.

In essence, what it does is add common FAQ-based questions to your search listing. Similar to the image below.

I know some people say that if you add this to your site then there is no reason for people to visit your site. And in essence, Google wins because it keeps them on their search engine.

But the way I look at it is if your website provides amazing content and helps create an amazing experience, a portion of those people will remember your URL and will come back in the future.

Plus if you aren’t in the number 1 spot, you don’t have much to lose by implementing this. Even if you are in the number 1 spot like I am for my affiliate marketing page and you add FAQpage schema…

I’ve found that when I add the FAQpage schema my traffic
hasn’t dropped.

Now all I have to do is add this for another 649 blog
posts that we identified that are a good fit for this on my blog. 🙁

Advanced SEO Strategy #6: Content Clusters

I bet you have content on your site. And similar to me, when
you wrote the content you used tools like Ubersuggest and wrote whatever
had a lot of search volume.

And if you want to get a bit more organized and move faster, you probably even used a content calendar.

But just like me, I bet over the years you never focused on clustering your content together. And because you didn’t you probably have tons of pages on similar topics if not the same topic.

This is a big problem because it confuses Google.

For example, I have so many pages on “keyword tools” and “keyword research” that Google doesn’t necessarily know which page to rank. Because of this, my rankings for some of those terms are somewhat stable, but the rank page from my site constantly changes.

A good solution to this problem and improved overall rankings is to use content clusters. A great example of a site that didn’t use clustering but now does is Hubspot.

Their content went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

The overall goal is to have sections of your site and blog about specific topics. And from there you can link and connect other articles around the same topic together. Doing this lets the search engines know which one is the main topic through things like breadcrumbs and URL hierarchy.

A good example of this is the Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz.

Within that guide, they link 8 chapters that cover all aspects of SEO. Each of those chapters links back to the main introductory article.

Instead of making them 9 separate blog posts (including the
introductory page), they linked them all together and made them flow with each
other.

Just look at how they set up their URL structure.

Here is the URL of the introductory page:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

And here is the URL of a chapter:

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/why-search-engine-marketing-is-necessary

Do you see what they did?

They are telling search engines that the chapter is part of the whole Beginner’s Guide to SEO and they did this through the use of folders.

And here is another chapter… https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

As you can see, they followed the same structure. This a simple way to use content clustering to improve your rankings. Case in point, they rank number 1 on Google for the term “SEO” and have for years.

Now I just have to do this with my whole site in multiple
languages.

Advanced SEO Strategy #7: Conquer the World

I’m serious when I say that by the way… I really am going
after all of the major countries.

The most vital SEO strategy I ever learned came from a Google employee. And it was simple… Google has tons of content to choose from when it comes to ranking sites in English but they lack a lot of high-quality content in other regions.

So, I decided to do something simple years ago… I translated my content into other languages. That’s how my traffic has gone from this:

To this:

Sure, I have leveraged a lot of other tactics over the years as well, like building Ubersuggest into a free SEO tool. But even that, Ubersuggest has grown so fast because it is translated into 9 different languages.

Just look at the language breakdown of Ubersuggest’s traffic
stats.

When you combine all of the different variations of English, all of the other variations make up roughly 40% of the tools traffic.

Now with my blog, I haven’t gone as far as translating it into as many languages as the tool, but I plan on translating it eventually into 22 languages. I pick them based on population size and GDP.

This one will take me a few years to really scale up but it provides massive gains for me.

If you want to scale globally, follow this.

This is a must if you want to not only dominate SEO but business in general. Companies these days aren’t just based in the US or UK or China… they are all going global.

Conclusion

No matter if you have been doing SEO for just a few weeks or
even years like me, there is always more to do.

Google is constantly changing and with the new technology
that’s available to you, there is still a lot of room to do well.

As you can see from the above strategies, that’s the stuff I am focusing on over the next 12 months. They’re tactics that work and provide results.

Some of them are really advanced and require engineering
help, but SEO is no longer just about hiring a marketer and having them help
you get more traffic. To really do well, you have to get a bit more technical
than most marketers are comfortable with.

So, what do you think of the strategies above? Have you
tried any of them yet?

The post 7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020

Google makes over 3,200 algorithm changes per year. That’s a lot of changes. Just think about that for a minute… and let that sink in. It’s roughly 9 changes per day. So how can you beat this gigantic company at their own game and rank high? Especially when you consider that they generate over $100 … Continue reading 7 Advanced SEO Strategies I’m Trying to Implement Before 2020

Advanced Hack: How to Improve Your SEO in Less Than 30 Minutes

I’ve been testing a new SEO hack and it works no matter how old or how new your site is.

Heck, you can have barely any links, and I’ve found it to work as well.

Best of all, unlike most SEO changes, it doesn’t take months or years to see results from this… you can literally see results in less than 30 minutes.

And here’s what’s crazy: I had my team crawl 10,000 sites to see how many people are leveraging this SEO technique and it was only 17.

In other words, your competition doesn’t know about this yet!

So what is this hack that I speak of?

Google’s ever-changing search results

Not only is Google changing its algorithm on a regular basis, but they also test out new design elements.

For example, if you search for “food near me”, you’ll not only see a list of restaurants but you also see their ratings.

And if you look up a person, Google may show you a picture of that person and a quick overview.

Over the years, Google has adapted its search results to give you the best experience. For example, if you search “2+2” Google will show you the answer of “4” so you don’t have to click through and head over to a webpage.

But you already know this.

Now, what’s new that no one is really using are FAQ-rich results and Answer Cards.

Here’s what I mean… if you search “digital marketing” you’ll see that I rank on Google. But my listing doesn’t look like most people’s…

As you can see from the image above, Google has pulled FAQ rich results from my site.

And best of all, I was able to pull it off in less than 30 minutes. That’s how quickly Google picked it up and adjusted their SERP listing.

Literally all within 30 minutes.

And you can do the same thing through Answer Cards anytime you have pages related to question and answers.

So how can you do this?

Picking the right markup

Before we get this going with your site, you have to pick the right schema markup.

FAQpage schema is used when you offer a Frequently Asked Question page or have a product page that contains frequently asked questions about the product itself. This will let you be eligible for a collapsible menu under your SERP with the question, that when clicked on, reveals the answer.

It can also let you be eligible for FAQ Action that is shown on Google Assistant. This can potentially help get you noticed by people using voice search to find out an answer!

Q&A schema is used when people are contributing different types of answers and can vote for which answer they think is the best. This will provide the rich result cads under your SERP and shows all the answers, with the top answer highlighted.

After making sure you understand what these are used for, Google also has additional guidelines on when you can and can’t use these schema’s for:

Google’s guidelines

Google has a list of FAQpage schema guidelines.

Only use FAQPage if your page has a list of questions with answers. If your page has a single question and users can submit alternative answers, use QAPage instead. Here are some examples:

Valid use cases:

An FAQ page was written by the site itself with no way for users to submit alternative answers
A product support page that lists FAQs with no way for users to submit alternative answers

Invalid use cases:

A forum page where users can submit answers to a single question
A product support page where users can submit answers to a single question
A product page where users can submit multiple questions and answers on a single page
Don’t use FAQPagefor advertising purposes
Make sure each Question includes the entire text of the question and make sure each answer includes the entire text of the answer. The entire question text and answer text may be displayed.
Question and answer content may not be displayed as a rich result if it contains any of the following types of content: obscene, profane, sexually explicit, graphically violent, promotion of dangerous or illegal activities, or hateful or harassing language.
All FAQcontent must be visible to the user on the source page.

And here are the guidelines for Q&A schema:

Only use the QAPage markup if your page has information in a question and answer format, which is one question followed by its answers.

Users must be able to submit answers to the question. Don’t use QAPage markup for content that has only one answer for a given question with no way for users to add alternative answers; instead, use FAQPage. Here are some examples:

Valid use cases:

A forum page where users can submit answers to a single question
A product support page where users can submit answers to a single question

Invalid use cases:

An FAQ page was written by the site itself with no way for users to submit alternative answers
A product page where users can submit multiple questions and answers on a single page
A how-to guide that answers a question
A blog post that answers a question
An essay that answers a question
Don’t apply QAPagemarkup to all pages on a site or forum if not all the content is eligible. For example, a forum may have lots of questions posted, which are individually eligible for the markup. However, if the forum also has pages that are not questions, those pages are not eligible.
Don’t use QAPagemarkup for FAQ pages or pages where there are multiple questions per page. QAPagemarkup is for pages where the focus of the page is a single question and its answers.
Don’t use QAPagemarkup for advertising purposes.
Make sure each Questionincludes the entire text of the question and make sure each Answer includes the entire text of the answer.
Answermarkup is for answers to the question, not for comments on the question or comments on other answers. Don’t mark up non-answer comments as an answer.
Question and answer content may not be displayed as a rich result if it contains any of the following types of content: obscene, profane, sexually explicit, graphically violent, promotion of dangerous or illegal activities, or hateful or harassing language.

If your content meets these guidelines, the next step is to figure out how to implement the schema onto your website and which type to use.

How do I implement Schema and which to use?

There are two ways to implement it… either through JSON-LD or Microdata.

I recommend choosing one style and sticking to it throughout your webpage, and I also recommend not using both types on the same page.

JSON-LD is what Google recommends wherever possible and Google has been in the process of adding support for markup-powered features. JSON-LD can be implemented into the header of your content and can take very little time to implement.

The other option is Microdata, which involves coding elements into your website. This can be a challenging process for some odd reason, I prefer it. Below are examples of how each work.

FAQpage Schema JSON-LD:

<html>

<head>

<title>Digital Marketing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Neil Patel</title>

</head>

<body>

{

“@context”: “https://schema.org”,

“@type”: “FAQPage”,

“mainEntity”: [

{

“@type”: “Question”,

“name”: “What is digital marketing?”,

“acceptedAnswer”: {

“@type”: “Answer”,

“text”:”Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic device”}

}]

}

</script>

</body>

</html>

FAQpage Schema Microdata:

<head>

<title>Digital Marketing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Neil Patel</title>

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<h3 itemprop=”name”>What is digital marketing?</h3>

<p>Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that involves electronic device.</p>

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Q&A Schema JSON-LD:

{

“@context”: “https://schema.org”,

“@type”: “QAPage”,

“mainEntity”: {

“@type”: “Question”,

“name”: “Can I tie my shoe with one hand?”,

“text”: “I currently have taken a hobby to do many actions with one hand and I’m currently stuck on how to tie a shoe with one hand. Is it possible to tie my shoe with one hand?”,

“answerCount”: 2,

“upvoteCount”: 20,

“dateCreated”: “2019-07-23T21:11Z”,

“author”: {

“@type”: “Person”,

“name”: “Expert at Shoes”

“acceptedAnswer”: {

“@type”: “Answer”,

“text”: “It is possible to tie your shoe with one hand by using your teeth to hold the other lace”,

“dateCreated”: “2019-11-02T21:11Z”,

“upvoteCount”: 9000,

“url”: “https://example.com/question1#acceptedAnswer”,

“author”: {

“@type”: “Person”,

“name”: “AnotherShoeMan”

}

“suggestedAnswer”: [

{

“@type”: “Answer”,

“text”: “It is not possible to tie your shoe with one hand”,

“dateCreated”: “2019-11-02T21:11Z”,

“upvoteCount”: 2,

“url”: “https://example.com/question1#suggestedAnswer1”,

“author”: {

“@type”: “Person”,

“name”: “Best Shoe Man”

}

]

}

Q&A Schema Microdata:

<div itemprop=”text”>I currently have taken a hobby to do many actions with one hand and I’m currently stuck on how to tie a shoe with one hand. Is it possible to tie my shoe with one hand?</div>

<div>asked <time itemprop=”dateCreated” datetime=”2019-07-23T21:11Z”>July 23’19 at 21:11</time></div>

<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span

itemprop=”name”>Expert at Shoes</span></div>

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<div><span itemprop=”answerCount”>2</span> answers</div>

<div><span itemprop=”upvoteCount”>20</span> votes</div>

It is possible to tie your shoe with one hand by using your teeth to hold the other lace.

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<a itemprop=”url” href=”https://example.com/question1#acceptedAnswer”>Answer Link</a>

<div>answered <time itemprop=”dateCreated” datetime=”2019-11-02T22:01Z”>Nov 2 ’19 at 22:01</time></div>

<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span itemprop=”name”>AnotherShoeMan</span></div>

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It is not possible to tie your shoe with one hand

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<a itemprop=”url” href=”https://example.com/question1#suggestedAnswer1″>Answer Link</a>

<div>answered <time itemprop=”dateCreated”datetime=”2019-11-02T21:11Z”>Nov 2 ’19 at 21:11</time></div>

<div itemprop=”author” itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Person”><span

itemprop=”name”>Best Shoe Man</span></div>

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When you are implementing it on your website, feel free and just use the templates above and modify them with your content.

If you are unsure if your code is correctly implemented or not, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and you can add your code snippet or the page that you implemented the schema on and it will tell you if you did it right or wrong.

Plus it will give you feedback on if there are any errors or issues with your code.

You can also try Google’s Rich Result Tester. This will give you a brief look at how your structured data will look like in the results!

Getting results in under 30 minutes

Once you make the changes to any page that you think is a good fit, you’ll want to log into Google Search Console and enter the URL of the page you modified in the top search bar.

You’ll then want to have Google crawl that page so they can index the results. All you have to do is click “request indexing”.

And typically within 10 minutes, you’ll notice it kick in and when you perform a Google search you’ll see your updated listing.

Now the key to making this work is to do this with pages and terms that already rank on page 1. That’s where I’ve seen the biggest improvement.

Will Schema get me to rank for People Also Ask and Featured Snippets?

Will this help with People Also Ask and Featured Snippets? So far, there has been no correlation between schema markup and People Also Ask or Featured Snippets and you do not need them to be featured in them.

Optimizing your content for this will not hurt you though and can potentially improve your chances to be on here.

Google has been testing out how they can show these types of Q&A, FAQ, and How-To results and looking at structured data to help understand them.

It’s better to be early to the game and help Google understand your pages, as well as possibly participating in any of Google’s experiments.

Will this get me on voice search?

With more and more people using mobile devices to find answers to questions, this is a very relevant question!

Especially considering that over half of the searches on Google will be from voice search in the near future.

Answers from voice search get most of their answers from featured snippets.

And adding structured data on your website increases the chances of getting you into featured snippets, which increases the chance of you getting featured on voice search.

Conclusion

This simple hack can potentially increase the visibility of your brand and help improve the authority of your website. It’s a simple solution that can take a single day to implement across your main question, product, or FAQ page.

I’ve been using it heavily for the last week or so and as long as I pick keywords that I already rank on page 1 for, I am seeing great results.

And as I mentioned above, when my team analyzed 10,000 sites we only found 17 to be using FAQ and QA schema. In other words, less than 1% of the sites are using this, which means you if you take advantage now, you’ll have the leg up on your competition.

So what do you think about this tactic? Are you going to use it?

The post Advanced Hack: How to Improve Your SEO in Less Than 30 Minutes appeared first on Neil Patel.