Kaizen Newsletter – March 2021: Incorporating E-A-T signals, our latest e-commerce report & exploring influencer marketing

As we enter March we welcome another wave of new partners, projects, and campaigns. Continuing on from last month, we wanted to update you on developments in the industry and across our services as part of our newsletter series. 

 

In the news – You are what you E-A-T – More signals on how to operate your SEO approach 

As another month passes us by, Google has once again gifted us more cryptic insights into the inner workings of their search engine. The recent claim, from their Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, is that Google is trying ‘to understand what is relevant for a website’, speaking primarily in this instance in relation to the importance of a qualitative approach to building links. 

The statement continues the held-narrative of trust being a significant component of digital PR activity, and how that plays a role in a larger SEO strategy built around E-A-T (expertise-authority-trust). We’re fortunate to be servicing our partners across several channels and products, and as we form new plans together, we’re constantly looking at ways to incorporate E-A-T in a more holistic way. Approaches in other channels you might want to consider include the following: 

• Expertise – Portraying your expertise in your space is dependent on the output of content you provide on your site. Communicating insights on changes and trends in your industry through content creation means people are more likely to engage with your brand and can be dually functional as newsworthy link-building content.   
• Authority – We use engagement tools to determine the most effective influencer strategies for the brands we work with, increasing the likelihood of landing sector-specific coverage and highly relevant traffic acquisition through influencer partnerships. 
• Trust – From a technical and on-site perspective, review visibility and site security are at the forefront of ‘quick fixes’ to tick off this part of the checklist, but as earlier mentioned it is through hyper-relevant links in your space from authoritative publications which allow trust to grow offsite as well. Keeping content up-to-date and factual allow content to be both trustworthy, and appealing to trusted sites.

 

In the industries – Kaizen E-commerce report  

This week we have launched the next report in our recent series, focusing on the recent on-site and offsite progressions of some of the most exciting retail e-commerce brands.

Comparing the best performing brands against Majestic’s trust flow metrics, we see a correlation between organic traffic increases and trust flow increases related to topics such as ‘shopping’ or ‘clothing’.  

In order to gain a more effective understanding of the ROI of our own activity, we are always looking to benchmark the performance of our clients in their target topics in addition to keywords and pages to better integrate digital PR with core SEO channels. 

The report can be found here, if you wanted to see the rankings in full! 

 

In our work – Investigating influencer marketing 

Across the channels we operate in, we are always looking at how things are developing in order to refine how we service our partners. In the influencer space, true engagement has been a key metric for us to determine the best options for an effective strategy. 

Some recent research we performed shows that influencers in specific sub-sectors offer higher levels of engagement than the umbrella industries they sit within. For example, influencers in the ‘automotive’ space as a whole have 25% lower engagement than those in the ‘electric vehicles’ space. Similarly, influencers focused on ‘personal savings’ and ‘budgeting’ have an engagement rate that is six times higher than the umbrella topic of ‘finance’. 

Many worry that the sector they function within is too niche to incorporate influencer marketing as part of long-term strategy, but figures are showing that more and more industries are finding ways that it can work for them and their customers, and the more niche the better! 

Kaizen offers a range of capabilities across Technical SEO and Paid Social – for examples view our case studies here. If you believe there are gaps in your marketing strategy that need refining, we as an agency are always happy to provide insight into the value it can give to your business.