The Wax Blog

Once upon a time if a search result was at the top, it was considered the best. Now, a search result is superior if it has placement as the featured snippet, also known as  position zero.  This Google update populates snippets of information and positions them at the very top of search results for a quick and easy answer without ever needing to click on the website. In the SEO world, it is prime real estate to have your content featured.   How can marketers optimize their content for position zero?

Use Imagery for Position Zero

Often the snippet at position zero will include an image or most recently a video. Including relevant images or videos in your content will provide a visual element for the keywords you are targeting. In addition to imagery and videos benefiting your rank, it also enhances the user experience. For example, if you are searching “How to use on-SERP SEO?” a video explaining the process would enhance your content and also increase your rank for achieving that superior placement. Position zero makes RRR content even more important because those added benefits like photos, videos, tables, etc. will help in ranking content. Try turning your normal blog into a video or an audio blog.  If you do a monthly podcast, turn that conversation into a blog.

Stand Out with Lists and Tables

Sometimes position zero snippets are formatted like bulleted lists and tables.

WordPress is the best content management system for most website owners these days. It has a huge community with great plugins and themes. There are also tons of WordPress migration services on the market for those who are eager to move to the well-known CMS. So, you can use them to move to WordPress and then proceed to build an effective site. In this article, we will show you the step-by-step guide on how to optimize your WordPress website, which includes choosing a theme, creating a site map, structuring your pages for optimal search engine visibility, and more.  

1. Simple design

  Optimizing a website is about a lot more than just picking a theme and a few plugins. If you're going to be building a website for yourself or a client, it's imperative that the site loads quickly and that there are no barriers to accessing it. 

In this next installment of our series on major trends in communications for 2022, we're talking about interactive content as part of a strategy that works in tandem with emotional marketing and ephemeral content. As we discussed in our piece on ephemeral content, one of the top tips to ensuring your content has impact is to involve the viewer's input in some way. Whether it's taking a quiz or a survey, or playing a game that supports what you're sharing, allowing your audience to interact with your content creates an immersive and memorable experience. Interactive content is the next level in content consumption and engagement that lets viewers interact with the content instead of passively view it. Previously the engagement tactic for most social media, e-mail marketing, blog posts and multimedia content was to encourage viewers to like, reply or share to engage and spread the word. Interactive content is a more rewarding, real-time way for your audience to feel engaged and connected to your brand.

Continuing our series on major trends in communications in 2022, in this installment we're discussing ephemeral content and how to harness it for effective marketing.

What is Ephemeral Content?

Traditionally in marketing and communications emphasis has been on evergreen content - something that will stay visible and relevant for years. Evergreen content is still important and forms the backbone of many websites, including blog posts, white papers or case studies, and complementary media like videos or podcasts. However, over the past few years there have been more and more opportunities to experiment with ephemeral content, which is any content that disappears quickly - usually after 24 hours - and can't be found again. Ephemeral content is mostly based on video and social media platforms. Snapchat introduced the world to the concept, but virtually all major social media platforms now have ways of posting something that is designed to be seen for only a short time.

How Is It Used?

Celebrities frequently use this kind of content to showcase personal videos, and in general ephemeral content is very popular as a way to share something personal people don't necessarily want on the internet forever. In some ways, it could be considered the evolution of "felt cute, might delete later" culture, but with a mechanic in place to make it easy and acceptable.

Welcome to the first in a four-part series in which we'll be exploring major trends in communications for 2022. In this initial installment, we're examining the concept of emotional marketing, its traditional definition,  and its current state. People have been appealing to emotions to motivate others for millennia. Aristotle himself established techniques for emotional appeals that were quite persuasive. While appealing to emotions may seem manipulative, it's usually not nefarious. Emotional marketing connects people with the things they want and need on a deeply personal level. True, some marketing and advertising campaigns play on negative feelings of fear or greed.  Here, however, we're looking at how emotional marketing can elicit positive results, and why it's a major trend in communications with tremendous staying power.

What is emotional marketing?

Emotional marketing identifies and builds on an audience's emotions to market to them more successfully. Rooted in current best practices in research and behavioral psychology,  today's emotional marketing requires a deep understanding of the feelings a specific audience has toward a product or service and its competitors.  To work, emotional marketing has to get a good handle on an audience's vibe, and how it affects their view of the entire product genre. A very simple example is marketing campaigns for online talk therapy providers where emotional marketing is essential to conversion. The target audience naturally includes anyone who's experiencing distressing emotions and could benefit from online mental health counseling. You don't have to look far on Twitter to see people tweeting about their struggles with mental wellbeing - and you also don't have to look far to see ads for these therapy providers in the same places.

Is it ethical?

  The other day I read this quote in Anne Lamott’s new book Dusk, Night, Dawn: “…the movement of grace in our lives so often begins with desperation and blurt.”  After I stopped laughing I realized it was a perfect way to recap 2021. Grace continues to...

Since the announcement of nationwide 5G, it seems that almost every day, a cellular provider comes up on the television during a commercial break to tell us that nationwide 5G is going to revolutionize the world. Now, two years after the first introduction, Americans are starting to see 5G phones and plans become more of a common occurrence. Sure, 5G means faster internet browsing and higher quality video streams, but mobile users aren’t the only ones getting an upgrade with 5G capabilities. The launch of nationwide 5G is also great news for the Internet of Things (IoT) market. In this second installment of the Wax Marketing Blog’s “5G Experience Series”, I will be talking about how the already powerful IoT market will be seeing record-breaking growth in 2021. It’s All About Speed It’s no secret, the success of IoT over the past two decades has come down to how fast it can perform data transfers. When 4G was released, it was meant specifically to enhance mobile data services. It was never optimized to ensure that IoT would have the same improvement nor was it strong enough to handle the billions of devices trying to link to it. That has all changed with 5G. It has been reported that 5G will be 10 times faster than current LTE networks. This massive increase in speed will allow IoT devices to communicate and share data even quicker than before.   How Many Devices is too Many?