5/1 WWT: Optimizing User Engagement with Emote

All righty, we can go ahead and get started

Thanks again for being here today, everybody, as we go through our new emote tool, which I'm very excited to chat with you about today

We'll start off with a little bit of introduction, just some background on myself and then webinars through Ezoic in general

before I kind of dive into what the importance is of user engagement

and then obviously that emote overview, which I know you're all looking forward to

Not one to typically talk about myself, so forgive me here. But my name is Nolan

I'm a publisher, success manager here at EZOIC. I work on the VIP team

I came to EZOAC with about five years of experience. I used to work in marketing agencies, helping brands, you know, grow their catalogs, whether they be, you know, Fortune 500 companies, universities, small businesses, kind of anything in between

But I did a lot of work on the actual advertiser side of things rather than the publisher's side and helps a lot with SEO and advertising as a whole for my clients prior to coming to EZOIC

I've been here for a few years now, but again, at my old positions, I was an award-winning copywriter, which is a fun one

So the ad copy that you actually see on those display ads, I used to write that stuff and ended up winning some awards for it, which was super fun

I work out of our Carlsbad office. This is our headquarters in the United States

In my free time, you can catch me playing golf, playing hockey or running

I just ran a marathon last month, so I tend to be outside a lot

If I'm not outside, I'm probably inside playing video games or beating my friends in my favorite strategy game, Katon

Again, if you have to drop off early today or you want to come back and revisit things, you can always find the Ezoic webinars through the support site

So again, that's support.ezoic.com. You can find the webinar library. You can go there through your publisher dashboard

clicking the levels or the support in account settings. And then if you don't want the video

you can actually just check out the companion blog. So if you're tired of hearing my voice, you can just read along and kind of follow the steps there

to get emo going on your site. So without further ado, I would like to chat about the importance of user engagement

As I'm sure you all know, Google has been constantly fluctuated, the SERPs, whether that just be through repeated testing or through algorithm updates

But this was a very consistent trend that we had seen throughout almost all of 2023, and it has

continued well into 2024. Today is the first day of May, so it's 105 months of fluctuations

already in 2024, which is absolutely flying by. But one thing that has remained constant

through all of this is that Google has been continuing to reward and rank sites that are

utilizing inputs from actual users. I'll get into what that means a little bit more later on

but I did want to make call out to something that you probably all have seen in the search engine

results page, which is this new discussions and forums widget, essentially. And in my opinion

this is what Google is kind of showing when they say that they're putting an emphasis on that direct

user input Obviously there are some questions I think a lot of us have as to how this pertains to eat or double EAT you know especially getting like first person perspective from a user and how that pertains to the overall topic that a you know a website is talking about

Personally, I don't see this emphasis going away. I think the recent update really kind of showed this as it was essentially the longest update that we've seen

and Google had 45 days to kind of back down from their position on rewarding this type of feedback or engagement from users, but ultimately held firm

It's a trend that we've seen pretty consistently over the last few months, and a lot of people were kind of forecasting maybe a step back from this position, but Google really held firm on it and are continuing to kind of boost up those discussions and forum sections, which in my opinion stems from user engagement more than anything else

I think it's really important to take a step back from just Google and actually look at like algorithmic-based platforms as a whole

So that's things like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, anywhere that you can get your traffic from that's basically using an algorithm to decide what is being shown to a user

A lot of these models are actually built with user engagement at the forefront of their plan

So, you know, engaging with your users on the site should really be an integral part of your business strategy as it's going to help with long-term success

But I do think user engagement actually goes beyond just what's on the website

If you are, you know, part of a Facebook group or if you have a newsletter or are posting on Pinterest, it's really important to be engaging with your audience anywhere that you have an algorithm, essentially, because we know for a fact that that user engagement is

a critical factor in both ranking and distribution in each algorithm. Specifically, today we're

talking about Google and how our tool can kind of help you there. But I do think it's worth calling

out that anywhere you have an audience, you should be trying to nurture that audience, whether it's

through repeated newsletters, whether it's through replying in comments on Facebook or Instagram or

whatever it may be. It's really important to be engaging with your users, so they engage back

with you, giving you that reward or benefit from the algorithm. A little bit about Emoat to start and still as it pertains to the importance of user engagement

but commenting systems are one of the easiest ways that you can kind of help build this

user engagement specifically on your website. We know for a fact that a single engaged conversation on one of your pages can actually

improve your engagement signals and improve your rankings as it pertains to

search engine results page and Google discover, whatever it may be. We know that having that

engagement and having users actually spend longer on the site because they're reading comments

or their writing comments is going to send a positive signal to Google and will actually

impact rankings or even just your signals. You may not see it at first. It may take a while. It could

take six months, potentially even a year. This is a fantastic strategy that we know has a positive

indicator. Google is also publicly stating that they want this type of thing. I have a quote here

from Search Liaison on X, and I'll read it here. It says actual searchers seem to like it

They proactively seek it out, and it makes sense for us to be showing it to keep the search

results relevant and satisfying for everyone. And this is actually in a response to showing those

discussions in forum sections Search Liaison is basically saying that users are clicking on these things because they value the opinion of other users So having these types of engaged conversations can actually lead to more people coming to your website

And obviously, Google is looking to satisfy search intent. If search intent is showing that users are valuing this information, that's what's going to get shown

I think that's a common misconception that some publishers might have is that, you know

Google wants to satisfy, you know, the SEO side of things when really what they're focused on

is satisfying the search intent. If user data from, you know, the search pages is showing that

people want to go read discussions or forums or comments or whatever it is, that's what they're

going to show. That's basically what the business model of the search engine itself is, not the

actual company, is to satisfy that user intent. And if people are clicking on these things, you know

it's in your best interest to be adding them to your site and actively managing them to make sure that you are getting that positive addition to your rankings

So a little bit more about emot specifically. Again, this is a pretty new tool that we have on Exoic, but I do think it can be extremely powerful

One thing here that's really important is that, you know, this is your stuff

You own this stuff when it comes to comments. It's your data. and you can use it however you like

Emote is free to use, and you do have complete control over all the data that is collected

and I'll get more into what control actually looks like in terms of customization, moderations, things like that

But I do want to call out that this is a really, really powerful tool that can actually make your life very easy

as it comes to managing comments, but also just allowing for them on your site

We do have an AI moderator essentially built in that you can customize or toggle on or off to make your life easy and keep comments streamlined

Obviously, depending on what your website is about, people may be super passionate about it

My mind immediately goes to sports sites. If a team's not doing well, people will be really vocal in the comments and can tend to use some language

that may not be appropriate or even kind of skew from what the original topic was

A moderation can kind of help keep these things in check. so you can focus on writing content instead of reading through your comments to make sure that they're appropriate or that the topic is kind of being talked about the way that you're wanting it to

Something I think that really stands out to me is that this tool is extremely lightweight

A lot of commenting systems can actually add bloat to the site just through unnecessary JavaScript or just basically unoptimized services

Emoat is extremely lightweight and will not cause any bloat to your site

You really can make this tool whatever you want, kind of similar to a lot of the other tools we have on Ezoic, but you can be as hands on or as hands off as you want

It's really up to you. If you want to be involved in your comments, you absolutely can be in there, responding to conversations, starting new ones

You can be moderating comments and even sending like web hooks to kind of notify your users that something new is happening

You really can take the data, mold it, and use it to your advantage here to make sure that you're keeping people engaged, you're keeping the comments clean, and obviously you're providing a good experience for those users coming to your site

So in order to activate emote and again as everybody here is a current Ezoic publisher what you going to want to do is log into your publisher dashboard in the top bar where all of the little icons are there will be a little gear You click the settings gear obviously and then on the left hand side there was a content option

So if you click into the content option, you should see eMote right there as an option

What you're going to want to do to turn it on is basically click the enable button next to replace WordPress comments

One thing that's really important to note here is that in order to use email, in order to replace those WordPress

comments, you do have to actively be using the ESOIC WordPress plugin

With this, it's actually very easy to import current comments on your website

So if you have a commenting system that you maybe aren't the biggest fan of or it's causing

bloat to your site or you don't like the way it looks, if you use WordPress comments or discuss

you can actually directly import those comments and turn them into EMOT very easily

Those steps are clearly outlined inside of the dashboard in EMO, and also in the support article

and we talked about in the companion blog as well. Like I mentioned, there is an AI moderator

You do have the option to kind of turn it on or off, or you can create a moderator via email

If you have multiple users on your Ezoic account, so if that's people that you have given permissions to

to check revenue or traffic or reports, or if somebody manages the site for you and you just own it

It is important to note that you will have to add them as a moderator in order to give them comment control permissions

Currently, only the email address associated with the EZOCA account only has those moderator permissions

So again, if you do have sub-users on your account, you'd like them to be a moderator

You do need to go in there and add them manually via email to make sure that they have those permissions

and those people will be able to monitor specific terms, flag comments, upvote, whatever it may be

to really take control of a conversation, steer things the right way

You can flag hostile comments, you can flag comments that contain links so they can be reviewed

Again, it is really customizable and you can make it exactly what you're looking for to keep things going the right way

So with those customizations, you obviously have control over how things look

how they interact on the website. So under the widget settings within Emo

you do have the ability to auto load the comments. You can disable refresh if you want to make sure

that you are manually approving things before they go live on the site

You have the option to disable different fonts. You can hide delete comments

and then obviously you can customize what it looks like. So how wide it is, how tall it is, how deep it sits

And then obviously the language default that it's in, as well in addition to some CSS settings there too

And again, inside of the emote settings, you will have optioned to ytics so you can get a full

comment roll up and you'll also be able to view comments by page. This type of information

is extremely helpful because if you see certain types of pages or certain categories or

generating more user engagement, it may be in your best interest to continue writing about those

topics, write more of them or perhaps maybe write less of them, if you're

if they're not generating that same user engagement. It's a really powerful tool

And again, it's very easy to use those ytics are right at the forefront of the tool

And it is a big selling point, in my opinion, to be able to see that stuff broken down by page

And obviously, as we continue to build out the tool and continue to add new services

I would imagine that these ytics will only get more in depth so you can make more educated decisions based on the data at hand

Thank you