Thursday, 30 November 2017

Your Guide to Google’s Exact Match Domain Algorithm Update by @BrianHarnish

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Instagram’s business profiles are being used by more than 25 million marketers

More businesses are looking to do business through Instagram.

More than 25 million marketers have switched their Instagram accounts to business profiles, the company announced on Thursday. That’s up from 15 million business profiles on the Facebook-owned app as of July 2017.

Instagram rolled out business profiles — the equivalent of Facebook Pages — in May 2016 to give companies a more commercial presence on the photo and video app. By converting an account to a business profile, companies can include a “contact us” button on their pages and view in-depth analytics about the organic posts and Stories they publish on the app, such as the number of impressions and unique reach posts received.

Instagram’s hope is that the more tools it offers to marketers, the more that marketers will use Instagram to boost their business, organically and eventually through advertising. That strategy appears to be working. Since Instagram rolled out business profiles, its advertiser base has ballooned from more than 200,000 in February 2016 to more than 2 million in September 2017. That puts Instagram’s ratio of organic business accounts to advertisers roughly in line with Facebook, which has more than 70 million businesses using Pages and more than 6 million advertisers.

Eighty percent of Instagram’s 800 million monthly users follow a business, and roughly 40 percent of the 500 million people who check Instagram daily view at least one business’s profile, according to the company. Of the 200 million-plus people that view a business profile on a given day, two-thirds don’t follow the brand. That last stat makes a strong case for Instagram’s business profiles. While marketers may hope non-followers tap the follow button, they would likely be just as satisfied, if not more so, if these people tap the button to contact their businesses, enabling them to cultivate a customer base outside of the app.

About The Author

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

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Author: Tim Peterson

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SearchCap: Google audiobooks, local spam & SEO metrics

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

About The Author

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article.
Author: Barry Schwartz

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Daily Search Forum Recap: November 30, 2017

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Other Great Search Forum Threads:

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article.
Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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It’s time to get real about omnichannel marketing

When you stop to think about the evolution of marketing in the last decade alone, it’s pretty remarkable — especially how mobile has forever changed the way we engage with our favorite brands.

The billboard, television or email campaigns of yesteryear have transformed into in-app messages, chatbots and social memes. These are just some of the marketing channels that have developed in the last decade — and it seems as if more channels are being introduced all the time, especially with the introduction of voice-activated technology.

But effectively utilizing these new channels and capabilities seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. In fact, driving business value through effective customer engagement is an area where many brands have fallen short.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

As the Director of Marketing Communications at Localytics, Kristin is focused on driving the public relations, analyst relations, thought leadership, event sponsorship/speaker’s bureau and social media strategies for the company. She brings 15 years of experience in leading global public relations, marketing communications and content marketing campaigns and programs for a range of B2B technology companies, including early stage startups all the way up to large public companies.

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Author: Kristin Cronin

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ironSource’s ‘4D Interactive Ads’ deliver personalization (and data) through interactivity

A new mobile format from ironSource, a mobile monetization and marketing technology company based in Tel Aviv, Israel, puts a playable “choose your own adventure” spin on ad personalization.

Dubbed 4D Interactive Ads, as in breaking the fourth wall, the units prompt users to make selections from various scenarios, and the ads evolve based on those choices. For example, an ad from a shoe retailer starts by asking users to choose their shoe style, either elegant or casual. From there, the ad is tailored to show shoe styles and products based on the subsequent selections the user makes.

4D uses video as a base and layers on interactivity to add personalization to the ads. The company says the (anonymized) data generated from user choices “can be used to inform marketing and even product optimization.”

“Previously, networks could only pass on data about completions and clicks, which doesn’t say much about who the user is or what they like. With 4D ads, advertisers can ask their users specific questions and learn more about them. Do they prefer to listen to music on the train or at the gym? Are they more interested in makeup or clothes? Answers to questions like this have tremendous value for advertisers,” said Dan Greenberg, chief design officer at ironSource, in a statement. “Understanding consumers is a difficult task. 4D ads make it much easier, giving brands a chance to leverage the intimate mobile medium for what it was meant to do, tear down that fourth wall.”

The new ad format is part of a wave of interactive formats that have sprung up specifically to engage mobile users. For its part, ironSource’s in-house unit, Playworks Studio, has developed a suite of interactive ads that include playable ads, interactive end cards and augmented reality ads.

[This article originally appeared on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

As Third Door Media’s paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article.
Author: Ginny Marvin

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Is establishing a brand-safety KPI a good idea?

The universal key performance indicator (KPI) to end all measurement metrics; an amalgamation of all that brands care about; a compilation of everything that agencies, suppliers and tech companies are forced to deal with for the betterment of the industry — a brand-safety KPI has the potential to benefit players on all sides of the advertising ecosystem by tracking brand safety at the campaign level. But is it a good idea?

When you think about the big three elements of measuring whether a digital campaign was safe or not, you think about three things:

  1. Did my ad show up next to the content I desired, or alternatively, did it show up next to something questionable?
  2. Was my ad viewable?
  3. Was my ad served to a human or some sort of invalid traffic (IVT)?

I like to ask if the three of these got together and a had a child, a super-KPI-kind, what would it look like, and would it have any value in the marketplace?

Calculating a brand-safety KPI

The three big measurement concepts — contextual relevancy, viewability and fraud/IVT — are essential sets of numbers which are already tracked. Combining them would require a methodology that brings together campaign data, relevant parameters and times and a mechanism to weight the score.

Managing all the data inputs would be difficult, but it can be done. The resulting score could be compared to all of the supply in the market using a universal scoring system.

Scoring could originate at the domain, property or company level — and someday even at the placement level. This scoring system could be circulated and managed against by all buyers, direct, programmatic, marketers and agencies.

How the concept of the brand-safety KPI came to be

As a content developer and leader of a consulting organization, I regularly host board meetings and advisory sessions which have participation from senior industry leaders from both the buy and sell sides. Over the past 12 months, I have heard a common theme during the conversations at these functions: the increasing need for the ability to transact on brand-safe inventory. This recurring sentiment led me to consider how this need could be met.

Benefits of a brand-safety KPI

As with any universally adopted metric, the brand-safety KPI would provide a simplified way of measuring the overall safety of a media placement. The KPI would level the playing field for suppliers large and small, allowing marketers and their agencies to buy only brand-safe inventory.

The long-term value for publishers would be the opportunity to be scored on a fixed set of criteria to optimize toward, rather than an undefined blanket term such as brand safety.

The challenges of establishing a brand-safety KPI

First and foremost, it would be no small task to develop a brand-safety KPI. Implementing it and getting the market to transact on the KPI would be an even larger hurdle to overcome.

In the short term, some suppliers would be hurt if they scored too low on an overall Brand Safety Index and fail to quickly make adjustments to raise their score.

Bringing it all together

The value of providing marketers and their agencies with a single metric for measuring brand safety was an interesting topic of conversation at our recent conference. A takeaway from these discussions is that this concept could evolve into an invaluable way to further increase confidence in online advertising.

But I’m interested to hear reactions from the market at large. Does this concept resonate with you? Why or why not? Are there benefits and challenges of establishing a brand-safety KPI that I missed?

I look forward to seeing how this concept evolves. I anticipate that in the year ahead, we’ll move further away from the discussion on what brand safety is and focus more on how we can transact on brand-safe inventory.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Rob Rasko is a thought leader in the digital marketing industry. His venture, global digital solutions firm The 614 Group, enables results-driven client marketing efforts in the practice areas of content monetization and revenue strategy, brand safety, technology and digital systems integration, and corporate strategy.

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Author: Rob Rasko

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Law firms spamming Google My Business: Don’t trust your money or your life to them!

Last year, I wrote a piece addressed to SEO companies showing how much they were spamming Google Maps and giving the industry a bad reputation. If I worked at Google, this type of stuff would make me hate SEO companies and have no desire to help them.

Lately, I’ve been seeing this same level of spam (or worse) in the legal industry. If you’re an attorney or a marketing agency that works with attorneys, this article is for you.

Personally, if I were looking to hire an attorney and trust my money and my life to someone, the last place I would look is Google, due to my knowledge about how unreliable the information is and how fabricated the reviews are. Let’s get into some specifics.

Fake reviews

Attorneys often complain about how hard it is to get their clients to leave reviews. I get it. Someone rarely wants to publicize who they hired to help them with their divorce or admit that they had to hire a criminal lawyer. This does not, however, excuse what attorneys are doing to get reviews in spite of this.

One common trend amongst attorneys currently is review swapping. Although sites like Avvo might have sections that encourage peer reviews, they do a good job of separating them so that consumers realize they are not reviews from clients.

Google has no such distinction and is very clear in their guidelines that reviews should be about the customer experience. Attorneys you are friends with all around the country do not count as customer reviews. I say this because so far, every review that fits this scenario that I’ve reported to Google has been removed.

In addition to violations of Google’s guidelines, quid pro quo attorney review circles may violate attorney ethics rules. According to Gyi Tsakalakis, a digital marketer with a focus on law firms:

Per the ABA Model Rules, with limited exceptions, lawyers aren’t supposed to give anything of value to a person for recommending the lawyer’s services. The quid pro quo nature of some of these review circles could be construed as a violation of this rule. At the very least, these communications could be interpreted as misleading, which is also prohibited by most states’ rules of professional responsibility.

There also could be legal implications to review swapping. In addition to it being against Google’s guidelines, it could also get you in trouble with the FTC. In an article I wrote on fake reviews earlier this year, Brandon J. Huffman, attorney at Odin Law, mentioned:

The FTC looks at whether you got something of value in exchange for your review. The thing of value is usually cash or a free product of some kind, but the positive review you receive is also something of value. So, this is really no different than a typical paid-for review under the regulations. Businesses would need to disclose that they received a positive review in exchange for their positive review.

Review swaps aren’t the only thing that can get lawyers in trouble with their state Bar Associations. A variety of fake review tactics are likely to lead to sanctions, such as having your employees pose as clients to leave reviews or paying someone to write fake reviews. Indeed, many law firms are just flat-out getting fake reviews posted.

Recently, in looking at the top 20 listings that ranked for personal injury lawyers in a major city in the USA, I found eight that had fake reviews (40 percent).

Fake listings

The most common practice for attorneys who want to rank in several cities is to create listings at virtual offices. When these are reported, Google has been pretty good at removing them. However, attorneys (and their marketing companies) are getting smart at this stuff and have found ways to trick Google My Business support into thinking their fake locations are real locations.

These are also clearly false, or at least misleading, communications about the lawyer’s’ services — a clear violation of attorney ethics rules.

Fake photos

I have experienced this one many times. An attorney will submit photos on their listing that “prove” they exist there, even though the address belongs to a virtual office service provider. These photos are often:

• photoshopped.
• signs that were taped to a wall, only to be removed after the photo was taken.
• photos of a completely different location.

I actually visited an office recently that an attorney was using for a listing on Google. The photos of the signs that he posted did not exist there in real life. So he was willing to actually show up at the office and tape signs to the wall just to “show” Google that he is really at that location. There is a word we use in my circles to describe this type of thing — and it’s called lying.

As business author Stephen Covey says:

The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle. Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too.

Using other attorneys’ addresses

This is another tactic I’m seeing on the rise in the attorney world. One attorney will get another attorney to accept the postcard from Google My Business so they can get an “address” in that town. Usually, they aren’t competition and practice different types of law, so there isn’t any negative impact on either party. This is also against the guidelines, and when caught, will be removed by Google.

I’m seeing more and more videos being used as evidence on the Google My Business forum to help prove businesses don’t exist at the address they are using. User Garth O’Brien posted another clever idea as a comment on an article by Mockingbird Marketing:

I was aware of a local law firm that did this in Washington. Their competitors called up each city and pointed out that law firm had a physical presence within their city. They inquired if that law firm was paying B&O tax in each city. The law firm was not, so each city called up and asked them to fork over some tax money. That law firm quickly erased each profile for every city [where] they did not have a physical presence.

Keyword stuffing

The final tactic I see being used frequently is keyword stuffing. It’s an old trick that still works well. If you want to rank higher on Google, just shove “Best Attorney Ever City Name” into your business name field in Google My Business.

The problem is that Google will remove the keywords when they catch you. I have also seen them recently suspend a listing for an attorney who wouldn’t stop doing it. Currently, this guy has no ability to edit or control his listing on Google.

Summary

If you are sick of the spam you see in the legal industry, please to continue to report it on the Google My Business forum. I urge you not to let these people get away with the tactics they are using. Also, no matter how tempting it is — never join them!

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Joy Hawkins is a Local SEO expert who is a Google My Business Top Contributor. She regularly contributes to many online communities in the Local SEO world, including the Google My Business forum (Top Contributor), the Local Search Forum (Top Contributor), and the Local University Forum (Moderator). She is also a contributor to the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Joy is the owner of Sterling Sky in Canada and is the author of the Expert’s Guide to Local SEO, which is an advanced training manual for people wanting a detailed look at what it takes to succeed in the Local SEO space.

This marketing news is not the copyright of Scott.Services – please click here to see the original source of this article.
Author: Joy Hawkins

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Embedding images in email? Consider these 3 techniques

Images have proven to be one of the most compelling and information-dense media available to marketers today. A good image can communicate emotion, transmit knowledge and get that critical engagement leading to a purchase.

Every marketer needs to consider including images across their media, and email is no different. There is, however, a big caveat for images in email: They can be notoriously difficult to work with.

If not handled well, embedding images in an email can affect deliverability, engagement and sender reputation. Appearances in a recipient’s inbox also can change from email client to email client.

To get around these issues, it’s critical to understand the usable methods for embedding images in emails, as well as their benefits and drawbacks.

Senders today primarily have three different methods for embedding images at their disposal: CID tags, inline embedding and linked images. But before using these methods, email marketers should take a close look at how their active recipients behave with current emails.

The importance of analyzing recipient behavior before using images cannot be overstated. You will need to know what email clients to design images for, what size is optimal for these email clients, how these clients treat ALT text and how they both do and do not render images for recipients.

Analytics done? Great. Let’s jump into our first image-embedding option, the humble CID tag.

CID

CID (Content-ID) has been used for quite some time to send media via email. Though dated, it’s still a viable option.

CIDs are fairly easy to understand when it comes to email: Attach the image to the email and reference it with HTML tags in the email’s template. This embeds the image when it’s opened.

While using CIDs may sound simple, the actual process can be fairly complicated, with mixed results. For example, CIDs work well with desktop email clients, but they do not play well with browser-based email.

Additionally, embedding images in this manner increases the size of your overall email, which can hinder deliverability.

Inline embedding

Compared to CID, inline embedding is a much simpler solution to embedding images. The downside? It’s not as versatile as CID, and it shares CID’s problem with increased email size.

Inline embedding requires you have a base64 string — a type of encoding scheme — of your image. But with that encoded string, you can simply embed your image into your email through a standard HTML tag and be done. No deep dives into MIME or code are required.

However, inline embedding does not play well with webmail services and is blocked completely by Microsoft Outlook. These are likely significant chunks of your email lists, which means you’ll need to plan around inline embedding’s shortcomings if you’re to deliver images successfully.

Linked images

Finally, there are linked images. Unlike the CID and inline embedding techniques, linked images are simple to implement and light on email sizes. The one complication, however, is how many recipients you’re sending an image-laden email to.

If you’re sending an embedded image to a smallish number of recipients (a few hundred, for example), then a typical cloud hosting site like Box, Google Drive or Dropbox could help deliver that image. If you’re sending an embedded image to tens of thousands of people, however, you will need to look into a Content Delivery Network, or CDN.

CDNs essentially host your images across a network of data centers. Emails designed with an image in mind will then call on the CDN-hosted image through an embedded HTML tag. That’s it.

Linked images are simple: They keep email lightweight and allow you to make adjustments to the image through simple changes to HTML tags.

However, using linked images does present a few downsides. Namely, it requires an email to download an image from external servers, which could lead to latency issues.

Additionally, it can succumb to the same blocking issues that CID and inline embedding suffer from. So, while linked images may sound good at first glance, they may not offer any tangible benefits over the other image-embedding techniques.

Regardless of what embedding technique you use, you’ll need to have a crystal-clear understanding of who is going to look at your email and where they’ll look at it. Your design team will need to prepare and design email images for mobile, desktop and web browsers for an almost endless supply of email services.

Still, the effort to stand out from the crowd and build a stronger relationship with your recipients can be worth it.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Scott Heimes serves as Chief Marketing Officer at SendGrid, where he is responsible for the company’s brand strategy, driving demand for its solutions and leading global marketing operations. Scott oversees corporate marketing, demand generation, corporate communications, partnerships and alliances, international expansion and SendGrid’s community development team.

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Author: Scott Heimes

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My 12 most important SEO metrics to monitor

As a digital marketer, you can measure the success of your work in several ways. One of those ways is by examining key SEO metrics.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools that provide you with easy-to-read reports so you can check those metrics. Two of the best utilities, Google Search Console and Google Analytics, are not only offered for free, but most of the metrics you need to focus on can be gathered from either one of those tools.

But which metrics are the most important to track? Here are 12 that stand out from the pack.

1. Organic traffic

Organic traffic is defined as traffic you earn from appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) without paying for placement.

That’s the essence of SEO, after all. You want your site to rank for keywords related to your niche.

It’s important to track your overall organic traffic so that you can see how many people are visiting your site as a result of your SEO strategy.

By landing page

Overall organic traffic is sitewide. You also need to track organic traffic by landing page. Why? Because that’s how you can determine where you need improvement.

If you find that some pages are ranking on page 1 while others are on page 7, you know that you need to direct your SEO efforts towards those pages that are ranking poorly.

Additionally, if you’re using different SEO strategies for different pages, you’ll get an idea of which strategies work best when you compare rankings.

By location

It’s important to track where your organic traffic comes from. This is especially true if your SEO efforts are meant to target specific geographic locations or if you’re planning to expand your business into new markets.

First, you should track organic traffic by country. You might be surprised to learn that you have a strong fan base overseas. If that’s the case, then you may want to consider updating your marketing strategy to include expansion into these markets. (Time for some international SEO!)

Alternatively, if you’re seeing heavy organic traffic from countries that aren’t profitable for your business, you may want to figure out why that is. It’s possible that you may need to adjust your SEO strategy to focus more on your target countries.

Even if the vast majority of your organic traffic comes from within the US, it’s possible that your product or service appeals to people in some states more than others. The only way you can know that is by tracking organic traffic by state.

If you find that people in certain states like your brand better than people in other states, you can divert more marketing resources into those states so that you can improve sales. If states that are important to your business aren’t performing well, that may be a sign that you need to tweak your website experience to better target this audience segment.

Drilling down even further, it might be the case that your brand appeals to people in metropolitan areas. That’s why it’s good to examine organic traffic by city.

Again, allocate your resources where you’re likely to get the best ROI.

2. Organic bounce rate

The bounce rate tells you how many people “bounced” away from your site after only viewing one page. It’s measured as a percentage of visitors, with a lower number being better.

If you see that you have a high bounce rate, that may mean you need to do some on-site work to keep people around. For example, you could show links to related posts or other items of interest in the right-hand sidebar.

By landing page

It’s also a good idea to inspect the bounce rate by landing page. That way, you can see which landing pages tend to turn away visitors and which ones keep them hanging around for more.

If a landing page has a high bounce rate, that could indicate that the content on the page didn’t match the keyword the visitor plugged into the search engine. (It could also mean the person quickly found what they needed and left, so be careful here.)

3. Organic conversion rate

Remember: Organic traffic only gets people to your website — it doesn’t mean you’ve made the sale. That’s why you need to measure the conversion rate as well.

You’ll want to check your aggregate conversion rate for organic traffic. That way, you’ll get an idea of how well you’re appealing overall to people who arrive at your site from the search results. However, you’ll also want to drill down into various segments to see what factors are impacting conversion rates.

By landing page

You may wish to measure conversion rate by landing page. Why? Because conversions are usually won or lost on the page itself. If you find that one page has a much higher conversion rate than another, then that could mean one doesn’t have an effective marketing message.

By location

By tracking organic conversions by geographic location, you might find that your messaging appeals to people in specific areas. If you do find that your message resonates with people in one or more locations, follow basic principles of Business 101 and push more marketing dollars into those regions.

By device

It’s almost impossible to capture a healthy market share unless you appeal to a mobile audience. To check how well your site appeals to people on mobile devices, you need to check the conversion rate by device for organic traffic.

If you find that your conversions for desktop users are unusually higher than conversions for smartphone or tablet users, then your site probably isn’t optimized for a mobile audience. Run some tests and contact your development team to improve the mobile experience.

By browser

Your job would be a lot easier if there were only one browser and everybody used it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

That’s why you need to check conversion rate by browser for organic traffic.

If you find that people on one browser convert much higher than people on other types of browsers, that usually means that your site is user-hostile to people using those other browsers. Contact your development team and ask them to ensure that the site works across all popular browsers.

I recently worked with a client and found their site didn’t work on Samsung Galaxy phones. When we fixed it, they started making an extra $50,000 a month.

4. Top exit pages for organic traffic

Exit pages are the last pages that people visit before they leave your site. It’s important that you track the top exit pages. Why? Because those pages are probably your “problem children.”

They’re pages that cause people to lose interest in your site and go elsewhere. See what you can do to improve those pages so that visitors hang around for a little longer.

5. Breakdown of organic traffic from Bing and Google

Although Google is the most popular search engine, it’s not the only search engine. Many of your customers use Bing, too.

That’s why you should examine your organic traffic breakdown between those two search engines.

If you find that you’re not pulling in the expected traffic you think you should from one search engine or the other, it’s probably a great idea to update your SEO strategy.

I often see that people do not focus enough on Bing when looking at this report.

6. Keywords ranked in Google

You may wish to use a keyword tracking tool like SEMrush to determine the total number of keywords for which your site ranks in Google. Once you know what keywords your site is ranking for, there are numerous ways you can use that data to inform your SEO strategy.

Take note of which keywords you want to rank for but aren’t yet — these are the keywords you may want to focus on in your SEO campaigns.

It’s also a good idea to capitalize on your existing success. If you find that your site ranks in the top 10 for some high-converting keywords, continue using those keywords in your content marketing campaigns to ensure that you stay there. Your top-ranking keywords are likely bringing you the most traffic, so make sure that the landing pages associated with those keywords are relevant to keep your bounce rate low.

7. Local visibility

If your business has one or more physical locations that local customers can visit directly, it’s very important that you keep track of your local visibility.

Specifically, is your site appearing in the local 3-pack for keywords related to your niche? Is it appearing when people type the name of your town or city plus the name of your industry? If not, it’s time to work on some local SEO.

8. Click-through rate (CTR)

Google Search Console offers a Search Analytics report that shows the average percentage of people who click on one of your links after seeing it in the search results. That percentage is called the click-through rate (CTR). It’s a stat you should pay attention to because it tells you more than just how well your pages rank in the SERPs. It also tells you how much the content appeals to people.

If people like what they see of your content in the search results, they’ll click the link. If not, they’ll move on to another result.

By landing page

Examining CTR by landing page will show you your money-makers from an SEO perspective. Those are the pages that get the most attention from the search results.

You should also look at the pages with the lowest CTRs and optimize them.

By top keywords

Another stat to check is the CTR of your top search terms in Google Search Console. If you see that a term is getting you a lot of clicks, you should determine which pages are ranking for those keywords and ensure that your page content accurately reflects searcher intent. It might be a good idea to test conversion optimization elements on these pages, too.

On the flip side, if you observe a low CTR for a valuable search term, you should look at the page(s) optimized for that term and find out why. It might be that the title or description associated with the page isn’t relevant or enticing.

9. Pages indexed in Google Search Console

One thing is certain: Nobody is going to find a webpage in the search results if it isn’t indexed. That’s why you need to pay attention to the number of pages on your website that have been indexed.

If you find that it takes an unusually long time for your pages to get indexed, you can always submit them manually using the Crawl>Fetch as Google option in the Search Console.

You should also take note of how many pages are indexed relative to how many pages have been submitted. Again, if you find that a small percentage of your submitted pages are indexed, you might need to manually request indexing via the Search Console.

10. Pages crawled per day

The Google Search Console will also show you how many pages have been crawled every day for the last 90 days.

If you have thousands of pages, and only a small percentage of them are getting crawled, that could point to a problem with your crawl budget. Google won’t crawl your entire site if it looks like its bot will consume too many of your system resources in doing so.

11. Duplicate titles and descriptions

You can also use Google Search Console to check the number of duplicate titles and descriptions on your site. As a rule of thumb, duplicate content is a no-no. When multiple pages have the same title tags and meta descriptions, that tells search engines that all those pages are about the same topic; this can dilute your topical authority and limit your ability to rank well for those terms.

If you find that you’ve got duplicate content on your site, it’s a good idea to update it so that it’s unique or block it.

12. Crawl errors

Google Search Console also provides you with crawl errors. Although the default report shows sitewide errors, you can also use a filter to view errors by segment. Any crawl errors you find should be addressed right away.

Follow your SEO metrics closely

I find it fascinating how many SEO metrics there really are. And the ones I mentioned here are just the start.

The longer I work in digital marketing, the more I learn. I encourage you to really dive deep into your analytics and get good at determining which data is most helpful for measuring SEO success.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, a digital marketing teacher at the University of California San Diego and author of the book Digital Influencer, A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online. Throughout his career, Lincoln has worked with hundreds of websites, ranging from start-ups to household names, and has won awards in SEO, CRO, analytics and Social Media. In the media, Lincoln has been featured on sites such as Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. Magazine, CIO magazine and more.

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Report: Google to reabsorb Nest to better compete with Amazon in smart home market

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google is considering bringing its smart home device unit, Nest, back under the Google umbrella. Nest was acquired in January 2014 for roughly $3.2 billion.

Nest became part of Google’s “other bets” when the company formed Alphabet in 2015 and separated its other lines of business. In its most recent earnings report, the company said that “other bets” collectively brought in $302 million (vs. $197 million a year ago). Analysts believe a meaningful chunk of that belongs to Nest.

The rationale behind the potential reintegration is that the Nest team and Google teams could work more closely to develop more tightly integrated products. In addition, there are manufacturing and distribution synergies from the recombination.

The analyst consensus is that Nest has underperformed relative to its potential and early promise. It’s now just one among many dozens of home automation companies. But as Google pushes Google Home as the gateway to smart home automation, it makes considerable sense to sell a larger array of devices.

Consumer Intelligence Research Partners has found that ownership of Google Home and Echo devices triggers other smart home purchases by consumers:

The growth in smart home devices has promoted the connected accessory market. In home lighting, more than 70% of Amazon Echo and Google Home owners with smart lighting in their home, report purchasing the system after owning an Echo or Home device. Over 80% of smart thermostat users reported installing and setting up their connected accessories themselves. Over 70% of smart door lock and smoke detector systems report using Echo or Home to control the system.

Nest was Google’s second-largest purchase after Motorola’s consumer hardware division ($12.5 billion), which was eventually sold to Lenovo. Earlier this year, Google got back into that business, buying HTC’s smartphone unit for more than $1 billion.

Consumer surveys reflect that Amazon Echo and related devices control about 70 percent of the US smart speaker market today. Smart speakers are just the entry point and first round in the larger battle for home automation.

I would speculate that if the reintegration of Nest happens, we’ll probably see the Nest brand disappear over time. The Google brand is much stronger.

About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.

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Author: Greg Sterling

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Google book search now includes audiobook results

Google has added an audiobook option to its book search feature.

Now, if you search for a specific book title, the Google book search feature includes an “Audiobook” button under the “Get Book” tab that will display different audiobook platforms offering the title.

The book search update was announced via the following tweet:

To actually listen to the audiobook, users must select their preferred audiobook app.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

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LaterPay offers first paywall platform for AMP pages

AMP (accelerated mobile pages) is designed to deliver publishers’ pages quickly on mobile devices, but the stripped-down format lacks functionality in some areas.

This week, the German-Swiss online payment infrastructure provider LaterPay is releasing what it says is the first AMP-enabled paywall and subscription platform, called AMP Access.

While there are other custom solutions, such as from The Washington Post, LaterPay CEO and founder Cosmin Ene told me he is unaware of any other out-of-the-box offering.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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Author: Barry Levine

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Facebook halts advertisers from using targeting to exclude racial groups

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Facebook is disabling some ad-targeting options because it’s been revealed how those those options can be used to discriminate against people.

First, some backstory. A little over a year ago, Facebook came under fire for enabling advertisers to skirt federal housing laws and use its quasi-racial ad-targeting options to discriminate against people based on ethnicity (African American, Asian American and Hispanic). Then, earlier this year, Facebook said that it would institute a system to reject housing-, employment- or credit-related ads that exclude racial groups. However, last week, ProPublica revealed that system to be porous. In response, Facebook is temporarily disabling advertisers from using its multicultural affinity ad targeting options to exclude people in those segments from seeing an ad.

“ProPublica recently found that safeguards we put in place earlier this year were not as comprehensive as they should have been. This was a failure in our enforcement. We must do better,” said Facebook’s VP of ads growth and solutions Rob Goldman in an emailed statement.

But here’s the thing. It was clear back when Facebook announced those safeguards that they were not comprehensive. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

When the system is finally in place, it won’t be impermeable. It will be like a road work section along a highway, with signs telling drivers to slow down, that penalties are doubled but that can’t physically slow down a driver until a cop pulls them over. In Facebook’s case, the system will show alerts at different points in the ad-buying process. If the Page buying the ad is categorized as a housing page, for example, when that advertiser clicks to begin creating an ad an alert will appear informing them of Facebook’s policy. Same if and when the advertiser opts to use an ethnic affinity targeting option.

If the advertiser doesn’t heed Facebook’s warnings and Facebook’s automated approval system isn’t able to recognize any violations in the ad, then the ad can still be shown to people, and it will be up to those people to recognize if the ad is discriminatory and flag it to Facebook.

It was ProPublica, not Facebook, that found the ongoing flaws in the system. Now that the inadequacy of Facebook’s system has been revealed, the company is reviewing its ad-targeting options for the second time in almost as many months.

In addition to disabling brands from using its multicultural affinity targeting for exclusion targeting, Facebook is reviewing how its portfolio of ad-targeting options can be used to exclude “other potentially sensitive segments (e.g., segments that relate to the LGBTQ community or to religious groups),” according to Goldman’s statement.

Facebook will also require advertisers “to certify that they understand our anti-discrimination policies and the law when using multicultural affinity segments for inclusion on ads on Facebook. These self-certification measures will be introduced over the next several weeks,” said Goldman. Now to wait to see if Facebook’s latest attempt to mitigate this misuse — which sounds a lot like its earlier attempt — is sufficient.

About The Author

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.

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Safe or Risky SEO: How Dangerous Is It REALLY to Change Your Article Dates? by @ab80

Fresh content is a powerful currency when it comes to search.

Not only does fresh content keep your brand relevant and help you engage with your audience’s current interests and pain points, but ever since Google’s Freshness update, the more recent and relevant your content is, the better it’s likely to rank in SERPs.

But what about the appearance of freshness? What happens when a website tweaks old content or changes the date on an article from 2014 to today? What are the SEO benefits – and the consequences?

Most importantly, how do you keep “evergreen content” – content that’s meant to withstand the test of time – current and relevant year after year?

In this article, I’ll answer these questions by examining how key influencers in the SEO and digital marketing industry treat date stamps, and I’ll discuss my strategy for combating outdated content.

Why Might You Change Article Dates?

Conrad O’Connell, digital marketing strategist and consultant, has recently encountered an interesting “fake freshness” case.  He noticed a discrepancy between the date on one of Airbnb’s property listings and the number of reviews it had received.

Specifically, a cabin listing stamped with the current date had somehow accrued more than 5 million reviews.

Airbnb’s property listing with date discrepancy

Upon further examination, it appears that various Airbnb pages auto-generate fake dates that roughly correspond to the last time Google crawled them.

The benefit of changing article dates like this is subtle, and it doesn’t obviously improve your SEO (the date listed in your SERP meta description won’t inherently impact your freshness).

Instead, what date manipulation does is appeal to user bias. Users are naturally drawn to the most current, up-to-date information, and there’s a good chance that a user who sees a cabin listing from 2012 and another from 2017 in their SERPs will click the most recent result.

Conrad confirms that he’s seen some pages with a CTR as high as 55 percent after a simple update to the month and year in their title tag. And, date manipulation in SERP meta descriptions isn’t currently penalized, this benefit comes at little personal risk.

The deceitfulness of the date manipulation did leave some people wondering, however:

Will Changing Article Dates Impact Your SEO Negatively?

While changing dates in article snippets seemed like a shortcut to higher CTR, it leaves one wondering about the potential future ramifications. After all, just because date manipulation isn’t currently penalized doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future.

Jennifer Slegg from TheSEMPost shared my concerns. In October 2017, she asked Google’s Gary Illyes whether auto-generating dates might have consequences, such as triggering Google’s spam filter:

“From our perspective, from Core Ranking perspective, I’d like to believe that in some way that will hurt you.  At least from, let’s say, we will not believe your dates anymore.

Typically when you search something, especially if it is newsy content, or your query is newsy, then I found that those date bylines in the search results can be very helpful in determining if it is relevant to your query – the result – or not.

Imagine if you were a news publisher and suddenly your byline dates would be gone overnight because we believe you were abusing them, you probably don’t want that.  So I would advise against that.”

The answer seems to be that while you might get away with changing a date a few times, there could certainly be consequences down the road. Consequences could even include the complete removal of dates for your site, which would be a huge blow to news sites.

Furthermore, ShoutMeLoud’s Harsh Agrawal published a recent case study, the results of which seem to contradict Conrad’s findings that recent dates always improve CTR.

While Harsh’s blog posts have always included a “last updated” tag, he has typically not included dates in his site’s snippets. Upon the reintroduction of snippet dates, his blog traffic dropped by almost 40 percent.

Despite the fact that dates should enhance user experience, snippet dates had a significant negative influence on ShoutMeLoud’s keyword ranking and blog traffic and only removing the dates allowed him to recover in SERPs.

How Do You Safely Keep Your Content Fresh?

Keeping your content fresh has little to do with the date on your article, at least as far as Google’s concerned.

There are many factors that affect freshness, including the:

  • Frequency of your updates.
  • Amount of content changed.
  • Rate of new link growth.

The date an article is published is only one of these factors.

 In other words, what really matters is the quality additions you’ve made to an existing page.

There are three main strategies for breathing fresh life into your old content, and all of them hinge on one simple principle: your content needs to be timeless, relevant, and valuable.

 1. Use the Same URL but Refresh the Date

The most common strategy you’ll see is to add even more value to posts that were proven top performers. Typically you do this either by supplementing the article’s original publication date with a “last updated” date stamp or an updated date beneath it.

Search Engine Journal uses this strategy, so I reached out to Danny Goodwin, SEJ’s Executive Editor, to learn what makes this strategy so effective:

“Search Engine Journal has been around since 2003 and published thousands of posts through the years. In an industry that moves as quickly as SEO and digital marketing, information can quickly become outdated – sometimes in as little as a year or sometimes even a few months.

Outdated information is bad for users – which will reflect back on you as a brand/business. If you have a post ranking #1 that was written in 2013, it makes perfect sense to update it.

Like cars, content typically loses value as time goes by. Traffic declines. And if you’re ranking well, those rankings tend to go away as fresher and more up to date (or more thorough) content is published by your competitors.

Here’s one example. When I was editing for Search Engine Watch, we had a popular post, How to Use HTML Meta Tags. I believe it was originally written in 2005 (if not earlier), ranked number one at the time, and typically drove more than 1,000 pageviews to the site every day.

But by 2012, it needed a refresh. SEO had changed quite a bit in those many years. We kept the title, URL, and changed everything else. After republishing (maintaining the same URL), it maintained its top spot and in fact surged for a while.

Here’s another example. Over the years, SEJ had published probably 4-5 posts about optimizing your URL structure. None of them were driving much traffic, and all of them had been published at least five years ago.

So, earlier this year, one of our authors rewrote it, turning it into a comprehensive post on the topic, 8 SEO Tips to Optimize Your URL Structure. After publishing, our developer 301 redirected all the old/outdated posts to the new post.

The final result: Traffic increased by 8x!

seo friendly url post - analytics screenshot

While all these posts existed before, we updated them. That included the publication date. I would never recommend just changing dates for the heck of it – you need to make some significant changes.

Also, with Google showing dates posts were published in the SERPs, I can pretty much guarantee you that will impact which post searchers will click on. If I have the choice of reading content published in 2017 that ranks #3 or something published in 2011 that ranks #1, I often find myself clicking on the newer result. Most of us humans are biased toward the ‘new.’”

2. Add Live Updates to a Single Page

Another strategy that’s been gaining steam in recent years is to publish news as it happens, by updating a single page with live coverage. On these pages, you’ll typically time stamp each new entry as you post them.

Examples of this type of post include FiveThirtyEight’s live coverage of the U.S. elections in March 2016 and the BBC’s live coverage of the solar eclipse in August 2017.

live updates

Live updating a single page and time stamping each new addition to the page is also one of the methods Illyes recommended to Slegg – in addition to adding an updated date to old articles:

“I know that especially the news team are working with lots of news publishers, for example the BBC, on trying to figure out how to put content online that is better for the users, and BBC has these very interesting live coverage pages and basically they just time stamp every single addition to the page – that works too.”

3. Create New Landing Pages with Distinct URLs

At the SEO PowerSuite blog, we use a third method to refresh valuable, old content.

When we find a blog post that’s in need of an update, and we can see that it’s performed well in the past, we prefer to create a new landing page altogether. That means creating a new URL that shares some of the same content, with extra added value for our users.

We then specify to Google that the new page’s URL is canonical, to avoid posting duplicate content. A crucial final step is to support the new page in social media.

Conclusion

My own preference is not to change article dates. But naturally the path you choose is up to you. No matter which strategy you choose, you need to remember that not every article is worth updating.

The best types of content to breathe more life into are those that are evergreen – content that is just as relevant now as it was when you first published it. The content should also be detailed enough to have resonated with your audience when it was first published, and there should be enough new, helpful information about that topic to add new value without derailing your original article’s subject.

And, just as you would with any other new article, don’t forget to encourage new social shares. Use social media to tell your users that you’ve updated your content, and actively engage with them through social media and your comments section to keep them interested in your update. That’s the best way to ensure your content stays fresh.

More SEO & Content Resources Here:

Image Credits

Featured Image and In-Post screenshots: Created by Aleh Barysevich, November 2017.

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Author: Aleh Barysevich

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