Tag: Search
The Search Engine Watch Top 5!
First, congratulations on surviving 2022, you’ve done great! 2022 was surprising, unique, and a challenging mix of several global events that kept us on our toes as consumers, brands, and search marketing professionals. The recession, great resignation, a war, FIFA finale, and several silent battles we all fought by ourselves.
As we recap the year gone by, let’s look at the world through the lens of search, SEO, analytics, and content creation.
2022 has been about…
- Looking at your consumers as human beings and not just data sets
- Understanding how your target consumers perceive the world and how they experience life in a digital age
- Tailoring and testing your strategies to meet consumers in their moment of need – all without losing budget (or your sanity!)
- Finding most-effective tools, technologies, and talent to navigate business uncertainty
We present to you the #SEWTop5
A countdown of editor’s picks that the Search Engine Watch community loved and found great value in!
#5. Understanding the three awareness stages of your online audience
Businesses often forget that success metrics aren’t just numbers – they are living, breathing people who are driven by behavior and emotions. As customer journeys continued to remain complex and multifaceted, businesses competed to ensure they were at the finish line when prospects were ready to convert.
Add People’s Content Operations Lead, Jack Bird created a guide on harnessing a content strategy that caters to consumers and their journeys. He detailed the three key awareness stages of online traffic, what type of content fits these stages, and how to audit your existing content.
#4. A must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers
Did you know, 98% of US-based websites aren’t accessible? This year web accessibility moved out of the shadows and took center stage as one of Google’s search ranking factors – making the topic itself more accessible to discussions. Marketers could no longer ignore this critical aspect, because –
Stellar user experience >> Positive brand perception >> Greater appeal to value-driven consumers = Good for business
Web design and marketing specialist, Atul Jindal created a must-have web accessibility checklist for digital marketers. It went beyond dispelling “what is web accessibility?” and spoke about its benefits and action points on “how to make your website accessible?”.
#3. Google Analytics 4: drawbacks and limitations—is it worth sticking around?
On July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics properties stopped processing new hits, forcing users to switch to its successor, Google Analytics 4. This transition demanded SEOs and marketers to have a steep learning curve and adaptability since the shift meant losing some historic data.
This article dove into the issues with Google Analytics 4 from a user perspective and a privacy and compliance standpoint. Objective, hard-hitting observations helped inform SEOs and marketers’ decisions before switching platforms.
#2. The not-so-SEO checklist for 2022
While most of the internet focused on “what to do”, we took an offbeat path of “what not to do” that will help your SEO succeed from the get-go.
Best-selling author and SEW Advisory Board Member, Kristopher (Kris) Jones dispelled some major myths surrounding Core Web Vitals (CWV) and Google’s bigger, mainstream 2021 updates.
As an especially interesting, strategy-focused read, this was one SEOs could not miss before designing their 2022 strategy.
#1. Seven Google alerts SEOs need to stay on top of everything!
We as SEOs and marketers often forget that while we focus on consumers and clients, we too are humans – with limited energy (we mean coffee supply), 24 hours (wish we had more), and sleep deprivation (yes we mean sleep deprivation). As burnout crept in and to-do lists climbed, our very own Ann Smarty shared seven Google alerts that aimed at making life easier for SEOs.
These smart ways helped the community get ahead of competition, prevent a reputation crisis, fix a traffic drop, and do much more (without getting overwhelmed).
We hope you enjoyed this! Thank you for being valuable supporters throughout our journey.
Team Search Engine Watch wishes everyone a happy new year! Keep spreading the love and SEO wisdom.
*Ranked on target audience engagement, time on page, and bounce rate.
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The post The Search Engine Watch Top 5! appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Google market pulse for search marketers
30-second summary:
- Google is always testing new spots on the page for SERP components
- In simple terms, the #1 position in organic or paid ads does not guarantee that your paid ad listing will be visible without scrolling
- Organic position #1 reported by Google Search Console is not the actual position 1 on page
- A lot of anomalies and assumptions impact your paid and organic clicks – is there a smart way to counter this problem?
- Leading advisor and performance marketing expert, Prasanna Dhungel unravels four key insights marketers to maximize performance marketing initiatives in 2023
Over the last two decades, Google’s search engine results page (SERP) has evolved a lot. The Google SERP, which once only had organic listings now features dynamic paid ads and other organic SERP components as well.
Currently, Google SERP has many organic features like –
- People also ask (PAA),
- Popular products,
- featured snippets,
- Google MAP,
- image packs,
- videos,
- Tweets, and many more that I believe we are just scratching the surface of
Paid features currently seen on Google SERP are –
- Shopping ads,
- text ads, and
- MAP local search ads
These are some paid features advertisers should not ignore if they want to build better advertising and content strategies for maximum search marketing ROI.
Google varies the composition of SERP by keyword, geography, time of day, and device. Google is testing new spots on the page for SERP components. What does all this mean, you may ask? In simple terms, the #1 position in organic or paid ads does not guarantee that your listing will be visible without scrolling. It means that an organic position #1 reported by Google Search Console is not actual position 1 on the page. So, you have a much lower CTR than you expect, and all these impact your paid and organic clicks.
With this dynamic nature of SERP, search marketers must understand the SERP landscape and their brand’s true rank on Google vs competition. This view will enable search marketers to deploy the right paid and SEO tactics to maximize visibility and clicks.
Based on my experience and understanding of the dynamic SERP, here are four key insights marketers should focus on to maximize their performance marketing initiatives.
1. Analyze the composition of SERP for your keywords
Marketers must understand SERP features visible for their keywords. The graph below suggests that along with organic, SERP features like PAA and popular products are taking significant real estate for “apparel” and “accessories” keywords. Search marketers that are not targeting these components will miss acquiring customers in different stages of their buying journey that are clicking on People Also Ask.
2. Monitor emerging and contracting SERP features
Marketers must understand new SERP features that have appeared and are getting popular for their keyword traffic. This helps develop a long-term advertising and content plan that targets popular SERP features.
In the last quarter, we identified Map Local Search Ads and App Install (in mobile devices) SERP features appearing in the “apparel” and “accessories” keywords. We saw growth in the popularity of PAA and popular products across many keyword groups.
3. Keep track of above-the-fold SERP features
Understanding the SERP features visible above-the-fold real estate is critical. These insights will help marketers understand the dynamics of rising and falling SERP click-through rates. You may wonder why the clicks are declining even though your average position reported on Google Reports is improving. Such questions can be answered with true ad position in SERP.
As shown in the below graph, the usual organic component in this keyword landscape has lower above-the-fold coverage compared to SERP features like PAA and popular products.
Insights like these help marketers understand the fastest gateway to the first page above the fold position. Marketers can build a holistic search strategy to correctly allocate their search marketing budget across organic and paid SERP features.
4. Monitor competitor’s through SERP features
Google is an ultra-competitive channel. You have many domains appear on Google SERP from aggregators to publishers to actual competitors of your business model. To build the right marketing tactics -it is imperative to understand the top domains by SERP features, their competitive tactics, and the SERP landscape changes.
From planning link building to acquiring secondary traffic to improving authority score to crafting advertising and content strategies – SERP-driven insights like these help you maximize search advertising performance.
Additionally, monitoring your top emerging competitors’ tactics across SERP formats allows you to timely optimize your advertising campaigns. As shown in the graph below, Amazon has tremendously improved its Google Shopping Ads Share of Voice from May to July 2022.
When brands like this are heavily advertising in a category, marketers will need to advertise products in categories Amazon is not aggressively pushing and come back when Amazon advertising slows down.
Conclusion
Google is increasingly sharing less data. Google ad data doesn’t show advertisers which low impressions may be appearing and creeping up on your CPCs. Google search console data doesn’t show true rank, and the organic rank shared isn’t representative of the actual location on the page.
Going into 2023, it is imperative for search marketers to use SERP-driven insights to gain an edge in their performance marketing campaigns.
Prasanna Dhungel co-founded and runs GrowByData, which powers performance marketing for leading brands such as Crocs and top agencies like Merkle. GrowByData offers marketing intelligence for search, marketplace, and product management to win new revenue, boost marketing performance and manage brand compliance.
Prasanna also advises executives, board & investors on data strategy, growth, and product. He has advised leading firms such as Melinda & Bill Gates Foundation, Athena Health, and Apellis Pharma.
Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.
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The post Google market pulse for search marketers appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Balancing paid and organic search strategies for optimum success
30-second summary:
- Even though it is evident that SEO and PPC are great tools, these two disciplines work in silos
- In fact, these teams and channels mostly work on their own in silos and are often handled separately
- Accenture Song’s SEO Manager, Michael McManus discusses how businesses can combine paid and organic SEO to function as one value-add unit
SEO and PPC are a must-have in your arsenal when planning your marketing strategy. Depending on what they are looking to do, most companies tend to choose one over the other, if they are looking to increase their rankings and get traffic from organic search, then they will go with SEO, whereas PPC focuses on getting instant “paid for” traffic from such areas as search, social, and display.
Both SEO and PPC are great tools to boost your site/brand’s authority as well as help generate more traffic and sales for your business. But these two teams/channels tend to work on their own in silos and are often handled separately.
Now while both of these options can and do work well on their own, having both teams work together can be a powerful strategy for any business. Instead of working apart and potentially fighting for budget, time, resources, and rankings. By bringing both departments together so that they can collaborate and work as one, they will benefit from different insights and learnings that they would otherwise not get on their own. These insights will allow them to produce amazing results in both campaigns.
These two marketing channels aren’t meant to operate independently, yet that is the case almost every single time. But instead of looking at both channels as separate entities and you bring them together, you’ll see that they can help you achieve better results across the board than having them work on their own.
The data and insights that you can get from PPC campaigns are extremely insightful and powerful. When you take that data and combine it with your SEO strategies, it will give you the insights that you can use to create content that will make a big difference to your organic search traffic.
Balancing organic and paid search strategies for optimum success is a key challenge and lots of businesses need to catch up as they are typically only using one of these strategies.
How SEO and PPC can work together to boost your business
Along with large amounts of keyword and conversion insights that SEO can use by working with PPC, another huge benefit that companies can achieve when they bring both SEO and PPC together is the potential to consume a large portion of the SERPs, where they can showcase ads at the top of the page while owning the organic listings below.
This is something that shouldn’t be overlooked as it gives you more chances to capture the user, who might be looking for your brand or something that your brand has to offer. For example, let’s say you are running PPC and SEO campaigns separately and a user does a search and your ad appears, but they skip over it and go right to the organic listings but you are not showing up for that particular search, you are potentially missing out on capturing that user.
So now if you are using both PPC and SEO together and you use your PPC data to gather insights as to what the users were and are searching for, where your ads are showing, but not your organic listings. You can then take that data and start to create great content for those terms and optimize your site for that phase of the user’s journey. Now you can potentially have your site’s PPC ads showing at the top of the page as well as your site showing up below those ads in the organic results. This means that if a searcher were to skip over your ad and go directly to the organic results, your site will also be listed there winning you greater brand discovery.
Bringing both PPC and SEO together and working side by side, and taking over the SERPs for a given keyword will not only allow you with getting more exposure than what you would get if you only used SEO or PPC, but you now also increase the visibility of your site and the chances that a user will click over to your site.
Another added benefit from combining both SEO and PPC and taking over the SERPS is that users, searchers, and potential customers are more likely to see value and trust in a brand that is well represented across the SERPs.
If you were able to help guide and encourage users to click through to your site, wouldn’t that be an effort worth the implementation?
Getting SEO and PPC to work for you
Well, you might be asking yourself “ok great now I know that I need to have both SEO and PPC work as one, how do I go about this?”
Here are some practical tips to have both SEO and PPC work together.
Keywords
Keywords are important to both SEO and PPC as each one is reliant on them to help with creating the proper content for each strategy. They are both going to want to target the proper and relevant keywords in order to show up in the SERPs when a user is searching for information, shopping, looking for a brand, etc.
Using the keyword data and insights from your PPC campaigns and providing that information to your SEO team, will allow them to then create content that a user is searching for and thus be able to be in front of the customer throughout their journey.
Creating ads
Paid social media ads as well as retargeting ads are a great way for you to get your content shared across different platforms that will help with getting backlinks that will help your site’s content rank organically. While this is happening, you can create retargeting ads that will help to capture users’ attention once they have left your site.
PPC data
As we mentioned earlier, PPC campaign data has a plethora of information that you can use to help create highly targeted content to help get your site’s pages to rank organically. From your PPC campaigns, you’ll be able to see things like keyword search data, impressions, CTR, and so much more.
This will allow you to better optimize your site’s content and create content that might be missing, as well as help with creating highly targeted and optimized page titles and descriptions.
Conclusion
It’s no longer about SEO vs PPC anymore, or at least it shouldn’t be after reading this article. Now that you are aware of the potential benefits of combing both your PPC and SEO efforts, it’s time to go out and implement this new strategy.
Armed with all the data that you have at your fingertips from your PPC campaigns, use this new data and insights to help with creating better SEO strategies, that will give you a competitive advantage and help you with reaching your customers at every step of their journey.
It’s time to stop treating SEO and PPC as silos and time to bring them together so that your site can benefit from the added data and insights so that your site can dominate the SERPs.
Remember SEO and PPC are each other’s most powerful tools.
Michael McManus is SEO Manager at Accenture Song. Michael has hands-on expertise in branding strategies, website structure/architecture and development, SEO strategies, and online marketing campaigns.
Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.
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5 Steps to Perform Voice Search Optimization For Your Content
So, you’ve created some blinding content. Now you need to get it read. How do you go about this? The traditional search route is to think of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and insert some keywords, not forgetting to mention the product a lot. For instance, if your business is all about Databricks Hadoop connector matters, you’ll need to reference this a fair amount on your site.
So far, so obvious.
When it comes to voice search, though, some slightly different thinking is needed. This variety of search has become so commonplace now that anyone wanting to get their content found will be wise to give it some consideration. Consequently, we’ll look at voice search and offer an easy-to-follow method for achieving better prominence for your content.
Voice Search – What’s It All About?
Voice search has become super-popular as a means of searching the internet. How popular? Well, statistics show that over 70% of people prefer using voice search to typing. The driving force behind this transformation is the rise of virtual assistants. The resulting growth in voice search-driven eCommerce is startling.
Voice search is set to become even more popular as more people buy smart speakers and other voice assistants, and will likely see a major increase in use once the Internet of Things really gets going and smart devices proliferate. As a result, it makes sense to consider voice search optimization when thinking about internet visibility.
So, let’s see how you can put this optimization into practice.
1. Conversational Language
The need to adopt a less formal tone has made inroads into content creation, especially in areas such as email copywriting. It’s even more important when considering generating content for voice search.
Voice search queries tend to be phrased more conversationally than their written counterparts. So, search terms might be “vegan shoes Baltimore” in a typed search but will be more likely to be “Where can I get vegan shoes in Baltimore?” when it comes to a verbal query.
Start by listing all the conversational queries a voice search user might employ when searching in your area. For example, “Where can I find vegan brogues in Baltimore center?” and “Show me where there’s a vegan boot shop in Baltimore.”
If you run out of queries quite quickly, do what a sensible person does: Try Google. Put one of the above queries in, and then go to where it says, “People also ask for…”. And then grab the suggestions.
Then, when you’re formulating your content, stop repeatedly to ask yourself, “what kind of query does this material answer?”. Keep this in mind, and you’ll be tailoring your content to be what people are looking for, i.e. answers to questions. Use question keywords and long-tail keywords. This is a good technique to appeal to all searchers.
Moreover, keep the writing tone conversational, and you’ll score big with the voice searchers we’ve been talking about.
2. Know Your Customer
You should have a clear idea of who’s most likely to be interested in your site and angle your content to appeal to them. This is a fairly standard practice in commerce—any lead generation database will use this principle.
However, with voice search optimization, it’s doubly important as the natural language they use when speaking can vary between population segments.
It can be fairly nebulous. It might simply be that you probably appeal to a younger demographic, for instance. In which case, imagine you’re reading out the content to a room full of teens. Are they starting to look a bit bored? Best pep it up a bit with some concise answers and maybe some humor.
Think about the expertise of your customer too. If they’re likely to have some expertise on subjects like Azure data lake cost, then you don’t want to be too elementary in tone.
The more you remember who’s likely to want to access your site, the more likely your site is to be accessed. This a simple point, but a very important one.
3. Emphasize Local
Local’s huge in the voice search world.
What this means for you is that you need to maximize your local findability. In other words, highlight your business locations (should your business have a brick-and-mortar presence, of course). Start by attending to your Google Business Profile listing. Make sure that the business listing information is correct and up to date.
Then go through your content and take the opportunities where they arise to mention your location.
Again, think of what questions people will ask when they’re on the lookout for a local supplier, and key into those phrases.
4. Think fast
It should go without saying that you need a site with speed. The more you lag, the more you lose.
The internet is built on speed and convenience, and users are becoming more and more accustomed to high performance. They don’t want to hang around for ages while a site that may or may not contain what they need struggles to make its wheezy way down to their device.
It’s even more the case with voice searches. People conducting a voice query may be out and about and perhaps multi-tasking. They need a quick answer.
So, make sure you trim the site for speedy performance. This includes getting rid of large images and other factors that can slow things down.
5. Mobile-Friendly
The final step that we’ll look at here is to think about how your site looks and behaves with mobile searches. This is because a considerable proportion of voice search devices are mobiles.
The best way to deal with the demands of mobile devices is to make your site design responsive. This means that it takes into account the device that’s being used to access the site and changes its design accordingly. What was large and landscape on a laptop must be compact and portrait on a mobile device.
Since 2019, being mobile-friendly has impacted a site’s Google ranking, so it makes all kinds of sense to accommodate mobiles into your site design and make the mobile user experience as great as it can be.
Conclusion
Some of the steps to voice search optimization aren’t that dissimilar to standard SEO. However, there are differences there, some large, some small. Pay attention to these, and you’ll soon have voice SEO to shout about.
The post 5 Steps to Perform Voice Search Optimization For Your Content first appeared on PPC Hero.
Are these SEO rookie mistakes costing your search rankings?
30-second summary:
- SEO has increasingly become a key area of practice for businesses to gain visibility, however, if done wrong can stagnate or even sabotage your online visibility
- From optimizing your website for the wrong keywords to putting too many keywords in the meta keywords tag or creating lots of similar doorway pages
- We have listed the most common SEO mistakes to avoid and be future-ready
Through SEO, marketers can improve their websites’ rankings in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) and thus reach top results.
While doing SEO, however, there are some common SEO mistakes to keep away from. In case of committing any of these mistakes, marketers might end up harming their search ranking and reputation.
Below are seven of the common mistakes that you must avoid.
SEO Mistake #1: Optimizing your site for the wrong keywords
The first step in any search engine optimization campaign is to choose the right keywords for which you should optimize your site. If you initially choose the wrong keywords, all the time and effort that you devote to trying to get your site a high ranking will go down the drain. What good will the top rankings do if you choose keywords which no one searches for, or if you choose keywords which won’t bring in targeted traffic to your site?
The good news is that there are some warning signs that say you’re maybe optimizing for the wrong keywords. Amongst these, we find the following:
- Having little to no organic visibility
- Having high impressions with a low click-through rate
- Experiencing a high Bounce Rate or a low time on page
According to Neil Patel, an SEO expert, and co-founder of Crazy Egg and Hello Bar:
If you go about optimizing site content for every keyword you can think of, chances are, you won’t rank highly in search engine results pages.
Worse, you’ll experience a high bounce rate, because search engine users who eventually find your web site will leave without doing anything that you want them to do.
….In fact, not optimizing site content for the right keywords will cripple your search engine rankings.
SEO Mistake #2: Putting too many keywords in the meta keywords tag
We often see sites that have hundreds of keywords listed in the meta keywords tag, in the hope that will get a high ranking for those keywords.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to popular opinion, the meta keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. Google does not use keyword meta tags directly in its rankings.
Hence, just by listing keywords in the meta keywords tag, you will never be able to get a high ranking. Since there is no correlation between the keywords you stuff into a Meta tag and your search engine rank. To get a high ranking for those keywords, you need to naturally add the keywords to the actual body content on page.
SEO Mistake #3: Repeating the same keyword too many times
Another common mistake that people make is to endlessly repeat their target keywords in the body of their pages and in their meta keywords tags.
Because so many people have used this tactic in the past (and continue to use it), the search engines keep a sharp lookout for this and may penalize a site that repeats keywords in this fashion.
Sure, you do need to repeat the keywords a number of times. But, the way you place the keywords in your pages needs to make grammatical sense. Simply repeating the keywords endlessly no longer works. Furthermore, a particular keyword should not ideally be present more than thrice in your Meta Keywords tag.
SEO Mistake #4: Creating lots of similar doorway pages
Another myth prevalent among people is that since the algorithm of each search engine is different, they need to create different pages for different search engines. While this is great in theory, it is counter-productive in practice.
If you use this tactic, you will soon end up with hundreds of pages, which can quickly become an administrative nightmare. Also, just imagine the amount of time you will need to spend constantly updating the pages in response to the changes that the search engines make to their algorithms.
Furthermore, although the pages are meant for different engines, they will actually end up being pretty similar to each other. Search engines are often able to detect when a site has created similar pages and may penalize or even ban this site from their index.
According to Google,
“…they (Doorway Pages) can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results, where each result ends up taking the user to essentially the same destination. They can also lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.”
Hence, instead of creating different pages for different search engines, create one page which is optimized for one keyword for all the search engines.
SEO Mistake #5: Using hidden text
Hidden text is text with the same color as the background color of your page. For example, if the background color of your page is white and you have added some white text to that page. That is considered a black-hat SEO practice.
Many webmasters, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their pages as keyword rich as possible. However, there is a limit to the number of keywords you can repeat on a page without making it sound odd to your human visitors.
Thus, in order to ensure that the human visitors to a page don’t perceive the text to be odd, but that the page is still keyword-rich, many webmasters add text (containing the keywords) with the same color as the background color. This ensures that while the search engines can see the keywords, human visitors cannot.
Search engines have long since caught up with this technique, and ignore or penalize pages that contain such text. They may also penalize the entire site if even one of the pages on that site contains such hidden text.
However, the problem with this is that search engines may often end up penalizing sites that did not intend to use hidden text.
For instance, suppose you have a page with a white background and a table on that page with a black background. Further, suppose that you have added some white text in that table. This text will, in fact, be visible to your human visitors, that is, this shouldn’t be called hidden text. However, search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they may often ignore the fact that the background of the table is black.
In official guidance from Google, they state:
“Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”
Hence, in order to ensure that your site is not penalized because of this, you should go through all the pages in your site and see whether you have inadvertently made any such mistake.
SEO Mistake #6: Using page cloaking
Cloaking, which is against Google’s webmaster guidelines, is defined by Google as follows:
“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agents may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index”
People generally use page cloaking for two reasons:
- To hide the source code of their search engine-optimized pages from their competitors
- To prevent human visitors from having to see a page that looks good to the search engines but does not necessarily look good to humans
The problem with this is that when a site uses cloaking, it prevents the search engines from being able to spider the same page that their users are going to see. And if the search engines can’t do this, they can no longer be confident of providing relevant results to their users. Thus, if a search engine discovers that a site has used cloaking, it will probably ban the site forever from their index.
Hence, our advice is that you should not even think about using cloaking in your site and if you are already doing any cloaking and getting away with it, I guess you may have to be on the lookout.
SEO Mistake #7: Devoting too much time to search engine positioning
Yes – we lied. There’s another common mistake that people make when it comes to search engine optimization – they spend too much time on it.
Sure, search engine placement is the most cost-effective way of driving traffic to your site and you do need to spend some time every day learning how the search engines work and optimizing your site for the search engines.
However, you must remember that search engine optimization is a means to an end for you – it’s not the end in itself. The end is to increase the sales of your products and services. Hence, apart from trying to improve your site’s position in the search engines, you also need to spend time on all the other factors which determine the success or the failure of your website – the quality of the products and services that you are offering, the quality of your content, and so on.
You may have excellent rankings in the search engines, but if the quality of your products and services is poor, or you’re not producing high-quality SEO content, those high rankings aren’t going to do much good.
Jacob McMillen is a copywriter, marketing blogger, and inbound marketing consultant.
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The post Are these SEO rookie mistakes costing your search rankings? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
Balancing between paid and organic search for brand success
30-second summary:
- Relying on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for short-term gains and neglecting organic marketing will prove ineffective
- Before pumping any money into SEO strategy, a business must ensure that its website is fully optimised for user experience
- Once in a comfortable position, PPC advertising can be used to amplify brand reach by experimenting with new keywords
- While short-tail keywords have a higher search volume, long-tail keywords remain vital
- Search results drastically differ on mobile and desktop and mobile users have less patience, so allocate more PPC advertising budget for mobile
When trying to grow a business, the importance of SEO cannot be understated. If people are unable to find a business, especially as ecommerce continues to grow into an unstoppable force, then attracting customers is an impossible endeavour.
In a bid to fast-track brand awareness, an inexperienced business owner might be tempted to rely on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to get fast results. However, finding the right balance between organic marketing and PPC advertising is crucial for brand success.
I have broken down six ways to find the perfect balance between organic marketing and PPC advertising so that any business owner can build awareness for their brand the right way.
Fully optimize your website first
Before focusing on paid or organic search for brand success, having a fully functional website is imperative. If a prospective customer has a torrid experience using a website, the odds of securing a sale drastically decrease. All the logistics of a website should be thoroughly inspected, such as broken links, load time and the volume of customers which can be hosted at once. It’s also important to avoid over-optimising a website and using too many keywords. Keywords should be implemented subtly so that the untrained eye would never notice, otherwise, they might add negative SEO value.
Rely on PPC whilst waiting for organic SEO improvement
While it would be great to be able to rely mostly or solely on organic marketing to raise brand awareness eventually, doing so when starting out is virtually impossible. Historically, PPC advertising has been encouraged to be used whilst a business is waiting for organic SEO improvement to land. This is not a licence to neglect organic marketing – far from it – as the goal is to improve a business’s SEO value whilst using PPC initially. In the longer term, results from PPC advertising should be used to guide organic marketing efforts.
Experiment with brand-related keywords
Once in a comfortable position, a business can shift its PPC advertising strategy towards experimentation. As and when organic brand-related keywords drop in place, the corresponding PPC advertising budget can be reallocated to test new keywords, thus amplifying the total reach of the brand. When improving SEO value, a business needs to constantly explore and update its targeted keywords for organic SEO improvement. As mentioned, results from PPC advertising should be used to inform organic marketing planning.
Focus on both short-tail and long-tail keywords
A short-tail keyword or ‘head term’ is a search term with one to three words that cover a general topic. Landing on the first search engine results page for short-tail keywords borders on impossible due to the sheer number of results, so even though they typically have a higher search volume, long-tail keywords remain important as users are more likely to be closer to a point-of-purchase when searching them. Searching for “shoe shiner” would be a short-tail keyword, whereas searching for “how to shine my shoes” is a long-tail keyword, as it is three to five words and more focused on a specific subject. Naturally, the short-tail keywords will garner more searches, but ranking well for the long-tail keywords will offer a business a meaningful advantage over competitors in the same market.
Don’t just rely on Google
Most business owners, executives and managers will be inclined to focus all their efforts on Google – and rightfully so as it’s the world’s biggest search engine platform by far. However, it can also be worth testing ads on the likes of Bing to see what returns are achievable elsewhere. If the results are favourable, it might be worth splitting SEO-related efforts across multiple platforms.
Use PPC advertising for mobile, organic marketing for desktop
Search results drastically differ on mobile and desktop. At the risk of stating the obvious, using a search engine on desktop presents the users with more results because the screen is naturally bigger. As the window of opportunity – literally the size of the search window on a smartphone – is much smaller on mobile, using PPC advertising for mobile is critical. Furthermore, mobile users are less likely to make multiple searches using different keywords, than a desktop user with more patience might.
Growing brand awareness requires a streamlined and focused strategy for both organic marketing and PPC advertising. Solely relying on PPC advertising might seem like an easy solution, but slowly working on organic marketing will eventually allow a business to use PPC advertising to amplify brand reach. Business owners might underestimate the importance of SEO, but its importance can’t be underscored in the ever-growing digital marketplace.
Nick Swan is Founder of SEOTesting.
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Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022
30-second summary:
- Confused users don’t spend money
- Your search marketing needs to thread in your brand’s messaging, targeting, design, and overall experience to ensure trust, clarity, and eventual sales
- SEO pioneer, serial entrepreneur, and best selling author, Kris Jones helps you weave a tight SEO and search marketing strategy before 2022 ushers in
If you spend enough time in the digital marketing space, even if you focus on just one area of it, you’ll eventually catch wind of the intersection of SEO, paid media, web design, and link building. There’s no avoiding it since all these areas run together to ideally form a strong online presence for a business. Within that context, if you’ve ever been the one to devise a digital strategy for yourself or your clients, you’re probably familiar with the types of market niches that would push a business to focus more on SEO or paid search marketing.
SEO is obviously a fantastic tool for just about anyone, but don’t discount the power of paid media. Each has its pros and cons, and when done the right way, neither is going to hurt you.
What will hurt you, however, is making mistakes in your efforts and then letting them go for a long time. Weak points in your SEO and paid media can be tricky things. They can harm your digital presence in the long term and yet be difficult even to detect unless you really know what you’re doing.
With the home stretch of 2021 right around the corner, now is the best time to stitch up those holes in your search marketing for 2022. Here are four tips for cleaning up your SEO and paid media marketing.
1. Stop writing for keywords over topics
SEOs know the old story, but here it is again for anyone who doesn’t. Ten to twenty years ago, it was a popular practice to keyword-stuff on web pages. That just meant overusing a certain keyword on a page in an attempt to get Google to rank the page more highly.
In 2021, we know this is a bad practice because it doesn’t help users to answer their questions. What answers questions for online users today is content that discusses popular topics rather than just keyword-spamming.
You can use popular topic-research tools such as BuzzSumo, Answer the Public, or Semrush to find topics relevant to your desired industry niche. Then, do your own research to generate content that’s useful. Always think of the user first.
Keywords still have their place, though. Google needs to match up queries with content, and the content that makes the smartest, most useful, and natural use of keywords will tend to perform better. Content needs to have keywords in its headings and also use naturally within the body. But don’t think that you need to overuse keywords or focus your content completely around the keywords. Instead, determine the intent of the keywords and align that with your topic research to create killer content that ranks.
2. Don’t abandon paid media message consistency
When your search marketing includes paid media, too, you have a whole other set of guidelines to follow. Again, everything you do should be with users in mind. Put yourself in their place. How would you respond to this ad if you saw it?
Then, click through to the landing page to make sure everything still makes sense. The thing is, here is where PPC specialists can fail if they aren’t careful.
With paid media, you’re using ads to get people to do things. That’s what you have available: words and images on little square ads on web pages or paid search results on the SERPs.
Sounds straightforward, right? As long as you do your research and get the ads’ messaging correct, you should be golden.
Except you can go way wrong if your messaging isn’t consistent across the entire paid search journey. Your landing pages need to contain the same type of messaging as your ads. They need to reference the information users saw when they first clicked the ad.
That shows continuity across your paid campaigns. Without that continuity, without landing pages that reference offers or claims made in ads, users will be confused. They’ll wonder if they clicked the wrong ad or got taken to the wrong website.
And confused users don’t spend money.
Think about it this way: it’s been estimated that it takes between five and seven impressions before one user remembers a brand. Five to seven! It can be challenging enough to reach those numbers but imagine if you tried to get there without brand consistency. You’d be setting yourself up for failure, plain and simple.
The solution is once again to think like a user. Go through all the elements of a paid search user’s journey. If the messaging and branding flow logically and actually make sense, you may have a winning campaign on your hands.
3. Don’t ignore poor site UX
I said at the outset that the different areas of digital marketing all have the potential to intersect and flow together. Here is where SEO and web design meet up: website UX.
SEOs can spend all day researching keywords, writing content, optimizing meta tags, and building backlinks, but users probably aren’t going to do what you want if your website has a terrible layout and design, not to mention if it isn’t optimized for the mobile experience.
But don’t just listen to me – read the numbers. According to Intechnic, 67 percent of online users say that a badly designed website negatively affects their impressions of a brand. That is a huge figure, to put it mildly.
When Google’s spiders crawl a site, they do so logically, as a human would. That means the main navigation needs to set out the content your site has and be clear about where users can go to find certain information.
Now, what qualifies as a “good” layout? It’s simple when you think about it, and yet so many websites struggle to do it. The main navigation needs to show users all the vital areas of a site. Whatever business you’re in, your nav should show your main services first, followed by a blog if you have one (you should), an “about us” section, and a contact tab.
That setup right there covers all the main points that you’ll need to keep users engaged. Now, how everything else breaks down from there is up to you, but again, keep it logical. Your main services tab should have a submenu of all your main services, your locations tab can break down to show your different business locations, and so on.
Also, you absolutely cannot forget accessibility when you’re talking about website UX today. Accessibility, of course, is the capability of any piece of website content to be consumed and understood by people with a range of physical or mental disabilities. Not only is this simply a good business practice, but it’s also just inclusive and courteous.
Website accessibility includes considerations such as making content available to the visually and hearing impaired, ensuring your web pages are navigable with a keyboard only instead of just with a mouse, and choosing colors that don’t clash so color-blind people have no trouble reading your content.
Makes sense, right?
It’s important that it does make sense because if neither human users nor Google can understand how to navigate your website, you probably won’t rank for your desired keywords.
4. Don’t set and forget PPC
If you’re a business owner and are doing your own digital marketing, or if you employ one (possibly overworked) specialist to do it for you, it can be more than a little tempting to engage in the “set it and forget it” mindset.
Small to medium-sized businesses have so much to do just running themselves that putting sufficient effort into digital marketing can seem like too much of a stretch.
You may think that you’ve come up with a pretty effective PPC ad campaign that contains all the right visuals and messaging and hits all the right audience marks. And maybe you have, for now.
But you can’t set and forget anything in PPC or digital marketing more generally. Trends change, markets shift, consumers move on. You have to check in on your ads’ performance over time to see if you’ve recently fallen flat. Because if you have, then you’re wasting a lot of effort maintaining ads that aren’t converting.
Instead of letting things go like this – put the time into analyzing your ads’ performance, particularly in the time immediately following the start of the campaign. You want to ensure things are running as you predicted and tweak them if they aren’t.
While you’re at it, set aside some time to research how you can optimize your PPC campaigns’ resource consumption. The best campaigns are obviously the most efficiently performing ones, and so how can you do better?
Try reworking your ad copy. It sounds simple, but as you know, more relevant ad copy drives click-through rates and Quality Scores. And high-quality scores reduce your cost per click and cost per conversion.
Another money-worthy avenue you can take to hone in on your ads’ efficiency is to use dayparting and geolocation together. Dayparting will schedule your ads to appear at certain times of day, while geolocation will show your ads only in certain places.
This is particularly useful for local businesses that have brick-and-mortar locations and want to get customers through the doors.
This takes plenty of audience research to get it right, but it’s a smart and common-sense way to optimize the resources you’re using on your PPC ads.
A stale PPC campaign has the potential to be one of your biggest search marketing holes in 2022, so don’t wait on this one.
Jump on your 2022 fixes now
There truly is no time like the present for fixing your search marketing loopholes. Any mistake that’s out there for any length of time is probably going to hurt you. But with the second half of 2021 already here, lots of businesses are setting their sights on 2022.
Become one of them. Follow these pointers to get ahead in your search marketing efforts, and it could make all the difference.
Kris Jones is the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate network Pepperjam, which he sold to eBay Enterprises in 2009. Most recently Kris founded SEO services and software company LSEO.com and has previously invested in numerous successful technology companies. Kris is an experienced public speaker and is the author of one of the best-selling SEO books of all time called, ‘Search-Engine Optimization – Your Visual Blueprint to Effective Internet Marketing’, which has sold nearly 100,000 copies.
Subscribe to the Search Engine Watch newsletter for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.
Join the conversation with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
The post Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
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The search dilemma: looking beyond Google’s third-party cookie death
30-second summary:
- In 2020, majority of the 181.7 billion U.S. dollar revenues came from advertising through Google Sites or its network sites
- Even though they will be removing the third-party cookie from 2022, the search giant still has a wealth of first-party data from its 270+ products, services, and platforms
- The Trade Desk’s 20 percent stock price drop is proof of Google’s monopoly and why it shouldn’t enjoy it anymore
- Google expert, Susan Dolan draws from her rich experience and details the current search scape, insights and predicts future key themes that will arise out of the 3p cookie death
Imagine search as a jungle gym, you automatically imagine Google as the kingpin player on this ground. This has been a reality for decades now and we all know the downside of autonomy which is why the industry now acknowledges a need for regulation. Google announced that it would remove the third-party cookie from 2022. But a lot can happen in a year, 2020 is proof of that! Does this mean that cookies will completely bite the dust? Think again. I dive deep into years of my experience with the web to share some thoughts, observations, and insights on what this really means.
For once, Google is a laggard
Given the monopoly that Google has enjoyed and the list of lawsuits (like the anti-trust one and more) this move is a regulatory step to create a “net-vironment” that feels less like a net and is driven towards transparency and search scape equality.
But Firefox and Safari had already beaten Google to the punch in 2019 and 2020 respectively. Safari had launched the Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) update on March 23, 2020. Firefox had launched its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature in September 2019 to empower and protect users from third-party tracking cookies and crypto miners.
Google’s solution to respect user privacy
Google recently announced that it won’t be using identifiers. Google is developing a ‘Privacy Sandbox’ to ensure that publishers, advertisers, and consumers find a fair middle ground in terms of data control, access, and tracking. The idea is to protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers. The Privacy Sandbox will don the FLoC API that can help with interest-based advertising. Google will not be using fingerprints, PII graphs based on people’s email addresses that other browsers use. Google will move towards a Facebook-like “Lookalike audience” model that will group users for profiling.
Did that raise eyebrows? There’s more.
Don’t be fooled – They still have a lavish spread of first-party data
Google is already rich with clusters of historical, individual unique data that they’ve stored, analyzed, predicted, and mastered over the years and across their platforms and services. These statistics give you a clear sense of the gravity of the situation:
- Google has 270+ products and services (Source)
- Among the leading search engines, the worldwide market share of Google in January 2021 was almost 86 percent (Source)
- In 2020, majority of the 181.7 billion U.S. dollar revenues came from advertising through Google Sites or Google Network Sites (Source)
- There are 246 million unique Google users in the US (Source)
- Google Photos has over one billion active users (Source)
- YouTube has over 1.9 billion active users each month (Source)
- According to Google statistics, Gmail has more than 1.5 billion active users (Source)
- A less-known fact, there are more than two million accounts on Google Ads (Source)
- There are more than 2.9 million companies that use one or more of Google’s marketing services (Source)
- As of Jan 2021, Google’s branch out into the Android system has won it a whopping 72 percent of the global smartphone operating system market (Source)
- Google sees 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide (Source)
Google has an almost-never ending spectrum of products, services, and platforms –
Here’s the complete, exhaustive list of Google’s gigantic umbrella.
Source: Matrics360
Google already has access to your:
- Location
- Search history
- Credit/debit card details shared on Google Pay
- Data from businesses (more than 2.9 million!) that use Google services
- Your device microphone
- Mobile keyboard (G-board)
- Apps you download from the Google Playstore and grant access to
- Device camera, and that’s not even the tip of the iceberg
Google’s decision to eliminate the third-party cookie dropped The Trade Desk’s stock by 20 percent
Nobody should have monopoly and this incident serves as noteworthy proof. Google’s decision to drop 3p cookies shocked The Trade Desk’s stock prices causing a 20 percent slump in their stock value. The Trade Desk is the largest demand-side platform (DSP) and Google’s decision kills the demand for The Trade Desk’s proprietary Unified ID 1.0 (UID 1.0) – a unique asset that chopped out the need for cookie-syncing process and delivered match rate accuracy up to 99 percent.
Google’s statement on not using PII also jeopardizes the fate of The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0. which already has more than 50 million users.
Here’s what Dave Pickles, The Trade Desk’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer had to say,
“Unified ID 2.0 is a broad industry collaboration that includes publishers, advertisers and all players in the ad tech ecosystem.”
“UID provides an opportunity to have conversations with consumers and provide them with the sort of transparency we as an industry have been trying to provide for a really long time.”
Adweek’s March town hall saw advertisers and publishers haunted by the mystery that surrounds Google as Google denied to participate in the event. The industry is growing precarious that Google will use this as a new way to establish market dominance that feeds its own interests.
We love cookies (only when they’re on a plate)
Cookies are annoying because they leave crumbs everywhere… on the internet! Did you know, this is how people feel about being tracked on the web:
- 72 percent of people feel that almost everything they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies
- 81 percent say that the potential risks of data collection outweigh the benefits for them
These stats were originally sourced from Pew Research Center, but the irony, I found these stats on one of Google’s blogs.
On a hunt to escape these cookies or to understand the world’s largest “cookie jar” I checked out YouTube which seemed like a good place to start since it has over 1.9 billion monthly active users. You could visit this link to see how ads are personalized for you – the list is long!
My YouTube curiosity further landed me on this page to see how my cookies are shared (you can opt out of these). Even my least used account had 129 websites on this list, imagine how many sites are accessing your data right now.
Back in 2011 when I was the first to crack the Page rank algorithm, I could already sense the power Google held and where this giant was headed – the playground just wasn’t big enough.
Key themes that will emerge
Bottom line is, the cookie death is opening up conversations for advertising transparency and a web-verse that is user-first, and privacy compliant. Here’s what I foresee happening in search and the digital sphere:
- Ethical consumer targeting
- Adtech companies collaborating to find ways that respect their audience’s privacy
- A more private, personalized web
- More conversations around how much and what data collection is ethical
- More user-led choices
- Rise in the usage of alternative browsers
- Incentivizing users to voluntarily share their data
- Better use of technology for good
What do you think about the current climate on the internet? Join the conversation with me on @GoogleExpertUK.
Susan Dolan is a Search Engine Optimization Consultant first to crack the Google PageRank algorithm as confirmed by Eric Schmidt’s office in 2014. Susan is also the CEO of The Peoples Hub which has been built to help people and to love the planet.
The post The search dilemma: looking beyond Google’s third-party cookie death appeared first on Search Engine Watch.