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Learn How to Optimize for Voice Search NOW: More than Half of Queries will be Voice Search Queries by 2020 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
By 2020, there will be 200 billion voice search queries per month and more than half of searches will come from voice search, according to comScore research. Digital marketers need to invest in strategies that target voice searchers. Read on to get tips on optimizing for voice search with perspectives from a search agency (with Bing’s Purna Virji), a publisher (The SEM Post’s Jennifer Slegg) and an SEO (Elite SEM’s Tony Edward).
From left: Tony Edwards, Purna Virji and Jennifer Slegg
Purna Virji, the senior training manager at Microsoft, talked about how voice search is shaping our world. Everything from television remotes to hotel rooms can be powered by voice. By 2017, all Ford vehicles will come with Apple CarPlay.
You can speak 110–150 words per min, as opposed to avg person’s typing 38–40 wpm. -@purnavirji…
Click To Tweet
Like Virji, the founder and editor of The SEM Post, Jennifer Slegg, believes the time to optimize for voice search is now.
Consider the fact that more than half of U.S. teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis, or that there are 30 times more action queries on voice search.
Voice search has a higher percentage of featured snippets. Slegg says 43.3% for voice queries have featured snippets, compared to 40.6% for text queries.
Moreover, Google reads the featured snippets aloud to users beginning with “According to (site)” or “We found this information on (site).” Google reinforces your brand in voice search. (Learn how to earn featured snippets in 2016.)
Use Moz and SEMRush to track your own and your competitors’ featured snippets.
How do you optimize for RankBrain? By optimizing for conversational search.
Voice search queries are longer than text search queries. The average query length for voice is 4.2 words, and the average query length for text is 3.2 words.
Long-tail queries are less competitive and have higher intent. While they’re searched for less, they’re more likely to convert.
Use your content to answer questions. There is a 61% growth in queries starting with who, what, where and how. Furthermore, almost 10% of voice search queries start with who, what, when, where, why, how – as opposed to only 3.7% of text queries. “How” begins 3.6% of all voice search queries and “What” begins 3.5% of all voice search queries.
Tony Edward, the senior SEO manager at Elite SEM, reminded digital marketers that optimizing for voice search begins with standard SEO best practices.
Edward shared his tips on coming up with content strategy:
By implementing the above best practices and creating useful content, Edward has been able to earn branded Knowledge Graphs and Featured Snippets. As noted earlier, getting a branded Knowledge Graph entry or Featured Snippet makes your result more voice search ready.
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services, SEM PPC, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.
Leading SEOs Discuss AMP, PWAs, URL Parameters, Featured Snippets, KPIs and More was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
Meet the SEOs is a key SMX session where digital marketers are able to ask four leading digital marketers any question they have. The panel, moderated by Search Engine Land Founder and Editor Danny Sullivan, features:
From left: Duane Forrester, Hillary Glaser, Aleyda Solis, Michael King, Danny Sullivan
What do you think about AMP, progressive loading web apps (PWAs), and web apps?
Forrester: I welcome our new PWA overlords. If Google wants it, Google will get it if it waits long enough for it. Google is doing this for a very good reason, because the average person will fail.
Glazer: If you are a newspaper or magazine or a site with a lot of content where the amount of content that is on your site is weighing down your site’s load time, AMP might be a quick fix. But if you rely on ads to produce revenue, AMP is not a good route for you. There are other ways you can go about decreasing your load time.
King:
What @iPullRank thinks about #AMP & progressive web apps, live from @smx. #smx #seo #apps #AMP http://pic.twitter.com/asx53FfSpx
— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 29, 2016
Do people need to have apps?
Glaser: It’s situational. We have a healthcare client who it really makes sense for. Their clients can book appointments through the app, for example, without even having to log in. That makes the app valuable.
Forrester: I don’t know that AMP is going to have a long life span. If you don’t have an app already up and running and your app is two years away, I would reconsider building the app. PWA is blindingly fast and looks like a regular website … it just might crush AMP and apps.
Do we need URL parameters?
Forrester:
Do you need URL parameters? Here are @DuaneForrester‘s thoughts. @smx #smx #seo http://pic.twitter.com/p4GFAoPWcl
— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 29, 2016
King: I don’t think inherently they’re bad, but they can create bad situations.
When creating tables does the formatting style influence whether you get a Featured Snippet?
Forrester: It’s not about how you formatted it, but how much the search engine trusts you. To get a featured snippet, you must be highly trusted and serve up highly relevant content.
Will Google make featured snippets sponsored eventually?
Solis: I don’t think that’s realistic.
Glaser: I don’t think that’s going to happen.
(Read our coverage of the SMX East session How to Earn Featured Snippets.)
301s vs. 302s?
Unanimous: 301s.
(Read our guide on How to Implement a 301 Redirect.)
Should we be delivering ranking reports or not?
Glaser: Yes, if you can tie back to something.
Solis: You want to monitor it and see how you are vs. your competition, because it does have an effect on the ultimate goals: traffic, conversion, ROI, etc.
What are the top three KPIs you need to report to management?
Forrester: That needs to be decided before you take on the work. Whatever that business wants or needs, those are your KPIs. Could be traffic, sign-ups, revenue, time on site — find out from them. Ranking is not a KPI, but a tool.
Solis: For a migration, however, I would say ranking is a KPI. It depends on the project.
Should I interlink related but not duplicated sites that my company owns?
Sullivan interjects and answers the question: No — you should only do it if there’s some value. Don’t do it for a boost.
Forrester: Maybe combine the content and make a single, stronger site. If you interlink them, you risk appearing like a link network and getting in hot water. Pull your content together, put it on a single strong domain, build a business and move forward.
If you had a brand new site and no budget, what would you do?
Glaser: Invest in really good content. Update your meta data seasonally and learn how to understand user intent and behavior. Learn why people come from both Google and Bing and dig into Search Console. Update your content with that knowledge.
Forrester: If you don’t have a lot of money, you better have a lot of personality. You need to have a reason for people to engage with you, and that can be writing style, tone and voice. These will get you a social presence. There’s no end to it and virtually no cost.
King: This is what guest posting is actually for. When you write something on a highly trafficked site, it’s one of the quickest ways to get eyes and links on your own site. It’s a good idea when you’re starting something from scratch. Realistically, if you’re going after a competitive term, search is not what you want to target at first with no budget.
What are some of your favorite tools?
Forrester: Bing Webmaster Tools.
King: Moz’s Keyword Explorer, KeywordTool.io and Keyword Studio.
Solis: Keyword Finder and SEMRush.
Glaser: SEMRush, BrightEdge, Raven Tools, Google Keyword Planner.
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services, SEM PPC management, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.
17 Ways Link Building Can Go Awry was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
Link building specialist Sha Menz
Link removal specialist Sha Menz has a word of warning for SEOs: Manipulating the link game is like everything else — it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
A superhero SEO can come along and save your site, but there are much more powerful things your superhero SEO could be doing rather than link cleanup.
Menz shared 17 areas where link building can go awry and 3 ways link building can be done best!
1. Anchor Text
2. Paid Links
There’s nothing wrong with a sponsored link, by the way — but call it out. Note that it’s sponsored, like Search Engine Land Editor Barry Schwartz does in the below example.
3. Reciprocal Link Exchange
These seem to be having a resurgence, said Menz. If you’re shaking hands and agreeing to trade links with someone, it’s not necessarily a bad thing — if there’s some actual reason that both of your sites can link to the other in a natural and useful way. BUT if this is the case, don’t hesitate to use a nofollow tag. Getting traffic and being useful are the key things you’re doing here.
4. JavaScript and CSS Tricks
Don’t hide things here. Search engines will see it.
5. Irrelevant and Spun Content
6. Footer Links
People can get very sneaky. In the below example, the word “C-o-p-y-r-i-g-h-t” actually has a link on every letter.
7. Comment Spam
8. Wiki-loading
9. Bad Directories
10. Guest Posting
11. Kiss-of-Death Domains
Learn about suspect domains at DomainTools.com.
12. Link Networks
13. Redirect Madness
Watch out for third-party redirect passes through high-quality domains. This might appear in the form of intentionally misspelled domain names in the code. Use the SpamFlag Chrome extension in conjunction with Majestic SEO.
14. Coupon Capers
15. Link Builders You Forgot to Fire
This may sound ridiculous, but it can happen. Ensure previous link builders have been informed and are not building additional links.
16. Rogue Themes, Toolbars and Plugins
17. Black Hats Masquerading as White Hats
It’s all about doing the work. None of the tricks are worth it. Investing your time in actual work is much more profitable. Consider, then, doing the following:
1. Help Others to Help Yourself
Sometimes you’re just out there in a forum being really helpful, or you have written a blog post that’s really valuable. Those kinds of things can pay you back dividends with links.
2. Share Your Expertise
Loan a developer, teach a local class, etc.
3. Do the Unexpected
Menz would be remiss if she didn’t bring up the elephant in the room: Penguin. Is the newly hatched real-time Penguin the light at the end of the tunnel for your site, or are you clinging to a runaway train?
“Recognition of your cleanup work will be quicker by the search engines, but results will be harder to spot,” said Menz, adding that the only real results she’s seen (so far) have been people who are ill-affected.
One thing she wants to note is that disavows are still important, which we also confirmed with Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes earlier this week:
@BruceClayInc we haven’t changed our recommendations for the disavow tool with this launch
— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 26, 2016
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO penalty repair, SEO services, SEM PPC management, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk.
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Featured Snippets in Search ‘Build Near-Instant Credibility’: Glenn Gabe on How to Earn Them in 2016 was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
Want to earn Featured Snippets in Google Search? Glenn Gabe, the president of G-Squared Interactive, shares how to increase your chances of earning a Featured Snippet at SMX East.
Featured Snippets are incredibly powerful and can drive more traffic than a No. 1 result. According to Gabe, Featured Snippets build nearly instant credibility.
Gabe shares a client case study. A Featured Snippet yielded 41,444 clicks in 90 days, accounting for 73% of the client’s traffic from Google. The CTR? 13.2%.
A word of warning, though: the Google algorithm can be fickle when it comes to Featured Snippets. A different client Gabe had earned a Featured Snippet, but then lost it … along with 39,000 clicks within a two week period. The client then won the Featured Snippet, and then lost it again, proving Gabe’s point about Google’s fickleness.
Do you need to rank No. 1 to receive a Featured Snippet?
No! But always Page No. 1.
Are they displayed just for “question” queries?
No. They appear for head terms and topics, as well.
Is Structured Data a requirement?
No. Though John Mueller’s team once considered making this a requirement, they decided against it. They didn’t want to bog down webmasters with even more code.
Can Featured Snippets be personalized?
Yes, depending on whether or not you’re logged in, your location, and your search history.
What are some tools to find and/or research Featured Snippets?
Google Search Console, SEMRush and Moz.
Is there something even better than Featured Snippets?
Yes: the huge SERP real estate winner that is a Featured Video.
Can you refine Featured Snippets?
Yes. And it works fast. Gabe did this and saw his result change in seven minutes. He reminds digital marketers to be careful, though – you could lose your Featured Snippet in the process.
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services, SEM PPC, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk. |
SEO Godfather Bruce Clay & Search Insider Duane Forrester Field Digital Marketers’ Questions at #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
Representing Bruce Clay, Inc., Bruce Clay and Duane Forrester hosted an AMA (ask me anything) session at SMX East 2016. The audience is packed and ready to dive into hot SEO topics including:
Where do we start with SEO and how do we get the most out of our site as a garage-based business? What’s a good blueprint for the next six months?
Bruce: If you haven’t taken a formal course, I’d recommend it. Read books, pay attention, go to conferences – invest your time and money in understanding SEO. Don’t violate any rules, write content that is worthy of being linked to and then let people know you created it.
Are reviews ranking factors?
Duane: Reviews are about a trust-level factor. Mentions indicate sentiment at a consumer level. Google and Bing will not look past that.
Reviews are good and extraordinarily powerful. Millennials and Generation Z have a huge impact on consumer spending and on businesses, so it’s very important to understand what matters to them.
You want to hear from them and know what they think is good and bad. Millennials and Generation Z trust anonymous grouped results more than friends and family.
Generation Z is still figuring out what matters to them. They have no brand loyalty.
Do not auto-generate reviews. Absolutely not. If you were our client and you did that, we would fire you. That will destroy your domain and your SEO career.
Bruce: It’s all about trust. The Google Quality Rating Guidelines talks about expertness, authority and trust. These are the three most important things they look at when determining how a site should rank. (Learn more about the Google Quality Rating Guidelines.) There’s actually a fourth factor, too: maintenance.
How do you deal with spammy links. Getting spammy links every month. What is the best practice to clean up?
Bruce: We have a free guide to link pruning that gives you the complete how-to procedure.
TL;DR: Identify the bad links with Majestic, sort by lowest trust, add them to a disavow file. (Do a free check of your backlinks against backlinks others have disavowed at DisavowFiles.com.)
There are four terms worth understanding: organic, inorganic, transactional and navigational.
Organic links should be experts in my field and the link should support my business. Suppose I’m an SEO company and you link to me but you have a site about cowboy boots, Google won’t count that. Organic is subject-related.
Inorganic is when they’re not related and those will not be counted by Google. Google gives them no weight.
Then there’s transactional and navigational. Transactional is when you’re linked to with a keyword. If 80 percent of your inbound links are transactional, Google will see you as a spammer. Navigational is anchor text like “click here.”
Duane: We like to think of this in terms of bad actors. If a dentist links to me, that is irrelevant to me – I’m not associated with the world of dentistry. It’s not just about spam – it’s about cleaning up irrelevant links.
We have multiple sites, two of which sell similar offerings. Do you have any ideas on how to market one of them that’s newer without cannibalizing the established brand?
Duane: You need to take one of those horses into the backyard and let it go. The best way forward is to determine which one should live and migrate (301 redirect) the other. Focus on the stronger site and move forward.
Bruce: If your content is replicated, use canonical tags. I would at least consolidate links and PageRank. If you have multiple instances on multiple domains of the same source, Google will consider it spun content and it won’t benefit you on either site.
We changed domain names and 301 redirected our old site to our new site. Where do I check for bad links?
Bruce: Both sites. If a domain had a penalty and it was totally trashed, what you redirected it to will inherit the penalty. Analyze and purge both.
How important are things like heading tags, image names and alt tags in terms of ranking factors? If they are important, how do I convince my designers and developers to use those things correctly?
Duane: All these things are a fundamental piece of the work you need to do. If you don’t do it and your competitor does, your competitor will be shown ahead of you. If everything else is equal, they’re just a little more useful than you.
Bruce: According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, you must have an alt attribute. (Learn more about image optimization and alt attributes in Point 11 of our SEO Checklist). Also, a designer who uses a heading tag to format something is lazy.
Can you disavow an entire domain?
Bruce: Yes, but not a TLD.
Do you consider m-dot site for ecommerce?
Duane: No.
At what point do you make the jump to HTTPS?
Bruce: Now. Make it your initial 301. Spammers with 50,000 websites are not going to pay for those certificates. This is the cost of organic ranking.
I believe Google’s plan is to give a boost to HTTPS in the future. Officially, it’s just a tie breaker. But understand that Google is going to evolve to where HTTPS is going to be a requirement for top rankings.
Why do some exact match domains still rank well?
Bruce: I would assume they’re also legacy domains that have been around for quite a few years.
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO services, SEM PPC, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk. |
What’s New & Cool with Google AdWords & Analytics: Keynote by Jerry Dischler & Babak Pahlavan was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
With a keynote delivered by Googlers (complete with product announcements!), it’s a full house at SMX East 2016.
Jerry Dischler, Vice President of Product Management for AdWords, and Babak Pahlavan, Senior Director of Measurement & Analytics, field questions from Search Engine Land editors Ginny Marvin, Greg Sterling and the SMX audience.
Read on to learn about:
Ginny Marvin acts as a moderator for the SMX East keynote with Googlers Babak Pahlavan and Jerry Dischler.
Who’s succeeding with expanded text ads?
Editor’s note: Expanded text ads are the next generation of standard text ads on the Google Search Network and Google Display Network optimized for the mobile user experience. The format was rolled out to advertisers this past July.
Dischler: Advertisers who are using a dynamic, creative elements. Those who aren’t getting good results are only dipping their toe in the water. They’re only using one creative element, not going dynamic, aren’t optimizing as strongly.
What we’re hoping is that folks will jump in with both feet and start devoting the effort they devoted to standard text ads to expanded text ads.
Another observation: with branded terms, we’re seeing shorter headlines perform better.
Earlier this year, device-level bidding was reintroduced. Talk a little bit about that decision to bring back separate device bidding and you expect to see advertisers take advantage of that?
Editor’s note: Here’s the quick and dirty background on device bidding. In 2013, Google took away its advertisers ability to bid differently based on the consumer’s device (mobile, tablet, desktop) in an initiative called Enhanced Campaigns. This year, device-level bidding was reintroduced to the Google advertising networks. Read Marvin’s write up on Search Engine Land for more on how advertisers are organizing campaigns by device.
Dischler: What we were seeing was a number of advertisers come to us with use cases for tablets that were really different. Let’s say you’re looking for NY hotels on your mobile phone vs. looking for NY hotels on your tablet. On the mobile phone, you’re going to have much higher conversion rate and would want to bid aggressively accordingly. Folks are thinking in a very mobile-first way, and this was happening more and more.
In the time before Enhanced Campaigns, we were seeing mobile avoidance. But here is the opposite. Advertisers have fully embraced mobile but the controls we had weren’t robust enough.
Take a look at your current bids – they represent a blended ROI. If you are able to get better performance on desktop and worse performance on tablet, adjust them in a way that is symmetric. In general what you should be doing is looking at your blended target across platforms in order to set your bid. This will achieve the right ROI mix. You have to figure out what’s right for you.
Google announced that they were expanding the store visits metric and that more than one billion store visits have been measured. Where is this going? What are the metrics today? Why is this important?
Dischler: In this multi-device, mobile-focused world, you should be measuring entire ROI whether they’re online or offline or calls, etc.
We want to help you work in an omni-channel way and measure the total value of your ad spend.
In retail, where 90+ percent of sales are offline, or in auto where 99.9% of sales are offline, it’s very important that you be able to measure online ROI.
For many advertisers, we’re seeing that the offline benefit is greater than the online benefit and we want advertisers to be able to measure that as easily as possible.
Earlier this week, Brad Bender announced that we’re adding the store visits metric to display, as well.
We have hundreds of millions of people who’ve opted into location history. We take that anonymized data and aggregate it, combine it with tradition signals including Google Maps and 3D modeling of building, Wi-Fi data and more to increase precision. We also have more than 5 million human reviewers working with us. Google has more than 99% accuracy with its store visits.
Regarding the enterprise Audience Suite, how does audience targeting work and what does it mean for marketers?
Dischler: Advertisers who are using our RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) say that this is the biggest change we’ve made that allows them to target their customers. Some largely sophisticated advertisers are still hesitant to experiment with RLSA, and I’d really encourage them to try it out.
What’s going with Google Analytics Data Studio?
Pahlavan: Data Studio is our dashboard and reporting tool. There are two fundamental things about it that people love.
First, you can be up and running to do reporting by just connecting to the data sources.
And there’s collaborative sharing. The notion of collaboration is something we really focused on – you can very easily share a report across organizations and make the data available to everyone. The free version and enterprise version are available in 21 countries as of today; it was only available to U.S. advertisers before.
What new tools are coming?
Pahlavan: Our objective is to enable measurement for all businesses, no matter the size. Today we are announcing the free version of Optimize; sign up here: g.co/optimize.
Smart Goals were created for AdWords advertisers to be able to take advantage of crowd-sourced machine learning analytics that will help inform marketers of sessions that likely would have converted. How does this work?
Pahlavan: We have a set of investments around how to leverage Google machine learning capabilities to make business a lot more efficient when leveraging the data they have. It’s being used by tens of thousands of advertisers. You can get a preview of what the performance could look like even if you’re not yet using it.
Recently, the Google Analytics mobile app launched with Insights cards. Can you talk about what’s going on with that?
Pahlavan: Insights cards is in the bucket of our efforts around leveraging Google’s machine learn capability. Inside our Google Analytics app, it looks at a series of signals and tells you things like products that are performing much better. It looks at all permutations automatically. What channels are under or over performing? What are the areas you should pay attention to more? These are the kind of things it looks at. Insights cards will also be available on desktop in the future.
Will expanded texts ads be available for call-only ads?
Dischler: We’re in the process of testing out some things.
Do you want to talk about the thoughts behind the changes to Keyword Planner as far as data available to non-paying customers?
Dischler: We had this situation where what we wanted to do is have good actors be able to use our Keyword Planner and keep some bad actors out.
Our limits are really low so the vast majority of advertisers who have any spend should be able to use our tool. We can now accommodate most use cases while keeping the bad actors out.
Does Google Analytics have a plan to better address referrer spam?
Pahlavan: We have an active project internally. It’s been going on for sometimes to combat spam traffic. I can’t share the stats externally but this is something we take very seriously. We are constantly monitoring.
Some people just rely on Google Analytics for tracking and goals rather than implementing the AdWords pixel. What do you recommend?
Dischler: We recommend implementation for both.
Pahlavan: The have complementary use cases.
Are you going to add more and more ads to the search results page? Will organic disappear?
Q & A with @google‘s @jdischler & @babakph at @smx. “Are you going to add more and more ads? Will organic disappear? #SMX #SEO #PPC http://pic.twitter.com/xJnVCtWbFm
— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) September 28, 2016
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, SEM PPC services, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk. |
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How to Strengthen Your Retail Presence on Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook & Polyvore was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
When it comes to driving retail sales online, Google is the biggest game in town but it isn’t the only game in town.
Revenue is revenue and you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t explore possibilities beyond Google — we’re talking major opportunities on Amazon, Polyvore and eBay.
SEM pros Chris Humber and Elizabeth Marsten leverage Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook and more to drive traffic and sales. Read on for their ecommerce expertise.
Chris Humber, the head of search at GroupM, starts with a fast tip: within seven to 10 days of optimizing your product database, you will see an increase in visibility.
Where do consumers go when they’re ready to purchase products? Many turn to their local stores. They walk in and get it … it’s immediate gratification. This is traditional shelf space.
But what about digital shelf space?
Amazon plays a key role in the shopping journey. Consumers use Amazon as a top destination for product searches.
Here are the leading e-retailers beyond Google:
What about social shopping? Sites like Pinterest, Polyvore, ModCloth, Wanelo, OpenSky and Fancy are frequented more and more.
Pinterest is where the world’s ideas are catalogued and stored, and it’s also one of the most advanced visual-based search engines that exists today.
On Pinterest, 55% of users shop for products, not to talk with friends or brands. Compare this to 12% on Facebook and 12% on Instagram, according to Forrester research.
Traditional optimization tactics can help your e-retail efforts in numerous ways:
To identify keywords, leverage multiple tools. Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) Premium provides your top 100 search terms each month.
Understand the search landscape beyond Google. Look at organic search results with tools like STAT, BrightEdge, SEMRush, SpyFu, AdGooRoo, Mozenda and Deep Crawl. Determine what has the top share of voice on search (paid and organic) and Amazon (paid and organic) to pinpoint market trends.
Don’t forget to optimize your product pages!
Elizabeth Marsten, the director of paid search at CommerceHub, is going to dive into some other platforms. Some of them, like Polyvore, you may have never heard of.
CommerceHub has seen an average return on ad spend (ROAS) among clients at 900-1200%. These clients have product catalogs ranging from 350 to 1,000.
Keep in mind that this is still a remarketing method. You first need engagement channels to create audiences. It cannibalizes other channels with a last-click attribution. Use your revenue numbers, not just Facebook’s.
Some useful things to leverage on Yahoo:
This Yahoo-owned social commerce site’s users are 84% female and 50% of those females are millennials under the age of 34. On the site, you make “sets,” which are outfits. More than 3 million sets are created each month.
Marsten said ladies shopping on these sites have money to burn. The average order on Polyvore is $270. Comparatively, the average order value on Instagram is $228, Twitter is $155 and Facebook is $130.
Fast facts about Polyvore:
This marketplace connects retailers and influencers. Note: influencers lift purchase intent by 2X. 49% of users rely on recommendations from influencers.
They have partnered with Facebook to monetize message apps (i.e. sending auctions through Messenger) and create collections for sharing. They’ve adopted AMP. They’ve adopted ASIN pages, which improve SERPs to be static pages, not auctions that have ended.
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, SEM PPC services, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk. |
Creating Better Ad Copy: PPC Problem-Solving for B2B & B2C was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
This is a report from SMX East 2016. Search Marketing Expo (SMX) features speakers from industry-leading digital marketers and search engine representatives. Subscribe to the BCI Blog to get coverage of key sessions sent to your inbox.
There are more than 1.2 million advertisers in the Google Search Network. With so many business and brands competing to show up in paid search ads, how can you stand out?
Standing out is something search engine marketing leaders Pauline Jakober, Virginia Tonning and Marty Weintraub spend a lot of time thinking about.
From tips to crafting headlines to the results of testing ad copy to the effect of ad extensions, these three shared their insights and tips at SMX East 2016 through case studies and experience. Here’s what they had to say.
From left to right, Marty Weintraub, Pauline Jakober and Virginia Tonning on the SMX East 2016 stage.
Are you tired of seeing the same ads? So is Pauline Jakober, the CEO of Group Twenty Seven. She asks the audience, how can we be different? Will being different increase our bottom line?
Here are the things that Jakober starts with when creating ads. First, there’s an initial client interview and questionnaire. She talks to many people, including customer service reps, the sales teams and the product team. She looks at customer testimonials and customer complaints, and looks at competitor ads. She also learns the customer pain points and works to understand her audience
One of her clients is a B2C business that sells all types of dance shoes. Jakober learned the following things about her audience of dancers:
In an effort to see the difference being different can make, Jakober set about testing whether or not a message really matters and what exactly can be achieved in the 80 characters available in a search ad.
For the dance shoe retailer, Jakober came up with this industry standard ad:
From Hip Hop to Jazz, Shop Our Shoe Brands For Your Favorite Style of Dance.
As well as ads that addressed the pain points she discovered during her research.
Virginia Tonning, the global manager of paid search at Schneider Electric, is interested in finding out how to take advantage of the precious space of characters in an ad – space is especially critical to her as the name Schneider Electric takes up so much space.
The founder of aimClear Marty Weintraub asserts that there is a waning need for marketers when it comes to ad copy and targeting. Analysts are taking over tasks that were once the marketers’. Furthermore, in five to eight years, artificial intelligence will be at the point where AI will be able to write the most high-performance ad creative.
Ad creative is still a mostly human endeavor, so he’ll take a look at the tools available to you. With expanded ads, you can take advantage of so much more SERP real estate and have more opportunity to be creative. He’s particularly excited about mobile ads because they take up so much space.
The most natural thing to do is think of the finished product headline. But don’t do that. Instead, theorize and come up with every possible way to talk about something. Rather than think of the finished headline, Weintraub advises marketers to think terms of theories.
Get approval for creative elements, not complete ads. It allows you more flexibility. Lock down the two keywords that are most important and key to the ad and go from there. It looks like this:
In addition to looking at synonyms, look at definitions. Use the Google Dictionary; at the bottom of every entry, there is a graph that shows a word’s use over time. This can be helpful in choosing the right word.
Google Dictionary’s use over time graph for the word “intentional.”
His final tip is to make every part of the purchase path cohesive. Every part of the funnel should work together. The person who designs the ad should design the landing page, and the pages that follow. They shouldn’t be disparate experiences.
Bruce Clay, Inc. is a global digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, SEM PPC services, content development and social media marketing. Looking for a partner to grow your online business presence? Let’s talk. |
The Complete Guide to Disavowing Links for Google and Bing was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Google has named content and links as its top two ranking factors that affect how well a website will perform in organic search results. As such, links have a wild history of being manipulated and spammed, making their acquisition risky but still important.
A September 2016 update of Penguin, Google’s link analysis algorithm, has brought into sharp focus the sophistication with which Google judges links. SEOs must closely evaluate their every link, and be honest about its value to the brand.
Search engine link disavowal tools are needed in today’s link penalty environment. These tools cut ties between a site and links pointing at it that might be seen by engines as dark marks. As with all powerful tools, the disavow tools come with questions about proper use and concerns for abuse.
Let’s talk about the whys, whens and hows of the search engines’ tools for disavowing links. This guide provides steps on disavowing links for both Google and Bing. Get a clear map of disavow links tools best practices, including:
DisavowFiles is a free crowdsourced database and SEO tool that gives users insight into their websites’ backlinks. This tool was the buzz of SMX Advanced when it launched because it offers previously missing data that simplifies the process of backlink evaluation and disavowal. Read more about the free DisavowFiles tool in our announcement post.
Quality backlinks are a requirement of healthy search rankings. But it’s clear from the mouths of the search engines that you can’t go very far if your site is associated with off-topic or spammy inbound links. While it’s important to attract good links, it’s just as important to remove bad ones. This is why link pruning is a critical task of SEO.
A problem arises, however, when you’re stuck with a few bad backlinks. If you can’t get them removed, how do you avoid a search engine penalty for these backlinks? Fortunately, both Google and Bing have an answer: each search engine has a tool for disavowing links, or telling them the backlinks that you want them to ignore.
The search engines’ disavow links tools can help your website in many ways.
First, it can improve your inbound link profile. Disavowing a low-quality backlink essentially blocks it from the search engines’ considerations. If a search engine feels that a low-quality link is dragging down your trust factor, removing that link via disavow can help your site regain some of that trust. In fact, we’ve seen that getting rid of low-quality backlinks can provide positive results in a way similar to attracting quality links to your site. Of course there are exceptions, which is why it’s very important to properly evaluate your links before using the tool.
Another benefit to using the tool is the opportunity to discover negative SEO. While gathering link information, you might find artificial links pointing to your site that you had no part in generating. If you are indeed negatively targeted by your competition, asking nicely to remove the links may not work. While rare, negative SEO is a great example of when disavow links tools can stop poor-quality links from harming your site.
Site owners have no insight into disavow data held by Google and Bing. SEOs can be left without answers …
Are you affected by Google’s Penguin penalty?
Are you a victim of negative SEO?
How do you know if you have backlinks that others have disavowed?
Would you like to know if another site has disavowed your pages?
With the launch of DisavowFiles.com, we help to answer the questions above and aim to bring SEOs peace of mind. Every site can benefit from this free service. Start using DisavowFiles for free here.
Google has said that not everyone needs the disavow links tool. The search engine calls it an advanced tool and warns users to only use the tool if “…you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you.”
So do you really need this tool?
The short answer: probably. (Sorry, Google.)
Why? There are many reasons disavowing links might be the right choice for you, the first of which is: “Not everyone has a perfect link profile,” says Robert Ramirez, former SEO Manager at Bruce Clay, Inc.
Ramirez says most sites today have a disavow file. While initially envisioned as a last resort, disavow tools have become a required last step in a complete link pruning process. As our founder Bruce Clay says: “Everyone has a weakest link. We all have links that we wish would go away.”
Following the launch of Penguin 4.0, Google representatives confirmed the usefulness of disavowing links for backlink clean-up.
@BruceClayInc we haven’t changed our recommendations for the disavow tool with this launch
— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 26, 2016
Once you’ve worked to remove as many low-quality, off-topic, or spammy inbound links from your site, if you’ve found you’re stuck with a few stragglers (which is very common), the disavow links tool might be the best way for you to avoid current or future penalty.
You might also want to use the tool if you’re turning a new leaf in your SEO strategy. You or a past vendor may have consciously created unnatural backlinks in the past. Whether or not you have been penalized for these backlinks yet, you’re eager to follow the search engines’ guidelines. Using this tool helps you to get on the path of SEO best practices.
Here are other very important reasons you might need to use the disavow links tool.
If you fall into one or more of the categories mentioned above, the disavow links tool might be the best option for you. That said, there are drawbacks and limitations to disavowing links.
Problems with the disavow links tools:
Imagine if you could see which of your backlinks other sites have disavowed. Imagine if you could see if a site has disavowed your site. Information like this would enable the SEO community as a whole to combat inbound link spam. The tool we released has addressed these issues.
Google’s disavow tool requires you submit a list of the domains and pages you wish Google would ignore when evaluating your inbound link profile.
The first step to using the Google disavow links tool is to create a .txt file. Per Google’s instructions, this file type has to be a.txt file encoded in UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII. Within this file, list the URLs and domains you want to disavow; each domain and URL should have its own line.
To include a domain-level link in the file, add “domain:” before the URL of the domain home page (for example, “domain:shadyseo.com”).
To submit a page-level link, simply list the URL.
Add notes to each submission by starting the message with “#” on the line before the URL or domain listing.
Once you have your .txt file, you can now submit the final list to Google’s Disavow Links tool. Here’s how:
Note: If you want to remove links from or add links to your disavow file in the future, upload a new and complete file. The new file will replace the previous one.
Google cautions users about the domain-level disavow because of potential damage it can cause. However, Ramirez says something a little different. Disavowing links on the domain level is a more thorough approach to cleaning up bad links. He says he utilizes domain-level disavow often because a “link from a blog page may also be included on a tag or category index page and as more posts are added to that tag/category, the link gets pushed further into pagination.” A link can be a moving target within a site and the only way to safely extract it is by disavowing the domain as a whole.
The way to use Bing’s disavow links tool is slightly different than Google’s tool because you don’t need to upload a .txt file. Instead, you manually enter each domain or URL.
After you’ve submitted the links you want Google and Bing to ignore, it’s time to wait. Google says it could take weeks before it recrawls your site and “reprocesses the pages.” This might be especially frustrating if you’re waiting to recover from a certain manual or algorithmic penalty. Bing says you might not notice any dramatic changes at all! At least you can sleep a little better knowing that you’ve cleaned your house of low-quality backlinks – until, of course, it’s time to do it again.
Publishing notes: This post was originally published in May 2015, then updated in June 2015 with the release of the DisavowFiles tool. It was again updated September 2016 with the announcement of the Penguin 4.0 algorithm update.