The SEO tips below are a blend of analytics, organization, & productivity practices that seems to be frequently forgotten during chats with other marketers.
The post 10 SEO Tips You’d Be Surprised You Didn’t Know by @texasgirlerin appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
You can’t guarantee first-page website ranking with the same bag of black hat tricks. Today, there’s a new content-driven, user-focused approach to SEO.
The post How to Help Your New Website Get Indexed on Google by @neilpatel appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
A prestigious night in search marketing concluded with a first class ceremony at the UK Search Awards.
The post 2015 UK Search Awards Winners Announced at Fifth Annual Ceremony in London by @mattsouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Barrie Smith put together this guide to highlight nine roadblocks that could be holding your website back from Google ranking success.
The post 9 Roadblocks That Could be Harming Your Google Rankings by @barriesmithii appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
If I told you that your website could load faster, your server could use fewer resources, your developers wouldn’t have to waste time on hacks to increase site speed and you’d get a boost to your rankings all from one simple change, you’d probably call me a liar. If it sounds too good to be true, then it must be, right?
Wrong! The future is here with one of the greatest advancements in web technology in the past 20 years, and the SEO community doesn’t seem to be talking about it.
When Barry Schwartz posted a recap of a recent Google Webmaster Central Hangout in which Google’s John Mueller said that GoogleBot will support HTTP/2 by the end of this year or early next year, I expected a mad scramble and people shouting from the rooftops. Instead, there were crickets throughout the SEO industry.
You should already have switched to HTTP/2 for many reasons, including a tremendous speed increase, which makes for a better user experience, but now there are potential ranking factors on the line, as well.
HTTP/2 is the latest update to the HTTP protocol by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The protocol is the successor to HTTP/1.1, which was drafted in 1999. HTTP/2 is a much-needed refresh, as the web has changed over the years. The update brings with it advancements in efficiency, security and speed.
HTTP/2 was based largely on Google’s own protocol SPDY, which will be deprecated in 2016. The protocol had many of the same features found in HTTP/2 and managed to improve data transmission while keeping backwards compatibility. SPDY had already proven many of the concepts used in HTTP/2.
There are several demos out there where you can see the difference in action with tiled images. It appears that as the latency increases, the speed increase from HTTP/2 is even more noticeable, which is great for mobile users.
According to Can I use, HTTP/2 is supported by 76.62 percent of the browsers used by users in the US and 67.89 percent globally. There are a couple of caveats to these numbers, as Internet Explorer 11 only supports HTTP/2 in Windows 10, and Chrome, Firefox and Opera only support HTTP/2 over HTTPS.
You can check how this will affect your website visitors in Google Analytics by going to Audience > Technology > Browser & OS and comparing to the supported browsers.
You’ll also find that most major server software — such as Apache, NGINX, and IIS — already supports HTTP/2. Many of the major CDNs have also added HTTP/2 support, including MaxCDN and Akamai.
While HTTP/2 supports both secure and non-secure connections, both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome will only support HTTP/2 over HTTPS. Unfortunately, this means that many sites that want to take advantage of HTTP/2 will need to be served over HTTPS.
Fortunately, there are new initiatives such as Let’s Encrypt, which goes into public beta on December 3, 2015. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority that is providing free security certificates for websites. It’s a great initiative towards a more secure web.
Speed, speed, and more speed, providing for a better user experience. As time goes on, and people learn the limits of the new protocols, users should see increased speeds on HTTP/2 connections.
With HTTP/1.1, many techniques were used to speed up websites that are no longer necessary with HTTP/2. These optimizations used to take additional development time and were made to cover up inherent flaws in speed and file loading, but they also caused additional issues at times.
For my fellow geeks out there dealing with REST APIs, you will no longer have to batch requests.
Many of the techniques mentioned above by developers placed additional strain on servers due to extra connections opened by browsers. These connection-related techniques are no longer necessary with HTTP/2. The result is lower bandwidth requirements, less network overhead and lower server memory usage.
On mobile phones, multiple TCP connections could cause issues with the mobile network, causing them to drop packets and resubmit requests. The additional requests just added to the server load.
HTTP/2 itself brings benefits for a server, as well. Fewer TCP connections are necessary, as stated above. HTTP/2 is easier to parse, more compact and less error-prone.
With GoogleBot adding support for HTTP/2, websites that support the protocol will likely see an additional rankings boost from speed. On top of that, with Chrome and Firefox only supporting HTTP/2 over HTTPS, many websites that have not yet upgraded to HTTPS may see an additional boost in rankings when they do.
I make this last statement with the caveat that many technical items have to be done correctly with HTTPS, or you will likely experience at least a temporary, if not permanent, drop when making the switch from HTTP.
The number one problem I see with sites switching to HTTPS is with redirects — not just 302s instead of 301s, but placement or writing of the redirects, additional hops or chains in the redirects and failing to clean up old redirects. There are many additional items that need to be cleaned up, such as internal links, external links where possible, mixed content, duplication issues, canonical tags, sitemaps, many tracking systems that need to be changed and more.
Let’s not forget what Gary Illyes said:
There are other reasons besides Google ranking signals that your website should be secure. One most people don’t realize is that when switching from a site using security to one without, the referral data in the headers is dropped.
In Google Analytics, this typically means that more traffic is attributed to direct, when it should actually be attributed to referring websites. HTTPS also prevents ads from being injected on your website, as AT&T was recently found doing with their free Wi-Fi hotspots.
We’ve all seen studies on how slow websites affect conversions and cause users to abandon a website, and conversely how site speed increases lead to increased sales and conversion rates. The important thing to note is that HTTP/2 is faster and provides a better user experience.
Google made speed a ranking factor for a reason, and it will be interesting to see if HTTP/2 itself becomes a ranking factor and how much additional weight will be placed on the added speed.
SEOs, developers, server admins, sales teams and pretty much everyone else should be getting the ball rolling with implementing HTTP/2. There is no downside to upgrading, since if a user cannot load the site over HTTP/2, they will load it just like they always have. Shout from the rooftops with me, or on Twitter:
A final note, and an interesting thought from a conversation I had recently with Bill Hartzer at Internet Summit, is that Google may be pushing for HTTPS and only supporting HTTP/2 over HTTPS in Chrome because this will actually eliminate some of the competition from competing ad networks.
Bill said he couldn’t take credit for this idea, but it does make sense. A lot of the smaller networks don’t support HTTPS, so by recommending HTTPS and only supporting HTTP/2 over HTTPS, they are likely gaining more market share in the ad space.
The post Why Everyone Should Be Moving To HTTP/2 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
In this episode of Marketing Nerds, Kelsey Jones and Amanda DiSilvestro talks about how you can come up with tons of content idea for your blog.
The post New #MarketingNerds Podcast: How to Come up With Content Idea for Your Blog by @AkiLiboon appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. World’s Largest Android Marshmallow Mosaic:
Google John Mueller Star Wars:
Source: Google+
Google Pet Toy:
Source: Google+
GoogleBots Playing In The Snow:
Source: Google+
The post Search In Pics: GoogleBot In Snow, Google Pet Toys & John Mueller In Star Wars appeared first on Search Engine Land.
A reputation management plan for the holidays means more than stocked shelves and full tills. You'll also need a solid plan that can help you spot and solve attacks, so you can give your boss the gift of a solid reputation at the end of the year.
The post Unwrap Your Holiday Reputation Management Action Plan by @jeanmariedion appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Today’s Thanksgiving Day Google logo is based on the “three sisters” of North American agriculture: corn, beans and squash, and was created by guest Doodler Julia Cone using a papercraft technique.
“In the end, I hope that viewers will enjoy the craft of cut paper as an art from in a digital space,” says Cone on the Google Doodle Blog.
The colorful logo marking today’s holiday leads to a search for “Thanksgiving” and includes “Happy Thanksgiving 2015” sharing icons for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or email.
Google offered a quick agricultural history lesson on its Doodle blog, explaining the origination of corn, beans and squash crops.
This planting technique, combining the three crops, originated in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) villages, and was commonly used at the time of the European settlements in the early 1600s. This indigenous practice revolutionized horticulture and helped stave off starvation in many areas, including the Old World.
Here are a selection of Cone’s original sketches that led to the final Doodle used on Google’s U.S. homepage:
Search Engine Land wishes all of its readers a happy Thanksgiving!
The post Thanksgiving Google Doodle Features “Three Sisters” Of North American Crops: Corn, Beans & Squash appeared first on Search Engine Land.
PPC works when an ad network makes money when someone clicks on their ads. Here's how you can make better and more clickable ads---regardless of network.
The post How to Write High Quality Clickable Ads (No Matter What Network You are On) by @adamlundquist appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
It’s frustrating, isn’t it? When Google suddenly changes something, and you had no idea it was going to happen.
That’s where all the awkward conversations with your clients begin. And you have to try to figure out how you’re going to explain another change in strategy.
Now, while there may not be any way to become fully future-proof against Google changes (after all, they perform 500–600 minor changes a year, on top of their big updates), there are ways you can stay ahead of the game.
One of those ways is to understand the patents that Google is applying for and how they might impact search in the future.
In this article, you’re going to learn about three patents that could have a huge impact on future results — both for yourself and your clients.
Patents are funny old things.
While Google may file for them, there are no guarantees that they’ll ever come into play. They often file them as a “nice to have,” to prepare for future projects, or because it could come in handy at some point.
But by understanding the types of patents that Google is filing for, and the changes they want to make to search, you can get a solid understanding of:
Understanding these can make decision-making much simpler and more effective for you. After all, you can never have too much of an idea about what Google plans to do, can you?
That being said, let’s look at the three most important patents you need to know about for 2016…
Google hasn’t updated PageRank in a long time. In fact, their last official update of PageRank was back in December 2013.
The announcement that PageRank was being discontinued caused a big stir in the industry, especially in the aftermath of Google announcing it wouldn’t be updating its Toolbar PageRank.
But with this patent, it seems that it may be returning in one form or another (whether as a replacement or an improvement), and it’s going to be at the forefront of people’s minds in 2016.
Where PageRank was one of the original foundations for trust in searches, the 0–10 scoring system proved to be a little less than stellar for Google’s liking, despite their using it for over a decade.
This patent proposes to not only change what they built with PageRank as a factor, but to grow and expand on it — for example, looking at onsite pages as more than that page versus the pages on the other sites, and using a Global Ranking to compare a representative page on a site against:
As Bill Slawski writes on his SEO by the Sea blog:
The global ranking score for a site may be based, at least in part, on a level of trust in a domain associated with the particular site. This sounds like it anticipates the possibility that multiple sites might be contained on one domain, like a WordPress.com.
This makes trust, both coming in and flowing out from links on your site, an important staple.
This trust is seen a little differently for onsite and offsite content, though. For onsite content, it comes in the forms of:
While for offsite content, it looks like:
So putting an emphasis on building trust for all of your content could become one of the biggest undertakings you have in 2016.
Google wants to reduce duplicate content as much as possible. But it’s a hard thing to do — especially for e-commerce sites, which can often have thousands more pages indexed than they actually need, leaving results that can look like this:
But now Google may have found a way to reduce duplicate content — using Schema markup — leading to fewer pages with duplicate content ranking for the same, or similar, search terms and promoting authority content.
This patent Google filed outlines a process that, using the vocabulary, would look a little like this:
This lets Google discern what is relevant, and what isn’t, more and more effectively. It also means that search results could be:
This creates a more accurate and personalized search result for the user.
But what does that mean for you?
If you’re unacquainted with using schema markup (or your skills are a little rusty), I’d recommend using Schema.org to find the appropriate markup for your site.
In February, Search Engine Land published an article about how Google displays rich answers for 19.45 percent of queries.
But even in less than a year, that number is dramatically rising. The same company that did that research, Stone Temple Consulting, found that by July of this year that figure had already grown to 31.2 percent of results.
Although this data set may not be representative of all searches, it’s still a huge increase in rich content that’s worth paying attention to.
This patent in particular, though, is about question queries. That is, if you were to search “How to fry bread?” the results would have to be relevant to answering that question for the user. Whether that’s in the form of:
But why has this rich content increased? Because search intent has changed, and users are looking for more comprehensive answers to questions/queries. Plus, the amount of quality content has grown. Rich answers are the logical next progression from that.
That means that answers with more accurate authority content for search queries — even implicit ones like “language in belgium” — are going to be a huge contributing factor to a website’s growth next year.
Stone Temple Consulting recently did a full guide (and case study) on rich content. Alternatively, you can look at the recently updated developer’s guide from Google.
It’s clearly evident that authority and rich content will play a major part in search campaigns in 2016. And it’s also the right time to identify the right schema markups for your content to make sure that the right pages show up for the most relevant search queries.
Do you think semantic search will influence your approach to content and rich answers in 2016? How? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter or our LinkedIn Group.
The post 3 Google Patents You Need To Know About In 2016 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
In order to see where our industry is growing and how strategies are changing, we created a short survey - and we need your input.
The post Announcing: Survey for SEJ’s Annual Report 2015 by @dantosz appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
There are many factors that are key to the notion of semantic search. Two that are critical to understand that have not been written about much from an SEO point of view are trust and unique identification.
These two factors lie at the core of the many changes we see happening in search today, alongside Google’s ever-growing knowledge graph and their move in the direction of semantic search.
The notion of trust is a key component in the semantic web. Below is an illustration that depicts the semantic web stack, with trust sitting at the top.
Semantic Web Stack (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web_Stack)
Trust is achieved through ascertaining the reliability of data sources and using formal logic when deriving new information. Computers leverage or mimic this factor in human behavior in order to derive algorithms that provide relevant search results to users.
Search Result Ranking Based on Trust is, in fact, the name of a Google patent filed in September 2012. The patent describes how trust factors can be incorporated into creating a “trust rank,” which can subsequently be used to alters search result rankings in some fashion.
People tend to trust information from entities they trust, so displaying search results to users from entities they trust makes a lot of sense (and also brings in a personalization component).
A group at Google recently wrote a paper titled, Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources. The paper discusses the use of a trustworthiness score — Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) — which is computed based on factors they describe therein.
Below, I have extracted some salient features from the paper that I believe are worth understanding from an SEO POV:
We propose using Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT) to estimate source trustworthiness as follows. We extract a plurality of facts from many pages using information extraction techniques. We then jointly estimate the correctness of these facts and the accuracy of the sources using inference in a probabilistic model. Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source.
The fact extraction process we use is based on the Knowledge Vault (KV) project [10]. KV uses 16 different information extraction systems to extract (subject, predicate, object) knowledge triples from webpages. An example of such a triple is (Barack Obama, nationality, USA). A subject represents a real-world entity, identified by an ID such as mids in Freebase [2]; a predicate is predefined in Freebase, describing a particular attribute of an entity; an object can be an entity, a string, a numerical value, or a date.
I also most definitely enjoyed the introduction here:
Quality assessment for web sources is of tremendous importance in web search. It has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as hyperlinks and browsing history. However, such signals mostly capture how popular a webpage is. For example, the gossip websites listed in [16] mostly have high PageRank scores [4], but would not generally be considered reliable. Conversely, some less popular websites nevertheless have very accurate information.
What can be garnered from this is that SEO practitioners should ensure that all statements written on any website or blog are factual, as this will enhance trustworthiness (which may one day impact rankings).
When it comes to searching for entities in Google, it is clearly evident that they use some form of a trust-based mechanism. Users tend to trust online reviews, so reviews and review volumes are useful to users when they search for a specific product. As a case in point, a search for the product “La Roche Posay Vitamin C eyes” yields the following result in organic SERPs:
Google Search for “La Roche Posay Vitamin C eyes” — Organic Results
The only example that shows up without the enhanced displays associated with reviews (rich snippets) is a page that, when selected, does in fact contain reviews from an authoritative and trusted source (Amazon).
The “most trusted” result is given first, as that comes from the official website of the brand and the reviews page associated with that product. This is a pattern that seems to be quite prevalent in a large majority of product searches at this point in time.
I have written in the past about how another Google patent may utilize reviews in search results in such a manner, and I will quote a relevant portion of the referenced patent here:
The search system may use the awards and reviews to determine a ranking of the list, and may present the search results using that ranking.
In addition, I have also described in the past how unique identifiers may be leveraged to aggregate reviews by search engines.
Why is this important in the context of reviews in e-commerce?
If a search engine or e-commerce site cannot uniquely identify a product, multiple pages can be created for the same product. This causes those pages to effectively have diluted their “trust rank” and/or link equity in terms of impacting those signals they send to the search engines.
For example, you can see below, in the case of the marketplace eBay, that there are many cases where the same product is listed many times, and hence the reviews are not aggregated on one unique URL:
Search for results “La Roche Posay Active C eyes ebay”
This means that it is critical for merchants to be able to uniquely disambiguate their products internally, if they want to send strong signals in order to rank in organic SERPs for a specific URL.
Ensuring your product listings are correctly and uniquely identified provides this benefit, as it will aggregate the reviews for that product onto the same page/product listing, thereby strengthening the “trust rank” of that page. It ought to have a corresponding effect in terms of avoiding link dilution for that page.
Until recently, this was also an issue on Amazon, but one that appears to have recently changed. Compare a recent product search on Amazon for the same product search a few weeks ago:
In this product search from several weeks ago, you can see many separate listings of the same product. [click to enlarge]
In a more recent search for the same product, only one listing appears. From that page, you can select other sellers to purchase from.
Amazon very recently altered this (a couple of weeks ago), and now only displays the one (correct) product at the top of their search results; however, this also appears to give a strong and exclusive bias to the brand owner of the product.
This is unfortunate as I now only seem to get one price (from the brand itself), and it is clearly not the best price. For me, it degrades the user experience, as I don’t seem to be able to get the best price or many options from other sellers (which is my understanding of the definition of a marketplace).
As local business are all entities and have associated products or services, the impact of trust clearly has an equivalent effect and plays a strong role here. An example is depicted below for a search for a specific product.
Search for “4 slice toaster oven near me”
It is also very well known that results from trusted review sites often dominate organic SERPs in local search today, with Yelp as a well-known example. This means this applies to professional services and all other kinds of local businesses, forming the basis for a large part of the user’s “trust” in that business entity and/or the products or services they offer.
Looking at this in another vein, Google recently started advising users to promote their content using Critic Reviews, and they suggest adding review markup to any of the following pages:
“The page can be any of the following:
They provide an example for promoting Critic Reviews for the movie “Gravity” and specify that the preferred format is JSON-LD (although they do state that they accept microdata and RDFA as alternative syntaxes). For examples of the microdata format, they recommend looking at schema.org/review.
Critic reviews – Sample markup in json-ld for the movie Gravity
Google in fact put out a terrific video on the topic of Critic Reviews. A snapshot below illustrates how the schema.org markup added for these reviews appears on your mobile device.
As Google clearly states here, these snippets help users make decisions and also introduces them to new, authoritative sources (whom they now presumably trust).
Crtitial Review Snippets on mobile
The standard set of attributes for Critic Reviews is well defined on the post, and there are also additional requirements for four specific Critic review types: movies, books, music albums and cars.
As an SEO, you should work to make your code “machine-friendly” and add relevant structured data to your pages using schema.org where applicable. As Google states very clearly here, doing so will give you a better chance of achieving enhanced displays (rich snippets) in search results, as well as a presence in the knowledge graph.
If you can, go one step further than specified in the blog by adding identifiers where possible. Focus primarily on Freebase and Wikidata IDs. I illustrated how to find a freebase ID in a previous article by locating the “MID” (Machine Identifier), and I also discussed how to facilitate the search engines disambiguating your content using the “sameAs” predicate in schema.org.
I would also recommend obtaining the wikidata identifier (or “QID”), which you can find quite easily on Wikipedia by going to the URL of the entity and then clicking “wikidata item” in the left-hand navigation.
I would like to end this article with a screenshot from the video that I could not resist, as it makes a very clear statement. Structured Data allows Google to answer some really hard questions, and Google clearly loves the ability to do so. This means if you want to make Google happy, be sure to add structured data to your web pages.
Structured Data Lets Google answer some really hard questions.
The post How Trust & Unique Identification Impact Semantic Search appeared first on Search Engine Land.
The AdWords team behind shopping ads has been very busy improving their offering, with at least 11 major new capabilities launched in the past six months.
Even if you’re using AdWords regularly, it’s easy to have missed some of these new capabilities that may be buried deep in the UI. To make sure you’re not missing any opportunities, here’s a roundup of what’s new in AdWords Shopping ads, along with my thoughts on how to use all these features to drive more sales and profits for your ecommerce business.
The new features fall into a few different buckets that I’ll cover here one by one:
I’ll wrap it up with a few extra tips based on my experiences with shopping ads.
Google Trends has long been an amazing tool to help retailers figure out what products they should stock, and now Google has launched a variation of this tool that is geared specifically towards retailers: the Shopping Insights tool. The tool covers the 5,000 most popular products on Google Shopping.
Because the dataset is limited, Google Trends may still be the best way to gauge the interest in the products you carry. One classic example I’ve shared at many of my AdWords lectures is how to use Trends to see which brand of jeans may be most popular in various parts of the country.
The new Google Shopping Insights tool shows the most popular product searched in different regions and on different devices. Currently the data is limited to 5,000 products. Screenshot from google.com taken November 2015.
Google Trends lets you look beyond the 5,000 most popular products. In this example, we can look at any brand of jeans, even if it’s not in the top 5,000 of all products searched on Google. Screenshot from Google.com taken November 2015.
The Shopping Assortment Report found in the Google Merchant Center shows the most popular products in categories where you also sell products. The idea is to tell you if there are popular products in those categories that you don’t offer and that might provide an opportunity to drive a massive amount of new sales.
Because these products are best-sellers, and there will be a lot of competition from other retailers, you shouldn’t expect these to contribute a lot of profit, but they could certainly drive a big increase in revenues when added to your product mix.
The report only includes products for which you have received no impressions for the past 14 days. This means you may actually have the product in your feed, but your bids and relevance are too low to get any traction.
To make sure you’re not missing any simple opportunities like this, cross reference your list of GTINs with those in the Assortment Report to find popular products that you sell but that aren’t getting any share of the available impressions.
This Assortment report shows that eBay usually has a higher prices for the most popular products in Apparel & Accessories. Screenshot from Google.com taken November 2015.
Because the Shopping Assortment Report shows reference prices from five sites for each product, it can be used to understand the pricing strategies of your competitors. Who is always offering the product for a penny less than the typical price? And which sites always have a higher price yet are still successful?
For example, eBay often has higher prices. This suggests that perhaps consumers mistakenly believe an auction always leads to a better price, so sellers on eBay can get away with charging more for the same products.
For small sites that don’t offer a lot of products, the easiest way to create a feed for the Google Merchant Center is through Google Sheets. Now, Sheets even offers a free add-on that helps with validating the data and submitting it to the Merchant Center.
The Google Merchant Center add-on for Google Sheets simplifies the creation and maintenance of a product feed that is compatible with Merchant Center, a prerequisite for running shopping ads on Google. Screenshot from Google.com taken November 2015.
Over the past year, Google Sheets has gotten powerful enough that I often prefer it over Excel, especially for working with AdWords data, which I can easily import into Sheets using AdWords Scripts. (There are many great examples of AdWords Scripts to start pulling data into Google Sheets on this site, as well as on Google’s Developer Site for Scripts.)
Larger advertisers who want to send continuous updates about prices and inventory can now use the online product inventory update feed. It updates faster than the full feed and won’t cause issues with the full product feed’s approval status if there are transient errors.
Showing the correct price for a product is critical to maintaining a great conversion rate, so this is a must-have for merchants who change prices more often than they typically update their main product feed.
Google has made it easier to structure product groups by letting advertisers who are building new ad groups pick an attribute in their feed by which to split products into groups. This feature also lets advertisers put a single product into each resulting product group.
Here’s a use case where that can be useful: when you have 100 groups after splitting products by the different brands you sell, you’d have had to manually go and subdivide each of these 100 groups by item ID, a process that can be very time-consuming. Now, Google can do this two-level split automatically.
Automatically build product groups for new shopping ad groups. Screenshot from Google.com taken November 2015.
Enable the new click share column to get insights beyond what you already get from impression share. Unlike impression share, which tells you how many times your shopping ad showed divided by how many times a user within your targeting searched for your product, click share shows how many clicks you got divided by how many times your ad was competitive enough to potentially get a click.
If your impression share is good, but your click share is low, it may be because your shopping ad is not appealing, so fix the elements that influence CTR (i.e., the things that show up in the ad like price, image and headline). On the other hand, if you are losing impression share, increase your rank by increasing your bid or improving your quality (CTR).
Remember, Google makes money through a combination of CPC and CTR (because Ad Rank, also known as CPM = CTR x CPC x 1,000), so your relevance is just as important as your bid.
When Shopping ads launched last year, they could only show on Google SERPs; now, however, they can be syndicated to search partners like YouTube, Walmart.com and others, so these provide a big opportunity for driving more volume.
Google is making two flavors of shopping ads available on YouTube:
TrueView For Shopping. TrueView for Shopping will automatically create cards from the data in your Merchant Center to show in your own in-stream TrueView ads, thus making it easier for users who see your video ad to purchase it from your site. To enable this feature, you will need to ask a Google rep.
Shopping Ads On YouTube. Shopping ads on YouTube is already available to all advertisers because it’s just a part of the Google Search Network. When you opt in to show your ads on search partners, someone who is watching a video review of a product you sell can see a card with your product overlaid in that video.
Shopping Ads can now appear as cards on YouTube by opting into the search partners option of a shopping campaign in AdWords. Screenshot taken on Google.com in November 2015.
As you run your ads on search partners, be sure to segment your AdWords reports by “Network (with search partners)” to make sure that your results on these partner sites are good enough to justify the money you’re spending there. Results that I’ve seen have been good, but it’s always a good idea to check your own data as more partner sites start to drive clicks on shopping ads.
Last year, I recommended structuring shopping campaigns into ad groups so that you could take advantage of ad group-level features like mobile bid adjustments and negative keywords. Now, add flexible bid strategies to that list of features available for well-structured shopping campaigns.
The best bid strategy for e-commerce is almost certainly to target the ROAS that corresponds to your profitability goals. You can use this strategy so long as you’re adding conversion value data into AdWords, either with the AdWords conversion tracking code or with an import of Google Analytics’ e-commerce data.
The formula to calculate your target ROAS is as follows: to break even, you need an ROAS target of 1 divided by your margin. If you want to keep some profits, you subtract the amount of profit you want from 1 and then divide that by the margin: (1 – percentage of profit to keep)/margin.
Google recommends a bid strategy of “maximize clicks” if you’re promoting a sale and want to drive foot traffic for a local inventory ads campaign. Other flexible bid strategies make less sense for shopping ads, in my opinion.
You can now add a remarketing audience to your shopping ad groups or campaigns. Like with RLSAs, they can be used to modify bids or to target only those people who are on a remarketing list.
Combine this with the very powerful new Customer Match feature where you can build an audience list by importing the email addresses of your current customers. You can even segment them based on how much they spent, how recently they purchased, or what types of products they bought.
You can then, for example, increase bids for customers who tend to place high-value orders and decrease bids for customers who buy very little and where there may be little profit left after you pay for your free shipping promotions for the holidays. (You are offering free shipping, right? Eighty-eight percent of consumers say free shipping makes them more likely to buy.)
If you previously installed the code for Dynamic Remarketing (where Google automatically inserts products users looked at into display ads), AdWords will already have created some other useful audience lists like shopping cart abandoners. These may be an excellent audience to pursue with a more aggressive promotional ad or with a more aggressive bid strategy.
As I said in my column about Shopping ads last year, there was no point adding promotional text to ad groups because virtually no user would ever see it, and Google has now retired this feature. Now, Google will automatically try to make your ad more clickable by including details about your promotions.
To get this to work, be sure you have a promotions feed added in your Merchant Center, and keep your prices up-to-date so that Google can indicate when there is a price drop and a great opportunity for prospective buyers to put down their plastic.
Now that the promotional text for shopping ads has been retired, Google may automatically enhance shopping ads with automated ad extensions like these.
Use data from the Bid Simulator for shopping ads to estimate how many more clicks you could have gotten with different increases in your bids. This type of data lets you calculate incremental costs like “incremental cost per click” and “incremental cost per conversion,” which are critical to help you bid the right amount for your goal, whether that’s to maximize profit or revenue.
As you can see, AdWords has made huge strides in making shopping ads more powerful and easier to manage, but like most power users, we’ve found a couple of additional scenarios that could be easier to handle, so here are a few final tips and tricks.
Even after you’ve taken the time to build a well-structured set of ad groups with well-divided product groups, your AdWords structure might get out of sync with the data in your Merchant Feed.
To make sure you’re never losing potential sales, I recommend always having a low-priority catch-all shopping campaign that targets everything in your feed. That way, you’ll always have a chance to show an ad for a product you sell. I also recommend you avoid getting too many clicks coming from these types of catch-all campaigns, or product groups of “everything else” because that’s akin to buying only broad match keywords for search ads: great for getting lots of traffic but lousy for giving you control over your ROI.
To balance the need to never miss a sale while keeping product groups neat, you have to periodically check that there aren’t any new items in the feed with attributes that require you to update your structure. Here’s a simple example. If you divided products into groups based on brands X and Y, and then your feed gets updated with a new product from brand Z, that brand would fall under “everything else” until you add brand Z as a product group.
You can do this manually by editing all of your current product groups, but that’s clunky, so at Optmyzr we built a Shopping Refresher tool that checks whether your AdWords structure matches what’s in your feed and automatically adds or removes product groups based on what changed.
A common issue in AdWords has to do with data density for making optimizations like bid adjustments. A well-structured account with lots of tightly themed ad groups may get great Quality Scores, but it may leave you with too little data to act on when it comes to changing bids. Aggregating the data based on commonalities between elements helps increase data density.
Luckily, this is where a good structure helps: in product groups, you can roll up to a higher level of your product group splits, and in ad groups, you can roll up data to the campaign level. For example, if you’ve split all your products into groups of single item IDs, use a dimensions report to get aggregate stats for attributes like brand or product category where you have at least 15 conversions, and then use this larger set of data to help guide bids for those product groups that don’t have 15 conversions on their own.
My fellow columnist Daniel Gilbert shared a script to set hourly dayparting bid adjustments. We took inspiration from his idea and rewrote the script for our users. Based on feedback from one of our users, we decided to extend our script’s capability to also let you do hourly dayparting for shopping campaigns.
We’ve published a free single account version of the code to do hourly dayparts for shopping ads here, but you could also take Daniel’s code and replace the string var campaignIterator = AdWordsApp.campaigns() with var campaignIterator = AdWordsApp.shoppingCampaigns().
Isn’t it great how, with AdWords Scripts, you can take an existing script and (in this case) make it do something more by literally adding eight characters to it?
With so much new in shopping ads, now’s a great time to take another look to make sure you’re taking advantage of these 11 new capabilities AdWords offers.
The post AdWords Shopping Ads Enhancements: A Roundup appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Warren Whitlock explains how businesses can better incorporate storytelling into their content marketing
The post Storytelling in Marketing: An Interview With Warren Whitlock by @lorenbaker appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Columnist Pratik Dholakiya outlines three patents that Google is applying for and explains how they could affect search results for you and your clients.
Is your content trustworthy, and does that matter? Columnist Barbara Starr explores how Google might be using trust as a signal when displaying search results.
Columnist Frederick Vallaeys notes that AdWords has released many new features for Shopping Ads recently. Are you taking advantage of them?
Google released data earlier today on foot traffic patterns during the holiday shopping season. The data were collected from anonymous mobile users with location history enabled. These capabilities are part of Google’s broader Estimated Total Conversions effort to connect digital advertising with store visits. It matters because local commerce is more than 10X larger than […]
Industry
Local & Maps
Searching
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
Search Marketing
The post SearchCap: Google Store Data, AdWords Shopping Ads & Semantic Search appeared first on Search Engine Land.
WordPress.com has been rewritten from scratch in what is said to be the platform’s biggest update ever.
The post WordPress.com Gets Desktop App, Goes Open Source in Biggest Update Ever by @mattsouthern appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google released data earlier today on foot traffic patterns during the holiday shopping season. The data were collected from anonymous mobile users with location history enabled.
These capabilities are part of Google’s broader Estimated Total Conversions effort to connect digital advertising with store visits. It matters because local commerce is more than 10X larger than e-commerce. Lack of visibility on what is helping generate offline visits means lack of clarity on ROI.
To help remedy that, Google announced that you can see how specific keywords or ad groups are impacting physical store visits — by day, week and month:
Starting today, advertisers can get a more detailed view of offline measurement with the ability to breakout store visits at a keyword or ad group level, and the ability to view visits by day, week, or month to better inform bidding and campaign strategy. By reviewing data at this level, advertisers can understand which keywords or ad groups drive the most store visits. For example, a toy store may learn that certain dolls or action figures bring in the most visitors. With this insight, that toy store might invest in search terms that drive both online and offline sales, and display those products at the front of their store. As a reminder, store visits are based on anonymous and aggregated statistics and are shared in a privacy-safe way.
The value of this kind of data is self-evident. It should be something of a revelation to search marketers to be able to see which keywords or ad groups are actually impacting in-store foot traffic. And it should impact bidding fairly dramatically.
The post From Search To Store: Google Shows You Ads And Keywords Driving Offline Visits appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Social media has evolved. From super-sensitive sentiment detection to data-driven channel charges, the technology is here to actually use social engagements in repeatable, business-building ways.
Get Oracle’s Modern Marketing Essential Guide to Social Marketing to learn how to fortify your marketing programs with social media with the 5 pillars of social marketing: Listening, Engagement, Marketing Communications, Social Advertising, and Analytics.
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download your copy.
The post Modern Marketing Essential Guide To Social Marketing appeared first on Search Engine Land.
This week's SEJ Wrap-Up is about AdWords’ brand new tools , as well as psychology in marketing.
The post SEJ Wrap-Up: Google Rolls Out SMS Remarketing & Learn About Sustainable Link Building by @megcabrera appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The new mobile experience is among the updates released before the holiday shopping surge, including Click Share reporting.
Having trouble getting traction for your SEO campaign due to bureaucratic red tape? Columnist Andrew Shotland suggests that you consider thinking local.
The current number of weekly URL copyright removal requests is nearly double what it was this time last year.
Having trouble showing progress when it comes to online reputation management (ORM)? Columnist Brian Patterson explains his metric for tracking ORM campaign progress over time.
With Bing now at the center of Microsoft’s consumer monetization strategy, executives display a new level of confidence when sharing plans for growing the search business.
Doing SEO for a business in another country and not sure where to start when it comes to local citations? Luckily, columnist Myles Anderson has put together this great list of sites for you as a starting point.
Google tells us they are actively working on detecting and penalizing sneaky mobile traffic networks.
Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia, now notifies webmasters when they violate their own Webmaster Guidelines.
October desktop search data from comScore came out late Friday afternoon. Google appears to have “stabilized” at roughly 64 percent market share, while Bing and Yahoo are also mostly unchanged from September. Search market share was in nearly the same place in October 2008. Google controlled roughly 64 percent of search query volume, and the […]
The right message, in the right place, at the right time, to the right audience. Content marketing doesn’t have to be painful. Want to know more about ending the chaos of your organization’s content creation, management and measurement? This guide from Oracle will walk you through steps you can take to get your plan put […]
Industry
Local & Maps
Link Building
Searching
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
The post SearchCap: Google Penalty, Yandex Actions & Google Shopping appeared first on Search Engine Land.
On Tuesday, November 17th, the SEJ ThinkTank was joined by Prashant Puri of AdLift Inc to talk about driving profitable content marketing techniques.
The post #SEJThinkTank Recap: Content Marketing Excellence in 2016: Driving Profitable Content Marketing Techniques by @megcabrera appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Image Credit: Denys Prykhodov / Shutterstock.com
Google has made a flurry of updates for shopping results and campaign features ahead of the holidays. Among them are a new display for broad product searches on mobile and a new column metric for managing product groups.
Google says that 40 percent of product searches are on broad terms. To help users narrow down their searches, Google has started showing Shopping results on some broad queries segmented by category, rather than showing itemized product listing ads.
This categorization only happens in mobile search results, for now, anyway. For example, a search for “droids” shows popular categories of Collectibles and Dolls, Playsets & Toy Figures, Interlocking Blocks, Home Decor and others.
I also saw this configuration on a search for “bike” in which categories were broken out by bikes and parts and accessories.
Google also added a click share column for product groups in Shopping campaigns. The new click share metric shows the percentage of total possible clicks received by your Shopping ads.
To see this, simply add the click share column to the Product groups tab in the AdWords UI.
The post For Some Broad Queries, Google Shopping Showing Top Categories On Mobile, Not PLAs appeared first on Search Engine Land.
