Here are a few brands who are succeeding at keeping it real on social media and creating solid, human connections in the process.
The post 7 Brands Who Are Keeping It Real on Facebook & Twitter (And What You Can Learn From Them) by @dantosz appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Hiring experienced marketers are fine. But there are five things to look for when hiring top-quality employees.
The post 5 Things You Should Look for to Hire Top-Quality Employees by @bryantgarvin appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
In a major update to Google+, Google has removed all local business info from Google+. Is it the end-of-the line for Google+ Local or just another reformat?
The post Google Kills Off Google+ Local but is Still Committed to Local Search by @bright_local 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.
Industry
Local & Maps
Link Building
Searching
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
Search Marketing
The post SearchCap: Google AdWords Snippets, Google Place Rich Snippets & Google Entertainment Results appeared first on Search Engine Land.
This week's SEJ Wrap-Up is about surprising SEO tips you didn't know, as well as getting your new website indexed by Google.
The post SEJ Wrap-Up: Surprising SEO Tips You Need to Know & Get Your New Site Indexed in Google by @megcabrera appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Foursquare has come a long way from its early days as a social “check-in” app. Along the way, the company repositioned its app as a Yelp competitor; now the company is substantially focused on “place insights” and “location intelligence” for enterprises.
Earlier this year, Foursquare introduced its advertising platform, “Pinpoint.” Foursquare works directly with advertisers and makes media buys through exchanges (on both the desktop and mobile) and then measures offline actions (e.g., store visits) after ad exposures. This model is radically different from selling ads to local restaurants and bars — even check-in ads to brands — which is where the company began.
Foursquare is also making money off location-data licensing. This is not just business listings data but audience data based on real world store visitations and movements. It’s selling that data to hedge funds, commercial real-estate interests, banks and others.
For example, banks can use the data to determine business credit-worthiness based on foot traffic patterns. The company used the same type of location analytics to correctly predict the success of the iPhone 6s launch. Revenue and sales prediction capabilities like this have piqued the interest of investors.
I spoke with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley last week about the company’s evolution. There are a range of mobile marketing providers and platforms now using location data and location history for ad targeting and location analytics. I asked him what differentiated what Foursquare was doing from the myriad other companies doing similar things.
The outspoken Crowley said that Foursquare’s data is much more accurate than its competitors’ because the company has first-party data from 50+ million global users, whereas most of the location data many of Foursquare’s mobile marketing “location intelligence” platform competitors rely on comes from ad calls, which are often inaccurate.
“We do this better than anybody else,” says Crowley.
Crowley argues, “Everyone is drafting off someone else’s data,” except Foursquare. In fact, Foursquare isn’t the only location targeting platform with first-party data (YP and UberMedia have first-party location data, for example), but it has a larger dataset than others.
Foursquare has developed a “couple thousand” audience segments that marketers can use to target ads via the exchanges, says Crowley. As mentioned, Foursquare also provides location/offline attribution on those ads — even if they’re shown on PCs. However the company disregards and discards “about 80 percent of the location data” it sees from exchanges because of inaccuracy and poor quality.
Crowley asserts that many mobile marketing companies are unable to disambiguate business locations in malls or areas of high population density (e.g., urban centers). “We’ve spent years figuring out where people are; and we can do this quickly at a high degree of precision and speed.”
The post Foursquare CEO Crowley: “We Do Location Better Than Anybody Else” appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Chances are, your customers are handing out all sorts of key data on sites like Yelp and Facebook. Are you listening to them? FInd out how to do it, and how to make their comments count.
The post 5 Ways to Build a Culture of Listening and Boost Your Reputation by @jeanmariedion appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Using psychographics and social behavior data, marketers can now go beyond demographic targeting to create completely custom audiences. We can understand what consumers love, what they want, and even what they are going to do next.
On Tuesday, December 15, join Bob Ciccone and Chris Leet of Netbase in this webcast to learn about an innovation called NetBase Audience 3D 3D™ that gives you the entire dimensional social story and a deeper understanding of your audience.
Register now for “What Every Marketer Should Know about Social Audience Engagement,” produced by our sister site, Digital Marketing Depot, and sponsored by Netbase.
The post What Every Marketer Should Know About Social Audience Engagement appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Marketing analysis and reporting tool DataHero announced an integration with Google AdWords on Monday that offers users access to more than 20 AdWords reports.
“Google AdWords has been the most popular connector requested by our users, especially digital agencies. Now they can analyze data from AdWords along with the other cloud services used every day to measure performance,” said Ed Miller, CEO of DataHero.
DataHero already enables users to pull data from cloud services such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics and Stripe into its drag-and-drop interface.
Stephen Barone, COO at FullFunnel, which tested the the AdWords integration, said in a statement, “With DataHero, we can seamlessly connect performance data from AdWords with landing page and conversion metrics from both HubSpot and Google Analytics all within one easy-to-use platform. This helps us make sense of AdWords spend and ensures we’re using data to drive decision making.”
The post DataHero Adds Support For Google AdWords Reporting appeared first on Search Engine Land.
You can register for SMX West anytime and get the latest SEO and SEM tactics. But why wait? Register now and save $300.
Join us for the most comprehensive search engine marketing conference anywhere. You get 3 days of tactics, hacks and strategies that will improve SEM and SEO performance. Customize the experience by choosing from more than 60 sessions, keynotes and clinics including:
Check out the agenda for all of the details.
SMX West is programmed by the editorial staff at Search Engine Land, your source for industry trends, thought provoking analyses and product updates. We guarantee that our programming and quality content will be worth your investment.
Register today and save $300 off on-site rates! You pay just $1595 for all of the sessions, clinics, hot lunches, all-day snacks and networking activities that make SMX an epic experience.
Super early bird rates expire next week. Register today!
Need additional info? Check out these helpful links:
The post Don’t Procrastinate — SMX West Rates Increase Next Week appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Google continues to build on its structured snippets feature in AdWords, which launched in August. Now, up to two lines of structured snippets can display in AdWords text ads.
In the example above, structured snippets are used to showcase both Styles of shutters and Services the advertiser offers. From the blog post:
Now if you select two predefined “Headers” and define two lists of customized values, they can both show with your ads at the same time — whether that’s a combination of styles and brands or destinations and featured hotels. For example, if you’re a retailer that offers window treatments, you might create one structured snippet for the most popular shutter styles and another for the services you offer.
Google adds that each structured snippet enters the ad auction separately, which means both may not show simultaneously. And, like all other AdWords extensions, the more structured snippets you include, “the better the auction is at selecting the best combination of extensions to help improve ad performance.”
The options of headers currently available are:
In November, Google debuted a short-term set of headers specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions.
The post Now Get A Second Line Of Structured Snippets In Adwords Text Ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Launching a new site is always exciting for those involved. But it can also be intimidating, not least because it is so hard to predict how users and search engines will react to it.
Websites get redesigned, rebranded and migrated for all sorts of reasons, but stakeholders are always going to be interested in the traffic and revenue impact.
Having been involved with several site migrations, I have seen online businesses make the same mistakes time and again. This guide shows how to avoid the most common SEO and UX pitfalls when redesigning, re-platforming or rebranding a website.
When things go wrong, the main failure is often due to strategic mistakes that take place at the very early stages. Unfortunately, fixing these mistakes after the new site has launched can be very costly.
A site redesign is often seen as the golden opportunity to address multiple known problems that may have cropped up over the years. However, radical strategic shifts can be risky unless there is factual evidence or other signals.
And introducing too many major changes can sometimes backfire. Sites that undergo radical UX changes may end up with frustrated users that find it hard to familiarise themselves with the new site. Similarly, search engines may struggle to crawl, index and rank pages that have been updated or moved but not in an SEO-friendly way.
There are many factors that can hinder success when re-designing or migrating. Here are 12 top tips to make sure your site migration is a success:
A common scenario is that a website gets redesigned because it feels dated, but the new site then fails to perform as well as the old site. The need to design a new site really should be backed up by evidence, e.g., organic search performance has been diminishing due to poor site architecture, CMS lacks certain features that will help increase user engagement, A/B split tests suggest that conversion rates can be improved further and so on.
It is also worth pointing out that the objectives should ideally take into account both SEO targets, such as retaining organic traffic levels or improving key rankings and user engagement targets, reducing bounce rate or increasing conversions. Why? Because the former affects traffic and the latter conversions, and there is no point in trying to improve one without the other.
Examples of SEO objectives include retaining or increasing organic traffic levels and retaining or improving key rankings. And examples of measurable user engagement objectives include increasing user engagement, reducing form dropoffs and reducing exit rate on key pages.
Choosing measurable objectives will also make it possible to define the ideal success metrics.
Each site migration is unique and needs to be treated with a lot of thought and attention. Defining realistic objectives requires good knowledge of your site’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as an in-depth understanding of the competitive landscape. It would be unrealistic to expect organic traffic levels to increase as a result of a site migration if you are competing with bigger and more established brands in a very competitive vertical.
Failing to take the strengths and weaknesses of the online competition into consideration can easily lead to setting unrealistic objectives. Growth in saturated niches can be challenging, and the decision to go ahead with a site redesign needs to balance both the pros and cons.
One thing to bear in mind is that growth is very likely to be the main objective across all your competitors. Make sure you are realistic about your true position in the market. Are you really in a position to challenge your competitors? If not, then investing in a new site is unlikely to yield much return.
Taking a data-driven approach will help you make better design and UX decisions. Analytics data can help identify things such as high- or low-traffic pages, popular or problematic user journeys and the best or worst-performing calls to action.
A data-driven approach will help to prioritise the areas that need to be improved and safeguard the ones that are already performing well.
For most websites, it is essential to try and find the right balance between UX and SEO. Too great a focus on UX may result in a dip in rankings and traffic, whereas focusing exclusively on SEO can easily hinder user engagement.
Site redesigns led by UX teams often see their organic traffic levels suffer after the new site goes live. On the other hand, site re-designs led by SEOs often see their conversion rates being reduced. In both cases, revenue goes down, and the outcome of the site migration is negative.
Finding the right balance between UX and SEO is essential so you don’t risk losing your hard-achieved rankings or your most loyal customers.
Site redesigns often involve several individuals or even teams with different objectives and goals: content strategists, UX and CRO experts, web developers, SEOs and data analysts, to name but a few.
Failing to work collaboratively on such a complex project will invariably lead to problems, as one team’s actions may well hinder the goals of another. Similarly, letting one team lead a site migration project (e.g., IT or marketing) can be very ineffective.
The ideal is to establish and encourage a much more collaborative approach between all involved parties as this will help the business meet its objectives.
All teams should be encouraged to feed into the project so they all contribute to the decision-making. In large organisations where a site migration can take several months, building up a multi-disciplinary team can be very beneficial.
With so many different parties involved, effective project management will play a pivotal role in the success of the site migration. With so many dependencies between the different activities, project management can be challenging, but it is vital in making sure each party is delivering what is expected on time.
But because things do not always go as planned, a certain degree of flexibility is also necessary, as long as key deadlines and milestones aren’t hindered. Site redesigns or migrations that don’t involve experienced project managers are prone to failure.
When not well-thought-out, content strategies can condemn a site migration to failure. The decision to move, remove or consolidate a significant portion of a site’s content without thinking about the consequences on UX and SEO is a classic mistake.
A new content strategy can significantly influence a site’s information architecture, page structure and internal linking. Therefore, it can have a big impact on the various user journeys but also on how search engines crawl the site’s pages.
To avoid coming across nasty surprises later, content strategies need to be discussed and evaluated at a very early stage and before moving into production. The SEO and UX teams should consider the pros and cons of the suggested content strategy, flag any potential issues and make recommendations where necessary. Forecasting traffic loss or identifying user experience flaws at this early stage will be much more beneficial than dealing with these potential issues after the new site has gone live.
It is surprising how many sites get redesigned or rebuilt without performing any user testing ahead of the launch. Relying on best practice and common sense alone can be quite risky.
There are many ways to make sure that the new design, taxonomy, site navigation or other essential features are right. First and foremost, user testing needs to be carried out by users who fit the demographics of the site’s real audience.
Large organisations should invest time in testing with real users, whereas smaller ones can get away with remote online user testing, which is very cost-effective. Identifying usability issues in the user journey during the design phase is essential so that any problems can be addressed and resolved before the new site goes live.
The agreed timeline needs to be realistic so that it doesn’t act as an obstacle later. A common mistake is to come up with a very tight deadline for going live, without leaving any time to deal with unforeseen circumstances. Site migrations hardly ever go as planned; according to a Forester study the average delay for replatforming projects is 4.2 months. Therefore, factoring in some additional time during planning will almost certainly pay dividends.
Another common mistake is to plan the new site launch close to a business-critical period. For example, retailers should avoid launching a new website anytime between September and December so they do not hinder their site’s performance before the busy pre-Christmas sales period.
Budget and available resources always play a big part in the success of a site migration or redesign. Underestimating the amount of work required to have everything ready for a risk-free site launch can have a negative impact on the success of the site migration.
You need to be realistic about what you can achieve with the available budget and resources, but you should always secure some additional budget that could be released to deal with any unforeseen circumstances that may occur. Reducing the scope of the project to keep it on budget can be risky, depending on which activities are left out.
Platform or build limitations where moving from one platform to another can impose certain technical limitations; for instance, certain features may not function in an SEO or user-friendly way right out of the box.
An extensive technical SEO and UX audit needs to be carried out during the very early stages, so any technical obstacles are identified and assessed by the SEO & UX teams. If any of these issues are likely to have a big negative impact, they will need to be addressed by the development team prior of launching the new site.
Human error is unavoidable, but testing the site’s technical implementation on a staging server can help with spotting and fixing them before launch. It is worth delaying the new site launch by a few days or even weeks, rather than risking some of your site’s revenue.
Launching a new site that is poorly optimised will certainly result in traffic loss. Poor optimisation often comes down to very simple mistakes. Time pressure is a very common reason for the optimisation of a site to be overlooked — a deadline has come and gone, and you need the site to go live. But going live without the best possible optimisation is a mistake.
Lack of expertise is another common reason for site migration failure. Google’s documentation on this subject matter is insufficient and cannot meet the unique requirements and characteristics of every single site.
Complex site migrations can be very challenging because of the number of ranking signals that change overnight. An experienced site migration specialist should be able to come up with a tailored site migration process but also needs to make sure that any potential issues are identified as early as possible.
Predicting how users or search engines will react to a site redesign can be challenging, and relevant experience on this subject matter can be invaluable, so if things do not go as expected, a well-thought-out recovery plan is in place.
To be able to measure the success of a site migration some preparatory work needs to be carried out before the new site goes live.
Benchmarking is essential and needs to be as extensive as possible and cover as much as possible:
A lot of the above data will no longer be available after the new site has gone live. Missing any of these will just make it difficult or even impossible to measure the success of the new site.
The post Site Redesign & Migration Tips To Avoid SEO & UX Disasters appeared first on Search Engine Land.
If you play in the Local arena at all, you’ve probably seen the new Google Plus update and freaked out along with the rest of us. The redesign has completely dumped every “local” element, leaving marketers and business owners scratching their heads.
Various blog posts and forum discussions popped up, with everyone freaking out about lamenting the updates. Is the update still in beta? Will any elements be added back? What about reviews? Where in the world *IS* Carmen Sandiego?
Thanks to a recent post on the Google Advertiser Communities site from Matma B., we now know that Local pages are no longer a part of Google Plus, and the following features are no longer supported:
The change isn’t all that surprising, considering how Google has slowly been decoupling Google Plus from all of its different properties. Most Local SEO experts agree this won’t have much (if any) impact on the general public. The only people who ever really visited Google Plus pages were business owners and SEOs.
The general public will now interact with your local business information either in the knowledge box on the right side of brand searches or on the new Local Finder page (after clicking on a 3-pack result). Your new Google business listing page is simply your Google Maps listing.
The only real shakeup with this update is the fact that the links we’ve been using for customer reviews will be broken. Since reviews aren’t a part of the Google Plus experience anymore, you can’t send customers there to leave reviews. Even worse, everyone’s favorite auto-pop-up-review-box trick (adding &review=1 to the URL) doesn’t work anymore, either.
All of the Local SEO experts started tinkering… links that popped up review boxes worked, but only if a user is signed in to Google. Other links worked regardless of being signed in, but only on desktop. After testing several different variations, a few people created automated tools to assist with review link generation.
Grade.us pushed out the tool that we’ve been using for all of our clients (and recommending to everyone). Head over to their Review Link Generator and follow these steps:
Once you land on the page, it’s a simple process. Just enter the name of your business and your ZIP code, and click the “Get Google Review Links” button. The system will search all active listings, then provide a list of possible matches.
Obviously, you’ll want to choose the option that matches your business. In most test cases, we’ve only seen a single option — but expect to see several to choose from if you’re a multi-location business with several locations in the same city.
The system will then spit out a list of five links. Copy the second link, and use that one on your site (or emails) to let customers leave you a review. If you want to get more advanced, you could use a script to detect the operating system being used to serve up the appropriate link, whether a user is on a desktop, Android or iOS.
Now you’ll be able to update your “leave us a review” link on your site, and the rest of the Google Plus update won’t really have much of an effect on your business.
The post How To Get Google Review Links After The G+ Update appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Despite the shift of local search from desktop to mobile, SMBs are still using desktop strategies for mobile marketing.
While mobile ad spending is expected to increase by 50 percent, desktop advertising budgets driven by PPM, PPC and CTR are still often used to plan and measure mobile ad success. While those metrics are not entirely obsolete, mobile search should be analyzed with methods that take advantage of its strengths.
One of those mobile metrics is calls. Click-to-call and call extensions make generating calls to SMBs a seamless one-touch action driven by mobile ads — unlike the much more deliberate and separate function of moving from desktop screen to dialing a phone number.
As a result, analysts expect a sizable boost in call volumes to local businesses. Mobile search in particular will eclipse other sources and drive 65 billion calls to businesses by 2016, a volume that will grow at a 43 percent compound annual growth rate.
Credit: DialogTech, “The Click-To-Call Playbook For Paid Search”
The lift in call leads from mobile search is good news to SMBs, as calls are the most valued source of leads. According to a report by BIA/Kelsey, 66.4 percent of SMBs rate phone calls as a good or excellent source of leads, higher than any other source, including online forms, emails, paid leads, and even in-person leads.
The value of calls as leads is no surprise. Calls indicate strong interest and a live connection to a customer or potential sale. The immediacy of the response, answering the customer’s precise needs and the ability to engage in a two-way dialogue all help heighten conversion rates of phone call leads.
And yet, even though the technology exists to drive more calls, SMBs often use desktop measurements such as click-through rates and design ads that boost conversions like completing web forms.
Not only can that strategy lead to poor feedback on the effectiveness of those ads, but it can actually detract from critical mobile conversions such as calls.
A study by xAd found that focusing on CTRs negatively affects secondary actions which can be much more productive in driving leads to the business. The study found that when ads were optimized for higher click-through rates resulting in increases of up to 38 percent across campaigns, the secondary action rate for actions such as phone calls fell by up to 69 percent.
So what are some good ways to take advantage of the correlation between mobile search ads and call leads? Two of LSA’s members, DialogTech and Telmetrics, recently released a playbook and e-book respectively to help SMBs use local search to get that phone ringing. Following are six strategies from those guides for using paid search to drive calls.
Call extensions are buttons within search results that, when clicked, immediately dial a phone number on the user’s mobile device. They may be in the form of a phone icon, a “call” button or a link from a phone number that appears in the search result or ad.
Credit: DialogTech, “The Click-To-Call Playbook For Paid Search”
Call extensions are the most direct conversion to call-in leads for smartphones — where, as discussed above, the majority of searches for local businesses are occurring.
And DialogTech reports in its “Click-to-Call Playbook for Paid Search” that consumers want and use the convenience of call extensions when they are looking for local business information. Seventy percent of consumers have clicked on call extensions, while 50 percent will look at other ads or results if call extensions are missing. Including call extensions boosts ad performance with an 8-percent increase in CTR.
Thus, using call extensions in all marketing assets — whether they be enhanced listings, paid search results, landing pages, social media pages, mobile websites or mobile ads — is a no-brainer.
Consumers are shopping local at an increasing rate, not just because the businesses are close by, but because they trust local business owners more and believe the products and services are superior. Eighty-two percent of US consumers shop local businesses, and almost 50 percent said they would increase shopping for local products and services in the upcoming year.
This is further reflected in Google’s reports that 50 percent of searches have local intent. Thus it is vital to make sure consumers know that a business is local (and locally owned).
Local area codes, location information in ad text and URLs and location extensions that include a link to directions to your business all communicate that the business is nearby and local.
Even national franchises can take advantage of consumer preferences for local by using the term “locally owned” in ad text or including location information in their names, such as “Discount Tire — East Plano.” Hyper-local terms such as neighborhoods or cross streets may help emphasize even more a business’s relationship to its local community.
In the past year alone, the number of searches for businesses using the search term “nearby” or “near me” doubled, with the vast majority (80 percent) on mobile.
In response, this year Google launched a new mobile ad format that shows up when users search for businesses “nearby” or “near me.” The ads are triggered by location extensions in AdWords when a search is performed “near me” and it matches a radius and location bid defined by the business. The ads display location, a link to directions and a click-to-call button.
These ads take advantage of consumers performing searches on the go who are ready to buy. Compared to last year, there has been a 25-percent increase in consumers who look for local information while they are out, away from home or work, according to LSA and Thrive Analytics’ 2015 Local Search Report. Today, a majority of searches for local information on mobile phones (52 percent) occur while consumers are either in the car or away from home or work.
Local businesses must reach consumers on the go and utilize location-based mobile marketing strategies such as these “near me” geo-targeted ads that get consumers to call.
In today’s “data overload” society, a common problem is TMI — too much information. We face too many decisions which impact our ability to make other decisions. Leaders such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg famously wear the same dark t-shirt and jeans outfit to avoid spending unnecessary energy on deciding what to wear, instead focusing on important decisions only. The phenomenon has been defined as “decision fatigue.”
Providing consumers with simple, singular calls to action helps sidestep any hesitation on making yet another decision about how to contact a business. Ads that only provide one option — a phone call — cut through the clutter, potentially driving higher engagement with the ad. And mobile, with its limited screen space, small ads and on-the-go audience, is perfect for driving conversions with an immediate response.
DialogTech provides the following tips from its Click-to-Call Playbook when using call-only ads:
Failing to attribute calls from mobile ads means you can’t optimize your spending, since you don’t know where those calls came from or accurately determine which ads drove the calls, leads and revenue. Failing to attribute resulted in missing 49 percent of conversions, per DialogTech.
While tracking your calls may seem like an obvious strategy, according to the Local Search Association and Thrive Analytics 2015 SMB Outlook report, only 10 percent of SMBs use call tracking, a decrease from 16 percent in 2014.
Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is a technology that replaces selected phone numbers in digital media with unique phone numbers for each platform, media source or ad, so that calls can be tracked back to the source that generated the call-in lead.
Credit: Telmetrics
Telmetrics reports that DNI helped increase call attribution by as much as 37 percent, enabling marketers to accomplish the following:
Don’t use the same measurements used to evaluate clicks or other actions for phone calls. Doing so misses out on data that can tell you so much more about the quality of the call and the person making the call.
Instead, track and measure the following data points:
Tracking this data helps optimize ads that drive calls, such as increasing bids for those high-converting targets and eliminating keywords that did not lead to phone leads. This helps increase efficiency in allocating resources, reduces costs and boosts call volume.
Mobile marketing strategies are too often copied and pasted from past PC campaigns. Yet even mobile campaigns may have different goals that are best optimized for narrower reach or lead type. Mobile or PC strategies meant to drive clicks can result in poor performance when calls are the desired or preferable lead type.
Both the volume and quality of leads can be boosted by customizing marketing and search advertising to optimize them for calls. A common mistake is using the same keywords, copy, targeting and bids for advertising across all media and campaigns. Also, marketing is often not optimized due to a failure to track metrics relevant to the campaign; phone calls have unique analytics that can help improve efficiency and ROI for campaigns meant to get customers calling.
Develop a plan specifically to generate phone calls from mobile devices, and perhaps your new problem will be that your phone won’t stop ringing.
The post Stop Using Desktop Conversions For Mobile Search: 6 Strategies To Help Drive Mobile Calls appeared first on Search Engine Land.
In August, Google began testing booking appointments directly from the local search results box. Then Friday, December 4, Google released the developer documentation on how to add this structured markup to your page to add what Google calls “Place Action rich snippets” to your site, to enable searchers to “place orders, make appointments and complete reservations.”
The documentation was live on Friday, but some time over the weekend, it disappeared from the developer docs again. Well, the links to the pages were there, but the pages themselves return a “page not found” status code, like they did in late November, when Google was getting ready to release them.
The Google cache has copies of both the Provide Local Business Information and Place Actions pages in the developer docs, but again, that is currently the only way to get to them.
We are not sure if Google removed them intentionally or if it was an accident.
I have also copied the cache versions, just in case those go offline, as well.
The post Google Place Actions Rich Snippet Markup Documentation Posted & Then Removed From Developer Portal appeared first on Search Engine Land.
SEO audit is something simple that can cause a large problem. Here are seven SEO audit tips you can do in case your original audit is inconclusive.
The post 7 Simple But Overlooked SEO Audit Tips by @joeybalestrino appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Most online retailers experience a high rate of cart abandonment and are searching for effective strategies to bring those shoppers back without annoying them.
For this paper from Bronto Software, over 1,000 online shoppers were surveyed about their awareness of shopping cart technology, expectations for marketing when they abandon a cart, and more. This report:
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download your copy and learn more.
The post Why We Don’t Buy: Consumer Attitudes On Shopping Cart Abandonment appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Currently, in order to have two accounts with the photo-sharing platform, you must completely log out of one and re-login with another email address and password. The new multi-login feature was first reported on Twitter by user @fro_rouge last week.
The post #Instagram Tests Multiple Account Feature by @dantosz 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.
Most advertisers won’t be affected, but all should review to ensure compliance in the new year.
Home services professionals are no longer featured in the search results with the newest ad version.
Google’s default settings often aren’t as advantageous as one might think. Columnist Aaron Slusky explains which settings you may want to change.
How difficult is it to master the SEO basics? According to columnist Stephan Spencer, it’s child’s play!
The ads autoplay shortly after the search results load, taking over most of the screen on desktop.
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: Leaf Plows In Mountain View, California: Source: Google+ Matt Cutts With […]
Give your business the gift of local optimization this holiday season with columnist Marcus Miller’s Local SEO Advent Calendar!
Does Google use click data for local rankings? A new post by a Googler said so, but it was then quickly edited to remove those details.
Was it a bug or a feature change? Google no longer shows local data in the main search results snippets.
Social marketing teams and budgets have grown, and tools and channels have proliferated, increasing the importance of measuring the ROI of social media marketing for the majority of brands. It’s critical for any company that wishes to be strategically smart on social to know the impact of its social marketing activities. This handbook from Falcon […]
Link Building
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
Search Marketing
The post SearchCap: Google Local CTR, Yahoo Jumbo Ads & Local One Box appeared first on Search Engine Land.
With over a billion users and enough traffic, YouTube is the third most popular website globally. Here are five ways to improve your YouTube organic reach.
The post 5 Ways to Improve Your YouTube Organic Reach by @ab80 appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google’s Shopping Policy Center will get an update come February 2016.
The new version, seen above, is currently in preview. Google announced the upcoming change in a Merchant Center help page, stating that the new Policy Center will provide:
Below is a screenshot of the current Google Shopping Policy Center:
Most advertisers won’t be affected by the changes, though Google suggests reading through the updated version to be sure you’ll remain in compliance.
Google overhauled the AdWords Policy Center in 2014 with a similar aim of simplicity. There were a few changes that tightened restrictions on weapons, fireworks and tobacco, but most advertisers saw no effect.
The post Google To Update Shopping Policy Center In February 2016 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
In this episode of Marketing Nerds, SEJ's Kelsey Jones and Danielle Antosz talks about investing in yourself as a freelancer or small business owner.
The post New #MarketingNerds Podcast: When is it Worth Investing in Yourself? by @AkiLiboon appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
According to the Facebook Newsroom, this new feature will allow users to share streaming videos they are seeing in real-time.
To share a live video, click "Update Status" and then look for the "Live Video" icon, next to the photo, tag, and emoticon options on your iPhone. The icon appears as a person with two rings around their head.
The post Facebook Releases Live Video Streaming to Limited Number of iPhone Users by @dantosz appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google is testing a new, smaller format for Home Services Ads (HSA).
Instead of featuring a few providers and links to more results, the new format asks users to enter their ZIP code and the type of job they need completed before showing the list of service providers available for that kind of work in the area.
The initial ad format for HSAs featured individual service providers and took up significant real estate, as seen below.
The latest version, first reported by Mike Blumenthal, is an interesting departure from the original larger, more visual format. For the service providers, the new version may provide better-qualified leads and improve the user experience by filtering their choices up front. However, it’s far less eye-catching than similar style ad units Google uses for its Compare products for auto insurance and credit cards, which include partner logos and credit card images.
Like those Compare ads, though, the new HSA format takes users off the SERP to a separate page of listings.
Home Services Ads launched in the San Francisco and Silcon Valley areas in July and are currently open to locksmiths, plumbers, house cleaners and handymen via AdWords Express.
The post New Google Home Services Ad Format Puts Lead Qualifiers Up Front appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Today, the company confirmed a new streaming mobile ad feature. This new feature will allow users to access a short 60-second or less version of an app that will respond to taps just like the full app. According to Sissie Hsiao, Google’s new head of product for mobile ads, the goal of this new feature is to help app developers find the right users.
The post Google Releases ‘Trial Runs’ Streaming App Ads by @dantosz appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
The vast majority of experienced paid search advertisers fully understand Google AdWords campaign settings. However, these settings often go unnoticed by novice advertisers.
Simply being aware of these settings and their implications can save advertisers hundreds to thousands of dollars out of the gate. In this article, I’ll cover five tips for new advertisers related to Google AdWords settings.
First and foremost, when setting up your Search Network campaign within the Google AdWords interface, I would recommend against going with the Search Network with Display Select option, which Google advises is the “Best opportunity to reach the most customers.”
Stick with the Search Network only option to start (i.e., Google search and search partners), especially if you’re not an experienced advertiser on the Google Display Network. The Display Network will spend your budget extremely fast if the right controls are not applied.
After choosing the “Search Network Only” option, you’ll notice a choice between “Standard” and “All Features.” Google AdWords defaults to “Standard.”
If you do not click on “All Features,” you’re limiting your options.
For example, by leaving the default setting as “Standard,” you’ll automatically limit your ad extension options during the campaign setup process to three out of the seven available with “All Features.”
Personally, I think it’s odd that Google would not select “All Features” as the default setting, especially after telling us that ad extensions play a role in Ad Rank. Why would they not just offer all the available options at campaign setup?
Furthermore, by not choosing “All Features,” you miss out on the following four advanced settings.
Ad scheduling and Ad delivery are especially important for new advertisers to view while setting up a new campaign.
When setting up a campaign, newer advertisers may scroll past “Location options (advanced),” thinking that it’s actually an advanced feature that they don’t need to address at setup. Google AdWords does not display this option in expanded form.
There is really nothing “advanced” about this setting. When you do click to expand and see your options, Google AdWords “recommends” the broadest approach.
Here are the default settings for “Location options (advanced)” in expanded form.
Read Google’s recommended “Target” option carefully. This option can mean an awful lot of things and might be too broad for many advertisers based on their goals.
If you want to exclude clicks from anyone physically outside of a certain location, you’re going to want to choose “People in my targeted location.”
Without going into the many different scenarios where any of these may work for you, it’s just another example of how Google AdWords defaults to the broadest targeting option. If you don’t expand this option and proactively change out of the default setting, you could end up with hundreds of dollars of wasted spend before you catch this through analysis.
You’ll also find this same default setting in Bing Ads (along with other default settings that I’m mentioning in this post).
Newer advertisers may also easily scroll past “Ad delivery: Ad rotation.” Google does not display delivery option in expanded form, either.
This is how it appears in the interface.
Over the many years that I’ve been managing PPC campaigns, I’ve found that the default setting is often not the best choice for my programs, and I believe that the vast majority of my colleagues would agree with me. In expanded form, you’ll see the following options:
The default setting is “Optimize for clicks: Show ads expected to provide more clicks.” Google AdWords also states that this is the “ideal setting for most advertisers.”
However, clicks are not the primary metric by which most advertisers optimize campaigns. There are certain cases where this may make sense (limited time to manage the account), but the majority of experienced advertisers are going to choose another option. And you should, as well.
The setting that I use most often to start a campaign is “Rotate indefinitely.” This way, I can effectively test what messaging delivers clicks, conversions, actions, leads and opportunities.
This is a feature that advertisers appreciate. It gives us more control and the ability to run better testing. The option of “Rotate indefinitely” was actually removed at one time from Google AdWords until an outcry from the marketing community caused Google to reinstate it.
WordStream’s Larry Kim sent out a reminder at the time to double-check your “Ad delivery: Ad rotation” settings.
“Optimize for conversions” is also a good setting to test after you collect enough data.
Again, I rarely use the “Optimize for clicks” setting. Be aware of your campaign goals, and know you have options in how your ads are served.
Understanding Google Search Network options is important, as well, and this can often be overlooked by new advertisers.
In Google’s default setting, “search partners” are included alongside the Google Search Network
Who are all these partners?
While Google does not provide a full partner list, I recommended taking the time to read this article at Search Engine Land and this article at Search Engine Journal. They provide some insight into what sites your ads might be appearing on, as well as tips to monitor performance and ensure that search partners are not negatively affecting your account.
I would recommend sticking with the default selection here of including these search partners. Be proactive in segmenting performance between the two to make sure it’s on track.
These are examples of a few default settings within Google AdWords that may lack overall transparency. Experienced paid search advertisers understand these options extremely well, but I can see how a novice advertiser could simply overlook them. Unfortunately, it might cost them dearly.
In Google’s defense, there are links to various AdWords help pages throughout the setup process.
New advertisers should just remember that when establishing a new paid search campaign, you’re getting Google’s definition and Google’s examples.
I feel that Google AdWords, Bing Ads and other publishers could do more to be transparent and make it easier to not miss any of these options within their interfaces during the campaign setup process.
I recommend that new paid search advertisers do a bit more research to gain additional insights. You can find excellent reading and helpful tips on industry blogs, including Search Engine Land, PPC Hero, Search Engine Journal and Search Engine Watch.
And to keep up with the latest happenings from Google AdWords and Bing Ads, I recommend bookmarking Inside AdWords and the Bing Ads Blog.
I hope this article is helpful for the new advertisers out there. I know this topic has been discussed in the past, and it’s my hope that Google AdWords and Bing Ads will make a few small tweaks within their interfaces to make the campaign setup process fully transparent.
The post 5 Things New Advertisers Need to Know About Google AdWords Campaign Settings appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Some on-page SEO element may seem unimportant, but even as simple as image alt-tags can actually hurt your business.
The post How Alt Tags can Hurt Your Business, Especially When Under the Legal Magnifying Glass by @5le appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
