Learn how to write and share better social media content for your platforms and audience, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The post 15 Tips to Help You Write Better Social Media Content by @JuliaEMcCoy appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
A lot of companies, particularly mid-sized multi-location brands, can’t seem to get their acts together to do “national” SEO. They may have hired an SEO consultant, or they may have an in-house team driving SEO strategy, but they can’t seem to execute. When it takes six months to update a title tag, you know you’ve got some SEO challenges.
There are a million different reasons for an SEO program to hit a roadblock:
So what do you do when, either as a consultant or an in-house team member, you are the one tasked with driving SEO, but the company can’t seem to find the keys to the car?
If your company has a physical presence (aka a headquarters or sales office), then we strongly urge you to shift your focus from “national” SEO to “local” SEO, even if you don’t think you should be targeting local search queries. Here’s why:
Local SEO often does not require the input of multiple stakeholders from within an organization. This doesn’t mean you don’t need anyone else’s help to do it — you still need to coordinate with someone at a location to verify a Google My Business listing, for example. It does mean that you can get a lot of traction from local optimization without having to rebuild the website, without involving the PR person and without taking up a lot of time from other internal teams.
Of course, if the website is not optimized for local queries, you’d want to get that taken care of. However, we have seen great results for companies just by focusing on off-page Local SEO factors like Google My Business pages, local citations and local link building — all while waiting for approval on the $1,000,000(!) budget to add individual store location pages to the site.
Many companies have nowhere to go in Local but up. Often it’s the case, particularly with B2B companies, that no one has been paying attention to the state of their location info on the Web. Offices close, move, change phone numbers, rebrand and so on all the time — and often when this occurs, no one thinks that they need to clean this stuff up on Google, at the local data aggregators, on the top local citation sites and elsewhere.
Just doing this kind of thing can affect both your local and your non-local rankings. This can be particularly true when a company has a lot of locations that don’t appear on local citation sites. Just adding new listings to these sites often means getting hundreds, if not thousands of new backlinks to the company’s website. This alone can give you a nice organic pop.
Over the past few years, Google has been boiling the local query frog. If there’s even a hint of local intent in your target keywords, Google is going to surface a local pack at the top of the search engine results page (SERP).
Many businesses think of themselves as “national” and are therefore focused on ranking for non-geo-specific keywords. They are missing out on the Local SERP low-hanging fruit:
Local queries are often not as competitive as “National” queries for multi-location brands. The above screenshot is a perfect example of a B2B query that a national plastic molding company could compete at if they had a local presence in the Bay Area.
Multi-location companies often have an edge over single location companies in that each location can be a source of citation backlinks which, in turn, will help every other location’s ability to rank in the Local packs. In many cases, we have seen positive traffic impact for these types of businesses within a few weeks of claiming and updating their Google My Business pages and optimizing their local citations.
Often the only way to overcome corporate SEO inertia is to prove that SEO works. If you can’t do it, you can’t prove it. So focusing on something you can do, like Local SEO, can point the way towards ROI for all SEO efforts. Note: If you have suffered from Corporate SEO Inertia for more than four months, consult your Local SEO consultant.
Now don’t get me wrong, Local SEO has its own fair share of mind-blowing headaches and Looney Tunes brick walls, but for businesses that have even a small local presence, it often can be a fast (or better put, “a faster“) path to SEO success.
For more thoughts on the subject, see Dan Leibson’s presentation, Small Tactics for Multi-Location SEO = Big Results, from last week’s State of Search conference.
The post Even If A Brand Can’t Do SEO, It Can Still Do Local SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.
When both content marketing and search engine optimization are carefully considered and come together for any website, the result is a match made in heaven.
The post 10 Steps to Effective Website Content and Copy by @ChandalN appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
The number of URL copyright removal requests sent to Google continues to climb at a rapid rate. According to its latest transparency report data, Google received 15,659,212 URL takedown requests based on copyright infringement during the week of November 19, averaging 2.2 million requests per day.
This is a steep rise compared to the same time last year, when Google says it received 8.2 million requests for the week of November 17, 2014.
During the past month, Google says it received 65,122,023 million URL copyright removal requests for 72,207 specified domains from 5,492 copyright owners.
In January, Torrent Freak reported the Google takedown requests had grown 75 percent between 2013 and 2014.
Google’s latest transparency report includes a breakdown of the top reporting organizations and copyright owners submitting URL removal requests during the past month, along with the top domains involved in the takedown requests.
The post Google Received More Than 65 Million URL Takedown Requests In The Past Month appeared first on Search Engine Land.
It’s something all companies fear: You Google your brand name, and right on the first page are negative Google reviews, a low Yelp score, damaging articles or — possibly worst of all — a Ripoff Report post.
The thought of this setback is enough to make any good marketer break out in a cold sweat. But for many of us, this is just another SEO challenge we face, albeit under a slightly different name: Online Reputation Management.
Imagine you are the marketing genius behind the iconic Snuggie. You Google your brand, see the following results and are rightly concerned:
In these results, you can see a few clearly negative search results from big news sites (boxed in red). There are also two blog posts that you might consider neutral (boxed in blue). These neutrals aren’t the worst things in the world, but they aren’t glowingly positive, either.
Just two negative articles appearing in the search results for a product can cost you up to 44 percent of potential customers, so this is definitely an issue to address, as it could be significantly impacting online sales.
As with every project, we want to start by capturing a baseline starting point and determining how we will report improvement over time.
Tracking progress for an online reputation management (ORM) project like this can be complex. Instead of tracking a single domain for a large set of keywords (as with SEO), we are tracking multiple URLs for a smaller set of branded keywords. So while SEO metrics are well established, ORM metrics are almost always custom-defined for the client and project.
The initial focus of a reputation management project with a client is almost always, “Is it off page one?”
While that is a valid question, completely cleaning the search engine results pages (SERPs) for a brand name can take months. And in that time, if you are only focused on a binary yes/no result, you miss out on how improvements or setbacks are impacting your brand.
This binary question misses some of the nuances of the search results (namely, their ranking positions). As we know, ranking position impacts user visibility and click-through rate.
Because of this challenge, we built a SERP Sentiment score to measure branded SERPs based on the number of positive, negative and neutral URLs that appear on page one, along with what positions each of those occupy.
This score helps you see and report the progress of your reputation management campaign on a daily and weekly basis — the type of progress that isn’t noticed if you focus on the binary result of, “Is it off page one?”
We researched, discussed and tested different approaches to calculate what impact negative SERPs should have on our sentiment score. We broke through when we started with 100 points and deducted points for every negative or neutral search listing on page 1.
Each ranking position has a preset value based on the (admittedly imperfect, but useful) average CTR distribution.
For a SERP with 10 results, the value of each position looks roughly like this:
Each SERP starts with 100 points. If a piece of content in a position is negative, it loses the value of that position. If the piece of content in that position is neutral, it loses half of the value of that position. And if it is positive, no points are lost for that position.
In the example above, everything is positive except for position 8. So we would start with 100 points, subtract the value of position 8 (value of 4), to give a SERP Sentiment score of 96. Not bad, Ron Popeil.
If there was a neutral result, we’d divide the value of that position in half, and subtract it out. However, in this case, there is only one negative result in the SERPs to contend with.
Let’s calculate another:
In these results, I noted the positions where we need to subtract points. Negative content is again boxed in red, neutral content in blue. We start with the 100 points, and then adjust as follows:
After these adjustments, the SERP score for this query is 81.
When we built this score, 10 blue links was the rule, and Google did not vary from it. However, now the number of listings in SERPs can vary widely, with things generally settling between seven and 11. In those cases, we modify the scoring as follows:
Using the scoring for nine SERP listings, the SERP Sentiment score for Snuggie’s brand results (from the beginning of this article) is 81.5.
We first establish with the client what is positive, negative and neutral. We read through each page, assess it and make a recommendation on the sentiment (but at the end of the day, it is the client’s call). We also establish which queries we are going to monitor. Generally, it is the brand name (or person’s name) and also queries such as “[brand name]+reviews” or “[brand name]+product name.”
We track weekly the search results for each query, monitoring five pages deep, so we are aware of anything moving up from deeper in the SERPs. The SERP score, however, is only based on page 1, since the vast majority of searchers never click to page 2.
For ORM projects, we report on the ranking position of each piece of content. (We have a tool that automatically tracks ranking positions, but it can be done manually.) We also report on this SERP Sentiment score, which is a simple way to roll up these positions into a single number. We provide weekly and monthly reports, which go into detail on the work completed and its results.
Since developing this sentiment score, we’ve found our clients’ C-Suites to be more engaged and interested in incremental progress, because they can clearly see the project direction through the changes of a single number. They know that as their score gets closer to 100, things are getting better.
Furthermore, with the utility that we’ve found in this score, we’ve also built out other ways to score online sentiment that factor in online reviews (both the aggregate rating and the number of reviews), knowledge panels, Google images and more. Scores and dashboards really add value and make tracking improvement easy for even those only casually involved on the project.
Google changes their search result pages constantly, which makes this sentiment score a work in progress to keep up to date. I hope that by sharing this metric, others will be able to use it in their own projects and improve upon it (and ideally, share their updates).
Customer satisfaction has the Net Promoter Score. Now, online reputation management has the SERP Sentiment score.
The post Our SERP Sentiment Score For A Person’s/Brand’s Online Reputation appeared first on Search Engine Land.
“We’re all in on search” was the message from Rik van der Kooi, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of advertiser and publisher solutions, at Bing Ads Next, a day of briefings for roughly 60 advertisers held earlier this month in Kirkland, WA.
It’s been a year of transition for Microsoft’s ad businesses: a new agreement with Yahoo eliminated Microsoft’s exclusive hold on Yahoo search inventory on desktop, but it also freed Microsoft to be the exclusive sales force for Bing Ads. Microsoft also handed off display ad sales to AOL and Appnexus.
“Some doubted our commitment,” said van der Kooi. “We’ve built a business that’s on the path to success. We’re all in.”
That tone of confidence set by van der Kooi is a sharp change from the almost apologetic tone expressed by executives at this event just two years ago. Many of the conversations then focused on the “punch list” of features still needed to reach parity with Google AdWords and pleas for greater reach and scale from advertisers. The big product release announced at that year’s event was the Hero Ad, a branded banner-like ad that appeared in Smart Search results on Windows 8.1. Almost nobody in attendance had seen, much less used, Windows 8.1. The Hero Ad test was short-lived.
Just two years later, Bing integrations into Microsoft products, syndication partnerships, faster engineering cycles and a new sales focus have helped change the conversation.
Rather than apologize for what might be perceived as underwhelming market share compared to Google, Kooi touted the fact that Bing has grown from seven percent of the US search market six years ago to a 21-percent share today – and up to a third of the market, if you include syndication.
“A year ago we didn’t have a significant syndication business. We’re seeing 20 percent growth year-over-year,” said David Pann GM of search advertising. Ad clicks from syndication partners have increased four to five times in the past year. Partners include Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
Then there is Windows 10, which puts Bing and Cortana in the task bar. When Windows 10 launched in July, Pann predicted Bing would see a 10- to 15-percent lift in search volume by September. Microsoft announced in October that Bing had contributed roughly $1 billion in revenue for the quarter, finally becoming profitable. CEO Satya Nadella also mentioned that Windows 10 users had already asked Cortana more than a billion questions.
Circumventing the browser is becoming part of the growth model: “Four out of five queries go to Google in the browser,” said Kooi, “In the task bar five out of five queries go to Bing.”
In discussing plans for growth on mobile, where Bing is weaker than both Google and Yahoo, Kooi said they are taking a three-pronged approach:
“There is no silver bullet for us. We were small on the PC as well once, too,” concluded Kooi.
The pace of feature tests and releases has picked up significantly in the past year. Paul Apodaca, principal PM manager, discussed some of the recent feature updates, including automated rules, multi-account bulk spreadsheet management (in beta now), the ability to include new and refurbished items in Shopping campaigns and a flurry of ad extensions, such as the image extensions that went live this past week.
“It used to be that every test had to get pushed through the entire system,” said Apodaca. Now engineering has adopted a more agile workflow.
On the updated Universal Event Tracking product, Apodaca says remarketing, which went live globally in mid-October, “is just the tip of the iceberg.”
The big product announcement was that Bing Ads Editor for Mac is finally on its way. This has been the top feature request for several years, and it’s a milestone to finally have engineering resources devoted to it.
On the user experience and consumer engagement side, Ryan Gavin, General Manager at Microsoft for Search, Cloud, and Content, said that the focus is now on people’s passions, such as sports or elections, to bring more users to Bing and drive engagement. Gavin pointed to Bing Predicts and the elections features that debuted ahead of last year’s November elections as products that have become wildly popular.
These differentiated experiences also offer commercial opportunities (football, Nascar, awards shows, elections and more), Gavin added, noting that they often see search volumes in these areas exceeding those of Google.
Cortana is also a big part of the growth strategy. “Speech recognition is going to transform how we search,” said van der Kooi. Noting Microsoft’s work in this area for more than a decade, he said they feel well positioned to take advantage of the move toward more users using voice to search. The Cortana app is now available on iOS and Android in addition to being baked into Windows 10. “If we make it useful, people will want that app wherever they go.”
The idea of search as a small division fighting an uphill (if not losing) battle against Google is gone at Microsoft. “Search is a key component to our monetization strategy,” said Gavin.
With Microsoft taking back search selling for Bing Ads back from Yahoo, Microsoft is now the only company focused solely on selling search in the US and many other markets around the world. The company says it has hired a sales force of about 400 globally.
The post After A Year Of Transition, Microsoft Execs Say, “We’re All In On Search” appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Yandex, the Russian search engine, has been busy, as Anna Oshkalo from the Russian Search Tips blog reports. Now, Yandex says they will warn webmasters and SEOs when they violate their webmaster guidelines — similar to Google’s manual actions notifications.
The warnings that Yandex will give webmasters include these penalty notifications:
Anna also provided screen shots of what the notification looks like. For example, here is a screen shot of a website without a penalty:
Here is a screen shot of a site with a link penalty:
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