Search for “tools for SEO” and, among the results, you’ll find “29 best free tools,” “the top [number goes here] SEO tools you should be using,” and many many more headlines following this formula. But if you’re serious about Search Engine Optimization, managing a large enterprise program for a brand, for example, you may be looking for something more substantial to guide your tool evaluation process. We’ve spent the last few months on a resource that I know you’ll find really useful. Compiled with advice from Eric Enge of Perficient Digital and enterprise SEO consultant (and SEL in-house advisor) Jessica Bowman, this just-launched downloadable guide — Enterprise SEO Tools for Content Marketing, Search Intelligence, UX and More — looks at the trends SEOs and vendors are adapting to. It also features in-depth profiles of 20 different companies and the software they offer, including a discussion of up-and-coming functionality that distinguishes the innovators in the space. Download the report now and make a more well-informed tool-adoption decision! The post Get past the hype and into the nitty-gritty of SEO platforms for enterprises appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/38723tb
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We know that SEO is a huge priority for marketing; 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority (HubSpot). But across the organization – right on up to the C-level – brands are now starting to tap into the full potential of their SEO talent. As an SEO, you have amazing potential to become ingrained in your organization’s DNA, as you have the best insights and knowledge into what customers want and need. And in terms of career development, you are in the best position to fulfill the hybrid roles modern organizations need to combat the skills shortage impacting the wider digital marketing industry. In this post, we’ll explore a few ways you can show your value and gain that additional investment to scale your campaigns by utilizing your skills and outputs in the most creative ways. 1. Grab your seat at the planning and strategy tableMany of the most talented SEOs I meet want to have an impact not only on search rankings, but on the business they are working for as a whole. After all, you are agents of change; the interpreters of data, technical wranglers and creatives all in one. When your organization needs insight into consumer experience, chances are people come to you as the best bet. Organizations are near-universally struggling with the volume of data they have to process – and with activating its insights. Your access to search and CRM data, on-site and search ecosystem behavior, which conversion triggers and offers work best, how customers feel about your products and services via online reviews, and more makes your insight indispensable. Yet some organizations are making better use of SEO’s insights than others. In fact, companies using marketing analytics in corporate decision-making tend to invest more in marketing as a whole. The C-suite is missing out on a massive opportunity to make better-informed decisions when SEO is not afforded a seat at the table – so let them know. How many times have you had to issue a fix, come in and clean up, or create time-consuming work arounds because you weren’t consulted early enough? Fight for your place at the table from the very initial planning stages, but understand that you need to do so with tact. Learn to speak the language of those you’re trying to win over; translate the benefits of SEO to real, tangible business results they can understand. Remember, you don’t need to explain how everything works; doing so will quickly result in glazed-over eyes and lost interest. You just need to be afforded a seat at the table while decision-makers are strategizing, so SEO is an integral part of the process and no longer an afterthought. 2. Collaborate instead of competing internallyThe days of IT and marketing duking it out for a share of budget need to be left far behind us. The different channels and tactics of successful digital strategy have converged as the customer’s journey has become a scattered matrix of touchpoints across devices and networks. Organizations are adapting, but slowly. When it comes to paying for martech, for example, acquiring the budget is solely marketing’s responsibility 40% of the time. Marketing leads with guidance and collaboration from IT just 37% of the time [Gartner]. And while Marketing and IT are perhaps most closely related, there’s room to look at how SEO interacts with Ops, R&D, Sales, and other departments, as well. As an SEO, you know from a technical perspective how to read and interpret the data. But you also understand from a consumer perspective what decision makers in other departments are looking for; what expectations customers have of their interactions with your brand, and how to pull the answers to specific questions from data. It’s not always easy to assert yourself. Depending on the size of your organization and its culture, there may be all kinds of interpersonal and political hurdles to SEO being seen as a collaborative partner. Find opportunities to share SEO insights in ways that are helpful, not competitive. No one likes to hear “I told you so,” so swooping in after a failed campaign to list all the ways your data would have prevented it won’t find you a receptive audience. Instead, look for ways to proactively share insights in company-wide or cross-departmental meetings, newsletters, or other communications. If those opportunities don’t exist yet, take the initiative to create them! I met an SEO recently who started a company-wide newsletter in which he planned to share search insights but, knowing that most other departments didn’t really understand search and wouldn’t read it, he invited every other department to input news they wanted to share, as well. In getting others invested in the project, he guaranteed its success and now week after week, the newsletter is widely circulated internally and has become a conversation starter, as those who contribute have an incentive to not only read but share it, as well. And that SEO? Well, he has full ownership of a company-wide communication that has won the eyes and ears of decision-makers from sales to R&D to ops and beyond. 3. Invest in yourself and your own professional developmentSearch is an incredibly fast-moving space and staying at the forefront of all of these changes is incredibly challenging. As an SEO your skill sets are likely already broad and wide-ranging, rooted in elements of content marketing, PR, digital advertising, video, brand messaging and more. SEO requires equal parts creative and technical, innovative and analytical to do it right. Make sure your leaders understand the importance of your access (and your team’s) to ongoing training, a community of your peers and professional development. Share the knowledge you gain in workshops and at conferences back to your peers and the organization as a whole, across departments. Don’t wait to be given these opportunities; create them. Go into each learning experience with the goal of bringing something back to the company and they’ll be happy to keep sending you. Reconsider the types of professional development opportunities you’re asking your company to fund, too. Technical SEO, content marketing, local marketing and related disciplines are all certainly within your wheelhouse. But if you really want to stretch and grow within the company, you should be looking at communications, leadership development, and marketing technology, as well. Gartner research shows that 29% of marketing leaders indicate that training and upskilling existing martech talent is a major impediment to their martech stack effectiveness. Identifying and recruiting talent is a major impediment for 27%. Building those skills enhances the importance of SEO to marketing as a whole and helps to make you an indispensable asset. Make it clear that as SEO grows in importance in the organization, you plan to be the one leading that charge. Develop your people management skills. And if your company won’t fund all of the training you feel you need to grow as an SEO leader, take some of it on yourself. If the company you’re with today doesn’t value these new skills, the next one you choose certainly will. 4. Develop a growth mindset and focus on how SEO can move the whole organization forwardAs we head into 2020 more and more challenges and opportunities are opening up for SEOs, with voice and visual search, in particular, leading the way. Furthermore, as brands increasingly focus on providing SEO focused multi-channel experiences there are significant opportunities for you to build new skills, become more creative and take on more digital marketing responsibilities. In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck explains the benefits of a growth mindset; where you know that your intelligence or personality is something you can develop. It’s not an entirely new concept, but developing your growth mindset is highly relevant to the SEOs of today who want to become digital leaders of tomorrow. SEOs who adopt the growth mindset will be able to provide integrated services that span across paid search, mobile, content, social, display and email marketing. You can become hybrid marketers who will continue to drive change inside the organization. You’ve long been an expert in growing traffic, visibility, and revenue. Now’s the time to focus on growing your own influence and the impact of SEO, as a result. The post How SEOs can grow their talent, influence and impact appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Vp2Q65 Any good marketing team is awash marketing collateral, blog copy, images, audio files and videos. In fact, the glut of materials produced these days has made digital asset management platforms a particularly important piece of martech for enterprise (and SMB) stacks. That’s because digital asset management can play a vital role in your marketing organization, unifying online and offline marketing channels and leading to more efficient marketing resource allocation. As our report, Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide, shows, the specific benefits of using a digital asset management platform include – but are not limited to – the following: • Improved communication between in-house and freelance/contract workers. Some of the DAM vendors profiled in this report offer specially designed interfaces for external creatives to submit their content and collaborate on needed changes and required versioning. Content in the creation/approval process remains accessible only to those involved at this stage, rather than being made available for deployment before it’s ready. • Improved distribution of assets to clients, partners or other outsiders. Some of the DAM vendors profiled allow users to create “portals” customized for viewing and downloading by outside entities. • More efficient utilization of existing resources. Appended metadata and search capabilities enable marketers to more easily find the right image or other asset for a campaign, without spending tedious hours flipping from image to image or watching video after video. This also saves time and resources that are often spent recreating something similar to an existing asset, because it couldn’t be found or the user wasn’t aware of its existence. • Increased efficiency in the workflow for internal approvals. Many DAM providers offer — either as part of core functionality or as an add-on — workflow or project management tools, which allow for smoother collaboration and transparent movement of an asset through an approval process. • Speed the conversion of assets into different sizes, aspect ratios and file types for different marketing applications. Though a file is uploaded to the DAM system in a particular format, many systems allow for automatic or manual cropping or editing within the system, as well as the conversion of the asset to different sizes or file formats as they’re downloaded or distributed for use. • Improved efficiency on the front end, in the creation of brand assets, and on the back end, in the distribution of those assets to various martech and ad tech systems. Many DAMs integrate with content creation software, like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and also connect (either through native connectors or APIs) to systems that distribute content directly to the customer, such as ad servers, marketing automation platforms or website content management systems. • Easier compliance with changing brand standards and licensing terms. DAMs allow for an expiration date to be set on assets, so they are no longer used after the licensing term for a particular asset expires. For example, if a contract with a particular celebrity spokesperson is not renewed, a DAM can take those assets out of circulation so they’re not used beyond the expiry date. • Ease of presenting a more consistent brand face to the customer with an eye toward loyalty and retention. DAMs make it easier to enforce brand standards and distribute content so every customer interaction reinforces the brand values marketers intend to convey. This is one of the key advantages of a DAM at a time where the number of devices and media outlets is larger than ever, making it more difficult to maintain consistency among the assets designed for consumption in various places. • Ability to quantify the usage of each individual digital asset, and therefore track ROI on the cost of creation and distribution. DAMs enable marketers to track the distribution and efficacy of marketing assets, which allows them to invest more in the most cost-effective content creation and distribution methods. Some systems are able to automatically track this data, while others simply provide the data that allow marketers to make these calculations themselves. Get the report: Enterprise Digital Asset Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide The post Digital asset management platforms: What are they good for? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/32uqGyQ Google announced that the rich results testing tool now also supports showing you how your How-to markup will look on the Google Home hub and other smart displays. What it looks like. Google shared a screen shot of how how-to markup will look like in the rich results test tool on a Google Home hub: Recipe results. Last December, Google added similar support to the rich resting tool for recipes. You are now able to see not just how recipes look on these displays but also how-to markup. How to markup. Google introduced how-to markup officially last May at Google I/O. How-to search results in Google will show searchers step-by-step information on how to accomplish specific tasks directly in the search results. Google has published how-to documentation for your developers to use when adding the markup to your own pages and also how to add this to Google Assistant. The documentation includes information on the steps, tools, duration, and other properties you would include in your markup. Why we care. This new feature will let webmasters, developers and SEOs test to see how the how-to markup for a specific page will show up on these smart displays. You no longer have to wait and see how it looks. You can test this immediately without having to wait for Google to index and then decide the page is worthy of showing up as a result on the Google Home hub. The post Google Rich Results testing tool adds support for ‘How To’ markup for Google Home displays appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/393fZG0 The post SEL 20200227 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/32uPh6A If you’re looking to gather leads for your business, you need to have a landing-page strategy. To see the greatest return on their investment, businesses need to build effective landing pages, then test and optimize them to maximize conversion rates. This guide from SharpSpring is written for any marketer looking to initiate or improve their landing page strategy. It will guide you through everything you need to know to allow you to create and optimize landing pages for your website. Download your copy to find out:
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Creating Landing Pages That Convert.”
The post The seven elements of a high-converting landing page appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Pr86T1 Google is sending out notices via Google Search Console with “mobile-first indexing issues detected” alerts. In those emails it communicates the issues Google has when it comes to moving that site over to mobile-first indexing. It also says “Google expects to apply mobile-first indexing to all websites in the next six to twelve months.” Mobile-first indexing. Google first introduced mobile-first indexing back in November 2016 and by December 2018 half of all sites in Google’s search results were from mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing simply means that Google will crawl your site from the eyes of a mobile-browser and use that mobile version for indexing and ranking. All in on mobile-first indexing. Google is sending out notices now and those notices say “Google expects to apply mobile-first indexing to all websites in the next six to twelve months.” Here is a screen shot of this “mobile-first indexing issues detected” email from @KyleW_Sutton. The notices. Clearly Google is trying to be proactive and notify sites that are not yet moved over to mobile-first indexing with specific advice on what those sites need to do to become mobile-first indexing ready. In this specific case, Kyle said the issue was with “”Missing image” is listed as an error, while “Page quality issue” and “Video issues” are warnings.” Why we care. If you get one of these notices it is likely a notice you should read and take action on. If Google has issues with accessing your site with the mobile-crawler, then it might impact your indexing and ranking of your web pages in Google. The post Google mobile-first indexing to be applied to all sites within a year appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3a5X0dL Tired of manually weeding through placement reports to exclude inappropriate websites and apps from your display campaigns? So was Dave Rigotti. He’s built a tool called ExclusionSites.com. And it’s about as straightforward as its name. “I’ve spent 15 years managing paid media and running marketing teams,” said Rigotti, “and I am always shocked to see some of the sites and content display ads would show up alongside.” Rigotti is head of Commercial Account-Based Marketing for Adobe Experience Cloud, but created this on the side. (I first met Dave in 2013 when he and a colleague built a free UTM tagging tool for Bing Ads URLs back when we had to do that manually.) Crowdsourcing. Out of his own frustration and need to get time back in his day, Rigotti started crowdsourcing exclusions lists from his marketing friends. “The more I talked about the idea with companies, the more I heard that many have exclusion lists of 100K websites (or more!),” he said. Those lists weren’t categorized in any way, though, and were also a hassle to manage. How it works. After you create a free account on the site, you can quickly create lists. The screenshot below shows the no-nonsense interface. You can select categories of crowdsourced exclusions and add your own lists manually to combine them. Once you click the Create button (not shown here), the list will appear on your Exclusions Dashboard where you can copy the text list in a couple of formats and import it into your ad accounts. Why we care. Managing brand safety in display campaigns can be time-consuming and/or expensive. If you or your team are currently trying to manage exclusions on your own manually, this tool could help. You’ll still want to do some due diligence after you create your lists to ensure the crowdsourced lists are the right fit for your brand. The post Create display network exclusion lists with this (free) tool appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3a6TRKP At Google I/O last year, Google announced 3D images with augmented reality in search. Google even posted live examples of this last year. But now it is showing up for some e-commerce sites. Burberry bags in 3D. Glenn Gabe of G-Squared Interactive shared an example on Twitter based on this article of a Burberry bag showing up as a “view in 3D” option in the Google search results. Here is that snippet: View in 3D. When you click on view in 3D, Google will show you the image using AR, augmented reality, as if it is in front of you through your mobile phone’s camera lens. Here is how the bag looks like on my desk: And you can also see it as a 3D object. You can rotate the bag around and see the various angles: How do I get 3D images into Google? Last May we posted a slide showing 3D markup you can potentially add to your images to help them show up as 3D images in mobile search. Here is that slide again: Why we care. Numerous apps already support AR (augmented reality) to enable consumers to see how furniture and other objects look in their homes or to see what different eyeglasses or makeup would look on them. This shows how Google can start to enable those kinds of capabilities in the SERP for commercial queries. Over the past several months, Google has been dropping hints that image search is something SEOs, webmasters, developers and content producers should pay attention to. It is a good way for searchers to discover new content and information and can be helpful in not just driving eye-balls but potentially even conversions. Seeing that now a retail brand, like Burberry, has this feature live, is really exciting for this 3D image feature in search. Retailers and brands now have added incentive to include 3D images and structured data on their sites. Related: AR and Structured Data are both elements in our new Periodic Table for Digital Commerce Marketing. The post Google search view in 3D now live for e-commerce sites appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3aa5e4y Search Console users can now download complete information (instead of just specific table views) from almost all reports, Google announced Wednesday. Data can be exported as a Google Sheet, Excel or .CSV file. Why we careBeing able to export your Google Search Console reports makes it easier to analyze and manipulate the data using other tools. It also provides you with the option to join datasets, perform more advanced analyses or just visualize the data a different way. More on the news
The post Google Search Console now lets you export more data appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3aawHn1 |
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