Beginning in July 2022, advertisers will no longer be able to create new ETAs or edit existing ETAs in Google Ads according to an announcement by Sylvanus Bent, Product Manager, Google Ads . “Your existing expanded text ads will continue to serve alongside responsive search ads, and you’ll still see reports on their performance going forward. Additionally, you’ll be able to pause and resume your expanded text ads or remove them if needed. You’ll also still be able to create and edit call ads and Dynamic Search Ads,” said Bent. We’re continuing to expand this story as we learn more. Use ETA info for RSAs in the transition. “To prepare for this change, we recommend that you have at least one responsive search ad in every ad group in your Search campaigns by June 30, 2022,” Bent suggested. Google’s announcement also includes ways advertisers can repurpose their ETA content for RSAs. Recommendations include the following:
Though take that last recommendation with a grain of salt. “If you’re in an industry where your ad must contain certain pieces of text in very specific locations, pin away! But if it’s not required, we found that attempting to control the machine by telling it what text to pin to certain ad positions was usually detrimental to results,” wrote Frederick Vallaeys, Cofounder of Optmyzr, for Search Engine Land. The warning of the sunset is now on the ETA help documentation page as well. This “stinks for anyone in highly regulated fields. Would be nice if the RSA data was usable or scientific instead of a generic ‘Best’ or ‘Good’ & knowing combos that work together would help,” wrote Gregg Finn, Partner & Digital Marketer at Cypress North, in a tweet. “Don’t love this, but as long as they don’t take away the option to pin headlines/descriptions in RSAs we can at least approximate the control we have had with ETAs,” added Tim Jensen, PPC Campaign Manager at Clix Marketing. Why we care. This is the latest move that Google is making to push automation through their ad products. The announcement says that, “15% of search queries every day are new searches we’ve never seen before” and therefore “Automation is key to keeping pace with these trends.” Many advertisers do use RSAs, but they also like having the control and capabilities that ETAs offer. The future phase-out of ETAs means advertisers are moving further away from direct control over their accounts and having to work with the Google Ads machine learning and AI. Before the sunset is complete, we recommend testing your ETA ad pieces in RSAs and figure out what works best so you’re not cut off completely from new ad creation when Google Ads stops allowing new ETAs. “If you’re evaluating RSAs on incrementality, their conversion rates might be lower than ETAs but the efficiency of those conversions might be better — lower cost per conversion, higher margin and/or lifetime value — and come from impressions your ETAs weren’t eligible for. But measuring this is far from straightforward because the reporting on RSAs is limited and there’s no way to easily tie a query to an ad much less an RSA combination,” wrote Ginny Marvin for Search Engine Land around this same time last year. Read more:
The post Google to sunset Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) in June 2022 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3DIyejR
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Your final chance for industry-wide recognition, awesome social buzz, and a hefty boost to company morale is fast approaching: The 2021 Search Engine Awards entry period closes at the end of this week — Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PT to be exact! There’s still time for you to submit your application — especially because the submission process is faster and easier than ever. But before you begin that entry, take a moment to meet the judges, a fabulous panel of experts across the SEO and PPC spectrum… … and look over their first-hand advice for what makes a winning SEO or PPC campaign, and thus, a winning Search Engine Land Awards application.
Remember: The final deadline is this Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PT. Standard entrance fees are $595 per application — and you can submit to as many categories as you like. What are you waiting for? You, your company, and your career deserve this. Begin your application now! The post Meet the 2021 Search Engine Land Awards judges appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2WG1g2H Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, and how do you use cross-organizational data? Sharing data between SEO and PPC has probably been one of the easier silos for search marketers to break. It’s pretty simple to go check how your paid search advertising is going and use that data to improve your SEO (check out how Lily Ray did it here). And PPC experts can do the same of SEO data. But one thing I rarely hear search marketers talk about is data-sharing across the organization. Once a company I worked with told me about how they used their call recordings to improve their SEO and PPC. Not only were they adding in the FAQs to their site that came in over calls, but they figured out where their “leak” in the funnel was. The company was driving a ton of traffic, but none of it was converting. Not understanding why, they went to their call recordings and quickly found that… no one was answering the phone at certain locations! It’s easy to think that maybe we should tweak a top-of-funnel campaign when the bottom-of-funnel numbers are suffering — but sharing data might show that there’s a step missing in between. Carolyn Lyden, Four tools to check for title changes in the SERPsOn August 24, Google confirmed that it changed how it creates titles for search result listings. Unfortunately, title change information isn’t available in Google Search Console or Google Analytics. So, SEOs have turned to third-party tools to see whether their titles are being changed. Below is a list of tools you can use to check for title changes and instructions on how to do so.
ICYMI: Google’s payment to Apple to be the default search engine just keeps going upSearch choice has been a topic of controversy over the past year:
So we’re not surprised to see news about Google paying billions to beat out Bing as the search engine default on Safari. Google pays $15 billion to be Apple’s default search engine. Google paying Apple to be its default search engine on Safari is also nothing new. In 2018, Google paid Apple $9 billion to be the go-to place that users can find what they need on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. That price has only increased year-over-year, with the latest report. “The amount is likely to increase to about $20 billion in 2022. Those estimates are based on patterns found in the latest available financial documents from both companies,” wrote Florence Ion for Gizmodo. The most interesting part is many analysts see this as a fee to essentially prevent Bing from being the default search engine. Jane Horvath, Apple’s senior director of global privacy, told the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference (CPDP) that Safari defaults to Google because it’s the most popular search engine, but that users still have the ability to change to the search engine of their choice: “We do support Google but we also have built-in support for DuckDuckGo, and we recently also rolled out support for Ecosia.” Why we care. This move has many marketers asking, “So when will Apple launch their own search engine?” The company has been propelled mostly by hardware, and this deal with ever-increasing payments from Google is one of its moves toward improving its services options. But perhaps the deal with Google is more lucrative than the potential of having to compete with the biggest player in the marketplace for some advertising dollars. How Google and Yelp handle fake reviews and policy violations: A side-by-side analysis of eachBoth Google and Yelp have implemented automated systems as their first line of defense against fake reviews and bad actors. And, they both use human moderators for tasks that the technology isn’t suitable for. However, their respective policies, approaches and punitive measures (a few of which are outlined below), which inform the deployment of their technology and human staff, are the most important distinctions to keep in mind as you establish your online presence.
Shorts: Some questions and maybe some answersWant to know if Google’s changed your title tags? This bookmarklet checks if the title tag in SERPs matches the one you set on your site. Could Google’s “Privacy Budget” break the internet? That’s what Kate Kaye asked on Digiday yesterday about Google’s attempt to prevent fingerprinting. Would advertisers (and users) switch to a different search engine? If so, here are some non-Google options from contributor John Smith. What We’re Reading: Despite women’s progress in many parts of society, advertisements still consistently cast women as secondary“Between 1980 and 2010, women in commercials were shown in workplace settings only 4 percent of the time; frequently they were shown in kitchens, waxing poetic about the products they were selling,” wrote Mara Altman for the NYT. Surely, marketing and advertising have come a long way since then, right? … right? Sadly, research from Jane Cunningham and Philippa Roberts shows that it really hasn’t, and they say it has to do mostly with who fills the high-level roles at advertising and marketing agencies. “The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that ads up for awards at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival depicted male characters working almost twice as often as female characters. Male characters also outnumbered female characters two-to-one and had twice as much screen time and speaking time. Another study conducted by Ebiquity, a media consultancy, found that, of the ads aired in 2016, only 4 percent showed women in leadership positions,” said Altman. The issue is that marketing isn’t just reflecting what’s happening in real life, but it’s affecting women’s real life, too. “There is a really big body of work around the impact of marketing and just how powerful it is — young women are consuming something like 10,000 messages a day from brands. Think about the collective impact that can have when the same things are being said over and over again, which are usually: Be thinner, be blonder, be more feminine, be hairless, be whiter,” said Cunningham in the interview. So how can women improve these marketing messages? “The way that women can influence marketing is spending with the brands that are doing the right thing by women and refusing to buy from brands that are very evidently trying to keep women in their place, and/or the place they think women should be,” said Cunningham. The post Cleaning house: how Google and Yelp handle fake reviews; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3kHYhP8 Last week, Google had one of its typical reporting issues where we thought maybe the data was delayed due to some pipeline bug. But it turns out the data that was lost, is likely gone forever and won’t be backfilled in the Search Console performance report. The statement. Google posted a statement saying that between August 23rd and August 24th “an internal problem caused a data loss in Search and Discover performance during this period. Users might see a significant data drop in their performance reports during this period. This does not reflect any drop in clicks or impressions for your site, only missing data in Search Console.” Lost data. John Mueller of Google said this means that “it looks like this is really data loss and won’t be back-filled.” Performance report. The Google Search Console performance report is a report many marketers rely on to see how much visibility and traffic Google Search sends a site. It shows you impressions, clicks, average position in search results; click through rate; and any special features (such as rich results) associated with your results. Learn more about this report over here. Example of data loss. There are plenty of examples on Twitter of shocking graphs showing huge declines in clicks and impressions in the performance report. But you are not alone, many are noticing this as well. The issue is, if the data looks normal to you, I would not assume all the data is there. You are probably missing data and I would think it is safe to assume you had a better performing day than what Search Console is telling you on August 23rd and 24th. Here is one tweet showing a decline but there are tons: Why we care. It is important that you annotate this data glitch in your own reporting or client reporting. Google has added an annotation to the Search Console reports but do not forget, that data on August 23rd and 24th is likely gone forever. I would think it is safe to say you had more impressions and clicks on those days than what Google is showing you. But make sure to communicate the data issue with your clients when you do your monthly reporting. The post Google Search Console lost performance report data for August 23rd and 24th appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3mNuzev On Saturday, Google Search Advocate John Mueller clarified that the changes the company has been making to titles in the search results have no effect on rankings. “This just changes the displayed titles, it doesn’t change ranking or takes [sic] anything different into account,” he elaborated. Why we careThis means the titles you wrote may still be taken into account by Google when it ranks results. So, don’t stop optimizing your titles just because they may change in the search results. If your clickthrough rates have taken a hit, you can use a third-party tool to check whether Google changed your titles and if it did, it may be worthwhile to experiment with a new title. If, on the other hand, your clickthrough rates have improved, you might want to make note of how Google changed your title for future reference. That having been said, Google makes ranking changes very often, so you may experience rankings fluctuations, but they won’t be due to title changes. More on title tag changes
The post Google says title changes don’t impact rankings appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2UYHNJF On August 24, Google confirmed that it changed how it creates titles for search result listings. The confirmation came roughly a week after search professionals began noticing such changes — in the interim (and even after the confirmation), SEOs raised concerns about how these Google-altered titles may affect their traffic. Unfortunately, title change information isn’t available in Google Search Console or Google Analytics. So, SEOs have turned to third-party tools to see whether their titles are being changed. Below is a list of tools you can use to check for title changes and instructions on how to do so. Ahrefs. Title changes can be checked in Ahrefs, although it is a manual process. You can check for changes via historical SERPs in Site Explorer > Organic Keywords 2.0. Since this method shows a list of search results for a given keyword, toggling the “Target only” switch (as shown below), which only shows the snippet from your site, can help you get to the information you’re looking for a bit faster. You can then compare titles by changing dates. Rank Ranger. The SEO Monitor tool from Rank Ranger is designed to monitor URLs and show you how they perform in Google Search, based on historical data. The data is displayed in a graph that shows ranking changes over time (shown below). Below the chart is a list of all the changes to the page title and description in Google Search. This means if you or Google make any changes to your title or description, it’ll be displayed here with the date that the change occurred. This enables SEOs to cross-reference rankings changes with title changes, although Google has said that title changes do not affect rankings. Semrush. It is possible to track title changes using Semrush, although the toolset provider does not have a specific feature to do so. For keywords you’ve been tracking in the Position Tracking tool, click on the SERP icon next to the keyword. That will pull the search results page for the date selected in the report, as shown below. If you suspect a title was changed, you can confirm this by changing the date in the report and repeating this process to compare titles. Note: you can only view this information for the period you were tracking those particular keywords. SISTRIX. In the left-hand navigation, under SERPs > SERP-Snippets, there is a button to “Show title changes,” which takes you to this screen: The red text indicates words that have been dropped from the title and the green text indicates words that have been added. Other tool providers. We also reached out to a number of other toolset providers. Screamingfrog and Sitebulb do not support this functionality. And, Moz and STAT did not immediately respond to our inquiries. Why we care. Knowing when your titles are getting changed, and what they’re getting changed to, can be useful for analyzing any correlation the changes may have on your clickthrough rate. Together, these details may help you decide whether to adjust your titles, or if you’re seeing positive changes, they can also tell you what may be resonating with your audience. The post Four tools to check for title changes in the SERPs appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3mKSb37 Keyword research is one of the most fundamental practices of SEO. It provides valuable insight into your target audience’s questions and helps inform your content and marketing strategies. For that reason, a well-orchestrated keyword research strategy can set you up for success. Are you looking to improve the way you’re conducting keyword research? Join experts from Conductor as they deliver a crash course on keyword research tips, tricks, and best practices. Register today for “Choose the Right Keywords With These Research Tips and Tricks,“ presented by Conductor. The post Choose the right keywords with these tips and tricks appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3mLWbQU Review platforms, like Google and Yelp, enable local businesses to expand their online visibility and establish credibility through customer reviews — two important aspects of marketing that SMBs may otherwise struggle with. Over the last few years, maintaining an accurate online presence has gone from being an important marketing tool to being a lifeline for local businesses. In fact, platforms like Google and Yelp churned out a slew of new features last year in response to the coronavirus pandemic, enabling businesses to rapidly communicate business hours or service changes to their customers. Unfortunately, bad actors may seek to harm a business’s online reputation through fake reviews or by crowding them out with fake listings. While Yelp and Google both have extensive systems and policies to fight bad actors, there are important distinctions that every local marketer should be aware of, and knowing them can help frame your expectations for each platform as well as enable you to make more informed decisions about where to spend your time and resources. In addition to a side-by-side analysis of Google and Yelp’s respective detection systems and ramifications for violators, we’ve also featured insights from experienced local search marketing experts on the efficacy of each platform; you can read their insights towards the end of this article. How Google and Yelp detect fake reviews and listingsBoth Google and Yelp have implemented automated systems as their first line of defense against fake reviews and bad actors. And, they both use human moderators for tasks that the technology isn’t suitable for. However, their respective policies and approaches, which inform the deployment of their technology and human staff, are the most important distinctions to keep in mind as you establish your online presence. Google’s approach seems to emphasize prevention at scale via machine learning algorithms that help to tackle fake reviews and listings. Yelp focuses heavily on the integrity of its reviews and seems to have more robust punitive measures in place for violators. Google’s automated detection system. Google’s automated systems “use hundreds of cues to detect abusive behavior, such as a shift of review patterns on a business and implausible behavior patterns by reviewers,” a company spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Typical user pattern data (for example, users tend to leave reviews, ratings and photos at places they’ve already been) is one of Google’s most important resources when it comes to identifying illegitimate review content and implementing solutions to combat them. Google’s machine learning-first approach, which has also become a prominent aspect of its paid and organic search systems, is designed to prevent policy-violating content at scale. “For example, we have focused efforts on detecting content coming from click farms where fake reviews and ratings are being generated,” the company said in a February 2021 blog post, “Through better detection of click farm activity we are making it harder to post fake content cheaply, which ultimately makes it harder for a click farm to sell reviews and make money.” Machine learning models are also used in the Google My Business verification process to catch fake profiles before they appear on Maps. Ideally, Google’s systems will remove the policy-violating content or flag it for further review, along with the associated user account, before the content gets in front of users. But, some fake reviews and profiles are bound to slip through the cracks, as they do with all platforms, which is why the company also deploys thousands of human analysts. Google’s human content moderators. Teams of human operators and analysts complement Google’s automated detection systems. These analysts help with content evaluations that algorithms may not be able to analyze, such as understanding local slang within a review. The company has yet to disclose more information about the role of its human analysts, such as whether they help to improve Google’s systems (the way search quality raters do), stating that, “Staying a step ahead of scammers is a constant battle, so we don’t share specific details about our processes.” Yelp’s automated detection system. Yelp’s automated recommendation software analyzes data points from all reviews, reviewers and businesses in order to recommend reviews to users, but it also looks for solicited reviews and unfairly biased reviews (like reviews that may be written about a competitor or someone’s own business). This software takes the relevance of the review and the reliability of the reviewer (how often the user is active) into account as well. Yelp’s human content moderators. Yelp has been relatively open about how it uses both technology and its human content moderators to combat policy-violating content: “When a community member, a business owner or our automated system alerts our team about potential issues, a real human reviews the issue every single time,” Noorie Malik, Yelp’s VP of user operations, told Search Engine Land. Yelp’s user operations team investigates fraudulent activity, validates new businesses when they sign up with Yelp and works to identify activity that might warrant a Consumer Alert. Consumer Alerts. When Yelp detects abnormal activity on a business profile, which may be an attempt to manipulate a business’s reviews or ratings, it conducts an investigation that may lead to the application of one of its Consumer Alerts. These notices appear as a pop-up over the business’s review section and may contain a link to any evidence Yelp has gathered. The platform may also temporarily disable the ability to post reviews when it applies a Consumer Alert. There are currently six types of Consumer Alerts:
Consequences for violating Google and Yelp’s content policiesIf you get caught, running afoul of Google and Yelp’s respective content policies can result in a range of consequences for your business. Both platforms can remove illegitimate reviews. “Reviews are automatically processed to detect inappropriate content like fake reviews and spam,” Google states in its prohibited and restricted content page, “We may take down reviews that are flagged in order to comply with Google policies or legal obligations.” In fact, in 2020 alone, Google removed 55 million policy-violating reviews and almost three million fake business profiles. However, these figures, which the company publishes annually, tell an incomplete story because it does not disclose the total number of reviews submitted, active business profiles, reviews and profiles flagged by users and so on. And, as some of the local search professionals who spoke to Search Engine Land for this article have highlighted in the section below, “the success rate is very tiny” when it comes to getting Google to remove fake reviews once they’re live. On Yelp, “Reviews that the software determines to be less reliable are moved to a separate ‘not currently recommended’ section of a business’s Yelp page and are not factored into the business’s overall Yelp rating,” said Sudheer Someshwara, Yelp’s head of trust and safety product. The “not currently recommended” section is still accessible to users via the link below the recommended reviews, and reviews may move back and forth between the two sections over time, as the recommendation software continues to learn and evaluate signals. When content is flagged on Yelp, either by its technology or users, the platform’s team of human moderators manually investigates the complaint, which may result in the removal of fake or purchased reviews, whether those reviews are “recommended” or not. Yelp applies ranking penalties; Google declined to comment. When businesses violate Google’s policies, the company removes the misleading content and additional penalties may be applied, depending on the specific case. Google declined to comment when asked whether it specifically applies ranking penalties to businesses that violate its policies. Yelp was more transparent about ranking penalties: “When we find evidence of extreme attempts to manipulate a business’s reputation and inflate their search ranking, we may issue a search ranking penalty,” Someshwara said. These penalties are lifted once the offending behavior has stopped. In particular, search ranking penalties can be applied against businesses that solicit reviews; “If we find indicators of systematic review solicitation, we will apply a search ranking penalty to affected Yelp business pages,” the company said in a support center post. Yelp may remove business listings; Google may revoke profile ownership. Yelp reserves the right to remove from its platform businesses that seek to artificially manipulate its systems or mislead users. “If we determine that a business is buying fake reviews or violating any other Google My Business policies, we take swift action ranging from removing content to account suspension and revoking Business Profile ownership,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Violators can still advertise on Google, but not on Yelp. In addition to managing their business profiles and organic presence on Google and Yelp, business owners can take advantage of each platform’s paid products to boost their visibility. “Businesses are banned from advertising with Yelp for at least one year if they receive a Compensated Activity Alert or a Suspicious Review Activity Alert (including if our team finds evidence that they participated in a review ring),” Someshwara said, adding that these alerts require concrete evidence before they’re applied. Yelp may also ban businesses from advertising if it identifies egregious attempts to manipulate a business’s search ranking or star rating. This is one area where Yelp and Google differ dramatically, as Google currently has no advertising penalties for businesses that violate policies on the organic side. All of Google’s standard ads policies still apply. Yelp continues to monitor listings; Google doesn’t seem to. “Yelp has a system in place that monitors and detects if repeated violations occur,” Someshwara said, adding that it also relies on its base of users to report violations. Google did not disclose details about if or how it continues to monitor business listings that have a history of policy violations. However, the company did emphasize that “we closely monitor 24/7 for fraudulent content, using a combination of people and technology.” Google and Yelp, through the eyes of practitionersA business’s experience with a platform often plays out differently in real life than it does when they’re learning about the platform. The three local marketers who spoke to us for this article have extensive experience with both Google and Yelp and their insights can help to frame your expectations when using those platforms. “Room for improvement in . . . both platforms.” “I think the strengths Google and Yelp have as local review platforms is their reach and their authority, so to speak,” said Niki Mosier, head of SEO at AgentSync, who spoke more broadly about the pros and cons of these platforms. “I posted a review for a national park less than a week ago with a photo and got a notification yesterday that over 2,000 people have seen that photo,” she provided as an example. Mosier pointed to the difficulty involved with removing policy-violating reviews as a weak point for both Google and Yelp: “Slanderous or inaccurate reviews can be very harmful to a business,” she said, “I know it’s a slippery slope with letting people get reviews removed but I think there is definitely room for improvement in that area on both platforms.” Google. Ben Fisher, co-founder of Steady Demand and a Google My Business platinum product expert, and Joy Hawkins, owner of the Local Search Forum, Local U and Sterling Sky, spoke to the respective strengths and weaknesses they’ve experienced across Google and Yelp. “Google powers local search, and while [reviews] are a conversion factor, they can also be a ranking factor,” Fisher said. People may decide to visit a local business after reading reviews, and reviews are also a ranking factor for Google. “This is a powerful [benefit],” he added. “[Google’s] strength would be that it is easier for business owners to collect a high volume of reviews without worrying about them all getting filtered (like Yelp),” said Hawkins. Fisher and Hawkins both singled out fake reviews as a problem for the search engine: “The most negative con is that reviews can be gamed, they can be bought by competitors and in the worst-case scenario, they can be weaponized in an attack,” Fisher said, “A successful negative attack can easily wipe out your star rating and bring down the ranking of GMB and any Local Service Ads you have connected to GMB.” Google does have workflows for handling negative reviews, “but the success rate is very tiny,” he added. “For Google, their biggest weakness is combating fake reviews,” Hawkins said, “They are beyond terrible at it and even the most obvious cases that get reported by a human (not automatically caught) get missed (Google deems the reviews fine even though they’re fake).” Yelp. “Yelp’s strength is definitely that they combat fake reviews (and filter them) better than any other platform, in my experience,” Hawkins said. Fisher shared a similar opinion: “Yelp has a better way of handling reviews and I hear clients that get very good removal rates; additionally if there are a lot of fake reviews Yelp may put up a warning to consumers.” Yelp’s more stringent reviews policy seems to be a double-edged sword for marketers: “The negative is that they also filter out a ton of legitimate reviews which makes the overall ratings for many businesses appear to be much lower than what Google shows,” Hawkins said, “Their no-soliciting policy makes it really hard for businesses to combat negative reviews,” she added. “This is probably the most frustrating part: a user must have a trusted account to leave a review and many users simply do not fall into this criteria,” Fisher said with regards to Yelp’s recommended reviews, “Therefore, a review on Yelp could be a lost opportunity.” You don’t get to pick and chooseDon’t put all your eggs in one basket. As marketers, we must meet our customers wherever they are, and in this case, that means growing your presence on both Google and Yelp. Knowing the policy and capability differences of each platform can help you invest your time and resources more wisely, but ultimately, each site should serve to bolster your business’s overall reputation. This can be especially important if you ever become the victim of a negative review attack on one platform, as your presence on other platforms can continue to bring in customers. The post How Google and Yelp handle fake reviews and policy violations appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3jz6O81 Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily. Good morning, Marketers, and we need to work on our communication. I just hopped off a call with the SMX SEO committee and one takeaway I got from the lively conversation we had is that search marketers don’t always get communication right. Whether it’s in the form of setting expectations for clients and stakeholders from the beginning or reporting what’s going on in our campaigns and accounts. We all know the key to solid communication is knowing your audience and knowing what matters most to them. Your CEO cares about top-level metrics. Your tech team cares about the details and specifications. And your associate cares about how they can best do their jobs. This conversation had me nodding my head and thinking of PPC expert Amanda Farley’s SMX Advanced session on approaching your audience in a whole new way. And how to craft your communication to actually answer what matters most to each person involved. Sure, it’s meant for your PPC campaigns, but we could probably learn a thing or two from it about communicating with stakeholders, clients, team members and our bosses, too. Carolyn Lyden, The latest data behind the title tag changes in GoogleBowTiedWookie (yep) posted a thread on Twitter after analyzing “10 sites for the same 500 keywords” with the Keywords in Sheets tool. Sure, it’s a small sample size, but the data is worth examining (and seeing if the same is true for your sites). What trends did they find?
Calling all future-focused search marketers, submit a pitch for SMX Next!SMX Next returns virtually on November 9-10, 2021 focusing on forward-thinking search marketing. AI and machine learning have already become part of both paid and organic search performance. Commerce platforms are just as powerful as the traditional search engines for driving sales. And new ways to deliver content across search and social platforms are giving creative marketers more options for driving engagement. SMX Next will explore next-generation strategies, equipping attendees with emerging SEO and PPC tactics as well as expert insights on the future of the search marketing profession. Whether you’ve been speaking for years or are just dipping your toes into speaking, please consider submitting a session pitch. We are always looking for new speakers with diverse points of view. The deadline for SMX Next pitches is September 24th! Read our tips for a compelling session proposal and send in your pitch here. 10 powerful reasons to enter the Search Engine Land AwardsThe global events of the past two years have made it more important than ever for brands and agencies to stand out against the competition. Being able to call your company “award-winning” is one of the most powerful differentiators you can have. That’s just one amazing reason to enter the 2021 Search Engine Land Awards. Need more?
Read the other 5 reasons here. Deadline alert: The final date to submit your Search Engine Land Awards entry is Friday, September 3 at 11:59 pm PST. Begin your application now! Search Shorts: Local, local, localHow to handle local SEO without a physical address. Yes, your business can rank in search results in cities where you don’t have a physical address. How? By using tools like Google My Business (GMB), by creating content related to the city you want to target, by adding reviews or testimonials from clients in the city you’re targeting, and more. Google Local Pack without any CTAs. “If you search for [restaurants near me] in Google Search mobile or desktop, you will see the local three pack and map but you won’t see buttons to call the restaurant or directions or a way to order online,” wrote Barry Schwartz on SERoundtable. We’re with Lily Ray on this one: “How is this helpful for users?” Your Google Posts might start appearing on third-party sites. “Which third party sites would posts appear on?” asked Claire Carlile in a tweet last week. We’re interested to see which types of sites Posts will appear on. Quote of the Day“I might be in the minority here, but I think Google has the right to change title tags just like they have the right to change meta descriptions if they think it leads to better experiences for THEIR users,” tweeted Eli Schwartz, author of “Product-Led SEO.” The post Trends behind the Google title tag changes; Monday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3BDv671 Running a business is an act of faith, especially when you think it might be time to say goodbye to... The post Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Your Current Client? appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/3BuETMB |
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