The 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. Keep reading for more. Deadline alert: The final date to submit your Search Engine Land Awards entry is next Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PST. Begin your application now!
There’s only one catch: You have to get your submission in by Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PST. The submission process is faster and easier than ever before. What are you waiting for? Begin your application now. Standard entry fees are $595 per application — and you can submit to as many categories as you like. Our judges look forward to reviewing your work. Best of luck to you and your team! The post 10 powerful reasons to enter the Search Engine Land Awards appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3jiuBZm
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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, over the past week, Google made a small change that impacted some of the clickable titles in the search result snippets, and some SEOs and marketers are having a hard time with the change. For well over a decade Google has often not shown the title tag in your page’s metadata as the clickable link in the Google search results. But something changed last week with how and when Google shows the title tag versus headers or other content from the page or links. And with that change, it causes a lot of unrest amongst the SEO community. Both Brodie Clark and Lily Ray covered this in a lot of detail, and I covered when this happened, which was on August 17, and how it is unrelated to passage-based ranking. But rest assured, Google has heard the feedback and is collecting examples of when these titles do not make sense. In fact, Danny Sullivan even said this might lead to more controls within Google Search Console for us to manage our titles in the Google search results better. Who knows if that will end up happening? Andrew Charlton came out with a nice tool to show you how Google is changing your title tags – just keep in mind, a lot of the title tag changes are query dependent. My advice: This doesn’t seem to be a huge change. We have already seen Google not use our title tags before and as SEOs, we are awesome at dealing with change. We will adapt and use this to our advantage going forward. Barry Schwartz, Google Shopping bug leads to large impression dropsGoogle Ads seemed to have a bug last Friday with Google Shopping in some regions, like the UK, where the shopping listings were not showing up. Some advertisers were claiming drops in their listings from showing up by over 90%, yes, 90% impression drops for Google Shopping campaigns. Impressions and spend have dropped in Smart Shopping for many UK advertisers starting around August 20, 2021. “A high proportion of UK-based advertisers have seen a drop in impressions, cost and revenue for their PLA campaigns since Friday 20th,” tweeted PPCer Liam Wade. Google Ads Platinum Product Expert Emmanuel Flossie posted in the forums that it’s a known issue. Why we care. “Assuming it gets fixed, bear in mind that bid strategies will likely be affected and may re-enter learning phases,” tweeted Wade in the initial thread. If your accounts or campaigns have been affected by this issue, it’s critical to communicate to clients and stakeholders that this change is a glitch in their metrics, and not indicative of other issues. It’d also be beneficial to annotate this change in Google Analytics so any KPIs can be caveated in future reports. The bug is also causing advertisers to question the machine learning and automation happening behind the scenes in ads. Please note, this was fixed on Tuesday late afternoon, so all should be good now. Google link spam update is finally done rolling outA full month after Google initially started to roll out the link spam update, the company has finally confirmed the update is complete. Google initially said this update would take only two-weeks. Now a full-month after it was announced, Google’s Danny Sullivan said via the Search Liaison account “the link spam update is now complete.” Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients, since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time. Google Ads rolling out a new campaign setup screenGoogle Ads is rolling out a new ads campaign set up screen that has the steps to set up your campaigns across the left-hand rail of the screen, as opposed to the top of the screen. This seems to be broadly rolling out now and may surprise some advertisers who have been accustomed to the older version of this screen. Some advertisers, as you can imagine, are not a fan of this change. It made a lot of industry vets do a double-take and it slowed down their process of setting up new campaigns in Google Ads. We do suspect that advertisers will adapt quickly to this new screen, as time goes on. Why we care. Don’t be surprised when you see this new Google Ads campaign set up screen. You may have the same reaction as many of your colleagues where it takes you longer to set up the campaigns now because you are not accustomed to where things have moved. But you will quickly learn the change and be able to crank out new campaigns in no time. Google AdSense new auto-optimize optionsGoogle AdSense has added three new settings to auto-optimize features in your experiments. These new methods include select traffic, block a style and block an experiment.
Why we care. Publishers, it is probably worth testing some of these new auto-optimize options for your Google AdSense ads and see if they make an impact on your earnings. You can learn more on how to set these up over here. Custom metrics in Google Ads, did COVID change SEO, and Crunchbase gets crunchedGoogle Ads custom metrics. Google has announced the addition of four new metrics, these metrics include Search impression share, Click impression share, Display impression share and all phone call metrics. Poll: Did COVID change SEO? J. Turnbull asked on Twitter, “did COVID change how we do SEO?” 52.5% said no, COVID did not change how we do SEO. 216% said yes, COVID did change how we do SEO. And 22% said, “it depends.” Google crunches Crunchbase. Data from FiveBlocks says that Google is showing results from Crunchbase a lot less often since this past Thursday, August 19th. Why? We are not sure, but that is what the data is showing. We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.
The post Title changes in Google Search causing distress; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3sK5vps People shop in stores and on websites that recognize them and welcome them back. They like offers that match their interests and are delighted by great experiences. Sometimes they want to be fully known, at other times, they want their privacy maintained. To make this happen brands must constantly keep track of the known and pseudonymous information about people. This process requires identity. It should be the core of your madtech stack. Top brands make sure they know who they are talking to and deliver the best possible experiences based on what they know about them. This is referred to as identity resolution, and it’s at the heart of what advertisers and marketers need to get right to deliver on their brand promise. The art and science of identity has evolved with technological advances and the need to facilitate an incredibly complex series of decisions and actions to deliver the right content to the right person or persona – all in milliseconds. While some of this is informed by third-party cookies, the amount of information available has declined substantially and will be largely gone next year with Google no longer providing tracking information from the Chrome browser. Apple and others are already out of that business. Google’s eventual exit has created quite the buzz about a world without third-party cookies. At Acxiom, we see the madtech world with identity at the center. From there, it’s about the process to collect, create, and convert. Trying to convert – to get a person to join, subscribe, buy or promote your brand – without the best possible fidelity around identity is difficult at best and may lead to dissatisfaction and disengagement if it goes sideways. The path to incredible customer experienceIf you start with collecting information, you’ll get both useful and distracting data. It comes from sources you know to be better – your first-party data from direct interactions with a person – like emails, loyalty programs, CRM, and mobile device IDs. This is known, or offline, identity and forms the basis for a first-party identity graph. Acxiom helps brands focus on that private domain – meaning advertisers’ first-party data and relationships are key. The customized graph is built specifically for the advertisers’ enterprise and tailored to their specific requirements. From there, the goal is to extend that identity capability across use cases ranging from traditional direct marketing to measurement of paid media. A lot of this hinges on the value exchange between people and brands. People want more control and transparency into how their data is being used and monetized. Brands are looking to find new high-value customers and want more transparency into how their media is working. Publishers want to monetize their content. Any intermediary that steps in between this value triangle is reducing the transparency between the primary entities. There are powerful players in the game to collect and control information. Brands looking to control the information they can see and augment that information will be in a better position than brands counting on renting insights from third-party providers. As the walls of the “walled gardens” get higher, brands that want to market outside the closed Google or Facebook ecosystems will need a plan that puts them firmly in control of their own identity-driven solution. Back to the path…With identity close enough is not necessarily good enough. As communications get more personalized to smaller audience segments, advertisers are increasingly interested in who responded to which offer, which outlets performed the best, where someone is in the purchase process, and getting to know more about the consumer as they engage with the brand. Brands, in many cases, need to know exactly who they are talking to – for example, to make a rebate offer or a firm offer of credit. Others may want to deepen the relationship with a person – starting with the first touchpoint. Correctly making these decisions counts on getting people right, knowing who they are and something about what they might want based on the signals they have collected and have access to. And the graph.The private identity graph is the foundation of the path to great customer experiences. This is where all the signals or noise are optimized, resolved, and enriched to build the best possible view of the customer or prospect, all while governed by the proper privacy controls. The private graph works together with cross-domain graphs. These are graphs that are built by third-parties for the purpose of optimizing media activation and extending the reach of the private graph. This combination allows the collection, tracking, resolving, and acting on the data to happen at adtech speed. Another way to look at this is the blend of two graphs – private domain and cross domain – working together to deliver exceptional consumer experiences. Why is this all so important?There is more than one way to potentially achieve the same outcome. Our goal is to make sure brands put themselves in control and consider the private identity graph as the heart of the customer engagement engine. The advantages of knowing that someone is who they appear to be and resolving all the possible combinations of people who might be that person include:
The safest way to build on this relationship is to start with the direct relationship between one person and the brand – and grow from there. If you are the brand, think about this as what you know about a person without having to ask someone else. This is likely to be data the consumer has shared with you or that you know about them from purchase or other transactions. Own the solution.The madtech ecosystem is vast, complex, and constantly changing. An advertiser’s private identity graph should sit at the heart of the enterprise, acting as a central source of consumer intelligence, a brain to the nervous system that enables real-time collection, identity resolution and activation across the entire ecosystem. It’s always on, constantly collecting bits of entropy or signals from all inbound and outbound consumer engagement. When you get identity right, everyone wins. The post Is your brand facing an identity crisis? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2WqX9qA The post 20210825 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3sOyzfM Google has confirmed that the search engine has changed how it creates titles for the search result listings. Google said “last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages.” What changed. Previously, Google often used the query the searcher entered into the search box when formulating the title of the search result snippets. But now, Google said “generally” Google “will no longer” use the query when making these titles. Instead, Google has a new system to generate these titles that the company says “describe what they are about, regardless of the particular query.” Google said it is now “making use of text that humans can visually see when they arrive at a web page.” Specifically, Google is now considering “the main visual title or headline shown on a page.” This is content that site owners often place within Title tags still primary. Google said for 80% of the results, the HTML title tags are still the primary way it produces titles. Google wrote “HTML title tags is still by far the most likely used, more than 80% of the time.” Why the change. Google said this “update is designed to produce more readable and accessible titles for pages. In some cases, we may add site names where that is seen as helpful. In other instances, when encountering an extremely long title, we might select the most relevant portion rather than starting at the beginning and truncating more useful parts.” Industry coverage. So far, this has been covered in our newsletter a couple of times, also both Brodie Clark and Lily Ray covered this in a lot of detail. I covered on my personal blog when this happened, which was on August 17, and how it is unrelated to passage-based ranking. Google is making tweaks. Google wrote the search company is “already making refinements” to the new title system “based on feedback,” and Google promises to “keep working to make it even better over time.” Google has heard the feedback and is collecting examples of when these titles do not make sense. In fact, Danny Sullivan even said this might lead to more controls within Google Search Console for us to manage our titles in the Google search results better. Why we care. If you noticed changes to your click-through rate from the Google search results, it may be related to these changes. Hopefully those change are positive, Google did say the changes should be positive, the company wrote “our testing shows the change we’ve introduced produces titles that are more readable and preferred by searchers compared to our old system.” Although, we have seen some funny and weird examples of titles over the past week or so. The post Google confirms it changed how it creates titles for search result listings appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3kkGvBA Launching and managing a successful digital advertising campaign takes time and planning. This primer will help orient you along the way. Key areas covered include:
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download the PPC campaign launch checklist from MoreVisibility. The post PPC campaign launch checklist appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3B45qzU The post 20210824 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/38pjZlz Google has completed the rollout of the link spam update it started just over four weeks ago. “The link spam update is now complete,” Danny Sullivan said via the Google Search Liaison account.What took so long. Google originally said this update would “roll out across the next two weeks.” But as you can see, it took an additional two weeks to complete – a total of four weeks. Why did it take so long? Google did not say, but I suspect things got stuck a bit and the rollout hit some unexpected snags. The original announcement. “In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam-fighting change today — which we call the ‘link spam update.’ This algorithm update, which will roll out across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms,” Google wrote.Nullifying link spam. You can see the word Google used here was “nullifying,” which does not necessarily mean “penalize,” but instead, to ignore or simply not count. Google’s efforts around link spam have been to ignore and not count spammy links since Penguin 4.0 was released in 2016. Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time. As Google wrote, “Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high-quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetize it with properly tagged affiliate links.” The post Google link spam update done rolling out appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3j9Lcia 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, I was at a climbing gym last Friday when suddenly a semi-familiar tone sounded off all around me. It was a severe weather notice for Hurricane Henri going off on everyone’s smartphones at the same time. I tapped on the notice and was taken to Google’s mobile SERP, where I was shown the SOS alert at the top, followed by the latest articles in the Top Stories carousel, a map of the storm’s expected path and links to local resources — a far more useful results page than the simple, nostalgic 10 blue links of days long gone. The layout and interface of search results pages has shifted so much, even just over the last few years: The industry had a field day when Rand Fishkin published that over half of Google searches ended without a click. Last year, I documented how Google adjusted its coronavirus-related results pages in response to the pandemic’s spread across the U.S. And, just last month, Google’s Pandu Nayak sat down with me to share his roadmap for MUM and what search results might resemble in the future. Needs change and so do the nature of queries — it’s to be expected that the interface our audiences use to find what they’re looking for also evolves. I don’t expect any of you to be optimizing for storm warnings, but it’s always worth it to take a look at the experience offered on those results pages because, one day, they may make it onto a commerce-driven results page, for example. George Nguyen, Ch-ch-ch-ch-changesGoogle said in the year 2020, it made 4,500 updates to Google Search. These changes can be ranking changes, user interface changes and much more. By comparison, in 2019, Google made 3,200 changes to Search. Looking further back, in 2010, we covered that Google had about one change per day. Google also launched a “fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search.” In the 2021 version, it “updated the site with fresh information, made it easier to navigate and bookmark sections and added links to additional resources that share how Search works and answer common questions.” Why we care. It is nice to see Google document how many changes it makes to Search from year to year. It is also good for search marketers to review how Google Search works and do a deep dive into the language Google uses to describe how the search engine functions. The case for advertising on search engines other than GoogleIt can be easy to equate search marketing with Google marketing, because, well, statistically, it is. But it shouldn’t be. By focusing on Google above all else, we perpetuate a cycle that overlooks the value that smaller competitors might be offering and keeps the search behemoth at the top. We can’t write off these smaller search engines’ failure to launch as evidence they were a worse product. That’s an oversimplification and it’s one we see Google and other near-monopolies use to justify their status as “natural” monopolies. The dilemma is that search engines need revenue to grow, which comes, in most business models, from advertisers. And advertisers need users, which come with growth. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Which comes first: growth or advertisers? Who else can you consider for advertising:
Messy SEO Part 1: Navigating a site consolidation migrationMessy SEO is a new Search Engine Land column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study. “I recently joined the Third Door Media team to help clean up these issues arising from the consolidation of Marketing Land and MarTech Today. The new site needed someone to jump into the thick of things and chart a path forward,” writes Third Door Media’s new Content and SEO Manager. Follow along as Corey sorts through the messy side of SEO and navigates the fixes needed to help this website migration achieve its goals. The deal with title tags in Google Search, Bing Webmaster Tools adoption and the WFH schismGet caught up on the title tag situation. For those wondering what the deal is with titles in Google Search, Brodie Clark has published an excellent explainer, complete with an FAQ section at the bottom. Do you use Bing Webmaster Tools? Eli Schwartz posted a Twitter poll asking whether SEOs ever log into BWT. There are still two days left to participate, but when I last checked, a bit under half of respondents said, “Nope.” “Why does everyone want to keep working from home?” “Return hesitancy is sparking friction as businesses figure out the new normal,” said Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne. The burden of sending our children back to school this year“It’s enough to bring a parent to tears, except that every parent I know ran out a long time ago—I know I did,” Dan Sinker wrote for The Atlantic. “Ran out of tears, ran out of energy, ran out of patience. Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own. It was unsustainable then, it’s unsustainable now, and no matter what fresh hell this school year brings, it’ll still be unsustainable.” The main point of Sinker’s article is encapsulated in the four-word title, “Parents Are Not Okay.” I’ve chosen to spotlight it today because, chances are, some of your colleagues are parents or you, yourself, are a parent and we are now in back-to-school season. Sending our children back to school while COVID cases are rising, masking continues to be a battleground and a vaccine for children under 12 remains unavailable is a far cry from the improvements we were hoping for a year ago. Sinker describes it as a “monkey’s-paw situation, because, as a parent, all I’ve wanted for a year and a half is for my kids to go back to school—for their sake and for mine—but not like this.” While we all like to view ourselves as professionals, there are things that are far more important than our jobs; in this case, the welfare of our children. These worries are likely to take a toll and businesses should recognize that, from practitioners all the way through to the C-suite. No one has ever had to do what parents in 2021 are doing, especially because, unlike last year, remote schooling seems to be off the table in so many regions. “All this and parents are somehow expected to be okay,” Sinker wrote. Perhaps we can lighten the burden by acknowledging what parents around us are experiencing and maybe even find ways to support them where we can. The post The shifting sands of SERPs; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2UJl44d A new wave of caution for in-person gatherings is sweeping over marketers as the COVID-19 Delta variant is causing cases to spike, especially in areas with lower vaccination rates. Marketing professionals we surveyed this summer give it a 5 out of 10 chance, on average, that they will attend an in-person event through the end of 2021. The results showed a slight decrease in optimism compared to April, when respondents gave a 6 out of 10 chance, on average, that they would attend an in-person event in the fourth quarter of 2021. About 30% of the nearly 170 marketers we surveyed in our latest Events Participation Index, said it was extremely unlikely (1 out of 10) that they would attend an in-person event this year. On the other hand, 20% said they were extremely likely (10 out of 10) to attend an in-person event this year. This comes as several trade shows, conferences, and smaller regional shows are being planned for the remainder of 2021. It also follows an announcement by the New York Auto Show that it will not hold its 2021 event, despite optimism earlier this year that it could host tens of thousands of attendees in person. The outlook improves slightly for 2022. Respondents on average gave it a 6 out of 10 likelihood that they would attend an in-person event in the first half of 2022. That jumped to 7 out of 10 for the second half of 2022. All of this suggests that the kind of attendance seen in conferences, trade shows and more before the pandemic will not return in the near future. Looking to 2022Despite lingering concerns over safety, both attendees and exhibitors are budgeting to attend in-person events in 2022. But they plan to attend far fewer than before the pandemic. About 78% of respondents said they are budgeted to attend a small number of in-person events in 2022, while only 12% said they were budgeted to attend many. We saw the same trend with exhibitors, which make up a smaller proportion of our respondents. Nearly 19% said they were budgeted to exhibit at a small number of in-person events next year, compared to 5% who expect to exhibit at many. 2022 attendance might also be limited by geography. While 56% of marketers said they would attend regional events that they could access through ground transportation or by driving, only 40% said they would fly long distances to attend. Of course, willingness to attend an in-person conference depends on how safe attendees feel, so it is not surprising that 70% told us organizers should only allow vaccinated adults to attend. This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which could lead to more vaccine mandates across the US. New York City has already mandated proof of vaccination for visiting restaurants or gyms, and several major employers are also requiring staff to be vaccinated. The Consumer Technology Association’s upcoming CES 2022 event in January will also require proof of vaccination to attend. Still, 30% of our respondents disagree with mandating vaccination, suggesting that organizers should expect mandates to be another limiting factor on attendance. What hybrid means to attendeesOffering a digital component to a live event is not new. Conferences like SXSW, TechCrunch Disrupt and more had incorporated digital live streams into their events before the pandemic. But with the lockdown proving the value of virtual events, organizers are betting that hybrid events that pair in-person and digital experiences is the future. However, what attendees want from hybrid events is not so clear-cut. About 32% of the marketers we surveyed said they would prefer a hybrid event where the in-person experience is smaller and more intimate paired with a large virtual experience. On the other hand, 25% said they would prefer a larger in-person event paired with a scaled-down virtual offering. About 26% said the in-person and digital components of a hybrid event should be identical in scope while 17% said they saw no value in hybrid event experiences. The virtue of hybrid during pandemic times is it gives organizers a chance to engage a larger audience that includes both in-person and virtual attendees. About 40% of the marketers we surveyed said they would attend an event in-person and access virtual components. About 22% said they would attend in-person only while 38% said they would attend the virtual components only. Virtual to stayMany of our respondents commented on how the past 18 months have changed their views on professional training and networking. For many of them, virtual events expanded their access to actionable information. “It’s wonderful getting the benefit of top-notch presentations from the safety of my office. Going virtual has allowed vastly more people to ‘attend’ events and learn from the best,” wrote one respondent. “While I love in-person events, I feel like I’ve attended more virtual events and training than I would have otherwise. It’s probably a combination of a reduced overall time commitment, and not having to pay for travel. I also feel like the level of training I’ve received hasn’t diminished from not being in-person,” wrote another. But when it comes to networking, digital experiences miss the mark for many professionals, which is surprising in the age of social networking. “I have not found virtual networking to be useful. It’s impossible to genuinely connect when there are so many participants, and the camaraderie that comes from being at a conference in person is totally gone. I don’t know what the magic ingredient is (mutual bonding over bad coffee and lack of sleep?) but online, networking interactions feel much more forced,” one marketer said. Maybe this response sums it up perfectly. “Virtual training is possible. Virtual networking … not so much.” Events Participation Index timeline
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