Google Ads API v12 will sunset on September 27, 2023. Developers are being advised to migrate to a newer version before then to ensure API access is not affected. Why we care. API updates have a direct impact on how advertising campaigns work. When an older version is no longer supported, requests using it will fail, which can disrupt campaign management. To prevent this, it’s important to keep using the latest API version. This way, advertisers and developers can access new features, ensuring campaigns run smoothly and perform well. Depreciation and sunset timetable. Typically, three major versions are available at any one time with a lifespan of around 12 months, while minor versions have a support lifespan of 10 months. Developers have to perform a maximum of two upgrades per year, but you do not have to upgrade in strict sequential order. The table below lists the specific deprecation and sunset dates for each available version, and projected release dates for future versions. Migrate asap. To migrate to the newest version, visit the Google Ads API documentation here. Dig deeper. Read the announcement from Google here. The post Last call for Google Ads API v12 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/5m4IB9O
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Search behavior has evolved since the inception of search engines. Google’s confirmation that 15% of queries are new underscores the dynamic nature of search. This exposes a weakness in traditional keyword research, which heavily relies on a user feedback loop that limits the discovery of emerging topics. This article explores how integrating customer insights into your SEO strategy can help you succeed in the evolving search landscape. The limitations of keyword researchKeyword research has long been considered a necessary element in content creation. However, a keyword-centric approach lacks foresight into future trends and fails to prioritize the customer. Sadly, this approach is common in SEO campaigns. We might pursue monthly search volume (MSV) and rankings without assessing if that traffic is qualified to convert. Relying solely on keyword analysis often overlooks untapped opportunities and inhibits your business from staying ahead of competitors. As searchers’ needs evolve, we must strive for a deeper understanding of our customers and integrate this knowledge into our SEO strategies. Customer insights: A strategic approachWe gain a significant advantage when we go beyond traditional keyword research and prioritize understanding customers. Connecting and engaging with customers can uncover content ideas that competitors may have missed. This strategic approach enables you to become a first mover within search engine result pages (SERPs), enhancing your visibility and authority. Consistently delivering new content aligned with customers’ needs can compound this advantage, establishing your brand as a true authority in your industry or niche. To establish and increase topical authority, strive to become an authoritative source that produces comprehensive and focused content on specific subjects. Identifying and addressing content gaps left by competitors lets you demonstrate your expertise by building a complete and high-quality collection of content, such as a blog post, knowledge base, or other resources. However, it is equally crucial to go beyond this by consistently bringing new ideas and information to the web. How to broaden your content roadmapping strategiesContent roadmapping should extend beyond the confines of keyword research. A more customer-centric approach enables your business to deliver exceptional value to your target audience. The following are alternative ways to gain insights to shape your future content strategies. You may use one or more of these methods depending on your business goals. Method 1: Jobs-to-be-doneA jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) analysis helps you focus on customers' desired outcomes by examining the tasks they use a product for. This reveals valuable insights by:
Conducting a JTBD analysis enables you to craft targeted content that addresses customers’ needs and fosters deeper connections. Let's consider Screaming Frog, a company seeking to enhance its SEO Spider tool and conduct a JTBD analysis. They may identify crawling sitemaps as a primary job while scraping sites using the extraction tool emerges as a related job. During the analysis, they might uncover the pain point when utilizing the browser's XPath selector output in the extraction process, as it may not always yield the desired results. This discovery prompts them to create a series of tutorials on XPath syntax, simplifying the learning process for users. Method 2: Product-led SEOIn this approach, you’ll develop a product that drives your SEO strategy rather than using SEO to market the product. The key is to build a product that is new or better than the competition, programmatic and scalable while addressing untapped search demand. By developing an offering incentivizing searchers to click from SERPs, you can build search demand as your product is adopted while bringing new resources to the web. Conduct primary research with users to validate product-market fit and learn from your customers’ needs and preferences. A successful product that may have been part of a product-led SEO strategy is SmartAsset’s Paycheck Calculators. For a finance-focused website, a paycheck calculator offers value to customers who frequently manually compute paychecks for budgeting and financial planning. Regardless of whether SmartAsset was the first to develop the paycheck calculator or merely created a better version than competitors’, tool adoption has driven an increase in search demand over time. SmartAsset built and refined these calculators tailored to specific states, creating 50 high-quality pages. They succeeded in their product-led efforts by ensuring product-market fit. Customers naturally support a product when this is achieved since the offering is highly targeted toward helping them. Method 3: Conduct primary researchPrimary research helps you learn about customers through:
Through this process, you can unlock valuable insights that can enhance existing content and inspire new content ideas yet to be explored on the web. New and compelling content ideas naturally emerge as you gather and synthesize customer insights. Your team may be inspired to brainstorm innovative topics that have never been considered. Moreover, insights from primary research benefit marketing, support, and product teams. Integrating these insights fuels a comprehensive strategy, enhancing customer experiences beyond SERPs throughout the buyer journey. Presenting research as a holistic customer experience solution for budget-conscious teams can secure leadership buy-in. Dominate search with customer-centric SEOThriving in search demands customer-centric SEO. Beyond keywords, embracing customer insights will give your SEO strategy a competitive edge. Customer-centricity aligns with search engines' aims: to deliver diverse, helpful results. Businesses that maintain the highest level of topical authority will become trusted sources, gaining more authority in SERPs as a reward. It's time to go beyond keywords and embrace customer insights. By doing so, you’ll level up your SEO results and foster stronger connections with your customers. The post Customer-centric SEO: Adapting your search strategy for success appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/smr2jA1 In 2015, I joined what was a very small SEO team. Since then, we have more than tripled our size. As we grew, we faced the challenge of scaling our team and continuing to deliver strong work, all while maintaining the culture that enabled our growth in the first place. This article underscores the significance of creating a strong culture and shares our tactical steps as we grew our team. Our goal for this journey wasn’t just team expansion but to nurture a culture of excellence and innovation. Every new member needed to amplify our collective strength rather than dilute it. Here, I’ll take you behind the scenes of our growth story to:
Challenges with scalingUltimately, the challenges of scaling an SEO team boil down to changes in the quality of your “three Ps”: people, process and product.
To overcome these challenges, you must:
With the right approach, you can successfully scale while maintaining your team culture and delivering great client results. Why culture matters in an SEO teamSEOs are effectively consultants, often working with other marketers. In any consulting business, the biggest asset is the people. Engaged employees are happier and lead to a 202% revenue increase compared to organizations with a less engaged workforce per one study. A strong culture in the SEO space is essential for a consulting team as it fosters collaboration, attracts and retains top talent, and helps build a strong brand – all of which help your team stand out in the market. Up to 35% of workers would pass on a job if they felt the culture was not a good fit. 12 ways to maintain your culture as you scale1. Define your SEO team’s core valuesThe best corporate cultures are usually rooted in a shared set of beliefs, values, working methods and (perhaps most importantly) purpose. To define your core values, start by defining a mission statement. Is there anything people consistently say about you that makes you great? Discussing shared values and goals with your team in a brainstorming session can be a good place to start, but you may want a smaller group to define the final set of core values. Stephanie Gioia offers a useful framework to determine which values may be truly useful versus which do not serve the overall strategy. Dig deeper: How to build a values-based agency that drives results 2. Create a strong leadership team and structureLeaders typically define the culture of a team. This is why it’s especially important to think about the cultural contributions that are most important when identifying team leaders, as well as how to structure your team beneath those leaders. Limit direct reports to maximize time spent with managers Nothing says that it’s time to look for a new job like a manager who isn’t providing proper leadership. Building a culture means retaining the key players through supporting their needs. To do so, you need to ensure that your team has what they need, and one of the most important things needed is proper guidance, especially at the junior levels. We also recognized early on that for managers to be effective, they need time to provide deep learning, tactical support, and strategic guidance. We made the business case to hire ahead of the present need state and bring in additional managers to stabilize the management structure. We divided the team into two distinct teams, each with an associate director. We found that three to four direct reports per manager were the maximum we could allocate without losing our culture and bandwidth to manage and lead. Frequent manager check-ins Regular check-ins with team members so that they feel valued and heard is critical to creating an empowered team and retaining personnel. For our team, this means that each manager meets with their direct reports at least once weekly to dive into the work. Some managers meet with their direct reports twice or thrice weekly to review deliverables or prepare for client presentations. Creating a feedback loop It isn’t enough to just encourage feedback. High-performance teams tend to create a feedback loop wherein feedback is not just heard but clearly actioned upon, thus encouraging more feedback. The faster and more publicly you act on feedback, the more feedback people will provide. The more feedback that people provide, the better the team gets. We frequently ask the team for feedback on onboarding, client kickoffs, projects we executed, and team events. We also encourage our team to provide feedback to their managers on how they can better work together. 3. Delegate ownership of team cultureAnother critical aspect of scale is delegating key tasks and objectives across the team, including culture. While it often comes from the top, sometimes team members are stronger connectors and culture builders – and that is OK! Acquiescing control is tough for most leaders, but the sooner you elect an “owner of team culture,” the sooner you’ll see that garden grow and flourish. From a tactical perspective, we picked an employee who came to our team with a strong desire to lead culture and had fantastic ideas about implementing it well. This person also has a great attitude, is highly thoughtful and pleasant, and even wins awards for their cheerful demeanor. Let team members own areas of the business if they are better suited. 4. Hire for culture contribution vs. culture ‘fit’One of the biggest paradigm shifts I had as a manager and leader was realizing that I didn’t need or want a “culture fit.” Instead, I needed to recruit based on what cultural contributions candidates could make. SHRM.org has collected great resources on the idea of “culture ad,” which I recommend reading to learn more about the topic. There’s also the danger of hiring people whose own core values are not aligned with your team. Rand Fishkin discusses hiring for competence versus culture fit and makes the astute point that it is unlikely that you will be able to change someone’s views totally. Fishkin recommends building questions in your interview process that can help you identify alignment or gaps. Identify potential new hires by how well they match your existing culture and what they can add to it. To put this process into action, map out what you feel your team needs from both a competency and a cultural perspective. Ensure you consider that in your recruiting and career path development approach. 5. Acknowledge greatness as much as you canIn hearing the stories of CEOs and founders, a common thread that I have noted among the best is that their organizations had a strong culture of acknowledging greatness. Good deeds, both big and small, that are boldly acknowledged can have a powerful effect on an organization. Jim Perdue of Perdue Farms shared in NPR’s, “Wisdom From The Top with Guy Raz” that highlighting his employees’ good work with a “good egg” award was a key part of a critical change that they needed for Perdue to become a $7 billion business. You can highlight your team’s work in digital communication channels such as Slack, Teams, or email, or even in person with a paper cut-out award like Jim Perdue. Whichever method you take, call out your team’s great work frequently, publicly, and individually during one-on-ones. 6. Have SOPs that are carefully documentedOne thing distinguishing an SEO practice is the SOPs that the team follows and their ability to cater deliverables to client businesses and situations. Having an SOP library has helped our team maintain our culture of detail-oriented work and the quality of that work. Our team has around 40 different SOP deliverables. These deliverables range from on-site, technical/structural, and off-site. We generally have a template to follow for each category, an SOP document, and even videos. This documentation helps our team feel like they know what to do while encouraging them to iterate and improve the SOP. Having a living, breathing SOP that grows and develops as the industry changes is critical. Accordingly, ensure the team knows that “breaking the mold” is welcomed and encouraged. Tools like tango.us or fireflies.ai can help you quickly document processes and meetings. A company intranet where all the SOPs live is also a great resource. You can also simply use Google Drive or a project management tool like Asana to house all SOP documentation. Dig deeper: 4 tips to build a data-centric culture in your agency 7. Create frequent learning and development opportunitiesHigh-performance race cars require fine-tuning – so does your team. Having a culture built with learning and development cultivates top talent while adding value to employees. Learning and development create a space people want to be in and an empowered, engaged community. Here are the regular learning and development practices we have:
8. Consider a democratic approachOur most critical decisions are decided based on a vote from the full team or among the managers. Running a democratic team requires patience and diplomacy but, in the long term, creates a true sense of community. Sometimes, leaders may need to make decisions that not everyone is on board with. That said, the more leaders can gain alignment and treat the team as the sum of its parts, the more stock people put into things, and the better everything works. Making decisions democratically is like rocket fuel for a team dynamic. 9. Offer up well-planned communication channelsIn a remote work environment, we have to navigate having open lines of communication – while still allowing people to focus on their work. We analyzed how best to simulate our in-office synergy and landed on using channels in Teams. We have channels dedicated to tools and tech, getting help from others, off-topic non-work things, and client-specific channels in Teams that help our team stay connected. 10. Celebrate together, oftenOur focus on celebrating together as a remote team is about celebrating client successes, personal development milestones, years with the company, personal achievements and more. One of my favorite things we do is celebrate workiversaries (work anniversaries). Whenever a team member hits their company anniversary, we collect quotes from the other team members and send them along as words of praise, encouragement and general cheer. With so much of our lives spent at work, we want to make it clear that we appreciate the time people spend with us. 11. Share in what makes people uniqueOur Team Hub document is a place for us to collect information about our team members’ interests, hobbies, and favorite foods so that we can celebrate their individuality. We use this information during holidays, celebrations, and generally, to create a supportive, festive environment that celebrates our individuality. We also do something we call “Question of the Day,” where we ask a fun question each week and everyone provides their answer. This could be something like “If you were a Disney character, which one would you be?” or, “if you had a YouTube channel, what would it be about?” It is a fun way for us to connect and discuss our favorite things in a fairly structured way, enabling everyone to have the mic for a moment. 12. A strong recruiting approach leads to a strong teamHow you approach recruiting can greatly impact the talent pool and how your team culture develops. Some of the most important tools that helped maintain our culture were a part of our hiring process.
Running all candidates through the same process helps us to accomplish several things. First, make the right hires, adding value to our culture. Next, the process helps us provide what we feel is a fair and equitable approach to evaluating talent and fostering an inclusive environment, which is the type of culture we want to build. Ready to scale your team?Shift your hiring mindset from culture "fits" to culture "contributors," delegating the ownership of culture curation, acknowledging greatness and adopting methods to retain and enhance team culture. Additionally, we recommend fostering a learning environment, limiting the number of direct reports to managers, and creating a democratic decision-making process. Hopefully, some of our learnings will prove helpful to you in your journey. This road was not easy, but with the principles discussed here, we adapted, innovated and grew the way we wanted. The post 12 strategies to scale your SEO team without losing your culture appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/LOnPphN A fundamental catalyst for innovation, data fuels growth and success. Now with AI, businesses can have an actual dialogue with customers. Instead of having one-way conversations where customers provide elements marketers seek, we can help customers navigate the breadth of information we make available. In turn, we receive the information necessary to segment them. In this episode of the MarTech Podcast: Data Makes the Difference, Karlos Palmer, Dun & Bradstreet’s senior vice president of sales and marketing solutions product, and Kim Davis, editorial director at MarTech, explore the essential role of customer feedback, market trends, and insights and data in creating products that meet customer needs and become valuable assets for organizations. Tune into the podcast and learn:
Tune in to other episodes in the series here. GuestKarlos Palmer, SVP of Sales and Marketing Solutions Product, Dun & BradstreetKarlos Palmer is an accomplished senior executive with a proven track record in product management, strategy development, and business growth. As the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Solutions Product, Karlos currently oversees the strategic planning, competitive intelligence, product lifecycle management, and budgeting functions for Dun & Bradstreet’s flagship Sales Acceleration product, D&B Hoovers and is responsible for driving innovation and growth across the product portfolio. Karlos has a strong background in global alliances, product development, and project management and has consistently achieved outstanding results throughout his career. He holds an MBA in Management from the Texas McCombs School of Business and a BBA in Economics/International Business from Baylor University.ModeratorKim Davis, Editorial Director, MarTechBorn in London but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim Davis started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. Prior to working in tech journalism, Davis was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication and as a music journalist.Sponsor
Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, enables companies around the world to improve their business performance. Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud fuels solutions and delivers insights that empower customers to accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk, and transform their businesses. Since 1841, companies of every size have relied on Dun & Bradstreet to help them manage risk and reveal opportunity. For more information on Dun & Bradstreet, please visit www.dnb.com.
The post Data and AI ignite real-time customer conversations and tangible business results appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3jaybcJ Integrating generative AI into search presents a compelling value proposition. If SEOs figure out how to adopt this technology effectively, it could revolutionize the industry and fundamentally change how people interact with search. While there are still some concerns around the accuracy of AI-generated content, as well as omissions leading to some information being taken out of context, SEO expert Eric Enge explained that the technology is still a fantastic tool for creative inspiration and saving time. Below is a summary how generative AI can be used to drive your technical SEO strategy, as presented by Enge at SMX Advanced. 1. CodingOne of the impressive aspects of ChatGPT is its proficiency in coding, according to Enge. He explained:
2. Generating Hreflang tagsEnge shared an example of a scenario where he used generative AI to create Hreflang tags for different webpages:
3. TranslationGenerative AI produces accurate results when used for translation purposes. Enge said:
4. Implementing .htaccess rulesEnge added that generative AI can also be used to help speed up the process of implementing .htaccess rules:
5. Creating title tagsEnge recommended using generative AI to get creative inspiration for title tags – but stressed that SEOs should also take into account other factors before publishing anything:
6. Producing meta descriptionsWhen generative AI is used to create meta descriptions, additional prompts can fine-tune the result until you’re happy with it. Enge added:
7. Summarizing contentEnge said generative AI is accurate when summarizing content as it carries out this task solely using content you have entered, leaving no room for confusion, date omissions or false information:
8. Keyword groupingEnge also shared examples of him using ChatGPT prompts to classify and cluster keywords into groups. He added:
9. Content assistanceGenerative AI is also a useful tool for generating content ideas. You can ask ChatGPT to create a list of popular questions related to a topic to get a list of potential article ideas:
Watch: Using ChatGPT to drive technical SEOBelow is the complete video of Enge's SMX Advanced presentation. The post Using ChatGPT to drive technical SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/C3S7Dlq Grocery delivery service and advertising platform Instacart filed for its IPO on Friday. Why we care. Instacart Ads is an emerging platform where CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands can advertise products (via sponsored product ads, display ads, coupons) to 7.7 million “monthly active orderers” as they shop. 1. Instacart’s 2023 ad revenue. Instacart reported $406 million in ad revenue for the six months of 2023, a year-on-year increase of 24%.
2. Instacart’s 2022 ad revenue. Instacart’s full-year advertising revenue hit $740 million in 2022, a 29% YoY increase. Advertising was 29% of Instacart’s total revenue.
3. How many brands use Instacart Ads. Intacart had more than 5,500 “active brand partners” using Instacart Ads as of June 30. This number has grown of “over five times” since December 2019. 4. New Instacart Ads offerings coming. Instacart has plans to add new display advertising offerings, specifically mentioning “shoppable products brand pages to serve as destinations for on- and offsite media,” according to the S-1. 5. Instacart plans to expand its ad tech to more retailers. The company plans to invest in and grow the Instacart Enterprise Platform, according to the S-1 filing:
6. Instacart is impacted by seasonality. Instacart expects seasonality to cause fluctuations in its quarterly financial results.
7. Instacart Ads growth strategy. Here’s how Instacart said it plans to increase its advertising revenue:
What Instacart said. The company’s filing also touted its high ROI and ability to drive purchases:
The filing. Instacart’s Form S-1. The post Instacart IPO: 7 key takeaways for advertisers appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/rP5T6nZ We all want to demonstrate strong results for our clients or stakeholders. But sometimes, pushing to an extreme can undo our efforts. This is much more obvious between different disciplines and departments. For example, designers (or UX / CRO specialists) may think they can increase a site’s conversion rate by 10% by cutting content and giving a more streamlined look. But if that 10% increase in conversion rate comes at the cost of 20% of organic traffic intake, then it’s probably not a good trade. These conflicts are common, especially between competing disciplines and roles. But even within one discipline, like SEO, similar issues can arise. This article looks at some competing forces in SEO and how to approach them.
Volume of URLs: Ranking footprint vs. crawl efficiencyWorking on a large site with plenty of webpages? Some SEOs might think more pages and content items are synonymous with a broader indexing (and therefore ranking) footprint. But more URLs on your site doesn’t always equate to more potential ranking opportunities or organic traffic. This is especially applicable to sites that suffer from poor architecture. For example, ecommerce sites that include a product category within a product-level URL which also allow products to be nested within multiple separate categories. In such a situation, you can end up with:
Since all of the above resolve the same product page (product-1), there are now three URLs for the same page (duplicate content). This means that Google will invariably end up (eventually, over time) crawling the same product three times. Two of those three crawls could have gone to different products or content. That content could then have gone on to rank. So, in this situation, inefficient use of the crawl budget actually ends up harming the velocity at which new content is ranked. Hopefully, Google will still crawl all the unique, distinct content eventually, but it may take longer. As new content is published, it will take longer to perform. Several other scenarios can cause this same phenomenon. For example, different filtering combinations on a site with faceted navigation may result in exponentially expanding volumes of parameter URLs spawning on a website. A non-filtered category page may end up with ten or even 100 parameter variations as different filtering is applied. We can just put canonical tags on the highly-duplicate pages that we don’t want Google to index and that will handle the content duplication issues, right? While that is true, Google still has to crawl and visit the non-canonical addresses to see that they are non-canonical (to read their embedded canonical tags). Canonical tags only help to alleviate content duplication, but they don’t really help much with crawl efficiency and content discovery. You could argue that this is where you deploy complex wildcard robots.txt rules. Still, you must be careful in that area, as you can easily unintentionally cut off chunks of organic search traffic. The best practice is to implement correct URL architecture and supporting redirects. If you have those in place, not much can go wrong. Often, canonical tags are deployed as a band-aid solution after issues have already arisen. But they’re quite a messy patch to a more fundamental problem. Links and content: Quality vs. quantityOn the surface, this seems like a no-brainer. Google has constantly stated that quality content and links matter more than mass-manufactured spam. SEOs and digital PR specialists can often spend weeks attempting to create great content and ascertain a single high-value placement to knock the competition off their ranking pedestal. No SEO worth their salt would argue that mass-spun content and spam links are an effective tool. These tactics are ineffective if you expect to maintain a long-term online brand, a foundation of business that you can build upon over time. So, is there a place for quantity on a quality-first web, where higher quality signals matter more? Yes. If you have worked on large sites for enterprise-tier clients, you’ll know that such brands (and those they compete with) already have high-quality links and content. Quality never becomes irrelevant, but quantity once again raises its head. For such clients, the game is about delivering a quantity of quality. In these situations, both dimensions (quantity and quality) matter. When your site has such powerful ranking equity, every minute you’re not delivering new content, which targets new keywords, is lost time and traffic. Every moment you get three high-value links, as your competitor wins 10, can be a moment of failure. For such high-caliber sites and clients, the goalposts change entirely. The only way to earn high-value links quickly enough is to do very noticeable things in the real world, like:
You stop thinking about building links and individual placements and start thinking, “How can we go out there and do something newsworthy?” While quality is sovereign, don’t forget that quantity is still required within the most competitive spaces. Quality real-world activity can deliver a quantity of quality links. That’s where you want to be. Dig deeper: How to use digital PR to drive backlinks and business growth Keyword optimization: Sparse vs. spamA content gap analysis can present you with two primary findings.
In the former scenario, you’re likely to open an existing page and work out where you could deploy the underperforming keyword. Or you might go further and determine whether an additional content section is required. Either way, you’re browsing a content page and looking for a keyword deployment opportunity. And what’s wrong with that? It’s what we’re paid to tweak content and get each item of content performing to its optimal standard. We want to identify sparse, thin, underperforming content, which doesn’t say enough. But it’s a thin line between sparse content with too few referenced topics (too few keywords) and spam content, which is nothing but keyword injections. Even before Google’s well-known Panda update, there were attempts to curb the “keyword enthusiasm” of SEOs. Content that doesn’t contain atopical relevance doesn’t have the weight to penetrate Google’s SERPs. By contrast, content that is too optimization-heavy sinks. Keep these competing forces in mind when optimizing or reducing the optimization intensity of your content. Your content must be heavy enough to penetrate but not so heavy that it sinks. User experience: Speed vs. functionalityWordPress is known as an SEO-friendly content management system (CMS). But often, some site wonders want more functionality than the default CMS, so they start installing many plugins. Fairly quickly, site performance deteriorates as pages load slower and slower. Shortcode must be queried and transmuted to HTML / CSS, which involves additional calls to various tables from the database. Additional scripts pile up in the browser’s main thread, creating execution bottlenecks. Getting a good balance of page-loading speeds and functionality was fairly easy in the past. As long as you minified your scripts and sheets, compressed your images and installed a caching plugin, you were good to go. Those days are over. Nowadays, Google wants us to begin interpreting what happens on the client’s (end-user’s) browser’s main processing thread. There’s no point shipping 5-10 scripts to a user really efficiently if all of that JavaScript waits in the browser’s main processing thread to be executed. As such, we now have to consider:
You can still achieve high functionality combined with high speed. It just takes a lot more work (and intelligence) than previously. Forging an effective critical JavaScript/CSS rendering path is not for the faint of heart. If you can spare the senior development time, you can have a relatively feature-rich and fast site running on mediocre hosting. It will take more time than ever, so be prepared. Regional deployment: Local focus vs. global reachThis is a trap that can spring both ways. You can aim for global reach without sufficient content, architecture and authority. In such a situation, you may wish you had picked a more localized domain (national) instead. You may wish you had aimed at your local area with NAP signals. Sometimes it’s better to walk before you can run, and over-extending your reach too quickly can lead to failure (success on neither local nor global fronts). On the other hand, going with a local approach when you have global ambition can really lock you in. For example, it’s unlikely that a .co.uk (UK) domain would rank well in France or Germany. It’s important to realize that none of these decisions are concrete. If you lock yourself down locally, you can buy new domains and perform site migrations. In such a situation, you’ll likely lose at least a little of your ranking power, so you should only jump ship (from one domain to another) once your site has gained critical mass. If you’re only seeing a few hundred organic sessions monthly, it’s probably not time to make that move yet. Depending on your ambitions, a local or global approach may be better. If you’re a local vacuum repair shop, no one is likely to be critically interested in your business. Aiming for global SEO might be a bit of a reach. If there are only two other vacuum shops in your local area, a locally targeted SEO campaign would almost guarantee you ranking on top of the search results for relevant, local terms. That’s much less effort than reaching out to potential consumers across the seas. If you’re a well-known fashion brand and branching out from clothing to other items like scents (cologne), you’d probably expect some business from other countries. Take the actions that will bring you the fastest revenue with the least effort. If you’re a small business without enough ranking power to rank globally, go local first and circle back later. Otherwise, aim high and chip away. Internal linking: Connected vs. cumbersomeAdding a few choice links within your content is great, perhaps to support orphaned pages or top-performing products. That said, there’s such a thing as having too many internal links. Imagine a page where every other word or phrase was linked to a destination URL. How would you determine where to go? It would seem like every snippet of text was competing for your attention equally. This would be problematic for end users of your website. The same can also be said for search engines. If every text item is a link to somewhere else and every page on your site supplies and receives thousands of links, how can a search engine interpret which pages are more or less valuable? Even contextual analysis and thematic page categorization become much trickier. Navigating competing forces in SEOBalancing competing forces in SEO requires a strategic approach.
Adopting a holistic and adaptable strategy that respects the nuances of each force can help you make your SEO efforts more manageable. The post How to balance competing forces in SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/gEbjcSQ Bing Chat now works in Chrome, Google’s web browser. Microsoft initially launched Bing Chat to work only on its own browser, Edge. Then Microsoft began testing Bing Chat support on other browsers, such as Chrome and Safari, but it was not fully available to all users. Chrome support for Bing Chat. Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Bing, wrote on X last week that Bing Chat now works for 100% of Chrome. “Chrome is shipped a 100%,” Mikhail Parakhin wrote. Here is Bing Chat working for me on Chrome on my Mac: Safari support coming soon. While some are able to also access Bing Chat on Safari, Apple’s browser, it is just a limited test right now. “Working on Safari, hopefully will release soon,” Mikhail Parakhin added. Why we care. Bing is expanding access to Bing Chat across more and more browsers. That should give more people access to try out and potentially adopt Bing Chat for more searches in the future. If you were holding out using Bing Chat because of the required Edge browser support, now you can try it on Chrome. The post Bing Chat now works on Chrome, Google’s browser appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/Dg90WGT SEO is not just about keywords and content. It ensures search engines can effectively access, crawl, and interpret a website. This is where technical SEO comes into play. As I highlight in my article “Unleashing enterprise SEO superpowers: The 4 pillars for SEO success,” mitigation and error management in technical SEO are crucial for a flawless online experience. Companies can save time and money by equipping enterprise engineers with the knowledge of common technical SEO issues, streamlining the SEO process, and improving organic search performance. Why engineers need to understand technical SEOHere are some reasons why organizations must keep their engineers technical SEO-savvy engineers. Cost-effective and time-savingBy identifying and addressing technical issues during the development phase, engineers can prevent costly mistakes that require rework. Improved website performanceSites optimized from a technical standpoint offer better user experiences, which can result in higher engagement and conversion rates. Evolution of SEOAs the SEO landscape changes, having engineers who are up to date with the latest trends and ensures a proactive approach to website development. Recent developments in SEOTechnical SEO holds significant importance, as Google’s John Mueller tweeted July 24.
Moreover, Google’s announcement about the reduction in visibility of FAQ rich results and the limitation of HowTo results to desktop devices indicates the dynamic nature of SEO. These changes underscore the need for technical vigilance, as even minor technical issues can significantly impact visibility in organic search results. Technical issues to monitorSoft 404sA soft 404 error occurs when a non-existent page displays a “page not found” message but doesn’t return a 404 status code. These errors can:
To address soft 404s:
JavaScript SEOJavaScript plays a crucial role in modern web development. However, JavaScript comes with SEO challenges, including:
Implementing server-side rendering, code minification, and lazy loading can optimize load times and improve user experience and SEO performance. Dig deeper: What to look for in a technical SEO audit Empowering engineers with SEO knowledgeEngineers are at the forefront of website development, and their understanding of technical SEO can be transformative for an enterprise. Companies can ensure optimal website performance by integrating SEO best practices into development. The ever-evolving nature of SEO, as evidenced by Google's recent announcements, underscores the need for continuous learning and adaptation. With this knowledge, engineers can proactively address issues, ensuring that websites are user-friendly and search-engine-friendly. Technical SEO, often overshadowed by its on-page counterpart, is a cornerstone of organic search performance. By empowering engineers with the tools and knowledge they need to tackle these challenges head-on, enterprises can enhance website performance, user experience, and their bottom line. As the SEO landscape shifts, a proactive approach to technical challenges will be the key to staying ahead. The post Mitigating technical SEO issues by empowering engineers appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/IYDjFOC TikTok’s Smart Performance Campaign (SPC) is a fully automated solution that lets advertisers target their audience automatically using the platform’s machine learning-based system. On TikTok, ad content matters more than targeting. TikTok’s algorithm is incredibly powerful in matching content to user activity for organic and paid content. If your content isn’t adapted to the platform, precise targeting in an ad set won’t achieve the desired results. Why should you try TikTok’s Smart Performance Campaigns?With this campaign, you have more time to focus on creating the ad content – optimizing the time spent creating one or more ad sets. SPC reduces campaign creation time by 26%, according to TikTok. The campaign is available for website conversions or app-install campaigns, focusing entirely on the conversion objective. Tips for setting up a TikTok Smart Performance CampaignStart with installing TikTok pixel on your website for proper tracking. This will help the platform’s algorithms move from quantity to quality. Implementing just the Complete Payment or Complete Registration event is not enough. The more events you implement correctly, the greater the chances the Smart Performance Campaign will bring you more valuable results. When it comes to audience targeting, you don’t have many options aside from Location and Preferred Language. However, you can only exclude audiences when you click Advanced Settings. Many advertisers prefer to target broad audiences. We decided to do the opposite and excluded buyers from the last 30 days in one campaign. After doing so, its conversion rate increased by over 1.4%. Selecting the creative is a crucial element of your SPC. You can add up to 30 TikTok ads. Test the format, which can be a Spark Ad or a Video Ad. From our tests, Spark Ads perform over 72% better than regularly uploaded videos, and they also help boost the client’s organic TikTok account. The Call-to-Action tab is set to dynamic by default. TikTok even suggests keeping this setting to maximize campaign performance. But for many businesses, some calls to action may be completely irrelevant, so you should eliminate those unsuitable for your client. The last important setting is choosing the destination, either a website URL or a TikTok Instant Page, where you can create a more creative design for your client's product. Once you’re done setting up your SPC, make sure it collects enough data – after 3-4 weeks, you can start drawing conclusions. From the Campaigns tab, select your Smart Performance Campaign, and then click on View Data. There, you will find useful advertising data, such as key metrics (conversions, cost/conversions, conversion rate, and more). While you can't exclude certain age segments in SPC, TikTok will push your ads toward the most suitable users in each segment. In the case study below, you’ll see that results were similar in terms of CPA for more age segments, although the volume was different. How to optimize your TikTok Smart Performance CampaignWhile there are fewer levers to pull, you still have the option to:
Never leave just one video in your Smart Performance Campaign. The more content you have, the longer you can extend its lifespan. You can include up to 30 videos in one SPC, but pay attention to the budget. If you’re running on a limited budget, you may want to reduce the number of creatives to allow your videos to gather enough data. While SPC performed better than regular campaigns in 80% of the accounts we tested, that doesn’t mean you should give up on standard campaigns. SPC also provides good insights that you can use in standard campaigns for more testing. The Audience tab provides enough data for you to create a buyer persona to target in other types of campaigns. You might want to keep your eyes on the View Data tab because you can optimize based on search keywords. TikTok search ads are now available, and the SPC is the first type of campaign to share insights about keywords used by your audience to interact with your brand. Even though this is not yet available for all TikTok Ads accounts, you will soon have the option to add irrelevant keywords as negative keywords. Build your historical conversion data to make the most of TikTok Smart Performance CampaignsAccounts without a significant conversion tracking history may find it hard to see results with SPC. TikTok's algorithms are powerful but need time to understand audiences who converted, what content they consume, and so on. SPC yielded good results on accounts with a history of at least 100-200 conversions in the last 30 days before campaign creation. So don’t rush! Grow your account with regular conversion campaigns, then test the Smart Performance Campaign. The post TikTok Smart Performance Campaigns: What you should know appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/uvMKmi9 |
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