Within Google Ads, every keyword is subject to Google’s Quality Score metric, which impacts your cost and your ad’s ability to display. Enhance your performance and optimize your cost with these simple steps to improve your ads’ Quality Score. Download this guidebook from Titan Growth to learn:
Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Top Tips for Improving Quality Score.“ The post Top tips to improve your Google Quality Score appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/330DUoL
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Yelp redesigned the Yelp for Business UI and functionality in May. This week, it’s out with more updates aimed at giving advertisers more control over and insights into their campaigns. Bringing ads and profile management together. The biggest change is the integration of the Ads Dashboard into Yelp for Business. Previously the Ads Dashboard and Yelp for Business were two separate tools. Yelp for Business is Yelp’s equivalent of Google My Business. The integration of ads into profile management gives marketers on Yelp more visibility and control over their presence on the platform. The move is not unlike Facebook’s recent launch of Facebook Business Suite, which brings together ads, content and analytics for both Facebook and Instagram in a single dashboard. The new Yelp Ads Dashboard In addition to the integration of Ads Dashboard into Yelp for Business, the company also announced a number of new features and capabilities for ads:
Advertisers who choose to stop ad campaigns can now restart them with a single click. Yelp will save the previous campaign goals and budget settings. If or when advertisers what to resume, they can do so with one click rather than having to create a new campaign from scratch. Yelp pointed out that a test earlier this showed that “by making this a simple, one click process for businesses, they were 14% more likely to restart their campaign.” That convenience is also good for Yelp’s own business. Local ad reach heatmap In the announcement, Yelp also teased some forthcoming features that help businesses visualize ad targeting and performance.
Why we care. Yelp remains an important site for its consumer influence, its ranking in search and its network, though it may be impacted by Apple’s new native reviews. Indeed, it’s under pressure on multiple fronts, especially when it comes to competition for ad spend. And many of Yelp’s reliable advertisers (i.e., restaurants) are suffering during COVID-19. The company said recently that 60% of them on the site are “permanently closed.” In the midst of limited budgets and intensifying competition, Yelp must continuously innovate and simplify in order to attract and retain advertisers and organic business users. Accordingly, Yelp has been adding new free and paid promotional tools on a regular basis to stay one step ahead of Google My Business. The inclusion of the Yelp Ads Dashboard into Yelp for Business makes sense from a business UX/UI perspective. It’s also a way to quickly expose many more small businesses to Yelp’s advertising capabilities. The post Yelp brings Ads Dashboard into Yelp for Business, debuts new ads features appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/33505KN When COVID-19 hit the world’s economy, businesses attempted to acclimate to the new normal as best they could. And with shutdowns common across nations and industries, the only way for many to still conduct business was through a shift to remote work. This shift has allowed many to keep their […] The post Keeping Your Company Data Secure as Reliance on Technology Grows appeared first on Lawrence Tam. via Lawrence Tam https://ift.tt/3638CiW If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s this: as businesses embrace a digital-first world, they also need to adapt to the feedback economy. We’ve always known that customer feedback influences whether people choose to do business with you. According to a consumer survey conducted by Fan & Fuel, 97% of participants said customer reviews factor into their buying decisions, and 92% of consumers hesitate to make a purchase when there are no customer reviews. But something else is going on. Consumers are making decisions based on how they perceive a business in Google search results. Consider, for example:
This reality rang true in 2020, as Google attempted to respond to the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused massive disruptions in service beyond the control of businesses — including automotive dealers, restaurants, and retailers with GMB listings. Google knew that in most cases businesses lacked the tools to properly update their listings with information on temporary hours, temporary closures, and the addition of workaround services such as curbside pickup (which would become permanent services). Google responded by quickly offering new features to help businesses properly manage their listings. And during a transition period, Google suspended customer reviews to protect businesses from being criticized for problems beyond their control. Google knew negative customer feedback could do more than hurt ratings/reviews on GMB. The feedback could cause serious damage to a business. Rethinking the role of reviews and ratings in customer experienceGoing forward, businesses need to think of the relationship between marketing (including SEO) and customer experience differently. They need to think in terms of reputation experience management. With reputation experience management, businesses think of customer feedback in three crucial, interconnected ways that influence their entire operations:
Marketing and customer experience alignmentHere’s something else many business are overlooking: when you use both customer ratings/reviews and unstructured feedback to get better, you:
But you cannot wave a magic wand to get the benefits from this virtuous cycle. Businesses need to:
Reputation experience management recognizes that the customer experience is intertwined with all phases of the marketing funnel. And customer feedback is the common thread. The post The rise of reputation experience management appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/363sGlm Google is opening up Local Services Ads (LSAs) to auction-based pricing. This comes after a successful test in a subset of professional services categories. Google will notify the eligible advertisers. A selection of advertisers across the expanding list of LSA categories will now have access to bidding in a new beta test. They will be notified by Google if they are eligible to participate. Assuming this larger beta test also delivers positive results (for advertisers and Google), we can probably expect bidding to become generally available sometime next year. The selected advertisers don’t have to participate; they can continue using fixed pricing if desired. LSAs launched in 2015 with fixed cost per lead pricing — for simplicity. Prices were set by Google and varied by industry vertical and geography. Leads can be delivered in the form of calls, appointment bookings or messages, depending on what the advertiser wants to receive. According to a Google spokesperson, “After seeing success with auction based pricing within our professional services vertical for Local Services Ads, we are excited to bring auction-based pricing as a beta to select markets for local services advertisers. We believe this model will help bring more customers to this trusted group of advertisers.” Google LSAs: “Electrician San Francisco” The ‘Trust Pack.’ In order to participate, advertisers must be certified as “Google Guaranteed” or “Google Screened.” Both programs involve licensing, insurance and background checks. One of the major benefits of LSAs is that they appear at the very top of search results, above traditional ads and above the Map Pack. They prominently feature reviews and the trust signal of Google Guaranteed or Google Screened. (Justin Sanger recently dubbed the ads the “Local Trust Pack.”) While Google hasn’t released any LSA data, anecdotal evidence suggests these ads are performing well. Google offered several advertiser testimonials about success with LSAs. Realtor Cleve Gaddis said, “Local Services Ads has produced leads which convert at a much higher rate than most of our other sources, generating a 10X return on investment within the first 6 months of use. I highly recommend using Local Service Ads, it’s helped us stand out against our competition and the leads we’re getting convert at a rate up to four times higher than our typical lead sources.” Under the new auction-based pricing advertisers can only set one bid regardless of lead type. In other words, they must bid the same amount for a call, message or booking. If they operate in multiple verticals – as some in the home services industry do – they can bid separately by vertical (e.g., roofer vs. general contractor). Why we care. This move could have been foreseen. As LSAs become more competitive, there’s demand for a way to stand out. Indeed, some categories have numerous Google Guaranteed advertisers, but only three ads can appear on the page; the remainder are available on a list one page down. Google says that bidding gives advertisers more control and allows those that want to pay more for leads the ability to do so. But as more local advertisers enter the program and competition intensifies it also means more revenue for Google. Recently, Google started making the Google Guaranteed badge available to non-advertisers as part of an upgraded profile for $50 per month. Currently the Google Screened certification is only available for service providers that advertise using LSAs. The post Google brings bidding to Local Services Ads appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/33TMuFb Bing is now using natural language generation models (models that generate text) to improve its autosuggest and People Also Ask (PAA) features, the company announced Wednesday. It is also expanding the use of natural language representation models to extend its question answering and semantic highlighting features globally. Real-time phrase suggestions. Bing’s automatically generated search suggestions now make use of Microsoft Turing Natural Language Generation (T-NLG) Next Phase Prediction to present full phrase suggestions in real-time. This expands the scope of autosuggestions, which may also improve the user experience. In the example above, Bing suggests an entire word to complete the user’s query. As part of Microsoft’s AI at Scale initiative, the company has been building deep learning models that enable Bing to suggest queries on the fly. Previously, autosuggestions were constrained to information from previous queries asked by users and confined to the current word being typed. Generating question-answer pairs for PAA. Bing is also using a generative model to identify question-answer pairs within documents. When those documents appear on the search results, it then uses the generated question-answer pairs to bolster the PAA box (in addition to data from similar questions that have previously been asked by users), as seen below. Other features rollout globally thanks to AI language models. Using its Turing Universal Language Representation (T-ULR) model, Bing has also expanded its intelligent answers to over 100 languages. Semantic highlighting, which presents relevant information from meta descriptions in search listings in bold text, can now identify and highlight answers in all languages as well. This feature was previously highly dependent on matching keywords within a search query, which was an issue when the query was presented in the form of a question. Why we care. The improved PAA box and autosuggest features are two more examples of AI being applied to natural language processing and understanding on the search results page. As models are developed and improved, search engines will be able to better understand content and how it relates to a user’s query, and those improvements will be present within both the search listings as well as the features that populate the search results page. RELATED:
The post Bing applies AI and natural language models to autosuggest, People Also Ask appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3cvPStU There are a number of common phrases that speak to the power of “small” things. “Good things come in small packages” or “small but mighty” are just a couple that come to mind. But small content – in length, but especially in size on a handheld screen – holds enormous significance for brand storytelling and consumer engagement. Marketers and their creative counterparts are committed to writing attention-grabbing copy, developing video content to stop a social-media user mid-scroll, and designing visuals that make websites an engaging place to spend time on screen. And the idea of content optimization is something marketers intrinsically “get.” Writing SEO-friendly copy, link building to optimize a campaign, creating different versions and sizes of content for “web vs. mobile” – these are all things a marketer thinks through during the stages of content creation and distribution. But there are a few not-so-small dynamics that marketers must pay attention to in order to holistically optimize their digital content. The first is the opportunity to capitalize on “micro” moments of engagement with 10-20 second video clips. The second is a two-part trend, really: the value of microbrowser content and the resulting “dark social” space, or the social shares that contain no referral information about the source, that is often forgotten in campaign planning. Micro-video clips engage users short on time and attentionAs Forrester’s Dr. James McQuivey famously claimed more than a decade ago, one minute of video is the equivalent of 1.8 million words. Whether or not you agree with the math he used to arrive at that particular number, there’s no debating just how efficient a short video can be when it comes to educating an audience. In cutting a video down to the most important or compelling 10 to 20 seconds of content, marketers can quickly grab attention and drive viewers to take the desired action, whether it be an email capture, social media follow, a share, or a sale. These micro-videos are so effective because they have a unique ability to delight and entertain in a condensed time frame. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with game highlights. Sports fans thrive on video content, wanting to relive important moments again and again, or catch up on the action they missed on demand. As a digital destination for sports fans, Bleacher Report even delivers those micro-video highlights while games are still in progress. In order to rapidly generate and publish the clips, Bleacher Report acquired the technology needed to automatically transcode videos into a streamable format, adjusting their quality and resolution and delivering them through a fast, reliable content delivery network. By focusing on streamlining the creation of these micro-video moments, Bleacher Report saw an immediate (and impressive) increase in video views of 350%, and each month has seen an increase in total video views by 25%. How to deliver the micro-video moments consumers craveMicro-videos convert, but they’re also difficult to execute across all available sales and engagement channels. Depending on the platform, there’s a headline or accompanying description to write. The video content needs to adjust for both portrait and landscape, responsively expanding to fill the width of the screen while maintaining the right aspect ratio. The alternative is static sizing, which can easily break page layouts, distort the image, or display black bars on either side of the video clip, limiting the “wow” factor of great content. Remember, you just have a few seconds to get the visual experience right, or someone may scroll past or bounce off a webpage. With micro-video, small adjustments make a big impact. There are two ways to ensure micro-video experiences are the marketing “gold” they hold the potential to be:
Optimizing for the “small but mighty” microbrowserNow taking a wider-angle view of content, not just video, it’s important to understand the growing trend of peer referrals shared via microbrowsers. If the term is unfamiliar to you, think of a URL shared via text message, or links sent back-and-forth on platforms like Facebook Messenger, Slack or WhatsApp. The Cloudinary State of Visual Media 2020 Report found that 62% of people in the U.S. share links via iMessage, generating microbrowser previews that marketers often don’t account for. iMessage, for example, is designed to surface data to deliver an optimal microbrowser view, but not all microbrowsers do the same. You’ve likely noticed when a link on one of these microbrowsers doesn’t generate any sort of helpful context, lacking a relevant thumbnail preview – whether image or video – that is auto-generated from the URL. While tiny in size, these microbrowser previews pack a powerful punch when it comes to user engagement. But the sad truth is, many companies and brands fail to consider how their website and content design might be impacting the preview that’s generated. With early-on alignment with front-end developers, marketers can be sure they’ve properly accounted for compelling imagery, video or text information that will load in a microbrowser. Optimizing microbrowser previews increases the likelihood that peer-to-peer recommendations convert to the desired outcome. Not planning for microbrowser activity ahead of time puts an unfortunate limit on the impact of an otherwise compelling marketing effort. For this reason, marketing and dev teams should be working together to be sure the visual experience is consistent across all chat and messaging apps. A cheat sheet for fixing microbrowser issues and getting macro ROICloudinary’s State of Visual Media report found that more than one-third (36%) of links shared within microbrowsers don’t have their campaign IDs intact. If the link is copied and pasted by a user from a campaign, that original campaign is credited with the referral. Not understanding the big picture is a huge missed opportunity – the “dark social” space that hides meaningful campaign insights. Understanding indirect microbrowser traffic and its relationship to social media can help correlate where conversions are really coming from, and whether you ought to boost or reduce spend accordingly to see a better ROI. Hiding out of sight, or at least with the wrong attribution, a percentage of direct traffic flows from microbrowsers to your website and the reporting analytics lead you to think that lead is coming through Facebook. In reality, that site visit is a result of a peer referral and knowing that precisely will help marketing teams plan better. Link “unfurling” is another technical aspect of microbrowser referrals. Unfurled links are the previews of web pages inside of the private message, and they create, as previously discussed, a brand’s first impression. The person who shared the link with a friend or family member has already qualified the lead, so marketers must not let that opportunity fall flat because of a missing, misleading or unengaging preview. Marketers should stay in communication with developers to be sure content is created and optimized to unfurl properly. A couple of best practices include:
Many of us have been told in life, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” But in marketing, it really pays off when you do. In an increasingly digital world, with more time spent on screens and more competition for those eyeballs, paying attention to the “small” details of micro-video and microbrowsers is an opportunity that can’t be overlooked. The post Making the most of small-screen content for big engagement impact appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2G8ugY5 Well my friend, here again, I find myself not knowing what to write to you about so I’ll just start… Yesterday, we hung out by the ocean most of the day. I took my daughters and we swam wayyyyyy out to the orange buoys separating the safe swimming area from the boats. Angelina thought it was pretty hilarious to say “I touched the butt”… Those of you who’ve seen Finding Nemo will understand. Ah, the message just came to me…
When we were sitting on the rope going between the orange buoys, I thought I’d take a minute for a quick “lessons with Daddy” moment. “Lina, you were pretty scared to swim all the way out here weren’t you?” She nodded with a smile. “How do you feel now?” I asked. “I’m not scared at all now,” she replied. “Are you happy you did it?” “YES!” she beamed. “Girls, many things in life are going to be like this… You’ll feel scared at first, but when you actually do the thing you’re scared of, you’ll wonder why you were ever scared in the first place. “Do you know what it’s called when you have fear but you do it anyway” I asked. “Courage” they said in unison. (We’ve had a few of these Lessons With Daddy moments) “That’s right,” I said with a smile. I continued, “Girls, the people who succeed in life don’t succeed because they’re any more naturally talented or smarter than others. It’s that they simply had the courage to try when most people were too afraid.” “Daddy do you think there are any turtles out here?” Zara asked – and suddenly the lesson was over. I don’t know if they’ll remember our little lesson or not, but on the swim back I thought about the truth of what I said. Growing up, I was a below average student, below average in popularity, and was definitely not the kid anyone would vote as most likely to succeed. But because of a burning desire, I had the courage to just keep going in business until I won. I’ve seen so many people through the years with way more talent than me. But today live average lives punching the time clock because they refused to have the courage to continue trying after failure struck. I failed so many times I can’t even count. It was incredibly frustrating. I felt defeated and down on myself. There were times when I lost hope and wanted to quit. If you’ve felt any of that… and you’d like a guide to help you through the struggles, pick up my book over at www.7StrategiesBook.com and you’ll not only learn how to harness a burning desire that will lead you through the struggles, you’ll learn how to develop a specific action plan for achieving 7 figures. You’ll also learn the mental frameworks and leadership laws that will make you unstoppable in network marketing. Okay off to breakfast… Lots of Love, Matt Morris You may also READ our previous blog post about “Why You Should be Bigger than Your Challenges?” Want Some Advanced Training on Leadership?Feel free to hop over to LeadwithMatt.com. I’ve got some strategies there on becoming a powerful leader and recruiting powerful leaders. Learn How To Overcome Every Major Objection in Network Marketing:Go to https://www.overcometheobjection.com/register-now for the FREE overcoming objections training. Go Make Life An AdventureBe sure to check out my Facebook and Instagram account for daily motivational and inspirational content. The post Why Winners Win and Succeed in Life appeared first on Matt Morris. via Matt Morris https://ift.tt/3i0pdq5 The post 20200923 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2FL0o4x Video: Barry Schwartz and Googles Martin Splitt discuss strained relations with the search community9/23/2020 The SEO industry is vibrant in large part because of the personalities in the community and their constant desire to learn more about how search engines work. On the latest edition of his vlog, Search Engine Land News Editor Barry Schwartz sits down with one of the Google employees responsible for communicating with search professionals, Developer Advocate Martin Splitt, to discuss (and joke around about) why some SEOs are at odds with Google. Martin shares how he came to work for Google and why the company recruited him despite already employing other webmaster trends analysts like John Mueller. The two also discussed the malicious intent that SEOs project onto Google and its employees, common misconceptions, why the response to questions is so often “it depends,” and the SEO rumors that Splitt wishes were true. That same day, Google recorded an episode of SEO Mythbusting, in which Martin and Barry expanded on their talk about the often strenuous relationship between the search community and Google. In the episode, Martin responds to the criticism that featured snippets defeat the purpose of creating content, saying that they have the potential to deliver higher quality traffic. The two also examine how Google’s attempts at transparency with SEOs have become a lose-lose proposition, the company’s focus on building an internet for the “next billion users,” as well as why Splitt doesn’t think it benefits him to know more about ranking. If you’re a search professional interested in appearing on Barry’s vlog, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable; he’s currently looking to do socially distant, outside interviews in the NY/NJ tri-state area. You can also subscribe to his YouTube channel by clicking here. The post Video: Barry Schwartz and Google’s Martin Splitt discuss strained relations with the search community appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3cr7SWb |
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