Most SEOs know the difference between short-tail and long-tail searches. In local SEO, we take it further by giving these search term types another name: implicit and explicit searches. Applying this concept to your local search strategy can help improve your local rankings and drive leads from Google Maps with arguably less effort. Here’s how knowing the difference can help you get better results in local search. Implicit vs. explicit search in local SEO: How do they differ?An explicit search is a search where the user adds a location in their search phrase, such as “car accident lawyer Philadelphia.” While an implicit search is when the user does not add a location modifier to their search phrase, such as “car accident lawyer.” Simply put:
Google can show radically different search results depending on the location modifier a user adds to their search and the user’s physical location at the time of the search. Generally, this difference is less prevalent in organic SERPs. In Google Maps search results, however, the difference between an explicit vs. implicit search is more stark and an element every local SEO must pay attention to. Why do implicit and explicit searches matter?One search type is much easier to rank and optimize for than the other. This is due to how Google treats local search results based on their local ranking factors. Google continually aims to deliver the best search results by considering a combination of these key factors:
Relevance and prominence are factors we can more or less influence with marketing efforts. Distance is a fixed factor that we cannot change unless we physically move the address of the business – something most businesses are less than willing to do. While relevance and prominence are important, proximity to the searcher is the top local search ranking factor, beginning with the 2016 Possum update. As such, ranking for implicit keywords across a large service area or in a competitive city is virtually impossible. This changes when a user adds a location modifier to their search, as Google will not use a user’s location as the center radius for the particular search. Instead, Google will use the center point of the location added to the search as the center of the search radius. This makes the proximity/distance factor less influential and allows you to strategically go after various keywords. See the examples below of a search for “auto insurance agency” vs. “auto insurance agency new york.” (My location extension is set to ZIP code 10007 for both searches.) The results differ significantly. Figuring out which keywords you can dominate by using this key metricNow that we know Google ranks businesses differently based on where the search is done and whether location modifiers are used, let’s dig into how you can effectively strategize your local SEO with this information. I use Share of Local Voice (SoLV), a metric for determining “how frequently your listing shows up in the Map Pack per a given scan radius. The greater the SoLV, the greater your local search visibility,” according to Local Falcon’s website. With SoLV, you can effectively determine how well your business dominates the market for your target keywords. You can also do this for your competition to see how well they dominate the market for your target keywords. This is an invaluable metric that can show you what is actually possible when it comes to opportunities for local ranking and traffic improvements for all your keywords in your given market. When Share of Local Voice saved the dayI once had a locksmith client who was obsessed with ranking for the term “locksmith” because it has 10x the search volume of the explicit versions of the keyword, like “locksmith near me” or “locksmith [city]”. The U.S.-based client was located in the middle of a major metropolitan area, surrounded by tons of competitors, in an already competitive industry. Talk about a trifecta. Though the client was technically correct about the search volume, as a seasoned SEO, I knew there was no way we would dominate map rankings in their city for “locksmith” with just one GBP listing, no matter how hard we tried. He was far from convinced and insisted we not ”waste time” with low search volume keywords when his listing was barely ranking for “locksmith” across his service area. This caused us to investigate how many opportunities there actually was for their listing to improve for “locksmith”. We looked at their biggest competitors in the market and found that none of them could dominate the market for “locksmith” with one GBP listing. Below is the SoLV for “locksmith” for our client vs. their top competitor. The screenshots show limited room for growth as the top competitor has one more green pin than him. In reality, that’s not enough of a growth opportunity. To double down on unrealistic expectations, the client was also insistent we increase leads by 20%, a lofty goal we could never hope to achieve if we just went after “locksmith.” Thus, we pivoted to optimizing their GBP and website for less competitive keywords like “locksmith [city]” and “emergency locksmith.” We did this largely through:
From this long-tail strategy, we saw major success. Not only did their rankings for the explicit versions of his head keyword go up, but so did the number of calls they got from their listing. Putting all this into practiceShare of Local Voice is an invaluable metric that can help estimate the true possibilities for improvement for any local keyword. I’ve encountered many clients who are not local SEO-savvy, and by showing them the maximum SoLV, we are better aligned with the potential impact of local SEO efforts. Relationships are immensely better when you set data-backed expectations from the start. Instead of constantly chasing an unachievable unicorn, shifting to an explicit, long-tail keyword strategy can truly impact their bottom line. Education is key here. Our job as SEOs is to educate and guide our clients, as their time should be spent running a business, and they can't possibly know all of the ins and outs of our ever-changing industry. So instead of throwing mud at the wall and hoping it sticks, take a look at what explicit keywords you can be targeting for your listings and work towards optimizing for those. The best part? Optimizing for explicit long tail keywords does not conflict with optimizing for implicit head terms. Optimizing content is not a zero-sum game. By focusing on increasing visibility for the keyword we knew we could improve, we could make improvements to all the most important keywords and, most importantly, leads. The post Understanding explicit vs. implicit searches: The key to dominating local SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/vJeplSt
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In any PPC campaign, the ultimate goal is to improve and deliver better results year after year. Ideally, trendlines in your performance charts are going up and to the right. Yet, despite the best of intentions, an account can hit the skids. Results tank and you might not be exactly sure why. I’ve seen this happen too many times:
In this article, you’ll learn some steps to address PPC mistakes, missteps and errors that have helped my team get things back on track. What to do when your PPC campaigns perform poorlyWhen your account starts performing poorly, you need to take swift action. There are two main factors at play here: internal and external. Internal issues are essentially problems we create ourselves – mistakes that could have been avoided with different choices or actions. On the other hand, external issues are events or changes beyond our control, like the emergence of new competitors, economic conditions or search engine updates. When things go south unexpectedly, our first step is to investigate internal factors because these are within our control and can often be fixed. Dig deeper: PPC management checklist: Daily, weekly and monthly reviews Internal PPC checkpointsChange history report in Google Ads or Bing Ads This tool is invaluable in these situations. The change history report contains the footprints and fingerprints you need to solve the crime of poor performance. This is the place to start understanding if someone tripped a wire that can quickly be fixed. Some questions to look for and ask yourself:
Development changes Different teams may not have a clear understanding of each other’s actions. For instance, your development team might implement changes without fully grasping the overall impact. To address this, it’s crucial to establish an early checkpoint with other teams and thoroughly review their release notes. This ensures everyone is on the same page and understands the changes being made. Some of the things to look for and ask about:
Dig deeper: 3 ways to stay on top of PPC performance External checkpointsCompetitors Did a new competitor come out of the blue and start spending aggressively? You can use the auction insights report in Google Ads to monitor this. You should be doing some regular competitive monitoring, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes other brands just do something that is out of the normal, and it impacts your results. Seasonality or promotions This seems obvious, but sometimes the simplest reason is the answer.
Many of these things are pretty knowable (Prime Day, Labor Day, Back-to-School), but too often, we don’t appreciate these events’ influence on our business. Analyzing historical data can help you identify such trends. For instance, we had a business heavily tied to the holiday season, where we significantly increased ad spend for a specific day. It was intentional, but we failed to notify Google Ads about this expected surge. This lack of communication led the platform to suspect fraud, shutting our account and causing substantial losses. This situation is similar to calling your credit card company when traveling abroad. While it may seem unnecessary, it’s a precaution that can prevent potential issues. In our case, it could have saved us from the account shutdown and the associated revenue loss. External events Have unexpected events like wars, natural disasters, or interest rate hikes affected your account? You might think these events are irrelevant to you, but they can substantially impact PPC performance. For example, we experienced a 40% decrease in CPCs for one client, which was closely linked to inflation and CPI numbers. While this worked in our favor, it caught us off guard, and explaining it using other data points was challenging. In another case, one client saw a 15% drop in conversion rates year over year due to factors related to the war in Ukraine. Although it’s not a positive development for the business, it underscores how geopolitical events can profoundly influence the economy and consumer behavior. Dig deeper: How to keep up with macro trends that impact PPC performance Tips for tackling PPC performance issues proactivelyTo prevent problems and make it easier to spot issues, consider these three tips: Report annotations for key changesCreate a process to add annotations to your reports when significant changes are made to your website. Often, issues may not be immediately apparent and could take days or weeks to surface. Annotations serve as breadcrumbs to help you trace your steps and identify the cause of problems over time. Quality assurance (QA) processImplement a QA process, which can involve using a buddy system to review changes before they go live. While it may not always be necessary, the principle of "measure twice, cut once" applies here. Taking extra care to review changes can prevent errors from occurring. Strong password security and avoiding shared accountsEnsure strong password practices and avoid shared accounts. Shared accounts can make it challenging to pinpoint who made specific changes. Strong password security, including two-factor authentication, is crucial to prevent unauthorized access to your account. Bouncing back from PPC setbacksWhile nobody wants their account to experience a decline, it's a situation most PPC marketers will have encountered at some point. This article provides a roadmap to swiftly identify issues and steer your campaign toward profitability and growth. The post What to do when performance tanks in PPC appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/Q2qdZbc Google releases broad changes to their ranking algorithms several times a year, which can cause major shifts in websites’ search visibility and traffic. When updates roll out, it’s important to keep stakeholders and business partners informed on the update, timing, and potential impacts so that you can highlight your team’s work. As an SEO, your role extends beyond optimizing for search engines. You’re also the bridge between the content and technical teams that rely on your expertise. By being a proactive communicator, you demonstrate leadership of the SEO team and shape perceptions of your team and its work. Here’s how to use Google updates as another opportunity to drive product- or marketing-focused strategy within your organization. Communication across teams is critical to SEO successSuccess in SEO depends on partnerships with teams across the organization. If you aren’t constantly communicating, you’re missing out on opportunities to influence content and product strategy that can impact the SEO team’s goals. Great communication is a soft skill that’s important to master as you level up from an individual contributor to a leadership role. At the director, head-of, and VP levels, the soft skills of communication and strategic thinking become more important because that’s how you’ll win budget and resources to implement your SEO strategy. Communication skills are essential for anyone looking to level up their SEO career, as highlighted by:
Control the narrative on the SEO team’s expertise and attentivenessImagine that Google has just announced a core update, and you see that it will take a couple of weeks to finish the rollout. You won’t have any data for a week or more, so there’s nothing to report. You’re OK to wait until you have something definitive to report, right? Wrong! The best time to communicate about a core update is when Google has made the announcement. Communicating that there is an update (even when there’s nothing to report yet) and offering some background information will let you demonstrate the work the SEO team has been releasing. Think about it from the leadership point of view: If you aren’t communicating, leadership doesn’t know what’s going on or what’s in your head. Is no news good news? Or does it mean you’re hiding, hoping not to get called out? What happens if another team or outside agency starts talking about Google updates and is now leading the conversation and forcing you to respond? You’ve lost the ability to lead the narrative and are now reacting to someone else’s agenda. Don’t leave the perceptions to chance. Do everything you can to be proactive and take control of the conversation. You are the expert, and knowing how to communicate during a period of uncertainty is a critical skill when dealing with executives. So, what do you communicate about core updates?When informing your management or stakeholders about core updates (or any other broad change like the reviews or helpful content updates), lay out the overall timing and goals of these updates and any historical context. Google releases core updates several times a year. When laying out the context around updates, refer to the timeline of updates and their various themes. Even better: tie recent SEO work to those themes or responses to past updates Use the announcement of the core update to lead the conversation on the SEO team’s roadmap, work in progress, and expectations around the update. When Google announces the updateSend out an email to stakeholders and your leadership and include:
Sometimes you’ll already have early movements to report, but this is usually an awareness email. What this does is reinforce that your team is on top of their responsibility to About midway through the update (or when you see the first results)Send a follow-up. This communication can reinforce your work, keep teams updated on your status, and enable you to start new conversations around performance.
When the core update is completeGoogle will announce this via Google Search Central and the Google Developers site. At this point, you get to send a recap email that reinforces your prior two emails and ads in any final results you see. Ensure to also include that Google often fine-tunes results after an update, so you expect to see additional volatility over the next 1-2 weeks. In this email:
Expect these emails to be forwarded to other leaders watching traffic and revenue metrics. Send a copy to your key partners so they know how you communicate the team efforts related to SEO and traffic growth. After you’ve sent out these updates, take time to schedule meetings with key individuals on both impacts and opportunities. I’ve used these meetings both as ways to highlight successful feature releases and as a way to get backlogged projects prioritized. (Once, I was able to dust off a project idea that was over a year old. Timing is everything!) Take control of the SEO narrativeWhen leading SEO in an organization, focusing time on the soft skills of effective communication is a cornerstone to long-term success. SEO managers are responsible for ensuring this knowledge is relayed strategically to stakeholders and teams across the organization. Taking the initiative to communicate during times of uncertainty affords you the opportunity to highlight the great work your teams are doing. It can unlock additional resources to take your teams to new heights. Because updates are a recurring fact of life, now is a great time to craft your communication plan and have those templates ready to go when the next core update is announced. Dig deeper: Google says you can recover from core updates without a new core update The post How to communicate Google core updates to executives appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/YWKlgmQ Google has confirmed that the September 2023 helpful content update is now finished rolling out. The update took 14 days to roll out, starting on September 14, 2023 and ending on September 28, 2022. Google has posted it completed today, September 28. Google wrote, “The rollout was complete as of September 28, 2023.” What we saw. We will do our deep dive on this update in the coming days, after we process the data given to us from the data providers. Do keep in mind the data providers saw unprecedented low volatility over the past couple of weeks, especially for a Google update. This is while the SEO community has seen significant changes to their client and their own rankings since this update started to roll out. Stay tuned for our story on the impact of this update. What’s new. As we covered in our what’s new with the helpful content update story, we documented these changes to Google’s own help documentation.
More on the helpful content update. Google’s helpful content system specifically targets “content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.” This algorithm update aims to help searchers find “high-quality content,” Google told us. Google wants to reward better and more useful content that was written for humans and to help users. Searchers get frustrated when they land on unhelpful webpages that rank well in search because they were written for the purpose of ranking in search engines. This is the type of content you might call “search engine-first content” or “SEO content.” Google’s helpful content algorithm aims to downgrade those types of websites while promoting more helpful websites, designed for humans, above search engines. Google said this is an “ongoing effort to reduce low-quality content and make it easier to find content that feels authentic and useful in search.” What to do if you are hit. Google has provided a list of questions you can ask yourself about your content. Read through those questions as we posted over here, and in an unbiased manner, ask yourself if your content is in sync with this update. Please note if this update has hit you, it can take several months to recover if you do everything right and make changes to your content over time. The post Google September 2023 helpful content is now done rolling out appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/nDwlaRc Meta AI, announced today, is a new conversational assistant “you can interact with like a person,” according to the company. Microsoft Bing is working with Meta to “integrate Bing into Meta AI’s chat experiences enabling more timely and up-to-date answers with access to real-time search information,” according to Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, in a company blog post. This includes bringing Bing to Meta AI and Meta’s 28 other new AI characters in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. What Microsoft is saying. If a request requires fresh information, Meta AI will automatically ask Bing to get the chat answer, according to Jordi Ribas, Microsoft CVP, head of engineering and product for Bing.
Why we care. Search continues to expand and is now essentially everything, everywhere, all at once. This integration means Meta’s AI assistant will have access to real-time information, which in theory should produce better chat results via conversational search. And coming soon: businesses will be able to create their own AIs. What Meta AI looks like. Here’s a GIF Meta shared: More Meta AIs with Bing. Meta announced it is releasing 28 additional AIs, all with unique personas, that users can interact with on its platforms. Meta said it plans to bring Bing search to these AI characters, many of which are based on celebrities (e.g., Tom Brady, Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Mr Beast) “in the coming months.” Bing’s role. Meta AI is powered by a custom model that leverages technology from Llama 2 and other large language models. However, Meta’s LLMs are only trained on information prior to 2023, which would lead to dated responses. This is where Bing’s real-time web results will come into play. More to come. Meta promises that it is working on AIs for businesses and creators that will be available next year. From Meta:
The post Meta AI assistant uses Microsoft Bing Search results appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/jfsKAB3 Open AI has reenabled the Bing search feature it has added to its ChatGPT AI service after temporarily disabling the feature in early July. “ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021,” wrote OpenAI on X. Browse with Bing. Open AI added Bing Search to ChatGPT as a premium service in May. Doing so added to ChatGPT more up-to-date information and timely information powered by Bing Search. ChatGPT has a data set from 2021 or earlier, which is why using Bing Chat provided a better experience for more timely questions. With Bing Search in ChatGPT, the service can “provide timelier and more up-to-date answers with access from the web,” the company wrote. The service was for ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Returned on September 27. Open AI explained, “Since the original launch of browsing in May, we received useful feedback. Updates include following robots.txt and identifying user agents so sites can control how ChatGPT interacts with them. Browsing is particularly useful for tasks that require up-to-date information, such as helping you with technical research, trying to choose a bike, or planning a vacation.” Who can use it. Browse with Bing is available to Plus and Enterprise ChatGPT users today. Open AI said they will “expand to all users soon.” To enable, choose Browse with Bing in the selector under GPT-4. Why we care. The Browse with Bing feature in ChatGPT made the service even more useful to searchers and people with questions. Now that this feature is back, it adds more recent information to ChatGPT. To learn more about this, see our original story over here. The post ChatGPT Browse with Bing returns after being disabled 3 months ago appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/ipGTU9F Making informed decisions about your marketing data investments is crucial. That’s why empowering yourself as a confident, savvy data-buyer is essential. Join industry experts in this webinar to learn how to save time, reduce headaches and extract maximum value from your marketing data investments. Learn more by registering and attending “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Data but Were Afraid to Ask,” presented by Rhetorik. Click here to view more Search Engine Land webinars. The post Everything you ever wanted to know about data but were afraid to ask appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/4GtP8lN Google Optimize will not be available after Sept. 30. This means you will no longer be able to create or edit experiments, personalizations, or view experiment reports after this date. However, you will still be able to run A/B tests in Google Analytics 4. Why we care. Moving forward, you will need to use GA4 to conduct A/B testing and optimize your website or app’s user experience. This may prove problematic for some marketers as many are still grappling with the navigation of the new analytics platform following the sunset of Universal Analytics. Why is Google Optimize sunsetting? Google explained that although Optimize is a longstanding product, the platform does not have features and services that customers need for experimentation testing. The search engine therefore decided to invest in solutions that will be more effective for customers instead. Access your data. You can still access your data. Be sure to download it from the Optimize user interface before September 30. Testing in GA4. Google has been working on integrations with the following A/B testing providers:
The search engine is making its APIs publicly available so that anyone can integrate their A/B testing tool with GA4 in the coming months. What has Google said? A Google spokesperson said in a statement:
Dig deeper. Read Google's announcement in full for more information. The post Reminder – Google Optimize sunsets this weekend appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/BdgETAa YouTube is updating its Advertiser-Friendly Content guidelines regarding controversial issues. Under the new best practice recommendations, creators will be able to earn ad revenue on content discussing topics such as:
This means content that addresses these topics without going into graphic detail can now be fully monetized. Why we care. YouTube is expanding advertising avenues, providing advertisers with more opportunities to showcase their campaigns. However, brands should carefully weigh ad placement decisions, and consider whether they wish to have their products or services promoted alongside content discussing controversial issues – even if it doesn’t go into graphic detail. Why now? YouTube confirmed the change was prompted by feedback from creator communities claiming that they receive “more yellow icons” than others when their content simply references controversial topics. The platform is hoping the update to its guidelines will enable more communities to discuss controversial topics for educational purposes while maintaining the opportunity to monetize their content. What else is changing? YouTube is aligning its Advertiser-Friendly Content guidelines on eating disorders with the YouTube community guidelines. Content that focuses on eating disorders and shares triggers will not receive ad revenue, such as:
However, content that references an eating disorder but does not promote it will be eligible for monteization, such as:
A YouTube spokesperson added: “This change will ensure that this content isn’t incentivised with ads, and that our monetization and community guidelines continue to be in sync.” What has YouTube said? Conor Kavanagh, YouTube monetization policy lead, said in a video statement:
Deep dive. Read YouTube's Advertiser-Friendly Content guidelines in full for more information. The post YouTube relaxes controversial topic guidelines to boost ad revenue opportunities appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/VxbrJMC At least 26 of the top 100 most popular websites – and 242 of the top 1,000 – are now blocking GPTBot, the web crawler OpenAI introduced Aug. 7, according to an updated analysis.
Why we care. To block or not to block ChatGPT? That has been a big question for many SEOs because ChatGPT does not cite or link to its sources. We have let search engines crawl our content because there is a clear potential benefit – we get traffic through direct links/citations. Clearly, even more of the most popular websites have decided to block GPTBot, presumably because they don’t want OpenAI scraping their data to help train its models – at least not without some form of compensation. 12 popular websites now blocking GPTBot. Among the new additions from the top 100 most popular sites in the past month, the majority of which publish news and information:
One big reversal. Interestingly, Foursquare, which was blocking GPTBot last month, no longer is. What about CCbot? Common Crawl’s web crawler is still blocked less – by just 130 websites. As a reminder, Common Crawl provides part of the training data used by OpenAI, Google and others.
Limitations. 67 robots.txt files out of the 1,000 websites were not identified/inspected as part of this analysis. (That’s why I wrote “at least” in the opening sentence.) Originality.ai’s updated analysis. Websites That Have Blocked OpenAI’s GPTBot – 1000 Website Study Dig deeper. Should you block ChatGPT’s web browser plugin from accessing your website? The post 26% of the top 100 websites are now blocking GPTBot appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/m4wFBlV |
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