In an interview with the Best SEO Initiative Award winners, Search Engine Land Editor George Nguyen deep-dives into the best SEO strategies and tactics for your campaigns. Here are the category winners: Lindsay Neilson from NP Digital worked with PROS to overcome the challenges of a conceptual product and finding search volume in the market to win the Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEO: “We were trying to find a nice balance between the product marketing buzzwords and the conceptual theories of what their product does and actually how users and these various industries and personas work for those terms.” Lily Ray is the director of SEO at Path Interactive and worked with an insurance client that was affected by a Google core algorithm update to win Best Overall SEO Initiative – Enterprise: “There was a lot of content on the website that needed to be updated to meet Google’s expectations as far as E-A-T. There was a lot of other work that we did as well both on the technical front content optimization website architecture and backlinks.” Abby Reimer from Uproer worked with CaringBridge to help them drive more traffic through their resources and blog sections to win the Best Overall SEO Initiative – Small Business award: “The challenge here was as a nonprofit, they don’t have the time or resources that a large scale company has, so we had to work around that and that really involved expertise, authority, and trust. We thought about who are the experts on these topics around how to you know cope with a certain health crisis, we found that it’s actually CaringBridge users and people who have gone through it themselves.” Kaushal Thakkar is the Founder of INFIDIGIT worked with Superbalist to gain maximum traction during Black Friday to win the Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative – SEO category: “Superablist’s site was not ranking for the particular set of keywords for 2018. So for 2019, they wanted to rank in the top positions for Black Friday related keywords. We were able to rank them on the featured snippets not only for some of the Black Friday related keywords but several other keywords.” They offered their best tips around optimizing for difficult industries, using paid data to inform organic search, using UGC in search campaigns, and getting 240x results for Black Friday e-commerce campaigns. Buzzwords are often a big sticking point when it comes to B2B and SaaS marketing. How do you work around that to optimize an SEO campaign? Lindsay: It’s definitely a challenge when you get into SaaS companies. Phrases like empowering digital transformation and words like omnichannel, but sometimes it’s a little hard to actually connect up to the solutions that users are actually looking for. We dug things down a little more granular and noticed that challenge that comes up, is the sales cycle is really long. And so, with organic especially attribution can sometimes be a challenge because you don’t necessarily see that one to one connection between a top of funnel visit to the site and revenue. They now have a more robust content offering that we’ve been able to bring a lot of in front of the gate, a lot of it was previously unprofitable or not optimized or existed in PDF format. So one of the cool things about PROS is they have so many fantastic thought leaders and subject matter experts internally. We were able really to tap into a lot of what they already have, and just kind of either reformat it or really closely align it to very specific longtail keywords that were actually more representative of how users are thinking about the products and solutions. How do you strategize and think about recovering from being hit by an algorithm update? Lily: One of the things about this site is that it produced a lot of content over the years and it’s not necessarily a content publisher site–that’s not their primary purpose as a business. It’s just something that they’ve successfully used for SEO and to drive new visibility over the years. And we do actually think that that’s one of the main sources of why the site declined. One of the things that can happen and something that I see really frequently with sites that are negatively impacted by recent core updates is that they have produced so much content for so long–and maybe way back when the content did really well for SEO–but the rules of the game, kind of changed. So one of the things that we were looking at is you know you have great product pages, service pages, brand pages, but there’s this blog that has so much content on it. And in many cases that content was not up to par with what we would expect nowadays with good quality content. So it’s really chipping away at that and just making sure that whatever is being indexed by search engines is truly high-quality content. So that was really like the bulk of the strategy. How can businesses improve their E-A-T of their content? Lily: For example, with this client, there was some content that required medical review or expert review that the company wasn’t demonstrating that they had actually used expert reviewers throughout that content. So you read the article and it’s like, “Who wrote this? Should I trust them?” So we made a lot of enhancements just like on the template level to depict that we can be trusted. And in cases where we felt a little bit iffy even the was client like, “Oh, we wrote that six years ago it’s not really accurate anymore.” There was a lot of consolidating and getting rid of content. So, in many cases, it’s just about communicating the right things on the site but also making sure that you’re putting your best foot forward with trustworthiness especially if you’re a website that falls into the “your money your life” space. It’s often hard for clients to retire content. What tips do you have to help? Lily: I think it always comes from the data so it’s not just like a gut feeling about content. (Although it can be. We’ve had clients where it’s like, that needs to come off the website. And they’re like, “Yeah it’s not safe information anymore.” So that’s easier to get rid of.) But data speaks for itself. So if you see that there’s really no organic traffic going to the page, not a lot of page views, not a lot of engagement, maybe it hasn’t ranked for anything in a few years, that makes it a lot easier to recommend what to do with it. And it’s not always just delete it. In many cases, it’s consolidated into this one, redirect it, and update that existing article. How do you use paid to inform your page titles and meta descriptions? Lily: Yeah, this is something we love doing just because you get so much more direct information about the performance of keywords and paid search you can really tie it to the conversion a lot more easily used to be able to do that in SEO but it’s been a while. So, we always love to bring in data whenever possible, cross-reference that with organic title tags and meta descriptions and they really see like are we using the best possible language. So an example for this client would be, we have state pages like a lot of brands do. We can actually look on the page-level and see if different language resonates in different states differently so as opposed to having a template a title tag where you just fill in the name of the state. Maybe there are some tweaks that you can do to the language that better resonates with the audience and that state, and the keyword itself might even change based on how people describe things. Paid can give you that type of data. How do you use user-generated content for an SEO campaign? Abby: That really goes back to CaringBridge’s main challenge, which was the lack of time and resources to invest in one-on-one interviews with individual users or even doctors or therapists. We discovered that the experts in topics like “how to support someone who’s going through a cancer journey” doesn’t necessarily need to be a doctor. It’s actually the people who go through it every day whether it’s themselves or they are experiencing it in the loved one’s life. So that’s what really led us to do the research for the topic and create from on social media. CaringBridge is an established brand with more than 300,000 followers on Facebook. So we thought, you know, why not try asking for their advice? Some posts get upwards of 100 to 200 comments of people telling their stories, their tips or advice. We see common themes throughout them and then we actually also incorporate those comments within the content itself. How do you assess where you can compete in SERPs and how do you go about talking to clients about that? Abby: The best way I think I found to talk to clients on this is by showing them the search results and asking them, “Do you want to get found here?” And most often the answer is no: no, we don’t want to compete with someone who has a Ph.D. So actually just showing them what the real search results look like and then comparing it to when we look at more supportive products–then we see competitors maybe like, Hallmark or Caregivers.com, where we actually do want to see ourselves amongst those names. That’s one way I use to communicate is just actually showing them what the search results look like and being really rational about it. What are some things to take into consideration when you’re running a Black Friday campaign? Kaushal: The thing about Black Friday is that you can face competition from any kind of websites–news websites and anything else. Say you’re ranking number 1 or 2. And a news publisher writes about Black Friday sales happening across e-commerce companies. They can suddenly come and outrank you. One thing we need to be aware of while doing this particular part of SEO is planning our strategy so that we’re outranking even news websites and even BlackFriday.com. We had to ensure that the page speed was optimal, the technical SEO was taken care of, the site health was at its optimal level, and that several keywords were supporting that one particular page so that the page can rank well. How did you implement content for Black Friday? Kaushal: We worked on several infographics, video content–which was required for the schema we implemented–and it helped us a lot. We created an infographic around how to go about shopping for Black Friday. When Google featured it on the featured snippet, the number of clicks and the CTR was much higher than usual. It also helped us achieve 240x more than paid search traffic. Make sure to watch the full video to learn all the best tips from the Search Engine Lane SEO initiative winners. The post SEO strategies from the Search Engine Land SEO initiative award winners appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Y2n7OR
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Do you keep a content calendar? While getting comfortable calling yourself a writer is definitely one hurdle, new writers must... The post A Low-Tech Content Calendar to Plan, Organize, and Share Your Ideas appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/2LOv3kk If your New Year’s resolutions include earning more organic traffic, executing stronger PPC campaigns, and generating greater profits, you can’t afford to miss the actionable tactics at SMX Report — online February 23. At just $99, your All Access pass packs a ton of value, including an all-new training experience covering everything you need to know about search marketing analytics. Here’s how it works:
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Still not enough? Add a two-day, post-conference workshop to your itinerary for maximum value: These interactive, in-depth training opportunities take place February 24-25 for just $149 each. Bundle with your All Access pass to unlock extra savings! For the last 14 years, over 70,000 marketers have trusted Search Marketing Expo to deliver reliable, proven, actionable tactics to achieve search marketing success. Now, it’s your turn. The post The SMX Report agenda is live! appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3o21EAd DuckDuckGos focus on privacy-minded users pushes it past 100 million searches in a single day1/19/2021 DuckDuckGo served 102,251,307 search queries on January 11, breaking past the 100 million query milestone for the first time, according to the search engine’s traffic page. DuckDuckGo remains a very niche competitor. As of December 2020, Google’s estimated search engine market share in the US is 87.81%, according to data from statcounter. The closest competitor, Bing, accounts for only 6.45%, followed by Yahoo! at 3.05% and DuckDuckGo with 2.3%. Google has not made search volume data publicly available, but HubSpot and Kenshoo have published that Google serves over 5 billion searches per day. An exponential trendline based on DuckDuckGo’s actual daily average of queries (calculated on a monthly basis) suggests that, if the company maintains this rate of exponential growth, it will reach 1 billion queries per day sometime between 2026 and 2027. New competitors aren’t challenging Google head-on. Clearly, DuckDuckGo (along with all other search engines) is a long way away from being considered a serious challenger to Google. However, a search engine does not necessarily need to serve billions of queries per day to be a success — as a matter of fact, it’s likely that newer search engines aren’t looking to become the industry leader. In that regard, DuckDuckGo’s ability to carve out a niche for itself among privacy-minded internet users may serve as a playbook for other businesses. Berlin-based search engine Ecosia differentiates itself by donating a large share of its ad profits to reforestation efforts worldwide. OneSearch, Verizon Media’s privacy-focused search engine that operates on a similar business model as DuckDuckGo, launched in January 2020. And, former Google ad boss Sridhar Ramaswamy announced Neeva, an ad-free, subscription-based search engine, in June 2020. The Android search choice screen. As part of its efforts to comply with a July 2018 antitrust ruling in the EU, Google introduced the Android search choice screen on March 1, 2020. The screen prompts new Android devices in the EU to select a default search provider, with the available options being determined by auction. At face value, this concession to the European Commission and Google’s competitors offered other search engines a way to gain more mobile users. However, the selection method was met with criticism by DuckDuckGo as well as Ecosia, which said it would boycott the auction. DuckDuckGo appeared alongside Info.com and Google in all 31 EU territories when the screen first rolled out (auctions occur on a quarterly basis). Even so, the company remained a critic of Google’s antitrust remedy, arguing that the search choice screen ignores screen size and the ability of users to scroll and that the auction model favors “search engines who squeeze money out of every last drop of people’s personal information.” Despite actively prompting EU users to select a default search engine, the search choice screen still puts Google at less of a disadvantage than it does competitors that also appear on the screen. That’s because Google always shows up as one of the four options, with the other three being determined by quarterly auctions — an EU Android user who buys a device in Q1 2021 may be met with very different search engine options than one who bought a device in Q4 2020. For Q1 2021, DuckDuckGo will only appear on the screen for users in Belgium. Additionally, the efficacy of the search choice screen to increase competition may have been affected by external factors. The coronavirus pandemic may have impacted the mobile phone supply chain, and with stay-at-home orders and social distancing measures in place, consumer demand may have also decreased. Why we care. Pressure over consumer privacy has prompted Apple and Google to block third-party cookies from tracking users across the web. That same focus on privacy has also helped propel DuckDuckGo past 100 million searches in a single day. Its success, while modest, may provide new or existing search engines with a roadmap to chipping away at Google’s dominance or avoiding it altogether by concentrating on an underserved base of users. It is still miles behind Google, but DuckDuckGo is gradually closing in on Yahoo! and Bing, so a future in which it is as much a part of the conversation as Bing may not be that far off. Nevertheless, optimizing specifically for any non-Google search engine remains highly unlikely. The post DuckDuckGo’s focus on privacy-minded users pushes it past 100 million searches in a single day appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3o0LmaE There’s nothing easier than audio content, right? Just fire up your recording software or webinar service and start talking away.... The post 4 Copywriting Techniques for Engaging Podcasts and Audio Presentations appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/38YWGQt Google has posted an update on its new crawl stats report saying “the crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls.” This means you may see an increase in the number of crawls reported for your site but this is just a reporting change – there is no direct impact in search. Crawl stats report. Google, back in November 2020, launched the new crawl stats report. You can check it out over here if you have not seen it. The crawl stats report shows you statistics about Google’s crawling history on your website. What has changed. Google has updated the report to show more types of crawls. It is unclear what “types of crawls” means exactly. It might refer to Googlebot types, including not just Googlebot for search but Adbot for Google Ads, Imagebot and more. Google wrote “The crawl stats report has increased its reporting coverage for additional types of crawls. As a result, you may see a jump in the number of crawls reported for your site. This does not reflect additional crawling of your site, only improved reporting.” What it looks like. Here is a screen shot showing the notification in the crawl stats report: Why we care. If you notice a bump in your crawl rate, do not be alarmed. Google is simply showing more types of crawls to your website. It does not mean Google is crawling your website more often but rather just reporting on more of the types of crawls your site has received. The post Google crawl stats report now showing more crawls appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/35V4Nvw In part one with Phillip Thune, we spoke about the super old days in the search industry. Phillip Thune, the CEO of Textbroker and former President of FindWhat.com. Here, in part two, we speak a bit more tactical, about how content and search. Specifically we spoke about how to prepare to write for users and search engines. What you can do to help find the write authors for your content, if outsourcing content is what you want to do. We even talked about how to do content quality assurance and then train writers to write better, if that is even possible. Phillip also described how SEOs changed how they approached content development both around the time of the Panda algorithm and then again around the Penguin algorithm releases. Here is the video: 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: Phillip Thune on finding good writers and writing good content appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2M5443S The past 10 months or so have given PPC pros a crash course in adaptability, ingenuity and nimble marketing. Those who thrived in pandemic-era PPC deserve some sort of advanced honorary degree in “PPC’ology.” In many instances, smart, effective PPC has literally saved brands from the brink of devastation. But let’s face it, PPC pros have been in a near-constant state of reinvention since PPC first became a thing. Compared to other marketing disciplines such as print and broadcast, we’re in our adolescence at best, which is actually an exciting place to be. 2020 just made us do a lot more reinventing and adapting in a very short amount of time. The tumult of the past several months may be a hidden blessing. Smart PPC pros are now well-positioned to use the tools at their disposal to help brands ride a wave of recovery while adapting to new normals in the way people use search to do commerce. PPC automation: 2020’s lessons for a banner 2021We’ve discussed the power and pitfalls of PPC automation at great length over the past year, in particular. It was the main topic of our October 21, 2020 Search Engine Land article and was a recurring topic during our now-bi-weekly, virtual PPC Town Hall, which launched in response to the pandemic. Now, we want to advance the discussion beyond how we work in highly automated channels and tie in lessons learned during the wild and unpredictable months of the recent past. Sure, automation makes it easy to do basic PPC, but it also makes it easy to be lazy. Don’t be lazy. Take some cues from 2020 and learn to adapt and be great. Predicting and responding quickly to behavioral changes using a smart mix of automated tools and manual controls can keep you ahead of the pack. Lesson 1: Homebodies still do commerceEarly in the pandemic, many people feared that economic and employment concerns would wipe out spending. In many instances, it did the opposite. Pandemic purchasing skyrocketed in many areas. Those who anticipated the shifts won.
Many indicators show that a lot of companies and employees now embrace more flexibility and remote working arrangements. People have enjoyed gaining back an hour or more of their day otherwise spent in traffic jams. And as we saw from the points above, people naturally try to make the best of their situation. It’s this combination of factors precipitated by what happened in 2020 that may well lead to a permanent shift in how people engage with brands and conduct commerce (on and off company time). As PPC pros, we can thrive by focusing more on our strategic roles and letting the machines handle the tedious and repetitive button-pushing that we once did ourselves. But let’s be clear, humans are an essential part of the formula for PPC success in 2021 and beyond. As consumer behaviors continue to morph in unexpected ways in reaction to societal and pandemic-related forces, the machines cannot succeed on their own—artificial intelligence and machine learning use historical trends and data. While the machine can change bids in response to external factors impacting conversion rates, it cannot decide that a company should change its distribution model and rewrite all their ads to highlight a significant new trend in 2020: BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store). A big lesson from 2020 was that rapidly changing dynamics on the ground can send signals the machines can use to avoid wasted ad spend, but not always in ways to help businesses capture new opportunities. PPC pros have an opportunity (and a responsibility) to master the tools at their disposal AND apply deeper strategic insight to ensure the machines are doing the best they can to reach audiences through paid search. Relying solely on the platform tools won’t work in 2021 and beyond. The native, disparate automations within Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook can certainly work for basic paid search. Still, they are not well suited to the needs of advanced PPC marketers who strive for stellar results. The evolving landscape for digital marketing in 2021 will require PPC pros to remain at the forefront of developments and opportunities. PPC rockstars will be those who maximize all the tools at their disposal this year. Lesson 2: People LOVE convenience, making eCommerce an omnipotent kingOkay, on the surface, the importance of convenience is self-evident. But during the past several months, the desire for safety and security made people double-down on the need for ease and convenience. Smart PPC marketers are looking more holistically at their marketing mix. Some things to consider:
Being a one-trick PPC pony doesn’t cut it anymore. Cross-channel PPC marketing is where the winners soar. Effective, unified campaigns managed from a single interface put more power in PPC marketers’ hands to meet customers where they are and how they are behaving. With Optmyzr, advertisers can optimize each channel independently to make the most of its unique capabilities and then do a cross-platform budget optimization that prioritizes ad spend in the best-performing channels. Lesson 3: Supply chain disruptions can wreak havoc on the ability to sellEven during “normal” times, businesses still struggle with predictability in their supply chains and delivery channels. Minor disruptions can lead to huge challenges in meeting customer demand. From toilet paper and hand sanitizer to mountain bikes or available time slots on ski slopes, the supply chain and available inventories can put huge limits on the ability to sell. The global pandemic turned “unpredictable” into a daily norm over the past several months and challenged marketers even further to convert ACTUAL sales.
With the newly redesigned Campaign Automator from Optmyzr, advertisers can ensure their ads are hyper-focused on just those products that are ready to be bought. After specifying templates for account structure, ad text, keywords, and extensions, the tool automatically builds the necessary campaigns and ad groups to advertise the available inventory. It even makes the ads more relevant by letting advertisers insert dynamic elements such as lowest price, number of product variants (e.g. ‘available in 5 colors’) or limited availability to instill a sense of urgency (e.g. ‘just 3 left’). Caption: Campaign Automator from Optmyzr makes it easy for advertisers to always have the right ads running based on their business priorities and inventory. In addition to automating search ads from inventory, advertisers with a Google Merchant Feed can also automate their Shopping and Smart Shopping campaigns with the Shopping Campaign Builder and Refresher. These easy-to-use tools help build advanced shopping campaign structures in minutes and are refreshed regularly to prevent wasted ad spend when popular products go out of stock. Crushing your 2021 goals requires learning from 2020!The lessons learned over recent months have made marketers stronger, more adaptable, and more creative. Relying on the platform level tools won’t cut it anymore. Before you move on to the next story, we’d like to offer some much-deserved props to all PPC pros out there. When speaking of the accomplishments of NASA’s Apollo 13-era teams, Flight Director Gene Kranz famously said he thought everyone should at least once in their life have a ticker-tape parade to honor their accomplishments. We wish we could give PPC pros such a parade, but it’s simply not practical from a social distancing perspective, and, in reality, ticker-tape parades just aren’t environmentally acceptable to do! But in the spirit of the era, we’d like to give you all a virtual ticker-tape celebration as we collectively launch into 2021 and its promise of a move back to something resembling normal. Join Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys with special guests from Google and leading eCommerce agencies on Wednesday, January 27, 2021, for a PPC Town Hall dedicated to practical PPC tips for eCommerce. The post 3 Critical PPC Lessons from 2020 for a Brilliant 2021 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3qF6cyl I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still... The post The Martin Luther King, Jr. Guide to Inspirational Writing appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/3oVQyOw Marketers ready to lead the comeback in 2021 need to innovate faster, and be able to quickly pivot budget, resources and plans when the company or strategic direction changes. With a Marketing System of Record, all work can be visible, trackable and actionable, allowing you to create end-to-end processes for any contingency. That way, when things change, your organization can change with it. Join our experts for this webinar as they demonstrate four key reasons a Marketing System of Record can bring greater efficiency and consistency to creative work and marketing campaigns, while allowing your team to prove their value. Register today for “How to Build a Marketing System of Record,” presented by Workfront. The post How to Build a Marketing System of Record appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2XIRycX |
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