In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. This Googler dressed up as Captain America:
What did they do to this foosball table?
A Google word of mouth t-shirt from the old days:
A shiny Google slide:
A mural at the GooglePlex:
The post Search in Pics: Google’s Captain America, a mural at Google & a shiny Google slide appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2GD0zcS
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For the first time since 2014, Shareaholic says search outpaced social in the percentage of overall traffic it delivered in 2017. According to the analytic platform’s data, search drove 34.8 percent of site visits in 2017 compared to social networks which accounted for 25.6 percent of referral traffic. Chartbeat, an analytics platform for online publishers and media organizations, has witnessed a similar trend with traffic from Google search to publisher websites up more than 25 percent since the start of 2017. “Google Search has always been the largest referrer to Chartbeat clients,” writes the company’s CEO, John Saroff, on Chartbeat’s blog, “In late August, Chartbeat data scientists noticed that Google Search referrals across our client base were trending up.” The CEO says his team initially thought the rise in Google referrals were attached to events like last year’s solar eclipse and Hurricane Irma, but traffic continued to rise even after news headlines around the events subsided. Instead of falling back into normal patterns, Chartbeat saw Google search driving even more traffic to publisher sites. Search beats out social for share of visits“At a high level, it’s clear that social media’s tenuous grip on being the top referral category is over. After beating out search for the last three years, it’s given back the title, driven by changes to the algorithms behind Facebook’s News Feed,” writes Shareaholic in its latest traffic report. Shareaholic’s findings are based on traffic to more than 250,000 mobile and desktop sites that have opted-in to the content marketing platform’s publishing tools. The company says it analyzed a variety of traffic sources — direct traffic, social referrals, organic search and paid search — for websites that ranged in size from a thousand monthly unique visitors to one million, and spread across a broad selection of website categories (food, tech, fashion and beauty, marketing, sports, general news, and more). Google was the top overall traffic referrer for the year, and owned a 36.82 percent share of visits during the second half of 2017. While Google’s share of visits was up more than seven percentage points between the second half of 2016 and the second half of 2017, Facebook’s dropped 12.7 percent during the same time frame. Even with a double-digit drop however, Facebook remained the top social network for share of visits in 2017. Shareholic notes the changes Facebook has made to its news feed algorithm, boosting content from “trusted” news sources while penalizing spammy, click-bait headlines, influenced the site’s drop in share of visits: “After a rocky 2016 US election year, Facebook made a number of major changes to what content they display in the news feed and how they display it.” The two charts below, one from Shareaholic and the other from Parse.ly convey similar trends with respect to search vs. social referral traffic in 2017, through the third quarter of the year. The Parse.ly data reflects the upward trend in referral traffic from Google (all – including AMP – Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages format) and declining trend in referral traffic from Facebook specifically (all Facebook – including Instant Articles). Publishers also see continued gains from search driven by AMPWhile Shareaholic’s traffic referral report is based on a wide category of websites, Chartbeat’s data is specifically attached to publishers’ web traffic. As mentioned earlier, Chartbeat saw a 25 percent surge in traffic to publisher sites by Google search over the last year. Josh Schwartz, Chartbeat’s chief of product, engineering and data, told Digiday that Facebook referrals to publishers was down fifteen percent in 2017 — aligning with Shareaholic’s findings. Facebook’s news feed algorithm tweaks to curb fake news and spam content are definitely impacting its overall referral traffic numbers, but Chartbeat reports the most significant factor driving traffic to its clients’ sites is AMP content. After analyzing whether or not the rise in traffic was the result of a bug, or “un-darkening” of previously dark social traffic and finding nothing, Chartbeat turned its attention to mobile versus desktop traffic numbers. “We then looked specifically at search traffic by device and the answer was clear from our dataset. Mobile Google Search referrals were up significantly while Desktop Google Search referrals were flat,” writes Saroff. Chartbeat then dug further into its data to evaluate sites using AMP and said it found a “stark” difference between the sites using AMP and those that were not. “While Mobile Google Search traffic to our AMP-enabled publishers is up 100 percent over the same time-frame, traffic to publishers not using AMP is flat.” Chartbeat says, during the last six months, Google Mobile Search referrals now outpace both mobile and desktop Facebook referrals. The post Search outpaced social for referral traffic last year, driving 35% of site visits vs social’s 26% share of visits appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2HHNakT Google is further ramping up the distribution, scale and the capabilities of its Assistant. It’s adding languages, handsets, carriers and some new cross-device tricks. Against the backdrop of intensifying smart speaker competition with Amazon and Apple, Google is taking its Assistant from eight languages to 30 by the end of 2018. In a blog post the company said that will mean the Assistant reaches 95 percent of Android phones around the world. Previously Google reported that the Assistant is on 400 million devices globally. The first crop of new languages introduced will be Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai. And now, the Assistant will be able to understand and respond to individuals in multiple languages or accommodate multi-lingual families:
These capabilities will extend to the iPhone version of Google Assistant as well. Google is also planning “deeper integrations” on Android phones and with mobile carriers. The Assistant was initially only “deeply integrated” into the Pixel. Then, in December last year, the company made the Assistant available on a range of Android phones and tablets. Deeper Assistant integrations will be available on new devices from Sony, Xiaomi and LG. And carriers will also be able to more deeply integrate Google Assistant, so that users can ask about plan details and other carrier related services. In other words, carriers will theoretically be able to offload some of their customer service functions to Google Assistant: “This gives carriers a new way to support their customers while reducing response time.” Initial participating carriers include Vodafone, Sprint and Telus. Others will follow. In some ways this is the most interesting element of the smorgasbord announcement Google is making this morning. Google closed with the statement that it’s expanding “routines” and reminders. There will be six new routines. And while the company doesn’t go into detail, I’m assuming these will be mostly pre-defined. Alexa also offers routines. However most “regular folks” aren’t going to set up routines because it’s an “IFTTT” manual process. Finally, there will be new location-based reminders that users can set on Google Home but receive when there’ someplace else, on their phones. The example Google offers is a shopping list compiled on Google Home at home, triggered on the phone by arrival at the grocery store. While Alexa devices dominate the smart speaker market, Google controls the globe’s largest computing platform in Android. It’s building a cross-device ecosystem for the Assistant (smart speakers, TVs, cars, phones) will enable it to consolidate leadership and potentially create a kind of “lock in” that was once reserved only for Apple. The post Google Assistant to get multiple new languages, distribution and skills appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2CFkXaW Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:
The post SearchCap: New Google AdWords keyword planner, Yelp ads & audits appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2HFbOmg Auditing customer reviews for organic traffic growth without losing speed or attracting penalties2/22/2018 User-generated content on product or service pages can be key to driving conversions and a fantastic way to add unique content to a page. If you don’t have the resources to write good content yourself, user-generated content can be especially helpful. However, if your customer review content isn’t optimized for search engines, it can work against you and delay or obstruct your marketing efforts instead of driving more business. Below are four common issues (and a bonus) I have come across when auditing retailer product pages and the workarounds I’ve used for each. 1. Page speedThis is a much-discussed subject, and as of late, it is a mobile search ranking factor coming July 2018. It is key to sync with your web developers on the optimal page load speed, as images, related products and content will impact load times for this critical part of the purchase funnel. Customer review content is best when optimized for both Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and page speed. Suggesting you open the floodgates to 500+ reviews on a product page is not ideal for anyone (adds content but also adds load time). Search engine optimization specialists (SEOs) and developers will agree most third-party review providers will issue a standard eight to 10 visible reviews on a page before transitioning to another mechanism for accessing the remaining reviews. Ask your dev team the threshold of reviews on your pages (don’t feel limited to 10) before speed is impacted by your desired load time, and run tests. There are a few different ways review content can be exposed to users and search engines:
2. Structured data markup: Have you done it right?Marking up your product pages with structured data, including the aggregate rating and reviews, can generate a rich result in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which can increase your click-through rate (CTR) over competitors and provides more information to the crawlers about the content on your page. You already know the benefit of markup, but has it been done correctly? You may not know you have an error! If you use a third-party provider for your reviews, they typically supply the markup on those reviews when they are syndicated to your site. We have seen two issues here:
When testing either of these in the Structured Data Testing Tool, it won’t actually flag as an error or warning since it’s testing to see if you have structured data and the required elements, which you do. If you’re not getting rich results, one of these could be the culprit. 3. Shared or syndicated reviewsIt’s not uncommon to see retailers pull reviews from a vendor site onto their own site, or sometimes a retailer shares customer reviews across multiple country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) where they sell the same product/service. If done incorrectly, both of these scenarios can cause duplication of the user-generated content and dilute the value of the page. Worst case: a penalty for the syndication of reviews! Sharing vendor review content across multiple sites (typically retailers): Are you aware of how many retailers are getting the same feed for the same product information and reviews? Perhaps you’re the vendor and want to protect your unique content on your site while still sharing to retailers for increased conversions. Here is an example of a pair of UGG boots for sale on Macys.com but pulling from Ugg.com: Potential solutions for the UGG boots review could be to block crawlers from he syndicated review content, or perhaps it should be embargoed on the original source for a determined period of time. That time should be determined based on the content being crawled and indexed before it is shared with other parties. Check log files and crawl rates to determine an approximate time for your site; and test the indexation of that new content once crawled. This allows the search engines to determine the original source. Often, retailers want to leverage the reviews from their other domains to help sell the product. This is fine, but the duplicate reviews must be blocked from the crawlers. This will continue to benefit the sale without harming or penalizing your site for duplicating the user-generated content. Amazon is a good example of this. Years ago, they pulled the Amazon.com reviews into the Amazon.ca pages. This practice was later halted in favor of still showing the reviews, but blocking crawler access. Now, they simply provide a link to their Amazon.com site for more reviews. 4. Coding customer reviewsAnd finally, none of the above matters if the review content isn’t accessible to search engine crawlers. How you code your reviews to be displayed on the page (JavaScript vs HTML) will impact using that content for improved rankings and traffic growth. This happens all too often: JavaScript is disabled and customer reviews disappear from the page. You can also test this in Google Search Console and run a fetch and render. Bear in mind cached content is not the same as having content in Google’s index; they are separate entities. This falls into a bigger, much-debated and much-tested subject: Does Google crawl and index content rendered with JavaScript? There’s no clear handbook on Google crawling and indexing different JavaScript frameworks; it’s something we’ve tested several times over. We’ve found many articles that try to help audit and explain JavaScript rendering for SEO, and while there are some good pointers, you must check everything against your own site, as we have found what works for one does not work for another. We have performed our own in-house testing where HTML content is converted to JavaScript and seen no change to the page ranking and indexing. Therefore, we know it can work, but will it always? Google says JavaScript is not going away, yet it’s not clear it can be indexed. While Google does index client-rendered HTML, they have not perfected this, and other search engines may be severely less advanced in this progression. For SEO purposes, you still need to have server-rendered content. At the very least, perform the audit on your reviews and ensure Googlebot is crawling and indexing them. You may need to speak further with your review provider to ensure the content is accessible to Googlebot. Depending on the provider and template, they can help resolve any errors or concerns here. Bonus: 5. Use your XML sitemapsNow that you’ve created customer reviews that will drive more crawlable content, let the search engines know! Updating the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) sitemap entries will be a strong signal to incentivize the recrawl of those specific pages and access changes sooner. Pending your crawl rates and the number of pages on site, it may be a long time before a crawler gets to all your updated customer review content. SummaryTo wrap things up, customer reviews are a fantastic source for growing your organic traffic by means of unique content. Audit your reviews for the following:
Following these guidelines can deliver significant organic search growth. Run the audit and take a closer look at the reviews on your site for improvements you could be making. The post Auditing customer reviews for organic traffic growth without losing speed or attracting penalties appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2F0Ogdd The agenda for our upcoming SMX Advanced show is live and we’ve opened up our “speaking pitch” form for select sessions for the show, June 12-13 at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle. To increase the odds of being selected, be sure to read the agenda. Understand what the sessions are about. Ensure that your pitch is on target to the show’s audience and the session. Please also be very specific about what you intend to cover. Also, if you do not see a particular session listed, this is because there are no openings for that session. Use this form to submit your request. PLEASE NOTE: Many sessions have already been filled and are not open for pitches. If a session does not appear on the pitch form, it is closed, even if no speakers are appearing on the agenda yet. As you might guess, interest is high in speaking at Marketing Land conferences. We literally sift through hundreds of submissions to select speakers for the show. Here are some tips that will increase your chances of being selected. Pitch early: Submitting your pitch early gives you a better chance of being selected. Coordinators accept speakers as soon as they identify a pitch that they think best fits the session, just like colleges that use a rolling admissions policy. So pitching early increases the likelihood you’ll be chosen. Use the form: The speaker pitch form (http://marketinglandevents.com/speaker-form/) is the way to ask to speak. There’s helpful information there about how your pitch should be written and what it should contain. Write it yourself and be specific: Lots of pitches come in that are not specific to the session. This is the most effective ways to ensure that your pitch is ignored. And this year, we’re no longer accepting pitches written by anyone other than a proposed speaker. If you’re a thought leader, write the pitch yourself… and make certain that it is 100% focused on the session topic. “Throw your best pitch:” We’re limiting the number of pitches to three per person, so please pitch for the session(s) where you really feel you’ll offer SMX attendees your best. You’ll be notified: Everyone who pitches to speak will be notified by email whether you are accepted or not. And don’t delay—the pitch forms for each session will close as sessions are filled, with everything closing Friday, March 9. The post Want to speak at SMX Advanced? Here’s how appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2Cf8UWb Google appears to be rolling out an overhaul of AdWords Keyword Planner in the new AdWords interface. The workflows in the new Keywords Planner are much more streamlined than the current/old version, and it uses Google’s Material Design, matching the new AdWords interface. The best indication of this new approach is immediately apparent from the start screen. Whereas the old version had multiple options and links, the new start screen condenses things down to just two options: “Find new keywords” and “Get metrics and forecasts for your keywords”. Here’s a look at some of the changes you’ll find in the new Keyword Planner. Keyword ideasThe Keyword ideas chart in the new Keyword Planner shows total monthly search volumes like the old version, but also shows mobile search volume in the main chart. In the old version, mobile search volume is only available from the Search volume trends drop down menu. However, the ability to see ad impression share comparisons to competitor and market leader domains is not available from the search volume trends dropdown in the new Keyword Planner. To filter out negatives or keywords already included in the account, users can click the filter icon below the chart. There are two new metrics available in Keyword ideas. Users can now see Organic impression share and Organic average position for the keywords if a site ranks for them and enough data is available. To see this data, the AdWords and Search Console accounts need to be linked and users need to add the columns to the Keyword ideas report. ForecastingIn the forecasts section of the tool, the old version requires users to set a bid to get forecasting, and users can adjust the slider in the chart to see how bid changes affect the other performance metrics, as shown below. The new forecasts section immediately shows total estimated performance impact, including a max CPC, from the keywords. There is not an option to play with bid settings. Rather than having to toggle between menu tabs to see device and location breakouts, a new plan overview includes cards for devices and locations. Users can adjust the metrics shown in those cards. It’s not clear how widespread the roll out of the new Keyword Planer is at this point, so you may not see it in your accounts yet. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update here if and when we get a response. It will take a bit of getting used to, but overall these changes do seem to be an improvement on the old Keyword Planner, which had become cumbersome to navigate. The post AdWords Keyword Planner update appears to be rolling out in the new interface appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2CDqM8C It’s been a while since search was limited to text on a computer screen. Nowadays, your target audience doesn’t even have to type a query to get results. Search is often voice-activated, happening across mobile and Internet of Things devices, like smart home speakers. Search is powering intelligent agents that are fast becoming a focal point for connecting with your customers. Join us for the SMX West keynote, The Future Of AI & Intelligent Search. Kelly Thomas Nojaim, Vice President of Partner Development at Microsoft, and Shelby Reed, Regional Vice President of Sales at Bing Ads, will explore how personal agents, voice search, and chatbots will impact your marketing efforts, and how you can prepare for the emerging era of intelligent search. Kelly and Shelby are two of the nearly 100 experts speaking at SMX West on SEO, SEM, ecommerce, and other crucial search engine marketing topics. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn the tactics and strategies that make them industry thought leaders! View the complete agenda. SMX is like visiting an all-inclusive resort… for search marketers
Psst… Planning to join us with a FREE Expo+ Pass instead? You’ll still be able to attend and enjoy the Microsoft/Bing keynote, plus full access to online speaker presentations, free WiFi, the entire Expo Hall, as well as SMX Theater presentations and Solutions Track sessions. This pass is literally free. What are you waiting for? Register now! The post Personal agents. Voice search. Chatbots. Check out the SMX West keynote. appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2ojvhkq As someone who works regularly with small businesses, I am frequently asked: “Should I advertise on Yelp”? Since this came up again recently, I thought I would share my insights and experience in hopes my answer helps someone else. Yelps makes it hardThe last person asking about Yelp owns a European auto repair garage in Florida. They were spending $700 a month on Yelp ads and wanted to know what kind of ROI it was driving. It is a very fair question but a hard one to answer since Yelp doesn’t make it easy for a business owner to understand what happens as a result of the ads. They only show you impressions and clicks but nothing else. This is kind of surprising given the amount of free data they provide with a listing. (This may be changing as Yelp this week shared the results of an attribution trial it recently conducted.) If a business claims their listing on Yelp, they can see how many mobile calls they get and how many clicks were made to the website. However, when you advertise with them, they don’t break this down and tell you how many of those actions were a result of the ad itself. This raised a huge red flag for me, I’ve found when media sellers leave out information, it’s not a good sign. Yelp ROITo figure out the ROI from Yelp ads, I first needed to estimate the increase in leads that happened after the ads started. To calculate this, I looked back historically for two years and saw they had a total of 964 “leads” from Yelp according to the metrics inside their listing’s dashboard. I then modified what I was going to count as a lead since Yelp’s definition of a lead and my definition is vastly different. Here is what I included and the rounded percentage of Yelp-defined leads that they represented:
I did not include:
I excluded the directions metric because I don’t think someone clicking the map counts as a lead. If Yelp had separated these two things and included the number of just those who sought driving directions, that would be much more helpful. Additionally, people don’t generally just drive up to a European auto repair garage without an appointment, so the people getting directions would most likely be duplicates of the people that called. Since I was only considering 35% of Yelp leads to be real leads, I was left with a total of 50 leads in a three month period. However, not all these leads were from ads. When you start advertising, you are still getting a ton of organic traffic from Yelp regardless of the ad. To estimate the amount that was from the ad, I looked at the previous three months and saw they got 34 leads before they started advertising. Because of this, I concluded they saw an increase of 16 leads (32% increase) in the three months they had been advertising. The real number of leadsAfter my careful calculation, I still felt like the number was missing something. Knowing someone clicked to your website or clicked on your phone button doesn’t mean they should be counted a lead. Yelp doesn’t track how many total calls you get directly from the listing; they only count “click-to-call” on mobile. I felt this was probably causing me to undercut the real ROI quite a bit. For this reason, we decided to switch the phone number on the Yelp listing for a couple of months and track and record every call that came in. We added the new tracking number as a secondary phone number in Google My Business to make sure it didn’t mess up any consistency with the Name-Address-Phone Number (NAP). During January 2018, the auto repair garage received 50 calls from the Yelp number from 43 unique callers. That number might sound high, but to classify which were actual leads, I listened to every call. Here’s who called:
Based on this, they got a total of five new leads from calls plus one additional lead that filled out a contact form on their website. Since we previously saw Yelp ads increased their leads by 32%, that works out to be two new leads that came from a $700 ad spend, or a cost of $350 per lead. Yelp ads ROI vs Google AdWordsTo determine if that’s a good cost per lead, I wanted to compare it to the Google AdWords account we were running for them. Including our management fee, they spent $1,171.64 on Google AdWords in January. They received 36 calls from 26 unique callers from these ads. The calls broke down like this:
Based on this, they had a total of seven callers that were leads, along with four additional leads that submitted a contact form on their website. This leaves a total of 11 leads from a $1171 ad spend or $106 a lead. Yep, their cost per lead on Yelp is 3.3 times higher compared to Google AdWords! In conclusion, Yelp ads might be a good option if your customer lifetime value is high enough to justify spending a lot more per lead than you would elsewhere. No matter what you do, don’t trust the data you see on the dashboard and make sure you test the actual quality of the calls you’re getting — because a call isn’t the same thing as a lead. The post Are Yelp ads worth paying for? How to figure it out appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2BIPLuA Today, digital marketers believe they have to choose between scale and precision targeting. Oracle Data Cloud offers proof that they don’t have to. The more relevant the audience, the stronger the campaign performance will be. While we’ve found that maximizing reach is important, it’s all about Relevant Reach. Learn how to harness the power of Relevant Reach by carefully crafting an audience of the highest-potential buyers with data-driven targeting to push better campaign results. Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “Relevant Reach” from Oracle Data Cloud. The post Is the way you think about reach outdated? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2sJfEYh |
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