Google reported searches for “how to help small businesses” spiked in March, “increasing more than 700% since February.” Partly in response to this outpouring of interest, Google introduced support links in early May. This is just one of several new features and tools Google is rolling out broadly in an effort to help local businesses survive COVID-19. Global expansion of support links. Initially available for English speaking markets (i.e., U.S., U.K, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand), support links are now expanding to 18 additional countries including Japan, Spain and Italy. They allow business owners to add donation and gift card links to business profiles, through Google partnerships with PayPal and GoFundMe. For gift cards, Google is working with Square, Toast, Clover and Vagaro. Google said that a business name search will expose donation or gift card links on the Business Profile (screenshot below). The company added that soon people will be able to use Search and Maps to find nearby/near me businesses seeking support. By popular demand. I asked whether there was any evidence that these links would result in meaningful support or help to local businesses. Google’s SVP of Google Maps Jen Fitzpatrick pointed to the search query volume and added, during a conference call, that anecdotal evidence indicated high demand for them. Support links Online classes and virtual appointments. During that same conference call previewing these announcements, Google discussed the shift from in-person and offline services to online classes and “virtual appointments.” Accordingly, the company is going to surface online services with several new business attributes such as “online classes,” “online appointments,” or “online estimates.” Google said that “in the coming weeks,” it will make these attributes more visible in Search and Maps. The company is also expanding the Reserve with Google program beyond in-person appointments to online services. The program features a growing roster of third party booking software providers. For online services it’s adding Booksy, WellnessLiving, Zooty and Regis to start. “Merchants working with one of these partners can offer online bookings directly on Google and share details with customers about how to pay and join the meeting using their preferred video platform,” Google said in its blog post. As businesses begin to reopen, some of them have secondary hours. Below is an example of a restaurant that operates a drive-through after the main restaurant is closed. But this also applies to special grocery store hours for seniors or pharmacies within a larger supermarket or drugstore. (Local SEO Carrie Hill goes into more detail on secondary hours.) Secondary hours A million COVID posts. Among other data shared during the call, Google emphasized the success of COVID posts. The company said it has seen more than a million such posts since March, “with millions of clicks to merchants’ websites every week.” In addition, there have been “more than 200 million edits to business profiles” since February,” many of these addressing special hours and temporary closures. In the restaurant category, “more than 3 million restaurants have added or edited their dining attributes,” (i.e., “takeout,” “delivery”) since March. And Google has added more attributes, such as “no contact delivery” and “curbside pickup.” The company is also bringing on more food-delivery services globally. More control over food delivery. Food delivery been quite a controversial topic during the pandemic, with some delivery providers being accused of unethical business practices (e.g., hijacking listings) or extracting excessive fees from struggling restaurants. Google says it’s going to give restaurants greater control over which delivery services are associated with their profiles and the ability to identify a preferred food-delivery provider. I asked whether Google checks to see if there’s an actual business relationship between the delivery service and the restaurant. Google says that it does but if a restaurant sees an unauthorized vendor on its profile, the owner can “contact Google My Business support to get the third-party vendor removed.” Why we care. It’s important to point out that Yelp offers many of the same features and tools, including some that Google does not. But anyone working with local businesses or multi-location brands knows the gravitational importance of Google My Business. And while there’s nothing dramatic among the new announcements, they reflect an acceleration in the platform’s evolution — as a gateway to both offline and, increasingly, online services and e-commerce. The post New Google My Business features aim to help SMBs pivot and survive COVID-19 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2Xxc2F2
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Google introduced two big image-driven ad tests at its Google Marketing Live event last year. Gallery ads for Search campaigns didn’t make it and are set to shuffle off this summer, but Discovery ads have emerged from testing and are now available to all advertisers globally. Discovery campaigns quietly rolled out last month, and Google made the news official Wednesday. Discovery ads are eligible to serve across the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discover feed on the Google Search app and in Gmail Promotion and Social tabs and open up new avenues for both Google and advertisers. Treading lightlyIf you’ve failed to notice ads in Discover feed yet, that’s because Google is treading very lightly here. The company says Discovery campaigns are delivering scale for advertisers, but it is being very cautious — particularly about ads in Discover feed. There is currently just one ad slot — in position three — on the Discover feed. More ads are likely, but Jerry Dischler, VP/GM of Ads Platforms & Google Properties, in a phone interview Tuesday, said “we are holding the quality bar really high and only showing the ads that have the best image assets that we think are most relevant to users” in that context. Google machine learning is used to determined when to serve a Discovery ad that will deliver the best results on the campaign objective, said Dischler, who noted results continue to improve. Welcome to Google Ads, social media marketersAs we wrote last year, “Discovery campaigns take their cue from Facebook’s success at exactly this type of visually impactful, native ad format targeted based on audience data rather than search intent.” When Google introduced the Discovery campaign type last year, it called out that the Discover feed has more than 800,000 monthly users. Now, Google is rolling up usage across the YouTube, Discover and Gmail surfaces to claim a combined audience of 2.9 billion people. This approach to audience totals takes a page from Facebook, which started reporting usage across its “family of apps” last year. As it would happen, Facebook reported 2.99 billion monthly active people (MAP) as of March 31, 2020. In other words, Google is saying it can offer reach on par with Facebook. In case it wasn’t abundantly clear that Discovery ads are aimed at paid social dollars, Google spells it out. In one case study cited in today’s announcement, Deckers “repurposed high-quality images from social campaigns” for Discovery ads last holiday season. In another, Gareth Cleevely, VP head of paid search at iProspect, says, “We’ve seen them deliver positive performance further down the funnel with up to 48 percent lower cost-per-action compared to social ads.” And yet another, Phil Twigg, head of acquisition at MandM Direct, says, “We were able to quickly scale our social media campaigns to Discovery ads.” It is the Discovery ads that come out of the social vernacular that tend to perform best, said Dischler. He noted that in evaluating ad creatives during testing, they’d know which ones were created by social teams, display teams and search teams. Those who are using or adapting ads starting from social assets, including high-quality images, have been most successful in using Discovery ads to “inspire users and generate demand,” he said. Advertisers are “now understanding the value of a more multi-faceted marketing strategy.” Discovery campaigns aren’t just another effort by Google to move beyond search intent and deliver audience connections throughout the funnel, they give Google an avenue into working with social budgets and teams. Which team is ultimately responsible for Discovery campaigns will vary, but in many cases agencies and companies will have search, display and now social teams with a hand in Google Ads campaigns. How to get started with Discovery campaignsDiscovery ads are set up in Discovery campaigns. There are two ad formats: Discovery carousel ads with multiple images and Discovery ads with a single image. For image assets, you can have Google scan your website for images that meet the size requirements, upload images, or select stock images from a Shutterstock library. The key is to have eye-catching, high-quality images. Google’s creative guide for says, “Aspirational imagery and copy is crucial.” As with responsive search ads (RSAs), Discovery ads serve combinations of headlines and descriptions automatically. Enter up to five headlines and and five descriptions. Google will also show a weekly impression estimate based on your geographic targeting. Targeting the United States? The weekly impressions estimate is 3.3 billion. You can let Google automatically choose the call to action text in your ads or choose from more than ten options such as “Apply Now,” “Contact Us,” “Download,” “Visit Site,” and “Shop Now.” Discovery campaign ad groups should be organized your campaign by strategy or theme. In additon to location, Discovery campaigns can be targeted by audience and/or demographic (age, gender, parental status and household income). Note that as this is one of Google’s automated universal campaign types, smart bidding is required and Ad Rotation and Frequency capping are not available for this campaign type. Google also notes in its Discovery ads tips page that advertisers should “Choose an average daily budget at least 10 times the value of your target cost-per-action (CPA) bid and wait for at least 40 conversions before making changes to your campaign.” The post Google is coming for Facebook budgets with Discovery ads, now available globally appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2TZ7G8L The post SEL 20200527 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3eoHEDC Serious content creators know that each article they publish is a piece of a larger content marketing arena. But the... The post How to Write 16 Knockout Articles When You Only Have One Wimpy Idea appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger https://ift.tt/3d1ATqV You know how important it is to consistently use on-brand visual marketing materials, and how to create them. The same goes for leveraging effective audio and building a sonic marketing strategy. Let experts in audio-specific branding, analytics and distribution explain why sound matters and how to incorporate it into your ad campaigns. Join Damian Scragg, general manager of Veritonic, Colleen Fahey, US managing director for Sixiéme Son, and founder and president of Adsonica, William Agush as they share their insights about audio marketing and how sound can play an important role in differentiating your brand from competitors. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:
Register today for “Sonic Branding: Leverage the Power of Audio In Your Marketing Strategy,” presented by Adsonica. The post Sonic Branding: Leverage the power of audio in your marketing strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3ekSr1u New Google Ads retail category reporting allows retailers to see product category performance across Search and Shopping campaigns. The reports show performance across a set of pre-defined product categories based on labels Google “uses to categorize the words that people search for on Google.” To get started. Create a new custom table report from the Reports tab in Google Ads. The fastest way to start building a retail category report is to just enter “Retail” in the search bar in the report builder. There are five levels of product categories, each one more granular than the next. You can add any level or stack levels in the rows section. Then add “Campaign type” to be able to see performance by Search and Shopping and add the metrics you want to analyze in the columns section. You an also add other dimensions, of course, including campaign name and campaign subtype which will show you performance for Smart Shopping campaigns. Why we care. Retail advertisers can then can apply filters and segments to see only those categories that meet certain activity thresholds and dig in to performance differences by bid strategy, targeting, location and more to help inform budget allocations and campaign optimizations. The post Analyze retail category performance across Google Ads Search and Shopping campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2ZKKxKV As lockdowns begin lifting, businesses have to consider how their reopening might be perceived by customers. While some customers are eager to return to their pre-pandemic activities, others are reluctant for fear of a second wave of infections. During our brand marketing session of Live with Search Engine Land, Cultivative’s Amy Bishop, Clix Marketing’s Michelle Morgan and Survata’s Chris Kelly discussed how their clients are thinking about the issue and the type of messaging that’s most advantageous when audiences are split. “It’s becoming just so fragmented in the different opinions and it’s becoming really polarized, so I think brands have to be a little bit careful about what they say because it could rub one group the wrong way,” Bishop said, adding that, in order to appeal to as many customers as possible, “being able to share your message of, ‘Here are the different ways we can operate; here are your options,’ I think will be important.” “I think that . . . it’s something where you kind of need to see if you can find a lane where you can fit in the middle, but there really might just be a little bit of brand playing into it; of ‘what company are you?’” said Morgan, noting that some businesses’ decisions and messaging may also be dictated by their immediate financial needs. When the only options are reopening as soon as possible or closing permanently, businesses should lean in with their messaging, Morgan advised. “Trying to pander to everybody usually means that you’re talking to nobody,” she said. “A lot of attention is already being given to, ‘Hey if this comes back in the fall, what do we do? Let’s not be caught flat-footed again,’” said Kelly. Some of the CMOs he’s spoken to are planning safety-related messaging for the impending reopening phase, but are also building contingency plans in case of a coronavirus resurgence in the fall. Why we care. Some audiences may be hesitant to shed social distancing measures at this time and others may be yearning to resume their regular lives as quickly as possible. Knowing how customers feel about returning to your business should guide your decision to reopen as well as the offerings and messaging that go along with that process. Planning for the possibility of a COVID resurgence can also help your business respond quickly should the unfortunate situation arise. This may take some resources away from the immediate reopening effort, but brands that are prepared are more likely to succeed during and after a potential outbreak. Want more Live with Search Engine Land? Get it here:
More about marketing in the time of the coronavirusThe post What’s the right messaging when customers are divided about reopening? [Video] appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/36ykAzt Google has introduced a new “confirm with voice match” payments feature into the Google Assistant for smart speakers and displays. Originally noticed by Android Police, I was able to access and activate it on my iPhone through the Google Home app. (I have not yet tried to test it.) Turning on the feature. On an iPhone, you can enable the feature by opening the Home app, tapping your image in the upper right and then selecting assistant settings. Following that, you choose payments and toggle on the “confirm with voice match” option. You’ll then see the screens below introducing the feature. Supported by an existing credit card on file, confirm with voice match is apparently not available for all purchases. Google does not indicate the purchase categories or limits tied to the capability. On a support page, Google says, “When you authorize payments with Voice Match, you can make purchases with your Google Assistant, like in-action upgrades through Google Play digital goods . . . What you can purchase with Voice Match might change depending on the good or service.” Set up for “confirm with voice match” Not clear where this can be used. Google’s vagueness suggests the feature is still very experimental for the company. Indeed, buying or ordering anything using a smart speaker or display is a minority use case and likely to be for the foreseeable future despite some early survey findings that suggested the arrival of “v-commerce.” In a 2017 survey by NPR and Edison Research, for example, 57% of respondents said they had purchased something on a smart speaker. Curiously, those findings have not been repeated since. In the most recent survey wave, 18% of smart speaker owners said they had ordered food through a smart speaker. That number probably can’t be extrapolated to the entire smart speaker owner population, however. Walmart’s voice-grocery ordering experiment. Roughly a year ago, Walmart introduced voice-grocery shopping on the Google Assistant. The focus was on existing Walmart shoppers and reordering. During it’s Q1 earnings, Walmart reported that e-commerce sales grew 74% year-over-year. It also said that demand for grocery pickup and delivery services had grown significantly. The fact that Walmart has never made any public statements about usage of this Google Assistant voice-ordering feature indicates it’s not being widely used. Yet, if ever there was a time for voice-based grocery shopping to arrive, it’s right now. Why we care. There are roughly 126 million smart speakers in 60 million U.S. households, according to the most recent NPR study. Despite this penetration, Amazon Echo and Google Home devices have not evolved into an effective marketing or commerce channel for retailers and brands. However, one could imagine grocery/food ordering, Google shopping transactions (in certain categories), hotel reservations or movie rentals — instances where users are seeking a specific business or branded product — using confirm with voice match. To get there, Google will need to do a lot more consumer marketing and education. The post Google Assistant’s ‘confirm with voice match’ gives new meaning to ‘contactless payments’ appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3gmGiuJ One of the most common opportunities we see for Shopify stores is to create blog content for SEO. Often, we see that Shopify sites are targeting keywords with informational intent with transactional pages. This creates a discrepancy between what content the store has and what Google is “willing” to rank. The result is that the Shopify store doesn’t have pages to support the intent of the keywords. In this post, we’ll talk about ways you can identify and fix this discrepancy. Let’s dive in: Identifying keyword intent for ShopifyLet’s use an example of a query for the term “selfie camera.” On the surface, this appears to be a transactional query. Users who are looking to perform a purchase for the term “selfie camera” are performing a query to purchase the product. However, when we look at the SERPs in Google, we actually see something different: All three of the top results for this term are informational in nature as opposed to transactional. This means that if you’re a Shopify store trying to rank a collections page for this query, you might not have any luck. This is an example of Google displaying what the user intent of the keyword is. By displaying these results, Google is showing us that users want informational “Listicle” types of content for this query. Users don’t just want to see all of the “selfie cameras” that you have available in your Shopify store, they want to see the best selfie cameras that the market has to offer. This means that the opportunity to rank for this keyword doesn’t exist within your category page. Instead, the opportunity to rank for this coveted keyword lies within your Shopify blog. Related: Shopify SEO Guide: How to increase organic traffic to your store Here is another interesting example. Similar to the term “best selfie camera,” another keyword that appears to be transactional is “cloth diaper.” Once again, at the surface we would assume that this keyword is queried by users who might want to make a purchase of cloth diapers. When looking at the SERPs, we can see that in this instance it is partially true. We can see that this term has mixed intent: The top three ranking pages are in fact transactional. Users who are looking to make a purchase for “cloth diapers:”
However, the results taking up positions 4 & 5 are more informational in nature:
This is called a “mixed intent” result. There are two different user intents active here. One is transactional (to purchase a cloth diaper), while the other is informational (to learn more information about best practices). Both types of pages are eligible to appear on the first page for this term. This means that there is an opportunity for some of these sites to appear more than once. For instance, let’s take a look at the results in the #1 position, Cottonbabies.com. This store is clearly already doing a great job with their SEO as they have claimed the first position here. However, there might also be an opportunity for another one of their results to appear. They only are ranking for the transactional intent but not the informational one. Looking through their site, they do have a page targeted towards “Cloth Diaper Basics.” This is essentially a blog post type of content under their /pages/ URL path. Looking at the page, we can see that it’s a very detailed FAQ that provides users with answers to all of their questions on the subject of “cloth diapers:” This page would make a great opportunity to improve the optimization to better target the transactional nature of the keyword. They could consider making adjustments such as:
This might give both their Shopify category page and their blog post a chance to rank in the top 10 for a very important keyword of theirs. It might seem difficult to rank a page for both transactional and information intent but it certainly can be done. For instance, Later.com does a great job of this for the keyword “instagram scheduler”. Knowing that this is a very important term for them, they have optimized their home page for the transactional intent and a blog post for the informational intent. The result is that they claim the first and second position for the keyword: This strategy that a lot of Shopify stores could benefit from. Finding Shopify blog opportunitiesSo all this information is certainly great but how can you find opportunities for your Shopify blog? Fortunately the process is pretty straightforward:
How to create new Shopify blogs for content gapsIf you’ve identified that you don’t have the blog content to compete for your store’s core keywords, you’ll need to go out and create it. This can be a bit of a daunting task, especially if you have to start from scratch. Fortunately for you, there’s no better SEO research tool out there than the Google search results. By reviewing them, you’ll be able to see exactly what types of content are ranking well in the search engines 1. Note common topics of top ranking postsThis is probably one of the most important aspects of ensuring that your Shopify blog posts rank well. Oftentimes, users expect to have certain types of questions answered when they’re looking for an informational article. It’s your goal to ensure that your content answers all of those questions. To do this, start by noting what types of content the URLs on the first page consistently have. For instance, back to our “cloth diapers” example, we can see that both of the informational articles talk about “Types Of Cloth Diapers”: Of course, this means that we’ll want to be sure that our content also contains this information. Both Google and users might expect this content on the page to be considered relevant enough to rank for the term. 2. Review “related searches”You can also review the “Related Searches” at the bottom of the search results. This will show you other queries that users generally search around this topic. Oftentimes, this will include ideas of topics that you could utilize in your own content. For instance, here are the examples of “Related Searches” that appear for this query: While obviously many of these ideas are branded and won’t be a good fit for our content (cloth diapers amazon, cloth diapers walmart), there are still ideas we could use. For instance, “how to clean cloth diapers” would be a great section to add to our pages. You can use this section to find additional content ideas around your core topic. 3. Utilize hub contentIn SEO, the concept of “hub content” is becoming more and more popular. Essentially, we’ll often see Google ranking articles that not only answer the question but also link to other internal resources that the site offers around that topic. As an example, Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO” ranks very well for the term “SEO,” despite having very limited on-page content. As of this writing, the page contains about 6-7 paragraphs of content at the top of the page. From there is simply an aggregated list of internal links: If you’re writing content for your Shopify blog, try to make it a piece of “hub content.” If your site already contains other useful resources that users would find helpful, ensure that you’re linking to them within the post. We recommend linking to them in both the on-page content as needed as well as a section at the bottom called “Resources”. This shows both users and Google that you not only have the content to answer the original query but your site can also help answer other variant questions that users might have. 4. Upsell to product pagesWe understand that one of the frustrating parts of this process is that these pages are informational in nature and are inherently less revenue focused. If these pages aren’t going to be revenue drivers, then there’s less incentive to create and optimize these blogs. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your Shopify blog is offering upsell opportunities for related products. You can do this in several ways:
This will give your blog posts a better chance of resulting in conversions from users. ConclusionWhile blogging might seem like a second priority for Shopify stores, oftentimes it can be extremely important for SEO. Shopify stores may need to create blog content to rank for keywords that may appear to be transactional in nature but Google is actually ranking informational results. Always be sure you understand the search intent of your high-value keywords as that will be pivotal to your content strategy. The post Blogging for Shopify: A unique SEO approach appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3cZCGN8 Social media platforms have become an integral part of people’s lives around the world. Even though numerous social media platforms exist, nothing compares to the popularity of Facebook. With billions of monthly active users, this social media giant is easily the biggest and most influential among its counterparts. It […] The post 4 Latest Facebook Trends to Revolutionize Your Marketing Strategy appeared first on Lawrence Tam. via Lawrence Tam https://ift.tt/3ex6KQP |
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