Google announced some updates to how it plans to inform users about the ads they see, including a new type of schema, as well as the latest on Privacy Sandbox proposals to manage ad serving, measurement and more without third-party cookies and cross-site tracking on Friday. Ad Disclosure schema. Google’s testing an Ads Transparency Spotlight tool that relies on what it calls Ad Disclosure schema to show users information about the ads served on web pages. The Ads Transparency Spotlight tool is available now as a Chrome extension in alpha stage. (You can also enable it in Microsoft’s Edge browser if you allow extensions from other stores.) At this point the tool only shows data on ads purchased through Google Ads that have implemented Data Disclosure schema. Google’s hoping the schema catches on with other ad sellers. See this Github page for the types of data it can support. The aim is to let users see “detailed information about all the ads they see on the web,” but it will need to get broad buy-in and implementation of Ad Disclosure schema to get there. When the extension can’t detect any ads on a page, you’ll see this message: “Currently can only show information about display ads purchased through Google Ads. These ads have implemented a new Ad Disclosure Schema. As others implement the Ad Disclosure Schema into their ads’ HTML, they will appear here, too.” If it does detect ads, at this point it simply lists the number of ads detected and the platforms used to buy them — currently just Google. The idea is to add information about why an ad was served. and include other controls in the tool. An Entities tab lists all companies and services with a presence on the page — content delivery networks or analytics providers, etc. About this ad. A new look for ad disclosures shown to users will be called “About this ad.” It will still continue to feature the “Why this ad” and “About the advertiser” sections. The verified advertiser information is pulled from your Ads account as part of the advertiser verification program that Google introduced for all advertisers in April. The About this ad experience, shown below, will first start showing on display ads bought through Google Ads and Display & Video 360 in the coming months, followed by other ad formats in 2021. Google says Why this ad receives more than 15 million user interactions daily and that it is now available when Google ads appear on connected TVs. Privacy Sandbox update. Privacy Sandbox is the Chromium initiative for proposed alternative privacy-centric solutions for enabling advertising in ways that don’t rely on third-party cookies, device IDs or techniques like fingerprinting. “One of the proposed APIs, for trust tokens that could combat ad fraud by distinguishing between bots and real users, is now available for testing by developers, and more will move to live testing soon,” wrote Mike Schulman, Safari and Mozilla already limit third-party cookies and Chrome is set to phase them out by 2022. This has significant implications for the entire ecosystem. In a guide for marketers published this month, Google says suggests brands focus on building direct (i.e. first-party) relationships with users and learn to be flexible with targeting and measurement “when personalization is limited.” For more on where ad privacy is heading and how to prepare, read:
The post Will Google’s Ad Disclosure schema catch on? appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2BPYMV6
0 Comments
I’ll get right to it. As an SEO I think you should care about brand performance. This isn’t an “I know better than you” post. I don’t. This isn’t a “you’re obsolete” post. You’re not. What I’m going to do here is make a series of statements that I think you’ll agree with and I believe that, together, we’ll come to the conclusion that SEOs should be actively involved in brand decisions. I think we’ll agree on that because we don’t have the option of saying “I’m not getting involved”. Because, like it or not, our brand interest is already affecting the performance we are held accountable for, so our best bet is to get ahead of it and use the data we have access to as SEOs for the benefit of our whole company. To get credit for the successes we’re contributing to and avoid the losses. An SEO decision treeIt all boils down to the decision tree image below. To use it, start at the blue box at the top and let yourself be guided by your answers to each question. After the decision tree, I’ll break down each question to show why I think they are relevant and why I think they lead us to caring about brand. The questionsIf you agree with me and you don’t need convincing – skip to the end for details on how we can be involved with brand performance. Through measuring success and helping to guide brand building efforts. I’m not going to break down the first couple because I think they’re fairly self-explanatory. We’re focusing on the impact of brand for SEOs. If you’re not an SEO or you know brand just isn’t a factor in your industry then fair enough. Are you able to separate your branded and non-branded traffic?As an SEO, you’re likely judged on how many valuable sessions you can bring to the site through Google organic traffic. If you are just reporting on total organic sessions, that number will include the sessions where people have searched {{x generic product name}} or {{y topic we’ve targeted by a blog post}}. But they will also include sessions where people have searched for your brand and, understandably, clicked through to your site. That means that if more people start searching for your brand, you get more traffic. Great, you look good. It also means that if fewer people are searching for your brand then you look bad. If we focus only on standard SEO tactics and overall organic performance, we don’t have full control over whether the numbers go up or down. We also won’t always have a good explanation for why the numbers are going up or down. In this case our personal performance, the performance of our team, is impacted by demand for the brand in a way we can’t control for. You should care about brand. How can I separate branded and non-branded numbers?One way is to use data from Google Search Console (GSC). GSC will give you data that is kind of like organic session numbers, broken down at keyword level. You can see here that for two of my coding-themed keywords, I’ve had 436 and 102 clicks respectively. We can take those “click” numbers to be roughly similar to sessions. So you can make one bucket that has every keyword which includes your brand name, misspellings of your name, and any terms which only refer to you or things you list on your site. You can make another bucket which includes everything else. You can then sum up those groups to get an idea of how many brand/non-brand sessions you’re getting over time. You could do that manually by exporting data from the interface. You could use the excellent Search Analytics for Sheets plugin which will extract the data directly to Google Sheets. You could use code to extract the data day-by-day and put it straight into BigQuery (which is what we do with our clients). Whatever you do, I would use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to help with the categorization because people will be spelling your brand in a bunch of ridiculous ways when they search for you and matching RegExs avoids having to identify all the misspellings manually (if you’d like to learn RegEx, I actually made a game to help you). As we’ll see in the next section, that won’t give you perfect data but separating everything out this way will give you some idea of how you’re getting on for brand and non-brand separately. Are you sure you’re getting all of the brand/non-brand data?Maybe you are separating out your traffic based on whether it’s branded or non-branded. Maybe you’re using one of the methods we spoke about in the last section to calculate the number of branded clicks. The problem is, Search Console doesn’t give you all the data. Particularly if you ask for keyword-level data you lose some of it to sampling and some of it to protect the privacy of users if Google thinks that what they searched for is specific enough. We said that we use Search Console clicks as a rough guide to the number of organic sessions (Google only). Below I’ve pasted the number of clicks that Search Console registered for my site and the number of Google organic sessions it registered, for the same time period. Admittedly, this is a particularly bad example but Google Analytics is reporting 191 users arriving from Google Organic search for a total of 325 sessions whereas Search Console is reporting only 60 total organic clicks. That’s a lot of data missing. So if we use GSC data to measure brand, we might be able to see some fluctuations in interest but, if we’re using Google Analytics terminology, our data is basically sampled at 15%. There’s a lot of potential for us to think brand is going up when it’s actually going down. However, brand interest could change a lot over the course of a year, for example. We could lose enough branded sessions over the course of a year that this lost data makes a difference to your year-on-year session numbers. And it’s quite likely that you will be held responsible for that change. If we aren’t reporting specifically on brand changes over time it’ll be hard to say why. So if we’re not getting all the data, we’re still in a position where changes in brand interest can change the overall numbers we’re responsible for. And we don’t have all the data to pick it apart. You should care about brand. Do you avoid reporting on things like conversions that you can’t split by brand/non-brand?I want to be clear in this section – I think we should report on conversions. Whenever we can, whatever we do should come back to business impact. Branded sessions are highly likely to convert. By the time someone is searching for your brand, particularly by the time someone is searching for your brand plus a product you sell (i.e. “H&M dresses”) they are interested in buying specifically from you. If you’re in an industry where customers tend to spend much more time researching, you’re probably using some kind of multi-touch attribution to see what channels are contributing to conversions. In that case brand could well come up multiple times, for example at the comparison stage (i.e. “Zendesk vs Freshdesk”) and then the final conversion decision (“Zendesk”). Whether we’re just looking at conversions based on the last referring channel, or we’re using some kind of attribution, branded sessions are likely to be a significant chunk of the organic numbers we are reporting. We can’t reliably split organic conversions into brand and non-brand because on-site analytics platforms can’t (or won’t) tell us what organic keyword brought a user to the site. So if brand interest goes up organic will probably get credit for more conversions, and we will look good. If it goes down we will look bad. If we’re not paying attention, if we’re not involved in brand activity, these changes will be out of our control and we’ll be blind to the causes. You should care about brand. Are you allowed to report to your line manager directly on non-branded performance?Even if we can split brand and non-brand, and our manager understands the distinction, if we’ve set KPIs based on the total number they are going to care about the total number. So if we aren’t measuring brand changes, if we’re not participating in brand activity or brand planning, our success or failure is still somewhat outside of our control. You should care about brand. Can you tell your board to ignore non-brand performance numbers?Again, I have to be clear here – I don’t think we should be doing this. We just need to be aware – this is what is required if we want to separate brand performance from SEO numbers. If we took the stance that organic measurement shouldn’t include brand and shouldn’t include conversions, we might be able to convince our manager. But they probably have time to understand the nuance. Their manager might not, or perhaps the level above them. Usually, at some point below board level, someone in the hierarchy doesn’t have time to think purely about organic non-brand clicks. They just need to know how much we’re getting through organic search. In order to completely avoid being judged on changes in brand performance we would have to convince our entire company that whenever “organic performance” is mentioned it should only be in the context of non-branded clicks. I don’t think we want to win this particular argument. Organic performance will be compared with paid, social, email. Those are all channels that are very good at talking money. If we’re not reporting on things like conversions it becomes a lot harder to justify investment in organic. That makes it harder to get more people on our team, to get space in the dev queue to make site changes, to get rises and promotions. Even if we ignore the impact on our progression and workload, we aren’t doing SEO for the sake of it. We’re doing SEO to help our company to make money, and that means caring about conversions (and hence brand performance). These things affect whether our company will exist next year. Even if we decide it’s worth it, it’s quite unlikely that we can get the whole company to only judge us on non-brand clicks. So if we’re not involved in brand decisions we don’t have control over the numbers we’re held responsible for. You should care about brand. Do you have evidence that brand recognition doesn’t impact click-through rate for your brand?In surveys around 70% of people say that they look for brands they know when choosing what result to click on in search. Say we completely ignore the purpose of SEO (to help the business make money) and we massively reduce our own influence by convincing everyone to judge organic performance based only on non-brand clicks. Because people are more likely to click on brands they know, we could end up getting less traffic for exactly the same hard-won position in a non-brand search, purely because people don’t know us. So if we’re not measuring brand, if we’re not involved in brand decisions, we’re not fully in control of the numbers we’re reporting on. You should care about brand. Are you sure that branded searches don’t impact rankings?Maybe we know (somehow) that click through rate isn’t impacted by brand. Or maybe we’re not even judged on organic traffic, maybe we’re judged on rankings for specific keywords through some kind of rank-tracking tool. The only wild card left is the rankings themselves. To rank search results, Google has always needed a way to work out which sites are reliable and which aren’t. Initially the main solution was links. If we assume that links are still a major factor for Google in terms of trust, we know that generating links often involves getting attention and exposure across the internet (through things like press). Essentially – building a brand. What’s more, if people know your brand they are more likely to link to you. So even if we take links at face value, they’re pretty deeply entwined with brand. You could think we can generate links without building brand. Funnily enough – that is exactly why links have always been so problematic for Google. SEOs have worked out how to generate lots of fake links that don’t actually provide value for users, that don’t actually help users trust a brand. And trust is what Google wanted to measure from the very start.. Now, Google has lots more information about the internet than it used to. There are lots of other signs they could use to judge if something is reliable. For years, Tom Capper has been talking about brand being a better predictor of search rankings than links are. That doesn’t mean that Google has to know what a brand is, but it does mean that Google may be measuring a series of other factors which all, like links, are correlated with brand. In that case, even if we can directly manipulate some of them the way we can directly manipulate links, it’s much harder to know which levers to pull and the most direct way to try to impact the numbers we’re judged on, again, becomes brand. There are also some stories filtering through the SEO industry, by way of pub chats, DMs and private groups, of people influencing rankings by driving up specific branded searches. The theory could be summed up with this example;
I don’t have any direct data on this and don’t have any interest in us committing to rumours here so we’ll treat that as an interesting point but not one that we need to take as gospel. This question has a less obvious answer than some of our others but there’s still some evidence here that we should pay attention to, and be involved in, brand, because it may well be impacting our rankings as well as everything else. You should care about brand (if you disagree, go to the next section). You answered “yes” to all the questions – are you taking the credit?So, to get to this point we have to take the fairly extreme position that;
If you’re getting sessions for non-branded searches, that means that people are coming to your site when they might not otherwise. They are seeing your products, they’re knowing more about your brand. As an SEO, when you aren’t benefiting from brand you are building brand. While we’ve focused purely on the SEO impact here, that brand awareness will affect your company’s marketing and success. If you’re not measuring brand, if you’re not part of brand conversations, then you’re not getting full credit for all your hard work. You should care about brand. Why SEOs are the perfect team to be involved in brandYou could argue that many teams are impacted by brand and I won’t disagree with you. I think it’s important for SEOs to be involved in brand conversations because we are particularly vulnerable to untracked brand changes and because we regularly use tools and work with data that can help us estimate branded search. As an industry, we’re also much more used to SEO involving longer-term investment. Perhaps because channels like paid social and paid search are so thoroughly tracked, it can sometimes be even harder to convince people to think less about those channels in terms of immediate ROI and more in terms of medium-term brand growth. How to measure brand and inform brand activityWe have a couple of ways to track overall brand performance, you can use these to help benchmark efforts over time. Direct traffic to the homepage: tells you about people putting your site into the address bar and landing directly on the homepage (so they definitely know your brand). It’s not specific to SEO and it’s not perfect but it helps you form a picture. Total branded searches in Search Console: won’t give you all the data but by tracking total brand impressions you can see a trend in interest (for more information on this, check out the section above How can I separate branded and non-branded numbers?) Guiding brand activity Even better than seeing how well we’ve done – we can help our whole company know where to focus brand-building efforts. Google Trends: is a fantastic source of information that can help you see what has been working for you or your competitors, and what states/locations/geographic areas to focus your activity on. That can inform everything from blog content and digital advertising, to newspapers to target and billboard placement. Google Ads: can get you next-level brand data at product and city level. For example, you could use it to see if your customers are more likely to search for your dresses or your competitors’ (replace product as necessary). As with Google Trends, you can use that data to guide everything from on-site content and email campaigns, to advertising, events, and outreach. SERP ownership trackers: are increasingly common. For instance Visably (I have no affiliation but do have a free account, which you could get too) and SERP Sketch (I’ve heard of it but not used it). Rather than just telling you if you’re ranking for a specific keyword, they’ll show you if any of the pages in the top ten results mention your brand. That’s the kind of information you can use to select outreach targets. Let’s do the interesting workBrand isn’t the only factor we need to contend with in SEO but the way I see it, we either have the choice of reducing our roles, of closing off and taking less responsibility for the performance of our companies, or diving right in, understanding that brand is a part of our work and using the data we have access to, to help everyone. Anything you think I’ve missed? I’d love to hear your thoughts. The post Why SEOs should care about brand appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/316hmRf Expanding marketing efforts beyond your home country can be an exciting step. However, branching into new regions with PPC entails much more than simply copying your campaigns and changing the geographic targeting. Don’t rush into setting up international campaigns until you’ve thought out budgeting, channel allocation, account structure, localization, and unique regional concerns. In this article, I’ll expand on each of these points to help you establish a framework for beginning to target other countries. Budget for different costs by countryCPCs and CPMs to compete in ad auctions vary widely by country. You can get a rough estimate for projected spend in Google search by adding your keywords to Google Keyword Planner and setting the region to the country you’re planning to target. However, these estimates can be off, and you’ll get the best idea of average CPCs/CPMs once you actually start running a campaign and see actual figures. In addition, costs for customer acquisition also will likely vary by country. If you’re just starting to advertise in a region that’s not familiar with your brand, you can often expect higher CPAs. However, you might find the opposite to be true if CPCs are lower in that region. I recently launched a LinkedIn campaign in Latin America for a client, and we found that CPAs were less than half of our averages in the United States due to significantly lower CPCs. Also, pay attention to CRM data to measure lead quality. While they may be cheaper in a region, a lower percentage of prospects may actually be the right potential customers. You’ll ultimately want to look at metrics like cost per qualified lead and cost per completed sale to determine what CPAs to aim for in your campaigns. Research top channels by regionConsider what search and social channels people use the most in the regions you’re looking to target. Targeting Google alone will exclude a significant number of users in several countries. For instance, Yandex covers 44% of the search engine market share in Russia, and Baidu has 66% of the market share in China. StatCounter is a good site to start for research (with the caveat that no stats are going to be 100% accurate), as well as talking to contacts on the ground in regions you’re looking to target. Representatives at ad platforms may be able to assist in providing stats on regional usage, as well. Plan for account structureSeparating campaigns by country, or by overarching region, allows you to better control bids and segment out reporting. This tactic also prevents countries with cheaper CPCs and high volume from cannibalizing spend, giving countries that may have higher CPCs, but quality leads, a chance to perform. Separate geographic campaigns also allow for more accurate usage of time-based bid modifiers. If you lump the Europe and the US into the same campaign, and lower bids during the night in the US, you’re effectively also lowering bids during the workday in Europe. Keeping those regions in different campaigns allows you to apply hourly bid modifiers without worrying about hurting performance in time zones several hours away. You should also consider billing needs when deciding how to segment out accounts. Particularly for enterprise-level companies, payment often needs to come from different divisions by region. Using separate ad accounts may be necessary to ensure you can use different billing sources for each division. Include asset localizationMake sure to localize copy for the people you’re aiming to reach. This work may entail translating keywords, ad copy, and landing page copy into another language. Or, you may be targeting people who already speak English but use different words based on regional dialects. For instance, if you’re selling diapers, you’ll want to refer to “nappies” when advertising in Britain. See how the wording on these example results pages vary for the same product category between Amazon US (“diapers”) and Amazon UK (“nappies”): Be sure to adapt for regional spellings, as well. For instance, a call-to-action to “View Our Catalog” should say “View Our Catalogue” in Britain. Have a copywriter familiar with regional dialects scrub through your copy to look for words, spelling, and colloquialisms that might not make sense for the area you’re targeting. Identify unique regional concernsSimply copying and pasting a campaign over to another region (even after a localization process) may not prove effective. Different areas of the world may have needs for unique services and varying behaviors as they engage with the sales funnel. For instance, a cybersecurity company may see interest in DDoS-related services surge after a particular country experiences attacks. Or a ski supply store may see sales pick up as regions approach their colder seasons. Finding these concerns should entail a combination of talking with your contacts within the business who have experience in the region, as well as researching search trends by month and by region. Google Trends can be helpful to pinpoint overarching seasonal trends. For example, see below how searches for “heater” peak at opposite times of the year for the United States vs. Australia. If you’re selling heating units, you’ll obviously want to take into account the weather by region when marketing internationally. Next, think about user behavior in different regions. I’ve found that in some cultures people are more responsive to talk to a salesperson sooner, while in others they may be more likely to want to simply read content first. You may need to refine your sales funnel and how much content you’re offering people at the top and middle of the process to see what works in each area. This step may take some testing to determine what works best. At the end of the day, don’t assume that your perfectly refined funnel in one region will translate perfectly to another region. Start planning your international campaignsReady to take the next step beyond marketing in your home country? Take these steps to build your plan for expanding into international PPC. Think through the nuances of the regions you’re targeting and the assets needed to adapt. Finally, be ready to watch the data and adapt your strategy on a regional basis as you begin to track performance. The post 5 tips for starting international PPC appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2CXNtLf The post SEL 20200731 appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3hUmVcA For many search marketers, title tags are one of the first-learned elements of the SEO’s toolkit. Unfortunately, that leads many to toss off title tag optimization as a beginner’s tactic. During his presentation on Advanced Title Tag Optimization at SMX Next last month, Moz SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard explained why title tags are a critical component of SEO – and how when done correctly, can provide massive value for searchers and businesses. In a crash course on title tag optimization, Shepard discusses why tags aren’t just for beginners and offers practical techniques – and what to avoid – in order to boost click-through rate (CTR) and earn more traffic. Why are title tags important?Title tags are the clickable headline that shows up on the SERP. Dictated by an HTML element that reflects the title of a web page, these tags are designed to help search engines understand the content of the page. There are key reasons why title tags are important, Shepard emphasized.
Going beyond the title tag basicsFor beginners in SEO, there are a few general ground rules for when you’re just starting out with title tags. Shepard said, for example, “We know that we only want one title per page, that the title should be relatively short – 50 to 60 characters – the title should be unique, meaning it shouldn’t be a duplicate of other titles on your site.” Other important considerations: use your target keywords (but avoid stuffing) and write compelling copy that answers the user’s query and will entice them to click through. How to write compelling titlesShepard uses the acronym NPR (yes, like the news organization) to help guide the thought process behind writing compelling headlines. N = Noticeable P = Promising R = Relevant Noticeable. In the below example of a Google search result for the best time to visit Europe, the title tags essentially all say the same thing. “I have to admit they’re a little uninspiring,” Shepard said. “There is nothing noticeable about these results. They’re just using the keyword but there’s nothing enticing me to click. There’s nothing to differentiate one of these results from any other result.” Promising. “When a title is promising, it tells you what you should expect when you click. It goes beyond the keyword to promise you something to satisfy an emotional need. And good titles typically offer this,” Shepard explained. When writing title tags, SEOs should think about how to use promising language to satisfy those needs as people search. He offers six ways to make title tags more promising for searchers:
“Even if you’re selling, you know, blenders. You can try to surprise people, thrill them, and impress them. They’re not just looking for blenders. They want something extra. Give them that in the title and you can entice the click. It’s hard to do, but you can do it,” Shepard said. Relevancy. Without relevancy, the elements of ‘noticeable’ and ‘promising’ can be easily diluted. Searchers are looking for results that are relevant to their intent, Shepard explained. In the below example, he demonstrates the difference between a relevant and non-relevant title tag for a search related to Target coupons. “The second result was a Target ads manufacturer. That’s not what I’m looking for. That’s not the promise that I want. I want the target promo codes and coupons,” he added. The recipe for Systematic SuccessShepard outlined the “rules” for how he approaches title tag audits in five steps, using it as high-level guidance to “win at title tags nearly every single time.”
The post Advanced tactics for SEO title tag optimization appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3jXmZdp Verified Google My Business profile owners in the U.S. can now add a Black-owned business attribute to their listings. Business attributes are highlighted as icons when customers view a business’ profile on mobile, as shown below. Why we careGoogle said it has seen “a surge in online searches for Black-owned businesses” in recent months — a period in which the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum. Distinguishing Black-owned businesses in local search may help those businesses attract visibility in Search and Maps and gain customers. “With this attribute, our goal is to make Search and Maps more inclusive and help support Black-owned businesses when they need it most,” Jewel Burks, head of Google for Startups U.S. said in Thursday’s announcement. Google is also adding the new attribute to its digital skills training program Grow with Digital Coaches, an initiative designed to help Black and Latinx small businesses reach new customers. More on the news
Related reading:
The post Google adds ‘Black-owned’ business attribute to local listings appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3ghwvFR In my last post, I shared how UGC (User Generated Content) helped my nonprofit client create authoritative articles that 1.) saved both of us loads of time and 2.) crushed it in search and social. (Update: that same client’s organic blog traffic is now up +776% Y/Y). But the wins don’t stop there. I discovered that users’ comments on the posts themselves not only provide great supplemental content that may help the page rank, but also offer amazing insight into how to further optimize the content. I call this “Feedback Optimization” – the process of using readers’ comments to improve a piece of content for relevancy and user intent. Doing this improved a top query’s click-through-rate (CTR) by +96% P/P with no change in ranking position. Intrigued? Here’s how it works: Feedback optimization process1. At the end of your article, include a call-to-action (CTA) to comment. A clear next step can encourage more engagement on your site. Simply ask users to leave their thoughts and ideas on the piece. Here’s an example of a comment CTA: “We’d like to hear it from you: what are some of the best ideas you have around this topic? Leave a comment below!” 2. Promote the article on social and email. Cross-channel promotion can spark a burst of comments from users who are already engaged with your brand. 3. Analyze the comments, both on the article itself and on social. Once your piece has gathered a few comments, read through them and take notes of what you find. Pay special attention to ideas that multiple users share. And remember: it’s best to remain true to your business’s values and perspective. A user who simply disagrees with your stance may not provide the most relevant feedback. Focus on consistent, helpful responses rather than singular opinions. 4. Update the article to incorporate readers’ ideas. This can mean adding relevant tips that users share, or updating/removing content that has received negative feedback. The goal is to tailor your content to what your audience truly wants. Then, you can re-promote to get feedback on your improved article! 5. Add Feedback Optimization to your ongoing content strategy. Consider checking the comments on top pieces every 3-6 months, rather than this being a one-off project. Regularly incorporating user feedback can supply new ideas that keep your content fresh (which we know is a search success factor). Now you may be wondering – will I actually see an SEO benefit from this effort? The resultsI tested this exact process on one of my client’s listicles. I read through the ~100 comments and quickly noticed a pattern: three of the suggestions missed the mark for a handful of commenters. Fortunately, many of these users also offered ideas on what to replace those items with. We were able to quickly pivot the list items and descriptions to what our audience felt was more helpful. Note: Comment analysis may sound time-consuming, but for reference, it took me less than 30 minutes to comb through all the comments and understand what needed to be changed. After updating the content and submitting to Google Search Console for faster indexing, we saw nearly immediate results. CTR on the best-performing featured snippet increased +96% P/P, from 14.2% to 27.8% with no significant change in ranking. We also saw a +21% traffic boost to the page, with improvements across most keywords. It’s interesting to consider: you can own the snippet—the holy grail of ranking positions—but if people don’t like what they see, they may simply move on. And even if you don’t own the snippet, user perception still impacts a variety of factors that may affect your page’s performance: backlinks, dwell time and comment sentiment, to name a few. Short on comments? Try these 3 tips1. If you don’t receive a lot of comments or social engagement on your own pages, try looking at competitors’ articles for the same keywords. They may have comments on their pages that would be relevant for your own content! 2. It also never hurts to directly ask (if appropriate) a few people you think the article’s topic applies to. Gathering even a few opinions can bring to light obvious ideas you may not have thought of. 3. Finally, look at your article’s queries in Google Search Console to see if searchers are finding you for topics that you should dive deeper into in the piece. For example, one of our SaaS clients has an article about team meetings that started gaining traction for “online” and “conference call” keywords when quarantine began. We updated the language to be more relevant for virtual meetings – applicable not only during the COVID-19 pandemic but also as the working world shifts more and more remote. Final thoughtsBeyond the traffic gains, the point of this process is to listen to our audiences and create the best possible content to suit their needs. I hope these results encourage content creators to prioritize user perception alongside the “search engine opinion.” Asking for feedback and acting on helpful suggestions is one way to create better search results that can truly make a difference. That’s something I think we can all get behind. The post Feedback optimization: A user-first approach to SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3gepntX Google has added support for image license metadata for licensable image label to both Google Search Console reports and the Rich Results test tool. Google said on Twitter “we are happy to announce support for Image License structured data in Search Console in addition to the Rich Results Test tool.” Image license metadata. This is metadata and schema that you can use to display licensing information about content that appears in Google Images. Here is what the licensable image label looks like in search: Search Console enhancement report. A new section has been added to the Enhancements reports in Search Console if you use this markup. Google will only show this to you if you use this markup. Here is a screen shot of the new section, showing some errors: Rich results test tool. Google also said it is supported on the Rich Results test tool over here. Google’s updated documentation on this tool says it is one of the 17 markup options supported by the rich results test tool. Why we care. Now you can debug any coding issues or indexing and display issues with Google Image Search with your image licenses schema and markup. The post Google Search Console adds image license structured data support appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2D5xYkj Bing fully launched its new Bing Webmaster Tools Thursday, and with that, a brand new URL Inspection tool. The Bing URL Inspection tool allows you to inspect Bing indexed version of your URLs allowing to detect potential indexing issues due to crawl or not following Bing Webmaster guidelines. Google launched its URL Inspection tool over two years ago in June 2018. How do the two compare? They are similar. Google and Bing’s URL Inspection tools are pretty similar. They essentially do the same thing: help webmasters, developers, SEOs and site owners see potential indexing issues with URLs in their respective search engines. Use both. Even though they are similar, it doesn’t mean you should just use one. Use both. Each will show you how your URLs are doing within those specific search engines. If you want to see how your URL is doing in Google, use the Google URL Inspection tool. If you want to see how your URL is doing in Bing, use the Bing URL Inspection tool. Overview screen. Here is what the tools look like on the overview page after you run a URL for testing. Bing URL Inspection Tool: Google URL Inspection Tool: Both tools let you enter a URL, compare the indexed version of the URL or run a live test of that URL to see immediate changes to the URL that you may have made. Both tools show you if the URL is indexed in its search engines. And both show you any SEO issues or improvements you can make as well as any markup or enhancements on those pages. Also, both tools allow you to request indexing. Google’s tool highlights AMP, Bing’s does not. Indexing details. This shows you information about the indexed status of a page. It shows you if the URL is indexed and much more. Let’s compare. Bing: Google: Bing shows you the first date and time the URL was discovered on, Google does not show you that. Both show you the last time the page was crawled. Google shows you the method of discover, either an XML Sitemap file or referring page, Bing does not show those details. Google shows you the user agent that crawled the page, was it a smartphone user agent or desktop – Bing does not. Both show if the page was allowed to be crawled, if it was fetched successfully and if indexing was allowed. Also both show the canonical URL, but Google shows the Google selected canonical versus the user-declared canonical. Issues. Both tools also aim to help you fix issues with your URLs when it finds any. Bing: Google: Both tools may show you different issues. For example, the URL I inspected in Bing showed issues with meta language tags being missing and alt attributes for images missing. I did not get those errors on that URL with the Google URL Inspection tool. So I had to compare another page on my site to see errors and the error I was able to see on Google was around AMP, which Bing did not show me. So both tools can and do show different issues that are more applicable to those search engines. When the tools do show issues, you can click on them, it will not only describe the issue and give you help documentation on how to fix those issues. The tools will also highlight the code or HTML that has the issue. Google opens those issues in a hover over window on the right of the page. Bing overlays the issue on top in a context menu. Why we care. If you are having issues with a specific URL and getting that URL indexed properly, then use this tool. Even if Google shows everything is fine, try the Bing tool, see what it shows you that you can fix. It seems that after a quick review, both tools show you slightly different errors that you can fix that may benefit both search engines. The post Bing’s new URL Inspection tool: What it does and why to use it appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/3fcFW88 Google is testing a larger font size in ad headlines. In the search result captured by PPC hubbub, all of the ads in the top positions above the organic results showed the test headline treatment. Why we care. It’s easy to see this treatment yielding higher click-through rates. Google is always running tests and there’s no telling if this one will stick, or if it would roll out for just the absolute top ad, all top ads or even all ads on the page. Google often reserves features for the ad in the absolute top position, making it more desirable and competitive in the ad auction. But it’s clearly testing the treatment in the absolute top ad against the impact when all four top ads get the big-font treatment. The post Google blows up ad headline font in new test appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/2XcnqXj |
Archives
April 2024
Categories |