The paid media marketing landscape has become increasingly complex, as the speed of search engine algorithms and development changes accelerates and marketers demand more integrated channel capabilities. Automating paid media campaign management through an enterprise platform can improve efficiency and productivity. MarTech Today’s “Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for paid media campaign management platforms and the considerations involved in implementation. The 54-page report also includes profiles of nine leading vendors, pricing charts, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. Get your copy today at Digital Marketing Depot. The post Updated for 2017! Enterprise Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2fA3awk
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With Google’s continued focus on user experience and engagement metrics in recent algorithm updates, it’s become even more important for marketers to pay attention to how fast their sites are. Page speed has long been a ranking factor for desktop search results, and it may soon impact mobile rankings as well. The benefits of improved load times go well beyond their impact on SEO and your site’s organic rankings, however. Consider recent Google data, which shows that “53 percent of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load,” or that “for every second delay in mobile page load, conversions can fall by up to 20 percent.” So, how do you actually go about speeding up your site? For many non-technical marketers, trying to figure out how to improve page speed can be a daunting task. Which levers should you actually be pulling to generate a result? And how do you get those changes implemented on your site? I’m not a developer. My company owns and operates a number of different (relatively simple) publishing sites built on WordPress. I set about working to improve load times for these sites without any developer intervention to see what kind of impact could result from some simple tweaks that anyone (even me!) could make. In this post, I’ll walk through each of the optimizations, explain what the impact on our sites was and share actual data around load times, Google Speed scores and more. Three important points I’ll return to later in the post:
All of that said, this post (and understanding some of the basic levers available to improving page speed) should help you better understand the potential for speed improvements on your site. What are you optimizing for? Choosing the right page speed metricsLike a lot of SEOs starting out, I focused my efforts on page speed, based on Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool recommendations. It’s straight from Google’s mouth, gives very easy-to-understand metrics (a grade, just like school!) and has useful suggestions for speeding up page load times. The tool can definitely be helpful, but as you dig into page speed, you may recognize that:
That bolded bit above about your speed being factored in relative to your SERP competitors is very important; if you have a simple B2B site, you may look at a successful e-commerce site and say, “Their site is way slower than ours and does great! We should be fine!” But the reality is, that’s not who you’re competing with. You want your site to be as fast as it can be, so you should be comparing it to the sites that are ranking in the most important search results for your site. So, if we’re not using Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool scores as the be-all and end-all for our optimization efforts, what metrics should we be focusing on? Search Engine Land columnist Chris Liversidge does a great job of breaking this down in further detail in his excellent post on different page speed events, but effectively my focus was on:
Again, we want to focus on the user experience on our site, so making sure that the content above the fold is delivered lightning-quick and that the entire page loads quickly are really the main concerns. The TTFB metric (while imperfect) can be helpful in that it lets us know if our load time issue is a result of server problems. So these are our metrics. How do we know if our pages are even slow, though? Page speed measurement toolsFirst, we’ll need a tool to measure them. Fortunately, there are a lot of great free tools for these purposes. I used Web Page Test, which lays these out pretty simply. Here are the results for Search Engine Land, which are quite good for such a visual home page and a large and complex publishing site: Where tools are concerned, there are a lot of options to measure speed and get suggestions, including: And others. For our purposes here, I’ll be using data from Web Page Test. What are our goals? What’s a ‘good’ page speed?Again, the page load times will vary significantly from niche to niche and SERP to SERP, so our initial goal should simply be “get better.” That said, let’s look at some general best-practice guidelines around target times for these events:
Again, if your full page load times are coming in at 15 seconds, and it’s 5 seconds before critical path rendering is complete, don’t just throw up your hands. Start optimizing and work to get those numbers down, even if you may not be able to get them to under a second. Faster is better! OK, so what can you actually do to improve page speed?Let’s say you measure your page speed, and it’s slow; what can you do to make a difference? The most common suggestions from Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (and from optimization experts) include:
I’ll walk through here what optimizations I was able to implement on four different WordPress sites, and the before/after load times resulting from those optimizations. Again, these numbers won’t be true for all sites, and not every best practice will have the same impact on every site. But I think that through this process, you’ll see how some simple, quick optimizations can have a major impact on speed. Please note that while there are some optimizations you can make with a basic understanding of HTML, there are some inflection points where it’s important to get a technical resource to jump in and figure out the best way to improve your site’s load times. Step 1: Benchmarking our page speed metricsFirst, I took a snapshot of each site’s page speed metrics on the site’s home page and a deeper article page. I did this specifically for the purposes of this post. If you’re looking to optimize your site, you’ll ideally want to look at metrics sitewide, or at least on a sampling of your highest-traffic pages and across a typical page for each template on your site. Compared with some sites, these numbers aren’t terrible — but for simple content sites built on WordPress without a lot of bells and whistles, there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. What we did was implement four different commonly recommended page speed optimizations. Below, we’ll see the impact of each optimization as it was implemented, and then the cumulative impact of all of the optimizations. So let’s dig into the optimizations. Step 2: Code clean-upGoogle’s PageSpeed Insights tool recommended we “minify” each of the sites’ CSS, JavaScript and HTML. For this, we used a free WordPress plugin called Autoptimize. It took about 20 minutes to set up across the four sites: After optimizing HTML, JS and CSS and loading the JS and CSS inline, Google’s tool moved minification and “Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content” into the “Optimizations Found” column: What was the impact? As you can see, a majority of the pages saw improvement, and some saw significant 20-percent-plus upgrades. But in some cases, there was very little percentage improvement, or even worse performance. There is some variance from test to test, but what you see is that while these improvements will generally improve page speed, their level of impact varies and is dependent on the site. Please note: This is the free version of the plugin with a “best guess” at ideal settings. Be careful in making changes to your site’s code, and as I’ll mention later in the post, this is a particular area where you may want to look to a developer for guidance. Step 3: Browser cachingNext, we wanted to leverage browser caching. Typically, you can use WordPress plugins like WP Super Cache or WP Rocket for this purpose, but these sites were hosted on WP Engine, which has some compatibility issues with some of those plugins. So, we simply enabled the WP Engine object caching: What was the impact? As you can see, this had a more dramatic impact than our code cleanup efforts, and for two of the sites we saw dramatic performance improvements of 20 to 30 percent, with just two pages seeing an uptick in start render time. Step 4: Implement a CDNAgain, WP Engine has its own CDN option, so we enabled that, which is also an extremely simple process in WP Engine: What was the impact? This is the first implementation where we actually saw a marked drop-off in performance. A few things to note there:
The important takeaway here is really more that, once again, not every optimization will have the same impact on every site, and occasionally, some efforts will have minimal or no real impact. Step 5: Image optimizationFinally, we worked on compressing and resizing images on each of the sites. In some cases, the images on the sites had already been compressed, and the biggest culprit was (as you’ll see) the home page for site four. I find that on sites that have been ignoring it, image optimization is frequently the quickest, easiest and highest-impact page speed win. To do this, we used an image compression plugin called Optimus. We also compressed and resized each of the images on the pages “by hand” to make sure compression didn’t impact quality and that the files were as small as possible: There are a number of image optimization plugins for WordPress including, but not limited to: Whenever you use these kinds of plugins, you do have to be cognizant of potential image quality/rendering issues somewhere on your site if you’re applying them to all of the existing images in your media library. (After some additional testing/recommendations from page speed pros — more on that below — we actually switched over to Short Pixel.) There are also a number of tools available to compress individual images before you upload them as well, including: And there are many others as well. What was the impact? As you can see from a couple of the home pages, compressing images can lead to some of the biggest page load wins. Best of all, compressing images and replacing the uncompressed versions is a task for which you won’t generally need any kind of development help. Again, though, the level of improvement is dependent upon the site. Sites where images have already been compressed and resized (or just happened to be smaller) will obviously see little to no gain from this particular step. So, what was the cumulative impact of our efforts?As you can see, the results here vary from site to site. But we’ve shaved as much as 2 seconds off of load times by following these steps, and in almost every instance, we improved the speed at which visitors are seeing our above-the-fold content. But some load times actually got a bit worse for all of our efforts, and it seemed that for a simple site, we should be able to beat a lot of these load times. So, what else can you do? BONUS STEP: Hire a pro!After getting a significant yield from some of my amateur DIY efforts, I decided to go ahead and hire a developer specializing in page speed optimization. Our specialist worked on driving load times down even further. Specifically, they:
This process actually cut our (improved) load times in half. This is a great example of how a developer well-versed in page speed best practices can dramatically improve your results. If you have a development resource internally, communicate your goals (reducing page load times and the speed that a user sees important, above-the-fold elements), and if necessary, share resources to ensure they’re aware of best practices for speeding up a site. The post The non-developer’s guide to reducing WordPress load times up to 2 seconds (with data) appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2k3jzuJ In response to the European Commission’s antitrust ruling — and record $2.7 billion fine — against Google for favoring its own content, the search giant is making some changes to the way it handles Google Shopping results in the EU. Starting today, Comparison Shopping Engines/Services (CSEs) such as Kelkoo, Shopzilla and Twenga will be able to run product listing ads in Google Shopping results as retailers do so currently. The EC’s ruling required Google to deliver a solution to provide “equal treatment” to CSEs within 90 days or face further penalties. That deadline has now arrived. The EC doesn’t have a specific approval process, but Google believes the changes it’s making put it in compliance with the order. How is the auction changing?The biggest change isn’t in how the results are displayed but in who competes in the auction. CSE’s will compete in the auction against each other — and against Google Shopping. As was previously reported, Google Shopping will operate as a separate business unit with a separate team in the EU that will be responsible for its own operating budget. It must operate profitably and will be reviewed regularly by the Commission to ensure the unit is competing on equal terms. All of the ad slots will be available to all bidders; no ad slots are reserved for either Google Shopping or CSEs. This brings up several questions about how this will actually play out for merchants now that Google Shopping and the CSEs are in effect bidding on their behalf. A good percentage of merchants are likely participating in Google Shopping and at least one or more CSE. The visibility in Google Shopping will now depend, not just on the merchant’s own bid and quality metrics, but on how well it performs for Google Shopping and the CSEs for a given query. Google’s bids will have to make sense for it as a marketer, just as they do for CSEs. How this new bidding dynamic will affect merchants’ own bidding strategies will be interesting to watch. We have learned that there are controls in place to keep merchants that are running ads through Google Shopping and through participating CSEs from bidding against themselves for a given query. How are the Shopping ad results changing?As the example above shows, ads will appear with the name of the service that is serving up the ad — either Google or a CSE. The ads themselves each link to the product page on the retailer’s site, just as they do now. Clicking on “By Kelkoo” or “By Google,” for example, takes the user to the product results on the given engine. There is no longer a “Shop for … on Google” link a the top of the shopping results. What else you need to know about this update
Google is continuing its appeal of the EC ruling. That appeal process could take years. The post CSEs will compete head-on with Google Shopping in EU search results appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2hyhQZV Jonny Nastor and I want to help you develop, launch, and run a remarkable show. That’s why we created The Showrunner Podcasting Course — which is currently open, but closes today at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. And yes, I said show — not “podcast.” For most intents and purposes, the distinction doesn’t make a huge The post [Last Day] Join The Showrunner Podcasting Course Before the Doors Close appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2k43apB Googles latest Easter Egg is a video game that shows up with searches for snake & play snake9/27/2017 To celebrate its 19th birthday, Google put together a doodle that launches a spinner prompting 18 of its past Easter egg games and quizzes and one new game called “Snake.” Searches for “snake,” “play snake,” “snake game” and “snake video game” all result in a “Play Snake” card showing at the top of search results. Clicking the “Click to Play” link launches a video game on both desktop and mobile where players navigate a snake around a screen to eat an apple. The snake game concept of maneuvering a line around a screen is long-lived, originally used in the arcade game Blockade in 1976. The game has had many variations throughout the years before making it to Google’s search page, showing up preloaded on Nokia phones as early as 1998. The post Google’s latest Easter Egg is a video game that shows up with searches for ‘snake’ & ‘play snake’ appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2xB0frG Content strategy is an essential part of SEO — after all, content and links are among the top three ranking factors in search. However, you can’t simply create content for content’s sake and expect to achieve any results. Millions of blog posts are published each day, so you need to create content that stands out and earns worthwhile links. This is where the strategy part comes into play. Strategic content planning and execution involves:
A complete SEO content strategy will include these processes. With the glut of content published daily online, you must be strategic to garner the attention needed for success. Many brands believe publishing blog post after blog post will lead to more links, higher rankings and increased website visitors. However, SEO is not so simple — you need to be linkworthy to secure links, there are a variety of factors beyond content and links that influence rankings, and you must build strategic buyer funnels to sustainably build relevant traffic. Today, I want to share a content strategy we’ve used to grow several clients’ site visits by ~303 percent over the past year. Prioritize lower-difficulty topicsThe first step in building your content strategy is to identify which topics your content will cover. Effective strategies begin with research — start by analyzing the keywords and themes relevant to your business. For this post, I’ll be using SEMrush (although there are plenty of viable tools available) for my research. During your analysis, you should evaluate three main criteria:
The sweet spot that you’re looking for in your research is high search volume and value with low difficulty. However, all your important keywords will not fall within this ideal cross-section, so you should also prioritize lower-difficulty topics. In SEMrush, you can quickly get an estimate for keyword difficulty by clicking “Keyword Analytics”=>”Keyword Difficulty”: Again, there are several tools to choose from to gauge keyword difficulty; just make sure you use the same tool when comparing the difficulty of potential topics. Of course, you can also manually assess difficulty by simply analyzing the SERPs. Examine the pages currently ranking on page one — if you see well-known brand names or high-authority sites, it likely means higher competition. Conversely, low-quality and/or low-authority results mean lower competition and a potential opportunity to fill a content gap. Unless you’re already an established, authoritative brand, you’re going to have to prioritize lower difficulty topics. Targeting these less competitive spaces will guide your content marketing strategy, helping you focus your efforts where they will make the most impact. Layer content and optimize internal linksAs you strategize and plan content, consider opportunities where content layering and internal linking are possible. Content layering refers to the practice of “layering” middle-of-the-funnel content on top of bottom-of-the-funnel content by covering relevant, complementary topics and internally linking between pages. Finding and executing on these opportunities provides a wide array of benefits, including:
Content layering and internal linking need to be part of any content strategy. By layering content and linking internally, you can structure your site in a way that’s easy to follow for readers and search engines alike. Focus on linkability and opportunityAny SEO strategy — particularly a content strategy — must account for links. Links remain an important ranking factor and have numerous benefits beyond search. Because links are so valuable, you should focus on linkability as you plan content. Linkability, or “linkworthiness,” simply refers to the potential for securing links. People link to other sites in a variety of ways online, so to evaluate linkability, you need to think about why someone might link. The first place to start is with the potential outreach market for your content. These are the people who might be interested in sharing and linking to your content if you contacted them and let them know it existed. A few factors to consider as you analyze a potential outreach audience include:
Along with evaluating the outreach market, you need to analyze link opportunity. Analyzing opportunity essentially boils down to one question: Can I create something better or more useful than what is currently ranking? SEO expert Brian Dean’s “skyscraper technique” — in which marketers identify great content, create something better, and then reach out to relevant parties who have linked to similar content — is a great option for capitalizing on link opportunity. However, you must adapt the technique to meet your specific situation. The key portion of the skyscraper technique is creating something better than what is ranking. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to spend hours creating the most comprehensive resource imaginable — sometimes it only takes small tweaks to deliver something better. Some common options for improving on what’s already ranking includes:
Along with these improvements, another way to elevate your content above the competition is to add extra formats. Perhaps the topic would be better suited to a video? Maybe you can add original photography or animation to create something that is best in class. Adding extra content types can require more of an investment, but it’s worth it. Investing in at least one sunk cost differentiator — photography, video or design, for example — will truly set your content apart and help you secure the links needed to outpace the competition. Regularly update and maintain existing contentWhile most content marketing strategies focus on crafting new content, a complete content strategy will also account for existing content and pages. As you identify potential link opportunities and content gaps, don’t forget to take stock of your existing content. Sometimes it can be easier (and more effective) to update existing content rather than create something from scratch. In fact, many of the methods for improving content listed above can be applied to your own pages. Adding extra content types can be particularly effective for upgrading existing content. For example, adding a video to a long-form how-to post adds extra value and linkability, and can even capture bonus traffic and attention via YouTube — as I demonstrated in this post. An alternative option to upgrading is repurposing. Rather than adding extra content types or formats, you can repurpose an underperforming content asset into something that better serves the needs of searchers. Analyze the SERPs you want to rank in, see if there is a prevailing content type, and then match that format. Finally, a simple way to keep your existing pages fresh is to add a “Last updated” tag at the top of the page. This tactic will allow you to continuously update and improve a page as the topic it covers evolves over time, keeping your page fresh and competitive in search. Including the last updated date will also inform readers how current the information is, serving as a form of social proof. Your SEO content plan should largely concentrate on how you can deliver new, engaging content to your audience. But don’t forget to dedicate some time and effort to improving existing pages as well. Outline of an effective SEO content strategyTo recap all the information shared here, follow this outline and implement these practices in your content planning.
We’ve used this SEO content strategy time and time again to help our clients grow their site visitors, and I hope you find success with it as well. The post SEO content strategy: How to grow visits by 300% in one year appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2fsoZdq
When you look at the internet as a whole and the websites that are active and creating content today, WordPress is completely dominating every other CMS platform out there. However, just because everyone is using WordPress it doesn’t mean it’s the best platform for running every website you create. For example, if you were to create a single page website that was just going to be used for an online resume or profile, you likely wouldn’t need to have a complete install of WordPress to create something worthwhile. Just like in the early days of the internet, websites were built
via ShoeMoney http://ift.tt/2k1I0sh For its 19th birthday, Google has posted a birthday doodle that leads to a spinner prompting surprise searches for 19 of its past Easter egg games and quizzes. Three spins leads to the ICC Championship interactive cricket game Google launched earlier this year, an Earth Day quiz launched in 2015 and Google’s solitaire game Easter egg rolled out in 2016. Google has also released a new “snake game” Easter egg — a digital game where you lead a snake around the screen to eat an apple. (I tried it, and I’m as awful at it as I am at every other video game I’ve ever played. My kids, I’m sure, will be totally engrossed.) Google’s birthday doodle leads to a search for “google birthday surprise spinner” and is currently being displayed on nearly all of Google’s international home pages. In Google’s blog post about the doodle, the company revisits how its co-founders met, explaining that Sergey Brin was “randomly” assigned to give Larry Page a tour of Standford University’s campus when Page first began his work toward a Ph.D. in computer science in 1997. “This chance encounter was the happy surprise that started it all,” writes Google, connecting the birthday surprise spinner doodle to the company’s origin story. Google says it continues to inch closer to its namesake (the number googol, which represents a “1” followed by one hundred zeros), serving more than 4.5 billion users in 160 countries. The post Google marks its 19th birthday with a ‘Google birthday surprise spinner’ doodle appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2hxKiid On Monday, Ronell shared with us his five “ingredients” for creating truly high-quality content. These are the consistently important factors he’s observed while working with many different kinds of clients. We agree! Ronell’s advice will help you create content that genuinely helps your audience. And that content will be interesting because it speaks directly to The post The Magical Sixth ‘Ingredient’ that Can Take Your Content to Greatness appeared first on Copyblogger. via Copyblogger http://ift.tt/2xxJIHA Here’s your chance to finally own my most treasured collection of network marketing training… Reports, Checklists, and Implementation guides. Literally everything I use to grow and operate my network marketing business. Welcome to a special episode where you get to hear what’s going on Behind the Scenes at MLM Nation and get a close up view of the life of an entrepreneur. This is where you’ll get not only the latest news about MLM Nation, but a sneak peek inside the life of Simon Chan… Learn about the latest adventures that Simon is going through… His journey as a husband and father… His wins and losses… His reflections and deep thoughts… What Simon is currently reading and learning … In this Episode You’ll Learn:Going with the Flow Must Read BookBlue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne Recommended Resources Mentioned On ShowNO BS NO HYPE Australia Event What Did You Learn?Thanks for joining me on the show. So what did you learn? If you enjoyed this episode please share it on social media and send it to someone that needs extra motivation in their MLM business. Do you have any thoughts or comments? Please take 60 seconds to leave an HONEST review for the MLM Nation Podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely important for me to make this show better. Finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes so that you get updates and new episodes downloaded to your phone automatically. Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes Click here to Subscribe via Stitcher Click Here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed) The post 392: Behind the Scenes @ MLM Nation “How To Quickly Get Over Things When Something Negative Or Unpleasant Happens To You” appeared first on MLM Nation: Network Marketing Training | Prospecting | Lead Generation | Leadership | Duplication | Motivation. via MLM Nation: Network Marketing Training | Prospecting | Lead Generation | Leadership | Duplication | Motivation http://ift.tt/2hzrzza |
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