Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:Industry
Local & Maps
Link Building
Searching
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
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Your customers’ own words are more important to your brand than any marketing tagline you can write. More than 90 percent of consumers say they trust recommendations from others — even people they don’t know! — over branded content. Join Marty Weintraub, founder of aimClear, and Janelle Johnson, VP of demand generation at BirdEye, as they show you how to proactively leverage customer reviews, ratings and social media comments. They’ll share best practices for using positive reviews, as well as how to turn negative user-generated content (UGC) into brand-building opportunities. Attend this webinar and learn:
Register today for “Make UGC Your Brand’s Secret Weapon,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by Birdeye. The post Make user-generated content your brand’s secret weapon appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2ybBJRl Bing Ads announced on Thursday some new features in Editor related to ad extension management. These new features are now available for the Windows version of Bing Ads Editor, and they will soon be available for the Mac version. Ad extension schedulingAdvertisers can control when their ad extensions are shown in Editor, including by date, day of the week and time of day. There’s also support for times to be based on either the advertiser’s time zone or the searcher’s time zone. These scheduling options allow advertisers to run ad extensions only during appropriate times and help enhance relevance. For example, a restaurant may want to have callout extensions enabled for the morning to highlight breakfast items, and then schedule them to turn off when breakfast stops serving and turn on callouts for dinner promotion. The new scheduling options displayed when extensions are highlighted in Editor: Clicking Edit in the Ad Schedule section of the editing pane brings up a scheduling window:
Shared Library support for call and location extensionsBing has also upgraded the management capabilities of their Shared Library to include location and call extensions. Advertisers can now create a library for each and quickly associate them to multiple campaigns in a few clicks. This will save time spent going into individual campaigns one by one to assign these extensions, and it makes mass edits easier. For example, if a phone number changes, as the number in the Shared Library is updated, the new number will automatically populate in all campaigns using it. These options now appear in the Shared Library section in the left-hand margin:
The post Bing Ads announces new Editor features for ad extensions appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2xOpV6g Being a technical SEO, I love digging into any weird problems where things don’t seem to work as expected. Canonical tags seem easy enough, but these tags cause all sorts of interesting issues — and some minor fixes can lead to big wins. Almost every major website will have some kinds of issues with their canonical tags, so I dug into a few different ones to see what examples I could find. Canonical tags thrown into the <body>In my recent post, “Canonical tags are easy, right?,” I gave an example of a canonical tag that looks fine if you view the source code, but if you use “Inspect” in Chrome Dev Tools to view the DOM tree, you’ll see that the <head> section of Home Depot’s website breaks early and the canonical tag is thrown into the <body> section, where Google will ignore it. What’s the worst that could happen if all of your canonical tags are ignored? You won’t have control over the preferred version or consolidation of signals. Many pages will be indexed with the wrong version, or you may have multiple versions of the same page indexed without consolidating the signals, and no version of that page will rank as high as it should. Here are a few different searches in Google that show parameters on Home Depot’s website that are getting indexed even though they have a canonical set to the clean URL: An interesting note is that the canonical tags seem fine on Home Depot’s mobile website. Likely, one of the scripts they are calling on the desktop version of the site is causing the issue, but the problem will resolve itself with the upcoming mobile-first index. If Home Depot wanted to fix this sooner, they can probably get away with moving the canonical tag in the <head> section so it’s above all the scripts or figure out what is causing the <head> section to close early (which is likely a tag that wasn’t closed properly). Canonical tags when every version references itselfWhat happens when you have multiple versions of the same page, and each version has a canonical tag that says it is the correct version? The answer is that Google will choose one, or both, but it probably won’t be consistent. That’s exactly what happens on Meetup.com. Meetup pages have at least two versions used interchangeably: one with the name of the Meetup in mixed case as it was entered and one all lowercase. Mixed case of any kind works for the URLs on Meetup.com; try making any of the lowercase characters capitalized, or vice versa. So, if we have two versions that both work, and both say they are correct, what happens? <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://ift.tt/2wZtZwx; /> <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://ift.tt/2yaDkXq; /> In this case, both pages are being indexed, but only one will show. Both versions have links, and the equity is currently split. I have added &filter=0 to the Google search in the screen shot below so that I could show that both are indeed indexed. You can also check by doing an info: command for the different URLs to see the canonicalized version. To recap: Both versions of the page are indexed, both have links, and only one can show. A quick fix from Meetup here could consolidate a lot of signals that are currently split, and they would likely see a large traffic increase. Forgot to include the canonical tag or included the wrong pageA quick search for “sams club tires” will show you both desktop and mobile versions of the samsclub.com tires page. The problem here is that the m.samsclub.com/tires page does not have a canonical tag at all, allowing both pages to show. Even if the m. page indexed had the canonical tag in place, I don’t think this one would work correctly — the desktop site references a different mobile page as the alternate (http://ift.tt/2fB7Ceq), and that page 302 redirects to the m. page shown in SERPs above (http://ift.tt/2yufi5S). Having the mismatch on alternate versions is a common problem on their site, and m.samsclub.com shows in many desktop search results because they aren’t indicating the connections in the way they need to in order to consolidate the pages. Without establishing the relationship between desktop and mobile versions of the page, they will be treated as separate entities — both can be shown in search results, and neither will rank as high as they should if this was done correctly. When I started writing this, it looked like there were also some issues around canonicalization with what appeared to be a dev server. The canonical tags were using the subdomain of the dev server, which was prod-i.samsclub.com. These pages were getting indexed and sometimes being chosen as the version to show, even for the home page of the website. It looks like they have recently fixed this as they redirected prod-i.samsclub.com to www.samsclub.com, but you can still see many of these pages in the index with a site: search, and their cached versions still show the incorrect canonical tag. If you’re going to expose an environment like that, I’d highly recommend using server-side authentication so search engines won’t be able to crawl it in the first place to avoid problems like this. Another potential disaster is copying a page and not changing the canonical or accidentally setting a section or even an entire website to canonical to a single page. While some of these will be ignored, others may be respected, and you could see a decline in traffic for many pages. Canonical tags with URL parametersThere are lots of ways canonical tags can go wrong when you have multiple versions of a page. First up, if you have multiple versions of a page and no canonical, then what happens? That’s right, you get multiple versions indexed. A more interesting question might be, what happens when you have a separate mobile version that has parameters? When you are connecting, say, an m. mobile site and the desktop version, then you have to specify the alternate version of the page on the desktop site and canonical from the mobile site back to the desktop. What happens when you only link to one version of the mobile site, but URL parameters make it so there is more than one version of the page? The others get indexed, as they have with this page — site:samsclub.com pretend play inurl:1938. Did you know there’s also a tool in Google Search Console for handling parameters? Canonical tags ignoredRemember that canonical tags are a hint, not a directive. They’re made to be used for duplicate versions of pages, and you can get away with nearly duplicate versions in many cases. If the page you set as the canonical is too different from your target page, the canonical will likely be ignored. This happens with the channels page under YouTube user accounts; just check out site:youtube.com inurl:channels. In some situations, other signals might overpower canonical tags as well. Things like how URLs are submitted in the sitemap and how the pages are internally linked are other signals, and Google also has preferences for things like HTTPS versions and shorter URLs. Canonical tags with other tagsCanonical tags can have all kinds of issues when used with other tags. I would say don’t point the canonical on page 2 to page 1 in a paginated set, don’t use noindex on pages with a canonical tag, and be very careful with hreflang tags since each page needs to be the indexed version. There are tons of other problems that happen when canonical tags interact with other tags. Canonical tags and redirectsIt’s generally a bad idea to canonical to a page that redirects. This usually breaks something or consolidates signals inconsistently. Take Amazon stores, for instance, where there are lots of redirects and weird canonicalization happening. Look what happens, and notice that at each step there are pages indexed and that the URLs might use the clean name or the store IDs or both.
Canonical tags always create the most interesting issues, and things don’t quite work out the way you would expect. I’d bet that some of these pages end up canonicalizing to that final Amazon home page version and give the home page a bit of a boost. The point is that the canonical tag is powerful, and it can go wrong easily — so double-check your website to see what kinds of issues there might be. Check your canonical tagsI found most of my examples in the article with a simple site: search of the domain in Google and maybe removed filtering, as with the Meetup example, or searched for an individual product or just something I saw in one of the title tags to see if there were other versions. None of these examples took long to find, and I didn’t even use a crawler, but you definitely should use a crawler when looking for issues on your own website. I would expect any major website out there to have more than a few examples of canonical tags gone wild. The post Canonical tags gone wild appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2fsqiJe A bug in Google has wiped out a search feature that allows searchers to search within a specific site from the Google search result snippets. The feature launched three years ago, and it is officially called a Sitelinks Searchbox, where Google will show a search box directly within a search result snippet, allowing the searcher to restrict their search results to pages within the site listed. Here is what it looked like on a search for “YouTube” when the feature launched. Now, the Sitelinks Searchbox is no longer showing, at least temporarily. RankRanger caught the feature dropping out of Google globally a couple of days ago. Google is working on it, but there is no estimated timeline for a fix to be rolled out. The post Bug drops Sitelinks Searchbox from Google search results appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2yuTRSg Advertisers that run Bing Ads campaigns to generate leads can now upload offline conversion data back into the platform to get a more complete picture of campaign impact on actual sales. How Bing Ads offline conversion tracking worksThe system leverages the Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) that gets appended to every Bing Ads URL when an advertiser enables the new Offline Conversion Import feature. That click ID gets passed in the referring URL and can be stored either in a cookie or remain persistent in the URL as a user browses the website. The click ID then gets passed into the advertiser’s CRM system when a user fills out a lead form on the website and remains associated with that user. If the user converts offline after speaking with a sales agent, the conversion can connect back to the click ID. When an advertiser uploads that offline conversion data back into Bing Ads, the conversions appear at all levels of conversion reporting. Setup requiredThere are several steps advertisers need to take to enable offline conversion tracking. The first step is to create an Offline Conversion goal, which is now an option in the list of conversion goal types. After the goal is created, Bing Ads will automatically turn on auto-tagging in the account to append the Microsoft Click ID to ad URLs. Advertisers then need to update the tracking code on their websites in order to capture the click ID and store it with the lead information in their CRM systems. Offline conversion tracking is rolling out globally over the next few weeks. The post Bing Ads rolling out offline conversion imports to capture impact of ads on offline sales appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2xOn659 Not long ago, I talked about 16 very specific on-site SEO mistakes that I see very often, and how to fix those issues. Today, I want to shift the focus toward problems that plague e-commerce sites specifically. I’ll also be addressing on-site problems that have a bit more to do with strategy and a bit less to do with specific technical mistakes. Finally, I wanted to make sure we had some real-world examples to refer to, so I mined case studies from the industry to demonstrate the concrete impact these changes can have on your search traffic. Let’s take a look at these problems and what you can do to resolve them. 1. Weak product descriptions (or none at all)Since e-commerce sites usually have a very large number of products, it’s common for product descriptions to be short, automated and provided by the manufacturer. Unfortunately, this creates a few problems for SEO:
It’s not always possible to manually update the product descriptions for every page on your site, but this action isn’t strictly necessary to resolve these issues. A focus on turning just a few of the highest-value product pages into full-fledged landing pages with conversion-based copy can have a dramatic effect on the rest of the site. An Australian retailer named Toy Universe was able to increase its search engine traffic by 116 percent in just four months. That doubling in traffic also doubled sales. While many changes were involved in that boost, a large chunk of the effort went toward work on the product descriptions. Put simply, the site did not originally feature any unique product descriptions or unique content for the category pages. Adding them in was a huge piece of the puzzle. The Motor Bookstore serves as another classic example. When Google first released the Panda update, this online automotive bookseller saw a 38.5 percent drop in organic search traffic overnight. The brand was well respected by its customers, but their product descriptions were supplied by the publishers; as a result, those descriptions were identical to the descriptions found on many other sites. That duplicate content didn’t look good to Google — hence the drop in traffic after Panda was introduced. (These days, Panda is baked into Google’s core ranking algorithm, so your site could be affected by it without your knowing.) Eliminating duplicate product descriptions and replacing them with unique descriptions can help resolve this issue. Opening up your site to user-generated content like reviews can also help by introducing new content to reduce the proportion that is duplicate — a strategy that has obviously worked wonders for Amazon. On that note… 2. Not including user reviewsIn addition to diluting duplicate content, user reviews seem to affect search results in other ways. It’s not entirely clear whether the presence of reviews affects search engine results directly or indirectly, but the impact is clear and unambiguous. Yotpo conducted an analysis of over 30,000 businesses that added user reviews to their site and measured how this impacted organic search traffic. The results were stark: Over a period of nine months following review implementation, they found that Google organic page views per month grew by over 30 percent. Including user reviews can be scary, as this allows buyers to leave negative feedback on your products. But there is a wealth of evidence that including user reviews increases conversion rates. In fact, in a bizarre twist of fate, more diverse product ratings improve conversions better than five-star-only reviews. If you’ve been hesitating to include user reviews because of concerns about negative feedback or due to the difficulties of implementation, I highly recommend you take the plunge now. The impact is almost sure to be positive. 3. No unbranded keyword optimizationPerhaps one of the most common issues is that many e-commerce product pages are simply not developed with keywords in mind. The typical product page is built around a brand and model name. It’s certainly true that some consumers may be searching for these names, and they should definitely be included in the title tag and the other important locations on the page. That said, most consumers are likely not searching by brand or model name, especially when it comes to more obscure brands. For that reason, it’s important to include more generic, popular phrases on your pages as well. This isn’t to say that you should abandon any more niche keyword usage. What I mean is that you should be going after phrases that consumers are using when they search for products like yours, and that means going deeper than branding to focus on the actual mechanics of the consumer journey. White Hat Holsters did just that, and the result was a 100 percent increase in sales and a 400 percent increase in search engine traffic. The traffic grew from 2,000 to 8,000 visits per week in just eight months. To accomplish this, they:
4. Focusing too heavily on transactional keywords and not developing informational contentIt’s incredibly difficult to rank for “money” keywords, and it’s usually a failing strategy to focus too heavily on them, especially if this means you are neglecting the informational keywords that target customers who are a bit further up the funnel. By shifting some of your attention toward less transactional keywords and toward more informational ones, you can rank for less competitive keywords and build a stronger reputation with the search engines. Ranking for these less competitive phrases doesn’t just add traffic for those individual phrases; it can also improve your site’s overall reputation with the search engines. This may be because it influences behavioral metrics. Whatever the cause, I’ve personally witnessed this effect many times. Darren Demates helped a medical e-commerce site skyrocket its search traffic by an incredible 1,780 percent using an interesting keyword method he calls the “double jeopardy technique.” Here was his process:
I’d recommend taking notes here and putting this to use. The possibility of increasing search engine traffic by an entire order of magnitude isn’t the kind of thing you want to ignore. 5. Implementing poorly planned site redesignsThis one hurts to watch. I’ve had clients rush ahead with a site design without notifying me, and I’ve had new clients who approached me after a site update tanked their rankings. This experience is incredibly painful, because a site redesign intended to modernize and beautify a site, or to implement changes expected to maximize conversions, can end up obliterating your organic search traffic. Few things hurt more than dropping a wad of cash on something and having it backfire on you. If you implement a site redesign without taking SEO into account, this is almost bound to happen. Pages that ranked well can get lost, content that was pulling in traffic can get rearranged, and the results of past wins can get lost. Seer Interactive assisted one retail client who had redesigned their site in order to secure the site with HTTPS. Their redesign caused their organic traffic to plummet by a staggering 75 percent. The situation was so bad that they no longer ranked for their own brand name. What happened?
After fixing those issues and introducing a long-term content strategy, the site experienced a 435 percent growth in search traffic. This led to a 150 percent increase in transactions, and a 64 percent increase in revenue. This was accomplished in six months. Do not execute a site redesign without the help of an SEO professional. The results can be absolutely horrifying. 6. Poor migration between e-commerce platformsIt’s a safe bet that most e-commerce sites are built using third-party platforms. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement that allows the e-commerce business to focus more on its core business and less on web development. It’s not uncommon for a site to outgrow one platform and switch to another as their market share increases, or to switch platforms in order to gain access to previously unavailable features. Unfortunately, switching e-commerce platforms can sometimes hurt rankings. In one case, TotalHomeSupply.com found itself losing 37 percent of its traffic after switching from Volusion to Mozu. Despite Mozu being owned by the same company and serving as the enterprise-level version of the same platform, the transfer led to technical SEO issues. (This isn’t a knock against Volusion — this can happen with any e-commerce platform if you aren’t careful.) The drop in traffic led to a 21 percent drop in transactions, despite a 24 percent boost in the conversion rate that Mozu may have contributed to. The issue with Mozu was that the pagination was handled by JavaScript instead of HTML. Inflow worked together with Mozu to eliminate the JavaScript issues, allowing Google to properly crawl the pagination, which was invisible to the search engines when JavaScript was involved. In addition, they trimmed thin content that had led to a demotion from Google’s Panda update and introduced new, high-quality content. The result was a doubling in year-over-year organic revenue and a restoration of organic traffic to levels higher than before the site migration. As with site redesigns, make sure an SEO professional is involved any time you update your e-commerce platform. 7. Not optimizing for your most promising keywordsIn the section on informational keywords, we mentioned Darren Demates’ “double jeopardy” technique. In addition to focusing on information keywords, part of the reason for the strategy’s success also lies in the fact that it leverages the keywords that already show promise. We mentioned that his technique involves performing a site: search to identify which page on the site already ranks best for any given keyword. A related method of identifying keywords is to analyze your existing rankings to see which keywords are already performing well, and to make changes in order to better optimize for those keywords. This is what Digital Current did for Sportsman’s Warehouse. They identified “low-hanging fruit” pages which were already ranking fairly well for keywords, then updated those pages by tweaking the titles, headers and content in order to better reflect the keywords. They were careful to focus on keywords which would be “in season” shortly after the changes were made. In addition, they performed some link building and improved the quality of the on-site content. The changes resulted in a 31 percent year-over-year increase in organic search traffic and a 25 percent year-over-year increase in organic search revenue. This was a tripling on the ROI they had paid for the SEO work. There are two primary methods you can use in order to optimize for promising keywords. The first is to run your URLs through the Google Keyword Planner as in the “double jeopardy” technique. The second is to look at your keyword rankings in the Google Search Console or a tool like SEMrush to identify keywords that are already ranking on the second page or so. If these keywords are ranking without having already been optimized, they are a golden opportunity, and you should capitalize on them by updating your titles, headings and content. This second approach is sometimes called the “low-hanging fruit” technique. In the process, it’s important to make sure you aren’t cannibalizing your rankings for more important keywords, and, of course, to verify that the changes in the content will be useful for users and will not detract from the primary message of the existing page. Time to put this information to use!Don’t close that browser tab just yet. Leave it open and start taking a look at your site. Take a look at the problems I’ve listed here, and ask yourself if you’re facing any of them right now. You’ll thank me when your search traffic starts climbing. The post 7 on-site SEO problems that hold back e-commerce sites appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2yv5j03
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via ShoeMoney http://ift.tt/2xNBhHH Yesterday, at a pre-emptive event in Seattle, Amazon introduced new Alexa devices to keep its lead in the battle for the smart home. Google is having its own hardware event on October 4. Amazon introduced six products. First and foremost, it presented a more compact, cheaper Echo with better sound. It comes in six different colors or skins. It starts at $99, which is much cheaper than the original Echo’s price ($179). Many people will likely compare this price to Apple’s forthcoming HomePod and opt for the less expensive device. The company also introduced Echo Plus, which is being marketed as a smart home hub. The device looks like the original Echo but is also less expensive at $149 and includes upgraded speakers. The $99 Echo also works as a smart home hub, but the Echo Plus includes additional hardware that reportedly makes smart home device connections easier and entirely voice-activated. The novel Echo Spot is a rounder, smaller version of Echo Show. It’s like a Dot with a screen but looks like an Alarm Clock that would sit beside your bed. It has a 2.5-inch screen to provide visual information and will cost $129. It will also support video calling. Speaking of which, the Echo Connect is a square black box that looks like Apple TV. It allows Echo devices to make calls to any phone and is designed to play catch-up with Google Home, which can already do that. Current Echo devices can only call other Echo devices or smartphones with the Alexa app. It will cost $35 and is a kind of retrofit for current Echo owners. Next-gen Alexa devices will have this capability built in. Perhaps the most curious of the products unveiled are Echo Buttons, which connect to other Echo devices but enable families to play games together. They will cost $20 each and are reportedly the “first of many Alexa Gadgets” that will connect to and extend Echo devices in “fun and playful ways,” according to the company. The final two announcements yesterday were an enhanced Fire TV with 4K support ($70) and Alexa integration into BMW vehicles. Even though Amazon doesn’t have a successful smartphone, it’s trying to keep pace with distribution of Apple and Google virtual assistants in the car. Google is expected to make a number of virtual assistant-related announcements next week. On October 4, Google will reportedly be introducing its answer to Echo Dot, the $49 Google Home Mini. It will also be rolling out a Home device with improved sound called the “Home Max” that will compete with these improved Echo devices and Apple’s forthcoming HomePod. Amazon has had great success with Alexa devices and is getting more aggressive by rolling out many devices at more price points. In this way it’s like the anti-Apple, which would be more careful and selective about what it introduces, wary of potential failure. Amazon is innovating quickly and trying things. Some of these new devices will fail, but some will succeed. There are as many as 20 million smart speakers and virtual assistant devices already in US homes, with predictions that the number will grow to 30 million by the end of the year. With all these competing new offerings, I suspect 30 million may be conservative. Looking narrowly at just these smart speakers, one might find all the new Amazon devices frivolous, unnecessary or amusing. But in the larger context of the smart home, the stakes and the strategy become clear. Research from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners shows how Google Home and Echo are accelerating the adoption of smart home devices. In its most recent research release, the firm said:
For years, the “smart home” has been hyped and consumers have yawned. With the advent of Echo and its competitors, consumers are becoming more interested in controlling lights and thermostats with their voices. In other words, voice-controlled smart speakers are becoming the front door to smart home adoption. And while companies making smart-home accessories can design them to be compatible with multiple systems, the winner of the smart speaker market will control the smart home market — literally and figuratively. Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are all well behind Google and Amazon, but especially Amazon, which has perhaps a 75 percent market share of the smart speaker market today. Microsoft has been the historical proponent of smart-home gadgetry. Now, the company risks being marginalized unless it can create its own compelling new devices/software or convince more small appliance, electronics and other hardware companies to make Cortana (and not Alexa or Google Assistant) the virtual brain inside. Amazon’s powerful sales channel and its crazy quilt of devices at a range of price points — an Echo for every budget — give it major advantages against competitors. It’s also innovating, iterating and responding quickly to competitor device features (like better sound and landline calling). Think of these many Echo and Alexa devices like Campbell’s Soup flavors dominating shelf space in the supermarket — capturing mind share and pushing others out of view. The post Amazon just upped the ante in the battle of the virtual assistants appeared first on Search Engine Land. via Search Engine Land http://ift.tt/2k6BIYF Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land:
Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:
Search News From Around The Web:Industry
Local & Maps
Link Building
Searching
SEO
SEM / Paid Search
Search Marketing
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