Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Thursday 30 June 2016
SearchCap: Dynamic search ads, Google Keyword Planner & e-commerce SEO
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Dynamic search ads, Google Keyword Planner & e-commerce SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google says Dynamic Search Ad targeting will soon get better
Google announced it will be adjusting how Dynamic Search Ads are triggered over the next few months.
The goal is to improve ad relevance on queries. From the announcement:
For example, ads that point to a landing page about iced coffee makers will be less likely to show for less relevant searches like “iced coffee.”
As the updates roll out, performance may fluctuate, says Google. You’ll want to keep an eye on the search terms report even more vigilantly than usual with DSA campaigns during the transition period to see how query matching is affected.
Twitter Announces Searchable #Stickers: Are They The New Hashtag? by @dantosz
Earlier this week, Twitter announced a new feature called ‘Stickers’. Essentially, theses are a mash-up of hashtags, emoticons, and Snapchat filters all in one easy-to-use photo features.
Like hashtags, stickers are also searchable. After you use one you can then click on the sticker to view a newsfeed of other users who have used the same sticker. Because of the search feature, Twitter stickers could be more useful to brands than Snapchat’s filters.
Similar to Snapchat filters, Twitter’s stickers are a fun way to personalize pictures.
Connect your photos to the world with a visual spin on hashtags: tap #Stickers to peel back a fun new way to search. http://pic.twitter.com/YVy7r53Nja
— Twitter (@twitter) June 27, 2016
How Could Brands Use Twitter Stickers?
While they might seem like nothing more than another silly way to personalize photos, the search feature makes Twitter stickers extremely interesting for brands, particularly if Twitter offers sponsored stickers, similar to Snapchats sponsored filters.
Image if Finding Dory sponsored a fish or aquarium sticker. Pixar could then easily engage with users who use the sticker by retweeting and sharing GIF collections of their favorites. They could then retarget those users with ads to purchase a DVD of the movie or collectibles. They could even add a photo backdrop that interacts with the sticker in the theater to encourage users to share what are essentially branded photos.
Currently, Stickers are rolling out to a limited number of users. Sadly, I am not one of them. This tweet from Linda Jiang, Strategy and Operations Program Manager at Twitter, shows how much fun we could be having:
Tuesday Mornings at SF Media! http://pic.twitter.com/2NUwmKzXQf
— Linda Jiang (@lindaj) June 28, 2016
Have Twitter stickers rolled out to your profile yet? I’d love to see your creations! Comment below, or tweet me @dantosz.
Image Credit
Featured Image: Deposit Photos| cpenler
Add Multiple Locations to Your Trip on Google Maps on Mobile by @SouthernSEJ
The ability to plot multiple destinations on Google Maps has come to Android.
The post Add Multiple Locations to Your Trip on Google Maps on Mobile by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Google to Provide Timely Information About Earthquakes by @SouthernSEJ
Google has introduced a new feature to its search results that will be helpful next time you have to look up information about an earthquake in your area. According U.S. Geological Survey, approximately 500,000 earthquakes occur around the world every year, but only 100,000 of them are felt.
Now, when earthquakes are felt, people can get the information they need directly from Google’s search results. Search commands like “earthquake” or “earthquakes near me” will return a summary of information about the earthquake, including its size, as well as a map of the area that has been affected.
Not only will there be a map to show you the size of the affected area, the map will indicate the levels of intensity felt throughout the affected area. With that information you can quickly determine where the epicenter of the earthquake was and how far of a reach it had.
In a further effort to help people stay safe during an earthquake, Google will provide tips on the next steps you should take during possible aftershocks. Google will continue to provide updates throughout the hours and days after the earthquake about the damage caused and whether or not aftershocks can be expected.
Twitter Dashboard: New App Helps SMBs Write, Schedule, Track Tweets by @DannyNMIGoodwin
For those of us who have been using Twitter for years, it’s easy to forget that Twitter can be a bit confusing at first. What should you tweet about? When should you tweet? How do you know if you’re doing a good job on Twitter?
With the launch of a new desktop and iOS app called Dashboard, Twitter is trying to help busy SMBs engage with their current customers and reach new customers.
How To Get Started With Twitter Dashboard
If you’re an SMB and new to Twitter, it’s easy to get set up. Start by heading to dashboard.twitter.com or downloading the Twitter Dashboard app.
First, Twitter will ask you what type of business you have (Local, Online, App or Game, Brand or Product, Enterprise, or Other) and how many employees you have.
Next, Twitter will help you set up a custom feed to see tweets “you might otherwise miss.” By default, this feed will include your business name (any tweets mentioning your business/brand name) and mentions (tweets that include your Twitter handle). Then you can add (or exclude) additional keywords relevant to your business, including nicknames, phrases, people, and hashtags.
Finally, save you Feed.
Now it’s time to start using Twitter Dashboard. Here are three things the app offers SMBs:
1. Tweet Inspiration
Twitter Dashboard will offer you some suggestions on what to write. For example, since today is Thursday, it suggests that I should “share a childhood photo that hints at the work you’re doing today.”
You might also get a suggestion from Twitter to “Tweet a surprising fact about one of your team members” or that you should like and retweet tweets from your customers.
Not the most brilliant suggestions ever. But it’s a start.
Remember, people will follow you on Twitter because you provide something of value to them. So tweet out fun, helpful, and interesting content that will help more people discover you.
2. Tweet Scheduling
Once you’ve composed your tweet, simply click on the arrow next to the blue Tweet button, which will reveal the option to Schedule your brilliant new tweet. This works pretty much the same as Twitter’s TweetDeck dashboard:
- Click on a day on the calendar.
- Use the pull down to pick a time (if you accidentally pick a time that has already passed, Twitter will tell you to select a time in the future). You can only pick from times that end in :00 and :30 here, but if you want something at a different time (e.g., at 11:15 a.m. or 3:05 p.m.), you’ll have to type it in.
- Click on Schedule Tweet.
3. Measure
Clicking on the Analytics tab will bring you to your real-time analytics page. Here you’ll find a fairly basic overview to measure the success of your Twitter activity. You’ll see data on:
- Tweets
- Media Tweets
- Replies
- Mentions
- New Followers
- Profile Visits
- Tweet Impressions
What do you think of Twitter Dashboard?
Image Credits
All Screenshots of Twitter Dashboard and setup taken by author.
What the heck is going on with Google Keyword Planner?
First there were the error notices that users have to have an active campaign, not just an AdWords account to access Keyword Planner. Then came combined search volumes for close variants.
A Google spokesperson has confirmed with Search Engine Land that users do not have to have an active campaign to use Keyword Planner. On social media, Google told users that the error was the result of a technical issue that was being fixed. When Keyword Planner launched inside AdWords in 2013, replacing the open Keyword Tool, it got a cool reception. So there was alarm when some users got the error message telling them they’d also have to have an active AdWords campaign to use it. The error didn’t affect all accounts; still it got people speculating whether it just a glitch or Google backtracking. Either way, for now at least we can move on.
So, to close variants and the resulting combined search volume results. Google isn’t commenting the move; we asked. Close variants grouping is not necessarily unexpected — Google replaced exact match targeting with close variants in ad campaigns in 2014 — and yet it is often inconsistent. Sometimes plurals are grouped, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes acronyms and abbreviations are grouped with their full phrase, sometimes not. Sometimes search volumes for synonyms are combined, other times not. Sometimes combined words and misspellings are grouped, other time they are not. And apparently we search for dogs and cats at the same rate.
Here are just some examples of oddities I’ve found:
| Scenario | Search term | Avg. monthly searches |
|---|---|---|
| Plural treated the same. | cat | 3,350,000 |
| cats | 3,350,000 | |
| – | – | – |
| Plural treated differently | seo service | 6,600 |
| seo services | 27,100 | |
| – | – | – |
| Same volume for abbreviation | pay per click | 135,000 |
| ppc | 135,000 | |
| – | – | – |
| Then different volumes for abbreviation and synonym | search engine marketing | 12,100 |
| search marketing | 2,900 | |
| sem | 368,000 | |
| – | – | – |
| Some combined words get different volumes, some don’t | car wash | 550,000 |
| carwash | 550,000 | |
| dog walker | 22,200 | |
| dogwalker | 2,900 | |
| auto body shop | 49,500 | |
| autobody shop | 2,400 | |
| – | – | – |
| Plural and abbreviations reported separately | cfp | 110,000 |
| cfps | 4,400 | |
| certified financial planners | 480 | |
| – | – | – |
| Spelling choice reported separately | financial advisor | 74,000 |
| financial adviser | 6,600 | |
| – | – | – |
| Not measured as synonyms | ecommerce business | 8,100 |
| ecommerce company | 4,400 | |
| ecommerce firm | 110 | |
| Synonyms and word order measured separately | remarketing | 22,200 |
| retargeting | 18,100 | |
| remarketing adwords | 2,400 | |
| adwords remarketing | 1,600 |
What does this mean for search marketers?
First, it’s a good reminder that the search volumes (and estimated CPCs) in Keyword Planner should be seen as directional signals, not hard facts. Second, if you’ve been benchmarking certain keywords and/or keyword groups over time, you’ll may or may not see shifts in historical reporting. Third, sometimes you’ll get granularity, sometimes you won’t. Which brings us right back to point number one: yes, it’s kind of annoying some keyword variations are grouped and some aren’t, but it might offer some directional insight into when granular targeting could make more of an impact in your efforts.
SMX Advanced recap: Using Paid Search & Social Together to Deliver the Ultimate Knockout Punch
As always, SMX was chock full of new ideas and actionable content. One of the struggles that many media teams face is the disconnect between the digital strategies that one team owns versus the strategies being implemented by teams that are responsible for other digital media types. This particular session brought together leaders in paid search and paid social to provide insight into:
- Proven ways to bridge the knowledge gap between teams.
- Building a cohesive strategy.
- Working in tandem to deliver results.
Maggie Malek, Head of PR & Social at MMI Agency
Malek kicked off the session noting that ad blockers are on the rise and that the key to getting around ad blockers is to put people before efficiency. In other words, putting in the time to create useful content pays off. In order to do that, Malek emphasized that search and social teams need to work together.
To truly maximize combined efforts, it’s important to understand the role of search and social in the buying cycle and to make sure that the teams work together closely. Her slides included a process for working together from an agency-partner kick-off all the way through launch, to ensure that both teams were in lockstep. In addition to the process, she also detailed the information that each team should plan to share throughout the project.
After covering project logistics, Malek underscored the importance of creating the best experience possible. Her approach is a three-step process: Discovery, Campaign Creation and Optimization.
The discovery phase is all about understanding the consumer. Malek suggested parsing out demographics from current followers and creating personas.
Second, campaigns are created based upon the personas and what each of the persona’s interests. Interests are important not only for targeting but for messaging, as well.
Once the campaigns have enough data, you can adjust your settings and audiences based upon your learnings (the optimization phase).
Jon Kagan, Sr. Director of Search & Biddable Media at Marc USA, and Tara Siegel, Sr. Director of Social at Pepperjam
Kagan and Siegel tag-teamed the second part of the presentation. They kicked off their talk by noting that search and social crossover is all about the audience.
Like Malek, they reiterated the importance of understanding your target market’s interests so that you can deliver the most valuable content possible. Siegel called social media an omni-channel optimizer and walked through the potential uses for leveraging social to improve performance in other channels and also highlighted social’s value throughout the buying cycle. In addition, she shared targeting options and noted that audience insights are a valuable way to learn about your consumers so that you can create your messaging.
Kagan reiterated the value of understanding the best-suited audiences to target, as well as excluding audiences that aren’t the right fit. He also illustrated the value of measuring and taking advantage of increased brand awareness created by television ads. Kagan and Malek went on to share case studies illustrating the lift in performance when search and social were used in sync.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
How e-commerce SEO matters in strategic redesign of web shops
Baking a cake is easy — when you use all the right ingredients from the beginning!
But just imagine how it would be if you mixed the batter, poured it into a tray, sprinkled icing sugar all over it, and were just about to pop the creation into the oven… when you remember that you forgot to add eggs!
You’d have to do either bake it without the eggs, resulting in a flat and crumbly cake, or you’d have to start over again from scratch, this wasting valuable time, energy and ingredients.
Sadly, many Web shops and online businesses build their website in the same way. They neglect to involve SEO professionals early in the design process, and then expect to hire an SEO specialist to wave a magic wand over it and make the site rank well on Google.
It doesn’t work that way.
You should aim to build your website right the first time. I see so many sites underperform their potential or get a wrong start because they ignored the importance of SEO during the planning phase. It leads to frustration, wasted time and inflated budgets.
SEO can’t be overlooked
If you wish to maximize sales and revenue from your Web shop or e-commerce website, you must understand that SEO is of critical importance. Smart e-commerce players get SEO consultants involved early. They realize that high organic search rankings cannot be achieved with SEO tactics applied late in the web development process.
Even before you have finalized your information architecture, website structure and design, content organization and content publishing strategy, you must start thinking about how SEO will be integrated into each of these steps.
Why is this so important? Your site design (or re-design) can have a dramatic impact on your search engine visibility, and therefore on your website traffic and sales.
Some business owners, after enjoying good search engine rankings for a prolonged period of time, start thinking about it as a permanent feature that will continue forever. That can be a dangerous attitude.
Remember, you don’t own your rankings on Google or other search engines. You must constantly defend what you already have (rankings, traffic, sales, customers, conversion rates, everything). Google owes you nothing!
It doesn’t matter that you’re the biggest company in your market, or that you dominate offline market share. When it comes to the Web, everyone starts off equal… and effective SEO is one thing that can set you ahead of the pack.
SEO strengthens your team
Many inexperienced business owners think an SEO consultant only does keyword research and suggests ways to rank pages on those search terms. But the role of a specialist is much greater than that when it comes to e-commerce SEO.
Your SEO consultant will help improve the user experience in ways that go far beyond just keywords and ranking tactics. A good SEO expert will be a precious asset who reinforces your team of information architects, web developers, user interface designers, website designers, and content marketers.
Yes, it all begins with keyword research and analysis. But while an average SEO guide might help you find keywords with high search volumes, a true expert will use the data to help you understand your customers on a deeper, more personal level.
You’ll be able to discover:
- which problems your clients find most troublesome
- what solutions they are searching for
- when and where they expect to be offered these options
- how you should communicate with them
… and a lot more.
Once you have established a clear picture of user intent, it becomes easy to tailor your website and product offerings to match your customers’ needs optimally. Your conversion rates will improve, profit will soar, and customers will be delighted by what they find on your online store.
SEO will boost the effectiveness of other components of your Web presence and your marketing efforts. The synergy will strengthen your team and grow your business faster.
Here’s what SEO will do for your web shop
- Keyword research and analysis, in combination with other analytics and data, can help you forecast sales, profits and ROI.
- You’ll know what to prioritize and execute first, what to focus on next, and which other things to put lower down the list (or even avoid completely).
- It will ensure that you build your website right the first time, without making costly mistakes that take time and resources to fix.
- You’ll build a website that’s future-proof, taking into account trends and shifts that will become relevant and important only a few months or years later.
- Instead of starting over from scratch every budget year, or whenever you re-design your site, you’ll be able to build upon existing strengths so that your web shop grows more powerful with each iteration.
To make this happen, however, SEO must be involved early — long before your website is launched! Your SEO practitioner should be involved in decisions such as which e-commerce platform you use, what your website structure looks like, how your website is designed and coded, and how your content is produced.
But isn’t SEO included in the platform?
A common misunderstanding arises due to self-styled “SEO-friendly” platforms and content management systems (CMS). You should be aware that SEO is not included in any e-commerce platform when it ships.
Generally, all “SEO friendly” means is that the platform or CMS makes it easy for someone with SEO expertise to implement necessary SEO elements such as optimized page titles, custom meta descriptions, canonical tags, 301 redirects, image alt tags, optimized URL slugs, web analytics tags, etc.
Don’t expect a vendor to throw in “readymade SEO” that works out of the box. SEO is a discipline in its own right. It is specialized work that requires knowledge of how search engines crawl and parse web pages. Typically, a custom approach is necessary — one that’s unique to your particular needs, goals and situations.
E-commerce SEO in particular has some unique twists and tweaks that only an SEO specialist with years of hands-on experience in the field can implement correctly. (I have listed some of them in an earlier article I wrote for this site.)
What’s the key takeaway message from this article? Get SEO right — the first time. The way to do this is by involving an SEO consultant early in the process and planning the various elements of your Web shop. That’s the way to e-commerce success.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
SMX Advanced recap: Dr. Pete’s Guide To The Changing Google SERPs
For those of you unfamiliar with him, Dr. Pete Meyers is a marketing scientist over at Moz. He is responsible for building the MozCast and likely as a byproduct of that has spent a lot of time examining all the different changes to Google SERPs.
Local and social have been huge parts of the constantly changing Google SERPs and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. The average SERP can have 5+ different features just as a rule, with the local pack, knowledge graph, AMP and in-depth articles being increasingly common.
In fact, mobile SERPs have moved so far away from the traditional 10 blue links, it’s not even worth thinking of them in that framework anymore. And since Google seems to think they can offer a better and more information-rich mobile experience than in websites, that isn’t likely going to change anytime soon.
Title tags
Probably one of the most salient points about SERP features for SEOs is the ever-changing title tag length. The number of characters appearing in search engine listings keeps changing. Additionally, Google continues to rewrite title tags in some cases, which could impact your click-through rate from search.
Dr. Meyers recommends to shoot for less than 60 characters, but don’t obsess over it. Interestingly, most people assume mobile displays shorter title tags; however, listing titles are two lines on mobile, so they are often showing longer title tags.
New features look strong
Google recently announced rich cards, “a new Search result format building on the success of rich snippets.” Similar to rich snippets, rich cards use structured data markup to make SERPs more visually engaging.
While these are being rolled out slowly and to select industries, they highlight Google’s continued interest in using structured data to create “better” SERPs. Google is trying to turn even unstructured data into SERPs features, and you can see these in answer boxes and other featured snippets. SEOs like to poke fun at all the examples where they do this wrong, but they are increasingly getting it right.
Speaking of the answer box, this is a powerful feature that can take you from ranking in position #10 to being the first piece of info on the SERP. Dr. Pete believes this is something all SEOs should be thinking about (I agree). When you change devices, answer boxes become even more powerful. For instance, they take up a significant amount of real estate on mobile, and if you are using voice search and there is a featured snippet, Google will read it back and source it from the website (e.g., “according to Moz”).
Another relatively new feature is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). With the continued growth of mobile search and ads, it makes sense for Google to continue to drive what they feel is a better mobile experience for their users. This illustrates Google’s thinking when it comes to mobile first design.
With so many changes coming to Google’s search results, it’s helpful if you think of all these new SERP features and changes as “search units.” It’s important to see these as opportunities and look towards how you can get your (or your client’s) company included in them. That will hopefully alleviate some of the doom and gloom!
See Dr. Pete’s full presentation below:
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Leverage the power of IBM Watson in your AdWords campaigns
In 2011, IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy! against the two reigning champions and easily took the first place prize of $1 million.
While that was some amazing marketing, the real prize was the technology developed as part of that effort. I suspect IBM has slowly been working that technology into its products, but it is also available directly as an API. If you’ve read any of my other posts, you know where this is going. Today, I’m sharing the script library I put together to leverage IBM Watson’s technology in my AdWords account.
One of the APIs available in the Watson Developer Cloud is called Alchemy Language, and it provides a set of endpoints to help you pull information and parse text from URLs. It can do things like automatically pulling dates, authors, concepts and keywords from a webpage with just a simple call. That last one sounds like it would be a great tool to add to our keyword research toolbox.
The example they give in the documentation is based on analyzing a Twitter feed for relevant keywords, but we can send in any URL we want. If you’re an agency, maybe you could leverage this API to make sure your customer’s keywords are relevant to the landing page they’re linking to. If you’re running your company’s campaigns, maybe you could analyze a competitor’s content to find keywords you might want to compete on as well.
One thing to note is that this is tool does not try to replace Google, so the keywords and topics Watson says are important will be slightly different than what Google says. At some level, both companies are trying to analyze text for topics and keywords, but there’s no doubt they are doing it very differently.
The Alchemy Language API is incredibly easy to use, but you will need to sign up for a developer token to call it. IBM has a free tier, which is plenty for what we are doing here, but of course, you can always pay for additional quota if you need to. At the end of the sign-up process, you will get something that looks like this:
Those credentials are what you pass to the library to make the calls. Here’s the library you can paste into the bottom of your AdWords Scripts for accessing this API. I’ll provide an example for using it at the end of the post.
It’s only a few lines because I am dynamically generating the functions for each endpoint. That means that anytime you see something like “POST /url/URLGetTypedRelations” in the docs, you can call it from your script code like “watson.URLGetTypedRelations(config)” and it will return the response already formatted as an object.
Here’s an example of parsing one of my old blog posts and finding the list of keywords that are related.
Running that code in your account won’t make any changes, but should print out something like this below to help you get familiar with the library.
And that’s all there is to it. Now you should be able to combine this with some of the other AdWords Scripts out there to find keywords related to your own landing pages or someone else’s. There are a few other endpoints on that list that might also be interesting, such as URLGetRankedConcepts or URLGetEmotion, but I haven’t played around with them too much.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Google now offers real time earthquake information in search results
Google announced they are now showing richer earthquake related information right at the top of the search results for earthquake related queries.
They want to give people who feel a tremor quick and authoritative information about what they just felt. Google said the “information will include a summary of the size of the quake, a map of the affected areas, and tips to safely navigate the aftermath.” In addition, the Google “map will show areas that shook with various intensities (known as a shakemap), so you’ll be able to quickly assess the reach of the earthquake as well as its epicenter.”
In addition, Google will also show you safety tips and also show you the estimated damage hours or days after the event.
You can try it yourself by searching for [earthquake] or [earthquakes near me].
Here is a GIF of it in action:
Citation Building is How Customers Find Local Businesses by @DholakiyaPratik
Finding local businesses is rapidly becoming what the internet is for. Four out of five mobile phone and tablet owners use their devices to search for local business information, and 80% of those searches result in a purchase.
Further, according to data from Google, 50% of consumers who made a search by mobile made a purchase in store within 24 hours:
That’s great, right?
Yes, it is. But it works a little differently than traditional SEO. “Long distance” SEO is increasingly about content optimization and integration, while local SEO is far more about citation building – getting your name and address mentioned by local sites with authority. David Daniels, in an article on Search Engine Watch, calls citation building “the new link building.”
Citations and prominence have a huge impact on whether your local business shows up in SERPs or not. And since search is how customers find a local business, you need to leverage citation building to win at local search.
What is a Citation?
Citations are online references to your business NAP – your Name, Address, and Phone Number. Citations are the local SEO equivalent of links, pointing to your bricks and mortar location instead of your website. And just like links, they pass on the juice: “Like links to your website, Google uses them when evaluating the online authority of your business,” says UK-based local SEO pro Mark Walters.
Google uses relevance, distance and prominence to ascribe this local ranking juice. You have some say in relevance, which Google says is simply about how close a match you are. You can’t control distance. But you certainly can control prominence. That’s where citation building comes in.
And just like links, they’re useful for people, too. It’s not just search engines that browse through local business directories, looking for a plumber, cafe, carpet retailer, chiropractor or other business in their area. That’s how a lot of businesses get found these days.
Unlike links, citations can be in plain text – Google doesn’t care whether they link to our website, just as long as they reference your business name, address and phone number.
Structured and Unstructured Citations
Structured citations are what you’ll find in local business directories. You’ll often have control over the form in which they appear so you can change them to suit you. Any Yelp listing page is a good example of a structured citation.
Unstructured citations are mentions of your business name or contact details on sites that aren’t directories. If you get into a local newspaper article about how Main Street is really picking up, or a blogger talks about how good your Coq au Vin is, you’ll have an unstructured citation. Often it will be incomplete – mentioning your name and address but not phone number, for instance.
How Do You Build Citations?
That leads us to the most important question – what are the different ways you can amass these citations?
[Disclaimer: None of the tools/agencies I mention here are a client of my company. I have used them first hand, and cite from experience.]
1. Use Citation Building Services
Specialist local SEO service providers like Whitespark and BrightLocal will build citations for you. They’ll have access to thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of sites that will accept citations, and the building itself is done by hand by professional citation builders in good agencies. The best thing about Whitespark is that they built the popular Local Citation Finder tool, so they know best how it works.
Typically, about a quarter of your citations will go live right away, with the rest taking a few weeks to catch up, but if you want to just hand over some bills and get it done, this might be your best bet.
2. Do It Yourself: Manual Citation Building
You can do what those companies do, but for yourself, manually. Moz keeps a list of places you can have citations from – scroll through it and use that to build out your own citations.
Building citations are fairly simple. Start your search for places to enter citations with the major places for SEO juice: Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, and whatever the big review sites are in your space or industry. Then move on to the four main aggregators, which supply data to all major search engines. In the USA these are Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze, and Factual.
You just have to make sure that your listing is identical each time. You only earn search juice from citations that use your NAP the same way: the exact way it appears on your Google+ Local page and your website.
What does that mean? It means you have to pick one format and stick with it. If you’re:
Kat’s Cradles, 17, Pine Street, West, Texas TX 76691
in one directory, and
Kats Cradles LLC, 17 Pine St, West TX 76691
in another, you’re not getting the benefits of citations – these are like links where you typed the URL wrong, they’re not going to get you anywhere.
The good news is, even if your citations aren’t consistent, you can fix them. Just round up the citations you already have using a tool like Moz Local. Then go through site by site and update them.
You can also use tools to track which of your competitors are listed on which sites, so you can cover all the bases. Covering what your competitors are doing is important. It lets you take advantage of their research and piggyback your way into some quick wins, and can be built into a longer term strategy if you’ve decided to oversee that yourself.
Pro tip: While you’re at it, take a look at competitors’ ad copies using SEMrush; these will give you some ideas on what to write on the descriptions in your business listings.
To learn more and get some ideas on who to approach to carry your citations, check out Moz’s guide to the local search ecosystem as well as your own results from your competitor searches.
3. Hire a Digital Agency
Another alternative is to turn to a full-service digital agency for a complete solution. Many digital agencies are either location specific or industry specific, sometimes both. That means they know how to present your brand to the local world or to your consumers, as well as how to make citations reinforce other areas of local digital marketing. They’ll tie citations into a broader SEO and digital strategy and leverage them to the best advantage.
While it’s tempting to think of your website and citations carried by review sites as unconnected, nothing could be further from the truth. Gerrid Smith, CEO of digital agency Black Fin, which specializes in local SEO in the legal niche, categorically said, “To be brutally honest, the things we do on a client’s website will typically only account for about 30% of the SEO effects we’ll generate. The other 70% happens offsite.”
This means taking into account developments not only in your industry or niche, but also those in search itself, such as new algorithmic features (e.g. RankBrain) or search behavior options (e.g. voice search), analyzing their impact on local SEO and charting an appropriate course of adjustment for your strategy.
Building a solid local digital strategy is a job for pros, so this third option is often the most successful.
In Conclusion
Citation building is overwhelmingly the most effective single tactic for generating local SEO juice. But we’ve seen what’s happened to link building. It’s more effective to implement citation building as part of a cohesive local digital strategy, and the rewards of doing this well are going to grow as the world becomes more connected and more mobile.
Featured Image Credit: www.futureatlas.com (modified and used under CC license)
Spotted in Google PLAs: “Special Offers” filter & an ad that links directly to a new Google Shopping page
Google is constantly testing and iterating on how it displays product listing ads. The team at CommerceHub spotted two new variations this week. In one, a “with Special Offers” filter option appears in a product card unit. In another, a single product listing ad links to a landing page on Google Shopping that’s formatted like an expanded version of a typical product card unit — that’s what Google calls the product ad format that looks like Knowledge Graph panels).
“With Special Offers”
On a search result for [amazon fire], a “with Special Offers” option is selected by default. Oddly, the first listing for Best Buy has no offer associated with it. The special offers shown include free shipping, no tax and used – so these are not merchant promotions.
Selecting “Item Only” from the drop down removes “with Special Offers” from the product title and a new product image is shown. The two products listings highlight “used” and “no tax”, so it’s unclear to me exactly how these are getting separated. Send me a tweet if you know of have ideas.
Google has included feature filters like the 8GB option in the Amazon Fire product card unit, and more elaborately for products like the iPhone; see below.
Single PLA Links Directly To Google Shopping Landing Page
Another variation CommerceHub found was a product listing ad that doesn’t include any retailer listings and instead links to a Google Shopping landing page that is essentially an expanded version of the product card units like the ones shown above that show up on the main search results pages with retailer promotions and links, reviews, related products, maps to nearby stores and more. In fact, this page flows a lot like an Amazon product page.
A search for the EAN of a Prada perfume includes a title, reviews snippet and product image.
Here’s what the top of the landing page from that ad looks like on Google Shopping on desktop.
On mobile, the experience is a little strange, but it prioritizes access to reviews above retailer links. Whereas on desktop, clicking anywhere on the ad unit brings you to the top of the landing page, on mobile, only the “Reviews” links are clickable. Here’s what the ad looks like when expanded. Click on the “Reviews” links and you’re taken to that section of the product landing page, below the retailer listings.
This isn’t the first time Google has tested driving brand searches directly to Google Shopping pages rather than to retailer or brand sites. In 2014, Google tested a PLA unit that showed category options for David Yurman jewelry, in one example. Clicking on any of the options brought users to a filtered page on Google Shopping.
Search for Okay Google commands available in Google Search App
Searchers and users are talking to their phones more than ever and sometimes you’d be surprised what your phone understands. That is why Kristijan Ristovski designed ok-google.io to give you a searchable and browsable list of 150 commands and 1000+ variations of Okay Google voice commands you can say to Google.
This is probably not even the full list he said, he said he will continue to update the list with more and more commands as he discovers them.
Here is the list of the categories of Google voice commands you can find this web site: People & Relationships, Time, Weather, Stocks, Conversion, Math, Device control, Definitions, Alarms, Calendar, Gmail integration, Google Keep & Notes, Contacts & Calls, Messaging, Social apps, Translation, Reminders, Maps & Navigation, Sports, Flight & Travel, Web Browsing, Movies & TV Shows, Easter eggs, Music, and Timer & Stopwatch.
Here is a screen shot of part of the site:
Give it a try yourself at ok-google.io.
On the Road Again: 5 Tips for a Successful Working Vacation by @LWilson1980
Working vacations have a bad reputation; either the assumption is that little if any work will get achieved, or that any notion of having a real vacation is optimistic at best. But this doesn’t have to be the case! In this post, I am going to explore five essential tips for a successful working holiday.
Tip 1: Getting the Work/Fun Percentages Right
This is the initial barrier that frequently causes working vacations to fail, or under deliver on pre-trip expectations. While percentages will always differ depending on the driving force for combining business and pleasure, travel destinations, and myriad other factors, it is possible to combine work life and home life successfully in your travel plans.
Setting expected work/fun percentages before your trip will enable you to plan for delivering on your expectations.
The more forward planning you can book into your holiday from the outset the better.
From advance booking activities, through to identifying ‘between meeting stop offs’, investing in advance planning, will save on disappointing work/fun deliverables.
Tip 2: Using Personal Experiences to Drive Success
Regardless of your industry, there will be logical opportunities to leverage travel plans (or direct work needs requiring travel) for business and home life value add.
The charity sector is a fantastic example of this in action. Companies are able to volunteer time, energy, expertise, and provide real stories to influence the behavior of others. This can encourage user involvement, engagement, and contribute towards business goals, including naturally shareable content and link building, building brand awareness, and adding faces (people) to services provided.
The top countries for contributing volunteering time are currently: Myanmar, USA, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia:
Source: CAF World Giving Index 2015
On smaller scales, this is something I like to do every few months with the company I work for – an example below from a recent Dartmoor Challenge. This type of approach can provide employees with an added feeling of personal, or self-achievement, and is great for team building too.
Tip 3: Making the Most From Seasonal Slows
Many industries have some degree of seasonality. The summertime is a regularly quoted slow period, but this can also become a time for innovation, service enhancement, and increased work/vacation productivity.
Companies can leverage seasonal slow times for chances to combine employee efficiency, and work/life balance improvements. When the need for staff numbers is lower, creativity with staff holiday use, wider remote working, and getting flexible with holiday working options, can be a real win-win.
Some tips for using a working vacation to overcome seasonal slumps include:
- Take time out to re-approach your product/service delivery, refine, and innovate
- Implement good ideas, and turn existing insight into actionable next steps
- Experiment – with processes, reporting, and other business approaches (challenge the ‘status quo’)
- Leverage the season for evergreen content creation, seasonal opportunities, and creative seasonal writing
- Add new areas of potential positive impact into the marketing mix – develop new ways to turn around business slow times
- Get to know your customers more – use remote travel plans to have face to face meetings with customers in disparate locations
Tip 4: Save Money by Combining Priorities
Regardless of how much time and money is set aside for work and for fun, there will be scope for combining both outcomes to save money. Part of this is tied to effective and early planning, another aspect of this is prioritizing what outcomes matter the most to you (are finances an issue?), and ensuring you are able to positively impact them from the outset.
If you can make the most out of each location; setting agendas, booking in multiple meetings, and identifying ‘go between’ vacation stops, you are likely to save money before you even leave for the airport.
Here are some extra tips for saving money on working holidays:
- Expenses: Agree with your company the parameters for what qualifies as a work expense. Having clarity on areas like this helps to avoid disappointment and unexpected costs when you return to the office.
- Maximize locations: Every meeting destination is an opportunity for exploration and fun. The more you can approach each business requirement as a chance to combine personal and business, the better.
- Book in advance: From flights and traveling to package deals and more, every day counts when it comes to cost saving with advance booking.
- Buy in bulk: Food is one of the most overlooked costs with business trips and working vacations. If you are situated in a single location and can plan supermarket trips when on the road, you will be able to save compared to constant eating out. Buying in bulk also covers items like refreshments, which individually are low impact, but can collectively make a large difference between and extra sightseeing or staying in the hotel.
Tip 5: Enjoy Every Moment
If your working holiday is 50% work and 50% pleasure, or any variation on your work demands, the end result doesn’t have to be 50% less fun.
Embrace the moment; look at every interaction, work commitment, and pre-booked event, as a moment to enjoy and be enhanced by the fact that you are on a form of vacation.
The biggest mistake people make on working breaks is forgetting to enjoy themselves, or at the other extreme, neglecting to get the most work value out of the trip. Striking the perfect balance will result in a productive, relaxing vacation.
How Did it Go?
I love to hear about other people’s experiences, so please let me know about your successful (or not so successful) working vacations and share what others can learn from your experiences.
Image Credits
Featured Image:
In-post Photos #1: CAF World Giving Index 2015. Used with permission.
In-post Photos #2: Vertical Leap – ‘Dartmoor Challenge’. Used with permission.
Wednesday 29 June 2016
Pinterest Adds 4 New Features To Boost Sales by @DannyNMIGoodwin
Pinterest is upping its ecommerce game and wants to become the go-to social shopping platform. Here are the four new shopping features Pinterest has introduced to help businesses boost their online sales.
1. Pinterest Expands Buyable Pins To The Web
Pinterest is bringing Buyable Pins to the web. Introduced a year ago, Buyable Pins were initially only available to iPhone and iPad users.
Eighty percent of Pinterest’s users are mobile, but Pinterest realizes that people don’t just shop and purchase on mobile. With 10 million products available for sale on Pinterest, you can expect to see a lot more buttons with blue prices in the search results, related Pins and business profiles.
To get access to Buyable Pins, you have to use one of the following platforms: BigCommerce, Demandware, IBM Commerce, Magento, or Shopify.
2. Pinterest Upgrades Visual Search
Speaking of search, people conduct more than 130 million visual searches every month on Pinterest. Building on the success of In-Pin visual search, which was introduced in November, Pinterest users have a new way to discover products from within a Pin.
Clicking on the visual search icon will bring up a few dots, which users can then click on to explore similar pins. Say, for example, you’re looking at a Pin of a living room. After clicking on visual search, you could do a visual search for anything in that image, whether it’s a lamp, pillows, or a sofa.
Pinterest accomplishes this with automatic object detection, which you can read about in greater detail in this blog post.
3. Pinterest’s Got A Brand New Shopping Bag
Pinterest will now let users add multiple products from different merchants to their virtual shopping bag, no matter how they access the site (web or app). This is similar to how Amazon lets you buy products from multiple sellers but pay for all the items in one order.
4. New Pinterest Merchant Profiles
New profiles will make it easier to discover new products that highlight what’s new, what’s on sale, and what’s popular. Here’s an example:
Image Credits: Pinterest
SearchCap: Shopping campaigns, common SEO mistakes & a product search survey
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: SEO? SEM? SMX East has you covered. Jun 29, 2016 by Search Engine Land One thing is certain: profound changes are coming to your profession, whether you’re an SEO...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. 
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
SEO? SEM? SMX East has you covered.
One thing is certain: profound changes are coming to your profession, whether you’re an SEO or SEM.
This year’s SMX East agenda was created to ensure that you’d succeed in spite of the dramatic developments in organic search marketing and paid search advertising.
Get the details on this year’s agenda.
-The SMX East Conference Team
Shopping campaigns: Play like every day is a holiday
Shopping campaigns are becoming a major source of website clicks and revenue during the holiday season, and the “Shopping Campaigns: Play Like Every Day Is A Holiday” panel at SMX Advanced featured tips and advice from three PPC veterans: Ann Stanley, Todd Bowman, and Mona Elesseily.
Ann Stanley: Shopping ads, buy buttons, social commerce & remarketing
Shopping ads and buy buttons are everywhere. Stanley explored those areas where ads are driven by product feeds, and clicks either lead to retailer websites or convert on host platforms. Her talk was full of data insights and provided a neat map divided into three conversion areas:
Area #1: The search giants: David Bing vs. Goliath Google
Thanks to Windows 10, Bing Shopping ads share is growing (21% US, 9% UK). With Google Shopping winning by volume, Bing nearly always shows lower CPCs. In terms of conversion and ROAS efficiency, results vary heavily by vertical. Bottom line: if you target the US or UK, give Bing a try to see how effective it could be for you.
Area #2: Social commerce: growing ecosystem with many faces
Social commerce still carries the promise of incremental returns by opening the door for the impulse purchases in the digital world. Stanley subdivides the area into four main types, showing how the growth potential is backed up by a hugely diversified ecosystem:
- F-commerce: Retailers can offer their products within the Facebook environment. Shoppers can browse through the retailer’s product tree, liking and commenting on products as they go and putting them into a Facebook cart with checkout option.
- Buy buttons: Although Twitter has discontinued its buy button in favor of Dynamic Remarketing, other players like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest still continue offering the ad format that allows brands to educate and sell at the same time.
- Dynamic remarketing: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram start the next generation of remarketing, where the shopper does not necessarily notice that he or she is being retargeted. In a nutshell: using a remarketing pixel, retailers inform the platform about what products users engaged with (looked at, put into cart, bought). They can retarget these users showing alternatives or complements to the products they interacted with — to cross or upsell. All of this is, of course, based on product feeds, dynamic ad creation and even works across devices.
- Social Shopping sites (Polyvore, Houzz, Opensky): These sites use peer-to-peer influence around different verticals (Fashion, Beauty, Jewellery, Home & Garden, etc.). Communities create content that inspires to buy. Merchants either directly offer their products or push these using paid features like sponsored promotions.
Area #3: Products and price buttons in display ads
Google starts using the Merchant Feed in many more areas: TrueView and the brand new Google Contextual Dynamic Creative carries product ads into YouTube videos and into the Display Network.
Use remarketing to tie channels together
To think omnichannel is the new, old marketing imperative. Wait, but how? With different channels managed by different departments, this is clearly a tough task. Stanley comes to the rescue by showing smart remarketing techniques:
- Retarget on Google Shopping. Try leveraging low-cost “honeypots” like educational offers (“Learn about how to…”) or open competitions (“Win these tickets / products”) to drive visitors from search, social or display to your site and create remarketing audiences in Google Analytics. Use RLSA in Shopping ads to retarget users when they express a buying intent on Google.
- Retarget on Facebook or Twitter. By using Facebook’s or Twitter’s retargeting tag, dynamic product ads can be shown on the social platforms, using additional audience targeting provided by the platform.
- Retarget on Display. Combine Google’s display campaigns for dynamic retargeting with dynamic ad units and overlay with Analytics remarketing audiences using “Target and Bid” to show display ads only to former tagged visitors.
Stanley also made it clear that a good feed management software is at the heart of being able to scale product ads across channels.
Todd Bowman: Strategies to take your holiday shopping campaigns to light speed
Bowman started to show how important PLAs have become, especially in terms of click share against text ads. For Non-Brand, it rose to a staggering 70% on Google, and 27% on Bing for U.S. paid retail clicks.
Collaborate to avoid a Death Star scenario
Given that importance, departments need to collaborate closely to succeed during special sales periods like Black Friday. As product data quality is at the heart of online sales, the Merchandising department needs to gather excellent product information from suppliers when buying the products. It is exactly that information that the Web Development needs to expose on the website.
Marketers’ task is to make sure the quality data is used properly, e.g. in the Google Merchant feed. Marketers also need to look at past data — when did clicks occur that drove sales? People are doing research for deals much earlier, and just pushing bids on cyber weekend will cause them to miss out on a lot of sales.
Shopping Ads: taking into account search query conversion probability is rewarded with more revenue and higher ROAS
When structuring Shopping campaigns, Bowman recommended analysing search queries and applying different bidding strategies: Generic queries like “Bluetooth Speaker” and a more targeted “JBL Bluetooth Speaker” may otherwise end up in the same campaign showing the same product and the same bid.
However, targeted traffic is more likely to convert and should thus be rewarded with a higher bid. That, According to Merkle, is a driver to affect the bottom line strongly in terms of revenue as well as ROAS. (At Crealytics, we focus on the same strategy and can confirm these findings.)
Brick-and-mortar stores benefit from strong click growth and high CTRs when using Shopping Local Inventory Ads — yet the value is hard to measure
When connecting offline and online, Local Inventory Ads (LIA) offer opportunities to traditional stores. Not only can a store be easily located on Google Maps, but also do LIAs provide a way for potential shoppers near the store to learn about products and availability.
Google is testing a lot of new Shopping features, including a “Buy online, Pick up in Store” currently in Beta. Bowman expects the majority of digital ads in the future be powered by feeds. Yet the biggest LIA challenge remains to track store sales and offline orders to measure the value of its clicks. At least measuring store visits is, as of now, no longer a vision, with Google offering a “Store visits” beta.
We at Crealytics also expect GTINs to play a major role in conversion attribution in the future. As Bowman notes: Google keeps being very serious about this number, rigorously disapproving products that fail to carry them in the feed after a 30-day grace period.
Mona Elesseily: Getting Better Bang for Your PPC Shopping Bucks
Elesseily provided a healthy a mix between Shopping present and future: tactics and useful tools for today, as well as an outlook on the next Google Shopping features for tomorrow.
Today: Combine Shopping with other ad formats, leverage Similar Audiences, and optimize for mobile
Combining Google Shopping & Dynamic Search Ads is a promising way to get additional shopping reach. Elesseily highly recommends to ask Google for help to set up additional DSA campaigns from the Merchant Center feed with their internal tools. Mix these with regular “backup” DSA campaigns to cover any product currently not in your feed. Bid low on the backup campaigns to avoid cannibalization, which can go up to a 25% in her experience.
As an estimated 74% of internet traffic will be video by 2017, YouTube should not be underestimated to leverage more reach. Combining Trueview for Shopping, layered with dynamic remarketing yield amazing results according to Elesseily.
In the past, “Similar Audiences” were only available for Display. But since the Google I/O Summit in May 2016, these are also available for Shopping, Search and DSA campaigns.
Intended to reach new customers, Similar Audiences are incremental and recent; audiences do not overlap with existing RLSA lists und remain 24 hours on the list only. Her bet is that you’ll have to include higher funnel audiences (e.g. cart abandoners) to get traction from Similar Audiences as lower funnel audiences (e.g. purchases in the last 30 days) will be too small to provide significant traction.
For Mobile optimization, Elesseily considers site speed a crucial factor. To get started, she recommends the official Think with Google tool, testmysite, which provides actionable recommendations customized to your site.
Tomorrow: More ad inventory, better offline attribution, conversational shopping and…
In addition to more Google inventory opening up for Shopping ads (like the image search) Driven by mobile and local initiatives, Elesseily sees online and offline growing together heavily. Beyond informing the shopper what he can expected to find in a store, better in-store attribution remains a core area of effort.
Siri Voice Search, Amazon Echo and Chat Bots will become more and more popular. This changes the way people shop today – towards something more of a conversation. Advertisers will have to find new ways on how to respond to shoppers’ questions.
On the long term, we can also expect Google Tango, an augmented reality framework, to bring new digital marketing opportunities into the game. It can project virtual products into images of the physical space in nearly real time – just think of examples like placing virtual furniture into a room to see if they fit before purchasing them.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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