Google AdWords has introduced new IF functions to search ads which allow ad text to be customized based on whether or not specific parameters are met.
Ads can be customized in a number of ways using IF functions, here are just a few examples:
IF it’s a new customer, then show ads for introductory promotions.
IF it’s a returning customer, then show ads emphasizing your loyalty program.
IF the customer is using a mobile device, then show ads emphasizing quick and easy mobile checkout.
Anyone who has ever used IFTTT (If This Then That), or has a background in computer programming, will get the basic idea behind IF functions. If X parameter is met, then perform Y action… and so forth.
IF functions can be used to display custom text if any of the following parameters are met: device, time, audience, gender, or age. IF functions can be applied in any field of an expanded text ad, except for the URL itself.
In the example which Google provides below, IF functions are used in both the second headline field and description field.
Headline 2 will promote “Fast Mobile Booking” if the user is searching on a mobile device. In the description field, “Save 15% at checkout” will be added if the searcher is in the LoyaltyMembers audience.
In the event that parameters aren’t met, advertisers can now select default values to be displayed instead, which means you’ll never have to have an ad without customizers in your ad group.
Facebook is changing the way it ranks stories in the News Feed. The social network is adding and updating signals to its ranking algorithm.
The goal is to start showing users more authentic content by cutting down on posts that are “misleading, sensational or spammy.” In other words, cutting down on the Facebook’s fake news problem.
Authentic posts may start appearing higher in your Facebook News Feed. Sounds great, but what exactly is an authentic post?
Well, to figure this out, Facebook started by categorizing pages to identify any pages that were posting spam or encouraging users to like, comment, and share posts. Facebook then used posts from those pages to “train a model that continuously identifies whether posts from other Pages are likely to be authentic.”
As one example, Facebook said that it looks at how often users who read posts end up hiding them.
Facebook Updates Real-Time Signals
Timey posts or topics that get a lot of engagement (likes, shares, comments) during a short period could also appear higher in your News Feed.
For example, if your favorite sports team wins a game and lots of people are posting about the game or the team, then those posts will get a temporary boost.
Facebook promises these update will result in little change to News Feed visibility for most pages – though some Pages may notice small increases or decreases in referral traffic and clicks.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google new AdWords interface, ads by AdWords & IF functions appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google has been slowly building out the new AdWords interface, first introduced last March. More accounts have been granted alpha access, and on Tuesday, Google’s head of search ads, Jerry Dischler, said it is rolling out to even more AdWords accounts in the next few months.
When you first get access, you may be taken right to the new interface, or you may see a notification in the top right corner or at the bottom of the screen like the one below.
Don’t worry about clicking it and never being able to get back to the land you know. You can toggle back and forth between the new and old interfaces, which you’ll want to do because functionality like being able to download data is still not available. A guided tour will launch the first time the new UI loads in an account.
Google continues to add more features to the new UI, so even if you don’t find yourself working in it extensively at first, it’s worth continuing to check out and get used to the navigation. Here’s a look at an Overview screen today. The Advanced bid adjustment menu option on the left nav is relatively new, for example.
Google says accounts are selected based on a number of factors such as the features used.
About The Author
As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.
Automation is nothing new in AdWords, but this month, Google launched a pilot this month that adds new text ads to advertisers’ accounts. Dubbed Ads Added by AdWords, the program started on January 26.
Not surprisingly, this news has set off alarm bells among paid search managers that worry about Google usurping control over the ad creation and testing process. Here is what we know so far about this test.
The initial set of advertisers were notified of the pilot on January 12. For those that chose to participate, ads were added to ad groups two weeks later, on January 26, at which time a second wave of advertisers were notified about the pilot. Currently 2,000 accounts have been selected for the test. Each has a two-week opt-out window via a form. If you do not receive an email, you haven’t been selected for the pilot.
What accounts were considered for this program? Google looked at campaigns with ad rotation settings of either “Optimize for clicks” or “Optimize for conversions” that have ad groups with few ads in them.
If you’ve opted out of automated extensions or are in a vertical with privacy sensitivities such as pharma, your account was not selected for this program.
How are the ads generated? We’re told that, for the test, the ads were generated by people (as opposed to auto-generated) based on the existing ads in the account and the landing page content. The ads went through review by the product team, among others, for quality assurance. The sales teams were also involved in creative review and account selection for the pilot.
From the Help Center page on this new program, we also know that any ads generated for the pilot will be labeled “Added by AdWords”. In the example below (yes, all of the ads are terrible, but try to look past that for now), Google has added two test ads in an ad group that had just one ad. Notice that the headlines, description and paths are all being tested.
Google says on that Help Center page, “We believe that adding more ads to the affected ad groups can improve these ad groups’ performance by 5 to 15%.” The new ads are set to run indefinitely, and Google recommends pilot participants not pause the ads. Theoretically, if they perform worse (based on conversion or click-through rates), the ads will be shown less. But, certainly review the ads if you’re participating in the test, as Google also advises.
This program obviously raises more questions about advertiser control and the role of machine learning in ad creation. If Google deems the pilot successful and roles Ads Added by AdWords out more broadly, it’s hard to see how the current ad creation and vetting process can scale without automation. One can assume that the machines will be learning from this pilot.
About The Author
As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.
We’re creating a lot of content these days. It’s everywhere. Everyone is writing; everyone has a blog. I’m truly waiting for the day when my mom asks me how she can start a blog to impart her wisdom about how to behave properly in a restaurant.
With the nonstop stream of content being created, it sometimes seems like not everyone is really thinking about how to make their content stand out. I remember that a few years ago, a friend asked me why I hadn’t written a piece about some SEO topic that everyone else was writing about. I explained that I didn’t think I had anything to add to what was out there. If everyone else is saying it, why would you? Wouldn’t you rather say something else, or something better?
For example, around Halloween I was searching for lists of the scariest movies ever made. I kept finding great lists full of movies I’d never even heard of, but one big thing was missing: none that I found showed you where you could stream the films or rent/buy them.
All these articles had some unique perspectives to them, too. Some listed the trailers for the films. Some were filled with recommendations from famous actors and directors. However, for me, as a big fan of streaming services, I was quite disappointed to not see any that told me where to find them and linked to those sources. This definitely stood out as something that I’d have added myself.
It’s even about Netflix, but instead of giving you a link to the movie on that site, they show you the trailers. I mean I’m certainly capable of searching for a movie on Netflix (in fact, I’m pretty close to an expert on it) but as a link builder all I think is, “This is a wasted chance to link.” You see the section about the movie “Creep?” Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d linked to it on Netflix?
So they do tell you where to get the film, but they don’t link to it! Why not? And in the “Honorable Mentions” sections, they list other films but leave it up to you to go search for them. If I had a horror movie site, and someone approached me with an alternative piece that linked to where to find these films, I’d favor that over this one any day.
We can do better
The beauty of a tool like BuzzSumo or Ahrefs Content Explorer is that you can easily see what content is performing well on what platforms. If you see several articles getting a lot of traction on Twitter, and you have a very similar piece in the works, look at what they don’t have and add it to your own.
To give you an example of how someone could use this idea and go above and beyond, here’s a great content opportunity for a site that sells dog collars to do a nice blog post on that same topic, linking to the parks themselves. Maybe they ask for visitors to send in photos of their dogs in these parks, wearing the collars they sell. That would be a nice way to get some great social shares, wouldn’t it?
Let’s go forward with that more specific niche and find one more example of something that could be made better.
They do include some nice info, though. They provide a list of free admission dates for the year (the article was from 2016, so it’s for that year), and they have summarized the pet policies for each park, which is pretty nice. They don’t have a photo of each park, though, and since a national park is such a visual experience, all I’m thinking is, “Why not?”
It has 212 total shares according to BuzzSumo, but I think it would have had more if it had contained outbound links and more photos.
Now, even if you’re not trying to create new content, you could surely look at all of this and see that other articles about dog-friendly national parks did contain links and photos, and you could thus update your piece and re-socialize it. Maybe you could add videos of drone footage of the parks or give tips on the best times to visit each one. What about linking to camping options or other accommodations for each park?
For one thing, if you have content that doesn’t stand out for having all it could have, you’re opening yourself up to potentially losing that link to someone else. It’s like broken link building, really. “We noticed you have a link to X piece, but our Y piece actually gives more information — so would you think about replacing the old link with ours?”
I recently received an email asking me if I’d consider updating an old article where I linked to a tool review. The person reaching out said that on her blog, they had recently reviewed this tool and wondered if I could change my link to their review instead, as it was much more comprehensive and reviewed several new features. If I weren’t such a lazy person, I might be tempted.
So, what can you add to make your content better?
And last, but not least… outbound links! Don’t ever be afraid to link out if it helps your audience.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
blog. Julie began working in search marketing in 2002 and soon became head of search for a small IT firm. Eventually, she started Link Fish Media, where she now serves as Director Of Operations, focusing on working with clients in ultra-competitive niches all over the world.
Back in August, I posited the concept of a two-factor ranking model for SEO. The idea was to greatly simplify SEO for most publishers and to remind them that the finer points of SEO don’t matter if you don’t get the basics right. This concept leads to a basic ranking model that looks like this:
To look at it a little differently, here is a way of assessing the importance of content quality:
The reason that machine learning is important to this picture is that search engines are investing heavily in improving their understanding of language. Hummingbird was the first algorithm publicly announced by Google that focused largely on addressing an understanding of natural language, and RankBrain was the next such algorithm.
I believe that these investments are focused on goals such as these:
Better understanding user intent
Better evaluating content quality
We also know that Google (and other engines) are interested in leveraging user satisfaction/user engagement data as well. Though it’s less clear exactly what signals they will key in on, it seems likely that this is another place for machine learning to play a role.
Today, I’m going to explore the state of the state as it relates to content quality, and how I think machine learning is likely to drive the evolution of that.
Content quality improvement case studies
A large number of the sites that we see continue to under-invest in adding content to their pages. This is very common with e-commerce sites. Too many of them create their pages, add the products and product descriptions, and then think they are done. This is a mistake.
For example, adding unique user reviews specific to the products on the page is very effective. At Stone Temple, we worked on one site where adding user reviews led to a traffic increase of 45 percent on the pages included in the test.
We also did a test where we took existing text on category pages that had originally been crafted as “SEO text” and replaced it. The so-called SEO text was not written with users in mind and hence added little value to the page. We replaced the SEO text with a true mini-guide specific to the categories on which the content resided. We saw a gain of 68 percent to the traffic on those pages. We also had some control pages for which we made no changes, and traffic to those dropped 11 percent, so the net gain was just shy of 80 percent:
Note that our text was handcrafted and tuned with an explicit goal of adding value to the tested pages. So this wasn’t cheap or easy to implement, but it was still quite cost-effective, given that we did this on major category pages for the site.
These two examples show us that investing in improving content quality can offer significant benefits. Now let’s explore how machine learning may make this even more important.
Impact of machine learning
Let’s start by looking at our major ranking factors and see how machine learning might change them.
Content quality
Showing high-quality content in search results will remain critical to the search engines. Machine learning algorithms like RankBrain have improved their ability to understand human language. One example of this is the query that Gary Illyes shared with me: “can you get 100% score on Super Mario without walkthrough.”
Prior to RankBrain, the word “without” was ignored by the Google algorithm, causing it to return examples of walkthroughs, when what the user wanted was to be able to get a result telling them how to do it without a walkthrough. RankBrain was largely focused on long-tail search queries and represented a good step forward in understanding user intent for such queries.
But Google has a long way to go. For example, consider the following query:
In this query, Google appears unclear on how the word “best” is being used. The query is not about the best down comforters, but instead is about why down comforters are better than other types of comforters.
Let’s take a look at another example:
See how the article identifies that the coldest day in US history occurred in Alaska, but then doesn’t actually provide the detailed answer in the Featured Snippet? The interesting thing here is that the article Google pulled the answer from actually does tell you both the date and the temperature of the coldest day in the US — Google just missed it.
These things are not that complicated, when you look at them one at a time, for Google to fix. The current limitations arise because of the complexity of language and the scale of machine learning required to fix it. The approach to fixing it requires building larger and larger sets of examples like the two I shared above, then using them to help train better machine learning-derived algorithms.
RankBrain was one major step forward for Google, but the work is ongoing. The company is making massive investments in taking their understanding of language forward in dramatic ways. The following excerpt, from USA Today, starts with a quote from Google’s senior program manager, Linne Ha, who runs the Pygmalion team of linguists at the company:
“We’re coming up with rules and exceptions to train the computer,” Ha says. “Why do we say ‘the president of the United States?’ And why do we not say ‘the president of the France?’ There are all sorts of inconsistencies within our language and within every language. For humans it seems obvious and natural, but for machines it’s actually quite difficult.”
The Pygmalion team at Google is the one that is focused on improving Google’s understanding of natural language. Some of the things that will improve at the same time are their understanding of:
what pages on the web best match the user’s intent as implied by the query.
how comprehensive a page is in addressing the user’s needs.
As they do that, their capabilities for measuring the quality of content and how well it addresses the user intent will grow, and this will therefore become a larger and larger ranking factor over time.
User engagement/satisfaction
As already noted, we know that search engines use various methods for measuring user engagement. They’ve already publicly revealed that they use CTR as a quality control factor, and many believe that they use it as a direct ranking factor. Regardless, it’s reasonable to expect that search engines will continue to seek out more useful ways to have user signals play a bigger role in search ranking.
There is a type of machine learning called “reinforcement learning” that may come into play here. What if you could try different sets of search results, see how they perform, and then use that as input to directly refine and improve the search results in an automated way? In other words, could you simply collect user engagement signals and use them to dynamically try different types of search results for queries, and then keep tweaking them until you find the best set of results?
But it turns out that this is a very hard problem to solve. Jeff Dean, who many consider one of the leaders of the machine learning efforts at Google, had this to say about measuring user engagement in a recent interview he did with Fortune:
An example of a messier reinforcement learning problem is perhaps trying to use it in what search results should I show. There’s a much broader set of search results I can show in response to different queries, and the reward signal is a little noisy. Like if a user looks at a search result and likes it or doesn’t like it, that’s not that obvious.
Nonetheless, I expect that this is a continuing area of investment by Google. And, if you think about it, user engagement and satisfaction has an important interaction with content quality. In fact, it helps us think about what content quality really represents: web pages that meet the needs of a significant portion of the people who land on them. This means several things:
The product/service/information they are looking for is present on the page.
They can find it with relative ease on the page.
Supporting products/services/information they want can also be easily found on the page.
The page/website gives them confidence that you’re a reputable source to interact with.
The overall design offers an engaging experience.
As Google’s machine learning capabilities advance, they will get better at measuring the page quality itself, or various types of user engagement signals that show what users think about the page quality. This means that you will need to invest in creating pages that fit the criteria laid out in the five points above. If you do, it will give you an edge in your digital marketing strategies — and if you don’t, you’ll end up suffering a a result.
Summary
There are huge changes in the wind, and they’re going to dramatically impact your approach to digital marketing. Your basic priorities won’t change, as you’ll still need to:
create high-quality content.
measure and continuously improve user satisfaction with your site.
establish authority with links.
The big question is, are you really doing enough of these things today? In my experience, most companies under-invest in the continuous improvement of content quality and improving user satisfaction. It’s time to start putting more focus on these things. As Google and other search engines get better at determining content quality, the winners and losers in the search results will begin to shift in dramatic ways.
Google’s focus is on providing better and better results, as this leads to more market share for them and thus higher levels of revenue. Best to get on board the content quality train now — before it leaves the station and leaves you behind!
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
First, a moment of silence for the Standard Text Ad format that held on for 15+ years. Today marks the end. And with that, Google is rolling out AdWords IF functions globally to give advertisers the ability to customize their ads in much the same way ad customizers allow, but without the feed.
With IF functions,text ads can be tailored based on whether users are on mobile and/or a member of an audience list. For example, Frederick Vallaeys wrote in his column about using the IF function for mobile last fall when the feature was first announced as a way for advertisers who were running mobile preferred Standard Text Ads to continue customizing ads for mobile users.
In the example below from Google, an If function is used to customize the description offer based on whether a user is in the advertiser’s “Cart Abanodoners” retargeting list. If they on the list, users will see a “15% off” promotion; if not, they’ll get a “10% off” offer.
Syntax
Broken down, the syntax for IF functions is:
Start with “{=IF”
Add an open “(” after IF
Follow with the targeting of “device=mobile” or “audience IN”
If you’re using audience targeting, put the list you want to target inside parentheses. If you are targeting multiple audience lists, separate them with a comma.
Put a comma after the targeting
Add the text to insert when targeting criteria is met
Close “)”
Follow with a colon “:”
After the colon, add the default text that will be used when the targeting criteria is not met
End with the closing curly bracket “}”
Put together it looks like this:
{=IF(device=mobile or audience IN(audiencelist1,audiencelist2), Custom Text): Default Text}
A few more things to note
If you’re creating ads in the web UI, the IF function option will become available when you enter a curly bracket “{“. However, for now at least, it defaults to the mobile targeting syntax: {=IF(device=mobile,insert text):default text}. You’ll have to change it for audience targeting, and be sure to use the exact list name.
IF functions can be used anywhere in an Expanded Text Ad except for the final URL. They are only eligible to run on the Search Network.
And last but not least, with the default text provided with IF functions, advertisers don’t have to have an ad that doesn’t use customizers ad in their ad groups.
About The Author
As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.
President Donald Trump’s executive order barring people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, even if they have a valid visa or green card, is not the way to “make America great again.” In fact, the online marketing industry as we know it would not exist had this order been in effect in Google’s early days.
Let me explain.
One of the most successful companies to come out of the US in the past two decades is Google, founded by Sergey Brin, a Russian and Larry Page, an American. While they had a great search engine, there was no business model. According to John Battelle in “The Search,” Google was months away from shutting down in 1999, when it was spending $500,000 per month with only $20 million in the bank and no significant revenues of any kind.
Employee #9, Salar Kamangar, born in Tehran, Iran, is credited with figuring out how to start making money by selling relevant ads on Google.* Employee #11, Omid Kordestani, also born in Tehran, figured out how to scale that business.
How much did it scale? In 2016, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Apple went back and forth for holding the honors of being the world’s most valuable company based on market cap. On January 26, 2017, Google, the part of the business including ads, reported Q4 2016 revenues of $25.8 billion with profits of $7.8 billion. It is estimated that about 90 percent of Alphabet’s revenue comes from ads.
Had it not been for two Iranian immigrants and all the profits Google makes from selling ads, Google might no longer exist today. When I worked there from 2002–2012, I found ads tremendously exciting, but I also knew that my work helped fund all the things that make our lives more convenient and that we could not imagine being without, like Maps, Search, Gmail, Apps, and soon, self-driving cars.
And the benefits haven’t been limited to making life more convenient or giving all of us in the online marketing industry our careers and livelihoods. It’s benefited companies of all sizes everywhere. Across the US, Google’s search and advertising tools helped 1.4 million businesses drive $165 billion in economic activity in 2015.
And that is why I will argue that President Trump’s latest executive order is misguided.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are my personal ones.
*The pay-per-click advertising model was invented by Bill Gross of Idealab. Salar’s unique twist was to make ad relevance part of the ranking algorithm. Online ads at the time were on the decline because users hated how irrelevant and interruptive they were. By making them relevant, users started to click on ads to connect with companies that could help them, a true win-win.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building AdWords and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the Google AdWords Evangelist.
Today he is the Cofounder of
, an AdWords tool company focused on unique data insights, One-Click Optimizations™, advanced reporting to make account management more efficient, and Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords. He stays up-to-speed with best practices through his work with
, a search marketing agency focused on turning clicks into revenue. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and become better online marketers.
As you may remember, Majestic, an SEO toolset company, set off on a voyage last year to print the internet in 3D in outer space. Well, we are glad to report that that mission has been a success.
After 18-months, the “Majestic Landscape,” which is a 3D data visualization sculpture that depicts the internet graph was printed on a 3D printer designed to work in zero gravity on the International Space Station.
Matthew Napoli, the VP of In-Space Operations for Made In Space, Inc. said, “the print looks really good. It was exciting to be able to print those complex digital features in microgravity and see the great results.”
Dixon Jones from Majestic said, “the #MajesticInSpace Project has been about expanding ideas, expanding knowledge leadership and about believing that data can be more than just numbers on an excel spreadsheet. I think that it also inspires people within our industry to say we are doing more there is more that we can do in the world to advance humankind.”
Here is a photo:
Here is a video from Majestic on this mission:
Here is a GIF of it floating in the space station:
The API is a simple and quick tool that you can use to build your own tools to see what pages are mobile-friendly or not.
Google’s John Mueller said “the API method runs all tests, and returns the same information – including a list of the blocked URLs – as the manual test.” “The documentation includes simple samples to help get you started quickly,” he added.”
The API test outputs include these three statuses:
MOBILE_FRIENDLY_TEST_RESULT_UNSPECIFIED Internal error when running this test. Please try running the test again.
MOBILE_FRIENDLY The page is mobile friendly.
NOT_MOBILE_FRIENDLY The page is not mobile friendly.
AdAge reports that Google has partnered with Cloudflare and TripleLift to deliver instant loading ads on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs). Cloudflare has developed a tool called Firebolt for delivering ads as fast as AMPs can load, while TripleLift is a native ad network which is now adding AMP support.
New Firebolt technology will be integrated with AMP for Ads, where ads must be verified by an authorized service before being delivered to users. In addition to being able to load ads three times faster, Cloudflare’s Firebolt is also built with security in mind.
According to the CEO at Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, Firebolt can cut ad loading times from 2.2 seconds to 700 milliseconds. This is already being seen in practice though an integration with TripleLift, where Firebolt-based ads are being delivered on properties owned by Time Inc.
The decision to partner with Cloudflare, a company which may be relatively unknown to the average digital advertiser, was based on the growing concern to rid the web of ads which contain malware and spread viruses.
Cloudflare’s CEO tells AdAge:
”We really got pulled into this space because we desperately care about encrypting everything on the web. Ad networks have little control over serving malware and we turned to encryption to help solve that problem.”
The decision to partner with TripleLift could be based on the company’s initial success with delivering AMP ads. Time Inc. properties using TripleLift to deliver AMP ads have seen a 13% increase in impressions, with a similar increase in CTRs and eCPMs.
Neither author nor SEJ has any affiliation with any of the tools mentioned within this post.
To help you kick off 2017 right and reach your marketing goals this year, I’ve put together a list of must-have digital marketing tools that simplify and enhance work life, day in and day out. From Google Analytics to Mention and Copyscape, let our favorites be yours!
Google Analytics: Know Your Audience
What we see a lot in new clients who explore digital marketing for the first time is that they don’t know where to start when it comes to utilizing their data. With endless ways for customers to interact with your brand in the modern era — everywhere from in-store to tablets to smart watches — it can become a challenge to piece together a complete picture of your audience. Yet that full understanding of your audience is key to make the right marketing moves. That’s where Google Analytics comes in. As a digital marketing agency, three of our most used functions are:
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is measured as the number of visitors that come to your site and only view one page before they leave again without completing an action. Bounce rates can gauge if your website is visually appealing, has good content and good user experience, and is easy to navigate if visitors are looking for certain info. While all businesses should take advantage of small adjustments to lower bounce rate, if your bounce rate is significantly above 40%, it’s time to audit your site and figure out what is driving visitors away. Sometimes simple common sense will give you the answer, or maybe you need user testing to identify the issue.
Conversion Rate: This is very straightforward. It reflects the number of visitors who perform a specific action on a page that converts into a lead for you. Why is this important? If you have an action you want users to perform (buy something, book something, download an item, or fill out a form), the conversion rate tells you how effective each of your pages is in leading users to complete that action.
One of our clients, for example, works with a complex eight-step booking system on their website. We’ve implemented Google Analytics and can now tell exactly how often potential bookings don’t get completed and in which step of the process users drop off. That’s crucial information and helps us optimize the process to see higher conversion rates and to craft the best customer experience possible.
Plus, especially with consumers shopping more online, the effectiveness of your website is a vital KPI for e-commerce businesses. These statistics by Custora E-commerce Pulse visualize the potential loss of sales for online businesses with low website conversion rates:
Channels: Where are your visitors coming from? Is it organic search traffic? Referral? Paid? This helps businesses gauge your marketing efforts. For example, if you are running radio ads, you may see a spike in direct traffic because you mention your website at the end of the ad. If you’re investing in SEO, you will see movement — hopefully an increase — in your organic search traffic. If you’re running a Facebook contest, you’d hope to see more visits from social. The breakdown in channels basically helps businesses see which marketing efforts are driving the most eyeballs to their site. By engaging other metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate, you will find out if your website is what users want to see.
MailChimp: Power Up Your Email Campaigns
Constant Contact used to be the go-to service for newsletters until MailChimp came along. MailChimp makes crafting newsletters fun — our designers love it. It’s a fantastic email marketing tool that lets you create, send, and track HTML email campaigns with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop user interface.
From an SEO perspective, we love that it has powerful reporting features and comes with integrations that give its functionality that extra bit of oomph: WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Magento, Salesforce, ZenDesk, Shopify, WooCommerce, Mandrill, Eventbrite, Unbounce, Squarespace, Drupal, Slack, and Google Analytics — just to mention a few. One click and the recipient can share your content on Twitter, helping you increase your exposure!
In terms of understanding your audience and giving them what they want, Mailchimp’s A/B testing feature is gold. It allows you to design two entirely different emails — or just two different subject lines — and send option A to one-half of your subscribers and option B to another while tracking opening rates for both. That way, you collect valuable information about what speaks to your audience and learn how to craft amazing content that drives up your opening rates in the future and ultimately helps increase your page conversions. Since email is still the driving force behind e-commerce purchases this November, you’ll want to definitely up your game to make every email count.
That way, you collect valuable information about what speaks to your audience and learn how to craft amazing content that drives up your opening rates in the future and ultimately helps increase your page conversions. Since email is still the driving force behind e-commerce purchases this November, you’ll want to definitely up your game to make every email count.
Canva for Work has been a great tool for our SEO, editorial, and social teams. We’ve created a template that can easily be used by anyone on the team and is aligned with our brand standards. When working with clients, it is important that the designs used for their social shares are in line with their visual standards and not ours. Thanks to Canva’s template feature, we can create those templates for any of our clients and have a stunning post or blog image done in no time — with no design training required. It saves a lot of time and the flexibility you have within the tool makes it fun to work with.
Mention: Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Talk About
Mention is a media monitoring and tracking tool that helps you monitor virtually all mentions of your brand online. Mention helps you get the most out of your online promotional efforts by allowing you to track and stay informed of every instance of your brand name online (including web and all major social media). Mention also allows you to stay informed on relevant topical discussions in your industry through keyword tracking, which offers the opportunity for your brand to enter the online discussion in real-time and build brand awareness within relevant audiences.
When you set up Mention, you will create alerts for words and topics you would like to track. These alerts will include your brand name and could also include relevant keywords you would like to track in your industry. The great thing about Mention is that they offer in-depth search refinement functions so you can exclude irrelevant instances of your keywords and you are only notified of the most relevant mentions. Mention will send you daily emails with your results for quick and convenient tracking. Average mentions per day and which sources you are receiving those mentions from also conveniently gets tracked, therefore visualizing your increase or decrease:
SEMrush: Do You Want to Be Found?
SEMrush is an online software that digital marketers and online businesses use to collect valuable information about their online presence. We use it to analyze traffic and keywords statistics plus research keywords for our clients. SEMrush allows you to observe the success of your online marketing efforts but also track your competitors, which is great.
This powerful software has grown to allow you to observe backlinks, display advertising stats, video and display ad research, and sample ads. All of this is provided in one scan and can be exported using their reporting capabilities.
So why are we addicted to SEMrush? This program has grown and developed to be a one-stop shop for all our clients’ online marketing needs. Whether we need to know what keywords a client is ranking for or if we want to start targeting certain ones on a website, SEMrush can show how difficult it will be to rank and if we’ve already had success in this. Track your progress in a saved project and generate reports also allows you to display progress in a visual manner and to you and to other stakeholders. All of this can help marketers and businesses make decisions without having to use six tools on the web.
Copyscape: Because You Don’t Want to Get Kicked Off Google
No matter what your profession is, plagiarism is always something you’d want to avoid. From an SEO perspective, however, this really is a life or death matter. The worst potential consequence of plagiarism is the risk of being deindexed by Google. If your page is deindexed, it will be completely invisible in search engines and the only way to access the page is via a direct link to the URL. In addition to the offending page being deindexed, your entire site could be deindexed if the problem is deemed widespread or severe enough. For most businesses, this is a death knell. There are also potential legal consequences and negative ramifications in terms of brand reputation and trust, especially if the entity you have stolen from has the means or interest to strike back. When working on new website content, blogs, email campaigns, and Google ads, we always run every piece of content through a plagiarism check. Our service of choice here: Copyscape. It lets us run a full scan on websites and helps optimize our SEO to the max.
Grammarly: Double Check Every Word You Write
Grammarly makes you a better writer by finding and correcting up to ten times more mistakes than the good old word processor. Just copy, paste, and fix your errors. This is an absolute favorite for our content writers and social media specialists. It’s great because it does much more than just correcting your spelling and grammar mistakes. It makes word suggestions to help you enhance your vocabulary usage and provides citation suggestions to address plagiarism which is very helpful to optimize web content for our clients.
Another great flexible detail we love is its adjustable writing style. The tool allows you to choose from editing styles for students, business professionals, bloggers, ESL, medical professionals, technical writers and more — which is great if you’re a blogger or work with a wide range of clients like we do. Plus, once you’ve installed the Grammarly extension, its automated proofreading feature works pretty much everywhere on the web.
MailTester: Spam-proof Your Emails
According to email spam stats published on Hubspot, marketing emails are responsible for about 70% of spamming complaints. Yikes. And those can get expensive! Due to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, you could be fined with up to $11,000 for each spam email that goes out of your account. Obviously, that’s something you might want to avoid but also from a business perspective, having your email campaigns end up in somebody’s spam box isn’t the goal. You’ve worked on it for hours, came up with a great offer and interesting content for your customers, and are hoping to see conversions spike after you hit “send.” MailChimp already provides a ton of useful tips to help you craft the most efficient and spam-safe email possible but to make extra sure that your campaign is worth everyone’s while, another test is always good.
You’ve worked on it for hours, came up with a great offer and interesting content for your customers, and are hoping to see conversions spike after you hit “send.” MailChimp already provides a ton of useful tips to help you craft the most efficient and spam-safe email possible but to make extra sure that your campaign is worth everyone’s while, another test is always good.
Toggl: Make the Most of Your Day
According to Brandfolder, 65% of our workday is spent talking to clients, colleagues, or business partners. A business with 100 employees spends an average of 3.4 hours each day clarifying poor communication. Apparently, we also spend about one-quarter of each day reading emails and responding to them. Or looking for stuff.
Our team uses Toggl to track the use of our time each day and optimize it to be our most productive selves. It’s not just great to identify your daily time wasters but especially when working with clients, the easy one-click time track feature is super convenient to never lose a minute.
What’s your favorite digital marketing tool? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn!
Unless you’re talking to tech geeks, SEO usually gets lumped in with genius-exclusive activities like coding or hacking.
This makes sense, when you think about it, because, at one point, SEO was a little bit like hacking. Back in the good ol’ days, so-called “black hat” SEOs used to find creative ways to game the search engine system and manipulate low-quality pages into ranking at the top of Google’s charts.
While search engines and user preferences have dissuaded many of these practices, there’s still a massive difference between good and bad SEO, and knowing which is which can make all the difference in your online presence.
I’ve created a current, up-to-date guide on the major good and bad SEO tactics so you know what to do, and what to avoid, in your content creation — down to Google’s recent mobile penalty update.
Are You a Good SEO, or a Bad SEO?
It’s true: even if you’re not purposefully creating keyword-stuffed content or pages crammed with manipulative links, you might still be partaking in bad SEO.
The reason for this is that Google, the veritable God of the search engine universe, changes all the time. Over the years, Google has rolled out algorithms with names like Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin, Pigeon, and more. With such a zoo of changes, it’s easy to see how one could fall behind the times where SEO is concerned.
While Google isn’t making all these changes to drive SEOs insane, it’s not at all uncommon for SEOs and marketers to only learn the details of an algorithm update once it has already rolled out, and is actively affecting their sites.
As Google pushes for a more unified, accessible, high-quality web, the changes it makes to things like mobile-friendly rules, search ranking practices, content ranking guidelines, and more can have a dramatic and distinct impact on SEOs. These changes can turn good SEOs to bad SEOs in the blink of an eye, or the click of a mouse.
The Cardinal Sin of the SEO World: Poor User Experience (UX)
If you’re wondering if you might be a bad SEO, ask yourself this one question: do my SEO habits destroy user experience for my visitors?
If the answer is “yes,” you might be a bad SEO.
It’s really that simple!
Today, Google is downright obsessed with creating a digital environment that puts the user first, and rightfully so. Google gets more searches right now than it ever has before, and many of them are coming from new and different platforms like mobile phones and tablets. In fact, of the more than 2 trillion searches Google processes each year, more than half come from mobile devices. In addition to the fact that these mobile searches have changed the way people search (it’s on the go, local, focused on researching products, goods, and services, and dominated by voice search), they’ve also changed the way search engines want to successfully relate to their searchers.
Since a mobile screen is only a fraction of the size of a traditional computer screen, user experience is magnified and drawn, forcefully, to center stage. If a site’s SEO or content practices are sub-par (keyword stuffing, for example, or intrusive ads that ruin the user experience), that reader is going to “bounce” off the page, which has an adverse impact on the site’s SEO and perpetuates the “bad SEO circle.”
To be successful today, even white hat SEOs need to keep user experience in mind consistently. If an SEO practice interrupts it, rather than enhancing it, that’s a practice that deserves to be abandoned. Which brings us to the next point…
Intrusive Interstitial Ads: The Pinnacle of Bad SEO
As I mentioned earlier, Google is consistently updating its algorithms to create more positive user experiences across the board. One of the most recent examples of this is Google’s (unofficially named) “Intrusive Interstitial Update.”
This update, which takes aim at intrusive pop-up ads that affect mobile users, is a prime example of why being a good SEO is so crucial in today’s environment.
Unlike many of its other algorithm updates, Google warned users this one was coming. Back in August of 2016, Google released a statement announcing its plans to punish intrusive ads in the near future. In the statement, Google said:
“Although the majority of pages now have text and content on the page that is readable without zooming, we’ve recently seen many examples where these pages show intrusive interstitials to users. While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google, content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result.
Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.”
True to its word, Google rolled out the Intrusive Interstitial Ad update on January 10th of this year, when it went to work penalizing mobile websites that use interstitials that do the following things:
Covers the main content
Requires the user to dismiss it before accessing main content
Pops up without interaction
Features a layout where the content above-the-fold looks like an interstitial but must be dismissed or scrolled through to reach the main content, beneath the fold
Annoys or otherwise bothers readers
Pops up on a page but isn’t a necessity, such as an age-verification box for sensitive content
For reference, here’s the graphic Google created to demonstrate what these intrusive interstitials look like:
If you’re wondering why Google cracked down so hard on these ads, the answer is simple.
Like the developers said in their statement announcing the intent to unleash this update, intrusive ads have a negative impact on user experience.
As such, anything that falls into the “intrusive pop-up” category is labeled “bad SEO” and, in Google’s eyes, deserves to be punished.
5 Bad SEO Mistakes to Avoid
When it comes to Google, you want to stay in the search engine’s good graces — and thus, your readers and the people using Google.
While it’s not impossible to recover from Google penalties, it is challenging and time-consuming, and it’s much easier and more efficient to master good SEO from the start.
Here’s how:
1. Buying Links
While buying links might seem like a quick way to game the system and help your site rank, it’s guaranteed to backfire.
Here’s why: before search engines were as smart as they are today, it was possible to get away with buying links, since crawlers were more concerned, at that point, with quantity than quality. Not so today.
Now, Google and other search engines have evolved into honed machines that place more value on the quality of links than they do the quantity. While any site can create a bunch of spammy internal or external links, it’s significantly harder to earn high-quality links from reputable sites, and this is exactly what search engine bots want to see.
To put this another way: buying links is like buying Instagram followers. It won’t work, and you’ll look silly doing it.
2. Spamming Other Sites With Link-Dense Comments
While reading other blogs and leaving thoughtful, valuable comments is a great SEO approach, copying and pasting general comments that include a link to your site isn’t. Again, Google and search engines like it believe that any link to your site should be earned through quality content. Anything less than that just won’t do.
What’s more, spamming other bloggers is harmful to user experience — both for the blogger in question and for the readers who must slog through spammy comments to leave their own valuable and thought-out comments. Google doesn’t take kindly to this, so avoid the practice altogether. The only possible exception is if you’ve read a person’s post and have a piece of content on your site that will genuinely add to the discussion (not just make you some money). In that case, a link can be acceptable.
3. Abusing Anchor Text
Anchor text serves an important purpose in the world of online link building. For search engines and people alike, anchor text gives a preview of what a link will be about and helps people draw value from a piece of content. It is possible to abuse anchor text, though, and doing so is a “bad SEO” practice.
Unfortunately, many people don’t realize this, and beginning SEOs are especially susceptible. Here’s how it works: if a person started a content marketing firm, and was trying to get their site to rank for the keyword phrase “content writing services,” they might link back to the site 50 times, all with the same anchor text.
Google sees this, though, and the search engine knows what you’re doing. Instead of seeing duplicate anchor text, Google wants to see companies using branded anchor text, which means using a company name to link. In addition to inspiring trust, these links have a lower propensity to be misused.
4. Duplicating Content
This is a MAJOR no-no in the world of SEO — for many reasons. For one, content is what makes the web run, and it’s in the search engines’ best interest to have lots of it and to ensure that most of it is high-quality.
Search engines know high-quality content takes time, though, and they’re unwilling to allow people who aren’t willing to invest that time to rip off other people’s effort. As such, duplicating any piece of content from another author, site, or source will result in a hefty Google penalty.
It’s easy to think you’re probably OK here, but don’t skip over it so quickly.
In some cases, however, duplicate content doesn’t even come as the result of blatant plagiarism.
In fact, many people copy their own content without even knowing it. This is especially prevalent in places like meta titles and descriptions, and product pages where products are very similar but not identical to one another. An example would be a company that sells polo shirts and uses the same product description for a green polo shirt as it does a blue polo shirt, instead of writing two different descriptions.
To keep your SEO on the up-and-up, and avoid Google penalties in the process, ensure that all the content you publish on your site and in your meta fields is entirely unique and original.
5. Creating Overly-Dense Keyword Content
Before search engines evolved to their current station, they paid a lot of attention to keyword phrases to rank sites. For example, if a site featured 300 words of content and used the phrase “New York bagels” 30 times, Google would have gone, “Ah, yes. This page is about New York bagels,” and ranked it accordingly. Today, however, the focus is user experience, and nothing dampens user experience quite as quickly as keyword stuffing. After all, who wants to be hit over the head with the topic of a page as they’re trying to learn something new or answer a question?
As search engines have gotten smarter, the importance of keywords has shifted. While they’re still critical for helping search engine bots decipher and categorize pages, said bots are more sensitive than they’ve ever been before to “keyword stuffing” — the practice of incorporating a keyword phrase into content over and over.
Today, Google (and the people who use it) want content that offers value, not hat tricks. With this in mind, keywords should be included, but they should always be sprinkled naturally throughout the content. Over-optimize for your keywords or stuff them in there like you’re filling a piñata, and you risk a hefty Google penalty.
7 Ways to Master Good SEO
Now that we’re caught up on what bad SEO looks like, lets’ talk about mastering great SEO. Here are seven tips:
1. Do Your (Keyword) Research
While it’s true that you don’t want to overstuff your content with keywords, you can’t abandon them altogether.
Today, however, keyword research is all about user intention. This means that, instead of finding a single keyword phrase and hammering it again and again, you’ll want to make use of things like synonyms, answers, and content grouped around topics instead of individual terms.
This is especially critical since the release of Google’s RankBrain update in 2015, and adhering to the practice will boost your content’s value and help you become a trustworthy source of online information.
2. Optimize Content for Local
If you run a brick-and-mortar business, optimizing your content for local SEO is a great way to land customers and help Google help you. Simple things like claiming your business listing and using geo-focused keywords throughout your site can help identify you as a local business and help you make use of the 20% of all searches that are locally-focused.
3. Create to Be Conversational
Remember how much focus search engines place on user experience today? Of course you do. If you’re wondering how to capitalize on that, the answer is conversational content. This is important for two big reasons. For one, conversational content is just more enjoyable to read.
The second thing, however, is that 20% of Google’s mobile searches are voice searches, and these voice searches are highly conversational in nature. That said, creating conversational content that bears in mind the questions your users would ask and the language they’d use to ask them can land you in the coveted “rich answers” segment of Google’s SERPs.
Today, more than 30% of all searches result in rich answers and claiming this spot for your content can earn you a huge uptick in traffic. To get an idea of what a great “rich answer” looks like, check out this screenshot:
4. Include Schema On-site
Schema is one of those techy SEO things that makes people run for the hills. It’s critical, though, and using it on your site can make a mountain of difference in your SEO standing. Schema markup is a collection of HTML tags users can add to pages to create rich snippets in SERPs. Common with companies who want to create rich snippets for content relating to music, products, videos, and recipes, Schema is a critical SEO tool for white hat SEOs.
5. Work to Earn Your Links
Links are essential to ranking well, but earning them is tough.
One way to do that is simply by creating a volume of consistently amazing content.
On my site, I have various sections that I’ve built for over four years now, contributing to it myself weekly and bringing in many of my agency team members as co-contributors. It’s a LOT:
Our Write Blog, with over 600 blog posts
A resource section with e-books, my published book, and more
A dedicated section for my podcast show notes and episodes
A section for all the recaps for our weekly Twitter chat, #ContentWritingChat
All of those areas get updated weekly. It’s a full-time job for two people, but we’ve never once had to ask or buy a link — we earn them consistently when our content gets picked up and shared. It’s even been picked up and linked to by major influencers!
By building trust and demonstrating authority, resource-laden sites can attract high-quality links from around the web, which, in turn, boosts your SEO incredibly well.
6. Launch Google AMP
A mobile-friendly step that can boost your site’s ranking in mobile search, AMP is an open-source code you can install on your site to help your content load at lightning speed on mobile devices. Guaranteed to be a massive ranking factor in 2017 and beyond, decreasing your mobile load time is a wonderful step toward increasing your user experience.
7. Put Your Users First
As a general rule, any SEO tactic that’s meant to trick your users or search engines is a bad one. This includes things like hidden content. At the end of the day, a great guideline for good SEO is simply to put your users first. If you do this and make user experience your top priority, the chances that you’ll stay in Google’s good graces and serve your readers well is massive.
Take Your SEO to the Next Level This Year
If you’re a recovering “bad SEO,” 2017 is a year of promise and opportunity. While it’s true that SEO is fluid and changing constantly, it’s also true that you can get on top of it by keeping a few key things in mind, like that you always need to honor user experience, and that quality is essential in everything you do — from links to keyword research.
When you remember these simple tips, it’s easy to ditch bad SEO forever and find yourself on the up-and-up, both with Google and your readers.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Julia McCoy / Express Writers In-post Image: PixelsAway/DepositPhotos Interstitial ads screenshot: webmasters.googleblog.com Mobile search screenshot taken 2017
The “Enterprise SEO Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide,” from our sister-site MarTech Today, examines the market for enterprise SEO software platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software into your business.
If you are considering licensing an SEO software tool, this report will help you decide whether or not you need to. The report has been updated for 2017 to include the latest trends, opportunities and challenges facing the market for SEO software tools as seen by industry leaders, vendors and their customers.
Also included in the report are profiles of 13 leading SEO tools vendors, pricing charts, capabilities comparisons, and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing.
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