6 Things You Must Do Before You Ever Accept Guest Posts by @seocompanymiami

Guest posting can be an incredibly valuable marketing tactic. For most, guest posting is all about publishing your content on other websites. However, there is also a big opportunity when you allow others to guest post on your website.

Accepting guest posts is a great way to grow your blog without having to do a ton of work. Guest posters will share their content when it’s published and will subsequently promote your blog. Free marketing! That free marketing can lead to more social media shares and, hopefully, links to your site.

But accepting guest posts isn’t easy in the beginning. You need to prepare.

Here are six things you must do before you ever accept guest posts.

1. Figure Out Your Goals

Publishing guest posts on your blog is almost guaranteed to bring in new visitors to your website. So what are your goals for these extra visitors?

• Do you want them to subscribe to your email list?
• Is your ultimate goal to increase your conversions or your click-through rate?
• Do you want more social media followers?

Whatever your endgame might be, it’s important to put some thought into it before you allow people to start guest posting. You can then prepare your website to best utilize the extra traffic to meet your specific goals. A big mistake companies make is running toward this strategy hoping to reap all the benefits, and oftentimes their website is unprepared and they end up actually missing opportunities.

If you want people to sign up for your email list, include a contact form and maybe even a sign-up incentive on the first page of your site so no one will miss it. If you want to increase conversions, consider running a sale or promotion around the same time you publish your first guest post. Set a goal (or a few), prepare your site, then let your guests do the marketing for you.

2. Create Guest Posting Guidelines

Once you open your blog to guest posts you’re bound to get a lot of inquiries about your expectations for posts. You can save yourself some time and easily address these questions by posting a guidelines page (check out SEJ’s rules for guest contributors page as one example). This will also let visitors know that you’re open to guest posts and hopefully encourage them to contact you.

Consider including information about how long you want posts to be, some possible topics you’re interested in, your preferred style of writing, and any incentives you might be willing to offer.

For instance, SEJ’s Writer’s Program page lists a few nice perks to attract writers:

• Share your expertise with a whopping 1 million+ monthly viewers, over half of whom are internet marketers.
• Earn up to $75 in Amazon gift cards each month for top performing articles.
• First dibs on free conference press passes in exchange for covering it on SEJ.
• Access to exclusive SEJ programs and events including webinars, SEJ Summit, podcasts, and more.
• Access to an exclusive SEJ Writer’s Facebook Group where you can network with other SEJ writers.
• Monthly email from Jenise Henrikson, SEJ’s Executive Editor, with tons of article ideas. (These go fast!)
• The undying, eternal love of the entire SEJ team. <3

You can also optimize your guidelines page by including keywords like “guest post guidelines” or “write for us.”

3. Highlight Your Stats

Again, no one is going to write for you for free, so make sure you can explain why it’s worth it for them to choose you. You should have statistics readily available like how many monthly visits your site attracts, audience demographics, or how many people are signed up for your newsletter or email list.

They might want to know how many Twitter followers you have, or what your following looks like on LinkedIn or Facebook. While they have access to some of this information without your help, it will look good if you can immediately answer their questions with some hard stats.

If not all of your numbers are great (because whose are?), try to just focus on the best statistics — something that’s easier to do if you have control of the conversation.

4. Create a Plan for Promoting Guest Posts

Another thing that guest posters might be wondering about is how you plan on advertising their post after they’re done writing it. It’s just as important for your success to have a plan in mind as it is for theirs.

If social media is a big part of your marketing plan, then emphasize that. Share how often you usually tweet new posts, or how many shares you get when you post content on Facebook or LinkedIn. If you generally share your posts through a newsletter or email list then explain that to your guests.

You should promote guest posts exactly the same way you promote your own content; this is definitely not a time to slack off in that area. Remember, the more you promote the post, the more others will be motivated to do the same, and this will result in increased traffic for your website.

In addition, have an idea of where you’ll put their author bio. Guest posters should submit a nice photo and specific (but not too detailed) author bio, and they’ll want this information displayed prominently somewhere on your website. Knowing where you’ll put it ahead of time will send the message that you value their work and are proud to promote it.

5. Make Sure the Content on Your Home Page Is the Best You Have to Offer

This has more to do with you than with your guests, but it’s important nonetheless. Think about what message you want to send to all these new visitors.

What’s the first thing visitors going to see when they arrive on your page? Is it representative of your brand and your company? If not, it’s time for a revision.

Think specifically in terms of content — if a visitor reads one post and ends up on your site, they might be motivated to read more. You want to make sure the articles they see first are some of your best work, and it doesn’t hurt to feature a few with engaging headlines (as long as the content inside the article is valuable, which it always should be).

6. Give Your Social Media Presence a Boost

There’s nothing wrong with using the increased traffic generated from guest posting to give your social media presence a little “pick-me-up.” In fact, it’s encouraged!

You can do this by making sure your Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media sites you use have buttons visible on your website so people can easily access these websites.

Consider including your Twitter handle or LinkedIn web address in your contact form, which should also be displayed somewhere prominently on your site.

Conclusion

There are many benefits to allowing guest posts on your website:

• You have the chance to highlight a different voice or opinion on a topic.
• It’s free content for your blog.
• You’ll receive increased social media exposure.
• You’ll have free time to complete other tasks that would normally be neglected when you’re writing.

Just make sure you’re prepared to accept guest posts. Remember, there are plenty of other great blogs looking to attract guest writers. Following these six tips will help make sure your blog looks professional and stands out as one of the best in your industry.

Image Credits

Feature Image Credit: DepositPhotos

All screenshots taken by author March, 2017

Search Ad Revenue Up 19%, Now 48% of All Digital Ad Revenue [REPORT] by @MattGSouthern

According to a report from iab, total revenue from search ads has hit a new high which can be attributed in large part to the success of mobile ads. As a result of an unprecedented level of spending on mobile search ads, the search ad format accounted for $35.0 billion in revenue in 2016 — up from $29.5 billion in 2015.

Broken down into desktop and mobile:

• Desktop Search accounted for $17.8 billion in 2016 revenues, down 13% from the $20.5 billion 2015.
• Mobile revenues increased 77% from $20.7 billion in 2015 to $36.6 billion in 2016.

Mobile ad formats are doing so well this year they are selling a combined 51% of digital ads compared to desktop digital ads. This has led to an unsurpassed $72.5 billion in total digital ad spending.

The rising tide raises all ships, as the saying goes. More mobile ads being sold means more digital ad types are being sold in general. As advertisers shift their spend to mobile it’s clear they still see search as an integral component of their mobile marketing campaign.

As users change their searching habits, with more searches now being conducted on mobile than desktop, it makes sense for advertisers to shift their spending to mobile. They’re naturally going to want to invest their advertising dollars where their advertising will be seen.

For more information about digital ad spending in 2016 you can view the report in its entirety.

SearchCap: Google job search, metrics on search update & cheese doodle

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google job search, metrics on search update & cheese doodle appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Is Google testing its own jobs search engine?

Google seems to be testing a new search feature. This one is designed to help searchers find new job openings. John Doherty spotted this test for queries on Google that include [jobs online], [data entry jobs online], [newbury street jobs] and so on. Google shows job listings and takes you into what appears to be their very own job search portal to drill down deeper.

Here are some screen shots of the job search results in the core web results:

After you click on “more jobs,” it takes you into this jobs-specific search results interface that gives you additional filters for job categories, titles, dates, types, state, city, company type and employer. The interface looks a little bit like the local results interface, with the listings down the left-hand side and results in the middle.

This story is developing, and we will update it as we have more information from Google. As we wrote earlier today, Google performed 9,800 live traffic experiments last year; this is just one of the many new ones.

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6 key paid search trends from Merkle’s Q1 2017 report

Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report for Q1 points to strong growth from Google and the continued strength of PLAs (Google Product Listing Ads). Expanded text ads have yet to yield promises of CTR gold. Bing and Yahoo’s lack of mobile market share is hampering growth. Here’s a look at some of the key trends from the report. (Keep in mind the data reflects spending from Merkle’s own client base, which skews large retailer.)

AdWords Q1 year-over-year growth outpaced that of Q4

Spending on Google AdWords increased 21 percent year over year in Q1 2017, up from 19 percent in Q4 2016. Click volume increased 20 percent over the previous year. CPCs ticked up 1 percent.

Merkle credits the addition of a fourth mobile text ad, PLAs in image search, Google Maps ads and the return of separate device bids as key contributors to growth over the past year.

Tablet bids fall, mobile bids improve relative to desktop

Tablet bids have steadily declined relative to desktop since Google enabled advertisers to bid separately on the two devices last summer. Merkle says decoupling tablets from desktop helped drive growth, with advertisers able to adjust bids separately for higher-value desktop clicks.

Google AdWords phone and desktop spend increased 51 percent and 12 percent, respectively, while tablet spend fell 23 percent.

Phone CPCs continued to gain ground on desktop in Q1. For non-brand queries, phone CPCs were 43 percent lower than desktop CPCs in Q1, compared to being 51 percent lower in Q4. Tablet CPCs were 25 percent lower than desktop in Q1, down from near-parity in early 2016, when the devices were combined in bidding.

Source: Merkle

PLAs keep growing faster than text ads

With 52 percent click share, PLAs accounted for more than half of retail search ad clicks in Q1, up from 48 percent in Q4. For non-brand queries, PLAs drove a whopping 75 percent of all clicks for retailers.

Spending on Google Shopping rose by 32 percent year over year in Q1, compared to 12 percent for text ads. Growing impression volume on mobile is helping to increase PLA click share, and growth was largely driven by non-brand queries.

Source: Merkle

Search partners, which includes Google image search, accounted for 11 percent of PLA clicks for the quarter, similar to Q4’s share.

Local Inventory Ads gaining traction

In Q1, Local Inventory Ads (LIA) accounted for 19 percent of all Google Shopping clicks on phones. CTRs on LIAs are 19 percent higher than PLAs on phone and desktop. Not surprisingly, online conversion rates for LIAs, which are designed to direct store traffic, are lower than PLAs.

CTR boost for expanded text ads (ETAs) remains elusive

Merkle has consistently reported seeing mixed results since ETAs first came on the scene last year. The Q1 results for ETAs show a CTR lift compared to standard text ads only on desktop ads shown at the bottom of the page.

After accounting for device, keyword type, and ad location, there is still no clear evidence that Expanded Text Ads are producing consistently higher click-through rates than the legacy Google text ad format.

Source: Merkle; high-traffic ad groups with both formats active in Q1

Overall, text ad spending on Google increased by 12 percent. However, non-brand text ad spending rose 16 percent year over year. Merkle says the fourth mobile ad unit and the addition of ads in Google Maps has done more to buoy text ad growth than format changes.

Bing & Yahoo mobile troubles

Across Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini, spend fell by 14 percent compared to the previous year, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of spend declines.

With Google as the default search option on Android and iOS devices, mobile weakness continues to be a considerable handicap for Bing and Yahoo. Google accounted for 97 percent of mobile phone traffic in Q1. Bing and Yahoo clicks made up 19 percent of desktop clicks for the quarter.

There is much more detail in the report, including on organic, social and Amazon. It’s available for download here.

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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.

Google launched more than 1,600 new changes in search last year

Google revamped its How Search Works site, the site they launched in 2013 to describe the efforts Google makes in search. Google added some new metrics around the various Google search launches they made last year, how many tests they tried out and the various numbers around their diverse set of search experiments.

Google mentioned the update to this site when they also announced Project Owl earlier this week.

The site shares that Google launched 1,653 new search changes last year, based on 9,800 live traffic experiments, 18,015 side-by-side experiments and 130,336 search quality tests.

As you can see, only a small percentage of what Google tries actually goes live, but to launch over 1,600 new changes in search in a single year is massive. In fact, we don’t know exactly how many of the 1,600 changes are user interface changes versus new feature changes versus algorithmic or ranking changes. I doubt Google would share those details.

What we do know is that only one percent of searchers were part of the 9,800 live traffic experiments and that while we likely covered many of them, I am sure we missed the majority of those experiments.

Here is an animated GIF of the page that documents these numbers:

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Google doodle celebrates Marie Harel, the inventor of Camembert cheese

Today’s special Google doodle honors the inventor of the Camembert cheese. Marie Harel was born 256 years ago today in Crouttes, France. She invented the Camembert cheese back in 1791, at the age of 30.

The Google doodle shows the steps it takes to make Camembert cheese in nine different Google logo slides. Google said that the “Doodle celebrates Harel’s 256th birthday with a slideshow that illustrates how Camembert is made, step by step.” “It’s drawn in a charming, nostalgic style reminiscent of early 20th-century French poster artists, such as Hervé Morvan and Raymond Savignac,” they added.

Her work earned her a statue in Vimoutiers in France.

Marie Harel lived to the age of 83 and died on November 9, 1844.

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The future of local discovery

We’ve entered an exciting time for local marketing. Big Data, digital assistants, augmented reality and beacons will fundamentally change the way users discover locations. As Bob Dylan so aptly pointed out, “The times they are a-changin’.”

As such, local marketers and advertisers need to start thinking about how they’re going to change along with the times. Here’s what you need to know about the future of local discovery.

Big Data: ‘Who’ informs ‘where’

Proximity is the primary ranking factor in local searches. That’s not likely to change. After all, what’s nearby is the fundamental aspect of local discovery.

What is changing, however, is the filter that sorts out, ranks and presents those nearby locations. What filter, you ask?

It’s you.

Going forward, local discovery will function as proximity filtered by your individual preferences. The person searching will inform what locations are shown.

In truth, this is nothing new. Google, Bing, Safari and Yahoo have been personalizing search results for some time through tracking your browsing history. What is new is the sophistication of artificial intelligence and Big Data analytics.

With the burgeoning Internet of Things, the amount of customer and behavioral data is growing by the day. Even if Congress hadn’t cleared the way for internet services providers (ISPs) to sell your data, what marketers and advertisers know about customers was only going to increase thanks to the growing data fiefdoms of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

For good or ill, the ability to use that information to target the right customer with the right message at the right time is maturing. In fact, even back in 2012 ,Target had the capability to use data mining to predict the pregnancy of a teenager before her father could deduce the news himself. Big Data has come a long way since then.

In the case of local discovery, Big Data will help search engines personalize local results based on a user’s preference. The more the search engines know about you, the more relevant search results and maps will be.

For example, a search for nearby restaurants might include ranking factors such as your favorite dishes, food allergies, price point, time of day and how long it was since your last visit. Meanwhile, a search for a nearby product such as shoes might be filtered by your favorite brand, shoe color, size and any ongoing sales.

However, knowing your customer and targeting your customer are two different things. There needs to be a means of surfacing local information in a unified way, and that need will undoubtedly be addressed by digital assistants.

Digital assistants and voice search

Digital assistants will serve as the connection between customer profiles and the preferred locations and products around them.

Digital assistants will be everywhere. On your phone, in your car, your house, your office — everywhere and inside everything connected to the internet.

The ultimate goal of Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri is to become that universal connection between the physical and digital worlds.

In the context of local discovery, think of a digital assistant as your very own personal Rick Steves, providing you with everything you’d ever care to know about a location — and then some.

This omnipresent assistant, part tour guide, part planner, part shopping liaison, will provide users with the most relevant and personalized local recommendations for anything you can imagine.

And thanks to voice search, digital assistants are always listening.

Google Home and Amazon Alexa operate in this mode by default, and Apple’s latest iPhone update is pushing users to set up voice activation for Siri.

In addition to enabling ambient listening, voice activation establishes voice biometrics, which will allow digital assistants to become device-agnostic.

Whether it’s smart cars, smart homes or smart offices, the ability to distinguish between users is critical to translating your personal preferences regardless of location or device. This will provide a consistent user experience without a disruption to conversational context.

In fact, Google Home recently made progress on this front by being able to recognize up to six different voices from one device. It’s not hard to extrapolate this trend to the point that digital assistants will be able to recognize who you are regardless of where or what device you’re using.

Soon you’ll be able to make dinner reservations by talking to the digital assistant embedded in your hotel room, order an Uber from the digital assistant on your phone as you walk to the lobby and check your flight from the digital assistant inside your autonomous Uber — all without breaking the conversational context with your digital assistant.

Augmented reality

With the rise of voice search, it’s also necessary to replace the traditional screen on your phone and monitor. A picture is worth a thousand words, so it’s unlikely that even a sweet-talking digital assistant will replace our need to visualize what’s in front of us.

As I outlined in a previous article, the solution to traditional screens is to replace them with augmented reality — your smartphone transforming into smart glasses. Based on Facebook’s recent plans for augmented reality, this indeed seems to be the direction we’re heading.

In my mind, augmented reality is likely to be one of the more exciting and less privacy-invasive developments of local discovery. You’ll be able to scout out a local restaurant, visualize the precise location of a product on a shelf or interact with custom location-based content triggered with beacons. Which brings me to the final trend you should be keeping an eye on.

Beacons

Proximity targeting will flourish with the rise of augmented reality and digital assistants.

Beacons are perfect for surfacing content in a user’s immediate proximity. The challenge right now is alerting users to beacons. However, if everyone has a digital assistant embedded in their augmented reality glasses, it will be easy for users to discover beacon content and have that content personalized based on personal preferences.

Whether it’s triggering a coupon for a customer’s most likely purchase as he walks by a store entrance or promoting a fast food restaurant as a vehicle exits the interstate off-ramp, the potential for beacons is tremendous.

Start preparing now

Many of these developments might seem too far out in the future. However, technology is evolving at an exponential rate. The time to start preparing and laying the groundwork for these marketing developments is now.

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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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About The Author

Brian Smith is the director of local solutions and resident local search expert at

Placeable

, a local marketing company specializing in enterprise brands. For over 12 years, Brian has been conjuring up solutions to the most vexing search problems for his clients. Responsible for all aspects of Placeable's managed services organization, Brian executes local search strategy through content marketing, data syndication management, and technical enhancements to Placeable's suite of products. When the Montana native isn’t working on ways to improve his clients' search strategies, you can find him driving his kids to various sporting events and dance practice.

Search in Pics: Bing body painting, Google airplane seat room & hallway race track

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. Google meeting room that looks like an airplane: Source: Instagram Bing body...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Paid Search: A Focus on Profitability With Maddie Cary [PODCAST] by @brentcsutoras

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

Are your paid search efforts going nowhere? Read on to find out how to get bigger and better payoffs from paid search in this Search Engine Nerds episode.

Maddie Cary, Director of Paid Search at Point It Digital Marketing, joins SEJ Chief Social Media Strategist Brent Csutoras to discuss the profitability of paid search and how to ensure your campaigns result in a good ROI. Cary also talks about how brand awareness affects paid search and identifies areas that could have a significant impact on paid search profitability.

What exactly is impression share?

Maddie Cary: Impression share is a look at all the available impression volume you’re targeting within your paid search campaign. It’s capturing how much of the traffic demand you’re going after.

Where it’s tricky is when search engines like Google give you those kind of impression share metrics, they are not a true measurement in the simplest of forms. For example, if you are running a paid search campaign and it’s telling you that you’re capturing 100 percent impression share, what that really means is the impressions that Google thinks you’re eligible to have gotten. So what it thinks you realistically would get based on what keywords you’re targeting, your quality scores, a lot of different factors — you captured 100 percent of those. That doesn’t mean that all the impressions you’re going after, you’re getting every single one, but what Google thinks you’re eligible or able to get, that’s what you’re capturing.

It’s a good metric to help get a sense of what exactly you’re targeting, how much of that are you capturing and consistently capturing over time.

What’s a good number to target and when does it really make a difference in what we do?

MC: I think that’s the balancing act we do as search marketers. It’s an interesting channel to be in because our audience by nature is coming to us and telling us what they want, compared to what you can target within social or even outside of just direct search like demand and display or email. People are coming to a search engine and using queries to indicate what they’re looking for.

I think there is a tendency for particularly newer search marketers to feel that, “Oh, we have this demand. It’s valuable, it’s indicating what people are looking for. I should try to capture all of it.” That’s where we have to remember as digital marketers that there is still data and measure things from a cost per conversion or even an ROI standpoint. Is actually maximizing all of it the right move? Is that going to help you in your profitability?

When I work with clients I generally start by looking at what we’re doing in brand. Brand is a highly valuable demand stream for any advertiser.

Folks who are searching on your brand have not only an association with your brand but likely a positive one. They’re actively searching for you.

Depending on what brand you are, it can be less competitive with lower CPCs. So it’s basically a low-cost investment for high value, oftentimes with highly profitable conversions.

Brent Csutoras: When you say brand, you mean people searching on the brand?

MC: Yeah, so things that specifically contain the company brand in the query. For example, if Amazon was running paid search ads, it would be Amazon or Amazon Prime.

For those terms, there is a lot of value there. If your competition isn’t incredibly intense, so your competitors aren’t bidding on your own brand really aggressively, then it does make sense to maximize impression share. How can you capture the majority of that demand in a way that somewhat “belongs” to you, that is highly relevant to the searchers who are searching on those brand queries?

There can be a lot of value in figuring out how to maximize that, and that might not necessarily be 100 percent, but it could be 90 percent, 95 percent. Also, once you get over the 95 percent mark, you’re essentially at 100 percent. You’re really at the top of what you can maximize. That’s definitely a place where it is worthwhile to consider optimizing to a higher impression share.

If you’re bidding on terms that do not contain your brand name — what we would call the non-brand bucket — or if you’re going after your competitors’ keywords, obviously there’s a lot more folks investing in those spaces. They’re all going after pieces of the same pie. There aren’t necessarily going to be those lower CPCs.

The investment is going to be much higher, and if you’re not careful you can quickly hit a point of diminishing returns where you’re just spending excessively for not much gain. That’s where it’s important to be more fine-tuned. If you are taking an impression share approach to how you’re bidding on those terms, make sure you are being smart about it and not just bidding up to 100 percent for the sake of trying to capture it all.

How do you balance the high brand SERP results you have with the impression share you want?

MC: I always suggest to clients that opting out of brand for paid search can be detrimental not just to your paid search growth but also to what you’re doing organically. There have been a lot of different studies that measure what the impact is when you have both a paid listing and an organic listing shown on the SERP. The most infamous one is what Google put together a couple years ago that demonstrated doing so added a 50% incremental click lift for advertisers who had both showing, and even demonstrated that if your organic listing is not in the very top spot but is in positions two and three, paid search adds an 80 percent incremental lift.

The two play really well together. On top of that, there’s additional benefits that sometimes are a little harder to measure. Having both listings show definitely represents a feeling of authority and at times trust with people searching, that not only do you have a presence organically, but you have one in paid. Those paid results can add a lot of additional bells and whistles that can’t quite be utilized in an organic listing.

Those little things — reviews, phone numbers, click to call,  snippets and site links that are specific to search, even different kinds of extensions that help the ad stand out — create some of that authority as well as hopefully optimize the experience you’ve set up in what’s showing in your organic listing.

How can negative keywords lead to massive results in saving money?

MC: The part that pains me the most is when you’ve found a client who cannot figure out how to grow their account, or they know they should be doing something different but they’re not sure what it is, or they’re struggling with profitability, or CPAs are too high, or return is really poor, and you go and look in their negative keywords and you look at their search query reports and you discover that negative keyword management is just not happening on a regular basis, which is the easiest way to cut out inefficient costs.

You have to look at what queries you’re matching to and tell your campaigns what to no longer match to, what’s not relevant, or what’s not cost-effective. The flip side is discovering that some queries they’re matching to is burning through 40-50 percent of their spend so they can’t actually fund the things that are working.

We see it on the Google Display Network, too — display network campaigns that have no negative placements. Those things just aren’t being updated regularly, so it’s one of the easiest wins you can have.

I always equate the search space to putting a net out into a river and hoping to catch fish, but there’s water, rocks and leaves, whatever flowing through. If you don’t check the net regularly, you’re going to pull it out of the water and discover that there’s a giant hole in it. It’s just been completely blown through. That’s our jobs, to check the net.

We’re capturing that demand at the bottom of the funnel via those queries and if you don’t check the net, then you’re not really fishing. You’re not really doing anything effectively.

What other areas could impact profitability?

MC: I think the first thing anyone should do is identify what I call your cash cow. Figure out what are the keywords driving the lion’s share of your conversions, or your revenue if you’re in the e-commerce space. Look at that first and figure out if you’re doing that effectively.

• Are there any opportunities for you to target a different audience on those terms?
• Do testing from copy and landing page perspectives help with click-through rate or conversion rate?
• Is there anything that’s really ineffective cost-wise that you’re doing there? Maybe they’re driving a lot of conversions, but you’re actually not managing your costs in those terms well.

Starting there is the first step that people neglect or they don’t want to touch what isn’t broken. Oftentimes, I suggest having a testing plan and a hypothesis around some of those things. If the results aren’t as good as they were before, then you can revert back to what you were doing before.

The other way to improve profitability is to have regular account health tasks and management — what you’re doing in your account, whether that’s negative keyword mining on a weekly basis or looking at placement targeting and making adjustments there, not doing set-it-and-forget-it bidding. If you have enough conversion volume, leverage AdWords, flexible bid strategies, or even ECPC strategies to drive more conversions at better CPAs.

To listen to this Search Engine Nerds Podcast with Maddie Cary:

Think you have what it takes to be a Search Engine Nerd? If so, message Loren Baker on Twitter, or email him at loren [at] searchenginejournal.com. You can also email Brent Csutoras at brent [at] alphabrandmedia.com.

Visit our Search Engine Nerds archive to listen to other Search Engine Nerds podcasts!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita
In-post Images: DepositPhotos

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

Facebook Tests Showing More Related Articles by @MrDannyGoodwin

Facebook is running a test to its related articles feature that could help users discover more stories about trending topics, the social network has announced.

Heading forward, Facebook will show you related stories before you click on an article. Here’s how Facebook described the related articles test:

“These additional articles, which appear for topics many people are talking about on Facebook, will appear in a unit below the link. That should provide people easier access to additional perspectives and information, including articles by third-party fact-checkers.”

Facebook shared an example of when you’d be likely to see more related articles:

“During an instance when a lot of people are discussing an article about a new medical advancement, we may also show you a few other articles below it from different publishers about the same medical topic.”

Here’s what that would look like:

Since launching the related article feature in 2013, Facebook has only shown related articles to you after you’ve read a story that appeared in your News Feed.

After you clicked on a story in your feed, Facebook would then show you up to three related articles.

This test shouldn’t impact the visibility for publishers in the News Feed, according to Facebook:

“We don’t anticipate Pages will see significant changes in reach. Pages should continue posting stories that are relevant to their audience.”

Image Credits
Featured Image: Depositphotos
Article GIF: Facebook

SearchCap: Google Assistant, Bing Ads merchant promotions & AdWords settlement

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google Assistant, Bing Ads merchant promotions & AdWords settlement appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Report: Google Assistant bests rivals for questions answered and overall accuracy

In January, Stone Temple Consulting released a virtual assistant consumer survey showing the majority of respondents wanted the assistants to provide “answers” rather than conventional search results. Today, the firm published a follow-up study that measured the relative accuracy of the four major assistants.

It compared results of “5,000 different questions about everyday factual knowledge” on Google Home, Alexa, Siri and Cortana, using traditional Google search results as a baseline for accuracy. The following table shows the study’s top-line results.

As one might have anticipated, the Google Assistant answered more questions and was correct more often than its rivals. Cortana came in second, followed by Siri and Alexa. Of the questions it could answer, Amazon’s Alexa was the second most accurate assistant. Siri had the highest percentage of wrong answers of the four competitors. (Apple is reportedly “finalizing” its Amazon Echo competitor.)

Here’s Stone Temple Consulting’s summary of the outcome:

Google still has the clear lead in terms of overall smarts with both Google search and the Google Assistant on Google Home. Cortana is pressing quite hard to close the gap, and has made great strides in the last three years. Alexa and Siri both face the limitation of not being able to leverage a full crawl of the web to supplement their knowledge bases. It will be interesting to see how they both address that challenge.

One of the interesting observations in the report is about featured snippets. Cortana had more featured snippets integrated than any of the others, even Google Home, although Google search had more. Siri and Alexa lagged far behind in the category, although they want to use third parties to deliver “answers” and transactional capabilities.

There’s a good deal more discussion of both the results and the study’s methodology on the Stone Temple blog.

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About The Author

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog,

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, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on

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What your paid search KPI says about you

There are plenty of options for particular metrics to drive paid search programs toward, but not every KPI is created equal. Here, we’ll dive into what your preferred KPI says about you and provide recommendations to help you assess whether your KPI reflects the goals you care about.

All insights are at least slightly hyperbolic and assume you have a one-track mind for your KPI of choice. I bet some of you out there can keep two, three, maybe even more KPIs in mind when managing accounts, as you should. You’ll just have to meld the descriptions to uncover those deep insights into your psyche that you’re reading this to find.

Click-through rate

You waaaaaaant them to want you.

You neeeeeeed them to need you.

Some brands care a lot about how likely a user is to click on an ad, and for good reason. Click-through rate (CTR) is a key component of Quality Score, which Google uses to determine both how well an ad ranks and what price an advertiser must pay for clicks. Higher CTR means better rank and lower cost per click (CPC).

Thus, brands should make their ads as appealing as possible to searchers. However, chasing CTR above all else can lead to some poor choices.

Could I probably make a few friends at a college activity fair with this sign? Sure.

Will they still be my friends if I don’t actually have the goods? Probably not.

Similarly, advertisers might be able to draw more clicks with some versions of ad copy but end up hurting conversion rate or brand sentiment in the process. As such, it’s important to avoid pitfalls like overpromising or misleading searchers in the pursuit of higher CTR.

Impression share

You love to be seen, and ensuring your ads are present for a minimum share of relevant searches makes you feel good about your competitive position in search. Consistently getting in front of users searching for queries related to your business offerings is important, and that visibility can sometimes come at the cost of less flashy metrics like return on ad spend.

Advertisers can access estimates for the share of relevant impressions their ads are showing on the SERP by using Google Auction Insights reports. These reports also feature information on how often specific competitors are showing ads, as well as other metrics such as average position and top-of-page rate.

Shooting for impression share in search as your primary KPI isn’t that dissimilar from a television ad buy focused on reaching a specific segment of the television-watching population. Maybe in search you’re focused on getting in front of 100 percent of people searching for “red running shoes,” while on television you want to reach ESPN viewers in the 7:00–8:00 p.m. time block on the East Coast, with different categories of keywords somewhat analogous to different television channels in terms of audience differences.

The difference is that the effects of online interactions with ads are, for the most part, much easier to track than the effects of television ads. Users can be cookied, and online orders and other interactions such as email signups properly attributed to ad clicks. Thus, shooting exclusively for impression share requires abandoning this information in pursuit of visibility.

For many brands, performance metrics such as return on ad spend (ROAS) are deemed more meaningful in allocating search spend as effectively as possible. However, there are some advertisers who would prefer to lock up a percentage of impressions related to particular categories of search, regardless of how ROAS turns out.

Return on ad spend

You care about profitability — unimpressed by all the impressions and clicks your ads are getting, you care about how much they cost and what your business gets out of them. Paid search is great for you, because it’s easy-peasy for most advertisers to track events such as orders and information inquiries to the clicks driving them.

The trickiness comes in how you measure that ROAS. Are you using last-click attribution? Accounting for offline interactions such as phone calls or store visits? Baking in the interactions that occur on a different device from the one searched on originally (cross-device)?

Not all ROAS measures are created equal, and the better an advertiser can get at attributing value to ads, the more effective optimization efforts will be. But since you care about performance so much, I bet you’ll put in the work to get attribution just right.

New customer acquisition

You’re all about growing your customer base, reaching those shoppers you’ve never been able to pull through other marketing channels. Maybe your business is such that paid search clicks from existing customers don’t carry much incremental value, or maybe you just really want to expand your market share.

There are a number of ways you can go about targeting those new customers. One is to shoot for cost per new customer acquisition as the primary KPI of search campaigns, while another strategy might involve trying to turn ads off to all existing customers via audience exclusions using Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and Customer Match audiences.

Choosing between these different methods of focusing on new customers should include evaluating what bringing back existing customers is worth. Is there literally no value to these interactions (very rare), or is it just that interactions with new customers should be valued more than those with existing customers (more common)?

Everyone likes new customers, but if you’re going to use new-to-file acquisition as a key measure of success, it’s best to make sure you’re not neglecting valuable existing clientele in search out of a desire for those shiny new shoppers.

Average position

I suppose what kind of person you are depends on what average position you want to be in. Want to stay in first? You’re a winner at heart who wants be number one. Really just hoping for position three? That’s a losing attitude right there.

Really though, shooting for average position in general is kind of a losing attitude. Sure, it might make sense to try to stay in position 1 for your own brand keywords, but shooting for a specific spot on the page with non-brand keywords regardless of cost and return on ad spend is pretty risky given the competitive nature of AdWords auctions. Get in a bidding war with a couple of competitors, and the ad spend can add up pretty quickly.

While there are some studies and individuals out there proclaiming that specific positions on the page magically perform better than others in metrics like conversion rate, most of the data and studies behind those conclusions can be politely characterized as pseudoscience. What’s more, even if those conclusions were true, they would change with every SERP update, such as the removal of text ads on the right rail and the addition of a fourth text ad above organic results rolled out in early 2016. As such, we recommend taking such declarations with a grain of salt.

Look at it all, focus on what’s important

The awesome part of paid search is that you can measure ALL of these metrics at the same time. The slight downside is that you have to choose what’s most important to your brand, which can be harder for some to pin down than others.

Paid search ads almost certainly have an impact on brand awareness and recall, though those effects can be hard to measure. Thus, it makes sense to take into account metrics like impression share to see how visible ads are for particular keywords.

At the same time, impressions don’t directly put money in the bank, and focusing on metrics like return on ad spend and cost per new customer acquisition can better ensure brands are getting enough out of their spend to justify the expense.

In the big scheme of things, brands should keep track of all of these metrics (as well as others, such as conversion rate, average order value and more) but optimize toward those that prove the real value of search.

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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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About The Author

Andy Taylor is Associate Director of Research at Merkle, responsible for analyzing trends across the digital marketing spectrum for best practices and industry commentary. A primary contributor to the Merkle Blog, Dossier, and quarterly Digital Marketing Report, he speaks frequently at industry conferences and events. Prior to digital marketing, Andy worked as an event organizer for a political campaign and dabbled in freelance writing. A graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in Economics, he likes to spend his free time watching documentaries and selling homemade ice cream sandwiches at farmer's markets with his wife.

More Than Just SEO: Running Content Departments Like Newsrooms by @sejournal

This post was sponsored by Aimclear.

Brands repeatedly invest in content creation for the sole purpose of SEO. This sometimes-myopic approach fails to generate journalistic content that can supercharge a company’s customer retention, reputation management, PR, and brand tone. Sure, great content can drive great SEO, but it can do so much more in support of product launches, refining brand personas, and driving sales at the same time.

With paid social farm-to-table journalistic capabilities, brands would be wise to create their own brand journalism platforms that serve as an SEO powerhouse weapon while fulfilling a myriad of marketing goals.

Brand Journo Strategy Breakdown

To execute a brand journalism strategy that meets strategic KPIs, marketers and SEOs need to get on the same page. Content is much more than keywords and simply “words on a page.” Content is one of the most powerful tools to enrich customers’ lives so they a.) notice your brand, and b.) stick around.

Identify Goals (Please Don’t Stick to Just One)

Let’s say you’re a startup eager to sell your product with an overall business goal to clearly drive revenue. Trouble is, sales almost always require trust. In this case, the content/brand journo goals should be to establish yourself as a trusted source for news/tips/features stories.

Don’t stop there.

Promote that same content via psychographic targeting directly to qualified potential customers and influencers to establish your brand as a vertical source.

Still, please, don’t stop there.

Consider how content can be distributed for reputation management (whether you think you need it or not) and how it can evolve to meet sales and customer retention KPIs.

Establish Your Organization as the Go-to for Information

This is the fun part! Generating story ideas that speak to consumers’ concerns and interests directly related to your product is downright exciting. Don’t think like a sales person — think like a reporter covering your industry’s beat. Break outside the lines and give consumers content they’d seek in any reputable publication.

Become a Publication

Think, behave, and look like a publication. Take the time to structure your blog (or whatever you choose to call it) to mimic a news site. Make it user-friendly, easily noting sections and serving visitors with an easy, helpful experience.

Create an Editorial Calendar

Once the publication is created, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed thinking about how to keep content flowing. An in-depth editorial calendar includes brainstorming topic ideas and organizing them based on business objectives and seasonal considerations. It also connects all marketing — digital, social, and SEO — for the entire marketing team.

Get to Know Your Beat — Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

Feel overwhelmed by content idea generation? Sure, it might seem daunting, but we promise there are no shortages of stories and angles related to your product. Products solve a problem or indulge a desire. There are great stories in virtually every product/service known to humankind.

Don a reporter hat and start talking to customers. Understand their interests and what intrigues them. Start obsessing about your vertical and uncovering story angles that customers (past, future, and present) sincerely care about.

Create Paid Search and Social Strategy

As stated above, creating a publication without utilizing content as a means to drive customers back to a site is a bit of a waste. Such an approach might be great for pure SEO, but misses the mark on so many other opportunities.

Utilize psychographic targeting to create personas for a variety of your publication’s targets. This process will not only help you promote content, but also better understand your audience. Data will prove to you who your audience is, what they crave, and what they hate. Utilize psychographics to fine-tune your editorial calendar and hone in on your audience sweet spot.

Think Like a Newsroom (AND Snag the Leads)

Creating a publication people actually want to read gives brands the honor of collecting user information. Create news-based mailing lists (for top-of-funnel campaigns) and provide simple opportunities to join. Companies that think and operate like a newsroom do a fantastic job of this — if you’re into DIY home projects, house hunting, or financing tips, you’d have no problem signing up for Zillow’s email list — and with optimal placement, signing up is intuitive and easy to do.

Thinking Just SEO Still? Think Bigger

All too often organizations look at what they’re self publishing (blogs, white papers, etc.) purely in terms of SEO. Trouble is, when they do that, the blog sucks and nobody knows where to find it anyway. A lot of time, effort, and energy down the drain.

A broader content strategy that ties to all relevant goals (customer retention, thought leadership, psychographic promotion, etc.) benefits overall marketing strategies and can actually deliver on ever-elusive SEO KPIs.

Learn more about Aimclear’s content and integrated marketing capabilities.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Wellphoto via Shutterstock. Image provided by Aimclear. 

Bing Ads rolls out Merchant Promotions for Shopping campaigns in US

Bing is rolling Merchant Promotions out of pilot in the US, giving advertisers a way to highlight offers in their product ads.

When Merchant Promotions are active, ads can appear with a “Special Offer” extension. When users click on the notice, the offer pops up with a description, promotional code, expiration date and a link to shop the product.

Sellers need to fill out a form to apply for Merchant Promotions. Bing Ads says the approval process takes three to four business days.

Once approved, you’ll see a new Promotions tab in your Bing Ads Merchant Center account. You can set up promotions in the UI (shown below) or with a promotion feed.

To get reporting details on Merchant Promotions, select Click Type ID and Total Clicks on Ad Elements in the product partition and product dimension reports in Bing Ads.

For more details, see the blog post announcing the rollout.

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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.