Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Monday, 1 August 2016
SearchCap: Bing & Google Olympics, Yahoo tests & more
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Bing & Google Olympics, Yahoo tests & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Bing adds 2016 Rio Olympic Games search feature & “Events to Watch” prediction tool
Bing is getting into the Olympic spirit, bringing the 2016 Rio Olympic Games into its search results, and launching its “Events to Watch” feature, recommending must-see Olympic events based on Bing Predicts technology.
Now, Olympic-related Bing searches will deliver a Rio Games box with tabs to navigate between: Sports, Athletes, Schedule, Medals and Daily Predicts.
Bing will also be tracking the number of medals won by each country, and updating daily its newly lauched “Events to Watch,” suggesting the most anticipated 2016 Olympic events.
According to Bing, its “Events to Watch” feature delivers an optimized schedule of “must-watch” Olympic events based on projected upsets, new world records and the likelihood of a close competition – all calculated using Bing Predicts technology.
New Google Alert widget saves us from repeatedly Googling ourselves
Google just saved users who can’t stop Googling themselves a whole lot of time.
Now, if you Google your name while logged into your Google account, a “Stay in the loop” widget will appear at the bottom of the first page of search results. (For it to display, you must have allowed Google to save your web and app activity in your user account settings.)
The new feature lets users sign up to receive a Google Alert when their name is mentioned online.
Clicking on the “Stay in the loop” link will return a Google Alerts set-up form with your name in quotation marks, and options to control the frequency and level of alerts.
The “Stay in the loop” feature was announced last month along with other updates to Google’s “My Account” tools, but didn’t launch until recently.
Google gears up for 2016 Rio Olympics with search updates & YouTube highlight videos
Google says it’s “bringing the best” of its products to this year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
According to the Official Google Blog, the site will be adding event schedules, medal counts, athlete information, competition results and TV schedules (for 30+ countries) in Search.
In addition to Olympic-related search updates, YouTube will have event highlights by official broadcasters from more than 60 countries. Also, fifteen of YouTube’s top creators will be in Rio livestreaming events.
We’re bringing the best our products have to offer to help people around the world stay up-to-date with the Olympic Games Rio 2016.
The Google app on Android and iOS is also getting the Olympic treatment. Olympic-related searches will return an option to receive automatic updates on top events and medals won.
Google says users can also follow worldwide Olympic-related search trends, and explore Rio venues via Google Maps Street View.
Is “SEO” the right term anymore?
An SEO’s role and job duties have changed significantly since I began working in the field 12 years ago — and I think it’s time that we got a new title. In my view, our current job title does not accurately reflect the role that we now play in digital marketing.
A few years back, we focused on optimizing existing landing page elements (title, meta description, headings, body content updates and so on), building links using link development tactics and conducting website audits to fix technical issues.
We still do these things today, of course — but we also do so much more.
These days, a practitioner of search engine optimization is more of a content experience analyst who focuses on optimizing and deploying content across multiple devices and platforms. It’s all about building high-quality, useful, intent-based content for all stages of the buyer journey so as to be there in a consumer’s moment of need.
Why has our role changed?
In the past, a big part of our job as SEOs was to review a website and make sure there were no technical issues that could prevent the site from being indexed. These issues often presented the biggest hindrance to search engine visibility, so we spent a great deal of time and focus on them.
Though we still conduct technical audits and make recommendations based on our findings, SEOs today spend more time on links/content and less time on technical issues. But why?
There are a few reasons for this shift. First, Google’s crawlers have improved; for example, they’ve become much better at understanding JavaScript, AJAX and other technologies that might once have made it difficult to access your page content.
Other technologies have evolved as well. Many content management systems these days have SEO capabilities built in (or readily available via plugins) that make it easy to incorporate basic SEO elements or fix basic technical issues without hand coding. Additionally, tools like Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) have grown more sophisticated, and technical issues that might once have taken hours to detect are now easy to see at a glance.
Finally, SEO is becoming more integrated into the website development process. The web developer of the past was only interested in front-end usability and back-end integration, and often knew little to nothing about SEO best practices.
Now, if you look at job ads for webmasters/developers, you’ll see that a basic knowledge of SEO is generally desired (and often required). Slowly but surely, the tech work an SEO used to do to make a website crawler-friendly has been shifting into the purview of the web developer.
But if the web developer is now taking responsibility for much of the tech side of the SEO, what is the SEO of today actually doing?
Through search, new roles have evolved
Talk to anyone who’s been doing SEO for a while, and you’ll note that many of them are wearing multiple hats these days. Most of us have at least a basic proficiency in related areas like content marketing, social media marketing, conversion rate optimization and/or user experience (UX) design. Many of these disciplines are younger than SEO, and some may even have stemmed from it.
In other words, SEO today is a complex role — one that goes far beyond simply ensuring that search engine crawlers can access and parse your website. Doing the job well requires a working knowledge of many different online marketing channels, along with an understanding of how these various channels work together to enhance search engine visibility and create a great user experience.
As stated above, an SEO’s role has largely evolved into that of a content experience analyst, who is basically a professional charged with optimizing a brand’s content across multiple devices, platforms and web properties to attract consumers at all stages of the customer journey.
Final thoughts
In the early days of SEO, there was almost an “us vs. them” relationship between the SEO community and Google, with little or no communication at all from the search giant. Over the years, that changed dramatically. Google has made great strides in transparency and communication with SEOs, helping to legitimize the profession.
Still, Google’s communications seem to have a distinct lack of reference to search engine optimizers. Rarely is “SEO” referred to by Google in outreach; it’s almost always references to “webmasters.” Perhaps this omission is simply a holdover from the “us vs. them” days, but it does speak to the fact that what we do is much broader than just optimizing webpages for search.
If other professionals can change with time and evolve naturally into newer roles as their industry changes, then we can, too. Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate what we call ourselves and determine if SEO is still the right name/term for what we do. What are your thoughts?
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
How does Google’s local algorithm work in 2016?
Last month at SMX Advanced, Dan Leibson and I unveiled the results of what we believe to be the largest ever statistical study of Google’s Local SEO ranking factors. We looked at over 100 factors across 30,000 businesses to try to figure out how local businesses can rank better in Google, and the results were both surprising and perhaps not so surprising.
For years we have participated in David Mihm’s/Moz’s ranking factors survey, which has been great for getting a feel for what practitioners were seeing/feeling. But we felt that a statistical analysis of ranking local businesses could be a great complement and add additional insights into how we as an industry go about getting those businesses to rank well in Local Packs.
We partnered with Places Scout and Majestic to provide a lot of the data, then worked with the Center for Statistical Consulting at University of California, Irvine, to do all of the hard work of crunching the numbers.
The result was a monster report that we attempted to boil down into bite-sized, usable chunks. We focused on high-volume local queries (e.g., “dentist,” “lawyer”), looking at at both explicit local queries (e.g., “dentist in Pleasanton”) and implicit (e.g., “dentist”).
So what matters for local rankings?
It’s important to note that our findings are not a “Top Ten Local SEO Ranking Factors” thing. It’s basically an analysis of which of the 100+ factors we looked at correlate positively with good Local rankings and which didn’t.
Since we’re not Google, we couldn’t look at every factor, so we are likely missing some important concepts. But in general, we think the data provides a pretty good roadmap for how to prioritize your local SEO investment.
- Links. It shouldn’t be a surprise that backlinks can affect your local rankings, but we were surprised at how links appeared to have the strongest correlation with positive rankings. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Google’s infamous Toolbar PageRank correlated with positive rankings, implying that sites with older links are generally doing better. (Toolbar PageRank hasn’t been updated in a long time.)
- Website factors. Again, not surprising, but use of the target keywords and the number of words on a page appeared to make a difference. In our experience, location pages with a lot of content tend to do better than those with smaller amounts.
- Citations. Citations did not appear to correlate with good local rankings, which was odd, since local SEOs tend to talk about them a lot. This matched up pretty well with our experience. Last year, we did a large-scale test that showed that in cases where a business had citation issues (e.g., lack of citations, inconsistent or duplicates and so on), fixing those issues improved their odds of getting into the Local Packs significantly, but if they were already there, citation work tended to have little effect in moving the business up in the rankings. So citations appear to be foundational but not a competitive advantage.
- Google My Business factors. The data showed that factors like having reviews, photos and/or owner-verified businesses all correlated with strong rankings. It’s hard to say if this helps them rank well or if it’s because they already rank well so they attract more engagement, but it’s safe to say that beefing up your Google My Business pages isn’t a bad way to spend your Local SEO time.
- Some big surprises. One of the biggest surprises was that having the City & State in the title of your Google My Business landing page did not correlate with positive Google My Business rankings. While there was some difference in how this factor fared depending on the kind of query (explicit vs. implicit), this has always been a top recommendation, even from me. While it still may make sense to do this for usability, we are no longer as obsessive about this kind of explicit geotargeting. We also were depressed to see that Keyword in Business Name is one of the strongest factors. This is likely one of the reasons why there’s so much successful spam in Local Packs.
So what does this all mean?
Well, besides getting through your citation work as quickly as you can and moving on to getting backlinks, particularly in competitive markets, I think this means that the organic algorithm has a lot more influence over Local Pack results than it had pre-Pigeon.
Over the next few months, we will be publishing more detail on the results as we work through the data. Until then, here’s our expanded take on Local SEO Ranking Factors with more detail on the different factors we looked at and our methodology. We are hoping this type of project encourages others to invest in more empirical studies of SEO and share their findings.
If you are interested in participating in the next version of our study in 2017, please get in touch.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
Google adds multi-stop support to Google Maps iOS app
Google announced that the new iOS app for Google Maps has added multi-stop, multi-destination support for directions. You can now tap to add not just a point A and point B directions mapping but also point C, D, E and so on.
So if you are taking a road trip and you are planning for multiple stops, the Google Maps iOS app can help.
Here is a screen shot:
Google explains how this works by saying “just open the app, enter a destination, tap the corner menu, and then tap “Add stop”. To rearrange the order of your stops, tap and hold the stop you want to move and drag it to the position you want. Once you’ve added all your stops, tap “Done” and your multi-stop route is complete.”
Yahoo testing new search bar where logo is on the right, not the left
Days after Verizon announces it will acquire Yahoo, Yahoo is testing a new search bar at the top with a missing logo at the left. The post Yahoo testing new search bar where logo is on the right, not the left appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. 
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
7 Things Marketers Need to Know About AdWords Store Visit Conversions by @LarryKim
E-commerce sales totaled more than $341 billion in 2015. That’s huge. But amazingly, 90 percent of sales still happen in stores, not online, according to Google.
That’s why AdWords introduced the in-store visits metric in 2014. The consumer purchase journey is now more complex than ever – and Google wanted to create a way businesses could understand how much in-store foot traffic their location-based PPC ads were driving.
Thus far, Google has measured more than 1 billion store visits. But not every business has access to this powerful metric.
At the Google Performance Summit – where Google announced Expanded Text Ads, new local search ads, and gave us a preview of the new AdWords interface – in-store conversions were one of the huge topics of conversation, and Google promised this metric would soon become more widely available to more businesses.
If you’re a local business, the combination of new Google Maps Local Search ads and in-store conversions will be an absolutely killer combination.
To get you ready, here are seven things you need to know about AdWords’ store visit conversions.
1. What are Store Visit Conversions?
Google estimates store visit conversions by looking at phone location history to determine whether someone who clicked on your search ad ended up visiting your store. Google looks at ad clicks on all devices – smartphone, desktop, and tablet.
In-store conversion data will help you understand which ad campaigns, keywords, and devices send the most people to your store so you can optimize your account to increase ROI. It doesn’t guarantee that someone bought from you – just that they visited after clicking on one of your ads.
Google’s goal is to provide the data so you can attribute the online value of your ad spend. In less than 2 years, advertisers in the retail, restaurant, travel, automotive, and finance industries have counted more than 1 billion store visits globally.
For privacy reasons, in-store conversion data is based on anonymous and aggregated data gathered from people who have Location History turned on. A conversion can’t be tied to an individual ad click or person.
In addition, as Matt Lawson, Director of Performance Ads Marketing for Google, wrote on Search Engine Land:
“Simply being near a store doesn’t automatically count as a visit. There are additional considerations.
We know that a one minute visit isn’t the same thing as a thirty-minute visit. One minute could simply mean that a shopper passed through a store on the way to get a hot pretzel from Auntie Anne’s at the food court. There’s even such a thing as too much time spent in one location. Employees who spend time at stores in long, discernible patterns aren’t counted as store visitors.”
Here’s Google’s official overview video on AdWords Store Visits Conversions:
2. What Technology Does Google Use to Measure Store Visits?
Google Maps knows the exact coordinates and borders of millions of businesses globally. That’s why the AdWords team worked with the Google Maps team to match location history for hundreds of millions of users with Maps data for more than 2 million businesses.
Google says they use a hybrid approach with a large number of signals in order to measure visits.
According to Marketing Land, some of those signals include:
- Google Earth and Google Maps Street View data.
- Mapping of the coordinates and borders of hundreds of millions of stores globally.
- Wi-Fi signal strength in stores.
- GPS location signals.
- Google query data.
- Visit behavior.
- Panel of over 1 million opted-in users provides their on-ground location history validate data accuracy and inform the modeling.
To ensure accuracy, Google also surveyed more than 5 million people to confirm they actually visited a store. Google used this information to update its algorithms and reported that its results are “99 percent accurate”.
3. What’s New With Store Visits?
At the Performance Summit, Google announced that it most recently made in-store visits available to manufacturers, like auto manufacturers, to track store visits to dealerships.
Google shared a case study on how Nissan UK has been using store visit conversion data to see which keywords and campaigns were driving people into their dealerships to buy a car and increase their ROI by 25x. They’ve used the data to map buyer journeys to reach them at key moments of the research journey.
They discovered that 6 percent of their mobile ad clicks resulted in a visit. This is huge, considering that the average consumer only visits a dealership twice before actually buying.
You can see more in this video AdWords posted:
Google shared two other case study last year showing how PetSmart and Office Depot used store visit data.
4. Is Google Using Beacons to Improve?
Google said it is starting to experiment with beacons to improve its algorithm. Google is exploring how to use Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) beacons for in-store analytics and in-store visits.
In fact, Google has a BLE beacon pilot underway that should eventually help people who operate at smaller locations and businesses by ensuring Google is getting and providing the most precise and accurate location data for the least amount of effort.
5. How Many Store Visits are Incremental?
Though most purchases happen in person at a physical location, digital channels – especially paid search – still play a huge role in the research and buying process.
Google wanted to quantify the substantial offline impact mobile search ads can have on a business. So Google ran a study of 10 top big-box U.S. retailers (including Target and Bed, Bath & Beyond) to determine how many store visits are incremental.
What Google found was that, on average, the number of incremental store visits driven by mobile search ads actually exceeded their number of online purchase conversions.
The study essentially found that these store visits otherwise never would have happened, if not for the influence of mobile search ads.
6. How can You Get Access to Store Visit Conversions?
Store visits have been made available to more than 1,000 advertisers in 11 countries so far, and Google promises more will gain access soon. If you want to start tracking store visits, you can contact your account manager.
Not every business can track store visits yet – there are a few requirements. You must:
- Have multiple physical store locations in an eligible country.
- Receive “thousands” of ad clicks and “many” store visits every month.
- Link a Google My Business account to your AdWords account.
- Enable location extensions.
7. Where can You View Visit Conversions?
Store visit conversions will be added to the “All conversions” column in your campaign reports. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to add this column to your reports:
Store visits are available at the campaign, ad group, and keyword level and can be segmented by device.
Google provides step-by-step instructions here.
This post originally appeared in Wordstream, and is re-published with permission.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Wordstream
Don’t Miss Out: How to Use Google’s New Mobile Testing Tool by @highervis
Google’s original mobile testing tool came out in 2014, and two years in the land of technology might as well be a lifetime. It was about time they came out with an update, and I’m happy to say it was worth the wait. According to Google, “people are five times more likely to leave a mobile site that isn’t mobile-friendly,” and “nearly half of all visitors will leave a mobile site if the pages don’t load within 3 seconds.” In other, more blatant words, it’s imperative that business owners optimize their sites for mobile.
Read below to find out how to use the newest version of Google’s mobile testing tool and make sure your website is meeting the needs of your mobile customers.
How to Get the New Google Mobile Testing Tool
First things first: you can access the tool from Google’s Search Console’s mobile usability report. Either way, once you’ve arrived at the tool, it’s as simple as entering your website’s URL into the search box, clicking “test now”, and waiting for the results. The home screen will look something like this:
Then, once you enter a URL, your results page will look something like this:
How to Interpret the Google Mobile Testing Tool Results
So now you know how to access the tool (it’s pretty self-explanatory and easy to use, thanks to Google!). Next, you need to know what those results mean. A test is worthless if you can’t use the results to make positive improvements.
In terms of the screenshot above, Google makes it pretty clear that the site is mobile friendly. The big green 99/100 rating for mobile friendliness is a pretty big giveaway. If you’re not looking for an in-depth analysis of your site, this might be just enough information to make you happy and send you on your way. However, you’d be missing out on some of the tool’s (not-so-hidden) features that could help improve your mobile site even more.
You’ll notice in the shot above that next to the mobile friendliness rating are ratings for mobile and desktop speed. Although Express scored high in the overall rating, they didn’t fare so well when it came to speed. This is just one example of the added information you get with the newest version of this tool.
If this was my site and my ratings, the first thing I’d work on fixing would be the speed of my site on both mobile and desktop.
One of the big differences between the old version of the tool and the updated version is that you now have access to this added information; in the past, all the tool said was whether or not your site was mobile friendly. Now, users have much more detailed information in the form of a 0-100-scale rating that discusses mobile friendliness, but also mobile and desktop speed.
Additional Features of the Google Mobile Testing Tool
Besides the new rating scale and the fact that you can get all three scores on one screen, Google has made another big change; they give you the option to have a comprehensive report sent to you that you can share with your team. If you click that button, a screen will appear that looks something like this:
Google is nice enough to give you some mobile tips in an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand format even before receiving your free report (which they promise will arrive within 24 hours). Here is a report that I had sent to me for amandadisilvestro.com:
You can see that in the area where I scored poorly (mobile speed), Google tells me exactly what needs to be fixed. They even provide links that lead to technical support in case the team needs help fixing the problem. They’re pretty much taking the guesswork out of the whole thing, so truly optimizing a mobile site has never been this painless.
Possible Critiques of the Google Mobile Testing Tool
I do think it is interesting, and worth noting, that while there is a ton of information out there about how the tool works and how to use it, there isn’t a lot of information that explains the algorithm the tool uses in order to determine the three different ratings. All I was really able to determine was that it looks at things like CSS, HTML, scripts, and images and then evaluates how quickly (or slowly) it takes for your website to load.
So how do they determine where your site falls on the rating scale? Perhaps by how long it takes for your site to load past the 3-second mark, which they claim is the attention span people have for waiting on mobile sites. (Ironically enough, it takes longer than three seconds for Google’s site to complete its test.)
I became even more skeptical after coming across this article by Search Engine Watch. They did some more extensive tests and found that their site, along with Forbes, and many other sites, all received “poor” ratings for both mobile and desktop speed. In fact, the only site they could find that received good scores in all three categories was Google. When I did the test myself, I received the same results, as you can see below:
I hate to be a skeptic and go around touting a conspiracy theory, but what’s up with that Google? Are all the other mobile sites out there really inferior to yours, or are you just trying to drum up business for your new tool?
Regardless of the critiques or potential fishy-ness happening, the tool is easy to use and is something I would recommend. After all, it’s free, and if you truly don’t believe what you see, then you don’t have to make any changes. If nothing else, it gets you thinking.
What do you think of Google’s new tool? Was your site able to score a “good” in more than one category? Comment in the section below and let us know what you think.
Image Credits
Featured Image: gpointstudio/DepositPhotos.com
All screenshots by Amanda DiSilvestro. Taken July 24, 2016.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)