Now, when you search for “workouts” or “exercises,” Bing will deliver carousel-styled search results with images that link to a wide variety of exercise options.
Filters within the carousel make it possible to narrow the search by gender, difficulty, target-area, type of exercise, or type of workout equipment.
Bing has added the same carousel results for yoga and Pilates-specific searches, in addition to including how-to videos at the top of search results for a limited number of yoga poses.
The Bing App has new updates as well, focused on healthy recipe-related searches. Queries for search terms like “low-fat recipes” and “low-fat stew recipes” will return a carousel of results where users can drill down via a “Nutrients” tab to see calorie counts, carbs, fat content and more for food items.
Users can also find calorie counts by searching “calories in a cup of” and adding a food item to the search term, i.e. “calories in a cup of couscous” will give you the following results:
Bing says food search experiences on its app are now “even richer” — offering quick ways to find recipe preparation times, calorie counts and more for some of the most popular recipe searches.
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including
I only recently learned of a Wikipedia page dedicated to inventors who were killed by their own inventions. That page is amazing, and if you end up leaving this article and just reading that list for the next half hour, I totally understand.
But it got me thinking: what are some ways in which paid search managers end up killing their own campaigns as a result of their own optimization attempts?
Here are a few examples that come to mind, with some suggestions for avoiding self-induced paid search failure at the hands of well-meaning optimizations.
Bid increases in budget-restricted campaigns
Optimally, paid search campaigns are allowed to spend as much as efficiently possible, with efficiency judged by the return on ad spend (ROAS) generated and how that aligns with profitability. However, many advertisers are constrained by necessary budget restrictions, and use campaign budget settings in AdWords, Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini to prevent spend from going above their spend limits.
The downside of this management style is that any keyword bid increases actually reduce the total amount of traffic a campaign can garner if it is already being held back by budgets prior to the bid changes, since the price paid per click increases with higher bids. Greater cost per click means it takes fewer total clicks to reach budget caps.
Thus, bidding more aggressively might get ads further up the page, but traffic would actually go down, since budgets would prevent the ads from showing as often. I’d say this qualifies as an optimization that ends up killing performance.
Limiting paid search campaigns to only target RLSA or Customer Match lists
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and Customer Match audiences provide advertisers with the ability to target ads to high-value groups who have either visited a brand’s website or provided the brand with their email address, respectively.
With such demonstrated affinity for a brand, these audiences naturally outperform non-RLSA and Customer Match audiences when it comes to measures like click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate, as shown in many casestudies.
As such, advertisers might be inclined to only target these audiences in search, and indeed such a strategy is a necessity for some brands in highly competitive industries, since they simply can’t afford to bid enough for keywords to reach non-RLSA and Customer Match audience searchers and still maintain an effective ROAS. Outside of these rare situations, however, targeting only users familiar with your brand has obvious consequences.
For one, most advertisers use non-brand keywords in order to attract new customers. Limiting ads to just users who have already been to a website or provided their email address eliminates the possibility of reaching customers that are totally unfamiliar with a brand.
Additionally, non-brand search ads help to grow RLSA and Customer Match lists by adding new users who are likely to click/convert further down the line. Thus, turning ads off to non-audience members may result in RLSA and Customer Match lists slowly dwindling in size over time.
And while advertisers could potentially use other channels in the hopes of growing site visitors and email lists, search query is often a very strong signal of who will ultimately buy from you, compared to weaker signals from other channels like paid social.
So while targeting campaigns solely to RLSA and Customer Match lists may result in higher overall account CTR and conversion rate, it can also lead to negative impacts on new customer acquisition and the health of these audiences further down the line. For these reasons I’d say such an optimization might be another example of an optimization dealing death to the campaigns it was meant to help.
Deleting/pausing keywords and Google Shopping product targets that aren’t performing well
A great man once said, “There are no bad keywords,” only bad bids. The logic behind this is that, assuming your keyword list is reasonably targeted and relevant to some aspect of your business, keyword bidding should be used to pay the appropriate price for traffic.
If a keyword isn’t providing an adequate ROAS, the bid simply isn’t low enough, and keywords that will never produce an adequate ROAS should eventually be bid down to a level so low so as to shut off traffic.
Brands that try a keyword and find that the ROAS is poor might be tempted to pause or delete the term. However, the first step should be to try lowering the bid, while also examining whether the ad copy and landing page for the term are as effective and targeted as they can be.
Similarly, product targets for Google Shopping campaigns shouldn’t be immediately paused if they don’t initially perform as desired. Can the target be broken down into smaller targets with fewer products each in order to set more granular bids? Can bids be adjusted to hit ROAS goals? Are there queries driving poor-performing traffic to the products within the target that should be prevented with the use of negative keywords?
These are all questions that advertisers should look to answer before pausing product targets that are producing poor ROAS.
Deleting or pausing keywords and product targets without attempting to adjust bids and other variables can result in valuable traffic being written off for good, to the detriment of paid search campaigns.
Don’t accidentally kill your paid search campaigns
These are just three of the ways in which well-meaning optimizations might end up coming back to haunt paid search managers. And while this post is no Wikipedia page on inventors who were killed by their own inventions, hopefully it will help get you thinking about some of the adverse effects of optimizations you’re considering or have already undertaken.
Some death traps, much like the parachute coat, can be avoided.
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
Andy Taylor is a Senior Research Analyst at Merkle, responsible for analyzing trends across the digital marketing spectrum for best practices and industry commentary. A primary contributor to the Merkle RKGBlog, Dossier, and quarterly Digital Marketing Report, his 6+ years of experience have seen him master and provide valuable insights into topics that extend across paid search, comparison shopping engines, display advertising, SEO, and social media. 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.
Although many of us in the industry pay hundreds or even thousands for SEO software that helps to automate and simplify our everyday work, we already have one of the most handy free SEO tool sets in the market with Google Chrome’s DevTools. Built into Google Chrome, this set of web authoring and debugging tools allows us to validate some of the most fundamental and critical SEO aspects of any page.
In most cases, using DevTools is pretty straightforward. But there are a few very handy and not so obvious applications for SEO analysis. Let’s go through them now.
Start by navigating to the page you want to investigate in Google Chrome and opening DevTools. You can do this by selecting More Tools > Developer Tools from the Google Chrome menu in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window.
Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+I (Windows) or Cmd+Opt+I (Mac), or you can right-click on the page element you’d like to investigate and click “Inspect” from the drop-down menu that appears.
1. Check your page’s main content elements, including JavaScript-rendered ones
Google is now able to crawl and index JavaScript-based content, but it doesn’t always do so flawlessly. Therefore, it is a must to verify the main content elements of your pages — not only by reviewing their HTML source code, but also by checking their DOM to see how the information will be actually rendered and identified by Google.
You can directly see the DOM of any page with DevTools in the “Elements” panel.
Use this to review the content of any of the page’s elements (such as the title, meta description or page text) to verify that the desired relevant information is shown in each case, to make sure it’s accessible to Google.
For example, in the upper left screen shot below, we can see how the displayed main text (in red) is included in a <div>. But this is actually implemented with JavaScript, the code for which can be seen in the upper right screen shot below, which shows the page’s HTML source code.
[Click to enlarge]
When identifying these differences between the content shown in both, you can then take the appropriate steps to verify it’s being indexed correctly: reviewing the page cached version in Google, verifying if the text is being shown in Google’s results when searching for it, using the “Fetch as Googlebot” in Google Search Console and so on.
2. Look for CSS hidden content
It’s known that Google “discounts” text content that, although included in the page’s HTML source code, is hidden to the user by default with tabs or menu options that need to be “clicked” to view or expand them.
Among the most common ways to hide text is by using CSS with the “display:none” or “visibility:hidden” properties, so it’s recommended to check if there’s any important information on your site pages that might be hidden via these means.
You can do this with Chrome’s DevTools “Search” drawer, which you can access by hitting Ctrl + Shift + F (Windows) or Cmd + Opt + F (Mac) when DevTools is open. This search feature will allow you to look not only through the opened page file itself but across all of the used resources, including CSS and JavaScript.
Here, you can search for the desired properties, in this case “hidden” or “display:none” to identify if/where they exist within the page code.
Click on a search result to view the full code surrounding the property you’ve searched for. Review the code to see which text is being hidden; if it’s important content, check if it’s being discounted by Google, and take the appropriate actions.
3. Verify your images ALT descriptions
Besides checking your pages’ main text content elements, you can also verify your images ALT descriptions in the “Elements” panel. Right-click on any image and select “Inspect,” as shown here:
[Click to enlarge]
4. Identify no-indexation & canonicalization configuration in pages & resources
You can also use Chrome’s DevTools to inspect your pages’ technical configuration. For example, you can validate the meta robots and canonical tags configuration, which can be done by using the “Search” drawer to look for these specific tags and review how they’re implemented.
This validation can be done not only for the implementation of these tags in the HTML <head> area, but also in the HTTP headers, by going to the “Network” panel and selecting the desired page or resource to verify their header information, including the existence of a link rel=”canonical” in an image file, for example, as shown below.
5. Look for the HTTP status in the header configuration
When checking the header configuration of the pages and resources using the “Network” panel, you can also verify their HTTP status and see if there are any redirects, which type of redirects they are, and error statuses, as well as the inclusion of other configurations such as the x-robots-tag, hreflang or the “vary: user agent” ones.
6. Validate your mobile web optimization by emulating any device
Mobile-friendliness is now essential for SEO, and you can validate page configuration and content in mobile using the DevTools “Device Mode.” This option can be enabled by clicking the device icon in the upper left-hand area of the panel or by pressing Command+Shift+M (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+M (Windows, Linux) while the DevTools panel is open.
Once in Device Mode, you will be shown viewport controls in the upper area of the window. Here, you can select a responsive viewport (freely resizable) or choose a specific device to test your page with. You can also add your own custom device using the “Edit…” option.
7. Assess your page load time & identify speed issues
Analyze any page load time by emulating the network conditions and device used. For this, you can go to the “Network Conditions” tool, which you can access from the Customization menu in the upper right-hand corner of the panel under “More tools.”
Here you will find the “Caching,” “Network throttling” and “User agent” configurations.
Once you’ve chosen your settings, you can reload the desired page and go to the “Network” panel to see not only the page’s full load time (Load) but also when the initial markup of the page has been parsed (DOMContentLoaded), both of which appear at the bottom of the window. You can also view the load times and sizes of each one of the used resources, which can be recorded by clicking on the red button at the left side of the panel.
To get recommendations of actions to take in order to improve the page speed performance, navigate to the “Audits” panel and click the “Run” button. Each recommendation will specify the related resources causing issues, as can be seen below:
Additionally, you can capture screen shots of your page rendering with the “Filmstrip” option. By clicking on the camera icon and reloading the page, you can view screen shots of your page across various stages of loading, which allows you to verify what your users can see at every stage.
8. Identify render-blocking resources
You can also use the resources load times data in the “Network” panel to identify which JS and CSS resources are loading before the DOM and potentially blocking it, which is one of the most common page speed issues. You can filter by CSS and JS by clicking the buttons for them (as shown below).
9. Look for non-secure resources during HTTPS migrations
Chrome DevTools can be very helpful during HTTPS migrations, as it allows you to identify security issues in any page with the information provided in the “Security” panel. You can see if the page is secure and has a valid HTTPS certificate, the type of secure connection, and if there are mixed content issues due to non-secure origins of any used resource.
10. Validate your Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) implementation
If you’re implementing AMP, you can see if there are any issues with your pages by adding “#development=1” string to your AMP URL, then checking in the “Console” panel. This will tell you if there are any issues, warnings or errors — and in which element and line of code these have been found so you can take the appropriate action to fix them.
Bonus: Personalize Chrome DevTools settings
As you can see, you can use Chrome DevTools for SEO in so many ways that you will likely spend some time in it. Thus, you might want to personalize it a bit based on your own preferences. You can adjust the appearance, enable shortcuts and more.
You can do this in the “Preferences” settings, which can be found by clicking on the Customization menu button in the upper right-hand corner of the panel and choosing the “Settings” option.
Last but not least, speaking of personalization of preferences: Analyzing minified code can make it difficult to parse, so make sure to click on the pretty print “{}” button in the central bottom area of the panel so you’re able to see a non-minified version. This will allow you to go through it easily due with improved readability.
I hope these Chrome DevTools tips help to make your SEO life easier!
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
, a digital marketing consultancy focused on helping businesses -- from startups to multinational companies in Europe, Asia, North & South America -- to grow their multi-device organic search visibility, traffic and ROI in multi-lingual & multi-country environments. She is also a frequent blogger, a teacher at the Online Marketing Master of Pompeu Fabra University and Kschool, as well as an international speaker at online marketing conferences, having spoken in more than 12 countries & 60 conferences.
In this industry, I see a ton of bad advice out there. Unfortunately, this is the nature of search marketing. No matter how many experiments we run or how much experience we have, we never know 100% what works with Google. Only Google knows for sure – we just have to use what data we have and our experience to make our best guess.
I’ve heard a lot of statements about backlinks and backlink profiles over my career. Here are my most common misconceptions:
“Rel=nofollow” Links Do Not Help
“Rel=nofollow” is a tag that tells Google “do not crawl this link” and “do not pass PageRank,” per Google’s Webmaster Tools. However, the big debate in the search marketing community is: do these really help for SEO?
My answer – yes and no. They do not help as standalone pieces, in my experience. Meaning, if we start a website and pump it full of good PR “nofollow” links, we wouldn’t see a big bump in traffic, rankings, etc. I think that Google does a good job of understanding “nofollow” links in that regard.
However, there are a few key areas where I have seen “nofollow” links have a really good impact and provide a lift in rankings and overall website domain authority:
Over-optimized websites
Few “nofollow” links in the backlink profile
Anchor text is over-optimized
All three of these above examples have “wacky” backlink profiles. These could be from a number of different things. I have seen some profiles that have a ton of affiliate links, some of which had bad, “spammy” backlinks from 2011 and worse. Generally, this stems from SEOs trying to game the system back in 2008-2012, or just from affiliate partners not using best practices.
What I can say for certain is over the past one or two years, we have used a tactic where we tried to gain good quality “nofollow” links from quality websites in the form of blog comments, forum links, editorial placements (bio line), and more similar links (more on this later).
Once we achieved these links, we were generally able to see an instant impact in overall keyword rankings over the next 2-3 months. Here is a snapshot from SEMRush for one example. The links indexed are from around June and July, and we saw more than a 100% increase in keyword rankings.
As much as some people want to say that “rel=nofollow” links do not help SEO, I just don’t buy it. I have seen them work too often, mainly for balancing out ratios of over-optimized links, and Google shows them in their Webmaster tools.
The Quantity Doesn’t Matter
If you had asked me in 2014 which was better — quality or quantity — I would have looked at you funny. Today, not so much. Reason being, I am seeing a ton of websites outpacing other websites even though they have fewer “quality” links and just have more referring pages linking to them.
For example, if I have one website (DA 80) linking to me with 20 links, but a competitor has a website (DA 60) link to it with 10,000 links, the competitor would have the edge over me. I am not sure if it is Penguin 4.0 which allows more weight for quantity of links, but I have seen a large correlation with the number of links, not just the quality of them, affecting the top players in the top positions.
Although this is just a small data sample, having a lot of links from the same domain can help you, and Google does favor it. At the very least, it sure isn’t hurting. Brian Dean’s Google Rankings guide also showed that the total number of external backlinks helps and that it is a large correlating ranking factor.
This is also called “link velocity,” for those out there who may use that terminology.
You Only Need High-Quality Links
This one is generally thought of by people reading the “Quality over Quantity” statement made by the community. The truth is, you cannot build a quality backlink profile on just 10-15 good quality links.
Google prefers a good, healthy backlink profile filled with lots of links – everything from high-quality links and blog comments to forum links, etc. They want a natural link profile. If you only have super high-quality links, it looks rather sketchy, right? Almost like a private blog network, which is a popular black hat tactic, right?
Remember, Google isn’t necessarily a smart algorithm. It cannot see what websites look like or know how you acquired the links. It just looks at the finished product. If you try to look too squeaky clean, it can look bad.
A big mistake that we used to see was people disavowing links too much. If the links weren’t 100% quality, they would disavow them, which was actually hurting them. Once we took out the disavow file, we could see improvement over the next 3-6 months.
Old Sites/Links Do Not Help
Just because a site has a “bad” design does not make it a bad site or not an authority site. For instance, here is Matt Cutts’ website:
Yup, he made a blog in the past five months and it has 190 comments!
Google doesn’t care about how your website looks. It just cares about how it performs in its search engine. Just because someone has a bad-looking site or the content is old does not mean Google will not value it or value it less. In fact, they also value web pages and sites that have long histories and will place them in the search results over unproven web pages.
Therefore, do not worry about the look or the age of the potential link. A good source of information is a good source of information. Just focus on the metrics behind the link.
Bio Links Do Not Help
Biography links in guest posts or editorial submissions are “rel=nofollow” links just like any other link. They will help if your link profile needs them. They are a cornerstone for great content creation and promotion using another website’s viewer base.
Even if you get the same biography links from the same site but from a different article, it should still help because you are adding more links and getting more link velocity. These links are similar to blog comments.
Like I said, Google isn’t necessarily smart. If it were, it would eradicate affiliate links and paid links. But it can’t understand the difference – how could it? So, at the end of the day, don’t overthink Google. A good quality link is a good quality link, but don’t go out paying for links or affiliate links. Reason being:
Affiliate & Paid Links Do Help – But Are Dangerous
Being in e-commerce, I say that some affiliate programs make their links “dofollow” and can positively impact their client’s link profiles. They will also tell these clients that these links “will not help” their SEO efforts, which is a lie or they do not know better. Affiliate links do help sometimes, in SEO, because it is a link, at the end of the day, and how does Google know it is an affiliate?
There are tons of affiliate companies and general companies that sell links promising they are “Google friendly,” but they are not. Make sure all of your affiliate and paid links have the “rel=nofollow” tag for a couple of reasons:
First, it is dangerous because you never know what Google is going to do. Will it buy some company in Silicon Valley who figured out how to find and eviscerate every affiliate program known to man? Maybe…maybe not…who knows? But a good rule of thumb is to stay as far away from the Google “ban hammer” as you can. Otherwise, you are risking your site suffering from Google’s wrath.
The second reason is that these links can inflate your rankings and, if you leave the affiliate program, it will drop you for those phrases. From my experience, it happens a lot, so if you have an affiliate program without the “nofollow” tag, you need to implement it immediately.
There are also some cases where the affiliate links were removed, and the site dropped even though the links used the “rel=nofollow” tag. However, these were rare cases, as normally those affiliate links were not even close to anything resembling high-quality links.
Blog Comments Are Spam Links
Blog commenting, guest posting, and forum links have a really bad rap. Back in the day, SEOs would use and abuse these tactics to no end. However, these are still websites that give quality information to consumers. Why would you not want to be in front of them?
Blog comments, forum posts, and guest posts are still fine. Just don’t do them for the links. Do them to create good content, answer questions, and provide value. If you do that, the links will come. If you get mad that 70% of your content marketing efforts don’t provide links, then you don’t have the right attitude.
At the end of the day, Content Marketing > SEO.
Links to Your Page Only Help That Page
This is not true. If you get a link to one page on your site, then hopefully that page links to other pages, from your navigation bar, footer, inner links, etc. That authority will pass throughout the different pages it links to, and Google will value the site more.
In my e-commerce world, we try to increase the overall value of the domain, which in turn increases the products and categories rankings in Google and makes our clients more sales.
Site-wide links still work and using them is a prevalent tactic in SEO. However, in my opinion, it is a sketchy tactic and you should always add a “rel=nofollow” tag in footer or site-wide links. You never know when Google will release the Google ban hammer on this. While I don’t think that you should be using this to gain authority, I have seen them work and increase ranking even with the “rel=nofollow” tag, unfortunately.
Over-Optimizing Anchor Text
Back in 2013, we were getting huge results for clients who had problems with Penguin. We would disavow or dilute their anchor text with “rel=nofollow” links, and they would magically skyrocket for rankings. In 2016, this is pretty much dead because of Penguin 4.0. In fact, I would say that anchor text is rather overpowered right now.
I would 100% not try to game anchor text, but there should be zero fear about using anchor text and over-optimizing yourself anymore, especially if you are not worried about it and are focused on good content.
Mentions Without a Link Count
This may be one of the most ridiculous statements that I have heard. If an article mentions your name but doesn’t link to you, it still somewhat counts positively. The thought behind this notion is that if you are mentioned throughout the internet, Google will count that positively.
I don’t want to go into this too much because – who knows? Maybe Google can use this as a ranking factor, but I have never seen one shred of evidence of this or, in my experience, seen this to be a benefit. Google is a crawler, and when it comes down to it, it crawls links. If there are no links, then it doesn’t count, at least in my experience/experiments.
Conclusion
Overall, there are some common misconceptions of a backlink profile, mainly due to the amount of information out there and how you interpret it. No one really knows what Google uses, but we can make good assumptions.
For all of the examples I used above, I either have data that shows there is a good chance it works or I used my own personal data set of real world experience. You should always take anything that you read with a grain of salt and learn for yourself.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Pixabay Screenshots by Ronald Dod. Taken December 2016.
That’s a question I hear all the time — and it’s a good one.
You see huge players like American Express and IBM creating loads of amazing content…
…but they have the resources and money to throw at it.
What about the little guys — the solopreneurs or small businesses of two to ten people? Can content marketing work for them?
I’m here to give you an absolute, undisputed YES!!
However, there are a few caveats (there’s always a caveat, right?):
You must commit fully to content marketing. Content marketing institute found that just 21% of content marketers in North America are “extremely” committed to content marketing. The other 79%? They’re just wasting their time (and everyone else’s, too).
You have to spend more time promoting than creating content. One of the biggest content marketing myths is “create amazing, out of this world content, and the readers will come.” This is FALSE! Unless you promote that content, NO ONE will see it, share it, or convert on it — period.
If you’re ready to finally commit to content marketing and stop wasting everyone’s time, read on.
In this article, I’m going to explain the benefits of content marketing, give you a few success stories to inspire you, and give you an action plan to get started right now.
Here’s a clickable index so you can get straight to where you wanna go:
Now, let’s talk content!
Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Business
Why would you even want to commit to content marketing? What can you look forward to if you fully commit?
Oh, there’s a lot. How does this sound:
Increase your traffic by 800%.
That’s right. Neil Patel found that content marketing leaders experience 7.8 times more site traffic than non-leaders. Not too shabby, eh?
Rank higher on search engines.
Without content, it’s going to be very difficult to rank your site on Google or Bing. Content gives you the extra, well, content needed to optimize your site and appear on search.
Establish authority and thought leadership in your industry.
Who do you view as an authority in your niche? If I asked you why I bet I’d know your answer — you see their face on high-quality, authoritative content across the web.
Generate more leads — and more sales.
HubSpot found that businesses with a regular blog generate 126% more leads than those without. With more leads, you get more chances to sell.
What would I be if I didn’t back up my claims with real-life examples? A fraud, that’s what. As such, here are five examples of small businesses using content marketing for huge success.
CoSchedule
I really look forward to CoSchedule‘s new blog post every week. It’s always informative, easy on the eyes, and actionable.
What I love about CoSchedule is that they committed to writing content before they even wrote their first piece of code. They started blogging before their product was launched, back in March of 2013 — just two guys telling the world about their ideas.
Three years later, in July 2016, they reached 100,000 blog subscribers and $2 million in recurring annual revenue. In short, they went from a two-man team with an idea to the fastest growing tech startup in North Dakota — all thanks to content.
Groove
Groove is a helpdesk software company that almost went out of business soon after their launch.
The story of how their startup almost died is an interesting one. You see, they tried content marketing. They seemingly did everything right… but it wasn’t enough. Traffic wasn’t increasing.
Their biggest mistake? They didn’t write about what their audience cared about. They chose unappealing topics. Not on purpose, of course — they didn’t know better.
So, how’d they turn it around? They started asking questions. They asked their customers what they needed help with, and scoured forums like Reddit to find what people were struggling with. Then, they directly answered those questions with their blog.
Now, they have 250,000 subscribers and over $5 million in recurring annual revenue — again, all thanks to content.
Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club is one of my personal favorite content marketing success stories. You’ve seen their viral video, I’m sure — you know, the one with the bear, machete, and raining money. No? Here it is:
I know what you’re thinking: “But Bill, that’s just one viral video. How is that content marketing?”
Yes, the video put them on the map. However, they create a lot of social media content. (Remember, content marketing doesn’t just mean blogging!)
Best part? Their social content has the same sense of wit and random awesome-ness of their video:
Dollar Shave Club started in 2011 and now has over $140 million in annual revenue from 2 million subscribers. Content is powerful!
River Pools and Spa
For fans of Joe Pulizzi’s book Content Inc, you’ll be familiar with the story of Marcus Sheridan and his company River Pools and Spa.
Long story short, this small company of 20 people was at risk of closing their doors for good — they were overdrawing their checking account and only had a few months left before they couldn’t afford to continue. It was 2009, during the recession, and people simply weren’t buying fiberglass pools.
That’s when Marcus decided to start his blog. He answered every conceivable question they’ve ever gotten around fiberglass pools. One of their articles, “How much is my pool really going to cost?“, is now on the first page of Google for the broad search term, “Fiberglass pools.”
Fast forward to 2011 — they did over $5 million in sales when other pool and spa companies were down 50 to 75 percent, all while reducing their marketing spend from $250,000 per year to $40,000 per year.
Noticing a trend?
Monetate
My fifth and final example is Monetate, a tech company that helps brands personalize themselves through dynamic testing and conversion rate optimization.
“Don’t talk about Monetate.” says Rob Yoegel, Monetate’s content marketing head. This is a truth in content marketing: If you want to be successful, don’t talk about yourself — talk about solutions.
I hope by now you’re convinced that content marketing works. Let’s move on.
How to Get Started Content Marketing Right Now
You’re inspired, fired up, and ready to get started. That’s awesome!
So, what are the steps to creating a content marketing strategy for your brand?
It boils down to five steps:
Creating content
Promoting your content
Measuring the results
Tweaking your approach based on the data
Rinse and repeat
However, before you even create your first piece of content, I highly recommend creating a content marketing plan. To create an effective plan, you need to figure out:
Bing announced a series of updates to its search results designed to make it easier for people to find health and fitness information.
Searching for either “workouts” or “exercises” will return a carousel of exercise videos that can either be performed at home or in a gym. Searches can be narrowed down based on difficulty, target areas, equipment, and more.
If you already know the type of exercise you’re looking for, you can get more specific with searches such as “yoga exercises” or “Pilates exercises”. Selecting one of the exercises will open up an instructional video about how to perform the exercise correctly.
Exercise is all for naught if you’re not feeding your body with the right fuel, so Bing has made it easier to find healthy recipes and nutrition information.
The new recipe search functions appears to be quite versatile. You can search for the name of a specific dish, such as “red onion soup”, or you can search based on nutritional needs such as “low fat recipes”.
For those counting calories, Bing is making it easier than ever with a brand new search command. If you want to know how many calories are in the food you’re eating, you can use a command such as “how many calories are in a cup of walnuts”, and Bing will provide the answer immediately.
The Bing App as also been updated with these new features, providing an even richer experience than what is available on desktop.
Google’s iOS app received a fairly significant update today, bringing with it several new features that will help users do more without having to leave the app. Here’s what’s new in version 22.0.
Native YouTube Support
It’s now possible to watch YouTube videos in the Google app without having to open a new web page or open the separate YouTube app.
If your search returns a carousel of YouTube videos on the front page, as shown in the example below, then tapping on one will have it load instantly in the app’s native YouTube player.
Interestingly enough, if you select a video from the ‘Videos’ tab it will not open within the app. Those videos still need to be opened in the YouTube app. It seems the new feature only applies to video cards on the front page of search results.
Hotel Searches
Another new feature in Google’s iOS app involves hotel searches. Now, when you search for the name of a hotel and expand the Knowledge Graph box, you’ll see a new section for rates and booking info. An example is shown below.
Restaurant Searches
Restaurant searches have also been revamped in Google’s iOS app. Knowledge Graph cards for restaurants now have a new ‘Menu’ section. Tapping on the menu option will load it within the app without having to visit an external page.
Unannounced Feature: Built-in Gboard
Google’s iOS app changelog only mentions the three new features listed above, but it has been discovered there is a 4th and unannounced new feature. With the latest version of Google’s iOS app installed, users can change their keyboard to Google’s Gboard without having the third-party keyboard installed on their phone.
This can be done by going to Settings > General > Keyboard > Keyboards > Add New Keyboard > select Google. Having both the Google app and Gboard installed on one’s phone is now redundant since you can now get Gboard by updating your Google app.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google updates its iOS app, a guide to SSL certificates & Bing Ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google’s latest update to its iOS app is out, and it includes a few changes that mean searchers won’t need to leave the app as often as in the past.
Here’s the three-part bullet list from Google’s release notes:
Watch Youtube videos right in your feed — instantly play YouTube videos from cards in your feed. No need to open a new web page or the YouTube app.
See rates and booking info in search results for hotels
Open restaurant menus instantly from restaurant search results; no need to load an external web page.
An example of the restaurant menu experience is shown above; although the initial screen (on left) shows that the menu is from the restaurant’s website, clicking that link shows the menu right in the app (on right). Credit is given to the restaurant’s website at the top, but I’m seeing that menu without actually visiting the restaurant’s website.
This is version 22.0.0 of the Google iOS search app and it’s available now.
About The Author
Matt McGee is the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. After leaving traditional media in the mid-1990s, he began developing and marketing websites and continued to provide consulting services for more than 15 years. His SEO and social media clients ranged from mom-and-pop small businesses to one of the Top 5 online retailers. Matt is a longtime speaker at marketing events around the U.S., including keynote and panelist roles. He can be found on Twitter at
