Erin Robbins on How Sales and Marketing Can Use Search Data to Communicate Better [PODCAST]

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Sales and marketing often have a contentious relationship. But by using search data to better understand what the customer is actually looking for, they are able to not only better serve their user base, but also create a cohesive tone of brand mentioning. Erin Robbins of Ginzametrics talks with SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones about why sales and marketing should actually work together, and how the personal relationship building of sales is something that could serve digital marketing departments better.

I’ve seen a lot of benefits from the marketing and sales departments knowing what each other’s talking about. Is cross-training something you’ve found useful, especially when it comes to discussing data?

Erin: It’s important to understand what everybody’s talking about. It helps the customer or potential prospects have a more seamless experience across mediums. Marketing should also be getting ideas on what topics and content to create and things to cover based on feedback that sales is getting.

It really should be cyclical. Once everybody’s having these discussions, what you’re able to do is set up your data capturing and analysis programs to better figure out how to do that in the future, make smarter decisions, and give the customer a better experience. It shouldn’t feel like somebody’s passing the baton, or that there are these kinds of breaks in experience between when somebody’s initially getting product awareness and when they start speaking to sales, and then again when they become a customer and have an account manager or onboarding process.

Some of the metrics and the way data is measured varies between sales and search or marketing. How can different types of data help each of these departments?

Erin: There’s a lot of metrics and things people pass around, like X number of leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads. I like to steer away from thinking about things in those terms, and think more about things in what I’ll call “content groups” and “keyword groups”.

If you’re setting up things with marketing, sales, and customer success and support in mind, the idea is you should have all these kinds of groups for your content around things like features, solutions, common questions or problems, issues, and topics.

The reason I’m big on these ideas of groups is because it allows you to easily see and understand how someone consumes content and interacts with various aspects of your organization. Content and keywords can belong to multiple groups. I like to say, “Hey, sales. We can help you craft email conversations that will help you close better if you give us access to some of this info. We can look at keywords and themes that are going on in your emails and how this actually matches or doesn’t work with how people were searching for solutions to begin with.”

Same thing with customer support and success. “Hey, people are writing in, having these problems or questions,” or, “Hey, people are looking at certain types of FAQs. How can we get ahead of that a little bit more?” When you group your content like this, you can also see differences in locations. You can say, “Hey, in certain locations or among certain types of users, these are common themes. Among other locations or other user types, these are different themes.” Then you can actually give this data to your sales team and they’re likely to close business a lot more.

Kelsey: You’re saying to think of it from a behavioral or problem-solution approach. Instead of thinking of them as just a lead to make money off of, think of them as, “Well, what are they really looking for and what do they really actually want from us?”

Erin: It’s not a linear process as much as the funnel makes it seem linear. It’s more than just mining customer support tickets for blog posts. It’s really about saying, “Hey, you know what? We’re getting a lot of questions about this specific feature. This means people don’t understand this or that it’s not explained well in initial messaging, or that sales is talking about something in a way that customers don’t end up actually grasping.”

When you think about it that way, the idea is you need to know what is going on with people. Search data’s great because not only are you capturing people who are telling you they’re looking for something because they’re actually searching for it, they’re telling you how they’re searching for it. And because search terminology has continued to increase, we’re now getting why they’re searching for it.

How can search data help with managing expectations not only for the sales staff but also for clients?

Erin: I feel like the best possible solution is to say, “Look, what can I actually do with this information and the fact that they keep doing this?” In my mind, sales people are promising somebody something because the person is asking for it, right?

If they’re promising somebody something because people continue to ask for it, you have to start looking for thematic or recurring asks. If somebody keeps asking for a specific genre of requests and you’re starting to see sales people continue to promise this, they’re getting that information from somewhere. So I would take the terms and things the sales team is actually promising these people and put them into my keyword searches and say, “I need to track this” because what you’re probably going to find is that competitors are actually offering that, or it’s something they’ve heard somewhere.

Kelsey: Yes, I love that. Instead of getting defensive, focus on the reason behind why they’re asking for it and look more into using data. That’s a really good way to put it.

Erin: I’ll give you an example. I noticed that when people were having calls with us about the platform, one of the recurring conversations that would keep coming up was contract length. What I did was I started tracking keywords and terms around SEO platform, content marketing platform contracts. What I found was that a lot of people didn’t like being forced into these one- and two-year long contracts. That’s how we came back to offering a month-to-month solution or shorter term contracts with different options.

Kelsey: Yes, that’s awesome. Instead of bucking requests and saying, “Oh, we don’t do that,” think of it as, “Well, can we offer this in a different way that is against our competition that would actually help alleviate some of our potential customers’ pain points?”

Erin: And if you don’t have the opportunity to change the way your product is working or you can’t create the thing that sales has promised, what you can do as a marketer is get ahead in terms of messaging. You can adjust messaging strategies if you’re noticing thematic conversations that sales is having and things they continue to promise over and over again. Hopefully, if sales continues to promise something, the product team and whoever’s in charge of that will get on top of it. But in terms of what you can do as a marketer, you can get ahead of it, you can send out emails around it, you can figure out how you can try to make it work within the existing structure of your product, and then try to create content that will lead people to something you do currently provide.

Kelsey: You can use the data to do the best you can within the freedom you have in the organization. Even if you don’t have power to actually transform the product, you could create more content that’s answering these customers’ pain points or their inquiries.

Do you think having sales training as a marketer is helpful? Does that help interpret data?

Erin: I think it does. I think that when we’re talking about doing sales training, Steve Farnsworth made a good suggestion to me. He’s a big advocate of marketing folks going along and doing ride-alongs essentially, or sitting in on sales meetings.

You don’t have to explain who you are or what you’re doing there, it’s more just so that you understand. Especially if you’re talking about going with good sales people, because people who close a lot of business are obviously closing a lot of business for a reason. You want to understand what it is they’re saying and how they’re saying it that people tend to gravitate toward. Why wouldn’t you want to know that? It’s only going to help you create and craft better marketing messaging if you know what’s working when someone’s in the room.

I think it will also help break down barriers between sales and marketing departments that have actually continued to cause bigger problems for most organizations. Conversely, sales could learn a lot by looking at marketing’s copy. I think that if everybody had that opportunity it would probably be a lot better.

The other thing I would add is besides doing the ride-alongs or joining some sales conversations, listen in and hear how people are describing things. You want everybody to be on message or at least talking about things in a similar way. It goes back to that seamless experience because if you have a marketing department that’s going at things and branding things one way, and then you’ve got a sales department that comes at it from a completely different voice, even if you’re saying the same thing, there’s a big difference in tonal shifts.

Kelsey: That brings up a good point that I hear over and over by some of the speakers in our industry. It all comes down to human behavior and actual interaction. I think as digital marketers, sometimes we get too focused on being online and not actually interfacing with people or looking at how people search and interact with companies. Because the sales team are more front-facing, they have actual phone conversations or they’re just more interactive, and they do have a better idea of what the customer is asking and what they’re expecting as well.

Erin: They know the customer’s voice. They know the tone, they have a more back and forth rapport than we as marketers would normally have. A lot of times that’s where you’re going to get information about what is the real tone, how formal or casual is it, how professional or advanced or novice these conversations are. Those are things where you can mine a lot of data about your user without having to do typical marketing things like asking questions directly. You could find a lot of that information by just talking to your sales team.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds Podcast with Kelsey Jones and Erin Robbins:

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Danielle Antosz on Twitter, or email her at danielle [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita
In-post Image #1: tashatuvango/DepositPhotos
In-post Image #2: koctia/DepositPhotos

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Google Adds Recipe Suggestions to Mobile Search Results by @MattGSouthern

Google has a new mobile interface for recipe search results, as spotted today by Alex Chitu. After searching for a dish, there’s now a sizable list of tappable keywords that appear at the top of search results.

The new keyword carousel can help you narrow down your search from “french toast” to “french toast casserole”, for example. It’s also a useful tool for discovering ways to put a new twist on an old recipe.

Underneath the keywords you’ll notice there’s also a carousel of newly designed recipe cards. Tapping on a recipe card will bring you to the page where the recipe is published, while tapping on a keyword will bring you to a new set of Google search results.

Tapping on a recipe idea in the new keyword carousel will help you refine the search. Google brings you to a new page full of relevant recipe cards. In the new page you can continue to tap on the keywords to narrow down your search even further, Google will dynamically update its search results with each selection.

This update currently only applies to US mobile searches.

SEO in 2017: Seizing opportunity, evangelizing success, achieving overarching growth

As we begin 2017, the fusion of the search and content marketing disciplines has become increasingly more evident. A full 89 percent of B2B marketers (PDF) say that they use content marketing, as do 86 percent of B2C marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute.

Additionally, over 70 percent of marketers in both groups plan on producing more content in the new year than they did in 2016. However, content only has real value if it is found and optimized, and if it converts with effective search marketing.

Search is the key driver that opens up opportunity in 2017

Research from BrightEdge (my company) found that 51 percent of traffic to websites comes from organic search. Additionally, another 10 percent comes from paid. This means that over 60 percent of the traffic on your site arrives from the search engine results pages (SERPs) alone.

While organic search is the primary driver of website traffic, the role of ads cannot be overlooked. Google has recently been taking initiatives to increase their prominence on the display page.

In early 2016, they eliminated the ads that once appeared along the sides of the SERP. Now, up to four ads may appear on the top of the page before the organic results. For some queries, this pushes the organic results below the fold.

More changes may be ahead for PPC. There has been discussion about the prospect of Google introducing a paid result to the local 3-pack, leaving PPC to play an even larger role in local search. It has become nearly impossible to build an effective strategy for a strong presence on the SERP without coordinating with paid search.

Customers have also become increasingly channel-agnostic. They interact with brands on several different devices via multiple channels, and they are interested in a variety of types of content.

Brands that succeed in 2017 will need to coordinate organic and paid search marketing disciplines and understand how they can work together to build the relationship with customers.

Seizing SEO opportunity across a fragmented customer journey in 2017

It is important to recognize, as we move into 2017, that the modern customer journey has fragmented. In years past, marketers were able to clearly identify a linear path that people followed as they moved from their first realization that they had a problem that needed to be solved to making a purchase.

The increasing prevalence of digital technology in modern life, however, has shattered this journey into a series of micro touch points — high-intent moments that Google has termed micro-moments.

We are likely all familiar now with the four main categories of micro-moments:

• The I-want-to-know moment
• The I-want-to-go moment
• The I-want-to-buy moment
• The I-want-to-do moment

These micro-moments can appear in any order at any point in the buyer’s journey, and they all present opportunities for brands to build relationships with their prospects. The SERP has changed in order to better reflect these micro-moments. Google tries to understand the intent behind a particular query, the micro-moment that fits it best, and the type of content most likely to answer the need of the user.

This is why certain queries are answered by images, others by videos, rich displays or local business listings. For brands to effectively optimize for the modern buyer’s journey, they must also be able to understand the intent that customers have behind their queries and be able to optimize different types of content to meet the needs of consumers throughout this fragmented path.

On the modern customer journey, content, local, and mobile have all converged. Customers’ expectations of content changes from moment to moment, and brands must be prepared to meet their needs. Evangelizing search success and its pivotal position in content, social, mobile and local markets will set you up for personal and professional success in 2017.

Evangelizing success in your organization

To successfully grow the role of organic search within your organization, you must evangelize the practice to others, both cross-departmentally and to those in the C-suite or on your board. To drive further organic search success in 2017, you will need buy-in from those higher in the organization.

It is also critical that people in other departments start understanding the language of SEO so they can incorporate the principles into their work. This is the only way you will be able to develop mature, organization-wide optimization practices. Below I leave you with a few tips for achieving this.

1. Focus on your largest channel — organic search

Use concrete numbers to show your progress and results. Organic search remains the largest channel for most B2B and B2C websites, so focus your efforts here to begin to build a strong case for the value of optimization.

Organic search does not have direct media costs, but it has the potential for high returns while also driving brand awareness in addition to revenue, making it a great starting point for your conversations with others.

As you build your organic channel, use data as your source for the strategy to guide your efforts. Then use the numbers to demonstrate your progress and success to the rest of the organization.

2. Invest in your talent

As the different channels within marketing become more connected with search in the age of the micro-moment and the new customer journey, the value of strong marketers who understand the different channels becomes even more evident.

Your investment should be in both existing employees and new ones. For existing employees, look for both internal and external training opportunities to teach them how the different channels work. Encourage cross-departmental communication and cooperation to provide people with opportunities to grow their skills.

3. Understand the priorities of those in the C-suite

To properly engage the leaders of your organization, you need to align your data and arguments with what the C-suite leaders want to see.

Key data points that interest leaders tend to be the position of your brand against competitors, the value of your marketing efforts, the efficiency of organic search optimization and your ROI.

4. Secure executive sponsorship

Business leaders want to map their strategy to their projected outcomes to allocate budget appropriately. By following the above steps and being able to demonstrate your success, you will build a strong case to secure more budget for your initiatives moving forward.

Use these resources to begin the process of scaling your efforts and further integrating organic search throughout different marketing channels and departments.

5. Focus on overarching digital growth

Succeeding in SEO in 2017 will require brands to put SEO at the core of their organization and Digital Centers of Excellence.

Rather than acting as a standalone department, SEO needs to be integrated with the rest of the brand marketing functions, from PR to SEM. Brands need to recognize the changing customer journey and how those changes impact the strategies used by the organization.

Digital disruption has shifted how customers interact with brands, where they go to seek answers, and how they build relationships with companies. The brands that succeed in moving forward will be the ones that understand the different intent signals of various types of queries. They will know how to optimize all of the content they produce, from videos and images to social posts, to be present for these customers and address their needs during the micro-moment.

The mature organization is one that understands the value of SEO integration: breaking down silos and functioning as a single promotional unit, rather than having it handled by several separate departments. Once brands accomplish this change in mindset, they will be in a position to establish themselves as leaders within their industry and build a strong sales funnel for the modern digital consumer in 2017.

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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

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of

BrightEdge

, the leading enterprise content performance platform. He combines in-depth expertise in developing and marketing large on-demand software platforms with hands-on experience in advanced search, content and digital marketing practices.

Organic Search Party: Our Top SEO Columns of 2016

Each year brings a plethora of changes to search engine optimization, and 2016 was no different. From the rollout of Accelerated Mobile Pages to the long-awaited real-time Penguin update, the SEO world had a lot of exciting news to digest this year. With the help of our All Things SEO and Link Week columnists, readers were able to stay informed and adapt to these changes as needed.

As the SEO industry matures, the skills needed to remain on the cutting edge have become increasingly complex. This was evident in the fact that two of our top ten SEO columns were primers on more technical topics like implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages and making the switch to HTTPS. Search optimizers are clearly looking to up their game by learning about more advanced topics.

Or are they? Also popular this year were pieces targeting those who are new to the industry, such as Stephan Spencer’s “7 quick SEO hacks for the SEO newbie” and John Lincoln’s “6 Big Mistakes That SEO Rookies Make.” It seems there’s room for SEOs of all levels here on Search Engine Land!

And in case you don’t know where you fall on the spectrum from rookie to guru, columnist Eric Enge put together a handy quiz to test your knowledge of SEO. It’s not too late to take it!

For these stories and more, check out Search Engine Land’s top ten SEO columns of 2016:

1. How To Get Started With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) by Paul Shapiro, published on 2/24/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 632, Google+ 194, LinkedIn 524
2. Infographic: 11 amazing hacks that will boost your organic click-through rates by Larry Kim, published on 10/5/2016. Social activity: Facebook 1086, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 821
3. Test Your Knowledge Of SEO by Eric Enge, published on 1/5/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 900, Google+ 189, LinkedIn 594
4. HTTP to HTTPS: An SEO’s guide to securing a website by Patrick Stox, published on 4/14/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 962, Google+ 219, LinkedIn 619
5. KPIs for SEO: measuring SEO success by Marcus Miller, published on 8/5/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 894, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 929
6. 7 quick SEO hacks for the SEO newbie by Stephan Spencer, published on 8/25/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 970, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 733
7. SEO is as dirty as ever by Patrick Stox, published on 7/7/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 991, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 885
8. The real impact of Google’s new paid search ad layout on organic search by Winston Burton, published on 3/29/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 953, Google+ 224, LinkedIn 1271
9. 6 Big Mistakes That SEO Rookies Make by John E Lincoln, published on 1/15/2016.
   Social activity: Facebook 744, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 532
10. 7 e-commerce SEO trends we’re seeing in 2016 by Jayson DeMers, published on 6/14/2016.
    Social activity: Facebook 1096, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 1201

Methodology: Columns published in 2016 are ranked in order of pageviews measured by Google Analytics. Data includes all columns published through November 30, 2016. Social data provided by SharedCount. 

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About The Author

Jessica Thompson is Associate Features Editor at

Marketing Land

and Search Engine Land. She is a well-rounded digital media enthusiast with a keen interest in all things Internet marketing. Jessica earned her B.A. in English from Drew University and has since gone on to fill a wide variety of roles over the course of her career, including web designer, copywriter, editor, SEO consultant, online marketing specialist and marketing manager. Most recently, she worked at Advance Digital, where she conducted digital optimization training for journalists and provided high-level SEO and social media recommendations for 12 major regional news websites, including NJ.com.

Why Google shutting down Map Maker should terrify SMBs

Google’s Map Maker has often received bad press due to the amount of spam that originates from users of the product. In May of 2015, Map Maker was actually shut down to help prevent disasters like this one. So Google’s announcement that they’re shutting down Map Maker entirely in March of 2017 made a lot of people really happy.

It’s the end of spam, right? We should all be celebrating, right?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Allowing spammers to hide rather than vanquishing them

The truth is that users — some with less-than-virtuous motives — will still be able to make edits to business listings, just like before. Instead of doing it on Map Maker, however, they will do it through Google Maps by pressing “suggest an edit” on the listing.

Spammers know this, of course, and have already shifted the majority of their edits to Google Maps because it hides their activity from the general public.

Currently, when a user makes an edit to a listing on Map Maker, the edit history on the listing shows their username, and you can see what other edits they’ve made.

This feature of Map Maker makes it much easier for power Maps users and marketing companies to chase down spammers and report them to Google (there is an option to report the user, as well).

With Google Maps, however, the users are completely anonymous, and there is no way for anyone, other than Google, to see what types of edits they have made in the past and who else they may have sabotaged.

Why this is a serious problem

Here are a few recent examples.

1. In case you didn’t hear, Maps users recently were able to successfully change a bunch of listings for Trump hotels and cafes to list them as “Dump Tower” and “Dump Cafe.”

At one point, the category for the hotel was also changed from luxury hotel to a garbage collection service. The edits were made by users through Google Maps, and the only way to see them was while they were pending on the Google Maps app.

I took several screen shots after I saw the article on Twitter, and as you can see, the edits show absolutely no details about the user who made them.

There is no way for the person looking at the edit to tell what else that user is doing or what their intentions might be.

2. The insurance industry is one that gets a lot of spam edits. Because these edits are now going through Google Maps, the mapping community is completely blind to them, and apparently, Google isn’t taking much note of them, either.

Back in Mid-November, someone managed to update over 59 listings for various insurance companies to change the listed phone number to this one: 800-701-5909. When you call it, this phone number goes to a lead provider so that they can capture the user’s information and then turn around and sell that lead to an insurance office.

Here is a screen shot showing some of the various listings that still had that phone number on them three weeks later (December 8).

The business owners were not alerted of this change, so most of them are completely unaware that all their customers and potential customers are now calling someone else. Who made this change? There is no way for anyone (other than Google) to know. Google Maps shows no edit history log whatsoever, and Map Maker is classifying this user as “Google” (edits via Google Maps on desktop show up this way in Map Maker).

Although I can tell the business owner to change the information back via the Google My Business dashboard, there is nothing stopping it from happening again, and unless the business wants to check their information daily, there is currently no way that they will know about changes.

I have already contacted a few of these businesses to make them aware, but the problem is still that the Maps user is out there unpunished and most likely making more edits, since there is no way for businesses to identify him or her and alert Google about the username.

Long-time spammers have shifted their efforts from creating dozens of fake listings (which is becoming harder to do) to reporting legitimate businesses as spam and having them removed.

Here is a recent example of a legitimate locksmith in Florida who had his listing removed from Google because a user (most likely a competitor) reported him as spam. Neither the locksmith nor I have any clue who did it or what will prevent them from doing it again. His listing was down for about a week while he was waiting for Google to reinstate it.

So, while I wish I could look forward to the prospect that spam on Google will diminish with the removal of Map Maker, I’m actually seeing the exact opposite occur.

The number of threads on the Google My Business forum related to legit listings being changed or taken down is on the rise and will most likely continue to increase until there is more transparency. After all, what would spammers like better than to be able to hide all their activity? My current advice to SMBs is to keep a close eye on their Google listing to make sure no one is trying to sabotage it.

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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

Joy Hawkins is a Local SEO expert who is a part of Google's Top Contributor program & MapMaker Regional Leads program. She regularly contributes to many online communities in the Local SEO world, including the Google My Business forum (Top Contributor), the Local Search Forum (Top Contributor), and the Local University Forum (Moderator). She is also a contributor to the Moz Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Joy currently works as a product consultant at

Imprezzio Marketing

in Toronto. She also loves to

blog

on her own time about things pertaining to Local SEO.

Google launches a new look for recipes in the mobile search results

Google has launched a new look and feel for the recipe search results done over a smartphone device. Alex Chitu first noticed the change that shows richer images and content for recipe related queries.

The results show various recipe cards, with a link to “view all.” When you click on that link, it takes you into a deeper view of recipes that you can then filter more based on these bubble filters at the top of the search results.

Here is a screen shot showing the main results page on mobile:

Here is what happens after you click on “view all”.

And here is what happens when you activate the filters at the top:

To compare, here is a screen shot I took back earlier this month showing the old recipe results:

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What you’re missing with SEO that will make a world of difference

There are two approaches to take when it comes to developing new digital marketing or online reputation strategies.

The first approach sees marketers and SEO strategists creating proactive campaigns that push content to consumers with the intention of soliciting immediate reactions.

The second method is considered to be responsive, where marketers create content that capitalizes on a particular concept or event to improve consumer awareness of their brand and its offering.

An example of responsive marketing is when solar energy companies distribute branded press releases when new tax incentives are approved by federal or state governments.

Proactive and reactive approaches to SEO

The vast majority of SEO strategists’ efforts are going to fall into the active position since they are always reviewing upcoming trends to determine how to maximize opportunities months in advance.

However, there are particular opportunities that allow strategists to combine both marketing approaches to improve brand awareness and solicit consumer reaction.

Consider these opportunities when creating a new SEO initiative.

1. Capitalize on internal events

If your company is on the verge of releasing a new product or service, you’re about to hire a well-known executive from a competing brand, or you’re expanding into new emerging markets, make sure you let the world know about it!

Smaller to mid-size businesses tend to keep these pivotal points of their history quiet, not realizing they are missing out on the opportunity to increase brand awareness, which would generate more traffic on their website.

Notable internal events are excellent opportunities to submit optimized press releases that have the potential to spark stories by local or national news outlets. (Keep in mind that Google considers some press release distribution methods to be link schemes, which are grounds for a penalty or removal from search results.)

When this happens, your company’s online presence is awarded more traffic from new potential customers/clients, a spike in new backlinks that come from reputable sources and an influx of consumer citations.

2. Turn internal events into guest author opportunities

If one or more of your internal events are capturing significant attention, you may be able to use this as a means of improving your brand’s credibility within your industry.

This type of positioning creates opportunities to author content for notable brands and publications that cater to similar audiences. Every piece of content your company executives contribute to industry publications can help build your organic authority, as it gives you a chance to improve referral traffic from relevant third-party sources, while also adding more links to your portfolio.

If you choose to follow through with this opportunity, make sure that you are only working with other industry authorities who have significant organic equity in the markets where your business operates. Working with low-authority sources or social media influencers who cater to foreign audiences will not lead to any organic or transactional growth.

3. Get in front of a new, interesting subject

A quick search for any concept on the internet will show you how hard it is to create original content.

There are millions of content creators throughout the world who are developing lists, how-to guides, buyer guides, white papers and other forms of content that ultimately offer duplicative information on a particular topic.

Coming up with unique ways to present information or being the first to expose new concepts can be extremely beneficial for improving your organic authority, as you will have a chance to:

• Improve brand awareness.
• Attract new potential customers.
• Increase your organic visibility.
• Improve your online reputation and industry authority.
• Acquire new, meaningful backlinks.

4. Build content around keywords that your competitors are missing

Keyword research continues to change based on the ongoing development of search algorithms. However, there are opportunities for brands to capitalize on emerging keywords that their competitors are missing out on.

Use tools like Soovle and Google Keyword Planner to continuously research new keywords that your consumers are using when searching for products or services your brand offers.

Ideally, you can uncover keywords that have significant search volume and little competition, then create meaningful content around them. When you can accomplish this, you are likely to improve your backlink profile, increase site traffic and earn more social connections.

5. Monitor your competitor’s social interactions

If one or more of your competitors use their social media profiles to manage customer engagement, make sure to keep your eyes open for opportunities that allow you to offer their audience a better experience.

When you see customers complaining about their services on Facebook or Twitter, send the user a sympathetic direct message that includes an incentive for working with your brand, such as a coupon or rewards membership.

Capitalizing on these opportunities requires a measured approach that sees you actively monitoring competitive and consumer environments to get in front of upcoming trends.

When such opportunities do arise, it is important that you act swiftly, as your competitors are likely to provide a response at some point.

While following through with one of these concepts will not position your brand as an absolute industry authority, strategically fulfilling all of these recommendations over time will improve your organic search presence to a point where you can notice significant growth.

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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

Julian Connors, President at

SEO Without Borders

, is an experienced search marketing manager who has developed complex, wide-scale search and social campaigns for brands that include: P&G, Duracell, Dickies, Staples, and more. A published author on the concept of "Social SEO," Connors contributes to a number of recognized publications and speaks at digital marketing conferences throughout the country.

Google logo for Charles Macintosh, the Scottish chemist who invented waterproof fabric

Google has an animated Google logo, aka Doodle, for the 250th birthday of Charles Macintosh. Charles Macintosh invented waterproof fabric, which is why Google has the man in a raincoat, to recognize his Mackintosh raincoat. In fact, the first raincoat sold in 1824 but was patented in 1823.

Charles Macintosh was born on December 29, 1766 in Glasgow, United Kingdom and died at the age of 76 on July 25, 1843.

Google wrote:

It’s a wonder how the weatherbeaten Brits coped before Scottish chemist Charles Macintosh invented his eponymous waterproof coat. His invention, patented in 1823, came about as he experimented with coal-tar naphtha and rubber and realised they could be fused together with fabric to create a waterproof surface. These days in the U.K., it’s common to call any type of raincoat a “Mac.”

Today’s Doodle shows Macintosh enjoying a Scottish rain shower whilst testing his ingenious invention.

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2016: The year in paid search (A year of massive change!)

Aloha, here we are again — coming down from the high of holiday e-commerce, the Q4 scurry of lead gen, and the calm before year-end reporting starts churning. Let’s take a breather and look back on all of the changes in PPC that came flying at us in 2016.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way. In last year’s year-end round up, I said Yahoo might be worth paying attention to in 2016 due to the renegotiated search deal with Microsoft and CEO Marissa Mayer’s stated commitment to mobile search. So long ago. It did seem like Yahoo might just be able to gain steam back then. Now, that steam is gone like the data of over a billion user accounts.

The final adieu to the Yahoo Bing Network came in February, and for many advertisers that was the last time Yahoo entered their campaign heads. Sure, if you advertise with Bing and/or Google, your ads typically show up on Yahoo, too, but other than the water cooler talk about who was going to buy Yahoo that developed into, “Will Verizon still buy it and at what discount,” Yahoo held little relevance for search marketers in 2016.

So, moving on to all the stuff that made 2016 a giant year in PPC! We’ll start with the biggies that impact most everyone and move to more specialized updates.

Major, major changes this year

There are always changes in paid search, but 2016 were not your garden variety year. There were fundamental updates that will continue to have repercussions in the years ahead. The was a lot less frustration, however, in 2016 than in the last year of major changes — when Google unleashed Enhanced Campaigns in 2013. 2016 can be seen as the year mobile truly took hold as the primary focal point in paid search, with some reports showing mobile now accounts for 60 percent of searches in the US. Desktop results were changed to reflect mobile. That Mobile preferred check box for ads went away and mobile bids can now be used as a foundation for campaign bidding. Enhanced campaigns did its job.

Google upped its PR finesse in 2016. It announced advertisers would have to rewrite all of their ads at the same time it announced device bidding is coming back. Desktop and tablet were re-separated for bidding, and it’s now possible to have mobile be the base bid. Maybe you’re not even doing anything differently yet, but knowing you can set a tablet bid adjustment or make a campaign mobile-first whenever you want feels so empowering, right? Well played, Google. Bing, which was never as restrictive with device bidding as Google to begin with, is currently piloting new bid adjustment ranges, but still makes desktop the base bid.

We first reported the biggest change of the year — Expanded Text Ads — was being tested in April. ETAs went live for everyone at the end of July. The new ad format upends how advertisers have written text ads since the inception of AdWords, more than 15 years ago. The transition hasn’t been without its bumps or teeth pulling — Google pushed the cut off for being able to edit and add standard text ads until January 31, 2017 after seeing slower-than-expected adoption of the new longer text ad format. There was the headline truncation kerfuffle, but that mostly seems to have been remedied with a narrower font, but for the most part, advertisers have taken the changes in stride, on the promise of better CTRs.

2017 will be the year we really see how ETAs perform. Early results have been mixed with some advertisers seeing dramatic bumps in click-through rates and others seeing, well, meh. Bing added support for ETAs as well, and rolled them out globally in October for much welcomed parity between the two platforms in this area.

The ushering in of ETAs was made possible, of course, by the removal of text ads in the right rail on desktop, which also made desktop echo the layout mobile results. It was quickly pointed out that longer titles and description copy in ETAs also have a way of making text ads look even more like organic listings. And speaking of making ads blend in with their organic surroundings, let’s not forget 2016 was the year of the green ad label. Green replaced the yellow in the ad labels next to the display URLs in text ads, which also happen to be green like their organic counterparts. (Want to see how Google’s color treatment of text ads has changed over the years? Here it is.)

Now, for two  announcements that generated a ton of interest, but essentially had zero impact this year. First, the Google AdWords redesign. Some advertisers do have alpha access, but there are still a lot of elements missing before the new look is ready for prime time. Still, that didn’t tamper interest in some of the very handy visualizations in the new design. We’ll have to wait until 2017 to get the full Material Design treatment that Google Merchant Center and AdSense got this year. Second, Microsoft is buying LinkedIn. The deal hasn’t closed yet, but Microsoft’s Lynne Kjolso told the audience at SMX Advance this year that discussions of advertsiing scenarios were already happening shortly after the announcement.

Shopping & Retail

With Amazon being Amazon, and Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads and even Pinterest’s Promoted Pins gaining adoption, Google is under pressure to squeeze everything it can from product search and its product listing ads. And squeeze it did this year. Carousels of product listing ads (PLAS) are now showing up in Google Image Search, YouTube, in addition to third-party retailer sites.

Google also opened Shopping campaigns up to Customer Match, allowing advertisers to retarget customers with product listing ads with bids tailored to those audiences or exclude those audiences from Shopping campaigns.

Google started looking at ways to get more from all those broad product searches like “cocktail attire” this year. The most innovative, but perhaps least likely to succeed of these is the shop the look format for apparel and home products that pull images from partners such as Curalate and Polyvore (owned by Yahoo, so there you go) and link to a set of product ads based on the looks. The other broad query PLA format called Showcase Ads initially showed off retailer collections (shown below). But one recent variation on this featured new and used clothing on outlet-related searches.

Oh, and Purchases on Google — AKA the buy button-like feature that lets consumers shop from a PLA on their phones—is ticking along in pilot mode. Ralph Lauren, .Ugg, and Staples are among the brands that continued to test it this year.

Google took a big step in standardizing product data in Google Shopping by requiring GTINs for brand name products that are sold by multiple retailers in product feeds.

Another big change for sellers was Google’s announcement that retailers and brands must have at least 150 ratings in the past 12-months for seller ratings to appear in their ads. That was up from just 30.

Also, for manufacturers, it’s worth pointing out that Manufacturer Center is still alive. Introduced last year, but flying far under the radar, Google’s Manufacturer Center is where brands and original manufacturers can provide a primary source for their product data used in Google Shopping. Manufacturers that use it can get some pretty nifty insights into how their products perform across Google in the analytics dashboard, such as clicks made on their products versus competing products. This year, Google reduced the amount of data its requesting in Manufacturer Center, apparently because most weren’t providing complete information anyway.

Local And Maps

Local got a shake up this year with the introduction of ads in the local pack, Promoted Places pins in Maps, exposure for local inventory ads in Maps and Knowledge panels, developments in store visits metrics, and pulling Google Maps out of the Search Partners network.

Ads started showing up in the Local Finder, the listings that appear next to the Map after a user clicks on “More places” from the search results, in April, around the same time Maps was moved into general search ad inventory. Later that month, Google started testing a purple “Ad” label on Local Finder ads and a corresponding purple pin on the map on Android and desktop. That didn’t last in the local finder, but the purple labels and pins did roll out in Google Maps.

And the big development in Maps, Promoted Places, has been in testing for a good part of the year. Retailers such as Walgreens, MAC Cosmetics and Starbucks have been testing the ads on Android that feature the brand logo in the pin and can include promotions.

Though still limited to a handful of metro markets in California, another area to keep an eye on in the local space is Google’s Home Services Ads program. This year, HSA opened up to HVAC services and electricians and the whole program finally rolled out to mobile.

Google’s efforts to connect online campaigns with offline impact continued in 2016. Its store transactions measurement is still in beta and there weren’t really any announcements around that this year, but Store Visits continued to gain traction in AdWords. Google announced it had measured more than 1 billion store visits from AdWords in eleven countries as of May (it’s now available in 14 countries). Store Visits also expanded to Display Network campaigns. Finally, Store Visits data became available in distance and location reports in Adwords. (The distance report is an unsung resource for advertisers with physical locations).

Audience Targeting

Google has been steadily shifting from a focus on intent targeting to audience + intent targeting, thanks to market pressure from social networks Facebook. 2015’s Customer Match was the first big step in this area.

Big news in audience targeting is demographic targeting — age and gender — rolling out, and the ability to target similar audiences in search coming out in beta.

This fall, Google announced it would at last start to support cross-device retargeting. Google’s head of search ads, Jerry Dischler, made several announcements on audience targeting for search at SMX East in October: Cross-device retargeting extended to Retargeting Lists for Search ads (RSLA), demographic targeting for age and gender in search ads was rolling out of beta, and similar audiences for search is now in open beta. These all add up to big possibilities for refining the way we execute search campaigs in 2017 and beyond.

Analytics & Reporting

This year, Google unveiled the Analytics 360 Suite in May. The a la carte premium suite includes the rebranded versions of Google Analytics Premium, tag manager, and Adometry attribution tools, as well as a new data management platform, a testing and optimization tool, and a reporting and data visualization service. The nice thing is, the freeloaders got gifts, too. A free version of the reporting and visualization platform, Google Data Studio, rolled out early this summer. This fall, a free version of Google Optimize for landing page testing and optimization went into beta (sign up here).

Ad Extensions

A quick rundown of what happened in extension land this year:

• Bing launched a Social Extensions test in March that seems to have faded away.
• Sitelinks started showing up in swipable carousels. The new Price extensions started off as a list and then shifted to swipable carousels.
• Affiliate extensions didn’t get much fanfare when they rolled out, but I’m hoping to see some case studies on how these are working for manufacturers in 2017.
• Message extensions came out of beta. There is a lot of promise in this extension, and it will be interesting to see the kind of support Message extensions receive next year.
• A Visual Sitelinks test started running in late fall. On mobile, each sitelinks displays with an image in a swipeable carousel card. (No, it’s not just you, the swipable card carousel showed up all over the place this year.)  I’m not so sure about these, but we’ll see.
• The Promotions extension beta launched ahead of Black Friday. From what I’ve heard so far this, too, holds lots of promise.

Honorable Mentions in no order particular order

Google added native inventory to the Display Network and introduced a responsive ad format to fill it. The responsive ads can run across the GDN, including in the newly available native ad inventory. Advertisers can convert text ads to responsive ads in Editor now. It looks more may be in store for responsive ads soon.

Conversions became the king of measurement in AdWords as Converted Clicks went off to into the sunset this fall.

Salesforce users can now import their lead data right into AdWords.

A whole bunch of weird stuff happened in AdWords Keyword Planner, presumably thanks to bots. And Google added forecasting and trend data for those with active AdWords campaigns.

Google banned payday loan ads, kinda sorta.

Here’s something I was excited about when it was first announced, but have yet to do anything with and am jealous of those who have: AdWords Campaign Groups

Google started shutting down it’s Compare products in the US and UK in early in the year — a big deal to the industries affected (credit cards, auto insurance, mortgages and travel insurance).

Google updated automated bidding in AdWords and introduced Portfolio bid strategies to make it possible to set distinct CPA targets at the ad group level.

In the US, those giant car ads, Model Automotive Ads (just rolls off the tongue), came out of beta on mobile along with nearby dealer ads.

Christmas came early for Mac users with the release of Bing Ads Editor in June.

And that’s a wrap on 2016. Expect to see the trends we say this year — audiences; attribution, including online-to-offline; mobile; automation — continuing to influence change in the year ahead.

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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.

5 Silly SEO Mistakes That Even Professional Marketers Make by @grybniak

With the rise of comprehensive digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) has been somewhat on the sidelines. Why would you spend your time on keywords, tags, and links (all this technical stuff) when you have paid ads, social media, and content? Though a bit ignored, SEO is still increasingly important to a site’s overall performance in search.

Utilizing the power of on-page and off-page optimization, you can bring your site to the next level (i.e. increase rankings, drive more traffic, bolster conversion rates). The bad news is, doing SEO the right way is easier said than done. It is evolving quickly, and Google continues to throw out search algorithm updates, one after another.

It can be hard to stay on top of things and keep your site optimized for the new realities of search. No wonder SEO professionals are constantly skimming the Web to fish out crucial bits of info about upcoming changes and updates. But the problem is, being deeply afraid of missing out on the new stuff, they often make basic-level mistakes.

In this article, I review five silly but harmful SEO mistakes that even professionals make. Avoid them at any cost because these errors can ruin your entire digital marketing campaign. Let’s dig in!

5 SEO Mistakes to Avoid

#1 Close Your Site from Indexing in .htaccess

If you do SEO for a living, most likely you have heard about .htaccess. Basically, it is a configuration file which is used to store specific directives that block or provide access to a site’s document directories.

I cannot stress enough how important the .htaccess file is. If you know how to manage it, you can:

• Create a more detailed sitemap
• Generate cleaner URLs
• Adjust caching to improve load time

In short, .htaccess is a crucial tool to polish your site’s indexing process and, eventually, receive higher SERPs.

However, you need to be a true pro to set up an .htaccess file correctly. A single mistake could lead to dire consequences. For instance, you can entirely block your site from indexing, like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Google.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Bing.*
RewriteRule ^/dir/.*$ – [F]

If you see these lines of code in your site’s .htaccess file, search bots won’t crawl and index it. Ask a developer to delete the code or do it yourself.

Make sure that you check .htaccess every time you start a new project. Some SEOs promote and optimize sites for months, not realizing that all their efforts are in vain. You don’t want to be like them.

#2 Discourage Search Engines from Indexing in CMS

SEO plugins of CMS platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal can jeopardize your optimization efforts. They have built-in features that allow users to instruct search engines not to crawl the website. All you need to do is go to Settings → Reading → Discourage to stop search engines from indexing the site. Tick the box and you can forbid search bots from indexing your site.

Make sure that you check this box at least once a week. After all, anyone who has access to the CMS might accidentally click the box, which will undoubtedly have a negative effect on your campaign.

To note: Search engines may keep indexing your site even if you tick the ‘discourage’ box. So, if you really need to close the site from indexing, you’d better do it in the .htaccess or robots.txt files.

#3 Leave Your robots.txt File Entirely Open for Crawling

This one is the worst. Remember: Never ever leave your robots.txt file open for crawling because it can result in serious privacy issues. You can lose your site entirely through a data breach.

If you are a beginner, make sure you take the time to learn as much as possible about setting up and managing robots.txt files. Act immediately if you check robots.txt and see something like this:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

This means that search bots can access and crawl every web page on your site, including admin, login, cart, and dynamic pages (search and filters). Keep your customers’ personal pages closed and protected. You don’t want to be penalized for having dozens of spammy dynamic pages as well.

Either way, ensure that you disallow pages that should be blocked but allow pages that should be indexed. It sounds simple but takes time to learn.

#4 Forget Adding “nofollow” Tag Attribute to Outbound Links

SEOs know that links are still an important ranking factor. Unfortunately, they focus on backlinks and completely forget that their own sites pass link juice to other sites. What you should do is drive high-quality backlinks, but keep all the link power on your site.

So, your strategy is simple:

• Scan your site using a site scanner tool (I use Xenu)
• Sort links by address to locate outbound ones
• Create an Excel file with all outbound links (or download a standard HTML report)
• Check out every link in the list to implement “nofollow” tag attribute where necessary

Don’t be obsessed with the “nofollow” tag attribute, though. By saving all the link juice for yourself, you provoke other SEO professionals to nofollow you as well. In short, don’t abuse it.

#5 Fail to Check the Code in Validator

Your website consists of code, and the better this code is, the higher SERPs your site will potentially earn. This is because neat and clean code allows search crawlers to scan and index your site more efficiently, without leaving a single page behind.

So, everytime a new project is assigned to you to promote and optimize, make sure you check the code. You don’t have to be a developer. Just copy your site’s URL and paste it into the address field of The W3C Markup Validation Service. Then, ask a developer to fix the errors. The image below demonstrates a typical validator report:

While Google doesn’t penalize websites for having invalid bits of HTML and CSS, you’re better off running the validator tool anyway. After all, it doesn’t take much time but improves your site’s performance for both users and crawlers.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is ever-changing, and you should work hard to keep up with all the tactics and algorithm updates. Keeping your finger on the pulse of SEO is great (a must, actually) but don’t forget about the basic stuff, too. After all, silly mistakes are the most harmful ones.

What do you think? What SEO mistakes do you usually come across? Share your thoughts on social media. 

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: seenaad/DepositPhotos

Screenshot by Sergey Grybniak. Taken December 2016.