Search spend now accounts for almost a third of advertising spend in the UK, and has grown consistently since 2001. Balancing the marketing mix is a huge challenge facing any CMO or marketer, and it’s no different in the world of search. It can be difficult for brands to find the right blend of PPC and SEO, ensuring that marketers are getting the most out of both. It’s one of the more nuanced choices marketers have to make. Too much of one or too little of the other and marketers could be in the position of unnecessarily wasting valuable budget or, on the flip side, marketers could be in the position where they are not delivering the results search could be yielding for their brand. Forward3D’s application and understanding of data has helped to advise clients on their best strategy for success. By having using an integrated approach to strategy, appropriate recommendations can be made to allow marketers to balance activity. For one major airline client, aggregated performance data enabled us to make the recommendation to turn off PPC for brand keywords meaning they could deploy that significant marketing budget for acquisition purposes elsewhere. So, with this in mind, how do you approach the seemingly complicated relationship between PPC and SEO to yield the best results? Setting up for successWithout aligning PPC and SEO teams, it’s difficult to implement an appropriate strategy. Although it may seem obvious, many companies still report on search as two separate channels when an aggregated view can add a much greater value. This visibility into integrated search performance is crucial to understanding what impact individual channels have on the overall performance mix. For example, if paid search click-through rates (CTR) increase then organic traffic might well be expected to drop. However, if marketers report this at search engine marketing (SEM) level, they’ll find that total brand traffic is likely to be flat, as it’s the proportions (and costs) per channel that are actually shifting. Teams need to have visibility and understand how changes in performance at this granular level can impact the entire business as this information is critical when planning budgets or future activity. Understanding the problemCreating a joint strategy can allow you to more effectively tackle particular problems a business is trying to solve. While it’s still possible to do effective paid search with a sub-optimal website, it’s much more straightforward when site performance is being guided and prioritized by SEO. This is because it benefits from the site speed, conversion rates, and relevancy being driven by tech and content which paid teams can’t usually influence. For example, an advertiser in a highly competitive paid search auction might be able to achieve some incremental gains from keyword, ad copy, and bid optimization but working with SEO could give them a greater competitive edge. For example, prioritizing page optimization—either from a technical or content standpoint—can ultimately improve both user experience and landing page relevance which not only benefits conversion rates but can lower CPCs too. Likewise working with content teams helps paid search marketers think more about planning and executing around events rather than reacting to traffic changes. It can also lead to a more collaborative testing strategy whereby Organic teams work with Paid to prioritize long term keyword and ranking opportunities based on first party or performance data to indicate higher profitability or lifetime value rather than relying on traffic. Through ongoing testing and adjusting traffic across these terms it may end up that Paid activity becomes an evolving test bed for high value terms which over time get transitioned to organic. Taking a long-term viewUltimately, finding the balance required to run strong search campaigns is largely impacted by planning, budgeting and investment. Long term investment in SEO is more likely to benefit all channels, but short to medium term there may be spikes in interest or particular products that suit a paid search investment. Brands need to correctly identify this balance and budget accordingly, which ultimately determines search success. By hiring the right talent or working with the right partners who understand the data and nuance around both organic and paid search, businesses can start identifying where investment is best placed. By understanding this process, the teams can produce meaningful, actionable insights, which benefit customers and businesses alike. Neil Morse is Associate Director, Paid Search Strategy at Forward3D. from https://searchenginewatch.com/why-ppc-seo-need-to-work-together
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One thing that causes many businesses abandon efforts to succeed in online marketing is that it’s extremely overwhelming. How many SEO reports have you seen? I’ve seen hundreds of them. They may be indepth, insightful and totally to the point but very few of them are organized to the point when they can be actually actionable or useful. In many cases even bigger businesses with large in-house marketing teams give up on an idea to ever get digital marketing organized. There’s usually a well-defined goal and even a solid strategy but there’s rarely an actionable step-by-step actionable roadmap that would allow that strategy to ever be realized. The thing is, digital marketing can be quite overwhelming: There are too many interconnected pieces to put together and there are too many simultaneous processes to keep an eye on, especially prior and during the launch or a project or a new campaign. I am a big believer in getting organized, so here are a few tools for you to go from planning into implementing: Productive Planning: Agendas, Checklists, and Due DatesI don’t like marketing meetings. Not only because it’s a major time waster (taking away my time from actually getting things done), but also because meetings seldom give anyone an actionable plan of where to go from there. It’s true that marketing meetings are necessary evil though: You need to hear other team members’ perspectives, brainstorm together and discuss possible outcomes from anything you have planned. But to make those meetings at least somewhat productive, you always need to have an agenda. 1. Instant AgendaInstant Agenda is a great tool to start with:
Instant Agenda is also a must-have tool if you are managing a remote team because it allows you to effectively collaborate with everyone including those outside of the office. 2. SerpstatOne of my favorite SEO platforms, Serpstat has recently come out with a new feature set allowing marketing teams to better organize their efforts. As I am a huge fan of to-do lists and checklists, I was pretty excited with the update. Serpstat checklists allow you to break your SEO tactics into actionable steps. Checklists are tied to your projects and you can also get your team collaborate on creating them. To get you and your team inspired, there are a few pre-built templates you can choose from and edit. You can also save any of your own checklists as a template to replicate the same to-do list throughout all your projects. Using the feature, you are likely to improve your current SEO routine as well as discover tasks you haven’t thought of before. 3. MoreThere are other task managing tasks I often recommend, but none of them is marketing-focused. Still, the other two to-do list and collaboration tools I often use to organize my projects are:
Both of the tools above allow you to set due dates which is something I highly recommend doing. There’s never getting things done unless the due date is approaching. Productive Monitoring: Reports, Growth, TransparencyFrom experience, making a team part of business growth monitoring is the best way to incentivize everyone involved. If you make this process as transparent and scaled as you can, you will find your team much more motivated and ready to come up with creative ideas. 4. CyfeCyfe (Disclaimer: This is my content marketing client) is multi-feature business management dashboard that can be used to monitor all your marketing efforts. Simply put, it’s a Swiss knife of your marketing monitoring because you can customize it the way you want. There are dozens of pre-built widgets inside Cyfe. I always recommend setting up a separate clutter-free marketing monitoring dashboard and share it with your team. This way they will see all the important graphs and trends within one page: No scrolling through reports or opening dozens of tabs. A few useful widgets you’d want to set up for that include:
Alternatively, you can create a robust monitoring dashboard right inside your WordPress dashboard but may require some development skills. 5. WhatagraphWhile your team members or employees can get too busy to ever remember to open the reports, emails are hard to miss. Whatagraph is the nicest way to keep your team updated on your traffic stats. It visualizes marketing reports and sends you a weekly email with a nice infographic detailing how you are doing. Whatagraph supports all key digital marketing tools including Google Analytics, Facebook ads, MailChimp campaign reports, etc. This is a perfect solution for everyone who doesn’t need to dig deep but wants to keep an eye on the overall trend. More resourcesThere are many more articles on how to get your whole team on board with your marketing efforts. So in case you are looking for more tools and ideas, here is some further reading:
Which tools are you using to organize your marketing efforts? Please share in the comments! from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/09/13/digital-marketing-organized-motivated/ Globant released a recent report on the rise of voice-activated technology in 2018. In this post, Globant CTO Diego Tartara shares data from the report and insight into what businesses can do to adapt to voice technology. Voice-activated technology is here and more accessible than ever before. Thirty-nine million Americans already own smart speakers, and we’re witnessing voice drive evolution in areas outside of personal gadgets. GE, for instance, recently introduced a line of voice-connected home appliances. But the widespread popularity of voice-activated technology for consumers has an unexpected side effect. Consumers are also employees, and their personal excitement about voice solutions now has organizations considering how to best implement the technology internally. In fact, one–third of companies believe voice will be their biggest differentiator in 2018. However, stakeholders cannot let their personal feelings or fascination with voice – or that of their peers – stand in the way of intelligent investments that improve internal logistics and enhance experiences for end users (customers and employees). The role of voice in personal and professional settingsEagerness to implement voice technology is often rooted in a common goal – staying competitive. Seventy-five percent of decision makers view companies that offer voice interactions as more sophisticated than those that cannot, and there’s a clear link between emerging solutions like voice and feeling prepared for the future. That’s a fair assumption. Modern technologies like voice, AI, and blockchain are positioned to help organizations engineer digital experiences that account for new expectations and desires. But decision makers only earn the sophistication they’re after when their organizations implement new solutions with a great deal of critical thinking and planning. Otherwise, adding experiences like voice can actually do more harm than good. Sometimes, critical thinking and planning can get pushed down the list of priorities when employees are personally energized about voice-activated technology. Currently, 87% of decision makers use voice in their personal lives, compared to just 67% who use the technology at work. The frequency of use is also quite telling. Nearly the same number of people use voice solutions in their personal lives daily (45%) as do weekly in professional settings (53%). Enthusiasm for voice integrations among employees at all levels of an organization isn’t necessarily a problem. But it can quickly become one when enthusiasm is not balanced with research about where voice experiences can make changes that end users desire and will actually use. A narrow focus on personal feelings about voice may lead decision makers to ignore the solution’s full spectrum of benefits and can create a false sense of readiness – a major reason why just half of organizations (55%) say they’re prepared to add voice-activated technology in ways that improve internal operations. Turn personal excitement about voice into workplace improvements, not problemsAgain, personal excitement around voice-activated technology is never something your organization should discourage. However, your company stakeholders must pursue strategies and practices that allow these positive feelings to be correctly cultivated. To mitigate negative outcomes when considering voice applications, pay attention to:
Personal familiarity with voice is a valuable springboard to build enthusiasm toward new solutions early on, but how you feel about voice-activated technology cannot be the sole factor informing your integration plans at work. Organizations must be even more ready to address voice’s popularity in our home lives in the near future. Twenty percent of households that use virtual personal assistants (VPAs) in the year 2020 will have two devices, and 5% will have three or more, according to Gartner research. The enhanced role of voice in our personal lives ups the ante for companies to follow suit, rewarding organizations that proactively develop strategies to harness all the excitement. And while Siri and Alexa may feel like they have all the answers, your employees and customers are the best sources to determine where and how voice solutions can inspire a more intelligent, efficient professional environment. Diego Tartara is CTO Latin America, Globant from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/09/12/hey-siri-how-do-i-responsibly-invest-in-voice-activated-technology-at-work/ Search marketing is going through a rapid transformation driven by new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Voice Search, Visual Search, Amazon, and Blockchain, impacting how we search for information and buy products and services online. The Transformation of Search Summit, taking place in New York on October 19 combines the expertise of ClickZ and Search Engine Watch, in partnership with Catalyst (part of GroupM), along with speakers from Hertz, Hilton, Condé Nast, LEGO, and more, to dissect the current landscape and provide a deep-dive into the actionable steps to future-proof and protect your strategy. This week we sat down with Pete Kluge, Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, to deep dive into his role at Adobe and panel discussion on Google, Amazon, Bing, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Adobe. ClickZ: Tell us a bit about your role?Pete Kluge: As Group Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Advertising Cloud, my team leads go-to-market strategy in two key areas:
In addition to driving strategy, my team partners with sales and account services to support clients, deliver business growth, understand customer challenges, and evangelize our products through education and thought leadership. CZ: What are your key priorities over the next 12 months?PK: Key priorities for Advertising Cloud Search include: expanding on data and audience integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud and external partners, as well as enhancing AI-driven performance optimizations by leveraging our unique data access. This includes a full rollout of features powered by Adobe Sensei—Adobe’s framework for artificial intelligence and machine learning—such as performance optimizations, performance forecasting, and spend recommendations. On the creative side of the business, a key priority for the next year is to continue to grow adoption of the platform through greater awareness and thought leadership as well as to deepen existing integrations to allow for seamless collaboration between creatives, marketers, and media buyers. CZ: What is your biggest challenge in achieving these?PK: The biggest challenge from a product marketing perspective lies in taking difficult and complex concepts and creating stories and messaging that fully convey the value of our offering to advertisers in a way that is easy to understand. Since Adobe offers such a comprehensive marketing stack that spans many parts of a brand organization—from the CIO to the CTO, CMO on down to practitioners like media buyers and creatives—helping customers connect the dots to drive results is a key part of our role. CZ: What’s your advice to those that may be facing a similar challenge?PK: My advice would be to understand your customer’s challenges. The closer you are to clients and their unique goals—which often vary not only by industry but brand history, perception, and a host of variables—the more you can help them leverage technology to drive great experiences. CZ: What’s the most interesting trend you are you seeing in the market right now?PK: Delivering great experiences that transcend whatever product a brand is selling is a key trend we’ve helped shape, and are uniquely-suited to solve. Making advertising more connected to marketing strategy through technology is a key part of how we’re doing that. CZ: How is this going to change in the medium and long term?PK: The technology to deliver relevant marketing experiences across channels, formats, and screens is continually evolving and improving. We’ve seen consolidation in the industry moving away from point solutions to integrated advertising and marketing stacks that make it seamless to access and share data and audiences across channels for delivery of personalized experiences. CZ: Do you have a daily routine?PK: Whether I’m at a conference, collaborating with product teams or meeting clients, it’s always different. Invariably, it’s fueled by coffee and regular exercise. CZ: What was the last movie you saw in theaters?PK: “Mission Impossible: Fallout” Join the discussion and meet 300 other senior marketers trying to solve the same problems. Be sure to check out the full agenda here. Interested in winning a free pass to attend the summit? Fill out this survey—we hope to see you there! from https://searchenginewatch.com/qa-adobe-future-search Google updated their search quality rating guidelines in July. These rating guidelines, which you can view here, are used by humans to rate the quality of web pages as search results for specific queries. These ratings are used to guide how Google’s search engineers improve their search engine. Soon after the update to the guidelines, Google introduced a broad core algorithm update circa August 1st, most likely to ensure that the search engine was returning results that reflected the changes to its guidelines. One of the most important changes to the guidelines was a greater focus on Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T), as well as a focus on applying this to individual authors—not just brands or web pages. E-A-T is important for the ecommerce industry because shopping pages are considered by the rater guidelines to be “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) pages, and these types of pages are held to the highest quality standards. For that reason they are also expected to have the highest E-A-T. If you want your shopping pages to show up in the search results, you will need to identify how to maximize your E-A-T score for Google’s hypothetical human quality raters, which Google’s algorithms are designed to emulate. Let’s talk about how to do that. Which content is Google taking into consideration?The expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of a page are determined primarily by looking at the main content on the page. What counts as main content is obvious when we are talking about a content site like a blog, but which content are Google’s quality raters taking into consideration on your category and product pages? The first important thing to recognize is that “content” is not limited to text. The rater guidelines explicitly state that “webpage content includes … functionality (such as online shopping features, email, calculator functionality, online games, etc.).” So raters aren’t just being asked to evaluate text. They’re being asked to evaluate your site’s functionality. It isn’t just the text on your page that needs to be high E-A-T, it’s the design, interface, interactivity, useability, and other features. For example, raters are explicitly asked to “put at least one product in the cart to make sure the shopping cart is functioning.” They are reminded that “high quality shopping content should allow users to find the products they want and to purchase the products easily.” I highly recommend meeting these basic functions expected of the modern ecommerce site in service of that goal:
Google provides quality raters with some examples of main content. In an example featuring a product page, they consider the content behind the reviews, shipping, and safety information tabs to be main content: The rest of the content on the page is considered “supplementary content.” This is because the purpose of the shopping page is to sell or give information about a product. Everything directly involved in serving that purpose is considered main content. Everything peripheral to it, such as suggested products and navigation, is considered to be supplementary. For a page to receive a good quality score, raters are asked to look for a “satisfying amount of high quality content.” They give an example of a shopping page that includes “the manufacturer’s product specs, …original product information, over 90 user reviews, shipping and returns information, [and] multiple images of the product.” High E-A-T isn’t going to get you far enough if the amount of content isn’t satisfactory for the purpose of the shopping page, so this is where you need to start. PrerequisitesFor quality raters to determine the E-A-T of your shopping pages, there are a few things they need to be able to find to give you a positive score at all. When raters are evaluating shopping pages, the guidelines ask them to “do some special checks” for “contact information,” including “policies on payment, exchanges, and returns,” suggesting that this information will most likely be found under “customer service.” Make sure this information is present and easy to find. What is expertise in the ecommerce industry?The rater guidelines offer an example of a shopping page that earns a high quality score because of its high E-A-T: They say that the page has “high E-A-T for the purpose of the page” because they have “expertise in these specific types of goods.” They mention that many of the products sold on the site are unique to this company, presumably as evidence of this. They also mention that they have “a positive reputation.” This suggests that what counts as expertise for a shopping page, according to Google, is the expertise of the manufacturer and the brand regarding the products being sold. The fact that they have a good reputation and exclusive products are used as evidence of this. Needless to say, this means you should only work with manufacturers that have recognized expertise in the industry. The expertise of those who don’t work for your brand are actually relevant as well. The guidelines ask raters to look for “recommendations by experts, news articles, and other credible information…about the website” while they are doing reputation research for your brand or your content creators. This emphasizes the importance of outreach in earning a high E-A-T score. Obviously, your products, your site functionality, and your brand integrity must be inherently high in order to earn positive press and recommendations from experts in the appropriate industries, but there are limits to how much your site and products are capable of promoting themselves. To earn a positive reputation, you will also need to reach out directly to industry influencers and experts, send products to product reviewers, and make headlines by taking newsworthy actions. Failing to do so means that even if your products, brand, and site are stellar, while you won’t have a negative reputation, you will have less of a reputation than those who have made the effort to promote themselves effectively. Crucially, reputation requires high editorial freedom. Placing sponsored content on sites or promoting your site with ads will not earn you a positive reputation, at least not directly, because content created by your own brand isn’t considered during this research phase. What makes an ecommerce brand authoritative?The rater guidelines consider this shopping page to deserve the “highest quality” rating: As part of the reasoning behind this, they mention that “since the store produces this backpack, they are experts on the product, making the page on their own website authoritative.” This reveals an interesting insight into how Google decides product content is authoritative. An industry expert or the manufacturer of the product needs to be providing the information, or it isn’t authoritative. In contrast, a blog post written by somebody who doesn’t work in this industry, isn’t an outdoors enthusiast, and otherwise doesn’t know very much about backpacks wouldn’t be considered an authority on this product. Google provides this page as an example of one that should receive the “lowest” quality rating: They name “no evidence of E-A-T” as one reason for this. They note that the “Contact Us” page doesn’t give a company name or physical address, and that the “Shipping and Returns” page lists a different company that doesn’t seem related. Perhaps most notably for authority considerations, however, they note that they include official looking logos for the Better Business Bureau and Google Checkout, but these don’t seem to actually be affiliated with the website. While the guidelines don’t explicitly mention it, the inclusion of the “Nike” logo in the header also seems to be deceptive. When it comes to authority, Google seems to be most concerned with how it can be misrepresented. Presumably, a small company with limited reach could still be considered to have good authority so long as it only claims to be the authority over its own products. Likewise, a marketplace selling products produced by other manufacturers would presumably be considered authoritative if it were easy to verify that those manufacturers were indeed affiliated with the seller, and that the ecommerce site was an authorized merchant. For this specific example, had the Nike, BBB, and Google Checkout logos linked to some sort of verification of affiliation, the page likely would have been considered to have high, or at least satisfactory authority. What is trustworthiness for ecommerce sites?To be considered high quality, raters are asked to look for “satisfying customer service information” when evaluating shopping pages. This means that any potential questions or concerns that shoppers might have about the product and the buying process should be addressed. It’s best to be as extensive and comprehensive as possible. The purpose of the product, how to use it, what it looks like, and what results they should expect need to be covered in as much detail as possible. Information about shipping charges should be transparent and revealed up front. Return policies, guarantees, and similar information should be easily accessible. The checkout process shouldn’t surprise users by completing before they thought they were making a purchase or introducing fees they were not expecting or warned about. Contact information, live chat, and customer support should be easy to find. Remember that Google is considering all of this information main content. This should be reflected in your site design as well. Do not hide this information away or make it difficult to find. Put it where shoppers and human quality raters alike would expect to find it and where it will alleviate any concerns about the buying process. The guidelines explicitly mention that stores “frequently have user ratings,” and that they “consider a large number of positive user reviews as evidence of positive reputation.” Needless to say, it’s strongly recommended to introduce user review functionality to your site. User reviews have a well-measured positive impact on search engine traffic. Various studies have found that 63% of users are more likely to buy from a site that features user reviews, that users who interact with user reviews are 105% more likely to make a purchase, that they can produce an 18% lift in sales, and that having 50 or more reviews can result in an additional 4.6% boost in conversion rates. In addition to allowing users to leave reviews, it’s important to encourage your users to leave reviews. Include automated emails asking your users to leave a review into your checkout process, with emails arriving in user’s inboxes shortly after their product is shipped successfully, or even papers telling them how to leave a review sent with the product. If you’re concerned that asking users to leave reviews, or allowing them to in the first place, will result in negative reviews, this fear is largely unfounded. A study published in Psychological Science found that buyers were actually more influenced by the number of reviews than by the overall score, even to the extent that this was considered irrational behavior on their part. Another study found that users are actually more likely to purchase a product with a rating between 4.2 and 4.5 stars, since excessively high star ratings are considered suspicious. Finally, if you leave users to their own devices, the ones who are most likely to leave a review are the ones who are either extremely surprised by how well things went, or extremely disappointed. Additionally, they will review your products on another site if they can’t do so on yours, and Google’s guidelines ask quality raters to look at other sites for reviews. For these reasons and more, try asking your users to leave reviews. One crucial piece of the puzzle for trustworthiness is security. The guidelines specifically call out an “insecure connection” on a checkout page as a reason to consider a shopping page untrustworthy, and a reason to give it a “low” quality rating. While they are specifically talking about the checkout page, it’s best to deploy HTTPS on every page of your site in order to eliminate any source of doubt. Another example receiving the “lowest” score, is considered malicious because it asks for the user’s government ID number and ATM pin number. While this is an obvious piece of deception that no legitimate checkout page would ask for, consider less clearly malicious features that could lead to distrust. For example, requiring an email address for checkout, without explanation, that automatically adds users to an email list instead of the option to opt into one, is likely to reduce your trust score. ConclusionGoogle’s search quality evaluator guidelines indicate that expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are central considerations for Google’s engineers. To perform well in the search results for the foreseeable future, your pages should be developed as though humans were evaluating them for these factors. When it comes to ecommerce, shopping pages are of primary concern, and E-A-T functions differently for them than it would for a blog post. A high quality ecommerce site doesn’t just feature authoritative text, its features and functionality are built with E-A-T in mind. Earn expertise by working with manufacturers at the top of their industry, and by getting your brand and products in front of industry experts. Be authoritative by partnering with authoritative brands and ensuring that everything is easily verifiable. Build trust with user reviews, extensive contact and customer service information, a secure site, and a transparent checkout process. Invest in these features to ensure that your shopping pages continue to perform well and remain competitive in the long run. Manish Dudharejia is the president and founder of E2M Solutions Inc, a San Diego based digital agency that specializes in website design & development and ecommerce SEO. Follow him on Twitter. from https://searchenginewatch.com/what-googles-eat-score-means-ecommerce We’ve covered DuckDuckGo many times here at Search Engine Watch (check out Rebecca Sentence’s great primer here). This month sees the privacy-first search engine turn 10 – an impressive age for any business that boasts Google and Bing as its main competitors. The 10-year anniversary coincides with a major funding boost for the service. This comes courtesy of Canadian pension fund Omers who have invested $10m to assist with expansion into Canada and further global impact. While DuckDuckGo’s worldwide search market share might currently be tiny compared to Google et al. (less than 0.39% according to StatCounter), it is clear there are tech disruptors beyond the walls of the business itself who continue to see great potential for growth as the digital landscape evolves. So how has DuckDuckGo grown in recent years? And is there still a viable pull from the duck side as the service enters its second decade? DuckDuckGo: The search engine that doesn’t track youAs we’ll discuss later, DuckDuckGo has evolved to become more than just a search engine during its first 10 years. But first, let’s recap on this element of the company and how it sets itself apart. Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo gave users the option to search the web without having their IP addresses, search history, or any other user data stored save for some essential cookies. It has its own web crawler, and its SERPs bolster this primary source with hundreds of other secondary sources such as Yahoo! and Wikipedia – as well as ads from the Yahoo-Bing network (but these are not tracked). In a nutshell, complete privacy is DuckDuckGo’s USP. There are no filter bubbles for users because there are no user profiles. The same results are delivered to everyone regardless of their demographic, location, user behavior, etc. Thanks to the un-tracked ads and affiliate partnerships it runs, the company has managed to be profitable since 2014. It makes a point of diverting some of these profits as donations to start-ups and projects who share a similar philosophy to their own. DuckDuckGo: The privacy companyThe search engine arm of DuckDuckGo certainly has its fans, averaging 24m daily direct searches last month. But the company is broadening its appeal by working to make it even easier for the average internet user (i.e. those who might not be familiar with VPNs or Tor) to be able to retain their privacy throughout their online journeys beyond just making searches. In the first place, the latest iteration of the DuckDuckGo app and browser extension helps demystify just how tracked we are online. As each webpage loads, DuckDuckGo provides users with a ‘Privacy Grade’ (A is safe, D to F are not so) allowing them to make a quick assessment. With just a click or two, users can then see a list of the trackers it has identified on the site. This tracker visibility is enlightening. For readers from Europe who are used to the EU Cookie Directive, it is a lot more usable and transparent than the varying quality of warning pop-ups we’re used to. Trackers that seem to crop up with frequency often relate to Google advertising – but it doesn’t take much browsing before trackers from big media names such as AOL and Fox are noticed, as well as expected Web 2.0 businesses such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. Of course, this is after just a few minutes of surfing. We can quickly see tracker after tracker with more and more obscure names. As we move around the web, DuckDuckGo immediately gets to work blocking these trackers. It also forces sites, when possible, to use encryption to keep your data even more secure. The tool doesn’t promise 100% security across the internet, but when it can’t impose its tweaks or be sure of certain elements, the Privacy Grade and information at least highlights a site’s failings and alerts users to potential nefarious scripts. If DuckDuckGo can successfully block a site’s trackers (it usually can), it will offer an amended grade for that site after it has done its work. And if a user decides it doesn’t want DuckDuckGo to make its changes, they can easily whitelist any site they like with a single click. The increasing need for the duck sideIt is unsurprising that DuckDuckGo hit new heights of popularity earlier this year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is precisely this kind of creepy data breach which the company is working to protect internet users from. In a post at the DuckDuckGo blog, the company published the results from a survey of US internet users in the weeks after the scandal which found growing concerns in online privacy and the consequent increasing interest in tools which help to make web use safer. It also points out that regardless of whether internet users have a profile on the site or not, Facebook-run trackers operate on around 25% of websites, collecting user data and creating shadow profiles for ad targeting even if you never visit the social network’s domain. Tracking hit the headlines again last month as numerous scripts were found to be operating on US school websites. Of course, not all trackers are bad. Yet it is unsurprising parents and technologists in the US are asking some big questions about student data and where it ends up as they are increasingly expected to engage with their schools online. However, arguably some of the most significant privacy questions which might convince users to consider DuckDuckGo’s search engine and app/extension emerge from recent reports surrounding Google’s storing of location data even after users have turned this functionality off. The search giant is being sued by a user for just such activity in San Diego, and this again raises concerns about who really owns our personal data even if it appears that we, as users, can opt out of having such information stored. DuckDuckGo’s futureThis latest round of investment and the near-weekly headlines about data breaches, dodgy tracking, and dishonest privacy practices are good news for DuckDuckGo. The company still has a difficult job competing in the pure search vertical. Private search is, after all, not a completely original pursuit when Startpage and even incognito searching via Google Chrome is also an option for users seeking to make private searches. But where DuckDuckGo have really made great progress in recent years is by broadening their reach to assist web users to browse in private beyond search. The privacy app/extension is both educational when it comes to reminding users of the ubiquity of ad trackers and other bad practice, and it is useful and practical for making browsing the web that bit more secure. The future of online data and privacy is hard to predict, but it is good that companies like DuckDuckGo are working to make the internet a safer, more transparent, space – one that is led by the rights of users, rather than the desires of advertisers. This is especially important when so many of the bigger digital names seem to find it so difficult to operate in such a way. from https://searchenginewatch.com/marking-ten-years-duckduckgo-search-engine-privacy-company A great link building strategy works wonders for the SEO performance of a website. Helping websites gain traffic, these backlinks are expected to be high-quality because search engines weigh them when it comes to the ranking of a website. Ensuring that your website is sporting high-quality and authentic backlinks is crucial. If not monitored properly, the presence of bad quality links on the website can ruin the online reputation of the site as it can be identified as a black hat SEO move. For this purpose, the SEO domain offers some pretty amazing backlinks monitoring tools that help you monitor the link profile of your site and make sure that everything is as per a standard link building strategy. Let’s check them out. AhrefsAhrefs primarily offers tools to grow your search traffic and research your competitors while you monitor your niche. Its backlink research tool is powered with the world’s largest index of live backlinks. The service’s robots crawl 4 billion web pages every 24 hours. They also update this index every 15 minutes so that everything is caught up. To use Ahrefs tool for your site, you simply need to enter your site’s URL into the site explorer tool and you’ll see all its backlinks along with some useful SEO metrics such as the quality of these links. The tool also offers several advanced reports and filters to provide you with more information. Majestic SEOThe service is very popular among online marketers when they have to take care of the link building aspect of their sites or the sites of their respective clients. Its backlink history checker tool runs the web robots to determine the number of backlinks for given domains, subdomains, or URLs. If you are looking to compare up to 5 domains for their backlink performance, the tool will let you do so. Offering time-specific charts for your external links and referring domains along with the analysis of the types of backlinks that run to your site, MajesticSEO is a viable link tool. SEO PowerSuiteOffering profound link analysis service, SEO PowerSuite helps its users find, monitor, analyze, and compare all the backlink data so that they can effectively accomplish link building for their websites. The service’s SEO SpyGlass tool provides new link-building opportunities for its subscribers with the help of 50+ backlink factors available for analyzing the performance of these backlinks. It also offers different types of backlink reports that you can further customize and share. Claiming to have the world’s largest backlink index on the Web, the tool lets you find and neutralize harmful backlinks present on your site with its Anti-Penalty Link Audit. You can also run a deep link quality analysis to make sure that your links are functional in accordance with the Google algorithm changes. LinkodyThe tool has been helping its users monitor their website backlinks 24/7 by offering robust link management services. It notifies its users over the loss and gain of links along with the analysis of the site’s link profile with tons of metrics. This analysis helps the site owners figure out the backlinks that are valuable and the ones that are harmful for the site’s keyword positions and traffic. It even helps you get rid of the bad links by disavowing them. Monitoring the backlink strategy of your competitors is just as important as building one for yourself, as claimed by several blogging guides and website resources. Linkody provides you insights into your competitors’ link building strategies so that you don’t miss out on anything. Linkody’s main SEO tool is the Backlink Checker that can be used to check 5 unique domains per week. It is available for a 30-day free trial. KerbooHelping you understand your Link profile better, Kerboo employs multiple data sources to come up with a highly accurate one true view of the link performance at your site. While you encounter bad links on your site with the tool, you can create a disavow file that will tell Google that these are the certain links that are no longer needed to be considered towards ranking factors on your site. The Link Audit feature of the tool identifies the strengths, weaknesses, and risks in your link profile, and offers the service of getting work done by their team. Monitor BacklinksMonitor Backlinks helps you find the good and bad backlinks on your site and even monitor your competitors link building strategy. The service tells you about the relevant, high-quality sites that you can contact for outreach and link building. If one of your ads or guest posting links has been removed from a site, the tool will notify you. Helping you ward off negative SEO penalties, the tool also offers the feature of disavowing bad links. The service features an easy to use dashboard that will help you drive insights into the site’s traffic, backlinks changes, and keyword rankings. It also provides useful and customizable reports analyzing the patterns across the backlinks with its comprehensive filters. The best thing about this tool: it aggregates metrics from the best data sources (like Majestic and Moz) in one place so that you can manage them efficiently with useful tags, filters, notes, and import/export. In sumAll the above-mentioned backlinks monitoring tools have their established reputation in the online marketing community. Offering different versions for your site’s link profile management, these tools have been steadily working their way to improve your site’s overall ranking and enhancing its SEO. Having quality links on your website is integral to its success as well as the fact that they help new visitors find your website. Some of these backlinks monitoring tools mentioned above will help you ensure that’s the case. Pawan Sahu is a Digital Marketer and blogger at MarkupTrend. from https://searchenginewatch.com/best-tools-monitoring-backlinks So, you’ve optimized your site content and followed all those under-the-hood best practices to maximize your appeal to search engines…what’s next? Executing a truly complete SEO strategy means going beyond the confines of your own site to also engage in off-page SEO. A search engine ranking isn’t solely based on your own site’s merits; it’s also a bit of a popularity contest. Off-page SEO includes bolstering your digital reputation and authority by earning both backlinks and reputation-validating placements across the web. Search engines strive to connect information-seekers with content they’ll find valuable, and these off-page factors demonstrate there’s a world out there that believes your site and your content is useful and trusted enough to recommend. Said another way: search engines want their users coming back, and quickly pointing them to the relevant information they need is the golden ticket – your goal is making that job as easy as possible for them. To that end, here are seven specific techniques for building links and growing your site’s reputation from an off-page SEO perspective: Link-Building TechniquesWhile earning a link from another site helps affirm your brand’s relevance and authority in the eyes of search engines, not all backlinks are created equal. Search engines view a link to an external site as a recommendation, and the reputation of the linking site informs how much weight that link carries. This being the case, effective link building means not just earning backlinks, but high-quality ones. Search engines assign links their value based on several factors, including the linking site’s overall authority and the number of backlinks to the site—generally, sites with good off-page SEO make more weighty recommendations. Links also carry more value coming from pages that are more relevant to the content, brand, and industry being linked to, and also benefit when the link’s anchor text is relevant. To assess sites and select worthy targets for your backlinking efforts, checking a site’s website traffic rank provides a useful indicator of its influence. 1) Guest blogging builds links—and your reputationSuccessfully placing guest blog posts with influential sites is a highly effective method for boosting off-page SEO. Most guest blogging opportunities will allow you to include a link or two back to your site, which will also help build your reputation in the eyes of the all-powerful search engines. To recognize guest blogging opportunities, investigate sites that are authoritative in your industry and/or with relevant topics (finding such sites through your own research or via tools). Also, uncover where your competitors are active and check the ranks of sites that share the same audiences. Once you determine which targeted sites overlap with your desired audience and have the rank to make them worthwhile, reach out. 2) Turn existing brand mentions into linksIf your brand has reached a certain level of success, you may already be receiving mentions of your brand, products, or other company information on influential sites outside of your guest blogging efforts. If this is the case, it’s worth searching for these mentions and reaching out to ask that links be added (or updated to point to the correct or newest content you’ve published). 3) Help other sites fix broken linksLinks are somewhat ephemeral—sites change link structures or go offline, and URL addresses stop working. With tools such as Broken Link Builder or Check My Links, you can quickly locate broken links in articles or content relevant to your business. After identifying promising targets, contact the site in question to helpfully inform them of the broken link (and offer a potential substitute link that goes to your own site). 4) Where your competitors have links, often you can tooBeyond guest blogs, your competitors may successfully gain inclusion in articles, industry roundups, directories, and more. These are often ripe targets for your own off-page SEO efforts. Recognize where competitors are active, and work to achieve similar placements wherever possible. Reputation-Building TechniquesNot all methods of enhancing off-page SEO focus on link building. Follow these additional best practices to win search engines’ trust by bolstering your digital reputation: 5) Really build out your business directory and social media profilesAfter creating your website, building out business directory and social media profiles are the next most important steps to establishing your digital foothold. This means ensuring your business and your website appear in directory searches and across major social media platforms (depending on your business this could include LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikipedia, etc). Brick-and-mortar businesses should also create a Google My Business page to appear as a rich result in searches. Not only will search engines take notice of these placements when calculating your site’s reputation, they often include the opportunity to add a link. 6) Utilize social media marketingWhile social media metrics such as likes and shares aren’t confirmed to directly influence off-page SEO, the indirect benefits are too compelling to pass up. Developing a social media presence certainly builds your brand’s reputation and authority; doing so can also win you brand evangelists, thus increasing the reach of your content and ultimately adding to your site’s traffic – which is certainly a contributor to SEO improvements. To do so, create content that’s shareable, encourage shares by including share buttons, and actively maintain your presence on key social channels. 7) Attach your reputation to influencersIndustry influencers germane to your market—and other brands that make sense as strategic partners—can boost your own reputation by association. To make the most of this technique, enlist influencers (who don’t need to be celebrities!) to share your content and play an active role in marketing your brand. This improves your off-page SEO by adding traffic, mentions, and authority to your site, while also introducing your brand to new audiences you want to reach. When using these off-page SEO techniques, it’s important to closely monitor site metrics to understand their effectiveness and adjust strategy as necessary. In conjunction with successful on-page SEO, these methods will enable your site’s reputation to flourish and better ensure that search engines are taking proper notice. Kim Kosaka is the Director of Marketing at Alexa.com, whose tools provide insight into digital behavior that marketers use to better understand and win over their audience. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/09/04/7-off-page-seo-techniques-build-website-reputation/ Search engine optimization isn’t a quick fix and it may take no less than 6-9 months before you find any changes in the SERPs. Search engine optimization isn’t nearly website traffic, by the manner. For successful regional search engine promoting assistance, local SEO plays a critical function. Effective local SEO for your Ontario-based company is never a fast fix. All sorts of SEO involve very different strategies, so give us a call and see how we can assist you and your organization. SEO should be a continuous consideration for absolutely any progressive business competing in an internet market place. SEO done right provides a steady stream of prospects for your company. If you are searching for SEO in Scarborough or some other service we offer, please contact Semtelligence nowadays, we’d really like to hear from you! Small business Local SEO in Scarborough could be a far simpler process than you could have been told. All types of technical sides of your website are important for the odds of your site to rank in the various search engines. You ought to focus on all the facets of website optimization so as to be the very best result. There is an assortment of aspects involved with internet marketing and optimization. If you’re genuinely great at what you do, you’re an ideal candidate for SEO and Google. Organic SEO Scarborough is a kind of online marekting that will yield the very best ROI for your community business if done correctly. Any comprehensive Scarborough, Maine seo agency service will take a good look at the different aspects of your business. The web makes it feasible for people all around the world to purchase from meta tags and could use them to help formulate search effects. Our agency companies utilize the most potent and current Scarborough, Maine seo procedures. Moreover, video services are currently a huge issue because of rule changes instituted by biggest search engines. Our services are made to maximize the effect of your internet presence. If you’re interested our search engine optimization services, then please speak to us. After a definite period of time, seo services in Scarborough may have to change to be able to stay informed about the search engine’s new requirements. If you currently have a search engine optimisation company working with you, no issue, don’t hesitate to use our report to make certain that you are receiving honest reporting and fantastic price. The companies which are rendering SEO services adapt to special procedures and processes to present the better exposure for their customers, letting them carve a niche in the neighborhood sector. In case the company doesn’t have a very good on-line presence then they’d lose out on the prospective clients and they wouldn’t have the ability to fulfill the current competition. The most effective digital advertising provider works on several levels at the exact same moment. Herein, the company should try to avail the service of a professional search engine marketing company. If your company is located within Scarborough, you have a lovely location and one which functions as an awesome basis for future success. Every company is focusing on improving its on-line presence to receive a superior hold on the targeted market. As an overall guideline, small regional businesses should observe results within 3 months. Our very best seo practices incorporate a comprehensive evaluation of the customer’s unique needs. Our on-line visibility consultation supplies an up-to-date overview. Our search engine optimization specialists will make sure your site becomes high rankings for selected keywords. Prior to taking the search engine optimisation service it’s vital to make a correct research on the service provider and have a peek at their experience. When you seek the services of a neighborhood seo Scarborough expert, you gain immediate access to the very best seo marketing Scarborough, Maine offers. Search engine marketing consultants ought to be ready to answer questions and supply advice. From time to time, clients leave since they get too busy! There are a lot of outstanding tactics to create SEO links. Get to understand the individual SEO Expert in Scarborough you’re thinking about hiring, who will be working on your website, ask lots and a lot of questions, and first and foremost use your gut and your common sense to find out if you’ll be a superior fit. On the exact low end, you can contest with a website that’s decent, and you simply advertise it. It’s essential your site communicates what it is which you do efficiently and professionally. It’s fundamental that we connect your site with the goals of your company. The online retail website should center on making the site user friendly so the user doesn’t need to fight out to find their preferred products. Please take a look around and make certain you read my home page as it comprises a whole lot of information on SEO to assist you. from https://kanwarmanoria.digital/seo/scarborough/ from http://kanwarmanoria.weebly.com/blog/seo-scarborough We’ve covered DuckDuckGo many times here at Search Engine Watch (check out Rebecca Sentence’s great primer here). This month sees the privacy-first search engine turn 10 – an impressive age for any business that boasts Google and Bing as its main competitors. The 10-year anniversary coincides with a major funding boost for the service. This comes courtesy of Canadian pension fund Omers who have invested $10m to assist with expansion into Canada and further global impact. While DuckDuckGo’s worldwide search market share might currently be tiny compared to Google et al. (less than 0.39% according to StatCounter), it is clear there are tech disruptors beyond the walls of the business itself who continue to see great potential for growth as the digital landscape evolves. So how has DuckDuckGo grown in recent years? And is there still a viable pull from the duck side as the service enters its second decade? DuckDuckGo: The search engine that doesn’t track youAs we’ll discuss later, DuckDuckGo has evolved to become more than just a search engine during its first 10 years. But first, let’s recap on this element of the company and how it sets itself apart. Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo gave users the option to search the web without having their IP addresses, search history, or any other user data stored save for some essential cookies. It has its own web crawler, and its SERPs bolster this primary source with hundreds of other secondary sources such as Yahoo! and Wikipedia – as well as ads from the Yahoo-Bing network (but these are not tracked). In a nutshell, complete privacy is DuckDuckGo’s USP. There are no filter bubbles for users because there are no user profiles. The same results are delivered to everyone regardless of their demographic, location, user behavior, etc. Thanks to the un-tracked ads and affiliate partnerships it runs, the company has managed to be profitable since 2014. It makes a point of diverting some of these profits as donations to start-ups and projects who share a similar philosophy to their own. DuckDuckGo: The privacy companyThe search engine arm of DuckDuckGo certainly has its fans, averaging 24m daily direct searches last month. But the company is broadening its appeal by working to make it even easier for the average internet user (i.e. those who might not be familiar with VPNs or Tor) to be able to retain their privacy throughout their online journeys beyond just making searches. In the first place, the latest iteration of the DuckDuckGo app and browser extension helps demystify just how tracked we are online. As each webpage loads, DuckDuckGo provides users with a ‘Privacy Grade’ (A is safe, D to F are not so) allowing them to make a quick assessment. With just a click or two, users can then see a list of the trackers it has identified on the site. This tracker visibility is enlightening. For readers from Europe who are used to the EU Cookie Directive, it is a lot more usable and transparent than the varying quality of warning pop-ups we’re used to. Trackers that seem to crop up with frequency often relate to Google advertising – but it doesn’t take much browsing before trackers from big media names such as AOL and Fox are noticed, as well as expected Web 2.0 businesses such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. Of course, this is after just a few minutes of surfing. We can quickly see tracker after tracker with more and more obscure names. As we move around the web, DuckDuckGo immediately gets to work blocking these trackers. It also forces sites, when possible, to use encryption to keep your data even more secure. The tool doesn’t promise 100% security across the internet, but when it can’t impose its tweaks or be sure of certain elements, the Privacy Grade and information at least highlights a site’s failings and alerts users to potential nefarious scripts. If DuckDuckGo can successfully block a site’s trackers (it usually can), it will offer an amended grade for that site after it has done its work. And if a user decides it doesn’t want DuckDuckGo to make its changes, they can easily whitelist any site they like with a single click. The increasing need for the duck sideIt is unsurprising that DuckDuckGo hit new heights of popularity earlier this year in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is precisely this kind of creepy data breach which the company is working to protect internet users from. In a post at the DuckDuckGo blog, the company published the results from a survey of US internet users in the weeks after the scandal which found growing concerns in online privacy and the consequent increasing interest in tools which help to make web use safer. It also points out that regardless of whether internet users have a profile on the site or not, Facebook-run trackers operate on around 25% of websites, collecting user data and creating shadow profiles for ad targeting even if you never visit the social network’s domain. Tracking hit the headlines again last month as numerous scripts were found to be operating on US school websites. Of course, not all trackers are bad. Yet it is unsurprising parents and technologists in the US are asking some big questions about student data and where it ends up as they are increasingly expected to engage with their schools online. However, arguably some of the most significant privacy questions which might convince users to consider DuckDuckGo’s search engine and app/extension emerge from recent reports surrounding Google’s storing of location data even after users have turned this functionality off. The search giant is being sued by a user for just such activity in San Diego, and this again raises concerns about who really owns our personal data even if it appears that we, as users, can opt out of having such information stored. DuckDuckGo’s futureThis latest round of investment and the near-weekly headlines about data breaches, dodgy tracking, and dishonest privacy practices are good news for DuckDuckGo. The company still has a difficult job competing in the pure search vertical. Private search is, after all, not a completely original pursuit when Startpage and even incognito searching via Google Chrome is also an option for users seeking to make private searches. But where DuckDuckGo have really made great progress in recent years is by broadening their reach to assist web users to browse in private beyond search. The privacy app/extension is both educational when it comes to reminding users of the ubiquity of ad trackers and other bad practice, and it is useful and practical for making browsing the web that bit more secure. The future of online data and privacy is hard to predict, but it is good that companies like DuckDuckGo are working to make the internet a safer, more transparent, space – one that is led by the rights of users, rather than the desires of advertisers. This is especially important when so many of the bigger digital names seem to find it so difficult to operate in such a way. from https://searchenginewatch.com/marking-ten-years-duckduckgo-search-engine-privacy-company |
ABOUT MEPleasure to introduce myself I am Gillian 32 from Calgary, Canada. I am working as social media expert and have helped many clients with their social media marketing. Archives
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