When Google’s Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev was asked about Google’s most important ranking factors, he gave three: content, links, and RankBrain. We’ve known for a long time that links impact websites’ search rankings and Google has for a very long time emphasized the importance of quality content. What is RankBrain all about, however? Unlike content and links, RankBrain is influenced by behavior metrics that indicate that users actually find a site to be useful. These behavior metrics, more than anything else, are influenced by the usability of your website — in other words, user experience (UX). If you’ve been focusing on content and links at the expense of user experience, you won’t be able to maximize the performance of your website in the search engines. The following five UX tips will give you an SEO advantage. 1. Work on your site’s mobile compatibilityGoogle hasn’t hidden the fact that it pays a lot of attention to a site’s mobile compatibility. Anyone who has been in SEO for more than a few years will remember mobilegeddon, and mobile-first indexing is a thing: in other words, coming to terms with the realization that most of the usage of its search engine comes from mobile devices, Google has decided to start indexing the mobile version of a website first. In other words, if your website does not have a mobile version — or if the mobile version of your website is not properly optimized — then you could lose more than half of your search traffic. Below are some tips to ensure your website is mobile compatible:
2. Optimize your website speedJust how important is the speed of your website? Research shows that a single second delay in site load time can reduce your conversions by 7 percent, and that 40 percent of people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. In other words, people don’t like slow websites. And that explains why Google keeps strengthening page speed as a ranking factor. While Google has long been using site speed as a factor to rank desktop sites, it recently began to use site speed as a ranking factor for mobile sites in July 2018. You can make your website faster by doing the following:
3. Optimize your site architectureAnother UX tip that will give your site an edge in the search engines is to optimize your site architecture in a way that is easy to use and search engine friendly. For example, take a look at the following screenshot from the website of Lookers: In particular, pay attention to the navigation bar and you will notice a few things:
Not only will a good site structure make your site more accessible to readers, while at the same time making it easy for the search engines to crawl your website, but you are also likely to be rewarded by sitelinks. Here’s what a Google search for Lookers turned up: 4. Use breadcrumbs navigationA breadcrumb is a secondary navigation system that helps users know where they are on your website and that can help them trace their way back. Besides the fact that breadcrumbs make it easy for users to navigate your website, they also make it easy for Google to see how your site is structured and while increasing your site’s indexability. Here’s a look at SEW’s breadcrumbs: As you can see, from the screenshot above, the trail goes like this “Home >> Industry >> The end of Google+ after a data breach and how it affects us.” In other words, it makes it easy for the user to trace his/her steps back to the primary category of the article, then to the homepage. 5. Work on your content readabilityWhile we tend to focus on the technical aspects of UX when it comes to SEO, content also plays a great role in UX as far as the big G and other search engines are concerned. Making the following tweaks to your content will give you an edge:
ConclusionWhile good UX can give you an edge when it comes to SEO, it does more than that: it ensures that users actually use your website while guaranteeing an improvement in ROI and conversions. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/30/5-ux-tips-seo
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Getting PPC and SEO to work together effectively is always a key goal, whether we’re managing just one of the channels or both of them. Although it sounds easy in principle, it’s generally not. A typical request cropping up is around sharing top-performing PPC ad copy by category and using this to update meta descriptions. Sharing ad copy performance is something PPC teams should definitely be doing with their SEO counterparts; but unless your meta descriptions are awful the impact here is minimal. This brings us to the first problem you encounter — although there is lots you CAN do, picking and prioritizing what you do when is vital. The second common request is switching off PPC ads when you rank in position one (P1) organically. Initially this makes perfect sense and gets the attention of sharp CMOs and CFOs. But this is the second key challenge to overcome; how do I get the right data in the right place to know if it’s actually working. Let’s take a typical example: car insurance. Here we see MoneySuperMarket ranking P1 organically: The inevitable push comes; can we turn PPC off in [car insurance] because it’s really expensive and we’re ranking P1 organically. Well, probably not. Yes, your report is accurate: you rank P1 organically. But you’re actually the fifth result on that page. On my work monitor the organic ranking is well past halfway down the page. On mobile you’re well below the fold: This is where getting the right data is key. Keyword universeOne way in which we’re improving SEM data for our clients is via a Keyword Universe. This isn’t perfect by any means, but it gives us a working framework on which to build our reporting and optimize efforts. A template can be found here. It uses PPC search query data as a starting point. It’s important to use this; instead of the Paid v Organic report you can find in Google Ads or Search Ads 360. The reason for this is that Shopping search query data isn’t included in this report, so for retailers you’re likely to be missing out on a ton of data! Layer this with organic data from Search Console and you’ll start to be able to build up an idea of your coverage. Pulling in conversion data at a keyword level for PPC is easy; organic not so much. What we recommend here is using the category column to categorize your terms and then pivot up. You can then assign landing pages to categories and understand organic conversions and revenue. Not a perfect solution, but it gives you something to work with. Then you can add in search volume estimates from Google Keyword Planner or other tools you may use. You can use this to figure out what your paid, organic, and SEM share of voice is. This gives you a few ideas:
You can then add in search queries where you only rank organically and see if you want or need PPC coverage. Finally, you could add in keywords you might want to target and ask the PPC team to run some tests to see what kind of volume and competition you will be up against. Run PPC temporarily until organic rankings get up to scratch. The categorization element of the report is the most time-consuming. Brand testingAs you can see, the argument for switching off generics can be blurry at best. However, we tend to also see an argument for switching off brand. It’s generally the next conversation once a client realizes that turning off a generic head term is perhaps not going to have the impact there were expecting. Again there are a multitude of options and approaches here but we’ll cover the most common ones:
There are tech providers out there which offer, in various guises, ways supported here. The important thing to remember is that you are not allowed to scrape Google search results if you are also making changes to bidding. So for example, ad monitoring platforms which can tell you what competitor creative is for certain terms can do that because they are allowed to scrape the results — but they cannot use this information to make automatic changes to your account. That means an account manager jumping between both monitoring tools and search engines on a daily basis to eke out minor gains. It’s possible; but probably not a sensible use of time. The challenge we have with the strategies outlined above, respectively, are:
As such, we’ve been establishing a more balanced approach – which takes time, but will help save budget and, most importantly, keep the data flow going so you can explain WHY the results are as they are. Key steps to a more balanced approach1. Understand the lay of the land:
2. You now want to identify a target search exact match impression share. This is a little bit finger in the air as the idea is to drop this gradually over a period of weeks; but you need a starting point. We’d recommend:
3. A report template can be found here. All you need to do here is to populate the table with your data. Take the PPC data from Google Ads for the campaign you are testing and then Google Search Console data and look for your branded terms. 4. Fill out the report every week, with both your PPC and SEO teams feeding into it. What you are hoping to achieve is SEM traffic staying static and your overall PPC investment declining. Key benefits of brand testingThis is a good starting point for brand testing. The key benefits are:
Build an environment that encourages sharingAside from the more practical tips outlined above, we’ve found the most important strategy in getting PPC and SEO to work well together is enabling a method for the teams to talk to each other. If this is internal it should be easy; but across different agencies it’s likely to be a bit more difficult. Our top tips for this are: 1. Establish a monthly learning deck. This changes from client to client but typically looks like this:
2. Have a monthly call. This can be tweaked depending on the scale of work that’s going on; but monthly works for a lot of our clients. It takes 30 minutes and we run through the monthly learning decks and highlight areas of opportunity. One example of a benefit here was landing page testing. An SEO team had struggled to make a case for changes to the organic page because the internal brand team were winning the argument on what the page should look like. We used PPC landing page data to evidence how a change in the position of a call to action had a significant impact on the conversion rate of the page; immediately the SEO team got the green light to start testing new page designs and performance improved! 3. Make sure you’re sharing anything you think may be relevant. Sometimes even the smallest detail can be important. For example SEO teams may be planning for AMP pages; but that means new Floodlight tags for PPC teams if they are using SearchAds 360. 4. Don’t forget about the other teams. I know this is an SEM post; but audience data is already a key pillar. Search has had to play catch-up with the likes of Facebook; but the stuff PPC teams have access to at their fingertips is extensive. Make sure the social and programmatic teams know about it! Getting PPC and SEO to work better together is a bit like the attribution conversation. It’s not always perfect; but it’s better than doing nothing! Hopefully these points give you a jumping-off point. Martin Reed is PPC Account Director at Croud. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/29/ppc-seo-work-together-gain-visibility/ Yesterday while I was having a blast reading “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” I happened across some fun facts. We got into some of the more technical goods from the paper yesterday, but figured these would also be an worthwhile — or at least more enjoyable — read. Friday and all. 1. “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” – people encountering a crawler for the first timeThey note that they received almost daily emails from people either concerned about copyright issues or asking if they liked the site after looking at it. For many people with web pages, this was one of the first crawlers they had seen.
More innocent times. 2. A billion web documents predicted by 2000“It is foreseeable that by the year 2000, a comprehensive index of the Web will contain over a billion documents. . . The goal of our system is to address many of the problems, both in quality and scalability, introduced by scaling search engine technology to such extraordinary numbers.” Now in 2018, there are reportedly 130 trillion documents on the web — an extraordinary number indeed. And sure enough, their search has scaled to meet it. 3. Google took up 55 GB of storage“The total of all the data used by the search engine requires a comparable amount of storage, about 55 GB.” Now, Google is 2 billion lines of code. As noted by one of their engineering managers in 2016, the repository contains 86TB of data. 4. “People are still only willing to look at the first few tens of results.”Please note: “tens.” They write about the need for more precision in search. Remember the days when people regularly clicked past page 1? 5. Percentage of .com domains: from 1.5 to 60, to now 46.5They note how “commercialized” the web was already becoming, leaving search engine technology “to be largely a black art and to be advertising oriented.” “The Web has also become increasingly commercial over time. In 1993, 1.5% of web servers were on .com domains. This number grew to over 60% in 1997.” According to Statistica, the number of .com domains is down to 46.5% as of May 2018. “With Google,” they wrote, “we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.” 6. “There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits”After going into some technical detail about optimized compact encoding, they reveal that they’ve their complex compact encoding preparations are categorized simply — endearingly — into fancy and plain. 7. Already defending user experience in anticipating searchFrom the start, it seems Brin and Page fought for users to not need to excessively specify their queries in order to get desired information. They wrote:
It’s interesting that this was so clearly in their thinking from the beginning. At last week’s Search Summit, Googler Juan Felipe Rincon said, “The future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know.” 8. There was a typoIn the second paragraph of section 3.2, they write “Couple this flexibility to publish anything with the enormous influence of search engines to route traffic and companies which deliberately manipulating search engines for profit become a serious problem.” Did you catch it? The verb should be, “companies which are deliberately manipulating search engines become” or “companies which deliberately manipulate search engines become.” Of the utmost gravity, we know. Just goes to show that even if an incomplete verb phrase won’t keep you from doing some pretty cool stuff in the world. And of course, that even the best of us need editors. 9. Search Engine Watch shout outWe tweeted this yesterday, but felt the need to share again for extra emphasis. Our very own Search Engine Watch was cited in the paper, stating that top search engines claimed to index 100 million web documents as of November 1997. Been a fun 21 years. 10: They chose these photosHappy Friday, everyone. from https://searchenginewatch.com/fun-facts-original-google-paper Earlier today, Dixon Jones from Majestic shared on Twitter a thorough, digestible explanation of how PageRank actually works. I gave it a watch myself, and thought it was a good moment to revisit this wild piece of math that has made quite a dent on the world over the past 20 years. As a sidenote, we know as of 2017 that while PageRank was removed from the Toolbar in 2016, it still forms an important part of the overall ranking algorithm, and thus is worthwhile to understand. Jones starts with the simple — or at least, straightforward — formula. For those who don’t adore math, or who may have forgotten a few technical terms since the last calculus class, this formula would be read aloud like this: “The PageRank of a page in this iteration equals 1 minus a damping factor, plus, for every link into the page (except for links to itself), add the page rank of that page divided by the number of outbound links on the page and reduced by the damping factor.” Back to the original Google paperAt this point, Jones moves forward in the video to a simpler, still useful version of the calculation. He pulls out excel, an easy 5 node visual, and maps out the ranking algorithm over 15 iterations. Great stuff. Personally, I wanted a bit more of the math, so I went back and read the full-length version of “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” (a natural first step). This was the paper written by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. Aka the paper in which they presented Google, published in the Stanford Computer Science Department. (Yes, it is long and I will be working a bit late tonight. All in good fun!) How’s this for an opening line: “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.” Casual, per their overall, continuing style. As an extra fun fact, our very own Search Engine Watch was cited in that Google debut paper! By none other than Page and Brin themselves, stating that there were already 100 million web documents as of November 1997. Anyway, back to work. Here’s how the PageRank calculation was originally defined:“Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows:
PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper.” What does that mean?Bear with us! Here’s our formula again: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) Note this is the same as the picture above, except that the photo “simplifies” the second part of the equation by substituting an upper case sigma (∑), which is the symbol for a mathematical summation, i.e. do this formula for all pages 1 through n and then add them up. So to calculate the PageRank of given page A, we first take 1 minus the damping factor (d). D is typically set as .85, as seen in their original paper. We then take the PageRanks of all pages that point to and from page A, add them up, and multiply by the damping factor of 0.85. Not that bad, right? Easier said than done. PageRank is an iterative algorithmPerhaps your eyes glazed over this part, but Brin and Sergey actually used the word “eigenvector” in their definition. I had to look it up. Apparently, eigenvectors play a prominent role in differential equations. The prefix “eigen” comes from German for “proper” or “characteristic.” There also exist eigenvalues and eigenequations. As Rogers pointed out in his classic paper on PageRank, the biggest takeaway for us about the eigenvector piece is that it’s a type of math that let’s you work with multiple moving parts. “We can go ahead and calculate a page’s PageRank without knowing the final value of the PR of the other pages. That seems strange but, basically, each time we run the calculation we’re getting a closer estimate of the final value. So all we need to do is remember the each value we calculate and repeat the calculations lots of times until the numbers stop changing much.” Or in other words, the importance of the eigenvector is that PageRank is an iterative algorithm. The more times you repeat the calculation, the closer you get to the most accurate numbers. PageRank visualized in ExcelIn his video, Jones gets pretty much straight to the fun part, which is why it’s so effective in just 18 minutes. He demonstrates how PageRank is calculated with the example of 5 websites that link to and from each other. He then brings it back to the calculations in excel: And demonstrates how you would iterate by taking the row of numbers at the bottom and repeating the calculation. Upon doing this, the numbers eventually start to level out (this was after just 15 iterations): Or as some might caption this photo, “Eigenvectors in the Wild.” Other interesting observations Jones raises:
So finally, here’s the original tweet that got me down this long, riveting rabbit hole. Hope you all enjoy the same!
from https://searchenginewatch.com/google-pagerank-algorithm-explained Welcome to the fourth in my series on alternatives to Google. It follows my piece No need for Google back in May and my in-depth reports on Ecosia, DuckDuckGo and Baidu. Today we turn to Yandex. Since we last covered Russia’s search giant (way back in 2015) the engine has reasserted its dominance over Google in the market. It has a presence in other countries too and is branching out into numerous other tech verticals. So let’s take a look at search in Russia and what Yandex is doing well in order to solidify its position. And what does the future hold for the brand and Russian search market at large? A top-level view of digital RussiaRussia is the biggest internet market in Europe. It boasts more than 109m web users reaching 76% of the total population (according to Internet World Stats). The size of the market may not be much of a surprise, but the country’s digital landscape does have some unique traits. Desktops, for instance, are still the leading devices by which Russian users engage with the digital world. According to StatCounter, more than 75% of the platform market is accounted for by desktop use – with mobile and tablet weighing in at 22% and 2% respectively. This proportion of mobile/tablet users compared to desktop users is far smaller than other big European internet markets such as the UK (where handheld devices now equal desktops), as well as the continent as a whole (where mobiles account for around 45% of digital platform use). Yandex vs. Google: Two separate battles on desktop and mobile?It is arguable that Yandex’s popularity in the Russian market may be linked to the continuing popularity of desktops in the region. If we look at the overall search market across all platforms (again, using StatCounter data), Yandex’s share has grown from 38% to 53% between 2014 and 2018. If we focus in on desktops, we see Yandex’s share peaking at nearly 60% a little earlier this year. It is a different story when we look more closely at the mobile/tablet search sector. In fact, things are almost exactly flipped with Google currently boasting 58% share of the market and Yandex second at 40%. What is Yandex doing well?At first glance, Yandex doesn’t look much different to Google. The English-language Yandex.com homepage – with its generous white space and spare pictogram links to ‘images,’ ‘video,’ etc. – arguably bears even more similarity to the Google homepage than it does to the busier magazine-style design it uses for the Cyrillic versions of its own pages. To US and UK audiences, then, Yandex’s Cyrillic design might look a little old fashioned. But this layout hints at the desktop-centric users it is appealing to in its domestic market. While in the design sense, the needs of the Russian market plays its part in keeping things quite traditional, the engine has been ahead of the curve in other ways. For instance, in being able to understand the unique nuances and inflections of the Russian language. This was certainly an initial USP for the engine, and is no doubt fundamental in keeping so many domestic users coming back to the service rather than making their searches elsewhere. Aside from its dependable search functionality across text, image, video, and its portal homepage elements, Yandex has long been quick to branch out into other digital and technology services. Yandex.Disk is its cloud storage offering giving P2P sharing functionality and the ability to search your files straight from the search bar. Alice, the service’s voice assistant is taking the brand’s speech and language recognition capabilities even further. More recently, Yandex.Music – with its smart playlists and massive library of streamable songs – has just launched in Israel (it’s first territory outside of the former Soviet Union). Yandex Taxi is also on the verge of launching autonomous cabs in the nation’s capital Moscow. Yandex’s developments inside and outside of search are united in that they are always quick to plug the gap in the Russian market as soon as the technologies are viable, and they are increasingly underpinned by machine learning and artificial intelligence. The future for Yandex and Russian search?Looking to the future, Yandex does potentially face some challenges. While the brand’s market share is on the upward trajectory, so too is the migration of Russia’s desktop users to mobile devices. This trend might be slower and steadier in Russia than in other markets, but the move to mobile must surely be seen as inevitable – and is likely to be key in giving access to the 24% of citizens who are currently disconnected. Google is in a good position to benefit from any growing appetite for mobile search in Russia. This is due in no small part to the prevalence of the Android OS which currently accounts for more than 69% of the mobile OS market (including tablets). But the Russian search market is a complicated one and things are very hard to predict. I wonder if Yandex will be able to make good in the mobile search sphere if, for instance, Russian consumers are lured by the advanced voice recognition services of Alice? Could new internet users be ‘straight to voice’ in the same way populations have been ‘straight to mobile’ in other emerging markets? Additionally, if other Yandex-branded apps, across such verticals as video and ecommerce, see further visibility as more Russian users come to mobile, will this help keep more mobile users on Yandex-owned mobile sites when they are searching for these respective types of content? There might be more questions than hard predictions here, but out of all the alternatives to Google, Yandex is arguably one of the more clear-cut success stories. Winning once more in a massive domestic market with plenty of room for growth, growing in other countries and verticals, as well as pushing the technology envelope wherever it can. I’d be surprised if it went down without a fight, even if a Russian mobile boom happened tomorrow. from https://searchenginewatch.com/yandex-beating-google-europes-biggest-internet-market/ A great website is a powerful combination of quality content, appropriate web design, ample SEO efforts, and marketing. Web design and SEO go hand-in-hand, and both play a part in developing an SEO-optimized website. This further lays emphasis on the major role played by web designers in building the entire website and its online reputation as well. To get better at SEO, web designers need to get a deeper understanding of the commercial aspects of websites. Apart from creating killer designs, web designers should always be aware of some of the basic SEO insights that can implement positive change in their entire web design approach. In this post, we’ll discuss the basics of SEO for web design, whether you’re building a new website or revamping an existing one. Site structureThe structure of your website is essentially how your audience gets around. There is always a peculiar way for the information to flow on a website. This path is taken by every visitor to reach their destination i.e. the information they are looking for. Every web designer must keep the fact in mind that if the site visitors are having a hard time going around the website or reaching their point of destination, the site’s traffic will always be affected. To put simply, the structure of the site is the casual flow of navigation for new and experienced website visitors alike. The web design should be approached in such a manner that all visitors can seamlessly experience the site’s navigation and get around it with utmost ease. As a general rule, pages should be no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. This will help your site’s SEO by allowing search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible. Make sure the navigation isn’t complex for the user nor confusing for search engines. The compulsion of a responsive, mobile-friendly web designMobile traffic as a share of total global online traffic in 2017 was 52.64%. Well, that means that every web designer needs to get the fact that a mobile-friendly website will help them get better at the traction of the traffic. A responsive website is highly favored by search engines and it can only happen when the web designers approach it in the correct manner. Having a responsive web design will help your website adjust to the pixel-width of the screen upon which they are being viewed. This will work to equate and enhance the user experience on every device. Less work for the audience means that they spend more time on your website. So, don’t be that website that 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend because of a poorly designed website on mobile. Image optimization is crucialWeb designers play a very crucial role in deciding the aesthetic appeal of the website they are working on. Right from the typography, the use of colors, patterns, geometric shapes, symmetry etc., they also handle the choice of images that would make it to the website. Hence, optimizing the chosen images is a must because large images slow down your web pages, creating a roadblock for optimal user experience. Depending on the website builder in use, web designers can optimize images by decreasing their file size by either a plugin or script. This also happens to be a core instruction in the blogging tips furnished by reputed bloggers. Speed optimized web designWeb developers and designers have to be at the beck and call of the client and the team, owing to revisions and bug fixes. In this haste, they often avoid optimizing their web design for a fast loading web speed. Did you know that a website that takes more than 2-3 seconds to load can face a higher abandonment rate as compared to others? Roping in the importance of page speed from the very beginning is just as important as laying the building blocks of the website. If the project manager or client is inexperienced, web designers must guide them through the importance of investing in a reliable web hosting service as well because that definitely affects the loading speed of the website and other server-side issues. Using the right toolsWeb designers aren’t expected to be the best at taking care of a site’s SEO, but they should at least have a surface-level understanding of how their SEO tip-offs can help the website function improve immensely. There are a few tools that should be at the disposal of every web designer such as the GTmetrix. This tool can help them analyze their site’s speed and make it faster. It will also provide them with insights on how well their site loads along with actionable recommendations on how to optimize it. Tools like Responsive Web Design Testing can help them test their website’s responsiveness across multiple devices with different screen sizes instantly in just simple steps. To top it off, the very popular Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool can help these web designers with a website crawler, that allows them to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze onsite SEO. ConclusionThe design of the website and its SEO are the two moving parts of the same entity. Hence, it should be the aim of every web designer to furnish their knowledge of web designing with the key SEO elements that are a must to be considered before, during and after a website design task. They must understand that they are the ones that will set the SEO fireball rolling. In an attempt to embed the site’s SEO into the design process, we hope that our basic SEO insights for web designers will be of huge help to experienced and new web designers, alike. from https://searchenginewatch.com/seo-web-designers-what-know This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing. Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you. As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered. Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day: Where search is headingSiddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%. With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these. New research: The Era of EcommerceKerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places. There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy! How blockchain will affect searchJeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content. Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, GooglePanel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry. Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one? They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options. We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points. They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us. And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.” Mobile searchJason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck. Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before. Amazon and Amazon Marketing ServicesJohn Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon. They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late. They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.” The full-funnel search approachClaudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend. How to optimize for voice searchMelissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization. She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen. In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels. Visual search and ecommerceClark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.” 93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision. 61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon. We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works. Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé NastPanel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations. They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products. They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do. All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us! from https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup Ecommerce marketers at US brands are struggling to keep pace with where and how consumers browse and purchase online, according to new research published today. An ecommerce-focused study by Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, produced in partnership with Catalyst, part of GroupM, has found that 85% of browsing and purchasing activity occurs with non-Amazon retailers, but only 25% of US brands say they have a strategy for ecommerce retailers beyond Amazon. The Era of Ecommerce: Capitalizing on the New Customer Journey has also found that there is a 29 percentage point gap between the proportion of consumers who have visited a retailer to research and the proportion of brands who market on that retailer’s website (53% vs 24%). Details about the researchThe report is based on a survey of more than 750 North America-based consumers and more than 600 business to consumer (B2C) client-side marketers across the following nine sectors: appliances, baby care, beauty and personal care, clothing and apparel, consumer electronics, footwear, furniture and home decor, non-perishable goods and beverages, and toys. It includes in-depth interviews with numerous senior marketers actively engaged in ecommerce advertising for their brands. All surveys and interviews were conducted between June and September 2018. This research comes as a follow up to last year’s Age of Amazon report, in which we told the story of the ecommerce giant and what its ascent meant for marketers. Building on that, this report looks beyond only Amazon to assess the wider ecommerce industry, highlighting both consumer and advertiser behaviors. From traditional search engines to ecommerce websites, and from vertical-specific retailers to visual search, this research seeks to understand how and when consumers use specific channels and how advertisers prioritize each channel. Significant opportunity awaits advertisers who think holistically about reaching consumers in each phase of the consumer cycle. Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst, commented on the report: “Our new research illuminates a significant disconnect between today’s consumer behavior and ecommerce advertising strategies. We’re hopeful that marketers will be able to use our findings and recommendations to bridge this gap, and ultimately drive better returns for their businesses.” Downloadable linkThe research will debut today at the Transformation of Search Summit held in New York. It is also available for download from ClickZ here (registration required). from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/22/new-research-era-ecommerce/ The most important ranking factor for 2019 and beyond definitely has to be ranking a website without any backlinks (CTR manipulation). The higher your domain authority and fewer links you have the better your website will rank on Google. All you need is persistence and patience and you will see big ranking jumps using my private software built for the sole purpose of manipulating click-thru-rate. If you are interested in learning more I will only let 10 people into my close-knit SEO circle. The price for this software is going to be anywhere from $500 – $1000 per month. This is the bleeding-edge method of ranking well into 2019 and beyond. I will add more testimonials as the software gets developed. You cannot find this kind of software ANYWHERE else on the internet – its custom coded just for me and I have spent tens of thousands of dollars to develop it. Click Here to Signup and get Notified about Launch Date!
from https://kanwarmanoria.digital/seo/google-ranking-factors-for-2019/ from http://kanwarmanoria.weebly.com/blog/google-ranking-factors-for-2019 First let me ask you: how many unread emails are in the “promotions,” “updates,” and “other” tabs of your inbox? When I got to work on Monday morning, there were 248. How many of those did I read, you ask? Three at best, and only because they were already my favorite news roundups. The others? Didn’t stand a chance. “Marked as read,” “deleted,” and otherwise wholeheartedly, happily ignored. Long story short, consumers these days are drowning in emails. We have promotions, “we’ve missed you!”s, “rate our product!”s, and 100 other types of unread newsletters pouring from our inboxes and never getting close to our attention. For a long time, it was businesses seeking out consumersAnd while that obviously is still at play, the tides are shifting. It’s just too much content to keep tabs on. More and more, consumers are ignoring the bombardment and seeking out businesses on their own terms — when and where they want to look. For a long time, SEO was a small group of nerds (*experts) sitting in a corner doing their thing, trying to convince everyone that search mattered and that there were ways to improve rankings. For a long time, people kind of let them do their thing while not understanding what SEO actually was or fully grasping their value. But now, the amount of content is suffocating. I don’t want to read 248 “other” emails to find the information I need. I want it know. Where do I go? The place where 93% of online journeys begin: I search. Now, businesses need to be found by searching consumersAs often happens when tech goes mainstream, all of a sudden businesses care a lot more about that group of nerds in the corner. The question now turns to, “how can I make sure my business is found when and where my customers are looking?” In a world of customer experience, I don’t want to bother consumers — I want them to happen “serendipitously” upon my product or service. I want to be there when they’re ready. These days, customer journeys start not when a consumer walks into a store, or lands on my web page. Customer journeys start the second a consumer opens a search engine. Desktop to mobile to voiceAnd to top it all off, the stakes keep getting higher. When I search on desktop, I probably look at the first ten results. On mobile, maybe I consider five. On voice? One gold spot at the top. Exciting times for SEO and search marketing. As such, we’re thrilled to host The Transformation of Search Summit today here in New York City, in partnership with ClickZ and Catalyst. Topics to consider in search marketingWe’ll be covering all of these and more:
Needless to say, we’re pretty jazzed about the event. Speakers include some brilliant minds from SAP, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, LEGO, Hertz, Pinterest, Hilton, Conde Nast, and many more. Mostly, we’re excited to see the continued rise of search marketing and how businesses adapt to better at being found by consumers. This post also appeared on ClickZ. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/10/19/why-search-marketing-matters-in-2018/ |
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
July 2019
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