Friday, September 30, 2016

SearchCap: Penguin & link building, PPC leads & social

searchcap-header-v2-scap

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

  • What’s new and cool at Google from SMX East 2016
    Sep 30, 2016 by Mark Traphagen

    At this year’s SMX East, Googlers Jerry Dischler and Babak Pahlavan shared recent updates and what’s coming to AdWords and Google Analytics. Columnist Mark Traphagen was on hand to cover the highlights.

  • Up close at SMX: Using paid search and social together
    Sep 30, 2016 by Kristi Kellogg

    Columnist Kristi Kellogg recaps a session at SMX East that dives into how marketers can integrate their paid search and social efforts for better marketing results.

  • Why call tracking helps improve PPC lead generation account performance
    Sep 30, 2016 by Jeff Baum

    Columnist Jeff Baum explains that when properly set up, call tracking can help you both measure the value of your PPC campaigns and optimize them for better ROI.

  • Authority & link building with real-time Penguin
    Sep 30, 2016 by Marcus Miller

    Google recently released Penguin 4.0, and the Penguin filter now updates in real time. Columnist Marcus Miller explores what this means for SEO and link building.

  • Search in Pics: Google & YouTube cake, pumpkins & DJs
    Sep 30, 2016 by Barry Schwartz

    In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. GoogleBot at the AngularConnect conference: Source: Twitter DJs in suits at a Google partners party: Source: […]

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

Search Marketing

The post SearchCap: Penguin & link building, PPC leads & social appeared first on Search Engine Land.

What’s new and cool at Google from SMX East 2016

google-newyork-nyc-building-1920

At this year’s SMX East conference, which took place this week in New York City, Search Engine Land reporter Ginny Marvin and contributing editor Greg Sterling hosted a conversation with Google executives Jerry Dischler, the vice president of AdWords (@jdischler) and Babak Pahlavan, the global head of products and director of Google Analytics (@babakph).

Dischler shared recent updates and changes to the Google AdWords platform, while Pahlavan covered the same for Google Analytics.

[Read the full article on Marketing Land]

The post What’s new and cool at Google from SMX East 2016 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Up close at SMX: Using paid search and social together

From left to right: Pamela Parker, Executive Features Editor, Marketing Land & Search Engine Land; Tara Siegel, Senior Director of Social at Pepperjam; Maggie Malek, the head of social at the MMI Agency; and Sahil Jain, CEO of AdStage.

From left to right: Pamela Parker, Executive Features Editor, Marketing Land & Search Engine Land; Tara Siegel, Senior Director of Social at Pepperjam; Maggie Malek, the head of social at the MMI Agency; and Sahil Jain, CEO of AdStage.

No news flash here. Marketing teams cannot afford to exist in silos.

Paid search and social are no exception. You can amplify the reach of both of these channels by combining your efforts and leveraging data from each together.

In the SMX East session, “Using Paid Search and Social Together,” three speakers, Tara Siegel, Jahil Sain and Maggie Malek, shared their top tips for winning with paid search and social.

Using search techniques to win at paid social by Tara Siegel

Tara Siegel, the Senior Director of Social at Pepperjam, said she is on a mission to make people understand that social must be viewed holistically. Social is an omnichannel optimizer.

It’s very important to be consistent across channels. Deliver the right message to the right people, Siegel explained.

tara-siegel-right-message-600x301

In social, campaign goals will guide ad type and strategy. The same is true for search, with ad extensions, click-to-call, lead generation and so on.

[Read the full article on Marketing Land]

The post Up close at SMX: Using paid search and social together appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Why call tracking helps improve PPC lead generation account performance

smartphone_analytics-366588536-ss-1920

Many businesses receive significant lead volume from phone calls. The reason marketers want to generate phone leads is to capitalize on the immediacy of being able to activate the sales funnel.

This article delves into why lead generation businesses need to have a call tracking solution in place, how data collected through call tracking technology can improve conversion funnel performance and why integrating call tracking into third-party systems can lift paid search performance.

Why do lead generation businesses need call tracking?

Lead generators run into a blind spot when trying to assess the value of their paid search campaigns. While it’s easy to track web-based conversions, phone leads generated through a single “catch-all” phone number can’t be tied back to a specific source or keyword.

Optimizing accounts with incomplete information leads to poor outcomes such as pausing campaigns, reducing keyword bids or removing marketing sources that could be providing value through phone conversions.

Call tracking provides visibility into total account performance via use of tracking phone numbers. These tracking numbers identify a phone lead’s marketing source (e.g., Google or Bing) and the keyword that specifically drove that phone conversion.

Having this additional information on hand better informs key decisions such as whether account structure needs to be altered or budget allocations shifted between campaigns and sources. For instance, analysis of data from a call tracking solution can lead to expanding a PPC account into new campaign types (such as call-only campaigns) or optimizing an account’s ad messaging to include “call us today” or similar call-to-action messaging.

Improving the conversion funnel

Generating leads is only half the battle for lead generation marketers. The leads generated need to convert into paying customers to justify the outlay of marketing dollars. A call tracking solution can also bring specific information to paid search marketers about the sales funnel that can be optimized. Here are a few solutions to consider.

  • Automatic phone routing. Provides the ability to set specific rules and criteria to take inbound calls and automatically route them to a salesperson in real time. Immediately routing phone leads to a salesperson or call center reduces lead aging and increases the probability of converting that lead.
  • Phone call classification. Variations of this feature can be used to automatically classify phone leads as good leads or bad leads. Furthermore, automatic classification of phone calls can help determine whether paid search traffic is truly driving sales-related calls or support calls. Leveraging this information can help optimize PPC campaigns to ensure high-quality, sales-oriented leads are being generated and that every marketing dollar is optimized for maximum return.
  • Call transcripts. Analyzing conversations between customer and sales representative is one of the best ways to both optimize the back-end conversion funnel and to uncover new keyword lists and audiences that target qualified, top-of-funnel prospects. One of the most effective PPC (and overall marketing) strategies is to optimize and target based on what your current customers are telling you.

Strategically speaking, call tracking solutions provide the means to create a “closed-loop” PPC marketing strategy. Simply put, top-of-funnel data can be used to optimize the back of funnel, and back-end funnel insights can improve how the top of funnel is targeted.

Integrating into third-party systems

Most call tracking solutions offer the ability to integrate into a variety of CRM, advertising and other platforms. The ability to integrate call tracking provides more complete insights and enhances the ability to optimize your PPC program. Some key integrations revolve around:

  • CRM. Integrating call tracking into a CRM system allows for the ability to create records from phone leads that can be managed and tracked through the sales funnel.
  • advertising platforms. Integrating call tracking into platforms like AdWords or Bing Ads further guides marketers regarding how to best create and optimize paid search campaigns.
  • bid management. Integrating into third-party bid management platforms increases the effectiveness of their technologies. For instance, feeding call conversions into their systems allows for creation of call-specific bid rules and also provides the additional data needed make specific bid algorithms like CPA or position-based bidding work more efficiently.
  • conversion rate optimization. Call tracking integrated with CRO technology provides deeper insights into testing experiments and can also help determine new testing ideas. Call conversion tracking embedded within CRO tests more accurately determines the success of a particular landing page or set of pages.

Final thoughts

Call tracking provides marketers the information and functionality needed to optimize both the top and bottom ends of the conversion funnel. Gaining visibility over phone lead performance and fine-tuning lead generation efforts will lead to better paid search and overall business results.

The post Why call tracking helps improve PPC lead generation account performance appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Authority & link building with real-time Penguin

Link building and giving Google what they want

So it happened. Google finally released Penguin 4.0 — the last Penguin update of its kind, as it now processes in real time as a part of Google’s core ranking algorithm.

In this post, I want to take a look at what Penguin is, how this update affects the SEO community as a whole and how the brave and the bold can continue to safely improve their organic visibility without fear of repercussions from punitive search engine algorithms.

The announcement

After a few weeks of turbulence in the SERPs, the announcement that many had predicted was finally made.

The Penguin 4.0 announcement had two key points:

  1. Penguin is now running in real time. This is really good news. There are lots of folks out there who have paid the price for low-quality SEO yet are still not seeing a recovery after removing or disavowing all of their spammy backlinks. Certainly, a house built on dodgy links will not spring back to a position of strength simply by removing those links; however, there are many businesses out there that seem to have been carrying algorithmic boulders around their digital ankles. Hopefully, these folks can now move on, their debt to a punitive algorithm update paid in full.
  2. Penguin is now more granular. This element is a little more curious, in that Penguin 2.0 seemed to add page-level and keyword-level penalties, making it more granular than the 1.0 release. However, we can only imagine that things have got much more advanced, and possibly individual links are considered rather than the seemingly aggregate approach that was taken historically. Only time will tell the degree to which this granular approach will impact sites, but I suspect it will be a good thing for those looking to play by the rules.

It will also be interesting to see how this fits in with the other 200 or so factors or “clues” that Google uses to rank websites. We now we have both Panda and Penguin integrated into Google’s core ranking algorithm (though Panda does not run in real time), so it’s possible that the weight of the various known ranking factors may have changed as a result.

One other interesting nugget is that there will be no more notifications for Penguin updates. Penguin now constantly updates as Google crawls the web, so tweaks to the finer points of this system will no longer be announced. Personally, I think is a good thing — folks can concentrate on doing good marketing (and SEO) rather than nervously waiting for the hammer to fall on some overused link-building tactic.

Links are still important

It’s important to remember that links are still important. Google has clarified this a number of times now, with Googlers such as John Mueller, Gary Illyes and even Matt Cutts clarifying the importance of links as a ranking signal, while also often warning of the problems of focusing on just links as a marketing and SEO strategy.

Of course, if we can step back a little, this makes perfect sense. If you have a simple five-page website, no corresponding social or PR noise, and 5,000 links… something does not quite add up there. Why would people cite that resource so widely?

On the other hand, if you have worked hard on your site and have a hundred or so great content pieces, solid reputation signals and 500 or so editorial links with wildly varied anchor text spread across the web with no discernible pattern, then this does look a little more natural. Add on some PR and social activity, and we start to see a pattern that looks like a real business.

So links are important — critically so for SEO. But links are one of many factors and should not be looked at in isolation. In fact, great links should often be the side effect of great marketing. So take off your reverse-engineering hat and put on your smart marketing hat, and you are moving in the right direction.

What Google wants

I always find it useful to briefly analyze Google’s recommendations. You can be sure those press releases and webmaster guideline pages are carefully worded, and often we can derive more clarification of what is needed.

  • From the Penguin 4.0 announcement: “focus on creating amazing, compelling websites.”
  • From the Link Schemes page: “The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.
  • From the Webmaster Guidelines: “Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.”
  • From the original Penguin announcement: “focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.” This is the same statement again, so they must mean it, folks!

There is a common thread here: quality. Whether it’s website quality, link quality or content quality, Google clearly wants to drive this point home.

“The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community.”

That statement says it all. The only problem here is that Google is often a little (wildly?) optimistic. Creating great content often is not enough on its own. You have to let people know about it.

You have to build relationships with folks who may be interested in what you have to say. You want to build relationships with other bloggers and website owners. You will then want to look at ways to use these relationships to start building the kind of links that will move the needle.

High quality, in Google’s eyes, means making your site valuable to your target audience. Create something that is really, truly helpful — then let people know about it. Don’t do this the other way around and start building links in volume where there is nothing of value to link to.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem with most link-building efforts — they are tackled completely back to front. Links are built before on-site value has-been created. The solution to this is simple: Start with your site. Build something of value. Then layer your link building over the top.

Link building tactics

The following is a brief overview of some link building tactics that still have merit and are based on the thinking above.

  1. Basic prospecting. Using a range of advanced query operators, you can often find resource pages or even (shock, horror!) highly ranking and well-maintained directories that are relevant to the product or service you provide. The more content you have on your site, the easier it becomes to find sites that are linking to similar resources and that will consider linking to you. Search for your keywords +resources, +links, +directory and other terms that indicate a relevant resource. Then do the requisite research. (More details.)
  2. Competitor research. Often, reviewing the links your competitors have will reveal some sites that will consider linking to you or your content. Again, make sure you have something of value before requesting any links — and remember that just because a site links to your competitor, it does not mean that link is helping them rank. Think quality. See some smart thoughts on how to do (and not do) competitor research the right way here.
  3. Guest post prospecting. Guest posts are a still a great way to generate exposure for your business and tap into a site’s audience. Remember, though, quality must come first. Likewise, if you have an opportunity to link to a piece of content within the body of the article and it adds value, then do it in a natural way to get an editorial vote within that article. I would tend to look for blogs in your space initially and manually review whether they have guest authors. You can also prospect, again on Google, using search strings like “Keyword” + “guest post,” “keyword” + “write for us,” “keyword” + “contributor” — I favor this approach rather than tools, as the sites returned highly are likely to be authoritative.
  4. Content + outreach. Once you have a bedrock of great content on your site, you can find sites that link to other articles and then go about contacting the owners to see if they will link to your content. Ideally, your content should improve on what they already link to so that link can be swapped out or yours can be included in addition to the original link. The Skyscraper Technique can work well here; however, it is not perfect for every situation.
  5. Broken link building. This is similar to #4 in many ways, but you are looking for broken links on sites you have identified as potentially providing a valuable link (or vote) for your business. You may well need to create some content to fill the gap when you find an opportunity, but this approach where you are helping the site owner and providing a simple alternative can yield great results. Identify sites you would like a link from, then crawl those sites with Screaming Frog or Xenu Link Sleuth to find opportunities. Lots of legwork here, but you can find diamonds in those 404s!
  6. Local organizations. With local businesses, I like links that help tie you into that physical location. Often you will be able to find clubs or some such that will accept some sponsorship in return for a safe, branded link on a page of their site. Play it safe here; do this for the right reasons, and you can generate some solid ties with local businesses, leading to more eyes on your business and some great local links.
  7. Press and PR. Further to having an amazing site, doing great things in the real world can also have benefits in getting exposure in the press and relevant publications. This will, in many cases, generate a link back to your site, again helping you build trust and relevance.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, and really, I don’t like to attempt link building from a tactics perspective without having a clear and unique strategy tailored to each business. We see tactics that deliver great results for one business completely fail to deliver for another.

This game is all about determining what is right for you and adding links to your site that enrich the web and make the linking page a better place. Of course, to do this, you have to focus on ensuring your site is the very best it can possibly be so the linking site is improved by the link to yours.

Final thoughts

The best SEO often comes down to common sense. Spammy directory listings did not make sense. They were there purely for SEO. This backwards approach meant many sites were top-heavy with links with no content. All that time and effort spent, and no real value added to the site.

I talked about the psychology and history of this in a post on my own blog called “Ass Backwards Link Building” that really dives into how search engines work, the mentality of many low-end SEO agencies and how their practices are directly out of alignment with Google’s own “give, give, give” mentality.

Sure, Google shows us ads. Lots and lots of ads. But they gave us free access to the world’s information. In my mind, that is a good trade-off.

Unfortunately, though, we live in a world where we have folks looking for a cheap SEO solution, and there will always be some provider who will fill that gap — the demand for cheap SEO creates cheap SEO. Around and around we go… unless, of course, Penguin 4.0 finally puts pay to risky, low-value tactics.

I sincerely hope that Penguin 4.0 puts and end to the often daft link-building tactics of the past. Penguin may well need some fine-tuning, but link building in 2016 and beyond will mean tackling your website first — building something great, and then letting people know about it.

The post Authority & link building with real-time Penguin appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search in Pics: Google & YouTube cake, pumpkins & DJs

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.

GoogleBot at the AngularConnect conference:

googlebot-angular
Source: Twitter

DJs in suits at a Google partners party:

google-djs
Source: Twitter

Google’s 18th birthday cake:

google-birthday-cake-18
Source: Instagram

Google pumpkin:

google-pumpkin
Source: Instagram

YouTube cake:

youtube-cake
Source: Instagram

The post Search in Pics: Google & YouTube cake, pumpkins & DJs appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

SearchCap: Google Penguin recoveries, voice enabled maps & Landy Awards

searchcap-header-v2-scap

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

The post SearchCap: Google Penguin recoveries, voice enabled maps & Landy Awards appeared first on Search Engine Land.

iProspect, Razorfish, Wolfgang Digital earn multiple wins at 2016 Landy Awards

iprospect-2016-landy-awards

Three agencies picked up multiple awards Wednesday night as Search Engine Land hosted its second annual Landy Awards in front of a full crowd of more than 300 search marketers at Edison Ballroom in New York City.

iProspect won the coveted SEO Agency Of The Year award and also took home a trophy in the Best B2B SEM Initiative – Enterprise category. It’s the second straight year that iProspect has won multiple Landys.

But they weren’t the only agency to walk away with multiple honors.

Razorfish picked up wins in both the Best Mobile SEM Initiative and Best Retail SEM Initiative categories. Those are Razorfish’s first Landy Awards. And Wolfgang Digital, a Dublin, Ireland-based digital agency, picked up its first Landys in the Best SEM Initiative – Small Business and Best Cross-Channel Integration of Search categories.

The highly-coveted final award of the night, Best Overall Search Marketing Initiative, went to Edelman. Jennifer Johnstone of Piston Agency was named female Search Marketer Of The Year, and Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting won male Search Marketer Of The Year.

Without further ado, here’s the full list of 2016 Landy Award winners:

Best Local SEM Initiative
C-4 Analytics for a luxury car dealership

Best Local SEO Initiative
DAGMAR Marketing for Turner Pest Control

Best Mobile SEM Initiative
Razorfish for Lane Bryant

Best Retail SEM Initiative
Razorfish for Lane Bryant

Best Retail SEO Initiative
Go Fish Digital for a jewelry retailer

Best SEM Initiative – Small Business
Wolfgang Digital for McElhinneys

Best SEO Initiative – Small Business
Noble Studios for Tahoe South

Best Overall SEO Initiative – Enterprise
iCrossing for Microsoft

Best B2B SEM Initiative – Enterprise
iProspect for Microsoft Office 365

Best B2C SEM Initiative – Enterprise
Point It for Microsoft Store

Best Overall SEM Initiative – Enterprise
Acronym for Scotts Miracle-Gro

Best Cross-Channel Integration Of Search
Wolfgang Digital for Littlewoods Ireland

Search Marketer Of The Year
Jennifer Johnstone

Search Marketer Of The Year
Eric Enge

In-House Team Of The Year – SEO
Lenovo

In-House Team Of The Year – SEM
UPMC Health Plan

Agency Of The Year – SEM
Jellyfish

Agency Of The Year – SEO
iProspect

Best Overall Search Marketing Initiative
Edelman for Zagg

This year’s awards featured 19 categories, up from a dozen in 2015, and nearly 200 separate entries, which was almost double last year’s count. The entries were judged by an esteemed panel of search industry experts, including representatives from Google and Bing, as well as Search Engine Land’s editorial staff and contributors.

The event raised $5000 for the SoulMates program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a choice that was inspired by the experiences of our very own Monica Wright, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last November.

Stay tuned to Search Engine Land in the coming weeks as we profile some of the 2016 Landy Award winners and their successful search marketing campaigns.

The post iProspect, Razorfish, Wolfgang Digital earn multiple wins at 2016 Landy Awards appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Prepping SEO for 2017: it’s all about the ROI

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Fall is in the air, and that can only mean one thing for most digital marketers: budget season.

The approaching fourth quarter is often the time when companies begin the budget and planning process for the next fiscal year. And it seems that ROI, while always considered a top priority, has renewed importance now. Advertising Age recently reported that intense demand for ROI is causing companies to replace their CMOs at a rapid rate — as much as a 48-percent turnover in top retailers.

You’d think that ROI would be easy to track on digital, right? Compared to offline media, digital clearly has a tracking advantage. But integrating tracking correctly can be difficult, especially for what may be influencing channels and not the final purchase channel, which can be the case at times for organic search and SEO.

So what’s the answer? How do you integrate SEO into the tracking mix and prove the organic search channel’s ROI? How you’ll track ROI may differ based on the tools and data you have access to in your organization.

Determine your attribution model

If your organization hasn’t yet determined the attribution model to use, that’s where you’ll need to start. The attribution model is the basis for allocating credit to each marketing channel. There is no correct or incorrect attribution model or one that applies to all organizations. Each model is different, and you’ll need to decide which model best fits your business.

The most common attribution models are single-source attribution, measuring first touch or last touch. First-touch, as the name implies, gives all credit to the first channel or lead source that brought the customer or lead to your website. The first-touch channel is recorded and then never changed. By contrast, the last-touch attribution model credits the last channel the customer or lead used to come to your website. The last-touch channel is always updating as the customer or lead continues to interact with your site over time.

In part, these attribution models are most common because many measurement tools, like marketing automation or CRM (customer relationship management), often only have one field to store attribution data. Unfortunately, first- or last-touch attribution essentially ignores all of the channels that may have influenced a customer or lead in the process.

If you want to use a model that gives some level of credit to all channels that may have influenced along the way, consider a fractional attribution model, such as linear or time decay. Linear attribution credits all influencing channels equally, whereas time decay gives the most credit to the most recent channel and the least credit to the oldest channel for that customer or lead.

To track each lead’s or customer’s fractional attribution, however, you will likely need a new field created in marketing automation and/or CRM. I’ve often created what I call a “running lead source” field, which appends the last lead source to the end of the field every time a new channel is encountered by this lead:

running-lead-source

I can then download my leads into an Excel spreadsheet and break apart and examine the array of data in this field. I also find this approach useful for reviewing which content pieces had an impact on the buying cycle for leads.

Set up Google Search Console

Ideally, your website(s) already have Google Search Console (GSC) set up. And I expect that for many, it goes without saying that GSC is an essential SEO tool, helping you to understand measurements that you can’t typically ascertain on your own.

For instance, when we advertise using Google AdWords or other paid search platforms, the platforms provide us with impression data and click through rate (CTR). This helps us to understand how many people, when presented with our message, seemed interested enough to click through.

With organic search, however, it’s a bit more difficult. You don’t know how many people searched for your keywords and the CTR — unless you use GSC.

However, there are a few pitfalls to avoid with GSC:

  • GSC only keeps the last 90 days of search history. Be sure to download CSVs of data from GSC before that data is erased.
  • HTTP and HTTPS must be tracked under separate GSC website properties. Ideally, you should move to HTTPS for SEO reasons too, but if you still use both HTTP and HTTPS, you’ll need to have a GSC website property for each and then combine impressions and clicks data from each. However, do not combine or average percentage data, like click-through rate. You’d basically be taking an average of an average, which is inaccurate. You’ll need to calculate this on your own after combining the raw impressions and clicks first.
  • Mobile sites and desktop sites may be tracked separately. If you have a separate mobile website (not necessarily a responsive site) such as m.domain.com, then you’ll need a separate website property in GSC to track it.
  • Subdomains must be tracked on their own GSC website property. I know, not ideal. But Google clarifies how GSC sees domains in this highlight:subdomains

If you have to create multiple website properties in GSC, you can now at least tie them together using Property Sets, which allow you to see the data in a combined report.

Optimize website analytics

Whether you use Google Analytics (GA) or another website analytics package, website analytics data is incredibly helpful for understanding ROI. With GA, there are several steps I recommend to help track ROI:

  • Add your site’s domain to the referral exclusion list. Recently, I shared how a tracking change in Universal GA causes many sites to incorrectly attribute some traffic to the site’s own domain as a referral. Fixing this problem for one of my clients caused them to see an uptick of 16 percent week over week in organic search traffic that had been previously attributed as self-referral.
  • Set up goals. Goals can be any call to action on your website, but for ROI, you’ll likely want to track goals that are directly attributable to lead generation or purchase, such as a request for a quote or even a newsletter signup. Remember to be judicious in how you use your goals, because each reporting view is limited to 20 goals.
  • Set up e-commerce tracking. I expect most e-commerce companies already do this, but if not, be sure to set up e-commerce tracking in GA. It can give you an immediate view into actual sales from various channels.
  • Use the Attribution Modeling tool. Setting up goals and e-commerce tracking also helps provide more information in the GA Attribution Modeling tool. This tool allows you to compare various attribution models and determine which channels are performing best.
  • Connect GSC to GA. It’s helpful to have much of GSC’s data directly in GA.

If you want to get really sophisticated, you can try to upload your offline sales data into GA as well, using Data Import. Data can be uploaded manually or via the API; so if you don’t have a developer who can help you, it can be a highly manual process. Data Import will then reveal much of what you need to know about sales data directly in GA, including lifetime value. However, it still does not allow you to personally identify specific customers or prospects — just overall trends.

Integrate marketing automation and CRM

While website analytics are helpful, they cannot identify individual buyers and how those individual buyers found your site. Also, it’s difficult to ascertain lifetime value of a marketing channel when you can’t ascertain the lifetime value of an individual customer through a given marketing platform. That’s where your marketing automation and CRM tools come in.

Unlike Google Analytics, which dictates in its terms of use that you cannot have personally identifiable information, marketing automation and CRM are all about personally identifiable information.

Earlier I mentioned the running lead source field I created in my Marketo and Salesforce.com platforms. This allows me to pull data from Salesforce, along with lead status and opportunity and value information to determine which lead sources contributed to actual qualified leads, opportunities and total sales.

Begin to measure and report

In every case I’ve seen, organic search plays a significant role, if not the most important role, in conversion. Here’s the model I like to use to demonstrate the value of SEO in an ROI report, showing all of the stages that an organic search visitor likely came through. I use this particular table in Excel to calculate B2B ROI from a first- or last-touch attribution model:

roi-b2b

Another good report to run to determine the value of each channel is separate from ROI — Average Order Value (AOV) and Average Lifetime Value. If you are an e-commerce company, then you can likely track this by customer in your e-commerce platform. But when you’re tracking offline sales, you may need to calculate this yourself.

If you use Data Import for GA, you can track AOV in GA. Average lifetime value may be more difficult to track directly in GA, so you can use this table to help you calculate that:

aov lifetime

Once you have a list of all of your customers from the organic channel, you can determine what the average lifetime value is across the organic search channel by dividing the total lifetime value of all customers in this channel combined by total customers in this channel.

These tables are important because, when run against other channels, you’ll often find that organic search has high values. This can certainly help justify your value and the value of your service to the company.

If you use a fractional attribution model, however, you can’t really use the table above, as you might double-count conversions and sales against multiple channels. That’s where things get a bit more complicated. You’ll likely need to assign a percentage value to each channel that touched the customer, then only attribute a percentage of that sale’s value to each channel.

Use conversion rate optimization to improve organic conversion

Once you finally know these numbers from organic search, begin focusing on how to improve them. If you’re driving lots of organic traffic to your site, but that traffic isn’t meeting your site goals (lead generation or purchase), then consider how you can test improvements to your site through conversion rate optimization techniques.

Since our ultimate measurement is ROI, it’s not enough for marketers to consider SEO successful just because organic site traffic is high. ROI isn’t about traffic — it’s about revenue. Do everything you can to improve that progression from organic search visit to conversion so that those visitors have a greater opportunity to influence your ROI.

The post Prepping SEO for 2017: it’s all about the ROI appeared first on Search Engine Land.

The myth of the duplicate content penalty

Reality check, myth vs facts on duplicate content

Many people are more afraid of duplicate content than they are of spammy links.

There are so many myths around duplicate content that people actually think it causes a penalty and that their pages will compete against each other and hurt their website. I see forum posts, Reddit threads, technical audits, tools, and even SEO news websites publishing articles that show people clearly don’t understand how Google treats duplicate content.

Google tried to kill off the myths around duplicate content years ago. Susan Moska posted on the Google Webmaster blog in 2008:

Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.

You can help your fellow webmasters by not perpetuating the myth of duplicate content penalties!

Sorry we failed you, Susan.

What is duplicate content?

According to Google:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.

People mistake duplicate content for a penalty because of how Google handles it. Really, the duplicates are just being filtered in the search results. You can see this for yourself by adding &filter=0 to the end of the URL and removing the filtering.

Adding &filter=0 to the end of the page URL on a search for “raleigh seo meetup” will show me the exact same page twice. I’m not saying Meetup has done a good job with this, since they actually indicate the two versions (HTTP and HTTPS in this case) are both correct in their use of canonical tags, but I think it does show that the exact same page (or similar pages) are actually indexed, and only the most relevant is being shown. It’s not that the page is necessarily competing or doing any harm to the website itself.

Raleigh SEO Meetup SERPs showing duplicate content filtering

How much of the web is duplicated?

According to Matt Cutts, 25 to 30 percent of the web is duplicate content. A recent study by Raven Tools based on data from their site auditor tool found a similar result, in that 29 percent of pages had duplicate content.

What are Google’s thoughts on duplicate content?

Many great posts have been published by Googlers. I’m going to give you a summary of the best parts, but I recommend reading over the posts as well.

  • Duplicate content doesn’t cause your site to be penalized.
  • Googlers know that users want diversity in the search results and not the same article over and over, so they choose to consolidate and show only one version.
  • Google actually designed algorithms to prevent duplicate content from affecting webmasters. These algorithms group the various versions into a cluster, the “best” URL in the cluster is displayed, and they actually consolidate various signals (such as links) from pages within that cluster to the one being shown. They even went as far as saying, “If you don’t want to worry about sorting through duplication on your site, you can let us worry about it instead.”
  • Duplicate content is not grounds for action unless its intent is to manipulate search results.
  • About the worst thing that can happen from this filtering is that a less desirable version of the page will be shown in search results.
  • Google tries to determine the original source of the content and display that one.
  • If someone is duplicating your content without permission, you can request to have it removed by filing a request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
  • Do not block access to duplicate content. If they can’t crawl all the versions, they can’t consolidate the signals.

Sources:

Deftly dealing with duplicate content
Duplicate content due to scrapers
Google, duplicate content caused by URL parameters, and you
Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced
Learn the impact of duplicate URLs
Duplicate content (Search Console Help)

Causes of duplicate content

  • HTTP and HTTPS
  • www and non-www
  • Parameters and faceted navigation
  • Session IDs
  • Trailing slashes
  • Index pages
  • Alternate page versions such as m. or AMP pages or print
  • Dev/hosting environments
  • Pagination
  • Scrapers
  • Country/language versions

Solutions to duplicate content

The solution will depend on the particular situation:

  • Do nothing and hope Google gets it right. While I wouldn’t recommend this course of action, you may have read previously that Google will cluster the pages and consolidate the signals, effectively handling duplicate content issues for you.
  • Canonical tags. These tags are used to consolidate signals and pick your preferred version. It’s a pet peeve of mine when a website has canonical tags set correctly and I see an audit that says there are duplicate content issues. It’s not an issue at that point, so don’t say that it is.
  • 301 redirects. This would prevent pages from even having most duplication issues by preventing some alternate versions from being displayed.
  • Tell Google how to handle URL parameters. Setting these up tells Google what the parameters are actually doing instead of letting them try to figure it out.
  • Rel=”alternate”. Used to consolidate alternate versions of a page, such as mobile or various country/language pages. With country/language in particular, hreflang is used to show the correct country/language page in the search results. A few months ago, Google’s John Mueller, answering a question in the Webmaster Hangout, said that fixing hreflang wouldn’t increase rankings but would only help the correct version show. This is likely because Google has already identified the alternate versions and consolidated the signals for the different pages.
  • Rel=”prev” and rel=”next”. Used for pagination.
  • Follow syndication best practices.

TL;DR

There are some things that could actually cause problems, such as scraping/spam, but for the most part, problems would be caused by the websites themselves. Don’t disallow in robots.txt, don’t nofollow, don’t noindex, don’t canonical from pages targeting longer-tail to overview-type pages, but do use the signals mentioned above for your particular issues to indicate how you want the content to be treated. Check out Google’s help section on duplicate content.

Myths about duplicate content penalties need to die. Audits, tools and misunderstandings need correct information, or this myth might be around for another 10 years. There are plenty of ways to consolidate signals across multiple pages, and even if you don’t use them, Google will try to consolidate the signals for you.

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Google Maps app adds “Ok Google” voice command activation for hands free directions

google-maps2-ss-1920

Google announced they have updated the Google Maps app where you can now just say “Ok Google” to activate voice search within the app. You no longer need to tap the microphone icon or type in your destination search – just say “Ok Google.”

Google said on the latest version of the Google Maps app you can “enter navigation mode or driving mode, you can simply say “Ok Google” followed by a voice command, without needing to tap or even look at the screen.”

Here is a screen shot:

guidednavigation-1

Google has a whole slew of voice commands within the Google Maps app. They release a cheat sheet of these command and include:

Directions and travel:

  • “Mute.” or “Mute voice guidance.”
  • “Unmute.” or “Unmute voice guidance.”
  • “Show traffic.” or “Hide traffic.”
  • “Show satellite.” or “Hide satellite.”
  • “Navigate home.” or “Navigate to Starbucks.”
  • “Show route overview.” or “Show alternate routes.”
  • “What road is this?”
  • “What’s my next turn?”
  • “What’s my ETA?”
  • “How’s traffic ahead?” or “How’s traffic to home?”
  • “What’s the weather like?”
  • “Avoid tolls.” or “Enable tolls.”
  • “Avoid highways.” or “Enable highways.”
  • “Avoid ferries.” or “Enable ferries.”
  • “Exit navigation.”

More commands you can say:

  • “Call Mom.”
  • “Find gas stations.” or “Find restaurants.”
  • “Send a text to Larry.” or “Send a SMS to Sergey, I’m feeling lucky.”
  • “What’s the weather like?” or “How’s the weather in Seattle?”
  • “Play some jazz.” or “Play happy birthday on Google Play Music.”
  • “What’s the closest hotel?”
  • “When’s my next meeting?”

To make sure this feature is on, make sure you have the latest version of the app and then tap the overflow menu (the button with three dots), then tap “Settings”, and finally, tap ““OK Google” detection”. The “While driving” setting allows you to say “Ok Google” during navigation in Google Maps. If you’d like to do this anywhere on your device, you’ll need to enable the “Always on” setting (on some devices, the setting is called “From any screen”).

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Ladislao José Biro Google doodle honors the inventor of the ballpoint pen

Apple rolls out Search Ads for the App Store

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After a beta period that began in June, Apple is now opening up Search Ads for the App Store to all publishers and developers. It’s currently available for the iPhone and iPad only in the US.

While Apple will certainly make money from this program, the main rationale appears to be app discovery. Google has had search ads in the Play store for well over a year.

Search Ads will be delineated with a blue background. Apple will generate the ad images and copy from the app metadata supplied by the publisher or developer, so there’s no ad copy per se. It appears there will only be one ad per search.

Apple Search Ads

Developers set a max daily budget and an overall campaign budget. Apple’s Search Ads use the familiar “second price auction” to set winning bid prices. Apple says that relevance and bid price will determine which ads show. (Developers will pay on a “cost per tap” basis.)

Search Ads allow for bidding on the iPhone or iPad individually. There’s a keyword suggestion tool, with popularity indicators and negative keyword capabilities. There are audience targeting features, including customer type (e.g., has not downloaded) gender, age, and location. And of course there are analytics.

App store search is the dominant way that apps are discovered; however other discovery channels are now growing in relative importance according to comScore.

comScore app discovery

Beyond this, comScore says that roughly 50 percent of smartphone owners don’t download any new apps in a given month, while the average user downloads two apps per month.

comscore app downloads

 

Search Ads will go live in the App Store on October 5. Developers also receive a $100 credit for the first campaign.

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Updating your SEM toolbox with new, shiny tools –- SMX East 2016

webmaster-tools-development-ss-1920Ask any PPC manager how they do their job well, and, aside from their skill set, they’ll name the tools that give them the data they need and the time in their day to drive strategy.

In this session from SMX East 2016: “Updating Your SEM Toolbox with New, Shiny Tools,” Moderator Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster was joined by speakers Brad Geddes (@bgTheory) of AdAlysis, Daniel Gilbert (@dangilbertppc) of Brainlabs and Sahil Jain (@sahilio) of AdStage to share what SEM tools they rely on, and what shiny new tools they are most excited about.

Secrets of PPC productivity

First up was Brad Geddes with the secrets of PPC productivity, and he contends that time management is the key to good PPC management. There are so many tools out there, he says, and success is often determined not by what you use but when you use them.

Geddes believes that collaboration tools should be considered PPC tools — this includes things like Basecamp, Google Docs and more, because PPC managers have difficulty finding the time to fully give their attention to doing the important work of building campaigns.

Productivity is a challenge because we get interrupted often. He shares a post from Trello on finding productive hours in the day. PPC professionals have to be both managers and makers. So it’s important to find a schedule that works to your advantage.

Here’s a sample below from Trello’s blog post:

managers-makers

Some tips from Brad that work for him include:

  • Keep a clean office.
  • One monitor is better than two.
  • Keep your computer desktop clean.
  • Subscribe to SearchCap to stay on top of search news.
  • One-fifth of his email replies are machine-written — things like “done,” “I will take care of it” and “What do you think?”
  • Make meeting rules, and remember: Attending a meeting should not be viewed as an obstacle to be overcome; attending a meeting should be a privilege because you’re helping shape the direction of a company or its products and services
  • Use a project management tool — there isn’t a right one or wrong one, but there should be one that helps your team be more productiveproject-management-tools
  • Track time to find inefficiencies: Why does someone take double the time to do the same task compared to someone else?
  • Optimize customer support and client calls, and consider making a video to include in your FAQs if your clients ask  the same questions over and over.
customer-support

Finally, when determining what tools you need:

  1. Determine your process first.
  2. Ask yourself what you need to do.
  3. Figure out how often you need to do it.
  4. Look at how long it takes.
  5. Then, decide what tools fit each task
tools-process

The full slide deck from Brad’s presentation can be found here.

Free SEM tools

Up next, Sahil Jain talked about the free SEM tools you should be using.

Keyword research

  • Ubersuggest: Enter root keywords and get all variations, as well as ad group themes.
  • Soovle: Gives you an idea of what certain keyword searches look like across various sites like Google, Amazon, YouTube and others.
  • WordStream Keyword Niche Finder: This tool breaks down keywords into possible niches to give you ideas that are more specific.
  • Google Trends: Uncover popular searches, as well as seasonal searche.s
  • Answer the Public: Based on Google autosuggest data, search queries populate popular searches in the form of questions.
  • Search Cloudlet: This is a Firefox add-on that inserts smart tag clouds into the Google/Yahoo/Twitter interface to help you search faster — and the tag clouds reveal better search terms.
  • 5minutesite.com’s local keywords list: Great for local businesses or small businesses. Enter root keywords plus ZIP code and radius to get a list of keywords plus names of surrounding locations.

Keyword wrapping

Ad copy tools

  • Google AdWords preview tool to review competitor ads.
  • Quick character counters like Word Counter or Google Sheets using the equation: =len(cell #) to count character length.
  • CoSchedule’s headline analyzer and grader.

Testing

The full slide deck from Sahil’s presentation can be found here.

Maximizing activity with your PPC toolset

Last but not least was Daniel Gilbert, who talked about maximizing your effectiveness through the PPC tool set. He starts by saying that automation is not optional, it’s a must. One small account can have 10,000 keywords and a trillion data points.

There are many tools out there:

ppc-tools

But in this interactive session, Daniel wants to poll the audience to see what their favorite tools are in multiple categories, then he’ll reveal his. And he said if his choices don’t match the audience, he’ll remove his clothes (update: he only removed his sweatshirt).

Call tracking

Audience picks: DialogTech, Marchex, CallRail

Daniel’s choice: CallTrackingMetrics, CallRail, ResponseTap

call-tracking

Feed management

Audience picks: Whoop! App, Channel Intelligence

Daniel’s choice: GoDataFeed, FeedSpark, Productsup

feed-management

Competitor insights

Audience picks: SpyFu, SEMrush, Adgooroo

Daniel’s choice: Adgooroo, Adthena, SEMrush

competitor-insights

Important: There isn’t any tool out there that will estimate your competitor ad spend!

Account management

Audience picks: WordStream, AdAlysis, Brainlabs

Daniel’s choice: WordStream, Optymzr

account-management

Reporting

Audience picks: Supermetrics, Raven

Daniel’s choice: Swydo, Supermetrics, Periscope Data

reporting

Attribution

Audience picks: Google Analytics, Visual IQ, Adometry (now Google Attribution 360)

Daniel’s choice: Google Analytics, Abakus, CUBED Attribution

attribution

The full slide deck from Daniel’s presentation can be found here.

This info-packed session gave us all some more ideas on how to use tools to help us be more productive and successful in our paid search. I hope you get as much out of the recap as we all did in the session here at SMX East 2016.

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Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Google says Penguin recoveries have started to roll out now

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Gary Illyes from Google said tonight that those who were suffering from previous Penguin penalties should begin seeing recoveries as soon as right now. He said this on Twitter:

penguin-recoveries

This is one part of the Penguin update we saw happen this Friday – but this “recovery” part only started happening hours ago according to Gary Illyes.

You should also keep in mind that even if you do recovery, you won’t bounce back to where you were pre-Penguin penalty. Remember, as we covered earlier today, Penguin 4 devalues link spam now, so those links that once gave you such great rankings now do not count. However, while those spammy links do not count, they also don’t give your site an extra demotion on top of not counting. They simply are devalued, they don’t count for good or for bad.

The Penguin recovery roll out is happening now and can take a few days to fully roll out.

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SearchCap: Google Penguin & disavows, search ad news & Amazon search

searchcap-header-v2-scap

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

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Forrester study: How marketing analytics can boost the bottom line

analtyics_289640804-ss-1920Google recently asked Forrester Consulting to survey 150 marketing, analytics and IT executives about the measurement challenges they face. The results showed that:

Only 26% believed that their marketing analytics tools are well-integrated and work seamlessly together.

On the other hand, marketers are 39% more likely to see improvement in their overall marketing performance when they deploy a complete marketing analytics stack of 5 or more tools. Clearly, the right tools are critical to success.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download the full study and learn more.

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Report: Amazon grows lead as product search engine of choice

A consumer survey recently conducted on behalf of retail personalization platform BloomReach found that Amazon has increased its lead as the product search engine of choice for US consumers. Last year 44 percent reported starting their search for products on Amazon; this year it’s 55 percent.

The “State of Amazon” study polled 2,000 US consumers in September. A survey released earlier this year by PowerReviews (n=1,000 consumers) found a narrower lead for Amazon (38 percent) vs. Google (35 percent) as the starting point for product search.

Amazon is utilized as a starting point by twice as many people as use traditional search engines. On mobile devices search engines do a bit better: 34 percent vs Amazon’s 50 percent.

Bloomreach Amazon Bloomreach Amazon

Even if it’s not the starting point, Amazon is still used during the online shopping process: “9 in 10 say they check Amazon even if they found a product they want on a retailer’s site.”

Overall the Amazon user experience was cited as superior to most retailers and as a major loyalty driver: 53 percent of survey respondents said that Amazon offered the best site experience overall. In addition, 58 percent of consumers said they have abandoned a retailer site for Amazon after a poor site experience.

Bloomreach Amazon

The chart above reflects usage patterns among consumers with a product in mind (left) as well as those uncertain about what to buy (right). Amazon is more widely used by those who know what they want but still heavily used by those who do not.

One daunting finding for traditional retailers: survey respondents expect to do half of their holiday shopping online, with 94 percent planning to shop on Amazon.

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Google Penguin doesn’t penalize for bad links – or does it?

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Google Penguin launched the real-time, more granular version, on Friday. Google wrote in their announcement that it “now devalues.”

Many SEOs and webmasters took that to mean that Penguin no longer penalizes – and it seems like they are right.

Google’s Gary Illyes said on my public Facebook post that the new Penguin algorithm “managed to devalue spam instead of demoting.” But he also said that Google’s recommendations for using the disavow file has not changed. Meaning, you should use the disavow file to help recover from Penguin issues.

But if Google only devalues the spam and doesn’t demote the spam, then why use the disavow file?

Gary Illyes said in the Facebook that for Penguin “specifically there’s less need” to use the disavow file. Gary also added “you can help us help you by using it.” Adding that “also, manual actions are still there, so if we see that someone is systematically trying to spam, the manual actions team might take a harsher action against the site.”

So in short, it seems Google Penguin no longer penalizes the site or specific pages but rather ignores/devalues the spammy links and thus the rankings are adjusted. Gary said this should this should make webmasters “happier,” adding “and that makes me happy.”

Here is a screen shot of the raw conversation:

penguin-devalue

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