Thursday, August 31, 2017

SearchCap: Google local pack mentions, Google Shopping reports & PPC evals

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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Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Google local pack tests displaying website mentions matching your query

Google is testing displaying in the local pack results if the local website returns the keywords you searched for on their website. For example, if you search for [climate control] in a specific region, the local pack might add an additional line to the search snippet, mentioning if the website in the local listing actually has those words on their web pages.

Here is a screen shot from Matt Schexnayder of Sparefoot, who sent this tip to us:

It is unclear if this means that the local results use the local listing’s website content for ranking purposes or not. All this is telling us is that Google local is indeed aware if the local business website has the query’s content on their website.

We have emailed Google for a comment, but at this point, it seems like a limited test.

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SearchCap: Alexa & Cortana, Google Assistant speakers & Google Maps parking

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

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

Search Marketing

The post SearchCap: Alexa & Cortana, Google Assistant speakers & Google Maps parking appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Safeguard your Google Analytics data

The digital space has given marketers massive reach and capability. But with that power comes responsibility, along with an obligation to protect data that can be recognized as personally identifiable information (PII). Recurring audits and safeguards built into your technical layer are critical to ensuring that PII doesn’t pass into your Google Analytics.

Read Cardinal Path’s guide to data security and privacy for:

  • best practices for mitigating risks of PII and limiting chances of common occurrences.
  • tips on assessing whether you have PII present within your GA account.
  • approaches to auditing and solutions for resolving the issues of PII.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download ” Personally Identifiable Information: Responsible Practices to Safeguard your Google Analytics Data”

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Your account structure might be hurting performance. Here’s why (and how to fix it)

When it comes to managing AdWords, something I’ve come across time and again is that lots of accounts are oversegmented. I’ve seen AdWords accounts with almost awe-inspiring intricacy. No dimension unsegmented; no campaign setting untweaked; no minute negative keyword unadded. I think we’ve officially reached the point at which some of you are too good at your jobs.

Automation is better than it’s ever been. It’s so good, in fact, that it often beats oversegmented, even overengineered accounts. Campaigns can be segmented by devices, match types, audiences, geographies and more. Campaigns shouldn’t be segmented by all of those.

AdWords Smart Bidding looks at specific queries (and the context of those queries)

Overly segmented account structures are attempting to approximate something that Smart Bidding already does: bid to a user’s specific search query and adjust bids for devices, time of day and audiences to control the impact on the advertiser’s objective. AdWords Smart Bidding considers dozens of additional signals and the combinations of them, like mobile devices at nighttime in a specific area.

You don’t need to manually define each segment’s value if you’re accurately tracking your conversions in AdWords. Tell Smart Bidding what your end goal is, then track performance. You can stop using CPC bidding as a proxy for value; Smart Bidding can boil everything down to what really matters for you, whether that’s a CPA or ROAS goal.

A simpler proposal

Your default campaign structure should be a lot more straightforward. This may sound insane, but here’s how I think campaigns should be organized:

  • Organize your ad groups around what ads you want to serve to groups of users.
  • Organize your campaigns around your objective and KPI.

Some aspects of campaign setup warrant separate campaigns — such as budgetary control and the countries/territories where you can actually sell your goods and services. There is no longer a need for additional campaigns to work around long-gone AdWords limitations surrounding bidding and messaging. Bidding has Smart Bidding. Ad text has ad customizers. Audience targeting benefits from both Smart Bidding and ad customizers.

One thing in particular that I want to highlight is separate campaigns or ad groups by match type. The AdWords system is set up to prefer the more specific keyword, and in those rare cases when it doesn’t, it’s to your benefit. A less specific keyword will trigger only if you’re projected to have a higher Ad Rank and a lower CPC. (You might even consider de-duplicating your match types of the same keyword in your account. That’s too big a topic to cover here.) Ultimately, what may seem like sloppy structure is actually saving you money.

If you have a set of high-performing keywords that deserve their own budget, you should break those out. That’s a case where it makes sense to make such a management decision. But that should be for your best stuff. Let performance dictate what gets priority.

The benefits of aggregated campaigns

An overly segmented AdWords campaign structure can actually be a serious barrier to performance.

1. Automation works better on large sets of information.

AdWords’ Smart Bidding can work on pretty paltry data. But it works even better when it has large amounts of insight to feed into its machine learning. Larger campaigns, including data across all different types of cross-device, cross-user-list, cross-time insights, tend to perform better. A bigger campaign is actually more likely to perform better when you fully embrace automation.

2. There are fewer ads to maintain.

Keeping up with your ads is a lot of work. The smarter you are about the amount of work you create for yourself, the more your work time is spent on finding and deploying great messaging. And the less time you have to spend making sure that you’ve copied/pasted your ads across all nine device-specific campaigns that advertise women’s tankinis to previous customers who reside in New England.

There are ways to customize ads geographically without a duplicate campaign. If you find yourself copying/pasting tons of ads, while only changing the tracking parameters to capture the name of your highly specific ad groups and campaigns, you might not need that additional campaign.

3. There are fewer ad extensions to maintain.

Ad extensions are fantastic. They’re a universally good thing, and it’s important to enable everything that makes sense for your business. As your campaigns multiply, so does your need to monitor all of those extensions. You’ll have to start by ensuring that they’re implemented, then you’ll have to ensure that they don’t overlap with your ad text.

4. It’s easier to manage negative keywords.

I totally get the impulse to use negative keywords to shape traffic, but the obsession with seeing that every query matched to the intended ad group is misguided. As I mentioned earlier, the system is set up to save you money when serving less specific keywords. You should instead investigate why a less specific keyword/ad group is that much better than what you intended.

And once you let go of using negatives as traffic cops, they can return to their original usage: eliminating queries that aren’t a match for what you’re selling online.

5. It’s easier to identify insights.

Instead of looking through 9+ campaigns, you can look at one campaign and see how things are trending. And you’ll always have the ability to segment for deeper insights down the road.

The current status quo of pivoting a bunch of campaigns into one high-level output can be turned on its head. You’ll instead start with aggregated insights, then segment data as needed. I think it’s a much more useful way to keep an eye on trends.

6. It’s easier to make decisions.

When you’re doing a better job identifying insights, you make it easier on yourself to make decisions that improve your account. Once your structure allows you to spot trends, you can adapt to those trends more quickly.

Conclusion

I know moving away from oversegmentation is a big change, but I think it’s an important one. If you want to dip your toe in the waters to start, consider consolidating some ad groups together and see how performance trends.

You could even use campaign drafts and experiments to run a split test of consolidated ad groups against segmented ad groups. (As you’re evaluating performance on that campaign, remember to factor in management time.) If performance is roughly even, that’s a big win for consolidated campaigns/ad groups. You’re saving time, which frees you up to do bigger and better things for your account.

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Alexa and Cortana will soon work together, allowing each to access the other

Earlier this morning Amazon and Microsoft announced that their virtual assistants will soon work together. Alexa devices will be able to access Cortana, and Cortana will be able to open Alexa:

Alexa customers will be able to access Cortana’s unique features like booking a meeting or accessing work calendars, reminding you to pick up flowers on your way home, or reading your work email – all using just your voice. Similarly, Cortana customers can ask Alexa to control their smart home devices, shop on Amazon.com, interact with many of the more than 20,000 skills built by third-party developers, and much more.

It’s an enlightened approach on the part of both companies. Alexa will benefit from Cortana’s general knowledge and web-search capabilities, as well as Office integration. Cortana gains distribution via Amazon hardware devices.

It’s also consistent with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s vision to make Microsoft software tools available on rival platforms, such as iOS and Android. “Later this year” is the stated time frame for the availability of the integration.

At least on the Amazon side, you’ll have to use the awkward multistep language now familiar to Alexa users (“Alexa ask  . . . “). Third-party content integrations — let’s call them “voice apps” and not “skills” — are keys to the long-term success of these assistant platforms. The more difficult it is to access that third-party content, the less likely it will be used.

The New York Times has an interesting story on the genesis of the Microsoft-Amazon partnership and the thinking behind it. The article quotes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos extensively. He says he has not reached out to Google or Apple but would welcome similar arrangements with those companies.

Both are unlikely to make their assistants available through Alexa devices. However, it’s not entirely out of the question. Apple made a version of Safari and iTunes for Windows, and Google apps are obviously available on iOS.

Some analysts have predicted as many as 30 million virtual assistant devices in US homes by the end of the year. Given how rapidly the market is developing, that number may turn out to be conservative.

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Advanced budget management made easy with scripts

It’s the end of the month, so chances are you’re spending a lot of time thinking about PPC budgets. Will you spend the full amount you allocated for the month and do so without going over budget?

It’s pretty amazing that simple questions like this have to take so much thought from account managers. There’s gotta be an automation for this, right? Once again, AdWords Scripts to the rescue!

So read on, and I’ll point you to some useful ones that have been around awhile and share a brand-new script for allocating budgets equitably among multiple locations in hard-to-target cities.

Translating PPC budgets to business budgets

Part of the reason budgets are such a pain is that the engines think about them differently from the average company. A company sets monthly, quarterly or annual budgets. AdWords, on the other hand, relies on daily budgets.

Ad Budgets

Companies tend to think about budgets pretty broadly; for example, they might have a marketing budget with a subset of that allocated for AdWords. But AdWords works primarily with campaign budgets. Facebook gets even more granular with Ad Set budgets.

Because of the way advertisers have to set up budgets in the engines, even a simple business requirement like spending $10,000 on AdWords this month can get pretty tricky.

Solution #1: Spend your whole budget for the month

Let’s tackle the first common budget problem: how to make sure that every campaign or shared budget spends the full amount, even when there are a few days in which traffic may have been unexpectedly weak.

Google automatically handles this to some degree with overdelivery. But overdelivery is limited to 20 percent of the budget per day, so it won’t always be able to make up the difference.

It’s also a challenge for advertisers because they will often set a daily budget they think will help them achieve a goal, but they’ll have a monthly budget amount in the back of their mind. There’s no way to communicate the true budget goal to Google. Google simply assumes that the real goal is to spend 30.4 times the daily budget in any month.

Luckily, Google has written a great AdWords script to help reach budgets, wherein you set a monthly target, and the script updates the daily budget based on how much is left to be spent and how many days are left.

At Optmyzr, we made this script available in our patent-pending Enhanced Scripts library, and we even gave it the ability to use historical day-of-week patterns to allocate more budget to higher-potential days of the week — a feature that’s particularly useful in the last few days of the month, when Google may miss out on the fact that you typically spend relatively little on the weekend.

Reach Target Monthly Spend Script

This preview from AdWords scripts shows how the script is able to detect historical day-of-week delivery patterns and use this to set an appropriate daily budget to ensure the full budget will be spent by the end of the month. Screen shot courtesy Google, August 2017.

While these tools help ensure you’re not underspending, we’re still left with the problem over overspending.

Solution #2: Don’t exceed your budgets

If you don’t make many changes in AdWords, you could use the daily budget to make sure you’re never spending too much for a campaign for the month. Remember, they will not bill you more than 30.4 times the daily budget amount for any month; they call this the monthly charging limit.

But advertisers reading posts on Search Engine Land are probably not content to use a set-it-and-forget-it approach. The moment you shift budgets between campaigns in an attempt to optimize, or the moment you use a script like the one above, the calculation of the monthly charging limit no longer matches your true monthly budget goal.

Furthermore, a well-managed account uses as much granularity as possible because it provides more control. So advanced advertisers likely use campaign-level budgets rather than one shared budget for the whole account. This means that the company goal of a certain monthly AdWords budget still has to be translated into separate campaign budgets.

Now, you could use Automated Rules to turn off campaigns when they spend too much, but these rules can only run once per day, so your ads could continue to accrue additional cost for 23 hours and 59 minutes after they hit their limit.

Budget Forecast Tool from Optmyzr

Account managers usually want to stay within a total monthly budget across their entire AdWords account, so they may build spreadsheets or tools to track how they are doing against their targets. Screen shot courtesy of Optmyzr, August 2017.

To address this, we created a free script that can pause all campaigns in an account when the monthly target budget for the account is reached. It’ll even re-enable all the campaigns it paused when the next month starts. When I created this script, I thought it’d also be useful to give advertisers the ability to set budgets at a lower level than the campaign. So I added budgets for ad groups, keywords and ads.

The use case this solves is when advertisers add new keywords to experimental campaigns because they fear these new keywords could take away too much budget from keywords that have been in the account awhile and whose performance is already well understood.

When these keywords eventually prove themselves, they have to be moved into the non-experimental campaign, and they lose history. With this script, an advertiser can simply add a new keyword or ad into the place it should eventually be and use a script to limit its budget until it has proven itself.

Solution #3: Maximize traffic and split budgets fairly for franchises

But could we use a script like the one mentioned above to enforce budgets at another level, like by location? At first that may seem like a bit of a stupid suggestion, because after all, campaigns have location targeting and a campaign budget, so aren’t budgets in AdWords today effectively location budgets? While that’s true, there is a scenario in which I believe this can still be useful.

Ad Budget By ZIP Code

Say you’re running ads for a franchise. Typically, you’ll set up separate campaigns for each location, each with its own budget. But in densely populated areas, you might have multiple franchises in the same city.

For example, in Mountain View alone, there are eight Subway sandwich shops. If each of those locations needs to get their fair share of PPC advertising dollars, you could use separate campaigns with ZIP code targeting.

But the problem is that as you get more granular with targeting, Google is not always able to know where a user is, and you end up losing traffic. In one of my own campaigns, I looked at postal code data for our ads when they show in Australia. There were 18 clicks with a postal code associated. But in that same day, there were 30 clicks from Australia.

So Google didn’t know enough about the location for these 12 clicks to associate them with a postal code. These 12 clicks would have been lost if I were targeting only postal codes, rather than broader entities like cities or regions. So, to get more volume and to reduce the number of campaigns you need to maintain, it’s often desirable to target broader locations, like cities or regions.

But as a franchise, if I run a campaign for all of Mountain View, it’s possible that one of the locations eats up 70 percent of the budget, leaving just a small amount for the remaining six locations. While it may make sense from a business perspective to spend more where there are more people, in a franchise model, there is often a contract that says every location will get its fair share of the ad spend.

So here’s a script that looks at location data for a campaign and lets you disable specific granular locations when they exceed a certain level of spend for the month.

Conclusion

Budgets are not hard to understand, but they can be time-consuming and tedious to manage manually. Looking at whether daily budgets are dialed in to fully spend the target; ensuring an account hasn’t spent too much; and analyzing budget usage for granular locations are all well-defined tasks — all of this makes these tasks ideal for automation with AdWords scripts.

 

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Google Assistant coming to more speakers and home appliances from LG

Earlier today at German consumer electronics and appliances show IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung) in Berlin, Google announced that the Google Assistant will be coming to new smart speakers and home appliances. With the move Google is more aggressively competing with Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana for third party hardware and software integration.

The company said that a range of new speakers will get the Assistant:

  • Zolo Mojo by Anker
  • TicHome Mini by Mobvoi
  • GA10 by Panasonic

These devices will be able to deliver the capabilities and functionality of Google Home and will be available in the US and Canada, Australia, Germany and France. On a smaller scale (right now) this is analogous to Google’s Android OS strategy, with the Assistant powering third party hardware. Alexa and Cortana are also pursuing a similar strategy.

Perhaps more interesting than the extension of the Google Assistant to more smart speakers is its integration with a range of home appliances. This is what I had originally envisioned for Samsung when it announced the acquisition of Viv (founded by the former CEO of Siri).

In its blog post Google announced South Korean manufacturer LG as its first major appliances partner:

[W]ith manufacturers like LG, you’ll be able control your appliances, including washers, dryers, vacuums and more from your Assistant on your smart speaker, Android phone or iPhone (any device with the Google Assistant built in!). Need to clean up? It’s as easy as “Ok Google, start vacuuming.” Want to know if your favorite jeans are clean?? “Ok Google, are my clothes clean?” or “is the laundry done?” Getting help around the house will be easier than ever.

Participating appliances will be controllable from the Google Assistant and any Assistant-enabled device (e.g., third party speakers). It doesn’t appear from the material I’ve seen that the Assistant will be directly integrated into the appliance (e.g., the dishwasher). In other words you talk to Google Home or your smartphone or an equivalent device, rather than directly to the dishwasher. However that could quickly change.

Google also said in its post that there are “more than 70 home automation manufacturers” (e.g., Honeywell), currently compatible with Google Assistant. And the company indicated in an email that more brands will be announced over the course of the week at IFA.

There are several noteworthy things here:

  • Integration of Google Assistant into third party hardware, which will quickly expand both in terms of partners and device categories
  • The corresponding acceleration of the “smart home”
  • The intensification of competition in the virtual assistant space, with Google and Amazon as market leaders, followed by Cortana, Siri and Samsung in the second tier

We’re going to have to wait to see how well and smoothly these devices work with Google Assistant. Simplicity and usability will be key to adoption and success. But make no mistake we are now in an episode of The Jetsons.

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Google says we don’t need no stinking location modifiers… or do we?

Last week, Google declared that the “near me” search query and other “geo-modifiers” (e.g., ZIP code, city name) were, if not dead, then certainly not worth spending your valuable SEO time worrying too much about:

In September 2015, we shared that “near me” or “nearby” searches on Google had grown 2X in the previous year. Now, just two years later, we see that behavior has continued to change. Make no mistake, people still use ”near me” to discover places of interest around them. But we’re now seeing a shift toward dropping location qualifiers (like zip [sic] codes, neighborhoods, and “near me” phrasing) in local searches, because people know that the results will automatically be relevant to their location — thanks to their phone. It’s kind of magical. In fact, this year, search volume for local places without the qualifier “near me” has actually outgrown comparable searches that do include ”near me.” [see data] Over the last two years, comparable searches without “near me” have grown by 150% [see data].

But, as you can see through Google Trends, it’s not just that “implicit” local search queries (searches for local places without the local qualifier) are growing rapidly — it’s that they have always had a much higher base volume as well.

Google Trends Near Me

Source: Google Trends

So, we get it — the search term “tacos” is a better term to target than “tacos costa mesa.” However, Google treats implicit/explicit/”near me” searches differently. Just look at these different results (searches were all done from the same location with an incognito browser):

Tacos (located in Costa Mesa, CA)

Tacos

Tacos Costa Mesa

Tacos Costa Mesa

Costa Mesa Tacos

Costa Mesa Tacos

Tacos Near Me (located in Costa Mesa)

Tacos Near Me

While there’s overlap, literally none of the results above are the same. That tells us that Google evaluates all of these queries differently. Not only that, but according to our 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors study (2017 version coming soon), it looks like Google is looking at different ranking factors as well.

Here’s how various factors correlated with high rankings in the Local Pack for implicit and explicit local search queries:

Explicit v Implicit Local SEO Ranking Factors

So, this requires a more holistic approach to location-based SEO. Local SEO isn’t just about fixing data accuracy problems, it’s about making sure that clients are effectively optimized for the myriad terms and paths that will generate them business.

That means implicit geo-location queries like “tacos” may have the highest search volume and best growth opportunity, but if you’re skipping other term variations, you are leaving money on the table.

For example, here is the monthly search volume for these searches in Pleasanton, Calif.:

Tacos — 210
Tacos Near Me — 140
Tacos Costa Mesa — 50
Costa Mesa Tacos — 10

If you are only focusing on “tacos,” that’s 210 monthly searches, or 51 percent of the potential traffic out there for core taco-related terms (and there are likely hundreds of long-tail “taco” queries for a city, each with their own unique results). Now, start applying that to, say, a 100-location business, and that’s 21,000 potential customers you are trusting Google to send to the right place.

This is part of the reason why we treat ALL these terms as a “taco” search. Because given the particular searcher, their search behavior, and proximity to your location, they could theoretically be engaging in any of these searches.

By the way, the #1 tacos-related search term?

Tacos Nearby — 590

So I wouldn’t abandon “near me” optimizations just yet.

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Google Home partnership with Condé Nast’s Vogue offers new model for publishers

In what is sure to be a model for other publishers, last week Google and Vogue magazine announced a partnership that offers “behind the scenes” audio content from selected Vogue magazine interviews. Most of these are monologues from the writers about their subjects.

By asking Google Home to “talk to Vogue” (one of several ways to invoke the content), users hear a brief introduction and then a menu of choices, which in this case includes five articles from the September issue on Jennifer Lawrence, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Serena Williams and Megyn Kelly.

There’s a corresponding indicator in the print magazine about which articles offer Google Home companion “behind the scenes” audio content. Each piece is split into shorter and longer segments. The speaker in each case is the author of the article initially answering the question, “What is [interviewee] like?” Then there’s an option to hear more in-depth information.

Julia Chen Davidson (Partner Marketing Lead, Google Home) told me that it was Google’s idea to approach Condé Nast but that the company was already in the process of exploring other content expansion and distribution options. When I suggested the experience was analogous to podcasting, she pointed out that the content from Vogue is more interactive, with the opportunity to select specific pieces in a non-linear order. “It’s more conversational,” she explained.

While this is the first such partnership for Google, the company is already talking to other publishers and partners. “There’s lots of curiosity,” Chen said. Indeed, this is something that many more publishers should explore sooner rather than later.

Google’s Chen wouldn’t discuss specifics but said that she and Google were “really pleased with the response” to the launch. To promote it, Google did a social/influencer campaign, and Vogue offered pages in the magazine (image above). The still photograph at the top of this page comes from a video, which shows a variety of women listening to the content as some browse the magazine.

This dual-media opportunity is very interesting because it could make some print content interactive and “trackable” in new ways (e.g., articles that drive Home engagement). It very quickly opens the door to voice-based commerce as well. One can imagine a partnership between Google (Express), a retailer or brand and a publisher to enable selected items in print ads to be easily ordered and delivered.

This is my speculation, however. Google didn’t talk specifically about monetization. As always with a new product, Google is focused on the consumer experience and “voice UI optimization,” as Chen described it.

Magazines have suffered significant subscriber and ad-revenue declines in the past decade. Publishers might be able to use Home (and other smart speakers) to extend their brands and content into this new medium and, in some cases, connect print and audio — to “digitize” the traditional print medium. (This is not unlike what out-of-home advertising has done with mobile-location data.)

But the model isn’t limited to traditional publishers. One can imagine brands and retailers creating entertaining or instructive audio content for smart speakers that is exposed or marketed via other channels: print, outdoor, TV, and even radio.

The Google-Vogue partnership points the way to a great many provocative scenarios ahead.

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Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Google Maps Android app adds ‘find parking’ feature to show you nearest parking garage

Google Maps is making it easy for Android users to find parking options.

The Android app now has a “find parking” button on the direction card that is displayed once you search for your location. The button leads to a list of parking garages and lots near the intended location.

Users can select their preferred parking option, and the app will automatically add it to their trip, along with walking directions from the parking spot to their destination.

The “find parking” feature was rolled out in 25 US cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, DC, Detroit, Portland, Orlando and St. Louis.

In addition to its latest feature, the app has expanded its “parking difficulty” feature for Android and iOS apps to 25 international cities, including Amsterdam, Dusseldorf, London, Milan, Rio de Janeiro and Vancouver.

When available, the parking difficulty icon appears in the bottom of a direction card screen, and it ranks parking availability as “limited,” “medium” or “easy” based on historical parking data.

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SearchCap: Google AdWords ad rotation, local panel ads & trip search

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

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

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Google upgrades flight and hotel search to provide price grid views & more

Google announced several upgrades to both their flight search and hotel search features to aid searchers in finding the most economical options for their trips.

Rolling out on Google Flights is the ability to ability to click on “Dates” to see the calendar view of date combinations with the cheapest prices highlighted in green and the most expensive in red. You can also see price graphs over time if you have a certain length of trip in mind. This feature is available on mobile and rolling out to desktop later this year. Here is a GIF of these flight search features in action:

Often, flying to different nearby cities’ airports can save you on flight costs. Google also added the ability to see all nearby airports on an interactive map, view the distance between each one and your final destination and select the most convenient airports to include in your results. Here is a screen shot of this feature:

Google Hotel search added a nightly rate in the calendar view that shows you a similar grid of prices for the hotel you selected. You can also check out price trends for a hotel to see how rates change over time. Here is a GIF of that in action:

Also, Google formally announced the hotel price labels on the interactive maps in this blog post. This is something we covered a month ago:

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Google says it will offer antitrust remedy to EU to avoid further penalties

Google parent Alphabet is preparing to comply with EU regulators’ demand that it no longer “favor its own content” in shopping search results. Google must propose a solution that will offer “equal treatment” to Google’s shopping rivals by Tuesday at midnight.

In June, Google received a long-anticipated antitrust fine of EUR 2.4 billion (now $2.9 billion). The European Commission gave the company until September 28 to discontinue its alleged anti-competitive practices. Google’s indication that it will comply suggests it has declined to challenge the Commission’s decision in court.

Failing to meet the Tuesday deadline would expose Alphabet to additional fines, which could amount to millions of dollars per day. The question is: what will Google’s proposal look like? Will it affect shopping-related ad placement in search results? It’s not clear to me whether ads will be impacted.

Before current European Commission head Margrethe Vestager took office in late 2014 and adopted a more aggressive approach toward antitrust, Google was on the cusp of settlement with former European Commission competition chief Joaquín Almunia.

However, Almunia was unable to sell any of several Google proposals to colleagues and European politicians. Those proposals included modification of search results to make competitive offerings more prominent. A formal Statement of Objections was filed in April 2015 which stated the following:

  • Google systematically positions and prominently displays its comparison shopping service in its general search results pages, irrespective of its merits.
  • Google does not apply to its own comparison shopping service the system of penalties which it applies to other comparison shopping services on the basis of defined parameters, and which can lead to the lowering of the rank in which they appear in Google’s general search results pages.
  • As a result of Google’s systematic favouring of its subsequent comparison shopping services, Google Product Search and Google Shopping, both experienced higher rates of growth, to the detriment of rival comparison shopping services.

Any proposed remedy will need to address these considerations, among others. Accordingly, Google may need to remove any results at the top of search results that points to Google Shopping or other Google-hosted content. Addressing this in a mobile context could bring the unwelcome return of “10 blue links.”

On the desktop, Google could use the right column for display of Google Shopping ads or content. It could also take a native advertising approach and put third-party content at the top of the page, moving Google Shopping results and ads down the page, which could also be done in mobile.

Shopping search is the first of multiple antitrust cases that Google faces, including potentially other “vertical search” categories (e.g., Travel, Maps/Local). Other active cases involve exclusivity provisions in Google AdWords agreements and Android-OEM contracts.

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Buying a pre-owned domain? Check these 10 things first

With over 1 billion websites on the World Wide Web today, it comes as no surprise that the domain name you may want to use is already owned by someone else. Luckily, in some cases, the current owner might be willing to part with it — for the right price.

Acquiring a pre-owned domain can have a drastic impact on your SEO efforts, so it is important to approach such a purchase with caution. It is recommended that you do your due diligence — it’s not uncommon for a domain name to have changed hands many times, and just like buying a used car, it’s often difficult to get the full history.

While examining the SERPs and scanning for any spammy links may be a good first step, it’s important to conduct a thorough assessment to ensure that the domain does not have a manual action penalty or warning from Google. There are many small issues that may not initially be cause for concern; however, in aggregate, these problems can seriously hamper your domain’s ability to rank.

If you’ve bought, or are looking to buy, a pre-owned domain, read below for 10 things you should check before proceeding with a site migration:

1. Google Search Console

Obtaining access to the Google Search Console account is critical for analyzing the health of the domain you’re looking to acquire. If you don’t have the credentials to this account, it’s worthwhile to reach out to the current admin and request access. Likewise, if this property hasn’t been set up, you can request for it to be done at this time.

Once logged into the Search Console account, you’ll want to go to Search Traffic > Manual Actions and look for any notes on the account.

You can also click on Security Issues, which will notify you if Google suspects that your website has been hacked.

While you can still make a valid assessment about the domain’s health by performing other checks, it’s highly recommended that you access Google Search Console if possible, since this is the only way to see manual action penalties on the domain.

2. Google Analytics & Bing Webmaster Tools

If you have access to Google Analytics (GA), poke around the account and make note of any abnormal traffic patterns or unusual URLs receiving organic traffic. You can also look at referral traffic to determine if spammy websites are mainly responsible for driving traffic to the site. If the site does not have GA set up, you won’t be able to backfill the data, therefore making this check null and void.

Similar to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools has a site security section that will alert you about malware, phishing attempts and changes in your sites SSL certificate status. You can also visit the “Page Traffic” report under Reports & Data to assess the top landing pages, much like GA.

3. Site indexation (SERP analysis)

Use the site search operator [site:yourwebsite.com] to conduct a Google search, and check for any spammy or malicious landing pages in the SERPs. You can also add on the search operator [inurl:keyword], replacing “keyword” with red flag terms like “online games,” “gambling,” “porn” and so on.

While Google typically displays a warning in the SERPs when it detects a hacked site, not all content may be flagged. Read here for a more comprehensive look at a hacked site.

4. Blacklist status

Your domain may be blacklisted if there is a history of sending spammy emails, which may in turn lead to your email server’s IP address getting blocked. You can check the Blacklist status of the domain you seek to acquire by using Site Securi.

5. Internal & external linking

One telltale sign of domain misuse is link manipulation. A compromised domain may use overly specific anchor text phrases to link out to other spammy content. In some cases, when hackers want to remain even more elusive, the anchor text will remain unchanged, making link manipulation even harder to detect.

Fortunately, you can use a tool such as Screaming Frog, which allows you to crawl up to 500 URLS for free. Once in the program, click the “outlinks” tab at the bottom to see what a specific URL links to.

When looking at external linking, you can use a tool like Majestic to get a snapshot of the backlink profile. From here, you can take a deep dive into other off-page factors, such as the referring domains which send the most backlinks to the site.

You can even get as granular as seeing which TLDs (top-level domains) your backlinks are coming from. For example, if you have a US-based website and notice that 90 percent of your backlinks are coming from Taiwan, that may be cause for concern.

Similarly, having a disproportionate amount of backlinks coming from one or more sites that may imply that the domain used a pay-to-play strategy to acquire those links, or perhaps the site has been the unfortunate recipient of negative SEO.

6. Anchor text usage

Another important but often overlooked off-page factor is anchor text usage. Anchor text is simply a word or phrase that is hyperlinked and takes a user to your website. Anchor text signals topical relevancy to Google — for example, if you have a page about women’s fleece pajamas, it would be ideal for other sites to link to that page using that phrase or something similar.

If you plan to wipe all content off the domain you are purchasing, these anchor text phrases will lead to 404 pages, thus having no effect on the site. However, if there are any links pointing to the home page that use anchor text that is not in line with your content, it’s recommended you reach out to webmasters to update their anchor text or remove the links altogether.

This could be a problem if numerous sites are linking to the domain you plan to acquire using location-specific anchor text. For example, if you sell women’s designer shoes in the US, and most of the anchor text says “Designer boots Paris,” then you may be sending Google mixed signals and implying that your company is based in France.

7. Local citations

Local citations that reference your business’s NAP (Name, Address and Phone number) are a critical local ranking signal. A citation is whenever your NAP information shows up on another website or directory. Before migrating to a pre-owned website, you should identify all instances of NAP that appear on the web and update them. There are several ways to make these updates:

  1. Identify which, if any, big data providers (e.g., Localeze, Factual, InfoGroup) were previously being utilized. Updating citations via these local content managers allows you to concisely manage your local listings across the web.
  2. Reach out to webmasters directly and ask them to update their citations.
  3. Perform outreach to gain new local citations.

8. Hosting location

While hosting location is not a direct SEO ranking factor, it’s important to at least make sure your website is hosted in the same country where you do business in. In fact, IP location has been shown to impact page speed, which in turn can impact your site’s SEO performance. You can use an IP location tool to determine your hosting location.

9. Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA), a proprietary metric coined by Moz, aims to predict the “ranking potential” of your website. In an ideal world, the site you are looking to migrate to would have a higher Domain Authority than your current site. The higher the Domain Authority, the more likely you are to appear in the SERPs.

While the formula for calculating Domain Authority is proprietary, we know that backlinks tend to play the biggest role in growing your DA score.

If you are acquiring a site with a DA lower than yours, know that rebuilding this score will be a long-term effort. You can expect to see some movement around the three- to six-month mark; however, it may take up to 12 months, or even longer, to match your site’s previous DA.

This shouldn’t deter you from migrating to a pre-owned site; however, you will need an ongoing SEO strategy over the course of the next 12 months to make sure you are moving the needle.

10. Page speed

Last but not least, one of the most important factors to benchmark prior to any migration is page speed. There are a host of free SEO tools to help you gauge page speed, such as Google PageSpeed Insights, Web Page Test, and GTMetrix, for those looking to get extra granular.

While page speed will be influenced by your site’s architecture, if you plan to stay on the same CMS (content management system) as the current domain, ensure that you’re using the most up-to-date version before migrating any content. CMS updates typically include patches for any vulnerabilities –- and many CMSes are constantly optimizing for speed as well.

Final thoughts

Once you’ve completed these 10 checks and resolved any issues, you should feel confident to proceed with your domain migration. Before you begin, there are a few important properties you should make sure are set up correctly so you can start collecting data from the get-go:

Next steps:

  • Google Analytics — Ensure this property is set up correctly, or create if needed.
    • Ensure GA tracking code is firing properly prior to go-live.
    • Do not delete any pre-existing profiles. These should be archived and will serve as a benchmark.
  • Google Search Console — Ensure this property is set up correctly, or create if needed.
    • Make sure you are tracking for both HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site.
    • Check for any lingering penalties or warnings prior to moving forward with the migration.
    • Submit XML sitemap on the day of site launch.
    • File a change of address request.
    • Set country targeting appropriately.
  • Bing Webmaster Tools — Ensure this property is set up correctly, or create if needed.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you are well on your way to a successful migration. For more migration tips and strategies, check out Thomas Stern’s article, “SEO Strategy During A Website Redesign Or Migration.”

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AdWords ad rotation settings to get trimmed: Optimize or don’t

The signs were all pointing this way.

Google announced Tuesday a slight change to the ad rotation settings in AdWords. There will soon be just two options: “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads” and the not-so-subtly named “Do not optimize: Rotate ads indefinitely.”

The options currently appear as:

A bit of backstory

Five years ago is ancient history in digital marketing, but anyone who worked in paid search in 2012 will remember the backlash that came when Google announced the “rotate evenly” setting would last just 30 days before reverting to “optimize for clicks.” That was in April. In October of that year, Google reinstated “rotate indefinitely.” Since then, advertisers have been able to set their ad tests to “rotate indefinitely,” “rotate evenly” for at least 90 days, or rely on Google’s machine learning to optimize for clicks or conversions.

Google has made it clear for some time that it would really prefer that advertisers select the “optimize ad rotation” settings. Googler Matt Lawson laid out the case against “rotate indefinitely” in a 2015 column. Over the past year, with the removal of ads from the right rail and the introduction of expanded text ads, Google has been steadily encouraging advertisers to move beyond A/B tests, run at least three ads per ad group and let the “optimize ad rotation” settings determine which ad to serve. This all fits into the broader picture of machine learning’s increasing pervasiveness and influence on AdWords systems as a whole.

More details on this change

  1. Ad rotation can be set at the ad group level instead of only at the campaign level. (That could make management more confusing, but it does offer a dose of more fine-grained control.)
  2. The “Do not optimize” option provides the standard even rotation. (Soon enough, we will refer to this setting as “old school.”)
  3. The new optimize setting “will optimize your ads for clicks in each individual auction using signals like keyword, search term, device, location and more.”
  4. To optimize for conversions, use Smart Bidding (automated bidding strategies). In May, Google added a “Maximize conversions” Smart Bidding strategy. If Smart Bidding strategies are used, ads will automatically be set to Optimize.
  5. Yes, Google strongly suggests running at least three ads in an ad group: “The more of your ads our system can choose from, the better the expected ad performance.”
  6. The change will take effect in late September.

While there may be some grumbling about this tweak, I expect most marketers won’t be all that surprised or flustered by it. Google can thank Facebook in part for conditioning advertisers to give up ad-serving control to the machines. The next step is to phase out “rotate indefintely” altogether.

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How to rank #1 on YouTube search in 30 days [case study]

Ranking number one is easy!

Of course, that is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment. After years of working in the search industry, I know that ranking number one in Google search is very, very difficult. But as for ranking number one on YouTube search? Maybe not so much.

In fact, we’ve developed a process at Siege Media for achieving first-page rankings on YouTube search in less than a month. Using this process, we saw massive returns in terms of views for our ranking video:

Today, I want to share this process with you and help you execute this strategy for your own videos.

Because I feel that showing is always more effective than telling, I’ll use a running example throughout this post to help demonstrate the full process we’ve used.

For my running example, I’m going to borrow from a recent situation in my life where I could not get my wireless Xbox One controller to sync to my Xbox One console. With “Game of Thrones” in full swing, this was an unacceptable problem, as I needed to be able to stay up to date with Khaleesi and her dragons.

Also, it just so happens that the search phrase [how to sync xbox one controller] presents an opportunity to outline this process.

Let’s get started!

Leverage your popular pages

Start by analyzing your popular pages that are already performing in search.

Although YouTube search is less competitive and complex than Google search (and the two rank videos differently), you still need to build on a solid SEO foundation. To springboard your video to the top of YouTube search, you’re going to need to piggyback on an existing page’s SEO equity.

For our project, we used a page that was ranking well (lower end of page one) but still had some room for improvement. We wanted to find a page that had enough equity to give our new video a chance to rank, but also could benefit from having the video and potentially see a ranking boost as well. Here are some other criteria for selecting this page:

  • The content of the page translates well to video.
  • The view counts for top-ranking videos on YouTube and Google indicate that there is interest in this subject.
  • There are videos currently showing on the first two results pages of Google search for the selected keyword.

You need to be strategic about where you place your video if you want it to rank quickly, and analyzing the ranking videos (on both Google and YouTube) will provide a good idea of feasibility. Specifically, you should look at the current top results on YouTube search for your target keyword. If at least three of these top videos have high view counts, you’ll know there is interest in video on this topic, and an opportunity exists.

Make sure you pay close attention to who is sharing and responsible for the video. View counts can be inflated if the video comes from a high-profile influencer in the space sharing the video with their subscribers, making the audience seem much larger than it is.

For my example, I’ll be hypothetically building a video for Driver Easy to go on this page.

Driver Easy’s page is already on the bottom of page one for [how to sync xbox one controller]. This indicates that there is a potential opportunity for them to add a quality video to their content and rank that video on YouTube.

However, before I start designing a video, I need to check the criteria outlined above to ensure it’s worth creating a video.

Does the content translate to video?

Driver Easy’s page would easily translate to video, as the content is built like a tutorial, outlining step-by-step advice.

What do view counts look like on Google Video and YouTube search?

View counts for videos on both Google Video and YouTube search are strong (many of them are the same videos). The top three results on YouTube have over 100,000 views:

Clearly, I am not the only one who has had syncing issues with their controller, and there is interest here.

Are there videos showing on Google search?

Yup! In fact, there are three videos showing right below the first result (and snippet) on page one.

Sometimes the best way to understand what will rank in search is by researching what is currently ranking. Seeing these videos in search results means that Google thinks video content is relevant and useful for this query.

Having ticked off all the necessary boxes, I know that if I add a quality video to Driver Easy’s existing page, it will have a strong chance to rank highly on YouTube.

Optimize your video for search

After identifying a page you can upgrade with video, it’s time to start designing your video.

Like when building new pages, you need to also consider search as you build a new video.

The beauty of this tactic is that you already have the framework for the video built on an existing page, so all you need to do is convert that content to video. However, there are still some best practices to follow to ensure your video is optimized, including:

  • Hook the audience in the first 15 seconds, so they don’t bounce — SEO expert Brian Dean suggests the “PPP Formula.”
  • Create a longer video that retains viewers, as watch time is an important ranking factor in YouTube search.
  • Add calls to action (CTAs) at the end of the video to subscribe to your channel or like the video. This will help you grow your audience and send positive engagement signals to YouTube.
  • Optimize the video thumbnail to be eye-catching and enticing.
  • Embed the finished video above the fold on your page.

Following these best practices will give your video the best chance possible to earn high rankings in both YouTube and Google search. To learn more video SEO tips, I recommend checking out Brian Dean’s post on YouTube SEO.

I can leverage these tactics for Driver Easy’s hypothetical video as well.

For example, optimal video placement would be below the five steps the post outlines:

This would put the video above the fold, but after the intro, so readers would have context for exactly what the video is about.

At Siege Media, we’ve noticed that placing videos here helps drive initial, relevant views via search traffic. These qualified views convert to subscribers at a higher rate and send positive signals to YouTube, such as longer viewer duration:

And “Likes”:

Since [how to sync xbox one controller] has a search volume of over 12,000 (according to SEMrush), a video on Driver Easy’s ranking page would capture a fair number of relevant viewers, boosting the video on YouTube.

Using Brian Dean’s “PPP Formula,” I would create an intro like this:

  • Preview: “In this video, I’m going to show you how to quickly sync your Xbox One controller to your console.”
  • Proof: “This is the same process I’ve used dozens of times to sync my controller without fail.”
  • Preview: “This video will cover five different options for syncing your controller.”

The fact that Driver Easy’s post covers five different ways to sync a controller, when the current ranking videos only show one or two ways, could be an attention-grabber for viewers who’ve already tried the main methods of syncing.

To further leverage this, I would consider creating a thumbnail that highlights the five methods covered as a text over an eye-catching and relevant image (controller, console and so on). A well-designed thumbnail would help Driver Easy’s video stand out in both Google and YouTube results, as most of the current ranking videos have no design elements.

There is a real opportunity here for Driver Easy to create something that stands out.

Recap

By piggybacking on the SEO equity of their existing page-one result, Driver Easy could place a video on that page that would have a great chance of ranking quickly in YouTube search. Furthermore, the video would add even more value to their current page, potentially helping it rise higher on page one of Google’s search results.

To recap, here is the process I’ve outlined for ranking quickly on YouTube search:

  • Identify a popular page that has no video.
    • Should be visible in search and provide a steady source of qualified traffic.
  • Check viability and necessity for video.
    • Does the content translate to video?
    • How many views do the top videos for this keyword on Google and YouTube have?
    • Are there videos ranking on the top two results pages on Google?
  • Build a well-optimized, quality video.
    • Hook the audience within the first 15 seconds.
    • Create a long, engaging video for increased watch time.
    • Add CTAs to the end of the video to direct the audience on what to do next.
    • Design an attention-grabbing thumbnail for the video.
    • Place the video above the fold on the page.

I hope this post will help you identify any potential opportunities you have on your site to create a video that can rank quickly on YouTube.

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