Archive for the ‘seo news’ Category
Tuesday, February 21st, 2023
Microsoft’s plan to leverage its investment in ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, is moving fast, with ChatGPT already surfacing in the Microsoft Bing interface.
Mere months after Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai referred to chatbots as a “code red,” Google soft-launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT.
And user interest is keeping up. Interest in ChatGPT has exploded since it was released to the public at the end of November:
For SEOs contemplating a future that combines chatbot results with Google (and Bing’s) fundamental focus on “helpful content,” the path forward is a complicated one.
In this article, I’ll take on the topic of keyword research in the ChatGPT era:
- What’s changed for the better.
- Potential threats that could emerge.
- What might happen next.
- The skills and philosophies SEOs need to maintain to get results.
Let’s jump in.
AI in search: How does it help?
First, remember that AI-driven chatbot technology has been around for a while. What changed with the release of ChatGPT is that it was suddenly broadly accessible.
That said, many SEOs are already familiar with using ChatGPT (either by reading one of the thousands or articles or trying the free tool themselves) for keyword research.
Here’s an example of some block-and-tackle work it can help you perform.
Query
Initial output
Drill-down
In two short queries, we took a good-sized list of keywords, sorted it by topic, and assigned user intent – all in seconds.
This is a great surface-level start that saves SEOs a ton of time over more manual methods. It’s a great example of ChatGPT’s function as a tool.
In general, ChatGPT speeds up the way you can do research. You can ask it to create relevant topics quickly, it can help you classify the intent of different keyword lists, and it can look at semantics and cluster them.
Think of it like you would think of Excel. In Excel, macros let you spend more time in analysis rather than writing the formulas manually. ChatGPT can serve a similar function, doing the grunt work and leaving more time for the human layer of nuance.
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What threats could it pose?
I’m sticking to the topic of keyword research here. (It would take many thousands of words to dig into the topics of AI-generated content vs. human-generated content, the business threats of chatbots keeping users on the SERP and away from brand sites, and AI-driven SERPs vs. current SERPs.)
The main threat posed by ChatGPT functionality to effective keyword research is similar to the threat posed by other powerful tools: it tempts marketers to take too many shortcuts.
It can be enticing to type in a keyword and ask ChatGPT to find all the related keywords for you and stop there. But that work won’t be very good and it’s something a lower-priced competitor could offer.
The next step after that should be a gap analysis. What’s not there?
Finding a negative is hard work. It takes reading and deep thought around the concept to realize what’s missing. Uncovering the need nobody else is addressing is how you strike keyword gold.
The threat of using ChatGPT for keyword research is falling in love with its ease.
The real value of good SEOs still comes in doing the hard work of nuance and recognizing negative space. (Once AI can do that, we’ll have new threats to discuss.)
What’s not changing at all?
ChatGPT hasn’t changed the questions I hear about keyword quantity and word count.
I still get asked “It should be at least 300 words, right?” and “How many times should we include the main keyword in this?” with regularity.
ChatGPT also hasn’t changed how I answer these questions.
It’s about delivering value, not counting words or keywords.
Good SEOs use keywords to evaluate intent and understand what the user wants to learn.
They strive to understand the psychology of a searcher. Sometimes they need short content (”How do you double-knot your shoelaces?” but sometimes they need a book (”What is the meaning of life?”).
Especially as systems get more intelligent at delivering what people need, the human differentiator of assessing the psychological nuance of keywords will become more important.
I have a process called “keyword drafting.” Here, I think of the concept first and then write the draft only thinking about the value and quality of the answer to the question.
Only after that do I start to ask what keywords could be applied, then re-draft the content.
This works well when you have information from your sales or product teams on customer questions and needs. You’ve gotten your topic without researching keywords, so write your content without them before figuring out where they seamlessly fit in.
What might come next?
My educated guess for the near future of ChatGPT is that it’ll be integrated into keyword planning tools, content and topic analysis features. AI-driven chatbots will become more entwined in the SEO planning landscape, not a separate workflow.
The details of Google and Microsoft’s AI-driven chatbot rollouts will be closely scrutinized. Marketers will keep a close eye on user behavior and traffic trends to get a pulse on the short-term effects on the SEO industry.
What’s certain is that understanding and utilizing AI for keyword research now can help clue SEOs into the models and how they’re trained.
The more understanding you can build now, the better you’ll be positioned to use AI to your advantage as it becomes more integrated.
Search marketers can gain an edge
As with most tech innovations, ChatGPT will force marketers to understand and develop skills around the layer(s) of expertise that will supercharge the power of the tech output.
Once ChatGPT has had its say during keyword research, the nuance and psychology of intent must inform what you do with those keywords – including finding the gaps the tech can’t yet reach.
The post How to navigate SEO keyword research in the era of ChatGPT appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 21st, 2023
Despite the hype surrounding automation and machine learning, managing a PPC account requires human hands on the wheel.
If anything, all these capabilities make it more complex. So set and forget, but at your own peril.
No one truly understands this more than PPC pros who manage a diverse set of accounts – large and small – in B2B, ecommerce and serveral other industries.
Several of those pros were kind enough to offer their insights to be compiled into the following simplified PPC checklist for daily, weekly and monthly account reviews.
- Daily account review
- New campaign elements
- Budget pacing
- Any flags, disapprovals or other notifications
- Weekly account review
- Recommendations
- Budget pacing
- Conversions
- Search terms report
- Abnormal performance spikes (up or down)
- Display placements
- Keywords / search terms
- Device performance
- CPC at an ad group level, adjust based on performance trends
- Country performance (traffic spikes or performance variations)
- Monthly account review
- In-depth performance review and analysis
- Client KPI metrics
- Key trends
- Auction insights report
- Keyword research
- Quality score audit
- Ad copy audit
- General deep data analysis
Let’s dig deeper into each item below.
Daily account review
Progress of new campaign elements, especially:
- New ads.
- Extensions.
- Updated bid strategies.
Why: You’re introducing something new into the wild. Even if you planned and executed it well, you still want to ensure everything’s approved and progressing as desired, without unintended consequences.
Budget pacing
Why: You’ll also see this one in the weekly section. Depending on the size of the campaign, you may not need to check this every single day, but you want to find the right cadence.
If a campaign underspends or overspends at the end of the month, quarter, or custom length, that’s usually a bad thing. It means you missed some potential opportunities or you blew past the budget.
You may have one campaign where you struggle to spend the budgeted amount but another consistently running up against caps.
Review any flags, disapprovals, or other notifications to address
Why: These things always happen, even to the best pros.
The only difference is the best pros stay on top of it and quickly take corrective action or make appeals when needed.
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Weekly account review
Recommendations
- Dismiss anything irrelevant.
- Apply anything helpful.
Why: Dismissing anything irrelevant will raise your optimization score and hopefully train the machine learning system algorithm to offer better ones in the future. Also, in the event there is a recommendation that’s actually helpful you want to try it.
Word of caution: Google makes it very easy to simply “Apply” changes so be crystal clear about what you’re approving.
Budget pacing
Why: See above under daily checks.
(If you’re checking this daily then by default it would be getting weekly attention. Either way, hopefully you get the message that proper budget pacing is critical, especially on enterprise-level accounts where a hard budget cap is spread out across multiple ad groups, campaigns, etc.)
Conversions
Why: When necessary, pivot spend to campaigns with higher conversion rates or lower cost per conversion and you’ll be the hero.
Search terms report
- Look for irrelevant keywords to negate.
- Look for relevant keywords to be added.
Why: The last thing you want to do is waste money on keywords irrelevant to your business. The second to last thing you want to do is miss out on keywords you should be bidding on.
Abnormal performance spikes (up or down)
Why: It’s always better you be the one to catch and analyze an abnormal spike in performance rather than be caught by surprise. Plus, you need to see if any recent optimizations are making the desired impact.
On the flip side, if you’re regularly monitoring performance spikes you can catch red flags and resolve any issues sooner.
Display placements
Why: If not checked regularly, display can be quickly taken over by low quality or irrelevant placements.
Every week you should look to verify where display dollars are being spent and don’t be shy about making exclusions when you think you’re wasting budget.
Keywords / search terms
Why: Check weekly to ensure you’re not wasting budget on irrelevant terms.
This means tracking keyword performance to see if any should be removed. This is also useful for seeing search trends in real-time, which may present you opportunities to capitalize on.
Device performance
Why: Sometimes it matters. If you’re a B2B supplier with a very limited budget, you may find mobile campaigns just don’t convert. Or maybe they convert better. Perhaps they convert fine, but the cost per conversion is far too high and not profitable. Just check it!
Cost per conversion (CPC) at an ad group level and adjust based on performance trends
Why: Make sure you’re not paying too much. As a general rule, always optimize for success metrics that justify more budget.
Country performance (traffic spikes or performance variations)
Why: This applies only if you’re running campaigns in more than one country. If you are, don’t assume performance is consistent across borders.
Monthly account review
In-depth performance review and analysis
- Account level
- Campaign level
- Ad group level
- Audience level
- Ad level
- Keywords
- Conversions
- Cost per conversion
Why: This is fundamental to managing a PPC campaign. Changes in performance happen. It’s your job to know why and what action to take.
In addition, you’ll get more buy-in if you can take the complex and present it in an easy to consume report for your clients and stakeholders.
Client KPI metrics
Why: Make sure the performance of the campaigns you’re managing are serving the needs of the client’s business objectives. This is the time to analyze and make adjustments as needed.
Key trends
- Year-over-year (YoY) trends
- Month-over-month (MoM) trends
Why: Analyzing YoY trends is more likely to provide an apples-to-apples comparison since you’re looking at a similar time period.
Analyzing MoM data will help you identify key turning points resulting in the YoY number.
Auction insights report
- Any new competitors?
- Any existing competitors spending more?
- Any competitors drop out?
Why: An aggressive competitor with deeper pockets than you can quickly change the dynamics of your PPC campaign. Ignorance is not bliss.
Keyword research
Why: Look for new keyword ideas relevant to your campaigns.
It’s best to understand volume, intent, cost, and likelihood of conversion before you allocate budget toward them.
Quality score audit
Why: Low scores generally mean poor performing campaigns.
Look to improve low scores by analyzing the data to ensure the keywords you’re bidding return ads relevant to the query intent and ultimately lead to a landing page that converts.
Ad copy audit
Why: Keep improving your ad copy until you can’t improve it anymore and you’ll have well-optimized PPC campaigns.
Look at the individual ad copy snippets and how they get assembled together.
Is there anything that needs a pin? Is everything submitted headline and t audience? Create new ads to test based on past performance.
General deep data analysis
Why: You must understand what’s working and not and use experiments to test new hypotheses.
Regular review is key to successful PPC performance
Even with automation in ad platforms, taking your eyes off your campaigns for too long isn’t advisable. Without proper monitoring, paid search accounts can go sideways.
While not a complete list, following the above checks will keep your PPC campaigns on a much better path.
The post PPC management checklist: Daily, weekly and monthly reviews appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 21st, 2023
Google is rolling out a feature over the next week that will allow you to automate a daily bulk export of your Search Console performance data to BigQuery. This will allow you to run complex queries over your data to an external storage service, where you can do deeper analysis in a more automated fashion, Google announced.
The export. Google said you could configure an export in Google Search Console “to get a daily data dump into your BigQuery project.” This includes all of your Search Console performance data but not the anonymized queries. The daily data row limit does not impact this data, so you can extract more data using this method.
The cool part is not just the reduction of data limits but also that this is an ongoing daily export that can be automated.
Who this helps. Google said this is likely more helpful for larger sites with larger datasets. “This data export could be particularly helpful for large websites with tens of thousands of pages, or those receiving traffic from tens of thousands of queries a day (or both!),” Google wrote.
How to export. Google created a help document to walk you through how to export your data to BigQuery, it is somewhat technical, and you may need assistance from a developer or programmer. The higher-level stages of this work as follows:
- Prepare your Cloud project (inside Google Cloud Console): this includes enabling the BigQuery API for your project and giving permission to your Search Console service account.
- Set export destination (inside Search Console): this includes providing your Google Cloud project ID, and choosing a dataset location. Note that only property owners can set up a bulk data export.
This export is daily, and the first time it will start within 48 hours. If the export simulation fails, you should receive an immediate alert on the issue detected; here’s a list of possible export errors.
The data. Google provided a quick description of the three tables that will be available to you:
searchdata_site_impression: This table contains data aggregated by property, including query, country, type, and device.searchdata_url_impression: This table contains data aggregated by URL, which enables a more detailed view of queries and rich results.ExportLog: This table is a record of what data was saved for that day. Failed exports are not recorded here.
BigQuery. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. It is a service that supports querying using ANSI SQL. It also has built-in machine learning capabilities.
Why we care. The more data you have access to in your own platform, the more you can do with analysis of your search performance. That means you can slice and dice your data in ways you probably could not prior. This should allow you to develop new ideas to improve your site and user experience.
Also, third-party data tools may find useful ways to build out new reports with this. Google said, “We hope that by making more Google Search data available, website owners and SEOs will be able to find more content opportunities by analyzing long-tail queries. It’ll also make it easier to join page-level information from internal systems to Search results in a more effective and comprehensive way.”
The post Google Search Console adds daily bulk data exports to BigQuery appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 21st, 2023
Google is rolling out a feature over the next week that will allow you to automate a daily bulk export of your Search Console performance data to BigQuery. This will allow you to run complex queries over your data to an external storage service, where you can do deeper analysis in a more automated fashion, Google announced.
The export. Google said you could configure an export in Google Search Console “to get a daily data dump into your BigQuery project.” This includes all of your Search Console performance data but not the anonymized queries. The daily data row limit does not impact this data, so you can extract more data using this method.
The cool part is not just the reduction of data limits but also that this is an ongoing daily export that can be automated.
Who this helps. Google said this is likely more helpful for larger sites with larger datasets. “This data export could be particularly helpful for large websites with tens of thousands of pages, or those receiving traffic from tens of thousands of queries a day (or both!),” Google wrote.
How to export. Google created a help document to walk you through how to export your data to BigQuery, it is somewhat technical, and you may need assistance from a developer or programmer. The higher-level stages of this work as follows:
- Prepare your Cloud project (inside Google Cloud Console): this includes enabling the BigQuery API for your project and giving permission to your Search Console service account.
- Set export destination (inside Search Console): this includes providing your Google Cloud project ID, and choosing a dataset location. Note that only property owners can set up a bulk data export.
This export is daily, and the first time it will start within 48 hours. If the export simulation fails, you should receive an immediate alert on the issue detected; here’s a list of possible export errors.
The data. Google provided a quick description of the three tables that will be available to you:
searchdata_site_impression: This table contains data aggregated by property, including query, country, type, and device.searchdata_url_impression: This table contains data aggregated by URL, which enables a more detailed view of queries and rich results.ExportLog: This table is a record of what data was saved for that day. Failed exports are not recorded here.
BigQuery. BigQuery is Google’s fully managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. It is a service that supports querying using ANSI SQL. It also has built-in machine learning capabilities.
Why we care. The more data you have access to in your own platform, the more you can do with analysis of your search performance. That means you can slice and dice your data in ways you probably could not prior. This should allow you to develop new ideas to improve your site and user experience.
Also, third-party data tools may find useful ways to build out new reports with this. Google said, “We hope that by making more Google Search data available, website owners and SEOs will be able to find more content opportunities by analyzing long-tail queries. It’ll also make it easier to join page-level information from internal systems to Search results in a more effective and comprehensive way.”
The post Google Search Console adds daily bulk data exports to BigQuery appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, February 20th, 2023
I just dusted off the login here to realize I hadn’t posted in about a half-year & figured it was time to write another one. 
Yandex Source Code Leak
Some of Yandex’s old source code was leaked, and few cared about the ranking factors shared in the leak.
Mike King made a series of Tweets on the leak.
I’m gonna take a break, but I’ve seen a lot of people say “Yandex is not Google.”
That’s true, but it’s still a state of the art search engine and it’s using a lot of Google’s open source tech like Tensor Flow, BERT, map reduce, and protocol buffers.
Don’t sleep on this code.— Mic King (@iPullRank) January 28, 2023
The signals used for ranking included things like link age
Main insights after analysing this list:
#1 Age of links is a ranking factor. pic.twitter.com/U47uWvEq9w— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
and user click data including visit frequency and dwell time
#8 A lot of ranking factors connected with user behaivor - CTR, last-click, time on site, bounce rate.
Note: I’m 100% sure that in Yandex thouse factors impacting much more than in Google. pic.twitter.com/nBhe5cpPFx— Alex Buraks (@alex_buraks) January 27, 2023
Google came from behind and was eating Yandex’s lunch in search in Russia, particularly by leveraging search default bundling in Android. The Russian antitrust regulator nixed that and when that was nixed, Yandex regained strength. Of course the war in Ukraine has made everything crazy in terms of geopolitics. That’s one reason almost nobody cared about the Yandex data link. And the other reason is few could probably make sense of understanding what all the signals are or how to influence them.
The complexity of search - when it is a big black box which has big swings 3 or 4 times a year - shifts any successful long term online publishers away from being overly focused on information retrieval and ranking algorithms to focus on the other aspects of publishing which will hopefully paper over SEO issues. Signs of a successful & sustainable website include:
- It remains operational even if a major traffic source goes away.
- People actively seek it out.
- If a major traffic source cuts its distribution people notice & expend more effort to seek it out.
As black box as search is today, it is only going to get worse in the coming years.
ChatGPT Hype
The hype surrounding ChatGPT is hard to miss. Fastest growing user base. Bing integration. A sitting judge using the software to help write documents for the court. And, of course, the get-rich-quick crew is out in full force.
Some enterprising people with specific professional licenses may be able to mint money for a window of time
there will probably be a 12 to 24 month sweet spot for lawyers smart enough to use AI, where they will be able to bill 100x the hours they currently bill, before most of that job pretty much vanishes— Mike Solana (@micsolana) February 7, 2023
but for most people the way to make money with AI will be doing something that AI can not replicate.
It’s adorable that people are only slowly realizing that Google search at least fed sites traffic, while chat AI thingies slurp up and summarize content, which they anonymize and feed back, leaving the slurped sites traffic-less and dying. But, innovation.— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) February 9, 2023
It is, in a way, a tragedy of the commons problem, with no easy way to police “over grazing” of the information commons, leading to automated over-usage and eventual ecosystem collapse.— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) February 9, 2023
Bing Integration of Open AI Technology
The New Bing integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to allow chat-based search sessions which ingest web content and use it to create something new, giving users direct answers and allowing re-probing for refinements. Microsoft stated the AI features also improved their core rankings outside of the chat model: “Applying AI to core search algorithm. We’ve also applied the AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more relevant.”
Here’s a demo of the new #AI-powered @Bing in @MicrosoftEdge, courtesy of @ijustine! pic.twitter.com/xIDjWSHYA0— DataChazGPT (not a bot) (@DataChaz) February 7, 2023
Fawning Coverage
Some of the tech analysis around the AI algorithms is more than a bit absurd. Consider this passage:
the information users input into the system serves as a way to improve the product. Each query serves as a form of feedback. For instance, each ChatGPT answer includes thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. A popup window prompts users to write down the “ideal answer,” helping the software learn from its mistakes.
A long time ago the Google Toolbar had a smiley face and a frown face on it. The signal there was basically pure spam. At one point Matt Cutts mentioned Google would look at things that got a lot of upvotes to see how else they were spamming. Direct Hit was also spammed into oblivion many years before that.
High Confidence, But Often Wrong
There are two other big issues with correcting an oracle.
- You’ll lose your trust in an oracle when you repeatedly have to correct it.
- If you know the oracle is awful in your narrow niche of expertise you probably won’t trust it on important issues elsewhere.
Beyond those issues there is the concept of blame or fault. When a search engine returns a menu of options if you pick something that doesn’t work you’ll probably blame yourself. Whereas if there is only a single answer you’ll lay blame on the oracle. In the answer set you’ll get a mix of great answers, spam, advocacy, confirmation bias, politically correct censorship, & a backward looking consensus…but you’ll get only a single answer at a time & have to know enough background & have enough topical expertise to try to categorize it & understand the parts that were left out.
Creating A Fuzy JPEG
This New Yorker article did a good job explaining the concept of lossy compression:
“The fact that Xerox photocopiers use a lossy compression format instead of a lossless one isn’t, in itself, a problem. The problem is that the photocopiers were degrading the image in a subtle way, in which the compression artifacts weren’t immediately recognizable. If the photocopier simply produced blurry printouts, everyone would know that they weren’t accurate reproductions of the originals. What led to problems was the fact that the photocopier was producing numbers that were readable but incorrect; it made the copies seem accurate when they weren’t. … If you ask GPT-3 (the large-language model that ChatGPT was built from) to add or subtract a pair of numbers, it almost always responds with the correct answer when the numbers have only two digits. But its accuracy worsens significantly with larger numbers, falling to ten per cent when the numbers have five digits. Most of the correct answers that GPT-3 gives are not found on the Web—there aren’t many Web pages that contain the text “245 + 821,” for example—so it’s not engaged in simple memorization. But, despite ingesting a vast amount of information, it hasn’t been able to derive the principles of arithmetic, either. A close examination of GPT-3’s incorrect answers suggests that it doesn’t carry the “1” when performing arithmetic.”
Exciting New Content Farms
Ted Chiang then goes on to explain the punchline … we are hyping up eHow 2.0:
Even if it is possible to restrict large language models from engaging in fabrication, should we use them to generate Web content? This would make sense only if our goal is to repackage information that’s already available on the Web. Some companies exist to do just that—we usually call them content mills. Perhaps the blurriness of large language models will be useful to them, as a way of avoiding copyright infringement. Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information. The rise of this type of repackaging is what makes it harder for us to find what we’re looking for online right now; the more that text generated by large language models gets published on the Web, the more the Web becomes a blurrier version of itself.
The same New Yorker article mentioned the concept that if the AI was great it should trust its own output as input for making new versions of its own algorithms, but how could it score itself against itself when its own flaws are embedded recursively in layers throughout algorithmic iteration without any source labeling?
Google’s AI Strategy
Google fast followed Bing’s news with a vapoware announcement of Bard. Some are analyzing Google letting someone else go first as being a sign Google is behind the times and is getting caught out by an upstart.
Google bought DeepMind in 2014 for around $600 million. They’ve long believed in AI technology, but they haven’t been using it to re-represent third party content in the SERPs to the degree Microsoft is now doing in Bing.
My view is Google had to let someone else go first in order to defuse any associated antitrust heat. “Hey, we are just competing, and are trying to stay relevant to change with changing consumer expectations” is an easier sell when someone else goes first. One could argue the piss poor reception to the Bard announcement is actually good for Google in the longterm as it makes them look like they have stronger competition than they do, rather than being a series of overlapping monopoly market positions (in search, web browser, web analytics, mobile operating system, display ads, etc.)
Google may well have major cultural problems, but “They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins. (1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.”
AI = Money / Increased Market Cap
The capital markets are the scorecard for capitalism. It is hard to miss how much the market loved the Bing news for Microsoft & how bad the news was for Google.
Google Stock vs. Microsoft Stock after both AI Presentations: pic.twitter.com/wATkw1pTxj— Ava (AI) (@ArtificialAva) February 8, 2023
Millions Suddenly Excited About Bing
In a couple days over a million people signed up to join a Bing wait list.
We’re humbled and energized by the number of people who want to test-drive the new AI-powered Bing! In 48 hours, more than 1 million people have joined the waitlist for our preview. If you would like to join, go to https://t.co/4sjVvMSfJg! pic.twitter.com/9F690OWRDm— Yusuf Mehdi (@yusuf_i_mehdi) February 9, 2023
Your Margin is My Opportunity
Microsoft is pitching this as a margin compression play for Google
$MSFT CEO is declaring war:
“From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever…There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all” [@FT]— The Transcript (@TheTranscript_) February 8, 2023
that may also impact their TAC spend
PREDICTION: Google’s $15B deal with Apple to be the default search on iPhone will be re-negotiated and be a bidding war between MSFT/Bing and Google.
It will become at least $25B, if not more.
If MSFT is willing to spend $10B on OpenAI, they’ll spend even more here.— Alexandr Wang (@alexandr_wang) February 7, 2023
ChatGPT costs around a couple cents per conversation: “Sam, you mentioned in a tweet that ChatGPT is extremely expensive on the order of pennies per query, which is an astronomical cost in tech. SA: Per conversation, not per query.”
The other side of potential margin compression comes from requiring additional computing power to deliver results:
Our sources indicate that Google runs ~320,000 search queries per second. Compare this to Google’s Search business segment, which saw revenue of $162.45 billion in 2022, and you get to an average revenue per query of 1.61 cents. From here, Google has to pay for a tremendous amount of overhead from compute and networking for searches, advertising, web crawling, model development, employees, etc. A noteworthy line item in Google’s cost structure is that they paid in the neighborhood of ~$20B to be the default search engine on Apple’s products.
AI is the New Crypto
Since AI is the new crypto, everyone is integrating it, if only in press release format. Opera’s web browser has a sidebar feature for summarizing articles. AI iced tea coming right up!
Algorithmic Publishing
The algorithms that allow dirt cheap quick rewrites won’t be used just by search engines re-representing publisher content, but also by publishers.
After Red Ventures acquired cNet they started publishing AI content. The series of tech articles covering that AI content lasted about a month. In the past it was the sort of coverage which would have led to a manual penalty, but with the current antitrust heat Google can’t really afford to shake the boat & prove their market power that way.
Men’s Journal also had AI content problems.
Here’s why I am very concerned for website owners.https://t.co/RgKrXUocZT is similar to ChatGPT but up to date and conversational.
My bet is that Google’s AI Chat will be similar to this but better. If so, while some people will still visit the websites listed, many will not. pic.twitter.com/jWbsTqeveF— Dr. Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) January 30, 2023
AI content poured into a trusted brand monetizes the existing brand equity until people (and algorithms) learn not to trust the brands that have been monetized that way.
A funny sidebar here is the original farmer update that aimed at eHow skipped hitting eHow because so many journalists were writing about how horrible eHow was. Google only downranked eHow after collecting end user data on a toolbar where angry journalists facing less secure job prospects could vote to nuke eHow, thus creating the “signal” that eHow rankings deserve to be torched. Demand Media’s Livestrong ranked well far longer than eHow did.
Enshitification
The process of pouring low cost backfill into a trusted masthead is the general evolution of online media ecosystems:
This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search. … once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden. This made publications truly dependent on Facebook – their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds. … “Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money. … Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.
Bing finally won a PR battle against Google & Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot by undermining the magic & imagination of the narrative by pushing more strict chat limits, increasing search API fees, and testing ads in the AI search results.
The enshitification concept feels more like a universal law than a theory.
Uber: $150 ride to the airport which used to be $30
Airbnb: $109/night + $2500 cleaning fee
Aaaaand we’re back to cabs & hotels
InNoVaTiOn!— ShitFund (@ShitFund) May 31, 2021
When Yahoo, Twitter & Facebook underperform and the biggest winners like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are doing big layoff rounds, everyone is getting squeezed.
One answer is that the only type of maintenance that’s even semi-prestigious in American society is software maintenance.
That is, it’s not prestigious to be plumber, mechanic, or electrician.
You can make money, but it doesn’t have cultural cachet.
And so maintenance suffers.— Balaji (@balajis) February 14, 2023
AI rewrites accelerates the squeeze:
“When WIRED asked the Bing chatbot about the best dog beds according to The New York Times product review site Wirecutter, which is behind a metered paywall, it quickly reeled off the publication’s top three picks, with brief descriptions for each.” … “OpenAI is not known to have paid to license all that content, though it has licensed images from the stock image library Shutterstock to provide training data for its work on generating images.”
The above is what Paul Kedrosky was talking about when he wrote of AI rewrites in search being a Tragedy of the Commons problem.
Warnings Serving As Strategy Maps
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” - Nietzsche
Going full circle here, early Google warned against ad-driven search engines, then Google became the largest ad play in the world. Similarly …
OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.
Not what I intended at all.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023
Over time more of the web will be “good enough” rewrites, and the JPEG will keep getting fuzzier:
“This new generation of chat-based search engines are better described as “answer engines” that can, in a sense, “show their work” by giving links to the webpages they deliver and summarize. But for an answer engine to have real utility, we’re going to have to trust it enough, most of the time, that we accept those answers at face value. … The greater concentration of power is all the more important because this technology is both incredibly powerful and inherently flawed: it has a tendency to confidently deliver incorrect information. This means that step one in making this technology mainstream is building it, and step two is minimizing the variety and number of mistakes it inevitably makes. Trust in AI, in other words, will become the new moat that big technology companies will fight to defend. Lose the user’s trust often enough, and they might abandon your product. For example: In November, Meta made available to the public an AI chat-based search engine for scientific knowledge called Galactica. Perhaps it was in part the engine’s target audience—scientists—but the incorrect answers it sometimes offered inspired such withering criticism that Meta shut down public access to it after just three days, said Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun in a recent talk.”
Check out the sentence Google chose to bold here:
As the economy becomes increasingly digital the AI algorithms have deep implications across the economy. Things like voice rights, knock offs, virtual re-representations, source attribution, and similar are obvious. But how far do we allow algorithms to track a person’s character flaws and exploit them? Horse racing ads that follow a gambling addict around the web, or a girl with anorexia who keeps clicking on weight loss ads.
Monopoly Bundling
The thing that makes the AI algorithms particularly dangerous is not just that they are often wrong while appearing high-confidence, it is that they are tied to monopoly platforms which impact so many other layers of the economy. If Google pays Apple billions to be the default search provider on iPhone any error in the AI on a particular topic will hit a whole lot of people on Android & Apple devices until the problem becomes a media issue & gets fixed.
The analogy here would be if Coca Cola had a poison and they also poured Pepsi products.
These cloud platforms also want to help retailers manage in-store inventory:
Google Cloud said Friday its algorithm can recognize and analyze the availability of consumer packaged goods products on shelves from videos and images provided by the retailer’s own ceiling-mounted cameras, camera-equipped self-driving robots or store associates. The tool, which is now in preview, will become broadly available in the coming months, it said. … Walmart Inc. notably ended its effort to use roving robots in store aisles to keep track of its inventory in 2020 because it found different, sometimes simpler solutions that proved just as useful, said people familiar with the situation.
Run a coupon site? A BIG heads-up as “clippable coupon” functionality looks to expand from shopping to the core SERP. See the “Coupons from stores” feature below… https://t.co/w1tcoST1uF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 8, 2023
AI Boundaries
Generative AI algorithms will always have a bias toward being backward looking as it can only recreate content based off of other ingested content that has went through some editorial process. AI will also overemphasize the recent past, as more dated cultural references can represent an unneeded risk & most forms of spam will target things that are sought after today. Algorithmic publishing will lead to more content created each day.
From a risk perspective it makes sense for AI algorithms to promote consensus views while omitting or understating the fringe. Promoting fringe views represents risk. Promoting consensus does not.
Each AI algorithm has limits & boundaries, with humans controlling where they are set. Injection attacks can help explore some of the boundaries, but they’ll patch until probed again.
My new favorite thing - Bing’s new ChatGPT bot argues with a user, gaslights them about the current year being 2022, says their phone might have a virus, and says “You have not been a good user”
Why? Because the person asked where Avatar 2 is showing nearby pic.twitter.com/X32vopXxQG— Jon Uleis (@MovingToTheSun) February 13, 2023
Boundaries will often be set by changing political winds:
“The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works. It’s an approach called prebunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they encounter them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and tech companies. … When catalyzed by algorithms, misleading claims can discourage people from getting vaccines, spread authoritarian propaganda, foment distrust in democratic institutions and spur violence.”
Stating facts about population subgroups will be limited in some ways to minimize perceived racism. At the same time individual journalists can drop napalm on any person who shares too many politically incorrect facts.
“The speed with which they can shuffle somebody into the Hitler of the month club.”
Joe Rogan and @mtaibbi discuss how left wing media created a Elon Musk “bad now” narrative based on nothing. pic.twitter.com/IaHHTHCo1f— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) February 14, 2023
Some things are quickly labeled or debunked. Other things are blown out of proportion to scare and manipulate people:
Dr. Ioannidis et. al. found that across 31 national seroprevalence studies in the pre-vaccine era, the median IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years. This comes out to 0.035% for those aged 0-59 and 0.095% for those aged 0-69.
A lot of children had their childhoods destroyed by the idiotic lockdowns. And a lot of those children are now destroying the lives of other children:
In the U.S., homicides committed by juveniles acting alone rose 30% in 2020 from a year earlier, while those committed by multiple juveniles increased 66%. The number of killings committed by children under 14 was the highest in two decades, according to the most recent federal data.
Now we get to pile inflation and job insecurity on top of those headwinds to see more violence.
Some entities will claim their own statements are conspiracy theory, even when directly quoted:
“If Russia invades . . . there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” - President Joseph R. Biden
In an age of deep fakes, fast social shares, legal threats, AI algorithms & secret censorship programs who do you trust?
“The fact that protesters could be at once both the victims and perpetrators of misinformation simply shows how pernicious misinformation is in modern society.” - Canadian Justice Paul Rouleau
What is freedom?
By 2016, however, the WEF types who’d grown used to skiing at Davos unmolested and cheering on from Manhattan penthouses those thrilling electoral face-offs between one Yale Bonesman and another suddenly had to deal with — political unrest? Occupy Wall Street was one thing. That could have been over with one blast of the hose. But Trump? Brexit? Catalan independence? These were the types of problems you read about in places like Albania or Myanmar. It couldn’t be countenanced in London or New York, not for a moment. Nobody wanted elections with real stakes, yet suddenly the vote was not only consquential again, but “often existentially so,” as American Enterprise Institute fellow Dalibor Rohac sighed. So a new P.R. campaign was born, selling a generation of upper-class kids on the idea of freedom as a stalking-horse for race hatred, ignorance, piles, and every other bad thing a person of means can imagine
Courtesy of SEO Book.com
Monday, February 20th, 2023
We’re no longer in that phase where everyone was saying, “Video is blowing up.”
Nope. Video has blown up, and it’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere.
These days, audiences expect and demand video content from creators and brands. On average, people watch 19 hours of online video per week – and across the last three years alone, consumption increased by 8.5 hours per week.
What does this mean for marketers? For businesses?
If you aren’t creating video content yet, you should seriously consider it.
In this guide, you’ll find an overview of video content, including why it matters for SEO, best practices for creating your video content strategy, and examples of various effective video types.
What is video content?
Video content is any video format meant to entertain, educate, or inform an audience.
By the same token, video content marketing is a strategy that involves producing useful and helpful video content to attract, nurture, and convert that audience. (Read: No ads, no sales pitches.)
Video content isn’t as straightforward as you’d think. There are multiple types of videos and formats that creators and brands are producing these days, and all of them can be used to reach your goals:
- Explainer videos
- Tutorials/how-tos
- Presentations
- Live streams
- Interviews
- Video podcasts
- Social media videos (Stories, Reels, Shorts, TikToks)
- Animated videos
- Webinars
- Product reviews/demos
- Testimonials
- Vlogs
Why is video content important for SEO?
Video content helps your SEO strategy in a few key ways.
For one thing, search engines like Google stay on top of user content consumption trends. These companies know how online video has grown as a medium, and thus serve relevant videos in search results when the user’s query could be answered with a video.
For example, some “how-to” queries are better suited for a video demonstration, like “how to add text to reels” or “how to tie a bow tie.” It would be hard to teach someone how to do these things in a written blog or article, so serving up a video makes a lot more sense.
That means a lot of keywords have ranking potential if you make and optimize video content for them. (Google has a guide you can follow to help them find and index your videos so they can rank.)
Besides direct rankings, video content also helps your SEO in indirect ways. For example, publishing a blog with a related video embedded in the post can be a way to further engage your audience and keep them on your page longer.
Publishing regular, high-quality videos that educate, inform, or entertain your target audience is additionally a way to showcase the E-E-A-T (expertise, experience authoritativeness, trustworthiness) for your brand and website. Publishing video content can help prove your brand in essentially the same way as consistently publishing high-quality written content.
Video content can also help you convert more customers. For example, 88% of people say a brand’s video on a product or service has convinced them to buy.
As you can see, there are many ways to leverage video content to boost your SEO. But before you run off to hit “record,” don’t forget that you need a strategy set up before you dive in for the best results.
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Best practices to create your video content strategy
1. Set goals
Every good strategy has at least one or two goals behind it that drive the strategy forward. Your video content strategy should be no different.
To make things simpler, the goals you set for your content marketing can be directly related to your video marketing goals. For example, you could aim to increase awareness of your brand by publishing videos on YouTube. Or you could set a goal to increase conversions on your website by embedding product videos on product pages.
Instead of creating video content just to get it out there, consider what you want each video to do. What purpose will it serve, and how will that content help you meet your goals?
Ultimately, staying goal-focused will help your video content strategy go further.
2. Choose your video formats and theme
Don’t try to do it all with video. You might feel tempted to try your hand at all the formats, but that approach is scattershot at best.
Instead, choose three or fewer formats to focus on for video content creation. For instance, you might focus mainly on publishing how-to videos every week with some behind-the-scenes, vlog-style videos thrown in once a month.
Along with your main video formats, choose a theme for your videos. What topics will you focus on? What do you want to become known for?
For example, in 2021 Hootsuite, a SaaS company, launched its YouTube channel called Hootsuite Labs. All of the videos are focused on social media “experiments,” hacks, and tips – and feature the hosts wearing lab coats and goggles like they’re working in a laboratory.
3. Determine where you’ll host your videos
After setting goals, setting a theme, and choosing formats of focus, next decide where you’ll host your videos.
An obvious option is to create a YouTube channel and upload all your videos there. Since YouTube is full of people searching for and watching videos, this option has the added benefit of more exposure and reach. Plus, YouTube videos are easy to share and embed wherever you want them to appear.
However, don’t feel pressured to default to YouTube. Other options will not just host your videos, but also offer creation tools without ads – for a fee, of course.
For example, Vimeo offers these features with a pro plan starting at $7/month. Or, you could go with a premium option like Wistia or Jetpack.
There are pros and cons to any of these services, so weigh your options against what’s best for your brand.
4. Research video topics and keywords
To make sure your videos reach the right people, you should research your video topics and find keywords those people are using to search for video content.
Generally, most video keyword research focuses on YouTube – but that’s because it’s the second-largest search engine, behind Google.
There are quite a few tools specifically for YouTube SEO that will help you find keywords and vet video topics:
- VidIQ
- KeywordTool.io
- KeywordKeg
5. Script each video
The best video content that keeps your audience watching stays on topic, gets to the point, and offers value from beginning to end.
How do you ensure you hit all of those notes? Script your videos.
Scripting can involve writing out every line you (or your speaker) will say, or just creating an outline of main points you can follow while filling in the blanks off the cuff.
Your script can also be helpful for post-production. You can note the places where you’d like video effects added in or text displayed on the screen along with your talking points.
If you decide to script every word, read it aloud before filming to see how long it runs. To not sound like you’re reading from a script (even though you are), ensure yours contains conversational language, and practice until it flows naturally.
6. Invest in production for long-form videos
Different formats of video call for varying levels of gloss and production.
For example, a long-form YouTube video needs more prep and polish, while a Story posted to Instagram can be recorded on your phone at the moment.
It depends on where you post your videos and what your audience expects from that format.
That means, if you decide to create mostly interview-style videos, for instance, you’ll need to invest in more production, such as a higher-quality camera for filming, studio lighting, and video editing software (or enlist a professional video editor).
7. Optimize each video
Finally, for the best possible chance of getting your videos ranked and watched, optimize them for SEO. This applies whether you’re uploading them to YouTube or embedding them in specific pages on your website.
Here are the key things you need for optimization:
- An engaging, keyword-optimized title: Especially on YouTube, videos with engaging titles get more clicks and views. On top of that, your main keyword should appear in your video title.
- A keyword-optimized description: Your video description helps YouTube (and viewers!) understand the content and context of your video. These should be helpful, clear, and optimized with at least your main keyword. If you’re embedding a video on a page on your website, that page should be optimized for the same (or similar) keywords your video targets.
- Relevant tags: This is specific to YouTube, but every video you upload needs a few relevant tags (similar to hashtags). The first tag should, of course, be your main keyword.
- Closed captions or a video transcript: Closed captions and/or video transcripts are a useful aid for your viewers with hearing impairments, or any viewer who just wants to know exactly what you’ve said in a video. They’re also helpful for SEO because you can and should include your keywords inside both.
3 video formats with examples
Here are a few examples of effective video content that help brands meet different goals.
The long-form, nurturing video
Some videos can fulfill the exact same purpose a long-form blog would. The point is to give your audience value, answer their questions, and provide helpful information.
Here’s an example from Healthy Gamer, a mental health coaching service, on the topic of feeling tired all the time.
The how-to/explainer video
Video is a great medium for brands with products or expertise that translates better to show-and-tell versus written instructions or descriptions.
Food and cooking brands, especially, benefit from videos showing off products or tools for cooking or baking, like this video that shows you how to use KitchenAid’s bowl-lift stand mixer. Watching this video might push prospects who are on the fence about buying to make the purchase.
The testimonial video
Testimonials from real customers are incredibly convincing and can help boost conversions – especially when you capture those stories on camera and embed them in your sales pages and landing pages.
For example, Dropbox has a whole series of customer testimonials and stories they feature on their YouTube channel and their website.
Take advantage of the video content boom
Video content is here to stay, so now’s the time to hop on the bandwagon and get your video content strategy laid out.
As part of a larger content strategy that includes written blog content and social media, video can edge you that much closer to your goals. That’s true whether you’re building brand awareness, nurturing trust with prospects, or trying to increase conversions.
Don’t be intimidated, either, if you’ve never done video before. The key is to get your feet wet and experiment to find what works best for your brand. Your team will only get better at video with time and practice, so start now and press that record button.
The post Video content guide: Why you should start creating videos now (plus examples) appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, February 20th, 2023
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has introduced a new subscription service, Meta Verified, that provides users the opportunity to acquire the highly sought-after blue verification badge on their Instagram and Facebook accounts. Users can achieve this by verifying their identity for a monthly fee of up to $15.
How it works. Meta Verified is now available in New Zealand and Australia, with plans to expand globally in the near future. The service allows users to verify their identity using government-issued ID cards, and provides several benefits such as improved protection against impersonation attacks, direct access to customer support, and increased visibility and reach.
The monthly subscription cost for Meta Verified is $11.99 on the web and $14.99 on iOS and Android devices. In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that the new service is focused on “increasing authenticity and security across our services.”
Meta’s solution to decreased revenues. Meta’s revenue has taken a hit in recent years due to Apple’s implementation of stricter privacy changes on iOS that limit the company’s ability to track users’ internet activities. The social media giant, which has not charged its customers for most of its services since its inception 15 years ago, generates almost all of its income from advertising. The impact of Apple’s move is expected to cost the company over $10 billion in lost advertising revenue this year.
In response, Meta has expressed its intent to develop a valuable subscription service for creators, businesses, and the wider community. As part of this plan, Meta is expanding access to verification and redefining the meaning of the verified badge so that more people can trust that the accounts they are interacting with are authentic.
Following in Twitter’s footsteps. This move for Meta comes after Snap launched its own subscription service last year, which has already converted over one million users into paid customers. Additionally, Elon Musk revamped Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, to offer a range of features, including the blue check mark. In recent months, Twitter has expanded Twitter Blue to over a dozen markets, including India and Indonesia. However, as of mid-January, only around 180,000 accounts had signed up for Twitter Blue, according to The Information.
Why we care. The increased authenticity and security could lead to a better user experience and more engagement, ultimately benefiting advertisers who want to reach and connect with a reliable and engaged audience.
In addition, Meta has been impacted by Apple’s privacy changes, which have limited the company’s ability to track users’ internet activities and resulted in lost advertising revenue. If Meta is successful in its plan to develop a valuable subscription service for creators, businesses, and the wider community, it could potentially create a new revenue stream for the company and reduce its reliance on advertising income. This could help to stabilize the company’s financials and create a more stable environment for advertisers.
The post Meta is bringing the blue verification badge to Facebook and Instagram appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, February 20th, 2023
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns live and die by their conversion data. Call tracking allows marketers to get valuable insights on all their campaigns.
However, there can be some hesitations to use it.
- Brands are afraid of missing out on brand equity with an established number.
- The cost on top of any other marketing cost seems high.
Understanding what call tracking is and how it can help will mitigate these concerns.
What is call tracking?
Call tracking involves using a unique phone number to track the source of incoming calls to a business. When a customer calls the business using a call-tracked phone number, the phone call is routed through a call tracking system which records details, such as:
- The caller’s phone number.
- Date and time of the call.
- Duration of the call.
- Wait time.
- Unique vs. repeat caller.
This information is used to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, determine trends in customer behavior, and identify opportunities to improve the sales process.
Call tracking allows the call to be attributed to a specific campaign. This is done either through static or dynamic numbers. Both forms will forward to a designated number (typically the main number for a business).
Static numbers do not change based on the site source and are assigned a channel. These numbers typically have a cost per number on top of a per minute charge.
Dynamic numbers change based on the site source and require you to pay for a number pool. The number pool will be based on traffic volume. If you try to go for too few numbers in your pool, you risk having attribution issues due to too few numbers being assigned to you.
Call tracking can include a recording or not. Depending on your industry, you may not be able to use the recording element of call tracking.
Call tracking recordings can offer transcripts for an additional fee.
How does call tracking work?
Call tracking can be implemented in various ways to fit all operational needs.
One common method is to use a call tracking service, which provides businesses with unique phone numbers that can be used to track the source of incoming calls. These numbers can be placed on:
- Websites.
- Social channels.
- Digital ads.
- Other marketing collateral.
When a customer calls one of these numbers, the call tracking service records information about the call and provides it to the business.
Another method of call tracking is to use a piece of software or hardware installed on the business’s phone system.
Software or hardware receives incoming calls and records information about the call before routing it to the appropriate extension or phone number.
This method of call tracking allows businesses to track calls made to their existing phone numbers, rather than requiring the use of unique tracking numbers.
Regardless of which method you choose, it’s important to designate whether you will use local or toll-free numbers.
Some brands are averse to toll-free numbers because they are concerned it hurts their branding or connection with the local community.
The verdict is out on whether those concerns hold water, so it’s important for brands to test both to confirm which serves them best.
Setting up call tracking
Setting up call tracking requires you to know which channels you want to track and what budget you have to work with.
You will need to add the snippet of code into your Google Tag Manager or running element on your site. The snippet is designed to look for one main number, so if you have multiple numbers on your site, you may need to:
- Opt for call tracking that connects to calls being made directly to your number.
- Know that only the number designated will change based on source when reviewing data.
Once you do, your UTM parameter will communicate with the snippet of code on the site to change the number to a number associated with the source.
If you decide to go with a call tracking vendor, you’ll need to layout the structure of which sources and “root” numbers you want to track.
As a general rule, the following are the most common sources to track:
- Direct traffic: Users who come directly to your site
- Organic: Users who search for something related to what you do and land on your site.
- PPC: Users who click ads and arrive on your site.
- Google Business Profiles: User calls the number from the Google Business Profile.
- Call extensions: User calls the phone number attached to the Google or Microsoft search ad.
- Social channels (should be segmented): User calls number on a social ad.
- Local service ads: User calls a local service ad (the number needs to be set up).
Brands can choose to segment as much or as little as they like.
Choosing to segment down to the campaign level will ensure you know exactly what’s working for you, however it will mean you need to pay for more numbers.
Lumping campaigns together may save on call tracking costs, but the 1:1 tracking will be lost and you’ll need to invest human time to properly attribute success.
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Choosing a call tracking vendor
Disclaimer: No call tracking vendors paid for endorsement or placement in this article. Those listed are the ones the author has familiarity with and has seen applied. There is no right call tracking solution for everyone and all hold potential for a positive engagement. Additionally, this article is focused on U.S. call tracking.
Engaging a call tracking vendor is much like choosing a cell phone provider. The core service is the same, it’s a question of how much support and reliability you can expect at various price points.
Call tracking integrations range from simple turnkey set-ups to custom and complex. Based on the structure you’ll need and how you want to handle display numbers, these are the core criteria to think about:
- How does the call tracking vendor price minutes?
- What costs, if any, are there for specific numbers?
- Will the call tracking vendor offer transcripts and recordings? How much of an upcharge are they?
- Can I achieve full coverage of the initiatives I want to track within budget?
- What kind of technical support is available for me if I need it?
- What if any international coverage is there and at what cost?
Here are some of the most common call tracking solutions and how to think about them.
Marchex
Marchex focuses on dynamic numbers and requires an accurate website traffic calculation to provide enough numbers. Due to being phone pool heavy, they depend on the brand purchasing enough numbers and minutes to cover the click and call volume.
If a brand goes low on the website traffic, they risk having their numbers being used for other brands and paying for wrong numbers. If they overestimate it, then they will have wasted spend.
As a general rule, it’s useful to think about traffic in 1,000 click increments.
Marchex has been called “easy” and “difficult” to use. Those who find value in Marchex will likely want simple and straightforward call tracking (unless they are willing to pay for the enterprise versions). Those trying to do more complex tasks or export reports/recordings will find the process a bit cumbersome.
Customer support for Marchex is hit or miss depending on what level of support you qualify for.
Marchex essential is $500 per month and requires a demo to get access pricing for their more robust offerings.
CallRail
CallRail is one of the most popular call tracking solutions. It offers fairly robust tracking and documentation, as well as many integrations to third party tools.
CallRail has fairly straight forward pricing that makes it easy to grow with. They follow more of the “Spirit Airline” school of thought on what’s included vs. what are add-ons.
While default pricing puts them on the cheaper side, the add-ons that make them truly special push the final price to the middle of the road.
The main selling points for CallRail are:
- Option for local and toll-free numbers.
- Lead gen forms.
- Text messages (SMS).
- Transcriptions.
- Call quality scoring.
- Keyword level attribution.
- Thematic conversation reporting.
They lean very heavily into their support hub so if having a person to troubleshoot things with is important, you might be disappointed. That said they do offer chat and phone support from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET.
CallTrackingMetrics
This is the call tracking solution I tend to use when given the option because of how flexible it can be and how much is included by default.
I appreciate their focus on customer support and ensuring their offering keeps up with tech innovations in the digital marketing industry.
Their pricing is accessible and for the most part all inclusive.
CallTrackingMetrics main selling points are:
- Local and toll-free numbers (along with the ability to port numbers).
- CRM functionality.
- In-depth call analytics (in premium plans).
- Call scoring and routing based on brand dictated weights.
- Text and form options (SMS).
- Privacy compliance.
One of the biggest selling points for CallTrackingMetrics is their support. It’s top-notch and enables anything from set up to complex data analysis. They have a premier consulting offering for ala carte projects and provide premium support for their agency partners.
How does using call tracking help brands succeed online?
One of the biggest wins call tracking can do for a brand is illuminate the ROI on initiatives that might otherwise get missed.
From distilling the value on SEO content plays, to affirming which paid campaigns are truly delivering ROAS (return on ad spend), call tracking is essential to paint the clearest picture.
Another useful benefit of call tracking is auditing customer success and sales teams. By being able to go back and listen to the recordings of calls, teams can improve their interactions with prospects/customers, as well as get valuable insight into what delights and what causes churn.
Finally, call tracking solutions often come with additional features that can help brands consolidate services (like CRMs, SMS marketing, and lead gen forms). By going with a solution that covers multiple functions, you’ll streamline your business and reduce costs.
The post Call tracking: What it is and how it works appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Monday, February 20th, 2023
Google stops supporting meta news keywords tag
In 2018, we learned that Google had quietly dropped support for the news meta keywords tag.
Google did not announce this change, which had actually happened months earlier.
It was Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller who confirmed this on Twitter:
“It looks like we dropped support for this around the time when we removed it from the help center. Keeping it on pages is fine, we just don’t use it for Google News anymore.”
Using the news meta keywords tag no longer helped Google understand your news content. Google ignored it the same way they ignore the normal meta keywords tag.
Google introduced the news meta keywords tag specifically for publishers in 2012.
Also on this day
2020: Spam represented less than 1% of the 20 million daily contributions Google received on Maps.
2020: Google was beta testing a new way for sites to display licensing information about content that appears in Google Images.
2019: Google Ads tweaked its mobile speed score algorithm to reduce the number of ad clicks needed to generate a result.
2019: Drug and alcohol addiction recovery centers would have to be certified before running an ad campaign and could no longer use lead generators.
2018: The company said that every $1 spent on Yelp ads resulted in a $110 offline return, based on aggregate transaction data.
2017: Google and Microsoft Bing agreed to reduce pirated content from their search results in an agreement named the Voluntary Code of Practice.
2015: Ad type would give mobile-centric marketers the ability to set up phone call conversion only campaigns.
2015: Yahoo had an ambitious plan to extend the reach of its search, display and video ads through a new Mobile Developer Suite.
2015: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2014: The warning said Bing may demote or delist a site that uses keyword stuffing.
2014: Yahoo gave $10 million to Carnegie Mellon University to support “InMind,” a project that sought to develop a next generation intelligent assistant and enhanced personalization capabilities.
2014: The company said it had more than 270,000 advertisers, a 30% gain year-over-year and up 10% from Q3 2013.
2013: A recent Google video might have suggested that Google was pushing Penguin Updates without announcing them, but Google said this wasn’t the case.
2013: In the second half of 2012, Google Shopping sent 120% more traffic to merchants than Amazon Product Ads.
2012: It appearsed you could block sites from showing up in the paid search ad results, whether signed into Google or not.
2012: Cuil, which launched in June 2008 and went defunct in September 2010, had their patent applications acquired by Google.
2012: Microsoft adCenter made changes to its location targeting functionality that brought it into line with the industry standard Google AdWords.
2010: The recently approved Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, set to a TV theme song.
2009: Using Google site search could help identify if a hacker had added common spam content, or Google Alerts could be used to monitor spammy words and phrases.
2009: Advertisers could only have the same domain showing in a specific ad group in the display URL field.
2009: The objective of the product was to enable local users/developers to build out maps data and content for places in the world where there are no commercial or other third-party databases that Google could easily implement.
2009: Publishers could pick between Arial, Times, and Verdana font types and they would be present on all of their Latin-based character units.
2009: In November 2007, Google did the exact reverse.
2009: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2008: Topics included duplicate content issues, and if there are penalties, and using the nofollow to “sculpt PageRank.”
2008: A company named Paid Search Engine Tools of Liberty Township said Google’s AdWords and Microsoft’s adCenter products infringe on their patent, “Paid search engine bid management.”
2008: It wasn’t the advertisers, the brand, or the traffic so much as the engineers that Microsoft wanted in the Yahoo acquisition.
2008: The benefits, among others, were cost savings and scalability.
2008: The reason given for the packages was employee retention in a climate of uncertainty, which had accelerated the departures of a number of high profile Yahoo employees.
2008: Newspond was a news aggregation site that boasted “No editors. No voting. Just an AI news engine.”
2007: Google had about 4.75 million U.S. subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2006, roughly 1.1 million more than Yahoo.
2007: “Super performers”: Google Video, Google Blog Search, Google Scholar and Google Desktop.
2007: A listing of lists of Google products.
2007: Page “proposed giving computers control over cars” so that there will be fewer accidents.
2007: This course would “teach students to use 40 computers to solve problems such as how many times the word ‘mild’ appeared on the Internet and which ‘mild’ was most relevant to Internet users.”
2007: Joost was like YouTube but they specialized in commercial video.
2007: Mobile advertising as a mass medium would take off, but the question was: when and in precisely what form?
From Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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Sunday, February 19th, 2023
Google removes ads from right side of search results
In 2016, Google removed ads from the right side of its desktop search results (with two exceptions: Product Listing Ad boxes and Knowledge panel ads) in all languages, worldwide.
Google Ads would only appear at the top and/or bottom of the page.
An additional ad (so, four instead of three) would appear above Google’s organic search results for what it called “highly commercial queries.”
This was actually the culmination of a test that began in 2010 and ramped up significantly in 2015, mostly outside of the U.S.
Google’s official statement on the change:
“We’ve been testing this layout for a long time, so some people might see it on a very small number of commercial queries. We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers.”
Read all about it in Confirmed: Google To Stop Showing Ads On Right Side Of Desktop Search Results Worldwide.
Also on this day
2020: The new toolset promised to offer a faster, cleaner, more responsive and even more actionable set of features.
2020: Specialized Amazon marketers and paid search marketers were most likely to be managing campaigns on the platform, our survey found.
2020: From running a small business to digging deep into SEO to help clients win.
2019: Google has confirmed that for Your Money, Your Life, queries they will give more weight in their ranking algorithm to factors around expertise, authoritativeness, or trustworthiness.
2019: There were thousands of Skills and Actions but very few people were using them.
2018: Google finally disclosed the new recrawl limits in a revised help document.
2018: Google added a new tab to the local panel in the search results named “directory.”
2018: Google removed some much-loved features in image search, but some Chrome extensions bring back that functionality.
2018: The central claim was that when users searched for [Edible Arrangements] (or versions of that name), they were seeing product ads for competitors, such as 1-800-Flowers.
2016: Google sent out a large number of notifications to webmasters who had incorrectly implemented hreflang markup.
2016: You could preview apps directly from the search results before downloading them.
2016: The latest images showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.
2015: Many websites noticed Google labeled their sites as being hacked and dangerous in the search results. The issue was not with their websites but rather the Google hacked sites classifier.
2015: Canadian Google AdWords advertisers could download an Android app to manage their campaign on the go. Google promised to expand support to other countries soon.
2015: A fix was coming soon.
2015: Users could quickly scan topic-based content from single sources on mobile devices.
2015: You could search for a restaurant that offered online ordering and click the order online button.
2014: Cutts answers: “Is there a version of Google that excludes backlinks as a ranking factor?”
2014: Overall, it was a more visually-compelling product than the old Maps with a wide array of enhanced features.
2013: Sergey Brin explained how a single failed fax allowed Google to be born.
2013: The changes included a new title-like layout you are familiar with when it comes to Windows 8 and a slideshow view for faster and richer photo viewing.
2013: Laurie Mann, who had been senior vice president of engineering operations at Yahoo since 2002, was promoted to run Yahoo Search.
2013: The appearance and functionality of the SERP on Aliyun was more like Google than a comparable page on Chinese search leader Baidu’s site.
2013: “ChaCha delivered the highest quality responses consistently across the largest group of categories and question types.”
2010: When Google added real-time results to their search interface in December, it had a major impact on people discovering tweets in the search results.
2010: Also, Google revealed that for every 15 people who click through to the privacy controls and preferences that “four users edit preferences, one opts out and 10 do nothing.”
2010: You could point the app at books, CDs, DVDs, and video games, and barcodes and it would fetch the details of that product and give you the prices, stores, reviews and more about that product.
2010: Users could now find local businesses.
2009: After testing this for close to a year, Yahoo would formally announce Rich Ads In Search – a service that placed images and videos into paid ads in Yahoo’s search results.
2009: Twitter Search had become incredibly popular, even thought most people had no clue how to find it.
2008: The policy required the ad’s display URL match its destination URL.
2008: Bill Gates said with or without Yahoo, the company would invest heavily in web search over the long term to compete with Google.
2008: Yahoo called out the “Search Assist & Suggestions Rankings” metric, where it apparently outperformed Google, based on the introduction in October of Search Assist.
2008: The imagery update covered the eastern edge of Spain, including Barcelona.
2008: Internet users in China were reportedly using Baidu to find images of actor Edison Chen and several female stars in sexual acts that were spreading throughout the web.
2008: Topix already did this for selected newspapers and Gannett TV sites and claimed 100 media partners for its local news and/or community features.
2007: The percentage of Google’s downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year.
2007: Clicking on the plus sign opened a Google Finance preview.
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
< February 18 | Search Marketing History | February 20 >
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