Archive for the ‘seo news’ Category
Wednesday, February 8th, 2023
Pinterest is leaning hard into its shoppable video and advertising-based revenue generation as part of its growth strategy.
Despite a 6% drop in monthly active users (MAUs) in the fourth quarter of last year, the social platform has regained growth, with a 4% increase in MAUs to 450 million and significant growth in mobile app users in the fourth quarter of 2022.
What Pinterest says. As part of its formal strategy, Pinterest aims to increase engagement and enhance advertiser outcomes through shoppability, along with enhancing monetization per user and streamlining operations. According to surveys, over half of Pinterest’s users consider the platform as a shopping destination, however, the company has not been efficient in making the shopping experience seamless, as acknowledged by the CEO.
“We’re building an experience that resonates with this audience, specifically around video. In fact, nearly half of all new videos pinned in Q4 were from Gen Z users.”
“Over the long term, we also want to make every pin shoppable. To that end, we’re making video content on Pinterest more actionable using the same playbook we applied to static images. Over the course of this year, we will be deploying our computer-vision technology across our video corpus to find products and videos and make them shoppable.”
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready
Future initiatives. Pinterest has initiated a project to improve the shopping experience by sending users directly to the product page on the merchant’s app and utilizing its mobile deep-linking format (MDL) for shopping advertisements. During the Black Friday Cyber Monday period, MDL generated 40% of the revenue from Pinterest’s shopping ads and contributed to a 50% growth in Q4.
The platform is also integrating shopping across its most-trafficked surfaces, including the home feed, search and related pins, to show users products most relevant to them.
Short form video content. Regarding monetization, Pinterest has seen over 10% of its engagement come from video content, with over 30% of its revenue being generated through short-form videos. The platform recently started letting advertisers create their own ads with the Idea Pin format, added support for video assets in product catalogs, and partnered with music labels to allow the use of licensed music in short videos.
Driving ad revenue. Pinterest ad revenue is now driven in roughly equal parts by campaigns driven by brand-oriented, consideration and conversion KPIs. The platform has “seen advertisers who take a full-funnel approach see more success than those who are only active on one campaign objective,” with advertisers that used a multi-objective media strategy seeing up to a 50% improvement in sales lift compared to those focused on one objective, Ready said.
Pinterest is also looking to help advertisers enhance relevance and personalization, Ready said, noting as an example its Q4 launch of ad-load management with whole-page optimization.
That enables flexing ad-load “opportunistically, in context, where ads are most well-suited for the user,” Ready said. “In our initial testing, this drove double-digit improvements in ad relevance on search, while simultaneously reducing CPAs for advertisers. We expect the whole-page optimization will enable us to continue to improve the efficiency with which we monetize our platform over time.”
Why we care. Adopting a full-funnel approach and utilizing a multi-objective media strategy, brands are likely to see better results and improvements in sales compared to those who focus on only one campaign objective.
On Pinterest, this has been shown to result in up to a 50% increase in sales lift. Additionally, the platform’s ad revenue is generated roughly equally by campaigns driven by brand-oriented, consideration and conversion KPIs, making it a valuable platform for advertisers looking to reach a wide range of objectives.
As platforms like Instagram and Facebook move away from shopping, Pinterest can step in as an alternative, giving advertisers an additional channel to showcase their products.
The post Pinterest puts more emphasis on its shoppable video feature appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 7th, 2023
If you see “Discovered – currently not indexed” in Google Search Console, it means Google is aware of the URL, but hasn’t crawled and indexed it yet.
It doesn’t necessarily mean the page will never be processed. As their documentation says, they may come back to it later without any extra effort on your part.
But other factors could be preventing Google from crawling and indexing the page, including:
- Server issues and onsite technical issues restricting or preventing Google’s crawl capability.
- Issues relating to the page itself, such as quality.
You can also use Google Search Console Inspection API to queue URLs for their coverageState status (as well as other useful data points) en masse.
Request indexing via Google Search Console
This is an obvious resolution and for the majority of cases, it will resolve the issue.
Sometimes, Google is simply slow to crawl new URLs – it happens. But other times, underlying issues are the culprit.
When you request indexing, one of two things might happen:
- URL becomes “Crawled – currently not indexed”
- Temporary indexing
Both are symptoms of underlying issues.
The second happens because requesting indexing sometimes gives your URL a temporary “freshness boost” which can take the URL above the requisite quality threshold and, in turn, lead to temporary indexing.
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Page quality issues
This is where vocabulary can get confusing. I’ve been asked, “How can Google determine the page quality if it hasn’t been crawled yet?”
This is a good question, and the answer is that it can’t.
Google is making an assumption about the page’s quality based on other pages on the domain. Their classifications are likewise based on URL patterns and website architecture.
As a result, moving these pages from “awareness” to the crawl queue can be de-prioritized based on the lack of quality they have found on similar pages.
It’s possible that pages on similar URL patterns or those located in similar areas of the site architecture have a low-value proposition compared to other pieces of content targeting the same user intents and keywords.
Possible causes include:
- The main content depth.
- Presentation.
- Level of supporting content.
- Uniqueness of the content and perspectives offered.
- Or even more manipulative issues (i.e., the content is low quality and auto-generated, spun, or directly duplicates already established content).
Working on improving the content quality within the site cluster and the specific pages can have a positive impact on reigniting Google’s interest in crawling your content with greater purpose.
You can also noindex other pages on the website that you acknowledge aren’t of the highest quality to improve the ratio of good-quality pages to bad-quality pages on the site.
Crawl budget and efficiency
Crawl budget is an often misunderstood mechanism in SEO.
The majority of websites don’t need to worry about this. In fact, Google’s Gary Illyes has gone on the record claiming that probably 90% of websites don’t need to think about crawl budget. It is often regarded as a problem for enterprise websites.
Crawl efficiency, on the other hand, can affect websites of all sizes. Overlooked, it can lead to issues on how Google crawls and processes the website.
To illustrate, if your website:
- Duplicates URLs with parameters.
- Resolves with and without trailing slashes.
- Is available on HTTP and HTTPS.
- Serves content from multiple subdomains (e.g., https://website.com and https://www.website.com).
…then you might be having duplication issues that impact Google’s assumptions on crawl priority based on wider site assumptions.
You might be zapping Google’s crawl budget with unnecessary URLs and requests. Given that Googlebot crawls websites in portions, this can lead to Google’s resources not stretching far enough to discover all newly published URLs as fast as you would like.
You want to crawl your website regularly, and ensure that:
- Pages resolve to a single subdomain (as desired).
- Pages resolve to a single HTTP protocol.
- URLs with parameters are canonicalized to the root (as desired).
- Internal links don’t use redirects unnecessarily.
If your website utilizes parameters, such as ecommerce product filters, you can curb the crawling of these URI paths by disallowing them in the robots.txt file.
Your server can also be important in how Google allocates the budget to crawl your website.
If your server is overloaded and responding too slowly, crawling issues may arise. In this case, Googlebot won’t be able to access the page resulting in some of your content not getting crawled.
Consequently, Google will try to come back later to index the website, but it will no doubt cause a delay in the whole process.
Internal linking
When you have a website, it’s important to have internal links from one page to another.
Google usually pays less attention to URLs that don’t have any or enough internal links – and may even exclude them from its index.
You can check the number of internal links to pages through crawlers like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb.
Having an organized and logical website structure with internal links is the best way to go when it comes to optimizing your website.
But if you have trouble with this, one way to make sure all of your internal pages are connected is to “hack” into the crawl depth using HTML sitemaps.
These are designed for users, not machines. Although they may be seen as relics now, they can still be useful.
Additionally, if your website has many URLs, it’s wise to split them up among multiple pages. You don’t want them all linked from a single page.
Internal links also need to use the <a> tag for internal links instead of relying on JavaScript functions such as onClick().
If you’re utilizing a Jamstack or JavaScript framework, investigate how it or any related libraries handle internal links. These must be presented as <a> tags.
The post Understanding and resolving ‘Discovered – currently not indexed’ appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 7th, 2023
Mastodon was all the craze when Elon Musk took over Twitter, but its growth has not just slowed in the past several weeks but has actually declined. The monthly active users are now at about 1.4 million after reaching 2.5 million users in November 2022.
The growth and decline. Wired published a great chart showing the growth and decline of Mastodon over the past several months.
Why the decline. That is a good question, and many suspect that Mastodon, being a decentralized platform, is just too hard for the normal user to set up and use. Sure, there is a pretty active SEO community on Mastodon, but even that community seems to be less active today than it was a month or two ago.
The truth is, once you set it up and start using it, it is not hard to use. You just need to know how to find people on the platform, and the best way might be hashtags.
However, most users want to lurk and follow their favorite personalities on a platform. Finding people on Mastodon is hard, very hard, and you first need to find out what server that user is on and then search for that person’s username and server name. It is confusing and frustrating for the average user.
Why we care. Participating in social networks is time-consuming, and if you are active on those networks, you want to see a return on your investment. Maybe that return is friendship, and maybe it is engagement, maybe it is views on your content, maybe revenue or maybe something else.
If the people have a hard time finding you on a network and your reach is limited, is it worth investing your time on that platform? Seems like recent data says no.
The post Mastodon shows declined growth, despite concerns with Twitter appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 7th, 2023
Google’s hard push into machine learning and automated bidding – and away from more manually controllable optimizations – builds a sense of exasperation for experienced PPC marketers.
The January revision to the “remove redundant keywords” recommendations, where they announced the removal of redundant exact and phrase match keywords in favor of broad match, was an aggressive example of that trend.
And it’s made some of us wonder if it’s time to reconsider a long-time little sibling of the paid search world, Microsoft Advertising.
In late 2022, Microsoft announced its ambitious goals for capturing a greater share of brand advertising budgets.
With such a promising prospect, let’s look at Microsoft Ads (or Bing Ads, as most PPC marketers still fondly call it) in relation to Google – including advantages, disadvantages, and opportunities for the platform to make some gains in market share.
What advantages does Microsoft search offer over Google for PPC experts right now?
There are a couple of major advantages Microsoft (and its search engine, Microsoft Bing) offers over Google as I’m writing this.
The first is an EQ advantage: I’ve found their reps to be reliable, helpful, and far less likely to push an agenda than Google’s reps.
This might be expected of a challenger brand that needs to work extra hard for market share, but it’s still a plus to work with folks who look for ways to achieve your goals and do what’s right for your clients.
Strictly from a growth marketing perspective, Microsoft has the unique ability to pull in LinkedIn targeting, which could enable an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy for marketers looking for ways to leverage tighter budgets.
Microsoft offers targeting by job function, industry, and specific companies. They don’t have full LinkedIn targeting capability yet (more on that in a bit), but you can leverage job-function exclusions and company targeting to construct ABM targeting for brands in your ICP.
Microsoft’s Search Partners network also includes DuckDuckGo, which gets some buzz even though – or maybe because – it’s a privacy-first platform and not an ad network.
If you’re interested in testing DuckDuckGo, you can exclude other placements in Search Partners to try and concentrate spend there, but you can’t actually isolate it for a clean test.
On the features front, Microsoft recently beat Google to the punch by rolling out video extensions, which complement action extensions and review extensions as nicely built-out ad features.
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What disadvantages persist for Microsoft Advertising?
The first and most obvious is scale. Although Bing has closed the gap with Google in search engine volume over the past three years, Google’s volume is nearly 10x that of Bing’s.
And Bing is a little sibling in other ways. It tends to mimic Google with a few months of lead time. (For instance, the deadline for switching to Bing RSAs is approaching, and they’re pushing Performance Max-like functions for ecommerce brands).
In other words, most functionality released by Google eventually comes out on Bing whether advertisers like it or not.
On the quality front, Bing has traditionally struggled to match the consistency of Google’s algorithm, which has been an issue for advertisers fighting to maintain control of their top keywords.
Recently, their exact match query results look nearly as good as Google’s and they share almost all search term data on all keyword types (~99%, compared to Google’s <80%).
If this is still a disadvantage, it’s minimal – and could actually become an advantage if Bing continues to focus on consistency.
When (and why) should advertisers consider investing and testing more on Microsoft Advertising?
In my clients’ accounts, lower levels of competition for keywords on Bing generally result in lower CPCs than Google’s.
While this doesn’t always result in higher conversion rates (in fact, those tend to be higher on Google), it can result in more efficient CPLs.
That said, the scale is much lower that the competitive CPLs alone don’t justify big resource shifts.
But Bing is a smart play in a couple of scenarios.
- We always recommend keeping an eye on your brand terms to protect your turf. This might seem obvious, but there are lots of brands that forget that step.
- Lower CPCs can help you get enough volume to understand what your spend is delivering.
- I still recommend fully funding Google, but if you’re seeing a relatively soft month or opportunities to save budget from scrubbing lower-performing keywords on Google, it might be worth testing Bing.
Overall, if you’re putting in a consistent investment into Google and struggling to improve or maintain returns, look at where return has dropped and consider scaling that back and re-investing into Bing tests.
Where should Microsoft focus on improving to compete with Google?
Microsoft appears to be going all in on AI, given its recent $10B investment in OpenAI and its red-hot ChatGPT functionality.
If it incorporates ChatGPT into Bing search, as is rumored, it could instantly make waves for Bing as a trendy, user-friendly alternative to Google, helping it wrest away some market share.
On the advertising budget front, one thing I’d strongly recommend Microsoft work on providing advertisers is the ability to create audiences from LinkedIn targeting.
In-market audiences for B2B represent a major soft spot for Google that Microsoft should exploit as soon as possible. This could be a great grassroots ABM option for companies that can’t pay for expensive ABM tools.
There’s also room to add plenty of nuance to the existing LinkedIn-like targeting. The ability to target by job title and, more importantly, the ability to drill down by using the “and” piece of and/or targeting, would give B2B advertisers a nice level of precision that Google doesn’t have.
Along with targeting and chatbot innovation, I’d recommend Bing focus on buttoning up its offline conversion tracking.
It’s come a long way with the combination of the Microsoft click ID and the auto-tag for use with CRMs, but it’s not as robust as Google’s offline tracking, which is a big deal for B2B optimization.
Don’t overlook Microsoft Ads
At this point, other than in a few specific use cases, I don’t have a compelling argument for shuttling resources away from Google and over to Bing. That said, Microsoft is steadily building momentum with room to create more.
If Google’s engagement costs continue to climb, and Microsoft focuses on releases that allow advertisers to reach the right people more efficiently, the picture could change.
For now, keep an eye on product releases and announcements. Stay ahead of the curve on adoptions from a platform determined to become more relevant in the coming months.
The post Microsoft Ads in 2023: Key areas to leverage, test and optimize appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Tuesday, February 7th, 2023
Google will be removing the podcast carousel fully from Google Search on February 13, 2023. There is a notice in the Google Podcast Manager about the podcast carousel going away.
The notice. The notice reads, “Note: Google Search will stop showing podcast carousels by February 13. As a result, clicks and impressions in How people find your show will drop to zero after that date.”
Here is a screenshot:
Didn’t it already go away. A few weeks ago, a bunch of SEOs who manage popular podcasts or like to consume podcasts, noticed that the podcast carousel was gone from the Google Search results. I guess it is not 100% gone until February 13th.
Reaction. Here is some of the reaction around this feature going away:
Yeah I feel (at the moment) that it's an opportunity wasted. I'm not sure how AI could take over podcast search though, but it would certainly be an interesting development!
— Azeem (@AzeemDigital) February 7, 2023
Why we care. If you manage a podcast and that podcast you may see less impressions and clicks on your episodes from Google Search. You should also consider downloading your historical data, just in case Google removes that data over time.
The post Google Search podcast carousel going away on February 13 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Monday, February 6th, 2023
If you’re intimidated by writing any piece of content longer than 1,000 words, don’t be.
Long-form content can be just as straightforward as dashing off a 500-word piece.
It will take you slightly longer to do it, but there are huge benefits to reap from spending time creating long-form pieces.
For one thing, longer content tends to perform better than short content. It earns more backlinks and is most likely to appear on Google’s first page.
Plus, bloggers continually report that longer content formats such as guides and ebooks are most effective. The ones who write ultra long-form posts (3,000+ words) are 2.5x more likely to say their results are strong vs. bloggers who write shorter posts of 1,500 words or less.
Ultimately, writing long-form content that gets results is a skill, and once you learn, you can leverage it to meet your content marketing goals.
What is long-form content? Why does it matter?
Long-form content is any piece of written content that’s over 1,000 words in length.
Some people will quibble about the exact word count, but almost everyone agrees that short-form content is always under 1,000 words. That means a good long-form content benchmark is 1,000 words or over.
That’s not the only defining factor of long-form content, however. To be truly long-form, the content must have depth. It needs to dive deep into a topic and provide value. It should be useful and helpful to readers, giving them the information they need.
For SEO purposes, long-form content helps you hit three connected goals:
- Rank higher in search engines: Comprehensive content outranks thin content. Usually (but not always), comprehensive content is long-form.
- Engage leads and keep them on your site: Long-form content should be chock-full of interesting, valuable information targeted to a specific reader. This engages them, keeps them on your page longer, and improves your bounce rate.
- Build your reputation: Lengthy guides and blog posts demonstrate your expertise on your topic and industry, establishing trust. Publish many high-quality, long-form posts, and your authority will build on itself.
Finally, as we move further into the age of multimedia content, don’t discount alternative content types when discussing the long-form format.
Videos, webinars, and podcasts can have just as much depth as a piece of written content and can help you meet your goals, too – and they might invite even better engagement.
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How to write long-form content in 7 steps and examples
Writing long-form content doesn’t have to be an onerous chore. If you look at it as a big puzzle that needs to be put together, it becomes a fun challenge.
The key to writing long-form content is to break it into manageable chunks – the individual puzzle pieces. Here’s how.
1. Choose the right topic
One of the first things to understand about creating long-form content is: Not all topics are suitable for this format.
If you choose a topic that’s wrong for a long-form piece right off the bat, you’re setting yourself up to struggle. You probably won’t have enough to write about and may find yourself writing just to pad out the length – a recipe for fluff and useless filler no one wants to read.
To avoid these mistakes, look at your potential topic critically before writing. The right topic for a long-form piece will be:
- Complex. There will be a lot of different parts to explain or walk the reader through.
- Specific. A general explanation of the topic won’t give your reader the kind of understanding they need to grasp it fully.
- Uncommon or unique knowledge. Your audience shouldn’t have a deep understanding of your topic going in, because the knowledge is unique or uncommon to them. This will vary depending on who you’re targeting, so make sure you understand your audience before hunting for long-form topics.
“The Pros’ Guide to Renovating Your Bathroom” by House Beautiful is a great example of a long-form blog sharing uncommon knowledge about things to consider when renovating a bathroom.
2. Study the search intent of your topic
Once you have a topic that can easily bear the weight of many words, it’s time to figure out exactly how many of them you should use.
Should your long-form guide on planning a European vacation be 1,500 words? 2,000? 3,000 or more?
To find out what searchers looking up your topic want to see (their search intent), look at the top results in Google and try to answer these questions:
- What kind of information is your audience looking for when they search for this topic?
- How much information do they need to understand it?
- How much information about the topic is satisfying to a searcher looking for answers?
For example, googling “how to plan a European family vacation” will show you a bunch of guides at the top with a mix of word counts.
Browsing through these results (and taking notes) reveals a few key details:
At a base level, all of the guides include tips for traveling in Europe with families. Two guides (in the top two spots) provide additional information on booking airfare and accommodations. The top guide (”European Family Vacation Itinerary + Tips” by Somewhat Simple), however, went above and beyond and included a full itinerary for traveling from London to Paris to Italy.
So, how many words does your long-form guide need, based on all of this?
- When you’re not sure how many words you should write, average the word count of the top 3 results for your topic and shoot for that number. For the above topic, I would try for a 2,500-3,000-word guide.
- To find the word count of any page on the internet, use a word counter tool like Word Counter Plus.
- Think about what you can add to the topic that’s useful and hasn’t already been said. How can you put your unique spin on it based on your brand expertise to provide more value to readers?
- Don’t forget to consider what the top articles in Google are missing. Are there any gaping holes you can fill?
- Always include the base information that searchers are looking for. In this instance, I would include tips for traveling to Europe with families, plus strategies and tips for booking airfare, hotels, and transportation.
3. Create an outline and structure the content
From your search intent research, you should already have a few notes about what your long-form post should include. Now it’s time to mix that with your expertise about the topic, plus any additional necessary research, to create an outline.
Why? It’s super important for long-form content to be structured and organized well to maximize readability and engagement. Outlining helps you build that structure.
To that end, always create a loose outline for your long-form content pieces. Since outlining gives you the skeleton structure of your post, it’s useful for playing with the order and flow of your points. Are they arranged logically? Are they all useful and necessary?
Your skeleton outline also gives you key places to include headings in your finished piece. In general, each major point and sub-point should have a heading attached to it. Including headings organizes the post, breaks up the text, makes it more scannable, eases readability, and even helps with SEO.
Here’s a rundown on headings you should use in your long-form content:
- H2 – Used for titles of sections and main ideas.
- H3 – Used for points that support the main idea in your H2.
- H4 – Used for additional sub-points that support an H3.
You’ll rarely use H5s, and probably never use H6s, so no need to worry about those. H1s are strictly for your post title and nothing else.
This guide by MagnifyMoney on how to balance a checkbook is well-structured and probably started with an outline of the major points, which also serve as the headings.
4. Think about your audience as you write
As you research, structure, and write your long-form post, your audience should be top-of-mind the entire time.
What do they need to know about the topic? What do they want to know?
Do you have particular insight on these things from your research or interactions with them? Include those details in your content.
For example, say I’m writing a post for beginning photographers. My team has had a conversation with a member of our audience who told us they struggle with understanding exposure and need help remembering the basic concepts. I could take that straight into my long-form post and dedicate an entire section to demystifying exposure with pro tips.
Your audience research should guide what you include in your long-form content just as much as what you learn from studying Google and the competition. In many cases, this will help differentiate your content, too.
5. Expand on your points and answer, ‘Why should I care?’
As you fill in your outline and expand on each of your points, don’t just offer rote explanations. Instead, also answer the implied question your reader will have as they scroll through your content:
“Why should I care?”
Tell them why the information is important – why it’s crucial to understand in the scheme of things, how it benefits them, what it will ultimately help them do, and/or why it matters.
Great example – this Salesforce article, “3 Ways to Promote Efficient Growth with Resources You Already Have,” has an explanation for each point on why the advice matters and why business owners should care. Even better, Salesforce provides data on why it matters.
6. Add visuals, like images and videos, to break up long-form content
More than any other type of content, long-form begs for visual elements to help break up the text.
This includes headings, but more importantly, you need relevant images or videos in there, too. Otherwise, your engagement will be much lower than if you didn’t include these elements.
After all, you don’t want your blog to look like this:
You want it to be readable, scannable, and visually engaging. For that reason, along with smart structuring and formatting, a good rule of thumb is to include one relevant image or video every 200 words.
For instance, in this beginner’s photography guide by Expert Photography, the text is punctuated with colorful custom diagrams and images that illustrate key concepts of photography.
7. Consider creating a table of contents
Are you taking the plunge and writing a truly epic long-form guide? If your post is longer than 2,500-3,000 words, consider adding a table of contents to the top of the post.
This helps ground your reader in the face of an overwhelming amount of content. You’ll show them a clear overview of what’s inside your post, giving them the lay of the land before they head out on the trail you’ve laid for them through the topic.
It’s immensely helpful for any kind of reader, no matter the industry. Here’s a good example from a blog I mentioned earlier by MagnifyMoney, which includes “key takeaways” at the top followed by a table of contents:
Other types of long-form content to consider
Finally, don’t forget about the other types of long-form content out there that are not written – videos, webinars, and podcasts.
These content types will take just as much planning and research as written long-form content but can be just as effective for building authority and trust with your audience.
Webinars
According to a survey by Demand Gen, B2B buyers prefer webinars over any other content type (tied with ebooks, another long-form hero, at 57%).
Webinars are simply live presentation events broadcast over the internet to a select group of people. Participants can stream the presentation and participate virtually.
Brands produce educational webinars for the same reasons that you publish long-form content – to build trust with your audience and to grow your brand authority. Plus, webinars can be recorded and published as standalone long-form videos (“replays”) that anyone who couldn’t attend live can watch later.
A great example of a webinar is this free event hosted by UX Testing, “24 Hours of UX.”
The webinar featured multiple speakers who talked about UX topics for a total of 24 hours. Over 7,000 people worldwide signed up to watch.
Long-form videos
Generally, long-form videos are around 15 minutes to a full hour in length and dive into a topic in the same vein as written long-form content, except with a visual or storytelling focus.
One example of a brand with a robust library of video content (both long and short-form) is Lush, a cosmetics company. Generally, their long-form videos focus on skincare and haircare guides, such as their guides to henna hair dye and refreshing your hair routine.
Podcasts
In the last decade, podcasts have risen in popularity. 78% of Americans are familiar with podcasting, and over 50% have listened to one.
It makes sense: They’re easy to listen to in the car or on public transport while doing chores or cooking dinner. They’re easy to download or stream from your mobile device. And there are limitless choices for topics.
Podcasts are also a great choice for long-form content creation. Your brand can tell stories and share valuable information with minimal investment, and you’ll reap the same benefits as publishing long-form content.
A good example is the Dear Headspace podcast, from the people behind the Headspace app.
In the podcast, meditation experts answer listener questions and provide mindful advice on everything from loss to learning new skills to dealing with negativity in the news.
Commit to writing long-form content and beef up your content strategy
There’s no question that writing long-form content takes commitment. And, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can seem like a monumentally difficult task.
It takes more time, effort, and resources to create than its short-form sibling, but ultimately, long-form will bring more and better results.
That’s because long-form content is more comprehensive. It aims to explore a topic fully, demonstrate the breadth of your brand expertise, offer valuable insights, and teach your audience something they don’t know.
Done right, comprehensive content ranks better. It keeps your readers on your page longer. Last but not least, it builds trust better than short-form content.
The time you spend learning to write long-form content won’t be wasted. It’s a highly-valuable skill that will help your content marketing bring in more ROI, and one you will use over and over to create profitable content that wins with readers and search engines.
The post How to write long-form content: 7 smart steps and examples appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Monday, February 6th, 2023
Google AdWords announces Enhanced Campaigns
In 2013, Google AdWords announced Enhanced Campaigns. This major update was designed to simplify campaign management across multiple devices and increase adoption rates of mobile advertising among small and medium-sized businesses.
Among the notable changes:
- Tablets and desktops would be grouped together, rather than treated as separate devices.
- Advertisers would set a baseline bid that applied to both desktop and tablet, and then set the mobile bid as a multiplier of the desktop/tablet bid.
- Targeting at the operating system level would no longer be available.
Google planned to upgrade all campaigns in June 2013 (though the full rollout would actually begin July 22 and would take several weeks to complete).
Read all about it in The Big AdWords Update: Enhanced Campaigns Puts The Focus On Mobile.
Also on this day
2020: Google introduced a refreshed version of its app for Android and iOS with some new features.
2020: Google kept finding more places to show Shopping ads as merchants prioritized them over text ads.
2019: Starting at the end of March 2019, Google would change how the Google Search Console Performance reports counted metrics.
2019: Google would display that information to searchers looking for more information about those times.
2018: The beta version had reached nearly everyone as of a couple of weeks ago.
2018: Less than a year after it launched, Google removed the shortcuts offering quick answers on weather, sports and entertainment info.
2018: Bing believed there were many questions where getting just one point of view was not sufficient, convenient or comprehensive
2018: Quora offered more options for behavioral and contextual targeting to either narrow or widen audience targets.
2017: The AMP header area would display a link or chain icon, what it called the “anchor” button. Clicking on this would make the publisher’s direct URL appear.
2017: Both advertisers opted to drive users to their own sites instead of YouTube.
2017: Swiping up from the bottom of the Google Maps app home screen on Android displayed a Places tab, Driving tab and Transit tab.
2015: Google said he latest update the SEO community noticed was not related to the Penguin or Panda algorithms.
2015: Google censored out the Google autocomplete results to show ISIS for the search term [how can I join].
2015: Changes were designed to make quality score easier to use as a guide to where to focus your optimization efforts.
2015: The spike in Gemini traffic appeared to come almost entirely at the expense of mobile ads served by Bing.
2014: He added that Google would be going after more Germany link schemes in the near future.
2014: Some business owners received emails from Google requiring them to reverify their listings within three weeks or their listings would be deleted from Google Maps and Google+ Local.
2014: Two new link tools were available for those looking to analyze their own links or competitor links.
2014: The logo included a quote stressing that the official Olympic Charter was against discrimination and using the colors of the rainbow gay pride flag.
2014: Yahoo inserted a Search Shortcut that displayed not only the live start time but the TV broadcast time at the top of the search results.
2013: Matt Cutts said the “writing is on the wall” for this feature. Google would remove Toolbar PageRank just over three years later, in March 2016.
2013: The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission sued Google six years earlier, claiming that certain travel-related ads appearing in search results were misleading.
2013: Despite reports that Naver controlled somewhere between 70-80% of the search market in South Korea, StatCounter was showing Google soundly defeating Naver since February 2012.
2013: Channel Intelligence offered a range of services built around data management and product feed optimization.
2013: Eighty percent of brands bought AdWords for branded searches and 50% bought AdWords for commercial taglines.
2013: The new feature overlayed lifts and trail maps for 38 major ski areas in the U.S.
2013: The Search, Discover and Connect tabs were all updated.
2012: If you went to the search preferences it would say Google Instant was only enabled when “my computer is fast enough” and then showed whether Google thought your computer was fast enough.
2012: Insufficient funding, a lack of education or just plain ignorance were the factors behind the flawed national-local approaches.
2012: The tool scanned for HTML Microdata, Microformats, RDFa, Schema.org and Open Graph.
2012: As an app search tool, it was quite nice. Neither Google nor Bing offered anything comparable in their main search engines.
2012: The law made online publishers potentially liable for the acts of individual users and third parties.
2010: His tweet suggested that Google would run its first major broadcast television commercial during the Super Bowl.
2009: Forrester Research had concluded that Google, for lack of user loyalty, was vulnerable to being dethroned and that another “Google killer” was lurking just around the corner.
2009: An example of overreaching in an effort to gain (media) attention.
2009: An interesting look into how Google tested its search results pages and how searchers interacted with them.
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: No real news other than Yang telling employees no decision had been made, proposals were being evaluated, and people loved Yahoo.
2008: Several internal groups were slated for leadership changes.
2008: 7% of Baidu’s traffic was to access free music, but Baidu had been a target of copyright actions because of this.
2008: It was similar to Google News, with a side of Digg.
2008: There wasn’t much map content about the tornadoes that tragically tore through the Southern U.S.
2008: Coverage of first SphinnCon event in Jerusalem, Israel.
2008: The company was hiring in its Nairobi, Kenya headquarters and opening new offices in several Africa countries.
2007: With the new ad ranking system in place, Yahoo hoped people would start looking at the results more as a whole.
2007: How marketers were using search volumes to help conduct research and development, launch new products and predict potential product success based on perceived consumer demand.
2007: They described the flatlining of the Google pen to cause “considerable inconvenience and loss of data.”
2007: IAC’s profits dropped 98 percent in the fourth-quarter.
2007: How Search Engine Land was growing.
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 5 | Search Marketing History | February 7 >
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Sunday, February 5th, 2023
Moz upgrades its Domain Authority metric
In 2019, SEO tool Moz announced an update to how they measured Domain Authority (DA).
Basically, DA is a score, from 0-100, that “predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages.”
Curious about what changed? Read all about it in Moz upgrades controversial ‘domain authority’ metric.
To be clear, Google does not use Domain Authority to determine ranking. “We don’t use domain authority at all in our algorithms,” according to a tweet. by Google’s John Mueller.
I bolded that part above because the DA metric has caused confusion within the SEO industry, as many have basically assigned it value as a meaningful SEO metric, akin to the old visible Google PageRank scores. And you will often see it in spammy SEO and link building emails.
Even Rand Fishkin, who created the metric, essentially disowned Domain Authority as something he didn’t care much about anymore (“I know. I created it, but still”) during Milestone’s Engage conference in August 2022.
Also on this day
2020: The feds were interviewing publishers and ad-tech rivals about whether Google has too much control “over the monetization of digital content.”
2020: The subscription-based product could also be used to identify review trends across sites.
2020: In this installment of Barry Schwartz’s vlog series, he also chatted with Boykin about Google penalties, algorithm updates and the importance of featured snippets and people also ask for SEO.
2019: Google executives discussed search experience, campaign, device and performance updates.
2018: The popular auditing tool used by developers and search marketers enabled users to run basic SEO checks against site pages.
2018: Google’s partnership with WordPress aimed to jump-start the platform’s support of the latest web technologies, particularly those involving performance and mobile experience.
2018: “Major content mismatch” were due to a processing error on Google’s side.
2016: After being quiet for over a year on link network penalties, Google said it had penalized a large, Japanese-based link network.
2016: New conversion columns were also available in the latest update.
2016: Google updated its store name guidelines in the Merchant Store policy center to specifically cite emoticons and emoji among its don’ts.
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: Twitter confirmed that it had a deal again to supply Google with access to its full stream of tweets.
2015: Would it be Bing, Yahoo or Apple itself that supplied Safari’s search engine?
2015: Lack of keyword attribution created a “blind spot” for search marketers.
2015: Google Webmaster Tools email notifications drove app deep linking awareness in terms of errors and impression and click statistics.
2014: Google escaped any significant fines or penalties. More coverage: Wow! See How Much Screen Real Estate Google Is Giving Rivals In Its EU Antitrust Settlement
2014: How to get it: marking up content that was invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violated Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.
2014: Ramaswamy and Wojcicki shared the title of SVP, Ads & Commerce, and had been jointly running the ads division for the prior year.
2014: Only 47% of respondents from within a company said there would be a significant or, at least, some increase to their SEO budget.
2014: Active local business accounts on Yelp grew to 67,000 in 2013, up 69% year-over-year.
2014: Microsoft had reportedly signed a multi-year agreement to license Foursquare data for both mobile and Bing on the PC.
2014: When Bing users searched on specific sports and athletes the search engine would include Olympic-related schedules and content in its search results.
2014: How Google, Bing and Yahoo stacked up in this Olympic effort.
2014: Apparently because Scout had higher user ratings than Google Maps in the Google Play store at the time.
2013: Either they needed to change their ways — and become much more transparent and easy to use — or they would apparently need to look elsewhere for ads. More coverage: IAC: We Comply With Google’s Toolbar Standards
2013: 70% of SMBs said they didn’t have the time to manage listings on all of the sites that consumers use.
2013: The study found that ads associated with black identifying names were more likely to have ads with the word “arrest” in them than ads that were associated with white identifying names.
2013: A Dilbert cartoon once again took a jab at SEOs and what they do or can do.
2012: In past years, organizations like the NFL, the playing teams, and the failed to show up in search results because none of their sites answered the question.
2012: Google didn’t seem to occupy any higher ground than Microsoft when it came to using data gathered from browser add-ons to improve its own services, including its search engine.
2012: The NFL and FOX were still nowhere to be found.
2010: The content block, called “Nearby places you might like,” appeared below reviews on the place page and show up to 10 recommended businesses.
2010: Deal included a more robust Bing search experience on Facebook. Also, Bing would power Facebook search outside of the U.S., to all Facebook users, worldwide.
2010: The highly-anticipated iPhone app was intended to enable you to do more with your voice and your phone in fewer clicks or moves.
2010: All three had Super Bowl shortcuts/oneboxes in place.
2010: Major events from the year 2002 in consumer search.
2010: Y could compare, side by side, the earth as it is today versus how it was during World War II.
2010: 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.
2009: It was still a limited beta to test the effectiveness of engaging potential customers for advertisers.
2009: If you viewed the book on a mobile device, they would try to extract the text using OCR and show you plain text, not scanned text.
2008: Although the bad reputation issue had been out there for years, demand for SEO services was as strong as ever.
2008: There seemed to be mounting cynicism and detachment among Yahoos.
2008 elections
2007: You could view and even download thousands of links to your site via Google Webmaster Central.
2007: They analyzed IP address, duplicate clicks, and various other clicking patterns to detect click fraud.
2007: Although there were improvements over 2006, this year was still lacking in terms of integrating their offline and online ad efforts.
2007: Google didn’t know whether a video was infringing. It simply knew it was reported as an infringement.
2007: Krillion helped consumers find where they could buy products in their markets after conducting online research.
2007: The companies included Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and Cingular.
2007: It let publishers manage and serve their own advertisements, bypassing Google, Yahoo and other third-party contextual advertising services.
2007: 28% of internet users had tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts.
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 4 | Search Marketing History | February 6 >
The post This day in search marketing history: February 5 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Friday, February 3rd, 2023
Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo, Day 4
In 2008, there were some big developments following the news of Microsoft’s bid to purchase Yahoo.
Google wasn’t happy about the news. The company objected, suggesting that the move would hurt what it called the underlying principles of the internet: “openness and innovation.”
There was some ironic back and forth, as Google had spent the past year arguing that it should be able to acquire DoubleClick, which Microsoft argued against because it would make Google too dominant in online advertising.
Meanwhile, was Yahoo considering an alliance with Google? And why did Google CEO Eric Schmidt call Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to offer Yahoo help?
And what about post-acquisition “integration” issues? Local, maps, and mobile were areas where both companies had made significant investments but also had significant duplication and redundancy.
Microsoft sounded pretty confident the deal would happen. As Kevin Johnson put it:
- “It doesn’t make sense to have thousands of engineers at Yahoo working on a search index, thousands of engineers at Microsoft working on the same search index. By combining, we can have one team of people across the two companies working on the search index, and then have others continue to focus on areas where we’ve defined differentiation in search. New search verticals and expanded user experience for search. We’ve got so many ideas, more engineers applied to those ideas will drive breakthroughs in search.”
Dig deeper:
Also on this day
2022: The global site tag could now automatically collect the information (e.g., email, telephone number) that a user submitted on the website.
2022: There were links to the MSN Autos marketplace in the knowledge panels for these car-related searches under “learn more” and “shop used cars” right above the car specifications.
2021: Phrase match would expand to include additional broad match modifier traffic and support for broad match modifier would end.
2020: For the first time, the company disclosed YouTube advertising revenues.
2020: Hitwise informed its customers that daily, weekly and monthly metric updates were on pause until further notice.
2020: Scripts were also coming to Shopping campaigns in Microsoft Advertising.
2019: The company’s primary goal was not to drive revenue and chose not to monetize search results.
2019: Roughly 53% of firms doing local SEO had 10 or fewer clients.
2016: Google started supporting JSON-LD for structured data markup for reviews and products rich snippets.
2016: Once you clicked on the “more destinations” button, Google led you into a travel search experience that made it harder to view organic search results.
2016: The idea, according to Microsoft, was to help users “find” and “do” faster.
2015: Google clarified and expanded on their reconsideration request documentation for those who had been hit by a Google manual action.
2015: The agreement came 3+ years after a similar arrangement ended. It would make tweets easier to find via search.
2015: This had been done previously for easter eggs and Google’s own content, but now it worked for third-party publishers.
2015: The company’s foray into native advertising would harness intent signals from Bing Ads.
2014: For the first time in ages, the three major search companies in the US were all run by CEOs who either came out of a search background or had a solid understanding of it.
2014: Converted clicks = Conversions (1 per-click) and Conversions = Conversions (many-per-click).
2014: The suite was comprised of two new capabilities: Dynamic Product Listing Ads creation and Product Listing Ads optimization.
2014: Searching Google for video-related content would return a large, playable, video directly at the top of the search results.
2014: The app would notify you if a faster route was available while you were in transit.
2013: Viewers turned to their devices to ask [why did the lights go out], [superdome power outage] and [what caused power outage].
2011: Bing said it has search signal, not Google signal.
2011: The mobile audience on Yelp was more active and engaged than its PC audience.
2011: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2010: Google Store Views would allow people to virtually walk into the store, off of Google Street Views.
2010: Yahoo would continue to have a career site, but it would be powered and populated by Monster.
2010: Major events from the year 2001 in consumer search.
2009: More coverage: Google Latitude Turns Maps (For Mobile) Into Social Tool
2009: Google was rolling out voice search on the Android platform via the new software update.
2009: You could use the advanced search features and then subscribe to that search via RSS.
2009: Instant answers were shown for searches related to financial information, weather conditions, movie show times, calculations, equations, conversions, and definitions.
2009: The application automatically collected sites and content as users conducted online research.
2009: Google was the “fourth-largest corporate source of campaign cash” for President Obama’s presidential race.
2009: The major updates included the new Digital Globe satellite imagery they recently licensed and “bird’s eye” photos of Paris, France.
2008: IAC claimed the legal battle for control of IAC’s board was impeding the company’s ability to effectively operate.
2008: Yahoo ranked as the top site with just under 19% of US online display advertising.
2008: For those who required server-based analytics.
2008: The European Union’s antitrust regulator was likely to impose conditions or ask Google for concessions in order to bless the acquisition.
2008: The tool modeled the potential value of Google equity awards, including transferable stock options.
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.
< February 3 | Search Marketing History | February 5 >
The post This day in search marketing history: February 4 appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Thursday, February 2nd, 2023
If you get Google’s Analytics emails, you may have already gotten the word. But ICYMI, Google has once again reminded us that Universal Analytics (UA) will stop processing data on July 1.
What’s new is the email states that starting in March, any customer who does not set up a GA4 property with basic settings, Google will configure one with a few basic settings consistent with the existing Universal Analytics property; this includes certain conversion events, Google Ads links, and existing gtag or analytics.js tags.
Opt-out. If you don’t want Google automatically creating GA4 properties for you, you may opt-out via the instructions in this link.
Here is what the email says.
Subject: We’ll soon configure Google Analytics 4 for you
Hello.
Universal Analytics standard properties will stop processing data on July 1, 2023. To maximize historical data and to ensure that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) meets your specific needs, we recommend you make the switch to Google Analytics 4 now. This will give you the opportunity to customize the setup including using the latest site tag.
For any customer who does not set up a GA4 property with basic settings, starting in March, we will configure one with a few basic settings consistent with the existing Universal Analytics property; this includes certain conversion events, Google Ads links, and existing website tags.
For Universal Analytics customers whose websites are tagged with gtag.js or analytics.js (including through tag management systems like Google Tag Manager), we will create a connected site tag that will reuse existing tags when possible to send traffic to the new GA4 property. If you do not wish to have a GA4 property created and configured based on your Universal Analytics property and existing tags, you may opt-out.
Their ‘Learn More’ CTA directs to a Google Doc page that I don’t have access to.
The notification also appears in a yellow bar at the top of some Analytics accounts. Shameem Adhikarath noticed it last night and posted it to Twitter.
New notification from @googleanalytics . On July 1, 2023, this property will stop processing data. Starting in March 2023, for continued website measurement, migrate your original property settings to a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property, or they'll be copied for you.. @rustybrick pic.twitter.com/qWzOdmqhGV
— Shameem Adhikarath (@shemiadhikarath) February 2, 2023
Why we care. With the discontinuation of Universal Analytics standard properties on July 1, 2023, advertisers need to switch to Google Analytics 4 to maximize historical data and take advantage of the latest analytics capabilities. If they don’t, Google may create a GA4 property for them with basic settings, which may not meet their specific needs. Therefore, to ensure accurate tracking and analysis of their advertising efforts, advertisers should make the switch to Google Analytics 4 now and customize the setup as needed.
The post Make the switch to GA4, or Google will do it for you appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
