Atomic Media

Microsoft Advertising Network for retail launches in the US

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

Microsoft Advertising Network for retail has been rolled out in the US.

The network has been designed to simplify the process of creating retail media campaigns, making it easier for brands to launch their retail media programs faster by:

• Connecting retailers with a large, relevant pool of demand.
• Expanding their reach offsite, driving traffic to their websites at no cost through co-branded ads.
• Providing an additional buying path.

Microsoft has not yet confirmed when the network will be expanded to additional markets.

Why we care. Creating a retail media program is typically time-consuming and resource-intensive, involving multiple teams and can take a long time to become profitable. The Microsoft Advertising Network for retail streamlines this process, enabling retailers to launch profitable programs quickly and access relevant advertiser budgets from Microsoft Advertising’s extensive network.

What is Microsoft Advertising Network for retail? Microsoft Advertising Network for Retail is a new program that lets advertisers use Microsoft’s wide-reaching ad resources and access high-intent shoppers to boost their business. By joining the network, you can potentially increase sales and retail media revenue with quality ads, even if you have a private retail media platform.

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What has Microsoft said? Paul Longo, Global Head of Retail Media Sales at Microsoft, said in a statement:

• “We have deep learning of the retailer experience across Microsoft, so with Microsoft Advertising Network for retail, we minimized the efforts for retailers of all sizes to begin immediately generating retail media revenue and increasing their onsite sales.”

Deep dive. Read the Microsoft Advertising blog for more information.

The post Microsoft Advertising Network for retail launches in the US appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Microsoft Advertising Network for retail launches in the US

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

Microsoft Advertising Network for retail has been rolled out in the US.

The network has been designed to simplify the process of creating retail media campaigns, making it easier for brands to launch their retail media programs faster by:

• Connecting retailers with a large, relevant pool of demand.
• Expanding their reach offsite, driving traffic to their websites at no cost through co-branded ads.
• Providing an additional buying path.

Microsoft has not yet confirmed when the network will be expanded to additional markets.

Why we care. Creating a retail media program is typically time-consuming and resource-intensive, involving multiple teams and can take a long time to become profitable. The Microsoft Advertising Network for retail streamlines this process, enabling retailers to launch profitable programs quickly and access relevant advertiser budgets from Microsoft Advertising’s extensive network.

What is Microsoft Advertising Network for retail? Microsoft Advertising Network for Retail is a new program that lets advertisers use Microsoft’s wide-reaching ad resources and access high-intent shoppers to boost their business. By joining the network, you can potentially increase sales and retail media revenue with quality ads, even if you have a private retail media platform.

---

---

What has Microsoft said? Paul Longo, Global Head of Retail Media Sales at Microsoft, said in a statement:

• “We have deep learning of the retailer experience across Microsoft, so with Microsoft Advertising Network for retail, we minimized the efforts for retailers of all sizes to begin immediately generating retail media revenue and increasing their onsite sales.”

Deep dive. Read the Microsoft Advertising blog for more information.

The post Microsoft Advertising Network for retail launches in the US appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Apple has 19 billion reasons not to build a Google Search rival

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

Apple is not planning to create its own search engine to rival Google.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, is expected to testify at the federal antitrust trial that there are no plans for an “Apple Search” model because its partnership with Google works better for its customers, reports Bloomberg.

Cue notably helped negotiate Apple’s multibillion-dollar deal with Google, which took four months “working every single day” to finalize.

Why we care. The U.S. Justice Department argues that Google’s deal with Apple to become the default search engine on its products has played a major role in creating an unfair search landscape as it’s prevented rival search engines from being able to compete seriously. The testimony from Cue, which Apple tried to block per Reuters, provides a significant insight into Google’s relationship with Apple.

Apple’s deal with Google. Google has a financial agreement in place with brands like Apple to be the default search engine on its products at a cost of around $10 billion a year. In addition, Google pays Apple advertising revenue – which is one of the search engine’s biggest costs.

Apple reports its income from Google as advertising revenue, which is categorized under its services division. This amounted to $78.1 billion in sales during Apple’s fiscal year 2022.

Google could pay Apple as much as $19 billion this fiscal year, according to an estimate from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

Why Google is Apple’s default search engine. Cue is expected to testify that Apple chose Google as the default search engine for its product because it is the best search engine. He will also state that Apple has financial deals with other search engines such as Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, as well as Google. In addition, Cue is set to claim that Apple customers with Google as their default search engine can easily change it, echoing comments made by Google’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein.

However, DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told the court last week that changing a default search engine is “way harder than it needs to be.” He said:

• “If you switch some of these defaults eventually you’re just going to be switched back to Google if you do nothing.”

Who else has testified? Cue will be the scond executive from Apple to testify, following pple AI head (and former Google executive) John Giannandrea last week. However, the majority of Giannandrea’s testimony was given in a closed courtroom and so the details and not publicly available.

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What has Google said? John Schmidtlein, lead lawyer for Google, claims the company dominates the search market with a 90% share because it is a superior product – not because it has financial deals that give its rivals an unfair advantage. In contrast, it highlights the default inclusion of Microsoft’s Bing on the Windows operating system, which has not significantly helped Bing’s market position.

Deep dive. Read our Google antitrust trial updates for all the latest developments in this landmark case.

The post Apple has 19 billion reasons not to build a Google Search rival appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Apple has 19 billion reasons not to build a Google Search rival

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

Apple is not planning to create its own search engine to rival Google.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services, is expected to testify at the federal antitrust trial that there are no plans for an “Apple Search” model because its partnership with Google works better for its customers, reports Bloomberg.

Cue notably helped negotiate Apple’s multibillion-dollar deal with Google, which took four months “working every single day” to finalize.

Why we care. The U.S. Justice Department argues that Google’s deal with Apple to become the default search engine on its products has played a major role in creating an unfair search landscape as it’s prevented rival search engines from being able to compete seriously. The testimony from Cue, which Apple tried to block per Reuters, provides a significant insight into Google’s relationship with Apple.

Apple’s deal with Google. Google has a financial agreement in place with brands like Apple to be the default search engine on its products at a cost of around $10 billion a year. In addition, Google pays Apple advertising revenue – which is one of the search engine’s biggest costs.

Apple reports its income from Google as advertising revenue, which is categorized under its services division. This amounted to $78.1 billion in sales during Apple’s fiscal year 2022.

Google could pay Apple as much as $19 billion this fiscal year, according to an estimate from Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

Why Google is Apple’s default search engine. Cue is expected to testify that Apple chose Google as the default search engine for its product because it is the best search engine. He will also state that Apple has financial deals with other search engines such as Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, as well as Google. In addition, Cue is set to claim that Apple customers with Google as their default search engine can easily change it, echoing comments made by Google’s lawyer, John Schmidtlein.

However, DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg told the court last week that changing a default search engine is “way harder than it needs to be.” He said:

• “If you switch some of these defaults eventually you’re just going to be switched back to Google if you do nothing.”

Who else has testified? Cue will be the scond executive from Apple to testify, following pple AI head (and former Google executive) John Giannandrea last week. However, the majority of Giannandrea’s testimony was given in a closed courtroom and so the details and not publicly available.

---

---

What has Google said? John Schmidtlein, lead lawyer for Google, claims the company dominates the search market with a 90% share because it is a superior product – not because it has financial deals that give its rivals an unfair advantage. In contrast, it highlights the default inclusion of Microsoft’s Bing on the Windows operating system, which has not significantly helped Bing’s market position.

Deep dive. Read our Google antitrust trial updates for all the latest developments in this landmark case.

The post Apple has 19 billion reasons not to build a Google Search rival appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to create an SEO roadmap

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

When implementing an SEO strategy, a document roadmap is crucial for several reasons:

• It serves as your daily guide.
• It represents what non-SEO professionals perceive as SEO – a practical checklist of tasks.
• It provides a structure to communicate expectations with stakeholders.

A solid, well-researched strategy is best complemented with an SEO roadmap in Google Sheets or a tool like Jira or Asana. Ideally, leverage the technologies your teams are already using. 

This article discusses why an SEO roadmap is essential for your strategy. Plus, learn how to create a solid SEO roadmap to prioritize tasks and collaborate effectively with teams.

What you need for an SEO roadmap

An SEO roadmap is a lot like SEO as a whole, it cannot successfully exist in a silo. That’s both in terms of your own research and your team within the wider business. 

Within SEO, you’d ideally have a completed SEO strategy, which includes your: 

• Technical audit.
• Content inventory, content audit and content gap analysis.
• Topical research – entity (including your own brand), keywords and topics.
• Market and competitor research.

Once you have all of that, you should be able to layer it on top of your wider business context. This includes: 

• Your business goals for the next one to five years.
• Tools, people and budget availability. This includes knowing when and how you can pitch for budget.
  • Planned product launches or marketing campaigns.
• Your technology stack and any known limitations, considerations, or planned changes (including migrations).

Gathering this information for your SEO roadmap is crucial because, initially, you’ll aim to tackle high-impact, low-effort tasks. Keep in mind that these tasks vary depending on your organization.

Understanding your business goals will:

• Help align your SEO “quick wins” with work that will actually directly benefit the bottom line of the business.
• Give you the ability to speak to that benefit when getting the work done. 

Knowing the people, tools and budget available to you may push you to reconsider where you start with your roadmap. 

Let’s say you’re launching a new product in the next three months, and your development team is totally at capacity until a month after that launches. Maybe you start with your content team and create new hub-and-spoke content within your organization’s area of expertise first.

For example, when I worked at Optus, a major telco in Australia, folks would be hard-pressed to get any new development done on the website, large or small, from about June to September because we were preparing for the iPhone launch.

(In that instance, I was a part of that launch team, so I had a bit more wiggle room to get stuff done than I would’ve otherwise, but you get the gist). 

You’ll also want to get a grasp on your tech stack. For some tech stack configurations, particularly on smaller websites or with SPAs, implementing a 404 server response or a 301 redirect might seem straightforward but is much more difficult and time-consuming than standard. 

It isn’t easy to generalize in SEO. So, while you may want to say that a high-impact, low-effort task would be to resize the 10MB images on your product pages (yes, I’ve seen this happen, and you probably have too), there may be a reason why your images are that large, or why they haven’t been compressed yet. 

Having all this context before putting together an SEO roadmap becomes your early indicator of those sticky situations. 

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Steps to create your SEO roadmap

1. Prioritize

This is the first round of prioritization, the one where I estimate the SEO impact in a silo. 

If I look at nothing else, the one metric I look at to help prioritize is how much of the website that potential issue affects. 

Once I understand the scale, I look to estimate the impact. Quantifying impact can be difficult, but there are a few ways to do it: 

• Top-down using competitor analysis and historical or current website changes as a model.
• Bottom-up using keyword-level forecasting based on estimated position changes.
• Traffic estimates using historical modeling and tactically based case studies or historical competitor execution.

While we can be secure in our scale and impact estimates for SEO, the one element we’re less certain of is effort. 

I’ll still take a stab at estimating effort, but to do it well, I bring in the experts.

2. Assign and estimate

SEO can sometimes be like herding cats because you rely on other people or teams to implement your tactics. 

This is why I start my roadmap with what some may feel is that last step – figuring out who’ll be doing the work and speaking to them about how long they think it will take. 

If relevant, I’ll ask when they think they can do it and any other dependencies they’d need to do the work, like budget. 

I’m not an expert in design, UX, or front-end development for our website. They are.

So, while I can build a rough estimate of what I think a task will take based on my own experiences with other clients or what the web generally says, it’s only a T-shirt size – one that could be off-base for reasons I don’t know.

I don’t know the legacy code we have stringing through the website or the fact that it can take up to an hour sometimes to replace images on a product page because of a buggy CMS that’ll randomly not apply filename changes sometimes. 

I don’t know if we’re amidst an unofficial code migration or running 20x CRO tests on that page. 

I don’t know all that stuff, but my teams do.  

So I take my SEO strategy, which I’ve probably worked on for months, agonized and perfected, and I pull out all the tasks I think a particular team will do. 

Then I take that and do a rough grooming and sizing session for those tasks with someone who knows what they’re talking about – usually, with the product owner of that squad. 

And if you don’t know who that is, it’s a good time to make friends. I swear, 90% of being an SEO is about being curious and kind. 

Note: Depending on your organization, your team might estimate differently. Sometimes, it’s in days. Other times, it’s using an agile Fibonacci scale or something similar. 

Whatever it is, you’ll want to be consistent. A Fibonacci scale can make translating to days in order to estimate the time frame a bit more difficult. Still, I’d lean on the team to give an average execution time so you can then put in at least an estimated delivery.

This estimation process is helpful for enterprise-level companies because, assuming the conversation goes well, you’re essentially getting a soft yes from that team. 

That’ll make it easier for them to say yes for real when the work comes across their desk later.

And then once that’s done, for me, it’s mostly paperwork.  

3. Do the paperwork

For me, there’s no better format than Gantt when it comes to timed work and keeping track of it.

You can build it like I typically do in Google Sheets or use software-based versions in tools like Jira or Monday. 

Define your headings

Your headings should be your primary work areas and can be based on your strategy. 

For example, you may have buckets of work related to infrastructure, content or engineering. 

For my strategy and roadmap, I typically align my primary areas of work to the teams that will primarily be handling them because that’s how my brain keeps track of things best. 

Sometimes, aligning them differently, for example, with your business goals or team KPIs may make sense.

This could be something like “site speed, accessibility, expertise” where site speed and accessibility would primarily be development teams, and expertise would be a mix of SEO, development and content tasks. 

Define your tasks

Everyone has a different perspective on what tasks should and shouldn’t be included in an SEO roadmap. Two major considerations are: 

• How much you’re able to execute yourself.
• The level of detail you want and at what point it becomes overwhelming.

I typically work with enterprise clients, so in terms of tasks, there’s not usually much I can actually do myself. 

What this means is my SEO roadmap is often a duplication of tasks that are assigned elsewhere, like JIRA tickets for developers or Asana tasks for designers. 

The SEO roadmap becomes a centralized way for me to keep track of progress on SEO initiatives all in one place rather than a to-do list for me and my team to follow. 

Let’ say you can execute much of the work yourself, then fabulous.

If tasks you can do yourself account for more than half the tasks in your roadmap, I’d suggest culling the list to focus on SEO work only and tracking non-SEO work either in a different tab in the spreadsheet or elsewhere.  

For the granularity of tasks, aim for the middle ground – not too big and overwhelming, but also not too small and insignificant. 

You wouldn’t want to include, say, “change the title tag on the blue widget page. But “change all title tags on the website” might be too large if you’re an enterprise site. 

A middle ground could be, “Rewrite title tag formula for product page template, ” or even “Rewrite all title tag formulas.” 

Something like “Product page optimization” could and should be broken into its component tasks, like: 

• Create and share example product schema output for implementation.
• Create FAQ for top 20 revenue-driving products.
• Resize images for top 20 revenue-driving products.  
• Work with content team to re-write product descriptions so they’re different from the manufacturer-provided ones for top 20 revenue-driving products.

From a practical perspective, if this is a year-long SEO roadmap, you want a manageable number of rows rather than hundreds or even thousands. 

You’d likely get overwhelmed and end up not feeling confident getting started. Analysis paralysis is real. 

4. Re-prioritize, assign and schedule your tasks

To use the SEO roadmap well, you need to treat it with laser focus. Once you have everything bucketed and tasked and know how long they’ll take to execute, it’s time to review your priority. 

I prioritize tasks through a few different lenses after taking clear notes from my teams about dependencies and requirements for getting the work done. 

First, the Eisenhower matrix. 

This simple scale of the intersection of urgency and importance can be super grounding: more will probably end up in the “delete” bucket than you think. 

I generally put these in a list in my notebook or project management tool I call “If/When I Have Time.” 

This is after the initial grooming with execution teams, which probably discussed a few tasks or elements of tasks I realized weren’t worth the effort for the impact they would have. 

I then come back to my initial prioritization and factor in the effort estimation from my teams. 

• Does their feedback change my estimate of the impact? 
• Did their expertise change my understanding of the scale? 

Finally, we come back to the start. With tasks re-prioritized from actual feedback from the folks that’d be doing the work, it’s time to get the ball rolling. 

This is when I tap execution teams on the shoulder to let them know this work should be coming their way and confirm they’ll be the ones to execute. 

I start those “let’s make this official” for the tasks scheduled for the next six weeks, which, if all has gone well, should be those low-effort, high-impact tasks. 

Drive SEO results with a well-defined roadmap

In case you weren’t sure, yes, this is a cycle. There’s a reason I started and ended my suggested process with similar tasks around assigning and estimating. 

A strong SEO roadmap often moves and adjusts to what’s happening in the business and on the Internet. It’s an agile, living document. 

When creating an SEO roadmap, my advice is to: 

• Have a clear picture of the business and market context.
• Prioritize tasks first based on your SEO expertise.
• Re-prioritize tasks based on estimations and feedback from the executing teams.
• Organize your roadmap based on business goals or execution teams.
• Be focused on which tasks are actually valuable.
• Remember this is different from your day-to-day task list. Detailed page-level tasks should probably be kept out of the task list.
• Revisit the roadmap regularly.

With all that in mind, you’re armed to build a strong and flexible SEO roadmap for your clients, your business or your employer. 

The post How to create an SEO roadmap appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to create an SEO roadmap

Tuesday, September 26th, 2023

When implementing an SEO strategy, a document roadmap is crucial for several reasons:

• It serves as your daily guide.
• It represents what non-SEO professionals perceive as SEO – a practical checklist of tasks.
• It provides a structure to communicate expectations with stakeholders.

A solid, well-researched strategy is best complemented with an SEO roadmap in Google Sheets or a tool like Jira or Asana. Ideally, leverage the technologies your teams are already using. 

This article discusses why an SEO roadmap is essential for your strategy. Plus, learn how to create a solid SEO roadmap to prioritize tasks and collaborate effectively with teams.

What you need for an SEO roadmap

An SEO roadmap is a lot like SEO as a whole, it cannot successfully exist in a silo. That’s both in terms of your own research and your team within the wider business. 

Within SEO, you’d ideally have a completed SEO strategy, which includes your: 

• Technical audit.
• Content inventory, content audit and content gap analysis.
• Topical research – entity (including your own brand), keywords and topics.
• Market and competitor research.

Once you have all of that, you should be able to layer it on top of your wider business context. This includes: 

• Your business goals for the next one to five years.
• Tools, people and budget availability. This includes knowing when and how you can pitch for budget.
  • Planned product launches or marketing campaigns.
• Your technology stack and any known limitations, considerations, or planned changes (including migrations).

Gathering this information for your SEO roadmap is crucial because, initially, you’ll aim to tackle high-impact, low-effort tasks. Keep in mind that these tasks vary depending on your organization.

Understanding your business goals will:

• Help align your SEO “quick wins” with work that will actually directly benefit the bottom line of the business.
• Give you the ability to speak to that benefit when getting the work done. 

Knowing the people, tools and budget available to you may push you to reconsider where you start with your roadmap. 

Let’s say you’re launching a new product in the next three months, and your development team is totally at capacity until a month after that launches. Maybe you start with your content team and create new hub-and-spoke content within your organization’s area of expertise first.

For example, when I worked at Optus, a major telco in Australia, folks would be hard-pressed to get any new development done on the website, large or small, from about June to September because we were preparing for the iPhone launch.

(In that instance, I was a part of that launch team, so I had a bit more wiggle room to get stuff done than I would’ve otherwise, but you get the gist). 

You’ll also want to get a grasp on your tech stack. For some tech stack configurations, particularly on smaller websites or with SPAs, implementing a 404 server response or a 301 redirect might seem straightforward but is much more difficult and time-consuming than standard. 

It isn’t easy to generalize in SEO. So, while you may want to say that a high-impact, low-effort task would be to resize the 10MB images on your product pages (yes, I’ve seen this happen, and you probably have too), there may be a reason why your images are that large, or why they haven’t been compressed yet. 

Having all this context before putting together an SEO roadmap becomes your early indicator of those sticky situations. 

---

---

Steps to create your SEO roadmap

1. Prioritize

This is the first round of prioritization, the one where I estimate the SEO impact in a silo. 

If I look at nothing else, the one metric I look at to help prioritize is how much of the website that potential issue affects. 

Once I understand the scale, I look to estimate the impact. Quantifying impact can be difficult, but there are a few ways to do it: 

• Top-down using competitor analysis and historical or current website changes as a model.
• Bottom-up using keyword-level forecasting based on estimated position changes.
• Traffic estimates using historical modeling and tactically based case studies or historical competitor execution.

While we can be secure in our scale and impact estimates for SEO, the one element we’re less certain of is effort. 

I’ll still take a stab at estimating effort, but to do it well, I bring in the experts.

2. Assign and estimate

SEO can sometimes be like herding cats because you rely on other people or teams to implement your tactics. 

This is why I start my roadmap with what some may feel is that last step – figuring out who’ll be doing the work and speaking to them about how long they think it will take. 

If relevant, I’ll ask when they think they can do it and any other dependencies they’d need to do the work, like budget. 

I’m not an expert in design, UX, or front-end development for our website. They are.

So, while I can build a rough estimate of what I think a task will take based on my own experiences with other clients or what the web generally says, it’s only a T-shirt size – one that could be off-base for reasons I don’t know.

I don’t know the legacy code we have stringing through the website or the fact that it can take up to an hour sometimes to replace images on a product page because of a buggy CMS that’ll randomly not apply filename changes sometimes. 

I don’t know if we’re amidst an unofficial code migration or running 20x CRO tests on that page. 

I don’t know all that stuff, but my teams do.  

So I take my SEO strategy, which I’ve probably worked on for months, agonized and perfected, and I pull out all the tasks I think a particular team will do. 

Then I take that and do a rough grooming and sizing session for those tasks with someone who knows what they’re talking about – usually, with the product owner of that squad. 

And if you don’t know who that is, it’s a good time to make friends. I swear, 90% of being an SEO is about being curious and kind. 

Note: Depending on your organization, your team might estimate differently. Sometimes, it’s in days. Other times, it’s using an agile Fibonacci scale or something similar. 

Whatever it is, you’ll want to be consistent. A Fibonacci scale can make translating to days in order to estimate the time frame a bit more difficult. Still, I’d lean on the team to give an average execution time so you can then put in at least an estimated delivery.

This estimation process is helpful for enterprise-level companies because, assuming the conversation goes well, you’re essentially getting a soft yes from that team. 

That’ll make it easier for them to say yes for real when the work comes across their desk later.

And then once that’s done, for me, it’s mostly paperwork.  

3. Do the paperwork

For me, there’s no better format than Gantt when it comes to timed work and keeping track of it.

You can build it like I typically do in Google Sheets or use software-based versions in tools like Jira or Monday. 

Define your headings

Your headings should be your primary work areas and can be based on your strategy. 

For example, you may have buckets of work related to infrastructure, content or engineering. 

For my strategy and roadmap, I typically align my primary areas of work to the teams that will primarily be handling them because that’s how my brain keeps track of things best. 

Sometimes, aligning them differently, for example, with your business goals or team KPIs may make sense.

This could be something like “site speed, accessibility, expertise” where site speed and accessibility would primarily be development teams, and expertise would be a mix of SEO, development and content tasks. 

Define your tasks

Everyone has a different perspective on what tasks should and shouldn’t be included in an SEO roadmap. Two major considerations are: 

• How much you’re able to execute yourself.
• The level of detail you want and at what point it becomes overwhelming.

I typically work with enterprise clients, so in terms of tasks, there’s not usually much I can actually do myself. 

What this means is my SEO roadmap is often a duplication of tasks that are assigned elsewhere, like JIRA tickets for developers or Asana tasks for designers. 

The SEO roadmap becomes a centralized way for me to keep track of progress on SEO initiatives all in one place rather than a to-do list for me and my team to follow. 

Let’ say you can execute much of the work yourself, then fabulous.

If tasks you can do yourself account for more than half the tasks in your roadmap, I’d suggest culling the list to focus on SEO work only and tracking non-SEO work either in a different tab in the spreadsheet or elsewhere.  

For the granularity of tasks, aim for the middle ground – not too big and overwhelming, but also not too small and insignificant. 

You wouldn’t want to include, say, “change the title tag on the blue widget page. But “change all title tags on the website” might be too large if you’re an enterprise site. 

A middle ground could be, “Rewrite title tag formula for product page template, ” or even “Rewrite all title tag formulas.” 

Something like “Product page optimization” could and should be broken into its component tasks, like: 

• Create and share example product schema output for implementation.
• Create FAQ for top 20 revenue-driving products.
• Resize images for top 20 revenue-driving products.  
• Work with content team to re-write product descriptions so they’re different from the manufacturer-provided ones for top 20 revenue-driving products.

From a practical perspective, if this is a year-long SEO roadmap, you want a manageable number of rows rather than hundreds or even thousands. 

You’d likely get overwhelmed and end up not feeling confident getting started. Analysis paralysis is real. 

4. Re-prioritize, assign and schedule your tasks

To use the SEO roadmap well, you need to treat it with laser focus. Once you have everything bucketed and tasked and know how long they’ll take to execute, it’s time to review your priority. 

I prioritize tasks through a few different lenses after taking clear notes from my teams about dependencies and requirements for getting the work done. 

First, the Eisenhower matrix. 

This simple scale of the intersection of urgency and importance can be super grounding: more will probably end up in the “delete” bucket than you think. 

I generally put these in a list in my notebook or project management tool I call “If/When I Have Time.” 

This is after the initial grooming with execution teams, which probably discussed a few tasks or elements of tasks I realized weren’t worth the effort for the impact they would have. 

I then come back to my initial prioritization and factor in the effort estimation from my teams. 

• Does their feedback change my estimate of the impact? 
• Did their expertise change my understanding of the scale? 

Finally, we come back to the start. With tasks re-prioritized from actual feedback from the folks that’d be doing the work, it’s time to get the ball rolling. 

This is when I tap execution teams on the shoulder to let them know this work should be coming their way and confirm they’ll be the ones to execute. 

I start those “let’s make this official” for the tasks scheduled for the next six weeks, which, if all has gone well, should be those low-effort, high-impact tasks. 

Drive SEO results with a well-defined roadmap

In case you weren’t sure, yes, this is a cycle. There’s a reason I started and ended my suggested process with similar tasks around assigning and estimating. 

A strong SEO roadmap often moves and adjusts to what’s happening in the business and on the Internet. It’s an agile, living document. 

When creating an SEO roadmap, my advice is to: 

• Have a clear picture of the business and market context.
• Prioritize tasks first based on your SEO expertise.
• Re-prioritize tasks based on estimations and feedback from the executing teams.
• Organize your roadmap based on business goals or execution teams.
• Be focused on which tasks are actually valuable.
• Remember this is different from your day-to-day task list. Detailed page-level tasks should probably be kept out of the task list.
• Revisit the roadmap regularly.

With all that in mind, you’re armed to build a strong and flexible SEO roadmap for your clients, your business or your employer. 

The post How to create an SEO roadmap appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Former Googler: Google ‘using clicks in rankings’

Monday, September 25th, 2023

“Pretty much everyone knows we’re using clicks in rankings. That’s the debate: ‘Why are you trying to obscure this issue if everyone knows?’”

That quote comes from Eric Lehman, a former 17-year employee of Google who worked as a software engineer on search quality and ranking. He left Google in November.

Lehman testified last Wednesday as part of the ongoing U.S. vs. Google antitrust trial.

If you haven’t heard this quote yet, expect to hear it. A lot.

But. That’s not all Lehman had to say. Google’s machine learning systems BERT and MUM are becoming more important than user data, he said.

• “In one direction, it’s better to have more user data, but new technology and later systems can use less user data. It’s changing pretty fast,” Lehman said, as reported by Law360.

Lehman believes Google will rely more heavily on machine learning to evaluate text than user data, according to an email Lehman wrote in 2018, as reported by Fortune:

• “Huge amounts of user feedback can be largely replaced by unsupervised learning of raw text,” he wrote.

User vs. training data. There was also a confusion around “user data” vs. training data” when it came to BERT. Big Tech on Trial reported:

“DOJ’s attempt to impeach Lehman’s testimony also seemed to backfire. In response to a DOJ question about whether Google had an advantage in using BERT over competition because of its user data, Lehman testified that Google’s ‘biggest advantage in using BERT’ over its competitors was that Google invented BERT. DOJ then put up an exhibit titled ‘Bullet points for presentation to Sundar.’ One of the bullets on this exhibit said the following (according to my notes): ‘Any competitor can use BERT or similar technologies. Fortunately, our training data gives us a head-start. We have the opportunity to maintain and extend our lead by fully using the training data with BERT and serving it to our users…’

This likely would have been an effective impeachment of Lehman if “training data” meant some kind of user data. But after DOJ concluded its re-direct examination, Judge Mehta asked Lehman what “training data” referred to. Lehman explained it was different from user search data.”

What is it like to compete against Google?

Sensitive Topics. Lehman was also asked by DOJ attorney Erin Murdock-Park about a slide from one of his slide decks on “Sensitive Topics” that instructed employees to “not discuss the use of clicks in search…”

According to reporting from Big Tech on Trial (via X), Lehman said “we try to avoid confirming that we use user data in the ranking of search results.”

The reporter X post says “I didn’t get great notes on this, but I think the reason had something to do with not wanting people to think that SEO could be used to manipulate search results.”

Google = liars? Since discovering this testimony, SEOs have been quick to use Lehman’s quotes as definitive proof that Google has been lying about using clicks or click-through rate for all of its 25 years.

The question of whether Google uses clicks was the first question asked last week during an AMA with Google’s Gary Illyes at Pubcon Pro in Austin. Illyes answer was “technically, yes,” because Google uses historical search data for its machine-learning algorithm RankBrain.

Technically yes, translated from Googler speak, means yes. RankBrain was trained on user search data.

We know this because Illyes already told us this in 2018. He said RankBrain “uses historical search data to predict what would a user most likely click on for a previously unseen query.”

RankBrain was used for all searches, impacting “lots” of them, starting in 2016.

Google Search tracks everything. But the fact that Google tracks clicks in Search does not mean clicks are used as a direct ranking factor. In other words, if site A gets 100 clicks and site B gets 101 clicks, then site B automatically jumps up to Position 1.

Much like how Google uses its people to rate the quality of its search results, Google is likely using clicks to rate the results for queries and train its ranking systems.

Why we care. Does Google use clicks? Yes. But again, probably not as a ranking signal (thought admittedly I can’t say that with 100% certainty as I don’t work at Google or have access to the algorithm). I know clicks are noisy and easy to manipulate. And for many sites/queries, there simply wouldn’t be enough data to evaluate to make it a useful ranking signal for Google.

Dig deeper. The biggest mystery of Google’s algorithm: Everything ever said about clicks, CTR and bounce rate

The post Former Googler: Google ‘using clicks in rankings’ appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Mapping the customer journey for SEO and marketing success

Monday, September 25th, 2023

Before embarking on a shopping journey, customers often find themselves in a state of awareness where a specific need or desire has sprouted in their minds. 

A growing recognition of a gap characterizes this initial phase – perhaps a missing item in their collection, an upgrade to enhance their lifestyle or a solution to a newly identified problem at their workplace.

During the purchasing decision process, a customer navigates a rich landscape of exploration and contemplation.

Initially, curiosity leads them to sift through various options, scrutinizing features, reviews, and personal recommendations while considering the product’s aesthetic appeal.

As the customer dives deeper, a complex interplay between desire and rationality occurs, with considerations of value, necessity and potential enjoyment balanced against budget constraints.

An emerging emotional connection to the product influences their choice, potentially aligning with their personal narrative or lifestyle.

Ultimately, a fusion of research and emotional resonance guides them to a decision where trust in the brand and perceived value peaks, culminating in a purchase that is both anticipated and satisfying yet open to subsequent evaluation based on the product’s ability to meet cultivated expectations.

In the vibrant canvas of digital marketing and SEO, weaving personal narratives through customer journey maps isn’t just vital – it’s a sophisticated art.

Join me on a journey to understanding the significance of the customer journey map and what role SEO plays, bridging SEO finesse with a nuanced grasp of your audience’s journey and painting not just a plan but a masterpiece of empathy and insight.

Understanding the significance of the customer journey in SEO

By aligning SEO strategies with the customer journey, marketers can craft content that is highly relevant and tailored to resonate with users as they research a product or service. 

This approach enhances the user experience and positively impacts search engine rankings by aligning the two. 

Google, in particular, tends to favor content that embodies the principles of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). The process in which users begin to research their needs starts on Google and other search engines.

Data-driven insights from understanding and optimizing the customer journey through keyword analysis and proper tagging can inform SEO strategies. This leads to more impressions, traffic and increased brand loyalty.

Users who identify their needs and validate their decision will make a purchase decision quickly and are more likely to engage with the site and convert. 

In the long run, SEO strategies focusing on the customer journey are more sustainable and benefit the user experience, contributing to a positive return on investment (ROI) and a competitive edge in the digital landscape.

The customer journey map: A compass for success

A customer journey map is a visual tool that meticulously charts the various touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a brand, extending from the initial spark of awareness to post-purchase engagements. 

This illustrative map captures transactional phases and intricately explores the underlying emotions and motivations steering the customer’s choices. 

It serves as a comprehensive blueprint, offering a deep dive into each step of the customer’s experience, thus painting a fuller picture of their path and nuanced relationship with your brand and offerings.

Why define your customer journey map?

In the ever-evolving business and marketing landscape, understanding your customer journey map is more of a necessity than a luxury. 

I have entered new roles as an SEO of a company many times, only to find that the marketers I work with haven’t considered where the user is in their decision-making process while developing content. 

As a part of this, it isn’t clear what role SEO should play during attribution. I will utilize a keyword analysis while considering what problems they want to solve. 

I ask myself the right questions, tagging each keyword with where they are in their journey to understand their intent. 

But don’t take my word for it. Here are some compelling reasons why defining your customer journey is crucial for the success and growth of your marketing efforts:

Better understanding your customer

Implementing a customer journey map provides deep insights into your target audience’s goals, pain points, and emotions. With this knowledge, you can tailor your marketing and SEO efforts for maximum impact.

Identification and resolution of service issues

No product or service is flawless, but by viewing the brand from your customer’s perspective, you can identify and address shortcomings to enhance customer satisfaction.

Creation of exceptional experiences

A clear understanding of the customer journey allows you to optimize touchpoints from your various marketing channels, creating exceptional experiences at every stage and fostering trust in your brand.

Discovery of untapped opportunities

By analyzing the journey, you may uncover gaps in your SEO strategy or what your competitors might have missed. These unique nuances can set your brand apart.

Cost reduction and improved results

Aligning your SEO strategy with the customer journey can enhance campaign effectiveness, driving up results while reducing costs.

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SEO’s part in the customer experience journey

For optimal success, it’s vital to harmonize your marketing efforts with the nuanced pathways of the customer experience journey. This holistic approach involves:

Understanding the phases

• Recognizing that marketing communications alone are short-sighted. 
• The entire customer experience should be considered, from awareness to post-purchase, with SEO playing a crucial role.

Data-driven decisions

• Use estimated volume numbers from your keyword analysis to guide marketing decisions at each journey stage.

Industry-specific tailoring

• To stay focused, adapt the customer journey map and where SEO fits within your business model, whether B2B, B2C, or retail.

Optimizing for search throughout the entire customer journey

The customer journey process intricately branches into six well-defined stages, each necessitating a tailored marketing strategy. 

This approach effectively engages and shepherds users through a thoughtful progression culminating in a well-informed purchase decision. 

It is a delicate dance of guidance and persuasion, ensuring potential customers feel supported and enlightened on their path to choosing the perfect product or service at each step.

1. Awareness of need

Initially, customers recognize a pressing issue that necessitates resolution. They gauge the gravity of the dilemma, presenting an opportunity for brands to seize their interest. 

Marketing strategies should encompass problem-related keywords, enlightening blog articles, captivating social media narratives, and instructional videos. 

Additionally, events are a powerful tool to deepen the audience’s understanding of the matter, showcasing the brand’s viable solutions.

2. Investigate options 

During this phase, users initiate broad searches to gather information, read reviews, and align criteria for potential solutions. They start defining outcomes, stakeholders, metrics, budgets and more. 

To assist users in their research, marketers should:

• Optimize blog posts.
• Create informative website pages.
• Share empathetic social media posts addressing pain points.
• Produce videos guiding users in selecting the best product or service.

3. Committing to change 

Users in this stage commit to their goals, narrow choices, and delve deeper into research. 

Sales engagements become more prominent, and stakeholders join the decision-making process. 

Marketing strategies should focus on content that challenges doubts or objections, such as comparison pages that validate the company’s credibility. 

Influencers, email campaigns and retargeting efforts can reinforce the commitment made by users.

4. Solution selection 

As users seek buy-in from decision-makers, they require content that justifies their expenditure, often emphasizing pricing, ROI and overall value. 

B2B marketing should speak the language of the C-suite, highlighting ROI and efficiency improvements. 

For ecommerce, testimonials and reviews play a crucial role in influencing selection.

5. Validate choice

Users validate their choice in this stage by seeking management support and evaluating implementation logistics, costs, and ongoing support. 

Brands should optimize for brand-related searches, leverage testimonials and reviews to showcase successful experiences and highlight exceptional customer service.

6. Purchase 

Following a thorough assessment, customers stand on the cusp of making their ultimate purchasing choice. Discussions surrounding pricing, terms and specifics of implementation might take place. 

To facilitate this phase, brands can employ SEO and email marketing strategies, offering resources like: 

• User guides.
• Setup manuals.
• Answers to frequently asked questions. 

Moreover, leveraging influencers to craft engaging unboxing videos can vividly illustrate the product or service in use, enhancing the customer’s ability to visualize its value in their lives.

Successful campaigns are born from the seamless integration of customer journey mapping, adept SEO and strategic marketing. 

Businesses can cultivate trust, enhance online visibility, and boost customer engagement by deeply understanding the customer’s journey and aligning SEO techniques with marketing efforts. Embrace this powerful synergy, ensuring you confidently navigate the vast SEO terrain. 

In my next Search Engine Land article, I’ll guide you on aligning SEO with your customer journey, diving deep into keyword analysis and content strategy to enrich your company’s digital prowess.

The post Mapping the customer journey for SEO and marketing success appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

5 outdated marketing KPIs to toss and what to reference instead

Monday, September 25th, 2023

Moving away from conventional KPIs and toward a more advanced understanding of your campaigns gives you real competitive advantages. 

I could have written about this topic years ago, but it’s especially important as engagement costs on major advertising channels continue to increase, and an unpredictable economy puts a premium on efficiency. 

Ready to change the way you measure your campaigns? In this article, I’ll look at five KPIs I still hear clients reference and explain: 

• Why it’s past time to replace them.
• What they should analyze instead.
• Why it matters.

Bad KPI 1: Spend

What to use instead: Profit

I’m not saying the concept of a budget is moot, but spend should not be the starting point or goal for campaigns unless:

• You’re just beginning and have no CRM data to reference.
• You’re going for scale without regard to efficiency. 

That said, we still get companies coming to us frequently and saying, “We’d like to spend this.”

Even more off-base, “We’d like to spend {x} on Google, {y} on Facebook, and {z} on LinkedIn.”

A better approach is to aim for efficiency goals, agnostic of channel. 

If you start with an ROI goal of 3.0, good analytics folks will be able to crunch numbers and tell you how much you can spend and stay within that goal – no matter which channel you spend it on. 

Referencing spend without tracking efficiency is how you hit growth walls (and get on the wrong side of your CFO).

Specifying spend across channels is a good way to doom yourself to the fate of spending too much on certain channels and not enough on other, more incremental sources of revenue. 

If you are going for scale without regard to efficiency, metrics like conversions, spending, revenue, and visitors do become more important, while CPA and ROAS (efficiency metrics) will take a hit. 

A core tenet of digital marketing is that the more conversions you get, the more expensive they are, so you’ll have to decide whether your first goal is improving efficiency or driving scale. 

Bad KPI 2: Platform-provided CPA

What to use instead: CRM-based CPA

Relying solely on CPAs delivered by Google Ads, Facebook and LinkedIn without assessing the quality of those acquisitions (leads in B2B, purchases in ecommerce) makes it likely you’re spending too much on the wrong leads.

(Note: Google Search Partners and display campaigns produce particularly weak lead quality.)

Instead, integrate your CRM data to understand cost per down-funnel metrics (for B2B) or cost per CLTV (B2C and ecommerce). 

This is especially important for B2B, given its long sales cycles and purchase stages.

Knowing what you’d like to pay for opportunities and understanding what you have to pay to acquire them on certain channels is more important than straight-up lead acquisition.

And it’ll make you more likely to swallow high CPCs (hello, LinkedIn) if the resulting leads carry enough value. 

Dig deeper: 3 steps for effective PPC reporting and analysis

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Bad KPI 3: Click-based CPA

What to use instead: Incrementality-based CPA

Click-based CPA (think first-click, last-click, or cookie or UTM-based MTA) ignores the contributions of impressions-based advertising campaigns, whether it’s a YouTube a, a programmatic ad or a billboard you sponsored on a highway near one of your target geos. 

True CPA is based on incrementality, which implements things like the halo effect, brand lift testing, geo lift testing, etc. 

It means being agnostic to clicks vs. impressions and understanding the true effect of any advertising interaction. 

This can be relatively complex to set up. Still, there are native tools, like Facebook lift tests and Google’s CausalImpact R package using Bayesian structural time-series models, that can be a good starting point. 

I recommend figuring out how much data you need to draw a statistically significant conclusion and only running these initiatives in test locations so you’re not curtailing entire campaigns while you assess their effects.

Bad KPI 4: Average CPA/Average ROAS

What to use instead: Marginal CPA/Marginal ROAS

When you’re using Marginal CPA, you’re really trying to figure out what you paid to acquire marginal returns – which means you’re calculating the return on each conversion, not just assuming you pay the same or get the same for all new customers. 

Let’s illustrate this with a simple scenario: say you’re taking an average CPA from Facebook ads, which brought in a mix of expensive and cheaper customers, all worth roughly the same revenue amount. 

If you take the average CPA, you might see that you spent $2 to acquire a new customer, whereas marginal CPA might show that you converted a bunch of new customers at $1.50 and a handful at $8.

Rather than turn up the dial across the board, it’d be smarter to keep finding more cost-effective customers like the first bunch. Don’t spend more to reach more expensive customers who provide no additional value.  

Bad KPI 5: Impression share lost to bidding (search)

What to use instead: Impression share lost to budget (search)

If you are running search campaigns and want to lower spend, there are two main ways to do it.  

• You drop bids or targets to decrease CPCs.
• You lower the campaign’s daily budget, which forces the campaign to turn off for portions of the day. 

When you drop bids or targets and lose impression share, a lower CPC will help produce more clicks and conversion opportunities for the same budget. 

I’ve seen brands use bidding strategies with goals of capturing something like 90% of available impression share (IS), which gives Google the green light to overcharge.

In these scenarios, switching to manual CPC targets and aiming lower (thereby losing some impression share) immediately tunes up performance and efficiency.

When you drop your budget, the campaign will hit the daily budget and turn off. This will lower overall spend and impression share but keep the same efficiency. So keep budgets up and control spend using bids and efficiency targets!

There are far-reaching implications when you embrace this “scale vs. efficiency” mindset.

Let’s say you are a B2B company that always sees poor performance on weekends. Instead of turning the weekends off, lower the bids/targets until the traffic is profitable.  

Next steps

Some of these – especially the first and last – should be easy to implement right away. Others may need you to find a trusted analytics resource to help you sketch out some models and integrate the right data. 

But by reading this far, you’ve already taken the first step: casting a critical eye on boilerplate KPIs that aren’t helping you truly optimize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. 

One word to the wise: make sure you’re getting the right people on board before you pull the switch on any of these since people leaning on the old KPIs to gauge your work should be in alignment with what success looks like going forward. 

Dig deeper: Tracking and measurement for PPC campaigns

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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

The Magical Black Box

Sunday, September 24th, 2023

Courtesy of SEO Book.com