Atomic Media

An SEO guide to audience research and content analysis

Written on May 11, 2022 at 1:55 pm, by admin

How your customers find you can vary significantly. It may be based on their interests, needs or pain points.

Some people may already know exactly what they need and search for that on Google. Others may be just starting the research process. Others may already know what they need and compare to identify the best source to purchase from.

In this stage of your SEO research and planning, you’ll want to identify:

• Target personas
• Buying stages
• Potential keywords 

Your goal will be to map your target personas, buying stages and keywords for each persona and buying stage.  

Persona research 

You can start by using customer service data or information from your Google Analytics demographic details. With this information, you can start creating target personas.  

Below is an example of possible target personas for a real estate company.

Once you have your personas and ideas of who they are, what they need, and what they are looking for, you’ll want to map out the possible steps they’ll take in their buying journey.

Buyer’s journey

Finally, you can add the possible keywords they’ll search for and map them to the journey.

Map keywords to persona to the buyer’s journey

The goal of this phase is to identify all of the possible ways you can be found and to make sure you have content optimized on your website targeting these buying phases and keywords.

You’ll start by identifying primary, root phrases. As you progress, you can go deeper into long-tail terms or semantically related keywords.

This will allow you to identify gaps and opportunities that were missed during your initial baseline and competitive research. Some of these keywords won’t be uncovered unless you truly understand your audience and their needs and pain points.

This stage will complete your research phase and give you all the information to create your content strategy and focus your on-page SEO priorities.   

Evaluate your existing content

With your comprehensive keyword research, the next step is to look at the existing content of your site and see if it’s optimized properly.

• Does your website have pages that are not getting any traffic from Google, pages that are near-duplicates or multiple pages targeting the same keyword?
• Do you have content pieces to match the keyword list you created in the previous stage?

Before creating a content calendar or editorial strategy, it’s ideal to audit your existing content. By reviewing your existing pages, you can decide which pages need to be removed, consolidated or optimized.

Some of the elements you can look for include:

• Page traffic
• Primary keyword
• Number of keywords ranking
• Word count
• Internal linking

To perform a content audit, you’ll need to export all of your pages from your CMS or use an SEO audit tool, such as Screaming Frog or Semrush Site Audit, to get a list of your site’s existing pages.

Consolidate all of this data into a content audit spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet could look something like this:

Assess your site’s content

Once you have collected all of the data, go through the URLs and label the pages:

• Keep: The page is optimized and performing well and can be left alone.
• Optimize: The page could be ranking better with improved on-page SEO.
• Rewrite/revamp: This is for pages where the content needs to be revamped or rewritten.
• Remove: These pages are not performing well and should be removed. When doing so, it’s important to remove the page from your sitemap, Google Search Console, and any inbound links.
• Consolidate: If there are multiple pages targeting the same keyword, consider moving all of the content into the URL that is performing best and using 301 redirects for the other pages. 

How to optimize, revamp or consolidate pages

Once you have all of your pages labeled, it’s time to optimize your content. Some pages may be performing well but could be refreshed to help them perform even better. Others may be performing poorly and need to be optimized to rank.

Typically, this process will involve two steps:

• Editing and re-optimizing the existing content. 
• Expanding the article with new content. 

Select the primary and secondary keywords for each page

The best way to gather this data is to use Google Search Console for ranking pages or your keyword database for pages that are not.

To gather data from Google Search Console, click on Performance > Search Results report:

You can click on a page to see the keywords that it’s ranking for and the clicks, impressions and average position for each:

This will help you identify target keywords for each page, which you can add to your spreadsheet.

For each page, add the target primary and secondary keywords you will use when performing the necessary content updates.

Revamp existing content

When optimizing pages, you need to make sure that you are preserving or adding the correct on-page SEO elements. Let’s review these:

Primary keyword optimization

The primary keyword should appear in the:

• Meta (page) title: For existing articles, you can edit an existing article’s meta-title. Use the Google SERP Simulator to see how your title would look. Where possible, start the title tag with your primary keyword and add modifiers to your titles. 
• Meta description: Up to 230-character description of the article. Make sure that you use the primary keyword as close to the beginning of the meta description as possible.  
• The first heading of your article is the title. This should be an H1 heading. The title/heading should include the primary keyword.
• First paragraph. The primary keyword should appear in the first paragraph, ideally within the first 100 words.
• Anchor text: Include the primary keyword in at least one outbound, internal link.

Adding any secondary keywords

All related secondary keywords should be incorporated naturally into the article. For each related keyword, add them in an H2 heading. Whatever the focus keyword is for each paragraph, it should be both in the H2 heading and in the paragraph following the heading.

Questions and answers

Q&A is an easy way to expand upon your articles by finding related questions. Take the primary keyword, and search for it on Google. Use the questions in the “People also ask” box as section headers:

The section header with the question will be an H2. In the next section, you should answer the question as quickly and succinctly as possible. Don’t re-state the question; instead, immediately provide the answer.

If the question was “How do you get featured in snippets,” then the first sentence should answer the question: “To get into featured snippets, you need to ask questions and answer them using paragraphs, lists, and quick answers.” 

Use bullet points! Google loves listing answers with bullet points, so where possible, answer the question and immediately add a list with bullet points: 

Content formatting

Use proper formatting to make the content easy for people to read quickly. Here are a few suggestions for formatting your content:

• Break up giant walls of text. Give information in short paragraphs. Use succinct sentences. 

• Add lists. Google loves lists! Are there any paragraphs or sections you can change into bullet points or numbered lists? If so, do it!

Internal links

Add 2-3 internal links to other relevant pages on the site. Keep your anchor text short. Then, find at least 3-5 relevant pages on your site, and link to your target pages. Every page of your site should contain as many links from other site pages as possible.

External links

Add 2-3 external links to relevant pages. Good external links serve a strong purpose. They create a natural link map and connect your sites to authoritative sources. Google will give more weight to a page that has good external links.  

Add new content

If the article is thin, you can add new content to expand on key points.  

Writing new content

• Add more paragraphs. If you can add a list, more sub-headings, etc., all the better! 
• Reading level. Keep the language at a 7th-grade reading level whenever possible. The best content is easy to read and understand, not dense and impregnable.

Images

• Add new, optimized images to your revamped content.
• Along with the link, please write the alt text for the image. This should be a one-sentence image description that includes the primary keyword. 

Content consolidation

When there are several short pages or articles that are all ranking for the same keyword, it might be ideal to consolidate these articles into one longer, more comprehensive piece.

When consolidating articles, keep in mind: 

• Take bits and parts of the different existing articles and merge them into one that makes sense.
• You should write the TARGET URL slug at the top of the document and include the new, optimized meta title and meta description.
• Add links to internal pages and external sites 

Prioritize your fixes

Once you have created and labeled your spreadsheet and added target primary and secondary keywords, the final stage is to prioritize and assign your optimizations based on traffic or keyword importance.  

If you have pages targeting important keywords that are not ranking well, move those to the top of the priority list.

If there are pages that have a lot of traffic and could be performing better, these should also be prioritized.

At the end of this stage, you should have a comprehensive keyword list that you will have mapped to existing pages or labeled to be created.

Mind the gap

During the early stage, you want to be mindful of identifying persona, content and keyword gaps. If you don’t have content targeting some of your keywords, you’ll be missing opportunities to reach your target audience.

Most sites will have a degree of cannibalization as the SEO and content plans go through different teams and stages.

Before spending significant resources on producing new content, first, identify and maximize the content you already have, and then “mind the gap” by creating a content plan that targets all keywords that haven’t been optimized.

The post An SEO guide to audience research and content analysis appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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

RSAs. E-A-T. GA4. See the tactic-packed SMX Advanced agenda!

Written on May 10, 2022 at 10:55 am, by admin

Elite, actionable search marketing tactics, expert answers to your burning SEO and PPC questions, and engaging discussions with passionate search marketers are a just click away… secure your spot at SMX Advanced now and join us online, June 14-15, for free!

The agenda is live… see what’s in store! 

Programmed by the Search Engine Land editors, this experts-only, tactic-rich training features senior marketers from FoodBoss, William Sonoma, Honey (a PayPal company), and more exploring the latest, most sophisticated search marketing topics and trends, including…

• Leveraging semantic search to improve E-A-T
• Getting the most out of the Google Search Console API
• Maximizing PPC performance with automated bidding
• Seamlessly transitioning to Google Analytics 4
• Future-proofing against the next Google algorithm update
• Driving PPC success in a world with only RSAs
• Understanding the impact AI and entities have on content strategy
• Boosting Core Web Vitals rankings

… and that’s just the start. You’ll also unlock two exclusive keynotes on authoritative content and the link between creativity and automation, live Q&A with speakers (Overtime!), invigorating Coffee Talk meetups, and afternoon breakout discussions with like-minded attendees, and more.

For more than 15 years, over 150,000 search marketers from around the world have attended SMX to learn performance-enhancing tactics, make game-changing connections, and further their careers. Don’t miss your opportunity to join them online for the only professional training experience created by advanced search marketers for advanced search marketers.

Secure your free SMX Advanced pass now!

The post RSAs. E-A-T. GA4. See the tactic-packed SMX Advanced agenda! appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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

Google adds new valid page metadata help document

Written on May 10, 2022 at 10:55 am, by admin

Google has added a new help document named valid page metadata that talks about how Google can process invalid or inconsistent HTML with the issues around invalid markup. Google also updated its help document on title links with a new section on “no clear main headline” in the troubleshooting section.

Valid page metadata help document

The new “use valid page metadata” help document can be found here, and it reads “using valid page metadata ensures that Google can process the HTML markup of your pages.” “Google tries to understand HTML even when it is invalid or inconsistent with the HTML standard, but errors in the markup can cause problems with your website in Google Search,” the document added. For example, if you use an invalid element in the head, Google ignores any elements that appear after the invalid element.

This is more of an issue for schema or structured data but can potentially also impact other areas in which Google may not understand an element in your HTML.

Google said you should only place valid metadata inside the <head>. Valid metadata includes the following HTML elements:

• title
• meta
• link
• script
• style
• base
• noscript
• template

Google added not to use invalid elements in the head:

The following elements are invalid when used in the <head>, and therefore aren’t supported by Google Search when placed in the <head>:

• iframe
• img
• Any other HTML element

Updated title link help document trouble shooting item

Google also updated its title link help document, which was originally published in October 2021. Google first renamed the sub-head from “Avoid common issues with title elements” to “Troubleshooting common issues.”

Google also added a new section named “no clear main headline” that reads:

When there’s more than one large, prominent headline, and it isn’t clear which text is the main headline for the page. For example, a page has two or more headlines that use the same styling or heading elements. If Google Search detects that there are multiple large, prominent headlines, it may use the first headline as the text for the title link. Consider ensuring that your main headline is distinctive from other text on a page and stands out as being the most prominent on the page (for example, using a larger font, putting the headline in the first visible h1 element on the page, etc).

Why we care

SEOs, in general, should be up-to-date on the Google Search developer help documentation. Many of you have already read through these documents once or twice. Learning about new documents being posted and changes to existing documents can save you time on understanding what has changed or how Google sees SEO and Google Search.

These two changes may help you communicate to your stakeholders how to build better pages that work better for Google Search.

The post Google adds new valid page metadata help document appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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

How a self-audit SEM checklist can protect your work from external audits  

Written on May 10, 2022 at 10:55 am, by admin

Search audits have the power to either help or ruin people’s work (and sometimes their career) at the same time.

And honestly? That’s a good thing.

SEM audits are powerful. External and internal audits are needed for the direct and indirect value they bring to your operation.

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Audit types

First, let’s talk, non-extensively, about the most common types of audits:

• New biz pitch audit: These are straightforward – the goal is to find (usually surface-level) holes in the current efforts. Expect to do a lot of remote searches and ghosting your IP. You’ll likely use third-party tools like SimilarWeb, Semrush, Adthena and SpyFu to estimate competitor spending and determine their approach. No doubt about it, these aren’t fun. But the payoff could be literal dollars of new business.
• The “under the hood” audit: This is done when you’re pitching new business and the brand is already over their current agency. The business gives you some degree of keys to the castle with access to Google Analytics and their Google and Microsoft ads accounts. These are fun. There will be few, if any, unanswered questions. It’s also easier to win business and a great way to kick an operation in the gut when they are already down.
• “The consultant” audit: Huge pain, where the brand has brought in a “consultant” who is all-knowing, and questions the most minute things, forcing you to question your best practices and decide if truly is best in class.
• Self-audit: This is a noble and shockingly helpful self-check scenario. This is you doing a gut check of your own work on a semi-regular basis (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.) It also helps you find out when the engines changed something via a glitch or just forgot to tell you, and you can go back to them self-righteously and demand your money back.
• The “invited third-party” audit: Honestly, these are my favorites. Anyone working on an account long enough gets “account fatigue” and cannot see the forest behind the trees. Here you bring in a trust third-party (outside operation or someone in-house who doesn’t work on the business) to eyeball the business. Less pressure, more trust, less “throwing of hands.” This becomes educational for all more than anything else.

No matter the type of audit, the end goal is the same: to find the brand a way to make more profit, directly or indirectly – whether through incremental revenue generation or cost-savings operations.

Doing a great audit

How do you do a great search account audit? “Great” is a relative term in search audits.

It really comes down to what level of access you have. That will decide your next steps for the audit.

But it always starts with a handy QA checklist consisting of settings that need to be reviewed – from simple things like GTM on the site, GA on the site, and whether geotargeting is in place, to more advanced scenarios, such as: Are Bing syndicated search partners on, is their unique ads in rotation for RLSA audience and are ads on/off during low sales periods of the day.

This QA checklist will have hundreds of checkpoints to review. It is designed to help you successfully launch a new campaign. But an audit is basically a QA checklist in reverse.

What makes audits so powerful?

Well, it is easier to explain findings than explain their potential. All of these findings are from real audits:

• Scenario 1: A credit reporting brand refused to allow the team to bid on the term “free credit report.” An audit found multiple keywords mapping to that term within an SQR, all with higher CPCs. They were accounting for 73% of those keywords traffic. Each keyword had a Quality Score of 3. If the brand actively bid on the term “free credit report,” with appropriate ad copy, the QS would come in closer to 5. Estimated cost savings by making this change to the client was $573,000 per fiscal quarter.
• Scenario 2: A car wash brand was trying to figure out how to save funds while driving more visits to their locations. It was documented that the average target consumer would drive a max of five miles for a car wash in their markets and would research the car wash only an hour before going. It was discovered that geo-targeting had a 10-mile radius for advertising, ads ran 24/7 and no local search campaigns were live. Roughly 30% of the ad budget was being spent on consumers too far away and/or unlikely to come given the time of day. Adjustments to both geography and daypart were made to reallocate funds to local campaigns.
• Scenario 3: Sports nutrition CPG was informed by their agency they were getting stellar performance on YouTube front-end metrics, and they were. However, the data was only surface level. An audit of content triggering ads was done. Keep in mind, sports nutrition means scantily clad individuals, sweating, drinking protein shakes and pre-workout powder. The content audit noted that the agency failed to put negative parameters for brand safety in place. 40% of spend for a year was spent on videos related to Cocomelon, BabyBus and Super Simple Songs. Ultimately, the brand took legal action against the agency running YouTube based on the audit. Seeking damages for the amount spent inappropriately.

• Scenario 4: A QSR brand was in review for a new agency and gave all operations competing in the RFP a look “under the hood.” To the surprise of all the operations, it was observed that the brand was not using brand keywords while having rather weak SEO. In addition, 10% of budget spend was used during breakfast hours, which accounts for less than 3% of total revenue, while actively losing out on impression share due to budget. This finding (after we won the business) led to bidding on brand terms (and the good old “SEM+SEO: 1+1=3” theory), generating a 10% lift in SEM+SEO revenue. In addition, ceasing SEM during breakfast hours allowed for a reallocation of budget to later in the day during peak periods and reduced impression share loss due to budget.

• Scenario 5: This was a well-timed internal review, and honestly, it still sends a cold shiver down my spine. About 10 years ago, we had to lay off an employee, and he was incredibly displeased. On his way out, he had created automated rules to raise manual bids by 100% 3x a day, every day, and to raise budget caps 1,000% once a week. The cherry on top was that he had created a rule to automatically reactivate campaigns if they were paused every two hours. An audit of scheduled activity and rules revealed all of this and was performed the day after his departure. If you’re wondering, the answer is yes, he lost his severance. We had to provide a legal deposition, and an unnamed search engine was notified by various legal teams to give activity over based on IP address.
• Scenario 6: Honestly, this was the weirdest audit of my career. In 2011, my team was understaffed, and we were running a well-known credit card brand business. This brand promoted a self-created holiday to encourage holiday shopping at local stores rather than online. It was decided to run an online video campaign with the brand. The targeting was pretty wide open. We just had a list of negative keywords. We asked the video platform to run it for us, and they obliged. It was a very short run, a total of five days. We audited the oddly terrible performance after the run to figure out why the performance was so bad. The well-known video platform had used our negative keyword list (a list littered with a wide variety of terms showcasing the worst of human depravity) as the target list. This audit resulted in a reimbursement of $500,000 of media spend and 25% on top of it for pain and suffering.

I share all these scenarios not to frighten, only to inform.

Audits happen. Protect your work.

In the past five years, I’ve gone through four audits on my work. Why? Because a consultancy told the brand it was needed.

It’s nerve-racking and anxiety-provoking, in part because every operation has a different point of view on the proper way to deal with work.

However, my team regularly does internal audits, starting with a simplistic QA document. So we were able to retain our work because “our house was in order.”

A QA document does not take much to create. It just requires you to make an excel spreadsheet, with every setting in a UI, and an hour of your time to review it regularly.

An audit, especially done by an uninvited outsider, is never a welcomed experience. But if you regularly audit yourself and/or your team’s work, it won’t be a problem for you when an outsider does it.

Doing this will give you the most power possible within the search marketing world.

The post How a self-audit SEM checklist can protect your work from external audits   appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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

How to get better leads and conversions with Google’s AI

Written on May 10, 2022 at 10:55 am, by admin

If you’re looking for ways to modernize your PPC optimization, you’ve probably come across value-based bidding (VBB). This technique revolves around teaching AI systems at Google and Microsoft what types of conversions you value most. Together with automated bidding and ad formats like responsive search ads (RSAs), the ad platforms can then prioritize getting you more of the best conversions and significantly improve the results from your ad budget.

VBB can make successful advertisers better, and it can even be a solution for advertisers who’ve tried and failed at PPC because they were unhappy with the quality of the conversions when leads were low quality or buyers made too many returns.

In this article, you will learn how to deploy VBB for three different types of advertisers: pure-play e-commerce, hybrid retail and lead gen.

The principle behind VBB

The idea of value-based bidding is that automated bids should be based on the value the resulting clicks and conversions add to your business. That’s not so different from the idea of bid management in general. But rather than achieving this goal through the manipulation of CPCs or targets like tROAS or tCPA, it’s achieved by teaching the machine the true value of conversions. 

The reason VBB is so important in PPC in 2022 is that automation is now the standard way new campaigns operate and when you give automation bad or incomplete goals, you risk creating a vicious cycle that leads to poor results in those campaigns. 

One problematic scenario is when advertisers give the ad engines an incomplete picture of what their goals are. Is the conversion they’re reporting to Google truly the conversion the CFO of the company cares about, or is it just some intermediate goal that happened to be easier to set up?

It’s similar to a problem you may face with people. When you hire someone for your PPC team, you can only expect them to drive great results if you tell them what results you’re after. If you tell your new teammate to get as many leads on the landing page as possible, don’t be surprised if those leads aren’t all of the most reputable origins.

If, on the other hand, you tell your coworker that the leads on the landing page will go to the sales team and they expect those leads to be well qualified, they will likely change how they go about generating leads and the quality will go up. If you tell them they will be judged not just on the volume of leads but also how many turn into paying customers, results are likely to get even better.

And so it goes with machine learning too. The machine will only do a great job if you teach it what you’re really after!

So let’s look at how you can teach the machines what a conversion really is and which type of conversions are the kind you’d like to get more of.

Optimizing PPC with better conversion data

There are two levels of sophistication when it comes to teaching the machine about the value of your conversions. Let’s start with the more sophisticated and precise method first. For every click or order, we will teach the machine what happened in the weeks after the original conversion event.

For lead gen advertisers:

The most sophisticated method of teaching the ad engines what you value relies on offline conversion imports (OCI), a method that depends on capturing the gclid or msclkid, passing it through your CRM and then feeding it back to the ad engines within 90 days as the value of the ‘conversion’ becomes more clear. 

Recently Google introduced Enhanced Conversions for Leads, a simpler method with many of the same benefits but without the need for storing the click id in your own system.

For retailers:

E-commerce advertisers don’t need to grab the engine’s click ID but can instead send their own unique order ID with the conversion. As the true value of the sale becomes clear, advertisers can restate values to the ad engine within 55 days. Look up conversion value adjustments to learn how this works.

If you haven’t implemented one of the three methods above, it’s probably not because you weren’t aware of them, but rather because there is a technical limitation within your team that’s made it hard to implement. So let’s look at a new, simpler alternative to optimizing PPC with your conversion data.

It’s called Conversion Value Rules and lets you tell Google more about how to value different conversions based on a common attribute, like location, device or audience. While not as precise as the other methods, it’s a much easier way to teach the machine so it can start to prioritize the types of conversions that matter more to you.

Questions to help determine the true value of conversions

With Conversion Value Rules, advertisers create rules to adjust conversion values based on attributes like location, device, and audience.

When setting Conversion Value Rules, advertisers should focus on elements of a conversion that Google may not be able to observe like lifetime value, average deal size, lead-to-sale conversion rate, returns, etc. Google already knows about conversion rate differences between different locations, but what they may not know is what happens to conversions from different locations after they start to engage with your business.

Let’s look at some example questions to guide yourself to an initial set of Conversion Value Rules.

Conversion Value Rule questions for lead gen advertisers:

• If you generate leads for HVAC installers, do prospects in certain zip codes have bigger houses and spend more on a typical installation?
• If you generate leads for education, do prospects in cities that are closer to campus tend to stay in the program longer?
• If you generate leads for plastic surgery, do prospects who read your article about rhinoplasty tend to become repeat customers and have higher lifetime value?

Conversion Value Rule questions for pure-play e-commerce advertisers:

• Do purchases made in a hurry on mobile devices lead to more items being returned for refunds?
• Do purchases from people who read your blog with tips for runners tend to be more frequent repeat buyers of running shoes from your brand?
• Do purchases from those who engage with your social media platforms tend to lead to a bigger brand impact when they share their own images of their purchase with their friends?

Additional Conversion Value Rule questions for hybrid retailers:

Hybrid retailers can ask the same questions as pure-play e-commerce retailers but refine their Conversion Value Rules further with additional questions like these.

• Are customers in California worth more because it’s the only state with physical stores?
• Are customers who shared their email address when they shopped in-store worth more because they make fewer returns?

Now that you have an idea of what types of questions to ask to get an idea of conversion signals Google may not be able to detect on its own, it’s time to create rules for your most important traffic segments.

Which segments to score for Conversion Value Rules

The sample questions above can get you thinking about Conversion Value Rules to create, but you may quickly get stuck on deciding for which locations or audiences to answer these questions. That’s where a good PPC management tool like Optmyzr can help. 

Optmyzr’s new tool for Optimizing Conversion Value Rules starts by asking advertisers to rank the typical value for each of the highest volume locations and other segments detected for a site.

The tool also helps solve the challenge of deciding a good value for each rule. It helps with a question like: if a customer from California is worth more than average, exactly how much more valuable are they? The good news is that VBB will work even if your answers are not precise. Just creating a Conversion Value Rule that says a conversion from California is a bit more valuable than typical will help steer the engine’s AI automations in the right direction. It’s like giving it a nudge that says if all else were equal, it should try to get more conversions from California.

To make this scoring process easier, Optmyzr asks advertisers to rank every segment on a scale of 1 to 5. It can be a bit jarring as a data-driven marketer to be asked for a gut-based judgment call, but like Google’s mantra of “don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough,” the beauty is that this type of optimization works well as an iterative process rather than a quest for instant perfection. 

After ranking around 30 segments, the tool will have enough data to create an initial batch of Conversion Value Rules which will teach Google’s AI how to get better conversions for your company.

Determining the right Conversion Value Rules

After you’ve thought about the relative value of different conversions for a business, the next step is to translate those insights into rules. Remember Conversion Value Rules can be for a single attribute, like just location, or for combinations of segments, like location + audience, or location + device.

These combinations can be complex to figure out and cumbersome to maintain but Optmyzr’s tools can help with this too. Using the principle of the wisdom of the crowds, it uses scores from you and your team to come up with a sensible set of Conversion Value Rules. For example, an advertiser who values conversions from California a lot and who also sees more value from mobile conversions may see a value adjustment of +20% for that combination.

By setting Conversion Value Rules like this in Google, Smart Bidding strategies like Maximize Conversion Value with an optional tROAS can go to work to find more of the highest quality conversions.

Conclusion

In modern PPC, where bids, ads, and so much more are automated, advertisers can still get an edge over their competitors. This requires taking true-and-tried principles like solid bid management and knowing the new ways to optimize these levers. Value-based bidding is the modern way to improve bidding. And thanks to innovations from Google and Optmyzr that make optimizing Conversion Value Rules easier than ever, better-performing campaigns are now well within any advertiser’s reach. If you’re interested, you can try Optmyzr free for two weeks.

The post How to get better leads and conversions with Google’s AI appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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

Google now allows virtual food brands to have Google Business Profiles

Written on May 9, 2022 at 7:53 am, by admin

Google has updated its Google Business profile guidelines page under the “guidelines for chains, departments & individual practitioners” to allow virtual food brands to be listed with “conditions.”

One of the more popular virtual food brands is MrBeast Burgers, a popular YouTube creator has deals with local burger shops to sell his own branded burgers but MrBeast does not have any official burger shop or workers. You buy virtual branded food items made by the local shop. Joy Hawkins said with these updated guidelines “Mr. Beast would be allowed listings and should set them up as service area listings (without an address).”

Updated guidelines. The updated guidelines now say “virtual food brands are permitted with conditions.” It goes on to write out those conditions:

Co-located food brands offering pick-up

• Food brands that are co-located each must have permanent separate signage. They should display their address only if they offer pick-up to all customers.
• Delivery-only brands (no-pick up option) out of shared kitchens must hide their address and add service areas to that specific brand to avoid confusing their customers.

Delivery-only food brands

• Delivery-only brands (i.e. those operating out of virtual kitchens) are permitted if they have distinct branded packaging and a distinct website.
• Multiple virtual brands operating out of one location are permitted, but are subject to additional verification steps.
• Delivery-only brands must add their service areas and hide the address on their business profile to avoid confusing their customers.
• If there is a partnership where a food brand has authorized the virtual kitchen as a verified provider of the food, the virtual kitchen may manage each authorized brand’s business profile once the authorization is confirmed.
• The facility that houses the delivery-only brands, i.e. Doordash Kitchens, is permitted to have its own separate business profile. Only someone affiliated with the facility can claim and verify this profile.

Virtual food brands in local search. Yes, MrBeast Burgers, a virtual food brand, does indeed show up in Google local search results:

Why we care. So now Google is allowing virtual food brands to have listings in Google Business Profiles and thus Google Maps and local search results. If you have any clients that offer virtual food brands or you run your own, you can now technically show up in the local search results in Google Search and Google Maps. This is even when the address is technically not listed and there is no physical presence of that business outside of another business slapping on a new label on the product.

The post Google now allows virtual food brands to have Google Business Profiles appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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

Why SEO is a great investment, not just a cost 

Written on May 9, 2022 at 7:53 am, by admin

Companies make investments all the time. The intention of any investment is to fund something now that will deliver a return later.

So why is the investment not there for an acquisition channel like SEO?

My theory:

Investments in SEO are compounding in nature. It can be difficult to “see” the results of increases in traffic and revenue because the growth is much more visible when measured over time, often up to a year later.  

But who wants to return to leadership 12 months later saying, “Hey, look, we did it!”

Alas, that’s the nature of organic results. They take a while to produce.

This article will discuss some of the main inputs that drive organic growth, as well as the kinds of outputs to expect. Specifically, how SEO needs investments in:

• People: Building teams to develop and oversee the SEO strategy that drives business results. 
• Content: Creating and optimizing content that’s supported by a strong, technical foundation that drives the consumer’s journey and decision to trust and transact with your business over another. 
• Tools: For SEO and content practitioners alike. In the same way a sports team needs a ball and equipment to play, tools are needed to find the many micro-optimizations that drive the macro impact.  

A huge misconception: SEO is “free” 

There’s no such thing as “free traffic.”

Earning consistent, quality web traffic is not free. It never has been.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a startup, enterprise brand or a company of some other type or size.

What matters is getting the best possible ROI.

That requires investing in the components that contribute to traffic growth.

Another huge misconception: SEO ‘just happens’

At its core, SEO is a long-term strategy. SEO requires an ongoing investment.

Results are realized over time as the amount of improvements compounds.

Just having a website full of content or products to sell won’t make organic traffic magically materialize.  

The reality: any traffic acquisition strategy, especially one involving growing organic traffic, requires funding.

• People are needed to manage the strategy and daily operations.
• Writers are needed to create and optimize content.
• Engineers are needed to code and release improvements to the technical architecture of a website.

Practically every team in an enterprise organization touches the website or app, which means they need to be aware of how to help contribute to SEO efforts (and not unknowingly harm them). 

SEO involves multiple teams and it works best with continuous improvements. 

SEO that delivers real business value requires an ongoing, intentional investment in people, content and tools.

Organic traffic is a sustainable source of customer acquisition. SEO becomes your unfair, competitive advantage once your website outpaces its competitors.

What is an SEO investment?

At a minimum, resources for SEO teams look like this: people, content, and tools.

Businesses can choose to go “all in,” investing in building the team internally, or externally using agencies and consultants, or fund a mix of both.

The only “correct” answer here is what works for the business.

Let’s look at each. 

People

In many ways, the biggest asset a business has is its people. In SEO that means bringing on knowledgeable search engine professionals to manage the ins and outs of maintaining a website (or a group of sites).

This can range from one subject matter expert to, ideally, a team of SEOs each with a specialized skill set or unique experiences they bring to the table (think of any superhero movie where they combine their powers).

Since the success of SEO relies on the coordinated outputs of multiple teams, the investment can also include staffing people on complementary teams who are copywriters, engineering resources, strategists, web analysts, data scientists, product managers and UX professionals. 

Alternatively, if the team is not in-house, the investment costs can go toward outsourcing the work to an agency or specialized consultants. The key here is that there is a team of subject matter experts who create the right SEO strategy for the business based on its resources. They prioritize the work and collaborate with different teams to make periodic releases of SEO improvements. 

I would be remiss if I did not mention the acquisition of knowledge. In a dynamic field like SEO and digital marketing, it’s important for a business to also carve out a budget for continuous learning and development (L&D) for your SEO team.

That can mean anything from supporting their leadership development (e.g., online courses, regional SEO meetups and industry conferences that offer learning and networking opportunities). 

Content

The investment in content can take a few forms – from hiring an internal SEO content strategist to oversee a team of writers to outsourcing the work to an agency or consultant.

Bottom line: no matter how SEO content teams are structured, the key to success is having the capability to upload and publish optimized content on the website. 

It’s uncommon for a single SEO, who is dedicated to running the day-to-day SEO operations, to also be able to consistently write and publish content (those are called unicorns).

It’s also unrealistic to expect a single person to produce content at scale for a business of any size. That kind of output takes a dedicated team of specialized writers working from an editorial calendar.

Websites can’t rank without great, relevant content. This is why this type of investment is key for businesses operating online. 

Tools 

Physical writers and SEOs need tools for content creation, optimization and performance tracking.

The costs involved here? It largely depends on what the business needs and where the gaps are.

It could be volume: how many pages will be published and at what rate? How big is the team that needs access to the tool (some charge by number of “seats”). There’s also varying levels of cost with the software tools themselves ranging from basic keyword and URL rank tracking to enterprise level with more robust data for large websites that need crawling and analysis capabilities at scale. 

There are so many options for teams of all different sizes and budgets. If you’re a marketer making the decision on tools for your teams and resources, it’s best to self-educate and self-evaluate the best approach for the business.  

Paid vs. earned media (or: investing now vs. later)

Paid search and SEO (earned media) are among the two biggest traffic acquisition investments that both basically require funding of people, content and tools.

Many feel the investment in both channels should be more equally distributed. However, the reality is the results are produced in different timelines.

• Money that goes toward a paid search campaign generates a more immediate result because campaigns can be managed daily – even hourly – which is why SEM often gets a bigger share of the budget. 
• The ROI for an SEO investment is realized over a longer timeline; it can be months or years before a page (or pages) of optimized content are indexed by search engines and start ranking well enough to drive measurable visitors to a website.  

Think of the investment timeline in this way; you have a garden and want to grow tomato plants. To get the garden to produce that vegetable you must do all the things involved with growing that type of plant which inevitably will take a certain amount of time. 

But if you need tomatoes tomorrow, you would need to buy a fully developed tomato plant and plant it in your garden. That’s Paid Search. 

So if you want tomatoes tomorrow, and if you haven’t been properly tending to your garden, they won’t be there because gardens don’t produce immediate results. That’s SEO.  

Using this example, one can see it’s not sustainable for a business to be overly reliant on a channel like paid search to drive customers to its website. The budget will eventually run out or you will get priced out of the market in a bidding war. 

SEO cannot deliver immediate results like paid search because it doesn’t operate that way. But SEO is like a garden that will bear an abundance of fruit year after year, as long as it’s properly cared for season after season. 

Investing in an SEO team  

Google made more than 5,000 changes to search just in 2021.

That alone is reason enough to have an experienced team overseeing every aspect of SEO. 

Say you’re a director or manager and tasked with growing your SEO team. You have to look at your internal resources and what kind of expertise the business needs.

Maybe it’s an e-commerce site where a technical SEO with e-commerce experience would benefit the business. Maybe your business needs to double down and update its content.

Find whatever type of SEO skills and experience is needed for the business. 

The point is that every company will need a different mix of SEO skills.

A bare-bones in-house SEO team at the enterprise level and estimated salary range (USD) looks something like this: 

• Director of SEO: $150,000+
• Senior SEO Manager: $120,000+
• SEO Product Manager: $120,000+
• Technical SEO Lead: $120,000+
• Content SEO Lead: $110,000+
• SEO Analyst: (specializing in data science and mining the company data for insights) $150,000+
• Platform specialist: (enterprise sites are built on solutions at scale like Salesforce or they’re bootstrapped together; what matters is that you have an SME that can make technical changes to the site based on the platform it’s on) $150,000+

Remember, you can’t just build the team and not equip them with the right tools. A great football team isn’t just made up of only players – you also need different types of coaches, equipment and gear, training facilities and more.

This is why SEO is considered a long-term investment. Hiring talented and experienced individuals to oversee and improve upon the content and technical architecture of a website is an investment that requires upfront funding and pays dividends later. 

It’s similar to the investment involved in owning a home. A homeowner needs to proactively set aside a budget for home improvement projects and general upkeep of their property. Doing proper repairs over time means when the house is on the market, it’s attractive to a buyer and will sell for top dollar thereby netting a return for the homeowner.  

In the same way that it is financially more prudent to upkeep a property over time than it is to do a full rehab, a business needs SEO professionals to look after and improve upon the website as a whole. 

SEO is profitable: the ROI of SEO

The main SEO KPIs are traffic and revenue. 

How much can SEO increase traffic? That can be tricky to pin down because it depends on a number of factors related to output like:

• How often are you releasing improvements to your site?
• What kind of improvements are they?
• Are they ones that will move the needle?

As a starting point, one way to approach this calculation is to frame it like this: take the baseline of your existing level of yearly organic traffic (from your traffic source, like Adobe or Google Analytics). From there, ask “what does a 1% improvement look like?” And, subsequently, “if we did nothing, what would a hypothetical 1% decline in traffic look like?”

That’s your  +/- baseline where you can then extrapolate up to 5% in either direction as an estimation of improvement or decline in site visits.

For context: “doing nothing” means releasing no technical SEO improvements or updates to existing content or publishing new content.

Important: Doing nothing can sometimes cost more than a marginal investment in SEO. 

Measuring the ROI of an SEO investment

SEO should be more widely viewed as an investment because it doesn’t yield direct results for dollars spent from day one.

Think about the reason it’s considered financially sound to invest money into a 401K account, is that the expectation is that the funds will grow over time and be greater when you need them in the future. That happens because of continued investment in the fund and compound growth.  The same is true for SEO. 

Savvy marketers know Search is an attribution channel that grows over time as improvements are made to the site. 

“Search is a critical part of website traffic, as can be seen clearly from almost any Google Analytics account you might look at,” says Krista Seiden, Founder & Principal Consultant, KS Digital. “Whether it’s last click attribution or a multi-touch path to conversion, organic search is a key driver for a majority of businesses out there, and therefore, an important reason to invest in the channel itself.” 

Content optimizations are another measurable SEO investment that requires funding up front and pays dividends down the road. Let me explain. 

Most marketers should be familiar with the stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

It turns out that customers seek out different types of content based on where they are in the process of their evaluations. The key is to meet the customer’s search intent with your content.

This fantastic illustration from Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media highlights what types of content a business would need to have in order to attract, inform and convince someone to buy their product:  

Now, think about how many types of content your business has, or doesn’t have, from each section on that list. When was the last time that content was updated? What content is missing that you’d need to create that would make your offer more competitive? 

Let’s say you do a content audit on your site and determine you don’t have any how-to content.  Hypothetically, it might cost $500 to $1,000 to get a 1,500-word article written and published on your site so that when people search for something like “how to replace an LG water filter” you have an article that can appear at the top of the SERPs. 

If done well, the article is comprehensive about the topic, relevant for a number of terms people are searching for and maintains its ranking on the first page of Google for months if not years. The result is that the initial, one-time cost to create the article contributes to multiple sales thereafter.  

That, in a nutshell, is how investing in content optimization delivers value year after year.  

SEO Investments based on business size

Now let’s look at how it can be profitable at different levels. Take this with a grain of salt; these are ballpark estimates for the sake of evaluating what an SEO investment breakdown could look like based on annual revenue and company size.

Startup, SMB

• Headcount: 5-50 full time employees
• Annual Revenue: <$50M 
• Rough SEO Investment: $1-$5K/month, $60K/yr.
• Revenue from SEO channel: between 2-5%

At the startup and small business level, an investment in SEO is best once a product market fit has been determined. Most startups are in need of acquiring paying customers quickly. Once there’s stability from customers and recurring revenue, SEO can come in and improve upon the existing site content and performance to help cast a wider net thereby amplifying the product and attracting more prospects. 

Most small businesses should invest in SEO but they often don’t because it’s expensive and there often isn’t anyone besides the business owner to update the website. Investing a small amount in SEO services will help drive foot traffic to retail locations.

Agencies and/or specialized consultants in the local SEO space are great resources because they can often shoulder the resource load to make the website mobile-friendly and optimize the content for things like Google Maps and a Google Business Profile listing. 

For SMBs hiring an SEO should be like hiring a trusted, licensed professional to do your taxes. It’s not something every business owner can or needs to do on their own. Hire an expert that will look out for your SEO needs as it relates to your business.   

My recommendation for SMBs would be to start allocating at least $1,000/month towards SEO services. Take it out of your advertising or marketing budget for 3 months and see what you can get done.

Mid-size 

• Headcount: 50-250 full time employees
• Annual Revenue: $50M-$1B
• Rough SEO Investment: $10-$20K/month, $240K/yr
• Revenue from SEO channel: between 5-10%

Mid-sized businesses should invest in SEO because it’s a more cost effective way to acquire customers long term and they to benefit the most from SEO investments because they typically have some resources to afford supporting their in-house SEO lead with external agency services and/or consultants. At this level, an investment in SEO can mean the difference between being able to drive efficiencies at scale and pull ahead of competitors or being left behind. 

At mid-size companies and agencies it’s usually the marketing team’s responsibility to oversee the website. An SEO specialist can be part of that team but, still both technical and content resources can be scarce.

The midsize level is where SEO can really grow a business. But without a knowledgeable expert that’s overseeing the technical aspects of your site and optimizing your content for what real people are searching for that relates to your business, you’re missing out. 

Enterprise organizations

• Headcount: 1,000+
• Annual Revenue: 1M+
• Rough SEO Investment: at least $1M/year
• Revenue from SEO channel: between 5-20%

At the enterprise level, SEO results rely on investment in addition to consistent outputs of multiple teams. Enterprise SEO is more about establishing processes so that different cross functional teams can each improve upon the technical aspects like architecture, internal linking and crawl and index efficiencies.

On the content front, it’s about partnering with internal brand and content teams to write and publish content optimizations at scale that deliver a better user experience than competitor sites. 

Large sites often require more than fixing issues flagged in an SEO audit. Because SEO is inherently a cross functional discipline, if a business wants to be able to thrive off of its organic traffic, it requires strategic oversight to prioritize and collaborate internally across many different teams delivering on the SEO work; product, engineering, QA, delivery managers, content, UX, and design teams just to name a few.

“[To] see SEO results you need more than SEO investment – SEO relies on product, technology and content. It’s a hybrid, complex domain that is interdependent on other resources, teams and outputs.”

– Tom Critchlow in his email newsletter SEO MBA

SEO success depends on cross-functional teams, especially the outputs of engineering and content. If you cannot publish code or content, don’t expect to see your SEO traffic improve. 

The Benefits of SEO

Even a small investment in maintaining a website’s performance, content and user experience can accumulate over time to provide the business with a return, year after year.  

SEO is always a great investment because humans are naturally curious; we’re always searching for ways to solve our problems, new places to eat, directions to where we’re going–we are engineered to ask questions and that handy, mobile device in our pocket that’s connected to the internet 24/7 is ready to answer any and every query. 

Here are some key SEO statistics:

• 93% of the time, an online session begins by searching keywords on a search engine.

• As of 2021, 53% of all website traffic (worldwide) clicks on organic results.

• Google alone processes more than 40,000 keyword searches every single second. That’s over 3.5 billion searches in a single day and 1.2 trillion per year!

• 16-20% of keywords searched on Google in any given day have never been searched before.

These compelling stats point to the fact that search isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. 

In addition to curious humans, another benefit of investing in SEO is that it addresses many of the same challenges associated with the need for making websites easier to navigate for the percentage of the population that has a disability. This practice is known as accessibility.

It’s not a 1:1 match but there are many principles of technical SEO that also translate into enabling those that must navigate websites with a screen reader (data shows 8.1 million Americans have a vision impairment) to have a better user experience. 

On top of that, SEO with accessibility labels used in the QA automation process makes things even more efficient since those labels make testing automation easier. That’s a nice win for multiple in-house teams contributing to SEO and driving business value. 

SEO Tactics to invest in 

Page speed 

In 2022, the North Star of investment is improving website speed and performance according to measurements from Google known as Core Web Vitals (CWV). These are aspects that help a website load quickly for both search engines and users.

Many teams are organizing around: 

• LCP (largest contentful paint): loading the heaviest assets first so the rest seems seamless. 
• CLS (cumulative layout shift): minimizing the elements that “jump” or move around the screen while it loads. 
• FID (first input delay): the time when users first interact with the page and can accomplish what they came to do.

Fundamentally, your website pages should load quickly. Speed became a ranking factor in July 2018 and it’s what users expect. But speed alone won’t result in increased traffic. 

Relevant and authoritative content 

Improving content (either updating existing content or pruning underperforming pages) is one of the best investments for SEO dollars.

Why?

Google is getting better at determining user intent. Which means it’s table stakes to stay on top of your content making sure it’s helpful, accurate and relevant. 

It’s worth investing in overhauling your content to improve your E-A-T signals: 

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness 

The generic searches that occur at the top of the funnel (TOFU) is largely where SEO is most efficient for enterprise businesses. Big brands can usually afford a larger budget for paid search but over time it benefits the business greatly if the amount of incoming, new visitors arrive at the website due to the efforts of a strategic, ongoing investment in well-written, relevant content. 

Technical SEO outputs

This relates to the velocity, or speed, at which engineering and product teams can collaborate with SEO teams to fix the technical aspects of the site. A consistent level of output will contribute to a healthy and strong technical foundation.

Generally speaking, if a site goes 6 months or more without releasing any technical improvements it’s at risk of losing meaningful rankings and therefore traffic because it’s not able to be as competitive online against other teams who are focused on testing and learning to improve upon the SEO results they’re seeing. 

A few reasons not to invest in SEO

Let’s say you’re a:

• Startup that hasn’t found a product market fit. 
• You’re an affiliate site only trying to generate revenue. Keep reaching out to influencers… 
• You’re under the illusion link building is the only way to go. Have fun with that. 
• You have a target number of users to hit for investors which means you should look to paid search to acquire customers quickly, then use SEO to keep them. 
• If your business has limited engineering resources or none at all. SEO relies on partnerships with engineering and content teams and their frequent output. 
• When you can’t afford to pay a knowledgeable consultant or agency for their services. Worldwide, SEO providers charge $112.22 on average per hour and 50% of SEO providers worldwide have a monthly retainer minimum under $3,000 per month.

For SEO to deliver, it requires investment and collaboration   

Make no mistake: SEO is two things. It is work and it is worth it!

Ever hear the saying “Anything worth having is hard or requires work?” The same is true for SEO.

A site that loads quickly, is secure for processing transactions, and has relevant and helpful content –those are the table stakes that need looking after in order to be competitive online. 

The fallacy that organic traffic “just happens” and doesn’t cost anything is flat out wrong. It takes a level of investment to develop organic traffic into a meaningful marketing channel furthermore driving a sustainable return. 

A steady flow of organic traffic is one of the strongest foundations a business can have.

SEO investments are worth it because every human on the planet searches for products, services and information to make their lives easier. Your business needs to be the solution at the top of customers’ consideration list.  

It’s crucial for businesses to invest in SEO because it’s a discipline that’s uniquely designed to optimize the technical aspects of a website for search engines so that real humans searching online are able to find it when looking for great products and solutions. 

Remember, the ROI of SEO is not immediate; it compounds over time. Whereas paid search is either on or off. When your budget for PPC ads runs out, what then?

SEO is a channel that will always deliver. You just have to keep investing.

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

How to gain insider expertise as an outside SEO vendor in 4 steps

Written on May 9, 2022 at 7:53 am, by admin

You’re an expert in SEO, but when you engage with a new client, you aren’t an expert in what they do. But you do need to learn fast.

Hopefully, the client is a subject matter expert with tens of thousands of experience hours under their belt. As an SEO agency or consultant, you do not need their level of expert knowledge.

But you do need to know what they are saying. In most cases, you need to gain some level of insider expertise if you’re going to earn their trust and make a real difference in their business.

To do that, you need to:

• Get to the heart of why the business stands out in the marketplace.
• Get into the mind of the customer to gain an intimate understanding of their needs.
• Know what makes the website tick.
• Understand the competition, their edge and their SEO strategies.

Let’s look closer at each of these steps that will take you from novice to expert in no time.

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1. Client research 

To learn about your new client, your primary and most available resource is the people running the client’s business. Your client will be a treasure trove of expert information, from the executives to the customer service call reps.  

Start your expert learning process with an in-depth discovery interview with those who oversee the business’s marketing, product development and customer service. You may do this on the project kick-off call, or you might break it up into a series of calls with different folks in the company.

Conversations with customer service can be extremely valuable. Knowing what’s important to their customers can help you make recommendations on everything from content holes to site navigation. Answering common questions is one way to create compelling SEO content for a website.

Regardless, you need to create a template of questions for your client research. You want to make sure that you ask every new client about their business and what they do.

Get intimately familiar with their products and/or services. You can even ask them to onboard you like they would a new hire.

2. Customer research 

It’s important to know everything you can about the people your client sells to or interacts with. After all, a good SEO strategy is all about being able to reach these people with the right messages on the web.

A good place to start is to create audience personas with the client. Even better if they already have them. Knowing the audience will set you up for the next step in customer research: keyword research.

I like to say that to catch fish, you need a few things: the bait the fish are eating, to fish where the fish are and hungry fish. Personas help quite a bit. BTW, many people think they have personas well defined… like:

• Highly intellectual
• Advanced degree, hopefully, PhD
• Respected
• Extremely theoretical
• Curious to a fault
• Can invent when called upon
• “White hair” studious

So beyond defining personas, keyword research is an important exercise in getting to know how the audience you are targeting searches for what you have to offer. This is a cornerstone of your SEO strategy; you want to show up for those searches in the search results with the best information possible.

3. Website research

A good SEO strategy is only as good as the website. So you need to understand the state of the client’s website and what could be hindering search engine rankings. Usually, the best way to do this is through an SEO audit. 

There are several levels of SEO audits out there, but the best SEO audit is an in-depth technical audit. This takes many hours (ours can take over 100 hours) but offers the most thorough look at a website from the technical back end to on-page optimization and beyond.

And beware, free tools are exactly that, and they often waste time focusing on things that do not matter. 

“Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of ‘recommendations,’ most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.”

– Google’s John Mueller

4. Competitor research 

SEO is about beating the competition in search results. And to beat them, you should know:

• Who they are.
• What they are doing right and wrong with their SEO strategy. 

That’s why competitor research is critical. And there’s quite a bit to it.

Start with your target keywords and then analyze who shows up for them on Page 1 in Google. 

In competitor research, you might look at:

• The market competition to assess your strengths and weaknesses against theirs.
• The online competition, including everything from on-page and off-page factors to link profiles to the technical health of their websites to the content and much more.
• What keywords they rank for and the extent of content on their site. Often, this exercise identifies keyword gaps on your client’s site.

Spying on your client’s competitors is one of the best ways to improve your client’s SEO strategy and how you present the client online.

Rinse and repeat

Even as you go from novice to expert on your client, there’s always going to be more to learn.

Establish a process for staying up to date and keeping the listening channel open. Or else your SEO strategy could get stale.

And invite feedback from your client so you stay on top of their evolving needs.

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Google’s Responsive Display Ad go vertical for a better mobile experience

Written on May 9, 2022 at 7:52 am, by admin

The popular automatic display ad type Responsive Display Ads (RDAs) will be undergoing a major transformation in the second half of this year. RDAs have been the default display option since 2018 and these new enhancements are geared toward a better mobile offering for advertisers.

Portrait images and videos now welcome. The versatility of RDAs has the ability to flex images to display on mobile devices, but Google will allow for portrait images and videos to be used.

RDA using a horizontal image (left) vs RDA with new portrait image (right)

Previous options required a landscape or a square image while using machine learning to fill in the gaps for mobile ads. This new upgrade should be a welcomed option as it gives advertisers more control over their mobile appearance.

Auto-generated vertical video. If you are an advertiser that doesn’t have vertical videos handy, Google will now be able to help create those assets for your RDAs. Google is leveraging machine learning to use existing assets to create vertical video for campaigns.

Google is using “machine learning to speed up the design and iteration process, you can deliver engaging display ads faster than ever.”

If you are an advertiser that has tight branding/brand standards, you may want to view automated vertical videos before testing, as some advertisers have been dissatisfied with auto-created videos within Performance Max campaigns.

Image uncropping, powered by machine learning. A unique addition coming to RDAs is the ability to “uncrop” images via machine learning. Google said this “automatic improvement lets your products shine by seamlessly expanding to fill the available space.”

RDA using different images in the current state (left) vs RDAs using the uncropping technology (right)

As you can see in the sample image, this does look to be a big improvement with big bold images and less white space. This shouldn’t be a problem if all ad sizes are uploaded, but it should help those advertisers who are missing sizes. 

Creative inspiration. If you are an advertiser looking for inspiration with your assets, Google has a new home for you. Creative inspiration is a filterable tool that allows you to surface some of the best ad creative from around the globe.

The filtering includes a helpful “Ad Format” option to allow for browsing by ad type. 

For more information on the improvements, see the full release and stay tuned for more after the May 24 Google Marketing Live event.

Why we care. Google said its advertisers see “2X more conversions, on average, when adding a responsive display ad to an ad group with a static display ad.” This additional image size and vertical video support should allow advertisers to deliver more specific messaging by device.

The filterable additional creative inspiration center is a nice touch for advertisers looking for new ideas. Additionally, the uncropping of images should help advertisers with a hodgepodge of image sizes in their ad groups. These tools should be warmly welcomed by advertisers everywhere.

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Accelerate customer journey automation with this CDP roadmap

Written on May 7, 2022 at 1:51 am, by admin

Leading companies are focused on creating stronger customer experiences that span multiple channels and feel cohesive and meaningful to end-users. But many teams struggle to effectively combine legacy tools and emerging technologies required to build effective omnichannel experiences.

Autodesk partnered with ActionIQ to develop a future-proof stack that would empower a self-service approach to achieving superior omnichannel CX. Join this virtual session to learn how you can accelerate your approach to mastering omnichannel customer journeys.

Register today for “Is Your Marketing Stack Ready for Omnichannel CX?” presented by ActionIQ.

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