Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google AdWords experiments, Google profiles & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Retirement of the legacy testing tool will begin the week of October 17. The post AdWords Campaign Experiments (aka ACE) to sunset in favor of Drafts & Experiments appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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How are marketers using online and offline data to understand and optimize the customer journey? And what cross-channel strategies work best to drive offline conversions? Join digital marketing experts from Adobe and DialogTech to understand how marketers are solving the online-to-offline dilemma....
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Back in 2007, I took a job with a large software company that built a massive but traditional software business. My team was challenged with shifting our enterprise CIO customers perspectives away from traditional products to cloud-based enterprise offerings. At times it felt like we were trying to...
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Your local business profile image has a significant impact on the impression prospective customers have of your business. Columnist Wesley Young of the Local Search Association covers ways to make sure that impression is a positive one. The post 8 tips to make sure your Google profile images boost...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/8-tips-make-sure-google-profile-images-boost-local-search-results-258297 Posted by MiriamEllis Albuquerque’s locals and tourists agree, you can’t find a more authentic breakfast in town than at Perea’s New Mexican Restaurant. Yelp reviewers exclaim, "Best green chile ever!!", "Soft, chewy, thick-style homemade flour tortillas soak up all the extra green chili," "My go-to for great huevos rancheros," and "Carne was awesome! Tender, flavorful, HOT!" The descriptions alone are enough to make one salivate, but the Yelp reviews for this gem of an eatery also tell another story — one so heavily spiced with the potential of duplicate listings that it may take the appetite of any hard-working local SEO away: “Thru all of the location changes, this is a true family restaurant with home cooking.” Reading those, the local SEO sets aside sweet dreams of sopapillas because he very much doubts the accuracy of that last review comment. Are all customers really following this restaurant from place to place, or are visitors (with money to spend) being misdirected to false locations via outdated, inconsistent, and duplicate listings? The local SEO can’t stand the suspense, so he fires up Moz Check ListingHe types in the most recent name/zip code combo he can find, and up comes: A total of 2 different names, 3 different phone numbers, and 4 different addresses! In 5 seconds, the local SEO has realized that business listings around the web are likely misdirecting diners left and right, undoubtedly depriving the restaurant of revenue as locals fail to keep up with the inconvenient moves or travelers simply never find the right place at all. Sadly, two of those phone numbers return an out-of-service message, further lessening the chances that patrons will get to enjoy this establishment’s celebrated food. Where is all this bad data coming from? The local SEO clicks on just the first entry to start gaining clues, and from there, he clicks on the duplicates tab for a detailed, clickable list of duplicates that Check Listing surfaces for that particular location: From this simple Duplicates interface, you can immediately see that 1 Google My Business listing, 1 Foursquare listing, 3 Facebook Places, 1 Neustar Localeze listing, and 1 YP listing bear further investigation. Clicking the icons takes you right to the sources. You’ve got your clues now, and only need to solve your case. Interested? The paid version of Moz Local supports your additions of multiple variants of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of clients to help surface further duplicates. Finally, your Moz Local dashboard also enables you to request closure of duplicates on our Direct Network partners. What a relief! Chances are, most of your clients don’t move locations every couple of years (at least, we hope not!), but should an incoming client alert you to a move they’ve made in the past decade or so, it’s likely that a footprint of their old location still exists on the web. Even if they haven’t moved, they may have changed phone numbers or rebranded, and instead of editing their existing listings to reflect these core data changes, they may have ended up with duplicate listings that are then auto-replicating themselves throughout the ecosystem. Google and local SEOs share a common emotion about duplicate listings: both feel uneasy about inconsistent data they can’t trust, knowing the potential to misdirect and frustrate human users. Feeling unsettled about duplicates for an incoming client today? Get your appetite back for powerful local SEO with our free Check Listing tool! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4393533 Posted by Alan_Coleman Hey Moz Blog readers. I’m delighted to share with you a big body of work the Wolfgang team has just completed. It’s our E-commerce Benchmarks 2016 study. We dove into Google Analytics insights from over 80 million website sessions and over one-quarter of a billion dollars in online revenue for travel and retail websites, calculating average e-commerce website key performance indicators (KPIs) for you to use as benchmarks. I hope these findings help you benchmark your KPIs and gain deeper insights into what you can do to boost conversion. There are a number of unique features to this study:
In this post I’m going to give you an overview of 12 key takeaways. You can read the full report here. Or grab some quick insights from our infographic here. 1/ The average e-commerce conversion rate is 1.48%.
It was notable that the travel websites enjoyed higher conversion rates but lower engagement rates than the average retailer. This spiked my curiosity, as that just seemed too darn easy for the travel retailers. After deep-diving the data, I found that the committed retail customer would visit the one retail website multiple times on their journey to purchase. On the other hand, the travel shopper does a lot of research, but on other websites, review sites, via online travel agents, travel bloggers, etc. before arriving at the e-commerce website to merely check price and availability before booking. This finding illuminates the fact that the retailer has more influence on its customers' journey to purchase than the travel website, who's more dependent on an ecosystem of travel websites to warm up the prospect. 2/ The death of SEO?The data states it emphatically: "Hell no!" Google organic is the largest source of both traffic (43%) and revenue (42%). SEO traffic from Google organic has actually increased by 5% since our last study. There was also a strong correlation between websites with a high percentage of traffic from Google organic and higher-than-average Average Order Values (AOVs). From this finding, we can infer that broad organic coverage will be rewarded by transactions from research-heavy, high-value customers. 3/ AdWords is the king of conversionThe strongest correlation we saw with higher conversion rates was higher-than-average traffic and revenue from AdWords. In my experience, Google AdWords is the best-converting traffic source. So my take is that, when a website increases its spend on Adwords, it adds more high-conversion traffic to its profile and increases its average conversion rate. AdWords accounts for 26% of traffic and 25% of revenue on average. 4/ Google makes the World Wide Web go 'roundWhen you combine Google organic and PPC, you see that Google accounts for 69% of traffic and 67% of revenue. More than two-thirds! Witness the absolute dominance of “The Big G” as our window to the web. 5/ Facebook traffic quadruples!In our last study, Facebook accounted for a meagre 1.3% of traffic. This time around, it's leapt up to 5%, with Facebook CPC emerging from nowhere to 2%. When better cross-device measurement becomes available in Google Analytics, I expect Facebook to be seen as an assisted conversion power player. 6/ Don’t discount emailEmail delivers 6% of traffic, which is actually as much as all the social channels combined — and treble the revenue. In fact, with a 6% share of revenue, Google is the only medium that delivers more revenue than email. Digital marketers often lust after shiny new toys (hello, Snapchat!), but the advice here is to look after the old reliables first. And this 40-year-old technology we all use every day is about as old and reliable as it gets. 7/ Site speed matters mostThis section was added to the study after comments from you, the Moz Blog readers, last time around, so thanks for your input. The server response time correlation with conversion rate (-0.31) was one of the strongest we saw. It was dramatically stronger than engagement metrics, such as time on site (0.11) or pages viewed (0.10). We also found that for every two-tenths of a second you shave off your server response time, you'll increase conversion rate by 8%. Don’t forget that site speed is a Google ranking factor, so by optimizing for it you'll benefit from a "multiplier effect" of more traffic and a higher conversion rate on all your traffic. Google’s page speed tool is a great place to start your speed optimization journey. Check out our conversion rate correlation chart below to get more insights on which metrics can move conversion rate. 8/ Mobile is our "decision device"2015 was finally "the year of mobile." Mobile became the largest traffic source of the devices, but seriously underperforms for revenue. Its 42% share of traffic becomes a miserly 21% share of revenue, and it suffers the lowest average conversion rate and AOV. Despite these lowly conversion metrics, our correlation study found that websites with a larger-than-average portion of mobile traffic benefitted from larger-than-average conversion rates. This indicates that the "PA in your pocket" is the device upon which decisions are arrived at before being completed on desktop. We can deduce that while desktop remains our "transaction device," mobile has become our "decision device," where research is carried out and purchase decisions arrived at. 9/ Digital marketers are over-indexing on display advertisingDespite accounting for 38% of digital marketers budgets (IAB Europe), display failed to register as a top ten traffic source. This means it contributed less than 1% of e-commerce website traffic. 10/ Bounce rate don’t mean diddly squatBounce rate actually has zero correlation with conversion rate! Digital marketers feel a deep sense of rejection when they see a high bounce rate. However, as an overall website metric, it’s a dud. While admittedly there are bad bounces, there are many good bounces accounted for in the number. 11/ Digital marketing "economies of scale"Interestingly, websites that enjoyed more-than-average traffic levels enjoyed higher-than-average conversion rates. This illustrates a digital marketing version of "economies of scale"; more traffic equals better conversion rates. The corollary of this is lower CPAs (Cost Per Acquisitions). 12/ People are buying more frequently and spending more per order online.Average conversion rates have increased 10% since the last study. Retail average order value has shot up a whopping 25%! This demonstrates people are migrating more and more of their shopping behavior off the high street and onto the Internet. There’s never been a better time to be an e-commerce digital marketer. You can deep-dive the above digestibles by reading the full study here. How do these benchmarks compare to your personal experience? Anything you're surprised by, or that confirms your long-held suspicions? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Optimize hard, Alan Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4391636
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google AdWords ad preview, Bing autocomplete, & illegal linking appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/searchcap-google-adwords-ad-preview-bing-autocomplete-illegal-linking-258526
Bing says autocomplete suggestions for movies will analyze a user's natural language and intent to deliver the most likely interpretations. The post Bing improves autocomplete suggestions for academic papers & movie titles appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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With more functionality now available in Feed Rules, here is a look at how some marketers have been using them to improve Google Shopping campaign performance. The post Tips for when and how to use Feed Rules in Google Merchant Center appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Columnist Lydia Jorden discusses techniques to digitize traditional marketing in a way that allows your brand to connect with its traditional audience while maintaining competitive local SERP positioning. The post Digitizing traditional marketing methods to compete in local search appeared first...
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Google’s hosted AMP viewer takes the risk — and commitment — out of clicking a mobile search result. Contributor Barb Palser discusses what this will mean for publishers. The post Google’s AMP Viewer: the Tinder UX for content? appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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The view now includes sample ads and separate views for mobile and desktop. The post Google has updated the AdWords ad preview tool for expanded text ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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What are automated extensions in AdWords, and how can they impact your PPC analytics and ad performance? Columnist Michelle Cruz explains. The post The unexpected impact of Google automated ad extensions appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more. Bing Ads balloons for 20% UK marketshare: Source: Twitter Google Brazil...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/search-pics-googles-upcoming-birthday-bing-20-share-balloons-fruit-bar-truck-258473 Weird Crazy Myths About Link Building in SEO You Should Probably Ignore - Whiteboard Friday9/9/2016 Posted by randfish The rules of link building aren't always black and white, and getting it wrong can sometimes result in frustrating consequences. But where's the benefit in following rules that don't actually exist? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand addresses eight of the big link building myths making their rounds across the web. Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about some of the weird and crazy myths that have popped up around link building. We've actually been seeing them in the comments of some of our blog posts and Whiteboard Fridays and Q&A. So I figured, hey, let's try and set the record straight here. 1. Never get links from sites with a lower domain authority than your ownWhat? No, that is a terrible idea. Domain authority, just to be totally clear, it's a machine learning system that we built here at Moz. It takes and looks at all the metrics. It builds the best correlation it can against Google's rankings across a broad set of keywords, similar to the MozCast 10K. Then it's trying to represent, all other things being equal and just based on raw link authority, how well would this site perform against other sites in Google's rankings for a random keyword? That does not in any way suggest whether it is a quality website that gives good editorial links, that Google is likely to count, that are going to give you great ranking ability, that are going to send good traffic to you. None of those things are taken into account with domain authority. 2. Never get links from any directoriesI know where this one comes from. We have talked a bunch about how low-quality directories, SEO-focused directories, paid link directories tend to be very bad places to get links from. Google has penalized not just a lot of those directories, but many of the sites whose link profiles come heavily from those types of domains. 3. Don't get links too fast or you'll get penalizedLet's try and think about this. Like Google has some sort of penalty line where they look at, "Oh, well, look at that. We see in August, Rand got 17 links. He was under at 15 in July, but then he got 17 links in August. That is too fast. We're going to penalize him." Yes. If you are doing sketchy, grey hat/black hat link building with your private networks, your link buys, and your swapping schemes, and all these kinds of things, yeah, it's probably the case that if you get them too fast, you'll trip over some sort of filter that Google has got. But if you're doing the kind of link building that we generally recommend here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz more broadly, you don't have risk here. I would not stress about this at all. So long as your links are coming from good places, don't worry about the pace of them. There's no such thing as too fast. 4. Don't link out to other sites, or you'll leak link equity, or link juice, or PageRank...or whatever it is. I really like this illustration of the guys who are like, "My link juice. No!" This is just crap. 5. Variations in anchor text should be kept to precise proportionsSo this idea that essentially there's some magic formula for how many of your keyword anchor text, anchor phrases should be branded, partially branded, keyword match links that are carrying anchor text that's specifically for the keywords you're trying to rank for, and random assorted anchor texts and that you need some numbers like these, also a crazy idea. So yes, if you are in the grey/black hat world of link acquisition, sure, maybe you should pay some attention to how the anchor text looks. But again, if you're following the advice that you get here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz, this is not a concern. 6. Never ask for a link directly or you risk penaltiesThis one I understand, because there have been a bunch of cases where folks or organizations have sent out emails, for example, to their customers saying, "Hey, if you link to us from your website, we'll give you a discount," or, "Hey, we'd like you to link to this resource, and in exchange this thing will happen," something or other. I get that those penalties and that press around those types of activities has made certain people sketched out. I also get that a lot of folks use it as kind of blackmail against someone. That sucks. 7. More than one link from the same website is uselessThis one is rooted in the idea that, essentially, diversity of linking domains is an important metric. It tends to be the case that sites that have more unique domains linking to them tend to outrank their peers who have only a few sites linking to them, even if lots of pages on those individual sites are providing those links. 8. Links from non-relevant sites or sites or pages or content that's outside your niche won't help you rank betterThis one, I think, is rooted in that idea that Google is essentially looking and saying like, "Hey, we want to see that there's relevance and a real reason for Site A to link to Site B." But if a link is editorial, if it's coming from a high-quality place, if there's a reason for it to exist beyond just, "Hey, this looks like some sort of sketchy SEO ploy to boost rankings," Googlebot is probably going to count that link and count it well. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Feeling inspired by reality? Start building quality links with OSE. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4371587
The facts of the present case were egregious but the law created by the court is bad for the internet. The post European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google widget links, ads & SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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New graphs make it possible to see and analyze data in seconds rather than hours. The post 6 data visualizations in the new AdWords that will save you a ton of time appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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Columnist Dan Gilbert shares another script from Brainlabs that will copy your AdWords extensions across different campaigns. The post Here’s a script that copies AdWords extensions to all your campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/heres-script-copies-adwords-extensions-campaigns-258165 Posted by ronell-smith Steve Rayson's latest BuzzSumo article is provocative, interesting and well-written. But I do hope he's wrong when he says the future will be about more content, not less. He shares why he thinks content marketing brands will begin producing more content in the days ahead, and how they'll likely be successful by doing so. Upon reading the piece, I did a facepalm. I was reminded of a conversation I had a few years back, when I walked into the break room of the agency I was working for, and almost bumped into the content specialist on my team. After we exchanged pleasantries, she informed me of an unwise decision she was about to make. Her: "Guess what? I'm going to run a marathon." Me: "Why?" Her: "I think it'll be fun." Me: "OK. How many marathons have you run? And have you been training for this one?" Her: "I've never ran one, but there are a lot of training guides online; they say it only takes 17 weeks to train for it." Me: "..." The philosophy of doing a lot what we don't yet do well is ruining content marketing — and the knees, joints and backs of wannabe marathoners. If you doubt that, please explain why 90% of what's published online barely rises to the level of crap. Anyone who disagrees with that statement is either (a) fooling themselves or (b) never had to conduct a content audit. Even for big brands, producing quality content with frequency is seemingly near-impossible task Therefore, when someone says "create more content," I hear "brands will continue to waste resources that would be better spent elsewhere," for now. Worse still, it means they'll see the failure as not one of execution, but born of content marketing itself. Rayson is a solid content marketer working for a brand with a strong product. I admire them both. And while I don't mean to attack him, I would like to tackle the logic of the post, which I'll excerpt below. [Eds. note: The primary reason I chose to tackle this topic is because content frequency and content length remain two of the biggest albatrosses impacting our industry. Despite this fact, many fail to see how related they are. That is, many brands are failing fast by chasing the long-form posts and frequent posting unicorn. Also, I'm very clear in understanding that Rayson is not advocating for quantity at the expense of quality. My contention is simply that quantity is typically the wrong goal, at least for the vast majority of brands.] You're a brand who publishes content, not a brand publisherThe Washington Post now publishes around 1,200 posts a day. That is an incredible amount of content. My initial reaction when I read the statistic was ‘surely that is too much, the quality will suffer, why produce so much content?’ The answer seems to be that it works. The Post’s web visitors have grown 28% over the last year and they passed the New York Times for a few months at the end of 2015. As a former journalist who spent four years in a newsroom, I've always been against the brands as publisher mantra, in large part because, well, as a brand you ARE NOT a publisher. Publishing content no more makes you a publisher than running 26 miles makes someone a marathoner. Newsrooms are built to produce lots of content. There are often dozens of editors, copy editors, line editors and writers on staff, so quality control is baked in and a priority. Additionally, a newspaper writer can easily write several stories a day and not break a sweat, owing to an environment that places premium on speed. By contrast, most many content marketers use junior writers or, worse still, content mills, that deliver low-quality posts for $20. It's very unlikely that attempting to follow the path of newspapers would prove fruitful. Better idea: Determine the cadence with which your brand can create uniquely valuable content, which Rand defined and described in a 2015 Whiteboard Friday. The key is to focus the lion's share of your attention on creating content that's exclusive and recognized as best-by-far in its class. Will WaPo's strategy work for your brand?I think whilst it is true that content will take a wider range of forms, including interactive content, the future is not less content but the opposite. I'm of the opinion that seeing WaPo's strategy as anything but "effective for them" is a mistake. As anyone who's been around the marketing space for any amount of time can attest, chasing what another brand has been successful at is a bad idea. Yes, you should be aware of what the competition is doing, but seeing their success as anything more than unique to them, or their vertical, is a recipe for pain. Remember, too, that WaPo isn't selling anything but ad space, not products, so the more real estate the better for them/businesses like them. Also, the rapid rise in number of pages indexed by Google would seem to highlight one thing: A lot of brands are investing in content; it doesn't mean a lot of brands are being successful with it. Better idea: After finding your cadence and nailing quality consistently, test frequency along with elements such as length and content type to find the right balance for your brand. Quality and quantity typically go in the opposite directionAs the costs of production, storage and distribution fell, particularly with online and digital products, it became economically attractive to provide products for the long tail niche audience, in fact revenue from the long tail became greater than the hits because the tail was very long indeed. Companies like Amazon and Netflix were arguably some of the first long tail companies. Unlike WaPo, which buys ink by the proverbial barrel and has a stout staff, most brands have razor-thin content teams, increasing the likelihood that producing more and more content means increased expenditure as new team members must be hired and vetted or contractors are hired. As I experienced while working for an agency, brands expect that as the cost rises, so too do their rankings and traffic, which is not typically the case. And when those two don't move in lockstep, the spigot is shut off, often for good. Better idea: Develop a goal for your content that's in line with your brand's goals, then let your marketing team test and refine the publishing schedule. You're likely to find that the right cadence to nail quality is fewer but bigger content pieces. Don't conflate strategy with the goalBy creating over 1,000 pieces of content a day you are more likely to cater for demand in the long tail for specific niche content or simply to produce content that engages a wider audience. ... Sites such as BuzzFeed have also increased their content production, the Atlantic recently reported the following figures: Again, these are — even in the case of BuzzFeed — media companies we're talking about, so it's not surprising that traffic, frequency and quality can continue in the same direction. For most brands, two out of three is the gold standard and one out of three is the norm. Better idea: Stop thinking you're a media company. It's OK to adopt a strategy that includes more frequent publishing, but that strategy must fit inside your brand's overall goals, not vice-versa. Shares are the cotton candy of content marketingWhen I looked recently at the most shared content published by marketing and IT sites, the data confirmed that on average long form posts achieved more shares. But when I looked in more detail at the 50 most shared posts, 45 of them were short form and under 1,000 words. Thus people are very happy to share short form content and given the pressures on everyone’s time may prefer short form content. ... On this point, I largely agree with Rayson insofar as shorter content, with rare exception, should be a part of your brand's content strategy (this post notwithstanding). I know, I know, many of you do very well with posts of varying lengths. I get that. What I'm saying is your content should be assigned, not by your whims or the needs of the brand, but by the needs of the audience. And certainly not based on shares, which, as we know from a recent Moz and BuzzSumo post, do not correlate with the all-important links. In many cases and for many brands, shares are a distraction serving to keep our attention away from the important elements of content marketing. I liken them to the cotton candy at the county fair: a lot of puff, but not nearly as filling as that smoked turkey leg. When creating content, we should begin with empathy being top-of-mind. That's when you can allow your inner journalist to soar:
Notice I never mentioned length. That was intentional. The length of your content should be determined by your audience, not your brand. A recent study by Chartbeat, which looked at user behavior across 2 billion visits over the web during the course of a month, found that 55% of visitors spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page. 15 seconds! Better idea: If readers aren't spending a great deal of time on our site's we should reward them, not punish them: create short but meaty posts; share graphics with a few lines of commentary to invite comments; share videos or podcasts you've enjoyed, as curated content; or ask a question, then be the first answer, nudging others to dive into the fray. Whatever direction you decide to go in, do so with guidance from your audience and/or would-be audience. Imagine a world filled with web searcher advocatesAgain, this post is not meant as an attack on Raysons' post. If anything, I wanted to take the opportunity to reiterate to folks that content marketing isn't an either/or game; it's a long-haul game, a "this and that" game, an iterative game. As someone who's been made sick from doing deep dives into clients' content, I feel strongly that we often need to protect brands from themselves. Big budgets and large teams don't prevent marketers from making bad decisions. I've made it clear to prospects and clients that I'm there as an advocate for them, but first and foremost I'm an advocate for web searchers. The more and the better I can help brands be the chosen result (not merely the top result), consistently, the happier we will all be. Who's willing to join me on the web searcher advocate crusade? Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4364888
We often don't consider the impact our website's ads could have on organic search visibility, but columnist Kristine Schachinger explains why too many ads can be a bad thing for users and search engines alike. The post 5 ways ads are killing your site (& SEO) appeared first on Search Engine...
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Don't be surprised if a new wave of unnatural link penalties are sent out via the Google Search Console for widget links. The post Google reminds webmasters that widget links are against their webmaster guidelines appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widget-links-webmaster-guidelines-258393 Posted by Dr-Pete As many of you know, Moz recently went through a major reorganization, which included the loss of 28% of our staff. Our Community team was heavily impacted, which has understandably led to speculation about the future of the Moz Community. I want to specifically address those concerns, project by project. The Moz Community is an essential part of our past and future, and while we can’t ignore the reality and difficulty of our recent losses, we believe strongly in our Community and are doing our best to chart a path forward. A personal noteI asked to write this post, knowing it wouldn’t be easy. I’ve been a member of the Moz Community for almost 10 years. When my first YouMoz post was promoted in April 2007, I didn’t realize it would be the start of a decade-long journey. The Moz Community made my career in SEO possible, and I’ll always be grateful for that. The people affected by the past few weeks are my peers and friends, and I take that loss personally. It’s ok to take that personally. At the same time, there are 160 peers and friends still at Moz trying to figure out how to do more with less, and they believe in our Community, too. We will make mistakes along the way, and we will need your help. I and the entire Moz team would also like to thank the departing members of the Community team – Jen, Erica, Charlene, and Matt – for all of their contributions over the years building and maintaining a thriving community. This has been a month of difficult decisions driven by both unpleasant financial realities and shifts in Moz strategy, but we do not take their contributions for granted. A few clarificationsBefore diving in project-by-project, I’d like to clarify a few points. First, we did not lose the entire Community team – Megan and Danielle are still at Moz, and they’ve been with the team since 2011 and 2013, respectively. They know our Community well. The day-to-day of our main blog is (and has been) run by members of our Audience Development team (Trevor and Felicia, with the help of the Marketing team), which is separate from the Community team. Moz Q&A and Social are a joint effort between Community, Customer Support, and a group of dedicated industry experts known as Moz Associates. It takes a lot of hard-working, dedicated people to create a world-class community. The Big ListHere is a list of all of our major Moz Community-focused projects, and the status of those projects as best we know today. I will try to be as transparent as possible. (1) MozCon 2016Please be assured that MozCon 2016 is full speed ahead. Erica and Charlene graciously agreed to stay with Moz through the conference, and everything will proceed as originally planned. We look forward to seeing many of you in Seattle next week. When you see them, please thank Erica and Charlene for everything they’ve done to make MozCon a great event. (2) MozCon 2017We’ve had many conversations about MozCon 2017 in the past two weeks, and have committed to moving forward with our flagship event. As originally planned, MozCon 2017 will take place in Seattle, from July 17–19. We realize that an event of the size and quality of MozCon is not an easy thing to pull off, but we have many team members who have been actively involved in past events and we will collectively work hard to maintain the MozCon tradition. (3) Moz BlogBefore Moz was a company and long before it was a product, there was a blog. The Moz Blog has our full support, will remain a core part of our Community, and we will continue to support and update big content projects, including The Beginner’s Guide to SEO. We are 100% committed to maintaining strong educational resources for the SEO community. (4) YouMozPrior to the reorganization, we had started some difficult conversations about YouMoz. As our Community and the entire world of content marketing has evolved, the quantity of submissions has increased while the quality has suffered. This left our team spending a large amount of time on managing the queue and editing posts. It also meant that good posts had to wait longer to be published, frustrating our best contributors. In the near future, YouMoz will be phased out in favor of a better guest contributor process and system for the Moz Blog. Our hope is to offer guest authors higher-profile opportunities on the main blog. We will also be exploring ways to allow our community to pitch blog topic ideas without submitting an entire post, to save everyone time and frustration. (5) Moz Q&AA few months back, we started looking for a new technology platform for the Q&A forum, one that could better serve our evolving community. Those plans will continue forward. Our Community team is working hard to launch a better Q&A engine that can support both our Moz Pro and Moz Local customer communities, as well as the broader SEO community. We are fully committed to a new and improved Q&A in the coming months that supports a wide range of SEO conversations and helps the next generation of marketers grow in their careers. (6) Social mediaObviously, the Community team had a huge hand in growing and managing our various social channels. Many of those channels have also changed, with Facebook pushing hard toward paid inclusion and Google+ facing an uncertain future. Megan, Danielle, and our Customer Support team are committed to actively supporting Twitter and our other existing channels, even as we look for the best ways to engage our Community in the broader social world. The coming monthsUltimately, our commitment to the Moz Community will be judged by our actions in the coming weeks and months and not just by our words. Our resources are more constrained now, but our dedication is as strong as ever. I’d like to thank all of you for supporting us over the years, and I hope that you will continue this journey with us as we explore the future of the industry and the Community. If you have specific questions or concerns, please feel free to ask in the comments, and I will do my best to address them (or find someone on our team who can). We look forward to seeing many of you at MozCon next week! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4362930
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google web reviews, security reports & Penguin update appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article. via Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://searchengineland.com/searchcap-google-web-reviews-security-reports-penguin-update-258376 |
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October 2016
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