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Advertisers can add the extensions at the campaign and ad group levels.
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As the layout of search engine results pages continues to change and evolve, columnist Rachel Lindteigen notes that being the top result may not be as important as it used to be.
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Most of us have used Google Search Console, but many SEOs ignore Bing Webmaster Tools. Columnist Tony Edward argues that we should not overlook this rich source of data.
The post Why SEOs should not ignore Bing Webmaster Tools appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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. Kangaroo at Google this week: Source: Google+ Russo brothers visit Google London: Source: Google+ New napkins […]
The post Search in Pics: Kangaroos, Russo brothers & new napkins at Google appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Posted by randfish
[Estimated read time: 14 minutes]
Are you guilty of living in the past? Using methods that were once tried-and-true can be alluring, but it can also prove dangerous to your search strategy. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand spells out eight old school SEO practices that you should ditch in favor of more effective and modern alternatives.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about some old school SEO practices that just don't work anymore and things with which we should replace them.
Look, I get the appeal here. The idea is that we've done a bunch of keyword research, now we're doing keyword targeting, and we can see that it might be important to target multiple keywords on the same page. So FYI, "pipe smoking," "tobacco smoking," "very dangerous for your health," not recommended by me or by Moz, but I thought it was a funny throwback keyword and so there you go. I do enjoy little implements even if I never use them.
So pipes, tobacco pipes, pipe smoking, wooden pipes, this is not going to draw anyone's click. You might think, "But it's good SEO, Rand. It's good to have all my keywords in my title element. I know that's an important part of SEO." Not anymore. It really is not anymore an important . . . well, let's put it this way. It's an important part of SEO, which is subsumed by wanting to draw the clicks. The user is searching, they're looking at the page, and what are they going to think when they see pipes tobacco, pipes, pipe smoking, wooden pipes? They have associations with that — spammy, sketchy, I don't want to click it — and we know, as SEOs, that Google is using click signals to help documents rank over time and to help websites rank over time.
So if they're judging this, you're going to fall in the rankings, versus a title like "Art of Piping: Studying Wooden Pipes for Every Price Range." Now, you're not just playing off the, "Yes, I am including some keywords in there. I have 'wooden' and 'pipes.' I have 'art of piping,' which is maybe my brand name." But I'm worried more about drawing the click, which is why I'm making this part of my message of "for every price range." I'm using the word "stunning" to draw people in. I'm saying, "Our collection is not the largest but the hand-selected best. You'll find unique pipes available nowhere else and always free, fast shipping."
I'm essentially trying to create a message, like I would for an AdWords ad, that is less focused on just having the raw keywords in there and more focused on drawing the click. This is a far more effective approach that we've seen over the last few years. It's probably been a good six or seven years that this has been vastly superior to this other approach.
This used to be a practice that could have positive impacts on rankings. But what we've seen lately, especially the last few years, is that Google has discounted this and has actually even punished it where they feel like it's inappropriate or spammy, manipulative, overdone. We talked about this a little in our internal and external linking Whiteboard Friday a couple of weeks back.
In this case, my suggestion would be if the internal link is in the navigation, if it's in the footer, if it's in a sidebar, if it's inside content, and it is relevant and well-written and it flows well, has high usability, you're pretty safe. However, if it has low usability, if it looks sketchy or funny, if you're making the font small so as to hide it because it's really for search engines and not for searchers and users, now you're in a sketchy place. You might count on being discounted, penalized, or hurt at some point by Google.
This is an SEO tactic that many folks are still pursuing today and that had been effective for a very long time. So the idea was basically if I have any variation of a keyword, I want a single page to target that because keyword targeting is such a precise art and technical science that I want to have the maximum capacity to target each keyword individually, even if it's only slightly different from another one. This still worked even up to four or five years ago, and in some cases, people were sacrificing usability because they saw it still worked.
Nowadays, Google has gotten so smart with upgrades like Hummingbird, obviously with RankBrain last year, that they've taken to a much more intent- and topic-matching model. So we don't want to do something like have four different pages, like unique hand-carved pipes, hand-carved pipes, hand-carved tobacco pipes, and hand-carved tobacco smoking pipes. By the way, these are all real searches that you'll find in Google Suggest or AdWords. But rather than taking all of these and having a separate page for each, I want one page targeting all of them. I might try and fit these keywords intelligently into the content, the headline, maybe the title, the meta description, those kinds of things. I'm sure I can find a good combination of these. But the intent for each of these searchers is the same, so I only want one page targeting them.
Every single one of these link building, link acquisition techniques that I'm about to mention has either been directly penalized by Google or penalized as part of an update, or we've seen sites get hit hard for doing it. This is dangerous stuff, and you want to stay away from all of these at this point.
Directories, well, generic directories and SEO directories for sure. Article links, especially article blasts where you can push an article in and there's no editorial review. Guest content, depending on the editorial practices, the board might be a little different. Press releases, Google you saw penalized some press release websites. Well, it didn't penalize the press release website. Google said, "You know what? Your links don't count anymore, or we're going to discount them. We're not going to treat them the same."
Comment links, for obvious reasons, reciprocal link pages, those got penalized many years ago. Article spinners. Private link networks. You se private and network, or you see network, you should just generally run away. Private blog networks. Paid link networks. Fiverr or forum link buys.
You see advertised on all sorts of SEO forums especially the more aggressive, sketchy ones that a lot of folks are like, "Hey, for $99, we have this amazing package, and I'll show you all the people whose rankings it's increased, and they come from PageRank six," never mind that Page Rank is totally defunct. Or worse, they use Moz. They'll say like, "Domain authority 60-plus websites." You know what, Moz is not perfect. Domain authority is not a perfect representation of the value you're going to get from these things. Anyone who's selling you links on a forum, you should be super skeptical. That's somewhat like someone going up to your house and being like, "Hey, I got this Ferrari in the yard here. You want to buy this?" That's my Jersey coming out.
Social link buys, anything like this, just say no people.
So this again used to be a very common SEO practice, where folks would say, "Hey, I'm going to split these up because I can get very micro targeted with my individual websites." They were often keyword-rich domain names like woodenpipes.com, and I've got handmadepipes.net, and I've got pipesofmexico.co versus I just have artofpiping.com, not that "piping" is necessarily the right word. Then it includes all of the content from all of these. The benefit here is that this is going to gain domain authority much faster and much better, and in a far greater fashion than any of these will.
Let's say that it was possible that there is no bias against the exact match domain names folks. We're happy to link to them, and you had just as much success branding each of these and earning links to each of these, and doing content marketing on each of these as you did on this one. But you split up your efforts a third, a third, a third. Guess what would happen? These would rank about a third as well as all the content would on here, which means the content on handmadepipes.net is not benefitting from the links and content on woodenpipes.com, and that sucks. You want to combine your efforts into one domain if you possibly can. This is one of the reasons we also recommend against subdomains and microsites, because putting all of your efforts into one place has the best shot at earning you the most rankings for all of the content you create.
It's the case like if I'm a consumer and I'm looking at domain names like woodenpipes.com, handmadepipes.net, uniquepipes.shop, hand-carved-pipes.co, the problem is that over time, over the last 15, 20 years of the Web, those types of domain names that don't sound like real brands, that are not in our memories and don't have positive associations with them, they're going to draw clicks away from you and towards your competitors who sound more credible, more competent, and more branded. For that reason alone, you should avoid them.
It's also that case that we've seen that these types of domains do much more poorly with link earning, with content marketing, with being able to have guest content accepted. People don't trust it. The same is true for public relations and getting press mentions. The press doesn't trust sites like these.
For those reasons, it's just a barrier. Even if you thought, "Hey, there's still keyword benefits to these," which there is a little bit because the anchor text that comes with them, that points to the site always includes the words and phrases you're going after. So there's a little bit of benefit, but it's far overwhelmed by the really frustrating speed bumps and roadblocks that you face when you have a domain like this.
A lot of folks, when they're doing keyword research, for some reason still have this idea that using cost per click or AdWords as competition scores can help determine the difficulty of ranking in organic, non-paid results. This is totally wrong.
So see right here, I've got "hand-carved pipes" and "unique wooden pipes," and they have an AdWords CPC respectively of $3.80 and $5.50, and they have AdWords competition of medium and medium. That is in no way correlated necessarily with how difficult they'll be to rank for in the organic results. I could find, for example, that "unique wooden pipes" is actually easier or harder than "hand-carved pipes" to rank for in the organic SEO results. This really depends on: Who's in the competition set? What types of links do they have and social mentions do they have? How robust is their content? How much are they exciting visitors and drawing them in and serving them well? That sort of stuff is really hard to calculate here.
I like the keyword difficulty score that Moz uses. Some other tools have their own versions. Doctor Pete, I think, did a wonderful job of putting together a keyword difficulty score that's relatively comprehensive and well-thought through, uses a lot of the metrics about the domain and the page authority scores, and it compensates for a lot of other things, to look at a set of search results and say, "This is probably about how hard it's going to be," and whether it's harder or easier than some other keyword.
Last one, some folks are still engaging in this, I think because content strategy, content marketing, and content as a whole has become a very hot topic and a point of investment. Many SEOs still invest in what I call "nonstrategic and unfocused link bait." The idea being if I can draw links to my website, it doesn't really matter if the content doesn't make people very happy or if it doesn't match and gel well with what's on my site. So you see a lot of these types of practices on sites that have nothing to do with it. Like, "Here are seven actors who one time wore too little clothing." That's an extreme example, but you get the idea if you ever look at the bottom ads for a lot of content stuff. It feels like pretty much all of them say that.
Versus on topic link bait or what I'd call high quality content that is likely to draw in links and attention, and create a positive branding association like, "Here's the popularity of pipes, cigarettes, electronic cigarettes, and cigars in the U.S. from 1950 to today." We've got the data over time and we've mapped that out. This is likely to earn a lot of links, press attention. People would check it out. They'd go, "Oh, when was it that electronic cigarettes started getting popular? Have pipes really fallen off? It feels like no one uses them anymore. I don't see them in public. When was that? Why was that? Can I go over time and see that dataset?" It's fundamentally interesting, and data journalism is, obviously, very hot right now.
So with these eight, hopefully you'll be able to switch from some old school SEO techniques that don't work so well to some new ways of thinking that will take your SEO results to a great place. And with that, we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Posted by MiriamEllis
Imagine getting three months in on a Local SEO contract before realizing that your client’s storefront is really his cousin’s garage. From which he runs two other “legit” businesses he never mentioned. Or that he neglected to mention the reviews he bought last year. Worse yet, he doesn’t even know that buying reviews is a bad thing.
The story is equally bad if you’re diligently working to build quality unique content around a Chicago client’s business in Wicker Park but then realize their address (and customer base) is actually in neighboring Avondale.
What you don’t know will hurt you. And your clients.
A hallmark of the professional Local SEO department or agency is its dedication to getting off on the right foot with a new client by getting their data beautifully documented for the whole team from the start. At various times throughout the life of the contract, your teammates and staff from complementary departments will be needing to access different aspects of a client’s core NAP, known challenges, company history, and goals.
Having this information clearly recorded in shareable media is the key to both organization and collaboration, as well as being the best preventative measure against costly data-oriented mistakes. Clear and consistent data play vital roles in Local SEO. Information must not only be gathered, but carefully verified with the client.
This article will offer you a working Client Discovery Questionnaire, an Initial Discovery Phone Call Script, and a useful Location Data Spreadsheet that will be easy for any customer to fill out and for you to then use to get those listings up to date. You’re about to take your client discovery process to awesome new heights!
Lack of a clearly delineated, step-by-step onboarding process increases the potential for human error. Your agency’s Local SEO manager may be having allergies on Monday and simply forget to ask your new client if they have more than one website, if they’ve ever purchased reviews, or if they have direct access to their Google My Business listings. Or they could have that information and forget to share it when they jump to a new agency.
The outcomes of disorganized onboarding can range from minor hassles to disastrous mistakes.
Minor hassles would include having to make a number of follow-up phone calls to fill in holes in a spreadsheet that could have been taken care of in a single outreach. It’s inconvenient for all teammates when they have to scramble for missing data that should have been available at the outset of the project.
Disastrous mistakes can stem from a failure to fully gauge the details and scope of a client’s holdings. Suddenly, a medium-sized project can take on gigantic proportions when the agency learns that the client actually has 10 mini-sites with duplicate content on them, or 10 duplicate GMB listings, or a series of call tracking numbers around the web.
It’s extremely disheartening to discover a mountain of work you didn’t realize would need to be undertaken, and the agency can end up having to put in extra uncompensated time or return to the client to renegotiate the contract. It also leads to client dissatisfaction.
Setting correct client expectations is completely dependent on being able to properly gauge the scope of a project, so that you can provide an appropriate timeline, quote, and projected benchmarks. In Local, that comes down to documenting core business information, identifying past and present problems, and understanding which client goals are achievable. With the right tools and effective communication, your agency will be making a very successful start to what you want to be a very successful project.
There’s a lot you want to learn about a new client up front, but asking (and answering) all those questions right away can be grueling. Not to mention information fatigue, which can make your client give shorter and shorter answers when they feel like they’ve spent enough time already. Meanwhile your brain reaches max capacity and you can’t use all that valuable information because you can’t remember it.
To prevent such a disaster, we recommend dividing your Local SEO discovery process into a questionnaire to nail down the basics, a follow-up phone call to help you feel out some trickier issues, and a CSV to gather the location data. And we’ve created templates to get you started...
Use our Local SEO Client Discovery Questionnaire to understand your client’s history, current organization, and what other consultants they might also be working with. We’ve annotated each question in the Google Doc template to help you understand what you can learn and potential pitfalls to look out for.
If you want to make collecting and preserving your clients’ answers extra easy, use Google Forms to turn that questionnaire into a form like this:
Loading...You can even personalize the graphic, questions, and workflow to suit your brand.
Once you’ve received your client’s completed questionnaire and have had time to process the responses and do any necessary due diligence (like using our Check Listings tool to check how aggregators currently display their information), it’s time to follow up on the phone. Use our annotated Local SEO Client Discovery Phone Script to get you started.
No form necessary this time, because you’ll be asking the client verbally. Be sure to pay attention to the client’s tone of voice as they answer and refer to the notes under each question to see what you might be in for.
Sometimes the hardest part of Local SEO is getting all the location info letter-perfect. Make that easier by having the client input all those details into your copy of the Location Data Spreadsheet.
Then use the File menu to download that document as a CSV.
You’ll want to proof this before uploading it to any data aggregators. If you’re working with Moz Local, the next step is an easy upload of your CSV. If you’re working with other services, you can always customize your data collection spreadsheet to meet their standards.
Keep up to date on any business moves or changes in hours by designing a data update form like this one from SEER and periodically reminding your client contact to use it.
There are two sides to every successful client project: one half belongs to the agency and the other to the company it serves. The attention to detail your agency displays via clean, user-friendly forms and good phone sessions will signal your professionalism and commitment to doing quality work. At the same time, the willingness of the client to take the necessary time to fill out these documents and have these conversations signals their commitment to receiving value from their investment.
It’s not unusual for a new client to express some initial surprise when they realize how many questions you're asking them to answer. Past experience may even have led them to expect half-hearted, sloppy work from other SEO agencies. But, what you want to see is a willingness on their part to share everything they can about their company with you so that you can do your best work.
Anecdotally, I’ve fully refunded the down payments of a few incoming clients who claimed they couldn’t take the time to fill out my forms, because I detected in their unwillingness a lack of genuine commitment to success. These companies have, fortunately, been the exception rather than the rule for me, and likely will be for your agency, too.
It’s my hope that, with the right forms and a commitment to having important conversations with incoming clients at the outset, the work you undertake will make your Local team top agency and client heroes!
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!
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Posted by MatthewBarby
The traditional ways of measuring the success or failure of content are broken. We can’t just rely on metrics like the number of pageviews/visits or bounce rate to determine whether what we’re creating has performed well.
“The primary thing we look for with news is impact, not traffic,” says Jonah Peretti, Founder of BuzzFeed. One of the ways that BuzzFeed have mastered this is with the development of their proprietary analytics platform, POUND.
POUND enables BuzzFeed to predict the potential reach of a story based on its content, understand how effective specific promotions are based on the downstream sharing and traffic, and power A/B tests — and that’s just a few examples.
Just because you’ve managed to get more eyeballs onto your content doesn’t mean it’s actually achieved anything. If that were the case then I’d just take a few hundred dollars and buy some paid StumbleUpon traffic every time.
Yeah, I’d generate traffic, but it’s highly unlikely to result in me achieving some of my actual business goals. Not only that, but I’d have no real indication of whether my content was satisfying the needs of my visitors.
The scary thing is that the majority of content marketing campaigns are measured this way. I hear statements like “it’s too difficult to measure the performance of individual pieces of content” far too often. The reality is that it’s pretty easy to measure content marketing campaigns on a micro level — a lot of the time people don’t want to do it.
Within any commercial content marketing campaign that you’re running, measurement should be business goal-centric. By that I mean that you should be determining the overall success of your campaign based on the achievement of core business goals.
If your primary business goal is to generate 300 leads each month from the content that you’re publishing, you’ll need to have a reporting mechanism in place to track this information.
On a more micro-level, you’ll want to be tracking and using engagement metrics to enable you to influence the achievement of your business goals. In my opinion, all content campaigns should have robust, engagement-driven reporting behind them.
One metric that Medium uses, which I think adds a lot more value than pageviews, is "Total Time Reading (TTR)." This is a cumulative metric that quantifies the total number of minutes spent reading a piece of content. For example, if I had 10 visitors to one of my blog articles and they each stayed reading the article for 1 minute each, the total reading time would be 10 minutes.
“We measure every user interaction with every post. Most of this is done by periodically recording scroll positions. We pipe this data into our data warehouse, where offline processing aggregates the time spent reading (or our best guess of it): we infer when a reader started reading, when they paused, and when they stopped altogether. The methodology allows us to correct for periods of inactivity (such as having a post open in a different tab, walking the dog, or checking your phone).” (source)
The reason why this is more powerful than just pageviews is because it takes into account how engaged your readers are to give a more accurate representation of its visibility. You could have an article with 1,000 pageviews that has a greater TTR than one with 10,000 pageviews.
A related and simpler metric to acquire is the average time on page (available within Google Analytics). The average time spent on your webpage will give a general indication of how long your visitors are staying on the page. Combining this with ‘scroll depth’ (i.e. how far down the page has a visitor scrolled) will help paint a better picture of how ‘engaged’ your visitors are. You’ll be able to get the answer to the following:
“How much of this article are my visitors actually reading?”
“Is the length of my content putting visitors off?”
“Are my readers remaining on the page for a long time?”
Having the answers to these questions is really important when it comes to determining which types of content are resonating more with your visitors.
BuzzFeed’s “Social Lift” metric is a particularly good way of understanding the ‘virality’ of your content (you can see this when you publish a post to BuzzFeed). BuzzFeed calculates “Social Lift” as follows:
((Social Views)/(Seed Views)+1)
Social Views: Traffic that’s come from outside BuzzFeed; for example, referral traffic, email, social media, etc.
Seed Views: Owned traffic that’s come from within the BuzzFeed platform; e.g. from appearing in BuzzFeed’s newsfeed.
This is a great metric to use when you’re a platform publisher as it helps separate out traffic that’s coming from outside of the properties that you own, thus determining its "viral potential."
There are ways to use this kind of approach within your own content marketing campaigns (without being a huge publisher platform) to help get a better idea of its "viral potential."
One simple calculation can just involve the following:
((social shares)/(pageviews)+1)
This simple stat can be used to determine which content is likely to perform better on social media, and as a result it will enable you to prioritize certain content over others for paid social promotion. The higher the score, the higher its "viral potential." This is exactly what BuzzFeed does to understand which pieces of content they should put more weight behind from a very early stage.
You can even take this to the next level by replacing pageviews with TTR to get a more representative view of engagement to sharing behavior.
Alongside predicting "viral potential" and "TTR," you’ll want to know how your content is performing against your bottom line. For most businesses, that’s the main reason why they’re creating content.
This isn’t always easy and a lot of people get this wrong by looking for a silver bullet that doesn’t exist. Every sales process is different, but let’s look at the typical process that we have at HubSpot for our free CRM product:
This is a simple process, but it can still be tricky sometimes to get a dollar value on each piece of content we produce. To do this, you’ve got to understand what the value of a visitor is, and this is done by working backwards through the process.
The first question to answer is, “what’s the lifetime value (LTV) of an activated user?” In other words, “how much will this customer spend in their lifetime with us?”
For e-commerce businesses, you should be able to get this information by analyzing historical sales data to understand the average order value that someone makes and multiply that by the average number of orders an individual will make with you in their lifetime.
For the purposes of this example, let’s say each of our activated CRM users has an LTV of $100. It’s now time to work backwards from that figure (all the below figures are theoretical)…
Question 1: “What’s the conversion rate of new CRM activations from our email workflow(s)?”
Answer 1: “5%”
Question 2: “How many people download our gated offers after coming through to the blog content?”
Answer 2: “3%”
Knowing this would help me to start putting a monetary value against each visitor to the blog content, as well as each lead (someone that downloads a gated offer).
Let’s say we generate 500,000 visitors to our blog content each month. Using the average conversion rates from above, we’d convert 15,000 of those into email leads. From there we’d nurture 750 of them into activated CRM users. Multiply that by the LTV of a CRM user ($100) and we’ve got $75,000 (again, these figures are all just made up).
Using this final figure of $75,000, we could work backwards to understand the value of a single visitor to our blog content:
((75,000)/(500,000))
Single Visitor Value: $0.15
We can do the same for email leads using the following calculation:
(($75,000)/(15,000))
Individual Lead Value: $5.00
Knowing these figures will help you be able to determine the bottom-line value of each of your pieces of content, as well as calculating a rough return on investment (ROI) figure.
Let’s say one of the blog posts we’re creating to encourage CRM signups generated 500 new email leads; we’d see a $2,500 return. We could then go and evaluate the cost of producing that blog post (let’s say it takes 6 hours at $100 per hour – $600) to calculate a ROI figure of 316%.
ROI in its simplest form is calculated as:
(((($return)-($investment))/($investment))*100)
You don’t necessarily need to follow these figures religiously when it comes to content performance on a broader level, especially when you consider that some content just doesn’t have the primary goal of lead generation. That said, for the content that does have this goal, it makes sense to pay attention to this.
So far I’ve talked about two very different forms of measurement:
What you’ll want to avoid is actually thinking about these as isolated variables. Return on investment metrics (for example, lead conversion rate) are heavily influenced by engagement metrics, such as TTR.
The key is to understand exactly which engagement metrics have the greatest impact on your ROI. This way you can use engagement metrics to form the basis of your optimization tests in order to make the biggest impact on your bottom line.
Let’s take the following scenario that I faced within my own blog as an example…
The average length of the content across my website is around 5,000 words. Some of my content way surpasses 10,000 words in length, taking an estimated hour to read (my recent SEO tips guide is a perfect example of this). As a result, the bounce rate on my content is quite high, especially from mobile visitors.
Keeping people engaged within a 10,000-word article when they haven’t got a lot of time on their hands is a challenge. Needless to say, it makes it even more difficult to ensure my CTAs (aimed at newsletter subscriptions) stand out.
From some testing, I found that adding my CTAs closer to the top of my content was helping to improve conversion rates. The main issue I needed to tackle was how to keep people on the page for longer, even when they’re in a hurry.
To do this, I worked on the following solution: give visitors a concise summary of the blog post that takes under 30 seconds to read. Once they’ve read this, show them a CTA that will give them something to read in more detail in their own time.
All this involved was the addition of a "Summary" button at the top of my blog post that, when clicked, hides the content and displays a short summary with a custom CTA.
This has not only helped to reduce the number of people bouncing from my long-form content, but it also increased the number of subscribers generated from my content whilst improving user experience at the same time (which is pretty rare).
I’ve thought that more of you might find this quite a useful feature on your own websites, so I packaged it up as a free WordPress plugin that you can download here.
The above example is just one example of a way to impact the ROI of your content by improving engagement. My advice is to get a robust measurement process in place so that you’re able to first of all identify opportunities, and then go through with experiments to take advantage of the opportunity.
More than anything, I'd recommend that you take a step back and re-evaluate the way that you're measuring your content campaigns to see if what you're doing really aligns with the fundamental goals of your business. You can invest in endless tools that help you measure things better, but if core metrics that you're looking for are wrong, then this is all for nothing.
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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 in-depth articles, expanded text ads & search console emails appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Finally, after much feedback from webmasters, they can now unsubscribe and mute email notifications from the Google search console.
The post Google Search Console now let’s you unsubscribe from some email notifications appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Google seems to have fixed what appeared to be a bug with their search results interface, where they brought back the "in-depth articles" section for some queries.
The post Google brings back in-depth articles to search results after 17-day outage appeared first on Search Engine Land.
With right side text ads gone, Google is testing a new, longer look for text ads that can display across devices in any ad position.
The post In new test for Google text ads, headlines are expanded without sacrificing ad copy appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Think dynamic remarketing is only for retailers? Think again! Columnist Laura Collins explains how non-retailers can set up these campaigns and discusses the success her agency's clients have seen by utilizing this tactic.
The post Dynamic remarketing: not just for retailers anymore appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Do you make decisions based on metrics alone? Columnist Julie Joyce makes the case that this mindset can remove the critical human element from your marketing efforts.
The post Metrics blindness: Why it’s harming your link dev efforts appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Google is testing a minimalist version of the local box in the mobile search results. My best guess, it is a version for slower internet connections.
The post Google Testing A Slimmed Down Version Of The Local Box appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Posted by KelseyLibert
[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]
In a recent Whiteboard Friday about 10x content, Rand said to expect it to take 5 to 10 attempts before you’ll create a piece of content that’s a hit.
If you’ve been at the content marketing game for a while, you probably agree with Rand. Seasoned content marketers know you’re likely to see a percentage of content flops before you achieve a big win. Then, as you gain a sense for why some content fails and other content succeeds, you integrate what you’ve learned into your process. Gradually, you start batting fewer base hits and more home runs.
At Fractl, we regularly look back at campaign performance and refine our production and promotion processes based on what the data tells us. Are publishers rejecting a certain content format? Is there a connection between Domain Authority (DA) and the industry vertical we targeted? Do certain topics attract the most social shares? These are the types of questions we ask, and then we use the related data to create better content.
We recently dug through three years of content marketing campaigns and asked: What factors increase content’s ability to earn links? In this post, I’ll show you what we found.
We analyzed campaign data from a sample of 345 Fractl campaigns that launched between 2013 and 2016. To compare linking performance, we set benchmarks based on the industry averages for links per campaign from our content marketing agency survey: High success (more than 100 placements), moderate success (20–100 placements), and low success (fewer than 20 placements).
We looked at the relationship between the number of placements and the content’s topic, visual assets, and formatting. "Placement" refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. In terms of links, a placement could mean dofollow, cocitation, nofollow, or text attribution.
The chart below highlights the largest differences between our high- and low-success campaigns.
We found the following characteristics were present in content that earned the most links:
The data confirmed our assumptions about why some content is better than others at attracting links, as all four of the above characteristics were present in some of our biggest hits. As an example, our Women in Video Games campaign checked all four of those boxes.
It paired a highly emotional topic (body image issues) with a strong visual contrast. It also included a pop culture theme that appealed to a niche audience (video game fans) while also resonating with a broader audience. To date, this campaign has amassed nearly 900 placements, including links from high-authority sites such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, MTV, and Vice Motherboard.
Read on for more takeaways on how to increase your content’s link-earning potential.
Emotional impact was the greatest differentiator between our most successful campaigns and all other campaigns, with those that secured over 100 placements being 3 times more likely to feature a strong emotional hook than less successful campaigns.
Our Truth About Hotel Hygiene earned more than 700 placements thanks to a high "ick" factor, which gave it emotional resonance paired with universal interest (most people use hotels). We’ve also found including an element of surprise helps strengthen the content’s emotional impact. This study definitely surprised readers with a shocking finding: The nicest hotels had the most germs.
In our Perceptions of Perfection campaign, audiences were surprised to see drastically how designers altered a woman’s photo to fit their country’s standards of beauty. The surprise factor added an additional layer of emotionality to the already emotional topic of women’s body image issues, which helped this campaign get nearly 600 placements.
So we’ve proven emotionally provocative content can attract a lot of links, but what about high-quality links? We found a correlation between high average domain authority and content topics with mass appeal. Broad topics appeal to a greater range of publishers, thus increasing the number of relevant high-authority sites your content can be placed on.
Some verticals may have an advantage when it comes to link quality too. Campaigns for our travel, entertainment, and retail clients tend to have a high average domain authority per placement since these verticals naturally lend themselves to content ideas with mass appeal.
Some examples of campaign topics with a DA-per-placement average above 55:
Pro tip: A site’s influence matters more than the type of link you’ll acquire from it. Don’t fear nofollow links; for two of our best-performing campaigns of all time, the initial links were nofollows from high-authority sites. A nofollow link on a high-authority site can lead to syndication on hundreds of other sites that will give dofollow links.
Contrast was a recurring theme in our high-performing campaigns, with strong contrasts achieved through visual or numerical comparisons. More than half of our highest-performing campaigns centered around a ranking or comparison, compared to just a third of our lowest-performing campaigns. Pitting two or more things against one another fuels discussion around the content, which can lead to more placements.
Comparing Cortana was a hands-on study for which participants gave a command to their virtual assistant and rated their satisfaction with the response. Comparing the three most widely used smartphone assistants attracted the attention of techies (especially Apple fans) as well as the broader public, since most people have one of these assistants on their smartphone.
The Airport Rankings campaign looked at which airports offered the best and worst experiences, based on data including the volume of canceled flights, delays, and lost luggage. Local publishers loved this campaign; many focused on the story around how their regional airport fared in the rankings. Since most travelers have lived through at least one terrible airport experience, the content was extremely relatable too.
Pro tip: Side-by-side visualizations pack a high-contrast visual punch that helps drive linking and social shares. This type of contrasting imagery is extremely powerful visually since it’s easy to process. It helps evoke an immediate response that quickly engages viewers.
Did you notice a majority of the broad-topic campaigns with a high domain authority listed above also had a geographic angle? In addition to broad appeal, geography-focused topics help attract interest from international and regional publishers, thus securing additional links.
The Most Popular Concert Drugs, one of our most successful campaigns to date with nearly 1,900 placements, examined the connection between music festivals and drug mentions on Instagram. Many global sites featured the story for its worldwide festivals, including publishers in the U.K., France, Italy, Australia, and Brazil. Had we limited our selection to U.S. festivals, it’s doubtful this campaign would have attracted as much attention.
As with the example above, pairing a geographic angle with Instagram data proved to be a winning formula for the Most Instagrammed Locations campaign. We featured the most Instagrammed places in both the U.S. and Canada, which helped the campaign secure additional coverage from Canadian publishers.
Pro tip: To extend a campaign’s reach to the offline world, consider pitching relevant TV and radio stations with geo-themed content that offers new data; traditional news outlets seem to love these stories. We’ve had multiple geo-focused campaigns featured on national and local news stations simply because they saw the story getting covered by online media.
Our campaigns with more than 100 pickups were nearly twice as likely to incorporate a pop culture theme than our campaigns with fewer than 20 pickups. Content that ties in pop culture is primed for targeting a niche of dedicated fans who will want to share and discuss it like crazy, while it simultaneously resonates on a surface level for many people. Geek-culture themes, such as comic books and sci-fi movies, tend to attract a lot of attention thanks to rabid fan bases.
Trending pop culture phenomena are best for making your content feel relevant to the current zeitgeist (think: a Walking Dead theme that appeals to fans of the show while also playing up the current cultural obsession with zombies).
On the other hand, old school pop culture references are effective for creating strong feelings of nostalgia (think: everything in BuzzFeed’s ’90s category). If your audience falls within a certain age bracket, consider what would be nostalgic to them. What did they grow up with, and how can you weave this into your content?
Fictional Power Sources looked at which iconic weapons, vehicles, and superpowers featured in movies were the most powerful. Rather than focusing on one movie, we featured a handful of popular movies — including Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix — which increased it the campaign’s appeal to movie fans.
Sitcom Cribs looked at the affordability of the living spaces on various TV shows — could the “Friends” characters really afford their trendy Manhattan digs? By featuring a lot of older TV shows, this campaign had a high nostalgia factor for audiences familiar with classic ’90s sitcoms. Including newer TV shows kept the campaign relevant to younger audiences too.
Pro tip: To increase the appeal, feature a range of pop culture icons as opposed to just one, such as a list of movies, musicians, or TV shows. This adds to the range of pop culture fans who will connect with the content, rather than limiting the potential audience to one fan base.
Earning high-quality links is just one benefit of creating content that incorporates high emotionality, contrast, broad appeal, or pop culture references. We’ve also found these characteristics present in our campaigns that perform well in terms of social sharing.
In particular, emotional resonance is a key ingredient, not only for earning links but also for getting your content widely shared. Our campaigns that received more than 20,000 social shares were 8 times more likely to include a strong emotional hook than campaigns that received fewer than 1,000 shares.
How can you ensure these elements are incorporated into your content, thus increasing its linking and sharing potential? In a previous post, I walk through exactly how we create campaigns like the examples I shared above. Check it out for a step-by-step guide to creating engaging, highly shareable content.
What observations have you made about your most successful content? I'd love to hear your thoughts on which content elements attract the most links and shares.
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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 purple ads, Shopping ads & more appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Global Trade Item Numbers are an often overlooked aspect of Google Shopping ads. Columnist and Googler Matt Lawson explains why you need to take them seriously.
The post Five reasons why GTIN should be your new favorite Google Shopping acronym appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Consumers weave their way through more media and platforms than ever before to find local information, making marketing to them more complicated. Columnist Wesley Young recommends which marketing tasks can be DIY and which should be outsourced by local businesses.
The post The complicated local path to purchase: 7 marketing tasks to do yourself and 7 to outsource appeared first on Search Engine Land.
The ad label matches the advertiser's pin on the map.
The post Google testing purple “Ad” label in Maps appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Posted by Dr-Pete
[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]
Four years ago, just weeks before the first Penguin update, the MozCast project started collecting its first real data. Detecting and interpreting Google algorithm updates has been both a far more difficult and far more rewarding challenge than I ever expected, and I've learned a lot along the way, but there's one nagging question that I've never been able to answer with any satisfaction. Can we use past Google data to predict future updates?
Before any analysis, I've always been a fan of using my eyes. What does Google algorithm "weather" look like over a long time-period? Here's a full year of MozCast temperatures:
Most of us know by now that Google isn't a quiet machine that hums along until the occasional named update happens a few times a year. The algorithm is changing constantly and, even if it wasn't, the web is changing constantly around it. Finding the signal in the noise is hard enough, but what does any peak or valley in this graph tell you about when the next peak might arrive? Very little, at first glance.
Even before we dive into the data, there's a fundamental problem with trying to predict future algorithm updates. To understand it, let's look at a different problem — predicting real-world weather. Predicting the weather in the real world is incredibly difficult and takes a massive amount of data to do well, but we know that that weather follows a set of natural laws. Ultimately, no matter how complex the problem is, there is a chain of causality between today's weather and tomorrow's and a pattern in the chaos.
The Google algorithm is built by people, driven by human motivations and politics, and is only constrained by the rules of what's technologically possible. Granted, Google won't replace the entire SERP with a picture of a cheese sandwich tomorrow, but they can update the algorithm at any time, for any reason. There are no natural laws that link tomorrow's algorithm to today's. History can tell us about Google's motivations and we can make reasonable predictions about the algorithm's future, but those future algorithm updates are not necessarily bound to any pattern or schedule.
If we trust Google's public statements, we know that there are a lot of algorithm updates. The fact that only a handful get named is part of why we built MozCast in the first place. Back in 2011, Eric Schmidt testified before Congress, and his written testimony included the following data:
To give you a sense of the scale of the changes that Google considers, in 2010 we conducted 13,311 precision evaluations to see whether proposed algorithm changes improved the quality of its search results, 8,157 side-by-side experiments where it presented two sets of search results to a panel of human testers and had the evaluators rank which set of results was better, and 2,800 click evaluations to see how a small sample of real-life Google users responded to the change. Ultimately, the process resulted in 516 changes that were determined to be useful to users based on the data and, therefore, were made to Google's algorithm.
I've highlighted one phrase — "516 changes". At a time when we believed Google made maybe a dozen updates per year, Schmidt revealed that it was closer to 10X/week. Now, we don't know how Google defines "changes," and many of these changes were undoubtedly small, but it's clear that Google is constantly changing.
Google's How Search Works page reveals that, in 2012, they made 665 "improvements" or "launches" based on an incredible 118,812 precision evaluations. In August of 2014, Amit Singhal stated on Google+ that they had made "more than 890 improvements to Google Search last year alone." It's unclear whether that referred to the preceding 12 months or calendar year 2013.
We don't have a public number for the past couple of years, but it is incredibly unlikely that the rate of change has slowed. Google is making changes to search on the order of 2X/day.
Of course, anyone who has experience in software development realizes that Google didn't evenly divide 890 improvements over the year and release one every 9 hours and 51 minutes. That would be impractical for many reasons. It's very likely that releases are rolled out in chunks and are tied to some kind of internal process or schedule. That process or schedule may be irregular, but humans at Google have to approve, release, and audit every change.
In March of 2012, Google released a video of their weekly Search Quality meeting, which, at the time, they said occurred "almost every Thursday". This video and other statements since reveal a systematic process within Google by which updates are reviewed and approved. It doesn't take very advanced math to see that there are many more updates per year than there are weekly meetings.
Maybe we can't predict the exact date of the next update, but is there any regularity to the pattern at all? Admittedly, it's a bit hard to tell from the graph at the beginning of this post. Analyzing an irregular time series (where both the period between spikes and intensity of those spikes changes) takes some very hairy math, so I decided to start a little simpler.
I started by assuming that a regular pattern was present and looking for a way to remove some of the noise based on that assumption. The simplest analysis that yielded results involved taking a 3-day moving average and calculating the Mean Standard Error (MSE). In other words, for every temperature (each temperature is a single day), take the mean of that day and the day on either side of it (a 3-day window) and square the difference between that day's temperature and the 3-day mean. This exaggerates stand-alone peaks, and smooths some of the noisier sequences, resulting in the following graph:
This post was inspired in part by February 2016, which showed an unusually high signal-to-noise ratio. So, let's zoom in on just the last 90 days of the graph:
See peaks 2–6 (starting on January 21)? The space between them, respectively, is 6 days, 7 days, 7 days, and 8 days. Then, there's a 2-week gap to the next, smaller spike (March 3) and another 8 days to the one after that. While this is hardly proof of a clear regular pattern, it's hard to believe the weekly pacing is entirely a coincidence, given what we know about the algorithm update approval process.
This pattern is less clear in other months, and I'm not suggesting that a weekly update cycle is the whole picture. We know Google also does large data refreshes (including Penguin) and sometimes rolls updates out over multiple days (or even weeks). There's a similar, although noisier, pattern in April 2015 (the first part of the 12-month MSE graph). It's also interesting to note the activity levels around Christmas 2015:
Despite all of our conspiracy theories, there really did seem to be a 2015 Christmas lull in Google activity, lasting approximately 4 weeks, followed by a fairly large spike that may reflect some catch-up updates. Engineers go on vacation, too. Notice that that first January spike is followed by a roughly 2-week gap and then two 1-week gaps.
The most frequent day of the week for these spikes seems to be Wednesday, which is odd, if we believe there's some connection to Google's Thursday meetings. It's possible that these approximately weekly cycles are related to naturally occurring mid-week search patterns, although we'd generally expect less pronounced peaks if change were related to something like mid-week traffic spikes or news volume.
I've written at length about why I think algorithm updates still matter, but, tactically speaking, I don't believe we should try to plan our efforts around weekly updates. Many updates are very small and even some that are large on average may not effect our employer or clients.
I view the Google weather as a bit like the unemployment rate. It's interesting to know whether that rate is, say, 5% or 7%, but ultimately what matters to you is whether or not you have a job. Low or high unemployment is a useful economic indicator and may help you decide whether to risk finding a new job, but it doesn't determine your fate. Likewise, measuring the temperature of the algorithm can teach us something about the system as a whole, but the temperature on any given day doesn't decide your success or failure.
Ultimately, instead of trying to predict when an algorithm update will happen, we should focus on the motivations behind those updates and what they signal about Google's intent. We don't know exactly when the hammer will fall, but we can get out of the way in plenty of time if we're paying attention.
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Born in 1564, Shakespeare's work has shaped four centuries of literature.
The post William Shakespeare Google Doodle celebrates iconic writer & England’s St. George Day appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
The post SearchCap: An AdWords UI wishlist, Earth Day Google doodles & an IAB report appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Columnist Paul Shapiro shares his method for determining what pages on your site might be seen as authoritative by search engines, based on a metric he calls "Internal PageRank."
The post Improve internal linking for SEO: Calculate Internal PageRank appeared first on Search Engine Land.
With Google announcing a new AdWords user interface is in the works, Search Engine Land asked paid search marketers for their wish lists.
The post Psst, Google: Here’s what PPC marketers hope to see in the new AdWords UI appeared first on Search Engine Land.
As searchers become increasingly mobile, hyper-local searches are on the rise. Columnist Jason Decker believes that multi-location businesses stand to benefit the most.
The post Why “near me” is critically important for multi-location businesses appeared first on Search Engine Land.
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. Austin version of the Google bike: Source: Google+ Queen Elizabeth II Google Maps 90th birthday Pegman: […]
The post Search in Pics: The Queen Pegman, Google Austin bike & expense bag appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Created by doodler Sophia Diao, the series includes illustrations of the tundra, forest, grasslands, desert & coral reefs.
The post Earth Day Google doodles highlight planet’s 5 major biomes appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Posted by randfish
What have you been doing with branded searches? If the answer is "not much," it may be time to shift your focus a bit. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the huge benefits of turning some of your unbranded searches into branded and offers some key tactical advice.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about how to influence branded search and get a load of benefit out of that. Some of these things that I'm going to talk about today are more theoretical. Like we think they work. We've experimented. We've seen some other folks experiment. We're pretty sure. Then some of them are solid. We know that these things influence. Regardless, I think I can persuade you that trying to turn more of your unbranded search into branded search is a hugely positive thing. Generating more branded search in general is also hugely positive. Let me show you what I mean with some examples first.
Non-branded search, these are essentially the search terms, the queries and phrases that we are all pursuing. We're trying to rank for them. This is searchers who have not yet expressed a brand preference. They're searching. Let's say we're talking to a chemist or a lab instructor at a school and they're trying to put together all their materials for their lab. So they're searching for things like test tubes and lab equipment and chemical safety goggles. They're trying to figure out the best prices and the best products, the ones that'll be the safest, the ones that'll be best for their class. Those are unbranded. They have expressed no brand preference. They haven't said, "Oh I want this kind and I know that."
Branded searches are more like, "Oh I know I want a Fisher test tube, Fisher Scientific." Fisher test tubes is what I'm looking for, or lab equipment from Thermo. Thermo Scientific makes a bunch of lab equipment that you can buy prepackaged, kind of all together. Or chemical goggles, "I know I want the 3M variety." 3M has, like, these awesome chemical goggles. They're very safe, very good for this stuff.
These branded searches are preferable in many ways for the brands that own and control these companies than the non-branded searches. Here's why.
Obviously it is way, way easier to rank well for "3M chemical goggles" if you are 3M than ranking for just "chemical goggles" if you're 3M. You're competing against far fewer folks. A lot of people won't even use your brand name. Even the people who do, like maybe on Amazon.com, you'll still get some benefit from that because they're searching for your brand.
It also increases the propensity to convert, meaning that if someone performs that branded search, they're more likely to actually buy that product. They're generally speaking further down the funnel. They've sort of decided to at least investigate your brand, and now you have a chance to pitch them. They're familiar. They know your brand name at least. That's a real positive thing.
The second thing that's nice is you can affect search suggest, meaning that if lots of people, for example, started searching for "3M chemical goggles" instead of "chemical safety goggles" or "chemical goggles," it would actually be the case that over time what you'd see Google do is in the dropdown box for "chemical safety goggles," 3M, the word, would start to be associated with it. You'd see that in search suggest. It might be at the very bottom.
For example, if you do a search for "whiteboard," today in Google, Whiteboard Friday is somewhere on that list, but it's usually way down towards the bottom. In some geographies it's probably not there at all. Over time if we get more and more people searching for Whiteboard Friday, it'll move up in search suggest. So that means people will be more likely to perform that query. At least they'll see it and say, "Oh that must be a brand," or "I must have some association with that, or maybe I'm supposed to," or "I want to investigate that, I'm curious about it."
This is one of those speculative things. We believe that right now search volume for branded terms does have an impact on ranking for the non-branded version of the query.
We saw Google file some patents around this, but we also saw some tests in this direction that looked promising, basically saying that if . . . Let's do Fisher for this one. Let's say people start searching for Fisher test tubes a lot more. Google might say, "You know, I think Fisher is very relevant to the search query 'test tubes.' Let's move Fisher up in the rankings for just the unbranded phrase 'test tubes,' because that volume is suggesting to us that this brand is more relevant to this query than maybe we initially presumed." That's huge as well. If you can drive up that search volume, now you can start to get benefit in the non-branded rankings.
You can appear in the related search feature. Related searches is usually somewhere between the middle of the page and the very bottom of the page, most of the time at the very bottom of the search page. That's a powerful way for those 10% to 20% of people that scroll all the way to the bottom before making a click selection or before deciding to change their query, those related searches are a powerful way to suggest, just like search suggest is, that they should, instead of searching for the non-branded term, search for your branded query. The related searches, by the way, is also we think influenced by content, which I'll talk about in a second.
Create an entity-style association. This is essentially the idea of co-occurring keywords. If Google is crawling the web and they see tons of documents, high-quality, trustworthy documents that contain the word "test tubes" that also contain the word "3M," oftentimes in close proximity to the word "test tubes," they'll over time start to associate the word "test tubes" with the word "3M." That can impact suggest. It can impact related. It can impact rankings. It has a bunch of positive potential impact. That can make you more relevant for all sorts of things around search that are just awesome.
Then the last one, which is also cool and powerful, is that this can affect search personalization, meaning, for example, let's say someone does a search for "3M chemical goggles." They click on 3m.com. Maybe they buy them. Maybe they don't. Next time they do a search, for example let's say "chemical aprons," well it turns out that Google already knows that person has visited 3M in the past. They might see that behavior and, because they're logged into their account, they might show them 3M higher up in the rankings. They might show them 3M higher in the search suggest as they start typing. That personalization is another powerful way that you're getting benefit from branded search.
There are all these benefits. We want to make this happen. How do we do it?
It turns out SEOs, we're going to have to work pretty cross-departmentally in our marketing teams to be able to make this happen because some of the best tactics require things that SEO doesn't always own and control entirely. Sometimes you do, sometimes not.
You've seen more and more of this. You have seen advertisements probably on television and YouTube ads. You've seen branded ads on display ads. You've probably heard things on the radio that say search for us, all that kind of stuff. All that classic media, everything from billboards to radio — I know I'm drawing televisions with rabbit ears still. There are probably no TVs in the US that still have rabbit ears. Magazines, print, whatever, billboards, all of that brand advertising can drive people to then be curious about the brand and to want to investigate them more. If you hear a lot about 3M goggles and the cool stuff they're doing, well, you might be tempted to perform a search.
Be careful with this one. This can get spammy and manipulative and could get you into trouble. You can do it. If you do it in authentic white hat ways, you'll probably be okay.
The idea is basically telling customers like, "Hey, if you want to research us, learn more about 3M's goggles, don't just take our word for it. Search Google. Go find what people are saying, what reviews are saying about our product." You see I think it was LG or Samsung ran a big one of these where they were suggesting people do a Google search, because it turns out their phone had been very, very highly rated by all the top folks who'd done a review of them. You can do that in email. You could do it over social networks. You could do it in content. You're essentially driving people directly to the Google search result page. That could be an embedded link, or it simply could be a suggestion to search and check people out.
You can use events and sponsorship, all of that stuff to essentially drive latent interest and curiosity, kind of like we did with brand advertising but in a little more organic fashion. If The New York Times writes a piece about you, if you speak at a conference . . . This is me wildly gesticulating at a conference. It looks like I'm very dangerously, precariously perched to fall into the crowd there. Guest contributions on a website, maybe something like a Fortune.com, which takes some guest posts, driving people to want to learn more about the brand or the product that you've mentioned.
I put just web documents here, but really it's important, trustworthy web documents from sources that Google likes and trusts and indexes. That means looking at: Where are all the places potentially on the web that lab equipment is talked about or would be talked about maybe in the future? How do I influence those authors, those creators, those publications to potentially consider including my brand, Thermo Scientific, in their documents? Or how do I create content for places like these that include my brand and include the unbranded term "lab equipment?"
Bunch of tactics, bunch of great opportunities here. I'd love to hear from you folks about what you've done around influencing branded search and how you've seen it affect your SEO campaigns overall. I'll look forward to catching up with you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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