Google Performance Planner adds support for ineligible campaigns, secondary metrics, “Suggested changes” and specific time ranges

Google has added four new features to its Performance Planner forecasting tool, including options for previously ineligible campaigns, “suggested changes,” and more, the company announced Tuesday.

Previously ineligible campaigns can be forecasted using past performance. Image: Google.

Performance Planner’s new features. The updates include:

• The ability to add previously ineligible campaigns by using past performance or adding manual forecasts to plan across your entire account.
• The “Suggested changes” column, which displays budget and bid recommendations for a specific campaign.
• The ability to add secondary metrics to a performance plan, which may help advertisers understand impacts on performance beyond their most important metrics. “For example, if you create a plan to maximize conversions, you can now also add a column that shows the changes to clicks as well,” Dean Chen, product manager at Google Ads, wrote.
• The ability to select a specific time range for historical conversion rate. This enables advertisers to use a historical conversion rate that may be closer to what they’re expecting for their plan’s date range.

Why we care. These new features expand Performance Planner’s flexibility, making it potentially more useful for advertisers in more situations.

Now, advertisers can add campaigns that may have been previously ineligible, enabling them to generate forecasts for those campaigns. Suggested changes may help improve campaign efficiency and secondary metrics can help you anticipate the impact of changes on metrics that are important but aren’t your key metrics. And, being able to select a specific time range for historical conversion rate may help advertisers get more accurate predictions, which may be especially useful since the pandemic has shifted consumer behavior and introduced supply chain challenges.

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Google Merchant Center now shows relative visibility, page overlap rate and higher position rate metrics

Competitive visibility reports in Google Merchant Center are now available in open beta, Google has confirmed to Search Engine Land. The metrics within the reports include relative visibility, page overlap rate and higher position rate.

Tip of the hat to Gianpaolo Lorusso for bringing this to our attention.

A screenshot of the relative visibility report. Image: Gabriele Benedetti & Giusi Lombardi.

Why we care. Competitive visibility metrics can help merchants understand how often their competitors’ offers are shown compared to their offers, how frequently competitors’ offers are shown together with their offer on the same page and how often a competitor’s offer was placed in a higher position than their offer.

This data can help merchants get a more detailed view of their reach across Shopping ads and free listings (specifically or combined), who their competitors are and how visible their offers are compared to their competitors, which may help to identify aspects of their campaigns that they can improve for greater relative visibility.

The metrics. The competitive visibility report covers three metrics — relative visibility, page overlap rate and higher position rate. Here is how Google defined each of those metrics.

• Relative visibility: Relative visibility shows how often your competitors’ offers are shown compared to your offers. In other words, this is the number of displayed impressions of a competitor retailer divided by the number of your displayed impressions during a selected time range for a selected product category and country.
• Page overlap rate: Page overlap rate describes how frequently competing retailers’ offers are shown together with your offers on the same page. In other words, this shows the number of times in which you and a competing merchant received an impression for at least one displayed offer divided by the number of times in which you received an impression for at least one offer.
• Higher position rate: Higher position rate shows how often a competitor’s offer got placed in a higher position on the page than your offer. In other words, the number of times in which the competing merchant received an impression for at least one product in a higher position on the page than you, divided by the number of times in which you and a merchant appeared together on the same page.

How to access the competitive visibility report. The report is currently limited to offers that are eligible to generate traffic in the United States. After signing into their Merchant Center account, merchants can click Performance within the page menu. Next, select Competitive visibility.

The report includes two tabs. The first tab (“Your competitors”) displays the competitive visibility of pre-selected competitors, while the second tab (“Top merchants”) displays the aggregated competitive visibility of top-performing merchants. Both tabs can be filtered by product category, listing type and time range.

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YouTube’s experimental tool for creators simplifies keyword research and identifies content gaps

YouTube Search Insights is an experimental feature that shows creators search data such as the queries that led viewers to their videos or query data across YouTube’s entire audience. It can also identify content gaps (when viewers can’t find the exact content they’re looking for). Search Insights was announced on YouTube’s Creator Insider channel on Thursday, November 25, 2021; the company has not provided a timeline for the rollout.

The new features are spread across two tabs within YouTube Insights: “Your viewers’ searches” and “Searches across YouTube.”

Why we care. This experimental feature provides brands and creators with keyword data that can be used to hone in on their audience’s interests or gauge interest for any topic across YouTube’s entire user base. It also provides them with data on how important those keywords are to their overall view count. And, if it works well, the content gap feature may streamline workflows even further by simply highlighting content opportunities that YouTube has identified.

When YouTube Search Insights becomes widely available, brands and creators will be able to use it to improve their content planning to make more relevant videos for their audiences.

Your viewers’ searches. The “Your viewers’ searches” tab (shown below) displays the top searches from your viewers or from channels similar to yours. YouTube-wide search volume for the term is also available, although it is described generically as low, medium or high.

“Your viewers’ searches” within YouTube Insights. Image: Creator Insider.

And, creators can also see the number of views their channel received for a given query (this data is only available for the previous 28-day period).

Searches across YouTube. This tab goes beyond a channel’s own audience and allows creators to explore searches across YouTube’s entire audience. This data is searchable, so creators can, for example, type in “Chromebook” to view the most popular keywords viewers are using to find Chromebook-related content.

“Searches across YouTube” within YouTube Insights. Image: Creator Insider.

Similar to the Your viewers’ searches tab, search volume is described as high, medium or low and data for views your channel received from these terms is only available for the previous 28-day period.

Content gaps. “We’re also testing a new concept called content gaps,” Alina Verbenchuk of Creator Insider said, “A search becomes a content gap when viewers can’t find the information they were looking for.” Content gaps can include instances when users can’t find any results for a particular query or the content they found is low quality, she provided as examples. When applicable, content gap labels appear next to keywords (as shown above) and content gap filters will be available in both the Searches across YouTube and Your viewers’ searches tabs.

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Google November 2021 core update is finished rolling out

Google has confirmed that the November 2021 core update is now finished rolling out.

The announcement. “The November 2021 Core Update rollout is now complete,” Google wrote on the Google Search Central Twitter account.

The November 2021 Core Update rollout is now complete.

— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) November 30, 2021

November 2021 core update. As a reminder, the November 2021 core update started to roll out at about 11 a.m. ET on November 17, 2021. This update took 13 days to roll out after it was announced. So this update started on November 17, 2021 and lasted through November 30, 2021.

When and what was felt. Based on early data, this update seemed to roll out fast and in a significant manner for many queries the data providers track. We did see some “tremors,” shifts in volatility, after the initial update the day before and the day of Thanksgiving, as well as on November 30th, these are the final sets of

volatility you would see from the initial broad core update release.

More on the November 2021 core update

The SEO community. The November 2021 core update, like I said above, was felt fast and hard. Not just in terms of the ranking impact but the timing. I was able to cover the community reaction in one blog post on the Search Engine Roundtable. It includes some of the early chatter, ranking charts and social shares from some SEOs.

What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. There aren’t specific actions to take to recover, and in fact, a negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages. However, Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update. Google did say you can see a bit of recovery between core updates but the biggest change you would see would be after another core update.

Why we care. Whenever Google updates its search ranking algorithms, it means that your site can do better or worse in the search results. Knowing when Google makes these updates gives us something to point to in order to understand if it was something you changed on your website or something Google changed with its ranking algorithm.

If your site saw any changes between November 17 and November 30, it was likely related to the November core update.

More on Google updates

Other Google updates this year. This year we had a number of confirmed updates from Google and many that were not confirmed . In the most recent order, we had: The July 2021 core update, Google MUM rolled out in June for COVID names and was lightly expanded for some features in September (but MUM is unrelated to core updates). Then, the June 28 spam update, the June 23rd spam update, the Google page experience update, the Google predator algorithm update, the June 2021 core update, the July 2021 core update, the July link spam update, and the November spam update rounded ou the confirmed updates.

Previous core updates. The most recent previous core update was the July 2021 core update which was quick to roll out (kind of like this one) followed by the June 2021 core update and that update was slow to roll out but a big one. Then we had the December 2020 core update and the December update was very big, bigger than the May 2020 core update, and that update was also big and broad and took a couple of weeks to fully roll out. Before that was the January 2020 core update, we had some analysis on that update over here. The one prior to that was the September 2019 core update. That update felt weaker to many SEOs and webmasters, as many said it didn’t have as big of an impact as previous core updates. Google also released an update in November, but that one was specific to local rankings. You can read more about past Google updates over here.

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60,000 websites using Cloudflare turned on IndexNow

IndexNow has now been turned on by over 60,000 websites that use Cloudflare in less than two months after IndexNow was announced by Microsoft. IndexNow is an open protocol that any search engine can participate in to enable site owners to have their pages and content instantly indexed by the search engine. 

Microsoft and Cloudflare announced today that “more than 60,000 unique websites that have opted-in to Crawler Hints. Those zones have sent Bing about billion Hints for when specific assets on their websites have changed and need to be re-crawled.” I turned it on for the Search Engine Roundtable, my personal search blog, when it was announced.

How to turn it on. It literally is controlled by the flip of a switch in Cloudflare under the crawler hints section that you can access under the cache tab, then under the configuration section:

Microsoft said once this setting is enabled it, IndexNow “will begin sending hints to search engines about when they should crawl particular parts of your website.”

Google may adopt it. Google said recently that it too will test the IndexNow protocol for indexing. So while Microsoft Bing and Yandex are the only two who have fully adopted it, if Google adopts it, you can expect other search engines to as well.

Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing. Plus if you use Cloudflare, it can be turned on with the flip of a switch.

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5 steps to automate your SEO processes using simple programming tactics

“Everyone has annoying tasks in their job that you wish you could hire someone else to do, and at this point, you could automate it,” said Colt Sliva, SEO Engineer at iPullRank, in his presentation at SMX Next. “Additionally, you can be effective even when you’re not available.”

Many SEOs, however, lack the programming knowledge to set these systems up themselves, which is why automation tools are on the rise. Choosing one may seem daunting with so many automation resources, including no-code, low-code, and maximum-code options. But, as Sliva points out, there is always a tool available, no matter your technical literacy.

Selecting a marketing automation tool is just the first part of this process. Here are some actionable steps Sliva recommends marketers take to automate their SEO tasks.

Create a data storage space

Every marketer has their tool preferences, but Sliva recommends using Google Sheets and its macro scheduling when setting up SEO task automation. “What it will do is run a crawl in your site on a schedule and then write that straight into a single excel sheet,” he said, “You get a summarization of all the features of the crawl, and that data is saved in a sheet.”

Craft data visualizations

Whether you want to focus on missing HTML elements such as title tags, meta descriptions or H1 tags, or more technical components like orphan URLs or XML sitemap issues, creating visualizations can help marketers better analyze their data.

Sliva shared some helpful SEO data visuals from Dan Sharp of Screaming Frog, highlighting different ways marketers can display their automated crawl data.

Image: Dan Sharp and Colt Sliva

Develop a feedback loop

Once the data storage and visualization elements are in place, marketers will want to ensure their automation systems can detect significant crawling issues on a regular basis. SEO should use tools that highlight these problems.

Image: Colt Sliva

Sliva pointed to a significant indexability issue shown in his own automated report: “I can see that there’s been an issue in the past here with total internal non-indexable URLs, where the number of indexable URLs completely flip-flopped and most of the site was non-indexable. That is a clear problem that we would want a feedback loop for.”

Build SEO alerts

Automation systems that fail to notify SEOs of issues aren’t helpful, even if they can identify them properly. Sliva recommended using a script that pings specialists when a set number of issues arise — in his case, non-indexable URLs.

“It grabs the active spreadsheet of the current sheet and then it gets the range of data and grabs the last column and last row. So we have a complete section, and then it grabs the 11th column, which just happens to be the non-indexable column.”

Image: Colt Sliva

SEOs can use scripts of this sort to set automated alerts for a variety of issues, allowing team members to begin working on solutions as soon as problems arise.

Automate SEO processes with programming tools

Here are some additional tasks SEOs can automate with their chosen tools, according to Sliva.

• Automated segmentation;
• Internal link analysis; and
• SEO data extraction.

“There are endless automation opportunities,” he said. “And that is exciting once you start to track these patterns and these simple programming concepts to get this work done.”

Image: Colt Sliva

Sliva offered a caveat to automation implementation: “If you could spend 10 minutes doing the task manually and then you decide to spend 10 hours writing the code — and you don’t do that task very often — you probably don’t need to automate that task.”

But often, the advantages outweigh the costs. It all depends on your campaign goals and workload. “The benefits are speeding up your tasks, removing obstacles, and lightening your workload,” said Sliva.

“It’s just a fun problem to solve. If you enjoy solving problems, this is for you,” he added.

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

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Lost SEO traffic in 2021? Here are 3 potential reasons why (and how to recover your rankings heading into 2022)

Navigating Google updates, algorithm changes, and diagnosing specific causes of traffic loss can be challenging.  Throughout the past year, Google has been more aggressive, rolling out changes to their search algorithm, launching three Core Updates along with a variety of more narrowly focused improvements during the year.  Complicating things further, many of these updates overlapped or occurred within the same date range, making it more difficult to understand which update(s) may have caused traffic & ranking loss for webmasters.

If your SEO traffic is on the decline, let’s take a look at three potential reasons why and discuss how to reverse the trend heading in 2022.

1. Page Experience, Site Speed, and Core Web Vitals

The first phase of Google’s Page Experience Update had a three-month rollout this past summer, concluding in early September.  This update rewards secure & fast-loading pages on mobile devices which pass Core Web Vitals requirements as described by Google.  While the search impact thus far has been largely flat, we’ve seen numerous websites in competitive verticals lose mobile traffic throughout the update.  Further, Google has announced they are bringing this update to desktop search results in the first quarter of 2022, presenting an opportunity to improve existing site performance while staying ahead of future updates.  If you lost mobile SEO traffic in late summer and failed the new requirements, it may be worthwhile spending time improving your site’s Page Experience and Core Web Vitals metrics.

Not sure where to begin?  Google has recently updated their PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse tools which can help you better understand specific causes of slow site speed and pinpoint Core Web Vitals failures.  Search Console offers additional insight regarding your website’s performance, and WebPageTest.org can help developers get a deeper look at the situation.

It’s important to note this is largely a page-level update, so webmasters will need run diagnostics at the URL level.  For larger websites, this can present a significant time investment and may be why Google gave such advance notice of this update.  To help diagnose more quickly, begin by analyzing your website’s pages on a template or page-type level to uncover solutions that can likely be applied to all pages of that page type and template.

Taking things a step further, it may be worth utilizing cloud hosting services like AWS or Cloudflare for your website.  These solutions have built-in speed and security optimizations that can help your site load more quickly on desktop and mobile devices.  You may also choose to hire a professional who can make a complex technical project more approachable for you & your developers.

2. Being authentic and serving your users

The latest version of Google’s Search Quality Guidelines refines their guidance for content quality, especially pertaining to YMYL industries (finance, healthcare, e-commerce, and so on).  We’ve seen content quality consistently be a key indicator of how your website will perform throughout a Core Update, so it’s always a good idea to stay on top of Google’s recommended best practices and produce content that meets your users’ needs – especially as compared to your competitors.  If you lost SEO visibility during June, July, or November, a Core Algorithm update could be the reason, and it’s likely a lack of content quality or a poor user experience may be reasons why.

When analyzing your site’s content, it’s important to ask yourself:

• Is the content on your website authored by a topical expert, and are you proving this in your author profiles and bylines?  This is especially important in YMYL categories to convey E-A-T, although there are certain situations where it may not be needed.
• Are you removing bias and presenting both sides of a story?  The pros, cons, and alternatives of a product?  The differences between Option A and Option B?  In most situations, it’s important to paint a complete picture of the topic at hand to best serve your users and encourage Google to rank your content.
• Gone are the days of trying to meet a minimum word count to rank well.  Instead, put yourself in the users’ shoes and focus on intent – for example, a user searching for “Nike Sneakers” doesn’t need a 500-word history of the brand, rather a category page with size, color, and price filters to meet their needs.
• Are there excessive ad units on the page, especially ads above the fold, interstitials, popups, or overlays?  When possible, advertising should complement your content, not distract from it.
• Is your content easy to consume?  Comprehensive information is great, but formatting long paragraphs into lists, bullet points, tables, and so on can help users better digest what you have to say (and can help you capture SERP features in Google, too).
• Are media objects (videos, images) or references (external links to trusted citations) integrated within your content?  This isn’t always needed but can further help position you as a trusted authority and gain more SEO traffic.

3. Link spam & guest blog posts

Quality, relevant backlinks are still a strong indicator of how well a site will rank, and obtaining natural links remains one of the most challenging areas of SEO to get right.  Google has a long history of taking action against unnatural links, and we’ve seen the search engine continue to filter out links they believe violate their webmaster guidelines in 2021.

Google rolled out their latest “Link Spam” Update in July, which specifically targets links from guest blog posts, affiliate links, and links within sponsored content.  Why are they focusing on filtering links from these areas?  These link tactics scale incredibly well but are often low-value and low-effort.  They form easily detectable unnatural link patterns and pose a long-term risk.  This update reminds us of something we’ve seen over and over throughout the years: when a link-building approach becomes too popular, Google will eventually take action.  No surprise here, Google is algorithmically filtering out links fitting these criteria. 

If you experienced a drop in rankings during late July and know you may have these types of links in your backlink profile, it’s very likely some of those links which once helped you rank are no longer providing any value.  If you haven’t already, a backlink audit and disavow may be in order, but proceed with caution – even Google acknowledges you can do more damage disavowing links if you don’t know what to look for.  This includes relying on software to quickly identify “toxic” links; automated solutions are never a substitution for human review for such an important ranking factor.

So what can you do to replace lost link equity?  It’s important to keep in mind that natural link acquisition can be THE most effective part of your SEO strategy.  Earning natural links from trusted websites, industry publications, and media outlets will provide safe, effective, and long-lasting results.  Acquiring these types of links on a regular basis relies on the quality of your content and its audience, so the best approach marries your outreach strategy with your content plan and editorial calendar.

Wrapping things up

2021 has been a challenging year for many of us.  Losing traffic during this time has many potential causes but also presents opportunities to better focus your SEO efforts heading into 2022.  Taking a holistic approach to your SEO efforts across technical, content, links, speed, and UX factors will help put you in the best possible position to recover your rankings and reduce the risk of being negatively affected by a Google update moving forward. 

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20211130 SEL Brief

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Find your Google paid search path to success in 2022

Marketers spend billions of dollars in paid search deployed across tens of thousands of local campaigns. The challenge is dealing with all the complexity that creeps in while managing those campaigns across multiple locations alongside multiple affiliates, media partners, and agencies.

In this webinar, join Adthena and learn how to drive performance from your campaigns while reducing waste through ineffective local campaigns. And as a bonus, do it in less time with more confidence. You’ll hear about the challenges that Adthena customers have faced and the steps they took to forge ahead.

Register today for “2 Lights to Guide Your Google Paid Search Path to Success in 2022,” presented by Adthena.

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Cyber Week may be giving way to Cyber Month, according to Adobe

Online consumer spend in the U.S. came in at $5.1 billion on Thanksgiving Day, showing flat YoY growth, and Black Friday generated $8.9 billion, which is slightly less than the $9 billion it generated in 2020, according to Adobe. Thanksgiving weekend sales also failed to outperform last year’s figures, although consumer spend is expected to achieve 10% YoY growth for the overall shopping season.

Adobe’s data comes from analyzing direct consumer transactions online. Projections are based on an analysis of over one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categoriess.

Why we care. Cyber Week sales are struggling to meet last year’s levels, but that might be okay because, “With 21 days in November driving over $3 billion in spend, what we know as Cyber Week is starting to look more like Cyber Month,” said Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights. For reference, last November, only 8 days topped $3 billion by November 28, 2020.

Supply chain issues, labor shortages, new consumer behaviors and even a Google core update the week before Thanksgiving — many variables could be affecting how retailers performed this Cyber Week. Because of these factors, businesses may fall short of their Cyber Week goals. However, Adobe still expects the full season (November 1 to December 31) to reach $207 billion (10% YoY growth). With that in mind, it may be better to assess sales over a longer period, perhaps beginning at the start of November, to get a clearer picture of how your campaigns and promotions did this holiday season. This may also enable better YoY comparisons since customers seem to be shopping much earlier this year.

Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Actual Thanksgiving and Black Friday online consumer spend came in at the low end of Adobe’s predictions: Consumers spent $5.1 billion on Thanksgiving Day (the same as in 2020). On Black Friday, consumers spent $8.9 billion, which is actually less than in 2020, when consumers spent $9 billion.

For reference, Thanksgiving Day drove $4.2 billion in online spend just two years ago (2019). However, this is the first time Adobe has reported decreased spending on major shopping days since it first began reporting on e-commerce in 2012.

Thanksgiving weekend. Online sales slumped even harder over the weekend than they did during Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday: On Saturday, November 27, consumers spent $4.5 billion online, down 4.3% YoY. On Sunday, November 28, they spent $4.7 billion online, which was also down YoY but by a much narrower margin, 0.5%. 

On November 27 and 28, the prevalence of out-of-stock messages rose 16% compared to the prior weekend (November 20 and 21). Supply chain concerns may have contributed to inventory shortages, which could help explain the sales slowdown. But, it is also possible that customers adjusted their behavior to shop earlier to avoid potential inventory shortages or to take advantage of sales earlier in the season: Between November 1 and November 28, consumers spent $99.1 billion, up 13.6% YoY. And, this season, there have been 21 days exceeding $3 billion in online sales, compared to just 8 days that exceeded that amount by this time last year.

The Cyber Monday outlook. Inventory issues and new, earlier consumer shopping patterns are also impacting Adobe’s Cyber Monday projections: Consumers will spend between $10.2 billion and $11.3 billion on Cyber Monday, Adobe predicted. If actual sales meet those expectations, then Cyber Monday will likely be the biggest online shopping day of 2021, although it may retain that title without necessarily exceeding last year’s figure of $10.8 billion.

Cyber Monday discounts are also expected to be weaker than last year. Discount levels have fallen across several product categories, Adobe said: TVs are seeing discounts of -16% (compared to -19% in 2020), apparel is discounted at -15% (-20% last year), computers are at -14% (-28% last year) and appliances are at -8% (-20% last year).

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Google says it values all local reviews; both positive and negative

Google has updated its reviews help document page in the Google Business Profile support area to say that Google values all reviews, not just positive. Now Google says it is “more trustworthy” to see a mix of both positive and negative reviews on the business profile.

What is new. Google has added a bullet point to the document that reads “Value all reviews: Reviews are useful for potential customers when they’re honest and objective. Customers find a mix of positive and negative reviews more trustworthy. You can always respond to a review to show the customers that you care and provide additional context. If the review doesn’t follow our posting guidelines, you can request to remove it.”

Here is a screenshot:

Ranking impact? This will probably not impact rankings in any way but it might be a sign that if a business has 99% all positive reviews, maybe – just maybe – Google will flag that business and manually audit the reviews of that business. It is simply not natural for all customers to only leave positive reviews on a business online.

Why we care. If you manage local businesses and some of your customers feel anxious about having negative reviews on their business listing, then show them this new update to the Google help document. Maybe that will alleviate some of the anxiety around getting negative reviews?

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Google Merchant Center now automatically displays badge eligibility for products

Google Merchant Center is now automatically showing retailers when their products are eligible for badges, a Google spokesperson has confirmed to Search Engine Land. Available badges include, but are not limited to, the “sale price,” “price drop,” “amount off,” “percent off,” and “buy quantity, get percent off” badges.  

Tip of the hat to Kirk Williams, who first posted about this new feature.

Image: Kirk Williams.

Why we care

Badging isn’t new. However, the column showing which badge your products are appearing with is new and it can help merchants understand how potential customers are seeing their ads, without needing to manually figure it out for themselves. This can help retailers identify the types of promotions that are (or aren’t) working out for their business.

The latest shopping search news

• Google introduces new ‘Deals’ features for the Shopping tab and Merchant Center
• Google to enforce unique product identifiers on free merchant listings
• Microsoft Bing expands Shopping options for users, gives retailers more options to reach shoppers

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Tell us if you are planning to attend in-person events in 2022

Since the pandemic started we’ve been tracking how COVID-19 has affected the way marketers attend conferences and other business events through our Event Participation Index. And, as you’d expect, overall comfort with attending in-person events has grown since vaccines became available and activities like dining and movie-going have resumed.

But with the Delta variant wave having caused major spikes across the country, and the new Omicron variant sparking fresh concern, we thought it would be a good time to check in again about your attitudes toward in-person events. The data we gather helps organizers to better make plans and accommodations.

So, please answer this quick, 3-minute survey and tell us how you are feeling about attending conferences in the coming year. We will publish the results here in the next few weeks.

Click here to answer our survey.

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7 best link-building services for SEO performance

Building links isn’t easy and navigating the link-building landscape nowadays is complicated. Many agencies and platforms out there claim to do incredible work, but it’s hard to know who to trust.

Some services use white hat link-building tactics that search engines love, and others build low-quality links using unnatural tactics.

What is link building, and why is it important?

Link building is the process of actively seeking out backlinks from another website back to yours. 

Having high-quality links to your site is one of Google’s most important ranking factors. It’s a key trust signal for search engines and an indication that people like your content and your brand.

A number of ethical, white-hat link-building strategies can be used to accomplish this, including broken link building, guest posting, and outreach campaigns to show people your incredible content.

What is a link-building service?

A link-building service is a company or platform that will help you to accelerate the number of backlinks to your website.

While that sounds great, the problem is that genuine quality link-building services are hard to come by, with many providers simply ending up acquiring low-quality links through spammy strategies which Google doesn’t like.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best link-building services to consider helping you achieve improved SEO results in an ethical, white-hat manner.

The 7 best link-building services to help improve search rankings

1) Reputable link-building company

Recommended provider: LinkBuilder.io

Using a specialist link-building agency is the best overall option since they’ll use a number of different link-building strategies at their disposal to build high-quality backlinks to your website.

This option is best for those who want to outsource all of their link-building efforts entirely and depend on experts who will develop a custom link-building strategy for your website.

The quality of services out there varies greatly, and you’ll need to do your due diligence to make sure that any provider is the right fit for you.

Key considerations for hiring a link-building company:

Analysis – They should be doing detailed competitor analysis to figure out exactly how many links and what types of links other successful sites are building. This is something we place a huge emphasis on at LinkBuilder.io.

Bespoke link-building strategy – Make sure they’re proposing link-building tactics to build topically relevant links for your industry. Additionally, they should have a roadmap for how they’re going to structure a link-building campaign.

Pricing – Most agencies will offer a variety of link-building packages with different pricing tiers. If the price seems too good to be true versus other services, that could be a red flag that the quality of links isn’t good.

Samples – Always ask for link samples and link-building case studies. This is by far the best way to evaluate their quality of work to make sure they’re getting links from high-quality websites.

Size of the team – Often, large link-building companies see their quality decreases as the size of the team increases—the shift in mindset changes from focusing on high quality to focusing on scaling their own business.

2) Outreach platform

Recommended provider: Pitchbox or GroupHigh

Link-building outreach platforms will help you to find relevant bloggers & websites that you can email and connect with to try and earn a backlink. They are an essential game-changer for anyone serious about link building.

This service option is much more suitable for an in-house marketing professional who manages link building in-house. You’ll essentially have your own link-building CRM, which can save time on prospecting, emailing and chasing leads for link building.

3) HARO

Website: Helpareporter.com

“Help a Reporter” is a platform that connects journalists seeking expertise to sources who have expert knowledge in a given subject matter.

Active journalists use the platform to crowdsource insights from experts in any given field, and there are hundreds of requests every day from writers at huge sites like Shopify, Yahoo and American Express.

If you can answer their request and feature your opinion within their article, they’ll give you a source link back to your website.

It’s an incredible (and free) link-building service that can help you land some extremely high authority backlinks.

4) Citation building service

Recommended provider: SEOBuilder.com or BrightLocal

The fact is the vast majority of local businesses only have links from directories. Pull up the backlink profile of any local dentist or optician in your area, and you’ll notice that even websites ranking at the top of Google have a ton of directory links.

This tells us that citation links (also known as directory links) are an extremely natural type of link for local businesses. Given that most sites are ranking well with only this link type, it’s obvious that they are very effective.

If you’re a local business owner or agency owner whose clients are local businesses, I’d strongly recommend finding a good citation building service. Building out niche-relevant directory links is a real pain, and they’re going to make your life so much easier.

5) Facebook & Slack groups

Recommended Group: B2B Bloggers Boost Group

Social media & Slack provides an incredible opportunity for link building for those willing to spend the time.

There are a huge number of people out there creating amazing content for so many different brands and companies. What these groups do is leverage that into a link-building opportunity.

Here’s an example of how it works:

1. A group is established with vetted content writers. These may be people who work for an individual brand or freelancers who work with a number of companies.
2. A writer announces that she’s writing a blog post for an extremely well-known SaaS company all about marketing
3. She asks the group if they have any sources which might make a good fit for her article.
4. If she deems the sources to be worthy and genuinely beneficial for her readers, she’ll add the link
5. The person who she linked to now owes her a link in return

So basically, the currency in this system is links. However, because these are all vetted & talented writers, they’re only going to link to great content.

What you end up with is a self-moderated system where people share links to other great stories – It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

This caveat is that this particular type of link building works best in the B2B / SaaS space. If you were looking to build links to your website about pets, you’d be better off finding a group that various pet bloggers reside in.

6) Podcast booking service

Recommended provider: Podcast Bookers

There’s an ever-increasing number of podcasts in every industry imaginable, and the podcast hosts are always looking for great guests to interview.

This is an incredibly great way of combining brand & company awareness in addition to backlinks, since the host will always link back to your site.

If you were lucky enough to land a podcast with the likes of Tim Ferris (highly unlikely), then it could literally explode your business into the stratosphere.

The only downside is that it can be very time-consuming and mentally draining to do lots of podcast interviews unless you enjoy that kind of thing.

7) Digital PR

Recommended provider: Fractl

Digital PR involves taking high-quality content and sharing it with relevant journalists who might want to cover the story.

If you can find a digital PR company that’s able to create content that gets picked up by real journalists consistently, then you’re going to be rewarded with links from some super high authority news websites, which is the Holy grail of link building.

There has always been an interesting crossover between PR (public relations) and link building since both activities often seek the same end goal. The value of backlinks is something that is becoming increasingly prominent within the PR industry.

Link-building services to avoid

This wouldn’t be a comprehensive guide if we didn’t also discuss the link-building services you should outright avoid.

• Private Blog Networks (PBNs) – This is a black hat link-building technique that involves building a network of websites specifically created to link out to other websites. It’s a blatant attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. Most PBN providers will rent you links on sites that just are not going to stand the test of time.
• Web 2.0s – This is a very outdated link-building strategy that involves creating your own blog on blogging platform sites like Medium, Typepad and Weebly, with the idea that you can ‘piggyback’ off that domain authority. These are simply very ineffective, and most service providers will end up spamming a huge volume of links. Not good!
• Link Farms – These are large groups of domains often bought up by the same owner designed to fool novice link builders. On the surface, they appear to have good metrics like a high DA score and good organic traffic. However, once you look beneath the hood, we realize the website is ranking for spammy keywords and is only set up to sell links. 

Be careful investing in link building

We all want the best possible search engine rankings, and most SEOs understand the value of inbound links. That’s why it’s so important to be vigilant and careful when it comes to investing in link building, take the time to do your own research, and make sure you pick a service that will give you a positive ROI in the long run.

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20211129 SEL Brief

The post 20211129 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

November 29: The latest jobs in search marketing

PPC Strategist @ Portent (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $60-85k/yr
• Support the PPC Team Lead and other PPC team practitioners to help execute for clients on Google Ads, Bing Ads, and other major paid advertising platforms.
• Monitor and optimize client accounts, seeking out growth opportunities, assessing performance, and partnering with other Strategists and Senior Strategists to drive strategy and meet the client’s marketing goals.

Sr. SEO Specialist @ G2 (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70-90k/yr
• Drive the keyword strategy and content optimization on learn.g2.com.
• Support the SEO team in developing and executing big bets for G2’s marketplace.

Head of PPC @ Evoluted (UK remote)

• Salary: £40-50k/yr
• Develop and/or oversee client strategy development with paid media strategists and specialists.
• Lead, manage and inspire the paid media team to deliver exceptional work for Evoluted’s clients.

Senior SEO Specialist @ American Addiction Centers (San Diego, CA; remote option available)

• Pay: $60-95k/yr
• Work with content team to publish high quality, thoroughly researched, factually accurate and informative content that will encourage visitors to seek addiction treatment for themselves or their loved ones.
• On-site SEO projects and tasks, including fixing broken links, crawl errors, 301 redirects, and other on-site optimization efforts.

Want a chance to include your job listing in the Search Engine Land newsletter? Send along the details here.

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Google drops its mobile-first indexing deadline, leaves it open-ended

Google’s mobile-first indexing deadline is no longer a deadline and it decided to leave the “timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing,” John Mueller of Google said on the company blog. Previously, Google postponed the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021, and that deadline came and past.

No timeline. Now, Google said there is no specific timeline, instead Google said the search company “decided to leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing.” Google added currently Google does not “have a specific final date for the move to mobile-first indexing.”

Why no deadline. Google said the deadline has been removed because after “analyzing the sites that are not yet indexed mobile-first” the company “determined that some of these sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various, unexpected challenges that they’re facing.”

Google added that these “sites were facing unexpectedly difficult challenges and we wanted to accommodate their timelines.” Thus it was to be “thoughtful” of these sites and not move them over until they are ready.

Previously. Google in early March, before all the lock-downs began across most of the world, announced the deadline for all sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing would be September 2020. At that time, Google said, “To simplify, we’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.”  Then in July 2020, Google moved that deadline once again to March 2021.

Sites will move. Google said as these sites make changes that enable them to switch over to mobile-first indexing, it will “gradually to move those remaining sites over.” Google said that if a website is not verified in Google Search Console, then Google won’t be able to inform it of a pending switch to mobile-first indexing. You can learn more about this in their blog post.

Why we care. Chances are, most, if not all, of your sites and the sites you manage have been moved to mobile-first indexing. If not, this means you have more time to worry about it.

If your site is not ready for the switch, I’d be concerned there are other issues with the overall platform that you may need to upgrade before it becomes a larger issue outside of just mobile-first indexing.

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How marketers can adapt to Google’s local SEO changes

“COVID itself has changed the way that people interact with businesses online,” said Amanda Jordan, director of local search at LOCOMOTIVE Agency, in her session at SMX Next, “which means that search engines, businesses and marketers had to pivot to meet those demands and needs.”

The events of 2020 have changed how local businesses operate as well as Google’s search results. And, while these shifts are designed to make search easier for consumers, many businesses have been caught unawares, losing visibility on Google.

Image: Amanda Jordan.

Local marketers are at the forefront of these SERP updates, helping clients adapt to changes in features such as their Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and Google Maps. But, the differences in these updates are not lost on local marketing professionals.

“Google, as always, is changing the layout and testing new things, so that’s not surprising,” said Jordan. “The thing that I found most interesting were the changes to reviews and the knowledge panel.”

To help local SEOs navigate these developments, Jordan provided the following strategies.

Improve the quality of local reviews

“Google has grouped reviews together by topic,” said Jordan. “This is one of those updates that were mentioned in a timeline. You can see that there is a new badge for the new reviews.”

Google also seems to be reorganizing how it displays third-party reviews.

“Third-party reviews are going to continue to be important because those are being shown in the knowledge panel,” said Jordan. “They’re being shown in regular organic search results, so it’s important to know where you stand.”

Image: Amanda Jordan.

Review topics, sources, relevancy, and recency each play a major role in how the local algorithm ranks them. Marketers should know where their clients stand in terms of each of these factors and help facilitate the creation of quality reviews.

Edit your knowledge panels using on- and off-site sources

Google is revamping its local knowledge panel in major ways. It seems to be shaping into “its own entity, which includes lots of third-party data,” says Jordan. This means more of your clients’ panel information could be coming from sources you have no access to.

“While these things may seem out of our control, sometimes we can influence what Google uses,” Jordan said.

Here are some areas Jordan recommends marketers check if their panels contain inaccurate data from sources across the web:

On-site sources

• Schema
• Site content
• Robot directives
• Google Business Profile completion

Off-site sources

• Industry sites
• Third-party reviews
• Google reviews

Make corrections to your data sources and test your knowledge panel appearances when possible. Even if the corrections seem small, Google can still find the new information if the changes are made in one of these key areas.

Prepare to adapt to mobile SERP changes

Business information isn’t the only thing changing in this local landscape; mobile SERP layouts are transforming as well. While marketers know this happens, SERPs have begun transforming them frequently — and not always for the better.

Jordan highlighted an instance in which one of her clients’ local panels lost some important information: “We had a client that had their site links not showing up only on mobile only if you search from their city; anywhere else in the world everything was fine.”

Local SERP issues like these can seem complicated to fix, but marketers can use insights from competitor analysis to determine the best course of action. In Jordan’s case, her team worked on updating their client’s local panel so that it would include each element the competitor used.

It should be noted that Google often experiments with local results, which could result in temporary changes to how they display in the SERPs.

Moving forward with local SEO

“Google is going to continue focusing on online reputation and customer sentiment,” Jordan said, pointing to what she believed marketers should expect from local SERPs going forward. Getting clients onboard with these areas of focus can help future-proof their campaigns in the long run.

These changes to local SERPs, coupled with the rise in features focused on purchasing products and booking appointments, will require marketers to become more adaptable. But if Google provides actionable data along the way, businesses can rest assured they’ll be ready for what comes next.

“I would hope that Google’s insights for businesses get even better so that trends and user experience and customer experience show up in your panel,” said Jordan, “So that you’d be able to look at that data and make changes in your business.”

Watch the full SMX Next presentation here (registration required).

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20211124 SEL Brief

The post 20211124 SEL Brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google AdSense’s Matched content widget will only show ads starting on March 1, 2022

Beginning on March 1, 2022, Google AdSense’s Matched content widget will only show ads, the company announced Wednesday. To go along with the change, Google is also rebranding Matched content as “Multiplex ads.”

What’s changing. Launched in 2015 as a free recommendation service that enables sites to promote their own content, along with ads (which can be disabled), to visitors, the Matched content widget will continue to function that way until February 28, 2022.

An example of a Matched content widget. Image: Google.

“Due to decreasing usage of the content promotion service, and positive customer feedback and performance results from the ads-only Matched content ad format, we’ve decided to turn down the content promotion service and convert all existing Matched content units to only show ads,” Google said in the announcement, “This also applies to Matched content units that have the ‘Monetize with Ads’ option turned off.”

Fresh rebrand, new rules. To be eligible for Matched content, sites must contain a minimum number of unique pages and meet a traffic volume requirement. With the change and subsequent rebrand as Multiplex ads, these requirements will be lifted and the ad type will be available to all AdSense publishers.

After March 1, 2022, the Matched content page in the AdSense interface will be removed and the Matched content unit editor will be updated to show the new ads-only format.

Why we care. Sites that were using the Matched content widget to show users a mix of their own content and ads will, as of March 1, only be showing ads. This change will happen automatically, even if you have the “Monetize with Ads” option switched off.

If you don’t want the widget to only show ads, you should remove it before March 1.

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Google had a crawling issues that impacted some sites

Google’s John Mueller has confirmed that a bug prevented Google from crawling for the AMP cache between November 11, 2021 and November 17, 2021. The bug has since been resolved.

Google confirmed. “We saw that crawling for the AMP cache had slowed down for some sites,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “This bug has since been resolved, and an internal analysis showed it wasn’t widespread, and that there were no negative effects overall.”.

The issue. It seems the issue impacted only certain crawling of caches for some sites. “We saw that crawling for the caches had slowed down for some sites. This bug has since been resolved, and an internal analysis showed it wasn’t widespread, and that there were no negative effects overall,” Mueller said on Twitter.

Yes, we saw that crawling for the caches had slowed down for some sites. This bug has since been resolved, and an internal analysis showed it wasn't widespread, and that there were no negative effects overall.

— John (@JohnMu) November 23, 2021

First to notice. Olivier Papon from Seolyzer first spotted the issue and posted about it on Twitter, saying that he noticed Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, has essentially stopped crawling much of the web. He said it began on November 11 at 6PM (GMT) and then crawling went back to normal on November 17 at 8PM (GMT), he said in a follow-up tweet.

Here is the chart he shared showing the drop in crawl activity from Googlebot:

I personally did notice a number of sites show a decline in crawling in the Google Search Console crawl stats report but it seemed not to impact most of the sites I have verified access to in Search Console.

Why we care. If you noticed any issues with new pages being indexed or old but updated pages not reflecting those changes in Google Search, this may be why. Google seems to have resolved the bug and going forward, all should be fine. Google said this wasn’t widespread and “there were no negative effects overall.”

Hopefully, your business and website were not impacted by this bug but if it was, you probably have zero recourse.

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