Merkle: Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales from Google paid search up by double digits YoY

By most accounts, this year’s Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch was another record-setter for e-commerce sales. The search team at Merkle shared with us some early top-line stats on how a sample of the agency’s retail accounts fared over the weekend.

The sample includes Google AdWords data from 50 of the top 500 retailers in the US, along with some smaller retailers.

Sales from Google paid search campaigns rose year over year by double digits on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday:

• Black Friday sales from paid search were up 21 percent year over year.
• Cyber Monday Google paid search sales rose 16 percent year over year.

Shopping campaigns (product listing ads) continue to play an increasing role in driving sales from search. Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, sales from Google Shopping campaigns rose 54 percent above last year, far outpacing text ads, says Merkle.

During that same stretch, phone sales also rose by 28 percent over last year, accounting for 26 percent of all Google paid search sales. Mark Ballard, Merkle VP of research, said that share of phone sales “was in line with expectations, which were to see some share gains compared to earlier in the quarter and earlier this year.”

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Google Local Questions & Answers now rolling out to desktop search

Google shared that the local Question & Answer feature that rolled out back in August is now available on desktop search.

Google said they are “expanding Questions & Answers on Google My Business.” This enables both searchers and business owners to ask and answer questions from their desktop, on mobile search or on Android Google Maps.

We're expanding Questions & Answers on Google My Business. Now, users and merchants can ask and respond to questions from their desktop, on mobile search, or on Android Google Maps.

— Google My Business (@GoogleMyBiz) December 1, 2017

You can see the Q&A feature now on desktop for most local knowledge cards. For example, if you search for [google mountain view] you will see on the right side of the search page a local knowledge card for the main Google office. In that card is a section for “questions & answers” with the ability to click on the “ask a question” button.

Here is a screen shot:

When you click on the questions, it brings up an overlay to scroll through them all:

Google has been testing this on desktop for a few months, and now it is officially live. Although some local cards will not see these sections because of spam and moderation issues.

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8 simple ways to utilize a blog to improve SEO results

Seemingly every company has a blog these days. Unfortunately, very few organizations fully capitalize on their blog content to maximize SEO results. Here are eight simple ways a blog can improve your website’s organic visibility, traffic and results.

1. Create a compelling name for your blog

It irks me when I go to a company’s website and the name of the blog is… “Blog”! I urge marketers to be creative and more descriptive when naming the blog section of a website. Your blog name is also an optimization opportunity. Ask yourself these questions:

• What is the overarching theme of the blog?
• What would be a compelling description in my industry?
• Can I incorporate important SEO keywords in the blog’s title or name?
• Specifically, who am I trying to reach?

Coming up with a descriptive name and optimizing around a theme can lead to incremental organic traffic. For example, office supply retailer Staples has its “Staples Business Advantage blog,” which discusses topics ranging from office productivity to workplace safety. And Berghoff Brewery has its “Berghoff Beer Blog,” which covers topics from beer festivals to food pairings to seasonal beer reviews.

Remember, if you find it difficult to create a name for your blog that includes keywords you are trying to target, then try to at least include those keywords within the page title of the blog. For example, check out the page title for the RENTCafe blog:

2. Reach a specific audience with each post

I recommend that each blog post be written for a specific segment of your target audience. This allows marketers to create content that is optimized for specific customers and contains target keywords related to specific needs and solutions.

For example, if you sell marketing services, you might include a post in your blog about a hot topic in the industry (e.g., ABM marketing) that targets a particular audience you are trying to capture (e.g., B2B marketers).

3. Implement an effective URL structure

An effective URL naming convention is good for marketers and website visitors for several reasons:

It makes results reporting easy

I’ve noticed that some companies do not include “/blog/” in their URL syntax when keeping the blog on their main website domain. This can make it a little more difficult to track the overall progress of the blog within analytics. I recommend that you include /blog/ in your URL structure to improve the ease of blog results reporting.

You can ensure user-friendly URLs

When it comes to creating the URLs for each post, many marketers include every single word in the title of the post in the URL. This can lead to long, hard to read URLs. Tip: Try to make your blog URL descriptive but also short and relevant. Remember to leave out conjunctions such as “and,” “but” and “or” within your URLs. For example:

Longer, non-user-friendly URL:

http://ift.tt/2zHAE0J

Shorter, optimized URL:

http://ift.tt/2njql0T

4. Continually optimize blog content

Recycling is not just good for the environment; it’s also good for SEO!

SEO improvements do not always require new website content. Look for additional opportunities to optimize existing blog posts. Review current content and identify opportunities for additional on-page SEO. Here are some possible optimization techniques for existing blog content:

• Add internal links to other relevant pages on the website.
• Add optimized images (or optimize existing images).
• Link one post to another related post.
• Review title tags and meta descriptions to ensure targeted keywords are included.

Leveraging existing blog content can save precious time and resources.

5. Find & fill content gaps

Blogs can be a fast and easy way to create content specifically designed to fill SEO gaps.

Are there high-priority SEO phrases that you are struggling to rank for? Does your website lack content related to these words? If yes, these topics are great candidates for new blog posts.

6. Add optimized images & videos

Images help to create a positive experience and can increase visitor engagement. They also provide incremental SEO value. Remember to include images in your blog post and optimize them with descriptive alt tags (including high-priority keyword phrases where appropriate).

Lights, camera, action! Blog posts also provide a great home for video content. Review your YouTube page. Do you already have video content that could enhance a blog post? Videos keep users engaged and allow marketers to provide additional educational opportunities.

7. Mark it up

Let’s not forget about structured data markup. Structured data markup can be added to your HTML to provide information about a page, classify the page content, and in some cases improve the way your page is represented in SERPs.

I recommend that you include schema markup in your post to ensure that this content is fully optimized. Here is an example of how you can use JSON-LD structured data to mark up a blog post:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{ "@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "BlogPosting",
"headline": "Insert Blog Title Here",
"image": "Insert Blog Image URL Here",
"editor": "Insert Editor/Author Name Here",
"genre": "Theme/Blog Category Here",
"wordcount": "Insert Blog Post Word Count Here",
"publisher":
{
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "Insert Company Name Here",
"logo": "Insert Company Logo Image URL Here"
},
"url": "Insert Blog Post URL Here",
"datePublished": "YYYY-MM-DD",
"dateCreated": "YYYY-MM-DD",
"dateModified": "YYYY-MM-DD",
"description": "Insert short description of blog post. Try to keep it around 150-156 characters",
"articleBody": "Insert entire blog post here",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Insert Author Name"
}
}
</script>

8. Capitalize on social media sharing

There are a lot of benefits to sharing blog posts on social media:

1. It keeps your social media sites current and relevant.
2. It helps keep your audience engaged.
3. Because social signals are included in the ranking algorithm, it improves SEO results.
4. Social links help to increase referral traffic.

I recommend that you always share the blog post on social channels. Try to share a couple sentences describing a brief summary of the post or an excerpt from the post. Remember to include keywords you are targeting within the social media posting as these social signals can help with rankings.

Summary

Make sure that you are fully realizing the potential SEO benefits of your blog. Create a compelling blog name; create optimized content for specific audiences; optimize your blog URLs; add images and videos; implement schema; and share blog content via social channels.

Remember, a blog is one of the fastest and easiest ways to implement or enhance website content and improve SEO results.

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Four brand-building activities that lay the foundation for SEO

At Google’s inception, one innovation differentiated it as a search engine: It used information gained from off-site sources to inform its estimation of the relevance, importance and quality of pages in its index. Originally, this source of off-site information was the network of links found by crawling the web.

Nearly two decades later, in 2017, with countless other rich data sources at its disposal, Google uses a more diverse and sophisticated set of data to determine just how big a deal you really are in the marketplace. In my experience over the past 10 years working in SEO, Google has always been pretty good at making this determination, and the signals have become harder and harder to fake over time.

At this point, the most efficient and sustainable path to making your company look like it is a significant player in the marketplace is to become a significant player in the marketplace. What does that mean for SEO folks? It means it’s time to stop thinking about how to build links and instead focus on how to build your brand online.

Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive — but if you’re doing any kind of activity with link-building as a primary objective, I would be skeptical of that activity if you don’t believe it also has the ability to boost the strength of your brand in some way, independent of the SEO impact of the links you’re getting.

With that in mind, I present the four major pillars of digital brand growth. If you can achieve wins in each of these four areas, you will be making rapid progress toward the kind of brand growth that creates positive SEO signals, while boosting the perception of your brand in the hearts and minds of your prospective audience:

1. Improving the product

Have you done user testing on your website? Have you watched people try to perform a specific action on all devices and media available? Have you tested all the major elements of the conversion funnel? Do you know how well people like using your website versus your biggest competitor’s? Do your pages load in under two seconds?

Not many companies can answer “yes” to all these questions. Testing needs to be a standard part of the development process. The more you believe you don’t have time or resources to test, the more badly you probably need it — especially if your site architecture is a mishmash of “urgent” mandates from upper management. The bottom line is that if your site design is based on hunches and intuition, your success is being left to chance.

Make time to test, improve and repeat. If you make a fast site that people love using, your chances of success go way up.

2. Creating valuable resources

What topic can you make your site the best resource for? Ideally, it would be something that is unique in some way and at least somewhat challenging for others to replicate. Here are some starter ideas:

• A tool/calculator/selection guide that solves a common problem.
• A searchable archive of a unique data source you have access to.
• An educational resource that makes a complex topic easy to understand.
• An interview with an expert or influencer in your field.
• A tutorial that teaches people how to do something for themselves.

The more evergreen staying power your resource has, the more it can pay dividends for years to come!

3. Increasing repeat visitors

If I had to identify one defining characteristic of successful online brands, it would be the ability to convert first-time visitors into repeat users. If you have that, then you can build a brand. Without repeat visitors, you may be able to find a niche that produces positive ROI, but you can forget about being an online powerhouse.

Some ideas for encouraging repeat visitors include:

• Giving people really good reasons (value) to sign up for regular emails from you.
• Offering a loyalty plan or discounts for repeat customers.
• Personalization/being able to give good recommendations.
• Building on-site community features where users can interact with you and each other.
• Finding ways to reward especially active members of the community.
• Adding high-value content on a regular basis and creating channels where people can be notified when new offerings are available.

The bottom line is, you need to find a way to create value on an ongoing basis — and make sure people know about it.

4. Being newsworthy

I’ve never heard anyone claim that you should have low-level employees write half-hearted blogs and then post them to your social media in order to build your brand. Yet that might be the most common content marketing “plan” being used today. There’s too much content out there to waste time creating stuff you don’t care about. And if you don’t care about it, why on earth should anyone else?

Start your thought process with “What can we do that would be truly valuable and remarkable?” instead of “How can we get some links?” You just might get a different result — including more and better links.

It’s okay and often even helpful to be controversial, but if you do so without a purpose that is in alignment with your brand and core audience, the attention you get may not be worth what you end up paying for it.

Here are some positive ways of being newsworthy:

• Solve a challenge no one else has been able to solve.
• Run an original study that brings real insight to a common question in your field.
• Create something that inspires strong emotion in people.
• Create something that is massively funny or entertaining. (Be careful here, as you want to make sure that this still adds value to your brand.)
• Create something that shatters people’s expectations — surprise them in a good way.
• Make a significant contribution to your community.
• Create a valuable resource (see section 2) that has mass appeal.

The stronger the alignment between your brand and your newsworthy activities, the more it will benefit you.

Final thoughts

If you continuously improve your site, create valuable resources, get people to come back and do newsworthy things, your online brand will grow and thrive. It’s easy to say, but not as easy to do.

Being mediocre is easy. Being outstanding requires planned action, disciplined follow-through and the willingness to test and try different things until you get it right.

Am I saying SEO is dead? No! Structuring your campaigns for maximum SEO impact is still a hugely important part of the campaign planning process and can dramatically improve the results you get. Organic search is a major traffic channel, and it needs to have people who are looking out for it. That’s not going to change. But if you’re going to be a market leader in 2017, SEO has to be the cart and not the horse. Your brand is the horse, and the stronger it gets, the bigger you can build your cart.

The post Four brand-building activities that lay the foundation for SEO appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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Google brings local lead generation to Google Assistant and Google Home

Google is bringing new forms of local search to the Google Assistant and Google Home. The company announced it’s working with local home service providers “like HomeAdvisor and Porch.”

On any platform where Google Assistant is available, users will be able to ask for contractors (e.g., “Ok Google find me a plumber”). That initiates a structured interaction which generates a lead or contact with a local service provider.

In the case of IAC-owned HomeAdvisor, which now also owns Angie’s List, users can ask to be connected by phone at the end of the process to a contractor or receive a list of relevant, pre-screened contractors. The following graphic depicts part of the user experience and the structured Q&A that’s used to refine the lead.

This is a highly structured local search and lead-generation experience that will bypass conventional search results (i.e., business listings). Google said the new functionality would be rolling out in the next week or so.

Google itself offers local lead generation for contractors and service providers with Local Services ads that appear in search results. What’s unclear is how providers from HomeAdvisor, Porch (and perhaps Google) will be prioritized or presented for a given query.

In its blog post, Google didn’t say anything about its own advertisers or how many third-party directories might eventually be involved. There’s also no word on whether Google will collect a share of the lead price or any sort of “toll” otherwise.

Currently, if you ask Google Home for a local service provider (e.g., “I need a house painter”) you’ll get three “thin” listings with address information but little else. The coming experience will supplant that, offering a more personalized result based the specific request and subsequent information provided.

Because it’s not yet live, we don’t know how well it will work. It has the potential to be effective both for the consumer and the contractor. Generally speaking, this is going to be bottom-of-the-funnel activity.

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Google facing $1 billion in potential liability with UK class action

In 2012, Google paid $22.5 million to settle an FTC claim that the company “misrepresented to users of Apple Inc.’s Safari Internet browser that it would not place tracking cookies or serve targeted ads to those users . . .” The company bypassed Safari’s cookie-blocking settings, it said, to deliver a “signed-in” user experience.

Google explained that it “used known Safari functionality to provide features that signed-in Google users had enabled,” adding that “advertising cookies do not collect personal information.” Critics took a more skeptical view.

This same conduct is now the subject of a class action lawsuit in the UK. The potential UK class includes 5.4 million people who owned iPhones between June 2011 and February 2012. Google’s hypothetical liability in the matter could exceed $1 billion — considerably higher than the settlement in the US action.

The UK lawsuit is being framed as a privacy case about the “misuse of personal data.” Google says that it believes the suit is meritless and will contest it.

The group pursuing the case is called “Google You Owe Us.” On the group’s website it makes the following statements about the case, called a “representative action” in the UK:

We believe that Google took millions of iPhone users’ personal information illegally in 2011 and 2012. Google did this by bypassing default privacy settings on the iPhone’s Safari browser . . .

We want to ensure that big companies like Google respect our privacy in the future. Our personal information is valuable and it must be used it in a way that is trustworthy and fair.

This case can be seen in the broader context of European privacy complaints against US internet companies. Google and Facebook specifically have been the subject of numerous complaints in different countries.

Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation is coming in May, which will create strict new privacy rules and significant potential liability (millions of euros) for companies that fail to comply or violate its provisions.

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Search in Pics: Light bulb cups, Google brain fixtures & crazy hat day

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.

Google drinks from light bulb cups:

Source: Instagram

Front of the Google Chicago rooftop subway car:

Source: Twitter

Crazy hat day at Google:

Source: Instagram

Google Brain light fixtures:

Source: Instagram

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