Messy SEO is a column covering the nitty-gritty, unpolished tasks involved in the auditing, planning, and optimization of websites, using MarTech’s new domain as a case study.

Hello marketers,

This installment for “Messy SEO” details my process of rectifying the broken link and image issues that arose following the MarTech website consolidation. In Part 2 we discussed fixes for incorrect canonicalization, which aimed to future-proof our site for proper indexation.

You can read Part 2 of our Messy SEO series here.

Anyone who’s worked with website moves and merges knows redirecting the old pages to the new domain is just part of the story. Consolidating duplicate pages, fixing canonical tags, and optimizing page indexation are foundational steps that make search engines happy. But an equally important stage in any SEO project is user experience optimization.

SEO is incomplete without good UX

Regardless of how well Google and other search engines crawl your website, few people will interact with your brand if they have a poor experience. Broken and non-HTTPS links discourage many from trusting what your page has to offer. People want relevant links and engaging images in their content, not outdated links no longer working.

Link issues were everywhere after the MarTech site consolidation. Whether they were broken or non-secure, many of the newly consolidated pages suffered from choppy pages filled with blank boxes and links leading nowhere.

Fixing broken links

Virtually all of these instances had nothing to do with negligence; they were largely the result of old domain URLs on the site. The link issues we chose to tackle first were those that were completely broken, undoubtedly leaving visitors wondering why they were included within the article at all.

Many of these were simply outdated links to external sites that either completely removed their content or neglected to redirect it to someplace else. Finding the lost page was relatively easy after combing through their sites.

The most obvious broken links, and those which have the most obvious impact on user experience, were those housing images that were no longer available.

Replacing images that no longer exist

Search marketers run into this messy problem most often during migrations. If the old site domain isn’t set to redirect every image file to its new URL, the new site will fail to pull the old, non-existent content.

Needless to say, visitors will have little interest in pages full of blank boxes. The question is, how do SEOs replace these missing pieces?

The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine

In scenarios such as this, some marketers opt to view cached images from their old domain in the search results. The problem is that search engines such as Google only store cached images for a limited amount of time. And this is only helpful if your domain URLs are still indexed post-migration.

We’ve found the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to be the most extensive and reliable source of images no longer published online. We used its archive of pages from the old MarTech Today and Marketing Land sites to find the corresponding missing images from MarTech’s domain.

This process may seem pretty straightforward; after all, most experienced SEOs are aware of Wayback and its functions. But simple mistakes—no matter how small they seem—can land marketers right back at square one.

Restoring images with cached images the right way

It may be tempting to save time in this process by copying the cached images and pasting them into the pages in question. But there are many problems with this method. For instance, the image’s source will lie on another site. This takes away all control from the webmaster; there’s no guarantee that the image will stay on Wayback forever.

In addition, a cached image on your site takes away your chance to rank for your own site’s images. And in the visual-driven search landscape, you want to take advantage of every opportunity to improve image rankings.

To address this potential issue, we downloaded the applicable images from the cached MarTech Today and Marketing Land pages and uploaded them to MarTech. This process allowed us to replace the broken images with the restored versions on our new domain.

Though tedious at times, we found this solution to be a much better alternative than leaving visitors to comb through a sea of broken images and links.

Wrapping up

That’s it for the third installment of “Messy SEO.” We’ll continue to go through the steps taken toward cleaning up the issues that arose post-site consolidation and migration.

Have you had issues tracking down pages or images from an earlier version of a site? Did find any hiccups using the Wayback Machine? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia.com with the subject line Messy SEO Part 3 to let me know.

The post Messy SEO Part 3: How to find cached images and improve user experience appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Santa Ana, October 14, 2021 – LenderHomePage proudly announced today that they are the recipient of two honors in the mortgage industry, MPA Magazine’s “Top Mortgage Employers 2021” and the “Housing Industry Icon in Mortgage Technology”, awarded to Rocky Foroutan, CEO and Founder of LenderHomePage. Already surpassing last year’s milestones, LenderHomePage attributes these significant achievements and their exceptional growth to key personnel appointments, collaborative performance, and creating an impactful work culture.

“These awards are testament to something bigger than outpacing our competitors or surpassing revenue goals – it’s proof of our remarkable team at LenderHomePage, whose collective expertise and commitment raise the bar in the digital mortgage space,” Foroutan asserts. 

The Top Mortgage Employer award comes on the heels of a 34% percent increase in employee headcount for LenderHomePage, signifying rapid growth, high employee retention, and exceptional employee satisfaction rates. 

Employee satisfaction, particularly work culture and management relationships, is a strong predictor of a company’s growth. 

A study first published in 2015 in Personnel Review looked at 475 firms to analyze the relationship between performance and employee perception of their work and the company. The data revealed a clear correlation between employee satisfaction and increased organizational performance in both the company’s operating margin and revenue per employee.  

A leader’s ability to make strategic hirings is also crucial. In 2021, Foroutan bolstered its leadership team by adding Brandon Salisbury as the new Director of Sales & Marketing and transitioning Bryan Skitt to Chief Creative Officer. LenderHomePage also expanded its sales and development departments with new hires and promotions.

Equally critical to an organization is its leadership. A wealth of literature exists underscoring the role that leadership plays in the company’s growth, revenue, and overall success. A leader’s aptness to innovate, cultivate a collaborative work dynamic, and motivate the organization to achieve goals are strong predictors of success.

Foroutan’s MPA Housing Industry Icon award, a peer-nominated recognition awarded to exceptional mortgage executives with at least ten years of experience, comes as he has led the mortgage technology company to another 40% year-over-year growth. “Our philosophy has always been to make our software simple and easy to use,” says Foroutan. “but the real secret to our continued success is our preeminent team. Putting the right people in the right seats – and giving them reign to blow it out of the park – you can’t lose.”

Since 2003, LenderHomePage has been a market leader in innovative mortgage technology development. They are the designer of highly acclaimed mortgage software products, including Loanzify POS and Loanzify Mortgage Mobile App, enabling mortgage companies of all sizes to create better operations efficiencies and deliver an omnichannel experience for their consumers.

About LenderHomePage:

Since 2003, LenderHomePage.com is the leading provider of a secure and compliant cloud-based digital mortgage platform that powers lender websites, mobile apps, and mortgage POS solutions. Mortgage lenders of all sizes use LenderHomePage.com’s customizable and scalable solutions to enhance borrower experience, streamline the mortgage process, and increase Loan Officer productivity and efficiency.

About Loanzify:

Loanzify POS by LenderHomePage is part of a suite of innovative productivity solutions developed for the modern mortgage professional.

About MPA:

Mortgage Professional America (MPA) is the mortgage & finance industry’s most trusted source of news, opinion, and analysis.

Google’s mobile search results now offer infinite scroll, what Google is calling continuous scroll. So as you scroll, Google will not show you the “more results” button when you reach the bottom of the page, instead, Google will just load the next page of results automatically.

Google said “with this update, people can now seamlessly do this, browsing through many different results, before needing to click the “See more” button.”

Google added that while “you can often find what you’re looking for in first few results, sometimes you want to keep looking.” And for those searchers who want to keep on looking, you will be able to continuously scroll “up to four pages of search results” without clicking to load more.

What it looks like. Here is a GIF of it in action:

When can I see it? Google has been testing this for some time, in fact, I’ve seen it myself over the past couple of weeks. Google did say it will “gradually roll out today for most English searches on mobile in the U.S.”

But Google also tested it earlier this year, and then again in 2019, 2015, 2011 and more.

In 2018, Google took a step closer to infinite scroll with launching the more results button.

Why we care. This may (or may not) encourage searchers to look beyond the first few results and scroll more through more results. It is yet to be determined how this might impact your click-through rates and traffic from Google search but keep an eye on it.

The post Google rolling out continuous scroll on mobile appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, can you imagine a search engine without a results page?

That’s what Neeva, the ad-free, private search engine, introduced yesterday — a feature called FastTap Search that enables users to bypass the results page via a list of direct links that are generated when the user puts a query into the URL bar or the Neeva app (learn more about the feature below).

It is very interesting to see what kind of features are possible when a search engine isn’t reliant on ad revenue. Neeva is supported by its subscribers, meaning that the company has no skin in the game when it comes to whether users spend time on their properties or head directly to another site.

Of course, Neeva is not on the same plane as Google, but neither is its strategy.  Google has a similar feature (the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that takes users straight to the top result for their query), but appears to be moving towards more robust results pages. In fact, its MUM-related announcements from Search On in September gave us a preview of results pages that lead to even more search results, with featured snippets that may resolve queries without users having to click through to another site.

Will Neeva’s new feature change the way we optimize for search? Unlikely, but I’m hoping this spurs even more innovation among search engines. That kind of competition is important because it often provides marketers with more opportunities, like the free product listings Google introduced last year (and Bing also launched shortly after), which help it compete against e-commerce platforms like Amazon.

George Nguyen,
Editor

Neeva’s ‘FastTap Search’ feature presents direct links instead of a results page

Neeva is launching a feature that enables searchers to type queries directly into the URL field of their browser or the Neeva app to be shown a drop-down menu with direct links. Dubbed “FastTap Search,” the feature allows users to bypass traditional search results pages and head directly to a site via the list of links generated based on the query. As Neeva’s founder and former SVP of ads at Google, Sridhar Ramaswamy, said in the announcement, this type of feature is made possible by the search engine’s unique business model, in which users pay $4.95 per month for an ad-free, customizable search experience.

Why we care. This feature may take on more significance if Neeva is able to increase its share of the search market or if Neeva is popular with your particular audience. While this is a reimagining of the search results page, it is still a list of results and there is still a top position, which means algorithms have to determine relevance and award that position to a page, just as they do on other search engines. However, since FastTap Search only presents a few results, the brands or publishers that are able to earn that top spot stand to gain significant visibility, which can be important if you operate in a highly competitive sector.

Read more here.

Facebook changes how it measures users for advertising purposes; Instagram introduces notifications for outages and a new Account Status tool

Facebook changes how it measures accounts for advertisers. “If someone does not have their Facebook and Instagram accounts linked in Accounts Center, we will consider those accounts as separate people for ads planning and measurement,” Facebook announced Monday, adding, “Facebook and Instagram accounts that are connected in Accounts Center will continue to be counted collectively as a single person.”

Previously, if someone used the same email address for both their Facebook and Instagram accounts or accessed both platforms using the same device, the company counted them as one person when they interacted with ads. As this new methodology rolls out over the next few weeks, advertisers should expect increases in pre-campaign estimates such as estimated audience size, “but for most campaigns we do not believe this will have a substantial impact on reported campaign reach,” Facebook said.

Instagram launches notifications for outages and a new Account Status tool. Instagram is testing Activity Feed notifications to inform users when the platform experiences outages (like the one from last week), technical issues and when those issues are resolved. “We won’t send a notification every single time there is an outage, but when we see that people are confused and looking for answers, we’ll determine if something like this could help make things clearer,” the company said. The test will run in the U.S. for the next few months.

Alongside that announcement, the company also unveiled a new tool called “Account Status.” The tool is designed to inform users about whether their account is at risk of being disabled. Within the tool, users can see if their content has been removed and why. They can also appeal a removal by requesting a review from their Account Status menu.

For the visual learners among us

“Short Videos” carousel spotted on desktop. First appearing as a test in mobile search results in November 2020, Brodie Clark has spotted a “Short Videos” carousel in Google’s desktop search results (shown above). The screenshot even includes a video from TikTok. Search feature junkies might also want to bookmark Brodie’s timeline of Google SERP features, which is sure to become even more handy as the company experiments with more features.

I heard you like flowcharts. Aleyda Solis has published her 10 favorite flowcharts to support SEO decision making. The charts can help you avoid the “it depends” answer with stakeholders, they may be easier to understand for non-SEOs and can make the criteria for various decisions more transparent.

Shipping delays mean Santa’s got some bad news this year. Marketoonist Tom Fishburne addresses supply chain slowdowns with the help of Santa and a young child wondering whether a year of good behavior was even worth it. Fishburne’s take is especially pertinent since so many businesses pivoted to e-commerce over the last year and a half. If you’re looking to learn how shipping delays might affect your advertising, check out Fred Vallaeys’ post on the subject over at Optmyzr.

What We’re Reading: Leaked documents suggest Amazon has been doing exactly what some merchants and regulators have suspected for years

“Use information from Amazon.in to develop products and then leverage the Amazon.in platform to market these products to our customers” — That quote comes from an internal Amazon document that details the strategy for Solimo, a private brand Amazon created in India. Reuters reporters have analyzed thousands of internal Amazon documents showing that, in India, the e-commerce platform ran campaigns to create knockoff products, undercut the original brands and promote them using manipulated search results.

“The documents show that two executives reviewed the India strategy – senior vice presidents Diego Piacentini, who has since left the company, and Russell Grandinetti, who currently runs Amazon’s international consumer business,” wrote Aditya Kalra and Steve Stecklow for Reuters.

The documents are about as damning as it gets: There are specific instructions on identifying which brands to “replicate,” a strategy for partnering with the manufacturers of the original item, there’s even a designated term for the practice of placing Amazon’s own newly launched private brand items in the top three ASINs in search results — “search seeding”; seedy indeed. Focusing specifically on the above-mentioned Solimo brand, Amazon matched or exceeded the quality of competing products but were 10–15% cheaper, the documents from 2016 revealed. 

This is bad news for merchants who have reached a high degree of success selling their own products on Amazon: “It is third-party sellers who bear the initial costs and uncertainties when introducing new products; by merely spotting them, Amazon gets to sell products only once their success has been tested,” Lina Khan, now-chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, wrote in a 2017 paper for the Yale Law Journal. “The anticompetitive implications here seem clear: Amazon is exploiting the fact that some of its customers are also its rivals.”

“As Reuters hasn’t shared the documents or their provenance with us, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated,” Amazon said in a written response. “We believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated.”

The post Search results, but without the search results page; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Keeping that pipeline filled with new qualified leads is one of the biggest challenges that brokerages face daily, and marketing plays a critical role in making that happen. However, many mistakenly hand this crucial task to their LOs or office staff, thinking that it’ll be just as effective (or cost-efficient) to do so. 

But having your LOs take responsibility for mortgage marketing could be costing you more than you realize. 

If you want your LOs to increase their loan volume, you must take marketing off of their plate and pass it on to a professional marketer. Here’s why:

1. A professional marketer will free up LO time so they can focus on processing loans
2. A professional marketer will modernize your lead gen strategy
3. A professional marketer is easier to manage and will deliver better results.

In this age, it’s no longer a question of whether a brokerage needs to do digital marketing but rather how serious they are at getting results. A healthy benchmark for effective marketing would be that it accounts for about 20-30% of your total pipeline. Are you near that benchmark? How much time are you willing to have your LOs dedicate to reaching that goal? 

By answering those two questions, you’ll start to get a better idea of how significant and costly the problem is to have your LOs take responsibility for your business marketing. Let’s take a deeper look at why you need to remove marketing from their to-do list, and give it to the capable hands of a professional mortgage marketer. 

Mortgage Marketing Powered by LenderHomPage

A professional marketer will free up LO time to process More loans.

Many business owners have a “Do-It-Yourself” type of mentality. While admirable and essential to business start-ups, requiring your LOs to have this same mentality regarding marketing will end up backfiring, and here’s why. Firstly, marketing takes knowledge of how marketing works, how to design a marketing strategy, and how to execute it. Essentially, when you require your LO to take on marketing, you make them take on a second career. 

How well do you think they’ll execute? 

How long do you think it’ll take them to complete the necessary tasks? This leads us to our second point…

Even with an experienced marketing team at the helm, implementing the strategy takes time. Considering the 40-hour workweek, how many of those hours are you willing to take away from lead nurturing and loan processing to have your LO make a rudimentary effort in mortgage marketing?

A professional marketer will modernize your lead gen strategy.

The rise of the digital age has reinvented many aspects of marketing, and with algorithms constantly evolving, competitors altering their campaigns, market changes, and consumers shifting their online behaviors, your approach must also adapt. 

That includes modernizing every aspect of your inbound mortgage marketing strategy. Below is a partial list of tasks that entail a “modern marketing strategy”:

• Website development or redesign
• Branding
• Graphic design
• SEO/keyword research
• Content development
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Local market research
• Mobile marketing integration
• Print marketing development and production
• Paid advertising
• Metrics and data analysis
• Public relations
• Video creation and marketing

While this is an extensive list, it’s not exhaustive. Remember that innovative technology, apps, and marketing disciplines are constantly being created. It’s challenging enough to train an LO into a top producer –do you really want her also to try to keep up with the latest in marketing? 

A professional marketer is Easier to Manage with better results.

When you hire a mortgage marketing agency, you get access to a team of expert copywriters, graphic designers, social media marketers, SEO professionals, PPC strategists, web designers, plus managers to coordinate it all. Is this something you want your loan officers or business to take on?

While some are tempted to take their marketing in-house, that’s not always the best way to go, especially for mortgage businesses. For mortgage businesses, the cost of recruiting and training a new marketing department could be prohibitive. And that rings true for both individual and multi-branch firms. 

So unless you’re in the business of marketing, it’s best to focus on lending and leave the marketing to the experts.

The Bottom Line

Marketing is both essential and a necessary expense. That’s right –there’s a cost for marketing and lead generation. Some falsely believe that they can eliminate or reduce the cost by their LOs do the marketing. But as you now can see, you’ll end up paying much more. When you shift the responsibility of marketing from your LO to a marketing professional, you’ll have beefed up your revenue streams from both your lead generation side and your lead nurturing side. 

Ready to make that happen? Click here to schedule a conversation with our redesigned mortgage marketing services. 

Learn More

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, if you are as obsessed with tracking the Google search results as I am, you may have noticed Google has been busy.

Forget about all the confirmed updates that we have covered here (if you can). The unconfirmed updates are just as fast but also sometimes furious. One of my passions is tracking these updates, especially the unconfirmed ones. And let me tell you, it seems as if we are seeing at least one, but often two, updates per week from Google. 

Sure, it can be normal pages just coming into the index but I don’t think there is anything normal about it. It seems like real algorithmic tweaks, which I guess you’d expect — Google even said it made over 4,500 changes to search in 2020. It is also interesting to see how many of these fall out on the weekend, I charted it here:

Weekend

• October 9th
• October 2nd & 3rd
• September 24th & 25th
• September 9th – 12th
• September 4th
• August 11th

Weekday

• October 6th & 7th
• September 16th & 17th
• September 9th – 12th
• August 6th

This doesn’t mean you should worry about these updates, I just find it fascinating to follow — but, as search professionals, you should be focused on the bigger picture, not all these minor and rapid Google updates.

Barry Schwartz,
Google algorithm chaser 

NerdWallet cites Google ranking declines in S-1 filing

NerdWallet, the popular personal finance company, cited Google as a concern for financial growth and said the company saw a Google Search ranking decline in 2017. The company’s S-1 filing specifically cited Google as a factor that “could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.” 

We dug into what happened in 2017 with NerdWallet’s rankings, reviewed the statements they made in the S-1 filing and showed how their Google traffic has exploded since. By the way, NerdWallet would not speak to us about this topic when we asked.

Why we care. If anything, this shows you that no matter how big or small your website or business is, everyone is at risk of suffering a ranking decline in Google Search. 

Those ranking declines can make or break businesses of all sizes and are clearly cited by NerdWallet as a factor that “could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.” It has been cited by other businesses as well over the years. No modern business is immune, which is why it’s important to diversify the sources of traffic to your website.

Read more here.

Yelp adds custom search filters, a new review flow and themed ads

Yelp announced new features for services businesses and the users that may be looking for them, including custom search filters, a new review flow, themed ads and Project Cost Guides.

Why we care. Custom search filters for services can help users save time by showing them the businesses that specialize in what they’re looking for. Themed ads, which are available to advertisers at no additional cost, may provide more visibility for businesses that fall into one of the themes offered. Reviews are crucial for most local businesses and the new review flow may help reduce friction when it comes to writing reviews. Some of these features are unique to Yelp, which may differentiate it as a reviews platform for users — at least, with regards to local services businesses — and help it continue to compete against Google and other reviews platforms.

Read more here.

Google vet and director of R&D, Peter Norvig steps back from Google

Peter Norvig the director of research and former director of search quality at Google is joining Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute as a Distinguished Education Fellow. Peter Norvig joined Google in May 2021 after a prestigious career at NASA and Sun Microsystems. He said he is still affiliated with Google but will be spending most of his time at Stanford going forward.

Why we care. Peter Norvig is the latest big name at Google to step back from his day-to-day role. He has set a lot of the groundwork for the mega search company and it looks like he is ready for his next big thing now.

Read more here.

Absolute vs relative URLs, mind reading and gambling ads

Absolute vs relative URLs. Google released a short SEO video saying there is no difference ranking-wise or SEO-wise in using an absolute URL vs a relative URL in your code.

Gambling Google ads. Google now allows certified, state-licensed entities in Connecticut to place gambling-related ads for sports betting, online casinos and daily fantasy sports.

SEO mind reading. Here is another good one-liner from John Mueller of Google “SEO is all about not requiring search engines to read your mind.”

We’ve curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader.

• 2021 Local SEO Holiday Success: A Ready Response for Each Customer – Moz
• Big Tech to be forced to hand over data on political ads – POLITICO
• Google Local Screened Ads Showing More Often & Scrollable Local Reviews – Search Engine Roundtable
• Make Google TV more you with personalized profiles – Google Blog
• Soaring prices, weaker targeting push companies to rethink digital ads – Axios

The post What is with Google Search updating all the time?; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.