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, here’s a fun (and perhaps creepy) idea that my friends had over the weekend.

I was explaining Google’s FLoC proposal, as one traditionally does over board games with friends. Then, one friend said, “I’d be interested in meeting the other people in my cohort.” “What about a FLoC-based dating service?” another friend chimed in.

Since FLoC groups users with similar browsing behavior into cohorts, it stands to reason that you might share a lot of interests with others in your cohort. That could be a nice way to make friends, meet people in your industry or even establish a support network for those who are looking for support. On the other hand, it might be another echo chamber that insulates us from interacting with people of different lifestyles, viewpoints and backgrounds (although fresh cohorts are assigned on a weekly basis).

It’s highly unlikely Google would ever pivot its ad tech to play some sort of social matchmaker, but it’s fun to think of new ways existing technology can be expanded. I’d want to try it out for two reasons: 1) to see whether the cohorts are actually an accurate way to group audiences, and 2) I want to see where the commonalities end (i.e., do we also share personality traits or does it end with browsing behavior?). 

George Nguyen,
Editor

How to maintain organic performance when merging multiple websites

When performing a site migration or merger, creating a sitemap that draws on the strengths of the existing websites can help give your new brand the initial visibility it needs to succeed. To help marketers make the most out of this opportunity, Tom Crewe, head of SEO at UK-based digital marketing agency Adido, advised that SEOs prioritize the following:

• Traffic drivers. Pages that drive relevant traffic are going to continue to be important, but even if the high traffic pages are slightly less relevant (but not completely irrelevant) to the new business’s offering, it might be worth keeping them to help build brand awareness in the early days.
• Convertors. These pages can keep the sales, inquiries, etc., rolling in while the site builds its rankings/visibility up in other areas.
• Ranking pages. Finding pages that rank for valuable keywords, whether they have high search volumes or not (maybe they don’t drive a lot of traffic, but they attract the RIGHT traffic that converts) and whether they have high rankings or not (if a page ranks position 36 for a target keyword, it can be developed and improved to rank better, rather than trying to start completely from scratch) will be an important part of the strategy.
• Pages with backlinks. If you don’t bring across pages that have backlinks, then the new site will be missing out on all of that potential authority-building goodness.
• Priority page supporters. Some pages may appear to have no value as they get no traffic, conversions, rankings or backlinks, but they might be the supporting architecture helping to hold up the rankings of other pages.
• New business offering/priorities. The sitemap needs to look to the future, not just to the past, so any new offerings or priorities for the newly formed business will need to be considered within the sitemap, and pages will need to be built out within the proposed architecture to cater for these new offerings.

Read more here.

Jobs in advertising, PR and related services slowed down in July after a big jump in June

Employment in advertising, PR and related services increased by 1,200 jobs last month (bringing the total figure to 446,400 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), a relatively small gain after a big jump (4,800 jobs) in June. This follows six months of growth since ad jobs hit a pandemic-period low of 432,100 jobs in January.

Zooming in on just ad agency jobs, which account for about 43% of the figures stated above, domestic agencies added 2,500 jobs in June, up from just 900 in May. Stats for July aren’t available yet because the BLS reports ad agency employment with a one-month lag, but the overall July increase of 1,200 jobs suggests a small gain in ad agency employment last month.

Why we care. “U.S. ad agency employment tends to peak earlier than the overall U.S. job market in the waning days of a business cycle’s economic expansion before a recession,” Bradley Johnson wrote for Ad Age, “On the flip side, agencies generally are cautious about adding employees as the economy recovers, resulting in a lag in staffing growth.” The slowdown in ad job growth could indicate the “waning days” of the current economic expansion, or it could just be that agencies are opting to play it safe. Unfortunately, with so much uncertainty about the Delta variant, we’ll have to wait and see which one it is, if it’s even either of those.

Tag it, cook it, climb it

How to tag all the things in GMB. Clair Carlile has published her process for tagging links, posts and more in GMB. She even included a link to her Google Sheet auto generator.

Concise recipe content that ranks. Dan Shure tweeted some data for a recipe that has only two sentences of content, but boasts an avg. position of 4.9 and over 700,000 lifetime visits. Checkout the replies for some fascinating discussions as well.

SEO at the Olympics? No, not really. Seo is actually a very common Korean surname. Now, you know!

Some Amazon sellers are pressuring customers to revise or delete negative reviews

“Product doesn’t work and company will bother you till you change review.” “Seller offers $20-$30 to delete negative reviews.” These are two of the Amazon reviews Nicole Nguyen came across during her investigation for the Wall Street Journal. In the course of her research, Nguyen discovered a number of sellers that have broken with Amazon’s policies to reach out to customers, sometimes offering them more than they paid for the product to revise or erase their negative reviews.

The idea here is to appease disgruntled customers and boost the overall star rating, which can bolster sales velocity. The thing is, sellers whose fulfilment is handled by Amazon aren’t supposed to contact customers outside of Amazon’s official channel — it’s actually a violation of the terms of service.

So, how are they obtaining customers’ contact information? One way is via third-party email extraction services available for Amazon sellers (which are also in violation of Amazon’s policies).

“No matter the method a seller or brand might use to obtain customers’ information, the result is the same,” Nguyen wrote, “It’s hard to trust the authenticity of reviews, and you might be less inclined to leave your own negative review of a product, out of fear of seller retaliation.” Not only does this impact consumer trust, it also hurts merchants that are playing by the rules.

And, as a quick plug, I’ve written a guide to Amazon’s A9 product ranking algorithm. Check it out to learn how reviews, sales velocity and keywords factor into product rankings.

The post Hear me out: FLoC, but as a matchmaking service; Tuesday’s daily brief 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, and I’m trying to work from a coworking space this week.

It’s strange, to say the least. Everyone is social-distancing… together? As an introvert, it can definitely feel like a lot sometimes, but I’m making it work, designers. When I was chatting with Barry Schwartz about it, he brought up that it’s a lot like shared hosting. I guess I’m the website in this analogy.

I’ve seen a few articles about the pros and cons of shared hosting, and they are confusing if you’re not an expert. Is it bad for SEO? Can it affect your site resources? Yes and no and yes and no. A top-ranking Forbes article says, “The downside is that the resources available will be limited and could even be affected by the actions of others on the same server. For example, if one user on the server gets a virus, it can put everyone else at risk.”

The featured snippet when I ask “Is shared hosting bad for SEO?” tells me: “The choice of a web hosting provider or a web hosting plan does not affect the SEO of a website, if all other things are equal and adheres to Google webmaster quality guidelines.” But then goes on to say, “It is indeed a fact that most low quality spammy websites use shared hosting for hosting most of their sites.”

So what’s a business or SEO newbie to do? Follow John Mueller’s advice from last year and “Host where it makes sense for you.”

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Sorry. The Google Ads search term disclosure was a glitch

Big womp. “Back in September 2020, Google announced it would show less search term data in the Google Ads Search Terms report. As you can imagine, the advertising community was not happy. But something changed yesterday and all the search term data is now showing in that report,” wrote Barry Schwartz for SERoundtable.

Many PPCers responded on Twitter hoping it was here to stay: “Please be feature … please be feature … please be feature … please be feature … please be feature …” tweet-begged CypressNorth’s Greg Finn. But later yesterday Barry confirmed that it seems to be a bug as it just … stopped working for advertisers. We hope you were able to download your search term reports before the glitch was fixed.

Update. Google Ads product liaison Ginny Marvin tweeted that the search terms glitch may become a feature. Yay!

Yelp introduces “Proof of vaccination required” and “Staff fully vaccinated” profile attributes

Yelp is introducing two new COVID-related profile attributes, the “Proof of vaccination required” and “Staff fully vaccinated” attributes, the company announced Thursday. Users will be able to filter searches using these attributes and the “Proof of vaccination required” attribute will be visible in search results.

Why we care. Given the rapid spread of COVID’s Delta variant, these attributes may help customers feel safer when visiting a local business. Yelp’s “additional safety measures” may also help to curb any potential blowback from bad actors seeking to leave reviews based on their stance about COVID vaccines as opposed to their firsthand experiences with the business.

Read more here.

Google drops safe browsing as a page experience ranking signal

Google is removing the safe browsing signal from the Google page experience update, the company announced. “We recognize that these issues aren’t always within the control of site owners, which is why we’re clarifying that Safe Browsing isn’t used as a ranking signal and won’t feature in the Page Experience report,” the company said.

Why we care. This is one less ranking signal and factor you need to worry about when it comes to your performance in Google Search. Of course, you don’t want to provide an unsafe browsing experience for your users, but you can still learn about those in Search Console, but it won’t count against you in your rankings.

Read more here.

Search Shorts: Trends in PPC, salary negotiations, and start your GA4 account now

Key trends in PPC, reporting and analytics. Consumers are more online than ever before. Ecommerce sales jumped $174.87 billion from 2019 to 2020, and there’s still an indication that trends begat by COVID won’t go away anytime soon and may even become our “new normal.” For PPC marketers, that means a focus on the following five trends.

Ready to switch jobs or move up in your career? Don’t forget to negotiate your salary. It’s a job-seeker’s market in SEO and PPC right now. Salary negotiation gives you the chance to ensure you’re paid what you’re worth. Check out these 6 salary negotiation tips from yours truly.

Not ready for the switch to GA4? Well, at least get your account started ASAP. Make sure you’re running Universal and Google Analytics 4 concurrently because “Data will not transfer to GA4 from Universal Analytics” Julie Bacchini reminds us on Twitter.

What We’re Reading: Trying to get shadow banned —  for science

“Shadow banning is the first thing every social media marketer’s mind goes to when they experience sudden drops in engagement or reach,” wrote Stacey McLachlan for Hootsuite. 

However, Instagram’s CEO says shadow banning isn’t actually a thing: “If someone follows you on Instagram, your photos and videos can show up in their feed if they keep using their feed. Being in [Instagram’s Explore page] is not guaranteed for anyone. Sometimes you’ll get lucky, sometimes you won’t.”

To test her “how to get shadow banned” experiment, McLachlan decided to act like a bot. She said the most SMMs believe that there are three main ways to get banned:

1. Using too many hashtags
2. Using irrelevant hashtags
3. Writing generic comments on a bunch of other people’s posts

So she hopped to it. Posting pictures that would normally get engagement with WAY too many hashtags, spam-commenting things like “Nice post” to random accounts on the Explore page, and posting stock photos of her city to her feed.

Did it work? In short, no. She couldn’t get shadow banned. The experiment actually got her account a ton of comments and support, which may be why. McLachlan’s engagement did dip during the shadow ban attempt — going from 17% to just above 9%. But her reach remained the same. “I wouldn’t say I’ve been ‘shadow banned’ so much as I’ve been ‘correctly noted as being a liar,’” she wrote.

Is shadow banning real? Or is Instagram just good at determining what users want when they search for hashtags and content on the platform? Or are the two one and the same?

The post If you saw expanded search terms in Google Ads, it was a glitch; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is how Google serves its users’ most relevant search results. A large part of Google’s E-A-T can be objectively measured and improved upon using Topical Authority. So, if you want to rank better than your competitors on Google, you need to understand the drivers of Topical Authority and how to improve on them.

Join iQuanti’s Ajay Rama and Kartik Shrivastava in this webinar to understand the framework and tactics used to build topical authority and win in Google’s E-A-T.

Register today for “How to Win in Google’s E-A-T,” presented by ALPS.

The post How to win in Google’s E-A-T 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, I’m not a big sports fan, but when there’s a domain dispute, count me in.

Those of you who have gone through a rebrand know how much effort goes into it. Unfortunately for Cleveland’s MLB team (which will soon be going by its new name, the Cleveland Guardians), the rebranding effort may have overlooked an important detail: the preferred domain. ClevelandGuardians.com is the official site for the men’s roller derby team of the same name.

The roller derbying Cleveland Guardians have been around since 2011, and on top of possessing the domain, the team also has the Facebook and Instagram accounts. Now, both entities seem to be positioning themselves for a trademark battle.

It wasn’t until four days after the Cleveland MLB team made its name change announcement that it filed for a federal trademark to begin selling merchandise, according to Cleveland 19 News. A couple days later, the roller derby team filed for their own trademark and launched their own online store.

It’s still unclear how this is going to end, but what is clear is that, if an MLB franchise with all the resources at its disposal can commit such an oversight, it could happen to any of us. 

George Nguyen,
Editor

‘Make Every feature Binary’: Bing’s sparse neural network for improved search relevance

Bing has introduced “Make Every feature Binary” (MEB), a large-scale sparse model that complements its production Transformer models to improve search relevance. This new technology, which is now running on 100% of Bing searches in all regions and languages, has resulted in a nearly 2% increase in clickthrough rate for the top search results, a reduction in manual query reformulation by more than 1% and a 1.5% reduction of clicks on pagination.

“When looking into the top features learned by MEB, we found it can learn hidden intents between query and document,” Bing said. As shown in the image above, MEB was able to learn that “Hotmail” is strongly correlated to “Microsoft Outlook,” even though the two aren’t close in terms of semantic meaning. It can also identify negative relationships, like how users searching for “baseball” don’t typically click on pages about “hockey.”

MEB’s more nuanced understanding of content may also help to drive more traffic to brands, businesses and publishers, since the search results may be more relevant. And, its understanding of correlated phrases and negative relationships may enable marketers to spend more time focusing on what customers are really searching for instead of fixating on the right keywords to rank higher — this is especially applicable for rebranding scenarios (are you listening, Cleveland Guardians?). And, for the search industry overall, it may help Bing maintain its position as Google continues to innovate with new technologies like MUM. 

Read more here.

How to limit waste and accelerate ROI in paid search marketing

Having spent the last 11 years surrounded by sales leaders, Amanda Farley, Partner and Director of Accounts and Digital Strategy at SSDM, picked up on some of their biggest successes and opportunities. But recently, she had the idea to apply them outside of the sales box and into her digital marketing campaigns. “This is really what sales and marketing integration is all about,” said Farley recently at SMX Advanced. “It’s about building the relationships, the trust and guiding [buyers] to impactful solutions that ultimately lead into more sales or leads.”

These buyer personas are based on a book called The New Strategic Selling by Robert B. Miller and Stephen E. Heiman. “Your strategy can only begin when you know who your players are,” added Farley. “The best way to think of it is like a football team: every player must be on the field to close the deal.”

• Economic buyer: Has the ability to commit funds to a purchase.
• User buyer: The end-user of your product or service.
• Technical buyer: Ensures all the technical specifications are met.
• Coach: Really wants your solution to win.

When we take this into our marketing efforts, we need to understand what each audience cares about most, what their content preferences are and what channels they’re most likely to engage with.

Read more here.

“We should allocate our budget first to digital because our brand is… um… digital-first.”

Before you switch agencies. “Too often, marketers put the media cart before the strategy horse,” said Marketoonist creator Tom Fishburne, “Media choices should be driven by the specific goals the marketers are trying to achieve. And the most value often comes from an integrated plan that combines multiple channels.”

No thanks. Jason Hennessey found a street pole flyer asking “Do you want to learn SEO?” Apparently, there’s only one correct answer, and it’s in all caps.

But, AdWords. Andrew Bethel spotted this text ad of, well, nothing. It just says “AdWords AdWords.” Interestingly enough, the URL it leads to belongs to a System1 company — System1 owns Info.com, which was the only search engine that seemed to have positive things to say about the Android search choice screen when I asked for comment earlier this year.

How to win against endless AI-generated content

We’re approaching what Ryan Law calls the “search singularity,” according to his blog post for Animalz. “AI writing tools mean that the marginal cost of a blog post is nosediving from multiple skilled person-hours to minutes spent in a freemium SaaS product,” Law said. “In the near future, any company with a modest budget and a functioning internet connection will be able to pump out truly mind-numbing volumes of content.”

The technology is getting better and more accessible. Like any tool, it’s really about the wielder rather than the tech itself. There will be those who use GPT-3-like models to assist in their writing and then there will be the ones who use it to churn out generic content. Since it’ll be so easy to do the latter, Law argues that the industry is headed to a point where the search results may be flooded with homogenous content — the “search singularity.”

Bad content impacts everyone: It makes users lose trust across the board and it makes it harder for us to cut through the noise. There are, however, things that human marketers are great at that can help us continue to achieve our objectives in the face of this deluge of samey content. Law recommends that marketers:

• Focus on information gain. AI can only work with what’s already available, but marketers can uncover new information and conduct interviews and surveys to bolster their content.
• Invest in thought leadership. If we humans are great at one thing, it’s giving you our opinions, which AI-generated content struggles to do. Bringing in elements of industry analysis, storytelling and even personal narrative can help you stand out in this regard.
• Create a new experience. Creativity will continue to be a valuable trait if we ever reach the search singularity. By putting our own spin on something, marketers can create content that resonates with their specific audiences — just look at what Lin-Manuel Miranda did with Hamilton.

The post MEB or meh? Make Every feature Binary is Bing’s new search tech; Thursday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

For every dollar a local business owner spends on technology and digital solutions, $2.50 is spent on implementation and ongoing services from marketing agencies and other local experts. Digital technology is a $220 billion market that is rapidly expanding and comes with its own set of challenges. 

A 2020 survey of more than 600 respondents reveals local agencies and business experts saying their inability to scale operations is the number one challenge they face in providing digital solutions to local businesses.

Here are the most common challenges faced by local experts and tactics to help overcome them.

Challenge #1 to scale your agency: Attracting qualified leads

Three out of four B2B buyers want to self-educate and try before they buy. Most local business owners want to test-drive technology before ever spending a cent. To show up in places where small-and medium-sized business (SMB) owners search and have the best chance at capturing a lead, try these tips:

1. Optimize your website for search engines. Ensure you’re easy to find by positioning yourself as a technology company.
2. Make sure your product catalog is available online. Adopt a product-led (freemium) acquisition strategy so that your clients can try before they buy. Use this tactic to uncover insights about your prospects so you can meet their needs with the right paid solution at the right time.
3. Nurture your leads with email campaigns. Use marketing automation to trigger a campaign whenever you get a new lead, so your business always remains top of mind for them.

Challenge #2 to scale your agency: Knowing what to sell and when

The secret to sales success resides in your data.

During the sales process, ask yourself what are the pieces of data that you can bring to the table for your prospects. Do you have competitive intelligence and industry benchmarks? Do you understand how their online performance compares to the businesses that matter to them? These data points allow you to earn trust.

Lean on sales intelligence tools like the Vendasta Snapshot Report to surface data that helps you gain trust with your SMB clients, identify what solutions they need, and pinpoint exactly when they need them.

These tools allow agencies to generate personalized competitive intelligence and industry benchmarks on their prospect’s online performance, all with one click of a button. Vendasta partners who use more than 100% of their monthly allotment of snapshot reports each month have a revenue pipeline 18 times bigger. They close nearly three times more opportunities than partners who use less than 50% of their allotment.

Challenge #3 to scale your agency: Connecting with prospects

The pain of sending multiple back-and-forth emails, playing phone tag and texting a client several times just to find out when both you and your sales prospect are available for a meeting, can be a major cause of concern. Not only is there opportunity for a follow-up to fall off your radar, but the process can frustrate prospects, causing them to abandon their intentions to find out more about working with you.

Use a meeting scheduling software that’s integrated with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Just by using a tool that lets you schedule meetings; experts can save an incredible 10 hours per week.

Challenge #4 to scale your agency: Predictable revenue

Without being able to predict how much revenue you’ll be generating next month, next quarter or next year, it’s impossible to grow your operations. It limits your ability to hire new staff, determine whether you can afford to spend more on marketing, and figure out if you should invest in expanding your product offerings.

All of these problems can be solved by effectively managing your sales pipeline. It’s a critical component to growing your business.    

Manage your sales pipeline in a CRM through four basic stages:

1. Prospect
2. Qualify
3. Connect
4. Close

Looking across our channel partner base, we found that one in 10 opportunities resulted in a sales order. Your mileage may vary, with a higher conversion rate or fewer opportunities, but it’s a nice ratio to keep in mind as you work your (sales) pipeline. It’s a starting point for understanding how much revenue you can forecast based on what’s in your pipeline.

In addition to creating opportunities, use a metric-driven approach to move prospects through a sales pipeline. Monitor activities that lead to winning new business, like the number of calls, prospecting emails sent, and booked meetings, and use a CRM that can track this activity.

Wrapping Up: 5 key takeaways for scaling your operations

1. Focus on attracting product-qualified leads. Optimize your website and nurture it with email campaigns.
2. Use data to help understand what to sell and when. Use a sales intelligence tool like the Vendasta Snapshot report and set time aside to use up your monthly allotment of reports you can generate to help you sell to new leads.
3. Engage using integrated meeting schedulers. Setup text replacement on your mobile device to quickly send a link to book a meeting into your calendar.
4. Build a sales pipeline and fill it with opportunities. Monitor top activities that lead to winning new business-like number of calls, prospecting emails sent, and meetings booked.
5. Adopt an end-to-end platform. Stop piecing together different technologies to solve your biggest challenges by using a single integrated platform for a seamless experience that removes complexity and reduces costs.

By using one unified place where you can log in, manage, view and assign, you’re removing obstacles that crop up when you’re ‘frankensteining’ together different digital solutions to build your business.

Adopting an end-to-end platform

Based on a typical local expert with five employees and 75 customers, agencies can save 520 hours and up to $70,000 per year by switching to the Vendasta platform. Using an end-to-end platform, local experts can:

• Build and configure: instantly go-to-market with a broad set of customizable and branded solutions
• Market and sell: predict needs and intent through an SMBs interaction with sales intelligence reports using an integrated CRM with built-in marketing automation
• Bill and fulfill: invoice and accept payment from clients for any of your tightly integrated products and services
• Deliver and grow: offer a seamless experience for your clients with a single sign-on dashboard of automated proof of performance reporting to help identify the ongoing needs of your SMB customers

To learn more, watch these videos:

Scale your business by bringing everything together.

With Vendasta, you can operate your business, find and sell more digital solutions and services, engage with your customers, and create a superior client experience, all under one roof.

GET STARTED WITH VENDASTA  for free today.

The post 5 tactics to scale your agency appeared first on Search Engine Land.