Google logo schema now supports ImageObject type, in addition to the URL type, according to updated information on the help document. Google said this provides “new flexibility” to specify an organization logo using these schema markup.

What is new. The logo required properties use to just say it accepted the URL property, but now it says both URL or ImageObject. Here is a screenshot of this section of the help document:

ImageObject type gives you the ability to add additional data to an image, such as width and height, or the author or a caption. Whereas the URL type did not give you these added values.

Why we care. Google is giving us a bit more flexibility with implementing logo schema and structured data going forward. So if you are using these schema, you may decide that going forward that you want to use ImageObject type over URL type – or not.

The post Google logo schema gains ImageObject type support appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Marketing functions are at a turning point in their evolution. In the wake of recent challenges, CMOs and leaders face an imperative: reenvision operations and brand experiences to drive growth without more resources or taking more risk to move faster.

Consistency in providing an on-brand customer experience is critical to scale. Delivering consistent brand experiences (e.g., unchanging messaging, values, and language across channels and the customer lifecycle) drives engagement and growth. Consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by as much as 33%. Inconsistent and off-brand experiences do just the opposite: nearly three-fourths (73%) of consumers would go so far as to switch brands if they don’t receive a consistent experience.

With remote teams and customers engaging in more ways, CMOs can no longer ignore the impact of unwanted variability in the brand experience that their company delivers. But many CMOs feel out of control over all the many places that audiences engage with their brand, making it difficult to maintain a consistent experience.

Let’s look at the perennial challenge of living the brand—and the opportunity that awaits if CMOs rethink their approach to the brand experience.

Why meeting new demands requires a consistent brand experience

Consistency underpins the ability to meet new customer behaviors and demands. Most consumers (75%) now expect consistent experiences across multiple channels. But the focus on omnichannel and influx of new digital channels have opened up more opportunities for disconnected, off-brand content and communications. CMOs need to bridge these gaps to overcome conflicting interactions that slow down teams and erode the brand experience.

On top of customer demands, remote and hybrid work isn’t going away, and the shift to distributed teams makes it more challenging for brands to present a united front. According to IDC, “intelligent digital workspaces” that deliver a single integrated experience to employees—no matter the location—are becoming an expected way of working. With dispersed environments as the norm, CMOs need to find new ways to keep teams in sync so they aren’t weighed down trying to manage brand positioning across touchpoints.

Meeting these new realities starts with a new, scalable approach to the brand experience. By equipping teams to stay on-brand no matter the channel or context, CMOs can drive up customer and employee engagement while positioning the business for growth.

Driving consistent, scalable brand experiences with technology

Traditional approaches to improving the brand experience—like employee training, manual tools, and static guidelines—don’t sufficiently scale and contribute to digital overload among teams. CMOs and teams don’t need more systems to manage; they need ways to enhance existing content and communications that don’t require additional resources.

AI-powered solutions are now available that provide automated ways to keep teams on-brand. Yet surprisingly, Gartner reports only 17% of digital marketing leaders use AI and machine learning. For example, platform-agnostic tools like digital writing assistants and living style guides offer real-time guidance to teams around preferred language, brand names, terminology style, and even tone. By integrating into all the places employees and audiences already engage, these types of tools improve productivity while delivering higher-quality team and customer experiences.

At the same time, CMOs must avoid using automation in a way that impacts the human side of their brand. The focus should be on solutions that fit what IDC calls the “digital coworker”—technology that expands or enhances human capabilities, not detracts from them. The right solutions help teams augment their work across systems and strengthen their own abilities in the process, allowing CMOs to improve the brand experience in a more productive and human-centric way.

Case study: Building customer trust with a unified brand voice

Let’s look at a real-world example from HackerOne, the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform committed to mitigating cyber risk. HackerOne’s marketing team needed to present a unified brand voice across two very different but equally critical audiences: enterprise businesses and the hacker community. By deploying AI-powered writing assistance from Grammarly Business, the team can maintain a consistent brand identity and experience across every touchpoint—no matter the writer or channel.

With access to in-line writing suggestions, tone detection, and automated style guides, HackerOne’s entire team can easily follow brand language and guidelines, avoid confusing jargon, and balance the right voice and tone across audiences. The solution updates dynamically and integrates seamlessly into existing workflows, making it easy to push updates on branded terms and preferences to the entire company in minutes. As a result, HackerOne’s metrics show that communication as a whole improved by 66%—measured across quality pillars such as clarity, correctness, delivery, and engagement. 

“HackerOne’s brand must speak to two very distinct audiences: the security teams that benefit from our products and services and the hackers that make up our hacker community,” said Tim Matthews, CMO at HackerOne. “Real-time writing assistance from Grammarly Business lets us deliver higher-quality marketing content for our customers while bringing our brand voice to life consistently across channels. This reduces our time spent reviewing written work and managing our brand identity, improving productivity in a scalable way so we can focus on higher-order growth initiatives.”

The bottom line

As we look ahead, CMOs have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine the brand experience in a way that boosts both productivity and engagement. With a foundation of consistency across the board, they can ensure exceptional customer experiences, free up time to focus on growth, and build resilience that leads to long-term results.

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For more about the importance of a consistent brand experience in driving marketing outcomes, visit www.grammarly.com/business.

This article was written by Dorian Stone, Head of Organizations Revenue, Grammarly.

The post CMOs, It’s time to rethink your brand experience for long-term growth appeared first on Search Engine Land.

For the most part, the mortgage industry is dominated by massive enterprises and regional teams of loan officers. However, independent mortgage brokers still have their place within this extremely competitive industry. 

With that said, these passionate, hardworking individuals need all the help they can get to satisfy demand in the local markets they serve.

That’s where a top-quality innovative CRM solution for individual mortgage brokers can help, providing a full suite of tools that will enhance productivity and profitability. 

Below, we’ll outline why a mortgage CRM is vital for loan officers and highlight some of the top benefits of a powerful platform for individual loan officers.

Why Individual Mortgage Brokers Need a CRM

Due to the ever-changing nature of the mortgage industry, an independent loan officer can easily become overwhelmed. Between marketing responsibilities, keeping up with current clients, and the need to stay in touch with past customers. It can be all too easy for individual mortgage brokers to stay in the office all day and night, working long hours just to keep up.

Quality CRM software can help individual mortgage brokers to overcome these challenges. This technology provides effective tools to stay organized, follow-up with previous clients, and advertise your services to prospective customers.

Benefits of Mortgage CRM Solutions 

By taking advantage of cutting-edge CRM solutions, individual mortgage brokers will gain access to:

Marketing Software

A great CRM will offer the latest mortgage marketing technologies, which makes it that much easier for loan officers to convert leads into loans. 

Mortgage CRM solutions allow mortgage brokers to automate otherwise tedious marketing tasks and enhance conversion rates. In turn, this will free them up to devote more time to their current clients.

A Digital Loan Platform

Modern consumers crave a digital mortgage experience. With the help of a powerful mortgage CRM, individual loan officers can satisfy this desire. A digital loan platform allows mortgage brokers to streamline the borrower experience with an online 1003 form and digital document management capabilities.

In addition, loan officers can send the borrower regular updates via app-based push notifications or text messages. This kind of platform is essential for brokers who don’t have a dedicated team. If you can’t delegate, automate!

Post-Funding Follow-Up Platform

Following up with customers after their loans close is an essential part of earning repeat business. But manually conducting follow-up can be exhausting. 

Mortgage CRM software allows loan officers to set pre-configured ad campaigns with customized follow-up prompts. This feature can ensure that you stay at the top of a customer’s mind. If they decide to refinance or seek out new mortgage services in the future.

Refinance Opportunities and Birthday Alerts

Tired of filling your calendar with reminders to send out birthday cards? Want to make sure you never miss a beat when a past client would be in a great position to refinance?

Mortgage CRM software includes tap-to-call reminders. It can also send mortgage officers in-app push notifications. These prompts will let them know when it is time to reach out to a past borrower so that they can make the most out of every opportunity.

The Premier Solution for Individual Brokers

If you would like to learn more about a top-quality mortgage CRM that can benefit independent loan officers, contact BNTouch today. We will arrange a free demo so that you can see our technology firsthand.

The post Individual Brokers: Empowering Productivity with the Right CRM Solution appeared first on .

Applying for a mortgage is a means to an end. Whether the “end” is a new home, funding for a home remodel or investment property, or saving a few hundred dollars a month with a lower mortgage payment, and the application is simply a step towards the prize.

The trouble is that for many consumers, the mortgage application isn’t “a step.” It’s a hurdle.

With seemingly endless intimate financial questions, unfamiliar terms, cumbersome process of requesting and submitting documentation, and a mishmash of paper docs and online apps for completing the process are frustrating, to say the least.

So frustrating that most consumers abandon their 1003. One startling statistic revealed that about 78% of consumers back out of transactions solely based on a poor online experience.

So what does it take to create a favorable mortgage experience? A study conducted by McKinsey discovered that there are four factors that mattered the most when it came to creating a pleasant online application experience: reassurance, transparency, simplicity, and speed.

When comparing old school processes with modern mortgage software, which do you think does a better job in those four areas?

Customer Experience is the Real Differentiator, and Mortgage Application Software Delivers

In an industry where competing with numbers is the norm, mortgage pros often forget how vital the experience is in the borrower’s journey. That same Mckinsey study demonstrated that not only were those four factors essential to an exceptional experience, but in regards to what consumers desire, they were nearly as crucial as saving money.

In other words, most mortgage applicants in the study were unwilling to sacrifice an excellent experience for lower interest rates.

So if you’re looking for ways to boost your mortgage application conversion rates, you must provide what consumers desire above all else —a superior mortgage application experience.

Key Areas Where An Online Mortgage Application Boosts Conversion Rates

Optimized For Mobile

Over 50% of all web traffic comes from mobile, and this trend is growing every year. This means that a mobile-optimized mortgage application is foundational to increasing conversion rates.

However, beware of poor-quality ones. Tiny details like too small buttons or awkward navigation placement can make your conversions plummet. So when shopping for a quality mobile-friendly online mortgage application, look for items like drop-down menus, checkboxes, large enough content boxes, and easily accessible buttons and explainers.

Bite-Size Where Possible

The mortgage application can be a lengthy process, and some may even feel it intrusive. Smart online applications reduce intimidation by breaking into smaller steps. This can be accomplished by having fewer questions per screen, pre-populating information where possible, asking more sensitive questions later in the application, and displaying a progress bar to how much more is necessary to complete it.

Details matter!

Features like animated graphics or simulated text messages lighten the mood and encourage the applicant to continue. Applications with a single sign-on feature and the ability to flip from short pre-qual to full 1003 (without having to re-enter data) empower the consumer and boost their confidence, ultimately influencing your conversion rates.

Self-Serve Efficiency

Self-serve efficiency refers not only to the ability of the consumer to DIY it, but also the speed and ease in which they are able to do it. 

With key features like real-time notifications of changes or next steps alert and reassure the borrower that things move as swiftly as possible.

Has the loan been approved? Don’t make your enthusiastic borrower wait a minute longer. Use mortgage software that allows borrowers to download their approval letter instantly!

Mortgage Software Transforms Your Conversion Rates

With estimates that over 5.1 billion people are browsing the internet via smart devices, your intake must meet modern online consumer behavior if you want any hope to raise your conversion rate.

LenderHomePages’s digital mortgage tools are precisely the mortgage software to do it with.

Our customizable and brandable software helps originators streamline their workflows, connect with borrowers, expedite funding, strengthen customer relationships, and automate with self-serve efficiency –all of which increase application conversion rates. Plus, online mortgage software like Loanzify POS allows originators to handle a higher volume of loans and be more productive without adding new hires.

Take the first step towards success with a conversation. Schedule a live demo with one of our account executives today!

Schedule a Demo

Do you ever feel like you are wasting time and money on content syndication?

Marketers seem bound to ever-increasing and hard to achieve lead goals. As a result, they are being forced to work with a disparate mix of publishers to reach buyers with their latest content.

Join Matt Mullin, Sr. Director of Growth Marketing at Tenable, and Stephanie Swinyer, Head of Revenue Marketing at Integrate, and learn how you can streamline content campaigns across publishers and enforce a 100% marketable lead data guarantee.

Register today for “4 Ways to Boost Confidence in Your Content Syndication Strategy,” presented by Integrate.

The post Be more confident in your content strategy with these 4 tips appeared first on Search Engine Land.

It’s no secret that it’s a job seeker’s market right now. While the pandemic may have initially hampered companies’ investment in SEO and PPC, as the lockdowns continued and more people took their lives online search marketing became paramount. Even anecdotally, I noticed an uptick in businesses interested in SEO services as they realized that they needed to be found online now more than ever.

Employees are getting antsy for career development and advancement. This shift means that search marketers have the power to set the tone for what’s next in their careers, but we’re not the only ones. According to Prudential Financial’s Pulse of the American Worker survey, 26% of workers planning to switch jobs post-COVID, 80% are doing so because they’re concerned about career advancement. The pandemic has led to a “very real experience that employees have had around a lack of career progression and a concern around skills development,” says Rob Falzon, vice chair at Prudential. People feel that they have been working hard but have not been given opportunities to advance professionally in their current company, wrote Caroline Castrillon for Forbes.

Shifting search landscapes mean shifting career skills. In search marketing, we’re seeing a move toward the larger players taking away our individual controls and levers. To advance we have to rewrite the old search marketing playbook. Problem-solving has always been our forte, but we have to be even more creative now as data is taken away, more of our processes are being automated, and we have to expand beyond our own siloes to get things done. Leveling up your career — regardless of how you decide to advance it, is all about becoming a strategic leader.

In my opening keynote at SMX Next today, I’m going to go through these nine key tips for becoming a search marketing leader in your area. It’s about more than just your spreadsheet skills (though that’s important too).

A caveat. Before we dive in it’s important to remember that career progression is not always linear. Especially with the fluctuating nature of work over the past two years, you may have found yourself having to take a break to help with homeschooling or taking care of a sick family member. Or perhaps your work increased dramatically faster than you anticipated and you’re still reeling. Whenever you are right now, just remember: You’re exactly where you need to be. And these are the steps to take to get to where you want to go.

1. Tech skill are important.

The foundation of SEO and PPC are technical skills. Search engines are giving us the numbers behind user experience, and we need the quantitative and specialized skills to be able to make those changes a reality. A while ago, someone asked Barry Schwartz what he thought would be a differentiator in SERPs in the coming years, and he replied, “Content.” His reasoning was that technical SEO and PPC skills will become table stakes. We will all need to have them just to get by.

We’re seeing a huge wave of more technical skills in both emerging as practitioners are finding new ways to automate their own processes, pull and analyze data to create reports that matter for each target audience, and manage the more specific back-end details of website accessibility. We’ve always been a technical field, and those skills aren’t going anywhere.

2. People skills are important-er.

While tech skills are table stakes in search marketing, the “softer” skills are often more varied and sometimes harder to come by. There’s, of course, an element of search marketing that’s just, sort of, intuition. Once you’ve been working in the field for a while, you can just tell what searcher intent is with specific queries. You learn your target marketing and your industry so well that you truly understand the people you’re serving.

The other key people skill in SEO and PPC is empathy. Microsoft regularly promotes their Marketing with Purpose Playbook which talks about expressing to your customers that your products and services are for them: “85% of consumers say they’ll only consider a brand if they trust the brand,” said MJ DePalma at Microsoft Advertising. “Authenticity is the most important attribute to brand performance.” Being able to convey authenticity in your search marketing isn’t easy! It’s a skill we have to work to build and hone, but it’s one worth investing in.

3. Not everyone wants to be a manager.

Many times when people move to the next level of their careers, they think it means they have to become a manager. The fact is not everyone wants to manage people. Some people really love the individual contributor work that they do and don’t want to give that up! In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott talks about two types of employees: rock stars and superstars.

Rock stars are the steady rock of a department. They know how to do what they do really well, and they get exceptional results. Their growth trajectory may be more steady, but they love their jobs and don’t really want their boss’s job.

Superstars, on the other hand, are the type of people who absolutely cannot stand the thought of doing the same job two years from now. They have a much steeper growth trajectory and are excited at the thought of taking their boss’s job someday (someday soon, preferably).

The path that I think Radical Candor leaves out is for people who want to go out on their own. They don’t want their boss’s job because they don’t want a boss at all! Any of these career paths are great. And, honestly, you may want to partake in any of them at any time given what’s going on in your life.

4. It’s ok if you don’t have a 5-year plan.

Someone told me once that when she asked for a raise at her job her boss countered by asking for her five-year career plan with the company. She asked my advice, and I honestly didn’t have anything good because 5 years is a long time! Sure, having an idea of where you want to go is great! But no one needs a detailed career map with an accompanying timeline.

So much can happen in 5 years. I bet 5 years ago no one could have predicted COVID-19 and how it would affect the workforce. If a career map makes you feel better, then don’t let me sway you from achieving your goals, but also remember to be flexible in your timelines and trajectories. You may get there a little slower or a lot faster than you anticipated.

5. Work on negotiation.

Regardless of whether you want to be a manager, an individual contributor, or an entrepreneur, almost everyone can benefit from leveling up their negotiation skills. While it can help you increase your salary and get better benefits at work, it’s also a beneficial skill in general. Negotiations are truly just conversations where two sides are coming together to discuss their interests and come to an agreement.

Negotiation skills can benefit you when you’re working with vendors, problem-solving with colleagues, determining scope of work with clients, or even determining whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher at home. Many people are nervous about negotiating, but the most you practice it in everyday life, the easier it gets. If you can work on negotiating in these smaller conversations, the bigger negotiations (like salary!) will come a lot easier.

6. Pursue your strengths.

In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferris talks about relentlessly pursuing your strengths and not worrying too much about your weaknesses. “By improving your strengths over your weaknesses, you focus on multiplying the results as opposed to incrementally fixing your flaws,” summarized Elle McFarlane for Oberlo. In business, this is called, “niching down.” The idea is that YOU know where you are the absolute expert and pursuing that arena would benefit you more than trying to learn everything about search marketing.

For example, I found out about Kristie Plantinga from iPullRank’s People Supporting SEOs list. I found her site really beautiful and asked her how she decided to niche down into SEO specifically for therapists: “I work with therapists because I was going to become a therapist [but] pursued my love of writing instead. Before working with therapists, I worked with lawyers. [I found out that some] lawyers are really aggressive, so I decided to niche with professionals I knew would be kinder and more patient. I didn’t end up working directly in mental health, but now I can support people who do,” she told me on Twitter. She pursued her strengths and area of expertise and serves the therapy community.

Instead of trying to fix all your areas of weakness, find ways to amplify your strengths like Plantinga!

7. Start a win list.

Along with helping in potential job negotiations, starting a win list gives you a tool to help kick imposter syndrome when you’re feeling it sneak up on you. Start by creating a folder on your desktop or Google drive and any time someone says anything remotely nice about you, your work, or working with you, take a screenshot. Put the screenshot in the folder for when you need it later.

This is also a great place to keep a running document of your achievements and projects. Keep track of the quantitative and qualitative wins you achieved (and things you said yes to outside your scope of work). That way, when it does come time to ask for a salary bump, you have the metrics and testimonials to prove you earned it. Plus, you can look at all your win list screenshots and organize them by themes. This will tell you what your superpowers are so you can continue to pursue them (see tip 6 above!).

8. Ask for what you need at work.

As I mentioned in the intro, it’s a search marketer’s job market right now. Not only has the pandemic accelerated the need for SEO and PPC, but it’s also dramatically changed the way we work. We’re working from home more, and it’s been nice to give up commuting and save money on lunches out. But it also means we are balancing more than ever, and there’s often no real differentiator between work time and home time since they all occur at the same place now.

There is a viral TikTok video going around now talking about the 8-hour workday. The premise is that the way our workweeks were originally built catered to those doing assembly-line-type jobs. Nowadays we can work from anywhere and get our work done at any time, so the way companies think about a workday should shift to accommodate that.

All this is to say that you have the power as the employee to advocate for what you need to make yourself a successful search marketer. Ask for what you need and don’t be afraid to ask your coworkers if they’d like to join in the negotiations with you. Now is a great time to consider what you need to do your best work and to talk with your leadership about making it happen.

9. Give back to the search community.

Finally, once you’ve worked relentlessly to become the best, next-level search marketer in your industry, make sure you consider giving back to the SEO and PPC communities. Even if you don’t want to become a manager, you could always give back by becoming a mentor.

I did an informal Twitter poll a while back asking how people learned search marketing. Only 10% of search marketers had a mentor guide them along the way:

Mentorship is one way to help accelerate the careers of others in SEO and PPC. Plus, there are some benefits to you as a mentor:

• Improve your communication and personal skills.
• Develop leadership and management qualities.
• Reinforce your own study skills and knowledge of your subject.
• Increase your confidence and motivation.
• Increase your network.

The Search Engine Land mentorship program, for example, hosted three mentorship matches each in both SEO and PPC. These mentorships varied in topics from technical SEO skills to how to manage a team all the way to getting your dream job in search. It doesn’t have to be a formal commitment like our program, but any way you can take your career advancements and offer a hand in search will grow the community as a whole.

Career progression isn’t always linear. Whether you’re entry-level or the CEO of a thousand-person organization, there are always areas to continue to develop to improve your career and its effect on those around you. These nine tips are a good starting point to continue to cultivate your career path and keep growing as a human and a search marketer.

The post 9 ways to level up your search marketing career appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has is testing adding a few new columns of metrics to the Google Keyword Planner Tool. The new columns we’ve seen on the Google Keyword Planner Tool include year-over-year change, three-month change and trend type.

New in Keyword planner tool. You can access the keyword planner tool over here if you have a Google Ads account. When you run a new report, Google may pop up a message saying “Keyword trends: Now you can compare recent and past keyword trends.”

Google’s Keyword Planner tool helps you research keywords for your Google Search campaigns. You can use this free tool to discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of the searches they receive and the cost to target them.

New columns. Google has added new keyword trends data including:

• YoY Change – The year over year change compares the monthly search volume of the latest month with the same month the previous year.
• Three month change – The three month change shows a three month change in search trends by comparing the latest month’s data, with the data from two months prior. For example, if the latest month is July, the July data would be compared to May to show change in search volume over three months.
• Three month trending type – This shows you if the trend is going up or down or remaining flat for the keyword. I no longer see this but Google was testing this.

What it looks like. Here are screenshots of these new columns; one from Patrick Garde on Twitter and the other from Arbab Usmani’s on Twitter:

Google statement. “This is a small experiment. We’re always testing new ways to improve our experience for our advertisers and users, but don’t have anything specific to announce right now,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land.

It looks like Google has continued to experiment with new keyword planner columns.

Why we care. Having more data, be it trending figures for the past three months or year-over-year, can be useful for marketers to see trends and plan their campaigns with more insight. Check out the keyword planner tool and utilize as much of the data Google is giving you to benefit your customers and your own campaigns.

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