Search marketing has a diversity problem. Older data from the American Marketing Association shows that most marketing leadership is still majority white, hetero, and male. Meanwhile, the audiences we’re marketing to are more diverse and inclusive than ever. It’s a topic we’ve covered multiple times at Search Engine Land:

• The onus of diversity should not fall to Black marketers
• What does commitment to diversity look like in an organization?
• How inclusion can lead to diversity in marketing and communications
• The business imperative behind inclusion and diversity

But it’s not one and done. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are ongoing efforts and something we need to commit to every day. This is why we’re excited to announce the second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing to celebrate those individuals or organizations who are affecting real change.

We’re elated to announce that this year’s awards will include a guest judge, last year’s winner Areej AbuAli, a pillar in the SEO community and the founder of Women in Tech SEO.

You may nominate as many organizations or individuals as you feel deserve the recognition. We ask that you highlight specific initiatives conducted by the nominee and that in the nomination form you include the contact of someone who can “second” that nomination.

Nominate a person or organization now.

The post Second annual Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing: Nominations open 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, are we doing the work or going through the motions?

My friend and I were taking a walk around our coworking space just to get some fresh air and reset our brains before afternoon calls. We both park in a deck down the road because the parking lot right outside the office is 3-hours only. However, the handicapped spaces directly outside the space are all-day parking. At first, I thought that was pretty cool. Good for this space for being accessible, I thought, and for not making people who use wheelchairs park in the parking deck far away. 

And then I looked at the entrances right outside these parking spots and noticed the ramp was nowhere close. Then I thought about the actual space and how I think I’ve only ever seen one elevator — which is on the other side of the building to the parking spaces.

Just like in life, accessibility on our sites can’t be an afterthought. We’ve been working on an accessibility audit of Search Engine Land, and we encourage you to think about doing the same as you plan your 2022 goals. It can’t just be an afterthought. We have to do the actual work. With the increased focus on user experience in SEO, we need to make sure our sites have a positive experience for all users.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

3 sessions search marketers will want to see at MarTech

How are we handling the data challenge?
MarTech Editorial Director Kim Davis’s keynote explores the importance of data to modern marketing with experts from major brands like HBO Max and El Camino Health.

Guiding company influencers and evangelists to successfully engage on LinkedIn
Join Darryl Praill, CRO at VanillaSoft, as he explains how he interacts on LinkedIn, who he responds to, who he completely ignores and why.

Is your brand ready for the search-first age?
Deepcrawl shows why CMOs need to shift from being search-shy marketers to become search-first CMOs.

Get your free pass now.

Video and vertical-based product ads pilots arrive on Microsoft Audience Network

Video ads and vertical-based product ads are now being piloted on the Microsoft Audience Network, Microsoft announced yesterday. In the announcement, the company also revealed disclaimers in ads, new third-party integrations with Universal Event Tracking, flexible insertion orders and inline appeals for rejected offers in Microsoft Merchant Center.

Why we care. While unlikely to be game-changing, Microsoft Advertising’s September announcements offer a variety of quality-of-life improvements for paid search marketers:

• Microsoft Audience Network’s new video format may help brands increase awareness as well as engagement with their ads.
• Disclaimers in ads may help advertisers in regulated industries stay compliant.
• Inline appeals may help decrease the amount of time your team spends reaching out to Microsoft Advertising’s support team. This can be especially useful for resolving rejections during the holiday shopping season, a crucial time of the year for many merchants.
• The new UET integrations may mean a simpler setup process for event tracking.
• Flexible insertion orders may provide advertisers with a more versatile way to manage their budgets.

Read more here.

81% of B2B tech marketers believe the importance of SEO has increased in the last 12 months

SEO budgets in B2B have reflected this increase in importance as over a quarter of B2B tech companies have increased their investment in SEO in the past year, according to data from FINITE, the global B2B technology marketing community.

However, with the increased emphasis on SEO and budgets related to it, only half of B2B tech has an SEO strategy. The report also found that most of the SEO efforts in this industry are being performed in-house: “Only 28% of B2B tech marketers rely on third parties to help with their SEO strategies.”

Attribution is a challenge even outside this industry, but FINITE’s data found that nearly half of all B2B tech marketers struggle to measure the impact of organic search. What were the other big challenges for the respondents?

• technical SEO (38%),
• link building (21%) and 
• content creation (21%)

Why we care. This information could help agency and in-house marketers looking to make the move to B2B tech/SaaS. Even more companies are seeing the value in organic search optimization, but are missing out on strategy and implementation best practices. Knowing this can help search marketers craft proposals and help these companies hone in on the best ways to improve their SEO.

Search Shorts: End of ETAs #PPCChat, reducing churn, and stats in content

#PPCChat on RSAs and ETAs. Check out the advice, thoughts, and reactions from the experts in yesterday’s #PPCChat about the end of ETAs.

3 ways to reduce customer churn with content marketing. No matter how large they are, even multinational corporations aren’t immune to customer churn. But there’s a way to retain customers – and it all starts with content marketing.

Truth or Dare: How to use statistics in your content. Statistics actually have the power to make your content more engaging and compelling. When you use them the right way, statistics can help you tell an even better story than you could with words alone.

What We’re Reading: The secret to happiness at work

Job satisfaction is up, according to this piece in The Atlantic by Arthur C. Brooks. “In 2020, despite the fact that millions of Americans had shifted to remote work, 89 percent said they were either ‘completely’ or ‘somewhat’ satisfied,” he wrote. Brooks teaches graduate classes and says his students often assume that, in order to love your job, it has to be your “dream” job: “one where your skills meet your passions, you make good money, and you are excited to get to work each day.” 

But, says Brooks, that’s not what drives satisfaction at work. “After all, how many kids say, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to be a quality-assurance analyst’?” And, how many of us knew we wanted to be search marketers when we were asked our future career aspirations as children? I think mine shifted from marine biologist to broadway star to writer as I got older. And here I am in search.

To really be satisfied with work, Brooks says your job needs two things:

1. Earned success. Earned success gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy. Employers who give clear guidance and feedback, reward merit, and encourage their employees to develop new skills are the most likely to give you those feelings.
2. Service to others. This is the sense that your job is making the world a better place. That doesn’t mean you need to volunteer or work for a charity to be happy, but that you’re helping make the world a better place for someone or making their life easier.

So what’s the secret to happiness at work? “Rather than relentlessly pursuing a ‘perfect match’ career that they’re sure will make them happy, a better approach is to remain flexible on the exact job, while searching for the values and culture that fit with theirs,” said Brooks.

The post New pilots from Microsoft Ads and the secret to happiness at work; Wednesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Microsoft has opened up its Bing content submission API after over two and half years of it being in a private beta. The content submission API is different from the Bing URL submission API, in that the content submission API lets you submit not just your URLs but also your content, images, HTML and more directly to Bing’s index.

Microsoft said “the API provides the ability for webmasters to notify Bing directly about the changes in their site content in real-time.”

Bing Content Submission API. The Content Submission API is a method that enables websites to directly send content to Microsoft Bing whenever website contents is updated or created without waiting for BingBot crawl. This is different from the URL submission API. With the URL submission API you only can send URLs for Bing to crawl and index. With the Content Submission API you not only send the URL but you send along the your HTML, content, images and so on directly to Bing to index, technically bypassing the crawling process completely.

Open to all. After expanding the beta version of this in May, Microsoft said “with an overwhelming response and great feedbacks from website owners who had adopted the API, we are pleased to announce that Bing Content Submission API is now open for all to implement and to start sending their content changes to Bing, not only to reach more relevant users on Bing but also to reduce bingbot crawl load on their sites.”

API documentation. You can learn more about how to technically send this information to the Bing API within the Bing API docs. Here is a screenshot of a JSON request example:

Why use it. Bing says it not only helps you get your content and pages into Microsoft Bing Search faster but also “will reduce BingBot crawl load on your sites.”

How to get started. Microsoft said you will need to request an API key within Bing Webmaster Tools. This API key can be generated from Bing Webmaster Tools by following these steps:  

1. Sign in to your account on Bing Webmaster Tools. In case you do not already have a Bing Webmaster account, sign up today using any of Microsoft, Google or Facebook ID.
2. Add & verify the site that you want to submit URL for through the API, if not already done. 
3. Click on Settings button on top right corner and then go to API Access section. If you are generating the API key for the first time, please click Generate to create an API Key. Else you will see the key previously generated

The company shared code examples in its API docs on how to submit this content through the API.

Why we care. This solution not only helps expedite indexing for your new or updated URLs like the Content Submission API offered, but it also bypasses the crawling of that content and lets you submit content directly to the search engine. This solution might be something you want to test out on your sites or client sites and see if it makes a big difference on indexing and your server resources.

The post Bing content submission API now available to all appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Bing has introduced “Make Every feature Binary” (MEB), a large-scale sparse model that complements its production Transformer models to improve search relevance, the company announced Wednesday. 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.

What MEB does. MEB maps single facts to features, which helps it achieve a more nuanced understanding of individual facts. The goal behind MEB seems to be to better mimic how the human mind processes potential answers.

This stands in contrast to many deep neural network (DNN) language models that may overgeneralize when filling in the blank for “______ can fly,” Bing provided as an example. Most DNN language models might fill the blank with the word “birds”.

“MEB avoids this by assigning each fact to a feature, so it can assign weights that distinguish between the ability to fly in, say, a penguin and a puffin,” Bing said in the announcement, “It can do this for each of the characteristics that make a bird—or any entity or object for that matter—singular. Instead of saying ‘birds can fly,’ MEB paired with Transformer models can take this to another level of classification, saying ‘birds can fly, except ostriches, penguins, and these other birds.’”

Discerning hidden intent. “When looking into the top features learned by MEB, we found it can learn hidden intents between query and document,” Bing said.

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. Hotmail was rebranded as Microsoft Outlook and MEB was able to pick up on this relationship. Similarly, it learned the connection between “Fox31” and “KDVR” (despite there being no overt semantic connection between the two phrases), where KDVR is the call sign of the TV channel that operates under the brand Fox31.

MEB can also identify negative relationships between phrases, which helps it understand what users don’t want to see for a given query. In the examples Bing provided, users searching for “baseball” don’t typically click on pages talking about “hockey” even though the two are both popular sports, and the same applies to 瑜伽 (yoga) and documents containing 歌舞 (dancing and singing).

Training and scale. MEB is trained on three years of Bing search that contain more than 500 billion query/document pairs. For each search impression, Bing uses heuristics to gauge whether the user was satisfied with the result they clicked on. The “satisfactory” documents are labeled as positive samples and other documents in the same impression are labeled as negative samples. Binary features are then extracted from the query text, document URL, title and body text of each query/document pair and fed into a sparse neural network model. Bing provides more specific details on how MEB works in its official announcement.

Even after being implemented into Bing, MEB is refreshed daily by continuously training on the latest daily click data (as shown above). To help mitigate the impact of stale features, each feature’s timestamps are checked and the ones that have not shown up in the last 500 days are filtered out. The daily deployment of the updated model is also fully automated.

What it means for Bing Search. As mentioned above, introducing MEB on top of Bing’s production Transformer models has resulted in:

• An almost 2% increase in clickthrough rate on the top search results (above the fold) without the need to scroll down.
• A reduction in manual query reformulation by more than 1%.
• A reduction of clicks on pagination by over 1.5%.

Why we care. Improved search relevance means that users are more likely to find what they’re looking for faster, on the first page of results, without the need to reformulate their queries. For marketers, this also means that if you’re on page 2 of the search results, your content probably isn’t relevant to the search.

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, MEB’s understanding of correlated phrases (e.g., “Hotmail” and “Microsoft Outlook”) and negative relationships (e.g., “baseball” and “hockey”) 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.

For the search industry, this may help Bing maintain its position. Google has already laid out its vision for MUM (although we’re far from seeing its full potential in action), and MEB may bolster Bing’s traditional search capabilities, which will help it continue to compete against the industry leader and other search engines.

The post Meet Make Every feature Binary: Bing’s sparse neural network for improved search relevance appeared first on Search Engine Land.