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 not going to lie.

Every time I write the Friday newsletter it takes a lot not to type, “It’s Friday. Friday! Gotta get down on Fri-hi-day-hay. Everyone’s looking forward to the weekend, weekend.” I sing it to myself every Friday newsletter. So there. I sincerely hope you sing it to yourself all day long too. 

It makes me think about when this song first came out. It went viral pretty quickly. We all cringe-listened because it wasn’t good but it sure was delightful. If you’ve worked in marketing for a while, there’s a very high chance you’ve been asking how to make some client or company asset “go viral” like this song. 

Of course, we know it’s not that simple. There’s a special combination of factors (often completely out of our control) that make phenomenons take off like Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Search marketing (even PPC) is more about the long game — the testing, the learning period, the slow accumulation of links and content, etc.

But in the end, the slow build is better than the firecracker hit. While the viral song only pops up when I force it on people, what we’re building will continue to serve us, our businesses, and the searchers looking for answers online.

Oh, and I hope your weekend is all partying, partying! Yeah! Fun, fun, fun!

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

How to test your content site strategy for continued improvement

Assessing the effectiveness of your content strategy is an integral part of growing your organic visibility as well as furthering your skills as an SEO. Techniques like forecasting can help you estimate the value a piece of content or site change may generate for your business, but failing to record the real-life performance associated with those changes and comparing them with your forecasts may mean that you’re overlooking takeaways that can be used to improve future initiatives.

At SMX Convert, Alexis Sanders, SEO director at Merkle, shared the tactics that she uses to analyze site strategies for continued improvement. While the techniques mostly pertain to content, they can also be applied to other aspects of a site, like user experience.

• Forecasting: Clickthrough rate curve estimates can help you predict incremental traffic lift. “We [calculate] that using the search volume multiplied by the clickthrough rate of our forecasted rank subtracted by our current rank,” Sanders said.
• Case studies: Maintain a record of your internal case studies and links to relevant articles about case studies for initiatives that you may want to attempt in the future. Accumulating all this information will help you get a better idea of how your proposed content may perform.
• Competitive research: Competitors’ rankings, estimated traffic and search volume are going to be the most useful metrics for forecasting. You can use this information to estimate whether you’ll outperform a competitor based on what you’re going to do and your level of authority within the space.
• Pre-reads: Interviewing a small sample of your target audience can help you gather feedback and refine your content, as well as inform you about potential hurdles like readability and accessibility.
• Split testing: Ensure that search engine bots are receiving the experience you want them to. If there is the potential for search engine bots to find one of your alternative experience URLs, it’s best to 302 redirect to the main URL.

Read more here.

How and why you should pause paid search (for science) 

With the right structure and parameters, pausing paid search can be an invaluable source of data for PPC professionals.

When it comes to demonstrating return, Sr. Paid Search Analyst at Uproer, John Smith wagers most PPC professionals measure some variation of total revenue over total cost: “If it’s high, we’re doing well. If not, we rethink and rework until we hit the ROAS we want.”

That’s not inherently bad. It’s a quickfire estimate of efficacy, and Smith says he finds himself doing the same thing, but “the problem is that number doesn’t tell us much. It doesn’t tell us if we actually lost money buying users who would have converted anyway. And it doesn’t show what might have happened if we simply didn’t spend.”

Read more here.

Search Shorts: A title tag case study, why no one cares about your content and limiting PPC waste

• Tackling 8,000 title tag rewrites: A case study. Dr. Pete recently dug in to over 50,000 Moz title tags to understand the impact of Google’s rewrite update.
• You want to know the truth about content marketing? Nobody cares about your product or service. 
• A new way to approach your PPC personas. Learning from the sales process to limit waste and accelerate ROI.

What We’re Reading: UN says we should cool it on AI that could potentially affect human rights

“The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday called for a moratorium on the sale and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that threaten human rights until adequate safeguards are in place to ensure the technology will not be abused,” according to Al Jazeera.

The AI in question refers to those that affect “who gets public services and decide who has a chance to be recruited for a job” with the idea that data collection isn’t totally private and can risk discrimination against those online.

But there could be even wider implications for search engines and search marketers if the moratorium were to actually take effect. Bachelet released a report detailing “the risks of AI technologies, and emphasising that while AI can serve as a force for good, it can also cause catastrophic effects if used irresponsibly.”

“The complexity of the data environment, algorithms and models underlying the development and operation of AI systems, as well as intentional secrecy of government and private actors are factors undermining meaningful ways for the public to understand the effects of AI systems on human rights and society,” said the report.

Yes, AI does help search marketers, but Google’s unfettered and undisclosed use of it could potentially be contributing to this discrimination. We’ve seen it before when Google Ads settings allowed advertisers to discriminate against people multiple times.

Will a moratorium actually take effect? Probably not. AI is so ingrained in our technology now. But we could benefit from more transparency around how big tech is using it.

Hat tip to Doug Thomas for the heads up on this news.

The post SEO testing for continuous improvement; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Assessing the effectiveness of your content strategy is an integral part of growing your organic visibility as well as furthering your skills as an SEO. Techniques like forecasting can help you estimate the value a new piece of content or site change may generate for your business, but failing to record the real-life performance associated with those changes and comparing them with your forecasts may mean that you’re overlooking takeaways that can be used to improve future initiatives.

At SMX Convert, Alexis Sanders, SEO director at Merkle, shared the tactics that she uses to analyze site strategies for continued improvement. While the techniques mostly pertain to content, they can also be applied to other aspects of a site, like user experience.

Potential roadblocks to experimenting and testing your strategy

Experimentation can help you figure out what works best for your brand and its audience, but only if you’re able to ensure the integrity of your experiments and overcome the challenges associated with them.

High level of effort. Forecasting can require a high level of effort, skill, comfort with analytics and time. You’ll also have to determine a model to work with and formulate an approach that ensures consistency. Fortunately, the effort involved may decrease over time: “You can become better at it, but it takes extra time and it takes time away from the action and so that’s one of the challenges that a lot of people have to face,” Sanders said.

Multiple moving pieces. Large sites also typically have many people working to implement different things across the site. An e-commerce site, for example, may have different teams dedicated to merchandising, inventory, updating pricing and development. “So, extrapolating a driver can be very challenging on a large site, and making sure to have that accurate record of what is actually going on is absolutely critical,” she said.

Time. In order to get an accurate depiction of how your changes are impacting your site or business, it’s crucial to record your findings over time. “How often are you going to be reporting on things? When are you ultimately going to see an effect?” Sanders asked, “One of the solutions that we’ve seen at Merkle is by recording at different times and reporting 15 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days after a particular event has occurred and making sure you maintain a record of that.”

Search engines’ reactions. How search engines respond to your content may also present an unexpected challenge: “You may think your content is the best content in the world,” Sanders said, “It may satisfy your users, but search engines, it is their prerogative to determine what is the actual best result … and so there’s a certain level of lack of control that we have over that variable.”

Data infrastructure limitations. “If you’re interested in whether or not users are clicking a specific button or going through a specific path, and you’re not actually recording that information, then you’re not going to be able to report on it,” she said. For those facing these limitations, it’s necessary to set up the appropriate tracking and analytics moving forward so that you can eventually compare data over time.

Backburner burn. With the various action items that SEOs have to tend to on a regular basis, clearing some time in your schedule to report and communicate issues can be difficult. Nevertheless, it’s something that should be prioritized: “If it’s work that you’re doing, if it’s things that can make you more valuable within your organization, it’s something that should be prioritized for both your career and for future SEOs,” Sanders said.

Analyzing the effectiveness of new content

To determine how your audience will perceive your content, “We’re ultimately going to have to rely on is forecasting, to start off with, because that’s going to be our hypothesis,” said Sanders. For this, she recommends relying on historical data, such as case studies and competitor insights, and findings from qualitative tests, which you can conduct on a sample of your target audience.

Case studies. Sanders recommends maintaining a record of your internal case studies and links to relevant articles about case studies for initiatives that you may want to attempt in the future. Accumulating all this information will help you get a better idea of how your proposed content may perform. “Potential KPIs that we’ll be looking at may include revenue, traffic, visibility metrics like impressions, rankings and user engagement metrics,” she added.

Competitive research. Competitors’ rankings, estimated traffic (which may be correlated to rankings) and search volume are going to be the most useful metrics for forecasting. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, BrightEdge, Conductor, AWR and Similarweb can provide you with insights on how your competitors are performing. “This can be really useful if you want to do a specific initiative that is sort of similar to what a competitor is doing,” Sanders said, “You can see how they’re currently performing and then guess whether or not you will outperform them in certain areas based on what you’re actually going to be doing and your level of authority within the space.”

Pre-reads. A pre-read is when you ask a small group that represents your target audience to react to a piece of content. You can interview the group members for their opinions or provide them with surveys. Interviews with screen recordings “can be particularly useful if you’re looking at a site in general, or a functionality, but you can also use it for content,” Sanders said, adding, “What you’re looking for is: Do people have strong opinions about things? Do they have a strong affinity towards a piece of content? What is the ease of reading with this piece of content? Is it accessible to people? Those can be really useful for providing initial feedback and refining what you’re actually going to do with this new piece of content.”

Biological reactions. If your content deals with tough topics, observing your sample audience’s biological reactions, such as eye movement patterns and perspiration, can also be helpful for testing your content strategy. Tools like EyeQuant can help you document how users respond to your content.

Forecasting. Clickthrough rate curve estimates can help you predict incremental traffic lift. “We [calculate] that using the search volume multiplied by the clickthrough rate of our forecasted rank subtracted by our current rank,” Sanders said.

Estimated traffic lift = Search Volume x (Forecasted Rank’s CTR – Current Rank’s CTR)

“This can be really useful if you’re trying to show potential for ranking for certain keywords or keyword sets, or if you’re looking at a large group of keywords, you can just say what would be our incremental value if we increase by one ranking on all these keywords,” she added.

Quantifying the search value of content updates

Trends data.Sometimes it makes more sense to update existing content rather than start from scratch. In this scenario, trends data can also be used to predict performance (in addition to the above-mentioned clickthrough rate curve estimates).

To utilize historic trend data to create forecasts, “We would take a certain model — like Facebook Prophet, a machine learning model, whether it’s linear regression, a SARIMA model, a long/short-term memory recursive neural network machine model — and we would use that by feeding it time-series data of what we currently have of any metric (revenue, traffic, impressions, whatever you want to feed it) and that time series would project out into the future,” Sanders said. Those projections can be combined with findings from your internal case studies to give you an idea of how your content will perform.

Split testing. In certain scenarios, such as testing UX changes, split testing can help you find out what works best to facilitate your users and increase conversions. “For SEO, generally, we don’t want to have duplicate content, so if you’re introducing more than one URL, what you’re going to want to do is ensure that the bots are getting the appropriate experience,” she said, adding, “Or just don’t change the URL at all — ultimately, preserving the URL is generally going to be the best course of action.”

If there is the potential for search engine bots to find one of your alternative experience URLs, it’s best to 302 redirect to the main URL or simply exclude the bot if the test is over a short period of time.

In terms of analysis, user engagement metrics can tell you if users are taking the actions you want them to and whether they’re doing so efficiently (compared to the control experience). Tools like Google Analytics can reveal how your new experience compares in terms of bounce rate, time on page and so on.

Launch and learn. This approach is as simple as it sounds — just launch the proposed change and see what happens.

“A lot of times when you launch, you can basically look at any metric that you’re recording,” Sanders said, “Some of the core ones are going to be the user engagement metrics: How are users acting on your site? Are they completing actions that you want them to do, like clicking buttons, completing forms, are they staying on the site appreciably long?”

The KPIs to look at include revenue, conversions, traffic, visit sessions, organic clicks and impressions, ranking information and so on. Social media engagement can also tell you whether your audience is engaging with a piece of content.

Best practices for experimenting and testing your strategy

“The number one tip I have for you is to maintain an accurate record of events,” Sanders said, “Significant updates, good and bad, are absolutely critical to record — it is what allows us to have indifference towards the results and it’s something that also allows us to quantify risk later on.”

Likewise, it’s important to record site updates or anything else that happens on the site that may affect performance. Industry news and seasonality are also factors worth making note of, as well as search industry-related news, like core algorithm updates that may impact rankings.

As a final piece of advice, Sanders touched on the mindset necessary to conduct experiments that yield trustworthy results: “Be open to qualitative feedback and insights from your core audience members, they may tell you things that you didn’t even think about, which can be really useful for refining a new piece of content or modifying an existing one.”

“Results indifference is absolutely critical to refining your understanding,” she emphasized, “So, make sure you go into it with a lack of caring as to whether or not the content performs but more interest in learning what you can from that.”

Want to see the whole session? Sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.

The post How to test your content site strategy for continued improvement appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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.

This second installment for “Messy SEO” details my process of rectifying the canonicalization issues that arose following the MarTech website consolidation. In Part 1 we discussed fixes for duplicate content issues—redirects. Fixing these issues is expected to address our site’s issue with diluted rankings and a decreased crawl budget.

>> You can read Part 1 of our Messy SEO series here <<

During this process, we discovered some instances where another factor needed to be addressed—canonicalization. Virtually all of the articles on MarTech contained canonical tags pointing to now non-existent URLs.

Unlike redirection—which improves user experience while simultaneously sending ranking signals to search engines—canonicalization addresses the algorithm side of the equation. Specifying which version of a page we want to rank for helps dictate what shows up for your potential site visitors.

Proper page canonicalization ultimately serves the searcher in the long run. It makes it easier for them to find the content we’ve created that best meets their needs.

A crowd of canonicals

As mentioned in our introductory “Messy SEO” article, the new MarTech site was born from the consolidation of Marketing Land and MarTech Today. And between the hundreds of pages between each property, there was a large number of canonical URLs. What’s more, they were pointing to now non-existent pages.

At a first glance, marketers may not see the excess amount of erroneous canonical as a severe issue. After all, only bots can see these tags at a glance, and they don’t direct people to new pages like redirects. Google and other search engines rely on them to ensure the search results are up to date and meet searcher needs. And this is precisely why we in the SEO business must make sure these are set correctly (especially after site consolidations and migrations).

Aligning 

In our site’s situation, the pages that used to be housed on Marketing Land and MarTech Today more often than not contained canonical tags pointing to their previous iterations. So, when Google and other search engines crawl these pages they will receive a signal stating that the canonical version of the content lies on non-existent domains. This won’t add more non-existent URLs into the index, but it will make it take longer to remove the versions that are still listed in the SERPS (of which there are many).

This is why we decided to fix the canonical tag issues alongside the duplicate content consolidation efforts. Aligning our new consolidated URLs with the correct canonical versions will help search engines show the right URL in the results.

To do this, we analyzed the URLs set on each consolidated page via the Yoast SEO plugin. These would be replaced with the new URL version.

Before

After

What happens to the old URLs?

So, we’ve decided what to do about the current canonical tags. We’re going to be replacing the MarTech Today and Marketing Land URLs with the newly consolidated MarTech URLs. This leaves many URLs out there, both in the SERPS and on the MarTech site itself. 

Fortunately, the Third Door Media team already put in redirects from these domains to the new MarTech site, sending a pretty strong signal to search engines. But with a domain as large as ours, it’s taken months for the index to cull the old URLs. We suspect part of this delay has to do with the many articles pointing to the old canonical pages.

Our ultimate goal is to remove the signals on our site pointing to the old URLs, and the canonical tags play a major role in this. But we want to be sure the other types of links on our site are consistent as well. This means we’ll be updating outdated internal links in articles, main pages, sitemaps, and other areas.

In short, we’re going to be getting even messier with our SEO tactics.

Wrapping up

That’s it for the second installment of “Messy SEO.” We’ll continue to go through the steps taken toward cleaning up the messiness of our post-site consolidation. 

Have you had canonical tag issues on your sites? Did find any major improvements after rectifying the issue? Email me at cpatterson@thirddoormedia.com with the subject line Messy SEO Part 2 to let me know. 

The post Messy SEO Part 2: The importance of canonicalization appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Businesses turn to content marketing because it can be an effective method for building brand awareness and guiding customers through their sales funnel. Yet, many have been unable to capitalize on their content marketing initiatives because they haven’t covered all aspects of the customer journey, didn’t keep track of their assets and wasted resources on duplicate content, failed to create unique content or were simply unsuccessful with their outreach efforts.

In her session at SMX Convert, Eve Sangenito, director at Perficient, shared her comprehensive content strategy to engage potential customers at every point in their journey and generate backlinks for greater discoverability and higher rankings.

Understanding the customer and mapping their journey

Your content should exist to serve your brand by serving your audience — that should always be at the center of your planning and execution. “It isn’t so much about what you want to tell your audience; it’s what you understand they want to learn and what’s going to be helpful for them to learn more about your solutions and/or about your industry as a whole,” Sangenito said, adding “Just knowing where they’re coming from is one of the key elements you should be focused on.”

Mapping the journey that a customer typically goes through can also help you build your audience personas while identifying opportunities to answer common questions at each phase of the journey.

“From your business’s standpoint, you want to think about how the customer lifecycle plays into the sales funnel because you’re trying to build relationships with target audiences and target buyers,” Sangenito said.

What audiences typically search for at each stage of the funnel. “We tend to see informational queries when someone is in their awareness phase,” she said, providing the following examples of questions a consumer at the top of the funnel may be asking: “What are the options available to me? What are people saying about those options? How are other people in the market feeling about the information that’s put forth by this organization?”

In the next stage of the funnel, consumers typically seek to educate themselves via how-to articles, studies and influencers. When a potential customer gets to the consideration and evaluation phases, they’re narrowing their options, reading reviews or case studies and comparing prices.

The customer lifecycle continues after the purchase as well. Teaching your customers how to make the most out of your products or services can enrich their experience and providing accessible support via FAQs or videos, for example, will also help to maximize your chances of turning a first-time buyer into a loyal customer.

Once you’ve mapped the journey for a particular persona, you should leverage that map to develop pillar and supporting content topics. This “content topic universe” (more on that below), will help you steer clear of irrelevant topics that may end up leaving your audience with more questions rather than guiding them further down the funnel.

Developing your content topic universe

The personas you’ve created can act as the locus of the content topic universe, enabling you to brainstorm themes that are specific to that type of customer.

“What are some of the common questions based on where they are in their life stages?,” Sangenito asked, using prospective home buyers as an example, “Are they buying a home for retirement? Are they buying a home for the first time?” Marketers can create variations of those topics for different personas and branch out to answer follow-up questions that customers are likely to ask.

Cut down on wasted resources by managing your assets. Taking and maintaining an inventory of your existing content helps you understand what assets you already have at your disposal. This can minimize resources wasted on duplicate content by, for example, helping you distinguish what assets can be updated versus what needs to be created from scratch. “Also, knowing what you have allows you to see the gaps and where your editorial calendar can go in the future,” Sangenito said.

Injecting your brand and goals into the content. Brand and market insights can inform how you actually create the content and, consequently, help to shape what that content does for your business: This is where you can insert your brand’s guidelines to ensure a consistent tone across your content marketing. You can also address topical issues in your industry, differentiate your offerings or tailor your content for a specific purpose (like social sharing), for example.

Creating unique, optimized content

Validate your topic. Before you start writing or creating the content, you’ll first need to confirm that the topic is relevant and of interest to your audience. You can validate your topic while conducting keyword research by looking at the search volume associated with the keywords you’d be targeting.

Align with search intent. Understanding intent for your target keywords is also a critical step: “You can look at the SERP and you can start to understand what kinds of content are being surfaced for someone who’s searching for this topic and you can see whether or not that would fit what you’re trying to accomplish,” Sangenito said. This is also an opportunity to do some research on the competition and how they’re performing in the search results: “[If] what’s being featured [in the search results] is all coming from a single set of organizations, there might be an opportunity to diversify by having your organization produce content on that [topic],” she added.

Differentiating your content. Emulating the top-performing search result is a pitfall you’ll want to avoid. Your competitive analysis should reveal ways to go beyond what’s already out there, enabling you to differentiate your content and your brand. Getting quotes from experts, hiring writers that specialize in the topic or even formatting (an infographic might appeal to your audience more than a listicle, for example) could be meaningful ways to differentiate.

After you’ve compiled your content brief (informed by your personas, journey map, keyword research and competitive analysis), it’s time to pass it on to your content writer or creator. “Make sure that your authors have the knowledge and expertise to write about those topics because the nuances of how they write about it versus the generalist who’s just doing research on their own can really come through and affect the content,” Sangenito said.

Optimizing and editing. Once you have your draft, SEO best practices, such as internal linking, title tag optimization and structured data, can be applied so that your audience can find more information related to your content and continue to move along the customer journey. It’s also important to conduct an editorial review before publishing to ensure that your content conveys professionalism, adheres to your brand tone and serves your business and your readers the way it should.

Building links for more traffic and better rankings

Determine what’s link-worthy. When building backlinks, it’s best to focus on promoting the most relevant and highest quality content for the audience you’re trying to tap into.

Sangenito recommends that marketers ask themselves the questions that the people they’re outreaching to are probably asking: “What’s the scope and scale? How relevant is this content that you want me to link? How many people does it potentially affect or how engaged is the base of people that it will affect and how much will they want to read it? What is that impact potential?”

Content that is able to engage audiences on an emotional level can also be an important factor in whether or not you earn the backlink.

Timing can influence how many backlinks you’re able to attract, as well. “There’s relevance to linking out to both evergreen content or seasonal content, but thinking about that in terms of when you actually publish content to generate organic links, or outreach for it, is something that you should keep top-of-mind,” she added.

Link building strategies. Link building can help you expand your discoverability, drive traffic to the most valuable assets on your site and create a sense of trustworthiness for your brand if you’re able to earn backlinks from authoritative publications. There are numerous ways to approach link building — Sangenito highlighted a few strategies, as shown below.

“You can do tactical elements, like understanding if you have broken inbound links and seeing if you can outreach to the sites that are linking to you to see if they could be updating them,” Sangenito said, adding that PR coverage may be another opportunity to turn a brand mention into a link if it isn’t one already. Reviewing your competitor’s backlinks can reveal sites that may also be open to linking to your brand as well.

Resource-based link building, which involves promoting an existing piece of content that might add value for users of other sites, can also be an effective approach depending on the quality of your content and your outreach skills.

Content marketing isn’t a “one-and-done” tactic

Once the content is created and the backlinks are earned, you’ll want to keep your momentum going by periodically auditing your content inventory and updating assets when appropriate. This will help keep the content that you’ve worked so hard to create and earn backlinks for up-to-date. That way, the content will continue to serve your audience and you can keep performing outreach for that particular asset, further strengthening your brand’s reputation, which should also mean more conversions for your business.

Want to see the whole session? Sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.

The post How to drive the funnel through content marketing and link building appeared first on Search Engine Land.

As part of the page experience update, Google News will be displaying both AMP and non-AMP web content, the company announced in an email to publishers on Friday. The platform will also no longer render article text from RSS feeds in the Google News app; instead, it will send readers directly to publishers’ webpages.

AMP no longer required. “In the coming weeks the Google News app will improve its support for web content, displaying both AMP and non-AMP web content with more regularity from sites worldwide,” the company said in the announcement. 

The AMP framework was previously a requirement to be included in Google News. Now that Google has gotten rid of the requirement, the platform may be a more viable way to attract readers for publishers that didn’t adopt AMP.

“We’ll send readers directly to publishers’ web pages.” Google News will also no longer render article text provided via RSS feeds. As such, the platform is sending readers straight to the publisher’s content hosted on their own site.

The company is also removing functionality in Publisher Center related to feed-based article rendering, including custom Analytics tracking IDs, third-party tracking pixels, custom RSS styling and feed ads. These functionalities are scheduled to be removed in early November.

No change to the way you track traffic. “You will still be able to track and measure all of your Google News traffic through your web site’s existing analytics tracking,” the company said, “Google News performance reports in Search Console will also be unaffected.”

Why we care. We’ve known for some time that the Top stories carousel would be open to non-AMP content, but now we know the same will go for the Google News app. The AMP requirement for Google News may have been a barrier for some publishers, but now that it’s going by the wayside, those publishers may want to get their content onto the platform to potentially attract more readers.

And, as Google stated in the announcement, the Google News performance reports in Search Console are unaffected and your ability to track and measure traffic from Google News remains unchanged.

The post Google News app will display non-AMP content and send readers to publisher pages 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.

Your final chance for industry-wide recognition, awesome social buzz, and a hefty boost to company morale is fast approaching: The 2021 Search Engine Awards entry period closes at the end of this week — Friday, September 3 at 11:59pm PT to be exact!

There’s still time for you to submit your application — especially because the submission process is faster and easier than ever. But before you begin that entry, take a moment to meet the judges, a fabulous panel of seasoned pros across the SEO and PPC spectrum, led by Search Engine Land’s own editorial experts…

… and look over their first-hand advice for what makes a winning SEO or PPC campaign, and thus, a winning Search Engine Land Awards application.

Azeem Ahmad

For me, a successful campaign starts at the end. Yes, you read that right. What I meant by that statement is that for any campaign to be a success, you have to absolutely decide what the measure of success is, and what success looks like for you. Jumping in without clarity often leads to more harm than good for the business.

It’s ok to just say “we want more traffic”, but the great campaigns go a step further and say “with this campaign, we’re looking to increase leads from [x] to [y] – or a [%] YoY growth – by implementing these strategies.”

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Crystal Carter

What makes difference in for a good SEO campaign is a clear understanding of the target audience – what you have to offer and what is most genuinely of value to those users. SEO provides a wealth of user data and insights to underpin content, advertising, promotion, and technical improvements. Putting that targeting to good use makes all the difference.

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Emily Mixon

My tip for a successful PPC campaign is negative fencing, particularly when you’re in a niche product category, and with all the recent match-type updates and close variants. Crucial to maintaining, and especially improving efficiency, campaigns need to be structured in a way to maintain control of keyword targeting and exclusions in an environment where automation is taking over.

For starters, begin with a phrase match-only campaign with a select few keywords, which you know will have a breadth of search queries matching back to them. For example, if you’re selling kitchen appliances, you could target “ovens” and “ranges”, and then collect the data around all of the search queries matching to them over a period of time. It is key to set a cadence for this, and stick to it, or the amount of search queries to sift through could become unmanageable. My cadence, on a good week, is every Monday, pulling the last 7 days of data.

Next, identify the search queries that are driving significant conversion volume, and add them as exact match keywords into an exact match-only version of the campaign. Do not add them as phrase matches to your phrase match campaign. The point here is to funnel traffic to exact match keywords, for which you can tailor specific and relevant ads and landing page experiences, (ex. [double oven wall unit] or [stainless steel gas ranges]). The phrase match keywords have done their job at this point in identifying converting search queries.

Finally, and most importantly, add the new exact match keywords from your exact match campaign as negative exact match keywords in the phrase match campaign. This helps to ensure that those queries hit the exact match keyword, which should have a better Quality Score and CPC’s than phrase match, and frees up budget for the phrase match keywords to find more search query variations.

Also, while combing through the SQR, be sure to add irrelevant search queries such as, “driving ranges” or “dutch ovens” in this example, as negative keywords to the campaign to help reduce wasted spend.

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Anu Adegbola

Regarding what I think makes a successful campaign… a few things straight away come to mind: A good structure based on either site structure, performance of keywords, match types (Broad vs. Phrase vs. Exact).  Clear indication of testing being done (ad copy, bid strategies, match types, etc). Robust use of different bid strategies (but according to performance not just a one size fits all solution.

Varied use of ad copy types – expanded text ads, alongside response search ads, dynamics ads, as well as using extra functions like countdowns, IF statements etc. Indication of regular search query analysis being done. Use of automation as needed.

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Brett Bodofsky

What makes an effective PPC campaign (specifically Google Ads and Microsoft Ads) is a robust structure which allows for ads that are highly tailored to their targeting. The targeting and copy/creative work together, in unison, to help achieve a clearly defined business objective (obtaining leads, sales, customer retention, creating brand awareness). Landing page also plays an important role in the success of a PPC campaign.

A campaign with refined targeting, bids and creative can drive highly qualified traffic to a page. If the page that traffic is sent to is not what a user would expect, has poor functionality, looks unprofessional, that can severely damage the effectiveness of a PPC campaign.

One factor that gets set up outside of campaigns similar to landing pages that can impact effectiveness is the conversion action. For intelligent bidding decisions and iterations to be made campaigns need a proper conversion action to work off of.

Another factor that can make a PPC campaign effective is time. It sounds so simple, but time allows for data to come in, which helps the machine learning make more informed decisions.

• It is the sum of many aspects which create an effective campaign (settings, targeting, bids, budget, creative, messaging, proper tracking, experimentation, demand, landing page, competition, etc). One of these aspects being off in some way can damage the integrity of your campaign and make it less effective.
• A campaign might not always be effective as soon as you launch or even in the first week or 2, but in due time, with more data in the door, it could become effective through means of machine learning having more to optimize off of and any manual optimizations/iterations the practitioner makes.

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