IndexNow has now been turned on by over 60,000 websites that use Cloudflare in less than two months after IndexNow was announced by Microsoft. IndexNow is an open protocol that any search engine can participate in to enable site owners to have their pages and content instantly indexed by the search engine. 

Microsoft and Cloudflare announced today that “more than 60,000 unique websites that have opted-in to Crawler Hints. Those zones have sent Bing about billion Hints for when specific assets on their websites have changed and need to be re-crawled.” I turned it on for the Search Engine Roundtable, my personal search blog, when it was announced.

How to turn it on. It literally is controlled by the flip of a switch in Cloudflare under the crawler hints section that you can access under the cache tab, then under the configuration section:

Microsoft said once this setting is enabled it, IndexNow “will begin sending hints to search engines about when they should crawl particular parts of your website.”

Google may adopt it. Google said recently that it too will test the IndexNow protocol for indexing. So while Microsoft Bing and Yandex are the only two who have fully adopted it, if Google adopts it, you can expect other search engines to as well.

Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing. Plus if you use Cloudflare, it can be turned on with the flip of a switch.

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Q4 is here, and it’s time to ensure your paid search programs drive the success you need for a strong finish in 2021. 

Two short years ago, typical steep discounts and strong promotions were big factors in driving Q4 e-commerce success. Then COVID hit and upended the world. Then 2021 hit with massive strains in supply chains and escalating shipping costs. These factors mean marketers cannot assume vast inventories or even alternative products to satisfy their customers. 

Take, for example, the auto industry. Dealerships cannot get adequate inventories of new vehicles. They are pre-selling allotted vehicles before they even hit the lot, and they wish they had more cars to satisfy huge demand, including for used vehicles. It’s more crucial than ever to reduce ad waste and connect a buyer’s search with THE specific car they are searching for online. Similar challenges confront countless other industries in 2021. 

To win during Q4, your PPC campaigns need to be far more responsive to real-time inventory and other stressors that are flummoxing many marketers. Here are three tips for executing on the new game plan that can help you win as supply chains wreak havoc on your competitors’ campaigns.

The three steps outlined below won’t solve every problem in Q4, but these steps can help you conquer some of the most pressing challenges marketers are facing in the coming few months: 

Step 1: Connect your ads to real-time supply chain and inventory data

After all, you can only sell what you’ll ACTUALLY have on hand or on the way. By connecting real-time data right into a PPC workflow, marketers can pivot quickly and automatically when one line of product sells out, and a much-delayed shipment finally arrives. 

Automated ad creation instantly reflects the new inventory and makes it possible to serve up ads for only the items you can actually deliver. And when automating ads from inventory, there’s no need to stop at simple text ads. Extend the automation to also create RSAs (Responsive Search Ads), RDAs (Responsive Display Ads with images), and DSAs (Dynamic Search Ads). 

Next, use the automation to add hyper-relevant targeting criteria like keywords to serve ads against product-specific searches, including for users who are searching for attributes that align with your inventory data (in the instance of vehicles, think about make, model, color, year, mileage, etc. – or size, color, and other attributes relating to apparel or other products). 

This alignment of inventory data and your PPC programs also allows for automated creation of ETAs and DSAs along with the most popular ad extensions. With RSAs becoming the default ad format, this is a great time to add RSA to your whole account and align your inventory data with ad creation. 

Another nice outcome – when inventory is gone, ads for that product stop, which helps eliminate wasted spend (and frustration for customers). This simple first step gets you on the right track, and you should see benefits quickly. 

Step 2: Optimize your feed to show better ads

While structured data like that found in spreadsheets is commonly used by PPC teams, automatically turning that data into ads may present some problems, especially when the data feed wasn’t built specifically with PPC ads in mind. The problem is that data may be formatted inconsistently, incorrectly, or certain required fields to run ads are simply missing. This is when the need arises to optimize the feed data, a process that must be automated with rules if the advertiser hopes to gain the full time-saving benefits of data-driven ads. 

The data advertisers have access to usually originates from a shopping cart system and may not follow all the strict requirements for what Google needs for ads. For example, the product titles may be too long to fit in an RSA headline component or to fit the title element of a shopping ad. Or the product category data may not map cleanly to Google’s product categories. This is when you will need to optimize the feed before using it to advertise.

The Feed Optimization tool simplifies things like:

• Creating product titles that follow Google’s best practice guidelines. Many data sources are not inherently Google-friendly. Feed Optimization is designed around those guidelines. 
• Standardizing attributes such as colors and sizes. For example, simply replacing all instances of “M” with “Medium” or replacing unusual color names such as “cardinal” with more common references such as “red” result in more impression volume because your keywords are better matched to how users search. 

Think of the impact on automatic creation of relevant ads when the source data is aligned properly. Cleaner inputs = more powerful outputs. 

Step 3: Use Google’s Drafts and Experiments to explore what works best. 

With new data-driven ad strategies in place, it’s time to start testing what works best and prove to your stakeholders that the new strategy is paying off. Drafts and Experiments is a feature-rich tool from Google that offers a lot of horsepower for search marketers but isn’t the most intuitive, fluid add-on in the Google environment. For example, monitoring experiments in Google across more than one account or across multiple experiments can be cumbersome. 

Free scripts or PPC tools like those from Optmyzr can help you see all experiments across accounts in more user-friendly ways, with results and recommendations served up on a single page. The streamlined views via Optmyzr make it much easier to monitor the experiments and take actions according to the results. 

The best PPC practitioners are really good at experimenting. They test, learn, and iterate – and the faster they can do all of that, the more they leave competitors in the dust. 

Masters of automation & optimization become masters of PPC

Paid search pros benefit when they are in the greatest control of the automations at their disposal. The steps noted above can really help position PPC pros to tackle the ever-evolving challenges that confront marketers in Q4 of 2021. The challenges are big, but so are the opportunities to drive exceptional results. Approach Q4 methodically and think automation and optimization at every turn:

• Connect real-time supply chain and inventory data with PPC ads
• Supercharge your data with feed optimization tools that sanitize and standardize the info your PPC management system needs for higher-performing ads
• Experiment, test, react and optimize faster if you want to grow faster

Remember – focus on using automations to remove those task-heavy activities of PPC from your plate. Those who master the automations and then use powerful tools that further free up time and energy for more strategic endeavors are the ones who will have the advantage in the daily battle for paid search dominance. 

We’d love to talk to you 1:1 and give you a demo of how Optmyzr and Campaign Automator go beyond platform-level automations. Empowered PPC pros are the ones who will win! Talk to us about how to get that empowerment right on your desktop. We even offer free trials so you can get started without risk.

The post 3 tips for winning with real-time, inventory-driven ads appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Keyword research is one of the most fundamental practices of SEO. It provides valuable insight into your target audience’s questions and helps inform your content and marketing strategies.

For that reason, a well-orchestrated keyword research strategy can set you up for success. Are you looking to improve the way you’re conducting keyword research?

Join experts from Conductor as they deliver a crash course on keyword research tips, tricks and best practices.

Register today for “Choose the Right Keywords With These Research Tips and Tricks,“ presented by Conductor.

The post Choose the right keywords with these tips and tricks appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google’s SERP is a very competitive environment. For this reason, getting competitive intelligence on its players is a crucial process that helps understand how the search giant assesses various website search campaign activities.

The problem is that when you look at a competitor’s current data, you don’t see the full picture. In other words, you have no way of knowing what they did in the past to get to where they are now. That is until you reverse engineer the process. This is where historical data comes to the rescue. 

This article focuses on how to analyze competitors through the retrospective analysis of their keyword and domain data. Plus, we look into why historical data is important to analyze and why you should prioritize SEO tools that gather such information. 

Note that all of the examples herein are based on analytical, historical data provided by SE Ranking.

1. What competitor insights can you get with historical data?

Whenever you start working with a new client or need to analyze a potential client to prepare a pitch, you need to have access to as much data as possible. 

Besides closely studying their current data on traffic, backlinks, keywords, and rankings, you can uncover a vast pool of data for previous periods by digging into their historical data.

Historical data is exactly what can show you the logic behind a domain’s previous setup. As in, what the domain owners were doing before and what results this led to.

Say you’re analyzing your client’s niche. Once you put together a list of all of your client’s top and direct search competitors, you can perform a comprehensive retrospective analysis of each digital rival to see what makes them tick and find out how they got to where they are today. 

What historical data points should you pay attention to?

Start by analyzing last year’s data on each shortlisted competitor with regard to traffic, backlinks, keywords, and their rankings, and then move up in time month-by-month to identify positive or negative trends.

Please note that whenever you look at a specific data point, you need to analyze it not only in comparison with your client’s site but also see how it correlates with other data points––as they are all interconnected.

• Organic and paid traffic. When analyzing traffic, pay attention to how quickly or slowly a domain’s traffic volume increases each month leading up to real-time data.
• Backlinks and referring domains. During the analysis of the growth dynamics of backlinks and referring domains, it helps to study the Domain Trust of referring domains, their dofollow/nofollow status, as well as the anchor text.
• Keywords. In terms of keywords, pay close attention to their overall number and whether that number went up or down with each month.
• Keyword rankings. Lastly, analyze the keyword rankings dynamics. More specifically, look at how many keywords were ranking among the top 3, 10, 30, 50, 100, and beyond each month.

You can actually look at more data points than the ones outlined here, but we are going to limit the analysis to the most important ones.

Analyzing the data

Once we collect information on these data points and know what their value was each month, we’re able to reveal a lot of actionable insights. Focus on domains that are showing steady growth to uncover opportunities, and analyze less successful ones to avoid repeating their mistakes.

The big question here that you want to get an answer to is this: Which strategy yielded the best results with minimum investments?

With the power of this data, you can look at each domain and find out if, for example, the site was able to drive more traffic by getting links from referring domains with a high Domain Trust score, or if the total amount of target keywords helped the site increase the number of organic visitors.

By gradually moving back in time, you can discover the small steps that were taken by a domain along the way and use that data to improve your clients’ future strategies. Moreover, you can understand if a search engine update caused the SERP players to move around or whether the players’ strategies are, in fact, responsible for their success or failure.

Without access to such historical data, you can waste valuable time and resources doing the guesswork and experimentation yourself. But learning from other people’s mistakes can fast-track your clients’ success.

Now that we’ve covered the value you can get from analyzing historical data on domains, let’s take a look at the benefits of using historical data when working with client websites.

2. Boosting client visibility through historical domain data

Historical data on website traffic and rankings can help figure out what advantages and drawbacks to expect from investing in organic and paid search engine optimization efforts. 

On top of that, by analyzing your clients’ previous achievements along with the work that’s been carried out on their sites and comparing it to their competitors, you will be able to make market predictions with greater accuracy.

In SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool, you can get plenty of SEO insights on the past, going back to February 2020. Naturally, every month the tools get updated with a set of data for the previous month.  

Let’s dive into the tool to see some of the ways SEOs and marketers can take advantage of historical data on domain traffic and rankings.

Have the data to make a great first impression with clients

A big part of working with clients has to do with getting pitches ready, which ideally must convince them to do business with you. But there is one problem that makes it difficult to obtain enough data to have a clear picture of the client’s market share: you can’t access any client accounts to dig into their data. To boot, you can’t access their competitors’ accounts either, but that’s always the case.

To solve this problem, SEO experts leverage paid solutions like SE Ranking’s Competitive Research to get market and SEO data that gives them the necessary historical insights. Through such tools, experts are able to paint a good picture of the journeys client websites went through, as well as their competitors. This ultimately allows agencies to put forward a strategic plan that is a lot more insightful and actionable.

Get more data when gathering competitive intelligence

Having an understanding of how quickly client competitors advance in SERPs and climb the rankings ladder can shed light on the search environment for digital experts. Once agencies have that historical rankings and traffic data on client competition, they are free to compare how their clients and their clients’ digital rivals move forward in search and understand the pace at which client websites need to go in order to reach the set goals.

So, besides using such tools to get historical data on client websites, you are encouraged to dig into the competition as well to gain a competitive edge on the market.

Access historical insights from day one

The vast majority of SEO solutions on the market don’t give you the opportunity to import relevant performance data from other SEO solutions seamlessly. This means that once you sign up for a new SEO tool, you don’t have any way of going back in time through search engine results pages. In most cases, such tools only provide data starting from the date you add the website to the tool as a project and specify which keywords you want to target.

Since SEO experts and digital marketers can’t afford to lose such valuable historical data at the risk of drawing the wrong SEO conclusions, they tend to strongly avoid switching their software solutions.

With SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool, you can get your hands on practically the same historical data on traffic and rankings that you have in your current tool. Sure, it’s not the ideal solution, but it does allow us to see how current results compare to past achievements, regardless of whether or not you were keeping track of a website’s search performance.

Over to you

Historical organic and paid data from Google on domains is practically priceless to SEOs and digital marketers. It’s like going on a treasure hunt guided by a map, which in this case is represented by historical data. Obviously, X doesn’t mark the spot here, but it sure does help stay on the right track towards success. 

Through the power of this data, experts working with clients can get an understanding of past progress, strategy evolution, competitor movement to ultimately put forward a very well-informed SEM and SEO strategy. The best part is that you won’t have to play catch-up if you do decide to switch to a new SEO software solution like SE Ranking—all the data is there as soon as you sign up.

Time travel has already been invented, but at the moment, it only allows us to travel through Google’s SERPs.

Boost your SEO Strategy with Historical Data

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