SEO tool provider Semrush has announced plans to acquire competitive intelligence and sales enablement platform Kompyte.

Why we care. Semrush is a major player in the SEO tool space, and this announcement, along with its recent acquisition of Backlinko, shows that the company is serious about expanding both its audience and capabilities for search marketing as well as sales teams. 

The acquisition may also provide Semrush with a path to increasing the business it’s already doing with existing users: “Kompyte is the perfect product to upsell to our existing customers who already use our competitive intelligence features,” Eugene Levin, chief strategy and corporate development officer at Semrush, said in the announcement. “With an average ARR [annual recurring revenue] per customer of about $20,000, there’s a great opportunity for us to elevate our customers to the next level.”

More anecdotally, demand for SEO professionals has risen over recent years, especially since the outset of the pandemic. That may make SEO tools a more common part of MarTech stacks, fueling growth for tool providers.

What Kompyte does. Based in Austin, TX, Kompyte offers competitive analysis tools that help marketers track changes on a competitor’s site, ad copy, social media and more. It’s products are designed primarily for marketing, product development, and sales and enablement teams.

Why Semrush wants Kompyte. Semrush’s goal with this acquisition is to diversify its offerings from search marketing-specific tools to products for a wider audience of professionals. “We were always looking for a MarTech product that uses market data to bring other teams to the table,” Levin said.

“The acquisition will expand Semrush’s ability to help its customers beyond their marketing departments, especially considering 88% of Kompyte’s total user base falls within sales organizations,” the announcement said.

In addition, Kompyte’s technology will be used to expand on .Trends, Semrush’s existing competitive intelligence feature.

The post Semrush buys Kompyte so it can upsell competitive intelligence tools appeared first on Search Engine Land.

SMX Advanced, the premier conference for experienced senior-level search marketers, returns virtually this year on June 14-15.

As always, the educational event program will cover the most advanced and timely search topics in both PPC and SEO.

For the SEO track, we’re looking for session pitches on several different topics, including:

• How UX, SEO and content must work in harmony.
• The importance of technical SEO.
• Ways to optimize content for rich results.
• Case studies of scaling content with AI.
• Frameworks for measuring ROI.

In the PPC track, we’re looking for sessions that address the loss of control marketers are feeling and the shift to fully automated campaigns, as well as measuring and reporting at a time when less data is available.

Even if you haven’t spoken before, consider submitting a session topic idea now. We are always looking for new speakers with diverse points of view. The deadline for SMX Advanced pitches is April 15!

Here are a few tips for submitting a compelling session proposal:

• Present an original idea and/or unique session format.
• Include details about what an attendee will be able to do better or different as a result of attending your session.
• Include a case study or specific examples and explain how they can be applied in different types of organizations.
• Be realistic about what you can present in 30 minutes. You can’t cover everything about your topic. Going more in-depth on a narrow topic is often more valuable to the attendee.
• Provide tangible takeaways and a plan of action.

Jump over to this page for more details on how to submit a session idea, or directly to this page to create your profile and submit a session pitch.

If you have questions, feel free to reach out to me directly at kbushman@thirddoormedia.com. I’m looking forward to reading your proposals!

The post Want to speak at SMX Advanced? We want to hear your ideas appeared first on Search Engine Land.

In SEO, you have access to so much data. But what good is all that data if you aren’t turning it into actionable strategies that have a clear and measurable impact?

Used correctly, you can do many things with Google Analytics combined with Data Studio: pulling data, turning it into insights, and then using those insights to acquire, serve and retain customers.

Ready to learn how to turn your challenges into solutions? Here’s how to transform your data into relevant and impactful SEO actions.

1. Dealing with data

Data is the foundation of Google Analytics and the greatest obstacle. To make the most of it, you’ll need simple access to high-quality data in one spot.

Challenges

Creating a Dashboard

Taking the data from Google Analytics and other sources and synthesizing it into a dashboard is a common struggle among users. You are not alone in this. In the report “Global State of Consumer Analytics Survey” (Forrester/Burtch Works Q3 2019), providing quality data from various sources is one of the top concerns for analytics and measurement professionals.

A well-built dashboard will translate and display data in a way that will allow you to understand your audience. A dashboard should provide the level of detail on your audience behavior and the effectiveness of your campaigns, enabling you to make decisions that will impact revenue.

Trying to DIY

Although access to data is a top concern, many businesses try to take on the challenge of creating an effective dashboard by themselves. Unfortunately, these businesses might not have the resources or expertise to do these tasks themselves, and that’s fine.

So, what is the impact of not having an effective dashboard in place?

An effective dashboard containing relevant Google Analytics data about your audience and their behavior and providing data from other sources can determine the route your SEO strategy will take.

However, to translate insights into relevant actions in an SEO strategy, businesses should strongly consider whether their internal resources have the expertise and availability required to build and maintain a sustainable process for ingesting, enriching, harmonizing, and visualizing data, making it available to the right department in your business.

Solutions

Put everything in one place

Consider data as a sequence. You might not want to depend on your data if it is primarily incomplete, especially for the route your SEO strategy could take: focusing on rankings and search volumes (not good) or focusing on audience, behavior, shopping experience and revenue (ideal).

Data studio will allow you to integrate data from several sources: Google Analytics, Semrush and others. If your data is relatively complete and visible in one place, it is a good starting point.

Here are two sources to get you started on Data Studio:

• Getting started with Data Studio
• Getting started with Google Data Studio

Training

If your team has the passion and availability but needs that extra on how to pull, clean and centralize data, don’t just give them a few hours a day so they can find out how to do so themselves. If you have the capabilities, bringing training to your business or sending your team to be trained is also a good solution.

For example, have them attend SMX Master Classes – Google Analytics 4 and Data Studio training – March 8-9.

Bring a consultant

Consultants might be an expensive upfront investment, but they can help you get insights and solutions faster and more efficiently, resulting in a considerable return on investment.

Synchronize teams, processes, objectives

Clarity is key. It is important to agree from the start on specific user-centric KPIs and how the correct data will assist you in achieving your objectives.

For example, if you want to increase customer retention, what data will you need to score to retain as many customers as possible? Once you have the retention scores, what action can you take? Does everyone on your team agree?

2. Building a dashboard

Many businesses have a plethora of data from multiple sources but little understanding of their target audience. The key to uncovering possibilities and turning those insights into actions is deciding how you’ll use data on a dashboard.

Challenge: Differentiating your audience

Personalization is necessary for determining what your audience wants and how to obtain the most value from them. Having clean, high-quality data from reliable sources sometimes isn’t enough.

Segmenting your user base is a good start, but it won’t provide you with the level of data you need to maximize your ROI.

These days your audience has too many choices, which is why it is crucial to have a Dashboard that will provide a view of your audiences in as much detail as you can (more than just behavior, location and devices they come from).

A dashboard with data from Google Analytics and other relevant sources can create personalized shopping experiences and content for landing pages and publications that your audience will read and follow.

“78% of consumers said personalized content as well as good user experience, made them more likely to repurchase”

McKinsey & Company, Next in Personalization 2021 Report, November 2021

Solution: Build a dashboard focused on your audience, campaigns, revenue

How do you decide which elements to use on your dashboard when you have multiple choices, many of which could likely deliver results?

Consider developing a user-centric dashboard to provide you with information about your target audience. Data that may be used to upsell, cross-sell and retain existing customers rather than gain new ones (retention is up to 95 percent more profitable than acquisition, according to research from Bain & Company, in part because you already have the data).

Here are more resources on how to create a useful Dashboard:

• 50 Data Studio Templates
• Technical SEO audit Data Studio Templates
• Instagram Insights Reporting – Free Template and Tutorial (Excellent for audience insights)
• Data Studio Dashboard for Web Stories

3. Converting data into actionable SEO strategies

Now it is time to extract all of the value you’ve invested in your data and dashboard. This is the most crucial step, where you’ll decide on the best course of action to have the biggest influence on your SEO strategy.

Challenges

A sophisticated dashboard is not an action or decision

Businesses often lose sight of the fact that they need to act. It is common to see teams spending all their efforts on getting approval for a Google Analytics consultancy project (audit, tracking, dashboards). However, no matter how sophisticated a report is, that fancy dashboard is only a synthesis of your data at the end of the day.

It would be best to have the right team with the right processes to turn these insights into action.

Being receptive to different insights

Also, be prepared for unexpected findings that reveal something completely new about your audience or business. Businesses sometimes want to hear insights that support and justify what they’re currently doing. That isn’t always a good thing if revenue is your top focus.

Getting buy-in from business stakeholders

People will struggle to recognize the value of measurement in analytics and execute the strategy if there isn’t adequate data education. Gaining buy-in from the business decision-makers is critical, especially when so many departments (SEO, development, PR, content, etc.) must collaborate closely.

Solutions

Collaboration from the start and the feeling of certainty

Getting buy-in early on in a project implies that everyone is on the same page about the present condition and the final goals.

When you know who your audience is and what you want to achieve, you can establish certainty and trust within your team, which will help you overcome any reluctance to change and produce results. Feeling and acting with certainty get the message across to the senior stakeholders.

Feeling uncertain when negotiating a change, buy-in, or an implementation? Good luck trying to get a result.

Close the cycle, learn and start again

Measuring is an ongoing process. A successful business continuously evaluates the performance of its campaigns regularly, refines them based on new data and facts, then retrains the model and repeats the process.

Remember that successful SEO tactics are marked by a disciplined approach, an experimental attitude and a desire to explore new possibilities. Always have a user in mind, not an algorithm.

The post How to turn data into insights and impactful SEO strategies appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Microsoft made a few announcements this week on the Bing webmaster blog around more software providers adding support for IndexNow leading to millions of sites using IndexNow since its launch in October 2021. Part of these announces have that Duda, All in One WordPress SEO plugin and Rank Math SEO plugin all added IndexNow integration into their systems.

What is IndexNow. IndexNow provides a method for websites owners to instantly inform search engines about latest content changes on their website. IndexNow is a simple ping protocol so that search engines know that a URL and its content has been added, updated, or deleted, allowing search engines to quickly reflect this change in their search results. The co-sharing of IndexNow went fully live last month in January 2022.

Millions of sites using IndexNow. Last November, Cloudflare announced it added integration with IndexNow and 60,000 websites turned on that feature. Microsoft released a simple to use WordPress plugin for IndexNow and Google announced it would be testing this protocol. Then last month, Microsoft said 80,000 websites are now using IndexNow for URL submission. We are now up to millions of sites adopting IndexNow, just several months after IndexNow was initially rolled out.

New adoption. In these three announcements, we had the number 20 CMS platform on the internet, Duda announce they have enabled IndexNow by default across nearly 1 million active websites. The All In One WordPress SEO plugin announced it added support for IndexNow to the over 2 million sites that use its plugin. To activate and use IndexNow with AIOSEO, users can head over to the Feature Manager tab in the AIOSEO dashboard, where they’ll find the option to activate the addon. Then Rank Math SEO plugin announced it added support to the 1.1 million sites that use their plugin. Check out those individual blog posts to learn how to activate IndexNow if you use those tools.

How it works. The protocol is very simple — all you need to do is create a key on your server, and then post a URL to the search engine to notify IndexNow-participating search engines of the change. The steps include:

1. Generate a key supported by the protocol using the online key generation tool.
2. Host the key in text file named with the value of the key at the root of your web site.
3. Start submitting URLs when your URLs are added, updated, or deleted. You can submit one URL or a set of URLs per API call.

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.

Now with these three new software players adding support, it makes adoption even easier for millions of sites.

The post IndexNow integrations grow as Bing says ‘millions’ of sites are using it appeared first on Search Engine Land.

BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform, has acquired technical SEO platform Oncrawl. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

Oncrawl will continue to run as its own company. Both customer bases will soon have access to additional technology without an accompanying price hike. 

What it means for BrightEdge. This acquisition mirrors the merging of SEO and data science. It will allow BrightEdge to perform sophisticated data scientist tasks in their website analysis to complement the work they are already doing on the platform, BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu said. He added that this acquisition is good news for digital marketers who want to scale campaigns with speed and precision.

SEO is creating more data than ever – too much for anyone to process without the right marketing technology, Yu said. Data analysis for SEO is complex – and most SEOs aren’t data scientists. So this acquisition means that BrightEdge users can combine Oncrawl’s “zero-code” data science with BrightEdge’s enterprise data and automation. 

“We saw a big opportunity to help SEOs be more effective at driving performance with data, without having to become data scientists,” Yu said.

Oncrawl is the third acquisition for BrightEdge, which was founded in 2007 and has more than 2,000 customers. In 2019, BrightEdge acquired Trilibis, which was crucial in developing their Autopilot offering. 

What it means for Oncrawl. Oncrawl will still run independently but under the BrightEdge umbrella, Yu said. Typically, when there is a merger, one company absorbs the other, and its customers and employees can suffer in the aftermath. Yu said that would not be the case here.

Oncrawl users will soon be able to start benefiting from BrightEdge’s advanced automation and data visualization technology. 

Oncrawl, founded in 2013, has 50 employees, more than 1,000 clients, and raised more than $4 million in funding since 2013.

Why we care. 2022 is shaping up to be a year of mergers and acquisitions in the SEO space – this is the third notable shakeup in the search market. Already this year, Semrush has acquired Backlinko, a move meant to prop up its content distribution. On the software front, Conductor recently acquired ContentKing. Plus, Moz was acquired by iContact last June. All of these changes have implications for users of these tools/platforms. In this case, for now, it seems like things will remain status quo for both BrightEdge and Oncrawl customers – we’ll have to wait until the company’s annual Share event in May to learn additional details about what the path forward looks like, and any implications or advantages for customers.  

The post BrightEdge acquires Oncrawl in enterprise SEO shakeup appeared first on Search Engine Land.

On February 8, 2022, Google released a document to the U.S. Copyright Office saying “when a site is demoted [by the Pirate update], the traffic Google Search sends it drops, on average, by 89% on average.” This is a statement about Google’s efforts to remove sites that “received a large number of valid removal notices” as DMCA requires, hence the Google Pirate update from 2012.

The Pirate update. The Pirate update, which Google originally called the DMCA update, looked at if a site had a large number of DMCA takedown requests and if so, it demoted the site. Google officially only confirmed updating this algorithm once after its launch in 2012, that was in 2014. It is without a question that Google runs this algorithm update periodically to catch new sites that may be copying copyrighted content from others. But Google clearly does not announce each time the search company runs this update.

Google said in the new PDF document “we have developed a ‘demotion signal’ for Google Search that causes sites for which we have received a large number of valid removal notices to appear much lower in search results.”

89% demotion. This PDF document written by Google states that when sites are demoted by this algorithm, the sites hit on average see 89% less Google Search traffic as a result. The document states “When a site is demoted, the traffic Google Search sends it drops, on average, by 89% on average.”

Redirect tricks. Google also said that it has a flag named “still-in-theaters/prerelease” that will pick up on when a site hit by this update redirects to a new domain without that flag. Google said, “We have also made it much harder for infringing sites to evade demotion by redirecting people to a new domain.” Google added “we have added a “still-in-theaters/prerelease” flag for DMCA notices involving this category of content to enhance the Search demotion signal.”

This report comes via TorretFreak, a publication that tracks the latest news about copyright, privacy and related topics. Also, a hat tip to @GlennGabe for notifying me of this.

Why we care. If a site gets too many (how many is unknown) DMCA takedown requests, it can lead to that site being hit by this Pirate update. If a site gets hit by the Pirate update, you can expect, on average, 89% less traffic from Google Search to that site. And no, redirecting that site to a new domain name won’t seem to help you.

So if you run into any clients during an audit that have these notices, which you might see Search Console notification, then maybe check the Google transparency report for the domain and then maybe request reconsiderations after cleaning up the issues.

The post Google’s Pirate Update can cause 89% drop in search traffic for offending site appeared first on Search Engine Land.