Core Web Vitals (CWVs) have already impacted search rankings for mobile, and with the desktop rollout now underway, they’re set to gain even greater importance for publishers. Due to complete by late March, we’ll see the familiar trio of CWV pillars incorporated as active measures for determining desktop search success – namely, first input delay (FID), largest contentful paint (LCP), and cumulative layout shift (CLS).

Why Core Web Vitals can no longer be ignored

According to a recent analysis of Chrome’s User Experience Report, Similar Web and global traffic data, only 31% of websites globally are compliant with all three CWV measures on mobile – just five percentage points higher than when CWVs became official KPIs for site evaluation last summer. But compliance with these user-centric metrics has never been more crucial – with those publishers that boost their search status able to drive higher visibility, traffic and revenue, as well as improved user experience. In fact, Google’s own research highlights major gains on mobile of up to 10% ad revenue uplift and 23% higher session duration.

And while site owners might assume they’ll have an easier time with desktop – with its superior connections and faster processing – that’s not necessarily the case. Figures from the Chrome User Experience Report show that, of the top 1000 media sites globally, only 59% meet the requirements for CLS on desktop. That’s even lower than compliance on mobile, at 67%, and leaves publishers at risk of accidental clicks from readers – potentially leading to penalties from Google and a significant hit to revenues.

The risk of sudden changes

Even those with good scores can’t afford to be complacent: often, seemingly minor changes to a site, such as adding a new script or vendor, could cause a sudden drop in scores that isn’t immediately obvious.

For example, one of Clickio’s publisher partners saw a significant fall in their CLS score last July, shortly after making some changes to the setup of their Progressive Web App (PWA).

While there were seemingly no problems with the site’s performance or layout, Clickio’s Web Vitals Monitoring service showed that CLS on mobile had dropped from around 90% to under 60% in just a couple of days. However, by spotting the issue quickly, the publisher could test several solutions and fix the issues fast – before they showed up in Google’s Search Console or impacted the site’s search ranking.

In another case, a publisher working with Clickio had never paid much attention to Core Web Vitals and had not experienced any real issues. This was until last August when they suddenly saw a 16% deduction from their Google AdSense earnings due to invalid traffic.

With this increasing to a 26% deduction in September, the website owner was keen to get to the bottom of the problem and began to look into their Web Vitals scores with our real-user monitoring tool. This showed a CLS score under 60%, but after implementing a few quick CSS changes, the site was soon fully compliant again, with all three metrics above 90% and deductions from Google back to almost zero in November.

Four reasons publishers should set up real-user monitoring

With the desktop rollout bringing new challenges and Core Web Vitals metrics also expected to evolve over time, the only way for publishers to remain agile in the face of change is to set up real-user monitoring.

Specifically, real-user monitoring is vital for the following reasons:

1. Google says so – Despite the tech giant announcing its own Search Console report for desktop URLs, it has openly stated that this analysis doesn’t go deep enough:

“The data provided by Chrome User Experience Report offers a quick way to assess the performance of sites, but it does not provide the detailed, per-page view telemetry that is often necessary to accurately diagnose, monitor, and quickly react to regressions. As a result, we strongly recommend that sites set up their own real-user monitoring.”

Effectively, Google acknowledges site owners’ need for more granular data about how users are experiencing pages.

2. Track real user experience – In other words, publishers need field data. Distinct from lab data, which is gathered in controlled environments with unchanging device and network settings, field data gathers insight into what is happening in the real world, including the impact of varying factors such as differing location, device type, and network quality. With Google utilizing field data for its page experience rankings, publishers must prioritize this resource when learning how users experience their website.

3. Access real-time data – While Google’s tools are generally based on historical data, meaning site owners have to wait weeks for updates, real-user monitoring platforms are based on real-time, real-user data. This means publishers can see how their site performs in-flight and immediately take action. Some services, such as Clickio Web Vitals Monitoring, also allow site owners to set up email alerts – so they’re notified straight away if their vitals drop.

4. Identify specific problems – This ability to see, at a glance, whether a site is compliant with each of the three CWVs, means publishers can quickly spot when their site isn’t up to scratch. By drilling down by page, device, browser, and other dimensions, publishers can pinpoint exactly what needs fixing.

Time to act

The desktop rollout of CWVs is the latest wake-up call for publishers to enhance their site performance. With many already struggling on mobile, site owners now face the possibility of low scores across both environments if they don’t keep a close eye on compliance levels. By using real-user monitoring platforms, publishers can equip themselves with the information required to take stock of their site, understand the user journey, and take swift action to safeguard their search ranking – along with traffic and revenue.

Why not try Clickio’s Web Vitals Monitoring for free? Click here to sign up now, or contact us if you’d like to find out more.

The post Optimizing Core Web Vitals: Why real-user monitoring is key appeared first on Search Engine Land.

“Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of ‘recommendations,’ most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.”

–John Mueller, Google, Reddit Thread

There’s a difference between data and wisdom. That’s why relying only on the recommendations of your SEO software is an inefficient way to do SEO.

SEO tools make life easier for those of us doing SEO. But so many generate busy work that will not move the needle. 

The problem is that if you don’t understand the context behind the tool’s recommendations — if you cannot see the bigger picture on how things connect and you aren’t able to read between the lines when it comes to the data — you won’t be able to execute a successful SEO strategy. 

That isn’t the tool user’s fault. Most SEO software companies market to the masses in such a way that users think they can just follow the tool’s recommendations, and they are doing SEO. 

Even if the SEO software is simple to use, most require training to use it properly. If someone doesn’t do any training, the tool may be fairly useless. If they get the training but don’t have the SEO knowledge to question the data, that’s useless too. 

This is one of the reasons that for years, we’ve had our clients take our SEO training at the outset of their project. It helps them understand the big picture. 

Compounding the problem is that many of the tools out there are based on SEO “best practices.” 

These best practices often come from​​ data in large-scale SEO research studies, which look at a massive amount of search results across all niches and all types of keywords. In other words, generic data not customized to the business or website (think recommendations based on data like “optimal article length”).

Related: Why real-time and customized data matters

This generic data then becomes an SEO “truth” that trickles into every corner of the SEO industry, including practices and SEO software. 

Then, of course, you have to navigate the SEO software’s “branded” metrics, which the company making the tools invented. These metrics, if not understood, can confuse people and even steer them in the wrong direction. 

(See my article on “site authority” for more on why this metric is a false target).

So what ends up happening is that many businesses subscribe to SEO software and blindly follow its recommendations. 

A better way:

• Become educated on an SEO need and find the right tool to help. (Hint, it’s usually not just one SEO tool. See the top SEO software tools our experts use every day). 
• Take the recommendations with a grain of salt and discern which activities are worth the time.

Real SEO tools support the project rather than become the project. Use tools that provide you with the right answers without getting lost in unimportant detail, and focus on applying wisdom to implement successful SEO strategies.

The post The SEO tool you use shouldn’t become the SEO project appeared first on Search Engine Land.

CallRail just released its 2022 Outlook for Digital Marketing Agencies. The good news: “2021 was a good year for agencies, and 2022 is looking even brighter,” said Mary Pat Donnellon, chief revenue officer at CallRail. 

“The report highlights the areas of success agencies saw last year and reveals what challenges they expect to face in 2022 and beyond. With client acquisition a key concern, agencies are utilizing — or plan to utilize in the near future — the latest marketing trends, like conversational marketing and artificial intelligence, to bring in new clients and keep their momentum going.” 

The study surveyed over 500 individuals employed full-time at U.S.-based marketing agencies to also determine how client expectations are projected to change in 2022 and which marketing trends agencies are currently implementing to bolster client acquisition. 

Key findings from the research include: 

2021 saw extensive growth for marketing agencies 

Marketing agencies made big gains in 2021. Respondents said their agencies experienced an average of 54% revenue growth in 2021, with 95% saying their agency met its 2021 revenue goals. 

Much of this success was due to accelerated client growth: 83% of respondents said their agency surpassed its 2021 goals for client growth. With more clients under their belts than ever before, agencies are feeling optimistic about what 2022 has in store for them. 

2022 will see even more growth – and new challenges

A whopping 99% of respondents said they expect their agency to grow in revenue in 2022, and CallRail’s data shows agencies project to experience an average of 68% revenue growth this year. 

Revenue won’t be the only thing getting a boost, however: 85% of respondents said they expect their agency to grow in size in 2022, with hiring new employees emerging as a top priority to keep up with the influx of new clients. 

But this growth doesn’t come without its challenges. Respondents expect hiring and client retention to be more difficult in 2022 than in 2021, but the biggest emergent challenge will be client acquisition. 82% of respondents said this will be more challenging in 2022 than in 2021. 

Why is client acquisition keeping agencies up at night, and what can they do to rise to the challenge? 

Agencies should adopt the latest marketing trends to meet changing expectations 

CallRail’s data reveals that client expectations when choosing an agency are changing. Over the next five years, 98% of respondents believe clients will want to see agencies offer more comprehensive services; 85% said clients will want to see more diverse clientele, and 82% said clients will want to see more specialization. 

To keep up with these new expectations, agencies must evolve with the times. Agencies have been quick to adopt the latest marketing trends and those who haven’t yet plan to do so in the future. Conversational marketing, artificial intelligence (AI), and zero-click searches have emerged as the latest and greatest ways for agencies to bring in new clients. 

The research found that 62% of responding agencies have already implemented conversational marketing. 44% of agencies have already implemented AI, and 39% have implemented zero-click searches. Of those who haven’t yet, 20% plan to utilize conversational marketing, 21% plan to introduce AI, and 30% plan to implement zero-click searches in the next year. 

Choosing not to take advantage of these trends appears to be a detriment to marketing agencies: those that did not meet their 2021 revenue goals were 27% less likely than average to have already implemented AI. Agencies that wish to succeed in 2022 and beyond must adapt and use every tool at their disposal to acquire new clients. 

Client relationships are changing too

Massive growth across the board will also change how agencies handle their client relationships. Right now, reporting is the name of the game. 86% of respondents said reporting is an essential part of client services, with agencies spending an average of 56 hours per week on reporting. 

CallRail’s data suggests reporting may be key to client growth, as those who didn’t meet their 2021 client growth goals were 15% less likely than average to say reporting is an essential part of their client services. 

But agencies that met and surpassed their client growth goals will have to adapt in order to accommodate their new client load. 95% of respondents said they believe how their agency handles client relationships will change in the next five years as they continue to grow. Of those, 89% said less time will be spent on reporting. 

“The marketplace is constantly changing, and so too are client expectations when choosing a marketing agency,” said Donnellon. 

“CallRail’s research shows that taking advantage of the latest marketing trends and rethinking how they approach client relationships will set agencies up for success in 2022 and the years to come.” 

To learn more about how CallRail’s platform can help marketing agencies and the clients they serve optimize their marketing spend, click here and try it free.

The post Secrets of marketing agency success appeared first on Search Engine Land.

With Google on its way to over $200b per year in ad revenues, companies that aren’t yet advertising online should think long and hard about why everyone else but them seems to be growing their business with Google Ads.

Perhaps they’ve tried and failed. Let’s face it: Especially in recent years, Google advertising has gotten increasingly automated, yet strangely also more complex with a multitude of campaign types, bidding strategies, and targeting options to choose from. 

In what appears to be an effort to simplify, Google recently introduced a new, streamlined, all-in-one automated-campaign type: Performance Max. This new campaign needs minimal setup and promises to run a company’s ads as appropriate across Google’s six primary advertising channels: Search, Maps, Display, Gmail, Discover and YouTube. 

But as with any automation, Performance Max shouldn’t be thought of as a set-it-and-forget-it campaign. After all, as we’ve established many times before, the best PPC results come from humans and automation working together. Or as Frederick Vallaeys put it in his first book, Digital Marketing in an AI World:

What inputs does Performance Max use?

To get started with automated ads on Google, you need to provide:

• Your marketing objectives and goals
• Budget
• Creative assets 
  • Text 
  • Images 
  • Video (optional, since this will auto-generate)
• Geo-targets
• Feeds (optional)
  • Google My Business
  • Google Merchant Center
  • Dynamic Ads feed
  • Business data feeds
• Audience signals (optional)
  • First-party Audiences, including remarketing lists
  • Google Audiences, including custom audiences

From there, automation is off to the races and promises to show your ad when it expects to be able to get you a conversion.

Where do Performance Max ads run?

To find conversions that meet your stated objectives, Performance Max can, as appropriate, automatically serve your ad across its six channels: Search, Maps, Display, Gmail, Discover, and YouTube. Performance Max will replace Smart Shopping and Local campaigns but is intended to be a supplement rather than a replacement for the other campaign types like Search and Display.

For new advertisers, this is a big deal and significant simplification because the same possible coverage would have previously required creating a separate campaign for each channel. And for advertisers who are just getting started with Google Ads, they may not have the time, or necessary experience and skill, to set up each and every one of these campaigns correctly to drive success. Now, with only a single campaign to create, advertisers can start seeing immediate results and focus on optimizing those aspects of their campaigns that have the biggest upside potential.

What could go wrong?  

It’s important to understand what any automation’s capabilities and limitations are. If you overestimate an automation’s capabilities, and it fails to deliver, you really have only yourself to blame.

A good analogy is to self-driving cars’ five levels of automation, as defined by the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) and National Traffic and Highway Safety Administration: 

What happens when a ‘self-driving’ car crashes?

As long ago as 1979, IBM put the prosecution’s case this way:

In Los Angeles, a driver is now being prosecuted for vehicular manslaughter for letting his “self-driving” car run a red light and killing two people in the process. The driver treated his car’s capabilities like a level 5 automation when in fact, it was just a level 2 automation or a driver-assistance feature.

Likewise, in PPC, Performance Max campaigns are not level 5 fully self-driving automation, but more like a level 2 or 3 assist feature. Performance Max handles a narrowly defined task quite well, but it lacks context to be able to do it fully alone.

It’s up to you, the human advertiser, to supply that context, which includes your ultimate business goals. As an account or campaign manager, you’re in the driver’s seat. Google automation can’t be held accountable when problems arise. 

So what can go wrong…

1. You give the automation incomplete goals. 

Think of automation in PPC as your newest team member. When a new person joins your team, whether they’re a hired consultant or a new full-timer, you’ve got to teach them about your business, like your goals and how you make money. If you share incomplete information, for example, by failing to specify that you don’t just want leads but rather leads that convert into sales, they will probably do a poor job.

It’s the same with PPC automation. For example, if you tell the automated Google Ads system that your goal is to get leads, it will probably get you lots of leads. But that wasn’t your real goal. You want leads that turn into customers. It’s critical to have a way to feed this and other goal-related data back to Google so they can deliver what you truly want.

Tools like Optmyzr can help advertisers create value rules to help steer Google automation to better quality conversions. 

2. You supply Google with poorly optimized feeds.

If you sell stuff, or you have multiple business locations, you can give this data to Google through one of their many structured data formats. In the case of products, this is a Google Merchant Feed. 

Google then uses the data from the feed to decide what searches are relevant to your offer and show what it deems the best image, title, and price in each ad. But if your feed contains incomplete data, or if your title text is poorly optimized, your ads will look and feel worse than your competitors’, and you’ll either get fewer or more expensive conversions.

While long-time PPC pros may stress the importance of keywords, bids, and creative, Performance Max lets you control almost none of this. In Fred Vallaeys’s just-published second book, Unlevel the Playing Field: The Biggest Mindshift in PPC History, he explains that modern PPC managers shouldn’t manage every detail but should rather know how to manage Google Ads on the periphery, where they interface with the automated system. 

Knowing how to optimize a feed is a great example of this. The feed connects to the ads system, where Google’s automation takes over and turns it into keywords, targeting, and the ads themselves. 

And if you want more control, PPC software can help turn your feed into keywords, ads, and campaigns from a template you control.  

3. You don’t leverage first-party data.

As privacy concerns mount, there’s a big shift away from third-party data in online advertising. That means that first-party data is gaining in importance. If you have a list of existing customers, feed that first-party data into your Google Ads campaigns to improve targeting. Yes, over time, Google AI could probably learn what type of audience would be best to target. But why let the system potentially waste thousands of dollars to learn what you could have told it right from the start?

And with more advanced PPC tools, you can bring virtually any first-party data into a rule engine to automate your PPC decision-making.

4. You fail to write “helpful” ad components.

If you’re used to advertising on social media and similar platforms, you may have gotten used to writing ads or posts that aim to be attention-getting above all. After all, when a user is rapidly swiping down their feed, the best way to stop them maybe with a controversial title or catchy image. 

Things are different and more complicated with Google Ads. People use Google to search for things they already know they need. If you can help them, there’s no need to stop them in their tracks. Instead, aim to answer their questions and assure them that yours is the best possible solution to their problem. How will you help them? That means including unique value propositions and clear calls to action in the ad text components that will then make up the various parts of your Responsive Search Ads (RSAs). 

For more great insights about how to create effective RSAs, take a look at Optmyzr’s 2021 RSA research and its RSA presentation at SMX Next.

Automation-layering tools can help you avoid these mistakes

So while Google makes it ever easier to run automatic PPC ads, the reality is that these campaigns will deliver far better results with your ongoing help and optimization. You can either do this work manually or get help from automations you manage and control, like those available in PPC-management software suites like Optmyzr. 

“Automation layering” is what we call automation you install that provides checks and balances to Google’s automation. This is automation you, the manager sitting in the driver’s seat, insert in the interface between you and the Google Ads system. To do this, you don’t need to spend inordinate amounts of time monitoring all the minutiae of the ad engine. Instead, use simple rules and scripts to do this work for you. You can then focus on the strategic elements that add the most value when you, the human driver, deploy them in the system.

Automation layering PPC software doesn’t have to cost a lot. Optmyzr recently introduced Optmyzr Lite, a free tier of service specifically designed for new Google advertisers with single-business ad budgets under $10k per month. Advertisers get access to a dashboard, reports, audits, and optimization suggestions different from and independent of those Google provides. It’s a great way to monitor and correct Google AI when it could use your help, as it inevitably will at times. 
Many advertisers say: don’t let the auctioneer tell you how or when to bid. Optmyzr Lite is a trustworthy third-party tool that can offer a different perspective on how to optimize your Google Ads account so that you can focus on growing your business.

The post 4 things to beware of with Google’s Performance Max automated campaigns appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google’s disavow links tool launched nearly a decade ago, on October 16, 2012.  As we approach the tenth anniversary, webmasters still have confusion and disagreement regarding how to approach a link analysis and properly use backlink data when considering a disavow.  A lot has changed since 2012!  

Whether you’re disavowing as a preventative measure or a means to recover your rankings, we’ll review current-day approaches to take based on our experience disavowing links over the past decade.  

Who may need a link disavow?

Let’s begin by answering who likely doesn’t need a disavow, and that’s most of you.  If you’ve stuck with natural link acquisition and SEO traffic is on the rise, a link disavow is unlikely to help.  This is especially true if your site already has a relatively small number of backlinks or is in a less competitive vertical.  Submitting a disavow can even hurt the rankings of otherwise healthy websites if the tool isn’t used wisely.

Consider analyzing your backlinks and submitting a disavow if:

1. You have an “unnatural links” notice in Google Search Console and corresponding manual action.
2. You know unnatural links were acquired to your website, either recently or at any time in the past. Even links from years ago can come back to bite you as Google continues mapping out artificial link networks.
3. You’ve experienced unexplainable traffic/ranking loss or traffic loss near the time of a known Google link-based update or core algorithm update. Similarly, traffic may be flat over long periods of otherwise strong on-page SEO and content creation initiatives, and you suspect off-page factors may be the reason why.
4. You see a lot of new spammy links pointing to your website regularly and may be the target of a negative SEO attack.
5. You don’t fully trust the algorithm and want to get a better understanding of your current link profile and level of risk.

Links from scrapers and other obvious spam are likely to get filtered out and ignored by Google, providing no value but also not counting against you. Nearly all websites have them, and you can usually ignore these yourself or include them in your disavow if you’re worried. But links from known link sellers and link networks can become a big problem. Frequent link-building tactics necessitating a link disavow include:

• Buying guest blog posts or “sponsored content” without the appropriate link attributes.
• Buying links with a guaranteed minimum level of “authority.” 
• Buying links from a list of sites that have varying pricing for placement.
• Obtaining keyword-rich anchor links pointing directly to SEO landing pages. 
• Buying links at all, for that matter, especially from anyone offering pre-selected placements.

Compiling your backlinks & properly analyzing them

For an advanced SEO looking for the most comprehensive look and their link data, merging multiple datasets (Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, Semrush, and so on) will paint the most complete picture of your backlink profile.  For the rest of you, hiring a professional to help is the best path forward for the rest of you – a second reminder that disavowing can do more harm than good if not fully confident in your approach. Should you choose to do it alone, downloading the links provided in Google Search Console will likely suffice, even if they’re only showing a small “sampling” of your overall link profile.

Once your link data is obtained, you’ll have to make some decisions on how to analyze your backlinks. Most webmasters take shortcuts, relying on software to tell them how “authoritative” or “toxic” a link might be. This is a quick but dangerous way to compile links for your disavow.  

Although convenient, we do not recommend relying on:

1. Third-party link metrics from SEO software listing the “authority,” “trust,” or “rating” of your links. These scores better represent a site’s ability to rank itself than its ability to pass link equity (or harm) to you. None of the companies who provide these metrics are Google, Google doesn’t use their data, their scoring is based on their unique & often limited crawl, their data and link values all vary from each other, and they generally don’t consider if a website which links to you has disavowed any of its own links or has been penalized by Google for selling links. Ironically, many penalized sites will receive a high “authority,” “trust score,” or “rating” due to the quantity of their (spammy) backlinks, and these are certainly not sites you’d want a link from!

2. Blindly pasting any software’s “toxic” or “spam” link list into your disavow. We’ve seen webmasters rely on this all too often, leading to further traffic loss. A third reminder: a disavow can do more harm than good if completed improperly.
3. Making decisions based on a linking site’s traffic levels. A link can be natural and relevant, even from a town library, local nonprofit, or hobbyist website. These sites likely have low traffic levels since they traditionally don’t rank for large amounts of commercial phrases. However, links from them are still natural & freely given to support your overall link profile. Don’t disavow these!

Instead, ask yourself:

1. Does the site linking to you appear to be a good resource, put online to provide value to its audience? Is it maintained by someone who has subject-matter expertise or a strong interest in the topic at hand? Are they linking to you in a natural way, as an extension of their own content and compiled resources?  If so, this is likely a great link to have and one you won’t have to worry about causing issues.
2. What does the linking site’s link neighborhood itself look like? Are the backlinks natural, or do they appear manipulated for SEO purposes?  Are the external links throughout the website there to provide more information about the topic being discussed and consistent with the site’s theme? If the site’s internal & external links pass the smell test, you’re likely safe to exclude this link from your disavow file.

3. Is the website linking to you filled with varying content and many unrelated external links? Is it a blog you’ve never heard of with articles about everything, always linking out to a commercial website within each article?  Links from sites fitting this pattern are likely in a link network or database, can potentially be harmful to your SEO performance, and were a primary target of Google’s link spam update last summer. You’ll want to consider links from websites fitting this mold for your disavow, especially if they’ve never sent you any direct traffic via someone actually clicking on your link.

Preventative or reactionary analysis & disavow frequency

Like most SEO efforts, staying on top of your link profile is rarely a one & done initiative and more often resembles a game of cat & mouse, depending on the scenario. If your website and its traffic levels are healthy and growing, revisiting your backlink profile can be done on a less frequent basis. Semi-annually or yearly may be appropriate depending on your level of concern.

A preventative disavow may make sense in this situation; if troubles arise, Google is months behind on reconsideration requests, and that’s not a situation you want to find yourself in.  Always remember that links are really hard to get and a primary part of Google’s ranking equation, so being conservative with a disavow here is usually the best approach.

On the other hand, webmasters may find it worthwhile to review their backlinks and update their disavow files more regularly if they’ve been affected by manual action or link-based updates in the past, or they suspect they are being targeted by a negative SEO campaign. More frequent revisions can help ensure you’re ahead of the algorithm when disassociating yourself with links that have the potential to cause issues in the near or long term.  

Final thoughts

From its early days a decade ago, Google’s disavow links tool has remained an often misunderstood part of its Search Console for webmasters. From initially being needed solely as a response to 2012’s “Penguin” algorithm rollout and as a way to resolve manual actions, its use cases have evolved for both preventative and reactionary scenarios. Likewise, the way webmasters review their links for a variety of purposes has changed over the past decade. 

Regardless of your need to visit the disavow tool, it’s important to keep in mind how earning natural, trusted links can be one of the biggest SEO growth drivers, directly contributing to traffic and ranking increases over time. Safe & effective link earning reduces risks in your backlink profile and helps avoid the need for disavowing at all. 

The post To disavow or not? Getting it right, 10 years later. appeared first on Search Engine Land.

If you are looking to outrank and outperform within organic search, link building is essential. However, there are many misconceptions about effective, safe link-building strategies and exactly how brands can harness links to propel their Google rankings, trust and authority in 2022.

Improve your strategy by joining 17-year SEO veteran, Jon Lightfoot of StrategicSEOSolutions.com, who uncovers the most effective link-building strategies and the metrics that matter. Rise above the competition with creative, effective and sustainable link-building strategies.

To learn more, register today for “Building Trust, Builds Brands: SEO Link-Building Strategies That Work” presented by Strategic SEO Solutions.

The post Building trust builds brands: SEO link-building strategies that work appeared first on Search Engine Land.

It goes without saying that the past year has been a time of momentous change for marketers. In previous articles, I addressed how CMOs and leaders have had to navigate an array of emerging trends, from new digital demands and customer preferences to growing workforce dispersion and diversity. These shifts have undoubtedly reshaped the marketing landscape as we know it and led leaders to seek new operating models and digital solutions to keep pace.

Now, as ongoing global disruption ushers in a new digital and hybrid era, it’s time for leaders to embrace that there’s no turning back. According to McKinsey, the future of work is hybrid, and Forrester dubbed 2022 the “year to be bold” as demands only grow stronger. Strategic marketing leaders must reshape their agenda in line with these new realities to find success this year.

So, where should leaders focus as they reenvision their organizations for the road ahead? Let’s look at the top four areas leaders must prioritize to gain a competitive advantage in 2022:

1. The cost of ineffective communication: Overcome the growing business impact of poor communication to adapt and scale.

Success in a digital workplace requires agility to reinvent operations, but one essential—and overlooked—factor hinders marketers from driving growth: ineffective communication.

In fact, new data released by Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimates U.S. businesses lose up to $1.2 trillion annually due to poor workplace communication—or $12,506 per employee every year. This is especially true for communications-heavy functions like marketing. And now, evolving workforce and customer demands are continuing to amplify the impact of poor communication across organizations.

From the surge of e-commerce and omnichannel to the rapid adoption of new digital tools, brands and customers are showing up and interacting in more ways and places than ever before. In this landscape, achieving clear, compelling, and consistent communication—no matter the channel or context—is critical for both productivity and engagement.

By building a foundation of effective communication internally and externally, leaders will build resilience to grow faster, control costs, and create reimagined experiences for customers and employees alike.

2. CX as a growth driver: Address ongoing market disruptors by delivering exceptional experiences that balance quality and efficiency.

New market disruptions are driving a renewed focus on the brand and customer experience, at a time when it’s increasingly critical to business success.

As consumer spending continues to overwhelm supply chains, experts predict that inflation and higher prices will continue to worsen. This will lead to a far higher bar in customer expectations to pay those prices. In response, CX will reach a critical turning point this year as business and marketing leaders must double down on the customer experience to justify rising costs and keep pace with demands.

Success for brands will come down to a delicate balance of meeting customer expectations with both quality and efficiency—i.e., keeping up with high spending patterns while delivering a better, more consistent experience. Leaders must overcome unwanted brand variability across channels and equip teams with the right tools to quickly and consistently meet customer needs.

Those who deliver consistently compelling experiences will gain an advantage so that when supply chains normalize, they’ve cemented a loyal customer base.

3. The rise of employee empowerment: Engage employees—and customers—by building an empowered work environment that promotes confidence.

Marketers can no longer ignore that the employee and customer experience are inextricably linked. Successful CX depends on first building engaged, productive teams who effectively represent the brand.

But from the “Great Resignation” that shows no signs of slowing down to increasing globalization creating more cross-cultural teams, it’s never been more challenging to engage and retain all employees. In a world where employees have increasing choice, delivering exceptional employee experiences will become a foremost differentiator. In fact, research shows business leaders are prioritizing employee satisfaction and retention this year—ahead of team productivity and customer satisfaction. 

Leaders that deliver a new, location-agnostic approach to EX—i.e., reinventing experiences to be engaging and seamless, no matter the location or context—will come out ahead. Employee empowerment will be at the core of this approach as leaders must embrace new tools and strategies designed to enhance employees’ potential, grow their confidence, and help them be more productive wherever they are.

This focus on empowerment will underpin the digital workplace, lead to new customer and brand experiences, and redefine productivity with experience at the center. 

4. Empathy as an imperative: Prioritize the human connection to meet customer and employee needs.

In many ways, the constraints of the past two years often made interactions more impersonal and transactional. This lack of human connection has left customers and employees alike desiring more empathy and emotionally sensitive support from employers and brands.

But that’s a daunting task when paired with the shift to a hybrid workplace and influx of digital touchpoints that have cropped up in recent months. This leaves marketers with a dual challenge: Keep pace with the sheer amount of interactions happening across systems while delivering higher quality in all of those engagements.

In response, leaders must invest in empathy in the workplace as a strategic business priority. Human-centric technologies play a vital role in this process by helping teams move faster while maintaining the humanity of a brand. With automated and integrated solutions like communication augmentation platforms, leaders can infuse more of a human touch, strike the right tone, and create more genuine connections with employees and customers in all the places they’re already engaging.

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As we tread forward, CMOs and marketing leaders must embrace that uncertainty is the only constant they can expect. As Forrester emphasized, the time to be bold is now—and tremendous opportunity awaits for those who reimagine the status quo.

By focusing on the above areas—investing in effective communication, delicately balancing new customer and employee needs, and prioritizing empathy and human connection—marketers will be well-poised to adapt and grow this year and beyond.

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For more on how to reimagine success in the hybrid-work era and the business impact of poor communication, download the report, “The State of Business Communication: The Backbone of Business Is Broken,” and visit www.grammarly.com/business. 

This sponsored article was written by Dorian Stone, head of organizations revenue, Grammarly.

The post CMOs, put these 4 trends at the top of your agenda for success this year appeared first on Search Engine Land.

You’ve worked hard to turn the engagement from your recent marketing campaign into leads. Once your suspects have become prospects who’ve finally reached the scoring threshold, you toss the leads over the proverbial wall for sales to work. Later, you learn that after an initial push, your warm marketing leads have gone cold. This is because sales prioritized their list over the leads you sent to them. Moreover, sales doesn’t want you to do any marketing to their prioritized list because you lack the context of the relationships they are actively cultivating. This results in them not sharing data with you.

Misaligned goals. Poor execution due to a lack of communication. A dearth of shared, reliable data. All of it culminates in low trust between the two teams. It’s an illustration of the kind of scenario that can cause a deep divide between sales and marketing. And it impacts revenue.

So what do you do? Let’s take a look at how to fix the funnel.

Use a Buying Group Marketing strategy

According to Forrester, 94% of B2B purchasing decisions are made by buying groups and not individuals. Using a traditional Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach these days is not enough. You have to go more granular to reach the right contacts. You have to go to the buying group.

Buying Group Marketing (BGM) focuses on engaging the key decision-makers inside your target accounts. This approach is about continually monitoring sentiment and engagement with buying groups within your target accounts to curate marketing and sales experiences accordingly. For instance, a finance buying group member likely has different concerns than an IT buying group member. Your content, creative, and delivery should be designed around that.

While traditional solutions have not been sophisticated enough to reliably identify and engage with buying groups, new technologies are emerging that measure probabilities of conversion for the group. Influ2’s Person-Based Advertising solution is a BGM enabler. Person-Based Advertising allows you not only to capture buyer engagement at an individual and buying group level. The score indicates how ripe the individuals are for outreach. This data can then be operationalized through the funnel and in existing workflows through platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Outreach. This allows marketers to notify sales about the engagement activity of the contacts they care most about.

Rethink the MQL

In the life of a lead, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is typically the link where ‘ownership’ passes from the hands of marketing into the hands of sales. Marketing and sales often work independently on either side of the MQL wall.

Marketing casts the content net wide into the sea of possible prospects. Sales goes narrow, addressing specific needs and hot buttons of individuals. When the lead is qualified by marketing, it passes from one world to the next—broad to narrow.

If the MQL is the main KPI you report on as a marketer, it’s not enough. Imagine a world where sales and marketing could work together throughout the entire life cycle of the lead—from initial awareness to closed deal. Getting rid of the MQL would unify the funnel into one holistic buyer’s journey where sales and marketing activities are not separate concepts but rather a well-coordinated effort targeting the entire buying group. It uses all the tools in the toolbox with surgical precision. A holistic effort such as this focuses on the buyer’s experience. A Buying Group Engagement score is a sales and marketing shared metric that could help to better align the teams and provide valuable insight to push the entire account across the finish line.

Our data shows that engaged buying groups get approximately a 2.5x boost in conversion rates on average versus non-engaged buying groups. Marketing that results in engagement at the sales development stage is priceless. In fact, one of our clients who targeted advertising at buying groups even deep in the funnel had great results. Buying groups that engaged with their advertising at the ‘demo stage’ had a 1.5x increase in conversion and at the ‘evaluation stage’ had a 2x increase in conversion.

This is a whole new way of working!

Sales and marketing teams working together

In many companies marketing and sales alignment begins and ends with a joint meeting to define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) so that teams target the right prospects. While BGM requires sales and marketing collaboration through the entire funnel, it’s also especially important messaging is aligned through each stage of the journey.

Without an MQL, the sales development team can prioritize the buying group engagement to hold warm conversations. But keep in mind that while priority goes to buying group engagement, any engagement with marketing effort is a sign of interest. If a target clicks on your ad, there is interest, so salespeople should be aware of every click.

At a high level, working together includes:

• Aligning on strategy, covering areas such as buying group architecture and approaches, personas, personalization, and privacy.
• Creating a relevant experience: from copy to creative from awareness to closed deals, handcrafting buyer experiences to reach prospects as individuals and not types.
• Shared metrics: aligning marketing and sales metrics to end results and each other.

In the end, fixing the broken sales-marketing funnel will drive a different way of working.

It will require a much closer orchestration of activities through the funnel, one where everyone has a clear understanding and agreement about strategy, target audience, and the ideal customer profile. One where operationally, your systems are aligned to your strategy to keep the data flowing. You must define what types of data are critical to your business and what parts of the process you can automate. And you must have regular communication between sales and marketing teams to ensure that you carefully design and administer around the journey, putting the customer where they should be—in the center.

If you would like to learn more about how to implement a Buying Group Marketing strategy, please contact us.

The post How to fix the broken sales-marketing lead funnel appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Marketers can’t argue the effectiveness of social marketing or the need to cultivate a social presence to connect with their audience. The struggle is keeping pace with the constant changes of the social landscape and its relation to your brand’s health. This is more important than ever in light of the past 22 months of the pandemic.

Join experts from NetBase Quid as they share insights from their State of Social 2022 report, including the biggest trends in social media that are shifting brand priorities and where the golden opportunities are for brands to connect meaningfully with targeted audiences.

Register today for “The Ultimate Social Media Guide to Building Your Brand in 2022,” presented by NetBase Quid.

The post The ultimate social media guide to building your brand in 2022 appeared first on Search Engine Land.