Monday, May 2, 2016

Video Marketers: Stop Using 'Reach' as the Go-to Metric

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Video marketers don’t want to risk losing the support of some senior executives or potential clients who still believe the world of online video is as flat as the world of network television. Am I right? That’s why I secretly celebrated when I recently read that, “Next year will mark a major milestone for ad spending, as total digital surpasses TV for the first time". In fact, while TV ad spend will total $7B in the US, digital ad spend is predicted to equal $77B. Now, YouTube reaches more 18 to 49 year olds than any cable TV, or broadcast network in the US, but should 'reach' be the only metric that continues to matter to the industry?

The Best Ways to Measure the Impact of Video Marketing

With the Digital Content NewsFronts kicking off in New York City this week, I think it’s time to stand up and publicly declare: The advertiser isn’t always right! But, he or she is still the one who pays you, right? So, if some brands and agencies are still spending too large a share of their total ad budgets on TV, then calling them “stupid” isn’t the smartest way to get these “Mad Men” and Women to spend even bigger bucks on digital video. A safer and savvier strategy is to quietly share some new ways of measuring the impact of video on their future success.

So, where can you find some of these strategic insights on where they can get their hands on certain critical data? Well, it turns out that some new ways of measuring the impact of video recently have emerged, so let's take a look. First, Yahoo recently partnered with Nielsen & Hunter Qualitative to find out exactly what makes video ads effective, and their report yielded some strategic insights for video marketers:

  1. Mobile alignment: According to Yahoo’s research, video ads must be optimized for screen alignment. In other words, viewing a landscape ad horizontally or a portrait ad vertically, compared to viewing a landscape ad vertically, can increase brand affinity 20% and 80% respectively. It can also lift purchase intent 33% and 100% respectively.
  2. Align ad tone with KPI’s to reach Millennials: Comedic ads drove a 50% lift in brand familiarity with Millennials, compared to viewers overall. Dramatic/emotional ads drove a 33% lift in brand affinity with Millennials. And informational ads drove a 31% lift in purchase intent comparatively. So, employ different ad tones to drive Millennials down the purchase funnel.
  3. Auto-start native video ads: Compared to user-initiated video, this new research shows auto-start video ads in native environments achieve 51% higher aided recall, 10% higher brand familiarity, and 4% higher affinity. So if you aren’t testing native video, this year might be the time to start.

ALSO ►  Why BuzzFeed's Video Distribution Strategy Demands New Industry Metrics

Facebook: Driving Business Objectives via Video

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO confirmed that “People are sharing and creating nearly 3X more video on Facebook than they were a year ago". Also, the amount of time people spend watching video content on Instagram has risen by 40% over the past 6 months. Last year, Facebook introduced a metric called Conversion Lift to measure how Facebook and Instagram campaigns drive business objectives like sales. So, has anyone used Conversion Lift to measure and improve their return on ad investments? Brands like Chase Bank have used the feature to measure campaigns.

'Sales Lift' Metric via YouTube TrueView

Now, if sharing all this critical data doesn’t help you win friends and influence people during the Digital Content NewsFronts, then it’s time to up your game and master the fine art of schmooze optimization. That’s when you whisper the following into the ear of a senior executive or potential client while you’re both waiting in line to get into YouTube Brandcast: “Do you want to see online video drive offline sales?” Let's take a a look Inside AdWords to see how Google is helping brands with video metrics.

A certain brand measurement product manager at Google just put the word on the street that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, brands, advertisers, whatever, can get their hands on sales lift studies in the US – for free – if they just happen to be using TrueView video ads. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. According to my sources, 78% of the TrueView campaigns that they studied on YouTube showed an increase in offline sales. How much of an increase? Well, 61% drove a “statistically significant” lift in sales of the advertised brand, according to people who oughta know.

Now, according to some wise guys and gals, one campaign they measured – I think it was Gatorade’s “We Love Sweat” – earned $13.50 sales in return for every dollar spent on TrueView. Now, that’s a hell of a return on ad spend, or ROAS, as they’d say on Madison Avenue. Also, Mars tested a video that opened with some very strong corporate branding, against one that used branding at the end, and confirmed that using branding at the beginning drove nearly 7x greater sales lift.

You might say that this new sales lift offering drops the last piece into place for full funnel measurement of CPG campaigns on YouTube. So, we just might want to talk with some of the Google people who most certainly will be hanging around YouTube Brandcast. I understand that they plan to scale these studies. So, it won’t hurt to see if they’ll cut us in on the action. Who know, we might pick up some strategic insights into how online video can drive offline sales for our brand.

If brands are looking for deeper ways to measure video engagement, Tubular Labs has recently launched Tubular Video Ratings, which provides you with a standardized metric that rates every digital video, publisher, and influencer according to views and engagement. This seems to be the first time that engagement and views for video content (not ads) have been benchmarked across the entire video ecosystem, which new way to measure the success of branded entertainment, media sales, and influencer marketing.

The Tubular Video Rating now scores 100 Million videos as well as 5 Million brands and influencers. And it covers videos uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, and Vine, and enables video marketers to rate their video content against competitors, categories, and peers to see how they stack up in terms of views and engagement. To learn more about these new Tubular Video Ratings, just click here.

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The power of “Anchor Influencers”

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The Power of Anchor Influencers

We all recognize that influencer relationships play a key role in any business or career plan. Finding and developing the right relationships helps you accelerate the progress towards your goals.

It’s also important to understand that some influencer relationships will be more important to you than others. I call these people “Anchor Influencers.”

What fuels these is a stronger sense of connection, stronger alignment in your view of the market, and perhaps even some level of personal connection. Choose these relationships wisely, as they are a key component of your overall marketing plan.

In today’s post, I’m going to discuss how you go about developing these relationships. I’m not going to spend that much time on the very basics of relationship building, as I plan to get quite a bit deeper into what drives Anchor relationships. I’ll also share several stories of creative strategies I have seen people employ.

This ability to benefit from Anchor Influencers holds true regardless of the size of your business. Anchor Influencers can help you accelerate the process of spreading your message and provide external validation and credibility, even if you are a larger brand. If you’ve got money, you can pay for their attention, of course; but obtaining their personal engagement and passion will still be invaluable.

One word I want you to lose from your vocabulary right at the start of this discussion is “leverage.” You ain’t gonna be leveraging no one (the awful English here is intentional). And that’s your first lesson. When pursuing Anchor Influencer relationships, the relationship is the positive outcome you are looking for — help with your business goals stems from that.

Content marketing and SEO benefits

Influencers who are engaged with your brand can be like rocket fuel for your content marketing efforts. The payoff is their active sharing of great content that you produce, which acts as third-party validation for that content and can cause others to share it and link to it.

Influencers Can Accelerate Your Marketing Plan

What the above graphic shows is:

  1. If you create great content, sharing it in your social media channels will help those channels grow.
  2. If the content is linkworthy, then sharing it in social media channels can help it obtain additional shares and links.
  3. If influencers share it, they act as accelerants, due to their large audiences and the value of their independent validation.

This does depend on your creating the kind of content that is worth sharing and linking to, and that is by itself a difficult task. But if you’re able to do that, the influencer relationship helps you maximize the ROI of creating that content. From an SEO perspective, this comes in the form of high value links to your content.

The essential power of passion

Everything starts with your passion for what you do and openly sharing that love with people you encounter. This is definitely not a “fake it ’til you make it” conversation — the passion has to be real. Your expertise and passion will create unique opportunities for engagement with influencers who share that passion.

Shared Passion is the Key to Building Strong Relationships

It’s also helpful to take stands on key issues in your market. These may be somewhat polarizing, but that is normally a good thing. Take, for example, Seventh Generation, a household products company that made its name by taking a strong stand on eco-friendliness. This eco-friendly focus is at the core of their brand identity, which allows them to communicate with passion and connect with others who share a similar point of view.

At Stone Temple Consulting, our passion is ethical, white-hat digital marketing (and SEO). It’s a message we’ve been broadcasting from the very early days of the company. You can see an example of that in this post I wrote on the Moz blog back in February 2008, “I Don’t Buy Links.”

Passion does many things for you, including these:

  1. Gives you and your employees a focus to rally around.
  2. Creates key points of connection with influencers who share those passions.
  3. Provides something to which others in the market can attach.
  4. Differentiates you from your competitors.

The raw basics of relationship building (quick recap):

This section is written on the assumption that you don’t have money to deploy in building your Anchor Influencer relationships. Even if you do have that available, bear in mind that money can sometimes interfere with the process, and the principles below still apply. Here are the basic steps:

  1. Follow the influencer everywhere they exist publicly online.
  2. Read everything they write and share.
  3. Find ways to add value with comments.
  4. Don’t ask anything of them.
  5. Don’t stalk them.
  6. Be incredibly patient.
  7. Know that the process may take six months, a year, or more.
  8. Wait for the right opportunity to arise to help them out, and then leap on it.

Your focus needs to be on helping them in a material way related to their interests in your market space, but that’s not the only component of building a relationship. Find ways to bring in who you are as a person outside of business into the picture, as well. When people learn about who you are as a person, that helps build trust. Take pains to learn more about them, and find ways to engage on non-market interests.

Now, on to the more advanced stuff!

Make them feel special

It may sound trite, but it really helps to make them feel special. One great way to do this is to focus on those relationships where you have the most in common. Extra effort in developing a relationship usually gets noticed. I’ll show many ways to make people feel special in the example shared below. As always, avoid the stalker syndrome. There is no win in that.

All of this works really well if you concentrate on those people that you already feel an affinity for. That way, the process of forming the relationship is not one where you’re play acting. That will bite you in the long run anyway.

For larger brands, part of how you make them feel special is that they get to be associated with you. Influencers are not immune to that. But do what you can to truly enhance that feeling of mutual association, and it will likely bring great rewards.

Principles of aggressiveness

Aggressiveness is good, but there are limits. Push too hard on building a relationship, and you become a stalker (as I warned above).

Too much aggressiveness usually stems from being focused on your business goals and losing sight of what it takes to build a personal connection with someone. Early in my career, I had a tendency to fall prey to this.

Being Too Aggressive Can Be a Bad Idea

It would be natural to be thinking that what I’ve outlined above limits how many influencers you can truly connect with, and that should yield a big fat “you betcha.”

Not everyone is a fit for you. So this starts with identifying the right natural fits, adhering to social norms, and then aggressively working on those relationships.

Example case studies

The key to most of these examples is extra effort, of the kind that most people won’t do. This is what gets you noticed. Honestly, sometimes that can be very simple. Learn that someone has a loved one who is sick? Send them flowers. Someone you know just won an award? Start pushing your congratulations to them via social media. You get the idea.

Here are some more things you can do:

1. Speak their language, literally. I had a friend who was trying to get to know someone and was getting nowhere. My friend was American, and the influencer was from Italy. My friend invested the time in learning enough Italian to have an introductory conversation. This broke the ice with the influencer and created a really strong start to an ongoing relationship.

2. Find a common connection. This one is well-known, but highly underutilized. I established a connection with a major influencer once by discovering that I knew someone who went to high school with him. That made for a great initial conversation.

Of course, you can’t expect to use the high school connection path with every influencer, but you may have other common contacts. LinkedIn can work really well for this. Just be aware that people on social media sites aren’t always connected well enough to make an intro, so this doesn’t always work. But it’s worth a try.

3. Get on a plane and go meet them. The best way to do this is if they’re speaking at a conference. Buy a ticket to the conference, and go and watch them speak. Sit in the front row, and go up and introduce yourself to them when they’re done. Nothing like connecting in person to move things forward.

Fly to Conferences to Meet Key People

Better still is doing this if they’re showing up a hyper-local event where connections are inherently more personal. Be careful to not take this too far, though. Don’t knock on the front door of their home. That’s moving into stalker territory.

4. Monitor social media conversations for specific opportunities. People will share all kinds of interesting information online, and influencers are no exception. Find out what they’re looking for. I’ve shared many times my own story of being the first person to respond to Rand Fishkin’s “Free Linkbait Idea” post where he was asking someone to take on a massive web analytics study, and I volunteered to do just that. This happened back in 2006.

Nothing like stepping up and addressing a communicated need to create traction in a conversation.

5. Conspicuously respect their pet peeves. Sometimes, this is all it takes. For example, pretty much every influencer is very sensitive to being misquoted. One reason I’ve been able to interview as many people as I have is that we use a process that includes a final review and approval of the transcript by the interviewee.

If the influencer (or their PR agency) wants something edited or removed, we just do it. They need to trust that you’ll take care of their concerns if you want to have any chance to interview them.

6. Speak to their passions. Like the last two items, this requires really effective listening. In addition to specific requests or pet peeves, influencers likely share other things they are passionate about. Find ways to add fuel to the fire of their passion, and your chances of connecting go way up.

7. Put on a show. This one bears some explaining, which I’ll do with an example. I was in a meeting a few months back where I cited an example of something we had done for a client (the “Client”). The person (the “Challenger”) I was speaking to said, “You know, there’s someone else out there claiming credit for that exact same thing.” Fortunately, there were other people in the same meeting, so I started ignoring the conversation and leapt into action.

Put on a Major Performance to Attract Attention

Without leaving the meeting, I started texting one of my contacts at the Client, and asked him if he’d be willing to provide verification of what I claimed. He said yes, and I asked him if he could jump on a call right then and there. He said yes again, so I called him, gave him a brief explanation of the situation, and walked over to the Challenger and asked him if he want to speak to my contact at the Client. I was holding my phone out toward him as I asked the question.

He was a bit stunned. He talked to my contact at the Client, and he got to hear that the claims I had made were 100 percent accurate. This story is an example of what I call a “Show.” My credibility was challenged, and I was able to address that challenge in real time with an unimpeachable source. My doing so in real time, the way I did it, said a lot about how I feel about my personal integrity, and it made a big impression on him.

Summary

Anchor Influencers can be a strong core component of a robust digital marketing strategy. As you work on developing these relationships make sure you bring a high degree of value to them — or as I like to say, “Bring the goods.” If you don’t have these, then all the creative tactics in the world won’t work.

These relationships will end up being a lot of work, so choose them wisely, and then continue to invest in the relationship over time. The rewards are definitely worth it. Producing great content is a major investment. Anchor Influencers provide strong independent validation of that content, and this can result in the high-value organic links that should be playing a big role in your SEO strategy.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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Google seems to be preparing to migration Search Console to new URLs

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Google seems to be preparing to migrate Google Search Console from /webmasters to /search-console URLs. This is about a year after Google rebranded Google Webmaster Tools to the Google Search Console.

Dan Shure posted several screen shots on Twitter of the new URL format.

Here is a picture of him accessing http://ift.tt/1Z2PRiM:

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When I try to access it, I get this coming soon page:

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But he gets a real new mobile friendly testing page:

mobile-friendly-google-new-test-1462193871

He did say he is part of a beta but when he got a notification via the Google Search Console, the link in the notification took him to this new URL.

I assume Google has been planning the migration from /webmasters to /search-console for some time and the best way to make sure the migration goes well is to beta test it with some users.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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Google now shows automatic translation in search results for some words

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Alex Chitu spotted that Google is now automatically translating certain foreign language words or phrases into English for some searchers.

You can test it yourself by searching for [buenos días], [buenas noches], [amanecer] and so on.

Here are some screen shots:

google-translate-searchgoogle-translate-search2google-translate-search3

It seems to auto-translate for shorter words or phrases, as opposed to longer sentences.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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German payment service Paydirekt wants to expand in Europe

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Paydirekt, the online payment service of the German banks, wants to expand its service in Europe. The planned expansion isn’t something that will happen very soon, but in the medium term the payment solution, which started as a PayPal rival, should be available for customers outside of Germany.

“The road is going into that direction”, says Joachim Schmalzl, executive member of the German Savings Bank Association. This German umbrella organization, funded by the regional savings banks associations together with the national banks, announced Paydirekt in November last year.

Paydirekt was officially launched during Deutschen Sparkassentag last week. All German savings banks confirmed their participation, which means 15 million customers with online-enabled checking accounts can use the system immediately and pay their online purchases conveniently, securely and directly from their checking account.

In December, the participating banks announced they were very happy with the success of online payment method. Paydirekt was very well received by the customers and the organization recorded 150,000 registrations after just six weeks.

About Paydirekt

The payment solution was put into market as a competitor to Paypal, after many banks in Germany complained about the dominance of the American payment company. Foreign consumers were already able to use Paydirekt, provided they have a bank account with online access at one of the participating banks. But now there are plans to expand the Paydirekt services to other European countries.

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German payment provider Paymill files for preliminary insolvency

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Paymill, a one-stop solution which enables merchants to easily accept credit and debit cards, announced it made the decision to go for a preliminary insolvency in self-administration. With this decision, the German online payment provider hopes to bring the merger and acquisition negotiations to a successful result.

There were already some rumors about Paymill filing for bankruptcy in the German media, but the online payment provider chose to share the news itself on the company’s blog. Mark Henkel, co-founder and CEO of Paymill, used the blog to answer some questions customers may have. He explains that the management team decided to go for a preliminary insolvency so it could help change the company’s ownership. “As an aspect of strategic management, mergers and acquisitions can allow enterprises to grow, change the nature of their business or improve their competitive position”, he says.

Paymill is in advanced M&A negotiations

The CEO stresses that the payout to all of their register customers won’t be affected, because processing and settlements are being handled by the acquiring banks. For now, Paymill remains the customer’s contact to the acquiring banks. On what happens next, Henkel says they will be continuing their business operations as usual. “We are currently in advanced M&A negotiations with several parties and focused on bringing the process to a successful outcome.”

One of the reasons for the current situation is that it took longer as expected to get a banking license for Paymill. “To be great in the fintech area, you need a banking license. But this has taken too much time”, Henkel told Gründerszene.

The news about Paymill follows after other European payment provider news. SumUp and Payleven announced a merger agreement and to operate under the name SumUp.

About Paymill

In 2012, Rocket Internet launched Munich-based Paymill, which was modeled after US rival Stripe. Since then, the company raised 18 million euros in venture capital from investors like Rocket Internet, and Holtzbrinck Ventures. Paymill currently employs about 60 people.

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May: ecommerce events in Europe

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A new month, a new chance to attend some ecommerce events in Europe. This month there are several online retail conferences you could attend in London, but there are also interesting summits in Berlin, Stockholm and Bucharest! We made a handy overview for you, so you know when and where an ecommerce event in Europe takes place.

May 4-5: Ecommerce Show Europe 2016 – The United Kingdom

Ecommerce Show Europe is being organized for the third time now. This two-day event consists of three different conferences, as it runs alongside Home Delivery World Europe and Click & Collect Show.

May 10: Treffpunkt E-Commerce Berlin – Germany

Treffpunkt E-Commerce Berlin is a networking event of Der Händlerbund, the national online trade association of Germany. It’s off course meant for ecommerce players and offers presentations from Coeo Inkasso, SpringGlobalMail, Smarketer and PaketButler.

May 17: UK E-Commerce Summit – The United Kingdom

This London-based event brings together UK and EU policy makers, local ecommerce companies and international retailers trading in the UK together to discuss the issues affecting ecommerce in the UK.

May 18: eCommerce Worldwide Cross-Border Summit – The United Kingdom

eCommerce Worldwide Cross-Border Summit is a free event for companies who plan to expand their ecommerce business overseas. There are keynotes from Boden, Global-e, Virgin Megastore, Shop Direct, Alibaba and more.

May 18-19: Nordic eCommerce Summit – Sweden

If you want to know more about the ecommerce industry in the Nordics, the Nordic eCommerce Summit might be it. This 2-day event welcomes more than 1,000 attendees. There are speakers from Asos and Alibaba and you can follow 15 different symposiums and workshops.

May 24: Online and Digital Grocery Summit 2016 – The United Kingdom

Online and Digital Grocery Summit 2016 is an event that is particularly interesting for companies in the FMCG industry. It wants to make attendees understand the key actions to optimize ecommerce strategies and increase online sales. Speakers include Facebook, Asda, Waitrose and Coca Cola.

May 25-26-27: GPeC 2016 – Bucharest

GPeC Summit is a popular online retail event in Romania which lasts for three days. During these days, there are several conferences, workshops, the GPeC E-Commerce Expo, networking possibilities and… a party!

May 29 – June 1: Global E-commerce Summit – Barcelona

This popular event lasts four days and it takes place in sunny Barcelona. Not bad, huh? You can absorb information from keynotes, market insights, business cases, the Global E-commerce Party and the European E-commerce Award show.

Visit ecommerce events in Europe

If you want to visit more ecommerce events in Europe, please visit our events calendar. If your event is missing, don’t hesitate to contact us!

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Friday, April 29, 2016

SearchCap: Bing Ads updates, latest Windows 10 release & the Jelly relaunch

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Link Building

Local & Maps

Searching

SEM / Paid Search

SEO


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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UK ecommerce provider EKM partners with Klarna

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EKM, the largest hosted ecommerce provider in the UK, has announced it is partnering with Swedish payments company Klarna. Starting today, all new merchants who sign up for a store with EKM will be offered a store and payment solution powered by EKM and Klarna. The new store will have Klarna’s checkout pre-installed and ready to go.

EKM and Klarna announced the news today in a press release, stating they both invested heavily in making sure that a merchant instantly can start to sell. “Customers can use familiar payment methods, or benefit from Klarna’s ‘pay after delivery’ option”, the companies explain. “Mobile shoppers can experience true one-click purchases across all stores using Klarna, while merchants get seamless payment and increased conversation online and on mobile devices.”

According to Steven Hickey, head of business development at EKM, businesses of any size can set up their ecommerce website almost immediately in a single process, with “a payment system that rivals the biggest names in retail”.

About ecommerce software EKM

EKM claims to be the largest hosted ecommerce provider in the UK and say they host 1 in 5 British online stores using its cloud-based solution. The company has grown to host 30,000 online stores and on average 1,000 new merchant sign up per month.

About Klarna

Klarna is a payments startup from Sweden that processed almost 8 billion euros in payments last year. The company has more than 1,200 employees and is active on 18 markets. It works with more than 50,000 merchants.

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Callout and Review extensions now available in Bing Ads

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Bing Ads rolled out callout and review extensions last week. The new ad extensions are available in all Bing Ads markets with the exceptions of Hong Kong and Taiwan. The ad shown above features both of these new extensions.

Callout Extensions

Advertisers can add up to 20 callouts in their campaigns and ad groups, and must have a minimum of two callout extensions for them to display.

One thing to note is that Bing says the format in which callouts show can vary. In the ad above there are actually two lines of callout extensions showing in this ad — one with dot separators (starts with “Free Cancellation”) and one with dash separators (starts with “The 20 best hotels in Chicago, IL”).

Review Extensions

Reviews for review extensions must come from “reliable, well-established and trusted sources”. The review must appear on the review landing page — and advertisers are not charged for clicks on those links. The reviews can be paraphrased, but must accurately represent the original review.

The ad above — with two lines of callouts and extended sitelinks — has a review extension enabled with a review from the World Travel Awards.

You can set up both of these from the ad extensions tab in the Bing Ads UI.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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The #1 Reason Why Position #1 Doesn’t Matter

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That’s right — position #1, the elusive goal for so many SEOs, may not matter so much anymore. Crazy statement, right? Trust me… follow me for just a minute.

The screen shot below shows what Google refers to as a featured snippet, also known as a direct answer. (It’s also one I searched recently when baking, realizing I forgot to buy self-rising flour and hoping I wouldn’t have to go back to the store. Anyway, moving on… )

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As you can see, the direct answer information is displaying above the initial search result. I don’t even have to click on the link to find the answer I need. I’m able to see that if I pull the baking powder and salt out of the cupboard, I can save myself a trip to the store.

While this is great for the end user, it means that MyRecipes.com provided me the information I needed, but I never visited their site. In many instances, however, the consumer is still going to visit the website because they need more information than what’s displayed in the direct answer.

So why does position #1 not matter as much? While the direct answer shown above does come from the #1-ranked website for the search query, it doesn’t always work this way. The direct answer is pulled from the site with the best answer, and Google doesn’t seem to care how it’s ranked.

In the example below, the featured snippet has been pulled from the #3-ranked result. (Not that I’ve ever searched this particular query in a sleep-deprived moment during the past year… )

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Can you imagine the difference in traffic for the #3 result with the direct answer vs. the #1 result without? Normally, the top organic ranking would have the highest click-through rate; however, the direct answer is likely taking traffic from the top result here (if not getting the majority of the clicks).

It’s important to optimize the content on all of your properties, not just your website. Yes, you really do need to include full content descriptions on your social profiles, because you never know what Google’s going to deem the best candidate for a direct answer.

In the example below, Google has chosen a featured snippet from a video on Pottery Barn’s YouTube channel for the search query, “how to hang drapes.” A page from Pottery Barn’s website that contains tips and how-tos for hanging drapes is #1 in the SERP — but because they’ve optimized their YouTube video description, it’s been selected as the direct answer. This benefits Pottery Barn in the long run, because now they have more real estate above the fold.

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The video is embedded in their website, along with additional supporting content on hanging drapes. Pottery Barn’s how-to guides provide a great information resource for customers, and that’s likely why Google’s rewarding them with both the featured snippet and the #1 position in the SERP.

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The featured snippet is pulled from the video description on YouTube:

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So, what does all of this have to do with your SEO content strategy? When you provide useful information that’s easy to follow and understand, it could be used as a featured snippet in Google search results. If that happens, you will likely see a boost in traffic to your site — perhaps even more than the top organic result.

If you have optimized your site and your social channels, you can potentially gain a bigger portion of the SERP landscape through the featured snippet and position #1 ranking. However, even without #1, if you have the featured snippet, you are essentially the new #1.

Now that you understand the reward, you need to determine how to go after the direct answers. Start by searching Google for some of your target keywords (especially long-tail variations that take the form of a question) and find out if these queries trigger a featured snippet.

If these searches do produce direct answers, look at the sites that are obtaining them and evaluate what they’re doing differently. If you have the right information on your site to answer the query, double-check your setup. Do you have a dedicated page for each question with comprehensive, high-quality content? Or do you answer the question as part of a larger FAQ page? You may need to make some changes in order to win the featured snippet placement.

Direct answers are still relatively new, and they’re not on all queries. You may find that they’re starting to add them for queries related to your vertical, but the number of questions being answered is limited. Remember, even if a particular query doesn’t trigger a direct answer now, it may in the future — so you can always start creating content with that in mind.

Keep in mind that featured snippets are more commonly found on informational queries rather than transactional ones, so optimizing your content for direct answers will primarily be for the purpose of capturing searchers at the top of the funnel. In other words, plan your content accordingly; don’t try to use product pages to obtain featured snippets unless it’s appropriate to do so.

Position #1 isn’t as important as being the direct answer. Focus on creating great content that’s useful to your audience, and target the queries that would send someone to your site. While simple answers such as “what is a substitute for self-rising flour” may not drive tons of traffic, queries like “how to hang drapes” will likely drive traffic and quite possibly revenue in time.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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Europe could expect more cross-border sales from US

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The US Customers and Border Protection have announced it increases the limit on duty-free purchases from the European Union from 200 to 800 dollars. In practice this means American online shoppers can buy more expensive stuff from European merchants without paying duties and taxes. So ecommerce companies in Europe could be expecting more US customers this year.

As Internet Retailer describes it, the increase was announced in March by the US Customs and Border Protection. The federal law enforcement agency raised the value of a shipment of merchandise imported by one person on one day that generally may be imported free of duties and taxes from $200 (€175) to $800 (€700). The retail value is based on the price of merchandise in the country of origin.

The change could mean European ecommerce companies will be welcoming more American customers. German shoe retailer Shoepassiong.com is one of those companies. It launched an English-language website in 2013, but now plans to alert its US-based customers by email about the duty change and is about to launch a US version of its ecommerce website next month.

‘Expect more cross-border sales from US’

According to Uwe Bald, vice president of international development at Hermes, the increase hasn’t been widely publicized in Europe. “But when it does, look for more cross-border sales”, he says. “It could take three to six months for larger retailers to begin promoting the new duty level to US customers, and up to a year for small and medium-sized retailers”, Bald thinks.

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Why SEOs should not ignore Bing Webmaster Tools

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Before I make my case about using Bing Webmaster Tools, I want to preface the conversation with a couple of statements:

  • You should be optimizing your website based on Google’s guidelines and best practices, because they have the larger market share for search.
  • By no means am I advocating the use of Bing Webmaster Tools in lieu of Google Search Console. Rather, I’m suggesting the use of both, Google Search Console being the primary source and Bing Webmaster Tools the secondary.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about leveraging Bing Webmaster Tools. As an SEO Account Manager at Elite SEM, many times when onboarding new clients, we learn that they don’t have Bing Webmaster Tools set up. The majority of the time, it’s because the client is not aware of the tool or does not feel Bing is important.

So, you may thinking, why would I need to pay attention to Bing if Google has the majority of the market share? Here are some reasons.

Bing is still a major source of organic traffic

While Google may be your primary source of your organic traffic, Bing is almost certainly your second-highest source. Even if Bing accounts for only 20 percent to 30 percent of your monthly organic traffic, would you be willing to lose that traffic, which may be generating leads or revenue? My guess is probably not.

The image below shows an analytics breakdown from one of my clients for their Q1 2016 performance year over year. As you can see, Bing is the second-highest source of traffic and contributed to overall organic traffic growth year over year.

Bing Organic Search Traffic

Bing is expanding

Did you know that Bing powers Yahoo’s and AOL’s organic search results? The Yahoo partnership has been in effect since 2010, and the AOL partnership took effect in January 2016. So Bing’s reach is actually much larger than what is usually reported.

Here is comScore’s Desktop Search Engine Rankings from February 2016:

ComScores Search Engine Rankings

As you can see, Bing had 21.4 percent market share, but that number does not include the Yahoo or AOL numbers.

Even without Yahoo and AOL numbers, Bing’s market share has been increasing steadily year over year. It’s up from 19.8 percent in February 2015 and 18.4 percent in February 2014.

Bing Webmaster Tools offers unique data and tools

Bing Webmaster Tools provides additional site diagnostic reports and testing opportunities. Though the platform has many similar features and tools to Google Search Console, some features and tools can only be found in Bing. Either way, it’s helpful to use these tools to check your performance in Bing organic search and perhaps obtain data that Google has missed.

Some of the ways I leverage Bing Webmaster Tools are as follows:

1. Monitor site security

Both Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console have a security monitoring feature. However, neither is 100 percent perfect, so it’s good to have two sources to review security issues such as a malware. Most recently, I wrote an article which highlights a malware warning from Google — the warning itself did not provide any details and was not particularly helpful, so this is an area where Bing data could be useful.

Bing Webmaster Tools Security Monitoring

2. Monitor crawl & indexation performance

Sometimes you may see crawl or indexation performance issues in Google Search Console. You can use Bing Webmaster Tools reports to get a larger picture of what may be causing the issues. It will also allow you to see if it’s a Google-specific issue or involves all search engines. Keep in mind Bing Webmaster Tools reports includes Yahoo data, as well.

Bing Webmaster Tools Crawl Indexation Reports

3. Keyword research & optimization recommendations

Bing has two new tools that are still in beta but can help provide keyword ideas and on-page SEO recommendations.

  1. Keyword Research Tool. This tool is very similar to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool. However, it provides organic keyword data versus paid data.
Bing Webmaster Tools Keyword Research
  1. SEO Analyzer Tool. This tool provides SEO feedback and recommendations for the web page that is entered. It also provides a rendering of the page source, which is similar to the Fetch tool in Google Search Console.
Bing Webmaster Tools SEO Analyzer Tool

There is also a Markup Validator tool that is in beta, which you can use to test structured data.

Conclusion

There are lots of new features and enhancements in Bing Webmaster Tools. I would highly recommend setting this up for your website.

By monitoring both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools on an ongoing basis, you will have more data at your disposal and gain a more holistic view of your organic search performance.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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Search in Pics: Kangaroos, Russo brothers & new napkins at Google

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In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have and more.

Kangaroo at Google this week:

Kangaroo at Google
Source: Google+

Russo brothers visit Google London:

Russo brothers visit Google London
Source: Google+

New napkins at Google London:

New napkins at Google London
Source: Twitter

European Google Shop:

European Google Shop
Source: Google+

Jon McLaughlin plays at Google:

Jon McLaughlin Plays At Google
Source: Google+


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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Thursday, April 28, 2016

Microsoft blocks Google Chrome & other browsers from Cortana in latest Windows 10 release

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Sorry, Google. You, Firefox, Opera and anyone else with a web browser that competes with Microsoft’s Edge will no longer be able to work within Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant in Windows 10.

Microsoft buried the news today in a blog post about Cortana’s personalization of search results. It gave a few examples of how Cortana already integrates into Edge and Bing — nothing new, as far as I can tell, despite the blog post’s “Delivering Personalized Search Experiences in Windows 10 through Cortana” headline.

Instead, talking about Cortana personalization is really a set-up for the actual news, euphametically put under a sub-headline of “Protecting the Integrated Search Experience in Windows 10.”

In that section, Microsoft explains that apparently some software programs are somehow “circumventing the design” of Windows to redirect to other search engines “not designed” to work with Cortana. Here’s the key section:

Unfortunately, as Windows 10 has grown in adoption and usage, we have seen some software programs circumvent the design of Windows 10 and redirect you to search providers that were not designed to work with Cortana. The result is a compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable.

The continuity of these types of task completion scenarios is disrupted if Cortana can’t depend on Bing as the search provider and Microsoft Edge as the browser. The only way we can confidently deliver this personalized, end-to-end search experience is through the integration of Cortana, Microsoft Edge and Bing – all designed to do more for you.

Personally, I think Microsoft is taking some big liberties here. I installed Google’s Chrome browser as my default browser on one of my Windows 10 laptops. Google didn’t trick me into doing this. It was a deliberate choice on my part.

As a result, today if I do a search within Cortana, it gives me results that, if I click on them, jump me into Chrome. But shortly, I’ll be forced into Edge against my will, all because Microsoft has unilaterally decided that’s the best “experience” for me.

Even before this change, Microsoft was already getting around another choice I’d made: to have Google be my default search engine. That’s because with Windows 10, there’s no way to set a systemwide choice about your search provider. You can only use Bing.

Microsoft, in its post today, tries to suggest you have a systemwide choice over search providers, writing:

Of course, you can continue to use your search engine and browser of choice on Windows 10.  They can be accessed and used as you always have.  You can easily use our centralized default manager to choose your preferred default program for everything from browsing to email, and you can configure the search default setting in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer, which are available when you directly access those programs.

The bolding is Microsoft’s, because it even as it reduces user choices wants to given the impression that users actually have choice. This is pretty clear when you look at the screenshot Microsoft itself shared about its “centalized default manager,” as shown below:

Cortana-image-1

Quick. Do you see the setting for default search provider within that so-called centralized “Default apps” area of settings. No, you don’t. That’s because it doesn’t exist.

You can’t set a systemwide search provider setting. That means Cortana is locked to Bing. That now also means that Cortana will only launch Microsoft’s Edge, which by default uses Bing. If you want to change that, rather than use that “centralized” system, you instead have to:

  1. Open Settings in Edge
  2. Scroll down to Advanced settings and click to open those
  3. Scroll down to “Search in the address bar” and click “Change”
  4. Discover that Bing is likely the only option listed and, if so, click on the “Learn more” link
  5. After clicking on “Learn more,” a search is performed on Bing that tells you to go to the search engine you want within Edge, then repeat steps 1-3 above.
  6. In the case of doing this with Google, you can then finally change the search default in Edge.

Isn’t choice easy? That’s so much easier than with Chrome, where you go to Settings, select “Search” and then find Bing as one of the default choices offered.

After doing all that, you still won’t have that choice carry over to Cortana, thanks to today’s new Bing and Edge-only change.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)

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