Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Billionth transaction via Dutch payment method iDeal

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Online payment method iDeal from the Netherlands registered the billionth transaction that happened via its system. The milestone was reached during King’s Day in the Netherlands, the national holiday that marks the birth of King Willem-Alexander. The online payment system has a market share of 56 percent and is being used since 2005.

The milestone was shared by iDeal, which announced the billionth transaction happened at a New York Pizza franchise during King’s Day on the 27th of April last month. According to iDeal, the amount of transactions increased by almost 25 percent during 2015.

Betaalvereniging Nederland, which facilitates iDeal together with the national banks, thinks we can expect a strong growth in mobile payments. All banks in the Netherlands now offer the option to pay for mobile orders with the payment method iDeal. Last year, the number of mobile payments in the Netherlands increased by 53 percent. “A quarter of all iDeal payments is already done using a smartphone or tablet”, says Piet Mallekoote, manager of Betaalvereniging Nederland. “This will only increase in the near future, as consumers increasingly use their mobile devices for shopping, ordering and completing purchases.”

iDeal gets popular across the border

According to the European Institute for Brand Management, iDeal is one of the most indispensable brands in the Netherlands, together with major brands such as Hema and Albert Heijn. The local payment method is also being used in foreign web stores in more than fifty different countries around the world. As a matter of fact, one in five payments that are completed using  iDeal, takes places at a foreign ecommerce website.

With a market share of 56 percent, iDeal is the most popular online payment method in the Netherlands.

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DHL successfully integrated Parcelcopter into logistics chain

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DHL says the test it run with its Parcelcopter drone between January and March has been completed successfully. The German company claims it’s the first time worldwide that a parcel service provider has directly integrated a parcelcopter logistically into its delivery chain.

DHL Parcel conducted the trial run between January and March this year in Reit im Winkl, a community in the German state of Bavaria. Private customers in the region tested out the the specially developed Packstations, which were called the Parcelcopter Skyport. By inserting their shipments into the Skyport, automated shipment and delivery per drone was initiated. During the test period, DHL was able to perform 130 autonomous loading and offloading cycles with its Parcelcopter.

Drone four times faster than car

The DHL drone could deal with heavier loads, longer distances and delivery to an alpine region. And the latter could have been a big game breaker, as the drone had to deal with the rapidly changing weather conditions and severe temperature fluctuation that occurred in the test area. “With that achieved, the DHL Parcelcopter then performed a series of flawless flights. Each round trip from valley to plateau at roughly 1,200 meters above sea level covered eight kilometers of flight. The drone’s cargo was typically either sporting goods or urgently needed medicines and it arrived at the Alm station within just eight minutes of take-off”, the company proudly announced. “The same trip by car takes more than 30 minutes during winter.”

Testing in urban areas

Jürgen Gerdes from DHL thinks the company has now reached a certain level of technical and procedural maturity with its Parcelcopter, that it could eventually allow for fields trials in urban areas as well. The company will now analyze performance data and use these findings to select other potential areas for testing.

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Monday, May 9, 2016

Yahoo Gemini launches retargeting for search and native ads in US

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After several months of testing with over 100 advertisers, Yahoo has launched custom audience targeting for search and native image and video ads on Yahoo Gemini in the US.

Yahoo first announced custom audience targeting in September, and has been testing it with advertisers since January. Advertisers can retarget site visitors — segmented by page visited or action taken — or import app customer lists for retargeting using mobile advertiser IDs.

Audience creation in Gemini is fairly straightforward. From the Tools tab, click Custom Audience to set up an audience of past site visitors or app customers.


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

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SearchCap: Google black & blue links, voice search tracking & Bing Twitter results

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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:

Industry

Local & Maps

Link Building

Searching

SEO

SEM / Paid Search


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

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Bing confirms testing Twitter results in search results listings

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A Microsoft spokesperson has confirmed with Search Engine Land that they are indeed testing displaying tweets, Twitter results, in the Bing search results pages. This was first reported this morning by Ruben Gomez during his testing.

Bing is using a carousel box, similar to how Google shows tweets in their search results, to include these tweets in the Bing search listing page.

Here is a picture from Ruben:

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This is what it looks without the Twitter results:

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A Microsoft spokesperson told us, “We’re constantly updating and refining the Bing search experience. We’ll share more information when available.”


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

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AdWords Express now shows Google Analytics goal results

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Small businesses using AdWords Express to advertise on Google, can now see goal tracking data in their Express dashboards.

Businesses can set up a new Google Analytics account, if needed, from AdWords Express. After setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics and linking it to the AdWords Express account, goal completion data as well as behavior metrics like new visits driven from the ad, time on site and page view averages will show in the Express dashboard.

adwords express analytics
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Act now: SMX Advanced early bird rates expire next week

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Nearly 75% of the tickets for Search Engine Land’s SMX Advanced are sold and rates increase next week. Don’t miss your only opportunity this year to attend this unique event experience, which has sold out each of the last 10 years!

Register now and save $400 off on-site rates. Here’s what you get:

  • Tactic-rich and fast-paced sessions that don’t slow down to explain the basics on SEO, SEM, mobile, social, conversion optimization and more! See what’s in store by checking out the agenda-at-a-glance.
  • Nearly 60 search marketing experts sharing case studies of overcoming complex hurdles in SEO and SEM. They’re selected based on experience, ability AND willingness to share the tactics and strategies that make them successful. See who’s speaking!
  • Connect with the most accomplished group of search marketers on the planet. You’ll meet them by attending the structured and casual networking events.

Join us in Seattle June 22-23 for two days of expert level sessions and discussions you’ll find nowhere else. We guarantee it.

Don’t miss out on your chance to attend SMX Advanced this year. Register today!

See you in Seattle!

– The SMX Advanced Conference Team

P.S. – Will several members of your team benefit from attending? You save even more with our discounted team rates.


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How to effectively prioritize and amplify SEO content

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Many SEOs these days are focused on content marketing. This involves building out high-quality content optimized for searcher intent, then amplifying that content through social to capture end users in their moment of need.

But what are the right steps to prioritize and amplify content? Read on.

SEO content prioritization & creation

At one point in SEO, all we talked about was being “relevant” in order to rank. However, modern SEO is about being both relevant and useful; content that achieves this is exactly what Google is looking for.

You can prioritize based on intent, striking distance, search volume and (if you have them) conversion metrics. I recommend that you remove branded keywords and low search volume keywords to get a more accurate picture.

Define your goals, and find low-hanging fruit

Let’s look at your goals. If your goal is to increase traffic by 15 percent year over year, you need to put together a plan to see where you can drive incremental traffic: local, optimizing existing landing pages, building out new content, optimizing videos and so on.

As a first step, I recommend taking a look at your website analytics and ranking tools to see what opportunities there are to drive incremental traffic with your existing assets. This could be done by looking at “striking distance” keywords, which are those that rank on page 2 of the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo). Moving striking distance keywords from page 2 to page 1 can drive incremental revenue and traffic, especially for keywords that have a lot of volume and transactional intent.

Pro tip: Focus on keywords that convert well from paid search and drive a lot of volume based on intent. These keywords should be your target for SEO, especially with Google’s new paid search layout pushing organic search further down the page.

Evaluate existing content and look for gaps

Determine where you need to develop useful content by conducting a gap analysis. All brands need to develop content around each stage of the buyer’s journey, as this allows you to capture search queries for many different kinds of user intent.

While many businesses understand the need to appear in search results for high-converting keywords (i.e., queries that signal intent to purchase), they often overlook the value of being visible in SERPs during the research phases of the buyer’s journey. In the digital era, this journey is not linear, but is a fragmented path to purchase — so you’ll want to be present at all stages in order to keep your brand top of mind.

Review your existing content and segment it based on intent — in other words, what stage of the buyer’s journey does it map to? From there, figure out where gaps exist, and build out content to fill in those gaps.

You can also see how your competition is doing using a tool like SEMrush, which allows you to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for. Determine where they’re visible and where they have no presence across the buyer’s journey. Take advantage of where they aren’t present by building quality content in those areas (or greatly improving existing content).

Communicate with other departments

Despite the push towards omni-channel digital marketing, many SEOs still find themselves in a silo. Having open communication with other departments (if you are in-house) or your client and their vendors (if you’re at an agency) will ensure that you are aware of any important content initiatives that need to be further optimized and prioritized.

Evaluate the content other departments are producing, prioritize it based on intent, search volume and opportunity and promote it through paid social and your existing social profiles.

Social listening

Listening to customers and finding influencers can impact visits and engagement. Social listening can give you a detailed review of your owned social landscape and competitive set. Plus, it can identify key social trends from the millions of conversations happening every day, which can help drive your content strategy by uncovering new keywords and trends that are happening now.

Content promotion

Now that you have prioritized and created your content, it’s time to promote it. The saying, “If you build it, they will come,” is sadly inaccurate. Content needs to be promoted, and a catalyst is needed to get things started.

Social amplification

Search helps social. Brands should always focus on creating high-quality and engaging content. Engaging content will be shared through social media to attract social endorsements and links, which will help improve your visibility in the search engine result pages from prioritized content.

Paid social

Paid social is a cost-effective way to help promote priority content and to drive more traffic and sales. Since paid social is relatively inexpensive, I recommend testing it to see what results you can get from paid social campaigns (e.g., an increase in links, social mentions and traffic, since they all can influence rankings).

I would only recommend putting paid support behind engaging and useful content that answers users’ questions throughout the user journey.

Final thoughts

Prioritizing content is a must for every SEO campaign to drive incremental traffic and revenue. As SEOs, we must continue to focus on building out high-quality content based on user intent that can move the needle and help our clients achieve their goals.

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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How to Use Sequential Retargeting in Google Adwords for YouTube

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I rarely encounter marketers who have YouTube retargeting on their digital marketing plan. People try this once and usually 'aren't ready' to waste their money for an existing audience. Why is that? Lack of knowledge or curiosity? In this post I'd like to fight this unwillingness to try new features and explain the this remarketing feature for everyone (a pretty tough task knowing the difference in backgrounds and goals in our professional lives).

Adwords for YouTube: Remarketing Strategy

Let's begin with the basics. Retargeting can help to re-engage your audience and assist every stage of the conversion funnel. It's as simple as that. When creating campaigns in Google AdWords for YouTube, you can use the standard audiences (provided by Google) and custom tailored to target on YouTube. What's an audience? People with similar behaviors, similar watching history or simply the visitors of your webpage. For this post, we'll concentrate on the audience segments provided by YouTube, which are:

  • Users who shared your videos
  • Users who liked your videos
  • Users who subscribed
  • Users who commented on your videos
  • Users who watched one exact video
  • Users who watched one exact video as an ad
  • and combinations of this lists (can be altered and created manually)

Sequential retargeting, one type of remarketing, allows you to segment your audience into different categories, and also include, and of course exclude, different sections of that audience based on the previous actions they have taken. For instance, a user who clicks on the ad may be shown one version, while another user who not only clicked on the ad but also went on to add a product to the shopping cart may be shown another version.

5 Ways to Use Sequential Retargeting on YouTube

Let's assume you run a small local company - you and one of your college pals run a car converting business taking old garbage on wheels and making it electro. Simple idea - you start filming the process and publishing these episodes on your channel. People like it. People share it. After some time you are able to buy the garbage, convert it and finally sell as your own inventory. You have a place to store these little VW bugs and they really make your storefront alive. How to sell these cars? That's where your growing channel can help.

If people like something - they share it. A shared video gets additional views, and, the content is good, subsequent video content from the channel gets a bigger chunk of coverage because of growing amount of subscribers. But the process can take years to bring a substantial support for your business. To make it faster and more creative we have to use retargeting for our YouTube audience. Let's think how:

1) We can publish a series of episodes about the new project you build gradually revealing the details about it in every next episode. Using the so-called 'sequential' retargeting you can show every new episode to the viewers of the previous episode only. This will urge viewers to watch all of them but you won't be sure that they won't miss an episode making them frustrated and unmotivated to follow the sequence further.

2) You can announce the secret project and target your preroll video ads to the subscribers only forcing everyone to follow your channel in order to keep up with your updates. This makes people feel themselves special and 'chosen'. Good tactics. And you can make these videos public and available for everyone after you publish the last episode of the series.

3) You can create an interactive game and spend some money running the first video in the sequence as a preroll ad for your subscribers.

4) You can target likers, video viewers and commenters and mix these lists together (it makes sense for you of course)

5) You can negatively target the existing viewers of your channel in your new YouTube advertising campaign if you try to reach new people (potential customers, subscribers, viewers etc). For example you want to gain more subscribers and you run a campaign targeted to technofiles in Austin (you know from your YouTube Analytics that this city doesn't really know about your business) and you exclude people from the targeting who already watched your videos. Does it make sense?

Sequential Retargeting Tips 

Sequential retargeting is an enormous video advertising opportunity that many brands aren't picking up on. If you are part of a marketing team here are some thing to seriously consider if you decide to test this approach:

  • Set up your frequency cap, and limit ad impressions per user. There really is such a thing as overkill.
  • Target your campaigns locally. I don't think your ecar will be interesting for your friends in Somali. Not this year at least.
  • Think about your audience and try to group videos into groups to create 'look-alike' audiences
    Consider negative retargeting when your budget is limited and you really don't have much money to show the ad to everyone
  • Stay relevant. Your VR (View rate) has to be your king (in case that's your KPI but that's another story)
  • The value of retargeting is so underestimated so it's difficult for me to start pitching it to my clients. Customer education is the worst task we have in our professional life but if you get it done properly...dude, everyone is hooked then.

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The SEO industry is worth $65 billion; will it ever stop growing?

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Since its early days, search engine optimization (SEO) has always had naysayers insisting that this marketing discipline is a passing fad, or that it’s dead.

Not only has SEO survived this long, it’s thriving: According to a recent study by Borrell Associates, companies are going to spend $65 billion on SEO in 2016. This is more than triple what they predicted for this year back in 2008, before major game-changers like Panda and Penguin even entered the equation.

What’s more, the company is predicting that the SEO industry will continue to grow to an estimated $72 billion by 2018 and $79 billion by 2020.

Though estimates can be fallible, this does suggest that SEO has grown even more than previously expected, with a trajectory to preserve that growth well into the future. In fact, another recent survey of 357 marketers found that more than 90 percent plan to increase their SEO budgets or keep them the same over the next year. Assuming these projections are at least roughly accurate, is there anything that will stop SEO from growing?

Factors for perpetual SEO growth

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons SEO might continue to grow indefinitely:

  • More user searches. It’s likely that the number of searches per user will grow well into the future. Older generations, averse to technology, will make way for younger generations, who rely on technology for everything. Plus, technologies will become faster and more convenient, enabling even more search traffic for each user in circulation.
  • More users. The sheer number of search users will also feasibly increase, compounding the effects of the per-user search growth. This is largely due to the internet becoming more affordable and more available to different demographics. One day soon, thanks to efforts by Google, Facebook and other companies, we may enjoy universal availability of the internet. And technologies such as self-driving cars will give users more time to perform searches at times when they previously couldn’t. These changes will make it possible for almost anyone to search for anything at any time.
  • More outlets for search visibility. There will also be more outlets for search visibility, beyond the conventional search engines we’ve come to know (e.g., Google and Bing). Alternative search engines will certainly rise, but there are two main areas where I expect radical growth: first, the use of digital assistants, which bridge the gap between online and offline search; and second, search engines specific to individual platforms, like app store-based engines, Amazon.com or YouTube search.
  • Decreasing power of traditional ads. Traditional advertising methods have been dying for a long time, and they’ll continue dwindling in power until they eventually fade away. When they finally do bite the dust, a number of businesses dependent on traditional ads as a means of customer acquisition will have no choice but to look to inbound marketing campaigns in the online world to supplement their acquisition strategies.
  • Increasing SEO sophistication. We’re getting better at creating and managing more intense SEO campaigns. As a simple example, what used to be a matter of keyword stuffing and cheap link building has now become an intricate strategy of content development and publication. Furthermore, we have access to more data than we’ve ever had before, and our capacity will only grow from here.

Factors against unlimited growth

And now, some of the reasons why SEO may face an eventual halt or decline:

  • Competition and prohibitive costs. SEO spend rising means that more businesses are getting involved in SEO. That means more competition to deal with. For a while, this will be fine, but eventually the cost of entry will become prohibitive, and there will be a “tipping point” where the rise in spending tapers off.
  • The Knowledge Graph and visibility decline. Thanks to the Knowledge Graph (and similar future technological developments), users are being given more immediate forms of answers, reducing their reliance on individual site visitations to find what they’re looking for. This could eventually start compromising the ROI of SEO, pushing people out of the game.
  • Alternative search modes. Search is starting to evolve in some weird forms, including personal digital assistants, which marry online and device-specific search. These alternative modes of search are harder to predict and harder to “rank” for, since oftentimes they forgo a “ranking” process entirely.
  • RankBrain and decreasing rank predictability. Machine learning is already huge, and it’s only getting bigger. Technologies like RankBrain are starting to upgrade search systems in real time, with processes only AI programs can incorporate. That’s going to make it harder and harder to accurately assess ranking factors and respond accordingly.

The problem with definitions

It’s also important to recognize what may actually qualify as “SEO” in the strict sense. Today, this term largely refers to optimizing a website to be featured higher in organic search rankings, but already it’s starting to apply to other areas, from local results to Knowledge Graph entries, and even digital assistant-based results.

As new forms of search technology evolve, it’s likely that SEO will adapt with the times, rather than dying outright. If that’s the case, spending on what we see as “SEO” today may disappear, but spending on what we label “SEO” in the future may continue to perpetually rise.

The bottom line

It’s hard to look more than a few years into the future with so many variables and potential technological developments in play. However, it’s likely that SEO will continue to grow in popularity, in one form or another, for the foreseeable future.

With that information, you should at least feel comfortable investing further into your existing strategy. For search optimizers, that also means a positive outlook on your job security — as long as you’re willing to adapt.

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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Voice search reporting coming To Google Search Console’s Search Analytics report

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Google webmaster trends analysts, John Mueller, said on Friday in a Google hangout at the 23 minute mark that Google is looking for ways to show webmasters in the Google Search Console how people are finding their pages through voice search.

John explained that Google wants to provide a way to segment out how people search for your site using a keyboard versus voice search in the Search Analytics report. John said, Google wants to “kind of make it easier to pull out what people have used to search on voice and what people are using my typing. Similar how we have desktop and mobile setup separately.”

John added that it is “tricky” because many of the voice searches are done in much longer form sentences and thus, by default, Google Search Analytics may not see enough volume for that query and group it together with the lower volume keywords, thus not showing it in the report. But he said they did have a discussion internally about how to go about separating out voice searches in that report.

Here is the Q&A I transcribed:

(Q) Does Google plan to include Voice Search Search console reports in the future?

(A) I don’t know what the exact plans are there but we have discussed something like that. To kind of make it easier to pull out what people have used to search on voice and what people are using my typing. Similar how we have desktop and mobile setup separately. I think some of that might be trickier because in practice voice queries are more long form, they’re more like sentences and real questions. And sometimes those exact queries don’t get used that often so we might be filtering them out in search console. But it’s definitely something we’ve talked about, we’ve looked into different other types of queries or search results as well to see if there is something that we could be doing their differently. If you have any explicit examples of specifically how you think this type of feature or any other feature in such console could make it easier to to really make high-quality websites, to really get some value out of search console in in a way that makes sense for you to improve your service for users then we’d really love to see those and examples.

You can hear it yourself at the 23 minute mark.

John also added later at the 26 minute mark that Google also wants to segment out AMP results as well.


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Google widely testing the title links in black, instead of the traditional blue hyperlink color

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Over the weekend, Google began testing a widely noticed change to their search results listing page by changing the color of the titles in the search results listings snippet from the traditional blue color to a black color.

Here is one of the many pictures and screen shots of this in action, this one is from @matibarnes:

google-black-links

Compare the above screen shot to what most people see, the blue links, and you can see why so many people are complaining:

google-blue-title-links

We emailed Google for a comment about this on Saturday but we have yet to hear back. I suspect the response will be something like, “we are constantly testing new ways to improve the user experience, and this is just one of those many tests.”

Overall, it seems like the feedback that we’ve been hearing about the change in the color of the link is mostly negative.


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

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Sunday, May 8, 2016

What day is Mother’s Day 2016? Today’s Google Doodle leads to a direct answer

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Google is celebrating moms today with a Mother’s Day doodle illustrated by doodler Sophia Diao.

“As we get older, we forget how heavily we once relied on our mothers and mother-figures. Today’s doodle for Mother’s Day harkens back to a time in my youth when following Mom around was all I knew,” writes Diao on the Google Doodle blog.

The Mother’s Day-themed logo leads to a search for “What day is Mother’s Day 2016?” and includes the usual sharing icon so that users can post the doodle on their social pages.

Search Engine Land wishes all the moms out there a very Happy Mother’s Day!


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

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Friday, May 6, 2016

SearchCap: Google APIs, global SEO & public relations

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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:

Local & Maps

Link Building

SEO

SEM / Paid Search

Search Marketing


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

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5 reasons to keep doing mobile SEO even though ads are everywhere

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ss-mobile-seo“Look,” says your boss, directing your attention to the Google search results on her iPhone. She just searched on “life insurance quotes,” and the organic listings are nowhere to be seen. She actually has to scroll down past the third ad before she gets to the first organic listing.

Screenshot_20160428-145815

“Why would we continue to pay any attention to organic search on mobile when Google is only showing ads?” she says. “I just read a report from a prominent agency that said organic search visits were down seven percent year over year in Q1, as increased monetization of mobile results is pushing more traffic to paid listings, and that mobile traffic share has been flat for organic search in the past year, but it is up 10 points for paid search. Let’s just shift the budget into paid and be done with it.”

If you’re interested in growing your traffic overall, you should resist that suggestion.

While it’s true that organic search visits are down overall, according to recent reports, there are many reasons you should continue doing mobile SEO in 2016. Here are five of them.

1. The first organic listing in mobile still gets 73% more clicks than the first and second sponsored listings combined.

The first three points I’m going to mention come from research done last month by Mediative, a Montreal-based digital marketing agency and originator of the Golden Triangle study. Their white paper called “How do consumers conduct searches on Google using a mobile device?” is definitely worth downloading (registration required) if you’re interested in solid research on mobile search behavior.

[See the full story on Marketing Land]

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: Karl Urban I’m not an SEO, make SEO great again hat & Google wine club

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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.

Google wine club:

Google wine club
Source: Twitter

Make SEO great again hat:

Make SEO great again hat
Source: Twitter

Karl Urban in Star Trek: I’m a doctor, not an SEO:

I'm a doctor, not an SEO
Source: Facebook

Google New York LEGO wall:

Google New York LEGO wall
Source: Twitter


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

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Google updates the Google My Business API to version 3.0

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Google has released version 3.0 of the Google My Business API. This has not yet been announced by Google but you can see version 3.0 marked as new in the changelog and the new features page, it documents the new API.

The original Google My Business API was released in December of last year bringing the ability for businesses to automate managing their business listings.

Version 3.0 “adds new functionality for people who manage locations at scale,” Google said. The “key new features include the ability to read and respond to customer reviews and provide additional attributes for locations, such as whether a restaurant accepts reservations, serves brunch, or has outdoor seating,” Google added.

Here is the changelog for version 3.0:

  • Attributes Provide additional, category-specific information about locations.
  • Find Matching Location Find and manually associate existing maps locations with your business location.
  • Transfer Location New action on Location :transfer. Allows transferring a location from one account (business or personal) to another.
  • Preferred Photo Indicate which photo you’d prefer to show up first in Google Maps and Search.
  • New Search Filters New search filters include any_google_updates, is_suspended, and is_duplicate.
  • New Location States Location states now also include is_verified and needs_reverification.
  • Photo URL Improvements The API now accepts photo URLs without an image format suffix.
  • Backwards incompatible changes Photos can now only be updated for locations with a Google+ page (these were accepted and silently dropped before). The location_name and category_name fields are now output only. Only use category IDs when setting categories. Field masks no longer require the location. prefix for included fields. Create/update operations now take the location as the body payload, other parameters are moved to the query string.

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

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Thursday, May 5, 2016

SearchCap: Google featured snippets, Viv assistant & AdWords redesign preview

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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:

Local & Maps

Link Building

Searching

SEO

Search Marketing


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

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Son of Siri: Viv aims to go way beyond today’s digital assistants

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There’s a confluence of technology advancements that are dramatically changing “search”: mobile, artificial intelligence, big data and natural language processing. From Siri and Alexa to Facebook M and Jibo, voice UIs and virtual assistants are the future.

Ahead of its public unveiling on Monday, the WashingtonPost ran a story on next-generation virtual assistant Viv. Viv could be described as Son of Siri or Siri 2.0, with much more focus on AI and commerce. It’s built by the same people who launched Siri before Apple acquired it, including co-founder Dag Kittlaus.

Believe it or not Siri launched way back in 2009 with the goal of advancing the search experience using a natural language interface and delivering actionable/transactional results rather than a SERP. The Post article uses the example of ordering pizza from a nearby restaurant to showcase Viv’s conversational-transactional potential:

“Get me a pizza from Pizz’a Chicago near my office,” one of the engineers said into his smartphone. It was their first real test of Viv, the artificial-intelligence technology that the team had been quietly building for more than year. Everyone was a little nervous. Then, a text from Viv piped up: “Would you like toppings with that?”

In fact, this was always the vision for Siri. The idea was to enable people to speak their questions and objectives, which would then be fulfilled by third party providers via back-end API integration thereby cutting out the SERP. However that vision was only partly realized before Apple acquired Siri. And while Cupertino has certainly improved Siri’s functionality and usability, it hasn’t invested to enable Siri to achieve its full potential.

Now Viv hopes to pick up where Siri left off.

The company has been building its technology for several years. But rather than present itself as a next-gen search engine or even a digital assistant, Viv’s positioning is much more focused on the AI angle. The company’s website says it “radically simplifies the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything.”

If this doesn’t sound like Google or a replacement for Google I’m not sure what does.

The Post article says that there have already been acquisition offers from Google and others. It also says that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is an indirect investor. If Viv can deliver anything approaching its lofty ambitions it will be bought in short order. Though Kittlaus and his co-founders might resist, hoping to see what the technology can achieve further along.

Another intriguing angle in the Post story is the way that Viv (and related technologies) might not only displace search but might equally disrupt apps. With a voice-powered virtual assistant that can can fulfill transactions (“order a pizza,” “get Uber,” “make a hotel reservation”), apps hypothetically become less necessary, if not unnecessary.

The issue, as with Siri, is deciding who fulfills the request. However, I’m sure Kittlaus and his team have thought carefully about this.

In the original vision for Siri, users would specify a favorite provider (e.g., OpenTable, Kayak, etc.) to handle fulfillment. But because voice is an imperfect interface and complex transactions cannot be fulfilled by speech and voice prompts alone it’s likely that apps (and the mobile web) will stick around for the foreseeable future.

According to 2015 research from MindMeld, use of voice search and virtual assistants is growing dramatically. In addition, Amazon Echo (with assistant Alexa) has proven to be the company’s most popular hardware device. And Microsoft just announced that Cortana “has helped answer over 6 billion questions since launch.”

All these developments show significant momentum for voice and virtual assistants. As that continues, powered by AI and better results (including predictive results), major questions will arise for publishers, developers and advertisers. For example, what will happen to SEM and the search ad model? How can publishers and brands optimize content for voice search?

Nothing will change in the near term. Yet the combination of the technology developments I mentioned above will all but guarantee that search, content retrieval and commerce will look radically in a few years than they do today.


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

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Google featured snippets now with related topics, extending the information in those snippets

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Google is now showing extended featured snippets, where they add more information to the top featured snippet box for some queries. Featured snippets are often seen in the Google search results when Google is confident they can answer your query by extracting content from a specific web page.

Now, it seems Google is showing extended versions of them showing “related topics” that hyperlink to additional queries in Google.

Here are two screen shots, one for [birth control] and the other for [personal loan]. Both those queries currently bring up extended featured snippets for me:

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It is not surprising to see Google place more content and information in the featured snippet box.


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

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Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Updated: Google penalizes mobile sites using sneaky redirects

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In October 2015, Google warned webmasters not to trick mobile users by redirecting them to an unsuspecting web site. Well, today, Google announced on Google+ and Twitter that they have been “taking action on sites that sneakily redirect mobile users to spammy domains.” Google issued a correction with Search Engine Land that they did not issue any new manual actions recently, that this post on Twitter was just to remind webmasters not to use sneaky redirects.

Google wrote, “As mentioned in Webspam Report 2015, spam reports from users are an important part of our spam-fighting efforts. They often help us surface issues that frustrate users – like the trend of websites redirecting mobile users to other, often spammy domains.” Google added, “to combat this trend, we have been taking action on sites that sneakily redirect users in this way.”

Sneaky redirects are never a good thing and Google has penalized web sites for directing the user to a site they do not expect to go to from the search results. The same for those using a mobile device and searching on Google’s mobile results. Google wants the user to land on a site they expect to land on based on the snippet Google shows.

Here is an illustration of that behavior:

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Google added that “if your site has been affected, read this Help Center article on detecting and getting rid of unwanted sneaky mobile redirects.

We are in the process of getting more details from Google on this announcement.

Postscript: Google has updated us telling us that this an old notification and no new manual actions have been sent out today.


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

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