Google Tests Bigger Images in New Look News Results

If you dislike the amount of real estate that Google News listings are currently given in the Google search results, you definitely won’t be happy with the new Google News OneBox change that is currently being tested, as reported by Google Operating System.

There are two major changes they have made, both of which will reduce the natural search result listings for many searchers.

The previous thumbnail images, which were fairly small, have now been replaced by a significantly larger image that takes up far more on-page real estate in the search results. For breaking news, I could see how people might gravitate towards these images. But for other searches, the images are probably going to be quite detracting from the natural search results, although the images will likely have a fairly significant click-through rates.

The second change, and one that I use very frequently, is when you search for something in Google and there are many news results that Google believes the user could be searching for, it initially provides a link leading to the news results for that particular search. With this change, that link has been completely removed, and simply replaced with direct links to the news results themselves. At the end of the news listings, it does contain a link to view further news listings, but it isn't very noticeable to users.

While this new style of integrated news listings seems to be a limited test at this time, it is worth noting that often these tests do make it into the search results. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing these listings that are definitely pushing more users to news results from the natural search results.

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AdWords Top Movers Report: What It Is & What It Should Be

Each morning, millions of people log into their AdWords and Bing Ads accounts to see how their performance was on the previous day. This often includes reviewing which keywords drove the most traffic, how that new ad text you created is performing, and how you're pacing against your client's goals.

Each SEM manager most likely has their own approach and set of reports they run. Unfortunately, to truly understand how your account is performing, it can take some time. Thankfully, Google has released a new feature: the top movers report.

Per Google, this report will "show you which campaigns and ad groups have experienced the largest changes in clicks and cost, and highlight changes you made which might have contributed to those moves."

Running the Top Movers Report

The top movers report will be found under the Dimensions tab. You'll need to select two consecutive time periods of equal length.

Once the date has been selected you will be shown the campaigns and ad groups that experienced the largest change during that time period. You can compare periods of 7, 14, or 28 days, or look at reports generated in the last 90 days, according to Google.

What Data is Available?

Once the report is created you will be presented with a roll up of information such as Top Increases, Top Decreases, Total Change and more. These data points will be available for both cost and clicks.

When you drill down further into the top movers data, Google will actually provide a "possible cause" of why the change occurred. Per Google's AdWords Blog you could see "bids were increased" or "new keywords were added".

You will also be provided with additional information as the exact change that occurred (example: an increase of 100 clicks), the percentage of change as well as additional information such as impressions, CTR, Avg. Pos and Avg. CPC.

How Can You Use the Top Movers Report?

At first glance this new report seems quite helpful. SEM managers will be able to log into their accounts run one single report and know what campaigns and ad groups need to be focused on. You'll easily be able to see if the changes you made to your account have had a positive or negative affect on the performance of your account.

This report can also be super helpful to those accounts which have multiple SEM managers touching them. In most agencies you'll see a lower level employee making the day to day adjustments on the campaign and the more senior manager overseeing the optimization efforts and client relationship. With this report, the senior team member can easily see what has caused the fluctuation in account performance.

When creating reports, access to insights and changes in performance will be easier than ever. Simply select the date range and any major change that caused fluctuation in performance is within reach.

What Can Google Improve?

While these reports definitely will help streamline a SEM manager's workflow, it could be even better. With data only appearing at the campaign and ad group level, there is still a level of granularity missing from the report that will cause the SEM Manager to dive deeper.

If you took the time to set up a very granular account structure this report will save you quite a bit of time. If you happen to have larger campaigns and ad groups that don't have a clear structure strategy behind them, you'll still be spending your morning shifting through keyword and ad text level data to determine what really occurred.

The next most obvious and glaring need for improvement is the inclusion of conversion data. For most SEM managers, spend levels and total clicks aren't KPIs. Having data points such as cost per conversion, conversion rate, and even total conversions would be extremely informative and actionable.

In Google's blog post there is no mention of device level data. It would be extremely beneficial to understand if the change in performance was related to desktop and laptops or mobile devices.

You'll also notice that the top movers are selected by total change (number of clicks) instead of percentage of change. If you happen to ad groups that drive a significant amount of traffic compared to others, I'd expect to see them quite often.

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Social Media May Soon Drive More Traffic to Your Website Than Search Engines

If your marketing strategy doesn't have a serious social media component you should probably consider adding one. While most people in the U.S. still use traditional search engines such as Google to find what they're looking for online, users -- especially younger ones -- are increasingly discovering websites by way of social networks.

Last year, half of all internet users ages 18 to 23, and 43 percent of users ages 24 to 32, used social networks as their go-to internet-discovery resource, according to a new report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. Overall, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are the preferred means of discovery for nearly a third of all Americans, up from 18 percent in 2010.

At the same time, 54 percent of American internet users still relied on traditional search results to find the information they were looking for. As expected, that number is on the decline and, according to the report, represents a seven-point drop in overall search engine popularity from 61 percent in 2010.

Although consumers are rapidly changing their habits and behavior, marketers still haven't caught up, prioritizing SEO and paid search efforts above engagement over social media. In order to turn that around, the report asserts, search marketing teams need to learn what searchers are really looking for and focus on broader engagement instead of simply trying to drive an immediate sale.

Some other interesting highlights from the report:

• Direct marketing works. In 2012, 26 percent of users reported typically finding websites through corporate and branded emails, an 11 point jump from the previous year.
• Sponsored search results surge in popularity. Last year, 18 percent of web users said paid search results helped them find what they were looking for. That's up from eight percent just the year before.
• Links keep users engaged. Roughly 28 percent of all internet users, regardless of age, discover new sites from links on websites they're already visiting, the report said.

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More than 75% of searches result in click-throughs

More than 75% of searches in July resulted in clicks through to websites, underlining just how adept search engines are at delivering relevant content.  

Stats from Experian Hitwise show that Bing and Yahoo had the highest proportion of ‘successful searches’, meaning searches that resulted in a click-through, with 84% and 86% respectively.

Ask and Google both achieved a success rate of 76%, however it should be noted that it is increasingly common for Google to give users the answer to a query without them having to click on something.

As part of its new Knowledge Graph that was rolled out in May, Google now shows information relevant to search queries in a column to the right of the search results.

It also trialled a new interface during the Olympics that essentially acted as a minisite for information relating to all of the events and athletes.

The apparent success rates also clearly aren’t having an impact on search engine traffic.

Data from June shows that although Google’s market share dropped for the first time in four months, the change was fairly negligible and the search engine still accounts for more than 90% of UK searches.

Source

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Social Media Is Taking Over Search & SEO

How strong of a role does social media play in search and SEO? There are still many B2B companies not participating in social media. It doesn’t help our sales effort, we cannot quantify it, our target doesn’t use it and the list goes on. I would argue that without participation in social media your SEO and search effort is working at 50%. If you think sophisticated audiences aren’t using social, then think again. Over 5 million high networth investors use LinkedIn. According to a Hubspot 2011 survey of 611 advisors, 61% said they had landed a new client directly from LinkedIn.

Will social media replace search? Lee Odden’s recent blog post, “Social Media & SEO” talks about how search is now increasingly becoming “social”. Most content now is sourced from social media (blogs, video, tweets, Facebook posts and images).  According to Lee, “All major search engines take data feeds from Twitter and Facebook. In fact, if you compare the search volume numbers shared in this Search Engine Land article, Twitter is the second most popular search engine (Google 88bn, Twitter 18bn, Yahoo 9.4bn, Bin 4.1bn queries per month).”

A few other numbers courtesy of Mass Relevance:

•        50% of Facebook’s 750 million active users log on in any given day
•        30+ billion pieces of content shared each month within Facebook
•        500+ tweets per minute contain a @YouTube link
•        100 million active Twitter users and 55% access the platform via their mobile

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5 Advanced (But Simple) SEO Analyses You Should Perform With Visitor Intelligence

In order to understand the impact your SEO efforts have on your business, you first need to make sure you are collecting the right data and attributing it to the right sources. This is why it's important to use visitor intelligence to analyze your SEO performance and ensure your SEO efforts are producing the right results.

How your data is structured is critical to enable accurate analysis and reporting. It will allow you to build five advanced, but simple, SEO analyses that you can perform with visitor intelligence.

Laying the Groundwork – Choosing the Right Systems

Almost every SEO solution will give you search volumes, keyword ranks and even traffic volumes, but are these the metrics that matter to you?

Most B2B marketers care about leads and opportunities, while every business cares about revenue. What are your KPI’s (key performance indicators) and more importantly, what are they being measured by? Is it leads, opportunities, ROI, annual revenue or LTV (life time value)? Whatever it is, make sure your SEO plan has a clear path focusing on how to bring you there.

When you select a marketing software solution, make sure it can provide you with the metrics that align with your company’s goals. This doesn’t have to be a native feature of the software, as it can be delivered through integrations, but you do want to make sure it’s possible. Otherwise, you will spend hours every month building Excel spreadsheets and trying to align data from different source to connect the dots.

The right system will provide a comprehensive solution, giving you the ability to report and analyze your data in one place. It might take some upfront work to set up the systems and customize them to your liking, but every minute you spend upfront will save you hours of work later.

Building Your Analyses – Start from the End & Work Your Way Back

It’s often easier to plan and build your analysis if you first look at the final product – the recommendations.

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Optimizing to Lifetime Value of Customers to Maximize SEM Performance

As search practitioners, everything we do is designed with goals in mind.

Depending on clients or the type of organization our goals could be lead generation, sales, traffic or any number of onsite activities designed to engage the customer. In addition, we're often optimizing toward lowering the cost per acquisition of these events, or driving up the ROI.

Some marketers are getting even smarter with their analytics and tracking ROI against new customer acquisition versus existing customer retention.

While this is great performance-based marketing, what if we could go further, and optimize campaigns towards acquiring the right type of customer, those who buy more frequently, or buy larger ticket items? Wouldn’t you pay a higher CPA to acquire a customer who buys three times a month with no coupons over a customer who comes in once for a great deal?

Credit card companies and savvy direct marketers know this and have leveraged this concept in their direct mail efforts for years. But how can we accomplish this in the search engine marketing (SEM) landscape, especially when we optimize to keyword performance, not customer performance? What do we need to get started?

Step 1: Access Your Customer Database

Your customer file is rich with data. It's likely able to be segmented by purchase behavior, such as frequency of purchase, average order value and promotional usage.

Spend some time with your CRM department to make sure you understand the different customer segments, and most importantly which segments correlate to your most valuable customers. They probably have already identified what the best customers look like, what their lifestyle behaviors are and what factors drive their purchasing activities.

Get to know who your best customers are, and who your worst customers are.

Step 2: Understand Your Allowable Acquisition Costs

You probably have a good idea of what your average allowable cost per acquisition is because it’s your performance benchmark or target currently. Take a deeper look.

If your top customer segment spends 4X of the average customer each year, what if you paid 3X the average CPA to acquire this customer? Your ROI would increase 25 percent the first year alone.

Also, what if your worst customer only spends a fifth of the average? Cut your CPA to 20 percent of the average for this customer segment in order lift overall program ROI. By creating unique acquisition targets per customer segment, you can create compounding increases in ROI.

Step 3: Sync Campaign Data With Customer Data

Depending on your campaign tracking tool and or conversion page, the key attribute may already be passing back, or you may need to marry the two data sets into a single file for optimization purposes.

It’s important to note here, that rather than adding campaign metrics to your customer file, you want to create a new file which combines campaign metrics and key customer attributes tjat identify the customer segment. These attributes may include customer ID number, existing versus new customer field, products ordered, geography or customer segment type (if this information already exists).

One common segment defining attribute is product type. For example, in the hospitality industry, customers who reserve suites are more valuable than those booking single rooms as the room rate is higher. On the flip side customers who stay just a single night on average are deemed the least valuable customers.

Step 4: Optimize Your Keywords Against Customer Value

Once your campaign data is appended with your key customer attributes, you can now calculate keyword level CPAs by which to optimize your campaigns.

Identify the keywords which drive the best customers and maximize your campaigns there, while dialing back spend on terms which deliver the worst customer types. But, that’s easier said than done, because a keyword (especially brand and/or generic terms) can deliver multiple customer types.

How do you evaluate a keyword which delivers multiple customer types? You’ll need to develop a blended action model which calculates the value of a keyword by determining the percentage of conversions at each customer value, to get a relative value of the keyword.

You're now on your way to using customer value in optimizing your SEM campaign performance for increasing long term ROI!

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How To Use HTML Meta Tags

Want top search engine rankings? Just add meta tags and your website will magically rise to the top, right? Wrong. Meta tags are one piece in a large algorithmic puzzle that major search engines look at when deciding which results are relevant to show users who have typed in a search query.

While there is still some debate about which meta tags remain useful and important to search engines, meta tags definitely aren't a magic solution to gaining rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or elsewhere – so let's kill that myth right at the outset. However, meta tags help tell search engines and users what your site is about, and when meta tags are implemented incorrectly, the negative impact can be substantial and heartbreaking.

Let's look at what meta tags are, what meta tags matter, and how to avoid mistakes when implementing meta tags on your website.

What Are Meta Tags?

HTML meta tags are officially page data tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document.

The text in these tags is not displayed, but parsable and tells the browsers (or other web services) specific information about the page. Simply, it “explains” the page so a browser can understand it.

Here’s a code example of meta tags:

<head> 

<title>Not a Meta Tag, but required anyway</title> 

<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here" /> 

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> 

</head>

For more on the history of meta tags, see our post “Death of a Meta Tag”.

The Title Tag

Although the title tag appears in the head block of the page, it isn’t actually a meta tag. What’s the difference? The title tag is a required page “element” according to the W3C. Meta tags are optional page descriptors.

To learn more about best practices for title tag element, our post “How to Write Title Tags For Search Engine Optimization” tells you everything you need to know.

The Description Meta Tag

This is what the description tag looks like:

<meta name="description" content="Awesome Description Here" />

Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces). However, check the search engine results page (SERP) of choice to confirm this. Some are longer and some are shorter. This is only a rule of thumb, not a definite “best practice” anymore.

The “description” meta tag helps websites in three important ways:

• “Description” tells the search engine what your page or site is about: For the search engine to understand what your page is about, you need to write a good description. When Google’s algorithm decides a description is badly written or inaccurate, it will replace that description with its own version of what is on the page. Wouldn’t you prefer to describe your site to potential customers or visitors using your own words rather than leaving it in Google’s artificial hands? Look at this example and judge for yourself:

• “Description” helps with clicks through rates to your site: Writing a good description not only helps keep Google from rewriting it, but also helps you get good more people clicking through to your site. A well-written description not only tells users what is on your page, but also enticesthem to visit your site. A description is what shows up here in the search engine results. It is like good window dressing. Sites with poor descriptions will get less click throughs and the searc engines will demote your site in favor of other sites.
• “Description” helps with site rankings: The common belief (based on what Google said in 2009) is that nothing in the description will help you get rankings. However, I have seen evidence to the contrary. Is it heavily weighted? No, but if you want some value on a secondary keyword (say an –ing –ed or –s), use it here.

Two other quick notes on meta description tags:

• Empty Descriptions: Can a description be empty? Yes. When it is empty Google and Bing will fill it in for you. In fact, sometimes (e.g., for blogs) you may prefer Google’s or Bing’s version. (Personally though, I always fill it in whenever possible, preferring my version to theirs, but if you have a small staff, this isn’t always practical.)
• Quotes: Don’t use full quotation marks (“”) in your description. It will likely cut off your description. Use single quotes to avoid this issue.

The Keywords Meta Tag

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the “keywords” meta tag was a critical element for early search engines. Much like the dinosaurs, this tag is a fossil from ancient search engine times.

The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is Microsoft’s Bing – and they use it to help detect spam. To avoid hurting your site, your best option is to never add this tag.

Or, if that’s too radical for you to stomach, at least make sure you haven’t stuffed 300 keywords in the hopes of higher search rankings. It won’t work. Sorry.

If you already have keyword meta tags on your website, but they aren’t spammy, there’s no reason to spend the next week hurriedly taking them out. It’s OK to leave them for now – just take them out as you’re able, to reduce page weight and load times.

Other Meta Tags

There are many other meta tags, but none are really considered useful nowadays. Many of the tags that we used did things like:

• Told the spider when to come back
  <meta name="revisit-after" content=" 30 days ">
• Told the browser the distribution
  <meta name="distribution" content="web" />
• Told the page to refresh
  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30" />
• Told the page to redirect/refresh
  <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="x_seconds; url=http://www.yourhost.com/pagetosendto.html">

We don’t use these anymore, either because there are better ways (such as schema tagging or server side methods) or because the engines they used to work on are no longer in existence or Google has explicitly told us they are not great ideas (such as redirects at the page level).

NOTE: Schema tagging and rich data snippets are single handedly the most important (and somewhat quietly announced) change to how your site interacts with the search engines and the search spiders. Learn it. Know it. Implement it.

Robots Meta Tag

The robots tag is still one of the most important tags. Not so much for the proper implementation, but the improper.

The robots meta tag lets you specify that a particular page should notbe indexed by a search engine or if you do or do not want links on the page followed.

Believe it or not, it is still common for a site to be deindexed because someone accidentally added a noindex tag to the entire site. Understanding this tag is vitally important.

Here are the four implementations of the Robots Meta Tag and what they mean.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

• This means: “Do not Index this page. Do not follow the links on the page.” Your page will drop OUT of the search index AND your links to other pages will not be followed. This will break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.
  
  
  This tag is most often used when a site is in development. A developer will noindex/nofollow the pages of the site to keep them from being picked up by the search engines, then forget to remove the tag. When launching your new website, do not trust it has been removed. DOUBLE CHECK!

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW">

• This means: “Do Index this page. Do not follow the links on the page.” Your page WILL be in the index AND your links to other pages will not be followed. This will break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

• This means: “Do not Index this page. Do follow the links on the page.” Your page will drop OUT of the index BUT your links to other pages will be followed. This will NOT break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">

• This means: “Do Index this page. Do follow the links on the page.” This means your page WILL be in the index AND your links to other pages will be followed. This will NOT break the link path on your site from this page to other pages.

NOTE: The robots tag may be ignored by less scrupulous spiders.

The Charset Tag

Finally, all sites must validate charset. In the U.S., that is the UTF-8 tag. Just make sure this is on your page if you’re delivering HTML using English characters.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

Conclusion

While meta tags aren’t the magical solution that you may have heard, they still play an important role in helping your site get found in search engines. Enjoy your metas!

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