Bing Search Makes Improvements To Their Intelligent Answers Text-To-Speech & Visual Search3/27/2019
https://ift.tt/2HixzL9
Bing Search Makes Improvements To Their Intelligent Answers, Text-To-Speech & Visual Search https://ift.tt/2CFYFZc Bing published some upgrades they made to Bing search the other day. In short, they upgraded their intelligent answers system, their text-to-speech capabilities and their visual search engine. Intelligent AnswersBing said they can now provide more "comprehensive, summarized information aggregated across several sources in response to certain queries." Bing said by new computing power and technologies they are able to "provide answers for harder questions than ever before." Here is the example they gave, instead of the relatively simple answer to ‘what is the capital of Bangladesh’, Bing can now provide answers to more complex questions, such as ‘what are different types of lighting for a living room’, quicker than before. Text-To-SpeechThe new Bing app can now change text to speech. In short, Bing can speak answers to your queries back to you "with a voice that’s nearly indistinguishable from a human’s," Bing said. Again, Bing gives credit to NVIDIA GPUs processing power to make this possible. Visual SearchBing added the ability to search using an image, although I though Bing had that before. Bing's example, if you see an image of an accent light you like, Bing can show visually-similar decor and even show purchase options at different price points if the item is available online. To save you time, visual search also automatically detects and places clickable hotspots over important objects you may want to search for next. Forum discussion at Twitter. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 27, 2019 at 07:12AM
0 Comments
Google Ads Keyword Planner Adds Features https://ift.tt/2JHlrWB Google Ads is adding a bunch of new features to their keyword planner tool. Ginny Marvin dug into the features in detail at Search Engine Land, but here is a summary from the announcement screen provided to me by Ross Barefoot on Twitter. The upgrade includes:
Here is the screen shot: Forum discussion at Twitter. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 27, 2019 at 07:02AM
https://ift.tt/2HJ9AFW
SMX Overtime: How to use customer segmentation to test new value propositions https://ift.tt/2HM8s4i Senior Digital Marketing Manager at ThriftBooks, Seth Meisel, offered his insight as a performance marketer for B2C e-commerce websites during the “Aligning Your Marketing With Your Customer’s Journey” session at SMX West. He also offered a first-hand experience about how working with multiple stakeholders with differing agendas and goals can be a lesson in diplomacy. Do you trust your Google rep? Meisel: I answered this during the Q&A part of the session and believe I said that I’d had multiple Google reps over my 12-plus years in paid search. In some cases, previous reps had pitched inefficient upper funnel products that didn’t fit well with our overall business goals. I did mention that our current rep is great because they’re recommending strategies or new products that align well with our current business goals. I’m glad I remained somewhat diplomatic though with my answer because a member of our Google account team ended up being in the audience! How long did your A/B test take and what statistical confidence level did you use? Meisel: The IF Function Test highlighted in my talk was more of a “proof of concept” for being able to segment messaging by new and repeat customers by utilizing Google Ads Customer Match and the IF Function in text ads. The test we did went 11 days, so it didn’t go long enough to reach statistical significance. We’re continuing to test different new and repeat value props in this way and look at other customer segmentations on our site like members of our loyalty program ReadingRewards. We also hope to expand this IF Function test into our Bing Ads account, but it requires breaking duplicating campaigns in Bing Ads currently. How granular do you get with your audiences? Is reversing that funnel to re-format the website (the architecture, CTA location, etc.) important? Meisel: We didn’t get very granular with the audiences utilized in this test. We used a two-year buyer file and two other AOV segmentations to segment ad messaging buy customers who have purchased from us versus users who haven’t been to our site or purchased from us. But overall, we have around 20 automated audiences via Salesforce Marketing Cloud and a similar amount for Bing Ads via Liveramp. Bing Ads has also released a feature called Ad Customizers for Expanded Text Ads, which will enable advertisers to customize ad copy based on whether they’re in a specific audience or not. At the end of the presentation, I laid out some next steps like expanding this test by utilizing audiences who have completed certain actions. For example, utilizing a customer match audience that is part of your loyalty program To create audiences for Google Ads, must you have customer email addresses, or can you upload cookie data or other session data so you can target people who have even visited your site vs. non-visitors? Meisel: Brad Geddes corrected me during the Q&A that in addition to emails, you can utilize RLSA / Website Visitor cookie data to create audiences in Google ads. Additional audience creation options include emails, phone numbers and mailing addresses as matchback data. Also, mobile device IDs as matchback options for customer match audiences. Google also offers audience creation options based on app users, Youtube users and custom combinations of website visitor, customer lists and similar audiences. Google is giving advertisers a lot of other audience creation options other than just email address! Do you prefer setting up conversions directly in Google Ads or setting up Goals in Google Analytics and importing? Why? Meisel: I don’t have a preference here and in my current role we utilize conversions via Google Ads. I believe Google Ads counts more absolute conversions when compared to comparable time periods in Google Analytics. About The AuthorWendy Almeida is Third Door Media's Community Editor, working with contributors for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. She has held content management roles in a range of organizations from daily newspapers and magazines to global nonprofits. SEO via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/1BDlNnc March 27, 2019 at 07:00AM Google Drops Info: Command But Has Added Canonical Info To URL Inspection Tool https://ift.tt/2HVa4I7 Google has announced they are dropping the info: command, primarily used to tell webmasters which URL Google considers the canonical URL in their index. At least that is what Google has been telling webmasters to use for this purpose for years. Now, you need to have verified access to the site to see such details in the URL Inspection tool. John Mueller from Google wrote a blog post about what is a canonical URL. Then at the end, they drop this: We’ve also changed URL Inspection tool so that it will display any Google-selected canonical for a URL, not just those for properties you manage in Search Console. With this change, we’re also retiring the info: command. This was an alternative way of discovering canonicals. It was relatively underused, and URL Inspection tool provides a more comprehensive solution to help publishers with URLs. Yay and then - oh no! URL Inspection Tool with Google Selected Canonical URLSo now the URL inspection tool added the ability to see what Google selected as the canonical URL. This is the URL selected by Google as the authoritative version of this page. Other versions can be served in search results, depending on factors such as the user's device type or language. This is not available in the live test, as Google selects a canonical URL only after a page is indexed. Here is a screen shot: Google Kills Info: CommandAnd the second part of the announcement is a by the way, we are dropping support for the info command. Google has been telling webmasters this is the best way to find the canonical URL of any URL in Google's index. Now, you can only know this information if you have verified Google Search Console access. Google severely limited the info command a couple years ago and now it is just killing the whole thing off because it "was relatively underused."
How long will it take to go away? It is unclear but John Mueller made it sound like soon:
John also wants to hear why SEOs want to keep the info command:
Glenn summed up the main reasons well:
John says Google didn't kill it off because they hate SEOs:
SEOs will adapt, they always do. Forum discussion at Twitter. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 27, 2019 at 06:51AM
https://ift.tt/2OvkVtQ
Google Team Hires Mariachi Group After Unlocking Work Achievement https://ift.tt/2HGFtih Here is a video from Adam Lasnik (former mini-Matt) on Instagram who shared that his team was celebrating a team achievement and hired a Mariachi group to do so. How funny! I wonder what the achievement was? Here is the video embed: This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 27, 2019 at 06:24AM
https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/What-to-Do-When-Amazon-Sales-Start-to-Cannibalize-Your-Ecommerce-Sales.png
What to Do When Amazon Sales Cannibalize Your Ecommerce Sales by @bestfromthenest https://ift.tt/2UVrmZz Everything went better than planned. Your items are selling on Amazon faster than you ever imagined. And it is a complete nightmare. Everywhere you turn there is:
“Our sales on Amazon increased faster than we could ever have imagined. However, after all the dust settled, we found that as our sales on Amazon decreased our sales on our website, where we make the best margins, slowed down…” This is something that I regularly hear from young brands wanting to highlight their products on Amazon. How Can Great Sales on Amazon Be a Problem?Now if you are reading this while struggling to get your product to move as anticipated, you might wonder how having too much success too fast could be a bad thing. Amazon is a complicated marketplace. Because there are multiple ways that people source and sell on Amazon, it can be hard to anticipate some of the problems of quick success if you are newer to the platform. When you have rapid growth, it can cause changes in all of your other distribution channels. Most importantly your independent ecommerce site. The success you have on Amazon can easily cannibalize sales from your ecommerce site, which in general, has higher margins for the manufacturer. Amazon has built up an incredible amount of consumer trust. When you combine that with the massive adoption rate of Amazon Prime and the low friction check out process they have implemented, you create a shopping experience that is so preferred by the consumer that many customers simply won’t buy if the product isn’t on Amazon. When you consider that over 50 percent of American households will have a Prime membership in 2019 alone, it becomes clear that it can be an expensive proposition to ignore Amazon completely. To capture those avid Prime buyers, your product has to be on Amazon. However, how can you best protect your higher margin sales distributions in the process? How to Reduce the Impact of Your Success on Amazon to Your Website SalesThere are two ways that you can reduce the impact of your success on Amazon to your website sales:
Your Website PricingUntil recently, there was a rule that in the Terms of Service (TOS) for selling on Amazon that required companies to ensure that the price they offered on Amazon was the same or lower than their website offer. Now that the price parity clause has been removed from the Amazon Terms of Service, one of the simplest things to do is to have your price be slightly below the price of Amazon. The reason this is so effective is that the Amazon Prime customer is so loyal to making their purchases on Amazon they seldom check to find the lowest price outside of Amazon. However, for those loyal customers who have already been buying from you and the price-sensitive customer, you can encourage them to purchase directly through the site. If you use this strategy you also have to make sure the price of your items on Amazon stay at or above your minimum advertised price (MAP) and website prices. 1. Controlling Your Price on AmazonWhen you are looking at controlling your price on Amazon, you have to first consider the platform you are using. While from the customer experience all items on Amazon seem to have the same interface. In reality, there are two different ways to make your products available on Amazon selling physical products on Amazon:
I am not going to go into the virtues of each platform in this article. However, if you sell to Amazon (sometimes called 1P) through Amazon Vendor Central, you have to consider how Amazon will be pricing your items. Remember, if your price falls below your website or other channel prices, you can lose your higher margin sales to Amazon. According to Amazon, they say they don’t price match. However, if you are selling to Amazon on Vendor Central, Amazon will often match the lowest price that they find for your product. Getting Amazon to raise the price back up can sometimes be a herculean feat. However, in some cases, if the algorithms see that the lower prices have been raised from the websites they are monitoring, they will restore the price the items originally sold at. That said, if you have multiple sellers on the listing, getting the price restored can mean a rehaul of your entire distribution channels. Amazon is a site where prices are almost completely dictated by supply and demand. The better your product is ranking on Amazon, the more Amazon Vendor Central could be interested in selling your product, but also the more resellers will be looking to purchase your items. What happens with the pricing of many items on Amazon is that while the product has more demand than supply, the price holds steady. As resellers jump on the listing, supply can start to outpace demand and sellers anxious to move their inventory drop their price. This causes a cascading effect for all of the resellers on that listing all matching the lowest price seller. 2. Controlling the Price of ResellersAmazon has no financial interest in helping you protect your price or margins on Amazon. The lower the price, the better Amazon looks to consumers. Amazon does not have any way for brands or manufacturers to remove sellers based solely on the price they are offering. There is a way to control your price and protect not only the sales on your ecommerce site but also the sales from your brick and mortar stores. That is to control your distribution on Amazon. Controlling your distribution is the most effective way to protect your products from price erosion on Amazon. For most brands, this means having strong reseller agreements in place with your distribution channels and individual sellers. Casey Vaughn is an attorney at Vaughn Law. She helps brands and sellers with the many legal issues that can come from selling on Amazon. Her advice:
Once your price starts to plummet, it can take 3-9 months to recover from the price disruptions on Amazon. The key to protect the future sales of your products is to:
Having a Plan Is KeyIt is possible to both sell on Amazon to capture as many Prime customers as possible while limiting the number of sales that you might lose on your higher margin ecommerce site. With its large base of customers ready to buy new products, it can be tempting to rush into selling on the Amazon platform. However, to achieve long-term success, it is essential to:
Conversely, just not having your product on Amazon to avoid the potential pitfalls of the marketplace can lead to loss of control of how your product is represented and marketed in Amazon. Anyone with a Seller account can create a listing, and if your product has any real success, it will be put on Amazon by a third-party seller at some point. If you aren’t monitoring Amazon as a sales channel, you can lose control not only of the price your items are being sold at but also the way your products are represented. So avoiding Amazon isn’t the answer either. It comes down to:
More Resources: SEO via Search Engine Journal https://ift.tt/1QNKwvh March 26, 2019 at 07:56AM Revealing The Google March 2019 Core Update Survey Results https://ift.tt/2U5UlN2 About ten days ago we began collecting data from you all around the Google March 2019 core update that touched down on March 12th. We collected over 500 responses and I wanted to share the results with you all. To be clear, this is just a tiny slice of sites that were impacted by this update. The data is obviously not fully representative of the whole Google index. We also covered a lot of the speculation around the update, shared links to other data providers around this update, covered some myth busting and more. In summary, the data isn't as bold in terms of when I named the August 1st update the Medic update. There was a 100% more health sites reporting issues and changes than other categories in this new survey but the data might be skewed because I did email those who took the August 1st survey to take this survey. That being said, even with that, we saw less health related sites, overall, impacted by the update. Let's get to the results... More negatively impacted than positively impactedMost of those who took our survey reported that they were impacted in a negative way, i.e. their rankings went down. Obviously that makes sense, people who are upset are likely to say so more than those who are happy. Here is the pie chart: Many saw recoveries but not all.Despite most of those reporting a negative outcome, when we asked if they saw recoveries from previous core updates, 56% said they say a recovery while 44% said they did not. Here is the pie chart: What did they do to recover?If they did see recoveries, what did they do to try to recover from the update? Many said they did absolutely nothing, while others tried a huge array of things. Here were the most popular answers (click to enlarge): Categories of sites impacted mostAgain, a bit skewed towards the health space but 10 points less so than the Medic survey results from August 1st. So I would say overall a similar landscape of sites felt this but it was more broad than that August 1st update. So much so, I wouldn't even consider naming it as a target towards medical/health related sites. It was more of a mix than before. Here is the chart (click to enlarge): Hand review...I personally went through each site submitted and I honestly didn't see any pattern in terms of only really low quality sites were impacted. Or low quality content, or spammy links or technical SEO issues. I did NOT do deep dives on each of the 500+ sites. Glenn Gabe did that with some of his data - but this survey is not set up in a way to dig deeper into 500+ sites. I didn't see obvious patterns of issues. So when Google says core update - yea, I'd recommend the overall guidance of making sites overall better, similar to Glenn's advice in his post and the advice SEOs and Googlers have given around these core updates. Summary: Apology.I am sorry the results were not conclusive on any specific area, even in terms of the category or types of sites hit by category, types of content, links, tactics, etc. But I wanted to share that with you all so you can review this yourself and see if it helps you in any way. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 26, 2019 at 07:46AM Google: Accents In URLs Work Fine For Google https://ift.tt/2JGAxvK Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that having URLs with accents are perfectly fine for Google. John said "Accents in URLs are no problem -- feel free to use them." He did warn that sometimes your own internal tools or third party tools have issues with tracking them. "You sometimes need to watch out for how your own tools work with them, but I suspect most of them will just work fine too," he added. But from a Google perspective they do work. Here is a URL in Google's search results with accents in them showing up fine in search: See what I did there? :) Google previously said that Cyrillic script and those special characters and/or accent marks on characters work fine for Google. So this is just reinforcing that statement from 2017. Here is John's tweet:
Forum discussion at Twitter. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 26, 2019 at 07:03AM
https://ift.tt/2FrVZPx
SMX Overtime: Learn the difference between mobile-first indexing and mobile-friendly SEO https://ift.tt/2UV7Igf General Manager of Perficient, Eric Enge, explained how to construct a mobile-friendly SEO site with good UX during the “Mobile First Indexing & Mobile Friendly SEO” session at SMX West. Attendees wanted to know about page speed, ranking, interstitials penalties and how SEO for the mobile-first index is different from traditional SEO. Doesn’t designing a responsive site to the best of the search engine guidelines do away with building a site for “mobile first?” Aren’t we just building “sites” now? Enge: It is true that with a responsive site you’re seemingly building a single site. But, that’s not entirely true. Most likely, you’ll be creating three different sets of style sheets. These enable you to deliver a different version of the site for desktop, tablet and smartphone users. How you manage and display information within these style sheets is actually very important. For example, your content font size may be too small, or links too close together so they are not easily “tappable.” You may also want to take large blocks of text content and implement tabs, accordions or drop down boxes to manage how they display on a smartphone device. So there are many things that still need to happen to be mobile first. Simply being responsive is not enough! In the case of a dedicated mobile website, passed in mobile-first, is it relevant to keep canonical from mobile to desktop as usually done? And do we change the instruction (from mobile to desktop)? Enge: You should still leave the rel=alternate and rel=canonical tags in place. I think it’s still useful. However, Google has stated many times there is no need to reverse them in the mobile-first world. From their perspective, while they could ask webmasters to change the direction of these tags, the reality is that it would take publishers years to switch them correctly. In case all our desktop pages are not available in mobile, do you think it is more relevant to create them in AMP instead of a mobile version? Enge: You can create pages “natively” in AMP. That means you can have your mobile pages simply be in AMP instead of having traditional HTML/Javascript pages. How do you balance user experience with your statement that you need to have the same amount of content on your mobile site as you do with your desktop site? Google says it values the experience of a user and a content overloaded mobile page can kill that and potentially decrease your conversion rate if they are swamped in text. Enge: Let’s look at a scenario contrary the one that you outlined. Imagine that you just learned you have diabetes. Would you be looking for a web page that has four sentences of content and a way to buy their diabetes pills? Or would you prefer as much information as possible in order to learn as much as you could about it? The point is that the idea that “less is more” on web pages is not always true. In fact it’s often not. Another example: A user searches for a “Ford Focus.” The right thing to do to have a page full of listings and show only the year, the mileage and the price. But what if they want an S Sedan, SE Sedan, SEL Sedan, or Titanium Sedan? Do you think the color matters? How about the powertrain The exterior options? The interior options? What about the accessories? I think you get my point. Users WANT choices. At a more fundamental level, if you have a desktop page that offers a Ford Focus SEL Sedan with power heated exterior mirrors at 36,000 miles from 2015, and the user searched that specified the year and the desire for heated exterior mirrors, the desktop page would show up for that search. However, if the mobile version of that page does not include the mirror information and the year information after a user performs the same search, there is no way for Google to know that you have a vehicle that meets that need. That means you won’t show up for that search. So yes, you need to include that information. What leaves you with is a CX/UX challenge. Winning sites will present designs that offer the same level of information and use design to make for a great mobile experience. For the sites that you audited to see desktop vs. mobile, were they m dot sites or responsive sites that had the huge discrepancy in desktop vs. mobile? Enge: During my presentation at SMX West I showed sample data from sites that used subdomains for their mobile sites. For example, one of those sites had over 700 pages on the desktop version of their site, and the mobile version of their site had only three pages. What this illustrates is that many sites that use a subdomain for the mobile version of their pages have large differences between their mobile and desktop site. It’s OK to use a mobile subdomain if that’s your preference. But make sure you invest the time to make sure that the site is equivalent in content to your desktop site! You mentioned Google penalizes interstitials. Has there been any widespread impact to site rankings with the implementation of GDPR in the EU and potentially with the California Consumer Privacy Act, since many sites need to have an immediate display and acceptance of cookies? Enge: I have not seen any indication that Google has made GDPR and the CCPA – and whether or not your support it – a ranking factor. Over time they could potentially do that, but I’m not sure they will. Are interstitials that pop up but disappear as soon as the user taps out of it, ok? Or are all mobile interstitials bad? (Working in the multi-family/apartment housing industry for context.) Google’s main problem with interstitials is if they interfere with the user getting the content with the initial page load. So an interstitial that is in the way of a page load would be a problem for Google, even if it was easy for the user to make it go away. A more progressive way to handle this would be as an interstitial that pops up only when the user moves the mouse cursor towards the address bar of the browser or towards the “x” to close the window. Which is better – client-side rendering or server-side rendering in regards to speed and ranking? Enge: I believe there are a few factors that impact the answer to this. The two most important ones are the memory and speed of the web server, and the memory and speed of the client computer. That said, client-side rendering as done by most single page applications will generally be faster after the initial page load. This is because key components of the site are already residing on the client computer and don’t need to be downloaded again. Angular JS question, you had mentioned that prerender IO could help with indexing, is that similar to Phantom JS? Enge: No, they are different. What pre-rendering does is take a web page that contains Javascript and execute all those instructions to create the full rendered page exactly the way that a user would see it. That full rendered web page is stored separately. When Google comes to see the content of the page, it gets delivered in the pre-rendered version instead of having to try and execute the Javascript to render the page. This is very helpful because Google can’t always execute all the javascript successfully, and that can mean that it won’t otherwise see all the content of the web page. In contrast, Phantom JS is just the way to simulate a web browser in your own programs. So you can use it to attempt to render pages, whereas with prerendering we’re trying to save Google from having to do that. If your site is an example being mobile indexed because it is mobile indexing ready, but is not mobile friendly (i.e. responsive, but won’t be a good consumer experience), will it be penalized in search rankings? Enge: It could be. It depends on just how bad an experience it is. But for example, if you have a page where all the links are not tappable, the site might be pretty well unusable on mobile. As a result, it may be a poor page for Google to show in the search results. We have both non-amp and AMP pages on our website. The non-AMP page is still receiving mobile traffic based on Google Analytics, is it okay? How can we prevent this? Enge: Yes, this is OK. If the percentage of traffic to the non-AMP pages is high (greater than 25 percent) it may mean that Google is not confident of the quality level of the AMP pages. That may be something that you want to investigate. But, I have not yet seen any sites where the AMP pages get 100 percent of the traffic. On the case study, what is it about AMP that would lead to improved metrics that wouldn’t appear to be related to page speed (ex session time)? Enge: I think the primary thing it would be page speed, but not as a direct ranking factor. Users may enjoy the lightning fast and it may make them have far engagement with the site. There may be some aspect of that which Google sees as a ranking signal. That would make the speed an indirect factor. It’s not the speed of the site that Google measures, but the other aspects of the user behavior that improve because users like faster sites. Even after mobile first, does Google still keep an eye on the desktop version? Enge: Yes, Google has said that they will still look at the desktop version of a site from time to time. However, the primary source of information Google will use for ranking the site will be the mobile version. What is considered “fast and “slow” when it comes to analyzing your page speed results from Google PageSpeed Insights? Back in 2010 Google released a YouTube video with Maile Ohye where she said: “Two seconds is the threshold for ecommerce website acceptability… At Google, we aim for under a half second.”” Sadly, most of the web has not gotten any faster since then, so two seconds is a good initial target to shoot for. About The AuthorWendy Almeida is Third Door Media's Community Editor, working with contributors for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. She has held content management roles in a range of organizations from daily newspapers and magazines to global nonprofits. SEO via Search Engine Land https://ift.tt/1BDlNnc March 26, 2019 at 07:00AM
https://ift.tt/1OI4yol
Having Both Mobile URLs & Responsive Design Can Confuse Google https://ift.tt/2UbXquY Google's John Mueller said that if you have a web site that deploys both a separate mobile URL and also has a responsive design, it can lead to confusing Google. He said on Twitter "We'd probably get confused - which one should we show when? It's unclear." The webmaster wanted to have both options for "better user experience." But in this case, Google is saying, forget the "better user experience" and keep it simple I guess? Here are the tweets so you can see the context:
So since it can confuse Google, John is telling the webmaster to pick one. Either go responsive or do dynamic serving but keep it to a single URL and not give users or Google multiple URLs. Forget what is best, or what you think is best, for your users here. But clearly John believes a single URL is best for your users. Forum discussion at Twitter. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable https://ift.tt/1sYxUD0 March 26, 2019 at 06:51AM |
Categories
All
Archives
November 2020
|