Google Maps Business Reviews Vanishing After Suspension Removal http://bit.ly/2GCBGRb There are numerous reports of Google Maps listings, Google My Business listings that have had their suspension removed then seeing all of the reviews they had on their listings vanish. Joy Hawkins at the Local Search Forums wrote "listings that are suspended and then reinstated are missing all their reviews. This isn't intended and Google is aware of the issue." SEO via Search Engine Roundtable http://bit.ly/1sYxUD0 April 24, 2019 at 06:41AM
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Winter Is Coming: SEO During Economic Downturns by @tonynwright http://bit.ly/2vjCYdG I started my agency in 2008. That year, I attended the SMX conference at the Javitz Center in New York City. It was during this conference that the Dow plunged, suffering its worst points loss in history. I sat looking at the New York skyline, expecting to see stockbrokers jumping out of windows. Fortunately, I didn’t see any. As I continually checked my phone looking at the plummeting stock indices, my brain was panicking. Why did I start a business in what was beginning to look like the worst economic situation of my lifetime? I found out that direct marketing, specifically search engine optimization, not only weathers economic downturns, it thrives in them. Winter Is ComingIf you listen to the economic wonks, we are due for a significant financial downturn. It’s impossible to predict if the coming downturn will be significant enough to define itself as a recession, or will merely be a blip on the radar. But one thing is certain, eventually, the economy will head south. It always does. Why Does SEO Do Well in Economic Downturns?When money is scarce, people want the money they have to work harder. In marketing, few channels work harder than search for most products and services. This doesn’t mean that search is a panacea, or that it is for everyone. In fact, I wrote about why search might not be for you here. I frequently tell a story about my days managing Gateway Computer’s search marketing, both paid and organic. Our program was extremely successful. We had a better ROI than any other channel, including print and television. The marketers and Gateway saw our results and decided they needed to shift their marketing budget to search. Almost all of it. I did a dance and prepared to show Gateway what search could do. It worked for about 6 months. Then the bottom fell out. Without the assist of television, radio, and print, the search volume for everything went down. I don’t care how good your search marketing is, if you don’t have search volume, you don’t have customers. In the end, Gateway was bought by Acer and I lost the contract. But I’ve never forgotten the lesson that search doesn’t live in a vacuum. But Back to the EconomySearch can live in a vacuum for a short period of time. And when the economy goes bad, branding goes out the window. When your profits are down, you don’t want to spend money on a long-term strategy. In down times, for many businesses, it’s about survival. Survival means leads and sales. And search provides leads and sales, even if it’s less effective when sitting in a non-branded vacuum. How to Prepare for SEO in Bad Economic TimesWhether you are an agency or an in-house SEO, there are things you need to do to prepare your decision-makers for an economic downturn. If you don’t prepare, there is a good chance that you’ll get cut with the rest of the marketing budget. When the economy takes a turn for the worse, the key to keeping decision-makers on board with their search marketing efforts comes down to effective tracking and communication of value. The first step is to make sure that you and your client (or boss, for you in-house folks) are up-to-date on how the campaign is performing. If you don’t know the lifetime value of a customer, now is the time to invest in finding out. If you are still looking at last-click metrics for search, you need to adopt attribution modeling. I just did a two-part series on attribution modeling for SEMrush that can give you some good insights on the nuts and bolts of creating an attribution strategy using only Google Analytics. Take a look. As a search marketer, you are only as valuable the decision-makers perception. Your goal should be to become irreplaceable. That means that you need to communicate your value early and often. You need to celebrate every win. You need to let the decision-maker know that even if someone comes in offering to do the job cheaper (they will), your results are going to more than make up for any additional cost they incur by employing you. But to do that, you need to be on the same page with the decision-maker. To be on the same page, you have to agree on what the results are. Goals Are the Key to Reduced Churn During DowntimesOnce you agree on what the results are, you can start setting smart goals for what the results will be. And once you can set smart goals, that’s when you can become irreplaceable. If you can set realistic goals that the decision-maker agrees to, you can set yourself up for long-term success. Set the goal and get the decision-maker to agree to it. Get it in writing, or in an email. I’ve found it can be effective to put the goals on paper and make both parties sign the paper, agreeing that if the goals are met, the relationship will continue. It’s definitely a risk if you don’t hit the goals – but don’t set a goal you don’t think you can hit. If the decision-maker wants to set an unrealistic goal, you need to fight back. Suggest making the unrealistic goal a “stretch goal” and set a more realistic actual goal. Don’t get pressured into agreeing to something you can’t deliver. Goals Are Not GuaranteesEven if you don’t hit a goal you can save the relationship by communicating why the goal wasn’t hit and what’s going to change in the future. But when the marketing budgets are being cut left and right because of a down economy, having stated goals with monetary numbers backing them up can save your job. The Bottom Line Is the Bottom LineThe economy will tank. It may not be tomorrow, or next month, or even in the next two years. But the leading economic experts are warning it could happen sooner rather than later. When that happens, SEOs can thrive because what we do contributes to the bottom line, even if the economy is in the dumps. But in order to survive, we need to prepare now. Set goals with your decision-makers. Agree on what success looks like. Become irreplaceable. If you do these things, you’ll weather the upcoming financial storm just fine. More Resources: SEO via Search Engine Journal http://bit.ly/1QNKwvh April 23, 2019 at 08:18AM
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Will Nofollowed Internal Links Impact Your SEO? by @jennyhalasz http://bit.ly/2GzVQLQ Editor’s note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column by technical SEO expert Jenny Halasz. Come up with your hardest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post! Welcome to another edition of Ask an SEO! Today’s question comes from Dianne in California:
No. This will not impact your SEO for Google, Bing, or any other search engine. This is the problem with using only tools to do SEO. They have a tendency to surface a lot of false positives. This is necessary because tools can’t understand the nuances that humans can, but it can be challenging when the explanation given isn’t exactly accurate either. You can absolutely use nofollow on an internal link. In fact, if you don’t want pages like login screens or comments on your blog to be shown in search, nofollow is one good way to achieve this*. In your specific case, it sounds like your comment plugin is suppressing comment reply links. There’s no good reason to allow people to link to those pages directly, nor would you want them to show up in search, so nofollow is a completely acceptable way to handle them. My advice with all tools is to look up the definitions of terms yourself (on Google or Bing) and think about the purpose of those commands in a larger context. The History of ‘Nofollow’Many people think Google invented “nofollow”, but in reality they did not. Nofollow is a microformat that Matt Cutts (formerly of Google) and Jason Shellen (formerly of Blogger) collaborated on. According to the official specification, nofollow:
There are two significant keywords in this definition. The first is “author of the page”, which indicates that nofollow should be used in cases like blog comments or advertising, where the author is not directly responsible for the content linked. The second is “additional weight”. While SEO professionals have become accustomed to nofollow actually meaning “do not follow the link” because that’s what Google says they do, it’s not in the original specification. So it probably also surprises people that Yahoo, Bing, Ask, and Baidu do not treat the nofollow attribute the same way that Google does. Bottom LineNofollow is a useful (if sometimes overused) tool in the SEO toolkit. The insinuation by this tool provider that “using it on internal links will make Google suspicious” is false. *Note that nofollow only works to keep pages out of search results if it is also paired with a noindex command on the destination page and there are no other follow-able links to the page. Have a question about SEO for Jenny? Fill out this form or use #AskAnSEO on social media. More Resources: Image Credits Featured Image: Paulo Bobita SEO via Search Engine Journal http://bit.ly/1QNKwvh April 23, 2019 at 08:06AM
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The time has come to optimize for IRLs rather than URLs https://selnd.com/2KW0R5B Sometimes we have this fight in our minds between reason and data. Should I trust my gut feeling or should I trust the data? Back when I was running an agency, I would often be the one to present the side of the data and I could observe that mental struggle on the face of a client or a prospect trying to align his or her world view with what the data presented. We shouldn’t blindly trust the data which has problems of incompleteness and unreliability. But we should never reject what the data says either. The good news in 2019 is that data relating to offline activity – things you do without a screen – is becoming actionable enough to fuel dedicated strategies rather than just side-projects or proofs of concept. Store-visits tracking have become more reliableAt the core of this change lies the improvement in tracking mechanisms. It looks like the “store-visits” tracking from Google and Facebook has become more reliable in several contexts. The precision and reliability of this type of tracking depend on the capability to precisely track ones geographical position via GPS and wifi. The level of precision is dependent on several factors like the geographical location, user behavior (logged in?) and technology (sophistication of devices) in each case. From one country to another, the level of precision could be radically different and there are a lot of potential error factors. Clearly, it makes a difference to know whether a user has been inside your specific point of sale, outside your point of sale or next door at a competitor’s shop. A difference of one meter (three feet) makes for an entirely different interpretation of user behavior. Leading teams have started doing thisIn our research for the Search Strategy report, we asked the participating teams (shortlisted teams in search awards around the globe), to what extent they took offline data into account in the projects they managed. They declared using tracking of offline activities in almost 1/3 of their projects. Although perhaps several projects are not meant to generate an offline impact, there seems to be a huge untapped potential for better data collection on the impact of digital campaigns. Additionally, if the adoption rate of offline tracking is 32% among the leading teams in paid search, we should expect the rate to be much lower in the broader population of search marketers. There is ample opportunity! Research Online Purchase OfflineROPO is when we do online research for a purchase but end up buying the product in a physical store. We do this for a number of reasons: trust, need to touch, delivery place and delay. When we do ROPO, it is almost impossible to track our full user journey as we change “channel” and “device.” One minute our touch point comes from a desktop computer, the next from a smartphone and in the end, we physically touch the product with our hands and the tracking chain is definitively broken. One of the teams in our survey, award-winning digital marketing agency Wolfgang digital, used a sophisticated method to measure the effect of ROPO for one of their clients. It involved the use of digital receipts after a purchase allowing them to reconcile data from campaign-driven ROPO. The main learning was that for every dollar being spent online, there was another $6 spent offline after a user visited the site. Knowing that the value of their digital campaign was significantly higher than they could measure online, they could now redistribute an additional part of the overall budget to online channels. The change is significant! What is becoming mainstream is a simpler approach. One in which the data is not as complete as the example we gave, but on the other hand, it is available in real time. Campaigns will, therefore, aim to drive people to the point of sale, and it is this visit to the store which is the data-point we optimize against. Hence the name drive-to-store strategy. We can then only assume or retroactively estimate sales outcome from the store visits. What does a drive-to-store strategy look like?In a simplified manner, a drive-to-store strategy can be summarized in the following points:
Increasing store visits by 50%In the report, we illustrate the drive-to-store strategy with an award-winning case study from MediaCom Worldwide and Bose who established an ambitious strategy to generate measurable and quantifiable offline actions based on digital campaigns. Bose increased visits to their store originating from digital campaigns by 50% and the revenue generated from these actions increased by 56% driving significant amounts of incremental sales. This was achieved by implementing a full-scale drive-to-store strategy in which always-on campaigns were enhanced with location information and extensions and a Promoted Places beta allowed them to place ads on Google maps to flag and promote Bose stores. The age of IRL has arrivedWe are at a turning point. It is time to exit our online boxes and start optimizing campaigns for what happens In Real Life rather than to actions that happen on specific URLs. Offline data has become available for online optimization. We can’t yet access transaction data in real time, and it is, therefore, impossible to optimize to value. However, we have taken a major step into solving the offline-online equation in that we can now measure traffic flows in physical locations and optimize to that dimension. It is a major break-through and a major competitive advantage as illustrated by Bose’s 50% increase in store-visits. If you are click-and-mortar and not already in that game, you need to move now. Learn from the data and trust your guts when you see the story they tell. Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here. About The AuthorAnders Hjorth is the author of the Search Strategies Reportand the founder of Innovell, a Digital Marketing Insights consultancy researching trends in Digital Marketing. As a pioneer in SEO, one of the first Google Advertising Professionals and the co-founder of several agencies: Relevant Traffic (Search Marketing), BDBL MEDIA (Biddable Media) and AZNOS (Content Marketing), he has a broad and long-running experience across SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, Content marketing and Programmatic. Anders was also COO for GroupM Search across EMEA. Anders is also active as a member of various awards juries and advisory boards. SEO via Search Engine Land https://selnd.com/1BDlNnc April 23, 2019 at 07:43AM Google Home & Assistant Listings May Need Google Guaranteed Label http://bit.ly/2XwvIqE You've seen the Google local services ads before, they have the Google Guarantee label on them. But when the Google Assistant started showing ads, people asked how does one not pay to show up in the local listings if you need the guarantee label but those come from local services ads. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable http://bit.ly/1sYxUD0 April 23, 2019 at 07:42AM
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Google: Nofollow Link Attribute Is Working Fairly Well http://bit.ly/2GAnZ5i Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the nofollow link attribute has been and still is working fairly well. He added hasn't "seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting credit in quite some time." SEO via Search Engine Roundtable http://bit.ly/1sYxUD0 April 23, 2019 at 07:19AM Google: AJAX/XHR Calls Can Impact Crawl Budget http://bit.ly/2IBCfNx Google's Gary Illyes posted on Twitter this morning that he updated the crawl budget post from January 2017 to explicitly say that AJAX (i.e. XHR) calls were added to the list of things that will consume your site's crawl budget. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable http://bit.ly/1sYxUD0 April 23, 2019 at 07:08AM
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One Simple Hack That’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Sales http://bit.ly/2KYb4OV There’s a little growth hack that every ecommerce site should be using. It’s the easiest hack… it doesn’t require money, you don’t need a following, and it works instantly. But you know what? No one is using it. Can you guess what it is? Well, I’ll give you hint… just look at the image above. It’s not related to SEO, paid ads, or anything else you are used to reading about here on the blog. The beautiful part about it is no one is leveraging it, which means it works roughly 100% of the time. ? A simple way to get more ecommerce salesAlright, do you want to know what it is? Well, I’ll give you one more hint before spilling the beans. If you watched a video like this on YouTube about the best makeup products, what do you think would happen? There’s a good chance you’ll buy one of the products recommended. And if you don’t, someone else will. The issue is, it only works if you generate enough video views. And I have a lot of articles breaking down how to get more YouTube traffic like:
There is one big problem… there is no guarantee that your video will rank on YouTube or get enough views. But what if I told you that there is a channel that is highly relevant to ecommerce and you can easily get 20,000 plus views per video? Best of all, there is no competition and you can do it every single time, without even having a following! How to get 29,090 video views on AmazonYou already know about YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Instagram Live… and you may even know about LinkedIn Live. But did you know about Amazon Live? Just like all of the other live platforms, it works similarly, but the whole purpose is to show off and promote your products so you can drive more brand awareness and sales. The video above is by Skincare by Alana. Alana presented tips in the video about how to reduce puffiness around your eyes and how to make them brighter. Can you guess how many views that video received in the first week it aired? Well, based on the headline above you are probably going to guess 29,090. That is correct. ? And all Alana spent was $200 to boost the video. It’s not just Alana who is seeing massive success… I know 2 other people that are getting similar results, but they won’t let me share their stats as they are white labeling other people’s products and don’t want more competition. ? So how do you get thousands of views from Amazon Live?Well, there is a simple process… let’s break down how you can do it step by step. Now before we get into that, I need to be transparent: You are going to find it a bit awkward at first. But after you do it a few times, you’ll find that it is easy and fast. Step #1: Download the Amazon Live appYou probably have an iPhone or an Andriod device. Log into your app store and download the Amazon Live app. Although you can view Amazon Live on your desktop computer, you can’t post a video unless you do it from your phone. When you install the app, make sure you allow Amazon to access everything on your phone. This will come in handy later when you try to upload your slate image. I will get into what a slate image is later on… Step #2: Open the appNow open up the app. Once it’s opened it will look something like this other than the fact that you won’t have any videos. On the bottom left you will see a “Streams” navigational option and that will show you all of the videos you have aired. On the bottom right you will see a “More” navigational option that shows you all the preferences and options you have. And to get started, you would click the “+” button at the bottom. Step #3: Getting startedWhen you click the “+” button at the bottom, you’ll see a screen that looks like this: Amazon Live has a cool practice mode feature. I highly recommend you start off with a practice run or two. Once you get the hang of it, create a real live video. But before you do you’ll want to add products that you want to promote. You can select one or multiple. As for video source, your phone camera will be the easiest. There are other options as well such as an encoder and other things for video ninjas, but I would just use your phone camera (also known as phone cam) as it’s simple and works well. You’ll also have to name your live stream. This is where you enter the title of the video. This is very important because if your title sucks, you won’t get as many views. If you don’t know how to write amazing headlines, check out these posts:
Step #4: Boost your videoIt doesn’t take much money to get thousands of views. Technically, you will get thousands of views without spending a dollar. But if you want to spend a few hundred dollars it will go a very long way. Again, this tactic works without spending any money, but a few dollars can help you get a lot more traction. Step #5: Schedule or post your videoYou’ll have 2 options when it comes to posting your video. You can go live and post right away, or you can schedule your video to go out. If you haven’t filmed your video during peak hours, I recommend that you schedule it. The last thing you want to do is publish a video in the middle of the night or too early in the morning. Step #6: Add a slate imageA slate image is a cover image. This is what people see when browsing Amazon Live. Here’s an example of a slate image: Remember how I said you’ll want to allow the app access to files on your phone? You’ll want to do that so you can upload a slate image. Step #7: Show a bannerYou need to show a banner. It will change the number of sales you generate. You have 2 options when it comes to showing a banner. The first is to share a promotion with the views, and the second is to share a custom message. When you select the “share a promotion” option, your promotion will be displayed as a banner at the bottom of your video. Customers can click on the banner to apply the promotion to their account. And when you select the “share a custom message” option, your custom message will be displayed as a banner at the bottom of your video. People can hide the message at any point. You can test both options, but I recommend that you at least “share a promotion” so it makes it easier for people to get a discount with just a click. Step #8: Watch the sales roll inAlana only generated one sale on her first video, but that’s because she didn’t push too hard. She already knows how to drastically improve that number and, in a bit, I will go over how to generate hundreds of sales through Amazon Live. The other accounts I have access to have generated hundreds of sales through Live. One has generated 391 sales so far from 2 videos and the other has generated 328 sales from 3 videos. And I will share below why they were able to generate sales and why Alana wasn’t. How to maximize your sales from Amazon LiveHere’s how to get more sales:
It really isn’t that complicated. As long as you follow the tips above, it shouldn’t be hard for you to generate dozens of sales from each Amazon Live video. ConclusionJust like every other video platform, the reach will eventually be limited, and it will be harder to get results. And sadly, there is nothing you can do about it. For the time being, though, you need to jump on the Amazon Live bandwagon and create as many videos as you can. Once you get the process down right and you are seeing sales, I would create 1 video each and every day. I can’t create videos on Amazon Live as I don’t sell ecommerce products myself, but you can. That’s a requirement that I can’t get around. So, what do you think about Amazon Live? If you aren’t jumping to create a video after reading this, you are missing out. The post One Simple Hack That’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Sales appeared first on Neil Patel. SEO via Neil Patel https://neilpatel.com April 23, 2019 at 07:04AM Google Search Console Coverage Report Delayed 16 Days & Counting http://bit.ly/2veUQGz It is now 16 days and counting since the Google Search Console Coverage report has been updated. Two-weeks later than the normal two-day delay and there is no end in sight. I've been seeing complaints pointed at Google's John Mueller on Twitter with zero response. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable http://bit.ly/1sYxUD0 April 23, 2019 at 06:55AM
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Google My Business: POI Establishment Category http://bit.ly/2USNMys I am seeing reports of business owners and local SEOs saying they are seeing a new category being added to some of the business listings they manage. The category is called POI Establishment and folks are confused what this is about, espesially because it can be mixed with their real categories, like barber shop, hair salon, etc. SEO via Search Engine Roundtable http://bit.ly/1sYxUD0 April 23, 2019 at 06:38AM |
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