SEO Marketing News - RICK REA: Helping You Grow Through Online Marketing

Googles iOS App Can Now Filter Search Results by Date by @MattGSouthern

9/30/2017

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Google’s iOS App Can Now Filter Search Results by Date by @MattGSouthern

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Google’s latest update to its iOS app allows users to filter search results by date range.

Here is the info included in the changelog:

I tested it out and it works exactly as advertised. You’ll find the “Tools” option toward the end of the option bar after you search for something.

After tapping on “Tools” you will see another bar appear underneath with filtering options.

Tap on “Any Time” to filter your search results by a predefined date range.

Here are the options there are to choose from:

Tapping on a date range will then render the search results again with your filter applied.

The new set of search results will be automatically sorted by relevance. If you want a true chronological listing of search results, tap on the button and select “Sort by Date.”

As you may have noticed in the screenshot, there are a couple of other filtering options available.

There’s also the option to search by country, and tapping on “All Results” gives you the option to conduct your search verbatim.

Of course, filtering search results by data or by country is not a new thing, but it is new to Google’s iOS app.

Those who search only via the app, and not a mobile browser, may not have ever known the feature was available.

Now casual and power searchers alike can do more without having to leave the Google app.

SEO

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September 30, 2017 at 04:51PM

YouTube Changes Rules Regarding Videos With External Links by @MattGSouthern

9/29/2017

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YouTube Changes Rules Regarding Videos With External Links by @MattGSouthern

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YouTube Changes Rules Regarding Videos With External Links - Search Engine Journal

YouTube is adding restrictions on which accounts are able to add external links at the end of their videos.

External links are added to videos in the form of end cards, and now there are requirements that every account needs to meet in order to be able to use end cards.

Here are the new requirements for using end cards:

You must join the YouTube Partner Program
Your channel must have 10,000 total public views or more

These requirements are being put in place to prevent abuse of end cards. By having to join the YouTube Partner Program, the company will be able to individually evaluate every account before granting them approval.

Adding an end card to a video, which is a screen that directs the viewer toward clicking a link, is an effective way to drive traffic to a website.

YouTubers tend to use end cards to point viewers towards things like crowd funding campaigns, Patreon, and merchandise stores.

End cards can be used for just about anything though. You can direct viewers to your website, a landing page, a product page, or anything else that will help you reach your marketing goals.

The next time you go to add an end card to one of your videos, you may see a notice saying “you’ll need to enable your channel for monetization.”

All that means is you need to join the YouTube Partner Program. It doesn’t mean you need to monetize your channel with ads. You can continue to use end cards without any other form of monetization

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September 29, 2017 at 09:09PM

Google is the Worlds 2nd Most Valuable Brand in 2017 by @MattGSouthern

9/29/2017

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Google is the World’s 2nd Most Valuable Brand in 2017 by @MattGSouthern

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Google has been ranked as the second most valuable brand in the world in 2017.

The company has maintained its position ahead of competitor Microsoft, but was unable to top Apple which is the the world’s most valuable brand for the fifth year in a row.

The distance between Google and the rest of the world’s top brands is notable. Google’s brand valuation rose 6% this year to $142 billion, which is nearly twice the brand valuation of Microsoft.

Apple’s lead on Google isn’t as great, but they’re not exactly neck-in-neck either.

What’s also worth noting is that Google’s growth is slowing down. Google’s brand valuation grew by 11% last year while only growing by 6% this year.

Microsoft, on the other hand, grew more this year compared to last year and rose from position 4 to position 3.

Google still has a commanding lead on Microsoft, however, but it’s interesting to see how the two competitors are growing compared to one another.

For a more extensive look at the world’s top brands, see the chart below.

SEO

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September 29, 2017 at 07:46PM

Bing Ads Upgrades URL Tracking With New Parameters by @MattGSouthern

9/29/2017

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Bing Ads Upgrades URL Tracking With New Parameters by @MattGSouthern

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Bing Ads Upgrades URL Tracking With New Parameters - Search Engine Journal

Bing Ads is introducing three new URL tracking parameters, which will further assist advertisers in learning about the source of ad clicks.

Tracking parameters can be appended to the end of a destination URL for the purpose of learning more about the source of an ad click.

Now, advertisers can learn which ad extension led to a click, the geographic location of the click, and the location of interest that triggered the ad.

The new parameters are {feeditemid}, {loc_physical_ms}, and {loc_interest_ms} respectively.

With these new tracking parameters it’s possible that advertisers can use the data to discover if any trends exist between geographic locations and a specific ad extension.

As an example, if you find there’s one city that is highly receptive to a specific ad extension, you can target more ads with that extension to people who live in that city.

In addition to these new parameters, Bing Ads has updated the {TargetID} parameter. Now it is able to provide insights about custom audience lists, in-market audience lists, and targeted location IDs.

SEO

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September 29, 2017 at 07:46PM

Google AdWords Call-Only Ads Upgraded with Ad Extensions by @MattGSouthern

9/29/2017

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Google AdWords’ Call-Only Ads Upgraded with Ad Extensions by @MattGSouthern

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With hundreds of thousands of advertisers now using call-only ads, Google is finally upgrading them with a feature that is available with other ad types.

Ad extensions, additional lines of text that appear at the bottom of an ad, can now be used with call-only ads.

In Google’s testing, adding extensions to call-only ads can improve click-through rate by an average of 10%.

When you keep that in mind, and also consider that calls convert three times better than web clicks, you start to realize how much potential these ad units can have.

The following extensions for call-only ads are now available to all advertisers:

Location: Include information about your business location that could encourage customers to visit in-person
Callouts: Highlight unique selling points of your business, such as free shipping or hassle-free returns.
Structured snippets: Add specific details about products and services. For example, a hotel might advertise that it offers a spa, restaurants, meeting rooms, etc.

Advertisers may be pleased to know that they won’t have to do the same work twice. Any account level ad extensions you have already applied will be automatically added to call-only ads.

SEO

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September 29, 2017 at 04:57PM

SEO ranking factors: Whats important whats not

9/29/2017

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SEO ranking factors: What’s important, what’s not

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This week, Google celebrated its 19th birthday. A lot has changed in nearly two decades. Rather than relying primarily on PageRank to evaluate the quality of web pages, Google now uses a whole array of techniques to suggest a wide range of content in response to queries, from simple direct answers to multimedia audio and video files.

With loads of guesswork and assumptions, the debate about Google ranking factors is never-ending and evolves with every algorithm update. What’s on the rise, what’s on the decline, and what still works?

At SMX East, several sessions look closely at today’s most important ranking considerations. In SEO Ranking Factors In 2017: What’s Important, What’s Not, you’ll hear the results of comprehensive studies undertaken by Searchmetrics and SEMRush, which looked at millions of sites to determine what separated winners from losers. You’ll also hear a case study from Herndon Hasty, SEO for the Container Store, which battles with formidable competition from Amazon, Walmart and other e-commerce giants.

Shari Thurow has been practicing SEO and carefully observing Google since its inception. In her always popular Search Engine-Friendly Web Design session, you’ll learn how to create search engine-friendly sites that are equally appealing to human visitors. And you’ll get juicy insights into critical aspects of SEO, including:

Wayfinder sitemaps vs. XML sitemaps
guidelines for mobile-friendly URL structure
mobile readability tools, techniques and guidelines
parallax design & mobile UX: Dos & don’ts

And if you have questions about particular strategies or techniques, be sure to attend the Meet The SEOs session. During this PowerPoint-free panel, veteran SEOs answer your questions about search engine optimization. Got a puzzling issue? Wondering about a possible trend? Put it to the experts.

Register for SMX East today!

SMX East is just a month away, and the best preconference rate is still available. So be sure to register for SMX East now.

SEO

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September 29, 2017 at 04:21PM

Paid Social for Content Marketing Launches - Whiteboard Friday

9/29/2017

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Paid Social for Content Marketing Launches - Whiteboard Friday

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Posted by KaneJamison

Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won't do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch's traffic and results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we're welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I'm the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.

So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.

Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content marketing, that audience development component is really important. A lot of people just don't have a significant market share of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. So it's great to use paid social in order to reach new people, get them over to your most important content projects, or even just get them over to your week-to-week blog content.

Social teaser content

So the first thing I want to start with is expanding a little bit beyond just your average image ad. A lot of social networks, especially Facebook, are promoting video heavily nowadays. You can use that to get a lot cheaper engagement than you can from a typical image ad. If you've logged in to your Facebook feed lately, you've probably noticed that aside from birth announcements, there's a lot of videos filling up the feed. So as an advertiser, if you want to blend in well with that, using video as a teaser or a sampler for the content that you're producing is a great way to kind of look natural and look like you belong in the user's feed.

So different things you can do include:

Short animated videos explaining what the project is and why you did it.
Maybe doing talking head videos with some of your executives or staff or marketing team, just talking on screen with whatever in the background about the project you created and kind of drumming up interest to actually get people over to the site.

So that can be really great for team recognition if you're trying to build thought leadership in your space. It's a great way to introduce the face of your team members that might be speaking at industry conferences and events. It's a great way to just get people recognizing their name or maybe just help them feel closer to your company because they recognize their voice and face.

So everybody's instant reaction, of course, is, "I don't have the budget for video." That's okay. You don't need to be a videography expert to create decent social ads. There's a lot of great tools out there.

Soapbox by Wistia is a great one, that's been released recently, that allows you to do kind of a webcam combined with your browser type of video. There are also tools like...
Bigvu.tv
Shakr
Promo, which is a tool by a company called Slidely, I think.

All of those tools are great ways to create short, 20-second, 60-second types of videos. They let you create captions. So if you're scrolling through a social feed and you see an autoplay video, there's a good chance that the audio on that is turned off, so you can create captions to let people know what the video is about if it's not instantly obvious from the video itself. So that's a great way to get cheaper distribution than you might get from your typical image ad, and it's really going to stick out to users because most other companies aren't spending the time to do that.

Lookalike audiences

Another really valuable tactic is to create lookalike audiences from your best customers. Now, you can track your best customers in a couple of ways:

You could have a pixel, a Facebook pixel or another network pixel on your website that just tracks the people that have been to the site a number of times or that have been through the shopping cart at a certain dollar value.
We can take our email list and use the emails of customers that have ordered from us or just the emails of customers that are on our newsletter that seem like they open up every newsletter and they really like our content.

We can upload those into a custom audience in the social network of our choice and then create what's called a lookalike audience. In this case, I'd recommend what's called a "one percent lookalike audience." So if you're targeting people in the US, it means the one percent of people in the US that appear most like your audience. So if your audience is men ages 35 to 45, typically that are interested in a specific topic, the lookalike audience will probably be a lot of other men in a similar age group that like similar topics.

So Facebook is making that choice, which means you may or may not get the perfect audience right from the start. So it's great to test additional filters on top of the default lookalike audience. So, for example, you could target people by household income. You could target people by additional interests that may or may not be obvious from the custom audience, just to make sure you're only reaching the users that are interested in your topic. Whatever it might be, if this is going to end up being three or four million people at one percent of the country, it's probably good to go ahead and filter that down to a smaller audience that's a little bit closer to your exact target that you want to reach. So excellent way to create brand awareness with that target audience.

Influencers

The next thing I'd like you to test is getting your ads and your content in front of influencers in your space. That could mean...

Bloggers
Journalists
Or it could just mean people like page managers in Facebook, people that have access to a Facebook page that can share updates. Those could be social media managers. That could be bloggers. That could even be somebody running the page for the local church or a PTA group. Regardless, those people are probably going to have a lot of contacts, be likely to share things with friends and family or followers on social media.

Higher cost but embedded value

When you start running ads to this type of group, you're going to find that it costs a little bit more per click. If you're used to paying $0.50 to $1.00 per click, you might end up paying $1.00 or $2.00 per click to reach this audience. That's okay. There's a lot more embedded value with this audience than the typical user, because they're likely, on average, to have more reach, more followers, more influence.

Test share-focused CTAs

It's worth testing share focus call to actions. What that means is encouraging people to share this with some people they know that might be interested. Post it to their page even is something worth testing. It may or may not work every time, but certainly valuable to test.

Filters

So the way we recommend reaching most of these users is through something like a job title filter. Somebody says they're a blogger, says they're an editor-in-chief, that's the clearest way to reach them. They may not always have that as their job title, so you could also do employers. That's another good example.

I recommend combining that with broad interests. So if I am targeting journalists because I have a new research piece out, it's great for us to attach interests that are relevant to our space. If we're in health care, we might target people interested in health care and the FDA and other big companies in the space that they'd likely be following for updates. If we're in fashion, we might just be selecting people that are fans of big brands, Nordstrom and others like that. Whatever it is, you can take this audience of a few hundred thousand or whatever it might be down to just a few thousand and really focus on the people that are most likely to be writing about or influential in your space.

Retarget non-subscribers

The fourth thing you can test is retargeting non-subscribers. So a big goal of content marketing is having those pop-ups or call to actions on the site to get people to download a bigger piece of content, download a checklist, whatever it might be so that we can get them on our email newsletter. There's a lot of people that are going to click out of that. 90% to 95% of the people that visit your site or more probably aren't going to take that call to action.

So what we can do is convert this into more of a social ad unit and just show the same messaging to the people that didn't sign up on the site. Maybe they just hate pop-ups by default. They will never sign up for them. That's okay. They might be more receptive to a lead ad in Facebook that says "subscribe" or "download" instead of something that pops up on their screen.

Keep testing new messaging

The other thing we can do is start testing new messages and new content. Maybe this offer wasn't interesting to them because they don't need that guide, but maybe they need your checklist instead, or maybe they'd just like your email drip series that has an educational component to it. So keep testing different types of messaging. Just because this one wasn't valuable doesn't mean your other content isn't interesting to them, and it doesn't mean they're not interested in your email list.

Redo split tests from your site

We can keep testing messaging. So if we are testing messaging on our site, we might take the top two or three and test that messaging on ads. We might find that different messaging works better on social than it does on pop-ups or banners on the site. So it's worth redoing split tests that seemed conclusive on your site because things might be different on the social media network.

So that's it for today. What I'd love for you guys to do is if you have some great examples of targeting that's worked for you, messaging that's worked for you, or just other paid social tactics that have worked really well for your content marketing campaigns, I'd love to hear examples of that in the comments on the post, and we'd be happy to answer questions you guys have on how to actually get some of this stuff done. Whether it's targeting questions, how to set up lookalike audiences, anything like that, we'd be happy to answer questions there as well.

So that's it for me today. Thanks, Moz fans. We'll see you next time.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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September 29, 2017 at 04:14PM

Access all of your data with Data Studio Community Connectors

9/29/2017

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Access all of your data with Data Studio Community Connectors

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Since the recent developer launch of Data Studio Community Connectors, users have been able to easily connect to and report on data from over 250 new sources.

Partners are also now leveraging Data Studio + Community Connectors as a free and powerful reporting and analysis solution for their customers, with minimal development investment.

We’ve already seen a number of interesting use cases. For example, ClickInsight, a Data Studio certified partner, used Community Connectors to create interactive experiences for the weather forecast in Toronto, the NY Times most popular stories, and real time departures info for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. They embedded these Data Studio reports in a blog post for anyone to try, Are You Ready to Get Creative with Data Studio Connectors?

Try Community Connectors

We have been working with a growing number of partners that are making it easy for users to directly access all of their data in Data Studio. Partners such as AdStage, Analytics Canvas, CallRail, data.world, Funnel, PowerMyAnalytics, and Supermetrics have enabled easy access to 250 data sets including: Facebook Ads, MailChimp, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Amazon, and many more available through the Community Connector Gallery.

Data Studio Community Connectors Gallery

Easily build your own Community Connector

You can develop your own Community Connectors and use them in Data Studio reports and dashboards. Your connector can fetch data from sources such as:

Platforms for social media, enterprise, search, financial, HR, advertising, etc.
Public and other open data sets.
Internal/Private company data.
...and any data source or service that can be accessed over the internet.

We’ve made it easy to build your own connector by leveraging the Google Apps Script platform which provides a multitude of services and resources to quickly build and deploy connectors.

To learn more about building a Community Connector visit Getting Started with Community Connectors and the Community Connector Developer Program.

Share, publish or open-source your Community Connector

The reports you create using Community Connectors can be shared with others. In addition, you can let other Data Studio users use your connector. For example, you can directly share your connector with colleagues at your organization or make your connector available for all Data Studio users to find by publishing your connector in the Community Connector Gallery.

Tell us your story

If you have any interesting connector stories, ideas or if you’d like to share some amazing reports you’ve created using Community Connectors please let us know by giving us a shout or send us your story at community-connector-feedback@google.com.

As we continue to improve the Community Connector features be sure to regularly check the Community Connector Gallery for new additions that will enable greater access to all of your data in Data Studio.

Posted by Pete Frisella, on behalf of the entire Data Studio team

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September 29, 2017 at 03:12PM

SearchCap: Bing Ads tracking Google Home screen & Google Fred

9/29/2017

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SearchCap: Bing Ads tracking, Google Home screen & Google Fred

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Bing Ads tracking, Google Home screen & Google Fred appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

SEO

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September 29, 2017 at 03:00PM

Search in Pics: Google balloon statues a Fiat Polski car & massage chair

9/29/2017

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Search in Pics: Google balloon statues, a Fiat Polski car & massage chair

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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 Polski Fiat car: Source: Instagram Google massage chair: Source:...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

SEO

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September 29, 2017 at 09:10AM