Tag governance can be a complicated process. With the growing availability of tag-driven marketing and data platforms, it’s more important than ever to monitor the tags on your site, as well as what data they’re collecting and the overall impact they may have.

But who in your organization is in charge of monitoring tags? Are you GDPR compliant, ready for new e-privacy regulations coming down the pike? Proper tag governance is not a luxury – it’s essential to your company’s digital success.

Join our tag management experts from InfoTrust as they explain the business risks associated with tag negligence and how tag monitoring technology can help your website outperform the competition.

Register today for “Tag Auditing Platform Buyer’s Guide: Best Practices for Tag Management and Governance” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by InfoTrust.

The snippet is a single search result in a set of search results and generally consists of a title, a URL and a description of the page. The content of a snippet matches parts of the search query and you’ll see your keyword highlighted in the snippet description. Search engines often use pieces of your content to fill in the parts that make up the snippet. In most cases, search engines determine the best possible snippet for you, but you can try to override that by adding a meta description to your page. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into what is a snippet.

The snippet is one of your most valuable pieces of online real estate. This is the doorway to your site, and you should make it as enticing as possible. You need people to click your link — without misleading them, of course. While search engines have the last say in how these snippets appear, you can give them options. If they deem these worthy, they’ll use it. Even Googles John Mueller says you should fill out your meta description:

I'd generally recommend specifying one, you know your content best.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) October 29, 2018

Regular snippets, rich snippets, and featured snippets

The snippet in the screenshot you saw at the beginning of this article is a regular, static snippet but there are many variations to be found. Search engines love to experiment with different ways of highlighting particular results within the search results pages.

For some time now, we’ve seen rich results appear in different forms. Rich snippets are regular snippets with added information, like product details, availability, reviews and a lot more. Here’s a rich snippet for the search term [Fender Standard Precision Bass sunburst]. You’ll notice that this snippet is much ‘richer’ so to say. It has ratings, review, pricing, stock availability and some product highlights. This is a specific product rich snippets, but there are similar snippets for recipes, reviews, videos, events, courses and much more. Adding structured data is a necessity for some types of these rich results.

Another type of snippet is the

featured snippet

. This is a new kind of result that appears at the top of the search results pages, even before the first organic search result — at position 0 so to say. The content for these featured snippets comes from pages that best answer that specific question in its content. You can’t sign up for this — you have to earn it with your content. Here’s one of our featured snippets, this one for the search term [what is a meta description]. This feature snippet takes the full answer to that question from our article and puts it right at the top of the page.

SEO title and meta description

Earlier, I pointed out that search engines sometimes prefer to pick their own text from a website to use in the snippets. While they are pretty apt at making up something nice, in a lot of cases you’d probably want to control how your page appears in search. One of the ways you can influence this is by adding a meta description to your page. This is a short piece of text describing your content in a way that makes it attractive for both searchers as well as search engines. You can also edit the SEO title of your article if you want to override the standard way search engines show your page title. Yoast SEO helps you do all this.

Snippet preview in Yoast SEO

Enter the snippet preview in Yoast SEO:

The snippet preview in Yoast SEO gives you a good idea of how your post or page might look like in search engines. Also, you can edit the SEO title if you want it to be something else then your regular page title. If you want you can use variables, so you can automate stuff. You’ll also find the meta description field in which you can add the text you want to suggest to search engines to use. Learn how to make your site stand out in search results and how to write an awesome meta description.

Now you know all about the snippet

A snippet is a deceptively simple thing: a single search result. However, it has great power. A good snippet will help you get those clicks. You don’t just want to appear at the top of the search results, no, you want those clicks! And to get people to click, you need a brilliant snippet.

A year after Twitter doubled its character limit from 140 to 280, data shows users are being more polite, using fewer abbreviations, and replying to more tweets.

More Polite Users

The use of polite sentiments is way up since the character limit increase.

Data shows that 54% more tweets use the word “please,” while the use of “thank you” is up 22%.

Fewer Abbreviations

The ability to tweet more characters has led to a decline of abbreviations and an increase of the full-length words.

• Usage of “gr8” is down 36%, while “great” is up 32%
• Usage of “b4 is down 13%, while “before is up 70%
• Usage of “sry” is down 5%, while “sorry” is up 31%

More Replies and Engagement

Replies to tweets are reportedly on the rise, although the exact increase in tweet replies was not provided in the data.

It’s possible that there are more replies because users are asking more questions – 30% more tweets include a question more.

Tweets Are Not Getting Longer on Average

Curiously enough, the character limit increase has not led to longer tweets for the most part.

The most common length of tweets in English is 33 characters, which is actually one less character than before the change.

In fact, only 12% of English language tweets are longer than 140 characters. Just 1% of tweets hit the 280-character limit.

Looking at data across all languages, 6% of tweets are longer than 140 characters.

Here is a collection of tweets that were recently published that support the above statistics.

r u abbreving less rn?

Since the switch to 280 characters a year ago, we've seen an increase in people writing out full words and phrases. pic.twitter.com/pjnfyVmilY

— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) October 30, 2018

All about the please and thank you.

With 280 characters, people are saying 'please' (+54%) and ‘thank you’ (+22%) more.

THANKS!!!!

— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) October 30, 2018

???

280 characters later, there are more ? and replies to Tweets. More room, more conversations!

— Twitter Data (@TwitterData) October 30, 2018

Last year, we upgraded tweet length to 280 and guess what? Use of 'please' is up 54% and 'thank you' is up 22%. I love that! Also, people are asking more questions and having more conversations. All this, and the majority of tweets are still under 140. It worked.

— Biz Stone (@biz) October 30, 2018

Now that the latest changes to “close variants” of exact match keywords have started rolling out more broadly than the last time I wrote about it, I’ve started to hear anecdotes about some of the impact. At a recent conference I attended, there were at least a few advertisers reporting significant changes in performance due some close variants that didn’t seem so close after all. While I’m sure there are many advertisers who are benefiting from this change with cheap additional conversions, the fact that the results are mixed makes it worth looking at four ways that Google Ads Scripts can help restore control for advertisers who are impacted.

Last month I shared a script to help you easily see the impact for your own accounts but this month I’ll take that script one step further. With the latest version (below), you will be able to automatically add negative keywords for close variants that aren’t working well. I’ll also share two variations of similar scripts for automating adding negative keywords, and a script for getting high level match type performance reports.

But first, to remind everyone of the latest change to close variants and how it fits in with other changes made by Google, here’s a timeline of how close variants have evolved over the years.

This spreadsheet shows examples of exact match keywords and what close variant search terms they have shown for. Generate your own spreadsheet with the script in this post (below).

Updated examples of exact match close variants

With the query analysis script I shared last month, it becomes really easy to see specific examples of what Google considers to be “close variants.” But when I first shared the script, many advertisers were still running on the 2017 version of close variants so it’s probably a good idea to look at the latest results from the script now that most advertisers should be on the 2018 version. As Google said in their announcement, the changes are expected to roll out through October of this year. Here is an example of some close variants of exact match that I found on Oct. 19.

These search terms are all relevant but appear to be different enough that they would likely benefit from being managed as separate keywords with unique bids.

A timeline of how match types including “close variants” have evolved over time.

Don’t undo all close variants

In the table above with 4 examples of not-so-close close variants, there were another 2000 close variants that were much closer and the four I picked out as less relevant had only about 80 clicks while the others had 28,000 clicks. While individual results may differ, it’s probably fair to say that close variants can drive good traffic that’s worth keeping.

There is a script available that undoes all close variants but I prefer to be a bit more picky and only eliminate close variants that are driving poor performance or that are just too semantically different. There are many close variants that are actually helpful because they let advertisers manage accounts without having to worry about every possible typo or other close variation as extra keywords.

For example, my company’s name is “Optmyzr” and there are a few vowels we had to leave out of our name to be able to get the domain name. As a result, a lot of people spell our name wrong in search and it saves us a lot of time managing those misspellings as keywords by letting close variants pick up the traffic automatically.

I might be dating myself, but I was reminded of the 597 ways people spell Britney Spears incorrectly. There’s clearly a benefit to not having to manage all typos manually.

A script for seeing aggregate performance by match type

A really old script that is all of a sudden very relevant again is the match type performance script. While it doesn’t show query-level detail and hence can’t be used for managing accounts, it helps advertisers see the big picture of how different match types impact their performance and inform strategy decisions like how much effort should be put into managing different types of keywords.

This script helps advertisers see the big picture by reporting stats aggregated at the keyword match type level. There are two tabs on this report, one for keyword match types and another for search term match types.

Section 1: Keyword match types
When advertisers talk about match type, they most often mean the match type they chose for the keyword. They don’t refer to how those keywords actually matched to queries. For example, when looking at the performance for the phrase match keyword “optmyzr scripts” in Google Ads, we see the data for the “keyword match type.”

In this example, we see 69 impressions for a phrase match keyword.

The unsegmented view of keywords shows performance based on the advertiser-selected match type, without considering its relationship to the query.

Based on this way of counting, the script aggregates the performance for all keywords and returns the totals.

In this example, keywords added as exact match have a far lower CPA than those added as broad matches.

Note that there is no data for broad match modified (BMM) keywords because that’s not an official match type and BMM data gets lumped in with broad match in Google’s reports.

Section 2: Query match types
Building on the example from section 1, advertisers could look more deeply into their keyword data and add a segment for “search terms match type.” Now the example from before will look like this:

By segmenting Google Ads data by search terms match type, you can see that a phrase match keyword accrues different stats depending on how the keyword matches to the query.

Of those 69 impressions for a phrase match keyword, 51 impressions happened when the query was exactly the same text as the phrase match keyword (or an exact close variant), hence Google counts it as an “exact match.” Now the aggregated stats would look something like this in the output from the script (see script below).

The API actually reports close variants separately so the above report tells us very clearly that in this account exact match close variant search terms are driving conversions at a lower CPA than pure exact match. Perhaps an indicator that this account could benefit from a keyword buildout. Or perhaps just an indication that Google is doing a good job driving additional conversions for the account.

The keyword performance match type report aggregates data based on the match type selected by advertisers.

A script for managing close variants by performance
So now you’re equipped with two scripts that help gauge the impact of close variants on your account. If you find that performance is impacted and you want to start controlling close variants by adding some negative keywords, you can use this script (see below).

I took last month’s reporting script and added the capability to add negative keywords based on some rules you specify.

The Levenshtein Distance is an algorithm for calculating how many edits are required to turn one string into another string. In this example, we use it to calculate how close the word “pajamas” is to “pjs.”

Rule 1: Automatic negatives for very different words
Like I said before, I like how close variants send me traffic for lots of typos of our brand name. These misspellings tend to be 1 or 2 characters different from my keywords. A good way to count the difference in characters between the query and the keyword is with the Levenshtein distance. This score calculates the number of characters that have to be changed, added or deleted to turn one string into another.

In this example, we noticed that our keyword “pajamas” was shown when the query was “pjs.” This string transformation required 4 steps so it has a Levenshtein Distance of 4.

In our script, we can set the threshold for the largest Levenshtein Distance before we add the query as a negative keyword.

Rule 2: Automatic negatives for low performance queries
The second approach afforded by this script is to add negative keywords for any close variant query that has too much cost and no conversions. This assumes that there are at least some clicks on the keyword so it’s a less proactive approach than rule 1 but it’s also less aggressive and lets the performance data drive the decision rather than the semantic analysis.

Of course there are many ways to determine “low performance” and this is just one example. With a bit of experimentation, you should be able to change the query to make it follow your preferred method for when to add negative keywords.

The script generates Search Terms Match Type performance data to help advertisers understand how “close variants” perform relative to non-close variant match types.

A script to manage close variants in SKAG ad groups
There’s one more script you might find useful to deal with close variants. This one comes courtesy of Steve Hammer. Rather than proactively blocking all close variants, or doing so based on performance, it blocks only close variants that interfere with a single keyword ad group (SKAG) management structure.

SKAG ad groups are often deployed in an alpha/beta account management structure. The alpha campaign is populated with SKAGs based on queries that drove conversions in the past. Each ad group has one exact match keyword in it. When queries occur with any variation of that exact match keyword, those are expected to be directed to the beta campaigns where keywords with less restrictive match types are kept, often in ad groups with several related keywords.

You can grab the script here and it will identify your SKAG ad groups based on a common element in the ad group naming convention (usually the presence of the text “skag”). If it finds close variant queries occuring in those ad groups, it will add them as negative keywords.

Conclusion
I love Google Ads Scripts because they let us quickly automate tedious processes and reports that are necessary to keep agencies running while they work out new strategies based on the ever-changing PPC landscape. When Google makes exact match keywords less exact, that’s a prime example of where we can use scripts to:

• Better understand the high level impact with a match type performance report
• Get granular insights into what Google means by “same intent”
• Undo the close variants we don’t like

I hope some of the scripts shared here today will prove useful in your day-to-day PPC management.

The scripts:

Query match types script:

Managing close variants by performance script:

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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If you use insertion order billing in your Bing Ads account, a new update will help ensure your campaigns keep running.

With Bing Ads’ new recurring insertion orders feature, advertisers can create a series of insertion orders that will automatically renew based on the set frequency.

How it works. To set up a recurring insertion order, go to the Accounts & Billing page in your Bing Ads account. Then click on the insertion orders tab on the far right. When you choose the Create order option, you’ll see Recurring insertion order in the dropdown.

Give the recurring insertion order series a name to quickly identify the IO grouping.

Recurring IOs can be scheduled with a frequency of monthly, bimonthly, quarterly or yearly and include an end date if needed.

There are optional areas to input the purchase order, order name and any notes about the series.

You’re able to edit recurring IOs and also still manage individual IOs.

Why it matters. Let’s face it, it can be easy to overlook IO renewals and discover your campaigns haven’t been running. This is a handy, unique offering that will help advertisers who use IO billing to manage the process without having to regularly set reminders to re-up their orders. The notes feature  also allows campaign management, finance teams and other stakeholders to capture all the necessary details so everyone is on the same page.

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Greetings, boils and ghouls!

Today is Halloween – one of the most popular U.S. holidays, with more than 21 million searches per month.

Clearly, this means Halloween needs to be celebrated by the digital marketing community.

So I decided to mark this Halloween in the spookiest way possible.

I asked 19 SEO pros to share the most terrifying stories – the most horrifying situations they’d ever faced during their career.

This post is not only here to entertain you, but to also remind you how one small mistake can destroy the whole site’s SEO performance.

Hopefully, next year at this time, you won’t be featured in one of these gruesome Halloween roundups!

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Back in 2013, I was called in to have a manual penalty lifted. I spent a year disavowing thousands of spammy backlinks.

I also took the opportunity to clean up the site – deleting doorway pages, switching to SSL and HHTP2, reorganizing the categorization, optimizing the images, adding some funky Schema, and a few other nice tricks.

After three months, the penalty was lifted, and six months later we were seeing 10 percent+ traffic increases every month.

One day I noticed the Google +1 count had shot up from 20 to 1,020.

Turns out, the boss had become frustrated with the “slow” progress and bought them from what he called a “reputable” online service.

A few days later, manual penalty.

Back to square one.

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A client decided to open up a marketplace system within their existing ecommerce platform.

All those vendors got their own profile and unique URLs for their product range.

Next, to that, the general ecommerce environment added new facets for every individual vendor. They proudly launched the platform together with 120 vendors.

All those new facets and vendor pages added up to over 1 billion new URLs for a domain that used to have 120,000 indexable URLs.

Nobody involved in that project understood the implications of the new setup for SEO and it took us six months to clean up again.

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Clark Boyd, Founder, Candid Digital

I worked at an agency for a little bit whose “USP” was that they use freelancers to perform all the usual SEO tasks.

My first project there was to try and coordinate 382 new landing pages, all of which were due to launch on the same day for a big event.

The agency used to sell in these preposterous projects on the proviso that the “freelancer network” could deliver.

The assets were delivered to me on time by the freelancers, but the client was less than impressed with the quality.

No, that’s too diplomatic.

They hated it.

With two days until launch, we were 382 pages from our target.

In the end, I and one colleague worked round the clock to write titles, descriptions, and many, many paragraphs.

I’m not sure it was any good, but the content was at least a little better than what we had…

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Craig Campbell, Founder, Craig Campbell SEO

I was working with someone on their website to help them rank better within the Lancashire area for a number of terms.

We were making good progress with technical SEO – then they decided to move from WordPress to Wix in order to “save on costs.”

And yes, it looks good; but the rankings are now tanking.

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Adam Connell, Founder, Blogging Wizard

When I was doing agency work a few years ago, my team and I spent 3+ years working with a client to develop content assets, build links, and increase rankings/traffic.

One day traffic and rankings plummeted. I opened up the site to start figuring out why. The problem was obvious – the blog didn’t exist anymore.

Turns out that a customer service rep at their host “accidentally” deleted their entire blog. Along with all their backups. And their ToS got them out of any responsibility.

The impact was significant: 400+ blog posts and content assets wiped out in an instant. They had to be resurrected from drafts in emails and old Word documents.

The lesson:

Even if your client only hires you to work on content/SEO, and even if they have an agency managing their website – make sure they have redundant backups for everything.

And I mean everything.

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Rachel Costello, Technical SEO Executive, DeepCrawl

It seemed like just another ordinary day in the office – how was I to know that a client was about to tell me something that would send a terrible chill down my spine?

One morning I was checking the crawl error report in Google Search Console for a new ecommerce client.

There had been a huge spike in crawl errors, from less than a hundred or so to thousands.

I started checking through the website itself. Category page after category page was either completely empty or had just one or two products left on it, when the last time I checked the previous day they were full.

I then checked the back-end in the CMS and saw, to my horror, that over two-thirds of all of the products had been disabled even though there was still stock left, meaning all of these product pages we’d been working hard to improve were now serving 404s.

I set up a call with the client as soon as I could to find out what had happened.

They told me that “The SEO consultant we worked with before told us it was fine to disable products whenever we want. So at the end of each season, we disable all of the products and if they’re seasonal we just launch them again with new URLs when we want to showcase them on the website again. That’s still OK, right?”

Needless to say, some training on stock management was scheduled immediately. However, the thought of all that wasted link equity over the years still haunts me to this day.

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Early on when I started my agency, I was rebuilding a website for a small business on WordPress.

I built out the redesign on my local machine and would migrate the site late one night.

When I migrated the new site, there was a critical error and the website was showing a 500 error.

I tried again, the same result. I tried, and tried, and tried, nothing was working.

It was about 12:30 am and I froze. I didn’t know what to do.

From 12:30 am on, I resorted to rebuilding the entire site in the live environment.

I finished the site at 5:30 a.m.

I later found my critical mistake. Even though I had double, triple, quadruple-checked the database info, I made the slightest mistake in the password.

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Nick Eubanks, Founder, From the Future

So this is so simple but it was costing our client so much money (tens of millions of dollars per month), and all it was was a misplaced canonical tag…

This client had an internal page, right off the root directory, that was built to target a keyword with an exact match MSV of ~130,000, but there was a canonical to the site’s homepage.

After a simple site crawl, once it was identified, we simply removed the tag and the page popped to Position 5 (and now generates literally tens of millions of dollars in online revenue each and every month).

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Dan Foland, Director of SEO, Postali

I once worked for an agency that handled the SEO for some of the largest and most well-respected healthcare systems in the U.S.

Every time one of our largest and most notable clients pushed an update live from their dev server it also pushed sitewide noindex tags and robots.txt disallow rules live.

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Jenny Halasz, President, JLH Marketing

Working for a very big ecommerce brand about five weeks before Christmas, we had a post about the best gifts get really large reach and get a #1 ranking for “Christmas gifts” on Google.

The increased traffic caused the site to start throwing 503 errors!

We responded really fast with two SEO plays:

1. 302 redirect traffic on that specific URL to another domain hosted elsewhere until we could spool up additional bandwidth.
2. Change the meta description to include the phone number so that if people couldn’t access the site and hit back, they could call.

Both worked really well. We definitely lost some sales, but were able to recover a lot.

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Milosz Krasinski, Founder, Chilli Fruit Web Consulting

My client turned up to be multinational scam agency. Since I have been managing their hosting as well I was halfway involved in this.

Thankfully all got sorted.

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Ron Lieback, Founder and CEO, Content Mender

Back in 2008, during the first year of running Ultimate Motorcycling, we hired an agency to migrate us from Drupal to WordPress.

At the time we were doing around a million uniques per month, and the content was stronger than ever.

But after the migration or rankings tanked by more than half, and the SEO company “lost” about 15,000 URLs, and over 30,000 images.

Yes – lost; it was super scary because I thought the entire business would go under – advertisers pay based on exposure, and we couldn’t afford to go under.

That was the last time I trusted an agency, but it forced me to learn SEO for myself, which led to where I am today.

I can’t stand a hack, but thankfully that one came into my life. ? As for rankings, it took nearly two years to recover, but persistence and patience paid off. And then some.

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Karen Neicy, Director of Experience Strategy, OGK Creative

I once inherited a client website that got hacked because it was using some outdated plugins.

Turns out, the links implanted on the site ended up ranking it for all sorts of “adult” keywords.

So the client was getting traffic from some pretty unsavory verticals.

It was a major brand, and we were getting press inquiries about why they were showing up for such distasteful search terms.

I was like, we’re handling it, but why were you searching for those things in the first place?

It took weeks to correct, but we installed malware protection, removed the bad links (most of them were in the forms of anchored blog comments), removed the outdated plugins, and switched to a more secure, https certificate.

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Andrew Optimisey, Founder, Optimisey Cambridge MeetUp

This is a classic SEO tale of woe.

I’d just started in a new job, SEO was just one of the things I “looked after” (I was very much the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind).

All was going well and then I had some holiday booked so was away from work for a bit.

Two days into my holiday I had panicked messages from my boss (via LinkedIn, email, phone – they’d tried almost everything to get hold of me – I was in a low/no signal area).

In short, the developer team had released a bunch of updates and… included the “User-agent: *Disallow: /” in the robots.txt.

Ouch.

It took them two days to notice that the traffic jumped off a cliff. After having the “hair on fire” moment, they started trying to call me.

The, moderately, happy ending is that it was a relatively quick fix (thanks to a quick fix from the devs and Google Search Console) and the dev team didn’t make that mistake again!

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At an old agency, we worked with a very well-known ecommerce brand.

They were immovable in their #1 rankings for many, many years. (I’d really love to tell you who it was, but I cannot – still, it’s all terrifyingly true!)

They decided to buy their #2 competitor in a very expensive buy-out (who was also immovable in their respective rankings). It was a huge story that month in the trades.

This competitor had an exact match keyword as their domain. (The EMD update hadn’t happened yet.) The keyword had more than a million searches per month. It was a phenomenal opportunity.

We were asked for our opinion on an SEO approach.

We said, “They are mighty, and you are mighty. We recommend you run the site and keep it as close to its current state, even if you change the fulfillment to your own infrastructure. After all, you’ll be owning your #1 and #2 spot – that’s a huge advantage against Amazon. Own that ‘above the fold’ real estate.”

The advice was not taken.

Instead, the site was purchased and promptly dismantled until Google eventually found very little importance in the domain. It dropped right out of the top spot it had enjoyed for 10+ years.

When the purchasers came back and asked how they can fix their mistake, we told them their best bet was to restore to the original state. But that was now impossible. The whole process had been fumbled.

To this day, that domain is sitting with no site attached to it. It’s just sitting in a very large company’s portfolio. It’s a domain that has so much power, and it’s just being squandered. Now that is terrifying.

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I remember starting a business that was to be called Kukumber (an agency) and made some cool videos that I published on my site.

My intern Catherine told me she wanted to “publish the videos on other sites.” Great idea, I thought.

What I didn’t know is that she found a multi-channel video uploader and didn’t create original descriptions or even use an article spinner.

And I didn’t ask about her process nor consider she might not know the difference between duplicated content and syndicating content; alongside mass uploading of the same content.

Within a week, my videos and website were slapped with a manual penalty and you could not “Google” Kukumber for love nor money.

And that’s how the story of Pearl Lemon started.

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Sal Surra, Senior SEO Specialist, Angie’s List

I accidentally put a meta noindex tag on a template for an enterprise site that generates millions of dollars from ad impressions on organic search results.

Because we used Google Analytics, it took us a couple of days to realize what had happened and get it fixed.

A couple day-long issue resulted in multimillion-dollar losses.

That was a really bad day.

Glad I could keep the job.

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A large telecommunication service provider used to offer white label shops for their local stores.

Local stores would be paid an affiliate commission for all product sales.

Good idea, but horribly executed because all white label shops were just put in a directory on the main domain with no canonical tag in sight. ?

This created enormous amounts of cannibalization issues since there were now multiple duplicates of the very same store.

Of course, this also leads to the most SEO-savvy local store ranking for all products with their white label shop instead of the TSP’s very own, original online shop.

The local store’s subdirectory even ranked for most of the brand terms resulting in a massive affiliate payout for this local store owner.

The worst part about this horror story: They didn’t even notice.

They noticed the decline in sales in the original online shop but they were excited about the uplift in the affiliate marketing channel.

It was not until 6 months later (!) when they started using Ryte Search Success and discovered this huge SEO screw up.

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Dan Taylor, Founder, Dan Taylor SEO

Working with a large, international travel brand they were facing issues not being on HTTPS, but due to their legacy infrastructure, they had a limit of the number of redirects they could implement on any given site.

The first solution provided by development was to have the different country managers implement 10,000 redirects manually through the CMS – the country managers rejected this as it’s insane.

So the second option was they found another “SEO agency”, who agreed with (the development team) them that redirects weren’t necessary for a protocol migration and you could just change the preferred URL in Google Search Console.

The end result, both protocol versions open, both indexed, and because the majority of the international sites were English for other regions (with no hreflang so it was duplicate content), this was a straw that broke the camel’s back.

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What are some of YOUR most horrific SEO tales? Scare us all in the comments, below.   

Until next time, pleasant screams!

More SEO Resources:

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Created by author, October 2018

Google began shipping the Google Home Hub, the Google Assistant with a display, to consumers last week. After having a few days to play with the Google Home Hub, I wanted to share what differences I found between the Google Home – voice only, and the Google Home Hub, with a digital display.

Speakable markup

It appears the new speakable markup for news publishers is not supported on the Google Home Hub. Speakable markup lets webmasters add markup to their news stories where the Google Assistant can read back that text when someone is asking about a news story. The Google Home works well with this but the Google Home Hub seems to jump to YouTube news videos for all news related queries.

Here is how it acts on the Google Home:

VIDEO

Now if you compare the same query on the Google Home Hub, it brings up an unrelated video on YouTube:

VIDEO

Featured snippets

Featured snippets seem to show up less on the Google Home Hub. The Google Home Hub seems to show less featured snippets when compared to the Google Home Hub. I was able to trigger a featured snippet for the question about [what are SEO snippets]:

VIDEO

You get the same result on the Google Home without a display, but obviously it doesn’t show you the text on a display.

But in many cases, the featured snippets you’d get on a Google Home won’t show on the Google Home Hub with the display. Google tries to give you more YouTube video answers instead.

For example, a query on how to change the oil in your car on a Google Home Hub shows you a YouTube video, but the Google Home (no display) speaks content from a website in a featured snippet format:

VIDEO

Knowledge panel answers

The Google Home Hub does show knowledge panel answers. On Google Home without a display, knowledge panel answers are spoken:

VIDEO

Google Answers

Google answers also work similarly on the Google Home Hub as it does on a Google Home without a display. The key differences is that on the Google Home Hub you see the answer and a relevant picture, and you can tap on the screen to drill in versus using your voice to ask more questions.

Here are some videos showing it off:

VIDEO

VIDEO

Why it matters

If the Google Home Hub displays take off and families put them in their kitchens and you put one on your desk in your office (they make great picture frames if you use Google Photos), then making sure you have featured snippet-worthy content is important as is having equivalent answers on YouTube.

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Here we are at the end of October and you’re realizing your SEO is not in shape for the holidays. Whether that’s because you are just now understanding that your SEO strategy isn’t going to yield the results you want before the holidays, or if you’ve just procrastinated – you’re looking for some techniques that will generate short-term wins.

Fortunately, they exist.

A couple of years ago I wrote a similar piece on last-minute SEO tips for the holidays. That left readers with about three weeks to make use of them.

This year we’re getting a slightly earlier start, so let’s dive in with 5 things you can do right now to get started on making more money during this peak time of year.

Titles and descriptions in the SERPs

I’m going to start with the only tip that I’ll be repeating from my previous article and that’s titles and descriptions. I’m repeating it for two reasons:

1. 1. It’s easily the most straight-forward thing you can do with tremendous impact.
   2. There have been changes in how to approach this.

Let’s consider a parent is out looking for a video game for his kids and encounters two titles and descriptions in the SERPs:

Title: Gamer-Rated Top 10 Video Games For Christmas 2018 | GamerEmpire.info
Description: Gamer Empire enlists top video game enthusiasts to rate and rank this year’s top video games to make your Christmas gift buying easier.

OR

Title: Best Video Games | Last Guardian, Titanfall 2, Pokemon Sun & Moon, Battlefield
Description: Best video games for Christmas including Last Guardian, Titalfall 2, Pokemon Such & Moon, Battlefield 1, Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Skyrim, PS4, xBox One

Which one am I likely to click? One tells me that I’m going to find what I’ve likely queried, the other is showing me a list of things I probably don’t recognize.

Look through the new Search Console and find the terms that your pages are ranking for and focus your titles and descriptions on improving the clickthroughs for those terms. Remember, you are not just optimizing for the person who wants what’s offered on your site, you’re optimizing for the people who would purchase it for them.

This year, we can very quickly test titles (and thankfully we have time) with Google Ads. With the expanded text ads now allowing three sets of 30 characters rather than two (and in the fall of 2016 it had just been increased from a single 25-character headline) and descriptions now increased from 80 to 90 characters, we can test versions a lot closer to what we would deploy organically.

Importance of featured snippets

Featured snippets give you the opportunity to jump the queue and launch yourself into the coveted position zero for a lot of the types of queries that holiday shoppers would use (remember – for this purchaser they often don’t know what they want so many of the queries will be exploratory).

Here’s what Tech Radar pulled off for one such phrase:

In my opinion, that featured snippet is more valuable than any #1.

If we consider some of the data regarding the growth in voice search, that will be a strong influencer as well. The folks at Stone Temple Consulting (now Perficient Digital) outlined the year-over-year data in voice search just after the holidays last year in this study. At its core, it revealed a much stronger willingness of people to use voice search, especially in public (read: on their phones).

Featured snippets essentially drive voice search but they are a bit different so I recommend reading this piece by Brian Ussery. There have been a few changes since it was written a year ago however the information and process are still valid.

Updating evergreen URL with new content

This advice pretty much works anytime but never more than when you’re in a scramble for rankings to attract visitors who may not necessarily buy from you for their own purposes.

Top lists of popular games/toys/books/etc. are always a winner. Staff Picks. Reviews and ratings. Guides.

Think not about what you sell or what the people who want to buy it would search for, think about who shops for that demographic, what questions they would have, how they would ask it and target that in your content.

If you do this annually, I’d recommend creating a URL something like:

/guides/10-best-video-games/

Next year when you update it take the content from that location if you want to archive it and move it to something like:

/guides/10-best-video-games/2018/

And put your 2019 content at the old URL. You’re effectively creating an evergreen URL but keeping your archive. This will keep any link weight passing to the primary URL headed to your most current content.

Rank elsewhere and format correctly

If you want to rank for terms that are too competitive for your current site strength, find strong resources that can rank that accept guest articles. But be careful to review Google’s reminder about large-scale article campaigns.

1. Make a shortlist of 3 or 4 sites that rank well within your niche and accept guest articles.
2. Research exactly what type of content resonated with THEIR audience. Use your favorite backlink or social measurement tool to figure out what content on their site gets shared the most.
3. Create content ideas and outlines around what will appeal to their audience that overlaps with what you want to rank for and your knowledge base.
4. Read their guidelines incredibly carefully and pitch in the EXACT format requested.
5. In your pitch, be concise. Editors have a tough, time-consuming job making people like me look good. Respect that and keep your pitch to the point but thorough and showing your knowledge of both the subject matter and their audience.

Rank during and post-holiday queries

We have several clients in travel and one of their biggest buying seasons is not before the holidays but rather, during them. It’s when family and friends get together and our analytics tells us how it plays out in many households.

Rather than searching for a “vacation rental Portland” they’re looking for “family reunion portland” or “8 bedroom vacation rental Portland.”

The searchers are looking not for a general type of place but are searching based on the end criteria (i.e., we need x bedrooms, or we want to host y event, etc.).

Couple this with the excitement and convenience of everyone being together, place a low barrier-to-entry on the site (a low non-refundable deposit in one case) and you’re set up to win.

The reason this ties to SEO is that the terms you’ll be targeting are often less competitive. Everyone wants to rent out their “vacation rental portland” but far less competition for the bedrooms, amenities, etc.

At the same time, you’ve got a bunch of folks with newly received gift cards and their searches will be very specific.

Where the parent might have looked for “best video games 2018,” the gift card holder will be searching queries like “black ops 4 price” or “black ops 4 ps4 cheap.”

The search volume isn’t what you’d see for just “black ops 4” but the terms are far easier to target, and the strategy works just as well if you rank already for the core terms and are just expanding to get the during-and-post holiday traffic you might have been missing out.

Focus on maximizing your strategy

The holidays are a time to pull up your socks and focus on the things you can do that will impact your results and maximize your earning from holiday shoppers and post-holiday spenders. Next year, promise yourself you’ll get an earlier start with SEO for the 2019 holidays.

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

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Whether you’re an industry veteran or a search newbie, there’s no denying this is an exciting space.

Changes happen frequently, new strategies are always being utilized, and seeing your client rocket to the top of the search results is so unbelievably rewarding.

However, it isn’t all fun and games.

SEO requires drive, patience, and a dedication to continuous learning. On top of all of that, it requires passion.

It can be a slow game, in some cases, taking years to really true reap the rewards of your efforts. Without passion, the wait would be maddening.

But what happens when you start to lose that passion?

In a recent post, Aaron Levy addressed some of the challenges search engine marketers face. He talked boredom, burnout, and how PPC marketers can find themselves questioning results.

The same thing can be said of those in SEO.

Let’s look at a few challenges facing SEO professionals and how we can work to address them.

1. Lack of Education

On a recent sales call, a prospect noted they didn’t want to engage in any formal SEO program, they simply wanted us to build links to each piece of content they created.

They wanted 10+ links to each piece because that’s what would help them rank.

Or how about the client email I received a few weeks ago asking me what keywords we were buying? For the SEO program.

Sigh.

One of the biggest frustrations we face is the lack of education and awareness of what it is we do.

How can we do our jobs effectively when the people we are working with or for don’t know what we do?

More so, how can we feel valued when the people we are working with/for don’t appreciate the work that is being put in?

SEO is complicated and, in all fairness, the secrecy of the past and “magical” nature of what SEO once was probably didn’t help us.

But this is a different time and it’s on us to make sure we are educating those around us.

How can we overcome this frustration and move forward? I have a few ideas:

Embrace the Opportunity to Educate

A quality I’ve found in a number of SEO pros is the ability to teach.

Think about it. We spend countless hours on the internet looking at content, code, and SERPs, and then distill that information into something regular folks can understand.

On top of that, we have grown this industry to what it is now, building SEO departments and agencies, holding conferences, creating weekly training videos, and much more.

While it can be frustrating to continuously have to explain what you do, embrace the opportunity to teach SEO the right way.

Step Out of the Vacuum

I remember the first time I attended an ad:tech conference. It was one of the first non-search marketing conferences I had been to and I just couldn’t believe how little SEO was discussed.

In the places it was discussed, it was basic-level stuff and really seen as part of the overall marketing strategy. That’s OK!

The SEO space is small and as a result, it can often feel like the most important thing in the world.

Sometimes we need to step out of the vacuum to gain a more realistic view.

Set the Right Expectations

I think the most important thing we can do, especially when working with clients or upper management, is to set the right expectations as early as possible.

That prospect I mentioned above who only wanted links – we let them know that isn’t what we do and the reasons their desired strategy won’t yield them the results they want.

By setting the right expectations, you are also educating the team, killing two birds with one stone and making your life much easier.

2. What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Back in July, Jacob Bohall wrote a wonderful piece reflecting on the SEO space and the challenges we each face.

One of his points was around the idea of being #1 and how it’s never good enough. I couldn’t agree more.

Marketing in and of itself is a ‘what have you done for me lately?’ industry but SEO truly goes above and beyond.

Do any of these sound familiar?

• Organic traffic is up 200 percent but my top keyword isn’t on the first page.
• Organic is driving 50 percent more leads than last year. How come it’s not higher?
• Sales from organic are the highest they’ve ever been but our team is concerned they aren’t getting enough volume.

Constant pressure can be draining and feeling that there’s no end in sight will easily strip away your passion.

Last Spring, I found my passion for search missing. As I started to dig into the why, I realized one of the biggest reasons was the constant pressure from a few specific accounts.

We worked with each of them for years, results were always great, but they were never happy. Even if they seemed happy, I knew it would be short-lived.

I would wait for the inevitable email each week complaining about something we had done. It wore me down.

Eventually, we restructured the accounts, addressed some of the key issues, and reset expectations. It wasn’t the ideal situation but it helped and we’ve been able to move forward with the accounts.

If you find yourself struggling with any of these same issues, I recommend the following:

Focus on ALL of the Wins

As mentioned earlier, SEO can be a long game. We have to take a minute to celebrate the wins, even if they are small.

• Did that keyword you’ve been working toward jump onto the first page?
• Did your blog updates results in month-over-month organic growth?
• Did a publisher accept your byline?

These are all great things!

Yes, we are paid to be successful. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the wins when we get them.

Don’t Be Afraid to Speak up

As I think back to my own frustrations, I realize that I didn’t communicate well and when I did, it was too late.

We all have moments where we complain about something or someone at work but if there is legitimately a problem, one that is draining you of your passion, you need to bring it up in a serious manner.

If you’re on the right team, they will support you.

3. Keeping Up with the Joneses 

I have been in the search space since 2005 and while I am constantly learning new things, I am also constantly worried I’m not learning enough.

There are some really freaking smart people in the industry and it can be easy to compare yourself to them.

Here’s the thing – we can’t be everything to everyone.

Rand Fishkin tweeted this a few weeks ago and it generated a number of responses, some positive, some negative but I have to say, I agree:

See, the thing is, that while I want the technical chops of Britney Muller or Mike King, that’s never going to be me.

What I can do is learn from these folks and understand the things that matter to my job.

For example, I am not a coder but I have learned enough HTML to identify technical issues impacting search. I am also not a designer, but I have learned enough about UX to understand what a site needs to perform better.

Those things make me better at my job.

Trying to keep up with everyone around you is exhausting and it can make you feel as if you are failing. Focus on what you’re good at and don’t be afraid to pick a niche.

When I started in search, I focused a lot on link building. It was something that spoke to me, I found interesting, and frankly, I was good at.

As time passed, I started leaning more toward content. I’m sure that will change as time progresses.

Remember, you can be a great SEO without being an expert in all the things.

Relighting the Fire

Burnout can happen and when it does, it’s important to recognize it, deal with it, and figure out the next steps.

Many of us have been there and if you are looking for a way to reignite the passion, reach out to your fellow SEO pros.

We work in an amazing industry and we do this for a reason. It has its challenges but at the same time, it has its rewards.

Enjoy them!

More SEO Career Resources:

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Pixabay
In-Post Image #1: Pixabay
In-Post Image #2: Pixabay
In-Post Image #3: Screenshot taken by author, October 2018
In-Post Image #4: Pixabay