Good morning, Marketers, and please take the Martech Replacement Survey.

We just think the transformation marketing and martech was compelled to undergo over the last twelve months makes it the most fascinating period in, well, the history of martech. That’s why we keep asking you to spend three minutes helping us understand it. The survey is here.

Meanwhile, the criticism of Google’s FLoC strategy is growing. Increasingly the search giant is suspected of building a massive walled garden, all while feigning a concern for consumer privacy. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google — can we take any of their statements about privacy and security at face value, or are they just building brand value?

It’s the kind of manoeuvring by dominant businesses which attracts the attention — informed or otherwise — of legislators.

Kim Davis
Editorial Director

Google’s FLoC poses a threat to identity solutions and advertisers

“Ultimately, this is Big Tech crushing the little guys in the industry.” – Jon Waterman, CEO of advertising marketplace Ad.net.

“We’re going to have a scattered market of policies and regulations across countries and states – that’s already happening. You’re going to have a scatter of different browsers, not all saying the same things. That’s a reality we should all just be prepared for and have our eyes open to.” – Michael Zacharsky, CEO of Engine Technology and digital marketplace EMX Digital.

“We’re beholden to what the walled gardens – Google, Apple, Facebook – are going to decide to do. Part of being able to combat that is this whole third-party data story. They can’t take it away if you own it.” – Sam Ngo, Director, Product Marketing at BlueConic, the CDP.

All three of them reacting to the profound uncertainty in the advertising space which has been growing since the significance of a brief statement issued by Google on March 3 has begun to sink in.

Read more here.

New cultural norms taking shape

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of martech designed to keep up with the fast pace of consumer behavior change. And that change is usually driven by shifts in consumer sentiment. 

In a new report called “Culture in Chaos,” creative agency and brand consultancy the projects uncovered trends well worth watching out for among your own customers as new cultural norms take shape in the wake of the pandemic. For example: 

• Tech: “…the future of tech will depend on connectivity and humanization. Our homes and cities will be smarter, using data, AI, 5G, and cloud computing to simplify our lives in ways that will become intuitive and almost imperceptible.”
• Fashion: Craftsmanship and items that are made to last foster collecting rather than consumption. “By buying less, shopping resale, and prioritizing a brand’s values, consumers are ushering in the era of an aesthetic of ethics.”
• Retail: The future is all about relationships between consumers and shopkeepers. 
• Travel: “Global travel won’t return to what it was until travelers can have confidence in the whole system.” 

Why we care. Understanding changing buyer values helps us keep an eye out for data that confirm or contradict what’s expected, so marketers can shift their strategies to best meet their customers’ needs.

Supreme Court sides with Google over alleged Oracle patent infringement 

The top court sided with Google 6-2 yesterday in an intellectual property dispute with Oracle that’s been ongoing for over a decade. Google created the Android operating system in 2007, writing millions of lines of new code–but including just over 11,000 lines that were also part of Oracle’s Java platform. Oracle argued that Google plagiarised their code and Google argued that it was fair use.

“When it implemented the Android OS, Google wrote its own version of Java. But in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google’s implementation used the same names, organization, and functionality as the Java APIs,” wrote the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The two dissenting justices were Thomas and Alito. In their dissent, Thomas and Alito asserted the code is protected by copyright: “Oracle’s code at issue here is copyrightable, and Google’s use of that copyrighted code was anything but fair.”

Why we care. This is a big deal for software and tech companies in the areas of fair use and open source. “The Court noted that fair use has ‘an important role to play for computer programs by providing a context-based check that keeps the copyright monopoly afforded to computer programs within its lawful bounds.’ I suspect this theme will unlock many future arguments and claims regarding the application of fair use to software related claims.  We will see more copying, more cases, and more claims of fair use,” said J. Michael Keyes, intellectual property attorney and partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney.

On the move

Logitech has named Najoh Tita-Reid its Global Chief Marketing Officer. Tita-Reid had joined the well-known mouse and keyboard maker a little over a year ago, designing and implementing its Global Commercial Marketing Organization. She previously held leadership roles at companies including Hero AG, Bayer PLC, Merck Consumer Care and GlobalHue Advertising Agency.

Quote of the day

“They’re rebranded the concept of a walled garden as their Privacy Sandbox. It’s kind of a more public-friendly term for their walled garden.” Justin Nakamura, VP, Business Intelligence, Ad.net (on Google’s Privacy Sandbox FLoC project)

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.

He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.

Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

The post Google’s FLoC, Supreme court: Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Marketing Discover.

From Google’s new organic Shopping listings to how SEOs rallied for gender equality and diversity to the upcoming Page Experience update, here’s our retrospective of the most impactful SEO news of 2020.

RELATED: PPC 2020 in review: COVID leaves its mark on e-commerce and paid search

The Google algorithm updates of 2020

There was some early suspicion within the search community that major algorithm updates would be on hold during the pandemic — in retrospect, we can’t imagine that was the case. News Editor Barry Schwartz has already recapped 2020’s most important algorithm updates, so here’s a brief summary of what rolled out.

The core updates. Google got started early, launching the January 2020 core update less than two weeks into the year. It typically takes about two weeks for these things to complete rolling out, but the company said it was mostly finished four days later, on January 16th.

Four months later, the May 2020 core update shook things up again, with some calling it an “absolute monster.”

The dust was allowed to settle for most of the year (in terms of core updates, at least), until the December 2020 core update launched, right between the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping season and the end-of-the-year holidays. Based on some reports, this was the most impactful core update of the year.

BERT goes from 10% to almost 100%. During its SearchOn event, Google announced that BERT is now powering nearly all English-language queries.

In December, keen-eyed search professionals recognized that the much-publicized departure of AI researcher and diversity advocate Timnit Gebru from Google was inextricably linked to the potential risks associated with training language models using large data sets. Those potential risks include using datasets from the internet, which may contain bias against marginalized peoples, which could then conceivably manifest in the language models used in search engines.

Announced, but not live. Announced in May, the Page Experience update is not expected to roll out until May 2021. It includes a mix of existing search ranking factors, such as the mobile-friendly update, Page Speed Update, the HTTPS ranking boost, the intrusive interstitials penalty, and safe browsing penalty, along with new metrics for speed and usability, known as the Core Web Vitals.

We already know that the Page Experience update will only be applied to mobile rankings, at least initially. There may also be a visual indicator to distinguish mobile search listings that offer a good page experience. And, when this update goes live, Google will also lift the AMP requirement for its Top Stories section, opening it up to articles that meet its threshold for page experience factors.

Passage indexing was announced in October and slated to begin this year, but Google has confirmed to us that it is not yet live. To be clear, Google doesn’t actually index passages separately; it’s more “passage ranking” than “passage indexing.”

The year in SEO news

On March 1, Google’s new treatment of nofollow links arrived, bringing with it the new rel=“sponsored” and rel=“ugc” link attributes. SEOs were up in arms about the announcement last September, but that passion wasn’t reignited when the change actually occurred; the impending pandemic may have given marketers larger issues to deal with.

Structured data. Google announced the end of support for data-vocabluary.org markup in its rich results; the end was set for April 6, but the company postponed it until January 29, 2021, citing the coronavirus situation.

The Rich Results Test Tool was released out of beta over the summer, signaling the end of the Structured Data Testing Tool — or so we thought. Instead, Google decided to keep the Structured Data Testing Tool around, but migrate it to schema.org this coming April.

SEO documentation. Both Google and Bing updated some of their important SEO documentation: Bing revised its Webmaster Guidelines, providing details on how it ranks webpages. Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines only received one update this year; adding more detailed instructions for raters as well as a new section for dictionary and encyclopedia results.

The SERP. The search results page saw its fair share of changes this year as well. Google announced that it was “decluttering” the first page of results by deduplicating featured snippets, meaning that pages that earn a featured snippet no longer repeat as a regular listing. The right-sidebar featured snippet variant was also migrated into the main results column, as well.

In an effort to provide more direct answers to users, Bing employed pre-trained language models to answer queries with a simple “yes” or “no.” It also added snippet controls, giving site owners more flexibility over how their search result previews. Google made it easier to locate featured snippet text on the page it lives on by formally launching a highlighting feature that it had been testing for years.

Image and YouTube. The “licensable” badge in Google Image search results came out of beta at the end of August, and the company also added a usage rights filter to return only images that include licensing information. The “key moments” feature also rolled out more widely; it can now appear on multiple videos in mobile results.

COVID-related updates. People turned to search engines as the coronavirus went from being a foreign issue to surging throughout the US. In response, Google’s coronavirus-related search results page received a drastic overhaul between the end of February and the end of March, giving us a preview of how search results pages might one day look.

Bing introduced a coronavirus tracker as well as a CDC coronavirus self-checker chatbot right on the search result page.

And, to help keep users informed, Google surfaced more local COVID news, opening up its Top Stories section to non-AMP, COVID content — something of a precursor to lifting the AMP restriction as part of the Page Experience update next year. It also began showing “travel trends” and “travel advisory” notices, displaying the percentage of flights operating to a particular destination, as well as adding a free cancellation filter to its hotel search.

Schema.org added COVID-related structured data types, which Google and Bing both adopted. The White House even urged private sector businesses to use the markup when appropriate. Features and resources were also made available to local businesses, which we’ll discuss in the local section of this article.

One highlight from this devastating period was the reaction from search marketers, who volunteered their services to help small businesses navigate the pandemic in a myriad of ways.

Industry news. In the EU, the Android search choice screen rolled out on March 1, but the smartphone supply chain disruption due to the pandemic delayed its impact, making it uncertain whether it produced a significant shift in search market share.

Early on in the year, Verizon Media launched OneSearch, a privacy-focused search engine that is more of a direct competitor to DuckDuckGo than Google. As the year unfolded, other search engines were announced, following a similar tactic and seeking to differentiate themselves from Google instead of taking it head-on.

Former Google ad boss Sridhar Ramaswamy announced Neeva, which, instead of bringing in revenue via ads, will charge a subscription fee. Former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher announced You.com; although less has been announced about it, it seems like it will be geared towards e-commerce.

With the backdrop of increasing scrutiny over Google’s business practices, both in the US and abroad, we asked the question: “What would it take for new search engines to succeed?” And, is the timing right for Apple to get serious about search and taking on Google?

The search industry is not shaped purely by Google, Bing, other tech giants or venture capitalists, though. Diversity and gender equality took center stage over the summer, and search professionals responded: The murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery drove us to find actionable ways to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion within our own organizations. 

North Star Inbound’s Nicole DeLeon released a study that found that more than 70% of SEOs in the US are men, who also make more on average than their female colleagues. Networking and allies remain critical to eliminating that disparity.

RELATED: 10 ways you can support women in SEO

Reporting and analytics

Google Search Console (GSC) received a number of updates in 2020, beginning with the launch of a new removals tool. The tool lets site owners temporarily hide URLs from showing in search, as well as showing them which URLs were filtered by SafeSearch and what content isn’t displaying in search results because requests have been made via the public Remove Outdated content tool.

One day before the Page Experience announcement, Google quietly swapped out the speed report in GSC with the new Core Web Vitals report. The current set of Core Web Vitals metrics focus on three aspects of user experience: loading, interactivity, and visual stability, in the forms of Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

The performance report was updated with a News traffic filter, giving site owners one more way to slice and dice their Google search exposure and traffic. A revamped crawl stats report was also launched to provide actionable data regarding crawling issues. A year after the old version of GSC was shut down, Google migrated the disavow link tool to the new version, updating its interface in the process. GSC users can now also download complete information, instead of just specific table views, from all reports, making them easier to analyze and manipulate.

In August, the company launched Google Search Console Insights, a new view of data “tailored for content creators and publishers,” as a closed beta. Search Console Insights blends Google Analytics and Search Console data to help content creators identify how well their content is performing, how people discover it across the web, what their site’s top and trending queries are, and what other sites and articles link to theirs.

And, users of the Google Search Console API received access to fresher data as well as the ability to query, add, and delete their sitemaps on domain properties.

Google Analytics 4. One of the biggest analytics announcements this year was the unveiling of Google Analytics 4, an expansion and rebranding of the App + Web property. It includes expanded predictive insights, deeper integration with Google Ads, cross-device measurement capabilities and more granular data controls. When setting up a new property, GA4 will be the default option; however, Universal Analytics remains available, at least for now, as new feature developments will be focused on GA4.

RELATED: How to get started in Google Analytics 4

Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft revamped Bing Webmaster Tools this year; the overhaul was announced in February at SMX West and the migration was completed at the end of July. Unlike the Google Analytics update, the old version of Bing Webmaster Tools is no longer supported, but users of the revamped version are in for some new features.

The new Site Scan tool crawls your site and checks for common technical SEO issues. The backlinks tool enables you to compare your site’s backlinks to another site, providing site owners with competitive data without verified access to the competing site. The company also resurrected and enhanced the robots.txt tester, a feature that Bing first dropped about a decade or so ago. And, Microsoft Clarity, the company’s user experience visualization tool which came out of beta at the end of October, was also integrated with the new Bing Webmaster Tools.

E-commerce

Right about the time the January 2020 core update was rolling out, Google also announced the mobile Popular Products section for apparel, shoes and similar searches, signifying the first in a series of e-commerce strategy shifts for the company. The section is organic and powered by product schema and product feeds submitted via Google Merchant Center.

Also on mobile, Google extended the functionality of its related activity cards, with respect to shopping, job, and recipe-related searches. The shopping activity card may now show products that a user has been researching, effectively ushering them along their customer journey.

Google’s most significant pivot in e-commerce strategy this year (and perhaps in several years) was opening up its Shopping search results to unpaid, organic listings, after eight years of being a purely paid product. There’s still space for paid listings, though: ads now show up at the top and bottom of Google Shopping results pages. Retailers that want their items to show up organically must upload product feeds within Google Merchant Center. Those that choose to do so will also be eligible to have their product listings displayed in knowledge panels on the main search results page, as these slots have also gone from sponsored to organic.

RELATED: FAQ: All about Google Shopping and Surfaces across Google

As you might have expected, Bing made the same move from paid to organic with its Shopping results in August, just four months later.

On the social side, Pinterest rolled out a new “Shop” tab to its mobile app. It also integrated its visual search functionality directly into shoppable Pins to make it easier to find similar products. Shopify retailers can take advantage of these updates through the Pinterest app in the Shopify app store, which enables merchants to upload their product catalogs to Pinterest, potentially allowing them to get in front of Pinterest’s over 360 million monthly active users.

Local

Maps. Google Maps turned 15 this year, and the company celebrated with a refreshed version of the mobile app. The 2020 iteration expanded the bottom tabs to five (“Explore” “Commute,” “Saved,” “Contribute,” and “Updates”) and the company also announced an expansion of Live View augmented reality walking directions.

The Maps updates continued through to December, when businesses using Google My Business (GMB) gained access to improved performance metrics, showing whether customers found them on Maps or through search, as well as expanded messaging via their business profile in Maps. Web search results also began showing in the Google Maps search results listings for individual businesses.

Apple also rebuilt its Maps app, adding or improving on features such as real-time transit schedules, sharable arrival time estimates, indoor maps of malls and airports, Look Around (its version of Google’s Street View), one-tap navigation for favorite locations, and more.

Google My Business. In February, there was a lot of chatter on Twitter about a new section on the Google My Business Help site that encouraged business owners to include relevant keywords in their GMB descriptions.

Google quickly backtracked on that guidance after local SEOs brought it to the company’s attention, and the messaging disappeared shortly after. Joy Hawkins, owner of Sterling Sky, has tested this advice previously, finding that the description field has no impact on ranking in the local three-pack.

As “buy online, pickup in-store” usage surged, Google announced it would be making nearby product inventory more discoverable via a more prominent “nearby” filter under the Shopping tab, adding new local store cards and increasing visibility for Curbside and In-store pickup labels. A few months prior to that, we learned that the company was expanding its Duplex tool to call local businesses to check for inventory availability; prior to this, Duplex was primarily used for appointment booking and verifying business hours. As online services continue to influence offline spending, these moves could help position Google to dominate the online-to-offline (O2O) economy.

The Google Guaranteed badge became available to non-advertisers through an experimental “upgraded” GMB profile for $50 per month — it’s not an organic feature, but the badge itself was spotted in Maps listings. If it becomes a permanent fixture, it may serve to distinguish the businesses that have it from the ones that don’t. Last year, Google fielded a survey and one of the proposed features was removing ads from your business profile — a small, whitelisted group of advertisers (Groupon, Seamless, and Caviar) were seen showing their ads on local business profiles. These ads can potentially redirect an order that might go directly to the business, and although it’s currently a small pilot program, there’s no way to opt-out or select the advertisers that appear on their profile.

Google said it saw a surge in searches for Black-owned businesses during the summer — more than 40% of Black business owners reported that they weren’t working in April, compared to just 17% of white small business owners, according to an analysis by The New York Times. To help distinguish these businesses, it introduced the “Black-owned” business attribute to local listings. Approaching the issue from the other side, Yelp announced a new “Business Accused of Racist Behavior” alert; when the alert goes up, Yelp disables new reviews for that business profile.

Google local support has had a less-than-stellar reputation, which the company is likely looking to recover from. In November, it introduced the Small Business Advisors program to help SMBs become more proficient with Google products. The program offers 50-minute individualized consulting sessions on topics such as GMB, Ads, Analytics, and YouTube. The program is $39.99 per session but there was no fee throughout 2020.

COVID. In the early days of stay-at-home orders, local SEOs called out multiple GMB problems, such as delays in posting new listings and updating hours and addresses, despite Google saying it would prioritize “open and closed states, special hours, temporary closures, business descriptions, and business attributes edits.” Local reviews were also temporarily disabled for both customers and business owners — review functionality returned about twenty days later.

To help convey the pandemic’s impact on businesses, Google enabled them to indicate that they were temporarily closed in Search and Maps. It later launched a feature to provide local businesses more flexibility with their hours of operation. Building on that, an indicator in GMB profiles now shows when business hours were last updated.

During this time, Google also allowed retail chains to publish COVID-related Posts at scale via the GMB API. Later on, that functionality was also extended to non-COVID posts as well.

Google wasn’t the only platform people turned to: Nextdoor rolled out Groups and Help Map. The Groups feature was in beta before the pandemic, but the crisis showed the company that it could help users overcome isolation. Help Map was launched to aid neighbors in need.

Yelp was the first to announce a fundraising partnership with GoFundMe, enabling local businesses to place a “donate” button on their Yelp profile. Not so long after, GoFundMe donate buttons became available to Bing Places for Business and GMB profile owners. 

Consumer confidence over safety became a priority as the economy sought to reopen. TripAdvisor and Yelp both launched new ways for consumers to highlight how businesses are handling health and safety measures. On Google’s platform, GMB owners can now indicate health and safety requirements for their stores via attributes such as “Mask required,” “Staff get temperature checks” and more.

Just for fun

Search professionals know that our industry has the potential to drastically influence perspectives and affect business outcomes — every once in a while, the general public catches wind of that fact as well.

In February, Warner Bros. renamed its recently released Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) to simply Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey so that moviegoers (remember going to the movies?) would have an easier time finding tickets online.

And, while Netflix’s Tiger King gave many of us something to binge during that initial shift to being home all the time, the Tiger King himself used illicit SEO tactics to mislead users searching for his main competitor. He didn’t get away with it, and we certainly don’t recommend it.

And, Google helped us get closer to the answer of the age-old question: “What’s the name of that song?” Now, the Google app can tell you the name of a particular song, all you have to do is hum it for 10-15 seconds.

Looking forward to 2021

As mentioned above, Google’s Page Experience update is set to go live in May. There’s still time to get your Core Web Vitals ready for it, SEO for developers expert Detlef Johnson’s guide can help.

Make sure to look over your structured data as well; data-vocabulary.org markup will be ineligible for Google rich results on January 29.

And, the deadline for mobile-first indexing is upon us, again. It’s far better for Google to migrate your site over on your terms, when your site is ready, than it is to allow the deadline to lapse and have your site forced over.

This story first appeared on Search Engine Land.

SEO year in review 2020: COVID forces platforms to adapt their local and e-commerce offerings, and more

About The Author

The post SEO year in review 2020: COVID forces platforms to adapt their local and e-commerce offerings, and more appeared first on Marketing Discover.

What often happens is that there ends up being one or two people in the office who are comfortable with writing and editing code and then these people produce scripts and notebooks that everyone else runs. The workflow looks a bit like this:

I will show you a simple way to streamline this workflow to remove the steps where people need to run a script and format the output. Instead they can run the automation directly from within Google Sheets.

The example I will show you is for a Sheets custom function that returns the Lighthouse score for a URL like in this gif:

The method I will show you isn’t the only way of doing this, but it does illustrate a much more general technique that can be used for many things, including machine learning algorithms.

There are two parts:

1. A Google Cloud Run application that will do the complicated stuff (in this case run a Lighthouse test) and that will respond to HTTP requests.
2. An Appscript custom function that will make requests to the API you created in step 1 and return the results into the Google Sheet.

Cloud run applications

Cloud Run is a Google service that takes a docker image that you provide and makes it available over HTTP. You only pay when an HTTP request is made, so for a service like this that isn’t being used 24/7 it is very cheap. The actual cost will depend on how much you use it, but I would estimate less than $1 per month to run thousands of tests.

The first thing we need to do is make a Docker image that will perform the Lighthouse analysis when we make an HTTP request to it. Luckily for us there is some documentation showing how to run a Lighthouse audit programatically on Github. The linked code saves the analysis to a file rather than returning the response over HTTP, but this is easy to fix by wrapping the whole thing in an Express app like this:

const express = require('express');
const app = express();
const lighthouse = require('lighthouse');
const chromeLauncher = require('chrome-launcher');

app.get('/', async (req, res) => {
    // Check that the url query parameter exists
    if(req.query && req.query.url) {
        // decode the url
        const url = decodeURIComponent(req.query.url)    
        const chrome = await chromeLauncher.launch({chromeFlags: ['--headless', '--no-sandbox','--disable-gpu']});
        const options = {logLevel: 'info', output: 'html', port: chrome.port};
        const runnerResult = await lighthouse(url, options);

        await chrome.kill();
        res.json(runnerResult.lhr)
    }
});

const port = process.env.PORT || 8080;
app.listen(port, () => {
  console.log(`Listening on port ${port}`);
});

Save this code as index.js.

Then you will also need a file called package.json which describes how to install the above application and a Dockerfile so we can wrap everything up in Docker. All the code files are available on Github.

package.json
{
    "name": "lighthouse-sheets",
    "description": "Backend API for putting Lighthouse scores in Google sheets",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "author": "Richard Fergie",
    "license": "MIT",
    "main": "index.js",
    "scripts": {
        "start": "node index.js"
    },
    "dependencies": {
        "express": "^4.17.1",
        "lighthouse": "^6.3"
    },
    "devDependencies": {}
}
Dockerfile
# Use the official lightweight Node.js 10 image.
# https://hub.docker.com/_/node
FROM node:12-slim

# Our container needs to have chrome installed to
# run the lighthouse tests
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y 
  apt-transport-https 
  ca-certificates 
  curl 
  gnupg 
  --no-install-recommends 
  && curl -sSL https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - 
  && echo "deb https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list 
  && apt-get update && apt-get install -y 
  google-chrome-stable 
  fontconfig 
  fonts-ipafont-gothic 
  fonts-wqy-zenhei 
  fonts-thai-tlwg 
  fonts-kacst 
  fonts-symbola 
  fonts-noto 
  fonts-freefont-ttf 
  --no-install-recommends 
  && apt-get purge --auto-remove -y curl gnupg 
  && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*


# Create and change to the app directory.
WORKDIR /usr/src/app

# Copy application dependency manifests to the container image.
# A wildcard is used to ensure copying both package.json AND package-lock.json (when available).
# Copying this first prevents re-running npm install on every code change.
COPY package*.json ./

# Install production dependencies.
# If you add a package-lock.json, speed your build by switching to 'npm ci'.
# RUN npm ci --only=production
RUN npm install --only=production

# Copy local code to the container image.
COPY . ./

# Run the web service on container startup.
CMD [ "node", "--unhandled-rejections=strict","index.js" ]

Build the docker image and then you can test things locally on your own computer like this:

First start the image:

docker run -p 8080:8080 lighthouse-sheets

And then test to see if it works:

curl -v "localhost:8080?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com"

Or visit localhost:8080?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com in your browser. You should see a lot of JSON.

The next step is to push your image to the Google Container registry. For me, this is a simple command:

docker push gcr.io/MY_PROJECT_ID/lighthouse-sheets

But you might have to setup the docker authentication first before you can do this. An alternative method is the use Google Cloud Build to make the image; this might work better for you if you can’t get the authentication working.

Next you need to create a Cloud Run service with this docker image.

Open Cloud Run and click “Create service”

Name and adjust settings. You must give your service a name and configure a few other settings:

It is best to pick a region that is close to where most of the audience for your sites live. Checking the site speed for a UK site from Tokyo won’t give you the same results as what your audience get.

In order for you to call this service from Google Sheets it must allow unauthenticated invocations. If you’re worried about locking down and securing the service to prevent other people from using it you will have to do this by (for example) checking from an API secret in the HTTP request or something like that.

Next you must select the container you made earlier. You can type in the name if you remember it or click “Select” and choose it from the menu.

Then click “Show Advanced Settings” because there is further configuration to do.

You need to increase the memory allocation because Lighthouse tests need more than 256Mb to run. I have chosen 1GiB here but you might need the maximum allowance of 2GiB for some sites.

I have found that reducing the concurrency to 1 improves the reliability of the service. This means Google will automatically start a new container for each HTTP request. The downside is that this costs slightly more money.

Click “Create” and your Cloud Run service will be ready shortly.

You can give it a quick test using the URL. For example:

curl -v "https://lighthouse-sheets-public-v4e5t2rofa-nw.a.run.app?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com"

Or visit https://lighthouse-sheets-public-v4e5t2rofa-nw.a.run.app?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com in your browser.

The next step is to write some Appscript so you can use your new API from within Google Sheets.

Open a new Google Sheet and the open up the Appscript editor.

This will open a new tab where you can code your Google Sheets custom function.

The key idea here is to use the Appscript UrlFetchApp function to perform the HTTP request to your API. Some basic code to do this looks like this:

function LIGHTHOUSE(url) {
  const BASE_URL = "https://lighthouse-sheets-public-v4e5t2rofa-nw.a.run.app"
  var request_url = BASE_URL+"?url="+encodeURIComponent(url)
  var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(request_url)
  var result = JSON.parse(response.getContentText())
  return(result.categories.performance.score * 100)
}

The last line returns the overall performance score into the sheet. You could edit it to return something else. For example to get the SEO score use result.categories.seo.score instead.

Or you can return multiple columns of results by returning a list like this:

[result.categories.performance.score, result.categoryies.seo.score]

Save the file and then you will have a custom function available in your Google Sheet called LIGHTHOUSE.

The easiest way to get started with this is to copy my example Google Sheet and then update the code yourself to point at your own API and to return the Lighthouse results you are most interested in.

Enhance your spreadsheet know-how

The great thing about this method is that it can work for anything that can be wrapped in a Docker container and return a result within 30 seconds. Unfortunately Google Sheets custom functions have a timeout so you won’t have long enough to train some massive deep learning algorithm, but that still leaves a lot that you can do.

I use a very similar process for my Google Sheets addon Forecast Forge, but instead of returning a Lighthouse score it returns a machine learning powered forecast for whatever numbers you put into it.

The possibilities for this kind of thing are really exciting because in Search Marketing we have a lot of people who are very good with spreadsheets. I want to see what they can do when they can use all their spreadsheet knowledge and enhance it with machine learning.

This story first appeared on Search Engine Land.

How to show Lighthouse Scores in Google Sheets with a custom function

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

About The Author

Richard Fergie is the founder of Forecast Forge which brings Machine Learning powered forecasts into Google Sheets so that anyone can use them to produce quick and accurate estimates for what will happen in the future. Richard consults on projects at the intersection of digital marketing, web analytics and data science where he has over 10 years of experience.

The post How to show Lighthouse Scores in Google Sheets with a custom function appeared first on Marketing Discover.

The divide between SEO and UX is shrinking, making success in search more challenging. Evolving your SEO strategy to focus on site experience is critical.

Join us on Thursday, November 12, at 2:00pm ET, for an SEO Content Strategy webinar where our experts will discuss how to increase conversion rates, grow organic presence and leverage nuanced search behaviors for positive engagement metrics.

Register for the webinar today!

About The Author

Merkle is a leading data-driven customer experience management company that specializes in the delivery of unique, personalized customer experiences across platforms and devices. For more than 32 years, Fortune 1000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to maximize the value of their customer portfolios. Our approach to hyper-personalized marketing is anchored by an intense focus on identity, with the ability to recognize individual customers and provide insights that inform real-time decisions in a privacy-sensitive manner, across platforms and devices. The results are improved marketing outcomes, enduring customer relationships, and sustained competitive advantage for the clients we serve.

The post Get beyond the algorithm with a data-driven SEO content strategy appeared first on Marketing Discover.

Google claims to update its search algorithm several thousand times per year. In the absolute majority of cases, Google algorithm updates are too small to notice. But, every once in a while, Google introduces a change so fundamental, that it disrupts the way we do SEO forever.

In this post, we will be counting down eight of the most critical search algorithm changes. We will look into why these updates were introduced, how they work and what adjustments we had to make to our SEO strategies in response.

But before we start, let’s see if you’ve ever been impacted by an algorithm update. All you need to do is launch Rank Tracker, sync it with your Google Analytics account and switch to Organic Traffic.

Just hover your mouse over the dash lines on the graph to see if certain algo updates correspond with your site’s traffic changes.

1. Panda

Date: February 24, 2011

Hazards: Duplicate, plagiarized or thin content; user-generated spam; keyword stuffing.

How it works: The Panda algorithm update assigns a so-called “quality score” to web pages. This score is then used as a ranking factor. Initially, the effects of Panda were mild, but in January 2016 it was permanently incorporated into Google’s core algorithm. Since then, update rollouts have become more frequent, so both Panda penalties and recoveries now happen faster.

How to adjust: Run regular site checks for content duplication, thin content, and keyword stuffing. To do that, you’ll need a site crawler, like SEO PowerSuite’s Website Auditor.

With the WebSite Auditor’s new Content Editor module, you can also avoid a potential penalty and create pages without the risk of accidental keyword stuffing. Content Editor analyzes the pages of your top competitors and provides SEO recommendations based on the content that’s already successful in Google search.

And if you want to check whether your content is duplicated elsewhere on the web, use a plagiarism checker like Copyscape.

2. Penguin

Date: April 24, 2012

Hazards: Spammy or irrelevant links; links with over-optimized anchor text.

How it works: Google Penguin’s objective is to down-rank sites whose backlinks look unnatural. This update put an end to low-effort link building, like buying links from link farms and PBNs.

How to adjust: To stay safe from the effects of the Google Penguin update, monitor your link profile’s growth and run regular audits with a backlink checker like SEO SpyGlass. In the tool’s Summary dashboard, you’ll find a progress graph for your link profile’s growth. Look out for any unusual spikes: those might be the result of a negative SEO attack by your competitors.

The stats that we know Penguin takes into account are incorporated into SEO SpyGlass’s Penalty Risk formula. Navigate to the Penalty Risk tab and sort your backlink list from highest risk to lowest. Links with a risk above 50% should be investigated. If they turn out to be malicious, add them to the disavow file, download it, and submit it to Google’s Disavow Links Tool.

3. Hummingbird

Date: August 22, 2013

Hazards: Keyword stuffing; low-quality content.

How it works: The Hummingbird algorithm helps Google better interpret search queries and provide results that match searcher intent (as opposed to the individual terms within the query). While keywords continue to be important, the Hummingbird algorithm makes it possible for a page to rank for a query even if it doesn’t contain the exact words the searcher entered. This is achieved with the help of natural language processing that relies on latent semantic indexing, co-occurring terms and synonyms.

How to adjust: Expand your keyword research and focus on concepts behind the keywords. Carefully analyze related searches, synonyms and co-occurring terms. Great sources of such ideas are Google Related Searches and Google Related Questions, as well as Google Autocomplete suggestions. You’ll find all of them incorporated into Rank Tracker’s Keyword Research module.

Use these insights to better understand your audience’s language and diversify your content. By creating comprehensive content that satisfies searcher intent, you’ll win both in terms of engagement and SEO. 

4. Mobile

Date: April 21, 2015

Hazards: Lack of a mobile version of the page; poor mobile usability.

How it works: This, and subsequent mobile search updates (2018, 2020) have shifted the focus from a desktop to a mobile version of your website. Today, Google ranks all websites based on how fast and user-friendly their mobile versions are.

How to adjust: Optimize your pages for mobile search and focus on speed and usability. Google’s mobile-friendly and page speed tests will help you see which aspects of your page need to be improved. The tests are integrated into WebSite Auditor so you can check your pages’ mobile optimization as a part of your overall website audit. You’ll find it in Content Analysis > Page Audit:

5. RankBrain

Date: October 26, 2015

Hazards: Lack of query-specific relevance; shallow content; poor UX.

How it works: RankBrain is a part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. It is a machine learning system that helps Google understand the meaning behind queries and serve best-matching search results in response to those queries. Google calls RankBrain the third most important ranking factor.
While we don’t know the exact formula behind this major update, the consensus is that RankBrain is responsible for customizing a user’s Google search results. Basically, Google goes beyond a person’s search query and takes into account the larger context, like synonyms, implied words, and personal search history.

How to adjust: Optimize your pages for relevance and comprehensiveness with the help of competitive analysis. With the WebSite Auditor‘s TF-IDF tool, you can discover entire lists of relevant terms and concepts used by a large number of your top-ranking competitors. Find a way to add these terms to your content and you will see your search relevance increase dramatically.

6. Medic

Date: May 4, 2018

Hazards: Lack of authority on YMYL websites; weak E-A-T signals.

How it works: The Google Medic update seemed to disproportionately affect medical websites as well as other websites that have to do with potentially life-altering decisions (finance, law, education). Although not explicitly confirmed, Google representatives have hinted that the update implemented some of the E-A-T (expertise, authority, trust) signals from the Quality Rater Guidelines document.

How to adjust: To date, there is no proven recovery strategy for the Medic update. Some SEOs suggest hiring expert writers to lend credibility to your website, others claim the solution is in building entities for your brand. But, if we were to stick to the facts, the only reliable way to increase the authority of your website is by growing your backlink profile. An efficient approach would be to use a backlink research tool, like SEO SpyGlass, and borrow backlink ideas from your competitors.

SEO SpyGlass allows you to find the backlink gap between your website and your competitors’ websites. The best prospects are the high-authority websites that link to two or more of your competitors. This indicates that the websites are interested in your niche, but do not have an exclusive relationship with any one company.

For more tips, explore this SEO guide based on the Quality Rater Guidelines.

7. Bert

Date: October 22, 2019

Hazards: Poorly written content; lack of focus; lack of context.

How it works: This Google algorithm update uses natural language processing technology to better understand search queries, interpret text, identify entities and relationships between entities. We’ve seen Panda, Hummingbird and RankBrain updates move away from keywords, and the BERT update is the culmination of this effort — it allows Google to understand much more nuance in both queries and search results.

How to adjust: We’ve finally lived to see the day when Google is actually rewarding good writing. Like never before, it is important to strive for meaningful copy. It means you should go easy on fluff words and adopt an expository style of writing. It is also a good idea to do entity research when creating copy — including relevant entities helps create context for your content.

For more tips, check out this guide on using entities in SEO.

8. Core Updates

Date: 2017-present

How it works: As far back as 2017, Google has started to refer to bigger updates as Google core updates. Since then, there is even less transparency about what those updates are and which parts of search they are intended to improve. SEOs would often track post-update ranking shifts and try to figure out what exactly has changed, but there is rarely a conclusive observation. It is likely that Google core updates are just improvements on previous Google updates or perhaps bundles of smaller updates tied together.

How to adjust: Since the effects of Google core updates are often unknown, one thing you can do is track SERP history for the keywords you are targeting. Once the update happens, you can check which of your competitors have moved up or down in rankings and make an educated guess about the contributing factors.

To start tracking your SERP history, launch Rank Tracker, go to Target Keywords > Rank Tracking > SERP Analysis, and click Record SERP data. The tool will start tracking the top 30 SERP positions for each of your keywords.

About The Author

SEO PowerSuite is a one-stop SEO toolkit that combines pro-level functionality with minimized costs, making full-scale SEO affordable for businesses of any size.

The toolkit lets webmasters, marketers, and professional SEOs run full-cycle SEO campaigns and grow rankings, traffic, and sales. The toolkit is always on top of the latest search trends with continuous improvements and feature updates, including the recently added SERP history, rendered site crawling, and in-depth backlink analysis. Since 2005, over 2 million users have grown their business online with SEO PowerSuite.

SEO PowerSuite is available for free download on the official website.

The post 8 major Google algorithm updates, explained appeared first on Marketing Discover.

You know at first glance who ranks at the top of the search because you can see the top 10 search results for “home contractors near me.” But have you ever wondered who is at the very bottom of the search? Or even right smack in the middle?

If you don’t know what elements help your website rank in the first 10 or even the first 20 results of a Google search, your site may well be one of those that ends up on the bottom end of a Google search. This spells disaster for small, local businesses. After all, if your business doesn’t appear among the top search results, then would-be customers don’t know you exist.

So, what do you need to do to maintain a high-ranking presence on Google? Here’s what you can expect to learn:

• Recent search trends
• The makeup of a Google search
• Local marketing tactics to help you rank

Understanding recent search trends

Recent information about search statistics suggests that convenience and personalization play a big role in how people search the web today and, also, the kind of information they get in their search results. The frequency of the search term “near me” has risen by 40% in the last year or so. That means that more web searchers spend their time looking for goods and services in their area than they ever have before.

The role of reviews and business listings

Local reviews on sites like Yelp and tools like Google local business listings help search engines determine if your company’s website fits someone’s “near me” criteria. The more times your site fits these criteria, the better chance you have at gaining new customers.

All Google searches have some elements in common regardless of who’s searching. However, personalization determines what you see in a search result. It also determines what a potential customer could see, and that customer’s results might be vastly different than yours, even if they live in exactly the same area that you do and use exactly the same keywords.

What personalization looks like

Google’s algorithm personalizes searches for each searcher. This isn’t to say that if you typed in “DIY home improvement near me”, you won’t get a listing of home repair stores in your general vicinity. You will. So will your neighbor and other people in your town.

The following searches will all yield different results for “DIY home improvement near me” based on their browsing history and search patterns:

• You searching on a family computer where others frequently browse Pinterest or home improvement blogs.
• Your neighbor across the street searching.
• You searching on your smartphone.

Here’s why: If someone in your family often looks up posts about saving money or visits a home improvement blog, relevant content will appear. Same goes for your neighbor. Even though you’re in the same zip code, their browser history is going to affect their search results. Lastly, your smartphone will have no outside influences and some businesses will rank higher in search based on their mobile-friendliness.

Finally, voice search is the next big thing on the search landscape. The use of voice searches has increased by 50% in the last year, and as people get more comfortable with this technology, that number is bound to rise even more.

To summarize, here are some of the most important trends you need to be aware of in the next year or so:

• ”Near me” searches have increased substantially.
• Online reviews and business listings help your site rank among “near me” searches.
• Personalization is growing in importance.
• The type of device being used for the search determines the outcome.
• Voice search has grown and will continue to do so.

The makeup of a Google search

You can use your knowledge of recent trends to help your company’s website rank better in a Google search. However, to maximize the results you get, it’s important that you understand the anatomy of a Google search and how search trends are related.

When your customers perform a search, they’re likely going to see one or more of the following in their search results:

• A snippet at the top of the page
• The title of a website/webpage
• The page’s URL
• Internal site links
• Related searches

In this list, the snippet is the greatest asset for you. Google will determine if something on your site becomes a snippet at the top of the page. While you have control over the type of content that goes on your site, you may now have that control over whether Google chooses your site to use as the snippet in the search results.

It will boil down to how relevant your content is in relation to the search inquiry. If it’s relevant, then Google may use information on your site to answer a query, such as “Where can I find a home contractor near me?” or “Which plumbers make emergency calls in [city] after 10 p.m.?”

The idea behind the snippet is to provide searchers with an at-a-glance look at the most relevant answer to the inquiry. The information on the snippet also prevents users from having to open up a website to find the answer they’re looking for. If your site is featured in the snippet, that means you’re in position zero and your site will likely gain a lot of traffic. People will probably click on your site if the information in the snippet positions you as an expert.

However, competition is tough because all businesses want their site to be in this position. You’ll have a better chance of landing there if you update your content often and remain hyper-relevant in your industry and niche.

You also have little control over related searches. However, given that related searches are long-tail keyword phrases that are associated with the original search, you do have some control over your site’s ranking. If you incorporate some of these related keyword phrases into the content on your site, then it will also appear among the search results when someone uses those keywords in their searches.

The rest of the elements are within your control. The title, the URL, and the internal links constitute the on-page components you should pay attention to when you’re creating content. Ideally, your titles, URLs, and internal site links contain relevant keyword phrases, including some that are voice search- and mobile-friendly. 

Local marketing tactics to help you rank

Fortunately there are effective tools at your disposal to ensure your business’ success. The following tactics are what we recommend based on the latest trends and on the anatomy of a Google search.

Local voice searches

Voice searches done by Google Assistant, Siri, or some other similar technology have a few things in common.

1. They’re typically phrases, like “Hey Google: Where can I find a plumber near me?”
2. They often include a geographic element, such as “near me” or a reference to the city or state the search is being conducted in.
3. They don’t follow the traditional format, which would be something like “plumbers in any city, USA.”

While it’s still okay for you to create content that includes more traditional long-tail keyword phrases, it’s important to include conversational phrases, like No. 1 in the list above. Essentially, you need to think about how people type an inquiry into a search engine versus how they would speak it into their phone or to their home’s voice assistant. You may need to expand your thinking about what search engine optimization encompasses nowadays to include voice search phrasing.

Google My Business service area

On the Google My Business platform and app, there is an option for you to update your Google business listing to include the service areas you work in. This feature allows you to add zip codes, cities or towns, and other geographical location information. By doing this, you’ll increase the likelihood that your business will show up in a search that includes phrases like “near me” or “in [insert name of city].”

Google Ads

Google Ads can boost your chances of having your business appear at the top of local search results. While this is always important, it can become even more important if you tend to be in a competitive local niche, like contracting or plumbing.

Here’s how to use Google Ads to optimize your search results: Utilize Google’s Local Service Ads. These ads cater to specific professional services, like plumbers, HVAC contractors, locksmiths, and more. They allow you to include information such as reviews and ratings, your business hours, phone numbers and more.

The ads also require the searcher to be very specific in their inquiry. For example, if the potential customer clicks on a local listing for a plumber, Google prompts the customer to confirm the service area and the type of service they’re looking for. If your company is a good fit, then that customer will be matched to you. It’s more likely that prospects who find your ad will be prequalified and become new customers.

About The Author

Surefire Local provides the industry’s most complete local marketing platform designed to help small and medium-sized businesses make online marketing easier so they can grow profitably. Through its flagship product, Surefire Local Marketing Platform, locally-focused businesses of all sizes can remove digital roadblocks hindering growth, gain insights, and take action to attract and engage new and current customers through measurable, multi-channel marketing.

The post Your all-access guide to improving your Google search visibility appeared first on Marketing Discover.

Ginny will be leaving behind some very big shoes to fill, so today we are launching our search for the next content leader for Search Engine Land and our companion conference series SMX — Search Marketing Expo.

This is a tremendous opportunity for someone who has the credibility and composure to lead the search community as an educator and an advocate.

Here is the job description:

Third Door Media is currently looking for a passionate expert in search engine marketing to lead the team responsible for producing Search Engine Land, the publication of record for search marketers, and Search Marketing Expo – SMX, the world’s largest search marketing conference series. 

What you will do

You’ll lead a team of subject matter experts in creating content for online and in-person consumption that elevates, informs and inspires search marketing professionals. 

Under your direction, the team will create: 

• Features, presentations, conference sessions and workshops that are tactical and eye-opening
• News coverage that is original and bold
• Guides and resources with evergreen educational value
• Newsletters that greet marketers daily with timely intelligence
• Research and analysis that explains key trends and their ramifications

The Director works closely with the Vice President of Content in setting and implementing the overall content strategy. This role is essential in the team execution of that strategy. 

The Director will lead by example too, by producing online and in-person content for Search Engine Land and SMX. The ideal candidate juggles their own calendar while effectively managing team assignments.

What we cover

The team behind SMX and Search Engine Land is obsessed with search marketing, so our core topic areas include SEO, PPC, technical SEO, local SEO, content marketing and paid social media marketing at the SMB, agency and enterprise levels. As the need for findability among brands is expanding beyond search and social platforms, we are increasingly focusing on areas like digital commerce marketing as well.

Who we are looking for

We are looking for a subject matter expert who wants to lead the search community. Experience covering search and performance marketing for a media organization or content marketing department is table stakes. Experience in public speaking or teaching is imperative. Overall, we are looking for someone who:

• Is endlessly passionate and curious about search and performance marketing
• Is confident in their own voice as an expert and leader
• Empathizes with our audience’s challenges and sees the content they produce as key to helping solve those challenges.
• Is a strong communicator, writer and editor who holds the clarity and impact of content above matters of style.
• Knows how to cultivate and manage a roster of expert sources
• Has 5-7 or more years experience at a digital publication, B2B media brand, agency or content marketing shop
• BONUS: Experience with creating content beyond text: video, data viz, infographics, etc.

What we offer

• Competitive salary
• Forever work-from-home

If you are interested, please email resume and work samples, including video of past speaking engagements if available, to Henry Powderly, VP of Content, at hpowderly@thirddoormedia.com

The post We’re hiring a new content lead for Search Engine Land and SMX appeared first on Marketing Discover.

The SEO community is always looking for new ranking factors and we have discovered over two hundred of them so far. But there may be hundreds more actually used by Google. Luckily, we don’t have to work on all of them. Most have very little weight in SEO and are often used as tie-breakers rather than ranking signals. Instead, here is the definitive list of Google ranking factors, each of which can make or break your search optimization strategy.

1. Backlinks

Even though Google is planning to move away from backlinks in the future, they still remain the most important ranking factor for your pages. Except it is now too risky to use black hat SEO strategies — your links have to come from a variety of high authority websites that are similar to yours. Furthermore, some Google patents say that freshness and traffic may also be important backlink metrics.

Optimization strategy

The most efficient way to grow your backlink profile is to borrow backlink ideas from your search competitors. All you have to do is launch SEO SpyGlass, go to Domain Comparison > Link Intersection, and add a few of your top competitors. The tool will analyze your competitors’ backlinks and find the backlink gap — websites that link to your competitors, but not you. Those websites are your prime outreach targets. Seeing how they already link to other websites in your niche, they are very likely to host your links as well.

2. Semantic saturation

Your SEO content has to contain an appropriate amount of relevant keywords, entities, and images for the length of the copy. The content should not be stuffed, like in the old days of SEO, it should rather be a natural-sounding copy written in an informative style.

Optimization strategy

It could be a little challenging to figure out exactly which keywords to use, where to put them, and how many of them are needed. So, if you want to play it safe, a good strategy is to create a benchmark by analyzing your search competitors’ top-ranking pages. To do this in Website Auditor, go to Content Analysis > Content Editor, enter your main keyword, and get a detailed list of SEO writing instructions. The SEO Content Editor tool will tell you the right amount of main and secondary keywords, their placement, and the recommended length of the copy.

3. HTML tags

HTML tags tell Google which bits of your copy are the most important. The title and meta description tags are what users see in search results – write them like a keyword-rich promo. Heading tags (H1-H6) split your copy into sections — they should also contain keywords and be written in an informative style. Finally, alt text is used to describe images to search engines and should be filled out if you want to appear in the image search results.

Optimization strategy

If you weren’t mindful of HTML tags, then there are probably hundreds of pages on your website that are not properly optimized for search. A thorough approach would be to use Website Auditor and review your pages in bulk. First, go to Site Structure > Pages > On-page and sort the pages by their search optimization score. If you spot any pages with a low score, click on them for a detailed report. It will tell you exactly which HTML tags are in need of optimization and what’s wrong with them.

4. Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are the newest user experience metrics that will soon become Google ranking factors. The metrics will measure the first impression the user gets when visiting a page. Specifically, how fast it loads, how soon it becomes interactive, and how stable the layout is. Now, it’s important to note that the vitals are not yet official Google ranking factors. But they definitely will be, so it’s best to use the remaining time to get them into proper shape.

Optimization strategy

Google has been kind enough to equip each vital with a detailed set of optimization guidelines. For faster loading, Google recommends better server response times, less render-blocking JS and CSS, and faster resource loading. For improved interactivity, Google recommends code splitting and using less JS. Finally, for better visual stability, Google recommends using size attributes for images and videos and loading content from the top.

5. User behavior

There is a lot of uncertainty in the SEO community on whether Google actually uses behavioral metrics to rank pages. Google says that it doesn’t, but there’s been some pretty convincing evidence that it might.

The metrics we are talking about are the click-through-rate (CTR), bounce rate, session depth, and session duration. To check your performance on user behavior metrics, use your

 Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts.

Optimization strategy

Improving user behavior metrics has a lot to do with creating engaging content. For example, CTR relies on having an attractive snippet in search results. Meanwhile, bounce rate, session duration, and session depth rely on whether there is anything fun to do on your page. To keep users engaged, make sure to produce high-quality copy with plenty of visuals and internal links. The goal is to catch the visitors and send them down your sales funnel.

6. Structured data

There are thousands of tags to choose from, and they can tell Google every little detail about your content. Structured data can be used to tag authors, ratings, product features, locations, and so much more. And it can do wonders for your SEO — create links between entities, pin your location, and enhance your search snippets with rich elements:

Optimization strategy

If you are not a technically inclined person, then it’s best to use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. Choose the type of markup (article, local business, and product come highly recommended) and submit a link to the page you want to enhance. Now highlight bits of text and choose corresponding tags. When done, save the HTML file and upload it to your website. Extra step — check whether your structured data actually works with the help of Google’s Rich Result Test.

7. Google My Business  listing

Claiming, optimizing, and maintaining your Google My Business listing is the single most important thing you can do for your local SEO. It helps establish your company as an entity, which in itself is a great asset to your SEO. More importantly, it skyrockets your local search performance. Once you create a listing, it becomes eligible for the local business panel as well as Google maps, opening your business to nearby searchers:

Optimization strategy

First, you have to visit Google My Business and either create or claim your profile. You will be asked to provide a few basic details as well as verify your ownership. When done, you will be transported to your Google My Business dashboard, where you will find many additional ways to enhance your listing. The least you can do is add a description, business hours, and photos, but there are many more cool features to explore. Google is constantly adding new Google My Business features and it’s gotten so advanced that it’s almost like a website of its own.

8. Mobile optimization

Mobile-first indexing is fully rolled out. Google announced that starting from September 2020 all websites without exception will be judged on their mobile version, not the desktop version. So, if you want your website to have any chance of ranking in search results, you have to make sure that it is designed for mobile users.

Optimization strategy

To check whether your page is mobile-friendly, visit Google’s mobile-friendly test, and submit a URL. If the page is ok, you will get a green light, and if it’s not, you’ll get some suggestions on what to improve.

Checking your website page by page is hardly practical, so you can use Google Search Console to check all your pages at once. Launch the tool, go to Enhancements > Mobile Usability, and view a report along with a list of suggested improvements.

Final thoughts

It’s important to keep tabs on the ever-evolving Google algorithm. Some ranking factors, like keywords and backlinks, are gradually losing importance. Other ranking factors, like user experience and semantic saturation, are taking their place. For now, though, the list above is a pretty solid selection of tactics to add to your SEO strategy.

About The Author

SEO PowerSuite is a one-stop SEO toolkit that combines pro-level functionality with minimized costs, making full-scale SEO affordable for businesses of any size.

The toolkit lets webmasters, marketers, and professional SEOs run full-cycle SEO campaigns and grow rankings, traffic, and sales. The toolkit is always on top of the latest search trends with continuous improvements and feature updates, including the recently added SERP history, rendered site crawling, and in-depth backlink analysis. Since 2005, over 2 million users have grown their business online with SEO PowerSuite.

SEO PowerSuite is available for free download on the official website.

The post 8 major Google ranking factors — SEO guide appeared first on Marketing Discover.

• As a Paid Search Manager, I want to utilize trend data to help inform when to ramp up ad spend on certain product categories.
• As an SEO strategist, I know it can take months to see the impacts of my work. So, knowing when my customers are searching most frequently will help me to prioritize my focus leading into peak season.
• As an ecommerce merchandiser, I want to understand how interest in our products have shifted over time. I want to be able to identify new trends gaining popularity so I can make more informed buying decisions.
• As a content strategist, I want to ensure we are providing our customers the most appropriate user experience based on peak search times for our products. How and when should the site be updated to speak to these seasonal trends?

And most importantly, as a business owner/key stakeholder:

• I want to be able to challenge my own assumptions (LOL) about my customers’ needs
• I want to know if my products are still in demand
• I want to know if there is a segment where I could expand my business
• I want to know if there are tangential lines of business that have some growth opportunity

I could continue, but the point I’m trying to drive home is decision makers in their respective silos are generally unaware of the true value in the data Google really shares. And thus, it’s your job to collect and disperse this knowledge across your organization. Break down those silos, friends.

So, you’re ready to make a name for yourself in your organization. Great. The best part is, it’s super easy to collect this data and analyze. I’m going to show you how to do it.

The tools

I’ll be leveraging a few different tools to capture the data I’m looking for. Specifically: 

• SEMRush for keyword research
• Google Keyword Planner to pull the historical keyword volume data
• Microsoft Excel to bring all that sweet, sweet data to life

Now, you could make the argument that Keyword Planner is unnecessary, as SEMrush provides keyword trend data. However, the data is limited (past year only) and it’s formatted and exported in a rather complicated way that I’m not a huge fan of. Google Keyword Planner has its own which I’ll address a little later on. Remember, we’re using this data directionally, not as the end all be all. 

The steps

First off, we need to start pulling together a list of relevant keywords for your brand. Depending on the size of your site and the products/services you offer, this could be a very large list, or a very small list. If I’m looking at an enterprise size ecommerce site, I like to approach this in bite size pieces rather than tackling the entire site at the same time. Focus on your priority categories and go from there. Remember, we’re trying to make our list comprehensive because we want to get the most out of our data. For this task I rely heavily on SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool. The tool makes it super easy to insert a “head term” and get back a ton of useful and related keywords. 

As I mentioned previously, you want to conduct your keyword research in a way that’s relevant to your site’s taxonomy. Segmenting this data now will make your life a lot easier later when you’re trying to identify trends based on categories. Fortunately, the Keyword Magic Tool makes it easy to segment keywords by specific word groupings, and they’ll neatly categorize these for you in your export. 

On the historical metrics tab, you can adjust your settings to include specific countries of interest, as well as languages. Most importantly, you’ll want to adjust your timeframe to include a longer period of time, since you know, we’re looking at trends.  

Next you’ll hit Export and select the Download Option “Plan historical metrics (.csv). This will ensure the data you receive is trended by month, which is exactly what you want!

Remember when I said that Google Keyword Planner has it’s own inefficiencies? Here’s a few things to keep in mind:

• When reviewing Historical Metrics, Keyword Planner likes to consolidate similar keywords (example: wedding dress and wedding dresses). So you might find that your lengthy keyword list just got cut in half. That’s okay – you can either utilize what you have or try to build out your list further.
• Keyword Planner also likes to modify keywords. So a keyword in your original list might have been modified by the tool (example: “women’s shoes” might be changed to “shoes for women”). 
• When you export you’ll get a bunch of data you don’t care about, so you’ll have to clean the sheet up a bit. I typically only leave the Keyword and the Keyword Volume Trend columns intact.

Next, you’re going to combine your SEMrush sheet and your Google Keyword Planner export into a single Excel file. On your Keyword Planner tab you’re going to add a Group column and add a VLOOKUP so that you call pull the keyword grouping over from your SEMrush sheet. This way all your keywords are categorized based on the groupings that align with your site categories. If you don’t know how to do a VLOOKUP, look it up because it will change your life. Once everything is combined, your master sheet will look like this: 

Let’s bring all that beautiful data to life. We’re going to do this through Conditional Formatting in Excel. There are a couple of steps to get the trend visualized. 

Step 1: Highlight a single row of one year’s data. In the example below, that’s January 2017 – December 2017. Then go to Conditional Formatting < Color Scales < Green – Yellow – Red Color Scale. This will make the smallest number in the range red, the largest number green, and anything in between a blend. 

Step 2: Once you have this done, you’ll have to apply the formatting to each row of data within the same year. Highlight your range and click Format Painter. Then apply that Conditional Formatting to each row within the same year. Tip: once you have a few rows completed, you can bulk Format a larger section, so you don’t have to go row by row. See below on how to do it: 

Step 3: Implement the same conditional formatting for each year within your Excel so that you see the high and low values for each year individually. 

VOILA! Your search volume trend chart is complete. Really makes you want some Fruit Stripe gum, doesn’t it? Now you can review the data by category to answer some of those pressing questions you might have: 

• Are your seasonal assumptions about your business valid? Have those search trends changed over time? 
• Has a category gained/lost interest over time? Does this data help to validate some of the increases/decreases in your KPIs?
• Do seasonal trends start to ramp up sooner than expected? How can you leverage different marketing channels to prime customers for peak seasonality?
• Is your business even impacted by seasonality online? 

There is a bounty of useful data available to help you make better decisions about your online marketing. These trend charts are just one small step towards my efficient marketing.

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

About The Author

Sebastian has been involved in SEO since 2011 after graduating with a BA in Marketing and International Business. He knows his way around the technical side of SEO, on-site content ideation, and promotional outreach campaigns. And he has experience working with pharma and e-commerce brands, from small to enterprise-level businesses. Sebastian loves the push to be agile and quick thinking in order to succeed in SEO. This approach should also help him reach his ultimate goal of being a Survivor contestant (five tryouts and counting).

The post How search data can inform larger online business decisions appeared first on Marketing Discover.

Let’s take a typical story of how the pitching process works. Sarah, the CEO of a successful SEO agency, gets introduced to the CEO of another successful e-commerce company through a common friend.

She rallies her team and meets the client over Zoom. They have a wonderful conversation, and both of them are excited to start a great partnership.

Filled with optimism, Sarah assigns her best colleagues to craft an insightful SEO proposal. They analyze the competitors, do the keyword research, take the organic opportunity into account, and form a unique strategy on how they can reach impressive results.

The day of the presentation comes, and the e-commerce team gathers around, continuously nodding along with each slide. By the end of it, everyone feels excellent. Sarah is thrilled.

Checking emails stopped being a chore for Sarah. She quickly scans all of them, looking for confirmation on starting the project.

She does this daily for almost two weeks and, with each day, her confidence drops. There is no answer from the potential customer.

It’s awkward to follow-up. What could she ask? Why don’t they indicate if want to pursue the SEO campaign or not? What is with this “Silent No”?

Understanding what makes customers indecisive

If you’ve pitched a few clients already, you’ve probably experienced a similar situation. It feels like a win, but then communication gets postponed. It’s not clear if you should follow-up or not. And even if you were to follow-up, what would you ask?

They haven’t raised any particular concerns or downright rejected the proposal. There has to be something that brought them to your agency in the first place.

They’ve invested the time for the meetings and maybe even shared their analytics account. So there’s a hint of trust building up so far.

What if the dilemma stems from them forming trust based on “gut feeling” in the meetings, but lacking enough knowledge to judge whether the projected results will, in the end, be achieved.

They want to make sure they make the best rational decision – but they can’t.

Explaining the reasoning behind each data point and action, and arguing from first principles, should leave less room for doubt and more for critical thinking.

Let’s look through the steps that can go into an SEO proposal and how to bring clarity and convey trust using granular data along the way.

What goes into an SEO proposal?

1. Show a deep understanding of the industry

Keyword Research. Keyword research is the first step into better getting to know your customer and their industry.

The entire quality of the pitch depends on choosing the right keywords and being able to explain the principles behind your decision.

Coupled with your expertise of choosing precisely the ones that you know are valuable for optimizing, you’re building the keyword portfolio. But this may prove challenging for your customer.

Sometimes, business owners would have a different way of describing their business. So they could mistake queries for whichever words they would want their brand to be associated with.

You can help your customer focus on the end-users’ search habits by describing why it doesn’t make sense to improve visibility for queries that are navigational keywords and trigger site links. Then, follow-up with why you grouped the ones that set off the same search results and are part of the same topic, for more understanding.

Competitor Overview. Customers might think of their competitors as being other companies selling similar services and products, regardless of their organic visibility. They might even disagree that a particular website or company is in their industry, but you have data on your side. You’ve selected only the companies that get the most impressions for the selected group of keywords – and it’s all easily verifiable by searching on Google.

The different visibility scores set the stage for what the opportunity will be. While it’s impossible to predict what the future will hold, the present results are precise. 

If a competitor has already achieved success, it shows there’s a substantial opportunity.

2. Establish current SEO performance by splitting organic traffic by brand and non-brand

The outcome of SEO is the increase in organic traffic. This makes many people turn towards the organic traffic figure whenever they want to measure SEO performance.

The total number of organic traffic is composed of both brand and non-brand organic visits. Still, it is only the non-brand traffic that connects to and is dependent on, search engine optimization.

Your customer might intuitively realize this, but they didn’t have the tools to be able to study the data. If you split the two, you focus the evaluation process on SEO. It, also, shows that you would not take credit for marketing activities that were already going on, and so removes another fear that could make the customer doubtful.

Plus, it might be the first time the customer can put their finger on how much their branding drives their income, a question they have probably struggled with for a long time.

3. Present a realistic forecast that can be understood and verified

Estimating Impact in Terms of Clicks and Conversions Instead of Rankings

From a customer perspective, all of the improvements in visibility have just one final goal – an increase in their business performance.

Clicks, e-commerce transactions or goals are the way businesses keep track of them. By transposing better rankings to clicks and conversions, you tie the SEO campaign to the reality of running a business.

Decoding the impact of rank changes into clicks and conversions can look like a simple formula for a customer at first.

Still, when taking into account search volumes, year over year trends that influence the past data, and dynamic changing CTRs, you show much work and thought goes into the process.

But to do that, you need to get into an even lower layer — the way Google displays results for each keyword and how changes in search features influence click-through rates.

Not only that, but the advent of mobile brings even more pieces to the puzzle.

The “ten blue links” have diminished in favour of a mix between search features and organic results. For example, a search for “hotels in Paris” would trigger Google’s hotel widget and at least two ads. It takes more than three full scrolls to get to the first organic result.

By using a variable CTR model for each SERP, you remove the possibility that the methodology could be considered oversimplified and expose the customer to the complexities of modern organic optimizations.

By adding monthly swings in search volume and year-over-year trends, you set the building blocks for a data-driven, comprehensive forecast.

Highlight how their traffic would look with and without the SEO campaign

Unless your customers have just launched their website, they already rank in search engines.

By going the extra mile and first creating and presenting a forecast based on their current traffic and the search trends that might influence them, you lay out a foundation of transparency and easily researchable assumptions.

Highlighting the difference between existing, projected and additional traffic and conversions you remove one last piece of doubt – What might happen if I won’t go through with the SEO campaign?

Set expectations and align SEO with the customer’s business projection

While some customers know that SEO is more of a marathon than a sprint, for others, it can be their first foray in attempting to improve visibility.

By acknowledging that the first months would bring less impact, but it picks up as the campaign progresses, you are transparent from the start.

A twelve-month forecast allows customers to be able to take their sales projections and fit them on top of the SEO opportunity.

Instead of treating SEO as an independent tactic, they can now imagine the campaign as an essential activity to their day-to-day business operations.

Including seasonality allows for better inventory planning and proves, once more, that you’re committed to their long term success.

They also get to learn about consumers’ habits and maybe, in the future, rely even more on search data when making a business decision.

4. Compare the SEO budget to the equivalent in PPC

Is the SEO campaign worth it? This question might go through someone’s mind when having to make the final decision.

By bringing an external source of truth in the form of how much it would cost to run a paid search campaign on the exact keyword portfolio, you highlight how valuable it is for other companies to grab the first results.

It allows the customer to perform their independent research and build more trust in the projected outcome. Not only that, but they now have a point of reference for your pricing as well.

5. Convey transparency by discussing performance tracking

As you have now navigated the ins and outs of the forecast, there’s still one more thing that may get the customer stuck in a loop.

Can they trust your agency on delivery? Would they be able to check the progress by themselves?

They can’t just load up their analytics account and see the impact – the results are a mix between branded and non-branded keywords.

You could provide a detailed explanation of how reporting will run in relationship with the set goal and what goes into the metrics that describe their visibility.

Taking it a step further and including the objective in the contract can remove any fear they still have.

It’s bold, but isn’t it worth it to have your agency’s day-to-day operations aligned with your customer’s results?

How to help your customers say a loud ‘Yes’ instead of a silent ‘No’

Remove doubts that can form in their mind by explaining each hypothesis and backing it up with evidence, going through the following:

• Show a deep understanding of the industry.
• Establish the truth on their current SEO performance by splitting brand and non-brand traffic.
• Present a realistic forecast that can be understood and verified.
• Compare the SEO budget to the equivalent in PPC.
• Convey transparency by discussing performance tracking.

Meticulously going through all of these steps is hard. We get that. That’s why we’ve launched a new version of our “Search Awards” winning SEO forecasting module.

It helps you along each of these actions, except for one. The hangover you get after celebrating your 10th closed deal in a single month.

Our forecasting methodology has been successfully used for more than four years, by hundreds of clients, to set realistic objectives and improve their pitches. That’s why we’ve gone a step further.

We created an SEO proposal builder that leverages data from SEOmonitor, with the simplicity of Google Slides, and gives real-world examples from other SEO agencies around the world, in an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

But that’s only a part of what we do. We’ve designed SEOmonitor to help you acquire, manage and retain more customers for your agency.

Join us, and hundreds of SEO agencies clients, in the journey of bringing more transparency and measurability to the SEO industry. Click here for a trial that doesn’t ask you for a credit card, but gives you full access to the platform.

Top tip: How to follow-up without the awkwardness

Instead of just asking busy customers if they had time to review your proposal, why not take a bit of time to go through their existing organic industry landscape and look for significant changes that they may not even know about – Yet!

With Signals, you can easily spot those insights that can help you re-open the conversation with your indecisive customers.

About The Author

SEOmonitor’s mission is to help digital marketers overcome the challenges by developing innovative technologies that can make the most out of the available data and deliver insightful and reliable reports. SEOmonitor is committed to empowering those who want to move the SEO industry forward. Acquire, manage and retain more customers for your SEO agency with daily rank tracking, SEO forecasting and a unique solution for (not provided).

The post How to craft a winning SEO proposal and avoid getting a silent ‘No’ appeared first on Marketing Discover.