Marketing Google

Gone are the days of enticing shoppers with festive windows and door-busting sales. As brick-and-mortar retailers continue to suffer from losses in revenue and iconic real estate, their shoppers are leaving behind the shopping sprees of Christmas past in favor of the internet’s infinite aisles and endless sales.Fueled by advancements in mobile commerce, and lured by lower and lower prices as competition between large retailers and digital marketplaces intensifies, the battle for customers is becoming increasingly difficult to win. But this holiday, the challenge is also an opportunity.The holidays are often the busiest time for retailers. This year, the smartest retailers are designing their strategic holiday plans around their most unique asset: customer data.Customers now expect personalized, data-driven experiences across all of their digital devices, especially when shopping online. In many cases, it’s the retailer that delivers the most seamless, personalized experience that wins…

In 2016, Google said that 20 percent of all mobile queries were voice searches. Since that time, the number of virtual assistants in US households has continued to swell, with tens of millions of voice-enabled home devices projected to be in use.Voice as a primary search interface — beyond mobile phones — is a reality. Marketers need to rapidly iterate on their mobile-first strategies, to adapt to the voice-first marketplace. And as the aptly titled e-book released today [registration required] suggests, voice search changes everything.I sat down with the book’s author, Yext VP of Industry Insights Duane Forrester, to discuss the landscape of voice search, how it will impact the business of search marketing, and what marketers can do to prepare for this evolution in search user interfaces.“Voice engagement is the most likely scenario that will challenge the biggest players in search for supremacy.” Michelle Robbins: What inspired you to put this e-book together?Duane Forrester: The wor…

We live in an age when all things are measurable — or at least that is the expectation. How long we sleep, our daily steps, our bodies’ sugar levels, the number of ads we view, the amount of media we digest and so on. In the world of marketing, it’s even more evident, as marketing leaders look at number of apps downloaded, time on site, click-throughs, shares, impressions, open rates, leads generated and so much more. But what are the right measurements?As someone who’s grown up in the world of digital marketing, I’ve kept my eye on the evolution of mobile and digital metrics and how they impact business. But as the complexities of measuring and modeling marketing activities increase, it’s critically important to seek out experts to help us focus on the right metrics.Fortunately, I happen to work with someone who has plenty of experience in the world of mobile and digital analytics. Chuck Hemann not only is one our senior analytics leads, but is also co-author of a book titled, “Digit…

Facebook wants to grease the car-buying process.On Thursday Facebook tuned up two of its ad products for auto brands looking to get people to come in for a test drive and drive off the lot in a new car. Auto advertisers can now use Facebook’s dynamic ads to turn the social network into a private showroom for people who have cruised around the web looking for cars. And they can use the company’s lead ads to follow up with those people and schedule a test drive at a nearby dealership.“The intent very much with both of these products is to remove any of that friction, either the pain of the researching and the getting to the dealership or the actual getting straight to ‘I just want this information, I just want to set up time to do a test drive,’” said Facebook’s auto industry lead Stephanie Latham in an interview.Dynamic ads for autoFacebook’s dynamic ads for auto brands work similarly to the versions that cater to retail, hotel, airline and real estate advertisers. They retarget the pe…

Suppose you had a contractual agreement that understood its own terms, could track whether the terms were fulfilled and could send the required payment or product when the deal was finalized.That, essentially, is the idea behind a smart contract, one of the new ways of doing business that blockchain technology is introducing. In this article, part of our MarTech Landscape Series, we look at this new kind of self-enacting agreement.The idea was first proposed in a 1996 paper by computer scientist and legal scholar Nick Szabo:A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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As an SEO expert at your company – maybe the SEO expert – you may find yourself needing to persuade executives to invest more in your company’s SEO practices.Championing SEO means successfully selling the right company leaders on the benefits, demonstrating the effectiveness and wisdom of your specific SEO strategy, and, more often than not, including a few convincing facts about why it will make them look good.Here are four practices you should use to your advantage when trying to win executive support for your SEO proposals:1) Understand your executive audience before you even step in the roomWhen you enter the executive meeting to present your SEO plan, know exactly what you’re getting into. Is this a group discussion, or are you going in one-on-one? What will keep the attention of this particular individual or group, and what are the expectations for this meeting on the other side of the table?In presenting your plan, it’s important to tell executives everything they need to know …

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:3 strategic goals SEO consultants should fulfill
Nov 15, 2017 by Ryan Shelley
Columnist Ryan Shelley discusses the three essential goals any SEO campaign must achieve: visibility, traffic and ROI. Google Manual Actions: Frequently asked questions and their answers
Nov 15, 2017 by Kaspar Szymanski
Contributor Kaspar Syzmanski addresses some of the most commonly raised questions and issues regarding Google penalties. 3 case studies of duplicate content consolidation
Nov 15, 2017 by Chris Long
Columnist Chris Long shares examples of how he addressed duplicate and similar website content to improve organic search performance for his clients. Facebook will tell publishers, creators the top Pages that shared their videos
Nov 15, 2017 by Tim Peterson
With Highlighted Shares, Facebook aims to encourage Pages to collaborate to grow their audiences, borr…

What is the benefit of an SEO strategy? This is a question I get asked quite frequently — and one that I usually have to answer more than once. While many business owners and companies accept the need for SEO, many are still confused or mystified by what SEO really provides. Being able to prove ROI to clients or your boss is essential to success and maintaining a good relationship.In this post, I want to cover three essential goals you can fulfill with an SEO strategy: visibility, traffic and ROI. I will explain how these three goals create a positive impact and how you can show these results to the decision-makers.VisibilityThe first goal SEO consultants can fulfill is increased online brand visibility. Consumers assume that top placement in the search rankings is a “stamp of approval” for the brand. While we know that this is not always the case, many searchers interpret high rank as a brand endorsement.[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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For webmasters affected by a manual action, understanding why a particular penalty is applied, what the consequences are and how to adequately address the issue are key to resolving a potentially critical situation.When penalties are discussed, some questions seem to come up more often than others. In this Q&A, which is a supplement to The Ultimate Guide to Google Penalties, I’ll include the questions I’ve heard asked most frequently, along with actionable answers.Experience shows that manual penalties are infrequently issued, and only for serious offenses. Human errors in the process, while not impossible, are extremely rare. It is reasonable to assume that once a penalty has been triggered, it is not a false positive. As far as Google Webmaster Guidelines go, an actual violation was confirmed.[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

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It’s commonly held that duplicate or substantially similar content is bad for SEO. When Google finds duplicate content, this creates a conflict for the algorithm. Essentially, Google gets confused as to which page should be the primary ranking URL for a given search query, so it chooses the one it believes to be the most relevant. Unfortunately, the URL it chooses may not be the one you wish to display — and, in cases of exact duplicate content, the other versions of the page may even be filtered out of search results.The best way to fix this issue is to consolidate the duplicate/similar content’s ranking signals into a singular version of the page. In practice, this is usually done by implementing either a 301 redirect, canonical or “noindex” tag.While many of us know this to be true, it can often be helpful to see examples of the different types of duplicate content that exist in the wild and how to best handle them. To better help you find and fix duplicate/similar content, I’ve pr…

Facebook will give brands, publishers and creators a better idea of who’s contributing to their videos’ viewership on the social network.Facebook is rolling out a new tab to all Pages globally that will list the top five Pages that reshared the videos they posted to Facebook, the company announced on Wednesday. The five Pages are selected and ordered based on the number of views that their reshares generated.The new Highlighted Shares metrics can be accessed through the Video Insights tab available within Facebook’s Page Insights section. For each video, the Highlighted Shares will detail the number of views; total number of likes, comments and shares; and the average amount of time people spent watching the reshared video through each Page.Facebook’s Highlighted Shares shows the top five Pages that have reshared a Page’s video. Facebook’s motivation in opening up the new analytics appears to be that showing Pages which other Pages are helping to spread their videos on Facebook could l…

As you put together your marketing strategy for 2018, there have never been more tools and tactics fighting for your budget. Technologies considered emerging over the last several years are beginning to peak as marketers inch closer to realizing the full potential of AI, machine learning and voice search. Privacy concerns over tracking and data collection have given way to demands for greater personalization across platforms, channels and devices.All of this increasingly granular, targeted marketing powered by technology enables more meaningful consumer interactions, driven by a massive amount of consumer data. The next big step in moving the needle on performance requires that you sync your tech around your understanding of that data, and martech is leading the way.As you prioritize your areas of focus, know that mastering these five martech trends will be critical in 2018.3. Take advantage of the wide open spaces in voice search[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

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Join our social media and CX experts as they explain how social customer service tools can help brands provide winning digital customer experiences. They’ll discuss how to manage that experience across multiple social touch points, leverage evolving social customer service tools and platforms to deliver long-term value and act on real-time customer insights to drive social ROI.Attend this webinar and learn:social strategies that drive loyalty and advocacy throughout the customer journey.social customer service response techniques that meet — and exceed — customer expectations.how global brands use social networks and communities to grow their customer bases.Register today for “CX in the Age of Social Media,” produced by Digital Marketing Depot and sponsored by Lithium.

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