Now you can speed up your site indexing in Bing
Bing’s content submission API is now available to everyone
Microsoft has opened up its Bing content submission API after over two and half years of it being in private beta. The content submission API is different from the Bing URL submission API, in that the content submission API lets you submit not just your URLs but also your content, images, HTML, and more directly to Bing’s index. “The API provides the ability for webmasters to notify Bing directly about the changes in their site content in real-time,” Microsoft said.
Last week in our newsletter we included Twitter conversations about pinning in RSAs to mimic ETAs after Google Ads sunsets the latter. On Friday, Brad Geddes continued the conversation by asking Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin, “Since Google recommends 2 ETAs & 1 RSA and has never recommended more than 1 RSA per ad group. Will the number of ads per ad group become restricted with this change? Will we be allowed to run 2-3 RSAs in an ad group?”
“It’s recommended to have at least one responsive search ad in every ad group in your Search campaigns by June 30, 2022. There’s a limit of 3 enabled responsive search ads per ad group,” Marvin replied. She added that there won’t be plans to restrict the number of RSAs to only one per ad group upon clarification by Geddes.
Later Geddes tweeted screenshots of reporting showing why advertisers want more control with RSAs (a callback to the pinning tweets last week). “This is an RSA with ‘excellent’ ad strength. When it was paused, this ad group’s conversions almost doubled due to G serving the highest CTR ad the most and not the one that converts the best. I have 1000s of these examples,” he wrote.
Bing Search tests a “Skip To Web Results” button. Microsoft Bing is testing a feature to let searchers skip down to the web results, past the ads, past the knowledge panels and direct answers and people also ask boxes and just see those web results
Read more: Now you can speed up your site indexing in Bing; Tuesday’s daily brief
Video and vertical-based product ads pilots arrive on Microsoft Audience Network
Disclaimers in ads, third-party integrations with Universal Event Tracking, flexible insertion orders, and inline appeals for rejected product offers were also among Microsoft Advertising’s September announcements.
Video ads and vertical-based product ads are now being piloted on the Microsoft Audience Network, Microsoft announced on Tuesday. In the announcement, the company also revealed disclaimers in ads, new third-party integrations with Universal Event Tracking, flexible insertion orders, and inline appeals for rejected offers in Microsoft Merchant Center.
Video ads pilot on Microsoft Audience Network. Video ads are now available on the Microsoft Audience Network as a pilot program in the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the U.K.
Vertical-based product ads pilot on Microsoft Audience Network. The company is also piloting another Microsoft Audience Network feature — vertical-based product ads, which use an advertiser’s existing feed to generate ads for auto listings, entertainment events, hotels, tours and activities, and vacation rentals in native environments.
Disclaimers for regulated industries. Microsoft Advertising is introducing disclaimers in ads (as shown below). While this feature isn’t specific to regulated industries, it can be particularly useful for advertisers in verticals in which consumers may need to be informed about details related to your business.
New third-party integrations with Universal Event Tracking. As an attempt to streamline the Universal Event Tracking (UET) setup process, Microsoft is also launching third-party integrations with Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Squarespace, and WordPress.
Read more: Video and vertical-based product ads pilots arrive on Microsoft Audience Network
5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact
As an SEO agency, you already know the role that keyword research plays in understanding the business opportunities of your clients and how to gather hundreds and hundreds of keywords for your SEO campaign.
But how do you go from a large list of keywords to an articulated, coherent, data-driven set that ensures you’ve zeroed in on the objective and know where you’re heading?
Jumping straight to execution, crunching tactics and tasks might work in the short-term, but without a well-defined strategy in place, the risk of wasting client resources and, ultimately, trust is high.
Pitfall #1 You include branded keywords in the mix
Mixing the two will muddle your data and will make your client’s position in the search landscape seem better than it actually is — which, in turn, will alter the strategy and your desired objectives.
The navigational keywords related to your client’s website or other websites (even competitors) won’t be valuable for your SEO campaign, as you can’t directly influence them. Plus, your client owns all the branded keywords, and they’re using other channels to amplify them (marketing campaigns, advertising, paid search, etc.). You don’t need rank tracking or SEO for that.
Pitfall #2 You don’t take into account relevance
One crucial pitfall you can encounter when curating your keyword list is not to account for the relevance of each keyword included. Relevance defines, in this case, the client’s website ability to satisfy the search intent.
Here’s one conclusive example. Let’s say “London” slipped into your keyword list when you have a client like “University of London.” What is the user searching for when typing “London?” It’s a very broad search, so Google will try to guess the intent and offer different answers on the first page, from travel articles to institutional websites or wiki entries.
Pitfall #3 You include keywords with high SEO difficulty
You can think about this category as the impossible for now.
These are relevant but resource-hoarder keywords: they’ll require too much energy and time. Looking at the interplay between the difficulty to rank in the top 10 positions and their potential, including the competition already there, it’s clear whether you should bother with them or not, at the moment.
For instance, a newly launched fashion retailer might want to target “black dresses,” but they need to fight giants like H&M or ASOS. Passing the keyword through a difficulty metric system would probably indicate it’s a hard endeavor, and it would be a waste of resources to compete there now.
Read more: 5 common pitfalls to avoid so you maximize your keyword strategy’s business impact
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Bing content submission API now available to all
