New Yelp feature: Request a Call

Yelp has added a new Request a Call feature to help service businesses more easily connect with potential clients. Users can specify a preferred call-back time. It’s then up to businesses to either confirm or ask for a different time.

How Request a Call works. People who land on your Yelp business page can click on a Request a call button. They must then select a service they want from you, then enter their phone number and preferred call time. This time could be super specific or a larger time window. 

When someone requests a call from your business, you will get a message in your Yelp for Business inbox, asking them to call the potential customer at the requested time window. Businesses then have three response options:

• Confirm call time. You will be prompted to specify a date and time you will call the customer (e.g., “I will call you this Friday at 1:30 p.m.”)
• Reschedule/unavailable. You can suggest a different call time to the customer.
• Need more information. You can ask the customer for whatever additional information you need before confirming the call. 

Businesses won’t be able to call a user on their actual phone number. That’s because, for privacy, Yelp creates a masked, temporary phone number. There is also an authentication PIN (personal identification number).

Source: New Yelp feature: Request a Call

TikTok Launches Creator-Crediting Feature

TikTok users will now be able directly tag and credit video creators using a button in the social media app.

TikTok is adding a new feature that will allow users to credit video creators and trend originators.

By allowing users to tag, mention and credit a video in posts, it will encourage people to credit their sources of inspiration.

Currently, when TikTok users want to credit another video, they can only acknowledge that creator in the captions or comments. The new feature will allow them to credit specific videos.

Users will be able to access the feature through the video page after posting or editing a video.

On the video page, they will have the option to tag videos they have liked, favorited, posted or that used the same sounds.

Additionally, TikTok will add user prompts like pop-ups explaining the importance of crediting and encouraging user to cite original creators.

Feature Comes Nearly a Year After Backlash from Black Creators

For some time, TikTok has faced accusations from users who feel their original content is being hijacked without proper credit being given.

“It’s important to see a culture of credit take shape across the digital landscape and to support underrepresented creators in being properly credited and celebrated for their work,” Chikumbu said in the post.

Source: TikTok Launches Creator-Crediting Feature

WooCommerce Calls for Early Testing on Custom Order Table Migrations

At the beginning of this year, WooCommerce announced its plan to produce an MVP of custom order tables by Q3, 2022, a long-awaited improvement that promises significant performance gains for stores. The plugin’s development team is now calling for developers, agencies, and hosting companies to test migration to its first implementation of customer order tables.

The process involves migrating orders from wp_posts and wp_postmeta to four new custom orders tables:

1. wp_wc_orders
2. wp_wc_order_addresses
3. wp_wc_order_operational_data
4. wp_wc_orders_meta

It requires a staging environment configured with WP-CLI and a staging database pre-loaded with order data.

WooCommerce developer Vedanshu Jain has created a migration testing guide, which details the custom code developers will need to add in order to enable the custom order tables. Once enabled, developers will have the option to migrate tables using WP-CLI or via Action Scheduler.

Source: WooCommerce Calls for Early Testing on Custom Order Table Migrations

Google Launches Tool For Practicing Job Interviews

Google has launched Interview Warmup, a new tool that uses artificial intelligence to help people prepare for job interviews.

Using voice-to-text or the keyboard, users can practice answering questions commonly asked in interviews, as well as job-specific ones picked by an expert in that field.

The tool then analyzes the answers and offers suggestions for improvement.

Currently, Interview Warmup has field-focused questions for Information Analytics, E-Commerce, IT Help, Undertaking Administration, UX Design or Basic.

Interview Warmup features three types of questions:

• Background –  covering past training and experience
• Situational – how specific situations were handled in the past or might be dealt with in the future
• Technical – covering knowledge and skills, often testing how hypothetical problems would have been handled

Machine Learning Analyzes Responses and Provides Insights

As well as allowing for personal review, Google’s algorithm will employ machine learning to identify patterns and generate insights in a user’s answers. These include:

• Job-related terms, which highlights words in answers that are relevant to the specific field
• Most-used phrases, which points out phrases that have been used three or more times and provides alternatives.
• Talking points uses Google’s artificial intelligence to uncover important points in replies, including skills, experience and lessons learned.

Source: Google Launches Tool For Practicing Job Interviews

Google launches video health tools to help publisher monetization

Maximizing the return on video inventory is a problem likely to be found at the top of most publishers’ lists. Help is on the way for those using Ad Manager thanks to new video specific tools from Google.

The new features are part of the Programmatic Video Health Tools and real-time video reporting, both with goals of using automation to surface insights and information quickly.

Programmatic video signals

This card will create views that show performance across the various video platforms being used.

Some elements that are automatically reported on include: app/web domain, viewability and audience information. Users will also be able to see the impact of each on revenue.

VAST errors

The Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) errors insight cart will help with error reporting on lost ad requests. This automated view will surface the number of errors on inventory caused by improper settings or broken creative.

Video performance alerts

Publishers will also have the ability to configure custom alerts based on requirements most important to them. This tool, Video Performance Alerts, can create a customized email based around campaign metrics and dimensions. The Video Performance Alerts feature is currently in beta.

Real time video reporting

Lastly a final tool, real-time video reporting, will help users resolve problems sooner.

This is for those serving ads on YouTube via Ad Manager and will give them the ability to test ad delivery and view ad requests, key values and details on the winning line items.

Source: Google launches video health tools to help publisher monetization

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Lucid visibility: How a publisher broke into Google Discover in less than 30 days from launch

Google Discover is one of the most sought-after traffic sources by publishers. It’s also one of the most confusing from a visibility standpoint.

For many, it’s an enigma. Some publishers receive millions of clicks per month, while others receive absolutely none. And a ton of traffic can turn into no traffic in a flash, just like when a broad core update rolls out.

Google has explained that it’s looking for sites that “contain many pages that demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T)” when covering which content ranks in Discover. Strong E-A-T can take a long time to build up, or so you would think. For example, when a new site launches and has no history, no links, etc., it often can take a long time to cross the threshold where it can appear in Discover (and consistently).

That’s why the following case study is extremely interesting. I’ll cover a new site, run by a well-known person in the tech news space, and the site broke into Discover in a blistering four weeks from its launch. It is by far the quickest I have seen a new site start ranking in Discover.

And if you’re in the SEO industry, I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of who runs the site. It’s no other than Barry Schwartz, the driving force behind a lot of the news we consume in the SEO industry. But his new site has nothing to do with SEO, Search Engine Roundtable, or Search Engine Land.

Or does it?

Let’s jump in.

Unrelenting writing and publishing

As many of you know, Barry’s work ethic is insanely strong. He’s written more than 30,000 articles about search. When he decides to do something, lookout.

So as you can guess, Barry took his Search Engine Roundtable blogging process and employed that for Lucid Insider, his blog dedicated to news about Lucid Motors, a car manufacturer producing the luxury electric sedan Lucid Aid. He blogs every day, with multiple posts covering what’s going on in the Lucid World.

Time To Discover Visibility (TTDV)

Haven’t heard of TTDV yet? That’s because I just made it up.

Lucid Insider started surfacing in Discover just four weeks from the time the site launched. For the most part, that’s before any (consistent) strong signals could be built from an E-A-T standpoint, before earning many links, before publishing a ton of content on the topic, etc.

Articles and Web Stories ranking in Discover

After Barry launched Lucid Insider, I pinged him and said he should build some Web Stories, especially as Discover showed signs of life for Lucid Insider. I have seen first-hand what Web Stories can do visibility-wise in search and Discover.

Source: Lucid visibility: How a publisher broke into Google Discover in less than 30 days from launch

We’ve crawled the web for 32 years: What’s changed?

It was 20 years ago this year that I authored a book called “Search Engine Marketing: The Essential Best Practice Guide.” It is generally regarded as the first comprehensive guide to SEO and the underlying science of information retrieval (IR).

I thought it would be useful to look at what I wrote back in 2002 to see how it stacks up today. We’ll start with the fundamental aspects of what’s involved with crawling the web.

It’s important to understand the history and background of the internet and search to understand where we are today and what’s next. And let me tell you, there is a lot of ground to cover.

Our industry is now hurtling into another new iteration of the internet. We’ll start by reviewing the groundwork I covered in 2002. Then we’ll explore the present, with an eye toward the future of SEO, looking at a few important examples (e.g., structured data, cloud computing, IoT, edge computing, 5G),

All of this is a mega leap from where the internet all began.

Join me, won’t you, as we meander down the search engine optimization memory lane.

Clearly, this image didn’t earn me any graphic design awards. But it was an accurate indication of how the various components of a web search engine came together in 2002. It certainly helped the emerging SEO industry gain a better insight into why the industry, and its practices, were so necessary.

Although the technologies search engines use have advanced greatly (think: artificial intelligence/machine learning), the principal drivers, processes, and underlying science remain the same.

An important history lesson

We use the terms world wide web and internet interchangeably. However, they are not the same thing. 

You’d be surprised how many don’t understand the difference. 

The first iteration of the internet was invented in 1966. A further iteration that brought it closer to what we know now was invented in 1973 by scientist Vint Cerf (currently chief internet evangelist for Google).

The worldwide web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir) in the late 1980s.

Why you need to know all of this

The web was never meant to do what we’ve now come to expect from it (and those expectations are constantly becoming greater).

Berners-Lee originally conceived and developed the web to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world.

Source: We’ve crawled the web for 32 years: What’s changed?

GA4 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What would it look like to switch?

Google Analytics is the top player when it comes to tracking website visitors. The platform’s value is reflected in its popularity, which is why it’s the market leader boasting an 86% share. But with great value comes great responsibility, and Google Analytics lacks in that department.

Designed to maximize data collection often at the expense of data privacy, Google Analytics and its mother company, Google LLC, have been on the radar of European privacy activists for some time now. Reports of questionable privacy practices by Google have led to legal action based on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that might result in a complete ban on Google Analytics in Europe.

On top of that, Google recently announced it will end support for Universal Analytics in July of 2023, forcing users to switch to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). So, if the switch must be made, why not seek a new analytics provider? Great free and paid solutions allow organizations to balance valuable data collection with privacy and compliance. With a GDPR-compliant analytics solution in place, your data collection becomes as it should be predictable and sustainable.  

Source: GA4 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What would it look like to switch?

What to look for in a technical SEO audit

According to Techradar, there are more than 547,200 new websites every day. Google has to crawl and store all these sites in their database, occupying physical space on their servers.

The sheer volume of content available now allows Google to prioritize well-designed, fast sites and provide helpful, relevant information for their visitors.  

The bar has been raised, and if your site is slow or has a lot of jargon in the code, Google is unlikely to reward your site with strong rankings.

If you really want to jump ahead of your competitors, you have a huge opportunity to be better than them by optimizing your site’s code, speed and user experience. These are some of the most important ranking signals and will continue to be as the internet becomes more and more inundated with content.

Auditing your website’s technical SEO can be extremely dense and with many moving pieces. If you are not a developer, it may be difficult to comprehend some of these elements.  

Ideally, you should have a working knowledge of how to run an audit to oversee the implementation of technical SEO fixes. Some of these may require developers, designers, writers or editors.

Fortunately, various tools will run the audits for you and give you all the comprehensive data you need to improve your website’s technical performance.

Not-so-seamless migration

GA4 introduces a different reporting and measurement technology that is neither well understood nor widely accepted by the marketing community. There is no data or tag migration between the platforms, meaning you’d have to start from scratch. The challenge grows with the organization’s size—you can have hundreds of tags or properties to move.

Limits on custom dimensions

A custom dimension is an attribute you configure in your analytics tool to dive deeper into your data. You can then pivot or segment this data to isolate a specific audience or traffic for deeper analysis. While GA4 allows you to use custom dimensions to segment your reports, there’s a strict limit—you can only use up to 50.

Lack of custom channel grouping

Channel groupings are rule-based groupings of marketing channels and, when customized, allow marketers to check the performance of said channels efficiently. Unlike Universal Analytics, GA4 does not allow you to create custom channel groupings in the new interface, only default channel groupings.

Source: What to look for in a technical SEO audit

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New TikTok Tool Surfaces Useful Insights For Marketers

Microsoft Bing drops anonymous sitemap submission due to spam issues

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New TikTok Tool Surfaces Useful Insights For Marketers

TikTok has launched a new tool that surfaces insights marketers can use to target different demographics around the world.

With TikTok Insights you can learn more about your audience’s behavior, their interests, and their general sentiment toward brands.

Featuring dozens of filters, TikTok Insights allows you to cut through data that’s irrelevant to your business and get only the insights that matter.

TikTok Insights is free to to use, making it an ideal addition to your marketing toolbox.

Here’s more about how to use this new tool and how it can assist your TikTok marketing efforts.

TikTok Insights Tool

TikTok Insights surfaces bite sized pieces of data that can help businesses refine their marketing campaigns.

When you first land on TikTok Insights you’re presented with a selection of tiles that each contain a piece of data.

You can sort through the tiles by selecting different filters on the left side of the screen. You can get as granular as you want.

If you want general data about Gen Z, you can get that. Or, if you want data about how American Gen Z users respond to tech & electronic marketing, you can get that too.

In addition to filtering by demographics and industries, you can also get data related to specific events and holidays.

Should you feel like getting a head start on planning Christmas marketing, for example, you can simply select the corresponding filter.

Should you feel like getting a head start on planning Christmas marketing, for example, you can simply select the corresponding filter.

If you’re using the data in an article or report, you can click Source to copy a citation and paste it into your document.

There’s limited data available at the moment. If you add too many filters you’ll likely run into instances where there’s no results available.

However, there’s much potential for TikTok Insights to be a valuable resource as it gets built out over time.

Source: New TikTok Tool Surfaces Useful Insights For Marketers

Google Search Console page experience report now tracks more desktop search features

Google has updated some of the reporting within Google Search Console to track additional desktop features for the page experience report, the company noted. That means you may see an increase in desktop impressions in the page experience report and the performance reports when filtered by “good page experience.”

The announcement. The original announcement was posted yesterday and it was super confusing, but this morning, Google has clarified the announcement to read:

“Search Console now logs impressions in the Page Experience report for additional desktop features, such as Top Stories. As a result, you may see an increase in your desktop impressions in the Page Experience report, as well as in the Search and News performance reports when filtering by the “Good Page Experience” search appearance.”

What changed. Google did not track some desktop features in the page experience report. Now that Google is tracking and logging those impressions for additional desktop features for the page experience report, you may see an increase in impressions starting on and after May 13th. This also can impact the Google Search Console Search and News performance reports when you specifically filter those reports using the “Good Page Experience” search appearance.

What to look out for. If you see a spike or increase in impressions starting on May 13th, you can drill in and filter by “Good Page Experience” search appearance in the Search and News performance reports to see if this is likely from the new logging of additional desktop features.

Google has always logged those impressions in the other reports, but not specifically for when it comes to desktop page experience.

Source: Google Search Console page experience report now tracks more desktop search features

Similarweb Acquires SEO & Rank Tracking Company Rank Ranger

On May 16, Similarweb announced it has acquired Rank Ranger, an SEO and rank tracking company.

This allows the Tel Aviv, Israel-based digital intelligence provider to offer term rank tracking alongside its keyword research and analysis tools.

With cross-search engine capabilities, the combined power of these companies seeks to provide search professionals with better insights into traffic-driving keywords.

Purchase Enhances Similarweb’s SEO Capabilities

This acquisition, the terms of which were not disclosed, means Similarweb users will now be able to monitor, track and report on keyword rankings over time.

The combined functionality of this merger should allow search professionals to quickly identify ways to grow traffic and generate better returns on their search investments.

Rank Ranger Provides Optimization Tools For Search Professionals

Founded in 2009, Durham, North Carolina-based Rank Ranger has software tools designed to help businesses capitalize on both free and paid traffic opportunities.

This includes functionality for monitoring progress and measuring, optimizing and reporting on specific strategies.

The incorporation of these capabilities into daily workflows gives search professionals the ability to quickly react to changes in search engine rankings, whether caused by competitor content or trends in the market.

Source: Similarweb Acquires SEO & Rank Tracking Company Rank Ranger

Webinar: Dominate your competition with Google auction insights and search intelligence

Auction insights is a powerful tool we’ve all come to use for understanding campaign performance against competitors. Search intelligence adds another layer of granularity to ensure you’re one step ahead of your competition.

Join Sean O’Connor, Senior CSM and Sales Engineer at Adthena, to explore three easy search intelligence tactics that will help you dominate your competitors along with use-cases from L’Oreal and Avanti West Coast trains.

Register today for “Dominate Your Competition with Google Auction Insights and Search Intelligence” presented by Adthena.

Source: Webinar: Dominate your competition with Google auction insights and search intelligence

Vimeo adds structured data to all public videos to improve Google Search visibility

Vimeo, a popular video hosting platform (obviously not as popular as YouTube), has added structured data to all of its publicly available videos on its platform. Vimeo said the SEO changes they made to the videos will give “your videos the best opportunity to appear for relevant searches.”

Google worked with Vimeo? Vimeo wrote that they worked with Google as an “early adopter of Google Search’s best practices for video players” to provide Google with “additional context about your videos.” This will help Vimeo surface those videos in Google search and take advantage of the video-rich results, like displaying key moments for videos in Google Search by adding chapters and timestamps to video structured data.

Google’s video best practices. The video best practices are not exclusive to Vimeo or “early adopters.” These best practices are published by Google over here for anyone who hosts videos to read and adopt on their websites or platforms.

The video best practices cover:

• Help Google find your videos
• Ensure your videos can be indexed
• Allow Google to fetch your video content files
• Enable specific video features
• Remove, restrict, or update your videos as needed

Steps to take in Vimeo. Vimeo said there is really nothing specific you need to do to take advantage of these SEO changes, outside of making your videos public. Vimeo wrote, “all you need to do is make sure your videos are listed as public. Our technology will handlee the rest.” That means the video platform will ensure the videos are (1) indexable, (2) that your metadata is optimized, and (3) that your chapters are visible to Google Search for key moments.

Vimeo’s SEO advice. Despite Vimeo handling this by default for you, Vimeo posted some tips for you when uploading your videos, naming them and adding descriptions and other data. That advice includes:

• Add chapters to your videos: Google doesn’t only review the title, but also the titles used for each chapter – which means adding chapters can help users discover the part of your video that is most relevant to their search.
• Choose your titles wisely: The title is displayed alongside your video thumbnail in search results. While it’s great to have a unique and catchy name for your video, it’s also important to keep your title descriptive using keywords most relevant to your audience’s searches.
• Research the best keywords: If you want new people to discover your video, it makes sense to describe it in the terms that people are searching for.

Note, that chapters are only available on the Pro plan or above or Vimeo.

Source: Vimeo adds structured data to all public videos to improve Google Search visibility

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Microsoft Bing drops anonymous sitemap submission due to spam issues

Microsoft Bing will no longer accept XML sitemaps submitted anonymously through HTTP requests, Fabrice Canel from Microsoft Bing announced today. The reason Bing will no longer allow anonymous sitemap submission is due to abuse by search spammers.

How anonymous sitemap submission worked. Microsoft explained that since the inception of XML sitemaps with Bing, Bing allowed for anonymous submission by using a HTTP request.

No longer supported. Microsoft is doing away with HTTP request anonymous submission of Sitemaps starting today, May 13, 2022. Fabrice Canel wrote that Microsoft Bing is “deprecating the ability for anonymous sitemap submissions starting today.”

Why is it going away? SEO and search spammers have been abusing the anonymous submission of Sitemaps and thus, Microsoft is no longer going to support it. Fabrice Canel wrote, “recent evaluations have shown that it was often subject to misuse by spammers.”

How to submit a sitemap to Bing. You can still submit your sitemaps using robots.txt on your domain name and/or through Bing Webmaster tools.

• robots.txt: Add a reference to your sitemap in the robots.txt file located at the root of the host to inform all search engines.
• Bing webmaster tools: Alternatively, you can submit your sitemaps in Bing Webmaster tools https://www.bing.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Don’t forget IndexNow. Microsoft Bing of course would still love for you to push content to them using IndexNow, so you have that as an additional and supplemental option.

Source: Microsoft Bing drops anonymous sitemap submission due to spam issues

Google Search Console adds translated results search appearance filter

Google Search Console had added “translated results” to the search appearance filter in the performance reports today. This filter lets you drill down to how searchers who get translated results interact with your content in Google Search.

How to access this filter. You can access this filter by logging into Google Search Console, clicking on your performance report, and then clicking on the “+new” filter and selecting the search appearance for “translated results.” Here is a screenshot of how to access the filter:

Translated results report. This report will break down what queries, pages, countries, devices and so on these searchers are using when finding your content in Google Search. Again, when you filter by “translated results,” this will filter the report to show you only those who get translated results. Here is a screenshot of this report:

More on translated results. Searchers who see translated results will be those who are likely based somewhere in India and speak Indonesian, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu languages. Google automatically will translate your title link and description it shows in the search results for your site’s snippet. When that user clicks on the result, Google Translate will also likely translate your page as well.

We covered this in more detail when Google released its help document on translated results last year.

Source: Google Search Console adds translated results search appearance filter

The anatomy of personalized search

Buyers expect easy navigation, relevant search results, and tailored search experiences that remember their preferences and rerank products accordingly, especially for in-session browsing. Unfortunately in 2022, consumers are still experiencing null results, and poor relevance and are often pointed in the wrong direction by their favorite brands. 

If you’re running an e-commerce site, internal KPIs most likely have an underlying impact on positive consumer retention, acquisition, and site revenue. All three inadvertently impact brand loyalty and therefore keep that cycle moving. 

Most of these online storefronts you manage started with a passion for the product and/or helping to solve a consumer issue. So, when improving your site’s functionality, how often are you working backward by focusing site search & product discovery efforts for your customer?

Being able to identify and implement the right AI-backed functionalities that power intentional search experiences will help your customers win, your brand’s site win and make you look like a product discovery hero.

Unlock magical experiences that foster customer loyalty online and better understand the capabilities of your site’s search engine. Continue your journey to becoming a product discovery hero by mastering the three key areas of personalized search: semantic understanding, SKU select, and 1:1, and segment-based personalization. 

When you understand the anatomy of personalized search, your search bar will be able to understand your customers. It’s a win-win. 

Source: The anatomy of personalized search

Entities and E-A-T: The role of entities in authority and trust

The development of Google into a semantic search engine and the increasing influence of E-A-T on rankings go hand in hand.

There is a common thread of innovation and updates that Google has been following for the past 12-plus years. Here’s a timeline of key events:

The organization of data and information around entities makes it possible for Google to rank entities of the entity type Person such as authors and organizations (publishers and companies) with regard to topics according to E-A-T.

Authors, companies, and publishers as entities

Content is published by people such as authors and organizations such as companies, associations and government agencies. These organizations and people are named entities.

Google increasingly arranges or organizes content around entities. Google can draw conclusions about the credibility and relevance of the document or content via the respective entity.

In the case of online content, there are usually at least two parties involved. The author/producer who created the content and the publisher or domain on which the content is published.

The author is not always a direct employee or owner of the domain. For example, in the case of a guest article, the publisher and author are not the same.

In my view of SEO, the entity classes such as organizations, products, and people play a special role, as these can be evaluated via the characteristics of a brand such as authority and trust or E-A-T.

Digital representations of entities

Entities that belong to certain entity classes, such as persons or organizations, can have digital representations such as the official website (domain), social media profiles, images, and Wikipedia entries. While images tend to be the visual image of the entity, especially for people or landmarks, a person’s corporate website or social media profile is the content image.

Source: Entities and E-A-T: The role of entities in authority and trust

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Link building: the least favorite part of SEO

There are plenty of reasons to love SEO. I certainly do and have since I started my SEO journey in 2007. 

But every job has unique challenges – aspects that can be frustrating, difficult, tedious or even downright painful. 

That’s why, earlier this week in the Search Engine Land newsletter, I asked readers: What is your least favorite part of SEO?

Well, we have a winner. Or loser?

It’s link building. More than 20% of respondents said link building was their least favorite part of SEO. 

Let’s dig into the results. 

Link building and outreach. It’s time-consuming. It’s tedious. And success is never guaranteed. These are a just few of the biggest complaints from SEOs about trying to build quality links that we saw from Search Engine Land readers:

• “Getting backlinks – it is the equivalent of a vampire sucking your soul for very little return.”
• “Obviously, getting natural links is nice, but when you’re out there fishing for them, it may or may not be fruitful. It’s so time-consuming and there’s no guarantee you’ll see the results you want.”
• “Too much work to get any reward. It often feels pointless.”

Google. Yes, Google. There were a range of complaints. A few were specific to Google Business Profiles:

• “Way too many spam listings outranking actual, quality businesses. Legitimate reviews are being removed. If you happen to get suspended for no reason, support is a nightmare to deal with to get your listing back up. And yet, you’ve got deal with GBP, at least in local SEO, because of its prominence in the SERPs.”
• “Lack of control. Such an important listing for local businesses, yet so volatile. Make it paid already and give us more control and better customer service.”

But our readers shared other Google-related complaints, ranging from algorithm update timing to GA 4:

• “Google releasing algo updates right before the holidays.”
• “The metrics for the so-called “Page Experience” are so ambiguous in testing and evaluating.”
• “They’re trying their darndest to keep everyone in their ecosystem instead of allowing clicks through to sites. Their profits last year say it all.”

Proving the worth of SEO. Have you had to convince your organization that SEO is a smart investment? The answer should be as simple as, “Have you heard of this thing called Google.” Well, now you can point them to this article: Why SEO is a great investment, not just a cost.

Defending the value of SEO shouldn’t be such a struggle anymore. It’s 2022. Yet here we are:

• “People not taking SEO seriously or understanding the worth of its investment and time.”
• “The expectation that results will be immediate and positive every time.”
• “Having to work double as hard as PPC managers to prove SEO’s worth.”

More least favorite parts of SEO. Finally, a few randoms. These answers didn’t fit into any of our other buckets, but they are all valid reasons for these being called out as a least favorite part of SEO:

• “Technical optimisation. Never straightforward as to what exactly is causing the issues, and more often than not you need help from a developer. It’s rewarding once the problem is solved but the process is a bit of a maze.”
• “Watching what appears to be a well-optimized page rise and fall sporadically in the SERPs. It’s maddening.”
• “The uncertainty of what actually influences SERP position. It seems like a mystery and a moving target which makes it hard to manage.”
• “Keyword analysis, hangs me out of my throat. Uses 5 different tools, and has trouble stopping when enough is enough.” 

Source: Link building: the least favorite part of SEO

What Is Personal Branding? Here’s Why It’s So Important

If you are reading this article, it is almost certain that you have been bombarded with the term personal branding and its relevance in the world of business.

You may think it is some new fad or a figment of the imagination of the marketing gurus.

But, believe it or not, personal branding is here to stay and will only become stronger with time.

So, what is personal branding, and why is it so important? Let’s find out.

What Is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is the process of creating a brand identity for a person or a company. As the name suggests, this is a brand for you or your business.

Why Is Personal Branding Important?

In an era where people’s attention spans are getting shorter by the minute, the need to make an impression is more important than ever. And the best way to do this is by creating a solid and memorable brand identity.

Unfortunately, most business owners do not realize the importance of personal branding because they think it’s a lot of extra work.

However, the truth is that if you want to create a successful business, you must create a successful brand.

People who know you and your business will trust you more and will buy more products and services from you.

4 Reasons For Personal Branding

• Helps One Stand Out From The Crowd
• Leads To Opportunity
• Your Audience Will Trust You More
• People Will Always Screen You Online

How To Get Started Developing Your Brand

One good place to start is by cleaning up your social media accounts. You can control what your reputation is online, and so you don’t want anything you post on social media to negatively impact your presence.

Another positive place to begin would be to create a personal website.

Use your website not only to build your brand but to add value to your audience. This is your platform to showcase your skills and experience, and also to share valuable advice with your audience.

Create a logo and theme for yourself, and keep it consistent throughout all your social media profiles.

Define who your audience is and devise a content strategy with them in mind.

Publish compelling content that will draw in your audience and keep them coming back for more because your content adds value to their lives.

Consider creating specialized, personal content that you can give your audience in exchange for their email address; this is a great way to build your email list.

Source: What Is Personal Branding? Here’s Why It’s So Important

Google Search Console to release new video page indexing report

A new video page indexing report is coming to Google Search Console in the near future, Dikla Cohen, a Web Ecosystem Consultant at Google, announced at Google I/O today. The new report shows you a summary of all the video pages Google found while crawling and indexing your site.

Video page indexing report. The video page indexing report will be found in Google Search Console, under the “Index” tab, under “video pages.” At the time of writing this, this feature does not seem live yet – but it should be coming soon.

This report shows you a summary of all the video pages Google found while crawling and indexing your site. It will help you:

• See how many video landing pages Google discovered and in how many of them a video was indexed
• Examine reasons for unindexed videos in landing pages
• Use the list of affected video pages URLs to debug and fix issues
• Validate fix to initiate recrawling of known affected URLs

What it looks like. Here are screenshots from the presentation:

Source: Google Search Console to release new video page indexing report

You still don’t have marketing security?

Five years ago, if you were to ask a marketer about their security strategy, the likely response would have been sheer confusion. “Bots, proxies, data-center traffic? That’s for the security team to worry about.” In 2022, however, you’d be hard-pressed to find a marketing leader who hasn’t deployed a marketing security strategy. Today, most marketers view fake, automated and malicious traffic as a strategic threat to their operation, compromising efficiency and hurting their bottom line.

27% of website traffic is fake, and it’s killing marketing efficiency

Recent data released by CHEQ across a pool of over 12,000 of its customers revealed that 27% of all website traffic is fake, consisting of botnets, data centers, automation tools, scrapers, crawlers, proxies, click farms and fraudsters. The scale of the “Fake Web” is massive, and marketers are seeing it everywhere. Just this past Super Bowl, 17 billion ad views came from bots and fake users. On Black Friday, a third of online shoppers weren’t real. Affiliate marketers are losing $1.4 billion a year to fraud. Elon Musk recently highlighted concerns over bots overrunning social media and Spotify is reportedly suffering from its own bot problem. Wherever marketers look, the Fake Web is there, and it’s affecting their campaigns, funnels, data and revenue. 

Paid marketers without security ‘waste’ thousands of clicks on fake users

Perhaps one of the most visible issues for marketers, especially those running paid user acquisition, is Click Fraud. Bots, click farms and even competitors are draining their ad budgets and severely damaging campaign efficiency. Many advertisers suffer from thousands and even tens of thousands of fake clicks every month, amounting to a massive waste of spend. But it’s not just the wasted spend, it’s also budgets that could have otherwise gone to real paying customers who would have generated actual revenue. In fact, recent data shows that $42 billion is lost each year in revenue opportunities because of this issue. 

But the real damage begins when those fake users infiltrate your audiences

Many paid marketers use smart campaigns or audiences to group together users that have either previously shown interest in their products or services or share attributes with users who have. This is helpful for expanding the market they are addressing and reaching new potential buyers. At this point, it might not come as a surprise that bots and fake users can stand in the way of successfully executing this practice as well. When audiences become polluted with malicious human users or invalid bot traffic, marketers end up accidentally re-targeting and optimizing toward fake traffic. If marketing security measures are not put in place, the cycle can continue until audiences are overtaken by bots and no longer share any resemblance to a group of human users that have the ability and intention to convert. If clean audience segments are a priority, then, for many marketers, marketing security is as well.

Fake traffic is also one of the biggest drivers of poor lead quality

Every marketer can relate to the frustration of illegitimate looking inbound leads. Sometimes it’s a fake account or a bogus email address. Sometimes the information looks legitimate but when you research the lead you can’t find the company or individual. But whatever the case is, nothing causes more tension between sales and marketing than bogus leads that waste the sales team’s time and never convert. In fact, poor traffic quality is one the biggest drivers of marketing security adoption today, as teams look to eliminate illegitimate form fills and submissions and prevent them from polluting the sales pipeline.

But perhaps the biggest reason marketers are fighting bots is data quality

Beyond the monetary waste, budget inefficiency, polluted audiences and fake leads, there is one issue that stands above them all, which is perhaps the biggest driver of marketing security adoption – and that issue is data quality. Think about it – organizations spend so much energy, time, effort, resources and money on data management and consumption – expensive BI, analytics and reporting tools, teams of analysts, CDPs and DMPs. All of this so that they can drive better tactical decisions around landing page optimization, audiences and targeting, as well as strategic decisions around budget and channel planning, growth planning and revenue forecasting. When an average of 27% of traffic-in-funnel is fake, all that data is skewed and those decisions are severely compromised. Adding a layer of visibility to detect bots and fake users and gain transparency over their funnels, is becoming an absolute integral part of the modern-day marketer’s role.

More than anything, marketing security is being looked at as an opportunity

Marketers want to eliminate these threats to their operation, but above all, they want to drive better budget efficiency, better leads and higher revenue, and that’s the ultimate goal of marketing security. Eliminating these inefficiencies drives a healthy, clean and transparent funnel that delivers better results. And for these reasons, asking a marketer “what’s your security strategy?” in 2022, is quickly becoming an almost banal question, as Marketing Security quickly becomes an industry standard.

Source: You still don’t have marketing security?

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