Technology News and Industry Knowledge

Join more than one thousand search marketers next week to discover actionable tactics that will drive more traffic, leads, and sales : Attend SMX online, December 8-9, for just $249! Your All Access pass unlocks 45+ tactic-rich sessions programmed by the Search Engine Land experts you know and trust, covering crucial topics like… Google algorithms and penalties Optimizing code for semantic HTML5 Emergent digital commerce channels 2021 digital advertising trends Budget-friend paid search strategies Google My Business optimization … and beyond. You’ll learn from seasoned search marketers including Elizabeth Marsten, Brad Geddes, John Mueller, Zenia Johnson, Peter Meyers, Frederick Vallaeys, Amy Bishop, Glenn Gabe, Greg Gifford, and dozens more — and have the opportunity to get your specific search questions answered during Overtime live video Q&A. Each day kicks off with a forward-thinking keynote that will help you prepare for a successful 2021: What The Future Hol...

Snapchat puts the “Spotlight” on top Snaps, will pay creators Snapchat has launched Spotlight to feature the best Snaps in a new feed aimed squarely at countering rival TikTok. Creators whose videos are selected can “earn a share of more than $1 million that we’re distributing to creators every day!,” said the company.  Creators can submit their videos to Spotlight. They must be at least 16 years old to be eligible for revenue sharing. Spotlight is first rolling out in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France. Why we care. Spotlight’s launch came as TikTok announced Charli D’amelio became the first creator to gain 100 million followers on the platform. Unlike TikTok, creator discovery has never been an integral feature of Snapchat. Spotlight presents a big shift in Snapchat’s approach. Spotlight has a very TikTok feel, with the ability to swipe up through videos in the feed. Paying users to make and promote their c...

Last month, we asked some industry experts whether economic uncertainty or increased comfort with online shopping would be the headline for this holiday season. It looks like we know the answer. As online shopping soared, in-person store visits fell by over 50% compared with 2019. In October, Taylor Schreiner, Director of Digital Insights at Adobe, told us in an interview : “It’s very hard to predict with precision what’s going to happen. The biggest question in my mind is, how bad is the personal employment and disposable income situation going to become?” On Black Friday, in a release, he said: “We are seeing strong growth as consumers continue to move shopping from offline to online this year. New consoles, phones, smart devices and TVs that are traditional Black Friday purchases are sharing online shopping cart space this year with unorthodox Black Friday purchases such as groceries, clothes and alcohol, that would previously have been purchased in-store.” The data in this artic...

In part one of my interview with Elie Orgel, the director of marketing at Rosenblum Law Firm, we discussed how to get links by leveraging data sources . Here, in part two, we move to how to build really good and useful and unique content with those data sources. There are many online databases, databases that Google cannot index, that have troves of amazing data. You can use these data sources to build out unique and useful content that has a good shot at ranking in the search results. If you can leverage that data and show it to users in a way that make sense and is useful to them, Google will often want to rank it. Elie also said when building out a site, it is important to show your expertise in your niche area of expertise. Write the most comprehensive pieces of content on the topic and then expand from there. You can learn more about Elie Orgel  on LinkedIn  or  ElieOrgel.com . He gives some very useful and practical content advice in this interview: If you...

Keying in on Levy's prominent eyebrows, the "Unlimited Eyebrowsing" effort highlights the "brow-sing" capabilities of the carrier's unlimited data plans. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/verizons-visible-eyes-schitts-creek-star-dan-levy-for-ad-campaign/589780/

An internal measurement system called ROI Engine has guided the marketer's recent decisions to place bigger bets on streaming and e-commerce, while saving the organization millions. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/pepsicos-in-house-technology-informs-radical-shift-to-digital/589792/

The Ferrero brand joins other marketers in reinforcing the idea that the holidays this year can still be a special time despite some traditions being put on hold. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/kinder-joys-holiday-campaign-highlights-family-moments/589797/

Online sales, curbside and store pickup all surged as a sales event defined by the pandemic took shape. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/winners-and-losers-of-black-friday-2020/589809/

While we understand a fair amount about Googlebot and how it crawls and indexes web pages, Google’s crawler has always been a bit of a mystery. Every SEO knows that optimization for search engines isn’t enough by itself to keep search engine bot

In an increasingly digital world, video is becoming the new norm for visual storytelling. It’s no surprise, given that video is a highly visual and effective medium for communicating with a brand’s audience. Going beyond static images, videos use sound and movement to create a compelling message, making it an integral part of any brand’s online marketing strategy. According to Databox , almost 60% of marketers said video ads tend to drive more engagement than images. To create online experiences that resonate with customers, every business should consider emerging video technologies that mirror the in-person experience, such as 3D and 360-degree videos that we highlighted in our last article. These immersive tools will build strong customer engagement that push the boundaries of the digital experience.  However, the key to using these tools effectively is to first get back to the basics and understand all of the fundamental strategies that can improve a brand’s video visual...

To put yourself in the best position to boost CLV, it’s important to examine the data foundation supporting your marketing efforts. Here are three ways to bolster your data strategy and keep customers happy. source https://www.marketingdive.com/spons/optimize-your-data-strategy-for-customer-loyalty/589507/

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We’re excited to have interviewed New York City SEO expert Marcus Becker from Mimvi SEO for the next installment of our Featured SEO Expert series! Mimvi SEO is one of SEOblog’s Top SEO companies in New York City. Mimvi SEO Digital Market

Posted by BritneyMuller Last week, we took you into the future with SEO expert Britney Muller to explore link prospecting in 2021 . This week, we're going back in time — all the way to 2017 — for her concrete advice on an important part of building links: image link building. Image link building is a delicate art. There are some distinct considerations from traditional link building, and doing it successfully requires a balance of creativity, curiosity, and having the right tools on hand. Let's dive in!  Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to go over all things image link building, which is sort of an art. I'm so excited to dig into this with you. Know your link targets So first and foremost, you need to know your link targets: I. Popular industry platforms - top pages What are those top platforms or ...

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"Free Range Humans" consists of eight brief episodes shot for social media platforms and comes as the brand doubles down on entertainment. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/corona-kicks-off-major-in-house-content-push-with-digital-travel-series/589745/

With Pinterest and Tastemade, the cross-portfolio campaign reimagines Heineken, Dos Equis and Tecate through "holiday hack" videos. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/heineken-crafts-bottles-and-cans-into-holiday-gifts/589722/

"The Missing Ingredients Project" will grant $1 million to groups improving access to food, and arrives as parent company Mondelez debuts its new human-centric marketing strategy. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/triscuit-takes-on-food-deserts-with-first-purpose-driven-campaign/589705/

Technical search engine optimization (SEO) optimizes a website at the backend and includes aspects like page speed, security, metadata and responsiveness. It gives both web crawlers and users a better experience of your website, which can increase your

I score poorly on every SEO writing tool out there. My headers, sentences and paragraphs are all too long. My voice is too passive. The tools are unanimous, my writing for SEO needs to change.  I must be a terrible writer… but wait, what does any of that have to do with writing? To quote Lord Helmet from Spaceballs, “Absolutely nothing!” Yet, if you asked most SEOs they would tell you that the key to good SEO content is structure, structure, and even more structure.  I’m here to tell you why I think this mindset is dangerous, detrimental, and debilitating for creating strong content.  Let the eye-rolling begin.  What is the ‘structured mindset’? What I’m calling the ‘structured mindset’ is really nothing new. It’s the notion that content must be formatted to incredible lengths in order to achieve search engine success. It’s the idea that for search engines to understand our content, they need an obscene amount of structured formatting.  I’m talking about...

Google this week began testing showing multiple contextual links within a single featured snippet result. In short, a featured snippet would have not just a single link to the publisher that Google used for this content, but would augment that featured snippet to provide links on phrases that Google feels needs more explanation. The catch is, those links would not link to the place Google grabbed the featured snippet from, but from other web sites. What it looks like. Brodie Clark spotted this in action earlier this week and posted about it on Twitter . I was able to replicate it and here is a high resolution screen shot of this in action: How it works. When you hover your mouse cursor over the dotted lines in the featured snippet, Google will overlay content from a third-party site. If you click on that dotted line or overlay, Google will take you to that third-party site, not the site Google uses for the featured snippet result. Here is a video from Brodie Clark of it in acti...

The so-called Cyber Five days — Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday — are nearly upon us. In a year unlike any other, we wondered what marketers have planned for their PPC routines this week through Cyber Monday. What will paid search and paid social marketers be looking for, monitoring, launching, adjusting this week? What have they learned from past years about how to manage their time and successful campaigns? Are they planning to do anything differently this year? Here’s what we heard. Not everyone will be trying to manage multiple holiday promotions. “I don’t have many clients that are doing significant discounting this year, so my routine will be the opposite of most people,” said paid media consultant Pamela Lund. “I’ll be monitoring conversion rate and CPA and daily and reducing spend or pausing campaigns altogether if we see a decline in performance while people are deal-seeking. Other than that, my schedule isn’t changing much this week.” Lund says her clients do MAP pri...

Google has shared some details around search features it has launched throughout the year that helps searchers search for what it thinks they are looking for. In short, Google is giving us more context around some of its newer contextual search features. Google did this around the Thanksgiving theme, which is timely in that sense, but these features have rolled out slowly throughout the past year or so. Suggestions based on recent activity. Back in May, we first covered the suggestions based on previous search history feature. Google has said it “can determine that you’re looking to learn more about preparing and serving a turkey and we’ll provide you with a helpful suggestion at the top of your search results page to get you to what you were actually looking for.” So since your previous search was related to turkey, Google will suggest that with a little addition to the search results: Related to carousel. This related to carousel is also not new but Google is now talking abou...

Aiming to replicate a strategy that has paid off on TikTok, the cosmetics brand is targeting Gen Z gamers who are also interested in beauty products. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/elf-cosmetics-taps-into-overlooked-gamer-market-with-twitch-star-loserfr/589651/

Becoming good at strategic cost optimization isn't just about making hard decisions and cutting costs. It ensures marketing is sustainable in the face of upheaval, writes Ewan McIntyre of Gartner for Marketers. source https://www.marketingdive.com/news/3-mistakes-cmos-are-making-with-covid-era-budgets/589217/

Google has announced the launch of a new crawl stats report in Google Search Console. What’s new. Google said the new report makes it easier for developers, webmasters, SEOs, etc to find issues with Google crawling. What is new is: Total number of requests grouped by response code, crawled file type, crawl purpose, and Googlebot type. Detailed information on host status URL examples to show where in your site requests occurred Comprehensive summary for properties with multiple hosts and support for domain properties New crawl stats report. This new chart shows your crawl stats over time, showing you the total crawl requests over a time period or by day, total downloaded data and the average response time. Google also has a way to break it down into “grouped crawl data.” The report provides data on crawl requests broken down by these groups: (1) response, (2) file type of the fetched URL, (3) purpose of the crawl request, (4) and Googlebot agent. Hosting issues are also u...

The SEO industry holds opportunities galore to gain leadership skills, work with top companies, and earn a good salary. However, a recent study by Nicole DeLeon shows that in 2020, 70% of SEOs identify as male. We can do better than that.  By supporting and encouraging women, we can work to increase women’s representation in this industry. But often, the question is, “Where do I start?”  Great question. I asked a variety of female-identifying search marketers – from industry veterans to recent grads – to offer their tips on how we can all better support women in SEO. Here’s what we suggest: 1. Provide mentorship To mentor simply means to advise or train. A common misconception is that mentorship has to be a structured relationship, or a huge time commitment. But mentorship can actually be as simple as making yourself available to offer advice. Receiving personalized guidance can give women the confidence and information they need to achieve their career goals. Whether y...