Daily Archives: October 8, 2019

Google Ads is letting advertisers set conversion actions at the campaign level for video ads. Previously, with respect to video campaigns, Google Ads users could only set conversion actions at the account level. Other types of campaigns, such as search and display campaigns, can have their default, account-level settings overridden by selecting conversion actions at the campaign level. Starting today, advertisers can now do the same with video campaigns. For clarity, a conversion action refers to a specific customer action that an advertiser defines as being valuable, such as a purchase or a newsletter sign up. These specific actions can be included in the “Conversions” column, which can then be […]

Whether you have a hotel website, retail store page, restaurant website, auto dealer site, banking site, healthcare site or corporate site – there are key elements you can leverage to drive more organic traffic. Join our next live webinar on Wednesday, October 9 at 2 p.m. ET and discover how key features in your content management system (CMS) can help maximize your website’s revenue for next-generation SEO, mobile technology, and voice search. Mike Supple, Milestone’s Sr. Director of Product Management, and Elizabeth Dalrymple, Product Manager for CMS at Marriott International, will share data from CMS case studies and discuss strategies for implementation. Discover: How schemas on your CMS can drive more revenue. […]

On October 3, Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller delivered an edition of #AskGoogleWebmasters describing how Google approaches H1 headings with regards to ranking. The explanation caused a bit of a stir. What Google said “Our systems aren’t too picky and we’ll try to work with the HTML as we find it — be it one H1 heading, multiple H1 headings or just styled pieces of text without semantic HTML at all,” Mueller said. In other words, Mueller is saying Google’s systems don’t have to rely on specific headings structure to indicate the main focus of content on the page. What’s the fuss? Mueller’s answer would appear to counter a longstanding […]

I think most of us can agree there are generic logos in the world that we easily forget, and then there are great logos that we’ll always be able to recognize (even without the brand’s name attached). But what is it about a logo that makes you recognize it? What is it about the design that can elicit a memory or even a specific emotion? If you’re in the process of creating a logo for your company, you’re in a unique position to make a powerful impact on how consumers perceive your brand. Everything you do, say, and, display as part of your new business will tell your prospects more […]

Editor’s Note: This post is from Search Engine Journal’s new ebook How Search Engines Work. This guide will teach you how search engines function and the key factors that influence search engine results pages. Want your copy now? Download it here or scroll to the bottom of this post for more details. Optimizing websites without first understanding how search engines function is akin to publishing your great novel without first learning how to write. Certainly, a thousand monkeys at typewriters will eventually create something useful (at least this monkey likes to think he does from time to time), but it’s a lot easier if you know the core elements of […]

Editor’s Note: This post is from Search Engine Journal’s new ebook How Search Engines Work. This guide will teach you how search engines function and the key factors that influence search engine results pages. Want your copy now? Download it here or scroll to the bottom of this post for more details. Optimizing websites without first understanding how search engines function is akin to publishing your great novel without first learning how to write. Certainly, a thousand monkeys at typewriters will eventually create something useful (at least this monkey likes to think he does from time to time), but it’s a lot easier if you know the core elements of […]

We’ve all got our favorite holidays scattered throughout the year. I know plenty of people who begin planning their next Halloween costumes on November 1. Others wait all year for Black Friday to roll around to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. When it comes to local SEO around the holidays, that word “season” is paramount. You know you want to boost your rankings, generate more online sales, and, most importantly, increase foot traffic in your brick-and-mortar for the holidays. But you obviously can’t expect much of that to happen if you start marketing the weekend before the holiday. Many customers out there push themselves to complete all […]

Click traffic from the Google search partner network took two major blows in early 2019. The first was Yahoo’s move to begin showing only Microsoft Ads-powered sponsored listings following a more than three-year stint in which some of Yahoo’s listings were powered by Google. The second was Google’s update to bring ads featured in image search out from the partner network and into the core Google Search Network. Here we evaluate a sample of long-standing Tinuiti (my employer) advertisers to assess the effects of these changes to the share of Google Shopping traffic coming from search partners, the relative value and cost of that traffic, and what it all means […]

Not long ago, my colleagues and I at Advanced Web Ranking came up with an HTML study based on about 8 million index pages gathered from the top twenty Google results for more than 30 million keywords. We wrote about the markup results and how the top twenty Google results pages implement them, then went even further and obtained HTML usage insights on them. What does this have to do with SEO? The way HTML is written dictates what users see and how search engines interpret web pages. A valid, well-formatted HTML page also reduces possible misinterpretation — of structured data, metadata, language, or encoding — by search engines. This is intended to […]

Britney Mueller, the Senior SEO Scientist at Moz, took me backstage after her Mozcon talk, to chat about her presentation, which was on Google’s featured snippets. In her presentation, she shared that based on a very small data set (not even statistically significant, she said), the impact featured snippets have on ones click through rate in the Google search results. The data didn’t seem too positive but at the same time, everyone really wants to show up in those featured snippet spots. You can listen to the interview with Mozcon being broken down behind us below: [embedded content] I started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up […]