SEO and Marketing

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say that we “must personalize the customer journey” I’d probably be on a beach somewhere drinking daiquiris. Instead, I try to help people understand what personalization actually means for in-app marketing. In the past decade, marketers have made a lot of progress in personalizing shopping experiences in stores and online. But when it comes to apps, the personalization game is still lacking; sure, some apps are doing personalized push notifications, but what happens when your users are in the app? Apps are increasingly a place where customers spend their time and money, and so we must take hard-learned personalizatio…

Since cloud computing first gained mainstream attention around 2009, its popularity has exploded. Promising increased efficiency, flexibility and cost-effectiveness, it was hailed as the ultimate business solution. This year, IDC predicted that CMOs will drive $32.3bn in marketing technology spending by 2018. According to Sean Grimes, Director of IT services for Agilisys, “there is no denying that Cloud Technology is creating as much disruption as the dotcom boom”. But are users seeing the benefits? What is a ‘marketing cloud’? The marketing cloud is made up of a suite of cloud-based marketing tools covering analytics, targeting, social media management, audienc…

Another crazy year is almost behind us. The year 2016 will be remembered for some huge and unexpected changes, some awesome new PPC features, and welcome changes to both the Google AdWords and Bing Ads platforms. But some new PPC features stuck out more than the rest this year. This article will separate the unicorns from the donkeys! http://www.wordstream.com/images/unicorns-vs-donkeys-top-ppc-features.png Here are my picks for the top 10 new PPC features of 2016. 1. No More Right-Side Ads http://www.wordstream.com/images/goodbye-adwords-right-side-ads.jpg In February, Google killed off right-side text ads on desktop results, bringing the SERPs more in li…

The 2016 holiday shopping season has been one for the record books as far as online sales are concerned, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales reaching new heights. But according to The NPD Group, many retailers could struggle to make the entire holiday shopping season a successful one compared to 2015. The firm, which collects and analyzes sales from leading retailers that provide it with weekly point-of-sale data, says that the fifth week of the holiday shopping season “brought the customary post-Black Friday lull, along with deeper discounts and more abundant week-long deals than in the past.” As NPD’s Chief Industry Analyst, Marshal Cohen, explained, “Bigger …

The term ‘marketing cloud’ has gained significant traction in the last few years as major software companies have sought to monetise the growing importance of technology for marketing teams. But what exactly does this sometimes fuzzy term mean, and are companies actually benefiting from the type of all-singing and all-dancing solutions increasingly being developed by the likes of Adobe, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce? ClickZ Intelligence has published a new piece of research entitled ‘What the Hell is a Marketing Cloud, Anyway?’ which, as the name suggests, seeks answers to these questions. The report is based on interviews with senior client-side executives across a…

Easily spotted on the mobile web: holiday ad next to plane crash story; Muslim dating ad next to KKK story; beauty ad next to domestic violence story; car ad next to emissions scandal story… [This post originally appeared on our sister site ClickZ.com, but we thought it was so useful we wanted to share it here as well] Let’s admit it we’ve all had an occasional giggle when we spot an ad prominently displayed next to inappropriate content on the web. But for advertisers this is no laughing matter. An ad that is not displayed in a contextually appropriate environment is not only a waste of marketing budget, but is a potential embarrassment (if shared on social med…

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the world of search marketing and beyond. This week, Google has been spotted testing a new user ratings feature in film and television search results; the National Football League has rowed back its heavy-handed social media policy; and a new report has revealed the distance that still remains between the marketing and IT sides of a business in the digital age. Google tests user ratings for films and TV shows Google was spotted testing a new user rating feature in its search results for films and TV shows with a small sample of users this week. Searchers in Google’s test sample found ‘Like’ and…

Digital marketers are under tremendous pressure at the moment to produce results with their marketing budgets. Gone are the days where a business just threw money at something and no care about the result. Instead we are in a world where every campaign needs evaluating to understand how it is performed against other marketing channels. The first part of this article will help you understand how ROI is calculated. Then the second part looks at how to predict traffic. The final part will bring everything together to understand how predict what ROI will be achieved as a result of implementing an SEO fix. What Is ROI and How To Calculate It ROI is a metric used to meas…

Why do you blog? You want your content to be discovered and read by as many people as possible, right? But often your reach is limited. You’re limited by the size of your existing audience. Every day, people are bombarded with more content than they will ever have time to read. Most people are both incredibly busy and have the attention span of a goldfish (guilty on both counts!). So how do you make your content go further and make sure lots of people read your stuff? http://www.wordstream.com/images/unicorn-using-linkedin.jpg Image via Reid Hoffman LinkedIn Pulse can help you do just that. What Is LinkedIn Pulse? LinkedIn Pulse is LinkedIn’s version…

Google has decided to experiment with user ratings for movies and TV shows. Is this a new permanent feature? There seems to be an initial attempt from Google to introduce user ratings in its search results for movies and TV shows. A selected sample of testers noticed a thumbs up and thumbs down sign on the special box that offers more details about a movie. This is a quick way for Google to build user ratings depending on its own audience. Image: Techcrunch According to the first images, the search results display a new percentage of user ratings, right next to IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. The only difference from the other two sites is the system of rating,…

With 677 entries from 343 companies across 27 categories, ClickZ and Search Engine Watch’s inaugural mobile reader survey has been compiled and is now open for voting! Designed to reward technology vendors and agencies at the cutting edge of delivering mobile solutions, services, content and technology, the power is now in you, our reader’s hands to select the winners! Voting rules: You may only vote for one company in each category. You may not be an active employee of the company that you are voting for. If you do work for one of the companies, you are encouraged to promote the survey to your clients and network, but you may not vote for your own company…

SEO fixes tend to get pushed further down the development queue as their benefit is harder to put a number on. While you can usually put a definitive number on CRO or UX fixes, SEOs tend to fall into the trap of parroting back Google guidelines, or best practice recommendations, which quite frankly do not stand up to the scrutiny of hard and fast projections. What if I told you I could give you a process which can put a definitive number on the returns you would get from SEO fixes? At Zazzle Media, we lead all our recommendations with data. We ground this with keywords, but then pull all the information we can about our competitors to make informed decisions. We then u…

Internal social tools are fantastic for business. They break down barriers, build connections,and make it easier for employees to collaborate across distances, functions and hierarchies. As the name suggests, they make work more social, too. But, there’s been an excessive amount of one-sided conversation around Workplace by Facebook recently, generated by those who perhaps don’t understand the company communications landscape as well as they should. So does Workplace by Facebook live up to the hype? Some words of caution: Beware of “shiny new object” syndrome Let’s not be too distracted by shiny new things. Instead, let’s focus on the basics of communication. Co…

Digital marketing circles’ main concern is steadily increasing conversions from websites, webpages, online ads, etc. We must all strive to understand the SEO-conversion-related factors; obviously, SEO increases visibility, which increases traffic, and, in turn, your chances of attracting your target audience. SEO -> Visibility -> Traffic-> Target audience! However, there has recently been quite a shift away from a strictly SEO approach to conversion to a more customer-focused one – especially when it comes to B2C campaigns. “Content [should be] written with a clear vision of what must be conveyed to the reader, built through understanding their pain poin…

In SEO, there’s no shortage of theory and best practices. But experimentation is what really keeps this great industry moving forward. All of today’s best practices came as a result of past experiments – both failures and successes. Everything we do in SEO is an opportunity to learn and improve. That’s why I love doing experiments. While Google may reveal a few bits and pieces of information, they’ll never tell us everything we need to know to evolve our SEO strategies from the ordinary into the realm of unicorns. http://www.wordstream.com/images/unicorn-seo-experiments.jpg Today I’d like to share six mind-blowing SEO experiments we did this year, what we lear…

Early in 2016, we promised that this would be the year that influencer marketing would become mainstream. We wrote about the progress that influencer marketing made in 2016, but as a marketer, you always need to be looking forward to be prepared for what the future holds. So what direction can we expect influencer marketing to take in 2017? We’ve seen the tactic grow, but we’ll see it explode in 2017. Here are a few things that we expect to see in the New Year: Less is more Influencer marketing’s growth across each individual network can largely be credited to the growth of the big player “celeb” influencers. The Logan Paul’s and Andrew Bachelor’s of the social …

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the world of search marketing and beyond. This week, we’ve got a special on stories about advertising and mobile, with a look at mobile ad viewability from our regular mobile columnist Andy Favell, and the news that Snapchat video ads are generating less than three seconds’ viewing time on average. Over on our sister site ClickZ, Tereza Litsa took a look at how neuroscience can activate brains in a mobile world. And speaking of advertising, take our 10-minute survey to tell us how the events of 2016 affected your advertising spend, and you could win an iPad mini in time for Christmas! What is…

Discount vouchers can be a great lever to grow top line revenues and engage new customers. However, they can also become a highly addictive and dangerous drug for retailers, increasingly relied upon (with diminishing effects) as a reaction to three major challenges: Customers becoming conditioned to buy only with a discount; cannibalisation of organic sales; and a ‘pull forward’ effect with sales spiking artificially in the short term and declining post-promotion. As their usage becomes increasingly widespread, there’s a rush by retailers to understand the full extent of their economic impact on the customer journey and get smarter with how they’re deployed. Her…

Influencer marketing saw a huge bump in popularity in 2016, and it’s expected to grow even more in 2017. The social media marketing industry is evolving faster than ever, which is why it’s important to stay on top of the industry changes coming in the New Year. This is how your brand or agency will stay ahead of the curve to be better prepared for your influencer marketing strategy: Marketers are investing more in influencer marketing Recent “60 Minutes” reports show that influencer marketing is rapidly inserting itself into the mainstream conversation and is becoming more familiar to average consumers. As a result, marketers are investing more in influencer marke…

Sponsored content in collaboration with Bijou Commerce. Click here to read our collaborative content guidelines. Artificial Intelligence might seem like a high-tech and lofty concept, but recent advances in technology have given rise to a number of more everyday applications for AI. And in ecommerce in particular, brands who want to stay relevant and ahead of the curve are embracing AI as a way to enhance the customer experience, making it more personalised, efficient and intuitive. Here are three ways that we are already seeing artificial intelligence in action across various sectors, which when applied to ecommerce, have the potential to take customer experienc…