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It’s easy to overlook your organic click-through rates on Google. After all, you’ve probably been lulled into believing over most of your marketing life that they’re not as important as other SEO metrics, such as inbound links. However, there are a lot of really great reasons you should work on improving your organic CTRs, not the least of which is its impact on your rankings. In fact, we’ve found evidence that if you want to move up a spot in the rankings, improving your organic CTR by 3% will do it. But even if you don’t believe that organic CTR can affect your SEO rankings, it’s a really good idea to work on increasing your click-through rate. A high organic C…
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There’s currently a lot of discussion about how to improve your domain’s SEO. Many issues are labeled as dramatically influential and people are always sharing tips on how to deal with them. However, one topic is seldom discussed within SEO circles: internal content cannibalization. Why should we care? SEO experts and digital marketers have long been contemplating whether or not there’s such a thing as a Google penalty for duplicate content. As it turns out, it’s a myth. However, we cannot simply sit back and relax. In fact, there’s one thing worse than “duplicate content” – “too similar” content, which can be a stone around your website’s neck. Pieces of co…
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As if you haven’t experienced enough turbulence in the last few months, what with the release of Penguin 4.0 and the proliferation of AMP through organic SERPs, Google has announced that it will soon be splitting its index between mobile and desktop. Speaking at Pubcon last week, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes stated that Google will create a separate mobile index within the next few months. Furthermore, this mobile index will become the primary Google index. The newly separated desktop index will not be kept as up-to-date as the mobile one. This is completely in line with not only everything Google has been building towards over the past few years…
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According to Deloitte’s annual retail holiday sales forecast, retailers should expect to see an uptick in both in-store and online sales this coming holiday. With a stable economy, low unemployment and more disposable income, sales are expected to exceed $1 trillion, or a 3.6%-4% increase in sales over the same period last year (November-January). That’s good news for many retailers who have been forced to close some stores, streamline SKUs and reduce expenses, but it’s no time to sit back and rest on the innovation front. While most retailers have finalized their holiday plans by now, use the next few weeks to test, pilot and innovate to yield new learnings, ins…
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One of people’s biggest fears about artificial intelligence is that machines will rise up and humanity will be obsolete, that we will give ‘them’ too much power and control, and they will take over through either benevolence or malevolence. The root of many of these science fiction horror stories is the ability for the machines to think for themselves and come to a reasoned logical conclusion. We have had a test for machine intelligence in the form of the Turing test, which sees if a machine can fool a human interrogator into thinking they are talking to another human. However, the test is not without its problems and one of my favourite criticisms of Turing’s test …
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When you’re just starting out as a business owner it’s easy to become wrapped up in the seemingly endless number of metrics you *need* to pay attention to in order to determine the success of your business. However, the problem with following a lot of metrics is that it can become very easy to not pay close attention to any of them, and isn’t the whole point of following metrics so that you know exactly what’s going on with your startup? Metrics have the potential to offer a ton of insight into your successes and failures, but only if you know which ones to track without getting overwhelmed. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of 10 important marketing metrics t…
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User-generated content is becoming an important part of content marketing, with consumers forming a part of a brand’s strategy. But how does this affect branded content? I recently talked to Rachel Meranus, Chief Marketing Officer at Olapic about the popularity of user-generated content and the recent trends marketers need to know. How do you see the future of earned content? The rise of visual user-generated content (or earned content) has fundamentally changed marketing and the conversation brands are having with their customers. Consumers are becoming more skeptical of advertising and celebrity endorsements and are now demanding a more authentic dialog with the …
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Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from around the world of search marketing and beyond. This week we have news about Google’s latest acquisition, the progress of AMP and some spooky Halloween search data. Google acquires FameBit to cash in on YouTube branded content As reported by Al Roberts, Google has announced that it is acquiring FameBit, an influencer marketing platform. The startup, which was founded in 2013, helps brands connect with more than 45,000 content creators for branded content opportunities, including product placements, promotions and sponsorships. This acquisition signals that Google sees influencer marketing a…
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Back in 2013 John Gagnon continued his popular series of posts about powerful spreadsheet use with a handy how-to guide for using the add-in GeoFlow for Excel. We thought we’d revisit John’s article and update it to reflect the latest geo-data functionality on offer in Excel 2016, as we have with VLOOKUP and other easy Excel shortcuts. GeoFlow was basically Excel charting plus Bing Maps on steroids. With geographic data from reports, like clicks by geographical location in Bing Ads, it can automatically detect each city on the map and overlay your click data. It was really easy to use. The Geoflow add-on was so popular, in fact, that Microsoft have decided to in…
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Visual search on the web has been around for some time. In 2008, TinEye became the first image search engine to use image identification technology, and in 2010, the Google Goggles app allowed users to search the physical world with their phone cameras. But in the last couple of years, visual search has come into new prominence, with companies like Pinterest and Bing developing into serious contenders in the visual search space, and search engines like Splash conceptualising new ways to search the web visually. We now have an impressive range of visual search methods available to us: we can search with images, with part of an image, with our cameras, with paint …
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We’ve written an awful lot about Google’s open source accelerated mobile pages project (better know as Google AMP) over that last 12 months. AMPs implications are far reaching, for marketers, for publishers (big and small) and for ecommerce. Implementing faster mobile web pages mainly benefits users, who are increasingly frustrated with slow loading times. The latest Google research shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less. But AMP will soon be a key battleground in search, as AMP listings are now spreading throughout organic mobile results. Publishers and organisations may find the need for AMP implementation will r…
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Twitter has opened Moments to all users and is therefore taking curation to the next level. What does this mean for brands? Twitter Moments used to be a curation of the best tweets of the day; an overview of the news and the important tweets you need to check out. It may not have reached the level of adoption Twitter was hoping for, but it was still an interesting perspective on how we can consume information without leaving the platform. Now Twitter Moments is gradually expanding to all users so they can facilitate storytelling through a series of tweets. This could be Twitter’s response to Snapchat (and Instagram) Stories, but luckily it’s not directly imitati…
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Email marketing can be overwhelming, especially if you are new. Lots of tweaking, designing and testing. These eight tools will help you manage email marketing like a champ! Some of these tools may have a lot of alternatives but I left them out to keep this list clutter-free! You can find more tools in my previous article: 10 tools for generating red hot leads. 1. Optimize your site for lead generation: Hellobar http://annsmarty.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/hellobar.png The first thing to do when you are launching a website is to create effective opt-in forms. You can experiment with designs and placements for as long as you manage your website, but there’s…
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Creating content is easy. Creating great content? That’s much tougher. Just 10 short years ago, the barrier to entry was much lower for companies. Content marketing wasn’t even a thing. But once 2010 came around, it started exploding, as seen on Google Trends: In the past six years, the amount of content has grown exponentially. Everyone has bought into the now clichéd mantra: content is king. Yet, although brands, businesses, and publishers are cranking out more content every year, conversion rates aren’t increasing. Why? It goes back to the first sentence: creating great content is hard! Yet for all the changes we’ve seen, there are many basic things …
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The use of virtual reality headsets is reaching a tipping point with increased opportunities for brands to exploit their growing popularity, according to new research published by ClickZ and Toluna. A poll of consumers in the United States has found that more than a third (37%) have now used either their own or someone else’s VR headset, almost double the equivalent figure of 19% in the UK. The survey of 1,000 US and 1,000 UK consumers was carried out by ClickZ Intelligence using Toluna software, the world’s leading provider of real-time digital consumer insights. Of those US consumers who have used a VR headset, the most common drivers of usage were for gaming (…
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Perception is everything. In the business world, people are naturally attracted to the biggest names, whether you call them influencers, experts, or [insert industry here] rock stars. But what if you aren’t a big name yet? What if you’re just starting out and looking to make a name for yourself? How can you get on the radar of people you want to do business with in the future? Social media advertising makes it super easy to appear superbad. You can bias the way people think about you and make yourself (or your company) appear bigger than you are. Here are six crazy ideas that will help you look like a really big deal using social media ads. 1. Target ads a…
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The big story in streaming this past week is the anticipated arrival of Amazon’s new on-demand music service. Rumours have been floating around for a while now but sites such as The Verge are guessing that the online retailer could jump into the ring with Spotify and Apple Music etc. over the next few weeks; with a service for customers already using the Echo device. It is expected they will launch an additional $10-per-month ‘open to all’ cross-device service in early 2017. Amazon certainly have a weighty legacy to leverage from, as well as a wealth of recorded media they already offer through their Prime service which they can now bring to the table. But I thou…
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A couple of weeks ago we published an article covering 12 high profile websites that have been hit with a Google penalty. Not all of these companies were in anyway directly to blame. For many it was a lack of education around SEO best practice. Or in some cases an errant SEO consultant earned them the punishment. In order to elucidate further on the behaviour that will lead to a penalty, let’s take a look at the ‘black hat SEO’ practices. What is Black Hat SEO? Any on-page or off-page practice that intends to falsely manipulate a website’s search position. There are many ways a website can do this, all of which are bad for your site, bad for search engines and …
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Google has been prepping a slew of new products for the limelight and after slowly and (probably) intentionally leaking those over time, it made the official announcement on October 4th. New products include a pair of Pixel smartphones, Google Home smart speaker, Daydream VR set, Google Wi-Fi router, and a higher-definition Chromecast streaming dongle. Something to note right off the bat is that the products themselves don’t offer new functionality for the consumer. In fact, they overtly mirror the utility offered by comparable products in the market, most notably Apple’s gold standard iPhone and Amazon’s wildly popular Echo platform. So what’s the motivation? …
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Google announced on its Analytics blog and at SMX East the launch of some intriguing updates to its Analytics platform. Notably a free version of Optimize 360 and a new metric, Session Quality Score. Optimize: what is it? Optimize 360 was launched as an enterprise-level product in March this year, and is essentially a landing page testing tool that allows site owners to test page layouts and copy without changing a page’s source code. This new version, for which users can sign up to trial now, will be available for anyone with an Analytics account worldwide, free of charge. How will it work? The functionality is similar to the likes of Optimizely (as…
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