5 must-dos for SEO Beginners

You might disagree, but I see Search Engine Optimization as both an art and a science. You need to be creative in your approaches to please search engines and outsmart competitors while also applying solid research and analytics-based strategies.
To do this, you need to employ a variety of techniques and tools. Unfortunately, however, most people tend to stick to what they know. That can be dangerous in the rapidly evolving SEO space, as the search engines continually adjust what they’re looking for and how they display results.
Following, some of the significant — but sometimes forgotten — levers you can pull to enhance your SEO efficiency

Keyword grouping

Keyword grouping refers to the organization of keywords into clusters for a variety of purposes — to inform your site’s information architecture, to optimize landing pages, to identify potential areas of content development opportunity and more.
But organizing your search keywords into the most valuable groups can be a difficult task, even for a seasoned guru. While different SEOs and tools take a variety of approaches, I find it best to unite keywords into clusters based upon whether queries using them results in similar URLs appearing in the top 10 results in Google.
If you have many landing pages to work with, it can be a weighty task to make reports, optimize and manage your SEO projects. As the keyword landscape is always changing, you need a tool and a solid strategy to cope with the challenges.
Benefits of keyword grouping

• A keyword grouping strategy allows you improve your SEO and PPC workflow and get a better understanding of how each type of a keyword is working for you.
• It helps with on-page SEO optimization, copywriting, topic selection and organizing your website architecture.
• You can prioritize your landing page creation based on what seem to be the most promising keyword groups.

Many webmasters use Excel or AdWords Editor to group big collections of keywords into smaller and more targeted lists, but it’s easy to make mistakes when working manually with large volumes of data. Using special tools for keyword grouping — such as SE Ranking Keyword Grouper or Wordstream Keyword Grouper — speeds up the process tremendously while maintaining quality and efficiency. Of course, no tool is perfect. It still takes a careful eye and some spreadsheet skills to make the groups perfect.

Page change monitoring

Monitoring page changes is a new tactic for me, but I find it’s absolutely crucial to SEO. With page change monitoring tools, you can receive alerts about any changes on the pages you are optimizing. If you’re a small business owner who is the only one touching your pages, this tip isn’t for you. But it will be invaluable for those who work within large marketing teams and agencies on projects where the website is accessed by many webmasters, marketing experts or clients.
When you monitor pages, you will always know when your client or a webmaster make a website change that will impact your rankings — and you’ll be able to make any necessary adjustments before your rankings drop or you get penalized by Google. We all know that even minor changes can have serious consequences, so it is really important to be aware of any adjustments before the pages are indexed by search engines.
You can use a variety of tools and apps to set up alerts for any page changes. These include VisualPing and ChangeDetection.com.
SE Ranking’s Page Change Monitoring also allows SEO experts to set a scan frequency and track and analyze the changes that occur between each scan. If your website is getting hacked, the feature will detect and show malicious code and bad links as well. You can monitor any pages — yours, clients’ or competitors’.

Competitor SEO research

Staying smart on the competitive landscape is critical for SEOs and marketers. Inform yourself by keeping track of your competitors’ marketing activities, starting from search rankings down to new content and links.
Lots of tools can help you discover competitors’ keywords for organic search. SpyFu, SEMrush, BuzzSumo and Ahrefs are some of my favorites.
As I mentioned briefly above, one often-overlooked tactic is to use a monitoring tool to spy on the changes (like new links or new content) competitors are making on their sites. This will allow you to discover what they are doing to generate quality traffic and let you develop your own outsmarting strategies based on those findings.

Long-tail keyword variations

Embracing long-tail keywords is vital for online businesses that want to get high rankings in organic Google searches. Long-tail keywords are often neglected because they initially get less traffic, but by cultivating those who search for these terms, you will get better results in the long run. That’s because these searchers — with their very specific lower-funnel queries — are exactly the target audience you are seeking.
The challenge is to find profitable and useful long-tail keyword variations for your niche and your website. Luckily, a lot of keyword suggestion tools provide this feature for use in optimizing your pages. Some of the more well-known include Google’s Keyword Planner (in AdWords) and WordStream’s free keyword tool.
 

Mobile rank tracking 

 

It’s impossible to ignore the incredible impact mobile devices are having in everyone’s daily lives, so mobile metrics are growing increasingly important.
Though Google hasn’t yet fully rolled out its mobile-first index, it’s on the way. And the mobile-friendly algorithm is already in play. For these reasons, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your mobile rankings, and any mobile fluctuations and changes, as they occur.
Using Google Search Console, you can check mobile rankings using the Search Analytics report. There, you can compare desktop and mobile rankings, looking at time frames, impressions and clicks for mobile rankings.  

Comparing desktop and mobile ranking will allow you to quickly identify problems posed by the mobile-first index rollout. If a page is ranking significantly lower in mobile, look closely at the factors that might be less than mobile-friendly.
There are also a variety of SEO platforms (too many to name) that provide info on mobile ranking, so consider utilizing these when optimizing for mobile search. You can import the results from multiple tools, including Google Search Console, into a keyword rankings dashboard to centralize your information in one place.  

Local keyword ranking

If your products or services are of interest to folks in your geographical area, make sure you’re also optimizing for local searches. As people carry around their smartphones and perform searches while out and about, local search — like mobile — is becoming increasingly important.

A challenge here is that proximity has been identified as a key factor in local search rankings, which means that different people in different places will receive different results for the same queries. Therefore, you need to employ tools that are designed especially to take on this task.
Some possibilities include SERPs’ Keyword Rank Checker (which lets you input local parameters) and BrightLocal’s free localized ranking tool.

Conclusion

SEO is a dynamic marketing field, which makes it both challenging and exciting. The good news is that you can gain a competitive advantage if you keep up with the latest tools and techniques, such as the ones I’ve detailed here.

Unconfirmed Google algorithm update may be better at discounting links and spam

Google may have made some tweaks to their algorithms this week on how they target link spam and other forms of spam. Google would not confirm or deny there was an algorithm change, but based on the signals I am tracking, there appears to have been an algorithm update that has hit those who undergo more aggressive link building.

The update seems to have happened around February 1, 2017. It may have been a tweak to how Google Penguin detects and discounts spammy links, or it may be a totally new algorithm — we are unsure. But many of the folks within the “black hat” SEO community seem to be noticing this and complaining that their tactics are not working as well.

Some are saying that their PBNs, private blog networks, are not working as well. Some are saying Google is slower at picking up new links. Some think Google hit their sites with penalties.
The vast majority of the Google search results tracking tools, such as MozCast, Algoroo, RankRanger and many others, are showing significant turbulence around February 1.
This is all despite many of the more “white hat” SEO communities not really noticing or complaining about ranking changes in Google.

If we had to guess, I’d say this is an algorithm update around how Google discredits spammy links, maybe updating the Penguin algorithm or something else.

We should note that Google did launch an algorithm update specifically for Google Japan and Japanese content this morning, but that is unrelated to this link update.

The impact (and lack thereof) of Google’s mobile popup algorithm

It’s not often that Google announces an algorithm update in advance. But when they do, not only can webmasters prepare for that update, we can also track its rollout once Google pulls the trigger. That provides a rare opportunity to gauge the impact of the algorithm update and determine what its effects are.
That’s exactly what I’ve been doing since January 10, 2017.
In August of 2016, Google announced that they would be rolling out an update on January 10, 2017, that could impact URLs employing intrusive mobile popups or interstitials. For example, if a URL presented an interstitial that covered a substantial part of the content, then that URL could be demoted in the mobile search results. The web as a whole cheered, as many users were extremely frustrated by aggressive mobile popups.
So, as January approached, many SEOs, webmasters and business owners wondered what the actual impact would be. Would there be mass casualties, minor bumps in the algorithmic road or something in between? Based on Google’s announcement, you would think that sites employing intrusive popups or interstitials would have gotten smoked by the algorithm. That would make sense, but when you’re dealing in an algorithmic world, the devil is in the details.

Preparing for the mobile popup algorithm

As the rollout neared, I had many questions. Would the update actually work? How extreme would it be? Would there be loopholes? How would it impact branded versus non-branded queries? Would large-scale sites be impacted as much as smaller sites? And so on and so forth.
That’s why I prepared for the update by collecting as many sites using mobile popups or interstitials as possible. My goal was to benchmark those sites and then gauge the impact as the mobile popup algorithm rolled out. I’m now tracking close to 70 domains on my mobile popup list — and those sites are across verticals, including news publishers, entertainment, sports, e-commerce retailers, bloggers, music and more.
Starting on January 10, I began checking my list twice per day to see which sites were still breaking the rules and which ones weren’t. And for the ones breaking the new Google mobile popup law, how much negative impact would they see? Would they see any impact at all?

My travels along the popup algorithm trail

My research took me across many sites, both large and small, across many categories and locations. It was fascinating to see which sites raised the white flag and stopped using popups or interstitials and which ones stood their ground and kept them. It was also eye-opening to analyze the various ways websites employed popups and interstitials in this new world (if they kept them). It was enlightening, to say the least.
And of course, I was able to see many different types of ads and interstitials, including benign newsletter signups, aggressive ads that take over your screen, autoplay video in popups, broken ads in popups, and even malware and malicious downloads from ads in popups. There were times I felt like I needed battle armor while visiting some sites.

Below, I’ll cover the impact, the non-impact, the natural side effects of a preannounced Google algorithm update, examples of popups and interstitials, and other interesting notes. So join me on a ride through mobile popup land.

January 10, 2017: The rollout begins

When the rollout began, I was excited to check my list and determine if there was any impact. As you can guess, there wasn’t much to report on the first day. The algorithm had to fully roll out, so I began checking my list twice per day to gauge the impact. And as I was checking the mobile SERPs, I ended up finding even more sites using mobile popups and interstitials. So my list was naturally growing as time went on.
On January 12, I noticed what I believed were the first signs of impact, and I wrote a post to document my findings. My plan was to keep adding findings to that post as I came across more and more impact.
Well, that didn’t turn out very well. After some initial movement, there seemed to be very little impact (if any at all).
I kept updating my post with disclaimers about the lack of impact I was seeing. I was floored. I thought for sure the domains I was tracking would see some movement, but I was wrong. I checked twice per day, only to see many of the URLs from those domains ranking exactly where they did prior to the rollout.
As of today, I’m still not seeing widespread impact. Again, many of the URLs across the domains I’m tracking are ranking exactly where they did prior to the rollout of the mobile popup algorithm. Therefore, I’m officially calling the mobile popup algorithm a dud. Sure, that can change if Google strengthens the algorithm or refines it, but for now, it’s not doing very much.

Examples of popups and interstitials still in use

You might be wondering what I’m seeing when checking sites. Well, I’ve seen it all since January 10: newsletter signups, popups on scroll, delayed popups, multi-ad interstitials, autoplay video, broken popups, malware, malicious downloads, multiple popups on one page, and so on.

Without revealing the sites, here is a potpourri of popups and interstitials I have come across during my travels. These are all from URLs that currently rank highly for competitive keywords — and ranked there before the algorithm update rolled out. Also, the desktop and mobile rankings are equivalent. In other words, I’m not seeing a drop in the mobile SERPs when compared to desktop, which would happen if the mobile popup algorithm were impacting rankings.

I’ll see you on the other side. That’s where I’ll cover the true impact of the mobile popup algorithm — and it might not be what you’re thinking.

 

 

And many more…

The true impact of the mobile popup algorithm

Well, the true impact has nothing to do with mobile rankings being impacted, a slide in mobile traffic or anything related to SEO. Instead, it has everything to do with the reaction of publishers to the news that the algorithm was going to roll out.

For example, many publishers removed mobile popups and interstitials as January 10, 2017, approached. They simply didn’t want to get hit or test the algorithmic waters. I saw this a lot as I was collecting sites that were employing mobile popups.

This also included sites removing the popups after January 10. Not every company knew about the algorithm update, so some were late to the game. My guess is that the algorithm got on their radar based on news of the rollout, so those publishers had a knee-jerk reaction and simply removed their popups without gauging the actual impact. They basically trusted that the mobile popup algorithm was working without evidence of it actually working.

And I get that. If you’re not neck-deep in SEO, you might not be familiar with the gray area of algorithms, and you might not know that some algorithm updates simply don’t work as expected. For those people, they just knew it was rolling out, that it could potentially negatively impact their rankings and traffic, and they pulled the popups and interstitials from their sites.

But like I said earlier, the devil is in the details. Again, I’m not seeing any widespread impact from the mobile popup algorithm as I write this post.

High risk, high reward: Will Google turn up the dial?

And here’s the rub. The publishers I mentioned earlier that stood their ground and refused to remove their mobile popups and interstitials have braved the mighty tsunami that never arrived. They stood on the beach facing a powerful surge of water that would surely suck the mobile life out of their sites… and nothing happened.

But that’s for now.

Google can absolutely turn up the dial and strengthen the mobile popup algorithm at any time. And if they do, then those sites using mobile popups or interstitials could get smoked. But that’s a big could.

Now, I’m not saying mobile popups are a good thing. I actually can’t stand most of them, and users overall hate them. That should be enough to rid them from the web, but they do work conversion-wise (unfortunately).

So, we have a situation where an algorithm that should impact URLs employing mobile popups is not living up to expectations, and a marketing tactic that drives conversion was removed from many sites. I don’t know where we go from here, but I fear more sites will test the algorithmic waters and add those popups back. And it’s hard to blame them.

So, based on what I explained in this post, I’ll provide some closing points below.

Key points

• Although there hasn’t been widespread impact yet, Google can turn up the dial at any time. I know many people are still hoping that happens; and if it does, sites using mobile popups or interstitials can get hit. Remember, high risk, high reward.

• Publishers are still figuring out ways to push the envelope with mobile popups in order to determine which formats and techniques will get hit and which ones won’t. But based on my research, there’s very little negative impact overall so far. I recommend watching my initial post for more updates.

• Never simply take Google’s word for it. Track and test updates for yourself. I’m glad I decided to gather close to 70 sites using mobile popups and interstitials. That enabled me to test how strong the algorithm was and if it was doing what it was supposed to do.

• Mobile popups and interstitials are horrible user experience-wise, but they perform well conversion-wise. Based on the lack of impact from the mobile popup algorithm, I fear we will see more sites testing the waters and adding them back. It pains me to say that… but the lack of impact is clear.

Summary: The waiting continues

When January 10 arrived, I was eager to gauge the impact of the mobile popup algorithm. But what I wasn’t prepared for was to see very little happen. And that’s exactly what occurred while checking many sites still using mobile popups and interstitials.
Moving forward, keep an eye on my Twitter feed and my original findings post. I will keep checking my list, and checking it twice, in order to see if the mobile popup algorithm is being naughty or nice.

The PPC industry would not exist under Trump’s immigration policy

President Donald Trump’s executive order barring people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States, even if they have a valid visa or green card, is not the way to “make America great again.” In fact, the online marketing industry as we know it would not exist had this order been in effect in Google’s early days.
Let me explain.

One of the most successful companies to come out of the US in the past two decades is Google, founded by Sergey Brin, a Russian and Larry Page, an American. While they had a great search engine, there was no business model. According to John Battelle in “The Search,” Google was months away from shutting down in 1999, when it was spending $500,000 per month with only $20 million in the bank and no significant revenues of any kind.

Employee #9, Salar Kamangar, born in Tehran, Iran, is credited with figuring out how to start making money by selling relevant ads on Google.* Employee #11, Omid Kordestani, also born in Tehran, figured out how to scale that business.

How much did it scale? In 2016, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Apple went back and forth for holding the honors of being the world’s most valuable company based on market cap. On January 26, 2017, Google, the part of the business including ads, reported Q4 2016 revenues of $25.8 billion with profits of $7.8 billion. It is estimated that about 90 percent of Alphabet’s revenue comes from ads.

Had it not been for two Iranian immigrants and all the profits Google makes from selling ads, Google might no longer exist today. When I worked there from 2002–2012, I found ads tremendously exciting, but I also knew that my work helped fund all the things that make our lives more convenient and that we could not imagine being without, like Maps, Search, Gmail, Apps, and soon, self-driving cars.

And the benefits haven’t been limited to making life more convenient or giving all of us in the online marketing industry our careers and livelihoods. It’s benefited companies of all sizes everywhere. Across the US, Google’s search and advertising tools helped 1.4 million businesses drive $165 billion in economic activity in 2015.

And that is why I will argue that President Trump’s latest executive order is misguided.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post are my personal ones.
*The pay-per-click advertising model was invented by Bill Gross of Idealab. Salar’s unique twist was to make ad relevance part of the ranking algorithm. Online ads at the time were on the decline because users hated how irrelevant and interruptive they were. By making them relevant, users started to click on ads to connect with companies that could help them, a true win-win.

AdWords IF functions roll out for ad customization as Standard Text Ads sunset

First, a moment of silence for the Standard Text Ad format that held on for 15+ years. Today marks the end. And with that, Google is rolling out AdWords IF functions globally to give advertisers the ability to customize their ads in much the same way ad customizers allow, but without the feed.

With IF functions, text ads can be tailored based on whether users are on mobile and/or are members of an audience list. For example, Frederick Vallaeys wrote in his column about using the IF function for mobile last fall, when the feature was first announced, as a way for advertisers who were running mobile-preferred Standard Text Ads to continue customizing ads for mobile users.

In the example below from Google, an If function is used to customize the description offer based on whether a user is in the advertiser’s “Cart Abandoners” retargeting list. If they on the list, users will see a “15% off” promotion; if not, they’ll get a “10% off” offer.

Syntax

Broken down, the syntax for IF functions is:

1. Start with “{=IF”
2. Add an open “(” after IF
3. Follow with the targeting of “device=mobile” or “audience IN”
   1. If you’re using audience targeting, put the list you want to target inside parentheses. If you are targeting multiple audience lists, separate them with a comma.
4. Put a comma after the targeting.
5. Add the text to insert when targeting criteria is met.
6. Close “)”
7. Follow with a colon “:”
8. After the colon, add the default text that will be used when the targeting criteria is not met.
9. End with the closing curly bracket “}”

Put together it looks like this:
{=IF(device=mobile or audience IN(audiencelist1,audiencelist2), Custom Text): Default Text}

A few more things to note

If you’re creating ads in the web UI, the IF function option will become available when you enter a curly bracket “{“. However, for now at least, it defaults to the mobile targeting syntax: {=IF(device=mobile,insert text):default text}. You’ll have to change it for audience targeting, and be sure to use the exact list name.

IF functions can be used anywhere in an Expanded Text Ad except for the final URL. They are only eligible to run on the Search Network.
And last but not least, with the default text provided with IF functions, advertisers don’t have to have an ad that doesn’t use customizers in their ad groups.