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One of the biggest problems digital marketers face is nuances to crafting high-quality SEO rich content.

A great area of opportunity for marketers is their SEO alt text for images. We’ve all been to websites and the image is replaced by a red “X”, or it’s just a blank box. Wouldn’t it be great if you could benefit from that image box for an increased search engine ranking?

That’s where alt text comes in.

Alt text is just a way to describe what is going on in the image while actively increasing your ranking through smart, thoughtful placement of SEO keywords. We are going to look at ways you can improve your image alt text while keeping your content search engine friendly.

Research keywords before you start

It’s important that you look carefully into which keywords you’re going to use before you start creating content including your alt text. Google’s Keyword Planner tool can help you make educated decisions about which words are best suited for your website, depending on your niche.

When you’re researching keywords, the best practice is to look for words that feature high search volume but low competition. The reason for this thought process is simple.

High volume, high competition keywords result in an uphill battle that you may not win. If there are plenty of people searching for the words you pick, but a bunch of reputable websites who have a high domain authority, you’re going to have a much harder time reaching the top of the search engine results.

At the same time, low competition, low search keywords mean your website probably will not get the traffic you need to thrive. The happy medium is words that are popular, but not dominated by highly authoritative sites. The success of your keywords is going to reflect not just in your content or title, but in your alt text, making this an important starting point.

Supplement your alt text with primary keywords

It’s worth pointing out that alt text is important, but it should never take priority over your researched and currently implemented SEO. You would never want to rearrange your pre-arranged keywords to make the alt text keywords fit.

Instead, try to find images that compliment the keywords you’ve already selected. When you work backward from your alt text images, you could end up with a page that is more focused on the images instead of the content throughout.

The only exception to this rule is if your content is image heavy. Companies that implement slideshows, photo galleries, and the likes may benefit more from working backward from their images instead of the other way around.

Connect the content to the image text

Another common mistake that SEO marketers make is they don’t directly link the alt text to the content they create. Alt text, as mentioned, is just text that describes what’s going on in the image. If you want to make a strong connection with your audience and the search engine results, make sure you make a connection between the text in your content, the image, and the alt text.

For example, if your piece of content was about website design, your content should include text within the piece that explains the image. In this fictional piece, let’s say your keyword is “expert web design”, you’re going to need to include an image that emphasizes your point, explains the image in the content, and the alt text should include the keyword.

Keep it short

Since the main purpose of alt text is to inform the reader of what the image shows if they can’t view it, your alt-text should never drag on. Simply explain what the image shows using your keywords as the primary descriptor and additional text as needed.

The recommended alt-text length is about 125 characters. Some browsers only create one line of alt-text and allocate the size of the image to the length of the one line. The result of a long alt text line is not just “search engine confusion”, but also reader confusion when they cannot finish the line of text from within the image because it was cut off by the browser they are using.

If you find that your alt text is always longer than 125 characters, your point is probably better off posted in the actual content of the article instead of the alt image text.

Examples of SEO-friendly alt text

First, let’s take a look at the source code:

<img src=”Image.gif” alt=”alt-text-goes-here”>

In this example, the “image.gif” is the image that is displayed to those who can properly see the image. Those who can’t see the image will instead see the text you include where it says “alt-text-goes-here”.

Here are some better examples to give you an idea of what a good SEO-friendly piece of alt text looks like.

Example one

You own a pet shop and your display picture is a kitten in a basket at your pet shop. Your source code should look something like this:

<img src=”FluffyCat.png” alt=”Pet Shop Kitten Snuggling in Basket”>

The goal is to make your alt-text clean, concise, and friendly to the keywords you decided to target in your piece.

Example two

Now let’s say you have an online car accessory shop. You sell things like seat covers, floor liners, and air fresheners. On your air freshener page your alt text will look like this:

<img src=”AirFreshner.png” alt=”Air Freshener Pack and New Car Accessories”>

In the example above, you’re targeting air fresheners, new cars, cars in general, and car accessories.

Example three

Finally, you have a membership site that sells marketing tips to your audience. You have an infographic of marketing statistics everyone should know in 2019. How will your alt-text look in this situation? Since you obviously can’t fit every stat in your alt-text, you might say:

<img src=”MarketingStatsInfo.Png” alt=”New Marketing Statistics for 2019″>

Piecing it together

There’s no doubt that alt text plays a crucial role in an online world consumed by the importance of keywords. If you want to make the most of your alt text, keep these tips in mind and remember that the online world is constantly evolving.

As your website grows in size and authority you may have to make changes to your SEO keywords for future articles, and therefore for your alt text. The good news is, this allows you to pull off some interesting split tests to see which keywords are ranking well for you, and which ones are pulling in lackluster results.

One thing is clear, don’t underestimate the power of alt text as it relates to your readers and your search ranking. It may not be the most important factor, but correctly creating optimized images and alt text is an important piece of the puzzle.

Syed Balkhi is an entrepreneur, marketer, and CEO of Awesome Motive. He’s also the founder of WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights. Syed can be found on Twitter 

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Supermetrics has launched a connector for BigQuery, promising a “plug-and-play” solution for marketers to compile cross-channel campaign and analytics data with just a few clicks.

What it does. Supermetrics for BigQuery is designed to bring data from multiple marketing platforms into BigQuery — effectively setting up a BigQuery data warehouse without having to write code or SQL or rely on developer resources.

“This new product complements our existing offering by providing a robust, enterprise-scale data pipeline into the most powerful data warehouse out there, Google BigQuery,” said Mikael Thuneberg, founder and CEO of Supermetrics, in a statement.

Why we should care. The ultimate goal is to be able to make better decisions about marketing allocations faster. Getting data from multiple channels into one place where it can be analyzed is often a big headache for marketers. Eliminating the need to know how to code or write SQL, or rely on programmers and developers to create the data warehouse, means just about anyone on your marketing team might be able to get this going. Of course, you’ll need to be using BigQuery.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

In all my years as an SEO consultant, I can’t begin to count the number of times I saw clients who were struggling to make both SEO and affiliate marketing work for them.

When their site rankings dropped, they immediately started blaming it on the affiliate links. Yet what they really needed to do was review their search marketing efforts and make them align with their affiliate marketing efforts.

Both SEO and affiliate marketing have the same goal of driving relevant, high-quality traffic to a site so that those visits eventually turn into sales. So there’s absolutely no reason for them to compete against each other. Instead, they should work together in perfect balance so that the site generates more revenue. SEO done right can prove to be the biggest boon for your affiliate marketing efforts.

It’s crucial that you take a strategic approach to align these two efforts.

Four ways to balance your affiliate marketing and SEO efforts

1. Find a niche that’s profitable for you

One of the reasons why affiliate marketing may clash with SEO is because you’re trying to sell too many different things from different product categories. So it’s extremely challenging to align your SEO efforts with your affiliate marketing because it’s all over the place.

This means that you’ll have a harder time driving a targeted audience to your website. While your search rankings may be high for a certain product keyword, you may be struggling to attract visitors and customers for other products.

Instead of trying to promote everything and anything, pick one or two profitable niches to focus on. This is where it gets tricky. While you may naturally want to focus on niches in which you have a high level of interest and knowledge, they may not always be profitable. So I suggest you conduct some research about the profitability of potential niches.

To conduct research, you can check resources that list the most profitable affiliate programs. You can also use platforms like ClickBank to conduct this research. While you can use other affiliate platforms for your research, this is a great place to start. First, click on the “Affiliate Marketplace” button at the top of the ClickBank homepage.

You’ll see a page that gives you the option to search for products. On your left, you can see the various affiliate product categories available. Click on any of the categories that pique your interest.

On the search results page, you’ll see some of the affiliate marketing programs available on the platform. The page also displays various details about the program including the average earning per sale.

Then filter the search results by “Gravity,” which is a metric that measures how well a product sells in that niche.

You should ideally look for products with a Gravity score of 50 or higher. Compare the top Gravity scores of each category to see which is the most profitable. You can additionally compare the average earnings per sale for products in different categories.

2. Revise your keyword strategy

Since you’re already familiar with search marketing, I don’t need to tell you about the importance of keyword planning. That being said, I would recommend that you revise your existing keyword strategy after you’ve decided on a niche to focus on and the products you want to sell.

The same keyword selection rules apply even in this process. You would want to work with keywords that have a significant search volume yet aren’t too competitive. And you will need to focus on long-tail keywords for more accuracy. While you should still use the Google Keyword Planner, I suggest you try out other tools as well for fresh keyword ideas.

Among the free tools, Google Trends is an excellent option. It gives you a clear look at the changes in interest for your chosen search term. You can filter the result by category, time frame, and region. It also gives you a breakdown of how the interest changes according to the sub-region.

The best part about this tool is that if you scroll down, you can also see some of the related queries. This will give you insights into some of the other terms related to your original search term with rising popularity. So you can get some quick ideas for trending and relevant keywords to target.

AnswerThePublic is another great tool for discovering long-tail keyword ideas. This tool gives you insights into some of the popular search queries related to your search term. So you’ll be able to come up with ideas for keywords to target as well as topic ideas for fresh content.

3. Optimize your website content

High-quality content is the essence of a successful SEO strategy. It also serves the purpose of educating and converting visitors for affiliate websites. So it’s only natural that you will need to optimize the content on your website. You can either create fresh content or update your existing content, or you can do both.

Use your shortlisted keywords to come up with content ideas. These keywords have a high search volume, so you know that people are searching for content related to them. So when you create content optimized with those keywords, you’ll gain some visibility in their search results. And since you’re providing them with the content they need, you will be driving them to your site.

You can also update your existing content with new and relevant keywords. Perhaps to add more value, you can even include new information such as tips, stats, updates, and more. Whatever you decide to do, make sure the content is useful for your visitors. It shouldn’t be too promotional but instead, it needs to be informative.

4. Build links to boost site authority and attract high-quality traffic

You already know that building high-quality backlinks can improve the authority of your site and therefore, your search rankings. So try to align your link-building efforts with your affiliate marketing by earning backlinks from sites that are relevant to the products you’re promoting.

Of course, you can generate more social signals by trying to drive more content shares. But those efforts aren’t always enough. Especially if you want to drive more revenue.

I suggest you try out guest posting, as it can help you tap into the established audience of a relevant, authoritative site. This helps you drive high-quality traffic to your site. It also boosts your page and domain authority since you’re getting a link back from a high authority site.

Although Matt Cutts said in 2014 that guest posting for SEO is dead, that’s not true if you plan your approach. The problem is when you try to submit guest posts just for the sake of getting backlinks. Most reputable sites don’t allow that anymore.

To get guest posting right, you need to make sure that you’re creating content that has value. So it needs to be relevant to the audience of your target site, and it should be helpful to them somehow. Your guest posts should be of exceptional quality in terms of writing, readability, and information.

Not only does this improve your chances of getting accepted, but it also helps you gain authority in the niche. Plus, you will get to reach an engaged and relevant audience and later direct them to your site depending on how compelling your post is.

Bottom line

SEO and affiliate marketing can work in perfect alignment if you strategically balance your efforts. These tips should help you get started with aligning the two aspects of your business. You will need some practice and experimentation before you can perfectly balance them. You can further explore more options and evolve your strategy as you get better at the essentials.

Shane Barker is a Digital Strategist, Brand and Influencer Consultant. He can be found on Twitter .

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Google announced the launch of Google Cloud for Retail Wednesday at Google Cloud Next, with a host of new solutions designed for the retailer vertical. The new solutions are aimed at helping retailers deliver personalized recommendations, unify customer experiences across online and offline environments and more.

What does it offer? Google Cloud for Retail includes solutions for inventory management, personalization, customer service and predictive analytics. E-commerce hosting is designed to flex with seasonal traffic increases and spikes on high volume shopping days — think Black Friday, Cyber Monday — so sites don’t get incapacitated and lose revenue due to traffic surges. Google offers managed customer reliability engineering (CRE) services for preparing for peak volume events.

Real time inventory management and analytics provide a full view of what’s in stock in-store, in-warehouse and online.

Visual product search enables retailers to integrate Google Lens-type capabilities that can let customers learn more about a product, pricing and availability by taking a picture of it with their phones. IKEA is lready using this to let customers find a specific or similar product on its site.

Google says its Recommendations AI “continuously learns and adapts to real-time user behaviors and dynamic environments such as changes in assortment, pricing, and special offers,” to power personalized product recommendations on retailer websites.

Currently in beta, AutoML Tables is a solution for data science teams to build and deploy machine learning models on structured data — such as product data. Retail applications can include supply chain management, fraud detection, conversion and revenue optimization.

Partnerships for future products. Google also announced it’s working with several partners to build more retail-oriented solutions. Partnerships include Accenture for personalization; Deloitte for demand forecasting and other supply chain analytics solutions; and Trax for in-store inventory insights with image recognition, to name a few.

Why you should care. This is among Google Cloud’s first efforts at developing and packaging a set of cloud solutions for a specific vertical as a growth strategy. Google clearly has its sites set on Amazon Web Services retail customers. It counts retailers such as Bed Bath and Beyond, Carrefour, IKEA, Kohl’s and Target as well as e-commerce platform Shopify, which supports more than 800,000 retailers, among its current customers.

Google also announced a partnership with Salesforce Wednesday focused on improving customer service experiences. It combines Google’s Contact Center AI which parses tone and intent of customer service calls and can bring in environmental information like weather and news events with Salesforce’s customer data to guide sales and customer service agents.

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

Discover is a popular way for users to stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, even when they’re not searching. To provide publishers and sites visibility into their Discover traffic, we’re adding a new report in Google Search Console to share relevant statistics and help answer questions such as:

• How often is my site shown in users’ Discover? How large is my traffic?
• Which pieces of content perform well in Discover?
• How does my content perform differently in Discover compared to traditional search results?

A quick reminder: What is Discover?

Discover is a feature within Google Search that helps users stay up-to-date on all their favorite topics, without needing a query. Users get to their Discover experience in the Google app, on the Google.com mobile homepage, and by swiping right from the homescreen on Pixel phones. It has grown significantly since launching in 2017 and now helps more than 800M monthly active users get inspired and explore new information by surfacing articles, videos, and other content on topics they care most about. Users have the ability to follow topics directly or let Google know if they’d like to see more or less of a specific topic. In addition, Discover isn’t limited to what’s new. It surfaces the best of the web regardless of publication date, from recipes and human interest stories, to fashion videos and more. Here is our guide on how you can optimize your site for Discover.

Discover in Search Console

The new Discover report is shown to websites that have accumulated meaningful visibility in Discover, with the data shown back to March 2019. We hope this report is helpful in thinking about how you might optimize your content strategy to help users discover engaging information– both new and evergreen.

For questions or comments on the report, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums, or contact us through our other channels.

Posted by Michael Huzman, Ariel Kroszynski

Your international marketing campaigns hinge on one crucial element: how well you have understood your audience.

As with all marketing, insight into the user behavior, preferences and needs of your market is a must. However, if you do not have feet on the ground in these markets, you may be struggling to understand why your campaigns are not hitting the mark.

Thankfully you have a goldmine of data about your customers’ interests, behavior, and demographics already at your fingertips. Wherever your international markets are, Google Analytics should be your first destination for drawing out actionable insights.

Setting up Google Analytics for international insight

Google Analytics is a powerful tool but the sheer volume of data available through it can make finding usable insights tough. The first step for getting the most out of Google Analytics is ensuring it has been set up in the most effective way. This needs to encompass the following:

Also read: An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics terms

1. Setting up views for geographic regions

Depending on your current Google Analytics set-up you may already have more than one profile and view for your website data. What insight you want to get from your data will influence how you set up this first stage of filtering. If you want to understand how the French pages are being accessed and interacted with then you may wish to create a filter based on the folder structure of your site, such as the “/fr-fr/” sub-folder of your site.

However, this will show you information on visitors who arrive on these pages from any geographic location. If your hreflang tags aren’t correct and Google is serving your French pages to a Canadian audience, then you will be seeing Canadian visitors’ data under this filter too.

If you are interested in only seeing how French visitors interact with the website, no matter where on the site they end up, then a geographic filter is better. Here’s an example.

2. Setting up segments per target area

Another way of being able to identify how users from different locations are responding to your website and digital marketing is by setting up segments within Google Analytics based on user demographics. Segments enable you to see a subset of your data that, unlike filters, don’t permanently alter the data you are viewing. Segments will allow you to narrow down your user data based on a variety of demographics, such as which campaign led them to the website, the language in which they are viewing the content, and their age. To set up a segment in Google Analytics click on “All Users” at the top of the screen. This will bring up all of the segments currently available in your account.

To create a new segment click “New Segment” and configure the fields to include or exclude the relevant visitors from your data. For instance, to get a better idea of how French-Canadian visitors interact with your website you might create a segment that only includes French-speaking Canadians. To do this you can set your demographics to include “fr-fr” in the “Language” field and “Canada” in the “Location” field.

Use the demographic fields to tailor your segment to include visitors from certain locations speaking specific languages.

The segment “Summary” will give you an indication of what proportion of your visitors would be included in this segment which will help you sense-check if you have set it up correctly. Once you have saved your new segment it will be available for you to overlay onto your data from any time period, even from before you set up the segment. This is unlike filters, which will only apply to data recorded after the filter was created.

Also read: A guide to the standard reports in Google Analytics – Audience reports 

3. Ensuring your channels are recording correctly

A common missing step to setting your international targeting up on Google Analytics is ensuring the entry points for visitors onto your site are tracking correctly.

For instance, there are a variety of international search engines that Google Analytics counts as “referral” sources rather than organic traffic sources unless a filter is added to change this.

The best way to identify this is to review the websites listed as having driven traffic to your website, follow the path – Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals. If you identify search engines among this list then there are a couple of solutions available to make sure credit for your marketing success is being assigned correctly.

First, visit the “Organic Search Sources” section in Google Analytics which can be found under Admin > Property > Organic Search Sources.

From here, you can simply add the referring domain of the search engine that is being recorded as a “referral” to the form. Google Analytics should start tracking traffic from that source as organic. Simple. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work for every search engine.

If you find the “Organic Search Sources” solution isn’t working, filters are a fool-proof solution but be warned, this will alter all your data in Google Analytics from the point the filter is put in place. Unless you have a separate unfiltered view available (which is highly recommended) then the data will not be recoverable and you may struggle to get an accurate comparison with data prior to the filter implementation. To set up a view without a filter you simply need to navigate to “Admin” and under “View” click “Create View”.

Name your unfiltered view “Raw data” or similar that will remind you that this view needs to remain free of filters.

To add a filter to the Google Analytics view that you want to have more accurate data in, go to “Filters” under the “View” that you want the data to be corrected for.

Click “Add Filter” and select the “Custom” option. To change traffic from referral to organic, copy the below settings:

Filter Type: Advanced

Field A – Extract A: Referral (enter the domain of the website you want to reclassify traffic from)

Field B – Extract B: Campaign Medium – referral

Output To – Constructor: Campaign Medium – organic

Then ensure the “Field A Required”, “Field B Required”, and “Override Output Field” options are selected.

You may also notice the social media websites are listed among the referral sources. The same filter process applies to them.  Just enter “social” rather than “organic” under the “Output To” field.

4. Setting goals per user group

Once you have a better idea of how users from different locations use your website you may want to set up some independent goals specific to those users in Google Analytics. This could be, for example, a measure of how many visitors download a PDF in Chinese. This goal might not be pertinent to your French visitors’ view, but it is a very important measure of how well your website content is performing for your Chinese audience.

The goals are simple to create in Google Analytics, just navigate to “Admin”, and under the view that you want to add the goal to click “Goals”.  This will bring up a screen that displays any current goals set up in your view and, if you have edit level permissions in Google Analytics, you can create a new one by clicking “New Goal”.

Once you have selected “New Goal” you will be given the option of setting up a goal from a template or creating a custom one. It is likely that you will need to configure a custom goal in order to track specific actions based off of events or page destinations. For example, if you are measuring how many people download a PDF you may track the “Download” button click events, or you may create a goal based on visitors going to the “Thank you” page that is displayed once a PDF is downloaded.

Most goals will need to be custom ones that allow you to track visitors completing specific events or navigating to destination pages.

With the number of goals you can set up under each view (which is limited to 20), it is likely that your goals will be different under each in order to drive the most relevant insight.

5. Filtering tables by location

An easy way to determine location-specific user behavior is using the geographic dimensions to further drill-down into the data that you are viewing.

For instance, if you run an experiential marketing campaign in Paris to promote awareness of your products, then viewing the traffic that went to the French product pages of your website that day compared to a previous day could give you an indicator of success. However, what would be even more useful would be to see if interest in the website spiked for visitors from Paris.

By applying “City” as a secondary dimension on the table of data you are looking at how you can get a more specific overview of how well the campaign performed in that region.

Dimensions available include “Continent”, “Sub-continent” “Country”, “Region”, and “City”, as well as being able to split the data by “Language”.

Also read: How to integrate SEO into the translation process to maximize global success

Drawing intelligence from your data

Once you have your goals set up correctly you will be able to drill much further down into the data Google Analytics is presenting you with. An overview of how international users are navigating your site, interacting with content and their pain points is valuable in determining how to better optimize your website and marketing campaigns for conversion.

1. Creating personas

Many organizations will have created user personas at one stage or another, but it is valuable to review them periodically to ensure they are still relevant in the light of changes to your organization or the digital landscape. It is imperative that your geographic targeting has been set up correctly in Google Analytics to ensure your personas drive insight into your international marketing campaigns.

Creating personas using Google Analytics ensures they are based on real visitors who land on your website. This article from my agency, Avenue Digital, gives you step by step guidance on how to use your Google Analytics data to create personas, and how to use them for SEO.

2. Successful advertising mediums

One tip for maximizing the data in Google Analytics is discerning what the most profitable advertising medium is for that demographic.

If you notice that a lot of your French visitors are coming to the website as a result of a PPC campaign advertising your products, but the traffic that converts the most is actually from Twitter, then you can focus on expanding your social media reach in that region.

This may not be the same for your UK visitors who might arrive on the site and convert most from organic search results. With the geographic targeting set up correctly in Google Analytics, you will be able to focus your time and budgets more effectively for each of your target regions, rather than employing a blanket approach based on unfiltered data.

3. Language

Determining the best language to provide your marketing campaigns and website may not be as simple as identifying the primary language for each country you are targeting. For example, Belgium has three official languages – Dutch, German, and French. Google Analytics can help you narrow down which of these languages is primarily used by the demographic that interacts with you the most online.

If you notice that there are a lot of visitors from French-speaking countries landing on your website, but it is only serving content in English, then this forms a good base for diversifying the content on your site.

4. Checking the correctness of your online international targeting

An intricate and easy to get wrong aspect of international marketing is signaling to the search engines what content you want available to searchers in different regions.

Google Analytics allows you to audit how well international targeting has been understood and respected by the search engines. If you have filtered your data by a geographic section of your website, like, /en-gb/ but a high proportion of your organic traffic landing on this section of the site is from countries that have their own specified pages on the site, then this would suggest that your hreflang tags may need checking.

5. Identifying emerging markets

Google Analytics could help identify other markets that are not being served by your current products, website or marketing campaigns that could prove very fruitful if tapped into.

If through your analysis you notice that there is a large volume of visitors from a country you don’t currently serve then you can begin investigations into the viability of expanding into those markets.

Conclusion

As complex as Google Analytics may seem, once you have set it up right expect to get clarity over your data, as it makes drilling down into detail for each of your markets an easy job. The awareness into your markets you gain can be the difference between your digital marketing efforts soaring or falling flat.

Helen Pollitt is the Head of SEO Avenue Digital. She can be found on Twitter .

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Marketing technology increasingly accounts for a significant share of marketing budgets, and 2018 was no different. According to Gartner’s CMO survey, Martech ate up nearly a third of marketing budgets, making marketing technology the largest area of investment for marketing resources and programs. And, according to the survey, it’s expected to grow with continued investments in 2019.

According to the survey, CMOs spent an average of 25 percent of their martech budget on three channels: search (11.2 percent), email (5.9 percent), and website (7.6 percent).  Marketing and customer analytics platforms accounted for 8.9 percent, indicating the need for measurement tools to continue supporting these programs.

Why you should care

As martech investments increase, marketers should expect increased visibility into digital marketing performance. Direct channel attribution should be a top priority for digital marketers and organizations looking to innovate and advance their marketing programs.

Other key findings

• Marketing expense budgets leveled off in 2018, remaining steady at an average of 11.2 percent of company revenue.
• Marketing technology now accounts for almost a third of marketing’s budget, while in-house labor investment loses shares.
• One in every $6 spent by CMOs is invested in innovation, despite doubts in the skills and capabilities available to support these programs.
• CMOs struggle to align marketing metrics with business priorities, favoring awareness as their No. 1 strategic measure instead of customer value and return on investment (ROI).

About The Author

JavaScript-powered websites are here to stay. As JavaScript in its many frameworks becomes an ever more popular resource for modern websites, SEOs must be able to guarantee their technical implementation is search engine-friendly.

In this article, we will focus on how to optimize JS-websites for Google (although Bing also recommends the same solution, dynamic rendering).

The content of this article includes:

1.    JavaScript challenges for SEO

2.    Client-side and server-side rendering

3.    How Google crawls websites

4.    How to detect client-side rendered content

5.    The solutions: Hybrid rendering and dynamic rendering

1. JavaScript challenges for SEO

React, Vue, Angular, Node, and Polymer. If at least one of these fancy names rings a bell, then most likely you are already dealing with a JavaScript-powered website.

All these JavaScript frameworks provide great flexibility and power to modern websites.

They open a large range of possibilities in terms of client-side rendering (like allowing the page to be rendered by the browser instead of the server), page load capabilities, dynamic-content, user-interaction, and extended functionalities.

If we only look at what has an impact on SEO, JavaScript frameworks can do the following for a website:

• Load content dynamically based on users’ interactions
• Externalize the loading of visible content (see client-side rendering below)
• Externalize the loading of meta-content or code (for example, structured data)

Unfortunately, if implemented without using a pair of SEO lenses, JavaScript frameworks can pose serious challenges to the page performance, ranging from speed deficiencies to render-blocking issues, or even hindering crawlability of content and links.

There are many aspects that SEOs must look after when auditing a JavaScript-powered web page, which can be summarized as follows:

1. Is the content visible to Googlebot? Remember the bot doesn’t interact with the page (images, tabs, and more).
2. Are links crawlable, hence followed? Always use the anchor (<a>) and the reference (href=), even in conjunction with the “onclick” events.
3. Is the rendering fast enough?
4. How does it affect crawl efficiency and crawl budget?

A lot of questions to answer. So where should an SEO start?

Below are key guidelines to the optimization of JS-websites, to enable the usage of these frameworks while keeping the search engine bots happy.

2. Client-side and server-side rendering: The best “frenemies”

Probably the most important pieces of knowledge all SEOs need when they have to cope with JS-powered websites is the concepts of client-side and server-side rendering.

Understanding the differences, benefits, and disadvantages of both are critical to deploying the right SEO strategy and not getting lost when speaking with software engineers (who eventually are the ones in charge of implementing that strategy).

Let’s look at how Googlebot crawls and indexes pages, putting it as a very basic sequential process:

1. The client (web browser) places several requests to the server, in order to download all the necessary information that will eventually display the page. Usually, the very first request concerns the static HTML document.

2. The CSS and JS files, referred to by the HTML document, are then downloaded: these are the styles, scripts and services that contribute to generating the page.

3. The Website Rendering Service (WRS) parses and executes the JavaScript (which can manage all or part of the content or just a simple functionality).
This JavaScript can be served to the bot in two different ways:

• Client-side: all the job is basically “outsourced” to the WRS, which is now in charge of loading all the script and necessary libraries to render that content. The advantage for the server is that when a real user requests the page, it saves a lot of resources, as the execution of the scripts happens on the browser side.
• Server-side: everything is pre-cooked (aka rendered) by the server, and the final result is sent to the bot, ready for crawling and indexing. The disadvantage here is that all the job is carried out internally by the server, and not externalized to the client, which can lead to additional delays in the rendering of further requests.

4. Caffeine (Google’s indexer) indexes the content found

New links are discovered within the content for further crawling

This is the theory, but in the real world, Google doesn’t have infinite resources and has to do some prioritization in the crawling.

3. How Google actually crawls websites

Google is a very smart search engine with very smart crawlers.

However, it usually adopts a reactive approach when it comes to new technologies applied to web development. This means that it is Google and its bots that need to adapt to the new frameworks as they become more and more popular (which is the case with JavaScript).

For this reason, the way Google crawls JS-powered websites is still far from perfect, with blind spots that SEOs and software engineers need to mitigate somehow.

This is in a nutshell how Google actually crawls these sites:

The above graph was shared by Tom Greenaway in Google IO 2018 conference, and what it basically says is – If you have a site that relies heavily on JavaScript, you’d better load the JS-content very quickly, otherwise we will not be able to render it (hence index it) during the first wave, and it will be postponed to a second wave, which no one knows when may occur.

Therefore, your client-side rendered content based on JavaScript will probably be rendered by the bots in the second wave, because during the first wave they will load your server-side content, which should be fast enough. But they don’t want to spend too many resources and take on too many tasks.

In Tom Greenaway’s words:

“The rendering of JavaScript powered websites in Google Search is deferred until Googlebot has resources available to process that content.”

Implications for SEO are huge, your content may not be discovered until one, two or even five weeks later, and in the meantime, only your content-less page would be assessed and ranked by the algorithm.

What an SEO should be most worried about at this point is this simple equation:

No content is found = Content is (probably) hardly indexable

And how would a content-less page rank? Easy to guess for any SEO.

So far so good. The next step is learning if the content is rendered client-side or server-side (without asking software engineers).

4. How to detect client-side rendered content

Option one: The Document Object Model (DOM)

There are several ways to know it, and for this, we need to introduce the concept of DOM.

The Document Object Model defines the structure of an HTML (or an XML) document, and how such documents can be accessed and manipulated.

In SEO and software engineering we usually refer to the DOM as the final HTML document rendered by the browser, as opposed to the original static HTML document that lives in the server.

You can think of the HTML as the trunk of a tree. You can add branches, leaves, flowers, and fruits to it (that is the DOM).

What JavaScript does is manipulate the HTML and create an enriched DOM that adds up functionalities and content.

In practice, you can check the static HTML by pressing “Ctrl+U” on any page you are looking at, and the DOM by “Inspecting” the page once it’s fully loaded.

Most of the times, for modern websites, you will see that the two documents are quite different.

Option two: JS-free Chrome profile 

Create a new profile in Chrome and disallow JavaScript through the content settings (access them directly here –  Chrome://settings/content).

Any URL you browse with this profile will not load any JS content. Therefore, any blank spot in your page identifies a piece of content that is served client-side.

Option three: Fetch as Google in Google Search Console

Provided that your website is registered in Google Search Console (I can’t think of any good reason why it wouldn’t be), use the “Fetch as Google” tool in the old version of the console. This will return a rendering of how Googlebot sees the page and a rendering of how a normal user sees it. Many differences there?

Option four: Run Chrome version 41 in headless mode (Chromium) 

Google officially stated in early 2018 that they use an older version of Chrome (specifically version 41, which anyone can download from here) in headless mode to render websites. The main implication is that a page that doesn’t render well in that version of Chrome can be subject to some crawling-oriented problems.

Option five: Crawl the page on Screaming Frog using Googlebot

And with the JavaScript rendering option disabled. Check if the content and meta-content are rendered correctly by the bot.

After all these checks, still, ask your software engineers because you don’t want to leave any loose ends.

5. The solutions: Hybrid rendering and dynamic rendering

Asking a software engineer to roll back a piece of great development work because it hurts SEO can be a difficult task.

It happens frequently that SEOs are not involved in the development process, and they are called in only when the whole infrastructure is in place.

We SEOs should all work on improving our relationship with software engineers and make them aware of the huge implications that any innovation can have on SEO.

This is how a problem like content-less pages can be avoided from the get-go. The solution resides on two approaches.

Hybrid rendering

Also known as Isomorphic JavaScript, this approach aims to minimize the need for client-side rendering, and it doesn’t differentiate between bots and real users.

Hybrid rendering suggests the following:

1. On one hand, all the non-interactive code (including all the JavaScript) is executed server-side in order to render static pages. All the content is visible to both crawlers and users when they access the page.
2. On the other hand, only user-interactive resources are then run by the client (the browser). This benefits the page load speed as less client-side rendering is needed.

Dynamic rendering

This approach aims to detect requests placed by a bot vs the ones placed by a user and serves the page accordingly.

1. If the request comes from a user: The server delivers the static HTML and makes use of client-side rendering to build the DOM and render the page.
2. If the request comes from a bot: The server pre-renders the JavaScript through an internal renderer (such as Puppeteer), and delivers the new static HTML (the DOM, manipulated by the JavaScript) to the bot.

The best of both worlds

Combining the two solutions can also provide great benefit to both users and bots.

1. Use hybrid rendering if the request comes from a user
2. Use server-side rendering if the request comes from a bot

Conclusion

As the use of JavaScript in modern websites is growing every day, through many light and easy frameworks, it requires software engineers to solely rely on HTML to please search engine bots which are not realistic nor feasible.

However, the SEO issues raised by client-side rendering solutions can be successfully tackled in different ways using hybrid rendering and dynamic rendering.

Knowing the technology available, your website infrastructure, your engineers, and the solutions can guarantee the success of your SEO strategy even in complicated environments such as JavaScript-powered websites.

Giorgio Franco is a Senior Technical SEO Specialist at Vistaprint.

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SAN JOSE, CA — “If you are in marketing operations right now, you know that rationalizing a single stack is hard. Bringing together two stacks or more is really complex,” said CabinetM COO Sheryl Schultz at this year’s MarTech Conference.

Schultz moderated the “When Stacks Collide” session featuring Poly (formerly Plantronics) senior manager of marketing technology Zack Alves and LogMeIn director of marketing operations Justin Sharaf. Both Alves and Sharaf have led their teams through major company acquisitions, having to manage the process of integrating multiple martech stacks into one stack that met everyone’s needs.

Three rules for blending stacks. LogMeIn has acquired more than ten companies in the past seven years, at one time growing from 1,200 to 3,500 employees in one afternoon. To manage the chaos of bringing two separate martech stacks together at such times, Sharaf has developed three specific rules.

He said his first rule is to find a “best-fit” technology. It’s not about selecting the most popular platforms, but choosing a solution that fits the company’s needs. Second, he makes sure the technologies he chooses fit within the existing technology ecosystem, and are scalable. Last, he avoids redundancy.

“We made sure when there was redundancy, we could consolidate,” said Sharaf about the LogMeIn’s martech stack when the company acquired GetGo in 2017.

Before deciding on a martech solution, Sharaf makes sure the technology passes security and compliance standards. He has also created a system to document each solution’s capabilities that is accessible to everyone in the company and has set up a leadership counsel so that stakeholders have the opportunity to offer their thoughts on what is important. Sharaf said getting leadership sign-off on any new technology is a priority.

“Once it was clear there was no redundancy and the proper sign-offs were given, only then would we start to evaluate the technology,” said Sharaf.

When your martech stack doubles in size. When Plantronics, a headset company that has been around since 1961, acquired Polycom in 2018, its martech stack doubled in size, with more than 120 new marketing technologies suddenly available.

“It felt like Christmas morning at first,” said Alves of all the new solutions. But then, he said, the reality set in. “You have a bunch of different toys from different play sets.”

Not only did the martech stack grow exponentially, the business teams doubled in size overnight with roles and responsibilities shifting and reorgs happening. (Just last month, Plantronics rebranded as Poly.) During this time, Alves said one of the most crucial factors to ensure his team’s success was the ability to build alliances within the new company structure.

“Find those new go-to people, and go to them,” said Alves, “You’re going to need those relationships when you’re selling ideas later on.”

Alves said it was important that his martech organization presented itself as a team of marketers who wanted to advance the company’s vision, which meant finding opportunity in the unknown when a lot of people were saying no to new ideas. To do so, his group gathered as much data on the company’s technology as possible.

“We wanted to make sure we were very organized and had a version of the truth we could react to,” said Alves, who also admitted it’s extremely important in the early stages of a merger to pick your battles. “I can’t emphasize this enough. You don’t need to die on every hill.”

Alves believes anyone trying to put their fingerprints on every project runs the risk of failing to succeed in the core mission.

Tactical actions to take during the first year. Sharaf and Alves agreed that if you can’t find a champion for any given marketing technology tool, then it’s gone. Clearing redundancy was also an important task for both Sharaf and Alves during the early stages of combining multiple martech stacks.

Alves was able to reduce three different marketing automation platforms to one that aligned with his company’s CRM system during the initial phases of blending Plantronics and Polycom’s martech stacks.

Reviewing all of your martech contracts is another important step to take early on so you can identify which contracts auto-renew and avoid being locked into an agreement with a platform you don’t plan on using. There are also new opportunities to renegotiate contracts as your company’s martech needs grow.

“If you haven’t implemented a system where every new martech contract comes across your desk, do it tomorrow,” advises Sharaf.

Share your knowledge. To evaluate the need for each martech tool in the stack, Sharaf had his team interview LogMeIn’s marketing staff to find out who was using what tools and how they were using them. He said the research showed different people were using tools in different ways.

Sharaf then built a profile for every piece of tech in the martech stack. “It’s so powerful because it opens up that knowledge for everybody.” Before new products can be bought, or even renewed, Sharaf requires a written business case for the tool by the person requesting it.

When it comes to blending martech stacks, and the ongoing management of marketing technology, Schultz pointed out how it’s a never-ending process. “Every time you think you have everything in your stack identified, it changes.”

This story first appeared on MarTech Today. For more on marketing technology, click here.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media’s General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs.com, SoftwareCEO.com, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.