gringom

When starting out a digital marketing program, you might not yet have a lot of internal data that helps you understand your target consumer. You might also have smaller budgets that do not allow for a large amount of audience research.

So do you start throwing darts with your marketing? No way.

It is critical to understand your target consumer to expand your audiences and segment them intelligently to engage them with effective messaging and creatives. Even at a limited budget, you have a few tools that can help you understand your target audience and the audience that you want to reach. We will walk through a few of these tools in further detail below.

Five tools for audience research on a budget

Tool #1 – In-platform insights (LinkedIn)

If you already have a LinkedIn Ads account, you have a great place to gain insights on your target consumer, especially if you are a B2B lead generation business.

In order to pull data on your target market, you must place the LinkedIn insight tag on your site.

Once the tag has been placed, you will be able to start pulling audience data, which can be found on the website demographics tab. The insights provided include location, country, job function, job title, company, company industry, job seniority, and company size. You can look at the website as a whole or view specific pages on the site by creating website audiences. You can also compare the different audiences that you have created.

Tool #2 – In-platform insights (Facebook)

Facebook’s Audience Insights tool allows you to gain more information about the audience interacting with your page. It also shows you the people interested in your competitors’ pages.

You can see a range of information about people currently interacting with your page by selecting “People connected to your page.”

To find out information about the users interacting with competitor pages, select “Interests” and type the competitor page or pages. The information that you can view includes age and gender, relationship status, education level, job title, page likes, location (cities, countries, and languages), and device used.

Tool #3 – In-platform insights (Google Customer Match)

Google Customer Match is a great way to get insights on your customers if you have not yet run paid search or social campaigns.

You can load in a customer email list and see data on your customers to include details like gender, age, parental status, location, and relevant Google Audiences (in-market audiences and affinity audiences). These are great options to layer onto your campaigns to gain more data and potentially bid up on these users or to target and bid in a separate campaign to stay competitive on broader terms that might be too expensive.

Tool #4 – External insights (competitor research)

There are a few tools that help you conduct competitor research in paid search and paid social outside of the engines and internal data sources.

SEMrush and SpyFu are great for understanding what search queries you are showing up for organically. These tools also allow you to do some competitive research to see what keywords competitors are bidding for, their ad copy, and the search queries they are showing up for organically.

All of these will help you understand how your target consumer is interacting with your brand on the SERP.

MOAT and AdEspresso are great tools to gain insights into how your competition portrays their brand on the Google Display Network (GDN) and Facebook. These tools will show you the ads that are currently running on GDN and Facebook, allowing you to further understand messaging and offers that are being used.

Tool #5 – Internal data sources

There might not be a large amount of data in your CRM system, but you can still glean customer insights.

Consider breaking down your data into different segments, including top customers, disqualified leads, highest AOV customers, and highest lifetime value customers. Once you define those segments, you can identify your most-desirable and least-desirable customer groups and bid/target accordingly.

Conclusion

Whether you’re just starting a digital marketing program or want to take a step back to understand your target audience without the benefit of a big budget, you have options. Dig into the areas defined in this post, and make sure that however you’re segmenting your audiences, you’re creating ads and messaging that most precisely speak to those segments.

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

Related reading

Five strategies to help digital marketers speed up recurring tasks and have more energy to focus on meaningful work. Scripts, excel, bidding, and more.

If there’s one thing that’s universally accepted, it’s that the results of SEO are unpredictable. An overview of SEO forecasting methodology and measurement.

The data-driven attribution model is exclusive to customers of Google Analytics 360 and offers an easy way to personalize experiences to your customers.

How do we create a content strategy that aligns with search growth, consistently? A 2000 word answer to that single, overriding question for content.

SAN JOSE, CA — Growing up in India, Freshly CMO Mayur Gupta said it was his mother who persuaded him to begin his career as an engineer.

“My mom inspired — or told me — to become an engineer,” said Gupta during his keynote session at this year’s MarTech Conference, “I listened to her and went down that path.” In the early days Gupta said he was like a hammer looking for a nail, just trying to write code as a technologist. Fast forward five years, his whole world change when he became a product lead at Sapient, moving from technology to marketing.

Engineering as a mindset. Gupta says it was an incredible experience for him, moving from technology into product management and eventually into strategy while at Sapien. The fundamental shift in Gupta’s career happened when he left Sapien after twelve years and was named chief marketing technologist for Kimberly Clark.

It was during his time at Kimberly Clark that he began to understand the work wasn’t just about the technology — it was about the outcomes. He began to see engineering as a mindset that could be applied to marketing.

“I wanted to apply that mindset to everything,” said Gupta, explaining that, as a technologist, his job was to simplify every single thing the company did. Once he gained a deeper understanding of how engineering and technology could be applied to every aspect of the business he began looking at data differently.

“How do you apply the data so you make the experience more relevant. More humanistic?” said Gupta.

CTO or CMO? A few years into his role as a chief marketing technologist, he knew he had to decide which career path he was going to take. He had to ask himself if he wanted to continue down the technology path with hopes of becoming a CTO one day, or did he want to go deeper into marketing?

“We’re all victims of marketing every single day,” joked Gupta. He took the marketing path, with the belief that marketers had to stop marketing. He coined the “engineering of marketing” ideology because, for him, traditional marketing didn’t make sense — what did make sense was applying what he knew about engineering to his marketing role.

“What I did know as an engineer was how to stitch it all together,” said Gupta. He says marketers must understand that your customers are your brand. That marketers need to sync the customer experience to deliver what consumers need before they know they need it.

“A mom waiting to buy her next package of diapers isn’t waiting for the next marketing campaign,” said Gupta. Marketers have to let go of thinking in terms of campaigns and channels because at the end of the day it is about outcomes and applying agile principles to the work.

Shaking up the marketing rules. For Gupta, marketing needs to focus on speed over perfection. He said that growing a brand is directly connected to the brand’s user value and user base. He doesn’t believe everything in marketing has to be measurable.

“While there is so much emphasis on data, we don’t have to be too data-driven.”

Gupta sees a distinct difference between data and insight: “While data can give you the facts, insight can give you the truth.”

What’s clear listening to Gupta talk about technology, marketing and his career, is how much he attaches what he does for brands with his own value system. His focus during the last three years has been on science as it relates to our culture.

“Learning the art of science and culture, learning to respect your belief system — because that’s what drives your culture.”

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.

Hubspot found that 80% of marketing professionals lean on visual content in their social media marketing.

It makes enormous good sense to assert that social media marketing is moving towards a direction where image and video content shall play pivotal roles.

Traditionally, content marketing has performed three roles:

1. Factually accurate content informs users
2. Stand-out content reminds them
3. Visual content convinces them

There are statistics that provide mounting evidence to the vitality of leveraging a visual content marketing strategy.

Key insights on the changing face of visual content marketing

1. With more than 2.5 billion camera phones in use, visual content creation is more accessible, affordable, and available to users than ever before.
2. Cisco found that by the year 2021, 82% of all IP traffic shall consist of video.
3. Image content enables brands to gain more traction in the market by increasing subscription users up to 329%.
4. Hootsuite found that a single piece of visual content has the same effect on the human mind as 60,000 words.
5. The Graduate School of Business, Stanford University that in fact offers a dedicated academic program called the Symbolic Systems Program, that reinforces the impact of visual content in the digital era of technology-driven marketing.

How do images and video content create value for brands on social media?

Prima facie, visual content augments value creation on social media in the following ways:

1. The human brain is designed to process a visual image in 1/10^th of a second. The obvious implication of this is that visuals enable brands to send across their brand philosophy to users in the smallest window of time and very often at a glance.
2. Visual content allows brands to showcase their key brand differentiators in the most seamless way possible. Take for example the short video that shows Coca Cola draping its bottles in beautiful red ribbons with the names of users written on the bodies of the bottles to personalize their selling. With this video, Coca Cola redefined personal selling on social media like never before.
3. Brands that leverage visual content for social media marketing reported a quantum leap in their traffic conversion rates and user engagements. In fact, as per Buzzsumo, images posted on Facebook get 2.3X more engagement than those without images. Dropbox had tried creating a face for its brand by investing an outlay of $50,000 in the creation of a video that saw its conversion rate jumping by 10%.

Challenge of leveraging visual content successfully for social media marketing

Accenture Interactive had conducted a survey on a sample of more than 1000 consumers that sought to objectively assess their tastes and preferences, habits, likes and dislikes of content consumption, and thus, identify patterns and insights on visual content marketing and consumption. The findings submitted as part of the Accenture Interactive research stated that visual content and especially video is still considered invasive by a large chunk of people.

The findings stated on page six of the report published clearly asserts that 35% of users find the use of video content for advertising inconvenient and invasive as opposed to 26% users that stated they prefer to see video advertisements.

Features of an awesome visual content design tool for social media marketing

Given the importance of visual content in the context of social media marketing and the abundance of design tools for creating visual content for the aforesaid purpose, it is worthwhile to explore the features, functionality, and performance parameters that make for a great design tool.

Other important aspects like ease of use, pricing, integration with other social media apps, and the spectrum of content prototypes that can be created using these design tools including but not limited to infographics, graphs, pie charts, bar charts, and scatter diagrams.

Some of the major parameters in assessing the merit of a great design tool for creating visual content are as follows:

• Ease of use
• Social media marketing integration
• User experience
• Choice of templates
• Custom design
• Pricing

The best visual content design tools for social media marketing

With the knowledge of the parameters that you got to be focusing on, from the perspective of visual content creation for social media marketing, it is easy to identify a list of the best such design tools that are available and in demand for the said job. Have a look.

1. Bannersnack

Making it to the list of the top design tools for image content creation is Bannersnack. Immensely popular with social media marketing professionals and graphic designers, the online banner maker offers the following features:

• AI-driven online banner generator: Bannersnack offers an artificial intelligence-driven online banner generator that allows users to edit multiple advertisement banners thereby reducing the turnaround time greatly and also augmenting the ease of creating banners with just a few clicks.
• Diverse banner sizes: The online banner design tool allows the user the option to choose from a wide array of banner templates of diverse sizes including miniature versions as well as scalable ones.
• Design from scratch with templates: Users get to choose from a wide diversity of animated and static banner themes and build their online banner the way they want to. Bannersnack allows for the use of built-in standardized themes as well as complete customization of designs.
• Export or embed your banners to any display advertising platform: Bannersnack allows users to create online advertisement banners of dimensions that are accepted by major digital advertisement publishing platforms like Google Ads, Display Network, AdRoll, and ReTargeter.
• Thirty-two, 32 ready-made animation presets for a fast result: Bannersnack offers users 32 built-in animation themes that can be used to create and customize animations in HTML5 through an intuitive virtual interface.
• Create more banners of more than 20 different sizes: With Bannersnack, users get to create online banners of more than 20 different sizes at the same time, thus augmenting productivity and speed and reducing the turnaround time.
• Allows multiple users to collaborate on any design project: Bannersnack offers some handy features for collaboration and co-creation of online ad banner copies. It allows multiple users to collaborate on the creative process of designing the banner copy.
• Pricing: Bannersnack offers the following pricing plans for individual users and teams. Individual users can fall back on a starter trial offer of seven days for free. A monthly subscription for individual users is available for $7. A quarterly subscription of three months’ duration is available for $18 a month, and a yearly subscription for 12 months is available for $36 a month.

2. Venngage

Second on our list of online banner makers is Venngage. Offering hundreds of charts, maps, and icons to create infographics for perfect data visualization, this online banner maker is highly used for making infographics. Venngage offers the following features listed below:

• Choose the perfect data visualization: The online banner maker offers a wide variety of options to create infographics. The list of statistical representations that can be created using Venngage includes but is not limited to the line chart, smooth line charts, area line charts, pie charts, bar charts, multi-column bar charts, stacked bar charts, scatter plot charts, bubble charts, stacked bubble charts, multi-series charts, and summary stats.
• Customizable infographic templates and themes: Venngage offers powerful features for creation of customized infographics. The online banner maker platform provides hundreds of templates and art themes to choose from with new templates being added to their portfolio every week.
• Easy drag and drop interface: Venggage has an easy drag and drop user interface that allows users to pull widgets directly into their canvas, lock and group widgets together into places and customize the widget size, color coding, and orientation.
• Free-form design canvas: Yet another feature of Venngage that makes it very convenient to use and operate for non-technical people is its supremely easy navigation that allows users to maneuver across diverse art themes, icons, pictures, fonts, and objects. The design tool offers a free-form design canvas that can be used to move objects around without any area restriction, snap to grid for automatic alignment, and thus delivers a seamless user experience.
• Share seamlessly on social media: Given that digital marketers, graphic designers and content creators usually do have the need to share their creative banners on social media platforms, blogs, and other digital publishing platforms, Venngage makes it easy for users to do so. The online banner maker tool allows users to share seamlessly on diverse social media platforms.
• Pricing: Venngage is affordable. For business enterprises, Venngage offers subscription plans priced at $49 a month. On the other hand, premium individual subscriptions are priced at $19 per month.

3. Visme

Third on the list of the best visual content creation tools is the online banner maker from Visme. The online banner maker is highly popular among graphic designers and marketing professionals. It offers a host of features, functionalities, and end user benefits as listed below:

• Easy to use banner maker: With a supremely easy to navigate user interface, Visme rates high among visual content creation tools for social media marketing among marketing professionals and graphic designers.
• Hundreds of templates to choose from: The design tool also offers features of built-in images and icons to select from millions of free and high-quality photos that can be searched from the image bank along with custom graphics and fonts for the text content.
• Create unified banners with simple resizing options: Yet another feature that makes Visme highly popular among communities of professional and novice designers is the rich customization that it offers. Users can create unified banners with diverse resizing options for their web arts and digital creatives without having to bother about the pixel clarity being affected.
• Easily create web graphics of all sizes: Visme allows users to create graphic arts of different sizes. Right from small scale banners to the large scale ones that brands need for their social media assets in the background or cover sections, users get to create web graphics of all sizes. Thus, it ranks high on the rich diversity of scale that it offers.
• Customize the banner template with your own graphics and fonts: Visme is one of the most popular image creation tools equipped with features like hundreds of templates for all the main social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. It provides custom features to choose from all types of banners, from advertisements and blogs to social media graphics of all sizes.
• Pricing: Visme offers a three-tiered subscription plan. There is a no-frills plan with basic features for users that is free of cost. Second, there is a standard subscription plan that costs $14 per month, and a complete subscription plan that costs $25 per month that allows users to access the whole suite of features and functionalities.

4. Fotor

Fourth on our list of the top visual content creation tools for use in social media campaigns is Fotor. With probably one of the most diverse and widest arrays of templates for creating image content, Fotor offers great multi-purpose functionality that embraces both the online and onsite business ecosystems. Fotor offers the following features to users:

• Templates: Fotor is an online image creation tool that offers a wide portfolio of templates that can be used to design web graphics and digital banners for social media platforms, emails, banners, flyers, invitation cards, business cards, thumbnails, tickets, mobile wallpapers, postcards, letterheads, and certificates.
• Design: On the front of the design, Fotor offers a multitude of features for graphic design, photomontage, and background. The online banner maker allows users to save their work in progress on the cloud and retrieve their last work at ease to take it forward later. The design features also include support for a large number of formats including JPG, PNG, and PDF.
• Basic edits: Fotor offers extensive features to users for executing basic edits to their copies of advertisement banners. Users can crop, resize, and straighten their web graphics with ease. Yet another feature that adds to the list of end-user benefits offered by this online banner maker is the supremely easy user interface that allows for seamless navigation.
• AI-driven visual effects: The online banner maker also offers an option to upgrade to a paid subscription that offers additional benefits of premium content with no watermark that is free of restrictions, advanced features for ease of use, advertisement-free editing, bigger sizes of canvas, and massive cloud-installed memory to archive your finished graphics and work in progress that can be downloaded in different image and PDF file formats. AI photo effects, stickers, collage, text, HDR photography are all part of the console.
• Multi-lingual collaboration: Further the online banner maker also offers a multi-lingual front end for graphic designers covering major international languages like Portuguese, German, Russian, French, Traditional, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese making it easy for multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan teams of designers to collaborate and co-create graphics for brands.
• Pricing: Fotor offers two subscription plans. Users can opt for a monthly subscription plan at $8.99 per month. On the other hand, Fotor also offers an annual subscription plan at $39.99 per annum, which essentially comes down to $3.33 per month, which by all accounts is certainly affordable.

5. My Banner Maker

Fifth in our list of the best visual content creation tools is My Banner Maker. An easy to use online banner maker, My Banner Maker stands out in the list for its professional turnkey assistance and professional collaboration in addition to the technology suite that it offers. Some of the major features that My Banner Maker offers are as follows:

• Social media banners for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube: The specialty of My Banner Maker lies in the features and functionalities that it offers for visual content to be deployed in games, that is in addition to that for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
• Banner advertisements of diverse sizes: My Banner Maker is one of those free visual content creation tools with simply awesome templates for feature-rich designs, custom color codes, customizable font sizes for content to go along with, and seamless user experience for designers. Further, the platform offers great scalability to users with options to access graphic content and images of different sizes.
• Professional collaboration with the vendor: With a paid subscription plan, brands can also collaborate with the design team at My Banner Maker to co-create their custom graphics assets and visual content pieces by sharing their brand logos, brand copyrighted images, and mascots.
• Pricing: Priced at $4. 95 per month, My Banner Maker allows users to make pixel perfect banners of different sizes, use the express banner editor and online design studio along with unlimited access to full photoshop library, and priority support.

In the final diagnosis, it is only humble to take cognizance of the ever-increasing influence of visual content in the context of social media campaigns and the opportunities that brands can look forward to leveraging. While this list is by no means exhaustive and exclusive, the above mentioned visual content creation tools make it to our list on parameters of user experience, custom design abilities, and pluralism of deployment across digital platforms. Here is wishing your brand all the luck to reinvent the future of social media marketing by creating some stunning visuals this year.

Related reading

A new study by Kaizen has revealed that content that performs well for backlinks does not necessarily perform well for social shares and vice versa.

It’s tempting to go after broad, high-volume keywords with huge audiences (and equally huge competition). But there’s an equally large — albeit more distributed audience — to be reached by targeting lower-competition, long tail keywords.

A few weeks ago, Google published a blog post on its webmaster blog sharing some tips on how to get more success in Google News search in 2019. 

How do we create a content strategy that aligns with search growth, consistently? A 2000 word answer to that single, overriding question for content.

SAN JOSE, CA — Why digitally transform? Business must go through digital transformation to win share, gain efficiency, make better decisions and delight customers, said Saira Nazir, head of digital marketing at Autodesk, at MarTech Conference Thursday.

Nazir outlined three foundations of digital transformation: organizational design, data and tools and discussed how Autodesk has engaged in digital transformation to move beyond incremental KPI improvements.

Organizations must evolve. “Organizational design is probably the most overlooked” of the three said Nazir. “If you update all your tools but your teams are still relating to each other and working in the same way, you will not be able to truly take advantage of the tools.”

The approach — decentralized or centralized — doesn’t matter, the key is to focus on the evolution of your teams while going through digital transformation, she said.

Identify bad data. Often marketers get hung up on data gaps, but Nazir cautions that identifying bad data or metrics is critical to the process of creating effective data models and algorithmic outcomes. It’s just as important to identify and tag good metrics such as conversion rates, latency, pages to conversion, etc. as it is to identify and tag bad metrics that will pollute data models, said Nazir.

“As more companies adopt AI, bad data matters a lot,” she said. If you create a model, you need to tag good and bad data to help the machines learn and create a good algorithm. It’s not just identifying gaps in data but tagging bad groups of data.

A bad metric is “a lagging indicator instead of a leading indicator,” said Nazir. “That can prompt you go in a wrong direction.”

Scale with a CDP. To analyze and test at scale, Autodesk deployed a customer data platform (CDP).

The team saw that a large percentage of customers were spilling out of renewals and coming back in to the journey to find new pricing. “About 60% of traffic was leakage from renewals,” said Nazir. “They are already customers, and a CDP can identify them and create a much more tailored experience for those people that already have the product. We can give them tutorials to understand the tool better.” Identifying and specifically addressing the needs of these audiences increases retention.

The team used the CDP to map out the customer journey using Adobe IDs, purchase history and product attributes to understand how customers interacted with them. It then can identify appropriate audiences for tailored email campaigns based on if/and statements that direct users to specific content based on their engagements — at scale.

Chatbot to shorten sales cycle. Autodesk had 68-day purchase cycle. It wanted to shorten it and grow the percentage of people who buy online. The company looked at chatbot offerings to help surface tailored content recommendations to site visitors.

Autodesk ended up creating its own chatbot rooted in machine learning and programmed it using popular content. It ingests the referral data and answers from a couple of  clarifying questions at the beginning of each session before showing content links specific to the user’s needs. Autodesk also thought carefully about the look of the chatbot’s prompts, designing it to feel familiar with the look of Instagram questions.

“We predicted customers need more information,” said Nazir. “This pushes content to them sooner.”

The initiative drove 4x more conversions and 109% more time on page, said Nazir. More impressive, Autodesk didn’t test this effort on brand keywords, but only on traffic coming in on non-brand keywords.

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.

As SEOs we know outreach for backlinks has to be done in order to give the websites we are working on the backlink authority it needs. With backlinks being one of the top three ranking factors (depending on which study you’re reading) there is definite value in doing outreach.

Although this is made a lot harder thanks to the mysterious world of black hat SEO. Webmasters out there are savvier to the tactics of sending a generic feeling email, and on our part, it’s a lot of work for usually not much return.

This is why I’ve collated a list of some of the ninja backlink outreach tactics I’ve found which work great for most sites. At the heart of most of these techniques is some good exciting content to make your website stand out, as backlinks and content work hand in hand.

So let’s get going and earn our black belt in building backlinks. (Apologies, there will be a few more bad ninja related jokes in this post.)

Six of the best ways to build backlinks

1. Sponsoring a college or university team

Ok so before we get into this first one it does involve a bit of money on yours or your clients part to get the backlink. Although this would usually cost a few hundred pounds to sponsor the team and all you’re asking in return is a backlink from their team page which hopefully if you’ve done the research right will be on a .ac.uk or .edu domain which will naturally have high authority.

2. Skyscraper technique

This one is borrowed from Brian Dean from Backlinko, and you can get more details from him on this here. In essence, this approach involves finding the top piece of ranking linkable content you can find for a search term you’re trying to rank for. Then you build on that idea to make a better version of the piece and reach out to the right people to gain the right exposure.

If someone has created content on the “best top 10 ways to be a ninja” you can go and make a post of the “top 11 ways to be a ninja”. It is key to this technique to make sure that you find the right area and do the correct research, so if you’re working on behalf of a client get their input then do your own research to back up their knowledge.

3. Interview with someone on your website

Yes, this is a way to get backlinks by doing the bulk of the work on your own website. Find an influential person in your industry and convince them to give you an interview for your website. Unless you’re running a website all about celebs, most people within any industry will be flattered that you would want to interview them.

The only stipulation to this is that they will need to have some type of following on social media. This is as it will be as much in their interest to share the content as yours. So once you have the interview share it with your PR and social team, and allow them to share the piece as much as they can, hopefully, you will get some valuable industry related backlinks from this.

4. Create a free tool

Free tools are a great way to gain backlinks, all you have to do is look at the SEO industry for this and find “top free SEO tools” posts to see a list of free tools, some of which have only been created to build authoritative backlinks naturally. These do not need to be anything fancy only something that serves the user. For examples, a mortgage broker creating a mortgage calculator is a simple solution to get targeted traffic on their site and gain backlinks from sites related to mortgages.

5. Create your own data

There is a lot to be said about the impact of data and how this can be used to gain backlinks. Although, what if you have no interesting data you can share to get out into the news? Well, there are ways you can create your own data. There are great sites like Google Surveys where you can ask a set questions to a specified number of people and get back true related data based on your own parameters.

Although — it is what you do with data that counts in gaining backlinks for this technique, once you have completed the post on your website with a snappy clickbait headline. Head over to Reddit and find the most relevant subreddits you can and post your content anonymously to see if it gets picked up. In case it fails to get picked up by any sites, get on Twitter and start contacting local and industry press journalists. Soon enough someone will pick it up.

6. Video transcripts

So this final technique takes its inspiration from Moz’s whiteboard Fridays we all know and love. On every video, it is accompanied by a transcript of the video. As Moz knows, Google finds it very difficult to understand the context of videos, so they provide HTML text that gives a much clearer indicator to Google. This makes their life much easier.

How can you use this to your advantage exactly? Well, all you have to do is find some recent video content from an expert or influencer in your field. Check their site to see if the content is accompanied with a transcript of the video, if not then jackpot! From there create a transcript for the video which is on your own or client’s website.

The last steps involve a quick buttering up of the influencer on Twitter. It could be something along the lines of “Loved the last video, you’re amazing. I have created a transcript for the video if it is useful for anyone, the link is here.” Hopefully, they’ll give a retweet and with the shares of their content comes some shares and backlinks for you.

Conclusion

Hope the whole ninja theme wasn’t too cringy. The main point is that, yes link building is much harder than it used to be a few years ago. And everyone is so tuned out to an email asking for a backlink that they’re just going to ignore them. Still, backlink building can be done. Just think outside the box, be a bit sneaky like a ninja, get creative, and make the best quality content you can for your users.

Mark Osborne is the SEO Manager at Blue Array, with a passion for keeping up to date on the latest goings-on in the SEO world. He can be found on Twitter @MarkSEOsborne.

For more on backlinks, read:

Related reading

Why do “lower authority” sites beat out higher ones for featured snippets? Why are images sometimes from other sites? What kind of content ranks?

According to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Five ways to make them stay and convert.

The link building industry is flooded with many myths that’ll never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble. Nine myths debunked.

It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity. Three ways to harness the power of social media for SEO.

SAN JOSE, CA — Brands are spending more than 16% of their budgets on technology, and yet 50% don’t believe they have the tools they need, according to a Moore Stephens poll.

The real problem, said Subbu Iyer, CMO at Riverbed, in a talk at MarTech Conference Thursday, is the way brands are approaching technology. “The amount of money going into tech as a percentage of marketing budget is increasing. But if you’re looking at satisfaction it’s not there.”

Many of us constantly seek out the new hot thing — the shiny object — and yet, often our marketing outcomes aren’t improving with all this new technology the way we expect.

“Marketers need to ask what the purpose of the technology is – and it needs to be to serve the human experience,” said Iyer. “How can we do better evaluating technology? Think about it from a human context.”

Marketers also need human-centered digital strategies. Then they can deploy technology for their own customer-centered use cases that address the human experience.

The human experience Iyer refers to encompasses “the total set of interactions and encounters that you as a brand have with your employees, customers and partners.” That’s a true measure of affinity, said Iyer. “It’s not about MQLs and SQLs. It’s about affinity and engagement.”

Customers are savvy. They demand, value, transparency and authenticity and personalization. As customers become more self-sufficient and do research on their own, those are the things they’re looking for, said Iyer. “To be successful, the starting point is not the technology.”

The buyer journey is not linear or sequential. “That’s our challenge when thinking about it from a tech stack perspective,” said Iyer. “We think about it very linearly. It’s not linear. It’s never linear.”

Among the strategies of people-first approach that Iyer explained is to use the full power of digital technology to build cognitive empathy.

Iyer pointed to a number of studies that show emotions are the number one factor in determining loyalty. Understanding and responding to emotions as users come into contact with your brand can dramatically change outcomes.

Companies such as Humana and Asurion that are doing this now with AI. For example, Iyer explained, Humana has deployed AI software to monitor inflection and tone on customer calls. It can warn agents where the call is heading based on the modulations of the customer’s voice. The results: 28% improvement in customer satisfaction, 63% increase in agent engagement and 67% improvement in first-contact resolution.

“Customers aren’t buying products and services anymore, they’re buying experiences,” said Iyer, in closing. “That’s a fundamental belief I have.” Many companies understand this, he said. Coke sells happiness. Apple sells a lifestyle. Nike sells inspiration. And then there’s Peloton. Is it a media company or a fitness experience, asked Iyer? “It’s an integrated experience and they disrupted the fitness market.”

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.

At the frontlines in the battle for SEO is Google Search Console (GSC), an amazing tool that makes you visible in search engine results pages (SERPs) and provides an in-depth analysis of web traffic being routing to your doorstep. And it does all this for free.

If your website marks your presence in cyberspace, GSC boosts viewership and increases traffic, conversions, and sales. In this guide, SEO strategists at Miromind explain how you benefit from GSC, how you integrate it with your website, and what you do with its reports to strategize the domain dominance of your brand.

What is Google Search Console (GSC)?

Created by Google, the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) initially targeted webmasters. Offered by Google as a free of cost service, GWT metamorphosed into its present form, the Google Search Console (GSC). It’s the cutting edge tool widely used by an exponentially diversifying group of digital marketing professionals, web designers, app developers, SEO specialists, and business entrepreneurs.

For the uninitiated, GSC tells you everything that you wish to know about your website and the people who visit it daily. For example, how much web traffic you’re attracting, what are people searching for in your site, the kind of platform (mobile, app, desktop) people are using to find you, and more importantly, what makes your site popular.

Then GSC takes you on a subterranean dive to find and fix errors, design sitemaps, and check file integrity.

Precisely what does Google Search Console do for you? These are the benefits.

1. Search engine visibility improves

Ever experienced the sinking sensation of having done everything demanded of you for creating a great website, but people who matter can’t locate you in a simple search? Search Console makes Google aware that you’re online.

2. The virtual image remains current and updated

When you’ve fixed broken links and coding issues, Search Console helps you update the changes in such a manner that Google’s search carries an accurate snapshot of your site minus its flaws.

3. Keywords are better optimized to attract traffic

Wouldn’t you agree that knowing what draws people to your website can help you shape a better user experience? Search Console opens a window to the keywords and key phrases that people frequently use to access your site. Armed with this knowledge, you can optimize the site to respond better to specific keywords.

4. Safety from cyber threats

Can you expect to grow business without adequate protection against external threats? Search Console helps you build efficient defenses against malware and spam, securing your growing business against cyber threats.

5. Content figures prominently in rich results

It’s not enough to merely figure in a search result. How effectively are your pages making it into Google rich results? These are the cards and snippets that carry tons of information like ratings, reviews, and just about any information that results in better user experience for people searching for you. Search console gives you a status report on how your content is figuring in rich results so you can remedy a deficit if detected.

6. Site becomes better equipped for AMP compliance

You’re probably aware that mobile friendliness has become a search engine ranking parameter. This means that the faster your pages load, the more user-friendly you’re deemed to be. The solution is to adopt accelerated mobile pages (AMP), and Search Console helpfully flags you out in the areas where you’re not compliant.

7. Backlink analysis

The backlinks, the websites that are linking back to your website give Google an indication of the popularity of your site; how worthy you are of citation. With Search Console, you get an overview of all the websites linking to you, and you get a deeper insight into what motivates and sustains your popularity.

8. The site becomes faster and more responsive to mobile users

If searchers are abandoning your website because of slow loading speeds or any other glitch, Search Console alerts you so you can take remedial steps and become mobile-friendly.

9. Google indexing keeps pace with real-time website changes

Significant changes that you make on the website could take weeks or months to figure in the Google Search Index if you sit tight and do nothing. With search console, you can edit, change, and modify your website endlessly, and ensure the changes are indexed by Google instantaneously. By now you have a pretty good idea why Google Search Console has become the must-have tool for optimizing your website pages for improved search results. This also helps ensure that your business grows in tandem with the traffic that you’re attracting and converting.

Your eight step guide on how to use Google Search Console

1. How to set up your unique Google Search Console account

Assuming that you’re entirely new to GSC, your immediate priority is to add the tool and get your site verified by Google. By doing this, you’ll be ensuring that Google classifies you unambiguously as the owner of the site, whether you’re a webmaster, or merely an authorized user.

This simple precaution is necessary because you’ll be privy to an incredibly rich source of information that Google wouldn’t like unauthorized users to have access to.

You can use your existing Google account (or create a new one) to access Google Search Console. It helps if you’re already using Google Analytics because the same details can be used to login to GSC. Your next step is to open the console and click on “Add property”.

By adding your website URL into the adjacent box, you get an umbilical connection to the console so you can start using its incredible array of features. Take care to add the prefix “https” or “www” so Google loads the right data.

2. How to enable Google to verify your site ownership

Option one

How to add an HTML tag to help Google verify ownership

Once you have established your presence, Google will want to verify your site. At this stage, it helps to have some experience of working in HTML. It’ll be easier to handle the files you’re uploading; you’ll have a better appreciation of how the website’s size influences the Google crawl rate, and gain a clearer understanding of the Google programs already running on your website.

If all this sounds like rocket science, don’t fret because we’ll be hand-holding you through the process.

Your next step is to open your homepage code and paste the search console provided HTML tag within the <Head> section of your site’s HTML code.

The newly pasted code can coexist with any other code in the <Head> section; it’s of no consequence.

An issue arises if you don’t see the <Head> section, in which case you’ll need to create the section to embed the Search Console generated code so that Google can verify your site.

Save your work and come back to the homepage to view the source code; the console verification code should be clearly visible in the <Head> section confirming that you have done the embedding correctly.

Your next step is to navigate back to the console dashboard and click “Verify”.

At this stage, you’ll see either of two messages – A screen confirming that Google has verified the site, or pop up listing onsite errors that need to be rectified before completing verification. By following these steps, Google will be confirming your ownership of the site. It’s important to remember that once the Google Search Console code has been embedded onsite and verified, any attempt to tamper or remove the code will have the effect of undoing all the good work, leaving your site in limbo.

Getting Google Search Console to verify a WordPress website using HTML tag

Even if you have a WordPress site, there’s no escape from the verification protocol if you want to link the site to reap the benefits of GSC.

Assuming that you’ve come through the stage of adding your site to GSC as a new property, this is what you do.

The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is widely acknowledged to be an awesome SEO solution tailor-made for WordPress websites. Installing and activating the plugin gives you a conduit to the Google Search Console.

Once Yoast is activated, open the Google Search Console verification page, and click the “Alternate methods” tab to get to the HTML tag.

You’ll see a central box highlighting a meta tag with certain instructions appearing above the box. Ignore these instructions, select and copy only the code located at the end of the thread (and not the whole thread).

Now revert back to the website homepage and click through SEO>Dashboard. In the new screen, on clicking “Webmaster tools” you open the “Webmaster tools verification” window. The window displays three boxes; ensure to paste the previously copied HTML code into the Google Search Console box, and save the changes.

Now, all you have to do is revert to the Google Search Console and click “Verify” upon which the console will confirm that verification is a success. You are now ready to use GSC on your WordPress site.

Option two

How to upload an HTML file to help Google verify ownership

This is your second verification option. Once you’re in Google Search Console, proceed from “Manage site” to “Verify this site” to locate the “HTML file upload” option. If you don’t find the option under the recommended method, try the “Other verification methods”.

Once you’re there, you’ll be prompted to download an HTML file which must be uploaded in its specified location. If you change the file in any manner, Search Console won’t be able to verify the site, so take care to maintain the integrity of the download.

Once the HTML file is loaded, revert back to the console panel to verify, and once that is accomplished you’ll get a message confirming that the site is verified. After the HTML file has been uploaded, go back to Search Console and click “Verify”.

If everything has been uploaded correctly, you will see a page letting you know that the site has been verified.

Once again, as in the first option we’ve listed, don’t change, modify, or delete the HTML file as that’ll bring the site back to the unverified status.

Option three

Using the Google Tag Manager route for site verification

Before you venture into the Google Search Console, you might find it useful to get the hang of Google Tag Manager (GTM). It’s a free tool that helps you manage and maneuver marketing and analytics tags on your website or app.

You’ll observe that GTM doubles up as a useful tool to simplify site verification for Google Search Console. If you intend to use GTM for site verification there are two precautions you need to take; open your GTM account and enable the “View, Edit, and Manage” mode.

Also, ensure that the GTM code figures adjacent to the <Body> tag in your HTML code.

Once you’re done with these simple steps, revert back to GSC and follow this route – Manage site > Verify this site > Google Tag Manager. By clicking the “Verify” option in Google Tag Manager, you should get a message indicating that the site has been verified.

Once again, as in the previous options, never attempt to change the character of the GTM code on your site as that may bring the site back to its unverified position.

Option four

Securing your status as the domain name provider

Once you’re done with the HTML file tagging or uploading, Google will prompt you to verify the domain that you’ve purchased or the server where your domain is hosted, if only to prove that you are the absolute owner of the domain, and all its subdomains or directories.

Open the Search Console dashboard and zero in on the “Verify this site” option under “Manage site”.

You should be able to locate the “Domain name provider” option either under the “Recommended method” or the “Alternate method” tab. When you are positioned in the “Domain name provider”, you’ll be shown a listing of domain hosting sites that Google provides for easy reference.

At this stage, you have two options.

If your host doesn’t show up in the list, click the “Other” tab to receive guidelines on creating a DNS TXT code aimed at your domain provider. In some instances, the DNS TXT code may not match your provider. If that mirrors your dilemma, create a DNS TXT record or CNAME code that will be customized for your provider.

3. Integrating the Google Analytics code on your site

If you’re new to Google Analytics (GA), this is a good time to get to know this free tool. It gives you amazing feedback which adds teeth to digital marketing campaigns.

At a glance, GA helps you gather and analyze key website parameters that affect your business. It tracks the number of visitors converging on your domain, the time they spend browsing your pages, and the specific keywords in your site that are most popular with incoming traffic.

Most of all, GA gives you a fairly comprehensive idea of how efficiently your sales funnel is attracting leads and converting customers. The first thing you need to do is to verify whether the website has the GA tracker code inserted in the <Head> segment in the homepage HTML code. If the GA code is to carry out its tracking functions correctly, you have to ensure that the code is placed only in the <Head> segment and not elsewhere as in the <Body> segment.

Back in the Google Search Console, follow the given path – Manage site > Verify this site till you come to the “Google Analytics tracking code” and follow the guidelines that are displayed. Once you get an acknowledgment that the GA code is verified, refrain from making any changes to the code to prevent the site from reverting to unverified status.

Google Analytics vs. Google Search Console – Knowing the difference and appreciating the benefits

For a newbie, both Google Analytics and Google Search Console appear like they’re focused on the same tasks and selling the same pitch, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Read also: An SEO’s guide to Google Analytics

GA’s unrelenting focus is on the traffic that your site is attracting. GA tells you how many people visit your site, the kind of platform or app they’re using to reach you, the geographical source of the incoming traffic, how much time each visitor spends browsing what you offer, and which are the most searched keywords on your site.

If GA gives you an in-depth analysis of the efficiency (or otherwise) of your marketing campaigns and customer conversion pitch. Google Search Console then peeps under the hood of your website to show you how technically sound you are in meeting the challenges of the internet.

GSC is active in providing insider information.

• Are there issues blocking the Google search bot from crawling?
• Are website modifications being instantly indexed?
• Who links to you and which are your top-linked pages?
• Is there malware or some other cyber threat that needs to be quarantined and neutralized?
• Is your keyword strategy optimized to fulfill searcher intent?

GSC also opens a window to manual actions, if any, issued against your site by Google for perceived non-compliance of the Webmaster guidelines.

If you open the manual actions report in the Search Console message center and see a green check mark, consider yourself safe. But if there’s a listing of non-compliances, you’ll need to fix either the individual pages or sometimes the whole website and place the matter before Google for a review.

Manual actions must be looked into because failure to respond places your pages in danger of being omitted from Google’s search results. Sometimes, your site may attract manual action for no fault of yours, like a spammy backlink that violates Webmaster quality guidelines, and which you can’t remove.

In such instances, you can use the GSC “Disavow Tool” to upload a text file, listing the affected URLs, using the disavow links tool page in the console.

If approved, Google will recrawl the site and reprocess the search results pages to reflect the change. Basically, GA is more invested in the kind of traffic that you’re attracting and converting, while GSC shows you how technically accomplished your site is in responding to searches, and in defining the quality of user experience.

Packing power and performance by combining Google Analytics and Google Search Console

You could follow the option of treating GA and GSC as two distinct sources of information and analyze the reports you access, and the world would still go on turning.

But it may be pertinent to remember that both tools present information in vastly different formats even in areas where they overlap. It follows that integrating both tools presents you with additional analytical reports that you’d otherwise be missing; reports that trudge the extra mile in giving you the kind of design and marketing inputs that lay the perfect foundation for great marketing strategies.

Assuming you’re convinced of the need for combining GA and GSC, this is what you do.

Open the Google Search Console, navigate to the hub-wheel icon, and click the “Google Analytics Property” tab.

This shows you a listing of all the GA accounts that are operational in the Google account.

Hit the save button on all the accounts that you’ll be focusing on, and with that small step, you’re primed to extract maximum juice from the excellent analytical reporting of the GA-GSC combo.

Just remember to carry out this step only after the website has been verified by Google by following the steps we had outlined earlier.

What should you do with Google Search Console?

1. How to create and submit a sitemap to Google Search Console

Is it practical to hand over the keys to your home (website) to Google and expect Google to navigate the rooms (webpages) without assistance?

You can help Google bots do a better job of crawling the site by submitting the site’s navigational blueprint or sitemap.

The sitemap is your way of showing Google how information is organized throughout your webpages. You can also position valuable details in the metadata, information on textual content, images, videos, and podcasts, and even mention the frequency with which the page is updated.

We’re not implying that a sitemap is mandatory for Google Search Console, and you’re not going to be penalized if you don’t submit the sitemap.

But it is in your interests to ensure that Google has access to all the information it needs to do its job and improve your visibility in search engines, and the sitemap makes the job easier. Ultimately, it works in your favor when you’re submitting a sitemap for an extensive website with many pages and subcategories.

For starters, decide which web pages you want Google bots should crawl, and then specify the canonical version of each page.

What this means is that you’re telling Google to crawl the original version of any page to the exclusion of all other versions.

Then create a sitemap either manually or using a third-party tool.

At this stage, you have the option of adding the sitemap to the robots.txt file in your source code or link it directly to the search console.

Read also: Robots.txt best practice guide + examples

Assuming that you’ve taken the trouble to get the site verified by GSC, revert back to the search console, and then navigate to “Crawl” and its subcategory “Sitemaps.”

On clicking “Sitemaps” you will see a field “Add a new sitemap”. Enter the URL of your sitemap in a .xml format and then click “Submit”.

With these simple steps, you’ve effectively submitted your sitemap to Google Search Console.

2. How to modify your robots.txt file so search engine bots can crawl efficiently

There’s a file embedded in your website that doesn’t figure too frequently in SEO optimization circles. The minor tweaking of this file has major SEO boosting potential. It’s virtually a can of high-potency SEO juice that a lot of people ignore and very few open.

It’s called the robots exclusion protocol or standard. If that freaks you out, we’ll keep it simple and call it the robots.txt file.

Even without technical expertise, you can open your source code and you’ll find this file.

The robots.txt is your website’s point of contact with search engine bots.

Before tuning in on your webpages, the search bot will peep into this text file to see if there are any instructions about which pages should be crawled and which pages can be ignored (that’s why it helps to have your sitemap stored here).

The bot will follow the robots exclusion protocol that your file suggests regarding which pages are allowed for crawling and which are disallowed. This is your site’s way of guiding search engines to pages that you wish to highlight and also helps in exclusion of content that you do not want to share.

There’s no guarantee that robots.txt instructions will be followed by bots, because bots designed for specific jobs may react differently to the same set of instructions. Also, the system doesn’t block other websites from linking to your content even if you wouldn’t want the content indexed.

Before proceeding further, please ensure that you’ve already verified the site; then open the GSC dashboard and click the “Crawl” tab to proceed to “robots.txt Tester.”

This tool enables you to do three things:

• Peep into the robots.txt file to see which actions are currently allowed or disallowed
• Check if there are any crawl errors in the past 90 days
• Make changes to suit your desired mode of interacting with search bots

Once you’ve made necessary changes, it’s vital that the robots.txt file in your source code reflects those changes immediately.

To do that, shortly after making changes, click the “Submit” tag below the editing box in the search console and proceed to upload the changed file to update the source code. Your root directory should then appear as www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt.

To confirm that you’ve completed the mission, go back to the search console’s robots.txt testing tool and click “Verify live version” following which you should get a message verifying the modification.

3. How to use the “Fetch as Google” option to update regular website changes

On-page content and title tags undergo regular changes in the website’s life cycle, and it’s a chore to manually get these changes recorded and updated in the Google search engine. Fortunately, GSC comes up with a solution.

Once you’ve located the page that needs a change or update, open the search console, go to the “Crawl” option and zero in on the “Fetch as Google” option. You’ll see a blank URL box in the center.

Enter the modified page in the box to look like this; http://yourwebsite.com/specificcategory, then click “Fetch and Render.”

After completing this step go to the “Request indexing” button and consider the options before you.

What you have just done is to authorize the Google bot to index all the changes that you’ve put through, and within a couple of days, the changes become visible in the Google search results.

4. How to use Google Search Console to identify and locate site errors

A site error is a technical malfunction which prevents Google search bots from indexing your site correctly.

Naturally, when your site is wrongly configured or slowing down, you are creating a barrier between the site and search engines. This blocks content from figuring in top search results.

Even if you suspect that something is wrong with your site, you can’t lose time waiting for the error to show up when it’s too late, because the error would have done the damage by then.

So, you turn to Google Search Console for instant troubleshooting. With GSC, you get a tool that keeps you notified on errors that creep into your website.

When you’ve opened the Google Search Console, you’ll see the “Crawl” tab appearing on the left side of the screen. Click the tab and open “Crawl errors”.

What you see now is a listing of all the page errors that Google bots encountered while they were busy indexing the site. The pop up will tell you when the page was last crawled and when the first error was detected, followed by a brief description of the error.

Once the error is identified, you can handover the problem for rectification to your in-house webmaster.

When you click the “Crawl” tab, you’ll find “Crawl stats.” This is your gateway to loads of statistically significant graphs that show you all the pages that were crawled in the previous 90 days, the kilobytes downloaded during this period, and precisely how much time it took for Google to access and download a page. These stats give a fair indication of your website’s speed and user-friendliness.

Conclusion

A virtual galaxy of webmasters, SEO specialists, and digital marketing honchos would give their right arm and left leg for tools that empower SEO and bring in more customers that’ll ring the cash registers. Tools with all the bells and whistles are within reach, but many of them will make you pay hefty fees to access benefits.

But here’s a tool that’s within easy reach, a tool that promises high and delivers true to expectations without costing you a dollar, and paradoxically, very few people use it.

GSC is every designer’s dream come true, every SEO expert’s plan B, every digital marketer’s Holy Grail when it comes to SEO and the art of website maintenance.

What you gain using GSC are invaluable insights useful in propelling effective organic SEO strategies, and a tool that packs a punch when used in conjunction with Google Analytics.

When you fire the double-barreled gun of Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can aim for higher search engine rankings and boost traffic to your site, traffic that converts to paying customers.

Related reading

Why do “lower authority” sites beat out higher ones for featured snippets? Why are images sometimes from other sites? What kind of content ranks?

According to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Five ways to make them stay and convert.

The link building industry is flooded with many myths that’ll never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble. Nine myths debunked.

It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity. Three ways to harness the power of social media for SEO.

Snapchat parent Snap Inc. on Thursday announced a slate of new features designed to help it keep pace in a digital environment that values efficiency, revenue opportunities, and cutting-edge creativity.

Why you should care

Many of the new features enhance the core Snapchatter experience, but with it comes key openings for marketers and advertisers.

Dynamic scanning and enhanced AR brings the Snapchat experience to life with improved movement tracking, new interactive templates via Lens Studio, landmark manipulation, and object scanning. From snapping math problems and movie posters to visualizing new perspectives on landmark locations, brands will be able to deliver targeted content in context for deeper engagement with audiences.

New third-party app integrations via Snap Kit allow users on apps like Tinder, Netflix, VSCO, and GoFundme to create custom partner stories directly from Snapchat. Partner apps will be able to display Snapchat stories on their own platforms with the added option of monetizing their content with full-screen mobile ads in the coming months.

Snap Originals is expanding its serialized mobile shows with a range of scripted dramas, comedies, and docuseries targeting a variety of audience interests. Available globally on Snapchat’s Discover page, each episode is approximately five minutes in length and includes six-second, non-skippable ads available for purchase.

The new Snap Games platform allows for multiplayer gaming in real-time with original and partner-developed games made for Snapchat. Snap Games will offer advertisers six-second ad spots in the platform, which is accessed directly from Chat for fast and intuitive gameplay.

About The Author

To help users find the answers to their questions faster, we included page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches in 2018. Since then, we’ve observed improvements on many pages across the web. We want to recognize the performance improvements webmasters have made over the past year. A few highlights:

• For the slowest one-third of traffic, we saw user-centric performance metrics improve by 15% to 20% in 2018. As a comparison, no improvement was seen in 2017.
• We observed improvements across the whole web ecosystem. On a per country basis, more than 95% of countries had improved speeds.
• When a page is slow to load, users are more likely to abandon the navigation. Thanks to these speed improvements, we’ve observed a 20% reduction in abandonment rate for navigations initiated from Search, a metric that site owners can now also measure via the Network Error Logging API available in Chrome.
• In 2018, developers ran over a billion PageSpeed Insights audits to identify performance optimization opportunities for over 200 million unique urls.

Great work and thank you! We encourage all webmasters to optimize their sites’ user experience. If you’re unsure how your pages are performing, the following tools and documents can be useful:

1. PageSpeed Insights provides page analysis and optimization recommendations.
2. Google Chrome User Experience Report provides the user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.
3. Documentation on performance on Web Fundamentals.

For any questions, feel free to drop by our help forums (like the webmaster community) to chat with other experts.

Posted by Genqing Wu and Doantam Phan

Last month Google invited a select number of users and journalists to try out its new augmented reality functionality in Google Maps.

It is an exciting development particularly for those who have ever experienced difficulty finding a location in the real world when Google Maps’ blue dot fails to be accurate enough. But with local and hyperlocal SEO becoming a bigger consideration for businesses seeking to be visible in mobile search, are there implications here too?

How Google is bringing AR to its maps navigation

Back in February, Google invited a small number of local guides and journalists to try out the new AR functionality in its Google Maps service.

As is detailed over on the Google AI blog, they are calling the technique “global localization”. It aims to make Google Maps even more useful and accurate by building on its GPS and compass powered blue dot with added visual positioning service (VPS), street view, and machine learning.

The result incorporates AR and map data. When planning a route from A to B, users can use the smartphone lens to see the world in front of them with Google Maps’ location arrows and labels overlaid.

Challenges

Accuracy and orientation have always been the biggest challenge for real-time mobile mapping. GPS can be distorted by buildings, trees, and heavy cloud cover. Orientation is possible because mobile devices are smart enough to measure the magnetic and gravity field of the earth relative to the motion of the device. But in practice, these measurements are very prone to errors.

With VPS, street view, and machine learning added to the Google Maps’ route-planning functionality, the early reports are very positive. VPS works in tandem with the street view to analyze key structures and landmarks in the field of view. It is pretty much the same way we as humans process what we are seeing in relation to what we expect to see. Once it calibrates, the AR functionality presents the relevant route markers (arrows and labels) to show the user where to go.

Of course, there are challenges with this added technology too. The real world changes. Structures come and go, which can make it difficult for VPS to marry up what it sees, with what street view has indexed. This is where machine learning comes in, with data from current imagery being used to update, build upon, and improve what Google Maps already knows.

An additional challenge also concerns user habits. But Google has been quick to build in prompts to stop users from walking too far while looking through the AR lens minimizing any potential risk from real-world hazards (vehicles, people, structures, and the others) outside of the camera’s view.

Implications for search

When its AR functionality is rolled out, it’s not hard to see that Google Maps will have added appeal for users.

This is building on an already massively popular tool. According to data from The Manifest, 70% of navigation app users use Google Maps. As a proportion of the 2.7 billion global smartphone user base, this is around 1.4 billion people.

We’ve written at length here at Search Engine Watch about the importance of local and hyperlocal search. If you have a real-world location for your business and you have not already done so, setting up a “Google My Business” profile is the first step to assisting Google Maps with knowing exactly where your business location is. In addition, it also improves how you are presented in local search elements such as three-pack listings, as well as giving the user clear opening time information, and the option to click-to-call.

This is obviously important as more people come to Google Maps to use the AR functionality. On a hyperlocal level, as Google Maps’ AR looks to make increasing use of non-transient structures and landmarks, it might be good practice for businesses to make it more of a point to rank for key terms related to these landmarks. It is also easy to see how important it is to consider how your business looks from a joined-up marketing/UX perspective, with questions such as:

• Is your real-world branding clear and visible in the real world? (It might be from across the street, but how about from 100 paces away?)
• Is your real-world branding consistent with what it is being presented as online?

A positive step for users and SEOs

As a Google Maps user, this AR functionality is very exciting and I believe that it could have positive implications for SEO too.

For businesses who have real-world locations, Google Maps is already a hugely important way for potential customers to discover you and pay a visit. AR is a fascinating arena of digital technology, and we have already seen its impact through games such as “Pokemon GO“ and other AR mapping tools that are popular with users. Ultimately, in as much as search and navigation apps are lenses through which it pays to be visible, it seems AR will prove to be just as important when this technology is rolled out publicly.

Luke Richards is a writer for Search Engine Watch and ClickZ. You can find him on Twitter at .

Related reading

The biggest impact here will be in the advertiser workflow. Great news for those seeking efficiency and less time spent on the Bing platform.

According to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Five ways to make them stay and convert.

The link building industry is flooded with many myths that’ll never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble. Nine myths debunked.

It’s not the actual social activity that matters, but what happens as a result of that activity. Three ways to harness the power of social media for SEO.