Publishers are increasingly adopting the paywalled content approach as a monetization strategy. If there’s anything, paywalled content has helped publishers generate more revenue online. But user experience may have suffered as a result.

Paying for content may sound arcane on the Internet, but it’s not a new thing. Newspapers thrived on subscription plans. And high subscription numbers are how publishers justify their ad rates. But with the way the internet has democratized access to knowledge, hardly does anyone pay for content anymore. But that is changing.

Adopting the content subscription strategy is on the rise. And it is being endorsed by decision-makers at major media outlets. However, both from an SEO perspective and a user experience angle, paywalls may create concerns.

How do paywalls work and are they sustainable?

“Can publishers sustain their paywalls?”, this is the question to ask. It’s understandable that introducing sudden changes to a platform may cause user apathy. But is that the case with publishers who use paywalls? Or rather, should content marketers begin to adopt this approach?

Interestingly enough, some major publishers report seeing their ad revenues improve once they added a subscription service. Why this is the case is still not clear.

Let’s breakdown the different types of paywall strategies and how they function

• Freemium: This approach is popular with media outlets with a fairly sizable audience. Here free content is separated from premium content, allowing the free content to be available to everyone while premium content such as in-depth analysis is reserved for subscribers.
• Metered paywall: Metered paywall is the most adopted approach and is the type used by major outlets such as Medium and The Times. Users are allowed to access a limited amount of content in a given month until they are required to become subscribers to continue to enjoy more content.
• Hard paywall: The hard paywall blocks the entire website’s content for non-subscribers. Typically, readers will only get to see the headline and nothing beyond the infamous “read more” link. Users can still use the search feature of the website but cannot access any of its content or comments unless they become subscribers.

Source: Betterhelp.com

Over at Betterhelp, where I oversee content creation we’ve only tried the “Freemium” approach and will continue to split-test between free content and putting back paywalls. So far, from professional experience, putting content behind paywalls has not helped our users, who rely heavily on our advice blog. While our experiment with a paywall is yet to be concluded, we can draw from other media outlets to see what works.

Why publishers adopt paywalls

Source: The Wall Street Journal

If you’re on the homepage of The Wall Street Journal website, you’re immediately prompted to register to start reading an article. Of course, to register means to pay to gain access to the content. On a website like WSJ.com, it’s easy to justify paying to read an article. They employ professional journalists who must keep producing high-quality content round the clock to meet the standard the newspaper is known for. Readers that enjoy it will not budge at the idea of paying to keep their subscription to The Journal. However, to understand why mainstream publications put their content behind paywalls, we need to look at how their business model works.

Revenue driven decisions

It’s obvious, monetization is the chief factor in why publishers adopt paywalls.

In print, established outlets like The New York Times, WSJ, and The Post rely on advertisers and subscribers to keep their business running. On the internet, however, advertisement is not a sustainable revenue model for large publishers as users are trained to seek fast bloggy content that is difficult to monetize. Further crippled by the wave of Adblockers, digital advertising generates less than the revenue that similar ads will generate in print. With this, publishers are willing to throw UX under the bus for revenue.

Should content marketers also put up paywalls?

Defiance and reports of success after implementing paywalls may tempt marketers to adopt the approach. As in our case, we had to shelve the idea after a brief experiment with the freemium approach.

Source: Twitter

Most publications have reported success after adopting the paywall program. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, has over 1,550,000 paying registered online subscribers that have opted to pay to read their content. In 2018, The New York Times also reported hitting 3,000,000 registered subscribers, with digital contributing the most to its revenue source.

Results may not be typical

Now, you need to understand that The Time and WSJ’s approach involves a lot of testing and engineering. WSJ, for instance, scores readers based on an average of 60 data points to judge their readers. This pool of data is then used to determine when the paywall is introduced. Data helps WSJ to determine whether to nudge a reader into subscribing, offer them a “Freemium”, or even put up a “Hard Paywall”.

For content marketers, especially those whose existence relies on educating their audience through content as we do at Betterhelp, putting valuable content behind a paywall may be risky. Paywalled content could become a hindrance in the decision maker’s ability to consider your brand for opportunities. Decision-makers may even think your brand is not serious when content that is meant to educate your customers is put behind a paywall.

How does paywall affect SEO and UX?

Google tried to rein in on paywalled content practice by forcing publishers to follow their “first-click-free” policy. Basically, readers coming from a Google search result must be allowed to get the first premium content for free, or you lose your rankings. Of course, this rule gave room for misuse by some users and placed publishers in a tight spot, forcing many to ignore the controversial policy at the risk of losing their search rankings. In 2017, Google dropped the first click free policy and allowed publishers to decide how their content is seen.

Poor user experience is the bane of paywalls

It’s important to note that the way search engine crawlers interact with content is not the same way humans interact with content. This means publishers must carefully consider user experience in making content strategy decisions. Should an article that is crucial to the free content you’re allowed to read from search be put behind a paywall? How does that affect the experience? Ultimately, user experience is critical to SEO performance.

Side doors may mitigate poor UX

Studying the pattern of the largest online newspapers that have prioritized subscription services, it’s noticeable that they understand the negative impact of this approach on UX. For instance, there is hardly any publisher that has employed the “Hard Paywall” approach without leaving room for numerous “side doors” for non-subscribers to still access their content.

The downside of poor user experience for an online brand is so significant, it goes beyond the website alone. It can as much as hurt the brand itself. This is where the impact could be felt in search rankings. Google predominantly favors higher organic click-through rates (CTRs) in ranking search results. And once users have been trained to ignore a brand’s links in the search result pages, it’s only a matter of time before Google starts dropping the website for others with higher CTRs.

Whether publishers are aware of the several “side doors” non-subscribers are actively taking advantage of, or perhaps are they intentionally leaving room for content leaks is not clear. The upside to this “loophole” is near parity with what Google expects from publishers versus what they get.

How do content creators factor in their users’ experience while still accounting for revenue generated from their content? The key is this – when deciding which content to put behind a paywall, think about its primary purpose first.

Marie Miguel has been a contributor and a writing and research expert for nearly a decade, covering a variety of health-related topics. Some of her write-ups can be found on BetterHelp.com.

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In our hyper-connected digital world, an omnichannel marketing approach helps brands bridge the gap between online and offline consumer behavior. But driving an effective multi-touchpoint strategy has its unique challenges – and oftentimes, our strategies are only as effective as what we know about our customers.

In particular, customer location data has emerged over the last decade as a wealth of information for marketers, providing a digital footprint of where customers are spending time and how they interact with brands – both online and offline. From offline attribution to geo-targeting, location data can help marketers understand the bigger picture of the customer journey. But while location-based marketing can be a powerful strategy for marketers, it can also be a bit of a black box.

Here we dive into what location-based marketing is, how it works and what marketers need to consider, from privacy to targeting, to make it consumer-friendly and effective.

So, what exactly is location-based marketing?

In short, location-based marketing is targeting audiences based on where they are or have recently been.

“This can range from targeting users who live in particular zip codes, to targeting devices that tend to visit particular locations such as coffee shops, auto dealers, etc.,” said Frost Prioleau, CEO and co-founder of location marketing agency Simpli.fi.

Location data can reveal a trove of information about a customer’s daily travel routines (such as commutes), recurring shopping habits (like grocery shopping or gas station stops), restaurant preferences, and even online-to-storefront purchasing behavior. The data allows for more personalized targeting for the products and services customers might care about and enables more efficient ad targeting and budget allocation for marketers.

Location-based marketing tactics

There are several ways to use location data in ad targeting.

Geofencing. Geofencing refers to the mechanism through which location data is collected in real-time. In geotargeting, a virtual perimeter is constructed around a location to enable real-time data collection or targeting within that geographic area. Typically, geofencing uses a combination of latitude and longitude coordinates, radio frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth technology, and location beacons to determine the specified area. Marketers can use geofencing as a vehicle for geotargeting or proximity marketing.

This technology isn’t necessarily new, but its increasing accessibility and application in digital targeting have ushered in more opportunities for real-time location-based marketing.

When a customer enters a geofenced area and shares their location with an app or browser, they might be served with local content in the form of push notifications, photo geo-filters, text messages, or in-app ads.

Geotargeting. Similar to geofencing, geotargeting is used to deliver ads to customers in a location – but unlike geofencing, geotargeting often combines past location data with particular audience attributes. Advertisers can specify the desired location in conjunction with defined criteria (such as demographics, behavior, interests, etc.) to target customers who meet the exact requirements.

Geotargeting with historical data enables marketers to reach more defined audience segments with campaigns that are informed by behavioral or shopping trends at a given location.

Conquesting. In his column Getting back to basics with location-based marketing Brian Handly explained that geoconquesting is used to help brands reach audiences that visit their competitors’ locations. “For example,” he wrote, “Burger King utilized geoconquesting to run a campaign offering the one cent whopper to audiences that had their app open when they visited a McDonald’s location.”

Geoconquesting is best served as a tactic for audiences who are local in real-time, but can also be applied to reach historical audiences.

Proximity marketing. A more granular form of location-based marketing, proximity marketing often uses geofencing to deliver customers with timely ads in a specific location, in real-time. Marketers can use proximity marketing for things like local events or recurring store visits with the aim of serving the most relevant content in that given moment (i.e. a nearby restaurant chain, gas station, etc.).

For example, navigation app Waze uses proximity marketing in its ad platform by delivering ads when a driver is near a promoted location or billboard and the car is stopped. Advertisers can then leverage information about the customer’s location, frequent routes, weather, and time of day to provide local suggestions based on what it knows about the customer in that moment.

How location data is used in marketing

Browsers, search engines, apps, and social platforms all collect data to deliver both organic and paid content relevant to the consumer based on their location. Jeff White, founder of location data provider Gravy Analytics, explained that location data collection is nothing new – but only in the last decade has it proven to be a lucrative asset to marketers.

“Early adopters of location data info came through e-commerce and large enterprises. Early on, it was big for large retailers and hotels,” he said. But now, location data has lent itself to much broader use cases that provide valuable insights about the behavior of consumers.

Location data and the customer journey. To identify how location data can be effective in marketing, it’s important to understand the location experiences that are most valuable to the consumer – and, by extension, to the advertiser.

“A visit to a convenience store doesn’t have the same significance to a consumer as a visit to a wine-tasting festival, for example,” said White. Location data provides a toolset that marketers can use to fill in the gaps of a consumer’s profile – where valuable location-based experiences are the missing pieces.

Industry segments. Retailers or service providers with physical storefronts are best positioned for location-based marketing.  Local business marketers can employ geotargeting campaigns to reach audiences based on real-world visits, rather than on digital engagements alone.

Prioleau of Simpli.fi explained that location-based targeting can be used by businesses to “drive foot-traffic to their stores or locations (like QSR, retail, automotive, etc.), and by advertisers who want to increase traffic to their websites or apps (e-commerce providers, direct-to-consumer brands, insurance, other service providers).”

Likewise, niche industries like real estate, education, and transportation are apt to benefit from location-based marketing given the nature of their businesses. By understanding the level of intent and time investment from audiences based on their location behavior, marketers in niche industries can paint a holistic picture of likely buyers.

“Location data is the next frontier of understanding consumer behavior,” said Jeff White. “Things like collecting and geofencing open houses helps marketers get an advanced view of who might be a highly-qualified lead.”

Online to offline attribution. In addition to enabling a more highly targeted ad experience, location intelligence can be used to help close the gap between online and offline purchasing behavior. For businesses with storefronts, real-time location data can help fill in the holes of the customer journey by shedding light on the relationship between an online touchpoint and an in-person transaction.

How location data is collected

The process of data collection and the ethics surrounding it are increasingly under fire, as evidenced by growing concerns over user privacy and the regulatory legislature aimed at protecting it.

While the extensive push for data regulations creates challenges for marketers, it also provides an opportunity for businesses to build a foundation of trust with customers. By obtaining user consent and offering visibility into how location data is being used, marketers can maintain customer trust and deliver meaningful content in the path to purchase.

The location data collection process involves several steps, including anonymization, said Jeff White from Gravy Analytics.

1. Users consent to sharing their location data by opting-in when prompted in an app or browser.
2. SDKs then gather and transmit information about a user’s location, including geographic coordinates and the time spent.
3. The location data is then cleaned, anonymized, and aggregated into a database to build specific consumer profiles.
4. All of this information can then be used by the marketer to target customers using programmatic (through a DSP) or direct advertising.

Data collection process from user-end. Image: Marketing Land

User data can be collected via IP addresses or mobile device ID when users are browsing on public WiFi networks or when they explicitly share their location during a search. A unique ID connected to a users’ device (desktop or mobile) is gathered during the process to provide advertisers with a retargeting identifier.

Privacy concerns and the marketer’s responsibility

Data breaches and mismanaged data by ad tech giants has provoked a groundswell of concerns from users, bringing heightened awareness to how data is collected and used. Consumers are worried – and rightfully so.

The challenges raised from regulatory legislation such as GDPR in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which takes effect next year, could significantly impact how marketers use location data in campaigns. However, the move also creates an opening for increased transparency for marketers.

“When initiating location-based marketing, advertisers should use platforms that are compliant with GDPR and other privacy standards, and focused on using data which has been collected based on these standards,” said Prioleau.

By taking measures to ensure privacy is top-of-mind, marketers and businesses alike are better positioned to achieve the location-based marketing outcomes desired. Marketers should approach user privacy as a facet of both their own and their customers’ best interests to build a foundation of transparency. This approach should include:

• Understanding and auditing the location-based insights that are most important to the business and the customers.
• Building an airtight strategy on how personal data is handled, processed, and used for campaigns – in line with the strictest privacy regulations.
• Determining a course of action for disposing of unused, irrelevant, and outdated user data.
• Facilitating internal education and procedures for managing location data requests and disclosure inquiries.
• Adhering to strict regulatory procedures in preparation of a potential data breach, with a clear operations process.
• Review and analyze all contracts from vendors and third-party providers of user data to ensure regulatory compliance.

When businesses and marketers are able to manage and use location data responsibly, it can empower rich and impactful marketing outcomes. From understanding how consumers engage with retailers to identifying untapped opportunities for product localization, consumer location data is a potent tool for the digital marketer.

But the duty lies with the marketer to embrace privacy standards which, in turn, creates a trusting environment for users. From the rich location data that consumers willingly provide, marketers can derive meaningful insights and start to connect online touchpoints to real-world applications.

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In an effort to provide mobile advertisers with more options for viewability measurement in Google Mobile Ads (GMA) and Interactive Mobile Ads (IMA), Google announced Thursday a new integration with Open Measurement Software Development Kit (OM SDK).

Developed by the IAB Tech Lab, the open measurement SDK provides advertisers with common code and libraries for facilitating third-party access to measurement data.

“IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement (OM) initiative makes it easier for ad buyers and sellers to work together for viewability measurement and other verification needs,” said Dennis Buchheim, EVP and general manager of the IAB Tech Lab. “The sell-side has been adopting OM quickly, and we ask brands, agencies, and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to get more active and take advantage of what OM offers.” 

Why we should care

Advertisers on GMA and IMA can now measure viewability using third-party measurement platforms such as Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Comscore, and Moat (in addition to the measurement already available with Google’s Active View). To take advantage of the integration, advertisers can add Open Measurement enabled tags to their ad creatives from the viewability vendor of their choice.

Viewability tracks ad impressions that appear “in view” on users’s mobile devices — and have an opportunity to actually be seen by users — as opposed to impressions served, which may load on a page but never enter the user’s view. Selling inventory on a viewable basis also helps publishers offer and charge more for inventory.

Typically, viewability tracking for in-app ads depends on the developer’s ability to integrate a variety of SDKs from different vendors, which often results in inconsistent measuring methodologies and costs.

The IAB Tech Lab’s Open Measurement standard eliminates the need to implement various SDKs, allowing advertisers to measure viewability signals from one single location across display, native and video. Through its integration with Open Measurement, Google mobile app advertisers will have access to universal code libraries that enable an app publisher to provide required measurement data to all measurement providers and advertisers.

“Google’s adoption of the Open Measurement SDK is a huge step in moving the industry forward and creating more transparency for advertisers,” said Sumit Shukla, SVP, Strategic Partnerships of Comscore. “It’s important for brands to consistently measure viewability across the entirety of their media buys.”

More on the news

• Google said it is continuing to work with the IAB’s Tech Lab Open Measurement Working Group to expand Open Measurement capabilities beyond viewability, as well as to other environments such as web video.
• Open Measurement has the potential to create a more transparent and accountable digital media ecosystem across all screens.
• More information on downloading and using the SDK is available here.

Have you had any issues trying to get images to load for organic posts on Facebook? Search Engine Land editor Barry Schwartz noticed images were not loading — or were being replaced with random images — when creating organic posts with links to stories he had written.

“People were sharing my stories, but the images stopped sharing all of a sudden in the past couple days,” said Schwartz, “Turns out, in what’s likely a bug, Facebook doesn’t like images on HTTPS URLs. People stopped sharing my stories because Facebook was including a random image.”

The problem: A corrupted image or platform bug? When Schwartz ran the HTTPS links through Facebook’s Debugger tool, he got a notice claiming the images connected to the URLs may be corrupted or were an invalid format. A thread on Stack Overflow covering the same problem dates back to 2012, but with entries as recent as four months ago.

The fix: Implementing an HTTP link instead. According to the thread, users resolved the issue by using an HTTP URL instead of HTTPS. One entry on Stack Overflow claimed Facebook was aware of the problem and, at the time, was looking into it. “I ran into the same problem and reported it as a bug on the Facebook developer site. It seems pretty clear that og:image URIs using HTTP work just fine and URLs using HTTPS do not. They [Facebook] have now acknowledged that they are looking into this,” wrote Keegan Quinn in January 2012.

Why we should care. For brands already struggling to gain traction with organic content on Facebook, a glitch that removes or replaces images from posts is one more obstacle. With the Facebook debugger claiming the error is a corrupted file, marketers may not realize that the problem might not be the image, but perhaps Facebook’s issue with HTTPS links.

We’ve asked Facebook for a comment and will update this story if we get a response.

Whether you’re migrating your existing online store or starting a new one, Magento is considered the ecommerce platform. In this post we are going to dive into SEO best practices to follow, looking at technical considerations and touching on content strategy. We will predominantly be concentrating on Magento Open Source.

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform developed by Varien. The first beta was launched in 2007. Since then it has had a number of owners (or maybe “custodians” would be a better term) including eBay, a private equity firm and, most recently, Adobe.

It’s a beast

In 2017, four years after its initial proposed launch date, Magento 2 was released. This may sound like a long delay, but with 1.84 million lines of PHP code and 239,000 lines of JavaScript – before you even consider HTML, CSS, XML, and other entities – you can appreciate the sheer scale of the task.

Given its size, it’s not the easiest ecommerce platform to get to grips with but, when it comes to sheer grunt, there isn’t much out there that can out-punch Magento.

Migrating?

Before we start, if you are migrating from another platform then you might find our post “The site migration tool for redirecting URLs like a boss” helpful.

Is Magento SEO-friendly?

Magento has many SEO-friendly features. However, first and foremost it is an enterprise ecommerce platform that can connect (via APIs and extensions) to a whole host of the world’s most popular payment gateway, order fulfillment, stock management, and CRM systems.

However, regardless of how SEO-friendly, it is out of the box, you’ll always want to be one step ahead of your competitors, right?

Let’s get optimizing. First, start with your theme.

The biggest consideration for any theme is how it handles the main navigation. A good test is to disable CSS and JavaScript (the Web Developer toolbar makes this easy), this then enables you to view the HTML structure. The out the box product Magento offers a pretty elegant solution that uses a semantically pleasing, nested unordered list. We would suggest using a theme that doesn’t deviate too far away from this convention if you aren’t 100% sure what you should be looking for.

Another area to check is to run the theme through Google’s mobile-friendly test. With Google’s mobile-first index nearly fully rolled out, making sure your site is fully mobile-friendly is a must.

Configuration setting

Considering the power of Magento, the backend isn’t too complicated and the options are split quite intuitively. All the following settings can all be found in the “Store – Configuration”.

General – Web – URL Options – Auto redirect to base URL

Selecting “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)” will mean non-www traffic is automatically redirected to www or vice versa.

General – Web – Search Engine Optimization – Use web server rewrites

Magento’s code is based upon a variation of the MVC framework. For non-devs, in simple terms, this means templates are called via the URL structure. This doesn’t always lend itself to human or SEO-friendly URLs. Ensuring this setting is set to “yes” means Magento will tidy up the structure. For example, “storename.com/index.html/page-name” will become “storename.com/page-name”.

General – Web – Base URLs – Base URL

If you are running with an SSL certificate, which all e-commerce sites should be these days, then this should be set to the same as the Secure Base URL that is “https://sitename.com“. This will mean anyone attempting to access HTTP will be redirected to HTTPS.

General – Design – Search Engine Robots – Default Robots

This might seem like an obvious one, but we’ve seen development sites pushed live having a global meta robots tag with the “noindex, nofollow” value. So, ensue when going live this is changed to “index, follow”.

General – Design – Search Engine Robots – Edit custom instruction of the robots.txt file

This is where custom amends to the robots.txt file can be made. You can disallow any pages or directories you do not want search engines to index.

Catalog – Catalog –  Search Engine Optimization  – Use Categories Path for Product URLs

Let me use the much-coined SEO phrase – “it depends”. If this is set to “no” all products will appear in the root directory which is “storename.com/product-name”. This option is the most manageable and trouble-free setting to use, especially if your products appear in multiple categories.

When set to “yes” the URL will show the path of categories and subcategories, that is “storename.com/categry-name/product-name”.

If you are familiar with the concept of content silos and think it is a strategy you want to employ, then you will want to set this option to “yes”.

You should be aware of potential duplicate content issues though. If you are unsure then it’s really not worth the risk.

Catalog – XML sitemap

This section allows you to set frequency values and priority settings for categories, products, and CMS pages. For most applications the default values are sufficient.

In the “Generation Settings” section, you can also set the sitemap to auto-generate/update by setting “Enabled” to “Yes”. This is usually a good option with the frequency set, depending on how often you add new pages to your site.

Catalog – XML sitemap – Search Engine Submission settings –  Enable submission to Robots.txt

This will add a line to your robots.txt file informing the search engines where to find your XML sitemap. You can submit it via the Google Search Console, but a bit of automation is always good. So unless you have a specific reason not to then this should be set to “Yes”.

Site speed, the elephant in the room.

It’s no secret that Google likes a fast site, and it’s also no secret that due to the size of Magento’s code base it doesn’t have the world’s best reputation for speed. However, there are some quick wins you can make.

1. Host server

This will largely come down to your budget. Magento does run a basic shared server environment, but if you can stretch to a dedicated server then you will have so much more processing power at your fingertips

2. Caching

Magento has a sophisticated caching system that should be implemented. If you navigate to “System – Cache Management” you will want to make sure that all caches are set to “Enabled”. Often in the development stage, these can be switched off.

3. Flat catalog

By default, Magento uses the Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) database system. This means that products and their attributes can be split over many tables. It’s a very flexible model but also slower when compared to a flat system. For this reason, Magento has the option to switch to using a flat catalog. The more categories, products, and attributes you have, the bigger the benefit you will see here. To enable this feature go to – “Configuration > Catalog > Storefront”. Here you will find two options, “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product”, set both of these to “Yes”.

4. Image optimization

Ensure that all images are sized no larger than they will appear at their maximum size within your responsive theme. Images should also be saved in the correct format with SVGs used for logos and graphics where possible.

5. Browser caching

This isn’t something that is an option in the backend of Magento. You’ll have to get your hands dirty by manually updating the .htaccess file. There are plenty of resources on the net that can provide guidance on this… just remember to make a backup on the .htaccess before you amend it.

6. HTTP/2

If you know, then you know. If not, it’s best to pop a support ticket into your hosting provider on how to implement this. HTTP/2 allows browsers to perform multiple requests over a single connection. With a basic Magento home page requiring around 200 requests, this is a no-brainer.

7. Extensions

It’s good practice to test your site speed before and after the installation of an extension. You can also do this retrospectively by disabling existing extensions. If you do find an extension that is causing speed problems then you will need to weigh up the benefit vs site speed cost.

Layered navigation

What is generally referred to as faceted navigation is known as layered navigation in Magento. It lets users filter down products in a category by their predefined attributes. This is a feature that users have grown to expect when navigating ecommerce sites. It’s also a feature that has given search marketers more than a few headaches over the years.

If you take as an example a category page with 20 products, and within those products, there are five colors, five sizes, and four styles. When you consider you can filter by any combination of attributes, one category page has now turned into more than 100, all with their own URL. To compound this, you can then also order the products by name, price or number, and then select where you want them ascending or descending. As these options generally also update the URL, we are now up to 600 URLs. When you consider this is just one category you can appreciate it could cause problems with indexing.

Don’t get stuck in the spider web

We have seen ecommerce sites with millions of pages needlessly indexed, due to faceted parameters, on more than one occasion. Not only does this cause issues for Google being able to figure out what are the important pages on your site are, but they can also become spider traps.

This is where search engine bots will spend so much time crawling they essentially give up on your site and go somewhere else.

Managing this issue is where search marketers earn our keep. So, how can we accomplish this in Magento?

Unfortunately, there is not a completely elegant solution that’s straight out of the box. There are extensions that you can install that do make the job a little easier or you could even write some custom code yourself with the help of user forums.

Ultimately what you are looking to achieve are any of the following solutions

• Add a canonical tag that references the non-filtered page
• Nofollow all links to filtered pages and add a “noindex” tag on the linked pages
• “Disallow” the pages in your robots.txt file

Another solution is declaring the URL parameters within Google’s Search Console. At the time of writing, you still have to do this via the old interface.

Which solution you choose, can depend upon the site. For instance, the canonical tag might be a good solution if you have only a few filterable attributes in your layered navigation, but as it still requires Google to crawl the pages to find these tags, if you have 100s of attributes it could use a large proportion of your crawl budget (even though the pages aren’t being indexed).

We have a dedicated post on faceted navigation if you would like to read more on the subject.

What next?

So you’ve got the right products at the right price, you’ve got your technical SEO sorted but so has your competition. How do you set yourself apart so you stand out in the SERPs?

Content

A solid content strategy is what we do best here at Zazzle Media. We won’t dig too deep into this subject here, as we have numerous other posts we will point you in the direction of, and it’s not a topic exclusively related to Magento. What we will do is cover some of the areas you should be looking to cover:

Functional content

You can read up on the importance of having engaging functional content here.

Category content – In the admin area navigate to – Catalog – Categories – [Category] – Content – Description

Category pages will often drive a good proportion of traffic to your site. Categorizing your catalog to align with your keyword research will be worth the time and effort and help your site realize its full potential. When generating copy for the pages, a top tip is to look at the TF*IDF using a tool such as Ryte. This will highlight any words that are over or under-optimized for our page based upon the main topic.

Product descriptions – These descriptions can be added on your mass import CSV file or by navigating to – Catalog > Products > [Product] > Content > Description in the admin area.

Try to steer clear of using descriptions provided directly from the suppliers or manufacturers, as you can bet they’ve already been used on numerous other websites. This can be a big task with larger catalogs, but set a certain amount of resources aside every month and concentrate on your most popular items to start with.

Informational content

There are various ways of publishing news/blog content on Magento. A popular solution is to integrate WordPress using the Fishpig extension. This has been around for years and there are versions for Magento 1 and 2. It allows one-click login to both platforms and lets you associate posts with specific products which is a useful feature.

This is the area where a good strategy can pay dividends. Performing a gap analysis on your top competitors is an effective way to identify quick wins. Some comprehensive informational keyword research will also highlight questions and topics users are searching for. All this information can help you put together a content calendar that should align with business focuses and seasonal trends. Considering the different stages in your sales cycle, and the questions your users might have at these points will enable you to create a comprehensive resource of information.

In summary

Developing a site on the Magento platform isn’t always the cheapest solution to launch an ecommerce website, however, on the flip side, you’ll never want for a more powerful solution or be short of advice from the vast developer community. You also should have any issue in integrating it with the product information management (PIM) tool of your choice.

With a little bit of configuration, you should also have a site that is SEO-friendly. Regardless of the platform, the output is simply a mixture of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images and other resources. So fundamentally the same rules apply. Also, remember SEO isn’t a one-hit solution, it’s a strategy that is constantly evolving. Stand still and your competitors will catch you up and take your customers.

Mark Chisholm is an SEO Executive working within the Search & Data Team at Zazzle Media.

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This collection of social media marketing and new hire announcements is a compilation of the past week’s briefs from our daily Marketing Land newsletter. Click here to subscribe and get more news like this delivered to your inbox every morning.

Pinterest pushes auto sales. According to new data from Oracle Data Cloud, Pinterest users tend to be early adopters of new car models. Oracle’s report revealed that people on Pinterest are 28% more likely to buy a new vehicle than people who don’t use Pinterest, and 31% are more likely to buy a new SUV model. Pinterest also says it now reaches one in two adults who plan to buy a car in the next six months, based on a March ComScore Plan Metrix Audience Profile report. “People are actively using Pinterest to learn more about their car shopping options,” writes Pinterest on the company’s blog, “Over seven million people on Pinterest engage with car-related content.”

Reddit comes to the Midwest. As part of its continued effort to bring more brands to the platform, Reddit is opening an office in Chicago’s historic Merchandise Mart location. “In addition to key Chicago and Midwest-based brands, Reddit’s Chicago team has built strong relationships with the region’s leading agencies and media companies, including Starcom, Publicis, OMG, and GroupM,” writes Reddit on its Upvoted Blog. Reddit began its dive into the Chicago market in April of 2018, working with Midwest-based brands like McDonald’s, Target and KFC. The Merchandise Mart office is Reddit’s first office in Chicago. 

Instagram Story views are, literally, unreal. Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it is aware of an issue with Stories getting a high volume of views by Russian accounts — and is working to fix it. “It [Instagram] also said this inauthentic activity is not related to misinformation campaigns but is rather a new growth hacking tactic,” reports TechCrunch. The bad actors involve third parties that are paid to boost account profiles by generating inauthentic activity like watching Instagram Stories — an effort aimed at winning the account more followers. Hydrogen, a UK social media agency, called mass viewing of Instagram Stories “the new buying followers of 2019” when it noticed the trend in June. 

What time is the show? Facebook has rolled out two new ad units for movie studios: movie reminder ads and showtime ads. The movie reminder ads allow moviegoers to click an “Interested” button on a film advertisement in their News Feed for a film that hasn’t come out yet. When the movie hits theaters, users will get a notification that it is now playing, with details on showtimes and tickets. 

For films already released, the showtime movie ads include a “Get Showtimes” button within the ad that links to the Facebook Page listing where and when the movie can be seen. Available for advertisers in the U.S. and the UK, Facebook’s new ads for movie studios were beta tested by Universal Pictures, which reported a significant increase in showtime look-ups and ticket purchases after using the ads. 

Changes to Facebook Group settings. Facebook has revised its Group options to include only two settings: public and private. Previously, Group admins had access to three settings: public, closed and secret. The revised options are designed to offer more clarity around a Group’s setting and simplify the privacy model for Facebook Groups. 

“Having two privacy settings — public and private — will help make it clearer about who can find the group and see the members and posts that are part of it,” writes Facebook Product Manager Jordan Davis on the Facebook Newsroom blog. Groups that were formerly set to “secret” will now be switched to “private” and “hidden,” while Groups that were formerly set to “closed” will now be “private” but “visible.” Public Groups will remain “public” and “visible.”  

Group admins will also be able to choose whether or not a Group can be found in Search or other places on the platform. 

Quora integrates LiveRamp IdentityLink. Advertisers on Quora will now be able to add audience lists to Quora’s Ads Manager via LiveRamp IdentityLink, the same platform used to add customer audiences to the Microsoft Advertising platform. “Now, marketers can use segments from their offline records in order to activate and run ad campaigns on Quora, all in a privacy-conscious way. This should also increase match rates for targeting, exclusion, or lookalike modeling,” writes Quora Software Engineer Ryan Oshima on the Quora for Business Blog. LiveRamp is an identity resolution platform that helps brands and agencies implement people-based targeting campaigns. 

Spectacles 3: The latest version of Snap’s sunglass cameras. Snap is rolling out the latest version of its Spectacles sunglasses, wearable cameras that let you capture images and upload to Snapchat. This marks the third generation of the devices, which will begin shipping in the fall and costs $380 — up from the $200 price tag on the last version. Spectacles 3 include new 3D effects, 3D filters and 3D lenses. “It will have dual cameras to add depth and dimension to photos and videos. After uploading the content to the messaging app Snapchat, users can add new lighting, landscapes and three-dimensional effects to the images,” reports Reuters. 

Spark AR on Instagram now available to all developers. Facebook has moved Spark AR on Instagram out of closed beta, making the AR development platform available to all developers. Along with the AR platform, Facebook is launching an Effects Gallery where developers can search for new filters. “To find it, users will have to reach the end of the effects tray in the Instagram camera and click on it there. Users will also be able to see the effect being used in Instagram Stories,” writes TechCrunch reporter Lucas Matney. 

YouTube testing new appeal process. YouTube confirmed to The Verge that it is testing a new appeal process for creators who have lost monetization privileges. The pilot program will allow creators to submit a video appealing the decision in real-time, versus the current policy that enforces creators to wait 30 days before making an appeal. The videos are reviewed by YouTube team members who then, within a seven-day time period, decide whether or not monetization for the channel can be reinstated.

Facebook reportedly offering million-dollar licensing deals to news publishers. Multiple “big-name” news publishers have been approached by Facebook to sign content licensing deals, according to the Wall Street Journal. Per the report, Facebook is offering as much as $3 million a year to republish stories from the likes of ABC News, Bloomberg, Dow Jones and The Washington Post. 

In response to the Wall Street Journal report, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to CNBC the company does have plans to launch a dedicated news section later this year, but would not comment on the licensing deals: “No details to share on the WSJ report, but I can confirm we’re working on a news tab to launch this fall.” 

Reports claim Facebook’s licensing deals with publishers could last as long as three years. As part of the deal, news outlets would have control over how their stories appear on Facebook, and whether or not readers get full access to the content or only a headline with a snippet from the article.

On the Move

Karuna Rawal has been appointed CMO for the biotech startup Sustainable Bioproducts. She will serve as the company’s first CMO, reporting to CEO Thomas Jonas. In her new role, Rawal will be charged with strategic marketing and innovation initiatives that support the company’s mission to launch new alternative protein product lines. “Karuna’s acumen as a storyteller and innovator along with her deep experience in building iconic brands that connect with consumers at an emotional and purposeful level is exactly what we need for the next stages of our company’s growth,” said Jonas. Prior to joining Sustainable Bioproducts, Rawal spent time at the Publicis Groupe, leading its Arc Worldwide shopper and commerce agency, and was the chief strategy officer for Leo Burnett’s Farmhouse, the agency’s new venture and innovation group. 

The cloud data integration platform Talend named Lauren Vaccarello as its new CMO. She will lead the company’s marketing organization and oversee its branding efforts. “Lauren is a dynamic leader with a deep understanding of the software industry and proven skills at helping SaaS organizations increase revenue and retain and grow their customer base through cutting-edge marketing techniques,” said Talend CEO Mike Tuchen. Before joining Talend, Vaccarello was the vice president of marketing at Box, and has held marketing roles at AdRoll and Salesforce. In addition to her marketing leadership experience, Vaccarello has published two books focused on the marketing industry: “Complete B2B Online Marketing” and “The Retargeting Playbook.” 

GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has named Christian Juhl as its next global CEO. Juhl will take over the role on October 1, 2019. “Christian has the right combination of leadership, people and technology skills to build the modern media company, something he has demonstrated extraordinarily well at Essence,” said CEO of WPP Mark Read. Currently, Juhl serves as CEO for Essence, the digital ad agency that was acquired by WPP in 2015. Juhl will succeed Kelly Clark who currently serves as GroupM’s CEO. Clark will continue to serve as a senior advisor to WPP and GroupM following his departure as CEO. 

It’s no surprise that PPC campaigns are great for driving quick results. However, it’s not the only way paid campaigns can bring profit to digital marketers. Integrating your PPC data in your SEO strategy will help you improve your overall performance.

Your SEO strategy should be flexible to trends, algorithms, and user behavior. While it takes much time to evaluate SEO results, the PPC data allows you to predict what works and what doesn’t work. Using this information for SEO, you’ll boost your search rankings significantly. In this article, I’ll tell you how to analyze your paid campaigns to determine which keywords resulted in the most significant number of conversions and focus on these phrases to improve your SEO.

The differences between SEO and PPC keywords

Pay-per-click advertising is an easily controlled digital marketing channel that provides an opportunity to target specific audiences, countries, and the time you want your ads to show up. Due to this fact, you can use PPC reports to get useful data for improving your keyword list.

These are the major differences between collecting keywords for SEO and PPC:

• The main aim of the PPC campaign is to drive conversions. That’s why the keywords used for paid ads have high commercial intent.
• The landing page of each ad should be highly relevant to the query. Otherwise, the ads will be marked as low-quality ones, and the search engines will display them less frequently.
• You can configure your PPC campaign in the way to avoid non-target visits, for example, you can select negative keywords, exclude irrelevant audiences, and more.
• You should mind that Google Keyword Planner usually provides you with high-cost and competition keywords. It rarely suggests users high-volume but low-priced phrases.

How PPC helps your SEO

There are four major reasons you should make your PPC campaigns work together with SEO efforts:

1. Analyzing your PPC campaigns, you can identify which keywords result in conversions the most. This step will let you focus on the web pages that generate the highest revenue.
2. Paid advertising is the best way to attract your target audience. The fact people click through the highly relevant ad and find what they’re looking for on your website result in better user behavior metrics. As these visits will result in lower bounce rates and longer session durations, they’ll serve as positive signals for search robots. That’s why paid targeted traffic often has a positive impact on organic search rankings.
3. If your website is showing up both in paid and organic searches, the chances a user will click through one of the results increase. Moreover, most of the search results provide lots of special elements, including ads, featured snippets, “People also ask” box and others. If all of these elements are displayed on one page, it’s not likely someone will scroll down to your page ranking the third in organic search.
4. Some brands bid on their competitors’ branded keywords. In the result, the official website is shifting in search results. If you don’t want to lose your prospects to competition, it’s worth bidding on your branded keywords as well.

Improve your SEO keyword list analyzing your PPC campaigns

Step one: Use high-CTR keywords for SEO

In your Google Adwords reports, you can find lots of useful data for organic search optimization. First of all, it may happen that you are spending large sums on PPC to get little conversions. It usually happens when you select high CPC keywords that are searched for by people who aren’t ready to convert (have you ever heard about a sales funnel?).  Instead, you could optimize your top-of-funnel content for these high-cost keywords and eventually lead the prospects to conversions.

To identify these keywords, go to “Reports” > “Search terms”

You’ll see the list of search terms that people have used, and the ones that resulted in your ad being shown and clicked. To collect keywords that result in the highest click-through rates, under “Clicks”, select “High to Low”. The list will automatically portray keywords sorted by the number of clicks.

Now let’s look at the conversion rate of the terms that drive a number of clicks. If the clicks drive no results, it means people using these specific search terms aren’t ready to buy. But if you optimize your blog posts for these keywords, your visitors might come back soon to convert.

Step two: Analyze your competitors’ PPC campaigns

To enlarge your SEO keyword list, you can also analyze your competitors’ ads and keywords they are bidding on. Content creation isn’t only about driving traffic to your website. To be worth something to your business, your website content should attract actual leads that are likely to convert. That’s why it’s important to check the keywords your competitors’ ads are showing up for. If a competitor is spending large sums to appear in Google for a keyword, it’s definitely worth your consideration.

At this stage, you’ll need one of the all-in-one SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, Serpstat, or Moz. To illustrate the process, I’ll go with Serpstat.

There are two reports you can use for this purpose:

1. Keywords report

In the “Keyword Research > PPC Research > Keywords” section, enter your target keyword, select your country, and click on “Search”. In the report, you’ll see the list of similar keywords your top-100 competitors are bidding on along with ads showing up for these keywords. Collect the most relevant ones and add them to your SEO keyword list.

2. Ad examples report

Clicking through the “Ad examples” section, you’ll also see the keywords used in your competitors’ paid campaigns, but this time they are grouped under the specific ads. It allows you to get ready-to-use clusters of keywords relevant to different landing pages.

Keep tracking

Analyzing your PPC results to improve your SEO performance is an unconventional but very effective method. Make your PPC and SEO work together for your brand promotion and you’ll not only witness higher conversions but also get more statistical data to outrank your competitors.

Adelina Karpenkova is a Brand Specialist at Serpstat.

Related reading

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Podcast mobile app usage has risen 60% since January 2018, and the sector’s growth is expected to continue as 45% of listeners said they plan on tuning into more podcasts in the future, according to a study conducted by Adobe Analytics.

Discovery and growth. The study, which combined survey information from 1,008 U.S. respondents and Comscore data comprised of 193 million monthly unique visitors to U.S. mobile apps (between January 2018 and May 2019), found that 41% of podcast discovery occurs through online sources such as blogs and articles.

The report also stated that 25% of current podcast listeners began listening to podcasts for the first time within the past six months. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents perceive podcast quality to be on the rise, with just 6% under the impression that quality is decreasing.

Who, where, what. One-third of millennials said they listen to five or more podcasts per week, accounting for the largest demographic of listeners. Slightly more than half (52%) of respondents said they tune into podcasts while working or commuting and 42% said they listen in the car. 

The four most popular genres were found to be comedy, educational, history and true crime/documentary. Video game and discussion panel podcasts were among the least popular categories.

Ad effectiveness. The majority (60%) of listeners surveyed said they looked up a service or product after hearing it advertised on a podcast, and 25% reported that they ended up making the purchase.

On the flip side, 58% of respondents said they skipped podcast ads.

Why we should care. The podcast sector’s momentum increases the viability of podcast advertising to reach a growing audience. And, with more data available from platforms like Spotify or third parties such as Nielsen, advertisers have more targeting capabilities to help them get closer to the listeners that are most likely to be interested in their products or services.

We love to help folks make awesome websites. For a while now, we’ve been answering questions from developers, site-owners, webmasters, and of course SEOs in our office hours hangouts, in the help forums, and at events. Recently, we’ve (re-)started answering your questions in a video series called #AskGoogleWebmasters on our YouTube channel. 

(At Google, behind the scenes, during the recording of one of the episodes.)

When we started with the webmaster office-hours back in 2012, we thought we’d be able to get through all questions within a few months, or perhaps a year. Well … the questions still haven’t stopped — it’s great to see such engagement when it comes to making great websites! 

To help make it a bit easier to find answers, we’ve started producing shorter videos answering individual questions. Some of the questions may seem fairly trivial to you, others don’t always have simple answers, but all of them are worth answering.

Curious about the first episodes? Check out the videos below and the playlist for all episodes!

To ask a question, just use the hashtag #AskGoogleWebmasters on Twitter. While we can’t get to all submissions, we regularly pick up the questions there to use in future episodes. We pick questions primarily about websites & websearch, which are relevant to many sites. Want to stay in the loop? Make sure to subscribe to our channel. If you’d like to discuss the questions or other important webmaster topics, feel free to drop by our webmaster help forums and chat with the awesome experts there. 

Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland