Keyword research is one of the most important digital marketing tasks. Furthermore, it lies at the foundation of any business strategy or campaign you are planning.

Keyword research provides useful insight into organic ranking opportunities, persona building, competitive research, product development — you name it!

Another reason why I love keyword research is that it’s a highly creative process. There is never such a thing as “enough tools” when it comes to keyword research. Each data source and the way the data is presented brings something new to the table. Sometimes when I feel stuck, all I need is to play with a new keyword intelligence tool.

With that in mind, I decided to create a roundup of free (and freemium) keyword research tools, i.e. those tools you can run right now, without the need to pay first.

Some of those tools are freemium (meaning you can pay for the upgrade) but all of them are quite usable for free (which is what I recommend doing first before deciding if you need to upgrade). Finally, I am not going to include obvious tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner and Google Search Console as I am sure SEW readers are well aware of.

New tools inspire new tactics which is what I hope you’ll end up with.

1. Rank Tracker: Aggregated keyword suggestions from multiple sources

(Freemium)

Rank Tracker free version gives you access to its keyword research feature that uses around 20 different keyword research sources, including Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Suggest,Wordtracker, SEMRush and more.

Rank Tracker is a downloadable tool and you do have to provide your name and email to start downloading. Other than that, the installation takes seconds, and running it won’t kill your browser.

The free version includes keyword analysis feature helping you to discover most promising keywords to include into your content strategy. These metrics include:

• Monthly search volume (according to Google)
• PPC competition
• Keyword difficulty that reflects the estimated level of organic competition of each query.

…keywords with the Keyword Difficulty score below 60 are the hardest to find but the easiest to rank for. When accompanied by a considerable and steady number of searches, they become perfect keywords to optimize your pages for. You may also have a look at KEI, visibility, and CPC parameters for a deeper analysis.

You can export the whole list into an Excel file to play further.

The premium features include collaboration, cross-tool reporting, task scheduler, multiple projects, etc.

You can see the full list of features you’ll get free access to here.

2. Answer The Public: Google Suggest driven questions and more

(Freemium)

Answer The Public is a completely free keyword research tool that requires no registration. It uses Google Suggest data to discover questions, comparison-based queries and keywords containing prepositions.

Answer The Public allows to view the data in two ways: Visualization (i.e. a mindmap) and Data:

You can also export all the results in a CSV file or save any visualization as a PNG file.

The recently launched premium version allows you to target keywords by location, compare data and add team members for collaboration.

You can see the version comparison here.

Tip: You can also use this tool to upload your Answer The Public spreadsheet to add Google search volume to each question. This will help you focus on those questions that are often being searched in Google.

3. Text Optimizer: Related concepts and terms

(Freemium)

Text Optimizer is the semantic analysis tool helping you identify related concepts behind each topic or query. It uses Google’s search snippets to analyze the keyword context to come up with related concepts and entities that help Google understand and classify the topic.

Text Optimizer is both content optimization and research tool helping you direct your whole content creation process.

Don’t get misled though: It’s not about stuffing your content with the suggested terms. Use the tool for deeper topic understanding and as a writing aid.

The premium version allows to use geo-targeting, build whole sentences to help you in writing and access your historic records.

You can see it in action here.

4. Kparser: Clustered keyword suggestions

(Freemium)

Kparser is a freemium tool that runs the whole keyword analysis for free, without requiring registration. You won’t be able to export the keyword list unless you upgrade but you can use the keyword filters to the left to group and cluster your list by a common modifier.

Kparser combines multiple keyword sources including Google Trends, Ebay, Amazon, Google Trends, and YouTube.

It’s a somewhat basic approach to keyword clustering but it’s nonetheless nice to have completely for free as it helps to discover more queries to optimize for.

The premium features include unlimited searches, geo-targeting and more.

Read more about Kparser here.

Bonus: Analyze keyword performance

(Free trial)

Finteza is a nice affordable alternative to Google Analytics with huge focus on conversion optimization and monetization.

One of its highly useful feature is search analysis section showing you which keywords brought most clicks to your site. It’s a great way to identify more queries to focus on:

If you select any of the queries and keep browsing the site, you’ll see data related to that keyword only, e.g. its conversion rate, associated conversion funnel analysis and user demographics. Finteza also recently added retargeting feature allowing you to serve specific content based on the initial referral or engagement.

You can read more on Finteza’s traffic analytics here.

Which keyword research tools do you know that are usable free of charge? Please share yours in the comments!

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I’m checking in with an update from the Search Engine Land editors: They’re wrapping up the SMX® East agenda. It’s going to be bigger and better than ever — 70+ in-depth sessions on SEO, SEM, search for multi-location brands, agency operations, conversion optimization, paid social, content marketing, voice search, and so much more.

I’ll be able to share the final agenda very soon, but until then… here’s another sneak peek at what’s in store:

Tactic-Rich Search Marketing Sessions

Last week, I revealed nine of the deep dive sessions coming to NYC November 13-14. Here’s nine more to whet your appetite…

• A Deep Dive on Google My Business
• Clarifying The Murky Waters Of Attribution
• Conversion Optimization For The Long Run
• Future Directions For Local Search
• Gearing Up For The Conversational Web
• Google Posts, Google Q&A & GMB Insights
• Harnessing The Power Of Online Reviews
• Tackling The Challenges Of Enterprise SEO
• The New Google Shopping

Notice any trends? This year’s agenda will feature new content concentrations on search marketing for multi-location brands and agency operations and management. And that’s in addition to all of our hallmark SEO and SEM sessions.

Opening Keynote

Rand Fishkin will kick things off with his opening keynote, “Google: From Everyone’s Search Engine to Everyone’s Competitor”. He’s also giving away copies of his new book, Lost and Founder, and hosting a book signing after the presentation!

Clinics: Expert Answers To Your Specific Questions

I. Love. Clinics. No PowerPoints, no presentations, no agenda — just a panel of friendly experts ready to answer your questions on SEO, SEM, Social Ads, Google Analytics, and more. (Each clinic has its own focus!) Bring your burning curiosities and specific cases to the table for a no-holds-barred Q&A!

Deep-Dive Workshops

Hungry for more? Our full-day, pre-conference workshops were designed for insatiable marketers like you. Choose an expert-led deep dive on one of the following topics:

Stay Tuned!

The official agenda will be unveiled next week… I’ll reach out as soon as it’s live. If you’re ready to register, now’s the best time — you’ll save up to $900 off on-site rates if you book your pass today!

See you in NYC 🙂

The past year has brought on an enormous shift for digital marketers and organizations. In the wake of GDPR —  and with CCPA going into effect in less than six months — data privacy compliance has become a focal point for organizations across the globe.

Data privacy compliance firm OneTrust announced that it has closed an impressive $200 million Series A investment from Insight Partners in its latest round of funding — bringing the valuation of the platform to $1.3 billion. The multi-million dollar investment demonstrates the mounting priority businesses are placing on operationalizing privacy compliance.

“It’s been an exciting three years at OneTrust, with our customers partnering with us to define and build the most widely used technology platform in a completely new market,” said Karbir Barday, CEO and fellow of information privacy at OneTrust. “This investment will help us to bring a new level of scale and support for our customers, coming at a timely juncture with just six months before California’s CCPA is set to be enforced.”

Why we should care

Just this week, the European Union slapped massive fines on British Airways and Marriot for data breaches that affected hundreds of millions of their customers. The sheer sizes of the fines — $230 million and $123 million, respectively — should be enough to put compliance at the forefront of your digital strategy (if it isn’t already). Third-party vendors like OneTrust are recognizing the need to provide tools and solutions for compliance management.

Data privacy is becoming a visible part of our strategies, particularly in digital marketing. As we learn to manage the different regional laws and global regulations, many organizations will turn to third-party vendors to help drive the compliance component of our strategies.

We can expect to see more data compliance management platforms coming into the marketplace as enterprises and their service providers implement new programs and new laws evolve.

More on the news

• OneTrust already serves over 3,000 clients in more than 100 countries.
• Products within the OneTrust platform include processes to automate CCPA and GDPR requirements, including “right to be forgotten,” “access,” and “do not sell”.
• Earlier in the week, San Francisco-based TrustArc raised $70 million in its latest funding to help organizations build privacy and compliance programs.

Since launching in 2015, Amazon’s Prime Day sale has claimed its place as an industry-wide shopping holiday, generating record-breaking revenues year-over-year, and eclipsing even Black Friday.

This year, the 48-hour Prime Day mega-sale kicks off Monday, July 15 and is shaping up to be the biggest online shopping day to date.

Amazon may have been the frontrunner of “Christmas in July” but big-box retail rivals have accordingly followed suit. Contenders like Walmart, Best Buy, Target and others have taken to sharing in the cyber frenzy, launching competing sales in tandem with Amazon’s event.

The Prime Day phenomenon has transformed the days during and surrounding the event into a profitable sales window for retailers in nearly every market. During last year’s Prime Day, brands ran cutthroat promotions, including Target touting a year of free same-day delivery with a purchase minimum, eBay suspending its membership paywall for a 36-hour period, Walmart peddling sales lower than Black Friday, and Best Buy offering loss-leader sales on electronics – just to name a few.

According to a Prime Day survey by Adlucent, 68% of respondents planning to shop on Prime Day said they will also be looking outside of Amazon to comparison shop, leaving ample room for competitors to take advantage of the holiday. Last year, Walmart was the biggest competitor, claiming around 50% of sales outside the Amazon marketplace, Adlucent reported. Target and Best Buy earned 33% and 32% share of outside revenue, respectively.

So what are retailers doing to capitalize on Amazon’s sale? We’ve compiled some of the key strategies that marketers should be considering during massive online shopping events like Prime Day, Black Friday and beyond.

Driving awareness with content and search

Clear, impactful messaging and high-quality content is a critical component for online retailers going head-to-head with Amazon.

The top brands rely on promotional messaging, competitive pricing, and optimized product page listings to build awareness and support sales. Descriptive product page copy, high-quality product imagery, and mobile responsiveness are among the key drivers for conversion lifts.

“A competitive, design thinking driven UX and UI can lead to more shopper engagement. Historically, we have seen that site visitors who interact with navigation/facets convert at a higher rate, buy more, and come back more often,” said Roland Gossage, CEO of GroupBy Inc.  “A competitive combination of product data enrichment, recommendations, and intuitive navigations can result in more conversions, higher order values, higher revenue per visit, and more returning customers.”

High-quality email content also drives Prime Day sales lift for competing retailers. During last year’s event, brands that used “Prime Day” in subject lines saw an enormous lift in open rates – 47% higher than the average of other shopping holiday campaigns, according to research from Yes Marketing. Email retargeting and planned segmentation strategies were also among the tactics used by big-box retailers during last year’s Prime frenzy, teasing with content directed at the most engaged consumers.

Brooke Willcox, director of digital business development at MNI Digital Media, said that a strong competitive marketing strategy for retailers on Prime Day “should start with a strong SEM campaign, with strategic keyword selection. Since users will be searching for deals, it’s vital that the brand/landing page pops up first.”

While bidding on PPC keywords for Prime Day is often an expensive tactic for small businesses, major e-commerce brands have shown to invest heavily hot-ticket keywords to warrant top of the page results. Smaller businesses can still ride the search wave with organic SEO, ensuring product pages are optimized, promotional messaging is well-defined, and high-traffic keywords are baked into titles and rich content.

Delivering on competitive shipping promises

Amazon Prime’s free one-day and two-day shipping has rapidly become the default expectation for many shoppers. Data from digital services and solutions firm Avionos suggests that Amazon’s shipping offerings are a major driver for consumers. When a product’s price point is bolstered by its quality, nearly half (49%) of online shoppers choose to purchase via Amazon instead of directly buying from other brands and retailers because of delivery efficiency.

But for online retailers competing with Amazon, a prompt delivery may not always be the determining factor for consumers, as, say transparency about when orders will be delivered.

In Walker Sands’ “Future of Retail” report, consumers said that faster shipping will make them more likely to shop online – but the true driving force is largely the convenience of door-to-door delivery. Of the surveyed consumers who purchased products online in the past year, 61% reported using standard shipping, while 42% went with two-day delivery.

Of all shipping promises, 77% of consumers surveyed in the report ranked free shipping as the most important option for online purchasing decisions. Still, the majority of consumers show a preference for reliable delivery, with high expectations that retailers will deliver products when they promise to.

Embracing retention through brand loyalty

Dedicated loyalty programs are a lynchpin for online retailers coasting on the Prime Day shopping mentality. Premium loyalty incentives – like tiered, paid, or value-based programs – have been shown to drive higher engagement and sustainable return customer behavior.

A recent study by Clarus Commerce indicated that nearly 86% of consumers who were satisfied with a brand’s paid loyalty program were likely to choose that retailer over a competitor offering a lower price for future purchases.

Retail rivals have been able to capitalize on the Prime Day mentality around impulse purchases and saturated shopping behavior by creating meaningful connections with customers after the sales are over. Personalized offerings, exclusive benefits, and content that goes beyond the discount signals value for customers who engage with Amazon competitors during Prime Day, laying a solid foundation for brand loyalty.

Fine-tuning sales operations and martech

With more than 29% more retailers expected to play in this year’s Prime Day arena, airtight sales operations and strong e-commerce technology are factors in delivering a positive customer experience and supporting promotional efforts.

Hazelcast CEO Kelly Herrell pointed out that mega-sale events like Prime Day “not only create new consumer demands, but also daunting technical challenges for retailers vying to keep up with the onslaught of buyers and transaction volumes.”

With Amazon alone selling more than 100 million products during last year’s Prime Day (equating to more than 1,150 transactions every second), retailers face the pressure to ensure that all technology touchpoints are optimized to withstand high-volume traffic while still delivering key funnel metrics.

“In this new climate, mere microseconds matter as even fleeting blips or delays can mean thousands lost in failed transactions – and unhappy consumers missing out on their desired purchase. Retailers who don’t build the right systems to support this type of split-second processing simply won’t survive the Prime-pocalypse,” Herrell said.

Featured snippets, also known as “position zero” placements on Google, have been receiving their fair share of glory and blame lately. 

While some big corporations like Forbes went ahead and questioned if Google is stealing traffic with the featured snippet, content creators like me have found it easy to get more traffic, thanks to being able to rank small sites on a featured snippet.

This post will give you a brief idea on how you can rank a page on Google’s featured snippet — without building any links to that page.

Understand the types

There are three major types of featured snippets that you can go for. As most of our clients are bloggers, we tend to go for either the paragraph snippets or the list snippets. Table snippet is another popular one that you can target.

Here’s a quick graph from Ahrefs about the snippet type and their percentages.

Targeting the right keywords

Once you finalize the type of snippet that you would want to go for, it is time to dig deep into your keyword research to find keywords that suit your blog and match the requirements for the type of snippet that you are going after.

If you are going for a paragraph snippet, you will have to find keywords that are primarily related to these types:

• How to
• Who/what/why

If you are trying to rank for a numeric list (numbered list or bullet points), the idea would be to structure your content in a way so that it offers step by step guides to someone. As per our experience, Google only shows a numeric list on featured snippet when the keyword tells Google that the searcher is looking for a list.

For table snippets, the idea is to have structured schema data on your website that compares at least two sets of data on the page. You don’t really have to have a properly formatted column-based table to be able to rank for table snippets as long as the comparison and the schema is there.

Understanding the type and targeting the right keywords will do more than half of the job for you when it comes to ranking your website on the featured snippet with zero links.

However, you are not going to win the battle by out-throwing an already existing featured snippet. This will only work for keywords that don’t already have a featured snippet ranking on Google.

To grab featured snippets from the existing competition, you will need to go ahead and perform a few more steps.

Copying your competitor

Some will call it “being inspired”, but essentially, what you are doing is copying the structure of an existing featured snippet article and trying to make it better (both with content and if possible, with links).

What do I mean when I say, copying the structure of an existing page and making it better? If you want to rank for the featured snippet for the keyword “best cat food brands” and if the one, ranking at this moment already has a list of 20, you will have to create a list of 25, in the exact same format that the current one is using.

Once that’s done, the final step is simply to make sure you have proper schema on the page.

Note: It is very unlikely that this method will help you outrank an existing featured snippet unless you also rank in the top ten for that keyword.

How do we find keywords for featured snippets?

As you can imagine, finding the right keyword to target is winning half of the battle when it comes to ranking on featured snippets.

I use Semrush, but feel free to use your own tools. Here’s what our agency’s process looks like.

Let’s assume, for the purpose of this article, that I run a pet blog and I am interested in ranking for multiple featured snippets.

I would go to Semrush, and put one of my competitors on search.

Source: semrush

Now click on “Organic Research”, select positions and from advanced filters, select – Include > Search features > featured snippet.

Source: semrush

This will give you a huge list of keywords that are currently ranking as featured snippets. As you can see, we found about 231 opportunities to target here:

Source: semrush

It is time to add another condition to our advanced filters. Let’s select include > words count > greater than five. Here’s what the new result looks like:

Source: SEMrush

From here on, simply organize the keywords by volume and then select the ones that you think matches with your target market. Like any keyword research, you will have to find keywords that have low competition and moderate search volume. Personally, I would try to go for keywords that have less than 500 monthly searches.

Make sure that you are following the initial three steps that we discussed. You will almost always have a higher chance of ranking on featured snippet following this strategy.

Khalid Farhan blogs about internet marketing at KhalidFarhan.com. He can be found on Twitter @iamkhalidfarhan.

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Anticipated for months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted today to fine Facebook a record $5 billion for apparent violations of a 2011 consent decree that required the company to better protect user privacy. This is according to reports in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and AP. The commission voted 3-2, reportedly with the two Democrats voting against according to the New York Times’ report.

Fines and supervision. In addition to the fine, “Facebook agreed to more comprehensive oversight of how it handles user data . . . But none of the conditions in the settlement will restrict Facebook’s ability to collect and share data with third parties,” the Times says. “And that decision appeared to split the five-member commission. The two Democrats who voted against the deal sought stricter limits on the company, the people [familiar with the proceeding] said.”

Triggered by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the FTC investigated Facebook for more more than a year before deciding to impose the record fine. And the massive penalty may well signal a new, more aggressive enforcement posture by federal regulators toward technology companies in the absence of federal privacy legislation. The full terms of the settlement, which reportedly include ongoing oversight, will likely be disclosed early next week.

The largest FTC fine prior to this was a roughly $22 million penalty against Google in 2012 for circumventing no-third-party cookie default settings on the mobile Safari browser (“Cookiegate”).

They saw it coming. Facebook had been expecting the fine and prepared shareholders during its most recent quarterly earnings release. The company also set aside $5 billion in advance to pay for it. Accordingly, the penalty has probably already been factored into Facebook’s stock price. But even $5 billion is not that significant for a company with revenues of more than $55 billion in 2018.

For its part, Google has received several multi-billion dollar fines in Europe for various antitrust violations. Despite this, Google has emerged almost completely unscathed. Similarly, Facebook is unlikely to be materially impacted by this fine.

In the wake of Cambridge Analytica and other data-related controversies, Facebook has pivoted to more forcefully embrace privacy and regulation.

Why we should care. Before we can do any assessment of the marketing-related fallout from this settlement, we’ll need to see the formal terms of the agreement. However, as the New York Times story suggests, none of Facebook’s core ad capabilities appear to have been compromised.

Change is a natural part of a business, particularly when it comes to your digital presence.

The need to rebrand, switch up the CMS (content management system), consolidate your resources or revamp the architecture and user journey of your website, is ultimately inevitable. And whatever the goal may be, it is not uncommon for all major initiatives to fall under the umbrella of a contemporary digital marketer.

How does Google feel about changes

One thing to keep in mind, however, is Google’s tendency to be less than accommodating towards major website changes, especially URL changes. And who can blame them? Whilst Google’s algorithm may be able to detect semantic differences between websites, it’s somewhat unrealistic to expect it to also realize that the similarities between store.hmv.com and hmv.com mean they’re both the same brand.

Therefore, without acknowledging this, many domain changes result in staggering losses of traffic and rankings, and suddenly the most well-known brand in an industry becomes non-existent within Google’s universe. It is therefore imperative to ensure the changes you’re making can be correctly comprehended by Google.

How to understand Google

Expecting a lonesome digital marketer to be a jack of all channels is quite unrealistic. But luckily you don’t need to be. There’s a whole industry of people who are dedicating their days to figuring out how to think exactly like Google, and they can help you avoid the risk of decimating your hard-earned keyword rankings (unless you’re doing black hat tactics, in which case, those rankings aren’t very hard-earned after all). This industry is SEO.

Three pillars of SEO

Before we dive into the value SEO, here’s a quick summary of the three key pillars:

• Accessibility: Technical workings of the site. This includes everything that Googlebot takes into account when understanding your site’s code. Basically, all the tags and developer language that are telling the crawlers how the site should be interpreted.
• Relevance: Content your visitors and Googlebot came for, including all of the text and metadata on your pages, blog posts, and even videos – everything your visitors see.
• Authority: Backlinks from other sites, with each one counting as a “vote” of confidence, which Google takes into account when ranking.

So with that crash course, we can now connect the dots between SEO expertise and high-level migration requirements.

Why you need SEO

Whilst a website’s appearance is important, first and foremost it’s crucial to understand how you’re going to explain the changes you’re making to Google. We suggest a handwritten note:

“Dear Google,

Don’t worry, some things are changing but we still love you, so here is a comprehensive, incredibly large map of URL redirects detailing the new versions of the exact same pages you know and ranked the first time around.”

On a more serious note, however, here are five ways in which the expertise of an SEO professional can propel your website towards successful migration.

1. Taking the complexity out of URL mapping and redirects

Since a site’s internal linking and page equity is an essential part of SEO, we deal with redirect handling and URL mapping and all the complications that come along with it, all the time. Therefore, you have to make sure each redirect makes sense, and also that each page is able to take on the new status. Common issues at this stage can include:

• Incorrectly implemented redirects (302 or the dreaded 307) that may undermine your intentions
• Extremely long or even infinite redirect loops, which will cause Google to rage-quit the page or even your entire site
• Redirects to irrelevant pages, which Google may not mind too much but will annoy your users

Just in case you’re not convinced, here’s a scary graph of what happens when you don’t do this properly.

Source: Croud

The process of telling Google what’s what extends beyond redirect mapping, it also includes on-page work. Specifically, the canonical tag.

Fun fact: 301 redirects don’t actually stop Google from indexing your pages, so if you left it at that, you would just end up with some poor rankings and some confused users. Luckily, your friendly neighborhood SEO knows all about the various ways to help encourage Google to drop your old page out of the index as it goes along your new site.

2. Understanding your website’s behavior

So, you’ve done all the mapping and have set up just how to introduce Google to your new site. While that’s very exciting, we do have to remember the “understanding” part of these first several weeks. The primary reason for site migration is to provide a new and improved site that will (hopefully) gain more traffic and drive more business. However, without understanding how your original site performed, it’s very difficult to establish if your new site is actually superior. This, therefore, highlights the importance of benchmarking.

Of course, you may know how much traffic your ad campaigns – and even your website in general – are pulling in, but you’ll need to know more than that to be successful. As SEOs, our aim is to understand your site as much as the search engines do, which as explained above, is much more than just content on your pages.

To paint the best picture of your website before you migrate, use several tools that provide a variety of key SEO data points:

• Keyword rankings and their respective landing pages
• Links to your site
• Pages with 200 (and non-200) status codes
• Crawl volume and frequency

By aggregating the different metrics and views of each tool, you can create a beautiful, detailed portrait of how your website behaves, and how it’s interpreted by both search engines and users. Astute benchmarking will allow for in-depth, helpful post-migration analysis, particularly for those metrics that can only be recorded at a particular moment. There’s no way to tell how fast your pages loaded, or how many pages returned non-200 status codes last week. If you don’t gather this information beforehand, you won’t be able to fully report the impact of the migration.

After you complete the migration, you can gather this data again to truly judge your results. Everyone will remember to check the new traffic statistics, and even the new rankings, but only an SEO will remember to check that those numbers make sense and you haven’t accidentally orphaned half of your product pages. SEOs will make sure users aren’t just on your site, but crawlers are too. With proper data at your disposal, you can set about making iterative improvements which will undoubtedly be necessary.

3. Migrating your tracking tools

All this talk about performance and results is for naught if you can’t actually track any of it. Much like Google’s search engine, Google tools aren’t so keen on supporting your site migration either. Therefore, you have to make sure you’re ready to start tracking the new site, ideally without losing your old data.

Dealing with various tracking tools and codes all the time, an SEO has to be a Google Analytics expert too (it’s commonly a requirement on most resumes). So how do you avoid a scenario in which either you have no historical data and can’t measure the success, or when you have two different accounts and have to do the calculations for performance comparisons by yourself? By making plans to migrate your tracking tools.

Ideally, you’ll use the same analytics tracking code for the migrating site, so that the old metrics can be directly compared to the new numbers once it takes place. Need some more persuasion?

Take a look at this graph detailing a successful site migration.

Source: Croud

 4. Testing and the importance of the human touch

So you’ve planned all your new pages, and your new site is built. What’s next? Hopefully, it’s built in a staging environment and not actually live. If it’s not, you run the risk of causing all sorts of issues with duplicate content and ranking cannibalization.

However, your SEO can easily take charge of this with a robots.txt directive (which will haunt them until the site is live and they can change it). Despite its purpose, a staging environment doesn’t always reflect the search engine’s behavior since it lives in isolation. There’s no way to track backlinks or see exactly what it will look like in a SERP at this time.

Often, Googlebot doesn’t even fully crawl staging environments, because it’s seen as time-wasting. Therefore, your SEO’s brain is your very best test.

Everyone will check that the pages are set up as planned, but your SEO will be the one who can thoroughly re-test each individual redirect at 2 am. This will likely be the last time that any mistakes will be recognized before launch, so it’s critical to make sure that every redirect behaves as expected and that they are all 301 status codes.

Lastly, you’ll need to make sure that a single XML file stays live on the legacy site, containing all the legacy URLs. This will be used to push Googlebot through the old URLs and onto the new site, expediting your meticulously-mapped redirects.

5. Launching and mitigating loss

Finally, you’re ready to flip the switch and the champagne bottles are out. So you turn on the new site, and congratulations – you’ve just lost 20% of your traffic.

No, really, congratulations. In case you forgot the daunting chart we shared earlier in this post, website migrations can cause damaging losses, and sites that don’t prepare accordingly, often never recover. However, if you’re smart and you hired an SEO expert to take charge of this project, they’ll have the task at hand.

Your traffic loss is a product of search engines and users not recognizing your new site – temporarily. Your SEO will have made sure everything is set up properly, so Googlebot is quickly figuring out that your new site contains all the same high-ranking, trustworthy content as on your old site. It’s still a little miffed at you for changing on it, so you may only get back on the second pages of results.

You’ll still have some further optimizations to do, but it’s much easier to go from page two to page one, rather than page ten to page one.

Just remember, we’re guiding this migration from an SEO perspective. Googlebot is basically a person, so as long as it can read the site, we assume that users will enjoy their experience too.

Kailin Ambwani is a Digital Associate at global digital agency Croud, based in their New York office.

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Location intelligence company NinthDecimal is rolling out what it calls “the industry’s first multi-touch attribution (MTA) solution for foot traffic measurement.” The approach takes a more holistic look at different consumer touchpoints and how they impact offline store visitation.

NinthDecimal President David Staas says the company already has “200 customers running live with 500 different campaigns” and that there has been a very positive response from brands and agencies. Staas characterizes the MTA approach as “a fundamental rethinking of foot-traffic measurement.”

Next-gen location analytics. The company sees MTA as the next evolution of campaign measurement and analytics. It differs from “traditional” multi-touch approaches in its relative simplicity (quick set-up) and offline measurement capability.

NinthDecimal also says it’s the only multi-touch offering among the company’s location-intelligence/location analytics competitive peers, which include Foursquare/Placed, PlaceIQ, GroundTruth, Factual, Blis, Cuebiq, ThinkNear, Ubimo and others.

For the past several years, mobile-location data has increasingly been used to measure the impact of a single digital channel or sometimes two channels on offline consumer actions and incremental store visitation. In this way, it has brought new audience insights and new data on the efficacy of media, by connecting the digital and physical worlds. However, there’s always been a quasi- last-touch attribution problem with online-to-offline analytics focused on the impact of a single channel or campaign. NinthDecimal is bringing a broader lens and attribution framework to digital and soon to cross-channel (traditional and digital media) measurement.

Multiple touchpoints weighted. According to the company, “the MTA approach fractionally applies credit for visitation across every relevant customer touchpoint… Brands can use MTA based insights to optimize across audience segments, creatives and other aspects of their marketing or content to have the greatest impact on real business metrics like revenues and customer growth.”

In traditional location analytics, there’s a control and exposed methodology and a trailing attribution window (example: did those exposed to the (mobile, video, OOH) campaign show up in a store within 30 days?). Brands and agencies can then understand incremental lift and optimize campaigns that are driving foot traffic and sometimes in-store sales.

Many more variables in the mix. The MTA approach looks “back” at various categories of data — audiences, creatives, publishers and media touchpoints — before the offline visit. The media are weighted according to an algorithm and the data are aggregated (millions of impressions/exposures). NinthDecimal and its customers can then see which publishers, media and creatives are having an offline impact overall and on which audiences.

NinthDecimal says it gets data from a wide range of sources and says it sees 270 million devices monthly. Through direct and data partner relationships it can measure TV, search, social, display, video, OOH and print media. It also says it now has more than 200 audience attributes that marketers can target and optimize against.

Why we should care. Most digital marketers are still using a first or last-touch attribution methodology, let alone more sophisticated location analytics. Most enterprises have wanted multi-touch attribution for a long time, but it has been complex to set up and is often unreliable because it’s based on abstract formulas that may or may not reflect actual consumer behavior. The combination of MTA and store visitation data potentially solves some of these challenges for brands, retailers and others who ultimately care most about mapping and optimizing media against real-world business outcomes.

The search landscape has always been one that is evolving. Right now the big discussion is around Google’s control on how much search traffic goes to publishers vs. stays on Google.com.

This might end up being a really big point for Google when it comes down to challenging the long-held point of view that competition is just one click away.

Over the past ten years that I’ve been writing for this publication, I’ve written an article each year where I review how paid and organic search can work together, and how brands appear in search listings. This article over the past few years has started to evolve into how Google has changed the search page. These changes include the inclusion of more paid search results, shopping, and local listings. As you will see from the data there is certainly a trend that is fueled by both Google’s growth objectives as a publicly-traded company, as well as consumer behavior shifts (that are, mobile and local).

The first piece is the overlap of paid and organic listings. What I’m tracking here is the number of times a brand appears in both paid and organic search results as a percentage of total paid results. For example, if there are three paid search ads, and GEICO, Progressive and Liberty Mutual all appear in both the paid and organic listings that would score 100%. I’ve been tracking five verticals since 2010. What’s really interesting is over the past few years the amount of overlap has gone up on average. However, this year the overlap dropped by 44% year over year. This had a lot to do with the drops across financial services, travel, and technology.

Source: Google Search Data

Factors driving this change

I think this trend is driven by two factors:

1. Increasing competition & costs – CPCs (cost per clicks) were up by five percent between Q4 2018 and Q1 2019
2.  Rise of other areas of optimization – Local Listings/Maps/Google My Business and Shopping. These additional areas have provided both a distraction and a release valve for additional traffic, and higher ROI.

Source: Google Search Data

So what has been happening to the other areas of optimization, especially local and shopping? I have also been tracking these areas over the last three years. The change is exactly what you would have expected. Over the past three years, the percent of search terms that have local listings has increased more than three times, from 11% in 2017 to 38% in 2019. Retail continues to have 100% of listings with the map pack. This validates the importance to both Google, brands, and consumers of having a local presence. Also gives additional credence to optimizing and cleansing your location data, not just on Google, but across the web.

Source: Google Search Data

Shopping ads have come on in a big way

Shopping ads have also continued to have a strong presence and have grown slightly. They are up from 43% in 2017 to 47% in 2019. Shopping ads provide a more visual experience for the consumer, and some very strong conversion rates for brands. Google has also been continuing to evolve their shopping product announcing a redesigned shopping experience in May. This included new ad formats, online to in-store options, and Smart Campaigns (which help encourage SMBs to get into the game). All these changes and enhancements demonstrate a commitment to the product and the value to both consumers and brands.

What should you be doing as a search marketer?

So what is the impact of this data to us as search marketers? I think there are two key takeaways:

1. Search is more than just keyword listings and optimizing your website. Yes, SEO and paid search are critical, but extending beyond that is also very important. Optimizing your product feed, and local listings are very important to success. You must think about how you are there for your consumers regardless of what they are trying to do, buy, visit, or call.
2. Having a winning strategy for critical search terms is important. You might not be able to afford top placement for paid search, or technical issues might be preventing you from having the top organic listing. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t need to have a presence for those terms over the long term. These could be choosing specific times of the day, or including schema markup for event listings. Whatever the case may be, there are now more ways than ever to be found, and having a very thoughtful strategy for your brand is key.

The search engine results page will continue to evolve as consumer behavior and technology evolves. Think about the continued expectations of online to offline buying behavior, real-time inventory, or the impact 5G will have on the marketplace. Remind yourself to take a look around at a macro-level to see the trends vs. always focusing on detailed keyword level optimizations. You will often find some great trends to help put your strategy in context.

P.S. Special thanks to Audrey Goodrick who helped pull together this data. Thank you for your help this summer Audrey.

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