A healthy and quality backlink profile can help you stay ahead of the competition. After Google rolled out the Penguin algorithm in 2012, it became clear that the quality of backlinks matters, not just their quantity. The more is not the merrier anymore. 

Luckily, over the years, it has become easier to analyze and monitor backlinks thanks to a number of specialized tools available on the market.

Through the use of such tools, you can dissect any backlink profile and discover where the competitors reverse engineer their SEO strategy to generate new backlinks. Plus, you can find out what kind of content performs best for obtaining certain types of backlinks or social engagement.

This post focuses on five tools agencies can take advantage of to benchmark the link quality of their clients against competitors, keep an eye on specific backlinks, and discover opportunities to partner up with other websites to reach the set SEO goals.

1. SE Ranking

Source: SE Ranking

SE Ranking offers a complete range of tools designed to help you stay on top of your entire SEO workflow, including backlinks.

With the Backlink Checker tool, you can discover all incoming links to any website, regardless of whether it belongs to you, a client, or a competitor.

Along with the full list of backlinks, referring domains, and Do/NoFollow links, the tool provides data on the backlink’s status, specifies the anchor text, the date the link was last seen and added on, the destination URL, and the Domain Trust score. Plus, you can add filters to conveniently sort the data.

The entire list of backlinks can then be added to a website in a single click where the data can be further analyzed. That’s where the other backlink tool comes into play.

Source: SE Ranking

The Backlink Monitoring tool enables you to work closely with the backlinks that have been added to a website, and get daily reports on any changes. This is where all the day-to-day backlink management tasks are performed.

By connecting Google Search Console, the list of backlinks will constantly get updated automatically. Otherwise, you will have to use Backlink Checker every now and then to pull up an updated list of backlinks.

Furthermore, you can switch between tabs to get an overview of the backlinks, see all the anchor texts, and set up a Disavow file to signal to Google what backlinks you don’t want it to take into account when analyzing the reference weight of the website.

Now, in addition to the parameter data provided in the Backlink Checker tool, the Backlink Monitoring tool offers a lot more information on each backlink, such as Google Index Status, Moz DA, Referring IP, Country, External Links, Alexa rank, and Social shares. This data gives you a good grasp of the backlink profile at hand.

Besides providing an array of backlink parameter data by default, the Backlink Monitoring tool gives you an opportunity to specify additional information on each backlink via custom parameters that need to be filled out manually, such as Source, Price, Anchor type, Category, Backlink manager, Setting up dates, Validity period, and Notes. Doing so will give you a convenient way to go through large amounts of data.

All in all, the tool provides comprehensive data, the interface is very clean, modern, and definitely not an eye-ache to look at. On top of that, the white label feature along with automatic reporting makes it easy to communicate with clients.

What else comes with the package

• Website audit
• Keyword rank tracker
• Keyword suggestion tool
• Competitor research
• Page changes monitoring
• Social media management
• Keyword Grouper
• Lead generator
• Search volume checker
• Index status checker
• Page changes monitoring
• API

Pricing

It’s a paid tool (starting at $39/month) but it offers a free 14-day trial. The Enterprise package suitable for agencies is available for $189/month.

2. LinkMiner

If you’re looking for a backlink analysis tool that’s specifically designed to help you find backlink building opportunities, LinkMiner is the right solution for you.

Just like other backlink analysis tools, LinkMiner also enables you to check the backlinks of any imaginable site, including your clients’ and their competitors’. Naturally, it also has a lot of other useful features.

With LinkMiner, you can analyze up to 50 backlinks a day at no cost regardless of the access level. And when analyzing such backlinks, you can click any one to get an instant preview of that website along with the highlighted anchor text, referring website title and URL — and decide whether or not it makes sense to replicate the backlink.

Furthermore, the service automatically breaks backlinks down into groups based on their category like Q&A, blog, forum, making it easier to spot new backlink opportunities and tag your favorite backlinks for later use. LinkMiner also provides a number of third-party metrics such as Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Do/NoFollow attributes to help you evaluate a link’s strength.

The provided third-party metrics can be a great way of analyzing the backlinks and determining the most valuable ones. Plus, the system will notify you if any backlinks break or go missing, but it’ll be up to you to reclaim the link from the site owner.

As for LinkMiner in general, it has some flaws that are a result of the tool being too simple for experienced SEO specialists, but it’s great if you’re just starting out with building links, so be sure to give it a go.

What else comes with the package

LinkMiner is a part of the Mangools SEO suite which also includes:

• KWFinder
• SERPChecker
• SERPWatcher

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $44/month) but it offers a free 10-day trial. The Agency package is available for $79.90/month.

3. URL Profiler

URL Profiler is a powerful software-based SEO tool that can pull bulk data from sites at a domain and URL level. Considering the fact that there are plenty of SEO tools out there like Majestic, MozScape, Ahrefs, Google, MY Addr and Copyscape, to name a few, URL Profiler was designed to group such tools to provide comprehensive insights under one roof.

The tool can actually be used to perform a number of SEO tasks that include the audit of content, social media, and Google penalties, link prospecting, keyword rank tracking, and, most importantly, backlink analysis.

URL Profiler analyzes the quality of backlink profiles, allowing you to quickly go through a huge number of links by analyzing various data such as location, link type, and the anchor text for spamming and unnatural use of keywords.

Since there’s a lot of data to work within this tool, it is up to your knowledge and experience to select the metrics that you value most.

Once you fill everything out, the tool produces an Excel file with multiple sheets containing a detailed analysis of every specified URL. You can look at the link score together with its explanation, view a list of URLs on Google’s blacklist, automatically get the contact info of all the sites you want to reach out to, and a number of other metrics.

With the power of this data, you can make informed decisions regarding every single backlink. To facilitate data analysis, you can customize the settings and look at URL and domain data separately to have a clear grasp of why certain URLs rank higher.

To sum up, URL Profiler is a tool for advanced SEO professionals as there’s a learning curve newbies will have to go through. Moreover, if you’re already using a number of the biggest SEO tools on the market, then URL Profiler is a what you need as it puts everything in front of you in a single data-rich, but, unfortunately, boring interface.

What else comes with the package

• Keyword tracking
• Analytics
• Data export
• External integrations
• Link tracking
• Data import
• Multi-user

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $19.95 + VAT/month) but it does offer a free 14-day trial. The Agency package is available for $64.95/month.

4. Monitor Backlinks

The name is an instant giveaway, but, either way, Monitor Backlinks was designed to help professionals check their and their competitors’ backlinks.

With this tool, you can find and keep track of backlinks, and Google keyword rankings on autopilot via email notifications. So, whenever a competitor successfully uses a keyword to obtain a new quality backlink, you’ll have a chance to act quickly and not let your clients fall behind.

Monitor Backlinks gives you an overview of your backlink profile, providing details on the domains that are helping your SEO efforts, and those that are not. Additionally, the tool sends out reports full of insights on the competition, highlighting what keyword resulted in a high Google rank, as well as backlink data. With data like that, all that’s required from you is to reverse engineer the process to devise a solution that works for your clients.

The tool is aimed at helping you build a strong backlink profile and come up with an SEO strategy to foster business and traffic growth. To help you achieve this, the tool is packed with the most critical SEO metrics that give you all the data you need in one neat interface.

The graph in the dashboard deserves a special mention. It allows you to measure keyword-based site traffic dynamics, as well as the efforts to build a healthier backlink profile. Such graphs provide information to clients that they can easily visually comprehend without doing any digging.

What else comes with the package

• External link count
• Backlink status
• Import/Export
• Bookmarklet
• Expiration date
• Disavow links export
• Tags and notes

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $24.90/month) that offers a free 30-day trial. For agencies, you can request a custom quote, if you want to control more than 10 domains ($187.43/month).

5. Mention

The last tool from this roundup is a web and social media brand reputation management and monitoring solution called Mention. Evidently, unlike the other tools described here, this one isn’t a backlink analysis tool per se.

In fact, we included it in the list because it can really help you get good topical backlinks by notifying you of all online mentions you’re interested in. Say someone is discussing a client’s brand, product, service, or content, but doesn’t link out — join in on the conversation and request that a link to the target website be added.

The tool can easily keep track of keyword-based mentions in over 40 languages across billions of sources online in real time. But what you want to be on the lookout for are articles that mentioned your client but did not link out to the site. Plus, the tool’s influencer discovery features can assist you in finding popular people who can help you get the word out.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do this work manually. Set up to receive daily email alerts of all mentions on that day, or, alternatively, get notified via the desktop/mobile app. Plus, you can get laser-precise results by filtering them by sentiment, location, and gender.

The best part for agencies is that all the data, reports, and mentions can be white-labeled with the client’s logo and sent to them automatically.

What else comes with the package

• Filter out online resources you don’t want to track
• Share alerts with clients and assign tasks to colleagues
• Get notified about priority alerts
• The service studies your behavior to hide irrelevant alerts

Pricing

It is a paid tool (starting at $29/month) but it has a free 14-day trial that allows you to track 500 mentions for 3 search terms. The Enterprise package is available for $600/month or even more.

Summing up

Although all of these tools aren’t free, they offer some type of cost-free trial. For this reason, we’d recommend trying them all out before choosing one solution for your backlink analysis and monitoring needs.

The bottom line is that you should consolidate the data from all these tools to get a clear picture of your clients’ and their competitors’ backlink profiles. Even some of these solutions with huge amounts of data are lacking in user-friendliness and design, and may even provide different crawl depths, index stats, and other valuable metrics for the same URLs.

So, if you’re serious about backlink analysis, it’s best to start using several of the mentioned tools and deciding on those that suit your needs most as you go along.

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Everyone in attendance during the SMX Advanced presentation with Amy Bishop and Michelle Morgan got an amazing deep dive on using paid media channels to effectively guide users from discovery to conversion. There was a ton of information in this session I couldn’t fit into this recap, but I wanted to share my main takeaways Amy and Michelle presented.

Know your market

It all starts with knowing your market segmentation. You should conduct an exercise (links to the templates in the image below) and define in each area which product and service is the best fit based on which problems you are trying to solve.  Besides the best fit, you should also try and figure out which users may be the worst fit for your business.

We also must separate the buyer’s journey from the sales journey. Maybe people consider the two to be the same, but the journeys are completely different. The sales team is looking at their job performance and doing what is best to get users to close. The buyer is becoming aware of a problem and then researching what to buy and where to buy it from to solve their initial problem. It’s our job as marketers to figure out who the audience is, but since users’ paths can be completely different, we need to research audiences in ways that make sense for each user.

Using audiences in a meaningful way

As people take different turns in their buyer’s journey, we can utilize audiences to better craft our strategies and market to these users. One of the best things in our industry is most of the major advertising platforms offer audience insights tools. The biggest takeaway is that these tools tell you how your audience or personas translate into the exact targeting options on the platforms.

• Facebook Audience Insights – This is really great for creating targeting personas. Identify top converting demographics and zero in on those first. Further segment by layering interests and other demographics. Identify new interests to target, and then monitor performance to flesh out and validate your personas.
• Google Ads Audience Insights – We can look at any audience we have (must have at least 1,000 users in it) to see which in-market and affinity audiences your base audience belongs to. Look at customer lists, converters, high volume purchasers, etc. to get a better understanding of how these audiences are comprised.
• Google Analytics – Also has in-market and affinity data in a broader scope, but we can layer on many other demographic insights.

There are many ways to look at your audience data between the channels. Look for patterns in between the platforms to find which ones should be tested first depending on the persona and where that persona might be in the buyer’s journey.

Map it out to make sure you know the information each user needs, what device they typically use, what action you want the user to take, and how you can measure the success of that action. And as we create different actions from each persona, we can build audiences off of these actions to create remarketing audiences to use to keep guiding the user to eventual purchase.

Calls-to-actions that make sense

We need to always keep in mind what we are asking our users to do. It’s not about what we as business owners (or marketers) want the user to do; it’s about what’s best for the user in that moment. We already mapped out the path to purchase in the section previous, but what action is holding these users up that is preventing them from moving forward? We need to work to figure this out to make sure we can have the proper content and CTA to keep them moving further along.

Ideally, you want to have CTAs for all stages of the funnel. Video views are great for top of funnel marketing because we’re not asking for a firm commitment from someone who may not even know who your brand is. This is going to be more effective than asking for the demo on the first interaction because the user most likely doesn’t know who you are or why they need your brand. But as users get deeper in the funnel, we can be more aggressive with our CTAs as the user shows more interest as time goes on.

Messaging in multi-channel

We also have to back away from the thought that people only use one channel throughout the buyer’s journey. Users do not only use Google or only use Facebook. You can’t make people use a channel. Advertisers have to go where their users like to go. Many of these channels can be used from top to bottom of the funnel. And as we expand our marketing message throughout these channels, we need to make sure the CTAs also match across the channels to make sure we’re serving the same message to users depending on their persona.

Here are targeting suggestions from Amy and Michelle depending on where the user is in the funnel.

• Top of Funnel – Utilize interest-based targeting, lookalike/similar audiences, affinity and in-market audiences as well as other custom audiences to fill the funnel. Be sure to exclude your lower funnel targets to make sure the top of funnel message doesn’t get repeated as users continue the journey.
• Middle of Funnel – Go after visitor traffic, repeat purchasers and loyalists, video viewers, and anyone else who engaged with social media posts or your mid-funnel content.
• Bottom of Funnel – Cart abandoners, form abandoners, visitors of high-intent pages like pricing, low funnel customer match audiences.

Let the user convert on the channel of their choosing. Create identical audiences for each stage of the funnel on all applicable channels if you can. Also, don’t forget about creating identical exclusions to make sure you’re not showing users any ads outside of where they are in the funnel. The more we keep our ad message and audience targeting to the persona across each channel, the better chance we have of getting the user to move further along in the funnel to eventual purchase.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

June 13 saw the release of a new tool by London-based company Trint which can assist the crawlability and visibility of video content in search engines.

The Trint Player has been unveiled at the Global Editors Network Summit in Athens where it will be used to publish video and transcripts of keynotes by Google News founder Krishna Bharat and Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait.

Video to dominate traffic and SERPs

In two years, video content is expected to make up 80% of online traffic. Google is increasingly returning video content in its SERPs and delivering it in a variety of ways, depending on device used and the type of content that is searched for.

To date, search engines can only find a video based on words in the title, the description and in a small amount of accompanying metadata. The embeddable Trint Player works by automatically attaching a transcript to videos using AI.

A search engine indexing a page with a video published in the player will be able to record all the words from the attached transcript and show the spoken words in search results.

The transcript functionality is interactive. Users can click on a word and the tool will navigate to that part of the video. It auto-scrolls as the video plays and you can easily follow along or view the text without image and/or sound.

I gave the searchability of the above Elon Musk video a quick test by Googling “we have an amazing product to show you tonight.” Indeed, the page on the Trint site which is hosting the video ranks very well – just below some news sites which have manually taken some quotes from Musk’s presentation. It is also worth noting that the embed in this instance is a fair way down the page.

Benefits for news sites and marketers

To date, manual transcription has been a very laborious and timely job. Understandably, taking time on such a task for SEO benefit is not necessarily a big priority for journalists. The Trint Player can do this job for them with minimal legwork from the user – and with 99% accuracy according to the press materials. Trint already boasts enterprise clients in The Associated Press, NBCUniversal, The Washington Post, Vice News and Der Spiegel.

It is also easy to see the potential for marketers and brands keen to get the most from their video content. According to Vidyard, 83% of marketers say video is becoming more important to them. Webinars and demos – precisely the types of videos which include a lot of unique content – are the most common types of video marketers are investing in.

Looking beyond YouTube

The player has been available to Trint customers in beta since February. It is currently compatible with videos published on YouTube and the company is awaiting feedback from users before exploring compatibility with other video hosting sites.

It builds on existing work the company have been doing with their productivity platform which uses automated transcription to change the way professionals work with audio/video to produce content and insights.

The company has been backed by Google Digital News Innovation Fund and the Knight Enterprise Fund. The launch of the Trint Player comes on the heels of the business closing $4.5 million in Series A funding, with follow-on investment from Horizons Lab, the Hong Kong-based seed fund operated by the managers of Horizons Ventures, as well as institutional investors including TechNexus and The Associated Press.

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VidMob has raised $25 million in its latest round of funding. The company said it will use the money to further develop its Agile Creative Studio, an API platform that curates first-party creative data to offer insights for optimizing video ad campaigns.

Why we should care

VidMob’s Agile Creative Studio employs, what the company defines as, first-party creative data to identify the creative assets within a video ad that yield the strongest performance. VidMob’s technology uses machine learning to analyze video ads and then uses that data to modify video ads in real-time so that they deliver more of an impact.

“The ad actually actually improves over time through this iterative process of creating and learning,” VidMob CEO Alex Collmer told TechCrunch. He said the company is trying to build what it thinks of as an API for creative, “Today, that friction point is frequently with our platform partners, with the Facebooks and Snaps, but we see it expanding to other areas where you see imagery as the central point of communication.”

The company’s video creation, analytics and optimization tools are designed for social video advertisers. VidMob is a certified creative partner with all of the major social networks, including Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. With more money to put toward its Agile Creative Studio technology, it will be able to offer advertisers a more comprehensive platform for their video advertising efforts.

More on the news

• VidMob’s Agile Creative Studio platform is still in beta, but the company reports it has already analyzed more than 280,000 ad assets using the technology.
• This Series B funding was led by BuildGroup, with additional investments from Acadia Woods, Herington LLC, Interlock Partners, Macanta Investments, LP’s of Manifest and You & Mr. Jones.
• VidMob has now raised a total of $45 million since 2015 when it raised $2 million in seed funding to build out at marketplace for video editing professionals.

When you have a smaller digital marketing budget, every dollar counts, and you often need to get creative to make sure your ads show where you want.

In this post, I’ll walk through a few important tactics to utilize if you are launching a new program or if you have an established program with a smaller budget.

1. Retargeting site visitors and purchasers
2. Mid-funnel remarketing
3. Bid adjustments: Geo-targeting and ad scheduling
4. Search terms reports: Exact keywords and negative keywords
5. InMarket and Similar Audiences for competitive terms

1. Retargeting site visitors and purchasers

We all know that it takes more money to acquire a brand-new customer than it does a customer who has already purchased or otherwise engaged with the brand. Paid search and paid social can be a very competitive space, so it’s crucial to use audience targeting to the best of your abilities. One easy way to get the biggest bang for your buck, with lower CPAs (Cost per acquisitions) and higher ROAS (return on advertising spend), is to retarget site visitors and purchasers. These users have already shown intent and interest in your brand, making it easier for them to engage.

It is important within your search campaigns to either segment these users into their own campaign or bid-up on them within your current campaigns. For GDN (Google Display Network) and paid social, try to get in front of these users with a special message to bring them back to the site, and keep these campaigns separate from your acquisition campaigns. For both paid search and paid social, consider special messaging or discounts for these users to help them convert.

2. Mid-funnel remarketing

Many B2B or lead gen businesses will focus their paid search and paid social campaigns on just getting that upper-funnel lead and will then let their sales team and email convert that lead down-funnel. Another way to ramp up the success of your paid social campaigns is to create mid-funnel remarketing campaigns to target upper-funnel leads who have not converted down the funnel. Paid social can also help push users to convert and helps complement the efforts of your sales team and email. One tactic is to stay in front of leads with a case study or white paper that talks about some of your brand’s biggest value propositions and how they help the current problems of your target audience.

3. Bid adjustments: Geo-targeting and ad scheduling

When you have limited advertising funds, it is important to allocate those funds to the areas that are performing the most efficiently, just as you would for keywords. I recommend analyzing these segments and adjusting bids accordingly:

• Geographical
• Device
• Time of day and day of the week
• Audience
• HHI (Household Income)
• Demographics (Age and gender)

For example: If you are a B2B company, you might see that CPA rises during the weekend. To take advantage of this observation, pull back on Saturday and Sunday to save more money for more efficient days of the week. Our AdWords history has shown that clients lower CPA by up to 30% by smarter bidding according to performance in these segments.

4. Search query reports: Exact keywords and negative keywords

Search query reports should be your best friend. Review the search query reports specifically for your broad terms to monitor poor matches and new top performers. Long tail keywords can add value to the account and provide reductions in CPA, so it is important to build them out if they are performing well in matching to your broad keywords. These broad keywords can also lead to poor matching, though, so it is important to review the search queries and add irrelevant or poor matching search queries as negative keywords.  For example, let’s say you are a skincare company that sells facial oil and are bidding on the keyword “facial oil.” You begin seeing your click-through rate start to decrease. You look into search queries and start to see that you are matching to “olive oil,” which is not a relevant search. You would add that as a negative to the account to cut back on wasted spend for irrelevant queries.

5. InMarket and Similar Audiences for competitive terms

Broad keywords can lead to high competition, high CPAs, and lower impression share, especially if bigger brands are part of the mix. That doesn’t mean you should ignore them; bid on potentially valuable broad terms, but restrict bidding to InMarket and Similar Audiences so your ads only serve to audiences you’re confident are interested in your product or service.

Small budgets might seem to lead to initial challenges, especially if the market is highly competitive or efficiency targets are not currently being met. Make sure to incorporate these steps into your marketing to drive greater efficiency.

If you have other tactics or strategies that have worked for your SMB, leave a comment.

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

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As marketers, we strive to design customer experiences that leave lasting impressions, drive conversions and keep our customers coming back for more. But do we rely too heavily on big data instead of honing in on the specific actions that drive customer engagements?

A recent report from Forrester commissioned by customer insights software firm FocusVision surveyed over 500 U.S. consumers to describe what they thought and felt was a truly memorable customer experience and the specific elements of the component that made it memorable. Forrester also surveyed over 200 B2C marketing decision-makers, including 54 CMOs, to gain insight into what methodologies they use to understand their customers.

The report defines big data as a “combination of structured and unstructured data, including log files, transaction information, internet of things, social media metrics, etc.” It defines small data as “a combination of VOC data, customer journey data, user focus groups, surveys, behavioral user experience data, etc.”

Small data unlocks the “why” behind customers’ actions

Over-reliance on big data is a common trend, according to the report findings. When asked if their customer experience strategy and execution was informed more by big data or by small data, nearly a third (29%) of the respondents said they rely “completely” on big data when making decisions.

Looking only at big data often leads digital marketers to convoluted customer insights and challenges in terms of understanding the drivers behind customer actions. More than half of the brands surveyed agreed or agreed strongly that small data is critical to unlocking the thoughts and emotions behind the actions customers take.

Forty-one percent of brands using small data strongly agreed they know why a customer chooses to purchase from them versus those who don’t. For brands not using small data, this number drops ten points to only 31%.

Digital marketing and business intelligence teams operate in silos

Additionally, the report found that marketing and business intelligence teams are communicating, but not effectively. The two groups are often siloed despite their heavy reliance on one another for day-to-day operations. These disparities in communication can lead to a breakdown across marketing strategies — when marketing is not adequately equipped with detailed insights, optimizing campaigns to meet customer needs will continue to be challenging.

Having a contextual background for your customer data — big or small — is a crucial success factor for digital marketers leveraging data to drive business decisions and further invest in martech. The context of your customers’ actions that is provided by the business intelligence group will tell you more about a customer’s decision-making process than merely looking at the big picture of whether or not a customer made a purchase.

Deeper insights deliver improved customer engagement

To eliminate the silo-factor between teams, marketers should meet regularly with their business intelligence team to review data findings and gain a deeper understand behind the insights they are given. Understanding these insights on the engagement level will help digital marketers better understand how to engage with customers effectively and drive bigger returns.

Big data will continue to be important, and business leaders and organizational stakeholders will continue to depend on it for broad-level insights into business outcomes and trends. But, marketers need to prioritize small data for day-to-day marketing decisions. By working closely with customer insights or business intelligence teams, digital marketers can gain a holistic, detailed view of their customers that delivers increased customer engagement and, ultimately, more conversions.

Whether you’re an SEO, PR or a website owner, it’s highly likely you’ve come across DA (Domain Authority). The metric, created by industry-leading platform Moz, was designed to help search marketers understand the value of a domain, at a glance and compare it with others in the same industry or niche.

This was important for SEO, third party links have long been used to understand how “trustworthy” a website is and form part of Google’s “ranking criteria” (although their importance and how this works is a hot talking point in SEO).

Moz uses their index (or understanding of the web), to map out these links between sites and, alongside other factors, try to assign a “competition” score to each website they encounter. This can then be used as a proxy to determine the value of a said site.

Note: I have nothing against Moz. This piece isn’t in any way designed to be a slight on them or their work, but further insight and context into how to use the data they provide.

The eye-opener to follower deception

Last year, Social Chain opened marketers’ eyes to the murky world of follower deception. Many brands understand the importance of influencers to the digital ecosystem, but measuring the value that someone can bring prior to working with them is difficult and time-consuming. As such, often companies rely on metrics that symbolizes “reputation”, followers, engagement, and other similar indicators. However, as Social Chain asserted, the typical signposts do not always depict a true picture and if not completely understood or manipulated, can lead to large amounts of spend being wasted.

This is a common theme with SEO. Although it’s less a question of manipulation and more a question of understanding. In 2012, Penguin, Google’s “webspam” filter was rolled-out and assigned a positive or negative value to third party links. Prior to this, “trust” was judged on an arguably simpler set of volume-based criteria, but as the flaws in the system were exploited. It soon became clear that a more complex solution was required, to ensure the integrity of search results was maintained. Trust continued to be an important factor in success, but SEO’s had to start thinking more carefully about how they generated these. Here the connection between SEO and PR became more important as links could not be artificially built they had to be earned, naturally.

The two teams started to collaborate more closely, with SEOs providing PRs extra resource to contact a “lower”, but still valuable tier of influencer and PRs helping SEOs reach the higher, more widely trusted publications that they could not access before. Over time, the lines between SEO and other channels have started to blur – and as teams were pushed to operate across remits, PRs started to use SEO metrics, with DA taking precedence (as it was arguably the simplest to use), to understand more about the people they were contacting. With investment from brands increasing, more influencers started to appear, and from this grew an industry in its own right.

Fast forward to the present day

An influencer marketer will likely sit across content, Social, PR, and SEO, with the goal of engaging personalities to improve performance across all the channels they are connected to (based on the goals of the organization/campaign). For social and PR, engagement and reach can be more easily measured. But SEO has always been complicated. This is because “good SEO” has never been about links alone and the idea of a “link value” is entirely subjective, based on factors that change between industries, counties, and even search results. As such, the idea of using a single, links-based metric to determine the value a domain can provide for SEO is inherently floored – and yet, many marketers, influencers and PR teams still continue to use DA for this purpose.

To make matters more complex, the whole link-building ecosystem has been flooded with misinformation. I discussed this in a recent webinar with SEMRush, but it’s often been the case that the wider industry’s understanding of the link building practice has come through commentators on the practice and not the experts conducting the work themselves. This means, the influencers and PR teams, and not the SEO community themselves.

Why is this the case?

There’s really no simple answer, although, for a long time before the collaboration was mainstream, it would be a frequent occurrence for SEOs and PRs to clash over remit cross-over. In the agency world, this could have led to reduced budgets – why pay two agencies to do the work of one, although (from my experience), clients were very much open to creating a joined-up approach between both teams.

While conflict happened behind the scenes, uncertainty, and misinformation filtered out to the influencer market, with PRs and SEOs trying to show that they “knew enough” about the other to make a wider judgment on influencer selection for projects. This led to followers and domain authority becoming key metrics in this process which, although not unhelpful, rarely offered the truest picture of a website’s worth. In turn, this led to transactional relationships with websites, where links and shares were bought for a price that, once this became a commodity only ever increased. Instead of paying for the time and expertise of the people that were being engaged, their value became intrinsically tied to their reach or their link-equity (perceived through domain authority), two metrics that could be easily manipulated.

Now, the growing rumble of discontent within the influencer landscape has finally hit the headlines with a theatrical flourish. Unfortunately for many, this has come too late, with brands realizing the cost of investing in reach over expertise, most famously with the Fyre festival scandal. But, this doesn’t mean that influencer marketing isn’t valuable, as I wrote at the time, but that how and most importantly – the reasons as to why marketers engage with content creators need to change. We’ve seen publicly how using followers to measure reach can be folly. But there’s still time to take these learnings and apply them to domain authority too before something as equally damaging to the industry happens.

Latest developments

Recent legislation in the UK has started to pave the way for change in this field. It’s certainly made working with influencers harder, in large part to the ambiguity around the specifics of how the changes should be interpreted, I personally apply the principle of “better safe than sorry”, even from a search perspective. Every brand interaction should now be declared as an advert, including event invites and even in cases where the only “payment” has been a reimbursing of travel costs. With Google’s hardline view on manipulative link building, the practice of engaging “high authority” SEO influencers is slowly ending or at least, becoming incredibly risky.

Instead, we should look to engage influencers for their subject matter expertise and credibility they can lend to a story or campaign. In practice, this means killing the transactional “I give you X and you give me Y” type of relationships and seeing content creators as partners in getting your message out to the world. For SEO, this may mean using “no-follow” links (which, in basic terms, tell crawlers that they should not consider them for search benefit), but this shouldn’t be an issue. Sure, their direct value on search may be limited, but to think that the search algorithm considers the web in as simple terms as this would be myopic. There are some brilliant studies around the power of brand on search, which are worth noting in this context. Moreover, at its heart, a link is there to carry users from A to B. Adding a “no-follow” tag doesn’t stop this from happening and in this case, using domain authority as a metric often would lead to discounting a valuable traffic driving part of this ecosystem.

With this shift in the industry and better collaboration than ever between search and the wider marketing mix, the opportunity for content, search and marketing communication teams to unite is stronger than ever. So too, is the need for it, as achieving cut-through in the wall of digital noise is harder than it’s ever been. Campaigns, to be successful on all fronts, must genuinely inspire, engage or provide value to users and older-school tactics, such as product reviews and content seeding, have all but lost their ability to drive results. On this point, we simply must move away from using domain authority and followers as a metric in isolation, as neither is an effective gauge of how useful a site might be to its users.

Closing notes

I’d like to speak directly to influencers because without a universal change in mindset, we’ll continue to see the same practices continue and the channel will continue to be under-utilized. I’d impress upon them the need to keep an open mind and focus on becoming the best subject matter experts that they can. I’d encourage the end of any agonizing over “vanity metrics”, which are often taken out of context, and in place look to whether their users are genuinely engaging with their content, and how this impacts their value as creators. Importantly, I’d implore everyone, PRs and SEOs included, to have a little more fun, harness the incredible creativity that brand communications teams, content creators, and influencer marketers can yield and build something great together.

Ric Rodriguez is an SEO Director and winner of the 2018 Drum Search Award. He can be found on Twitter @RicRodriguez_UK.

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Mary Meeker has released her annual internet report, giving marketers a glimpse of where we are globally in terms of social media use and online ad spend, among other trends. While overall internet usage keeps growing, social media usage is flattening — but that’s not slowing down online ad spend.

More than 50% of global population is now online. Between 2009 and 2018, the percent of global internet users has grown from 24% to 51% — more than doubling in just under ten years time. According to the report, there are now 3.8 billion global internet users, up 6% year-over-year.

Of all the people going online, more than a quarter (26%) of internet users fit into the “constantly online” category, up from 21% in 2015. Not surprisingly, 63% of adults say they are trying to limit their personal smartphone use.

Social media growth is slowing. The number of those people logging into social media networks daily is decelerating. As recently as 2016 and 2017, social platforms saw as much as 6% growth year-over-year. In the past year, that growth has slowed with social media usage up just 1% between 2018 and 2019.

Instagram and YouTube growing fastest. Facebook has the highest percentage of internet users who are logging on to a social platform at least once a day — but that number actually dropped from 31% in 2017 to 30% last year. YouTube, however, saw daily site usage increase to 27% of internet users in 2018, and increase from 22% in 2017.

Instagram grew daily site usage from 13% of internet users in 2017 to 19% last year. And while the number of internet users signing on daily to WhatsApp has grown only slightly between 2017 and 2018 (23% to 25%), the Facebook-owned messaging app ranks third among social platforms being accessed by daily.

Internet ad spend continues to grow. The report did not breakdown ad spend by platform, instead offering a generalized overview of year-over-year internet ad spend growth on desktop and mobile. At 22%, growth is strong, but what is most clear is how quickly mobile advertising has skyrocketed in the past five years compared to desktop ad spend.

While ad spend is growing, global internet ad revenue among six major platforms is decelerating. The report looked at revenue figures for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Snapchat and Pinterest. Looking year-over-year, growth has slowed fairly significantly.

In terms of ad revenue share among online ad platforms, Mary Meeker’s report confirms eMarketer’s findings published in February: Google leads followed by Facebook, with platforms like Amazon, Twitter, Snapchat and Pinterest well behind but gaining momentum.

Why we should care. There is not a lot of granular data to be gleaned from the report as far as market intelligence, but it does offer marketers a high level overview of what’s happening online from a global perspective. The number of people finding their way online keeps going up, but social media usage is stagnant. This could translate to marketers paying more attention to owned channels like email marketing.

There is no reason for marketers to have any knee-jerk reactions as far as social media strategy. But, knowing that future outcomes may not render the growth and ROI social once offered could help marketers better plan for the future.

In May, Google announced the launch of a new website aimed at explaining how they serve and address news across Google properties and platforms.

The site, How News Works, states Google’s mission as it relates to disseminating news in a non-biased manner. The site aggregates a variety of information about how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks news stories as well as how news can be personalized for the end user.

How News Works provides links to various resources within the Google news ecosystem all in one place and is part of The Google News Initiative.

What is The Google News Initiative?

The Google News Initiative (GNI) is Google’s effort to work with news industry professionals to “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” The GNI is driven and summarized by the GNI website which provides information about a variety of initiatives and approaches within Google including:

• How to work with Google (e.g., partnership opportunities, training tools, funding opportunities)
• A list of current partnerships and case studies
• A collection of programs and funding opportunities for journalists and news organizations
• A catalog of Google products relevant to journalists

Google attempts to work with the news industry in a variety of ways. For example, it provides funding opportunities to help journalists from around the world.

Google is now accepting applications (through mid-July) from North American and Latin American applicants to help fund projects that “drive digital innovation and develop new business models.” Applicants who meet Google’s specified criteria (and are selected) will be awarded up to $300,000 in funding (for U.S. applicants) or $250,000 (for Latin American applicants) with an additional award of up to 70% of the total project cost.

The GNI website also provides users with a variety of training resources and tools. Journalists can learn how to partner with Google to test and deploy new technologies such as the Washington Post’s participation in Google’s AMP Program (accelerated mobile pages).

AMP is an open source initiative that Google launched in February 2016 with the goal of making mobile web pages faster.

AMP mirrors content on traditional web pages, but uses AMP HTML, an open source format architected in an ultra-light way to reduce latency for readers.

News transparency and accountability

The GNI’s How It Works website reinforces Google’s mission to “elevate trustworthy information.” The site explains how the news algorithm works and links to Google’s news content policies.

The content policy covers Google’s approach to accountability and transparency, its requirements for paid or promotional material, copyright, restricted content, privacy/personalization and more.

This new GNI resource, a subsection of the main GNI website, acts as a starting point for journalists and news organizations to delve into Google’s vast news infrastructure including video news on YouTube.

Since it can be difficult to ascertain if news is trustworthy and accurate, this latest initiative by Google is one way that journalists (and the general public) can gain an understanding of how news is elevated and indexed on Google properties.

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