The shift to real-time data analysis and optimization has supercharged marketing in a way that frankly should have SEOs on the edge of their seats.

As organizations struggle to make sense of and activate their data, SEOs can combine their deep experience with massive amounts of data to make smarter business decisions and have an edge. Things are about to get real, very real.

Automation in marketing no doubt was (and still is) a game-changer for consultancies, agencies, and clients. Straight-up automation brought efficiency and order to the workflow. Now, you can expand your capabilities even further with the AI layer.

According to a study by the Economist, 75% of executives say AI will be “actively implemented” in companies within the next three years. Business leaders aren’t feeling so great about how it’s being implemented, though. Although 92% of C-level executives with some of the world’s biggest brands recently reported that the pace of their big data and AI investments are accelerating, 77% also said that business adoption of AI initiatives is a major challenge.

Where’s the disconnect? It’s telling that 93% of those interviewed identified people and process as obstacles. In this post, we’re going to explore the different ways SEOs can lead the charge in AI-powered insights and optimizations. We are entering a new era of real-time SEO and insights are being powered by machine learning and AI.

Understanding the opportunities in evolving SERPs

Google has gone all-in on AI, and it’s driving increasingly complex yet engaging and functional enhanced search results. With RankBrain, Google uses machine learning to analyze the context of content and serve more accurate organic search, image, and video results.

How does it work? Roger Rogerson dug up a succinct explanation in a recent column:

“… RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries. …”

– Greg Corrado, from Bloomberg’s: Google turning its lucrative web search over to AI machines

RankBrain isn’t just using natural language processing (NL) to better understand the intent behind each query. It’s converting words to data, plotting it on a chart, and examining the relationships that exist between terms. What it “learns” then drives rankings and different types of results in the blink of an eye for each new query.

How can you use this to your advantage?

• Content optimization is more important than ever. The bar for quality is high, and Google needs to be able to see how each piece of content, whether text, image, or video is the best answer for specific types of queries. But optimizing content once, before it’s published, isn’t going to cut it anymore. SEOs need AI-powered automation to audit site content, resolve errors, and suggest new optimizations on an ongoing basis, based on real-time data, and consumer behaviors.
• Automate competitive research and find opportunities to increase your share of voice with smart monitoring that identifies content that is outranking yours. See exactly where you need to build out content and what it needs to include in order to regain your rankings.
• Stay ahead of SERP changes with AI-powered analysis. By the time you manually evaluate the SERPs that Google returns for even a few keyword phrases, you’re making optimizations based on old data. Get ahead of the game with real-time SEO insights that tell you exactly what you need to do to take over competitors on the terms that offer your greatest opportunities.

Making smarter optimizations with AI-powered insights

A typical SEO practitioner uses six separate tools cobbled together and spends four hours a day on research, reporting, and analysis. This is no longer necessary, though. BrightEdge Instant for example (disclosure, my company’s innovation) provides marketers with real-time recommendations and data so marketers take action to optimize content, all within one unified platform.

Voice-enabled technologies, now used in more than 20% of mobile queries, are one opportunity you can’t afford to overlook. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and other digital assistants rely on AI to converse with consumers and respond to their needs. You need to understand the conversational journey and the next three follow-up questions someone is going to ask but are probably wading through a list of keywords from Keyword Planner. You’re manually looking for conversational searches or turning to a point solution with display-only capabilities (without search volume) that is disconnected from your SEO workflow.

SEOs need to be able to analyze when and why people use voice search in order to provide the types of answers digital assistants can use. Structured data is a great way to achieve this, but right now more than 80% of the world’s data is unstructured (SEW offers a guide to help you get started here).

Keyword research is another opportunity to save time and improve performance by working AI into your workflow. Given the large proportion of queries that Google says have local intent, you need to understand the location for every part of your business worldwide. For businesses with hundreds of thousands of locations worldwide, it’s impossible to accurately research and report on keyword performance in each of your key markets. Using an AI-powered tool here allows you to scale research across thousands of locations and dozens of languages, all on one platform. You can make smart, high impact decisions that give you the competitive edge quickly and seamlessly, and this is without a mess of Excel sheets.

How can you use this to your advantage?

• Make voice a reality by taking a data-driven, AI-enabled approach to understanding the conversations happening in your space. Doing so will help you identify top-of-the-funnel, awareness-generating question keywords, analyze the keyword landscape, and understand which portion of your keywords are quick answers, and which percentage you are winning.
• Look for a tool that uses the power of AI to curate the most relevant topics and keywords to go after. Automation can exponentially amplify your efforts to evaluate a seed list, but it’s the AI layer that supercharges it by understanding intent, producing and evaluating a massive list of related terms in real-time, identifying current trends, and helping you to prioritize your efforts.
• Don’t forget about video! YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and consumers increasingly look there as part of their shopping process (especially in the early stages of their buying journey). Measuring video performance and rankings immediately and on an ongoing basis enables you to respond to real-time insights, and make optimizations to improve performance in the critical post-publication period.

SEOs cannot afford to be late adopters in the AI arena and laggards in relation to real-time SEO. Today, you need to be able to anticipate searcher needs and have technology in place to trigger the optimizations that will return your content as the top answer for relevant queries. Want to learn more? Make sure you caught my last column, Five ways SEOs can utilize data with insights, automation, and personalization.

Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of leading enterprise SEO and content performance platform BrightEdge. He can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

SEO methods and insights are supporting strategy and decision making beyond website content. Uncover the broader use of SEO intelligence in evolution.

Google Analytics is great, but here’s look at newer, less-discussed tools that can be used for on-site analytics, including Finteza, HotJar, and Text Optimizer.

Understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to SEO, view them from a technical and commercial perspective. Lots of screenshots included.

A PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Starbucks’ and Forbes’ case studies included.

“One-to-one marketing” continues to be one of the biggest buzzwords of 2019. At MarTech West last month, it felt like everyone at the conference discussed how their teams are working to foster personalized connections with customers through technology stacks. It also was refreshing to hear that I’m not alone and no one has achieved truly one-to-one marketing – at least not yet.

Customer-centric brands constantly adapt and improve processes to cater to its customers more effectively. Here are five steps such brands take to get closer to one-to-one personalization.

Spotless data

It doesn’t matter how engaging your content is if you’re not making it into subscribers’ inboxes. To ensure you’re maximizing the potential of all its email campaigns, practice good data hygiene. This involves removing inactive subscribers, fake accounts and duplicate email addresses regularly. I’ve seen these practices allow retailers to see a 60% lower average bounce rate during the busy holiday season which translates to more conversions.

Good deliverability reputation with ISPs

It’s imperative that brands follow email best practices to establish and maintain a good relationship with internet service providers like Gmail, Yahoo and others. A poor reputation with any of the ISPs puts a barrier between your brand’s emails and their subscribers’ inboxes, which translates into lower conversions and revenue.

That’s why it is essential to monitor your reputation. We’re continually reviewing and adjusting targeting, frequency and deployment strategies to stay best friends with the ISPs. Last year alone these changes resulted in a 100% inboxing rate, an 18% increase in the average open rate and a 48% reduction in the average bounce rate with Gmail for one retailer I spoke with. These improvements were hugely impactful considering that Gmail continues to gain market share of subscribers. Not only did these changes isolate the less engaged audience, but it also reduced the bolstered engagement metrics for that segment.

User-friendly email templates

We marketers know that effective emails use responsive design and offer dynamic content, yet the biggest reason not all emails leverage these capabilities is the significant amount of resources required to create them. From idea generation to deployment, creating a new email campaign can take two weeks or more if marketers don’t have a streamlined process and the right tools in place. That’s why having a tool to easily customize content without involving a developer for coding support makes a significant impact in email.

With such tools, marketing teams can build responsive, dynamic campaigns without coding by using drag-and-drop functionality. In effect, you’ll see production time cut in half, which allows your team to create more relevant content for more of your audience.

Dynamic content blocks

Dynamic content blocks cater to each subscriber segment, and enabling more of these for offers or smaller items like the preheader can create greater efficiencies. In retail, there are a lot of constantly moving pieces from inventory to offers that can change at a moment’s notice. Building automated pieces of content within your templates ensures when these last-minute changes come, the creative teams don’t have to lift a finger. This dramatically reduces production and enables the creative teams to focus their time on the real design work.

The power of email triggers

A robust trigger program is the easiest way to implement personalization for email programs. The payoff is the delivery of relevant content in a timely manner that results in open rates that far exceed the average promotional message – over 100% greater. Look at your data to figure out unique ways subscribers’ activity, purchase history, browser behavior, preference data or interests can boost your program. These triggers provide a huge jump in revenue with much less maintenance in content creation and they provided an added benefit of a testing lab for creative ideas.

As marketers, we know that the best way to communicate with customers, build awareness and ultimately drive revenue is to offer individualized content. We know we need to send them the right content at the right time. While this is achievable for small companies with only a few loyal customers, scaling that level of individualized communication to a larger audience or customer base is currently impossible. But we’re getting closer every day, and by following the steps laid out here, marketers may be able to achieve true one-to-one personalization sooner than we think.

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

In the practice of SEO, as in life, the only constant is “change.” Even the pace of change in SEO is changing.

It’s accelerating as results grow ever richer and more personalized, search engines more numerous and specialized, and searchers increasingly expect to be able to summon answers whenever, wherever and however they like.

Though it may not always feel like it, none of this happened overnight. If we look at some of the key milestones in the evolution of search, we can get insight into how we got to where we are now. Let’s skip ahead a bit and start with Google in the early 2000s.

• The early 2000s: Google takes on black hat SEO methods by de-legitimizing and even penalizing unethical tactics like keyword stuffing and questionable link-building practices. At the same time, we see the very beginnings of localized search results.
• The mid to late 2000s: Google begins to refine the search experience with universal search, which incorporates results from sources like websites, social media, images, video, and news in its SERPs. Google Suggest launches, which offers related search phrases in the search results. Microsoft launches Bing.
• The early 2010s: Google breaks SEO briefly with algorithm changes that emphasize quality, user-focused content. Any vestigial gaming of the system is dead. Optimization is very much alive, but the gap narrows between content that Google’s algorithm sees as high quality and content that humans see as high quality. Localization gets a boost, and we begin to see zero-click searches.
• The mid-2000s to today: Search explodes. Google begins to demote content that is not mobile-friendly, then rolls out mobile-first indexing. YouTube becomes the second largest search engine behind Google. Amazon ranks first for product searches. We enter the frontier of voice search.
• Today and beyond: SEO has evolved and has proven out as a key business performance driver. Meanwhile, search is ubiquitous, increasingly vertical, and enormously topical.

SEO now

SEO is still very much about maximizing the effectiveness of organic content to drive traffic and demand, but its role in the organization has expanded and so has the workload along with it.

How SEO is used in the modern enterprise

SEO methods and insights are supporting strategy and decision making beyond website content. The broader use of SEO intelligence is a natural progression in the evolution of search. After all, SEO research can reveal a lot about consumer intent. For content, paid search, social media, and email marketers, knowing what the target audience is looking for makes it easier to tailor the message, product or service to them.

A 2018 survey of UK marketers reinforces the perception of SEO as an essential (88% of respondents) and effective (79% of respondents) part of the marketing imperative, but the survey also highlights the difficulty marketers and SEO specialists have when it comes to keeping up with the pace of change in search. More than two-thirds of respondents (70%) incorrectly identified a bogus Google algorithm change as being real. (Source: Zazzle Media)

How SEO is executed in the modern enterprise

For most search marketers, the daily work of SEO is a significant undertaking. Add to that the fact that 75% of marketers are regularly using at least four different tools or data sources to execute their SEO strategy.

SEO in 2019 and beyond: SEO goes single-platform and real-time

To date, SEO has been largely a reactive business function. In 2019, look for search to become not only reactive but predictive. Two shifts will drive this:

1. A shift from point solutions to platform SEO
2. The enablement of true, real-time SEO

The shift from point solutions to platform SEO

The time-consuming and somewhat disjointed nature of SEO execution for most search marketers is not surprising given the rapid pace of change in search. It is also not sustainable over the long term. Search is only going to evolve more quickly. Keeping up on all the changes, mastering new and additional tools to manage SEO, and finding the time to incorporate more and more diverse data sources into an already overtaxed SEO routine is prohibitive.

To see where the practice of SEO is headed, we can look at how leading brands do it now. BrightEdge Instant (disclosure, customer) empowers the next generation of search marketers to use real-time insights and take action to optimize content all within one unified platform, so they can effectively:

1. Speed up the busy work of SEO by
   • Streamlining or automating repetitive SEO tasks
   • Integrating disparate data sources and adding immense value by, effectively, crowdsourcing otherwise unavailable data
2. Turn data into insight by employing AI and deep learning to organize data and generate meaningful recommendations
3. Keep up with major and minor changes in search for their users and innovate accordingly

For SEO to be effective it needs to be efficient. Moving from managing multiple SEO point solutions, sourcing data from numerous sources in numerous formats, and analyzing data in Excel to single-platform SEO solution creates efficiency that marketers can no longer ignore.

The enablement of true, real-time SEO

What we know today as real-time SEO is, in actuality, the same, rearward-looking SEO with a shortened timeframe. SEO evolution, like change, is constant and the breakthrough for SEO has begun with live, real-time data that right-now drives keyword and ranking research, and produces in-the-moment recommendations.

Marketers will be able to see trends as they are developing rather than once they’re established. This level of insight will enable them to predictively produce or optimize content to capitalize on the interest that’s coming. This ability to displace competitors pre-emptively will change the face of search forever.

Andy Betts is a chief marketer, consultant, and digital hybrid with more than 20 years of experience in digital, technology and marketing working across London, Europe, New York, and San Francisco. He can be found on twitter @andybetts1.

Related reading

Google Analytics is great, but here’s look at newer, less-discussed tools that can be used for on-site analytics, including Finteza, HotJar, and Text Optimizer.

Around 77% of C-level executives recently reported that business adoption of AI initiatives is a major challenge. For SEO, introducing AI-powered tools could eliminate the mess of spreadsheets and empower more real-time action.

Understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to SEO, view them from a technical and commercial perspective. Lots of screenshots included.

A PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Starbucks’ and Forbes’ case studies included.

As technology improves with natural language processing and AI, chatbots will take away revenue from other marketing channels, a recent study examining retail brands by Juniper Networks claims. In fact, retail sales from chatbots will nearly double annually, reaching $112 billion by 2023, the study says. And retailers will see an increase in savings, thanks to the automation of customer sales and support processes.

“Retailers can expect to cut costs by $439 billion a year in 2023, up from $7 billion this year, as AI-powered chatbots get more sophisticated at responding to customers,” Juniper said.

The study also suggests that as retail brands shift to chatbot technology, more consumers will feel comfortable interacting with chatbots to resolve customer service issues and make direct purchases. A consumer-facing survey by marketing firm Uberall indicates that 20% of consumers surveyed are “very interested” in chatbot experiences from brands. 80% indicated that they have had “generally positive” interactions with chatbots.

Why we should care

As martech advances, consumers will also adapt their online behaviors and their expectations for digital interactions will change. According to the report, chatbots are positioned for rapid growth in the retail industry; we need to better understand how that will impact our digital marketing efforts and attribution methodologies going forward.

For digital marketers who haven’t yet experimented with chatbots, it is time to consider the best solution for your brand. Digital marketing is experience-driven; creating positive interactions with your customers with chatbots will be crucial to customer retention and driving sales.

For the SEO community, Domain Authority is a contentious metric.

Domain Authority (DA) is defined by Moz as

“A search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.”

Some people say that this score does more harm than good because it distracts digital marketers from what matters. Improving your DA doesn’t mean you’re improving your rankings. Others tend to find it useful on its own as a quick way to determine the quality or trustworthiness of a site.

Here’s what I say, from a digital PR perspective, domain authority is valuable when you’re using it to compare sites relative to one another. In fact, DA provides value for us PRs and is incredibly useful to our work.

Think of it this way. There are more websites than ever before, about 1.5 billion to be exact and so in some ways, this means there is more opportunity for marketers to get their content out in the world and in front of new audiences. While most people think that journalism is dying out, an enlightening post on Recode by Rani Molla explains that “while job postings for journalists are off more than 10 percent since 2004, jobs broadly related to content have almost quadrupled.” 

In other words, if outreach is executed well, there are more places than ever to get your content featured and lead to driving traffic, broadening your audience, and improving your search ranking.

But even the most skilled PR teams can’t reach out to 1.5 billion sites. The knowledgeable ones know that you really only need one successful placement to get your content to spread like wildfire all over the Internet, earning links and gaining exposure for your brand in the process. With so many options out there, how do PR professionals know which sites to spend time targeting?

That’s where DA comes into play. When it comes to link building, content marketers know that not all backlinks and brand mentions are created equally. The value of a link or mention varies depending on the referring website. Moz’s DA score is a way for us PRs to quickly and easily assess the quality of the websites we target for our client’s content marketing campaigns.

Our team tends to bucket online publishers, blogs, and websites into three categories:

• Top-tier
• Mid-tier
• Low-tier

Keep in mind, particularly with the new Moz update, when deciding who to pitch, you must take a holistic approach. While domain authority is an excellent way to quickly assess the quality of a website, a site’s DA can change at any minute due to a multitude of factors, so make sure you are also taking into account your goals, the site’s audience, social following, and reputation as well as Moz DA score. In response to a Marketing Land tweet about the new DA, Stevie Howard says it perfectly.

Top-tier sites

What constitutes a top-tier website? Can a top-tier site have a low DA? Potentially, but it’s uncommon.

When you look at the holy grail of media coverage, DA tends to align perfectly. Take, for example, the following seven major publishers that any brand or business would love to earn coverage on. The DA scores for all of these sites fall above 90. These sites all have an extremely large audience, both on-site and on social media.

Our team at Fractl has an innate sense of the online publisher landscape, and the largest and most well-known content publishers out there all tend to have a domain authority above 90. This is what we consider to be the “top-tier”.

These publishers are difficult to place with because of their large audience, social following, and reputation, so for the best chance at earning organic press mentions on these sites, offer them authoritative, unique, exclusive, and newsworthy content.

Mid-tier sites

Mid-tier sites may not be the holy grail of news publishers, but they’re our bread and butter. This is where the majority of placements tend to happen. These publishers hit a sweet spot for digital PR pros—they’re not as sought-after as Buzzfeed and don’t deeply scrutinize pitches the way The New York Times does, but they have large audiences and tend to be much more responsive to content pitches.

I tend to categorize the mid-tier as publishers that fall within a DA of 66 to 89. Here are some examples of publishers that may be considered mid-tier.

Low-tier sites

Don’t underestimate a low-tier site simply because of its domain authority. For example, it wasn’t long ago that personal finance website, Money-ish, had a DA of 1. Launched in 2017, it was first its own website before being absorbed as part of the larger MarketWatch domain. MarketWatch has a DA of 93, with social engagement as high as 12,294,777 in the last year. If you ignored Money-ish because of its DA when they first started, you would have missed out on a chance to get your content featured on MarketWatch as well as build relationships with writers that are now under the MarketWatch umbrella. There are all types of content, and most marketers can figure out which projects have “legs” and which have less appeal. These lower-tier sites are often very niche and the perfect home for content that is aimed towards smaller, more precise audiences. These lower-tier sites also tend to have a high engagement where it matters, your target audience. Consider the site’s community. Does this site have a ton of email subscribers or high comment engagement? Are they killing it on Instagram or on another social network? You never know which site will become the next Money-ish, either!

Pitching differences for each tier

There are plenty of sites that fall within different ranges of domain authority that would be an excellent fit for your content. It all just depends on your goals. In Fractl’s latest internal study, we were able to identify trends in the way journalists respond to PR professionals, based on the DA of the site they write for.

Observations

• Feedback from writers working for sites with a DA lower than 89 was most likely to be complimentary of the content campaigns we pitched them.
• The verbiage of their responses was also more positive on average than those from journalists working for publishers with a DA of 90 or above.

An example of the feedback we received that would be labeled as complimentary is,

“Thanks for sending this over, it fits perfectly with our audience. I scheduled a post on this study to go up tomorrow.”- Contributor, Matador Network (DA: 82)

Those of us that have been pitching mainstream publishers for a while know from experience that it’s often easier to place with websites that tend to fall in the mid to low-tier buckets. Writers at these publishers are usually open to email pitches and open to writing about outside content because such websites have less stringent editorial guidelines.

Conversely, publishers that fall into our definition of “high-tier” were less positive on average than writers working for publishers with a DA less than 90. On average, the higher the DA, the less positive the language becomes.

Why might that be? It makes perfect sense that publishers like The New York Times, CNN, TIME, and The Washington Post would be less positive. They’re likely receiving hundreds of PR pitches a day because of their popularity. If they do respond to a pitch, they want to ensure that they’re inquiring about content that would eventually meet their editorial guidelines, should they decide to cover it.

According to our study, when journalists at publishers with a DA of 90 or above do respond, they’re more likely to be asking about the methodology or source of the content.

An example of this feedback is from a staff writer at CNN.

“Thanks for sending along. I’m interested to know more about the methodology of the study.”

A response like this isn’t necessarily bad, in fact, it’s quite good. If a journalist is taking time to ask you more about the details of the content you pitched, it’s a good indication that the writer is hoping to cover it, they just need more information to ensure that any data-driven content is methodologically-sound.

Conclusion

Domain authority will continue to remain a controversial metric for SEOs, but for those of us working in digital PR, the metric provides a lot of value. Our study found a link between the DA of a site and the type of responses we received from writers at these publishers. High DA sites were less positive on average and requested research back methodologies more than lower-tier sites. Knowing the DA of a site allows you to:

• Improve your list building process and increase outreach efficacy
• Customize each outreach email you send to publishers of varying DAs
• Anticipate the level of editorial scrutiny you’re up against in terms of content types and research methodologies
• Optimize content you create to fit the needs of your target publisher
• Predict the outcome of a content campaign depending on where you placed the “exclusive”

Remember, just because a site has a high DA, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good fit for your content. Always be sure to take a holistic approach to your list building process. Keep in mind the social engagement of the site, the topics they cover, who their audience is, their editorial guidelines, and most importantly, the goals of you or your client before reaching out to any publisher solely based on domain authority.

Domenica is a Brand Relationship Manager at Fractl. She can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

Google Analytics is great, but here’s look at newer, less-discussed tools that can be used for on-site analytics, including Finteza, HotJar, and Text Optimizer.

Around 77% of C-level executives recently reported that business adoption of AI initiatives is a major challenge. For SEO, introducing AI-powered tools could eliminate the mess of spreadsheets and empower more real-time action.

Understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to SEO, view them from a technical and commercial perspective. Lots of screenshots included.

A PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Starbucks’ and Forbes’ case studies included.

In March, Google announced it will shift to first price auctions for Google Ad Manager, its ad server and publisher exchange, by year end. On Friday, it issued an update with some additional details on the transition.

How auctions on Ad Manager run now. Currently, there may be two different auctions run for a specific ad. A second price, real-time bidding auction runs among Authorized Buyers, which include Google Ads, Display & Video 360 and other DSPs. That’s then followed by a first price auction that compares the winning price from the second price auction with a publisher’s guaranteed and non-guaranteed advertising campaigns and bids from Exchange Bidding buyers.

Currently, Google doesn’t require Authorized Buyers to share and receive bid data, which means there is often not complete historical auction data available for publishers and buyers to inform future inventory evaluations, Jason Bigler, a director of product management at Google, wrote in the blog post.

How auctions will run after the shift. When Google Ad Manager shifts to first price auctions, it plans to require all partners to share and receive bid data, Bigler said.

There will be a unified first price auction that includes publishers’ guaranteed campaigns and all non-guaranteed bidders — Authorized Buyers and everyone else — at once. Bids from publishers’ guaranteed campaigns are compared against all other bidders. Non-authorized will have the same opportunities as authorized DSPs.

“Going forward, no price from any of a publisher’s non-guaranteed advertising sources will be shared with another buyer before they bid in the auction,”said Bigler.

Google will also no longer have a “last look” opportunity to pay just above the winning bid after an auction to win the impression. With a unified first price auction Google, like all bidders, will pay the full bid amount (minus fees).

Changes to floor price strategies and rules. Publishers’ floor (minimum) pricing strategies for second price auctions will of course no longer be relevant after the transition. Bigler advises publishers to “focus on understanding the true value of their inventory and adjust pricing based on their existing advertising deals and how buyers are valuing their inventory.”

Google released a new feature called unified pricing rules to help publishers manage floor prices for all non-guaranteed bidders. Publishers will not be able to set different floor prices for different buying platforms.

“For example, instead of setting up the same floor prices in multiple places — in the auction in Ad Manager, and with their Exchange Bidding and other non-guaranteed advertising sources — which can take a lot of time and can lead to errors, a publisher can set up a single unified pricing rule to control pricing from one place,” said Bigler.

Initially, there is a limit of 100 rules, but Bigler said Google will work with partners to understand if that limit should be increased.

Why we should care. Other major exchanges already support first price auctions. The industry has largely welcomed Google Ad Manager’s adoption of first price. As the dominant market leader, it means first priced auctions will essentially be the universal programmatic auction method.

That means greater transparency, operational simplicity and fairer and more informed bidders. Buyers will have more insights into pricing, making it easier to value publishers’ inventory.

Publishers will be able to get reporting on all bids submitted by buyers, including those from Google Ads and Display & Video 360, and Authorized Buyers and Exchange Bidding buyers will both be able to see the winning prices for auctions they participated in.

Reminder. This move will affect display and video inventory sold through Google Ad Manager only. It does not impact auctions for Search, YouTube, AdSense for Search or other Google property inventory.

About The Author

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

The digital marketing strategies used in B2B for the industrial sector are completely different from the strategies used in other industries because the audience is unique. According to the 2018 buyer survey report, 31% of buyers said that their buying cycles are longer when compared to 2017. Of them, 76% of buyers desired content that speaks to their company needs. And 65% of them followed peer recommendations and online reviews. That’s why manufacturers need digital marketing because each touch point is critical.

I will explain it step by step on how to create a digital marketing strategy that you need to apply in order to get relevant traffic and to increase your ROI.

B2B industrial manufacturers digital marketing tips:

Collect important information from the client

It is very important to collect the following information from the client:

• List of products or services that provide higher ROI
• Competitors
• Keywords or topics  that they consider relevant
• Target market
• The location where the client can deliver products or services
• New products/services
• Industries they serve
• Complementary services/products

This information will give me a starting point about the topics I need to start mapping out for my keyword research. I focus on the topics- keywords that provide higher ROI to my clients and in the main products or services. Feedback from clients about competitors, keywords, and target market are extremely useful.

I know I have tools to find this information but it is always good to get the insights from the source. Many software provides competitors and keywords based on the website’s content. Furthermore, think for one moment that it is possible that your client is not ranking or does not have the right content yet on his/her website. Then the tool will not provide you the right competitors.

After getting the information above, I do an exhaustive keyword research and competitor analysis with at least three competitors.  It is preferred to use tools, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs for these tasks. Having a project in SEMrush and tracking keywords in Ahrefs, provides useful information every month about how my project is doing. It’s easy to create reports and to find the low hanging fruits. I later add these findings to the content strategy.

Learning about my client’s new products/services as well as the industries they service gives an opportunity to plan keyword rich content in the forms of blog posts, infographics, and videos.

In addition to content creation, using industry knowledge about complementary products/services is a powerful backlinking strategy.

For example, my client provides metal stamping services for a variety of different metals. I would create a blog post titled “Choosing the right metal for your metal stamping projects” to live on the client site. And also create a sharable infographic ad that would be perfect for other metal suppliers to share on their websites or social platforms.

On-page SEO is powerful

First, I run a website audit using Screaming Frog. With the results, I can find the bottlenecks which would need improvements through the on-page SEO strategy such as:

• Rewrite short meta descriptions
• Write titles
• Write meta descriptions
• Add keywords in titles
• Shorten long titles
• Add alt tags
• Fix broken links (redirections)
• Add title tags (h2,h3)

It’s never advisable to work on a messy website, so you really need to get this done in the beginning. If the on-page SEO is really off and involves a major project, divide the project into different tasks in order to get it done. I know the power of on-page SEO and I do not want to lose my opportunities here.

Among my practices are rewritten URLs following SEO best practices:

• Short and clear
• Avoiding stop words
• Using on-page keywords

After I have created new URLs I use the 301 redirects.

Example: www.metalstamping.com/blog/the-advantage-of-fourslide-metal-stamping-over-tradicional-power-press-stamping-explained-09_87-5437&5%

www.metalstamping.com/blog/advantage-fourslide-metal-stamping-over-tradicional-power-press-stamping/

I also revamp old content from static pages to add better keywords such as long tail or user intent. A study shows that 50% of queries are four words or longer.

Use long tail keywords to get rankings

Long tail keywords help increase your traffic. The best way to optimize on-page is by using about 50% of long tail keywords. Seventy percent, 70% of searches are long tail keywords. That’s why they are an important part of my SEO strategy. I have a client that offers Metal Stamping services.  Metal stamping had 4400 monthly searches and  699 million results. With a high competitive keyword, it’s better to use a long tail keyword such as “what is metal stamping?”. I actually ranked number one on Google SERPs for one of my clients with this keyword, within days and without backlinks. You can check out my case study about it.

Take your time to learn about the industry

While working with several clients at the same time can be overwhelming. It is not easy to become an expert in many different types of businesses within the industrial and manufacturing sector. I have overcome this challenge by taking time to read about the products or services pages of my clients’ websites so that I get a general idea of what they do (this is a challenge because many products are designed and used for engineers). Nevertheless, this is a crucial part because I am in charge of the content strategy. You could even watch a video about the main product or services to reinforce your previous readings and research.

How I do B2B industrial SEO for my clients

There are many opportunities for B2B websites in the industrial sector. Many businesses in this sector have old websites and they do not have a digital marketing strategy. While doing my research for content ideas, I have found out that there is no content available for many keywords regarding topics on industrial, manufacturing, and engineering. The lack of online results opens a huge door of opportunities for industrial businesses. I have taken advantage of the opportunity and created informative content that covers the topic. As a result, I have earned top positions in search results and leads for my clients.

The buyer journey in the B2B industrial market is different from the other industries. Focus on the personas browsing in B2B industrial websites. Most of the time, the people that are gathering the information to find suppliers are engineers, managers, and CEOs. Make sure you are creating content that speaks to them and make good use of their jargon in the content strategy.

Some content ideas that work well are:

• Products technical data
• Case studies
• A process to create a product
• Products applications
• Terms and conditions of purchase
• Policies of purchase

These are important topics the person is looking for which the supplier needs to find in an industrial website.

B2B industrial content strategy 

I create a pillar page (a pillar page is usually a long-form content, around 2500 words). I also create the cluster pages (cluster pages are related to subtitles of the pillar page) or related content that internally links to the pillar page. Here one of my client’s pillar page that ranks position one on Google SERP for “what is metal stamping?”

The ideal structure of a pillar page

• Intro
• Subtitles (you can use long tail keywords here, if applicable)
• Short meta descriptions no more than 42 words
• Bullet points/list format (use html tags)
• Video or infographic
• Image (alt tags)
• External links (reputable sources only)
• Internal links (cluster- subtitles articles)

The intro must be a short paragraph about the whole idea that will be discussed in the article. Use a good hook or nice intro to engage users to keep reading. Then start with the subtitles. Try to use long tail keywords. Consider the (latent semantic indexing) LSI, user intent as a subtitle if possible. This adds more SEO value to the content. Another good approach for subtitles is to think about relevant/related topics and use these as subtitles. Later, write independent articles about subtitles topic-ideas (use these articles for internal links as cluster pages).

A study shows that:

1. After subheaders, a paragraph with no more than 42 characters increases the chances to get a feature rich snippet.
2. Using bullet points or lists also helps.

I have followed these steps and I have gotten results. I have earned several rich snippets and Google quick answer box sections for my clients. Furthermore, using bullet points or lists helps users to skim the content, and provide a better user experience on mobiles because it provides white space.

I love to create content in different formats in order to take advantage of the opportunities that may arise. That’s why I create videos, infographics, and pdf. Later, I reuse these video or infographics for social media and email marketing campaigns.

We need an alt tag as part of on-page SEO best practices. Infographics can do the job. I use a long tail keyword as an alt tag in my infographics, and I always add the extension “infographic” to let Google know what is my image about. Doing this increases my chances to get ranking in Google image searches. I also use embed codes to my infographics so that it allows others to use them and open my opportunities to get backlinks.

I only use reputable and updated sources to get information from my content and I create external links to them (most of the time I add “nofollow” tag to my external links).

I usually add videos/infographics to the pillar page (upload the video on YouTube to create a backlink). This also is a way to amplify the content beyond the website.

The cluster pages are small articles that support the pillar page. I also add internal and external links (the internal links are always “do follow”).

I add case studies, reviews, data sheets about the product; these work well as clusters (internal links).

To get leads, I create white papers such as ebooks embedded within the content or a landing page with clear CTAs. I recommend creating a goal in Google Analytics to track white paper downloads.

I optimize static pages, product pages and “About Us” pages. The “About Us” page is utmost important in order to build credibility. I recommend you to add a video of the CEO welcoming users and talking about the mission of the company. A short video no more than a minute.

Another good thing to do is to check your on-page and make little changes to add value. I used the SEMrush on-page checker feature to improve my existing pages. This provides great results.

PPC for B2B industrial market

PPC campaign for B2b for the Industrial sector is a little different because the search volume for the keywords is low. I use long tail keywords that include terms such as industrial, manufacture, supplier. For example, industrial pipes. This helps to avoid invalid clicks from users that are looking to buy from the ecommerce or retailer website. My accounts are B2B and my clients only sell big quantities. I use the same approach at the moment when I write the copy.

I regularly optimize the campaigns by adding a negative keywords list that contains words such as:

• Videos
• Pictures
• Images

This avoids wasting my budget with clicks from users that are looking for educational material or to learn a process.

I use the Google AdWords platform to test my ads by using A/B tests. Generally, I run three ads, with the option “do not optimize, rotate ads indefinitely”. I run these tests for a couple of months to see which two performs better. Once I have the data from the two, I’ll continually optimize by testing a new one. The tools I use for keyword research are: Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere, and Answer The Public.

PPC goals for B2B industrial websites

The most common goals to set up are:

• Call from ads – This one only works for mobile
• Call from website
• All “Thank you” pages (ebooks download, request a quote, and contact us)

I am recently using the promotion extension, and I have seen that my competitors have followed. My clients don’t offer discounts. Therefore, I have to be creative. I have added lines such as, “100% free consultation”, and “100% free eBook download”. I know that it can sound silly but it works. People are downloading ebooks and my clients are getting leads. The results are what matter.

Email marketing to follow prospect through the sales funnel

I use email marketing to follow up leads that I have obtained with white papers, eBooks, and the other marketing collaterals. I create different campaigns with targeted content depending on the landing page that was collected by the lead. For example, if the visitor downloads an eBook about metal stamping process, I will create a set of emails to follow-up with the person who is interested in the metal stamping products. The email will be customized for his/her interest only for metal stamping products, application, prices, process, etc.

Do not forget mobile and UX

UX is very important to lower the bounce rate. I check my client’s website and the competitors’. Then I suggest changes to be made by the UX/Developer people.

Some ideas I suggest when working with the UX team are:

• Create custom 404 pages
• Test CTAs
• Run A/B test with different home page versions

Seventy-one percent, 71% of B2B researchers start their searches with generic terms (Think with Google) and then get more specific to hone in on more relevant search results. This is a huge opportunity because here we can create pillar pages with CTA and download material to engage with users. Do not forget that B2B for the industrial sector leads takes a little longer to convert than B2C.

Another study shows that organic search is the number one channel that generates traffic to B2B. SEO beats social media’s traffic by more than 300%. We cannot deny that SEO plays an important role in the B2B customer journey. Are we taking advantage of this huge opportunity?

Karina Tama is a contributor for Forbes, Thrive Global and the El Distrito Newspaper. She can be found on Twitter .

Related reading

Around 77% of C-level executives recently reported that business adoption of AI initiatives is a major challenge. For SEO, introducing AI-powered tools could eliminate the mess of spreadsheets and empower more real-time action.

Understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to SEO, view them from a technical and commercial perspective. Lots of screenshots included.

A PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Starbucks’ and Forbes’ case studies included.

What is considered duplicate content? What steps can you take to make sure it doesn’t hamper your SEO efforts? Pressing SEO questions answered.

As a small or medium sized business owner, you have been rocking it at PPC lately. You’ve got a few different campaigns running, you’ve developed a solid list of keywords, optimized for mobile, and you even revisit these campaigns consistently to make sure they bring about solid lead generations (the whole point of PPC, right?). Great job!

Quick question though: Are you remarketing those keywords? As the PPC landscape has become more sophisticated, targeting methods have gone beyond keywords, allowing small and medium-sized businesses to interact with potential customers alongside their entire purchase cycle. In other words, if you’re not remarketing keywords, you’re missing out!

What’s remarketing?

Remarketing campaigns allow you to continually engage with people who have visited your website, but didn’t make a purchase. Through targeted pay-per-click ads, you can make sure your brand is front and center at relevant places throughout the internet, reminding the user of their interaction with you and encouraging them to revisit and make a purchase.

Mirroring traditional PPC marketing, these ads don’t cost you anything until someone clicks on them, and are an effective way to drive sales by reconnecting with those who have already shown an interest in your business. Research from Barilliance, an e-commerce personalization tools developer, found the average cart abandonment rate to be 78.65 percent in 2017. There is huge potential to target these customers and guide them back towards your small business using a remarketing campaign.

How does it work?

Let’s say you’re an online retailer, and I’m a potential customer searching for a silver necklace on your website. I go through different touchpoints and add a specific necklace to my cart before pulling the plug, no sale. With a strong remarketing campaign in place, that’s not the end of my journey on your site. You can pull information based on how much time I spent on your site and use that to continue to reach out me. You know I had at least some level of purchase intent, so the next time I’m online searching for jewelry, you could go back and remarket that exact necklace I added to your cart, using the name of the manufacturer, the price, etc. and make a very targeted ad, specific to me.

Retargeting essentially keeps your brand top of mind with a potential customer and motivates them to get to know your business better.

How do I set-up a remarketing campaign?

To get started, use your ad words account to create a remarketing list. On Microsoft Advertising, you do this by clicking on the Campaigns page and then Shared Library, then Audiences. Under the Audiences tab, click Create Remarketing List.

Name your list, then select the type of website visitor and set of rules that define who to include. This places a “remarketing tag” on your website and allows you to define what specific pages, products, or services you want to focus these ads on.

For example, if a few of your products are luxury items that customers naturally research before purchase or highly competitive products that push customers to comparison shop, you can focus remarketing campaigns specifically on those landing pages. It’s not all or nothing. Once a customer visits that specific page, a cookie is left on their browser and will push out your targeted PPC ads when they visit other relevant websites.

These remarketed ads are highly customizable, allowing you to segment visitor groups based on their page history and at what touchpoint they left your site. Advanced data reporting also helps you determine how long a person’s cookie remains in your remarketing list, and what kind of ad messaging would be the most relevant to them. For example, if someone adds an item to your cart, but abandons it, you could send a custom remarketing message saying if they come back within two weeks, they get a discount. The possibilities are endless.

People who may have been merely curious about your small business can be converted into a paying customer through retargeting. As they continue to see your brand name in important places throughout their online product search, you become increasingly legitimate and recognizable. This re-engagement deepens your relationship with them and gently guides them back your website when they are ready to make a purchase.

If you’re ready to start your own remarketing list, check out this easy how-to from Microsoft Advertising.

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

About The Author

Kenneth Andrew is the general manager of SMB strategy and sales at Microsoft Advertising, working globally to help SMB customers. In July 2014, he was awarded the prestigious Bill Gates Founder Award from Microsoft in recognition of outstanding financial results and leadership.

Google has sported a rocky relationship with China for more than 10 years. While the company’s on again, off again approach to the Internet’s largest ‘untapped’ market has always been tempestuous, recent developments suggest the tech giant may be yielding to its own growth imperative and bending to the government’s demands once more.

For more than a year, the debate has raged over accusations that the Chinese military is capitalizing on Google’s research and business activities in China. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate committee in March that Google’s work in China indirectly benefits the Chinese military, an accusation soon echoed by President Donald Trump.

Anxiety surrounding Google’s international and institutional affairs is nothing new. Last year, the company faced huge criticism after word leaked that it was building artificial intelligence (AI) tools to analyze drone footage for the Pentagon’s ‘Project Maven’. Executives experienced similar uproar over ‘Project Dragonfly’ in 2018, a secretive effort to develop a censored search engine for the Chinese market. This prompted outcry from employees and politicians who criticized Google for helping China withhold information from its citizens. CEO Sundar Pichai has since pledged not to go forward with the censored search product—at least for the time being.

Google has generally limited its operations in the Chinese market since 2010 when it pulled the majority of its products amidst a battle over censorship. Some branches of operation have been maintained, most of which relate to the distribution of Android software and Google Adverts on third-party websites. Despite this tumultuous history, the company’s latest movements have been speculatively characterized as an attempt to regain favor with Chinese officials in a bid to gain a foothold in the country’s heavily regulated internet market.

A bow to state censorship?

Following calls from China’s market regulator for internet platforms to strengthen their censorship and monitoring of advertisements, it was recently revealed that Google has now banned the distribution of advertisements in China for websites that review anti-censorship software – the very tools that many Chinese people rely on to access Google’s services.

Two companies reviewing virtual private network (VPN) software – tools that allow users to circumvent surveillance and censorship – have reported Google refusing to sell their ads to Chinese users after doing so for over two years.

Representatives from Google have issued a response stating:

“This is not new. […] It is currently Google policy to disallow [sic] promoting VPN services in China due to the local legal restrictions […] We have long-standing policies prohibiting ads in our network for private servers in countries where such servers are illegal. All advertisers have to comply with local laws.”

Though the software is essential for Chinese citizens to use Google’s search engine, email, and cloud services, VPN providers and associated websites are now blocked from promoting themselves through Google ads in the country, despite the fact they do not explicitly violate Chinese law.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Charlie Smith of GreatFire.org, a censorship monitoring organization criticized Google’s blunt action in relation to these advertisers as being too broad. He said:

“…there are legally registered VPNs operating in China, so either Google has not kept up to date with local regulations, or they are overstepping their boundaries.”

As it stands, there is no explicit, all-out ban on VPN providers or review websites in China, though providers do need to obtain a license to operate in the country.

The advertisements in question did not explicitly violate Chinese law, which suggests that Google may be following its own prerogative rather than meeting a legal obligation. What’s more, non-Chinese language ads appear to be unaffected by the restrictions, which suggests that Google has come under pressure from Beijing to block ads aimed specifically at Chinese citizens rather than those targeting foreigners. Spokespeople have yet to answer whether the ban was put in place of the company’s own accord or as a response to requests from Chinese authorities.

Freedom of information

Google’s choice to capitulate to the censorship of advertisements raises questions about the company’s complicity in political restrictions on the freedom of information. Controls such as those in China favor only the information that promotes government interests.

When Google shut down its Chinese search engine nine years ago, it announced it was no longer willing to censor search results, thus devastating its relationship with the country’s officials. Just last year, the company’s official position on content moderation stated its loyalty to political neutrality:

“Google is committed to free expression — supporting the free flow of ideas is core to our mission. […] Giving preference to content of one political ideology over another would fundamentally conflict with our goal of providing services that work for everyone.”

It’s clear that future access to the Chinese market requires complicity with state censorship tools, and these developments suggest that Google is willing to bow down to the government’s demands in order to achieve this. The decision to remove advertisements for legitimate security tools further deprives Chinese users of the ability to find uncensored material and undermines the company’s claim to political neutrality. It raises a particular question: If Google is in the business of expanding access to information, why do they not conceive of their business in these terms in China?

A fragmented Internet

There is more resting on Google’s movements in China than whether it might be putting profits over principles. The company’s relationship with the world’s second-largest economy tells a wider story of what happens in a world where the Internet is split in two at a time when our realities are largely driven by what we read on the web.

China’s escalation of media and communication controls over the past decade has manufactured an Internet and information economy entirely disparate from the model that dictates our lives in the West. Choosing to support this distinction does nothing but widen the digital wedge driving China and Western countries apart, and enables anything but the free flow of ideas. If China and the US continue to live in separate “cyber worlds” and absorb two distinct information realities, how can we expect the two entities to effectively cooperate on the world stage and negotiate political issues outside of internet governance?

Even in an environment where Western users are calling for platforms to limit user freedoms in exchange for security, it is only appropriate to recoil at the idea of a global platform that wilfully bans material in support of an authoritarian regime.

What it means for search marketers

China boasts a thriving digital economy. If you’re looking to grow your business and haven’t yet capitalized on this market, you may be missing out on tens of millions of relevant queries.

If you’re focused on improving organic performance alone, Google’s international decisions will have little impact. Instead, you’ll need to focus on Baidu. One of the world’s largest internet companies, Baidu’s search engine has an index of over 750 million web pages and accounts for well over 70% of Chinese internet search queries. Like Google, Baidu also offers music streaming services, maps, images, data storage and, most importantly for business growth, pay-per-click ads.

If you’re targeting Chinese users through Google Ads, Google’s strategic decisions will be paramount. It’s likely that this ban and those yet to come will affect other Google-owned services like Google Marketing Platform and Google Ad Manager.

The impact of these decisions will depend on the nature of your website, product, or service, as well as your target audience. If you intend to target Chinese users rather than foreign visitors to China, or your business provides a service that might be deemed incompatible with China’s agenda even if it’s not technically illegal,  it may face a similar fate. Though you may be unaffected thus far, it’s essential to stay on top of Google’s relationship with large markets like China to predict potential impediments to your marketing efforts and formulate an effective alternative strategy.

William Chalk is a cybersecurity researcher and digital privacy specialist. He covers these issues for leading tech publications to help support our digital freedoms. He can be found on Twitter . 

Related reading

Understand the best metrics for your business when it comes to SEO, view them from a technical and commercial perspective. Lots of screenshots included.

A PWA is a mobile-friendly website that behaves like an app but doesn’t need to be downloaded to be used. Starbucks’ and Forbes’ case studies included.

What is considered duplicate content? What steps can you take to make sure it doesn’t hamper your SEO efforts? Pressing SEO questions answered.

If you care about where and how you appear on search engines, Google Search Console and its updates will be of much interest to you.