Archive for category: Digital Marketing

Over the last few years the technical definition of Google Ads’ keyword match types has shifted massively, but the naming conventions have remained almost identical. With the upcoming addition of close variants, are we seeing a final nail in the coffin of precise keyword and search query management?

How are keyword Match Types Changing?

In a nutshell, Phrase & Broad Match Modified keywords will follow Exact match in triggering your ads for queries which share the same meaning or intent as your targeted keyword. This differs from the ‘close variant’ matches rolled out in 2014 which included “misspellings, singular or plural, stemmings, abbreviations and accents” for keywords. Instead, Google will now use its machine learning algorithms to identify if a users search query has the same intent as your targeted keywords.

In Google’s own example, we can see that not only does BMM now match to queries in any order, but individual targeted keywords can be entirely replaced by queries with a similar meaning – notice that ‘+mow’ is matched with ‘grass cutting’ and ‘cut your grass’.

Phrase Match keywords will soon also match for queries with a similar meaning – however unlike Broad Match Modified above, keyword order will be preserved. The example below shows “lawn mowing” matching “grass cutting” and “lawn cutting” then followed by “service” and “services” as expected.

What is still unclear is whether or not these upcoming changes to BMM and Phrase match targeting will use the same ‘implied information’ targeting that Exact match keywords have taken advantage of since last November. Exact “Implied Intent” matching allows Google’s machine learning algorithms to identify and match search queries containing additional longtail information to keywords in your account which you do not actively target. You can see an example of Mackerel Media’s own below:

We can see that while Mackerel Media only actively target [digital marketing edinburgh] Google’s Exact Match now ‘intelligently’ understands the intent of the query is relevant to the exact match keyword we targeted. Thats why our ads would trigger for ‘digital marketing agency Edinburgh Scotland’, ‘online digital marketing agency’ and ‘digital marketing agency Edinburgh’ – because the additional information is implied by the the keywords we target.

Avoiding Competing Keywords

At this point, you might be thinking “But what if I’m already targeting a keyword that is intelligently matched by Google – won’t this mean I’m competing against my own keywords?”.

Well, you’d be right – and Google knows it. To stop keywords that match a query from competing against each other and costing you more money, Google plans to introduce a change to it’s keyword selection process: 

“If a query currently matches to an exact, phrase, or broad match modifier keyword that exists in your account, we’ll prevent that query from matching to a different phrase or broad match modifier keyword that’s now eligible for the same auction as a result of this update.”

In other words, if you are already actively targeting a keyword that Google’s algorithms intelligently identify as part of a same-meaning close variant, only your actively targeted keyword will be eligible to trigger an ad. 

Why is Google Making These Changes?

Google claims that 15% of all search queries are new, and this means that advertisers are missing out on customers because the tightly controlled nature of the traditional Keyword Match Types means there is no real way to target every possible variation of a keyword. 

Ultimately, the changes are an excuse for Google to flex their evolving Machine Learning capabilities. By using AI to infer intent and fill in the gaps between targeted keywords & user queries, Google hopes to reduce the vast numbers of keywords digital marketers have to create to get their ads to trigger for relevant search queries.

As a counterpoint to this: consider a company we spoke to today, who spends a generous monthly sum on Google Ads but focuses on – wait for it – three keywords. Three. 3. Troi. Drei. 1-2-3. Three in total. Those are the only ones that convert for them, and the only ones that have ever converted profitably, in years of advertising. What will this change mean for them? More negative keyword management, more wasted budget and probably a harder job to keep their account KPIs on track.

What Can We Expect?

Unsurprisingly, Google expects advertisers to see a 3-4% increase in clicks for Broad Match Modified and Phrase Match keywords. In addition to this, Google claims that 85% of those clicks will come from keywords that advertisers do not actively target. 

In our opinion, this means that while clients can expect to receive more clicks to their site than ever before, keeping a close eye on the source of these clicks will be vital – checking and updating negative keyword lists will become a fundamental part of daily account management, ensuring that Ad Groups remain as focused and relevant as possible.

Consider also the halcyon days when exact match meant exact match, and nothing more. We spent a couple of weeks on the overhaul of a huge ad account with over 100k exact match and long phrase-match keywords, building out combinations upon combinations…but safe in the knowledge what we were bidding on is what we would get. Can you imagine doing that now? Clue – the answer is almost certainly “No!”

On the 26th September 2002, Google released the first of its major search updates – Google Dance. The changes made to Google’s algorithm gave greater significance to anchor text quality allowing Google to increase the relevance of the sites it displayed when a user typed in a particular search query. Since then, Moz has documented a massive 170 Google Core Algorithm updates, with the latest ‘Medic’ confirmed as recently as August 2018.

It is important to remember that the likes of ‘Panda’, ‘Penguin’ and ‘Hummingbird’ – names every digital marketer should have heard before – are just the major search engine updates that are identified and confirmed by industry watchers such as Moz or Search Engine Land. In between these SEO seismic shifts, Google is constantly tweaking and refining its algorithms to make sure users get the best possible results for their query. John Mueller, Google’s Senior Webmaster Trend Analyst, has even gone as far as to say “Google makes changes almost every day”. That’s’ a lot of updates to keep up with!

Google’s Web Page Ranking Factors

With between 500 – 600 Algorithm updates happening each year, you might not be too surprised to hear that there are an estimated 200 factors that can influence how Google ranks a page. Unfortunately, Google has never outright confirmed what any these ranking factors actually are – often hints are given or senior members of Google teams say something cryptic, only for SEO agencies to spend weeks trying to decode new SEO ranking methods to give their clients an edge in the SERPs.

What we do know however, is that the majority of SEO ranking factors are likely outside the influence of SEO agencies or businesses. This means that the elements we can affect – such as keywords, backlinks and technical elements – are incredibly valuable to SEO work and can have a huge effect of the ‘success’ of a web page.

So, What Can We Directly Influence?

As is becoming clear, your website’s page rank is a complicated matter. When a digital marketing agency talks about how to improve your organic traffic, they’re likely thinking about at least three distinct strategies that are covered by the term ‘SEO.’

On-page is the most common form of website optimisation – and the one you probably think of when talking about SEO. Is your content unique, relevant and interesting to the user? Does your content add something new to the web? Does every page have its own unique page title, meta description and content?  Are your pages correctly structured, with all images given Alt Tags?

Technical SEO covers how the site itself is structured & presented to promote a positive user experience. Google considers page load times, server response times, mobile device compatibility, Ref-Lang tags, canonicalisation and other criteria for an overall ‘health check’. Chances are if your keyword optimised website is still struggling to rank, it’s a technical SEO problem holding you back.

Finally, a SEO agency will consider your backlink profile. This where other websites – such as bloggers, industry recognised websites and even other businesses – provide a link from their website to your website. Google sees this as a vote of confidence (indeed backlinks are a core part of the founding PageRank principles of the search engine) and can help increase your overall authority. This is without doubt a hugely effective way of improving rankings.

Your SEO Is Out of Date

Last year, I wrote how SEO isn’t Dead– and concluded that on-page refinements to your SEO can still have significant impact on how your page is ranked by Google. Twelve months later, and I’m more convinced than ever that ongoing SEO work is the cornerstone of all online digital marketing activity.

With so many changes being made to Google’s algorithms every single day, ask yourself this question – when was the last time your website was optimised? John Mueller (that name again) recently revealed the importance of domain-level authority metrics, sub-domains & algorithm changes that Google now considers important ranking factors.

So, if you’re reading this thinking “well I optimised my site last year”, your page might already be lacking some SEO signposts that Google now considers to be important to Page Rank.

Of course, I’m not about to suggest that your website needs an entire SEO audit every couple of months – in fact, the stability and age of a webpage is often cited as a contributing factor to search engine rank. However, it is important to make sure that your pages are as optimised as possible for Google’s ever-changing algorithm, and that means making SEO work part of your day-to-day digital marketing strategy.

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If you need to optimise your website, Mackerel can help! Get in touch today at hello@mackerelmedia.co.uk.

Last week, the digital marketing world descended on Mackerel Media’s hometown of Edinburgh for Turing Fest 2018, and we were there to bring you the latest developments in digital marketing!

Across six digital marketing experts – one clear theme emerged time and time again: Google’s growing fondness of AI lead search results, specifically the use of voice recognition technology and the effect it will have on how we as digital marketers are able to advertise clients in the changing Search Engine results space.

While the scale of voice searches is a bone of contention between digital marketers – even here in the Mackerel office there are differing opinions on how commercially useful they actually are right now– one thing is undeniable: with the growth of ‘smart’ voice assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, 50% of all searches made by 2020 are expected to be initiated by voice and powered by machine learning.

Just Sayin’

Why is there such a push towards voice activated searches? Well, according to Cindy Krum, one of Turing Festivals Marketing Track speakers, it’s simple: Google wants to rank more than just websites and present result in a way personalized to your interests.

This makes a lot of sense, and Google has already begun using AI systems to start organizing which videos you see on YouTube, which Apps get returned to you when you do a search and can even allow you to do smart searches through your photographs stored in the cloud.

To allow this to happen, Google has had to change the way it thinks about the information it stores, and how it organizes that information. Whereas previously, Google grouped information together based on the words and phrases a website contained, in a world where not every bit of information a user is searching for has a website, Google has had to change tact – and it’s doing it via AI that you and I are helping to program.

Jes Scholtz – another Turing Fest 2018 speaker – points out that we’re constantly helping to tweak machine learning systems into better understanding what it is we’re looking for, and we may not even realise it. Those thumbs up and thumbs down icons in Netflix? Each time you give a rating you’re helping Nextflix refine its algorithm designed to show you the content most relevant. Same goes with Gmail’s “Mark as Spam” button. None of this is new, but the way in which the data is interpreted is – the massive scale of data gathered plus the application of AI to incorporate many other signals such as the time of day you hit thumbs up, or where you are when you hit ‘Mark as Spam’ leads to a massive improvement in the quality of the algorithms.

The End of the Website as We Know It?

So how does this relate to Voice Search? Well, traditional search engine results pages just aren’t suitable for devices that use voice technology to provide results to a query. Nobody wants to ask Alexa for places to buy a certain item only to be confronted with a list of 20 webpage URL’s read out one… letter… at… a… time…

What voice activated search results need to do is determine the most relevant piece of information for that search and return it right there and then, and they’re doing it through machine learning and combining that with their vast understanding of a users personal history, interests, behaviors & search intent.

We’re already seeing this type of ‘definitive information’ result being surfaced in the form of knowledge panels, direct answers in the SERPs and informational sidebar results. According to Cindy Krum, this type of search result has grown more prominent with mobile and voice results containing a knowledge graph answer climbing from 35% in 2016 to 60% in 2018.

Clearly, Google is putting a lot of emphasis on this type of result. Google’s end game, according to Cindy Krum, is allowing Google to become “the presentation layer of the internet”– soon, we might not need to see a product website to be able to buy, we’ll just do it directly through the Google results.

Good news for voice assisted searches, bad news for websites.

Hey Siri, What Do I Do Next?

The biggest question you might now have is how do we prepare for a world in which Google might not even consider our website before providing just one answer to a voice search?

One of the most interesting speakers at Turing Fest 2018 was Yoast’s very own ‘Mad Scientist’ Jono Alderson – who joined us on stage to explain how brands need to learn some important lessons from the pre-digital marketing era in order to succeed in the future.

Big brands have always relied on ‘story telling’ and relationship building with customers to position themselves at the forefront of their mind when decision making, and that is how brands of the future are going to stand out from the voice-search crowd.

Brands need to start thinking about how future customers may want to interact with their brand months or even years before the searcher even knows they want to buy a product. If Google knows a user has a documented history of interacting with a brands content, social media, pictures or other media, the more likely they are to consider that brand for a user’s personalised search result. The more a user knows and cares for a brand they’re presented with by Siri as a single voice-search result, the more likely they are to explore that search result further.

Jono Alderson calls this ‘brand currency’, and it’s invaluable in a world where AI powered voice search is dominant. If a searcher has no affinity with a brand, they’ll just search again and you may have missed the only opportunity you’ll have for that user to interact with your brand. What’s worse, is that Google could use its machine learning and AI to update its algorithm and push you out of that individual users ‘pool’ of potential search results in the future, having marked you as not of interest to the user.

How Do I Even Appear for Voice Searches?

It’s clear that Google see’s the future of search as hyper-personalised, AI driven results where even a single interaction with a brand can influence how a user is presented information, but we still need to make sure that we’re even eligible to be considered by a voice-search engine in the first place.

Thankfully, Google has already given us a suite of tools and platforms designed to specifically do that: Google My Business, Knowledge Graph results, Google Maps and a whole host of technical tools such as Schema Mark-Up and the Google Natural language API tool.

In a world where ‘on-the-go’ searches are becoming increasingly familiar – and where Google is able to collect vast quantities of data on the brands you interact with and what your feelings towards them are – what becomes the defining factor of whether a search result is presented or not is relevancy. Google now considers these ‘supporting’ pieces of information to be just as important – if not more so – than the content of a website or the products a brand sells.

If I do a voice search for “French restaurants near me”, guess what? The one which has its opening times and address listed on GMB is the one that a voice-assistant is going to return as my answer, because that’s the one I’m going to be more likely to go to. The same goes for e-commerce businesses which provide clear product prices or service providers who produce great knowledgeable content about their specific offerings. Again, Google is cutting out the middleman and giving us just the answers it thinks we want to see.

Do We Really Think This is the Future of Search Marketing?

To put it bluntly, if this is what Google is saying the digital marketing landscape is going to look like in the future, then it’s worth making sure we are prepared for a world where voice-searches overtake traditional text-based queries.

For the most part though, brands which take their digital marketing activities seriously needn’t worry too much. All of the tools Google has indicated may tip the balance of one search result appearing over another – such as Google My Business or Mark-up Schema – have already become part of most really good digital marketing strategies, and are easy to set up should you have forgotten.

Here’s a question: What value do you put on your business being seen by prospective customers?

Most of you will agree that the first thing you do these days when looking for a product, restaurant, or business is turn to Google. Working in digital marketing and specialising in local search has shown me two things: how effective it is to be fully present to your target market, and how few businesses utilise this free tool to make sure every possible user can find them.

Having a Google My Business listing allows you to present key information to customers, convincing them to continue to the website or contact you for more information. The best way to engage a user is through images. We’re told not to, but everyone judges the book by its cover, and business listings are no different. So why not make your business ‘cover’ the best it can be?

 

Power Of The Masses

Google has realised that a lot of business owners either don’t have the time, or just don’t know, to fill out their business listings. This is probably why they created the Local Guides community, allowing locals to not only leave reviews but to contribute edits or add to missing information on local business listings.

Out of intrigue I joined the Google Local Guides back in May 2016 and started adding pictures and reviews to the places that I had been.

As a digital marketer I found it fascinating that Google was now ‘Crowd Sourcing’ local business information. Obviously, for me there was a professional benefit here, to find out the information that Google was wanting to gather before making it available as an attribute on listings.

Having now contributed reviews, photos and verified other Local Guides’ information, I’ve worked my way up the Levels Google put in place unlocking different features along the way. One of my favourite features are the questions that Google asks about the places you’ve been, such as accessibility or what the place is known for. So much information has already been gathered that recently, Google has used the questions that it’s gathered from the local guides to add it’s Attributes feature to Google My Business.

“Google My Business Listings with photos and a virtual tour are twice as likely to generate interest.”

This brings my back to my original question of the value of a prospective customer and how they see us. While writing this article I surpassed 2 million photo views, and though the views aren’t for one particular business, there are some heavy-hitters who have seen traffic as the main image shown for their listing.

From restaurants to distilleries and museums, customers want to be able to see what’s there before arriving, so why not make sure you populate your listings with professional imagery that generates interest in visiting?

To truly give customers an immersive experience before arrival Google’s integration of its Street View app has even made it possible for Local Guides to contribute 360° photos to a listing.

 

Doing so and contributing over 50 approved images then leads to becoming a Google Street View Trusted Photographer (which I happen to be), allowing photographers to transfer the rights/ownership to Businesses.

So whether it’s a photo of items on your menu or a 360° of your roof-top terrace, make sure that your business listings show your potential customers everything your business has to offer, and you’ll be rewarded with more visits and more customers.