Refine Your Content Marketing Tactics to Benefit from Enhanced Search Engine Display

Content marketing has become commonplace for marketers today. For those who need guidance, there are numerous handbooks and step-by-step resources that teach the best ways to understand who we’re marketing to and what their needs are.

Most content marketing guides can explain the principles of optimization, as well as the critical role that search engines play in generating content visibility. What the guides fail to address are the many features or types of search results that exist and how they impact the visibility of content that is produced. 

These enhancements — special methods of display tailored to match the type of content being shown — encompass a wide range of SERP features, including:

• Knowledge Graph;
• local pack;
• reviews;
• site links; and
• Featured Snippets.

In this article, I’ll focus on Google and use Google-specific terminology, though Bing has unique methods of displaying information as well. Let’s explore the most effective ways Google enhances its search results and look at examples of keywords and content types that both generate and populate them.

Google Knowledge Graph

Google Knowledge Graph, one of the most prominent SERP features, appeared in more than one-third of searches in the last 30 days, according to Moz. 

Knowledge Graph was originally introduced in 2012 to enhance Google’s search results by tailoring content display to user intent. Today, Knowledge Graph provides a detailed spectrum of information on nearly any topic. The tool serves to reduce the need for consecutive searches and resolve any queries, without the user having to navigate to other websites lower on the SERP.

Google’s recent removal of right-hand-side ads on desktop search resulted in content marketers recognizing Google Knowledge Graph as a tool to improve visibility, in addition to their typical SEO and SEM initiatives for targeted queries. For instance, a search for “coffee creamer” displays images of a popular non-dairy creamer in addition to the brand’s shopping ads and search ads.

Local pack, reviews and sitelinks

A more general search term like “coffee” removes context and pushes Google to reveal a wider spread of SERP features, including: 

• Knowledge Graph of nutritional information sourced from the USDA;
• a local pack of nearby coffee shops with reviews; and
• a Wikipedia page with additional sitelinks.

In 2013, Google began analyzing search intent for each query when it rolled out its Hummingbird algorithm. Without additional keywords to help the search engine infer intent, the inclusion of the local pack provides context to the “coffee” query in case the user isn’t seeking health information or historical details about coffee.

The local pack features the top three nearby coffee shops. Though the two visible brands are both franchises closest to the ZOG Digital office, distance is not the only factor that potential customers are likely to consider — The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has 14 reviews with an aggregate rating of 4.2 stars, while both Starbucks locations combined have one review and no visible ratings.

Users who intend to find value in their searches rely on reviews to inform their actions.

If Google is able to infer a user’s intent, it will tailor its display of results with a spread of features designed to meet that user’s needs. A search for “best coffee” has a lot of value for brands aiming to reach consumers in the purchase consideration stages — brands not only need to invest in paid media like shopping ads and search ads, they also need to earn strong reviews. Conversely, a search term like “best coffee shop” prioritizes local quality and indicates the user’s desire to buy a prepared coffee drink rather than beans to brew at home. In this situation, reviews in the local pack have more value than distance, and the results shown include only the highest-rated nearby coffee shops.

For users seeking more information on coffee, the Wikipedia sitelinks that are visible in the above SERP direct visitors toward their specific need, while allowing them to skip a navigational step. As seen below, sitelinks are typically expanded to include a description for more brand-specific search terms like “Starbucks menu.”

Visible alongside the menu sitelinks is a carousel of menu categories and a link titled “More about Starbucks” that takes users to local Starbucks options. The categories expand to display a variety of menu options that users can access without leaving the SERP.

For restaurant brands, menu PDFs are difficult for search engines to crawl. Google prefers when pages have Schema coding, text cues that give search engines instructions for reading a page. Schema code specific to menu results must also be included on menu pages to populate a carousel, as shown above in the SERP.

As proven in Mediative’s latest SERP study, the top left-hand side of the SERP still has prominent visibility for the user despite mobile devices training a user’s search habits to scan results pages vertically, rather than horizontally. With increased competition for high-ranking search visibility, content marketers can optimize for results like these to earn visibility in other ways besides being the top organic listing.

Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets, as shown above, ensure that Starbucks has prominent content visibility among its competitors for search terms such as “brewing coffee at home.”

To accomplish this, Starbucks provides a blog post structured for readability and usability. It’s also structured its site so there’s prominent navigation for its “How To Brew” category of pages. The comprehensive 901-word article takes users step-by-step through four ways to brew coffee for a few different types of coffee makers. The segment that’s pulled for the SERP is for a common one — how to brew coffee from a coffee press.

Final thoughts

Google has enhanced its search engine to be more visual, informational and user-friendly. As a result, content marketers are presented with a unique challenge that requires new tactics.

With improved competition in the search space, content marketers cannot rely on classic SEO best practices to improve page visibility. Tools like SEMRush’s recently released Keyword Difficulty tool can be used to match which keywords have the potential to display with these enhanced SERP features, but optimizing for the enhanced results page in addition to improving search rankings requires more than identification. Optimizing results beyond the typical blue link results requires additional research and a comprehensive content marketing plan.

Source: Search Engine land

Share Conversions And Remarketing Lists Across Paid Search Accounts

Managing multiple search accounts for a single domain doesn't have to mean juggling tons of conversion and remarketing tags. Contributor Amy Bishop shares steps to seamlessly share data across accounts without cluttering your website's code with duplicative tags.

At some point or another, anyone handling paid search at an agency has likely managed a client that had multiple accounts. Before concerns are raised at the idea of double-serving, let me explain that there are a lot of different legitimate reasons for why and how this can happen, none of which promote double-serving or are meant to game the system.

Here are some of the scenarios that could cause a client to go this route:

• separated search and display accounts;
• an account for each different product;
• a brand account and a non-brand account; or
• accounts for different geographies.

These accounts aren’t built to compete with each other; they are just used to organize large accounts with a lot of campaigns.

There are pros and cons of splitting things into multiple accounts — a discussion of which could be its own post — but one of the previous cons was that it required you to place a ton of tags. Luckily, that’s not the case nowadays.

Thankfully, the engines have made it easier to share tags across accounts so that you don’t have to place duplicative tags from each account in order to pull in data. In this column, I’ll explain how to accomplish this.

What can you share?

You can share remarketing lists and conversion data across accounts, as opposed to setting up multiple tags to build lists and track conversions in each different account.

How to implement

The implementation process is different in Google and Bing –- and Google offers a few different options — so let’s walk through each separately.

Sharing data in Bing

Sharing conversions and audience lists in Bing is pretty straightforward if the accounts are in the same customer ID (CID).

When you set up your conversion event or audience, the last question in the setup form asks whether you’d like the conversion or audience to be shared among other accounts. If you don’t want this, you simply click the radio button by the account. If you do, you click “Across all accounts.”

By “All accounts,” it means any accounts that are housed within the same CID — not the entire Account Summary (Bing’s terminology for its answer to AdWords’ My Client Center).

When you set up your tags, you need to know whether you intend them to be used by a single account or to be shared across all accounts, because once the tags are created, that setting cannot be changed. In order to change it, you’d have to create a new tag and start from scratch.

Setting up lists and conversions to be shared from a Google AdWords Manager account

If you are creating a new My Client Center (MCC) with new accounts, the easiest thing to do is to create these data points at the MCC level, as opposed to creating them for each account.

To do this, follow these instructions:

1. Set up your MCC with the Accounts that will utilize the data.
2. Go to the “Accounts” tab in the MCC, and then choose “Audiences.” Set up the Remarketing tag the same way that you would for any Google account. You’ll use this tag as opposed to setting up different remarketing tags for each account.
3. Create your lists just as you normally would.

1. Make sure that your accounts are set up to share lists by going back to the “Accounts” section within the MCC and then selecting the Admin tab. Choose the accounts that should share remarketing lists.
2. Click Edit and choose “Remarketing account” > “Change to this manager.”

Setting up conversions at the MCC level is an equally simple process:

1. Just go to the “Conversion actions” section within your MCC and place the conversion tag.
2. Set up conversions as you normally would.
3. Go back to the “Accounts” section within the MCC, and then go to the Admin tab. Select any accounts that you would like to utilize the conversion actions that are set up at the MCC level.
4. Then click “Edit” and choose “Conversion account” > “Change to this manager.”

Note: It sometimes takes awhile for lists and conversions to show up in the account after you set them up, so don’t panic.

Sharing existing conversion and audiences between client accounts

If you already have remarketing lists set up in an account, then you probably don’t want to start over –- especially if you’re working with a website that only rolls out changes (aka new tags) one or two times per month. Once you already have an audience built up, you just want to use it, right?

Sharing data from one account to another is pretty easy in AdWords if you know what you are doing. It isn’t nearly as intuitive as in Bing, though, if you don’t know what you are looking for.

If you’ve already set up remarketing lists in one account that you’d like to share with other new or existing accounts, you can do so by following these steps:

1. Go to the MCC in which the accounts are contained. If you don’t already have these accounts in an MCC, you’ll need to put them in one.
2. Go to “Accounts,” and then click the Admin tab.
3. Select the accounts that you’d like to share or receive lists. Then click the “Edit” drop-down and choose the “Change to this manager” option under “Remarketing account.”

Go into the account that you plan to share lists from. Go into the Account Access page within Account Settings. Toward the bottom of the page, you’ll see a request to opt this account into sharing lists. Change the “Remarketing list sharing” option to “ON.”

Go back to the MCC. Within the MCC, go to the Audiences section (on the left-hand panel) and choose “Share lists” under “Existing lists.”

1. Add lists to the sharing pool by choosing the account that you want to share lists from.
2. Select the lists and click “Share.”

Bonus: Importing data from Google Analytics

In addition to sharing lists across AdWords accounts, you can also import Google Analytics data with ease. There are a lot of benefits to creating goals and remarketing lists in Google Analytics and then importing them into other channels.

For one, you can create hyper-segmented audiences with all of the data that you have at your fingertips. Likewise with conversions, Google Analytics offers a lot of options for setting up goals. An added benefit of Google Analytics goal-tracking, of course, is that it allows you to track performance across all channels with one consistent attribution model.

In addition, you can access Google Analytics lists from multiple accounts without having to place additional pixels. As if that’s not enough, Google took an extra measure last November to make it even easier to import data from Google Analytics to multiple client accounts.

With this change, you can link Google Analytics directly to your AdWords MCC using the setup wizard in AdWords within the account settings section.

This process allows you to link the MCC to Google Analytics, as opposed to linking your AdWords accounts to Analytics one by one. This is useful if you want all of the accounts in the MCC to be linked to the same Analytics Property (or properties). With this feature, you can pull in remarketing lists and goals one time for the whole MCC, as opposed to importing them one by one in each account.

If your accounts are in an MCC with other accounts, you can put them in a sub-MCC to make this work. Otherwise, you can choose to link multiple AdWords accounts to Analytics at one time, as opposed to linking the whole MCC.  You can find instructions for linking options, here.

Source: Search Engine Land

AMAZING ROAD TRIPS AROUND THE WORLD

RING ROAD, ICELAND

The Ring Road in Iceland also known as Route 1 is a 1,339-km motorway that encircles the island giving you glimpses of beaches, volcanoes, glaciers and little known villages from the countryside. 

CABOT TRAIL, CANADA

The 298-km trail passing through the island of Cape Breton, takes you past villages with French and Scottish influence and vast expanses with wildlife from the Cape Breton Highlands National Park.

GOBI DESERT, MONGOLIA

If off-road adventures are your thing, then a trip through the Gobi Desert is just the ticket. Travel through the nothingness, the rugged beauty will definitely impress you and if you get tired staying behind the wheel, then hop on a camel ride or camp with the nomads under the stars. 

SOUTH ISLAND, NEW ZEALAND

The highlight of the circuit is the drive between Te Anau and Milford Sound which goes through the quaint Fiordland and the Southern Alps.

INTERSTATE-84, USA

The 112-km road passes through Colombia River Gorge, while travelling east out of Portland, Oregon. The stretch offers a splendid view of the dramatic waterfalls on USA’s second longest river.

TASMANIAN PENINSULA, AUSTRALIA

A trip down the peninsula’s coastline from Eaglehawk Neck to Port Arthur gives you stunning visuals of Australia’s highest sea cliffs, crystal clear water and spectacular scenery.

THE KARAKORAM HIGHWAY, CHINA

Trace one of the many paths of the ancient Silk Route through the highest motorable road in the world. This motorway also connects China and Pakistan across a mountain range. 

THE GARDEN ROUTE, SOUTH AFRICA

The road between Mossel Bay and Storms River Mouth is marked with green lush on one side and beaches on the other – making for a beautiful introduction to the coastal country.

SALAR DE UYUNI, BOLIVIA

The transport road across the Bolivian plateau is a flat route across the world’s largest salt lake, where there is fair chance you might get to see the pink flamingos.

SAN JUAN SKYWAY, USA

The 380-km road across Colorado’s San Juan Range is a delight to travel through any season. During autumn, the landscape is lush with bursts of red, orange and yellow leaves spread all around.

PAN-AMERICAN HIGHWAY

The longest driving road in the Americas - the Pan American highway starts from Patagonia, Argentina and goes all the way across to Alaska. An astounding 48,000 km long, there is a impenetrable small gap between Panama and Columbia that must be undertaken by sea or air. 

RUTA 40, ARGENTINA

Running parallel to the centre of Andes, the longest road in American known as Ruta 40 passes 13 lakes and salt flats, 236 bridges and 20 national parks along the way. 

SKELETON COAST, NAMIBIA

Whale and sea lion remains along the coast give this trail its spooky name. The shipwrecks behind the bones does only adds to the splendour that is the Skeleton Coast. The rugged and harsh countryside looks bleak, though perhaps because of minimal human interference, the shoreline remains pristine and one of the most beautiful. 

GREAT OCEAN ROAD, AUSTRALIA

Stretching 285-km between Torquay and Warrnambool in southwestern Victoria, the road was built as tribute to commemorate the soldiers who died during World War I. The highpoint of the track is the “Shipwreck Coast” which is home to the rock formations of the Twelve Apostles.

BLACK FOREST, GERMANY

The road through the picturesque region passes villages, historic towns and evergreen forests.

THE ATLANTIC HIGHWAY, ENGLAND

Also called the A39, the route running from Bridgewater to Bude along the northern coast of Devon boasts of sea views on one side and hills on the other.

PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY, USA

The iconic 198-km route that starts at Monterey ending at Morro bay is considered to be the most iconic drive in North America. It threads through central California cutting through Carmel-by-the-sea, through Big Sur hugging the coast overlooking the cliffs in the vastness of the blue pacific ocean. 

THE OUTER HEBRIDES, SCOTLAND

A trip through the 210-km single track road running down the chain of islands from Barra Head to the Butt of Lewis enables you to do island hop, experience beautiful beaches and ancient standing stones.

ATLAS MOUNTAIN ROAD, MOROCCO

This 188-km road carved in the centre of Africa could easily be mistaken for a Formula 1 circuit owning to its sharp twists and turns.  Drive down this route for a breathtaking views from the Tizi-n'Tichka Pass.

THE ATLANTIC ROAD, NORWAY

Though 8.3-km long, this road connecting the islands Molde and Kristiansund with eight bridges tops the must-do list of road trips by The Guardian. The high point of the track is the curve above the water at Storseisundet Bridge.

THE GOLDEN ROUTE TO SAMARKAND, UZBEKISTAN

Travel through time and head towards the turquoise domes and you retrace the steps of ancient traders on another road that was once a Silk Route. 

THE ROAD TO MOUNT NEBO, JORDAN

Starting from Persha, if one drives towards the northern end of the Dead Sea, you may find the route for Mount Nebo along the way. Considered to be a holy ground by the Christians, there is much to see along the 120-km route and when you reach the summit, one can also see see Jerusalem on a clear day. 

AVENUE OF THE BAOBABS, MADAGASCAR

Also known as the Alley of Baobabs, this is a dusty track between Morondava and Belon’i Tsirbihina which is lined by baobab trees that can be up to 800 years of age and reach heights of 30 metres.

THE ROAD TO HANA, HAWAII

The 109-km road on Hawaiian island of Maui has six hundred twists and turns and fifty narrow bridges.

Source:  Amazing road trips around the world

Bing launches UET Tag Helper, a Troubleshooting Chrome Extension

Now quickly check if UET tags are set up correctly without having to wait for validation in the UI.

To help marketers ensure their Universal Event Tracking (UET) tags are properly implemented, Bing Ads has launched a Chrome browser extension called UET Tag Helper.

UET tags are used to capture conversion events from Bing Ads campaigns and power Bing Ads remarketing.

In Chrome, the new extension can be used to:

• validate UET tags in real time instead of having to wait a few hours and go back to the account to check on the status;
• check to see if you’ve implemented the UET tag correctly without having to wait for an event to occur; and
• troubleshoot common errors with the UET tag.

The extension is now live in the Chrome web store. The video from Bing Ads below shows how to use the UET Tag Helper. For more info on how the extension works, check out the help page.

Source: Search Engine Land - Bing launches UET Tag Helper, a Troubleshooting Chrome Extension

Google Product Listing Ads officially launch in Image search, among announcements for retailers

New features for Local Inventory Ads and an update on Purchases on Google.

Purchases on Google testing continues, Product Listing Ads are getting access to more inventory and brick-and-mortar retailers running local inventory ads see some new features. These are among the announcements from Google at Shoptalk in Las Vegas on Monday.

Product Listing Ads in image search

Ads in Google image search first started appearing in the fourth quarter of last year. First noticed byMerkle, the ads are officially launching Monday. On mobile, they display in a carousel format above the organic images. Image search is considered part of the Google Search Network. If your Shopping campaign is opted in to Search partners, Product Listing Ads (PLAs) will automatically be eligible to show in image search results.

Store pickup promotion in Local Inventory Ads

Retailers using Local Inventory Ads (LIAs) can now include a “store pickup” link for shoppers who want to buy online and pick up their orders in store. The option appears on the local product landing page hosted by Google after a user clicks on an LIA.

Inventory search from local Knowledge Panel

Also new for advertisers running local inventory ads, users will be able to click a “Search items at this store” link in the retailer’s local Knowledge Panel to see whether particular items are in stock at their local stores.

Update on Purchases on Google

There isn’t any news here other than to say the pilot is still alive. Google launched the test for Purchases on Google — the “buy button” feature that allows users to buy products right from a product listing ad on their phones through a commerce experience hosted by Google — last July. Google said on Monday that Ralph Lauren, Ugg, Staples and others are continuing to test Purchases on Google

Source: Search Engine Land