Google Webmaster Tools Update 2017

This month we’re looking at a Google Search Console update, Google adding a ‘news feed’, AMP content, a new version of AdWords Editor, new call bid adjustments and Google adding ‘holiday rentals’ to its Hotel Search.

 

Google Search Console (GSC) update

In last month’s round-up we looked at how long it takes for a website to rank. Avid users of Google Search Console may have noticed a note placed on 13 July 2017 within the search analytics screen that looked like this:

What does this mean for marketers? 

MORE DATA! You may take this as a positive or negative. The changes sure do throw off any impression or average position graphs you’ve been tracking and storing over the past x number of years.

The positives of these changes mean we’re no longer playing guessing games for lower ranking queries. We’ll be able to see beyond the average position 100. This offers further opportunities for queries we may not have even thought about targeting.

Our SEO experts would suggest starting small, just like you would with a new GSC account. Don’t try to analyze every query with average position 100+ or you’ll face a mountainous task. Start with a set of queries you’re familiar with and try looking for new opportunities and keyword variations.

 

Google to add ‘news feed’ to website and app

Google is currently rolling out a Facebook-style news feed to its homepage, which will be shown on both desktop and mobile devices. The purpose is to show users content they may be interested in before they perform a search.

Users will be able to click a ‘follow’ button on search results to add topics of interest to their feed. You can read more about this on the BBC website or check out this video:

 

What this means for marketers

This could present some new opportunities. You will be able to follow topics closely related to your business and discover relevant content. It also presents opportunities for content marketing, with more opportunities to get pieces in front of relevant audiences.

 

Survey shows AMP content is preferred over regular content

A recent survey has suggested that users prefer Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) over regular content.

Out of 1,500+ respondents, just over 50% said, “Yes, I prefer the stripped down version of a website when reading something.” That being said, within the survey 24% of participants answered, “No, if I want to read something, I will open the link whether it’s AMP or not.”

 

What is AMP?

AMP pages are essentially a stripped-down form of HTML. They are designed to be super-lightweight so they load faster on mobile devices.

 

What this means for marketers

When thinking about UX, website load speed has become one of the most important elements for mobile devices, especially now that mobile users make more than 50% of search. AMP pages have established themselves well in the past 18 months. If you are anything like me, you too will get frustrated when a page doesn’t open within two seconds.

As many of us have now adopted HTTPs, we should also be looking at adopting AMP to increase the usability of websites and ensure easy access to resources, or face the user switching to a competitor.

 

Google launches a new version of AdWords Editor

AdWords has a fresh new look, which has been designed for easier overall navigation. Also, there is a host of new features added, such as “Maximize Conversion Bidding”, which was released on the web version of AdWords last month. There are also new editable fields for responsive ads such as logos, promotion text, and call to action text.

This new version of AdWords Editor will allow marketers to use the software much like the web version, which has always been an issue in the past. Although not a perfect solution, it is a welcome next step.

 

Google adds holiday rentals to Hotel Search

Google is adding a new feature into its hotel search interface – now it will ask if you would rather search for vacation rentals instead of hotels.

This will have a huge impact on the vacation rental market as now, users can use Google Hotel Search instead of sites such as VRBO or Flipkey. Marketers now have to rethink how they create vacation rental ads that adhere to Google’s rules, as well as splitting budget between multiple sites.

 

New call bid adjustments in AdWords

You can now adjust bids related to call extensions in AdWords, which will allow you to show these extensions more or less often on mobile search ads.

From the announcement:

“If you’re a travel advertiser, you may see higher order values from calls because it can be easier to cross-sell rental cars, group tours and other vacation add-ons during a live conversation. Raise your call bid adjustments to show call extensions more frequently and drive more of these high-value call conversions.”

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Social Media Engagement Metrics

What does all of this have to do with social media metrics? On the face of it, nothing much.

But look deeper, and you’ll see that this particular sports story means nothing without being put into historical context. That 76-year wait turned a great win into a momentous one. While you will not have to wait 76 years to see results from your latest social media marketing campaign, your reports also need context if you are to draw conclusions which are useful, interesting and yes, even exciting.

Without context, without a frame of reference, you won’t be able to decipher whether your 150 post comments represent great, average or mediocre engagement. Without context, no raw statistic – whether a sports result or your digital campaign – carries any real weight. So it’s with context in mind that we take a look at three key social media metrics and why they matter for your business.
 

Conversation Rate and Cost Per Engagement

While those 150 comments on one of your posts may look great, this number means very little in isolation. 150 comments on a 500-fan page is excellent, but the larger your following, the more ordinary this same number appears. Instead, comments should be measured by conversation rate, which is the ratio of comments on your post relative to your number of page likes, reflected as a percentage. Similarly, your Cost Per Engagement (available via Facebook analytics), is a good barometer of the number of comments or other actions relative to the amount of money you’ve spent advertising your content.

In each case, you’re putting your results into perspective, allowing you to set realistic targets in the future.
 

Engagement Rate (based on reach)

For a good few years, marketers and social media managers have paid close attention to engagement. Yet again, “300 engagements” doesn’t mean much on its own. This is where engagement rate comes in – this is a metric that measures the level of engagement that a piece of content has received, reflected as a percentage. The most accurate engagement rate is one based on reach (Total Engagements divided by Total Reach and multiplied by 100). Effectively, you’re calculating the percentage of people who saw your post and chose to engage with it. Engagement Rate makes it easy to compare the performance of different posts, even if those posts had different allocated budgets. It also makes it easy to establish engagement benchmarks for your page, allowing you to set realistic goals for future campaigns.
 

Identify Growth and Engagement Irregularities

This one requires a bit more manual intervention when putting together your report, but your findings will be worth it.

Let’s say you reached 2500 people in February; sure, it may represent a numerical, month-on-month improvement for your business, but what if the bulk of that reach came from just one or two posts? To find out, pop into Facebook analytics and look at your daily growth or total reach graphs, preferably over a period of at least one month. These will show you the peaks and dips in your page’s performance. If you spot an unusually high amount of activity, you can trace this to a specific day or post. In the context – yes, that word again – of your specific business, why do you think the post did so well? Answer as best you can, and try to replicate these lessons in future content.

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Facebook Marketplace is to Receive Advertisements

Facebook is looking for new opportunities for advertisements. Since the space in the newsfeed is slowly running down, advertising in its own volume should be able to be shown in the future. A test is currently running.

Facebook wants to display ads on its own in the future. As the company now reported, there should be a test, in which the new advertisements are only a small part of users in the US are displayed. Afterwards, one wants to evaluate the general responses before Facebook wants to take further steps to the new feature, now announced Michelle Bonner Techel, Product Marketing Manager at Facebook, in a statement. Launched in October last year, the online service was designed to help users buy and sell things across the network.

Test with free advertisements

Since it is still a test run, no ads for the volume can be purchased. Instead, Facebook uses advertising that is already visible in the newsfeed and uses it for the volume. This "experiment" is free for the owners of the selected ads. The new advertisements will have the same appearance as in the newsfeed. The user will not be able to buy the advertised product directly via Facebook, but will land with a click on the advertisement on a landing page specially designed by the advertiser.

Volume rewards mixed reviews

The new feature, which is currently only found in the Facebook app, has not yet been convincing all users. Although or perhaps just because it is free for the user and Facebook does not deserve anything on a sale, the bad quality of the products is particularly criticized. In an article from March this year, the volume is compared to a junk store to get rid of things. Although there are no official figures on how much is actually sold across the markets, however, it needs to have enough access that Facebook is lucrative enough for advertisements.

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Website Analytics, AB Testing & Personalization Solutions : Career Ladder of Website Optimization

With the goal of better understanding the impact of their own website on the basis of visitor movement patterns, many e-commerce and online marketers have already integrated web analytics into their daily work. Versatile tracking options, the graphical preparation of the data in complex dashboards, and, last but not least, the relatively new career of the Data Analyst are an integral part of successful online shops.

However, the collection and evaluation of quantitative data on user behavior is only the basis of any website optimization, since they only provide information on what the customer has done in the retrospective. So you are, in order to remain in the picture, the CV of a website. The influencing factors - positive: the purchase and negative: the abort - for certain actions on the website are rarely read from the Analytics data. Similarly, e-commerce operators with analytics solutions can not interfere with or influence visitors' behavior.

How can I influence the customer experience?

Anyone who wants to get on the "career ladder" of the optimization must find in the direct customer interaction how he can influence this customer experience in his sense. Which setting screws on your own web presence, your own product presentation or marketing message have to be adjusted in order to offer an optimized customer experience and thus achieve a higher conversion rate in the long term? A / B testing has proven itself on the company side for this. More and more companies use this methodology to verify assumptions based on Analytics data and provide information about future behavior of their visitors.

With appropriate tools the responsible persons no longer rely on abdominal decisions. Clear test results have priority. A / B testing provides an answer to the question of why visitor behavior is the way it is and how to influence it. As in the application interview, the existing data should be evaluated well and the right motivation behind the facts should be taken in order to reach the next career stage.

If you want to understand why customers are behaving in a certain way, different analytical methods are available alongside analytics and quantitative A / B tests. Using mouse and mouse clicks and scrollmaps, he is able to perform the user behavior and gain valuable qualitative insights into conversion optimization. Further information is provided by customer satisfaction surveys and the recommendation rate. In the course of A / B testing, the optimization strategy can be complemented and raised to the next level.

The royal class: Personalization for the best customer experience

The "king class of improved user experience on the" career ladder "of website optimization is thus the personalization. This is where another dimension comes into play, namely the subject, the website visitor or the visitor segments. Influencing factors vary depending on personality, access medium or product segment. The right, personalized approach to different customer, personality, or visit segments determines a successful customer experience on the company website and can bring the conversions upwards. There are a wide range of approaches that should be based on an existing data analysis.

If the basics, i.e what happens (Analytics) and the set-screws (the "why" and "how") are known, the online marketer can concentrate on the right combination of the two factors and so-called customer segments. It has all the necessary ingredients for an individual customer journey. Even with a perfect CV and the right motivation, the career leaders will end prematurely if the company type and the culture do not fit into one's own plans and personality.

Three levels of success: web analytics, A / B testing and personalization

During workdays, specialized tools enable flexible implementation at all three levels. However, these should work well together or cover several areas, since only a common data base, a readable representation of the data and a consistent measurement of the key performance indicators (KPIs) across all three levels allow for efficient work. With appropriate test results a conversion into a permanent personalization should be possible with few clicks.

The benchmark for a constant optimization of the data analysis, tests and personalization strategies should always be a bit further upwards, in order to step by step a career level higher. A step-by-step implementation enables an agile response to market, product and customer developments with fast first successes. Since the transitions between the layers are quite smooth and many tool providers cover the edge area, extension tools should also be selected according to this approach.

In order to be competitive, companies must be "on the way up" at least in the area of ​​A / B testing. A / B, however, is no longer an all-round feature. Test and personalization campaigns should therefore be designed in a smooth transition to each other. Sophisticated insights of the testing tool form the basis. Sophisticated personalization strategies build on analytics and A / B testing and decipher the motivation for purchases or crashes. Anyone who has mastered the King's Personalization program has the right tools to keep customers, win new ones and increase sales.

An optimal personalization is a long-term project - a CEO post can not be reached from today to tomorrow - but not only through school and planning, but through much experience and work.

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Best Marketing Strategy for Online Business

Best Online Marketing Strategies

Setting up and developing a successful internet marketing business begins by setting a good internet marketing strategy. Without online marketing strategy because you do not have a clear "plan of attack" and therefore, you do not know what activities bring you closer to your goals. In this blog post I will show you a perfect internet marketing strategy, both for the short and long term.

Power of Internet Marketing Strategies

When you go for internet marketing, you know exactly what you want to achieve, a clear strategy for yourself on paper, how internet business is put together and how it should work. Often, you still do not see immediate results in the early stages of your Internet marketing activities, usually delivers the first 60% of the time and energy you anywhere protrudes only 10% of the results.

What digital marketing strategy is all about?

Internet marketing strategy goes like this - A visitor comes to your website, he explores for the information is your site is information related or go for shopping if it is ecommerce site. He follows the trail conversion and click the button, call to action and take action! Nothing more and nothing less!

Four Steps of Online Marketing Strategy

In four steps, we give below some practical tips for the ultimate online marketing strategy for your business. And let's see what the endless possibilities of internet marketing for your business. You will get result regarding inquiries, leads and new customers.

1. Define a distinctive online proposition;
2. Determine your target ONLINE;
3. Design a successful conversion strategy;
4. Translate steps 1 to 3 to each pixel.

Step 1: Define a distinctive online proposition

Doing business via internet sites, you need more sales and new customers. The website serves your business as if it were online account or online store, especially as online business card (if you want to be successful online, at least)!

The difference with offline marketing

All want to fishing the large group of websites from the same pond. In offline marketing you often have a field or a particular history, introduce new customers. But the Internet does this often different.

To be found

Many potential customers are searching online are active on social media or obtain information by e-mail or other sources about the existence of your business. And then there is one thing that matters: your website is to make a long lasting impression.

Sharp distinctiveness

This distinctiveness can partly be in the appearance or design, but ultimately it is about to offer your website or online shop exactly. And why visitors to go for your business and not for the other 10 sites that you just watched?

1. What are you doing differently?
2. Why do you excel in this?
3. What is the difference between other suppliers in the market?

The answers to these questions form the basis for a sound internet marketing strategy. The distinctiveness of your website to sit in the audience, what are you offering, and the service in the price.

Step 2: Determine your target ONLINE

Sounds like the way to Rome, but this step is often a step that is forgotten. If the base of your internet marketing strategy shakes, rattles it into the online results of your website.

1. Target audience

Of course you know the target of your business. But who is the online audience? Often there is no one to one match between customers and target audience. This knowledge and awareness of this is an important step. Often we see that the online searchers are not always the buyers, decision makers and users.

2. Keywords

In addition, the ultimate internet marketing strategy is based on knowing the keywords that your target audience is looking for. This seems simple and obvious, but this is in practice often much more complex.

Through Google Analytics, you can easily see which keywords provide longer website sessions than others. You can also find out through various sources in Google is where a lot of volume and competition. Eventually finding the right keywords and found this is a very important pillar of the ultimate internet marketing strategy for your business.

The best keywords and keyword clusters is the intention that you can make the ultimate SEO landing pages!

3. Online Proposal

A major conversion optimization law is that you manage to make you feel new visitor home. The 'tone of voice' which is used on your website / webshop, determines to a large extent or bounce visits, or start to feel and stay longer at home (often true: long duration = higher chance of conversion ).

Knowing your audience, knowing your online audience, discovering the most important keywords and properly addressing the audience of your business ... is a very important element of the foundation of the ultimate internet marketing strategy for your business.

Step 3: Design a successful conversion strategy

Online marketing

If distinctiveness is really clear and distinct and the online audience members are known, it is important to make 'targeted conversion' your website / shop. Which merely means "drop" a perfect first online impression that new visitors easy 'transforms' into concrete applications, leads and customers.

Take control of your customer!

- How do you want to be addressed on a website / web shop?
- How does an aggressive call2action on the homepage?
- How much are you willing to read?
- Can you instantly find what you are looking for?
- To what extent do you understand immediately where a website / shop about?

All these things are part of your conversion strategy. The average SME site / shop 'scores' less than 1% conversion (1 realized in 100 goals). In other words, 99% comes to your website, do nothing except go again (empty handed) away.

Friendly approach-ability
 
A strategy that served quite often, make sure you invite website or web shop (in a friendly way) to take action visitors. Eg download an article, a free introductory meeting, a small service (release) at an attractive price etc. Online accessible activities that attract visitors to your website / shop easier over.

Develop conversion paths

The right internet marketing strategy has a number of pre-punched conversion paths. A website script ensures that there are marked trails for visitors to your website. Inventing and naming aware of these paths also makes them measurable and manageable.

There are many more elements that can make the conversion strategy for your website / shop better, but these elements already give an idea of ​​the opportunities to work specifically with conversion strategies / optimization.

Step 4: Translation step 1 to step 3 to each pixel

Internet Marketing Strategy

Seems obvious, but this is so often not done properly. You see this in websites / webshops that are not in balance. Often one of the elements (eg SEO) picked up very well, but the results are out.

Balance in your website

If steps 1 through 3 have been fully completed, you have the absolute basis for the ultimate internet marketing strategy for your business. Translating this base to your site (technology, layout, text, design, conversion paths, keywords, landing pages, AdWords campaign etc.) ultimately provides IT results.

A header, for example,
To indicate what we mean here we take the header (right top of your site / shop) as an example. A good header tells the story: logo (they get it?), The distinctive points (USPs), radiation (web) format (do not ask anything to get a lot of attention?). A header balance often makes a tough desired impression.

Thus, each element has in your web pages / web shop a function. The better the underlying online marketing elements together are in balance / are matched, the better the final result will be your website / shop.

Conclusion

An ultimate internet marketing strategy is little more than a website online and basis of existence, knowing and addressing the right audience, develop and send conversion.

THE RESULT OF A SUCCESSFUL ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGY

• Your website is attractive by the online marketing strategy;
• Visitors understand your proposition and online marketing strategy immediately;
• Visitors are quickly convinced of your offer;
• Visitors visit more pages on your website by online marketing strategy;
• The bounce rate is lower due to the internet marketing strategy;
• In short, an internet marketing strategy provides more applications, leads, prospects and customers!

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How to Migrate from HTTP to HTTPS

Google has not specified the penalty to give more to 301 redirects .. and that's good news!

When you're developing a new shop, but want to move along many of your old web pages, often changing the URLs of those old pages. When live your new shop, but also, for example when switching from your shop to HTTPS, you will need to implement "301 redirects" to avoid problems.

A 301 redirect indicates that a page of permanent location changed. This ensures on the one hand that visitors still go to the old address will be forwarded to the correct page. On the other search engines can therefore understand that an existing page has a new address. Despite careful often referring lost some old pages about 15% of the PageRank. This caused a surge in the results after every major change to the page addresses.

Google HTTPS

A common security measure for websites and webshops is an SSL certificate. SSL certificate ensures that encrypted information is sent from your site to the visitor and that you address begins with "https://". In this way, the information that is sent may not be read, even if someone would halfway tap off the signal.

Google announced in August 2014 that websites using an SSL certificate would get a small boost in the search results. This made Google also boost security of websites besides relevance. And to show safe sites for each query.

However, this created a dilemma for websites and web shops that could not run on HTTPS, or just the pages where personal data were transmitted had run over HTTPS. As in Magento first standard was done by setting up a secure URL. You could choose to transfer your shop on HTTPS, which you accepted that you could lose some of your PageRank and there would be a surge in your position and revenue. Alternatively, you could also choose not to meet the needs of Google and thus accept that you would rank lower in the long term.

Our advice herein was always to take the switch to HTTPS when there are already changes to the URL structure were to arrive. For example, in the development of a new shop or to adjust the categorization within the shop.

Easily migrate to HTTPS

Google recently indicated no PageRank penalty to give more to 301 redirects. This does not mean that you will never lose more positions by referring to other pages. When you refer an optimized page with relevant text to a page about a completely different topic, then the value will flow quickly.

However, when a page is directed to a page with identical content, there would be virtually no swings or loss should be more. Let this is exactly the case for a migration from HTTP to HTTPS! Because there are no changes to the content of the page, therefore, there would be no more loss by switching to HTTPS.

Make the transition to a full HTTPS website, even if no other changes are made to addresses. Obviously, a good preparation is essential in this process; you always want to make this change in accordance with your online marketing agency.

Migrate from HTTP to HTTPS Step by Step

Step 1: Preparation

Check absolute versus relative URLs

Map out whether all internal links on your site are relative URLs. Navigation links, this can often be adjusted at once by means of a setting. The most likely where it does not always go well, are manually placed links to product descriptions, category texts or information pages. Edit each URL to a relative URL. Unlike absolute URLs are relative URLs directly right after the migration. The correct way is: <a href="/website-development"> Website Development </a> instead of the entire URL.

Also check immediately whether all images with relative URLs are in the code. The correct way is: <img src = "image.jpg"> instead of the entire URL.

See also http links in JavaScripts and CSS files.

Excel with inbound links

Create an excel with all incoming links and the corresponding addresses. After https going live then you website owners as much as possible sending an email with the request to modify the URL. All URLs will naturally after migration neatly redirect to the correct URL. Therefore, the link continues to work well, but it you have in any case whatsoever https inbound links.

Prepare in advance a mail that you can send directly after the migration of your shop to all webmasters.

Changing Destination URLs for advertising

Immediately after the switch, all AdWords destination URLs must be converted to https. This includes destination URLs in all other deployed advertising channels such as retargeting, banners, social media and affiliate marketing campaigns.

Data Feeds

Make sure that on the day of migration all data feeds for comparison, affiliates, Google Shopping, and other parties which data feeds are delivered to destination URLs contain https. Caution: do not convert yet that comes after migration.

Redirects HTTP to HTTPS

The easiest way to ensure that all redirects going over https is to set it in the web server. On an Apache server, you'll need to do this for example in the .htaccess file. This is for the search engines is very important in order to maintain the popularity of the pages. A 301 is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.

It is therefore wise to adjust the .htaccess (Apache server) so that all URLs automatically go over the https protocol with a 301. That looks like:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on

RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

</IfModule>

</IfModule>

Please note that when you turn on the redirects on that you do not redirect to the root, but the exact new URL. For example http://subimage.fr/fr/32-sublimation to https://subimage.fr/fr/32-sublimation.

The web server must be compatible with HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), these forces to load the host https. Nowadays, almost every server suitable. An SSL certificate must be installed on the server. This can best be carried out by the hosting party.

Further, the Web server must be compatible with SNI. SNI (Server Name Indication) is an extension of the TLS protocol (Transport Layer Security, rather SSL). This indicates the hostname the client attempting to connect. The SNI extension is supported by all modern browsers, only Android 2.x (default browser) Internet Explorer in Windows XP and Java versions 1.7 are not supported.

Certificates

Talk with your hosting provider what kind of certificate you need:

• Single domain single scure origin (example.com)
• Multi-domain (example.com, example.co.uk)
• Wildcard certificate (a.example.com, b.example.com)

If you have a weaker key certificates (1024 bit), upgrading it to a high level of security with a 2048-bit key.

TLS (Transport Layer Security) Libraries should be updated with the latest version available. At this time, TLS 1.2 is the latest version.

Step 2: Migration

Start request to the migration through the hosting provider to trigger the switch. All preparations can now trigger. So converting the URLs in data feeds, Adwords, retargeting, affiliate campaigns, etc., and accessing all mapped sites that link to the http link. Send them the mail that you've already put in the preparation.

Webmaster Tools

Then get started with Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Add and verify the new https version of the Webmaster Tools.
2. Duplicate and upload the robots.txt file for the new https version on your Web server. Edit via robots.txt tester (within Webmaster Tools Crawl under) and check it for errors.
3. Upload the sitemap with all https URLs. This will help Google a hand for the re-indexing of all pages.
4. If the new version is online, you can help Google to index it faster. Using Webmaster Tools you can submit the website or individual pages via the tool - Fetch as Google.

Test your site

Working all site functionality yet? Test the filtering, sorting, searching, reviews, pictures, newsletter subscriptions, etc. Also place a test order, even though the check-out already in https.

Traffic monitoring

Keep your traffic well watched. This can be done the following ways:

1. Analytics should automatically go well. Still, it is wise to monitor your traffic. Do this via Webmaster Tools and (real) Google Analytics.
2. Also compare https and http in Webmaster Tools with each other. If all is well, fall displays the HTTP version and rise to the https version. It can take weeks or months to all https URLs are replaced and indexed in the Google index.
3. Monitor indexation. Be the first https URLs already indexed and you maintain the position.

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