Over the holiday season I signed up to receive email newsletters and offers from several retail websites. Interestingly, when I received some of these emails for discounts, coupons or alerts for new items I was most likely to click on a link in the email and browse the retailer’s site. When comparing email to social media, TV or other forms of online media, the channel that most frequently grabbed my attention was email.
Not surprisingly, retailers agree that email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing tools that they have. Wait! Isn’t social media supposed to be the new medium that kills email while simultaneously generating sales? Not so, according to recent industry reports. Forrester tracked 77,000 sales during the recent holiday season and found out that only 1% of online sales came from social media sites like Facebook.
Knowledge is power, as the old saying goes. So what do marketers need to know about Google’s Knowledge Graph to power their SEO and search strategies?
There has been a lot of commentary around the semantic Web. The theory is that search results are becoming smarter by distinguishing between words with different meanings. Whether that is true or not largely depends on who you believe and how much stock you place in search engines’ ability to “learn” the wants and needs of their users.
The inception of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which began rolling out in May 2012, has been the driving force behind the rise of the semantic Web.
Understanding the Knowledge Graph The Knowledge Graph is basically a knowledge base consisting of more than 570 million objects and 18 billion facts. Since its inception, search result pages have gone through noticeable changes. These include the ability to distinguish between words with different meanings and a new sidebar feature that provides a snippet of related facts.
Through semantic integration, or the process of matching related information from diverse sources, Google has been able to serve narrower, more refined search results based on what people are searching.
Before the Knowledge Graph, if someone searched for “Kansas,” the results would split between information about the state of Kansas and the band Kansas. The Knowledge Graph allows Google to better associate specific results to the most relevant “Kansas.” (more…)
In honoring Purtell with the “Best of SEJ” distinction, former Search Engine Journal Editor-in-Chief Phil Butler described the article as an “insightful look at the emerging value of authors in search [that] from one of the industry’s most knowledgeable authors, or a super digitally influential company, MediaWhiz.”
When considering major trends that will impact SEO in 2013 it’s clear that AuthorRank will play an increasingly important role in marketers’ search and SEO strategies.
PageRank has long been the standard high-level metric used to identify the relative quality of a Web page. There is arguably limited value in using PageRank as a quality metric over the last few years, but it can still be meaningful in conjunction with other quality metrics (i.e. domain authority, page authority, etc.)
In 2013 a new quality metric will take the spotlight when it comes to page quality and search engine ranking. This metric is affectionately known as AuthorRank (or Agent Rank, according to Google’s patent).
Here’s why AuthorRank will help reshape SEO in 2013:
AuthorRank: A Brief Overview Content quality, as measured by search engines, is no longer based solely on the authority of a domain or Web page. It is increasingly based on the reputation and authority of the individual that authored the content. This reputational score grades authors on the Web and used that grade when ordering natural search engine results.
With the holiday marketing season closing, many performance marketers have already turned their attention to 2013. Inevitably, their thoughts turn to what they should do to finish the current year on a strong note and ensure the new year is an equal success. Here’s a checklist of what you should do:
Finish Q4 2012strong. Lead-generation marketers must ensure their budgets have enough leeway to meet seasonal offers for the holidays. The holidays are the best-performing season for cash-advance offers. It’s important to keep existing clients happy, as they will undoubtedly present additional budgets at the last minute. Lead-gen marketers need to do their best to meet clients’ year-end demands to ensure inclusion in advertisers’ 2013 budgets.
Assessstaff and optimize processes. As the year closes, and more people tend to take time off, now is the time to ensure your org chart and process are maximized. If you are able to move the business forward without some of your employees, then you need to cut ties or upgrade their positions. If you can’t succeed and are inundated with tactical maneuvers, then it’s time to get job specs together for the positions you need and seek out the right staffing level. (more…)
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a two-part series on predictions in performance marketing in 2013.
In my last column, I offered my 2013 predictions for companies in the performance marketing industry and potential new regulations. This column addresses predictions for performance marketing media channels in the new year, as well as how certain vertical markets will fare.
Media Channels Given all the opportunities and challenges, it will be critical for the performance marketing community to help educate and drive media-channel-specific results for clients.
Perhaps the easiest growth prediction is that mobile marketing will become a much larger piece of the advertising market. eMarketer forecasts 138 million mobile phone users in the United States in 2013, or 43 percent of the total U.S. population. That number will increase by 20 million users per year through 2016, reaching almost 200 million Americans (74 percent of the U.S. population). It will be critical for advertisers to optimize websites and lead-generation forms for mobile devices.
Agencies will continue to focus on branding and awareness for their clients in the digital space. This will mean the farming out of more performance marketing budgets to trusted networks. (more…)
Every webmaster’s and SEO professional’s nightmare is seeing a sudden plummet of those hard-earned Google rankings. The chaos that ensues in trying to pinpoint just what happened is never a welcomed experience.
The good news is that Google has been as transparent as ever in recent months. It offers new information, tools and methods to help webmasters beg for mercy, such as Webmaster Tools alerts, re-inclusion requests and the Link Disavow tool.
Begging for mercy isn’t always the best course of action, however, depending on the circumstances of the issues surrounding the drop in ranking. It should be a last resort once you have identified the reason for the issues with a great deal of certainty, done everything possible to resolve the issues and still don’t see a positive result. In order to take the right course of action after a Google manual review, the first step is to know if a manual review actually took place.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a two-part series on predictions in performance marketing in 2013.
The performance marketing industry has undergone massive changes in 2012.
The list of challenges the industry weathered over the past year is long and varied. It includes news of several long-standing affiliate networks going out of business; email delivery getting more difficult; Facebook and Google all but banning affiliate marketing; the federal government becoming more involved in the cash advance and “for-profit” education verticals; the rise of real-time bidding (RTB); data management platforms (DMPs) becoming critical in display advertising; and mobile marketing efforts gaining prevalence among marketers’ digital strategies.
While performance marketers shift priorities and tactics on the fly, the good news is that money continues to pour into performance marketing for its scalability, ROI focus and measurable results.
With all that in mind, 2013 looks to be a significant growth year for the companies that continue to survive in performance marketing. Further advancing the industry’s prospects will be the increasing influence of Online Darwinism — a term I coined to describe the natural evolution of the performance marketing industry, particularly its ability to rid itself of rogue marketers and agencies. (more…)
The performance marketing industry continues to grow. And with that growth comes significant opportunities — and challenges — for digital marketers looking to tap into performance marketing’s core strengths: data, technology and accountable results. Recently, I sat down with Peter Klein, MediaWhiz’s senior vice president of media services and head of MonetizeIt, the agency’s affiliate network, to discuss the state of performance marketing and his predictions for the industry’s future.
You can read a full transcript of the interview here.
Last week I predicted that AuthorRank will play an increasingly important role in marketers’ SEO strategies in 2013. This week, I examine what 2013 has in store for content marketing and its increasing value to search and SEO.
Content marketing has been a hot topic in digital marketing this year. The positive benefits it has on SEO are invaluable if done correctly. There are two main ways a good content marketing strategy can benefit organic search results: expanding a brand’s reach by syndicating useful content throughout the Web; and including links in syndicated content to build authority back to the brand’s website.
In order to employ an effective content marketing strategy, SEO experts must take more of a PR approach to developing topics to write about. Content must be cutting edge and ground-breaking to gain the momentum needed for success through social sharing and PR. In today’s landscape, there is little to no value in developing content based on a keyword. Instead, it must be based on a compelling idea. (more…)
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a two-part series on predictions in search engine marketing and SEO in 2013. The series is based on MediaWhiz’s new white paper,“SEO in 2013: The Year of the Consumer.” Download your copy.
When considering major trends that will impact SEO in 2013 it’s clear that AuthorRank will play an increasingly important role in marketers’ search and SEO strategies.
PageRank has long been the standard high-level metric used to identify the relative quality of a Web page. There is arguably limited value in using PageRank as a quality metric over the last few years, but it can still be meaningful in conjunction with other quality metrics (i.e. domain authority, page authority, etc.)
In 2013 a new quality metric will take the spotlight when it comes to page quality and search engine ranking. This metric is affectionately known as AuthorRank (or Agent Rank, according to Google’s patent).
Here’s why AuthorRank will help reshape SEO in 2013:
AuthorRank: A Brief Overview Content quality, as measured by search engines, is no longer based solely on the authority of a domain or Web page. It is increasingly based on the reputation and authority of the individual that authored the content. This reputational score grades authors on the Web and used that grade when ordering natural search engine results.
How is AuthorRank Established? The standard method for an author on the Web to be credited by Google with the content they produce is to tie pages they have written to their Google Plus profiles. This is done using rich snippets. Authors are then ranked based on the engagement factors of the content they produce. These factors include: social endorsements (tweets, +1’s, shares, likes); the influence and relevancy of those providing the social endorsements; comments on social networks (such as Yelp); the influence and relevancy of those commenting; and the quality and relevancy of inbound links pointing to the content. The more an author writes on a topic, and the more engagement with that content, the higher that author’s rank will be for a specific topic. (more…)
