Position of Website on Google SERP has been very volatile

SERP position moving down and back up



from Google SEO News and Discussion WebmasterWorld http://ift.tt/1dz6kGm

4 Surprising SEM Stats Every E-Commerce Marketer Should Know

Santa’s elves weren’t the only ones busy this past holiday season. Paid search was also working overtime to make sure shoppers ended up with perfect holiday gifts. The share of e-commerce transactions driven by SEM during November-December 2013 was 15%, up from 14% in 2012. And, organic...



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/NFv1r9

AdWords API For New Google Shopping Campaigns Now Available

Google has launched the API for the new Google Shopping Campaign type for managing product listing ads (PLAs). The API is available to agencies and third-party platforms to facilitate large-scale implementations. Google Shopping Campaigns came out of beta last month and are available globally. The...



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/1nmNQvN

5 Things I Wish I Knew as an Agency Marketer - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by dohertyjf

Working as an agency marketer is tough. I did it for a bit over two years and learned a lot of lessons. Along the way and since I have reflected about what would make me more successful as an agency marketer, and now that I am in-house at HotPads.com, I've come up with five things I wish I had known as an agency marketer. Never fear though, as there are some tidbits in there for the in-house crew as well!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is John Doherty. I currently lead Marketing at HotPads.com. Thank you Moz for having me back here on Whiteboard Friday. It's been a while since I've been here. I'm super-excited to be back in Seattle, able to get here on the camera and talk to you guys about a few things that are near and dear to my heart.

I've been at HotPads for about four months now. I joined them in San Francisco a few months ago, moving out from New York City to lead Marketing for HotPads, working with some of the other rentals businesses as well under the Zillow Inc. umbrella, both on the consumer side and the business-

to-business, B2B side.

But I worked for an agency for a couple of years. I worked for Distilled, based in New York City, and obviously I worked with a lot of clients, small clients, large clients, took a lot of pride in building relationships with my clients and getting things done. Distilled is phenomenal at that, and I felt like I learned a ton. I learned a ton about clients. But over the previous couple of months, I've really been reflecting and trying to figure out: What is really the difference between agency and in-house marketing?

I wrote a post about it on my own personal website, JohnFDoherty.com, which I don't write on there often enough. But I published a post on there recently about that difference. But today I want to take a little bit more focused approach to that, and I want to talk to you from the in-house perspective about five things that I wish I had known when I worked as an agency marketer working for clients.

So I have five points for you. Let's run through them real quick. First one is your client is the industry expert. What I mean by that is your client knows their industry, their vertical better than you know their vertical. You may be able to look at it from a domain authority perspective, who's ranking, who's creating content, who has social media going, who has a full-

fledged marketing team built out, who's just playing around, and who's spamming, who's building link networks. But you don't know their vertical, and you don't know their business. You don't know their monetization model nearly as well as they do.

So while you know the tactics, and one of the great things about agencies and one of the super valuable things about agencies is that you know the tactics and you can see across verticals. You know what's working in travel and what's working in real estate and what's working in video. You know what's going on across the broader spectrum. So that's where you can really add value to your client. You can tell them tactics, and you can tell them tactics that work across different verticals that they may not have thought about. But at the end of the day, they're the ones that know their business, and they know their vertical, from a business perspective, better than you do.

The second one is learn the whole marketing team. This is one that I struggled with early on in my career at Distilled. I was very focused on SEO, especially technical SEO, focused on site architecture and content and things like that. So I made sure to get to know the SEO. I made sure to get to know the SEO team, who does what, what's everyone's skills, all of that. For a long time, though, I failed to get to know their bosses. I failed to get to know who runs the marketing team. I failed to get to know the different sides of the marketing team and who does what. For example, in a big company, the marketing team may have five people in PR and three people in SEO and two people in email.

So talking tactics, such as email marketing strategies, with the SEO team when the SEO team has no ability to change the email marketing tactics isn't going to get you a long ways. However, this can be super valuable when you're talking with the SEO team about how they are going to be able to get buy-in with other teams to work together collaboratively with them to get more done on the SEO side. It's the old you scratch my back, I'm going to scratch yours sort of mentality.

The third is never forget that, as the agency, you are the outsource solution. Whether you like it or not, no matter how closely you get to your client, no matter how well you get to know them, no matter how often you go down to visit them, you are still the outsourced solution. You are not working there in-house with them all the time, part of the politics, seeing what's going on, knowing what the roadblocks are, knowing why certain things aren't getting done, or why certain things do get done. At the end of the day, you are still an outsourced solution that you were brought in for a reason. That's not necessarily a negative thing. Actually, from the in-house perspective now, I don't believe that's a negative thing at all, because you were brought in because you're the expert. You're the expert in SEO or technical SEO or link building or content marketing or social media marketing. You were brought in because that is what you own, and that's what you are known for, and so that is exactly the reason why you are there, not to be part of their marketing team.

However, what I learned in my time at Distilled is the closer you can get to the team, to the in-house team, the better you can get to know them, the more successful you are going to be.

This brings me to my fourth point. As an agency marketer, you're actually less responsible for results than you may think that you are. What I mean by this is ultimately the in-house team is the one that is responsible for the results. Myself, at HotPads, I am responsible for driving traffic, which drives leads which drives the business. If I hire an agency, you are not going to be responsible for driving traffic. You're going to be responsible for giving me deliverables that I can then use to go and turn into actionable things for my development team to do or for my marketing team to execute on.

To be successful as an agency marketer, what you need to do is you need to make sure that you are communicating with your client. That is the first and foremost, that you are communicating with your client, telling them when things are going to be in their inbox, what you're going to be delivering, why you are delivering it, what you're going to deliver next based off of the deliverable that you are currently working on, or spending a lot of time reporting. Honestly, I was really bad at this when I was at Distilled, reporting to my clients and telling them, "This is what we've done over the previous month, and this is what we're going to do over the next month."

That alone is invaluable to an in-house marketer, because then, as in-house marketer, if I'm given that from my agency that I'm working with, I can then go and set expectations with my bosses and tell them, "This is coming down from this agency. I expect it on this date. These are the things that they've done, and this is what we're doing with them."

Finally, this brings me to my fifth point, which is deadlines actually matter less than you think. Deadlines for deliverables actually matter a lot less than you might think. The reason for this is in-house marketers are very, very, very busy. Leading marketing at HotPads, I'm doing SEO. I'm helping out with the content strategy, helping my content manager with the content strategy, helping her meet the right people and get buy-in from the right people and figure out when to publish things and where do we publish things, and how do we push it on social media. I'm helping me email marketer get to know our developers and talk with people up here in our Seattle office, the email marketing team up here to find out what they're doing. We're strategizing about emails. I'm helping my link builder find new places to get links. We're strategizing about link building and measuring that and measuring the ROI on that.

So I'm very, very busy. Everyone on my team is very, very busy. All in-house marketers are very, very busy. We're all over the place. We're touching all sorts of different parts of marketing at some point and working very, very collaboratively, and I would suggest that any very successful in-house marketing team is all working collaboratively and not siloed away from other teams.

So all of this is to say that I really don't care about deadlines, and most in-house people aren't really going to care about deadlines. What's important for you as an agency marketer is going to be communicating with your client when something is going to be delivered. If you're going to be late, communicate that with them as soon as you're able to. If it's going to be a week late, let them know why. Things come up. Everyone understands that things come up. Maybe another client had an emergency. Maybe there was an algorithm change that they were hurt by, that their CEO is about to fire the whole marketing team if you don't jump in. Clients understand this. So what you need to do is you really need to communicate with them as soon as possible, as often as possible.

As an in-house marketer, speaking to the in-house guys for a second, you need to tell the agency exactly what you're dealing with, exactly what your responsibilities are. What keeps you busy day-to-day? There's nothing more frustrating as an agency marketer than being like, "Why can't I get a hold of my client? I know they're around. I know they're in there. Aren't they just like sitting there building links?" The answer is no. They're not just sitting there building links. They have a lot going on. So to be successful as an agency marketer, you need to find out from your clients exactly what keeps them busy day in, day out. So then you are able to not be a pain to them, but rather to help them do their job even better.

So these are five things that I wish I knew as an agency marketer now that I am in-house. Once again, my name is John Doherty. You can find me on Twitter, DohertyJF, and I'm happy to be back here. Please leave any comments you have below in the comments section. Thanks a lot. Have a great weekend.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1jYm33o

5 Things I Wish I Knew as an Agency Marketer - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by dohertyjf

Working as an agency marketer is tough. I did it for a bit over two years and learned a lot of lessons. Along the way and since I have reflected about what would make me more successful as an agency marketer, and now that I am in-house at HotPads.com, I've come up with five things I wish I had known as an agency marketer. Never fear though, as there are some tidbits in there for the in-house crew as well!

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. My name is John Doherty. I currently lead Marketing at HotPads.com. Thank you Moz for having me back here on Whiteboard Friday. It's been a while since I've been here. I'm super-excited to be back in Seattle, able to get here on the camera and talk to you guys about a few things that are near and dear to my heart.

I've been at HotPads for about four months now. I joined them in San Francisco a few months ago, moving out from New York City to lead Marketing for HotPads, working with some of the other rentals businesses as well under the Zillow Inc. umbrella, both on the consumer side and the business-

to-business, B2B side.

But I worked for an agency for a couple of years. I worked for Distilled, based in New York City, and obviously I worked with a lot of clients, small clients, large clients, took a lot of pride in building relationships with my clients and getting things done. Distilled is phenomenal at that, and I felt like I learned a ton. I learned a ton about clients. But over the previous couple of months, I've really been reflecting and trying to figure out: What is really the difference between agency and in-house marketing?

I wrote a post about it on my own personal website, JohnFDoherty.com, which I don't write on there often enough. But I published a post on there recently about that difference. But today I want to take a little bit more focused approach to that, and I want to talk to you from the in-house perspective about five things that I wish I had known when I worked as an agency marketer working for clients.

So I have five points for you. Let's run through them real quick. First one is your client is the industry expert. What I mean by that is your client knows their industry, their vertical better than you know their vertical. You may be able to look at it from a domain authority perspective, who's ranking, who's creating content, who has social media going, who has a full-

fledged marketing team built out, who's just playing around, and who's spamming, who's building link networks. But you don't know their vertical, and you don't know their business. You don't know their monetization model nearly as well as they do.

So while you know the tactics, and one of the great things about agencies and one of the super valuable things about agencies is that you know the tactics and you can see across verticals. You know what's working in travel and what's working in real estate and what's working in video. You know what's going on across the broader spectrum. So that's where you can really add value to your client. You can tell them tactics, and you can tell them tactics that work across different verticals that they may not have thought about. But at the end of the day, they're the ones that know their business, and they know their vertical, from a business perspective, better than you do.

The second one is learn the whole marketing team. This is one that I struggled with early on in my career at Distilled. I was very focused on SEO, especially technical SEO, focused on site architecture and content and things like that. So I made sure to get to know the SEO. I made sure to get to know the SEO team, who does what, what's everyone's skills, all of that. For a long time, though, I failed to get to know their bosses. I failed to get to know who runs the marketing team. I failed to get to know the different sides of the marketing team and who does what. For example, in a big company, the marketing team may have five people in PR and three people in SEO and two people in email.

So talking tactics, such as email marketing strategies, with the SEO team when the SEO team has no ability to change the email marketing tactics isn't going to get you a long ways. However, this can be super valuable when you're talking with the SEO team about how they are going to be able to get buy-in with other teams to work together collaboratively with them to get more done on the SEO side. It's the old you scratch my back, I'm going to scratch yours sort of mentality.

The third is never forget that, as the agency, you are the outsource solution. Whether you like it or not, no matter how closely you get to your client, no matter how well you get to know them, no matter how often you go down to visit them, you are still the outsourced solution. You are not working there in-house with them all the time, part of the politics, seeing what's going on, knowing what the roadblocks are, knowing why certain things aren't getting done, or why certain things do get done. At the end of the day, you are still an outsourced solution that you were brought in for a reason. That's not necessarily a negative thing. Actually, from the in-house perspective now, I don't believe that's a negative thing at all, because you were brought in because you're the expert. You're the expert in SEO or technical SEO or link building or content marketing or social media marketing. You were brought in because that is what you own, and that's what you are known for, and so that is exactly the reason why you are there, not to be part of their marketing team.

However, what I learned in my time at Distilled is the closer you can get to the team, to the in-house team, the better you can get to know them, the more successful you are going to be.

This brings me to my fourth point. As an agency marketer, you're actually less responsible for results than you may think that you are. What I mean by this is ultimately the in-house team is the one that is responsible for the results. Myself, at HotPads, I am responsible for driving traffic, which drives leads which drives the business. If I hire an agency, you are not going to be responsible for driving traffic. You're going to be responsible for giving me deliverables that I can then use to go and turn into actionable things for my development team to do or for my marketing team to execute on.

To be successful as an agency marketer, what you need to do is you need to make sure that you are communicating with your client. That is the first and foremost, that you are communicating with your client, telling them when things are going to be in their inbox, what you're going to be delivering, why you are delivering it, what you're going to deliver next based off of the deliverable that you are currently working on, or spending a lot of time reporting. Honestly, I was really bad at this when I was at Distilled, reporting to my clients and telling them, "This is what we've done over the previous month, and this is what we're going to do over the next month."

That alone is invaluable to an in-house marketer, because then, as in-house marketer, if I'm given that from my agency that I'm working with, I can then go and set expectations with my bosses and tell them, "This is coming down from this agency. I expect it on this date. These are the things that they've done, and this is what we're doing with them."

Finally, this brings me to my fifth point, which is deadlines actually matter less than you think. Deadlines for deliverables actually matter a lot less than you might think. The reason for this is in-house marketers are very, very, very busy. Leading marketing at HotPads, I'm doing SEO. I'm helping out with the content strategy, helping my content manager with the content strategy, helping her meet the right people and get buy-in from the right people and figure out when to publish things and where do we publish things, and how do we push it on social media. I'm helping me email marketer get to know our developers and talk with people up here in our Seattle office, the email marketing team up here to find out what they're doing. We're strategizing about emails. I'm helping my link builder find new places to get links. We're strategizing about link building and measuring that and measuring the ROI on that.

So I'm very, very busy. Everyone on my team is very, very busy. All in-house marketers are very, very busy. We're all over the place. We're touching all sorts of different parts of marketing at some point and working very, very collaboratively, and I would suggest that any very successful in-house marketing team is all working collaboratively and not siloed away from other teams.

So all of this is to say that I really don't care about deadlines, and most in-house people aren't really going to care about deadlines. What's important for you as an agency marketer is going to be communicating with your client when something is going to be delivered. If you're going to be late, communicate that with them as soon as you're able to. If it's going to be a week late, let them know why. Things come up. Everyone understands that things come up. Maybe another client had an emergency. Maybe there was an algorithm change that they were hurt by, that their CEO is about to fire the whole marketing team if you don't jump in. Clients understand this. So what you need to do is you really need to communicate with them as soon as possible, as often as possible.

As an in-house marketer, speaking to the in-house guys for a second, you need to tell the agency exactly what you're dealing with, exactly what your responsibilities are. What keeps you busy day-to-day? There's nothing more frustrating as an agency marketer than being like, "Why can't I get a hold of my client? I know they're around. I know they're in there. Aren't they just like sitting there building links?" The answer is no. They're not just sitting there building links. They have a lot going on. So to be successful as an agency marketer, you need to find out from your clients exactly what keeps them busy day in, day out. So then you are able to not be a pain to them, but rather to help them do their job even better.

So these are five things that I wish I knew as an agency marketer now that I am in-house. Once again, my name is John Doherty. You can find me on Twitter, DohertyJF, and I'm happy to be back here. Please leave any comments you have below in the comments section. Thanks a lot. Have a great weekend.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1e8rCaH

Are Links Losing Value in Google's Algorithm? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

There are some great arguments to be made on both sides of the question of whether links are losing value in Google's algorithm. In some ways, it seems that they are -- and in some, they're more valuable than ever. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores both sides of the argument, offering some concrete advice to SEOs on how they can navigate today's waters.

Here's the link to coverage of Google's testing removing links from the algorithm, and to the roundup post where links as a ranking signal are discussed (in particular, check out Russ Jones' reply in the comments). For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today, I want to talk a little bit about links losing their value in Google's ranking algorithm.

So Google recently came out and talked about how they had tested a version of their search engine, of search quality algorithms, ranking algorithms, that did not include links as a ranking signal. Of course, a lot of SEOs went "Wait, they did what?"

But it turns out Google actually said they really did not like the results. They didn't like what they saw when they removed links from the ranking elements. So maybe SEOs are going, "Okay, can I breathe easy, or are they going to keep trying to find ways to take links out of the ranking equation?" Certainly, links for a long time have been an extremely powerful way for SEOs and folks to move the needle on indexation, on rankings, on getting traffic from search engines.

I'm going to personally come out and say that, in my opinion, we will continue to see links in Google's rankings systems for at least the next five and probably the next ten years. Whether they continue to be as important and as powerful as they've been, I think is worthy of a discussion, and I do want to bring up some points that some very intelligent marketers and SEOs have made on both sides of the issue.

So, first off, there are some folks who are saying, "No, this is crazy. Links are actually growing in value." I thought Russ Jones from Virante made some excellent comments on a recent blog post where some experts had been asked to do a thought experiment around what Google might do if links were to lose signals.

He made some good points, one of which was as Google filters out . . . so let's say I've got this webpage on Google, and as I filter out the value that are passed from some links through algorithms like Penguin or through filtration systems that remove either Web spam or low-quality links or links that we don't find valuable in our relevancy algorithms, it actually is the case that these other links grow in importance. In fact, as Russ wisely pointed out, many of the other kinds of signals that Google might potentially replace links with, things around user and usage data, things around social signals, all of those things actually can be validated through the link graph, and you can use the link graph to add additional context and information about those other signals. So I think there's a point to be made.

People have also pointed out that as we get into this world where no-follow is very, very common, a lot of websites putting no-follow on there, social sharing is oftentimes a much more common form of evangelizing or sharing information than linking is. Before we had the popularity of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+ and all these networks, that social sharing would have been bloggers and people in forums linking out to these resources.

There's also, unfortunately, created a lot by Google themselves, and Bing to a certain extent, too, there are many, many webmasters and site owners and editorial specialists on the Web who have a fear of linking out. They worry that by linking to something bad or if they link out and then something happens to that website they link out to, that maybe something will happen to their site.

As a result, it's actually become a greater and greater challenge over time to earn editorial links for everyone. This is interesting because it actually suggests that there is more value when you do earn those editorial links. So I think there's a very credible case to be made.

On the flip side, there are SEOs who are pointing out, hey, look links are definitely a diminishing signal because there are elements in a ranking system, and anytime you have elements in a ranking system and you add new signals of relevancy, new signals of usefulness, of importance, of popularity, whatever those are, the pie chart has to squish those in. Then, the portion that used to be links, all of this stuff here, just this portion is still link-

based. So links become a smaller piece of the pie chart.

One good way of explaining this is think of, for example, Olympic ice skating, where you have judges who give rankings. Those judges, they'll give a score -- a 7.5 and an 8.5. They have criteria that they look at. As new criteria get added, the criteria for other pieces necessarily becomes a little bit less important.

Now, in Google's ranking system, it's not quite the same logic. We don't have a pie chart that can add signals and remove signals. It's not like everybody has a score out of just 10. But the ability of pages and sites to move up in the rankings is influenced by the elements that are in here in a similar fashion.

So what really should SEOs do? What should we take away from this sort of debate and discussion and this testing of Google by removing links from their algorithmic signals and not liking those results? Well, in an ideal world, in a best-case scenario, as a marketer, the way that I believe we should be thinking about this is to invest in the marketing, in the tactics and channels that provide value in multiple ways.

By "multiple ways," I mean provide value in terms of branding; provide value in terms of direct traffic; provide value in terms of growing my social network; provide value in terms of growing my e-mail network, in terms of growing my influence and thought leadership in this sphere; all those kinds of things.

If I can get those multiple ways and still earn links? So content marketing is one that a lot of SEOs and marketers have been investing in because it does these things. Content marketing means that I get social shares. It means that I get more social followers. It means that I grow the people who pay attention to my brand and are aware of my brand. That content can also earn links, which helps me in the search engine rankings. That's the ideal world. There are many forms of this. Content marketing isn't the only one.

It can also be good, not quite as good, to refocus the energy that you might currently be expending on building all kinds of links and instead concentrate very carefully on the few links that really matter. As we've seen here, even for those who are arguing, "No, it's becoming less important," it's not becoming less important. Those folks are saying, "Hey, there are a lot of things getting filtered out, and it's harder and harder to earn the good editorial links." Focusing on getting those is still very valuable.

Do not do these things -- keep getting any and every link. We've talked about this many times on Whiteboard Friday. You guys are all familiar. Especially the non-editorial kind. It's too dangerous a world. If you're building a site that you want to last in the search engines for a long period of time, many months and years in the future, you can't afford to be actively, proactively going and getting non-editorial links.

Please, don't ignore the value that you get from activities that might not directly earn you a link -- things that could get you brand mentions and grow your brand, things that could build up your resource of content, things that could build up your social channels -- just because those things don't earn you a link.

A great example of this one is a lot of folks have been talking about guest posting. Of course, I did a Whiteboard Friday right before Google made their announcement about guest posting. Guest blogging, guest posting, in that classic SEO for a link fashion, is not a great idea. But it can still be a great channel to earn brand awareness and attention, to earn direct traffic. I mean, a lot of folks can post on forums, on sites that earn them an additional audience, and that additional audience in the future might turn into people who share and link and become customers. So that's a beautiful world. Don't ignore the value of that.

I'm sure there's going to be some great debate and discussion in the comments, and I really look forward to hearing from all of you. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/1hohGOI

SearchCap: The Day In Search, March 6, 2014

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Yahoo Rolling Out Indoor Maps (via Nokia) Yahoo has started to integrate indoor maps into its newly upgraded mapping product. Even though Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer...



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing http://ift.tt/NClocR