editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

Google’s Universal Analytics sunsets in 51 days & cookies are crumbling: how to prepare

May 30, 2023 No Comments

According to Gartner research, just over a quarter of all marketing budgets go toward paid media, with 56% of that spent on digital channels. Proving return on ad spend is already difficult for digital marketing leaders, and changes to cookies and walled gardens strengthening their own walls will make it even more challenging.

Third-party cookie data fuelled two decades of digital media and data-driven performance advertising. It’s no wonder cookie deprecation and restrictions on third-party data are transforming the way marketers target, buy and measure digital media.

In addition to the immediate impacts of cookie loss, the increased regulatory pressures on walled gardens is creating an environment of more black box algorithms and fewer data points with which to measure and independently verify results. Of the three privacy scenarios proposed by my colleague Andrew Frank, we are quickly moving to a walled garden world. And the biggest among them, Google, is at the front of the pack.

Aside from the (continually delayed) deprecation of the cookie, Google has another fast-approaching deadline that will impact almost every marketer with a website: the sunsetting of Universal Analytics.

As my colleague Lizzy Foo Kune shared with The Drum last year, the migration to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) entails an urgent overhaul to long-standing marketing data collection, measurement baselines and operational approaches — and deeper ties to Google’s ad ecosystem. GA4 highlights the data usage and consent gaps between acquisition-oriented advertising and retention-and-growth marketing but provides bridging mechanisms such as lookalike modelling, retargeting, pathing and attribution.

Digital advertising is vital for the success of modern brands, for driving both top-of-funnel awareness and bottom-of-funnel consideration and sales. Key to their success is access to data about their prospects’ and customers’ online behaviour, which helps marketers target and personalize their campaign efforts. Regulations on the collection and sharing of consumer data is prompting major data providers and adtech alike to change how their platforms collect, store and share this data with advertisers.

To maintain their digital media effectiveness, marketers need to build resilience and evaluate existing digital partners for cookie and walled garden alternatives.

Build a cookieless and walled garden risk profile

Purchasing display ads indirectly indicates a high reliance on third-party cookies. Brands with campaigns that rely heavily on indirect impressions could be highly susceptible to disruption from additional privacy changes from walled gardens and limits on third-party tracking from regulatory bodies.

Brands should ensure that their website and digital media campaigns – and the data collected and used to target ads – are both privacy compliant and effective in the face of those challenges by:

Owning, assigning someone on the team or finding a trusted partner to keep up with the latest news on privacy changes, cookies and third-party data regulation and their impact on the brand’s business.
Building first-party data assets by homing in on core customers and building direct-buying relationships with strategically important media partners.
Working across the organization to ensure compliance across user data collection and digital media activation.
Partnering with media companies, as well as established and emerging technology firms, to test novel targeting strategies (e.g., Google’s Topics, contextual targeting, data clean rooms) that reduce the eventual impact of the loss of cookies on existing media strategies.

Once an organization understands how its digital media is purchased, either with an internal analysis or a report from its agency partners, determine the risk exposure to the company’s marketing programs. Privacy changes and cookie deprecation’s impact on advertising depend on two factors: sales strategy (direct or third-party sales) and media strategy (brand versus performance marketing).

Source: Gartner (May 2023)

Sales strategy and the proximity to the final sale are indicative of the relationship with the customer, including the receiving consent to use their data for retargeting and other conversion-oriented digital advertising tactics. Media strategy indicates the number of existing relationships brands have with their target audiences to deploy in a privacy-safe way and their reliance on advertising partners.

Limit exposure to changes in the long run

After determining the organization’s cookie risk profile and building overall resilience to disruption, follow some of these next steps, tailored for each profile, to limit exposure to changes:

Conversion-seeking brands should focus on the core value of their products to consumers and continue to build upon that niche in addition to investing in performance media partners. Work on increasing the loyalty of existing customers and growing through the network effects of word-of-mouth on social media and outside of digital.
Legacy wholesale brands should maintain mind share through their broad brand advertising strategies while leveraging emerging channels like retail media networks. These channels can help fill any potential gaps in performance advertising left by changes to walled gardens and third-party data.
Direct-to-consumer and mono-brand retail brands should leverage their consent-based first-party data and close relationships with customers to focus their ad spend across trusted sites and apps. With Universal Analytics’ sunset imminent, it is imperative for digital marketing leaders to start collecting data with both UA and GA4 now in order to test for data compatibility and source appropriate alternatives for signal loss.
Platform and multichannel retail brands must continue to innovate on their existing sites, apps and product suite to stay at the forefront of customer needs. If the brand is a Google Analytics site, it’s important to prepare for fewer granular data points on site visitors in exchange for more targeting options within the Google media properties. In addition, work with marketing technology providers to expand revenue opportunities by leveraging audience and conversion data for brands in high-risk, legacy and direct profiles.

Mike Froggatt is senior director, analyst in Gartner’s marketing practice. To read more from The Drum’s latest Deep Dive, where we’ll be demystifying data & privacy for marketers in 2023, head over to our special hub.

Feature Image Credit: Myriam Jessier

By Mike Froggatt

Sourced from The Drum

In News

The New Era of Consumer Culture

May 30, 2023 No Comments

By Ritu Marya

How D2C Founders Are Adapting Their Business To Meet Customers Where They Are Now and Where They Will Be Tomorrow

Nir Ayal has said “People don’t want something truly new. They want the familiar done differently.” New-age consumer brands have disrupted the retail market on this very mindset packaged with an omnichannel equation and combined with their unique blend of price, product innovation, and consumer experience. The inclusion of data on the whole — from anywhere and in real-time — has helped the brands make better, more informed judgments.

The culmination of technology and commerce with advanced systems such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which can detect patterns that human logic may miss, has brought faster decision making across the entire value chain. Additionally, the increasing focus on a content first approach for customer engagement has brought more control over output. If consumer data is the new oil, the consumer is the ecosystem’s North Star and then retail, no matter how you slice it, revolves around the consumer.

Our Makers Co issue is focused on new-age brands, showcasing decisionmakers who are growing, transforming, innovating, and therefore tilting the brand ecosystem in India. They are young, hyper-focused, and with their intellectual energy are gunning for the TAM of 759 million Indian active Internet users to shift towards new-age commerce. The founders are brand obsessed from day 0 and are always looking at the bigger picture, both qualitatively by enabling a real impact on lives, and quantitatively, in terms of scale. Whether it is a revolutionary subscription model or social commerce, video-based selling, storytelling, or memorable branded experience, the Makers are one step up from their industrial counterparts who are also fast catching on to the D2C moment.

The D2C opportunity is so lucrative as we also share in this issue how traditional FMCG companies such as Dabur, ITC, Marico, Wipro and Parle Agro are also trying their luck in the space either by acquisitions or starting their own digital-first brands.

Sustainability has become paramount in today’s world. The outright need to adopt sustainable practices and products has become a priority for all size of businesses. And in recent times, seaweed has emerged as a strong candidate to make our daily products more sustainable and eco-friendly. We look into various use cases of seaweed.

The issue also looks at new regulations brought in by the Government for the online gaming sector. Under these regulations, online real money games that involve betting or wagering have been prohibited. And the government will be notifying three new self-regulatory organisations (SROs) to approve the games that can operate in the country.

Does it indicate a new dawn for real money games? The issue dives deeper to find out what steps companies are taking up besides news rules to protect consumer interest in the wake of reports of people getting addicted to such games and losing their financial savings. What are the Markets telling you today? We turn our focus toward the amended Finance Bill that has taken away the indexation benefit enjoyed by debt mutual funds for quite a long time. The story evaluates if they are still a good investment option in the debt category.

By Ritu Marya

Editor-in-Chief, Entrepreneur Media (APAC & India)

Sourced from Entrepreneur India

In News

Generative AI for Email Personalization: A Hallucination Wrapped in Confusion

May 30, 2023 No Comments

By Chad S. White

The potential for generative AI creating highly personalized emails may be premature, as current AI technology falls short in several areas.

The Gist

Scaling limitations. Generative AI struggles to efficiently create highly personalized emails without significant manual intervention, limiting its practicality at scale.
Traditional superiority. Existing personalization methods and machine learning models are more effective, reliable and risk-averse than current generative AI approaches for email personalization.
Unproven potential. The performance and return on investment of generative AI personalization in emails remain uncertain, with unclear benefits and possibly diminishing novelty.

Let me be blunt: We are so far away from generative AI writing personalized emails in any meaningful way. So very far. Yet, I keep hearing people suggest that generative AI will be writing highly personalized emails to individuals in the not-too-distant future.

I don’t think this is a realistic expectation at any significant scale, with any degree of automation and with a reliable expectation of increased performance — much less a positive return on investment. Let me explain why.

Not at Scale

The best example I’ve seen of generative artificial intelligence (AI) writing a one-to-one email was a meeting request for a salesperson. First, that’s a pretty generic request — and, in the example, amounted to 10 words. Not a big time-saver. Second, the salesperson is chaperoning the AI, and if they don’t like what’s written, they either have to edit it or write a follow up prompt for changes, which further reduces the time-savings. In that example, the degree to which it was personalized was achieved through manual intervention and not automatically driven by the recipient’s past behaviours, demographics or other criteria — which is the traditional definition of personalization.

While generative AI will get much better in the years ahead, that example is a very realistic example of how generative AI would be used in a “blank page” email situation right now, given generative AI’s many faults and limitations, including its propensity to “hallucinate.” That use case appropriately minimizes the risk by (1) asking for a routine request, (2) keeping the text short and (3) having the output monitored and approved by an employee before it’s sent.

Not Automated

To date, I’m not aware of any brands using ChatGPT or any other large language model (LLM) to incorporate personalized content into an email. And there’s a good reason for that: It’s unnecessary.

Traditional methods of personalization are highly effective and are far from fully utilized — due to siloed and unreliable data. And machine learning models for product recommendations and send time optimization are even less utilized. These existing tools are tried and true and offer solid returns with much more control — which is to say, with far less risk — than generative AI.

In fact, when generative AI is ultimately used for personalization, I predict it will be fed content that’s been personalized using traditional methods. Put another way, any personalization done by generative AI will be done on top of traditionally personalized content. That approach would minimize generative AI’s opportunities to introduce inaccuracies, biases, plagiarized material and other problematic content while simultaneously focusing generative AI on the kind of personalization that only it can do.

Just what are these new forms of personalization that only generative AI enables? Here are a few:

Tone. Some subscribers are receptive to more aggressive pitches while others are much less so. And, of course, there’s a whole spectrum of potential tones that could be used. Generative AI could rewrite copy on the fly to better align with what subscribers respond to best.
Vernacular. Language varies in significant ways by geographic region, education level, religious beliefs and other factors. Especially if it’s informed by sales and support correspondence, generative AI could adapt a brand’s messages to match the recipient’s language usage.
Image backgrounds. Generative AI for images can enable brands to create highly personalized images based on the subscriber’s location, industry and more. For example, an outdoors retailer could place a model in any number of national parks depending on the location of the subscriber or knowledge of where they like to hike or camp.

As with all personalization, a big part of the challenge will be securing enough data to make sound decisions. But even if that hurdle is cleared, there’s the question of performance and generating a return on investment.

Unproven Performance

Oracle Marketing Consulting has identified more than 170 segmentation and personalization criteria that can be used in digital marketing campaigns. However, just because you can personalize a message using a particular data point doesn’t mean your subscribers will respond positively to it. Through experience and testing, each brand must discover which factors truly move the needle for them. The same is true for generative AI personalization.

Even if you have the data to try to personalize the vernacular of your emails, for example, it’s currently unclear if this would be a winning approach. It’s likely that at least some subscribers would find this kind of personalization creepy and manipulative.

It’s also likely that some performance boosts likely wouldn’t be sustainable as the novelty wears off. The history of first-name personalization likely provides a good example. A decade and a half ago when it was new, first-name mail merges moved the needle for a while. But it quickly became a hollow gesture and a gimmick because it generally didn’t signal that the email’s body content was any more relevant to subscribers. First-name personalization got brief bumps when brands gained the ability to personalize images with a subscriber’s name and again when they could personalize videos with their name. But subscribers still view these as technological stunts that don’t signal anything meaningful.

Generative AI personalization may have the same effect, drawing attention away from your message and to the technological stunt of personalizing an image with the skyline of the person’s home city, for example. Sure, it will be cool the first time you encounter it, but the novelty will fade quickly because it’s based on relatively easy-to-obtain geographic data that doesn’t speak to the person’s needs or wants. Plus, attention-grabbing tactics often don’t translate into better performance.

Uncertain ROI

Even if generative AI personalization can boost performance, a positive return on investment is unlikely — definitely not at current “per token” price levels. And given email volumes, it’s possible that generative AI personalization may never make financial sense except for highly targeted campaigns.

It’s worth noting that many of our clients have seen lacklustre returns when using predictive subject line writing tools like Phrasee and Persado. These tools have been around for many years and are primarily driven by machine learning models where wording recommendations are based on the historical performance of a brand’s subject lines and other copy. If models that are trained on historical performance can’t reliably generate a strong ROI, marketers should be deeply sceptical that generative AI tools with no access to performance intelligence can.

Muddied Terminology

A big contributor to this premature idea of generative AI personalization is that some people are using the terms machine learning, AI and generative AI almost interchangeably. While they’re all loosely related, they’re far from the same. They operate using different algorithms and models, have different goals, are built on different datasets and are appropriate for different use cases.

With generative AI and AI in general being so hot right now, brands need to work extra hard to be clear-eyed about what’s possible now and what may perhaps be possible at some point in the future. Just like in the late ’90s when adding “.com” to company names was all the rage, now .ai domains are super popular. Just like then, in some cases these are just aspirational or opportunistic marketing moves.

Generative AI will ultimately be huge, and brands should absolutely experiment with and get comfortable with it. However, we’re in the hype-iest part of the hype cycle, so proceed with caution and ask lots of questions.

By Chad S. White

Chad S. White is the author of four editions of Email Marketing Rules and Head of Research for Oracle Marketing Consulting, a global full-service digital marketing agency inside of Oracle.

Sourced from CMS Wire

In News

12 WordPress Plugins That All Beginner Bloggers Should Install

May 29, 2023 No Comments

By Danny Maiorca

If you want to set your blog up for success, install these WordPress plugins.

WordPress powers millions of blogs worldwide, and the service—particularly WordPress.org—has some of the best customization options you’ll find on the web. You can choose from numerous themes to make your website look how you want it to, and you can install several plugins to enhance the site’s functionalities.

You can use WordPress plugins to make your website compliant with local regulations, stop spam, and improve your marketing campaigns. You’ll find plugins for numerous other purposes as well, and we’ll reveal a dozen of the best options today.

1. CookieYes

If your blog operates within the EU or EEA, you must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Part of these regulations requires you to give users consent before you store cookies in their browsers.

CookieYes is a free plugin that allows you to embed a consent banner on your website. Users can alter and adjust their preferences however they want. After installing the plugin, you can sign up for a CookieYes account and set everything up on your blog.

2. Cookiebot

An alternative to CookieYes is Cookiebot, which helps your site remain compliant with the GDPR. You can also use the tool to comply with the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which has been in effect since January 2023.

You can use your Cookiebot banner in more than 40 languages, and the plugin is free for 50 subpages. If you need something more comprehensive as you grow your blog, you can opt for one of the various paid plans.

3. Yoast SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial if you want others to find your blog on Google, Bing, and so on. Yoast is one of the most effective SEO plugins, and the free version is perfect for beginner bloggers.

The Yoast SEO plugin lets you choose a focus keyword, and you’ll also receive scores for your posts. If you need to fill in some gaps, the tool will give you a list of suggestions—such as adding external links. Moreover, you’ll receive a readability score.

Learning about SEO will take time and experimentation. You can speed up the process with proactive learning, and we’ve got a full guide on how to become an SEO expert.

4. Jetpack

Website performance is just as important as high-quality content for building an audience, and Jetpack is probably the best WordPress plugin for helping in this respect. Jetpack has round-the-clock security features to keep your site safe from external threats, and you can automatically back up your blog.

Jetpack also makes it easier for you to move your blog to a new host later if you want to. You can get analytics tools, too, along with lots of other niceties. If you’re good at coding, you can use various JavaScript tips to optimize your performance.

5. MonsterInsights

Image showing MonsterInsights Overview in WP

MonsterInsights lets you monitor your web traffic more closely. You can look at your conversion rate, average order value, and which devices users are accessing your blog from.

Other metrics you can measure with MonsterInsights include how long people tend to stay on your blog and your total number of sessions. To use MonsterInsights, you’ll need to sign up for Google Analytics.

6. Akismet Anti-Spam

Spam comments are an unfortunate reality for online blogs, but you can minimize the risk by using anti-spam software. Akismet is one way that you can protect your blog from comments that fall into this category.

Akismet uses machine learning to determine what is spam and what isn’t, and you can integrate the service with Jetpack and other tools for your WordPress site. The basic version operates on a pay-what-you-can model, whereas more premium options have fixed pricing.

7. Creative Mail

All artists, including writers, should start an online newsletter for audience engagement, selling opportunities, and various other benefits. Creative Mail is a WordPress-designed option for creating email newsletters, and the plugin is free to use.

After integrating CreativeMail, you can go to it whenever you want from your main WordPress page. You can sync blog posts and use the feature with WooCommerce, and it also integrates with Jetpack. Creative Mail has numerous stock images that you can use to grow your newsletter as well.

8. Classic Editor

WordPress has moved toward the same block editing solutions that you’ll see on sites like Squarespace and Wix, but you can always revert to the previous editing version with the Classic Editor plugin. The Classic Editor lets you determine who is the default editor for each page or blog, and you’ll also get the old layout.

The Classic Editor plugin will continue to receive support and updates until at least 2024.

9. Elementor

Removing as much friction as possible will help you stay consistent in publishing blog posts, and Elementor does that by making editing much easier. The plugin lets you drag and drop elements like you would on some of the other most popular website builders, and you can use more than 90 widgets.

Elementor has support in over 50 languages, and the tool was designed to ensure that your blog continues to perform at an optimal speed. The service has a selection of paid plans, and you can get WooCommerce integration as well.

10. WooCommerce

Your blog probably won’t immediately make money, but you should think about monetization as soon as possible. Listing products you want to sell is one way to do that, and WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that gives you more control over your blog’s e-commerce aspects.

WooCommerce allows you to customize your product pages and choose your preferred payment methods. You can also sell both one-time purchases and subscriptions.

11. UpdraftPlus

You should take every step possible to stop your website content from getting deleted. But if the worst happens, knowing that you have a backup option helps—and UpdraftPlus lets you blog with more confidence by backing up your posts.

UpdraftPlus allows you to schedule your backups, and you can anonymize personal data with the service. It has free and premium versions.

12. Mailchimp4WordPress (MC4W)

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms, and you can integrate the service with your WordPress site via MC4W. MC4W is an unofficial plugin with more than two million active installations as of May 2023, and you can easily connect your account to your site. On top of that, you can design signup forms that can help you grow your mailing list.

Mailchimp4WordPress integrates with WooCommerce, WPForms, and several other plugins. You can manage the service from your dashboard.

Install These Plugins to Give Your WordPress Blog the Best Chance of Growing

You don’t need a perfect website when you launch your blog, but you should, at the very least, have the most essential plugins to set yourself up for long-term success. It’s also smart to think ahead and set up your monetization systems early on, which can save time later.

These plugins will help you measure website performance, stick with regulatory requirements, stop spam, and much more. So, why not integrate them with your site today?

By Danny Maiorca

Sourced from MUO

In News

Anthropic leapfrogs OpenAI with a chatbot that can read a novel in less than a minute

May 29, 2023 No Comments

By James Vincent

Anthropic has expanded the context window of its chatbot Claude to 75,000 words — a big improvement on current models. Anthropic says it can process a whole novel in less than a minute.

An often overlooked limitation for chatbots is memory. While it’s true that the AI language models that power these systems are trained on terabytes of text, the amount these systems can process when in use — that is, the combination of input text and output, also known as their “context window” — is limited. For ChatGPT it’s around 3,000 words. There are ways to work around this, but it’s still not a huge amount of information to play with.

Now, AI startup Anthropic (founded by former OpenAI engineers) has hugely expanded the context window of its own chatbot Claude, pushing it to around 75,000 words. As the company points out in a blog post, that’s enough to process the entirety of The Great Gatsby in one go. In fact, the company tested the system by doing just this — editing a single sentence in the novel and asking Claude to spot the change. It did so in 22 seconds.

You may have noticed my imprecision in describing the length of these context windows. That’s because AI language models measure information not by number of characters or words, but in tokens; a semantic unit that doesn’t map precisely onto these familiar quantities. It makes sense when you think about it. After all, words can be long or short, and their length does not necessarily correspond to their complexity of meaning. (The longest definitions in the dictionary are often for the shortest words.) The use of “tokens” reflects this truth, and so, to be more precise: Claude’s context window can now process 100,000 tokens, up from 9,000 before. By comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 processes around 8,000 tokens (that’s not the standard model available in ChatGPT — you have to pay for access) while a limited-release full-fat model of GPT-4 can handle up to 32,000 tokens.

Right now, Claude’s new capacity is only available to Anthropic’s business partners, who are tapping into the chatbot via the company’s API. The pricing is also unknown, but is certain to be a significant bump. Processing more text means spending more on compute.

But the news shows AI language models’ capacity to process information is increasing, and this will certainly make these systems more useful. As Anthropic notes, it takes a human around five hours to read 75,000 words of text, but with Claude’s expanded context window, it can potentially take on the task of reading, summarizing and analyzing a long documents in a matter of minutes. (Though it doesn’t do anything about chatbots’ persistent tendency to make information up.) A bigger context window also means the system is able to hold longer conversations. One factor in chatbots going off the rails is that when their context window fills up they forget what’s been said and it’s why Bing’s chatbot is limited to 20 turns of conversation. More context equals more conversation.

Feature Image Credit: Anthropic

By James Vincent

A senior reporter who has covered AI, robotics, and more for eight years at The Verge.

Sourced from The Verge

In News

Meta Outlines Its Evolving AI Ad Targeting Process, Which Is Improving Ad Performance

May 29, 2023 No Comments

By Andrew Hutchinson

Amid various changes to online data collection, which have restricted how much insight digital platforms can use in ad targeting, Meta has been developing new machine learning-based ad targeting models, which are able to deliver more relevant ads to each user without requiring the same level of personal usage insight.

This is particularly important for Meta, as it’s been hit especially hard by Apple’s iOS 14 update. Following the update, many users have cut Meta off from gathering usage data in its apps.

And while that has hurt Meta’s bottom line, more recently, Meta’s ad business has seen a recovery, while marketers are also reporting much-improved performance through tools like Advantage+, Meta’s automated ad targeting process.

So how is Meta delivering more relevant ads to users with less data to go on?

This week, Meta has provided an overview of its latest systematic update on this front, with a new ad delivery process called ‘Meta Lattice’, which uses multiple data points to better predict likely ad responses through AI and other predictive technology.

As explained by Meta:

“Meta Lattice is capable of improving the performance of our ads system holistically. We’ve supercharged its performance with a high-capacity architecture that allows our ads system to more broadly and deeply understand new concepts and relationships in data and benefits advertisers through joint optimization of a large number of goals.”

Okay, that’s a bit of a mouthful – but essentially, the Lattice system is able to infer more likely user responses, without requiring as much direct data insight from each person.

The process utilizes knowledge-sharing across Meta’s different surfaces (e.g. News Feed, Stories, Reels) to expand its mapping of potential user interest and activity. Previously, all of these elements were measured in isolation, but Meta’s more advanced predictive models are now able to take in a wider array of data points, in order to better understand likely individual behaviors.

It’s basically an expanded database of all of Meta’s ad response activity, which, when cross-matched with all of the other information it has on each user, enables the Lattice system to better predict likely ad interest through more advanced mapping. That makes better use of all of the data that Meta can access to show people more relevant ads.

“We’ve designed Meta Lattice to drive advertiser performance in the new digital advertising environment where we have access to less granular data. Additionally, Lattice is capable of generalizing learnings across domains and objectives, which is especially crucial when the model has limited data to train on. Fewer models also means we can proactively and efficiently update our models and adapt to the fast-evolving market landscape.”

In addition, the Lattice system is also able to better contextualize longer-term ad exposure, and its relative impact on response.

“The engagement between an ad and a person viewing the ad can span from seconds (e.g., click, like) to days (e.g., considering a purchase, adding to a cart, and later making the purchase from a website or an app). Through multi-distribution modeling with temporal awareness, Meta Lattice can capture not only a person’s real-time intent from fresh signals but also long-term interest from slow, sparse, and delayed signals.”

According to Meta, this approach has already improved ad exposure quality by 8%, and it’s getting better every day, leading to better results through its automated targeting tools.

Really, if you haven’t considered Meta’s Advantage+ ads, they’re worth a look, with, again, many performance marketers reporting strong results through the use of Meta’s advancing ad targeting tools.

And, as these AI-based systems evolve using a broader range of inputs, they’re likely to become more significant drivers of response, which could help you target the right audience for your offerings without needing to manually set the parameters of each campaign.

You can read more about Meta’s Lattice ad targeting system here.

By Andrew Hutchinson

Sourced from Social Media Today

In News

The best business podcasts to listen to in 2023

May 26, 2023 No Comments

By Nick Fernandez

It’s time to start that small business or side hustle.

There are podcasts for everything, but if you’re a small business owner, you probably don’t have time to listen to podcasts like Serial or The Joe Rogan Experience. Thankfully, there are plenty of business podcasts to listen to to gain tips, insights, and advice to improve your productivity or leadership skills.

It’s not always easy to find the best business podcasts on Spotify or other platforms, but we’ve done the hard work for you. Here are the best podcasts for business owners and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes!

The best business podcasts

10 Minute MBA

Frequency: Daily

Length: 10 minutes

10 Minute MBA — Daily Actionable Business Lessons with Scott D. Clary might have the longest name of any business podcast on our list, but thankfully the episodes themselves are as short as the title implies. This daily podcast is filled with actionable insights, tools, and strategies for business growth. Scott D. Clary is an investor and CEO himself, with a fairly substantial YouTube presence if you want to learn more. But at just 10 minutes, this one is easy to slot into your daily commute or morning routine.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The BizChix Podcast

Frequency: Weekly

Length: 30 minutes

Most business podcasts are, quite frankly, almost exclusively filled with men. For all the women entrepreneurs out there, Natalie Eckdahl puts out this weekly podcast filled with business training and coaching calls to help you learn everything from team-building techniques to managing work/life balance.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The Goal Digger podcast

Frequency: Twice weekly

Length: 30-60 minutes

The Goal Digger podcast is a great business and marketing resource for entrepreneurs and influencers. Host Jenna Kutcher, a self-made millionaire, shares her own experiences and lessons learned from building a thriving online business. It also features guest experts that offer insights and tips on key topics such as social media, branding, email marketing, and blogging, all essential for online success.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Business Accelerator

Frequency: Weekly

Length: 60 minutes

When it comes to the best podcasts for small business owners, Business Accelerator is right up there at the top. It’s hosted by father-and-daughter team Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller, and it’s filled with actionable advice on how to become a better and more effective leader. Episodes are released weekly and typically run just under an hour long.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Mind Your Business

Frequency: Twice weekly

Length: 60 minutes

If you listen to podcasts as much as I do, one hour a week just won’t cut it. The Mind Your Business podcast fills that gap with three episodes per week, each running anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. It’s hosted by entrepreneur James Wedmore and his girlfriend, showcasing everything from interviews and case studies to lists of tips, tools, and advice for business owners. It’s mostly focused on digital businesses, but even if you have a shop or restaurant it’s still one of the best business podcasts you can listen to.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Side Hustle School

Frequency: Daily

Length: 5 minutes

This next one is the best business podcast for anyone who isn’t quite so far along in their entrepreneurial journey. It’s a short, daily podcast that highlights a different person’s side hustle. Usually, these are modest businesses (there’s a series about making your first $1,000), but the podcast is filled with ideas to inspire you to start your own business without having to leave your day job.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Frequency: Varies

Length: 45-90 minutes

If you’d rather find out about how the world’s best-known entrepreneurs got started before they made their millions, How I Built This with Guy Raz is worth a listen. It features roughly hour-long interviews that go over the decisions founders made to grow their businesses, often into multinational conglomerates. Will you ever reach this level of success? Probably not. But it’s good to dream.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The Tim Ferriss Show

Frequency: Weekly

Length: 2-3 hours

I’ll be the first to admit that Tim Ferriss often rubs me the wrong way, but there’s no arguing that he gets some of the greatest guests on his podcast. Topics are more focused on lifestyle coaching and productivity hacks for entrepreneurs rather than how to actually run a business, but there are some gems in there. I just wish that Tim would let guests speak more without butting in, and the conversational nature of the podcast means episodes are extremely long.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

BBC Business Daily

Frequency: Daily

Length: 20 minutes

Most of the options on our list so far have had advice for small business owners and entrepreneurs, but the Business Daily podcast from the BBC has a much wider scope. It has stories and insights from business leaders, entrepreneurs, workers, consumers, and experts on various topics such as economics, technology, innovation, and social issues, so you’re getting a different perspective in every episode. As the name implies, episodes are released daily, and run about 20 minutes each.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Planet Money

Frequency: Daily

Length: 10 minutes

Any list of podcasts wouldn’t be complete without an NPR podcast, but thankfully Planet Money is one of the most popular and best business podcasts around. Like the BBC podcast above, it’s more focused on the wider economy, but if you want your business to thrive you’ll need to have some idea of what’s going on in the world. It’s also hugely entertaining, with three episodes a week running 20 to 30 minutes each.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Feature Image Credit: Lily Katz/Android Authority

By Nick Fernandez

Sourced from ANDROID AUTHORITY

In News

A guide to thinking counter-conventionally without getting fired

May 26, 2023 No Comments

By John Mullins

The author of Break the Rules explains how to rock the boat without sinking the ship and your career.

These days, it seems, most people want to either be an entrepreneur or work for a fast-growing entrepreneurial company. Even better, because innovation often holds the key to unlocking a company’s future success, many leaders today are seeking to employ people who are more “entrepreneurial” than those who are just marking time at work.

But being a counter-conventional, quick thinker in a slow-moving company can sometimes cause some bumps along the road. So how can you rock the boat as an entrepreneurial employee without sinking the ship and your career?

Start here

Why are entrepreneurial career settings so attractive, and so important, today? There’s freedom to break out and try new things. There’s the plethora of career opportunities that fast growth inevitably brings. And, if all goes well, there’s a chance to participate in changing the world, or at least your small corner of it.

Being entrepreneurial in a traditional company can often look like thinking and acting outside of your company’s unwritten rules. These are conventions that you’ll likely only know if you work within those cultures, but there are a few that are more universal.

Two of the most unfortunate, universal practices are the “rules” that well-run companies should only undertake new initiatives when the markets are “large” enough and that the first step in doing so is to dream up an “idea” of something, whether a product or a service, to offer.

Entrepreneurs know that rules are made to be broken and that new ways of thinking can hold the key to supercharged business growth. If you need a little bit of inspiration, consider the origin of one of the world’s most famous brands.

In the mid-1970s, Nestlé was the global leader in instant coffee, with the powerhouse Nescafé brand accounting for 30 per cent of global coffee sales. But after a spontaneous trip to Rome, a Swiss engineer in Nestlé’s packaging department named Eric Favre set out to recreate a machine that brewed perfect, Italian-style coffee. After some stumbling blocks with disappointing test results and low sales figures, Nestlé hired Jean-Paul Gaillard to overhaul the project, narrowing the focus to serve the individual coffee drinker market instead of restaurants, and prioritizing exclusivity with the launch of the Nespresso Club and high-end boutiques in select destinations. It’s now one of the most recognizable brands out there which shows the power of pursuing a counter-conventional approach within an established environment.

Six mindsets to start acting counter-conventionally

After over 20 years of research, I’ve found that there are six mindsets that can help you to think and act more counter-conventionally and more like an entrepreneur. These break-the-rules mindsets will bring fresh perspectives to your company’s efforts to innovate and grow but, perhaps unsurprisingly, they run counter to the conventional wisdom that may well be found in your organization’s handbook. So, you’d better proceed with your eyes wide open!

Here’s a quick summary of what they are and how you can incorporate them into your day-to-day:

Think narrowly: Instead of seeing that small project as a waste of your time, think like an entrepreneur who views tiny markets as opportunities to establish their brand, focus their efforts and set themselves up for learning and growth.
Adopt a problem-first, not product-first logic: Think of your boss or your colleagues as your customers, and work out what problems they’re facing. If you aren’t solving a genuine customer issue and are instead focusing on what you can offer them ‘off-the-shelf’, you aren’t thinking like an entrepreneur.
Say, yes, we can!: If you’re asked by your boss whether you can do something promising that falls outside your current competencies, remember what an entrepreneur would do say “Yes, we can!” then figure out how. That’s how many of our most popular gadgets including Amazon’s Kindle e-reader were created.
Beg, borrow, but don’t steal: Instead of investing in resources, entrepreneurs will find a way to borrow or outsource them, saving money and time in the process. In a big business setting, look for opportunities to “borrow” knowledge or assets from someone else—be that finding an internal expert or learning new skills online—or use existing resources for new projects at work. Your boss will likely thank you for taking the initiative.
Ask for the cash, ride the float: It’s an audacious act to ask for money ahead of delivering your product, but it’s precisely how Elon Musk and the founding team at Tesla made millions. If you can provide a product that customers really love, and can get your customers to pay for it ahead of time, you can put that spare cash—the “float”—into growing your project.
Instead of asking permission, beg forgiveness later: Entrepreneurs are known to plough ahead when there’s legal ambiguity and seek forgiveness instead of permission, so I suggest you follow the same logic—within reason. Entrepreneurs embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and pivot, so why don’t you?

If you’re someone who wants to make the world—or your small corner ther—a better place, in one way or another, as many counter-conventional thinkers have done before you, what are you waiting for?

Learning, practicing, and mastering an entrepreneurial mindset that breaks the conventional rules will give you and the place you work a fighting chance to change the world.

Feature Image Credit: Sunder Muthukumaran/Unsplash

By John Mullins

John Mullins is an associate professor of Management Practice at London Business School and the author of Break the Rules! The 6 Counter–Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World.

Sourced from Fast Company

In News

11 Best Content Analysis Tools Every Publisher Should Know About

May 25, 2023 No Comments

By Katie Lamb

If you want more traffic, conversions, and revenue from your blog or website, you need well-optimized content that’s consistent and engaging. But how do you know if your text is hitting the mark? This list of content analysis tools is going to show you a range of software that can be used to analyse what you produce.

Because you can create the most interesting and valuable piece of content out there, but if it isn’t optimized correctly, your efforts will go to waste.

Content analysis tools use a range of analytics to see how well your content is performing against some of your closest competitors.

They also help you see if you’re winning backlinks and whether your content is well-optimized for SEO.

Armed with this data, you can start improving the performance of your content so it ranks higher and drives more traffic.

11 Best Content Analysis Tools

Now let’s take a look at the best content analysis tools that are well-known to get excellent results.

Some are free, and some are paid, but all give you extremely helpful data that’ll improve your content efforts extensively.

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is one of the top content analysis tools where you can research, write, optimize, and audit your content.

Using Surfer, you get a tailored SEO content strategy that’ll increase the visibility and improve the rank of all your written work.

You can write content directly in the platform and benefit from a list of relevant keywords and recommended headings.

Surfer keeps you in check by scoring your content as you go from 0 – 100.

When you get into the green, you know your article will have a good chance of ranking on the first page of Google.

Price: Ranges from $99 – $199 a month.

Fancy trying out Surfer SEO right now?

Get a 30-day free trial here

Check out our full, in-depth Surfer SEO review.

Market Muse

Market Muse uses artificial intelligence to help you optimize your content and rank higher in search.

You can also use it to analyse your whole website and get personalized insights into what you could be doing better.

It’s a simple-to-use content analysis tool. Just type your keyword into the topic box, and you’ll be rewarded with a ton of data.

At the top, you’ll see a suggested content score and word count that you have to hit.

And on the right, you’ll see a list of suggested keywords to distribute throughout your article.

Price: 10 Free keyword queries a month. $149 – $399 a month for 100+ queries.

For more info on what this tool can do, read our Market Muse review article.

Frase

Frase is another top content analysis tool that also includes an AI writer.

Using Frase, you can write high-quality SEO-optimized content in minutes instead of hours.

This tool allows you to:

Create well-researched content briefs in 6 seconds
Generate high-quality content at the click of a button
Optimize your content to outrank competitors
Use content analytics to unveil new opportunities

This is one of the best tools if you’re looking for help with content planning, writing, and optimization.

Plus, you can use their ready-made templates for blog introductions and listicles.

Price: 5-day trial for $1. Plans range from $14.99/month for 4 articles/4,000 words AI and up to $114.99/month for unlimited articles/4,000 words AI.

Our thorough Frase review goes into more detail.

Clearscope

Clearscope is another premium content analysis tool that works similarly to Surfer SEO.

After typing in your main keyword, you get a content optimization outline to follow that includes:

Related keywords
Word count
Content grade
Readability score

The goal is to get your score in the A+ or A++ green range so it competes with your closest competitors.

It also monitors your content and alerts you when something needs updating so you don’t lose your ranking and traffic.

Price: $170/month for 10 content reports and custom pricing for anything more.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best free content analysis tools that anyone can use.

It’s where most bloggers and website owners start monitoring their website performance, plus real-time data.

You can even customize your dashboard and get custom reports and alerts.

Other types of reports available on the Google Analytics tool include:

Real-time
Audience
Acquisition
Behaviour
Conversions

Inside these reports, you can find useful information such as landing page performance and your best traffic sources.

This allows you to decide where improvements and extra effort need to be made.

Price: Free.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another handy free tool for bloggers and website owners.

It gives you information on how Google is crawling and indexing any errors on your website and detailed traffic reports.

Armed with this data, you can troubleshoot potential reasons why your website is under performing.

The main features of Google Search Console include:

URL inspection
Performance
Indexing
Page experience
Core web vitals
Mobile usability
Enhancements

Price: Free.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that gives you all the data you need to create better content and rank higher in search engines.

Using Ahrefs, you can:

Analyze your competitors
Do a content audit
Optimize your website pages
Find relevant keywords
Discover content ideas and link opportunities
Track your ranking progress

You can even take free courses in the Ahrefs Academy and get community support from experienced insiders.

Price: Use Ahrefs webmaster tools for free. Paid plans range from $79 – $799 a month.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another highly robust tool for SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing.

Using SEMrush, you can grow your organic traffic, plus:

Run technical SEO audits
Track your daily search engine positions
Analyse the backlinks of any domain
Advanced keyword research

Semrush has the usual tools all SEO suites have, plus a Surround Sound Tool that uncovers pages and domains that rank for your keywords and details on those sites mentioning you.

Also, the free writing assistant is pretty handy and does similar things that Surfer SEO and Clearscope can do.

Price: Limited access to some SEMrush tools and features for free. Paid plans range from $119.95 – $449.95 a month.

Rank Math

Rank Math is a powerful search engine optimization plugin for WordPress that makes it simple to optimize your content to perform better.

It contains a range of free features such as:

Set SEO titles and meta descriptions
Focus keyword analysis
XML Sitemap
Structured data/schema
Local SEO and image SEO
Internal link suggestions
Link counter and redirections
404 monitor and Google Analytics

You can even get access to a personal AI assistant that gives you AI-generated suggestions of what keywords and headings to use in your content.

Price: Use the plugin free with limited features. Paid plans start at $59/year for 15 AI credits/track 500 keywords and up to $499/year for 600 AI credits/track 50,000 keywords.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that has a ton of useful features.

Using this plugin, you’ll help your content rank higher and ensure your website adheres to the highest standards of SEO.

It can be used on WordPress websites and Shopify stores, and you can even take advantage of the free SEO for beginners training and Yoast SEO Academy.

It’s incredibly easy to use, and once you have it installed, it automatically takes care of your site’s technical SEO.

Price: Use main features for free. Get extra features and support with the paid plans – $99 or $229 a year.

If you’re undecided between Yoast vs Rankmath, check out our comparison.

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another one of the great content analysis tools every creator should know about.

It offers an all-in-one suite of SEO tools that’ll help you get more quality traffic and higher search engine rankings.

Moz Pro will remove the guesswork from SEO and help you to understand your visitors, target the right keywords, optimize your pages, and track your rankings.

To start, you can access free SEO tools on Moz, such as:

Domain analysis
Moz Bar
Competitive research
Keyword explorer
Link explorer

Price: Basic SEO tools are free. Paid plans range from $99 – $599 a month.

Conclusion: Best Content Analysis Tools

The content analysis tools mentioned are all extremely powerful and useful for online content creators.

Whether you have a blog, a business website, or an online store, these tools will help to increase your visibility in search and get more traffic to your site.

While these SEO content analysis tools do a great job, always make sure you check over your text manually and use your own judgment.

Do you need a little extra help with content creation?

Check out how to use ChatGPT to write a blog post and how to use ChatGPT for SEO.

By Katie Lamb

Katie Lamb is a professional freelance writer and blogger who loves to write about new and unique ways to make money online. She spends most of her time writing for different blogs and small business websites and when she’s not working you’ll find her in the gym, planning a new hiking trip or enjoying a live music gig.

Sourced from Niche Pursuits

In News

2023’s Top 7 Local Search Ranking Factors, Illustrated and Explained

May 25, 2023 No Comments

By Miriam Ellis

Learning to be the best in town at the top seven elements experts feel impact your rankings in Google’s local packs is a smart strategic foundation. Thanks to Darren Shaw who has been running the Local Search Ranking Factors survey since 2017, we all benefit from this respected annual report in which local SEO professionals get to pool their practical knowledge of what they see impacting clients’ rankings most.

Today, we’re going to look at how to set the local businesses you market apart by mastering the tippy-top of the list of factors, with lots of practical tips for improving your rankings so that you’re earning greater visibility.

But, first, what is a local pack?

This is the umbrella term for the local business results Google displays when it feels a searcher’s query has a local intent. Local packs have a variety of formats, like this one with the large map and lettered results:

And this one, also with the large map, but no letters and no links to the website or driving directions:

And this one, with the map above the results, and again, no letters or website/directions links:

There are many variations, based on query, industry, and device. Frequently, local packs appear above the organic results, but they can also be displayed further down the page. Mostly, local packs contain three results, but this number can sometimes change and they may also contain paid ads. Aspects of your Google Business Profile, as well as other sources like your own website and third-party websites, have a demonstrable impact on whether or not you show up in Google’s local packs and the extended listings they click to that are called the Local Finder results.

Now that we’ve got that covered, let’s look at this year’s 7 most influential local pack ranking factors.

1. Primary Google Business Profile category

It’s a local search fact of life that you can’t rank for your most important search phrases unless you’ve selected the right GBP category, and the primary category matters most. Usually, Google displays the primary category on your Google Business Profile (see “Italian restaurant”, above), but not always. You select your primary category by logging into your Google account, searching for your business by name, and then clicking on the Edit Profile tab in the New Merchant Experience editor:

Your primary category is the one you enter into the primary category box, and you can add a total of ten categories:

To discover the best category for your business, follow these steps:

Search for the #1 phrase for which you most need to rank in the local results and look at which categories the top-ranked businesses are using.
If you see diverse categories represented amongst the top 3 businesses, note which one most closely matches your business. For example, is your broadest and most accurate category “Italian restaurant” or “Fine dining restaurant”?
If the listing you are creating isn’t for your main business but is for a practitioner within a multi-practitioner company (like a legal firm with three lawyers or a dental practice with five dentists), try to diversify the categories you choose so that they don’t compete with the main listing for the practice.
If the listing you are creating is for a multi-location business, it’s okay to use the same primary category across all your listings, but if the close proximity of one branch to another appears to be causing one of your locations to be filtered out and invisible in the local packs, consider diversifying your primary categories.
If your market research indicates that your local market is extremely competitive/crowded for a particular category (think personal injury attorneys in Los Angeles), make a decision about whether you can reasonably compete for local pack visibility for the same category the top competitors are using, or whether you want to try to earn business from a less competitive category while you work to establish the brand you are marketing. Note how most of these businesses have chosen the primary category “Italian restaurant”, but one has chosen to be more specific with “Northern Italian Restaurant”:

That small difference could either positively or negatively impact the restaurant’s ability to rank for its most desired search phrases. So, pick a primary category, but don’t be afraid of changing it at a later date if you feel it might be holding you back. Testing is a smart practice.

We’ll be returning to the topic of choosing categories when we get to factor #7, below.

2. Keywords in Google Business Profile business title

Local SEOs keep a running agony column of spammy GBP business title examples, like this tweet from Darren Shaw. Unfortunately, seeing that keywords in the business title is such a powerful ranking factor can mislead business owners and marketers into believing they should be putting something other than their real world business name in this field of the New Merchant Experience editor:

The field is meant to contain only your real-world business name as it appears on your street signage with no extraneous keywords. In this screenshot, you can see that the name is just listed as “Moz”. Not “Moz Vancouver” or “Moz Seattle” or “Moz best SEO software company in America”.

Unfortunately, a weak spot in the algorithm Google uses to order results causes them to reward listings with spammy business titles. It’s probably the least-sophisticated aspect of Google’s system that it can be fooled by keyword-stuffing business titles. You can flag businesses with spammy names, and sometimes Google will edit them, but the penalties are never severe and, in my experience, the spammy names often simply re-appear shortly thereafter.

This problem with the system has business owners and marketers wondering whether they should be honest or try to game the system. Of course, the former is the best policy for companies that plan to build a lasting good reputation, but here are a few tips to help you work amid a rather messy scenario:

If you are trying to understand how to write the business title for something other than a single location business (such as a co-located business, solo practitioner, or multi-practitioner business), consult the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google for detailed instructions.
Feel free to report competitors in your market with spammy business names. Google may or may not act on your reports, but if they do, it can help decrease the ranking power of spammers and help your listing with its legitimate name move up.
Don’t name your business something that could limit its future growth. For example, think carefully before calling your new restaurant “Tacos San Diego” if there is any possibility that you may someday open branches in San Jose, San Francisco, and Santa Rosa.

If circumstances have made you realize that your real-world business name appears to be holding you back, you do have the option to legally change your name. If you decide on this course of action, try to choose a name that will stand you in good stead for many years to come. Be wary of trendy fads. For example, some local businesses have gone viral, as in the case of a NYC restaurant named “Thai Food Near Me”, but be careful you aren’t dubbing yourself with a phrase that could look dated three years from now.

If your company does rebrand, be sure to update all legal registrations, local business listings across the local search ecosystem, all social media profiles, and all references to the old name on your website and third-party websites

3. Proximity of address to the point of search

Back in 2017 when Darren Shaw first noted that the distance between the person searching and the thing being searched for had become the #1 local search ranking factor, he created the above graphic to illustrate this phenomenon. Your business may be situated on Jasper Avenue near the centre of Edmonton, but each of your customers is in a different location, on a different device.

In 2023, proximity of address to the point of search may have slipped to number 3, but it is still every bit as important to understand that there are no static number 1 local search rankings because Google shows each of your customers different results based, in part, on the location of their mobile phone, laptop, or other device. You can witness this in action by walking or driving around town, searching for the same keyword phrase. Local market research involves either engaging in this process manually to assess your overall visibility throughout your market, or using a local rank checker like the ones offered by Whitespark, Local Falcon, or Mobile Moxie’s Serperator.

You can’t control where your customers are and the only option you have if you discover your physical address is limiting your ability to meet goals is to move to a new location (a daunting prospect). What every local business marketer can and should do, however, is to observe how Google is behaving for each desired search phrase.

For example, you might discover that when you search for “tacos”, Google is casting a very narrow net for local results, showing restaurants mainly clustered in a single neighborhood of your city. But when you change your search to “organic vegan tacos”, suddenly Google is widening the net to encompass the whole city or even reaching beyond city boundaries. That’s amazing business intelligence because it shows you opportunities to optimize for more specific terms and show up for more distantly-located customers. Use this knowledge in choosing your:

Categories
Services
Photo and video subjects
Attributes
Website topics

While you can’t control Google’s heavy emphasis on proximity, you can respond to it with a smart local search strategy. And this segues nicely into the next factor.

4. Physical address in city of search

Look up your city in Google and click on the map. The red border, as shown above, indicates Google’s concept of the perimeters of your town or city. The reason this matters to local SEO is that businesses located beyond the border often have a much harder time becoming visible for searchers located within the border or for search phrases that contain the name of the town or city.

“I want to rank beyond my location,” has got to be one of the commonest requests local SEOs hear from clients (so common that I wrote an entire column about this in 2019 you might like to read). If you come to suspect that your physical address is severely limiting the number of customers who are finding you online, you have three main options:

Moving to a new location inside Google’s borders
Re-optimizing your presence to compete for less-competitive terms, as described in relation to factor #3
Making a substantial investment in multiple aspects of your local search marketing so that your Google Business Profile becomes so strong that it overcomes Google’s city border bias.

There is no guarantee that the third option will work, but it is often the best bet. To undertake this work from an informed stance, you will need to conduct a competitive local business audit of the top competitors for each of your most important search phrases. By using the free spreadsheet included in that article, you will be able to identify multiple factors that are likely contributing to the high visibility of the top-ranked competitors, and determine what you need to do to surpass their efforts. You may find yourself investing in review acquisition and management, local business listing development, link building, content development, and other areas. Sometimes, you can find sweet spots in which Google is willing to go beyond the borders for strong brands, so studying the maps and Google’s behaviour is an essential local search marketing habit.

5. Removal of spam listing through spam fighting

Four years ago, I wrote a column on Simple Spam Fighting: The Easiest Local Rankings You’ll Ever Earn and I’m sorry to say that the tactics I covered for recognizing spam are every bit as necessary today as they were back then. Google’s listing spam problem is massive. Both novice and bad actors have filled up the index with results that mislead the public and violate Google’s guidelines.

It’s a sad story that’s as old as local search, and every year is a new year to hope that Google will give more attention to protecting businesses from misrepresentation and unfair competition, while protecting consumers from disinformation. Perhaps the challenges now being posed by AI, like ChatGPT, and competitors for attention, like TikTok, will put some healthy pressure on Alphabet to defend the relevance of Google’s local results.

In the meantime, local business owners and their marketers have the toilsome (yet, perhaps satisfying?) option of reporting spam listings so that they can move up in the local pack rankings if/when the spammers are removed. To do this effectively, you need to know what constitutes spam in Google’s environment. This can range from:

Fake business names
Ineligible business models
Multiple ineligible listings for the same business
Fictitious businesses
Fictitious locations
Fake reviews

Learn the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google like the back of your hand, and you will become adept at spotting listing spam. When you believe you’ve encountered a spam listing, your best bet is to use the business redressal form to report it. If you come across a widespread pattern of spam in a given results set and use of the form isn’t getting any traction, you may need to use your marketing skills to bring public attention to the problem in hopes of inspiring Google to act. Want more spam fighting tips? Sterling Sky has a good piece on this.

6. High numerical Google ratings

Your average star rating isn’t just a top local pack ranking factor, but it’s also a top conversion factor. In our report on the Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior, respondents cited the star rating as the most important component of reviews:

Meanwhile, a majority of 51% say a business must have at least 4 stars for them to consider choosing it.

Chances are, if your reputation is below 4 stars, you’ll have some work ahead of you in both improving customer experiences and in actively seeking reviews so that a small number of negative reviews isn’t having an outsized impact on your average rating. For a complete tutorial, read How to Repair and Improve Local Business Reputation via Google Star Ratings and Reviews. Embrace the welcome news that 37% of customers may still give your business a chance, even with a less-than-four-star rating, and this may give you the time you need to make strategic business changes to raise your rating and start winning better rankings and more customers.

7. Additional Google Business Profile categories

The fact that two of the top seven local search ranking factors relate to categories emphasizes just how important these small elements are. Once you’ve selected your most influential primary category, you have nine more chances to help Google understand your relevance to specific customer intents.

Inspiration for filling in those category fields is easiest to find if you either download the GMBSpy Chrome extension or fire up GMB Everywhere to see all of the categories your top local competitors have chosen. If they relate to your business, add them to your profile. Then, read How to Choose GBP Categories (With Cool Tools) for further suggestions on researching and implementing the right identifiers of your business. Over time, keep an eye on Sterling Sky’s running tally of new business categories, in case Google adds something that was previously missing and helps further describe what your business is.

And that’s it for today! Once you’ve gotten a great handle on perfecting your management of the top 7 local search ranking factors, move on to tackle the rest by reading WhiteSpark’s full report. Meanwhile, if you’ve got a new tip or tactic for climbing up the local pack rankings, please don’t hesitate to @ Moz on Twitter!

Sourced from MOZ