In News

Google warns a thousand brands over bad ads

September 1, 2017 No Comments

Google is to take direct action against approximately 1,000 online publishers which it has identified as being responsible for the use of ‘highly annoying, misleading or harmful’ ads as it steps up efforts to protect its reputation.

The move will see brands such as Forbes, The Los Angeles Times; and The Independent issued with an email warning them that their advertising falls foul of the Better Ads Standard, established by a coalition of advertisers, media channels and technology firms; together with a link to its Ad Experience Report from where they can test their sites to see which ads must be removed.

Google is taking a lead role in the campaign having already pledged to bar bad ads from its Chrome browser from early next year, meaning browsers can use the web without fear of stumbling upon irksome popups, autoplay videos with sound and too many simultaneous adverts.

Google’s director of product management, Scott Spencer said: “We are doing this so they have ample time to change their ad experiences so there are no violations or concerns about anything. We provide the tool that’s just telling people what’s happening on their site and many publishers want to do the right thing, but some might not even know that there are annoying ads on their site.”

The Better Ads Standard is composed of Facebook, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, The Washington Post, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, GroupM and the Association of National Advertisers among others.

Google removed no less than 1.7bn ‘bad ads’ in 2016 but has struggled to put a lid on advertising fraud.

By John Glenday

Sourced from THE DRUM

In News

Google’s been running a secret test to detect bogus ads — and its findings should make the industry nervous

August 22, 2017 No Comments

By Mike Shields.

The ad industry is trying to root out fraudulent digital ads.
Google has quietly been running tests with media companies such as CBS to gauge how bad the problem is.
Industry leaders are banking on a new technical solution, ads.txt, to tackle the issue.

The digital-advertising industry is looking to stamp out bogus ad inventory, like websites that claim to be premium brands but are actually sites the average person hardly ever visits.

Google, with help from some media giants, is taking the lead. The company is pushing an industry initiative called ads.txt that’s aimed at wiping out fraud that’s dubbed ‘spoofing’ by the industry. Spoofing encompasses the variety of ways ad buyers can be tricked into paying for space they’re not getting. For example, spoofers can buy cheap ad space, from a low-quality site, on an exchange and then falsely list it as space on a premium site — like, say, CNN.com— at a higher price. The ad in question will never run on CNN.com, though.

It’s all enabled by the prevalence of programmatic ads, which are placed by algorithms and purchased on exchanges, rather than through direct negotiation with a publisher.

Yet spoofing is even starting to affect publishers that don’t even sell ads via programmatic channels. Several publishers say they’ve been hearing from ad buyers that their ads are for sale on various ad exchanges, even though these companies didn’t work with any ad exchanges to sell advertising.

The Google tests

To get a sense of the scope of this problem, Google has been quietly conducting tests with a handful of major media properties, including NBCU, CBS, and The New York Times, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

During these tests, Google and the partners shut off all of their programmatic ad inventory for brief periods, say, 10 to 15 minutes, and then scour the ad exchanges to see what’s listed. Google and its partners found thousands if not millions of video and display ad spots still available on multiple ad exchanges, despite no ads actually being for sale at that time, the people said, asking not to be identified because the results haven’t been publicly released.

These include Google’s own AdEx exchange, as well as AppNexus, Oath’s BrightRoll, and PubMatic. Google also discovered fraudsters claiming to be able to sell YouTube ad inventory on various exchanges, one of the people said.

Google’s not alone in these findings. An ad-tech executive from a different company went looking for some spoofed ads on exchanges and said they easily found thousands of such misrepresented ads for sale. And below are the results of another search by the Marketing Science Consulting Group, a company that specializes in researching ad fraud, which found a significant amount of inventory available on a given day last April from an unnamed publisher. That publisher does not actually sell ads on any exchanges.

Business Insider reached out to all the exchanges mentioned and included their comments below, if they responded.

fake ad inventory v2_720 There is lots of bogus ad inventory available on ad exchanges. Marketing Science Consulting Group

The ad exchanges responded to details of the results by pointing to their efforts to stamp out the kind of fraud Google found.

“We’re unaware of major publishers running such tests and finding problematic selling on our marketplace,” a representative for AppNexus said. “We do work proactively to avoid this type of problem. We are strong proponents of ads.txt, which we view as reinforcement of our longstanding policies and practices. We’ve created strong domain detection technology.”

“Oath has invested in proprietary technology on our buying platforms, including BrightRoll and ONE by AOL, that aims to enforce supply transparency and prevent domain spoofing across the majority of supply partners,” said a representative for Oath, which is owned by Verizon. “In fact, our technology blocks hundreds of millions of spoofed bid requests on a daily basis. Combined with our longtime partnership with the IAB, industry-leading third-party fraud measurement across our platforms and human review safeguards, we’re fully committed to a safe, transparent supply chain for our advertiser partners.”

“At PubMatic we work directly with our publisher clients to help them manage their digital inventory, and, as such, we are not aware of the issues,” said PubMatic’s chief marketing officer Jeff Hirsch.

“We take quality very seriously and view it as an issue for the entire ad tech industry,” said Smart AdServer chief marketing officer Michael Nevins. “We’re also enthusiastic supporters of the Ads.txt initiative and are actively working with our publishers to help them implement it. Our Chief Quality Officer, Gorka Zarauz, leads a dedicated department that works closely with leading external brand-safety firms such as Integral Ad Science and FraudLogix both pre-and post-auction to detect, block and remove bot-generated traffic and spoofed domains. We continue to commit permanent R&D in this area for the benefit of our partners and the ecosystem as a whole.”

The fake-Rolex problem

Marketers are expected to shell out $83 billion on digital ads in the US in 2017, according to eMarketer. And the more that advertisers spend, the bigger the opportunity for fraudsters. By some estimates, sophisticated ad-fraud perpetrators could cost the ad business over $16 billion globally this year.

There are lots of ways that ad fraud can happen. Often hackers from outside the US sell ads on fake websites using computer programs called “bots” that can mimic human behavior — making it look as though real people are visiting websites or clicking on ads.

Then, there’s spoofing, which has been around for years. Companies like ESPN have frequently encountered people claiming to have their right to sell their ads when they don’t. But as more big marketers push for better transparency in their digital-ad buying, following a string of recent reports of ads ending up in dicey corners of the web, there’s more awareness of how common spoofing is.

“There’s quite a bit of mislabeling of traffic,” said Mike Baker, CEO of the ad-tech firm DataXu. “It’s become somewhat pervasive over the last few years. It could account for 20 to 30% of the traffic on some secondary and tertiary [ad exchanges].”

Digital ad spending is growing, as is fraud. eMarketer

Ads.txt solution

Google has also hosted CEOs of several top ad-buying tech companies — “demand-side platforms” that act as major buyers on ad exchanges — including MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki, DataXu’s Baker, and Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green. The meetings were said to be constructive as the industry looks to embrace ads.txt as a solution.

Ads.txt was borne out of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab with support from the trade group TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group). It’s a technical solution designed to protect web publishers from any unauthorized companies selling their ads via programmatic ad exchanges.

Here’s how it works. By inserting a text file on their sites, web publishers can make it clear who is allowed to sell their ad space and who isn’t. Assuming enough publishers implement the ads.txt solution — and enough ad buyers make an effort to purchase ads only from authorized sellers — this could go a long way toward weeding out spoofing.

“There’s always been spoofing in the market, and with video it is [more prevalent],” said Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab. “Now there is more scrutiny in the market. It wasn’t top of mind before. Now, everyone understands it; it’s mainstream. And fraudsters are looking for known names that are on ‘white lists’ for advertisers. So this has opened up a conversation where ad buyers are telling sellers, ‘I’m seeing you here,’ and they are digging down and saying ‘Oh crap.'”

Brands get woke

A number of major developments have combined to dial up the scrutiny on the online-advertising business, causing marketers to scrutinize where their ads run to how they pay for them and who gets a piece of every dollar they spend on the web. First, about a year ago, the Association of National Advertisers released a damning report detailing a glaring lack of transparency in the ad-buying world.

Over the past six months, Facebook has revealed a string of measurement screw-ups, while Google has faced multiple advertisers pulling out of YouTube after ads were found alongside hate videos.

Procter and Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard. Getty/Phil Cole

And since the start of this year, Procter and Gamble’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, has been on a crusade, delivering a series of speeches in which he clamored for the ad industry to demand more clarity from digital media and the need to clean up the “crappy media supply chain,” as CNBC reported.

All of this has brought the issue of ad fraud to the forefront. “Brands are woke,” joked one ad-tech executive. “There’s suddenly a lot of attention on supply-chain hygiene,” he said. And hopefully ads.txt is the soap.

Some see the initiative as part of a larger set of antifraud tactics. Others are more bullish. “This will wipe spoofing out,” said Andrew Casale, CEO of the ad-tech firm Index Exchange.

Who’s responsible?

When it comes to supply-chain hygiene, there’s plenty of blame laid on the ad-tech companies — especially since so many programmatic exchanges have made big public pledges to keep out bad sellers. But as one ad-tech insider said, big media companies often don’t even know who is and isn’t allowed to sell their ads on the web.

‘They should take responsibility,” he said. For example, one publisher said it was working with just three exchanges, but they were really running ads on 17.

So it’s up to media companies to make the most out of ads.txt.

“Initially, this is putting the first implementation requirements on publishers,” said Art Muldoon, co-CEO of the programmatic ad buying firm Amnet. “It’s a burden and an opportunity.”

Media sellers “are being directly harmed,” said Mike Zaneis, president and CEO for TAG, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, an organization that was put together to tackle the ad-fraud problem.

“When there is twice as much inventory being sold out there than actually exists, that leads to deals you never get, bad prices, and the watering down of your brand,” Zaneis said. “That has a direct financial impact.”

Get the latest Google stock price here.

By Mike Shields

Sourced from Business Insider UK

In News

Six things you need to stop doing right now with your mobile strategy

August 4, 2017 No Comments

By Michael Hewitt.

he mobile search landscape has changed immensely in recent years, transforming how consumers engage with brands and discover new products. But the change of pace has left some brands struggling to keep up, wondering just how hard mobile is working for them, and whether their brand proposition is really translating to the small screen.

It has led to many making what are, in 2017, some fundamental mistakes with mobile strategy. Here are six of the biggest:

The ‘m-dot’ site

When the ‘mobilegeddon’ update first reared its head in 2015, it unsurprisingly caused panic in the digital ecommerce sector. This was an update that threatened to dramatically harm the web visibility of those brands that weren’t delivering a mobile-friendly experience, and it was an update that would kick-in not very long after it was first announced – certainly not long enough to align all of the necessary stakeholders and plan, build, test and launch a completely new site.

Many brands responded by launching what became known as m-dot websites – essentially copies of a desktop website that were tweaked for mobile and appear on an m.website.com or mobile.website.com sub-domain. It was a quick-fix solution, allowing brands to meet the criteria that would see them becoming a ‘mobilegeddon’ victim, but avoided the need to go through a lengthy web redesign and build.

But now Google is warning brands that it wants to see the end of the m-dot, claiming that the mobile-first index may not index m-dot sites effectively. Throw in the increased risk of broken redirects and duplicate content that come with an m-dot, and the time really has come for you call in the designers and go responsive.

Being deaf to voice search

In June 2017, a Think with Google survey found that 57% of people would use voice search more if it recognised more complex commands, and 58% of respondents said they would like more detailed results when using search.

Think about how you can make your existing keyword strategy more conversational, to reflect the way in which your audiences are going to interact verbally with their mobile or smart devices – particularly if your site features a lot of ‘how to’ content on its site. A desktop search for ‘flights to London’ could very easily become ‘when is the next flight to London?’ or ‘what is the cheapest way to get to London tomorrow morning’. Could your current content answer that query?

Not thinking about your long-term app strategy

A survey by Localytics found that 60% of people who download an application become inactive within 30 days, whilst data from Quattra shows that the daily active user rate drops 77% the first three days after an app is installed on a device.

Mobile apps are not, in themselves, a flawed marketing channel but if you are going to invest in developing and maintaining one, think carefully about how you are going to avoid the graveyard of unused apps that lies on practically every smartphone in existence.

Is your app simply an extension of your mobile site? If so, then think about why you actually need one. What does your app offer that your users can’t get or would find more difficult to get elsewhere?

Think about how you would use your app to re-engage and reconnect with your audiences throughout the customer journey, using your data to provide personalised messages and push notifications that will resonate with them. Just remember not to over-use tactics like push notifications as they can get irritating (particularly if you are just pushing offers and sales messages).

Bombarding users with ads

Speaking of things that are irritating, ads on mobile. Obtrusive adverts are annoying on any platform, but on the small screen of mobile, they are even more of a user experience faux-pas.

If you are advertising to consumers on mobile, make sure that it isn’t your brand that is frustrating what should be a seamless and enjoyable user experience with an intrusive and impossible to dismiss pop-up or interstitial. Not only does it frustrate users and harm the brand, it can also harm your organic search visibility.

Ignoring your audiences’ neighbourhood

So-called ‘near me’ searches are growing at a rate of 130% per year, and 88% of these searches are made using a mobile device, claims Google.

This trend is being driven by the way in which the customer journey is becoming much more integrated between desktop, mobile and offline. Consumers are turning to their devices for ‘quick reference’ queries – local shops and restaurants for example – and then making purchasing decisions across any number of channels based on that information.

It means that brands, particularly those with an offline presence, need to really think about how they are optimising their online presence for ‘near me’ searches, and thinking about the content that they serve to these audiences that works on a localised level, and could drive an in-store visit.

Consider the importance of implicit search variables, such as location, time, device, transport and previous search history, and ensure that you have content that can serve as many combinations of those searches as possible.

Failing to close the loop

Cross-device tracking remains one of the biggest challenges for marketers, as multiple devices and multiple communications channels converge to create a much more complicated customer journey.

Google is working hard to close this loop as much as possible, with Google Attribution rolling out to provide much better integration between AdWords and Analytics, and it is continuing to use user data and search history to ‘join up the dots’ as much as possible.

Different organisations will have different approaches and different models to understand how different devices and channels contribute to the overall buying journey, and the model that you adopt will ultimately depend on your brand objectives for your mobile strategy. However, if you are using a last click model of attribution, then it is highly likely that you are either under or over-estimating the value of mobile, depending on the nature of the brand and the product.

By Michael Hewitt

Michael Hewitt is a content marketing manager at Stickyeyes, and is behind the agency’s guide to mastering your mobile strategy.

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Four Ways Old SEO and New SEO Are Different

July 27, 2017 No Comments

To cut a long story short, what used to work wonders back in the old days just doesn’t anymore.

But the good news is that, at its core, the goals and basic tenets of SEO haven’t changed. Sure, some tactics and best practices may be different, but SEO is still about connecting your brand with your target audience by increasing your search rankings.

Perhaps the best way to describe new school SEO is that it’s about optimising for real people instead of search engines. But then again, this school of thought has already existed even in the old days of SEO.

So, how do you know which practices to avoid, and which ones you should be spending more time and resources on? Here are a few key differences between old and new SEO, which should tell you everything about the kind approach to take when marketing.

Today’s SEO is About Engaging Customers, Not Just Rankings

In the past, the thrust behind SEO was to focus on a few keywords and trying to rank for them on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some search marketers believed that it didn’t matter how you did it, as long as you managed to grab and keep top rankings on Google.

However, Google’s Penguin and Panda updates saw to it that marketers could no longer game the system with link farming and keyword spamming.

Today, SEO is about managing your brand’s reputation, and making people want to interact with your brand by spreading quality content about your products and services.

For law firms, this means creating content that attracts your target audience and nurturing them until they become your actual clients. If you have this down pat, your rankings should improve through organic sharing/mentions, and natural linking across the internet.

To put it simply, SEO is now rooted in traditional marketing and public relations, in that you’re trying to build your law firm’s authority through reputation management and savvy PR.

Keywords are Still Important, But They’re Not the Only Thing Going On

Anyone who’s been engaged in SEO before 2011 knows that for many years, the industry was always focused on one thing: keywords.

In the past, search marketers would focus on just one major keyword, hinging all their efforts on getting ranked for that specific search term, and only that term.

But as search engines continue to get smarter, the goal is now to think of what search engine users think and want when typing into the search engine. This has given rise to semantic SEO, which focuses on keyword intent and long tail keywords.

For law firms, this means the days of gaming Google with keywords are over, with the context behind searches now being taken into account when showing search results. In turn, this means your content has to be top notch and relevant in order to generate traffic and improve your site’s rankings.

Relevance will be the primary factor affecting how effective your website content is. This will be both a challenge and opportunity for providers of legal services, possibly requiring them to change their website content and marketing campaigns. But it can also place you in a prime position to beat your competitors in the SERPs.

SEO Copywriting: How To Write Content That Both Google And Your Visitors Will Love

July 14, 2017 No Comments

Sourced from Inbound Rocket.

Building an audience for your company can be achieved in a couple of different ways. In the old days, you would buy ads in your (local) newspaper; you did radio ads, tv ads or any other ad you could afford with your marketing budget.

Then came the internet and the same old advertising model moved along to the web.

But people are getting blinder every day for these types of companies trying to scream for attention. In a recent piece on Medium Jeremy Ettinghausen even called it “Why Does Digital Advertising Suck?”

He states:

The reason most digital advertising isn’t very good is because most people in advertising don’t really get the internet.

So unless you’re creative and have the potential budget to act upon it, how can you and your small business still generate business online?

That’s where Content Marketing came in over the last couple of years. After all, you know your market in which you’re operating best, right? So why can’t you help your potential customer solve their problems in the same way your product helps them only through media you are creating and promoting?

One of the biggest challenges faced by people doing Content Marketing though is how can you build an audience when your content is not being indexed properly by search engines. And if you do try to optimise your content too much for search engine indexation will it still appeal to your readers?

As we wrote in an earlier topic, SEO content isn’t that complicated, once you understand that with whatever you write the readers comes first, the user is more important than any search engine robot, you’ve already won the first battle.

Winning in Content Marketing, means you need to go further than just producing content for the sake of creating content. It needs to appeal to the reader by helping them solve their problems, AND it needs to appeal to search engines, so you get a good ranking.

But how can you create content that ranks well in Google and other search engines and still appeals to your readers? That is where SEO Copywriting comes in. It helps you to write content for people and at the same time optimising for Google.

What is SEO

But before we can start we first have to get our basics right. What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

So in other words, by using SEO, you’re trying to make sure that your website has a higher position in search results. SEO seeks to optimise your website in such a way that the algorithms of Google, Bing and others rate your site in such a way that you get a higher ranking.

Although the actual way this ranking works has always been (and probably will always be) a secret, over the years more and more people started to figure out what kind of things are necessary to get a higher ranking.

These items that can help you rank better can be divided into two categories. On-page SEO factors and Off-page SEO factors.

On-page SEO factors are the things you can change and optimise on your own website. Like technical changes, or the way you write your copy.

Off-page SEO is slightly more complicated because it involves things that are not happening on your domain and have little to no control over. Although the most important off-page factor is probably getting backlinks to your website. The more (relevant) sites link to your site; the higher your ranking will be.

In this article, we will be focusing on on-page SEO, and specifically how to write better copy.

Copywriting?

At its core copywriting is re-arranging words to make your products or services sell better. It is like that salesman who makes all the sales at your company, only then in writing form.

Copywriting is the art and science of creating copy, creating content that prompts the reader to either buy your product, subscribe to your email list, or take any action that you want as a result after reading that copy.

What drives a reader of your copy to take action? A good copywriter does, copywriting is all about:

Getting them to WANT to engage with you….not spamming them with offers.
Generously giving something valuable to the person….not just “greedily asking” for stuff.
Getting them to WANT to buy from you….not out of pressure, but because they enjoy your content and help.

Being a good copywriter first starts by understanding your audience. A good copywriter knows what his or her audience likes and chooses the words that will appeal to them. The headline, words, phrases, quotes used in the content are there to persuade and cause the reader to take action.

Next, to that, an SEO copywriter not only understands his human audience, but he also understands how search engines feel about certain words and phrases.

The beautiful thing is, in theory, everyone can become a good copywriter, just like everyone can be a good storyteller. The only way to become one though is by lots and lots of practice.

How to write copy for SEO?

Writing copy for SEO, just means that you want to create content with the goal of attracting search engine traffic. After all:

As you can see, if you do any business online, it is important that you optimise your content for search engine.

The better optimised it is, the better the ranking of your content. It could bring you to the holy grail, that first page of search results. Or even the first position. You will get more click, shares, likes, engagement and conversions. If nobody can find your website, then even the best-written content is pointless.

Writing SEO friendly content though sounds simpler than it might be seen. There are some steps involved, next to just producing content if you want it to be able to rank well.

At it’s core writing copy for SEO can be done in four steps:

Keyword research – if you want people to be able to find your content, you first need to figure out what it is that you want to get found on. If you do the research for quality keywords at the start, you can start to produce content that you know people are looking for.
Keyword optimisation – Now that you know what words, or combination of words work best for your company, you can start to figure out where and how to use these keywords in your content.
Content organisation – Even though you want to include the keywords into your content, you just don’t want to stuff your entire piece with the same keywords. A good piece of content is organised in a logical way. This will help the robots to better understand what the content is about and next to that it will also help your visitors to consume the content better and as a result stay longer on your site.
Content promotion – Content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice. After you published your new piece, be sure to promote and share it on different places to build visibility and backlinks.

Keyword research

A keyword is a word (or a phrase) that one might type into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. There could be thousands of words and phrases related to the content that you’re creating, so the challenge is the find the best ones for you that will drive the most traffic to your site.

So what makes a keyword a unique keyword? People tend to think that a good keyword is a popular one automatically. Popularity is not the primary focus you should have though; the main focus should be relevancy, followed by popularity.

Finding relevancy, first starts by thinking what you want to rank about. Write down in one sentence what you want to be find for. The next step will be coming up with questions related to that one sentence. The more questions you can think of the better. And finally you can imagine what it is you would type into a search engine if you want to get an answer to those questions.

Let’s give a concrete example. Say you want to create a page that talks about the best exercises you can do at home, without the need of any gym equipment. The first step is coming of with a statement, a one sentence describing what you want to talk about: “How to build muscle and strength at home without lifting weights”

Potential questions this page might answer are: “How can you become stronger without lifting weights?”, or “How can you use your body for weightlifting?”, or “What exercises can you do without gym equipment?”.

Potential search queries could include “losing weight”, “building muscle”, “easy steps to become stronger”, “workouts at home”, “workouts for men”, “workouts for women”, “beginner home workouts”, “best home workout”, etc.

While you now have a list of potential keywords. The next step is to identify the most important ones for you. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner you can get an estimate, based on real data, of the total number of searches that people are doing for these keywords each month. Next to that as an added bonus you also get a list with up to 800 keywords that are similar to the one you entered.

Other great tools are SEMRush (both paid and free) and KeywordTool.io.

Keyword Overview lead generation on SEMRush

Using SEMRush to do Keyword research

Using this information you can refine your list, deleting the ones that at the end don’t seem that optimal. In an ideal situation, you want to end up with no fewer than two and no more than maximum eight keywords for your piece of content.

Not sure which keywords to delete and which ones to keep? Remove any keywords or phrases that don’t sound natural that sound like some bad copywriter tried to write and advertisement. Or phrases that mention a competing brand by name.

The final step you need to take with the narrowed down list, is identifying your primary keyword (or long tail keyword). Again, this one doesn’t have to be the most popular keyword from the list of remaining items. But it is the one that describes your piece of content, your page the best. When it does that, you know your page will address the unique needs of the person searching for it and ending up on your site.

Now that you’ve chosen your primary keyword, the next task will be to select a handful of secondary or short tail keywords. These keywords should expand the range of people’s search to which your page could still be considered relevant, without losing too much of it’s focus.

After that, it’s time to optimise your content.

Keyword optimisation

The first step is often the hardest, so also in this case. Identifying the correct keywords for which you want to rank is the hardest part, now we need to start tweaking our page, by putting those keywords in the right spots.

The most important places for your keywords to appear in are:

Body copy
Your headings and subheadings
Your page title
Your meta description
Your URL or permalink
Alt texts of your images

Don’t go crazy by putting to much of your keywords (both long and short tail) in your content though. A good ratio is 1-2% of your text maximum should be your keywords. So, that means in a 500-word article, you should include the keywords no more than 5-10 times.

Integrate them naturally in your content, as we stated in an earlier article search engines are becoming better and better in understanding human writing. If the placement of your keywords look to weird, to unnatural Google and other will notice this and may punish you for it.

A great way to check if you did not over optimise is by using a free tool like Keyword Density Checker.

Content organisation

The third step is making sure your content is organised in such a way that it makes it easy for the reader ready to consume your piece of content. How can you optimise it in such a way that it is easy to the eye and easy on the mind to consume?

Let’s first start with the readability of your content. There are some great tools out there that can help you improve your writing.

Hemingway Editor

The Hemingway Editor is available as web app, but also as desktop application

The Hemingway Editor is a great tool for almost all of your writing tasks. You don’t want to bore people with difficult words, with large unreadable sentences. That’s how you scare away your readers! Hemingway Editor analyses your text to find any sentences that are difficult, or even “very difficult”, to read.

It highlights these sentences. Next, to that, it also highlights instances where your copy is too passive. The easier it is to consume a piece of content, the longer people will stay on your site to consume the entire piece of content and the higher the chances of them sharing your content.

More shares, means of course more people getting your content presented to them and the articles that get shared the most get the best SEO rating.

Read-Able

Read-Able Readability Test Tool

Read-Able is quite similar to Hemingway editor. It also analyses your copy based on readability, but instead of highlighting individual sentences that need improving, it gives your text and overall readability score. This score tell you what age group will be able to easily read your content. If you’re article is already online, you can also enter your URL instead op copy pasting the text.

Help.Plagtracker

Plagtracker – Professional Editing Assistance

If you’re writing content of course a lot of people look around on the web nowadays for inspiration. Sometimes you’re inspiration however, might be a bit to literal resulting in content that looks and sounds to much like other content already out there. Although it is perfectly fine to get some inspiration online, it is never okay to plagiarise content. Plagtracker will analyse your piece of content, looks for any instances of plagiarism, and replaces them with new, original content.

Other items to focus on with the organisation of your content, having a clear structure, adding visuals to make it visually more attractive, internal linking, etc.

Content promotion

Even if you produce the best content in the world, so is everyone else. According to research done in 2012 by the Content Marketing Institute (so probably by now these numbers are even higher) 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing.

So when everyone is doing it? How can you stand out above the rest? How can you get your content noticed faster and better than your competitors?

The answer is content promotion.

Creating and optimising your content on your website is only part of the process; once you’ve created it, content promotion helps you get in front of the right audience at the right time.

Thankfully, most traditional marketers have no idea how to promote their content (next to putting advertisement budget behind it), so it has only a small portion of the reach it could have.

If you want to be better than your competitor start promoting your content on all the channels you can after it is published. This means social media, specialised communities for around your topics, email newsletter. And not just on your company channels, using tools like Social Seeder, you can use the power of your employees and your brand ambassadors to share and amplify your content.

Creating content requires a lot of time, skill and knowledge. If you want to start getting better search traffic to your website, you’re going to put in the work.

The success of your content and its marketing value, however, will first depend on the quality of the content itself. Next to that the “small” details as outlined in this article will help you push your content further.

Don’t start with the optimisation of your content though; you want your content to read and feel natural.

So, first put down all your thoughts in an article, post, page or any other piece of content you want to create and only then start using the above techniques to make those final tweaks to make sure it ranks even better.

What’s your take on SEO copywriting? Do you think it’s a major factor for online content marketing success? How are you optimising your content at your company? Leave a comment below!

Sourced from Inbound Rocket.

In News

Google Says It Won’t Creep On Your Emails Anymore

July 14, 2017 No Comments

By Catherine Trautwein.

Google will stop scanning your emails in order to customize the advertising you see in Gmail, the company announced Friday.

“G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service,” Google Cloud senior vice president Diane Greene wrote in a blog post. “Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.”

The move means Gmail users — all 1.2 billion of them — will get the same treatment when it comes to this aspect of email privacy as the 3 million companies that pay for access to G Suite, according to the blog post.

“This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products,” Greene wrote.

Google makes an overwhelming majority of its money on advertising. The search giant raked in more than $21.4 billion in advertising revenue during the first quarter of 2017, which represented a nearly 20 percent increase year-over-year.

By Catherine Trautwein.

Sourced from TIME

In News

Google will stop scanning your Gmail messages to sell targeted ads

July 11, 2017 No Comments

By Nick Statt

Google will stop its long-standing practice of scanning the contents of individual Gmail users for advertising purposes, the company announced in a blog post today. The practice, something Google has done nearly since the launch of its email service, allows the company to digest the contents of email messages and use them to deliver targeted ads within Gmail itself.

Users are allowed to opt out, and Google also reserves the practice only for personal Gmail users and not those of corporate accounts. However, the practice has made it difficult for Google to find and retain corporate clients for its cloud services business, according to Diane Greene, Google’s cloud division head, who spoke with the Financial Times. This is due to general confusion over Google’s business tactics and an overall apprehension to trust the company with sensitive data, the report says.

“G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service,” Green wrote in today’s blog post. “Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.”

Greene’s role, since her hiring in November 2015, has been to convince more companies to rely on Google’s G Suite and to move more data off competitors’ services and onto Google’s cloud. This has been a bit of an uphill battle for Google, as both Microsoft and Amazon have emerged as two of market leaders in providing cloud services, with Amazon primarily providing hosting and Microsoft providing corporate productivity services. Now, Google hopes it can bring more customers on board by convincing them that its practices won’t jeopardize corporate privacy.

The move to end targeted advertising in Gmail doesn’t mean users won’t still see ads. Google can still parse search histories, YouTube browsing, and other Chrome activity as long as you’re signed into your Gmail account. But for those who might have been wary of Google’s ad-targeting practices in the past, this may put those worries to rest. The company certainly hopes it will do so for potential corporate clients.

By Nick Statt

Sourced from The Verge

In News

At Cannes, advertisers are still hunting for an alternative to Google and Facebook

July 11, 2017 No Comments

By Kurt Wagner

Plus new attendees, two ways to look at live video and a Snapchat-branded Ferris wheel.

The biggest spenders and personalities from the advertising and media worlds descended on the French Riviera this past week for Cannes Lions, an extravagant week-long party full of elaborate dinners, exclusive concerts and a limitless supply of rosé.

Tech companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rented out sprawling beachside cabanas for the week to host meetings and schmooze with business partners.

Others, like Spotify and Verizon’s newly formed AOL-Yahoo tie-up, Oath, threw big parties with expensive musical performances. (In Oath’s case it was Fleetwood Mac front-woman Stevie Nicks; Spotify had Solange Knowles, sister of Beyonce.) Medialink and iHeartMedia threw their very exclusive dinner party again this year where R&B star The Weeknd performed for celebrities like Ryan Seacrest and CEOs like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

But despite all the distractions — and there were plenty — Cannes is also a place where actual deals get done. Many ad buyers and ad sellers use the week to plan out spending for the second half of the year, and who shows up and who makes a scene can give you a good idea of the current pecking order for the industry.

Recode attended, too. Here’s a glimpse from our notebook at some of the biggest themes of the week.

Who’s No. 3?

The big, 60,000-foot takeaway from dozens of conversations this week is something that we’ve all known for a while: Facebook and Google are absolutely dominating the digital ad market, and buyers are eager for a third player to offer some competition.

What was different this year from years past is that folks no longer believe that the third player, if one ever emerges, will be another platform, like a Twitter or Snapchat. Instead, it feels like No. 3 might be a content provider, a company like Verizon-owned Oath or Comcast-owned NBCUniversal*, that has more control over the content they distribute.

There are a couple of reasons why this matters. One is that advertisers claim they don’t get enough data from Facebook and Google about who, specifically, they’re reaching with their ads.

The hope is a third player might share more of that info. But the other important reason is “ad adjacency,” which is ad industry speak for making sure your ads don’t appear next to something offensive, like an ISIS video.

Google and Facebook are platforms that carry content created by other people. A media company would theoretically have more control over said content, and thus ensure the ads are shown in the appropriate context. Still, no one expects that a third player will emerge quickly. That means we’ll probably be having similar discussions with ad buyers next year.

Could Facebook’s Live video problem become an advertising problem?

Speaking of adjacency … People are using Facebook Live for all kinds of horrible things, including suicides and beatings. And while the company is just starting to roll out ads within Facebook Live videos (and only from videos produced by hand-selected partners), two ad buyers we spoke with said their clients are already starting to question whether or not they’d want want to buy a Facebook Live video ad and be associated with the product at all.

The ads are so new that this is not yet a significant problem, but it’s also not a great sign for Facebook, which is finally making its big push into mid-roll video ads.

Twitter, meanwhile, is selling “live”

Virtually everyone in Twitter’s upper ranks was at Cannes this year. CEO Jack Dorsey spoke on a panel mid-week and, surprisingly, wasn’t asked much of anything about Twitter’s business. But we chatted with VP of Global Revenue Matt Derella at the company’s fancy beach cabana and he explained that Twitter is trying to sell video ads to accompany the live video content it’s been gathering for the past year. (Twitter spent time at Cannes selling ads for its NFL streaming package last year, but it doesn’t have those same streams this year.)

Derella says selling video ads for its live video streams is similar in process to selling traditional TV ads, but Twitter’s video ads are different in that they’re more targeted than TV ads, and mostly built for mobile devices.

“I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as TV 2.0,” he explained. “Some of the biggest CPG marketers in the world are taking their 15 and 30 [second ads], and we’re working with them and actually re-cutting them for Twitter.”

Twitter’s beach cabana at Cannes Lions in France - 2017.

Jeffrey Katzenberg has an idea for “New TV”

DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg was in town to pitch advertisers on his idea for what he’s calling “New TV.” The idea is to turn what has traditionally been a multi-hour program — a three-hour movie, for instance — into multiple shorter episodes and deliver that to people on mobile devices. He described it like cutting a book into short chapters.

But Katzenberg, who spoke with us from a suite on the top floor of the Carlton Hotel overlooking the marina, said he doesn’t want to create the kind of quick-to-produce internet videos that might do well for sites like NowThis or BuzzFeed’s Tasty unit. He wants to spend millions and produce videos that compare in quality to what you might see in the movie theatre.

The problem? The existing platforms that would be logical fits to distribute something like this — Facebook or YouTube — don’t offer an advertising model that can support that kind of production budget, Katzenberg says. That means he might try and build a platform himself, or work with an existing player to build something together.

“I don’t know. I’m in that process right now,” he said. “Over the last eight weeks I have met with what I believe are all of the potential enterprises that this might be a good fit for.”

Snapchat may not be doomed after all

Snapchat, whose presence in Cannes included an exclusive meeting compound surrounded by bushes and body guards (again) plus a giant yellow Ferris wheel, missed its Q1 revenue estimates this year, but ad buyers we spoke to in Cannes aren’t as concerned about the company’s business prospects as investors are.

Each of the five ad buyers we spoke with said their clients are eager to spend money on Snapchat, and one said he recommends Snapchat in every media package he sends to his clients.

So if everyone wants to give Snap money, why isn’t the company’s business bigger? These buyers claim that it’s a combination of things. Snap is still building its ad technology, like automated ad-buying software and better measurement tools. And it also takes bigger advertisers a long time to adopt anything new — and Snapchat’s business, which is just three years old, is still very new.

New arrivals

Reddit sent its sales team to Cannes for the first time this year alongside founder Alexis Ohanian. Pinterest has been at Cannes the past four years, but this was by far the company’s biggest presence. It rented a fancy beach pier, and executives told us that they are pushing their new search advertising units in conversations with marketers. (For more on that, and the rest of Pinterest’s business, you can read our profile of Pinterest’s President Tim Kendall here.)

Facebook Messenger was also in Cannes selling ads for the first time. It’s also showing advertisers its new inbox ads that it started testing back in January.

“We are selling mostly News Feed ads that push people to Messenger but we [are] also starting to educate … and teach people about those [inbox] ads coming inside Messenger as well,” explained Messenger’s product boss Stan Chudnovsky over breakfast on Facebook’s beach pier.

The New York Times is not opposing Donald Trump

The Times’s Deputy Publisher, AG Sulzberger, defended the paper’s reporting on President Trump during a panel at a beachside cabana hosted by media giant OMD this week.

Sulzberger, who will eventually take over as publisher, said that while the Times’ coverage isn’t flattering of Trump, the paper is not trying to actively oppose him either. Eventually, opposition groups come into power, Sulzberger explained, and he doesn’t want the paper to be fighting for any particular side. “The New York Times is nobody’s lapdog,” he added.

Feature Image: Solange Knowles performing at Spotify’s beach party during Cannes LionsTony Barson / Getty Images Entertainment

By Kurt Wagner

Sourced from recode

In News

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong slightly backed off his claim of challenging Google and Facebook in online advertising

July 6, 2017 No Comments

By Mike Shields

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong is slightly backing off his bold attack on Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, the company also seems to be somewhat downplaying its Verizon relationship in its pitch to advertisers.

Those were two of the takeaways from a press conference hosted at the Cannes advertising festival by Oath–the Verizon-owned company’s first public sit down since the telecom giant completed its acquisition of Yahoo.

Armstrong has spoken openly about taking on Google and Facebook, the two giants of online advertising. But at the event, Armstrong said, “Our goal is not to directly compete with Google and Facebook. Our goal is to basically open up new relationships with consumers in a differentiated way.”

Instead, Armstrong looked to paint the company as being a safe company for marketers, without mentioning the challenge that Google and others have had when it comes to ads landing in the wrong place (like next to hate videos on YouTube or on Breitbart articles without their knowledge).

“You hear the advertising world really, vocally crying out for trusted relationships,” he said. “We feel very strongly that from our current position from what the marketplace wants today, we’re going to be able to deliver a very trusted safe audience experience.”

Still, Armstrong acknowledged that brand safety may not be a huge selling point long term. Thus, hinted that over the next year, the company is planning to introduce a set of ad products that “include the consumer in a disruptive way,” and that the future is about “two way relationships between consumers and brands.”

Yet, when asked about the power of using Verizon’s robust consumer data for ad targeting, Oath president Tim Mahlman quickly steered the question toward the company’s plans to use Yahoo’s data from its registered users and other third party data sources for advertising.

A big motivation for Verizon’s acquisition of AOL and later Yahoo was to take advantage of Verizon’s vast pools of data on its subscribers — it knows where they live, what apps they use, where they go, etc. — and use that for powerful ad targeting. Ideally that asset puts the company in a better spot to compete with Facebook and Google, which also boast of powerful consumer data sets that help set the companies apart in the ad business.

The executives behind Verizon’s Oath gathered in Cannes on Monday Business Insider

It may be that Oath wants to be cautious when talking up using its wireless customer data, given the tough regulatory environment in Europe when it comes to ad targeting.

Still, Oath’s goals are lofty. By 2020 the company wants its sea of brands, from HuffPost to Yahoo Sports to TechCrunch, to reach 2 billion consumers and pull in $10 to $2o billion in revenue.

To get there, besides integrating Yahoo, Verizon wants to grow its global footprint, Armstrong said, while also “disrupting” brand marketing. “I like to say, ‘Google is search, Facebook is social and we’re going to be brands,” he said.

“Our challenge is, we have to do more than meet the market growth rates,” Armstrong said. “We have to take [market] share overall … Our engines need to fly faster than the tailwind.”

Feature Image: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong speaking at IGNITION 2016. Michael Seto/Business Insider

By Mike Shields

Sourced from Business Insider UK

In News

Google Chrome to block all adverts on websites that annoy users with intrusive pop-ups

June 23, 2017 No Comments

By Associated Press

Websites that run annoying ads such as pop-ups may find all ads blocked by Google’s Chrome browser starting next year.

The digital-ad giant’s announcement comes as hundreds of millions of internet users have already installed ad blockers on their desktop computers and phones to combat ads that track them and make browsing sites difficult.

These blockers threaten websites that rely on digital ads for revenue. Google’s version will allow ads as long as websites follow industry-created guidelines and minimize certain types of ads that consumers really hate. That includes pop-up ads, huge ads that don’t go away when visitors scroll down a page and video ads that start playing automatically with the sound on.

Google says the feature will be turned on by default, and users can turn it off. It’ll work on both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome.

Google says that even ads it sells will be blocked on websites that don’t get rid of annoying types of ads.

But there might not be vast changes online triggered by the popular browser’s efforts. It’s a “small number of websites that are disproportionately responsible for annoying user experiences,” Google spokeswoman Suzanne Blackburn said.

“I’m sure there are some publishers who will get hurt,” said Brian Wieser, an ad analyst with Pivotal Research Group. But in the long term, he says, cracking down on irritating ads should make the internet experience better, encouraging people to visit sites and click on links. That, in turn, benefits Google.

The company is also starting a program that could help publishers deal with users who have downloaded popular ad blockers. Some individual websites have come up with their own countermeasures. Forbes.com, for example, won’t let you read stories without disabling your ad blocker or logging in with Facebook or Google accounts, so the site can track you.

Google would work with websites to set up messages telling users to disable their blockers for the site or pay for a version of it with no ads. It’ll take a 10 percent cut of those payments.

To protect its ad business, Google has tried to improve user experiences in other ways. It launched a way for websites to load faster on phones. And it used its sway as the dominant search engine to push companies to make their sites mobile-friendly. Such sites show up higher in mobile searches.

Google also has tried to address advertisers’ concerns about their ads running next to offensive content by banning its ads from some objectionable videos on YouTube, like those that promote discrimination or advocate illegal drug use. Google also won’t place its ads on web pages with objectionable content — porn, for example, and or sites that promote suicide or violence.

Facebook, too, is trying to make links from inside its universe less spammy for users. It says it’s trying to cut down on posts and ads in the news feed that lead to junky pages with “little substantive content” and “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.”

Image: Google’s ad blocker will allow ads as long as websites follow industry-created guidelinesLeon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

By Associated Press

Sourced from International Business Times