It’s a common sight: Ads from that time you Googled flights to Cancún, or visited Nike to look for new running shoes, following you around the Internet.
Much of that tracking is made possible by cookies — little bits of code that jump off websites and lodge themselves in your browser, allowing new sites you visit to see where you’ve been before. Facebook and Google, the two most profitable advertising companies in history, use cookies to show ads across the Web based on info gathered on their own sites and social media networks.
But that’s all changing. Google has vowed to block cookies completely on its Chrome browser, which is used by around 70 percent of the world’s desktop computer owners, by the beginning of 2022. The decision, announced last year, sent shock waves through the advertising world, which has maintained revenue from tracking is necessary to fund a largely free Web.
Google says it has solutions to allow advertisers to keep showing relevant ads, but in privacy-protecting ways.Taken together, the company’s proposals are meant to let Web publishers, e-commerce companies and advertising agencies continue using targeted ads to make money, while assuring regular Internet users their data isn’t being stockpiled by an ever-growing list of companies and websites.
But privacy activists have already started poking holes in Google’s ideas.
And it may not matter. Advertising technology companies such as the Trade Desk have already taken the matter into their own hands, banding together to create new tracking tools that use email addresses. Other major companies have shown signs of pushing back against Google’s proposals, such as Amazon, which is currently blocking Chrome from collecting data on which users go to its websites. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Meanwhile, politicians and antitrust investigators in multiple countries have raised alarms that Google’s move could hurt competitors and further cement its power. And for regular Internet users, this largely behind-the-scenes change could have major implications for how private companies hoover up our data and make decisions about what we see online.
Here’s what you need to know.
How did we get here?
Cookies were written into early browsers to cut down on some of the inconveniences of surfing the Web. They allowed passwords to auto-fill, or websites to remember payment information so users didn’t have to type theirs in every time they came back. They also created a trail of breadcrumbs that the burgeoning online ad industry eagerly ate up, helping free websites make money.
But as the technology advanced, social media took off and consumers’ lives were lived increasingly online, it got creepy. Privacy advocates have always criticized the model, and more and more regular people have become aware of the issue, some expressing their displeasure by downloading ad blockers.
Google isn’t the first to make this change. Apple in 2017 started limiting and eventually blocking third-party cookies completely from its Safari browser. Mozilla’s Firefox followed soon after. But those two browsers make up less than 20 percent of the market, according to research firm eMarketer.
Despite Google’s own reliance on advertising and tracking for roughly $180 billion a year in revenue, chief executive Sundar Pichai admitted during a 2019 congressional hearing that people don’t like to feel they’re being tracked around the Internet. And in January 2020, Google said it too would block third-party cookies on Chrome within the next two years.
The changes come as politicians in the United States and elsewhere step up their attempts to regulate privacy. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has forced companies to ask permission before tracking people online since 2018. In 2020, America’s most populous state instituted the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives California residents the right to ask companies to delete whatever data has been gathered on them. As is the case with other consumer-focused regulation, the California law has essentially become the default nationwide.
Google was facing pressure from its competitors, too. Apple has been marketing its own privacy features aggressively, trying to paint itself as a privacy champion that doesn’t need to gather data to feed an advertising business like Google. It even threw up a giant billboard that loomed over Google’s exhibit at the 2019 CES tech conference in Las Vegas. Apple does gather some of its users data and uses it to sell targeted ads in its app store, though its ad business is much smaller than Google’s.
Some of Google’s advertising technology competitors say the move isn’t about privacy at all, but a way to hurt its rivals and push advertisers toward Google’s YouTube and search ads, which don’t need cookies to effectively target people.
“You can fix your public perception while at the same time cementing your own dominance and growing your own market share,” said Ratko Vidakovic, founder of AdProfs, an independent advertising technology consulting firm. “It seems like a no-brainer.”
A Google spokeswoman pointed to a company blog from March, where Marshall Vale, a product manager, said the company’s goal with FLOC and its other projects is to make cookies obsolete while also helping web publishers grow their businesses. Finding that balance is “critical to keep the web open, accessible and thriving for everyone,” Vale said.
How exactly does Google’s solution for the post-cookie world work?
Google can block cookies in Chrome relatively easily because it designs and controls the browser’s underlying code. Once it decides to make the change, it can update the browser and poof — no more cookies. To replace that functionality, Google’s engineers have marched out a menagerie of bird-themed acronyms like FLOC, FLEDGE and TURTLEDOVE to describe their proposals for advertising without cookies.
The ideas are working their way through the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, an international group of tech companies that debates and sets rules for how the Web works. However, Google doesn’t actually need to get approval from the rest of the W3C’s membership. Since its browser is the biggest in the world, it can simply make new rules and Web developers will have to follow them or risk seeing their websites stop working on Chrome.
“Google using the W3C letterhead to do this stuff makes it seem less like a Google power play,” said Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher at Brave, a browser that competes with Google’s Chrome.
The most fleshed-out idea so far is FLOC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. Under FLOC, instead of letting websites drop cookies into an individual’s browser, the browser itself watches what they do online. It then uses artificial intelligence to assign them to a cohort of several thousand people that the AI determines are interested in the same kinds of products. Then, instead of buying access to individual people, advertisers pay for ads to show up for users in a specific cohort.
For example, if you spent the past few days reading articles on ESPN, browsing New York Knicks jerseys and Googling NBA stats, you might be lumped into a package of several thousand basketball fans who would see similar ads. Cohort IDs refresh every week, so they’re based on the most recent browsing behaviour.
In the old world, websites would constantly be pulling up information about you based on the cookies trailing behind you. Now, the only identifying information your browser would present is which cohort you’re in. Google says this system is 95 percent as effective at getting clicks as old-school cookie ads are for advertisers.
If that’s true, consumers would see pretty much the same kind of ads they do now and will probably still have the feeling of being followed around the Web by ads for sites they recently visited.
This is good for privacy, though. … Isn’t it?
Generally, yes, but that doesn’t mean privacy advocates are celebrating the change. For one, Google’s Chrome browser is still monitoring every website you visit and feeding that into its algorithm. The information stays on your device, but it’s still being gathered. For those who want less surveillance from tech companies, it might feel like a step in the wrong direction.
“The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process,” Bennett Cyphers, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a March report on Google’s cookie replacements. “It hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model.”
It also isn’t clear yet which websites will have access to a person’s cohort ID. If it’s freely available, sites you visit repeatedly could collect them as they change week to week, tie it to other pieces of information about you such as your email or IP address, and build a dossier on your interests, circumventing the stated purpose of FLOC, Cyphers argues.Google acknowledges this issue and says it is one of the long-term problems it is working on. The system also raises the possibility of profiling based on race, allowing advertisers to discriminate against some people. Advertising jobs or housing selectively by race is illegal in the United States.
Still, compared to other proposals from the rest of the ad-tech industry, Google’s is arguably the best one for privacy, Vidakovic said.
“They’re trying to balance commercial needs with user privacy needs at the same time,” he said. “Despite their flaws, I think the concept behind FLOC and anonymous cohorts are a good balance.”
What does Google’s move mean for competition?
Unlike FLOC, cookies aren’t owned and controlled by a specific company. They are a generic technology that any Web publisher or ad-tech seller can use to track people and show them ads. The world of cookie advertising resembles a capitalist Wild West, where anyone can hang a shingle and try building a fortune in Web ads.
Google’s new FLOC system is more controlled, laying out strict rules for how exactly advertisers can interact with the people who use Chrome.
Cookies have also been used extensively to check how effective digital ads are. With FLOC, advertisers would have to trust Google that the ads they’re paying for are being shown to the right people.
Competitors to Google argue the company is pulling the ladder up behind it. Google used cookies to help it build a massive advertising business, but because YouTube and Google Search — which don’t need cookies — are its biggest moneymakers, it can afford to live in a cookie-free Web.Advertisers who can’t use cookies to find people on the open ocean of the Web will give more of their money to Google and Facebook who can pinpoint the right targets on their own sites, which industry insiders call “walled gardens.”
In January, the UK’s competition authority said it would investigate FLOC and Google’s other ideas to “assess whether the proposals could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors.”
On the flip side, if Google were to simply shut down third-party cookies without building an alternative like FLOC, small companies, and the consumers who look to them for innovative new products, could pay the price. Big brands who already have contact information for their customers can use email marketing to reach them, while start-up retailers use targeted ads to find new people. Without targeted ads, companies such as glasses seller Warby Parker or makeup start-up Glossier might never have survived long enough to compete and bring down the prices that older companies were charging consumers.
The same dynamic applies to publishing. Big news organizations who have paying subscribers don’t rely as much on targeted ads as small, local news providers. If those small news providers have even fewer ways to make money, the communities they serve will suffer. (The Washington Post is working with the Trade Desk and other companies to use an email-based identifier for targeted ads).
Google argues that, unlike Apple and Mozilla, it actually had small publishers, advertisers and the consumers they serve in mind when it said it would build FLOC to account for the loss of targeting ability when cookies go away.
Either way, Google is set up for success. If FLOC does work effectively, it gains more control over the advertising ecosystem and can tell its users it has scored a win for their privacy. If it fails, advertisers will likely invest even more in the “walled gardens” — which conveniently include Google’s search ads and YouTube.
So what does this all mean for me?
The debate over cookies is a major reminder of just how much our online behavior is being tracked and recorded by dozens of private companies. It also shows how many companies have a stake in that reality.
Targeted advertising has grown up alongside the Internet, and helped create giants such as Facebook and Google, but also fostered an ecosystem of thousands of companies employing hundreds of thousands of people. When companies such as Google make changes to how products used by billions of people work, there are consequences. Getting rid of cookies completely could hurt news publishers and e-commerce start-ups, decreasing the number of voices online and pushing up prices for consumer products. It could also increase privacy and move the Internet in the direction of less surveillance overall.
None of this has been fully decided, and keeping track of the big changes made by companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple over the next several years will be key to understanding how our online lives are recorded, packaged and sold.
Feature Image Credit: (Washington Post illustration; iStock)
For years now Google’s phones have been a critical success but a sales flop. What gives?
“Awesome screen, awesome camera, long-lasting battery life,” was a tune that may still ring in the ears of many who turned on a TV around the launch of the Samsung Galaxy A51 – a few months before the launch of the Google Pixel 5.
Later in the year, you were likely greeted by advertisements of the lavish colour variations on offer from the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE and its pulse-raising domino-like showcase. Apple’s ad assault started strong, of course, with Ridley Scott’s iconic 1984 Mac ad, which ran for a full minute, and carried on it the same manner with dancing jelly iMac G3s, pop art silhouette iPod spots, the “there’s an app for that” campaign, and more.
This begs the question, do you remember anything from Pixel 5 adverts? In fact, when was the last time you saw a Google Pixel advertisement? At £599, Google Pixel 5 looks like one of the best value phones on the market, while the Pixel 4a is similarly inviting, providing a top contender for the best camera and software for any phone under £400.
Yet, the popularity of the Pixel range still wanes in the face of competition from more widely adopted and promoted rivals. In the US, Google phones have a lower market share than both LG and Huawei. The former recently chose to ditch its smartphone business while the latter has not sold new phones in the country for over a year. At just over two per cent, Google market share is dwarfed by the respective 25 and 54 per cents of Samsung and Apple.
One thing is clear, there is little point in the bumps in specs and performance of the Pixel 6 if Google continues to do a poor job of shouting about it.
The Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a are great phones, and, aside from a rocky time with the Pixel 4, Google’s smartphones have delivered when it comes to hardware and software. What’s not to love about the Pixel? From a camera that is praised year-on-year and great software to well-built hardware and, recently, attractive pricing, it’s a compelling package. However, the market speaks for itself and the Pixel just isn’t that popular.
An area that may go some way to explain the Pixel range’s lack of popularity, despite them being great phones, is advertising. According to Nielsen, since the start of 2016, Google has spent just over £40 million on smartphone advertising in the UK. By comparison, Apple and Samsung have spent around four and five times more than that.
If you don’t recall seeing a Pixel advert on TV, or think it’s a rarity, the breakdown of Google’s ad spend explains this. Google spent just £14 million on TV ad spend in the same period while Apple spent £75 million and Samsung shelled out a whopping £124 million. Samsung is spending more than three times as much on just its TV campaigns than Google’s entire Pixel ad spend in the UK.
Google isn’t short on resource, so this begs the question, why isn’t it spending more to get the Pixel out there? This question was being posed way back in 2016, with Wharton University publishing an article titled “Why Google’s Pixel is more about strategy than smartphones.” Professor of management David Hsu stated: “The main business of Google is enabling their advertising revenue model. Hardware is always going to pale in comparison.”
Also, in 2016, both Hsu and assistant professor of business economics and public policy Michael Sinkinson suggested the Pixel range should’ve been priced more aggressively. Since then, the “a” series of Pixels and Pixel 5 have done just that, yet not much else has changed. In the same article, Gerald Faulhauber, professor emeritus of business economics and public policy, argued Pixel would likely be around for “a couple of years and go away”. You’d forgive Faulhauber for thinking this, given Google’s track record, but the company is sticking at it.
Google’s Pixel marketing plan has demonstrated there’s plenty of room for it to invest more. But Counterpoint Research’s Neil Shah thinks Google may be stuck between a rock and a hard place. “Google is in a Catch-22 situation with its hardware strategy. Google’s DNA is cloud, software and AI – it’s not hardware. Also, building your own hardware and competing with your partners, especially Samsung or Chinese vendors, is not healthy in long run.” This argument was made before the launch of the Pixel though, whether vendors would be happy about the company behind Android making its own phone, but Google pushed on.
Shah points towards a “lack of distribution and scale” as one of the reasons the Pixel hasn’t taken off. “Investing in hardware is expensive,” he says. “But it is also lucrative once you gain scale. I see Google trying to figure out the right timing for its investments and try to be truly vertically integrated, like Apple, to reap the benefits and go [full] throttle.” This vertical integration, where the company controls absolutely everything about the Pixel phone, could be inbound, with mounting speculation that the Pixel 6 will be powered by a new Google-created chip, Whitechapel.
Whether a new chip is a catalyst for Pixel to finally make its mark will very much be up to Google. It’s the company that will determine whether it chooses to throw itself properly into the mobile phone business or continue to play around at the edges.
Aside from Google’s lacklustre ad spend in the UK, the quality of Pixel ads has also been criticised. Meanwhile, indicators of Google’s strategy for phones still seems unclear. It took the savvy step in the US of partnering with a carrier (T-Mobile). Then, on the launch of a Pixel 5a, it listed just two countries (US and Japan) as release locations.
From new partnerships and chip development, to better distribution and good old-fashioned advertising spend, Google has plenty of options to make Pixel more than a minor entrant in the mobile race. Yet for much of the above this has been the case for years.
Through no fault of the hardware, the Pixel has existed in mobile limbo since the range’s launch almost five years ago. At this rate, another half decade of underperformance doesn’t seem out of the question. Google needs to get serious about its worthwhile phones or put the Pixel out of its misery.
In this article SEOLEVELUP focuses on strategies for better SEO that can help you rank higher on Google in 2021.
With more than 4.5 Billion Google searches a day, you will need to play by the rules of Google to rank high enough for potential visitors to come across your content. Improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts is one of the best ways to ensure that you are making full use of your content. Check out our SEO Tips that will help your website improve online visibility and rankings.
Before you get started, be sure to get our FREE SEO Audit if you want to see needed improvements to your website! Also check out our Google reviews and read some success stories!
Organizations need a way to assess and view their SEO activities in today’s data-driven environment to stay ahead. To accomplish this, 73% of marketers use SEO tools to refine their content and improve Google’s content ratings.
You can increase the probability of obtaining organic website traffic by introducing small changes to the content of your website.
In this article I focus on strategies for better SEO that can help you rank higher on Google in 2021. In the new year, it will break down Best SEO Companies for small business and clarify some strategies to enhance SEO.
Best SEO Tips to Implement in 2021
Monitor with a Program that works with Search Engines
Understanding Google Analytics is the best step that you can take in enhancing your SEO in 2021. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to understand your website, so you can make good decisions based on results.
Not only can statistics help you understand how you rank, but also your audience, so that content can be better created for them.
Google Analytics can be a fantastic tool over time to target the customers better. Some of the indicators you can learn from visitors to your site include:
What browsers they use
Google Analytics will give you powerful insights on which browsers your customers use. By concentrating on web design on the most-used browsers, will allow you to enhance their experience.
The devices used to visit your site
Similar to knowing the browsers your customers use, knowing what devices they use can be helpful. There are more web users on those pages than desktop users or vice versa. Understanding the metrics of your website will allow you to develop content customized to the screen size that is most widely used, improving the user experience.
Understand your competition
Google Analytics also provides insights into traffic from rivals. When determining how to boost your content and outrank rivals, this knowledge can be useful.
Refresh Website with new material
There is one thing in common with content marketers who create high-ranking content. They provide readers with engaging content topics. Successful marketing managers track patterns and discussions to brainstorm content ideas. This ensures that at some stage you’re going to have to revisit low-performing content.
Consider what kind of content would resonate with your audience when designing your content marketing strategy. From there, you can analyse what headlines will do well for that subject and whether you can establish some prequel topics.
Many content marketers consider mind maps to be useful. Using a mind map for visual individuals will help you present all of your future topic ideas. It will enable you to create larger topics that can be built into similar, smaller items. Visualizing your content plan can help you grasp it completely sometimes.
Ensure you create your Content around Keywords
Researching keywords not only works for your content and helps to develop your piece’s framework but it also allows you to understand what your audience wants to read. You can help build a content strategy to boost SEO by understanding what keywords are best for your target audience and content type.
Google-friendly writing depends on a balance between keywords and everyday language being proven. This implies that it should be written in such a way that your content flows naturally. In your content, keywords should naturally come up so that you don’t have to stuff your content at the last minute.
There is an option for the Keyword Magic Tool where you can look up related keywords for your primary keyword. To help you identify whether it is something you will want to add to your content.
You will see how closely related a keyword is and its search volume. You can talk with your SEO Agency and can make small changes to boost your SEO ranking gradually.
Expand your Portfolio Backlink
Even if you follow all of the tips related to on-page technical SEO, Google’s front page will still not be proven. A large portion of SEO deals with backlinks and whether high-authority sites generate backlinks.
Diversity in backlinks can come from two sources, specifically: The type of backlink
In general, a dofollow or nofollow would be your backlink, with a dofollow bearing more weight.
A site where the backlink originates
For example, if you are promoting your content and targeting publishers to run a story, the source of your backlink will be the site that links back to your content.
A diverse portfolio of backlinks signals to Google that your website is an authoritative source. Also that you naturally create links versus relying on automated tools or other spam tactics.
Use Appropriate Header tags
You want to be aware of how you organize the content on the page while creating content. With the most relevant details at the top of the page, each page should have content arranged logically.
Studies have noticed that 80% of readers spend much of their time at the top of the page looking at the content. How great are these SEO Tips?
Google does not, however, inherently index meaning exclusively to what is at the top of the list. To see if it’s comprehensive, they look at the article as a whole. So with that in mind, you may need to put some effort into how the page is laid out.
Consider adding jump links to the top of your page to get the most out of the keywords you’re targeting.
Not only does this create a more enjoyable user experience, but it also encourages you to use your header tags to go after Google Gathering Information from a sample in more innovative ways.
Conclusion
Search engines work overtime to list the billions of websites on the internet because of the content being made and released quickly. Get in touch with us today and we can discuss how to improve your online rankings.
Besides, you can improve SEO on your site and start ranking higher on Google by using tools to look at critical factors that affect it, such as loading speed, content problems, meta tags, linking, and crawlability.
I hope you enjoyed these amazing SEO Tips and be sure to get a FREE SEO Audit today!
Google, for much of the last year, has been detailing how it plans to roll out changes to its search algorithm in 2021, through something called a “page experience update.” The company made some announcements Monday about how the changes will work, and when to expect them.
“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021,” Google announced Monday on its developer blog. “However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. You can think of it as if you’re adding a flavouring to a food you’re preparing. Rather than add the flavour all at once into the mix, we’ll be slowly adding it all over this time period.”
Google went on to say that publishers should not expect “drastic changes.”
As Google has been stating since last year, the changes will consider “page experience signals,” based on the three Core Web Vitals metrics. Earlier indications had stated that the change would begin taking place in May.
Also, the new Top Stories carousel for Google Search will no longer require use of the AMP format.
“We will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content. You can expect this change to come to our products as the page experience update begins to roll out in mid-June. We’ll continue to test other ways to help identify content with a great page experience, and we’ll keep you updated when there is more to share,” the company said in its blog post.
Another change will be the arrival of a new Page Experience report in the search console.
“This report combines the existing Core Web Vitals report with other components of the page experience signals, such as HTTPS security, absence of intrusive interstitials, safe browsing status, and mobile friendliness,” the blog post said.
“The Page Experience report offers valuable metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance. You can also dig into the components of page experience signal to gain additional insights on opportunities for improvement.”
Google will also be offering Signed Exchanges (SXG) on Google Search for all web pages, not just those built with AMP.
AMP has long been controversial, with some arguing that it has entailed Google taking too much control over the web.
“Our vision for page experience is to build a web ecosystem that users love—together. We’re hard at work to make sure that you have the right tools and resources available before the ranking rollout starting in mid-June 2021,” Google said.
Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
When talking about “the elephant in the room” these days, it’s sometimes difficult to determine which one. It depends on whether you’re speaking about ecommerce or advertising, but perhaps not for long.
Google My Business (GMB) is increasingly playing a role as a local mediator. Historically, someone would search for information online, contact a small business, go to the retail store, or look up directions. Slowly, the company has been integrating GMB into Maps and into people’s lives and their routines.
This past year, as people dealt with COVID-19 and lockdowns, the industry focused on the growth of ecommerce, but something a little more complicated and interesting happened, said Greg Sterling, vice president of marketing insights at Uberall.
“The internet is now the starting point for everything, either ecommerce or local offline transactions like food ordering, pick-up in store or curbside pickup,” he said.
Google is trying to put its services in the centre of the online-to-offline experience, which includes Maps, product inventory, and search. There’s a lot of money at stake, he said — and Google is trying to influence it all, from reviews to remarketing.
“Last year, I estimated at one point, casually, at least $10 trillion of U.S. economic activity is impacted by the internet,” he said. “That’s probably underestimating it, but if GDP is between $20 trillion and $21 trillion, at least half is impacted by the internet in some form. That’s much more than ecommerce.”
When Inside Performance asked whether Google will become an ecommerce engine, Sterling said the company is headed in that direction. Increasingly, more transactions are happening through Google, including services such as appointments.
The future is a hybrid model of online and offline, Sterling said. GMB is an important part of that strategy.
Last week, Google announced that it is on track to bring more than 100 AI-powered improvements to Google Maps, such as a feature that provides the ability to navigate through indoors spaces with Live View, powered by a technology called global localization.
The technology uses artificial intelligence to scan tens of billions of Street View images to understand the consumer’s location, and helps to understand the precise position and placement of objects inside a building such as on store shelves, in airports, or transit stations, as well as retail stores in malls.
Live View can help someone find the nearest elevator and escalator in an airport, or locate an ATM machine.
“One of the ways you compete with Amazon is you let people know where locally they can buy some of the items they search for online,” he said. “Amazon is trying to compress delivery times to remove the physical store advantage.”
While Google is trying to expose inventory online that’s in local stores to give people a sense of where they can buy it and take it home, online direct-to-consumer brands are moving offline. They got their start online. If you’re a direct to consumer brands and you online have an online stores, you’re vulnerable, Sterling said.
“You need pop-up stores — something Nordstrom is doing,” he said. “You don’t need to build out stores, but you need to give them the experience of the brand.”
Exactly how Google uses engagement signals (i.e. clicks and interaction data) is subject to endless SEO debate. The passage above suggests Google uses engagement metrics to train their machine learning models. Google has also admitted to using click signals for both search personalization and evaluating new algorithms.
While many Googlers no doubt work hard to be helpful to the SEO community, they are also under pressure “not to reveal too much detail” about their algorithms out of caution that SEOs will game search results. In reality, Google is never going to tell SEO exactly how they use engagement metrics, no matter how many times we ask.
Most SEO debate focuses on if Google uses organic Click-through Rates (CTR) in its ranking algorithms. If you are interested, AJ Kohn’s piece is particularly outstanding as well as Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday on covering this topic. For a nuanced counter-view, I’d recommend reading this excellent post by Dan Taylor.
To be fair, I believe most of the debate around CTR up to this point has likely been far too simple. Whatever way SEOs think Google uses click data, how Google actually uses clicks is guaranteed to be far more sophisticated than anything we may conceive. This complexity gap gives Google easy deniability, and justification for calling otherwise reasonable SEO theories “made up crap.” (Google may very well say something similar about this article, which is fine.)
Not another CTR debate
At this point, you may think this is another post adding to the CTR debate, but in fact, it’s not. THIS SIMPLY ISN’T THAT POST.
Arguing “if” Google uses click signals leads us down the wrong path. We know Google does, we simply don’t know how. For example, are they direct signals, or used for machine learning training only? Are click signals used in the broader algorithm, or only for personalization?
Instead, lets propose something far more radical, and likely far more helpful to your SEO:
Why you should assume Google uses clicks for ranking
The patent is fascinating from an SEO perspective because it explains how using click signals can be very “noisy” (as Google often says) but describes a process for calculating “long click” and “last click” metrics to cut through the noise and better rank search results.
To be fair, we have no evidence Google uses the processes described in this patent, and even if they did, it would likely be far more sophisticated/nuanced than the process described here.
That said, the patent is riveting because it supports many of the same best SEO practices we’ve advocated for years. So much so that, if you optimized for these metrics, you’d almost certainly improve your SEO traffic and rankings, regardless if Google uses these exact processes or not. Specifically:
More Clicks (“High CTR”): earns you more traffic no matter your rank, and initial clicks form the basis of all subsequent click metrics.
Improved Engagement (“Long Clicks”): almost always a positive sign from your users, and often an indicator of quality as well as being correlated with future visits.
User Satisfaction (“Last Click”): the holy grail of SEO, and ultimately the experience Google strives to deliver in its search results.
We can summarize these principles into 3 tenets of click-based engagement metrics for SEO: First, Long, and Last.
Let’s explore each of these in turn.
1. Be the first click: earning high CTRs
As stated earlier, this isn’t a debate if Google uses CTR. There’s plenty of evidence that they monitor and consider clicks in a variety of ways. (And to be fair, there’s evidence that they don’t use CTR as extensively as many SEOs believe.)
Even if CTR isn’t a ranking signal, having a higher CTR is almost always good for SEO, because it means getting more clicks and more eyeballs on your content.
Besides the inherent value of earning a high CTR, clicks also form the basis of subsequent click-based metrics, including long clicks and last clicks. So earning that first click is an essential step.
How to earn higher click-through rates
Your ability to earn a higher CTR is almost entirely contained with optimizing your appearance in Google search results. How your snippet stands out and gets noticed for being a likely helpful, relevant answer—in a sea of other competing results—is the name of the game.
You may think your options at influencing CTR in this way are quite limited, but in fact, you have many, many surprisingly powerful levers to pull in your favor, including:
What about artificially manipulating your CTR, either using bots or one of the many blackhat click services you can find on the web? More often than not, these tactics lead to disappointing results. One possible reason why is that Google is very skilled at sniffing out “unnatural” browsing behavior.
So high CTR can be a good thing, but the fact remains—as Google has told us countless times—CTR is a “noisy” signal to use for ranking. Should a result with a flashy title be rewarded simply because users click on it, even if the actual page provides a lackluster experience?
In truth, while earning clicks is one of the primary goals of SEO, the “noise” of the signal is probably why Google avoids using CTR as a direct ranking signal itself.
In fact, earning a high CTR if your content leads to a poor user experience may actually hurt you in the end. More on this below.
So first, we need to figure out if our clicks create a good user experience. Read on…
2. Earn long clicks
So what if you trick people into clicking your URL, but your page actually doesn’t deliver what you promised, or even adequately answer the query.
This isn’t good for users, or for Google. And it definitely isn’t good for you.
One measure of content relevancy search engines can use is weighted viewing time, based on the concept that users typically spend a bit longer time on a site they find relevant, versus a page they find not helpful. Within this framework, “long clicks” can carry more weight than “short clicks.”
“But Cyrus,” smart SEOs protest, “not every query needs a long click. Many searches, like the weather or the “highest mountains in Europe,” can be answered very quickly, often in seconds. It doesn’t make sense for these pages to have long clicks.”
Those SEOs are right, of course. Fortunately, Google engineers understood not every query is the same and devised a clever solution: click scores can be weighted on a per-query basis, including language and country-specific click data.
“Note that such categories may also be broken down into sub-categories as well, such as informational-quick and informational-slow: a person may only need a small amount of time on a page to gather the information they seek when the query is “George Washington’s Birthday”, but that same user may need a good deal more time to assess a result when the query is “Hilbert transform tutorial”
To dive a little deeper, it’s not so much how long visitors stay on your page, but your ratio of long clicks (LC) to overall clicks (C), weighted on a per-query basis. This LC|C ratio could be used to re-rank queries based on user-engagement.
Take this a step further: results with good long-click ratios may rank higher, while results with poor long-click ratios may rank lower.
So consider a situation where you “hacked” your CTR to earn more clicks, but the page itself doesn’t deliver, resulting in more short clicks. In theory, this could actually hurt your rankings, even though you started with a higher CTR!
So be sure to back up your higher CTRs with great user experiences, e.g. long clicks.
How to optimize for long clicks
Many SEOs refer to long clicks as analogous to improving your “dwell time”, or simply the amount of time a user spends on your site. The signals associated with improving dwell time are often known as “UX” (User Experience) signals.
The golden rule of getting more long clicks is simply this: provide the most useful, complete, and engaging answer to a user search query, in the most attractive and effective format possible.
A note of distinction: because most pages rank for multiple keywords, and multiple keyword variations, all with possibly varying search intent, it’s often helpful to target for those various search intents all on the same page.
For example, a user searching for information about meta descriptions may also be interested in “meta description length”, “meta description format” and “how to write meta descriptions.” Optimizing more completely for these varying search intents can improve your long click metrics.
Pro Tip: You don’t need to optimize for every user intent on the same page. Linking to other resources on your site is fine, and even encouraged! Visitors don’t have to stay on the same page for a search click to count as “long.”
Aside from the quality of the content itself, there are a number of UX factors you can employ to encourage your visitors to engage with your content at a deeper level. While not an exhaustive list, a few examples may include:
Prominently link to closely related topics to cover multiple searcher intents. These can be internal links, or even external links.
Admittedly, there aren’t a ton of good excellent resources published on increasing engagement and improving long clicks. That said, I believe Brian Dean of Backlinko does an excellent job with this, and his resource on improving dwell time is worth checking out.
3. Be the last click
Yes, being the last click may be the holy grail of SEO.
A user clicks their way through a page of search results, not finding what they are looking for. Finally, they click on your URL and behold!…. You have the answer they sought.
Put simply, being the last click means searchers don’t return to Google to select another result (e.g. pogo sticking.)
Even if Google doesn’t use this as a ranking factor, you can see how it might benefit your SEO to be the user’s last click as much as possible. Satisfying the user query means users are more likely to browse and share your content, as well as seek you out again in the future.
How to be the last click
In my own SEO, there are fewer things I’ve seen associated with greater success than improving visitor satisfaction, and this is exactly what Google seeks to reward.
It’s also damn difficult to achieve.
Sadly, a typical process in SEO is to give a content brief to a copywriter, expect them to cover all the salient points, hit publish, and hope for the best. But more often than not, do you believe this content truly deserves to rank #1? Is this the first, last, and only result a user needs to click?
Years ago when working in a successful restaurant, a manager gave me advice about delivering 100% customer satisfaction that I will never forget: “Whatever happens, make sure they want to come back.”
This is how you should treat SEO: make sure every visitor to your site wants to come back.
Exactly how to make sure your visitor wants to come back is going to vary based on each and every query, but generally, it means going the extra mile, answering questions more completely, and offering the user more resources and a better experience.
In short, deliver an experience superior to every one of your competitors.
Beyond this, I recommend these 3 resources when improving your content (all amazingly from Rand Fishkin):
To be honest, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure click-based signals, as Google holds all the data.
(Even if you could accurately measure your long click/click ratio, or last click metrics, calculating their actual value would be meaningless without an accurate account of every other Google search result, let alone on a per-query basis.)
That said, there are metrics that can help you directionally measure any progress you might make. These are all available either through Search Console or Google Analytics:
Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a “good” score for these numbers, as everything is relative to the specific query it appeared for, as well as every single one of your competitors.
Regardless, these metrics can be directionally useful indicators when making improvements to your content. For example, if you see a drop in bounce rate and increase in session duration after a major content update, you can take this as an indicator that things are moving in the right direction. And in fact, it’s not unusual to see an increase in rankings/traffic after such a change accompanied by a positive shift in metrics.
While we can’t directly see what Google might measure in terms of complex click metrics, we can often make educated guesses.
And even if Google isn’t using these metrics exactly the way we speculate, we can still improve our SEO by paying attention to the user click behaviors we have influence over.
Thanks for making it this far. Remember:
Be First
Be Long
Be Last
Get those clicks, and earn them!
Appendix A: Evidence of Google using click-based ranking signals (incomplete list)
Keyword optimization, building backlinks, and writing brilliant blog posts aren’t the only way you can increase your website’s visibility through SEO.
You can now use Twitter to improve your SEO ratings.
Google cracked a deal with Twitter a few years ago to get access to its live tweets data, which indexes tweets on the Google search engine. This makes Twitter a big player in the world of search engine optimization.
With 330 million users on Twitter, you are missing out if not promoting your brand on the platform. Apart from offering such a vast audience, Twitter also offers paid promotions for your brand.
How Twitter improves SEO and your online presence
According to Statista, there are more than 330 million monthly active Twitter users
Does social media really impact SEO ranking? Given that social media is more about pictures, one platform is more about words, Twitter. Google and Twitter struck a deal in 2015 where Twitter provides Google with its live tweet data and more.
This has in fact affected SEO in ways marketers didn’t think possible. Google now uses real-time tweets to showcase its search results. So, when you search a hashtag, Google showcases Twitter results with the most recent tweets that use the hashtag in its search results. This makes Twitter absolutely essential for businesses.
Twitter helps businesses get in touch with their customers, and interact with them. Twitter’s hashtags about a product can give insights about how the product is and businesses can learn how people are responding to their products/services. Twitter strengthens the PR relationship a company has with its customers, as well as employees.
Here are some ways you can leverage Twitter to its full potential for growth and visibility online.
Paid promotions are the easiest way to reach your target audience, not only can you promote your tweets, but you can also promote your account.
Be mindful of what you write in your Twitter Bio. Deploying your brand’s Twitter Bio carefully is key. Make sure to add the correct keywords and hashtags in the Bio. The summary on Twitter should be effective and use keywords that are most relevant for your brand. This will increase your brand’s visibility on Google.
Creating a username with the brand’s name is crucial to bring you on top of Google’s search engine results. When someone searches for a brand name, Google also displays their Twitter accounts in the search list.
There are various tools that can be used to optimize reach on Twitter. By posting during the time most of your followers are online. Make sure to keep in mind the time for paid promotions too.
#2. Trending hashtags
Twitter has a feature that showcases various trending topics from around the world as “trends”.
What is a “trend”? Basically, it’s a topic a lot of people on Twitter are talking about. It can range from politics to fashion, from technology to food, literally anything.
Find the latest trending topics that suit your brand’s image and get into the conversation. This helps with visibility on Twitter and will also bring up tweets on Google.
#3. Re-sharing content
Re-sharing old content shouldn’t be frowned upon. Re-sharing old content from your website or any content that may be relevant with the current time should be shared again with your Twitter audience.
Your new audience will probably miss out on good content that was posted in the past. So pick up the most educational/informative content and post it again.
Do it a couple of times, or you can just pin those tweets to the top of your profile, giving important content visibility on your page.
#4. Engaging in relevant conversations
You can search for hashtags and keywords on Twitter in connection to your brand. Hop onto conversations that you might think speak in the tone of your brand. Retweet, share tweets, or just reply to tweets that are discussing your product, by giving information or just having a simple conversation.
Being responsive to complaints, queries, etc, prompts the consumer to make a purchase. Make a Twitter plan that also includes engaging your audience, and engaging an audience that reposts and shares tweets is very important.
A few tools that help with Twitter growth and engagement
MeetEdgar – This app helps with posting your content on a schedule and will also write your tweets on a lazy day.
TweetDeck – A twitter owned app, helps you see multiple feeds in a side-by-side view. You can follow hashtags, conversations, and even your competitors’ feeds.
Bitly – If you want to post your website links on Twitter, make Bitly your best friend. It gives you a shorter version of any link. Not only a link shortening app, but Bitly is also very informative about data analysis for Twitter.
While building social media for a brand, always have a reliable monitoring tool for insights, study the insights and make changes. Blending all the steps with your brand’s goals for Twitter will help it reach a better and larger audience. Be consistent, and patient to see growth, it doesn’t miraculously happen overnight.
Semil Shah, Chief Marketer at Shrushti Digital Marketing
According to his team, Semil Shah can take any digital marketing profile to the next level. With over 15 years of experience in the SEO world, he is a certified SEO specialist, who mainly focuses on growing businesses. He is the Chief Marketer at Shrushti Digital Marketing. In his free time you will catch him either listening to podcasts or trekking in the jungle clicking some really cool pictures.
‘Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy,’ say prosecutors
State antitrust watchdogs are targeting Google’s plans to phase out third-party tracking cookies, building on a major lawsuit filed last year. The group of 15 attorneys general, led by Texas, updated its complaint about Google yesterday to include a more detailed case against the search giant, including new claims about Google’s strategic use of the Chrome browser. In particular, the new complaint takes aim at recent privacy updates to Chrome, which could better protect users’ personal data while also entrenching Google’s market position.
Like the original Texas complaint, Tuesday’s updated filing primarily focuses on Google’s technology for targeting ads across the web. The attorneys general argue that Google used its power in search, streaming video, and other markets to stamp out independent advertising platforms, forcing small businesses and media outlets to use its system.
But in the updated complaint, the states apply this argument to Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” — a tool that’s supposed to replace invasive third-party tracking cookies with a more limited system devised by Google.
“Google’s new scheme is, in essence, to wall off the entire portion of the internet that consumers access through Google’s Chrome browser,” the complaint reads. Blocking cookies might broadly be a good thing — other browsers like Firefox and Safari have already done it. But Chrome dominates the browser market, and it’s part of a much larger Google product suite. The suit argues that Google’s plans would require advertisers to use it as a middleman and would make Google’s own advertising system far more attractive.
For years, Google has been gradually scaling back its use of tracking cookies, announcing earlier this month that it will not establish an alternate system for tracking users on the web. But critics of the company — including the Electronic Frontier Foundation — have criticized those efforts as self-serving. Now, state regulators seem to be adopting those criticisms and putting new legal pressure on Google’s efforts to block tracking in Chrome.
“Google is trying to hide its true intentions behind a pretext of privacy,” the suit continues. With Privacy Sandbox, “Google does not actually put a stop to user profiling or targeted advertising — it puts Google’s Chrome browser at the centre of tracking and targeting.”
Reached for comment, Google said the new allegations rested on a misunderstanding of Chrome’s privacy features. “Attorney General Paxton’s latest claims mischaracterize many aspects of our business, including the steps we are taking with the Privacy Sandbox initiative to protect people’s privacy as they browse the web,” a Google representative said. “These efforts have been welcomed by privacy advocates, advertisers and our own rivals as a step forward in preserving user privacy and protecting free content. We will strongly defend ourselves from AG Paxton’s baseless claims in court.”
Update 1:50PM ET:Added statement from Google.
Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
‘Grow with Google’ Vice President Lisa Gevelber explains Google’s professional certification training program which could lead to opportunities in high-growth fields.
Google’s online job training program is hoping to “create real economic opportunity for everyone,” according to Grow with Google Vice President Lisa Gevelber.
“Eighty million Americans do not have a college degree and we feel like that is a barrier to getting a good job,” she told FOX Business’ “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” Monday.
According to Gevelber, Google career certificates enable people to get the right skills and connect with the right employers for them.
The certificate courses are designed to be taken online at the participant’s own pace, which allows working people to take advantage of the program, according to Grow with Google’s website.
The average course can be completed in fewer than six months and costs roughly $240.
The job fields covered by the program include I.T. support, data analytics, user experience design and project management, all of which are “in demand” and “high-paying” fields, according to Gevelber.
The program’s site states the average salary for entry-level roles across certificate fields is $63,600.
Google is working with the online learning platform Coursera to offer the certificates and the courses are taught by “experts at Google who have decades of experience,” Gevelber said.
Gevelber believes the most important aspect of the program is Google’s partnerships with employers like Home Depot, Smucker’s, Walmart, Infosys and Better.com.
The top six Google tools to help grow your website SEO score
Building a website has never been easier than it is today. However, building a successful website is getting harder and harder in a highly crowded space, especially when considering the importance of website SEO (search engine optimization).
While choosing the best web hosting for your website will go a long way to helping you succeed, there are numerous other tools you should be make use of, and Google’s toolkit is a great place to start.
In this article, we look at six of the best Google tools. If you’re not already taking advantage of them, it might be time to change the way you work.
1. Google Ads
Google Ads is a powerful marketing tool (Image credit: Google)
Most experienced website owners will agree that Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is one of the most powerful marketing tools available. It includes a suite of smaller tools, effectively allowing you to perform keyword research, low-key competition analysis, and PPC (pay-per-click) marketing from one central hub.
Of course, this isn’t free, and it can cost quite a bit if you don’t know what you’re doing. But learn how to run effective ads, and you will soon be driving a decent amount of traffic to your website, no matter your budget.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a very powerful website statistics tracker (Image credit: Google)
When you own a website, it’s important to understand how it’s performing at all times. It might be that you’re suffering from a high bounce rate, but don’t know why. Or perhaps you’d like to know what your main traffic sources are. Whatever information you’re looking for, Google Analytics can help.
To get started, you will have to link your website to your analytics console. There are a few ways to do this, but the easiest is to paste a small code snippet into your website source code. Google provides a full tutorial on how to do this.
Once you’re connected, you will be able to access your analytics portal, where you will find information on everything from visitor demographics and source to your most popular content. And as you can imagine, this information is extremely useful for making future business decisions.
3. Google Trends
Google Trends is a great way to track keyword search volume over time (Image credit: Google)
One of the hardest things to do as a webmaster is to keep track of your keywords. Keyword research is all well and good, but search volumes are constantly changing, and it can be difficult to identify up-and-coming keywords or phrases with normal research.
This is where Google Trends is useful. Basically, it allows you to view the search volumes for specific keywords or keyphrases over time. You can compare the performance of different search terms while filtering by location, search platform, time period, and more.
4. Google Search Console
Any webmaster who is serious about developing a strong online presence should take advantage of the Google Search Console (Image credit: Google)
SEO is difficult at the best of times, but it’s almost impossible if you aren’t using the tools at your disposal. All webmasters should be using the Google Search Console in some way or another, largely because it’s a great source of information about the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns.
For starters, it allows you to submit sitemaps and individual URLs directly to Google to ensure your entire website is indexed properly. Keep track of search analytics, and get notified when Google finds any problems with your site and its content.
Google AdSense provides a great way for small website owners to monetize their sites (Image credit: Google)
If you run a content-based website, there aren’t a lot of ways to monetize your work. You could sell premium content or add a little ecommerce store, but these both require a lot of effort. Alternatively, you could include some form of advertising on your website by signing up for Google AdSense.
Once you’ve signed up, you will need to be approved by Google to become part of the Google Network of publishers. Once approved, you will be able to place small ads on your site. These are usually targeted at your audience according to their interests and past browsing history, and you will be paid whenever ads are published and/or clicked on.
6. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is basic yet powerful (Image credit: Google)
Google Alerts certainly isn’t the most powerful tool in the search engine’s toolbox, but it’s extremely useful nonetheless. It allows you to set alerts for keywords, phrases, or anything else you want to monitor on the web. When a relevant piece of content is published, you will be notified. A lot of webmasters use this to monitor the exposure their website is getting across the web. Simply create an alert for your brand or website name, and wait for the results to start rolling in.
Summary
Google is the most popular search engine in the world, and it comes complete with a suite of tools to help webmasters improve their website’s performance and search engine ranking. The above six are some of the best Google tools available, and now you know what they’re useful for and why you should be taking advantage of them.
