In our last column we asked: Has Google killed mobile organic search?

In this column we consider what Google’s plans are for those owned properties that get the prime real estate atop mobile search results, such as Google My Business (GMB) and Knowledge Graph (KG).

There are five areas/initiatives that should be observed closely, as these could be prototypes for the future of mobile local search. These are:

• Restaurants in [US city] – Google My Business (GMB) results.
• Hotels in [US city] – GMB results.
• [US city] –Knowledge Graph (KG) results.
• Movies in [US city] – KG results.
• Tradesmen (or similar) in [San Francisco area] – Home Services results. Some or all (unclear) of the tradesmen pay to be included in this scheme. This will be covered in detail in a subsequent column.

While these are likely to come to a Google near you, most are not yet seen, or not seen in their entirety outside the US (or parts of the US). So for the sake of this column we will pretend we are in sunny Venice Beach (Los Angeles).

GMB v KG

The distinction between Google My Business (GMB) and Knowledge Graph (KG) panels is a little fluffy (and the terms are often used interchangeably).

The GMB panel is found in the results of a local business search. So if you search on “Restaurants in Venice Beach”.  The results deliver a three-pack (as is called in the trade) of local restaurants, for three local restaurants (at the time of search): James’ Beach, Gjelina and 26 Beach; with the option to expand for more.

KG results from an information search which is not local business specific. An example is “Venice Beach” or “Harry Potter”. This delivers an information panel or card with data from various sources, most commonly, Wikipedia or from Google partners (see below).

With place searches, such as Venice Beach, there is commonly a carousel of restaurants and/or hotels at the end of the panel. These tend to be similar to the GMB listings, but the priority of results differs slightly from GMB results for “Hotels in Venice Beach” or “Restaurants in Venice Beach” (as shown below).

Tapping through on a restaurant or hotel in either GMB three-pack or KG carousel – does not take you to the business’s website. This brings up a new in-search panel, which Google calls a “Knowledge Graph card”, dedicated to your business, which is similar to the Venice Beach KG panel above, but with contact information; tap to call; tap for directions; and a link to website.

Today Google does not charge businesses a fee for calls generated, or people who click on a map to find the location, but it is keeping count of how many clicks it is generating for your business.

Note the presence of the paid listing prioritized at the front of the restaurant and hotel carousel. The example pictured below is from Google.co.uk – the same search in Google.com delivered the same results, but did not mark them as paid. The reason for this is not clear.

The new face of local search

Whether or not we like it, this is the future of Google mobile search, looks like this. Traditional organic website listings are being pushed further and further below the fold on mobile devices, as Google’s owned properties (ads – GMB – KG) take the prime real estate. Businesses have to face it and address it.

David Mihm, local digital marketing consultant:

There is no question that web results are in decline for high-volume local searches like ‘pizza.’

Organic place listings, though, (and hybrid/paid place listings like the HVAC (Heating, ventilation and air conditioning) tests going on in San Francisco at the moment) are here for the long haul as Google shifts more and more results to its Knowledge Graph. Knowledge Graph results will continue to provide significant impressions through the coming voice tsunami.

It’s time to start thinking about your website as an API of structured information about your business, its products, and services that will help Google display Knowledge Panels instead of webpages. Google is increasingly shooting for conversions to happen directly on the SERP, within Knowledge Panels, for example through their OpenTable integration in restaurants.

In many cases, conversion rates may actually be higher from place results, but they won’t show up in your Google Analytics. And of course a huge percentage of local searches result in offline conversions in-store, which (so far) aren’t easily trackable.

See restaurants below for more on the OpenTable integration, the HVAC listing, we will discuss in a subsequent post on Google Home Services.

Hotels in [Venice beach]

First we need somewhere to stay in Venice Beach. Whether you access a hotel via the GMB results in “Hotels in Venice Beach” search or via the carousel in the KG results for “Venice Beach” Google delivers the same GMB/KG card for the hotel.

Similar to other business panels, e.g. restaurants (see below), there is a tap to call, directions, web link with a description and reviews. But unique to hotels is the option to book a room through a booking agent e.g. Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com and others.

As demonstrated by the Ad badge, all of these brokerages are paying for their listings, presumably on a pay-per-click basis. In turn they will be taking a commission from the hotel for any booking.

Of particular interest, is that within these lists of paid-for results, when expanded, there is sometimes an option to book direct with the hotel, e.g. for Inn at Venice Beach. Which suggests that in order for a hotel to offer bookings direct via its so-called “my business” listing, the hotel has to bid against other advertisers (the travel brokerages) on Google.

Russell Jones, Principal Search Scientist at Moz, was able to shed a little light on how it might work:

I am not sure about this, although it appears that synxis.com,  the system which seems to power their booking engine, might be connected. However, from Google’s developer documentation it looks like you don’t need a third party for this – and that pricing uses the standard bid model. 

 

How to get on the three-pack GMB listing

Today the GMB three-pack – see the restaurant and hotels examples in the images above – are not paid-for listings. Though reports suggest that Google is certainly considering replacing one of the three pack with a paid listing.

So, with organic listing being pushed further and further below the fold on mobile devices, and the potential for GMB listings to drive calls, reservations (for restaurants and hotels), it is increasingly important to ensure that your business appears and appears correctly on the GMB three-pack.

But when your “My Business” panel is actually owned by Google, how do you do this? Start by updating the basic details on the listing. Also see these tips from Google.

But there does not appear to be an option to alter reservations or deliveries (for restaurants), so your listing shows your reservation or delivery service, rather than those of a third party. If this is possible, which isn’t entirely clear from Google’s developer pages then this is a job for your web developer.

As with all things Google, there’s a bit of mystery how the local search algorithms work, but it seems that old fashioned SEO rules still apply.

Dan Leibson, VP of Local at LocalSEOGuide.com

As far as general tips for getting in the 3-pack… we did a huge regression study on the rankings of 30,000 businesses and looked at over 100 factors. The biggest takeaway is that links are a dominant ranking factor. Also, citation consistency is incredibly foundational for getting in the pack. 

Buying ads in competitors GMB / KG panels

It appears that businesses can buy ads competitors’ GMB/KG card. These appear in the prime spot in the carousel of other restaurants (or hotels) displayed below the reviews in the competitors’ panels.

Interestingly these ads lead to the advertiser’s own KG card, not the advertiser’s own website.

The screenshots below were taken of the Domino’s Pizza and James’ Beach KG card on Google.co.uk (in Google.com the same restaurants were shown without the ad badge).

 

Restaurants in [Venice Beach]

So next we need to find somewhere to eat.

Whether you tap on the restaurant via the GMB results in “Restaurants in Venice Beach” search, via the carousel in the KG results for “Venice Beach”, or via the carousel in a rival’s KG card, Google delivers the same GMB/KG card for the restaurant.

These are similar to the hotel panels, in respect of details, click to call, directions. In addition there are several options to view menu, find a table and place an order, which may or may not be present.

• The menu may be provided by the restaurant or via a third party, most commonly, SinglePlatform. This is the provider of the menu for Domino in Venice Beach (though this is not clear from Google’s listing).
• Find a table appears to be exclusively provided by OpenTable, even where the restaurant takes reservations on its website, either directly or through a preferred third party.
• Place an order, where available, is only provided via third parties, such as GrubHub/Seamless, Eat24 (Yelp), DoorDash, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu and Slice/MyPizza.com. This is the case even when the restaurant has its own delivery service via its website. As seen below, both neither the GMB listing for Domino’s or James’ Beach offers place an order, but both outlets do offer delivery from their websites.

Unlike hotels these are not marked with an Ad sign, which suggests these third parties are not paying for their privileged Google partnerships. Certainly SinglePlatform does not receive compensation from Google.

Russell Jones, Moz:

Unlike the food delivery space, OpenTable seems to be by far the leader in nation-wide reservations. Given the cost of integration and the stability of partners required by Google, it is not surprising that OpenTable is the only partner at this point. I would suspect this to remain the same for quite some time.

The food delivery space is more crowded, so integrating with only one provider might leave a Google user with fewer options. Google seems to have chosen partners that have large, nationwide coverage. I am doubtful that this relationship is paid at the moment. 

Google’s developer pages give details on how web developers can adapt business websites to allow integration with their KG card. But it does not look likely that integration will happen automatically.

For certain, businesses (restaurants, hotels, events etc. along with any third party services) should register their interest in becoming Google partners and hope for the best.

Dan Leibson, LocalSEOGuide:

To your question on if you can remove competitors, you cannot. Lots of the special functionality in the right hand Knowledge Graph panel are through partnerships with Google.

So, to your example, a big brand like Domino’s could likely try to work out some form of partnership with Google where their Knowledge Graph entry would have some kind of special functionality. Though to my understanding Google only does it with services that will function cross brand.

 

Movies in [Venice Beach]

Next we need something to do, so let’s go to the movies. Ok, this is the last thing we would do in Venice, but let’s pretend.

The KG for movies is a different format with a carousel of movies along the atop the mobile search results. Tapping The Accountant film, reveals blurb, ratings, reviews and the option to select show times at one of the two movie theatres (both AMC).

Tapping on a show time delivers the option to purchase tickets from one of three Google partners Fandango, AMC Theatres and MovieTickets.com.

Unlike hotels these are not marked with an Ad sign, which suggests the booking agents are not paying (currently) for their partnership.

The option to book direct with AMC Theatres suggests that Google is not restricting partnerships to third parties, as appears to be the case with restaurants (see above). However this may just be for the largest national chains.

Where next?

It is easy to see any of these models – restaurants, hotels and/or cinemas being expanded into other areas, which makes it important to keep a close eye on them – particularly in the US, which is where most of the local mobile search innovation tends to start.

Another very interesting and, perhaps, concerning area of innovation are the on-going trials with local handymen, house cleaners, locksmiths, plumbers, and (as mentioned by David Mihm) HVAC engineers – where local tradesmen pay a fee to be listed as “pre-screened” in Google’s Home Services search.

For more detailed insight read our m-commerce reports:

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Author: Andy Favell

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YouTube star, Marques Brownlee, did a Google Assistant versus Apple Siri contest in one of his latest videos. He has the new Google Pixel phone and the new iPhone 7, the Pixel was running Android 7.1 and the iPhone 7 was running 10.0.3.

He compared basic questions, like what is the weather, to more complex questions using conversational search. To my surprise, Apple Siri wasn’t all that bad in some of the conversational questions – but Google was indeed better.

Marques called it the “battle of the smartphone voice assistants” and it was done pretty well. Here is that video:

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Author: Barry Schwartz

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Everybody loves analytics, but not a lot of people really understand how powerful it is. Annie Cushing, the ultimate go-to person about analytics, and also the Founder of Annielytics, sat down with Brent Csutoras, Chief Social Media Strategist at SEJ, to talk about analytics.

[embedded content]

Here are some key takeaways from the interview:

• In 2013, Google released the Channels report to clean up the mediums to pull everything together. It’s under acquisition > all traffic > channels. It is the best report because you can drill down from there. It took the mediums that when you tag ‘UTM_medium’ as ‘social media’, then Google is going to put it in a bucket called social.
• People mess up campaign tagging. Channels report organizes, and allows you to dig deeper, and drill down the different channels.
• If you click social channel, instead of drilling down to source/medium, it takes you to the social network dimension. It pulls together all of your social media networks.
• The source/medium report also doesn’t separate social and non-social referrals. They get grouped together under the referrals. If you get into the channels report, it separates social and non-social referrals which is the way it should be.

Connect with Annie Cushing

Twitter 
Website www.annielytics.com

Learn More about Analytics

Check if your campaign’s analytics is sailing in the wrong direction in this post by Jacob Baadsgaard.

Learn more about using analytics to drive better results from online marketing in this Marketing Nerds Podcast with SmartInsights CEO Dave Chaffey and SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Featured image screenshot taken Oct 2016.

Podcast: Download

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Author: Meg Cabrera

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In January, Moz reported that 25% of the Google search results were HTTPS. Meaning of the top search results Moz tracks, 25% of those were listed as HTTPS in the snippets. Well, now that number is up to 40% according to the Mozcast features tool.

Here is the chart:

Now, in July it was 30%, so the rapid growth seems unusually fast to me but numbers are numbers, right?

Pete Meyers from Moz wrote on Twitter:

Wrote in July that https: had topped 30% of page-1 URLs in @MozCast. Three months later, it’s 40% — https://t.co/zezk9DUD3r

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) October 26, 2016

Keep in mind, the indexing HTTPs by default was last December, so that didn’t seem to change on Google’s side. Maybe it is just more adoption by larger or more well-ranked sites? The HTTPS ranking boost I don’t think was adjusted.

Gary from Google confirmed no change to the HTTPS ranking boost:

@rustybrick nope

— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 27, 2016

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Florent Abaziou posted screen shots on Twitter of Google Maps showing the local version of the business name under the English version of the business name in the maps description. He said this is “great for global businesses” and shared several examples of this in action.

Here are those screen shots:

You see how the English version of the name is at the top, followed by the localized version of the name below?

Personally, I am not able to replicate it but I am based in New York – so that might be why?

Do you see it?

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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Google My Business posted an update that says you can now manage your business attributes in the Google My Business dashboard. So if you’ve uploaded these attributes using the spreadsheet method, Google may ask you to verify and update them when you login to the dashboard.

Google said:

Edit attributes for your business using your bulk upload spreadsheet. Attributes include offerings like “Has Wi-Fi” and “Offers outdoor seating,” which tell customers more about your business.

Google added that the “next time you sign in to your account, you may have a lot of attributes to review. To easily review and edit large numbers of attributes for the first time:”

• In your dashboard, accept all Google updates related to attributes.
• Download your locations.
• Edit attributes in your spreadsheet as necessary.
• Upload your updated spreadsheet to your account.
• Once you’ve completed your initial review of your listings’ attributes, you’ll have far fewer attributes to review and edit from your dashboard during routine account maintenance.

For more details, see this help document.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Author: barry@rustybrick.com (Barry Schwartz)

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With Halloween just a few short days away, it seems that everyone has spooky thoughts on the brain—and that’s ok, just as long as everything scary is in your head, and not on your website. There is plenty of room for surprises and unpredictability when you’re planning for Halloween, but NOT when you’re planning your SEO strategy.

Unfortunately, the scary truth is that SEO can be uncertain, and too many people have fallen prey to SEO bad practices that have ultimately lead to the demise of their rankings. Read below to find out more about some of the worst SEO horror stories, and then learn from the mistakes of others so that you don’t end up with any SEO skeletons in your digital closet.

BMW Used Black Hat Tactics

This story is pretty surprising to me seeing as how BMW is a well-known, established, multi-billion dollar company. It turns out, it doesn’t matter how much credit your name holds. If you mess with the proverbial SEO gods (aka Google and other major search engines), you’re going to have to pay the price. BMW found this out the hard way when they began using doorway pages to unnaturally attract links.

Doorway pages are pages that are created solely to boost your rankings. While this practice has never truly been condoned, it used to be more common when search engines didn’t enforce their guidelines so strictly. This is how BMW got away with doing it long enough for it to be effective; “they [even] held a number of prominent number-one rankings for generic keywords like “used car” for a while.”

Unfortunately for them, Google eventually got wind of the scheme and brought their domain authority down to nothing. Literally, down to zero. In my opinion, it’s not worth the risk to temporarily boost your rankings at the cost of a domain penalty that you might not ever recover from. Because today, in 2016, Google will find out what you’re up to, and you will pay the price for taking a short cut.

A Computer Bug Ruined iFly

While the irony of a small computer bug taking down a business called “iFly” may be amusing to us now, it certainly wasn’t funny to the company owners when their rankings dropped to almost nothing over just a few days. SEO expert and columnist Mark Munroe found himself faced with the task of figuring out what went wrong with his friend’s company.

What he discovered is that someone let a little tiny bug slip through- one single, line of code- on every single page on iFly’s website. This line of code essentially told Google and Bing to ignore the damaged pages, and so none of the pages on their site were being indexed. What’s worse is that although Munroe was able to identify the problem and remove the bug, it wasn’t enough to fix the damage to iFly’s SEO. As we all know, it takes months to build up a site’s SEO, and thus it will take months to repair it as well.

The moral of the story? Be careful, be diligent, and above all be AWARE of your site’s rankings and analytics so that you can catch small mistakes while they’re still that- small-and before they completely ruin all your hard work. This article on Search Engine Journal suggests helpful metrics to include so you’re always on top of your site’s analytics.

The Adverse Effect of Email Marketing Campaigns

Building up a site’s SEO is a long, challenging, and often-tedious process. It’s definitely not something that’s going to happen in a day, which is why many companies choose to hire SEO experts to handle this aspect of their business. Unfortunately, sometimes the term “expert” is thrown around pretty loosely. Make sure you do your homework before hiring a “professional” and trusting them to handle your website’s precious rankings.

Take, for example, this story of a company’s SEO “success” after their in-house person launched an email marketing campaign. Everyone was thrilled because he had worked for months changing metadata and adding content to no avail, and after beginning email marketing there was an almost immediate rank increase of over 500%. The fact that the increase happened so quickly should have been a warning sign. Upon closer examination of the traffic sources, it was determined that the reason for the surge was due to a large number (over 1000) of unsubscribes. When they took that out of the equation, their rankings were down again for the week. Keep this story in mind if you decide to start email marketing, and be wary of any major increases that happen too quickly and too easily.

Always Transfer Old Assets

Toys-R-Us learned this lesson the hard way and it cost them 5.1 million dollars. They spent that huge chunk of change on the domain name Toys.com- without realizing that Google had already de-indexed that specific URL. What’s worse, they then forwarded the domain name instead of transferring it, prompting Google to re-index the URL, and subsequently causing Toys-R-Us to lose out on all the rankings they had earned from searching the keyword “toys”. When they bought the domain they had the potential to completely dominate the SEO market, and they lost out on all that potential with just a small oversight. They could have avoided all these problems by just using “301 redirects for all the old URLs that they had used to build their existing domain authority.” Instead, they made a mistake that cost them a ton of money, de-valued their investment, and set them back years regarding SEO.

To learn more about how to avoid “Night of the Living Dead SEO,” read this article on dirty SEO tactics that you should steer clear of at all costs. To find out about best practices you can employ to keep your website from turning into a zombie, read this article or this one by Search Engine Journal. Happy rankings and happy Halloween!

Feature Image Credit: DepositPhotos

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Author: Amanda DiSilvestro

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What’s happening at Twitter lately? Today, we found out that 350 employees have been laid off, or 9% of the workforce. The cuts were announced alongside the company’s Q3 earnings which exceeded Wall Street expectations. The employees were just notified prior to the Q3 announcements, but the team will be addressed as a whole by CEO Jack Dorsey later today.

Recode reports that most of the layoffs impacted Twitter’s sales and marketing teams, with CFO Anthony Noto acknowledging that the company is intended to “fully invest in our highest priorities” and to “[de-prioritize] certain initiatives.” Almost exactly a year ago, Twitter laid off another 300+ employees, that time focused on product and engineering teams.

This year’s focus was likely on being able to sell the company. As the company is not yet profitable, the acquisition costs are not so sensible for any prospective buyers. Removing unnecessary extra expenditures is a necessary step for a potential acquisition, Recode reports.

More information will be shared in today’s Twitter’s earnings call.

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Author: Tamar Weinberg

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Yes, a lot has been written about the rise of chatbots, the digital assistants that can live in places where we spend time like Slack and Facebook Messenger. Brands jumped in early — order flowers in Facebook Messenger or tacos in Slack — and there are chatbots for customer service, health advice, personal shopping assistance, just to start. But what about chatbots to make the daily work of the digital marketer easier? There’s a chatbot for that.

There are now a handful of chatbots designed to help advertisers stay on top of their digital campaigns without having to be in the ad platforms themselves. Here’s a look at the nascent selection of AI assistants to help you monitor, analyze (and in some cases manage) campaigns from inside Slack, Facebook Messenger, Google Sheets, and elsewhere.

Where can I use it? Slack. Plans to expand to Skype and HipChat and other platforms.

What ad networks does it support? Facebook, Instagram. Plans to support Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Twitter Ads & LinkedIn Ads.

How can it help me? Launched last week by Revealytics, RevealBot provides an performance overview for campaigns, ad sets or ads with reports and graphs in Slack.

Users can also set alerts for metrics such as CTR, CPC or CPI to get notified when when ads become unprofitable, and pause poorly performing ads right from Slack.

For example, ask the bot “show Black Friday campaign” or “show Fall Sale ad sets from last week” to pull that data immediately and take necessary action using in-message buttons.

Schedule reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

What’s the cost? Free while in beta.

Where can I use it? Facebook Messenger, Slack

What ad networks does it support? Facebook and Instagram ads. Plans to add Google AdWords and Twitter Ads.

How can it help me? Launched in May by the makers of Automate Ads, an AI assistant named Zoey can answer questions about your Facebook Ads account in Facebook Messenger. For example, ask Zoey, “Can you show me the best age group by CTR last month?” or “Best locations last week?”or  “CPM yesterday?”.

The company plans on integrating optimization systems from Automate Ads so Zoey can send advertisers real-time insights like, “This creative is performing 40 percent worse at the CPA level compared to others in your campaign, remove this ad? (Yes/No)”.

What’s the cost? Free

Where can I use it? Google Sheets

What ad networks does it support? Over 16 platforms for social, search, display, including Google AdWords and Analytics, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram, Kenshoo, MediaMath, DoubleClick Campaign Manager and DoubleClick Search, Sizmek.

How can it help me? Developed by RTB Media, SahaBot can answer questions like, “Show me my spend, CPA by week for last month,” or “Facebook Conversions from last week by day” in a downloadable Google Sheet template after you connect your ad platforms. SashaBot will respond with either digits or a table that you can customize or add to. You can create a report based on a single question (example above) or one that includes multiple questions.

Where can I use it? Slack

What ad networks does it support? Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Salesforce. This is a chatbot for analytics, not ad platforms, but as digital advertising and analytics go hand-in-hand, it’s worth including here.

How can it help me? Statsbot lets you schedule reports, get alerts, ask questions about your Google Analytics, Salesforce and/or Mixpanel data in Slack. Separate analytics accounts can be linked via their own Slack channels.

More innovation to come

Most of these companies are already looking at expanding capabilities and availability for their chatbots. This is just the beginning. If you have a chatbot to add to this list or experiences to share, find me on Twitter @ginnymarvin.

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Author: Ginny Marvin

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Twitter released its third-quarter earnings results on Thursday morning. Here’s a quick rundown of how the social network’s business is doing.

Twitter continues to make money but not a profit

Twitter has not turned a profit since at least the first quarter of 2012. Despite total revenue growing by 8% year-over-year to $615.9 million and advertising revenue growing by 6% year-over-year to $545.0 million, in Q3 2016 the company recorded a net loss of $102.9 million.

Twitter’s ad revenue continues to decelerate

Twitter’s year-over-year advertising revenue growth peaked at 129% in Q2 2014 and has been on a slowdown ever since. The growth rate for Q3 2016: 6%.

Twitter’s audience size continues to grow slowly

Cup half-full: Twitter’s total and U.S. only monthly active user numbers are growing. Cup half-empty: They’re growing by low single-digit percentages year-over-year. In Q3 2016 Twitter’s total monthly audience averaged 317 million people, and its U.S. monthly audience averaged 67 million people.

Twitter continues to get more people engaging with ads but at lower prices

Since Q1 2015, the number of times people engage with ads on Twitter — by clicking on their links, watching their videos, retweeting them, etc. — has gone up and up, up 91% year-over-year in Q3 2016. But since Q3 2015, the amount of money Twitter makes per ad engagement has gone down and down, down 44% in Q3 2016.

Twitter’s ad network revenue did not continue to grow

Twitter has made money from running its ads on other publishers’ apps and sites since at least the third quarter of 2014 when that business generated $5.0 million in revenue. Two years later, it’s still very much a side business — and one that failed to grow this quarter. In the third quarter, it brought in $58 million in revenue, a 12% decline compared to a year ago. Compared to the money from ads appearing on Twitter proper, it’s pocket change. That on-Twitter ad revenue hit $487 million, which is 9% more than last year.

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Author: Tim Peterson

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