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🔍 Search Engine Land Award Finalists | New Amazon testing tool

Good morning, search marketers, are you feeling pride in your work?

I hope so — there is incredible work happening across this industry. Yesterday, we announced the Search Engine Land Award finalists. They represent the best in SEO, SEM, local, B2B and B2C search marketing. Be sure to check out the list and congratulate your peers. As a judge over the last four years, I've been blown away by the ingenuity and creativity of search marketers to solve problems and overcome challenges to achieve their companies' and clients' goals. Congrats to all the finalists. We'll be spotlighting many of the winners and their campaigns on Search Engine Land after they are announced at the awards and afterparty at the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture during SMX Advanced in Seattle on June 4.

SEMrush is a well known competitive search insights platform. Now, flush with a $40 million investment — and mandate to grow — it is getting into the market for Amazon seller tools. The company's new tool is called Sellerly. It's free, for now, and designed to help Amazon sellers split test their product detail pages to improve visibility and conversions.

SEOs, you may have seen that Google released an update to its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines — the guide that quality raters (i.e. humans) use to evaluate websites and results pages. We took a side-by-side look at some of the elements that have been updated. There is more emphasis on interstitial pages, particularly those that require an app download, as part of the distracting ads section. The term E-A-T is still used, but is de-emphasized somewhat in this latest version in favor of the term "page quality." The update also clarifies that author expertise is not necessarily a requisite when the creator may not have formal or everyday expertise "but is not doing any harm."

SEMs, Google also shared an update on the ongoing reporting gap problem, including which metrics and reports are still incorrect. The only conversion data that remains to be fixed for May 1 and May 2 is for store visits, store sales and local conversions. Several reach metrics still aren't fixed, and hotel campaigns have incorrect impression share stats for the two-day period.

Lots more below, including how to deal with higher brand CPCs, Googlebot testing and more.

Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief

 
 
 
Pro Tip
 

Here's how to approach rising brand CPC

"We recently saw a spike in brand CPC for some advertisers, attributed by Google to what it described as a 'bug'. CPC soon returned to normal, but there were no credits given out, even for advertisers that saw dramatic increases in ad spend from the issue," explains Andy Taylor of Merkle. "Google now seems to favor the argument that as long as average CPC is below max CPC, spikes in spend are on the advertiser. This transition in attitude only makes it more important for advertisers to control the gap between average CPC and bids to ensure there's only so much wiggle room for a similar bug to ramp up costs. Setting logical budgets to cap brand spend based on campaign history and creating systems for intraday checks can also go a long way towards limiting the potential damage from surges in CPC."

Read More »

 

Live Webinar: The Top 4 Digital Challenges Facing Consumer Brands And How to Solve Them - May 30

Sponsored by Mapp Digital

Large consumer brands are losing share to more nimble, digitally savvy challengers. Digital disruptors such as Casper and Dollar Shave Club operate with ultra-fast supply chains, using digital channels to create convenient and authentic shopping experiences. How do traditional marketers compete? Join our brand marketing experts as they tackle the biggest challenges facing consumer goods companies – and provide the strategies and tactics that will help you win.

Read More »

 
Search Shorts
 

Duplicate content, POST requests & GoogleBot testing more...

Googlebot testing Chrome 75. With the new evergreen Googlebot, Google will continue to test new versions of Chromium for Googlebot. Google was caught testing version 75 when 74 is the current released version.

POST requests and crawl budget. An FYI from Google, POST requests generally use more crawl budget compared to GET requests.

Duplicate pieces of content. It is normal to have similar boilerplate content across multiple pages of your content, so don't try to block that content, says Google.

 
What we're reading
 

We've curated our picks from across the web so you can retire your feed reader

2020 presidential election: Joe Biden surges past Trump on Facebook, Google ads – Axios

Google Gmail tracks purchase history — how to delete it – CNBC

Tips for making the most of client communication – Clix Marketing

How to make your awful technical SEO audit better – Dom Woodman

Terminated AdSense Publishers Can't Get Their Accrued Earnings-eOnline v. Google – Eric Goldman

 
 
 
Join Us
 

Gain expert SEO & SEM tactics to drive your campaign's success. Attend SMX Advanced, June 3-5!

Attend Search Engine Land's SMX Advanced, June 3-5, 2019 for expert-led sessions, networking (including the 2019 Search Engine Land Awards), and top amenities including WiFi, delicious meals, and snacks. This is your once-a-year event to learn only advanced SEO and SEM tactics. You'll come away with at least one tactic that you can immediately put to use… we guarantee it. View rates and register today!