Marketing

You’ve probably heard that doing keyword research is an essential, first step in optimizing your website properly. But how about these keywords: can they only be single words or can they also be longer multi-word keyphrases? And what exactly is the difference between the two? In this SEO basics post, we’ll explain the difference between a keyword and a keyphrase.

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Once a site is live or has advanced past a certain age, most webmasters don’t really concern themselves with their crawl budget anymore.

As long as you keep linking to new blog posts at some point in your website, it should simply show up in Google or Bing’s index and start ranking.

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Proper tracking is crucial to the success of any PPC campaign.

If you aren’t tracking conversions correctly, you won’t have the right data flowing into ad accounts to make informed decisions about keywords, ad copy, and audiences.

Unfortunately, implementation can be a barrier for accounts of all sizes. An overworked developer or a bureaucratic IT department can take weeks to add a simple Google Ads conversion code.

Thankfully, Google Tag Manager provides a solution to save time and back-and-forth communication when implementing tracking codes. Once a single code has been installed on the site, PPC marketers can then have full access to add as many ad platform tags as they need.

This article will walk you through how to set up Google Tag Manager (GTM) and deploy tags for major ad platforms.

Setting Up Google Tag Manager

If you haven’t yet created a GTM account, start here. The interface will walk you through setting up a new account.

Within your account, you’ll also need to create a container for your site. Generally, you’ll want to name this the domain name where the GTM container will be used.

Select Web and click Create to start your account.

Next, you’ll see a box appear containing the code to add to your site. You’ll need to add the first snippet of code toward the top portion of the site and the second snippet right after the opening tag.

Note that if you use WordPress, you can also install GTM using this plugin. Some other CMS platforms have built-in GTM integration; check with your provider’s support if you’re unsure where to go.

Checking Tag Installation

To double-check that GTM is installed properly, install the Google Tag Assistant extension in Chrome.

Now, navigate to the page you wish to check and click the extensions’ icon in your browser bar.

You should now see Google Tag Manager listed, along with any other active tags for Google products.

• A green “smiley face” indicates the code is functional.
• Blue indicates potential issues (such as placement in a non-standard section of the code).
• Red indicates an error in installation.

You can click on the tag to see more details about errors for troubleshooting.

1. Implementing Google Ads Tags

For Google Ads, you can deploy both conversion and remarketing tags through GTM.

First, we’ll implement a conversion tag.

Adding a Google Ads Conversion Tag

Navigate to your desired GTM account and container. On the overview screen, select Add a New Tag.

In the window that appears, click in the Tag Configuration to choose a tag type.

Select Google Ads Conversion Tracking.

Now, go to your Google Ads account in another tab or window to grab the Conversion ID and label. Click the Tools icon on the top menu and select Conversions.

Next, either create a new conversion or click an existing one to edit. Under the Tag Setup section, select the option to Use Google Tag Manager.

You’ll now see the Conversion ID and Conversion label. Copy these and paste into the respective fields in your GTM tag.

Next, add a trigger to determine where your conversion tag fires on the site. Of course, what you define as a conversion will vary from site to site, and the setup will be different for each.

In this instance, we’ll set up a conversion to fire on a “Thank You” page, assuming that a user sees this page after submitting a form.

Click within the Triggering section to begin setting up your trigger. Within the window that appears, click the Plus (+) button in the upper right to add a new trigger.

Name the trigger based on the specific conversion point you’re wanting to track. Click within Trigger Configuration to select the type of trigger. For this example, we’ll select Page View to track all hits to a certain URL.

Select Some page views so the trigger only fires on defined pages. Next, use the section below to define where the trigger will fire. We’ll set up a rule for a Page Path that contains /thank-you.

Save your trigger, and save your tag. For now, your edits will live in your workspace within GTM. Note that to push any GTM edit live on your site, you’ll need to click Submit and then Publish.

Next, we’ll add a remarketing tag.

Adding a Google Ads Remarketing Tag

Create a new tag in GTM and select a tag type of Google Ads Remarketing. Now, you’ll need to find your remarketing tag in your Google Ads account (or enable it if you haven’t done so).

Navigate to Tools > Audience Manager from the top menu.

Next. select Audience sources from the left menu. If your Google Ads tag is already active, click Details; otherwise, you’ll see an option to create your tag.

On the Details page, scroll to the bottom Tag setup section and click it to expand. Next, click Use Tag Manager at the bottom of that section.

You’ll see a box appear with your Conversion ID, which you can then copy and paste into the corresponding GTM box. Note that you don’t need a Conversion Label for a remarketing tag.

Next, click the “Triggering” section to choose where your remarketing tag should fire. If you simply want to include the tag across your entire site, choose All Pages. You can also set up triggers to fire the code only on select pages if necessary.

Finally, save your tag, and don’t forget to publish it live once ready!

2. Adding the Bing UET Tag

Now, we’ll cover setting up the Bing Ads tag in GTM. Create a new tag and select Bing Ads Universal Event Tracking as the tag type.

Next, go to your Bing Ads account to obtain the UET ID. Navigate to Conversion Tracking > UET tags from the left column.

If you haven’t yet created the tag, you’ll see a prompt to walk through setting it up. If the tag was previously set up, you can copy the Tag ID from the table.

Paste the ID into the proper field in GTM. For the default setup, you won’t need to adjust any of the advanced settings.

Next, choose a trigger for where you want the tag to appear. Since the Bing UET tag is a global tag, you’ll most likely want to fire this on all pages.

Once the global tag is in place, you can also add additional tags for event-based conversions. Use the same Tag ID, and select an Event Type of “custom.” Then, you can define parameters based on what you’ve set up in Bing for your custom conversion.

To check the setup of the UET tag, you can use Bing’s UET helper Chrome extension.

3. Adding the Facebook Pixel

While the previous two platforms we covered have built-in GTM templates, Facebook Ads does not.

Thankfully, GTM includes a Custom HTML tag as an alternative option, and Facebook offers a direct integration to make the setup process simple.

To access your pixel from your Facebook Ads account, mouse over the menu from the top bar and select Pixels. If you haven’t yet set up a pixel, you’ll be prompted to do so.

Otherwise, click Details on the proper pixel and Set up.

Now, you’ll see a box with options to select a setup method.

Click Use an Integration or Tag Manager and then select Google Tag Manager from the options that appear.

You’ll now see a series of steps walking you through logging into your account, selecting the proper GTM container, and finalizing setup.

To check the setup of the Facebook Pixel, you can use the Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome Extension.

4. Adding the LinkedIn Insights Tag

To add LinkedIn’s tag in GTM, create a new tag and select LinkedIn Insight as the tag type. You’ll now need to grab the Partner ID from your LinkedIn Ads account.

From within your account, go to the Account Assets dropdown on the top bar and select Insight Tag.

You’ll now see the code for your tag, or be prompted to set the tag up if you haven’t done so yet.

Look for the second line of code, which should look like the following (the number will vary):

_linkedin_partner_id = “12345”;

The number within the quotes is your Partner ID, so add that to the field in GTM.

Now, add a trigger for all pages (or define any specific criteria necessary for where the tag appears or doesn’t appear on your site) and publish the tag live on your site.

5. Adding the Twitter Universal Website Tag

To add the Twitter Ads tag to your site, create a new tag and choose Twitter Universal Website Tag as the tag type. Next, you’ll need the pixel ID from your Twitter Ads account.

From the top menu in Twitter Ads, navigate to Tools > Conversion Tracking.

On the page that appears, click “View code and installation instructions.”

Now, you’ll see the code in a text box.

Find the line of code that looks like the following (the final string in quotes will vary):

twq(‘init’,’12345’);

You’ll want to copy the string of characters within the second pair of quotes. Insert that string into the “Twitter pixel ID” field in your GTM tag.

For the global pixel deployment, you shouldn’t need to customize any additional settings. Add a trigger for All Pages (or whatever pages you want the pixel to appear on) and publish it live.

Conclusion

Google Tag Manager can help to majorly simplify tracking tag deployment for organizations of all sizes. With the ability to add tags more efficiently, you can reduce unnecessary communication and save time for other priority tasks.

If you haven’t yet worked with Google Tag Manager, start an account for free and begin setting up some tags for your ad accounts.

If you’ve started with GTM but haven’t dug in very far, try out some new templates and set up some custom HTML tags.

You’ll likely find using a tag management platform an improvement on previous methods of tag implementation.

Source: This article was originally posted at Search Engine Journal by Tim Jensen on January 28, 2019.

There are many techniques that can hurt your SEO rankings if implemented. Serpstat, in 2017, found about 300 million errors when they indexed 175 million pages with an SEO audit tool. These errors stemmed from not doing SEO the right way and while we have discussed 7 of these errors, here are more things that could hurt your rankings and how you can fix them.

Accessibility and indexation

The accessibility and indexation of your site contribute greatly to how your website pages can be seen on search engines. Some of the categories to consider include:

Canonical Tag: duplicate content makes it difficult for search engines to decide on a page to show users, which could affect the visibility of either page. If you will be implementing a rel=canonical tag, ensure it is done correctly, to avoid losing your website ranking. Situations, where you may implement wrongly, may include:

• Incorrectly installing a code, by inserting it in <body>, instead of the <head> section
• Implementing a rel=canonical to a 404 page
• Launching without checking the code, which triggers search engines to de-index.

Noindex Tag: if you do no longer need a noindex tag on a webpage, ensure you remove it as soon as possible. With the tag still there, search engines will not index the webpage, which could leave you wondering why your SEO isn’t improving. Always keep track of your pages to know when a tag is no longer relevant.

Robots.txt: always check for pages hidden in robots.txt and take them out when necessary, to help improve your SEO rankings. If you have redirects in the webpage hidden in your robots.txt file, the crawler will likely not recognize it.

Nofollow links: nofollow links have no SEO value but you could be penalized by search engines for not using it properly. Many websites easily fall victim of this, as they often have links featured in their web pages that are unrelated to the content of the page. This ends up dropping their SEO rankings.

Links and bad redirects

While links are great to help drive traffic and boost your SEO ranking, they could also ruin your SEO efforts if they aren’t managed well.

Broken links

Broken links on your web pages should be rectified or removed as soon as possible. Reasons for broken links could stem from entering the wrong URL, removal or permanent move of the linked webpage by the destination website, or a software on the user’s end that is blocking access to the destination website. There is a WordPress plugin for WordPress users that can be integrated into the website to get rid of dead links. You can also manually check for broken links by using the broken link checker plugin.

How to disavow negative backlinks

Google has a Disavow Tool that can help protect your site from penalties that may arise from bad linking and also help remove bad links. This tool simply sends a signal to Google to ignore negative backlinks. To disavow negative backlinks, look for the links you want to disavow, create a disavow file and then upload to the Google Disavow Tool. Once this is done, the specified links will no longer be considered by Google

Bad redirects and best redirects – 301 and 302

301 and 302 redirects might look similar to a user but definitely not to search engines. While 301 is a permanent move to a new site, 302 is temporal but a lot of users get to mix both up and use either, without thinking much about the difference. If you use 302 rather than 301, search engines might view it as a temporal move and still continue to index the old URL, which could affect your SEO rankings.

Not maximizing Google Search Console

Google Search Console is packed with lots of benefits that should be maximized in order to have the best SEO experience. Some of the things to pay attention to in Google Search Console include search analytics, links to your site, mobile usability, robots.txt tester, sitemaps, index status, and security issues. Once an identified issue is fixed, your rankings will be improved and your website will gain more traction.

Meta tags

Meta tags are important for SEO and usually one of the first things to learn in SEO training. Your key meta tags, including keywords attribute, title tag, meta description attribute, and meta robots attribute should be taken seriously, as they help search engines understand what a page is about.

Don’t use too long or too short titles and descriptions. The optimal number of words for your title required for the best SEO practice is 10-15 words, which is about 78 characters, following Google’s current meta title guideline.

Your description should be between 110 and 120 characters, for easy optimization for both mobile and desktop. While you ensure your title and description aren’t too long, you should also be careful not to make them too short. Your meta tags should provide enough info about the page to help the search engines understand the content.

Google encourages creating good meta descriptions; ensure there’s a description for every page on your site and they must be different for each page. Duplicate content could mess with your rankings. You should also include clearly tagged facts in the description and use quality descriptions.

Conclusion

Doing SEO wrongly will affect your SEO rankings and following the accurate SEO practices, based on Google standards, will help your website success. These common errors should be avoided at all cost. If you are also caught flouting the SEO rules, you might be penalized by Google which could cause a huge drop in your rankings.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Watch by Guy Sheetrit on December 5, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

After that, it’s a fight to see who secures enough traffic, and of course, in this sort of scenario you need all the help you can get.

Being penalized by Google and experiencing a drop in SEO rankings is one of the worst things that can happen to a website. Now, fluctuations are par for the course, especially considering the rapidly evolving Google algorithms.

When your search rankings take a huge tumble, you need to adopt a proactive approach before your site gets lost organic search obscurity. And this “approach” involves fixing the seven cardinal SEO mistakes listed below:

Avoid keyword stuffing

Use the same keywords repeatedly? You might want to stop! Of course, if it is necessary for your content to make sense, then you’ve got no other choice. But if you seek to optimize your copy in this manner, then you’re in for a rude awakening.

Not only does it discourage visitors from reading or interacting with your content but it signals the search engines that you’re attempting to outsmart their algorithms. And that is not something Google takes lightly.

The above comic strip reimagines keyword stuffing as part of a normal conversation. See how many times the man uses “lunch,” “fine,” “talking funny,” and “mean” in the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th panels, respectively. If it’s THIS irritating in regular dialog, imagine how your readers would feel reading content like this.

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/724/21695308292_443d1a2570_b.jpg

Use an online tool like Live Keyword Analysis or Addme.com to calculate the keyword density. Remove excess keywords to keep your density around 1.5 percent. Mention your keywords in the title, the description, your opening paragraph, and once or twice in the body of your content. Make sure it all sounds natural. That should do the trick and help you regain some of your lost SEO rankings.

Check your website speed

Almost half of the online users expect a web page to load within 2 seconds or less, and they abandon your website if it does not load in 3 seconds, revealed a survey by Akamai and Gomez.com. So, ensure quick load times for your website by leveraging browser caching, optimizing images, minifying codes, and activating resource compression.

Achieve all this by using a free tool like PageSpeed Insights from Google to determine the current speed of your website. Also, look at the actionable recommendations offered by the tool to increase your load times.

Source: CWC

Never buy links

Give your website enough time to become successful. Creating good content is hard work but it pays off in the end. Resort to shortcuts and you get penalized.

One of these no-no shortcuts involves buying backlinks, especially from unreliable sources. As soon as Google finds out, they cut your rankings significantly. 22 percent of web admins still buy links without disclosure, according to a survey.

So, the next time you spot an SEO ad promising hundreds of links along with a first page ranking for a ridiculously low price, ignore it. Links from social networking accounts and spammy, untrustworthy sites hurt your website. A few of these companies claim to protect you by creating a “link pyramid” or “link wheel” that point to an intermediary page.

The truth is, these might work for some time, but as Google continues to evolve and deal more strictly with spam content, they will learn about this practice and shut you down.

Become mobile friendly

With Google prioritizing a mobile-first approach, make sure your website is mobile friendly. According to Google, 85 percent of all websites in mobile search results now adhere to the mobile-friendly label. Become a part of the trend and enjoy a smooth flow of traffic.

Otherwise, if your site is not responsive and people are unable to view you on tablets and smartphones, then not only will your rankings suffer, but your customer inquiries and conversions will too. That’s because users will leave your website and visit one that actually fits this requirement.

Use tools like Screenfly by Quicktools to check whether your site is responsive or not. If not, use another tool like Bmobilized to convert your existing pages.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Wikipedia_%22Encyclopedia%22_article_on_a_large_Android_phone%2C_2015-04-16.jpg

Get rid of ads

Recent changes made to AdSense rules by Google indicate that stricter rules are going to be put in place for sites “with more advertising than publisher-provided content.” So, if you’ve been indulging in this practice, get ready to bid your SEO rankings goodbye.

Ads prompt users to leave your website and impacts your experience metrics. Once your user experience metrics become critically low, it is usually a sign to Google that your website holds no value for your visitors. They will demote you over time.

Plus, ads have led to the rise of ad blocking. In fact, a report by Adobe and PageFair concluded that the approximate loss of worldwide Internet revenue because of blocked advertising in 2015 was $21.8 billion. So, unless you want to be penalized without any payoff, all you need to do is get rid of the ads and your site will be fine.

Handle technical issues immediately

Technical problems like network outages, poor hosting, slow connectivity, and server downtime can affect your site rankings.

If Google constantly abandons attempted crawls on your site, in due time, your SEO rankings will go down. Of course, short server outages don’t matter, but if it becomes a regular occurrence, then you need to look for a new host.

Identify the problem first. This might not be easy, but it becomes quite obvious if your site goes down every 10 minutes. Or, use an online tool like Downforeveryoneorjustme to check whether your page is up or down. Determine if the problem lies with your host and not your Internet plan. You will find plenty of decent web hosting options, like Liquidweb.

Maintain the quality of your guest posts

Guest blogging can be a great tool for SEO and lead generation. Unfortunately, as of 2015, only 6 percent of bloggers published original content as guest posts. That’s a dismal number when you consider what an amazing way it is to give your website an edge against the competition.

Use scraping tools like the one from Guestpost.com to conduct automatic scrapes of every website that accepts guest posts related to your keywords. However, when it comes to your own website, make sure you accept only high-quality guest posts.

Feature fresh writers on your site and post original and relevant content that appeals to your audience. Also, make sure you maintain a balance between content produced from the site and content offered to your page in lieu of an author bio and a link.

Source: https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/low-quality-guest-post.png

Final words

If you want to survive the virtual world and stay relevant, then you need to focus on raising your SEO rankings. Follow the steps given above to help you fix bad SEO and regain your rankings.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Watch by Guy Sheetrit on November 27, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

But most SEO professionals take it a step further and use those same browsers to do a lot more.

In fact, some of the most important tools in my arsenal are my browser and its extensions.

So, let’s dive right in and see what we can do with them. And the best part is, all of them are free.

1. Ghost Browser

Ghost Browser is built on Chrome so everything available to you there is available in Ghost Browser… and more.

The biggest reason I switched to Ghost Browser is for what they call “sessions.”

Essentially a session is a fresh instance of Chrome that operates within new windows or even tab(s).

In the image above, you’ll see there are four different colored tabs, each with a different site up.

Each of these colors represents a session and they’re independent, which is why one of them is not logged in, one can be logged in, and another is logged in from a different location.

You can run multiple tabs for each session.

So, for example, I can be logged into one session as me to manage an AdWords campaign but also logged in through a different account to access the client’s analytics and Search Console (where they aren’t controlled by the same account).

Similarly, each session can be used to log into different social accounts, etc.

Ghost Browser also has Tasks. Essentially, you can save sets of tabs with their login state as a project and not have to log in and out or open all the different tab sets you likely regularly do each time you need to access them.

The free version supports three sessions at a time – so even it is three times better than what you’re likely currently working with.

There is a pro version. I found it worth the investment based on my usage, you may not.

Either way, after using the free version for a bit you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.

Note: I also discussed Ghost Browser in my article on non-SEO tools for the SEO.

2. Chrome Developer Tools

There is virtually no way I could cover all the features, functions, and uses of Chrome Developer Tools in this article.

The tool is built into Chrome and is accessed via Chrome Menu > More tools > Developer tools.

Easily the most common tasks I use it for is to find code, determine the size of elements, and troubleshoot them.

As illustrated in the image above, the tool allows you to hover over and select an element on a given webpage and it will display its code and (in this case) the computed output characteristics.

You can even adjust the code right in the Developer Tools to see how it would render prior to making the changes to the live site. You can do this on the desktop site or set it to render the page as it would on many popular mobile devices.

This isn’t the most advanced of its functionality, which includes various speed, security, and troubleshooting capabilities ranging from generating waterfalls of resource load times to indicating which resources are slowing down the site load.

The advantage to all this vs. some of the other online tools you might use?

The results are real world.

That is, you’re seeing how your browser on your connection is impacted by the resources being loaded.

Read the tool’s page and explore. There’s a ton in there.

When you know what data you have access to, you’ll know where to look when you need answers to related questions.

3. SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a classic among the extensions and plugins used by SEO pros – and for good reason.

Essentially, SEO Quake gives rapid access to an array of data that we all want.

On any given webpage a simple click to pull in the metrics will list backlinks data, cache dates, indexing information, and more.

With a couple extra clicks you gain access to the internal and external backlinks data, keyword density information (if you’re interested in that), and a ton of information regarding the use of Schema, heading tags, metas and more.

SEO Quake is not a replacement for site audit and analysis tools but gives an excellent quick snapshot of a page’s information.

Perfect when you need just some limited info or are on a phone call and need to pull up some core metrics.

It even ties in with SEMrush to yield some basic traffic stats as well – handy for competitor research, especially when considering new content strategies.

4. User-Agent Switcher

This is extremely helpful when developing new sites – especially when that site is built using less predictable technologies.

Essentially User-Agent Switcher is exactly what it sounds like: an easy to set up plugin that switches the user agent info sent allowing you to view a site as a different browser or bot.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve used it to troubleshoot crawl issues or uncover differences in how Googlebot is viewing a page versus a browser.

Obviously, it can also be helpful when determining how a site will load with different browsers or operating systems as well.

5. Tag Assistant

Google Tag Assistant is an extremely useful tool, especially for those who use Google Tag Manager.

It can also be handy when you simply need to identify issues with analytics or other tracking codes (AdWords, etc.)

The icon for the extension changes color depending on whether there are issues detected and makes note of the issues when clicked.

Search Engine Journal gets a green light, as illustrated above, but warnings and errors get reported when there are duplicate or empty tags or tags not configured properly.

Tag Assistant also reports on duplicate or analytics code issues.

It handily lets you record a session allowing you to navigate paths within your site (or other’s) and then review the recording to find errors and issues.

It’s an invaluable troubleshooting tool across an array of scenarios.

Here’s Google’s video outlining some of its core features:

6. Show Title Tag

By no means a critical plugin but a handy one, Show Title Tag simply displays the page title within the browser.

You can move it to any of the corners of the browser and the red text indicates where it’s likely to be cut off in search results.

It’s helpful when viewing competitors’ sites to quickly seeing how they’re doing their titling beyond the short snippet that would appear in the tab and without viewing the source or opening Developer Tools.

This plugin is also helpful when you’re navigating your own site, highlighting instances where your title might be too long.

7. Ghost Proxy Control

The Ghost Proxy Control extension comes pre-loaded with Ghost Browser.

Basically, you can add your proxies in and access them easily via the extension.

One of the big perks to the combo of Ghost Browser and Ghost Proxy Control is that you can load different proxies into different session and basically have a tab for each location.

I’ve found this incredibly useful for checking SERP results from various location and having the ability to view them at the same time, side by side.

It’s specifically interesting for local SEO.

The ability to check not just rankings from different locations but compare easily how the layout might differ.

The control allows for a proxy to be assigned to a single tab or an entire session (indicated by multiple tabs of the same color).

While the extension is free, proxies generally are not.

Although free proxies are available, I pay about $20 per month for 10 dedicated proxies.

Conclusion

There are definitely more browser extensions and plugins than what I’ve included on this list of essentials.

However, most of those require subscriptions, are too similar to one of those noted above, or don’t apply to the duties of virtually every SEO pro I know.

For example, Moz and Buzzsumo have great extensions. But they can be quite frustrating unless you have a paid subscription.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Journal by Dave Davies on October 14, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

Four ways a great PPC tool can turn you into a PPC rockstar

On the surface, it’s easy to wrongly conclude that Google and Bing are automating PPC pros right out of relevance. Basic PPC tasks can now happen with very little human intervention through the Google and Bing interfaces — easy enough for a novice PPC manager to create and launch pretty good campaigns.

That’s terrific. The big engines have made viable PPC accessible to the masses. Today, even a basic mom and pop shop can drive business effectively and inexpensively by tapping into the billions of searches happening daily.

The challenge, though, is that great PPC is actually becoming more challenging than ever, in part because of automation. Ironic? Yes. And while it may seem that Google and Bing have made it really easy to operate solely within their platforms, there is actually greater need for powerful third-party tools — a trend we expect to see continue.

Let’s address the obvious head-on: Optmyzr is one of those third-party tools, so, of course, we’ll say our service is needed. It’s important, though, to have an informed discussion about the true role of automation — where, how, and when to apply machines to take PPC programs from good to great.

Smart automation: The key to greatness

PPC automation via Optmyzr is fueled by machine learning and artificial intelligence. When coupled with powerful human intelligence, smart PPC pros have the power to run extraordinary campaigns with speed and agility we could only dream of a few short years ago.

Here are four powerful ways PPC pros can save time and energy automating critical tasks, freeing up time (and brainpower) to apply human expertise to strategize, refine, and elevate their craft:

Build search campaigns from e-commerce data

Yes, you can automate the lion’s share of campaign building, start-to-finish. We’re not talking about simply setting up the basics and running them. Using tools like Campaign Automator from Optmyzr, PPC pros can tap external e-commerce data, taking complex (and often messy or confusing) spreadsheets and automatically building out keyword-targeted campaigns. Essential data such as brand, price, color, size, channel — essentially any variable — can be set for dynamic insertion using templates you create.

The PPC pro can easily tie in inventory data from the Google Merchant Center Feed as well, preview campaigns to verify how they will appear and then launch. Campaign Automator even allows fully automatic campaign updates based on changes to the templates, inventory levels and a host of other attributes.

Check out our latest demos to see the automation first hand.

Streamline Shopping Ads (for Google and Bing!)

While powerful drivers of conversion, Shopping Ads can be nothing short of tedious to create manually in Google Ads and Bing Ads. The more products and product groups you have, the more time you can spend manually creating just your campaign structures. No exaggeration, PPC pros know this can take several hours, if not several days, if you’re creating Shopping Ads for thousands of products.

The Optmyzr Shopping Campaign Builder virtually eliminates the product-by-product manual creation by automating deeper levels of campaigns. Automation puts products into product groups and generates the ad groups for you. The PPC pro can then apply his or her time to actually thinkingabout nuances, bid adjustments and fine-tuning Shopping Ads campaigns, instead of spending arduous hours setting up the structures.

Deeper automation throughout the process allows syncing campaigns with inventory, finding product attributes that don’t perform well, changing product group bids based on various attributes and identifying negative keywords. The PPC pro still has the ability to jump in at any point in the process to apply their knowledge and skill to fine tune and make critical adjustments.

Remember the tedium noted above? It gets worse. After you’re done with the manual set up in Google Ads, then you’d need to turn your attention to repeating the process for Bing Ads. With Optmyzr, the same deep automation for your Google programs can be replicated for Bing Ads.

As with Campaign Automator, spend some time getting a deeper tutorial through our latest demos.

Automate repetitive tasks with advanced prebuilt scripts

Clients of all sizes garner exceptional value implementing advanced scripts into their Optmyzr workflow. Question is — are you a PPC pro or a scripting guru? PPC pros need not spend countless hours crafting the perfect script to automate key tasks. The Optmyzr team does all of that.

By making it easy to access, find and install powerful scripts, PPC pros can find time-saving automations to improve reporting, bids and budgets, notifications, optimizations and a lot more.

These advanced scripts go far beyond the stock scripts available via Google Ads, adding greater depth and functionality across PPC tasks. We’ve made them really easy to install and crafted a form-based user interface that allows PPC pros to modify them to their needs — without having to do the coding yourself.

Implementing scripts is as easy as downloading the script, copying /pasting into your Google Ads account and immediately beginning to generate outputs such as spreadsheets or take actions such as pausing broken links.

One more reminder — you can find in-depth demos for the automations discussed in this article.

Cross-channel reporting

One of the most time consuming tasks for PPC pros is generating reports to keep clients informed. While Google Ads includes a reporting module, it simply cannot cover what PPC pros do on other platforms like Bing, Facebook and Amazon.

Monitoring, alerts, data visualization presets, charts and tables can all be highly automated giving extraordinary insight along with visual appeal that capture a client’s attention.

A third-party tool like Optmyzr can help with this. We routinely hear from clients who say they’ve been able to automate reports that would commonly take five hours per month per client down to 30 minutes.

Winning the paid search race

Don’t get us wrong. The automations present in the Google and Bing interfaces are great, but they only go so far. PPC Management Systems — like Optmyzr — exist to help PPC pros become PPC rockstars.

In this article, we intentionally only explored four areas of opportunity that can help you strategically automate programs. The reality is there are many more automation opportunities search pros can tap within Optmyzr’s powerful PPC management system. Most critical — look to automate tasks that eat up time and don’t really tap your brainpower.

Flexibility. Ease. Efficiency. Control. By crafting automations that go deep into the tasks and functions of paid search programs, we make it our mission to put the PPC pro in the driver’s seat of all of their campaigns. Combining the power of human intelligence and vision with AI and machine learning, smart approaches to automation will take your game to the next level and help keep your organization a step ahead in the intense paid search race.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Optmyzr (Sponsored) on October 15, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]

Bing is working on making sure their crawler doesn’t miss new content and at the same time overload your web servers.

Fabrice Canel, principal program manager for Bing Webmaster Tools, provided an update on his team’s efforts to improve the efficiency of their web crawler, BingBot.

Responding to user feedback. The update is a follow up to his talk at SMX Advanced in June, during which he announced an 18-month effort to improve BingBot. Canel asked the audience to submit suggestions and feedback.

In a blog post Tuesday, Canel said the team has made numerous improvements based on this feedback and thanked the SMX audience for its contributions. He said they will “continuing to improve” the crawler and share what they’ve done in a new “BingBot series” on the Bing webmaster blog.

BingBot’s goal. In this first post, Canel outlined the goal for BingBot, which is to use an algorithm to determine “which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.” To ensure site’s servers aren’t overloaded by the crawler, the goal of BingBot is to limit its “crawl footprint” on a site while ensuring content in its index is as fresh as possible.

This “crawl efficiency” is the balance Bing is working to strike at scale. Canel said, “We’ve heard concerns that bingbot doesn’t crawl frequently enough and their content isn’t fresh within the index; while at the same time we’ve heard that bingbot crawls too often causing constraints on the websites resources.” It’s a work in progress.

Why should you care? Bing is clearly listening to the webmaster and SEO community. The Webmaster Tools team is making changes to ensure its crawler does not overload your servers while at the same time are faster and more efficient when it comes to finding new content on your web site. Bing is actively working on this and says it will continue to work on this.

How does this impact you? If you add new content to your web site and Bing doesn’t see it, it won’t rank it. That means searchers using Bing will not find your new content.

Recently Bing shut down the anonymous submit URL tool, and we have seen reports that Bing is not listening to submit URL requests even in Bing Webmaster Tools. It is possible the tweaks and changes Bing is making is causing some of this slowness with crawling and indexing now. But ultimately, Bing is clearly working on the issue.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_section][vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”orange” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-external-link”]This article was originally posted at Search Engine Land by Barry Schwartz on October 17, 2018.[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row][/vc_section]