Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, which are a growing part of the digital customer experience, from discovery via search marketing to customer support, may soon be used by protesters to disrupt organizations by flooding customer support channels, according to a study by Gartner. They believe this is one consequence of the increasing use of virtual assistants for legitimate customer support requests.

By the end of next year there will be 8.4 billion virtual assistants in use, up from 3.25 billion in 2019, according to Statista. These devices are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and are being used by customers to interact with companies. By 2025, 37% of customers will try using a virtual assistant to interact with customer service, according to The Gartner 2023 Leadership Vision for Customer Service and Support report.

Currently these interactions are for entirely legitimate reasons, like waiting on hold and ordering a pizza. Making them as seamless as possible is an increasingly important part of a customer’s interaction with a brand, even though the customer themselves aren’t directly involved.

Why we care. This is a fascinating and worrying example of a technology’s unintended consequences. Making something more efficient and easier-to-use is a big market advantage. Especially when it comes to customer service. As every marketer knows, few things build loyalty like great customer support. Do it poorly and you have a big weak spot in your brand.

Now, it may be that technological ease-of-use could also be a weak spot. What to do? Automate more, increase capacity and be ready to deploy more resources. Who knows if these attacks will come to pass, but be prepared is a prudent attitude.

As for the future, it is difficult to imagine all the possible things that may happen. The Pentagon employs a panel of science fiction writers to help them anticipate future threats. If these attacks come to pass, private industry may want to do the same.

Dig deeper: 3 steps to get ready for Siri, Alexa and other machine customers

Legitimate interactions with virtual assistants are going to increase. As of last year, Amazon Alexa had more than 130,000 skills people could potentially leverage to automate transactions. Soon virtual assistants will be able to request service, receive messages, make recurring transactions, report problems issues and gather product information via every customer service channel.

This by itself poses a challenge to organizations by increasing the demand for customer service. Within two years, 20% of inbound contact volume will come from virtual assistants, according to Gartner.

In response, many companies are investing in systems that use these capabilities — like a printer ordering more ink so a customer doesn’t have to. They are also automating customer service with chatbots and interactive voice systems.

But these legitimate interactions using virtual assistants will pave the way for protests, say Gartner’s analysts.

“Protests against business and government organizations are increasingly digital,” the report states. “In 2021 there were at least 9.84 million distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks designed to shut down organizations’ websites by overwhelming them with traffic. This was a 14% increase from 2019.” 

Ease of use will make virtual assistants a powerful vector for protest.

“Citizen-led denial of service attacks (cDoS) are a new type of denial of service, led by average people, not hackers, and performed through virtual assistants,” according to the report. “By 2024, citizens will shut down a major global enterprise company’s contact center through denial of service attacks launched by virtual assistants.”

These attacks are expected to be triggered by people protesting “social issues as opposed to maliciously motivated hackers.” They could be costly, as large businesses could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational expenses responding to them. That’s in addition to the costs from lost productivity, customer churn and long-term brand impact.

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Some commentators see trouble looming. Chris Penn of TrustInsight recently told us: “(I)f unbranded search is the lion’s share of your search traffic, particularly your converting search traffic, you should be very concerned. That’s where the large language models will be intercepting your traffic and not giving anything to you or giving very little to you.”

Others are more sanguine. We spoke with Brent Ramos, product director for search at Adswerve. “We’re at the precipice of this new frontier for search which will ultimately be better. I’m not taking a pessimistic view at all; I’m very much looking forward to it.”

Adswerve provides services related to Google products to agencies, analysts, marketers and publishers. Ramos focuses on search.

Changing the search paradigm

Repeatedly emphasizing that it’s early days for conversational search and that we don’t yet know what it’s going to look like further down the road, Ramos is optimistic about a new, more immersive and interactive search experience.

“I think it’s definitely going to change the paradigm of how we understand search today, because as soon as you throw in Bard, let’s say [Google’s generative AI], and it pushes down all the organic ranks, and you have the chat AI upfront, all of a sudden people are going to converge and convert in that experience, and it’s too early to know what it’s going to look like.”

In other words, and as expected, many users of Google search will look first at the answer to their query generated by Bard; they won’t necessarily scroll down to look at links, or even at footnotes that show where Bard found its information.

Dig deeper: Does ChatGPT pose an existential threat to marketers?

The implications for paid search

“What I anticipate is that there will be a new paradigm of what that will mean for paid results, so rather than have a host of links to click through in an index format, we’ll see new formats come up. I think the definition of conversions will change, and the experience of the paid ecosystem will change, but it’s not going to go away.”

The far from resolved question, of course, is what the new experience will ultimately look like. But we are on an irreversible journey, Ramos believes.

“It’s not going to go away,” he said. “Technology will very rarely recede. So we know it’s going to become a new paradigm and move search into this new realm. On the long-game horizon, we can expect to see new ways of conversion, new ways of formatting, SERP is going to get a lot busier, website conversions might decline.”

While some are concerned that, if users can get all of the information they need directly from the AI, the index of links, including paid links, will become irrelevant. Ramos insists that this isn’t something new. “We’ve seen that in social, right? People are converting more within the social channel itself rather than landing onto the actual page, especially for ecommerce.”

A living, breathing conversation

That does mean, however, that there will need to be opportunities within the AI content for people to convert, and Ramos doesn’t pretend he yet knows what that will look like. “Maybe it’s no longer pay-per-click; it’s pay-per-interaction,” he said. “Rather than getting this repository of links to sift through as humans, we’ll actually get this really rich, semantic conversation presented to us. The index or repository we’re accustomed to today will shift into a living and breathing conversation.”

The bottom line, for Ramos, is that whatever it looks like, it’s going to be better. “It will eventually be better over all. To me it’s like back when Google and the internet first started coming out — the big industry of the yellow pages, and publishers were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ And then of course it was ultimately a really good thing.”

The importance of interconnectivity

Even traditional search doesn’t just generate lists of links, Ramos observed. “SERP is one thing, but search also powers things like local listings, maps, ecommerce buy-buttons and all these other things that are interconnected with it and that are crucially embedded in the ecosystem.”

From knowledge panels to videos to dictionary definitions and alternative search suggestions: “All these things that are tangential to search are also wrapped up in that connectivity, so I think that’s the bigger picture people should be trying to understand.”

Even so, he admits: “That’s where I imagine it leading, but this is all speculation at this point because this all very fresh.”

Bumps in the road?

Not only do we not yet know how we’re going to get to this rich, interconnected conversation, but we are already seeing teething problems — from truly disturbing behavior from the AI to outright error.

“There’s definitely going to be a bumpy ascent,” Ramos admitted. “The silver lining is that we know it can be done; it’s more a matter of how fast we can architect against it, and it takes a lot of human capital and power to do so.”

What is he telling his clients at this stage in the journey? “The guidance is to understand holistically — and without your own biases about AI — and accept innovation.”

Ramos sees the competition between Google’s Bard and Bing’s ChatGPT-based generative AI as a positive. “We want to see competition in the marketplace — a marketplace that’s rich with innovation — so on both sides of the house I think it’s a good thing, and they should be pushing each other.”

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The version to be incorporated with Bing is GPT-4, said to be much faster than GPT-3.5. The news follows Microsoft’s January announcement of a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI.

Google is coming to the party. Not to be outdone, Google has said it will make its conversational AI service Bard, powered by its proprietary conversation technology LaMDA, more available in the coming weeks.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a new blog post:

“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner, these features will be rolling out on Google Search soon.”

“An important new step in our AI journey.”

Why we care. AI-powered natural language generation (NLG) has been around for some years now. In the 2010s, enterprises were using it to produce (largely non-critical) documentation at scale. It has been used to generate email subject lines and content, and even by the U.K. weather service to expand the scale of its forecasting.

So what are we seeing over recent weeks? For one thing, the democratization of NLG as it seems poised to become widely and cheaply available — to the extent that there are concerns about students using it to create homework. And now we seem to be on the brink of NLG taking command of search. Search, of course, is of enormous importance to all marketers in the context of brand and product or service discovery, not just to SEOs.

Dig deeper: Why we care about search marketing

Where the rubber hits the road. Imagine — and Google has already produced mock-ups — a page of search results that kicks off not just with a short answer to a search query (we already have that) but such a detailed and responsive answer that the links to sites that follow become much less useful and appealing to the user.

The prospect raises a range of questions from the impact on traffic to websites to the intriguing possibility that Google could cause its own digital advertising business to stumble. Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems likely that, just months from now, search could feel very different than it does today.

Based on reporting from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land.

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“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the lawsuit says.

Why we care. Google simultaneously acting as broker, supplier and auctioneer of online ads has always been problematic at best. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) put it, “The conflicts of interest are so glaring that one Google employee described Google’s ad business as being like ‘if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.’” Cracking down on monopolistic business practices does great things for the consumer and the economy. The breakup of AT&T in the 1980s is why communication is so inexpensive and widespread today.

In the past, Google has rebutted monopoly claims by pointing to the large number of other companies which facilitate online advertising. The company did not respond to a request for comment today. 

Dig deeper: Google offers adtech unit changes to fend off antitrust lawsuit

This is the fifth antitrust lawsuit filed by state and federal officials against Google since 2020. That year a group of states led by Texas filed an antitrust lawsuit over the company’s advertising technology, while the DOJ and another group of states sued Google over claims that it abused its dominance over online search. In 2021, several states also sued over Google’s app store practices.

Dig deeper: Antitrust bill could force Google, Facebook and Amazon to shutter parts of their ad businesses

Google and other tech giants are currently under pressure from governments around the world trying to restrain their power over online information and commerce. In the European Union, Amazon, Google, Apple and others have faced antitrust investigations and charges, as well as new laws limiting the use and collection of consumer data.

The post Feds finally file anti-monopoly suit over Google’s adtech appeared first on MarTech.

Consider: While Google doesn’t disclose exact figures, numbers are estimated to be anywhere from 3.5 billion to a truly staggering 8.5 billion per day. Any way you slice it, it amounts to millions of searches per minute, all day, every day. And a huge percentage of those users are researching products to buy, deciding whether to buy those products, looking for options from multiple sellers and so on. Search is a huge component of digital marketing and ecommerce.

For marketers, Google’s ubiquity, along with other search engines like Microsoft Bing — and the overall importance of search in general — means that in order to compete for clicks that convert to dollars, a solid search strategy is a must. 

This article will walk you through the basics of search engine marketing (SEM), the umbrella under which search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search (a.k.a., pay-per-click or PPC) sit. We’ll look at challenges facing marketers and best practices to meet them and the future of search marketing. 

The web is a big, busy place, so marketers competing for consumers’ time, attention and, most importantly, money must understand the critical role search plays in digital marketing — and how to use search to their advantage.  

Table of contents

• What is search marketing?
• SEO and PPC: The backbones of search
• Search marketing trends and challenges: What’s next?
• Resources for learning more about search marketing

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

What is search marketing?

Broadly defined, search marketing is a digital marketing strategy by which marketers use search engines to gain visibility and traffic for their online presence. As noted above, search marketing encompasses both SEO and PPC (more on both later), but broadly, the strategy involves any tactic to elevate a website’s visibility on a search engine. 

The ultimate goal for marketers utilizing a search strategy is to boost their ranking in search results. In a practical sense, that means when someone searches something like “best snowblowers” or “where to buy teak patio sets near me,” businesses are jockeying behind the scenes for position near the top of the resulting search engine results pages (SERPs). 

That coveted real estate adds up to more clicks — statistics show that around 30% of all clicks go to the top search result on Google — and eventually, marketers hope, more purchases.

SEO and PPC: The backbones of search

The two tactics commonly used in search marketing to bolster visibility are SEO and PPC. SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is an organic component of search marketing. Website owners use keywords and other strategies to push their websites as high as possible within a search engine’s results. Identifying what your target audience is searching for, then creating content to address the intent behind their search query is one of the foundational elements of SEO.

The reason for utilizing SEO as part of your search marketing strategy is simple. Google and other search engines use “crawlers” to sweep the web, using the information contained in the pages the crawlers come across to create a vast index, or library, of webpages. 

Then, algorithms — sets of rules that search engines use to understand what the webpages are about — analyze the pages to determine the order in which results are displayed and look at factors like site usability, relevance, quality and so on. 

Once you’ve got keywords down, the next logical step in SEO is to create helpful content on the topics you’re trying to drive search results for, so the search engines recognize relevance and authority.

Critically, Google, Microsoft Bing and other search engines don’t accept payment for website ranking on their search results pages. But patience is key. Many experts say that marketers should expect these tactics to begin to pay off in three or more months, as it takes work and strategy to optimize your results on search pages.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, on the other hand, is a paid strategy. Advertisers use networks such as Google Ads to promote websites above the organic search results. Search engines display PPC ads based on online auctions — which roughly translates into the amount marketers or business owners are willing to pay every time someone clicks on their ad. 

Finding the sweet spot between generating the right number of clicks and making sure you don’t blow your budget is key for marketers, as is keeping tabs on performance using services such as Google Analytics and paying attention to which ads generate conversions — and when. But also take note, PPC is not pay-to-win. That means your ads won’t get more attention if your bids are higher. And it’s not just about clicks — it’s about Google’s Quality Score too.

So, how effective are SEO and PPC? Why should marketers care? To start, consider that the average person conducts multiple Google searches per day, while 59% of shoppers reported that they use the search engine to research products they plan on buying. 

In 2019, a large majority of ecommerce sessions (65%) originated by search: 33% from organic and 32% from paid, according to the most recent statistics published by Statista in November. There are no two ways about it — jockeying for a position among millions of sites on the web truly requires a robust search marketing strategy.

Google organic search can drive some 60% of web traffic. U.S. search ad revenue grew 33% to $78 billion last year. We told you it was a big deal.

Search marketing trends and challenges: What’s next?

Artificial intelligence and harnessing the power of data analytics is always part of the conversation when it comes to predicting the future of anything in the digital marketing sphere — and that is certainly the case here. Specifically, however, there are a few essential items to keep a close eye on.

First, understand that while Google is the reigning titan of search, there’s room for competition and that it principally comes from Amazon and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. That’s why paid advertising on Amazon and having the right keyword strategy is important for digital marketers, especially when you consider that customers conducting searches on the site are most likely ready to buy.

One of the perennial challenges marketers face with their organic search strategy is keeping up with changing search algorithms. Google, for example, made major updates to its search algorithm some 10 times in the last two years, as well as running many undisclosed experiments and making minor improvements. Staying on top of those changes — and responding appropriately, as well as focusing on brand-building — is a must for digital marketers.

Marketers should also continue to pay special attention to keywords, both for SEO and PPC (there are differences). Speaking of keywords, marketers should keep in mind that voice-enabled search (especially for local businesses, restaurants, stores, etc.) is rising in popularity and accuracy. Optimizing mobile sites and keywords to support voice search by understanding that such searches are structured in full, conversational sentences is important. 

Resources for learning more about search marketing

Unsurprisingly, the web is full of helpful information about search marketing. A plethora of helpful information can be found right here or on our sister website, Search Engine Land.

• Search Engine Land’s excellent primer on search marketing can be found here.
• Google’s advice on search essentials can be found here.

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We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers. So starting next week for English users globally, we’re rolling out a series of improvements to Search to make it easier for people to find helpful content made by, and for, people. 

Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search, Google

Roll-out and impact. The changes are expected to roll out over the next two weeks. The timeline will be posted here. Subject areas that have traditionally attracted a high proportion of search engine-first content are likely to feel the most impact. These may include arts and entertainment, for example, where links lead to aggregated content from third-party sources (such as film reviews) rather than original content.

It’s important to note that the impact will be sitewide. In other words, if the algorithm determines that the site offers a high proportion of unhelpful content, all content on the site will be impacted.

For a deep dive into these changes read this analysis on Search Engine Land.

Why we care. Content marketers especially should reflect on what these changes mean for their content strategy. Brands want to see high search rankings for their content for purposes — obviously — of brand awareness, product discovery and customer acquisition. But those aims can no longer be pursued at the expense of providing rich, informative and original content.

This is a lesson many brands were learning anyway. Today’s customer doesn’t want to be sold to. He or she wants to be helped — with a decision, with a pain point, with an educational journey. The difference going forward is that Google looks set to make helpful content all but mandatory.

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Do you need an enterprise SEO platform?

Deciding whether your company needs an enterprise-level SEO platform calls for the same
evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment
of your organization’s business needs and resources, staffing, management support and financial resources.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Use the following questions as a guideline to determine the answers.

The post Does your marketing team need an SEO platform? appeared first on MarTech.

Today, SEO includes everything from content marketing and distribution to user experience, and even the core job of gathering and interpreting search intelligence has become more challenging as the search engines continually change their display of results and port them over to other media like voice assistants. This doesn’t mean that the well-established SEO best practices should be cast aside, however. Keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition, and rank tracking are still of critical importance, even as the environment continues to change.

SEO platforms offer numerous capabilities that range from keyword research and rank-checking to backlink analysis and acquisition, as well as competitive intelligence, social signal integration, and workflow rights and roles.

Enterprise-level platforms may also provide more extensive link and site audits or analytics that include predictive scoring systems to identify potential opportunities to improve page performance or link authority. Vendors differentiate by offering more frequent or detailed data updates or content marketing features that sometimes require additional investment.

The following section discusses some of these capabilities and the key considerations involved in choosing an enterprise SEO platform.

Link analysis and acquisition

Links continue to be one of the most important external or “off-the-page” signals that can help a website rise in search engine rankings. Most enterprise SEO platforms provide link analysis (i.e., what sites are linking to yours), link building or removal recommendations via competitive analysis, and other reports that reveal opportunities for obtaining links (i.e., what sites should you solicit links from) as part of their base platforms.

Keyword research/rank analysis

Keyword research – knowing what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for various queries, and how you should use those terms in your copy – has been a pillar of effective SEO. Virtually all enterprise SEO platforms provide keyword research tools that allow marketers to discover the ways that consumers search for content, and what keywords are driving traffic for competitors.

Vendors source this data differently, however. Some vendors license data from point solutions or ISPs, due to Google’s restrictions on scraped data in its terms of use and the percentage of search results that are “keyword (not provided).” Other vendors develop and manage a proprietary database of keyword terms. As a result, reliable keyword data has become less of a commodity and more expensive.

It’s also important to note that rank analysis has grown increasingly complex as Google has upped its use of more dynamic and visual SERPs. Marketers are no longer satisfied with simple numeric designation of how their page ranks for a particular query; they want to know if it’s displayed in a Carousel, in a Knowledge panel, with Sitelinks — or any of the other ways in which crawled content is being displayed on the SERPs. One of the newest entrants to this category, Visably, offers a very different look at ranking, going so far as to look at all of the content on pages that rank for a particular keyword and then categorizing those pages.

With all of this data, it seeks to give brands a sense of how they’re coming across in search generally, even if the brand-related activity is happening on third-party sites.

Search intent-based analysis

Google’s search algorithms are focusing less on keyword matches and more on search intent. Recent algorithm updates, including the addition of BERT, have reduced the value of keywords in SEO. To counter the lack of keyword data, SEO platform vendors are developing more “search intent”-based tools that analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that would meet the searcher’s needs.

Custom site crawls/audits

With content quality becoming the lynchpin for many marketers’ SEO strategies, site crawls or audits are important tools offered by enterprise SEO platform vendors. Some platforms offer optimization recommendations for keywords, page structures, and crawlability; prioritizing and assigning scores for such factors as HTML title tags, body tags, and meta-tags.

Most SEO platforms provide daily site crawls; others offer a weekly frequency. Ideally, the tool should be able to crawl the entire site, not just random pages, and should support the analysis of mobile-optimized and AMP pages as well. However, some enterprise sites are so large it’s unrealistic to expect a tool to crawl it in its entirety.

Social signal tracking and integration

Social media activity isn’t directly included in search engine ranking algorithms, but pages that are highly shared benefit from higher traffic, and watching social activity can help inform content creation and distribution strategies. Most enterprise SEO platforms track, measure, and integrate social signals into their analytics and dashboard reports.

Sites that experience strong social sharing typically perform better in organic search results. Capabilities range from social signal tracking and correlations to site traffic and conversions, as well as social profile monitoring and sentiment analysis, and contact-relationship management.

While most vendors do well at tracking organic traffic, few currently track paid social activity.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Content marketing and analysis

SEO and content marketing have become closely aligned, as Google has raised the content quality bar through developments like BERT and RankBrain (Hummingbird), and its regular algorithm updates. As a result, relevant, up-to-date content has become integral to SEO success.

Many vendors have upgraded the content optimization and content marketing capabilities of their enterprise SEO platforms and expanded the tools’ content marketing features. These include page management tools or APIs to monitor on-page content and errors, reports on content performance and traffic trends, influencer identification and campaign management, and real-time content recommendations.

More advanced platforms perform analysis to help improve the depth and quality of content by performing topical analysis of content and comparing it against competition to identify potentially important gaps and make recommendations for improvement.

One emerging area in which vendors are investing is the ability to automatically and proactively suggest topics that marketers should create content about — eliminating the need to spend lots of time on analysis. Some even provide assistance with developing the type of content that will show up in queries for target keywords.

International search tracking

International search coverage has become a critical capability, as the global economy leads more U.S.-based enterprises to conduct business online and offline in multiple countries and languages. Most enterprise SEO platforms offer some level of international search coverage that crosses borders, languages, and alphabets. The capabilities include international keyword research, integrating global market and search volume data into the platform, as well as integrating global CPC currency data.

Mobile/local analytics

Google’s search engine updates are increasingly focused on improving the mobile/local search user experience. As mobile-friendly sites rise to the top of the SERPs, marketers are demanding more and better mobile and local data and analytics to help them optimize their sites for mobile users and improve search engine rankings. Many vendors offer features such as mobile audits, rankings, and metrics by device (i.e., desktop, tablet, iPhone, and Android) as well as by location.

Technical SEO crawling

The increasing importance of mobile traffic is also driving the development of tools to identify problems that may be slowing page load or affecting mobile-friendliness. This includes providing information about a site’s ranking for Core Web Vitals.

Additionally, technical implementation of schema markup is necessary if a page is to be used in one of the featured snippets or other advanced displays. Many of today’s tools can identify schema errors and advise on correcting them.

Cross-device attribution

Recognizing that SEO is just one aspect of a brand’s marketing efforts, and also that search traffic (especially on brand keywords) is influenced by paid media, some vendors are developing capabilities that help marketers determine what marketing initiative is driving site visits or sales. This is becoming increasingly difficult, however, as third-party cookies are no longer being supported by many companies.

The benefits of using SEO platforms

With hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, social conversations, images, and keywords to manage and optimize, enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming.

Using an SEO platform can increase efficiency and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in managing organic search campaigns. More specifically, managing SEO through an enterprise toolset can provide the following benefits:

• Many tools, one interface. SEO platforms perform many tasks in one system. A comprehensive dashboard can help your organization monitor SERP rankings and trends, how you measure up to competitors and your share of voice. The integration and prioritization of tasks, reporting, and user permissions can offer substantial benefits to enterprise-level SEO operations.
• Intent insights. Because of the search engines’ increased focus on user intent, enterprise-level SEO tool vendors are developing machine learning models that analyze user behavior and site content to help marketers answer searchers’ questions.
• More efficient management of global operations. Enterprise SEO tools have built-in diagnostics that can be invaluable on a global scale to identify site-wide issues across languages, countries or regions. These tools uncover macro and micro issues with pages, templates and infrastructure.
• Keeping pace with the search engines. SEO software vendors have dedicated teams and engineers to follow frequent search engine algorithm changes and their impact on the SEO reporting required by enterprises.
• Automated reporting to provide data in near real-time. Many brands end up trying to put a lot of data in spreadsheets and manually update them. But that doesn’t provide a complete view of the data. Most enterprise SEO platforms offer highly customized reporting capabilities that are widget- and wizard-driven to make reporting faster and easier. Many also allow for the export of data to business intelligence tools or other analytics software.

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Reuse audiences. Advertisers will be able to reuse audiences across campaigns. When you build an audience to use in a campaign, Google Ads will save it so you can use it again in a future campaign.

This feature is now available for use as an audience signal on Performance Max and is coming soon to Discovery, Video Action and App campaigns. The ability to reuse audiences will be expanding to more campaign types in the coming months, according to a tweet from Ginny Marvin, Google’s ad products liaison. 

New terms. Google Ads is renaming some key terms in your audience report and throughout Google Ads. You may have seen this already in some accounts. Google revealed this via this help documentation in September 2021.

For example, Audience types (e.g., similar, custom, in-market, affinity) are now audience segments and Remarketing is now Your data. Here’s the full list of name changes:

New audience reporting. Google is consolidating audience reporting into a new Audiences tab. Located in the left-side navigation menu, you’ll find reporting about demographics, audience segments and exclusions. Google said this is a “simplified view” of all the same reporting features. This is another change you may have seen already in some accounts.

Dig deeper: Why we care about adtech

Why we care. Instead of rebuilding audiences manually in each campaign, new reusable audiences will allow advertisers to save time while keeping targeting consistent across campaigns. The experience should be similar to how custom segments act currently, where once an audience is created, it can be applied to any campaign instead of manually checking off types in each campaign. Changes to the audience segments will then be distributed to all campaigns targeting the audience segment. 

Here’s the email from Google, shared on Twitter by @PPCGreg:

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Sidharth Iyer is an SEO marketing consultant who has worked in marketing for more than a decade. Born in India, he immigrated to Canada five years ago, becoming a full-fledged citizen just before we spoke last month. Below is the transcript of our conversation.

How did you come to be in marketing? What was the path that brought you here?

I started as a journalist covering the media, entertainment and technology space back in India in 2013.  I then kind of transitioned into corporate communications. And it’s only when I landed in Canada as an immigrant in 2017 that I saw an opportunity to transition to marketing. I saw an opportunity in terms of filling a void in terms of the SEO talent. So I just upskilled myself to be a SEO specialist and SEO consultant. And I’ve gone on to build a successful career as an SEO expert for the last five years now.

I don’t think I’ve changed a lot of what I do from when I was a journalist, which is primarily to be a storyteller.

What I love about SEO is I can rely a lot on data to actually tell a story and also get buy-in for a lot of things. Things which probably other stakeholders aren’t aware of, be it with the content strategy, be it with backlinks. It’s easier to get that buy-in based on being able to show them we are at X, if we do Y and Z we can reach this place in this timeline. It’s a matter of being able to better inform people so decisions are made based on informed paths. I also enjoy the fact that I still get to collaborate and work cross-functionally. Just as I did as a journalist, all I’m doing is looking for sources, meeting with people, having those interactions.

What are your biggest challenges? 

The most difficult thing is to tie revenue success towards all the work that I and all the different team members have been doing. Most of the martech misses the last touch or the first touch in terms of gathering the correct data so we have a very clean kind of understanding of it. Like, okay, this is the first source that actually led to an interaction, and this is where the lead actually closed on the last touch. We don’t have the data to really tie how the channels are performing and attribute success or failure based on that.

What changes have you seen in marketing as a result of the pandemic?

There is a lot more focus and impetus on growing organic as a channel for organizations because they do see the value now. It’s not about “just throw in a boatload of cash and get those leads,” because that’s only going to be a sporadic effect. Whereas investing in a content strategy, an SEO strategy is going to be serving them more in the long term. I also think most organizations are now evaluating podcasts and videos as formats. They allow them to have a brand voice and be looked at as a thought leader rather than just selling their products or services. Those are definitely radical shifts I’ve seen because of the pandemic. 

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