WMT: Google Gets Personal With SEOs?

Christmas morning, I got something I never expected: a personal email from Google. And it truly felt like a gift!

Right out of bed, I had my 3 cans of Red Bull and checked my messages, as usual. Initially, I wasn’t surprised to see that I had an email from Google. I figured it was an automated message about profile linking or something like that. But I was wrong.

The email was actually from one of Google’s Webmaster Trends analysts. He was contacting me about a rankings situation — in smartphone rankings — for one of my brand’s domains! But don’t confuse this with Google’s recent announcement about the addition of smartphone specific crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools. That has an automated approach and is something else entirely.

What I’m talking about is a personal email I received from Google telling me I had a redirect issue that was hurting my mobile rankings. Take a look at the actual email below.

Have you received an email similar to this from Google? Perhaps it is part of a new initiative or process, but I haven’t heard anything about it.

In general, the email seems to be more manual than automated, or at least semi-manual. How so? First off, the email contains a personal signature. What’s more, notice that the message includes an actual “reply-to” email address rather than the usual wmt-noreply@google.com. These factors lead me to believe that this email was the result of someone at Google having an alert triggered and then personally reaching out.
With that said, I think it is important to note that the domain mentioned in the original email gets a considerable amount of traffic (~25K unique visitors a day). In other words, that kind of volume may have helped to trigger the email.

If this is part of a bigger initiative, I doubt that smaller players will get the same level of service. That’s a shame, because when I got Google’s note, I immediately thought of my good friend, Todd.

Last year, Todd had a problem with the indexing of his product details pages after a redesign. It caused his sales to nosedive, and he almost had to shut down his e-retail business as it relies heavily on organic traffic. If Google had informed him about the issue, it could have saved him a lot of trouble.

A Gift That Keeps On Giving

While I’m both happy and thankful for Google’s personal outreach to me, I’m hoping that it is part of a larger initiative, as I think it could greatly benefit the SEO community. After all, one of the biggest challenges SEO professionals grapple with is the implementation of our recommendations!

When we tell brands and their development agency that they need to change their coding and the way they handle mobile redirects to avoid a rankings loss, they rarely say, “Sure thing!” Instead, they usually come back with some quote that counteracts or challenges our recommendations.

But if Google sends out personal emails alerting webmasters to problem areas/situations, SEOs will have actual documentation from Google that will back up their recommendations. How awesome would that be?!
Getting clear and direct guidance from Google in the form of these Webmaster Trends emails will be even more important as technology continues to evolve, because the complexity of organic recommendations will only increase. This additional complexity has led to a lot of guesswork by SEOs, especially in regard to the impact of one variable on another.

But the guidance Google sent in the above email eliminated the need for guessing and spelled out the problem: a broken redirect will hurt your mobile rankings. As tech continues to evolve, SEOs and brands would greatly benefit from such direct and clear guidance from Google.

Overall, I hope the email I received from Google wasn’t an isolated event. I’d love to see Google’s Webmaster Trends analysts reach out to SEOs more and provide clarity into the complex technical issues that have large-scale impact like the one above. In the end, such outreach efforts could truly be the gift for SEOs that keeps on giving.

Google Preps “Hotel View” Interior 360 Imagery

Call it Google “Hotel View.” According to the Associated Press (via Fox), Google is photographing hotel interiors as part of an effort to enhance its travel content. Perhaps even more interesting, says the article, is that the initiative is being run not under the umbrella of Google Maps but through Google Wallet.
It’s not clear whether that last statement is accurate, however. Google has been slowly rolling out more and more interior photography for local businesses over the past few years. This may simply be a logical extension of that effort.






According to the AP, Google is making the push with major hotel chains and hotel management companies. Radisson and Best Western are the only two participating chains explicitly mentioned in the article, although Omni and Marriott are identified as participating in Google Wallet (through their loyalty programs).

I did a set of relatively random hotel searches in several cities and found interior imagery for a number of different hotel chains, suggesting Google already has a great deal of this in place. Above are two examples of the interior hotel photography from a Best Western in the Chicago area and a Hyatt in San Francisco.
TripAdvisor has traditionally been my “go-to” source for interior hotel imagery (from guests rather than the official hotel photographs). If consumers become aware of the availability of these images on Google, it may boost hotel-related search traffic specifically looking for these types of pictures.

Google’s Hotel Finder remains limited and not very visible to consumers. It doesn’t appear that Google has yet integrated these new 360-degree, interactive images into that property.

Postscript: I received some clarification from Google. The program is being run through Google Maps (not Wallet) and it is part of the interior photography program Google has been doing for a couple of years.

PPC Excel Tips For Every Level: Part 3, Advanced Level Keyword Research And Data Visualization

While many of the tips we’ve covered can also help SEOs as well as PPC practitioners, today’s focus on keyword research is particularly relevant to both camps.

Advanced Tip: Bing Ads Intelligence for deep-dive keyword research and Power BI for big data analysis and visualization.

Bing Ads Intelligence is an Excel add-in for keyword research that enables Excel to integrate directly with your Bing Ads accounts. However, you can use this tool for keyword research outside of Bing Ads campaigns as well.

Once you download the add-in, you’ll see the Bing Ads Intelligence tab in the top navigation. If you want to download your campaign data, sign in to your Bing Ads account by clicking “Sign In” icon to the far right. You can then see your keywords along with performance metrics.


These are top 3 features in Bing Ads Intelligence:

1. Keyword Suggestions: Keyword recommendations fine-tuned from Yahoo Bing Network data.
What’s also interesting about the Keyword Suggestion tool is that it will give include suggestions for match types not currently in our account along with the performance data and estimated bids for mainline and sidebar positions. Not only that, but you can run the Keyword Suggestion tool for any list of keywords, not just those already in your account, and it will show the broad, phrase and exact match statistics for each variation. Don’t want to look at phrase match types? Just use the filter to hide them from the list.

 2. Traffic: See the number of searches users conducted on the Yahoo Bing Network for a specific query.
The Traffic tool can be used to look at multiple keywords or one. The cool thing about this feature is you can see historical trending and you can break out performance by device. In the example below, I’ve chosen to see the traffic performance of the keyword “classic cars sale” on Desktops and Laptops and then on Smart phones by week. In this example, Desktop and laptop traffic trended down closer to Thanksgiving, while Smart phone traffic actually ticked up slightly in that final week of November. You could break this down by day if you wanted as well.



3. Keyword Performance: For any keyword, it will show you a snapshot of keyword performance by position. This can be powerful when trying to estimate traffic and set bidding strategies. Again, these don’t need to be words you are currently bidding on in your account, and you can separate results based on device type and match type. To see the performance stats for a keyword by every position, select “All” at the bottom of the Ad Position drop down menu as shown below.



Quick note: You’ll notice the shading in several columns in the tables above. This is done using Conditional Formatting, found under the Home tab. Conditional Formatting allows you to shade and color cells based on their values to be able to better visualize opportunities and problems.

In the Keyword List Generator template shown below, conditional formatting rules are set using the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager to show a different color in each metric column. In this table you can quickly see that, while the search volume for “buy new laptop” is relatively low, the CPC and Average Bid are high. With this template, you can add any sequence of keywords you want. Hitting the “Refresh All” button under the Bing Ads Intelligence tab will update the data keyword variations.



You can find this template and others for download by clicking the “Keyword Research Templates” button under the Bing Ads Intelligence Tab. There is much more to explore with this tool, so if you haven’t done so, download it and start experimenting.

Power BI
For those with the right software, Microsoft’s new Power BI tools for Excel offers advanced-level tools for data analysis. Here is the feature set for Excel in Power BI

• Power Query – Connect to data from public and corporate data sources including databases, web pages, even Facebook graph data.
• Power Pivot – Data Modelling tool that can handle nearly 2 billion rows of data
• Power View – Create reports and analytical views with interactive data visualizations
• Power Map –Visualize your campaign (or other) data geographically in 3-D within Excel

I am excited about Power Map for search advertisers. With it you can take the “geographic location” data from the dimensions report in Bing Ads and put it into Power Map to see where clicks are coming from by geographic location, for example.



There is a barrier to entry here, however. You will need Office Professional Plus 2013 or Office 365 ProPlus to run Power Map. If you meet those requirements, the Power Map and Power Query can be downloaded here. If you’re working with huge amounts of campaign data, Power BI tools could give you the bandwidth you need. Power Map also has broader applications beyond your own campaign data. You can import third-party or your CRM data to map out and see where your current customer and prospect bases are located for clearer insights into content development and campaign targeting. Think about the types of data sources available to you and how they might be able to inform your marketing efforts in new ways using Power BI tools.
That closes out our PPC Excel Tips series, just in time to usher in 2014. If you have tips and tricks of your own to share, please do so in the comments below.