Geomodified Searches, Localized Results, and How to Track the Right Keywords and Locations for Your Business - Next Level

Posted by jocameron

Welcome to the newest installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, our fearless writer Jo Cameron shared how to uncover low-value content that could hurt your rankings and turn it into something valuable. Today, she's returned to share how to do effective keyword research and targeting for local queries. Read on and level up!

All around the world, people are searching: X sits at a computer high above the city and searches dreamily for the best beaches in Ko Samui. Y strides down a puddle-drenched street and hastily types good Japanese noodles into an expensive handheld computer. K takes up way too much space and bandwidth on the free wireless network in a chain coffee house, which could be located just about anywhere in the world, and hunts for the best price on a gadgety thing.

As we search, the engines are working hard to churn out relevant results based on what we’re searching, our location, personalized results, and just about anything else that can be jammed into an algorithm about our complex human lives. As a business owner or SEO, you’ll want to be able to identify the best opportunities for your online presence. Even if your business doesn’t have a physical location and you don’t have the pleasure of sweeping leaves off your welcome mat, understanding the local landscape can help you hone in on keywords with more opportunity for your business.

In this Next Level post, we’ll go through the different types of geo-targeted searches, how to track the right keywords and locations for your business in Moz Pro, and how to distribute your physical local business details with Moz Local. If you'd like to follow along with this tutorial, get started with a free 30-day trial of Moz Pro:

Follow along with a free trial

Whether your customer is two streets away or gliding peacefully above us on the International Space Station, you must consider how the intertwining worlds of local and national search impact your online presence.

Geomodified searches vs. geolocated searches

First, so you can confidently stride into your next marketing meeting and effortlessly contribute to a related conversation on Slack, let’s take a quick look at the lingo.

Geomodified searches include the city/neighborhood in the search term itself to target the searcher’s area of interest.

You may have searched some of these examples yourself in a moment of escapism: “beaches in Ko Samui,” “ramen noodles in Seattle,” “solid state drive London,” or “life drawing classes London.”

Geomodified searches state explicit local intent for results related to a particular location. As a marketer or business owner, tracking geomodified keywords gives you insight into how you’re ranking for those searches specifically.

Geolocated searches are searches made while the searcher is physically located in a specific area — generally a city. You may hear the term “location targeting” thrown about, often in the high-roller realm of paid marketing. Rather than looking at keywords that contain certain areas, this type of geotargeting focuses on searches made within an area.

Examples might include: “Japanese noodles,” “Ramen,” “solid state drive,” or “coffee,” searched from the city of Seattle, or the city of London, or the city of Tokyo.

Of course, the above ways of searching and tracking are often intertwined with each other. Our speedy fingers type demands, algorithms buzz, and content providers hit publish and bite their collective nails as analytics charts populate displaying our progress. Smart SEOs will likely have a keyword strategy that accounts for both geomodified and geolocated searches.

Researching local keywords

The more specific your keywords and the location you’re targeting, generally, the less data you’ll find. Check your favorite keyword research tool, like Keyword Explorer, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. In this example, I’m looking at search volume data for “japanese noodles” vs. “japanese noodles london.”

"Japanese noodles"

"Japanese noodles London"

So, do I toss this geomodified keyword? Hold on, buddy — while the Monthly Volume decreases, take a look at that Difficulty score — it increases. It’s an easy search term to dismiss, since the search volume is so low, but what this tells me is that there's more to the story.

A search for “japanese noodles” is too broad to divine much of the searcher’s intent — do they want to make Japanese noodles? Learn what Japanese noodles are? Find an appetizing image?… and so on and so forth. The term itself doesn’t give us much context to work with.

So, while the search volume may be lower, a search for “japanese noodles london” means so much more — now we have some idea of the searcher’s intent. If your site’s content matches up with the searcher’s intent, and you can beat your competition in the SERPs, you could find that the lower search volume equates to a higher conversion rate, and you could be setting yourself up for a great return on investment.

Digging into hyperlocal niches is a challenge. We’ve got some handy tips for investigating hyperlocal keywords, including using similar but slightly larger regions, digging into auto-suggest to gather keyword ideas, and using the grouping function in Keyword Explorer.

Testing will be your friend here. Build a lovely list, create some content, and then test, analyze, and as the shampoo bottle recommends, rinse and repeat.

Localized ranking signals and results

When search engines impress us all by displaying a gazillion results per point whatever of a second, they aren’t just looking inwards at their index. They're looking outwards at the searcher, figuring out the ideal pairing of humans and results.

Local rankings factors take into consideration things like proximity between the searcher and the business, consistency of citations, and reviews, to name just a few. These are jumbled together with all the other signals we’re used to, like authority and relevancy. The full and glorious report is available here: http://ift.tt/1E65sTq

I often find myself returning to the local search ranking factors report because there's just so much to digest. So go ahead bookmark it in a folder called “Local SEO” for easy reference, and delight in how organized you are.

While you may expect a search for “life drawing” to turn up mostly organic results, you can see the Local Pack is elbowing its way in there to serve up classes near me:

And likewise, you may expect a search for “life drawing london” to show only local results, but lookie here: we’ve also got some top organic results that have targeted “life drawing london” and the local results creep ever closer to the top:

From these examples you can see that localized results can have a big impact on your SEO strategy, particularly if you’re competing with Local Pack-heavy results. So let’s go ahead and assemble a good strategy into a format that you can follow for your business.

Tracking what’s right for your business

With your mind brimming with local lingo, let’s take a look at how you can track the right types of keywords and locations for your business using Moz Pro. I’ll also touch on Moz Local for the brick-and-mortar types.

1. Your business is rocking the online world

Quest: Track your target keywords nationally and keep your eye on keywords dominated by SERP features you can’t win, like Local Packs.

Hey there, w-w-w dot Your Great Site dot com! You’re the owner of a sweet, shiny website. You’re a member of the digital revolution, a content creator, a message deliverer, a gadgety thingy provider. Your customers are primarily online. I mean, they exist in real life too, but they are also totally and completely immersed in the online world. (Aren’t we all?)

Start by setting up a brand-new Moz Pro Campaign for your target location.

Select one of each search engine to track for your location. This is what I like to call the full deck:

Another personal favorite is what I call the "Google Special." Select Google desktop and Google Mobile for two locations. This is especially handy if you want to track two national locations in a single Campaign. Here I’ve gone with the US and Canada:

I like to track Google Mobile along with Google desktop results. Ideally you want to be performing consistently in both. If the results are hugely disparate, you may need to check that your site is mobile friendly.

Pour all your lovely keywords into the Campaign creation wizard. Turn that keyword bucket upside-down and give the bottom a satisfying tap like a drum:

Where have we found all these lovely keywords? Don’t tell me you don’t know!

Head over to Keyword Explorer and enter your website. Yes, friend, that’s right. We can show you the keywords your site is already ranking for:

I’m going to leave you to have some fun with that, but when you’re done frolicking in keywords you’re ranking for, keywords your competitors are ranking for, and keywords your Mum’s blog is ranking for, pop back and we’ll continue on our quest.

Next: Onward to the SERP features!

SERP features are both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you could zip to the top of page 1 if you’re lucky enough to be present in those SERP features, but they’re also a minefield, as they squeeze out the organic results you’ve worked so hard to secure.

Luckily for you, we’ve got the map to this dastardly minefield. Keep your eye out for Local Packs and Local Teasers; these are your main threats.

If you have an online business and you're seeing too many local-type SERP features, this may be an indication that you’re tracking the wrong keywords. You can also start to identify features that do apply to your business, like Image Packs and Featured Snippets.

When you’re done with your local quest, you can come back and try to own some of these features, just like we explored in a previous Next Level blog post: Hunting Down SERP Features to Understand Intent & Drive Traffic

2. Your business rocks customers in the real world

Quest: Track keywords locally and nationally and hone in on local SERP features + the wonderful world of NAP.

What if you run a cozy little cupcake shop in your cozy little city?

Use the same search engine setup from above, and sprinkle locally tracked keywords into the mix.

If you’re setting up a new Campaign, you can add both national and local keywords like a boss.

You can see I’ve added a mouthwatering selection of keywords in both the National Keywords section and in the Local Keywords field. This is because I want to see if one of my cupcake shop’s landing pages is ranking in Google Desktop, Google Mobile, and Yahoo and Bing, both nationally and locally, in my immediate vicinity of Seattle. Along with gathering comparative national and local ranking data, the other reason to track keywords nationally is so you can see how you’re doing in terms of on-page optimization.

Your path to cupcake domination doesn’t stop there! You’re also going to want to be the big player rocking the Local Pack.

Filter by Local Pack or Local Teaser to see if your site is featured. Keep your eye out for any results marked with a red circle, as these are being dominated by your competitors.

The wonderful world of NAP

As a local business owner, you'll probably have hours of operation, and maybe even one of those signs that you turn around to indicate whether you’re open or closed. You also have something that blogs and e-commerce sites don’t have: NAP, baby!

As a lingo learner, your lingo learning days are never over, especially in the world of digital marketing (actually, just make that digital anything). NAP is the acronym for business name, address, and phone number. In local SEO you’ll see this term float by more often than a crunchy brown leaf on a cold November morning.

NAP details are your lifeblood: You want people to know them, you want them to be correct, and you want them to be correct everywhere — for the very simple reason that humans and Google will trust you if your data is consistent.

If you manage a single location and decide to go down the manual listing management route, kudos to you, my friend. I’m going to offer some resources to guide you:

• All About Local Listings and SEO
• Advanced Local Citation Audit & Clean Up: Achieve Consistent Data & Higher Rankings
• Unfiltered: How to Show Up in Local Search Results
• How to Perform a Basic Local Business Competitive Audit

3. You manage multiple local businesses with multiple locations

Quest: Bulk-distribute business NAP, fix consistency issues, and stamp out duplicates.

If you are juggling a bunch of locations for your own business, or a client’s, you’ll know that in the world of citation building things can get out of hand pretty gosh-darn quick. Any number of acts can result in your business listing details splitting into multiple fragments, whether you moved locations, inherited a phone number that has an online past, or someone in-house set up your listings incorrectly.

While a single business operating out of a single location may have the choice to manually manage their listing distribution, with every location you add to your list your task becomes exponentially more complex.

Remember earlier, when we talked about those all-important local search ranking factors? The factors that determine local results, like proximity, citation signals, reviews, and so on? Well, now you’ll be really glad you bookmarked that link.

You can do all sorts of things to send appealing local signals to Google. While there isn’t a great deal we can do about proximity right now — people have a tendency to travel where they want to — the foundational act of consistently distributing your NAP details is within your power.

That’s where Moz Local steps in. The main purpose of Moz Local is to help you publish and maintain NAP consistency in bulk.

First, enter your business name and postcode in the free Check Listing tool. Bounce, bounce...

After a few bounces, you’ll get the results:

Moz Local will only manage listings that have been “verified” to prevent spam submissions.

If you’re not seeing what you’d expect in the Check Listing tool, you’ll want to dig up your Google Maps and Facebook Places pages and check them against these requirements on our Help Hub.

When you’re ready to start distributing your business details to our partners, you can select and purchase your listing. You can find out more about purchasing your listing, again on our Help Hub.

Pro Tip: If you have lots of local clients, you’ll probably want to purchase via CSV upload. Follow our documentation to get your CSV all spruced up and formatted correctly.

If tracking your visibility and reputation is high on your to-do list, then you’ll want to look at purchasing your listings at the Professional or Premium level.

We’ll track your local and organic rankings for your Google My Business categories by default, but you can enter your own group of target keywords here. We account for the geographic location of your listings, so be sure to add keywords without any geomodifiers!

If you want to track more keywords, we’ve got you covered. Hop on over to Moz Pro and set up a Campaign like we did in the section above.

4. You’re a dog trainer who services your local area without a storefront

Quest: Help owners of aspiring good dogs find your awesome training skills, even though you don’t have a brick-and-mortar storefront.

At Moz HQ, we love our pooches: they are the sunshine of our lives (as our Instagram feed delightfully confirms). While they’re all good doggos, well-trained pooches have a special place in our hearts.

But back to business. If you train dogs, or run another location-specific business without a shop front, this is called a service-area business (or SAB, another term to add to the new lingo pile).

Start by tracking searches for “dog trainer seattle,” and all the other keywords you discovered in your research, both nationally and locally.

I’ve got my Campaign pulled up, so I’m going to add some keywords and track them nationally and locally.

You may find that some keywords on a national level are just too competitive for your local business. That’s okay! You can refine your list as you go. If you’re happy with your local tracking, then you can remove the nationally tracked keywords from your Campaign and just track your keywords at the local level.

Pro Tip: Remember that if you want to improve your Page Optimization with Moz Pro, you’ll have to have the keyword tracked nationally in your Campaign.

In terms of Moz Local, since accuracy, completeness, and consistency are key factors, the tool pushes your complete address to our partners in order to improve your search ranking. It's possible to use Moz Local with a service-area business (SAB), but it's worth noting that some partners do not support hidden addresses. Miriam Ellis describes how Moz Local works with service-area businesses (SABs) in her recent blog post.

Basically, if your business is okay with your address being visible in multiple places, then we can work with your Facebook page, provided it’s showing your address. You won’t achieve a 100% visibility score, but chances are your direct local competitors are in the same boat.

Wrapping up

Whether you’re reaching every corner of the globe with your online presence, or putting cupcakes into the hands of Seattleites, the local SEO landscape has an impact on how your site is represented in search results.

The key is identifying the right opportunities for your business and delivering the most accurate and consistent information to search engines, directories, and your human visitors, too.

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Metrics That Matter (and Don’t) When Attributing Influencer Effectiveness

Influencers can add significant value to a marketing campaign. Top-notch influencer campaigns use high-quality content to start organic conversations about a brand with its target audience. At a minimum, brands gain exposure, but many brands want more. They want to see a direct link between influencers and sales.

As with all marketing, metrics matter when it comes to influencer marketing. Knowing what impressions, clicks, conversions, or sales a campaign generated helps gauge performance and measure progress. Historically, influencer marketing has been difficult to track and measure, yet the pressure on marketers to be able to measure the value and impact of these campaigns has risen steadily.

Current Approaches to Tracking the Influencer Metrics That Matter

Currently, most brands working with influencers engage in a highly tedious, time-consuming process to track reach (followers) and engagements (comments, likes, shares, etc.). This manual approach typically involves counting the individual metrics from respective influencers and adding them to a spreadsheet. What’s more, these results often don’t include bottom of the funnel metrics, such as clicks, orders, and sales.

Brands may also use UTM parameters, coupon code tracking, like-to-buy (or comment-to-buy) features, and more to track further down the funnel. However, this can also be a manual, time-consuming process.

For larger brands, influencer networks are valuable partners. They can handle tracking, manage influencer relationships, create content, calculate reach and engagement, gather top of funnel metrics, and more.

Many influencer networks are limited in their ability to track bottom of the funnel metrics, such as clicks, orders, sales, conversion rates, and average order value. While top of funnel metrics are valuable, CMOs and marketing professionals now want both. They want to close the loop and see the whole picture of how their influencer marketing campaigns are performing.

Many key elements of influencer marketing fall under the affiliate umbrella. This means influencer performance can be measured and incentivized according to some of the same metrics used to gauge any affiliate program’s success. There’s very little difference between these two forms of marketing—both are essentially performance partnerships where compensation should align with the level of success achieved.

Measure influencer performance with the same metrics you'd use to gauge an affiliate program's success.
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Performance-Driven Approach to Influencer Marketing

While some brands partner with celebrity influencers with millions of followers, most partner with microinfluencers who have 10,0000 to 100,000 followers via their blog, social accounts, and other online channels.

These partners tend to focus on a specific niche and have smaller, but often more loyal, audiences than celebrity influencers. To track top and bottom of funnel metrics for a microinfluencer marketing campaign efficiently, the following components need to be in place.

1. An Influencer Network

Influencer networks have access to thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of microinfluencers and macroinfluencers. Moreover, they regularly bring new ones onboard.

Having access to large numbers of opt-in influencers allows brands to run a variety of campaigns with different microinfluencers. Opt-in influencer networks also make it easier for brands to communicate with influencers, approve work, and pay through the platform.

2. Performance-Based Tracking Technology

By connecting influencers to affiliate networks or SaaS platforms, brands can track the entire customer journey, from awareness to conversion. This allows brands to collect data such as clicks, orders, and sales to help determine attribution of payments for conversions to specific influencers.

3. Clear Goals That Establish What Success Looks Like

Marketers’ goals may be different from one influencer campaign to the next. To gauge whether a campaign is successful or not, it’s essential to establish what success looks like. Do you want to reach more potential customers? Increase brand awareness? Get a certain number of likes, comments, or shares? Drive sales? Create great content for their brand? Setting clear goals at the start of a campaign is vital for understanding what to measure and whether or not a campaign is successful.

4. Performance Plus Payouts

Currently, most influencers aren’t used to getting paid on a commission basis. Content affiliates are, but not influencers—yet. What they are familiar with is getting either a flat fee payment or a free product to use and review. In a performance-driven influencer campaign, influencers are paid on a “performance plus” basis. This means they are either paid a flat fee, given a free product, or given a free product plus a flat fee, in addition to a performance fee.

5. Exclusive Discounts or Time-Sensitive Promotions

If the goal is to drive sales, it’s important to provide influencers with valuable discounts, giveaways, and exclusive offers that they can share with their followers. Offering something special that no one else has helps influencers guide consumers down the funnel and closer to conversion. It also gives their followers a reason to click on a tracking link and redeem a special time-sensitive offer. The key is to provide them with something special or unique to promote in their content.

Powering Influencer Campaigns With Affiliate Networks

At Acceleration Partners, following these steps has proven to be successful for many of our clients, particularly Stella & Dot. This boutique-style jewelry and accessory brand ran an influencer marketing campaign intended to increase brand awareness and customer engagement with content generated by a select group of fashion influencers. These influencers created posts across blogs, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, sharing unique Stella & Dot styles. By managing influencers through an affiliate program, Stella & Dot had the opportunity to track the results, reward the influencers based on performance, and ensure that their promotional efforts were aligned with the brand.

Using affiliate networks to manage influencers provides exponential benefits. To illustrate: Recently, we ran several influencer programs on behalf of seven of our clients. The campaigns lasted between 10 and 12 weeks and utilized up to 20 “engaged” influencers at the start of the campaign. We also targeted content-focused microinfluencers to help our affiliate clients reach and engage new, targeted audiences.

In addition to the brand awareness and engagement generated by the campaign, our clients also now own this high-value content produced by the influencers. Brands can reuse this content, with credit to the influencer, to save time and money in content creation. Some of our clients transitioned participating influencers to in-house ambassadors following the campaign.

At Last, the Metrics That Matter

At a time when the largest brands in the world are demanding more transparency and measurable return from their marketing programs, influencer marketing is at a disadvantage. Most brands lack a standardized, performance-based pricing structure to incentivize and compensate influencers. As a result, many end up overpaying people who aren’t getting the desired results—but not for long. By aligning the content creation capacity, authority, and leverage of microinfluencers with the scalability and outcome orientation of affiliate marketing, brands can finally acquire the metrics they need to improve the performance of their influencer marketing campaigns.

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Watch Facebook, It Is Changing and Not For The Better

Over the last few months, from my own and my client’s experience, we’ve been seeing a huge organic drop in the reach of the posts and the videos.

Just recently upon doing research I discovered that Facebook is testing a new algorithm and it seems to be having a massive effect on our posts.

Since the new algorithm update earlier this year, we have experienced a dramatic reduction based on what I call the restaurant method of calculating, read the full update from facebook here.

This update had a huge impact, bringing our fan page reach organically to around 1 – 2 %. Now with this testing, it seems like we have hit the big fat ZERO….

Now if you’re like me, you’re possibly thinking Facebook is dead for business owners. Well, it has been dead for quite a few years compared to my first posts on Facebook back in 2007.

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How to Target Specialized Audiences With Facebook Ads

Do you want to improve the ROI of your Facebook ads and Instagram campaigns? Wondering how to reach specialized audiences with Facebook ad targeting? In this article, you’ll learn how to create six refined target audiences for your Facebook and Instagram campaigns. How to Create Target Audiences in the Facebook Ads Manager There are two

This post How to Target Specialized Audiences With Facebook Ads first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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Facebook Local App, Facebook Stories for Groups and Events, and Pinterest Pincodes

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore the new Facebook Local app with Mari Smith, Pinterest Pincodes with Alisa Meredith, Facebook

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

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How Google AdWords (PPC) Does and Doesn't Affect Organic Results - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

It's common industry knowledge that PPC can have an effect on our organic results. But what effect is that, exactly, and how does it work? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers the ways paid ads influence organic results — and one very important way it doesn't.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about AdWords and how PPC, paid search results can potentially impact organic results.
Now let's be really clear. As a rule...

Paid DOES NOT DIRECTLY affect organic rankings

So many of you have probably seen the conspiracy theories out there of, "Oh, we started spending a lot on Goolge AdWords, and then our organic results went up." Or, "Hey, we're spending a lot with Google, but our competitor is spending even more. That must be why they're ranking better in the organic results." None of that is true. So there's a bunch of protections in place. They have a real wall at Google between the paid side and the organic side. The organic folks, the engineers, the product managers, the program managers, all of the people who work on those organic ranking results on the Search Quality team, they absolutely will not let paid directly impact how they rank or whether they rank a site or page in the organic results.

However:But there are a lot of indirect things that Google doesn't control entirely that cause paid and organic to have an intersection, and that's what I want to talk about today and make clear.

A. Searchers who see an ad may be more likely to click and organic listing.

Searchers who see an ad — and we've seen studies on this, including a notable one from Google years ago — may be more likely to click on an organic listing, or they may be more likely if they see a high ranking organic listing for the same ad to click that ad. For example, let's say I'm running Seattle Whale Tours, and I search for whale watching while I'm in town. I see an ad for Seattle Whale Tours, and then I see an organic result. It could be the case, let's say that my normal click-through rate, if there was only the ad, was one, and my normal click-through rate if I only saw the organic listing was one. Let's imagine this equation: 1 plus 1 is actually going to equal something like 2.2. It's going to be a little bit higher, because seeing these two together biases you, biases searchers to generally be more likely to click these than they otherwise would independent of one another. This is why many people will bid on their brand ads.

Now, you might say, "Gosh, that's a really expensive way to go for 0.2 or even lower in some cases." I agree with you. I don't always endorse, and I know many SEOs and paid search folks who don't always endorse bidding on branded terms, but it can work.

B. Searchers who've been previously exposed to a site/brand via ads may be more likely to click>engage>convert.

Searchers who have been previously exposed to a particular brand through paid search may be more likely in the future to click and engage on the organic content. Remember, a higher click-through rate, a higher engagement rate can lead to a higher ranking. So if you see that many people have searched in the past, they've clicked on a paid ad, and then later in the organic results they see that same brand ranking, they might be more likely and more inclined to click it, more inclined to engage with it, more inclined actually to convert on that page, to click that Buy button generally because the brand association is stronger. If it's the first time you've ever heard of a new brand, a new company, a new website, you are less likely to click, less likely to engage, less likely to buy, which is why some paid exposure prior to organic exposure can be good, even for the organic exposure.

C. Paid results do strongly impact organic click-through rate, especially in certain queries.

Across the board, what we've seen is that paid searches on average, in all of Google, gets between 2% and 3% of all clicks, of all searches result in a paid click. Organic, it's something between about 47% and 57% of all searches result in an organic click. But remember there are many searches where there are no paid clicks, and there are many searches where paid gets a ton of traffic. If you haven't seen it yet, there was a blog post from Moz last week, from the folks at Wayfair, and they talked about how incredibly their SERP click-through rates have changed because of the appearance of ads.

So, for example, I search for dining room table lighting, and you can see on your mobile or on desktop how Google has these rich image ads, and you can sort of select different ones. I want to see all lighting. I want to see black lighting. I want to see chrome lighting. Then there are ads below that, the normal paid text ads, and then way, way down here, there are the organic results.

So this is probably taking up between 25% and 50% of all the clicks to this page are going to the paid search results, biasing the click-through rate massively, which means if you bid in certain cases, you may find that you will actually change the click-through rate curve for the entire SERP and change that click-through rate opportunity for the keyword.

D. Paid ad clicks may lead to increased links, mentions, coverage, sharing, etc. that can boost organic rankings.

So paid ad clicks may lead to other things. If someone clicks on a paid ad, they might get to that site, and then they might decide to link to it, to mention that brand somewhere else, to provide media coverage or social media coverage, to do sharing of some kind. All of those things can — some of them directly, some of them indirectly — boost rankings. So it is often the case that when you grow the engagement, the traffic of a website overall, especially if that website is providing a compelling experience that someone might want to write about, share, cover, or amplify in some way, that can boost the rankings, and we do see this sometimes, especially for queries that have a strong overlap in terms of their content, value, and usefulness, and they're not just purely commercial in intent.

E. Bidding on search queries can affect the boarder market around those searches by shifting searcher demand, incentivizing (or de-incentivizing) content creation, etc.

Last one, and this is a little subtler and more difficult to understand, but basically by bidding on paid search results, you sort of change the market. You affect the market for how people think about content creation there, for how they think about monetization, for how they think about the value of those queries.

A few years ago, there was no one bidding on and no one interested in the market around insurance discounts as they relate to fitness levels. Then a bunch of companies, insurance companies and fitness tracking companies and all these other folks started getting into this world, and then they started bidding on it, and they created sort of a value chain and a monetization method. Then you saw more competition. You saw more brands entering this space. You saw more affiliates entering. So the organic SERPs themselves became more competitive with the entry of paid, and this happens very often in markets that were under or unmonetized and then become more monetized through paid advertising, through products, through offerings.

So be careful. Sometimes when you start bidding in a space that previously no one was bidding in, no was buying paid ads in, you can invite a lot of new and interesting competition into the search results that can change the whole dynamic of how the search query space works in your sector.

All right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to your thoughts in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Recommended Marketing Podcasts: Week of November 13

Podcasts are a great way to educate yourself. Whether you’re on the train, in the car, at your desk, or anywhere in between, this medium is an incredible vehicle for supplementing your industry knowledge. Every week, I’ll be sharing with you some of the best marketing podcast episodes you can find, spanning the entirety of the marketing landscape.

Whether you’re new to podcasts or you’re a seasoned listener, I know you’ll find value in each weekly round-up. Let’s get listening, shall we?

Marketing Smarts: Why Your Next Hire Should Be a Cognitive Developer – IBM’s Bob Lord

MarketingProfs is known for aggregating some of the best marketing data and practices around and presenting it in very convenient packages. The Marketing Smarts podcast, hosted by Kerry O’Shea Gorgone—a lawyer by trade who’s been in the social game for a decade plus—is no different, delivering actionable insights for marketers of all levels every week.

Takeaways: The convergence of marketing and data science probably isn’t anything new for most of us; add in learned behaviors like the ones found in AI, and we’re newbies all over again.

Bob Lord, IBM’s first Chief Digital Officer, implores marketers to become more proficient in data science and development. Lord says, “[t]he core skillsets of the marketer have to go beyond pure marketing skills [to] really possess some data science skills in order to be effective in the future landscape.” If we want to use AI for all it’s worth, we’ll need to have a greater understanding of just how much these machines can do and what we, as humans, can achieve using them. It’s an eye-opening conversation.

Learned behaviors like the ones found in AI have marketers feeling like newbies all over again.
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The UnPodcast #197: The Maturity Show

Oh, The UnPodcast—such a brilliantly irreverent and absolutely essential marketing podcast. Hosted by husband and wife duo Alison and Scott Stratten, every episode is dripping with sarcasm, insight, and things you should never do at home (like being rude to your customers—it’s amazing how many companies still don’t know how to respond to negative criticisms).

Takeaways: In this particular episode, the Strattens discuss Instagram’s exploding user growth, how easy it is for small businesses to advertise on the platform, and their favorite accounts to follow. They also talk about the FTC’s crackdown on Instagram influencers and the need for further disclosure beyond using #ad.

Since this continues to be such a prevalent problem on the platform, the hosts openly question what needs to change around Instagram sponsorship disclosures. They don’t seem to have any final answer here, but it seemed to me that Alison and Scott wouldn’t mind seeing more attention being paid to this issue from both the FTC and Facebook, Instagram’s parent company.

Bonus Instagram conversation: A supermodel posted a photo of herself—taken by a professional photographer—on her own account and is now being sued by the photographer. Excellent conversation about the ethics, legality, and value of copyright when your likeness is in an image.

Invisible Office Hours, Season 6 Episode 4: Project Juggling

Regardless of whether you work for yourself or you’re in a large company, possessing the skill to juggle multiple projects at once is very valuable. Serial entrepreneurs Jason Zook, a man who actually sold his last name twice, and Paul Jarvis, a guy who builds people better businesses (and is not Tony Stark’s AI Assistant), kick around the best ways to determine and work through their priorities and how you can apply it to your life.

Takeaways: Whenever you’re beginning to map out your priorities, it’s best to start with potential revenue and your product’s longevity and work your way backward. While neither Jason nor Paul judge their successes by money alone, they recognize that they need to have revenue coming in in order to continue doing what they love to do.

Towards the end of the episode, Jason shares how his wife keeps him focused on the things that are important to him, their family, and their business by using the phrase, “Good for them, not for me.” Anyone, of course, can apply this to many different scenarios in life and business. It serves as a good reminder for all of us. Doing things that are beneficial for others is wonderful, but if we aren’t focused on helping ourselves first, we’ll never be able to serve others like we want to.

That’s all for this edition! I’ll be back with a new batch next week. In the meantime, share any podcasts you think I should know about with me @jwsteiert on Twitter or in the comments below!

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