Marcus Miller says, “Your website is the center of your digital marketing world — the place that all digital rivers run toward. And of course, the largest of its traffic sources is generally organic search. Yet all too often, businesses don’t think about SEO until after having a website designed (or redesigned), and these sites are often sadly lacking on the SEO and digital marketing front. They may look shiny, but if the marketing smarts are not cooked in at design time, then you will be running the marketing race with a wooden leg. Or at the very least, faced with going back to the... [...]

Daniel Gilbert says, “Making good things better is… good. Take campaign-level audiences — they’re good, but wouldn’t meta-campaign-level audiences be even better? Sure. To reiterate, campaign level audiences are great. You don’t have quite as fine control as with ad group-level audiences (and it’s annoying you can’t have ad group and campaign audiences together!), but they’re much easier to keep track of, because there are a lot fewer of them. (Plus, there’s a pesky limit of 5 million ad group targeting criteria in an account — which sounds like a lot but is easy to eat... [...]

Barry Schwartz says, “Google released its annual web spam report yesterday, documenting some of the company’s spam-fighting activity in 2016. One of the most eye-catching data points for me was that Google has sent out over 9 million messages related to web spam in 2016; that number was more than double the 4.3 million messages in the 2015 report. The other metric that stood out was that hacked sites continue to rise, this time by 32 percent from 2015 to 2016, but it was a 180 percent increase from 2014 to 2015 in the previous report. Here are some data highlights from this year’s report: 32... [...]

Greg Finn says, “A slew of helpful new changes have made their way into Bing Ads Editor’s new release, version v11.10. The changes enhance functionality, add features and alleviate issues within the Bing platform. Support of Review Extensions Thankfully, the new version of Bing Ads Editor supports Review Extensions and will be a godsend for paid search managers everywhere. No longer will advertisers be relegated to the web version for review extensions. The upgrade will allow for managing of the third-party reviews, along with implementing shared Review Extensions that can be added to... [...]

Greg Sterling says, “Apple launched app-store Search Ads in October 2016. Since that time they’ve received praise from developers as a high-converting, high-value app discovery tool. Today the company is announcing that Search Ads will become available in the UK, Australia and NZ. The booking UI opens today and ad serving begins on April 25. Developers running campaigns in the US will be able to clone their ads for the new markets. AppsFlyer issued the following assessment about Search Ads’ performance in a report issued earlier this year: [Apple had] the best retention in iOS North... [...]

Danny Sullivan says, “Google has neither censored nor banned the Infowars site, despite what some headlines out there say. The company did, however, rescind an example that its quality rater contractors received using Infowars and other sites in terms of how to judge page quality generally. Memorandum has a round-up on the news, including a Business Insider take that gets the situation generally right. The news came from Mike Cernovich’s blog, which gets it incorrect with a headline saying “Google Takes Out Major Contract to De-List InfoWars from Its Search Index.” Infowars itself... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “Quality Score reporting in the AdWords interface leaves much to be desired. Only the current Quality Score is available, and granular details are contained in individual pop-ups that make analysis cumbersome. That could be changing. Avner Pinchover shared a blog post on the Israel version of the Inside AdWords blog with Search Engine Land that describes a series of new columns of Quality Score metrics coming to the AdWords UI. It was posted back on March 10 and seems to have received little attention. It was removed for some reason yesterday. (The archive can be found... [...]

Janet Driscoll says, “Like any marketing channel, SEO is an investment. Whether you’re using in-house resources or hiring an agency to do the work, SEO isn’t free. To make the most of your SEO time (and perhaps direct financial) investment, it’s helpful to have an SEO strategy established to be your road map for execution. However, one of the bigger challenges to creating an SEO strategy is that the search engines (primarily Google) are shifting ranking factors and introducing new updates fairly regularly. Therefore, an SEO strategy has to be a living document, allowing for regular modifications... [...]

Ginny Marvin says, “In a very nice update, users can now use the same email to access multiple Google Merchant Center (GMC) accounts. GMC users may have already noticed an update about the change in their accounts, and Google Advertisers Community Manager CassieH posted a notice about it on Tuesday. Per the Help Center page: “Multiple users are able to access a single Merchant Center, and users can connect their individual Google account with multiple Merchant Center accounts as needed.” Admins can invite people by clicking on Users from the three-dot icon in the upper right corner.... [...]

Janet Driscoll Miller says, “Like any marketing channel, SEO is an investment. Whether you’re using in-house resources or hiring an agency to do the work, SEO isn’t free. To make the most of your SEO time (and perhaps direct financial) investment, it’s helpful to have an SEO strategy established to be your road map for execution. However, one of the bigger challenges to creating an SEO strategy is that the search engines (primarily Google) are shifting ranking factors and introducing new updates fairly regularly. Therefore, an SEO strategy has to be a living document, allowing for... [...]