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I’m always looking for an edge in PPC so that my campaign’s performance will shine in a very competitive landscape. Back in 2013, I started talking about how to use programming to set up time-saving and performance-boosting automations with AdWords Scripts, at the time among the newest capabilities in AdWords. But now that we’re about to head into 2017, there’s an entirely different AdWords power feature that is starting to let us use programming to improve performance: ad customizers (“customizers” for short). Customizers sit at the intersection of two of my favorite topics: feed-based advertising and programming. I’ll cover some innovative ways to use the older feed-based capabilities, but I’ll also cover some of the brand-new programming-based ways to use the feature to show different ads based on the device or the audience list a user is on. Ad customizers just got new capabilities The customizers’ capabilities that have now … [Read more...] about Ad customizers just got a whole lot more powerful

Local businesses often display maps of their locations on their sites, but not a lot has been said about how to best create those pages for good usability and search engine optimization. This article will describe how to geocode addresses, use them to create dynamic maps for a local website while simultaneously optimizing those map/location pages. Many small-to-medium local businesses will set up a page on their site with a map that shows where their shop is located. Typically, these pages will be called “Locations” or “Contact Us”, and most of them will consist of a brief bit of text for the address, a few written directions, and a static map image. Some have thoughtfully provided a hyperlink over to one of the top mapping services to enable users to get specific driving directions or to pan and zoom the maps. Now, how great would it be if all of these locations pages were set up with dynamic maps, allowing potential customers to easily interact with the maps … [Read more...] about How To Geocode An Address & Optimize Location Pages

There are three main components to organic search: crawling, indexing and ranking. When a search engine like Google arrives at your website, it crawls all of the links it finds. Information about what it finds is then entered into the search engine’s index, where different factors are used to determine which pages to fetch, and in what order, for a particular search query. As SEOs, we tend to focus our efforts on the ranking component, but if a search engine isn’t able to crawl and index the pages on your site, you’re not going to receive any traffic from Google. Clearly, ensuring your site is properly crawled and indexed by search engines is an important part of SEO. But how can you tell if your site is indexed properly? If you have access to Google Search Console, it tells you how many pages are contained in your XML sitemap and how many of them are indexed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go as far as to tell you which pages aren’t indexed. This can leave you … [Read more...] about How to check which URLs have been indexed by Google using Python

A practical local SEO guide for business owners. Have you ever used Google to find something nearby? Like searching for "sushi", "locksmith" or "nightclub"? If your business has a physical address such as a storefront, you should consider using local SEO to get new customers. Local SEO helps you get customers using a location keyword in their search (such as "Irving Park Plumber") or who simply search from a device with geolocation enabled, such as a smart phone. Local SEO also helps you to rank higher on Google Maps pages. For example, The Art Studio NY, the top-rated painting school in New York, ranks #1 for local search term "painting classes nyc": The local listing of The Art Studio NY includes NAP (name, address, phone number), Google Map, Google Reviews, hours of operation, website, and directions. This local listing format is very helpful in driving business. So how can we achieve good local search rankings? According to Moz.com, the major local search ranking factors are: … [Read more...] about A complete Local SEO guide for small businesses

The hreflang tag is used to tell Google and other search engines the language used on a specific page on your website. Search engines use the hreflang tag to ‘redirect’ the visitor to the page in the right language. Hreflang is also referred to as rel="alternate" hreflang="x". When I was discussing post subjects with our site review team, Annelieke pointed out that hreflang was mentioned on our website, but that we never did an article about it. Perhaps that is because for most sites, hreflang isn’t a ranking related issue. For the larger sites it could be, by the way. In this post, I’d like to explain a bit more about multilingual websites and how hreflang is important for these sites. What is Multilingual? In our online context, it basically means that content is available in more than one language. This can be cross border, for instance French or Chinese, but there is a bit more to that. It can also mean a language variation (so to speak) is available, like … [Read more...] about Use “hreflang” for Multilingual Websites