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Google Optimize Available Globally: Free and Premium Optimize 360 A/B Testing Tools

✔ Sohel Parvez April 01, 2017 Comment

We know at March 15, 2016 Google Introduced the Google Analytics 360 Suite and at September 28, 2016 they rolled out Google Optimize — a free version of enterprise-class web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool. Google Optimize is aimed at help Small Businesses and Professionals track website data and it is the free version of Google Optimize 360.

At that time we were told that:

Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

March 30, 2017 Google has announced that its Optimize and Optimize 360 A/B website testing tools are now available to everyone after a prolonged period in beta.

Both Free and Premium versions of the tools allow businesses to try out different versions of their company websites to see how each version performs based on the desired outcomes. They allow for a full A/B test with a WYSIWYG visual editor with drag-and-drop components. Tests can be targeted to specific types of users, and URL rules can be set to determine the pages that should be tested.

As we know Optimize is free, but Optimize 360 is not. Optimize 360 doesn't have a price listed online, but Convert has listed it at more than $150,000 a year. The differences are mainly in how many tests can be run at once. The free version only allows for three concurrent tests, and target metrics are limited to three as well. Optimize 360 has unlimited tests and target metrics available.

Google Optimize Features

Easy to Implement: A Google recent survey showed 45% of small and medium businesses don’t optimize their websites through A/B testing. The two most common reasons given were a "lack of employee resources" and "lack of knowledge to get started."

If you're part of that 45%, Optimize is a great choice for you. Optimize has many of the same features as Optimize 360. It's just right for small and medium-sized businesses who need powerful testing, but don't have the budget or team resources for an enterprise-level solution.

Optimize is easy for anyone to set up. Early users of Optimize have been happy with how easy it is to use. In fact, it's built right on top of Analytics, so if you're already an Analytics user you'll add just a single line of code to get Optimize up and running. With just a few clicks more, you can start using your Analytics data to design experiments and improve the online experience for your users.

Easy to Use: Worried about having to hire someone to run A/B tests on your site, or frustrated about not knowing how to do it yourself? Don't be. The Optimize visual editor allows for WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editing so you can change just about anything on your site with a drag and a drop. And more advanced users will enjoy the ability to edit raw HTML or add JavaScript or CSS rules directly in the editor.

Easy to use google optimize

Powerful targeting capabilities within Optimize allow you to serve the right experiences to just the right set of users. And you have flexible URL targeting capabilities to create simple or complex rules for the pages where you want your experiment to run. To find out if a targeting rule you've set will apply to a specific URL on your site, use the new Optimize URL tester. Just enter a URL and the tester will immediately tell you if that page is a match for your targeting rule.

Easy to Understand Data: Google Optimize calculates results based on your existing Google Analytics metrics and objectives using advanced Bayesian methods, so the reporting shows you exactly what you need to know to make better and faster decisions.

Easy to understand google optimize data

Google also upgraded the improvement overview (see image above) to help you quickly see how an experiment affects the metrics you care about most, whether that means purchases, pageviews, session lengths, or whatever else you’re tracking in Analytics.

Easy to Try: Leading businesses are building a culture of growth that embraces the use of data and testing to improve the customer experience every day. Google offering Optimize to everyone to help deliver better user experiences across the board.

Try Google Optimize

As of today, Google Optimize is available in over 180 countries. And we're not done yet: Keep an eye out for more improvements and announcements in the future.

See the Complete Customer Journey: Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels.

Useful Insights, not just more Data: Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.

Enable better sharing within your organization: Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.

Deliver engaging experiences to the right people: Internet Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.

What are you waiting for? Try Google Optimize Right Now!

Safe Browsing

Google updated Safe Browsing's Site Status Tool

✔ Sohel Parvez April 01, 2017 Comment

As per the Google's March 29, 2017 Post at Google Security Blog, they have updated Safe Browsing’s Site Status Tool. The new update includes, cleaner UI, easier-to-interpret language, and more precise results.

Google Manage warnings about unsafe sites

Google safe browsing helps showing warning message to users specially when they trying to navigate to dangerous sites. It gives more precise and clear transparency report. The Google's transparency report includes details about threats that safe browsing identifies.

Google warnings to mobile users attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files.

Site Status Tool helps users to protect themselves from web-based threats like malware, unwanted software, and social engineering. Users can check the current safety status of a web page, before they visit the website.

Google Safe Browsing gives users tools to help protect themselves from web-based threats like malware, unwanted software, and social engineering. We are best known for our warnings, which users see when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites or download dangerous files. We also provide other tools, like the Site Status Tool, where people can check the current safety status of a web page (without having to visit it).

We host this tool within Google’s Safe Browsing Transparency Report. As with other sections in Google’s Transparency Report, we make this data available to give the public more visibility into the security and health of the online ecosystem. Users of the Site Status Tool input a webpage (as a URL, website, or domain) into the tool, and the most recent results of the Safe Browsing analysis for that webpage are returned...plus references to troubleshooting help and educational materials.

We’ve just launched a new version of the Site Status Tool that provides simpler, clearer results and is better designed for the primary users of the page: people who are visiting the tool from a Safe Browsing warning they’ve received, or doing casual research on Google’s malware and phishing detection. The tool now features a cleaner UI, easier-to-interpret language, and more precise results. We’ve also moved some of the more technical data on associated ASes (autonomous systems) over to the malware dashboard section of the report.

While the interface has been streamlined, additional diagnostic information is not gone: researchers who wish to find more details can drill-down elsewhere in Safe Browsing’s Transparency Report, while site-owners can find additional diagnostic information in Search Console. One of the goals of the Transparency Report is to shed light on complex policy and security issues, so, we hope the design adjustments will indeed provide our users with additional clarity.

How To Properly Use Schema Markup For Local Business?

✔ Sohel Parvez March 29, 2017 Comment

How To Use Schema Markup For Local Business?

How To Properly Implement Schema Markup For Local Business Website To Improve Search Visibility?

Today I Came Across Quora and Found a Question About How To Use Schema Markup For Plumber and HVAC Business Website To Improve SEO?

I answered the question and I thought It would be great, If I publish my answer here at my Blog.

Google's search result pages support Semantic Markup that allows local business owners to provide information about their business by using schema.org vocabulary. By providing with a mix of required, recommended and optional properties with values for the https://schema.org/LocalBusiness class, a business can now provide Google with information about things like the business's name, address, telephone number, physical location and hours of operation in a machine readable way.

This also called structured data markup, and can be eligible to appear in two categories of Google Search features:

Rich Results Snippet: Structured data for things like recipes, articles, and videos can appear in Rich Cards, as either a single element or a list of items. Other kinds of structured data can enhance the appearance of your site in Search, such as with Breadcrumbs, or a Sitelinks Search Box.

Google Knowledge Graph Cards: If you're the authority for certain content, Google can treat the structured data on your site as factual and import it into the Knowledge Graph, where it can power prominent answers in Search and across Google properties. Knowledge Graph cards appear for authoritative data about organizations, and events. Movie reviews, and movie/music play actions, while based on ranking, can also appear in Knowledge Graph cards once they are reconciled to Knowledge Graph entities.

Google has supported the provision of local business information with schema.org since April 08, 2014, but this is the first time they've published prescribed property specifications for Local Business.

You can provide structured data markup in your HTML and AMP pages. Google Support Following Structured Data Markup Formats:

Microdata: Microdata is a WHATWG HTML specification used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. Search engines, web crawlers, and browsers can extract and process Microdata from a web page and use it to provide a richer browsing experience for users.

JSON-LD (Google Recommended Format): JavaScript notation separate from the body of the HTML itself. Markup is placed inside a script tag in the head of the HTML page. The markup does not have to be interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event. Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page's contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.

RDFa: RDFa (or Resource Description Framework in Attributes) is a W3C Recommendation that adds a set of attribute-level extensions to HTML, XHTML and various XML-based document types for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. The RDF data-model mapping enables its use for embedding RDF subject-predicate-object expressions within XHTML documents. It also enables the extraction of RDF model triples by compliant user agents.

How To Implement Schema Markup For Local Business Website To Improve Search Visibility?

Make sure your Plumbing and HVAC Business Contact and Geographic Information is implemented correctly on your website should be the first step when it comes to implementing schema markup onto your website.

The Local Business section of https://schema.org/LocalBusiness has a variety of categories that businesses can implement as part of the footer or contact page of their website, including address, phone, fax, operating hours, and even accepted payment types.

Microdata Example For Plumbing Service

The microdata schema markup is displayed via div tags and isn’t displayed on the live version of the website. The div tags designate the information that applies to the chosen schema markup:

<div itemscope="" itemtype="”https://schema.org/Plumber”">
<span itemprop="”name”">ABC Plumber</span>
<br />
<div itemprop="”address”" itemscope="" itemtype="”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”">
<span itemprop="”streetAddress”">123 Main Street</span>
<span itemprop="”addressLocality”">Phoenix</span>,
<span itemprop="”addressRegion”">AZ</span>
<span itemprop="”postalCode”">85001</span>
</div>
Phone: <span itemprop="”telephone”">555-555-5555</span>
<a href="http://googlemapsurl.com" itemprop="”maps”">URL of Map</a>
</div>

In this example for an Plumber’s Business, the only information that is displayed on the public-facing side of the website is the information between the span and div tags. Visitors won’t be able to tell that a business is using schema unless they view your website source code.

The ‘itemprop’ in the span tag identifies the schema markup property for that piece of information. All available properties are shown on Home - schema.org in their applicable category.

JSON-LD Structured Data Example For HVAC Contractor

Below is an example of a common JSON-LD syntax which can be used to define a single HVAC Company Business Information:

Content Marketing Inbound Marketing SEO

SEO and Content Marketing with Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin

✔ Sohel Parvez March 27, 2017 Comment

Search engine optimization (SEO) has come a long way since the days of stuffing keywords and hoping for the best. Back then, it was too often used to bolster weak writing, to trick people into reading something that wasn’t worth their time.

Now, good SEO makes great content even better. We use the keywords people search for to make sure what we offer will have value—which, in turn, makes the content naturally keyword rich. Good SEO practices help people find valuable content. As such, SEO is an essential part of content marketing strategy.

Few marketers know more about the mysterious inner workings of search engine algorithms than Rand Fishkin. Rand and the team at Moz have been helping clients improve their inbound marketing for over a decade. In addition to serving clients, Rand shares his expertise with the marketing community on the Moz blog, particularly in his Whiteboard Friday series.

As Arthur C. Clarke said (sort of), “Sufficiently advanced SEO is indistinguishable from magic.” So it makes sense that Rand’s official job title is “The Wizard of Moz.”

As part of the The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Content Marketing, we asked Rand to share his thoughts on SEO’s role in content marketing strategy. Read on to learn which SEO skills all marketers should have, which opportunities marketers should capitalize on within the coming year, and more.

Ask the Expert with Wizard of Moz Rand Fishkin

LinkedIn: If you were starting a content marketing program from scratch, where would you begin?

Rand Fishkin: I'd work hard on getting to know my audience, studying my competition, and formulating a strategy around what would resonate before I ever took to the content creation itself. But, from that point, everything would be experimentation and evolution based on what I learn. Every audience and every platform are different. I suspect that, depending on how unique the new audience I was going after was from my current audience (of mostly marketers and tech folks), it might take me some serious time to get good at finding a sweet spot.

LinkedIn: In your eyes, what is the biggest difference between content marketing five years ago and content marketing today?

Rand: A lot has changed, but I think, more than anything else, the last five years have reduced loyalty and attention to almost unrecognizable levels. No one subscribes to just a few feeds or just a few accounts on social media. No one's messages have a shot at reaching 60 or 70% of their audience—even the audience that's opted in and said "I want to see what you're sharing." All of the social networks have substantially reduced reach. Email deliver-ability and open rates continue to shrink. RSS readers are barely alive anymore. Earning your audience's attention five years ago was relatively easy (or at least, much easier) if they'd already connected themselves to you. Today, that advantage is gone—a subscriber doesn't mean what it used to, and I doubt it ever will again.

Every new message you want to send will have to pierce the cacophony of noise that overwhelms us in the digital age.

LinkedIn: If you were tasked with hiring a content marketer, what is the #1 attribute you would be looking for?

Rand: Empathy. Great marketers have immense empathy for their audience. They can put themselves in their shoes, live their lives, feel what they feel, go where they go, and respond how they'd respond. That empathy comes out in content that resonates with your audience.

LinkedIn: In your opinion, what is the baseline of SEO skills content marketers need to have?

Rand: I think a content marketer actually needs more SEO skills than marketers in nearly any other position (with the obvious exception of SEO specialists themselves). That means understanding keyword research and how to do keyword targeting, how search engines generally rank pages, some of the technical aspects of SEO around indexation and crawling, how content on the same domain can boost that site's authority and ranking potential, etc. Given that content marketing isn't just about producing content, but about earning traffic to it as well, SEO should be a cornerstone of any content marketer's repertoire.

LinkedIn: What current SEO opportunities will content marketers be glad they acted upon two years from now?

Rand: First, better content > more content. This is one that's tough because A) many teams and managers and clients still want a certain number of pieces rather than aiming for fewer pieces of higher quality and B) quantity is how content marketers get their reps in—it's how we practice our art and get better at it.

The reason this matters so much is that engines are starting to learn which domains people prefer, to put those domains in front of them more and more. If you fall behind this curve, and a substantive portion of your content doesn't interest, excite, or engage visitors, you could quickly find yourself in a negative spiral of a feedback loop that lowers your aggregate rankings long term.

Second, schema and rich snippets. This one's obvious because it not only drives up clickthrough rates today, but is likely to have more and more influence and opportunity over time. If you get good at it now, you can expect a string of returns.

Finally, link outreach and link-earning content. Many of us keep hearing how link building is dead, and it's something I've said myself. But the need for links is not dead, and it doesn't even appear that links are getting less correlated with high rankings. So links are still something we need, but classic, old-school, manipulative and low-quality link building is diminished if not gone. Thus, we need to produce content that naturally earns links, and content that's likely to earn links once we do the right kinds of outreach. Then we need to do that outreach!

The best part is that if you get good at link earning and link outreach now, you'll rank and earn visibility and those links will compound and earn you more and more rankings over time.

Thanks to Rand for carving out time to talk with us. You can follow him @randfish and find more of his always awesome content on the Moz blog.

Google+ Local Local SEO SEO News

Again Google Local 3-Pack Makeover!

Unknown March 26, 2017 Comment

Google continues to update the display for local search results in the Local Pack by removing the website, directions and call buttons from listings, and replacing with an image.

Over the past six months we have seen numerous tests in the pack display. Today we are seeing a widespread (re) appearance of the snack pack type display that shows images instead of the click to call icon.

Previously this display was exclusive to restaurants and hotels but today (anyways) is being seen across most types of retail and service industry results. Although NOT on lawyers or doctors.

We have seen this style before but the rollout today seems more broad based. A test? The new normal?

The imagery persists across the local finder requiring at least two clicks in to get to driving directions or click to call….. the rabbit hole appears to be getting ever deeper.

Here is a comparable screen shot taken last week that shows the same search result and comparable screen :

Whether this is the new normal this week or not, it clearly demonstrates Google’s desire to:

Keep searchers at Google and
Force them into the Local finder.

This has plusses and minuses from the local business POV. It makes it harder for users to take immediate action and but it provides users with a greater range of choices from which to choose. The former hurts those ranking in the 3-pack and the latter helps all the others. What it does for any given businesses traffic is unclear.

Obviously this design offers up significantly more choices to the user and in doing so moves away from the idea of “the 3 best” companies that is implied with the 3 pack. If this were tied to the horizontal local finder that you now see in the Google iOS app, the idea that the listings are more equal would be even further reinforced.

Like with most recent changes this one, if it is a real rollout, seems to offer a mixed bag for the merchant and plus for Google and a few more steps for the searcher.

A Little History: Three, Ten, Seven, Three

In 2006, Google launched the One Box. In terms of local listings, this was also known as the very first “3-Pack.” This box was a blessing to many wishing to receive local business information quickly.

In January 2008, Google began to unveil its new 10 pack. The 10 pack was a godsend to many SEO professionals offering local listing services to their clients, as they could prove real ROI (“Look, you’re being highlighted by the Google Gods!”).

By October 2009, the 10 Pack was cut to the lucky 7 pack (Lucky for some, anyway!). Many local SEO professional saw this as a challenge, but not one that was too difficult to master. Google has been very straightforward from the beginning, explaining what was expected of local businesses in their online presence in order to appear on the new 7 pack.

In 2015, after a long, strong run, the 7 pack that local SEO professional have grown to love and master was replaced by what is now known as the Google Snack Pack.

How To Dominate The Google Snack Pack & Local SEO

If you don't have a Google Local SEO Strategy to Get your Business Found on Google Maps, You can follow My Local SEO Strategy. Adopting My Local SEO strategy will help your business flourish locally. Whether you are a local brick and mortar retailer or a national brand, starting at home is an excellent way to get your feet wet with Local SEO and become a local authority. I always advise clients that before you worry about your visibility around the world, take the top spot in your home city and scale up from there.

So how to do you get started? Get ahead of your competition and stay there with My 4 Phase Local SEO Strategies.

1. Full Citation Audit: The most important part of any Local SEO Campaign is ensuring NAP consistency, which is why MY every single Local SEO Campaign starts with a full audit. Without this crucial step (that most cheap competitors skip), you’d be throwing money down the drain.

I put every campaign through this extremely detailed, time intensive process. I record correct and incorrect citations, avoiding any duplication of efforts. This results in a fully detailed report, including a road map on how to repair incorrect citations most effectively.

2. Local Citations Building: Local Directory Citations are the bread and butter of Local SEO. With MY careful, manual submissions, I make sure you are in the BEST directories for your niche and market. This is not just a standard list of directories. Every single campaign is different and I leverage 3 strategies for determining which directories to submit to for that particular client.

Strategy 1: Ego directories – The most popular, traffic dense, authority directories.

Strategy 2: Competitor directories – I take your specific keywords and find out what citations are important not only in your industry but your specific SERPs.

Strategy 3: Competitor review directories – I scrape competitor review directories to find Google trusted directories.

I claim all the most important directories where possible, and provide detailed instructions for all others that should be verified by the client (some require a phone call for verification or other methods). Only live profiles are delivered, including all login info.

3. Rich Media Citations: Anyone can do plain old directory submissions, but to make them count, I beef them up with geo-tagged photos and videos, plus citations and links from rich media sources.

Video: I create straightforward, Animoto style video slideshows, with music, pictures and text. These videos are optimized to the fullest extent, including geo-meta data. I then submit these videos to the top video hosting sources, creating high authority, legit links and citations.

Photos: Here, you provide ME with 10, ideally relevant & branded images. I optimize, upload, and again optimize, including geo-meta data. I then submit these images to the top image hosting sources, creating high authority, legit links and citations.

4. Social Citations: Social Media Today brings together the news, trends and best practices around enterprise social and digital marketing. I make sure you’re ahead of the game and rounding out your citation profile by getting you awesome Social Citations.

In this phase, I create careful, manual Social Citations Submissions, adding all media and content which again results in high authority, legit links and citations. I submit to powerful & authoritative social media sites.

Need Help? Contact Me.