Search Marketing Trends

2018
A briefing on the latest organic and paid search innovations for
marketing managers to review and action

Author: Dr Dave Chaffey, Smart

Insights
Part of the Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit
 CONTENT

CONTENTS
Contents ..........................................................................................2
Introduction.....................................................................................3
Foreword..........................................................................................4
About the authors...........................................................................7
Data, analytics and reporting ...................................................... 10
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ............................. 13
Conversational UI including voice-activated search ................. 16
Mobile search Developments ...................................................... 18
Enhanced SERPS features ..........................................................22
Trust ..............................................................................................25
Link equity / web spam ................................................................27
Paid search developments ..........................................................29
Conclusion ....................................................................................32

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INTRODUCTIO

How will this guide help me and my

business?
Search marketing remains one of the most important acquisition channels for most
businesses. Achieving visibility for your target keywords and outranking competitors is
vital to the future of many businesses. This is especially the case where your audience
show their intent to buy through researching products and services, using search
engines. In other sectors with lower intent you can use content marketing to generate
demand and interest in your products by creating content relevant to audience interests.
So, to maintain and improve your competitiveness in the SERPs (Search Engine
Results Pages), businesses and marketers involved in search marketing need to
carefully track the latest changes and innovations by Google, Bing and other search
engines. This applies both to changes in organic search results which will affect your
search engine optimization (SEO) activities and the paid results if you are investing in
Google AdWords. Of the 8 trends we recommend you consider, our focus is on organic
for 7 of the 8.
The aim of this briefing is to help you review your use of the latest innovations in organic
and paid search, to help you get an edge on your competitors. It reviews the major
changes made within 2017, many of which will increase in importance in 2018. It will
give you a checklist of search marketing success factors to consider your approach
against, so you can identify changes to prioritise in your search marketing programme.

Who is the guide for?

The guide will be useful for anyone involved in managing SEO or paid search. It will
particularly help managers who are responsible for maintaining or growing leads and
sales from search marketing, but who aren’t directly involved with hands-on daily search
marketing. Managers will learn the questions they should ask their search specialists or
agencies when planning their search auditing, analysis and improvements.
For search marketers with hands-on responsibility for search, this briefing will act as a
checklist of what you’re working on and planning and it may highlight some of the latest
changes you were unaware of, including tips on tools and techniques from our eight
expert commentators.

How is the guide structured?

The guide covers the latest search marketing trends and innovations in eight sections
defined in the table of contents, starting with data and analytics, then considering
applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. We then review specific
techniques such as mobile search; conversational UI; the enhanced SERPs; trust; link
equity with a final review of paid search. When Google turned 15 years old, it
announced the launch of its Hummingbird algorithm. This was a key turning point in the

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life of the world’s largest search engine, with machine learning and artificial intelligence
INTRODUCTIO
(AI) becoming core drivers of search results.

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FOREWOR
FROM THE REPORT SPONSORS
VERTICAL LEAP

At the turn of the century, search engines were little more than directories – lists of
websites that were ranked according to a small number of popularity metrics. The job of
search marketers was never simple, but it was certainly simpler than it is today.
“Pick five or ten keywords and we will help you rank for those,” was a popular mantra.
For some SEO professionals, that is still the case. Technology has moved on, and
Google is no longer a search engine, it is a recommendation engine.

It’s all about context and intent

You may have heard a search marketer say that no two search results are the same.
What appears on a search results page (both in Bing and Google) depends on the
context of the search and the intent of a user.
Understanding context answers these
questions:

þ Where is the user and what device are they using?

þ Does the user specify any locality or qualifying words?
þ Has the user carried out a previous related search?

This last point was a key feature announced with Hummingbird. You can search for one
thing and then carry out a related second search to get a contextual answer. This is
good for users (getting them the information they are looking for with minimal effort), it is
also good for the machine learning element of the search engine.
The difference between location of user and specification of the search term is
important, especially when it comes to paid search marketing. You can target people in
Glasgow for property sales, but what if people in Bristol or Portsmouth want to find a
property in Glasgow?
Understanding intent answers these
questions:

þ Does the user have a history with the searched-for topic?

þ Is the user looking to buy a product or find out how to do something?
þ Is the search urgent?
If you are on the move on an Android or iOS phone, trying to find a local business, you
probably want a map and an address. If you are sat in an office searching for a
company by name, the results are probably going to include the official website, a
Wikipedia link, review sites and other things that are less time-sensitive.

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FOREWORD FROM THE REPORT SPONSORS VERTICAL

Search marketing requires objectivity and scale

If search engines display different results to people based on a wide variety of contexts
and intents, how do search marketers optimise their exposure?
The answer is to switch from subjectivity to objectivity, operating at scale using data
science, machine learning and AI.
The old-fashioned subjective approach was to pick the search terms for which you want
to appear. The objective approach is to not assume you know what your users are
looking for, gather as much data as possible on the kinds of things they do look for, then
use technology to work across those.
Instead of a search campaign that focuses on 10-20 keywords, you can be optimising
your visibility and traffic across thousands or tens of thousands of search queries.

More than humanly possible

Only machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) can help search marketers keep up
with their workload. With never-ending analysis needed on masses of ever-increasing
data, you would have to be super-human to cope.
The digital universe grows 40 per cent each year – humans don’t have the capacity to
handle that. We have finite energy, we are overwhelmed by data expansion and the
need for more analysis and measurement of transaction details, performance metrics,
and profit forecasts. The answer is not more people. It is machine learning and AI.
PwC reported that highly data-driven companies are three times more likely to make
better big decisions. At Vertical Leap, we developed Apollo Insights to apply machine
learning capability to our clients’ search marketing campaigns. We can analyse a
wealth of data and improve our decision-making capability with the actionable insights
that Apollo Insights discovers.
Most SEO teams spend 75% of their time collating data from different systems and
analysing metrics, leaving 25% to implement the actions. Apollo Insights allows us to flip
that on its head - performing a lot of the analysis for our specialists so they can devote
more time on action.
Another factor to consider is human fatigue – machines can do the same thing
repetitively, in fact multiple things simultaneously, without getting tired or bored. They
don’t need food or breaks.
Imagine analysing every page of your website by checking every backlink and every
query against every page. Now imagine doing that EVERY WEEK. Add to that the
filtering of data to spot the opportunities for growth. That’s more than is humanly
possible. With robots, algorithms and AI, we can operate at scale, making sure our
focus is not too narrow.
Machine learning and AI will make the difference to search marketing. It will be a robo
analyst that performs the time consuming, repetitive tasks that humans can only do less
efficiently or more slowly. Audits, link analysis and keyword gap analysis are all
examples of tasks that could be delegated to a machine, liberating the search marketer
to get on with the valuable work – creativity and implementation. With Apollo Insights’
help, we now work at a scale that would previously have been impossible.

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FOREWORD FROM THE REPORT SPONSORS VERTICAL

This is the future for search marketing

We’ll be hearing a lot about automation, AI and machine learning. There are already
discussions about whether search marketing can be completely automated.
Many of the things we do manually may be replaced by, and done more effectively, by
robots, but by then we will have evolved further. Search engines will evolve, user
behaviour will be different, the way we seek out information will change – the marketers
will need to change with it and the only way to keep up will be to look for algorithmic
enhancement.
Steve Masters, Services Director, Vertical
Leap

LinkedIn |
Twitter

About Vertical Leap

Vertical Leap is the most effective search agency in the UK. We leverage data science
and machine learning combined with experience and expertise to dig deeper, achieve
more and operate at a scale that is at least 4x the capability of our nearest competitor.
Our Apollo Insights technology ensures that no stone is ever left unturned when it
comes to your search marketing campaign. It collects everything that could possibly be
known about your website, your wider online presence, your competitors and your
overall market. It combines, verifies and analyses all this data to provide both
prescriptive and predictive insights that identify all the opportunities and threats that you
are facing. It is infused with artificial intelligence that provides our search specialists
with a level of analysis that would simply not be possible manually; more than humanly
possible.
It means that we spend more time implementing a finely targeted set of activities that
are quantitatively proven to get the greatest impact. We spend more time on the details
that will yield the greatest results. We spend more time on what matters most – your
business.
For over 15 years, we have been leading the way in search marketing, pioneering
innovative techniques that keep our customers ahead of their competitors. Our
customers range from SMEs to enterprise-level, including the likes of P&O, Harvester,
Ordnance Survey, Foyles and University of East Anglia.
We are part of the Sideshow group; an independent group of 170 staff with an annual
turnover of £15m and offices in Portsmouth, London and Bournemouth. We are a RAR
top
100 agency and a Premier Google
Partner.

Vertical Leap. Search marketing that delivers more than humanly

possible.

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FOREWORD FROM THE REPORT SPONSORS VERTICAL

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and content director of the

digital marketing management advice site Smart Insights.
He is the author of 5 bestselling books on Ecommerce
including Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation
and Practice which are used by MBA students and
marketing professional worldwide. Dave is recognised
by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50
marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the
future of marketing.
Dave has advised on SEO since he created his first site in 1997 when Altavista was
the leading search engine before switching his attention to Google in ’99 onwards.
He later launched and delivered SEO training courses for the Chartered Institute
of Marketing, was the tutor on the Econsultancy Advanced SEO course and also
created the original Econsultancy Best Practice guide to SEO. Today his main SEO
focus is working with the Smart Insights team to improve organic search results for
our site which generates nearly 80% of its 1/2 million visits a month through SEO,
plus editing our premium guides, elearning and analysis spreadsheets for Smart
Insights members.

About Smart Insights

Smart Insights is a learning platform that helps our 150,000 active members and
premium subscribers in over 100 countries to increase their digital leads and sales.
Our members Plan, Manage and Optimize their digital marketing activities by
applying the actionable advice in our planning templates, guides and interactive
elearning tools. Free members can download our free guides and benchmark their
digital capability in our Toolkits covering all key digital marketing activities including
Digital Transformation, Digital Experience Management, Marketing Automation,
Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, B2B Marketing, Ecommerce,
International Marketing and Agency Growth.

The Smart Insights SEO toolkit

This free sample trends guide will introduce you to some key issues for getting
better results from SEO and how to structure how you manage it.
For more practical recommendations, Smart Insights premium members can apply
the other resources in our SEO toolkit in the members’ area boost their SEO. We
recommend you improve results by:
þ Scoring your capability using our interactive benchmarking tool which gives you a
score for 7 areas of SEO and then recommends where to focus

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ABOUT THE

þ Auditing your keyword effectiveness with our gap analysis toolkit that pulls in data
from Google Analytics and the Search Console
þ Downloading the in-depth guide to SEO, which goes into the detail you need to
get better results from technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-site SEO and content
marketing.
þ Complete the E-learning course which takes you through key areas to improve your
SEO, with each section marked off as you complete it
þ Download the SEO checklist for more details to ensure you’ve got everything

We also have a toolkit for paid best practices which explains how to get the most
from Google AdWords and other paid media and both include free guides to
avoiding search marketing mistakes:
þ View Smart Insights SEO toolkit
þ View Smart Insights paid media toolkit

About our Expert commentators

We asked 8 commentators to add further detailed interpretation and advice on
the trends we have identified. Many thanks to them for sharing their experience,
insights and recommendations!
Dawn Anderson
Dawn is a lecturer and researcher in digital and search
marketing and an International SEO Consultant, with her agency
Move It Marketing. She has been a UK Search Awards and
Northern Digital Awards judge and she’s a specialist in Technical
SEO and SEO Developer practices, including crawl optimisation
and architectural SEO. @dawnieando LinkedIn

James Gurd
James is the owner of Digital Juggler, Ecommerce + Digital
Marketing consultancy & co-host of #Ecomchat weekly ecommerce
discussion on Monday. He has helped companies like A&N Media,
Sweaty
Betty and Smythson to manage RFP/ITT proposals and been a
lead consultant on high profile projects for Econsultancy, Salmon
and Greenwich Consulting. @JamesGurd LinkedIn
Matt Janaway

Matt is a successful Digital Marketer and Entrepreneur based in

Nottingham, UK. He is now Head of Digital for a leading UK
retailer, managing a team of digital marketers and content writers
as well as running a web design agency, a digital marketing
agency and an agency offering consulting and training. Matt
contributes to some major online marketing websites as well as
blogging advice on SEO and digital marketing mattjanaway.co.uk.
@MJanaway LinkedIn

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ABOUT THE

Steve Masters
Steve is the services director for search marketing agency Vertical
Leap, where he has worked since 2012. He moved from magazine
publishing (in London and Johannesburg) before moving to online
publishing in 1996 as web editor for Computing. Roles before joining
Vertical Leap include MSN UK, Jackpot Joy, Poker Heaven, Age UK,
Time Warner providing expertise in all aspects of digital marketing
and online publishing. @masterstips LinkedIn
David Sayce
David is a digital marketing consultant with 20 years of
experience. He helps create and assist businesses with the
implementation of integrated marketing strategies with unique
insights on how businesses measure up against.
@dsayce LinkedIn

Alexandra Tachalova
Alexandr has worked in digital marketing for over 6 years. She is
a Digital Marketing consultant, helping digital businesses to open
new markets and boost sales. Alexandra is a frequent speaker,
and founder of online digital marketing event, DigitalOlympus.net.
@AlexTachalova LinkedIn

Hannah Thorpe
Hannah is Managing Director of White.net a digital marketing agency
based in London, that focuses on SEO, PPC, Content Marketing and
Digital PR. Hannah has experience speaking at conferences and
events, such as BrightonSEO and SearchLondon, as well as blogging
for multiple other websites in the industry, including Econsultancy.
@hannahjthorpe LinkedIn

Charlie Williams
Search veteran and content evangelist, Charlie Williams works
as part of the Screaming Frog team. A regular industry writer
and speaker, Charlie loves to share ideas on his specialties of
content strategy, creative campaigns, technical SEO and keyword
research. @pagesauce LinkedIn

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1 DATA, ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

In our view, success in SEO has always gone to those businesses and their agencies
who have the best data-driven processes and people to give attention to the detail
needed to compete. Google has gradually improved their insight data sources and tools
to help businesses identify new opportunities and fix problems.

KEY STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION 1: CREATE AN INSIGHT-DRIVEN

SYSTEM TO ALERT YOU FOR SEO PROBLEMS AND OPPORTUNITIES.
Review how your business or agency can improve your data visualization and
alerts to identify search threats/problems/opportunities by harnessing data APIs
(Application Programme Interface).

Smaller businesses can work with insight sources like Google’s Keyword Planner,
Campaign Planner, Analytics and Search Console (GSC) to help identify
improvements. These services have improved through 2017 and we hope to see larger
data volumes and longer time intervals than the current 90 days in GSC. Although
some have proclaimed (and Google has advised) that keyword analysis is futile, given
Google’s advances in personalization and semantic analysis, SEO still demands you
know which keywords you are targeting...
To take one example, in the laser eye surgery sector, searches for ‘treatment’ related
terms exceed those for surgery by ten to one, so that should inform your content
strategy and reporting to drive visits through paid and natural search. We agree with
the data-driven approach espoused by Charlie Williams:
“Use data from your analytics package to see what your audience wants from
you, such as internal search data, and which topics and formats convert and
hold your audience’s attention the best. Use the Search Analytics report from
Search Console (using the API where you can), to give you insight into topics
that Google thinks are relevant for you, even if you are not ranking highly yet,
and real search queries your audience uses. This is hugely powerful data to
direct you on where you can take your content - data not nearly enough SEOs
make the most of”.

BEST PRACTICE TIP 1

Use a keyword ‘gap analysis’ to define opportunity.

You can make the case and review the opportunity to attract more visits
by reviewing a defined set of keywords and qualifiers against actual visits to a
site.

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1
5 DATA, ANALYTICS
ENHANCED SERPSAND
FEATURES

Ask your team, consultant or agency for their approach to gap analysis or use spread-
sheet-based tools like the Smart Insights Gap Analysis1 to explore your opportunities
Steve Masters of Vertical Leap cautions that the gap between page content and user
queries is a common problem at site-wide level. He says:
“The way companies write about themselves is often at odds with what
customers search for. A gap analysis should seek to align the language and
content of the website with the language of the searcher.”

KEY STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION 2: ENSURE CONTENT

OPTIMISATION HAPPENS AS PART OF A PLANNED PROGRAMME.
Treat your content assets as a portfolio as shown below. Work to
improve problematic content and update and surface performing content more
prominently in the customer journey. This article3 gives an example of how
HubSpot has used ‘Historical optimization’ to more than double the number
of monthly leads generated by the old posts they have optimized, they
also increased monthly organic search views of old posts, optimized by
an average of
106%.
2

As part of your SEO and AdWords programmes, we recommend prioritising

improvements by thinking of your content as a portfolio of pages of different types,
which contribute different amounts of value to the business based on their popularity
and conversion rates. Content optimization is about making your content work better for
you, by reviewing content effectiveness using the type of analysis below (we now plot
this in Data Studio using a visualization technique that wasn’t possible in Google
Analytics) and then making improvements for SEO and conversion purposes.

1
Smart Insights Gap Analysis spreadsheet and monthly RACE reporting dashboard
2
HubSpot: The Blogging Tactic No One Is Talking About: Optimizing the
Past

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1
5 DATA, ANALYTICS
ENHANCED SERPSAND
FEATURES

An improvement we have seen in rolling out in 2017 are data visualisation tools such
as Google’s Data Studio1, Microsoft’s Power BI and Tableau. These tools enable
superior, more professional reports that show the channel and goals deltas (e.g.
month-on-month, year-on-year changes) needed to manage performance much more
clearly than was practical in Google Analytics.
Another benefit of these tools is that you can use different API data sources to pull in
and combine different data. At Smart Insights, we have adopted Data Studio for our
monthly and weekly trading reports alongside. However, for more detailed analysis, for
our members we offer Google Sheets reports at a URL level which access the Google
Analytics APIs.

1
Google Data Studio

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2
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND
MACHINE LEARNING

We see Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of the biggest trends for marketing in 2018
which will give many opportunities across the customer lifecycle, for businesses to
improve the efficiency of their marketing processes3. For marketing applications of AI,
we recommend you review opportunities for applying Machine Learning, which involves
analysis of historical data to identify future improvements.

Within search marketing, the applications of AI follow on naturally from our first section;
data-driven improvements. While you will get ‘quick wins’ and drive improvements from
the type of manual analysis of multiple data sources we mentioned, this gets less
practical for enterprise sites. Think of a retail site with tens or hundreds of thousands of
product pages for all the SKU product variants. As organic, AdWords and other traffic
sources vary through time, manual analysis and optimisation becomes impractical.
Machine learning is key here, with the ability to operate at large scale with a
consistency that people just can’t do.
Steve Masters shows the power of these techniques:

“AI and machine learning will make a huge difference to search marketing. It
will be a robo-analyst that performs the time consuming, repetitive tasks that
humans can only do less efficiently or more slowly, liberating the search
marketer to get on with the valuable work – creativity and implementation”.

3
Smart Insights: 15 applications of AI and Machine Learning

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2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE

KEY STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION 3: CONSIDER YOUR OPTIONS

FOR APPLYING MACHINE LEARNING TO IDENTIFY IMPROVEMENTS.
New Machine Learning options are becoming available as the technology
matures, review whether you can apply these to identify and manage
optimisations, particularly if you manage an ‘enterprise’ site.

For example, Vertical Leap’s Apollo Insights4 combines big data with intelligent
algorithms and machine learning to deliver actionable insights that will not only boost
your search marketing performance but also save you hundreds of hours in wasted
manual analysis. It does so at a scale that would be impossible to do manually and
produces actionable insights from the vast quantities of data that it harvests, verifies,
refines and analyses.
Steve Masters of Vertical Leap sees the opportunity of harnessing AI in this
way:

“We should teach robots to do our jobs, and encourage them to learn from the
analysis and insights they compile. Marketing professionals I speak to have a
handful of basic questions they want answered. ‘Where should I spend
money? How do I target the right people? What return will I get?’
The only way to answer those questions is through comprehensive trial and
error analysis, creating hundreds or thousands of benchmarks so that you can
draw insights. The only way to do all that is by creating robots that can make
their own decisions and draw their own conclusions.”
Another example of applying Machine Learning to assist with search marketing is
Google’s recently updated Analytics Intelligence5, a set of features in Google Analytics
that use machine learning to help users better understand and act on their analytics
data. It now offers marketers the opportunity to ask natural language questions, which
is an example of the conversational UI we cover in the next section.
Analytics Intelligence also includes machine learning capabilities in its features like
automated insights, smart lists, smart goals, and session quality. Automated
insights can show spikes or drops in metrics like revenue or session duration, tipping
you off to issues that you may need to investigate further. Insights may also present
opportunities to improve key metrics by following specific recommendations. For
example, a chance to improve bounce rate by reducing page loading time, or the
potential to boost conversion rate by adding a new keyword to your AdWords
campaign.

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2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE
4
Vertical Leap’s Apollo Insights
5
Google: Analytics Intelligence: Launch blog post and Support

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2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND MACHINE

Although these new AI options are exciting and are the future, we urge caution in
adopting them. For example, although tools like smart goals or lists can help smaller
businesses or non-experts who don’t have the skills or time to implement them
manually, setting these up manually in line with your known business goals rather than
Google’s monetisation goals, is still best for larger businesses who will need the skills
and should make the time!
As Steve Masters at Vertical Leap puts it…

“Search is too large and complex in scale to be managed manually if

businesses want to be effective to maximize through, particularly for
Ecommerce and large-scale enterprise sites”.

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3
CONVERSATIONAL UI
INCLUDING VOICE-ACTIVATED
SEARCH

We’re seeing more examples of Conversational User Interfaces on different devices.

Smart Insights and Vertical Leap see this as significant for search marketers since it
represents a shift from traditional keyboard-based searching. In this section, we’ll touch
on several themes related to conversational UI

Voice-activated search and connected

devices
This is part of an evolution we can track from when Apple and Google introducing
voice assistants on their smartphone operating system. Now we have voice
interactions through the likes of Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and
Amazon Alexa/Echo. As 2017 came to a close, Google announced its Home voice
controlled devices joining Amazon Echo, Apple HomeKit/HomePod devices and
Microsoft Homehub. This is a trend across all the main digital platform providers
which will feed search queries. Google has divulged that more than 20% of
mobile queries are voice-based 6 and this will only grow, but we’re not sure it will
grow to the extent that 50% of all searches will be voice-based by 2020, which is an
oft-quoted, poorly attributed comScore quote.

Rankbrain
Google introduced its AI-powered Rankbrain in 2015 to better answer ambiguous
queries or those it hadn’t encountered before, both of which are potentially more likely
to occur through voice-based search. It has evolved so that it now impacts more
queries in different ways which may be sector-specific. This recent article7 quotes Rand
Fishkin of Moz explaining that RankBrain seems to be weighing various ranking factors
differently, based on the industry, user intent and so on, implied by the query. He says:
“It’s no longer the case, as it was probably five, six years ago, that one set of
fixed inputs … governs every single query. Because of this weighing system,
some queries are going to demand signals in different proportion to other
ones.
Sometimes you’re going to need fresh content. Sometimes you need
very in-depth content. Sometimes you need high engagement. Sometimes you
don’t. Sometimes you will need tons of links with anchor text. Sometimes you
will not. Sometimes you need high authority to rank for something. Sometimes
you don’t. So that’s a different model”.
This also has an influence on how you create content. We asked Matt Janaway about
the impact of Rankbrain and he recommends that:

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 “While it seems to be common practice to match pages to specific
keyword

6
Think With Google: What Marketers Should Expect from Search in the Future
7
Search Engine Land: 5 ways SEO experts say you should optimize for RankBrain

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3 CONVERSATIONAL UI INCLUDING VOICE-ACTIVATED SEARCH

queries, it is in fact very important to diversify the use of semantic content

around your target keywords, rather than a direct approach to using
keywords. Semantic keywords offer the opportunity to target users who may
search in a different way and allow Google to understand the content on the
page from multiple perspectives. With the prominence of AI and the Google
RankBrain algorithm, this approach is going to become vital if your SEO
strategy is to succeed”.
Dawn Anderson advises that brands need to be mindful of the dramatic developments
with natural language processing when crafting copy and site structures. She says:
“Natural language processing has come a long way, however copywriters need to be
aware of the limitations of technologies in anaphoric and cataphoric resolution; ‘they’,
‘he’,
‘she’, ‘we’ mean little for example”. The consequence she says is that “Search engines
still struggle to pick up on the context of text without strong cues from connecting
content and surrounding text. She advises naming entities and where possible,
structured and semi-structured markup to reinforce their meanings and importance”.

Chatbots
Chatbots have been deployed more widely through 2017 and many of these apply
artificial intelligence. This form of conversational UI makes perfect sense on
smartphones where a combination of spoken or typed questions can be combined with
prompts to select from a preferred response. The future of Chatbots looks like this to
Steve Masters:
“The chatbots that we experience today, in the marketing world, tend to be
little more than if-then decision trees, not unlike the premium rate phone
scripts of the 90s. You ask a question and it sends you a programmatic
response or set of options. With the convergence of voice interfaces,
conversational UI, AI and machine learning, chatbots will be more proactive.
“This behaviour is already possible – we see it in the Google algorithm,
which tailors its results based on context, intent and even the current news
cycle. All of this means that search marketers need to accept that users will, in
future, find their information in more ways than through a triggered search.”
Potentially, chatbots could form part of mobile landing pages from organic or paid
search. Vertical Leap has compiled these great examples from the travel industry
showing how carefully designed prompts for data, time and location minimise the need
to type8. However, in some cases Chatbots have failed to live up to the hype and have
failed to deliver great experiences for users. This is largely because companies have
been to concerned with replicating or imitating human-like interactions, when they
should be focusing on the entire selling point of conversational UI: providing a
personalised experience for users.
Facebook has recognised this and will now train Messenger bots to handle “a narrower
set of cases, so users aren’t disappointed by the limitations of automation.” However,
this is just the first generation and leading chatbots like Mindmeld, recently acquired by
Cisco, use what they call “Deep-Domain Conversational AI which employs end-to-end
measurement and analytics to ensure optimal performance across the long tail of user
interactions”.

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8
Vertical Leap 5 conversational UI lessons from the best travel bots

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3 CONVERSATIONAL UI INCLUDING VOICE-ACTIVATED SEARCH

4
MOBILE SEARCH
DEVELOPMENTS

The growth in consumer adoption of smartphones globally is arguably the biggest trend
in digital marketing in the past 5+ years which has required us to reconsider how we
use organic and paid search to reach our audiences and re-configure the experiences
we create.
We are now past the tipping point where, in many sectors (other than B2B) and
countries, mobile site visits and conversions now exceed desktop, so this requires
close attention from most businesses.
Research by Google9 has shown that the recommended average user perception of
acceptable download time is two seconds, while for the average European website it
is around eight seconds as shown below. How does your site speed compare to these
averages?

We introduce this section with this chart since it shows Google’s obsession with speed,
particularly on mobile) and how it has many initiatives to improve experience which
may

9
Google: European Mobile Speed Rankings Are In. How Does Your Site Compare?

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4 MOBILE SEARCH

harm your site if your site has poor performance. To avoid this risk, here are some of
the latest, mobile search techniques to consider.
1. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). In August 2016, Google announced that these
faster loading page formats would appear in all search results, not just News results
and so they have become more relevant for all businesses beyond publishers for who
they were most relevant initially.
So, it’s worth reviewing AMP potential in your sector including their impact on lead
generation since pop-ups aren’t permitted on smartphone by Google, so using the
novel AMP features is an option as shown in the example from Smart Insights below,
which shows our AMP page on the left with lightning symbol in mobile SERPs and the
served page with an engagement offer on the right.

You can see the importance that Google gives to AMP, since David Besbris who is
the
VP of Google Search, is also the AMP Project Lead. He
says10:

“In two years, we’ve seen the project grow from a few launch partners to
over
25 million website domains that have published more than 4 billion AMP
pages. And not only has the number of pages built with AMP grown, their
speed has too. The median time it takes an AMP page to load from Google
search is less than half a second”.
He contrasts the ½ second figure with a benchmark statistic that 53% of mobile site
visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load although site
abandons are natural regardless of load time.

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4 MOBILE SEARCH

10
AMP: Two years of user-first webpages

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4 MOBILE SEARCH

KEY STRATEGY RECOMMENDATION 4: REVIEW THE POTENTIAL

OF AMP FOR YOUR SITE AND SECTOR.
Traditionally, AMP has been most important for news and blog pages, yet these
are relevant for most sites. So why do ‘just’ 25 million sites feature AMP and
why aren’t they used on more project pages? Bebris quotes research showing
that AMP leads to a 10% increase in website traffic with a 2x increase in time
spent on page. For ecommerce websites using AMP, the study also found a
20% increase in sales conversions compared to non-AMP pages.

2. Mobile-first web crawling and index. You may remember the hype around this in
November 2016 when Google first announced it. It turned out that the hype outweighed
the impact and rollout since comments from Google suggest they are still calibrating
the process and the full roll out could happen in 2018. It reminds us to keep a focus
specifically on your visits, outcomes and rankings from smartphone visits in 2018.
When doing a technical SEO audit, it is now critical to review how both the desktop
Googlebot accesses your site content and also Google’s smartphone crawler. It’s also
worth reviewing the impact on experience. Our research shows that fewer businesses
AB test their landing pages for smartphone against desktop pages.
Charlie Williams reminds us that although most businesses now have mobile optimised
sites, it can be all too easy to neglect mobile SEO:
“SEOs are used to working on desktops, and we tend to deal with the desktop
version of our clients’ sites. But as we live in world where more searches are
done on phones, and have now been waiting over a year for the promised
mobile-first Google index, putting the mobile experience as the primary
presence makes a lot of sense. Using SEO tools and looking at the mobile
organic footprint, content, user experience and analytics first is a change in
mindset, but one many of our audiences have already made”.

BEST PRACTICE TIP 2

Segment your mobile audience in analytics to assess mobile effectiveness

Review the performance of your mobile versus desktop landing pages

and keywords in Google Search Console and Analytics and then address areas
where mobile seems to be under-performing.

3. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and JavaScript. Google has continued to ‘push’
the future importance of PWAs11. Google explains the benefits of PWAs and contrasts
them to mobile apps like this:

“It’s not hard to see why leading brands would embrace PWAs. They realize
the need to provide the best mobile experience for users—regardless of
platform.

11
ThinkwithGoogle: Why a progressive web app might be right for you and your brand

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4 MOBILE SEARCH

PWAs eliminate friction by using the web to deliver app-level experiences.

There’s no need for consumers to find apps in the app store and install them—
they can just navigate to the site on any browser, including Chrome and
Safari. PWA techniques focus on reliably loading faster (even working offline)
and using less data”.
It’s worth considering the potential linkage between PWAs and AMP since AMP Pages
can use many PWA features on their own, as long as they’re served from your site’s
domain as opposed to an AMP cache. This means that PWA features won’t kick in
when consuming an AMP Page within a platform like Google or Bing, but they will on
the onward journey, or if users navigate to your AMP pages directly. This developer
article explores the options for these to work together12.

12
AMP Project: Combine AMP with Progressive Web Apps

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5 ENHANCED SERPS FEATURES

The Search Results Pages (SERPs) are now almost unrecognizable from even 5 years
ago since the list of blue links and snippets are now much richer, offering options to
many new types of visuals and data to support searchers. David Sayce explains the
potential:
“For me, the featured SERPs have been an exciting new technique to draw
visitors to websites. These can take a number of forms such as a paragraph
or list and appear at the top of the results under the Ads”. He notes though,
that: “However these are later stage priorities for SEO as it is vital there is a
well structured and well ranking website already in place”.
Take a look at the Mozcast Features13 report to gain an idea of the opportunities for
getting visibility. This breakdown is tracked across 10,000 top queries across sectors.

13
Mozcast Features

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5 ENHANCED SERPS

BEST PRACTICE TIP 3

Use Mozcast features to review your visibility for different results formats
in the search.

The importance of these different features is sector specific, for example

reviews are mainly relevant for retail, travel and hospitality and although
images are important, they are more important for some products than others.
So, review the features your competitors are using successfully for the target
keywords in your sector.

Sayce recommends that marketers

“look for opportunities for the various key phrases you are targeting to see
what is already appearing and check out the ‘People also Ask’ feature for more
ideas. The key to snippets is being concise, develop a complete answer in
around 50-80 words, or a list with 5-6 items”. He also shows how tools can
help: “My personal favourite tool when working with featured snippets is
SEMrush, this allows you to track where you are visible and also help you find
new opportunities”.
The Mozcast data confirms what Hannah Thorpe explains:

“There’s now an increasing number of types of knowledge graph types, and

enhance features in the SERPs – all of which are designed to provide quick
answers to users. Whether it’s the development of the local pack or more
intuitive conversational search; in 2018 it’s going to be even more important to
be optimising for these result formats”.
As you would expect, after AdWords, Knowledge Graph panels (common for brand
searches and for famous people) and images are most important, occurring in more
than 50% of searches. Other, more recent text-based features like Related Questions
and Featured Snippets (also known as Quick Summary or Answer boxes) are now vital
in many sectors, particularly in information queries such as needed by business-to-
busi- ness marketing.
James Gurd suggests these practical tips to help gain visibility for these new SERPs
features AND voice search:
þ Review how you need to update your content strategy to align with voice or
natural language query-based search. For example, handling more question
based searches like “What’s the best hoover for pet hair” instead of a search
query like “pet hoover” (I like to use alternative keyword research tools like
https://answerthe- public.com/ to help me unearth question-based search
opportunities).
þ Identify content gaps where voice-based search intent isn’t adequately satisfied
by existing content, and create new content to improve on-page engagement and
CTR. Then review existing landing page content to assess how fit for purpose it is
at answering natural language queries and questions.
þ If local search is important to your organisation, then you should explore how to

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5 ENHANCED SERPS

take advantage of the Q&A feature for Google My Business. It’s a new feature14,
so untapped by many, but offers a way to improve the usefulness and relevance
of content associated with your local business listing.
þ It’s initially rolling out on Android Google Maps only but will become available on all
mobile browsers soon.

14
Blumenthals: Google Rolling Out Questions and Answers

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6 TRUST

Google has acted to improve browser security through its adoption of secure HTTP. As
the Mozcast chart in the previous section shows, for popular queries, which are likely to
be popular sites, nearly three quarters of sites are secure.
James Gurd advises:

“It’s now more important than ever to be fully HTTPs site-wide. Most
browsers now visually show the user whether or not the connection is
secure, and a non-http page can trigger an insecure connection message –
not the brand perception you want to give”.
He cautions that the complexity of migrating fully to https depends on your current
platform and site architecture, but given the importance of security to customers and
the preference of search engines like Google to have an https connection, there’s a
commercial risk of lagging behind. More and more websites are adopting https and this
trend will continue, especially since most browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE,
Edge) have announced that they will only support the https protocol for HTTP2.

BEST PRACTICE TIP 4

Adopt secure HTTP if you haven’t already

The reasons are compelling, first Google has upweighted a positive ranking
signal for secure HTTP further in 2018. Second, In October 2017, Google added
warning messages in its Chrome browser for unsecure forms, which is likely to
damage conversion rates.

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6 TRUST

But trust, isn’t just about technical trust. Charlie Williams adds that he’s “also like
2018 to be a year where more brands take advantage of the opportunity to build
trust with their prospective audience. A key way to do this is through building your
reputation, and content, as an expert. Being a trusted advisor, delivering expert help,
establishing yourself as an authority - these are amazing ways in which all kinds of
sites can build a search presence”. He says that this fits in with Google’s guidance on
what they call E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) for content and
success for sites that focus on trust, from publishers to ecommerce product pages.
Hannah Thorpe reminds us of another side of trust that relates closely to the next trend;
brand trust. She recommends that you

“review metrics about on-page engagement, brand presence in the sector

and CTR, which are growing to be more influential. Links can indicate trust,
but they are not the only metric, so SEO strategies must become smarter”.
Steve Masters adds to this when he says:

“Conversion rate and click-through rate are always higher for brand terms.
The stronger a brand, the more people search for that brand, and a brand
term often signals a stronger buying signal. The challenge for companies with
weak brands is to boost awareness, and this can only be done, really, through
PR and advertising. A user searching for ‘Valentine roses’ could end up on
any site. If they search for ‘Interflora Valentine roses’, they are clearly showing
an intent to buy, as well as an intent to buy from Interflora.”

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7 LINK EQUITY / WEB SPAM

For many years, SEOs slavishly followed the latest pronouncements by Google’s head
of web spam, Matt Cutts. The latest changes to algorithm updates, like Panda and
Penguin, to improve the quality of SERPs, were analysed in depth and shared in
forums and catalogued on the Moz Change history.
However, if you look at the latest updates from Moz there are no updates for the last 10
months. What is going on? Has Moz ‘taken its eye off the ball’ or has Google stopped
announcing updates.

Well, it’s probably a bit of both. Since Matt Cutts left Google in 2016, joining the US
Government Digital Service, we have turned to new sources like John Mueller or Gary
Illyes answering questions on Google+ Webmaster Hangouts or at conferences. Yet
there does seem to be less transparency at Google to us.
This recent interview15 with Gary Illyes is wide-ranging and covers some of the latest
developments, but highlights disagreements within Google about what should be
disclosed and which features should be provided to help businesses via Google’s SEO
engineers. Here are the highlights:
þ There is a ‘Featured Snippets’ algorithm that is being actively updated, this is
important since changes to this can affect the top 10 search dynamics which can
significantly change traffic.
þ It is largely independent from Rankbrain which is also being updated to improve its

15
Search Engine Land: ‘Ask Me Anything’ with Google’s Gary Illyes at SMX East

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7 LINK EQUITY / WEB SPAM

Machine Learning, based on historic search query data.

þ The Panda ‘penalty’ is now part of the core algorithm and Google doesn’t consider
it as a penalty.
þ The Penguin algorithm is separate and caution is given about disavowing the wrong
type of site
þ Google may include more data (one year), featured snippets or voice search data
in
Search Console, but no firm commitments have been given.

Our commentators differed on their views on the future importance of links and how
Google assesses them. This commentary, from Alexandra Tachalova sharing her
experience, shows the uncertainty:
“I keep seeing that domains with spammy backlink profiles are appearing in
SERPs, staying for quite some time, and then disappearing. This means
Google hasn’t yet penalized such projects on the fly, and that’s why they’re
able to rank well for quite some time. Technically if you have the time and SEO
skills, you can analyse the ‘rising star domains’ that were able to perform well
SERPs, and see where Google is deficient. From time to time, it’s good to
review the analysis, since you need to understand why one site ranks better
than the others. Another important factor that all SEO experts should keep in
mind is that the backlink profile has to be relevant to your business niche. By
staying relevant to your industry links, you increase the quality of your backlink
profile16 and start landing referral traffic that brings potential clients onboard”.

Brand strength and the impact of PR and advertising

How to utilise your offline marketing to improve
SEO
Google seeks to recommend the most trusted, relevant content to its users. For some
time, it has used branded keyword searches and direct traffic as ranking factors. Matt
Janaway highlights the importance of this. He explains:
“We analysed hundreds of Google Analytics accounts and found a direct
correlation between the number of direct visits and the websites page
position in search results. This conclusion aligns with other recent industry
studies.”

BEST PRACTICE TIP 5

Encourage brand searches.

Matt Janaway strongly recommends understanding how offline marketing

and branding can impact your SEO performance. For example, if you run a
TV campaign, ensure you tell viewers to search on Google with your brand
name, as opposed to a generic keyword. This could indicate to Google that
your domain and brand is more authoritative.

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16
Smart Insights Backlink audit quick win guide

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8 PAID SEARCH DEVELOPMENTS

Google AdWords specialists will know that Google has a more transparent approach to
updating new AdWords features17 than for SEO, which is understandable as it directly
supports their monetisation.
Within AdWords, over the past several years we have seen a mobile-first
strategy in play where Google was seeking to protect its ad revenue as more users
adopted smartphones. Initially enhanced campaigns were deployed and more recently,
a range of ad extensions and bid adjustments have been released to give advertisers
the flexibility to serve their ads in the correct context depending on the device, user
location and previous interactions via different online placements.
At Google I/O this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced an “important shift from
a mobile-first to an AI-first world” at Google. This is reflected in the main trends in
AdWords updates we have seen through 2017, which we can expect to continue into
2018. We categorise these changes as:
1. Increased Machine Learning AI options in AdWords. For some time now Google
has sought to use analysis of historical ad data to better inform decisions. Sometimes
these changes have been to support less sophisticated advertisers, for example
optimising based on ‘Smart Goals’ or ‘Smart Bidding’ where the advertiser hasn’t set up
their own business goals or completed their own bid adjustments. In other cases, the
power of Machine Learning can be used on large scale campaigns to improve ROI, for
example travel search site Trivago used Smart Display campaigns (which optimised
targeting, bidding and over 25,000 ads on the display network).
2. Revised and new extensions. In 2017 Google’s Shopping extension which is
critical to retailers has been revised. Linking to real-world local retail outlets through the
‘affiliate location extension’ has also been released in 3 countries so will roll out to other
markets in 2018.
3. Improved experience and insight. AdWords practitioners will have seen the recent
revised user interface. Improved insights, such as the ‘average time to convert’ report,
are aimed at helping advertisers understand how their ad programmes fit with
consumer behaviour, which is often complex, involving multiple interactions and
devices through time. The Mobile Landing page report helps here too. More support for
testing through Campaign Experiments supports marketers to ‘test and learn’. Finally,
the launch by Google of its new attribution tool in 2018 deserves special mention.

Bing are pursuing many of these innovations in PPC too, if Bing is important for your
audience read this interview with James Murray of Bing18.

17
New Google AdWords features
18
Smart Insights article Major trends to inform your search marketing actions in 2018 according to James
Murray of Bing

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8
5 PAID SEARCH
ENHANCED SERPS FEATURES

Google Shopping
This has grown in importance for retailers. Analysis by Merkle in the US shows that in
Q4
2017, Shopping accounts for nearly 20% of all non-brand retail searches, so optimising
this is crucial for retailers. Changes to Google Shopping will also be worth keeping a
close eye on, in 2018, for the ramifications of the Google Antitrust fine in Europe which
has recently seen them change the way their ads are displayed, to potentially give more
prominence to other shopping engines in comparison. This tweet shows Google’s
limited results so far.

Google Attribution
You may have used Google’s Attribution modelling tool or reviewed Assisted
Conversions within Google Analytics. Watch out for a new attribution tool in 2018.
Google Attribution is currently in Beta so we can anticipate that it will be rolled out in
2018.
This is particularly significant for AdWords, other paid media and social media since it
will help businesses review and credit upper- and mid-funnel interactions, i.e. where
someone searches for a generic product or service or follows a social share or ad and
doesn’t convert immediately, but on a later site visit, potentially on a different device,
perhaps through a brand search or URL type-in.
Google Attribution is the simplified version of Attribution 360, a paid enterprise-level
service whose features are based on Google’s acquisition of multichannel attribution
model solution Adometry. It integrates with Google Analytics, Google AdWords and
DoubleClick Search and doesn’t require any additional site tagging.

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8
5 PAID SEARCH
ENHANCED SERPS FEATURES

Using Attribution helps ensure AdWords isn’t treated in isolation. Steve Masters
highlights the importance of integrating AdWords and SEO:
“SEO and PPC complement each other. One cannot be done in the absence
of the other. I like to explain it using the analogy of PR versus advertising in
print publishing. You can send a press release to a newspaper or magazine
and you have no say over whether it is used, how it is used or where it will
appear in the publication (this is organic SEO). Or you can pay for an
advertisement – you can design the page, specify where it will appear and
when (this is PPC).
“The other difference between PPC and SEO is that, with PPC, you decide
where someone will land when they click on your ad. With SEO, you are at
the mercy of the search engine. With PPC you have control, with SEO you
have influence.”

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CONCLUSION

The eight key trends within this report all point to search marketing being a vital,
dynamic part of marketing today, regardless of your business and the industry sector
you work in.
At Smart Insights, we believe that success comes to those businesses who give search
marketing the resources it warrants to grow the volume and quality of their organic and
paid search. This requires a strategic, insight-driven approach put in place, with their
agencies, the analysis, tools and review processes to continuously monitor, test and
learn. The advent and implementation of AI and machine learning promise to support
this insight-driven approach for those businesses which embrace them.
Regular auditing is essential, as one of our commentators, David Sayce points
out:

‘Whether it is advice for 2018 or 2008, I still believe in the power and the
benefits available from a good audit. Okay perhaps the word ‘audit’ does not
have the fun and excitement to it that other areas of digital marketing have, but
for me this is the key foundation point for search marketing. I have never
completed one that had not lead to visible improvements for the business,
often over and above current marketing campaigns!
Decide what areas to focus on and consider the return on the investment, all
too often I have found audits uncover issues that are simple to fix and have a
significant impact on improving business. With any new client, an audit is often
one of the very first steps suggested and one that can see the greatest return.
The cost of an audit will depend on whether it’s for an information based site or
an Ecommerce based site. It’s also going to depend on the size and complexity
of situation as well.
Often audits to identify improvements are limited by specialists to one activity like user
experience, content marketing, SEO or paid search. Our recommendation is that
modern marketers deploy 360-degree content audits19 which review the impact of all
of these aspects of audience engagement including search marketing in generating
value for visitors and the business.
We’re keen to learn from your questions and opinions of what works for SEO. Do join
our free members’ Facebook group to ask your questions or share your experiences
related to this guide or other digital marketing opportunities.
Dave Chaffey, December
2017

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19
Smart Insights: 10 reasons why you need a 360 degree content audit

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