Customers overwhelmingly rely on a company’s content for purchasing decisions. One survey found that most people prefer content over social media, reviews or contact with a sales rep.

So, how can you ensure your content marketing makes the right impact? 

Dig into the following information to discover the benefit of promoting engagement over pushing sales in your written content. Plus, learn how to combine the two strategies successfully.

Key takeaways:

• Promoting customer engagement is a better long-term content marketing strategy but requires patience and consistency.
• Pushing sales can be good for quick wins but has a lower return on investment.
• Companies often need good data and an outside perspective to create content marketing strategies that strike the right balance of encouraging engagement and asking directly for sales.

1. Realize that good content marketing is like diet and exercising

Staying healthy as a business is similar to taking care of physical health. Most of us recognize that getting healthy (whether losing weight, gaining muscle or something else) requires patience and long-term commitment for lasting success.

Your content marketing is similar. Pushing sales is good for short wins that are rarely sustainable on their own (like a crash diet).

Pushing can be effective when you need a rapid boost or want quick data. However, engagement through “pull marketing” is the way to go if you want enduring success.

You must provide consistent long-form content that educates, informs and entertains your target audience to draw them in and convert them to loyal followers. At the same time, you need intelligent SEO strategies that keep you visible on search engines.

In other words, good content marketing that promotes engagement is a “healthy lifestyle” for your business. Your business needs a steady program of valuable content to attract high-value customers that engage with your brand.

Dig deeper: The art of natural funneling: How to lead your readers without forced CTAs

2. Understand what consumer engagement looks like

Customers have more influence in the modern market. As a result, you have to establish a mutually beneficial relationship with inbound marketing. 

Compelling content that provides real value through actionable information builds trust and loyalty. Real engagement is more than a vote with a customer’s dollars. A client becomes a champion of your brand and increases their customer lifetime value.

Boosting engagement is more valuable than simply getting a brief uptick in sales. When your company receives a notable sales spike, don’t just congratulate yourself for a job well done.

Take time to figure out what worked, why and how to maintain that response with continuous content highlighting your brand’s value to your audience. Determine engagement by tracking how your audience interacts with you through comments, likes, clicks and subscriptions.

Discover how to match your brand strategy with your customer goals. Use content marketing and SEO practices to position yourself as an expert and thought leader that helps clients succeed. 

3. Recognize when you’re pushing sales too much

As a marketing professional, it’s surprising how often experienced business people think they’re providing value in content when they’re really still pushing sales. Anyone can get so deep in the weeds of their own industry that they lose sight of building customer relationships. 

Avoid having “sales breath” in your content by only promoting products. Desperation and self-interest push good leads away. Instead, sincerely look to help people, whether they use your service or not.

Creating the right blend of engagement and pushing sales is difficult and often requires an outside perspective to see where you’re missing the boat. You can do this through surveys or with the help of an experienced consultant or agency.

4. Discover how to push sales correctly

The need to push sales at the right time will never die. Your business requires methods to reach customers who know they need your solution and are ready to buy.

The trick to not wasting your advertising budget on low-return campaigns is constant measurement and good tactics, just like with your engagement strategy. Monitor and figure out who comes in your door (physically or virtually) in response to those campaigns. 

Now, study your ideal customers to find out what they like. Then provide excellent written content that they can respond to and keeps them coming back for more.

5. Use proven strategies for building engagement

Time-tested content marketing strategies continue to get results. Your biggest needs are quality and consistency. What makes that difficult is staying in tune with what your audience wants.

As you create content, ask yourself and your team:

• Do these pieces have an honest and relevant tone?
• Does the subject matter to our intended readers?
• Are we bringing a unique perspective?
• Are we supporting our information with good data?
• Are we giving readers something specific they can use?

To get engagement, always wrap up your content with a clear call to action that tells your readers how to apply what they’ve learned or maximize results with your help. As you build credibility and provide value, clients will take you up on that offer more and more.

Keep working on your content marketing

Devising the right blend of engagement and pushing sales takes time and smart strategizing, just like improving your physical health. 

Create a solid marketing plan that addresses customer concerns and continually refine your methods to create written content that leads to loyal customers.

The post 5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing appeared first on MarTech.

It is projected to rebound to 11.2% growth in 2024, the forecast said. Yearly increases in digital ad spending are predicted to hover around 10% through 2027.

Digital ad spend saw a dramatic rebound in 2021 following the initial wave of the COVID pandemic — when it saw growth of 37.6%. In 2022, the numbers fell to back to earth with 10.6% growth.

Digital slice of the pie. Overall media spending is only expected to increase 3.8% this year as traditional media investments continue to migrate to digital.

Digital media should make up 74.6% of total U.S. media spend, which is expected to reach nearly $264 billion in 2023. The digital slice of total media spending is projected to grow about 2% annually in the coming years.

Display and CTV. Connected TV (CTV) advertising keeps charging ahead.

To give some perspective, over half (55%) of digital spending is in display ads whose revenue is expected to grow 7.9% this year. CTV’s projected growth for 2023, however, is 21.2% — nearly triple digital’s growth.

CTV ad spend is on pace to hit $25 billion this year and account for 9.5% of total digital ad revenue, according to eMarketer.

Social display, on the other hand, is projected to see a growth increase of only 3.4% in 2023. Social network display advertising is about a quarter of total digital spending.

Dig deeper: Why we care about CTV and OTT

Search and retail media. Paid search represents 41.8% of total digital spending and should reach $110 billion this year. If it does, its growth will remain slightly higher than digital overall, at 8.2%.

Within search, retail media networks (RMNs) are a rising star, with 18.7% growth in retail media search. This segment is projected to be near $30 billion in spending in 2023.

RMN digital ad revenue (not just in search) is on course to rise from $31 billion in 2021 to $45 billion this year. If spending continues at its current rate it should surpass $106 billion in 2027.

Dig deeper: How Home Depot and Kroger use RMNs to improve shopper ad experience

Why we care. The long view from these numbers shows that digital advertisers are pumping the brakes following a remarkable rebound in 2021. A more modest rebound may also in the cards for 2024.

Outliers to this narrative — CTV and RMNs — show that regardless of overall trends, there is a marketing imperative to meet customers where they are. When TV watchers cut the cord and shift to streaming services, brands have to shift their budgets accordingly. They are also taking advantage of RMNs that provide new opportunities for brands to get closer to customers when they are shopping.

The post Digital ad spend growth drops to 7.8% this year appeared first on MarTech.

Is it more “visual, snackable, personal, and human?” Yes.

But, for now, you can only gain access to Google’s new search generative experience (SGE) through a Google Labs waitlist — which means you may be waiting weeks before you can play with it directly.

Don’t worry. We’ve got your first look and a deep dive into the new Google Search generative AI experience.

What the new Google Search Generative Experience looks like

The interface. SGE may display an AI-generated answer above the search results listings. Google clearly labels the answer as Generative AI is experimental, which is then followed by an answer to your query.

The answer is boxed in. Google cites the websites it used to generate the answer. Those sites can be clicked on to dig deeper. Or you can follow up with an additional question or even click the toggle button at the top right to dive deeper.

• “You’ll see an AI-powered snapshot of key information to consider, with links to dig deeper,” Google said.

When you click the expand button to toggle to show a deeper response, you are given additional responses from the generative AI.

Here is a GIF of it in action:

Throughout the answers generated by AI, Google gives you websites in these clickable boxes with images, so you can click over to the website to learn more.

The color of the generative AI answer box will change to “reflect specific journey types and the query intent itself,” Google said.

Vertical search with AI. This also works for vertical search experiences, such as Google Shopping results. Google’s SGE can pull in 35 billion product listings from the Google Shopping Graph, which has 1.8 billion updates every hour, Google told us. The generative AI needs to update fast, almost in real-time, to provide some answers.

Google can give you a good answer for which products to consider when searching for specific types of products, such as [bluetooth speaker for a pool party]:

Conversations. You can also follow up with your query by adding more details or additional prompts to the Ask a follow up box. Google will then generate a follow-up answer.

• “Context will be carried over from question to question, to help you more naturally continue your exploration. You’ll also find helpful jumping-off points to web content and a range of perspectives that you can dig into,” Google explained.

Conversational mode is especially useful for follow-up questions, as well as more complex or evolving information journeys, Google explained.

• “It uses AI to understand when a person is searching for something that is related to a previous question. It carries over context from previous questions to reformulate the query to better reflect the intent,” Google added.

Why we care. Most of us use Google search an awful lot of the time. It’s been clear that generative AI would change the search experience, but it wasn’t easy to guess how. We now have a better idea.

For marketers there will be some relief that Google isn’t using generated text to simply replace search results (that wouldn’t make much sense for Google’s business model, of course). Publishers will be relieved that there are plenty of links to websites. All of us, as users, should be pleased that we get a generous glimpse of what the information in the answers is based on.

How it works

Technology. Google said SGE uses a “variety of LLMs,” including but not limited to MUM and PaLM2.

This search experience was “purposefully trained to carry out tasks specific to Search, including identifying high-quality web results that corroborate the information presented in the output,” Google said.

Where Google won’t give answers. Google won’t give you answers for everything you might ask it, Liz Reid, VP of Search at Google, told us. Google is trying to be careful with this new version of Google Search, which will show answers for safer queries.

For example, Google won’t show an answer to a question about giving a child Tylenol because it is in the medical space. Google may also not show answers to questions in the financial space.

Sound familiar? Yes, Google is playing it safe in YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) categories. Google is expanding YMYL to include civic information.

• “Just as our ranking systems are designed not to unexpectedly shock or offend people with potentially harmful, hateful, or explicit content, SGE is designed not to show such content in its responses,” Google explained.

Google added that they hold this new search experience “to an even higher standard when it comes to generating responses about certain queries where information quality is critically important.”

This new search experience “places even more emphasis on producing informative responses that are corroborated by reliable sources,” Google told us.

When it comes to “data voids” or “information gaps” – where Google’s systems have lower confidence in its responses, Google “aims to not generate an AI-powered snapshot,” they said.

Plus, for explicit or dangerous topics, Google will stay away from generating a response.

Google’s approach. Google has a five-point approach to generative AI in search:

1. Information needs: How can Google reduce the number of steps it takes for the searcher to accomplish a task or complete a goal and how can Google make the experience more fluid and seamless?
2. Information quality: The information Google responds with needs to be quality, and the way the AI responds needs to be high level. So should Google answer health or financial-related queries?
3. Safety constraints: Should Google provide first-person responses? Should Google provide fluid answers that users would trust to be 100% accurate, when Google might not be able to verify the accuracy of all the answers?
4. Ecosystem: Google wants to provide traffic and credits to the source of the content. Google wants to design an experience that encourages the users and searcher to dig deeper into those sources.
5. Ads: Can ads be relevant and provide additional information to the user and how is it best to show the ads to the user in this experience.

Citations and links

When Google launched Bard, we were all taken aback by the lack of citations and links to publishers. It was rare to see links from Google Bard to publisher websites.

However, in SGE, we see a healthier way of linking to publishers and supporting the ecosystem.

Not only are the explicit answers generated in this search experience made up of specific websites, but those websites that make up those answers are also prominently displayed in the answer with a thumbnail image, title, and URL, all that is clickable to the publisher’s website.

Google, however, will not directly cite or attribute a particular page. Google’s AI model synthesizes information from a variety of sources.

In fact, Google looks for factual corroboration across sources to build the answers and then show the citations. These are generally from high-quality online sources. Google is using many of the signals Google has had in place for decades to understand information quality.

Links to publisher sites. Here is a screenshot showing those websites in the answer:

Toggle deeper. You can then click at the top right, on that toggle button to do a deeper dive into more sources, where the generative AI shows more answers with more sources that you can click on. The arrow in this image is pointing to the toggle, directly above the website links:

With search results below. Plus, you can continue to scroll down and access classic search results, in a more “snackable” format. You can see some of the links to search results, in a more boxed-in format here:

Dig deeper: Why we care about search marketing

Taking AI seriously

Google also spoke about its AI principles and emphasized they take all these AI technologies seriously.

“We’re taking a responsible and deliberate approach to bringing new generative AI capabilities to Search,” Google said.

This is not Bard, Bard was designed to showcase what the LLM models can do. This experience is specifically designed for search and works differently, as showcased above.

Google has deployed its search quality raters to do some early testing over the next few weeks before launching it to the first set of public users.

You will be able to signup for the waitlist today with the first wave of approvals to try out this new search experience in the coming weeks.

A version of this story first appeared on Search Engine Land. Additional reporting by Kim Davis.

The post Here’s what Google’s new AI Search Generative Experience will look like appeared first on MarTech.

Over half a billion chats were conducted on Bing Chat since it launched 3-months ago, Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi said.

Why we care. We’ve been keeping a close eye on generative AI integrations throughout the martech space. Bing Chat attracts many users who come to Bing to carry out searches and get questions answered. The API and new functionality will expand the possible applications for marketers. Exporting and sharing Bing Chats, for instance, makes it easier for marketers to collaborate.

What’s new. There are four main points to what is new with Bing Chat:

• Developer access to build third-party apps on top of Bing Chat.
• Removal of the waitlist for Bing Chat by going from a “Limited Preview” to an “Open Preview.”
• Gaining more visual answers for Bing Chat with rich images and videos.
• Offering a multi-session experiences with new chat history and persistent chats within the Edge browser, as well as the ability to export and share Bing chats.

API. Microsoft said soon, developers will be able to build third-party plug-ins into the Bing Chat experience. This is also something Bing hinted was coming weeks ago. In the screen shot below, you can see an example of OpenTable helping you find and book a reservation with a restaurant. This is something OpenAI’s ChatGPT already supports.

Improved experience with more visuals. Bing has updated the answers within Bing Chat to be more visually appealing by improving the formatting and layout, adding more rich images and rich videos, and also by adding charts and graphs when relevant. Also, Bing Image Creator is available in all languages, which means over 100 different languages, talk about getting more visual.

Microsoft also redesigned Edge to show chats in a better and more visual format. This includes streamlined look, rounded corners, organized containers and semi-transparent visual elements, the company said. Here is what it looks like:

You can even go from the Bing Chat interface into the Edge sidebar interface, so you can browse the web and continue your chat.

You will also be able to ask Bing Chat for answers by uploading images as part of your chat. After you upload an image, Bing Chat can search the web for related content.

In addition, Bing Chat in Microsoft Edge has improved summarization capabilities for long documents, both in PDF and HTML formats.

Chat history and exporting. Microsoft has been talking about adding chat history for some time now and now Microsoft is rolling it out for Bing Chat. You can use Bing Chat and be able to pick up where you left off, then you can return to previous chats in Bing’s chat history.

There is a “recents” tab on the right side to pickup where you left off. You can also see a “saved” tab for chats you saved for later.

Microsoft is also adding the ability to export and share your chats from Bing Chat or Edge sidebar. You will be able to share your chats on social media or move them into tools like Microsoft Word, if you so desire.

Additional reporting by Barry Schwartz

The post Bing Chat opens up to more users and developers with API, expanded visual answers appeared first on MarTech.

Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following: 

• How easy is the platform to use? 
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and our marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features? 
• Is the reporting actionable? 

Other questions to ask: 

How do you calculate search volumes? Knowing how the system treats information types will impact how you ascribe value to certain keyword terms, make decisions about keyword and content choices and affect the ROI of your search marketing efforts. Find out from where raw data is extracted (i.e., analytics, log files, a proprietary tracking pixel). •

Can this system track millions of searches, visits, site pages, etc.? Knowing whether the platform is a true enterprise solution or a simple tool that may not scale for your business needs is crucial. Limits on the numbers of keyword rankings, pages or traffic tracked could impact your use of the system or significantly increase the cost.

Do you support international search? There are many nuances within international SEO that can mislead even the best SEOs. Find out if the numerator in the calculation of the platform’s average clicks per search or average search volume is normalized for global or local (in that market) search and whether search ranks are calculated from within the country or remotely. Does their tool make hreflang coding recommendations? Will it manage the page relationship and directional recommendations? The misapplication of international data could impact the ROI of your search marketing efforts. 

How do you track and report on SERP features? You will want to know if and where your site was listed on the results page. For example, did your listing appear in web results, in Top Stories, in a carousel or the video results? That location and reporting feedback helps to quantify strategic and tactical efforts, which is especially important given that these SERP features can drive substantial or more-targeted traffic. 

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Does your tool help customers understand what competitors do and derive actionable insights from that? What are the most important features the tool has for providing competitive research? Competitive intelligence is a standard feature for virtually all enterprise SEO platforms – but the scope and cost differ between vendors. Find out what level of data is provided about your competitors and vertical industry and make sure it fits your requirements. 

How robust and flexible are your reporting options? Different users have different reporting needs. Find out if reports can be customized and automatically delivered to different users and types of users, and whether data can be exported in CSV format. 

Where are the actionable reports? Enterprise tools have dashboards and generous amounts of data but it’s important to understand how (and which) reports can immediately benefit your business. A good sales team will understand your company’s objectives and KPIs and will have reports ready or be able to run them in real-time. This is data that can be handed over to the appropriate teams and promptly acted upon. 

What other meta-information does your system collect that may be made available via API? Being able to trace search traffic data from the front of the funnel all the way to sales data in a CRM or business intelligence (BI) system will help you to more accurately calculate ROI. 

Is there a workflow built in that allows us to coordinate the work of our marketing, content, web development and social media teams across the organization? SEO cannot operate in a silo. A true enterprise platform should provide built-in workflow management that includes task assignment, management and monitoring of completion rates across groups. 

What does the onboarding process entail and how long will it take? What are the training options (i.e., is it online only or will you send people to our location to train us on-site)? Be sure to find out what onboarding and support is included in pricing and what is an add-on. 

What kind of ongoing support and client engagement will your account team provide? How will you gauge our use or non-use of the platform’s features? One of the most common reasons a company transitions out of an enterprise platform is because they don’t use it enough. How do they propose you avoid tool fatigue and checkout for your organization? A vendor should be prepared to address this issue and specifically how the tool creatively engages users and gets them back into the environment. 

What new features are you considering? What are the long-term roadmap and launch dates? The SEO landscape is constantly changing with new features to further leverage digital assets rapidly coming out of Google and Bing. This is especially important as AI chat interfaces emerge as a key channel for customer engagement. Find out how quickly the vendor responds to the implementation of new SERP features and begins tracking them. It’s important to understand the level of innovation and the ability to add and track emerging technologies. Knowing a vendor’s new feature release date schedule and its ability to stick to committed timelines is also important. This helps establish long-term trust and an expectation with the vendor that it will always be on the cutting edge of SEO.

The post 12 questions to ask SEO platform vendors during the demo appeared first on MarTech.

Do you need an enterprise SEO platform?

Deciding whether your company needs an enterprise-level SEO platform calls for the same
evaluative steps involved in any software adoption, including a comprehensive self-assessment
of your organization’s business needs and resources, staffing, management support and financial resources.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Use the following questions as guidelines to determine the answers.

The post Does your marketing team need an SEO platform? appeared first on MarTech.

SEO is not just about content creation and promotion anymore. It also involves improving the user experience and adapting to the evolving ways that search engines display and deliver results across different platforms like voice assistants. However, traditional SEO practices are still relevant. Keyword research, page-level analysis, backlink tracking and acquisition and rank tracking, are still essential for success even in a changing landscape.

SEO platforms offer numerous capabilities that include all of those, as well as competitive intelligence, social signal integration and workflow rights and roles.

Enterprise-level platforms may also provide more extensive link and site audits or analytics that include predictive scoring systems to identify potential opportunities to improve page performance or link authority. Vendors differentiate by offering more frequent or detailed data updates or content marketing features that sometimes require additional investment.

The following section, from our SEO platform guide for marketing (downloadable here), discusses some of these capabilities and the key considerations involved in choosing an enterprise SEO platform.

Link analysis and acquisition

Links are still one of the key external or “off-the-page” factors that can help a website rank higher in search engines. Most platforms for enterprise SEO offer link analysis (i.e., what sites are linking to yours), link building or removal suggestions based on competitive analysis, and other reports that show opportunities for getting links (i.e., what sites should you ask for links from) as part of their core platforms.

Keyword research/rank analysis

Keyword research —  finding out what terms people use to find your website, how your pages rank for different queries, and how you should use those terms in your copy — is a fundamental part of effective SEO. Almost all platforms for enterprise SEO offer keyword research tools that help marketers understand how consumers search for content, and what keywords are bringing traffic for competitors.

However, vendors get this data in different ways. Some license data from point solutions or ISPs, because Google’s terms of use limit the use of scraped data and the percentage of search results that are “keyword (not provided).” Others create and maintain their own database of keyword terms. As a result, reliable keyword data has become more scarce and costly.

It’s also worth noting that rank analysis has become more complicated as Google has increased its use of more dynamic and visual search engine results pages (SERP). Marketers are not happy with just a simple numeric indication of how their page ranks for a specific query; they want to know if it’s shown in a Carousel, in a Knowledge panel, with Sitelinks — or any of the other ways crawled content is being displayed on the SERPs. One of the latest additions to this category, Visably, offers a very different perspective on ranking, going as far as to look at all of the content on pages that rank for a certain keyword and then categorizing those pages.

All of this data aims to give brands a sense of how they’re perceived in search overall, even if the brand-related activity is happening on third-party sites.

Search intent-based analysis

Google’s search algorithms, often powered by artificial intelligence, now focus less on keyword matches and more on search intent. To counter the lack of keyword data, SEO platform vendors are developing more tools to analyze search intent and predict or recommend the most relevant content that would meet the searcher’s needs.

Custom site crawls/audits

Content quality is a key factor for SEO success, so marketers need to use site crawls or audits to evaluate their websites. Enterprise SEO platforms can help by providing suggestions for improving keywords, page layouts, and site accessibility. They can also rank and score different elements of the web pages, such as HTML tags and meta-tags.

The frequency of site crawls varies among SEO platforms. Some do it daily, while others do it weekly. The best tools should be able to scan the whole site, not just a sample of pages, and should also support mobile-friendly and AMP pages. However, some sites are too big to be fully crawled by any tool.

Social signal tracking and integration

Social media activity isn’t directly included in search engine ranking algorithms, but pages that are highly shared benefit from higher traffic, and watching social activity can help inform content creation and distribution strategies. 

Most enterprise SEO platforms track, measure, and integrate social signals into their analytics and dashboard reports. These capabilities range from social signal tracking and correlations to site traffic and conversions, as well as social profile monitoring and sentiment analysis, and contact-relationship management.

While most vendors do well at tracking organic traffic, few currently track paid social activity.

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Semrush, Ahrefs, Brightedge, Conductor and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on enterprise SEO platforms.

Click here to download!

Content marketing and analysis

Google has made content quality more important for SEO with its updates and features like BERT and RankBrain (Hummingbird). So, marketers need to create relevant and fresh content to rank well.

Enterprise SEO platforms have improved their content optimization and marketing tools to help marketers with this. They offer features like page management, content performance reports, influencer campaigns, and real-time content suggestions.

Some platforms also analyze the content and compare it with competitors to find gaps and suggest improvements. They can help marketers create better and deeper content on relevant topics.

A new trend among vendors is to automatically recommend topics for content creation, saving marketers time and effort. Some even help with developing the content that matches the target keywords.

International search tracking

As more U.S.-based businesses operate online and offline in different countries and languages, they need to have international search coverage. This means they can optimize their websites for different regions, languages, and alphabets. Most enterprise SEO platforms can do this by providing features like international keyword research, global market and search volume data, and global CPC currency data.

Mobile/local analytics

Google wants to make mobile and local searches better for users. So, it favors sites that work well on mobile devices. Marketers need more and better data and analytics to help them make their sites mobile-friendly and rank higher. Many vendors have features that let marketers check their sites for mobile issues, rankings, and metrics by device (like desktop, tablet, or phone) and by location.

Technical SEO crawling

Mobile traffic is very important, so marketers need tools to find and fix problems that may make their pages load slowly or look bad on mobile devices. This includes showing how their pages rank for Core Web Vitals. Also, schema markup is needed if a page wants to show up in one of the special displays like featured snippets. Many tools can spot schema mistakes and help fix them.

Cross-device attribution

Marketers know SEO is not the only way to promote their brands and that paid media can also affect search traffic (especially on brand keywords). Some vendors are creating features to help marketers figure out what marketing activity is bringing visitors or sales to their sites. But the declining used of third-party cookies is making this more difficult.

The benefits of using SEO platforms

With hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of pages, sites, social conversations, images, and keywords to manage and optimize, enterprise SEO has become increasingly complicated and time-consuming.

Using an SEO platform can increase efficiency and productivity while reducing the time and errors involved in managing organic search campaigns. More specifically, managing SEO through an enterprise toolset can provide the following benefits:

• Many tools, one interface. SEO platforms perform many tasks in one system. A comprehensive dashboard can help your organization monitor SERP rankings and trends, how you measure up to competitors and your share of voice. The integration and prioritization of tasks, reporting, and user permissions can offer substantial benefits to enterprise-level SEO operations.
• Intent insights. Because of the search engines’ increased focus on user intent, enterprise-level SEO tool vendors are developing machine learning models that analyze user behavior and site content to help marketers answer searchers’ questions.
• More efficient management of global operations. Enterprise SEO tools have built-in diagnostics that can be invaluable on a global scale to identify site-wide issues across languages, countries or regions. These tools uncover macro and micro issues with pages, templates and infrastructure.
• Keeping pace with the search engines. SEO software vendors have dedicated teams and engineers to follow frequent search engine algorithm changes and their impact on the SEO reporting required by enterprises.
• Automated reporting to provide data in near real-time. Many brands end up trying to put a lot of data in spreadsheets and manually update them. But that doesn’t provide a complete view of the data. Most enterprise SEO platforms offer highly customized reporting capabilities that are widget- and wizard-driven to make reporting faster and easier. Many also allow for the export of data to business intelligence tools or other analytics software.

The post What do SEO platforms do and how do they help marketers get found on search engines? appeared first on MarTech.

Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, which are a growing part of the digital customer experience, from discovery via search marketing to customer support, may soon be used by protesters to disrupt organizations by flooding customer support channels, according to a study by Gartner. They believe this is one consequence of the increasing use of virtual assistants for legitimate customer support requests.

By the end of next year there will be 8.4 billion virtual assistants in use, up from 3.25 billion in 2019, according to Statista. These devices are rapidly becoming more sophisticated and are being used by customers to interact with companies. By 2025, 37% of customers will try using a virtual assistant to interact with customer service, according to The Gartner 2023 Leadership Vision for Customer Service and Support report.

Currently these interactions are for entirely legitimate reasons, like waiting on hold and ordering a pizza. Making them as seamless as possible is an increasingly important part of a customer’s interaction with a brand, even though the customer themselves aren’t directly involved.

Why we care. This is a fascinating and worrying example of a technology’s unintended consequences. Making something more efficient and easier-to-use is a big market advantage. Especially when it comes to customer service. As every marketer knows, few things build loyalty like great customer support. Do it poorly and you have a big weak spot in your brand.

Now, it may be that technological ease-of-use could also be a weak spot. What to do? Automate more, increase capacity and be ready to deploy more resources. Who knows if these attacks will come to pass, but be prepared is a prudent attitude.

As for the future, it is difficult to imagine all the possible things that may happen. The Pentagon employs a panel of science fiction writers to help them anticipate future threats. If these attacks come to pass, private industry may want to do the same.

Dig deeper: 3 steps to get ready for Siri, Alexa and other machine customers

Legitimate interactions with virtual assistants are going to increase. As of last year, Amazon Alexa had more than 130,000 skills people could potentially leverage to automate transactions. Soon virtual assistants will be able to request service, receive messages, make recurring transactions, report problems issues and gather product information via every customer service channel.

This by itself poses a challenge to organizations by increasing the demand for customer service. Within two years, 20% of inbound contact volume will come from virtual assistants, according to Gartner.

In response, many companies are investing in systems that use these capabilities — like a printer ordering more ink so a customer doesn’t have to. They are also automating customer service with chatbots and interactive voice systems.

But these legitimate interactions using virtual assistants will pave the way for protests, say Gartner’s analysts.

“Protests against business and government organizations are increasingly digital,” the report states. “In 2021 there were at least 9.84 million distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks designed to shut down organizations’ websites by overwhelming them with traffic. This was a 14% increase from 2019.” 

Ease of use will make virtual assistants a powerful vector for protest.

“Citizen-led denial of service attacks (cDoS) are a new type of denial of service, led by average people, not hackers, and performed through virtual assistants,” according to the report. “By 2024, citizens will shut down a major global enterprise company’s contact center through denial of service attacks launched by virtual assistants.”

These attacks are expected to be triggered by people protesting “social issues as opposed to maliciously motivated hackers.” They could be costly, as large businesses could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in operational expenses responding to them. That’s in addition to the costs from lost productivity, customer churn and long-term brand impact.

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Some commentators see trouble looming. Chris Penn of TrustInsight recently told us: “(I)f unbranded search is the lion’s share of your search traffic, particularly your converting search traffic, you should be very concerned. That’s where the large language models will be intercepting your traffic and not giving anything to you or giving very little to you.”

Others are more sanguine. We spoke with Brent Ramos, product director for search at Adswerve. “We’re at the precipice of this new frontier for search which will ultimately be better. I’m not taking a pessimistic view at all; I’m very much looking forward to it.”

Adswerve provides services related to Google products to agencies, analysts, marketers and publishers. Ramos focuses on search.

Changing the search paradigm

Repeatedly emphasizing that it’s early days for conversational search and that we don’t yet know what it’s going to look like further down the road, Ramos is optimistic about a new, more immersive and interactive search experience.

“I think it’s definitely going to change the paradigm of how we understand search today, because as soon as you throw in Bard, let’s say [Google’s generative AI], and it pushes down all the organic ranks, and you have the chat AI upfront, all of a sudden people are going to converge and convert in that experience, and it’s too early to know what it’s going to look like.”

In other words, and as expected, many users of Google search will look first at the answer to their query generated by Bard; they won’t necessarily scroll down to look at links, or even at footnotes that show where Bard found its information.

Dig deeper: Does ChatGPT pose an existential threat to marketers?

The implications for paid search

“What I anticipate is that there will be a new paradigm of what that will mean for paid results, so rather than have a host of links to click through in an index format, we’ll see new formats come up. I think the definition of conversions will change, and the experience of the paid ecosystem will change, but it’s not going to go away.”

The far from resolved question, of course, is what the new experience will ultimately look like. But we are on an irreversible journey, Ramos believes.

“It’s not going to go away,” he said. “Technology will very rarely recede. So we know it’s going to become a new paradigm and move search into this new realm. On the long-game horizon, we can expect to see new ways of conversion, new ways of formatting, SERP is going to get a lot busier, website conversions might decline.”

While some are concerned that, if users can get all of the information they need directly from the AI, the index of links, including paid links, will become irrelevant. Ramos insists that this isn’t something new. “We’ve seen that in social, right? People are converting more within the social channel itself rather than landing onto the actual page, especially for ecommerce.”

A living, breathing conversation

That does mean, however, that there will need to be opportunities within the AI content for people to convert, and Ramos doesn’t pretend he yet knows what that will look like. “Maybe it’s no longer pay-per-click; it’s pay-per-interaction,” he said. “Rather than getting this repository of links to sift through as humans, we’ll actually get this really rich, semantic conversation presented to us. The index or repository we’re accustomed to today will shift into a living and breathing conversation.”

The bottom line, for Ramos, is that whatever it looks like, it’s going to be better. “It will eventually be better over all. To me it’s like back when Google and the internet first started coming out — the big industry of the yellow pages, and publishers were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ And then of course it was ultimately a really good thing.”

The importance of interconnectivity

Even traditional search doesn’t just generate lists of links, Ramos observed. “SERP is one thing, but search also powers things like local listings, maps, ecommerce buy-buttons and all these other things that are interconnected with it and that are crucially embedded in the ecosystem.”

From knowledge panels to videos to dictionary definitions and alternative search suggestions: “All these things that are tangential to search are also wrapped up in that connectivity, so I think that’s the bigger picture people should be trying to understand.”

Even so, he admits: “That’s where I imagine it leading, but this is all speculation at this point because this all very fresh.”

Bumps in the road?

Not only do we not yet know how we’re going to get to this rich, interconnected conversation, but we are already seeing teething problems — from truly disturbing behavior from the AI to outright error.

“There’s definitely going to be a bumpy ascent,” Ramos admitted. “The silver lining is that we know it can be done; it’s more a matter of how fast we can architect against it, and it takes a lot of human capital and power to do so.”

What is he telling his clients at this stage in the journey? “The guidance is to understand holistically — and without your own biases about AI — and accept innovation.”

Ramos sees the competition between Google’s Bard and Bing’s ChatGPT-based generative AI as a positive. “We want to see competition in the marketplace — a marketplace that’s rich with innovation — so on both sides of the house I think it’s a good thing, and they should be pushing each other.”

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The version to be incorporated with Bing is GPT-4, said to be much faster than GPT-3.5. The news follows Microsoft’s January announcement of a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI.

Google is coming to the party. Not to be outdone, Google has said it will make its conversational AI service Bard, powered by its proprietary conversation technology LaMDA, more available in the coming weeks.

Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a new blog post:

“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner, these features will be rolling out on Google Search soon.”

“An important new step in our AI journey.”

Why we care. AI-powered natural language generation (NLG) has been around for some years now. In the 2010s, enterprises were using it to produce (largely non-critical) documentation at scale. It has been used to generate email subject lines and content, and even by the U.K. weather service to expand the scale of its forecasting.

So what are we seeing over recent weeks? For one thing, the democratization of NLG as it seems poised to become widely and cheaply available — to the extent that there are concerns about students using it to create homework. And now we seem to be on the brink of NLG taking command of search. Search, of course, is of enormous importance to all marketers in the context of brand and product or service discovery, not just to SEOs.

Dig deeper: Why we care about search marketing

Where the rubber hits the road. Imagine — and Google has already produced mock-ups — a page of search results that kicks off not just with a short answer to a search query (we already have that) but such a detailed and responsive answer that the links to sites that follow become much less useful and appealing to the user.

The prospect raises a range of questions from the impact on traffic to websites to the intriguing possibility that Google could cause its own digital advertising business to stumble. Whatever the answers to these questions, it seems likely that, just months from now, search could feel very different than it does today.

Based on reporting from Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land.

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