Henry Thomas

As the web’s oldest form of advertising, display ads have long been a standby for brands. However, over the last several years, consumers have grown increasingly fatigued with irrelevant and intrusive banner and popup ads, diminishing ad impact and ROI.   So how do you boost the power of display ads? By combining native formats, audience targeting and artificial intelligence, display ads can become an effective tool for amplifying your brand and achieving conversions, especially when combined with search campaigns. I’ve outlined some tips and insights to help you optimize your display advertising. Blend in with native formats One of the best ways to boost the impact of your display ads (and avoid reader blindness to banner ads) is to use native digital displays. Native ads appeal to readers because they blend into the core user experience by matching the look and feel of display ads to the media in which they appear – such as in social media or as recommende...

A look at Merkle's Search Engine Land Award-winning campaign to help a new client remedy replatforming problems, regain rankings and revenue. Site migrations can be a daunting task because of all the things that can get lost or overlooked during the move. If not properly planned and executed, a site migration can result in a frustrating experience and kill your organic visibility, traffic and revenue. A botched site migration was the situation performance agency Merkle was brought in to resolve for its client, a leading electronics manufacturer. The team found ways to recover traffic and achieved better performance than pre-migration levels, increasing conversions and revenue. The effort earned Merkle the Search Engine Land Award for Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative in the SEO category this year. The task On this particular campaign, the agency was brought in to recover organic traffic after a full site replatforming and migration to HTTPS. The site was losing ne...

A new study uncovers data about how target audiences will influence our priorities around voice search. Hint: Older folks like it while the youngest voice searchers worry about privacy. In 2018, voice search was one of the hottest topics in the SEO community. A popular article by Wordstream listed a handful of statistics around voice search, starting with the misconstrued Comscore statistic that by 2020, 50% of searches would be done through voice. It turns out, this statistic was related only to voice search in China. Despite the inaccuracy in the U.S. and overall global market, the quote has reverberated through the SEO industry and pushed digital marketers to frantically prepare themselves by learning everything they could about voice search optimization. As 2020 approaches, marketers are now skeptical voice search will actually cause a cataclysmic shift to our marketing strategies. At BrightonSEO in April, Patrick Reinhart’s presentation was dedicated to questioning w...

To be competitive in search, you must audit and optimize desktop and mobile page speeds while also making data ready for real-time personalization. Google has long been secretive about the nuts and bolts of its search ranking algorithms, but we do know for a fact that page speed is a factor. In its “How Search Works” resource, Google  flat  out states that, “We develop algorithms to promote more usable pages over less usable ones, all other things being equal. These algorithms analyze signals that indicate whether all our users are able to view the result, like… whether the page loading times work well for users with slow Internet connections.” Consumers with lightning-fast connection speeds are growing impatient with slow sites, too – particularly those on mobile. When Google last analyzed mobile landing page load times in 2018, the average time it took to fully load one had dropped by seven seconds. However, it still took about 15 seconds, whi...

Here are some free software options to extract data from small to medium data sets to help you get the job done. We have all been there before. You need the right data from a website for your next content marketing project. You have found your source websites, the data is just there waiting for you to grab it and then the challenge emerges. You have 500 pages and wonder how to extract all this data at once. It doesn’t help if you have the data if you can’t grab it. Without proper data scraping software, you won’t get it. If you are like me, you had to learn Python so Scrapy can get the job done for you. Alternatively, you have to learn XPath for Excel, which is also something that takes quite a bit of time. And since time is our most precious commodity, there is software available that doesn’t require learning a line of code to complete this task. I have tried the following software as they all provide a free account and quite a good number of features to get the job d...