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Rick Mariano On Helping Clients Succeed Digitally Online & Hiring with Employee Retention

In part one with Rick Mariano we spoke about helping build LocalEdge to provide high volume digital marketing services at a low cost and then in part two we spoke more about using automation and the human touch. In this final part, we talk about advice for clients to work with agencies and get the most out of the agency.
Rick often thinks a lot about how to help all his clients, the thousands of them, and how they can all perform well online. He explained the more engaged customers often do better than the ones who just throw money at it and are not engaged.
So customers and clients that provide feedback to the agency and the strategist will always have a higher performing campaign. They want customers to send images, videos, and details of what they are doing on the ground so that the agency can share those details. Also, it is important to set expectations with the clients and have them understand patience is required in digital marketing, especially organic marketing.
We then spoke about hiring and retaining employees, especially post-COVID. He said he is now able to hire people anywhere but with that, the salary expectations have increased drastically. At the same time, he cannot increase his client costs tremendously. So you need to be creative with the budgets and figure out how to make it work. Losing employees is super hard for agencies to recover from, so retention is super important for them. Clients want consistency and have their strategist stick around during the campaign.
Then you need to be sure to have a system in place to be ready for employees leaving by having the systems in place to transfer knowledge and new employees ready to come on board.
You can follow Rick Mariano on LinkedIn and at LocalEdge.
You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
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Microsoft Advertising Target Shoppers By Browsing Categories With Keyword Boosters

The Microsoft Advertising team announced its PromoteIQ launched a new way to target your ads, by targeting shoppers based on the categories they browse with the ability to also use keywords as a booster for campaign bids.
Nicole Farley explained on Search Engine Land, “this latest development in category-based targeting with keyword leveraging is supposed to maximize revenue and sales for both retailers and advertisers, while also delivering an exceptional experience for shoppers. Interested advertisers should test the new.”
Unlike traditional keyword targeting, “which requires advertisers to research and build an exhaustive list of keywords per campaign,” Microsoft said. With this new targeting shoppers by what they browse, “advertisers only need to test and retain a few high-performing keywords,” Microsoft added.
Microsoft said that in their tests, “campaigns that boost bids by keyword whilst targeting by category exhibit 320% higher click-through-rate (CTR) than the campaigns without boosting bids by keyword.” “Meanwhile, retailers saw benefits from this solution by achieving 8x higher revenue per thousand impressions (RPM),” Microsoft added.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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Google Search Console Shows If embedURL Page Uses indexifembedded

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can now report if the embedURL page for a video uses the newish indexifembedded robots tag. The indexifembedded tells Google if Google is allowed to index the content of a page if it’s embedded in another page through iframes or similar HTML tags, in spite of a noindex rule.
This was spotted by Jon Henshaw and posted on LinkedIn. He explained that he requested that Google add to the URL Inspection Tool to show if “indexifembedded” is being used, “and through the stars and moons aligning and perhaps other miracles, they told me they added it today,” he said.
Here is his screenshot:
You can see in the “indexing allowed” section it says “No: ‘noindex’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag, ‘indexifembdedded’ detected in ‘robots’ meta tag.”
Jon explained what this means:
If you use YouTube and make your video Unlisted, and then embed the video on your site, Google won’t index it. Why? Because they add a “noindex” directive to the page that serves the video on your page. Bummer!
However, if you use Vimeo, make your video Unlisted, and then embed it on your site, Google can still index it! Why? Because unlike YouTube, Vimeo adds “noindex” *and* a special directive created by Google called “indexifembedded.” That tells Google to index the video on any page that has an iframe embedded video.
Coupled with Vimeo automatically generating and inserting VideoObject Schema structured data for all embedded videos (including Unlisted videos), businesses now have the best chance they’ve ever had to get their pages to rank for videos instead of competing with their video hosting provider.
Jon knows this because well, he is the Senior Director, SEO at Vimeo, and Vimeo is a massive video site.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
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Google Bard Won’t Link To Sources Too Often

As you know, we’ve been playing with Google Bard, it just started to roll out a couple of days ago. Early on, we were disappointed thus far with how limited it seemed and more so, how it rarely linked to sources and content creators. Now, Google got back to us on why this is the case.
Google added a few topics to the Bard FAQs, including “How and when does Bard cite sources in its responses?” Let me quote what it says:
Bard, like some other standalone LLM experiences, is intended to generate original content and not replicate existing content at length. We’ve designed our systems to limit the chances of this occurring, and we will continue to improve how these systems function. If Bard does directly quote at length from a webpage, it cites that page.
Bard was built to be a creative and helpful collaborator—it works well in creative tasks like helping you write an email or brainstorm ideas for a birthday party. We see it as a complementary experience to Google Search. That’s why we added the “Google It” button to Bard, so people can easily move from Bard to explore information from across the web.
Bard is an experiment, and we’ll use its launch as an opportunity to learn, iterate, and improve the experience as we get feedback from a range of stakeholders including people like you, publishers, creators, and more.
So since Bard “generates original content and not replicate existing content at length,” Google does not feel the need to cite sources? Bard will however cite sources and link to them if Bard “directly quotes at length from a webpage.”
Instead, Google wants you to go from Bard to Google with the “Google It”, “so people can easily move from Bard to explore information from across the web.” So click on links from Google Search, do not click on links from Bard, too often.
But things with Bard are early and may change, “Bard is an experiment, and we’ll use its launch as an opportunity to learn, iterate, and improve the experience as we get feedback from a range of stakeholders including people like you, publishers, creators, and more.”
Honestly, I am shocked, I did not think Google would launch Bard without citing and linking to sources as much as and as well as Bing Chat does. Even Gary Illyes from Google hinted publishers would be okay with it.
Let me show some examples (click on the images to enlarge).
Google Bard on “Who is Barry Schwartz?” – this is not me, this is the famous Barry Schwartz, by the way:
No citations with the default response from Google Bard.
But Bing, it gives 15 links to 15 different sources:
To be fair, if I work hard, and go to draft two, I get some citations from Google Bard:
I posted about this on Twitter and here is some of the response and reaction to Google’s FAQ statement on the citation bit:
What a joke. Absolutely brazen content theft.
— Don Caldwell 🦑 (@DonCald) March 22, 2023
Meanwhile, Google could care less: https://t.co/QQmZ1jA8WK
— Rutledge Daugette (@TheRealRutledge) March 22, 2023
A positive perspective: Bard is bound to say weird things and give inaccurate information. If that’s the case, you won’t necessarily want your brand up there co-signing certain conversations or answers.
— dog excited to meet pluto (@dogmeetpluto) March 22, 2023
That’s not great for site owners.
I’ve also seen a number of people share Bard responses that are questionable or outright wrong. Responses should be treated like discussing a topic with a questionably-informed internet rando, rather than a factual response if there’s no source.— Peggy K (@PeggyKTC) March 22, 2023
Uggh. No/Minimal citations is a big negative for me. (both as a creator, and potential user of Bard)
— ElizabethH (@ElizabethH15) March 22, 2023
IMHO it’s impossible to overstate what an enormous problem this is for publishers. If citations are not prevalent and prominent, publishers should be able to opt out of being used in training data without it having any affect on SEO. And every publisher should opt out.
— Michael Magnuson (@mdmagnuson) March 22, 2023
To be honest, the user in me prefers Bard’s UI/UX compared to Bing Chat.
The SEO in me hates the lack of sources, but the way Bing Chat has them incorporated just looks a bit naff.
— Chloe Ivy Rose (@chloeivyroseseo) March 22, 2023
That’s a massive miscalculation on their side, it’s the wrong result that they will need to address
— @[email protected] (@davidiwanow) March 22, 2023
I mean this section is *interesting*…
“For now, Google Bard likely won’t be sending a lot of traffic to the web or websites.”And likely a challenge for anyone trying to do research.
— Crystal Carter (she/her) (@CrystalontheWeb) March 22, 2023
I actually think #Bard could work very well for local if Google was willing to include URLs, use more its local knowledge graph and offer Maps links. pic.twitter.com/YZLB1DrY3u
— Greg Sterling 🇺🇦 (@gsterling) March 22, 2023
The same thought I had when started playing with it https://t.co/RllWsaQ9KQ
— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) March 22, 2023
One shimmer of hope is that if and when Bard is integrated some how into Google Search, those integrations you will see more prominent links to content creators. Via the WSJ, “Sissie Hsiao, a vice president in charge of Google Assistant, said the company “is deeply committed in supporting a healthy and vibrant content ecosystem” and “will be welcoming conversations with stakeholders.” She said when AI tools are integrated into search the company will give priority to sending valuable traffic to content creators. “
Good to hear from Google’s Sissie Hsiao about Bard for Search + Citations -> “She said when AI tools are integrated into search, the company will give priority to sending valuable traffic to content creators.” https://t.co/K3U82vtAu6 pic.twitter.com/xWbRl7SLRs
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) March 22, 2023
So we will see. Until now, prepare to be disappointed with any little traffic you might see from Google Bard.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
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