The post Aug 6th & 7th 2020 – Engage Virtual Conference appeared first on SEMpdx.

As promised, the SEMpdx Board of Directors has worked diligently to understand the ongoing situation in regards to COVID-19 (Coronavirus). After many discussions with our partners, vendors, and health professionals, the Board has moved to reschedule this year’s Engage Marketing Conference to August 2020.

This decision was not made lightly, but as a non-profit and a strong member of our community, SEMpdx felt this was the correct decision for the health and safety of everyone involved. We explored all potential options, and we believed the only acceptable option was to reschedule.

To those who have already purchased tickets, we will still honor any and all tickets already purchased for our August Engage Conference event. However, if you wish to receive a full refund, you have until 5PM, March 31st 2020, to make said request and can email engage@sempdx.org. We can also transfer any ticket at any time.

The newly rescheduled conference dates are Thursday and Friday, August 6th & 7th, 2020.

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly at engage@sempdx.org.

It is always an honor to have everyone involved with the Engage Marketing Conference and we appreciate your support.

Thank you,

The SEMpdx Board of Directors

The post Important Update – Engage Marketing Conference 2020 is Postponed appeared first on SEMpdx.

Update March 6th – Engage Marketing Conference has been postponed until August 6-7th, 2020

To our Engage Conference Attendees,

We’re extremely excited to see you next week at our 14th Annual Engage Marketing Conference. Speakers, sponsors, and venue are confirmed and we just wanted to let you know that we’re moving forward as planned. People are still registering with the few tickets that are still available.

We wanted to update you on steps the SEMpdx Board of Directors has taken as well as provide some best practices to stay healthy.

The SEMpdx Board has been working diligently with our venue (Sentinel Hotel) to ensure the most clean and safe space possible. We are also taking steps to provide additional hand cleaning stations and other preventative steps.

With that said, here’s the very short version:

• Wash your hands often (We’ll have extra hand sanitizing stations)

• Take Vitamins C & D

• Less handshakes and more dabs/pounds

• Avoid touching your nose, mouth, eyes.

• If you’re sick we’re asking that you remain at home.

The SEMpdx Board will continue to monitor any and all Local, State, and Federal Health updates and act on said updates accordingly.

The health and safety of all Attendees, Speakers, Sponsors, Volunteers and Staff is our top priority.

We want to thank you for your continued support of the Engage Marketing Conference and SEMpdx.

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to reach out to us directly at engage@sempdx.org.

Thank you,

The post Engage Marketing Conference 2020 Is Being Held As Scheduled! appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
Before starting TopHatRank, I was heavily involved in the affiliate marketing space generating insurance leads through SEO, media buys, email, and social marketing. Everything was good until the economy collapsed in 2008 and I had to close down shop. At that point, I started offering my digital marketing expertise as a service and formed TopHatRank in 2019.

We hired our first employee that same year and moved into our first office in 2010. Since then, the company has grown in popularity and recognition. We are now an internationally recognized, three-time award-winning agency.

2) I’ve heard many people ask advice on what the best eCommerce platform to launch a store upon. As an eCommerce SEO, what advice would you give them?
I typically advise choosing a platform that will fit your brand’s operational needs and budgets. As an SEO, I can find ways to optimize pretty much anything, throwing shade an eCommerce platform because it doesn’t provide access to, let’s say, server log files is not something I’m comfortable doing as it may excel at other things that make it very useful and important.

As an example, a lot of SEO’s complain about how Shopify forces you into organizing your store into “collections” and “products” silos. I, personally, do not see a problem with that. In fact, I actually prefer this as it allows me to organize the website into relevant informational silos and create logical navigational paths via breadcrumb optimization. Doing it this way also allows you to be able to continue to organize and re-organize where your products live (categories) without having to create redirects.

So my answer would be to really consider your needs as a brand first and not chose a platform solely on it being “SEO friendly”.

3) How have SEO clients that you’ve worked with evolved over the past 10 years?

Well, TopHatRank will only be turning 10 years old this coming September, so can’t tell you how they evolved over the past 10 years. But we do have really good client retention at TopHatRank, some clients have been with us for over 7 years. As a matter of fact, one of our clients, who was the second biggest merchant processor in the US, was acquired by the 1st biggest merchant processor in the US. Our client’s site was consistently outranking theirs for all of the important keywords, they saw this and decided to keep us on as SEOs and became our client. We are now working with on their SEO along with optimizing all of their other properties.

Now, I can’t say that our SEO efforts had anything to do with their success, but the fact that the acquiring company decided to retain us to take over SEO for them and all of their brands says a lot about the quality of work of we provide… I think.

Two more of our clients were acquired by PayPal a few years back. We’ve also helped brands grow to the point where we had to graduate them and assist with hiring internal SEO teams because their needs have grown above what we could deliver at the time.

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: Arsen Rabinovitch appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I am a Partner Manager at Pinterest, based at our headquarters in San Francisco. I work with mid-market partners across a variety of verticals. Prior to Pinterest I worked in partnerships at Twitter, Microsoft, and Foursquare.

2) Are Pinterest ads more about company branding or are they also generating sales / leads for your customers?
Pinterest ads help advertisers achieve both branding and sales goals. We work with brands across many different objectives such as brand awareness, offline sales, online sales, lead generation, and more. Pinterest ads work for driving lift in brand awareness as well as driving sales lift. We find Pinterest works best when brands take a full-funnel approach to the platform and run across awareness, consideration, and sales tactics.

3) What are some necessary criteria for creating effective Pinterest Campaigns?
When setting up effective Pinterest campaigns it is important to remember the Pinner mindset that brings them to the platform. Pinners come to be inspired and to plan for moments in their lives. When brands can meet Pinners in this mindset, when they’re open to inspiration, ads enhance the Pinterest experience and inspire discovery and action. The more creative can be customized for the visual and positive nature of the platform, the better!

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: Meaghan Haire Gaffney appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’ve been working in SEO since 2006, and have worked in-house, at search marketing agencies, and as an independent contractor, even trying my hand at PPC for a few years until it became clear to me that I just didn’t enjoy it as much as SEO. In 2012, I became the Head of SEO at Moz, where I worked for two years, including spearheading SEO planning for the new Moz.com site and working on a successful migration from seomoz.org to moz.com. After I moved to Oklahoma, I left Moz and was the Senior Manager for SEO at BigWing, a digital marketing agency in OKC. Since 2016, I’ve been working for UpBuild, first as the Director of Strategy and now as the Vice President of Strategy. UpBuild is a technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO, advanced web analytics, and whole-funnel conversion rate optimization; at UpBuild, I lead client strategy for our team of senior technical SEOs, as well as working to grow the business.

2) How much do clients want to hear about algo changes like BERT and what’s the most effective way to communicate them?
It really depends on the client; I’ve had clients who were very plugged in to search industry news and had questions about every development, and clients who didn’t want to be bothered with that kind of stuff unless it meant they needed to do something. So part of communicating effectively is gaining an understanding of who the client is and how much information they want. In general, we want to communicate proactively with our clients if we’re seeing a change that we think will affect them directly, whether that’s a new opportunity coming up in their market or a devalued tactic that we want to pivot away from. Of course, if we’re seeing an impact to a client’s traffic or rankings as a result of an algo update, we’ll let them know. If something is getting a lot of buzz, especially in national media coverage, we might proactively message our clients to give them our take on what’s happening and what needs to be done; I think it’s better to let your clients know that you’re abreast of the situation than to have them panicking because they hear about an update and don’t know what you’re doing about it.

3) What’s your initial read on Google’s Featured Snippets change?
It’s hard to tell since it hasn’t been that long, but so far I’m not seeing a huge impact to any of our clients’ sites. Removing the duplicated site makes a lot of sense to me as something that Google would want to at least test. If you’re targeting featured snippets as part of your overall strategy, you’re used to some volatility already, since Google is constantly testing whether or not a SERP for a given query should have a featured snippet; so far, that volatility has way more of an impact on my clients who are heavily targeting featured snippets than that change has.

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: Ruth Burr Reedy appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.

Hello! I’m Akvile DeFazio, pronounced “ahk-vee-lah”. I am the President of AKvertise, Inc., a social media advertising agency that specializes in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn Ads. We work with a variety of clients, big and small, ranging from Grammy-nominated artists to innovative companies right here in Portland like Indow Windows, to the on-demand mobile oil changing company based where I live, in the city of Paso Robles on the Central Coast of California.

In summary, my career path was an indirect but eventful one, plentiful in experience, adventure, discovery, trial and error, and hands-on education.

Long story long, prior to launching my agency, I went to school to go premed but later shifted towards becoming a physical therapist. As an immigrant from Lithuania during the Cold War, my family instilled on me that going into medicine would lead to secure and successful work, so I listened and followed that path. Upon graduating and working in the field as a PT aide while applying for graduate school to become fully licensed, I realized that I enjoyed the marketing tasks I dipped my toes into at the PT clinics I worked in much more. Upon realizing this, I left and sought out to obtain an MBA degree instead to get a marketing job. After one year of graduate school, I realized it wasn’t for me because there was only one marketing course during the three-year program and I yearned for more.

I officially got my start with an ecommerce marketing internship at evo, a Seattle based outdoor gear, and apparel company. I greatly enjoyed working there and was incredibly thrilled to have been hired after my internship concluded. Unfortunately, the 2008 recession hit not long after and some cutbacks took place since not many were purchasing new skis that year. I was incredibly grateful to have made the cut but after some time again, my school loans kicked in and I sadly had to leave as I needed to find a different job to help repay them. I then applied for and landed an internship at Trupanion, a pet health insurance company where my paid search experience truly took off. I was hired there and built their PPC campaigns from the ground up. Google, Bing, Yahoo…all of it! It was an exciting time. While there, I attended SMX Advanced with my team. It was my very first conference and it made a big impression on me as it further ignited my interest in online advertising. Later on when I relocated to California, I ended up working remotely for SMX, running their paid search, paid social, and organic social media marketing efforts along with doing advertising operations on Search Engine Land and Marketing Land for three years. Fast forward five years and here we are now, getting pumped to attend and share my knowledge and tactics with others at Engage in an effort to help their businesses and careers grow further using social ads.

2) Many in our audience will be small business owners. What 3 pieces of advice would you give them about Paid Social Advertising so they won’t make expensive mistakes?

1) Befriend the Funnel: The biggest piece of advice would be to familiarize yourself with sales funnels as they relate to social media advertising. Often times, clients we work with want to run conversion goal campaigns. In theory, that makes sense, however, in practice, they are lower-funnel campaigns that cost more than an introductory awareness, engagement, or website traffic campaign would. In addition, algorithms are favorable if your audience better matches where they are in the funnel to the campaign objective you select. One way to look at this is, in a real-world relationship-building scenario, you wouldn’t go up to someone you just met at a networking event and said “Hello, nice to meet you, now give me your wallet”. It takes time and multiple touchpoints before someone will develop trust with you or your business and make a purchase, similarly, how a funnel works.
2) Get a Head Start on Set-Up: Even if you aren’t yet ready to launch advertising campaigns, set up your Facebook Business Manager account and Ads Manager within it. Place the pixel, or the piece of code, on your website so that it can begin tracking what takes place on your website. Once you are ready to advertise, you will be steps ahead and have some data and be able to create custom audiences to target past website visitors within remarketing campaigns.
3) Keep it Seamless and Simple: When launching a campaign, create a strategy so that you are targeting the correct audience, at the right place in the funnel where they reside, and with the correct messaging. This way, your campaign will be more relevant, perform better as it will resonate with your audience, and social channels such as Facebook will reward you with lower click costs. For example, if you are looking to sell water bottles to a group of people who may not be aware of your brand yet, you will want to use a top of funnel campaign objective like awareness. In the ad set, you may want to target people that are interested in water, or hydration, or perhaps are interested in exercise. When creating your ad, put yourself in the target audiences place and compose ad copy that would resonate with them. Utilize imagery that complements the ad copy and use images or better yet, brief videos to show your product being used. If you are showcasing one particular product, make it easy for the person clicking the ad to purchase it and send them directly to that product page, rather than your home page or overall product page and expect them to find it.

3) ROAS on Paid Social isn’t always as clear as it is on Paid Search. Can you quantify why someone might be OK with a lower Paid Social ROAS because of its inherent reach and engagement?

Excellent question. While you can certainly drive leads and sales using social ads, it can be more challenging because people on social channels are there to socialize. They aren’t searching with intent like they are on search engines given the purpose of these platforms, however, don’t let that deter you from testing social ads as people just may not know about you yet and quite possibly, should, depending on who you are targeting and what your goals are.

Facebook and Instagram Ads are terrific introductory points to your target audience. Expanding your reach and increasing engagement on these platforms is currently the least expensive way via ads compared to most other channels and it’s an effective way to get new prospects into your funnel. People may learn about you via social ads, do some of their own research, shopping, and comparing, and come back to you through other channels or through a remarketing campaign right where they started on a social platform via an ad. Paid social is only a piece of the pie, however, it plays an important role in your holistic marketing strategy. Give it a test and see how it performs for your brand and your various goals.

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: Akvile DeFazio appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I do PPC for a living and run ZATO (my small agency), but have zero background in marketing or business. I actually did my undergrad, and grad work in Biblical Studies and hold a Masters in Theology (where my agency name came from, it’s a variation of the Koine Greek word ????? “to search after or seek”). I still use my degree on a weekly basis in my church, but definitely wish I had taken a business class of some sorts so I didn’t have to learn everything from the school of hard knocks.

2) Let us suppose you were building an eCommerce account from scratch. What criteria would you use in determining your choice of bidding strategy(ies) for the shopping campaigns?
This is an interesting question because my answer has changed a bit over the years. The key to automation is that it relies solely on data that is both good enough, and enough. In other words, if you have accurate data, and enough of it, you can run things with automation pretty quickly. Old habits die hard, and I find I prefer still to begin accounts with manual bidding, get an idea of what is working and what isn’t, where avg CPCs are, what competition is doing, and all of the other helpful stuff one can learn when playing a more direct role in the beginning. Then with enough time and data, we’ll transition campaigns to automated bidding. We segment our Bottom of Funnel and of Funnel targeting as much as possible, so we can match our bidding strategies and goals to these different audience types. If we are running Top of Funnel plays, we may experiment with Max Clicks, or enhanced CPC. If we are running Bottom of Funnel campaigns, we like to use TROAS for automated bidding.

3) Many shopping feeds we have to work with are massively huge and are populated by vendor-supplied product descriptions. Is there any hope of optimizing these at scale in a manner that could positively impact shopping campaign performance?

Typically the PPCer is limited in the scope of what you can change content side, but there are a few tricks you can employ here. First, and easiest (for us), is to work with either your in-house dev team or employ a 3rd party Feed Management Solution to assist with bulk feed optimizations. We are big fans of Feedonomics, primarily because they do this kind of thing (detailed bulk optimizations) as part of their services. That being said, another trick is to employ Feed Rules within Google Merchant Center. For instance, let’s say you want to add the optimized Product Title into your description for every product, you can easily create a Feed Rule within GMC appending the title to every description at scale and you’re done.

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: Kirk Williams appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I started out in SEO in 2007, and then fell in love with LinkedIn Ads back in 2011. I had so much success with them at a previous company when I took the account and grew it to LinkedIn’s largest spending account, and saw that no one was talking about LinkedIn Ads online despite how much incredible success I was seeing come from it. I decided to start my own LinkedIn Ads-focused agency in 2014. We’re official LinkedIn partners, and manage many of LinkedIn’s largest spending accounts worldwide (as well as many of the smaller and everything in between).

2) Can you please share some important characteristics of high-performing LinkedIn Ads?
LinkedIn Ads absolutely shine at getting your message in front of the right audience, but high-performing LinkedIn Ads give that audience a reason to go out of their way to click. The most important thing you can do is have an offer that people actually care about (your ad saying “click here to talk to our sales rep” is not going to do the trick). Then once you have something irresistible to give away, you’ll want your message to 1) stand out and 2) be simple. Your image can stand out by contrasting against LinkedIn’s predominantly-blue color scheme – try oranges, reds, and greens. It should be simple because people on LinkedIn are on a mission and you’re distracting them. If you give them a wall of text, they won’t want to read it and they’ll keep scrolling. Keep it direct and short, and you’ll see metrics that exceed benchmarks by 2-3X!

3) What would you tell people who shy away from LinkedIn Ads due to their high CPC cost.
Although LinkedIn’s high CPCs are certainly something you need to keep in mind, they are certainly bearable for many companies who are sophisticated enough to look down the funnel. High CPCs lead to expensive lead cost, but when you consider that LinkedIn leads are more targeted, thus more highly qualified, it means they’ll turn into Sales Qualified Leads at a higher rate, and close at a higher rate. So don’t make your determination on the channel being a success or not, simply looking at your costs per lead. Look a step or two down, and they generally significantly outperform other paid social channels.

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: A.J. Wilcox appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
Navah Hopkins is the Director of Paid Media at Hennessey Group, an integrated digital marketing agency helping our customers own their markets via PPC, SEO, CRO, PR, and Content. A veteran of the digital marketing industry, she began as an SEO in 2008, transitioning to PPC in 2012. She manages the strategy and execution of paid media, as well as leading a team of paid search and paid social champions.

Prior to joining Hennessey, she served as Services Innovation Strategist for WordStream, working across the international book of SMBs and the agencies who serve them. In this role, she identified accounts facing obstacles, helped customers overcome these obstacles, and relayed feedback to the customer success, product, and ad partner teams so all could proactively empower clients to profit.

Throughout her career, Navah has made a point to give back and loves sharing lessons learned on the international speaking circuit as well as local universities. She is a frequent contributor to SEJ, SEMrush, and WordStream blogs/webinars.

In 2019, she became a founding member of the Paid Search Association, a group dedicated to empowering the next generation of PPC practitioners, as well as serving as a resource for all practitioners to learn from and share with the community.

2) Working for agencies, we frequently confront the eternal question as to whether agency or in-house is a better solution. What’s your take on this question?
When working with a good agency, there will be no difference in the level of care, commitment, and market-knowledge as an in-house super-star. The main consideration a brand has to figure out is whether it is more cost-effective for them to hire a full-time resource or to delegate to a trusted vendor. In both situations, passion for the brand and for the trade should be obvious.

3) Some have argued that Google Automation is a way to drive search marketers out of business. What are your thoughts?
Automation makes our lives easier because we can delegate grunt work to the machine while owning the strategic work (creative, keyword choices, targets).

The post Engage 2020 Mini-Interview: Navah Hopkins appeared first on SEMpdx.