What SEO elements are most important? Plus, a HUGE announcement; Monday’s daily brief

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, and how important is content to SEO?

What about site architecture? Would you say reputation is a critical factor to Google? How about user experience? If you have opinions on how important certain elements are to SEO, we’re asking you to have them counted.

Take 10 minutes (or less if you’re Barry, who sped through it in 5) to send along your thoughts in Search Engine Land’s 2021 SEO Periodic Table survey. The survey has 9 quick parts where you’ll rate individual factors on a scale of 1 to 5: 1 being not important to SEO at all and 5 being very important to SEO. 

You’ll go through the on-page and off-page sections as well as our toxin list. Toxins are elements that detract from your SEO. Make sure to pay attention to the grading scale–because it differs for the toxins section.

We’ve also added 3 new SEO niches: local, news/publishing, and ecommerce. Let us know what factors you think are critical in these 3 new areas in the last sections of this survey. Can’t wait to see what you think!

Carolyn Lyden,
Search Engine Land

What is PPC? The complete guide from Search Engine Land

Onboarding a new PPC specialist? Or maybe you’re in SEO and want to learn the basics of PPC? Perhaps you’re an expert and just want to see what’s new? Regardless, we’ve just launched our updated PPC Guide. This comprehensive guide starts off explaining what is PPC and deep-dives into the details from there. We cover the following (and more!): 

• Targeting and retargeting in PPC 
• How to structure your PPC account 
• Different PPC settings 
• Types of ad copy 
• Ad extensions

Bookmark it in case you want some light reading ;) or for your next new employee!

Read the guide.

MarTech is marketing

The MarTech Conference, MarTech Today and Marketing Land have been chronicling the impact of technology on marketing transformation for more than 10 years. It’s with that perspective that we even launched a bold new tagline for the conference in 2019 — MarTech is marketing — that emphasized that technology is integral to marketing. 

Today, we are taking the next step. Combining Marketing Land and MarTech Today into a single content experience called MarTech, connecting the content, thought leadership and event-based education like never before.

Read more about our big launch here.

Reddit launches in-house creative strategy agency to help advertisers understand the unique platform

If you’ve tried advertising on Reddit, you know it’s much different than other platforms. The best Reddit marketers already understand the subs they’re targeting and are likely members and participants already. You can’t just hop in and self-promote without being on the receiving end of a slew of downvotes. To help advertisers understand the differences between Reddit and other social networks, the company just launched KarmaLab — Reddit’s “first in-house creative strategy agency dedicated to setting brands up for long-term success.”

Some of the examples in the announcement highlight how KarmaLab uses the unique nomenclature and culture of Reddit and the subs to truly personalize ads that search marketers are placing there. In the example above, Samsung crowdsourced answers in r/explainlikeimfive (ELI5) to create this ad that also capitalizes on the unique humor of Redditors. It’s a smart move on Reddit’s part to help advertisers succeed in a distinctive advertising landscape.

How Storage Asset Management succeeds with a focus on reviews and social media

Pennsylvania-based Storage Asset Management (SAM) manages storage facilities for third-party owners (SAM owns none of them). “We do everything, from operations and marketing to accounting, for a facility owner,” Melissa Stiles, VP of marketing and sales at SAM. “Basically, everything but file their income taxes.”

Focus on reviews and local SEO. Reviews help with local SEO, of course, but that’s not the only reason they’re important. “We know that about 50% of our customers have never used storage before,” said Stiles, “so people want to read the reviews before they choose their unit.”

“Google [My Business] released its messaging feature [for desktop] a few months ago,” said Stiles, “and we’re amazed by the amount of people that use it, and Google’s app isn’t great. When you’re managing this many pages, you see a notification and then have to figure out which page it came into. Reputation’s tool has been great at pulling that all together. We can see the metrics behind it too — how long was our response time, are we getting more customer service messages or sales, etc.”

Read more here.

On the hunt for something new in 2021? Here are the latest career opportunities in search

Growth Marketing Manager @ Upraw Media (Amsterdam, remote)

• Drive experimentation, launch tests, measure impact and collaborate both internally and externally.
• Collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data, optimise campaigns and help our clients scale up.

SEO Strategist @ Houzz (remote)

• Take responsibility and ownership of a section of Houzz.com
• Identify areas of SEO opportunity in site structure, on-page optimization, and keyword tracking

Director of Content Marketing @ Talkdesk (remote)

• Lead the internal Talkdesk content marketing team and manage projects/delivery for external writers
• Work closely with the director of content strategy to execute the company’s global delivery and execution of content plans

Head of Demand Generation Climate Tech @ Sylvera (UK, remote)

• Refine our messaging and content frameworks to build our reputation as a thought-leader
• Develop systems to deliver high-quality content at scale

Enter a job opening for an opportunity to be featured in this section.

Google Ads in Gmail, sunsetting APIs, and SMB content

No, Google doesn’t read your email. “When you open Gmail, you’ll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads… We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads,” they said.

Reminder: Ad Exchange Buyer API sunset. “The Ad Exchange Buyer API is set to sunset by the end of Q2, 2021. We will begin the process of phasing the API out on June 1st, where a small percentage of API requests will begin to return an API error response that includes details about the impending sunset,” wrote Mark Saniscalchi, Authorized Buyers Developer Relations.

Yes, even small and medium businesses need content. “Customers look to your business as a solution to a problem. If you can’t show them why you’re the only solution, they’ll jump ship to your competitor who shows them better. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) need content to compete online – don’t let anybody tell you otherwise,” said Melissa Popp at Rickety Roo.

Pinterest to test live-streamed events this month with 21 creators

Pinterest often takes a backseat to other social media platforms when it comes to marketing and advertising, but as we’ve written recently Pinterest has been quietly beefing up its offerings and features for users and creators. Well, now they’re jumping on the live-stream bandwagon, too.

“The company is planning to host a three-day virtual event that will feature live-streamed sessions from top creators, including big names like Jonathan Van Ness and Rebecca Minkoff, among others. The virtual event will run inside the Pinterest app from May 24th through May 26th, and will serve as the company’s first public test of directly streaming creator content to its more than 475 million global users,” wrote Sarah Perez for TechCrunch.

Similar to Facebook or Instagram Lives, viewers will be able to interact and comment with creators during the events. Plus, a boon to retailers, there will be a shopping functionality involved where creators can tag products with Product Pins. This is Pinterest’s first foray into courting creators — and while it doesn’t yet offer the monetization that most other platforms do, it is making a space for influencers to partner with brands on the visual social app.