Here’s why: if your content strategy is still optimised for an audience that no longer exists – human searchers clicking through to your website – your brand is effectively becoming invisible.

The shift we predicted in our previous analysis, AI and the Future of Search: What Every Brand Leader Should Know, has solidified. With Google AI Overviews (AIO), ChatGPT and Perplexity now mediating billions of daily searches, your brand is no longer competing for position one anymore. You’re competing to be cited as the definitive source inside AI-generated answers, often without the user ever seeing your homepage.

For one client – an equine health brand – this translated into commercial reality, with 70% of target queries now triggering AI summaries. Traffic patterns shifted as users found answers without clicking; while traditional metrics showed strong rankings, engagement dropped. The disconnect was clear: visibility in search results no longer guaranteed visibility to the audience.

By rebuilding content around how large language models retrieve information, we tripled their share of Google AIOs – from 9.1% to 30.5% – in three months. More significantly, they began appearing as the cited authority for high-intent queries, with links to our article being cited in the AIO results.

How AI Decides What to Cite

Large language models (LLMs) and Google’s AIO retrieve information based on three pillars:

1. Extractability: can the model isolate a clear, quotable answer?

2. Topical authority signals: does the wider web recognise you as credible?

3. Consistency: do your digital properties tell the same story?

Vague marketing language or buried answers work against you. For instance, if your response to “what causes equine gastric ulcers” appears in paragraph four after 200 words about company heritage, the model moves on.

To ensure your brand is cited, you need to adapt your strategy. Here are the 5 ways to meet these requirements:

1. Master Answer-First Content Architecture

AI search engines are summary machines. To get mentioned, you must make your content extractable. This means moving away from traditional SEO keyword optimisation and toward topical relevance. Start key sections with a 1-2 sentence direct answer that an AI can easily quote. Standard SEO often hides the answer to keep users on the page; AI SEO puts the answer front and centre.

2. Prepare for Agentic Commerce

Perhaps the most provocative change in 2026 is the rise of Agentic Commerce, with ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout now enabling direct purchasing within the interface. Users specify requirements, AI agents evaluate products across integrated platforms (currently heavily integrated with Shopify and Etsy) and complete transactions without your site even loading. Google Gemini is expected to launch similar functionality this year. A key watch-out for brands: products without machine-readable specifications do not appear in recommendations.

3. Focus on E-E-A-T (Human Signals)

 As AI-generated content floods the web, search engines are looking for human-only signals to verify quality.

Tip: Add a human author to your blog posts with a dedicated author page including a bio, photo, and social links. This turns your brand from a faceless entity into a trusted source with verifiable expertise.

4. Write Articles as Deep Topical Hubs

Don’t just mention a topic—own it. If you sell a specific product, don’t just have a sales page; build a comprehensive guide that answers every possible follow-up question. This proves that your brand is an entity with deep knowledge of the subject, making you a primary source for AI engines seeking medical or technical answers.

5. Audit and Track Your Share of Model (SoM)

Traditional ranking metrics no longer capture competitive position. Share of Model (SoM) tracks the proportion of relevant queries where your brand appears as a cited source.

This process requires manual auditing or specialised tooling and brands that adapt citation strategies early establish authority that becomes progressively harder to displace.

What This Means Commercially

Content built for traditional search doesn’t translate automatically to AI citation. The investment isn’t trivial: restructuring content, building expertise signals, securing validation and implementing data standards all require committed effort. The question is whether your organisation is set up to compete where trust – not click-through rates – determines visibility.

If you’d like us to review your brand’s current LLM visibility, get in touch with the team today.

The post How to Improve Brand Visibility in the AI Search Era appeared first on Harvest Digital.

If you think Amazon advertising is only relevant for brands that sell on the platform, you’ve missed one of the biggest evolutions in performance marketing. Over the past 18 months, Amazon has built a powerful performance media ecosystem, combining first-party commerce data, premium video and streaming inventory and creative automation that rivals the major platforms.

For brands investing heavily in digital, Amazon Ads creates both a new opportunity and a new risk. Performance mixes that once revolved around Google and Meta now have a third pillar – one driven by authenticated data and high-intent behaviour.
The question is whether you’re using it, or whether your competitors will get there first.

Not “Just Another Retail Media Network”

Amazon Ads is no longer just for brands pushing physical products on Amazon.com. Non-endemic advertisers, including service businesses, subscription brands, financial services and DTC players, can now tap into Amazon’s logged-in audience, its shopping behaviour and its high-quality inventory.

The marketplace and the ad platform now operate as two distinct ecosystems. One drives transactions; the other drives targeting, reach and performance. Crucially, the ad platform is open to any brand with a clear testing plan, regardless of whether you sell on Amazon.

Intent Signals That Other Platforms Can’t Match

Amazon knows what people buy – and what they almost buy. Every search query, basket addition, repeat purchase and review contributes to authenticated, first-party intent signals. Unlike probabilistic social data, this is verified behaviour tied to logged-in users.

These signals power Amazon Ads, enabling precise targeting across Amazon’s own properties (Twitch, Prime Video, Fire TV, Kindle) as well as thousands of premium third-party sites. You’re not just advertising where people shop; you’re reaching verified buyers and high-intent browsers wherever they go.

And because Amazon holds shipping addresses and location data, brands can reach audiences are postcode-level precisions – something that many non-endemic advertisers might not reliably achieve through traditional ads.

For brands with strong first-party data, it gets even better. Customer match and lookalike modelling based on real purchasers often outperform other platforms’ predictive models, changing the economics of acquisition for performance-driven teams.

Creative AI That Reduces Costs and Raises the Stakes

they’re free (don’t mistake this for generosity – it’s strategy!) By lowering the creative barrier to entry, Amazon makes it faster for teams to launch, iterate and scale campaigns. Every creative variation feeds the algorithm, which in turn drives better performance. For resource-stretched teams, this means more testing velocity with fewer production bottlenecks. But it also creates a new dependency: the more your ads rely on Amazon’s AI-generated creative, the more your performance relies on Amazon’s ecosystem. And the faster it is for competitors to do the same.

How Harvest Helps You Understand Amazon’s Real Impact

With acquisition costs rising elsewhere, growing privacy constraints and declining audience accuracy, authenticated first-party data is becoming the only reliable currency. Amazon has more of it (and better quality) than any platform except Google.

The challenge isn’t whether Amazon advertising works. It’s whether it’ll work for you, at what scale and at what cost relative to your existing channels.

Harvest helps brands answer that clearly. We size the genuine opportunity against your growth targets, running tightly scoped pilots with clear KPIs and proving value before you commit meaningful budget. Our tests generate fast, learnable results, giving you evidence before you commit meaningful budget.

Your customers are already on Amazon. The question is whether you’re visible to them there – or whether your competitors will be first.

The post Amazon Advertising Isn’t Just for Amazon Sellers Anymore appeared first on Harvest Digital.

On paper, it looks efficient. In practice, it’s one of the bluntest instruments in media planning. The over-65s aren’t a single audience they span two decades, from retirees still working, travelling and streaming their favourite TV shows – to octogenarians dependent on carers and often offline entirely. Treating them as one audience risks both wasted spend and missed opportunity.

Households headed by someone aged 65-74 now hold more median wealth than any other age group in the UK. Many own their homes outright, enjoy substantial pensions and have higher disposable income than younger cohorts. That makes them highly attractive to sectors – from financial services to travel, retail and healthcare. But only if brands plan with intelligence and precision.

Personas, Not Age Buckets

When we segment by behaviour, rather than by age alone, distinct personas emerge:

• Active Explorers – often 65-74, healthier, wealthier, streaming BBC iPlayer while planning their next holiday.
  
• Health-Challenged Planners – typically late 70s+, reliant on TV or smartphone, researching mobility aids and healthcare services.
  
• Legacy Givers – financially comfortable retirees who form the backbone of charity donor lists, split between digital and traditional channels.

These groups behave very differently and a single ‘65+ campaign’ will miss both the active traveller and the housebound donor. 

A Split Market

The latest data highlights just how diverse the 65+ audience has become:

• Broadcast TV still dominates with over 75s watching an average of 5h 41m per day on broadcast TV. This viewing is steadily declining, especially among younger retirees and brands banking only on linear TV risk losing reach. [chart 1]
  
• Broadcaster on-demand (BVoD) is up 30% YoY among 55-74s and 75+. Of the over 75s, 64% now use VoD services monthly, proving appetite for catch-up and digital viewing is surging. [chart 2]
  
• Subscription Video on-demand (SVoD) adoption is also rising: Disney+ usage among 65+ almost doubled in a single year (from 7% in 2022 to 12% in 2023), showing they continue to adopt new platforms. [chart 3]
  
• Podcasts are emerging: 12% of 65+ now listen weekly (RAJAR 2025), up from 5% in 2021. Their favourite genres? News (46%), politics (37%) and talk shows (32%). [chart 4]
  
• The digital divide persists: One in five over-65s is offline, meaning 20% of this audience is invisible to digital-only campaigns. Older audiences are still not “mobile-first”; over 75s spend just 3 minutes per day on social media, so campaigns are more effective on TV, tablets and broadcaster catch-up apps. [chart 5]
  

This is clearly not one single audience. It’s a split market demanding multi-channel, persona-led planning.

Smarter Tools, Smarter Targeting: From Age to Receptivity

At Harvest, we plan around receptivity – not just age or rough demographics, but exact moments when people are most open to messages.

For instance, the Active Explorer might be receptive when planning a trip, the Health-Challenged Planner following a medical appointment and the Legacy Giver when reviewing their finances.

For over-65s, digital adoption is driven by connection, convenience and necessity, not novelty or entertainment (pensioners are the most active NHS app users) and their behaviours create clear, targetable signals.

The tools to make this possible already exist. Google’s Performance Max and Demand Gen use intent and browsing signals to distinguish the cruise holiday purchaser from the mobility scooter buyer. Meta’s targeting works in similar ways. The caveat: programmatic display requires care, as thin or misleading signals can waste spend.

Why It Matters for Strategy and ROI

‘65+’ is not a strategy. Behaviour-led planning, enriched by personas, AI signals and a receptivity lens is sharper, more respectful and more effective. For brands, that means:

• Less wastage by avoiding irrelevant impressions.
• Improved targeting by aligning media with real habits and contexts.
• Higher lifetime value by meeting audiences when they’re most receptive.

For charities, the risk of oversimplification is especially acute. Donor bases are ageing – but not uniformly. A 68-year-old donor may be reachable on Facebook and ITVX while an 82-year-old donor might never go online but reads the Radio Times cover-to-cover. Planning that treats them the same risks alienating both.

The over-65s are a growing, wealthy and diverse audience. Treat them as such – and the commercial returns will follow.

The post The 65+ Opportunity: A Smarter Approach to Media and Targeting appeared first on Harvest Digital.

What’s new?

Part of Google’s ‘AI Power Pack’,AI Max is a ‘one-click’ feature bringing together three powerful capabilities:

• Understanding intent: the future of search is predictive. Instead of relying solely on keywords, AI draws on billions of signal combinations to identify what your potential customer is really looking for, before matching them with the most relevant message.
  
  
• Smarter creative: Using your existing content, headlines and landing pages, ads are automatically adapted, with AI generating new variations that feel natural and relevant at scale.
  
  
• Improved landing pages: Google’s powerful AI capability directs people to the page on your site that best fits their needs, even if it’s a blog or information page rather than a sales page. For brands, this unlocks value from the content you already have.

Landing page ‘exclusions’ give us control over which pages Google can use and all of these features can be adjusted or toggled off if needed (although we recommend keeping them on for maximum impact).

How Harvest is applying AI Max

When we tested AI Max with a client, the results were immediate and measurable:

• 36% more leads
• 19% lower cost per lead
• Higher engagement with deeper site content, showing that AI can connect people with material they might never have reached before.

This wasn’t anecdotal. We structured the test carefully: a 50/50 budget split against an existing broad campaign. With all three AI features enabled, we saw stronger click-through rates from automatically generated headlines – capable only through AI – and meaningful conversions even from pages designed to inform rather than sell.

What’s coming next

Google is already extending ads into new AI-driven formats, where search stops being just about keywords and starts being about trusted answers powered by AI:

AI Overview ads: Described as ‘one of the most successful launches in search in the past decade’, ads already appear above and below AI Overviews in 200+ countries. The next phase – ads inside the AI-generated answers themselves – is due to launch in the UK in H2 2025.

AI Mode ads: The new AI Mode feature rolled out by Google aims to tackle the toughest of questions with longer, informed responses. By having clients present within these results, they are positioned as the best solution to consumer queries. Google is testing ads in AI mode in late 2025 for the US, with rollout to other English-speaking markets expected in 2026.

Taken together, these moves mean ads won’t just sit on the edges of search results – they’ll increasingly be part of the trusted answers consumers rely on.

Supporting brands like yours

At Harvest, we help brands stay discoverable, relevant and competitive in an AI-shaped future – cutting through the jargon, focusing on what matters and turning the latest tools and platforms into strategies that deliver leads, lower costs and long-term growth.

If you’d like to see how AI developments – and other technology breakthroughs – could accelerate your next campaign, let’s talk.

The post AI and the Future of Search: What Every Brand Leader Should Know appeared first on Harvest Digital.

In our last blog, we explored why rankings, impressions and old SEO metrics no longer tell the truth about visibility. Now in Part 2, we look at the actions brands can take to actually win attention and build lasting mental real estate in a zero-click world.

Three actions brands should take now

1. Measure what really matters

Too many organisations reward teams for chasing impressions and raw traffic, even though both are increasingly misleading. The more telling signals are the ones that reveal whether people truly saw you – and remembered you. Are you seeing:

• Growth in branded search?
• Uplift in direct traffic?
• Higher rates of return visits?
• Share of SERP features (snippets, knowledge panels, AI overviews)?
• Deeper engagement: scroll depth, repeat interactions, conversions?

These are the true indicators that your brand is building space in users’ minds, the single biggest predictor of long-term growth.

2. Prioritise retention over reach

Clicks used to be the finish line. Today, they’re just the start. What really matters is what happens once someone arrives. Does your content:

1. Offer value
2. Hold attention
3. Build trust and create reasons for them to come back?

That means designing experiences that do more than convert in the moment. They need to educate, engage and lodge your brand in memory, so that when the real buying decision comes, you’re the name that resurfaces. Reach without retention is wasted spend; retention is what compounds.

3. Compete beyond Google

Your customers’ curiosity doesn’t begin and end with Google. Increasingly, it starts on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon – all search engines in their own right. So if your SEO strategy stops at the Google SERP, you’re only playing in half the market.

By extending presence across these ecosystems, brands have the chance to win early mindshare long before a click to their site even happens.

How Harvest helps brands put this into practice

We approach SEO as a growth lever, not just a traffic-chasing exercise. That means helping brands become genuinely visible and memorable where and when it matters. We do that by:

• Diagnosing true visibility with advanced frameworks that show where you’re noticed, not just where you’re listed.
• Owning the SERP by optimising for snippets, AI overviews and knowledge panels – the places that shape perception before the first click.
• Connecting beyond Google with search strategies tailored for the platforms your buyers are already searching.
• Closing the loop with retention and attribution analysis, so you can prove how visibility translates into growth.

Take Mobility Group as an example. Their traditional SEO approach – targeting an older demographic – delivered clicks but little intent or recognition. By shifting to a visibility-first strategy, we measured qualified attention instead of raw traffic, improved their share of voice across Google and YouTube and created a more consistent flow of inbound leads from people who remembered the brand when they were ready to act.

The brands that will win The brands that act now, by measuring the right things, optimising for retention and expanding their search strategies, will be the ones still winning mindshare, customers and market share in five years’ time.

The post From Clicks to Qualified Attention: How to Win in a Zero-Click World appeared first on Harvest Digital.

This is zero-click search. Not just another update, but a new value system. And brands are no longer  competing for search engine results page positions, they’re vying for space in users’ minds.

The unsettling reality is that a brand can do everything ‘right’ – maintain its rankings, protect its keywords – and still lose half its traffic. People are searching more than ever – they’re just not coming through to you.

A recent study found that in the US, only 360 of every 1,000 searches now lead to a click on the open web. In the EU, the number is only fractionally higher at 374 clicks. Meanwhile, six in ten searches end without a click at all.

So, while dashboards may show you’re performing well, the truth is that fewer people are actually reaching your site, engaging with your content or remembering your brand.

Three challenges every brands must understand:

1. Rankings no longer guarantee visibility
   
   Being ‘on page one’ used to matter. It meant real estate, credibility and above all, traffic. Today, your number one position may sit below an AI overview, a shopping carousel or multiple ‘People Also Ask’ results. You’re still technically there, but hidden in plain sight – rankings alone no longer reflect whether your audience has actually seen or registered you.
   
   
2. Impressions are a vanity metric
   
   On paper, impressions still look impressive. They suggest your brand is surfacing frequently in searches. But impressions no longer guarantee visibility. Increasingly, they mean your content has been referenced in passing, buried in AI answers or cited somewhere few users notice. That’s why impressions have become a vanity metric: they often say more about Google’s ability to use your content than your ability to reach your market.
   
   
3. Old SEO metrics don’t map to brand growth
   
   Traditional SEO metrics – traffic volume, CTR and keyword rankings – provided neat, reportable numbers. In a zero-click world, they’re less relevant. A brand can show rising traffic while losing share of mind or report high CTRs while failing to build recall or trust. The more brands focus on these ‘vanity’ metrics, the greater the gap between the numbers in reports and the reality of whether the market is actually paying attention.

Redefining visibility in a zero-click world

In this new environment, true visibility is about perception, not just position. It’s about being repeatedly noticed and recalled across a journey. To be genuinely visible, brands need to:

• Secure repeated mentions across related searches
• Appear above the fold in AI-driven answers
• Own snippets, overviews, and knowledge panels
• Show up consistently across different search ecosystems

It’s whether your audience remembers you, not simply whether Google listed you.

What this means for brands

Bain & Company recently reported that 60% of consumers now rely on zero-click results at least 40% of the time, cutting organic traffic by as much as a quarter.

The conclusion is clear: the metrics brands have relied on for a decade no longer tell the truth about visibility. If your teams are still optimising for ‘traffic volume’ while the market is moving to ‘mental availability,’ you’re building dashboards that look reassuring – while your share of mind quietly erodes.

In part 2, we look at how brands can respond: the three actions that will help you measure what matters, retain attention and expand visibility across a zero-click world.

Read part 2 hehttps://www.harvestdigital.com/how-to-win-in-a-zero-click-world/re >>

The post Forget the Click: Why SEO’s Biggest Challenge Is Mental Real Estate appeared first on Harvest Digital.

As much as paid tools are brilliant and helpful, you don’t always have to spend money to gain good insights or minimise some of the more manual tasks of the job. More importantly, with the rise of AI-powered search through tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews, the SEO landscape has evolved significantly in 2025.

As such, we’ve put together a handy list of our top favourite free tools for on-page SEO, technical audits, AI and content optimisation, outreach, general learning, and some useful browser extensions.

Free On-Page SEO Tools

Find keywords with Google Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner remains one of the most popular tools for discovering keywords and getting search volumes. With its local feature, you can easily look up volumes in different countries and cities, which is helpful for targeted campaigns.

Top tip for 2025: Since this tool is designed primarily for PPC, it only gives a range for search volumes per month, which are fairly broad. To see more accurate search volumes, simply add the keyword to your “Plan” and check out the monthly impression – this number is going to be more accurate than the initial range. Also consider using it alongside AI tools for intent analysis.

See ‘People Also Ask’ questions with Answer The Public

Answer The Public is an incredibly useful tool for FAQ and subtopic research. With the ability to see all questions relating to the main query, you can quickly gauge the sub-topics that people are most interested in around a topic. This is particularly valuable in 2025 as Google’s AI Overviews often favour content that answers specific questions.

Check for duplicate content with Copyscape

Duplicate content is always a source of headache, whether it’s caused by similar pages on the same site or other publications using an exact copy of your content. This tool scans the web for you, highlighting any sites that have the same information as yours. With AI-generated content becoming more prevalent, this tool is more crucial than ever.

Create beautiful designs for your on-page copy with Whimsical

Allowing you to create wireframes for both desktop and mobile, this handy tool helps envision and communicate design ideas with great ease. You can also use it to create various other things like mind maps, flow charts, and other projects.

Free Technical SEO Tools

Page speed checks with Google PageSpeed Insights

Check the page speed for both desktop and mobile for any webpage of your site. The tool will give you a score and a handful of suggested improvements, highlighting the most important and urgent ones to fix.

2025 update: This tool remains the king of speed optimisation. The scoring and baseline keeps getting updated, so don’t treat it as a one-time thing to check and improve. We suggest checking your scores every quarter, especially as Core Web Vitals continue to be a crucial ranking factor.

Crawl your site with Screaming Frog

If you have a smaller site, or you just want to crawl a certain section of your site, crawls under 500 URLs are free on Screaming Frog. Discover broken links, analyse meta titles in bulk, check for large images that slow down your page, and much more.

Check the CMS of a site with Builtwith

See what a site is built with in order to know what is achievable, or spy on your competitors. This tool has become even more valuable for understanding the technology stack behind AI-optimised websites.

Compress large images with TinyPNG

Improve your website speed with a simple trick of compressing and reuploading heavy images. This tool supports PNG, JPG, GIF, and even PDF formats. You can often compress file sizes by over 50%!

Check hreflang tags with Hreflang Tags Generator Tool

A staple for any multilingual site, this tool allows for bulk checking hreflang tags and lets you know about any issues across the site.

Free AI-Powered SEO Tools (New for 2025)

Content optimisation with ChatGPT (Free Plan)

ChatGPT has become invaluable for SEO tasks in 2025. Use it for keyword research, content ideation, meta description writing, and understanding search intent. The free plan provides substantial functionality for SEO professionals.

Claude for content analysis – Claude (Free Plan)

Claude excels at retaining context during long conversations, making it excellent for complex SEO strategy discussions and detailed content analysis. It’s particularly useful for reviewing longer content pieces and providing strategic insights.

Check AI Overview visibility with SE Ranking’s AI Overview Tracker

Monitor how your keywords perform in Google’s AI Overviews. This free tool helps you track your visibility in AI-generated search results, which appeared in over 13% of searches by March 2025.

AI content detection with Grammarly

Whilst not exclusively an SEO tool, Grammarly helps ensure your content (whether human or AI-assisted) is polished, error-free, and maintains the quality standards search engines favour for E-E-A-T compliance.

Free Tools for Link Building

Find and validate email addresses with Hunter

One of the most accurate free email address-finders out there, it can be installed as a plugin for Chrome, making the process of finding email addresses for a particular website quick and easy.

See journalist enquiries on a range of topics with Help a Reporter Out

Sign up for custom alerts or dig through the daily reporter requests. You can simply find a topic that’s relevant for you and write a response in the hope that your answer (and website) gets featured.

Find link opportunities with Featured

A newer addition to the link building toolkit, Featured offers a free plan that helps identify digital PR opportunities and journalist enquiries across various industries.

Free Training Tools

Get certified with Google Certification courses – Grow with Google

Learn the ins and outs of Google Analytics, Search Console, writing content, and promoting your site. Best of all, you can earn a free certificate too. The 2025 curriculum now includes modules on AI search and optimising for Google’s AI Overviews.

Learn the tricks of the trade with SEMRush Academy

With courses from industry leaders on a range of SEO, PPC, and paid social topics, you can quickly learn everything you need to know to get started in the field. New courses for 2025 cover AI-assisted SEO and adapting to changing search behaviours.

Watch the most interesting talks online at Brighton SEO

Brighton SEO continues to offer online access to presentations and talks on the hottest topics of the SEO industry from industry experts. The 2025 programme heavily features AI in SEO, E-E-A-T optimisation, and preparing for the future of search.

Essential Browser Extensions for 2025

SEO Minion – Free Chrome extension for quick on-page SEO checks Keywords Everywhere – Free keyword research extension with limited daily searches MozBar – Free toolbar from Moz for instant domain authority and page metrics Web Developer – Comprehensive set of web development tools useful for technical SEO

Free WordPress SEO Plugins

RankMath SEO – The most feature-rich free WordPress SEO plugin available in 2025, offering AI-powered suggestions and comprehensive optimisation features.

Yoast SEO – Still a solid choice with a simple interface, though not as feature-packed as RankMath’s free version.

What’s Changed in 2025?

The SEO landscape has evolved significantly with several key developments:

• AI Overviews: Google’s AI-generated answers now appear in over 13% of searches, making question-focused content more important than ever
• E-E-A-T focus: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness have become crucial for ranking, especially with AI-generated content proliferation
• AI search engines: Tools like ChatGPT now rank as the 5th most visited site globally, changing how people search for information
• Core Web Vitals: Page speed and user experience metrics continue to be critical ranking factors
• AI content detection: Search engines have become better at identifying and potentially penalising low-quality AI-generated content

Best Practices for Using Free SEO Tools in 2025

1. Combine multiple tools: No single free tool provides everything you need. Use a combination of tools for comprehensive analysis.
2. Focus on quality over quantity: With AI making content creation easier, quality and expertise matter more than ever.
3. Monitor AI search visibility: Track how your content appears in AI Overviews and AI-powered search engines.
4. Prioritise user experience: Tools that help improve Core Web Vitals and user experience are essential.
5. Stay updated: The SEO landscape changes rapidly. Regularly check for new features and tools.

The key to successful SEO in 2025 isn’t just about ranking on traditional Google searches – it’s about being visible across the entire search ecosystem, including AI-powered search tools whilst maintaining the quality and expertise that both users and search engines value.

Remember: whilst free tools can provide tremendous value, they often have limitations. As your SEO efforts scale, consider investing in premium tools for more comprehensive data and advanced features.

The post The best free SEO tools for 2025 appeared first on Harvest Digital.

1. Map your gaps
   What don’t you know? Focus on three things: who buys from you, why do they choose you, and when are they most ready to act? Identifying these gaps is the first step.
   
   
2. Plug the gaps with smart proxy signals
   Use third-party data partners to reach your audience when they’re actually paying attention (not just when you hope they might be). We’ve seen real results working with:

• AudienceQ: Targets people by recent store visits. Great for lifestyle segments like sports fans, festivalgoers or health shoppers.
  
  
• Sojern: Reaches travellers with confirmed bookings – perfect for brands in finance, insurance or wellness wanting to connect during high-planning moments.
  
  
• Western Union: Maps remittance flows, a strong signal for luxury, expat or diaspora audiences.
  
  
• Uber Journey Ads: Places ads during calm, focused rides, ideal for storytelling that needs attention in those ‘high-dwell, low-distraction’ moments.
  
  
• Amazon Advertising Network: Builds audiences from real purchase behaviour to reach new parents, supplement buyers, pet owners and more within Amazon’s ecosystem.

The key is to match campaigns to real-world behaviours, not just assumed demographics.

3. Build campaigns for moments of receptivity
   Don’t blast ads at random. Match your message to moments when people are most likely to engage. DAMAC, for example, successfully used travel plans and wealth signals to reach high-value buyers already planning overseas visits.
   
   
4. Measure what matters
   Look beyond clicks and impressions. Track signals of trust and intent: brand recall, search lift, repeat site visits and conversion quality.

Why is our proven Receptivity Model so well suited to challenger or fast-growth businesses? As well as being designed for brands without first-party data and a legacy CRM, it’s highly flexible and ROI-led.

So, don’t let missing data hold you back. Start now: use smart media choices to build trust, relevance and growth – while your own data catches up.

Leveraging ‘media as data’ and filling prospect data gaps delivers more efficient campaigns and faster results. Talk to us if you’re impatient for success.

The post How to Get Started with the Receptivity Model: A Roadmap for Challenger Brands appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Marketers know they must ‘build relationships’: capture emails, track journeys, feed the CRM… But what if you can’t?

What if you launch with no customer history, no login system, no app data, no loyalty programme – you just need to find new customers, fast – and at scale?

We believe the answer lies in Receptivity, a model that prioritises timing, context and mindset. It’s not about reaching millions; it’s about reaching people when they’re most open to your message.

This is where ‘media as data’ changes the game, where smart brands are now using media partnerships to access behavioural insight they’d never gather on their own – and finding high-intent, high-fit audiences without waiting to build a database from scratch.

Rather than rely on cookies or first-party data you don’t yet have, you ‘rent’ behavioural insight through smart media partnerships. You tap into real-world intent signals – travel bookings, purchase behaviour, remittance flows – moments that reveal when a consumer is primed to listen and act.

It’s a proven, data-driven shortcut to trust and relevance.

A luxury property developer used this approach to reach high-net-worth individuals interested in prime real estate in Dubai, London and Miami. By combining Western Union’s remittance data with Sojern’s travel signals, we were able to pinpoint prospects with the means and the intent to invest – and then engage them at moments of peak receptivity, such as planning a property visit abroad.

Future Farm, a plant-based challenger brand faced a similar obstacle. With no time to build a massive database, they just needed to reach real shoppers at the only store where the product was stocked: Sainsbury’s. By partnering with AudienceQ , we built a custom audience of verified Sainsbury’s shoppers. Layering that on top of standard targeting, we ensured every impression counted, boosting awareness and delivering immediate efficiency.

Both examples demonstrate how data-driven media targeting enhances receptivity – putting your message in front of people who are ready to hear it.

Why does this matter for your brand? Because when you match your campaign to real-life behaviour (not just assumed demographics) you show up as both helpful and credible. Over time, your consistent relevance builds brand salience, preference and trust – the hallmarks of lasting brand strength.

Unhindered as they are by rigid legacy systems, it’s no coincidence challenger brands are leading this shift. Nimble and ROI-led, they’re able to test fresh data sources, align creative and media quickly, doubling down on what works. For retail, health and wellness brands, especially, where trust, timing and relevance matter, receptivity turns media spend into lasting brand strength.In a world without cookies or guaranteed loyalty, renting data-rich relationships is often the smartest way to build your own.

Are you ready to reach people when they’re ready to listen?

The post Renting Relationships: Using the Receptivity Model to Build Brand Strength appeared first on Harvest Digital.

That might work for a streaming platform, a supermarket, or a subscription box service – but what if your business doesn’t naturally collect customer data at scale?

Not every brand has the luxury of a logged-in user base or repeat transactions. And some sectors – like high-consideration home improvements or big-ticket medical aids – don’t lend themselves to recurring customer journeys.

So where does that leave you?

When Repeat Purchase Isn’t Part of the Plan

Take Mobility Bathing Group. They run a family of brands offering walk-in baths and easy-access showers for people with mobility challenges.

Their audience tends to be older – the average customer is 79 – and they’re usually making a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. There’s no ongoing app engagement, no loyalty scheme, no email nurture journey.

And yet, the marketing has to work. Because this is a major decision – and often an urgent one. It’s emotional, it’s practical, and it involves multiple stakeholders:

• Older individuals taking charge of their independence
• Partners worried about falls and safety
• Adult children researching solutions on behalf of a parent

That’s not a simple persona. And “65+” as a targeting bracket doesn’t come close.

Why Traditional Demographics Let You Down

Here’s the problem with relying on platform data: it’s too crude.

In the programmatic world, 65-year-olds are lumped in with 85-year-olds. But the difference between someone recently retired marathon runner and someone with advanced mobility issues is significant – in needs, mindset, and media habits.

And if you can’t rely on behavioural tags, third-party cookies, or a deep CRM file, what’s left?

Use What You Can Hear

One of the most underused assets in marketing today? Customer reviews.

They’re honest, detailed, and direct – the literal voice of the customer.

At Harvest, we incorporate these into our Receptivity Model, which we use to help brands like Mobility Bathing Group market more effectively – even in low-data environments.

We start by building detailed personas, drawing from:

• Customer reviews and call centre feedback
• Search intent and online behaviour
• Publisher audience panels
• AI-powered analysis of creative response

Turning Personas Into Plans

These personas go far beyond simple demographics. They include:

• Key needs and decision drivers
• Typical objections and questions
• Media habits and preferences
• Seasonal or situational triggers for action

From here, we follow a three-step approach:

1. Persona-led marketing planning
We define not just who the audience is, but when they’re most likely to engage, what matters to them, and what might get in the way.

2. Journey mapping
We lay out customer journeys that highlight key media touchpoints – across channels like search, display, DooH, audio, and connected TV – ensuring relevance at each stage.

3. Media investment planning
We calculate what kind of spend is required to deliver those journeys effectively, balancing reach, frequency and creative impact.

The result is planning that’s customer-first, seasonally aware, and built with message delivery in mind – not just media mechanics.

Matching The Message to the Moment

Here’s what that looked like in practice:

We worked with Mobility Bathing Group to tailor campaign creative by persona, running parallel tracks of messaging based on likely mindset and life stage.

For example, ads targeting adult children focused on peace of mind, family safety, and trusted installation.
Meanwhile, messaging for older customers leaned more on regaining independence and making life easier – without moving home.

We also layered in contextual targeting – such as health-focused content and relevant editorial environments – to boost message relevance even without detailed behavioural tracking.

The result? Better engagement, higher lead quality, and a campaign strategy that’s resilient to data loss.

What to Do When Data Is Scarce

If your business doesn’t generate first-party data at scale, you’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean you have to settle for blunt targeting and guesswork.

Here’s what we recommend:

• Start with personas: Build real, nuanced customer models. Not everyone fits in a neat age or income bracket.
• Mine real feedback: Reviews and support logs are goldmines for emotional insight and unmet needs.
• Use intent signals creatively: Context, search, and page-level behaviour can tell you more than a cookie ever could.
• Design creative for real people: Speak to the mindset, not the demographic.
• Plan journeys before channels: Map out when, where, and how customers are most receptive – then let the media follow.

At Harvest, we’ve helped brands across finance, healthcare and home mobility succeed in low-data environments.

Because when you don’t have the data, you need the insight.

And we can help you find it.

The post No First-Party Data? No Problem. Why Brands Need Better Personas, Not Bigger Lists appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Those days are gone.

Third-party cookies, the old backbone of digital attribution, are disappearing while platforms, such as Google and Meta, offer less transparency than ever. AI-led tools like PMAX serve your ads across all channels but offer little clue as to what’s driving results – or if it even is.

Creative performance? Audience resonance? It’s all a black box. We’re not just in a privacy-first world. We’re in a feedback-free one.

And that’s a big problem. Especially for marketers in complex, high-trust sectors like financial services, where data and detail matter. Results matter. And proving ROI isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s how you get sign-off for the next campaign.

So, what now?

At Harvest Digital, we think it’s time to stop waiting for perfect data (the illusive silver bullet) and start focusing on what you can control. That means going back to the craft of marketing and rebuilding measurement from the ground up. Understanding your audience. Telling better stories. Being more human. Using skills and smart tools – not relying on them blindly.

Data or Intuition?

We’ve been buying digital media for over two decades. In that time, we’ve seen the pendulum swing from hunches to hyper-targeting and now back to guesswork, but this time, we’re seeing marketers working against higher expectations and increased pressure to perform.

That’s where craft comes in. Clean attribution isn’t reliable, but you can sharpen audience insights and align your creative with user intent, designing campaigns that respond to real-time opportunity.

Here’s a good example.

Matching The Message to the Moment

One of our clients, a peer-to-peer loans company, needed to attract new investors. Their platform showed real-time interest rates, but their ads were stuck on a fixed message. So, we built a campaign to change that.

We plugged their live rate feed into the Google Ads API so that when rates crossed a certain threshold, the system would:

• Launch new ad copy instantly
• Optimise messaging to reflect the day’s best returns
• Highlight rates investors wouldn’t want to miss

The results? CTRs tripled. Investor signups jumped. This wasn’t a secret attribution hack – we simply made the campaign respond to the real world in real time. Demand balancing supply.

Rethinking How You Measure “What’s Working”

Attribution was never the end goal. The real point was always: is this working?

Now, with the absence of ‘perfect data’, we need new ways to answer that.

At Harvest Digital, we’ve developed the Receptivity framework – our very own secret weapon designed to help us assess how well ad creative and landing pages fit real audience needs – not just by relying waiting for platform feedback, but by using AI to model response likelihood based on persona insight.

By understanding when and where consumers are most receptive to a brand message, we can craft campaigns that not only reach that audience but engage them at the optimal moment.

It’s already helping clients in finance, retail and healthcare make better creative decisions, driving performance and leading to stronger results.

What’s Working Right Now in Financial Services

Based on our experience, here’s what we’ve seen work in the financial space:

• Creative testing at scale: We use AI to rapidly test variations and spot what works – even in low-feedback environments
• Intent-based targeting: Going beyond demographic data to build campaigns around real user mindset
• Hybrid attribution: Combining simple first-party models with incrementality testing and post-sale feedback
• Dynamic creative optimisation: Linking campaigns to live data feeds and market conditions, like in the P2P loans example above.

Most businesses aren’t simply marketing a product – they’re earning trust. That’s why clarity, compliance and context matter so much. And it’s why everything we build is designed to meet those standards, without sacrificing creativity.

Why Clients Choose Harvest

We’re not prepared to wait for that silver bullet. We’re helping clients thrive with what they’ve got now.

• We bring deep performance media experience that helps uncover hidden opportunities
• We’ve invested in our own AI tools to supercharge testing and inform better creative choices
• We know the FS sector – from the intricacies of compliance to what it takes to convert

We’ve done this before and we’ve got the results to show it’s working

If your marketing feels like guesswork right now, you’re not alone. But you don’t need to settle for less.

With the right mix of craft, curiosity and creative adaptation, you can still build high-performance campaigns that deliver.

And we’d love to show you how.

The post Marketing Without a Map: Why It’s Time to Go Back to the Craft appeared first on Harvest Digital.

But here’s the good news: you can make your campaigns greener while keeping them just as effective. Here’s how.

First, What Makes Digital Ads Use So Much Energy?

It’s a bit like ordering takeaway. The more steps between the kitchen and your door, the more energy it takes to get your food. Digital ads work the same way:

• Your ad needs servers to host it (think of them as very energy-hungry kitchens)
• It travels through networks to reach people (like delivery drivers zigzagging across town)
• Finally, it plays on someone’s phone or laptop (the moment of truth!)

Video ads are particularly power-hungry – they’re more like ordering a three-course meal compared to a sandwich.

Simple Ways to Make Your Campaigns Greener

1. Trim the Fat from Your Content

No one likes bloated ads anyway. Try:

• Compressing your images and videos (they’ll load faster too)
• Using modern file formats like WebP for images
• Only loading content when someone’s actually going to see it

2. Take the Scenic Route Less Often

The shorter the journey, the less energy used:

• Use content delivery networks (CDNs) to store your ads closer to your audience
• Cut down on unnecessary middlemen in programmatic campaigns
• Choose hosting providers that use renewable energy (many now do!)

3. Work Smarter, Not Harder

Sometimes the simplest solutions work best:

• Target Wi-Fi users when you can – it uses less energy than mobile data
• Keep your code clean and efficient
• Think twice before adding that extra animation that no one really needs

Does It Actually Work?

Yes! Here are some real examples:

Kroger tried this and cut their ads’ carbon footprint by 37%. Mediahub found that greener ads actually converted better. And the best part? Most companies see their hosting costs go down too.

The Hidden Bonus

Going green isn’t just good for the planet – it’s good for business:

• Your ads load faster (everyone loves that)
• You spend less on hosting
• Your campaigns often work better
• You look good to customers who care about the environment (that’s most of them these days)

Ready to Get Started?

You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Start small:

1. Pick one campaign to optimize
2. Compress those images
3. Try using a CDN
4. Measure the difference

Even small changes can cut your campaign’s emissions by up to 50%. Not bad for a few tweaks!

Remember: every little helps. Your future customers (and their grandkids) will thank you for it.

The post Making Your Digital Ads Greener (Without Losing Impact) appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Despite their limited presence, there’s a significant shift in user behaviour towards search results. For every 1,000 searches in the US, only 360 clicks lead to non-Google sites, so you can expect ‘zero-click searches’ to be a big theme in 2025.

The silver lining? Google values content based on its utility, regardless of whether it’s AI-generated or human-crafted. Emphasizing relevance and value over mere keywords is key to standing out.

In this evolving landscape, focusing on addressing real user queries, providing genuine value, and ensuring content quality remains paramount. While AI can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it as a co-pilot and not an autopilot.

So, what should brands do in response to this shift? Here are clear actions to take:

Organic Search Strategy: Focus on ‘AI Overview Ready’ Content

• Prioritize In-Depth, Informative Content: Forget keyword stuffing and chasing rankings for the sake of it. The focus needs to be on creating content that genuinely answers user queries thoroughly and accurately. Think long-form content, FAQ-style resources, and detailed guides that address specific problems.
• Aim to Be the “Go-To” Source: Position your content as the most authoritative and helpful resource on a given topic. This increases the likelihood of your content being cited by AI Overviews as the most credible and complete answer.
• Structured Data is Key: Ensure you’re using schema markup to make it as easy as possible for Google to understand your content, and its relevance to specific queries. Well-structured data significantly improves your chances of inclusion within AI Overviews.
• Content Maintenance is Crucial: Keep your content up-to-date with the latest information. AI Overviews prioritize fresh and accurate data, making consistent content audits and updates essential.

Paid Search Strategy: Embrace the Evolving Click

• Expect Lower CTR, But Higher Quality Clicks: As searchers get their initial questions answered directly within AI Overviews, the clicks you receive from paid ads will be from users who are further along their purchase journey and more intent on taking action.
• Adapt Your Ad Copy: Emphasize the unique value you offer. Instead of focusing on general information, focus on elements such as specific product features, guarantees, or limited-time offers to encourage clicks.
• Refine Your Targeting: Double down on highly specific keywords and audience segments. You’ll likely see more success targeting people who are further down the funnel, and who know exactly what they’re looking for.
• Track and Analyze: Closely monitor the quality of your paid search clicks, and your conversion data. You may be receiving fewer clicks, but are they more valuable? Refine your campaigns accordingly.

In this evolving landscape, focusing on addressing real user queries, providing genuine value, and ensuring content quality remains paramount. While AI can be a valuable tool, it’s essential to use it as a co-pilot and not an autopilot. The key to success in the AI Overview era is to adapt your content strategy, focusing on authority and clarity. While there may be a shift in how users interact with search results, brands that create top-tier content will ultimately see the rewards.

The post Navigating the AI Overview Era: Strategies for Brands in a Shifting Search Landscape appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Checkmyfile is a credit health company dedicated to helping individuals build positive habits and take meaningful steps towards improving their credit. By providing clear insights into your credit data, Checkmyfile makes it easy to understand where you stand and identify actionable steps to help you move forward. With personalised guidance and a focus on progress, their platform and expert customer care team are there to guide you at every stage of your credit journey.

Harvest Digital will be responsible for strategic planning and activation of paid search channels to drive increased awareness of brand and drive efficient customer acquisition at scale.

Robyn Kassam, Checkmyfile’s Head of Brand said “Partnering with Harvest Digital has enabled us to focus on our core business while successfully launching our new branding and website. Harvest Digital have been instrumental in managing a smooth transition to new site, with expertise and guidance on how to continually optimise spend and bring in the right customers. We’re excited to continue building our working relationship with Harvest Digital”.

Emma Robbins, Harvest Digital CEO said “We’re thrilled to be partnering with Checkmyfile as they relaunch their website and branding. It’s an exciting opportunity, and we’re proud to have been chosen as their paid strategic partners. We fully support Checkmyfile’s mission to help individuals improve their credit health for a brighter future, and we look forward to building a strong, lasting partnership”.

About Harvest Digital

Harvest Digital is an award winning, independent media agency, delivering high performance digital marketing for over twenty years. We deliver truly integrated strategies that are proven to maximise revenue and build brand value online. Areas of expertise include marketing strategy, organic search, content marketing, paid search, programmatic display, customer journey optimisation, creative and web design, data and analytics and digital out of home.

The post Harvest Partners With Checkmyfile For Paid Media appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Paid results (adverts) are purchased by the marketer, generally via a biddable model. Whereas organic results are completely free and based on a variety of ‘ranking’ factors. Generally speaking, if the search engine sells advertising space or ranks content chronologically based on a query – there’s a place for both.

In this blog, we’re going to teach you the distinctions between the two channels and enlighten you on how they can be used in harmony with each other.

Organic search

Also referred to as SEO or non-paid search, these are rankings achieved based on a web page’s relevance to a search term. Organic results appear below the paid results, with ‘sponsored’ links taking up most of the initial page, particularly for the most competitive commercial search terms.

Organic listings are displayed chronologically below this, with the top positions occupied by the ‘most relevant’ results. The whole process is centred around a search engine’s algorithm, and the popularity, quality or technical performance of your page. In Google’s case, there are hundreds of potential ranking factors that could contribute to your site’s position on a SERP.

Some of these factors include:

• The quality of your page’s content
• The reputation of your website (Domain Authority)
• Your website’s backlink profile
• Page speed
• User experience on the page
• Technical proficiency of the page
• Mobile friendliness
• Keyword (search term) Optimisation

How ranking organically works

There are a number of distinct ranking factors that have been confirmed by Google but that list is likely much longer and growing as the platform evolves. There are also believed to be factors that haven’t been publicly disclosed that might also contribute to your website’s search visibility. By ‘optimising’ your site around these elements, it gives you the best opportunity to achieve a strong ranking position for any given search term.

Types of listings and appearance of organic results

Search engines now display many variations of organic listings. Gone are the days where your options were limited to 10 solitary blue links. Every year, Google’s SERP evolves to incorporate an increasing variety of ‘SERP features’ including:

• Featured Snippets: Concise answers pulled from websites, displayed above organic results
• Shopping Results: E-commerce products or services pulled directly from a site and displayed prominently
• Video Carousels: Rotating or swipeable collections of video results relevant to your search
• Images: Pulled from webpages and displayed for specific queries
• Local Pack: Map and listings for local businesses relevant to the search query
• And many more…

While a ‘tick-box’ approach to optimising your site, for instance, by inserting a target keyword into your page’s title, is a legitimate tactic. Google has been moving further and further towards a user-first approach in relation to how it ‘rewards’ content. In other words, creating web pages for people, not search engine algorithms. The quality, usefulness and relevance of what’s on the page now ultimately reigns supreme.

The elephant in the room, as far as organic marketing is concerned, is the length of time it can take to be rewarded for your efforts. Technical changes made to your website in the name of SEO can take weeks or even months to convert into traffic and revenue. That’s where paid search comes into play.

Paid search

Sometimes referred to as biddable or even PPC, this is a strategy in which you pay to have your ads (links to your preferred page) displayed prominently on search results pages, when users enter specific keywords or phrases. They look similar to their organic counterparts, except they feature a ‘sponsored’ tag and appear prominently at the top of the SERP. They are also blended tactfully at different points throughout.

Needless to say, there is a financial implication attached to paid search that enables your content to rank in the top positions for any length of time. The main benefit of this approach is prime visibility at the top of a search page, quickly. Enabling you to attract users to your products and services more hastily.

Which paid search platforms can you use?

Google Ads is the largest paid search marketing platform but there are others that you can leverage to get your website out to your audience. Just to name a few:

• Google
• Microsoft
• Amazon
• Youtube
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

No two ad platforms are completely alike and as a marketer deciding which to leverage can depend on several factors including:

• Budget
• Advertising space
• Creative opportunity
• Platform user base

Which Paid Search Payment models are there?

Similarly, different platforms operate with different pricing models. Some platforms, like Google Ads, offer several. Here are some of the main ones you’re likely to encounter.

• Cost-per-click (CPC) – a fee paid by the advertiser every time a user clicks their ad
• Cost-per-mille (CPM) – a fee paid for every 1,000 impressions of their ad
• Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) – a fee paid when a specific action is completed, such as a sale, form submission, or app download
• Cost-per-view (CPV) – a fee paid every time a video ad is viewed
• Flat Rate – advertisers pay a fixed rate for a placement of an ad for a certain period of time

This list is not exhaustive, there are other models that certain platforms will use, based on specific KPIs or engagement. In the context of Google paid search, cost per click is the payment model that most marketers operate within. But, you can also opt for CPM, CPA, CPV or even smart bidding – a set of bidding strategies that use machine learning to optimise around conversion probability.

Differing models have different benefits and drawbacks. A CPC model might be ideal for a SME looking to scale their business efficiently. On the other hand, a CPA approach could reduce financial risk of digital advertising campaigns and get you closer to a specific growth goal.

How can organic and paid search work together efficiently?

Since both channels usually occupy the same page (the SERP), it stands to reason that they can complement each other . By aligning and optimising your paid and organic marketing strategies, you can gain the edge on your online competitors.

One way you can harness both is by researching where your site currently ranks well, say within the top 3 organic results, and where it doesn’t, position 20 and beyond. If your organic presence is strong for a keyword or you have recently increased in ranking, you can likely save money by pausing PPC on that keyword and reinvesting elsewhere. Your new organic rank will likely convert as well as your advert, as it has achieved that rank through great content relevance.

Equally, for keywords where you are never realistically going to outrank a large competitor, turning on PPC will be the quickest way to get customers to the great products/services you’re selling, and increase traffic to your website.

If you do have the budget to activate both channels at the same time, ultimately it means more SERP real-estate for your brand, with the top of search pages being dominated by more ad-space than ever before. As well as brand awareness, paid search allows for quicker testing of ad-copy and landing pages. Analysing the success of these pages can give you valuable information to apply to the rest of the site, and safeguard future organic ranking.

Some other ways both can work together in harmony:

• Local SEO and Paid Local Ads (paid ads increasing local search presence)
• Paid Supporting New Product Launches or Promotions (Extra visibility to increase awareness)
• SEO Content Amplification (Serving high performing organic content to new audiences)

Hopefully, equipped with these fundamentals, you will have a better idea of how you would like to use search-marketing to sell the wonderful products or services you’re providing.

At Harvest Digital, we’re proud to possess a wealth of experience in both paid and organic search, with dedicated teams that service clients of differing sizes, across verticals. If you want to learn more about paid and organic, or need help scaling your business, get in touch here.

The post Organic vs paid search explained: what’s the difference? appeared first on Harvest Digital.

TalkRemit are a leading money transfer service, allowing customers to send money in a secure and protected way to family and friends abroad.

During our onboarding process, it was clear a new campaign structure was necessary to capture consumer demand across the various markets in which TalkRemit operates.

An extensive account restructuring began, starting firstly with paid search channels and then with paid social. By adhering to the best practice of the ad platforms and the wealth of knowledge within the biddable team, a new structure was devised, which took the strengths of the powerful ad platform algorithms but still allowed for budget flexibility between markets.

What we did

• Full account restructures on Paid Search, Performance Max and Paid Social
• Conversion goals were evaluated to ensure algorithms focused more on key KPIs
• Platform performance was evaluated to ensure budget was spent cost effectively

In just 3 months after taking on the client, we delivered outstanding results and performance consisting of:

• A remarkable 1,081% surge in registrations
• A substantial 53% boost in money transfers
• A significant 77% reduction in Cost Per Reduction
• A phenomenal 821% improvement in the Conversion Rate

These results highlight our dedication and commitment to providing tangible, exceptional, and measurable results to our clients.

The post Talk Remit: paid search performance appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Since GA4 arrived in the summer of 2019, it was only a matter of time before it supplanted the Universal Analytics (UA) we all know and love. Data sent to UA properties will stop being processed on the 1st of July 2023, or 3 months later on the 1st of October 2023 if you’re a UA360 customer. 

Why the change?

There’s a few key reasons for the change.

Firstly, Google heavily stresses the importance of future-proofing their platform during the shift towards stronger privacy protections. GA4 does not process IP addresses, and relies less on the use of cookies – with cookies on their way out, it’s clear that UA is not flexible enough to adapt.

GA4 also fundamentally rethinks the way it collects and processes data. Under UA, hits of data must be classified in distinct categories and separate tags must be created for each of these categories. Under GA4, all user interactions are recorded as events, allowing many more events to be recorded by default without needing to create tags to explicitly record a particular action.

Another key benefit is the unification of website and app analytics sessions. In UA, a single customer using your website and your app is counted as two distinct users, but GA4 facilitates a holistic view of the customer journey by matching users’ sessions on your website to their sessions on your app.

Machine learning features have also been made available to make analysis easier, with Analytics Insights highlighting trends and unusual changes that may prompt investigation. Predictive audiences have a powerful potential, highlighting users that the data suggests are close to converting. These can be exported to Google Ads to help advertisers eke out Google Ads performance improvements. 

However, as it stands, GA4 is an unfinished product and after more than 2 years since its initial launch, we’re still seeing a stream of updates and additions and we’re expecting more to come. We would like to see improvements made on attribution, audience and page content reporting.

Plan sooner rather than later

There are some obvious practicalities. Nobody wants to be caught out in the last week of June 2023, scrambling to draw up and implement a transition plan on the fly.

Give yourself several months of breathing room before the deadline to familiarise yourself with GA4, quality check and troubleshoot your new property, and monitor for differences in your set up (particularly if you are unifying users over web and app). 

This planning period is a golden opportunity to evaluate your web analytics, especially if you haven’t reviewed it for some time. This coming change is also an opportunity for re-evaluation of your web analytics. Does your measurement still reflect your business needs, and could you be getting more insight from your analytics?

Not sure where to start? 

Get in touch! Our Data & Analytics team will help you plan and implement your transition, and can help you ensure your analytics is up to scratch for your business goals. We can help you design a framework that ensures your KPIs are being accurately measured, and implement it for you, overseeing a smooth transition and helping to familiarise your team with platform demonstrations.

The post Sunsetting Universal Analytics appeared first on Harvest Digital.

When it comes to Shopping ads, there are two main areas that an advertiser should look to automate: Google Merchant Centre Feed and Google Shopping Campaigns.

Google Merchant Centre: Automate Your Feed

The first step to setting up any Google Shopping ads is creating a feed in Google Merchant Centre. Which will inform the platform on where to get the product data from. There are a few ways of doing so, such as uploading a feed manually through Google Sheets or through a third-party feed manager, but you can automate this process with a “website crawl”. 

A website crawl allows the platform to extract the most up-to-date information directly from your website. Which will save you time and avoid having to manually update the information each time a price or image changes. You will need to ensure that the website contains all the necessary data points and meets any Google requirements, before installing a pixel to allow the crawl.

Only one website crawl is allowed per account, but you can add or change information pulled from the site through rules or additional data feeds. For instance, you might set up a rule that adds the mention of an offer at the start of your product description to attract more users. Or you could use Supplemental Feeds to add a range of images you would want to appear in your ads, but not on your website. Even though your data gets pulled from the site automatically, you can still customise it. 

You can find more information about website crawls here.

Google Shopping: Automate Your Campaigns

Once your Google Merchant Centre feed is set up, it’s time to build your Google Shopping ads. Similarly to the GMC feed, you can set up your ads in a “Standard Shopping Campaign” and manually select your products, bid strategy and targeting. However, selecting a “Smart Shopping Campaign” would allow the Google AI to maximise conversion value across your products, by using automated bidding and targeting without having to manually set up all the components. The advertiser still has full control of the total budgets, which can either be set up per campaign or split amongst multiple campaigns.

Not only will Smart Shopping campaigns show your products to the most suitable audience, by letting the AI learn who those users are, but these campaigns are also favoured by the Google algorithm when it comes to ad placements. This will result in your products being displayed above those within Standard Shopping campaigns, driving higher sales. Whilst the campaign will ‘maximise conversion value’, you can still set up a target ROAS, to ensure that the results are meeting your expectations.

Whilst Smart Shopping can be fully automated in terms of which products get shown to whom, you can still create separate campaigns for different groups of products. For example, you might have an expectation of what ROAS will look like as an average for all your products, but some of them might have much better return on investment than your average. In this case, it would be beneficial to separate the top-performing products into its own “best selling” Smart Shopping campaign and maximise revenue for those products, with their separate target.

You could easily identify the bestselling products by looking at the data, but if you want to take the automation one step further – rules or scripts can be set up to automatically add a ‘bestselling’ label to a product, once it achieves the desired performance level.

You can read about Google Smart Shopping best practices here.

But why should I automate Google Shopping ads?

All of the steps above might feel unnecessary to an advertiser who is setting up their campaigns for the first time or has a small range of products on their site. It might seem much easier to simply upload all the products into a Google sheet to ‘have better control over the ads’ and avoid the hassle of setting up any pixels.

In reality, automating your Google Shopping ads is actually the easiest way to use the platform. Google’s step-by-step guides make it really simple to add a piece of code to your website and Smart Shopping is the best place to start advertising, especially when you’re not sure who your exact audience might be.

Through automation techniques such as rules and scripts, we’re also able to eliminate some of the manual optimisation work, which leaves room for more important tasks, such as gaining valuable insights around your target audience.

Finally, automation is considered ‘Google’s best practice’, so the platform will always favour showing your ads to a customer if there are elements of automation involved.

The post Automate Your Google Shopping Ads and Get The Most Out Of Your Campaigns appeared first on Harvest Digital.

If you follow technology trends or spend a lot of time online gaming, you probably have come across the term “Metaverse”, which is spreading increasingly across the internet and boardrooms of leading companies. 

So what is the Metaverse? Well it involves a shared virtual space where consumers are represented by virtual avatars, similar to a 3D version of Snapchat’s Bitmoji.

In a recent announcement by the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the future of his social media behemoth, and the migration into the Metaverse along with rebranding Facebook as “Meta”. He initially debuted ‘Horizons Workrooms’, a virtual reality (VR) app that lets consumers socialise and hold meetings digitally by using a virtual avatar to represent themselves. 

It is estimated that approximately 85 million users will have experienced AR or VR at least once a month in 2021 (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2021).

Along with the increasing number of users on the Metaverse, consumers seem to be quickly catching on with the keyword “metaverse”, yielding 166 million results on Google. Meanwhile, the hashtag #metaverse is widely used on Instagram, with more than 1.1 million posts on the platform and is tweeted over 1,800 times per hour on Twitter. 

Source: Influencer Marketing Hub

So… how can digital marketers utilise the Metaverse in digital marketing?

Before we start, there are a couple of points to keep in mind:

1. The Metaverse is always active and does not stop or end when you leave, it continues even when you are not connected.
2. The Metaverse timeline synchronises with the real-world time. For example, if it is 19:00 at night, it will be the same time in the Metaverse.

Now those key points are out the way, let’s get to the good stuff.

A Mix of Metaverse and Real-Life Marketing

Source: OpenSea

One method of digital marketing is linking real-world experiences of your brand into the Metaverse. For example, Adidas released an NFT project for their fans in December 2021, which enabled the NFT holders to have exclusive access to Metaverse experiences and free collaborative merchandise throughout 2022. 

Adidas’s NFT included a graphic hoodie and a co-branded adiColor Firebird tracksuit, in line with their iconic brand, which was a natural entry point and has been successful with their target audience.

Immersive Marketing

Immersive marketing is visual advertising within the Metaverse, e.g. as a ‘billboard’ style advertisement. You would be able to customise what each Metaverse user sees based on which demographic segment they fall under. E.g. Bidstack (a video game ad tech company) started advertising through in-game monetisation techniques such as the sponsorship boards which are on the perimeter of a football field and through sponsored billboards within the Metaverse.  

Further experiences have proven to be successful too such as, Lil Nas X concert in Roblox, and the Gucci Garden experience visits.

Source: Bidstack

Understanding NFTs

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a form of cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain. The market for NFTs rose in 2020, leading more and more people trying to understand what NFTs are, so they can invest early enough. As NFTs are being regarded as the next big thing before they boom further in the decade. 

Here’s an explanation video:

Making Collectibles Available

NFT lines can be presented and collected within the Metaverse. As a result, luxury brands such as Gucci have launched their own NFT line in collaboration with Roblox. This collaboration allows people to collect limited edition Gucci items in the Metaverse.

Source: Roblox

Continuously Experimenting

These are exciting times for digital marketers, as the Metaverse and NFTs have opened up potential for new experimental and creative forms of digital advertising. We just need to keep our eyes on this ever-expanding space, so we can keep up and maximise new opportunities to reach audiences. 

Whilst the Metaverse is gaining prominence across worldwide markets, it is still a relatively new platform. Therefore, there is still plenty of room for experimentation and the best practices for marketing in the space are yet to be determined.

This video perfectly explains the Metaverse, and its progress throughout the years:

With games such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox and other games all incorporating aspects of virtual (VR), augmented (AR) or mixed reality to provide an immersive gaming experience for users.

However, there is much more to the Metaverse than just gaming, socialising and advertising. A 2020 report from Consultancy PWC predicts that nearly 23.5 million jobs worldwide will use AR and VR by 2030. With the technology being used for tasks such as training, meetings and customer services. The Metaverse has the potential to impact and reshape the global economy far beyond what we can see right now. 

The post How the Metaverse Can Be Utilised in Digital Marketing appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Since the launch of TikTok’s rebrand in August 2018, it has become one of the most used and engaging social media platforms in the world.

With over 1 billion monthly users and an average user session time of 10.85 minutes, TikTok has fundamentally changed conceptions around how content is created and consumed.

The first difference-maker that stands TikTok apart from the rest is its algorithm. Unlike other social platforms, TikTok’s algorithm is focused on content, rather than social connections. A user’s feed is unique to them, meaning the platform does not take long to discover what its users want to engage in.

As Isobel Sita-Lumsden (head of B2B marketing Europe at TikTok) highlights ‘because the content on a user’s For You Page is tailored to their likes and interests, they enjoy the time they spend on the app.” This was reinforced by TikTok’s ‘2021 Audience Research’ revealing consumers felt 14% happier during and after using the app.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that TikTok’s average user session of 10.85 minutes is over double that of the next best platform, Pinterest (5.06 minutes). By placing content at its core, rather than social connections, TikTok has revolutionised the way in which platforms seek to engage their users.

Beyond the algorithm

The power of TikTok goes far further than just its algorithm. It has also changed perceptions about the way in which content is created and shared. Adrian Mulryan (TikTok global partnerships lead for WPP) states  ‘the age of over-polished content is done with now, the power is in the community and you need to be part of that community in order to tap into that power and reach.’

The authenticity and creativity of the content on the platform is what makes this community truly unique. The consumers create content that reflects them and engage with content that resonates with their character. As users share and engage this content, it rises from the micro-scale to the macro-scale. It is the power of this community that drives trends and drives culture.

The hashtags #EduTok has amassed over 138 billion views since its inception, #EasyRecipe has accumulated over 11 billion views and #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt has over 6 billion views. How brands interact with this community, will enable them to become a part of that culture.

“For brands looking to engage with the TikTok community, remember that they’re here seeking joy, happiness and creativity,” says Sita-Lumsden. “Tap into that by getting involved in trends, chatting to users in the comments and being authentic. If you’re doing that, people will stick around to find out more about your brand.”

Harnessing the power of community

A case and point to emphasise this was the Marks & Spencer ‘Percy Pig’ campaign. With the retailer suffering financially, it produced a TikTok of a Percy Pig mascot doing the widely trending oceanspray dance. The results were staggering with M&S announcing pre-tax annual profits of £500 million after its strongest Christmas ever.

Market analysts attributed the remarkable financial turnaround to M&S having ‘used the creative capability of TikTok to reach a younger demographic’, amassing 50,000 followers on the platform along the way. To corroborate M&S’s success, 54% of users stated they recalled branded content after using the platform, with brand performance doubling when they engaged with TikTok creators to produce content.

Harnessing the power of this community can be of huge benefit to companies and really hammers home the point…don’t make ads, make TikTok’s.

The post Don’t Make Ads…Make TikToks appeared first on Harvest Digital.

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However, not all teams work together as closely as one might think. Often, each team is focusing on their space and not looking at the broader picture and how they can leverage each other’s strengths.

With this guide, we’re hoping to shed some light on areas that the PPC and SEO teams can work together, gain some magical insights learnings from one another other and boost performance overall.

1. Share PPC conversion data for your brand’s best-working titles and descriptions (ad copy)

The wonderful thing about the paid search team is that they have a tonne of data to draw from. This is very accurate information on how well your ad copy, and the keyworks used within them, are performing.

The SEO team does not have the luxury of this level of detail and must often rely on generic SEO tools that are not as accurate.

The SEO team should have visibility of the paid team’s ad copy data and use this to enhance their understanding of the keywords and phrases that are converting best for the brand.  Then, incorporate this information your pages’ meta data where necessary for the pages to perform better.

2. Work together to dominate the SERP with #1 organic listing and top paid result

Is there a keyword that you know will drive extremely relevant traffic to your site which you’d like to focus your efforts on targeting? Bid to be in top position and optimise your page for SEO so you’re as close to #1 organically – if done successfully, the likelihood that users click on your website listing is much, much higher.

This is easier said than done, of course. Your core keyword could have a very high cost-per-click and be very competitive to rank well organically, so work as a team to decide whether it’s worthwhile to target such a term.

If you’re worried about CPC and competitiveness, try targeting a longer-tail variation of your keyword that isn’t so tough to dominate the SERPs for. They can be as relevant and easier to attain, but will likely have a lower search volume overall. Weigh up the options and make the decision that’s best for you.

3. Use Keyword Planner for monthly search volume fluctuations

‘Gifts for her.’

Would you be surprised to hear that some SEO tools give the search volume of this as consistent throughout the year? This doesn’t make sense of course, because depending on the holidays, seasons and myriad other factors, search volume changes.

For example, the above term fetches an average of 115,000 searches/month in the UK, according to Ahrefs. This is the amount that will show up if you download a keyword report from them. However, when looking in tools that give monthly breakdowns, this figure changes drastically.

For example, using Ahrefs again, they now show a seasonal search volume in December 2020 for this keyword as almost 230,000 searches per month! That’s double what the tool tells us when we download a report.

The point is that some tools, like keyword planner, can help you get those helpful monthly search volume breakdowns that help you have a better understanding of the search landscape around the year.

SEOs may have access to keyword planner and so can find this data, but they may not use it as often if they’re accustomed to using other tools that allow them to do other aspects of their job better. The paid team will live and breathe keyword planner, so will likely be far more used to tapping into this data and optimising their campaigns with it.

Use keyword planner or another tool that has monthly volume breakdowns to inform yourself of the true monthly volume for a keyword, not just the generic volume that some tools give. This will help inform you of the right terms to target for your pages in the long-term.

4. SEOs to advise on CRO of pages to improve paid and organic performance

Does your page have a poor conversion rate in both organic and paid search? This should be taken seriously as making a slight improvement can bring notable improvements.

To fix this issue, the paid team should speak to the SEOs to get their insights on areas to improve the site’s conversion rate.

Typical CR improvements can come from actions such as making the CTAs more prominent and providing a better content experience (what does the customer truly want from your site and how can they get it with as little brainpower as possible?)

Also, think mobile first! That should always be the case, no matter what the device share is for your audience – this is because Google judges a website’s organic performance on mobile first and foremost.

5. Large increases in bids should be shared from paid to SEO team

When the big paid budget increase has been signed off (happy days!) and implemented, this could have ramifications on your organic traffic.

Depending on your bidding strategy, paid search could take some of the traffic that would typically have gone to organic, so let your SEO team know if you are planning on increasing bids so they know that traffic could be slightly affected.

6. SEOs to advise on pitfall terms (i.e. terms the PPCs should avoid)

Ever the experts on intent and language nuance, SEOs should advise the paid team if there are any keywords that they should avoid bidding on.

These can then be added into the negatives list so that the paid team do not eek away precious budget on keywords that simply are not relevant for them to bid on.

7. SEOs to advise when pages have their URLs changed for whatever reason

Sometimes SEOs will make a change to a page’s URL and not inform the paid team. Shocking, I know.

Avoid this circumstance by making it common practice to inform the paid team whenever such changes take place, providing them with the original URL and the destination page.

When they send people to a URL that is then redirected, this could lower the landing page experience as it would take longer for the person to arrive at the final URL.

It’s in Google’s interests that people arrive as quickly as possible to the page that they clicked on, so eliminating any unnecessary steps like this is beneficial to us.

8. Combat negative PR

Any business can come under some heat if they haven’t been providing their regular quality service to customers.

If this ever happens, then you can use a combination of SEO and PPC to combat any negative press that you are receiving.

With SEO, you can produce content for your site talking about your desire to improve your services and the fact you’re striving to be the best brand in the industry.

You could also focus on improving user reviews and showcasing these on your site. There are many ways to do this, but some simple methods are to be attentive to what users are saying in the reviews and replying to them where necessary. Growing your review score in Google My Business or Trustpilot also makes a difference.

With paid, you can add negative keywords around stories that you do not want your ad to trigger for.

The post Ways SEO and PPC can work together to improve your digital performance appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Our team of experts provide SEM, paid social, display and SEO expertise for clients in multiple industries and locations. And a Google Partner certification is a real testament to the hard work and diligence we pride ourselves on.

Emma Robbin’s, Harvest’s CEO had this to say:

“We are delighted to be awarded the Google Premium Partner’s accreditation.

We look forward to continuing to build on our strong partnership over the past 20 years!”

In February 2022 Google recognised the achievements of top-performing digital marketing partners across the globe – including ourselves – by awarding Premier Partner status as part of the new Google Partners programme.

The Google Partners programme has undergone significant changes for 2022, including redefining what it means to be a Premier Partner through new, advanced programme requirements and offering new Premier Partner benefits to support growth and success with Google Ads.

Google’s own Davang Shah – Senior Director, Google Ads Marketing – said:

‘Congratulations to our Premier Partners for being among the top 3% of Google Partners in England. These companies stand out based on their commitment to developing product expertise, building new client relationships and helping their current clients to grow. We look forward to supporting them as they help their customers succeed online.’

This programme is designed for advertising agencies and third parties that manage Google Ads accounts on behalf of other brands or businesses. Its mission is to empower companies by providing them with innovative tools, resources and support to help their clients succeed and grow online.

The post Harvest Digital has been named a 2022 Google Premier Partner appeared first on Harvest Digital.

In a sense this is surprising, because bottom of the funnel activity like paid search – and especially brand search – does really well against a Last Click model.  However, Data Driven Attribution should deliver a more nuanced and holistic view of how different Google Ads campaigns are driving value. For instance, generics campaigns might be undervalued versus brand, assuming generic searches are part of a multi-visit journey.

When is this happening?

The roll out is starting in October 2021 and will be complete by year end.

Oh no. I love Last Click attribution and can’t live without it.

Whisper it quietly, but Last Click gives decent results for use cases where there isn’t a long consideration cycle.

Anyway, don’t panic – whilst Data Driven Attribution is becoming the default, you can still manually switch back to Last Click, First Click, Linear, Time Decay and Position-based models.

Why are Google doing this?

Partly because Data-driven attribution can deliver better results for advertisers. For instance, Lara Harter, Head of Online Marketing at DocMorris claims an 18% reduction in the cost of sales after switching from last-click attribution.

The other reason though is as a response to privacy concerns. It is likely that some journeys are not being effectively tracked because  cookies from earlier touchpoints have been deleted by the time of the conversion, so they’re not fed back to Google Ads.  DDA uses real conversion data enriched with machine learning techniques to build a more complete view of where value is being created. Potentially it can help advertisers to make better decisions with more limited data.

Doesn’t Data Driven Attribution need a lot of data?

That was the case in the past.  Deploying DDA in the past took a long training period to create a custom attribution model.

Google seem to have solved that problem, and feel confident that their algorithms can deliver a sound model even for low-traffic domains.

Again, if you don’t like the results you are seeing from DDA, you or your agency can manually switch back to Last Click.

What about Google Analytics?

Right now, Last Click remains the default within Google Analytics. Assuming that there is a cost to Google in deploying DDA, our bet will be that DDA will remain an option in GA rather than becoming the default.

Advertisers though are bound to want a consistent way to measure across different channels, so if they accept DDA for Google Ads we can see it becoming a common choice in Google Analytics.

The post Google Ads to move from Last Click to Data Driven Attribution appeared first on Harvest Digital.

“You finally really did it. You maniacs….Damn you. God damn you all to hell.”

That was a fitting level of anger and anguish from Charlton Heston when he finds out it was earth all along. And that they blew it up.

However, this also wasn’t too far from the reaction of many in Adtech a couple of weeks ago when those “maniacs” at Google blew up the whole industry by announcing it wouldn’t be replacing cookies with independent identifiers.

I’m not 100% sure the level of outrage was fitting on this occasion.

But Floc-ing hell it went off. It was like someone suddenly turned off the power, water, access to food and the Netflix subscription all in one.

For me, this was merely proof that we’ve become over-reliant on cookies for too long;  something that if we’re honest has drifted into mass spying on an industrial scale. Whole chunks of the industry is now based on profiling people by cookies and we can’t think beyond the lure of big data.

The promise of programmatic was that you could forensically target your audience without wasting budget on less focused media choices.  Placing your advertising in contextually relevant places and associating with media brands that deliver trust as well as exposure feels hopelessly old-fashioned to some – but hey, it still works.

Anyway, we don’t have much of a choice. It looks like in one fell swoop, we’ve gone from a world with a wealth of stats to work with, to one where data is restricted and time-bound.

And by the way, whilst Chrome is the most important browser in the UK, actually less than one person in 2 uses Chrome (Statcounter Feb 2021).  A third of browsers use Safari, which banned third-party cookies over a year ago. The future is already here!

So how are we adapting to this brave new world? One point to make is that whilst some data is becoming less rich, AI and machine learning techniques have made giant strides in filling the gaps with the data we still have.

What kind of data?

Well, for instance, there’s a rich seam of behavioural data like device, location, context, time of day and day of the week. Location can normally be targeted down to postcode level, which – as every leaflet distributor knows – is often all you need.

Then there are environmental factors that a good planner can exploit. Fancy a game of golf in the rain? No, no one does – so if you are marketing a golf course, put your marketing on hold until the next sunny day.

Finally, we need to think a lot harder about ad creative. The dominant format here is video – and just treating video as an animated billboard is surely a missed opportunity.  As a gazillion TikTok videos show, you can cram so much humour, or information, or emotion into 60 seconds.

Here are some ways in which you can make this change work for you.

Focus on the customer insight

Advertising is not all a string of zeros and ones. Our goal is to change minds, spark action, shatter complacency.

Of course, reach, frequency, format selection – all this is important. But more important, but less discussed, is having empathy with our target audience, getting under their collective skin and supporting change.

Never stop selling

In the old cookie-based days, we knew who our customers were, who our prospects were, and who had never heard of us.  Quite soon, that won’t be the case.  Remarketing in particular is going to be a struggle (except perhaps if the entire customer journey happens within a walled garden like the Google ecosystem).

So like it or not, you won’t be able to work out when to up-sell or cross-sell.  You just have to keep selling as if everyone is a prospect.

Capture an email address

Finally, don’t forget how the world worked before we could drop a tracking cookie on everything that moves.

If you want to talk to someone again, give them the chance to invite you.  Explain the value you can deliver through a longer engagement.  And ask for a lovely old-fashioned opted-in email address. Or even something that Charlton Heston would approve of – a postal address or phone number.

The post The crumbling of the Cookie appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Right now the UK – alongside much of the rest of the world – is in lockdown. In the UK, this will be our third lockdown in less than twelve months. This feels like a good time to look back at the first lockdown and see which search trends started then, and are still going strong today.

So what I was looking for was search terms which spiked in March 2020, but which never faded away. While it was supposed to be a quick peek, my first search might as well have been covered in white fur and carrying a pocket watch, because down the rabbit hole I fell, suddenly knee deep in hundreds of searches. What other attitudes had changed across last year’s lockdowns, what had continued beyond the first two and into this one, what weird stuff were people searching for? And how could this inform our business practices and understanding of consumers as we traverse Lockdown 3.

The first surprise was that, according to Google searches, depression was not as high as we all thought. In fact, searches for that term were higher before the first lockdown, and dropped afterwards. And then stayed below pre-lockdown levels. Hope at least.

This may, however, be linked to my second shocking discovery (which I wouldn’t blame you for distrusting…I had to double check it) that the most popular liquid delivery of 2020 was not always alcohol as I’d assumed, but often afternoon tea. While wine and beer spiked in the first lockdown, tea caught up in May and continued its lead for most of the year. Showing that when the going gets tough, the British reach for a cup of tea.

And the second jaw drop moment came when I decided to look at which country in the UK ordered the most tea. England, right? Wrong. Scotland. Proving beyond any doubt that 2020 really was a strange year.

From tea to travel, and further down the hole I went. With people being discouraged from using public transport such as trains and buses once the lockdown lifted, there was a stampede to try new-ish travel options, culminating in a pitched battle for dominance between electric scooters and electric bikes. With the latter coming out on top. Remarkable really, given that they are currently illegal to ride on public roads. And, seems a little on the lazy side, considering all we heard about was how people were getting fit.

But what really piqued my interest was an apparent preoccupation with paddleboards, which, during the hot summer months became THE way to get around – well, on the river. Not so good for getting down to Tesco for the big shop, or up to the office for the brief time we could go back, but it caught the nation’s attention none-the-less.

However, until the paddle-happy nation could get out on the open water they had to deal with working in their bedrooms/living rooms/garages/gardens/basements/linen closets/dogs baskets. And this is when the boring paraphernalia of an office – desks, chairs, monitors etc – became as interesting as Joe Wicks, Zoom Quizzes, clapping on the doorstep or the latest Netflix phenomenon.

What is surprising is how search interest in office supplies has not only sustained, but grown over time. This paints a picture of people who have invested heavily in making their home office a productive area – making it a tough proposition when the time comes to winkle workers out of their bedrooms and back into the office.

After a quick glance at the aforementioned pocket watch it became clear it was very late and I needed to take the blue pill and go home to bed. But not before one final search. Did everyone droning on about cultivating their own yeast and making sourdough bread actually do it?

To read The Guardian, you would think that the whole country has been cultivating wild yeast daily, but in actual fact, after an initial slow rise in interest (pun intended), searches quickly sunk (and again) back to pre-pandemic levels.

Anyway, I’ve finished my tea, my paddle board paddles are safely stored in the garage, time to pull myself from my Aster high back mesh office chair with retractable arms and scoot off to bed leaving the wonderland of Google searches behind.

The post Has Covid changed us for good? Google Search Trends has some clues… appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Do you agree?  Please comment below… 

1. Core Web Vitals – speed and other new tools 

Core Web Vitals will be big in 2021. If you have not yet heard of Core Web Vitals, it is probably time to take the plunge into this technical SEO hot topic.

What are Core Web Vitals?  

Core Web Vitals are essentially a set of metrics related to speed, responsiveness and visual stability. All three of these factors contribute to a good mobile user experience, so this is a key tactic for Google to promote best practices. 

Last year, Google was recommending that webmasters focused on the download speed of mobile websites. So, you could get away with a site that downloaded quickly, even if there were problems with the way the page rendered.  Now you need to focus on the entire user experience. 

Core Web Vitals (metrics for which are now available in all Google tools & resources) were supposed to become a ranking factor in Q1 of 2020. However, due to Covid-19, Google decided to postpone the implementation until May 2021.

So, we have had plenty of time to get familiar with new acronyms like FID (First Input Delay), LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) that are part of Core Web Vitals. (The last one of these is our favourite – it is a quick-win exercise, as it doesn’t take expert technical knowledge to spot and fix a layout shift problem.) 

A great place to start is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, a tool that has been greatly improved. Within this you’ll be able re-run tests faster than anywhere else, as well as find what Google considers the Largest Contentful Paint, alongside which on-page elements generate the largest layout shifts. PageSpeed Insights rely on your host location as well as your server speed index, so we recommend you run 4 tests at different times before calculating the marginal gains you obtained from adjusting your webpage.

For CLS issues, try to look at your images without dimensions in the <img> HTML element. When Responsive Web Design was introduced, developers began to omit width and height and started using CSS to resize images instead. Today, modern browsers prefer being explicitly told of the width and height of an image, so they not only allocate the right amount of memory before the load, but also reserve the right space for that image to fit. This is a simple fix to avoid layout shifts. 

2. The tech must go on 

In 2021, sites with better technical SEO will perform better, as John Mueller pointed out. We are bordering on obsessed with our daily Search Console checks, as errors or warnings you find within this tool can reveal the most important structural issues of a website. 

If you have never taken time to deep dive into Search Console Index Coverage, we strongly recommend doing this. It’s worth noting that one issue can be found through multiple categories here, so it’s best to fix issues by order of priorities and feasibility. 

In essence, fixes you’ll make from Google Search Console will be very cost-efficient as they run on-site, in most scenarios. For instance, a quick win could be to fix a phone number link that hasn’t formed correctly on your site. A simple change on its HTML could help solving 1,000s of dead pages auto-generated by this link. 

3. Structured data to please crawlers 

An easy win (which is not new but is increasingly important) is to optimise and test your pages with Structured Data. The purpose here is to mark-up information on your pages so that search engines can better understand what the page is about and who it is serving.

Have a look into the official schema.org website and find the schema mark-up that is designed for your industry. For instance, take the ‘LoanOrCredit’ Schema.org code if you are within this area of finance and inject that into your HTML. Seeing as it is extra data point for the bots to analyse, there’s nothing to lose in this technique.

4. Semantic search and SERP snippet opportunities 

In 2019, Google announced BERT – a natural language processing capability that allows for a better understanding of queries within Google search. Using BERT, Google can better analyse the intent behind people’s queries and provide more relevant results for them. For website owners, this means the emphasis should be on writing content naturally and in plenty of depth around the topic of interest. We should focus on writing our content for people and not for the bots. 

While only 10% of queries were powered by BERT in 2019, now almost 100% of English-language queries are powered by it. Seeing as we are already within the realm of this AI, if SEOs haven’t made semantic search a part of their strategy in 2020, then this should be the year to do it. 

 Next up: “micro text optimisation” will be key this year. Following a recent announcement from John Mueller, ‘passage indexing’ will be an important aspect to take into account in 2021.

What is Passage indexing?

Passage indexing is a technique to improve Google’s ability to answer niche queries. In other words, using BERT and all its wonderful algorithmic understanding of natural language, Google shows in a featured snippet a section of text on a page that is most relevant to the person’s question. While this is not new, Google will continue to improve the relevancy of their featured snippets, based on intent of users’ queries. 

5. User experience (UX) increasingly significant 

User experience (UX) as a whole plays an increasingly important role in a website’s organic performance, which is why it is also a major theme in the Core Web Vitals metrics discussed above.  

While traditional ranking factors are still very relevant to performance – links, content depth, page speed etc. – Google uses behavioural factors to determine whether the website is providing the experience the user was hoping for with their search. Factors such as dwell time on the page, bounce rate, the amount the person interacts with the page, pain-points such as broken links or elements of a page that do not function properly – these are all taken into account and Google makes a judgement on your website depending on these factors. 

Keeping people on your website using good content, and minimising any reasons for them to leave abruptly, should form the basis of all your site optimisations this year.

At Harvest, we have been using Microsoft Clarity, which has been extremely helpful for our clients. It’s a free tool from Microsoft that provides free heatmaps, session playbacks and other behaviour analytics that can unearth potential points of your website that are delivering a sub-optimal experience. 

6. EATing up the competition 

All websites are trying to be the authority on their subject matter. So, how to you push ahead of your competitors, who are also striving to be seen as the go-to brand in your space? 

E-A-T has been much talked about in the SEO community since 2018. It stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. While it’s nothing new to say that websites need to adhere to these principles to lead the way, we’re still finding lots of ways to improve our clients’ sites using these principles. 

E-A-T is important for all businesses, but for some there are additional considerations. Anything related to YMYL (You Money Your Life – how Google refers to the businesses that can impact people’s ‘happiness, health, financial stability, or safety’) must make extra efforts in this area.  

Whether you are a ‘YMYL’ brand or not, here are 4 simple ways to boost your overall Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness:  

• Keep content fresh and 100% factual 

Google likes articles that have been written or updated recently. A lot can happen since your 2008 article on ‘black hat SEO techniques and why they’re not effective’, so make sure your content is both up–to–date and factually watertight

• Get more reviews and show them on your website 

Google trusts people more than it does the website. If you have a good review score on your website, it’s likely that you’ll be favoured over a similarly performing brand that does not have them. Investing in Google reviews may also be a worthwhile exercise

• Mention the expert or authority in your articles 

Having the author shown in the article give both an authenticity and sense of  expertise to the advice given, which both people and Google’s bots can pick up on

• Boost authority from link-building 

We’re well aware of how important links are in SEO, and they continue to be a  strong sign of trust for Google. Build links to the homepage or to the individual  webpages to receive an SEO boost. 

We hope that our list will provide you with some insight into how you can knock it out the park this year with your organic performance! If you’d like to talk to Harvest Digital about improving your website’s performance in the search engines – please contact us here!

The post Key SEO Trends for 2021 – a Digital Agency Perspective appeared first on Harvest Digital.

Amazon already offers a variety of advertising products, to suit both awareness and conversion-based campaign objectives. Currently, display activity in the UK is managed through their DSP, requiring a minimum budget of £10k, with ads being sold on a CPM basis. However, this is all about to change. Sponsored Display ads have recently been launched in Beta in the US and will hopefully come to the UK by end of the year.

Sponsored Display ads will allow brands to connect with customers both on and off Amazon in a new self-service campaign format. It works very similarly to Amazon’s existing campaign types, in that you will be able to report on the same metrics within the interface, ads are bought on a CPC model and the ad creatives are largely pulled from existing product pages. The targeting capabilities differ dependent on the campaign objective: awareness, consideration and conversion.

To build brand and product awareness, you can target customers using Interest targeting. It should come as no surprise that Amazon have accumulated an extraordinary amount of customer data and have built out audiences based on their shopping behaviour. With this campaign targeting, you can also add a custom headline to tailor the creative to the audience, and even run some A/B tests. Amazon then assembles the ads from the title, descriptions and images on the product pages with your chosen custom headline, and a brand logo. We recommend that you keep the custom headline concise, with a benefit-oriented USPs with a clear call-to-action.

The consideration campaign objective allows both category and product-based targeting. Category targeting works exactly as you might expect – by selecting the most relevant for the product you are wishing to promote. However, there are additional layers that can be added to make it more granular, including customer ratings, price ranges and specific brands. With sponsored display, you will also be able to now adjust bids at category level, allowing us to better optimise the campaigns.

Product targeting is nothing new, especially with Sponsored Products being an existing campaign type within Amazon’s portfolio. However, when Sponsored Display does launch in the UK, these ads will start to be prioritised over existing Sponsored Product campaigns. This targeting strategy can also be used to cross and upsell customers, for example by targeting a camera product placement with a display ad of the tripod that you sell.

Finally, to drive sales of your product, you can target users who have visited your product with views-based targeting. This works by showing people display ads on placements off Amazon’s site, reminding them to return and complete their purchase. It is recommended to choose the products with the highest number of views, in order to reach a wider audience.

The current requirements needed to utilise Amazon’s display inventory makes it hard for some of our clients with smaller marketing budgets to make the most of advertising on the platform.  As an Amazon Agency Partner, we are always excited to see developments in this space and can only hope that it will be launched in the UK in time for Black Friday!

The post New opportunities for retailers with the UK launch of Amazon Sponsored Display appeared first on Harvest Digital.

This gives us access to some of Google’s internal tools we can use to identify and plan International opportunities for our clients.

Using data drawn from the World Bank, Media Metrix and internal Google data, we can identify the markets that look most promising for a client in a given sector.  For instance in the example below, the priority markets are identified as the US, Poland and Turkey.

Once we have priority markets, we can map out search seasonality and CPCs across international markets to identify the optimum time to enter those markets.

As an agency, we also have access to an International Growth Specialist at Google, who is on hand to give us more granular advice based on Google’s extensive experience of global export markets.

We can also help you to access Google Business Solutions services to solve specific export challenges across areas like translation, payments, legal issues, taxation and logistics.

To give one simple example, Google’s research suggests that 67% of online shoppers will abandon a shopping cart if it does not support local payment methods.

Some 40% of our clients already operate internationally, across some diverse sectors:

• Sziget in Hungary is one of the world’s largest music festivals. Harvest manages ticket sales across the key European markets.
• Sommet Education manages some of the top global hospitality schools, offering graduate and post-graduate degrees in subjects like hotel management and luxury management. Harvest recruits students globally via digital channels.
• Scuderia sells spare parts and offers customisations for high end luxury cars across the world.

As part of Google’s new International Growth Programme we are looking forward to supporting our existing and new clients with their export opportunities in the future.

The post Harvest joins Google’s new International Growth Programme appeared first on Harvest Digital.