This Week in Digital Marketing - January 21, 2022

Another week, another set of updates (especially from Google). Google is constantly changing, that’s why we need to stay on top of the updates, to help our clients keep (and improve) their ranking.

How Marketers can Adapt to Google’s Local SEO Changes
The events of 2020 have changed how local businesses operate as well as Google’s search results. While these shifts are designed to make search easier for consumers, many businesses have been caught unaware, losing visibility on Google.

Local marketers are at the forefront of these SERP updates, helping clients adapt to changes in features such as their Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and Google Maps. The differences in these updates are not lost on local marketing professionals.

Some strategies to help:

• Improve the quality of local reviews
  
• Edit your knowledge panels using on- and off-site sources
  
• Prepare to adapt to mobile SERP changes
  
• Moving forward with local SEO
  

How to Set Up a Simple Google Ads Testing Framework for Continual Campaign Optimization
Google may have made it easier for marketers to turn a blind eye to text ad testing with automated ad serving, but there are still advantages for those that commit to even a simple cadence of testing ad copy in their paid search campaigns.

The benefits of ad copy testing can extend to your other marketing efforts as well, including email, display, and social media campaign copy. Once you get into an ad testing rhythm, you build off of successes to get better results.

Looking to Leave WordPress Behind? You’re Not Alone.
Rising priorities like site speed and multi-platform distribution are driving enterprises to explore headless and hybrid content management systems. Most of the Content Management Systems (CMSs) businesses use today were originally built for a single purpose — delivering content to a desktop web browser. Looking closer, WordPress — the open-source platform now used for everything from e-commerce to massive corporate sites and owning 65% of the CMS market (see the image below) — was built in 2003 as a blogging platform, competing with names you rarely hear today outside of a historical discussion.

How to Build Your Organic Audience for the Long Term

• The number one method for building and retaining your audience is responding to people.
  
• Consistently producing content while improving is key.
  
• Creating a community for your audience is a game changer.
  

Google Search Console Launche Desktop Page Experience Report
With the upcoming Google page experience update coming to desktop, today Google launched a new page experience report for desktop in Google Search Console. “To support the upcoming rollout of page experience ranking to desktop, Search Console now has a dedicated desktop section in its Page Experience report to help site owners understand Google’s ‘good page experience’ criteria,” Google wrote.

Why we care: You can use this report to make the necessary adjustments to the desktop versions of your pages before Google rolls out the desktop version of the page experience update. As a reminder, we do not expect there to be a huge ranking change due to this update, but it may impact sites more if their stories show in the top stories section, since a solid page experience score is required to show in the top stories carousel.

URL Changes are Not So Simple for Google Search
Why is it not simple: Google said since Google stores each URL as an address in its index, and each URL is on a per page basis, when you change the URL, that data for that URL or page needs to be forwarded. All the signals, all the links, all the information Google has about that URL needs to be forwarded to the new URL. That can be complicated and for that reason, Google has detailed site move documentation.

Why we care: Many SEOs, site owners, publishers and webmasters have experienced site moves and migrations before. URL changes can be very scary for SEOs, so doing it properly and having the tools in place to catch errors and monitor progress can relieve a lot of that stress.

Marketers, Google Agree That Proposed ‘Surveillance Advertising’ Ban Goes Too Far
A new bill, the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act (BSAA), was introduced by Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday. The bill would no longer allow advertisers to target ads to consumers, with only a couple of exceptions.

Those exceptions: broad, location-based targeting and contextual ads.

Why the legislation was introduced: “Disinformation, discrimination, voter suppression, privacy abuses,” and other harms were cited by California Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, the lead sponsor of the bill, as the reasoning behind pushing this legislation forward. 

Privacy search engine DuckDuckGo tweeted its support of the bill, saying that “The collection of your private data to target you w/ads violates your privacy & leads to discrimination, manipulation, & disinformation.”

In short, the lawmakers want to stop allowing advertisers to “exploit” and profit from the data collected from consumers.

Digital Marketing Snippets

• You can’t predict Google algorithm updates using crawl stats. An increase in crawling activity does not necessarily mean Google is about to launch a new broad core algorithm update. Sure, it could. Or, it could simply mean that it’s just another day of the week. 
  
• Google has updated its Local Service ads documentation. What changed: businesses can now request their “own dedicated background check partner” to do the verification. 
  
• Both Instagram and TikTok are testing subscription-based content. On Instagram, a few creators can now provide exclusive content starting at $0.99 per month.
  
• Site migrations can cause headaches for you – but they also pose challenges for Google. Find out some best practices from Google on how to ensure your site migration goes as smoothly as possible.
  

Some of this information is relevant to your business, and some of it might not be. This is where we can help. We’re able to break down these updates and figure out which ones are most important for you and your business. Contact us for a consultation!