From presidential candidates to the everyday Joe, it seems like the usage of “fake news” as a phrase has risen exponentially over the past year. Quick to dismiss disparaging reports, politicians from both major US political parties have been quick to levy attacks against others by using the “fake news” label to discredit the reputation of their opponents. However, while the usage of the term “fake news” only skyrocketed after Donal Trump assumed office (as exhibited below), social media platforms and search engines have been infected (for lack of a better term) with misleading content for years now, with agenda-driven websites pumping out content to mislead followers.
While it may be difficult to corroborate the authenticity of content published within social media circles and indexed on search engines, tech giants are doing their best to minimize the potential outbreak of misleading or offensive content. Enter Google.
Google’s Project Owl
Capturing form submissions can be quite a hassle for any type of business within the digital environment. Every time a step is added to the conversion funnel, there’s an inherent risk in having a number of users drop out and abandoning the entire process. Conversion rates are likely to suffer even more on mobile devices, especially if your website is not up to snuff or you require users to fill out more than a couple of fields. Luckily, it seems like the people behind major media buying platforms are quickly becoming cognizant of this issues and providing businesses with solutions to combat potential issues. Following in Facebook’s footsteps, LinkedIn has launched Lead Gen Forms, which will help advertisers collect user information directly within site via Sponsored Content campaigns.
Online sellers rejoice! Facebook is releasing a new ad format and reporting metric to help track sales. Collection is a new, more engaging ad format which allows advertisers to display videos, product image and Canvas-style elements.
“Collection is, at its core, a new ad experience that we’ve built specifically for news feed, to drive product discovery and sales through an engaging format in a fast-loading shopping experience,”
– Maz Sharafi, Facebook’s director of product marketing
As you can see, Collections will showcase videos or photos as well as related products. Advertisers can choose which related products to display, or let Facebook decide based on performance and popularity, as well as based on which products would appeal more to the user viewing the ad.
Once a user clicks on the ad, they will be led to a catalogue where they can view more products. Since these product catalogues are hosted on Facebook, they will have quick load times, just like Facebook’s Instant Articles. Once a user clicks on a product they like, they will then be redirected to the advertiser’s website or mobile app to complete the purchase.
With the release of the new ad format, Facebook is also reevaluating their reporting for immersive types of ads. They will be introducing the metric of Outbound Clicks, set to measure the number of clicks from product catalogue to website or mobile app.
Will you be testing out this new ad format?
There has been no shortage of updates when it comes to the Google AdWords platform recently. Over the past year, the following has been updated within the Google AdWords platform:
- Regular text ads have gone the way of the Dodo bird, being replaced with Expanded Text Ads, which contain two headlines and one lengthy description.
- Price extensions were rolled out, giving media buyers an opportunity to beef up ad copy with an additional ad extension.
- Device-level bidding received an overhaul, giving advertisers more control and flexibility with regards to targeting by device category.
- Responsive ads were brought to the display network, allowing advertisers to have their ad formatted for any type of website within Google’s network.
- Account-level call extensions were launched, making it easier for AdWords managers to enable call extensions on a broader level.
For the most part, these updates were welcomed by those of us within the Google Adwords community. In fact, some of these updates were also adopted within the Bing Ads platform (how can you not love expanded test ads?). However, Google’s recent announcement, in which search the engine giant stated that they were changing the way exact match targeting triggers ads, has received a bit of a mixed reaction. This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering it relinquishes some control over how ads associated to exact match keywords are triggered. At the moment, exact match targeting isn’t really exact match anyways, as close variants (plurals, typos, abbreviations, and adverbs) are already included within the match type targeting. Now, it seems like the goal posts are being widened even further, with Google broadening exact match targeting to include addition, rewording, and reordering of text.
When it comes to search engine advertising, there is no doubt that Google AdWords remains the preferred choice among media buyers and small businesses alike. The wide reach available within the Google environment provides a rich amount of targeting for any type of business. A recent report by eMarketer corroborates the notion of Google AdWords being popular among media buyers, as the search engine giant generated $24.60 billion in revenue from search advertising in 2016, dominating the United States market.
$24.60 billion.
New, unconfirmed Google ranking update targets link quality.
On March 8th 2017, members of the SEO community suspected that the part of the Google algorithm that targets link quality has been updated.
While Google have neither denied nor confirmed hasn’t confirmed the update, many are calling it the ‘Fred Update’, after a joke by Gary Illyes suggesting all updates be called “Fred”, as they are constantly updating the algorithm.
This suspected update seems to be targeting poor quality links, similar to a suspected update back in February, meaning that if you are using black hat techniques to build links to the site, you could be seeing your rankings affected. Search Engine Roundtable has reported that within the black hat world of SEO, there has been a lot of talk about rankings dropping and decreases in traffic, suggesting that this is a link related shift, as black hat SEO does have a focus on low-quality link building. Search Engine Roundtable has quoted the Black Hat Word and WebmasterWorld forums, showing that a lot of people have noticed dramatic shifts in rankings since March 8th.
The emergence of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have made it very easy for users to customize their newsfeeds and stay up to date on topics that interest them. Of course, Google is still one of the main news sources for most folks online due to the simplicity of making a search and finding dozens of results in seconds. Understanding that consuming news is a daily activity for most web users, Google has launched an interesting update within its mobile app aimed at throwing as much news and content at users as possible. According to a user on Reddit, Google is now displaying “Trending News” cards within the search results, which sit atop the “related stories” carousel as shown in the interactive GIF below.
Despite the overwhelming amount of success that can be achieved by allocating advertising budgets to the online environment, businesses are still apprehensive about investing into digital marketing. Of course, if done strategically, search engine optimization can be the most rewarding campaign your business can launch due to the immense potential available by ranking highly on Google and Bing. As an agency, we have encountered our fair share of businesses that have expressed hesitancy in allocating a marketing budget to search engine optimization. However, once organic search strategies have been executed and perfected, these businesses have carved their spot on the 1st page of search engines for years to come.
If you need help pitching your senior staff and co-workers on the benefits of search engine optimization, or if you’re still unsure of the potential return on investment from this digital marketing tactic yourself, here are five reasons why SEO is a rock-solid investment.
1. Gain a competitive edge.
Whether you’re just starting out in the digital environment or have had a website for years, the amount of work needed to start ranking well for competitive keywords can vary. Websites built on brand new domains are virtually starting at point zero, which can be problematic if there are a lot of competitors with sites that have been indexed for years. However, if you develop a strategic SEO roadmap, you will be able to generate a lot of momentum by publishing optimized content and building links. While this may require a lot of resources each month, this is your opportunity to match up with the competition and try to get ahead. (more…)
Mastering search engine optimization can be an arduous task for small businesses that do not have adequate resources or time in-house to invest in digital marketing. Even when it comes to local SEO, a good amount of strategic planning is needed to be done on three fronts: onsite, offsite, and locally, the last of which involves optimizing local listings such as Google My Business. However, if you want to start gaining some traction organically, below are some handy tips that can help you capture traffic organically…without annoying end users.
1. Structure your content around your primary locations
Whether you only have one location or operate in several different areas, it’s important to optimize your content, site structure, and meta data around your key geographic areas. For example, if you have a storefront in Montreal, be sure to include the name of your niche market within the page you want to optimize for that area. If you have multiple locations, creating individual pages for each location with unique content can help you push new traffic to the most relevant pages and rank well on search engines. (more…)
*Author’s note: initial post was written for 2017. This has been updated to reflect changes for 2018.
There have been quite a few significant updated in the realm of search engine marketing. While some of the updates focused on the paid side (removal of right column ads, expanded text ads, responsive display ads, etc.), other updates focused on organic traffic. Some of the key updates included the following:
- Removal of right-column ads. While this was more of a paid search update, the impact is felt on the organic side as desktop searches show up to four ads at the top of search results.
- Mobile-friendly update #2. Google launched a second algorithm update a year after “Mobilegeddon,” which gave mobile-friendly websites a boost in rankings on mobile devices.
- Local search algorithm update. Unofficially named Possum, this local search update (while unconfirmed by Google) made a significant change in local search results. Duplicate business listings are filtered out, and more relevant results are shown based on search queries.
- Penguin 4.0. Google *finally* launched a new major Penguin update after a couple of years. Penguin also now runs in real-time and is included in the core algorithm (like Panda).
- Google announce the launched of a mobile-first index, expected to rollout sometime in 2018.
- The Google Search Console was updated to a new interface, looking sleeker and providing webmasters with data past 90 days.
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