Tag: Google

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Digital Marketing

How To Best Utilize Google’s Business Messaging

The opportunity to communicate with clients and customers on an individual level from across time zones is not unique to the age of the Internet, but it’s certainly never been as easy or convenient as it is today.

Google’s Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) has allowed business owners to enable in-app messaging through its mobile app for years, but has only recently enabled the feature on desktop. But what use does Google’s Business Messaging feature really have? Let’s take a look.

What is Google’s My Business Messaging? 

Like other customer-facing messaging functions, Google’s Business Messaging feature lets companies receive inquiries from search users who find their business via Google search.

The benefit of GMB Messaging over some other messaging avenues is that users can immediately engage in a conversation with a business from the search page without looking for the business specifically.

For example, looking for auto repair shops in your neighborhood might lead you to see the business profile for Martin’s Auto Shop, complete with their address, contact number, store opening and closing times, and a messaging feature. This helps put potential customers in touch with your business – provided you’ve optimized your Google business profile and have enabled the messaging feature.

Why You Need to Utilize This Feature

It’s always a good idea to take advantage of more opportunities for customers to reach out to you. While we all need personal boundaries, business messaging systems aren’t quite the same as your personal direct messaging connection.

Customers are given an expected timeframe within which your business will typically reply, will be sent a customary or automatic greeting (which you can edit to include a phone number for more immediate concerns), and while it is treated as an instant messaging feature, it is better to think of Google’s business messaging and other similar customer-facing messaging features as a support hotline in text form.

Sometimes, customers will send in a message just to ask for a price list or inquire about a basic service. Sometimes, they’ll need to send in a few pictures or provide a more detailed account of what they’re looking for. Messaging through Google is faster than email, and more feature-rich than a phone call.

Interactions Can Fuel Repeat Business

Enabling messages through your Google Business Profile also allows you to respond individually to customer concerns, which gives your business an additional chance to make a good impression. That impression can last longer than any marketing campaign.

Customers typically don’t remember most ads, especially ones they come across online. But an interaction with a customer representative on a messaging platform? That’s much more memorable, both in a positive and negative sense.

Helps Alleviate Customer Concerns

There’s nothing more frustrating than making a purchase or receiving a service and being left unfulfilled. Perhaps there’s some confusion on how to utilize the product, or you have a question about the service itself.

Your concerns might not necessarily be negative – but left unaddressed, they can turn into a major irritation. That sort of an experience can reflect poorly on your business.

In addition to a phone number, a message allows users to send you quick questions that you can address at a moment’s notice, or in bulk later in the day, without being inundated by ringing phones at all working hours.

It’s not productive for a customer’s phone call to go unanswered, or for your staff to be interrupted every ten minutes, especially if you run a smaller business.

Getting Started

A Google Business Profile is not difficult to set up. It’s free, and you start through the Google Business Profile Manager.

  • Log into your Google account
  • Add your business via the Business Profile Manager
  • Input your location and a few other key info points
  • Fill out your contact information for potential customers to see
  • Add a mailing address to legitimize and verify your company. This requires a real physical address (not a PO box) and is just used by Google to verify your business. It will be hidden from the public

You will be sent a code via physical mail to input into the Google Business Profile Manager, and can then get started on customizing your profile.

In addition to basic information about your business, you can also feature product and location pictures, manage and view your business as it appears in Google Search and Google Maps, send an invite to other business manager accounts that you would like to give access to, and create posts from your business.

Among the options on the left side menu, you will also find the Messages tab. This is where you can enable and customize your messaging.

Best Practices for Google’s Business Messaging

Like any customer interaction, there are dos and don’ts.

  • Respond quickly. Google keeps track of how quickly you get back to customers. Try to give an answer to any question within about 24 hours. Poor response times will lead to Google actually turning off your messaging feature. You can turn it back on if you so choose.
  • Keep yourself notified. A good way to stay on top of things is to keep your notifications on, both on desktop and on your phone.
  • Block unwanted messages. Any messaging feature on the Internet that doesn’t require a lot of information on the messenger’s part will inevitably lead to some spam. Don’t ignore these messages, or Google might penalize you. Report and block them.
  • Remember that it is a professional feature. Don’t get heated, don’t get personal. Keep things concise and relevant.
  • Don’t conduct business over messaging. Google warns you about this, but it bears repeating – no important information should be shared over the messaging function. Any transactional information, customer info, or purchase details should be conducted through proper channels.

There are other ways to boost your usage of GMB Messaging. Like other customer-facing messaging features, such as those for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, Google’s My Business Messaging lets companies set greeting messages for every customer engagement.

The right greeting can make a difference. Don’t waste space – use your greeting not only to get the ball rolling (i.e., “how can we help you today?”), but also to remind interested customers about your offering (i.e., a B2B company might want to greet with “let’s grow your business together.”)

Messaging options help businesses connect with customers on an individual level, beyond what might be possible via social media, and on a much more convenient and faster level than email. Customers feel heard and seen, and businesses can get a chance to build lasting relationships.

Optimizing your customer-facing strategies online is important. Let us help you make the most of your opportunities to create repeat business online.

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Digital Marketing

Google My Business Is Now Google Business Profile

Alongside a number of other changes made this year, Google continues to revise and rebrand its toolkit for online businesses and internet retailers by changing Google My Business into the Google Business Profile.

While little more than a name change on the surface, a deeper dive into the announcement reveals Google’s long-term plans for Google Business Profile, and how the product can benefit small businesses, customers, and advertisers alike.

Why the Change?

The name change might be an attempt by Google to help clear up what Google My Business is designed to do, and make it clear to businesses with multiple branches and locations that Google is providing them with a means to better analyze and control their web presence on the search engine giant.

Additionally, the name change is coming with a few additional features. While Google Business Profile is functionally the same thing as Google My Business, a few things are being expanded upon.

Most notably, Google is including greater customer communication tools, an easier way to respond to and manage reviews and questions, as well as streamlining the onboarding and management process for newcomers to Google Business Profile, so you can claim and begin improving on your business’ web presence right away.

What Is Google Business Profile?

Google Business Profile is, ultimately, the latest in a long line of names for the same or similar products aimed at helping local businesses establish and curate profiles that Google can use to improve search results. Previously, Google My Business was effectively Google Places, Google+ Local, and Google Local, among a few other iterative name changes.

Aside from the rebrand, Google Business Profile is a web-based platform business owners will have access to, in order to claim and verify their businesses, manage their business profiles on Google Maps and Google Search, interact with customer reviews, answer customer questions, receive and send messages as a business via Google, and even monitor and analyze performance metrics for inbound customer calls (such as call length, caller information, missed calls, and much more.

Managing Your Online Presence

The principles of how best to represent your business on Google via Google My Business haven’t changed. Google Business Profile still relies on unseen metrics to rank you against the competition.

It’s important to remember the basics of how search engine ranking works, and why SEO is becoming ever more complicated and involved.

There are thousands of factors that go into ranking any given site on any given search query, nearly all of which play a role in Google’s secret sauce in-house algorithms. Things like how quickly your website loads, your company’s location relative to the location of the user who initiated the search, your bounce rate (or how long people stay on your page), the readability of your website, the quality of your content, and the consistency with which you can gather and retain an audience and loyal following are just a handful of examples.

Coming out on top when ranked as a business in Search or Maps is much the same way, albeit with a few metrics skewed to adjust for relevance. For example, it’s safe to presume that Google places even greater importance on location when ranking different small businesses.

Making Use of Google

Online retailers and other small businesses with eCommerce capabilities can further leverage Google’s new tools to drive up sales during the holiday season, and beyond. Google wisely rolled these changes out just weeks prior to Black Friday, although it’s likely expected that the full impact of the rebrand will take shape in 2022, as Google slowly sunsets Google My Business and makes way for Google Business Profile to replace it entirely.

If you don’t already have your own Google Business Profile set up and ready to go, it’s worth noting that it likely exists anyway. That’s not always a good thing.

You Probably Already Have a Web Presence

The thing about the internet is that if you run a business, you’re on it. The question isn’t whether you have a web presence, to begin with, but whether you are in control of it.

Google Business Profile seems to be a more manageable and deliberate attempt at getting users to customize and curate their business profiles, both for their benefit, and to improve Google Search by bringing more accurate data to customers and advertisers.

How This Might Affect You

The biggest question to ask yourself in all of this is: why should I bother? And thankfully, the answer is quite straightforward. The more you control how your business is represented on Google, the better your chances of ranking above the competition, getting local traffic, and having new loyal customers make their way into your office.

Additionally, Google Business Profile is a direct pipeline for businesses with or without websites and social network profiles to benefit from the ubiquitous nature of Google on today’s Internet.

What’s the first thing you do when you need a recommendation for a service or product a friend can’t advise you on? Chances are that you look it up online. Or, you ask someone who did. This means that if someone in your vicinity looks for a service that you provide, there’s a good chance they’ll see the name of your business – alongside every other similar company and service provider in the area.

The better your business ranks via reviews, curated answers, response times, customer interactions and impressions, the more likely you are to be Google’s top recommended pick for that search.

On the other hand, the opposite can be just as easily true for businesses that rank poorly, with bad or few reviews, little to no interaction with customers, and no pictures or additional information to help a potential customer make an informed decision. Don’t let Google describe your company for you. Take charge of how you’re represented online and take full advantage of the new Google Business Profile.

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Digital Marketing

Google Introduces New Deals Feed

Google has introduced a new Google Deals feed, an innovative addition to its Shopping tab in search results. This Google Deals feed categorizes products related to user queries, highlighting promotions, sales, and price drops. This feature streamlines the shopping experience by conveniently displaying various deals, making it easier for consumers to find and take advantage of ongoing promotions and discounts directly through Google’s platform.

Google is updating some of its ecommerce features through a new feature: the Deals feed.

The Deals feed is a new feed added to the Shopping tab on Google search results, categorizing items related to the search query with promotions, sales, price drops, and other running promos.

Finding the Right Deal

As part of a range of changes and fixes planned for the holiday season, Google’s new Deals section will function by way of a “deals badge” applied to any items that are on sale, or part of a promotion.

Deals will be shown automatically when a search query specifies sales, promotions, deals, or related search terms (such as Black Friday). Alternatively, shoppers can select to filter results based on deals in the Shopping tab, from a drop-down menu in the search result (next to Shopping home, Stores, Saved items, Tracked products, and so on).

Performance Metrics Over the Holidays

Another change coming to Google Shopping and its list of ecommerce functions will be in the form of new trackable performance metrics in the Google Merchant Center. You can access the Google Merchant Center via Google for Retail, and begin managing how in-store items and other aspects of your ecommerce offering are showing up in Google’s search results under the Shopping tab.

The new performance metrics in question are largely going to help people separate traffic, clicks, click-through-rates, and impressions for all products, and products with promotions, sales, or price drop badges (i.e. products eligible for the Deals feature).

This will help webmasters and shop managers better gauge how effective a given promotion or sales drop has been. Managers can further segment their impressions and clicks by promotion type, product, brand, or product type.

Other Features of the Merchant Center

If you haven’t gone through the trouble of setting up with Google’s Merchant Center for your ecommerce platform, you may want to know how it works.

The Merchant Center effectively functions as a hub for you to go over the metrics on your products as they appear on search results, and it allows you to purchase and schedule advertising services and campaigns with Google directly, as well as manage and review the improvement any given sale or marketing campaign has had on your product’s sales and impressions.

To utilize Google’s Merchant Center, you will need a Google account through which you want to manage your products and sales data and follow Google’s beginner guide to adding and measuring products.

Google’s Merchant Center isn’t exclusively for ecommerce platforms – you can integrate your brick-and-mortar products as well, in which case advertising on Google will simply give customers the opportunity to find out more about how and where to buy from you. Note that for brick-and-mortar stores, these are local listings.

What this means is that anyone on Google making a rudimentary search for a product may have your listed product recommended to them if they’re from the same region. Alternatively, including the region in the search term (i.e. “cheese-making kits los angeles”) will likely help you and other local listings gain prioritized visibility.

Other information Google will require from you includes the basics, like your business’ address, a verified phone number (they will call you), the website you use to list your products, and any third-party platforms you work with to promote products on Google.

Note that Google offers different options and opportunities for free and paid listings, or “enhanced” listings. The difference between free and enhanced listings is that the latter requires more product information (as Google will display more of it to customers).

Integration with Shopify and WooCommerce

We’ve mentioned earlier this year that Google Shopping is also integrating Shopify and WooCommerce globally, which meant that you could manage your Google merchant settings and review performance metrics for your Google product search results through WooCommerce and Shopify.

A previous statement from WooCommerce explains that their users can “upload their products to Google, create free listings and ad campaigns, and review performance metrics — all without leaving their WooCommerce dashboard.”

This integration now extends into the new deals feature, as well. In other words, if you’re a retailer, or are implementing ecommerce through WooCommerce or Shopify, you can take advantage of the new deals feature by showing your existing deals on Google.

Starting December, Shopify users and WooCommerce users will also be able to show their deals in the Search and Shopping tabs.

How This Might Affect You

If you sell anything tangible and aren’t utilizing the Internet to send it halfway across the world – or even just one or two towns over – then you’re missing out on the biggest commerce shift of the century.

Online shopping was up a stratospheric 44 percent during the onset of the pandemic, after having already achieved pretty significant popularity over the last two decades. This is far from a new thing, after all. But it’s never been as ubiquitous or easy as today.

And the profits have never been greater. While it’s true that a vast majority of the growth in the industry has likely been soaked up by online retail giant Amazon, there is a bit of general tide raising going on for all boats in the industry.

These new tools by Google will further help you boost visibility for your listings and drive traffic to your products or net you holiday sales directly through the search engine. Now, products offered on sale or via promotion will be featured in the related search items, the new Deals feed, and the deals carousel. Once your product is eligible to appear on the new feed, you may be seeing increased traffic as people gear up to snag sales items before they’re sold out during the big holiday rush. And the best news? Google doesn’t take a cut from the sale, unlike eBay or Amazon.

Of course, there’s more to leveraging this feature than a simple plug-and-play with your product information.

Managing your ad budget for Google product listings, carefully monitoring and comparing results from different sales and promotions, tracking your campaigns – whether through Shopify or Google’s Merchant Center – can help you greatly improve the efficiency of this feature.

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Digital Marketing

Google Title Tag Changes: What You Need to Know

While there’s no guaranteed method to prevent Google from changing your title tags, following these best practices can reduce the likelihood of it happening. Remember, Google’s goal is to provide the best user experience possible, so creating title tags that accurately and succinctly describe your content will always be beneficial.

If you spend a lot of time tracking your web pages and search result rankings, you’re probably familiar with the ins and outs of search engine optimization. It’s complicated, to say the least – mostly because the rules of the game are changing constantly, and often, they’ll change without anyone even noticing for the first few hours.

Google, which constitutes the majority of search traffic on the internet (by far) makes thousands of changes to its search algorithm every year. And it isn’t like every single change log is documented for the world to see.

That being said, whenever Google makes a pretty big change, you can expect to see some kind of announcement, and at least a little bit of an explanation. One of those changes hit us just late last month, with Google’s new page title update. Google announced that they’ve gone from using about 80 percent of the title elements provided by you in your title tags, to 87 percent. The update is one piece of a continuing experiment on Google’s part to optimize title tags.

It might seem like a minor change – and it is – but it allows us to go deeper into why Google is making changes to the way you’re tagging your titles, and what that should mean for you and your website’s SEO.

What is Google’s Page Title Update?

First, a little explanation and backstory. Title tags, like meta descriptions, are important pieces of information for both search engine users, and the search engines themselves.

They’re what your users will typically see first when catching a glimpse of your site on Google’s search results page, and they’re really important for both getting ranked, and getting traffic.

Not only will better title tags help you catch more traffic, but by refining and improving your title tags, you can drastically improve the quality of your traffic, generate more leads, and help people find the kind of content they’re really looking for.

That’s what Google is after, as well – and it is why Google has a long history of altering title tags, or at least, not really using yours (Google does the same thing with meta descriptions – sometimes, it will just pick a phrase from your content that it feels better represents your page than the description you provided).

Back in 2014, a study of 111,000 search results found that 36 percent of results had their titles partially changed (minor changes, such as adding the company name or name of the city into the title), and over 25 percent had their titles completely changed (entirely different words or word orders compared to the specified title tags).

About the update: Not only has Google revealed why they’re changing title tags, but they revealed to what degree (on average) title tags are being changed, as well (a change from 80 percent to 87 percent). They also released guidance on what makes a great title, and how to improve your titles for clarity and better search results.

Furthermore, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller clarified that the changes Google makes to title tags do not affect ranking and are only meant to help convey better clarity and provide more accurate search results to users.

It’s important to note that not affecting ranking does not mean that your changed titles aren’t affecting click-through rates for pages and ads, because users are ultimately seeing a different title from what you may have intended.

Why Has Google Been Changing Title Tags?

To provide better context for why Google’s algorithm might sometimes partially or wholly change a page’s title tags, it’s important to understand Google’s main complaints with bad title tags. According to the company, the issues the algorithm looks for and tries to address the most are:

  • Half-empty titles: “ | Site Name” would be detected by the system and changed into “Product Name | Site Name” if the page in question was a product page, for example.
  • Obsolete titles: “2020 admissions criteria – University of Awesome” is changed into “2021 admissions criteria – University of Awesome” if the content was updated for the new year, yet the title tags weren’t.
  • Inaccurate titles: “Giant stuffed animals, teddy bears, polar bears – Site Name” may be made more accurate in cases where the content doesn’t reflect all the elements of the title, instead becoming “Stuffed animals – Site Name”.
  • Micro-boilerplate titles: If “My so-called amazing TV show,” is repeated for multiple different pages per season, then the system may change each page’s title to something along the lines of “Season 1 – My so-called amazing TV show”, “Season 2 – My so-called amazing TV show”, “Season 3 – My so-called amazing TV show”, and so on.
  • And a lot more.

Google will make very minor changes to title tags that, generally, reflect the content on the page and provide the kind of information you expect to see in a title – such as the name of the company or blog, or the location if it’s relevant to the content being posted.

Again, these changes do not affect the way your pages rank. But title tags themselves do affect ranking. This means that your own title tags are still important! Even if Google will change them for you, they won’t change the way your original title tags affect your search result rankings.

How Google’s Title Tag Change Affects You

While ranking is still entirely up to you, Google’s changes can affect click-through rate as users will be seeing a different title than you might have intended for them to see, under certain circumstances.

This is something a lot of marketers and SEO experts are skeptical on. There is no data to really prove that Google’s changes are purely positive – and it’s something Google tacitly admits.

This is a system that is still being developed after all, as proven by the fact that they’ve gone from changing affected titles by 20 percent, to changing them by just 13 percent.

If you want to avoid having your title tags altered by Google, take some time to review what they’ve previously written on good title tags, and be sure to take the time to update your title tags, especially after making major changes to a page, or for pages with dynamic content.

How to Write Meta Titles that Google Won’t Alter

IT can be frustrating to discover the meta titles you’ve created for your page have been altered by Google to display differently in the search results.

Fortunately, there are several things you can do to write a meta title tag that will ensure its optimized for your target keyword and safe from being altered.

  • Relevancy: Make sure your meta title aligns with the content on the page. Google’s algorithms are sophisticated enough to determine whether your title tag accurately reflects your content, and if it doesn’t, it may change it.
  • Length: Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag. If your title exceeds this limit, it may be shortened and replaced with an ellipsis (“…”). This may trigger Google to replace your title with what it considers a more accurate representation.
  • Keyword Placement: Try to place your most important keywords towards the beginning of your title. This ensures they’re seen by both Google and users, even if the rest of the title gets cut off.
  • Branding: Google now displays the favicon and site name above each result, so it may not be as necessary to include your site name at the tail end of your title. This is great because you no longer need to struggle to fit both your title and brand within the character limits of title tags.

While there’s no guaranteed method to prevent Google from changing your title tags, following these best practices can reduce the likelihood of it happening. Remember, Google’s goal is to provide the best user experience possible, so creating title tags that accurately and succinctly describe your content will always be beneficial.

Need Help with Your Title Tags?

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Sachs Marketing Group is a full-service digital marketing agency with a proven track record in SEO. Our skilled SEO team use cutting-edge strategies and industry best practices to help your business rank higher in search results, capturing the attention of potential customers and driving organic traffic to your site.

Imagine your business appearing on the first page of Google, attracting high-quality leads, and converting them into loyal customers. With Sachs Marketing Group, this can be your reality. We’ve helped countless businesses enhance their online visibility, improve customer engagement, and boost revenue through effective SEO.

Don’t let your competitors outshine you in search results. Contact Sachs Marketing Group today and let’s discuss how we can tailor an SEO strategy that will catapult your business to new heights of success. Your journey towards top Google rankings starts here.

Title Tag FAQs

We work with a lot of business owners who wonder why their website page titles aren’t displaying as intended. Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about Google changing title tags:

Why is Google changing title tags?

Google is changing title tags in an effort to better serve users. The goal is to provide more descriptive and relevant titles in search results that accurately reflect page content. This change aims to help users quickly understand what a page is about and decide whether it’s worth their click, improving the overall user experience.

Why is Google not using my title tag?

Google might not use your title tag if its algorithms determine that another piece of text on your page, or in the anchor text pointing to your page, is more representative of the page content. This usually happens when the original title tag is overly generic, stuffed with keywords, or is not descriptive of the page content.

How do I fix Google title tag rewrites?

You can reduce the likelihood of Google rewriting your title tags by making them highly relevant, concise, and accurate representations of your page content. Ensure they are unique to each page, include important keywords naturally, and appeal to the user. Creating well-structured, meaningful titles that closely align with the page content will discourage Google from altering them.

What does Google do if your title is too long?

If your title tag is excessively long, Google may choose to shorten it or replace it entirely in the search results. They do this to ensure the title remains readable and useful to users. Google usually truncates titles after approximately 60 characters, replacing the remainder with an ellipsis (…), or it may rewrite the title based on your page content or the search query.

How often does Google rewrite meta titles?

As of my last training data in September 2021, Google hasn’t publicly shared specific statistics on how often they rewrite meta titles. However, it’s known that the frequency can depend on several factors, including the relevance and quality of the original title tag, its length, and whether it accurately reflects the page content. Observations suggest that poorly structured or keyword-stuffed title tags are more likely to be rewritten.

Conclusion

Google’s practice of altering title tags in search results underscores the importance of crafting concise, relevant, and appealing titles for every page on your website.

A well-structured title tag that accurately reflects page content can enhance user experience and increase click-through rates, while also reducing the chances of Google rewriting it. Remember to avoid overly long, generic, or keyword-stuffed titles. Instead, aim for a unique, descriptive, and engaging title that naturally incorporates your target keywords.

In this era of ever-evolving algorithms, staying informed and adaptable is key to maintaining a robust and successful online presence.

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Digital Marketing

Google Integrates with GoDaddy

The news that Google integrates with GoDaddy is exciting for merchants interested in the benefits of two giants connecting. On July 13th, Google expanded its integration efforts to include GoDaddy merchants in the U.S., enhancing the ecommerce landscape. This move is part of Google’s broader strategy to integrate various ecommerce platforms into its Google Merchant Center. This integration allows for seamless advertising and selling of products via Google Search, the Google Shopping tab, Google Image Search, and YouTube, previously including platforms like Square, WooCommerce, and Shopify.

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would be working on improved integration of ecommerce platforms into its Google Merchant Center, which allows users and companies to advertise and sell products via Google Search and the Google Shopping tab, and manage the way their inventory appears on Google.

On July 13th, it extended that integration to GoDaddy merchants selling products in the US. Other ecommerce platforms that Google has been working with include Square, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Google’s Merchant Center also allows products to show up on Google Image Search and YouTube.

Related: 11 Essential SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

What Does This Mean?

GoDaddy is a domain registrar and web hosting service company. However, the company also offers several different web design and web builder services. One of its services is called the GoDaddy Online Store, through which you can build an ecommerce website for your company via GoDaddy’s own proprietary ecommerce builder and backend. In other words, GoDaddy lets you set up your own online shop, with features including:

  • Up to 5,000 different product listings.
  • Up to 10 images per product.
  • Dozens of store templates organized by category.
  • Secure payment via major credit cards, Apple Pay, and PayPal.
  • Facebook integration.
  • Email marketing campaigns.
  • Mobile-friendly design.
  • Google integration.

That last one is the company’s most recent offering. Through their cooperation, GoDaddy now allows you to log into your Google Merchant Center account while remaining onsite, syncing your GoDaddy Online Store catalog with Google, creating free listings, and configure your Google Smart Shopping ad campaigns to determine what products will show up across Google, including Google Search, Maps, Shopping, YouTube, and even Gmail.

Where free listings simply allow Google to pull from your catalog whenever results seem relevant to users, Smart Shopping allows users to manage how and where to focus their advertising budget on Google, while receiving clear performance metrics to better inform their advertising decisions in the future.

Commenting on the topic, Greg Goldfarb, the GoDaddy Vice President Commerce Products, explains: “Our customers’ success is our core motivation, we know that providing powerful ways to engage large buyer audiences is a key driver.

“Expanding our work with Google simplifies creating an ecommerce presence across Google surfaces and jumpstarts sales momentum by leveraging their best-in-class automated advertising solutions.”

Google has also announced that eligible GoDaddy users will receive up to $150 in ads credit when starting their first Google Smart Shopping ad campaign via GoDaddy.

What is the Google Merchant Center?

Google’s new Merchant Center allows you to manage how products that appear on your website will show up in free listings via Google Search, as well as paid Google ad campaigns.

It’s no secret that Google is by far the most popular search engine on the planet, and that hundreds of millions of people (by the company’s own metrics) use the website to specifically search for products to buy on a daily basis.

Google’s Merchant Center allows users to manage what products appear on Google, how they appear on Google, how to boost their appearance on Google, and how your advertising investments on Google are paying off for you. In short, the Merchant Center offers three basic features:

  • Free listings.
  • Paid ad campaigns.
  • Metrics.

So far, Google has worked with Shopify, WooCommerce, and GoDaddy to bring the Merchant Center to each of these companies’ respective ecommerce platforms, so their users can start and manage Google ad campaigns for their own products via their respective ecommerce platform.

Like a lot of other Google products, you only really need your own Google Account to get started. You probably already have one if you’ve ever logged onto YouTube, have a Gmail, or use Google Analytics (which you definitely should).

Premium ad campaigns utilize your detailed product listings as uploaded to Google Merchant Center, and require a Google Ad account, where you can begin and manage your very own ad campaign.

How Do Listings Work?

Google requires different levels of information for products to show up on the Shopping tab, Image tab, or general Search. Signing up with the Google Merchant Center isn’t required for Google to automatically construct free listings if your website has structured data markup, and you haven’t opted out via your indexing and crawl controls. If your products haven’t been crawled, you can manually submit a feed via google Merchant Center. Some of the attributes Google uses to index, sort, and recommend your products includes:

  • Product ID.
  • Product title.
  • Product link.
  • Image link.
  • Product price.
  • Product description.
  • Product availability.
  • Product condition (for refurbished products).
  • Product brand.
  • Product GTIN.
  • And much more.

Among these data points, Google particularly recommends that you provide information on shipping info and shipping policies, return policies (via the Merchant Center), the correct product URL (via the canonical_link attribute), and product availability.

For more information on making the most out of your Google ad campaigns, SEO campaigns, and product listings, get in touch.

Why Does This Matter?

This partnership between Google and GoDaddy is going to prove particularly beneficial for small-to-medium businesses, and small retailers. It’s a smart move for tech and IT companies to invest heavily in creating intuitive and easy-to-use ecommerce tools, as thousands and thousands of business owners are looking to move inventory over the internet after the pandemic forced countless brick-and-mortar stores to close.

But with the influx of new platforms to buy from comes a natural oversaturation of the market. Even niche industries are beginning to see multiple online storefronts fighting for the same or similar customer bases, to the point that differentiation and marketing savvy are becoming more and more important.

GoDaddy’s Google (and Facebook) integration, alongside a robust search engine optimization strategy, can help smaller retailers looking to reach broader audiences (locally, nationally, or worldwide) and ship their inventory out to the world.

While larger online retailers like Amazon took the biggest slice of the ecommerce revenue pie by far in 2020 and the first half of 2021, online shopping in general has experienced a massive boom as a result of the COVID pandemic, and we are likely to continue to see that trend grow even after this pandemic has finally come to an end.

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Digital Marketing

Google Announces New Ads Creative Studio

News this week is being presented by more than yet another change to the algorithm – this time, Google is making marketing headlines with the development and release of a (sort of) brand new toolkit called Ads Creative Studio.

The new toolkit is designed for both creative types and marketers, with the aim of helping them take their campaigns to the next level via a new suite of resources both old and new. Google has also stated that they are trying to make it easier for artists and ad specialists to collaborate.

What is Google’s Ads Creative Studio?

Combining the forces of the YouTube video editor, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager 360, Ads Creative Studio gives you a set of basic features unifying the best of all three – in theory, and hopefully, in practice as well. So far, Ads Creative Studio is boasting the following base features:

The Director Mix. A brand-new tool that allows advertisers to create and customize ad campaigns that scale. Advertisers can design and produce a base video asset and utilize customized and dynamic elements to adjust to a variety of potential customers and target audiences – greatly expanding the efficacy of a single campaign and multiplying an ad department’s productivity.

The idea, according to Google, is to enable advertisers to create “thousands of video variations with relatively little effort”, through the use of customizable video layers containing text, graphics, audio, and even references to the viewer’s location, time of day, or interest.

Dynamic Display ads. Dynamic display is an existing feature in Google’s advertising products, particularly the Google Display Network in Google Ads. Dynamic Display, in theory, allows advertisers to cater their ads to the user, rather than trying to sculpt an ad around a vague target audience.

This allows ads to display products and offers that are most relevant to the person viewing them, based on information Google has gathered. Data is by far the most valuable resource in the advertising arms race, and Dynamic Display ads are one of the more unique ways advertisers can choose to leverage Google’s enormous data analysis capabilities.

HTML5 creation tools. HTML5 creation tools simply let advertisers leverage the improved performance and loading speed of HTML5 web elements when creating ads through the new Ad Creative Studio. Remember, speed is key with Google – your ad should be catchy and unintrusive, as well as quick to load.

Audio Mixer and Dynamic Audio. Audio is the unappreciated and underrated MVP of any given ad. Sound is immensely powerful, from voice acting and music to basic sound design and foley. But audio mixing, in particular, can make or break an ad and can mean the difference between something memorable and catchy, or something completely and utterly forgettable.

And finally, a Project Library, which is as straightforward as it sounds.

Why Consolidate These Tools?

While Ads Creative Studio is bringing a few new things to the table, most of its tools can be found in Google’s other existing products, mainly the aforementioned three: YouTube, Display & Video 360, and Campaign Manager 360.

At the heart of it, the idea to consolidate probably boils down to this: one is simpler and more efficient than three. Let alone five, six, or seven, once you take into consideration how people utilize a vast number of different programs and suites to work on HTML5 ads, video ads, display ads, and audio ads.

Ads Creative Studio is Google’s way of taking what they’ve already developed and repackaging it with a neat little bow – while telling advertisers that this is the project they aim to refine over the next few years.

Ads Creative Studio is also a way for Google to lead advertisers in a dance towards a new kind of way to develop and roll out ad campaigns: a dynamic way, where ads become building blocks that include a foundation, and multiple dynamic and customized, user-specific elements that are swapped in and out by both man and machine (or, more correctly, algorithm).

Google is basically telling us that we’re going to spend less and less time coming up with ways to design a new ad around each and every target customer, and instead automate the way ads target our audience, while designing better, more intuitive, simpler, and hopefully less intrusive and less bloated ads (via HTML5 tools and Google’s help). Ads Creative Studio also contains an asset management system where advertisers can store and browse text, video, audio, and graphical assets to utilize in their different ads.

There’s another potential benefit behind the curtain here: increased and improved collaboration between the media team and the ad team. By consolidating the tools and the managerial process, Google aims to create a one-stop-shop for a company’s general ad creation needs – a place where artists can create assets, while advertisers assemble them in real time.

What Does This Ultimately Mean for You?

Ideally, Google wants it to mean that you’ll spend less time making more ads. More ads means more revenue, which is a good thing for a company that mostly generates revenue from online advertising.

Whether or not you use Google’s tools is absolutely up to you, and there’s no denying that a consolidated web-based toolkit like Ads Creative Studio probably won’t be putting out the same quality of work as an experienced ad agency with very high production values and renowned artists. But for the average marketing specialist, Google’s new suite can definitely help make life much easier, on artists and advertisers alike.

Google is Merging Other Resources

In other news, Create with Google is being merged with Think with Google. This is Google’s resource for sharing tools, information, and spotlights in creative ads and creative advertising throughout the industry. Check it out if you want a little inspiration for your campaign – or, more specifically, just want to go check out the kind of ads that perform well with Google. You can also review Google’s creative guidelines on video, text, and more.

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Digital Marketing

What is Google FLoC?

Whether you’ve heard of it via headlines in the news, releases by the EFF, or the viral sharing of AmIFLoCed, chances are you’ve heard about Google’s new FLoC initiative at some point this year.

FLoC, or the Federated Learning of Cohorts, is part of Google’s larger privacy sandbox, and is an experimental replacement for third-party cookies. While the name might sound confusing at first, the API is quite simple in concept (though its execution remains to be seen).

Explaining Google FLoC

FLoC is a new data collection concept by which the browsing and behavioral data of multiple individuals would be grouped up into generalized cohorts and used as an alternative to third-party cookies.

Currently, advertisers use cookies to track user behavior and create targeted ad campaigns. But privacy concerns surrounding the ubiquity of cookies and their invasiveness – particularly insofar as how they allow programs to track users across the internet, create user profiles based on their activities across different websites, and track users across different locations – have led people to wonder if there could be a better alternative, or if third-party cookies (and user tracking in general) should be completely done away with.

One of the biggest concerns regarding third-party cookies is that they can be attributed to a single person. Advertising platforms can generate user profiles based on their cookies and learn just about everything about a person from their behavior on the Internet.

FLoC aims to obscure the individual in the group, making it impossible for advertisers to single out individual users, and instead only gather and use information about large groups of people with similar patterns of behavior.

These cohorts would still enable personalized advertising, but the ads would be personalized to a profile roughly fitting several thousand people, rather than individual users.

“Federated learning” means that Google will be using machine learning to generate these cohorts. The idea is that advertisers will only be able to target a cohort once enough user data has been gathered to generate one, based on at least a few thousand users per cohort.

Cohorts would be categorized based on interests and behavior, and users could be placed within different cohorts at different times – for example, a single user may be part of a cohort centered around looking at gardening equipment one week, then at another point in time they may be in a cohort of people who viewed a lot of baking recipes.

How is Google FLoC Different from Cookies?

User information will be gleamed, aggregated, and provided by a user’s browser, but advertisers would only ever have access to the information of a generalized cohort of people rather than the individual user information currently made accessible by third-party cookies.

FLoC itself would still have access to that information to generate cohorts, but it wouldn’t be shared, even with Google.

Why Is There Controversy Surrounding Google FLoC?

Although FLoC is a proposed alternative to third-party cookies, there are privacy experts who worry that it’s just a pivot in a similar direction. FLoC holds no answers for common invasive forms of tracking like fingerprinting (which tracks user’s browsing history based on device information and other data rather than cookies) and may be combined with other non-cookie forms of invasive tracking to generate an even more accurate user profile.

Privacy experts also feel that addressing third-party cookies (which track users across websites, platforms, and devices) isn’t enough, and that first-party cookies (which are used to track logins and cart histories, but can also be used to generate in-house user profiles) still lend themselves to the development of targeted ad campaigns that are, by their very nature, discriminatory. Like fingerprinting, first-party cookies could potentially be combined with FLoC to continue to erode user privacy.

Google acknowledges these issues and is pushing ahead with FLoC testing, with the added caveat that the feature isn’t ready for a generalized rollout. So far, only about 0.5 percent of Chrome users in selected regions are being “FLoCed”. Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla all feel that the feature would have to be improved considerably, and are unwilling to implement it. Brave Browser explains that FLoC: “harms user privacy, under the guise of being privacy-friendly.”

Preparing for the Future

One thing to make note of is that FLoC is proposed to be a replacement for third-party cookies, and their ability to track users as they move throughout the web. FLoC is not a replacement for first-party cookies, which allow websites to offer functionality such as registering an account and logging in, saving items in a cart, and compiling data for the use of user experience improvements, for example.

If third-party cookies were to be extinguished, advertisers would (theoretically) have a harder time tracking a single individual throughout the internet and would be replaced by generalized cohorts instead. But that doesn’t mean advertisers cease to have any info whatsoever on individual users. It’s just that most, if not all of it, will come in the form of first-party data.

This leads to the question: what will advertisers be able to do with first-party data? Google continues to probe and research this question via its FLEDGE initiative, an expansion of a previous Google Chrome program dubbed TURTLEDOVE. Via FLEDGE, Google claims that Chrome plans to take into account: “the industry feedback they’ve heard, including the idea of using a ‘trusted server’ – as defined by compliance with certain principles and policies – that’s specifically designed to store information about a campaign’s bids and budgets.”

FLEDGE testing is currently in progress, and origin trials testing is set to begin this month, with “advertiser testing” occurring at some point later this year before the 2022 deadline. That being said, some experts doubt that any serious testing on Google’s new privacy concepts will take place until next year. Google has stated that ad companies interested in joining these tests will be able to make use of the experimental API through a “bring your own server” model.

Other proposed changes to preserve crucial ad effectiveness functionalities, such as conversion tracking, are still underway. Currently, there have been talks about altering the way conversion tracking data is presented to make it impossible to identify and expose any given individual behind a conversion, but still present advertisers with enough actionable data to determine how successful their campaign was in relation to previous efforts.

The privacy sandbox Google continuously mentions is part of a greater initiative throughout the web to earnestly tackle and answer the questions and problems surrounding privacy and anonymity in the modern web.

Privacy and user data has come into the forefront of public consciousness via the popularity of search engines like DuckDuckGo, Apple’s initiatives to block third-party cookies altogether and market privacy as a selling point for its consumer tech, as well as the implementation of the GDPR throughout the EU. Whether Google’s new initiatives will prove to be a long-term solution, or just a short-term paradigm shift in the online advertising world, is still undecided.

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Digital Marketing

Google’s June 2021 Core Update

Google released a new core update earlier this month and has uncharacteristically announced a second update following very closely next month. Google core updates tend to be spaced several months apart, but a statement from Google Search public liaison Danny Sullivan clarified that they originally planned on releasing a single, larger update this month, and have had to split the update into two parts to begin rolling out this month and avoid major delays.

Google’s blog previously wrote about core updates in 2019 and has linked to the same post once again to tell webmasters how to prepare.

Among other things, the post states: “There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update. They haven’t violated our webmaster guidelines nor been subjected to manual or algorithmic action, as can happen to pages that do violate those guidelines. In fact, there’s nothing in a core update that targets specific pages or sites.”

To clarify further, this means that changes in rankings after a core update are not the same as penalizations, and core updates don’t tackle spam or dole out penalties. This is more about Google trying to improve search results.

The post goes on to provide an analogy, where core updates are akin to changes to a Top 100 Films list. The iteration of the list in 2015 will look different from an iteration of the list in 2019, due to changes in interpretation, newer worthy additions, and reconsiderations or reflections granted by hindsight and time.

What is Google’s Core Update Covering?

Google continuously updates its search algorithm, which relies on hundreds of known ranking factors and hundreds more that are unclarified or potential ranking factors. While Google makes changes to its search algorithm several times a day, it packs most of the “bigger” changes into so-called core updates.

As with most Google core updates, the focus here is on content. What Google is looking for specifically is relevance and accuracy. The gist of what core updates have been covering so far is as follows:

  • Google is trying to improve how websites are ranked based on content quality and relevance.
  • They’re paying more attention to unique and cite-worthy content. This doesn’t mean heavily-cited content is a prerequisite for ranking – but they are trying to rank pages with insightful and interesting information.
  • They’re trying to discourage clickbait. Again, core updates don’t lead to penalties – but they do mean that your ranking may decrease because the algorithm now thinks other content should rank higher.
  • Sourcing and expertise are becoming more important. Google may rank authoritative content higher than content with dubious sources or authors.
  • Content should be more than just legible – it should be well-presented, on all platforms, free from excessive distractions (ads).
  • And, perhaps most importantly, Google wants webmasters and content creators to ask themselves: “Does the content seem to be serving the genuine interests of visitors to the site or does it seem to exist solely by someone attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?”

Expect Another Google Core Update in July

As mentioned previously, this update will amount to only about half of the changes Google aimed to introduce this month. The rest will follow next month.

However, because Google remains fairly opaque about what these changes are exactly – outside of clarifying that they’re trying to make search results emphasize content quality – we can’t really report on what’s “missing” from the update, so to speak, or predict how July’s changes will affect this month’s changes.

Unlike penalties, which can take several months to be reversed (even if you make the appropriate changes to your content ASAP), changes in ranking caused by a core update are not affected by the same kind of “time-out”.

You can make changes to your content to try and better match Google’s update, and hope for a more positive result. But there’s also an argument to be made for not doing anything hasty. If you want a more in-depth look at what Google might take into consideration when ranking, give the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines a look.

What To Do If You’ve Had a Hit in Ranking

With Google’s June update out in full force, many websites are seeing their rankings drop or change already. If you’ve experienced a sudden drop, then hold your horses on making any major changes. Your ranking might reverse with the next update (which is just a few weeks away). Alternatively, keep in mind what core updates usually seek to address: improved accuracy and relevancy when recommending content on the web.

In previous core updates, Google has advised webmasters to focus on the following four areas when hit with a drop in rankings:

  1. Content authoritativeness.
  2. Author expertise and truthfulness.
  3. Visual style and content presentation.
  4. Comparative quality (versus other similar pages).

To sum it all up, the general advice is for this coming core update is to wait and see, potentially do nothing. If the update did affect you, consider how your web content compares to the pages that outranked you, and what you might want to change to improve it (and even beat the competition).

Google’s update hit the ground running on June 2nd, and they’ve previously stated that it might take up to two weeks for the effects of the update to be fully integrated into the search algorithm. This means that even if you haven’t been hit with a ranking change yet (both positive and negative), it can still happen.

If you need help preparing for the next update, do note that any changes you are seeing now may reverse themselves in a few weeks. The July update can be more accurately seen as part two of the June update, or just the second, potentially larger half of an update Google had been planning to roll out completely earlier this month but failed to.

Webmasters and content creators should also bear in mind the previously mentioned Page Experience Update, which is rolling out this month as well, focusing on Google’s new Core Web Vitals.

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Digital Marketing

Google Delays Page Experience Update

Earlier this year, we wrote about how the upcoming Google Page Experience update might impact your ranking – and what factors to look out for when preparing for it. That update was slated for this month but has recently been pushed back to a gradual rollout beginning in mid-June this year, concluding with a total implementation by the end of August.

Google’s page experience update might amount to making a small overall impact on your ranking, to being incredibly important. The update revolves around a few core page experience signals, and will include a change to the way pages are selected for Google’s Top Stories carousel, expanding the usage of non-AMP content in Google News, as well as updates to the Google News app.

What is the Page Experience Update?

At its heart, the page experience update provides developers with greater tools to assess and improve their page experience through the new Page Experience report.

This new tool will combine the existing Core Web Vitals report and add in additional trackable UX signals, including mobile friendliness and safe browsing status.

Google is also announcing the general availability of signed exchanges for all web pages, not just ones build with the AMP framework. Signed exchanges (SXG) are meant to introduce a safer way of distributing portable content while maintaining the content’s integrity based on its original source.

How Will the Page Experience Update Benefit SEO?

If you’ve been keeping up to date with your SEO, then your website should already be optimized for user and page experience. These metrics have been known to play a role in rankings for quite some time.

The bigger change here is the introduction of a new toolkit to help track and visualize the impact of these metrics and give you greater insight over how Google rates your page experience based on their own data.

This can give you a much better idea of where to redouble your efforts when optimizing pages.

That being said, we still don’t know what kind of an impact this update is going to have on rankings, and it’s best to reserve any judgment for after it’s been released.

A Recap of the Page Experience Update

From what we know of the page experience update so far, the bulk of the update will concern itself with new tools to track the three core web vitals outlined by Google, as well as four additional vital signals.

Core Web Vitals

Of the signals emphasized in the update, the Core Web Vitals are the most important trio. These are three metrics called the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and the First Input Delay (FID). To keep things brief:

  • Largest Contentful Paint: This is best explained as a new metric designed to track how fast the majority of a website’s visual content loads. In other words, it’s a metric to see how long it takes for your website to load its main content and be useful to the user.The exact element being tracked is the render time of the largest image or text block within the user’s viewport on first load. To simplify it, a good LCP score is within or under 2.5 seconds.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift: This is a metric for how often shifts in layout occur – ones that can disrupt the user experience and annoy a user.Picture a block of text suddenly shifting in the middle of scrolling down, causing you to lose the sentence you were reading – or picture trying to click a link, only for the link to shift, causing you to instead click something else. These layout shifts are often caused by elements loading asynchronously, as well as pop up elements.What might be a minor issue most of the time can become a severe problem, especially in e-commerce. CLS will track how often these shifts occur throughout the page’s lifespan.
  • First Input Delay: This is a metric for measuring site interactivity, particularly how fast page elements respond to user input. This is especially important for login screens, for example. A good score requires an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

The other metrics critical to Google’s user page experience update include:

  • Mobile friendliness: How well does your website run across multiple different devices? Mobile friendliness is judged by whether a page loads and interacts as well on phones and tablets as it does through a desktop.
  • HTTPS
  • Ad experience (Interstitial Ads): Google is clamping down hard on interstitial ads, especially ones deemed intrusive.
  • User safety: Preventing the spread of malware, harmful downloads, and the like.

It should be mentioned that Google emphasized seeking to “rank pages with the best overall information, even if the page experience is subpar”. Page experience signals will join hundreds of other signals currently being tracked for ranking. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to squeeze an advantage wherever it’s available.

Are You Prepared for the Update?

The last time we wrote about Google’s upcoming update was January, and we’ve since urged content creators and companies to revisit their user experience, and make sure everything is up to spec. Consider this a second chance to do your homework and prepare for the update before it blindsides you.

The easiest way to give your website a once-over is to have Google do it for you, through the existing Core Vitals report through Google’s Search Console toolkit.

While Google has emphasized multiple times that the rollout is going to be gradual, we don’t know how heavily it’s going to affect search engine results and current rankings.

Many experts still speculate that it’s a largely minor change, with the biggest announcement herein being the ability to check your page’s user experience signals via a visual indicator. This is because most of the previously mentioned user experience metrics – from page loading speeds to mobile friendliness, HTTPS, and safe browsing – already play an important role in how websites rank on Google.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to take advantage of this delay to doublecheck your metrics and make improvements.

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Digital Marketing

The End of Modified Broad Matching

Earlier this year, Google announced its most recent change to the way keyword match types will work. This change sees the end of the modified broad match while expanding one of the other existing match types, the phrase match.

The modified broad match was introduced in 2010 and allowed advertisers to specify keywords that needed to be included in a search query to pull up their content.

Commenting on the change, Google explained that the modified broad match’s functionality was partially folded into the phrase match because the two often intersected. However, for many advertisers, the removal of the modified broad match feels like the loss of an important tool for manually specifying what keywords are most relevant for any given ad.

Before we get into the finer details, let’s review how match types work, and how the recent February changes will reflect on common keyword practices.

What Are Match Types?

Search results on the internet are displayed based on a complex set of factors, each of which attempts to contribute to the accuracy and relevance of the results respective to the query entered by the user. Keywords have always played a central role in this, and search engine optimization techniques have always involved utilizing a targeted approach to match content and ads to popular, niche, or valuable search queries.

This goes for both organic and paid results, paid results (or Google Ads) being the sponsored search engine results that usually show up near the top of a Google search. Keyword match types are a unique and important metric for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on Google, and they determine what search queries your ads are matched to. You can utilize different keyword match types by formatting your keywords accordingly.

Before the February 2021 change, there were five main match types for you to select for your ad. These were:

  • Broad match type. This would bring in the widest audience, but with the least specific targeting. As long as a query would be even contextually related to the keywords you have specified, your ad might be shown to the user. For example, the keyword “men’s shirts” as a broad match type keyword would trigger your ad on relevant searches, including queries for jackets, coats, and hoodies. Broad match keywords are written without brackets or quotation marks.
  • Modified broad match type. When selecting modified broad match type, you could further specify what keywords must be included in a query to trigger your ad. For example, adding “+shirts” as a broad match modifier keyword means your ad would show up to contextually similar queries as long as they included the term “shirts”. Queries for just jackets, coats, or hoodies would be ignored. Word order also didn’t matter. You could add multiple modifier keywords to your campaign to increase the relevancy of your ad to specific queries. Modifiers were specified through a prefixed plus sign.
  • Phrase match type. Phrase match type keywords were a little bit in-between, putting a greater emphasis on queries that match the keywords provided. When using the phrase match type, your keyword would need to be found in the query, but other terms could be added behind and after (but not in the middle) of your keyword phrase. For example, “men’s shirts” would also cause your ad to show up on queries for “shirts for men”, “men’s shirts for sale”, “casual shirts for men”, and “striped men’s shirts”. Phrase match keywords are written in quotation marks.
  • rolling it into a feature. The exact match type allows you to target very specific queries to maximize your conversion rate, at the cost of missing out on a wider audience. For an exact match type keyword, the query must be exactly like your keyword phrase, or a close variation thereof (i.e., “men’s shirts” is functionally identical to “shirts for men”). Exact match keywords are written in brackets.
  • Negative match type. rolling it into a feature allow you to filter terms that would disqualify a query from seeing your ad. You can set negative broad match keywords, negative phrase match keywords, and negative exact match keywords. These function just like normal keywords, but for search term exclusion rather than inclusion. This is useful when you want to make sure your product isn’t confused for something else, or when you want to improve conversion by cutting out contextually similar queries that end up being completely irrelevant. Negative keywords are specified with a prefixed minus sign.

Throughout the years, Google has been making changes to its search engine – including how each match type really works. In other words, broad match keywords were always spec’d to reach the widest audience, but the mechanics behind how they worked have been tweaked time and time again.

While this change is more substantial than usual – removing a match type altogether – it was presumably done in the service of leaning out the concept of keyword matches and avoiding redundancies. Whether or not the idea was executed properly is still up for debate between advertisers and SEO experts.

Why is Google Phasing Out Modified Broad Matching?

Google has removed the modified broad match type in favor of rolling it into a feature as part of the phrase match type. In other words, at least on a conceptual level, nothing has changed. But on a more specific level, advertisers now need to be careful about how they add modifiers to their keyword strings, and they need to keep in mind that modifier keywords now count as phrase match keywords.

To sum it up, you can continue to prefix keywords with a plus sign to single them out in your ad campaign, and they will continue to function as broad match modifiers. However, Google will also treat these as phrase match keywords, which means word order and context is important.

What You Should Do Next

Google itself is discouraging the use of the modified broad match type, as part of this shift towards the focus on the phrase match type is to highlight the improvements Google has made in recognizing context and intent for search optimization, through machine learning. Going forward, Google wants advertisers to utilize keywords on a simple slider of three basic settings

  1. Very broad, barely targeted (broad match type)
  2. Somewhat broad, somewhat targeted (phrase match type)
  3. Barely broad, very targeted (exact match type)

Whether these changes are positive depends on how your ad is currently performing. Google states that there should be no change in performance data and keyword migration wouldn’t be necessary and that modifiers can still be used until July when the change is completely integrated.

However, some campaigns will inadvertently do worse (reaching fewer people), but most should generally be doing better, as the increase in flexibility and automation means, at least on paper, your ad will be shown to more potential users. Here are some basic tips to navigate the change moving forward:

  • Review Google’s recommendations. Google’s optimization tips can be a handy starter checklist to help you work through the most obvious issues in your ad campaign, especially new duplicate keywords and match type suggestions.
  • Utilize negative keywords to specify queries you DON’T want. If you’re worried about Google’s new changes pulling in traffic you don’t want or need, take the time to highlight and exclude terms that are definitely bringing you non-converting visitors.
  • Listen to what advertisers have to say. Keeping up to date on the conversations and discussions between PPC experts and advertisers can help you optimize your keywords moving forward.

Worried about the new changes to your PPC campaign? Get in touch with us today for a free consultation.

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SEO

Google Page Experience Update Launches in May 2021

In just a few months, Google is set to launch its Page Experience update. The company first announced the update in May 2020, and first made the announcement in November. With four months left to prepare for it, what can we expect?

The update will mean that the expected user experience is considered as part of the search engine ranking signals. Google will test showing a “visual indicator that highlights pages in the search results that have a great page experience.”

What is Page Experience?

Google will evaluate a set of signals to understand how a user will perceive the experience of a certain web page. These signals include things such as:

Metrics around speed and usability are refined, and the refinements are known as Core Web Vitals.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Web Vitals is a Google initiative to provide uniform guidance for quality signals that are necessary for a great user experience online. Over the years, Google has provided a number of tools to measure and report on performance. Though there are many developers who are experts with these tools, others have found it challenging to understand and keep up with as things change.

The idea is that website owners shouldn’t have to be performance pros to understand the experience quality they’re providing to users. With Web Vitals, Google aims to help everyone learn and understand the metrics that matter the most. These apply to all web pages, and all site owners should measure them. They will be shown across all of Google’s tools.

Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a certain area of the user experience, is measurable, and reflects real-world experience necessary for a user-centric outcome.

The metrics that are part of Core Web Vitals will evolve, as has the web and SEO over the years. The current set focuses on three aspects:  loading, interactivity, and visual stability. The included metrics are:

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This refers to the render time of the largest text block or image within the viewport. It measures loading performance. The LCP should happen within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts to load, for a good user experience.
  • First Input Delay (FID): This measures the time from when a user first interacts with a page (clicks a link, taps a button, etc.) and the time when the browser starts processing a response to that interaction. It measures interactivity. For a good user experience, pages need an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures the sum total of all layout shift scores, for each unexpected layout shift that happens during the page’s entire lifespan. Unexpected page content movement usually occurs because resources are loaded asynchronously, or DOM elements are added to a page above existing content. For a good user experience, your CLS score should be less than 0.1.

Visual Indicators of User Experience in SERPS

Once the update goes live, Google will test multiple ways to display visual indicators of user experience. We’ve seen these kinds of indicators before with slow labels, mobile-friendly labels, AMP icons, etc.

“We believe that providing information about the quality of a web page’s experience can be helpful to users in choosing the search result that they want to visit,” Google wrote. “On results, the snippet or image preview helps provide topical context for users to know what information a page can provide. Visual indicators on the results are another way to do the same, and we are working on one that identifies pages that have met all of the page experience criteria.”

There is nothing to indicate what these visual indicators may look like, and if they will last. It will all be based on the test results. Google said the plan to test it soon, and if it is successful, it will be part of the launch in May. We can expect more details on this soon.

Preparing for the Page Experience Update

To get a good idea of what you need to do to get a good score once the update launches in May, visit the Core Vitals report in Google Search Console. With it, you can see how your site is currently performing. If you notice any problem areas, or areas that could use improvement, you can develop a plan of action and work toward implementing it ahead of the update occurs in May.

AMP won’t be required for articles to show in the Top Stories carousel in search results until after the update launches. Google will continue to support AMP because they say it is an easy and cost-effective way for publishers looking to achieve a great page experience. If you opt to publish an AMP version of your content, Google Search will link to the cache-optimized AMP version to optimize delivery to users, just like it does now.

It’s not clear how much of an impact the Page Experience update will have on overall rankings. Many experts expect it to be fairly minor, as many of these signals are already part of the Google ranking algorithm. The visual indicator Google announced, however, will give SEO experts more support for companies to start paying attention to more core web vitals and experience signals.

Though this was first announced in November 2020, Google has not released any new information about it. As we get more details, we will update this post, or write another feature covering the subject.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Google Makes Effort to Combat Internet Misinformation

Google is now asking some searchers to “verify the facts to help others.” This feature is a new development – not available for all queries and not available for all searchers. Evidence at this point indicates that it appears to be an option for some knowledge panels.

Take a look at this example shared on Twitter:

Upon clicking the button, an overlay presents itself to allow you to indicate whether the information they have is correct.

There’s not much to indicate how widespread these searches are – or whether people will be able to manipulate Google’s results by blatantly providing it with wrong information. We’ll have to keep an eye on this to see how it pans out.

Fact Check Google Images

Fortunately, that’s not the only thing Google is doing to prevent the spread of misinformation on the internet. Back in June, they announced that fact check information was being added to Google Images.

When someone searches on Google Images, there may be a fact check label below the image thumbnail results. If you tap on one of the results to see a larger view, you’ll get a summary of the fact check that appears on the underlying webpage. Labels may show both for fact-checked articles about specific images, and for fact check articles that include that image in their story.

The fact check label appears on results that come from authoritative, independent sources across the web that meet Google’s criteria. These sources rely on ClaimReview which is an open method publishers use to indicate fact check content to the search engines.

Fact Check Labels in Search and News

Google has offered fact check in Search and News since 2017. The fact check label in Google News was made available everywhere and expanded into search globally in all languages. When you conduct a search that returns an authoritative result that contains that check from at least one or more public claims, the information is clearly displayed on the search results page. The snippet displays information on the claim including who made the claim in the fact check of that particular claim.

This information is not available for every search result, and there may be search results pages were different Publishers check the same claim while reaching different conclusions. The fact check does not belong to Google and is presented to allow people to make more informed decisions. Even though differing conclusions can be presented, it is still helpful for people to understand the level of consensus about a particular claim and have clear information on the sources that agree. As fact checks have become more visible in search results, people will be able to easily review and assess the fact checks to make their own informed opinions.

YouTube also uses the ClaimReview to surface fact check information panels in the U.S., Brazil, and India.

How You Can Fact Check Your Content for Google Searchers

The ClaimReview schema is part of the review schema. It is a fact-checking review of claims either reported or made in some creative work. It can be referenced via itemReviewed.

To add the fact check tagged to your content, there are some rules to follow. You need to build content around what users want, relying on trusted sources of information to back it up with facts, and be transparent as to where the thoughts came from. Your customers, prospective buyers, and fans will come to know your business and digital reputation as either one that provides the truth or stretches it.

Even though the fact-checking articles do not get any kind of special ranking boost, the visibility can boost traffic in terms of clicks, and help increase your conversions.

The fact check snippet references search words or phrases instead of being a cad for specific news. While aiming to offer valid sources of information, it includes a link to help readers develop their own views on the topic.

ClaimReview is a source label that helps to inform the search engines that use machine learning about the content of your website and offers insights that help them classify that content for rendering on the SERPs.

Google states: “We acknowledge the difficulty in characterizing different types of content in the rapidly changing publishing landscape, but we also hope to provide useful ways of helping users select what they want to read.”

The fact check label helps users to evaluate content before clicking on the link. The web page that contains the fact check data provides a link to the original data itself so that viewers can analyze it. Fact checks may provide the page quoted with a higher relevance than they might otherwise have. Google does not determine what is true or objective.

It’s important to note that fact checks are not guaranteed to be shown. The inclusion of fact check elements in search results is determined programmatically, based on things like how the search is phrased and the domain trust of the site that is referencing the fact. It also depends on whether the topic that has been fact-checked by someone participating in Google’s program,  and if the necessary schema markup has been implemented on the page correctly.

For those who are curious, the full fact check tool, Fact Check Explorer, can be searched here, and APIs are available for developers.

Does Fact-Checking Influence Search Ranking?

If you, as a publisher, have fact-checked your content – either text or images – you will not see an increase in ranking just because you added the fact-checking schema to your site. The system is designed to provide users with the most relevant and reliable information available, including from the sources that provide the fact checks.

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

What is Page Experience?

According to Google Developers, page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. This is where core web vitals come in. Core web vitals are a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience or loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a page.

Before you start to panic, the page experience algorithm roll out is expected in 2021. Due to the coronavirus, Google decided to let everyone know about the future algorithm and what it covers so that you can adjust your website accordingly to prevent your traffic from plummeting.

According to Google, optimizing these factors makes things better for everyone across all web browsers and devices. It also helps sites move toward user expectations on mobile devices. Google believes this change will contribute to business success online as users grow more engaged and make transactions online with less friction.

Basically, Google is looking at how usable your website is. Things like whether the site runs on HTTPS, whether the site is mobile-friendly, and more.

Closer Look at Core Web Vitals

At this point in time, the CWV are focused on three aspects of the user experience: load time, interactivity, and visual stability. The metrics that make up the CWV will continue to evolve, but for 2020, this is what you should focus on.

Largest Contentful Paint

Also known as LCP, this metric measures loading performance. The LCP should happen within 2.5 seconds of when the first page begins to load. Anything after 4 seconds provides a poor user experience.

First Input Delay

Known as FID, this measures interactivity. For a good user experience, pages need to have an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.

Cumulative Layout Shift

Also known as CLS, this measures visual stability. For a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1.

For each of the metrics, to make sure you’re hitting the right target, aim for the 75th percentile of page loads segmented across both mobile and desktop devices. Tools that assess your CWV performance should consider a page as “passing” at 75th percentile or above, for all three metrics.

Optimize your site speed and reduce 400 errors

The faster your website loads, the better experience your users will have. When testing your page speed, it should be under three seconds to load. If at all possible, get it to one second or less. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom to test your site speed. Page Insights helps by providing suggestions to help you speed up your site, too.

Check your site for broken links, so you don’t end up with 404 errors throughout your site. You can design a custom 404 page to match the rest of your site and brand’s messaging to make the experience of a 404 error a little less frustrating for users – but you should still aim to have an error-free website.

Analyze the competition

Take a moment to compare your experience to that of your competitors. If you believe you have an awesome user experience but finds that it doesn’t stack up well against the competition, you’ll have a harder time outranking them. Look at their top pages – at least the top 25 to 50, and make sure you’re doing more in terms of speed, content quality, and overall user experience. View the keywords they’re ranking for, and how you stack up.

Look at your design

Usability is about more than site content and speed. Heatmaps show you where people are paying the most attention on your site, where they are clicking the most, and ultimately, how they are engaging with your content. To learn more about how your audience behaves on your website, you’ll want to run some heatmap tests – which are helpful in split-testing because you can see which version of your site your audience responds to better. Heatmap tools include CrazyEgg, Smartlook, and ClickHeat.

Looking at your entire website, you should emphasize page experience. While this doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, it does mean that Google is probably going to focus its algorithm at a page-level basis.

If you have a few pages on your website that promote a poor experience, but the rest of them are good, it doesn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings in your entire site especially if many of your pages provide a better experience than your competition.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Google Webmasters Unconference

The Google Webmasters Unconference is an innovative event where the webmaster community engages with Google’s team in an open, collaborative format. Unlike traditional conferences, it features interactive sessions where attendees actively participate, suggest topics, and lead discussions. This format fosters direct communication with Google experts, enabling attendees to gain insights, share experiences, and discuss the latest trends in SEO and webmaster best practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced either the cancellation or the digitization/virtualization of many events across the globe. Google has announced that rather than cancel their conference, this year they are offering a virtual version, known as the “Unconference”.

These events are hard to get into – and this year is no different. The website states that people can register to attend until August 19th, and be alerted about their attendance status by August 20th. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing on August 10, registration is already closed. While many are hopeful it will open again, chances are slim.

The conference starts at 8 a.m PDT on August 26th, and won’t have formal presentations. Instead, there will be a series of “interactive discussions.” Attendance is free for all registered users – but you aren’t officially registered until you get the confirmation from Google.

Google writes, “In this event, you decide what sessions will happen and will actively shape the content in them, by taking part in discussions, feedback sessions, and similar formats that need your input.” They go on to say attendees are expected to “actively participate in sessions you’re interested in, either through a voice or voice/video call through Google Meet.

Registrants have been asked to select two sessions from the list of proposed sessions, discussed below, that they would like to be part of. Only the sessions that receive the most votes will take place on the day of the event. Google also notes, “Depending on your feedback during registration, some of these sessions may not take place and we will group the sessions into two blocks.”

The Possible Session Topics at Google Webmasters Unconference

These are presented exactly as on the official event website. I’ve added links to more information about the topics/subjects themselves where I see fit.

Ads and SEO Mythbusting

How can ads impact/not impact your SEO?

  • Tell us about your experience with Ads and SEO
  • What makes people believe that Ads affect SEO?
  • Who’s spreading this? Where is it coming from?

Tips to Get Your Content Displayed in Discover Feed

Google recently updated the help document on Google Discover. In this session, attendees can learn about tips to increase their presence in Discover.

Approaches to Improve Core Web Vitals for Non-Tech Savvy Webmasters

There are many ways to improve CWV. Some of them are easy to implement but some of them aren’t.

In this session, attendees can learn about the optimization of CWV that is relatively easy to implement while showing noticeable improvements.

Web Performance: What Metrics are Important, How to Measure, and How to Spot What is a Priority

  • What ways are there to gather details?
  • How do you access them currently?
  • What do the metrics mean for you / your site?
  • What aspects confuse you or don’t work for your situation?

This is aimed at mid-level and advanced users.

Mobile/Desktop Diffing – Parity Findings

  • Why is it important to find the gaps
  • What’s truly at risk when prioritizing fixes

Helping You (or Your Clients) Understand How Their WordPress Site is Doing on the Web with SIte Kit

  • How do you combine information from different Google products to understand how your site is doing?
  • How do you set goals for your site and translate them to specific metrics to track
  • If you maintain sites for clients, what key metrics are they interested in and how do you share those with them?
  • Do you have to educate clients on how to set goals for their site?
  • If you use Site Kit, what can we do to make your life easier?

Common JavaScript Issues

Let’s talk about JavaScript and SEO. We would love to discuss which kinds of problems you see often and exchange ideas on how to tackle common issues.

Brainstorming Session: How Can the Search Console Team Further Help Publishing on the Open Web?

The Search Console team invites you all to a brainstorming session where we want to hear about your day-to-day challenges with publishing on the open web and try to think together of additional tools we can provide to help with these challenges.

E-Commerce SEO 101: Best Practices for Optimizing Online Stores

E-commerce stores come in all shapes and sizes -from commercial platforms such as Magento, Prestashop or WooCommerce, to custom-built and enterprise ones, online shops often face challenges coming up with the right SEO setup.

This session will cover common issues, solutions, and best practices that developers, webmasters, and SEOs should keep in mind when building and optimizing e-commerce sites.

CrUX Show and Tell

Bring your Chrome User Experience (CrUX) tools and show off how you use the dataset to understand real-user experiences. For any custom solutions, describe how you built it and what your feature wishlist looks like.

Accessibility and JavaScript

In this session, we want to talk about:

  • Ramifications of neglecting accessibility testing at-scale
  • Prioritizing fixes
  • Accessibility and JavaScript in general

Hreflang: How to Implement, When to Implement

Taking a look at the different approaches to specifying hreflang (tag, header, sitemaps)

  • When should you use them?
  • When shouldn’t you?
  • What issues do people experience?

Improving Search Documentation

How can we improve documentation to help SEOs to beginners to developers? Bring examples and suggestions! Are case studies helpful? How do you use them?

Mobile-First Indexing and How to Prepare For it

Are you confused about what mobile-first indexing is? Do you feel lost on how to prepare your site for it? Bring your questions!

We’ll help to address your confusion.

Talking About Talking About SEO

I think Google’s messages & information about SEO are getting better & clearer, but we often get flak for being vague. How can we improve in ways that help the average person? Bring examples & suggestions!

Communicating Our Publisher Policies and Monetized Updates

Policy updates: How do monetized policy changes change your experience? Our policies are constantly evolving. How can we convey updates to you in a way you can understand?

Timeline: We’ve gone from site level to page level (granular policies and enforcement) – to restrictions – how can we make your life easier/fairer as a partner?

Policy communication: Are our Policy documentation and training materials clear? What are we missing? Bring your ideas!

Fun with Scripts!

Show and tell! We bring a few examples:

  • txt diff checker – automated!
  • Mixed content warnings – identifying assets per page

Common Issues With Structured Data for Rich Snippets

Google documents guidelines for a gallery of rich results that you can obtain via structured data. This is an opportunity to talk about your struggles to enable those sought after enhancements and to discuss possible improvements.

How are Attendees Chosen?

Google maintains they have limited spots, so they may have to select attendees based on their demographics and background so as to ensure a good mix of perspectives in the event.

Will the Sessions Be Recorded?

Google notes that the sessions will not be recorded. It’s reasonable to assume they are doing things this way to keep it simple, keep the event intimate, and best mimic the in-person attendance experience. Instead of releasing recordings of the sessions hosted throughout the day, Google says it will instead publish a blog post that highlights some of the “top learnings” after the event.

After the event, I’ll come back with a summary of what was covered and any insights that may help you in your digital marketing and SEO journey.

Categories
SEO

Why Google Rewrites Meta Descriptions and How to Avoid It

Google’s John Mueller is a wonderful source of information, but staying up to date with his Webmaster Central Hangouts can be hard for many of us. In a recent episode, someone asked why their meta description was being re-written. His answer helps us see a bit of why Google’s algorithm may re-write your meta descriptions. But it doesn’t stop there – in another Google Webmaster Central Hangout, he responds to a question about what people can do to stop it from happening – so we have the information we need to make our lives easier while keeping the search engine happy.

It’s important to note that Mueller’s advice is general because he cannot provide an exact reason for the re-write without looking at the search results. He says Google re-writes meta descriptions for a variety of reasons. One note he did provide the search engine optimization community revealed it’s best to include the information naturally despite the possibility of Google making changes, as this provides Google with more information about your content.

Keyword Stuffing in Meta Description

If Google sees a bunch of keywords in the meta description, it’s going to assume the description isn’t useful to users and attempt to write something else. Google has to be able to trust the description before it will leave what you’ve provided alone. If you’ve written a meta description that focuses less on keywords and more about what the content of the page is about, it’s more useful to users and less likely to be re-written.

Duplicate Meta Descriptions Across Multiple Pages on the Site

If Google sees the exact same meta description provided for most of the pages on the website, it’s going to re-write them. Unique meta descriptions are essential to providing content that is useful for searchers.

Content and Query Matching Issues

In the publisher’s question about meta re-writes, he mentions that branded queries with a “UK” modifier were the ones rewritten. That may be why Google is re-writing the description. If the webpage itself doesn’t send Google UK related content signals, Google may believe that modifier isn’t relevant to users and change the meta description accordingly.

Adding modifiers to search queries can cause Google to not only rewrite meta descriptions but the title tags, too. It’s most likely to happen when modifiers like “home page” and “UK” are used in the query, but not found in the written content of the page.

The meta description needs to match both what the user is searching for and the other content on the page.

Search Query Influences

Whether Google rewrites a meta description is based on the search query. If you notice a rewritten query, take the branded query and check to make sure the meta description is not spammy and is actually useful to searchers.

Move forward from there, looking for patterns. Is it something that Google always gets wrong? Or is it only wrong some of the time, when the algorithm picks up something else on the page and mistakenly rewrites the meta description?

How to Avoid Google Re-Writing Your Meta Descriptions

There are undoubtedly times when the meta description the site owner provides won’t be enough for Google. There’s no way to ensure that Google will use the meta description you provide 100% of the time. But, there are things you can control that will influence Google to use the ones you provide more often than crafting their own.

Make the Descriptions Unique for Each Page on the Site

While it may be tempting to use a boilerplate meta description for every page on your website, this is problematic, especially if you have a larger site with hundreds or even thousands of pages. Think about the purpose of each page and what the user would be searching for to lead them there – as well as the information they will find to answer their query. Use that, along with relevant keywords to craft a useful meta description for each page on the site.

Pay Attention to Character Length

There is no official meta description length though Google may truncate at 155 to 160 characters. To ensure the entire description is viewable on the search engine results page, do your best to limit the character count to no more than 150 characters or so. To test the length of your descriptions, you can use a character counter tool. Remember, titles are truncated at 50 to 65 characters, so those need to be short and descriptive, too.

Make Them Match What Users are Looking For

Your meta description is basically a short sales pitch. It’s free advertising to reach out to prospects to entice them to click your results instead of another option on the page. And because Google is in the business of providing users the results they are looking for the first time around, you want to make sure you make the user happy to keep Google happy.

That means taking the time to ensure your meta descriptions match what users are looking for, but also match the page content. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword, “dog collars for small dogs”, then make sure that if the page isn’t specific to just small collars, that the page at least includes the option to filter out everything but the small ones. Don’t use a meta description for dog toys, or anything that’s not related to buying collars.

One of the ways you can make this easier is to divide your pages and keywords by search intent, then write the meta descriptions ahead of time, based on the keywords you’re targeting and the search intent of the people who’re using them. This way, you don’t create an informative meta description based on a transactional keyword, which could help boost your SEO results.

Meeting these criteria reduces, but does not eliminate, the chance that Google will rewrite your meta description. If there’s an obscure query that matches a selection of text from your webpage, it’s likely Google will just use that snippet of text in place of your original meta description.

Categories
SEO

Google My Business: FAQs for Multiple Businesses at the Same Address

There are several FAQs for managing multiple businesses at the same address on Google My Business. These address common concerns like differentiating individual listings, handling shared phone numbers, and specifying distinct business hours. Each business needs to maintain unique, accurate information to avoid confusion and ensure a clear online presence, aiding in better search visibility and customer understanding in local search results.

If you have multiple businesses at the same address, you may be wondering how you create Google My Business listing (now called Google Business Profile). You may also wonder how many listings you’re eligible for if you are legitimately running more than one business at your location.

You may be wondering about what determines eligibility and what penalties you may incur if you make a mistake as well as how to name your businesses at the same address.

You’ll find a wide variety of frequently asked questions surrounding this topic in local SEO forums all over the web every year. The guidelines for representing your business on Google contain most of the answers you’re looking for about complicated businesses. Still, sometimes they can err on the side of too little detail, thus creating confusion.

To help demystify the process, we will answer some of the most common frequently asked questions that business owners and marketers deal with.

Question: I have more than one business at the same address. Can I have more than one Google my business listing?

Answer: Yes, But…

To have more than one Google my business listing at the same address, you must be legitimately operating multiple legally distinct businesses. It’s not all that uncommon for more than one business to be located at a shared address but you need to keep reading for more provisions and details.

Question: Are my multiple businesses located at the same address distinct enough to be eligible for separate GMB listings?

Answer: Look at Your Business Structure

If each brick and mortar business you operate is registered separately with the appropriate state and federal agencies, and has its own unique tax ID, which you file separate taxes and meet face-to-face with customers with a unique phone number, then it is generally eligible for a distinct GMB listing. But you want to keep reading for more information.

Question: Do suite numbers help convince Google that I have two locations so I can have multiple GMB listings?

Answer: No, Google does not pay attention to suite numbers, whether they are legitimate or created fictitiously.

Don’t waste time attempting to make a single location appear to be multiple locations by assigning different suite numbers to the entities in hopes that you will qualify for multiple listings.

Question: What makes me ineligible for more than one GMB listing at the same address?

Answer:  if your businesses are not legally registered as distinct entities, or if you do not have unique phone numbers for them, you cannot list them separately.

Suppose your businesses are simply representative of different product lines or services under a single umbrella-like a handyman who repairs both air conditioners and water heaters. In that case, you are not eligible for separate listings. You should not list multiple businesses at virtual offices, mailboxes at remote locations, or any location you do not have the authority to represent.

Question: Is there a penalty for listing multiple ineligible businesses at the same address?

Answer: You may be penalized. Google could issue a hard suspension on one or more of your listings at any time.

If you get a hard suspension, it means that Google has removed your listing and its associated reviews. This could affect your search engine rankings.

Question: Can service-area businesses list multiple businesses at the same address?

Answer: Historically, Google has treated service area businesses differently than brick-and-mortar businesses.

There is no official guideline that forbids listing multiple service area businesses, such as blacksmiths and plumbers at the same location, it is not considered industry best practice. Google appears to be more active in issuing suspensions to service area businesses in this situation, even if the businesses are distinct and legitimate. Because of this, it’s better not to co-locate service area businesses.

Question: What if I work out of a Co-Working Space?

Answer: If your business has a direct unique phone number answered by you and you are staffing the co-working space with your own staff at your listed hours, then yes you are eligible for a GMB listing.

However, suppose there are any other businesses at the shared location in your categories or businesses that are competing for the same search terms. In that case, it is likely that you or your competitors will be filtered out of the mapping product because of the shared elements.

Question: How many listings can I have if there are multiple seasonal businesses at my address?

Answer: If your business hosts an organic fruit stand in the summer and a Christmas tree farm in the winter, you must closely follow Google’s requirements for seasonal businesses.

In order for each entity to qualify for its own listing, it must have year-round signage and set and then remove its hours at the opening and closing of Its season. Each entity needs to have a distinct name, phone number, and Google categories.

Question: How Should I Name My Businesses on Multiple GMB Listings?

Answer: To decrease the risk of filtering or penalties, co-located businesses have to pay attention to the allowed naming conventions.

Questions about this typically fall into one of these categories:

If one business is inside another as in the case of a restaurant located inside a Walmart, the Google My Business names should be “Subway” and “Walmart”  rather than “Subway in Walmart”.

Is Prague located Brands such as a Taco Bell in Dunkin Donuts share the same location, they do not need to combine their brand names for the listing. Alternatively, they should create a single listing with just one of the brand names, or if the brands operate independently, a unique listing for each separate brand.

If multiple listings reflect eligible departments within a business such as the sales and parts department of a Ford dealership, then it’s correct to name the listings for sale department and Ford parts department. No penalty should result from the shared branding elements as long as the different departments out of distinct words in their names, distinct phone numbers, and distinct categories.

If your brand sells another brand’s products don’t include the branding of the product being sold in the Google My Business name. However, Google says that if a business location is an authorized and fully dedicated seller of the brand’s product or service, such as a franchisee, you may use the underlying brand name when creating the listing.

If you are starting out with several new businesses at the same location, it is a best practice to keep their names distinct. For instance, a person operating a Pottery Studio and a pet grooming business out of the same building can reduce the chance of filters, penalties, and other problems, by avoiding Name-O and conventions like Sunshine Pottery and Sunshine Pet Grooming at the same location.

Question: Is it possible to create separate listings for events, classes, or meetings that share a location?

Answer: The guidelines on this topic don’t provide definition. Google says that you should not create listings for locations that you do not own or have the authority to represent.

Even if you do own the building, the guidelines can create confusion. For instance, a college can create a separate listing for different departments on campus, but should not create a listing for each class being offered even if the owners of the college do have the authority to represent it.

Let’s say a yoga instructor teaches at three different locations. If the building owners give the instructor permission to list themselves at the locations along with other instructors, the guidelines then appear to allow creating multiple listings of this nature. However, this kind of activity could be perceived as spam and filter it out because of the shared elements with other yoga classes at a location and therefore could end up competing with the building’s own listing.

Since the guidelines are not clear here, there is a bit of leeway in this area. Use your discretion in creating listings and view them as experimental in the event that Google should remove them at some point in the future.

If you have any questions that I haven’t covered here, be sure to ask them in the comments.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Google Says No More Cookies

Google says no more cookies in its announcement of the discontinuation of cookies in its Chrome browser. This move marks a significant shift in digital advertising and user privacy. Cookies, which have been essential for personalized ads, will be replaced by a new system. This change aims to enhance privacy while maintaining ad relevance, reflecting growing concerns over personal data security and evolving internet privacy standards.

Recently, Google announced that they are phasing out support for third-party cookies in 2022. Phasing out this support will affect everyone in the digital media industry. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Google drop 3rd party data or web browsers. But the stakes are a bit higher this time. Publishers are seeing the change as a potential turnaround in what has been a difficult digital transition.

According to Webopedia, a cookie is a message given to a web browser by a web server. The browser stores the message and a text file. The message has been sent back to the server each time the browser requested page from the server. You may also hear cookies referred to as an Internet cookie, browser cookie, web cookie, or HTTP cookie.

Cookies are used to identify users and possibly customize web pages for them. When you enter a website after using cookies, you may be asked to fill out a form to provide information such as your name and interest. The information is packaged into a cookie and sent to your browser which is stored for later use. The next time you visit the website, your browser sends the cookie to the server and they can use this information to present you with custom pages. For instance, rather than seeing a generic welcome page, you may see a page that welcomes you by name or shows the last time you visited the site.

Industry insiders expected the move however, most will be preoccupied with it during the two-year window to overhaul and replace what has been one of the key parts of digital media trading since the industry began.

Marketers who are wary of the industry’s reliance on Google have to figure out how they can adapt their first-party data strategy as some of the marketing tools in recent years have become redundant in a lot of internet browsers. These include third-party data and data management platforms, along with multi-touch attribution providers. Third-party data has been a critically important part of how marketers shape their communication strategies for nearly 25 years. For example, Procter & Gamble, one of the industry’s largest spending advertisers excitedly spoke about its frequency capping efforts at the National Retail Federation annual conference in January.

Because of this change, identifying audiences online will become significantly more challenging after 2022 within Google Chrome. Right now, it holds about a 69% global market share on desktop only.

Advertisers are Disappointed With Google

In a joint statement, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) said, “It may choke off the economic oxygen from advertising that startups and emerging companies need to survive. We are deeply disappointed that Google would unilaterally declare such a major change without prior careful concentration across the digital and advertising Industries. In the interim, we strongly urge Google to publicly and quickly commit to not imposing this moratorium on third party cookies until effective and meaningful alternatives are available.”

Cookie Support Rolled Back by Others, Too

If you’re upset at Google for making this change, it’s important to know that the other major players in the industry have already started doing the same. The difference is that because Google accounts for such a large part of the market, then making this change will have a much larger impact overall.

In April 2017, Apple started rolling out intelligent tracking prevention in the Safari web browser. Shortly after, Mozilla implemented something similar in Firefox. The Firefox feature is known as enhanced tracking protection which blocks third-party cookies by default. In Germany, Firefox has a much larger browser share than the United States. The browser share is reported to be between 20 to 35% of publisher traffic depending on the source. Given the high degree of market share, the effect of enhanced tracking protection on German publishers has been severe. They have seen a 23% decline in CPM, a 45% decline in revenue, and a 38% decline in bed rate.

When considered with Safari’s intelligent tracking prevention, this clearly demonstrates the third-party cookie base identifiers are rapidly coming to the end of their life. Without a method to identifyAnd reach audiences, media companies are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their business models and are in figuring degrees of crisis. Ad spend funds media and media plays a vital role in providing an investigative check against large companies and publicly accounted for governments.

What’s the Solution?

Though things appear grim for Germany, there is a clear path forward. Publishers and buyers can opt to leave third-party cookies behind and create real addressability, born from people-based first-party data that is determinist.

People-based identity is built on a foundation of user consent. You can get first-party data in publisher logins, newsletter sign-ups, and free walls, for example, but it comes from anywhere and user authenticate. In exchange for a minute or so of their attention, users give explicit consent to feed an engaging online experience. The open web then shifts to a more trusted environment based on user choice.

Spend the next two years focusing on ways you can improve your brand and trust so that users will voluntarily consent to provide you with their information. This way, if and when things like the California Consumer Privacy Act go nationwide, you won’t have to go through leaps and bounds to become compliant, because you’ve obtained all the information you have on your customers with their consent and don’t plan on sharing it anyway.

Though you may not want to ask users to register their data, effectively meaning that they have to sign in to your website, it is a good way to ensure you have a start on your first-party data strategy. If you are a publisher who is already been feeling the effects of Mozilla and Apple’s targeting restrictions, you may already be doubling down on your first-party data strategy.

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SEO

The Death of Google as We Know It

The death of Google is something digital marketers refer to a lot whenever there seems to be a major change within Google, especially in how it manages data and user privacy, impacting its core services like search and advertising. With increased regulatory scrutiny and evolving user expectations, Google may shift towards more privacy-focused models, altering its traditional ad-revenue-driven approach. This could lead to significant changes in SEO, content marketing, and data analytics practices.

Now that Google’s parent company is Alphabet – and the search engine that started it all is just one of many products – small businesses and marketers have had to make some major adjustments to the way things are done.

While SEO is targeted at helping people get clicks from search engines, the sad reality is that more than half of Google searches don’t even result in a click. And as voice searches and smart assistants become even more prevalent, we can expect that number to continue to climb.

But it’s not just the voice searches and the fact that no one has to click to get a result. A lot of it has to do with the simple fact that Google is providing results for a ton of queries right there on the search page.

When you used to Google “calculator”, you’d get a list of results full of websites that have calculators on them. (Yes, sometimes when you’re at the computer it’s faster to just Google “calculator” than it is to open your computer’s native calculator app. Same for the phone. Particularly if you’re a fast typist.)

Now, you get this:

 

Instead of clicking on a result for a scientific calculator, I can just handle whatever equation I need right there on the SERP.

The same thing happens when you search for things like conversions from cups to tablespoons, gallons to liters, Fahrenheit to Celsius, USD to Euro, etc. When you ask for a state capital… and countless other queries.

Even if Google doesn’t provide the tool you need as they do with the calculator and currency converter, they often provide featured snippets that answer your question without you needing to click off the page. Thus the birth of the “no click search” aka “zero-click search.”

When I searched to find the number of Google searches that don’t result in a click? Yep – you guessed it. I didn’t have to click. I could have, but why would I? The answer I was looking for was right there.

 

And even if it wasn’t, I could have clicked on any of the “People Also Ask” questions to find an adequate answer there, too, I’m sure.

Why Google Loves the No-Click Search

Google loves it because they keep you on their property longer. Their customer is the searcher, not the small business that it pulls up in the SERPs… most of the time anyway. (The small businesses are only customers when they’re paying for ads.)

Google wants to make things as quick and easy for the searcher as possible. And usually, that means keeping them on the SERP while still giving them the information they’re looking for. But that’s why Google also tells webmasters to think of site visitors first — they want you to provide a quality user experience, so they in turn can do the same.

Why You Suffer

On the calculator search example, there are only nine results on the first page. The rest of the space is taken up by Google’s calculator, the People Also Ask box, image search results, and related searches. There aren’t any ads, but for the right query, there could be. And when that’s the case, there’s even less room available for organic results.

Take for instance “lawyers near me”. The first three results are ads. Then there’s a huge chunk of real estate for the Google Map pack, followed by a People Also Ask box, before you get the first organic result. Sure, you can click the “website” button on one of the map pack results, but unless you do that, you’ll stay on a Google property.

If you’re one of the lawyers trying to get traffic for that query, users have to scroll. And most people won’t. They’ll just click the ad or the map pack. And when they click the ad, guess who makes money? Google. You might, if they become a client – but you’ll pay Google for that click first.

How You Can Adjust

Now, instead of trying to compete for position 1 — or the first organic search result, you should look for ways you can rank for position zero. This is the featured snippet.

The key here is that not every query results in a people also ask box. And those that do, generally have long-standing results in that box. Those are the oldest, most trafficked sites that have established authority in the industry related to the search.

That means getting more specific with your strategy. Take time to evaluate who is currently in the box, and if you can’t beat them to take over that spot, look for queries that are related. They may be easier to grab the spot from… or they may not have a spot at all (yet.)

In this case, you just have to do the best you can. And that means focusing on providing a high-quality experience for your users. How do you do that?

Focus on Google’s E-A-T guidelines, which come from the Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines:

  • Expertise
  • Authority
  • Trustworthiness

Is E-A-T a ranking factor? Three ranking factors? No. It’s just an indication of quality, which Google uses to determine whether your site is worth displaying to users.

Improve your E-A-T by building more links, keep your content up to date, make sure your content is factually correct, and links to quality sources to support your information. If you’re in a YMYL (your money your life) niche like health or finance, hire experts — because these are niches where life experience won’t be enough to prove expertise.

Make things convenient for users. That means making sure you have a website that is:

  • User-Friendly: Users should be able to find whatever they’re looking for within three clicks. They should be able to browse comfortably whether they are on a computer, smartphone, or tablet.
  • Fast: Aim for a site load time of no more than three seconds.
  • Secure: Install an SSL certificate on your site to help protect user data.

Need help with your website? Reach out to learn more about how SMG can help.

Categories
SEO

Google’s September 2019 Core Algorithm Update

Google’s September 2019 core algorithm update aimed to improve the overall quality of search results. Focusing on content relevance and user intent, this update impacted website rankings across various industries. Websites with high-quality, relevant content saw improvements, while those with thin or irrelevant content experienced drops. The update underscored the importance of continually optimizing websites for the latest SEO best practices.

We’re no stranger to Google core updates, and they seem to be happening on a quarterly basis these days. The last one we heard about was in June, but in September, Google pre-announced that a new core update was rolling out.

In keeping with their promise to make things easier for SEOs and webmasters, this is the second update they announced before the fact, with the previous one being the June Core Update.

On September 24th, Google announced on Twitter that it was releasing the September 2019 core update later that day. Now that we’ve moved out from the update, it’s a good time to take a look at the impact of the update.

What is a Core Update?

As a refresher, Google core updates affect how the search engine ranks websites and how it determines what is the most relevant web page for specific queries. Remember, If your website is hit as a result of one of these core updates, there is often nothing you can do to fix your site after one of these updates.

Google says, “We know those with sites that experience drops will be looking for a fix and we want to ensure they don’t try to fix the wrong things. Moreover, there may not be anything to fix it all. There’s nothing wrong with pages that may perform less well in a core update.”

What Changed in the September 2019 Update?

With any Google update, whether it is a core update, changes to the user interface, or quality update, we see a change in the search results. Some of these changes result in sites ranking higher for their primary keywords, while others see a drop in position and still some see no change at all. Also, click-through rates may be affected by updates and you may notice more or less traffic after any of these updates.

Google has made more than 3,000 changes to the algorithm over the last year alone. Core search algorithm changes happen several times a year, but larger core search algorithms happen around once every three months.

Using the data available from various SEO toolset providers, once aggregated, we see that this update was not as strong or as impactful as the June core update. Overall, they September for update appears to have had a stronger impact on the “your money, your life” (YMYL) category websites.

RankRanger

According to RankRanger, the health and finance niches, as is typically seen with these core updates, took the brunt of it. Volatility increases at positions 1 through 3 during the June update were much higher than what we saw with the September update.

Sistrix

Sistrix said their initial Impressions were that medical, media, and travel domains were included from a global perspective. In the United States, there were clear winners. And when it comes to losers, there were no significant examples to share. Looking at the data, the September core update shows less of an impact when compared to the June update.

The DailyMail, which suffered greatly in the June update, saw a nice recovery. Their data indicated that other big winners were AdditionCenter.com, AutoGuide.com and BiologyDictionary.net.

SEMRush

According to SEMrush, their research center showed an average level of volatility for September 25th as 4.7. Volatility in some categories such as news and sports is higher, but these categories are likely to have higher changes throughout the day. There was not a strong pattern for winners or losers in this update.

As stated by SEMRush, the biggest winners were DailyMail, eBackPage.com, MarionSchool.net and LSAD.org. The Australian version of the Royal Caribbean site along with BraidingClub.com, Monks.org, TheFourMusic.com and PascoLibraries.org were among the biggest losers.

Overall, the SEO community seems to agree that there was little impact. It seems that a fairly even number of people saw an increase in rankings and a decrease in rankings. About half the people polled said they saw no change yet. Many people who suffered a large drop in June saw a decent recovery as a result of the September update.

What Can You Do?

Because there’s nothing specific to fix, Google has given a little bit of advice to help those who have suffered a drop in traffic. Their advice is similar to the advice they gave around the Panda update in 2011. Google says to focus on ensuring your offering the best content you can because that’s what their algorithms seek to reward.

Google provided this list of questions to consider when evaluating your content:

  • Does the content provider original information, research, analysis, or reporting?
  • Does the content provide a comprehensive, complete, or substantial description of the topic?
  • Would you expect to see this content referenced by or inside a printed magazine, book or encyclopedia?
  • If the content draws on other sources, does it avoid copying or rewriting those sources and instead provide additional value and originality?
  • Is this the kind of content that you’d want to share with a friend, recommend or bookmark?
  • Does the content present information in a way that makes you trust it?
  • If you were researching the site producing the content, would you leave with the impression that it is well trusted or recognized as an authority on the topic?
  • Would you feel comfortable trusting this content for issues related to your money or your life?
  • Is the content free from spelling or style issues?
  • Does the contents play well for mobile devices?
  • Does the content provide substantial value when compared to other pages in the search results?

For the best chance of pleasing Google, you need to make sure you can answer “yes” on all of them. If you can’t, make adjustments to that particular area quality and expertise. This helps ensure that your audience will be happy with the content they consume on your website. When you make your users happy, Google will be happy, too.

Categories
SEO

Google’s Guide to Ranking Category Pages

Google’s guide to ranking category pages emphasizes using clear, descriptive titles and meta descriptions, and ensuring content relevance to the category. High-quality, unique content on category pages can enhance user experience and SEO. Internal linking strategies should be employed to improve site navigation and page authority.

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

Whenever Google’s John Mueller speaks, the community listens to what he has to say. Recently, he answered a question about how to rank a category page over a product page. As part of the discussion, he covered how Google views links and the negative ranking effect of keyword stuffing.

How Do You Rank a Category Page?

The publisher who asked the question saw their product page was ranking for a keyword phrase. However, they thought the appropriate page for that keyword would be the category page. The publisher was able to confirm the category page was indexed.

Mueller answered with:

“Some of the things I think you should look at here, one thing is to make sure that the category page is well-linked within your website.

So if you have multiple products that are all in the same category or related to that category then link to that category page so that when we crawl the website we can really understand this category page is actually really important.”

This is something I’ve come across in many client website audits. Often, they have a less-than-optimal site architecture and this prevents users and bots from reaching the pages you want them to find. It can add an unnecessary few extra clicks toward reaching a category page. A clear site hierarchy is crucial for user experience and for the crawlers.

Category pages are useful for users and for ranking, particularly when it comes to more general two word phrases.

User Intent and Ranking Product Pages

Something Mueller didn’t discuss, may be because he was taking the publisher’s word is that the Google algorithm sometimes understands that a percentage of users are looking for a specific product even when they use a general phrase.

In that situation, a product-specific page maybe the right page to show, better than the category page. Of course, the optimal outcome would be to show both pages – the category page and the product page. It’s worth pointing out that the reason a specific page is shown may be a reflection of what the user wants.

Keyword Stuffing May Prevent Ranking

Mueller suggests that a reason category page may not rank is because of using too many keywords. This practice, known as keyword stuffing or term spamming, is something Google frowns upon. Though it used to be a popular and easy way to rank for nearly anything you wanted to in the past, Google has grown smarter and more effective at preventing pages that keyword stuff from ranking.

Keyword stuffing and keyword best practices deserve an article of its own. However the point is that using too many keywords, or using keywords too much, can cause the page to be less trustworthy thereby affecting its ability to rank.

He said:

“Another thing that I sometimes see, especially with e-commerce sites that kind of struggle with this kind of a problem is that they go to an extreme on the category page in that they include those keywords over and over and over again.

And what happens in our systems then is we look at this page and we see these keywords repeated so often on that page that we think well, something is kind of fishy with this page, with regards to these keywords, well maybe we should be more careful when we show it.”

“So it might be that you’re… kind of overdoing it with the category page in that it would perhaps make sense to kind of move back a little bit and say, I will focus my category page on these keywords and make sure that it’s a good page for that but not go too far overboard.

So that when we look at this page we’ll see… this is a reasonable page, there’s good content here, we can show it for these terms. We don’t have to worry about whether or not someone is trying to unnaturally overdo it with those keywords. “

Linking Building and Ranking a Category Page

The publisher went on to ask if building external links to the category page as well as to the website homepage would be helpful. Once the discussion turned to building links, he said:

“Yeahhh… I… I mean… that’s that’s something doesn’t… doesn’t cause any problems and from our point of view, uhm…in general backlinks from other websites are something that we would see as something that would evolve naturally over time.”

In other words, links are fine, but getting too many too fast is the red flag. don’t engage in black hat SEO techniques of buying links or participating in link schemes. Focus on slowly and steadily building links to all parts of your website where they are a natural fit.

Perhaps more importantly, focus on creating high-quality content that people want to link to on their own. This will help position you as more of an authority.

Mueller said:

“So I don’t think you’d need to go out and kind of artificially go out and artificially build backlinks to a category page like that.”

There’s a Webmaster help page about link schemes that is worth reading if you have any questions about what constitutes an artificial link.

Mueller adds:

“I think, what I would also do in a case like this is kind of go with the assumption that you won’t be able to fix this very quickly. Not, not that it’s impossible but kind of assume that it’s… it’s going to stick around a little bit because sometimes our algorithms do take a bit of time to adjust.

And… find a way to make it so that when users land on that product page that they realize there’s actually a category page that might be more useful to them.

So, something like a small banner or some other visual element on the page so that when users go to that product page they can find their way to the category page fairly easily… so that you don’t have to worry about the short term problem that maybe the wrong page is ranking.

And in the meantime, you can kind of work on creating a reasonable solution for the category page itself.”

The most important takeaway from this question is that fixing a category page ranking issue needs to be thought of as a long-term project. Changes to a page may lead to ranking changes within days, but that doesn’t mean you should expect that to be the case. Internal linking patterns and the lack of links from outside the site also play a role.

 

Categories
SEO

New Link Attributes from Google

Google introduced new link attributes to provide more context about the nature of links. These include ‘sponsored’ for paid or sponsored links, ‘ugc’ for user-generated content, and modifications to ‘nofollow’ attribute, used when not endorsing a linked page. These changes allow for more nuanced link categorization, aiding Google’s understanding of web page relationships and improving SEO practices.

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

If you’ve been involved with working with websites for any amount of time, you are familiar with the nofollow attribute.  Google first introduced it about 15 years ago as a method to help fight against comment spam. Over the years, it evolved to become one of Google’s recommended methods for tagging advertising related or sponsored links. Since it was first introduced in 2005, we’ve seen the web evolve considerably.

In response to that evolution, Google recently announced two new link attributes to provide webmasters and marketers with more ways to identify the nature of links. But before we dive into the new attributes, let’s first refresh our memory about nofollow and why it’s important.

Rel=”Nofollow” and Why It Matters

Webmasters and marketers are advised to use rel=”nofollow” when they want to link to a page but don’t want to alert Google to an endorsement that includes passing the ranking credit to another page.

In 2005, Google would not count any link with the nofollow tag as a signal for use within the search algorithms. That’s not the case today.

All link attributes, whether nofollow, sponsored, or ugc are now treated as hints how about which links to exclude or consider within the search engines results pages. The Google algorithms will use these hints alongside other signals to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use the links within their systems.

Rel=”Sponsored”

Google advises people to use the rel=”sponsored” attributes on links that were created as part of advertising, sponsorships, or any kind of compensation agreement. This link attribute is especially important for bloggers and influencers who are regularly participating in marketing campaign.

Rel=”UGC”

UGC stands for user-generated content. Tag links within user-generated content, such as those in comments and forum posts with this link attribute.

Why Did Google Make the Change?

In the past, the nofollow attribute meant that Google was completely ignoring the link. Google has since determined that links contain valuable information that can help them improve search. This includes how the words within the links describe the content they point to. Google has decided that by looking at all the links they run into, they can improve their understanding of unnatural linking patterns. Using the hint model, Google doesn’t lose the important information but still allows webmasters inside owners to indicate that certain links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.

Do You Need to Change Current Nofollow Links?

If you are currently relying on nofollow as a way to block sponsored links or to let Google know that you do not endorse a page you link to, Google will continue to support that. You do not have to change any of the nofollow links you already have.

If you are using nofollow for ads or sponsored links, you can continue to use this method to flag links and avoid possible link penalties. There is no need to change any of your existing links. If you are using a system that automatically includes the nofollow attribute on new links, you can continue to do this. However, it’s a good idea to switch to see sponsored attribute when or if it is convenient for you.

It’s important to tag ads or sponsored links to be sure you avoid possible link scheme penalties. Google would rather you use the sponsored link attribute rather than nofollow, but either is fine. They will be treated as the same for this purpose.

If you’re afraid of using the wrong attribute on a link, there’s no wrong attribute except in terms of sponsored links. If you tag a UGC link or non-advertising link as a sponsored link, Google will see the hints, but there wouldn’t be much, if any, impact. At most, Google may not count the link as credit for another page, and in that situation, it’s not different than the current approach many UGC and non-ad links that are already nofollow.

That said, any link clearly sponsored or an ad should use either the nofollow or the sponsored attribute. Google would rather you use sponsored, but will still support nofollow.

Can You Use Multiple Attributes on a Single Link?

Yes, you can use more than one attribute on a single link. This is most useful for sponsored links that are also user-generated content. For instance, you can use “rel=sponsored UGC” to indicate that a link came from user-generated content that’s sponsored. You can also use the nofollow attribute with the others to ensure everything remains backward compatibility with services that don’t support the new link attributes.

These two new attributes went into effect on September 10th, the date of the official announcement on the Google Webmaster’s Blog. This allows them time to incorporate the attributes for ranking purpose. But, in terms of crawling and indexing, nofollow won’t convert to a hint until March 1, 2020.

When this happens, if you’re using a nofollow attribute to block pages from being indexed, which Google never recommended, you’ll need to use an alternative method to block URLs from Google such as:

  • Meta tags
  • Password protecting the web server files
  • Using txt

If you’re concerned about the new approach encouraging link spam, the truth is a lot of websites that allow third-party contributions to their sites are using other moderation tools you can integrate into many blogging platforms. Using UGC and nofollow attributes will continue to be a deterrent.

For the majority, moving to a hint model means there will not be a change in how Google treats those links. Google will generally treat them the same as they’ve done before by ignoring them for ranking purpose. The hint model will allow them to assess how to use links just as they’ve always done, and how they’ve acted with no attributes are used.

It’s a good idea to use the new attributes because it will help Google better understand process links for web analysis. If people apply the attributes to links to your content, this can improve Google’s understanding of your content.

Categories
SEO

Google Changes GMB Listings

Whenever Google changes GMB listings, you must check your listings to ensure they’re live and accurate. Google made significant changes to Google My Business (GMB) listings, enhancing the platform’s usefulness for businesses and consumers. Updates included more options for business categories, attributes, and posts, enabling businesses to provide detailed information. Enhanced features for booking services, messaging, and Q&A improved interaction with customers. These changes help businesses better manage their online presence and customer engagement.

Google recently announced they will be automatically applying changes to Google My Business listings with distance-based service areas.

The last remaining distance based service areas will be removed. Moving forward, service area businesses currently based on distance are to be automatically converted to the closest named areas. For instance, if your service area includes obscure towns such as Norris, South Carolina, Google will update it to mention Liberty, Central, Clemson, and so on.

Managers of Google My Business listings that are affected by this change will have the chance to review the updates after they log into their account.

If your account is one that has been affected by the changes, you’ll see an update from Google at the top of the page the next time you log in.

At that point you’ll have the option to either accept the changes Google has made or provide a new service area based on zip code, city, or other attributes.

Though it may seem like it is not a sudden change because Google has been in the process of phasing out the distance based service areas since last year. Google is making this change to accommodate businesses that provide services outside of set distance from where they’re physically located. This change is good for businesses that do not serve customers at a physical location.

Google has been encouraging businesses to apply the changes on their own and were given an ample amount of time to do so. Now, Google is forcing the changes on any listings that still has distance based service areas.

If you do not accept the change Google automatically applied, you can provide a new service area. You should receive an email notification about the change.

The change should not have any effect on how your listing appears in the search results. It is a good idea to review Google’s changes to ensure that your listing still shows up in the areas where you serve your customers.

Adding or Editing Your Service Area in Response to the Changes

If your business serves customers within a specific local area, you can list that area on your Google my business listing. Listing the service area how’s your customers know where you’ll go to deliver to them or visit them and helps ensure your listing shows up in the right local searches.

Though you can no longer say your service area as a distance around your business, you’ll be able to specify your service area by ZIP code city, or other areas. This way, you can cover your entire service area or delivery radius using the city names and zip codes in the area.

  1. Sign in to Google My Business.
  2. If you have multiple business locations, open the location you’d like to manage.
  3. If you need to verify your pure services listing, find the verification needed card and click “Verify now.”
  4.  Enter your address and click next.
  5.  Choose the verification off option to finish your verification process.

When you update your business information, it’s important to remember that if you do not serve customers at your business address, you must leave the address field blank and only enter your service area.

If you serve customers at your business address but also have other service areas, enter both your address and your service area.

As a pure service area business, you should not enter your address under the info tab in the Google my business dashboard. Leave the business location field blank.

To edit your service area:

  1. Sign in to Google my business and open the location you’d like to manage.
  2. Click “Info” from the menu.
  3. Click “Edit” in the service area section.
  4. Enter your service area information based on the cities, zip codes, or other areas you serve.
  5. Click “Apply”.

To remove a service area:

You can only remove a service area if you’ve enjoyed your business address.

  1. Sign in to Google my business and open the location you’d like to manage.
  2. Click “Info” from the menu.
  3. Click “Edit” in the service area section.
  4. Click remove next to each service area you want to remove. To remove all service areas at once, click “Clear service areas”
  5. Click “Apply”

Ultimately, this gives you more control over the specific areas you’re advertising your services in. Adding additional locations based on zip code or city will also help your local SEO efforts because you can choose the areas with the least amount of competition.

Categories
SEO

Google’s Stance on No-Follow Outbound Links

Google’s stance on no-follow outbound links is clear and concise. Google’s updated guidance on no-follow outbound links indicates a shift in how these links are interpreted. While originally used to combat spam and unendorsed content, no-follow links are now treated as hints rather than directives by Google’s algorithms. This change reflects Google’s advanced understanding of link context, impacting SEO strategies and link-building practices.

Many blogs and websites use no-follow links when writing about outside sources. It’s been common practice to do so among publishers, as it allows them to remain impartial and “safe” from showing preference for one source over another. This practice has long been believed to be the most acceptable way to avoid being seen as showing preferential treatment or providing “link juice” to sites with whom publishers may have a relationship. Another common belief is that sites will be dinged in Google rankings if they use do-follow links. Recently, though, comments from Google’s own John Mueller have made it seem that past thinking may be incorrect. Let’s take a look at this new information.

About No-Follow Outbound Links

First, let’s examine what no-follow links are. No-follow outbound links are ones with a rel = “nofollow” HTML tag used for them. This particular tag lets search engines know they should ignore or bypass that link. It’s long been thought that these links don’t affect search rankings because they don’t pass PageRank.

No-Follow Vs. Do-Follow Links

This may cause you to wonder what the difference is between no-follow and do-follow links, along with why they might even matter. Readers can’t tell a difference between the two tags when browsing a site. A no-follow link can be clicked on, copied and pasted like any other link and will perform in the same way. Common thought, however, was that do-follow links help increase search engine rankings, while no-follow links do not.

Only do-follow outbound links count in Google’s algorithm. No-follow links don’t count; they don’t pass  PageRank. If the link doesn’t affect PageRank, it won’t contribute to raising rankings in Google’s search engine algorithm. The long-standing rule in link building has been to try to obtain do-follow links as frequently as possible across the web. In an attempt to seem impartial, many publishers such as bloggers or news sites often choose to use no-follow links. They don’t want to appear to be giving favor to any outside sources, particularly in cases where sponsorship or payment for service may be involved.

Why No-Follow Links Were Created

The original creator of no-follow links is Google, and the purpose was to cut down on blog comment spam. You see, spammers jumped on the bandwagon when they saw the ever-increasing popularity of blogs. They would often leave unrelated comments on blog posts with a link to their site with the intention of gaining link juice from the action. These spammers were soon starting to rank highly, pushing legitimate sites with useful content aside in the rankings. So, in 2005, Google made the no-follow tag part of their algorithm. Other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo also started using the practice.

No-Follow and Paid Links

Google Webmaster Guidelines do state that all paid links should be no-follow. They don’t want advertisements to receive increased PageRank. This makes sense, as paid content isn’t occurring naturally. Therefore, it shouldn’t be rewarded with higher rankings. Google wants backlinks to be earned, not paid for. If Google catches paid advertisements or other content with links that are do-follow, they’re apt to penalize those sites. Any attempt to manipulate PageRank is considered to be a link scheme.

Google’s New Stance

In a recent Google Webmaster Central hangout, Google’s John Mueller made some statements indicating that no-follow links may not be beneficial or necessary for some sites to use. Specifically, he was talking about sites that use all no-follow links, not just the ones that choose no-follow for paid content.

The question that prompted Mueller’s response was this:

“What do you think about the practice of some big publishers tagging all outgoing links with rel=nofollow?

From what I know, the reasoning behind this is that with follow links you would leak link juice and then rank worse.”

In his response, Mueller indicated that this belief is “definitely wrong.” He said that using no-follow on all outgoing links could even cause problems for a site, as these links appeared by Google to be unnatural.

Here’s what he had to say:

“So that’s definitely wrong. It’s definitely not the case that if you use normal links on your website that you would rank any worse than if you put no-follow on all outgoing links.

I suspect it’s even, on the contrary, that if you have normal linking on your page then you would probably rank a little bit better over time — essentially because we can see that you’re part of the normal web ecosystem.

So it’s definitely not the case that you have any kind of ranking advantage by marking all outgoing links as no-follow.”

Why Sites Use No-Follow for All Outbound Links

In additional remarks, Mueller made note of the fact that some sites use no-follow tags on all of their outbound links. He believes they do this to err on the side of caution because they’re not sure who to vouch for. Therefore, they decide to use no-follow for everything in an attempt to remain impartial. However, it’s Mueller’s belief that this is not the way to go. By doing so, it seems to indicate these publishers don’t stand behind what they write.

He states:

“I understand not knowing which links you can trust. But essentially, if you’re a news publisher, you should trust what you’re writing about.

Or you should be able to understand which part of the content that you write about is actual content that you want to have indexed — that you want to stand for.

If these are things that you want to stand for, then make sure you have normal links on there.”

As you can see, Google’s John Mueller seems quite clear in the fact that news sites and other publishers may want to discontinue the practice of using no-follow outbound links everything in the future. There doesn’t seem to be a benefit to doing so, and it could actually hurt their rankings. That’s not to say that some links, such as paid advertising, shouldn’t be attributed as no-follow. Use your best judgment when making such determinations.

Categories
SEO

Google Breaks Silence: Top 3 SEO Factors

Google Webmasters has started a new video series designed to dispel SEO myths – called SEO Mythbusting. The first episode debuted May 15th, and in it, Martin Splitt, one of Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst speaks with his guest about how search engines work. As part of the discussion, he discusses how Google chooses relevant pages for its millions of searches every day, and the three most influential factors that webmasters need to consider when attempting to rank for any given keyword.

How Google Determines Relevance

Splitt says, “We have over 200 signals to do so. So we look at things like the title, the meta description, the actual content that you’ve got on your page, images, links… All sorts of things. It’s a very complicated question to answer what ranks you best, but yeah… we look at a bunch of signals.”

When asked about the top three things that someone should consider, Splitt responds with content, meta data, and performance.

Content is King – Number One Ranking Factor

“So… us being developers, originally, you probably want me to say, oh use this framework or use that framework… that’s not how it works.

You have to have really good content. And that means you have to have content… that serves a purpose for the user.

It’s something that users need and/or want. Optimally they need it and want it, like ice cream.

So, if your content says where you are, what you do, how you help me with what I’m trying to accomplish, that’s fantastic.”

Focus on the purpose of the page and build the content around that, rather than focusing specifically on the keyword.

If someone is looking for a Blue Soccer Ball, Google tends to rank product pages that are exact matches for Blue Soccer Balls. Google knows users are happier with pages that are direct matches to what they are looking for.

In the case of product page, the purpose is to provide accurate information about the specific item for sale. For a better user experience, add the ability to compare products.

When it comes to searches related to a topic rather than a product, Google ranks pages a bit differently, which is why many online businesses struggle with their SEO. It can be hard to take the focus away from the keyword and see the purpose of the page.

That’s where taking the time to match user intent to the keyword phrase matters. If you write content based on the phrase itself, rather than the stage of the buyer journey that someone would use for that phrase, you’ll miss the relevancy mark.

Meta Data

“So the second biggest things is [to] make sure that you have meta tags that describe your content, so have a meta description because that gives you the possibility to have a little snippet in the search results that let people find out which of the many results might be the ones that help them the best. And have page titles that are specific to the page that you are serving. So don’t have a title for everything. The same title is bad.

If you have titles that change with the content that you are showing, that is fantastic. And frameworks have ways of doing that. So consult the documentation but there’s definitely something that helps with the content.”

This means you need to pay special attention to the title and meta description. Using a template and automation can make it look and feel like cookie cutter content – which isn’t the best approach. But, tools like the Yoast SEO plugin use placeholders that make sure the title and meta descriptions are unique, and still follow automation.

For example, Yoast will take the WordPress post title and will automatically use it as the page title, with the site name appended to the end. Unless you create a custom meta description, it will automatically pull the first 160 characters of the blog post to use. You also have the option to create a unique page title for the meta data. This is particularly helpful if you want to create a blog post headline to encourage clicks, that doesn’t necessarily feature your keyword – because you can create the variant that features your keyword in the actual page title, instead of using your WordPress page or post title.

For years, the SEO community has understood that the meta description itself is not a ranking factor, but with the word from a Google employee that a meta description is part of the top three things to consider – even ahead of links. It’s a fairly good indication that Google has changed something.

Performance

Your website’s performance has been a top SEO factor for a long time. John Mueller, a senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google has said that as a ranking factor, performance (page speed) does not override other factors. In a Webmaster Hangout, Mueller says:

“…the good part is that we have lots of ranking factors. So you don’t have to do everything perfect.

But that also means that you run across situations like this where you say, Google says speed is important but the top sites here are not so fast therefore it must not be important.

So for us it is definitely important. But that doesn’t mean it kind of overrides everything else.

You could imagine the fastest page you can think of is probably an empty page, right? But an empty page would be a really terrible search result if someone is searching for something really specific.

It’s really fast but there is no content there. The user wouldn’t be happy.

So we have to balance all of these different factors. The content, the links, all of the signals that we have and kind of figure out how to do the ranking based on this mix of different factors that we have.”

Ultimately, because performance is a soft ranking factor, if you’ve nailed everything else, and the user experience will suffer because Google chooses not to show this site, you may still rank well even if your site speed is lacking a bit.

If the user expects to see a slow website, then that’s what Google will display.

A better way to look at it is performance is a top SEO factor, but it’s not often a top algorithmic ranking factor.

Splitt says, “Performance is fantastic, we’re talking about it constantly but we’re probably missing out on the fact that this is also good for being discovered online.” Google wants to be sure that people clicking on your website are getting the content quickly, so it’s not just about making your website faster, but making your website more visible to others, too.

While the full Google algorithm will never be released to the public, SEOs have been working for years to identify what influences rankings. Most of us had a pretty good idea about how content and site speed do influence rankings – and we use this knowledge to help our clients. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Mythbusting show to share more insights with you as they come along.

Categories
Digital Marketing

6 Ways to Make the Best of GMB Posts

Google has been announcing (and re-announcing) the decline and ultimate demise of the Google Plus platform for quite some time. With the disappearance of the platform looking like it will actually happen later this year, some business owners are focused on what to do next. Many were still using the partially-defunct social platform for marketing purposes.

Google My Business (GMB) has been around for quite some time as a toolbox for local business owners who want to control their business listings. While the disappearance of Google Plus will no longer allow for a controlled social feed, the GMB platform does now have a place for posts — and you definitely need to use them.

What is a Google My Business Post?

The post section on the Google My Business listing actually launched back in 2016. It was initially reserved for political candidates and then in early 2017 was released to all business owners in 2017.

GMB posts are different than social media posts. When a person does a Google search and sees a business listing in the sidebar, they are often presented with quite a bit of information.  In addition to address and contact information, visitors see Google reviews, questions & answers, and then posts.

Posts usually show on the business listing for seven days and then disappear. Because of this, it’s important to update them regularly as the most recent post won’t show on the listing indefinitely.

Posts are made from within the Google My Business listing manager. You need to optimize your posts with an image, sized 720 pixels wide by 540 pixels tall. Each post can also be enhanced with a call-to-action button.

Take a look at a few Google listings and you will find that quite a number of businesses are still not utilizing this space. So what can you do to make sure yours stand out?

Post Regularly

One of the biggest mistakes people make with GMB posts is a lack of frequency. The space for a post on your listing will remain blank if you don’t post at least once a week. You can post more than once per week. Google will show one post in full, a partial view of the second post, and then an arrow to scroll to any additional posts that are still visible (up to ten).

There is currently no way to schedule GMB posts in advance. To compensate, set someone up (who is associated with your business) to stay on top of them regularly.

Your posts need to be authentic and personable. No one wants to see just another advertisement. Give your visitors a sneak peek at what you’re doing and what you have to offer; an incentive to click through and visit your website or ask for more information. Create posts that are timely and relevant. This isn’t another social platform, so don’t just copy what you’re doing on Facebook and other sites.

Stay On Brand

Even though you don’t want to completely copy what you’re doing on your social platforms, your message needs to be consistent. This means staying on brand in terms of your general message, voice, and style. You can certainly tailor your copy and images to the audience you think is going to find you by conducting a Google search, but the overall message can’t stray so far from your brand that your website looks like a foreign object when they click through.

Leverage the Call-to-Action Button

Most platforms only offer call-to-action buttons on posts if you’re paying for an ad. GMB posts allow for several different options, making it easy for your readers to do exactly what you want them to do in one simple click. You can ask them to learn more, reserve, sign up, buy, or get an offer; then include the link to the landing page you’d like them to visit. Keep your posts simple and you’ll be amazed at how much response you can get. Your visitors will click without even thinking of going back out to the web to see what your competition is offering first.

Optimize Your Images

The image size we mentioned above is important. Google will cut off your images and crop them funny if they aren’t tailored properly to the platform. Take a little extra time to make sure your images are sized properly so they have the best visual impact. Make sure your images are centered so you don’t end up with important info chopped off if Google does make an adjustment.

Above all else, remember this: imagery should grab a user’s attention as soon as they land on your listing. Your image will make a huge difference whether or not someone will click your call-to-action button.

Simplify Your Text

All GMB posts are shortened on the main search page. You have to click the post itself to expand the text, and there isn’t always a prompt to do so. This means you need to make the biggest impact in your first 100 characters to ensure your visitors are intrigued enough to explore more. Don’t create text walls; they just won’t work.

Track Your Posts

Tracking your GMB posts is just as important as tracking any other ad campaign or traffic driver you’ve implemented. Your GMB dashboard will show you how many times your post has been viewed as well as how many times a potential customer has clicked your button. You can also use custom URLs to track which website actions were a result of a visitor that came from your GMB listing.

As a local business owner with a Google My Business listing, it’s important to take advantage of every tool you’re given to make your profile stand out. The more complete your profile, including posts, the more your listing will stand when compared to your competitors.

Although it isn’t yet obvious, the activity you get on your business listing may at some point even impact your overall website ranking, too. Either way, it’s a good idea to implement any free tool you can if it results in customer engagement and interaction!

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