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Search Engine Land’s Daily Briefing features daily insights, news, tips and advice essential for today’s search marketers. If you want to read this before the rest of the internet, register here to receive it daily in your inbox.
Hello, Marketers, “have we arrived yet?”
This seems to be the question everyone is on their minds: are we really getting closer to the end of the pandemic or are we preparing for another wave? How do we know what to prepare for?
Amazon stock prices have taken their biggest drop in a year Friday, and Etsy, eBay, and Wayfair have also seen their prices drop. The return of consumer behavior before the pandemic may help explain the slowdown in these businesses. But, the seven-day average for new cases of COVID is on the rise; it is currently back to its level at the end of October.
To the e-commerce specialists among us, I’d like to know what your strategy will look like over the next three to six months: do you expect a “normal†rest of the year? Has your supply chain been impacted? What are you doing to navigate this? How will your advertising budget evolve? Have you pivoted your content strategy? Please send me an e-mail, I am gnguyen@thirddoormedia.com (subject line: It looks like a plan!).
George Nguyen,
Editor
Google’s math solver guidelines require precision
Google has added several new technical and content quality guidelines to its Math Solver Structured Data Help documentation. The new guidelines list a number of requirements in order to be able to display results rich in mathematical and practical problems in Google search.
Technical guidelines require that MathSolver structured data be added to your site’s home page, your host’s load settings allow frequent crawls, canonical URLs are used on every copy of a page (if you have multiple identical copies of the same mathematical solver hosted under different URLs) and that your mathematical solvers are not entirely hidden behind a login or paywall.
The new content guidelines state that “promotional content disguised as a mathematical solver, such as that published by a third party (eg, affiliate programs)” is not allowed and, if a certain amount of your data turns out to be incorrect, Google may remove your solver until you fix the problem.
Read more here.
SEOs and online marketers weigh in on product ranking factors
Over 80% of respondents selected keywords in the product name as the most important ranking factor for products in Google search, according to a to study directed by Joe Youngblood. There was a three-way tie for second place between keywords in reviews, keywords in the title tag, and number of inbound links. And internal links rank fifth, with 68.2% of responses.
Youngblood’s study goes so far as to list the top 20 factors for ranking products for Google search, according to the 35 SEOs and online marketers who took part in the study. At the bottom of the list are the recency of the reviews, the amount of linking documents and the number of photos or videos of the product.
Why we care While reviews and media may not be the most important ranking factors, they are still worth the effort because they can convince potential buyers to make a purchase. The sample size here is quite small, but it may still be worth taking a look at the responses to see if your experiences match those of the participants.
Google Ads Editor v1.7 supports hotel ads and lead form extensions
Google Ads Editor v1.7 will be available in just under a week on August 9. With this update, advertisers can use the Google Ads Editor to manage their hotel ads, YouTube audio ads, and lead form extensions, and select specific parts of their campaigns to upload for offline work.
Why we care For advertisers who use lead forms or serve Hotel and / or YouTube audio ads in the web interface, Google Ads Editor now supports these features so they can be managed offline. The ability to download specific parts of a campaign can also make it easier for advertisers to work on their campaigns offline.
Read more here.
Chatbots have been around for decades, but have they improved?
Bing is testing a new chat feature. Sunny Ujjawal spotted a chat box on Bing. “This is an experimental AI-powered chat on Bing.com,†the warning reads. Bing added a CDC coronavirus self-checking chatbot to the SERP last year, but this test doesn’t appear to have a specific app in mind.
Google removes the rich result type from performance reports. Google has removal of generic rich result type from GSC performance reports and API. The company gave us a heads up about it in May, and now it’s officially gone.
Interview with Veruska Anconitano. Women in Tech SEO has a series of weekly interviews, and this week, Veruska anconitano, which focuses on helping startups enter non-English speaking markets, shared her approach to SEO as well as tips for women new to the field.
Analyze the performance of different types of GMB publications
Sterling Sky’s Joy Hawkins recently shared a case study in which his team manually analyzed clicks (according to Google My Business [GMB]) and clicks and conversions (in Google Analytics) for over 1,000 GMB posts from various small businesses. The results cover what types of posts work best, whether to use titles and emojis, what to include in post images, and what to post about.
- COVID posts performed the best, followed by event posts, offer posts, and update posts. COVID posts appear higher in the local knowledge panel, but they only contain text. Note that COVID posts are actually replacing your posts carousel, so your other posts won’t be visible anywhere else.
- Posts with titles saw almost twice as many clicks and conversions as those without a title. Just make sure you don’t write them in all caps – posts with titles in all caps regularly received almost twice as many clicks.
- Posts containing emojis received double the clicks, according to GMB information, and also saw more conversions than others.
- Photos containing text received almost four times as many clicks as photos without text. Logos don’t seem to matter, however, as there was no measurable difference between posts that contained logos and those that did not.
- The GMB post types that received the most activity were about specials or discounts. Then there were those that contained ACTs. And, the third best performing job type contained a sense of urgency (eg, same-day appointments).
About the Author
George Nguyen is an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic search, podcasting, and e-commerce. His background is in journalism and content marketing. Before entering the industry, he worked as a radio personality, writer, podcast host and teacher in a public school.
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