In this monthly post, we bring you the latest from all of the major platforms.
General
What: California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes live
Details: On January 1st, 2020 CCPA will go into effect representing a major milestone in data privacy legislation within the United States.
Impact: For brands that properly prepped for GDPR, there are likely minimal alterations to make. That said, every single business and advertiser should review the small print within CCPA to ensure 100% compliance. Although the bill goes into effect on January 1st, California AG will likely not begin formal CCPA enforcement actions until July 1st.
Details: On January 27, 2020, message extensions will be sunset
Impact: Existing Message Extensions will no longer serve and the ability to create new iterations will be removed. Data will be retrievable through the end of 2020. For those that found success with Message Extensions, consider replacement via Call Extensions and Lead Form Extensions.
Details: Optimization Score is a Google designated grading of a specific campaign. Previously available only for Search, this feature will aid advertisers in prioritizing the most impactful options within their Display efforts.
Impact: While most advertisers already have an extensive quality assurance process, Google’s Optimization score provides a second set of automated eyes to catch those missed opportunities.
Details: Staring January 1st, 2020 Google will end support via Facebook and Twitter.
Impact: Google has said the changes are intended to streamline the process. Advertisers needing support should navigate to the Contact Us section within Google Ads in addition to the Support Form.
Details: Amazon has changed the process in which agencies run ads on behalf of Amazon Vendors. Vendor codes are no longer needed; agencies simply need the approval of their client to register an advertising account.
Impact: Although a simple update, this streamlines the process for advertising via Amazon. Additionally, marketers see this as evidence that Amazon Advertising will continue to expand and evolve.
Details: Forms will allow advertisers to collect information from 12 distinct fields.
Impact: Lead Gen Forms have proven effective in other social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The introduction of Lead Gen Forms in Quora Ads should provide advertisers an effective means of increasing leads on a growing, high-intent platform.
Did we miss any major monthly updates? Not covering a certain platform close enough? Feel free to let me know on Twitter @Will_Larcom
Google’s John Mueller said on Reddit that Google uses XML Sitemaps like an energy drink. John said “All sitemap files of a site are imported into a common, big mixing cup, lightly shaken, and then given to Googlebot by URL in the form of an energy drink.”
Google has always recommended you use XML Sitemaps for sites that need better indexing. Smaller sites probably do not need them but they are easy enough to make for smaller sites that is probably worthwhile.
John went on to add “It doesn’t matter how many files you have. If you give the last-modification date (which you should), then you just need to make sure you’re giving the same date for any given URL across the files.”
So if you need a boost in terms of helping Google discover all your pages, then try XML Sitemaps as a boost.
The Ad Gallery is one of the most comprehensive galleries of paid media ads to date. With over 40 digital ad types including visuals and specs, this will surely be the digital advertising reference you visit time-and-time again in 2020.
You can use the Ad Gallery to filter by ad type and platform too. Say you’re… looking to do ads only on Google and Youtube; just select those platform icons to filter out the noise. We’ve added filter capabilities so you can view any combination of platforms and ad types at once.
The Ad Gallery filters make it easy to find the type of ads you’re looking for.
We’ll continue to add more ad examples and platforms throughout 2020 to keep you in-the-loop on new ad type roll-outs. Sign up for Ad Gallery Updates at the bottom of the page to make it easier to get updates!
Google is testing a new search user interface treatment for map results called “Lists on Google Maps.” This shows you a carousel of results from Google Maps, Google My Business listings, that you can scroll through and learn more about.
Mordy Oberstein posted a video of it in action on Twitter but here is a still shot first, followed by his tweet:
Has anyone ever seen Google show a carousel of Google Maps lists on the SERP for local queries before?
Here is a photo I found on Instagram of a sunset looking out from the Google office building in Irvine, California. The person who posted this on Instagram wrote “beautiful sunset at work today” using his Pixel 4 camera.
Google has some amazing offices around the world.
This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.
Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was “Good UX impacts rankings.” The responses available were “directly,” “indirectly,” or “neither.”
Only 6% of those who filled out the survey said UX, site user experience, did not have any impact on a site’s Google rankings. So 94% of SEOs believe UX is somewhat related to rankings. 40% said it was a direct ranking factor and the remaining 54% said it was an indirect factor. Direct means that Google has specific UX metrics they look at and will weight a site’s overall UX with a ranking score of some sorts. Indirect means that other signals may be boosted because Google can tell that the site performs well for users and thus should rank well, but UX specific features do not directly impact rankings.
The thing is, page speed is somewhat of a UX thing and we know that is a direct ranking factor. HTTPS is also a bit of a UX thing and impacts rankings. We know a lot of the messaging around the core updates are about UX, same with Panda. Google has a page layout penalty of some sorts, interstitial ad penalty and much more. We also know that GoogleBot renders the page almost exactly like you and I see it, espesially with the new evergreen GoogleBot.
2020 is almost here, but today I am going to tell you what you shouldn’t do in 2020 when it comes to SEO. And this is something that I see businesses doing so much, is putting out content on their websites, or on YouTube, on social media, that doesn’t directly relate to their service offerings or their service pages.
The real reason why this is bad is that when people are on your website, you don’t want them just to be interested in your content, but you want them to also convert. So, all the content that you are creating in 2020 needs to be directly relevant to the services that you are offering. And then hopefully, you guys take this on board, and it means that your content will be much better because it helps drive people down the funnel.
Ross Tavendale
Managing Director at Type A Media
Don’t Forget to Get the Basics Right
We have seen in 2019 that voice was a nothing burger. We spoke about it a lot as SEO people but didn’t really see massive impacts. That being said, all the technology that underpins what makes voice a thing will be much more important going forward.
I am not going to give you the usual, “Oh, look at natural language processing and BERT and AI,” and all that sort of stuff because you can’t really do anything with that information. What I will say though is try and have a look at your content and how it actually interlinks. I am not talking about an HTML link from this page to that page; I am talking about the entities on this page and how they are related to the entities on this page, and how they talk to one another. Ultimately, in 2020 the same rules apply: solid technical foundations, excellent on-page copy, and links, links, links.
Jason Barnard
Digital Nomad, Speaker, Event Host, Podcast Host at Kalicube.pro
Don’t Focus on Blue Links, Focus on Rich Elements
Here is what not to do in 2020: don’t remain obsessed with ranking blue links. There are three reasons. Reason one, it is a crowded, mature market; everybody and their dog has a basic blog article on the topic you are writing about, and some of them have a boatload of quality inbound links and historical advantage over you.
Blue links are highly competitive and getting more and more difficult to get because, number two, blue links are dying out. They remain dominant on the SERPs in terms of sheer numbers, but they are quickly being replaced by rich elements such as news, carousels, events-related searches, featured snippets, people also ask, knowledge cards, and many, many more. These are taking over and killing the blue links.
This is the gold rush. Google wants to put these rich elements on the SERPs. They want to give the answer right there on the SERP. These are amazing opportunities for you.
Not only are there more and more opportunities, but the competition is much less fierce than for the blue links. Just make sure you get some branding in there. You might not get the click, but you get the free brand awareness.
Reason number three, blue links are boring. In short, continue working on ranking your blue links but switch your obsession to rich elements. Thank you.
Evan Facinger
Director of Sales and Marketing at Foremost Media
Don’t Just Look at Your ACoS %
Don’t just look at your ACoS listed in your Amazon advertising campaigns. You see, Amazon advertising, that is going to impact your organic search ranking on Amazon, so it is going to lead to more sales. What you want to do is look at your total sales. And don’t just look at a low ACoS as a good thing; sometimes having a higher ACoS is going to mean a higher profit, so make sure to run the math.
Don’t Just Reduce Your Bids to Lower ACoS %
If you are looking to lower your ACoS, don’t just automatically reduce your bids. See what happens is, when you start to lower your bids, you end up getting fewer impressions, sometimes even no impressions. It also lowers your ad position, and in the end, that is going to end up decreasing your conversions, which leads to a higher ACoS.
Bartosz Góralewicz
CEO at Onely
Don’t Go After the Latest Trend
2020 is going to bring quite a lot of changes, just as 2018 was a year when a lot of new trends emerged. But one of the things, regardless of all that, I would recommend you to do in 2020 or don’t do, is don’t go after the latest trend.
One of the examples in 2019 being everyone focusing on BERT update that was completely not actionable for SEOs instead of focusing on, for example, massive issues with indexing their content. So you would see webmasters with 30% of their website indexed in Google going after some natural language processing hype that actually if you dig deeper, is not really actionable.
So one, don’t go after all of the things that you may consider cool without fixing your classics first. And two, make sure that everything in the technical SEO field is covered within your website. Instead of going after all these shiny objects, focus on web performance, focus on information architecture, focus on making your content indexable, amazing. Focus on a lot of basics that most of us still can improve. Thank you so much.
Dan Petrovic
Director at Dejan Marketing
Don’t Guest Post and Don’t Buy Links from Influencers
Hi everyone; 2020, one thing we need to stop doing, guest posting. It just doesn’t make any more sense. It is spammy, it is inorganic, and it just lacks all quality signals. So, when I analyzed things that were going on within my own team, I found that most of the time when the client presses for link numbers, my link builders go, “All right, let’s find a website that easily accepts links, pay them some money, get the link through.” There is no quality control, and the content is average. And I thought, “Well, this method has no future. We are not earning our links. Anyone can place a link on such a website. This is a liability for my clients. It could cause penalties in the future. We need to stop this.”
And this is what happened, we gradually trimmed down the number of people involved with guest posting to a point where it is very minimal, and in 2020 guest posting is truly out the door.
What do we do instead? But of course, one obvious thing remains — influencer engagement, but there is a problem. If everyone starts hammering influencers, what does that do for this industry? So, what I have seen so far is that the same thing is happening, influences are becoming transactional, the organic part is lost, and what we are doing is just glorified link buying. You are basically paying money to get an influencer to advertise your product, and this is not something that sits well with me.
Tony Wright
CEO at WrightIMC
Four Dont’s for 2020
The first thing is looking at your data, don’t test too many things at once. Seeing a lot of people that are getting really into data and coming up with some false conclusions because they are testing too many things and have no idea what is actually working.
Second, don’t knee-jerk on any algorithm changes. I predict we are going to see a lot of changes in Google and Bing in the next year, and a lot of people are going to panic when their rankings drop. Don’t panic; wait to see what happens. I know it is painful; it is painful for everyone, but there is nothing you can do by knee-jerking, and we could make the problem worse.
Third, don’t spend your resources on too many shiny objects. There are a lot of people coming out with a lot of theories based upon BERT and other things, and frankly, there are a lot of things we just don’t know. Stick with the tried and true stuff until you see something that is proven to work.
Lastly, don’t take anyone’s word for it; test yourself to see if something works. Sometimes things that work in one vertical don’t work in another. Read my stuff about baby algorithms; every site is a little bit different. So don’t just take someone’s advice at face. Test it and make sure that it works. Have an amazing year.
Amy Bishop
Owner at Cultivative, LLC.
Don’t Forget to Tell the Right Story to the Right People at the Right Time
In 2020, let’s stop working in silos, let’s stop focusing only on the bottom of the funnel and last-click attribution. Let’s stop judging top-of-funnel channels by bottom-of-funnel standards, and let’s stop running top-of-funnel campaigns without a strong middle-funnel program to convert those leads. And last but not least, let’s stop blasting one broad message to all of our audiences. This isn’t broadcast. We can do so much better. So here is to better performance in 2020.
Dom O‘Neill
Vlogger at vlogify.net
Don’t Forget Audiences are Transient
You need to be respectful of people’s time. You need to understand that people aren’t watching your content on the telly, on the laptop, in a controlled environment. They are usually watching it on the smartphone somewhere uncontrolled, and at any point, they can be taken away and back out into the real world. But you have got to be respectful of people’s time.
And also, people are on the phone. And so, after a minute, the phone starts to get heavy, the screen’s quite small, the eyes get tired, and they might be jostled on the bus. They might be in the queue at the post office, and they are just checking stuff out, and their number is called — right, they are gone. So if you are keeping your videos under one minute, you are more likely to say what you need to say to that audience before they get distracted by something else.
