COMING AT YOU WEEK OF 10.12.21
This week’s most important marketing news
ONE
Google Adsense is changing its selling structure from second-place auction to first-place auction which means you might pay a bit more on this platform than you have been so far. But seriously only a bit more, like a few cents per bid. But still, cents add up—or at least that’s what Ms. Pesek taught during our math lessons.
TWO
Canva is coming to the Facebook Business Suite.
THREE
“We’re combining IGTV and feed videos into one format – Instagram Video,” Instagram announced. They also mentioned, “We’re also introducing a new Video tab on your profile, where this combined video format will live, to make it easier for people to discover new video content.”
FOUR
Advertisers can’t post climate denial content on Google and Youtube. Climate denial ads deny, “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”
FIVE
Facebook’s outage has messed up our ad budgets and reminded us to diversify ad placement.
Lock in a great Google rank
Google is vague and even misleading about ranking factors, the elements that determine where your content appears in search results. But since most industries see over 50% of their site traffic coming from Google, many of us really, really want to know exactly what factors matter for your Google rank. Search Engine Journal did a great deep dive into all of this, here are four highlights:
What’s an easy ranking factor to optimize for?
H1-H6 tags, or header tags, allow people and Google to easily identify the key points of a page. Content labeled with a H1 tag, or another heading tag, gives Google more clarity on what the section is about.
Does it matter if a page has no H1 tag or multiple H1 tags? John Mueller, a Google search advocate, says, “Your site is going to rank perfectly fine with no H1 tags or with five H1 tags.“
If you aren’t formatting your content with heading tags, it’s a fairly straight-forward technique to start implementing.
How much does alt text do?
Whenever your image doesn’t load, alt text is there to help viewers understand the image without seeing it. That’s the first job of alt text. It also tells Google what an image shows, helping it populate results for their image search. According to John Mueller, alt text is only important if you’re trying to rank in the image search results, not the general search feed.
Google says, “Filenames and alt text are best when they’re short, but descriptive.” Wow, Google, that is so helpful and doesn’t feel contradictory at all. Here’s our example that we hope is more helpful than Google’s words. For this image:
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Don’t say
Prescription
Do say
Pills labeled: your copy is clever, but doesn’t convert
Alt text is a nice place to add a keyword, but Google says they’ll penalize keyword stuffing in alt text. Let’s use the same image as above for more examples.
Don’t say
Converting copy, conversion copywriting, writers, ad copy, landing page conversions
Do say
Pill bottle for converting copy
Even in our example, you can see how being too focused on exact keywords can make you start sounding more like a robot. Try to avoid that.
Do bounce rates affect rank directly?
Ah, the old bounce rate debate. Well, here are the facts people:
- Multiple Google search employees have said they don’t use bounce rate as a factor.
- Most great content with orderly site structure will have a healthy bounce rate.
Honestly, it kinda freaks us out that so many people waste time worrying about stuff like this. In order to create wonderful content for your audience, it’s useful to pay attention to your bounce rate (alongside other content metrics). Whether or not Google pays attention directly or indirectly doesn’t seem worth getting gray hairs over.
Should you pay attention to word count?
You know what is worth getting riled up about? When you get on a blog and have to scroll through 3,000 words of the purest fluff, bucketfull after bucketfull of the cotton candy of writing, to find what you actually care about: the 20-minute, one-pot stir-fry recipe. Obviously there are people who believe word count is a factor. Sorry bloggers, it’s a myth.
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So what?
Don’t ignore ranking factors, and if you want to check the validity of others, grab SEJ’s ebook. But when it comes down to it, focus on creating content that is simply awesome for your audience. Don’t take our word for it, take 🧀John’s🧀.
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Take the workday panic down a notch with this easygoing mix we put together for ya.
Lets get visual
