COMING AT YOU WEEK OF 1.4.22
GUYS, IT’S ABOUT TIME WE GOT TO KNOW EACH OTHER
This is me, Hayley. 👋🏻 I like to feel smart, and guess how I felt when I got started in my career as a content marketer? Not smart.
The marketing industry was full of pop-culture references, refreshes to Google’s algorithms, tech and software I didn’t understand, and updates to social media platforms.
I always felt out-of-the-loop.
I found marketing news outlets, but everything felt too hot (too much work to read) or too cold (not enough info to be truly helpful). Nothing was just right.
Soo, I decided to do what I was trying to avoid: spend hours and hours reading marketing news. And then I added more work: put together a weekly newsletter that covers that info at a level that’s “just right” (-Goldilocks). At least, that’s the goal.
So, I hope this newsletter is making your life easier. Every week that you open this makes me feel like a hundred bucks. Thanks for being here.
THIS WEEK’S MOST IMPORTANT MARKETING NEWS
BEGINNING JAN 19, CERTAIN FACEBOOK TARGETING OPTIONS WILL BE PHASED OUT
Targeting options from these four categories will no longer be available:
- “Health causes (e.g. breast cancer awareness)
- Sexual orientation (e.g. LGBT)
- Religious practices and groups (e.g. Catholic Church)
- Political beliefs”
Campaigns already running with those targeting options can continue to do so until March 2022.
Google, Facebook, and Microsoft were ranked first, second, and third in the international rankings for 2020. And TikTok took over first place for 2021. Cloudflare isn’t super straightforward about how they rank the domains on that list, saying it’s based on their “ranking methodology,” but it seems to be based on domain traffic. This boils down to another example of how many people around the world are becoming interested in TikTok.
AN ASSET LIBRARY IS NOW AVAILABLE IN YOUR GOOGLE ADS ACCOUNT
You can upload your images and other creative assets to the library where it will stay, allowing you to use those in other campaigns.
GOOGLE’S DECEMBER PRODUCT REVIEWS UPDATE FINISHED ROLLING OUT
That was the second product reviews update of 2021. Review sites and affiliate marketers are the ones largely affected by these. Google seems to reward in-depth reviews (makes sense). So, if you’re monitoring sites or pages that might be affected by this update, December might have seen some fluctuations or long-term shifts in rank.
2 ADVERTISERS FILED A LAWSUIT AGAINST LINKEDIN FOR INFLATING AD METRICS
The judge threw out the lawsuit though, saying that the accusations (even if proven true) weren’t enough to justify any legal action. This was about an instance in August last year (2021) when LinkedIn reported a measurement issue related to ad performance. So, the lawsuit being thrown means LinkedIn handled that situation well by telling people about the issues they found and offering to credit accounts that were affected by the wrong metrics.
HOW KEYWORD DIFFICULTY IS MEASURED AND HOW TO STRATEGIZE AROUND IT
When you choose keywords for your SEO strategy you might use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush to provide metrics like search volume, cost-per-click (CPC), and keyword difficulty (KD).
To help you understand those metrics, we’re gonna break down what keyword difficulty is and how you should account for it when choosing your organic keywords. (A lot of our links today lead to definitions to help you answer questions like, “What exactly are organic keywords?” and “What really is a backlink?”)
What is keyword difficulty? Tools, like those mentioned above, provide ratings for how challenging it is to rank well for a keyword. This info helps you to make strategic decisions, like if you want to spend resources on a term that’s difficult or if you can plan on a term ranking well sooner than others.
How do tools determine keyword difficulty? Each tool has their unique ways of determining keyword difficulty. Here are three examples.
Ahrefs bases their KD score purely on the number of backlinks the top 10 ranking pages have.
Moz has a more complex formula that takes into account how well the pages that currently rank for the keyword are optimized (page authority) and how well their sites are optimized (domain authority).
Semrush looks at the “authority of the domains that are showing up on the results page and then estimates how hard it would be for a new website to outrank its current competitors.”
Should I go after high- or low-difficulty keywords? Let’s compare this to food, because yummm. Just how your body needs both carbs and protein to function, your business needs both high- and low-difficulty keywords to have a successful SEO strategy.
You need low-difficulty keywords because you can rank sooner for those keywords; like how eating a piece of fruit can give your body energy relatively fast. You need high-difficulty keywords because they’re like proteins. It takes your body longer to get energy from eating a piece of chicken, and it takes longer to rank for keywords with a high difficulty.
Your SEO strategy can feed off of the traffic that will come when you rank for low-difficulty keywords while you work to rank well for high-difficulty terms.
To wrap it up
Ultimately, you need to weigh all the different metrics (CPC, volume, and KD) when deciding your keyword strategy. For instance, you may be wary of a high-difficulty keyword, but then notice that it has seriously high volume (and is therefore likely to bring a lot of traffic to your site). Ultimately, it will benefit you to have a variety of difficulty levels.
Have at it, friends.
LET’S GET VISUAL
