JB’s Digital Update 19th September 2023

Google has released another update to its classifier for what it terms “helpful content”. Great, except that as we talked about last week, Google isn’t all that helpful at defining what is or isn’t helpful content. 

 

There are a number of elements where people are reading the runes from minor updates to Google’s help documents, but like always there’s a lot of straw-clutching going on. Third-party content gets another down-tick (what makes you think it’s a good idea?), AI content is implicitly accepted (why wouldn’t it be?), expert review of content gets an updoot (as it should), but it’s downdoots for date changing on content (as it should be). 

 

One of the perennial surprises I find with updates is that a lot of things that get dealt with are irritants which Google should have dealt with a long time ago – and often in my view they actually have, but in updating the help files, people think it’s something new. 

 

Sigh. I’ve very good at helping SEO clients to recover from Google updates gone wrong, and helping them to not get caught out in the first place. Contact me to chat about SEO and update recovery.

Following on from last week’s GenZ TikTok search revelations, the Chinese data hoover dance company has started to incorporate Wikipedia snippets into its search results. 

 

Search results? On social media? Yes, finally one of the big social players is trying for a proper slice of the search market. It’s still very early days, but expect TikTok SEO videos to become abundant in the very near future. 

 

Talk to me about getting a great social media strategy, if you like. 

I’m sometimes very surprised by Google. John Mueller has been busy claiming that after a site redesign you will not have search results “back to the same”. 

 

On the one hand, this is patently true. Things are very unlikely to be exactly the same.  However, as I’ve talked about in many previous articles on website and seo migrations, if you do them well, with proper planning and execution, then the majority of rankings, traffic and conversions will stay the same, or even improve! 

 

Don’t accept that website redesigns should mean a loss in rankings and traffic. They can, but not if you listen to my advice. Talk to me about SEO, redirects and website redesigns. 

It’s been said for years that the search engine market share figures in the US have been somewhat massaged, with almost no one’s analytics ever showing Bing or any other modern search engine as having a meaningful share. 

 

The US authorities may have finally cottoned onto this as they are opening Antitrust proceedings against Google. (Just as TikTok makes a move towards search – timing!) Expect this to take forever and a day as it wends its way through the courts / congress before appeals. 

 

Who knows maybe YouTube, Gmail and Search will be unentwined sometime in the distant future. I wouldn’t hold your breath though.

 

Talk to me about executing both a well-thought out digital strategy and marketing strategy in this ever-changing environment.

There’s a degree of usefulness to this piece highlighting various nifty email designs using design and persuasion tricks. I like them, although I do have a very soft spot for Bob Cialdini’s 6 Principles of Persuasion (now 7).

 

What slaps me in the face very hard is that the designs appear to be desktop-driven. It is only in the corporate world that anyone (almost) still checks their email on a desktop or laptop. Pretty much every email is opened on mobile now. What on earth happened to mobile? If these are mobile designs, then they are somewhat challenged. 

 

This is still an issue I see every day when people present designs. Despite being in a mobile-first world, the vast majority of designs are presented desktop first with mobile as an afterthought. Honestly. That’s the kind of thing that makes me bang my head on the desk. Hard. 

 

Don’t get left behind in a mobile world. Talk to me about cracking Email and CRM strategy & implementation.