IndexNow has now been turned on by over 60,000 websites that use Cloudflare in less than two months after IndexNow was announced by Microsoft. IndexNow is an open protocol that any search engine can participate in to enable site owners to have their pages and content instantly indexed by the search engine.
Microsoft and Cloudflare announced today that “more than 60,000 unique websites that have opted-in to Crawler Hints. Those zones have sent Bing about billion Hints for when specific assets on their websites have changed and need to be re-crawled.” I turned it on for the Search Engine Roundtable, my personal search blog, when it was announced.
How to turn it on. It literally is controlled by the flip of a switch in Cloudflare under the crawler hints section that you can access under the cache tab, then under the configuration section:
Microsoft said once this setting is enabled it, IndexNow “will begin sending hints to search engines about when they should crawl particular parts of your website.”
Google may adopt it. Google said recently that it too will test the IndexNow protocol for indexing. So while Microsoft Bing and Yandex are the only two who have fully adopted it, if Google adopts it, you can expect other search engines to as well.
Why we care. Like we said before, instant indexing is an SEO’s dream when it comes to giving search engines the most updated content on a site. The protocol is very simple and it requires very little developer effort to add this to your site, so it makes sense to implement this if you care about speedy indexing. Plus if you use Cloudflare, it can be turned on with the flip of a switch.
“Everyone has annoying tasks in their job that you wish you could hire someone else to do, and at this point, you could automate it,” said Colt Sliva, SEO Engineer at iPullRank, in his presentation at SMX Next. “Additionally, you can be effective even when you’re not available.”
Many SEOs, however, lack the programming knowledge to set these systems up themselves, which is why automation tools are on the rise. Choosing one may seem daunting with so many automation resources, including no-code, low-code, and maximum-code options. But, as Sliva points out, there is always a tool available, no matter your technical literacy.
Selecting a marketing automation tool is just the first part of this process. Here are some actionable steps Sliva recommends marketers take to automate their SEO tasks.
Create a data storage space
Every marketer has their tool preferences, but Sliva recommends using Google Sheets and its macro scheduling when setting up SEO task automation. “What it will do is run a crawl in your site on a schedule and then write that straight into a single excel sheet,” he said, “You get a summarization of all the features of the crawl, and that data is saved in a sheet.”
Craft data visualizations
Whether you want to focus on missing HTML elements such as title tags, meta descriptions or H1 tags, or more technical components like orphan URLs or XML sitemap issues, creating visualizations can help marketers better analyze their data.
Sliva shared some helpful SEO data visuals from Dan Sharp of Screaming Frog, highlighting different ways marketers can display their automated crawl data.
Image: Dan Sharp and Colt Sliva
Develop a feedback loop
Once the data storage and visualization elements are in place, marketers will want to ensure their automation systems can detect significant crawling issues on a regular basis. SEO should use tools that highlight these problems.
Image: Colt Sliva
Sliva pointed to a significant indexability issue shown in his own automated report: “I can see that there’s been an issue in the past here with total internal non-indexable URLs, where the number of indexable URLs completely flip-flopped and most of the site was non-indexable. That is a clear problem that we would want a feedback loop for.”
Build SEO alerts
Automation systems that fail to notify SEOs of issues aren’t helpful, even if they can identify them properly. Sliva recommended using a script that pings specialists when a set number of issues arise — in his case, non-indexable URLs.
“It grabs the active spreadsheet of the current sheet and then it gets the range of data and grabs the last column and last row. So we have a complete section, and then it grabs the 11th column, which just happens to be the non-indexable column.”
Image: Colt Sliva
SEOs can use scripts of this sort to set automated alerts for a variety of issues, allowing team members to begin working on solutions as soon as problems arise.
Automate SEO processes with programming tools
Here are some additional tasks SEOs can automate with their chosen tools, according to Sliva.
Automated segmentation;
Internal link analysis; and
SEO data extraction.
“There are endless automation opportunities,” he said. “And that is exciting once you start to track these patterns and these simple programming concepts to get this work done.”
Image: Colt Sliva
Sliva offered a caveat to automation implementation: “If you could spend 10 minutes doing the task manually and then you decide to spend 10 hours writing the code — and you don’t do that task very often — you probably don’t need to automate that task.”
But often, the advantages outweigh the costs. It all depends on your campaign goals and workload. “The benefits are speeding up your tasks, removing obstacles, and lightening your workload,” said Sliva.
“It’s just a fun problem to solve. If you enjoy solving problems, this is for you,” he added.
Online consumer spend in the U.S. came in at $5.1 billion on Thanksgiving Day, showing flat YoY growth, and Black Friday generated $8.9 billion, which is slightly less than the $9 billion it generated in 2020, according to Adobe. Thanksgiving weekend sales also failed to outperform last year’s figures, although consumer spend is expected to achieve 10% YoY growth for the overall shopping season.
Adobe’s data comes from analyzing direct consumer transactions online. Projections are based on an analysis of over one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categoriess.
Why we care. Cyber Week sales are struggling to meet last year’s levels, but that might be okay because, “With 21 days in November driving over $3 billion in spend, what we know as Cyber Week is starting to look more like Cyber Month,” said Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights. For reference, last November, only 8 days topped $3 billion by November 28, 2020.
Supply chain issues, labor shortages, new consumer behaviors and even a Google core update the week before Thanksgiving — many variables could be affecting how retailers performed this Cyber Week. Because of these factors, businesses may fall short of their Cyber Week goals. However, Adobe still expects the full season (November 1 to December 31) to reach $207 billion (10% YoY growth). With that in mind, it may be better to assess sales over a longer period, perhaps beginning at the start of November, to get a clearer picture of how your campaigns and promotions did this holiday season. This may also enable better YoY comparisons since customers seem to be shopping much earlier this year.
Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Actual Thanksgiving and Black Friday online consumer spend came in at the low end of Adobe’s predictions: Consumers spent $5.1 billion on Thanksgiving Day (the same as in 2020). On Black Friday, consumers spent $8.9 billion, which is actually less than in 2020, when consumers spent $9 billion.
For reference, Thanksgiving Day drove $4.2 billion in online spend just two years ago (2019). However, this is the first time Adobe has reported decreased spending on major shopping days since it first began reporting on e-commerce in 2012.
Thanksgiving weekend. Online sales slumped even harder over the weekend than they did during Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday: On Saturday, November 27, consumers spent $4.5 billion online, down 4.3% YoY. On Sunday, November 28, they spent $4.7 billion online, which was also down YoY but by a much narrower margin, 0.5%.
On November 27 and 28, the prevalence of out-of-stock messages rose 16% compared to the prior weekend (November 20 and 21). Supply chain concerns may have contributed to inventory shortages, which could help explain the sales slowdown. But, it is also possible that customers adjusted their behavior to shop earlier to avoid potential inventory shortages or to take advantage of sales earlier in the season: Between November 1 and November 28, consumers spent $99.1 billion, up 13.6% YoY. And, this season, there have been 21 days exceeding $3 billion in online sales, compared to just 8 days that exceeded that amount by this time last year.
The Cyber Monday outlook. Inventory issues and new, earlier consumer shopping patterns are also impacting Adobe’s Cyber Monday projections: Consumers will spend between $10.2 billion and $11.3 billion on Cyber Monday, Adobe predicted. If actual sales meet those expectations, then Cyber Monday will likely be the biggest online shopping day of 2021, although it may retain that title without necessarily exceeding last year’s figure of $10.8 billion.
Cyber Monday discounts are also expected to be weaker than last year. Discount levels have fallen across several product categories, Adobe said: TVs are seeing discounts of -16% (compared to -19% in 2020), apparel is discounted at -15% (-20% last year), computers are at -14% (-28% last year) and appliances are at -8% (-20% last year).
Google has updated its reviews help document page in the Google Business Profile support area to say that Google values all reviews, not just positive. Now Google says it is “more trustworthy” to see a mix of both positive and negative reviews on the business profile.
What is new. Google has added a bullet point to the document that reads “Value all reviews: Reviews are useful for potential customers when they’re honest and objective. Customers find a mix of positive and negative reviews more trustworthy. You can always respond to a review to show the customers that you care and provide additional context. If the review doesn’t follow our posting guidelines, you can request to remove it.”
Here is a screenshot:
Ranking impact? This will probably not impact rankings in any way but it might be a sign that if a business has 99% all positive reviews, maybe – just maybe – Google will flag that business and manually audit the reviews of that business. It is simply not natural for all customers to only leave positive reviews on a business online.
Why we care. If you manage local businesses and some of your customers feel anxious about having negative reviews on their business listing, then show them this new update to the Google help document. Maybe that will alleviate some of the anxiety around getting negative reviews?
Google Merchant Center is now automatically showing retailers when their products are eligible for badges, a Google spokesperson has confirmed to Search Engine Land. Available badges include, but are not limited to, the “sale price,” “price drop,” “amount off,” “percent off,” and “buy quantity, get percent off” badges.
Tip of the hat to Kirk Williams, who first posted about this new feature.
Image: Kirk Williams.
Why we care
Badging isn’t new. However, the column showing which badge your products are appearing with is new and it can help merchants understand how potential customers are seeing their ads, without needing to manually figure it out for themselves. This can help retailers identify the types of promotions that are (or aren’t) working out for their business.
Google’s mobile-first indexing deadline is no longer a deadline and it decided to leave the “timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing,” John Mueller of Google said on the company blog. Previously, Google postponed the deadline from September 2020 to March 2021, and that deadline came and past.
No timeline. Now, Google said there is no specific timeline, instead Google said the search company “decided to leave the timeline open for the last steps of mobile-first indexing.” Google added currently Google does not “have a specific final date for the move to mobile-first indexing.”
Why no deadline. Google said the deadline has been removed because after “analyzing the sites that are not yet indexed mobile-first” the company “determined that some of these sites are still not ready to be shifted over due to various, unexpected challenges that they’re facing.”
Google added that these “sites were facing unexpectedly difficult challenges and we wanted to accommodate their timelines.” Thus it was to be “thoughtful” of these sites and not move them over until they are ready.
Previously. Google in early March, before all the lock-downs began across most of the world, announced the deadline for all sites to switch over to mobile-first indexing would be September 2020. At that time, Google said, “To simplify, we’ll be switching to mobile-first indexing for all websites starting September 2020.” Then in July 2020, Google moved that deadline once again to March 2021.
Sites will move. Google said as these sites make changes that enable them to switch over to mobile-first indexing, it will “gradually to move those remaining sites over.” Google said that if a website is not verified in Google Search Console, then Google won’t be able to inform it of a pending switch to mobile-first indexing. You can learn more about this in their blog post.
Why we care. Chances are, most, if not all, of your sites and the sites you manage have been moved to mobile-first indexing. If not, this means you have more time to worry about it.
If your site is not ready for the switch, I’d be concerned there are other issues with the overall platform that you may need to upgrade before it becomes a larger issue outside of just mobile-first indexing.
“COVID itself has changed the way that people interact with businesses online,” said Amanda Jordan, director of local search at LOCOMOTIVE Agency, in her session at SMX Next, “which means that search engines, businesses and marketers had to pivot to meet those demands and needs.”
The events of 2020 have changed how local businesses operate as well as Google’s search results. And, while these shifts are designed to make search easier for consumers, many businesses have been caught unawares, losing visibility on Google.
Image: Amanda Jordan.
Local marketers are at the forefront of these SERP updates, helping clients adapt to changes in features such as their Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) and Google Maps. But, the differences in these updates are not lost on local marketing professionals.
“Google, as always, is changing the layout and testing new things, so that’s not surprising,” said Jordan. “The thing that I found most interesting were the changes to reviews and the knowledge panel.”
To help local SEOs navigate these developments, Jordan provided the following strategies.
Improve the quality of local reviews
“Google has grouped reviews together by topic,” said Jordan. “This is one of those updates that were mentioned in a timeline. You can see that there is a new badge for the new reviews.”
Google also seems to be reorganizing how it displays third-party reviews.
“Third-party reviews are going to continue to be important because those are being shown in the knowledge panel,” said Jordan. “They’re being shown in regular organic search results, so it’s important to know where you stand.”
Image: Amanda Jordan.
Review topics, sources, relevancy, and recency each play a major role in how the local algorithm ranks them. Marketers should know where their clients stand in terms of each of these factors and help facilitate the creation of quality reviews.
Edit your knowledge panels using on- and off-site sources
Google is revamping its local knowledge panel in major ways. It seems to be shaping into “its own entity, which includes lots of third-party data,” says Jordan. This means more of your clients’ panel information could be coming from sources you have no access to.
“While these things may seem out of our control, sometimes we can influence what Google uses,” Jordan said.
Here are some areas Jordan recommends marketers check if their panels contain inaccurate data from sources across the web:
On-sitesources
Schema
Site content
Robot directives
Google Business Profile completion
Off-sitesources
Industry sites
Third-party reviews
Google reviews
Make corrections to your data sources and test your knowledge panel appearances when possible. Even if the corrections seem small, Google can still find the new information if the changes are made in one of these key areas.
Prepare to adapt to mobile SERP changes
Business information isn’t the only thing changing in this local landscape; mobile SERP layouts are transforming as well. While marketers know this happens, SERPs have begun transforming them frequently — and not always for the better.
Jordan highlighted an instance in which one of her clients’ local panels lost some important information: “We had a client that had their site links not showing up only on mobile only if you search from their city; anywhere else in the world everything was fine.”
Local SERP issues like these can seem complicated to fix, but marketers can use insights from competitor analysis to determine the best course of action. In Jordan’s case, her team worked on updating their client’s local panel so that it would include each element the competitor used.
It should be noted that Google often experiments with local results, which could result in temporary changes to how they display in the SERPs.
Moving forward with local SEO
“Google is going to continue focusing on online reputation and customer sentiment,” Jordan said, pointing to what she believed marketers should expect from local SERPs going forward. Getting clients onboard with these areas of focus can help future-proof their campaigns in the long run.
These changes to local SERPs, coupled with the rise in features focused on purchasing products and booking appointments, will require marketers to become more adaptable. But if Google provides actionable data along the way, businesses can rest assured they’ll be ready for what comes next.
“I would hope that Google’s insights for businesses get even better so that trends and user experience and customer experience show up in your panel,” said Jordan, “So that you’d be able to look at that data and make changes in your business.”
Beginning on March 1, 2022, Google AdSense’s Matched content widget will only show ads, the company announced Wednesday. To go along with the change, Google is also rebranding Matched content as “Multiplex ads.”
What’s changing.Launched in 2015 as a free recommendation service that enables sites to promote their own content, along with ads (which can be disabled), to visitors, the Matched content widget will continue to function that way until February 28, 2022.
An example of a Matched content widget. Image: Google.
“Due to decreasing usage of the content promotion service, and positive customer feedback and performance results from the ads-only Matched content ad format, we’ve decided to turn down the content promotion service and convert all existing Matched content units to only show ads,” Google said in the announcement, “This also applies to Matched content units that have the ‘Monetize with Ads’ option turned off.”
Fresh rebrand, new rules. To be eligible for Matched content, sites must contain a minimum number of unique pages and meet a traffic volume requirement. With the change and subsequent rebrand as Multiplex ads, these requirements will be lifted and the ad type will be available to all AdSense publishers.
After March 1, 2022, the Matched content page in the AdSense interface will be removed and the Matched content unit editor will be updated to show the new ads-only format.
Why we care. Sites that were using the Matched content widget to show users a mix of their own content and ads will, as of March 1, only be showing ads. This change will happen automatically, even if you have the “Monetize with Ads” option switched off.
If you don’t want the widget to only show ads, you should remove it before March 1.
As your organization continues to grow and expand, managing basic day-to-day processes can become increasingly complex. Fortunately, you can scale and streamline your business model with powerful mortgage CRM solutions from top providers.
With the right customer relationship management technology, you can enhance the borrower experience, track the performance of your loan officers, and maximize profitability.
A robust platform will allow you to:
Automate Marketing Processes
Automated marketing solutions will save you time while also enhancing the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. Unify your entire organization with powerful, and custom-tailored content featuring your brand.
With automated marketing, you can present a cohesive brand image across your organization. Your brokers will be able to connect with leads and past clients at the touch of a button. This will allow each team to focus their energy on more important tasks.
Increase Business Volume
There is no better way to boost the productivity of your individual loan officers than by implementing organized workflows.
For example, a CRM can perform basic tasks like sending out documents for signature when a specific event occurs. If a new VA loan comes in, you can set up your system to automatically send out relevant documents that will be necessary, saving processors time and ensuring that every detail is accounted for.
A mortgage CRM platform should offer premium sales tools, marketing automation, and other solutions that will help you increase business volume. These tools can make it easier to nurture existing client relationships while also building new partnerships with prospective borrowers.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
A lack of communication can have a negative impact on the customer experience. As your organization continues to grow, loan officers must be equipped with tools to keep buyers, processors, and real estate agents in the loop about the status of the loans they’re working on.
A powerful CRM platform makes it much easier to do just that. Your mortgage brokers can enjoy access to a multi-channel messaging system with branded content. They can communicate with other staff members and your valued customers via SMS, email, social media, and using in-app notifications.
For example, when an appraisal comes in, you can send out a custom-branded message automatically to the realtors on both sides of the table, informing them that the loan has moved forward. This can help agents to feel well-informed about where the deal stands.
With the right tools, your borrowers, real estate agents, and loan officers will be in sync from the moment an application is received to the time that the customer receives the coveted “clear to close.”
Develop Cohesive Brand Messaging
If you want to continue building your mortgage enterprise, you have to present cohesive brand messaging. Any content you deliver should convey your company’s core values and mission while also addressing borrowers who are at every stage of the mortgage process.
That is why a top solution should include branding and messaging control tools. These built-in functions allow you to set up compliant and consistent marketing content that aligns with your long-term goals.
Gain Total Control over Your Databases
Multi-location mortgage brokerages generate massive amounts of data. If your marketing and sales database is not properly managed, this abundance of information can cause leads to get lost in the shuffle. Over time, this will cause you to miss out on vital sales while damaging your reputation.
Top-quality software helps you avoid these dangers by giving you total control over your sales and marketing databases. You can assess loan officer performance — including the average time to close a transaction — manage client data and streamline the mortgage process from start to finish.
Schedule Your Free Demo Today
BNTouch’s solution has developed a reputation as one of the most innovative CRM platforms available today. But don’t just take our word for it. The best way to determine whether our technology is right for your mortgage enterprise is to try it for yourself.
At BNTouch, we are confident in the quality and performance of our flagship platform. With that in mind, we provide prospective clients with the opportunity to experience our solution firsthand. Contact us today to learn more or to book yourno-obligation demo!
