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Good morning, Marketers, and what is “next?”

The semantics have been on my mind as the SMX team has been programming SMX Next, but also as I’m seeing lots of career shifting in the search marketing community. Companies are hiring a ton. Marketers are quitting their jobs, starting new ones, or founding their own businesses. People are saying, “Thank U, next” to in-office work, low salaries, and inflexible schedules.

At the same time, automation is a big “what’s next” for our industry (as well as what’s now). NLP is an existing technology that will take our industry to the “next” level. All of us are learning to do more with less data (a trend that will likely only continue).

And these all play into the career aspect too. We have to learn how to navigate our excelling careers with all these next-level technologies. It’s a lot, but search marketers are pros at coping with (and conquering) what’s next.

Carolyn Lyden,
Director of Search Content

Google page experience update is now rolled out

Google confirmed that it completed the page experience update rollout yesterday. This includes the updates to the Top Stories carousel on mobile search but the Google News app changes won’t be done for a week.

Google began rolling out the page experience update on June 15th and told us it would be completed by the end of August. It technically was not finished before the end of August and has about a week more to go, but it is essentially done rolling out, say Google reps.

Read more here.

Why are in-house SEOs looking for new jobs?

Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO, tweeted about some contacts looking for new in-house SEO jobs. Mark Preston, Head of Digital at The Hakim Group, asked in response, “Why are so many great in-house SEOs looking for a new job?” Here are some of the top reasons Schwartz listed:

1. In WAY too many companies there are limited vertical opportunities for growth within SEO. For someone that loves SEO the only way to keep doing SEO is to move on.
2. There is not enough value placed on SEO so therefore salaries are arbitrarily capped. The SEO manager that knows they are contributing significantly to the bottom line will eventually get frustrated at not getting great raises and will move on to a company that is willing to pay $$$ precisely b/c they have to pay to hire.
3. Companies are making employees go back to the office after a year or more of remote work. Those companies are going to end up losing their highly skilled SEOs and won’t know how hard they will be to replace until it’s too late.

Why we care.  It’s food for thought for in-house marketing departments on how to keep their SEOs feeling heard, fulfilled, and like they’re growing in their roles. Even if your SEO manager doesn’t want to move into a management position, there should be practitioner options for growth within your organization. No one wants to stay stagnant, especially with all the great job opportunities out there in today’s fiery market.

What to do now that ETAs are going away

What happens when ETAs sunset and those in regulated industries still have to get ad coy and variations approved? “ETAs might be going away, but your ability to control ads is not. All you need to do is use ‘pinning’ at scale and you still have full control over your ad messaging. This is going to be essential for regulated industries and those who see poor RSA performance (*many* people),” tweeted Brad Geddes, Co-Founder of Adalysis. 

Data from our own contributors has found that pinning ad components can hurt performance: “In our analysis, we looked at ads with at least one pinned component and compared them to ads with no pinned components. Ads without pinning did better on CTR, conversion rate, CPC and CPA. But the opposite was true for ROAS where ads with a pinned component did better,” said Frederick Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr.

So what happens if you have to pin? “My opinion is that pinning headlines will be necessary for many ad groups.  Yes, it hobbles the algorithm somewhat, but so be it. I doubt Ad Strength measurement has any predictive value for low volume ad groups,” predicted Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster.

Why we care. While the PPC community knew it was coming, the phase-out of ETAs is making many start brainstorming new strategy ideas. With the advanced notice (ETAs won’t disappear until late June 2022), now’s the time to start testing, adjusting, and migrating your ad strategy to accommodate the changes. Those tests should probably include pinning, just to see how it goes.

Jobs: On the hunt for something new in 2021? Here are the latest career opportunities in search

SEO Specialist @ EmberTribe (USA, remote)

• Salary: $55k-70k/yr
• Audit client and prospect digital portfolios to identify improvement opportunities, and deliver these findings both verbally and in writing in such a way that supports new business acquisition.
• Track and report on relevant KPIs for organic search, teaching and guiding clients on what metrics are relevant and applicable. Use this performance data to drive strategic updates and iterative tests aimed at increasing overall search performance.

Web Content Manager @ WorkMoney (USA, remote)

• Salary: $90k/yr
• Create content that drives traffic to our soon-to-be released website
• Work within the member value team in close coordination with teams focused on direct member outreach, advocacy and digital engagement to refine our overall tone and offerings

Paid Search Associate @ Velocity Global, LLC (USA, remote)

• Salary: $55k-65k/yr
• Assist in creation, launch, and management of paid search campaigns to bring in qualified leads resulting in pipeline growth
• Monitor, optimize, and report campaign performance on an on-going basis to ensure KPIS are met or exceeded

Demand Generation Manager/Senior Manager @ Clarify Health Solutions (USA, remote)

• Salary: $120k-132k/yr
• Lead, design, and execute demand generation strategy and campaigns
• Own the development of a content strategy and creation of content (white papers, case studies, e-books, webinars, videos, etc) that will drive demand and is aligned to the stages of the buyer’s journey.

Enter a job opening for an opportunity to be featured in this section.

Search Shorts: Google Ads location targeting, Sept. 1 algo update, and post-cookie measurement

Understanding & optimizing Google location targeting settings. If you choose to have your ads showing in the US, why do you see people from Germany, France, and Japan clicking on your ads? If you are only targeting Chicago, why do you have clicks from San Francisco? The real question is: Are those clicks converting, and if not, how can I stop them?

Was there another algo update on September 1? Barry dives into the chatter on SERoundtable: “There are not a huge number of complaints, but the tools are picking up on the fluctuations in the Google search results.”

Google analytics chief addresses critics and plans for measurement in post-cookie world. “With paradigm shifts you end up having a phase of ambiguity, where there’s a lot of education that has to go around before the industry as a whole can coalesce to a solution,” said Vidhya Srinivasan in the interview with AdAge.

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The post Why are in-house SEOs looking for new jobs?; Friday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has completed the rollout of the link spam update it started just over four weeks ago. “The link spam update is now complete,” Danny Sullivan said via the Google Search Liaison account.

What took so long. Google originally said this update would “roll out across the next two weeks.” But as you can see, it took an additional two weeks to complete – a total of four weeks. Why did it take so long? Google did not say, but I suspect things got stuck a bit and the rollout hit some unexpected snags.

The original announcement. “In our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam-fighting change today — which we call the ‘link spam update.’ This algorithm update, which will roll out across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms,” Google wrote.

Nullifying link spam. You can see the word Google used here was “nullifying,” which does not necessarily mean “penalize,” but instead, to ignore or simply not count. Google’s efforts around link spam have been to ignore and not count spammy links since Penguin 4.0 was released in 2016.

Why we care. This might be a hard one to pinpoint for you or your clients since it took a month to fully roll out. But if you see any changes to your rankings, maybe in a big way, over the last month, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time.

As Google wrote, “Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high-quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetize it with properly tagged affiliate links.”

The post Google link spam update done rolling out appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google has updated the How Google Search Works website portal today and with that informed us that the search company made 4,500 “improvements” to search in 2020. “There have been 4,500 such improvements in 2020 alone,” the company said.

4,500 changes. Google said in the year 2020, Google made 4,500 updates to Google Search. These changes can be ranking changes, user interface changes and much more. By comparison, in 2019, Google made 3,200 changes to Google Search. Looking further back, in 2010, we covered that Google had about one change per day. Google said in 2019 it made about 350-400 changes in 2009.

Clearly, Google has expedited those changes over the years and is increasing the rate at which it updates Google Search.

Updated How Search Works site. Google also launched a “fully-redesigned How Search Works website that explains the ins and outs of Search.”

In 2013, Google first launched its How Search Works site with an explanatory infographic. The site has some pretty cool features, including showing examples of pages Google took down because of spam. Google took down that spam feature and relaunched the portal in 2016 with more details on how normal people want to know how Google Search Works.

Google said in the 2021 version it has “updated the site with fresh information, made it easier to navigate and bookmark sections and added links to additional resources that share how Search works and answer common questions.” “The website gives you a window into what happens from the moment you start typing in the search bar to the moment you get your search results. It gives an overview of the technology and work that goes into organizing the world’s information, understanding what you’re looking for and then connecting you with the most relevant, helpful information,” Google added.

Check it out at google.com/search/howsearchworks

Why we care. It is nice to see Google document how many changes it makes from year to year in Google Search. It is also good for search marketers to review how Google Search works and do a deep dive into the language Google uses to describe how the search engine functions. Dig into the new portal and let us know if you find anything exciting.

The post Google made 4,500 changes to search in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google is rolling out the link spam update today and throughout the next two weeks. This link spam update targets spammy links “more broadly” and “across multiple languages,” Duy Nguyen, a Google search quality analyst, said.

The announcement. Google wrote “in our continued efforts to improve the quality of the search results, we’re launching a new link spam fighting change today — which we call the “link spam update.” This algorithm update, which will rollout across the next two weeks, is even more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. Sites taking part in link spam will see changes in Search as those links are re-assessed by our algorithms.”

Nullifying link spam. You can see the word Google used here was “nullifying,” which does not necessarily mean “penalize,” but instead, to ignore or simply not count. Google’s efforts around link spam have been to ignore and not count spammy links since Penguin 4.0 was released in 2016.

Might feel like a penalty. While Google may not penalize your site for these spammy links, if Google ignores or nullifies links that may have been helping a site rank well in Google Search, that might feel like a penalty. In short, if you see your rankings drop over the next two weeks and if it is a sharper drop, it might be related to this update.

Best practices on links. Google’s Duy Nguyen published a blog post about link spam and best practices that you can read here.

Why we care. Again, if you see ranking declines in Google over the next two weeks, it might be related to this new link spam update. Make sure your links are natural and in accordance with Google’s webmaster guidelines. Work on improving your site, so it can naturally attract new links over time.

As Google wrote, “Site owners should make sure that they are following the best practices on links, both incoming and outgoing. Focusing on producing high quality content and improving user experience always wins out compared to manipulating links. Promote awareness of your site using appropriately tagged links, and monetize it with properly tagged affiliate links.”

The post Google Search link spam update rolling out now appeared first on Search Engine Land.