January’20 Digital Marketing News & Updates
Welcome to the second episode of digital marketing news that Converged SEO Consultant Cemre Yildiz summarized. It’s for you to read the January’20 updates that are mostly about SEO in a bundle. Hope you’ll enjoy it in a blink.
January ‘20
How to Create 10x SEO Reports
Cyrus Shepard shares great tips on reporting which is a crucial part of the digital marketing business in a 10 minutes video. According to him, a good SEO report tries to accomplish three things:
- tie the report directly to your business metrics
- show the value of SEO
- drive action
Check out Moz Blog for Cyrus Shepard’s article
Advertisers beware: location data often isn’t what it appears to be
As Patricio Robles underlines location is crucial for advertisers. From the location data, advertisers often make inferences about everything from intent to demographic characteristics. But there’s a catch when it comes to location data: Location isn’t nearly as straightforward as it looks. He also shares some examples of how the data could be manipulative. Quote: “For example, Siggi Simonarson, the founder of a startup called Hyperlink, discovered that his first Google AdWords campaign that he had set up to target individuals in the US was generating paid clicks in countries like Turkey and Egypt.” Woops!
Check out Econsultancy for Patricio Robles’ article
Best GTM Uses for SEO
It would be a waste if we skip Ian Pfister’s article on Google Tag Manager since he takes us through setting up event and form tracking step by step. If you have no idea of GTM, you can still understand and implement it. Dynamic schema implementation and injecting metadata are two bonuses.
Check out Path Interactive Blog for Ian Pfister’s article
Why Medium Lost Half of its Visibility
In this article, Izzi Smith joins forces with Onely’s Tomek Rudzki to share and explain Medium’s dramatic loss in SEO visibility. Everyone knows Medium which is a user-generated content publisher. Most of us are already publishers on that platform. But shit happens and according to Searchmetrics and Sistrix, Medium’s top level domain recently saw a 40% drop in organic visibility in desktop and 50% in mobile. This is truly an interesting case for everyone to observe, not just SEOs.
15 Experts Reveal The Trends for Technical SEO in 2020
Not the biggest fan of reading an article that has a bunch of contributors, but this one is different, to be honest. It has great predictions from SEO experts all around the world. Some of the best ones are:
- Task automation
- Schema and structured data
- Amazon SEO (Yes, that’s a thing and Hamlet Batista thinks more SEOs will take an interest in learning about Amazon SEO.)
Check out Kevin Indig’s Website
Google rolls out organic ‘Popular Products’ listings in mobile search results
Mid-January, Google announced the official rollout of “Popular Products” for apparel, shoe and similar searches in mobile results. You’d want to be there and you can. The listings are powered by product schema and retailer feeds submitted to Google Merchant Center.
Check out Google Blog for the announcement
Observation on January 2020 Core Update
On the 13th of January, Google rolled out a core update and we have seen it can affect different websites from various sectors and countries differently.
If you started to see an increase or a big hit at your organic traffic after that date, keep in mind that you might be affected.
Check out Google’s Core Update Announcement
Data-vocabulary.org is out. Schema.org is in.
On the 21st of January, Google announced that they won’t be using data-vocabulary markup. As they announced, with the increasing usage and popularity of schema.org Google decided to focus our development on a single scheme. As of April 6, 2020, data-vocabulary.org markup will no longer be eligible for Google rich result features. You better check before that date.
Check out Google Webmasters’ Twitter account for details
Twitter rolling out iMessage-like reactions feature to direct messages
Here’s how to use the new feature:
To add a reaction, hover over the message and click the reaction button (heart and plus icon), or double-tap on the message and pick an emoji from the pop-up. You can undo a reaction at any time and it will be removed from the message for all participants. Click or tap on a reaction in a conversation to view who reacted to the message.
This is very similar to the reactions feature Apple includes in iMessage, which makes it easier to acknowledge (or passive aggressively respond to) another message without sending a full reply.
Browser safety is constantly being improved. Latest requirements are for cookies. Even though Safari has not announced the implementation of SameSite requirements for cookies, Secure’ cookies as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are planning. Safari’s also recently announced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is similar but may handle SameSite settings differently.
So what does it mean for developers?
It’s important because of the different handling of third-party cookies as part of the secure-by-default trend in the browser space.
Check out Search Engine Land’s article on cookies
January’20 was a long month with a bunch of new updates, so let me drop a few additional links without a wrap up for you to discover in your free time:
