Season 2 – Episode 5
Today is January 7th, 2022 and I’ll be talking about some Google SERP updates, a Google ads error, New Display Ads for Podcasts in Spotify, WordPress major security release, Making money from a site hack, and some actionable tactics to help drive customers to buy.
Google has launched a “Shops” section in the mobile search results with three results that can be expanded to 10. Google’s statement:
“We recently launched Shops, a new module available on mobile devices for select US-English shopping-related queries,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “We launched this to help present more seller options to users on Search. This feature currently shows 3 shops and users can then expand to see up to 10 merchants depending on availability. The selection of results shown and their order are based on organic search ranking.”
This is something I really like seeing, we typically see additions to the search result page which you have to pay to be included, but this is purely organic. Go SEO!
https://searchengineland.com/google-launches-shops-section-in-mobile-search-results-378256
Google looks to be testing or updating their Google Discover section with trending searches. See if it’s updated on your device. This might help expand your discovery section and I personally find it to be fairly well done in general, but this would add a bit more diversity and help me expand beyond my little bubble of common sources.
Google Ads has an error right now when saving exact keywords saying they are being saved as broad. Google Ads Liason replied that it was a bug and they were working on fixing it. So don’t be alarmed, but is this the beginning of the end of match types? We’ll see, little by little it seems Google is trying to remove the ability to target specific searches and is trending towards industry or intent instead.
While we’re talking about ads, Spotify is going to be bringing display ads to Podcasts. Spotify is calling them Call-to-Action cards. These will be visual and interactive during ad plays as well as retargeting while exploring the app. A quote from spotify’s release: “With digital audio being such a multitasking-friendly and engaging medium, more people are listening than ever before. In fact, in the U.S., mobile time spent listening to audio content is now outpacing time spent on social media, video, and gaming, according to eMarketer.” Spotify has a bit of a walled garden right now with several major names only available via their app. Joe Rogan, Michelle Obama, Heavyweight, Reply All and the list goes on. We’ll see how this is used by your everyday podcaster.
WordPress released a security release yesterday which patched 4 major vulnerabilities. This affects versions 3.7 to 5.8, so pretty much any WordPress install out there. With WordPress powering nearly a third of sites out there, and knowing this has been out there for this long is a bit concerning. Make sure you keep your sites up to date, even low volume blogs can have a huge long term impact if they get hacked and you don’t notice. Everything from email deliverability to SEO rankings.
So, if your site is hacked, what do you do? First, you get it cleaned up and then make sure your IT or Dev Ops is taking proactive steps to ensure that it can’t happen again. If you don’t know anything about cleaning up – check out SUCURI, I’ve used them in the past to clean up a hacked site and they took care of things in just a matter of hours.
So what did years ago when her main site was hacked and started ranking for Michael Kors handbags. she was able to remove the hack and then redirected all of those pages to Amazon using her affiliate link. She made a few hundred dollars before turning it all off.
This is just pure genius, and hopefully your hack is for something G rated like handbags. Take a look at how the hack worked, what content was generated, how was it linked. It might give you some insights into the potential of the site if you are all of the sudden ranking #1 for a keyword.
Katelyn Bourgoin spent over 1500 hours learning about cognitive biases and heuristics, the stuff that drives customers to buy and she put together a Twitter thread of the top 19 concepts that marketers need to know: And example of one:
# 14 – BANDWAGON EFFECT: We’re more likely to do something if everyone else is doing it That’s why in 1957 McDonald’s started showing how many customers they’d served on their signs.
Take a look at her thread with examples, some things in there that may trigger some ideas for your marketing efforts.
