“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.
Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.
An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?
The rise of private search engines
Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”
Brave Browser
Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.
The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”
Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.
Would you pay for a private search engine?
While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.
Without Neeva versus with NeevaNeeva
Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”
Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.
Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.
“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”
Not a level playing field
Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.
Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.
“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”
But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.
DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.
Fighting for a future without Google defaults
Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”
Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.
“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”
If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.
Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.
In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”
Google engineers and staff on its ads and Chrome teams have a new monthly meeting on their calendars — with digital publishers.
Representatives from around 20 publishers, many from large Comscore 50 media properties, have convened monthly since March with Google ads and Chrome execs and engineers to conduct focused conversations about technologies Google is developing as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative.
In general, though some publishers have shown interest in testing Google’s emerging tech, many of them have believed the platform’s timeline for development and implementation of it has been “too aggressive,” said Rob Beeler, the de facto leader of the fledgling publisher collective and founder of Beeler.Tech, who helps publishers navigate the complex world of ad tech.
“It’s been clear in these meetings that publishers have had a lot of things to answer before they were on board with any of these solutions,” he told Digiday.
Publishers have in many ways been left out of Google’s efforts to redesign how digital ads work without third-party cookies. This is despite the fact that they produce and distribute the content that comprises the open web, which Google and others say they aim to preserve when the great shift away from today’s tracking technologies goes into effect. Now, the regular meetings between a small group of top-tier publishing execs and Googlers are intended to give publishers a louder voice in the discussion.
Neither Google nor Beeler would name publishers involved and two group participants Digiday spoke with for this story asked not to be named. Google and the publisher participants have made a point of keeping the meetings hush-hush, in part because none wants to alienate smaller publishers who might feel left out of a process that already has most of them feeling sidelined. Beeler said participants of the new group were selected because they are “in a position to have some influence as things get rolled out.” He also said meetings with a larger group of people might become too unwieldy to be productive.
“We are committed to open dialogue with publishers of all sizes as they develop strategies for the transition to a more privacy-centric web,” said a Google spokesperson. “We take every opportunity to engage with publishers and to listen, share information and solicit feedback on how we can build for a better future.”
A more accessible forum than the wonky W3C
Many industry players criticize Google for wielding too much power in the transition away from third-party cookies and development of new tech intended to replace them in a more privacy-preserving way. The aspects of that work that Google has made public have happened inside the W3C, or Worldwide Web Consortium. The international web standards body serves as host for engineers from companies including Google, Facebook and other ad tech firms hashing out complex elements of Privacy Sandbox tech development through jargon-laden web forums.
Although some bigger publishers such as The New York Times and Hearst have dispatched staff to W3C meetings and forums, many publishers find the environment an impenetrable labyrinth, keeping them away despite handwringing over how the tech developed by W3C participants will affect their businesses.
“The W3C is very technical,” said a participant of the recently-formed publisher group who represents smaller media outlets and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Rather than circumventing the W3C process, insiders said Google’s recent monthly meetings with publishers (which, of course, take place on Google Meet) are intended to provide a more accessible setting for publishing execs to learn about what’s in development, voice concerns and perhaps eventually acclimate to the idea of having their own representatives play more active roles in Privacy Sandbox efforts at the W3C.
Google itself has lamented a lack of engagement from publishers in its Privacy Sandbox development. Chetna Bindra, Google’s group product manager in user privacy and trust in its Ads division, told this reporter for The Drum in November 2020 the company was “hoping for more participation” from publishers “as we come up with a workable solution for everyone that is privacy-forward.”
What’s on the agenda — and what isn’t
Thus far, meetings have entailed discussions of technologies such as FLoC — Google’s recently-tested but evolving cookieless ad targeting method and how it might affect publishers, for instance in relation to creating inventory packages. First-party sets — which would affect how domains owned by the same publisher are defined in context of data collection and use via web browsers like Google Chrome — were a topic on the agenda at the July meeting. But the first half-hour was devoted to discussion of Google’s morphing timeline for rollout of Privacy Sandbox tech.
“A lot of these conversations are just like level-setting,” said the unnamed smaller publisher representative.
Beeler, who also helps run a similar recently-formed group of EU-based publishers meeting with Google to discuss the same sorts of issues, said he and other publisher reps help determine the meeting agendas.
Still, some topics that could have significant impacts for publishers continue to be relegated to engineer-centric spaces. For instance, participants in the new meetups said changes to FLoC which Google is mulling and were recently presented at an engineering research event have yet to make the publisher meeting agenda.
“It always amazes me how these things get reported in random tweets, blog posts or non-endemic conferences like an engineering research event,” said another exec participating in the new publisher meetings with Google who asked not to be named.
Correction: This story originally incorrectly reported that Chetna Bindra leads Google’s product development for third-party cookie replacement in its Chrome browser division.
The search giant has delayed the rollout of FLoC, its controversial replacement for third-party cookies, until 2023.
Google is in an interesting position when it comes to making the internet respect your privacy. It controls the world’s largest advertising platform, the most used search engine, and the most popular web browser. Together, that means Google has more influence over how your data is gathered and tracked online than any other company.
It’s significant then that over the past few years, Google has joined the effort to eliminate the worst offender when it comes to tracking, third-party cookies. Those are the little pieces of code websites use to track your activity across other sites and apps.
Cookies, in and of themselves, aren’t necessarily bad. They serve valuable purposes like keeping you logged in to sites you use regularly. It’s just that they are also used for purposes they were never intended for, like tracking everything you do online.
In 2020, Google announced that Chrome would block third-party cookies by default–something almost every other browser already does. Since that time, Google has been trying to figure out an alternative that will still allow advertisers to target users without invading their privacy.
Google’s solution, known as FLoC, analyses web activity in Chrome and assigns the user to a cohort. Advertisers can then target ads at those groups as opposed to individual users. Google argues that the method is privacy-protecting since individual users can’t be identified. In theory, that sounds great, right?
Except, basically, no one else thinks it’s a good idea. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, for example, calls it a “terrible idea.” Advertisers aren’t fans either. Amazon has said it will block FLoC from working on any of its sites.
That explains why last week, Google said it will delay the rollout of FLoC, and the blocking of third-party cookies, until 2023.
Look, there’s no question that Google, should it decide to, could make the internet respect your privacy. It could simply turn off third-party cookies in Chrome–just flip a switch and make them go away for good.
The cynical take is that Google is dragging this out because it’s addicted to your data and wants to protect its business. The truth, however, is that’s only partially true. In fact, I think you can make the case the truth is actually worse. Google doesn’t even need that data.
While Google could technically make the internet respect your privacy, the problem is that doing so would give it an enormous advantage over every other advertising network and platform. Google collects massive amounts of first-party data on its users, meaning that it is far less dependent on third-party tracking.
Besides, Google’s most profitable advertising platform is search. Google doesn’t have to do any third-party tracking to know what you search for since you literally type what you’re looking for into its website. All it has to do is show you ads at the top of the search engine results page.
Blocking third-party tracking altogether would certainly affect Google’s business, but would have a far greater impact on the rest of the digital advertising industry. As a result, Google is in an almost impossible situation, but not for the reason it might seem.
Eliminating third-party cookies seems like the best possible outcome for Google because it would force advertisers to become even more dependent on Google. In the long run, it would give Google even more control over digital advertising, which you might think would be a good thing for the company.
Except, considering the antitrust pressure Google is facing, the last thing it wants to do is anything that makes it look like the company is becoming more dominant. Google can’t cut off the rest of the industry–not because it’s being charitable, but because to do so would put its entire business at risk.
If you think Google is facing scrutiny now, imagine what would happen if it became even more dominant. It’s hard to see a scenario where it wouldn’t be broken apart by regulators, which might be better for your privacy but would definitely be bad for Google. Once again, when faced with a decision between protecting user privacy and protecting its own business, Google has chosen the latter.
This week: the page experience update is here, a new privacy-first search engine is here, and a new Search Console feature is here.
Here’s what happened this week in digital marketing.
Google Page Experience Now Rolling Out
Here we go!
We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. Some of us have been dreading this day.
And now it’s here.
Google started rolling out the page experience update this week.
But it’s happening slowly. You might not notice how it impacts your site until August.
It’s not likely that the change will impact your site much, if at all, though. Google previously claimed that the new signals have a minor effect on where sites land in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Here’s how it’s all going down:
Google started using page experience metrics to determine eligibility for top stories.
Soon, you’ll see the AMP badge go away.
Google continues to test the page experience badge but offers no report on when it will formally roll out.
Also: keep in mind that a core update recently rolled out. So if your keywords are already doing the Google Dance, that could be the reason. It might have nothing to do with the page experience update.
Meet Brave: A New Privacy-First Search Engine
Looking for a search engine that respects your privacy? Check out Brave.
Brave isn’t just the name of the search engine. It’s also the name of the company that makes that search engine.
And it’s the name of the browser, too.
As it stands now, Brave doesn’t show ads. The company says it might run ads one day in the future, but not in a way that violates users’ privacy.
“Brave Search does not track you, your searches, or your clicks; it’s impossible for Brave to disclose any information about you to anyone,” the company said in a statement. “Any future ads we may support will be anonymized (like all other Brave ads), and will not influence ranking. In the future, we will also offer paid ad-free search.”
Another Brave feature that publishers will love: the founders promise not to use content from the web without sending traffic to the website hosting the content.
As you may know, Google screen-scrapes content from websites and posts it on google.com. That gives people the ability to get their questions answered without even visiting the site with the answers.
Brave says it won’t do that.
The new software is still in preview mode.
Now All Google Merchants Can Accept Payment With Shopify
Good news if you’re a Google Merchant user: you can now accept payments via Shopify.
Even if you’re not a Shopify user.
More good news: you can use Shopify for checkout if you’re a Facebook or Instagram merchant as well.
The new solution is called Shop Pay. It’s a one-click checkout process offered by Shopify.
Here’s the announcement from the company: ”Each day, more than 1.8 billion people log on to Facebook and a billion shopping sessions take place across Google. By bringing Shop Pay to all merchants regardless of the commerce platform they use, we’re making an industry-leading checkout more accessible to independent brands at a time when finding and converting customers has never been more important.”
According to reports, check out with Shop Pay is 70% faster than an average online checkout. It’s also got a 1.72x higher conversion rate.
The new tool also offers order tracking for consumers.
Shop Pay has already facilitated more than $20 billion in online payments.
Google Rolls out Search Console Insights
Want to know more about what kind of content resonates with your core audience? If so, then check out Google Search Console Insights.
As the name implies, it’s part of Google Search Console. If you head over to Search Console right now, you’ll likely see a banner at the top advertising the new Insights feature.
Click on the link in that banner and Search Console will take you to a new screen where you’ll see site activity for the past 28 days.
For starters, the tool will show you how many clicks you got from Google Search. It will also show you how much that number increased or decreased from the previous month.
Below that, you’ll see your most searched queries that brought people to your site. You’ll also see where those keywords land in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and how many clicks landed visitors to that page during the time period.
You also have the option to view most trending queries. That will show you queries “on the rise” on your website.
Google Updating Top Stories Carousel
It seems like the Top Stories carousel is in the news a lot lately. And here it is again.
This time, it’s because Google announced that it’s changing the carousel.
Here are the changes you can expect to see:
AMP no longer required for inclusion in Top Stories
AMP icon will go away
Google will eliminate swiping on the carousel
It’s not much of a carousel without swiping, but Google says it needs to eliminate that ability.
Why? Because Google can’t guarantee instant loading of pages since AMP is no longer required.
You can expect to see the changes roll out around the same time as the page experience update rolls out.
That is: now.
Google Explains the Difference Between Audience Expansion and Optimized Targeting
Google recently sent out an email to Google Ads users stating that some campaigns using audience expansion would get migrated to optimized targeting.
It left many strategists scratching their heads and wondering: “What’s the difference?”
Google is here to answer that question.
According to a spokesperson, audience expansion “limited campaigns from benefiting from Google’s auto-targeting systems by expanding only on the user-selected audiences.”
On the other hand: “Optimized targeting is a new paradigm for auto-targeting that can move beyond any selected criteria to optimize into the best performing audiences for a given ad group while meeting the campaign’s objective.”
Bottom line: you’re in better hands with optimized targeting.
Facebook Gets Into Podcast Integration
This past week, Facebook announced that you can connect your podcast’s RSS feed to a Facebook Page. Then, users can enjoy your podcasts without ever leaving the Facebook platform.
Further, all your new podcasts going forward will automagically get integrated into the Facebook feed.
Facebook says that users can listen to podcasts even when the app is running in the background. So they can do other things at the same time.
Additionally, Facebook will enable users to create and share short clips from podcasts on its platform. That’s a great way to give your podcasts more publicity.
Facebook is contacting some Page owners about the new feature right now. No word yet on when it fully rolls out.
Twitter Getting Closer to Emoji Reactions to Tweets
It looks like you’ll soon be able to respond to a tweet with an emoji.
All we know right now about the feature is brought to us by reverse-engineer extraordinaire Jane Manchun Wong.
And from what we can see, it looks like Twitter is implementing something similar to what’s on Facebook. Users will have a limited set of emojis they can use to give their reactions to tweets.
Current emoji reactions include: “Like,” “Cheer,” “Hmm,” “Sad,” and “Haha.”
Homework
Before you enjoy the start of summer, consider handling these to-do’s:
Windows 10
Support
Apply
Backgrounds
Android
Samsung Flight
Owner
News Articles
Accept Payments
If you’re a podcaster, think about how you can use the upcoming Facebook integration to promote your podcast.
Take a look at Search Console Insights. See what you can learn about the type of content that best works with your audience. Then, double-down on those subjects and keywords.
If you’re in the e-commerce space, think about how you can use Shop Pay to streamline the checkout process for your customers.
Take a look at Brave, the new search engine. It might one day become yet another option for online advertising.
Keep an eye on your keywords over the next couple of months. See where you’re losing ground and where you’re improving. Look for the common traits that seem to help your keywords move up in the SERPs and apply those principles to all your content.
It’s a common sight: Ads from that time you Googled flights to Cancún, or visited Nike to look for new running shoes, following you around the Internet.
Much of that tracking is made possible by cookies — little bits of code that jump off websites and lodge themselves in your browser, allowing new sites you visit to see where you’ve been before. Facebook and Google, the two most profitable advertising companies in history, use cookies to show ads across the Web based on info gathered on their own sites and social media networks.
But that’s all changing. Google has vowed to block cookies completely on its Chrome browser, which is used by around 70 percent of the world’s desktop computer owners, by the beginning of 2022. The decision, announced last year, sent shock waves through the advertising world, which has maintained revenue from tracking is necessary to fund a largely free Web.
Google says it has solutions to allow advertisers to keep showing relevant ads, but in privacy-protecting ways.Taken together, the company’s proposals are meant to let Web publishers, e-commerce companies and advertising agencies continue using targeted ads to make money, while assuring regular Internet users their data isn’t being stockpiled by an ever-growing list of companies and websites.
But privacy activists have already started poking holes in Google’s ideas.
And it may not matter. Advertising technology companies such as the Trade Desk have already taken the matter into their own hands, banding together to create new tracking tools that use email addresses. Other major companies have shown signs of pushing back against Google’s proposals, such as Amazon, which is currently blocking Chrome from collecting data on which users go to its websites. (Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Meanwhile, politicians and antitrust investigators in multiple countries have raised alarms that Google’s move could hurt competitors and further cement its power. And for regular Internet users, this largely behind-the-scenes change could have major implications for how private companies hoover up our data and make decisions about what we see online.
Here’s what you need to know.
How did we get here?
Cookies were written into early browsers to cut down on some of the inconveniences of surfing the Web. They allowed passwords to auto-fill, or websites to remember payment information so users didn’t have to type theirs in every time they came back. They also created a trail of breadcrumbs that the burgeoning online ad industry eagerly ate up, helping free websites make money.
But as the technology advanced, social media took off and consumers’ lives were lived increasingly online, it got creepy. Privacy advocates have always criticized the model, and more and more regular people have become aware of the issue, some expressing their displeasure by downloading ad blockers.
Google isn’t the first to make this change. Apple in 2017 started limiting and eventually blocking third-party cookies completely from its Safari browser. Mozilla’s Firefox followed soon after. But those two browsers make up less than 20 percent of the market, according to research firm eMarketer.
Despite Google’s own reliance on advertising and tracking for roughly $180 billion a year in revenue, chief executive Sundar Pichai admitted during a 2019 congressional hearing that people don’t like to feel they’re being tracked around the Internet. And in January 2020, Google said it too would block third-party cookies on Chrome within the next two years.
The changes come as politicians in the United States and elsewhere step up their attempts to regulate privacy. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has forced companies to ask permission before tracking people online since 2018. In 2020, America’s most populous state instituted the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives California residents the right to ask companies to delete whatever data has been gathered on them. As is the case with other consumer-focused regulation, the California law has essentially become the default nationwide.
Google was facing pressure from its competitors, too. Apple has been marketing its own privacy features aggressively, trying to paint itself as a privacy champion that doesn’t need to gather data to feed an advertising business like Google. It even threw up a giant billboard that loomed over Google’s exhibit at the 2019 CES tech conference in Las Vegas. Apple does gather some of its users data and uses it to sell targeted ads in its app store, though its ad business is much smaller than Google’s.
Some of Google’s advertising technology competitors say the move isn’t about privacy at all, but a way to hurt its rivals and push advertisers toward Google’s YouTube and search ads, which don’t need cookies to effectively target people.
“You can fix your public perception while at the same time cementing your own dominance and growing your own market share,” said Ratko Vidakovic, founder of AdProfs, an independent advertising technology consulting firm. “It seems like a no-brainer.”
A Google spokeswoman pointed to a company blog from March, where Marshall Vale, a product manager, said the company’s goal with FLOC and its other projects is to make cookies obsolete while also helping web publishers grow their businesses. Finding that balance is “critical to keep the web open, accessible and thriving for everyone,” Vale said.
How exactly does Google’s solution for the post-cookie world work?
Google can block cookies in Chrome relatively easily because it designs and controls the browser’s underlying code. Once it decides to make the change, it can update the browser and poof — no more cookies. To replace that functionality, Google’s engineers have marched out a menagerie of bird-themed acronyms like FLOC, FLEDGE and TURTLEDOVE to describe their proposals for advertising without cookies.
The ideas are working their way through the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, an international group of tech companies that debates and sets rules for how the Web works. However, Google doesn’t actually need to get approval from the rest of the W3C’s membership. Since its browser is the biggest in the world, it can simply make new rules and Web developers will have to follow them or risk seeing their websites stop working on Chrome.
“Google using the W3C letterhead to do this stuff makes it seem less like a Google power play,” said Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher at Brave, a browser that competes with Google’s Chrome.
The most fleshed-out idea so far is FLOC, which stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts. Under FLOC, instead of letting websites drop cookies into an individual’s browser, the browser itself watches what they do online. It then uses artificial intelligence to assign them to a cohort of several thousand people that the AI determines are interested in the same kinds of products. Then, instead of buying access to individual people, advertisers pay for ads to show up for users in a specific cohort.
For example, if you spent the past few days reading articles on ESPN, browsing New York Knicks jerseys and Googling NBA stats, you might be lumped into a package of several thousand basketball fans who would see similar ads. Cohort IDs refresh every week, so they’re based on the most recent browsing behaviour.
In the old world, websites would constantly be pulling up information about you based on the cookies trailing behind you. Now, the only identifying information your browser would present is which cohort you’re in. Google says this system is 95 percent as effective at getting clicks as old-school cookie ads are for advertisers.
If that’s true, consumers would see pretty much the same kind of ads they do now and will probably still have the feeling of being followed around the Web by ads for sites they recently visited.
This is good for privacy, though. … Isn’t it?
Generally, yes, but that doesn’t mean privacy advocates are celebrating the change. For one, Google’s Chrome browser is still monitoring every website you visit and feeding that into its algorithm. The information stays on your device, but it’s still being gathered. For those who want less surveillance from tech companies, it might feel like a step in the wrong direction.
“The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process,” Bennett Cyphers, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote in a March report on Google’s cookie replacements. “It hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model.”
It also isn’t clear yet which websites will have access to a person’s cohort ID. If it’s freely available, sites you visit repeatedly could collect them as they change week to week, tie it to other pieces of information about you such as your email or IP address, and build a dossier on your interests, circumventing the stated purpose of FLOC, Cyphers argues.Google acknowledges this issue and says it is one of the long-term problems it is working on. The system also raises the possibility of profiling based on race, allowing advertisers to discriminate against some people. Advertising jobs or housing selectively by race is illegal in the United States.
Still, compared to other proposals from the rest of the ad-tech industry, Google’s is arguably the best one for privacy, Vidakovic said.
“They’re trying to balance commercial needs with user privacy needs at the same time,” he said. “Despite their flaws, I think the concept behind FLOC and anonymous cohorts are a good balance.”
What does Google’s move mean for competition?
Unlike FLOC, cookies aren’t owned and controlled by a specific company. They are a generic technology that any Web publisher or ad-tech seller can use to track people and show them ads. The world of cookie advertising resembles a capitalist Wild West, where anyone can hang a shingle and try building a fortune in Web ads.
Google’s new FLOC system is more controlled, laying out strict rules for how exactly advertisers can interact with the people who use Chrome.
Cookies have also been used extensively to check how effective digital ads are. With FLOC, advertisers would have to trust Google that the ads they’re paying for are being shown to the right people.
Competitors to Google argue the company is pulling the ladder up behind it. Google used cookies to help it build a massive advertising business, but because YouTube and Google Search — which don’t need cookies — are its biggest moneymakers, it can afford to live in a cookie-free Web.Advertisers who can’t use cookies to find people on the open ocean of the Web will give more of their money to Google and Facebook who can pinpoint the right targets on their own sites, which industry insiders call “walled gardens.”
In January, the UK’s competition authority said it would investigate FLOC and Google’s other ideas to “assess whether the proposals could cause advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors.”
On the flip side, if Google were to simply shut down third-party cookies without building an alternative like FLOC, small companies, and the consumers who look to them for innovative new products, could pay the price. Big brands who already have contact information for their customers can use email marketing to reach them, while start-up retailers use targeted ads to find new people. Without targeted ads, companies such as glasses seller Warby Parker or makeup start-up Glossier might never have survived long enough to compete and bring down the prices that older companies were charging consumers.
The same dynamic applies to publishing. Big news organizations who have paying subscribers don’t rely as much on targeted ads as small, local news providers. If those small news providers have even fewer ways to make money, the communities they serve will suffer. (The Washington Post is working with the Trade Desk and other companies to use an email-based identifier for targeted ads).
Google argues that, unlike Apple and Mozilla, it actually had small publishers, advertisers and the consumers they serve in mind when it said it would build FLOC to account for the loss of targeting ability when cookies go away.
Either way, Google is set up for success. If FLOC does work effectively, it gains more control over the advertising ecosystem and can tell its users it has scored a win for their privacy. If it fails, advertisers will likely invest even more in the “walled gardens” — which conveniently include Google’s search ads and YouTube.
So what does this all mean for me?
The debate over cookies is a major reminder of just how much our online behavior is being tracked and recorded by dozens of private companies. It also shows how many companies have a stake in that reality.
Targeted advertising has grown up alongside the Internet, and helped create giants such as Facebook and Google, but also fostered an ecosystem of thousands of companies employing hundreds of thousands of people. When companies such as Google make changes to how products used by billions of people work, there are consequences. Getting rid of cookies completely could hurt news publishers and e-commerce start-ups, decreasing the number of voices online and pushing up prices for consumer products. It could also increase privacy and move the Internet in the direction of less surveillance overall.
None of this has been fully decided, and keeping track of the big changes made by companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple over the next several years will be key to understanding how our online lives are recorded, packaged and sold.
Feature Image Credit: (Washington Post illustration; iStock)
For years now Google’s phones have been a critical success but a sales flop. What gives?
“Awesome screen, awesome camera, long-lasting battery life,” was a tune that may still ring in the ears of many who turned on a TV around the launch of the Samsung Galaxy A51 – a few months before the launch of the Google Pixel 5.
Later in the year, you were likely greeted by advertisements of the lavish colour variations on offer from the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE and its pulse-raising domino-like showcase. Apple’s ad assault started strong, of course, with Ridley Scott’s iconic 1984 Mac ad, which ran for a full minute, and carried on it the same manner with dancing jelly iMac G3s, pop art silhouette iPod spots, the “there’s an app for that” campaign, and more.
This begs the question, do you remember anything from Pixel 5 adverts? In fact, when was the last time you saw a Google Pixel advertisement? At £599, Google Pixel 5 looks like one of the best value phones on the market, while the Pixel 4a is similarly inviting, providing a top contender for the best camera and software for any phone under £400.
Yet, the popularity of the Pixel range still wanes in the face of competition from more widely adopted and promoted rivals. In the US, Google phones have a lower market share than both LG and Huawei. The former recently chose to ditch its smartphone business while the latter has not sold new phones in the country for over a year. At just over two per cent, Google market share is dwarfed by the respective 25 and 54 per cents of Samsung and Apple.
One thing is clear, there is little point in the bumps in specs and performance of the Pixel 6 if Google continues to do a poor job of shouting about it.
The Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a are great phones, and, aside from a rocky time with the Pixel 4, Google’s smartphones have delivered when it comes to hardware and software. What’s not to love about the Pixel? From a camera that is praised year-on-year and great software to well-built hardware and, recently, attractive pricing, it’s a compelling package. However, the market speaks for itself and the Pixel just isn’t that popular.
An area that may go some way to explain the Pixel range’s lack of popularity, despite them being great phones, is advertising. According to Nielsen, since the start of 2016, Google has spent just over £40 million on smartphone advertising in the UK. By comparison, Apple and Samsung have spent around four and five times more than that.
If you don’t recall seeing a Pixel advert on TV, or think it’s a rarity, the breakdown of Google’s ad spend explains this. Google spent just £14 million on TV ad spend in the same period while Apple spent £75 million and Samsung shelled out a whopping £124 million. Samsung is spending more than three times as much on just its TV campaigns than Google’s entire Pixel ad spend in the UK.
Google isn’t short on resource, so this begs the question, why isn’t it spending more to get the Pixel out there? This question was being posed way back in 2016, with Wharton University publishing an article titled “Why Google’s Pixel is more about strategy than smartphones.” Professor of management David Hsu stated: “The main business of Google is enabling their advertising revenue model. Hardware is always going to pale in comparison.”
Also, in 2016, both Hsu and assistant professor of business economics and public policy Michael Sinkinson suggested the Pixel range should’ve been priced more aggressively. Since then, the “a” series of Pixels and Pixel 5 have done just that, yet not much else has changed. In the same article, Gerald Faulhauber, professor emeritus of business economics and public policy, argued Pixel would likely be around for “a couple of years and go away”. You’d forgive Faulhauber for thinking this, given Google’s track record, but the company is sticking at it.
Google’s Pixel marketing plan has demonstrated there’s plenty of room for it to invest more. But Counterpoint Research’s Neil Shah thinks Google may be stuck between a rock and a hard place. “Google is in a Catch-22 situation with its hardware strategy. Google’s DNA is cloud, software and AI – it’s not hardware. Also, building your own hardware and competing with your partners, especially Samsung or Chinese vendors, is not healthy in long run.” This argument was made before the launch of the Pixel though, whether vendors would be happy about the company behind Android making its own phone, but Google pushed on.
Shah points towards a “lack of distribution and scale” as one of the reasons the Pixel hasn’t taken off. “Investing in hardware is expensive,” he says. “But it is also lucrative once you gain scale. I see Google trying to figure out the right timing for its investments and try to be truly vertically integrated, like Apple, to reap the benefits and go [full] throttle.” This vertical integration, where the company controls absolutely everything about the Pixel phone, could be inbound, with mounting speculation that the Pixel 6 will be powered by a new Google-created chip, Whitechapel.
Whether a new chip is a catalyst for Pixel to finally make its mark will very much be up to Google. It’s the company that will determine whether it chooses to throw itself properly into the mobile phone business or continue to play around at the edges.
Aside from Google’s lacklustre ad spend in the UK, the quality of Pixel ads has also been criticised. Meanwhile, indicators of Google’s strategy for phones still seems unclear. It took the savvy step in the US of partnering with a carrier (T-Mobile). Then, on the launch of a Pixel 5a, it listed just two countries (US and Japan) as release locations.
From new partnerships and chip development, to better distribution and good old-fashioned advertising spend, Google has plenty of options to make Pixel more than a minor entrant in the mobile race. Yet for much of the above this has been the case for years.
Through no fault of the hardware, the Pixel has existed in mobile limbo since the range’s launch almost five years ago. At this rate, another half decade of underperformance doesn’t seem out of the question. Google needs to get serious about its worthwhile phones or put the Pixel out of its misery.
In this article SEOLEVELUP focuses on strategies for better SEO that can help you rank higher on Google in 2021.
With more than 4.5 Billion Google searches a day, you will need to play by the rules of Google to rank high enough for potential visitors to come across your content. Improving your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts is one of the best ways to ensure that you are making full use of your content. Check out our SEO Tips that will help your website improve online visibility and rankings.
Before you get started, be sure to get our FREE SEO Audit if you want to see needed improvements to your website! Also check out our Google reviews and read some success stories!
Organizations need a way to assess and view their SEO activities in today’s data-driven environment to stay ahead. To accomplish this, 73% of marketers use SEO tools to refine their content and improve Google’s content ratings.
You can increase the probability of obtaining organic website traffic by introducing small changes to the content of your website.
In this article I focus on strategies for better SEO that can help you rank higher on Google in 2021. In the new year, it will break down Best SEO Companies for small business and clarify some strategies to enhance SEO.
Best SEO Tips to Implement in 2021
Monitor with a Program that works with Search Engines
Understanding Google Analytics is the best step that you can take in enhancing your SEO in 2021. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to understand your website, so you can make good decisions based on results.
Not only can statistics help you understand how you rank, but also your audience, so that content can be better created for them.
Google Analytics can be a fantastic tool over time to target the customers better. Some of the indicators you can learn from visitors to your site include:
What browsers they use
Google Analytics will give you powerful insights on which browsers your customers use. By concentrating on web design on the most-used browsers, will allow you to enhance their experience.
The devices used to visit your site
Similar to knowing the browsers your customers use, knowing what devices they use can be helpful. There are more web users on those pages than desktop users or vice versa. Understanding the metrics of your website will allow you to develop content customized to the screen size that is most widely used, improving the user experience.
Understand your competition
Google Analytics also provides insights into traffic from rivals. When determining how to boost your content and outrank rivals, this knowledge can be useful.
Refresh Website with new material
There is one thing in common with content marketers who create high-ranking content. They provide readers with engaging content topics. Successful marketing managers track patterns and discussions to brainstorm content ideas. This ensures that at some stage you’re going to have to revisit low-performing content.
Consider what kind of content would resonate with your audience when designing your content marketing strategy. From there, you can analyse what headlines will do well for that subject and whether you can establish some prequel topics.
Many content marketers consider mind maps to be useful. Using a mind map for visual individuals will help you present all of your future topic ideas. It will enable you to create larger topics that can be built into similar, smaller items. Visualizing your content plan can help you grasp it completely sometimes.
Ensure you create your Content around Keywords
Researching keywords not only works for your content and helps to develop your piece’s framework but it also allows you to understand what your audience wants to read. You can help build a content strategy to boost SEO by understanding what keywords are best for your target audience and content type.
Google-friendly writing depends on a balance between keywords and everyday language being proven. This implies that it should be written in such a way that your content flows naturally. In your content, keywords should naturally come up so that you don’t have to stuff your content at the last minute.
There is an option for the Keyword Magic Tool where you can look up related keywords for your primary keyword. To help you identify whether it is something you will want to add to your content.
You will see how closely related a keyword is and its search volume. You can talk with your SEO Agency and can make small changes to boost your SEO ranking gradually.
Expand your Portfolio Backlink
Even if you follow all of the tips related to on-page technical SEO, Google’s front page will still not be proven. A large portion of SEO deals with backlinks and whether high-authority sites generate backlinks.
Diversity in backlinks can come from two sources, specifically: The type of backlink
In general, a dofollow or nofollow would be your backlink, with a dofollow bearing more weight.
A site where the backlink originates
For example, if you are promoting your content and targeting publishers to run a story, the source of your backlink will be the site that links back to your content.
A diverse portfolio of backlinks signals to Google that your website is an authoritative source. Also that you naturally create links versus relying on automated tools or other spam tactics.
Use Appropriate Header tags
You want to be aware of how you organize the content on the page while creating content. With the most relevant details at the top of the page, each page should have content arranged logically.
Studies have noticed that 80% of readers spend much of their time at the top of the page looking at the content. How great are these SEO Tips?
Google does not, however, inherently index meaning exclusively to what is at the top of the list. To see if it’s comprehensive, they look at the article as a whole. So with that in mind, you may need to put some effort into how the page is laid out.
Consider adding jump links to the top of your page to get the most out of the keywords you’re targeting.
Not only does this create a more enjoyable user experience, but it also encourages you to use your header tags to go after Google Gathering Information from a sample in more innovative ways.
Conclusion
Search engines work overtime to list the billions of websites on the internet because of the content being made and released quickly. Get in touch with us today and we can discuss how to improve your online rankings.
Besides, you can improve SEO on your site and start ranking higher on Google by using tools to look at critical factors that affect it, such as loading speed, content problems, meta tags, linking, and crawlability.
I hope you enjoyed these amazing SEO Tips and be sure to get a FREE SEO Audit today!
Google, for much of the last year, has been detailing how it plans to roll out changes to its search algorithm in 2021, through something called a “page experience update.” The company made some announcements Monday about how the changes will work, and when to expect them.
“We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021,” Google announced Monday on its developer blog. “However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August. You can think of it as if you’re adding a flavouring to a food you’re preparing. Rather than add the flavour all at once into the mix, we’ll be slowly adding it all over this time period.”
Google went on to say that publishers should not expect “drastic changes.”
As Google has been stating since last year, the changes will consider “page experience signals,” based on the three Core Web Vitals metrics. Earlier indications had stated that the change would begin taking place in May.
Also, the new Top Stories carousel for Google Search will no longer require use of the AMP format.
“We will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content. You can expect this change to come to our products as the page experience update begins to roll out in mid-June. We’ll continue to test other ways to help identify content with a great page experience, and we’ll keep you updated when there is more to share,” the company said in its blog post.
Another change will be the arrival of a new Page Experience report in the search console.
“This report combines the existing Core Web Vitals report with other components of the page experience signals, such as HTTPS security, absence of intrusive interstitials, safe browsing status, and mobile friendliness,” the blog post said.
“The Page Experience report offers valuable metrics, such as the percentage of URLs with good page experience and search impressions over time, enabling you to quickly evaluate performance. You can also dig into the components of page experience signal to gain additional insights on opportunities for improvement.”
Google will also be offering Signed Exchanges (SXG) on Google Search for all web pages, not just those built with AMP.
AMP has long been controversial, with some arguing that it has entailed Google taking too much control over the web.
“Our vision for page experience is to build a web ecosystem that users love—together. We’re hard at work to make sure that you have the right tools and resources available before the ranking rollout starting in mid-June 2021,” Google said.
Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
When talking about “the elephant in the room” these days, it’s sometimes difficult to determine which one. It depends on whether you’re speaking about ecommerce or advertising, but perhaps not for long.
Google My Business (GMB) is increasingly playing a role as a local mediator. Historically, someone would search for information online, contact a small business, go to the retail store, or look up directions. Slowly, the company has been integrating GMB into Maps and into people’s lives and their routines.
This past year, as people dealt with COVID-19 and lockdowns, the industry focused on the growth of ecommerce, but something a little more complicated and interesting happened, said Greg Sterling, vice president of marketing insights at Uberall.
“The internet is now the starting point for everything, either ecommerce or local offline transactions like food ordering, pick-up in store or curbside pickup,” he said.
Google is trying to put its services in the centre of the online-to-offline experience, which includes Maps, product inventory, and search. There’s a lot of money at stake, he said — and Google is trying to influence it all, from reviews to remarketing.
“Last year, I estimated at one point, casually, at least $10 trillion of U.S. economic activity is impacted by the internet,” he said. “That’s probably underestimating it, but if GDP is between $20 trillion and $21 trillion, at least half is impacted by the internet in some form. That’s much more than ecommerce.”
When Inside Performance asked whether Google will become an ecommerce engine, Sterling said the company is headed in that direction. Increasingly, more transactions are happening through Google, including services such as appointments.
The future is a hybrid model of online and offline, Sterling said. GMB is an important part of that strategy.
Last week, Google announced that it is on track to bring more than 100 AI-powered improvements to Google Maps, such as a feature that provides the ability to navigate through indoors spaces with Live View, powered by a technology called global localization.
The technology uses artificial intelligence to scan tens of billions of Street View images to understand the consumer’s location, and helps to understand the precise position and placement of objects inside a building such as on store shelves, in airports, or transit stations, as well as retail stores in malls.
Live View can help someone find the nearest elevator and escalator in an airport, or locate an ATM machine.
“One of the ways you compete with Amazon is you let people know where locally they can buy some of the items they search for online,” he said. “Amazon is trying to compress delivery times to remove the physical store advantage.”
While Google is trying to expose inventory online that’s in local stores to give people a sense of where they can buy it and take it home, online direct-to-consumer brands are moving offline. They got their start online. If you’re a direct to consumer brands and you online have an online stores, you’re vulnerable, Sterling said.
“You need pop-up stores — something Nordstrom is doing,” he said. “You don’t need to build out stores, but you need to give them the experience of the brand.”
Exactly how Google uses engagement signals (i.e. clicks and interaction data) is subject to endless SEO debate. The passage above suggests Google uses engagement metrics to train their machine learning models. Google has also admitted to using click signals for both search personalization and evaluating new algorithms.
While many Googlers no doubt work hard to be helpful to the SEO community, they are also under pressure “not to reveal too much detail” about their algorithms out of caution that SEOs will game search results. In reality, Google is never going to tell SEO exactly how they use engagement metrics, no matter how many times we ask.
Most SEO debate focuses on if Google uses organic Click-through Rates (CTR) in its ranking algorithms. If you are interested, AJ Kohn’s piece is particularly outstanding as well as Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday on covering this topic. For a nuanced counter-view, I’d recommend reading this excellent post by Dan Taylor.
To be fair, I believe most of the debate around CTR up to this point has likely been far too simple. Whatever way SEOs think Google uses click data, how Google actually uses clicks is guaranteed to be far more sophisticated than anything we may conceive. This complexity gap gives Google easy deniability, and justification for calling otherwise reasonable SEO theories “made up crap.” (Google may very well say something similar about this article, which is fine.)
Not another CTR debate
At this point, you may think this is another post adding to the CTR debate, but in fact, it’s not. THIS SIMPLY ISN’T THAT POST.
Arguing “if” Google uses click signals leads us down the wrong path. We know Google does, we simply don’t know how. For example, are they direct signals, or used for machine learning training only? Are click signals used in the broader algorithm, or only for personalization?
Instead, lets propose something far more radical, and likely far more helpful to your SEO:
Why you should assume Google uses clicks for ranking
The patent is fascinating from an SEO perspective because it explains how using click signals can be very “noisy” (as Google often says) but describes a process for calculating “long click” and “last click” metrics to cut through the noise and better rank search results.
To be fair, we have no evidence Google uses the processes described in this patent, and even if they did, it would likely be far more sophisticated/nuanced than the process described here.
That said, the patent is riveting because it supports many of the same best SEO practices we’ve advocated for years. So much so that, if you optimized for these metrics, you’d almost certainly improve your SEO traffic and rankings, regardless if Google uses these exact processes or not. Specifically:
More Clicks (“High CTR”): earns you more traffic no matter your rank, and initial clicks form the basis of all subsequent click metrics.
Improved Engagement (“Long Clicks”): almost always a positive sign from your users, and often an indicator of quality as well as being correlated with future visits.
User Satisfaction (“Last Click”): the holy grail of SEO, and ultimately the experience Google strives to deliver in its search results.
We can summarize these principles into 3 tenets of click-based engagement metrics for SEO: First, Long, and Last.
Let’s explore each of these in turn.
1. Be the first click: earning high CTRs
As stated earlier, this isn’t a debate if Google uses CTR. There’s plenty of evidence that they monitor and consider clicks in a variety of ways. (And to be fair, there’s evidence that they don’t use CTR as extensively as many SEOs believe.)
Even if CTR isn’t a ranking signal, having a higher CTR is almost always good for SEO, because it means getting more clicks and more eyeballs on your content.
Besides the inherent value of earning a high CTR, clicks also form the basis of subsequent click-based metrics, including long clicks and last clicks. So earning that first click is an essential step.
How to earn higher click-through rates
Your ability to earn a higher CTR is almost entirely contained with optimizing your appearance in Google search results. How your snippet stands out and gets noticed for being a likely helpful, relevant answer—in a sea of other competing results—is the name of the game.
You may think your options at influencing CTR in this way are quite limited, but in fact, you have many, many surprisingly powerful levers to pull in your favor, including:
What about artificially manipulating your CTR, either using bots or one of the many blackhat click services you can find on the web? More often than not, these tactics lead to disappointing results. One possible reason why is that Google is very skilled at sniffing out “unnatural” browsing behavior.
So high CTR can be a good thing, but the fact remains—as Google has told us countless times—CTR is a “noisy” signal to use for ranking. Should a result with a flashy title be rewarded simply because users click on it, even if the actual page provides a lackluster experience?
In truth, while earning clicks is one of the primary goals of SEO, the “noise” of the signal is probably why Google avoids using CTR as a direct ranking signal itself.
In fact, earning a high CTR if your content leads to a poor user experience may actually hurt you in the end. More on this below.
So first, we need to figure out if our clicks create a good user experience. Read on…
2. Earn long clicks
So what if you trick people into clicking your URL, but your page actually doesn’t deliver what you promised, or even adequately answer the query.
This isn’t good for users, or for Google. And it definitely isn’t good for you.
One measure of content relevancy search engines can use is weighted viewing time, based on the concept that users typically spend a bit longer time on a site they find relevant, versus a page they find not helpful. Within this framework, “long clicks” can carry more weight than “short clicks.”
“But Cyrus,” smart SEOs protest, “not every query needs a long click. Many searches, like the weather or the “highest mountains in Europe,” can be answered very quickly, often in seconds. It doesn’t make sense for these pages to have long clicks.”
Those SEOs are right, of course. Fortunately, Google engineers understood not every query is the same and devised a clever solution: click scores can be weighted on a per-query basis, including language and country-specific click data.
“Note that such categories may also be broken down into sub-categories as well, such as informational-quick and informational-slow: a person may only need a small amount of time on a page to gather the information they seek when the query is “George Washington’s Birthday”, but that same user may need a good deal more time to assess a result when the query is “Hilbert transform tutorial”
To dive a little deeper, it’s not so much how long visitors stay on your page, but your ratio of long clicks (LC) to overall clicks (C), weighted on a per-query basis. This LC|C ratio could be used to re-rank queries based on user-engagement.
Take this a step further: results with good long-click ratios may rank higher, while results with poor long-click ratios may rank lower.
So consider a situation where you “hacked” your CTR to earn more clicks, but the page itself doesn’t deliver, resulting in more short clicks. In theory, this could actually hurt your rankings, even though you started with a higher CTR!
So be sure to back up your higher CTRs with great user experiences, e.g. long clicks.
How to optimize for long clicks
Many SEOs refer to long clicks as analogous to improving your “dwell time”, or simply the amount of time a user spends on your site. The signals associated with improving dwell time are often known as “UX” (User Experience) signals.
The golden rule of getting more long clicks is simply this: provide the most useful, complete, and engaging answer to a user search query, in the most attractive and effective format possible.
A note of distinction: because most pages rank for multiple keywords, and multiple keyword variations, all with possibly varying search intent, it’s often helpful to target for those various search intents all on the same page.
For example, a user searching for information about meta descriptions may also be interested in “meta description length”, “meta description format” and “how to write meta descriptions.” Optimizing more completely for these varying search intents can improve your long click metrics.
Pro Tip: You don’t need to optimize for every user intent on the same page. Linking to other resources on your site is fine, and even encouraged! Visitors don’t have to stay on the same page for a search click to count as “long.”
Aside from the quality of the content itself, there are a number of UX factors you can employ to encourage your visitors to engage with your content at a deeper level. While not an exhaustive list, a few examples may include:
Prominently link to closely related topics to cover multiple searcher intents. These can be internal links, or even external links.
Admittedly, there aren’t a ton of good excellent resources published on increasing engagement and improving long clicks. That said, I believe Brian Dean of Backlinko does an excellent job with this, and his resource on improving dwell time is worth checking out.
3. Be the last click
Yes, being the last click may be the holy grail of SEO.
A user clicks their way through a page of search results, not finding what they are looking for. Finally, they click on your URL and behold!…. You have the answer they sought.
Put simply, being the last click means searchers don’t return to Google to select another result (e.g. pogo sticking.)
Even if Google doesn’t use this as a ranking factor, you can see how it might benefit your SEO to be the user’s last click as much as possible. Satisfying the user query means users are more likely to browse and share your content, as well as seek you out again in the future.
How to be the last click
In my own SEO, there are fewer things I’ve seen associated with greater success than improving visitor satisfaction, and this is exactly what Google seeks to reward.
It’s also damn difficult to achieve.
Sadly, a typical process in SEO is to give a content brief to a copywriter, expect them to cover all the salient points, hit publish, and hope for the best. But more often than not, do you believe this content truly deserves to rank #1? Is this the first, last, and only result a user needs to click?
Years ago when working in a successful restaurant, a manager gave me advice about delivering 100% customer satisfaction that I will never forget: “Whatever happens, make sure they want to come back.”
This is how you should treat SEO: make sure every visitor to your site wants to come back.
Exactly how to make sure your visitor wants to come back is going to vary based on each and every query, but generally, it means going the extra mile, answering questions more completely, and offering the user more resources and a better experience.
In short, deliver an experience superior to every one of your competitors.
Beyond this, I recommend these 3 resources when improving your content (all amazingly from Rand Fishkin):
To be honest, it’s nearly impossible to accurately measure click-based signals, as Google holds all the data.
(Even if you could accurately measure your long click/click ratio, or last click metrics, calculating their actual value would be meaningless without an accurate account of every other Google search result, let alone on a per-query basis.)
That said, there are metrics that can help you directionally measure any progress you might make. These are all available either through Search Console or Google Analytics:
Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a “good” score for these numbers, as everything is relative to the specific query it appeared for, as well as every single one of your competitors.
Regardless, these metrics can be directionally useful indicators when making improvements to your content. For example, if you see a drop in bounce rate and increase in session duration after a major content update, you can take this as an indicator that things are moving in the right direction. And in fact, it’s not unusual to see an increase in rankings/traffic after such a change accompanied by a positive shift in metrics.
While we can’t directly see what Google might measure in terms of complex click metrics, we can often make educated guesses.
And even if Google isn’t using these metrics exactly the way we speculate, we can still improve our SEO by paying attention to the user click behaviors we have influence over.
Thanks for making it this far. Remember:
Be First
Be Long
Be Last
Get those clicks, and earn them!
Appendix A: Evidence of Google using click-based ranking signals (incomplete list)
